Thoughts on Ethics and Multitude

In our contemporary capitalism, we have ceased to exist as any kind of traditional unity. We are not one people. We are the multitude. The multitude, according to its theorists, is not simply a new subject that replaces the proletariat corresponding to the era of industrial capitalism. Indeed, this new “presence” appears to escape the field of traditional Marxist analysis. Perhaps it might be better to say that the concept of the multitude expands this traditional field. But what is this new object? What potentiality does it contain to overcome capitalist relations of exploitation?

The concept of multitude has entered into general discourse mainly through the efforts of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. To me there is something profoundly dissatisfying in their two co-productions, Multitude and Empire, though I recognise the extent to which these works have articulated and disseminated the politics of contemporary dissent. Both works are pitched at a level of triumphalism that seems terribly out of step with what seems a pessimistic age. And there appears to be a contradiction between the tone of confidence the works exhibit and their actual content: There is little to grasp on to. Concepts seem poorly developed and merely descriptive passages lack rigour.

Currently I am grappling with the idea that at least one source of the difficulty encountered in these works lies in the return to ethics. Understand that I am not opposed to a concern with the ethical itself; what I worry about is the way in which much post-Marxist mining of the ethical appears to be a kind of programme of producing philosophical answers to political problems, in an exact reversal of Marx’s approach in the Theses on Feuerbach. Understand also that I believe that there is a great deal to be gained through the analysis of ethics, particularly within a political tradition that has tended to ignore the ethics of its own practice to terrible effect. But nevertheless, it is critical to understand the idea of multitude politically, and for this we should examine the concept’s roots in Italian Marxism. In A Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno writes that:

The multitude is defined by the feeling of not-feeling-at-home, just as it [is] defined by the consequent familiarity with “common places”, with the abstract intellect.

Let me look at the first part of this definition. For Virno, the multitude is displaced from any feeling of security or shelter for several reasons and on several different levels. He explains the feeling of displacement by examining the relationship between dread and refuge. Dread is composed of two elements: Fear and anguish. The difference between the two lies in where they are situated. Traditionally, fear has a public character that is collective while anguish is more indeterminate and private. Previously, fear was definite and known, and as such it was experienced as a public feeling. People sought refuge from the things that they feared in the forms of public life, such as the village, government or the state.

Anguish, on the other hand, is generally a private experience. Anguish is “outside” the community and the sources of anguish cannot be addressed by any state. If we fear death, this fear is experienced as anguish: it is “ubiquitous, unforeseeable” and our possible sources of refuge escape immanence. Threatened with anguish, we search for the transcendence of religious feeling.

In contemporary capitalism, what was once experienced as private anguish has become externalised. What defines being multitudinous is this convergence: “What we have,” says Virno, “is a complete overlapping of fear and anguish.” Thus, in the work of writers attempting to delineate the new politics of the multitude, a great deal of attention is paid to the new post-Fordist conditions of social production. Social production because, as Jason Read deftly shows in The Micro-Politics of Capital, there is no longer any part of social life outside of capital.

Simply by choosing to begin with subjective experiences of dread, fear and refuge, we become aware that the multitude is not necessarily capable of being understood within the familiar confines of economic analysis. Or to put it another way, this is an analysis made possible by the new forms of economic production: Contemporary capitalism has achieved such a transformation of its conditions that it has collapsed categories that were previously distinct. Virno’s assumption is that capitalism has reached into the heart of subjectivity itself: It now produces subjectivity as its own object. If this is the case, analysis of the contemporary mode of production need not necessarily begin with external properties of relations and forces of production. Production takes on a subjective, internal character, but is at the same time always material and historical.

It is exactly here that we can see the opportunity for the posing of ethical questions, for we appear to be operating within the experience of subjectivity. But – and this is entirely provisional – to descend entirely to the ethical here would be to miss a perhaps more important opportunity, that of mapping and describing the political reality of subjectivity as the result of capitalist production. Virno steers close by the waters of contemporary ethical philosophy without running aground on the desire to solve philosophically what can only be accomplished in the field of practice. Or to put it another way, his philosophy always leads back to politics, by providing political practice with a deeper understanding of what is necessary for the transformation of capitalist relations.

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