Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press.



Hardt and Negri’s iconic idea is the multitude: a plural, productive, internally differentiated collective subject capable of generating common life within and against imperial governance, securitised war and biopolitical command. The theoretical contribution is their displacement of the people, the masses and the working class as homogeneous political figures in favour of a networked social composition that produces knowledge, affect, cooperation and political potential across global circuits. For Socioplastics, Multitude supplies a political grammar for understanding fields as collective infrastructures rather than author-centred monuments. Its operational value is the notion of the common: a shared plane of production where language, urban space, technical systems, care and resistance become co-authored materials. The conceptual bridge is to post-Fordist labour, biopolitics and urban assembly, where dispersed bodies do not simply occupy space but produce the social space through which new institutions become imaginable.