f iorEnzo i uliano One, No One and a Multitude: The Narrative of Seattle 1999 and the Emergence of Populism 1. The analepsis of the multitude The 1999 WTO protests in Seattle represent an important episode in the history of both the city and the anti-globalization movement� Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s are among the many voices that have praised, in the uprisings, the moment in which the movement was born and suddenly went under the global spotlight� The book Multitude, coauthored by the two scholars and published in 2004, relates Seattle’s events to the concept of multitude as the only - or one of the few - possible revolutionary subject(s) in the present era� The second volume of a trilogy started in 2000 with Empire, which theorizes the existence of a new political formation - the empire - engendered by late capitalism and by its rules, is followed by Commonwealth (2009), which ideally concludes the series� Multitude envisages possible strategies of resistance to global capitalism and identifies a new revolutionary subject that is not coextensive with social class, nor draws its strength from its ability to mobilize the oppressed and provide them with a strong political identity or a regulated organism, comparable to the party within Marxist tradition� Conversely, Hardt and Negri argue, the multitude is made up of heterogeneous forces resulting in a network of political and existential practices that fruitfully oppose the (visible and not visible) strategies of power enforced by the empire� Central to Multitude are the incidents occurred in Seattle in 1999� The authors, in particular, emphasize the convergence against the WTO meeting as the moment in which diverse forms of political activism coalesced in order to fight against the same enemy. They also, yet less noticeably, remark the importance of Seattle as the aptest context for the revolts, regarded as the culmination of the city’s long-standing radical tradition� No longer a simple background to the protests, Seattle becomes a crucial component in the birth and shaping of the anti-globalization movement because of its history and political identity� Hardt and Negri’s is among some of the narratives of the city circulated at the time, which read and sometimes forced the history of Seattle in order to corroborate the idea of the anti-globalization movement as the embodiment of a new revolutionary subject, which, in the riots, had experienced its first passage to the act. Multitude, thus, systematizes a diffused perception of the 1999 uprisings that circulated in the press and in the propaganda of the time� 106 f iorEnzo i uliano According to Hardt and Negri, what happened in Seattle between 29 November and 3 December 1999 was more than a largely attended protest against the WTO ministerial meeting� The conference was scheduled at the Washington State Convention Center, only one mile away from Pioneer Square, the original nucleus of the city that still honors the memory of both the loggers who first settled down in the area and of Chief Seattle, after whom the city is named� The thousands of people that gathered in Seattle, many of them from other parts of the State and the country, occupied a considerable area of the city, marching and chanting against the conference� Hardt and Negri identified the uprisings as “[t]he coming-out party of the new cycle of struggles” (215), the most significant and valuable of all the protests occurred in the US after the 1960s, and the beginning of a new phase in the global opposition to capitalism, also pointing out that none of the protests that had preceded Seattle had been able to mobilize the common so “extensively across the globe” (214). 1 Seattle at the end of the twentieth century is thus identified as the site of a global convergence, to the point that the very name of the city was turned into a metonymy that, even now, stands for a number of diverse, even contradictory, events� 2 For the first time in decades, Hardt and Negri go on, political subjects that in the past hardly ever shared campaigns and struggles, marched side by side� The heterogeneous groups gathered in Seattle, “the functioning mass coalition that has been lacking in the United States since the Great Depression of the 1930s” (Deusen and Massot 40), in fact, despite their differences, had “common practices, languages, conduct, habits, forms of life, and desires for a better future” (Hardt and Negri 215), and also embodied specificities and singularities that were not overshadowed by “the global mobilization” (216). What made Seattle almost unique and exemplary, thus, was the lack of any central coordinating organism and of any hierarchy among the groups that took part in the marches, the rallies and the other demonstrations� Elaborating a pattern that clearly resents of Deleuzian and Spinozian influences, Hardt and Negri therefore see Seattle as the moment in which 1 The common is one of Multitude’s keywords and subsumes the ideas of labor and productivity elaborated by Hardt and Negri� It is Hardt himself who provides what he considers an “initial” definition of the common in a collective book published in 2010. A long quote from his essay could help clarify the notion: “Here it is useful to distinguish between two types of the common, both of which are the object of neo-liberal strategies of capital� […] On the one hand, the common names the earth and all the resources associated with it: the land, the forests, the water, the air, minerals and so forth� […] On the other hand, the common also refers […] to the results of human labour and creativity, such as ideas, language, affects and so forth� You might think of the former as the ‘natural’ common and the latter as the ‘artificial’ common, but really such divisions between natural and artificial quickly break down. In any case, neo-liberalism has aimed to privatize both these forms of the common” (136). 2 The demonstrations are nowadays remembered as being marked by both peaceful marches and rallies and violent encounters between protesters and policemen� One, No One and a Multitude 107 distinct struggles were connected to each other, none of them losing its singularity but, conversely, each functioning “as a node that communicates with all the other nodes without any hub or center of intelligence” (217). By spontaneously converging in Seattle from different areas in the States, the protesters gave body to what Multitude theorizes as an unprecedented - and, as such, necessary - pattern of global insurgence� Rebellion, as the expression of an ever-expanding and creative desire, finally burst out as one of the people’s most genuine and unrestrainable impulses� When, over the centuries, it had from time to time found different forms to express itself, it had nonetheless been curbed into structures of power that annihilated its creative potential� The fact that different categories of protesters, “previously thought to be in opposition to each other” (217) - unions, environmentalists, anarchists, feminists, gay and lesbian activists among others - had found a common ground meant that the “desiring machine” of the global protest had fully displayed its true potential, “without any central, unifying structure that subordinates or sets aside their differences” (Hardt and Negri 217). In other words, there was no domineering force trying to channel the chaotic fluxes of revolutionary desires into hierarchical apparatuses of power and control� 3 Hardt and Negri did not hypothesize that Seattle’s protests could be appropriated and subsumed by any rigidly regulated political organization, probably because they were (delusionally) confident that the recent collapse of Soviet Union and global communism had liberated rebellious energies worldwide, without any risk of bureaucratic or totalitarian involution of the newborn revolutionary processes� To use the Deleuzian jargon, in Seattle no molar principle intervened to regulate and organize the molecular vectors of rebellion� As is often the case with Negri’s theories about power and revolution, however, even in Multitude the revolutionary subject that gives the book its name is more idealized than critically elaborated, and Hardt and Negri’s account of the event evoke a completely spontaneous and uncoordinated assemblage of people and militant groups that only partially corresponds to reality� 4 Indeed, the book’s insistence on the singularities that made up the multitude without ever being subsumed by it paradoxically turns the multitude itself into its very opposite� The body of the people celebrated as the trigger of a new revolutionary phase has apparently no voids, no lacks, no 3 Perhaps Hardt and Negri too easily merge the concepts of “chaos” and “lack of organization”. The Black Blocs, rightly or wrongly considered the most extreme and violent of the components that took part in the demonstrations, deny any lack of organization despite it representing one of the most appealing and innovative aspects of the multitude (Van Deusen and Massot 44)� 4 The volume The Art of Protest carefully lists and analyzes the different constituencies involved in the demonstrations (Reed 248-54), trying to discern a vague criterion in their arrangement: “The various constituencies (human rights, environmental, farmers, workers, feminists, debt relief advocates, and many others) were organized into two main components: nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and direct action-oriented movement groups” (247). A “very short representative list” of the groups represented at the demonstrations can be found in Thomas (66-67)� 108 f iorEnzo i uliano gaps, being instead constructed as a continuum of forces and vectors that exchange mutual feedbacks� What Hardt and Negri call multitude increasingly resembles a totality that, despite its heterogeneous character, produces a teleological process invariably oriented towards the final triumph of its revolutionary subjects� There would be nothing wrong in such teleology, were it not ultimately arbitrary and constructed as an analeptic narrative that incorporates different and sometimes contrasting events and geographies, producing a continuity that overlooks or even erases differences, contradictions, involutions and backlashes, gaps and voids, in order to produce the totality that Hardt and Negri call multitude� Over the decades, I argue, it is this erasure of the negative that has fostered a significant and definitive shift from the multitude to the totality� Many of the attributes and features then ascribed to the multitude have become, in the long run, essential components of the conservative and reactionary propaganda, and it is under this guise that they gained widespread consensus in the US and in Europe (and probably elsewhere)� Paradoxically enough, thus, the roots of nowadays right-wing populism could be traced back to a narrative of the people that, in the past, was charged with leftist revolutionary significance, and that has gradually been appropriated by reactionary parties within a (pseudo) welfarist and allegedly anti-elitist agenda� In this essay, I will first discuss the rejection of any dialectic process in the creation of the multitude, maintaining that the elaboration of the narrative of the people has been used in order to compensate for the missing negative moment in the construction of any alternative (be it socialist, communist, or generically ‘democratic’) political subject� Then, I will delve into the different narratives produced at the time in order to provide the multitude with a coherent strategy that would bypass any contradiction� I will focus on how the history and the (imaginary) geography of Seattle have been resorted to as rhetorical tools that produced a fictitious continuity among different and even contradictory events and identities layered over the decades� Finally, I will try to make sense of the events occurred in 1999 in the light of recent populist surge, arguing that it has at least partially incorporated the political stances that, in the past, had produced and informed the multitude(s)� 2. The story of an immanence I suggest that the multitude evoked by Hardt and Negri is the result of a narrative construction, which resorts to two distinct rhetorical artifices, to wit, metonymy and analepsis, in order to make sense� The former has turned the city into the event - Seattle 1999 - through a rhetorical gesture that instantaneously associates Seattle to what happened back then� This process is functional to the second rhetorical artifice, analepsis, that has infused a number of events occurred over the past (during or even before the riots) and the subjectivities they mobilized with a continuity that, in the different narratives of One, No One and a Multitude 109 the multitude - not only the ones authored by Hardt and Negri, but all those that had wide circulation at the time - has gradually, and despite what they claimed, turned into a teleology� These narratives hinge on one common and necessary feature, that is, the immanence of the people as, simultaneously, their author and protagonist� Immanence is thus essential to the construction of the multitude: there is no overarching principle, external signifier, or teleological projection in the process through which the multitude is born� The multitude is, at the same time, the trigger and the effect of a sheer, ever-expanding production of desiring vectors that give body to revolutionary subjects� The role of immanence has been remarked by Ernesto Laclau as an essential component in the construction of the political subjectivity of populism� Populists, Laclau argues, identify in “[t]he ‘people’ (as constituted through a nomination that does not conceptually subsume it) […] not a kind of ‘superstructural’ effect of an underlying infrastructural logic, but a primary terrain in the construction of a political subjectivity” (On Populist Reason 225-26)� This immanence, however, would not be conceivable or functioning were it not for the invisible presence of empty signifiers, like identity and totality, which embody “an unachievable fullness.” Having previously identified failed totality as “the place of an irretrievable fullness […] both impossible and necessary” (70), Laclau moves to remark that such category constitutes “a horizon and not a ground” (71). As an empty signifier, thus, not unlike “identity”, totality functions as a synecdoche and/ or a catachresis. It can only attempt to grasp and fill up its impossible and unachievable referents, which in the course of the twentieth century have been gradually emptied of any positive (that is, not merely differential) meaning� 5 The populist rhetoric, nonetheless, uses these signifiers as if they had meaning, turning them into idealized horizons of signification that provide diverse subjects and histories with a homogenizing, though actually absent, signifying agency� The immanence hypothesized by Hardt and Negri as the new horizon of rebellion and revolution, instanced by the 1999 events, likewise needs provisional and strategic rhetorical wedges to compensate for all those discontinuities that characterize the history of the revolutionary subjects and that are disavowed as such, and identified instead as diverse and diversely intense phases of a unique, modulating continuum� Analepsis is, thus, the most effective strategy through which Multitude comes to terms with the gaps and the discontinuities of the multitudes’ past� It is thanks to this rhetorical move that events and places that have little or no relation with each other are retrospectively aligned in a coherent narrative� 5 The debate about universalism has been a particularly animated one, and cannot even be summarized here� I will just mention Eric Lott’s contribution in a special issue of New Literary History about the “New Left Roots of Identity Politics”. Lott moves from Seattle 1999 as the attempt “to accommodate a host of mutually indifferent or even typically antagonistic movements momentarily converging around a common objective” (666), suggesting that the (Derridian) hauntological force of totality was coming back as a need to move beyond postmodern suspicion about any universal or universalizing subject (667-69)� 110 f iorEnzo i uliano The creation of this narrative undermines representativeness as essential to democracy and therefore questions the role and the existence of the political party� A necessary phase in the construction of revolutionary subjects for traditional Marxism, the party’s function is now emptied by the self-expanding process of the multitude� The rigidly organized and hyper-bureaucratized structure of traditional (especially communist) parties, in fact, is visibly at odds with the multitude’s spontaneous and rhizomatic nature� Once again, Hardt and Negri’s words anticipate present right-wing populism� Both, as a matter of fact, reject the party as a representative organization, to be overcome by either the unrestrained force of the multitude or by the rhetoric of “the people” as direct opponents of the elites, among which the parties are invariably included� Laclau’s discussion of the tension between the heterogeneity of the working class and its commitment to a common goal, and of the distance between its ideal aspirations and the limits and the contradictions imposed by their ordinary agenda, could be of help to further clarify why the multitude and its different narratives invariably edge toward populist rhetoric and, subsequently, policies� As early as in 1991, in an essay about universalism and particularism, in fact, Laclau questions some of the issues that would be at the center of Multitude� Explicitly addressing the American present, he insists on the role acquired by identity politics, referring to those “concrete finitudes” emerging after the post-modern “death of the subject”. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of any unifying onto-epistemological horizon, and in the light of “new forms of multicultural protest and self-assertion in the USA, to which we have to add the gamut of forms of contestation associated with the new social movements” (“Universalism, Particularism” 21), he argues, the limitation and partiality of any political position could fruitfully turn into a source of strength� Unlike Hardt and Negri, however, Laclau does not necessarily see in the (aspiration to the) universal the annihilation of the particular� The universal and the particular are in a relationship of mutual dependence, generating a tension that is destined to remain unsolved; this “non-solution is the very precondition of democracy” (“Universalism, Particularism” 35). The universal has always found its way in the particular through a mechanism of incarnation, that is, through the creation of proxies whose function was that of bridging the gap between these two extremes� For traditional Marxism, the function of gauging the distance between “the universal character of the tasks of the working class and the particularity of its concrete demands” (“Universalism, Particularism” 25) was entrusted to the party. The universal, as an empty signifier towards which the efforts of political action are oriented, could be broached or at least envisaged when the working class is able to avail itself of the party as a tool to achieve limited and discrete objectives that are, at the same time, part of a more general design� The groundbreaking character of the multitude born in 1999 is to be found not so much in the lack of any mediation between the universal and the particular, as in the lack of the need for such mediation� The activists and the groups involved in the protests almost unanimously agreed that the One, No One and a Multitude 111 absence of any structure and hierarchy produced a crucial shift in paradigm between past and present forms of radical subjectivity, making the newborn multitude radically different from any traditional socialist or Marxist party� This was acknowledged and praised even by Edward Luttwak, whose words incredibly do not contradict what Hardt and Negri argued about Seattle 1999 and the multitude: The protest’s incoherence was significant and even appropriate, unlike the pro-WTO side which could conceive of only one truth and one model� After all, it was once the Bolsheviks who proposed a single Leninist model for all countries� Ignoring all differences of culture, religion and economic and political structures� They attempted to impose their model everywhere� Today, the new Bolsheviks are the advocates of ‘turbo-capitalism’. (“Do the ‘Seattle Protestors’ Have a Point? ” 42-43) The protagonists of the protests, too, have persistently remarked that the convergence in Seattle of the numerous groups that took part in the demonstrations was not managed or directed by any coordinating center� Among the many voices of the activists - most of which have been archived online within The WTO History Project launched by the University of Washington - I will only mention here two quite typical testimonies by way of illustration� The words of David Solnit, a representative of the collectives “Art and Revolution”, best clarify the chasm existing between Seattle uprisings and progressive or radical organizations of the past� Solnit explains how different collectives scattered over the West Coast (from Vancouver to Los Angeles, with a stronger participation of militants from San Francisco and San Diego) coalesced and gave birth to the “Direct Action Network”, whose main aim was “to initiate focal mass direct action”. He goes on arguing that “[i]t wasn’t like an organization. […] People just got the word out however they could”, and concludes: “There was absolutely no Marxists, Leninist, or Old Left or Old New Left involvement� Those groups were completely not present� So, I mean, there’s no influence, very little influence of any liberal or progressive groups� It was almost exclusively radical and radical anti-authoritarian groups.” Denis Cooper, whose main effort was directed at coordinating the minority communities involved in the protests, not only confirms that “it wasn’t so much of us being an organization,” but overtly claims: “We didn’t want it to be an organization, so to speak, where anybody could join� We wanted to be more, not close so much as just more nurturing� […] It was like a few select people who chose to be together to work toward political ends.” Despite the existence of ongoing tensions among the different groups involved, documented by other interviews, even this scant record bespeaks the perceived self-sufficiency of the groups involved in the protests, and the fact that not only was there no overarching structure that provided the protesters with a common agenda and a goal, but, more significantly, that nobody resented its absence� Even those who maintained that the unions prevailed upon the other categories of participants - despite a narrative that has emphasized the diverse class and political origins of the protesters - had to concede that the coalition among different and once opposing militant subjects was the consequence of the escalating “decline in density” of unions (Levi 112 f iorEnzo i uliano and Olson 314)� The newfound cohesion among groups that “have long distrusted each other”, thus, was of course to be favorably saluted, but there still was “reason to be suspicious of the long-term maintenance of this solidarity” (Levi and Olson 314, 324)� These narratives of the uprisings confirm Hardt and Negri’s assumptions: as the infinite singularities that made up the new revolutionary subject did not aim at any transcendental goal, they did not need any synthesis of the partialities and differences into a unifying project� The tension between the universal and the particular, which, in the past, was mediated or even solved by the party, is presented as ultimately deceiving, because the multitude operates on a plane of pure immanence, in which the universal has no transcendental significance, but immediately results from the juxtaposition of the particulars� Yet this has also determined, in the long run, the disappearing of any lasting political strategy within the arena of global capitalism� If the multitude’s task was, in fact, that of fulfilling its own potential, there was no need to design any teleology in the political action� This pushes to the extreme Laclau’s understanding of radicalism in the global era� He argues, in fact, that given the entropic nature of global capitalism, it is not only necessary but even desirable to focus on discrete objectives besides longterm, almost eschatological, goals� Hardt and Negri’s multitude radicalizes this assumption, rejecting any strategy that is not aimed at immediate and tangible results� The strategy “disappears totally, while unconnected tactical interventions become the only game in town” (Laclau, On Populist Reason 242)� The full body of the multitude, thus, im-mediately incarnates and unceasingly (re)produces its own (albeit provisional) political achievements, its own decisions, its own desires� Multitudes, in other words, are as such and by themselves revolutionary, capable of radically transforming a reality that is utterly transparent to their eyes by simply fulfilling their own potential. 6 There still is, however, a missing link between the idea of the multitude and the fact that Seattle 1999, among so many similar events, was designated as its seminal founding moment� The arbitrariness of such choice has been contested, among others, by Robin Broad and Zahara Hecksher, who have remarked that Seattle was neither the beginning of the no-global movement, nor the watershed in its history (715-16)� Anti-globalization movements are, in fact, as old as globalization, and can be traced back, for instance, to the anti-slavery campaigns of the eighteenth century� The fact that an American and prevailingly white city has been symbolically designed as the birthplace of the anti-globalization movement, and that an event that enjoyed an unprecedented media coverage has been identified as its hotbed, perpetuates the myth of American exceptionalism rather than discarding and undermining its ideological biases� This choice, however, proves coherent with Negri’s genealogy of the multitude� The idea of an American intrinsically revolutionary - self-expanding and self-determining - subject had been central 6 As the late Italian philosopher Costanzo Preve has ironically put it in a video interview, the idea of the multitude implies that “the world is already communist, but it doesn’t know it” (“Costanzo Preve contro Toni Negri”, my translation). One, No One and a Multitude 113 to another book that he authored in 2002, Insurgencies� Here the notion of constituent power, pivotal to the whole book, is theorized as a democratic force that has often been restrained and domesticated by the constituted power, that is, the political, social and economic institutions that have, over the centuries, tamed its uncontainable revolutionary energy� In the history of the United States the strength of the constituent power has benefited from a distinctive American feature, which sets apart the specifically American constituent power as a revolutionary and democratic force per se� The immense land still to be appropriated, Negri argues, provided the Americans’ tension toward democracy with a usable, and not merely symbolic, space of articulation: “Space is the expression of freedom — but a very concrete freedom, a Harringtonian freedom founded on property, appropriation, and colonizing expansion” (Insurgencies 143)� The idealization of America as the place where the force of the molecular - what Negri also defines the barbarian, “Tartar” sense of freedom - could be aptly manifested had unsurprisingly been anticipated in Deleuze and Guattari’s tribute to American literature� The two philosophers’ (far too) idealized America embodies the pattern of the rhizome, the root that freely expands over a limitless territory and that informs a new philosophical paradigm, capable of breaking away with any past and with all genealogies: Everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside� American books are different from European books, even when the American sets off in pursuit of trees� The conception of the book is different� Leaves of Grass� (19) Deleuze and Guattari lay bare the implications of Negri’s discourse about America as the most natural homeland for the constituent power, ideally providing Negri’s pages with the missing link between American revolutionary tradition and the tension towards democracy of its present political organizations� There would be nothing more genuinely American, thus, than the anti-globalization movement born in Seattle, since it would incorporate that Tartar desire for freedom that Negri, echoing Deleuze and Guattari, ascribes to America (and which, as Negri obviously omits to mention, is closely reminiscent of the long-standing debate about dissent as an inherently American feature)� It is, thus, all the more clear the reason why, according to Hardt and Negri, any form of mediation between the singularities of the struggles waged by each component of the anti-globalization movement and its overall revolutionary momentum, was not necessary at all� Those who converged in Seattle to protest against the WTO conference were embodying, rather than simply expressing, a democratic tension that only drew its strength from its own protean essence, and that was all the more uncontrollable insofar as it incorporated and gave voice to a constituent power that had always inhabited the American soil� Any attempt at controlling, containing or simply regulating its force would have irremediably altered and deteriorated its nature� 114 f iorEnzo i uliano The machinic pattern that Hardt and Negri suggestively evoke in order to illustrate the functioning of the multitude, however, fails to completely account for its genesis� The idea of immanence as producing multitudes could at most explain how multitudes work, but is much less convincing when it is used to elucidate the process by which the people becomes a multitude, because it erases any past discontinuity and, deliberately rejecting the idea of the negative, mystifies the very events it wants to celebrate. Hardt and Negri, for instance, consider the alliance between different and once divergent forces, like unions and environmentalists, as the natural result of a convergence, and not as a consequence of a process of progressive weakening of the unions in the US, which, started in the Reagan era, was not halted by the Clinton administration (Cartosio 136-38)� 7 The fact that Hardt and Negri fail to consider any unconscious component operating in the creation of the multitude, postulating in its stead the existence of ever-expanding fluxes of desire that produce rebellious collective subjects, reveal the constructed and purely rhetorical and linguistic nature of the immanence evoked (rather then theorized) in Multitude� Immanence, thus, is the result of a narrative, rather than of a machinic process� It is this narrative that has connected the singularity of each component of the multitude, its past and layered history, with the moment in which the different forces coalesced to stand up against the new global order� It is this narrative, moreover, that has replaced the party as the tool that relates the multitudes to the objectives they set off to achieve� Representativeness, shunned by the constituent power, is substituted by (self-)representation� The narrative of the multitude, and of the American multitude in particular - as Insurgencies theorizes and Multitude tries to demonstrate - jeopardizes the very multitude it declares to celebrate and paves the way, however unwittingly, to present populisms by flattening the discontinuity and the contradictions of its actual stories and identities into a metaphysics of the revolutionary subject that, as a matter of fact, acquires its (much as paradoxical) coherence only when - and if - it is translated on a discursive plane� The disappearance of any negative, that is, of any transitory phase in which the political actors need to mediate among competing positions and look for a final synthesis, reframes the multitude’s political agenda and, more generally, the scope of its action as an irrational and utopian leap in the dark� Multitudes would embody, as such, the revolution, without any need to design a radical strategy or to envisage any 7 Negri fails to consider that, by the 1990s, unionism had progressively weakened and that Clinton’s administration had cut funding to welfare programs, dramatically widening an already existing gulf between workers (and, more generically, destitute people”) and the progressive wing of the Democrats. Deprived of their power in the farms and industries, and no longer backed by the Democrats, the Unions were registering in that decade a gradual but relentless decrease in participation� The unions had, by 1999, lost their role in American economy and in the relationship between workers and factories owners; the new models of industries and the fall of Soviet Union had decisively contributed to the dismantling of unionism within the US society� One, No One and a Multitude 115 figure of mediation and final synthesis. They are born revolutionary, Hardt and Negri suggest, and, if American, they are born all the more revolutionary because of the (natural) potential of the American territory� 3. A tale of many cities Laclau dismisses Hardt and Negri’s elaborations as the effect of “a triumphalist and exaggeratedly optimistic vision” of “the tendencies towards unity operating within the multitude” (On Populist Reason 243)� I have suggested that the pure immanence that should foster an “underlying and spontaneous” (On Populist Reason 240) universality amounts, as a matter of fact, to a discursive analepsis rather than to a machinic assemblage, and operates as an etiological myth of the collective self� This narrative, as I will try to elucidate in the following pages, has been constructed and, at the same time, endorsed by the subjects involved in the protests as a site of identification and as a cathected - much as (mostly) unacknowledged - telos onto which they have projected their expectations and desires and relocated their very ontological status� Different planes of immanence have been, more or less explicitly, mobilized to symbolically accommodate the multitude that gathered from 30 November to 3 December 1999 in Seattle. The riots have first of all been associated to a provisional geography of the anti-capitalists global movements; second, less noticeably, they have been identified as one of the many events that, over the years, have voiced the city’s radical history� After the riots against the WTO, Seattle has been incorporated into a map of the revolutions that were reconfiguring the geopolitical western order of the time. Symbolically removed from the Northwest of the United States, it was reconceptualized by many authors as part of a network of anti-globalization cities of the world� 8 Even Gayatri Spivak, whose effort to re/ deconstruct multiple and overlapping genealogies can hardly be related to any penchant for immanences, assembled her own map of global resistances, in which Seattle is followed by Naples and Genoa as alleged sites of “visible disruption of largescale international meetings”, to which she critically opposes the “subaltern disruption in detail [that] can throw the global machinery of world trade out of joint” (290). The geography of revolts, in which Seattle is included as the place where everything started, is accompanied by an even more telling rewriting of the history of the city� This history, by lining up the riots against the WTO meeting with a series of past events occurred in Seattle, turns out to be one more 8 These alternative maps comprise, for instance, Rome, Chiapas and Genoa (Hardt and Negri 265-67); Washington, Prague, Buffalo, Quebec City, Gothenburg, Genoa, Calgary, Prague, Geneva/ Annemasse, Tessalonica, Miami, New York, Scotland, Hillemm- Rostock, Strasbourg, Vancouver, Toronto (the latest of the events recorded, the G20 Summit, occurring in 2010, Dupuis-Déri 48-49); Porto Alegre, Florence, Paris, London, Mumbai (Negri, Good-bye Mr Socialism 69); Genoa, Porto Alegre, Rome, Barcelona (Reed 282); or, more vaguely, Quebec, Genoa, Spain (Aranowitz 206)� 116 f iorEnzo i uliano plane of immanence, which, conversely, belies the existence of a teleological sequentiality that sees in the city the (Hegelian? ) embodiment of the ideal nemesis of the United States as a capitalist-imperialist power� The 1999 uprisings, thus, seem to deterministically spring out of the history of Seattle that can be retraced to a long sequence of rebellions, as, for instance, Negri (again) remarks in a conversation with Italian scholar Raf ‘Valvola’ Scelsi� Whereas in Scelsi’s words Seattle is simply a “crucial place […] the American port that faces Asia, […] the land of Microsoft, Boeing, Coca-Cola, the home of grunge and even the first concerts of Jimi Hendrix” (Negri, Goodbye Mr. Socialism 63), Negri aggrandizes this description of the city, digging into its past: Seattle is also the city in which there was the first great repression of the American workers’ movement after World War I� […] Seattle is also the city where the colonists arrived, those who instead of stopping on the East Coast and becoming workers, fled from work and arrived there in order to invent a new life for themselves. … Seattle is also this in some ways, the organized right of flight. […] There is everything in Seattle� […] Hurray everybody! (Negri, Goodbye Mr. Socialism 63-65) Of course, Negri is not alone in retracing the 1999 riots back to their supposed, almost mythical, origins� He, once again, participates in and summarizes a strategy of representation and self-representation of Seattle, which many of the participants in the uprisings had already idealized as the natural site of American revolts when the 1999 riots occurred� The general strike of 1919, the first ever organized in the States, stands out as the seminal episode of the city’s long-standing revolutionary history� This is what, among others, Margaret Levi and David Olson argue, remarking that “Seattle is a city with a long past of militant labor and anarchist actions” (309) and that the city’s unionist tradition, so vital especially among the workers on the waterfront, has until the present days originated a considerable number of campaigns and demonstrations� Besides scholarly literature, political press was very active in 1999 and eager to relate Seattle’s present with its leftist and unionist tradition� The comparisons with 1919 were countless, despite the evident incommensurability of the two events� Justice, a socialist organization based in Seattle, before the riots issued a 20-page pamphlet titled The WTO, Global Capitalism and … the Socialist Alternative� The pamphlet is completely devoted to the WTO and to possible antagonistic strategies� Only one page diverts from the main theme to feature a brief but dense overview of the 1919 strike� No explicit parallel is drawn between the two events, but the final remark of the article exposes the rationale of this juxtaposition: “For us today, the Seattle general strike gives us a vision of the kind of response we need to the WTO conference” (15). The January 2000 issue of Ruckus, the “U[niversity of] W[ashington]’s Independent Students Newsmagazine”, features a couple of informative articles about the WTO, accompanied by trivia such as the “WTO Week Sign Slogan” (from the problematic “no globalization without representation” to the more prosaic “WTO kiss my ass”, 4), to which two survey-articles follow, “A short history of Communism in America” (13) and “A Retrospective of the Civil Rights Movement in Seattle and Beyond” (9). A 4-page newspaper-format publication issued at the time and emblematically One, No One and a Multitude 117 titled Shut Down the WTO, besides addressing debated questions about globalization and offering practical information to those interested in joining the protest, features a small box reporting an excerpt from an article published by Anna Louise Strong in The Union Record on 4 February 1919, “the eve of the 1919 Seattle general strike” (3). The Seattle late community newspaper Eat the State! featured a column, “Reclaim our History”, which reported events that had occurred in the same week but years or centuries before, on both local and global scale, thus placing Seattle within a broader, unofficial or even anti-official account of history. The column published in the special issue Eat the WTO! merges together the births of Peter Kropotkin (2 December 1842) and Noam Chomsky (7 December 1929) with the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal (1984) and the general strike of French workers against the government cutbacks (1995)� No actual connection among the events is implied, but a sort of analeptic effect is, though involuntarily, once again achieved� The dates mentioned, in fact, retrospectively produce a continuity in which the 1999 events perfectly fit as an essential part of the history of global rebellions. This continuity, needless to say, is the result of the need for a “usable narrative” of Seattle’s past, rather than an accurate account of the facts. This narrative, I argued, has repeatedly been evoked as a site for identification and, as such, as a unifying vector that connected the singularities of the protesters in one (forcibly) coherent, though diversified, multitude. Even scanty information about the history of Seattle’s working class and of the 1919 strike in particular, however, would suffice to disprove this narrative as chiefly fictitious and purposely elaborated so as to provide the multitude gathered in 1999 with a coherent history to identify with, rather than with an appropriate political (and practical) agenda� Idealized as the germinal moment of the birth of that multitude that, eighty years later, would have occupied the streets of Seattle, the 1919 strike, on the contrary, not only diverges from the pattern of the multitude illustrated by Hardt and Negri as intrinsically revolutionary, but counters its very animating principles� Consequently, it complicates the far-too-optimistic narrative of Seattle as the rebellious city of the United States par excellence� There was no “full” body of the people at all, nor was there any constituent power that, from below, produced its own policies by simply and creatively expanding its own revolutionary potential� There were, conversely, at least two perfectly identifiable master signifiers, proudly acknowledged by the protesters: on the one hand, the Socialist Party and the unions embodied and gave voice to radical militancy and activism; on the other, the intangible but essential presence of revolutionary Russia implied that these very radical positions needed to be enforced by law and authority� 9 9 After 1918, in fact, unionism was getting stronger all over the country (“total union membership in the US grew from 2,607,000 in 1915 to 5,110,000 by 1920”; Frank 30), also thanks to what was going on in Russia; in Seattle, moreover, the strong alliance between Wobblies and the Socialist Party represented an almost unique case in the United States of the time� 118 f iorEnzo i uliano Finally, the working class of the time had few or no traits in common with the multitude that took part in the “carnival against capital” of 1999 (Thomas 86). First of all, “working class” did not necessarily correspond to the category of the indigent� By 1919, in fact, many workers were enjoying relatively prosperous conditions, to the point that many of them were in the position of choosing whether to save or invest their money (Frank 67)� Moreover, the working class that animated the strike in 1919 was not at all heterogeneous and diverse with regard to gender and ethnicity� The strike, in fact, was organized and supported essentially by white men, some of whom were still animated by anti-migrant feelings (the Seattle labor movement “had originated in the 1890s as an anti-Chinese movement” and “the culture of male trade unions […] turned away many women”, Frank 20, 32). Affluent white male workers did not immediately associate with poorer female and/ or non-white ones, who were not easily accepted to unions� 10 As can be surmised even by this short overview, the multitude celebrated by Hardt and Negri was not only still to come, but not even detectable in the allegedly revolutionary past of Seattle� Those who opposed and repressed the strike accused protesters of being heavily influenced, if not directly maneuvered, by Russian Bolsheviks and their local representatives� Its supporters celebrated the strike as the triumph of those workers’ organizations, like the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Socialist Party, that had called it� In both cases, the strike was not regarded as the expression of a spontaneous convergence of groups who had, for different reasons, joined their forces, but rather as the result of a perfectly organized structure that responded to an absent yet overarching unifying scheme, as the one provided by the October Revolution and the newborn Soviet Russia� 4. The universal (as a) shame, or, what’s wrong with populism? I argued before that both the construction of the multitude and the narrative of Seattle 1999 contain some of the typical features and rhetorical structure of the populist discourse, such as the refusal of any form of representativeness and the rejection of the party as a mediator among different positions and a leverage to bridge the gap between discrete instances and universal goals� However, at least a question still remains to be answered: what would be wrong with all that? why, in other words, should populism pose a threat to democracy, instead of representing its culminating phase and its most accomplished expression? The answer to these questions is far from straightforward in relation to American history and identity, as several studies about populism in America remark� Alan Ware notices, for instance, that populism 10 As for the relationship between women and unionism in Seattle, see Oberdeck� The author remarks that working-class feminist activism, already dramatically declined after the war (the membership of the Seattle Womens’ Label League went down of 80%; 226), was severely undermined during the 1919 strike (227)� One, No One and a Multitude 119 (apparently? ) voices political positions that could be also held as the tenets of American democracy� He points out that “[p]opulism prioritises the opinions of people over anything else”, that “populists deny the legitimacy of a system in which representatives decide which policies will promote the interests of the people” (102), and that “[p]opulist movements can mobilise such mass frustrations against elites who seem to be exploiting constitutional protection in opposition to the views of ‘the people’” (103). To sum up, he concludes “populism resembles a number of mainstream political values, conflicts, and traditions in America” (104). Whatever it represents in Europe or in Latin America, in the United States populism would thus be the sheer expression of a democratic tradition that not only “lacks much of the anti-regime character evident in other countries” (104), but, conversely, valuably backs up and buttresses American democracy and its official apparatuses. So, again: what should be wrong with all that? In order to tentatively reply to this question, I will turn to an essay written by Italian political scientist and former communist senator, Gianfranco Pasquino, before finally going back to the relationship between multitude and populism� In a 2008 essay about “Populism and Democracy”, Pasquino sets off by referring to the United States in order to elucidate the controversial relationship between populism and democracy: “‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’� This famous phrase, pronounced by President Abraham Lincoln in his 1863 Gettysburg Address, could easily be accepted by democrats and populists alike” (15). Democracy and populism certainly share several of their ideals and principles, in that “both have firm and solid roots in the people and […] both indicate the paramount importance of the people” (15). However, the crucial divide between the two could be located in the meaning they ascribe to the very people they both regularly evoke: assuming that “the people” be a category of political thought, is it an inclusive or an exclusionary one? In the former case, the people is made up of citizens “endowed with rights and duties, but above all with the power of sovereignty that […] must be exercised within the limits and forms codified in the constitution itself” (15-16), as Pasquino clarifies by citing the first article of the Italian constitution� This means that the people, unlike the multitude, is an abstract entity and a political actor that draws its force from the law, according to a philosophical-juridical tradition long-established in western political thought. This definition identifies the law and the right as universal paradigms that define what the people is and who can belong to the people. It is probably a limited, and as such, for sure a disputable definition, since it assumes the universality of the western juridical and political thought� It has, however, at least the merit of indefinitely broadening up the category of the people and, at the same time, of relating it to a strict understanding of the dyad rights/ duties as the fundamentals of any legal system� As an exclusionary category, conversely, the people is made up of those, in Pasquino’s words, that “belong to the same tradition and share the same history” (16). Here, thus, the people does no longer refer to the abstract frame of the right as its precondition and guarantee, but to a story and an identity 120 f iorEnzo i uliano shared in common, such as the ones provided by the nation (which Pasquino, probably too restrictively, identifies as the primary instance of this exclusionary sense of people), or by other paradigms, presumably less abstract than those solely referring to the categories of law, rights and duties� In the conceptual slippage from the demos to the ethnos lies the transition between a democratic and a populist idea of people (16)� How about the multitude? did Hardt and Negri actually celebrate populism, while trying to theorize the multitude? does nowadays populism have anything to do with the ideas, the dreams and the aspirations of those multitudes that, almost twenty years ago, converged in Seattle, truly convinced that another world was possible and at hand? I do not want to go so far as to equate old multitudes with new populists� It is undeniable, however, that both stem from an angry response to poverty and exploitation� As Douglas Kellner puts it about Donald Trump’s admirers, “they had suffered under the vicissitudes of capitalism, globalization, and technological revolution� […] they have watched their jobs being moved overseas, displaced by technological innovation, or lost through unequal economic development amid increasing divisions between rich and poor” (23). It is undeniable, furthermore, that the words of those who, in 1999, along global capitalism and its crimes, also attacked representativeness and representative institutions because of their supposed uselessness or even complicity with national and supranational capitalist authorities, disturbingly resonate in the slogans used today by reactionary, conservative and nationalist populists who, almost thirty years later, have taken over the power in the US and in most European countries� The praise of the multitude’s coherence as a strategy, originated from the need to set apart internal differences so as to successfully struggle against a common enemy, has gradually turned into the praise of the people’s coherence as an essential and almost ontological datum� The absence of hierarchal and rigidly organized parties, typical of traditional Marxist and communist tradition, has often produced pseudo-democratic organizations that find a unifying vector in the leader as a “rigid designator” (as José Luis Villacañas Berlanga ingeniously remarks, referring to Saul Kripke and, once again, to the realm and language and signification, 56), or, as is the case of the United States’ past, in other forms of homogenizing identity� 11 11 Analyzing the origins of the United States’ populism, Paul Taggart remarks that the role of the leader has not always been an essential component of populist movements and policies: “The nature of nineteenth-century US populism was not a function of particular charismatic leaders (as in the case of Peron), or of studied groups of elites and theorists developing and then implementing complex abstract ideological frame works (as in the Russian case)” (26). The figure of the charismatic leader could be considered, thus, highly important but not indispensable for populists� In this, too, a coincidence between (old? ) populisms and modern multitudes could be detected. As brilliantly summarized by Mac Lojowsky, a student who participated in the protests and regarded Seattle 1999 as a “rite of passage” for his own generation, “[t]his new generation of activists has no leaders, for truly, ‘we are all leaders’.” One, No One and a Multitude 121 My contention, thus, is that the idealization of the multitude, despite what its theoreticians argued, could be held at least partially responsible for the appropriation of former revolutionary imagery and aspirations by exclusionary political positions� I have emphasized the rhetorical strategies adopted in the construction of the multitude, remarking that what was theorized and recounted as the result of an immanent process is instead an analeptic narrative that provides the multitude with an invisible master signifier to identify with� The metonymic gesture that stirs part of this narrative favors the concrete and the material over the abstract� The very lexicon Hardt and Negri use (and I am pretty sure they would not deny it) is imbued of materiality, constantly referring to bodies, love, desires, networks, habits and practices� The importance of Seattle, they remark, “was not to influence global leaders […] The real importance of Seattle was to provide a ‘convergence center” (287)� Once again privileging the sense of belonging to the event, the hic et nunc of revolution, over its inspiring doctrines - and they were unfortunately right, if it is true, as Gary Horlik states, that “[t]he colorful protests in the streets of Seattle had very little direct effect on the negotiations, beyond wiping out the opening ceremony” (170). The multitude, thus, apparently prefers the language of physics over the abstract, transcendent language of the law� Its rejection of any universality, wrongly assumed as intrinsically totalitarian, has in the long run produced the rejection of any universal principle� In its worst and most perverse appropriations, it has produced the rejection of the - probably too obsoletely Kantian - universal principle of right� Passed off and extolled as pure immanence, the multitude thus denies the existence of any external master signifier because it is - and functions as - its own master signifier. Being a narrative that predicates the process of its own construction and self-representation, it paradoxically turns out to be an exclusionary rather than an inclusive process� Despite its ostensible emphasis on heterogeneity, in fact, the multitude ultimately approximates to a prescriptive syntax rather than to an ever-expanding machine: it can mesh different subjectivities and generate new ones, on the condition that they belong to and self-identify with a shared code� Works cited Aronowitz, Stanley. “Reflections on Seattle 1999.” Dialectal Anthropology, vol� 33, 2009, pp� 203-08� Broad, Robin, and Zahara Heckscher� “Before Seattle: The Historical Roots of the Current Movement against Corporate-led Globalisation.” Third World Quarterly, vol� 24, no� 4, 2003, pp� 713-28� Cartosio, Bruno� L’autunno degli Stati Uniti. 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