“Multitudes is a political, cultural and artistic journal published quarterly.

Established in March, 2000, it is the backbone of a transnational editorial collective that runs an electronic list-serve, Multitudes-Infos, places back issues on line one year after publication, and edits one book serie through Éditions Amsterdam, Multitudes-interventions.

For Multitudes, politics lies outside the walls of the institutions dedicated to it, and knowledge is not enclosed in the depths of the academy. Its goal is to experiment with new conditions of political enunciation and agency while sketching out problematics that run across the fields of political eoconomy, philosophy, artistic practice and the emergent cultures of cyber-freedom.

Multitudes re-interrogates a few authors of preference from the annals of French philosophy (Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, but also Tarde and Simondon), classical philosophy (Machiavelli, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Marx), and Italian autonomism, but also explores subaltern studies, minority studies, and gender and queer studies. It takes up and enriches the debates opened by Hardt and Negri in Empire and Multitude; it dialogues with Gorz, Sloterdijk, Rancière, Badiou, Boltanski and Castel...

Multitudes takes interest in the analysis of all forms of domination, but it also strives to detect the construction of new spaces of creation, liberty and transformation in social movements (particularly those that are related to part-time and precarious labor).

Multitudes aims to be a companion to social movements that work upon the present by lending them an open ear and by bringing to them the echo of innovative concepts in such a way as to build common points of reference and strengthen the power and desire to intervene in both globalization and the formation of Europe.”

• Artists - economic conditions
• Biopower
• Biotechnology - philosophy
• Buildings, Portable
• Conscience
• Creole dialects, French – Réunion
• Cooperative societies - Italy
• Financial crises - Korea (South)
• Gated communities - South Africa
• Guaranteed annual income
• Individuation (psychology)
• Knowledge workers
• Lesbianism - political aspects
• Linux
• Military-industrial complex - Israel
• Natural selection
• Organic compounds - synthesis
• Radicalism – Italy
• Skepticism
• Social Darwinism
• Social conflicts - Brazil
• Sovereignty - Europe
• Subjectivity - political aspects
• Violence - philosophy

A transcultural journal, is how Multitudes defines itself.

Multitude, the term, is historically derived from Machiavelli and Spinoza, and was infused with new political life by Autonomista Antonio Negri and American scholar, Michael Hardt, when they published Empire, an alleged hit-manifesto that capitalized, expanded, and elaborated on the political and social momentum garnered by Western societies’ anti-globalization protests; Seattle (1999) and Genoa (2001) being the most virulent and mediated ones. This momentum was subdued by the events that followed the September 11 Terrorist Attacks in New York, the election and reelection of Bush II, and the inability of the 2003 multitudinous massive world protests against the re-invasion of Irak to stop the war.

Both the book and the journal appeared in 2000, marking not the beginning of something, but rather the continuation and crystallization of years of political struggle and thought, as Multitudes, the journal, continues a lineage that had been thinking questions of political agency, forms of resistance, and importantly, forms of cooperativistic or autonomous enactions at the heart of über developed, post-industrial Western societies, which despite the affluence remain unsettled. In fact, Multitudes positions itself as a successor of Negri’s Future antérieur (1990-1998).

But Multitudes displays a wider range of interests than its predecessor; besides political sciences and philosophy, they are also interested in art, in particular contemporary art which is engaged with the social, economical, and political mutations that had occurred in a ‘knowledge society’ or ‘information society;’ art that is reflective of the contexts that circumscribe what can be thought and created, while paradoxically allowing its production and diffusion. Of note are the many articles dedicated to ‘immaterial capital,’ as if a few of the artists, thinkers, writers, and the journal itself, were trying to figure out how to make ends meet; because the question remains unanswered: how to survive economically in a changed landscape of choice, one that doesn’t involve positions in academia, nor circulation in the trade-art celebrity circuits?

To this question Multitudes’ website provides one possible answer, as it enacts multiple functions: a journal’s website, a repository of a diversity of contents, an archive, a list-serve, an internationalist node of thought.

This internationalism is also what makes Multitudes interesting, as French culture tends to be chauvinistic; for readers of these words based in the United States it might be puzzling to learn that most of the representatives of what is known in North America as ‘continental philosophy,’ do not have the same clout in French intellectual life as they enjoy in U.S. Academia; for this reason, the journal's embrace of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, in the same country that their thought stemmed from should be perceived as an anti-parochialism statement of sorts; to this one should add their engagement with the remnants of Italian Autonomia, allowing the journal to apply all these philosophical and political frameworks (biopolitics, multitudes, worker’s movements, the minor, immaterial capital, etc.) to local, European, and other world contexts; the attention they have dedicated to divergent sexualities, biopower, biopolitics, and biotechnologies, open source knowledge, and also to local minors like immigrant women, les banlieues, and les sans-abri would attest to the accuracy of this statement; social movements--of protests or of possibilities--are also objects of thorough reflections, as well as new aesthetics forms, and piercing analysis of cultural production dilemmas, as faced in our current ‘knowledge society.’

Reading, looking and thinking with Multitudes, the journal and the term, can give a hopeful glimpse of a rhizomatic life of the mind, with its very grounding roots and shoots sent out from the diverse, either combative or positive nodes located in our unstable reality. To engage with, and to give voice to the submerged and the ever shifting subjectivities.