A Proper Subject (Negri's Multitude a multitool).

Finding a proper subject that can incorporate all instances of social oppression and repression but would also properly respond to the very same attempts at social coercion by power and domination would be an absolute revolutionary body. If this body also has the able to analyze his/her position and relationship with power and domination and then act against it, then this body’s struggle would be for absolute freedom. Does this individual exist or is it rather that all subjects are affected by domination and power and therefore all subjects have their own monopoly on acting out? These subjects could then unite on their individual experience but also realize that one’s own goals cannot be reached without collective action. Is there a chance that such a social being does exist or is it simply an ill-fated attempt to include to many social factors and different kinds of social injustice upon one body? The validity of rounding down to the lowest common dominator regarding peoples who are most oppressed by a global system in an attempt to unite all bodies under oppression is also dangerous because it could potentially fracture and pacify movements. Similarly to Third-Worldism were both European and North American radicals in the late twentieth century exhausted all their efforts in hopes of uniting their struggle with post-colonial uprisings throughout the Third World, so too could making a movement based on a detached and abstract struggle for oppressed peoples of the World pacify social movements in the West. Mass movements turned into underground terrorist organization that acted out in solidarity with movements beyond the realm of the local because the lack of a coherent theory and praxis, as internal activities mystified their own relationship and reproduction of power and domination. This unity was not based on a mutual struggle for a common goal. Rather, European and North American radicals lost sight of their own struggle and carelessly attempted to see their own reality in relation to struggles in Africa, as in Algeria, Palestine, imprisoned political activists, or Chile to sight a few. These struggles are connected in a sense because it is the same bio-political power structure or economic interests that have constructed these uneven social structures, but to say that these struggles are the same or that subjects across the globe are the same is a grand oversimplification. Rather, these struggles are connected and they share similar qualities but their difference is in how domination and power affects their lives and inhibits their movement. The way that power and domination attempts to control different subjects is the same but the results and reactions are different. Can we see their similarities and potential for unity in a struggle against domination and power that interacts differently with subjects across the globe and is it potentially more effective to embrace their difference without losing unification?

If a certain subject is more able to struggle than another it is because this subject understands its position and relationship to power and domination and acts against, but also has a goal or vision beyond its current state and relationship to the world around itself. This struggle does not pertain to any certain nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or ideology. Rather, the subject that understands and builds itself up on comprehending its surroundings and effects on the person will have a better chance for change and motivation for creating change. If power and domination no longer is exercised solely upon subjects from above by a fixed sovereign power that could only threaten its subjects with death, then power has taken on a new form that also guarantees life, and what remains is a struggle for subjects to decide how to live this life. Also, with power and domination being present in a subject’s relationship to death and life the subject’s reproduction of life is then a confrontation. The subject’s own control over life and death and how this life is going to be lived, qualitatively, is what power and the subject are in conflict over. “Domination and power are clever: they reigned over life because they understood that it had to be divided up—into work, emotions, the public, the private—in order to be conquered. And the modern idea of the state has operated for centuries in the same way, through division and fear. From this point of view, the recomposition of life was fundamental: one of the slogans of the 1970s was “We want it all.” This is what is important: everything”. As domination and control have gained control over not only death by also life and the reproduction of life, the subject must fight for the quality of life because under bio-politics death and life are both guaranteed. The struggle is no longer for survival but the quality of life. Life being under the control of power and domination production has spilled over into all aspects of society and are no longer contained within the factory. “Immaterial goods” such as knowledge, communication, and relationships are bound to the economy and therefore take on an economic form. Also, the production process has taken on a social character and is integrated into the very bios. Life itself has become a product and simultaneously a part of the production process of material goods, immaterial goods, and social relationships. Michel Foucault’s “bio-power” and understanding power in a complex and non-centralized top-down relationship between institutions and subjects has become central to understanding not only social creation of subjects but also their power and knowledge of self in regards to power and domination. Subjects are in power but yet victims of power and domination. Bio-power is a source of power that integrates bodies and life into its own production process. “The latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production,” and thus a circular production and reproduction process is put into practice. Within the very bios, power and domination is injected and is internalized by subjects who now identify themselves as power and domination because they are no longer on the outside and but act accordingly to power and domination. Foucault discusses the entry of life into history and therefore understands the entirety of humankind’s life as an entry, “into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques”. Bio-political power is exercised over life and power no longer controls subjects by threatening them with death. It is with the power of life that power and domination control subjects and a subject’s quality of life. Foucault, like Negri, claim the classical notion of freedom and classical juridical-political institutions are incapable of realizing humankind’s needs and desires. The, “right to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this “right”—which the classical judicial system was utterly incapable of comprehending—was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty”. The old sovereign power with a top-down power relationship did not take into consideration the needs and desires of its subjects but under bio-politics and “bio-history” a subject’s humanity was recognized and with it power and domination gained control through the subject’s own participation. Is there a subject that can properly interact and confront power and domination even though it is integrated within bio-politics?

Negri’s Multitude does not derive its meaning from the people nor does it derive its power solely from Marx’s class binary. In a postmodern world things are no longer as simple as they may appear, nor is it as simple as a binary that divides the world into two distinct class based on modern concepts. Rather, “the fracturing of modern identities, however, does not prevent the singularities from acting in common”. The Multitude is not the people therefore it is not restricted to the modern idea of democracy, freedom, or liberation. The Multitude embraces difference and difference’s ability to act in unison for social change. The Multitude in this respect, “is meant to re-propose Marx’s political project of class struggle. The Multitude from this perspective is based not so much on the current empirical existence of the class but rather on its conditions of possibility”. Negri asks use to see the Multitude as a new arena of possibilities in struggle rather than as a definition. The Multitude is a new vehicle for change rather than a new term or category to merely place a certain subject in struggle. “Working-class is fundamentally a restricted concept based on exclusions…The other exploited classes might also struggle against capital [and power and domination] but only subordinated to the leadership of the working-class. Whether or not this is was the case in the past, the concept of multitude rests on the fact that it is not true today. The concept rests, in other words, on the claim that there is no political priority among the forms of labor: all forms of labor are today socially productive, they produce in common, and share too a common potential to resist the domination of capital [power]”. And so, can Spivak’s Subaltern and Chow’s Native, speak and act within Negri’s Multitude? If the Multitude rests on the fact that it is not a category but a vehicle for action then it would seem that there is a strong possibility for the missing native and subaltern to act and then speak on their own accord without the permission of Europe.

Negri is not asking to hear the subject speak and he is not attempting to understand the native in her indigenous state of mind. Negri is most interested in their potential to act out against power and domination whether that power is oppressing the subject through Euro-centrism or a post-colonial decentralized power structure. “Alienation was always a poor concept for understanding the exploitation of factory workers, but here in a realm that many still do not want to consider labor—affective labor, as well as knowledge production and symbolic production—alienation does provide a useful conceptual key for understanding exploitation”. With bio-politics and bio-political production of domination within all aspects of life the struggle for freedom is permeated in all of life and all social spaces. Critical of Western scholarship and Western liberation ideology Spivak through Derrida deconstructs European identity which sets itself apart and defines itself on “the Other”. Spivak is not worried that such a deconstruction of identity will leave everything without an identity. Rather, it is not a general problem, “but a European one”. The European crisis of identity is based on the collapse of an old system which existed on the binary of inside and outside, the periphery and center, and first world vs. third world. Spivak points out that in a post-colonial world class-consciousness or “race-consciousness” in their historical meaning lose their validity as libratory concepts. In the post-colonial world the Western understanding of the native or subaltern will still be constructed on assumptions and will still, “cohere with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of learning and civilization. And the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever”.

Negri as Spivak understands that classical Marxism is based on notions of backward and progressive that place Europe in one category and the Other within its own category, but with Negri’s Multitude maybe the subaltern has a chance to act and would later then be able to speak. No longer trapped within the binary of European and Other but in the Multitude vs. Empire the Subaltern is not, in an almost preordained fashion, ignored and automatically silenced through Western scholars’ inability in opening up space beyond imperialist subjects. Also, the subaltern as a category of “Other” within colonial and post-colonial categories remains speechless for this subject has been socially constructed to remain a mute. No matter if one claims to support the subaltern in her quest to speak from either the left or the right the sympathizer will fail because they still view her as a colonized body. The subaltern from its creation is meant to be speechless, a body that represents oppression for others to speak onto and for. Chow, similarly to Spivak, points out, “the problem of the native is also the problem of modernity and modernity’s relation to “endangered authenticities”. The question to ask is not whether we can return the native to her authentic origin, but what our fascination with the native means in terms of the irreversibility of modernity”. As for art much is similar to politics of social change, “artists with famous names incorporated into their “creativity” the culture and art work of the peoples of the non-West. But while Western artists continued to receive attention specifically categorized in time, place, and name, the treatment of the works of non-western peoples continues to partake of systemic patterns of exploitation and distortion”. And so, the category of Subaltern, but not the Subaltern being a constant victim of exploitation and totally subjugated by the West, it possible for the Subaltern to act beyond its category and be included as the Multitude. Then the Multitude will begin to act in common with other oppressed sectors of a newly defined class dynamic which includes non-traditional sectors of labor as described above.

The Multitude has the ability to incorporate more sectors of social life and include more subjects because Negri has redefined the working-class in relation to innovation within production, reproduction of labor, and with bio-political production. All of society has become integrated within the production process therefore more than just the classical working-class can radically and effectively resist power and domination. Now that all of society is integrated within the process of production the time between free-time and work has become blurred and so too has the category of who is a worker and who is not, “and in turn the struggles of each sector tend to become the struggle of all”. Negri describes that the “Other” has become obsolete within the newly created global anthropology. “Now the decline of the figure of the peasant as other and consequently of modern anthropology, as many contemporary anthropologists formulate it, is to abandon the traditional structure of otherness altogether and discover instead a concept of cultural difference based on a notion of singularity. In other words, the “others” of classical and modern anthropology, the primitive and the peasant, were conceived in their difference from the modern European self”. Negri suggests that anthropology or the understanding of global cultures can no longer be compared to the west and therefore each culture should be understood as a singularity. “Cultural difference must be conceived in itself, as singularity, without any such foundation in the other,” and by recognizing a cultures singularity it no longer is defined upon the binary of West and non-West. These singularities share common qualities and from these qualities subjects are able to act in common. “We share bodies…we share life on this Earth…we share capitalist regimes of production and exploitation; we share common dreams of a better future. Our communication, collaboration, and cooperation, furthermore, not only are based on the common that exists but also in turn produce the common. We make and remake the common we share every day”.

Chuh, like Negri, views subjects in a singular fashion and understands the potential for singular subjects united on a common ground to oppose domination and power because they share a common enemy that interacts with each singularity but differently. Though each subject is different they share qualities and share a common enemy. “In conceiving of multiple kinds of differences, we must of course recognize that they do not exist independently of each other. Rather, they converge and conflict and thus participate in shaping each other. And it is through those contacts, those meetings, that discursive and knowledge limitations can be recognized and interrogated. In the attempt to negotiate the confusion caused by the meeting of differently configured subjectivities and identity formations lays the catalyst for political mobilization”. And so, it is not a matter of feminist and feminism needing to embody all forms of oppression before it can act against domination and power nor is it Negri’s job to make Marx’s working-class to include all oppressed peoples. The Multitude is not a term that needs to incorporate every oppressed subject it is rather a term that understands that the difference is what makes the Multitude possible.
In Bill Readings, The Deconstruction of Politics, Readings, as Spivak, recognize the limits of deconstruction and the danger of deconstructing politics to a point where no subject has any political agency. “Deconstruction can produce no simple model for political action, as Spivak has recognized…Therefore, deconstruction cannot be translated into the literal, either as model or as strategy. As I shall argue, the force of deconstruction is the extent to which it forces a rethinking of the terms of the political”. It is precisely this that Negri has done with the Multitude in relation to bio-politics, division of labor, and the production and reproduction of capitalism (power and domination). Though Negri might not call himself a deconstructionist the redefining of capital’s negation to include new sectors of humankind into the working-class or the Multitude has allowed a “rethinking” of political categories. “It is not easy for any of us to stop measuring the world against the standard of Europe, but the concept of the Multitude requires it of us. Embrace it”.

It is not that Negri’s subject embodies all oppressed masses or their unique situation. Rather, the multitude is a flexible term that morphs to different singularities and different subjects in order to create a common goal. From different points the Multitude comes together in reaction to domination and power and is not something that is created or mechanically put together like Lenin’s vanguard, the Multitudes arise from unique situations. Lenin claimed that the highest stage of capitalism was imperialism and by doing so Marxist-Leninism remains within the binary of periphery and center, colonial and colonized subject, European and the other, Therefore Leninism looks for the power to change society within an outdated revolutionary body. It is therefore impossible for certain strands of Marxism to even recognize the Multitude as a more advanced subject that goes beyond the classical meaning of working-class to include more singularities in an attempt to attack domination and power from different social spaces.

Women subjects whether they are Subaltern, workers, peasants, first world, or post-colonial, the Multitude is a term that recognizes their singularity. Through a reconstruction of their meaning in relation to other subjects within the Multitude all these singular subjects are able to act in unison from different points against power and domination. Negri’s subject allows for Spivak’s subaltern to speak through action and is not interested in the subaltern’s relation to Europe nor is the Multitude interested in the native outside what the native itself wants. Also, the native may be a mystification and socially constructed term placed upon peoples who are viewed as outsiders or non-European, therefore they do not exist except in defining what Europeans are not. The native is a way for the European scholar to search for a true voice of the non-European but this division exists solely for Europeans to explain themselves. Negri’s Multitude is not interested in defining any subject in such a modern binary and so the Multitude too recognizes that the Native is an improper category that does not exist beyond the European and non-European binary. Inside and outside Europe there exist singular subjects that are bound together through bio-political social-production and on their own accord struggle against domination and power together.




Sources:

Chuh, K. Imagine Otherwise on Asian Americanist Critique. Durham, Duke University Press, 2003.

Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality. New York, Random House Inc., 1990.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. Multitude, War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York, Penguin Press, 2004.

Negri, A. Negri on Negri. New York, Routledge, 2004.

Nelson, C. & Grossbery, L. ed. Spivak, Gayatri C. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. University of Illinois, 1988.

Waters, L. ed. Readings, B. The Deconstruction of Politics. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Bammer & Angeliak, ed. Chow, Rey. Where Have All the Natives Gone? Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994.