In catching up with my long list of texts I've tagged with the imperative "READTHIS," I just finished Antonio Negri's piece, "Towards and Ontological Definition of the Multitude." There are a few points which struck some familiar chords that tend to lead to entries on this blog for me - namely the way in which he describes the relationship between multitudes, individuals, and identity. Much of what he outlines can be extended to contemporary phenomena on the web.

"When we consider bodies, we not only perceive that we are faced with a multitude of bodies, but we also understand that each body is a multitude. Intersecting the multitude, crossing multitude with multitude, bodies become blended, mongrel, hybrid, transformed; they are like sea waves, in perennial movement and reciprocal transformation. The metaphysics of individuality (and/or of personhood) constitute a dreadful mystification of the multitude of bodies. There is no possibility for a body to be alone. It could not even be imagined. When man is defined as individual, when he is considered as autonomous source of rights and property, he is made alone. But one's own does not exist outside of the relation with an other."

This section fits particularly well with my thoughts on the operation of identity in these swarming media networks. Our interactions in these networks hinges on the same basic tension that Negri notices in his multitudes: that subjects - just like the multitudes, masses they make up - are at once singularities and multiplicities. Through our web-based interactions we cannot help but to create distributed, deterritorialized tendrils of identity. As I've written many times before on this site, these tendrils include everything from one's blog and del.icio.us links, to credit card transactions and clickstreams. They overflow from an imagined center that is our perceived selfness and are reified in the electronic database. One's tendrils intersect, come to sudden ends, and weave contradictory paths much in the same way that Negri envisions identity occurring in his singularities (I avoid using "individual" here as Negri seems to associate the term with a more sovreign conception of self).

So we exist both as multitudes and within multitudes, and this could not be seen any clearer than in this whole Web 2.0 business. This makes me ask, then, if attempts to centralize identity are not attempts to recreate Negri's sovreign individuality - thus avoiding the socially beneficial aspects of multitudes. The benefits he describes are worded in uncharacteristically glowing terms:

"[...] of the theories of labour where the relationship of command can be demonstrated (immanently) as groundless (insussistente): immaterial and intellectual labour, in other words knowledge does not require command in order to be cooperative and to have universal effects. [...] the power of the multitude can be exposed on the terrain of the politics of postmodernity, by showing how no conditions for a free society to exist and reproduce itself are given without the spread of knowledge and the emergence of the common. In fact, freedom, as liberation from command, is materially given only by the development of the multitude and its self constitution as a social body of singularities."

He places the multitude as nothing less than a precondition for freedom (in a Marxist sense, I suppose). I would never go so far as to claim that Web 2.0 is a precondition for some totalizing freedom - mostly because the parallel between the multitude and current phenomena is far from one-to-one - but the similarities imply that some cultural benefit lies in supporting the social structures we see developing in this area.

The attempts at centralization I'm speaking of that may work in an opposite direction from this development of a multitude are things like MicroID - and similar identity centralizers/verifiers - and attention trackers, which record and archive one's web activity. I certainly support the sentiment that drives the creation of these things, and respect the people championing them, there is always a hint of wariness while reaidng about them. Perhaps Negri's declaration that the distributed identities that make up both the multitude and the singularities within the multitude are the key to "freedom," explains my hesitation. I see the central cultural and social change that these swarming media networks are enabling is the creation of a platform for the reification of these distributed, networked identities. To pull this trend back toward centralization and what Negri might call the "lonely individual," would be to negate whatever benefit may come from these new social structures.

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[Eamonn over at MobFilms has made an interesting short video dealing with similar themes]