Multitudes

Mara Ins Garca Canal1

In May 1990, a succinct text by Gilles Deleuze was published in L'autre journalcalled Postscriptum sur les socits de contrl

(Deleuze,1990),

where he quickly, and maybe

schematically, shows the passage, in contemporary societies, from discipline to control as

the hegemonic mechanism of power.
Making an echo of Foucault's theses (who located the height of disciplinary societies in
Western modernity during the 19th century and the early 20 th century, as being
characterized by the political use of spaces, the production of confinement areas destined
to training, and the modeling of bodies with the object of turning them into productive and
subdued bodies); it makes evident the shift unto another type of societies after World War
II, which he calls control societies. This transit was caused by the crisis that, ever since, all
confinement institutions have been going through, from prison to the family; the explosion
and invasion in all the fields of an information technology in constant and uninterrupted
growth; and the appearance of new types of subjectivities, no longer subdued to their
corporal modeling by disciplines, but to the modulation characteristic of control: of shortterm and rapid rotation, a modulation that constantly changes from one instant to the other,
a situation of permanent informal education that more and more replaces the school, as in
this type of societies nothing is ever finished or completed. While the man of disciplines
was a discontinuous producer of energy Deleuze would say, the man of control is mainly
undulatory, set in orbit over continuous networks. (Deleuze,1990:244)
Control does not require confinement nor institutions and, therefore, it produces another
type of disciplining and surveillance on the subjects, not on the style of institutions. Control
exerted by the new technologies that focus in one of the aspects that the disciplinary
society was able to develop, as it was able to center its attention not only on the
individualized bodies of the subjects, but on entire populations, an action directed to the
management of large groups that Foucault would call bio-politics. It would seem, then, that
control societies are nothing else than the new form that bio-power takes, centered on life
and its management, in such current societies that leave to their own devices, without
any guarantees or insurances, ever growing populations that travel the world in search,
unsuccessfully, of a place to anchor.
This type of society imposes a different logic from the dominant order, its language is
numerical, what is essential is not the name or the signature, but the number, the
1 Research Professor. Universidad Autnoma Metropolitana - Xochimilco, Mexico

individuals become a digit and the individuals, without a name or face, take the form of
statistic samples, of markets or financial capitals.
Before these recurrent changes in vertiginous acceleration, it becomes harder and harder
to talk about the masses as an undifferentiated set that possesses a collective soul
(Freud,1921:38),

one can only make reference to multitudes in continuous dissemination,

disaggregation, fragmentation and recomposition... Power is exerted now through

machineries that directly organize brains (in communication systems, information
networks, etc.) and the bodies (in the social assistance systems, the controlled activities,
etc.)... (Hardt y Negri,2002:38)
The multitude is the new social subject that starts to be configured from the emergence of
control societies, becoming a key element for the analysis of the ways of life and the
everyday. Th term is taken back from the 17 th century as a socio-political category in the
dawn of modernity, and which was defeated and subsumed by the category of people,
which became convenient and harmonized with the formation of national states, as the
term people walks towards an idea of unity, centralization, the making up of unitary will,
the constitution of a state and a representative democracy.
The multitude appears as the opposite parallel to the people and it is expressed outside of
the circuits fixed by the state in any of its variants; it does not converge into a stable unit,
single will, becoming, therefore, the form of political and social existence of the many
insofar as many, settled in some elements that are constituted in that which is the
common that agglutinates them, especially the upholding of certain civil liberties, at times
ones, at times others, certain political demands of recognition of their existence; they
definitely claim existence as a right.

(Virno, 2003; Lazzaratto,2006; Hardt & Negri,2004)

The multitude is presented for Virno as a limit category, since it denies representative
democracy, it plays in the gaps of the public and the private, the collective and the
individual. For certain, now traditional, theoretical and political currents, it is deprived of a
voice and social presence, it is impotent and disorganized; it is not formed by workers or
citizens, it discards the ways to achieve single will; in it, differences persist and are
expressed insistently. It becomes, then, the shadow of an imminent danger and
consequently, control becomes more difficult, being only possible, and not always, through
the circuits of information and communication.
The multitude is object of constant perturbation for the dominant order, it does not walk
through known channels: its routes have no precedent, its manifestations are surprising,
its agreements are ephemeral, circumstantial, they are not sheltered by the stabilized
political or aesthetic rituals; its expressions are surprising and unusual; a common

element that acts as a mortar to that profuse and undetermined set of individualities, which
find in it the object of its task, of its common making.
This profusion of individualities that form the multitude, agglutinated in a common making
without a civic project and without adopting the path of institutionalization as a political
objective, is constituted by subjects that have lost their sense of belonging to a certain
community, they are characterized for their liminal condition, always placed in the gaps,
always in continuous movement, pertaining very diverse orders without pertaining any that
gives them a place of identity; always in movement: geographical, labor, affective,
movement of fields and also times: The many insofar as many born in the voyage, in the
journey they produce a story made up of jumps, somersaults and startles: they compose
part of a past that is ripped off its own time, they are constituted in a present of
instantaneity that does not link them to the past, as if their story started again and over
again... a perturbing present in which is inscribed the common that agglutinates them as
a petition and demand of desire and hope for shelter that ensures existence... Creative
invention, therefore, of a present that ensures their presence, and an erratic future to build
day by day. It would seem that time had got stuck, broken and torn in its passing: the
multiple pasts have to be forgotten to constitute a possible present and an uncertain
future; they can not be sewed together, knitted into a continuum, rather, the passing of
time is ruptured and torn, it does no more than ripping itself off. The time of the multitude is
then marked by discontinuity, the fracture, the tearing apart of the roots, a being always
away from home: peasants and indigenous people displaced from their original
communities, expelled from here and there, political and economical refugees, extremely
impoverished populations exposed to deadly risks in their continuous movements, a
multiplication of those risks by means of hunger, thirst, exposure to the violence of nature,
diseases and accidents... A new cartography of the world is being established, now that
the flows are growing more and more, incessant circulation of bodies that make use, not
without leaving their tracks, of the urban spaces and express, with humor and irony, the
discontent that consumes them and that, at the same time, is constituted in the common
element that gathers them together and neighbors them, which makes them one for an
instant, without getting lost or sank in totality, which confers them their common task.
Some reflections in order to approach this new social subject, mobile and changing,
elusive, which resists being thought from the old and well-worn traditional categories.
One should not lose sight of the forms that labor takes nowadays in control societies, now
that goods-producing labor has ceased to be hegemonic, giving its place to a type of
producing labor, no more of tangible goods in strict meaning but of information, knowledge

and affections, which demand from the subjects, in their very diverse workplaces, the
command (a certain expertise) of multiple and diversified signs and languages.
The labor that this new category of workers does is, in itself, a performance, as it produces
its own making, it is consumed completely in its own execution, demanding that the
subjects know how to accumulate knowledge and information and that they know, above
all, how to change.
For Hardt and Negri, this results in the rising of hybrid subjectivities, capable of
accumulating many functions in themselves, without being inserted into any institution they
can identify with and, from this, the institution grants them an identity.
Besides, Virno considers that the goods-producing worker is replaced by a performer, who
he calls virtuous, as an artist that does an activity that does not derive in an actual object,
rather it takes the form of a performance, always at the presence of an audience who
plays the part of the witness of its own making and gives testimony of it. We are all
virtuous, performing artists, mediocre or clumsy... Virno says, in that the duty of the
subjects, their own labor, consists in talking... a more talkative society day by day, which
closes and combats silence, which transforms talking not only into a making, but into work
and labor.
This way, contemporary production becomes virtuous, virtuosity characterizes it; it
produces information, knowledge, communication and affections in an excessive and
unstoppable way, all of which are found at the very grounds of the cultural industry and the
society of the spectacle

(Debord,1996).

In this type of societies that characterize our present

time, linguistic competence finds it place, knowledges, the production of information, of

relations, affections and imagination; without losing sight of the fact that the society of the
spectacle needs the cooperation, the making of the many for its execution.
The multitude is composed of a cumulus of virtuous performers, which have the
chameleonic force of modifying and modifying themselves constantly, of taking charge of
the multiple and always interchangeable possibilities and that they are in a constant state
of availability, they go from one performance to the next, they abandon one and run for the
next; they perform, as well, many performances at the same time. This malleability and
availability is turned into a value and the ability to survive.
Even though the multitude are many, they do not go after the conformation of a single will,
of a sovereign will, but rather, after the many, there swarm around individualities and
singularities that are expressed and sustained, not in a field where differences are
appeased, but, on the contrary, in a space crossed by them in which they emerge
endlessly seeking forms of expression: a continuous exercise of the difference after a

common task is produced.

It would seem that the multitude, as a social phenomenon, exacerbates the production of
differences, it is the fertile field for their bursting, as if this type of groupings assured the
emergence of individualities, gave incentive to the often unsolvable confrontations among
them and denied and prevented every agreement, except for the most general ones, the
most basic ones, those indisputable ones turned into a common agglutination element.
At the same time, it is not maintained by illusions or utopias: the everyday, the day by day
is immerse in a game of changing rules, lacking in stability that can not achieve legitimacy
or institutionalization; hence the fact that life is transformed into a simple bet: the content
of the game is not what is important, but the pleasure of playing is what is expressed in a
momentary, and also ephemeral, adherence. Behind its making an ethos shines that is not
part of transcendental and universal values, but rather it is ruled by the affections that the
many insofar as many are capable of mobilizing. Hence their precariousness and
variability, the uncertainty of their expectations, the fragile identities, the changing values,
the lack of habit formation, the breakage of hierarchies...
This new social subject takes the city as a scenario for its profuse and unexpected, and
even unusual, demonstrations. It is turned into an incessant productive machinery, it is
talkative opposed to the silent majorities, it changes the sense of the official discourses, it
produces its acid criticism by adding humor and unleashing irony. It plays with idiomatic
turns, it forces and bends languages, it re-works images, it caricatures incessantly: it
writes and inscribes its presence, it leaves its mark, it places its stamp.
Their ways of doing are always exposed to the gaze, as they are performers and, at the
same time, spectators of themselves, they produce in cooperation different scrips or
scores, which they repeat and re-update day by day, always the same and also others.
Unstoppable performances that are piled up and superimposed and that escape the copy
and the mimetic repetition, as they do not have an original and unique script or score, but
rather, the script and score are always in progress, in permanent production: the same
ever and ever being part of the difference, in the re-updating and in this way given unto the
experience...
They do not have an author, they are the result of cooperation, the making of many, the
aggregation of fragments, the superimposition of fragments over fragments, of the
constant recreation... spectacle maintained by the affections set into play and into the
pursual to unleash the affections: fear, tremor, laughter, happiness, enthusiasm.
The affections in their most diverse expressive forms are conformed in the new aesthetic
forms elaborated by the multitude, transformed into a witness and live document of an

unavoidable presence. Forms to be exhibited, to be given into experience, in order to

make them habitable and to live in them.
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