Ned Rossiter on Tue, 28 Sep 2004 19:07:58 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Virtuosity, Processual Democracy and Organised Networks |
The Italian Effect: Radical Thought, Biopolitics and Cultural Subversion Sydney University, September 9-11, 2004. http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/rihss/italianeffect.html Ned Rossiter 'Virtuosity, Processual Democracy and Organised Networks' [short version] I am a Stalinist - everyone should do as I say and think; I have no idea what I am - I don't exist... The contradiction between these two statements signals a tension between identity politics and the politics of desubjectification. Identity operates within a regime of coding; desubjectification is a process of subjectivisation and transversality in which 'relations are external to their terms' (Deleuze-Hume). There is nothing intrinsic about the relationship between the object, subject or thing that determines some essential attribute or identity. The identity of the Stalinist emerges from a milieu of radical contingencies. The Stalinist is thus a potentiality that subsists within the plane of immanence. The logic of coding is part and parcel of the unforseen capacities that define the externality of immanence. The relationship between the overcoded subject and the process of desubjectivisation is one of movement. The movement between the two comprises the force of processuality, and a politics of contingency and potentiality. Stalinist subjects are everywhere - we are all Stalinists, and we also don't exist. The force of relations external to their terms operate in a manner that continuously destabilises the authoritarianism of the Stalinist subject. The process of desubjectification corresponds with the plane of immanence. This is the common from which exodus, flight, and exit subsist as potentialities - potentialities that can also be found in the co-operation that is common to the surplus value of labour-power. The analysis of these relations is a practice of radical empiricism. Surplus value is based on excess - an excess of labour-power. With a surplus of labour-power (unemployment), the cost of production decreases, profit rises. Labour-power, however, is predicated on co-operation, and herein lies the potential for transformation, since co-operation subsists in the plane of immanence, the common. The capacity for the articulation of other values, and the mobilisation of other affects is immanent to the surplus value of labour-power. Surplus value can also be understood as an individuation transduced from the pre-individuality of co-operation, of the "general intellect". This is what Negri (2004) identifies as the 'ontology of the multitudes'. The co-operation peculiar to the surplus value of labour-power grants what Hardt and Negri identify, and had previously dismissed, as the class dimension to the emergent socio-technical form of the multitudes, since exploitation conditions the possibility of co-operation (Hardt and Negri, 2004; Negri, 2004). Through techniques of co-operation, collaboration and a distribution of capacities, the multitudes are showing signs of becoming organised. The problems of scale and sustainability are being addressed. The at times self-valorising movements of "tactical media" are beginning to adopt a strategic outlook on how to situate their activities within socio-technical systems in more secure ways. Indeed, the organised network is composing itself as a new institutional form. This transformation is not something to be suspicious of. There is no return here to institutions that subordinate what Paolo Virno calls the "pure potential" of labour-power to the conformist unity of "effective labour", "the people" or "the citizen". Institutions (coded formations) consist of practices and affects, techniques and sensations. Institutions emerge within the interplay between the plane of immanence and the plan of organisation. Within the co-operation common to surplus value's exploitation of labour-power resides the potential for new relations, new institutions, new socialities. The organised network is a potentiality coextensive with the process of becoming instituted. Virtuosity, as the absence of an "extrinsic product" (Virno, 2004: 52), institutes the political potential of organised networks. The virtuosos 'activity without an end product' is at once ordinary and exceptional: ordinary in the sense that 'the affinity between a pianist and a waiter', as anticipated by Marx, comprises the common of wage labour insofar as 'the product is inseparable from the act of producing' (68); exceptional in the sense of the potential that subsists within performances with no end-product holds the capacity of individuation - of transformation of the common - into singularities with their own distinct universes of sensibility, logics of sensation, regimes of codification. Virno suggests that the communicative performance of the multitudes constitutes 'the feasibility of a *non-representational democracy*' (2004: 79). Virno is elusive when it comes to developing that proposition. A non- or post-representational democracy is one that no longer operates within the constitutive framework of the nation-state and its associated institutions and civil society organisations. This is something Mouffe's (2000) "agonistic democracy" is not able to confront. While Mouffe correctly wishes to go beyond rational consensus, deliberative models of liberal democracy, her proposition that agonistic democracies negotiate the antagonisms that underpin sociality is nevertheless one that is predicated on the maintenance of the state as a modern complex of institutions. Mouffe has not made the passage into the post-Fordist state and its connection with capital's flexible modes of production and accumulation. The informatisation of social relations is nowhere to be found in Mouffe's thesis on agonistic democracy. As such, Mouffe is unable to describe the new modes of sociality, labour, and politics as they are organised within network societies and information economies. Even so, her notion of an agonistic democracy - like Virno's non-representational democracy - can be retained, but only, I would suggest, when they are recast in terms of what I call a *processual democracy*. =46irst of all, the potential of processual democracies are underpinned by the informatisation of social relations. Franco "Bifo" Beradi's model of the Infosphere and the Psychosphere is a useful one to describe the complex settings within which new polities may emerge. Bifo's conception of the Infosphere as a technical, digital coding of data whose unilinear flows "intermingle" with the unstable, recombinatory filter of the Psychosphere is, however, only partially right. The Infosphere is of course much more complex. Think of the uneven geography of information, the political economy of root servers and domain names, the competing interests surrounding Internet governance debates and policy making, etc. The Infosphere thus not only "intermingles" with the Psychosphere, it is inseparable from it: put it in different terms, the Real is always inscribed or present within the Symbolic as an antagonism or trauma. The Infosphere is shaped by background noise, which Serres defines as the 'absence of code'. Processuality - the relationship between coding and conditions of possibility - incorporates background noise as a constitutive outside. Organised networks, as they subsist within the material and immaterial dimensions of new communications media such as the Internet, activate the possibility of processual democracy. Such a political formation de-ontologises the media of communication, creating media-information systems that are conditioned by the empirics, labour and affects of "trans-individual collectives" (Deleuze, 2004: 89). A processual democracy is one that unleashes the unforseen potential of affects as they resonate from the common of labour-power. A processual democracy is one that goes beyond the state-civil society relation. That relation is one that no longer exists. Processual democracies necessarily involve institutions, since institutions function to organise social relations. Processual democracies also continue to negotiate the ineradicability of antagonisms. Their difference lies in the affirmation of values that are internal to the formation of new socialities, new technics of relations. Certainly, they go beyond the limits of resistance and opposition - the primary activity of tactical media and the "anti-corporatisation" movements. This is not to dispense with tactics of resistance and opposition. Indeed, such activities have in many ways shaped the emergence of civil society values into the domain of supranational institutions and governance, as witnessed in the recent WSIS debates. A radical adaptation of the rules of the game is a helpful way of thinking the strategic dimension of processual democracies. Ultimately, what is at stake is the ethico-aesthetic potential of the multitudes to engage with the antagonistic foundations of "the political". A processual democracy institutes a socio-technical network with the capacity to create conditions that sustain needs, interests and passions. References Deleuze, Gilles (2004) 'On Gilbert Simondon', in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, trans. Michael Taormina, ed. David Lapoujade, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 86-89. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Press. Mouffe, Chantal (2000) The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso. Negri, Antonio (2004) 'Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitudes', trans. Arianna Bove, Makeworlds Paper #4, http://www/makeworlds.org/book/view/104. Virno, Paolo (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. James Cascaito Isabella Bertoletti, and Andrea Casson, forward by Sylv=E8re Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e). # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net