Γραμματική του πλήθους: Για μια ανάλυση των σύγχρονων μορφών ζωής

by Paolo Virno, Βασίλης Πασσάς (Translator), Γιώργης-Βύρων Δάβος (Editor)

Οι έννοιες «λαός» και «πλήθος», σε διαμάχη μεταξύ τους, έπαιξαν πρωταγωνιστικό ρόλο στον ορισμό των πολιτικών και κοινωνικών κατηγοριών της νεωτερικότητας. Υπηρίσχυσε η ιδέα του «λαού». «Πλήθος» είναι ο χαμένος όρος, η έννοια που θάφτηκε. Σήμερα, από τη στιγμή που η πολιτική θεωρία της νεωτερικότητας πάσχει από βαθιά κρίση, η νικημένη έννοια θα δείξει μια ασυνήθιστη ζωτικότητα και θα πάρει έτσι μια μνημειώδη εκδίκηση.

Θα ήθελα να αποδείξω ότι η κατηγορία «πλήθος» βοηθά να εξηγήσουμε έναν ικανό αριθμό σύγχρονων συμπεριφορών. Έπειτα από αιώνες «λαού» και συνεπώς κράτους (εθνικού κράτους, συγκεντρωτικού κράτους, κ.λ.π.) επιστρέφει και εκδηλώνεται τελικά ο αντίθετος πόλος, ο ακυρωμένος στις αρχές της νεωτερικότητας. Το πλήθος ως στερνή κραυγή της κοινωνικής, πολιτικής και φιλοσοφικής θεωρίας; Ίσως. Ολόκληρη σειρά από αξιοπαρατήρητα φαινόμενα –γλωσσικά παιχνίδια, μορφές ζωής, ηθικές προδιαθέσεις, προεξέχοντα χαρακτηριστικά της σημερινής υλικής παραγωγής– δεν γίνονται κατανοητά, αν δεν ιδωθούν από τη σκοπιά του τρόπου ύπαρξης των πολλών. Για να διερευνήσουμε αυτό τον τρόπο ύπαρξης, χρειάζεται να ανατρέξουμε σε μια αρκετά ποικίλη εννοιολογική ενορχήστρωση: ανθρωπολογία, φιλοσοφία της γλώσσας, κριτική της πολιτικής οικονομίας, ηθικοί συλλογισμοί. Χρειάζεται να περιπλεύσουμε την ήπειρο-πλήθος, αλλάζοντας, κάθε φόρα, οπτική γωνία.

Το σύγχρονο πλήθος δεν αποτελείται ούτε από «πολίτες», ούτε από «παραγωγούς»‧ καταλαμβάνει μια ενδιάμεση περιοχή μεταξύ «ατομικού» και «συλλογικού»‧ γι’ αυτό, δεν έχει καμιά αξία η διάκριση μεταξύ «δημόσιου» και «ιδιωτικού». Και ακριβώς εξαιτίας της διάλυσης αυτών των ζευγών, που επί μακρόν θεωρούνταν προφανή, δεν μπορούμε να μιλήσουμε πια για λαό, συγκλίνοντα σε μία κρατική ενότητα. Για να μην τραγουδάμε παράφωνα τραγουδάκια μεταμοντέρνας κοπής («η πολλαπλότητα είναι το καλό, η ενότητα η συμφορά από την οποία πρέπει να προφυλαχτούμε»), χρειάζεται να αναγνωρίσουμε ότι το πλήθος δεν αντιτάσσεται στο Ένα, αλλά το επαναπροσδιορίζει. Η ενότητα δεν είναι πια κάτι προς το οποίο συγκλίνουμε (το κράτος, ο ηγεμόνας), όπως στην περίπτωση του λαού, αλλά κάτι που αφήνουμε πίσω, ως φόντο ή προϋπόθεση.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Theory, Nonfiction, Sociology, Modern, Italian Literature

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Paolo Virno (1952–2025) was an Italian philosopher, semiologist and a figurehead for the Italian Marxist movement. Implicated in belonging to illegal social movements during the 1960s and 1970s, Virno was arrested and jailed in 1979, accused of belonging to the Red Brigades. He spent several years in prison before finally being acquitted, after which he organized the publication Luogo Comune (Italian for "commonplace") in order to vocalize the political ideas he developed during his imprisonment. At the time of his death, Virno was teaching philosophy at the University of Rome.

Reviews

[Andrea Fiore · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Trenta anni fa, in molte fabbriche c'erano cartelli che intimavano: «Silenzio, si lavora». Chi lavorava, taceva. Si cominciava a «chiacchierare» soltanto all'uscita della fabbrica o dell'ufficio. La principale novità del postfordismo consiste nell'aver messo il linguaggio al lavoro. Oggi, in certe officine, potrebbero figurare degnamente cartelli speculari a quelli di un tempo: «Qui si lavora. Parlate!»." (88-9)

[Mariona · Rating 4 out of 5]

El trabajo es no trabajo remunerado y el no trabajo es trabajo no remunerado.

[Alex Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Virno develops a pre-class distinction of the masses in this book about the multitude. He does a good job of defining this class in his attempt to solidify new axises in post-Ford capitalism.

While his range of focus was impressive for such a small work, I found most intriguing his collapse of the autonomous spheres (for Marx) of political action, economy and intellect in describing the conditions that characterize the multitude. Why do we work so much? And how are we to understand the Commons in our day and age when so much of our corporate existences are subsumed under the rubric of work. Especially now with our many technologies, our private lives have "publicness without a public sphere".

In this way, the majority of the work surrounds a refining of what the multitudes are, and how we are all ready in this condition. While he does address how the axises of Marx are no longer conditions of the multitudes -- how class itself is no longer adequate to describe our current condition -- he does not give us velocity. We do not have an enemy to struggle against, or an aesthetic to attain.

Instead, he seems to leave us lingering among ourselves as a "communism of capital" as he puts it... that the borders of capital no longer lie outside in wilderness but within itself, much like the conclusion reached by Deleuze and Guattari when speaking about the limit of capitalism within itself.

Are we to understand ourselves as being completely sublimated by capitalism? That our condition of infinite labor (perhaps as expected of a fragmented post-modern workforce) relates now to an internal colonization of the Common shared pre-linguistic One inherent in our subjectivity? That while capitalism can only expand by seeking new markets, all "margins are in the center" that our logic of exploiter and exploited is perhaps becoming outdated when we understand our non-localized, non-representative political multitude?

I think Virno's text is very interesting. He serves better as an exploratory text than a manifesto.. and while he definitely anticipates a becoming- of "the people to come" (which is literally what the multitudes are, a becoming-, a differential that is never fully politically identified) there doesn't seem much for us to go on in, after recognizing the multitudes.

[lalala Manel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes made on update your progress gathered in a rambling incoherent fashion, starts slow then picks up and has scattered quotes throughout so that there may be a minimum of context to accompany the ramblings


1


Post fordist labour: Where the modernist (heavy modernity) notion of the production of commodities which exist separate from the producer (objects for mass consumption etc) is surpassed for activities where the product is not separate from the act of producing; Terciarization of the economy, Surplus value is still taken from the worker, but it's harder to track, as is the work itself, being caught up in unspecified Goals/objectives, there being a teatrics of work a simulation that hides the fact that there is nothing anymore to produce, the dissolution of the barrier between life and work ( seeing as work is no longer traditionaly defined and limited in a strict concept and material relation to production), the colonisation of life by the ethics of work and SURPLUS VALUE, investing training grinding job insecurity lifestyle influencers crypto etc; Connection with Paul de Mans concept of literature not representing an experience but its own act of reading/writing creating another experience itself, inseparable from the work accessible only through this medium. Connection with politics: there is nothing left to do, no people to govern (the concept of people tied to the state/to specific relations of production/ and its representational apparatus, to the social, being replaced by the multitude of the many, ungovernable an unrepresentatable) there is only the simulation of power left, a management devoid of meaningful acts and differences, ideology being replaced by “heroic measures”(baudrillard divine left), the progressive approximation of power to the people without the safe space of representation (between a signifier and signified) to protect, without the delegation of soveirgnity of the people to a figure (even though its opressive it allows for the true exercise of power, nowadays the humble political figure is anxious to take power and challenge the people, or even to just assume it, the discourse of the master (and its literal embodiment) is truly in a crisis/dissapearing, what discourse will replace it (if any), if every discourse works around a node, a hole that it ignores, and if truth is arrived at not by a totalizing meta discourse that would cover every such hole, but by a discourse that simply works around a different hole, having also lies in its bosom.

But allowing for truth to arrive by contrast (ex: utilizing the histeric discourse in analysis against the master discourse of the analysand, or against the university discourse, or utilizing the masters to help the psychotic), then what discursive position should we take to face this new mode of being and speaking (if any), or will it lead to something different, to a possibility of evading these repressions of representation but also to combat the deterriolization forces of capitals with a different kind of unity and togetherness founded on different principles?? Also: the rise of the impostor syndrome fenomenon related to the loosening of strict socialy imposed identitys and forms of being, a freedom to be whatever you want to be coming to terms with the fact that every identity is a simulation, there is no natural inside to return to, the original you, and in trying to return or to be or to inhabit such a position one is confronted with the fact the a: it’s a simulation b: it’s much harder to simulate being oneself, you have to create it yourself, and if there is no Other to the Other (there is no Other to the social Other) to ultimately verify your socially given position, the just wait because in post modernity there is not even an Other to begin with, so that one will start to miss its opression with a fondness that misses the security of being a slave. Therein is the problem and danger in contemporary politics also, will this provide for a new form of politics, or a neutral ground made of indifferent events, OR a desperate attempt to return to an earlier state by electing a totalitarian leader? Aka, was Lacan right about may 68 or not?



“My hypothesis is that the communication industry (or rather, the spectacle, or even yet, the culture industry) is an industry among others, with its specific techniques, its particular procedures, its peculiar profits, etc.; on the other hand, it also plays the role of industry of the means of production. Traditionally, the industry of the means of production is the industry that produces machinery and other instruments to be used in the most varied sectors of production. However, in a situation in which the means of production are not reducible to machines but consist of linguistic-cognitive competencies inseparable from living labor, it is legitimate to assume that a conspicuous part of the so-called "means of production" consists of techniques and communicative procedures. Now, where are these techniques and procedures created if not in the culture industry? The culture industry produces (regenerates, experiments with) communicative procedures, which are then destined to function also as means of production in the more traditional sectors of our contemporary economy. This is the role of the communication industry, once postFordism has become fully entrenched: an industry of the means of communication.”

But what about ai? Will the taking over and rending obsolete of certain technical jobs/or “bullshit jobs” engender a bigger unemployed faction of the population or will more “communicative” terciary performance simulacra pilled jobs emerge? After all our economy of consumption needs a good salaries for a high demand, production of consumption (the will to consume) being more important than production itself, or will the ai tech daddy gods invent a new way to pay for the jobless chopped ah workers (the credit card already addresses some of these issues, buy more with less money) ex: pay with ya blood if you have no cash, so they can infuse it and become younger or smth, or like your children’s blood or your placenta or whatevs ya get me? Emerge in response to unemployment, from where no one knows, hidden forces supra state inter state inter consciousness white lodge black lodge whatevs; There is an excess of products that needs be consumed, if not inflation and if prolonged total rupture of our current mode of living and social organization. Social media macidocation of virtuosity in extreme, TikTok universal terms creation helps global connection homogeneity of culture helps globalism thinking theatrics simulation, school on behaving TikTok dances yes yes that’s educational

“A situation of this kind is foreshadowed by Marx himself in the Grundrisse, when he writes that with the advent of large, automated industry and the intensive and systematic application of the natural sciences to the productive process, labor activity moves "to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor" (Grundrisse: 705). This placing of labor activity "to the side" of the immediate process of production indicates, Marx adds, that labor corresponds more and more to “a supervisory and regulatory activity" (ibid., 709). In other words: the tasks of a worker or of a clerk no longer involve the completion of a single particular assignment, but the changing and intensifying of social cooperation. When "subjective" cooperation becomes the primary productive force, labor activities display a marked linguistic-communicative quality, they
entail the presence of others. The monological feature of labor dies away: the relationship with others is a driving, basic element, not something accessory. Where labor moves to the side of the immediate productive process, instead of being one of its components, productive cooperation is a "publicly organized space." This "publicly organized space"-interjected into the labor process mobilizes attitudes which are traditionally political. Politics (in the broad sense) becomes productive force, task, “tool box." One could say that the heraldic motto of post-Fordism is, rightfully, “politics above all." After all, what else could the discourse of "total quality" mean, if not a request to surrender to production a taste for action, the capacity to face the possible and the unforeseen, the capacity to communicate something new? When hired labor involves the desire for action, for a relational capacity, for the presence of others-all things that the preceding generation was trying out within the local party headquarters-we can say that some distinguishing traits of the human animal, above ail the possession of a language, are subsumed within capitalistic production. The inclusion of the very anthropogenesis in the existing mode of production is an extreme event. Forget the Heideggerian chatter about the "technical era"... This event does not assuage, but radicalizes, instead, the antinomies of economic-social capitalistic formation. Nobody is as poor as those who see their own relation to the presence of others, that is to say, their own communicative faculty, their own possession of a language, reduced to wage labor. If the entirety of post-Fordist labor is productive (of surplus-value) labor precisely because it functions in a political-virtuosic manner, then the question to ask is this: what is the score which the virtuosos-workers perform? What is the script of their linguistic-communicative performances?”


2


‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️The salient traits of post-Fordist experience (servile virtuosity, exploitation of the very, faculty of language. unfailing relation to the "presence of others," etc.) - Est il possible que ce main character trend n’est plus que une materialization de une nouvelle maniere de travailler (on sait que les relations de produtions sont relaciones avec la production culturel, inter personnel etc, aka: dialectical materialism), et qu’elle cache secretement une angoise très actuel????? (Isto antes de admitirmos que a distância é distinção entre estes conceitos existe, o que o texto nega, e o Manel tb 😋. como podem ver no próximo parágrafo):
1-Also puts in question Marxist conception of superstructure and substructure, that is, the dependence of culture and personal relations on conditions of production, on production relations, on a whole material bases. If life and politics are no longer separate from Labor, if culture and communication are no longer a distinctly private affair, then such a distinction between structures no longer exists. We can see this change taking place as modernity (heavy to light) evolved, where other things other than those belonging solely to the labour process and work conditions started having an influence on society/the subject, even if that where because, paradoxically, work had been extended to all realms of life, capital infiltrating everything, a nomad exalt work from home whenever you like type thing, and here we have for the first time the substructure caught lacking behind the superstructure, the new relations of production where late in updating to new cultural paradigms, after all we can recall that Marx said: “The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production.”(preface to Walter Benjamins the work of art in the age of its meachanival reproduction); ⬆️Agora por Baudrillard ligeiramente diferente 🤣: The model overtakes the real, If is understood as the object/source(of class relations, of Ideology, class struggle, etc) and culture its representation, then the representation, the signifier, overcomes the signified and the represented, and comes to define it, to exerce its influence on him, reversing the relation of dependence; the sheer speed and circulation that makes an artificial social (doted with more aerodynamic plastic gadgets, so that it presents less wind “resistance”, devoid of stable institutions and subjects and reality principle and time and …, they slow down too much, so they were cast aside with history in the gutters of evolution, or better, of involution(implosion), for the erasure of the marks of the past makes impossibe the future (co-dependent terms), or even time itself) overtake the its heavy (modernity) determinations, throwing away the mantle of representation it denies it has a referent and comes to live in an abstract artificial paradise, a present without past or future, a purgatory: not hell, with its panoptic space and conotation, here there are no barriers, only blank spaces and ghosts of subjects, no true subjectivity is possible and no end is in sight; Gil Vicente come save us, à Barca à barca oué!!!!! Ou ainda: “Upon reflection, these rather abstract considerations are only another way of saying that the primary productive resource of contemporary capitalism lies in the linguistic-relational abilities of humankind, in the complex of communicative and cognitive faculties (dynameis, powers) which distinguish humans.”- IF WE follow Marx in believing that workers are alienated from the means of production, and if these means changed from tools to concepts, silence to communication, machine to human, then a new alienation is at play, taking root of what’s most close to us and defines us as people, e agora?😳🤔


“Idle talk and curiosity were analyzed by Heidegger in Being and Time. These were singled out as typical manifestations of the “unauthentic life," which is characterized by a conformist leveling of all feeling and all understanding. In the "unauthentic life" the impersonal pronoun "one" dominates uncontested: one says, one does, one believes this or that. In the words of Simondon, it is the pre-individual who dominates the scene, inhibiting any individuation whatsoever. This "one" is anonymous and pervasive. It nurtures reassuring certainties; it diffuses opinions that are always already shared. It is the faceless subject of media communication This "one" feeds us idle talk and unleashes a curiosity that cannot be restrained” “Let us ask ourselves this question: is it then true that idle talk and curiosity remain confined to the realm of free time and relaxation, outside of labor? should it not be supposed, rather, that these attitudes have become the pivot of contemporary production in which the act of communication dominates, and in which the ability to manage amid continual innovations is most valued? It seems to me that idle talk makes up the primary subject of the post-Fordist virtuosity discussed in the second day of our seminar. Virtuosos, as you will recall, are those who produce something which is not distinguishable, nor even separable, from the act of production itself. Virtuosos are simple locuters par excellence. But, now I would add to this definition the non-referenced speakers; that is, the speakers who, while speaking, reflect neither one nor another state of affairs, but determine new states of affairs by means of their very own words: those who, according to Heidegger, engage in idle talk. This idle talk is performative: words determine facts, events, states of affairs. Or, if you wish, it is in idle talk that it is possible to recognize the fundamental nature of performance: not "I bet." or "I swear," or "I take this woman as my wife," but, above all, "I speak." In the assertion "I speak," I do something by saying these words; moreover, I declare what it is that I do while I do it. Contrary to what Heidegger presumes, not only is idle talk not a poor experience and one to be deprecated, but it directly concerns labor, and social production. Thirty years ago, in many factories there were signs posted that commanded: "Silence, men at work!" Whoever was at work kept quiet. One began
"chatting" only upon leaving the factory or the office. The principle breakthrough in post-Fordism is that it has placed language into the workplace. Today, in certain workshops, one could well put up signs mirroring those of the past, but declaring:
"Men at work here. Talk!" A certain number of standard utterances is not what is required of the worker; rather, an informal act of communication is required, one which is flexible, capable of confronting the most diverse possibilities (along with a good dose of opportunism, however). Using terms from the philosophy of language, I would say it is not the parole but the langue which is mobilized, the very faculty of language, not any of its specific applications. This faculty, which is the generic power of articulating every sort of utterance, takes on an empirical importance precisely in computer language. There, in fact, it is not so much "what is said," as much as the pure and simple "ability to say" that counts. Post-Fordism (and with it the multitude) appeared, in Italy, with the social unrest which is generally remembered as the "movement of 1977"
Post-Fordism, in Italy arose from the tumults of labor-power which was educated. uncertain, mobile; one which hated the work ethic and opposed, at tunes head on. the tradition and the culture of the historical left. marking a clear discontinuity with respect to assembly-line workers, with their practices and customs, with their ways of life The masterpiece of Italian capitalism consists of having transformed into a productive resource precisely those modes of behavior which, at first, made their appearance under the semblance of radical conflict. The conversion of the collective propensities of the 1977 movement (exit from the factories, indifference to steady employment, familiarity with learning and communication networks) into a renewed concept of professionalism (opportunism, idle talk, virtuosity, etc.): this is the most precious result of the Italian counter-revolution ("counter-revolution" meaning not the simple restoration of a previous state of affairs, but, literally, a revolution to the contrary, that is, a drastic innovation of the economy and institutions in order to re-launch productivity and political domination). Since social cooperation precedes end exceeds the work process, post-Fordist labor is always, also, hidden labor. This expression should not be taken here to mean labor which is un-contracted, "under the table." Hidden labor is, in the first place, non-remunerated life, that is to say the pert of human activity which, alike in every respect to the activity of labor, is not, however, calculated as productive force.
The crucial point here is to recognize that in the realm of labor, experiences which mature outside of labor bold predominant weight; et the same time, we must be aware that this more general sphere of experience, once included in the productive process, is subordinate to the rules of the mode of capitalistic production. Here also there is a double risk: either to deny the breadth of what is included in the mode of production, or, in the name of this breadth, to deny the existence of a specific mode of production.”
— De nous jours meme scrollling C’est hidden labour, and all our credit records and applices seguro and personal data are tracked and sold and collected and produced with, in the online life there’s not even the virtuoso dimension (unless instagram etc posting for the Other), all your hidden google search working towards something genuine: Goal of life to work in a Chinese factory where you scrolll and search all day to feed data collections and pattern detection, The 🔑 to defeating alienation🤣!!!!

3⬆️

[shamaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genuinely so true bestie

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ours is the new seventeenth century: "an age in which the old categories are falling apart and we need to coin new ones”. So opens Paolo Virno’s exhilarating little tract on the ‘multitude’, which aims to fulfil just the task announced, an effort at political orientation in a world defined ever more by precisely its lack. Yet whence this destabilisation of categories? What exactly is it that has caused the collapse of our usual approaches to politics, society, and humanity? For Virno, it’s been nothing less than the advent of the Post-Fordist mode of production: one in which labour - but not only labour - is defined less and less in terms of the production of concrete goods (shoes, toys, tables), than it is by economies of information, communication, and knowledge (the ‘immaterial labour' of 'cognitive capitalism’, to use the lingo).

No longer workers in the factory hammering things out, but lives captured right at the level of our communicative, linguistic, and cognitive capacities: such is the condition in which we find ourselves today. And in the wake of this, can our old approaches to politics still hold? No, is Virno’s answer, and with it, the opportunity and the challenge - grasped throughout - to reformulate them anew. After all, something very peculiar happens in the shift from the factory to the writers-room: the ‘intellect’, once a private, solitary affair, becomes ‘public’: in post-Frodism, the traits that most define us as human, our ability to speak and think, become the shared and public resources upon which capital blooms. Not just ‘intellects’, but a ‘general intellect’ - Marx’s term - becomes the distinguishing feature of our political mode of being.

And it’s the change in just this, ‘our political mode of being’, that is captured most precisely, according to Virno, by the concept of the ‘multitude’. Set over and against the classically valorised concept of ‘the people’ (which, according to both Hobbes and Rousseau, is what takes the place of the unorganised multitude with the advent of the State), Virno sets out to recover the multitude as the primary political concept equal to the thought of our time. This insofar as the multitude is thought primarily on the basis of its plurality (the many as many), and not - as with the people - on the basis of its unity. Inescapably and publicly linked together by what was once most intimate and private to us (our linguistic and cognitive capacities), we exist in the mode of the multitude, and no longer the people.

Key to Virno’s text (and setting his thought apart from Negri and Hardt) is the ambivalence of the multitude: neither something to be celebrated nor feared, the multitude is simply the analytic category most appropriate to make sense of our contemporary condition. Importantly however, without a corresponding public sphere - one in which the multitude can express itself as such, a radically democratic re-public - the being of the multitude opens the door to ever more drastic forms of servility and unfreedom, ones bearing upon our very capacities of being-human (our thought, our speech). A new grammar then, but also a call for a new politics equal to the challenge of it: such are the stakes set out in the glorious little book.

[micha cardenas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a short, but very dense and very intelligent book. Overall, its tough to trudge through so much analysis of obscure passages of Marx. I think virno is at his worst when he's trying to claim that biopolitics is based in "labor-power", but at his best in the ten-theses at the end of the book. His analysis is broad and really amazing at describing some aspects of contemporary culture. I think the whole consideration of post-fordism is essential to understanding contemporary politics, but I think that he doesn't actually do a very good job of describing the multitude. I'm going to go back to Negri for that. Overall a great book, but too economically determinist, I think. Also, I wonder how much of the analysis of contemporary labor as always fluid and temporary really applies to most of the economy. He tries to say that there is a balance between people's instability in life and their instability at work, but i think this is totally oversimplified.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book expands on essays in Radical Thought in Italy, which Virno co-edited. I particularly appreciated his use of Freud's un/heimlich distinction in discussing fear in contemporary urban space, as well as the discussion of Heidegger's symptoms of inauthentic being in light of recent changes in production. Overall I think Virno sort of updates Society of the Spectacle, with the benefit of hindsight/living through. Highly recommended.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good in terms of tempering the idealization of the multitude that Hardt and Negri frequently advocate. It reveals the dialectics of multitude much more than the aforementioned works.

[Rui Coelho · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another fine italian thinker that repeats a lesser version of Negri's work.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Post-fordism as the gradual socialization of capital. A very strong argument.

Two opposing forces are at play. There is working faster to achieve a product, and there is not working at all, due to the inefficiency of labor time. Both become increasingly justified in an unsolvable contradiction based in the escalating mathematics of automatization. Intellectual language, now politically relevant within the homogenized work force in post-fordism, takes over all other forms of life.

When work has eaten up life outside of it, thereby actually severing its own political relevance, language (of the politically irrelevant kind) becomes the perpetual motion motor of surplus capital. Establishing a myth of the political, built into the workforce, with no means of self-correction.

Only near the end does he allow you to make the connection. To the full extent. That the capitalist system becomes the communist system by simply adhering to the political impotence of its own mechanics. Important to understand that this is totalitarianism too, whichever way you slice it.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

The multitude against the Hobbesian concept of people, is presented as a general intellect that rises up against the polis. It is in their process of individuation that the multitude gains its strength—as a heterogeneous One, rather than a homogenous One. The multitude is defined by virtuosity of the multitude: no longer a division of labor (poeisis), political (praxis) and intellect, now labor has become political, but a privatized political. The goal must be to raise the general intellect into the public. Two tools available: 1. civil disobedience (via refusal) and 2. exit. The multitude’s subjectivity s defined via 1. individuation, 2. bio-politics (because of commodification of labor-power as potential), 3. Oportunism/Cynicism, 4. Idle Talk and Curiosity (constant desire for novel knowledge). The multitude, says Virno, foreshadowed Post-Fordism, but might still be used against it.

[Simon Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. While it’s political and labor outcomes I am unsure about their manifesting, it is exceptional as a way to think about the reception of cultural production and its outcomes. What can images do in an expanded field of reception?

[David Šír · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential for understanding post-fordist transition.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zanimljiva knjiga s dosta poticajnih misli koje ipak ostaju neargumentirane i nedorečene, što je razumljivo s obzirom na format.

[Andrés Plascencia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me gustó mucho la originalidad de sus tesis. Valen la pena de estudiar a fondo.

[I- Stalker · Rating 3 out of 5]

+++++

[Vasiliy Speshilov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Generally just another one interpretation of neomarxist problematics in postfordism era however author is really trying his best at neutral critics without left-affiliated behaviour. It's not answers any questions and looks more like word-gymnastics more of the time but it has really good paragraphs and even pages.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is the most accessible introduction to the concept of the multitude that i've seen. demystifies negri with historical context, relevant politics, and discussion of major ideas while also adding substantively to negri's framework.

[Dipa Raditya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Replace the proles with multitudes then you have his argument.

[intet_]

Vilka är de främsta krav som ställs på anställda arbetare idag? Vanan vid rörlighet, förmågan att klara plötsliga omvandlingar, förmågan att anpassa sig till olika företag, flexibilitet i växlingen mellan ett regelsystem och ett annat, fallenhet för ett språk som är lika banalt som ensidigt, förmågan att hantera bristen på valmöjligheter. Nåväl, dessa krav är inte resultatet av industriell disciplinering, utan snarare följden av en socialiseringsprocess som har sin tyngdpunkt utanför arbetet. Den "professionalitet" som faktiskt krävs och erbjuds består i de förmågor man skaffar sig under en förlängd sejour inför anställningen, eller i ett prekärt tillstånd. Det vill säga: medan den arbetslöse väntar på en anställning utvecklas personens generiska sociala förmågor, liksom vanan att inte ha tydliga vanor. Alla dessa egenskaper fungerar senare, när man väl har fått anställning, som riktiga "yrkesverktyg".

- "Multituden som subjektivitet", s. 96.