Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The basic foundation in this book comes from Marx, that is to say, the form of labor — forces of production — shape subjectivity. Unlike Marx however, Hardt and Negri take the position that labor has already attained subjectivity. They dub this collective subjectivity as the multitude, not as a unity but as a collective resistance against the control of production that upper classes utilize. So while you can draw an analogy between communism as utopia, espoused by Marx and how Hardt and Negri take radical democracy of the multitude as utopic, the main difference from Marx isn’t democracy vs communism, it’s the concept that subjectivity is also produced by the mode of labor.
So to reconnect the dots, Hardt and Negri take a post-Marxist position that is analogous to Marx. Using the figure of the double articulation as a way of deploying meaning, the first articulation is the mode of labor to constitute subjectivity. The second articulation for Hardt and Negri is the state apparatus, the nest of multinational corporations that over grids national boundaries while defining the class relations within those national boundaries. Hardt and Negri envision a second articulation that follows the first articulation closely, in order to divide resource allocation more evenly.
They don’t pretend to know how to do this, this book is only meant to define the problem further.
So to follow their form, they do fall under the rubric of post-modernism as an accelerated form of modernism, because they take the populous multitude as having coherency within each separate identity, even if there is no coherency within a larger collection because such coherency creates a bottle neck that would centralize control, disrupting most positions within the multitude by “representing” them.
In this sense, their deploy is anti-representation, yet it also uses the political-social episteme as a model for itself. One assumes that we will not encounter Baudillaridian simulacra at the point, for Hardt and Negri like Marx assume that the subjectivities of the multitude are authentic and not a reflexive back-flow informed by the second articulation but wholly originary merely at the first level in-itself for-itself.
They don’t address this last point. Coached in the terms I just put it, their assumption becomes problematic and unstable, for as they point out, peace in the center requires expansive control of the territory directly outside. This seed is how they point out Empires start. And isn’t in this example, a singularity that would rule the multitude? They also don’t address this in the book; how a multitude could live with itself. I suppose their reach is to get away from abstract philosophy, but considering that their assumptions are centered from philosophy, it feels like a bit of a blind spot.
