Representation. A short comment on Multitude (2004), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude. War and Democracy in The Age of Empire (2004) is the volume that follows Empire (2000). While the first volume offered a description of the reactive regime that followed the years after the end of the Cold War, that is, the formation of Empire, the second volume offers the project of the multitude, the active agent of change, that which precedes and presupposes Empire. If empire works by a flexible regime that expands like a network, but also that eludes easy clear-cut definitions, the multitude is the active collective subject that can dismantle Empire. The biggest challenge is, then, face “the global state of war” (xi) that beats at the heart of Empire. In a way, the book was thought to reflect on events that reply shook the world during the first years of the millennium. While, perhaps, somethings depicted by the book did not aged well —like the prediction that algorithm knowledge production would enable new forms of collective identities or freedoms— some of the main ideas of Multitude are still relevant and important. 

The book’s main project is to describe the “multitude.” This concept was, in a way described in the previous book. But what makes different Multitude from Empire is that the first will focus exclusively on the challenges that the concept of multitude faces today, from both right and left, from war and democracy. This collective subject, early in the book, is defined as an “open and expansive network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally, a network that provides the means of encounter so that we can work and live in common” (xiv). What this concept offers, then, is openness and expansiveness as means to counter the closure and exclusion present in a world divided in an undividable war of all against all. That is, the multitude is the virtual promise for a world that is in stasis, in a civil war, in perpetual terror. It is not that difference is erased under the multitude, but what is at stake is the possibility of imagining a collectivity that does not serve identitarian means (like the political subject of the “people”) or like the unified collective subject of the “masses,” widely used and abused by work unions and so on. 

In a way, the book offers a radical way out from the politics of the twentieth century. The multitude truly is the way out of the politics of the party, of hegemony (even if the book does not mention this). But, at the same time the book does not go far enough. By focusing exclusively on democracy, as the only mean through which the multitude can expand its project, the book seems limit its own powerful concept. In fact, democracy is also tied to its own diseases, like representation. If as we are told, repeatedly, after the second half of the book, that representation is a mechanism that connects and separates (242-244), then, to what extent does the multitude needs representation? Or to put it differently, why does the politics of desire and positive affects of the multitude still needs a mechanism that, itself, is a trap? To a certain extent, this would imply that politics is unescapable from representation, but to another extent, the book could also suggest that the multitude errs. That is, since the multitude is “a diffuse set of singularities that produce a common life; it is a kind of social flesh that organizes itself into a new social body” (349), and consequently, representation is just one of the toys of the playful and creative forms of politics that the multitude is capable of creating. Then, as any other toy, representation will be no longer fun, but only time and the multitude would tell. 

The Savage Anomaly. The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphisics and Politics (Tdr. Michael Hardt)

Antonio Negri’s The Savage Anomaly. The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (1991) offers a detailed study of Baruch Spinoza’s works along with a comprehensive analysis of Spinoza’s historical and social background. Spinoza is an anomalous philosopher and only in the Lowlands was it possible that his thought could be produced. During those years, the Dutch are, after all, an anomaly as well, since “it is a bourgeois revolution but in an anomalous form, not protected by an absolute Power but developing absolutely in the vastness of rule and savage reproduction” (7). The XVII century was anomalous too. Those were the years when capitalism developed. And, of course, capitalism is also an anomaly. Hence, what anomalies teach us, is that what moves the world is the way to deal with crisis, philosophically (Spinoza), politically (Lowlands) and systematically-economically (capitalism). While the politics of the state and the system and economy of production became an appropriation of the crisis where potestas held sway, through Spinoza, a thought capable of rendering visible the possibilities of being’s potentia started a never-ending formation of the multitudo, “a genealogy of collectivity, as a conscious articulation and constitution of the whole, the totality” (21). 

As Michael Hardt introduces the distinction between potestas —that which “denotes the centralized, mediating, transcendental force of command” (xiii)— and potentia —”the local immediate, actual force of constitution” (xiii) in Negri’s work, one can hardly not think that The Savage Anomaly is also a book that depicts the story of captures and escapes of the constituent power (potentia). That is, the book illustrates how potentia is an accumulation and progression of affects via the conatus, apetitus, and cupiditas in a mechanism of liberation (157), while potestas is an accumulation of reactive captures, of internalization of crisis for the sake of transcending a limit, using exchange as a force that produces value, hierarchy and command. Potentia is active, and the market and the state live on mystifying potentia in potestas (72). With this in mind, the Spinozan anomaly is an invitation to see in the crisis not an opportunity for reinstituting a teleology or a “nomos” but of seeing the crisis as a chance for ethics, that “must course throughout the world of imagination and the passions to make itself the material and constructive force of the reconstruction of the world” (84). Potentia, then, construcs and reconstrucs the world. That is why only through metaphysics a political an ethical stance is possible, since being is always active and immediate.

We see metaphysics in Spinoza, and in Negri, yet in neither of them this ontological reflections lose their ties to materiality. Potentia and potestas are inherent to all bodies, one as creative and virtual, the other as imposed and oppressive. The political implications of Spinoza, then, should be put into work on a canvas that focuses better on the ways of liberation and less in the ways of oppression. Thus, what is at stake is the analysis of the contracts, pacts, and all the ways into which the “limitlessness of sovereign power [potestas]” mystifies the dynamic and constitutive inferences of the multitudes. This analysis would be one that puts science “as a non-finalized essence, as an accumulation of liberatory acts” (214). What matters is to follow “the development of subjective power, in the process of the destruction of the theological illusion, [that] gathers together all that has accumulated in being, all that being has produced, historically, by means of and against the mystification, towards a greater human sociability, and reappropriates it, redefines it” (227). The task then is for autonomy, liberation and affirmation of existence. Bliss in the multitudo, that is where all the affects are being gather, where they accumulate without being hierarchized. If the constituent process of potentia is counting on an accumulation that leads towards composition and not towards value and hierarchy, how would these accumulations would differentiate between each other now that we are reaching again (more) anomalous times?  

Estruendo. Notas sobre Arte y multitudo. Ocho cartas de Toni Negri (2000)

Las ocho cartas de Toni Negri que Raúl Sánchez traduce, edita y prologa en Arte y Multitudo ilustran que el arte no tiene como único fin ser narración o sensación, “sino crear dispositivos en los que la historia pueda hacerse” (“Prólogo” 13). Así, los temas que Toni Negri desarrolla en sus cartas van desde la posmodernidad, como subsunción de la cultura al capital, hasta la descripción de la abstracta relación que se entreteje entre el arte y multitudo. Como “la naturaleza colectiva y colaborativa del proyecto político [de Negri] asegura siempre que no se trata de un proyecto de renuncia sino de alegría, una aventura alegre” (89), así también, la relación entre arte y multitudo pasa necesariamente por la alegría, pues la belleza está en la forma en que el excedente liberado de trabajo del arte permite a las singularidades estar en movimiento, en “lo infinito de los ademanes que ponen a un cuerpo en los brazos de otro” (79-80). El arte excede en multiplicidad y en libertad a la unicidad y la opresión del capital y esto sólo es así porque la creación poética es una “herramienta de hacerse concreto en lo abstracto” (76). Precisamente la capacidad de abstracción del arte es la que permite afianzar la relación entre arte y multitudo. 

El arte, como saber práctico, se encuentra con la multitudo, como colección de cuerpos constituyentes de la vida práctica, a través de lo abstracto, que es el mapa por el que el arte “puede aventurarse en un continente desnudo y desconocido, para crear ser… nuevo” (26). Pese a que el posmodernismo señale el fin de la posibilidad del arte de inventarse, la presencia de la abstracción es lo que permite al arte ser siempre una fuente inagotable que se abre al “ad-venir”. Lo abstracto no es la negación de los cuerpos, lo abstracto es su afirmación escapada a los regímenes enunciativos del trabajo subsumido. No se abstrae de la nada, pues como la pintura abstracta ilustra la “parábola del perseguirse siempre nuevo del ser, del vacío y de la potencia” (38), así también cualquier manifestación artística que abstraiga plasma, recupera, acumula intensidades, persecuciones entre el vacío y la potencia. El arte siempre está relacionado al deseo, pero no a uno caracterizado por la ausencia, sino por un vacío que se teje “sobre el ritmo de las posibilidades” (46) de los cuerpos, porque el ser se construye “a través del hacer de deseo” (47), como continuación del appetitus del conatus. El arte guarda la letras que garabatean el placer de vivir (47) de los cuerpos, de las multitudes.  

Si el arte es bello es porque es “una acción colectiva de liberación que se presenta como excedencia del ser” (58). Por ese mismo excedente es que multitudo y arte confluyen. Esto, por supuesto no tiene nada de consolador, o tal vez, sí. Tal vez, las relaciones que Negri ilustra entre arte y multitudo, en que ambas se confunden son, como la experiencia recuperada por los años de prisión de Negri y sus compañeros, experiencias “paradójica[s] y ferocísima[s]” para “reafirmar la vida” (24) o al menos otras formas de vida. Tanto arte y multitudo pueden trascender el desarrollo histórico (Marx) y vencer a la soledad (Negri) porque ambos conceptos se desbordan en lo común, no como colección de cuerpos y afectos estáticos, sino como posibilidad “abstracta y constructiva” (59). Cuando arte y multitudo se encuentran se “rompe todo, y [se] transforma esa caída de átomos en un acto de amor” (79): la desviación del clinamen aviva una llama, desborda ríos y precipita los vientos sobre las planicies más allá de las montañas. El arte es el testimonio de una captura (subsunción del trabajo artístico al capital y al estado), pero también de una multitud de fugas, líneas, rayos, relámpagos y a veces sólo flashazos de un flujo no codificable pero siempre afectivo. Algún día estas cascadas de luz, pirotecnia no celebratoria, pero disparada con fe, chocarán con el murmullo de las multitudes, con sus gritos, o con sus silencio y la limpidez de sus cuerpos, si no es que este choque ya pasó.