| 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 machineswith 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 multipleforms 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 Space Odysseyand 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 thetraditionalrepresentativeforms of the global movement we
fail to grasp the new productive conflicts. Concerned as we are about
theimperial war, we do not appreciate the centrality of this struggle.
Following Manuel Castells, we define the movement as aresistance identity
that fails to become aprojectidentity. 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 yearsthe political lexiconhas
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 cognitivevs. precariousworkers, two faces
of the same medal that the precogsof 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 Zeitgeistand 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 construenswill 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 productiveand projectual, to abandon mere
representationof conflict and the representativeforms 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 immaterialdispositif 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
newmanagerialsocieties 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. empirebecomes the matchradical machines vs. imperial techno-monsters.
How do we start building these machines?
Matteo Pasquinelli
mat AT rekombinant.org
Berlin - Bologna, February 2004
Web + pdf: www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2264
(translated by Arianna Bove)
--
Notes
[1] Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), New York
2003.
Orig. ed. Grammatica della moltitudine, Derive Approdi, Roma 2002.
[2] Chainworkers, Il precognitariato. L'europrecariato si è sollevato,
2003, published on www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2184.
See also www.chainworkers.org
and www.inventati.org/mailman/listinfo/precog.
[3] Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, L'anti-Oedipe, Les Éditions De
Minuit, Paris 1972.
[4] Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire, 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.
This text is published under the Creative
Commons Attribution - NonCommercial 1.0 license.
