Emergent relations of readings as we move into Dean

On Terranova and Robins:

Terranova's intriguing, difficult and dare I say fluid thesis compels me to rethink the concept of the multitude. I believe what she offers is a dynamic account of more precisely how the ambivalence of the multitude operates - vis a vis Virno and Hardt and Negri. At once, the multitude arising from a (social) network of relations comes up through "soft" structure, and thus the need to discuss the biological vocabulary of "microdeterminism" on the one hand; on the other hand, the multitude engages in the production of its own autonomism, and thus the discussion of the vocabulary of emergent properties that "transcend" their own structuring rules. While this ambivalence occurs, social taylorism persists in the attempt to "control" it externally (government regulation of the internet); as well, corporations attempt to replicate it for capital internally (growing a reproduction of social relations in reality tv).

Terranova offers interesting biological and mechanical metaphors to further explicate the more fluid dynamics of the social operations at which all these relations intertwine. I do wonder, though, what advantage these organic metaphors possess over theoretical musings like in Virno. If we have a genuine desire for emergence, for transcendence, do we want to think ourselves at the level of structure or experiment at the level of transcendent production?

Laslty, Robins can be made sense of via a pessimistic reading of the possibility for the emergence of a genuine, fluid, multitude of forces that grow more "naturally" or autochthonously from a conceptualization of pure difference. This seems to point to the democratic stakes in all of this - we wish to grow a bottom up democracy that will not be "hijacked" as Terranova puts it. For Robins, a "nearness" that reduces the otherness of the other through the communal internet risks this problem in a way. So the question seems:

How ought we account for the "better" emergent property that is sociality when socialty is but the transcendental emergence of that which we cannot "control?" Just as the mind is beyond the brain, just as the general intellect is an emergent social product "I" do not control, the "public sphere" is beyond its mere participants - so what ontological status does a social sphere obtain and how can it be measured outside of the concepts used to produce it in the first place; i.e. how can we argue for what it ought to be when those arguments loop back to make it what it is? Who or what performs the measuring seems exactly the political question and not merely the philosophical one. However, the first realization "should" lie in the recognition that our own metaphors to conceive ourselves as part of this dynamic are thoroughly implicated in this politics and do not "transcend" it.