In the best of all capitalist worlds, the
stock market is supposed to provide resources for
industrial development, through a speculative game that
pays off later in the "real economy." What about the
Internet then? From 1995 to 2000, huge amounts of
infrastructure were financed throughout the world; now
the oversupply crisis is accounted a disaster. But
history is cunning, and the result of the dotcom boom
may have been to free up vast amounts of private money
for the development of a virtual public space, where
people can confront the major corporations on their home
turf - that is to say, in the realm of transnational
exchanges. The speculators of the late twentieth century
asked: "Is there any limit to the profit we can make off
the Internet?" Those who work for the virtual economy,
or who suffer its effects, are tempted by a wilder
speculation: "Can we really build a networked resistance
to corporate capitalism?"
While dissenting movements face up to the new
"anti-terrorist" campaigns, that last question is more
timely than ever. Among the answers that emerge will be
changes in the law, and in the course of technological
development. [1] But the primary responses are cultural and
artistic. They have everything to do with subjective
capacities for resistance. And resistance itself has a
history, with many different ruses. Those are what I'll
be looking at here, to answer what might turn out to be
the most important question: "Can the virtual class
really escape the domination of the flexible
personality?"
Paradigm Shift
From Taylor and Ford to Stalin and De Gaulle, the
major adversary of the radical Left in the twentieth
century was rationalizing authority. Whether on the
factory floor or in the military ranks that gave the
orders, regimentation and the hierarchical pyramid were
the archetypes of oppression. From the 1930's onward,
authoritarianism developed in both the East and the
West, with a logic that brought together war, work and
bureaucracy. The first to analyze this situation were
the Frankfurt School.
The originality of the Frankfurt School was to
combine Marx and Freud, to explore the industrial
economy's masochistic libido. But to do so was not just
to go beyond the pleasure principle. What the Frankfurt
School studied from the 1930's onward was a paradigm
shift: a new form of political-economic command that
stretched its social fingers deeply into the psyche. The
liquidation of nineteenth-century bourgeois
individualism and the emergence of a central-planning
state, along with a totally mobilized factory society,
were pursued on the subjective level by what they called
the authoritarian personality. They understood
this fascistic character structure as a "new
anthropological type." Its traits were rigid
conventionalism, submission, opposition to everything
subjective, stereotypy, an exaggerated concern with
sexual scandal, emphasis on power and the projection of
unconscious impulses. [2]
The Frankfurt School writers pursued their analysis
of authoritarian behavior in the 1940's and 50's, in the
face of American state capitalism. Exiles in the land of
freedom, they denounced a deepening enslavement to
instrumental reason, particularly through the soft
coercions of the culture industry. By the mid-1960's,
critiques of the disciplinary society became widespread.
We know the new forms of revolt that arose against the
standardizing forces: everything from free speech
campaigns and draft resistance to Reichean group-sex,
Provo events, situationist drifting and LSD, what
Marcuse called "outbreaks of mass surrealism." On a
deeper level there was an assertion of subjectivity, of
identity, of sexuality, the personal that is the
political. A poetics of resistance spread through
society and helped bring the decline of regimentation,
welfare-state bureaucracies, mass-consumption models and
factory discipline. But are we even aware how that
transformation helped shape today's political-economic
system?
The social order responded to the crisis the 1960's
and 70's, accepting selected elements of the old
critique. A new paradigm has arisen in the developed
countries in the past twenty years, with a specific
production regime, consumer ideology and social control
mechanism, all integrated into a geopolitical order. For
almost two decades this development remained largely
unconscious, invisible, unnamable. During that time,
vanguard movements were obsolete, intellectuals were
useless, there was no alternative. Now the cracks have
suddenly started to open up everywhere. People begin
realizing that the New World Order is not just
oppressive on its edges, in the so-called developing
countries. It has created a new regime of flexible labor
that exploits and alienates broad swathes of the
population, even in the places that are supposed to be
rich. And it's at the very heart of casual freelance
culture, replete with PCs, mobile phones and general
nomadism, that the technology of control is continuously
recreated. Winning the economic game today brings a high
reward. You get to be the inventor of the flexible
personality.
Culture/Ideology
New paradigms are adopted because they work. Only in
retrospect can we see them becoming modes of control.
Flexibility was an extremely positive idea, in
California in the 1970's when the culture of
microelectronics was invented. It was the polar opposite
of the rigid 1950's: openness to others, embodied
experience, self-expression, improvisation, refusal of
hierarchies and discipline. These were the utopian days
of Bucky Fuller, Gregory Bateson and the Whole Earth
Catalog: no-one would have dreamt that An Ecology
of Mind could become a management tool. But the
looser, more creative lifestyle did not just mean the
emergence of a whole new range of products, useful for
stimulating consumption. In California, and ultimately
in much of the developed world, the new culture seemed
to promise a way out of the social conflicts that had
stalled the Fordist industrial regimes.
Consider the way things looked to the Trilateral
Commission, in their 1975 report on The Crisis of
Democracy. [3] Not only were Third World countries using
the powers of national liberation to demand higher
prices for their resources, while the US lost its war in
Indochina. Not only were the capital returns plunging,
while wildcat strikes multiplied and the big ecological
standoffs began. But worst of all, the huge postwar
investments into socialized education, conceived to meet
the knowledge needs of the techno-economy, were
backfiring and producing resistance to capitalism and
bureaucracy, alternative values, demands for further
benefits and socializations. These new claims on the
welfare state had to be added to the traditional demands
of the working class; and then the crisis began. In the
eyes of the elites, the Trilateral countries were
becoming "ungovernable," there was an "excess of
democracy" - in the infamous phrase of Samuel
Huntington. The kind of systemic critique that the
Frankfurt School had pioneered reached its height in the
mid-1970's. From that point forth, the authoritarian
system had to start learning from the enemy within.
The transformation took a decade. The golden age of
neo-management began in the mid-1980's, while unionized
workers were replaced with robots and unskilled labor
was sought overseas. Corporate operations and financial
flows expanded outside nations, where regulation and
redistribution were called excessive. The triple
challenge for the managers was to keep tabs on a distant
work force, to open up global marketing and
distribution, and above all, to create a culture - or an
ideology - that would make significant amounts of
younger people want to run this new machine. The key
word of the age was "flexibility."
The social system had to accept and divert the
demands for autonomy, self-expression and meaning; it
had to turn those very demands into a new mode of
control. The French sociologists, Boltanski and
Chiapello, have shown the importance in this process of
the cooptation of what they call "artistic critique,"
which demanded mobility, spontaneity, the reduction of
hierarchy, in short, disalienation - at least for the
"creatives." [4] The hierarchical pyramid would therefore be
replaced, whenever possible, by the social form of the
network. But an important aspect of the solution was
directly technological. The magical answer to the
questions that faced the governing elites of the 1970's
turned out to be a communications device, a
language-and-image machine: the networked personal
computer. For the critical theorists of the 1960's, IBM
had been the instrument and symbol of a disciplinary
bureaucracy. Now the computer was going to set you
free.
Freedom has always been the great neoliberal
watchword, from Hayek and the Chicago economists to the
right-wing libertarians and the Cato Institute. In their
theories, it is constantly identified with economic
initiative. On the left, the economy had traditionally
been seen as the opposite of art, just as the act of
selling is the opposite of the spontaneous gift. But the
aesthetic strategies of the "counter-culture" -
difference and otherness, the rhizome, the proliferation
of subjectivities - could be exalted and set to work in
a semiotic economy, where what you sell are images and
signs. Such an economy had been rendered possible by
telematics. Networked interactivity promised to place a
whole new alchemy of cooperative production in the same
kinds of global channels that were already working for
the finance economy. Research and invention could happen
directly within the circuits of production and
distribution.
The laptop computer freed up individuals for physical
and psychic mobility; it could also be used as an
instrument of control over distant labor. It
miniaturized access to the remaining bureaucracy, while
opening private channels into entertainment, media and
the realms of "fictitious" capital - the speculative
economy that feeds off the dismantling of the public
sphere. Best of all, it recoded every kind of cultural
production as commodities, multimedia. Here was a mode
of development that might solve or at least gloss over
the full set of problems inherited from the 1960's,
particularly the struggles around the welfare state.
Small wonder that the governments and the corporations
started actively promoting a myth of flexibility. The
emerging "virtual class" - including cultural producers,
digital artisans, prosumers, what are now called
"immaterial laborers" - stumbled more or less blindly
into it.
Guidance Systems
How does the culture/ideology work? War is popular
these days, so let's take the military point of view.
The weapon of choice during the Cold War was the ICBM: a
huge, never-used giant, endlessly deconstructed by the
critiques of phallo-logo-centrism. The New World Order
takes off with a smaller, more practical device: the
cruise missile. This kind of weaponry gets constantly
used, and not just on the battlefield. Since the heyday
of Star Wars - both the Strategic Defense Initiative and
the Lucas movie - the military-entertainment complex has
become part of everyday experience.
"It seems that retailers will go to any length to
capture customers," reads a 1997 article called "Star
Wars turns on to Shoppers" (quoted by Sze Tsung Leong in
The Harvard Guide to Shopping). "Witness Safeway,
which has recently used an artificial intelligence
system from IBM called AIDA (artificial intelligence
data architecture) - which was initially developed to
detect and identify Russian missiles in space, but is
now used... to analyze information on buying patterns
with details of purchase from loyalty cards." When
consumer desire is "turned on" and encouraged to
proliferate, the ultimate control fantasy becomes that
of tracking the flexible personality.
"Mass marketing, for all intents and purposes, is
dead," writes business guru Art Weinstein, in Market
Segmentation. "Precision target marketing... has
taken over. By focusing on ever smaller yet profitable
market segments, stronger company-customer relationships
transpire. With technological products, users can
practically invent markets for companies - customers
become customizers." When feedback devices are built
directly into the distribution circuits, the sources of
desire are directly available to corporate monitoring.
So you can help perfect your own internal guidance
system.
Until recently, such trends seemed comfortably
ambiguous - just the irritating price for increased
freedoms. But with security-fever rising after September
11, everything starts to look different. The incitement
to perform, to find creative ways of deploying the new
equipment, reveals its hidden face, the fear of the
excluded other, the imperative to ruthlessly extend and
perfect the system. And the system really is threatened,
not only by suicidal terrorism: the collapse of the "new
economy," the growing protests against neoliberal
globalization, the revolution against the IMF in
Argentina... The perfect solution is total mobilization,
the shift to a wartime footing. September 11 was a
chance just waiting to be taken - the chance to
consolidate the new paradigm, on every level.
The American artist Jordan Crandall has made the
military compulsions of the networked system visible.
His work began with the heritage of the 1970's:
experimentation, cooperation, networked performance,
adjustment to the presence of others in virtual space.
But in 1998, he hired a freelance military contractor to
help him develop movement-predicting software, whose
algorithms show up as eerie green tracery around bodies
in a video image. The following exhibitions, "Drive" and
"Heat-Seeking," were full-fledged explorations of the
psychosexual relations of seeing and being seen, through
the new technologies in both their civilian and military
uses. [5]
A text recently published on Nettime, "Fingering the
Trigger," recounts the use by the CIA of an unmanned,
camera-and-missile-equipped Predator drone to fire upon
a suspicious Afghani man who, it turns out, was probably
just scavenging for metal. "We align eye, viewfinder,
and target in an act of aiming," Crandall writes. "But
we are aimed at, we are constituted in other acts of
looking. These are analysis and control systems in which
the body is situated.... It sees us as a nexus of data,
materiality, and behavior, and uses a language of
tracking, profiling, identifying, positioning and
targeting.... Within the circuitous visualization
networks that arise, one never knows which 'side' one is
truly on, as seer switches to that which is seen; as
targeter switches to that which is targeted." Crandall
thinks a new sexuality lodges in the body-machine-image
complex; hence the image of the soldier-man "fingering
the trigger."
This work helps us see what the easy money and
pluralism of the Clintonian years kept hidden: the
outlines of a social pathology. It has an authoritarian
cast, like everything that involves the military. But it
does not produce unthinking, stereotyped behavior, of
the kind we associate with 1930's fascism (or today,
with Le Pen). What Crandall describes is an extremely
intelligent process that, precisely by individualizing -
tracking, identifying, eliciting desire, channeling
vision and expression - succeeds in binding the
mobilized individual to a social whole. The new fascism
discovers a complex, dynamic order for subjective
difference, perspectival analysis, jouissance,
even schizophrenic ecstasy. It integrates networked
individualism.
Ghosts in the Machine
Arthur Kroker had an inkling of these things. Almost
a decade ago, he and Weinstein wrote about the "liberal
fascism" of the "virtual class": a technological elite,
driven by possessive individualism, whose interests lay
with the financial establishment, the military state and
the big corporations. But like all neo-situationists in
Baudrillard's wake, Kroker is obsessed by "the recline
of the West" and the hypnotic power of the digitized
image: "The virtual class is populated by would-be
astronauts who never made it to the moon," reads a
passage from Data Trash. "They do not easily
accept criticism of this new Apollo project for the body
telematic."
No doubt that was true, in 1994 when Kroker's text
was written. But the massification of Internet access,
pushed by the needs of globalized management, and hailed
everywhere as a catalyst of technological development,
has brought about the opening of the virtual domain to
political critique, and to social movements. At the
close of the millennium ordinary citizens began
exploring transnational space, which had formerly been
the sole preserve of the elites. One of major efforts
since the late 1990's has been to map out the new modes
of domination, in order to identify the planetary
division of labor, beyond the spectacular flux of images
(and of financial information). Another attempt, less
accessible to the general public perhaps, but decisive
for the struggles that became visible in 1999 in
Seattle, has been to create a poetics of resistance: a
virtual class struggle, alongside the embodied
one that never disappeared.
Consider the AAA, founded in 1995 with a five-year
mission: establishing a planetary network to end the
monopoly of corporations, governments and the military
over travel in space. The Association of Autonomous
Astronauts is a kind of multiple name, a freely invented
identity. Forget about the moon: "Reclaim the Stars"
they said on June 18th, 1999, during the Carnival
against Capital. The idea was to create not an art
group, but a social movement - a collective phantom
acting on a global scale. "Unlike a multiple name that
is restricted to art practices, a collective phantom
operates within the wider context of popular culture,
and is used as a tool for class war," says an astronaut
of the South London AAA, in a text called "Resisting
Zombie Culture." [6]
One aspect of the project was infrastructural
mapping, identifying the satellite hardware that links
up the world communications network. But another was
what Konrad Becker calls "e-scape": "Cracking the doors
of the future means mastering multidimensional maps to
open new exits and ports in hyperspace; it requires
passports allowing voyages beyond normative global
reality toward parallel cultures and invisible nations;
supply depots for nomads on the roads taken by the
revolutionary practice of aimless flight." Ricardo Balli
gives a further idea of what the galactic phantom might
do: "We are not interested in going into space to be a
vanguard of the coming revolution: the AAA means to
institute a science fiction of the present that can
above all be an instrument of conflictuality and radical
antagonism." [7]
The ideas sound fantastic, but the stakes are real:
imagining a political subject within the virtual
class, and therefore, within the economy of
cultural production and intellectual property that had
paralyzed the poetics of resistance. Consider Luther
Blissett, an obscure Jamaican football player traded
from Britain to Italy, who fell short of stardom but
became a proliferating signature, the "author" of a book
called Mind Invaders: Come fottere i media.
There, between tales of Ray Johnson and mail art,
Blissett takes time out for some political-aesthetic
theory: "I could just say the multiple name is a shield
against the established power's attempt to identify and
individualize the enemy, a weapon in the hands of what
Marx ironically called 'the worst half' of society. In
Spartacus by Stanley Kubrick, all the slaves
defeated and captured by Crassus declare themselves to
be Spartacus, like all the Zapatistas are Marcos and I
am all we Luther Blissetts. But I won't just say that,
because the collective name has a fundamental valence
too, insofar as it aims to construct an open myth,
elastic and redefinable in a network...." [8]
The "open myth" of Luther Blissett is a game with
personal identity, like the three-sided football played
by the AAA: a way to change the social rules, so a group
can start moving simultaneously in several directions.
This "fundamental valence" lies at the prehistory of the
counterglobalization movement. Just think of the way
names like Ya Basta, Reclaim the Streets, or Kein Mensch
ist Illegal have spread across the world's social
networks. One can see these names, not as categories or
identifiers, but as catalysts, departure points, like
the white overalls (tute bianche) worn initially
in north-eastern Italy: "The Tute Bianche are not a
movement, they are an instrument conceived within a
larger movement (the Social Centers) and placed at the
disposal of a still larger movement (the global
movement)," writes Wu Ming 1 in the French journal
Multitudes (#7). This "instrument" was invented
in 1994, when the Northern League mayor of Milan,
Formentini, ordered the eviction of a squatted center
and declared, "From now on, squatters will be nothing
more than ghosts wandering about in the city!" But then
the white ghosts showed up in droves at the next
demonstration. And a new possibility for collective
action emerged: "Everyone is free to wear a tuta
biancha, as long as they respect the 'style,' even
if they transform its modes of expression: pragmatic
refusal of the violence/non-violence dichotomy;
reference to zapatismo; break with the
twentieth-century experience; embrace of the symbolic
terrain of confrontation."
Yet a strange thing happened, explains Wu Ming in
another text: "Some rhetorically opposed the white
overall and the blue overall, and the former was used as
a metaphor for post-Fordist labor - flexible,
'precarious,' temporary workers whom the bosses prevent
from enjoying their rights and being represented by the
unions." [9] Between politics, class uncertainty and
sheer word play, the Tute Bianche got into full swing.
The technique of "protected direct action" - allowing
ludicrously padded protestors to face blows from the
police - was a way to invade, not just the media
screens, but above all the minds of hundreds of
thousands of other people. They converged in Genoa in
July 2001, to open a real political debate in a country
stifled by a neofascist consensus.
Another example of the effects created by a confusion
of identities are the Yes Men, in their cameo or
"chameleo" appearances as representatives of the World
Trade Organization. Here we're talking about two
artists, whose names aren't hard to discover. But the
uncertainty over language is no less interesting. To say
"yes" to neoliberal ideology can be devastatingly
satirical, as when the self-elected WTO representative
"Hank Hardy Unruh" displayed the logical fiction of the
Employee Visualization Appendage, a telematic
worker-surveillance device in the shape of a yard-long
golden phallus. No one has yet imagined a better
caricature of the flexible personality. But what kind of
satire is at work when Kein Mensch ist Illegal takes the
neoliberal ideology seriously, and declares all the
world's borders open, for everybody? Like the
fire-colored masks worn by thousands in Quebec City,
today's networked protests have two faces: the laughter
of open communication, or the violence of a gagged mouth
behind a chain-link fence. Both faces are the truth of
the contemporary political confrontation.
Voice and Exit
No doubt millions of the world's "flexible" workers
remain largely gagged - mute - with no voice and no hope
of escaping. But as use of the Internet has increased,
and as people have seized its communicational power for
both organization and subversion, a metamorphosis has
invaded the "transnational public sphere," which
formerly was only open to corporations and their
governments. Electronic e-scape - a new form of
the exit strategy, an exodus from the national space -
has been a condition for the access to political voice,
far from being its contrary. [10] It is in the Deleuzian sense that dissent
became virtual in the late 1990's: virtuality as
latency, as unmanifest reality, potential flight-lines
towards other spaces of confrontation.
The virtual class in this sense, or the immaterial
laborers - I've always preferred to say
networkers - cannot stand in for the rest
of the world's population. There is no universal subject
to represent, when the individual, the supposed bearer
of human rights, increasingly becomes a target for
technological and ideological manipulations. But an
active indistinction of identity has begun to spread,
like a new departure point; and the artistic experience
of multiple names points to one of the possible paths to
a renewal of collective autonomy. In a recent text, the
Italian philosopher Paolo Virno locates the universal in
pre-individual aesthetic and linguistic
experience, in the impersonality of perception and
circulating language. The chaotic dissension of public
space then becomes the landscape, not of defensive
individualism, but of evolving paths to
individuation: "Far from regressing, singularity
is refined and reaches its peak in acting together, in
the plurality of voices, in short, in the public
sphere." [11]
The kinds of conflict that began in the universities
in the 1960's have crossed over into the global
knowledge-space, whose nature as a public domain is now
intensely at issue. To what extent will these networks
form a space of cooperation, and to what extent a space
of intensified control? If new political voices confirm
an exit from the flexible personality, and a refusal of
liberal fascism, then there will have been no waste in
the wild speculations of the late 1990's - whatever the
multiple names of the investors.
This text was initially published in Mute
magazine.
[1] On the closely intertwined relation between
legal and technical aspects of the net, see Lawrence
Lessig, "The Internet Under Siege," <www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_novdec_2001/lessig.html>. [2] Cf. Theodor Adorno et. al., The
Authoritarian Personality, (New York: Harper, 1950).
For a more thorough treatment of the theories of
authoritarianism and their dialectical reversal in our
time, see my text on "The Flexible Personality," <http://www.noemalab.com/sections/ideas/ideasarticles/holmespersonality.html>. [3] The European rapporteur of The Crisis of
Democracy was the French sociologist Michel Crozier,
author of an important book entitled La société
bloquée (The Stalled Society). The American
rapporteur, Samuel Huntington, has not ceased to make
his views known since then. [4] See Luc Boltanski et Eve Chiapello, Le
Nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard,
1999). [5] For the work of Jordan Crandall, see his
book Drive: projects and writings 1992-2000
(Cantz Verlag/ZKM, 2002), as well as his website, <http://http://jordancrandall.com>. [6] Written in the name of Boris Karloff,
<www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/turb/articles/karloff.html>.
[7] The two quotes are taken from a French
anthology of the AAA, edited by Ewen Chardronnet:
Refuser la gravité (Nîmes: L'éclat, 2001); online
at <http://www.lyber-eclat.net/>. [8] Luther Blissett, Mind Invaders, Come
fottere i media: manuale di guerriglia e sabotaggio
culturale, chap. 1, "Ray Johnson e Reggie Dunlop tra
i Tamariani," <www.lutherblissett.net/archive/215-02_it.html>
(note: the "translations" of this text on the website
are incomplete and very free; and the Italian book it
not the same as the one published by Stewart Home under
the same title). [9] Wu Ming I (alias Roberto Bui), "Tute
Bianche: The Practical Side of Myth Making," <www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/giapdigest11.html>. [10] The opposition between the functions of
"exit" and "voice" in social conflicts was theorized by
Alfred O. Hirschman, in a book to which the Italian
theorists of exodus frequently refer: Exit, Voice,
and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms,
Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1970). [11] It is in this sense that the "multitudes"
are still before us, emerging through exchanges and
acts, unlike the prepolitical multitude described by
Hobbes. Cf. Paolo Virno, "Multitudes et principe
d'individuation," in Multitudes #7.
| |