Brian Holmes on Mon, 17 Apr 2006 13:00:54 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Network, Swarm, Microstructure |
Albert Hupa wrote: >Let's consciously combine two meanings of a network: a map, a set of >relations >analyzed from ecological point of view and the kind of behaviour.... That >is >why I think of using the notion of swarm - its emergent behaviour cannot be >described as unpredictable. We may find out some patterns in its behaviour >and >thus, learn something out of networks. Yes, I agree. The static graph of the network map is what leads, via the dynamic figure of the swarm, to a certain kind of complexity theory as a possible way to understand emergent behavior in the real world. On the one hand, the use of social network analysis tools is giving us pictures of very complicated interlinkages between individuals and groups. These pictures are quite simply fascinating, because they aggregate lots of data and allow one to glimpse patterns, or at least, the possibility of patterns, of regularities. But the maps are not enough. One needs an understanding of the quality of the links themselves, of what encourages a group to cooperate even when its membership is atomized and dispersed in space. Older sociological and anthropological studies tell a lot about how institutions organize a group (church, firm, disciplinary organization, etc) and they also tell a great deal about how family structures and status hierarchies organize people in stable localities. However, when the grip of institutions and of place-bound hierarchies declines, as is happening today, and when society largely becomes a matter of dispersions of mobile individuals in anonymous spaces - the big city; the world; the telecommunicational space - the only behavior that has really been understood very well is market behavior. We know A LOT (too much I would even say) about how price signals serve to structure the economic behavior of dispersed and mobile individuals, who are always portrayed as rationally calculating in order to maximalize their accumulation stategies (this is called "methodological individualism"). But is individual economic behavior the only kind that can be witnessed in the world today? Obviously not! Or let us say, rather, that within the space of very weakly determined social relations constituted by the market and price signals - the space of what the network sociologist Mark Granovetter famously called "weak ties" - other subsets or relational forms have started to appear. This is where the questions asked by complexity theory become so interesting and timely. What gives form and pattern to emergent behavior? How can we understand the internal consistency of self-organized groups and networks? The first answer seemed to be offered by the figure of the swarm. The word "swarming" describes a pattern of self-organization in real time, which seems to arise out of nowhere (or to be emergent) and yet which is recognizable, because it repeats in a more or less rhythmical way. Swarming is an initial image of self-organization. It is basically a pattern of attack, and here it's worth recalling the classic definition given by the military theorists Arquila and Ronfeldt in their book on "The Zapatista 'Social Netwar' in Mexico": "Swarming occurs when the dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing--swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse." What the observation and description of swarming has done is to give us a temporal image of emergent activity, decisively adding a dynamic aspect which was absent from the static network maps. This is very suggestive for anyone looking to understand the kinds of behavior that seem to be associated with networks, and indeed, with a "networked society." But does the dynamic image of swarming really tell us how self-organization occurs? No, I don't think so. The proof is that the American and Israeli military theorists have made dynamic models of what they see as the swarm tactic, and they now claim to use it as what they call a doctrine (see, for this, the important and sobering text by Eyal Weizman, "Walking through Walls," published in the current issue of Radical Philosophy). However, I do not believe that the miliary can engage in anything approximating self-organization, where individuals spontaneously coordinate their actions with others. This is antithetical to its hierarchical structure of command. Again, the "picture" can be misleading, even when it is a dynamic one. What is interesting, and perhaps essential to understand, is the way individuals and small groups spontaneously coordinate their actions, without any orders. This is self-organization, this is emergent behavior. But from what "ecology" does it emerge - to use Albert's term? I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental factors that help to explain the consistency of self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of a shared horizon - aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or metaphysical - which is patiently and deliberately built up over time, and which gives the members of a group the capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same referential universe, even when they are dispersed and mobile. You can think of this as "making worlds." The second is the capacity for temporal coordination at a distance: the exchange among a dispersed group of information, but also of affect, about unique events that are continuously unfolding in specific locations. This exchange of information and affect then becomes a set of constantly changing, constantly reinterpreted clues about how to act in the shared world. The flow aspect of the exchange means that the group is constantly evolving, and it is in this sense that it is an "ecology," a set of complex and changing inter-relations; but this dynamic ecology has consistency and durability, it becomes recognizable and distinctive within the larger evironment of the earth and its populations, because of the shared horizon that links the participants together in what appears as a world (or indeed as a cosmos, when metaphysical or religious beliefs are at work). Maurizio Lazarrato set me off on this line of thinking, with an article that we published in issue 15 of Multitudes and for which I suggested this title (just excerpted from important phrases in his text): "Creating Worlds: Contemporary capitalism and aesthetic 'wars.'" (Since then, all that work has been published in French under the title "Les revolutions du capitalisme," and bits have appeared in English all over the net.) Lazarrato pursues the Deleuzian concept of "modulation" to show how corporations strive to create worlds of aeesthetic perception and affect for their producers and consumers, in order to bind them together into some semblance of coordinated communities under the dispersed conditions of contemporary life. They do so via the media, which create aesthetic environments that are internalized within us in the form of recurring "refrains," or rhythmically recurring memories of a sounds, colors, words, etc. Lazzarato shows how these worlds, even in their difference and plurality (Coca-Cola, Nike, Microsoft, Macintosh...) conform to a "majority model" which is precisely that of capitalist production and consumption as structured by the bureaucratic state apparatuses and the transnational institutions that have formed between them. Nonetheless, the important thing to note is that in hyperindividualized societies, even these normalized forms of behavior are no longer directly shaped by institutional structures. Instead, there are multiple efforts and veritable aesthetic battle to create and maintain the referential universes within which choices are constantly made. But this creation of worlds is not only done by corporations, and not only at the degree of simplicity and sterility that examples from the commercial realm inevitably suggest. To describe the specific contents out of which richer and vaster worlds of meaning are made, and to detail the effects of the specific tools and procedures that make it possible to continuously transform them and to coordinate actions within their horizons, are the tasks of a complexity theory which seeks to understand how groups organize their own behavior, when they are no longer decisively influenced by traditional institutions. Bateson pointed the way to this possibility of a cybernetic understanding, an understanding of feedback processes, with his "Steps to an Ecology of Mind." Guattari tried to create even more dynamic models of such human ecologies, particularly in his great and strange book "Cartographies schizoanalytiques." These are still probably the most important references for the art of composing mutable worlds, where the goal of the participants is to carry out continuous transformation of the very parameters and coordinates on which their interactions are based (this is also understood as 3rd-order cybernetics, where the system produces not just new information, but new categories of information). Today, however, it is the sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina (thanks, by the way, to the several people who sent me her recent article!) who has expressed all this most clearly and in the most mainstream language, which can't just be ignored or tossed off as the work of a kook. Her ideas bring us back to networks and their concrete operations, with the concept of "global microstructures." As she writes in "Complex Global Microstructures": "Modern, industrial society created 'complex' forms of organizations that managed uncertainty and task fulfillment through interiorized systems of control and expertise. But complexity was institutional complexity; it meant sophisticated multi-level mechanisms of coordination, authority and compensation that assured orderly functioning and performance. A global society leans towards a different form of complexity; one emanating from more microstructural arrangements and the rise of mechanisms of coordination akin to those found in interaction systems.... The basic intuition that motivates the concept of a global microstructure is that genuinely global forms, by which I mean fields of practice that link up and stretch across all time zones (or have the potential to do so), need not imply further expansions of social institutional complexity. In fact, they may become feasible only if they avoid complex institutional structures. Global financial markets for example, where microstructures have been found, simply outrun the capacity of such structures. These markets are too fast, and change too quickly to be 'contained' by institutional orders. Global systems based on microstructural principles do not exhibit institutional complexity but rather the asymmetries, unpredictabilities and playfulness of complex (and dispersed) interaction patterns; a complexity that results, in John Urry?s terms, from a situation where order is not the outcome of purified social processes and is always intertwined with chaos. More concretely, these systems manifest an observational and temporal dynamics that is fundamental to their connectivity, auto-affective principles of self-motivation, forms of 'outsourcing', and principles of content that substitute for the principles and mechanisms of the modern, complex organization." Knorr Cetina stresses the creation of shared horizons in much the way that I described it above, focusing for this particular article on the religious horizon of a shared orientation to "transcendent time" (eschatology). As in previous articles on the microstructures of global finance, she also shows how networked ITCs allow participants of the microstructure to see and recognize each other, and to achieve cohesion by coordinating with each other in time, observing and commenting on the same events, even though the microstructure is very dispersed and not all the participants or even a majority of them are necessarily living anywhere near the particular event in question at any given moment. Cetina very suggestively reinterprets the usual idea of networks as a system of pipes conveying contents, to insist instead on the visual or scopic aspect of contemporary ICTs: from "pipes" to "scopes." Information is important for coordinating action; but it is the image that maintains the shared horizon and insists on the urgency of action within it (especially through what Barthes called the "punctum": the part that sticks out from the general dull flatness of the image and affectively touches you). To understand how all this works, one essential thing is to realize that it is different in each case: the "ecologies" are very different, depending on the coordinates or parameters that give rise to the particular microstructure. For one example, take the case of the open-source software movement. One the one hand you have a shared ethical horizon which is constituted by texts and examplary projects: Stallman's declarations and the example of the GNU project; Torvald's work; the General Public License itself and all the principles it is based on, particularly the indication of authorship (permitting recognition for one's efforts) and the openness of the resulting code (permitting widespread cooperation); as well as essays like The Hacker Ethic; projects like Creative Commons; the relation of all that to older ideals of public science; etc. Then on the other hand you have concrete modes of coordination via the Internet: Sourceforge and the innumerable forums devoted to each free software project (which I've been getting to know as I struggle with my Ubuntu distro, ha ha!). The whole thing has as little institutional complexity as possible (nobody is really compelled to do anything in any particular way), but instead is a situation full of self-motivation and auto-affection between dispersed members of a nonetheless very recognizable network, coordinated temporally around the development of specific projects, where order is obviously intertwined with chaos! And clearly, this particular global microstructure is influential in the world. Another great example, though more diffuse and complex, is the development of the counter-globalization movements. Again you can see the shared horizons of social justice, ecological awareness, resistance to hierarchical power (of the state and corporations), with reference to a constellation of texts and a number of great mythical moments of exemplary events (Seattle, Genoa, Cancun, etc). Then you see the coordinating systems, including Internet channels (indymedia, a myriad of web sites and mailing lists), but also forums and meetings (Zapatista encuentros; PGA meetings; counter-summits; social forums; activist campaigns). Even more clearly than the open-source projects, the counter-globalization movements are a universe of universes: the entire set of movements tries to distinguish itself from so-called "capitalist globalization", while a myriad of other, more specific horizons are established and maintained within that larger distinction. Both the open-source software movements and the counter-globalization movements have been capable of swarming behaviors. Indeed, the very idea of swarming arose from the particular form of solidarity between international NGOs and the Zapatists. In terms of open-source, one can consider all the peer-to-peer projects that emerged after the illegalization of Napster as successive swarm attacks on the content-provider industries. There is that classic pattern of converging, striking (in this case by producing new content-sharing programs), then dissevering, only to converge again at a different point (a new program, perhaps for video-sharing like Bit Torrent, or a hack of a DRM system, etc). Of course, different individuals are involved each time, different groups, differences of philosophy and mode of action; but a shared horizon makes all those differences also recognizable as somehow belonging together. This is the complexity of self-organization. You would again see such processes in action if you traced the history of the Mayday processes around flexible labor. But it is clear that by looking at these things in "ecological" terms you get a much richer picture, which is not limited to the visible dynamics of swarming. Now, I think these tendencies toward the emergence of global microstructures in a weakened institutional environment have been going on for decades. But it is clear that a turning-point was reached when one microstructure with a particularly strong religious horizon and a particularly well-developed relational and operational toolkit - Al Qaeda - was able to strike at the centers of capital accumulation and military power in the US (WTC and Pentagon). Suddenly, the capacity of networks to operate globally, independently and unpredictably, began to appear as a crisis affecting the deep structures of social power. At that point, the figure of the swarm rushed to the forefront of all the military discussions; and in a broader way, the question of whether complexity theory could really predict the emergent behavior of self-organizing networks became a kind of priority in social science. Knorr Cetina's article on microstructures is subtitled "The New Terrorist Societies," and it is about Al Qaeda (though her earlier work on microstructures is about currency-trading markets). But at the same time as the interest in swarming and complexity theory moved to the forefront of offical social science, one gradually became aware (I did anyway) that all over the world, serious attempts were underway to "overcode" and stabilize the dangerously mobile relational forms that had been unleashed by the generalization of the market and its weak ties. On the one hand there is an attempt to enforce the rules of the neoliberal world market by military force, and thus to complete an Imperial project which has now shown itself to be clearly Anglo-American in origin and in aims. This attempt is most clear in the book "The Pentagon's New Map" by Thomas Barnett, where he explains that the goal of American military policy must be to identify the "gaps" in the world network of finance and trade, and to "close the gap," by force if necessary. The thesis (on which the Iraq invasion was partially based) is that only a continuous extension of the world market and of its deterritorializing technologies can bring peace and prosperity, rooting out the atavistic religious beliefs on which terrorism feeds, and in the process, rationalizing the access to the resources that the capitalist world system needs to go on producing "growth for everyone." On the other hand, however, what we see in response to this extension of the world are market are regressions to sovereignist or neofascist forms of nationalism, and perhaps more significantly, attempts to configure great continental economic blocs where the instability and relative chaos of market relations could be submitted to some institutional control. These attempts can also be conceived as "counter-movements" in Karl Polanyi's sense: responses to the atomization of societies and the destruction of institutions brought about by the unfettered operations of a supposedly self-regulating market. They can be listed: NAFTA itself; the European Union, which has created its own currency; ASEAN+3, which represents East Asia's so-far abortive attempt to put together a stabilized monetary bloc offering protection from the financial crises continuously unleashed by neoliberalism; the Venezuelan project of "ALBA," which is raising the issue of possible industrial cooperation programs for a left-leaning Latin America; and of course, the "New Caliphate" in the Middle East, which is being proposed by Al-Qaeda and the other Salafi jihad movements. Perhaps people with more knowledge than I could talk about what is happening on this level in the Russian confederation, on the Indian subcontinent and in Africa. I think that in years to come, everyone will increasingly have to take a position with respect both to the Imperial project of a world market, and to the regressive nationalisms and the more complex processes of bloc formation. All these things are contradictory with each other and their contradictions are at the source of the conflicts in the world today. In this respect, Guattari's perception, at the close of the 1980s in "Cartographies schizoanalytiques," has proved prophetic: "From time immemorial, and in all its historical guises, the capitalist drive has always combined two fundamental components: the first, which I call deterritorialization, has to do with the destruction of social territories, collective identities, and systems of traditional values; the second, which I call the movement of reterritorialization, has to do with the recomposition, even by the most artificial means, of individuated frameworks of personhood, structures of power, and models of submission which are, if not formally similar to those the drive has destroyed, at least homothetical from a functional perspective. As the deterritorializing revolutions, tied to the development of science, technology, and the arts, sweep everything aside before them, a compulsion toward subjective reterritorialization also emerges. And this antagonism is heightened even more with the phenomenal growth of the communications and computer fields, to the point where the latter concentrate their deterritorializing effects on such human faculties as memory, perception, understanding, imagination, etc. In this way, a certain formula of anthropological functioning, a certain ancestral model of humanity, is expropriated at its very heart. And I think that it is as a result of an incapacity to adequately confront this phenomenal mutation that collective subjectivity has abandoned itself to the absurd wave of conservatism that we are presently witnessing."* The question that complexity theory allows us to ask is this: How do we organize ourselves for a viable response to the double violence of capitalist deterritorialization and the nationalist or identitarian reterritorialization to which it inevitably gives rise? It must be understood that this dilemna does not take the form of Christianity versus Islam, America versus the Middle East, Bush versus Bin Laden. Rather it arises at the "very heart" of the modern project, where human potential is "expropriated." Since September 11. the USA - and tendentially, the entire so-called "Western world" - has at once exacerbated the abstract, hyperindividualizing dynamics of capitalist globalization, and at the same time, has reinvented the most archaic figures of identitarian power (Guantanamo, fortress Europe, the dichotomy of sovereign majesty and bare life). Guattari speaks of a capitalist "drive" to deterritorialization, and of a "compulsion" to reterritorialization. What this means is that neither polarity is inherently positive or negative; rather, both are twisted into the violent and oppressive forms that we now see developing at such a terrifying and depressing pace. The ultimate effect is to render the promise of a world without borders strange, cold and even murderous, while at the same time precipitating a crisis, decay and regression of national institutions, which appear increasingly incapable of contributing to equality or the respect for difference. So the question that arises is whether one can consciously participate in the improvisational, assymetrical and partially chaotic force of global microstructures, making use of their relative autonomy from institutional norms as a way to influence a more positive reterritorialization, a more healthy and dynamic equilibrium, a better coexistence with the movement of technological development and global unification? The question is not farfetched, it is not a mere intellectual abstraction. Knorr Cetina's strong point is that global unification cannot occur through institutional process, because it is too complex to be managed in that way; instead, the leading edge is taken by lighter, faster, less predictable microstructures. Clearly, nothing guarantees that these are going to be beneficent. The forms that they will take remain open, they depend on the people who invent them. In his recent book, Lazzarato writes: "The activist is not someone who becomes the brains of the movement, who sums up its force, anticipates its choices, draws his or her legitimacy from a capacity to read and interepret the evolution of power, but instead, the activist is simply someone who introduces a discontinuity in what exists. She creates a bifurcation in the flow of words, of desires, of images, to put them at the service of the multiplicity's power of articulation; she links the singular situations together, without placing herself at a superior and totalizing point of view. She is an experimenter." The close of the book makes clear, however, that what should be sought is not just a joyous escape into the unpredictable. The point of this experimentation is to find articulations [agencements, which might also be translated as microstructures] that can oppose the literally death-dealing powers of the present society, and offer alternatives in their place. My guess is that in most cases, this can happen not at the local level of withdrawal (though that may be fertile), nor at the level of national institutions and debates (though these will be essential for holding off the worst), but most likely at the regional or continental level, particularly where the core economies overflow into their peripheries and vice-versa. This is the level where the most important policy is now being made, the level at which the major economic circuits are functioning and at which massive social injustice and ecological damage is happening all the time. What's really lacking are all kinds of border-crossing experiments, ways to subvert the macrostructures of inclusion/exclusion and to redraw the maps of coexistence. Ultimately, new kinds of institutions and new ways of relating to institutions will be needed, if there is to be any hope of stabilizing things and surviving the vast transition now underway. But we're not there yet, and it doesn't seem likely that any upcoming election will start the process. Instead it seems that much of the danger and the promise of the present moment can be found in the complex relations between network, swarm and microstructure. best, BH Note *I've altered the (relatively poor) translation of Guattari's text "Du post-modernisme a l'ere post-media," which is on pp. 53-61 of Cartographies schizoanalytiques, and on pp. 109-13 of The Guattari reader, under the title "The Postmodern Impasse." The key phrase, "un certain modele ancestral d'humanite qui se trouve ainsi exproprie au coeur de lui-meme," becomes "is appropriated from the inside"! The reverse of the original! No wonder people think Guattari is so hard to read... # 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