AUT: Hardt Interview: Two Definitions of Multitude

[Thomas Seay <entheogens@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hope the below piece from the Minnesota Review
Interview with Hardt brings some clarity to this issue
about the Multitudes.

http://www.theminnesotareview.org/ns61/hardt.htm



One thing I've recognized is that Toni and I use the
term multitude in
essentially two ways. They're in contradiction with
one another. I like
contradictions, personally, so that's not a problem.
In one sense, and
in
Empire it was used more this way, the multitude is an
always-existing
social
force that insists on its own freedom, refuses
authority, breaks its
chains.
On the other hand, and this is our inclination in the
new book,
multitude is
a political project. Multitude hasn't yet existed.
Multitude could
exist as
a form of organizing, something that could be created
today. There's
one
notion of multitude that's always-already, and there's
another that's
not-yet.

Smith: Is it always-not-yet?

Hardt: No, I think it's today not-yet. It would be
clever that way. I
can
imagine such a formulation, but it's important to me
that at least we
act as
if we could do it. Multitude is a possibility that
could be organized,
a
form of organization that can take political forms.




=====
<<Furthermore, we must ask what does the dialectician want?
What does this will which wills the dialectic want?  It is an exhausted
force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it-only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other.  Such a force denies all that
it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle
of its existence.>>  -Gilles Deleuze "Nietzche & Philosophy"

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