[p2p-research] [-empyre-] seeing yourself a prototype - the limits of open source (innovation as manipulation)

[Michel Bauwens]

I think we had this discussion about 18 months ago, when you talked about
the contempary situation as a new type of fascism.

What is demobilizing about it, in my view, is that it overemphizes the
enemy, it presumes a total defeat of civil society, which is not the case,
yes, there are new state powers, yes democracy is in crisis, but do we live
in a totalitarian state, or totalitarian capitalism, no, absolutely not.

I think that the fact the you mention insurrectionist anarchism, surely the
most ineffectual strategy at present, as using Agamben, is indicative, it
leads to nihilism.

Otherwise of course, I do find your thoughts and contributions very
informative, since I probably won't have the time to read it all, but I
truly feel that the language the post-modern left is using, is bringing it
further and further away from any contact with real social movements, and
totally away from the construction of a new p2p world, I feel it is the
scholastics of our time,

the way I see the method is: take something which has a grain of truth, say
measures of exception, take it as the absolute truth, then build a whole
system of thought on that doubtful premise,

of course, I wouldn't be able to engage in a convincing discussion about
this, but I noted how activists on the ground, often felt the same way as me
during this type of academic conferences ...

Michel




On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 10:02 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hiya,
>
> Why do they see state of exception theories as demobilising?
>
> I've seen Agamben namedropped or concept-dropped in insurrectionist
> anarchism, so he seems to be attracting attention from people who are
> certainly not 'demobilised'.  On the other hand his view is strongly against
> any kind of reformism or gradualism, since the problem is inherent to the
> state as a social form.  I wonder if this is where Hardt and Negri feel
> threatened - it demobilises *their* kind of politics.
>
> I also think Agamben and Virilio are too simplistic sometimes (a strange
> accusation when they're difficult to read, but I'm thinking of their
> conceptual frame rather than their language).  They have quite correctly
> deduced the social logic of the state - what Kropotkin calls the 'political
> principle' - but they wrongly use it as a general meta-theory of reality,
> ignoring the roles of other social logics which either syncretise with or
> oppose this logic (to be sure, neither of them deny that there is at least
> one other social logic - 'popular defence' in Virilio,
> 'whatever-singularities' in Agamben - but there seem only to be these two
> logics).  In Kropotkin there is a similar construct but the 'social
> principle', the other pole, is given a lot more prominence, and this leads
> in people like Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer and Colin Ward (and maybe Hakim
> Bey?) to a great deal of openness to the strategic construction of autonomy,
> even in quite 'reformist' ways (provided their tendency is to re-empower the
> social principle - e.g. squatting, mutual aid, etc).
>
> Obviously, I theorise this alternative logic in terms of
> affinity-networks.  The theory of the alternative pole to state power is
> already tending this way in Kropotkin, and I've already explained the extent
> (and limits) to which Hardt and Negri conceive it in this sense, but in
> Agamben it tends to be rather amorphous, almost a kind of minimum life-force
> which is irreducible.  I have a sense that Agamben and Virilio actually *
> mean* affinity-networks - Agamben's model is derived from Deleuze's, which
> is explicitly network-based; Virilio's draws on the density of ecological
> and social connections in peasant/artisan/indigenous communities, similar to
> Kropotkin's social principle - but it isn't very developed.  (If there was
> no 'second pole', state of exception theories *would* be thoroughly
> disempowering - as in their Lacanian incarnation for instance.  In Agamben's
> case, 'The Coming Community' is very clear in terms of the articulation of a
> second pole - this is the text used by Richard Day when he discusses
> Agamben.  My first reaction to Agamben - based on Homo Sacer - is that he
> was pessimistic and disempowering.  We need to remember that Agamben has
> over a dozen books in English alone - his theory is not limited to Homo
> Sacer).
>
> However, it's not only their under-theorisation of the affinity-network
> pole which bothers me a bit - it is also their failure to conceive of other
> social logics which are not either the state (at its most fascistic) or
> affinity-networks (at their most anarchic).  While this might ultimately be
> how the social field splits, there are also other logics operative which
> don't quite fit - in particular, the capitalist logic, the logic of the
> 'included' (addition of axioms), the 'mass' (in Baudrillard's sense), and
> reactive networks.  (Looking at the current field, one might specify for
> instance the people at the World Economic Forum who opposed the Iraq war as
> bad for business; movements such as Drop the Debt; or something like the RSS
> or al-Qaeda - none of these are either pure statist sovereignty movements or
> affinity-networks).  If the social field is not 'bipolar' (in the IR sense),
> if there are three or more logics (I count at least six, maybe seven if
> tributary modalities are included, and possibly others I haven't identified
> yet), things get a lot more complicated.
>
> I want to emphasise here that I think Agamben and Virilio are ultimately *
> right* - they have identified the social logic of the state very clearly.
> But they have failed to identify adequately the field in which this logic
> operates.  They can't really explain why the state doesn't *always* behave
> in this way, why it has taken so long to actualise its social logic, why it
> does so more in some places than others.  Their account is too much a matter
> of inner unfolding, almost a Hegelian process - the state becomes what it
> has always been.  Yet in fact, the state only unfolds its basic logic to the
> extent to which it is able to do so in a field where this logic is contested
> by other social forces.  The pure state of exception does not emerge, for
> instance, in syncretic Southern states connected to social networks; they
> are capable of brutal violence, but of a different order, that of the
> reactive network and the energised mobilisation of reactive forces (fear,
> hatred, etc).  And it does not emerge in the social-democratic state,
> because the power of the state as a social logic is mediated by the included
> and by a particular configuration with capital (the tripartite alliance of
> the state, capital and the included through negotiated social pacts).
>
> I think what is peculiar about the current conjuncture is that previously
> the state was very much constrained by capital - except in Bonapartist
> situations (necessarily temporary) or Stalinist situations (excluding
> capital from their frame - but not their actual functioning), the state was
> not allowed to actualise the 'state of exception' because doing so is 'bad
> for business' (the frame of bourgeois constitutionalism).  So if states are
> realising this logic today, it is because their relationship to the
> capitalist logic has changed: in neoliberal capitalism, the logic of the
> state of exception is re-enabled because it becomes compatible with the
> unconstrained realisation of the capitalist logic of accumulation, whereas
> previously the two had been antagonistic and 'mediated'.  Also important is
> the way the role of the included stratum or the logic of the addition of
> axioms mediates between the capital-state axis and the excluded or
> exploited.  The included stratum *hate* the state of exception (look at
> the Guardian for proof of this), but they've been pushed out of political
> power in the places where the state of exception has been actualised most
> drastically (and crucially, have *not* been pushed out of power in the
> places where it has not been actualised so much).  This supports the
> Deleuzian hypothesis of the contestation between addition and subtraction of
> axioms as different strategies within the alienated/capitalist field.  The
> current situation of the included stratum is a situation of 'adverse
> incorporation' - being kept on board through ever-decreasing concessions
> tending towards zero, or by the absent promise of influence which never
> emerges.
>
> Of course, this also alters the strategic position of autonomous social
> movements and the affinity-network social logic, though I don't think it
> alters it very much.  Hardt and Negri put a lot of faith in alliances with
> the included as a means to tilt the world towards the unfolding of
> affinity-networks.  I don't think this is likely to work, because the
> included have been quite thoroughly disempowered.  Today it is not so much a
> matter of settling for social-democracy as the complete self-disempowerment
> of would-be reform movements through the 'Third Way', which is neoliberalism
> repeated.  The danger in this approach is that autonomous social movements
> disempower themselves by tying themselves to the sinking ship of the
> excluded, when in fact, the power of the included was always conditional on
> the threat posed by autonomous social movements in fact or in potential (the
> included were given power because of their role as a pole of mediation, as
> placeholders for the absent excluded).  I think it also fundamentally
> misunderstands what autonomous social movements are.  There is a fundamental
> structural antagonism between autonomous social movements and the
> affinity/horizontal/p2p logic and the logica of the included, because the
> logic of the included is firmly within the logic of alienation,
> representation and transcendental signification, whereas the
> affinity-network logic is firmly outside.  So a strategy of working through
> the included cannot lead to a world in which the affinity-network form has
> primacy.  In this sense, Agamben and Virilio are right that the hope of
> opposing the neoliberal conjuncture lies with autonomous social movements
> and not with some kind of neo-reformism.  To go back to the IR analogy, on a
> global scale and in most of the key sites in the current global
> configuration, what we have in terms of social logics is a multipolar field
> which nevertheless resolves itself in the current conjuncture in a largely
> bipolar way because of the operation of alliances:  on one side the state
> logic + capital + included stratum as very subordinate element + some
> incorporated reactive networks; on the other, the affinity-network logic,
> sometimes composing into a 'black hole' space with non-incorporated reactive
> networks, informal economies, and the tributary logic owing to its emergence
> from forcible delinking rather than active assertion of the affinity-network
> logic itself.  Since the state operates as the enforcement wing of the first
> coalition, the 'fourth world war' tends to pan out as a social war between
> the state logic (with state of exception) and the affinity-network logic
> (autonomous social movements)  However, it's fairly easy to find local sites
> where this is not how the different logics line up.
>
> bw
> Andy
>
>
>
>
>  On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 2:36 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> thanks for the interesting comments,
>>
>> I'm reading commonwealth, which has an interesting critique of state of
>> exception theories as demobilizing, I tend to agree,
>>
>> Michel
>>
>>   On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 3:24 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> Hiya,
>>>
>>> Reminds me a lot of Virilio actually.  The idea that crises are only
>>> crises for civilians, and that unfriendly environments operate in favour of
>>> the state by reducing the capability for popular defence and creating
>>> dependence on those who can work in such environments.  Also Negri on the
>>> 'crisis-state', which seems to suggest that this model operates in
>>> contemporary capitalism in terms of imminent catastrophe as a pretext for
>>> states of exception.
>>>
>>> It can be traced in corporate and statist discourse, that the people in
>>> charge view terrain complexity as something frightening and threatening, and
>>> unregulated ecosystems as dangerously chaotic - they fantasise about
>>> concreting over everything.  I am thinking here of Sherene Razack on Somalia
>>> (discourses trying to mitigate human rights atrocities by 'peacekeepers'
>>> tended to fuse the hostile environment with local hostility and miltiary
>>> difficulties in the account of Somalia as a hellish place), and Spivak's
>>> essay 'Responsibility' (treating water in Bangladesh as the enemy and
>>> seeking to regulate it to 'protect' people who will actually end up
>>> dispossessed as a result).  In a sense, most of us (in urban settings) are
>>> already living in 'created' environments in this sense: urban environments
>>> are physically harsh, do not have food sovereignty and are highly dependent
>>> on artificial institutions (states, markets, welfare regimes) for
>>> material/ecological and social provisions which might be a lot easier to
>>> obtain in other settings (water needs to be stored up and piped in, energy
>>> concentrated and provided from outside, security provided artificially
>>> because of the lack of face-to-face interaction, mass transit becomes a need
>>> because of the zoning of cities, space becomes scarce and has to be set
>>> aside for purposes which less concentrated space would allow automatically
>>> e.g. leisure, health problems need to be treated rather than simply warded
>>> off - for most of history cities were population sinks for health
>>> reasons...)
>>>
>>> There is thus an extent to which the contestation of urban spaces
>>> (squatting, guerrilla gardening, urban foraging, autoreduction, social
>>> centres, etc) can be viewed as 'ruralisation' or 'ecologisation', somewhat
>>> akin to weeds peeping through the cracks and eventually eating away concrete
>>> - the city becomes a dense ecosystem in its own right to the extent that
>>> contestation of urban spaces restores an ecosystemic (rather than a
>>> dependent-dominant) dynamic, remembering that ecosystems are peer-networks
>>> rather than hierarchies, whereas the urban-rural division is hierarchical.
>>>
>>> bw
>>> Andy
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 9:47 AM, Michel Bauwens <
>>> michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>>> From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
>>>> Date: Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 2:25 PM
>>>> Subject: Fwd: [-empyre-] seeing yourself a prototype - the limits of
>>>> open source
>>>> To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> interesting reply revolving around
>>>> *
>>>> *
>>>> *" **an interest in introducing an innovation with the intention of
>>>> forcing adaptation
>>>> in the population. "*
>>>>
>>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>>> From: davin heckman <davinheckman at gmail.com>
>>>> Date: Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 10:35 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] seeing yourself a prototype - the limits of open
>>>> source
>>>> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Julian,
>>>>
>>>> I'm sorry for being unclear.  What I had meant to say is that,
>>>> typically, a prototype is a discrete thing which is created with the
>>>> intention of being tested.  Certainly the way the prototype is tested
>>>> is a) the object itself is put through various challenges that are
>>>> anticipated uses and stresses, and b) the general integration of the
>>>> thing into the system is also tested at that point (how the thing
>>>> might fare in light of unanticipated uses and stresses).  The
>>>> distinction I was trying to draw was the coercive potential of
>>>> innovations.  Where there is less an interest in testing an individual
>>>> thing with the intention of improving it....  and more of an interest
>>>> in introducing an innovation with the intention of forcing adaptation
>>>> in the population.
>>>>
>>>> I was less concerned with individuals modifying themselves through,
>>>> say, education or societies changing populations through educational
>>>> institutions.  These things, on their face, have the intention of
>>>> shaping the person and society.  They are, at least in principle,
>>>> geared towards the preservation of individual and social existence.
>>>> Or, at least, they do insofar as they are generated by a public in
>>>> service of the ideal public which they represent.
>>>>
>>>> On the other hand, there are technologies that seem to be introduced
>>>> with the stated purpose of achieving one objective, yet have the
>>>> larger objective of changing human populations.  Take, for instance,
>>>> the infamous case of Nestle's infant formula strategy in Africa.
>>>> Company reps masquerading as health workers introduce infant formula
>>>> to a population that had not used it previously.  The suggested
>>>> purpose is to provide nutrition and humanitarian aid.  But when women
>>>> stopped lactating and suddenly found themselves forced to pay for the
>>>> product or watch their children starve, a much more radical technical
>>>> innovation becomes apparent--the forced creation of a new social web
>>>> in service of corporate interests.
>>>>
>>>> More current (and relevant) examples might be the sort of biological
>>>> innovations that have been spurred by petrochemical industries as
>>>> ubiquitous products (plastics, agricultural products, drugs, etc)
>>>> saturate ecosystems with chemicals that interfere with hormone
>>>> production across the food chain, resulting in an explosion of
>>>> diseases requiring treatment.  I don't know that I know enough to say
>>>> that there is anything resembling a conspiracy here....  other than
>>>> the sort of conspiracy of opportunistically imposed apathy and
>>>> ignorance.  But the general recklessness of big business seems to
>>>> suggest that there is something intentional about turning quick
>>>> profits, letting major catastrophic accidents happen, and then
>>>> profiting further.  Habituating people to live in a precarious state
>>>> of withered consciousness seems to have been the real "value"
>>>> uncovered by the pervasive barrage of technical innovations....  human
>>>> beings can be turned into quivering beasts who will tolerate any
>>>> injustice simply to hope for another day, and in many cases, who will
>>>> tear at each other's throats in defense of the paymasters responsible
>>>> for this exploitation.
>>>>
>>>> I suppose I should hang it up, here.  I might be drawing a false
>>>> distinction.  And I certainly am off the rails for this month's
>>>> discussion.  There is something moralistic in my argument, resembling
>>>> the months old discussion of "good" and "bad" that we had here.  Yet,
>>>> I wonder that there might be some value in drawing distinctions
>>>> between orders of technological existence.   That the fast-forward
>>>> orientation of prototyping is fascinating and productive....  but it
>>>> is a loaded term...  and it is one that I have a hard time unpacking.
>>>>
>>>> Davin
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Julian Oliver <
>>>> julian at julianoliver.com> wrote:
>>>> > ..on Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 03:10:01PM -0000, Johannes Birringer wrote:
>>>> >> >> Davin wrote:>> At one point in time, discrete objects were things
>>>> that were considered prototypes that could be thrown into an existing system
>>>> and tested. Increasingly, it seems like the prototypes are geared to test
>>>> individual and collective consciousness.  In other words, maybe we are the
>>>>  prototypes?  Being tested so that we can be effectively processed,
>>>> shrink-wrapped, labeled, bought and sold>>
>>>> >
>>>> > Hmm, This statement from Davin confused me also. I thought it was
>>>> fairly clear
>>>> > that any act of learning - or any 'attempt', which all action is at
>>>> it's root -
>>>> > simultaneously produces the self as a prototype, even if only for the
>>>> duration
>>>> > of that act. The very notion of a prototype assumes a platonic and
>>>> eventuating
>>>> > objecthood, a finished thing. When are people ever so singularly
>>>> resolved?
>>>> >
>>>> > Second order prototyping is the work of other people, especially
>>>> aquaintances,
>>>> > marketeers and those that resource people.
>>>> >
>>>> > Beast,
>>>> >
>>>> > --
>>>> > Julian Oliver
>>>> > home: New Zealand
>>>> > based: Berlin, Germany
>>>> > currently: Berlin, Germany
>>>> > about: http://julianoliver.com
>>>> > _______________________________________________
>>>> > empyre forum
>>>> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>>> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>>> >
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> empyre forum
>>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think
>>>> thank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>>>
>>>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  -
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>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think
>> thank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>
>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

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