Multitude, Species-Being, and the Conjunction of Utopia and Authenticity 180

In contemporary articulations of “Autonomist” Marxism—we will look in particular at the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and Nick Dyer-Witheford— authenticity and utopia are resurgent and understood in relation to media. In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “Empire” trilogy (2000, 2005, 2009), we find a Marxian- Deleuzian synthesis; the authors posit history as a dance between the immanent and constitutive powers of “multitude” and the various structures and disciplinary orders that have sought to capture its energies, from transcendent absolutism to modernist

colonialism and industrial discipline through to the contemporary, global system they term “Empire” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 2009). The multitude is defined by its simultaneous negotiation of alterity and solidarity: “[The plural multitude’s productive, creative

subjectivities] are in perpetual motion and they form constellations of singularities and events that impose continual global reconfigurations on the system” (2000, p. 60). The (non-dialectical) battle between human potential and the various structures of

transcendence that have attempted to capture its productive capacities posits a resistant, networked subject that is always already outside, and in opposition to, power. Contra Althusser’s (1971) analysis of interpellation, then, whereby subjects are hailed by

disciplinary institutions before they even enter the world, Hardt and Negri emphasize the necessity of struggle by recourse to a network of autonomous desiring-production.

Hardt and Negri’s multitude is no natural nation or folk. They distinguish between the various levels of organization by which the multitude has been constructed and

negotiated—in a manner recalling Benedict Anderson’s (1983) suggestion that modern nation-states have been “imagined”—and technology is a key component of these processes. It is the convergence of the workers of the world with informational technologies that has calibrated and armed the multitude for conflict with its newest opponent, the imperial capitalist order: “In the passage to the informational economy, the assembly line has been replaced by the network as the organizational model of

production, transforming the forms of cooperation and communication within each productive site and among productive sites” (2000, p. 295). The transition to immaterial labour as the paradigmatic sector of capitalist production has put creativity,

communication, and knowledge at the centre of exploitation, which has been made possible by high-speed networks and digital media (Hardt & Negri, 2000). Yet, this machinic territorialization has simultaneously planted the seeds of a mobile, “hydra- headed,” global smart mob of sorts.65 Recalling McLuhan, they describe tools as “poietic prostheses” (2000, p. 217)—integral components of our being and our creative capacities.

Hardt and Negri do not use the word “authenticity” in their descriptions of “multitude,” but their concept nonetheless explores the potentiality of humanity to redirect its creative energies towards that which it “really” is: “The flesh of the multitude is pure potential, an unformed life force, and in this sense an element of social being, aimed constantly at the fullness of life” (2004, p. 192). The multitude constitutes

authenticity in motion: a becoming-autonomous that is already here. Similarly, Hardt and

65 _{“Smart mob” is a term coined by Howard Rheingold (2002), who views technology from more of a}

liberal perspective. Still, the concept somewhat similarly tries to grasp the relationship between embodied struggle and mobile, digital media.

Negri do not seem much concerned with the reclamation of the word “utopia” per se. The social productivity of the multitude is not an impossible elsewhere to be aimed at but rather an immanent fact. Still, if we remember Ruth Levitas’s (1990) understanding of utopia as “a desire for a better way of being,” we can easily consider Hardt and Negri as theorists of utopia, which appears as an immanent, wired, already-authentic elsewhere that is more like a virtual potency lying within the structure of Bloch’s “Not-Yet.”

Working along lines parallel to Hardt and Negri is Nick Dyer-Witheford, who has managed a more detailed and empirical account of laboring subjects in relation to digital media. Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Marx (1999) explores the potentialities latent within the media networks of high-technology, post-Fordist capitalism. Taking to task a wide range of thinkers on the postmodern condition, from celebrators of “post-industrial” society (such as Daniel Bell) to cynics who emphasize the overbearing hegemony of global media conglomerates (such as Herbert Schiller), Dyer-Witheford explores how

contemporary media technologies are both dominating as well as potentially liberating. This strategy considers Marx’s oeuvre as a conflicted, dialectical whole, as technologies both embody dominating social relations and, because the substance of labour power precedes and is in opposition to capital, offer the working class channels of resistance.

Cyber-Marx’s analysis parallels Bloch’s attempt to locate utopia within the structure of the present. A chapter on “Alternatives” unabashedly introduces the category of utopia into sociological and media analysis. Dyer-Witheford sketches a utopian

“commonwealth” which is in many ways similar to the glimpse of utopia found in The German Ideology (Marx & Engels, 1998), or to Morris’s News from Nowhere (1995), albeit within a high-technological and postmodern horizon. The difference is that Dyer-

Witheford’s proposals are not yet post-capitalist. They are virtual utopias that are already here in the present.

Dyer-Witheford puts forth four proposals which are attainable possibilities: “the institution of a guaranteed annual income, the creation of universal communications networks, the use of these networks in decentralized, participatory counterplanning, and the democratic control of decisions about technoscientific development” (1999, p. 193). In his description of each of these utopian proposals, the self- and society-creating powers of human beings are seen re-calibrated away from capital’s law of exchange and toward socially-directed means. The guaranteed annual income might dismantle the stratification of waged and non-waged forms of labour; it might also allow for more satisfying modes of life (Dyer-Witheford, 1999). As well, uncommodified and

universally accessible media channels would help to create a communicative commons where the society’s fate could be planned and organized by those who constitute it (Dyer- Witheford, 1999). This would make utopian discussion a very fabric of the proposed utopia: a utopia that yet desires utopia.

The actualizable configuration sketched by Dyer-Witheford is one made possible by the remarkable technologies and practical knowledges engendered by late capitalism (and indeed the focus is the technological); but it is also made possible by the immanent creative capacities of human life, which can be distinguished from capital’s power over it. Indeed, there is a profound tension throughout Cyber-Marx between the ways in which capital has directed labour and the immanent (and potentially “authentic”) capacities of the working class:

Capital attempts to incorporate labour as an object, a component in its cycle of value extraction, so much labour power. But this inclusion is always partial, never fully achieved. Labouring subjects resist capital’s reduction. Labour is for capital always a problematic “other” that must constantly be controlled and subdued, and that, as persistently, circumvents or challenges this command. Rather than being organized by capital, workers struggle against it. It is this struggle that constitutes the working class. (1999, p. 65)

The working class, although always struggling to realize its freedom, is directed away from its self-creating substance by capital. And yet, even if the working class loses itself, it always and already has the ability to rediscover its locus as the source of value.

Rediscovering and acting within its self-constituting powers would mean that labouring humanity has become what it “really” is—that it has become authentic.

At the background of this discussion is young Marx’s articulation of “species- being,” which is referred to in Cyber-Marx, and which Dyer-Witheford has given more explicit attention in recent work (see 2010). Species-being, Feuerbach’s concept which Marx deploys in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1961), is a dialectical version of authenticity. The power to transform is estranged from humans under capital, but it is a power that persists, latent: “[T]he proposition that man’s species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature. The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man stands to himself, is first realized and expressed in the relationship in which a man stands to other men” (Marx, 1961, pp. 77-8). Although Romanticism may have influenced Marx in his articulation of “species-being,” alienation and authenticity for Marx are strictly relational: vectors of struggle. Humans create themselves, their

relationships, and their world, but they can create them in a myriad of ways. Under capitalism, however, where creativity is alienated, humans are not. Under exploitative social relations, humanity is deprived of the ability to direct its own essence (the capability which is its “essence”).

In a more recent discussion of “species-being,” Dyer-Witheford via Marx emphasizes this paradoxically unessential essence of humanity (the essence to make its own essence): “In the Manuscripts, its discussion is cryptic, fugitive, tantalizing. It is, however, clear that Marx did not mean simply human existence as a biologically reproductive group. Species-being is rather the capacity to collectively transform this natural basis” (2010, p. 485). Species-being thus has little to do with heroic individuals getting in touch with their inner natures. “To be authentic,” from this point of view, is to be against structures of power and domination which contradict or divert the creative energies of labour: “[Species-being] might really better termed ‘species-becoming,’ the activity of a species whose only ‘essence’ is its historical plasticity. It has no eternal, universal content, but it is in opposition to both the laws of exchange and to instrumental efficiency” (2010, p. 487). The utopian dimension of “species-being” points towards the reclamation of both “the self”—considered inter-subjectively—and productive life. The authenticity aimed for exists not apart from but within and along the media ecologies humans have made for and with themselves.