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Abstract
Ambivalence and antagonism are constitutive of the multitude and its relations. Such attributes tend to complicate how the multitude is conceived and how it operates; these complications, in turn, often lead to inconsistencies and contradictions in terms of the multitude's signification and application. This article argues that the various complications that arise specifically with respect to ambivalence, antagonism, and the multitude—primarily in the works of the contemporary postautonomist thinkers Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt—need to be reformulated, not removed. It also genealogically traces ambivalence and antagonism back to Spinoza's initial conceptions of the multitude.
Notes
1. Ortega does not use the Spanish word multitud in his Spanish original, but the English word “multitude” is frequently used in the English translation of La rebelión de las masas (1929). In this translation, “multitude” often stands in for the Spanish word muchedumbre, meaning (rather contememptuously) “great crowd.” While Ortega may seem like a curious choice to juxtapose with a thinker such as Virno, his works are often emblematic of conservative thought. This thought consistently conspires against the autonomous and collective forces that hold the potential to enact radical change from below.
2. In line with Virno, Jon Beasley-Murray (Citation2010, 229) recognizes the inherently “ambivalent” nature of the multitude in his book Posthegemony: Political Theory. He also synthesizes this ambivalence with Hardt and Negri's notions of a corruptible multitude through his explorations of multitudes that may be “good” and/or “bad” (258).
3. I cite here Edwin Curley's unpublished English translation of the Political Treatise and will cite from his unpublished translation of the Theological-Political Treatise as well. All citations are made with Curley's permission.
4. The founding principles of the Spanish Falange are Orteguian to the core. Composed in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera (Citation2014; my translation), four years after the publication of The Revolt of the Masses, these principles are based on “a system of authority, hierarchy, and order” that sees any form of democratic government as being “the most ruinous and wasteful system of energies.”
5. Negri (Citation1996, 217) speaks of a “postmodern fascism” as well; he characterizes it as a “post-Fordist” phenomenon and compares it to communism, saying, “Postmodern fascism seeks to match itself to the realities of post-Fordist labor cooperation, and seeks at the same time to express some of its essence in a form that is turned on its head … [P]ostmodern fascism seeks to discover the communist needs of all post-Fordist masses and transform them, gradually, into a cult of differences, the pursuit of individualism, and the search for identity.”
6. Having first outlined their own particular take on antagonism in their 1985 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have recently posited that missing from the multitude is a more engaged form of antagonism. For example, Mouffe (Citation2013, 65–84; see also Laclau and Mouffe Citation2001; Laclau Citation2007) supports what she calls a model of “critique as hegemonic engagement with” instead of the “critique as withdrawal from” that she sees Hardt and Negri and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Virno all following.
7. In Hardt and Negri's (Citation2009, 31) Commonwealth, Negri now asserts that the antagonism that drives history is not so much potenstas/potentia but rather of biopolitics/biopower. Hardt and Negri explicate this antagonism as follows: “To mark this difference between the two ‘powers of life,’ we adopt a terminological distinction … between biopower and biopolitics, whereby the former could be defined (rather crudely) as the power over life and the latter as the power of life to resist and determine an alternative production of subjectivity” (57).
8. In The Persistence of the Negative, Benjamin Noys (Citation2012, 110) critiques what he sees as Negri's propensity to reduce this complexity (that is, ambivalence and antagonism): “We see a thread of continuity in Negri's work … the underlying schema of an asymmetrical opposition between forces, tracked through to that between constituent and constituted power … The tendencies of constituent power and constituted power are actually resolved when we realize that there is only one power: constituent power.”
9. The critique of work and productivism that follows accords with the critique put forward by Kathi Weeks (Citation2011, 12) in The Problem with Work: “Let me be clear: to call these traditional work values into question is not to claim that work is without value … It is, rather, to insist that there are other ways to organize and distribute that activity and to remind us that it is also possible to be creative outside of the boundaries of work. It is to suggest that there might be a variety of ways to experience the pleasure that we may now find in work, as well as other pleasures that we may wish to discover, cultivate, and enjoy. And it is to remind us that the willingness to live for and through work renders subjects supremely functional for capitalist purposes.”
10. For his part, Virno (Citation2004, 25, 35, 55) attempts to avoid the injunction to produce via recourse to what he calls “virtuosic performance,” which can characterize the multitude. Saying first, “The multitude is composed neither of ‘citizens’ nor of ‘producers,’” Virno explains how “we have labor when an object is produced”; comparatively, virtuosic performance “has its fulfillment in itself and does not produce (at least not as a rule, not necessarily) an ‘object’ independent of the very act of having been uttered.”