A presentation of some pieces taken from the editorial board electronic discussion about the concept of multitude. Multitude is a virtual social form; it is the networking of differing subjectivities in search about the common, the equal, the life. The multitude is the living as acting. It is a work method the limits of which are those of the present state of globalisation.

The more that industrial work is directed at consumption, the more it becomes service and communication, the more it mechanically imitates feminine modes of knowledge. Capital becomes, with the aid of the State, the only legitimate predator. Man is bound up a becoming-woman. Women overwork to give this becoming life. They produce an ever more precise individualisation, a sophisticated multitude of immaterial properties.

Guattari has progressively designed a set of tools capable of helping everyone escape from capitalist injunctions, finding support in affects, in participative action, in cultural universals and in the flows freed by the human adventure on the surface of the planet. The subject, distanced from the powerlessness generated by a central ego, develops her reflection and agency in infinitely diverse situations. He drew such tools, first, from institutional psychotherapy and psycho-sociology, later, from a form of semiotics not limited by the (...) collapse of the « loci of speech », which finally led him to invent schizo-analytic mappings and to prepare the ground for « ecosophy ». (shrink)

Read again in light of the current French social conflict around the part-time theater and cinema workers, the book by L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, seems to have been quite prescient when describing work as organized store and more through short-term projects. But the lack of social security in this system is supposed by the authors to conte front the artist-critics who were interested mostly in individual freedom and expressivity, store than from the infrastructural organization (...) of capitalism. Solutions are sought by analogy with the rides that protect salaried workers, particularly the idea of a guaranteed income or social wage. (shrink)

While the « street corner society » is mostly masculine, women seek out common spaces : school gates, around-the-clock/24-hour surgeries/ medical practices/centres, social centres, and nowdays the garden. There is an artistic and political practice, that has been grafted onto this need, for the construction of waiting spaces where it is possible to breath together. In the major European cities « vacuoles » are being created on the initiative of artist-activists, places where the inhabitants of a deprived neighbourhood can pool (...) their ideas and set down their dreams, making themselves available for the event. The collective construction of multiple languages, that of local migrations, is framed by a work of analysis and common effort, by the slow building up of a « plan of consistency », translocal and transnational. (shrink)