A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Semiotext by Paolo Virno
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Virno develops a pre-class distinction of the masses in this book about the multitude. He does a good job of defining this class in his attempt to solidify new axises in post-Ford capitalism.
While his range of focus was impressive for such a small work, I found most intriguing his collapse of the autonomous spheres (for Marx) of political action, economy and intellect in describing the conditions that characterize the multitude. Why do we work so much? And how are we to understand the Commons in our day and age when so much of our corporate existences are subsumed under the rubric of work. Especially now with our many technologies, our private lives have “publicness without a public sphere”.
In this way, the majority of the work surrounds a refining of what the multitudes are, and how we are all ready in this condition. While he does address how the axises of Marx are no longer conditions of the multitudes — how class itself is no longer adequate to describe our current condition — he does not give us velocity. We do not have an enemy to struggle against, or an aesthetic to attain.
Instead, he seems to leave us lingering among ourselves as a “communism of capital” as he puts it… that the borders of capital no longer lie outside in wilderness but within itself, much like the conclusion reached by Deleuze and Guattari when speaking about the limit of capitalism within itself.
Are we to understand ourselves as being completely sublimated by capitalism? That our condition of infinite labor (perhaps as expected of a fragmented post-modern workforce) relates now to an internal colonization of the Common shared pre-linguistic One inherent in our subjectivity? That while capitalism can only expand by seeking new markets, all “margins are in the center” that our logic of exploiter and exploited is perhaps becoming outdated when we understand our non-localized, non-representative political multitude?
I think Virno’s text is very interesting. He serves better as an exploratory text than a manifesto.. and while he definitely anticipates a becoming- of “the people to come” (which is literally what the multitudes are, a becoming-, a differential that is never fully politically identified) there doesn’t seem much for us to go on in, after recognizing the multitudes.
