What in the hell …

“[A] life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life is thinkable only starting from (…) the irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty.”

“I call thought the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life. I do not mean by this individual exercise of an organ or of a psychic faculty, but rather an experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and of human intelligence. (…) The experience of thought that is here in question is always experience of a common power. Community and power identify with each other without residues because the inherence of a communitarian principle to any power is a function of the necessarily potential character of any community.”

In light of the above, Agamben cites “Dante’s affirmation – in De Monarchia – of the inherence of a multitude to the very power of thought”, which asserts that the basic human “capacity is to have potentiality or power for being intellectual. And since this power cannot be completely actualize in single man or in an particularly community (…) there must be a multitude in mankind through whom this whole power can be actualized.”

Agamben continues, saying that the term ‘general intellect’ has its full “meaning only within the perspective of this experience,” and as such it is a name for “the multitudo that inheres to the power of thought as such.” Agamben, Means without end, p8-11.

This entry is just as much about Agamben’s use of multitude. Agamben places the terms in time, in the sense of being enacted or existing in its enacting – “an experience” – and so always existing in a relationship between times T(x) and T(y), but not fixed at any specific starting point in history. It’s a meta- or trans-historical phenomenon, and a potentiality which inheres in humanity as such. It may well have specificity historically, ie exist in unique modalities at each temporal point where it exists, (it must, though Agamben does not address this), but this is not a causal matter: general intellect and multitude for Agamben do not come into being or instantiate as a result of a periodization or change in modes production in the old fashioned Marxist sense, or the Negrian sense.

It might be possible to derive a periodization from/implicit in this schema of Agamben’s, based perhaps on modalities of instantiated multitude/enacted general intellect but it would be a different one from Negri’s. In it the contemporary multitude/Postfordist general intellect would be – while important to us, being part of the time we inhabit – one instantation among many (epoch/historical moment as singularity). The relationship among these different moments would likewise differ from the relationships between moments implied in Negri’s periodization.