The biopolitical machine is an orchestra without a conductor. The alt endorses a making towards the multitude: a metamorphosis of the common that permeates all spheres of life.

All the objective conditions are in place: biopolitical labor constantly exceeds the limits of capitalist command; there is a breach in the social relation of capital opening the possibility for biopolitical labor to claim its autonomy; the foundations of its exodus are given in the existence and constant creation of the common; and capital’s mechanisms of exploitation and control increasingly contradict and fetter biopolitical productivity. But there are also countervailing objective conditions: new capitalist mechanisms find novel ways to expropriate and privatize the common, and the old social institutions ceaselessly corrupt it. Where does all this leave us? Analysis of objective conditions take us this far but no further. Capitalist crisis does not proceed automatically to collapse. The multiplicity of singularities that produce and are produced in the biopolitical field of the common do not spontaneously accomplish exodus and construct their autonomy. Political organization is needed to cross the threshold and generate political events. The kairos—the opportune moment that ruptures the monotony and repetitiveness of chronological time— has to be grasped by a political subject.

We propose the multitude as an adequate concept for organizing politically the project of exodus and liberation because we are convinced that, in the current biopolitical context even more than before, traditional organizational forms based on unity, central leadership, and hierarchy are neither desirable nor effective.39 The multitude proposition has now been debated in intellectual and political circles for several years, and we can take advantage of these discussions to evaluate and refine the concept. The critiques and challenges we have found most productive center generally on two fundamental questions: one regarding the multitude’s capability to take coherent political action and a second about the progressive or liberatory character of its actions.

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The best critics of the concept of multitude regarding the first line of questions accept our assessment that, especially in the biopolitical context, society is composed of a radical plurality, or rather a multiplicity of irreducible singularities. The question is whether and how these singularities can act together politically. At play fundamentally is the concept of the political itself. Pierre Macherey, for instance, explains quite rightly that politics requires the ability to make decisions on not an individual but a social level. “How can the flesh of the multitude become a body?” he asks. “The intervention of a political entity is necessary, an entity in this case that, while maintaining the rhizomatic structure of the multitude, must itself be collective and refuse any vertical form of ordering, and in that way remain faithful to its immanent destiny that requires it to unfold on a plane of horizontality. How then can the multitude organize itself, without sacrificing the autonomy of the singularities that compose it?”40 Macherey sees the multiplicity of the multitude as posing a political obstacle or challenge because he assumes that acting as a political body and making decisions requires unity. He thus sees any political project for the multitude caught in a contradiction: either sacrifice its horizontal multiplicity and adopt a unified vertical organization, thereby ceasing to be a multitude; or maintain its structure and be incapable of political decision and action. Ernesto Laclau similarly considers the immanence and plurality of the multitude a barrier to its capacity for politics. He agrees that today there exists the initial condition of the multitude: the social field is radically heterogeneous. He explains, then, still along the lines of the multitude, that political action requires that the singularities on the plane of immanence engage in a process of articulation to define and structure political relations among them. Laclau diverges, though, when he insists that in order for articulation to take place, a guiding hegemonic force must emerge above the plane of immanence that is able to direct the process and serve as a point of identification for all the singularities. Hegemony represents the plurality of singularities as a unity and thus transforms the multitude into a people, which because of its unity is deemed capable of political action and decision making: “The political operation par excellence is always going to be the construction of a ‘people.”41 Like Macherey, Laclau sees the multitude as a figure on the road to politics but not yet a political figure. A second line of questioning concerns primarily not whether the multitude can act politically but the direction of its political actions—not the form, so to speak, but the content of the multitude’s politics. Specifically, these authors see no reason to assume that the political decisions and action of the multitude will be oriented toward liberation. Paolo Virno, for example, one of those who has most fruitfully advanced the concept of the multitude, considers its politics profoundly ambivalent since the multitude is endowed in his view with roughly equal measures of social solidarity and aggressiveness. Just as a long tradition of political philosophy warns it is naïve or irresponsible to assume that humans in the state of nature are unfailingly good, Virno emphasizes the ambivalence of the “state of nature” characterized by biopolitical production. The powerful new tools in the possession of the multitude—linguistic tools, along with tools of communication, affect, knowledge, and so forth—have no necessary predisposition to the good but can just as easily be used for ill. Virno thus advocates a “realist” position, insisting that any discussion of the positive political capacities of the multitude be accompanied by a sober look at the negative.42 Étienne Balibar similarly insists that the concept of the multitude lacks internal political criteria that would guarantee its actions a progressive orientation or antisystemic character. It may just as likely contribute to the systems of global exploitation as resist and contest them. Like Virno, Balibar emphasizes the ambivalent standpoint of the multitude, which he explains, for example, in terms of the double meaning of fear of the multitude. Both the fear the multitude feels and the fear it inspires can lead, in his view, in varying political directions. The multitude may be a sound sailing vessel, to lend Balibar a metaphor, but without a rudder there is no way to predict where it will end up.43 Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou take this questioning of the multitude’s political orientation one step further, posing it as not ambivalent but aligned with the forces of domination. Žižek charges that the multitude, even in the guise of anticapitalist struggles, really mimics and supports capitalist power, and he traces the flaw of multitude thinking back to Marx. Marx’s error, he suggests, is to believe that capital creates its own gravediggers, that the developments of capitalist society and production create within capital itself an antagonistic political subject, the proletariat, capable of revolution. Žižek maintains, however, that the apparent antagonisms and alternatives that capital produces internally really end up supporting the system. He focuses, for example, on how capital creates proliferating multiplicities in the realm of the market and consumption, through the infinite variety of its commodities and the desires they elicit. From this perspective, then, the multiplicities of the multitude and its horizontal network structures mirror capital’s own decentered and deterritorializing deployment, and thus, even when thought to be resisting it, the multitude’s actions inevitably repeat and reproduce capitalist rule. Radical transformation and, specifically, revolutionary opposition to capitalist rule, Žižek insists, will never emerge, as the multitude does, from within capital itself.44 Whereas Žižek credits the mistakes of multitude thinking to an error in Marx, Badiou traces them to the work of Foucault and his conception of resistance. Since resistance is constantly engaged with power, Badiou reasons, it never escapes power, and moreover never recognizes the necessity for the event to break with power. Any conception of a creative, antisystemic multitude, he claims, is only a dreamy hallucination (un rêverie hallucinée). “That which goes by the name ‘resistance,’ in this instance, is only a component of the progress of power itself.” The existing movements of the multitude thus amount to little in Badiou’s estimation. “All we’ve seen are very ordinary performances from the well-worn repertoire of petitbourgeois mass movements, noisily laying claim to the right to enjoy without doing anything, while taking special care to avoid any form of discipline. Whereas we know that discipline, in all fields, is the key to truths.”45 Badiou’s critique of the multitude is in effect an extension and generalization of Žižek’s: whereas Žižek, indicating Marx’s error, charges that the multitude in the guise of contesting capital merely mimics and supports its rule, Badiou, referring to Foucault, maintains that the multitude and other projects of resistance are really only components of the progress of power itself.

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The Common Nature of the Multitude

These questions and critiques regarding the political capacities and orientation of the multitude are useful because they help us focus on and clarify the extent to which the concept is adequate to organizational projects of liberation in our biopolitical reality. In order to respond to these questions we have to show how the multitude is not a spontaneous political subject but a project of political organization, thus shifting the discussion from being the multitude to making the multitude. Before addressing them directly, though, we need to explore some of the philosophical and political bases of the concept of multitude, investigating in particular the way the multitude interacts with and transforms nature.

Like “the people,” the multitude is the result of a process of political constitution, although, whereas the people is formed as a unity by a hegemonic power standing above the plural social field, the multitude is formed through articulations on the plane of immanence without hegemony. We can see this difference from another perspective by recognizing that these two processes pose different relations between politics and the state of nature. A long tradition of political theory tells us that the construction of hegemony or sovereignty requires a passage from the anarchy of the state of nature to the political life of the civil state. The constitution of the multitude, however, confounds this division between the state of nature and the civil or political state: it is thoroughly political while never leaving behind the state of nature. This is not as paradoxical as it seems once we see the metamorphosis of nature at work in the constitution of the multitude.

Feminist scholars, appreciating the political obstacle posed by a notion of nature as fixed and immutable, separate from and prior to cultural and social interaction, have demonstrated how nature is constantly constructed and transformed. Judith Butler, for example, challenges the traditional sex-gender distinction by questioning the fixity of nature. The major stream of feminist theory throughout its second wave investigates how gender is malleable and socially constructed, Butler explains, but assumes that sex differences are natural, biological, and hence immutable. She argues instead that, in addition to gender, sex too is socially constructed, that sex and sexual differences are, following Foucault, discursive formations. This is not to deny that sex is directly linked to biology and bodies, but rather to suggest that what we know and think about sex, our mode of apprehension of it, is inextricably embedded in determinate social discourses.46 Other feminist scholars pursue this argument in scientific and biological terms to demonstrate that nature modulates according to social constructs and practices. Anne Fausto-Sterling, for instance, explores how nature and bodies are constantly transformed through social interactions and, specifically, how what we understand as sex and sexual difference are entirely embedded in social and cultural practices and consciousness. Even human bone structure, she argues, which we think of as one of the elements of the body most fixed in nature, requires specific triggers for development and modifies differently depending on complex relations to bodily practices during growth, many of which are defined by specific gender practices. Culture shapes bones.47 This does not mean that there is no such thing as nature, but rather nature is constantly transformed by social and cultural interactions. The claim that nature is subject to mutation is closely related to the philosophical proposition of a constituent ontology—the notion, that is, that being is subject to a pro cess of becoming dictated by social action and practices. God or being or nature, in Spinoza’s vocabulary, is not separate from and prior to the interaction of modes in the world but rather entirely constituted by them.48

These investigations of the plasticity and mutability of nature really refer to the common—and indeed nature is just another word for the common. But it is important to keep in mind the distinction between the two notions of the common we cited earlier. Whereas the traditional notion poses the common as a natural world outside of society, the biopolitical conception of the common permeates equally all spheres of life, referring not only to the earth, the air, the elements, or even plant and animal life but also to the constitutive elements of human society, such as common languages, habits, gestures, affects, codes, and so forth. And whereas according to the traditional notion, for thinkers like Locke and Rousseau, the formation of society and the progress of history inevitably destroy the common, fencing it off as private property, the biopolitical conception emphasizes not only preserving the common but also struggling over the conditions of producing it, as well as selecting among its qualities, promoting its beneficial forms, and fleeing its detrimental, corrupt forms. We might call this an ecology of the common—an ecology focused equally on nature and society, on humans and the nonhuman world in a dynamic of interdependence, care, and mutual transformation. Now we are better positioned to understand how the becoming political of the multitude does not require leaving behind the state of nature, as the tradition of sovereignty insists, but rather calls for a metamorphosis of the common that operates simultaneously on nature, culture, and society.

The metamorphosis of the common leads us directly to the problem of the production of subjectivity. It is useful to remember how heated the so-called postmodernism debates became in the 1980s and 1990s around this question. On one side were postmodernists who focused generally on the production of consciousness. In some respects their position repeated the classic Frankfurt School thesis that alienated consciousness is produced in capitalist society, its culture industries, its mandate to consumption, and its commodity culture, but replaced the gloom of the Frankfurt School with a more cheerful disposition. The claim that subjectivity is produced in the circuits of commodified capitalist culture seemed to some to herald a weak notion of freedom based on play and contingency. On the other side were modernist defenders of the subject in the name of not only reason, reality, and truth but also the possibilities of a politics of liberation. A stable subject residing outside the functioning of power was thought to be necessary as a ground for politics in class politics, race politics, feminism, and other identity domains. These two sides, which we have painted in admittedly reductive terms, monopolized the most visible debates, but a third approach, much closer to our own, was developed in the same period by Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. These authors focus on the social mechanisms of the production of subjectivity in institutional architectures, psychoanalytic discourse, state apparatuses, and so forth, but they do not greet the recognition that subjectivity is produced through apparatuses of power with either celebration or despair. They regard the production of subjectivity rather as the primary terrain on which political struggle takes place. We need to intervene in the circuits of the production of subjectivity, flee from the apparatuses of control, and construct the bases for an autonomous production.49

The politics of the production of subjectivity helps us understand better the economic process of the metamorphoses of the common, which we analyzed earlier. The biopolitical production of ideas, codes, images, affects, and social relationships directly treats the constituent elements of human subjectivity: this terrain is precisely where subjectivity is born and resides. One might still conceive of economic production as an engagement of the subject with nature, a transformation of the object through labor, but increasingly the “nature” that biopolitical labor transforms is subjectivity itself. This relation between economic production and subjectivity thus cuts out the ground from under traditional notions of the labor process and creates a potentially vertiginous loop. We can cut through some of these seeming paradoxes, though, by approaching the production process in terms of metamorphoses of the common. And it should be obvious that this kind of economic process, central to biopolitical production, is also an ontological process through which nature and subjectivity are transformed and constituted.

Multitude should be understood, then, as not a being but a making—or rather a being that is not fixed or static but constantly transformed, enriched, constituted by a process of making. This is a peculiar kind of making, though, insofar as there is no maker that stands behind the process. Through the production of subjectivity, the multitude is itself author of its perpetual becoming other, an uninterrupted process of collective self-transformation.

From Being to Making the Multitude

Once we shift our perspective from being the multitude to making the multitude, and once we recognize the multitude as a constant process of metamorphosis grounded in the common, we are in a better position to respond to the questions and critiques of the concept we outlined earlier. The first set of questions deems the multitude incapable of politics because it is not unified by hegemony. At issue here is whether only hegemonic, unified subjects or also horizontally organized multiplicities are capable of political action. We can answer these questions by referring to our earlier economic investigations. Biopolitical production takes place and can only take place on the terrain of the common. Ideas, images, and codes are produced not by a lone genius or even by a master with supporting apprentices but by a wide network of cooperating producers. Labor tends to be increasingly autonomous from capitalist command, and thus capital’s mechanisms of expropriation and control become fetters that obstruct productivity. Biopolitical production is an orchestra keeping the beat without a conductor, and it would fall silent if anyone were to step onto the podium.

The model of biopolitical economic production serves us here as an analogy for political action: just as a wide social multiplicity produces immaterial products and economic value, so too is such a multitude able to produce political decisions. It is much more than an analogy, though, because the same capacities that are set in play, which are necessary for the one, are also sufficient for the other. The ability of producers autonomously to organize cooperation and produce collectively in a planned way, in other words, has immediate implications for the political realm, providing the tools and habits for collective decision making. In this respect the division between economic production and political action posed by authors such as Hannah Arendt completely breaks down. Arendt’s conception of politics focuses on plurality and freedom, characterizing political action as a realm of singularities that communicate and cooperate in a common world. She distinguishes this from the economic realm of Homo faber, which is separated off in the workplace and driven instrumentally toward making a product. The economic producer, she reasons, is inclined to denounce the action and speech that define politics as idleness and useless chatter. Work is driven narrowly toward a telos, such that “the strength of the production process is entirely absorbed in and exhausted by the end product,” whereas the strength of the political process is never exhausted in a product but rather grows “while its consequences multiply; what endures in the realm of human affairs are these processes, and their endurance is as unlimited, as independent of the perishability of material and the mortality of men as the endurance of humanity itself.”50 Arendt is clearly referring to an economic paradigm of material production, with the factory as her primary model, but once we shift our gaze to biopolitical production, we clearly see that all of the qualities she at attributes to the political apply equally to the economic: the cooperation of a wide plurality of singularities in a common world, the focus on speech and communication, and the interminable continuity of the process both based in the common and resulting in the common. This is one reason for using the term “biopolitical” to name this form of production, because the economic capacities and acts are themselves immediately political. We should note here that Arendt also distinguishes a third fundamental human activity, which she calls labor. The labor she has in mind corresponds to the biological functioning of the body and thus the production of vital necessities. Both the condition and goal of this labor, she explains, is thus life itself. Arendt primarily uses this concept of labor, of course, as a foil to distinguish the political realm, separating it from the world of needs, but here again we can see that her distinctions are progressively breaking down. Politics has probably never really been separable from the realm of needs and life, but increasingly today biopolitical production is aimed constantly at producing forms of life. Hence the utility of the term “biopolitical.” Focusing on the making of the multitude, then, allows us to recognize how its productive activity is also a political act of self-making.