I finally got around to reading Nick Spencer's review of Hardt and Negri's Empire and Multitude, "The Machinic Multitude." Yes, it was published nearly two and a half years ago and I marked it as something to read about six months ago, but things don't always happen in time.

I was originally intrigued by the title, expecting the review to look at the formation of machine-based collective subjectivities. Instead, Spencer succinctly highlighted H&N's dual description of the general intellect. For them the term at once applies to the process of pushing machines toward subjectivity through autonomy, as well as the movement of the collective, socialized worker toward a machinic state. He draws this point as part of his larger purpose of calling for academics to defetishize the technological aspect of multitude and instead focus on the centrality of labor.

Where Spencer's analysis starts to rub me the wrong way is in his fixation on H&N's discussion of the cyborg. He argues that their use of the cyborg as a concept points to a failure to move beyond workerist sentiments that have since become irrelevant - and which the two texts are supposed to step beyond. Yet, at least in Multitude, I find that their discussion of the cyborg is used less to underscore the technological or machinc aspects, but to discuss the worker as an essentially network form.

And perhaps that point shows where my opinion differs from Spencer's. I do not see academics' focus on the role of the technological in the potentialities of the multitude as a distraction from its core. Rather, the subjectively-aware machine, or network enabling technology more broadly, should be seen as an influence that enables and catalyzes the formation of pre- and post-individual subject formation on the ontological level.