[Upd-discuss] Analysis - Cognitive Labor: Radical machines against the techno-empire. From utopia to network, By Matteo Pasquinelli, Rekombinant

Thu, 4 Nov 2004 16:51:15 -0800 (PST)

[For our analysis. zmmm]
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English:
http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2264
Castellano:
http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2301
Italiano:
http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2257
Deutsch:
http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2300

Radical machines against the techno-empire. From
utopia to network

Matteo Pasquinelli - Lavoro Cognitivo 22.02.2004

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.

          -> download RTF file or PDF file

          -> versione italiana

        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
matteopasquinelli@gmx.it 
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.organdwww.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.

=====
Vorwärts!

Zapopan Martín Muela Meza
PhD student Information Studies
Department of Information Studies
University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/research/phd.html
http://www.geocities.com/zapopanmuela/index.html

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