Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003 10:41:33 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Negri: "The Multitude and the Metropolis"


"The Multitude and the Metropolis"*

by Toni Negri

http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=03/09/27/1429245&mode=nested&tid=9

1. ‘Generalising’ the strike.
It is interesting to note how, on the occasion of the
Spring and Summer 2002 struggles in Italy, the project
of ‘generalising’ the strike of the movement of
precarious and socially diffuse workers, men and
women, seemed to be harmlessly and uselessly subsumed
beneath the workers’ ‘general strike’. After this
experience, many comrades who participated in the
struggle began to realise that whilst the workers’
strike was ‘damaging’ to the employer, the social
strike passed without notice through the folds of the
global working day. It neither damaged the masters nor
helped the mobile and flexible workers. This
realisation raised a series of questions: how do we
understand how the socially diffuse worker fights; how
can he concretely subvert in the space of the
metropolis his subordination to production and the
violence of exploitation? How does the metropolis
present itself to the multitude and is it right to say
that the metropolis is to the multitude what the
factory used to be to the working class? 
In fact this hypothesis presents us with a problem,
one not simply raised by the obvious differences
between social and workers’ struggles in terms of
their immediate efficacy. It also raises a more
pertinent and general question: if the metropolis is
invested by the capitalist relation of valorisation
and exploitation, how can we grasp, inside it, the
antagonism of the metropolitan multitude? In the 60’s
and 70’s, as these problems emerged in relation to
working class struggles and the changes in
metropolitan life, often very effective responses were
given. We will summarise these later. For the time
being, we just want to underline how these responses
were concerned with an external relation between
working class and other metropolitan layers of wage
and/or intellectual labour. The problem today is posed
differently because the various sections of the labour
force appear to exist in the metropolitan hybrid as an
internal relation and immediately as multitude: a
whole of singularities, a multiplicity of groups and
subjectivities, who mould the (antagonistic) shape of
metropolitan 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 70’s and in a delirious manner, with
a new image of the metropolis. We are obviously
referring to Delirious New York. What was the central
thesis of this book?

Koolhaas drew an image of the metropolis that --
because of but in spite of a more or less coherently
developed planning -- lived through dynamics,
conflicts, powerful juxtapositions of cultural layers,
life styles and forms and of a multiplicity of
hypothesis and projects for the future. In order to
understand the city, one had to look at this
complexity and this microphysics of powers from
within. New York in particular was the example of an
extraordinary historical, political, technological and
artistic accumulation of various forms of urban
planning. However, this was not enough, for one also
had to recognise that the metropolis was stronger than
the urban centre. Speculative interests and citizens’
resistances defeated and swept away both the
prescriptions of power and the utopias of the
opposition. The metropolis confused and mixed the
terms of the urban discourse: starting from a certain
urban intensity, the metropolis constituted new
categories, it was a proliferating machine. The
measure went beyond itself. What was needed was to
provide a microphysical analysis of the metropolis --
in this case one of New York -- that could account for
both the thousands of active singularities and the
forms of repression and blockage that the power of the
multitude met. Thus Koolhaas’ architecture grew
amongst great plans of urban co-habitation that were
then taken up, modified and mixed with other
architectural forms…Koolhaas’ architecture tells a
great story, that of the destruction of western cities
and their replacement by the hybrid metropolis. That
for Koolhaas architectural development is classified
in a manner functional to the 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 we
perceive how far the metropolis organises itself on
continuous yet distorted layers, consistent with the
Welfare paradigm yet hybrid. The metropolis is a
common world, everyone's product –- not general will
but common aleatoriness.

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

This critical effort is neither solitary nor neutral.
On the contrary, it produces a different critique; it
entrusts it into the real movement. For instance, when
we introduce differential and antagonistic elements in
the knowledge of the city and we make them the motor
of metropolitan construction, we also compose other
fields of living and fighting –- common ones. Another
example concerns the metropolis and collectivation.
Surely, this old socialist word is now obsolete and
surpassed in the consciousness of new generations. But
this is not a problem. The project is not one of
collectivation but of recognition and organisation of
the common. A common made of a great wealth of life
styles, of collective means of communication and life
reproduction, and above all of the exceeding of common
expression of life in metropolitan spaces. We enjoy a
second generation of metropolitan life, creator of
cooperation and exceeding in immaterial relational
linguistic values: it is a productive generation. Here
is the metropolis of the singular and collective
multitude.

Many postmodernists reject the possibility of
regarding the metropolis of the multitude as a
collective and singular space, massively common and
subjectively malleable and always newly invented.
These rejections turn the analyst into the buffoon or
the sycophant of power. In fact we have recuperated
the ideas of external economies, of immaterial
dynamics, of cycles of struggles and all that makes up
the multitude.

New York is postmodern in so far as it has
participated to all stages of the modern and has, so
to speak, consumed them in critique and in prefiguring
something else: the result is hybrid, the metropolitan
hybrid as a spatial and temporal 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 the metropolis, all metropolises, not only
-- like Koohlaas -- as a hybrid and internally
antagonistic aggregate, but also as a figure
homologous to the general structure of capitalism in
the imperial phase. Metropolis expresses and
individualises the consolidation of global
hierarchies, in its most articulated points, in a
complex of forms and exercise of command. Class
differences and the general planning of the division
of labour are no longer made between nations, but
rather between centre and periphery in the metropolis.
Sassen observes skyscrapers in order to draw
implacable lessons. Who commands is at the top, who
obeys is below; in the isolation of those who are
highest lies the link with the world, whilst in the
communication of those who are lowest one finds mobile
points, life styles and renewed functions of
metropolitan recomposition. Therefore, we must
traverse the possible spaces of the metropolis if we
want to knot together the threads of struggle, to
discover the channels and forms of connection and the
ways in which subjects live together. Sassen suggests
looking at skyscrapers as the structure of imperial
unification. 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. Between the
above and below runs the relation of command, of
exploitation and therefore the possibility of revolt. 

Sassen’s themes strongly resonated in Europe in the
90’s when, with some difficulty and yet effectively,
some antagonistic forces started seeing the structure
of the metropolis as the mirror of the contradictions
of globalisation. In fact, whether there were
skyscrapers or not, the global order re-established an
above and a below in the metropolis, that of a
relation of exploitation that spread across the
internal horizon of urban society. Sassen showed the
places and the relations of exploitation and dissolved
the multitude, bringing it back to the dispersed
exercise of material activities. On the other side
there is command. Blade Runner has become science
fiction. 

4. Historical anticipations.
Others see the metropolises of skyscrapers and of
Empire as places of struggle that can reveal common
aspects and above all embody organisations and
procedures of resistance and subversion. In this
respect, one example immediately comes to mind: the
Parisian struggles of the winter of 1995-96. These
struggles are to be remembered because at the time the
privatisation plans of public transport were rejected
not only by the trade unions but also by the combined
struggles of the metropolitan population. However,
these struggles could never have reached their great
intensity and importance without being traversed and
somehow prefigured by the struggles of sans papiers,
sans logement, sans-travail etc. This is to say that
metropolitan complexity at its highest level opens up
lines of flight to the whole of the urban poor: then
the metropolis, even the imperial one, wakes up to
antagonism. 

These developments and antagonisms were anticipated
during the seventies: in Germany, the United States
and Italy. The great shift of the frontline from the
factory to the metropolis, from class to multitude,
was theoretically and practically experienced and
organised by many vanguards. ‘Reclaim the city’ was a
persistent, important and overwhelming watchword in
Italy. Similar words went through the German
Bürger-initiativen and the squatters’ experiences in
most European metropolises. Factory workers recognised
themselves in this development, whilst the order of
the unions and that of the parties of the working
class movement ignored it. The refusal to pay
transport fares, the massive occupations of houses,
the seizing of districts for the organisation of free
time and for the security of workers against the
police and fiscal agents were projects carried out
with great care. These zones were then called ‘red
bases’ but were in fact more city spaces for public
opinion rather than places as such. Sometimes they
were decisively non-places - they were mass
demonstrations in motion that went through and
occupied squares and territories. Thus the metropolis
began to be rebuilt by a strange alliance: factory
workers and metropolitan proletarians. Here we started
to see how powerful this alliance could be. 

At the basis of these political experiences there was
another greater theoretical experimentation. At the
beginning of the 70’s we started observing a
metropolis invaded by skyscrapers with globalisation,
but also built by the transformations of labour
practices in the course of their realisation. Alberto
Magnaghi and his comrades published a formidable
journal (Quaderni del Territorio) that showed, more
convincingly in each issue, how capital was investing
the city and transforming each street into a
productive flux of commodities. The factory was then
extended onto society: this much was evident. But it
also became clear that this productive investment of
the city radically modified class struggle.

5. Police and war.

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

The erection of walls to delimit zones the poor cannot
access, the definition of spaces of ghettos where the
desperate of the earth can accumulate, the
disciplining of the lines of transit and control that
keep the order, the preventive analysis and practice
of containment and persecution of possible
interruptions of the cycle: today, in the literature
on empire, when the continuity between war and global
police is mentioned we often neglect to say that the
continuous and homogeneous techniques of war and
police were invented in the metropolis.

‘Zero tolerance’ has become the watchword, or rather,
the dispositif of prevention that invests entire
social strata whilst persevering against the
refractory and excluded individuals. Skin colour and
race, or religious clothing, customs or class
differences are, in turns, assumed as the defining
elements of the repressive zoning within the
metropolis.

The metropolis is built on these dispositifs. As we
said regarding Sassen’s work, the spatial dimensions,
the width and height of buildings and public spaces
are completely subordinated to the logic of control.
This occurs wherever it is possible. In the spaces
where the housing capital determines too high a profit
to be turned into instruments of direct control
through the application of heavy urban processes the
metropolitan landscape is covered in electronic
control networks and traversed by representations of
danger that televisions and helicopters design. Soon
on each city we will see gathered those instruments of
automatic control, autopilot planes and police clones
that the army currently use as norm in wars. Soon the
enclosures and red zones will be established according
to logic of control planes: 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 and only represent one
part of metropolitan development. As in the theory of
war here the enormous capacity for developing violence
on the part of power, the so called total asymmetry,
generates adequate responses: the ghost of David
against the reality of Goliath. Similarly the ‘zero
tolerance’planning of control on the city produces new
forms of resistance. The metropolitan network is
continuously interrupted and sometimes subverted 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 control itself must
recognise, or even build, transindividual schemes of
citizenship. All of urban sociology, from the Chicago
School to our days, acknowledges that within a
framework of extreme individualism, the concepts and
schemes of interpretation must assume transindividual
dimensions, almost those of community. Analysis must
be applied to the development of these forms of life.
This is how determinate localisations of the movements
of the multitude and definite spaces in the metropolis
will be discovered. Spatial and temporal
determinations of the habitat and income (consumption)
are used to design the contours of districts and to
determine the behaviours of populations. War as the
legitimation of order and the police as the instrument
of order: these powers that are assumed as the
constituent function of the metropolis and take the
place of citizens and movements cannot get through.
Again, the analysis of the metropolis refers back to
the perception of the excess of value produced by the
cooperation of immaterial 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 in Seville, during the night, from
midnight onwards, groups formed in all districts to
block all roads, all boites de nuit and to communicate
to the city the urgency of struggle.

This lasted for a whole day alongside a general
mobilisation on the metropolitan territory
concentrated in the afternoon in mass demonstrations.
Here is a good example of management of a general
strike: a metropolitan strike where throughout the 24
hours of the working day, different sections of social
labour meet. However, this formidable political
movement seems insufficient to characterise a
‘generalised strike’. We need to go deeper and analyse
specifically each passage and/or movement of
recomposition, each moment of struggle that can flow
into the construction of a social strike. Why are we
saying this? Because we regard the metropolitan strike
as the specific form of recomposition of the multitude
in the metropolis. The metropolitan strike is not a
socialisation of the working class strike: it is a new
form of counter power. We still do not know how it
operates in time and space. What we know is that a
functionalist sociology, one of those that puts
together various sections of social recomposition of
labour under capitalist control, will not design a
metropolitan strike. The encounter, the clash and the
intertwining and moving forward of the different
strata of the metropolitan multitude cannot be seen
other than as constructions (through struggle) of
movements of power. How does this movement become
capable of spreading power? For us the answer does not
allude to the Winter Palace. Metropolitan revolts do
not pose the question of substituting a mayor: they
express new forms of democracy 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 of rebuilding the metropolis. This
entails finding the common and building metropolitan
proximities. We have two figures that are absolutely
indicative of this project, they lie at the extreme
margins of a scale of community: the fire 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;
the immigrant is the man needed to give colour to the
metropolis as well as meaning to solidarity. The fire
fighter is the danger, the immigrant is the hope. The
fire fighter is insecurity; the immigrant is what is
to come. When we think of the metropolis we conceive
of it as the physical community that is wealth and
production of cultural community. Nothing better than
the metropolis indicates the design of a sustainable
development, a synthesis of 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 only reproduce if we
introduce in it social safety valves that can be used
to turn (and eventually to repair) the dramatic
effects of capitalist development into money.
Politicians and corrupt unions are negotiating these
safety valves… We think that the metropolis is an
exceptional and excessive resource even when the city
is made up of favelas, barracks and chaos. Neither
schemes of order, prefigured by an omnipotent power
(from the earth to the sky through war and police),
nor neutralising structures (repressions, cushions
etc.) can be imposed on the metropolis and inside its
social tissue. The metropolis is free. The freedom of
the metropolis stems from the building and rebuilding
that it carries out on itself day by day; the ‘general
strike’ is inserted in this framework. It is the
prolonging or rather the manifestation or revelation
of what is alive in the depth of the city. Probably in
Seville the ‘general strike’ was also the discovery of
that other society that lives in the metropolis during
the whole of the working day.

We do not know whether things really went that way:
however, what we want to underline is that the
‘general strike’ is a kind of radical excavation in
the life of the metropolis: its productive structure
and its common.
*Published in the journal Posse and then circulated on
multitudes-infos-AT-samizdat.net on 20/11/02. Translated
by Arianna Bove for http://www.generation-online.org 

===="The world is the natural setting of and field for all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not 'inhabit' only 'the inner man' or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world and only in the world does he know himself."

— Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945

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