Crowded in: multitude strikes back.

By Zanny Begg

Charles Baudelaire, in Painter of Modern Life, urged the artist to “set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of motion, in the midst of the figurative and the infinite.” He urged the artist to “become one with the flesh of the crowd” and enter it as if it were an immense “reservoir of electrical energy”. In the fin de siecle malaise of post 1968 the electrical energy of the crowd, which in the 1860s so appealed to Baudelaire, appeared to have dimmed to the point where it was barely able to light the way into any serious discussion of mass participation in social life. The multitude ebbed away from sight; fractured, on the one hand, into the antagonistic single units of identity politics and overly homogenized, on the other, into the universal, and unifying, subject position of the working class. Between these two poles enthusiasm for the multitude languished in darkness.

But in the late1990s there was a perceptible recharge in electrical current. The Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, the mass public sector strike in France, and then the riot and demonstrations at Seattle, shone a beam of light into the discourses surrounding the agency of the masses. All at once it seemed the crowd has swelled back into popular consciousness bringing with it a renewed sense of power and energy. The fullest acknowledgement of this change of fortunes for the multitude was, unexpectedly, made by a New York Times editorial which described the massive global anti-war demonstrations of 2002 as the alternative “super-power” to America. By this time the global justice movement, and the concomitant anti-war movement, had clocked up an impressive number of mobilizations ( Seattle, Genoa, Melbourne, Prague, the global February 15 demonstrations) and even some minor victories (the shut down of the WTO trade round in Seattle and Cancun and the scuttling of the MAI agreement).

As the crowd came back into focus, artists began again setting up house in its heart. As Katy Seigel points out in an article in Artforum in January 2005 the “specter of the many (and the ordinary) hovered over block-buster exhibitions” like Documenta11, the Venice Biennale, the International Centre of Photography Triennial and the Whitney Biennial. Artists as diverse as Andres Gursky, Allan Sekula, Fabian Marcaccio and Aernout Mik have jostled with crowds of revelers, protestors and fans as the masses flooded into their work.

The crowd which was amassing in our collective imagination has been given a particular name by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt – the multitude. In choosing this name they borrowed from Benedict de Spinoza, a seventeenth century Dutch philosopher, who used the term multitude to describe the constitutive power of society: “It is clear that the right of the State or Supreme Power is nothing else than natural right itself, determined by the power, not of every individual, but of the multitude’. Hardt argues, in his translator’s forward to Negri’s analysis of Spinoza The Savage Anomaly, that the multitude is the “protagonist of Spinoza’s democratic vision.” He presents Negri’s Spinoza as a philosopher of power, who, in a vein of inquiry also pursued by French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, analyses the myriad forms and mechanisms through which power permeates the social horizon.

What Hardt sees as distinct about Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza is that he provides us with an effective “other” to power, “a radically distinct, sustainable and irrecuperable alternative for the organization of society.” A clue to this “other” to power lies in the translation of the word power itself. According to Hardt the English language only provides one word for power which whereas the Latin word used by Spinoza breaks down into two aspects potestas (the centralized, mediating, transcendental force of command) and potentia (local, immediate actual force of constitution). The antagonism between these two aspects of power unfolds in Negri’s mind along Marxist lines – the potestas of capitalist relations of production and the potentia of working class productive forces.

One of the more innovative aspects of the Italian autonomist Marxist current, within which Negri is a key intellectual, is the emphasis it places on the working class. In 1964 Mario Tronti published an essay as an editorial in ClasseOperaia’s first edition which argued that Marxism needed to be “turned on its head”. He explained “We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and worker’s second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head… and start from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class.”

Tronti was suggesting that capitalist restructuring could only be understood as a response to successful potentia of the working class. The power to drive forward social change lay not in the capitalist’s hands, but the workers. Whilst a seemingly benign shift in point of view – looking at the same outcome but from a different angle - the theoretical power of this different emphasis is revealed in Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Following in the footsteps of Tronti Hardt and Negri see the construction of a globalised world as a response to the power of the working class. It is workers who have driven forward the desire to communicate which has laid the basis of the “network” society, it is worker’s who have sought greater creativity in their labour and have thus spurred the growth of immaterial labour and facilitated the importance of communication flows and so forth.

Rather than the gloomy musings of Marxists such as Frederick Jameson, who see globalization as a totalizing discourse which has been born in a time of defeats of global worker’s struggles, particularly the defeat of “socialism” in the former Soviet countries, Hardt and Negri see globalisation as a desperate clash between capitalist potestas and the inventiveness and strength of worker’s potentia.

A second distinctive feature of Italian Autonomist Marxism is the shifts in its understanding of the composition of the working class. In 1967 a number of intellectuals associated with operaismo met at the University of Padua where Negri had assumed Chair of State Doctrine. At this gathering it was concluded that the working class had changed, the growth in production lines had created a “mass worker” who was still located at the heart of the immediate process of production but who was individually interchangeable and lacked the bonds which had previously tied skilled worker’s to production. According to Steve Wright, in his analysis of the history of Italian operaismoStorming Heaven, these features meant that the new mass worker “personified the subsumption of concrete to abstract labour characteristic of modern capitalist society”.

In the mid 1970s, after an explosion of social struggles which spread out from the point of production, such as the self-reduction campaigns by working class communities (in 1974 bus-fare reduction campaign by FIAT worker’s in Turin spread across Northern Italy) Negri would return to this discussion of the mass worker. He argued that capital’s attempt to control the mass worker’s struggles, by socializing the wage and restructuring giant plants like FIAT, had backfired and that although the mass worker had been devastated (in the two years leading up to 1975 the FIAT labour force had been cut by 13%) it had also entailed a greater socialization of capital with a related “further massification of abstract labour, and therefore” the generation “of socially diffused labour predisposed to struggle”. While the category of working class had “gone into crisis” Negri explained “it continues to produce all its own effects on the entire social terrain as proletariat”.

Negri thus shifted his analysis of class away from the site of production towards the “social factory” where layers of unemployed, house workers, students and the poor fell under the category of core sectors of the working class. As British Marxist Alex Callinicos points out this shift from the mass worker to social worker turns one of the key early tenants of operaismo into the opposite of its former self. Rather then concentrating hopes for revolutionary action in the core of industrial “mass workers” Negri and others within the Italian Marxist tradition began looking to broader social layers for their revolutionary potential.

This shift becomes progressively more marked in Negri’s most recent collaboration with Michael Hardt. In Multitude they argue that there has been a transformation in the basis of capitalist production from the early industrial capitalism of Marx’s time through to Empire. Whilst Marx saw the industrial labour as a hegemonic in the time that he wrote Capital (by this he meant it imposed a tendency on all other forms of labour and society) today this role has been replaced by immaterial labour. As they explain “in the final decades of the twentieth century industrial labour lost it hegemony and in its stead emerged “immaterial labour”, that is labour which creates immaterial products such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response”.

Hardt and Negri go onto explain that whilst industrial labour imposed its own imprint on society – the discipline of the factory, the regimentation of school, the structure of the military - immaterial labour also imposes its own values of communication, networks and affect: immaterial labour “transforms the linear relationships of the assembly line into distributed networks” of collaboration. According to Negri “if we pose the multitude as a class concept, the notion of exploitation will be defined as exploitation of cooperation”.

For Hardt and Negri the multitude is a whole of singularities irreducible to an individual unit or collective entity in synch with Baudelaire’s call for the artist to concern themselves with both the “figurative and the infinite”. It is distinguished from other descriptions of the crowd – particularly the “mob” and “the masses” by its self reflecting and self organsing character. The mob is a frenzied collective of people which can be manipulated or lead from the outside. The people, a la Hobbes, is an identifiable mass of people whose needs and wants can be reflected by a higher sovereign power. The multitude, in contrast, is constitutive: it exists on the plane of immanence. As Negri explains the multitude is an “active social agent, a multiplicity that acts.”

Negri’s creative reappraisal of the working class/multitude has not, however, gone unchallenged. Alex Callinicos describes Negri’s perspective as a “voluntaristic re-writing of Marxism”. He accuses Negri of transforming Marxism into a post-structuralist theory of power which reduces the dynamics of class struggle into a clash of “wills” between a nebulous multitude and a nefarious capitalist class leaving a “strategic vacuum” for any serious advocate of revolution. Other orthodox Marxists have argued that the multitude is a catch all term which is too broad to provide a useful description of the relationship of the oppressed to the means of production.

Dmitry Vilensky engages with this discussion in his work The Negation of the Negation. Vilensky projects video footage from a debate between Alex Callinicos and Antonio Negri on “multitude or class” at the 2003 European Social Forum on a large constructed wall (complete with graffiti and stencils). In an apparent privileging of Negri’s perspective Vilensky only includes footage of his speech (Callinicos remains an unseen challenger). Vilensky’s camera pans the crowd of participants who form a sea of faces listening attentively to the debate. Rather than existing as a passive mass this crowd (like one would expect of a multitude) interjects, argues and challenges Negri’s English translator (eventually replacing her) exhibiting all the attributes of “a whole of singularities” which cannot be reduced to a single collective unit. This is the multitude - a collection of worker’s students, unemployed, migrants and refugees - who provide the “one no” and “many yeses” of the global justice movement.

But in a complicated and inconclusive gesture Vilensky also includes a second projection, on the rear of the screen, of Russian workers labouring on the factory assembly line. So whilst the viewer sees Negri explain to the crowd the growth and centrality of immaterial labour we also stare into the faces of those workers who still sweat it out as material labourers. The weight of Callinicos’s argument remains present.

In an honest attempt to come to grips with the legacy of totalitarian socialism Russian born Vilensky probes what it means today to “set up house in the heart of the multitude.” He confronts head on some of the more rigid interpretations of Marxism, the staple diet of Soviet socialism, which privileged the universal subject position of the heroic and unchanging working class. But he also eschews any easy abandonment of the concept of the working class tout court. In a country which has undergone a deeply traumatic transition to capitalism, with an exponential growth in unemployment, corruption and capitalist exploitation of labour Vilensky remains alert to the experience of work for those, particularly in less developed economies, who remain caught in the cycle of old fashioned material labour.

The Negation of the Negation provides a complex and nuanced way into a discussion of the multitude. Vilensky, in challenging the viewer to think through how we understand the notion of working class, provides a uniquely critical response to globalization. In this sense he achieves his stated aim of creating art which “disrupts the established order, giving rise to creative chaos, from which utopian forms for a new society can emerge”.

The persistence of utopianism is also something which Sydney based artist Raquel Ormella explores in her work Che. Since finding a pair of Che underpants at Spittafeild's markets in London in 1999 Ormella has begun a collection of photographs of the Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara. Her collection includes photographs of posters, stencils, T-shirts, banners, tattoos, books, placards, street signs to the more ludicrous lip balms, ice creams, cosmetics and so on.

In the 1960s Che’s face was the symbol of humanist socialism. In contrast to the grey suits of the Soviet bureaucracy ‘s socialism in one country Che symbolized a more youthful, third wordlist and utopian idea of global revolution. His face became the global symbol of 1968 – from Paris to Czechoslovakia his beard and beret graced the paraphernalia of rebellion. As the upsurge of 1968 revolution receded Che’s popularity also retreated back into the hardcore ranks of socialists activists.

In the 1990s, after the ubiquitous Rage Against the Machine album cover Che popularity again spilled over from radical socialist circles into a more generalized symbol of cultural rebellion for young people around the world. Che became the symbol of broad anti-capitalist dissatisfaction as he adorned the clothing and cultural production of much larger pool of people than those who understood and supported the Cuban revolution he committed his life to.

In a strange way the global popularity of Che has stands as a metaphor for an understanding of the multitude. At his ideological core Che was a committed Marxist, a revolutionary fighter who helped bring into being a socialist society in Cuba. He died attempting to spread this revolution to Bolivia and his legacy is understood by many as deeply connected to that socialist ideological project. But arching over this base is a superstructure of emotion and attitude. Che speaks to millions who have no deep understanding of this project but respond to his defiance, his rebelliousness and his humanism.

Similarly at its core the multitude is a revolutionary subject composed of people who possess revolutionary subjectivity. But Hardt and Negri sweep into this category a larger pool of people who respond more generally to anti-capitalist ideas and actions. Like Che (the man) the multitude can never be divorced entirely from socialism and revolution but also like Che (the symbol) the multitude passes through temporary flirtations with a looser more inclusive anti-capitalist ideology.

Is the revolution just a Che t-shirt away? Clearly no. But Ormella’s work draws our attention to how symbols of revolution have also been globalised. Whilst we those, such as Thomas Freidman, may describe globalization as “wearing mickey mouse ears and eating a Big Mac” from an other perspective there has also been the globalization of Che, the Zapatistas and Malcom X. The power of these symbols is so great even corporations have tried to capitalize on their branding – hence the lip balm and Cherry Guevara ice creams. But these attempts only belie the ongoing power of the symbols itself.

This exhibition, by including a range of artists who have critically responded to globalisation, allows the viewer to take sock of the global justice movement at a crucial time. Almost a decade since Seattle, and in the wake of the Iraq war and September 11, the crowd may be back in focus but it remains to be seen exactly where it is leading us.

Edited version of the Catalogue essay for the exhibition Disobedience, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 2005.

Baudelaire, C in Bergmen, M All that is Solid Melts into Air, Penguin Books, New York: 1982 p 145.
George, S in Anti-Capitalism Where to Now, BookMarks, London: 2004, p47.
Siegal, K, “All Together Now: Crowd Scenes in Contemporary Art”, Artforum, January 2005, p167.
Spinoza, B, in The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics by Negri A, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 1991 p197
ibid p xv.
op cit p xi
Tronti, M in Storming Heaven, Wright, S, Pluto Press, London: 2002, p64.
Ibid p 64.
Op cit Storming Heaven, p107
Op cit. Storming Heaven, p107.
Op cit Storming Heaven, p158
Op cit Storming Heaven p 168
Negri in Storming Heaven p 163
Callinicos, A. Toni Negri in Perspective, in Debating Empire, ed. Balakrishnan, G., Verso, London: 2003.
Multitude p108.
Multitude p111
Negri, Approximations… p1
Negri Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitude
Op cit Debating Empire, p 133.
Negri, A, Multitude of Working Class?, Special edition of What is to be done, produced for the exhibition Cycle Tracks will Abound in Utopia, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Vilensky, D August 2004.
Cycle Tracks will Abound in Utopia, catalogue, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2004, p23.