What worked well

Overall the expressed consensus was that the project went well. Materials were easy to get and to work with. The use of media, especially social media (such as Facebook), was considered successful. Many people beyond the class participated in the workshops, with a wide demographic among those interested, and there were expressions of interest from schools and individuals for follow-up workshops. Community engagement — including donations from organizations and businesses — was high. And in the end several hundred — perhaps close to 1000 — seedbombs were created and disseminated. The sense was that we made an impact and that that impact will not have been in vain.

What didn’t work as well; lessons for next time

Time was our biggest constraint: we arrived at our project idea fairly late in the semester and did not have enough time to plan and organize it as well as we might have. Communication between task groups was sometimes difficult, and user participation was difficult to coordinate. There was an overall consensus that next time around the project should be started earlier in the course. That would allow for the development of a longer term strategy, with better final results, and for better integration with other class themes. We should also have set up a shared document, such as a GoogleDoc, for collective communication, updates, and so on.

Relationship to the course

The project bore an obvious relationship to many of the ideas we explored in the second half of the course, such as rewilding and guerrilla gardening, but, in fairness, these were added once we decided on the project. More generally, it related well to ideas of reclaiming the commons — specifically, reclaiming land (the physical commons) and reclaiming agency (our capacity to bring about change) and tools (our ability to access and make use of the various tools at our disposal, from media to seeds to our bodies and connections with friends and neighbors).

Here we also discussed the relationship between the project and the topics of locative media and “sentient cities.” This is where I felt the project failed, since it did not create much infrastructure for future work at the intersection of the mediated (online) and the immediate (place/city space) worlds. Future contributors to the “Seedbomb Burlington” project could be encouraged to add images, names/locations, and more information to the Facebook page or the project website. But we did not even agree that this was necessarily desirable. Some questioned the value of sharing something that was best viewed as a kind of surreptitious, guerrilla form of landscape intervention — something that may be better encountered on its own, by surprise, rather than through online documentation.

This issue was left unresolved. My own feeling is that online documentation, when done smartly, is generally a good thing. People are not likely to think much about a “weed” they see sprouting up somewhere. But if they see a sign (moss graffiti saying “SBB,” for Seedbomb Burlington) next to an interestingly designed landscape intervention, their curiosity might encourage them to look up “SBB” online. If there’s nothing there for them to follow up with, the effort will likely end there.

Next steps

The more immediate steps include sending thank-you cards to those who helped us and donated materials (Katie will be collecting names), deciding what to do with the seedball vending machine that’s been offered for our use, and ongoing seedbomb making and promoting activities over the summer. Venues where it was suggested that someone might follow up included the Friday music and food events at Bread and Butter Farm and the Thursday evening Summervale events at the Burlington Intervale.

The obvious longer-term step would be a follow-up class project. I hope to offer this course again, but since it is not a calendar course — just a “special topics” course — the next iteration may be different and may not have the same name. However, now that the idea is out there, it is ripe for the taking as a class project in other courses.

Other suggestions are welcomed below!

• We have looked at theories of new media, social media, Web 2.0, and media convergence, and examined a series of definitions of “media ecology.” These included the medium theory of Marshall McLuhan and others; the mental environmentalism of Adbusters; the cultural environmentalism of James Boyle and Lawrence Lessig, with their ideas of a mental or informational commons; the global network society theories of Deleuze (“society of control”), Galloway and Thacker (whose article we didn’t talk much about), and others; the “greening of media” assessments and proposals of Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell; and (briefly, this past week) the “three ecologies” of Felix Guattari.

• We’ve looked at the relationship between contemporary media and the public sphere; distinguished between three variations on a radical-democratic public sphere politics (Habermas’s deliberative democracy, Laclau & Mouffe’s agonism, and Hardt & Negri’s autonomism); and focused on a range of media uses in relation to public or political goals. Some of these included those of culture jammers and tactical media practitioners like Adbusters, Banksy, and the Critical Art Ensemble; location-based cyberdemocracy initiatives; the mediated environmentalism of Greenpeace; the movement against SOPA and PIPA; and the locative media and experimental public art work of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, REPOhistory, and related groups.

• We’ve looked at the changes in global political-economy over the last several decades: from the Fordist “grand compromise,” the broadly social-democratic or welfare-statist “settlement” between industry, the state, and labor that followed World War 2, to the various social and resistance movements of the 1960s (peaking in 1968), followed by the rise of post-Fordist neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s (and its incorporation of elements of the 1960s), the anti-neoliberal movements of the 1990s and 2000s (the Zapatistas, the Battle of Seattle, and the Occupy and “Arab Spring” movements of 2011); and the organizational and structural forms — networked, distributive, global — that seem to be shaping the terrain for any further political-economic changes today (as discussed, for instance, in the “sentient cities” readings).

• And we have planned, implemented, and assessed a class project that brought together a place-based eco-activism with the use of social media (less so locational media; that would have been the next step, which we could have taken more decisively had we given ourselves more time to develop it).

This final week of the class, I would like us to return to the topic of neoliberalism and its alternatives. Two required readings can serve to pivot our thinking here:

1. The section entitled “The Abstract Machine of Neoliberalism” in Chapter 6 of Jeremy Gilbert’s Anticapitalism and Culture (pp. 169-176). (Note: If you’re interested in reading more of the Gilbert book’s remaining chapters, I would recommend the following sections: pp. 179-183, pp. 198-201, pp. 203-209, and the Conclusion.)

and

2.William Connolly’s article “Steps Toward an Ecology of Late Capitalism,” from Theory & Event 15.1 (2012). (Note: To access this article, you need to work through your institutional library portal; or see Blackboard.)

A few notes on the Connolly reading

William Connolly is a political theorist at Johns Hopkins University who has authored over a dozen books on pluralism, identity, secularism, culture, and subjectivity. He is a proponent of a “deep pluralism” and of “agonistic democracy” (related to the views of Laclau and Mouffe, which we examined earlier), and has recently been developing a philosophical project that extends from a pluralistic democratic political theory to an understanding of the universe itself as pluralistic, open, self-organizing, and unstable — a universe of “becoming,” in which interacting systems with “differential capacities of metamorphosis” align with each other in various permutations, resulting in periods of relative stability punctuated by periods of rapid change. This world is a world of intersecting networks (which connects this reading with the reading by Galloway and Thacker from some weeks ago — refresh your memory of that if you don’t recall it — and of Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, and others).

Ours is one of those periods of rapid change, and much of the article deals with the question of how we can better account for and cope with the “fragility of things” that greets us as we look around ourselves today: with impending climate and ecological changes, economic collapse, rapid social change, and the rest. The article attempts to contextualize neoliberal “late capitalism” within this larger set of cultural, ecological, and cosmic milieus, and ends with a proposal for us to consider seven “sites of potential action.”

While the reading is challenging in its reference to numerous thinkers and ideas well outside the bounds of our course, I’d like us to try to follow Connolly’s overall argument in its full scope to see what we can get  out of it. What are the relations between political ideology, economic and ecological systems, and the cultural and religious (or spiritual) dimensions of our understanding of the universe? What sorts of alliances across all of these domains — and what would it even mean to seek alliances across such different domains? — could help us navigate the precarious near future of this planet?

See if there is an idea or two in the article that resonates particularly well with you. Then bring this idea (or two) out in your comments and maybe follow up on it to do a little more research on what you think he means with it (the endnotes could be helpful there) and what we might make of it.

The Boston Marathon bombing forced us this week to reconsider the name of our class project, “Seedbomb Burlington.” We decided to stay with the name for two reasons. First, all of our PR materials — press releases, social media sites, et al. — are well in motion and can’t be recalled at this point. (And even if it wasn’t too late, the obvious alternative — “Seedball Burlington” — just doesn’t sound the same.)

But secondly, we had a general consensus that seedbombs have little to do with real bombs. The only thing they share is a certain incendiary image, which comes from the term’s historical connection to the guerrilla gardening movement. That image, we decided, can be toned down, even if there was some diversity of views about its usefulness. (We were still deciding on our posters, and had good ones to choose from that were less, well, bomb-like. Above is the one being postered around town.)

The goals of the two kinds of bombs are, in any case, antithetical.

Bombs of a military nature — such as those used last weekend in Boston — aim to harm, maim, or kill: their immediate goal is death, or at least the production of a state of fear involving potential death or its close cousins (injury, etc.). By contrast, seedbombs aim to create life and its flourishing, and to generate the enhanced awareness and appreciation of life. They are deconstructions, transmutations, and reclaimings of the very idea of a bomb and what it might be good for.

And unlike even the kinds of utilitarian explosives used in mining or other industrial activities, seedbombs do not even literally explode. Their explosion is poetic, metaphorical, ecstatic. Seedbombing itself is a seeding, a dérive, a way to make one’s way around the urban environment so as to see that environment explode into wonder.

Enough, then, on justification. On this coming Earth Week Sunday and Monday, the class will host two teach-ins. These will include demonstrations of seedbomb (seedball) making techniques (and, if we get it together in time, of moss graffiti making to mark out some of the sites as SBB, a.k.a. SeedballBTV, Seedball Burlington, sites); and distribution of informational leaflets on how, why, and where one might wish the “seed” the city with them.

The class has broken up into four committees: Materials, Media, Art, and Legal & Location. Each is working on a variety of tasks this week, and our social media sites are indicating a growing interest in attending the two events.

These events, however, are only the first stage of the longer-term project — a “seeding” of the terrain for what could follow. We are preparing guidelines on the use of seedballs in relation to agro-ecological considerations (what will grow, what should grow — as in what kinds of seeds/plants/trees are locally and regionally appropriate — and how to take care of it) as well as legal and ethical considerations (what is legal, when seeding property that does not itself belong to the seeder; what isn’t legal; how to deal effectively with grey areas, community standards, local regulatory bodies, and the like).

The goal is a strategic one of seeding the idea into the Greater Burlington community and beyond, of sending out groups of seeders and land use revisioners equipped with seedballs, hands and eyes (able to scan the landscape for objects that may be useful to floral reconstruction, and to recognize signs of congenial territoriality), and smart phones (to upload photographs of sites and markers, to navigate the city with an eye for its seedability), and of generating momentum among citizens and land use planners in making an already reasonable city (as cities go) much more wildly green.

The project grows out of our class insights that new media activism works best in the context of a spatially politicized movement, and that locative media represents one of the most interesting frontiers for media development. The latter is my idea, which I’m not sure I’ve convinced students of yet; so we’re reading more on it this coming week.

Among our readings for this week is the article “Sentient Cities: Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space” by geographers Mike Crang and Stephen Graham. A related article is Martijn de Waal’s “The Urban Culture of Sentient Cities“. And see Mark Shepard’s quirky Sentient City Survival Kit (one or two of the things there are pretty funny).

Our discussions on these topics began here, and will continue below. You can follow the project on its Facebook page.

Our class project, Seedbomb Burlington, will involve organizing and carrying out a series of events/actions taking place in the landscape of Burlington, Vermont. It will also be a media event.

The initial actions will be two workshops that will take place on and around Earth Day 2013. But these should be considered as part of a much longer process: a process of remapping, re-seeding, re-wilding, reclaiming. A reoccupation of the city by the earth.

I’ve assembled an archive of readings on various topics related to the project including radical gardening (a.k.a. guerrilla gardening), locative media and place-based ubiquitous computing (including various forms of “monitorial citizenship,” location-based media arts, et al.), and a series of case studies of projects, groups, and organizations involved at the interface of art, ecology, media/technology, and land use. Some of the latter are involved in “re-naturalization” and other forms of radical, guerrilla, or just ecologically sane forms of organic intervention into urban landscapes. Others are developing software and apps for learning, activism, or entertainment, with a locative and/or place-based focus. Still others have a more clearly politically, economically, or ecologically critical/radical agenda.

Some of these articles are shared here; others have been made available directly to students in the class (they aren’t open-access).

Links to related resources can be added in the comments below.

RESOURCES

I. Radical Gardening

1. George McKay, Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism, and Rebellion in the Garden (Frances Lincoln, 2011). Read the Introduction, “The ‘Plot’ of Radical Gardening,” and see more parts of the book here.

2. “Cultivating Hope: The Community Gardens of New York City,” from Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 134-139. (PDF available on book’s web site.)

3. “Guerrilla Gardening,” from Notes From Nowhere, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 150-1.  (See above.)

4. Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Avant Gardening,” from P. L. Wilson and Bill Weinberg, ed., Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in the City and the World (NYC: Autonomedia, 1999).

II. Locative media and ubiquitous computing

1. M. Crang and S. Graham, “Sentient Cities: Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space,” Information, Communication & Society 10. 6 (2007): 789-817.

2. Drew Hemment, “Locative Arts,” Leonardo 39.4 (2006), 348-355.

3. Sha Xin Wei and Maja Kuzmanovic, “Sustainable Arenas for Weedy Sociality: Distributed Wilderness,” DIAC 2002 paper, available at www. sponge.org.

4. Michael Salmond, “The Power of Momentary Communities: Locative Media and (In)formal Protest,” Aether: Journal of Media Geography (2010) 90-100. Available here.

3c. Jillian Hamilton, “Ourplace: The Convergence of Locative Media and Online Participatory Culture,” OZCHI 2009 Proceedings.

Note: The Crang and Graham piece can be considered the key reading here. The others are among many you can find on the topic online. See also the Center for Locative Media.

III. Case studies

Center for Land Use Interpretation

1. Ralph Rugoff, “Circling the Center,” Overlook: Exploring the internal fringes of America with The Center for Land Use Interpretation (NYC: Metropolis Books, New York, 2006).

2. Ellsworth and Kruse, “Touring the Nevada Test Site: Sensational Public Pedagogy,” from Sandlin, Schultz, and Burdick, eds. Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling (Routledge, 2010)

Web sites:

Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)
CLUI Land Use Database
Extreme Media Studies’ issue on monitorial citizenship
ExtremeMediaStudies.org
Polar Inertia

See also Karen Rapp, “The Center for Land Use Interpretation’s ‘Theory of the Present’”

 REPOhistory

Lampert, “Permission to Disrupt: REPOhistory and the Tactics of Visualizing Radical Social Movements in Public Space,” from Sandlin, Schultz, and Burdick, eds., Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling (Routledge, 2010).

And see CT4CT’s REPOhistory page and Gregory Sholette’s page.

World of Matter

1. Biemann et al., “Biemann, et al, “From supply lines to resource ecologies: World of matter” Third Text 120 (v. 27, no. 1), special issue on Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, pp. 76-94.

And see the World of Matter web site (in progress).

Joseph Beuys, Futurefarmers, Free Soil

1. In ANTENNA Issue 17, read the articles on “Beuys’ Acorns” (starting p. 63) and “Futurefarmers (pp. 72-76).

2. Futurefarmers and Free Soil interviews, “Two Interviews,” in Max Andrews, ed., Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (London: RSA/Arts Council, 2006).

Other projects

1. “This is the public domain” (See Amy Balkin’s article in BlackBoard for background.)

2. Furtherfield’s Media Art Ecologies program.

3. Society for a Re-Natural Environment (described in a previous post).

Seedbombing, or aerial reforestation, refers to the practice of introducing vegetation to land by throwing or dropping compressed bundles of soil containing live vegetation (seed balls). Undertaken with the goal of re-naturalizing barren or ecologically underutilized land, seedbombing is an ecological practice for reviving urban environments.

Seedbomb Burlington is a place-specific project intended to provide people with skills and knowledge for remapping, reimagining, and rewilding their city through the practice of site-specific seeding with ecologically appropriate plants. It is a project of social and ecological reclamation and information dispersal, involving seeds, soil, boots, bikes, vacant landscapes, maps and smart phones, social and locative media, and time, gentle time.

As shown in Richard Maxwell’s and Toby Miller’s book Greening the Media, information and communication technologies are not ecologically benign. They leave behind plenty of residues — mountains of waste, toxic by-products that affect workers and consumers, and much else — and rearrange the materiality of the world in so many ways.

The book examines these material ecologies in relation to the production (“Words,” “Workers”), distribution and transmission (“Screens”), consumption (“Consumers”), and management (“Bureaucrats,” “Citizens”) of information and communication and the technologies that mediate it.

Specifically, we will read the following parts of the book:

• Introduction: pp. 1 to 9 (first section and “Greening the Media”)
• Chapter 2: the entire chapter, with a particular focus on pp. 46-52 and 60-64 (“The Ecological Context of Words,” “Changing Business, Persistent Environmental Issues,” and “Conclusion”)
• Chapter 6: the entire chapter, with a particular focus on pp. 147 to the end (“Imagining Green Citizenship for the Future”)
• Conclusion (pp. 157-165)

For those outside the class who do not have the book and aren’t willing to buy it, there’s this podcast:

Questions and comments to come.

Project: Seedbomb Burlington

Practice/tools: seedbombs, people, boots and bikes, vacant landscapes, ecopolitical landscape analysis of Burlington (and surrounds), maps indicating candidate sites, locative media, smart phones and video cameras, Facebook page, Twitter hashtags, subreddit, Earth Day, legal research, educational packets and teach-ins, apps (for planning and carrying out seedbombings in other cities), more…

Theory: mind bombs (Greenpeace), guerrilla gardening, ecoanarchy, rhizomanalysis, seeding the earth with ideas, seeding the web with organisms…

Add ideas to your heart’s content. We can sort through them as we go, and consolidate in class next Tuesday.

Two of these — one on Banksy and the Critical Art Ensemble, the other on Greenpeace and the movement against the Keystone XL pipeline — were presented in class this past week. We are planning to present the remainder in next week’s class. We will also discuss how and what to share online from these analyses, and what form our final applied media projects will take.

I am also planning to rearrange the final topics a little bit. Specifically, the plan is to move up the e-waste and “material ecologies of global media” topic to April 2 (we’ll be reading parts of Maxwell and Miller’s Greening the Media for that), and to leave the final chapters of Gilbert’s Anticapitalism and Culture, alongside the continuation of the “Theorizing global network society” topic, for a later class. More on all of this soon.

Links and posts related to the case studies (and related topics) can be added below.

Adbusters’ 2012 Meme of the Year video

This week we begin looking at some case studies of media uses — specifically, by “tactical media” activists such as “culture jammers” and other “hacktivists.”

The readings are as follows. As mentioned in class, this is a long set of readings (though they are generally easier to read than the last few weeks’ readings have been!). Since you have an extra week — until March 26 — to hand in your critical media analysis projects, please try to do the readings in time for Tuesday’s class. Feel free to keep your blog posts short this week (and be creative, linking to other appropriate online content, if you wish), but come prepared to discuss the readings in class. I’ll identify a few more specific things to focus on in my comments below this post.

1. Christine Harold, Introduction and Chapter 2 from OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2007).

The Introduction can be read here (pdf warning) or here.  It provides the general overview for the week, so please read it first.

Chapter 2, on the form of “culture jamming” practiced by Adbusters magazine and the Media Foundation, will be uploaded to the course Blackboard site (sorry, it’s not open-access), but I recommend buying the book.

2. Rita Raley, Introduction from Tactical Media (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008). Read the first half of the Introduction, pages 1 through 12 or 13, which can be found here or from the link on this page.

Raley’s book was one of the first book-length analyses of the tactical media (TM) movement, though the movement is recognized to have existed for several years before Raley’s book came out. This excerpt gives us a flavor of a certain strand of tactical media work. Raley’s focus is on “the aesthetic strategies of artist-activists producing persuasive games, information visualizations, and hybrid … forms of academic criticism.” This doesn’t cover the entire TM milieu, and Raley has been criticized for ignoring the interaction among media activists and public space activists — such as in the Occupy Wall Street protests and the many “revolutions” that have transpired in places like Tahrir Square (Cairo, Egypt) and elsewhere. We will focus more on those next week.

(One version of this critique is found in Eric Kluitenberg’s and the Institute of Network Cultures’ very useful report Legacies of Tactical Media — The Tactics of Occupation: From Tompkins Square to Tahrir.)

3. Yates McKee, “Tactical media, sustainability, and the rise of the ‘new green revolution’: From Neo-Situationism to nongovernmental politics,” Third Text 22.5 (2008), 629-638.

Read the article here or here.  McKee is responding to a critique of Tactical Media by relating it to various forms of environmental media activism, including the popular “neo-green” movements associated with Wired magazine, Worldchanging.org, Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth film (and book), et al. (Also of interest is Yates McKee’s blog.)

[Note: Before reading this article, see the update in comment #1 below.]

Further background and questions to think about

Here are links to a few of the TM interventions and activists Harold, Raley, and others discuss:

Adbusters Culturejammers Headquarters (and see their spoof ads and their YouTube channel)

Critical Art Ensemble

They Rule (explore it a bit)

Oil Standard (Firefox plugin)

Tuboflex by Molleindustria

Bureau of Inverse Technology

The Yes Men

Institute for Applied Autonomy

We’ll explore some of these and others in class. Feel free to post links to others — activists, organizations, or specific media projects — you have found interesting!

In a 2005 article on “Tactical Media, the Second Decade,” prominent media theorist (and director of Amsterdam’s Institute of Network Cultures) Geert Lovink wrote:

“All too easy the energy of the tactical media practitioners is getting lost inside the Internet that we all love to hate. It is tempting to get lost there and believe in the teleological development of the Internet as a ‘medium to end all media.’

“What tactical media makers do is to disencourage high expectations around the ‘liberating’ potential of all technologies, both old and new, while not falling in the trap of cultural pessimism. Instead, we’re looking for ways to connect the banal with the exclusive , the ‘popular’ with the ‘high art’ , ‘trash’ with expensive brand commodities.

“On a technical level this means finding ways to connect, relay, disconnect – and again reconnect – a multitude of flows of pirate radio waves, video art, animations, music jam sessions, xerox cultures, performances, cinema screenings, street graffiti and not to forget computer code. There is a lot of mutual aid in building up centre and networks, up to the point when it is time to leave them to others, to history, and move on.”

This kind of connecting takes time and sustained effort, and one of the debates among tactical media activists (and other activists who aren’t convinced by the tactical media approach) has been whether and how to build a sustainable media and informational infrastructure to support the movement. One place in which this connecting initially occurred was the series of gatherings known as the Next Five Minutes (N5M) festivals, which took place in Amsterdam between 1993 and 2003. (For a flavor of these festivals, see the Reader from the 2003 festival.)

This question gets to the debate over the role of “tactics” versus “strategy,” which both Raley and McKee discuss in reference to French sociologist Michel De Certeau’s distinction between the two: “strategies” require the creation of institutional spaces for political action, while “tactics,” being the “weapons of the weak,” make use of existing spaces to challenge, deconstruct, and transform them from within.

There are some who have argued that TM as a self-conscious and politically motivated movement is no longer coherent: tactical media interventions have become more and more common and widespread everywhere, but they no longer signify opposition to anything specific. Furthermore, they are easily co-opted by the economy of commodities, brands, and marketing ventures.

What do you think of the effectiveness of the tactical media strategies employed by some of the artists and activists discussed here? Is there a point at which political action becomes pose, style, or fashion? Are today’s rebels, as Heath and Potter suggest, tomorrow’s capitalist style leaders? Is that necessarily bad? What kinds of strategies can prevent that from happening?

What is, and should be, the relationship between tactical media strategies and the larger socio-political and/or environmental movements that they appear to be affiliated with? What should the relationship be between these kinds of media activism and political activities taking place in the public (and private) spaces of “non-media” life? How is all of this related to the political economy of neoliberal capitalism, and to Deleuze’s “control society” and Hardt and Negri’s “Empire”?

There are three required readings for this week (due March 12, with March 4-8 being Spring Break). They are:

1. Jeremy Gilbert’s Anticapitalism and Culture, chapter 5, “Ideas in Action: Rhizomatics, Radical Democracy and the Power of the Multitude.” (This is the longest reading and will require the most time.)

2. Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1990), which can be read here or, as a PDF, here.

3. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, “Prolegomenon: ‘We’re tired of trees’,” in The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (U. of Minnesota Press, 2007). Read at least pp. 1-6 of this, but feel free to continue with (or at least skim) the rest of the chapter.

Background

Following a brief overview of four key concepts (power, complexity, hegemony, and creativity), chapter 5 from Gilbert presents three sets of thinkers who, in different ways, attempt to understand the possibilities for social change in a globally networked society.

We will spend some time in class going over the similarities and differences between these three sets of authors. To understand all of them, however, it is essential to have a grasp of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s arguments about the immanence of power. In Foucault’s view, power is not something possessed by someone and withheld from others; it is not something by which one person or group controls or dominates another (though this does not mean that domination doesn’t occur). It is not something that transcends or precedes human relations. Rather, power is immanent to relations, dispersed and dynamically produced and shaped in every encounter between two entities. Every relationship is in this sense political — a matter of the exercise of agency, the actualization of capacity, the production of possibility — even if it is not reducible to the political.

French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Félix Guattari (1930-1992) were two of the most prominent thinkers to emerge in the wake of the events of ’68 in France. Drawing on radical political theory, psychoanalysis (Guattari was a practising psychologist as well as a deeply involved political activist), and a wide variety of philosophers and scientists (including biologists, ecologists, and complexity theorists), they developed a vocabulary to describe a world that was complex, relational, and always in motion — a vocabulary that is especially well suited to the world of networks (informational, social, global) that have grown immensely over the last four decades.

We’ve read about Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe before — theirs was the second category of “radical democracy” theories, the “agonistic,” examined in the article by Dahlberg and Siapera. And Gilbert provides a good enough background to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who have been particularly influential as theorizers of the anti-capitalist globalization movement.

The brief “Postscript” essay by Deleuze is only a small fragment of his thinking, almost an afterthought, but it has been widely read as an account of the shift from what Michel Foucault called the “disciplinary society” of the nineteenth century to the “society of control.”

As with Foucault’s notion of power, so with Deleuze’s notion of control: what he doesn’t mean is that there is someone doing the controlling and someone else (the rest of us) being controlled. Instead, the society of control is one in which social relations have become permeated by coding systems that allow for a kind of internalized and modular control of identity, subjectivity, and selfhood across all the domains of life. These domains — the family, the school, the church, the factory, prison system, et al. — had once been kept relatively separate from each other. Each was a distinct domain within which individuals were confined, trained, and disciplined. Each “molded” us to fit its purposes.

Now those domains have started to melt into each other. We have become (for the most part) willing participants in a single system that is not locatable — precisely because it is everywhere. We supply our passwords and identity numbers to access information, pay for things using credit cards, announce our views and our “likes” to our Facebook friends (and FB’s invisible data collectors) and political pollsters, allow our online movements and purchases to be monitored so that advertisements can be tailored to our interests, and so on and so forth. Instead of being “molded” to fit a pre-existing model — teacher or student, doctor or patient — we are now caught in a state of constant modulation, responding to the ebbs and flows of networks as wide and deep (or shallow) as the stock market, the World Wide Web, the array of educational, political, and healthcare options we can access, and so on. Whether all of this is liberating or insidious is a question for us to consider.

Here’s a video that makes Deleuze’s argument a bit more explicit. We will watch part of it in class, but feel free to watch it all.

Finally, the Galloway/Thacker reading provides something of an update and a geopolitical take on the kind of network thinking that the others have outlined, implicitly or explicitly.

Our main task in class will be to tease out what Deleuze & Guattari, Laclau & Mouffe, Hardt & Negri, and Galloway & Thacker think we can do to change anything — and to change everything — for the better, in the society they describe and critique.

Is all action creative, as Deleuze & Guattari sometimes imply? In a society of control, can any action be truly creative? What kinds of processes of articulation (Laclau & Mouffe) can effect socio-environmental change today? What do we make of Hardt and Negri’s “multitude”? Who is the multitude and who isn’t it? In the context of Galloway’s and Thacker’s reflection on American unilateralism and the global network society, how well does Hardt & Negri’s term “Empire” capture the state of the world in 2013?

Finally, if the networks we live within are, as Galloway & Thacker claim, beyond our capacity to control or even comprehend, then how can we do anything to shift those networks in a desirable direction?