an ungrammatical multitude

reach out and touch someone

2006-08-11T09:57:00.001-07:00

a friend told me recently about a notice affixed in a public washroom stall: "please don't 'hover.' there are more germs on a public telephone handset than a toilet seat." the notice, i suspect, will have little impact on washroom etiquette, but just might turn a few people off public telephones.

toilet seats and telephones: the most quotidian and frequent forms of touch take place surreptitiously. in the exchange of germs, the bodies of strangers embrace intimately as lovers. violently divided and reunited in so many ways, the world is always already an assemblage of singularities on a molecular level. no wonder biology is so rich with metaphors for anti-capitalist politics.

deleuze and guattari remind us that the (separate) organism is ontologically derivative. it is the product of a reiterative circumscription of corporeal boundaries, an imaginative enclosure lived, nonetheless, as real effects. the organism is an “order” in two senses: it segments and organ-izes an inherent biological indeterminacy, and it exists as a forceful command. “you will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body – otherwise you’re just depraved.”

the organism is subverted continually. sometimes, as with lovers, it is unmade intentionally (if only slightly). sometimes, however, the intention is the opposite. what is it, for example, that repulses us about public washrooms and public telephones? who is it that we’re afraid of touching? i can only speculate, but it seems to me that social divisions like class, race, gender, and sexuality can serve as the material with which corporeal boundaries are fortified. why else would the washroom be such a potent site of social inclusion and exclusion?

what’s my point? pulling a thread from the tangle i’ve made here, i want tentatively to suggest the relevance of “touch” to anti-capitalist politics. that the neoliberal war on everything at all public is concomitant with an intensifying process of social isolation indicates, to me at least, that the aversion toward the “public good” is experienced intimately, as well as intellectually.

we recline from the touch of others. the problem of public telephones (shared with who-knows-who?) is resolving itself with the proliferation of personal cellphones. there is no solution, as yet, for the problem of public washrooms. in this context, the old at&t slogan, “reach out and touch someone,” seems particularly anachronistic. no corporation would suggest such a thing today. and yet, without inviting nostalgia, it might be worthwhile to contemplate what it would mean, today, to heed the old telecom’s advice.

Public Acts: Touch and the multitude

2006-08-08T10:42:00.000-07:00

Through a series of readings and discussions, An Ungrammatical Multitude has been grappling with the challenges that the notion of multitude introduce to common understandings of subjectivity and action. Thanks to Christine's project Public Acts, we have stumbled upon the idea of touch as a valuable heuristic to continue thinking through these important themes. For what is a multitude without touch? Touching is an action, but one that complicates individualistic notions of constrained agency. Non-physical touch, which must be bracketed in order to imagine the multitude's constituents as singularities, precedes the will to be one or many; materialised touch, in turn, defies in a strict sense the monologic separation between toucher and touched.
Public Acts invites us to reconcile the politics and poetics of this everyday act/term. We wish Christine all the best with her project.

Thoughts on "touch"

2006-08-04T23:13:00.000-07:00

We met today (August 4, 2006) to discuss the term "touch" as part of our participation in Christine Shaw's project, Public Acts.

In typical Ungrammatical Multitude style, our conversation ranged far and wide, considering the term in various ways as well as mulling over several possible courses of action. We considered hosting events (e.g. discussions, parties) as well as engaging in different types of actions (e.g. guerrilla gardening, "flash-mob hug-ins") .

In the end, perhaps Sebastian put it best - our inability to come up with a concrete definition of the term or agree on an event of some sort demonstrated that our collective is not at a stage where we are prepared to speak with a single voice, even if only for the moment it takes to write a short article.

That said, our discussion did end with a plan of action: to write short entries as individuals regarding the term "touch" over the course of the week. Please add your thoughts as comments to this posting.

Touching questions

2006-07-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

When does touching begin? Yesterday, when Christine was presenting her project, one of our first reactions to the idea of touching was to touch each other with one hand--perhaps the most stereotypical and general representation of touching any person comes up with. But what was our sense of touch doing a minute before that? Were we not touching things? Were we not sitting, and therefore touching, the chairs? We were touching lots of things: the table, the beer glasses, the coffee cups, our clothes, etc. While we were touching all these things we were deciding not to touch each other and the other people at the bar. Most surely, this decision was unconscious. But it was still some kind of decision. What do we touch while we "think"? Isn't touching part of thinking all the time (at least in the form of a decision not to touch)? If we can conceive touching in this way, then we will agree that thinking "with the head" is only a part of a more comprehensive idea of thinking, one that involves the entire body. Thinking, in this sense, is all the time thinking with the body. And we, as people trained to "think with our heads," know this from experience. When we are saddened by something that happens in our daily life (something that causes us anxiety, or perhaps the boredom of the daily routine, or a sudden event that makes us feel that we are condemned to repeating meaningless 24/7 jobs for the rest of our lives) we are not as capable of doing our "head thinking" as days in which an event happens that puts us in a good mood. Our experience those disruptive events always involves a form of touching: touching the chair from where we watch television, avoiding the uncertainty of proximity to others that presupposes talking to other people, etc.

Where I am trying to get at is that our thinking about touching is incomplete if we try to make touching objective, an object of research, or something that we can explain by putting our hand on the arm of the person who is sitting beside us. Because when we contemplate that object we call "touching," when we isolate it from thinking, we forget that we are touching while we think. I believe a way to approach the issue of touching for the purpose of our 'public act' without forgetting that we are touching while we think would be to acknowledge all the time the fact that the body thinks and that there is no thinking that involves the mind alone.

It is relevant here to remember Spinoza, who said that "nobody knows what a body can do." If we do not know what a body can do, we cannot know what it will think. No specialist in "thinking with the head" can anticipate what a body is capable of thinking, let alone the bodies of a multitude of people.

How does this relate to the multitude? I would advance a few hypotheses that we can discuss later: If we define the multitude as a collection of singularities involved in a political process, we have to acknowledge that the multitude thinks. Its politics is already thinking. Nobody thinks on behalf of the multitude. The thinking of the multitude is inseparable from its bodily activity, which includes all forms of touching. The thinking of the multitude cannot be reduced to instances of conversation or communication for the same reason that the thought of a person cannot be reduced to mental activity.

But if touching is part of thinking, then nobody can think on behalf of other people for the same reason that touching is something that cannot be transferred. (This does not mean that the individual self is the centre of touching. Because touching involves multiple simultaneous sensations, it is not possible to find a centre for it) Each singularity of the multitude --let's say each person-- thinks on his or her own behalf for the same reason that nobody can touch on somebody else's behalf. Representation presupposes that the interests of a group can be aggregated and transferred to a representative body or person. In other words, it assumes that the thinking of a group can be isolated and separated from the touching of each of its members. The thinking of the multitude cannot be represented. Or, the representation of the thinking of the multitude must not be confused with its actual thinking, which is inseparable from the action of the multitude.

public acts

2006-07-10T16:15:00.000-07:00

Today we met with Christine, who's interested in our getting involved in her collaborative project Public Acts 1-29. Check it out. Our part would be Act 13. Touch.

Malgré Tout manifesto now online

2006-06-29T20:30:00.000-07:00

The manifesto of the Malgré Tout collective was one of our first readings. It finally found a home here. The name of the collective will be familiar to those who read the manifesto of the Network of Alternative Resistance, signed, among others, by Malgré Tout, Madres of Plaza de Mayo, and El Mate, the student organization at the faculty of social sciences of the University of Buenos Aires that gave birth to Colectivo Situaciones. Malgré Tout will also be familiar to those who have become acquainted with the work of Miguel Benasayag, the philosopher who was, before his exile in Paris, a member of the Guevarist PRT-ERP in Argentina.

The multitude in the imagination of the founders of PR

2006-05-19T00:56:00.000-07:00

Just to get things going once again on the old blog, I revisit a recent entry from Jon's blog dealing with his toughts on the Vancouver's 2010 Winter Olympics. Not knowing where to start, I'm posting an excerpt from an interview with Stuart Ewen by David Barsamian, which appeared in the May 2000 issue of Zmag (also available here) :

DB: One of the early public relations spinmeisters, Ivy Lee warned that “the crowd is now in the saddle. The people now rule. We have substituted for the divine right of kings the divine right of the multitude.”
SE: Ivy Lee was a journalist who came from a conservative Southern background and was very religiously attached to private wealth, and so from around 1904-1905 on he moved from being a journalist to telling the story of business. Ivy Lee was the representative of the railroad industry and of Standard Oil. He spoke for some of the most powerful interests in the society. When he went to them, he said, Look, you’ve got a situation where ordinary people assume that this is a democracy and that their concerns matter. If we don’t start behaving, or at least producing a story that speaks effectively on our behalf, the people are going to grab our power from us. So the history of corporate PR starts as a response to the threat of democracy and the need to create some kind of ideological link between the interests of big business and the interests of ordinary Americans.

Interestingly, 1904 was the year when the Olympic Games first came to the US. Coincidence?

What is to be Done?

2006-03-01T01:49:00.000-08:00

What is to be Done? is a Moscow-based publication of politics and philosophy.

It's recent issue 10, "How Do Politics Begin?" included the following: John Holloway's "Can We Change the World without Taking Power?"; and Colectivo Situaciones' "Altitude Sickness / Notes on a Trip to Bolivia", translated by Nate Holdren and our very own Sebastián Touza.

Thanks to Scott for the links.

Estrategias de transformación social

2006-02-17T12:44:00.000-08:00

¿Es posible cambiar el mundo sin tomar el poder? ¿Qué significa la
palabra solidaridad en un mundo tan fracturado como el nuestro?
Tomando en cuenta nuestra experiencia y saber acumulados, ¿cómo podemos darle apertura al sofocante campo de la Política de hoy?

En el verano del 2005, los Zapatistas lanzaron su Sexta Declaración de
la Selva Lacandona, anunciando un importante cambio de estrategia. Un
nuevo marco de lucha, llamado La Otra Campaña, está desde ya echando raices en torno a las próximas elecciones presidenciales en México.

Ven y participa este jueves 23 de febrero en una lectura y diálogo
bilingüe alrededor de la Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona y La Otra Campaña. Actualmente discutida alrededor del mundo, la Sexta Declaración nos invita a crear nuevos horizontes de entendimiento y práctica con respecto a la organización y la acción política. En respuesta a dicha invitación, queremos reunirnos con otras personas deseosas de tomar parte en este importante diálogo.

Una lectura de cuatro fragmentos de la Sexta Declaración será realizada
por Amorita Rasgado, Raúl Gatica, Patricia Valadez, y Dafne Blanco,
seguida de una discusión con el público.

Cuándo: Jueves 23 de febrero, de 7 a 10 pm
Dónde: Librería Spartacus, 319 W. Hastings St. Vancouver (segundo piso)

evento gratis para todos y todas

Preguntando Caminamos

evento organizado por the ungrammatical multitude

Strategies of Social Tranformation

2006-02-17T12:34:00.000-08:00

Can we imagine changing the world without taking power? What does social solidarity mean in a fractured world? Drawing on our accumulated
knowledge and experience of struggle, how do we open the space of
politics today?

In the summer of 2005, the Zapatistas issued their Sixth Declaration,
announcing an important shift in strategy. A new framework of struggle, entitled the Other Campaign, is now taking place alongside and outside of the upcoming Mexican presidential elections.

On Thursday February 23, come and participate in a bilingual performance and open dialogue of the Zapatista's Sixth Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle and Other Campaign. Debated by groups around the world, the Sixth Declaration issues an invitation to expand our understanding and practice of political organization and action. We want to participate in this discussion.

Excerpts from the Sixth Declaration will be performed by Amorita
Rasgado, Raul Gatica, Patricia Valadez and Dafne Blanco.

When: Thursday Feb 23, 7-10 pm
Where: Spartacus Books, 319 W. Hastings St. Vancouver, 2nd floor.

All welcome to this free event

Asking we Walk

event organized by the ungrammatical multitude

campaign

2006-02-11T05:24:00.000-08:00

Parallel to the struggle between PRI, PAN, and PRD for votes in the upcoming (July) Mexican presidential elections, the Zapatistas are conducting what they term an "Other Campaign". They launched this campaign last year with their "Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona" (Spanish text here).

In the midst of all the regional excitement about the Left's victories in successive elections--Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile--here, then, is one group that is continuing, and indeed stepping up, its extra-parliamentary activism.

Not that this is any coincidence. The Colectivo Situaciones hit the nail on the head when they write:

In effect, the Sixth Declaration is a much-needed text that aims to interrupt a definite tendency [deriva]: a tendency that orients the energies and victories of the past few years' struggles towards a revitalization of forms of sovereignty that are still trapped within traditional modes of representation, and that has succeeded, in line with the movement of the times, to construct a hypothesis appropriating the potential of the present situation by means of an affirmation of and from insurgent movements. (Bienvenidos a la selva 22-23)

In other words, if Chávez, Lula, Morales, and Bachelet are, in their different ways, instances of the conversion of constituent into constituted power, a constituted power that by definition blocks an analysis and critique of the form of power itself, the Zapatistas' Sixth Declaration is intended to derail that mechanism, and to rethink a politics that would extend rather than halt the process of constitution.

Hence the Zapatistas' stress on autonomy, self-government, and even their self-critique, suggesting that they they themselves had subordinated grassroots empowerment to the politico-military structure of the EZLN.

Rather than vertical consolidation, the Sixth Declaration insists on the importance of undoing all residual or incipient transcendence. It envisages, indeed, the dissolution of the EZLN itself, its subsumption into a plane of immanence: "perhaps it would be better with nothing below, just completely level [puro planito todo], without any military, and that is why the zapatistas are soldiers so that there will not be any soldiers" (332). Instead of building up, the Zapatistas are expanding outwards.

And John Holloway is right to note that this expansion is not envisaged in terms of solidarity, though "this has always been an element of the response to the Zapatistas: admiration for them, solidarity with them" (317; emphasis in original). Holloway continues:

The pro-Zapatista movement has always included two elements: the element of solidarity with an indigenous struggle, on the one hand, and taking on the struggle for humanity and dignity as our own struggle, on the other. My feeling is that with the Sixth Declaration and the abandonment of indigenous rights as principal focus of the EZLN's struggle, they are telling us "We've always said that behind the ski-masks we are in fact you, but perhaps you didn't understand this so well, so we'll say it to you more directly and in another way." (317)

The Zapatistas make this point playfully, joking with the conventions of solidarity. They promise to send a lorryload of maize to Cuba, in a lorry called "Chompiras," so long as a convenient place can be found for the transaction, and so long as the Cubans can wait until harvest. They suggest sending crafts and coffee to Europe. They debate doing more:

And perhaps we might also send you some pozol, which gives much strength in the resistance, but who knows if we will send it to you, because pozol is more our way, and what if it were to hurt your bellies and weaken your struggles and the neoliberals defeat you. (345)

The Zapatistas seek to expand and intensify their network, playfully, creatively, and performatively. And despite certain populist resonances in their vocabulary, it's this deterritorializing and excessive (because symbolic?) tendency that marks their break from such state fetishism.

technorati tags: political theory multitude mexico zapatistas

Housekeeping

2006-01-22T13:11:00.000-08:00

Hey folks,

A few housekeeping issues following yesterday's excellent meeting:

Just to clarify, we agreed to invite Ted to join the reading group, and I suppose Jon will contact him with details of next meeting. While I don't think we finalised a maximum group size, the number a few us mentioned was eight. Does that sound OK? With Ted, there will be seven of us.

We also started to organise a second event on the Zapatista sixth declaration, tentatively scheduled for Thursday February 23. At our next meeting (February 10, at Sebastian's house, from 3 to 6pm), we will devote two hours to discussion of Jason Read's Chapter 2 and one hour to organising the event. We are all to read the Sexta (available at http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/TheOtherCampaign.html ) and think of a few suitable five minute passages (we are aiming to have four such passages). Sebastian suggested we also think of three or four questions to guide the 45 minute discussion following the reading. In the meantime, Fiona volunteered to contact Spartacus about space availability, and also to find four potential readers (two in English and two in Spanish). She also volunteered to get some Zapatista images to project during the reading, but maybe we can all engage in that (the goal is to put them on powerpoint and borrow a projector, I might be able to do that from my department). We all agreed to make a few copies of the selected passages in English and Spanish so the audience can read translations simultaneously. Finally, Scott volunteered to use his Serving It Right ticket to get a liquor license and buy some beer and juice for selling at the event (profits will go to Spartacus).

A third Ungrammatical Multitude event was tentatively scheduled for Thursday March 23 (?) on the theme of Colectivo Situaciones. More on that later.

See you all on February 10, if not earlier.

-Pablo

affinity

2005-11-27T19:06:00.000-08:00

Both the title and the subtitle of Richard Day's Gramsci is Dead are misleading. The title because, though Day has much to say about hegemony, his version of the concept is sufficiently broad that he traces it back to (at least) Hegel, and he hardly discusses Gramsci's contribution. (I suppose, however, that Hegel is Dead would have been a marginally less alluring title.)

The subtitle, "Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements" is also something of a misnomer, mostly because Day is less concerned to establish influences than to point to resonances between social movements and the anarchist tradition. Even then, he is interested primarily in the ways in which recent theory as well as recent practice might help release anarchism (as well as Marxism) from what he terms "the hegemony of hegemony."

Day establishes an opposition between the "logic of hegemony" and the "logic of affinity." Hegemony, he tells us, is totalizing and state-centered. It operates, equally in either what he likes to term its "(neo)liberal" or its "(post)marxist" variants, by means of demand, representation, recognition, and integration. From the very moment that politics is predicated on the demand, it implies and invokes the existence of a state before which the individual or group constituted in the demand seeks to be represented, and by which it hopes to be first recognized and then integrated. Affinity, on the other hand, begins with Exodus and establishes self-generated (and self-valorizing) communities predicated on a "groundless solidarity" and "infinite responsibility" that are always open to the new and the other.

Though inspired by, and driven in part by an attempt to revindicate, the historical tradition of anarchist thought from William Godwin to Gustav Landauer, Day also stresses the contribution of poststructuralist and postmodern theorists such as Foucault and (above all) Deleuze and Guattari. He is particularly interested in the figure of the "smith" found in A Thousand Plateaus: the smith, located somewhere between nomad and citizen, opens up and inhabits the "holey space" that is neither fully smooth nor fully striated. The smith, Day argues, is "the autonomous subject of the coming communities" (128).

Day puts his case forcefully and in large part convincingly. There is no doubt that we should leave the dead carcass of hegemony and hegemonic thought well behind us. Yet the final few pages of Gramsci is Dead indicate some gnawing problems with his grand narrative pitting hegemony against affinity. Here he acknowledges that states are no longer sovereign as they once were, and that this is in part because "corporations [are] working to undermine" them (217). "Decentralization," Day admits, "just as easily, and much more likely under current conditions, means a shift from modern discipline to postmodern control" (216). Distinguishing between "radicle and radical forms of rhizomatic organization," he notes that "maintaining this differentiation will become an ever-more pressing task" (216).

For indeed, the notion of a grand struggle between hegemony and affinity no longer makes much sense (if it ever did). We live in posthegemonic times, in which control is exerted directly and immediately by affective and habitual means. And on the other hand, for all the fine examples of social movements that Day puts forward, from the Zapatistas to No One is Illegal, from Participatory Economics to People's Global Action, I am not sure that we can be quite so sanguine these days about Temporary Autonomous Zones, or that "clearly, an experiment carried out as part of a mass movement is much more dangerous than the same experiment undertaken by one or more packs" (176). What, after all, about the pack that carried out its experimentation on September 11th 2001, a day that cannot be so glibly despatched as "the Day of the Great Excuse for Oppression" (32).

In short, beyond attention-grabbing and unenlightening exclamations (Gramsci is Dead!), rather more work is required to construct a theory of posthegemony.

technorati tags: political theory anarchism hegemony posthegemony

Continuity or Rupture: Alain Badiou on Deleuze, Negri, and the Multitude

2005-11-23T16:02:00.000-08:00

Here is an excerpt from a lecture delivered by Alain Badiou on September 25th , 2003, at the Popular University of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, in Buenos Aires. (published in the journal Acontecimiento, N. 26, 2003). Perhaps it is a little too concise, but it helps undestanding a possibility of a politics that does not sacrifice multiplicity while it takes rupture as the point of departure of all politics.

Question from the audience: What are the points of contact between your position and Deleuze’s thought, in relation to the Zapatista movement. What points of contact are there with Deleuze’s thought in the construction of horizontal relations, that is, in relation to equality?

Alain Badiou: It is a difficult question. I will try to speak in plain language. It is evident that there is something in common. There is a contact point, which is the following: a political process must unfold in a creative way, it must not be in contradiction with something. In other words, political creation is not forcibly dialectical. For example, the Zapatista movement is independent from the Mexican State, it is not defined by the contradiction with the state, and in this point we are in full agreement. Politics needs to be defined positively and not by its contradiction with something else. This idea is present in the Zapatista movement. It is also an idea present in Deleuze’s philosophy. And it is an idea that I also share. From that point on there would be discussions. The discussion would be about the question of rupture. In Deleuze’s philosophy there is a powerful continuity, there is no negation; there is the creation of life, becoming. I think, of course, that politics needs to be its own affirmation, but also that this affirmation presupposes rupture. There is not a definition of politics in which the latter is in continuity with life. There are always events, discontinuities. Therefore, there is in political creation an element of affirmation, but also an element of rupture. Around these questions we might have a philosophical discussion.

Question from the audience: What is your opinion on Toni Negri’s book, Empire?

Alain Badiou: I don’t know if I want to give my opinion… The discussion with Negri’s book is, in the first place, a philosophical discussion. Somewhat the same we’ve had for the last little while. The fundamental point of Negri’s thought is the unity of constituent power. There is a single creative force, which is the multitude, thus the creation of the figure of the Empire has in the end the same foundation, the same source, as the power of resistance. In other words, there is in Negri an absolutely unitary conception of historical and political creation. In this point I am in disagreement. In the end, it is the significance of the reference Negri makes to Spinoza. In Spinoza’s ontology there is only one substance. One can say that, for Negri, there is one historical substance and that substance is actualized in the form of oppression and domination, and also in forms of resistance. I believe that within this framework it is impossible to understand political novelty. In the end, in Negri’s thought communism and capitalism are the same thing. One way or the other it is all about the creation of constituent power. In the conception that I have of politics there are real ruptures; there are really heterogeneous things; there are incompatible subjectivities; there is not a substantial unity of creation. The fundamental discussion is there. It is, if you will, an arithmetical discussion. It is the discussion between the One and the Two, and it is a truly fundamental discussion in political questions. But the problem behind all this is the balance of dialectical thought. The politics of the twentieth century were dialectical, that is, politics of the contradiction, fundamentally of class contradiction. Let’s suppose that we were forced to abandon the dialectic. There are two possibilities: one is the return to a unitary conception, there is no contradiction; there is power of the One. That, in my view, is Negri’s move. The other is to preserve the Two, but as something different from the contradiction. [To preserve it in] the element of the distance, of independence, of the separation of that which is heterogeneous. You see that, in the end, it is a very important and very simple discussion. If politics is no longer defined by class contradiction, are we going to introduce a single constituent power or are we going to preserve rupture and heterogeneity? This is the whole argument, and then there are the political consequences.

Holloway

2005-05-22T01:39:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile, after having read also Michael Hardt's essay "the Withering of Civil Society" and the "Malgré Tout Manifesto" (translated by Sebastian and Pablo), we've now moved on to reading John Holloway's Change the World without Taking Power. Here's a balanced but in the end not particularly complimentary review of Holloway's book.

LRB review

2005-05-22T01:35:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-05-14T18:23:00.000-07:00

Class or Multitude?

2005-04-15T10:29:00.000-07:00

[from Mike...]

PARECON MAN WEIGHS IN ON THE MULTITUDE:

Class or Multitude
by Michael Albert; April 14, 2005

The title of our panel here at the Left Forum in New York City, is “Class or Multitude?”

By way of answering, I think we need class concepts, but I don’t think we need the concept multitude. Here’s why.

Class concepts focus us on the difference between owning factories and selling one’s ability to do work. This difference produces capitalists versus everyone else. The source of this difference has to be eliminated if we are to transcend capitalism. I think we all agree on that.

Additionally, however, I think good class concepts should also focus us on a second critical economic difference.

Some people do work that conveys knowledge, confidence, and control over daily life. Their work is empowering. They give orders. They define tasks and decide who does them, at what pace, and with what distribution of the results. Their knowledge increases. Their confidence grows.

Other people do work that is overwhelmingly rote, obedient, and dis-empowering. They follow orders. They do not set schedules or agendas. They do not decide outcomes. Their knowledge decreases. Their confidence erodes.

On the one side we have people we call workers - which includes assemblers, bus drivers, short order cooks, miners, maids, nurses, and waitresses, the daily implementers of economic dictates - roughly 80% of the workforce.

On the other side, we have people who I want to call coordinators - which includes high level lawyers, engineers, doctors, accountants, architects, and managers, the daily designers and administrators of the economy and its protocols - roughly 20% of the workforce.

In capitalism, all around us, coordinators are subordinate to owners but in turn benefit at the expense of workers. In another type of economy, beyond capitalism, coordinators can rule workers.

Institutions that create and preserve the coordinator/worker class hierarchy include corporate divisions of labor, remuneration for output or for power, hierarchical decision making, and markets or central planning for allocation.

Sadly, with private ownership eliminated, these institutions remain central in what most people call socialism, but which I think we should call coordinatorism.

I want classlessness, which means I want all workers to enjoy conditions of comparable empowerment and quality of life at work. I want all people in the economy to have a fair say in outcomes. I do not want a few people to rule many others.

I think we need class concepts, then, to highlight the three class structure of modern economies and to guide our efforts to eliminate not only ownership bases for class division and class rule, but also division of labor bases for class division and class rule.

So what about the concept multitude? To be honest, I am not sure I get it.

Being one word, multitude presumably refers to essentially one thing. What?

Perhaps multitude refers to anyone who could conceivably become a revolutionary in revolutionary times. But since that could be anyone at all, the word population would do equally well as a label for that concept. I doubt the whole population is the intended meaning of the concept multitude, though I have heard people use the term that way.

Perhaps multitude refers instead to everyone who is a very good prospect to become revolutionary in revolutionary times. But then the word multitude just replaces the two word label, likely revolutionary, and that doesn’t seem very innovative or essential either. I also doubt that that is the intended meaning of the concept multitude, though again, I have heard people use the term that way.

Perhaps multitude means, instead, those who by virtue of their economic position are very good prospects to become revolutionary in revolutionary times. Taken in that sense, the concept multitude would replace the old concept proletariat, or even working class. As Michael Hardt himself put it in an interview back in January, “[this] is one way in which you might think of our notion of multitude as being very close to a traditional notion of proletariat, that is, the class of all those who produce, once the notion of production itself has been sufficiently revised and expanded.” This, I think, is the intended usage. Regretably, I also think it is the most counter productive usage.

If the term multitude means likely agents of economic and social change, and includes “all those who produce,” I think there is a high likelihood emphasizing it would crowd out giving equal attention to kinship, race, and power based dynamics as to economy based dynamics.

I think emphasizing multitude would tend to hide that procreation, sexuality, socialization, celebration, identification, adjudication, legislation, and implementation count just as much as production (and for that matter consumption and allocation) in people’s conditions and consciousnesses, and also in igniting or thwarting revolutionary inclinations.

Advocates of multitude correctly want to highlight that production affects and is affected by culture, gender, and power - so far, so good. But if our method for incorporating that insight impedes our also using central concepts that are specifically rooted in those other domains and not just in thinking about production, not to mention if they impede our using more detailed economic concepts of class and of consumption and allocation, then despite our good intentions our adopting the concept multitude will narrow rather than broaden our focus.

To see what I mean, I hope it is sufficient to note that using multitude this way would mirror the impact on the left of the old use of the term proletariat, also meaning revolutionary agent based on being a producer.

For example, many activists who used the term proletariat as agent of change, took race very seriously, even considering it of paramount social importance. Nonetheless, the proletariat-based framework led them to understand and think about race in overwhelmingly economic terms. And using proletariat as an organizing principle had the same predictable delimiting effect on people’s approach to gender and political power, as well, of course.

Despite multitude being defined more broadly than proletariat was defined, nonetheless, like the word proletariat, the word multitude identifies a revolutionary agent based on examining economic foundations. That approach will, I fear, cause people to think that the only or at least the most important way to become revolutionary is by way of economic concerns and attitudes. I thought we transcended that “rank the oppressions” approach thirty years ago.

Moreover, even if the above danger was avoided, I think elevating the concept multitude would certainly enforce a bi-polar view of economic change. Regarding economy, with multitude guiding our thoughts there will be potential bad guys - maybe we will call them capitalists, or emperors, or whatever - and there will be potential good guys, the multitude. This is quite like when the conceptualization of economic struggle was capitalists versus the proletariat or versus the working class, with no other economic agents operating.

The trouble with a two constituency approach to agents of economic change is that it covers over the existence of the coordinator class and makes it seem that beyond bad capitalist economics there can only follow either more of the same or, instead, good multitude economics.

This is quite like orthodox Marxism Leninism’s mentality that there is capitalism and then there is socialism. An economy simply must be one or the other. In fact, however, beyond capitalism there are at least two possibilities: one bad, one good.

A bad post capitalist economy has institutions that elevate what I earlier called the coordinator class. I call this economy coordinatorism, though most people call it market or centrally planned socialism. I hate it, though many advocate it. Whatever we call it, and however we feel about it, this economy has public or state ownership, corporate divisions of labor, hierarchical decision making, and either markets or central planning for allocation.

A good post capitalist economy would have institutions, instead, that eliminate class division. I think this will be participatory economics, and I think it will include such features as remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of work, balanced job complexes, self-managed decision making, and participatory planning, but of course the jury is still out on all that.

For me, the problem with the concept multitude is that whatever fine intentions its authors may have, I think it is (1) a step back toward crowding out priority attention for race, gender, and power, and (2) also a step back toward drawing attention away from the nature and importance of the coordinator/worker division.

I know these claims fly in the face of the stated motives of those advocating the concept multitude. But so too did charges of economism and of favoring institutions that elevated a new ruling coordinator class fly in the face of the stated motives of those who in the past advocated Leninist approaches to social change.

Yes, advocates of multitude urge their desire to broaden economics so that it accounts for other dimensions of life. They want to address all forms of domination. But, despite these admirable desires, it is far more probable that shoveling all dimensions of life under a single logic emphasizing only production will underplay extra-economic variables at least as badly as in the past, rather than elevate them.

Second, trying to hammer all the varieties of economic possibility into a bi-polar framework of a bad capitalist economy pitted against a good economy that a multitude will win ignores that anti-capitalists can in fact seek a future that is classless or revolutionaries can seek a future that has coordinators dominating workers. I want classlessness. I don’t want coordinatorism. And so I also don’t want concepts that pervert seeking classlessness into seeking coordinatorism.

I favor using the concepts capitalist, coordinator, and worker for understanding the key constituency dynamics of current economies and also for understanding the two main kinds of post capitalist economy, coordinatorism and classlessness, or, in my view, coordinatorism and participatory economics.

I favor using concepts like man, woman, mother, father, black, white, religion, nationality, ethnicity, citizen, order giver, and order taker, and others as well, of course, for understanding the key dynamics of current families, cultures, and political structures, and for envisioning future improvements as well.

It seems to me that trying to shoehorn social or even just an economic reality into a single-constituency concept like multitude is wildly backward, not forward, in its implications.

Highlighting multitude obscures the independent priority of race, gender, and political structures as well as economics, and papers over the coordinator/worker difference - just as Marxist Leninist concepts obscured and denied these same central elements in the past.

One last point about multitude, and, for that matter, empire, not to mention, dare I say it, post modernism.

To make a worthy bottom-up revolution in the U.S. is going to require at least a hundred million people being powerful and informed advocates and designers of a better future.

This multitude, if you will, of revolutionaries, will all have to be able to comprehend society and historical possibilities. They will have to be not only comprehending but proposing and refining goals and strategies. The tools of revolutionary comprehension and communication will therefore have to be very widely shared and utilized.

To me it follows that talking about democracy, participation, or self management in a language that requires great privilege to have the time to have any familiarity with it is not conducive to democracy, participation, or self management.

The word multitude is fine, as is the word empire. But the fact that I honestly don’t know what either word means, at least in the usage of the books about each word, neither of which I was able to understand, seems to me to be a damning problem.

Of course, it could be that I just lack some capacity needed to read these works and to know what they say, sort of like being color blind or tone deaf. I can’t do it, but nearly everyone else can.

Or it could be that these books, Empire and Multitude - and there are many others, too, of course - are hugely more obscure than serious theory and vision for participatory movements should be, and that they can’t be understood by more than a tiny fraction of the population, or even by more than a tiny fraction of their actual readers.

I think the latter is more likely the case. And most often I don’t think obscurity in left communication is so much a failing of writing and speaking style, as that it reflects the implicit view that revolution is to be comprehended and led by a small sector of professionals, not by a whole population, and that serious discussion is to occur only among that small highly privileged group, not the whole population. That is a coordinatorist bias, a Leninist bias. It is hard to overcome, but I think we need to.

So – what’s my take on Class or Multitude? I reject multitude as a core concept. I welcome class, and particularly a three class orientation.

Thoughts on Hardt's "The Withering of Civil Society"

2005-04-12T22:28:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

[I meant to throw these comments out after our last reading group while the article was still fresh in our minds but never got around to it. I'd still like to hear your thoughts on mine...]

Hardt, and I think many autonomists suffer from an affliction common to many traditional Marxists, that being the believe/hope that the growth of productive forces will expand the spaces available for human freedom.

In the traditional account, new technologies, rationalized means of production, etc. realized through capitalist competion would eventually be appropriated/socialized and put to more humane uses. Moreover, the "creative destruction" wrought by capital would put an end to the ossified traditions of previous societies ushering in a modern world.

In Hardt, Negri and Virno's account, these same forces bring about changes in subjective capacities that will put an end to older forms of identity (the citizen) and bring about more radical politics putting an end to capital/Empire.

And I think this is connected to another problem, one found also in Foucault. They avoid an explanation of what makes resistance possible . While they spend considerable time exploring the subjective capacities developed within the antagonism between labour and capital, they seem to rely on some underlying, irrepressible essential kernal of subjectivity that always resists power. Foucault argues that people will always resist that which they find intolerable but he doesn't explain why, under what conditions, people come to find aspects of their lives intolerable. Perhaps this is a humanist subject sneaking in through the back door...? (For the record, seeing as Change the World Without Taking Power has come up as a possible reading, Holloway relies on a more explicitly humanist notion of the subject, one whose alienation under capitalism leads inevitably to resistance).

Early in our reading group, in the first one I think, we touched on the lack of a theory of consciousness in autonomist thought. I'd like to come back to this. With respect to understanding the conditions in which resistance arises I think some of the post-marxists (Laclau, Mouffe, Zizek, etc) are much more useful in the way they explore discursive struggle and the production of subjectivity.

Original Violence and Coercion of Capitalism

2005-02-27T12:31:00.000-08:00

Hey folks. In our discussion yesterday regarding coercive measures taken by capital to capture labour power, I mentioned Deleuze and Guattari's thoughts on the violence of capital and the ongoing process of primitive accumulation. Here's the passage I was referring to from A Thousand Plateaus.

"…Marx made the observation in the case of capitalism: there is a violence that necessarily operates through the State, precedes the capitalist mode of production, it is very difficult to say who is the thief and who the victim, or even where the violence resides. That is because the worker is born entirely naked and the capitalist objectively ‘clothed’, an independent owner. …It is a violence that posits itself as preaccomplished, even though it is reactivated everyday. …as a general rule, there is primitive accumulation whenever an apparatus of capture is mounted…” (447).

I think the "apparatus of capture" concept is an interesting lens through which to see capitalist valorization and autovalorization, one that perhaps we can explore in future.

S

from Sebastian... "Where are we going?"

2005-02-06T20:01:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone,

I enjoyed the discussion we had yesterday. Thanks Jon for hosting the meeting.

The question "where are we going" appeared at the end of the discussion and then we continued talking about it with Pablo as we walked back home. If we had the blog or wiki this could be the first topic to start building it up. But as we do not have it yet, I take the liberty of filling your mailboxes with some ramblings about the subject of how to keep us focused.

The question “where we are going” probably requires a map. I thought such a “map” can be drawn from Virno’s introduction and first chapter, where he discusses the 'dialectic' of the One and the many.

In my view, this “map” has two elements and two coordinates or dimensions:

1) Forms of the One (the state, general intellect, capital, the spectacle, the Party, etc.).

2) Forms of the many (people, multitude, working class, mob, crowd, etc.). Includes the question about who is counted and how, i.e. the people implies a closed counting, the multitude an open one. Or, the count of who was a citizen of the statei.e. a person with rights--200 years ago did not include women and people from ethnic groups other than the ones that occupied higher positions in the hierarchy of the state (both examples are still valid today in many countries).

3) "Vertical" relations between the many and the One (these could be called 'representation' or ‘constitution’, depending the standpoint we take). The “vertical” relations are always dependent on the form taken by the “horizontal” relations between the many. In other words, the type of bond that connects the many defines one or other form of constitution. For instance, if I relate to others as members of the same people, this type of bond presupposes the state; if I relate to others as spectator, it presupposes we are connected through the spectacle; if I relate to others as workers or as consumers, the bond presupposes capital. It is necessary to note here that “vertical” also means “from the bottom up”: the One and the many is not a relation between the dominant and the dominated (or vice-versa). “Vertical”, in other words, does not mean that the One is “on top” of the many. Rather, “vertical” defines the lines of force that appear in the production of a totalization (i.e. the self-perception of the many as many) that always originates in the type of “horizontal” relations among the many.

4) "Horizontal" relations among the many (what I would call 'composition') In one sense, this dimension refers to the types of bonds between the many. A fundamental question is when those horizontal relations define a bond that does not lead to the formation of a One separate from the many, to which the many delegate their power. Another aspect to consider is the “structure” of those bonds and the subjectivity they relate to. For instance, linguistic communication (including Virno’s “common places”), common notions, money, commodities, etc. Which compositions make the many powerful as many and why? Another question arises regarding the universality of what connects between the many and how it relates to the formation of a political subject, i.e. to emancipatory struggles. For instance, does the formation of a political subject originate in the search for communication with other the members of the multitude? Or does it originate in the concrete forms of life a group within the multitude build in their locale (e.g. Zapatistas, autonomous piquetero groups in Argentina, etc.)?

Well, maybe this may be too abstract. But I think some sort of “map” that we could put together collectively can be helpful to keep us focused. It can allow us to more or less “see” how each article or book we read (or plan to read) contributes to the discussion. I do not mean that we have to expect that each reading fits into something we have already defined. Rather, I think each reading can potentially question the entire map, its elements, dimensions, etc.

As we said, we will meet again on February 26th, at 3:00pm at my place. The reading is the remaining part of Virno’s book.

Cheers,

Sebastian

so far we have read...

2005-02-06T17:20:00.000-08:00

We started by reading Paolo Virno's "Virtuosity and Revolution" (from his and Michael Hardt's Radical Thought in Italy).

We're now halfway through Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude.