<nettime> Re: Zagreb interview with Michael Hardt

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

Ognjen Strpic wrote:

"if the problem with multitude is only in 
not-precise-enough-formulation, your conclusion may be premature. 
that is, maybe an equally theoretically strong and appealing version 
of the notion of multitude can be proposed that would avoid those ... 
unpleasant developments. if so, the wholesale abandonment would be
unnecessary."

Whooaa! You missed my conclusion. I didn't say I wanted to dump "the 
notion of multitude[s]," but I do think it's time to go beyond this 
IMAGE of a spontaneous, swirling force that brings together teamsters 
and turtles. It's time to start making the concept of the multitudes 
work, beyond its "ferocious ontological optimism" (Pascal Nicolas-Le 
Strat). The optimism says: we don't have to conceive an essentially 
stupid mass that can only be shaped by hegemonic concepts into a 
People following a party program; instead we can achieve a new kind 
of collective intelligence. That's great, it's a beginning. What I 
said was: "The promise of the multitude is that of an operative 
intelligence of individuals and small groups, able to generate agency 
through the networked extension of an almost personal trust, which is 
based both on continuous critical debate and on cooperative action."

The networked extension is the key thing: what's critical now is the 
question of the very large scale, and the notion of the multitudes 
says that you can bring the small scale up to become the large one. 
The experimentation of the recent counter-globalization protest 
movements and the social forums shows that things can really be done 
along those lines. Now it's important to start asking: what can and 
can't be achieved? Can the spontaneous/critical collaborations 
involve people outside the far left, immaterial laboring, new-media 
types who have adopted the notion of the multitudes? Can that notion 
open up the time and desire it would take to go through all the 
historical and cultural discussions of race-nation-class that are 
necessary steps on the way to fully realizing what's promised in the 
word: all-inclusivity? Then on another level, are we talking about a 
theory of global civil society, as a counter-power in tension with 
administrative structures which are thereby critiqued and improved? 
Or are we talking, over the middle and long term, about a possible 
new way of organizing redistribution, as well as (oh that nasty word) 
control of the big capitalist predators? One more question: how to 
cooperate with people who just don't buy the notion - yet whose goals 
converge, to some degree, with those who do?

The answers make a huge difference. Of course these are "just" 
theoretical arguments. The experiments should go on, and I think that 
the stress on open, critical cooperation ensures that they are not 
fascistic. But it doesn't ensure that they're not naive. What's going 
to happen as the protests and radical demands go further is that 
they're going to provoke fascist reactions, which will be 
instrumentalized by the police states of authoritarian neoliberalism. 
So over the middle term, the ability to articulate answers to the 
theoretical questions, and to defend those answers in public so that 
it convinces lots of people to refuse the police state, will be 
extremely important, for the entire leftist movement. A 
"theoretically strong and appealing version of the notion of 
multitude" could help to make or break the whole effort to go beyond 
the present, drastically unsatisfying condition of mass-mediated 
representative democracy, run mainly by unelected administrators for 
increasingly capitalist ends, within the exclusive, racist borders of 
sovereign national collectivities.

Brian Holmes

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