Myth and Mediation: Toward a Multitude of Pure Means

To what extent is democracy the task of the current age? To what extent is democracy already the end toward which we are tending? Against the forces of Empire, but also because of them, we seem bound for democracy, thrown into a biopolitical world of common goods and global communicativity in which being-in-common is actively and creatively (re)produced. The multitude we are, the superabundance of social acts and communications we comprise, seems finally to prefigure the coming democratic age—an age that will rid itself of Empire by revealing itself as Empire’s immanent but disavowed condition of possibility. As such, the multitude will have constituted the resolution (as well as the revolution) of Empire. This transformation, and the means for achieving it, constitutes the innermost principle of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s labor of philosophy. Their work assumes as its task nothing less than bringing this resolution/revolution about.

But to what extent does the resolution/revolution of multitude hinge on a fulcrum of myth? That is to say, to what extent can such a revolutionary change take place without a mediating form, a mode of imagination, that justifies its violence? As Georges Sorel knew well, what presents itself as a problem for revolutionary thought is precisely the mechanism that resolves violence into a form that appears just. “A myth cannot be refuted,” Sorel writes, “since it is, at bottom, identical to the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the historical descriptions” (29). Through myth, the display of force becomes invisible as force from the point of view of the group whose convictions it enacts. Violence, in turn, becomes measurable only in relation to a perceived quotient of necessity, whose mythic nature inscribes it in the law books or the stars.

And yet sometimes, the mythic “language of movement” proves incongruous with “historical descriptions”—that is, with a discourse that can be refuted or validated—while actually taking on aspects of the latter, diminishing the discernibility of myth as such. This is the case, this essay argues, in Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude. The problem, preliminarily, can be stated thus: in emphasizing the immanence of multitude to the “imperial” condition of late capitalism, Hardt and Negri cannot help but mute the supplemental role of imaginative mediation within their own concept. The result is what William Mazzarella calls the philosophers’ “sublime” attempt toward “an image of unmediated becoming” concretized in the multitude (708, 718). Here, the mythic element (the “image” of multitude) turns out to be “unanalysable” in a double sense: first, because like all myths, it expresses certain convictions in the “language of movement”; but second, because the “movement” at stake also seeks to efface the fact of (and need for) its expression. Insofar, then, as multitudes are supposed to “obey only their own emergent law,” in Mazzarella’s words, and thus “refuse mediation through anything outside themselves,” and insofar as they simultaneously resist the reactionary “mediation of vital energies” associated with the retrograde figure of the crowd, the theory of the multitude cannot but aspire toward the abolition of its own mediate function, toward the cancellation of what we might call the event of its enunciation as such (707).

This question of mediation (including its erasure) has played an important, if understated, role in other critiques of the multitude as a philosophical concept. Mazzarella is not alone, for instance, when he points out Hardt and Negri’s vexed stance toward the figures of multitude they propose in the course of their analysis. Jacques Rancière criticizes a silent “ontological demand” (revendication ontologique) in such figures, one that requires that the content of all negation (disruption, chance, conflict) be reducible to the affirmative—and we might add, mediate—principle of the multitudinous (86, trans. modified).¹ In slightly different terms, Slavoj Žižek identifies Hardt and Negri’s mistake in “assum[ing] that the object of desire (unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when deprived...