From Utopia to Networks
Submitted by annett on Sun, 04/04/2004 - 17:02. http://makeworlds.org/node/102
BY MATTEO PASQUINELLI
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
multiple forms 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 Odyssey and 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 the traditional representative forms of the global movement we fail to
grasp the new productive conflicts. Concerned as we are about the imperial war,
we do not appreciate the centrality of this struggle. Following Manuel Castells,
we define the movement as a resistance identity that fails to become a project
identity. 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.[ii] 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 years the political lexicon has 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 cognitive vs. precarious workers, two faces of the
same medal that the precogs of 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«.[ii] 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 Zeitgeist
and 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 construens will 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.
A global radical class
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...
Networks as megamachines
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.[iii] 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 multitude's right
to self-control and autonomous self-production«.[iv] 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 tha t 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.
Be the Machine!
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«.[v]
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@rekombinant.org Berlin - Bologna, February 2004 Web + PDF:
http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2257 (translated by Arianna Bove)
Notes [i] Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), New York 2003.
Orig. ed. Grammatica della moltitudine, Derive Approdi, Roma 2002. [ii] Chainworkers,
Il precognitariato. L'europrecariato si è sollevato, 2003, published on
www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2184. See also http://www.chainworkers.org
and http://www.inventati.org/mailman/listinfo/precog. [iii] Gilles Deleuze, Felix
Guattari, L'anti-Oedipe, Les Éditions De Minuit, Paris 1972. [iv] Michael
Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 2000. [v]
George Orwell, Second Thoughts on James Burnham, 1946, quoted in: Franco »Bifo«
Berardi, Il totalitarismo tecno-manageriale da Burnham a Bush, 2004, published
on http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=224