The contemporary multitude

Résumé 0

The grammar of the multitude defines its salient features: the first is the end of the separation between the public and the private. The result is a new relationship between the individual and the collective: we do not converge in the One, we act differently from a common background. The multitude is ambivalent, servile and rebellious at the same time. It likes being scared, but being safe, it asks for security. It is animated by the sentiment of not feeling at home, and adopts different or even opposing strategies. The “commonplaces” characterize its discourses which take very general forms. This recourse to “commonplaces” comes directly from the sentiment of not feeling at home, and having to think of how we are there. But the public aspect of the intellect experienced in common, far from being free, creates a personal dependence on various hierarchies. Everyone behaves in public as a virtuoso, as a performer, in the productive cooperation characteristic of contemporary work.