Brian Holmes on Sun, 26 Jan 2003 06:22:06 +0100 (CET) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: <nettime> revenge of the concept |
"Hayeck is dead. But who killed him and how?" This would be as good a way as any to describe the stakes of this thread. Because Friedrich von Hayeck (the economist/philosopher behind the Thatcher/Reagan program) seems to have had his day in the sun. His exaltation of individual entrepreneurship and unfettered markets emerged in the eighties as the effective heritage of the anti-bureaucratic revolt of the sixties. The result was to call a halt to the development of the Keynesian welfare-state, and to launch the dynamics of transnational financial speculation, leading ultimately to what I call "transnational state capitalism," where the state mainly serves transnational capitals and corporations. Now those dynamics have in turn entered into crisis, as I've pointed out here before, with my recent contributions "Deflation, anyone?" and "The End of Neoliberal Globalization." The problem is, it has not yet been possible to locate any current of thinking or acting capable of articulating new values, and above all a new conception of social interaction that can rise to the challenges that we are now looking squarely in the eye, as the Hayeckian ideology of "neoliberal" globalization collapses and we must consider the cruder realities of a world capitalism articulated by rivalries between three major continental blocs (NAFTA, EU, and in the near future, China/ASEAN). The question is whether it is possible to imagine, encourage, and develop any response to these crude rivalries, from the bottom up, using the productive capacities and agency that we situated individuals may have in our lives. What I tried to broach in the paper at the origin of this little thread was the possibility of extending an existing, rather pragmatic line of thinking about co-operative production. Everyone involved with the Internet knows the paradigm of cooperative software production associated with Richard Stallman and Linus Torvald. Most everyone has become aware that there is an analogy, and indeed a certain family resemblance, between this cooperative paradigm and the kinds of social protocols that preside over the production and circulation of academic knowledge. In both cases, the motivation for what is essentially informational or cultural production is detached from the commodity form (stuff you sell or pay for, with someone gaining a profit). The motivation derives rather from what is quite vaguely defined as "recognition," "reputation," "idealism," etc. (each of these being somewhat different). In his excellent paper, "Coase's Penguin: Linux and The Nature of the Firm," Yochai Benkler explains, not the motivation, but the technical and legal preconditions for cooperative informational and cultural production. The technical considerations are basically: telematically interlinked personal computers. The legal precondition is basically: that information be treated as what it arguably is, a "non-rivalrous good," i.e. a resource that can't run out, that can't be destroyed in the using, and that therefore cannot be treated as an ownable commodity. Benkler's conclusion is that networked informational and cultural production obeys neither the constraints of a firm (with a bureaucratic organization), nor the price signals given by a market ("buy" and "sell" are irrelevant to non-rivalrous goods). So Benkler is talking about a form of production which is at once non-bureaucratic and, yes, non-capitalist, i.e. divorced from that complex and changeable human institution which transnational state capitalism now dominates almost entirely: the market. Given all that, my idea was twofold. First, to point out that there existed another important and quite visible realm of cooperative production, involving both aesthetic display and academic-type reasoning: this is the realm of the new political dissent, combining carnavalesque performance with political-economic critique. Second, I wanted to stress what Benkler refers to only vaguely in a footnote: namely, that the motivations for this kind of cooperative practice are specifically anti-capitalist, and indeed, anti-state-capitalist, insofar as they lead people to use cooperative production techniques as a way of explicitly refusing the social norms of neoliberal society. These norms tend at once to individualize people in conformity to market ideology, and to make those highly individualized people nonetheless amenable to bureaucratic control systems. Such individualized conformity is the characteristic feature of what I call "the flexible personality." I think it is basically what the counter-globalization movement is against, at an everyday, affective, motivational level. The risk I took - and this is the weakest part of my argument - was to use Marcel Mauss's notion, developed in his essay on The Gift, that human societies are only sustainable through the operation of complex reciprocities which cannot be accounted for in the logic and language of markets as we know them under liberal (or neoliberal) capitalism. The reason my argument is weak here, is that I do not have a good sociologial or anthropological language to describe how these reciprocities work in _our_ societies, today. Of course there's a reason for that lack: these reciprocities are almost destroyed by individualizing, flexibilizing capitalism, its firms and its markets. What I do describe appears as a kind of weak, desperate resurgence of older survival strategies. In the absence of a clear language expressing the necessity of relationships not built on money and which an adequately fulfilled contract does not abolish, the appeal to the "gift economy" looks romantic (Ken Wark's word). Indeed, if you want to contribute somehow to the general profile of "the one who killed Hayeck," you have to go beyond anything "romantic." So some conceptual help on this point would be much appreciated. Unfortunately, the two main arguments that have been put up against me so far are not to much use in this sense. Keith Hart wants to save a market and invent new kinds of money to articulate cooperative production: fine. I have no problem, as long as one agrees that the present rules governing market transactions are highly inimical or even fatal to cooperating, at least to cooperating outside the constraining framework of the contemporary firm. (The proof of that, by the way, is the pressure that academic production itself is under, particularly when the "publish or perish" imperative meets the competitive framework installed by scientific journals managed for a hefty profit. Here it would be necessary to talk more about the spreading revolt which seeks to establish a new peer-review and publication system via Internet). Beyond the distinction between markets in the broad sense and specifically capitalist markets, Keith's main point is that we should get working on the nitty-gritty of actual cooperative production. Strangely, he doesn't see that I am indeed talking about just that, as Benkler does too. But I'm talking about it exactly in those realms of political confrontation where there is an attempt to change the current, fatal rules imposed both on markets and on public institutions that diverge in any way from the norms of the competitive, profit-seeking firm. Ken Wark's argument is quite different, in that it seeks to refine the oppositionality I'm talking about down to a clear, specific opposition that he places at the cutting edge of society's historical development. This is the opposition between an information-owning "vectorialist class" and a hacker resistance that treats information as a non-rivalrous good ("free"). The logic is elegant, and it clarifies a real conflict. But it doesn't fully explain the resistance movements which actually exist, and give impetus to the most interesting and promising aspects of real politics today. Much of the resistance is in fact motivated by concern over ecological issues, or in other words, over clearly rivalrous goods, whose overuse destroys them. Water. Timber. Fish. The air itself. And so on. A teleological Marxism allows you to think that such struggles are subordinated to the main one at the cutting edge of production. But observation shows that the real resistance generally procedes from these "archaic" struggles, and only thence identifies the new struggle over the freedom, or not, of information. I think that the reason why the seemingly "outdated" issues come first is that they are survivability issues. Live or die questions. And since they make collective struggle against resource exploitation and then collective management of resources into preconditions for surviving, they link back to patterns of reciprocity (or of solidarity if you prefer) which can actually inform and deepen the new kinds of cooperative production, while pushing aside the harmful ideologies. Romantic? I'm not sure. I think that human society necessarily works out its collective survival strategies through a continuing reference to and transformation of older patterns, or in other words, through a cultural delay. You could even think of symbolic culture, with all its rituals and enigmas and obscure aspects, as the cumberous gift of a rather inefficient survival strategy that has to be "paid back" to the following generations. A gift that can turn out to be full of unrealized potential (like conceptual art in the age of Internet), or that can turn out to be poisoned (as when a figure like Hayeck arises from the rotting remains of older and more complex philosophies of political liberalism). Hmm, it's all a bit complicated. Marx wasn't very clear on that. But it was one of his weak points, I'd say. best to all, Brian # 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