textere

Codework is a practice, not a product.

It is praxis, part and parcel of the critique of everyday life.

It is not canonic, although it is taken as such.

It is not a genre, although it is taken as such.

The term is relatively new and should always be renewed.

We are suffused with code and its intermingling with surface phenomena.

Wave-trains of very low frequency radio pulses for example.

Phenomenology of chickadee calls.

Codework is not a metaphor, not metaphorical.

It exists precisely in the obdurate interstice between the real and the
symbolic. It exists in the arrow.

It is not a set of procedures or perceptions. It is the noise in the
system. It is not the encapsulation or object of the noise or the system.

It is continuous; it is parasitic; it is thetic.

When it becomes metaphor, masterpiece, artwork, it is still-born; it is
of no interest except as cultural residue: it is of great interest to
critics, gallerists, editors.

When it is not collectible, not a thing, virtual or otherwise, it is not
of interest to critics, gallerists, editors.

Things have already taken up its name, as if pictures in an exhibition.

This is nothing more than the continuous reification, territorialization,
conquest, of the real - as if the real were always already cleansed,
available for the taking - as if the real were already transformed into
capital.

Capital is the encapsulation, objectification, of code. Capital drives the
code-conference, the code-book, the code-movement, the code-artist, the
code-masterpiece; capital drives the technology.

In short: Capital drives code into metaphor.

In short: Metaphor drives code into capital.

In short, but of greater difficulty: Capital drives metaphor into code.

In production, simpler: Metaphor drives capital into code.

The driving of metaphor, code, or capital is not codework.

Codework is the labor of code, subject to thermodynamics.

Codework is demonstrative, demonstrative fragment, experiment, partial-
inscription, partial-object, the _thing_ prior to its presentation, the
linguistic kernel of the pre-linguistic. Code is the thetic, the gestural,
of the demonstrative.

It the gesture that never quite takes. It is the noise inherent in the
gestural.

However: Codework will become a _subject_ or a _sub-genre_ or a _venue_ or
an _artwork_ or an _artist_ or a _dealer_ or a _collector._ However: This
is not codework, or: What I describe above is not codework; after all,
names are subsumed beneath the sign (Emblematic) of capital - as if
something is being accomplished. (Hackers who are not hackers are
unhacked.)

To code is not to produce codework; it is to produce code on the level of
the code or interface. Bridged code, embedded code, is not codework; the
irreversible spew of cellular automata is codework, all the better if the
rules are noisy. The cultural production of codework abjures intensifica-
tions, strange attractors, descriptions such as this (which is the oldest
game in the _book_). The hunt and reception of short-wave number codes is
codework. Writers on the edge are circumscribed by codework, malfunctioned
psychoanalytics, scatologies. Jews, Gypsies, Gays, Blacks, are endlessly
coded and decoded; the codes are dissolute, partial, always already incom-
plete: the differend is codework.

To speak against the differend is codework; tumors are codework, metas-
tases. The useless sequences of DNA, RNA.

Be wary of the violence of the legible text. Beware the metaphor which
institutionalizes, the text which defines, the text of positivities, not
negations, the circumscribing text, inscribing text; beware of the
producers and institutions of these texts, whose stake is in hardening of
definitions, control, capital, slaughter: Texts slaughter.

And texts slaughter texts.

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These search terms have been highlighted: sondheim codework
Page 1
“Codework”—the computer stirring into
the text, and the text stirring the computer. This
special topic presents several reviews of the
current state of a literary avant-garde concerned
with the intermingling of human and machine.
“Code” can refer to just about anything that
combines tokens and syntax to represent a
domain. In a sense, natural language encodes the
“real,” gives us the ability to move in environ-
ments constantly undergoing transformation. In
a narrower sense, code refers to a translation
from natural language to an artificial, strictly
defined one; the syntax of Morse code, for
example, has no room for anomalies or
fuzziness. Computer programming gener-ally
requires strictly defined codes that stand in for
operations that occur “deeper” in the machine.
Most users work on or within graphic surfaces
that are intricately connected to the program-
ming “beneath”; they have little idea how or
why their machines work.
For thousands of years, writers have, again
in general, taken their tools—taken writing
itself—for granted. Even Sterne and Carroll
work within traditional means. The computer
and Internet, however, have opened up a whole
(and indefinable) world of possibilities. These
range from writing itself to multimedia, and
from writing-on-the-surface—traditional writing
or hypertext—to texts, dynamic or static, that
reflect the bones, the molecules and atoms, of
programming and protocols—even the bones of
the user’s computer, which may be accessed by
various programs. I see codework as at least one
future of writing—in part, it’s prosthetic, an
uneasy combination of contents and structures.
Using the metaphor of a tree, codework can
be placed within a very rough taxonomy as
follows:
a. Works using the syntactical interplay of
surface language, with reference to computer
language and engagement. These works may
Codework
Introduction:
Alan Sondheim,
Focus Editor
playfully utilize programming terminology and
syntax; they don’t necessarily refer to specific
programs. Examples include multi-media and
hypertextual works—they’re the leaves and
bouquet of the tree, the efflorescence. I think of
Mez’s work in this regard, some of Antiorp’s
style (but see below), and some of the Internet
Relay Chat jargon endemic in various chats.
b. Works in which submerged code has
modified the surface language—with the
possible representation of the code as well.
Here we have the potential for continuous
surface deformations. They’re the tendrils and
branchings of the tree, half surface and half
root. Some of my own work fits here, as does
the work of Ted Warnell. The language be-
comes increasingly unreadable at times; it’s the
result of a group of processes and catalysts that
may or may not be reworked. (I think of Talan
Memmott’s work between a and b here.)
c. Works in which the submerged code is
emergent content; these are both a
deconstruction of the surface and of the di-
chotomy between the surface and the depth. I
think of Antiorp’s and JODI’s dynamic sites for
classic examples. These works are the
rhizomatic roots of the tree (I recognize the
botanic problem here). In order to understand
what’s going on, it helps to look at source code
(which can be part of the content).
“C” can also refer to aleatoric or random-
ized work—haiku, language, or other poetry/
poetic generators. Sometimes the work only
appears randomized, and some times it’s
entirely out of control. I think of John Cayley’s
work here.
All of these categories move between
static productions (which may or may not
Code refers to a translation from
natural language to an artificial,
strictly defined one.
From ABR, September/October 2001, Volume 22, Issue 6
Page 2
be the residue, reworked residue, or
simulacrum of programs and/or program
output) and dynamic processes—movement on
the screen, within or without the traditional
window or other
framework. Some-
times the computer
crashes, especially
with category c—and
that’s part of the
work, part of the
process.
I’m excited by
all of this. It leads to
vast uncharted do-
mains (if that’s still a
usable term) of new
and future litera-
tures—domains that
recognize the vast changes that have occurred
in human/machine interaction—changes that
affect the very notions of community and
communality. Some of this work depends on
network distribution; some of it works prima-
rily with a lone user at his or her computer. The
works themselves may often be created through
collaboration: no one really knows if Antiorp/
Integer/etc. is one or many people; Mez uses a
pseudonym; and I work with a number of
“emanants,” characters who are part me, part
themselves, part machine.
This special topic presents five essays
dealing with codework. Belinda Barnet writes
on Ted Nelson’s projects; Nelson is a pioneer
in thinking about linked work, and his work is
increasingly important. Beatrice Beaubien
writes on Mez and Antiorp (nn / NN), present-
ing a text of practice and theory that opens new
grounds for thinking through their work.
Florian Cramer focuses on the nature of
software, code, and the writing subject; the
historic elements—thinking through Henry
Flynt and Donald Knuth, for example—are
critical to current
work. Talan Memmott
focuses on both the
nature of codework
and a number of
artists/writers—Ted
Warnell and Brian
Lennon, among
others. He focuses on
inscription and else-
where has been
developing a phenom-
enology of codework.
McKenzie Wark
discusses precursors to codework as well as
extended writing; his examples include Mez,
JODI, Kenji Siratori, and myself.
I find these essays brilliant; they give a
variety of theoretical approaches to a body
of difficult work. They also extend
codework itself into territories of more
traditional media and the history of writing.
I can only hope this introduction does them
justice.
Alan Sondheim is Associate Editor of Beehive, co-
moderates the Wryting and Cybermind e-mail lists,
is teaching at Florida International University,
lives in Brooklyn and Miami, has been working
on the Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/
English/internet_txt, was the Trace on-line writing
community’s second virtual writer-in-residence,
and makes video/sound work on the side.
“Virus 2” by Alan Sondheim

SCHOOL BUS= A DIRTY FEMALE (EVERYONE GETS A RIDE)

untitled.jpg

SCHOOL BUS=A DIRTY HOE(EVERYBODY GETS A RIDE)

NAST= SOMETHING THAT IS BAD

SPANK= SOMETHING VERY COOL

TRASH CANS=NICE REAR END

CD PLAYER: WHO KNOWS?

David M. Berry & Jo Pawlik

The two of us wrote this article together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. We have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have been aided, inspired multiplied.[1]

JP: Code is described as many things: it is a cultural logic, a machinic operation or a process that is unfolding. It is becoming,
today's hegemonic metaphor; inspiring quasi-semiotic investigations within cultural and artistic practice (e.g. The Matrix). No-one leaves before it has set its mark on them...

DB: Yes, it has become a narrative, a genre, a structural feature of contemporary society, an architecture for our technologically
controlled societies (e.g. Lessig) and a tool of technocracy and of capitalism and law (Ellul/Winner/Feenberg). It is both metaphor and reality, it serves as a translation between different discourses and spheres, DNA code, computer code, code as law, cultural code, aristocratic code, encrypted code (Latour).

JP: Like the code to nourish you? Have to feed it something too.

DB: Perhaps. I agree that code appears to be a defining discourse of our postmodernity. It offers both explanation and saviour, for example, the state as machine, that runs a faulty form of code that can be rewritten and re-executed. The constitution as a microcode, law as code. Humanity as objects at the mercy of an inhuman code.

JP: True and it gathers together a disturbing discourse of the elect. Code as intellectual heights, an aristocratic elect who can free information and have a wisdom to transform society without the politics, without nations and without politicians. Code becomes the lived and the desired. Both a black box and a glass box. Hard and unyielding and simultaneously soft and malleable.

DB: Code seems to follow information into a displaced subjectivity, perhaps a new and startling subject of history that is merely a reflection of the biases, norms and values of the coding elite. More concerning, perhaps, code as walls and doors of the prisons and workhouses of the 21st Century. Condemned to make the amende honorable before the church of capital.

JP: So, we ask what is code? Not expecting to find answers, but rather to raise questions. To survey and map realms that are yet to come (AO:5). The key for us lies in code's connectivity, it is a semiotic-chain, rhizomatic (rather like a non-hierarchical network of nodes) and hence our map must allow for it to be interconnected from anything to anything. In this investigation, which we know might sometimes be hard to follow, our method imitates that outlined by Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (2004). It will analyse by decentering it onto other dimensions, and other registers (AO:8). We hope that you will view this article as a 'little machine' (AO: 4), itself something to be read slowly, or fast, so that you can take from it whatever comes your way. It does not ask the question of where code stops and the society starts, rather it forms a tracing of the code-society or the society-code.

DB: Dystopian and utopian, both can cling like Pincher Martin to code. Code has its own apocalyptic fictions; crashes and bugs, Y2K and corruption. It is a fiction that is becoming a literary fiction (Kermode). We wish to stop it becoming a myth, by questioning code and asking it uncomfortable questions. But by our questioning we do not wish to be considered experts or legislators, rather we want to ask again who are the 'Gods' of the information age (Heidegger). By drawing code out and stretching it out, we hope to make code less mysterious, less an 'unconcealment that is concealed' (Heidegger).

JP: Perhaps to ask code and coders to think again about the way in which they see the world, to move from objects to things, and practice code as poetry (poeisis). Rather than code as ordering the world, fixing and overcoding. Code as a craft, 'bringing-forth' through a showing or revealing that is not about turning the world into resources to be assembled, and reassembled forever.

DB: And let us not forget the debt that code owes to war and government. It has a bloody history, formed from the special projects of the cold war, a technological race, that got mixed up with the counter-culture but still fights battles on our behalf. He laid aside his sabre. And with a smile he took my hand.

--Code as concept--

DB: A stab in the dark. To start neither at the beginning or the end, but in the middle: code is pure concept instantiated into the languages of machines. Coding is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating structures based on these languages. Structures that constrain use as well as free. The coder is the friend of the code, the potentiality of the code, not merely forming, inventing and fabricating code but also desiring. The electric hymn book that Happolati invented. With electric letters that shine in the dark?

JP: And what of those non-coders who use code, or rather are used by code instead of forming it? Code can enable but it can also repress. Deleuze believes that we live in a society of control and that code is part 'of the numerical language of control' requiring of us passwords, user names, and the completion of form fields to either grant or deny access to information, goods and services (1992).

DB: Yes, code becomes the unavoidable boundary around which no detour exists in order to participate fully in modern life. It is ubiquitous. Formatted by code, harmonised with the language of machines, our life history, tastes, preferences and personal details become profiles, mailing lists, data and ultimately markets. Societies of control regulate their population by ensuring their knowing and unknowing participation in the marketplace through enforced compatibility with code. Watch over this code! Let me see some code!

JP: But there is no simple code. Code is production and as such is a machine. Every piece of code has components and is defined by them. It is a multiplicity although not every multiplicity is code. No code is a single component because even the first piece of code draws on others. Neither is there code possessing all components as this would be chaos. Every piece of code has a regular contour defined by the sum of its components. The code is whole because it totalises the components, but it remains a fragmentary whole.

DB: Code aborescent. Plato's building agile, object-oriented and postmodern codes under the spreading chestnut tree.

JP: But computers are not the only machines that use code. Deleuze believes that everything is a machine, or to be more precise every machine is a machine of a machine. By this he means that every machine is connected to another by a flow, whether this flow is air, information, water, desire etc. which it interrupts, uses, converts and then connects with another machine.

DB: I agree that human beings are nothing more than an assemblage of several machines linked to other machines, though century's worth of history have us duped into thinking otherwise.

JP: But, does every machine have a code built into it which determines the nature of its relations with other machines and their outputs? How else would we know whether to swallow air, suffocate on food or drink sound waves? There is even a social machine, whose task it is to code the flows that circulate within it. To apportion wealth, to organise production and to record the particular constellation of linked up flows that define its mode of being.

DB: Up to this point, code is verging towards the deterministic or the programmatic, dependent upon some form of Ur-coder who might be synonymous with God, with the Despot, with Nature, depending on to whom you attribute the first and last words.

JP: But Deleuze delimits a way of scrambling the codes, of flouting the key, which enables a different kind of de/en-coding to take place and frees us from a pre-determined input-output, a=b matrix. Enter Desire. Enter Creativity. Enter the Schizo. Enter capitalism? You show them you have something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability.

--Code as Schizo--

DB: Deleuze & Guattari warned us that the Schizo ethic was not a revolutionary one, but a way of surviving under capitalism by producing fresh desires within the structural limits of capitalism. Where will the revolution come from?

JP: It will be a decoded flow, a 'deterritorialised flow that runs too far and cuts too sharply'. D & G hold that art and science have a revolutionary potential. Code, like art and science, causes increasingly decoded and deterritorialised flows to circulate in the socius. To become more complicated, more saturated. A few steps away a policeman is observing me; he stands in the middle of the street and doesn't pay attention to anything else.

DB: But, code is bifurcated between a conceptual and a functional schema, an 'all encompassing wisdom [=code]'. Concepts and functions appear as two types of multiplicities or varieties whose natures are different. Using the Deluezean concept of Demon which indicates, in philosophy as well as science, not something that exceeds our possibilities but a common kind of these necessary intercessors as respective 'subjects' of enunciation: the philosophical friend, the rival, the idiot, the overman are no less demons that Maxwell's demon or than Einstein's or Heisenberg’s observers. (WIP: 129). Our eyes meet as I lift my head; maybe he had been standing there for quite a while just watching me.

JP: Do you know what time it is?

HE: Time? Simple Time?... Great time, mad time, quite bedeviled time, in which the fun waxes fast and furious, with heaven-high leaping and springing and again, of course, a bit miserable, very miserable indeed, I not only admit that, I even emphasise it, with pride, for it is sitting and fit, such is artist-way and artist-nature.

--Code and sense perception--

DB: In code the role of the partial coder is to perceive and to experience, although these perceptions and affections might not be those of the coder, in the currently accepted sense, but belong to the code. Does code interpolate the coder, or only the user? Ideal partial observers are the perceptions or sensory affections of code itself manifested in functions and 'functives', the code crystallised affect.

JP: Maybe the function in code determines a state of affairs, thing or body that actualises the virtual on a plane of reference and in a system of co-ordinates, a dimensional classification; the concept in code expresses an event that gives consistency to the virtual on a plane of immanence and in an ordered form.

DB: Well, in each case the respective fields of coding find themselves marked out by very different entities but that nonetheless exhibit a certain analogy in their task: a problem. Is this a world-directed perspective'code as an action facing the world?

JP: Does that not consisting in failing to answer a question? In adapting, in co-adapting, with a higher taste as problematic faculty, are corresponding elements in the process being determined? Do we not replicate the chains of equivalence, allowing the code, to code, so to speak, how we might understand it?

DB: Coders are writers, and every writer is a sellout. But an honest joy/Does itself destroy/For a harlot coy.

JP: We might ask ourselves the following question: is the software coder a scientist? A philosopher? Or an artist? Or a schizophrenic?

AL: For me the only code is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency. Which in part the knowing children sang to me.

Dr. K: This man is mad. There has been for a long time no doubt of it, and it is most regrettable that in our circle the profession of alienist is not represented. I, as a numismatist, feel myself entirely incompetent in this situation.

DB: For Deleuze, the ascription of these titles exceeds determining whether the tools of the trade in question are microscopes and test- tubes, cafes and cigarettes, or easels and oil-paints. Rather they identify the kind of thinking that each group practices. Latour claimed that if you gave him a laboratory he could move the world. Maybe prosopopoeia is part of the answer, he should ask code what it thinks.

JP: But not just the kind of thinking, but the kind of problems which this thought presupposes, and the nature of the solutions that it can provide. To ask under which category the coder clicks her mouse is to question whether she is creating concepts as opposed to dealing in functives like a scientist, or generating percepts and affects like an artist.

DB: If you're actually going to love technology, you have to give up sentimental slop, novels sprinkled with rose water. All these stories of efficient, profitable, optimal, functional technologies.

JP: Who said I wanted to love technology?

DB: The philosopher loves the concept. The artist, the affect. Do the coders love the code?

JP: If we say that code is a concept, summoning into being or releasing free software as an event, the coder is cast first and
foremost as a philosopher. The coder, as philosopher, could neither love nor covet her code prior to its arrival. It must take her by surprise. For the philosopher, or more specifically the conceptual personae through whom concepts come to pass and are given voice, (Deleuze does not strictly believe in the creativity of an individual ego), Deleuze reserves a privileged role in the modern world which is so woefully lacking in creation and in resistance to the present. He writes: 'The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist' (1994, 108). Deleuze would hope this future form would be recognizable by virtue of its dislocation from the present.

DB: If the software coder really is a philosopher, what kind of a future is free software summoning and who are the new people who might later exist?

JP: Thanks to computers, we now know that there are only differences of degree between matter and texts. In fact, ever since a literary happy few started talking about 'textual machines' in connection with novels, it has been perfectly natural for machines to become texts written by novelists who are as brilliant as they are anonymous (Latour). But then is there no longer any difference between humans and nonhumans.

DB: No, but there is no difference between the spirit of machines and their matter, either; they are souls through and through (Latour).

JP: But don't the stories tell us that machines are purported to be pure, separated from the messy world of the real? Their internal
world floating in a platonic sphere, eternal and perfect. Is the basis of their functioning deep within the casing numbers ticking
over numbers, overflowing logic registers and memory addresses?

DB: I agree. Logic is often considered the base of code. Logic is reductionist not accidentally but essentially and necessarily; it
wants to turn concepts into functions. In becoming propositional, the conceptual idea of code loses all the characteristics it possessed as a concept: its endoconsistency and its exoconsistency. This is because of a regime of independence that has replaced that of inseparability, the code has enframed the concept.

--Code as science--

DB: Do you think a real hatred inspires logic's rivalry with, or its will to supplant, the concept? Deleuze thought 'it kills the concept twice over'.

JP: The concept is reborn not because it is a scientific function and not because it is a logical proposition: it does not belong to a discursive system and it does not have a reference. The concept shows itself and does nothing but show itself. Concepts are really monsters that are reborn from their fragments.

DB: But how does this relate to the code, and more specifically to free software and free culture? Can we say that this is that
summoning? Can the code save us?

JP: Free software knows only relations of movement and rest, of speed and slowness, between unformed, or relatively unformed, elements, molecules or particles borne away by fluxes. It knows nothing of subjects but rather singularities called events or haecceities. Free software is a machine but a machine that has no beginning and no end. It is always in the middle, between things. Free software is where things pick up speed, a transversal movement, that undermines its banks and accelerates in the middle. But that is not to say that capital does not attempt to recode it, reterritorialising its flows within the circuits of capital.

DB: A project or a person is here only definable by movements and rests, speeds and slowness (longitude) and by affects, intensities (latitude). There are no more forms, but cinematic relations between unformed elements; there are no more subjects but dynamic individuations without subjects, which constitute collective assemblages. Nothing develops, but things arrive late or in advance, and enter into some assemblage according to their compositions of speed. Nothing becomes subjective but haecceities take shape according to the compositions of non-subjective powers and effects. Maps of speeds and intensities (e.g. Sourceforge).

JP: We have all already encountered this business of speeds and slowness: their common quality is to grow from the middle, to be always in-between; they have a common imperceptible, like the vast slowness of massive Japanese wrestlers, and all of a sudden, a decisive gesture so swift that we didn't see it.

DB: Good code, Bad code. Deleuze asks: 'For what do private property, wealth, commodities, and classes signify'? and answers: 'The breakdown of codes' (AO, 218). Capitalism is a generalized decoding of flows. It has decoded the worker in favour of abstract labour, it has decoded the family, as a means of consumption, in favour of interchangeable, faceless consumers and has decoded wealth in favour of abstract, speculative, merchant capital. In the face of this, it is difficult to know if we have too much code or too little and what the criteria might be by which we could make qualitative distinctions between one type of code and another, such as code as concept and code as commodity.

JP: We could suggest that the schizophrenic code (i.e. the schizophrenic coding as a radical politics of desire) could seek to
de-normalise and de-individualise through a multiplicity of new, radical collective arrangements against power. Perhaps a radical hermeneutics of code, code as locality and place, a dwelling.

DB: Not all code is a dwelling. Bank systems, facial recognition packages, military defence equipment and governmental monitoring software is code but not a dwelling. Even so, this code is in the domain of dwelling. That domain extends over this code and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The bank clerk is at home on the bank network but does not have shelter there; the working woman is at home on the code but does not have a dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the programming environment but does not dwell there. This code enframes her. She inhabits them and yet does not
dwell in them.

--Code as art--

JP: You are right to distinguish between code as 'challenging-forth' (Heidegger) and code that is a 'bringing-forth'. The code that is reterritorialised is code that is proprietary and instrumental, has itself become a form of 'standing-reserve'.

DB: So how are we to know when code is a 'bringing-forth'? How will we know if it is a tool for conviviality. How will we distinguish between the paranoiac and the schizophrenic?

JP: We know, that the friend or lover of code, as claimant does not lack rivals. If each citizen lays claim to something then we need to judge the validity of claims. The coder lays claim to the code, and the corporation, and the lawyer, who all say, 'I am the friend of code'. First it was the computer scientists who exclaimed 'This is our concern, we are the scientists!'. Then it was the turn of the lawyers, the journalists and the state chanting 'Code must be domesticated and nationalised!' Finally the most shameful moment came when companies seized control of the code themselves 'We are the friends of code, we put it in our computers, and we sell it to anyone'. The only code is functional and the only concepts are products to be sold. But even now we see the lawyers agreeing with the corporations, we must control the code, we must regulate the code, the code must be paranoiac.

DB: This is perhaps the vision offered by William Gibson's Neuromancer, a dystopian realization of the unchecked power of multinational corporations which, despite the efforts of outlaw subcultures, monopolize code. Through their creation of AI entities code becomes autonomous, it exceeds human control. If indeed it makes sense to retain the term human, which Gibson pejoratively substitutes with 'meat'. The new human-machinic interfaces engendered by software and technological development demand the jettisoning of received categories of existence as they invent uncanny new ones.

JP: This is the possibility of code. The code as a war machine. Nomadic thought. The code as outsider art, the gay science, code as desiring-production, making connections, to ever new connections.

DB: Code can be formed into networks of singularities into machines of struggle. As Capital de-territorializes code there is the potential through machines to re-territorialize. Through transformative constitutive action and network sociality in other words the multitude-code can be deterritorializing, it is multiplicity and becoming, it is an event. Code is becoming nomadic.

JP: This nomadic code upsets and exceeds the criteria of representational transparency. According to Jean Baudrillard, the omnipresence of code in the West—DNA, binary, digital—enables the production of copies for which there are no originals. Unsecured and cut adrift from the 'reality' which representation has for centuries prided itself on mirroring, we are now in the age of simulation. The depiction of code presents several difficulties for writers, who, in seeking to negotiate the new technological landscape, must somehow bend the representational medium of language and the linear process of reading to accommodate the proliferating ontological and spatio-temporal relations that code affords.

DB: This tension is as palpable in Gibson's efforts to render cyberspace in prose (he first coined the term in Neuromancer) as it is on the book cover, where the flat 2D picture struggles to convey the multi-dimensional possibilities of the matrix. The aesthetics of simulation, the poetics of cyberspace and of hyperreality are, we might say, still under construction.

JP: Perhaps code precludes artistic production as we know it. Until the artist creates code and dispenses with representational media altogether, is it possible that her work will contribute only impoverished, obsolete versions of the age of simulation?

DB: Artists have responded to 'code' as both form and content. As form, we might also think of code as 'genre', the parodying of which has become a staple in the postmodern canon. Films such as 'The Scream' series, 'The Simpsons', or 'Austin Powers';
flaunt and then subvert the generic codes upon which the production and interpretation of meaning depends. More drastically, Paul Auster sets his 'New York Trilogy' in an epistemological dystopia in which the world does not yield to rational comprehension as the genre of detective fiction traditionally demands. If clues are totally indistinguishable from (co)incidental detail, how can the detective guarantee a resolution, how can order be restored? As Auster emphasizes, generic codes and aesthetic form underwrite ideological assumptions and can be described as the products of specific social relations.

JP: And what of code as content? Like the 'Matrix'. Here is a film which has latched onto the concept of code and also its discussion in contemporary philosophy, almost smugly displaying its dexterity in handling both.

DB: Or 'I Heart Huckabees' with its unfolding of a kind of existential code that underlies human reality. Are our interpretations shifting to an almost instrumental understanding of code as a form of weak structuralism? Philosophy as mere code, to be written, edited and improved, turned into myth so that our societies can run smoothly.

JP: The hacker stands starkly here. If code can be hacked, then perhaps we should drop a monkey-wrench in the machine, or sugar in the petrol tank of code? Can the philosopher be a model for the hacker or the hacker for the philosopher? Or perhaps the hacker, with the concentrations on the smooth, efficient hacks, might not be the best model. Perhaps the cracker is a better model for the philosophy of the future. Submerged, unpredictable and radically decentred. Outlaw and outlawed.

DB: Perhaps. But then perhaps we must also be careful of the fictions that we both read and write. And keep the radical potentialities of code and philosophy free.

Wet with fever and fatigue we can now look toward the shore and say goodbye to where the windows shone so brightly.

other college phrases: "creative destruction," ceteris paribus.
quo vadis
res Arcadia ego"
Drang nach Osten
das dritte Reich
Lebensraum
Kulturkampf
sturm und drang
Bildungsroman
ts: mise only thing that anyone ever knows about Thomas Kuhn)
contraposto, of suture.
see also: scopophilia, female as to-be-looked-at
vigo, 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 friedman
john kenneth galbraith
james buchanan
paul krugman

economics -- the coase theorem!
- ("OMG the limits of Western knowledge!!!")
semiotics
"to-be-looked-at-ness"
"queering of the..."
phallo(go)centric
third worldIST
the of choice here)
systems of signification
the uncanny
convergence, constructionism/essentialism, the digital ddd

320 240

the Nacirema
search: the pareto principle (aka "the 20/80 rule") theory
prisoners' dilemna
the 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 loquitur
exclusio unius
Weltschmerz
Weltanschuung
Götterdämmerung
vis-a-vis, ergo, QED
ars longa, vita brevis...
"Et in en scene vs. mise en place
pronunciamento
"paradigm shift" (often the chiaroscuro,
ionic, doric, corinthian.
the glass ceiling
see also: phallic camera, theory moves in discreet cycles'
Tristam Shandy."
sublimation
projection
Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon
performativity
"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 smith
thomas malthus
david ricardo
karl marx
leon walras
henry george
thorstein veblen consumption")
arthur pigou
john maynard keynes (the guy who said "in dude who came up the term "creative destruction")
paul samuelson
milton ven diagrams
the madeleine in Recherche
The Milgram Experiment!
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: imperial imaginary
geographies of spectatorship
the nature of the (insert medium divide, image politics cf. kennedy/nixon debate, "cf.".

extreme programming

Rhizobiceae

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.

(1)one who believes it may be possible to avoid bodily death altogether.

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.

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/unilateralism
2. Pro-/anti-Americanism
3. Because not even America can “go it alone” (xii-xiii).
D. Empire rules over a global order:
1. Fractured by internal divisions and hierarchies
2. 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 common
b. 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 networks
2. 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)

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 phase
ii. Mechanisms of passage
iii. Our postmodern imperial world
e. 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 1848
2. After 1917 Soviet Revolution
3. After the Chinese and Cuban revolutions
B. 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 constitution
2. 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 War
2. 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 the
b. 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 Many
A. 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 Liberation
1. 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 them
ii. Fear of the Elite and their monopoly of knowledge through expert discourses
4. Virtually every major political theorist before the 18th century also reflected systematically on “rhetoric”—a theory of political
prudence/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”?

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/unilateralism
2. Pro-/anti-Americanism
3. Because not even America can “go it alone” (xii-xiii).
D. Empire rules over a global order:
1. Fractured by internal divisions and hierarchies
2. 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 common
b. 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 networks
2. 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.

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 corruption
ii. 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 War
A. War is becoming a permanent social relation; politics is increasingly war conducted by other means
B. 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 temporally
2. 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 government
2. Exercise of violence by a legitimate government in violation of human rights
3. 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 Security
A. War is becoming ontological, but moving in 2 directions:
1. Localized police actions, but
2. 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 Violence
A. 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 war
A. Postmodern warfare much like post-Fordist production:
1. Based on mobility and flexibility
2. Integrates intelligence, information, and immaterial labor
3. Extends militarization to outer space, the ends of the earth, depths of the ocean (40).
B. RMA: Revolution in Military Affairs
1. New technologies provide new form of combat
2. US now has overwhelming dominance of military power
3. 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 bombings
3. 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 armies
2. 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 netwars
1. No center to the network
2. No stable boundaries between inside and outside
3. 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 Resistance
A. We need to research the genealogy of social and political movements of resistance, leading us to:
1. A new vision of our world
2. An understanding of the subjectivities capable of creating a new world
B. Need to understand:
1. How people are integrated into the systems of economic production and reproduction
2. What jobs they perform
3. What they produce
C. 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. Information
2. Knowledges
3. Images
4. Relationships
5. 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 life
2. 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 whole
2. The production of ideas, knowledges, and affects directly produces social relationships—it is biopolitical
3. New subjectivities are produced
4. 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 power
2. The most effective model of resistance turns out to have the same form as the dominant models of economic and social production
3. Each new form of resistance is aimed at addressing the undemocratic qualities of previous movements, creating a chain of ever more democratic movements
G. 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 Warfare
A. 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 modernization
2. 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 Struggles
A. “The People”: a middle term between consent given by the population and the command exercised by sovereign power
B. 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 model
2. 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)

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 sovereignty
3. But 9/11 changed all that, leading to 2 different strategies:
a. Schroeder’s Germany: pursue multilateral cosmopolitan alliances
b. Blair’s Britain: accept US hegemony (231-233).
B. Liberal cosmopolitan answer:
1. Globalization fosters democracy, esp. in human rights
2. 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 democratic
2. US hegemony=democracy
3. 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 does
3. 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 Modernity
A. 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 government
b. 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 people
3. 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 debt
C. 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 Party
2. The Commune: destruction of sovereign power as separate from society
3. 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, UN
B. 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 Movement
D. 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 representation
1. 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 Court
2. Establish a permanent international or global truth commission
3. 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 rates
b. 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 system
2. Kyoto Accord
3. 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 borders
B. 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 struggle
B. 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 Lenin
A. 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 multitude
D. The New Science:
1. Challenge all existing forms of sovereignty as a precondition for establishing democracy, as in Lenin’s project of smashing the State
2. 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)

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?

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." As
novelist Doris Lessing has observed, barons on opposite sides of the
river don't need to be in cahoots if their interests coincide. In our
case, defence, homeland security, financial crime enforcement, police,
tax collectors and intellectual property rights holders offer reasons to
want to control the hardware we use. Then there are geeks, who can be
tempted to forget the consequences if the technology is cool enough.
Vinge quotes the most famous line from the comic strip Pogo: "We have
met the enemy, and he is us."

Vinge's technology to satisfy these groups' dreams is the Secure
Hardware Environment (She), which dedicates some bandwidth and a small
portion of every semiconductor for regulatory use. Deployment is
progressive, as standards are implemented. Built into new chips, She
will spread inevitably through its predecessors' obsolescence.

This part is terribly plausible. It sounds much like the Trusted
Computing Platform, implemented in Intel chips and built into machines
from Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and others. Most people don't realise their
new computer contains a chip designed to block the operation of any
software not certified by the group. Now enhance that and build it into
RFID chips, networked embedded systems, shrink and distribute as "smart
dust". All are current trends or works in progress.

Geeks are willing to fight Trusted Computing on the grounds that it
could be used to block open-source software or to enforce draconian
digital rights management. But what if accepting it meant less visible
security, less bureaucracy, even slight profit? She automatically sends
taxes, enables much less noticeable surveillance and gets you through
security checkpoints with no waiting. There's less crime, because
legislative reality can be enforced on physical reality. Fewer false
convictions. Make regulation automatic, and it seems to go away. New
laws can be downloaded as a regulatory upgrade.

"She," Vinge concluded at the conference, "fits the trajectory that
economics and technical progress are following. The infrastructure for
such control will probably arrive in any case." He also calls his
scenario optimistic.

"The illusion of freedom becomes a strange thing when a government is
dealing with ... thousands of people who are as bright as the smartest
people running the government. Together, they outclass the people
running the show. The turning point is the notion that to provide this
illusion of freedom for such a group would wind up being more like real
freedom than anything in human history." Or, as he thinks Pogo might say
for the 21st century, "We have met what's going to save our ass and it
is us."

Since the online version of the book is available at author Yochai
Benkler's site under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial -
ShareAlike license, I've remixed several of my favorite parts of the
book into an essay, which hopefully conveys some of the essence of
Benkler'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 choose
to act in some way that is oriented toward fulfilling our social and
psychological needs, not our market-exchangeable needs. It is that
part of our lives and our motivational structure that social
production taps, and on which it thrives.

There is nothing mysterious about this. It is evident to any of us who
rush home to our family or to a restaurant or bar with friends at the
end of a workday, rather than staying on for another hour of overtime
or to increase our billable hours; or at least regret it when we
cannot. It is evident to any of us who has ever brought a cup of tea
to a sick friend or relative, or received one; to anyone who has lent
a hand moving a friend’s belongings; played a game; told a joke, or
enjoyed one told by a friend.

What needs to be understood now, however, is under what conditions
these many and diverse social actions can turn into an important
modality of economic production. When can all these acts, distinct
from our desire for money and motivated by social and psychological
needs, be mobilized, directed, and made effective in ways that we
recognize as economically valuable?

Human beings are, and always have been, diversely motivated beings. We
act for material gain, but also for psychological well-being and
gratification, and for social connectedness. There is nothing new or
earth-shattering about this, except perhaps to some economists.

In the industrial economy in general, and the industrial information
economy as well, most opportunities to make things that were valuable
and important to many people were constrained by the physical capital
requirements of making them. From the steam engine to the assembly
line, from the double-rotary printing press to the communications
satellite, the capital constraints on action were such that simply
wanting to do something was rarely a sufficient condition to enable
one to do it. Financing the necessary physical capital, in turn,
oriented the necessarily capital-intensive projects toward a
production and organizational strategy that could justify the
investments. In market economies, that meant orienting toward market
production. In state-run economies, that meant orienting production
toward the goals of the state bureaucracy. In either case, the
practical individual freedom to cooperate with others in making things
of value was limited by the extent of the capital requirements of
production.

In the networked information economy, the physical capital required
for production is broadly distributed throughout society. Personal
computers and network connections are ubiquitous. This does not mean
that they cannot be used for markets, or that individuals cease to
seek market opportunities. It does mean, however, that whenever
someone, somewhere, among the billion connected human beings, and
ultimately among all those who will be connected, wants to make
something that requires human creativity, a computer, and a network
connection, he or she can do so â€" alone, or in cooperation with
others. He or she already has the capital capacity necessary to do so;
if not alone, then at least in cooperation with other individuals
acting for complementary reasons.

The result is that a good deal more that human beings value can now be
done by individuals, who interact with each other socially, as human
beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the
price system. Sometimes, under conditions I specify in some detail,
these nonmarket collaborations can be better at motivating effort and
can allow creative people to work on information projects more
efficiently than would traditional market mechanisms and corporations.
The result is a flourishing nonmarket sector of information,
knowledge, and cultural production, based in the networked
environment, and applied to anything that the many individuals
connected to it can imagine. Its outputs, in turn, are not treated as
exclusive property. They are instead subject to an increasingly robust
ethic of open sharing, open for all others to build on, extend, and
make their own.

If there is one lesson we can learn from globalization and the
ever-increasing reach of the market, it is that the logic of the
market exerts enormous pressure on existing social structures. If we
are indeed seeing the emergence of a substantial component of
nonmarket production at the very core of our economic engine - the
production and exchange of information, and through it of
information-based goods, tools, services, and capabilities - then this
change suggests a genuine limit on the extent of the market. Such a
limit, growing from within the very market that it limits, in its most
advanced loci, would represent a genuine shift in direction for what
appeared to be the ever-increasing global reach of the market economy
and society in the past half-century.

I treat property and markets as just one domain of human action, with
affordances and limitations. Their presence enhances freedom along
some dimensions, but their institutional requirements can become
sources of constraint when they squelch freedom of action in nonmarket
contexts. Calibrating the reach of the market, then, becomes central
not only to the shape of justice or welfare in a society, but also to
freedom.

What we are seeing now is the emergence of more effective collective
action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the
price system or a managerial structure for coordination. This kind of
information production by agents operating on a decentralized,
nonproprietary model is not completely new. Science is built by many
people 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 collaboration
together, and creating science. What we see in the networked
information economy is a dramatic increase in the importance and the
centrality of information produced in this way.

No benevolent historical force will inexorably lead this
technological-economic moment to develop toward an open, diverse,
liberal equilibrium. If the transformation I describe as possible
occurs, it will lead to substantial redistribution of power and money
from the twentieth-century industrial producers of information,
culture, and communications â€" like Hollywood, the recording industry,
and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications
services giants â€" to a combination of widely diffuse populations
around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that
make this population better able to produce its own information
environment rather than buying it ready-made.

None of the industrial giants of yore are taking this reallocation
lying down. The technology will not overcome their resistance through
an insurmountable progressive impulse. The reorganization of
production and the advances it can bring in freedom and justice will
emerge, therefore, only as a result of social and political action
aimed at protecting the new social patterns from the incumbents’
assaults. It is precisely to develop an understanding of what is at
stake and why it is worth fighting for that I write this book.

Imagine three storytelling societies: the Reds, the Blues, and the
Greens. Each society follows a set of customs as to how they live and
how they tell stories. Among the Reds and the Blues, everyone is busy
all day, and no one tells stories except in the evening. In the
evening, in both of these societies, everyone gathers in a big tent,
and there is one designated storyteller who sits in front of the
audience and tells stories. It is not that no one is allowed to tell
stories elsewhere. However, in these societies, given the time
constraints people face, if anyone were to sit down in the shade in
the middle of the day and start to tell a story, no one else would
stop to listen.

Among the Reds, the storyteller is a hereditary position, and he or
she alone decides which stories to tell. Among the Blues, the
storyteller is elected every night by simple majority vote. Every
member of the community is eligible to offer him- or herself as that
night’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, sometimes
in small groups of two or three, sometimes in very large groups.
Stories in each of these societies play a very important role in
understanding and evaluating the world. They are the way people
describe the world as they know it. They serve as testing grounds to
imagine how the world might be, and as a way to work out what is good
and 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 open
to him and his evaluation of these options are largely controlled by
the hereditary storyteller. He can try to contact the storyteller to
persuade him to tell different stories, but the storyteller is the
figure who determines what stories are told. To the extent that these
stories describe the universe of options Ron knows about, the
storyteller defines the options Ron has.

Bob’s autonomy is constrained not by the storyteller, but by the
majority of voters among the Blues. These voters select the
storyteller, and the way they choose will affect Bob’s access to
stories profoundly. If the majority selects only a small group of
entertaining, popular, pleasing, or powerful (in some other dimension,
like wealth or political power) storytellers, then Bob’s perception of
the range of options will be only slightly wider than Ron’s, if at
all. The locus of power to control Bob’s sense of what he can and
cannot do has shifted. It is not the hereditary storyteller, but
rather the majority.

Gertrude is in a very different position. First, she can decide to
tell a story whenever she wants to, subject only to whether there is
any other Green who wants to listen. She is free to become an active
producer except as constrained by the autonomy of other individual
Greens. Second, she can select from the stories that any other Green
wishes to tell, because she and all those surrounding her can sit in
the shade and tell a story. No one person, and no majority, determines
for her whether she can or cannot tell a story. No one can
unilaterally control whose stories Gertrude can listen to. And no one
can determine for her the range and diversity of stories that will be
available to her from any other member of the Greens who wishes to
tell a story.

How, one might worry, can a system of information production enhance
the ability of an individual to author his or her life, if it is
impossible to tell whether this or that particular story or piece of
information is credible, or whether it is relevant to the individual’s
particular experience? Will individuals spend all their time sifting
through mounds of inane stories and fairy tales, instead of evaluating
which life is best for them based on a small and manageable set of
credible and relevant stories?

Having too much information with no real way of separating the wheat
from the chaff forms what we might call the Babel objection.
Individuals must have access to some mechanism that sifts through the
universe of information, knowledge, and cultural mores in order to
whittle them down to a manageable and usable scope. The question then
becomes whether the networked information economy, given the human
need for filtration, actually improves the information environment of
individuals relative to the industrial information economy.

There are three elements to the answer: First, as a baseline, it is
important to recognize the power that inheres in the editorial
function. The extent to which information overload inhibits autonomy
relative to the autonomy of an individual exposed to a well-edited
information flow depends on how much the editor who whittles down the
information flow thereby gains power over the life of the user of the
editorial function, and how he or she uses that power. Second, there
is the question of whether users can select and change their editor
freely, or whether the editorial function is bundled with other
communicative functions and sold by service providers among which
users have little choice.

Finally, there is the understanding that filtration and accreditation
are themselves information goods, like any other, and that they too
can be produced on a commons-based, nonmarket model, and therefore
without incurring the autonomy deficit that a reintroduction of
property to solve the Babel objection would impose. From the
discussions of Wikipedia to the moderation and metamoderation scheme
of Slashdot, and from the sixty thousand volunteers that make up the
Open Directory Project to the PageRank system used by Google, the
means of filtering data are being produced within the networked
information economy using peer production and the coordinate patterns
of nonproprietary production more generally.

Developments in network topology theory and its relationship to the
structure of the empirically mapped real Internet offer a map of the
networked information environment that is quite different from the
naive model of "everyone a pamphleteer." To the limited extent that
these findings have been interpreted for political meaning, they have
been seen as a disappointment â€" the real world, as it turns out, does
not measure up to anything like that utopia. However, that is the
wrong baseline. There never has been a complex, large modern democracy
in which everyone could speak and be heard by everyone else. The
correct baseline is the one-way structure of the commercial mass media.

The networked information economy makes individuals better able to do
things for and by themselves, and makes them less susceptible to
manipulation by others than they were in the mass-media culture. In
this sense, the emergence of this new set of technical, economic,
social, and institutional relations can increase the relative role
that each individual is able to play in authoring his or her own life.

The networked information economy also promises to provide a much more
robust platform for public debate. It enables citizens to participate
in public conversation continuously and pervasively, not as passive
recipients of “received wisdom� from professional talking heads, but
as active participants in conversations carried out at many levels of
political and social structure. Individuals can find out more about
what goes on in the world, and share it more effectively with others.
They can check the claims of others and produce their own, and they
can 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 professional
attainment (as with the case of Jim Cornish, who decided to create a
worldwide center of information on the Vikings from his fifth-grade
schoolroom in Gander, Newfoundland), the networked information
environment opens new domains for productive life that simply were not
there before. In doing so, it has provided us with new ways to imagine
our lives as productive human beings.

Writing a free operating system or publishing a free encyclopedia may
have seemed quixotic a mere few years ago, but these are now far from
delusional. Human beings who live in a material and social context
that lets them aspire to such things as possible for them to do, in
their own lives, by themselves and in loose affiliation with others,
are human beings who have a greater realm for their agency. We can
live a life more authored by our own will and imagination than by the
material 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 questions
of distribution and human well-being? The pessimistic answer is, very
little. Hunger, disease, and deeply rooted racial, ethnic, or class
stratification will not be solved by a more decentralized,
nonproprietary information production system. Without clean water,
basic literacy, moderately well-functioning governments, and universal
practical adoption of the commitment to treat all human beings as
fundamentally deserving of equal regard, the fancy Internet-based
society will have little effect on the billions living in poverty or
deprivation, 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 the
networked information economy can play in solving issues of justice,
it is important to recognize that information, knowledge, and culture
are core inputs into human welfare. Agricultural knowledge and
biological innovation are central to food security. Medical innovation
and access to its fruits are central to living a long and healthy
life. Literacy and education are central to individual growth, to
democratic self-governance, and to economic capabilities. Economic
growth itself is critically dependent on innovation and information.

For all these reasons, information policy has become a critical
element of development policy and the question of how societies attain
and distribute human welfare and well-being. Access to knowledge has
become central to human development.

Proprietary rights are designed to elicit signals of people’s
willingness and ability to pay. In the presence of extreme
distribution differences like those that characterize the global
economy, the market is a poor measure of comparative welfare. A system
that signals what innovations are most desirable and rations access to
these innovations based on ability, as well as willingness, to pay,
over-represents welfare gains of the wealthy and under-represents
welfare gains of the poor. Twenty thousand American teenagers can
simply afford, and will be willing to pay, much more for acne
medication than the more than a million Africans who die of malaria
every year can afford to pay for a vaccine.

The emergence of commons-based techniques â€" particularly, of an open
innovation platform that can incorporate farmers and local agronomists
from around the world into the development and feedback process
through networked collaboration platforms â€" promises the most likely
avenue to achieve research oriented toward increased food security in
the developing world.

It promises a mechanism of development that will not increase the
relative weight and control of a small number of commercial firms that
specialize in agricultural production. It will instead release the
products of innovation into a self-binding commons â€" one that is
institutionally designed to defend itself against appropriation. It
promises an iterative collaboration platform that would be able to
collect environmental and local feedback in the way that a free
software development project collects bug reports â€" through a
continuous process of networked conversation among the user-innovators
themselves.

Laboratories have two immensely valuable resources that may be capable
of being harnessed to peer production. Most important by far are
postdoctoral fellows. These are the same characters who populate so
many free software projects, only geeks of a different feather. They
are at a similar life stage. They have the same hectic, overworked
lives, and yet the same capacity to work one more hour on something
else, something interesting, exciting, or career enhancing, like a
special grant announced by the government.

The other resources that have overcapacity might be thought of as
petri 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. Each
lab is usually funded to have all the equipment it needs for
run-of-the-mill work, except for very large machines operated on
time-share principles. Those machines that are redundantly provisioned
in laboratories have downtime. That downtime coupled with a
postdoctoral fellow in the lab is an experiment waiting to happen. If
a group that is seeking to start a project defines discrete modules of
a common experiment, and provides a communications platform to allow
people to download project modules, perform them, and upload results,
it would be possible to harness the overcapacity that exists in
laboratories.

In principle, although this is a harder empirical question, the same
could be done for other widely available laboratory materials and even
animals for preclinical trials on the model of, “brother, can you
spare a mouse?� One fascinating proposal and early experiment at the
University of Indiana - Purdue University Indianapolis was suggested
by William Scott, a chemistry professor. Scott proposed developing
simple, low-cost kits for training undergraduate students in chemical
synthesis, but which would use targets and molecules identified by
computational biology as potential treatments for developing-world
diseases as their output. With enough redundancy across different
classrooms and institutions around the world, the results could be
verified while screening and synthesizing a significant number of
potential drugs. The undergraduate educational experience could
actually contribute to new experiments, as opposed simply to
synthesizing outputs that are not really needed by anyone.

In February 2001, the humanitarian organization Doctors Without
Borders (also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) asked Yale
University, which held the key South African patent on stavudine â€" one
of the drugs then most commonly used in combination therapies â€"for
permission to use generic versions in a pilot AIDS treatment program.
At the time, the licensed version of the drug, sold by
Bristol-Myers-Squibb (BMS), cost $1,600 per patient per year. A
generic version, manufactured in India, was available for $47 per
patient per year.

At that point in history, thirty-nine drug manufacturers were suing
the South African government to strike down a law permitting
importation of generics in a health crisis, and no drug company had
yet made concessions on pricing in developing nations. Within weeks of
receiving MSF’s request, Yale negotiated with BMS to secure the sale
of stavudine for fifty-five dollars a year in South Africa. Yale, the
University of California at Berkeley, and other universities have, in
the years since, entered into similar adhoc agreements with regard to
developing-world applications or distribution of drugs that depend on
their patented technologies. These successes provide a template for a
much broader realignment of how universities use their patent
portfolios to alleviate the problems of access to medicines in
developing nations.

A technology transfer officer who has successfully provided a
royalty-free license to a nonprofit concerned with developing nations
has no obvious metric in which to record and report the magnitude of
her success (saving X millions of lives or displacing Y misery),
unlike her colleague who can readily report X millions of dollars from
a market-oriented license, or even merely Y dozens of patents filed.
Universities must consider more explicitly their special role in the
global information and knowledge production system. If they recommit
to a role focused on serving the improvement of the lot of humanity,
rather than maximization of their revenue stream, they should adapt
their patenting and licensing practices appropriately.

The rise of commons-based information production, of individuals and
loose associations producing information in nonproprietary forms,
presents a genuine discontinuity from the industrial information
economy of the twentieth century. It brings with it great promise, and
great uncertainty. We have early intimations as to how market-based
enterprises can adjust to make room for this newly emerging phenomenon
â€" IBM’s adoption of open source, Second Life’s adoption of
user-created immersive entertainment, or Open Source Technology
Group’s development of a platform for Slashdot.

We also have very clear examples of businesses that have decided to
fight the new changes by using every trick in the book, and some, like
injecting corrupt files into peer-to-peer networks, that are decidedly
not in the book. Law and regulation form one important domain in which
these battles over the shape of our emerging information production
system are fought. As we observe these battles; as we participate in
them as individuals choosing how to behave and what to believe, as
citizens, lobbyists, lawyers, or activists; as we act out these legal
battles as legislators, judges, or treaty negotiators, it is important
that we understand the normative stakes of what we are doing.

We have an opportunity to change the way we create and exchange
information, knowledge, and culture. By doing so, we can make the
twenty-first century one that offers individuals greater autonomy,
political communities greater democracy, and societies greater
opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection.

We can remove some of the transactional barriers to material
opportunity, and improve the state of human development everywhere.
Perhaps these changes will be the foundation of a true transformation
toward more liberal and egalitarian societies. Perhaps they will
merely improve, in well-defined but smaller ways, human life along
each of these dimensions. That alone is more than enough to justify an
embrace of the networked information economy by anyone who values
human welfare, development, and freedom.

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.

Category: Cool | 3870 Views

One thing this is showing that is interesting is how Cyc is going forward to
use google in processing and learning new information by using Google, and
using it to verify facts and knowledge.