Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their book Empire make a distinction between ‘multitude’ and ‘people’ in that the former is a multiplicity with an open, inconclusive constituent relation while the latter is homogenous and merely a resource for the state: the people are constituted in preparation for sovereignty. However, if people – activists - are conceived as multitude then things change.

First, the activist event is not static which it might be if it is subsumed into the ‘res-publica,’ (for instance the sphere of state designated spaces for protest – city squares, avenues etc.) organized around a specific object ('res') for dissent.

Second, the activist group can now be conceived as what Hardt and Negri call a ‘posse.’ This term is not invoked by them in the sense of the Wild West group, in the service of the Law, chasing an outlaw, but rather in its renaissance sense of ‘power,’ as a verb and activity, and of being something mobile and productive; crossed by knowledge rather than organized around an object of it. Important for them, posse is the becoming-subject of multitude and its mode of production, and more importantly, perhaps, it is mobile like contraband that is always in motion and forever modulating its form.

Spinoza asked "what is a body capable of?" This could be thought through, for instance, as the unfolding of a smuggler/artist/installation in an airport (considered around Robert Smithson’s essay ‘Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site’). Alternatively, it might be the 'puissance' or ‘power’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic war machine or rhizome that are about the potential of singular bodies to maximize and act out subjectivity in its own sphere – like multitude, neither organized around an object nor reacting to oppression from above.

Now, Hardt and Negri raise exactly the same issue regarding posse:
"Posse is what a mind and a body can do". (Empire p408)

SIMON HARVEY