Death of the Artist by Nicola McCartney;

Author:Nicola McCartney;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786724724
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

The condition of the ‘multitude’ is that it must expand rhizomatically without prejudice, in order to prevent a hierarchical system, never stopping, so it becomes a multitude of global difference. While the Guerrilla Girls have undergone several revisions to their original group of founding members and have fought over their own identity politics, they retain the ability, through their use of pseudonyms and masks, to expand and contract like the ‘multitude’, well beyond the mortality and location of the current members. In fact, in order to become a part of the network, one does not need to wear a gorilla mask or be legally incorporated. Anyone can join the conspiracy, sign online petitions and download the posters.

Hardt and Negri argue that the right to disobedience and difference are fundamental, but ‘The challenge posed by the concept of the multitude is for a social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different.’70 That is, the collective or ‘multitude’ should continue to grow in number and strength without detriment to its individual members by undermining the right to difference. The Guerrilla Girls have continued to grow in scale and production, if not in human numbers. Though the Guerrilla Girls have struggled to retain and recognise their internal difference, this is something that their anonymity theoretically provides. However, in my attempts to draw comparisons between the Guerrilla Girls and the ‘multitude’, there is an implicit, somewhat dangerous, celebration of Hardt and Negri’s ideas, which also need interrogating. The ‘multitude’ has received criticism for failing to sufficiently recognise differences of gender and race, which, historically and politically, had shaped their theory. In 2010 Angela McRobbie argued that women were already forming social networks as part of their own precarious labour opportunities, prior to Hardt and Negri’s conception of the ‘multitude’. The Guerrilla Girls are one such example but she cites others of women’s self-initiated bookstores and the sharing of childcare. In her own words, ‘Hardt and Negri are locked within a class model which permits no space at all for reflecting on the centrality of gender and sexuality.’71

Moreover, in their perceived homogonising of ‘class’, it is implied that gender is no longer a ‘problem’ or that class struggle should be enough to unite persons of different nations and histories. The women’s movement is referred to but more for its role in disrupting the supply of new labour, women being ‘cast in the language of either domestic labour or reproduction’.72 McRobbie attempts to rectify Hardt and Negri’s writing on labour by reinstating the significance of the expanding opportunities for women: feminists’ fight for the right to work, equal pay, and thus increased spending power, saw a ‘feminisation of the workforce’ not adequately reflected by Hardt and Negri’s trajectory of the ‘multitude’. Booming sectors such as beauty, fashion and lifestyle are predominantly represented by and aimed at women, as is care-work for children and the elderly, schooling and charity work. Women are thus a significant and distinct bio-political force of labour,

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