hydrarchist writes:

This essay was first presented at the Dark Markets conference at Public Netbase in October 2002. You can watch the full presentation on video in real player here.

"The Dark Side of the Multitude"

Arianna Bove & Erik Empson

New Left politics began to see capital itself as
the subject of history, we only react to capital as an alien power and construe
the political defensively, organisation amounts to havens and enclaves of
resistance against this totalisation - this is a fundamentally negative
conception of politics which takes place through the adoption of the existing
paradigms of Power. Hence in addressing our needs and desires the reaction
is: we need more democracy, more rights, more freedoms, more juridical/
legalistic defences against the corporate face of this Subject who sticks
his nose into an otherwise uncomplicated terrain of liberal freedoms.



In this view of capital as Leviathan
resistance is limitation, the preservation of the public or its reconstitution.
Within this framework and within the institutions of the public some powerful
struggles of re-appropriation do take place. Yet these spaces are no longer
the real basis of power; they allow for only a symbolic resistance. Clearly
this is what has become of the street (but the same goes for parliament
or the mediatic figurehead of a state). The general dissatisfaction with
this situation pushes for a re-territorialisation of the 'public' from the
real to the virtual.



In this political mindset ©apital is responded to by a normative shift
to alternative values: altruism, austerity, responsibility, duty, morality
&c. In this process the Left concedes to neo-liberalism its monopoly
on the representation of desire and the real mode of its satisfaction: it
tries to attack power and desire in themselves as things to be ashamed of
and that require some kind of exorcism through therapeutic regulation. In
its anti-consumptionist and self- regulative guises it manifests itself
both as a denial of and a restraint upon the productive power of social
subjectivity. The multitude is both theoretically and practically a response
to these spurious meiotic divertive tactics.

Against this logic of limitation emerges a form of subjectivity that neither
grounds itself on an alternative future nor judges itself by abstract and
external standards of what is possible, but takes itself as its own ground
of realisation and in doing so challenges and transforms obstacles that
seek to contain and limit it. Rather than construing its projects in terms
of the 'political' (or indeed as a 'project') i.e. through pre-determined
avenues of engagement, it challenges this separation because it occupies
and operates on the terrain of life (i.e. neither simply subjectivity or
simply subjectification but the everyday struggle in-between them that the
poles do not adequately capture). It subverts the fixity of the liberal
subject, the individual of classical political economy, the citizen of representative
democracy. We are interested in forms of networks that function to increase
power, open operative spaces and to find ways to bypass or displace authority
by shifting the locus of political identity away from pre-existing mechanisms
of mediation, whether the voting booth, the party, the state, Trade Unions.
It does not distinguish between left and right. The mobility of this subjectivity
takes from them without buying their project and can withdraw from the game
at any point.



It is because of rather than in spite of social cooperation that the locus
of political power in the sovereign state undergoes subversion. In this
context the model of identity politics is exposed as wholly inadequate as
a response to the power of individuation, because it coexists with - without
undermining- the need of capital to channel unpredictability. In this sense
the multitude also sanctions the end of the model of representation and
the autonomy of the political which communication and new technologies have
rendered obsolete. The multitude differs from the people in so far as the
latter is a unity. In the latter case, mechanisms of legitimacy formation
and social management could take place within this form of identification
of the people with a nation, a state, a class, a religious hierarchy, or
a particular fusion of those elements. This refers to the management of
unpredictability in that the state is forced to exercise its authority as
control over agents that are pre-determined and constituted prior to and
outside of the very process of political engagement itself, hence its emphasis
on the idea of negotiation of identities and the corresponding need for
arbiters and moderators of this process. The continual crisis of the sovereign
state then, its unaccountability and its craving for legitimacy through
mechanisms of justification, in short the crisis of Potestas at the level
of its belief in its own project, forces it within the control paradigm
to turn the object of subjugation into the subject of that same process:
it forces the political onto the terrain of life itself which is inherently
discontinuous and unstable. Once self- regulation (always encouraged by
more or less immediate threats of a more exacting and physical force) becomes
the major mode of control and social management, the site of struggle reappears
on the very ground of productive constituent power; a power that does not
mediate itself through the political.



In control society, subversion is rarely public (because the public is citizens
with names, a supposedly open and accountable space for visible, autonomous
and recognisable subjects, but operative only in a context of legality and
liberal rights). One of the unrecognised potentials of the Internet lies
in the anonymity of the user, the opportunity it provides for people whom
for whatever reason have been excluded from the old form of public life.
It allows for those who do not have a name to speak for themselves.

Control society needs to be subverted rather than limited, and this is not
a matter of public dissent but rather of making subversion at once public
(in the sense of shared) and invisible, of dispersing through multiple points
of attack. Control society is not stopped by a re-assertion of the private,
data protection acts, and civil rights activism. Ours is not merely a libertarian
agenda nor is it an attempt at preserving a constructed category of individual
freedom, but it is the very opposition to individuation through forms of
socialised disobedience, networked and spread as a form of constitution
of new social realities of cooperation as well as exodus.



Rather than the visible networks of accountable individuals speaking in
the name of others, we are interested in invisible networks, those that
cannot be represented due to the content of their association. Drugs, theft,
absenteeism, are just a few examples of what are increasingly widespread
responses to the criminalisation of any aspect of life that refuses obedience.
Expressed in their own terms, none of these instances of often quite individuated
actions seems to carry much weight and their non-representability complicates
their articulation as common forms of action.



Our power stares us in the face because we know very
much from our own experience that fear, panic, depression and paranoia,
can be challenged and turned around. Confidence is infectious and cooperation
and association with other actors increases ones power. Because subjectivity
is inherently social, multiple becomings of instances of immanent connections
in life - introspection and self- reflection are the very opposite of this
process, they rarely have any constitutive effect. Where the one relates
to itself as one, it is really none, and thus in control society, sovereignty
(of the individual) is absolutely subverted. Hence the network appears where
there is a consciousness of that power. The reason why there are no leaders
in the movement is that everyone has become a leader of sorts, more or less
effective at certain times of being able to give expression to the common,
one formed by activity and example.



In this sense, and many other cases, the multitude is ahead of the
left. Why? Because it knows power but keeps it secret, hidden, it does not
allow its power to be expressed in the form of an institution, whereas for
the Left the institution; the accountable, representative and media sensitive
body is the only conceivable form of power. Because of this models of organisation
are uncritically borrowed from existing pseudo democratic structures (institutional
and behavioural) and democracy continues to be seen as a technical and procedural
issue of decision- making and consensus formation. This often invokes the
ideas of inclusion, community building, and citizenship, whereas the practical
manufacture of consent is in reality the opposite; modes of programmatic
exclusion and formal engineering of sentiment that organise to placate the
vocal minorities at the great expense of those whose desires show no inclination
towards formalised political representation.

What representation does is force a wedge between subjects and those acting
to exploit them. It shifts the terrain onto negotiation, agreement and consensus.
The constituent power of the real minority - those thieves and bullies -
tries to repudiate or recuperate the 'many' in order to give legitimacy
to the structures of meioses, mediation and control. Power (authority) craves
these mediations and very often we give it to them on a plate. And yet the
skill of the multitude in withdrawing from these constructions intensifies
and accelerates this process where all politics becomes a farcical attempt
at capturing a power that is one step ahead and beyond its grasp. It is
to the dark side of the multitude we must turn when reflecting on what can
be done, because it is there that forms of subversion are expressed not
merely as a refusal, but also as a constitution, that is to say active generation
of new forms of life and collectivities. There is nothing inevitable about
this process. But when we fashion political strategies from outside or above
this power we do so at our peril."