Brian Holmes on Sun, 10 Nov 2002 17:47:10 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes |
Here's some thoughts about various contributions to this thread, quite a useful one for me anyway, which David Garcia has now about capped off by contributing Gregg Bordowitz's insightful and even revolutionary reflections on AIDS and globalization. While awaiting the fusion of documentary and poetry :) 1. Kermit really doesn't like the slogan "everyone is an expert": ...no one, not even a genius, becomes an expert without the training, education and discipline necessary for creative and critical thought. Training and education involve the mastery of rules, techniques and ideas.... it is impossible to found a culture on despair, nihilism and a principled rejection of all ideas and debate, even if one chooses to call such an approach "tactical media", "radical media pragmatism" or even "art". [snip] Kermit, sometimes I wonder if you do any political organizing? You know, it might be great if leftists could only associate with people who had a clear sense of self, sharply honed critical faculties, a good background knowledge of all the issues, sound moral reflexes and a sense of coherency in their actions. Trouble is, these days that list of qualities probably better describes the majority of American voters who just gave Bush a mandate for holy war. "Negative thinking" is a philosopher's word for the difficult attempt to resist a badly oriented rationality, a predatory individualism, a malevolent discipline. But the sources of effective resistance don't just come from philosophy: they also come from the fringes of alienation and anger and despair, from the insights of artistic experience, from the sudden enthusiasms of technological change, sometimes from more obscure rejections of the status quo. One of the main issues today is that the majority of the "experts" never question the holy mantra of economic growth, or the unspoken credo of racist exclusion. Somehow that expertise has to be challenged, it's urgent. What Geert and Florian are doing is not just armchair resistance, they're trying to give fairly large numbers of people a possible way into political life, which is always about debate, even when that debate takes the form of a riot or a hacker attack. Did you ever stake your own physical freedom on an issue? Do you think someone who does might also have principles? The main thing right now is not to diss everyone off and claim the high ground. I mean, I appreciate your scholarship and also that you even take the time to apply it to what we're talking about here. What's dismaying, generally, is that the minority concerned about something other than their own greed spend half their time fighting with the people on their own side. We could use some subtler criticism. 2. I really liked Nik's post in this thread, recalling the role that the PGA and all the social movements associated with it have played in putting a new critique of capitalism seriously on the table. In the absence of that history and that continuing reality there would be no social forums, just a complicit center left waiting to cave in and abandon everything. Without a few principled riots the critique would have remained so "reasonable" that it'd just be contemplative nostalgia from a bunch of well-heeled artists, old profs or has-been communists. If you have problems with armchairs and you're not totally hooked on computer screens, check out the PGA for a change. I've found those meshworks to be the best way for me personally to experience and develop the kind of global cooperativity and solidarity that's going to be a broad basis of real resistance, as the days get darker and all of this bullshit economic crisis goes on wrecking people's lives. 3. I also liked the way that MacKenzie came back in his second post and talked about three major types of resistance, against three forms of domination, over land, the means of industrial production, and abstract or symbolic property. Those are actually Karl Polanyi's three anthropological categories: land, labor and money (or the social institution of exchange). Polanyi showed how the liberal fiction of self-regulating markets destroys all three, leading to violent conflict. The complexity and diversity of resistance, based on differing relations to those three categories, is a key reality, it's one that you have to respect in order to understand why different people stand up for their different struggles. Our job as intellectuals is to at least try to bridge the gap, whenever it's possible. But I don't think the "vector" thing adds much to the argument. Way back in the mid-eighties, people had analyzed what's still unfortunately true: finance capital reigns supreme in this phase of capitalism. Before the World Wide Web, abstract dollars and deutschmarks and yens were spinning madly around the planet in electronic circuits, and doing the kind of damage they're still doing today. And they did it in the 20s too, before electronics. The great grandaddy of intellectual property, the way of controlling land and labor and even commerce at a distance, is big money, stock, financial instruments, supported as always by national and international law that favors owners over non-owners. IP is just a new twist in that very old story. Again I agree with Nik. 4. All the above suggests the critique that I personally have of the concept of "multitudes." But first of all, to say it's a synonym of mob is just ridiculous. In all the autonomist texts the multitudes arise from subjective processes of individuation, which are opposed to the consensual figure of the "people" within the normalizing framework of the nation-state. The notion of the multitudes is a demand to go beyond the current premise of representative democracy: that a virtuous, unimpeachable collective will can be derived from just counting up votes or polling opinions in frameworks that ask only for knee-jerk reactions, and not for any kind of self-elaboration or collective participation (not even the kind you go through when you take part in a big demo). Paolo Virno puts the whole mob argument to rest in his article in the French journal _Multitudes_ #7, when he says that this singularizing process is actually an intensification of political sociality: "Far from regressing, singularity is refined and reaches its peak in acting together, in the plurality of voices, in short, in the public sphere." OK, for every Virno there are lots of sloppy uses of the word, and I agree with Kermit that it's right to point them out. It's really a word that needs to be kept at the level of philosophy, at least for a while anyway. But the fundamental problem I have with multitudes is the argument that says that we're all intellectual laborers now, or even if we're not, that's the key process, the same way as Marx said that industrial labor was the key process giving rise to the proletariat in the 19th century. I think the danger there is taking your own navel for the whole orange, or worse, for the whole planet. 6.25 billion post-fordists is just not yet reality. We intellectual laborers definitely have some scores to settle with finance capital and IP, and those are important struggles, for sure. But let's try and keep our intellectual eyes open for the ways that everyone else is living too. Brian Holmes # 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