Brian Holmes on Sun, 27 Aug 2006 18:32:33 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Re: Peace-For-War / Grid & Fork / Islamic perspective |
Hello Alex, Felix, Ed, Benjamin, everyone, I'm intrigued to the fullest by the responses to the paper I posted (why else does one write?), and by the chance to dig deeper into what's become a much more interesting subject. Alex has my three cheers for bringing the regulation school ideas into our amateur/activist/pop-theory debates. That body of work, along with a book called The Second Industrial Divide, is the background to a lot of the Italian autonomist theorizing that has been so great for finally managing to actually include us (the possible agency of each of us). The hope would be to go further, and to create concepts that really fit the present. In my opinion, the Muslim world perspective that Benjamin brings would make all the difference in that last respect. I'm really glad about this discussion and would like to continue it in a sustained way. People in English-speaking lands may be unfamiliar with the regulation school, though there was a good intro in David Harvey's book, The Condition of Postmodernity, chapter 7. I'm gonna give my version of what Alex already said about it. The regulationists treat technological changes in the mode of production as a force of rupture in history, then analyze how a new social form emerges from the interactions between organizational innovations on the one hand (the regime of accumulation), and governmental or societal intervention on the other (the mode of regulation). After the steam-based industrial revolution, it's generally thought that a first break occured in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the introduction of a new technological paradigm (electric power and internal combustion engines), leading to a new regime of accumulation (assembly-line mass production under the organizational form of the vertically integrated, multi-divisional corporation). In response to the crises of WWI, the Russian Revolution and 1929, the period of the 1930s then becomes a laboratory for the regulation of the new regime; and the model of the welfare state finally emerges from Roosevelt's programs, then later from Beveridge in the UK and related developments around Europe. All this becomes fascinating to the extent that yet another new technological paradigm (based on transistors, computing, communications) began coming together in the 1970s, a "third industrial revolution" that was gradually taken up and developed as an answer to the persistent crisis and stagnation of the mass production-national corporation-welfare state system. So you get what Castells calls "informationalism" as a new mode of production, soon matched by the emergence of the transnational network firm, organizing just-in-time customized manufacturing around the world. This amounts to a new regime of accumulation. Notice that it goes along with globalization and financialization, bringing into the equation a whole new problem of international relations that the regulationists don't deal with very well, to my knowledge. Anyway, Alex is saying (and I totally agree) that this new regime of accumulation, driven ahead by computerization and a host of associated technological changes, comes up against a socioeconomic crisis in the late 1990s, when the initial attempt to regulate it by basically doing nothing (laissez-faire) leads to market failures, social crises, wars and the abysmal state of the present. Alex does take on the international dimension, and he writes: "a regulation crisis occurs when the laissez-faire responses to a new technological paradigm show all its socioeconomic limits (not enough effective demand, no social legitimacy) and leads to geopolitical instability (open power rivalry with a concurrent crisis in world hegemony). Regulation crises are... those of the interwar period and the early 21st century. Again, my contention is that ideology matters most in regulation crises, when rival institutional setups are proposed and fiercely fought over." The basic program that emerges from any regulationist-type analysis is this: understand the social problems of the new regime of accumulation, then propose new institutions. That's what the people at the journals Futur Anterieur and then Multitudes have been talking about in a more activist way for the last 15 years (not surprising, the regulation school is mainly French). I dunno if there's been such a focused discussion in Italy, or anywhere else. And maybe the problem is, the autonomist crowd (and what Alex calls "the heretical left") only really got moving again in the late 90s during the bubble economy, so we somewhat simplified the picture of the new accumuation regime (network utopianism) and we idealized the subjects who could bring it into crisis (hackers, zapatistas, alterglobalizers, etc.). With the result that we're only just now starting to face the nitty-gritty. The text on Peace-for-War tried to look directly at the US neoconservative answer to the turn-of-the century crises, and to ask, counter-intuitively, whether that violently statist answer does not stem directly from the Clintonian internationalist neoliberal pattern of governance that preceded it. In the language we are using now, does the crisis of networked production not push the existing sets of national institutions to try to regain stability by reasserting sovereignty and reinventing a state-controlled war economy? In short: Isn't this, for lack of anything better, an old-style Fordist response to a wholly new regulation crisis of globalized flexible accumulation? I think that to a large extent it is, so far anyway, in terms of the concerted response led by the US and Britain - but to just say that adds almost nothing. Identification of the actors of such a response is important, but I agree with Alex that it's "reductive to look at the present historical shift as merely a reshuffling in the US composition of capital (from the dominance of technomerger to petromilitary capitalism)." What matters is the bifurcation, how all this is gonna go in the future. What matters is the way that society reconfigures itself, the new rules that are put into place to make life under capitalism safe, efficient, profitable, and just egalitarian enough that it can keep on stumbling along. And what also matters is the chance that we could still do better than that, and make use of this crisis (which will inevitably get worse) in order to spread new understandings of what we are actually doing as societies in the wide world, and how we could do it differently. What dismays me is the extent to which people on the Left hark back to the dreams of the Clinton era (for the post-68ers, greens and so on), to Roosevelt-Beveridge (for the old integrated Left), and to Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin for the rest (with a little Che-Fidel thrown in!). What you don't get is a concrete, sharable understanding of the extremely complex contemporary division of labor, and of the ways it is lived by billions of people, the kinds of solidarity it has elicited and the functions of ideology that serve to sustain it. One reason that the giddy 90's led to the gory 00's is that WE HAVE NO ANALYSIS, AND THEREFORE NO REAL PROPOSALS, so we get the old-style default solutions from the power-money people. And meanwhile, the new solution emerges under cover of the mistaken old ones, without the deep debate it really needs. Frankly, I'm afraid of what the new regulation could ultimately become, under the cloaking and distorting influence of what I call the party of war, oil and engineering. When I talk about "steering," I am pointing to the different - even very different - strategies that are brought into play in the attempt to influence systemic change. Felix distinguishes between structural dynamics (by which he seems to mean the way markets are structured financially, and the results on the global division of labor), interventionist power politics (carried out by states or their proxies), and chaotic processes (resulting from a large number of diverse actors all scrambling for influence). He observes how much the recent technological changes have reinforced the third category, and he writes: "The number of actors has grown that are powerful enough to disturb the establishment of order without being powerful enough to establish order themselves." This is a huge danger, one which is becoming serious for millions if not billions of people; and this is where a wider conceptual map of structural dynamics is needed, so as to convince more actors to intervene exactly at the points where they can contribute to establishing a different order. War and ecological damage are starting to press for this kind of conceptual framework, and so the time for proposing such maps is now. A look at Alex's Grid & Fork timeline shows the kind of complexity that's entailed, but also the necessary effort to reduce complexity, to find expressive forms that can allow people to say, "Yes, I was there, I was affected by that trend, and now I am shifting toward there, under the influence of this new trend - which I want to help change, in order to fit into a different configuration." This is the kind of "shared horizon" I was talking about at one point: something rather complex, strategical, but also inseparable from the more woolly order of a "world view." What I like in the Grid & Fork timeline is the way that Alex positions "Ideology and Political Mobilization" as exogenous, i.e. able to change the trends, notably by influencing the forms of regulation. We can also look for ourselves here, and the grid could become a kind of modeling device if it were able, through some kind of hypertext presentation, to project different futures on the basis of which combinations of ideology and mobilizing project are chosen by whom. But curiously, this outside position of ideology and political mobilization, symmetrical to technological change as another force of rupture in history, is opposed to both "Geopolitics and balance of Power" and "World Finance and International Commerce," which are considered weakly exogenous, i.e. capable of exerting some transformative force, but perhaps not of achieving what Alex calls a bifurcation. That's not so clear, Alex. Whay are these any more outside of the structural trends than accumulation dynamics or business and labor organization? Does it mean that they are only partially shaped by something like ideology? Or that they fall only partially under the influence of governmental and societal regulation? Or both? It would be interesting to know how you see this, because it pertains directly to the questions about the transnational division of labor that I'm going to ask below. Generally, I think the grid will only become useful with more argumentation about the categories themselves, and then about their specific contents. So I am really waiting to see the promised essay. The interesting thing would be to argue out the shape of the grid collectively, and then use it to orchestrate many existing references, many specially written original texts, so that it becomes a kind of data-bank with hyper-linked key words - eg. "Reverse Plaza Accord" or "flexworkers' syndicalism" - leading into a kind of encyclopedia of the processes of social change. Now I finally come to Benjamin's concerns. "Encyclopedia" combines the Greek word for circle with the one for pedagogy - and it is the centerpiece of the old Englightenment dream of transforming the world collectively through knowledge. When I wrote about creating a shared horizon, and that governments should be afraid of the "exact science of our unbound dreams," it's true that I was inhabiting this old Western model, where political motivation plus knowledge is conceived as a strategy for changing the regulation of society. (In the Peace-for-War text I was also trying to point out the importance that has been taken on by a more recent knowledge of circular pedagogy: cybernetics, which imho has largely become a science of control. I wanted to suggest that this is an area that could use some inervention, an area of societal regulation where both theory and practice could be reconsidered.) Somewhere in this more-or-less encyclopedic context, Benjamin raised a very interesting cautionary warning against "any premature rush towards an imagined universalism." He wrote this: "I don't think politics can be separated from culture. The British House of Commons, European anarchist working groups, and the deliberations among the heads of clans in Upper Egypt all have their distinctive cultures. Perhaps you are right, Brian, that tomorrow's social movements need a new shared horizon as the basis for international cooperation. But even if that's true, let it not be a totalitarian horizon, one that attempts to cast all political life in the same mould. Let it be one that allows individuals and groups to move freely among political cultures and to mediate between them." I found your first post extremely interesting, Benjamin, particularly when you said that you didn't want to look for any "shared horizon" until you had studied another culture deeply, and when you then said you had chosen to learn Arabic and embarked on a course of study in the Middle East. I would really be curious to know more about how that's going and what you are learning. One thing that I understood, more clearly than ever before, while writing the Peace-for-War paper, was that the last great expansive phase of capitalism has brought a huge population of new subjects into its orbit (what Marxists call, with an ugly term, "proletarianization"). This has greatly intensified the participation of Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern people in an economy which has meanwhile been cyberneticized (subjected to real-time monitoring and patterning) and culturalized, so that many of the new products and tasks concern words and images. Not all, obviously (let's not get into the material-immaterial labor debate again) - but what I'm saying is that the cybernation and culturalization somehow exacerbates the mere fact of participation in an economic circuit, particularly if you occupy a subordinate position. And that intersects with the long-term trend you pointed to in your last post: the disaffection of Middle Eastern populations from the national formulas of technological modernization according to some acclimated version of enlightenment principles, and the return of Islam as a renewed system of regional solidarity, in the face of continued and intensifying exploitation and oppression from the developed capitalist countries. In that situation I can imagine it might be enfuriating to confront, not only bosses and bombs, but also cultural and ideological productions that directly challenge and undermine the only functioning systems of solidarity one has. I think you are simply stating a fact in your deeply researched and considered post: "At the moment, it seems unlikely to me that any secular movement can gain widespread popular support in the Middle East. The ideologies that currently seem most likely to rebuild this part of the world are Islamist ones. If you want to create a new global political culture, I suggest thinking seriously about the role Islam could play in that culture." I agree that this is where almost all Leftist thought is still lacking; and I think it is basically a failure to come to grips with all the consequences of the worldwide division of labor under globalization. Alex, in a way, at once addresses and glosses over the necessity of understanding what might be called the really-existing systems of solidarity and social cohesion in the world, by imagining, as a future bifurcation of geopolitics, a "balanced multipolar" system as a kind of possible solution to the present crisis: "New Global Democracy under UN control, Liberal North America, Federal Social Europe, Bolivarist Latin America, Asian Prosperity Non-Aggression Pact, Pan-Islamic Union hegemonized by Iran, African Union under South African leadership." I think there are now real tendencies toward the autonomization of regional systems, and I have written about them in my work on Continental Drift. But the problem with a multipolar world is not only that under the conditions of empire, Rome is no longer in Rome, and the full-fledged world division of labor encourages people from all continents to mix and resettle in endless streams of immigration and transmigration. The problem is also that the last great attempt to achieve new societal regulations by turning inward to regional ensembles and currency blocs effectively happened in the 30's, and led to a huge war. Only afterwards was the veil of "UN control" acheived, along with the actual economic regulation of the world according to a balance between the free-trade liberalism of Bretton Woods and the notion of endogenous national development, hammered out in all the limits that the GATT process did place on imports and foreign ownership. But UN control is over; the postwar balance was only effective because of the counterweight of the Soviet Union. We don't want another world war to force everyone into erecting a new system dictated basically by the victors. There is a great urgency to reshape Leftist thinking so that it can contain, not just a definition of other forms of solidarity and political mobilization, but above all a capacity to dialogue with them and to see, at least partially, through their eyes. It's great to hear that at least some efforts in this direction are actually underway. 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