Empire (71 page)

biopolitical production; the proletariat produces in all its generality

everywhere all day long.

This generality ofbiopolitical production makes clear a second

programmatic political demand ofthe multitude:
a social wage and

a guaranteed income for all.
The social wage stands opposed first of all to the family wage, that fundamental weapon of the sexual

division oflabor by which the wage paid for the productive labor

ofthe male worker is conceived also to pay f

or the unwaged

reproductive labor ofthe worker’s wife and dependents at home.

The family wage keeps family control firmly in the hands of the

male wage earner and perpetuates a false conception of what labor

is productive and what is not. As the distinction between production

and reproductive labor fades, so too fades the legitimation of the

family wage. The social wage extends well beyond the family to

the entire multitude, even those who are unemployed, because the

entire multitude produces, and its production is necessary from the

standpoint oftotal social capital. In the passage to postmodernity

and biopolitical production, labor power has become increasingly

collective and social. It is not even possible to support the old slogan

‘‘equal pay for equal work’’ when labor cannot be individualized

and measured. The demand for a social wage extends to the entire

population the demand that all activity necessary for the production

ofcapital be recognized with an equal compensation such that a

social wage is really a guaranteed income. Once citizenship is ex-

tended to all, we could call this guaranteed income a citizenship

income, due each as a member ofsociety.

Telos (The Right to Reappropriation)

Since in the imperial realm ofbiopower production and life tend

to coincide, class struggle has the potential to erupt across all the

fields of life. The problem we have to confront now is how concrete

instances ofclass struggle can actually arise, and moreover how they

can form a coherent program of struggle, a constituent power

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adequate to the destruction ofthe enemy and the construction of

a new society. The question is really how the body ofthe multitude

can configure itselfas a telos.

The first aspect ofthe telos ofthe multitude has to do with

the senses oflanguage and communication. Ifcommunication has

increasingly become the fabric ofproduction, and iflinguistic coop-

eration has increasingly become the structure ofproductive corpore-

ality, then the control over linguistic sense and meaning and the

networks ofcommunication becomes an ever more central issue

for political struggle. Ju¨rgen Habermas seems to have understood

this fact, but he grants the liberated functions of language and

communication only to individual and isolated segments ofsociety.5

The passage to postmodernity and Empire prohibits any such com-

partmentalization ofthe life world and immediately presents com-

munication, production, and life as one complex whole, an open

site ofconflict. The theorists and practitioners ofscience have long

engaged these sites ofcontroversy, but today all oflabor power (be

it material or immaterial, intellectual or manual) is engaged in

struggles over the senses oflanguage and against capital’s coloniza-

tion ofcommunicative sociality. All the elements ofcorruption and

exploitation are imposed on us by the linguistic and communicative

regimes ofproduction: destroying them in words is as urgent as

doing so in deeds. This is not really a matter ofideology critique

ifby ideology we still understand a realm ofideas and language

that is superstructural, external to production. Or rather, in the

imperial regime ideology, critique becomes directly the critique of

both political economy and lived experience. How can sense and

meaning be oriented differently or organized in alternative, coherent

communicative apparatuses? How can we discover and direct the

performative lines of linguistic sets and communicative networks

that create the fabric of life and production? Knowledge has to

become linguistic action and philosophy has to become a real
reappro-

priation of knowledge.
6 In other words, knowledge and communica-

tion have to constitute life through struggle. A first aspect of the

telos is posed when the apparatuses that link communication to

modes oflife are developed through the struggle ofthe multitude.

T H E M U L T I T U D E A G A I N S T E M P I R E

405

To every language and communicative network corresponds

a system ofmachines, and the question ofmachines and their use

allows us to recognize a second aspect ofthe telos ofthe multitude,

which integrates the first and carries it further. We know well that

machines and technologies are not neutral and independent entities.

They are biopolitical tools deployed in specific regimes ofproduc-

tion, which facilitate certain practices and prohibit others. The

processes ofconstruction ofthe new proletariat that we have been

following go beyond a fundamental threshold here when the multi-

tude recognizes itselfas machinic, when it conceives ofthe possibil-

ity ofa new use ofmachines and technology in which the proletariat

is not subsumed as ‘‘variable capital,’’ as an internal part ofthe

production ofcapital, but is rather an autonomous agent ofproduc-

tion. In the passage from the struggle over the sense of language

to the construction ofa new system ofmachines, the telos gains a

greater consistency. This second aspect ofthe telos serves to make

what has been constructed in language become a lasting, corporeal

progression ofdesire in freedom. The hybridization ofhuman and

machine is no longer a process that takes place only on the margins

ofsociety; rather, it is a fundamental episode at the center ofthe

constitution ofthe multitude and its power.

Since great collective means must be mobilized for this muta-

tion, the telos must be configured as a collective telos. It has to

become real as a site ofencounter among subjects and a mechanism

ofthe constitution ofthe multitude.7 This is the third aspect ofthe

series ofpassages through which the material teleology ofthe new

proletariat is formed. Here consciousness and will, language and

machine are called on to sustain the collective making ofhistory.

The demonstration ofthis becoming cannot consist in anything

but the experience and experimentation ofthe multitude. Therefore

the power ofthe dialectic, which imagines the collective formed

through mediation rather than through constitution, has been de-

finitively dissolved. The making ofhistory is in this sense the con-

struction ofthe life ofthe multitude.

The fourth aspect deals with biopolitics. The subjectivity of

living labor reveals, simply and directly in the struggle over the

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senses oflanguage and technology, that when one speaks ofa

collective means ofthe constitution ofa new world, one is speaking

ofthe connection between the power oflife and its political organi-

zation. The political, the social, the economic, and the vital here

all dwell together. They are entirely interrelated and completely

interchangeable. The practices ofthe multitude invest this complex

and unitary horizon—a horizon that is at once ontological and

historical. Here is where the biopolitical fabric opens to the constitu-

tive, constituent power.

The fifth and final aspect thus deals directly with the constit-

uent power ofthe multitude—or really with the product ofthe

creative imagination ofthe multitude that configures its own consti-

tution. This constituent power makes possible the continuous open-

ing to a process ofradical and progressive transformation. It makes

conceivable equality and solidarity, those fragile demands that were

fundamental but remained abstract throughout the history of mod-

ern constitutions. It should come as no surprise that the postmodern

multitude takes away from the U.S. Constitution what allowed it

to become, above and against all other constitutions, an imperial

constitution: its notion of a boundless frontier of freedom and its

definition ofan open spatiality and temporality celebrated in a

constituent power. This new range ofpossibilities in no way guaran-

tees what is to come. And yet, despite such reservations, there is

something real that foreshadows a coming future: the telos that we

can feel pulsing, the multitude that we construct within desire.

Now we can formulate a third political demand of the multi-

tude:
the right to reappropriation.
The right to reappropriation is first ofall the right to the reappropriation ofthe means ofproduction.

Socialists and communists have long demanded that the proletariat

have free access to and control over the machines and materials

it uses to produce. In the context ofimmaterial and biopolitical

production, however, this traditional demand takes on a new guise.

The multitude not only uses machines to produce, but also becomes

increasingly machinic itself, as the means of production are increas-

ingly integrated into the minds and bodies ofthe multitude. In this

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407

context reappropriation means having free access to and control

over knowledge, information, communication, and affects—be-

cause these are some ofthe primary means ofbiopolitical produc-

tion. Just because these productive machines have been integrated

into the multitude does not mean that the multitude has control

over them. Rather, it makes more vicious and injurious their alien-

ation. The right to reappropriation is really the multitude’s right

to self-control and autonomous self-production.

Posse

The telos ofthe multitude must live and organize its political space

against Empire and yet within the ‘‘maturity ofthe times’’ and the

ontological conditions that Empire presents. We have seen how

the multitude moves on endless paths and takes corporeal form by

reappropriating time and hybridizing new machinic systems. We

have also seen how the power ofthe multitude materializes within

the vacuum that remains necessarily at the heart ofEmpire. Now

it is a matter ofposing within these dimensions the problem ofthe

becoming-subject ofthe multitude. In other words, the virtual

conditions must now become real in a concrete figure. Against the

divine city, the earthly city must demonstrate its power as an appara-

tus ofthe mythology ofreason that organizes the biopolitical reality

ofthe multitude.

The name that we want to use to refer to the multitude in

its political autonomy and its productive activity is the Latin term

posse
—power as a verb, as activity. In Renaissance humanism the

triad
esse–nosse–posse
(being–knowing–having power) represented

the metaphysical heart ofthat constitutive philosophical paradigm

that was to go into crisis as modernity progressively took form.

Modern European philosophy, in its origins and in its creative

components that were not subjugated to transcendentalism, contin-

ually tended to pose posse at the center ofthe ontological dynamic:

posse is the machine that weaves together knowledge and being in

an expansive, constitutive process. When the Renaissance matured

and reached the point ofconflict with the forces ofcounterrevolu-

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tion, the humanistic posse became a force and symbol of resistance,

in Bacon’s notion of
inventio
or experimentation, Campanella’s

conception oflove, and Spinoza’s usage of
potentia.
Posse is what

a body and what a mind can do. Precisely because it continued to

live in resistance, the metaphysical term became a political term.

Posse refers to the power of the multitude and its telos, an embodied

power ofknowledge and being, always open to the possible.

Contemporary U.S. rap groups have rediscovered the term

‘‘posse’’ as a noun to mark the force that musically and literarily

defines the group, the singular difference of the postmodern multi-

tude. Of course, the proximate reference for the rappers is probably

the
posse comitatus
ofWild West lore, the rough group ofarmed

men who were constantly prepared to be authorized by the sheriff

to hunt down outlaws. This American fantasy of vigilantes and

outlaws, however, does not interest us very much. It is more interest-

ing to trace back a deeper, hidden etymology ofthe term. It seems

to us that perhaps a strange destiny has renewed the Renaissance

notion and has, with a grain ofmadness, made the term once again

deserving ofits high political tradition.

From this perspective we want to speak ofposse and not of

‘‘res-publica,’’ because the public and the activity ofsingularities