A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Semiotext

by Paolo Virno, Isabella Bertoletti (Translator), James Cascaito (Translator)

Italian political thinker Paolo Virno argues that the category of "multitude" is a far better tool to analyze contemporary issues than the Hobbesian concept of "people." Globalization is forcing us to rethink some of the categories—such as "the people"—that traditionally have been associated with the now eroding state. Italian political thinker Paolo Virno argues that the category of "multitude," elaborated by Spinoza and for the most part left fallow since the seventeenth century, is a far better tool to analyze contemporary issues than the Hobbesian concept of "people," favored by classical political philosophy. Hobbes, who detested the notion of multitude, defined it as shunning political unity, resisting authority, and never entering into lasting agreements. "When they rebel against the state," Hobbes wrote, "the citizens are the multitude against the people." But the multitude isn't just a negative notion, it is a rich concept that allows us to examine anew plural experiences and forms of nonrepresentative democracy. Drawing from philosophy of language, political economics, and ethics, Virno shows that being foreign, "not-feeling-at-home-anywhere," is a condition that forces the multitude to place its trust in the intellect. In conclusion, Virno suggests that the metamorphosis of the social systems in the West during the last twenty years is leading to a paradoxical "Communism of the Capital."

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

120 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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.