This is not a "post": materialism and other "weightless" fantasies against "post"-modernism

This is a late post from last week's reading. Forgive this basic distinction, but it begs to be made evident:

I realize that the Huws piece is perhaps somewhat of a straw person argument, a bit easy to pick apart and therefore not in need of a corrective. However, there are small curious slippages that we grad students fall into sometimes and the devil of poor theorizations seems in these details. Huws performs this problem I think. Specifically, Huws notes, as some other commentators do, that "a consensus is emerging;" this agreement is one about the postmodern condition of the economy and our reality. Huws notes, "the world as we know it is becoming quite dematerialized..." Obviously, Huws is right to critique this. To say that the world is becoming dematerialized is absurd on its face. As Mark and others point out, "real" material reality exists... planes, trains, automobiles, etc...

However, I would like to know who utters the specific phrase that material reality is "disappearing." This is the "real" straw man argument. Postmodernism, if there is such a "thing," does not hold this view. It is far more accurate, ethical and productive to aver that "postmodernism" (or theorists writing in this vein) claims that people increasingly understand the world as becoming dematerialized, or rather, through the conceptual matrix of an understanding which is perhaps so mediated it is ontologically removed from reality. This is not to say that reality does not exist.. just like say "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" is not to say that there was no attack, death and destruction. Obviously there is; the point is the organization of reality not just through imagery, but as imagery itself. This is the more literary postmodern perspective (Lyotard, Baudrillard, etc...). Postmodern economists, those believing optimistically in a post-fordist economy, might exalt the dematerialization of labor; Huws might have an argument there. But to lump these people into the academic guild of postmodern theorists is highly suspect and shows little regard for theoretical distinctions (obviously, the postmodernism of Baudrillard is somewhat different than Danny Quah's of the London School of Economics).

The real desire "beneath"all this is of course the desire to preserve the groundwork of "beneath-ness" itself (Mark, this shout out is for you and the other materialists out there). How else do we explain Frederick Jameson's contradictory reading of the post-structuralism of Derrida and others? We have with Derrida, an account of the ever "present" logical gap of the structure of inquiry that produces the center term at its root - deconstruction in a nutshell; "the center will not hold and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Though this radically questions the possibility of depth hermeneutics to produce a truth, a depth and a center through structure, Jameson and others read Derrida and post-structuralism as symptomatic of our postmodern era. In another nutshell I suppose, Jameson reads Derrida and says: "a ha, I see what you are saying, you are a product of the postmodern times and I am getting at the structure that produces people and work such as you." In effect, Jameson reads the critique of depth hermeneutics in terms of a depth hermeneutics. Fascinating, frustrating and flabbergasting.

So why might someone pull such a stunt? Why would someone perform such a basic contradiction? Perhaps we should start turning more inward and apply this problem of a paradox to the problem of a tautology (Derrida once echoed Lacan - "as always, coherence out of contradiction expresses the force of a desire"). What is the desire of stating the tautology? "It goes without saying"... why are you saying it then? "The real is real, it is really real." Really? Because "really" implies like the real, not qua real. What is your investment in stating something should be more like what it is?

The desire here is one for structure, similar to the one Jameson did not want to cede. But desire is not a fantasy one can cast away, and this forever complicates the structure we seek to know apart from our own desire to know it. You cannot desire the real, have it and then be done with it. The desire is the constitutive force manufacturing the real as it moves. This is why fantasy is more real than real - it is the manner in which reality becomes to us. This is the sublimated or forgotten link to Althusser and ideology that is constantly omitted; we have an imaginary relationship to the conditions of our reality. The desire for the real, to have the real as ground and solid structure, expresses the desire to rescind our fantasy structure, to rid ourselves of ideology and get beneath the world of appearances. Speaking like Kant's double from the other side of noumenal realm does not accomplish this though.

Much like the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the knowledge of others' experiences of exploitation will never be fully known or appreciated at the same time. It is somewhat foolish to stop the atomic theory of individualism and say "But I see this individual particle and see its tragic trajectory right here." Yes, but the speed, its history, is lost. We cannot know it all at once. We do not feel another fully but can only imagine or fantasize that we might one day in a fuller, better, more literary (not literal) mode of real yet uncertain kind of experience.

Immoral, Illegal, or Fattening?

When Robins and Webster discuss the effect of ICTs on panoptic control, the language is very reminiscent of the move that Bogard makes with the ‘simulation of surveillance’: “What the computer has achieved is the extension and intensification of panoptic control; it has rendered social control more pervasive, more invasive, more total, but also more routine, mundane and inescapable. On the basis of the new technologies, surveillance becomes continuous and encompassing, a diffuse panoptic vision...We can speak of ‘a cybernetic society, in which the moral principle of democratic societies – individual autonomy – becomes more and more anachronistic and is replaced by technical imperatives handed down from the administrative economic spheres’”(Robins 180). This seems taken straight from Bogard, particularly this shift from individual autonomy and authoritarian, centralized prescriptive control to a more diffused, preemptive, soft control: “A landscape of surveillance without limits – everything visible in advance, everything transparent, sterilized and risk-free, nothing secret, absolute foreknowledge of events...Surveillance without limits is exactly what simulation is all about. Simulation is a way of satisfying a wish to see everything and to see it in advance, therefore both as something present (or anticipated) and already over (past)...Dreams of omniscience, omnipresence, mastery, and security – in short of control – are of course nothing new in the history of technology” (Bogard 15).

This is similarly echoed later on when charting a shift from intuitive to prescriptive to algorithmic thinking: “This approach privileges rational procedures, goal-directed behavior and cognitive structures. It emphasizes that problem-solving skills entail solving problems through ‘algorithmic thinking’, which according to one writer ‘is the third stage in problem solving that began to succeed the intuitive and prescriptive stages even before the computer era’” (Robins 188). I wondered if we can map intuitive thinking and individual autonomy to sovereign power; prescriptive thinking to disciplinary societies, and algorithmic thinking and soft control to the “societies of control.” This might be a bit of a stretch, especially considering that this last ‘stage’ entails that always elusive concept of biopower.

But both Robins and Webster as wells as Bogard use language that is highly suggestive of this biopower. When Robins and Webster speak about the ‘therapeutic state’, the language was very reminiscent of what Hardt calls, “the power of the creation of life; it is the production of collective subjectivities, sociality, and society itself” (98). “Such areas of life as physical and mental health, childcare, moral behavior and even sexuality are subjected to surveillance and administrative documentation. Lasch described the shift from an authoritative to a therapeutic mode of social control" (Robins 179). If soft control and the simulation of surveillance were to require initial programming that allows for complete surveillance (and, ideally, predictability); it would seem to necessitate some very particular ways to create life and train/educate (ultimately what Robins and Webster are arguing in Chapters 9 and 10).

I then thought a bit about ways to resist, if such a thing were possible. Which brought me to this quote from Bogard that has really been bugging me: “And that’s why labor organized by Capital is always a deterred death, a graduated, measured violence against the worker, a managed economy of little deaths, even as the logic of Capital propels it toward a totalization of death. Engineering the death of living labor, always however with an eye to reproducing it minimally, is Capital’s constant preoccupation” (102). I started to think about biopower and the ability to govern and maintain life and/or defer death. Is the best way to resist Capital to undermine this deferral of death and this strict governance of our bodies? I thought of that random quote: “All the things I really like are either immoral, illegal, or fattening.” Are doing these unhealthy things which bring pleasure a possible way to undermine Capital?

I’m not sure if this makes sense. Perhaps I’m just looking for a way to justify what I’ve done this weekend.

Google frees up your IT

Talk about "cloudware". Google's latest offer to businesses and higher education is to take care of their email, chat, calendar, and other office applications. At University of Iowa, for example, the University has decided to get a license to use Microsoft Outlook Software. Server space for our emails (to the best of my knowledge) remains physically on University of Iowa servers, not at Microsoft. In this latest Google "freebie," the email for your organization is the one and only Gmail, with all its surveillance capabilities.

Here is the offer (Basic/Free is on the left side and Premium/$$$$ is on the right):

Applications
Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Page Creator and Start Page
- 99.9% uptime guarantee for email**
- Email storage		5.552502 GB / account		25 GB / account
- Relevant text-based ads alongside email		Standard		Optional
- Conference room and resource scheduling

This is a major turn in the redeployment of the server-client model. Sometimes I wonder if I am making a big deal out of nothing. After all, I have a few domains with emails attached to them. The emails physically reside on the domain hosting service's servers. I also use Yahoo! for personal email applications, but in light of our recent conversations about intellectual property rights and enclosure, I am just a little freaked by the concept that Arizona State University adopted Gmail as their new e-mail platform. Proctor and Gamble signed on as well.

I would hope that a major public university like ASU would have bargained to make sure that their professors' and students' emails remain their intellectual property.

To check out more you can visit this page - Google Apps

p.s. I can tell from the marketing video that Google has adapted the free "OS" platform for the way the home page works for one's organization with Google Apps. Clicking and dragging content around is an innovation provided through work done by open source peeps. For more about this stuff do a search for Joomla or Word Press.

Spies like Flies

From Utne blogs:

The US government has been accused of sending out tiny, dragonfly-like drones to spy on anti-war protesters. People claim that mechanical insects have been sent by the government to hover over anti-war protests and collect information, reports the British newspaper the Telegraph.

Primitive Accumulation Demonstration

Say what you will about the current administration, but it is trying its best to contribute to our learning experiences in this class. Below is a link to a Wednesday NPR story on the "Cap and Trade" system for controlling and reducing carbon emissions. This is primitive accumulation in action, right before our eyes! One major aspect of the debate, as the news story explains, is whether the national government is going to make corporations pay for the initial carbon credits, or whether the government might just give these away at first. A similar giveaway system in the EU resulted in some major monetary windfalls for some European corporations when they sold their credits to other polluters.

Drat this immaterial labor! I can never get these links to work! Anyway, the story is at www.npr.org. At the "programs" label near the top click on "morning edition." You are looking for the Wed., 12.5.2007 story entitled, "Senate Committee Mulls Cap-and-Trade System."

More Concerns About the Commons...

Hop into your way-back machines because I'm going to bring us back to Hardt and Negri's work assigned on October 9th. Concerns about the diminishing commons seem to be a point we continue to come back to in this course. Lessig and Boyle most explicitly talk about these concerns, but Hardt and Negri have a bit in the "Informatisation of Production":

"We want to ask, rather, what is the operative notion of the common today, in the midst of postmodernity, the information revolution, and the consequent transformations of the mode of production. It seems to us, in fact, that today we participate in a more radical and profound commonality than has ever been experienced in the history of capitalism. The fact is that we participate in a productive world made up of communication and social networks, interactive services, and common languages. Our economic and social reality is defined less by the material objects that are made and consumed than by co-produced services and relationships. Producing increasingly means constructing cooperation and communicative commonalities.

The concept of private property itself, understood as the exclusive right to use a good and dispose of all wealth that derives from the possession of it, becomes increasingly nonsensical in this new situation. There are ever fewer goods that can be possessed and used exclusively in this framework; it is the community that produces and that, while producing, is reproduced and redefined. The foundation of the classic modern conception of private property is thus to a certain extent dissolved in the postmodern mode of production."

The Grassy Commons

Boyle is interested in the potential of creative, collaborative groups or communities (such as those that grow around open-source projects) to expand or serve as the structural model for social and political communities. One thing he in fact needs to assert to run his argument is that immaterial goods such as an MP3 file are non-rival and non-excludable. I think it might be worth running these assumptions up against Comcast’s (alleged) throttling of P2P users. This is worth pointing out for two reasons I think. One, it is an example of the legal system governing IP, as restricted as it might, being worked around. Boyle gets so caught up with the power of the formal legal framework and the power it has to “throttle” information, he neglects the possibility of such cases as Comcast, which is arguably more totalitarian than the legal, albeit superfluous, regulation through legal methods. The second point is the realization that, again, there is an infrastructure under the immaterial, giving it life. Boyle is so quick to draw distinctions between “the grass commons” and the “informational commons,” I think it’s worth pointing out there will always be a grassy commons relevant to that of the informational. Google’s server farms take up space and use resources, finite resources.