Just a few days after reading all about the Italian Effect conference (and shrieking with glee over Mel’s unique performance of geeky theory grrrl rebellion), I discovered this passage at the end of Steven Shaviro’s summary of Hardt and Negri’s Multitude:

There’s a wonderful passage in Multitude (190ff) where Hardt and Negri write of the way that political philosophy has traditionally seen the nation or the society as a body: Hobbes’ Leviathan is only the most famous use of this more-than-metaphor. The multitude, they say, can in this context only be seen as something monstrous, a disorganized agglomeration of flesh, since it rejects the sovereignty of the head over the other organs that is the central concern of Hobbes’ model (and that of all too many later political thinkers as well). Capital works, in the terms Hardt and Negri implicitly borrow from Deleuze, by separating the body politic from what it can do. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the multitude is a body without organs; it expresses its potentialities to the fullest by rejecting the restrictions imposed by the hierarchical organization of the organs.

While I find this image compelling, I can’t help being haunted by its inversion. In my picture, capital itself is the monstrous flesh, the body without organs, that we the multitude are forced to inhabit. This flesh is “really” ours, ultimately ours. But in our pragmatic, day-to-day experience, we don’t own it, or hold it in common. Rather we scurry about, in its folds and convolutions, like lice or fleas; or at best, we reprogram its code here and there, just a little bit, like viruses. It oppresses us, but we are stuck; we hate it, but we can’t live without it. Can we transform this parasitic, shadowy state of being into a form of resistance?

I like that – it’s nicely thought out, and elegantly rendered.

What really gets the mental gears turning for me though, is that it seems a higher power (and/or my own literally unsatisfiable desire for the Final Enlightenment of the Left) is directing me to engage with all this Italian business. Then again (I acknowledge but transfer no blame to Mel’s excellent paper), it might just be the global flows of fashion intersecting with the Theory Industry, urging me to throw out last year’s wardrobe and invest heavily in the latest conceptual gadgets.

Sigh…the black skivvy just doesn’t cut it anymore, and De Certeau is sooooo yesterday – and yet, I don’t even have a decent espresso machine, or a decent grasp on Deleuze.