1. (Polemically) Do we concur with Hardt on these two assertions?:
a. Modernization has come to an end (second Paragraph after “informatisation”)
b. Postmodernisation marks a new mode of becoming human (last paragraph before "sociology of immaterial labor")
2. (Conceptually) Immaterial labor provides the potential for an "elementary communism" (right before the section on “network production”). What is the nature of the overlap here into the last section on the "commons?" – Hardt is speaking here of the supposed dissolution of contemporary notions of private property, the increase of communal production/relations and the "liberation of the multitude." Do we have here some terminological filling our of Virno's conception of post-Fordism as communism? Is this a necessary or contingent unfolding
3. (Rationally) How do we begin to make sense of decentralization of the productive process that engenders command/control in other facets of production (right before section on “information highways”). The "network" Hardt speaks about is both the site of production and circulation - how do we then separate democratic from ologopolistic mechanisms?
2 comments:
The following are my notes for things I wanted to say/answers to Niko's questions. They are pretty rough.
1a. this is a conflation of moderization and industrialization- this would then seem to say that post-modernization is a result of contingent processes that can only exist temporally after we have seen modernization. The answer would seem to be no; as per Harvey 191; modernization continues in the margins concealed through a strategy of legitimation as per Habermas. Virno and others seem to run from habermas check multitude p 108. The questions really should be about which stories we tell to make it all work. Example: there are plenty of consumer advocacy movements that call out the continued violent ordering of the economy, these make very little headway. Some kind of narrative intervenes.
b. is it a new mode of becoming human? Becoming human in this context would be about being rooted and a part of a community. This reading argues that becoming human in this new system is more about entering into the regime of symbolism of the information economy. The modes of becoming that came before are important but these new forms of attachment are fundamentally more important. On the third hand, this could mean “becoming” in the D&G sense, in which case sure.
2. This entire communism-capitalism thing is dependent on buying the argument that the ownership of the means of production is the lynch pin of communism. If it is then yes, we live in a communistic era. This theory seems to discount other salient features of what that society would look like. I am not sure if even a reading of Marx would really be that important here; the argument is about the internal criteria. The private property argument in the conclusion is just silly, they are all about the true power of capitalism being its ability to function through deterritorialization and resistance be located there, so the regime of property law collapsing because it is “detached” seems really thin. It could be evidence for this ownership argument, because if the owners of creativity got off dead center they could control the creation of media content. This would represent a fundamental shift in how content would be created, however Hardt’s account of cynicism carried into Virno handles this all quite well. Capitalism works because it convinces people that they really shouldn’t resist, see argument one about legitimaiton. So, I would either conclude that his characterizaton of the essential traits of communism was off or that he is conflating creativity or agency or intelligence with communism too quickly.
3. Trying to unpack the question here I get two distinctive swaths of thoughts; first the section immediately before Information Highways is about new imagined centers. Second, this question tries to link imagined centers to expanded regimes of observation and other power relations. These are surely linked, particularly as the imagined centers and the Wizards of Oz who play like the Big Other need to get their fix of images. Third, I will try a really odd response to the question through a reading of solid and liquid metaphors. Separation of democratic and other systems is very difficult if impossible. The multitude seems to beg this question; democracy would be overcoded by certain other structural factors. I am not sure if we can square the structuralist bend we are going on here with the other folks we need to read empire. Is a core task here really severing politics? I didn’t get that drift,
This seems like a really important variable because we can not over come a centralized system of thinking if our genetic imaginary (to use a mixed botany metaphor) always has a center even if we only have decentered little bits, the center is always already there. I can defend this claim both on botanical grounds and because this is really all about the social narratives we use to legitimize the existing order of things. Perhaps my most pressing thought is of the imaginary center. I went on a tear Thursday before last bout D&G and I have really been thinking about imagined centers, how these can interface with an imagined. Even if Nasdaq or other markets are increasingly performed in a virtual space, there are still real factors in play at that virtual center.
The flows are utterly unstructural, take Liquid modernity or other fluidic metaphors, the questions we are asking seem to really fit what Irrigary is talking about when she argues that science has only understood the solid object not the politics of fluid; I am only a novice on Luce so Don’t quote me here. This approach to answering the question would seem to say that the nature of fluids react and destroy, they cut new channels that they then flow in. This post-solids reading would contend that fordism is a mountain while postfordism is a river. I think this reading is pretty fun, what it gets us that we didn’t have before is a metaphor that segregates pre-information flow from post in a meaningful sense. Many of our linakge/relationship metaphors were not nearly good enough at keeping the KINDS of relationships different, they seemed to emphasize DEGREE.
--dan
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