LRB review

There's a long review of Multitude by Tom Nairn in a recent edition of the London Review of Books.

Here's a snippet:

‘Multitude’ is defined in Webster’s as ‘the state of being many’, with an implication of formlessness or indeterminacy: ‘a multitude of sins’ is probably its most common use. The same dictionary goes to Claud Cockburn for its adjectival example: ‘The mosquitoes were multitudinous and fierce.’ Hardt and Negri attempt a more positive definition, laying emphasis on signs of grace, and attendant democratic virtues. But this turns out to be curiously like the bus tours found in all big cities. Sightseers impatient for the general design get whisked at speed past famous landmarks, as the guide intones a suitable (often rather similar) judgment on each one, with too few dodgy jokes. The guides in this case are invariably erudite: their references take up 45 pages, and great efforts are made with innovative concepts such as network struggles, ‘swarm intelligence’, ‘biopower’ (‘engaging social life in its entirety’), immaterial labour, and the multitudinous spirit as carnival (‘a theory of organisation based on the freedom of singularities that converge in the production of the common: Long live movement! Long live carnival! Long live the common!’). The ‘monstrosity of the flesh’ gets a look-in as well, though rendered decent as Man, ‘the animal . . . that is changing its own species’.

Yet this erudite tour leads only to an inconclusive emptiness, where the signs portend some somersault to come, via an unprecedented agency that may be everywhere, and potentially omnipotent, yet remains without a local habitation and a name.