The multitude as urban

Antonio Negri’s multitude is at least rhetorically identified with the new social movements that announced themselves so spectacularly in cities such as Seattle, Quebec and Genoa. Popular protests in these and other cities highlighted demands of subjects the industrialised West knew only theoretically, particularly the rural poor and indigenous peoples from the developing South. But despite the attention Negri has paid to the global multitude with its billions of rural poor, it is clear that cities are the key terrain in his work.

In Negri’s writing the metropolis is both a problem and a solution, a space of biopolitical exploitation par excellence and a place of potential resistance and creativity. The city is a privileged site of communicative co-operation, affective production and immaterial labour. More: If the urban subject is a tendency, it is a hegemonic tendency. The vicissitudes of urban life therefore help to shape the experience of the contemporary subject; and if it is true that the age of capital has passed and that of Empire has begun, then it is also true that despite the radical heterogeneity of the Multitude, its critical centre lies in the metropolis.

From this point of view, the problem of anti-capitalist transformation must be bound up with the problem of the human subject dwelling within contemporary urban society. Put together in this way it seems to me that Negri opens up a vital new horizon in urban studies, by placing the question of the possibility of transformational subjectivity at their centre. Put another way, Negri writes as though he believed that we must return to a consideration of the urban if we wish to take the possibility of change seriously. What then, do we discover when we read Negri through the eyes of the cosmopolitan urbanist?

Quickly we learn that Negri’s interpretation of the urban is heterogeneous and often the result of acute and irreducibly local political struggle. And despite his careful reading of sociologists such as Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells, two of the most noted commentators on the urban today, Negri’s theorisations of the city are both sophisticated and naïve. Anyone interested in the urban puts down Negri in frustration: where is the city? Where are the suburbs? What is the metropolis? Despite our frustrations, or perhaps because of them, we are compelled to pick him up again.

There is something deeply productive, if not always coherent, about the manner in which Negri elides the distinction between the material and the philosophical in his work. And it is in his characterisation of the urban that we can trace some of the most interesting aspects of this elision, an elision that prompts us to ask what exactly are we doing when we read a philosophical text looking for the contours of a material, historical object? What is a philosopher doing when she employs a philosophical discourse to understand something that is generally made knowable through engineering, social science and the discipline of planning?