Networking The difficulty is, as with the term 'social', the term 'network' has become so pervasive that it in danger of losing its meaning or of over-determining its effects. All the same, and in general terms, it seems clear that the nework represents a key organisational principle for understanding contemporary politics, society and life in general(from the activities of peer-to-peer file-sharing to the viral operations of economic and financial markets). Indeed network forms of organisation appear to increasingly prescribe power relations and control structures.21 Emergent forms are dissimilar to the ways in which social relations have been traditionally organised, but, in general, they appear to reinforce existing power structures. According to Rossiter,22 there is an urgent need for new institutional forms that reflect 'relational' processes to challenge existing hierarchical and centralising systems. In contrast to what he calls 'networked organisations', emergent 'organized networks' are horizontal, collaborative and distributed in character offering a distinct social dynamic and new forms of agency appropriate to networks (based the movement and flow between multiple agencies). The difference, not least, is how they have responded to developments in networked communications technology and the issue of intellectual property rights: on the one hand, using this as a regulatory mechanism to enforce or extend existing power structures, and on the other, advocating a loosening up of property rights. The contradictions between these characterisations reflect the political complexities and uncertainties associated with sociality and life in general. The potential to transform social relations is somewhat demonstrated in the dynamics of social networking technologies. But it is the institutional nature of this, as a description of the organisation of social relations, that makes it thoroughly political issue and why the many popular examples can be seen to be deeply compromised. For instance, Facebook demonstrates the potential for self-organisation through its networked capacity and at the same time the drive to commodify collective and communicative exchanges. Organised networks evidently represent relative institutional autonomy but they also need to operate tactically, engaging both horizontal and vertical modes of interaction. Rossiter stresses the point: 'The tendency to describe networks in terms of horizontality results in the occlusion of the 'political', which consists of antagonisms that underpin sociality. It is technically and socially incorrect to assume that hierarchical and centralizing architectures and practices are absent from network cultures.'23 The plurality of nodes in networks does not guarantee a more inherent democratic order, indeed it is arguably serves to obscure its totalitarian substructure.24 This is the trick of social networking in offering the promise of democracy but though centralised ownership and control where the web platform itself mediates relations (unlike peer to peer file sharing for instance). Crucially, the software and the knowledge to shape it, is no longer stored locally on the user's hard drive but through the browser interface (and in this sense amateur production does become a pressing issue of lack of access to the means of production). Network power can also be seen in the ways work is reconstituted and how as a consequence of more emphasis on socialised and communicative work new management techniques tend to stress horizontal rather than hierarchical organisational structures. As with the discussion of network control, this in itself is a technique of power that Maurizio Lazzarato takes to be more totalitarian than the production line, as it involves the willing subjectivity of the worker in the process.25 He explains the logic thus: 'If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the 'raw material' of immaterial labor issubjectivity and the 'ideological' environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the reproduction of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator - and to construct it as 'active'. [...] The fact that immaterial labor produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capital has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power, and knowledge.'26 The quote reflects the operations of social networking sites where social relations are produced as friendly rather than antagonistic. As the market outsources manufacture to its consumers, it resolves the contradiction between producers and consumers. It: 'tends not to sell any product at all to the consumer, but rather sells the consumer to the product'.27 In such ways, the participatory work ethic of social networking is interpreted as an expression of new forms of control over subjectivity. The value that is stolen no longer relates simply to labour power but to subjectivity too.28 The worker-user voluntarily generates themselves as complicit with the user-generated content they produce.29 Correspondingly, a shift is required in rethinking the social as a shared and common definition of what it means to be part of the same collective. This is important, as Latour emphasises, because: 'If there is no society, then no politics is possible'.30 Notworking The parallel between social networking and working in general (or the network and worknet, if preferred)31 is encapsulated in the way the networked computer has become like a factory, and has redefined social practices and relations. This is the 'social factory' in which work is no longer confined by the walls of the factory, and is more dispersed, intellectual, immaterial and communicative. The dislocation of class antagonism in the social factory is close to what Marx referred to as'real subsumption', to conceptualise the way that exploitation is dispersed and subsumed into the wider social realm. Consequently, the control of communications, and the labour related to communications, have become the key sites of antagonism. Furthermore, as labour time has become more difficult to measure and is less distinct from time outside work, much of it now practised as'nonwork', outside of traditional production processes - 'notworking' as opposed to networking. The confusion over what constitutes work and non-work turns attention to situations where work takes the forms of nonwork. This point is extended by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, by drawing on Virno's observation that work and action have becomeindistinct. They argue for uncovering latent action in non-work.32 As forms of work become ever more undifferentiated, it is work itself that needs to be transformed and made more autonomous according to Negri, not by the reappropriation of work but by the refusal to work by notworking. The position of refusal derives from Mario Tronti's essay 'The Strategy of Refusal' of 1965, following the logic that capital 'seeks to use the worker's antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor for its own development'.33 The strategy of refusal represents not a liberation of work, but from work associated with exploitation and thus affirms autonomous production. But is simply refusing to use certain social networking sites effective refusal? I might refuse to register my acount details and assemble my friends on facebook or enemies on hatebook, but the challenge is to make this into a more strategic political issue by identifying what Latour describes as redefining the'well-assembled collective'.34 This is a socio-technical issue required better assembled collectives of people and machines. There is need to identify the invisible architecture of the network and its protocols locked down by proprietary interests in order to make it more open, participatory and more public in the truer sense. of distributed infrastructures. For Rossiter too, organised networks offer a positive opportunity to develop strategies and techniques of better organisation. For instance, peer production offers an obvious example of the opportunity to explore the limits of democracy and rethink politics from within network cultures.35 In such scenarios, a challenge is mounted to definitions of social wealth: a distinction between revenue and benefit sharing that the commons is founded upon (on the one hand, extracting monetary value from social processes and on the other imagining more sustainable alternatives to capitalist economy that have collective benefit). A peer to peer system in this respect might be considered 'post-capitalist'36 in the production of a social relation based on sharing and the common good. A similar point is made by Virno, in A Grammar of the Multitude, when he argues for a political space in which 'the many' tend to common affairs.37 In such descriptions, terms like social networking holds the potential to transform server-client relations into peer to peer relations but only if held within the public realm, outside of private ownership and as part of the commons. In contrast, the rise of social networking as we know it with its participatory ethic has been largely stolen from free software development - interpreted by Dmytri Kleiner and Brian Wyrick as 'capitalism's preemptive attack against p2p systems'.38 However, social networking demonstrates underlying contradictions: also standing antithetically for relations that reflect the dynamics of network architectures and contestational politics. Political struggles need to reflect these socio-technical dynamics that seem to be encapsulated by conflicts over sharing digital content, such as those over peer to peer filesharing. In what Angela Mitropoulos refers to as the 'softwar'39 work and nonwork related to social networking software clearly invoke antagonistic not friendly relations. The suggestion of these notes - in support of 'antisocial notworking'40 - is that without the identification of antagonisms that underpin sociality, politics simply cannot be engaged. |
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