― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Wednesday, 14 June 2006 16:51 (eighteen years ago) link
other college phrases: "creative destruction," ceteris paribus. quo vadisres Arcadia ego"Drang nach Ostendas dritte ReichLebensraumKulturkampfsturm und drangBildungsromants: mise only thing that anyone ever knows about Thomas Kuhn)contraposto, of suture.see also: scopophilia, female as to-be-looked-atvigo, spengler, 'history class, whenever you see some statistic being thrown around whether it's being distorted or not."
BOOLEAN HIERARCHY IMPLICIT PARALLELISM, MUTUAL EXCLUSION, SEMAPHORE, ATOMIC OPERATION, (the dude who came up w/ the term "conspicuous the long run, we are all dead!")joseph schumpeter (the friedmanjohn kenneth galbraithjames buchananpaul krugman
economics -- the coase theorem!- ("OMG the limits of Western knowledge!!!")semiotics"to-be-looked-at-ness""queering of the..."phallo(go)centricthird worldISTthe of choice here)systems of significationthe uncannyconvergence, constructionism/essentialism, the digital ddd
320 240
the Naciremasearch: the pareto principle (aka "the 20/80 rule") theoryprisoners' dilemnathe phrases "moveable feast" (lit. majors) and "rational Hammadi library, 'The Fly Is About AIDS', Dziga Vertov, is "post hoc, ergo propter hoc." or something like ipsa loquiturexclusio uniusWeltschmerzWeltanschuungGötterdämmerungvis-a-vis, ergo, QEDars longa, vita brevis..."Et in en scene vs. mise en placepronunciamento"paradigm shift" (often the chiaroscuro,ionic, doric, corinthian.the glass ceilingsee also: phallic camera, theory moves in discreet cycles'Tristam Shandy."sublimationprojectionHerodotus, Thucydides, Gibbonperformativity "After this to make a point, you'll be able to tell FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING, TAIL-RECURSIVE FUNCTION, MEMORY COHERENCY MODEL, FINITE-STATE MACHINE,
EXPONENTIAL BACK-OFF
adam smiththomas malthusdavid ricardokarl marxleon walrashenry georgethorstein veblen consumption")arthur pigoujohn maynard keynes (the guy who said "in dude who came up the term "creative destruction")paul samuelsonmilton ven diagramsthe madeleine in RechercheThe Milgram Experiment!Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: imperial imaginarygeographies of spectatorshipthe nature of the (insert medium divide, image politics cf. kennedy/nixon debate, "cf.".
extreme programming
Rhizobiceae
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 15 June 2006 02:33 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Friday, 16 June 2006 02:44 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Saturday, 17 June 2006 02:49 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Saturday, 17 June 2006 19:03 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Tuesday, 20 June 2006 02:31 (eighteen years ago) link
On their fake Dow Chemical Website [2], the Yes Men first said as clearly and emphatically as possible that Dow Chemical Company had no intention whatsoever of repairing the damage. The real company received considerable backlash and both the real Dow and the Yes Men's Dow denied the statements but Dow took no real action. The Yes Men decided to pressure Dow further, so as "Finisterra" went on the news to claim that Dow planned to liquidate Union Carbide and use the resulting $12 billion to pay for medical care, clean up the site, and fund research into the hazards of other Dow products. After two hours of wide coverage, Dow issued a press release denying the statement, ensuring even greater coverage.
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Wednesday, 21 June 2006 02:42 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 22 June 2006 02:52 (eighteen years ago) link
(1)one who believes it may be possible to avoid bodily death altogether.
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Friday, 23 June 2006 02:29 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Friday, 23 June 2006 16:03 (eighteen years ago) link
This type of "ethical" argument is possibly the most absurd of all -- a strong statement, I realise, given the stiffness of its competition -- because of the enormity of what it overlooks within its own scope. To stand back and (by one's inaction) cause someone to die sooner, when one could act to let them live a lot longer at no (or even at some modest) cost to oneself or anyone else, is arguably the second most unnatural thing a human can do, second only (and then by a very small margin) to causing someone's death by an explicit action. (Of course, there is plenty of departure from these ethics in the world, but that's not the point -- abandonment of the law of the jungle is what most fundamentally defines humanity, and also what defines civilisation.) Thus, to ask humanity to accept the "naturalness" argument against life extension, and on that basis to delay the development of a cure for aging, is thus to ask it to transform itself into something as un-human as can be imagined. Even if such concerns were to turn out to be valid, it is for those who experience this diminution of their existence to act to restore it (e.g., by rejecting rejuvenation therapies that are on offer), not for us to make their choice for them.
One can also put this in terms of technology, rather than civilisation. It's clearly unnatural for us to accept the world as we find it: ever since we invented fire and the wheel, we've been demonstrating both our natural ability and our equally natural inherent desire to fix things that we don't like about ourselves and our environment. We would be going against that most fundamental aspect of what it is to be human if we decided that something so horrible as everyone getting frail and decrepit and dependent was something we should live with forever. And if you believe God put us here, presumably you also believe that God made us the way we are on purpose. Thus, if changing our world is playing God, it's just one more way in which God made us in His image.
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Saturday, 24 June 2006 00:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 25 June 2006 02:54 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 25 June 2006 21:04 (eighteen years ago) link
disenchantment and democracy¦ &br vbar brvba ¦ brvba r;&br vbar;¦ ;¦¦&brvb ar;¦ ¦ ;& rvba r;&b vbar;&br v ba r;¦¦¦ & brvba r;¦&brvba r;¦¦¦¦ lost within multitude, nothing to (constate/realize the impact/of one's cooperation& brvbar;¦&br v b a r; & b r v b a r ; & b r v b a r ;&b rvbar;¦¦& brvbar;¦¦¦¦¦&brv bar;¦¦ ;¦¦¦¦¦ ;¦¦¦ some better understanding of the power of one's visible actions¦¦&brvba r;¦&brvb a r ;& brv bar; &brvb ar;&b rvba r; & b rvb ar; &brvb ar;&br vbar;& brvba r ;& br vba r;&b rvba r; &br vb ar ;&b rvb ar; &br vb ar ; & b r v bar ; ¦¦& brvbar;&brvb ar;¦¦¦for meaning¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦&brv bar;¦¦ ¦&brvba r;&brvb ar;¦&brv b a r;& br vbar;¦& brvbar;¦¦¦¦¦ feedback is needed&brvba r;¦¦¦¦¦¦&b rvbar;¦ ¦ &brvba r;&brvb ar;& rvbar ;¦¦&brvb a r;¦&b rvbar;¦&brvba r;& br v ba r;¦¦&brv bar;¦ enter cybernetique¦&brvba r;&b rvb a r;& b r v b a r;¦¦&brvba r;&brvba r;¦¦¦ ;¦&br vbar;¦&brvb ar;¦&brvb ar ;&br vba r; ¦¦¦¦¦¦to percieve this power&br vbar;¦¦¦¦&b rvbar;&brv bar;&brv bar;¦ ;&brvb r;&b vbar;¦& brvbar;¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦&br vbar;¦¦¦¦ that's a difference, ce potentiel de pomo liberté , différent than ancient world, and different from the modern world.
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Tuesday, 27 June 2006 13:19 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 29 June 2006 02:57 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 29 June 2006 03:00 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Saturday, 1 July 2006 02:22 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 2 July 2006 02:21 (eighteen years ago) link
― Machibuse '80 (ex machina), Sunday, 2 July 2006 20:17 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Monday, 3 July 2006 03:00 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Wednesday, 5 July 2006 02:19 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 6 July 2006 02:23 (eighteen years ago) link
Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting an outline and, perhaps, discussion questions about Hardt/Negri's Multitude. Here are my notes on the Preface.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (N.Y.: Penguin Press, 2004).
Preface: Life in Common
I. The possibility of democracy on the global scale is emerging for the first time;A. the project of the multitude both expresses the desire for this democracy and provides the means for achieving it.B. But the primary obstacle to democracy is war, so there we must begin. (xi).II. This book is a sequel to Empire.A. Empire addressed the new global form of sovereignty.B. It identified “network power” as this new form, including as its primary elements, or nodes, dominant nation-state plus major capitalist institutions, supranational institution, and other powers. This power is “imperial,” but not imperialist. (xii).C. Our analysis cuts across “diagonally” current debates about:1. Multilateralism/unilateralism2. Pro-/anti-Americanism3. Because not even America can “go it alone” (xii-xiii).D. Empire rules over a global order:1. Fractured by internal divisions and hierarchies2. Plagued by perpetual war, which is:a. Both inevitable in Empire,b. Functions as a system of rule (xiii).III. This book focuses on the Multitude:A. Two faces to globalization:1. New mechanisms of control and conflict that maintain order.2. New circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents (xiii).B. The Multitude itself might be conceived as a network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally.1. It is thus different from “the People,” which is “one.”2. And from the “Masses,” which is indifference, the merging of differences into grey,3. The Multitude is multi-colored, like Joseph’s magical coat.4. The challenge posed by the concept of the multitude is:a. For a social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in commonb. While remaining internally different (xiv).5. It also is different from the working class, because:a. The working class no longer plays a hegemonic role in the world economy,b. Production today has to be conceived in social terms rather than the merely economic: the production of communications, relationships, and forms of life.c. The Multitude is composed potentially of all the diverse figures of social production. (xv)C. Labor as social production:1. Tends through transformations of the economy to create and be embedded in cooperative and communicative networks2. Especially true for labor that creates immaterial projects such as ideas, images, affects, relationships.3. This new model of production we call “biopolitical production” to highlight that it not only involves the production of material goods but also produces all facets of social life, economic, cultural, and political.D. The Multitude also, in contrast to earlier revolutionary organizations, has increasingly democratic organization—network organizations that displace authority in collaborative relationships (xvi).
IV. But don’t expect that this book will answer the question, “What Is to Be Done?”A. Our goal is to rethink our most basic political concepts: power, resistance, multitude, democracy (xvi).B. And to do so in language as clear as possible (xvii).C. Empire/Multitude are related as Hobbes’ de Cive/Leviathan are, except that while Hobbes moved from the nascent social class to the new form of sovereignty, our focus is the inverse—from the new form of sovereignty to the new global class.
Posted by jim at 11:30 PM | Comments (1)
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 6 July 2006 23:42 (eighteen years ago) link
The next few extended entries on the Blogora are my outline of Hardt and Negri's Empire (2000); I hope we can have some discussion of their new book Multitude over the next few weeks. I realized that it might be helpful to have some notes on the earlier, more difficult work.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Preface:
1. “Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire” (xii).a. But Empire is NOT imperialism. The sovereignty of the nation-state was the cornerstone of imperialism. Empire has no territorial center of power; it is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule. “Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command” (xii).b. Empire not a metaphor, but a “concept”:i. A regime that effectively encompasses the whole civilized world.ii. It is not a historical regime originating in conquest, but an order that effectively suspends history and fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity (xiv).iii. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety: biopower.iv. Although continually bathed blood, the concept is always dedicated to the notion of a perpetual and universal peace outside history (xv).
2. The dominant productive processes have changed:a. Role of industrial factory labor has been reduced and priority given instead to “communicative, cooperative, and affective labor” (xiii).b. Creation of wealth tends ever more toward biopolitical production, “the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another” (xiii)
3. Rather than merely resist global flows and exchanges the “multitude” needs to invent new democratic forms and a new “constituent power” that will “one day take us through and beyond Empire” (xv). An alternative global society is being written today through the “resistances, struggles, and desires of the multitude” (xvi).
4. This book is an interdisciplinary toolbox of concepts for theorizing and acting in and against Empire. Narrow disciplinary boundaries are breaking down: an economist needs to understand cultural production to make sense of the economy, and a cultural critic needs a basic knowledge of economic processes to understand culture (xvi). In note 4, Hardt and Negri cites Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and Karl Marx’s Capital as models for their interdisciplinary work.
5. Overview of the book’s structure:a. Part 1: general problematic of Empire.b. Part 2: passage from the early modern period to the present from the standpoint of the history of ideas—especially the concept of sovereignty.c. Intermezzo: hinge that articulates the movement from the realm of ideas to production.d. Part 3: narrates the same passage from the standpoint of production (production includes both economic production AND the production of subjectivity). Both parts 2 and 3 are structured by:i. Account of the modern, imperialist phaseii. Mechanisms of passageiii. Our postmodern imperial worlde. Part 4: alternatives beyond Empire.
Empire 1.3: Alternatives Within Empire
I. Introduction:A. Construction of Empire is a response to class struggle by the "multitude."B. Still, the construction of Empire is a step forward--NO nostalgia for power structures such as the nation-state to protect against global capital.C. Like Marx, for whom capitalism, was "progressive," despite its horrors. [Capitalism as simultaneously the best thing and worst thing that happened to people.]D. Left has committed itself to local struggles and nationalism against global capital, but we believe this to be "false and damaging" (44). Can easily devolve into a "kind of primordialism that fixes and romanticizes social relations and identities" (45)E. We need instead to address "the production of locality, that is, the social machines that create and recreate the identities and differences that are understood as the local" (45). "We should be done once and for all with the search for an outside, a standpoint that imagines a purity for our politics." Let us confront the homogenizing and heterogenizing flows of Empire in all their complexity, "grounding our analysis in the power of the global multitude" (46).
II. The Ontological Drama of the Res Gestae:[A. res gestae=means literally "things done" in Latin. In the law, the "res gestae" rule is that a spontaneous remark made by a person immediately after an event (Oh, no! I ran over your cat!) is likely to be true, and thus an exception to the hearsay rule. Term seems to come from Althusser (p. 63) to refer to self-constituting, unmediated collective action . . .]B. 2 methodological approaches:1. Critical and deconstructive: subverting the hegemonic languages and social structures, thus revealing an alternative ontological basis that resides in the creative and productive practices of the multitude.2. Constitutive and ethico-political: "seeking to lead the processes of the production of subjectivity toward the constitution of an effective social, political alternative, a new constituent power" (47). Refuses any deterministic conception of historical development and any "rational" celebration of the result (48).III. Refrains of the "Internationale":A. Proletarian internationalism was a protest against the nation-state and its warmaking capacity; but its time is over (49-50). These were the real motor that drove the development of the institutions of capital and drove it in a process of reform and restructuring (51). [The point is valid: without threat of revolution, we would never have gotten the 40-hour week, occupational safety and health legislation, labor laws, etc. The CLOSER a country was to the Soviet Union the more likely it was to have a generous welfare state.]1. First wave after 18482. After 1917 Soviet Revolution3. After the Chinese and Cuban revolutionsB. Living labor always tries to liberate itself from rigid, territorializing regimes. "When one adopts the perspective of the activity of the multitude, its production of subjectivity and desire, one can recognize how globalization, insofar as it operates a real deterritorialization of the previous structures of exploitation and control, is really a condition of the liberation of the multitude" (52). [Why do I hear "mob" when they say "multitude"?]
IV. The Mole and the Snake:A. We must broaden the term proletariat to include all whose labor is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected to capitalist norms of production and reproduction (52).B. Immaterial labor power, involved in communication, cooperation, and reproduction of affects, occupies an increasingly central position both in capitalist production and the composition of the proletariat.C. New struggles, though, are incommunicable; Chiapas, Intifada, etc. don't immediately translate across borders the labor struggles once did (54).D. But:1. Each struggle leaps immediately to the global level and attacks the imperial constitution2. All destroy the distinction between economic and political: they are at once economic, political, and cultural--thus biopolitical struggles over a form of life, creating new public spaces and new forms of community (56).E. An obstacle is lack of a common enemy; clarifying the nature of the common enemy is an essential political task. How can we create a new common language that facilitates communication, like the languages of anti-imperialism and proletarian internationalist did for an earlier era. Perhaps we need to learn how to communicate singularities? No clear, mole-like tunnels any more, but the undulating motions of the snake (57).F. Leninism: target the weakest link (i.e., the weakest capitalist state, Russia). Now there is no weakest link. But, Empire can be attacked now from any point (59).
V. Two-Headed Eagle:A. First head of the imperial eagle: juridical structure and constituted power, constructed by the machine of biopolitical command.B. Second head is the plural multitude of productive, creative subjectivities of globalization who have learned to sail on this enormous sea (60). Universal nomadism.
VI. Political Manifesto:A. [Initial reference to Louis Althusser, the French Communist philosopher's "period of seclusion" refers to being institutionalized after strangling his wife during a manic-depressive episode. . . .] The genre of the "manifesto" as text.1. Similarity between Machiavelli's Prince and the Communist Manifesto: form of the argument consists of a specific apparatus (dispositif) that establishes particular relationships between the discourse and its object and between the discourse and its subject.2. Difference: subject (proletariat) and object (the Party) are co-present, while in Machiavelli there is a distance between the subject (the multitude) and the object (the Prince and the free, republican state) (63).B. What would a new manifesto look like? What subjects and objects would it create? "how can the endeavor to bridge the distance between the formation of the multitude as subject and the constitution of a democratic political apparatus find its prince?" (65). A new manifesto must aspire to fulfill a prophetic function, the function of an immanent desire that organizes the multitude (66).
Empire, Part 2: Passages of Sovereignty
[Remember that Parts 2 and 3 are the story of the passage from modernity to postmodernity, from imperialism to Empire; Part 2 specifically narrates the passage primarily in terms of the history of ideas, especially the genealogy of the concept of sovereignty, while part 3 will look at the same passage from the standpoint of production (not only economic, but also production of subjectivity itself). Each part's general structure will move from 1: modern, imperialist phase to 2: mechanisms of passage, to 3: our postmodern imperial world (xvii).]
2.1: Two Europes, Two Modernities
We identify 3 moments in the constitution of European modernity related to concept of sovereignty:A. Revolutionary discovery of the plane of immanence: discoveries in philosophy and science that made attention turn to "this world"B. reaction against these immanent forces and crisis in the form of authority:1. Renaissance and Reformation culminate in War2. Modernity itself as defined by crisis:a. between immanent, constructive, creative forces (like Spinoza's placing of humanity and nature in the position of God) and theb. transcendent power aimed at restoring order (e.g. the modern, absolutist state)C. Partial and temporary resolution of this crisis in the formation of a modern state as locus of sovereignty that transcends and mediates the plane of immanent forces. Sovereignty developed in coordination with modernity itself, Eurocentrism (70).1. Descartes and Kant as part of this strategy, by emphasizing reason and Enlightenment, contributing to a "story" Europe told about itself;2. Hobbes by creating a transcendent political apparatus as God; sovereignty thus defined both by transcendence and representation (84);3. Rousseau does the same with the General Will (85);4, Smith does the same by reducing everything to the Market (86), thus sovereignty and capital are synthesized; also Weber, with bureaucratic rationality (89-90).D. A new humanism? Refusal of transcendence, acceptance of creative power of our posthuman, simian, cyborg bodies (92).
2.2: Sovereignty of the Nation-State
I. Birth of the Nation:A. Patrimonial state as body of the monarch; cuju regio, ejus religio--religion as subordinated to the territorial control of the sovereign, who himself is part of the body of God (94).B. Yielded to the spiritual identity of the nation (rather than the divine body of the king). Reinvented the patrimonial body of the monarchic state in a new form. This new totality of power was structured partly by new capitalist productive processes on one hand and old networks of absolutist administration on the other. This was an uneasy relationship, so it was stabilized by cultural, integrating entity of national identity, based on blood relations, spatial continuity of history, and linguistic commonality (95). From subject to citizen. But this quickly became an ideological nightmare. Herder: every human perfection is, in a certain respect, "national" (101). the next step is construction of absolute racial difference (103). [Importance for the history of rhetoric: the shift from the classical texts to modern "literature" is deeply involved with this discovery of the spirit of the "People" in its national language/literature, which comes to replace Greek and Latin] But this was also the consolidation of the victory of the bourgeoisie (105).C. Paradox: the concept of nation promotes stasis and restoration in the hands of the dominant, while it is a weapon for change and revolution in the hands of the subordinated (106). Malcolm X, for example (107). But Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as examples of use by the dominant (110). Nationalist socialism (Stalin) and national socialism (Hitler) met because the abstract machine of national sovereignty is at the heart of both. [This is one of the most interesting political claims in the book. Counter-arguments?]
2.3: The Dialectics of Colonial Sovereignty
I. Introduction: "The crisis of modernity has from the beginning had an intimate relation to racial subordination and colonization"; the "dark Other of European Enlightenment" has been a necessary component for the negative foundation of European identity and modern sovereignty as such. "Colonial sovereignty is another insufficient attempt to resolve the crisis of modernity" (115).
II. Humankind Is One and ManyA. Don't forget the utopian element of global colonization: love of differences and the belief in universal freedom and equality. Examples of this utopianism:1. Bartolome de Las Casas--who protested against Spanish treatment of the natives of the New World.2. Toussaint L'Ouverture--leader of the successful slave revolt in Haiti (in the name of the same Universal Rights of Man used during the French Revolution).3. Karl Marx--advice to India: refuse both submission to British capital AND return to traditional Indian social structures. But the only alternative path Marx can imagine is the same path traveled by European society already (120). Marx's "Eurocentrism."B. The Crisis of Colonial Slavery:1. Perhaps the extension of slavery in the New World was a kind of imposed apprenticeship to capitalism (122). [Interesting argument; this is a much-contested issue among historians.]2. "The deterritorializing desire of the multitude is the motor that drives the entire process of capitalist development, and capital must constantly attempt to contain it" (124).C. The Production of Alterity:1. "The negative construction of non-European others is finally what founds and sustains European identity itself" (124).2. Anthropology as key academic discipline for "producing" the native other (125).3. British had to write a whole new Indian history to legitimate colonial rule (126).D. The Dialectic of Colonialism:1. "Colonialism homogenizes real social differences by creating one overriding opposition that pushes differences to the absolute and then subsumes the opposition under the identity of European civilization. Reality is not dialectical, colonialism is" (128).2. "Colonialism is an abstract machine that produces alterity and identity" (129). Another version of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic, in which the Master can only achieve a hollow form of recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to gain full consciousness (129)** see appended note on Hegel.E. The Boomerang of Alterity:1. Sartrean solutions: unite all oppressed peoples in the same struggle; practice of negritude (black is beautiful, in the US version); but only as a first step toward the ultimate goal of a raceless society (130-1).2. Fanon: reciprocal counterviolence (The Wretched of the Earth). Like Malcolm X.F. The Poisoned Gift of National Liberation1. National liberation becomes a project of modernization that hands the revolution over to a new power group, from India to Algeria and Cuba to Vietnam (134).2. But the new global order of capital is quite different from the colonialist and imperialist circuits of international domination.G. Contagion:1. Image of the colonized as disease-ridden (in Celine's Journey to the End of the Night).2. If one looks back, Europe appears reassuringly sterile.3. "The horror released by European conquest and colonialism is a horror of unlimited contact, flow, and exchange--or really the horror of contagion, miscegenation, and unbounded life" (136).4. Now we see Africa and Haiti's AIDS epidemic in terms reminiscent of the colonialist imaginary: unrestrained sexuality, moral corruption, and lack of hygiene .5. "Nothing can bring back the hygienic shields of colonial boundaries. The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion" (136).
Posted by jim at 11:35 AM | Comments (2)
Here's an outline of the Preface and Part One of Hardt and Negri's 2004 book Multitude. Anyone interested in discussing? They put "communication" at the heart of their diagnosis of contemporary capitalism and at the heart of their notion of resistance, so the book is of theoretical interest to rhetoricians.
Discussion Questions:
1. Any specific “clarification” or “literacy” questions?2. Are the diagnoses of contemporary war accurate—particularly the “homology” between post-Fordist production and new forms of war and revolutionaryorganization?3. We should probably exercise the principle of hermeneutic charity here: read the whole book before we start trashing the lack of a practicalprogram—BUT,a. Is there a dangerous flirtation with “radical chic” in this book?b. The argument from jeopardy (see Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction): why should we jeopardize the hard-won civil liberties and benefits of the social-democratic welfare state in the name of a revolutionary leap into the void?c. Why is it that every time they use the word “multitude” I hear the word“mob”? My general theory that all systems of political thought are based on one of two different types of anxiety:i. Fear of the Mob and the demagogues who might incite themii. Fear of the Elite and their monopoly of knowledge through expert discourses4. Virtually every major political theorist before the 18th century also reflected systematically on “rhetoric”—a theory of politicalprudence/practical wisdom involving the design of messages to persuade the target audience(s) of the political theory. What “rhetoric” is the counterpart of Hardt/Negri’s “dialectic”?
1: War
1.1 Simplicissimus
Exceptions
I. War is becoming a general, global, interminable phenomenon.A. War used to be armed conflict between sovereign political entities.B. Now it is more like civil war: armed conflict between sovereign or semisovereign combatants WITHIN a single sovereign territory (3).C. Like the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, 9/11/2001 opened a new era of war: the passage from modernity to postmodernity (4).D. How to understand this phenomenon of brutal global state of war?1. The notion of EXCEPTION [from the creepy pro-Nazi German legal theorist Carl Schmitt: “sovereign is he who can declare a state of exception,” i.e. the suspension of “normal” constitutional liberties; Schmitt also proposed—with considerable influenced on right-wing political strategists—that “the friend/enemy distinction” is fundamental to politics—hence our current US politics of constant war against the other party, conceived as the polarized “enemy”].2. The goal of modern, liberal political thought and practice was the separation of war from politics (6).3. But now the exception, the state of war, has become permanent and general.4. It is connected with “American exceptionalism”:i. That we are an exception from European corruptionii. New thing: we can claim an exception from the law (8).iii. But the classical republicanism on which the US was founded claimed that no one is above the law; the new state of affairs erodes the republican tradition that runs through the nation’s history (9).
II. Golem [as in Empire, these italicized sections seem to serve the rhetorical purpose of providing an imaginative/poetic interlude in the more expository main argument]: “Perhaps what monsters like the Golem are trying to teach us, whispering to us secretly under the din of our global battlefield, is a lesson about the monstrosity of war and our possible redemption through love” (12).
III. The Global State of WarA. War is becoming a permanent social relation; politics is increasingly war conducted by other meansB. Foucault on biopower: force is reinscribed in all social institutions, economic inequality, even personal and sexual relations: “a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life” (13).C. War on drugs as an example of trend of treating enemies as set of concepts or practices (14)1. The limits of war are rendered indeterminate, both spatially and temporally2. The conceptual merging of war and policing.3. The concept of justice moves war beyond the battle of interests to the cause of humanity as a whole (14-15).4. As a result, tolerance—a central conception of modern thought—is being undermined.D. Terrorism is used as justification for this expansion of war, but the term is unstable, potentially meaning:1. Revolt against a legitimate government2. Exercise of violence by a legitimate government in violation of human rights3. Practice of warfare in violation of rules of engagement (targeting civilians)E. Diminishing civil liberties and increasing rates of incarceration are manifestation of a constant social war. The new forms of power and control operate in contradiction with the new social composition of the population and blocks its new forms of productivity and expression—a similar obstruction of freedom and productive expression led to the implosion of the Soviet Union (17).
IV. Biopower and SecurityA. War is becoming ontological, but moving in 2 directions:1. Localized police actions, but2. Raised up to an ontological, global level by technologies of global destruction.B. Ever increasing use of torture—a generalized, yet banalized technique of control. [From Nat Hentoff’s Village Voice column this week: --I'm perfectly comfortable in telling you [that] our country is one that safeguards human rights and human dignity. George W. Bush to a Russian reporter in Slovakia, February 24. --Mehboob Ahmad, a 35-year-old Afghan, was left hanging upside down by a chain, sexually assaulted, probed anally, threatened with a snarling dog at close range. Los Angeles Times, March 2, on Ali et al. v. Rumsfeld, a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First detailing Rumsfeld's responsibility for the torture and other abuses of U.S. detainees.--Then [the guard] brought a box of food and he made me stand on it, and he started punishing me. Then a tall black soldier came and put electrical wires on my fingers and toes and on my penis, and I had a bag over my head. Then he was saying, "which switch is on for electricity?" "United States of America: Human Dignity Denied: Torture and Accountability in the 'War on Terror,' " Amnesty International, 200-page report]C. Shift from defense to security—the use of preemptive strikes to undermine sovereignty (20).D. War now has a constituent, regulative function: it creates and maintains social hierarchies, a form of biopower aimed at the promotion and regulation of social life (21). While it was earlier regulated by legal structures, now war becomes regulating by imposing its own legal framework (22).E. Nationbuilding a good example of postmodern/essentialist thought: the nation can be destroyed or invented as part of a political program (23).
V. Legitimate ViolenceA. Declining ability of states to legitimate violence may explain increase in intensity of accusations of terrorism (27).B. Rise of international courts aimed at the destruction of rights and sovereignty of peoples through supranational jurisdictional practices (e.g. trial of Milosevic)—decline of international law and rise of a global or imperial form of law (29).C. The individualizing of the enemy: Noriega, bin Laden, Milosevic, Hussein, Qadafi—pedagogical tool for presenting this new view of war—not what power is, but what power saves us from (31).
VI. Samuel Huntington, Geheimrat: Trilateral Commission report of democracy in the 1970’s became blueprint for destruction of the welfare state; Clash of Civilizations became blueprint for current war.
1.2: Counterinsurgencies
I. Birth of the new warA. Postmodern warfare much like post-Fordist production:1. Based on mobility and flexibility2. Integrates intelligence, information, and immaterial labor3. Extends militarization to outer space, the ends of the earth, depths of the ocean (40).B. RMA: Revolution in Military Affairs1. New technologies provide new form of combat2. US now has overwhelming dominance of military power3. With the end of the cold war, paradigm of war as predictable mass conflict has ended, too (41).C. But:1. Doesn’t really correspond to reality,2. E.g. suicide bombings3. Lacks consideration of the social subject that makes war (45-46).D. Machiavelli’s republican ideal: armed, free men defending the republic; the postmodern dream of war without bodies, armies without soldiers, contradicts this ideal (48).E. The choice:1. All armies become mercenary armies2. How love of country could again become love of humanity (49-51).
II. Asymmetrical conflict:A. The enemy has a new form: threats to imperial order now appear as distributed networks rather than centralized and sovereign subjects—all wars today are netwars1. No center to the network2. No stable boundaries between inside and outside3. Makes it hard to find an “enemy target” to attack (54-55).4. The old army was like a wolf-pack; today’s enemy is a swarm, and it is very difficult to attack a swarm (57).5. So it takes a network to attack a network. Network forces of imperial enemies face network enemies on all sides (62).
1.3: Resistance
I. The Primacy of ResistanceA. We need to research the genealogy of social and political movements of resistance, leading us to:1. A new vision of our world2. An understanding of the subjectivities capable of creating a new worldB. Need to understand:1. How people are integrated into the systems of economic production and reproduction2. What jobs they perform3. What they produceC. Thesis: The contemporary scene of labor and production is being transformed under the hegemony of IMMATERIAL LABOR: labor that produces immaterial products such as:1. Information2. Knowledges3. Images4. Relationships5. Affects (65).D. Not that the old industrial worker is irrelevant, but the contractual and material conditions of immaterial labor spread to the entire labor market:1. Blurring of distinction between work time and nonwork time, making the working day fill all of life2. Lack of long-term contracts puts labor in the precarious position of constant flexibility (performing many different tasks) and mobility (moving continually among locations)E. Positive aspects:1. Immaterial labor moves out from the economic realm to include the production and reproduction of society as a whole2. The production of ideas, knowledges, and affects directly produces social relationships—it is biopolitical3. New subjectivities are produced4. Immaterial labor takes the forms of networks based on communication, collaboration, and affective relationships—invents new independent networks of cooperation through which it produces (66)F. 3 principles from the genealogy of resistance:1. Find the form of resistance most effective in combating a specific form of power2. The most effective model of resistance turns out to have the same form as the dominant models of economic and social production3. Each new form of resistance is aimed at addressing the undemocratic qualities of previous movements, creating a chain of ever more democratic movementsG. Resistance, exodus, the emptying out of the enemy’s power, the multitude’s construction of a new society are one and the same process (69).
II. From the People’s Army to Guerrilla WarfareA. Fundamental passage of modern civil war: formation of dispersed and irregular rebel forces into an army (70).B. Downside:1. Revolutionary civil wars became motors of modernization2. Centralization of the people’s army made the rebellion undemocratic (73).C. 1960’s guerrillas had a greater desire for freedom and democracy: rejection of the centralized model of the popular army (74-75) (increasing participation of women in leadership and combat in these movements, 76).D. Unlike Arendt, we cannot separate the political from the social (77).
III. Inventing Network StrugglesA. “The People”: a middle term between consent given by the population and the command exercised by sovereign powerB. But even in resistance and rebellion, this popular will is always grounded in a charismatic, transcendent authority (tendency to privilege authority) .C. So, can we imagine a new process of legitimation based not on popular sovereignty but on the biopolitical productivity of the multitude (79)?D. Need to focus on the relationship between the organization of the movements and the organization of social and economic production.1. The networks of information, communication, and cooperation—the main dynamics of post-Fordist production—begin to define the new guerilla networks;2. use of the Internet not only as organizing tool, but as model for organizational structure (82).3. No center, only an irreducible plurality of nodes in communication with each other (83).4. Examples: 2nd Intifada, Zapatistas (make communication, horizontal network organizations central to their notion of revolution, irony itself as a political strategy) (85), identity politics, resurgence of anarchism, the distributed network approach of the WTO and World Social Forum protests (86), creating a “movement of movements” (87).E. Resisting war—thus resisting the legitimation of this global order—becomes a common ethical task (90).F. Swarm intelligence:1. AI/Computers: swarm intelligence refers to collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without central control or provision of a global model2. Intelligence based primarily on communication (91).3. Need to read Rimbaud’s hymns to the Paris Commune (comparison to insects) (92-3).G. Need to remember that there is no natural, evolutionary path that forms of resistance take; history develops in contradictory and random ways (93).
Posted by jim at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 6 July 2006 23:43 (eighteen years ago) link
My reading group just finished discussing Hardt and Negri's Multitude last night. I disliked Empire a great deal, but I was really very impressed with this book--the last chapter, on learning from both Lenin AND James Madison is particularly inspiring. Of the five of us, 2 analytic philosophers, one continental philosopher, and 2 small-r republican rhetoricians, I was probably the most enthusiastic. Here's an outline of Part III (final) for those of you following along at home.
Part III: Multitude
3.1 The Long March of Democracy
I. Crisis of Democracy in the Era of Armed Globalization: What does democracy mean in a globalized world?A. The social-democratic answer:1. Globalization defined in economic terms.2. Nation-states should withdraw from globalization, to assert their sovereignty3. But 9/11 changed all that, leading to 2 different strategies:a. Schroeder’s Germany: pursue multilateral cosmopolitan alliancesb. Blair’s Britain: accept US hegemony (231-233).B. Liberal cosmopolitan answer:1. Globalization fosters democracy, esp. in human rights2. War has made this seemingly the only viable alternative to US global control.3. Subset: the US cannot “go it alone” (234).C. U.S. hegemony answer (neoconservatism)1. US global control plus expansion of capitalism necessarily breeds democracy, because the rule of capital is inherently democratic2. US hegemony=democracy3. Some British writers encourage the US to accept imperialism, because the US is heir to benevolent European imperialism.4. US authors believe US hegemony is new and exceptional (234-5).D. Traditional-values conservative answer:1. Globalization threatens traditional conservative values.2. US global involvement does3. Unregulated capital does as well (235).E. What these answers miss:1. Democracy today faces a leap of scale beyond the nation-state.2. They insist on liberty first and democracy later, leading to the absolute rule of private property, undermining the will of everyone.3. In the era of biopolitical production, liberalism and liberty based on the virtue of the few or even the many is becoming impossible, precisely because the social nature of biopolitical production threatens private property.4. Democracy in fact can ONLY arise from below (236-7).
II. The Unfinished Democratic Project of ModernityA. We are back to early modern political theory now; global war parallels the role of “civil war” that concerned Hobbes, Descartes, and other founders of modern European thought (239).B. 18th-century innovations:1. Democracy as rule of many over the few (Pericles) was transformed into the democracy of everyone.2. Notion of representation: fulfilled the 2 contradictory functions of:a. linking the multitude to governmentb. but also separates it, as a “disjunctive synthesis” that simultaneously cuts and connects ( 241).3. The term “republicanism” was used by 18th-c. authors to mark their distance from democracy (242).C. The American founding:1. Madison, for example: the US Constitution’s representative schema is an effective guarantee against oppression by the majority (243).2. Anti-federalists favored small sovereign states in which delegates actually represented people3. What we got in the Constitution as an “elective aristocracy”4. All these discussions are refreshing to read now because they show how democracy and representation stand at odds with each other (244).D. Types of Representation (from Weber):1. Appropriated or patriarchal representation:a. How black slaves, women, and children were represented in the US Const.b. How the IMF and World Bank work today (245).2. Free representation (parliaments between elections)3. Instructed representation (more frequent elections, recall) (246-7).
III. Debtors’ Rebellion as example of:A. Contradiction inherent in the US system: a society divided along class lines.B. Same contradiction today with global debtC. But Shays’ Rebellion wasn’t productive, nor would a similar global one today; we need to address inequality in the global system before such a rebellion arises (247-9).
IV. The Unrealized Democracy of Socialism:A. Promising elements in the early socialist tradition:1. Critique of the “autonomy of politics”2. Rejection of separation between political representation and economic administration (249).B. Alternatives to traditional representation:1. The Party2. The Commune: destruction of sovereign power as separate from society3. Self-management/council Communism (tended to be strongest when skilled workers controlled industrial production, but assembly line production caused this model to yield to a “planning” model).C. Degradation of the socialist model into bureaucracy, and eventually the implosion of E. European socialist regimes in the late 1980’s (249-252).D. Weber: the problem is that socialism was still the administration of capital—the same relentless dynamic of the instrumental rationalization of life.E. Right-wing populisms thus emerged perversely out of the socialist tradition (254-5).
V. Revolt, Berlin 1953: rejection of representation and affirmation of the Communist expression of desire through the multitude (255-258).
VI. From Democratic Representation to Global Public Opinion:A. Public opinion as 18th c. invention: fulfill role for modern democracy that the assembly filled for ancient democracy (259).B. Opposing views:1. Utopian view of perfect representation of the will of the people through public opinion (James Bryce’s American Commonwealth (1895)2. Apocalyptic vision of manipulated mob rule (Le Bon’s The Crowd).C. Hegel’s vision of civil society (social, political, economic institutions that are not part of the state, e.g. families, civic groups, trade unions, political parties, interest groups, etc.) as a mediation between individual or group expressions and the social unity (260).D. The new role of the media in transforming public opinion.E. Habermas responds, a la Hegel, by defending public opinion as communicative action aimed at reaching understanding and forming a world of values: free expression plus free communicative exchanges—an alternative to instrumental reason and to capitalist control of communication, a protest against capitalist colonization of the lifeworld.F. H/N disagree with JH because we are “all already inside, contaminated,” requiring “ethical redemption” constructed outside the system (261).G. Luhmann’s functionalist emphasis on equilibrium (261-2).H. Birmingham School’s (cultural studies) emphasis on communication as productive; we are not just passive receivers or consumers.I. C ommunication is productive, not only of economic values but also of subjectivity, and thus communication is central to biopolitical production; we can create alternative subcultures and new collective networks of expression within the dominant culture (263).
VII. White Overalls: a form of expression for new forms of labor: network organization, spatial mobility, temporal flexibility—a coherent political force against the new global system of power (Genoa G-8 protests in 2001) (265-267).
3.2 Global Demands for Democracy
I. Cahiers de Doleances [list of grievances]A. Grievances of representation: World Bank, IMF, UNB. Grievances of rights and justice: human rights NGO’s; truth commissions; international tribunals (Nuremburg Trials); International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court (US refuses to ratify)C. Economic Grievances: Debt, privatization, Jubilee MovementD. Biopolitical Grievances: construction projects (World Bank dam in India protests), control of knowledges (pharmeceutical company control over AIDS drugs) (268-285).
II. Convergence in Seattle: the first “global” protest (286), including environmentalists, union members and other of the Estates General presenting their grievances (286-288).
III. Experiments in Global Reform: Reform and Revolution today cannot be separated (289).A. Reforms of representation1. Making IMF and World bank “accountable” and “transparent” (290).2. Eliminating the UN Security Council (291-2).3. World Social Forum as possible model for a global body, not relying on one-man one-vote but on representing existing organizations or communities (294-5).4. European multilevel federal model (EU) (295-296).5. All oddly imitate the US constitution, while the US blocks extension of the US model (296).B. Reforms of rights and justice:1. Extend International Criminal Court2. Establish a permanent international or global truth commission3. Unclear what reparations to victims of economic corruption would look like (296-299).C. Economic reforms:1. New world debt-arbitration agency, al la domestic bankruptcy laws (299).2. Strategy of giving states MORE regulatory power, e.g. via the Tobin tax, a currency transaction tax:a. Controlling volatility of exchange ratesb. More control over their currencies and thus over their economies as a whole, allowing more redistributive policies (300)—puts too much faith in nation-states (300-1).4. Strategy of freeing up information by limiting copyright, promoting open-source software—the idea of a creation of the Common not of a Public (301-302).D. Biopolitical reforms:1. Alternative to the war system2. Kyoto Accord3. Global FCC (303-306).
IV. Back to the Eighteenth Century!A. The concept of democracy was not as corrupted then as now: challenge of reinventing the concept of democracy and creating new institutions adequate to modern society and the national space. If they did, we can too! (306-7).B. We need not an archaeology to unearth models of the past but something Foucault’s notion of genealogy: the subject creates new institutional and social models based on its own productive capacities (308-9). A New Science (or anti-science) of global democracy.C. TJ: ideas are enhanced by their communication: when I light my candle from yours both seem to burn brighter—immaterial property today is a main difference from the 18th c (311).
V. Excursus 3: Strategy: Geopolitics and New Alliances:A. Crisis of geopolitics: must adopt the US ideology of rejecting the European notion of fixed bordersB. Unilateral command and the Axis of Evil: but Europe, Russia, and China aren’t so easily fit into the US model.C. Contradictions: the US unilateral model is not working.D. A new Magna Charta? Like King John’s nobles the global aristocracies might be encouraged to revolt against US imperial control (322). Proposing alliances with the aristocracies for a program of counter-Empire?E. Iconoclasts: [a very odd digression on the iconoclasm controversy in the Eastern Church) (324-327).
3.3 Democracy of the Multitude
I. Sovereignty and Democracy:A. Sovereignty is a dual system: the ruler and consent (or revolt) of the ruled—it is a constant struggleB. Biopolitical production makes imperial sovereignty completely dependent on the productive social agents over which it rules (the Matrix needs us to survive).C. The choice is no longer between sovereignty and anarchy (328-336).
II. Ingenium Multitudinis: role of networks in the individual body, economic innovation in networks, organization of the multitude as something like a language—it produces real meanings (339). Its decision-making in common much like open-source production of software (34).
III. May the force be with you.A. Today democracy takes the form of subtraction, flight, exodus from sovereignty (but Pharaoh does not let the Israelites leave, we must remember) (341).B. Violence:1. must follow the Zapatista insistence of subordinating military violence to the political, not v.v. as in Cuban model (342);2. must always be defensive (343). Republican meaning of the 2nd amendment (oh, dear god. . ) (343).;3. use of violence must be organized democratically (345).4. critique of arms: reflection on which weapons today are effective and appropriate (345-6). Martyrdom as testimony (from Plutarch to Luther in the republican tradition) (346). Need for new weapons (biopolitical strike) (347).
IV. The New Science of Democracy: Madison and LeninA. Ontological standpoint: biopolitical nature of the multitude, creating a new social being, a new human nature (348-9).B. Sociological standpoint: new affective, cooperative, and communicative relationships of social production (349-50).C. Political standpoint: need to grasp love as a political concept, in understanding the constituent power of the multitudeD. The New Science:1. Challenge all existing forms of sovereignty as a precondition for establishing democracy, as in Lenin’s project of smashing the State2. But also need the institutional methods of the Federalist, which, after all, reflected Madison’s republican utopianism [WHOOP!]3. Need a new realism, a sense of timing (351-358).
Posted by jim at 03:57 PM | Comments (1)
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 6 July 2006 23:45 (eighteen years ago) link
WHOOP
But also need the institutional methods of the Federalist, which, after all, reflected Madison’s republican utopianism [WHOOP!]
how parecon institutions could fit as an alternative to that?
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Saturday, 8 July 2006 20:10 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 9 July 2006 03:09 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Wednesday, 12 July 2006 01:25 (eighteen years ago) link
Vinge makes two opening assumptions: no grand physical disaster occurs,and today's computing and communications trends continue.
He added a third trend: "The great conspiracy against human freedom." Asnovelist Doris Lessing has observed, barons on opposite sides of theriver don't need to be in cahoots if their interests coincide. In ourcase, defence, homeland security, financial crime enforcement, police,tax collectors and intellectual property rights holders offer reasons towant to control the hardware we use. Then there are geeks, who can betempted to forget the consequences if the technology is cool enough.Vinge quotes the most famous line from the comic strip Pogo: "We havemet the enemy, and he is us."
Vinge's technology to satisfy these groups' dreams is the SecureHardware Environment (She), which dedicates some bandwidth and a smallportion of every semiconductor for regulatory use. Deployment isprogressive, as standards are implemented. Built into new chips, Shewill spread inevitably through its predecessors' obsolescence.
This part is terribly plausible. It sounds much like the TrustedComputing Platform, implemented in Intel chips and built into machinesfrom Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and others. Most people don't realise theirnew computer contains a chip designed to block the operation of anysoftware not certified by the group. Now enhance that and build it intoRFID chips, networked embedded systems, shrink and distribute as "smartdust". All are current trends or works in progress.
Geeks are willing to fight Trusted Computing on the grounds that itcould be used to block open-source software or to enforce draconiandigital rights management. But what if accepting it meant less visiblesecurity, less bureaucracy, even slight profit? She automatically sendstaxes, enables much less noticeable surveillance and gets you throughsecurity checkpoints with no waiting. There's less crime, becauselegislative reality can be enforced on physical reality. Fewer falseconvictions. Make regulation automatic, and it seems to go away. Newlaws can be downloaded as a regulatory upgrade.
"She," Vinge concluded at the conference, "fits the trajectory thateconomics and technical progress are following. The infrastructure forsuch control will probably arrive in any case." He also calls hisscenario optimistic.
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Wednesday, 12 July 2006 01:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Wednesday, 12 July 2006 01:58 (eighteen years ago) link
"The illusion of freedom becomes a strange thing when a government isdealing with ... thousands of people who are as bright as the smartestpeople running the government. Together, they outclass the peoplerunning the show. The turning point is the notion that to provide thisillusion of freedom for such a group would wind up being more like realfreedom than anything in human history." Or, as he thinks Pogo might sayfor the 21st century, "We have met what's going to save our ass and itis us."
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Wednesday, 12 July 2006 01:59 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Friday, 14 July 2006 02:42 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Saturday, 15 July 2006 02:53 (eighteen years ago) link
Since the online version of the book is available at author YochaiBenkler's site under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial -ShareAlike license, I've remixed several of my favorite parts of thebook into an essay, which hopefully conveys some of the essence ofBenkler's subtle and insightful work.***
The text:
For all of us, there comes a time on any given day, week, and month,every year and in different degrees over our lifetimes, when we chooseto act in some way that is oriented toward fulfilling our social andpsychological needs, not our market-exchangeable needs. It is thatpart of our lives and our motivational structure that socialproduction taps, and on which it thrives.
There is nothing mysterious about this. It is evident to any of us whorush home to our family or to a restaurant or bar with friends at theend of a workday, rather than staying on for another hour of overtimeor to increase our billable hours; or at least regret it when wecannot. It is evident to any of us who has ever brought a cup of teato a sick friend or relative, or received one; to anyone who has lenta hand moving a friend’s belongings; played a game; told a joke, orenjoyed one told by a friend.
What needs to be understood now, however, is under what conditionsthese many and diverse social actions can turn into an importantmodality of economic production. When can all these acts, distinctfrom our desire for money and motivated by social and psychologicalneeds, be mobilized, directed, and made effective in ways that werecognize as economically valuable?
Human beings are, and always have been, diversely motivated beings. Weact for material gain, but also for psychological well-being andgratification, and for social connectedness. There is nothing new orearth-shattering about this, except perhaps to some economists.
In the industrial economy in general, and the industrial informationeconomy as well, most opportunities to make things that were valuableand important to many people were constrained by the physical capitalrequirements of making them. From the steam engine to the assemblyline, from the double-rotary printing press to the communicationssatellite, the capital constraints on action were such that simplywanting to do something was rarely a sufficient condition to enableone to do it. Financing the necessary physical capital, in turn,oriented the necessarily capital-intensive projects toward aproduction and organizational strategy that could justify theinvestments. In market economies, that meant orienting toward marketproduction. In state-run economies, that meant orienting productiontoward the goals of the state bureaucracy. In either case, thepractical individual freedom to cooperate with others in making thingsof value was limited by the extent of the capital requirements ofproduction.
In the networked information economy, the physical capital requiredfor production is broadly distributed throughout society. Personalcomputers and network connections are ubiquitous. This does not meanthat they cannot be used for markets, or that individuals cease toseek market opportunities. It does mean, however, that wheneversomeone, somewhere, among the billion connected human beings, andultimately among all those who will be connected, wants to makesomething that requires human creativity, a computer, and a networkconnection, he or she can do so â€" alone, or in cooperation withothers. He or she already has the capital capacity necessary to do so;if not alone, then at least in cooperation with other individualsacting for complementary reasons.
The result is that a good deal more that human beings value can now bedone by individuals, who interact with each other socially, as humanbeings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through theprice system. Sometimes, under conditions I specify in some detail,these nonmarket collaborations can be better at motivating effort andcan allow creative people to work on information projects moreefficiently than would traditional market mechanisms and corporations.The result is a flourishing nonmarket sector of information,knowledge, and cultural production, based in the networkedenvironment, and applied to anything that the many individualsconnected to it can imagine. Its outputs, in turn, are not treated asexclusive property. They are instead subject to an increasingly robustethic of open sharing, open for all others to build on, extend, andmake their own.
If there is one lesson we can learn from globalization and theever-increasing reach of the market, it is that the logic of themarket exerts enormous pressure on existing social structures. If weare indeed seeing the emergence of a substantial component ofnonmarket production at the very core of our economic engine - theproduction and exchange of information, and through it ofinformation-based goods, tools, services, and capabilities - then thischange suggests a genuine limit on the extent of the market. Such alimit, growing from within the very market that it limits, in its mostadvanced loci, would represent a genuine shift in direction for whatappeared to be the ever-increasing global reach of the market economyand society in the past half-century.
I treat property and markets as just one domain of human action, withaffordances and limitations. Their presence enhances freedom alongsome dimensions, but their institutional requirements can becomesources of constraint when they squelch freedom of action in nonmarketcontexts. Calibrating the reach of the market, then, becomes centralnot only to the shape of justice or welfare in a society, but also tofreedom.
What we are seeing now is the emergence of more effective collectiveaction practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either theprice system or a managerial structure for coordination. This kind ofinformation production by agents operating on a decentralized,nonproprietary model is not completely new. Science is built by manypeople contributing incrementally â€" not operating on market signals,not being handed their research marching orders by a boss â€"independently deciding what to research, bringing their collaborationtogether, and creating science. What we see in the networkedinformation economy is a dramatic increase in the importance and thecentrality of information produced in this way.
No benevolent historical force will inexorably lead thistechnological-economic moment to develop toward an open, diverse,liberal equilibrium. If the transformation I describe as possibleoccurs, it will lead to substantial redistribution of power and moneyfrom the twentieth-century industrial producers of information,culture, and communications â€" like Hollywood, the recording industry,and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunicationsservices giants â€" to a combination of widely diffuse populationsaround the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools thatmake this population better able to produce its own informationenvironment rather than buying it ready-made.
None of the industrial giants of yore are taking this reallocationlying down. The technology will not overcome their resistance throughan insurmountable progressive impulse. The reorganization ofproduction and the advances it can bring in freedom and justice willemerge, therefore, only as a result of social and political actionaimed at protecting the new social patterns from the incumbents’assaults. It is precisely to develop an understanding of what is atstake and why it is worth fighting for that I write this book.
Imagine three storytelling societies: the Reds, the Blues, and theGreens. Each society follows a set of customs as to how they live andhow they tell stories. Among the Reds and the Blues, everyone is busyall day, and no one tells stories except in the evening. In theevening, in both of these societies, everyone gathers in a big tent,and there is one designated storyteller who sits in front of theaudience and tells stories. It is not that no one is allowed to tellstories elsewhere. However, in these societies, given the timeconstraints people face, if anyone were to sit down in the shade inthe middle of the day and start to tell a story, no one else wouldstop to listen.
Among the Reds, the storyteller is a hereditary position, and he orshe alone decides which stories to tell. Among the Blues, thestoryteller is elected every night by simple majority vote. Everymember of the community is eligible to offer him- or herself as thatnight’s storyteller, and every member is eligible to vote.
Among the Greens, people tell stories all day, and everywhere.Everyone tells stories. People stop and listen if they wish, sometimesin small groups of two or three, sometimes in very large groups.Stories in each of these societies play a very important role inunderstanding and evaluating the world. They are the way peopledescribe the world as they know it. They serve as testing grounds toimagine how the world might be, and as a way to work out what is goodand desirable and what is bad and undesirable.
Now consider Ron, Bob, and Gertrude, individual members of the Reds,Blues, and Greens, respectively. Ron’s perception of the options opento him and his evaluation of these options are largely controlled bythe hereditary storyteller. He can try to contact the storyteller topersuade him to tell different stories, but the storyteller is thefigure who determines what stories are told. To the extent that thesestories describe the universe of options Ron knows about, thestoryteller defines the options Ron has.
Bob’s autonomy is constrained not by the storyteller, but by themajority of voters among the Blues. These voters select thestoryteller, and the way they choose will affect Bob’s access tostories profoundly. If the majority selects only a small group ofentertaining, popular, pleasing, or powerful (in some other dimension,like wealth or political power) storytellers, then Bob’s perception ofthe range of options will be only slightly wider than Ron’s, if atall. The locus of power to control Bob’s sense of what he can andcannot do has shifted. It is not the hereditary storyteller, butrather the majority.
Gertrude is in a very different position. First, she can decide totell a story whenever she wants to, subject only to whether there isany other Green who wants to listen. She is free to become an activeproducer except as constrained by the autonomy of other individualGreens. Second, she can select from the stories that any other Greenwishes to tell, because she and all those surrounding her can sit inthe shade and tell a story. No one person, and no majority, determinesfor her whether she can or cannot tell a story. No one canunilaterally control whose stories Gertrude can listen to. And no onecan determine for her the range and diversity of stories that will beavailable to her from any other member of the Greens who wishes totell a story.
How, one might worry, can a system of information production enhancethe ability of an individual to author his or her life, if it isimpossible to tell whether this or that particular story or piece ofinformation is credible, or whether it is relevant to the individual’sparticular experience? Will individuals spend all their time siftingthrough mounds of inane stories and fairy tales, instead of evaluatingwhich life is best for them based on a small and manageable set ofcredible and relevant stories?
Having too much information with no real way of separating the wheatfrom the chaff forms what we might call the Babel objection.Individuals must have access to some mechanism that sifts through theuniverse of information, knowledge, and cultural mores in order towhittle them down to a manageable and usable scope. The question thenbecomes whether the networked information economy, given the humanneed for filtration, actually improves the information environment ofindividuals relative to the industrial information economy.
There are three elements to the answer: First, as a baseline, it isimportant to recognize the power that inheres in the editorialfunction. The extent to which information overload inhibits autonomyrelative to the autonomy of an individual exposed to a well-editedinformation flow depends on how much the editor who whittles down theinformation flow thereby gains power over the life of the user of theeditorial function, and how he or she uses that power. Second, thereis the question of whether users can select and change their editorfreely, or whether the editorial function is bundled with othercommunicative functions and sold by service providers among whichusers have little choice.
Finally, there is the understanding that filtration and accreditationare themselves information goods, like any other, and that they toocan be produced on a commons-based, nonmarket model, and thereforewithout incurring the autonomy deficit that a reintroduction ofproperty to solve the Babel objection would impose. From thediscussions of Wikipedia to the moderation and metamoderation schemeof Slashdot, and from the sixty thousand volunteers that make up theOpen Directory Project to the PageRank system used by Google, themeans of filtering data are being produced within the networkedinformation economy using peer production and the coordinate patternsof nonproprietary production more generally.
Developments in network topology theory and its relationship to thestructure of the empirically mapped real Internet offer a map of thenetworked information environment that is quite different from thenaive model of "everyone a pamphleteer." To the limited extent thatthese findings have been interpreted for political meaning, they havebeen seen as a disappointment â€" the real world, as it turns out, doesnot measure up to anything like that utopia. However, that is thewrong baseline. There never has been a complex, large modern democracyin which everyone could speak and be heard by everyone else. Thecorrect baseline is the one-way structure of the commercial mass media.
The networked information economy makes individuals better able to dothings for and by themselves, and makes them less susceptible tomanipulation by others than they were in the mass-media culture. Inthis sense, the emergence of this new set of technical, economic,social, and institutional relations can increase the relative rolethat each individual is able to play in authoring his or her own life.
The networked information economy also promises to provide a much morerobust platform for public debate. It enables citizens to participatein public conversation continuously and pervasively, not as passiverecipients of “received wisdom� from professional talking heads, butas active participants in conversations carried out at many levels ofpolitical and social structure. Individuals can find out more aboutwhat goes on in the world, and share it more effectively with others.They can check the claims of others and produce their own, and theycan be heard by others, both those who are like-minded and opponents.
Whether their actions are in the domain of political organization(like the organizers of MoveOn.org), or of education and professionalattainment (as with the case of Jim Cornish, who decided to create aworldwide center of information on the Vikings from his fifth-gradeschoolroom in Gander, Newfoundland), the networked informationenvironment opens new domains for productive life that simply were notthere before. In doing so, it has provided us with new ways to imagineour lives as productive human beings.
Writing a free operating system or publishing a free encyclopedia mayhave seemed quixotic a mere few years ago, but these are now far fromdelusional. Human beings who live in a material and social contextthat lets them aspire to such things as possible for them to do, intheir own lives, by themselves and in loose affiliation with others,are human beings who have a greater realm for their agency. We canlive a life more authored by our own will and imagination than by thematerial and social conditions in which we find ourselves.
How will the emergence of a substantial sector of nonmarket,commons-based production in the information economy affect questionsof distribution and human well-being? The pessimistic answer is, verylittle. Hunger, disease, and deeply rooted racial, ethnic, or classstratification will not be solved by a more decentralized,nonproprietary information production system. Without clean water,basic literacy, moderately well-functioning governments, and universalpractical adoption of the commitment to treat all human beings asfundamentally deserving of equal regard, the fancy Internet-basedsociety will have little effect on the billions living in poverty ordeprivation, either in the rich world, or, more urgently and deeply,in poor and middle-income economies.
Despite the caution required in overstating the role that thenetworked information economy can play in solving issues of justice,it is important to recognize that information, knowledge, and cultureare core inputs into human welfare. Agricultural knowledge andbiological innovation are central to food security. Medical innovationand access to its fruits are central to living a long and healthylife. Literacy and education are central to individual growth, todemocratic self-governance, and to economic capabilities. Economicgrowth itself is critically dependent on innovation and information.
For all these reasons, information policy has become a criticalelement of development policy and the question of how societies attainand distribute human welfare and well-being. Access to knowledge hasbecome central to human development.
Proprietary rights are designed to elicit signals of people’swillingness and ability to pay. In the presence of extremedistribution differences like those that characterize the globaleconomy, the market is a poor measure of comparative welfare. A systemthat signals what innovations are most desirable and rations access tothese innovations based on ability, as well as willingness, to pay,over-represents welfare gains of the wealthy and under-representswelfare gains of the poor. Twenty thousand American teenagers cansimply afford, and will be willing to pay, much more for acnemedication than the more than a million Africans who die of malariaevery year can afford to pay for a vaccine.
The emergence of commons-based techniques â€" particularly, of an openinnovation platform that can incorporate farmers and local agronomistsfrom around the world into the development and feedback processthrough networked collaboration platforms â€" promises the most likelyavenue to achieve research oriented toward increased food security inthe developing world.
It promises a mechanism of development that will not increase therelative weight and control of a small number of commercial firms thatspecialize in agricultural production. It will instead release theproducts of innovation into a self-binding commons â€" one that isinstitutionally designed to defend itself against appropriation. Itpromises an iterative collaboration platform that would be able tocollect environmental and local feedback in the way that a freesoftware development project collects bug reports â€" through acontinuous process of networked conversation among the user-innovatorsthemselves.
Laboratories have two immensely valuable resources that may be capableof being harnessed to peer production. Most important by far arepostdoctoral fellows. These are the same characters who populate somany free software projects, only geeks of a different feather. Theyare at a similar life stage. They have the same hectic, overworkedlives, and yet the same capacity to work one more hour on somethingelse, something interesting, exciting, or career enhancing, like aspecial grant announced by the government.
The other resources that have overcapacity might be thought of aspetri dishes, or if that sounds too quaint and old-fashioned,polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machines or electrophoresis equipment.The point is simple. Laboratory funding currently is silo-based. Eachlab is usually funded to have all the equipment it needs forrun-of-the-mill work, except for very large machines operated ontime-share principles. Those machines that are redundantly provisionedin laboratories have downtime. That downtime coupled with apostdoctoral fellow in the lab is an experiment waiting to happen. Ifa group that is seeking to start a project defines discrete modules ofa common experiment, and provides a communications platform to allowpeople to download project modules, perform them, and upload results,it would be possible to harness the overcapacity that exists inlaboratories.
In principle, although this is a harder empirical question, the samecould be done for other widely available laboratory materials and evenanimals for preclinical trials on the model of, “brother, can youspare a mouse?� One fascinating proposal and early experiment at theUniversity of Indiana - Purdue University Indianapolis was suggestedby William Scott, a chemistry professor. Scott proposed developingsimple, low-cost kits for training undergraduate students in chemicalsynthesis, but which would use targets and molecules identified bycomputational biology as potential treatments for developing-worlddiseases as their output. With enough redundancy across differentclassrooms and institutions around the world, the results could beverified while screening and synthesizing a significant number ofpotential drugs. The undergraduate educational experience couldactually contribute to new experiments, as opposed simply tosynthesizing outputs that are not really needed by anyone.
In February 2001, the humanitarian organization Doctors WithoutBorders (also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) asked YaleUniversity, which held the key South African patent on stavudine â€" oneof the drugs then most commonly used in combination therapies â€"forpermission to use generic versions in a pilot AIDS treatment program.At the time, the licensed version of the drug, sold byBristol-Myers-Squibb (BMS), cost $1,600 per patient per year. Ageneric version, manufactured in India, was available for $47 perpatient per year.
At that point in history, thirty-nine drug manufacturers were suingthe South African government to strike down a law permittingimportation of generics in a health crisis, and no drug company hadyet made concessions on pricing in developing nations. Within weeks ofreceiving MSF’s request, Yale negotiated with BMS to secure the saleof stavudine for fifty-five dollars a year in South Africa. Yale, theUniversity of California at Berkeley, and other universities have, inthe years since, entered into similar adhoc agreements with regard todeveloping-world applications or distribution of drugs that depend ontheir patented technologies. These successes provide a template for amuch broader realignment of how universities use their patentportfolios to alleviate the problems of access to medicines indeveloping nations.
A technology transfer officer who has successfully provided aroyalty-free license to a nonprofit concerned with developing nationshas no obvious metric in which to record and report the magnitude ofher success (saving X millions of lives or displacing Y misery),unlike her colleague who can readily report X millions of dollars froma market-oriented license, or even merely Y dozens of patents filed.Universities must consider more explicitly their special role in theglobal information and knowledge production system. If they recommitto a role focused on serving the improvement of the lot of humanity,rather than maximization of their revenue stream, they should adapttheir patenting and licensing practices appropriately.
The rise of commons-based information production, of individuals andloose associations producing information in nonproprietary forms,presents a genuine discontinuity from the industrial informationeconomy of the twentieth century. It brings with it great promise, andgreat uncertainty. We have early intimations as to how market-basedenterprises can adjust to make room for this newly emerging phenomenonâ€" IBM’s adoption of open source, Second Life’s adoption ofuser-created immersive entertainment, or Open Source TechnologyGroup’s development of a platform for Slashdot.
We also have very clear examples of businesses that have decided tofight the new changes by using every trick in the book, and some, likeinjecting corrupt files into peer-to-peer networks, that are decidedlynot in the book. Law and regulation form one important domain in whichthese battles over the shape of our emerging information productionsystem are fought. As we observe these battles; as we participate inthem as individuals choosing how to behave and what to believe, ascitizens, lobbyists, lawyers, or activists; as we act out these legalbattles as legislators, judges, or treaty negotiators, it is importantthat we understand the normative stakes of what we are doing.
We have an opportunity to change the way we create and exchangeinformation, knowledge, and culture. By doing so, we can make thetwenty-first century one that offers individuals greater autonomy,political communities greater democracy, and societies greateropportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection.
We can remove some of the transactional barriers to materialopportunity, and improve the state of human development everywhere.Perhaps these changes will be the foundation of a true transformationtoward more liberal and egalitarian societies. Perhaps they willmerely improve, in well-defined but smaller ways, human life alongeach of these dimensions. That alone is more than enough to justify anembrace of the networked information economy by anyone who valueshuman welfare, development, and freedom.
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 16 July 2006 02:06 (eighteen years ago) link
The term is both descriptive and prescriptive. Typically, the kinds of enhancements sought by proponents of e-democracy are framed in terms of making processes more accessible; making citizen participation in public policy decision-making more expansive and direct so as to enable broader influence in policy outcomes as more individuals involved could yield smarter policies; increasing transparency and accountability; and keeping the government closer to the consent of the governed, increasing its political legitimacy. E-democracy includes within its scope electronic voting, but has a much wider span than this single aspect of the democratic process.
E-democracy is also sometimes referred to as cyberdemocracy or digital democracy. Prior to 1994, when the term e-democracy was coined in the midst of online civic efforts in Minnesota, the term teledemocracy was prevalent.
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Monday, 17 July 2006 01:48 (eighteen years ago) link
Category: Cool | 3870 Views
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Monday, 17 July 2006 13:24 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Monday, 17 July 2006 13:26 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Wednesday, 19 July 2006 02:42 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 20 July 2006 02:33 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 20 July 2006 14:04 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 23 July 2006 02:36 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 23 July 2006 07:28 (eighteen years ago) link
One thing this is showing that is interesting is how Cyc is going forward touse google in processing and learning new information by using Google, andusing it to verify facts and knowledge.
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 23 July 2006 07:49 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 23 July 2006 08:20 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Tuesday, 25 July 2006 01:57 (eighteen years ago) link
We've heard plenty about the tragedy of the commons --in fact, it pops up in several other chapters of this book. In the 1968 essay that popularized the concept, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin wrote:
Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
In the case of certain ingeniously planned services, we find a contrasting cornucopia of the commons: use brings overflowing abundance. Peer-to-peer architectures and technologies may have their benefits, but I think the historical lesson is clear: concentrate on what you can get from users, and use whatever protocol can maximize their voluntary contributions. That seems to be where the greatest promise lies for the new kinds of collaborative environments. [Dan Bricklin: Cornucopia of the Commons, Peer-to-Peer, Chapter 4]
So for example, as I process my daily RSS inflow in Bloglines, it's very much in my own interest to put the few items of most value in a place where I can find them later. That I'm also putting them someplace where you can find them, that you may be doing the same thing for me, that we may collectively move toward standardized use of shared topics as we iterate this process, that reputation-based filtering may then begin to operate on the emergent set of topics -- all this is goodness, and may ultimately matter, but my participation (and yours) does not depend on these outcomes. Pure self-interest is a sufficient driver.
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Tuesday, 25 July 2006 23:00 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Saturday, 29 July 2006 00:48 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Saturday, 29 July 2006 19:28 (eighteen years ago) link
"One cannot hope to prosper in such a world (art world) as a "conservative", and this may be why arts bureaucrats seem to have such a relentlessly progressive taste. They look first to the art that trumpets its own radical, non-commercial credentials when they are making funding decisions. The system is closed and clubbish, perpetuated by the terrorism of fashion - the dread of falling out with thein-crowd."
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 30 July 2006 18:02 (eighteen years ago) link