Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004).
Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude was published in 2004, at the same time that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire appeared. While both Virno and Negri come out of the Italian autonomia tradition, whose unique approach to Marx emphasized the `neglected’ Grundrisse and the ontological priority of the life-labor-capital relationship, their books bear some significant differences. While Hardt and Negri’s book was published by the more mainstream publisher Penguin, following upon Harvard’s publication of Empire, Virno’s book was published by the more vanguardish Semiotext(e) – known, of course, for their series of uniform pocket-sized black books, small enough to jam into your pocket before heading into an anti-WTO protest. While Hardt and Negri’s book is the result of lengthy reflection, writing, and rewriting, Virno’s is essentially a transcript of a four-day seminar. Hardt and Negri’s book – tome, really – weighs in at over four hundred pages; Virno’s book – pamphlet really – comes in at under a hundred pages (minus Sylvère Lotringer’s informative forward). There is no hardcover version of Virno’s book, while the girth of Hardt and Negri’s enables it to stand up all on its own. All of this is a set-up to a sort of `smack-down’ between the two takes on the concept of the multitude. But I’d like to side-step such a scene to comment a bit on the condensation in Virno’s approach to the multitude, and to suggest some openings his book enables – opening that, I would argue, are not as facilitated in the approach of Hardt and Negri.
A Grammar of the Multitude touches on many topics. In fact, one of its central themes is the topic of `the many.’ Virno’s introduction sketches a genealogy of the concept of the multitude, and his two main references points are Hobbes and Spinoza. While the latter has been reworked in all sorts of contemporary contexts (one thinks of Deleuze’s two books, as well as Negri’s The Savage Anomaly), there has been little or no discussion of the Hobbesian concept of the multitude. As Virno rightly points out, the term was quite prevalent in 17th century natural rights discourses (not only Hobbes, but Bodin, Locke, Rousseau all make use of the term). Thus, Virno’s first point is that the 17th century concept of the multitude is related, but may not directly pertain to the contemporary derivations of the term. What does continue to remain a key issue is the way that the concept of the multitude is opposed to that of `the people.’ For Hobbes, the multitude is the people in potential; it is the people moving out of the infamous state of nature towards the moment in which rights are given over to a sovereign, and `a’ people emerges. Spinoza’s Political Treatise replays many aspects of this narrative, but, Virno argues, Spinoza acknowledges the political status of the multitude, however ambivalent it may be. This difference allows Virno to position Hobbes against Spinoza on the issue of the multitude: while Hobbes sees the multitude as illegitimate, chaotic, unformed, Spinoza minimally acknowledges the multitude as a generative capacity of the many-as-many. No doubt it is this political and ontological difference that has made Spinoza so attractive to contemporary political theorists, including Balibar, Deleuze, Matheron, Montag, and Negri.
This introduction enables Virno to make what is perhaps his central thesis: that we are living in a new 17th century, in which all the old terms – public/private, individual/collective, local/global – no longer adequately function to describe, explain, and shape the experience of the world. Virno proposes that the concept of the multitude – in its historical and contemporary variants – serves as a more compelling way of redefining the public sphere than the concept of the people. The primary reason for this, Virno points out, is in the way the concept of the multitude asks us to consider the many as many. The core of Virno’s overarching theoretical argument is succinctly stated early on:
“The contemporary multitude.occupies a middle region between `individual and collective’.And it is precisely because of the dissolution of the coupling of these terms, for so long held to be obvious, that one can no longer speak of a people converging into the unity of the state. While one does not wish to sing out-of-tune melodies in the post-modern style (`multiplicity is good, unity is the disaster to beware of’), it is necessary, however, to recognize that the multitude does not clash with the One; rather, it redefines it. Even the many need a form of unity, of being a One. But here is the point: this unity is no longer the State; rather, it is language, intellect, the communal faculties of the human race. The One is no longer a promise, it is a premise. (25)”
This notion of the many-as-many is one of the guiding threads to Virno’s analysis. It can be seen to broadly follow from a Spinozist ontology, in which an immanent One (substance) is understood to condition and make possible all sorts of singularizations and differentiations. It is also not unrelated to a certain reading of Deleuze (especially Badiou’s remapping of Deleuze), in which `multiplicity’ is closely related to immanence, and this immanence a redefinition of `the One.’ In the political context, such ontological approaches literally make a difference, for they raise the possibility of a democracy that resists representation, a politics of the many that refuses the prerequisites of the One. Virno continues: `Unity is no longer something (the State, the sovereign) towards which things converge, as in the case of the people; rather, it is taken for granted, as a background or a necessary precondition.we must conceive of a One which, far from being something conclusive, might be thought of as the base which authorizes differentiation or which allows for the political-social existence of the many seen as being many’ (25).
But, aside from such ontological niceties, how exactly can this notion of the many-as-many be comprehended? Virno offers what he terms `three approaches to the many’ that take up the remainder of the book. The first is a political approach, one that focuses on the dialectic between `fear’ and `security’ that always demands that the many culminate in the One. The specific fears – be it terrorism, outsourcing, new social and medical maladies – dovetail into more general `anguish’ about Being as such, and the specific modes of security that are a response to this anguish cannot, of course, ever fully secure Being itself. Virno opens the Kantian schema of `dread’ and `refuge’ – as well as the Heideggerian pairing of `fear’ and `anguish’ – to this question of the many. Rather than a specific fear (terrorism) that is the content of the people, and rather than an existential anguish that is the core of the individual subject, Virno suggests that it is their point of indistinction that constitutes the many-as-many: the `commonality’ of `not feeling at home’ is immediately the concern of the many. Instead of a people united by fear, Virno comes out the other side of this `not feeling at home,’ and looks to Marx’s idea of the `general intellect’ and the possibility of a `publicness without a public sphere’ as a way of understanding the many-as-many in a political context.
This leads to Virno’s second approach to the many, which we might call economic or political economic. Virno begins with the classical, Aristotelian division of human activity (labor, politics, thought) and its modern reiterations in Arendt (labor, action, intellect), to suggest that at the root of such distinctions is a more basic division between poiesis and praxis, a distinction that needs reworking in light of the subsumption of the former in the latter (one could develop a critique of `new media’ through this lens as well). In a somewhat surprising move, Virno uses the pianist Glenn Gould as an example of what he calls `virtuosity.’ For Virno, the virtuosity of the performing artist has three main characteristics: its process is its product, it requires the presence of others, and vernacular of this virtuosity is in performance. (Gould’s seclusion into the recording studio is viewed by Virno as a reversion from virtuosity to labor, emphasizing as it does the end product. But I would argue that Gould’s controversial embrace of technology-as-process actually reinvents virtuosity as indissociable from mediation, and in doing so problematizes the self-presence of performance. A further example would be musique concrète in France during the 1940s.) Virno imports this notion of virtuosity to talk about the remapping of labor in the post-Fordist era (Virno prefers this to `post-industrial’ or `late capitalism’). In the networks of immaterial labor, where cooperation, collaboration, and communication are essential, virtuosity is both canalized into specific sectors (services, IT, mass media), but it also remains constitutively defined by process, and thus never fully inscribed by the product that is its result.
Virno’s political (fear-security) and economic (virtuosity) approaches intersect in this third approach to the many: the subjectivity of the many-as-many, or, as he states, the `emotional tonalities of the multitude.’ While the concept of the multitude is often discussed in political or economic terms, there is yet to be seen a sustained analysis on the experience of the multitude. And this is for good reason: it is, in a way, an aporetic endeavor, for if the many-as-many is not One, then to inquire into the subjectivity of the many can only lead to either `mob rule’ or the `end of the subject.’ Hardt and Negri attempt to address this problem by importing the phenomenological concept of the `flesh’ to describe the multitude, but this only replicates the problem, since Merleau-Ponty and arguably phenomenology itself cannot account for collective experience without resorting to a cognizing, Cartesian subject. Virno’s approach does not necessarily offer a solution, but it does offer several avenues to explore. One is the concept of individuation elaborated by Gilbert Simondon, in which the individual is product, not producer. This leads to Virno’s specific take on the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics. Here Virno suggests that the pre-existence of plurality over the individual (the many-as-many) resides in the three levels of life, language, and labor – the `common’ capacities of the many. Biopolitics is this capacity or this potential (dynamis) for work and for reinventing the life-labor relationship.
Thus, Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude begins from an ontological shift: to consider the many-as-many, to consider the One as immanent, and thus preceding the many. The One (the State, the people, the sovereign) is not the promise of the many, rather the One (general intellect, the common, biopolitics) is the premise of the many. Virno then offers a range of approaches to understanding the many-as-many (political, economic, experiential). Virno’s closing `theses’ on post-Fordism suggest that these capacities of the many-as-many do not exist outside of or separate from global capital, but that they inhere in its mutations, allowing Virno to provocatively suggest that `post-Fordism is the communism of capital.’ Despite this pervasiveness or this distributedness of post-Fordist labor patterns, Virno also points to the `intellectuality of the masses’ that both constitutes and yet exceeds post-Fordism. All of this depends upon the ontological shift Virno proposes, and in this way A Grammar of the Multitude is not unlike Multitude. What Virno does, however, is to suggest approaches to comprehending the many-as-many in a range of domains (labor, politics, thought), domains that often begin from the individual subject, the subject of propriety, from a prioritizing of the One (be it citizen or State).
Some final points concerning Virno’s analysis. First, the notion of the many-as-many really leads to a discussion of `multiplicity,’ a terrain well-worn by Deleuze. As Badiou notes, Deleuze proposes the series one-multiple-multiplicity, with multiplicity offering a third term out of the Hegelian one-multiple pairing. But – and this is one of Badiou’s `critiques’ – this ultimately leads to the problem of `multiplicity-without-oneness,’ and indeed Deleuze and Guattari’s musings on `packs’ acknowledge this problem of `a’ pack. Perhaps this opens onto a renewed engagement with mathematics, particular – as Badiou argues – with set theory, but one can also imagine ontological engagements with graph theory (the many as a network), topology (the infolding and superfolding of the many), and fuzzy logic (the ambiguous event or occurrence of the many).
This issue of multiplicity – the multiplicity of the multitudes (say it ten times) – is linked in Virno’s analysis to his notion of biopolitics, but only obliquely. In fact, the pervasive use of the concept of `biopolitics’ is reflective of this generalized use of the term in discussions of the multitude. Virno argues that biopolitics – in Foucault’s sense of the inclusion of `life’ into the political domain – only makes sense in the context of labor and capital. Hardt and Negri also make this point: that, without considering the imperatives of capital subsumption, there is no `motive’ for the biopolitical incorporation of social, biological and economic life. The question is, what is the `bio’ in biopolitics? Is it biological life, the social bios, the `economic’ life of the subject, the producer, the consumer? All of this leaves out one important element, an element absolutely central to Foucault’s concept of biopolitics: medicine. For Foucault, medicine in the broadest sense of the term is the constant mediator between politics and economics, the thread that stitches together political economy. Foucault’s analyses of the medical police, public hygiene programs, statistics and demographics, the establishment of norms, and the `government of the living’ all relate to a particular medical politics, a `noso-politics’. Foucault’s Collège lectures in the late 1970s pursue this theme by talking about the `apparatus of security,’ biopolitics as a `race war,’ and the notion of population and `human capital.’
This leads to a last point, which has to do with the `life’ of multiplicities. Deleuze often makes claims as to the life or the vitality of multiplicities, encapsulated in the notion of `nonorganic life.’ Are life and multiplicity simply isomorphic with each other? But what is the multiplicity specific to life? This is a point left unaddressed in Virno, but also in Hardt and Negri. If the multitude, the many-as-many, is indeed `bottom up’ or self-organized, and if it does indeed refuse transcendental models of organization (the State, representational politics, institutions), to what degree is it centrally a human affair? Is there a presumption that the multitude reinscribes the agency of the individual subject by meta-individualizing it. But if the `life’ of the multitude is constituted at many levels – not the least being the relation between multitude, milieu and `world’ (to use Heidegger’s terms) – then to what degree is it centrally human? Are there `accidental multitudes’ or `nonhuman multitudes’? How to the social and political issues raised by `emerging infectious disease’, `natural disasters’ and environmentalism relate to the many-as-many? It ultimately leads to a consideration of the multitude as being nonhuman, a nonhuman politics of the multitude.
Eugene Thacker is an Assistant Professor in “Literature, Communication and Culture” at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and is the author of Biomedia Univ. of Minn Press, 2004
More Than Many?
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004).
Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude was published in 2004, at the same time that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire appeared. While both Virno and Negri come out of the Italian autonomia tradition, whose unique approach to Marx emphasized the `neglected’ Grundrisse and the ontological priority of the life-labor-capital relationship, their books bear some significant differences. While Hardt and Negri’s book was published by the more mainstream publisher Penguin, following upon Harvard’s publication of Empire, Virno’s book was published by the more vanguardish Semiotext(e) – known, of course, for their series of uniform pocket-sized black books, small enough to jam into your pocket before heading into an anti-WTO protest. While Hardt and Negri’s book is the result of lengthy reflection, writing, and rewriting, Virno’s is essentially a transcript of a four-day seminar. Hardt and Negri’s book – tome, really – weighs in at over four hundred pages; Virno’s book – pamphlet really – comes in at under a hundred pages (minus Sylvère Lotringer’s informative forward). There is no hardcover version of Virno’s book, while the girth of Hardt and Negri’s enables it to stand up all on its own. All of this is a set-up to a sort of `smack-down’ between the two takes on the concept of the multitude. But I’d like to side-step such a scene to comment a bit on the condensation in Virno’s approach to the multitude, and to suggest some openings his book enables – opening that, I would argue, are not as facilitated in the approach of Hardt and Negri.
A Grammar of the Multitude touches on many topics. In fact, one of its central themes is the topic of `the many.’ Virno’s introduction sketches a genealogy of the concept of the multitude, and his two main references points are Hobbes and Spinoza. While the latter has been reworked in all sorts of contemporary contexts (one thinks of Deleuze’s two books, as well as Negri’s The Savage Anomaly), there has been little or no discussion of the Hobbesian concept of the multitude. As Virno rightly points out, the term was quite prevalent in 17th century natural rights discourses (not only Hobbes, but Bodin, Locke, Rousseau all make use of the term). Thus, Virno’s first point is that the 17th century concept of the multitude is related, but may not directly pertain to the contemporary derivations of the term. What does continue to remain a key issue is the way that the concept of the multitude is opposed to that of `the people.’ For Hobbes, the multitude is the people in potential; it is the people moving out of the infamous state of nature towards the moment in which rights are given over to a sovereign, and `a’ people emerges. Spinoza’s Political Treatise replays many aspects of this narrative, but, Virno argues, Spinoza acknowledges the political status of the multitude, however ambivalent it may be. This difference allows Virno to position Hobbes against Spinoza on the issue of the multitude: while Hobbes sees the multitude as illegitimate, chaotic, unformed, Spinoza minimally acknowledges the multitude as a generative capacity of the many-as-many. No doubt it is this political and ontological difference that has made Spinoza so attractive to contemporary political theorists, including Balibar, Deleuze, Matheron, Montag, and Negri.
This introduction enables Virno to make what is perhaps his central thesis: that we are living in a new 17th century, in which all the old terms – public/private, individual/collective, local/global – no longer adequately function to describe, explain, and shape the experience of the world. Virno proposes that the concept of the multitude – in its historical and contemporary variants – serves as a more compelling way of redefining the public sphere than the concept of the people. The primary reason for this, Virno points out, is in the way the concept of the multitude asks us to consider the many as many. The core of Virno’s overarching theoretical argument is succinctly stated early on:
“The contemporary multitude.occupies a middle region between `individual and collective’.And it is precisely because of the dissolution of the coupling of these terms, for so long held to be obvious, that one can no longer speak of a people converging into the unity of the state. While one does not wish to sing out-of-tune melodies in the post-modern style (`multiplicity is good, unity is the disaster to beware of’), it is necessary, however, to recognize that the multitude does not clash with the One; rather, it redefines it. Even the many need a form of unity, of being a One. But here is the point: this unity is no longer the State; rather, it is language, intellect, the communal faculties of the human race. The One is no longer a promise, it is a premise. (25)”
This notion of the many-as-many is one of the guiding threads to Virno’s analysis. It can be seen to broadly follow from a Spinozist ontology, in which an immanent One (substance) is understood to condition and make possible all sorts of singularizations and differentiations. It is also not unrelated to a certain reading of Deleuze (especially Badiou’s remapping of Deleuze), in which `multiplicity’ is closely related to immanence, and this immanence a redefinition of `the One.’ In the political context, such ontological approaches literally make a difference, for they raise the possibility of a democracy that resists representation, a politics of the many that refuses the prerequisites of the One. Virno continues: `Unity is no longer something (the State, the sovereign) towards which things converge, as in the case of the people; rather, it is taken for granted, as a background or a necessary precondition.we must conceive of a One which, far from being something conclusive, might be thought of as the base which authorizes differentiation or which allows for the political-social existence of the many seen as being many’ (25).
But, aside from such ontological niceties, how exactly can this notion of the many-as-many be comprehended? Virno offers what he terms `three approaches to the many’ that take up the remainder of the book. The first is a political approach, one that focuses on the dialectic between `fear’ and `security’ that always demands that the many culminate in the One. The specific fears – be it terrorism, outsourcing, new social and medical maladies – dovetail into more general `anguish’ about Being as such, and the specific modes of security that are a response to this anguish cannot, of course, ever fully secure Being itself. Virno opens the Kantian schema of `dread’ and `refuge’ – as well as the Heideggerian pairing of `fear’ and `anguish’ – to this question of the many. Rather than a specific fear (terrorism) that is the content of the people, and rather than an existential anguish that is the core of the individual subject, Virno suggests that it is their point of indistinction that constitutes the many-as-many: the `commonality’ of `not feeling at home’ is immediately the concern of the many. Instead of a people united by fear, Virno comes out the other side of this `not feeling at home,’ and looks to Marx’s idea of the `general intellect’ and the possibility of a `publicness without a public sphere’ as a way of understanding the many-as-many in a political context.
This leads to Virno’s second approach to the many, which we might call economic or political economic. Virno begins with the classical, Aristotelian division of human activity (labor, politics, thought) and its modern reiterations in Arendt (labor, action, intellect), to suggest that at the root of such distinctions is a more basic division between poiesis and praxis, a distinction that needs reworking in light of the subsumption of the former in the latter (one could develop a critique of `new media’ through this lens as well). In a somewhat surprising move, Virno uses the pianist Glenn Gould as an example of what he calls `virtuosity.’ For Virno, the virtuosity of the performing artist has three main characteristics: its process is its product, it requires the presence of others, and vernacular of this virtuosity is in performance. (Gould’s seclusion into the recording studio is viewed by Virno as a reversion from virtuosity to labor, emphasizing as it does the end product. But I would argue that Gould’s controversial embrace of technology-as-process actually reinvents virtuosity as indissociable from mediation, and in doing so problematizes the self-presence of performance. A further example would be musique concrète in France during the 1940s.) Virno imports this notion of virtuosity to talk about the remapping of labor in the post-Fordist era (Virno prefers this to `post-industrial’ or `late capitalism’). In the networks of immaterial labor, where cooperation, collaboration, and communication are essential, virtuosity is both canalized into specific sectors (services, IT, mass media), but it also remains constitutively defined by process, and thus never fully inscribed by the product that is its result.
Virno’s political (fear-security) and economic (virtuosity) approaches intersect in this third approach to the many: the subjectivity of the many-as-many, or, as he states, the `emotional tonalities of the multitude.’ While the concept of the multitude is often discussed in political or economic terms, there is yet to be seen a sustained analysis on the experience of the multitude. And this is for good reason: it is, in a way, an aporetic endeavor, for if the many-as-many is not One, then to inquire into the subjectivity of the many can only lead to either `mob rule’ or the `end of the subject.’ Hardt and Negri attempt to address this problem by importing the phenomenological concept of the `flesh’ to describe the multitude, but this only replicates the problem, since Merleau-Ponty and arguably phenomenology itself cannot account for collective experience without resorting to a cognizing, Cartesian subject. Virno’s approach does not necessarily offer a solution, but it does offer several avenues to explore. One is the concept of individuation elaborated by Gilbert Simondon, in which the individual is product, not producer. This leads to Virno’s specific take on the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics. Here Virno suggests that the pre-existence of plurality over the individual (the many-as-many) resides in the three levels of life, language, and labor – the `common’ capacities of the many. Biopolitics is this capacity or this potential (dynamis) for work and for reinventing the life-labor relationship.
Thus, Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude begins from an ontological shift: to consider the many-as-many, to consider the One as immanent, and thus preceding the many. The One (the State, the people, the sovereign) is not the promise of the many, rather the One (general intellect, the common, biopolitics) is the premise of the many. Virno then offers a range of approaches to understanding the many-as-many (political, economic, experiential). Virno’s closing `theses’ on post-Fordism suggest that these capacities of the many-as-many do not exist outside of or separate from global capital, but that they inhere in its mutations, allowing Virno to provocatively suggest that `post-Fordism is the communism of capital.’ Despite this pervasiveness or this distributedness of post-Fordist labor patterns, Virno also points to the `intellectuality of the masses’ that both constitutes and yet exceeds post-Fordism. All of this depends upon the ontological shift Virno proposes, and in this way A Grammar of the Multitude is not unlike Multitude. What Virno does, however, is to suggest approaches to comprehending the many-as-many in a range of domains (labor, politics, thought), domains that often begin from the individual subject, the subject of propriety, from a prioritizing of the One (be it citizen or State).
Some final points concerning Virno’s analysis. First, the notion of the many-as-many really leads to a discussion of `multiplicity,’ a terrain well-worn by Deleuze. As Badiou notes, Deleuze proposes the series one-multiple-multiplicity, with multiplicity offering a third term out of the Hegelian one-multiple pairing. But – and this is one of Badiou’s `critiques’ – this ultimately leads to the problem of `multiplicity-without-oneness,’ and indeed Deleuze and Guattari’s musings on `packs’ acknowledge this problem of `a’ pack. Perhaps this opens onto a renewed engagement with mathematics, particular – as Badiou argues – with set theory, but one can also imagine ontological engagements with graph theory (the many as a network), topology (the infolding and superfolding of the many), and fuzzy logic (the ambiguous event or occurrence of the many).
This issue of multiplicity – the multiplicity of the multitudes (say it ten times) – is linked in Virno’s analysis to his notion of biopolitics, but only obliquely. In fact, the pervasive use of the concept of `biopolitics’ is reflective of this generalized use of the term in discussions of the multitude. Virno argues that biopolitics – in Foucault’s sense of the inclusion of `life’ into the political domain – only makes sense in the context of labor and capital. Hardt and Negri also make this point: that, without considering the imperatives of capital subsumption, there is no `motive’ for the biopolitical incorporation of social, biological and economic life. The question is, what is the `bio’ in biopolitics? Is it biological life, the social bios, the `economic’ life of the subject, the producer, the consumer? All of this leaves out one important element, an element absolutely central to Foucault’s concept of biopolitics: medicine. For Foucault, medicine in the broadest sense of the term is the constant mediator between politics and economics, the thread that stitches together political economy. Foucault’s analyses of the medical police, public hygiene programs, statistics and demographics, the establishment of norms, and the `government of the living’ all relate to a particular medical politics, a `noso-politics’. Foucault’s Collège lectures in the late 1970s pursue this theme by talking about the `apparatus of security,’ biopolitics as a `race war,’ and the notion of population and `human capital.’
This leads to a last point, which has to do with the `life’ of multiplicities. Deleuze often makes claims as to the life or the vitality of multiplicities, encapsulated in the notion of `nonorganic life.’ Are life and multiplicity simply isomorphic with each other? But what is the multiplicity specific to life? This is a point left unaddressed in Virno, but also in Hardt and Negri. If the multitude, the many-as-many, is indeed `bottom up’ or self-organized, and if it does indeed refuse transcendental models of organization (the State, representational politics, institutions), to what degree is it centrally a human affair? Is there a presumption that the multitude reinscribes the agency of the individual subject by meta-individualizing it. But if the `life’ of the multitude is constituted at many levels – not the least being the relation between multitude, milieu and `world’ (to use Heidegger’s terms) – then to what degree is it centrally human? Are there `accidental multitudes’ or `nonhuman multitudes’? How to the social and political issues raised by `emerging infectious disease’, `natural disasters’ and environmentalism relate to the many-as-many? It ultimately leads to a consideration of the multitude as being nonhuman, a nonhuman politics of the multitude.
Eugene Thacker is an Assistant Professor in “Literature, Communication and Culture” at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and is the author of Biomedia Univ. of Minn Press, 2004