exeunt note 1

Natural right is not negated in the passage to civil right, as it is in dialectical conceptions of society, but rather it is preserved and intensi- fied, just as imagination is fortified in reason. In this transformation the multiplicity of society is forged into a multitude.20 The multitude remains contingent in that it is always open to antagonism and conflict, but in its dynamic of increasing power it attains a plane of consistency; it has the ca- pacity to pose social normativity as civil right. The multitude is multiplicity made powerful. Spinoza's conception of civil right, then, complements the first notion of freedom with a second: from the freedom from order to the freedom of organization; the freedom of multiplicity becomes the freedom of the multitude. And the rule of the multitude is democracy: "This right, which is defined by the power of the multitude, is generally called a State. And it is absolutely controlled by he who through common consent man- ages the affairs of the republic... If this charge belongs to a council com- posed of the general multitude, then the State is called a democracy" (Political Treatise 11:17). In the passage of freedom, then, from multiplicity to multitude, Spinoza composes and intensifies anarchy in democracy. Spino- zian democracy, the absolute rule of the multitude through the equality of its constituent members, is founded on the "art of organizing encounters." (GD:AiP 110)

First off, its worth noting that reading Spinoza in the original text is an entirely different ordeal from the continental engagements Hardt is dealing with here, specifically those of Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri (the former being heavily Nietzschean, the latter heavily Marxist). That being said, I do have the impression that this naturalist view of democracy, as the pinnacle of our natural inclinations when touched by what Spinoza calls "the third kind of knowledge," is true to his work. I like to think of this as a "lego-block" metaphysics: one learns the wisdom to ignore connections that do not work, that do not expand one's power (which for Spinoza is equivalent to both surface area of composability with other affecting agencies - power to be affected - and joy) and to follow rational intuition into an ordeal of commonness, with no teleology except what Hardt calls elsewhere a "materialist teleology" - the spinning pursuit of more commonness in order to discover more capacities to be affected, more avenues through which to experience joy.

I love this lego-block creative metaphysics because it has the effect of making affective connections - say romance - sound mechanical or technical, while making mechanics sound romantic. I suspect this is the kind of stirring we need in order to become more democratic and to think about technology more democratically: to understand our desires and emotions as somewhat more mechanical while understanding the mechanisms around us as being phenomena somehow of affection and desire.

The vision of democracy in the quote also works to me when considered next to Hayles and Deutsch, that is from a posthumanist and information theoretic perspective. Inasmuch as we understand life as a technological process of information habitating elements of the material world in order to reproduce itself, and are willing to give that designation to any bit of information capable of autonomously reproducing itself, democracy becomes a technology, a technological horizon for exploring what kind of information is able to embody itself in reality, what common patterns can be forged through the discovery process of the participatory forms of democracy, and -because we know the universe can do so much more, can venture so much further into the possibility space of universes, when information has found successful means to reliably reproduce itself- what kind of new things a universe can make. Democracy as a long-form, interspecies technological improvisation into the cosmic morphospace. (I love when Negri writes in his essay "Reliqua Desiderantur," Democracy is a prolix method.)

What are the implications of this Spinozian view of democracy for d/acc? It's clear that this vision of democracy tolerates the posthuman very well, but the question remains, can Vitalik's d/acc tolerate the posthuman?