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A Grammar of the Multitude
Chris Barr on "A Grammar of the Multitude"
People vs. Multitude
Central to Virno’s argument is the distinction between the concept of “people” and the concept of “multitude” as illustrated by Hobbes and Spinoza. The latter is viewed as “the many, seen as being the many”. The multitude “shuns political unity, resists authority, does not enter into lasting agreements, never attains the status of juridical person because it never transfers its own natural rights to the sovereign.” However, “people” are directly tied to and are in fact a reflection of the State. Within the multitude, individuals remain individuals and do not become One-people with a single will.
Fear/Security, Public/Private
While the idea of “people” revolves around a separation between a safe “inside and a hostile “outside”, the multitude relies on ending such separations. A unique characteristic of the multitude is a “not feeling at home”. This is seen as a uniting element of the multitude by Virno, and which at one level can be seen to lead to things such as opportunism within the multitude.
General Intellect
As a result of “not feeling at home” the multitude turns to common places to gain orientation. These common places are found within the linguistic-cognitive faculties common to the human species. The multitude relies on their ability to appropriate and re-articulate knowledge through language.
Labor as Performance
A large shift has occurred where labor is no longer happens solely when an object is produced. In post-Fordism labor takes on the form of a virtuosic performance, action without an end product, and requires publicly organized space; here the laborer takes on the role of speaker or politician.
Tasks of workers are increasingly involve changing and intensifying social cooperation. The procedures of this cooperation are often controlled by the culture industry, which “produces (regenerates, experiments with) communicative procedures, which are often then destined to function also as means of production”. As a result, communicative faculty, the possession of language, is reduced to wage labor.
Individuation
The multitude “consists of a network of individuals”. Within in the multitude however, individuality is the result of “a process of individuation which stems from the universal, the generic, the pre-individual.” The pre-individual is seen through our biological basis as a species and also through language. For this reason individuation is never completed because of the relation between the many and the general intellect.
References/ Recommended Reading
"Within the multitude, individuals remain individuals and do not become One-people with a single will."
If you look at the international democratic globalization movement you see the plurality of subjectivities. Or think of the anti-war protest of February 15, 2003 when more than ten million people worldwide united over one agenda. Also Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (who teaches part of each year at SUNY Buffalo) are in search of a societal glue that could hold people temporarily together- and Mouffe/Laclau ask how this can reflect in notions of citizenship.
"A large shift has occurred where labor is no longer happens solely when an object is produced. In post-Fordism labor takes on the form of a virtuosic performance, action without an end product, and requires publicly organized space; here the laborer takes on the role of speaker or politician."
We could add that the shift to post-Fordist conditions of labor is limited to the "developed world" where indeed, for the most part, "no object is produced." Surely, this does not hold true for all the offshore sweatshops on the shoulders of which our privileged life style exists. The fact that labor for us becomes performative and that artists, to transport the debate into the cultural realm, are performers of their ideas, is inspiring. This also links to the tension between cultural production and traditional perceptions of art. The cultural producer contributes to the larger field of culture through the production of texts, artworks, events, or other human encounters through which s/he performs her/his ideas.
I'd be very curious if you can link this summary of Virno to your own practice. How does your piece "Chris Barr is Available on Thursdays" relate to Virno's notion of performative labor?
No references for this section.