What About the Dark Side of Multitude

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Franco Berardi (aka Bifo)What About the Dark Side of Multitude?

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419255JCI35410.1177/019685991141925BerardiJournal of Communication Inquiry

1Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, Italy

Corresponding Author:

Franco Berardi,Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Via Brera, 28, Milan, Italy 20121Email: [email protected]

What About the Dark

Side of Multitude?

Franco Berardi (aka Bifo)1

Keywords

multitude, compositionism, subjectivity, digital media, precarity, knowledge

The books authored by Michel Hardt and Toni Negri during the first decade of the new

century may be defined as a Trilogy, and the number three is meaningful for those who

know the history of modern philosophy. The Trilogy has been a master stroke by the

point of view of political action and strategy. The authors have been able to accom-

plish a sort of redefinition of the theoretical field of contemporary philosophy, refram-

ing the relation between social communication, subjectivity, and global power, and

have succeeded in changing the very perception of the political framework after the

huge transformations resulting from fall of the Soviet system, creation of the Internet,and globalization of capitalist economy. Thanks to the conceptualization they have

produced in these three books, Hardt and Negri reassessed the space of critical and

dissident thought, while asserting the historical legitimacy of rebellion on new founda-

tions, all the while reframing social autonomy in a totally new perspective.

If you think of the effects of the Soviet Empires fall on culture, philosophy, and

political imagination, if you remember the triumph of neoliberal ideology in the after-

math of the 1989 upheaval, you will understand how important the reaffirmation of the

conflictive existence of the indomitable persistence of antagonism and the continuous

re-creation of a space for the Common has been, notwithstanding the aggressive priva-tization that has been enforced during the last decades.

In the 1990s, the theoretical field was occupied by two different kinds of imagination:

the first was the technophile social-darwinism that identified the invisible hand of Liberal

thought with the infinite development of the Net: the long boom of the New Economy

that Wired magazine triumphantly proclaimed while the Nasdaq was happily

exploding.

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Berardi 311

The second imagination was based on the prospect of clash of civilization, and on

the idea that the Great History of ideological conflicts and revolution was over and

the coming time is destined to be the time of a Small History, a history of particular

belongings, inessential conflicts, and cultural regression toward identitarian war.Negri and Hardt have been able to accomplish a difficult task: acknowledging the

progressive and irreversible trend of globalization but at the same time reopening the

challenge of autonomy and of revolt. So they opened a way to escape from the fake but

powerful alternative: either consenting to global capitalism or regressing toward the

nostalgia of the failed socialist attempt of the past century. The Negri-Hardt Trilogy

has succeeded in displacing the very ground of the opposition and of the search for

autonomy, and this is such an important achievement that every other remark is a

small thing.

However, some remarks I have to do, on the philosophical and analytical sides ofthese books published in the years zero zero. Something has to be said about the very

structure of the Trilogy, the not so cryptic hegelianism of its theoretical structure. The

succession is openly Hegelian: the negative (Empire), the negative of the negative

(Multitude), and, finally, predictably, the positive synthesis, the Common. Beyond the

general structure, which could be seen as an ironic mannerism, the analytical content

of the first two books is not always convincing. Let us think about the notion of

Empire. This concept is not really grasping the tendency of the first decade of the

century, rather the contrary, I think.

In the last part of the 20th century, American power has shown less and less abilityto impose its political will and its military might, while also unstable and declining at

the economic level.Empire was being written some years before its publication, in the

Clinton age, and is the best conceptualization of that conjuncture. However, the new

landscape of the Bush years (and of the Obama years too) is one of decline and defeat,

from Iraq to Afghanistan, not to mention the Pakistan catastrophic mess, the difficult

relation with Russia, and the lack of autonomy in front of the Chinese.

The concept ofEmpire is an effort at integrating the political sphere with the net-

worked system of communication. The Internet is conceptualized as an environment,

not only as a tool, and this allows Hardt and Negri to decipher the signs of formationof Semiocapitalism. However, they fail to see the ambiguous feature of the network,

the pathology that affects subjectivity becoming-network. The concept ofEmpire is

not read only in geopolitical and in military terms, it refers to the potency of the net-

work, no more limited by national borders and identity. The concept ofEmpire, in this

book, is encompassing the new force of the network as a structure of power and a pos-

sibility of liberation. What is important inEmpire is the change in the political posture,

which is no more marked by sense of defeat and past deceptions but is marked by the

disenchanted understanding of a new phase in the history of social conflicts.

The second book,Multitude, has always seemed to me a failed attempt in renamingthe subject, after the weakening of the industrial labor force, and the decomposition of

the worker class that followed the globalization and precarization of the 1990s. This

concept is not sufficient to build the process of subjectivation that we need in the new

sphere of global capitalism. The notion ofMultitude, in its spinozian derivation, refers

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312 Journal of Communication Inquiry35(4)

to the impossibility of power to reduce the boundless energies of social life to its

domination.

This is important, of course, but says nothing (or too little) about the quality, the

consciousness, and the intentions of theMultitude, particularly about its possibility ofautonomy from capitalist rule. The dark side ofMultitude is forgotten in the Hardt-

Negri formulation. Depression, panic, and suicide have been marking the phenome-

nology of life of the first connective generation (so far) and the concept of Multitude

is not dealing with this dark side, which is essential if we want to find an imagination

for movements to come.

In the third book, Commonwealth, Negri and Hardt have convincingly proposed a

new critique of property, based on the boundless expansion of productive energy of

general intellect in the network, and have proposed a new idea of the common, as the

space of an unceasing dynamics of invention, creation, liberalization, privatization, dis-possessing, then reinvention, and so on. Knowledge is the essential space of the com-

mon wealth, particularly in the age of the Net. And capitalism is less and less apt to

semiotize the expansion of knowledge potency. In this sense, the third book the Trilogy,

Commonwealth, is a good introduction to the movement we see at the horizon: the

movement of knowledge against financial capitalism or, better said, the movement of

knowledge-building autonomy from financial capitalism.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this

article.

Bio

Franco Berardi (aka Bifo) is a writer, media-theorist, and media-activist. He was accused of

participation in militant actions and was imprisoned in 1969 and 1972. In 1970, he publishedContro il lavoro (Feltrinelli), a small book which declared the libertarian philosophy of refusal

of work and opposed the Leninist ideology. He founded the magazineA/traverso (1975-1981),

was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978), and

cofounder of the e-zine rekombinant.org and of the telestreet network. In 1980-1982, he con-

tributed to the Italian musical magazine MUSICA 80 as correspondent from New York City.

His publications include Le ciel est enfin tomb sur la terre (Paris, 1978), Mutazione e

Ciberpunk (Genoa, 1993), Neuromagma (Rome, 1995), Felix (Rome, 2001; London 2009)

Generacion Postalfa (Buenos Aires, 2007), Skizomedia (Roma, 2005),La fabrica de la infe-

licidad(Roma, 2000; Madrid, 2004) El sabio el guerrero el mercader (Aquarela, Madrid,2006),Precarious Rhapsody (2009), The Soul at Work(2009). Currently, he is writing for the

monthlyLOOP(Rome) and for the monthly CRISIS(Buenos Aires), teaching social history

of communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, and working on founding a school

for social imagination at the Repubblica di San Marino, aimed at creating a new Europe free

from the capitalist exploitation.

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