| Paolo Virno
A Grammar of the Multitude
Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James
Cascaito and Andrea Casson
Globalization is
forcing us to rethink some of the categories—such as “the
people”—that traditionally have been associated
with the now eroding state. Italian political thinker Paolo
Virno argues that the category of “multitude,” elaborated
by Spinoza and for the most part left fallow since the seventeenth
century, is a far better tool to analyze contemporary issues
than the Hobbesian concept of “people,” favored
by classical political philosophy. Hobbes, who detested the
notion of multitude, defined it as shunning political unity,
resisting authority, and never entering into lasting agreements. “When
they rebel against the state,” Hobbes wrote, “the
citizens are the multitude against the people.” But
the multitude isn't just a negative notion: it is a rich
concept that allows us to examine anew plural experiences
and forms of non-representative democracy. Drawing from philosophy
of language, political economics, and ethics, Virno shows
that being foreign, “not-feeling-at-home-anywhere,” is
a condition that forces the multitude to place its trust
in the intellect. In conclusion, Virno suggests that the
metamorphosis of the social systems in the West during the
last twenty years is leading to a paradoxical “Communism
of the Capital.”
The metamorphosis of social systems in the West,
during the 30s, has at times been designated with an
expression as clear as it is apparently paradoxical:
socialism of capital. With this term one alludes to the
determining role taken on by the State within the economic
cycle, to the end of laisser-faire liberalism, to the
beginning of Welfare… The metamorphosis of social
systems in the West, during the 1980s and 1990s, can
be synthetized in more pertinent manner with the expression:
communism of capitalism.
If we can say that Fordism incorporated, and rewrote in its own way,
some aspects of the socialist experience, then post-Fordism has fundamentally
dismissed both keynesianism and socialism. Post-Fordism, hinging
as it does upon the general intellect and the multitude, puts forth,
in its own way, typical demands of communism (abolition of work,
dissolution of the State, etc.). Post-Fordism is the communism of
capital. |
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“I'm still working through the consequences
of Virno's arguments. It's only by delineating the new grounds
of affect and subjectivity that characterize the post-Fordist,
network society, that we can even begin to think about tactics
of political transformation. This is what grounds my current
work-in-progress on postmodern aestheticism, and I've found
Virno's book richly suggestive.”
— Steven Shaviro |
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