Re: [ox-en] Fwd: <nettime> Radical machines against the techno-empire
- From: "john03" <john03 smalleconomy.com>
- Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 10:05:55 -0500
Small economy
http://www.smalleconomy.com
On Mon, 23 Feb 2004 17:53:05 [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], Martin Hardie wrote
snip//
Don't hate the machine, be the machine. How can we turn the sharing
of knowledge, tools and spaces into new radical revolutionary productive
machines, beyond the inflated Free Software? This is the challenge that
once upon the time was called reappropriation of the means of
production.
----
Subject: <nettime> Radical machines against the techno-empire
Date: Monday 23 February 2004 02:07
From: Matteo Pasquinelli <matteopasquinelli gmx.it>
To: nettime-l bbs.thing.net
[ dear nettimers, orig. for framemagazine.org and neuro.kein.org /m]
rtf + pdf: http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2264
Radical machines against the techno-empire. From utopia to network
by Matteo Pasquinelli
Everyone of us is a machine of the real,
everyone of us is a constructive machine.
-- Toni Negri
Technical machines only work if they are not out of
order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually
break down as they run, and in fact run only when they
are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage
of this property by creating veritable group fantasies in
which desiring production is used to short-circuit social
production, and to interfere with the reproductive
function of technical machines by introducing an
element of dysfunction.
-- Gilles Deluze, Felix Guattari, L'anti-Oedipe
What is knowledge sharing? How does the knowledge economy function?
Where is the general intellect at work? Take the cigarettes machine.
The machine you see is the embodying of a scientific knowledge into
hardware and software components, generations of engineering stratified
for commercial use: it automatically manages fluxes of money and
commodities, substitutes a human with a user-friendly interface,
defends private property, functions on the basis of a minimal control
and restocking routine. Where has the tobacconist gone? Sometimes he
enjoys free time. Other times the company that owns the chain of
distribution has replaced him. In his place one often meets the
technician. Far from emulating Marx's Fragment on machines with a
Fragment on cigarette machines, this unhealthy example is meant to show
how postfordist theories live around us and that material or abstract
machines built by collective intelligence are organically chained to
the fluxes of the economy and of our needs.
Rather than of general intellect we should talk of general
intellects. There are multipleforms of collective intelligence. Some
can become totalitarian systems, such as the military-managerial
ideology of the neocons or of Microsoft empire. Others can be
embodied in social democratic bureaucracies, in the apparatus of
police control, in the maths of stock market speculators, in the
architecture of our cities
(every day we walk on concretions of collective intelligence). In
the dystopias of 2001 Space Odysseyand The Matrix, the brain of machines
evolves into self-consciousness to the point of getting rid of the
human. 'Good' collective intelligences, on the other hand, produce
international networks of cooperation such as the network of the global
movement, of precarious workers, of free software developers, of
media activism. They also produce the sharing of knowledge in
universities, the Creative Commons open licenses and participative
urban planning, narrations and imaginaries of liberation.
From a geopolitical perspective we could figure ourselves in one of
Philip Dick's sci-fi paranoia: Earth is dominated by one
Intelligence, but inside of it a war unfolds between two
Organisations of the general intellect, opposed yet intertwined.
Used to thetraditionalrepresentativeforms of the global movement we
fail to grasp the new productive conflicts. Concerned as we are about
theimperial war, we do not appreciate the centrality of this
struggle. Following Manuel Castells, we define the movement as aresistance
identity that fails to become aprojectidentity. We are not aware of the
distance between the global movement and the centre of capitalist
production. Paraphrasing Paolo Virno, we say that there already is
too much politics in new forms of production for the politics of the
movement to still enjoy any autonomous dignity.[1]
The events of 1977 (not only in Italy but also in the punk season)
sanctioned the end of the 'revolutionary' paradigm and the beginning
of that of movement, opening new spaces of conflict in the fields of
communication, media and the production of the imagery. These days
we are discovering that the 'movement' as a format needs to be
overcome, in favour of that of network.
Three kinds of action, well separated in the XIXth century - labour,
politics and art - are now integrated into one attitude and central
to each productive process. In order to work, do politics or produce
imaginary today one needs hybrid competences. This means that we all
are workers-artists-activists, but it also means that the figures of
the militant and the artist are surpassed and that such competences are
only formed in a common space that is the sphere of the collective
intellect.
Since Marx's Grundrisse, the general intellect is the patriarch of a
family of concepts that are more numerous and cover a wide range of
issues:knowledge-based economy,information society,cognitive
capitalism,immaterial labour, collective intelligence, creative
class,cognitariat,knowledge sharing and postfordism. In the last few
yearsthe political lexiconhas got rich of interlaced critical tools
that we turn over in our hands wondering about their exact
usefulness.For the sake of simplicity, we only accounted for the
terms that inherited an Enlightenment, speculative, angelic and
almost neognostic approach. But reality is much more complex and we
wait for new forms to claim for themselves the role that within the
same field is due to desire, body, aesthetics, biopolitics. We also
remember the quarrel of cognitivevs. precariousworkers, two faces of
the same medal that the precogsof Chainworkers.org describe in this
way: "cognitive workers are networkers, precarious workers are
networked, the former are brainworkers, the latter chainworkers: the
former first seduced and then abandoned by companies and financial
markets, the latter dragged into and made flexible by the fluxes of
global capital".[2]
The point is that we are searching for a new collective agent and a new
point of application for the rusted revolutionary lever. The success
of the concept of multitude also reflects the current
disorientation. Critical thought continuously seeks to forge the
collective actor that can embody the Zeitgeistand we can go back to
history reconstructing the underlying forms of each paradigm of
political action: the more or less collective social agent, the more
or less vertical organisation, the more or less utopian goal.
Proletariat and multitude, party and movement, revolution and self-
organisation.
In the current imaginary the general intellect (or whatever you want
to call it) seems to be the collective agent, its form being the
network, its goal creating a plane of self-organisation, its field
of action being biopolitical spectacular cognitive capitalism.
We are not talking about multitude here, because it is a concept at
once too noble and inflated, heir of centuries of philosophy and too
often called for by marching megaphones. The concept of multitude has
been more useful to exorcise the identitary pretences of the global
movement, than as a constructive tool. The pars construenswill be a
task for the general intellect: philosophers such as Paolo Virno,
when they have to find a common ground, the lost collective agent,
reconstruct the Collective Intelligence and Cooperation as emerging
and constitutive properties of the multitude.
In a different paranoid fable, we imagine that technology is the last
heir of a series of collective agents generated by history as in a
matryoshka doll: religion - theology - philosophy - ideology -
science - technology. This is to say that in information and intelligence
technologies the history of thought is stratified, even though we
only remember the last episode of this series, i.e. the network that
embodies the dreams of the previous political generation.
How did we come to all this? We are at the point of convergence between
different historical planes: the inheritance of historical vanguards
in the synthesis of aesthetics and politics; the struggles of '68
and '77 that open up new spaces for conflict outside of the
factories and inside the imaginary and communication; the
hypertrophy of the society of the spectacle and the economy of the
logo; the transformation of fordist wage labour into postfordist
autonomous precarious labour; the information revolution and the
emergence of the internet, the net economy and the network society;
utopia turned into technology. The highest exercise of
representation that becomes molecular production.
Some perceive the current moment as a lively world network, some as
an indistinct cloud, some as a new form of exploitation, some as an
opportunity. Today the density reaches its critical mass and forms a
global radical class on the intersection of the planes of activism,
communication, arts, network technologies and independent research.
What does it mean, to be productive and projectual, to abandon mere
representation of conflict and the representative forms of politics?
There is a hegemonic metaphor in political debate, in the arts world,
in philosophy, in media criticism, in network culture: that is Free
Software. We hear it quoted at the end of each intervention that
poses the problem of what is to be done (but also in articles of strategic
marketing.), whilst the twin metaphor of open source contaminates every
discipline: open source architecture, open source literature, open
source democracy, open source city...
Softwares are immaterial machines. The metaphor of Free Software is
so simple for its immateriality that it often fails to clash with
the real world. Even if we know that it is a good and right thing,
we ask polemically: what will change when all the computers in the
world will run free software? The most interesting aspect of the
free software model is the immense cooperative network that was
created by programmers on a global scale, but which other concrete
examples can we refer to in proposing new forms of action in the
real world and not only in the digital realm?
In the '70s Deleuze and Guattari had the intuition of the machinic,
an introjection / imitation of the industrial form of production. Finally
a hydraulic materialism was talking about desiring, revolutionary,
celibate, war machines rather than representative or ideological
ones.[3]
Deleuze and Guattari took the machine out of the factory, now it is
up to us to take it out of the network and imagine a post-internet
generation.
Cognitive labour produces machines of all kinds, not only software:
electronic machines, narrative machines, advertising machines, mediatic
machines, acting machines, psychic machines, social machines,
libidinous machines. In the XIXth century the definition of machine
referred to a device transforming energy. In the XXth century
Turing's machine - the foundation of all computing - starts interpreting
information in the form of sequences of 0 and 1. For Deleuze and
Guattari on the other hand a desiring machine produces, cuts and
composes fluxes and without rest it produces the real.
Today we intend by machine the elementary form of the general
intellect, each node of the network of collective intelligence, each
material or immaterial dispositif that organically interlinks the
fluxes of the economy and our desires.
At a higher level, the network can itself be regarded as a mega-machine
of assemblage of other machines, and even the multitude becomes
machinic, as Negri and Hardt write in Empire: "The multitude not only
uses machines to produce, but also becomes increasingly machinic
itself, as the means of production are increasingly integrated into the
minds and bodies of the multitude. In this context reappropriation
means having free access to and control over knowledge, information,
communication, and affects because these are some of the primary
means of biopolitical production. Just because these productive
machines have been integrated into the multitude does not mean that
the multitude has control over them. Rather, it makes more vicious
and injurious their alienation. The right to reappropriation is
really the multitudes right to self-control and autonomous self-production".
[4]
In other words in postfordism the factory has come out of the factory
and the whole of society has become a factory. An already machinic
multitude suggests that the actual subversion of the productive
system into an autonomous plane could be possible in a flash, by
disconnecting
the multitude from capital command. But the operation is not that
easy in the traditional terms of 'reappropriation of the means of
production'. Why?
Whilst it is true that today the main means of labour is the brain
and that workers can immediately reappropriate the means of
production, it is also true that control and exploitation in society
have become immaterial, cognitive, networked. Not only the general
intellect of the multitudes has grown, but also the general
intellect of the empire. The workers, armed with their computers,
can reappropriate the means of production, but as soon as the stick
their nose out of their desktop they have to face a Godzilla that
they had not predicted, the Godzilla of the enemy's general intellect.
Social, state and economic meta-machines to which human beings are
connected like appendixes - are dominated by conscious and subconscious
automatisms. Meta-machines are ruled by a particular kind of
cognitive labour which is the administrative political managerial
labour, that runs projects, organizes, controls on a vast scale: a
form of general intellect that we have never considered, whose
prince is a figure that appears on the scene in the second half of
the XXth century: the manager.
As Bifo tells us recalling Orwell, in our post-democratic world (or
if you prefer in empire) managers have seized command: "Capitalism
is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now
arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither
capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The
rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control
the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians,
bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name
of managers. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush
the working class, and so organise society that all power and
economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property
rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be
established. The new managerial societies will not consist of a
patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states
grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and
America. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an
aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom".
[5]
At the beginning we mentioned two intelligences that face one another
in the world and the forms in which they manifest themselves. The
multitude functions as a machine because it is inside a scheme, a
social software, thought for the exploitation of its energies and its
ideas. Then, the techno-managers (public private or military) are those
who, whether consciously or not, plan and control machines made up of
human beings assembled with one another. The dream of General intellect
brings forth monsters.
Compared with the pervasive neoliberal techno-management, the
intelligence of the global movement is of little importance. What's
to be done? We need to invent virtuous revolutionary radical
machines to place them in the nodal points of the network, as well
as facing the general intellect that administers the imperial meta-
machines. Before starting this we need to be aware of the density of
the 'intelligence' that is condensed in each commodity, organization,
message and media, in each machine of postmodern society.
Don't hate the machine, be the machine. How can we turn the sharing
of knowledge, tools and spaces into new radical revolutionary productive
machines, beyond the inflated Free Software? This is the challenge that
once upon the time was called reappropriation of the means of
production.
Will the global radical class manage to invent social machines that can
challenge capital and function as planes of autonomy and autopoiesis?
Radical machines that are able to face the techno-managerial
intelligence and imperial meta-machines lined up all around us? The
match multitude vs. empire becomes the match radical machines vs.
imperial techno-monsters. How do we start building these machines?
Matteo Pasquinelli
mat AT rekombinant.org
Berlin - Bologna, February 2004
(translated by Arianna Bove)
--
Notes
[1] Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), New York
2003.
Orig. ed. Grammatica della moltitudine, Derive Approdi, Roma 2002.
[2] Chainworkers, Il precognitariato. L'europrecariato si
[UTF-8?]�sollevato, 2003, published on www.rekombinant.org/article.php?
sid=2184.
See also
www.chainworkers.organdwww.inventati.org/mailman/listinfo/precog.
[3] Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, L'anti-Oedipe, Les Editions De
Minuit, Paris 1972.
[4] Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge MA 2000.
[5] George Orwell, Second Thoughts on James Burnham, 1946, quoted in
Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Il totalitarismo tecno-manageriale da Burnham
a Bush, 2004, published on www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2241.
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