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Refiguring the multitude
From exodus to the production of norms
Timothy Rayner
The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in antithetical
values.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §2
Hardt and Negri describe Multitude (2004) as a ‘sequel’ to Empire (2000). But
for many this book will seem a strange successor. Empire, for all its
radicalism, is a studiously academic, resolutely interdisciplinary work, and
accordingly it has found critics and adherents in a variety of academic
disciplines (law, politics, philosophy, sociology, postcolonial studies). The
sequel Multitude, by contrast, is a less academic and more obviously politically
motivated work. It remains to be seen how well Multitude is received in the
academy – it is clearly written with a more general audience in mind. The tone
is less theoretical and the language less technical than Empire. Whereas the
first book proceeded with brazen decisiveness and theoretical inventiveness,
Multitude, by comparison, is almost apologetic about its innovations; no sooner
has it declared itself to be ‘a philosophical book’ than it is making
concessions to the reader. All in all, one has less the sense of being told
about a new network power and society currently transforming the globe than of
being invited to participate in this transformation in whichever way possible.
Such a shift in rhetorical strategy undoubtedly reflects, in part, Hardt and
Negri’s attempt to regain their footing after the unanticipated blow to the
ontogeny of Empire that took place on 11 September 2001. One does not have to be
a political theorist to know that in a situation of violence and uncertainty,
the first thing to do is to build a community.
Multitude is manifestly a call to arms. Having established the premisses of
their argument in Empire, Hardt and Negri are able to hone their perspective on
the present, squarely targeting the ‘war on terror’ that the United States,
along with various other coalition nations, has prosecuted in the wake of the
September 11 attacks. Hardt and Negri argue that in the age of Empire, war has
become the norm. But this is a new kind of war, with new objectives: ‘War has
become a regime of biopower, that is, a form of rule aimed not only at
controlling the population but producing and reproducing all forms of life.’1 To
this statement, Hardt and Negri add an important twist: biopower, in its
management of life, both presupposes and produces biopolitical networks that are
immanent to the social field – rhizomatic processes of collaboration and
collective innovation, ‘multitudes’.2 In Hardt and Negri’s view, everything
hinges on how the struggle between biopower and biopolitics unfolds. In the age
of Empire, they claim, we are faced with a simple dichotomy and decision:
imperial biopolitical control or a new possibility for democracy currently
emerging on our horizon – the ‘absolute’ democracy of the multitude.
This article stages a confrontation with Hardt and Negri’s account of
absolute democracy. While the discussion of this concept in Multitude is
wide-ranging and provocative, Hardt and Negri’s theoretical exposition leaves
much to be desired. I fear that the ‘general audience’ approach that is taken by
the authors has also been taken as licence to bury much of the fundamental
conceptual content of this argument. Rather than unpack for us the theoretical
nuts and bolts of the multitude (as we might have hoped after the equivocal
final part of Empire), Hardt and Negri are content freely to apply their
theoretical vocabulary – including ‘biopolitical production’, ‘exodus’ and ‘the
common’ – as if the reader were already familiar with the terms. This does
little to clarify the mechanics of the multitude. Worse, it works to conceal a
number of contentious theoretical propositions with important implications for
the democracy of the multitude. Chief among these is the distinction between
‘constituted’ and ‘constituent’ power – a distinction that animates all of
Negri’s work from the 1980s on, alone and together with Hardt.
The constituted–constituent power binary first assumes a central place in
Negri’s work in his book on Spinoza.3 Highlighting Spinoza’s ambiguous use of
the terms potestas and potentia, Negri argues for a distinction between two
modes of power. On the one hand, there is constituted power: the centralized,
transcendental force of command that characterizes established forms of
political order. On the other hand, there is constituent power: the localized,
immanent force of socio-political constitution that underpins modes of order and
maintains them in their being. In a subsequent work, Insurgencies, Negri locates
the constituted–constituent power binary at the heart of a new political
ontology. Citing a range of historical examples, Negri presents constituent
power as the distributed, collective force of desire that drives ontological
emergence and social innovation – a minoritarian power perpetually opposed to
the ‘totalitarian’ sedimentations of the modern state.4
As Hardt points out, the distinction between potestas and potentia is readily
made ‘in most European languages (potere and potenza in Italian, pouvoir and
puissance in French, Macht and Vermögern in German)’ – though not in English,
which has only the one word, power.5 Perhaps this explains Hardt and Negri’s
decision to allow this conceptual binary to fade into the background in
Multitude, which was written in English, presumably with an anglophone audience
in mind. Despite its exclusion, however, the constituted–constituent power
distinction remains central to Hardt and Negri’s thought, having particular
relevance for the concept of absolute democracy. Ultimately, all that the
omission of this distinction from Multitude achieves is to conceal the limits of
the radical praxis that is proposed in the work. As in their previous book,
Hardt and Negri argue that Empire cannot be overthrown, yet it can be contested
and ultimately surpassed through the withdrawal of constituent power. Their
radical proposition is that the multitude counterpose the power of exodus to the
machinations of imperial governance: ‘Democracy today takes the form of a
subtraction, a flight, an exodus from sovereignty.’6
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