"Radical Machines Against Techno-Empire"
Matteo Pasquinelli
http://info.interactivist.net/print.pl?sid=04/02/23/0643243
Deleuze and Guattari took the machine out of the factory, now it is up to us
to take it out of the network and imagine a post-internet generation.
Everyone of us is a machine of the real, everyone of us is a
constructive machine. -- Toni Negri
Technical machines only work if they are not out of order. Desiring
machines on the contrary continually break down as they run, and in fact run
only when they are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage of
this property by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring
production is used to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with
the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of
dysfunction.-- Gilles Deluze, Felix Guattari, L'anti-Oedipe
What is knowledge sharing? How does the knowledge economy function? Where is
the general intellect at work? Take the cigarettes machine. The machine you
see is the embodying of a scientific knowledge into hardware and software
components, generations of engineering stratified for commercial use: it
automatically manages fluxes of money and commodities, substitutes a human
with a user-friendly interface, defends private property, functions on the
basis of a minimal control and restocking routine. Where has the tobacconist
gone? Sometimes he enjoys free time. Other times the company that owns the
chain of distribution has replaced him. In his place one often meets the
technician. Far from emulating Marx's "Fragment on Machines" with a Fragment
on cigarette machines, this unhealthy example is meant to show how
postfordist theories live around us and that material or abstract machines
built by collective intelligence are organically chained to the fluxes of
the economy and of our needs.
Rather than of general intellect we should talk of general intellects. There
are multiple forms of collective intelligence. Some can become totalitarian
systems, such as the military-managerial ideology of the neocons or of
Microsoft empire. Others can be embodied in social democratic bureaucracies,
in the apparatus of police control, in the maths of stock market
speculators, in the architecture of our cities (every day we walk on
concretions of collective intelligence). In the dystopias of "2001 A Space
Odyssey" and "The Matrix," the brain of machines evolves into
self-consciousness to the point of getting rid of the human. 'Good'
collective intelligences, on the other hand, produce international networks
of cooperation such as the network of the global movement, of precarious
workers, of free software developers, of media activism. They also produce
the sharing of knowledge in universities, the Creative Commons open licenses
and participative urban planning, narrations and imaginaries of liberation.
From a geopolitical perspective we could figure ourselves in one of Philip
Dick's sci-fi paranoia: Earth is dominated by one Intelligence, but inside
of it a war unfolds between two Organisations of the general intellect,
opposed yet intertwined.
Used to the traditional representative forms of the global movement we fail
to grasp the new productive conflicts. Concerned as we are about the
imperial war, we do not appreciate the centrality of this struggle.
Following Manuel Castells, we define the movement as a resistance identity
that fails to become a project identity. We are not aware of the distance
between the global movement and the centre of capitalist production.
Paraphrasing Paolo Virno, we say that there already is too much politics in
new forms of production for the politics of the movement to still enjoy any
autonomous dignity. [1]
The events of 1977 (not only in Italy but also in the punk season)
sanctioned the end of the 'revolutionary' paradigm and the beginning of that
of movement, opening new spaces of conflict in the fields of communication,
media and the production of the imagery. These days we are discovering that
the 'movement' as a format needs to be overcome, in favour of that of
network.
Three kinds of action, well separated in the XIXth century -- labour,
politics and art -- are now integrated into one attitude and central to each
productive process. In order to work, do politics or produce imaginary today
one needs hybrid competences. This means that we all are
workers-artists-activists, but it also means that the figures of the
militant and the artist are surpassed and that such competences are only
formed in a common space that is the sphere of the collective intellect.
Since Marx's Grundrisse, the general intellect is the patriarch of a family
of concepts that are more numerous and cover a wide range of issues:
knowledge-based economy, information society, cognitive capitalism,
immaterial labour, collective intelligence, creative class, cognitariat,
knowledge sharing and postfordism. In the last few years the political
lexicon has got rich of interlaced critical tools that we turn over in our
hands wondering about their exact usefulness. For the sake of simplicity, we
only accounted for the terms that inherited an Enlightenment, speculative,
angelic and almost neognostic approach. But reality is much more complex and
we wait for new forms to claim for themselves the role that within the same
field is due to desire, body, aesthetics, biopolitics. We also remember the
quarrel of cognitives, precarious workers, two faces of the same medal that
the precogs of Chainworkers.org describe in this way: "cognitive workers are
networkers, precarious workers are networked, the former are brainworkers,
the latter chainworkers: the former first seduced and then abandoned by
companies and financial markets, the latter dragged into and made flexible
by the fluxes of global capital". [2]
The point is that we are searching for a new collective agent and a new
point of application for the rusted revolutionary lever. The success of the
concept of multitude also reflects the current disorientation. Critical
thought continuously seeks to forge the collective actor that can embody the
Zeitgeist and we can go back to history reconstructing the underlying forms
of each paradigm of political action: the more or less collective social
agent, the more or less vertical organisation, the more or less utopian
goal. Proletariat and multitude, party and movement, revolution and
self-organisation.
In the current imaginary the general intellect (or whatever you want to call
it) seems to be the collective agent, its form being the network, its goal
creating a plane of self-organisation, its field of action being
biopolitical spectacular cognitive capitalism.
We are not talking about multitude here, because it is a concept at once too
noble and inflated, heir of centuries of philosophy and too often called for
by marching megaphones. The concept of multitude has been more useful to
exorcise the identitary pretences of the global movement, than as a
constructive tool. The pars construens will be a task for the general
intellect: philosophers such as Paolo Virno, when they have to find a common
ground, the lost collective agent, reconstruct the Collective Intelligence
and Cooperation as emerging and constitutive properties of the multitude.
In a different paranoid fable, we imagine that technology is the last heir
of a series of collective agents generated by history as in a matryoshka
doll: religion -- theology -- philosophy -- ideology -- science --
technology. This is to say that in information and intelligence technologies
the history of thought is stratified, even though we only remember the last
episode of this series, i.e. the network that embodies the dreams of the
previous political generation.
How did we come to all this? We are at the point of convergence between
different historical planes: the inheritance of historical vanguards in the
synthesis of aesthetics and politics; the struggles of '68 and '77 that open
up new spaces for conflict outside of the factories and inside the imaginary
and communication; the hypertrophy of the society of the spectacle and the
economy of the logo; the transformation of fordist wage labour into
postfordist autonomous precarious labour; the information revolution and the
emergence of the internet, the net economy and the network society; utopia
turned into technology. The highest exercise of representationthat becomes
molecular production.
Some perceive the current moment as a lively world network, some as an
indistinct cloud, some as a new form of exploitation, some as an
opportunity. Today the density reaches its critical mass and forms a global
radical class on the intersection of the planes of activism, communication,
arts, network technologies and independent research. What does it mean, to
be productive and projectual, to abandon mere representation of conflict and
the representative forms of politics?
There is a hegemonic metaphor in political debate, in the arts world, in
philosophy, in media criticism, in network culture: that is Free Software.
We hear it quoted at the end of each intervention that poses the problem of
what is to be done (but also in articles of strategic marketing.), whilst
the twin metaphor of open source contaminates every discipline: open source
architecture, open source literature, open source democracy, open source
city...
Softwares are immaterial machines. The metaphor of Free Software is so
simple for its immateriality that it often fails to clash with the real
world. Even if we know that it is a good and right thing, we ask
polemically: what will change when all the computers in the world will run
free software? The most interesting aspect of the free software model is the
immense cooperative network that was created by programmers on a global
scale, but which other concrete examples can we refer to in proposing new
forms of action in the real world and not only in the digital realm?
In the '70s Deleuze and Guattari had the intuition of the machinic, an
introjection/imitation of the industrial form of production. Finally a
hydraulic materialism was talking about desiring, revolutionary, celibate,
war machines rather than representative or ideological ones. [3]
Deleuze and Guattari took the machine out of the factory, now it is up to us
to take it out of the network and imagine a post-internet generation.
Cognitive labour produces machines of all kinds, not only software:
electronic machines, narrative machines, advertising machines, mediatic
machines, acting machines, psychic machines, social machines, libidinous
machines. In the XIXth century the definition of machine referred to a
device transforming energy. In the XXth century Turing's machine -- the
foundation of all computing -- starts interpreting information in the form
of sequences of 0 and 1. For Deleuze and Guattari on the other hand a
desiring machine produces, cuts and composes fluxes and without rest it
produces the real.
Today we intend by machine the elementary form of the general intellect,
each node of the network of collective intelligence, each material or
immaterial dispositif that organically interlinks the fluxes of the economy
and our desires.
At a higher level, the network can itself be regarded as a mega-machine of
assemblage of other machines, and even the multitude becomes machinic, as
Negri and Hardt write in Empire: "The multitude not only uses machines to
produce, but also becomes increasingly machinic itself, as the means of
production are increasingly integrated into the minds and bodies of the
multitude. In this context reappropriation means having free access to and
control over knowledge, information, communication, and affects because
these are some of the primary means of biopolitical production. Just because
these productive machines have been integrated into the multitude does not
mean that the multitude has control over them. Rather, it makes more vicious
and injurious their alienation. The right to reappropriation is really the
multitude's right to self-control and autonomous self-production". [4]
In other words in postfordism the factory has come out of the factory and
the whole of society has become a factory. An already machinic multitude
suggests that the actual subversion of the productive system into an
autonomous plane could be possible in a flash, by disconnecting the
multitude from capital command. But the operation is not that easy in the
traditional terms of 'reappropriation of the means of production'. Why?
Whilst it is true that today the main means of labour is the brain and that
workers can immediately reappropriate the means of production, it is also
true that control and exploitation in society have become immaterial,
cognitive, networked. Not only the general intellect of the multitudes has
grown, but also the general intellect of the empire. The workers, armed with
their computers, can reappropriate the means of production, but as soon as
the stick their nose out of their desktop they have to face a Godzilla that
they had not predicted, the Godzilla of the enemy's general intellect.
Social, state and economic meta-machines -- to which human beings are
connected like appendixes -- are dominated by conscious and subconscious
automatisms. Meta-machines are ruled by a particular kind of cognitive
labour which is the administrative political managerial labour, that runs
projects, organizes, controls on a vast scale: a form of general intellect
that we have never considered, whose prince is a figure that appears on the
scene in the second half of the XXth century: the manager.
As Bifo tells us recalling Orwell, in our post-democratic world (or if you
prefer in empire) managers have seized command: "Capitalism is disappearing,
but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of
planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any
accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will
be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is,
business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together
by Burnham, under the name of managers. These people will eliminate the old
capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all
power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property
rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The
new managerial societies will not consist of a patchwork of small,
independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main
industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. Internally, each society
will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of
semi-slaves at the bottom". [5]
At the beginning we mentioned two intelligences that face one another in the
world and the forms in which they manifest themselves. The multitude
functions as a machine because it is inside a scheme, a social software,
thought for the exploitation of its energies and its ideas. Then, the
techno-managers (public private or military) are those who, whether
consciously or not, plan and control machines made up of human beings
assembled with one another. The dream of General intellect brings forth
monsters.
Compared with the pervasive neoliberal techno-management, the intelligence
of the global movement is of little importance. What's to be done? We need
to invent virtuous revolutionary radical machines to place them in the nodal
points of the network, as well as facing the general intellect that
administers the imperial meta-machines. Before starting this we need to be
aware of the density of the 'intelligence' that is condensed in each
commodity, organization, message and media, in each machine of postmodern
society.
Don't hate the machine, be the machine. How can we turn the sharing of
knowledge, tools and spaces into new radical revolutionary productive
machines, beyond the inflated Free Software? This is the challenge that once
upon the time was called reappropriation of the means of production.
Will the global radical class manage to invent social machines that can
challenge capital and function as planes of autonomy and autopoiesis?
Radical machines that are able to face the techno-managerial intelligence
and imperial meta-machines lined up all around us? The match multitude vs.
empire becomes the match radical machines vs. imperial techno-monsters. How
do we start building these machines?
Matteo Pasquinelli
Email: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Berlin/Bologna, February 2004
Web + pdf: www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2264
<http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2264>
(Translated by Arianna Bove)
Notes
[1] Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude,
<http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.cgi?cart_id=9900922.1109&pid=389>
Semiotext(e), New York 2003. Orig. ed. Grammatica della moltitudine, Derive
Approdi, Roma 2002.
[2] Chainworkers, Il precognitariato. L'europrecariato si h sollevato, 2003,
published on www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2184
<http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2184>. See also
www.chainworkers.org <http://www.chainworkers.org> and
www.inventati.org/mailman/listinfo/precog
<http://www.inventati.org/mailman/listinfo/precog>.
[3] Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, L'anti-Oedipe, Les Iditions De Minuit,
Paris 1972.
[4] Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire,
<http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.cgi?cart_id=9900922.1109&pid=280>
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000.
[5] George Orwell, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham," 1946, quoted in
Franco "Bifo" Berardi, "Il totalitarismo tecno-manageriale da Burnham a
Bush," 2004, published on www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2241
<http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2241>.
"www.chainworkers.org" - http://www.chainworkers.org/
"www.inventati.org/mailman/listinfo/precog" -
http://www.inventati.org/mailman/listinfo/precog
"www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2241" -
http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2241
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