[responding to trew levellers comment on my post (i don't know how to use the comment function)]
Yes, I would definitely agree to a determination of “common” as a “capacity to activate, create, and mobilize multiple forces that break apart [or break open] organizations.” I think this is a great formulation – for me the question then becomes how to give a consistency to such “breaks,” without thereby resolving them into forms of “organization.” I realize this strikes one as parodoxical (maybe even non-sensical) in the terms that have usually designated “politics” (it may be easier think of these breaks in art), but I think it is precisely the loose affiliations and tentative associations built around specific, concrete problems that compose such "breaks" and that a term like “micro-politics” suggests (a term I don’t think HN use); one gives up an ideal of THE revolution (always put off until another day) for real, multiple, practices and experimentations.
It’s the affirmation, by that I mean the actualization, of such breaks that I find missing from the book. I don’t think you can attempt to synthesize or represent such breaks – you have to create them.
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ReplyDeleteYour post brings up two questions for me that I have been thinking about in relation to this book that I think tie in to all of the earlier posts:
ReplyDelete1) The book cannot actualize the multitude (obviously) and the authors are aware of that. They can't represent a break but only stimulate the desire for it. Concrete proposals would be a betrayal of the very conception of the multitude. So what leaves us dissatisfied? What do we want from a book like this exactly?
2) I think you rightly raise a key question about "breaks" plural versus "THE Revolution." It is telling that it is THE multitude never "a multitude" or "multitudes." Because in the age of Empire there is no outside. On the one hand, this means there is no transcendence to appeal to (fine) but it also means that there is no local politics anymore. There are no breaks that do not actualize the collective forces of the multitude that can be grasped as the productive element behind the global movements of Capital. "We" may not be a unity but "we" are always "one." All politics are micropolitics, but then aren't micropolitics simultaneously macropolitics?