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Discussions of the link between practice and action in European thought in recent years have come to resemble something of a merry-go-round, circulating between optimistic ontologies and pessimistic diagnoses, celebrations of passivity and predictions of activity. Changes in the nature of work and attempts to keep up with, diagnose or explain various forms of social resistance have seen the re-emergence of a curious pantheon of outsider literary figures - Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer, Melville's Bartleby, the Bible's Job.1 Work and its refusal are embodied in these troubled symbols of aesthetic excess (Josephine just wants to sing, not work like the other mice), obstinate potentiality (Bartleby's "I would prefer not to") and Job (the progressive withdrawal of all meaningful things and attachments). There is something minimal in all these figures, reduced to their ability to merely persist or to refuse in the last resort. We are reminded a little of Marx's early claims regarding "a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society... a total loss of humanity" which can only redeem itself through "the total redemption of humanity."2 But there is a crucial difference between Marx's universal class and these isolated, broken figures: the collective dimension is absent. Has contemporary philosophy become so withdrawn from organized struggle that it can only conceive of transformations in the attitude to work by recourse to minimal individuals? The last line of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street may be "Ah, Bartleby! Ah humanity!" but this is more like a sigh of despair than a radical loss presaging redemption, political or otherwise. Is this all we can hope for? It is arguable that transformations in work and the composition of labor have made older, classically Marxist analysis seem outmoded, or at least in need of radical overhaul, but contemporary thought seems to have opted for two extreme responses: the radically pessimistic (or minimalist) or the baselessly optimistic. If Agamben falls into the former camp, then Hardt and Negri represent the latter with their concept of the multitude:
The contemporary cooperative productive capacities through which the anthropological characteristics of the multitude are continually transcribed and reformulated, cannot help revealing a telos, a material affirmation of liberation.3
Just as it is altogether too quick...