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.

Strasbourg

 

 This evening we are in Strasbourg, staying at a relatively cheap hotel not far from the old centre of town. There is a music festival going on, and the streets are thick with people. There are so many people enjoying themselves that the main squares of the city are impenetrable. Bands run electrical cables from apartment windows and tune up forever. Crowds form around bands that we cannot see. At the doors of Strasbourg’s stupendous gothic cathedral a boy with one leg and a terrible haircut sings songs that make you think of Jacques Brel without cigarettes and his nuts twisted off.

The heat and the humidity are formidable. For the last few days there have been sudden thunderstorms that have cooled the air, but tonight the weather has not broken. The city has instead. While looking for a kebab, we heard loud power chords and screaming, and turning into a narrow medieval lane we saw a throng of metal fans crowded around a proper death metal act. Down the next lane an Irish fiddler stood uselessly in the din of a nearby d.j. A stunningly beautiful man in a cream three-piece linen suit and long black hair lurched drunkenly to hip-hop music being played by suddenly silent teenagers. Just down from our hotel the street was filled with Turkish music and dancing. Along the sidewalks the busy cafes and Turkish snackbars were busier still. Men with untucked shirts lifted their hands in the air and whirled sufi-like on the pavement.

Strasbourg seems to have everything. It has foetid canals, it has rattly bicycles (I have rented one for the week) and it has cheese and wine. It is an old city, with strange buildings that bulge and slouch irregularly with age. There are large, shuttered tenement buildings looming over the streets with peeling paint and scribbled over with chalk graffiti. There is a vast, ugly university campus and there is the magnificent cathedral that makes you dizzy when you look too hard.

Strasbourg is also home to several large European Union institutions, in addition to being the site of the European Court of Justice. But do not think that this means that Strasbourg is unimaginably wealthy or filled with Eurocrats to the exclusion of all others. The most obvious EU organ in this city turns out to be the European Parliament, and even Europe’s most ardent supporters will agree that this institution has been a dismal failure. Europe’s political gaze is focused on Brussels, where the bureaucrats hold the real power. Fortunately for Strasbourg, this has meant that the city is not nearly as tidy or as dull as you might imagine a European capital to be. Just beyond the old city centre and the upper class shopping precincts, Strasbourg is a real city, With only 200,000 or so citoyens, Strasbourg has a large immigrant community, teeming streets and failed housing projects. The city has poverty, exclusion and neglect. And it is a long way from Paris.

The recent unrest in France extended even here; cars were burned and groups of young people battled with police. A state of emergency was declared in the city. Nothing like what occurred in the banlieus outside Paris or some of the larger, more industrial cities in France. Much of the anger that was expressed during these days and nights came from young people with African and Muslim backgrounds. While I can only assume that the violence here was motivated by the same issues as in these other places – poverty, exclusion and unemployment –what I have seen reveals a presence of otherness that is quite unlike what I understand to be the case in Canada.

Compared to what we have seen in Munich, Freiburg and Basel, Strasbourg is a fundamentally diverse place. I have the feeling – and with my poor French I am certain this is just the surface of things – that Muslim and African identities constitute something fundamental to the character of this city. Despite the fact that France is vehemently anti multicultural, both of these identities in particular seem to exist inside the life of Strasbourg, and not just at the edges or pushed together in ghettoes. Of course, the ghettoes are here, around the edges and in other places. But there is something else as well, and so far I have only experienced it as a feeling and nothing more. Beyond the many relationships (friends, lovers, all kinds) that we’ve seen between Europeans, Muslims and Africans, cultural difference appears to be something shared and experienced in a way that appears to crack open what I might have thought of as “French” identity.

Much of this may have to do with the fact that so many of France’s “immigrant” communities come from her former colonies, and to my ears they speak the language beautifully. But I cannot help but feel that another reason may be because France seems to capable of dwelling outside of itself so easily. It isn’t simply an isolated place, apart from what surrounds it. What is now obvious to me is that unlike Britain and Germany, France is a part of the Mediterranean. It has real, tangible historical links with other places. You can feel the reality of this country’s relationship with Africa, with Spain, with the Middle East as a kind of radical reciprocity in a way that you cannot elsewhere in Europe. I am not suggesting that France is less racist or xenophobic than other places. What I mean is that this country’s relationship to cultural difference is totally different than that of North America or other colonial countries such as New Zealand and Australia. The riots have made it clear that there is a great deal about France that isn’t working well for many of its communities. What I have seen shows me that many of this country’s critics, particularly those in North America , do not give sufficient weight to the complexity of France’s relationship with difference.

 

Reflections on a Cuban Wedding, Part One

In December my partner and I flew to Cuba to be at my mother’s wedding. She’d been living in Cuba on and off for nearly three years before the ceremony took place. It was an unusual ceremony. Alex is retired now, in her early sixties and Alain, her new husband is an electrician living in a large tenement on the outskirts of Havana. Up to the moment of the wedding all I knew for certain was that he wasn’t quite half her age.

She was there with Alain when we got through the careful security at Havana’s large airport. She looked great, with her long silver hair and her sharp eyes framed by a pair of cheap cats eye glasses from Army and Navy. Alain looked nervous but happy, and he set to work quickly, helping us with our bags and getting us out to the busy taxi stand. It was evening and a cool mist was settling over the green fields and shambling buildings outside of Havana.

I hadn’t been unprepared for my mother’s new life. Throughout her forties and fifties she had had several relationships with younger men and most of our family and friends had learned to accept her choices. Politically, she always had a romantic attachment to revolutionary politics in general and to Cuba and Fidel Castro in particular. After an early retirement, she travelled to Havana and enrolled in a Spanish course in the city’s leafy university. She liked the city and she liked the people. In Canada she had always been conspicuous for many reasons, the most important being her exuberant love of music and dancing. Cuba is a place where the enjoyment of music and dancing is not unusual and so Alex felt at home, particularly in Havana, a city founded on the rhythms of Salsa, Rhumba and the frenetic pulse of Reggaeton.

The news that she was marrying a young Cuban man and planned to divide her time between Havana and her home in Vancouver was controversial, and I found myself having to explain my mother’s politics and emotional life to people around me. Each time the subject came up my understanding grew a little, as though a conversation about my mother was like a walk through a neighbourhood that I had thought I’d known, but only seen from a distance. In the beginning I hadn’t thought that there was a relationship between Alex’s political decision to identify with the socialist project in Cuba and her involvement with a younger man, but the more I thought about it, the more I became aware that in this case as in so many others, emotion and politics are inextricably linked.

Both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had told people that my mother had been a communist since she was a teenager, but even at the time I knew that wasn’t really true. To use a phrase that is outdated now, it would be more accurate to say that my mother has been a lifelong communist sympathizer. Even that is stronger than what I mean to say. To my knowledge, Alex has never been a member of a communist party. Although she is motivated by a deep hatred of capitalism she has always, until recently, been a dependable volunteer for the social-democratic NDP and the more left-wing Committee of Progressive Electors in Vancouver. Her work as an advocate for battered women has given her a pragmatic view of political change but at the same time she understands that inequality and oppression are systemic. Ultimately, for my mother as well as for many others, capitalist politics and economics must be overcome, and there will be a time when revolutionary politics will emerge as the only way to achieve this end.

But Alex is a terrible conspirator, and her work has given her a sensible view of the limits of violence. She is a non-conformist by simple disposition and has a dislike of authority that would make her unreliable to any insurrectionary party. Her ideal vision of society is more important than any programme or strategy for overthrowing the present one. Her politics are based on an unshakeable belief in co-operation, simplicity and music, and although some people might call this utopian I do not think this is fair. Growing up I was always aware of the enormous achievements of revolutionary politics and taught to value all forms of political involvement. Although her belief in co-operation might appear to be naïve, it is not ignorant; Alex’s convictions have been developed through her reading in ethnography, her diligent attendance at college night classes and her love of documentaries about the lives of people from less industrialised and non-capitalist societies.

* * * * * *

“According to article 72 of Cuba’s Criminal Code (Law 62), “any person shall be deemed dangerous if he or she has shown a proclivity to commit crimes demonstrated by conduct that is in manifest contradiction with the norms of socialist morality.” Article 75.1 of the same law provides that any police officer can issue a warning (acta de advertencia) for “dangerousness”. A warning can also be issued for associating with a “dangerous person.”(4) The declaration of a dangerous pre-criminal state can be decided summarily according to Decree No. 129, issued in 1991.(5) Any person who has received one or more warning can be convicted of dangerousness and sentenced at a Municipal Tribunal for up to four years in prison.” (From Amnesty International)