The bodies of the multitude, finally, are queer bodies that are insusceptible to the forces of discipline and normalization but sensitive only to their own powers of invention. (Hardt, Negri 2002, 335)
It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality. (Deleuze, Guattari 1983, 112)
The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies. (Marcuse 1974, 19)
In this essay, Hardt and Negri’s theory of the multitude will be supplemented with an analysis of libidinal, psychic, and aesthetic economies of the multitude. Herein lies the most important argument of this essay, namely, that all cognitive economies—political, libidinal, psychic, and aesthetic—are important to consider if the innovativeness of the multitude is to prosper. In effect, this essay is divided into three parts. The first part, ‘Queering the Multitude,’ introduces the political economy of the multitude and explains how it is related to the libidinal economy. Most importantly, the first part of this essay analyses the creative capacities of queer sexuality. The second part, ‘In Search of the Other’ discusses the psychoanalytic approach to sexuality. Here, it will be argued that multitude—like sexuality—is always caught up in psychic fantasies. By looking at the psychoanalytic method, it will be shown how these fantasies affect personal and communal growth within the multitude. In addition, the ways in which psychoanalysis can assist the analysand of the multitude will be discussed. The third part, ‘Separately we are Together,’ will analyze the relevance of autonomous art within the context of the multitude. It will claim that autonomous art deserves attention due to its emphasis on the purposiveness of the work of art. To clarify, the notion of purposiveness—in this instance—is borrowed from the Kantian framework where aesthetic purposiveness is distinguished from cultural purpose. A work of art is purposive insofar as it maintains internal self-sufficiency, that is, purposiveness without purpose (2010, 92). Here, autonomous art will be described as a force that can transform the multitude by facilitating collaborative action. This way, multitude can indeed expedite the creation of an aesthetic community of senses. Again, this essay is an attempt to define the multitude in terms of all levels of socio-political sensation. Only with a rigorous theory of political, libidinal, psychic and aesthetic economies can the queer bodies of the multitude efficiently fight the forces of normalization. It is the goal of this essay to show how exactly these four economies relate to each other. After all, none of these economies ever stand alone.
Queering the Multitude
Hardt and Negri’s attempt to theorize a (neo)Marxist metanarrative for the rapidly globalizing world reached two main objectives (2009, 103). Firstly, they managed to rehash the postmodernist view of agency as a fragmented unit by erecting the term ‘multitude.’ Secondly, they reimagined a pseudo-Marxist dichotomy of political agents; i.e., the bourgeois became the Empire, while the proletariat became the Multitude. It is important to note that these two theoretical feats by Hardt and Negri are codependent. Only if the postmodernist view of agency is repackaged into the quasi-coherency of the multitude can the idea of class antagonism be salvaged. Hardt and Negri admit this themselves for they claim that the multitude—as a theory of economic class—“need not choose between unity and plurality.” In other words, the fractured nature of the postmodern identity does not prevent “singularities from acting in common” (2009, 105). At its face value, multitude should stand for the ultimate symbol of democracy—a genus that is caught up in perpetual emergence and dissolution of political activity. Here, the stress should fall on the contrast between emergence and dissolution in that the democratic space should never sustain an overbearing hegemony for a long time—it should ultimately force the hegemony to undergo dissolution. Similarly, the internal differences of the multitude propel a bio-productive force that is constantly in a state of flux. For Hardt and Negri, the dynamism of the multitude is, therefore, also an immanent opportunity for politics of invention. Biopolitical production is the creative force of social relations attained “through collaborative forms of labor.” The reason why Hardt and Negri discuss bodies and bio-production is simple—they follow Gilles Deleuze’s substitution of Foucauldian “societies of discipline” for “societies of control” (1992, 3). That is to say, Hardt and Negri claim—in accordance with Deleuze—that hegemony is no longer managed solely by way of disciplinary institutions, instead, it is managed by “control that extends throughout the depths of the consciousness and bodies of the population” (Hardt, Negri 2009, 24). Here, the distinction between biopolitical production and biopower should become more apparent. Whereas bio-production is an opportunity for emancipation, biopower is a sovereign order that maintains global control. Empire, as a regime of biopower, does not simply represent the hegemony but—more importantly—it represents the regime of control that extends itself to the more intimate faculties of people’s everyday lives.
For Giorgio Agamben, such biopower is disseminated with the help of dispositifs—or apparatuses—that are outside of the ‘ontology of creatures,’ outside of the naked form of life (2010, 13). These dispositifs are the machines that human beings find useful at a particular moment in time. For example, such objects as the Gutenberg’s press or the steam engine are emblematic dispositifs in that they define a particular moment in history. By the same token, such material dispositifs as the computer, the surveillance camera, the drone, etc., are proving to be more relevant in today’s environment. The queer subject of the multitude may, therefore, emerge only if these dispositifs are fought or, at least, negotiated with. In support of this perspective, Agamben claims that the subject is that which “results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses” (2010, 14). Therefore, the material dispositifs should be put under scrutiny as they can indeed command the inventive powers of the emerging political subject.
It is important to reiterate that biopower—with the help of dispositifs—handles even the most intimate faculties of a person’s life. For this reason, the inventive power of the queer body should be scrutinized by bringing the (neo)Marxist theory of the multitude closer to the psychoanalytic theory of libido. It should be demonstrated, in other words, how does biopower interfere with the intimacy of the libidinal economy. Here, Deleuze and Guattari’s argument proves to be fitting, “libidinal economy is no less objective than political economy, and the political no less subjective than the libidinal” (1983, 345). By the same token, the inventive capacity of the libidinal economy is equivalent to the inventive capacity of the political economy. This means that the political economy of the multitude should be understood as the conclusion to the transformations that occur within the libidinal economy. It is the claim of this paper that the theory of multitude necessitates a rigorous analysis of the libidinal economy. After all, the bodies of the multitude are not only queer politically, they are also queer libidinally.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the Faciality machine as an apparatus of the signifying regime that defines the inequality of the social system (2017, 168). In Deleuze and Guattari’s opinion, the ultimate normalizing face is that of Christ. This is not a coincidence in that Christ represents the birth of the White Man’s archetype, which—for Deleuze and Guattari—commences the semiotics of capitalism. When compared to the face of Christ (White Man), all different faces are perceived as deviations that lack legitimacy. The Faciality machine, therefore, generates a pecking order whereby all races, genders, and classes are graded according to their similarity to the face. Lee Edelman describes something like the Faciality machine in terms of libidinal economy. For him, the ultimate authoritative face is that of the Child (2007, 3). Edelman begins his analysis by looking at the media coverage of Bill Clinton in 1997. The issue here is that Bill Clinton—during his speeches—was often filmed beside his daughter and his wife. These images (dispositifs) consolidated a model of the president as a family man. For this reason, Clinton’s political adversaries grew unhappy because—in their eyes—he was benefiting immensely from his image as the ‘daddy bear,’ the head of the family. Edelman wants to emphasize that the image of the father was not only helpful for Bill Clinton’s political career, it was also an impossible sight to resist for the American public. Edelman refers to this phenomenon as the “self-evident” one-sidedness of the Child’s defense. Due to the fact that Bill Clinton looks like a dad who preserves the American children, the public’s sympathy toward him no longer operates within a partisan discourse—he is no longer merely a party representative. The image of the dad makes Bill Clinton a public servant—not a politician—who unifies the public under one self-evident cause, the Child. At first glance, it may look as though the issue of the Child falls beyond the political realm. After all, Bill Clinton is no longer just a politician, he is—most importantly—a carer of the child. However, the image of the Child—according to Edelman—is nonetheless insidiously political insofar “as the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought” (2007, 2). In other words, the image of the Child defines the entire framework of the political, it dictates what is permitted and what is tabooed. The same image—according to Edelman—makes up the ideology of reproductive futurism, that is, the power apparatus that imposes the ideological limit on political discourse. Most importantly, the ideology of reproductive futurism pushes forward with an insistence on the absolute privilege of heteronormativity and devaluation of queer resistance. The face of the Child—like the face of the Christ—puts queer identities at the bottom of the sexual pecking order. Even the advocates of abortion rights, Edelman argues, engage in the same rhetoric in that they fight for women’s freedom to choose and—by extension—they fight for the future of ‘our daughters and sons.’ Here, it is important to come back to the notion of the multitude. As it was previously stressed, multitude does not need to choose between unity and plurality, that is to say, heterogeneous nature of the multitude affords people the biopolitical power of production. However, from Edelman’s analysis, it becomes clear that even if the multitude is facilitated by the heterogeneity of identities, the libidinal economy is nonetheless very much dictated by the heteronormative dispositifs. In the pursuit to bring political economy and libidinal economy closer together, it becomes extremely important to define the libidinal inventiveness in view of the face of the Child. After all, the inventive power of the libidinal economy will allow for a reduction in degrees of alienation and resentment—sensations that may daunt the political economy of the multitude.
One way to define inventiveness in view of the Child is by following Nietzsche, who claims that whoever affirms life must thereby also affirm death (1968, 102). For Edelman, this means that queer people should embrace the Lacanian negativity, specifically, they should reject the stable future of the Child and welcome the very lack of the future. That is not to say that queer negativity should imply nihilism, to the contrary, it should imply an opening for expression of libidinal inventive forces. This, again, can be tied to Nietzsche and his idea of the will-to-power—the exercise of life-force that privileges variation and creation. No single future can facilitate such libidinal inventiveness or will-to-power in that identities are bound to be fabricated in pre-established ways. The face of the Child is a perfect example of this due to the fact that the heteronormative imperative perpetually facilitates compulsive repetition of the invariable sexual norm. Again, according to Edelman, the compulsive repetition of reproductive futurism can only be fought by forming an anti-relational queer resistance. Such a position would deconstruct the symbolic restrictions implied by the single and inescapable future of the Child. The dissolving significance of the single future should supply queer people with the multiplicity of lines of flight. For Edelman, this means that queer jouissance may, in fact, become viable. That is to say, through the disintegration of stable cultural dispositifs queer people can find satisfaction that goes beyond the pre-packaged pleasure principle of the Child. All of this can be tied to the idea of the death drive—or Thanatos—which lies within the eternal circle of the reproductive futurism, or the need to come back to the fixed state (Freud 2015, 50). In ‘Anti-Oedipus,’ Deleuze and Guattari critique this Freudian idea of death drive by claiming that it brings desire to a halt, suspends the connections it has made and, more importantly for the purposes of this paper—it blocks innovativeness (1983, 8). For Deleuze and Guattari then, pleasure is meant to be freed from mechanical repetition by disavowing the pre-established identity, in this case, the face of the Child. In this way, jouissance can be arrived at through variation and improvisation. It should be clarified, when Nietzsche claims that an affirmation of death is required, he does not direct reader’s attention to the wreckage of life, instead, he tries to emphasize that only in the face of death can people truly will to live (1967, 532). Therefore, the interpretation of Edelman as an advocate of queer negativity presents the reader with only half of the story. It is, in fact, the case that unfettered queer innovativeness is possible only when reproductive futurism is properly disavowed. Queer positivity—and its insistence on plurivocal sexual expression—hinges on socio-political negativity. Edelman explains this by claiming that queer “must insist on disturbing, on queering, social organizations as such—on disturbing, therefore, our investment in such an organization. For queerness can never define an identity; it can only disturb one” (2007, 17). In other words, the very construction of queer sexuality hinges on its escape from the reproductive futurism. When compared to the analysis of the political economy of the multitude, queer dismissal of the face of the Child should seem quite obvious. After all, Hardt and Negri argue against, quite similarly, the representation of the people. They claim, “The people is not a natural or empirical entity, one cannot arrive at the identity of the people by summing up or even averaging the entire population” (2002, 82). The same truth, indeed, stands for the liberation of the libidinal economy, that is, only by dismissing the one-sidedness of reproductive futurism can people truly invent. This way, queer singularities could finally innovate in common.
In Search of the Other
So far, the notion of the multitude was analyzed through the perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy. Even though this approach succeeded in bringing these two mediums closer together, it nonetheless failed to account for the face of the Other, in Levinas’ sense of the word, within the multitude (1979, 39). In other words, it failed to approximate the personal encounter and the everyday ethics of the multitude. For this reason, it stands crucial to introduce the third medium of this analysis, namely, the psychic economy. This way, the unconscious of the multitude will be manifested and critiqued. More importantly, the medium of the psychic economy will also allow for treatment of queer bodies of the multitude as analysands. It should be noted, however, that the use of the term ‘analysand’ should not imply an attempt to stigmatize the entire population of the multitude. This term is meant—in very modest Freudian terms—to signify that the minds of the multitude are not transparent, instead, they’re woven out of repressed impulses and complex defenses. For the sake of theoretical clarity, therefore, the duality of analyst and analysand will be utilized. After all, multitude can only perform innovatively if the population is made up of active narrators and active translators—analysands and analysts.
Every past experience leaves an indentation in a person’s psyche. Therefore, the arrival at the politics of the multitude cannot happen instantly. The queer bodies of the multitude need to grapple with their own psychic repressions if they are to overcome them. It was hitherto expressed that queer sexuality—in very abstract terms—should withdraw from the heteronormative imperative of reproductive futurism. It was not, however, shown how this withdrawal should function in particular terms, that is, how it should function with respect to analysand’s psychic predisposition. Consequently, it seems fitting to begin this discussion with a famous Lacanian thought, namely, “there is no such thing as a sexual relation” (1991, 134). The absence of sexual relation, for Lacan, means that there is no stable basis for harmonious oneness between a woman and a man. The relation between sexes lacks oneness because bodies, to the extent that they are understood as coordinated units, are always caught up in the Imaginary register. For Lacan, the Imaginary register is born out of a person’s proclivity to perceive her body as a coordinated whole. In his famous article ‘The Mirror Stage,’ Lacan describes a powerful psychic transformation in a toddler’s mind (1996, 75). The child between ages of six and eighteen months perceives herself in the mirror and—for the first time in her life—sees a coordinated body. This is an image that follows the child throughout her life, it is supplied to the subject as an illusion of subjective wholeness. Lacan claims that people’s ego—or sense of self—is precisely based on the said illusion of control. The premise of this illusion constitutes the concept of the Imaginary register. Consequently, sexual relation should be understood as a relation between fragmented bodies rather than singular, coordinated bodies. Lacan claims that one can only “enjoy a part of the Other’s body, for the simple reason that one has never seen a body completely wrap itself around the Other’s body, to the point of surrounding and phagocytizing it” (Lacan 1999, 23). In other words, sexual relation emerges at the point of lack of full representation of the body. Alenka Zupancic claims that the lacking representation of the body is precisely where the norm ((hetero)normative prescription of sexuality) is inscribed (2017, 18). The image of the impossible unity of the body, in fact, helps to sustain this very norm. It is, therefore, the case that sexuality is always caught up in fantasy, which—in Lacanian terms—has to fight the lack of relation. This is also an ontological statement in that the lack of relation is part of the Real register or the noumenal reality. That is to say, the register of the Real is not contingent—according to Lacan—on sense perception (1996, 76). Zupancic, here, ties the lack of sexual relation to the Real register: “The lack of sexual relation is real in the sense that, as lack or negativity, it is built into what is there, determining its logic and structure in an important way” (2017, 18). In other words, sexual relation hinges upon an impossibility of structural fullness. This impossibility has to be accounted for insofar as the psychic economy of the multitude can become healing and innovative. It should be noted, in agreement with the classical Freudian assessment, that culture is indeed sexually motivated. Or, as Zupancic perceives it, culture is driven by that which sexuality lacks; i.e., the harmonious oneness between the bodies.
Finally, when engaging in ‘talking cure,’ the analysand and the analyst should embrace the lack of sexual relation by approaching it as an opportunity to invent absolutely new libidinal ties. For Lacan, this can happen by allowing the analysand to challenge his/her ego or self-consciousness by focusing on the more disarticulated parts of the self (1996, 446), In addition, the voice of the analysand is to be understood as the vehicle of the cultural-linguistic signification. Language, Lacan claims, is the “dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man and through man it speaks” (1991, 58). However, the analysand should not be deemed powerless with respect to the cultural discourse. The analyst’s goal should be to reinterpret the inconsistencies of the ego as an opportunity to open up to the overwhelming excess of psychic, libidinal and political alternatives. This would, in turn, constitute the psychotherapy of the queer multitude.
Culture—as it was shown previously—is there to fill the gap in the reality of sexual relation with romantic window-dressing. The cultural images that hide the lack of sexual relation are very insidious in that they ultimately guide political, libidinal, and psychic norms. Most importantly, they determine the nature of psychic repression and the framework of the personal and collective unconscious. In Lacanian terms, the unconscious should be understood as the “discourse of the Other” (1966, 16). Having in mind that Lacan defined the (big) Other as the governing socio-linguistic order, the unconscious should—therefore—be understood as a product cultural imaginary. However, to speak of collective unconscious within the multitude seems odd for the concept of the multitude bears an impossibility of collective generalization. It is, nonetheless, the argument of this essay that—insofar as multitude is a fitting estimation of political reality—collective unconscious should be assessed according to the conditions of the multitude.
The multitude is a concept that rests between the possibility and impossibility of social change. In other words, multitude defines a distinct form of production, bio-production, which cannot be defined in historically determined terms. The multitude lacks a metanarrative which could totalize a political movement and subjectify an agent. This means that the collective unconscious of the multitude is lacking the Jungian archetypal structure—multitude is too varied for a unifying unconscious. That is, however, for the best. The lack of unifying unconscious radically particularizes the instances of political marginality. It creates an opportunity to engage in dynamic cultural analysis wherein no singular cultural narrative can dictate the focus of attention. Every marginal narrative—no matter its vigor—possesses an imponderable capacity for resistance against the Empire. In light of this, Hardt and Negri claim that contemporary political movements already succeeded in depriving themselves of strict unifying metanarratives and hierarchical leadership (2017, 11). These movements—like Occupy and Black Lives Matter—succeeded in communicating the unconscious of the multitude, that is, of singularities within it. From this follows that the queer bodies of the multitude are beginning to grapple with their unconscious by resisting isolation, precarious job conditions, economic stratification, racism, and other forms of violent psychic repression.
Separately we are Together
The previous discussion of political, libidinal and psychic economies tried to bridge the gap between the singularity and the multitude. It undertook to ascertain what exactly forces singularities to act in common. So far, the emphasis fell on the capacity of the multitude to innovate, that is, to engage in bio-production of new social relations as well as new political, libidinal, and psychic constructions. There is, however, another medium that facilitates—even more overtly—creative bio-production, namely, the medium of art. In ‘What is Philosophy,’ Deleuze and Guattari describe art as a medium that forms a community of senses (2015, 166). That is, art creates sensual ‘varieties’ that are not motivated morally or politically. For Deleuze and Guattari, the work of art “is being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself” (2015, 164). Such an understanding of art draws heavily on the Kantian idea of sensus communis, which is based on the communal free play of observer’s cognitive powers (2010, 159). In other words, art takes up a position of the common denominator, which stretches beyond particular subjects and their sensations. The very fabric of an artwork is made of sensations, so much so that art can function in the absence of the man—it can function autonomously. The community of senses that is forged by the autonomous artwork is similar to the political economy of the multitude in that they both function on the premise of the ‘variety’ of senses. That is not to say that autonomous art is somehow politically motivated, rather, this means that the very lack of political motivation in art facilitates the politics of the multitude.
Art—for Deleuze and Guattari—has a capacity to generate absolutely new worlds, new percepts, and new observers. This way, the person who is experiencing art is forced to interpret, that is, to grapple with it. For example, in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the reader is presented with a new world (Ocean), a new percept (Moby Dick) and a new observer (Captain Ahab). In the context of the multitude, the reader of Melville’s book will tackle the fictional world that is autonomous, full of unresolved affects and, ultimately, impersonal. For this reason, the reader will be forced to translate the story, appropriate it, and make it his/her own. This ties well together with the previous discussion of analysand-analyst relationship in that art is also based on the active participation of narrators and translators. There is, nonetheless, an issue of commitment here. If art of the multitude is not politically and morally motivated, does that mean that there’s absolute freedom in the creation of art?
In his essay ‘Commitment,’ Theodor Adorno discussed the ways in which art can potentially bring about socio-political change (1979, 58). For the most part, this essay is a critique of Sartre and his idea of the committed art. Sartre thought that art should confront political power structures by way of commitment to a cause (2008, 67). In other words, the artist should take responsibility for the way his/her art speaks to other people. For Adorno, however, this meant that art will ‘preach to the converted,’ that is, artists will make political art for audiences that already agree with the premise of such art. Here, Adorno is drawing on the Kantian idea of the purposiveness of art or the way in which an artwork is sufficient unto itself – lacks an overt cultural purpose. In other words, autonomous art possesses organizational complexity, which makes it free from culturally conditioned variables. Correspondingly, Adorno is arguing for art that does not carry an overtly political message, that is, it resists short-sighted commentary of socio-political events. Autonomous art—for Adorno—should critique the society from the outside, it should allow people to develop their own opinions and it should foster aesthetic contemplation. This approach to art has the potential to radically augment the politics of the multitude. It should be stressed, however, that the autonomous art is far from committed to the politics of the multitude. That being said, the autonomous artwork is, nonetheless, committed to the myriad of affects, sensations, and interpretations that makes up the multitude. This is, surely, the most important distinguishing fact about autonomous art, namely, it solidifies the aesthetic community of senses wherein multitude can locate its multifarious affects and sensations. If art was to commit to a cause, it would lose the connection with the multitude, it would start to cater to the politics of the class. Even though multitude is a distinct kind of a class, it is—nonetheless—a class that deprived itself of homogeneity of class consciousness. Therefore, the issue of commitment in art should be rephrased. It is not the lack of commitment in art that facilitates political decadence, it is—instead—the lack of commitment to the art that facilitates political decadence. When the aesthetic community is approached—through the autonomous art—as the community of active, diligent interpreters, then the multitude can finally be enabled and mobilized.
It is important to illustrate precisely how art bridges the gap between the singularities and the multitude. To this end, Jacques Rancière describes art as something that begins in solitude; i.e., a person begins to experience art alone (2011, 89). Following this form of solitude, the relationship between the artwork and the person draws a connection with the community. This is facilitated by the fact that the affects, percepts, and sensations of the artwork are impersonal and, therefore, universal. For Rancière, however, the tension between the singularity and the multitude nonetheless persists. He claims that the “artistic ‘proposition’ conflates two regimes of sense—a regime of conjunction and a regime of disjunction” (2011, 93). That is to say, every aesthetic community is ultimately structured by disconnection. The aesthetic community of the multitude, in a like manner, possesses a great variety of interpretative points of view. For this reason, the discrepancies between two or more unique individuals are inevitable as these discrepancies indeed make up the very fabric of the community of dissensus. Here, Rancière quotes Mallarme, who writes: “separately we are together” (2011, 82). This means that the dissensual structure of the aesthetic community encases the struggle of the multitude. Therefore, the discrepancies (autonomies) between the agents of the multitude are to be valued in that they perpetually fuel the transformation of the multitude. The multitude—in this way—is endowed with a multiplicity of autonomies that do not commit to a universal political cause. In retaining the purposiveness (self-sufficiency) of the work of art the agents of the multitude participate in the regime of disjunction. However, the regime of disjunction—as it was shown before— perpetuates the politics of the multitude. The multitude, in this case, could be interpreted as a universalizing cause. The Kantian distinction between aesthetic purpose and purposiveness should, therefore, be reformulated to fit the context of the multitude. In a word, the purpose of aesthetic engagement—the multitude—can be manifested as a by-product of pure purposiveness (self-sufficiency) of the work of art. The autonomies of the multitude, in other words, do not have to agree on the aesthetic purpose in order to transform and solidify a common goal, namely, the politics of the multitude.
The aesthetics of the multitude is the aesthetics of the everyday. Hardt and Negri’s multitude can be explained by the force of bio-production only insofar as multitude is understood in aesthetic terms. That is to say, the specific interactions between singularities that make up the multitude are a priori aesthetic. After all, what is aesthetics if not the process of differing singularities undertaking to act in common? The collaborative nature of unique individuals implies that there’s an ‘equality of knowledge’ amongst the individuals of the multitude. This means that the heterogeneous web of workers produces immaterial and material goods that can be translated and repurposed by other workers. That is to say, the material products of the factory worker can be remodeled by the immaterial products of information worker and vice-versa. Such ‘equality of knowledge’ is precisely what Rancière understands as a necessary condition to the aesthetic community of senses. He claims that the emancipated community—such as the multitude—is a “community of narrators and translators” (2011, 42). The workers of the multitude act exactly like the narrators and translators in that they constantly create new ideas, images, affects, and relationships. For instance, the worker (narrator) can influence another worker (translator) by way of biopolitical production. Such a process of cooperation through biopolitical production can be illustrated by Brian Massumi’s image of the conjunctive synthesis (1992, 47-92). For Massumi, conjunctive synthesis is a (bio)production of conditional transitions with unforeseen outcomes. When the narrators and translators (workers) of the multitude interact, they are engaged in conjunctive synthesis, that is, they are engaged in the excessive transformation of ideas, images, and relationships. The subject that is born out of conjunctive synthesis opens up to the topological complexity of the multitude, grapples with it in an act of dissensus and finally—offers a new perspective. This is the aesthetics of the multitude, or at least, it ought to be. The concept of the multitude survives as long as contemporary workers are actually engaged in innovative bio-production. In Freudian terms, artistic production allows people to sublimate unresolved psychic impulses by transforming them into socially acceptable behavior. This means that artistic practice fosters resolution of psychic neuroses and in so doing, it allows singularities to feel enchanted in the process of creative transformation of the multitude. Art is, therefore, the sine qua non of the enchanted queer multitude.
Leonard Fink, a gay photographer, is a perfect example of an artist that practiced the aesthetics of the everyday. He took most of his photographs in the 1970s and early 1980s. It must be said, though, that during this time he was absolutely unknown. The most distinctive feature of his photographs is that they look very casual, almost as though they were cut off from the mise-en-scene. Fink was particularly drawn to the abandoned piers and—in general—spaces near the waterfront, where gay men were able to express their desires freely. This means that photography, for Fink, was a tool that allowed him to invigorate the queer spaces that were—for the most part—abandoned.
(Figure1) Leonard Fink. Pier 48 Interior, 1980 Silver gelatin print, 8×10. Courtesy of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Center National History Archive
(Figure 2) Leonard Fink. Self-Portrait in the Mirror with Camera to the Eye. 1979. Copyright the LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
The photograph here (see Figure1) encapsulates Fink’s commitment to the aesthetic complexity. It can be immediately observed that the space that these people occupy is fragmented. That is to say, there is no indication of where space begins and where it ends. In addition, the people’s perspectives are also disjointed, namely, their glances are totally isolated and detached. This photograph, therefore, signifies the lack of organizing design within the abandoned space. The abandoned space is already deemed to be worthless and unusable. Therefore, the abandoned structure turns into an open structure where all angles, surfaces, and corners are no longer different from any others. In other words, the abandoned space becomes open to interpretation, it exchanges structural utility for the freedom of movement within the field. However, there is very little left of interpretation, the people are relinquished to interpret separately, by way of agonism. This photograph is a perfect example of autonomous work of art, it preserves the aesthetic complexity—or purposiveness—and forces the observer to contemplate the architecture of sensations, percepts and affects. Most importantly, Fink employs photography to invigorate his daily life (see Figure 2) to document the lives of gay men like him. This makes Fink an active narrator, he is an innovative queer singularity of the multitude.
Denouement
The issue of queer innovativeness within the multitude is not straightforward—many stars have to align if the multitude is to efficiently fight off the forces of control and normalization. If, however, the multitude can manage to grapple with the political, libidinal, psychic, and aesthetic economies, the multitude can indeed be transformed, that is, the singularities within can gain innovative capacity. The fight for the politics of the multitude will not transpire in the halls of parliament, it will transpire in the excessively productive—yet sometimes banal—interactions of the everyday. For this reason, this essay constitutes a plan, a roadmap for everyday care of the queer singularity and the multitude.
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