images

Democracy 2.0
Geoff Cox

Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It’s called Democracy. Alan Badiou [1]

Critique is an essential part of capitalist production. The ability to express one's opinions in public allows the system to verify itself as democratic. Through such means, it is able to generate its own critique and then quickly neutralise it. Within the neo-liberal spaces of contemporary culture, thereby some opinions not readily acceptable in other public places can be displayed but the politics easily contained. The critic offers soft politics that is easily recuperated to legitimate the art culture's self-reflection. But it’s not quite that simple – and far more dialectical. On the one hand, culture appears to have lost its critical power as any form of critique is automatically recuperated; but on the other, the new situation opens up different strategies of opposition that respond to the ways in which power is organised.[2]

What is required is a more detailed examination of the power relations at work, and how they are configured as part and parcel of informational capitalism, and how social relations and control structures are managed. With no longer a centre of power to be found or established opposition as such, it is clear that the (class) enemy is increasingly hard to identify across its networks, and yet power continues to produce its own vulnerabilities. Correspondingly, the recommendation of those developing oppositional tactics is to take advantage of the vulnerabilities in networks (much like successful computer viruses do) – by exploiting power differentials that exist in the operating system.[3] Such tactics draw on methods informed by network and information theory, as well as reverse engineering mass culture.[4] The approaches offer direct responses to recuperative processes, and yet the effect of tactical media is paradoxical, as Geert Lovink contends, leading equally tactically to ‘benign tolerance’. To explain in more detail, he says:

‘The ideal is to be little more than a temporary glitch, a brief instance of noise or interference. Tactical media set themselves up for exploitation in the same manner that “modders” do in the game industry: both dispense with their knowledge of loop holes in the system for free. They point out the problem, and then run away. Capital is delighted, and thanks the tactical media outfit or nerd-modder for the home improvement.’[5]

That may be sadly the case, but the reappraisal of recuperative processes and interventionist responses is necessarily ongoing, not least in the context of how social media are changing the face of the representational political process. This is partly evident in the apparent success of various campaigns that hope to influence the outcomes of elections and in the rise of services that offer effective participation in the political process.

The tactics of dissent have changed too. Seppukoo, a recent hack of Facebook by Les Liens Invisibles (2009),[6] provides an example where users were able to commit virtual suicide in a ritualistic removal of their virtual identity.[7] Critique here operates in the challenge to the living-death user-experience of Facebook and other similar programs that express the social relation in restrictive form. The action provoked a litigious response by Facebook not least.[8]

Part of the friendly (inter)face of capitalism, restricted social relations are perpetuated through networks of friends (everyone is more a potential friend rather than enemy), such that antagonistic social relations are masked and the politics nullified. Evoking Carl Schmitt’s notion of enmity (in The Concept of the Political, of 1927), the political differentiation of friend or enemy (aka Facebook or Seppukoo) lies at the heart of this, and offers a certain definition of politics. Schmitt explains that: ‘The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.’[9]

The reference to the Japanese ritual suicide of Seppuku (literally stomach-cutting) evokes the stubborn refusal to fall into the hands of the enemy – and the preference for autonomy even at the cost of one’s life. In turn, the project is also inspired by to Seppuku!, the ritual suicide that some members of the Luther Blissett Project committed in 1999, to declare the end of their multiple identities project (and the death of net.art as a relatively autonomous zone).[10] Virtual suicide stands as the refusal to operate under intolerable conditions of service and as an affirmation of creative autonomous practice. Refusal responds to the way in which those in power regenerate themselves through constant upgrades to break opposition; the position 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’.[11] It is clear to Tronti that capital does not develop through technological innovation per se, but from the inventive power of labour (and this is the basis of the concept of immaterial labour).

Crucially, Capital does not wish to destroy critique entirely, as it is fundamental to its operations, but obscure its origins and subdue its effectiveness and appropriate its energies. Moreover, this is its friendly face whether you like it or not. For instance, in the case of Facebook, they keep your account details for perpetuity and commercial exploitation. The Seppukoo ‘about’ page explains: ‘Suicide is a free choice and a kind of self-assertiveness. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't give to its users this faculty at all, and your account will be only deactivated.’[12]

Democracy and authoritarianism operate dialectically. This is in keeping with the liberal tradition, as Etienne Balibar explains, and the distinction between individual opinions and collective actions in the ways they ‘reciprocally “underwrite” each other’.[13] Individuals voice their diverse opinions, both for and against the ruling power, in order to legitimate its effects. Expressing the violence of participation, this is the basis of liberal democracy as well as the basis of its democratic renewal – what we together refer to as participatory democracy. Liberal democracy exerts a friendly power that doesn't appear violent at all, and individuals actively imagine their participation in what ultimately is part of their subjugation. This comes close to Maurizio Lazzarato’s discussion of participative management in the workplace as a technique of power in restructured form, and one that appears to grant special privileges to creative labour. Indeed, Lazzarato thinks the technique is more totalitarian than the production line as it involves the willing subjectivity of the worker in the participatory process.[14] He explains the logic thus:

‘If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the “raw material” of immaterial labor is subjectivity 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.’[15]

Again, popular social media platforms like Facebook come to mind, and more specifically applications such as Causes through which users can imagine the effectiveness of their political engagement by creating petitions in support of a particular cause. The ‘about’ statement expresses the ambition of no less than changing the world:

'Facebook Platform presents an unprecedented opportunity to engage our generation, most of whom are on Facebook, in seizing the future and making a difference in the world around us. Our generation cares deeply, but the current system has alienated us. Causes provides the tools so that any Facebook user can leverage their network of real friends to effect positive change. The goal of all this is what we call "equal opportunity activism." We're trying to level the playing field by empowering individuals to change the world.'[16]

Another project by Les Liens Invisibles, commissioned by Arnolfini in 2010, uses the tactic of over-identification to respond to such tendencies.[17] In the age of over-mediated democracy, Repetitionr provides a platform for activism with minimal effort, an online petition service with a difference; offering advanced web 2.0 technologies to make participatory democracy a truly user-centered experience.[18]

The success of every campaign is guaranteed as just one click is all it takes to generate a whole campaign with up to a million automatic fake signatures. The project reflects the acknowledged need for new institutional forms that challenge existing systems of governance and representational structures, as a blatant expression of non-representational democracy - in other words, a form of democracy uncoupled from sovereign power. As Ned Rossiter puts it: ‘while networks in many ways are regulated indirectly by the sovereign interests of the state, they are also not reducible to institutional apparatuses of the state. And this is what makes possible the creation of new institutional forms as expressions of non-representational democracy.’[19]

The approach challenges the limits of representational democracy and the discourse of neo-liberalism in general, offering a means to rethink politics within network cultures. If Repetitionr is an example of over-identification with real existing participatory democracy, then the provocation is that we need to develop far better strategies and techniques of organisation.

As an example, in opposition to informational capitalism lies commons-based peer production. Indeed, concerns over the commons are encapsulated by the title of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s recent book Commonwealth, to indicate the ‘common-wealth’ of land, water and the atmosphere. They argue that, ‘love provides another path for investigating the power and productivity of the common. [… Such a] notion of love gives us a new definition of wealth that extends our notion of the common and points toward a process of liberation’.[20]

Current political, economic and ecological crises derive from aggressive and primitive forms of property (such as disputes over copyright and intellectual property) and energy production (geopolitical disputes over carbon fuels) – a lack of recognition of the common (and love towards others). Historical parallels between the ways in which the commons were turned in private property (through the enclosure movement), and the ways in which intellectual property is being privatised have been well established in contemporary commentaries.[21] The way that code as an intangible object outside the marketplace is being forced into the property regime offers a useful focus to discuss wider issues of organisation and power struggles. The question for James Leach is how technologies that establish collaboration are more and more central to economic production are effected by and effect ‘ownership regimes’. When it comes to creativity, ideas are extracted from the commons and modified by creative and intellectual labour such that the issue of ownership and property arises as a problem in a (Western capitalist) culture that has stressed creativity as inextricably bound to individualism.

The cultural significance of this is somewhat captured by the term recursive public to account for the ways in which the public is ‘a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives’.[22] Somewhat related to the concept of the public sphere, a recursive public is capable of modifying itself through participation, relatively unmediated by higher authority. For Christopher Kelty, the collective technical experiment of the Free Software movement is an example of a recursive public that draws attention to its democratic and political significance and the limitations of our understanding of the public in the light of the restructuring of power over networks, struggles over intellectual property rights and sharing of code. In this sense, the concept of the public sphere itself is taken as open to modification and reuse – and is made recursive. As a consequence, a reconceptualisation of political action is required that combines traditional forms of expression such as free speech with coding practices and sharing associated with Free Software. To Kelty, this is encapsulated by the phrase ‘running code’ to describe the relationship between 'argument-by-technology and argument-by-talk’.[23] Software is both expression as in speech or writing but also something that performs actions. Making reference to the work of Hannah Arendt, Kelty’s intervention is to extend a definition of a public grounded in discourse - through speech, writing and assembly – to other legal and technical layers that underpin the Internet in recognition of the ways in which contemporary power and control are structured – through both discourses and infrastructures.[24]

Such a reconsideration of public space or a politics of the common exposes the sad reality of lived liberal participatory democracy. To Jacques Rancière, the origin of the political lies in the properties of its subjects and in how they come together, how they ‘part-take’, or in other words how they participate in contradictory forms of action. ‘Politics is a paradoxical form of action’ according to Rancière, and hence can be defined in the contradictions at the heart of action - between acting and being acted upon. He explains:

‘Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined in its own terms, as a mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and deriving from a particular form of reason. It is the political relationship that allows one to think the possibility of a political subject(ivity), not the other way around.’ [25]

According to Rancière, it is the very ‘axioms of democracy’ – of ruling and being ruled – that require rupture to open up discussion of the constitution of the subject and its relations. New publics are required – in coalitions of human and non-human agents involved in radical networks – to engage with and to modify the infrastructures they inhabit as an extension of the public sphere. Evidently publicness is constituted not simply by speaking, writing, arguing and protesting – but also through acting on, and modifying the domain or platform through which these practices are enacted.

Moreover, publicness cannot be a positive public force unless it is at the same time political. Paolo Virno, asserts this issue: ‘if the publicness of the intellect does not yield to the realm of the public sphere, of a political space in which the many can tend to common affairs, then it produces terrifying effects. A publicness without a public sphere: here is the negative side - the evil if you wish - of the experience of the multitude.’[26]

The production of free software might illustrate the point to some extent: to make public as a result of shared labour. This, again, is a positive force, but only if it as the same time a result of political action and thinking. Also making reference to the work of Arendt in this respect (in her The Human Condition of 1958), Virno thus explains the current crisis of politics, and ‘the disrepute into which action has fallen’.[27]

Democracy requires further modifications but only on condition that it is released fully into the public domain.

 

images: Les Liens Invisibles
This essay was first published in Art, Activism & Recuperation, Concept Store #03 (2010)

Notes:

1. Alain Badiou, ‘Prefazione all’edizione italiana’, in Metropolitica, Naples: Cronopio, 2002. There are far too many other references to mention here that take a critical view of Western representational democracy, but a particularly polemical view appears in the first section of Muammar Al Qathafi's 'The Solution of the Problem of Democracy' in his The Green Book.

2. I prefer the word ‘antagonism’ to ‘opposition’ in recognition of how important it is for neo-liberalism to dilute it in order to function effectively. Amongst others, this is in keeping with Chantal Mouffe’s position in ‘Artistic and Agonistic Spaces’, in Art & Research, vol 1, no. 2, 2007, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html

3. Alexander R. Galloway & Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Electronic Mediations, vol. 21, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

4. The exhibition Craftivism, at Arnolfini Nov 2009 - Feb 2010, is an example of  'reverse engineering' aiming to question and disrupt the prevailing codes of mass consumerism, http://www.craftivism.net/

5. Lovink quoted in Rita Raley, Tactical Media, Electronic Mediations, volume 28, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, p. 28. ‘Tactical Media’ broadly refers to contemporary forms of dissent somewhere between creative experimentation and a reflexive engagement with social change; particularly important are the collaborative writings of Lovink, as in ‘The ABC of Tactical Media’, 1997 (with David Garcia), and ‘New Rules for the New Actonomy’, 2001 (with Florian Schneider) and the Next Five Minutes conferences, held in Amsterdam from 1993.

6. Les Liens invisibles is an imaginary art-group from Italy, comprised of media artists Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini, http://www.lesliensinvisibles.org/

7. Seppukoo, http://www.seppukoo.com/ - also note similar projects, such as Cory Arcangel’s Friendster Suicide, http://www.coryarcangel.com/2005/12/friendster-suicide-live-in-person-dec-2005/ and moddr_lab’s Web2.0 Suicide Machine, http://suicidemachine.org/

8. See the ‘cease and desist’ letter from Facebook’s lawyers, and the reply - both linked from the Seppukoo home page, http://www.seppukoo.com/

9. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 1927, p.30.

10. Thanks to Tatiana Bazzichelli for pointing out this reference, http://www.lutherblissett.net/archive/452_en.html

11. Mario Tronti, ‘The Strategy of Refusal’, in Autonomia: Post-political Politics, Semiotext(e) vol. 3, no. 3, New York: Semiotext(e), (1980 [1965]), pp. 28-34.

12. http://www.seppukoo.com/

13. Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, London: Verso, 2008 [1998], p. 27.

14. Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Forms of Production and Circulation of Knowledge’, in Josephine Bosma et al, eds. Readme! Filtered by Nettime: ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge, New York: Autonomedia.

15. Maurizio Lazzarato, 'Immaterial Labour', trans. Paul Colilli & Ed Emory, in Paolo Virno & Michael Hardt, eds. Radical Thought in Italy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p.142.

16. http://apps.facebook.com/causes/about

17. The psychoanalytic term ‘over-identification’, often associated with Slavoj Zizek, has been taken up as a tactic by many activist-artists, including The Yes Men to expose a position by exaggerating a position wildly, pushing the system to its extremes in order to conclude that it is unacceptable.

18. http://www.repetitionr.com/

19. ‘Non-representational democracy’ describes democracy decoupled from sovereign power, as discussed in Ned Rossiter’s Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions, Rotterdam: NAi, in association with the Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam, 2006, p. 39.

20. Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. xi-xii.

21. See James Boyle, ‘Fencing Off Ideas: Enclosure and the Disappearance of the Public Domain’, in Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed., Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

22. Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, p. 3.

23. Ibid., p.58. Kelty later refers to how the free software recursive public turns from a 'class-in-itself to a class-for-itself' as a radical transformation, p.116.

24. Ibid. p. 50.

25. Jacques Rancière, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, in Theory & Event, 5:3, 2001, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html

26. Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, New York: Semiotext(e) 2004, p. 40.

27. Ibid. p.51.