multitude and metropolis

8/13/2019 Multitude and Metropolis

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Multitude and Metropolis

Antonio Negri

1. Generalising the strike.

It is interesting to note how, on the occasion of the Spring and Summer2002 struggles in Italy, the project of generalising the strike of themovement of precarious and sociallydiffuse workers, men and women,seemed to be harmlessly and uselessly subsumed beneath the workersgeneral strike. After this experience, many comrades who participated inthe struggle began to realise that whilst the workers strike was damagingto the employer, the social strike passed without notice through the folds ofthe global working day. It neither damaged the masters nor helped themobile and flexible workers. This realisation raised a series of questions:how do we understand how the socially diffuse worker fights; how can heconcretely subvert in the space of the metropolis his subordination toproduction and the violence of exploitation? How does the metropolispresent itself to the multitude and is it right to say that the metropolis is tothe multitude what the factory used to be to the working class?

In fact this hypothesis presents us with a problem, one not simply raised bythe obvious differences between social and workers struggles in terms of

their immediate efficacy. It also raises a more pertinent and generalquestion: if the metropolisis invested by the capitalist relation ofvalorisation and exploitation, how can we grasp, inside it, the antagonism ofthe metropolitan multitude? In the 60s and 70s, as these problemsemerged in relation to working classstruggles and the changes inmetropolitan life, often very effective responses were given. We willsummarise these later. For the time being, we just want to underline howthese responses were concerned with an external relation between workingclass and other metropolitan layers of wage and/or intellectual labour. Theproblem today is posed differently because the various sections of the

labour force appear to exist in the metropolitan hybrid as an internalrelation and immediately as multitude: a whole of singularities, a multiplicityof groups and subjectivities, who mould the (antagonistic) shape ofmetropolitan spaces.

2. Theoretical anticipations.

Amongst the theorists of the metropolis (architects and urbanists),Koolhaas was the one who provided us, at the end of the 70s and in adelirious manner, with a new imageof the metropolis. We are obviously
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referring to Delirious New York. A retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan..What was the central thesis of this book?

Koolhaas drew an image of the metropolis that -because of but in spite of amore or less coherently developed planning- lived through dynamics,conflicts, powerful juxtapositions of cultural layers, life stylesand forms andof a multiplicity of hypothesis and projects for the future.

In order to understand the city, one had to look at this complexity and thismicrophysics of powers from within. New York in particular was theexample of an extraordinary historical, political, technological and artisticaccumulation of various forms of urban planning. However, this was notenough, for one also had to recognise that the metropolis was strongerthan the urban centre. Speculative interests and citizens resistances

defeated and swept away both the prescriptions of power and the utopiasof the opposition. The metropolis confused and mixed the terms of theurban discourse: starting from a certain urban intensity, the metropolisconstituted new categories, it was a proliferating machine. The measurewent beyond itself. What was needed was to provide a microphysicalanalysis of the metropolis -in this case one of New York- that could accountfor both the thousands of active singularities and the forms of repressionand blockage that the power of the multitude met. Thus Koolhaasarchitecture grew amongst great plans of urban co-habitation that werethen taken up, modified and mixed with other architectural

formsKoolhaas architecture tells a great story, that of the destruction ofwestern cities and their replacement by the hybrid metropolis. That forKoolhaas architectural development is classified in a manner functional tothe different organising techniques of the building work is not relevant,though useful to understand. What is of interest here is the exact opposite:despite the industrial corporativasation of the agents of production, here weperceive how far the metropolis organises itself on continuous yet distortedlayers, consistent with the Welfare paradigm yet hybrid. The metropolis is acommon world, everyone's productNot general will but common

aleatoriness.

Thus the metropolis wants to be imperial. Koolhaas is a forerunner of weakpostmodernism. Drawing from the genealogy of the metropolis, heanticipates an operation that will become crucial in mature postmodernism:the recognition of the global dimension as a more productive and generousone from the economic standpoint and with respect to lifestyles.

This critical effort is neither solitary nor neutral. On the contrary, it producesa different critique; it entrusts it into the real movement. For instance, when

we introduce differential and antagonistic elements in the knowledge of thecity and we make them the motor of metropolitan construction, we also


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compose other fields of living and fightingcommon ones. Anotherexample concerns the metropolis and collectivation. Surely, this oldsocialist word is now obsolete and surpassed in the consciousness of newgenerations. But this is not a problem. The project is not one of

collectivation but of recognition and organisation of the common. Acommon made of a great wealth of life styles, of collective means ofcommunication and life reproduction, and above all of the exceeding ofcommon expression of life in metropolitan spaces. We enjoy a secondgeneration of metropolitan life, creator of cooperation and exceeding inimmaterial relational linguistic values: it is a productive generation. Here isthe metropolis of the singular and collective multitude.

Many postmodernists reject the possibility of regarding the metropolis ofthe multitude as a collective and singular space, massively common and

subjectively malleable and always newly invented. These rejections turnthe analyst into the buffoon or the sycophant of power. In fact we haverecuperated the ideas of external economies, of immaterial dynamics, ofcycles of struggles and all that makes up the multitude.New York is postmodern in so far as it has participated to all stages of themodern and has, so to speak, consumed them in critique and in prefiguringsomething else: the result is hybrid, the metropolitan hybrid as a spatial andtemporal figure of the struggles, a plan of the microphysics of power.

3. Metropolis and global space.

Before and more than anyone else, Saskia Sassen taught us to see themetropolis, all metropolises, not only -like Koohlaas- as a hybrid andinternally antagonistic aggregate, but also as a figure homologous to thegeneral structure of capitalism in the imperial phase. Metropolis expressesand individualises the consolidation of global hierarchies, in its mostarticulated points, in a complex of forms and exercise of command. Classdifferences and the general planning of the division of labour are no longermade between nations, but rather between centre and periphery in the

metropolis. Sassen observes skyscrapers in order to draw implacablelessons. Who commands is at the top, who obeys is below; in the isolationof those who are highest lies the link with the world, whilst in thecommunication of those who are lowest one finds mobile points, life stylesand renewed functions of metropolitan recomposition. Therefore, we musttraverse the possible spaces of the metropolis if we want to knot togetherthe threads of struggle, to discover the channels and forms of connectionand the ways in which subjects live together.Sassen suggests looking at skyscrapers as the structure of imperialunification. At the same time she hints to the subtle provocative proposal of

imagining the skyscraper as an above and below rather than as a whole.


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Between the above and below runs the relation of command,of exploitationand therefore the possibility of revolt.

Sassens themes strongly resonated in Europe in the 90s when, with somedifficulty and yet effectively, some antagonistic forces started seeing thestructure of the metropolis as the mirror of the contradictions ofglobalisation. In fact, whether there were skyscrapers or not, the globalorder re-established an above and a below in the metropolis, that of arelation of exploitation that spread across the internal horizon of urbansociety. Sassen showed the places and the relations of exploitation anddissolved the multitude, bringing it back to the dispersed exercise ofmaterial activities. On the other side there is command. Blade Runner hasbecome science fiction.

4. Historical anticipations.

Others see the metropolises of skyscrapers and of Empire as places ofstruggle that can reveal common aspects and above all embodyorganisations and procedures of resistance and subversion. In this respect,one example immediately comes to mind: the Parisian struggles of thewinter of 1995-96. These struggles are to be remembered because at thetime the privatisation plans of public transport were rejected not only bythetrade unions but also by the combined struggles of the metropolitanpopulation. However, these struggles could never have reached their great

intensity and importance without being traversed and somehow prefiguredby the struggles of sans papiers, sans logement, sans-travail etc. This is tosay that metropolitan complexity at its highest level opens up lines of flightto the whole of the urban poor: then the metropolis, even the imperial one,wakes up to antagonism.

These developments and antagonisms were anticipated during theseventies: in Germany, the United States and Italy. The great shift of thefrontline from the factory to the metropolis, from class to multitude, wastheoretically and practically experienced and organised by manyvanguards. Reclaim the city was a persistent, important and overwhelmingwatchword in Italy. Similar words went through the German Brger-initiativen and the squatters experiences in most European metropolises.Factory workers recognised themselves in this development, whilst theorder of the unions and that of the parties of the working class movementignored it. The refusal to pay transport fares, the massive occupations ofhouses, the seizing of districts for the organisation of free time and for thesecurity of workers against the police and fiscal agents were projectscarried out with great care. These zones were then called red basesbut

were in fact more city spaces for public opinion rather than places as such.Sometimes they were decisively non-places - they were mass
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demonstrations in motion that went through and occupied squares andterritories. Thus the metropolis began to be rebuilt by a strange alliance:factory workers and metropolitan proletarians. Here we started to see howpowerful this alliance could be.

At the basis of these political experiences there was another greatertheoretical experimentation. At the beginning of the 70s we startedobserving a metropolis invaded by skyscrapers with globalisation, but alsobuilt by the transformations of labour practices in the course of theirrealisation. Alberto Magnaghi and his comrades published a formidable

journal (Quaderni del Territorio) that showed, more convincingly in eachissue, how capital was investing the city and transforming each street into aproductive flux of commodities. The factory was then extended ontosociety: this much was evident. But it also became clear that this

productiveinvestment of the city radically modified class struggle.

5. Police and war.

In the 90s the great transformation of productive relations that invested themetropolis reached a quantitative limit and configured a new phase.Capitalist recomposition of the city, or the metropolis, is given in all itscomplexity by the new configuration of the relations of forces in Empire.Mike Davis was the first to provide an adequate image of the phenomenathat characterise the postmodern metropolis.

The erection of walls to delimit zones the poor cannot access, the definitionof spaces of ghettos where the desperate of the earth can accumulate, thedisciplining of the lines of transit and control that keep the order, thepreventive analysis and practice of containment and persecution ofpossible interruptions of the cycle: today, in the literature on empire, whenthe continuity between war and global police is mentioned we often neglectto say that the continuous and homogeneous techniques of war and policewere invented in the metropolis.Zero tolerance has become the watchword, or rather, the dispositif of

prevention that invests entire social strata whilst persevering against therefractory and excluded individuals. Skin colour and race, or religiousclothing, customs or class differences are, in turns, assumed as thedefining elements of the repressive zoning within the metropolis.The metropolis is built on these dispositifs. As we said regarding Sassenswork, the spatial dimensions, the width and height of buildings and publicspaces are completely subordinated to the logic of control. This occurswherever it is possible. In the spaces where the housing capital determinestoo high a profit to be turned into instruments of direct control through theapplication of heavy urban processes the metropolitan landscape is

covered in electronic control networks and traversed by representations ofdanger that televisions and helicopters design. Soon on each city we will


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see gathered those instruments of automatic control, autopilot planes andpolice clones that the army currently use as norm in wars. Soon theenclosures and red zones will be established according to logic of controlplanes: urban planning will have to interiorise the forms of aerial global

control and prioritise them over the freedom to develop spaces and society.It is clear that in so saying we exasperate trends that are still limited andonly represent one part of metropolitan development. As in the theory ofwar here the enormous capacity for developing violence on the part ofpower, the so called total asymmetry, generates adequate responses: theghost of David against the reality of Goliath. Similarly the zerotoleranceplanning of control on the city produces new forms of resistance.The metropolitan network is continuously interrupted and sometimessubverted by webs of resistance.The capitalist recomposition of the metropolis builds traces of

recomposition in the multitude. The fact is that in order to be given controlitself must recognise, or even build, transindividual schemes of citizenship.

All of urban sociology, from the Chicago School to our days, acknowledgesthat within a framework of extreme individualism, the concepts andschemes of interpretation must assume transindividual dimensions, almostthose of community. Analysis must be applied to the development of theseforms of life. This is how determinate localisations of the movements of themultitude and definite spaces in the metropolis will be discovered. Spatialand temporal determinations of the habitat and income (consumption) areused to design the contours of districts and to determine the behaviours ofpopulations. War as the legitimation of order and the police as theinstrument of order: these powers that are assumed as the constituentfunction of the metropolis and take the place of citizens and movementscannot get through. Again, the analysis of the metropolis refers back to theperception of the excess of value produced by the cooperation ofimmaterial labour. The crisis of the metropolis is moved much further.

6. Building the metropolitan strike.

They told me that when the general 24 hours strike was launched inSeville, during the night, from midnight onwards, groups formed in alldistricts to block all roads, all boites de nuit and to communicate to the citythe urgency of struggle.This lasted for a whole day alongside a general mobilisation on themetropolitan territory concentrated in the afternoon in massdemonstrations. Here is a good example of management of a generalstrike: a metropolitan strike where throughout the 24 hours of the workingday, different sections of social labour meet. However, this formidablepolitical movement seems insufficient to characterise a generalised strike.

We need to go deeper and analyse specifically each passage and/ormovement of recomposition, each moment of struggle that can flow into the


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construction of a social strike. Why are we saying this? Because we regardthe metropolitan strike as the specific form of recomposition of themultitude in the metropolis. The metropolitan strike is not a socialisation ofthe working class strike: it is a new form of counter power. We sl do not

know how it operates in time and space. What we know is that afunctionalist sociology, one of those that puts together various sections ofsocial recomposition of labour under capitalist control, will not design ametropolitan strike. The encounter, the clash and the intertwining andmoving forward of the different strata of the metropolitan multitude cannotbe seen other than as constructions (through struggle) of movements ofpower. How does this movement become capable of spreading power? Forus the answer does not allude to the Winter Palace. Metropolitan revolts donot pose the question of substituting a mayor: they express new forms ofdemocracy and schemes other than those of control. Metropolitan revolt is

always a refoundation of the city.

7. Rebuilding the metropolis.

Hence generalised strike must contain in itself the delirious project ofrebuilding the metropolis. This entails finding the common and buildingmetropolitan proximities. We have two figures that are absolutely indicativeof this project, they lie at the extreme margins of a scale of community: thefire fighter and the immigrant.The fire fighter represents the common as security, as recourse of all in

case of danger, as the constructor in the common imaginary of children; theimmigrant is the man needed to give colour to the metropolis as well asmeaning to solidarity. The fire fighter is the danger, the immigrant is thehope. The fire fighter is insecurity; the immigrant is what is to come. Whenwe think of the metropolis we conceive of it as the physical community thatis wealth and production of cultural community. Nothing better than themetropolis indicates the design of a sustainable development, a synthesisof ecology and production in the biopolitical framework. In this period,today, we are carrying the weight of a series of old ignoble and impotent

schemes of social democracy, according to which the metropolis can onlyreproduce if we introduce in it social safety valves that can be used to turn(and eventually to repair) the dramatic effects of capitalist developmentintomoney .Politicians and corrupt unions are negotiating these safetyvalves We think that the metropolis is an exceptional and excessiveresource even when the city is made up of favelas, barracks and chaos.Neither schemes of order, prefigured by an omnipotent power (from theearth to the sky through war and police), nor neutralising structures(repressions, cushions etc.) can be imposed on the metropolis and insideits social tissue. The metropolis is free. The freedom of the metropolis

stems from the building and rebuilding that it carries out on itself day byday; the general strike is inserted in this framework. It is the prolonging or


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rather the manifestation or revelation of what is alive in the depth of thecity. Probably in Seville the general strike was also the discovery of thatother society that lives in the metropolis during the whole of the workingday.

We do not know whether things really went that way: however, what wewant to underline is that the general strike is a kind of radical excavation inthe life of the metropolis: its productive structure and its common.

*Published on the journal Posse and then circulated on [email protected] on 20/11/02

Translated by Arianna Bove

multitude and metropolis

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