The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

178 Notes
references in this paragraph are to Faust (dir. Jan Svankmajer, 1994); The
Thing (dir. John Carpenter, 1982); H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror”
and “The Call of Cthulhu,” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
(New York: Penguin, 1999); and Begotten (dir. Elias Merhinge, 1990).
42. Aristotle, De anima, trans. Hugh Lawson - Tancred (New York: Penguin,
1986), 2.2, p. 159.
43. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1.22.2, in Selected Writings, ed.
and trans. Ralph McInerny (New York: Penguin, 1998).
44. Henri Bergson, “The Perception of Change,” in The Creative Mind
(New York: Citadel, 1974), 147.
45. Raoul Vaneigem, A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings (London:
Pluto, 2004), 31– 32.
46. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 77.
47. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 411.
48. Luis Villareal, “Are Viruses Alive?” Scientific American, December
2004, 105.
49. Roland Barthes, Image– Music– Text (New York: Hill and Wang,
1977), 149.
50. See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1 (New York: Zone,
1998).
Coda
1. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 222.
2. Ibid., 99.
3. In this characterization, Hobbes would represent the side of secular
sovereignty (in fact, sovereignty is a precondition for the commonwealth to
exist at all), whereas Spinoza would represent the side of the multitude (following
on his ontology, which emphasizes radical immanence, “God or nature,”
as the basic principle of all reality). But this is, of course, only a heuristic
opposition. Hobbes, for all his railing against the “multitude not yet united
into one person,” shows a great deal of ambivalence about the role that the
multitude plays (this is especially evident in De cive). Sometimes it is the
threat of instability within the commonwealth (the “disease” of civil war),
and sometimes the multitude is necessary for the passage from the “state of
nature” to a fully formed commonwealth. Likewise, while contemporary
readings of Spinoza often radicalize him as a proponent of the multitude,
texts such as the Tractatus Theologico - Politicus show an equally ambivalent
attitude toward the multitude: sometimes it is a revolutionary, almost self -
organizing force, and at other times it is simply factionalism and mob rule.
4. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti
(New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 25.
5. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, “The Advent of Netwar (Revisited),”
in Networks and Netwars (Santa Monica: Rand, 2001), 6.