substratum

Constituent power is continuous and everyday. Appearances, however, are deceptive: in appearance, constituent power emerges only in moments of crisis, in the transition from one political order to another, soon thereafter to disappear. As Negri notes, "once the exceptional moment of innovation is over, constituent power seems to exhaust its effects" (Insurgencies 327).

The normative regulations of constituted power are more familiar than is the uproarious intensity associated with constitutional assemblies, when constituent power is glimpsed in full force as it intervenes decisively on the political stage. But for Negri, this "appearance of exhaustion" is simply "mystification"; in fact, "the only limits on constituent power are the limits of the world of life" (327, 328).

Constituent power "persists": once a constitution is declared, it goes underground; unseen, it continues to expand until it erupts once more to interrupt constituted power, forcing drastic changes in social relations. Capital responds with a series of class recompositions that it presents as natural; the state reacts with periodic refoundations that it presents as simple renegotiations of some original social pact.

At each stage, the multitude is beaten back, temporarily defeated, "absorbed into the mechanism of representation" (Insurgencies 3) and so misrecognized as class, people, mass, or some other docile political subject. But even such misrecognitions, Negri claims, signal an "ontological accumulation" (334). Being itself is transformed through the "continuous and unrestrainable practice" that is the multitude's everyday, permanent revolution (334).

A focus on constituent power, then, rather than on the different forms taken by constituted power, opens up "a new substratum" of history, "an ontological level on which productive humanity anticipate[s] the concrete becoming, forcing it or being blocked by it" (232).