Organized Networks

Where is the designer when design becomes automated by algorithms? Will the next generation of designers come from the digital sweatshops piling up across Asia? Is there an equivalent to attention deficit disorder that defines contemporary design cultures? The impulse is to answer these last two questions in the affirmative and the implication of the first is that a programmed decisionism blows disciplinary borders into oblivion. Web-generated design slogans provide an index of incoherence that signals the future-present of design disciplines: ‘Design criteria future, love it or leave it’. ‘Keep going well, keep going quality design control’. There’s a semblance of sense here, but not much more. The disarray of design grammar is at once refreshing and without foundation. The aesthetics of connection across time and space no longer institutes the history of design as we know it, no matter what national culture you wish to identify. Tomorrow’s designers have no sense of continuum. Their style is driven by affective desires and economic urgencies – two conflicting forces that hold their own distinct brutalities, but without guarantees for design futures. Since the academies are so questionable, the serious designer might fairly ask ‘where to then’? Eclecticism is rarely without interest and populates the streets with great abundance across the world. Translation is the key to post-disciplinary design.

Published in Geert Lovink and Mieke Gerritzen (eds) Everyone is a Designer in the Age of Social Media, Amsterdam: BIS Publishers, 2010, pp. 97-99.

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[Published in Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders, Digest no. 1, July 2010]

In programming field trip visits to two seemingly incongruous settings – an IT facility on the outskirts of Shanghai and Baoshan market for electronic waste, second hand products and fake gadgets  – we see how both regions and social mobilization are configured as singularities within a larger constellation of relations. Following earlier waves of manufacturing across East Asia where ‘Made in Japan’ and, later, ‘Made in Taiwan’ became synonymous with a range of electronic commodities and attendant mythologies of techno-cultural dystopias, over the last two decades China has become renowned as the planet’s epicentre for electronic manufacturing. When purchased, one of the primary attractions of an electronic commodity is how clean it seems. The lovely smooth surfaces coated in buffed plastics or complex metal composites provide a suitable black box of mystery for their interior circuits and generation of values that betray the toxic conditions of production and their effects on worker’s health and the environment. Such is the fantastic power of the commodity-form to abstract itself from the experience of labour and life.

But the index of labour, as Marx so astutely observed, is never entirely divorced from the commodity-form. The relation between labour and the production of electronic commodities will of course be palpable at an IT factory in ways that can never be the case at some flagship store for global electronic brands. But even at the factory, the body is separated from the commodity-form as a result of the division of labour and the centrality of machines to the manufacturing process. What we see is the body in toto, but it is a body that is at once machinic (as technical apparatus rather than social assemblage of the general intellect) while refusing any totalizing subjugation by the machine through the assertion of special human qualities. We hear the language of dialects and notice the skin of ethnicities. Here is the most basic of anthropological encounters. Without some kind of hermeneutic device we are left in the realm of the senses – responses that nowadays are discredited within academe and its disciplinary sensitivities to the politics of the other (which arguably are more about a narcissistic politics of identity and the self). No matter how momentary or partial, we search for a cognitive model with which to render the mutability of sensation as stasis in the grid of reason. This is the problem of method.

Where the IT factory’s PCB circuit board – “the basic platform used to interconnect electronic components” – is part of an East Asian regional formation at a transnational scale, sites such as Baoshan electronic market in urban Shanghai combine intra-national regional formations in terms of the domestic sale of second-hand commodities and electronic waste with a global traffic in the recycling of e-waste. By studying the movement of e-waste, we find that electronic components – many of which have been made in China – are grafted in different ways to national and international regulations designed to govern the treatment of electronic waste. As is well known, the Chinese government banned the importation of e-waste in 1996 (Maxwell and Miller). Yet the informal e-waste economy is substantial and thriving in small businesses in cities along the eastern seaboard. Some of these businesses located in places like Baoshan market integrate the reassembly of second hand computer parts with a sideline in recycling e-waste purchased both through domestic and transnational circuits of trade. In both instances, electronic objects that may come from the same family of parts hold substantially different status at the spatial scale depending on their circuits of movement.

In moving from the site of manufacturing to one that deals in the detritus of consumption, we might discern the multiplication of regions. The circuit boards produced at the IT factory are part of a social life of things that become mobilized across the regional space of Asia during the process of assembly. The composition of low-wage labour also constitutes a regional formation, but one that in the case of the Shanghai IT factory is drawn from provinces set back from the special economic zones stretching along the eastern seaboard. In China’s manufacturing, construction and service industries there’s a tendency for labour to assemble according to provincial filiations. The network of waste workers in Shanghai’s Xu Hui District (or former French Concession), for example, are migrants from Anhui province and their self-organization of labour is predicated on provincial connections. To take another example: many of the workers in the e-waste and second hand electronic markets in Ningbo, a city south of Shanghai, migrate from Jiangxi province. And in the case of Nanhai – “one of the best digital cities in Guangdong” (and one of the biggest centres for e-waste and second hand electronics) – workers stem from Hubei province. It’s worth noting that Nanhai also has a substantial ship building industry, and it’s perhaps no surprise that Guangdong province has more relaxed borders of control when it comes to the importation of illegal e-waste from overseas markets such as Japan, Europe, the US and Australia. Businesses in Ningbo, where border control at the port is more stringent, find alternative routes for the movement of illegal e-waste – cities such as Nanhai serve as a key source for the transit of waste from within the sovereign territory of the nation; in turn, unsold products in Ningbo’s second hand markets are considered e-waste and sold back to junk men and women from Guangdong and Taizhou (Lv Yulin).

In a site visit to Baoshan electronic market last week, Anja Kanngieser found that workers came from quite a wide range of cities and provinces: Suzhou, Nanjing, Henan, Jiangxi and Anhui. Yet at another electronic market, not so far away on Fuxing Lu, workers came predominantly from Guangdong province, the centre of the electronic manufacturing and waste industies. While e-waste seemed to be something on sale in the case of Baoshan with all its regional cosmopolitanism, this wasn’t the case at Fuxing Lu. Yet often e-waste is hard to see immediately, and it’s a sort of sliding object or category in the sense that unsold second hand products, which are often reassembled into hybrid objects to be sold again, then become ‘e-waste’ when they can’t be sold as products and are sold on to junk men/women as waste. Junk is not junk, in other words. Or rather, the same looking junk becomes quite different junk – an object lesson on the empty signifier. Both waste and labour, then, comprise forms of social mobility that can be understood as special intra-national and trans-national regional formations whose borders are highly elastic.

In searching for an analytical method with which to make sense of these various mobilities, we have been struck by the role of logistics as a biopolitical technology of control in governing the movement of people and things in the interests of communication, transport and economic efficiencies. “We understand method to emerge precisely from the material circumstances at hand …. Border as method thus entails not only an epistemic viewpoint from which a whole series of strategic concepts as well as their relations can be recast. It also requires a research process that continually accounts for and reacts to the multifarious battles and negotiations, not least those concerning race, that constitute the border both as an institution and a set of social relationships” (Mezzadra and Neilson). What, then, might logistics as method hold for the analysis of transit labour? As we note in our catalogue of project concepts: “Logistical methods of organization apply to contemporary production and patterns of mobility.” Organization, in turn, becomes a question and practice for the arrangement of bodies and brains mobilized as labour.

In governing labouring subjects and the treatment of objects or things, logistics deploys vastly different technologies of capture depending upon the scale of the business. In fieldwork undertaken with my MA students at Nottingham, Ningbo this past semester, it was fascinating to get a sense of the differences between logistics operations at CMA CGM, a large French multinational shipping firm, compared to Maoyu International Freight Agency, a local Ningbo company with around 20 staff that acts as “a forwarding agency which in fact doesn’t have cargo but only work as a coordinator linking and smoothing the communication between shippers, carriers and other relevant links within the whole logistics network” (Wu Yang). As Huang Yunbo noted in her fieldwork report, “Software used in KPI tracing in the big company differs from the small one. As mentioned by our interviewee that a powerful EDI [Electronic Data Interchange] system is extensively applied within international companies that it can automatically generate update information from different database instantly to ensure the operation go efficiently and properly”.

In terms of working conditions and experiences, “People working in the international giant seem to work in a less stressful environment for most of they show confidence in achieving targets for their performance and can finish work on time without OT. Interviewees in the small company expressed that sometimes they need to work after office hour for customer-relationship building. Other findings are the role and influence Worker’s Union in the big company. Although most people apply for Union membership as joining the company, they don’t treat union as a powerful place for right protection. Even most of they don’t know how the Union usually work. The way workers claim their rights not through any organization as Worker’s Union or Foreign Enterprises Service Company but through the communication with the immediate boss which are regarded as the direct and efficient way. The reason for this, according to the interviewee, that there is no a culture here to seek help from Worker’s Union” (Huang).

In the case of the local Maoyu International Freight Agency, Mukda Pratheepwatanawong found that the “The culture of the company is very informal. As the company is small, investments on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) databases have not been done.  Employees use traditional clocking machine to record their working hours and the Human Resource department will measure their performance based on their work, working hours and their behaviour. There is no labour union in the company and therefore employees would seek government support if they have any issues with the company.” And Wu Yang: “Because Maoyu is not a big company and quite a free styled privately-owned enterprise, the working environment is casual and eased. No formal dress is requested and non business talk is fine as well. Meanwhile, there is no KPI (Key Performance Indicators) or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) to systematically measure the employees’ performance but only depending on customer numbers, profit margin, workload and working behaviour. The only visible measurement on site is clocking machine. Though the physical environment seems quite informal here, the working pressure still exists everywhere. For sells man, they have to keep good relationship with existing customers and search for new ones; for buyers, they have to negotiate lower prices from shipping companies so as to compete with other forwarding agency; for documentation specialists, their job is most detailed and trivial, so intensive concentration and well-organized personality are requested. For all of them, working over-time or working outside workplace is quite normal…. Besides with social ability, computer skill is also a very important way to increase communication efficiency. Instant massager like MSN or QQ are used to not only timely report updated information to customers, but also track and trace shipment from carriers. Other software like Cargo2000 as an internal data system and communication platform can help keep the orders systematically and follow up the processing more easily.”

In visiting the IT facility and second hand and electronic waste markets, we might inquire how logistics plays a role in governing labour and commodity flows. In doing so, we might also discern how regions are constituted differently according to such technologies of management and control. Perhaps, more curiously, we might discover the possibility for what I have termed elsewhere “the production of non-governable subjects and spaces” that translate “the indifference of communication”.

 

Links
http://transitlabour.asia/concepts/
http://transitlabour.asia/publications/
Maxwell and Miller, http://orgnets.net/urban_china/maxwell_miller
Mezzadra and Neilson, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en
http://www.meadville.com.hk/pcb_conventional.html
http://www.newsgd.com/citiesandtowns/foshan/info/200309170061.htm
Lv Yulin, http://orgnets.cn/?p=1148
Huang Yunbo, http://orgnets.cn/?p=1128
Wu Yang, http://orgnets.cn/?p=1089
Mukda Pratheepwatanawong, http://orgnets.cn/?p=1074
Rossiter, http://nedrossiter.org/?p=116

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In his book Nice Work If You Can Get It, Andrew Ross opens the final chapter on ‘The Rise of the Global University’ with the following assessment: ‘Higher education has not been immune to the impact of economic globalization. Indeed, its institutions are now on the brink of channeling some of the most dynamic, and therefore destabilizing, tendencies of neoliberal marketization’.¹ Arguably, one of the central reasons higher education embodies the intensity of transformations wrought by neoliberalism has to do with ways in which post-Fordist labour is ‘multiplied and divided’.²

The political-economic technologies of measure are key to the division of labour in and across university settings. A quick listing of examples is sufficient to get an idea of what I am talking about here: systems of ranking institutions of higher education within a global frame serve to distinguish universities and the labour within them along national and geocultural lines of division; this in turn shapes the global mobility of students and thus the logic of economic accumulation, again dividing universities, labour and disciplines in terms of market competition and geocultural segmentation. The construction of special economic zones for higher education, which is most notable across the Asian, Middle Eastern and African regions, functions to divide national markets internally and externally along the lines of domestic and global spatialities that have implications for income generation derived from teaching and research activities in terms of the scope of student catchment and institutional sources for research funding.

The political-economic architecture of intellectual property regimes is another state supported device through which lines of division are constructed between what McKenzie Wark has termed the ‘vectoral class’ (those who proprietise and thus enclose the productive efforts of biopolitical labour) and the ‘hacker class’ (those engaged in the collaborative work of co-production and creation of the common).³ Universities and corporations have sought to further establish systems of measure from such labour through the global rankings of journals and citation indices. Such rankings overwhelmingly favour journals that are part of Anglo-American publishing consortia that over the past 20 years have set out to aggressively takeover the few remaining independent journals that support research and intellectual debate in national and regional settings. The effect of this has been to consolidate the hegemony of global English and erode the connection between the production of knowledge and its frequently local social-political conditions of possibility. This, notwithstanding the fact that the very notion of the local has become enormously complicated with the consolidation of economic and cultural globalization coupled with the rise of the network society.

Additional lines of division operate in terms of what Andrew Ross calls the ‘new geography of work’, and what I’m wishing to frame in this essay as the uneven distribution of expertise. Incorporated into the uneven distribution of expertise is the racialization of labour, both of which connect back to the construction of special economic zones for global universities. It is on this basis that my essay concludes that the 21st century informational university in its global manifestations is in many ways disturbingly similar to programs of institution formation and the management of populations undertaken by 19th century colonial powers. I will develop these aspects of my argument shortly, but first I wish to say a few more things about the multiplication of labour and how this dynamic and condition relates to the rise of the informational university.

The Informational University and the Production of the Common

In his book How the University Works, Marc Bousquet’s crucial insight is that the flexibilization of labour is at the centre of the informatization of the university as it embraces the force of neoliberal regimes.⁴ This orientation of labour around processes of informatization draws on work undertaken by various researchers associated with Italian post-operaismo thought. One of the key analytical and political precepts developed out of such work, as summarised recently by Tiziana Terranova, makes the distinction between the social production of value and the model of classical political economy, which measures the time and cost of labour in determining the production of commodity value.⁵

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note that traditional models of measure (e.g. intellectual property regimes, university and journal ranking systems, citation indicators, etc., all of which operate within the contemporary neoliberal, informational university), and thus of the law of value, are in crisis today due to profound contradictions within the force of economic globalization and the multiple antagonisms between the cooperative logic of biopolitical labour and capitalism’s mechanisms of expropriating the wealth of the common as it is produced by the creativity of biopolitical labour.⁶ In his dialogue with Negri, Cesare Casarino reiterates this point, noting how the common provides ‘the locus of surplus value’ for capital, whose apparatuses of capture – or regimes of measure – expropriate the wealth of the common.⁷

A distinction needs to be made here between the concept of the common and that of the commons. The latter is associated with processes of enclosure and proprietary control of that which was previously collectively owned and managed. In a neoliberal paradigm, such a process has been marked by the shift of public goods to private ownership. The key point here is that the commons – whether they are understood in terms of ecology, culture or relationships – are predicated on the dual logic of scarcity and ownership, and are thus assumed to be resources in need of protection. Within social democracies, the state is frequently bestowed with such a role. The commons is thus ascribed a representational quality.

The common, by contrast, cannot be owned or managed, most especially by statist formations that assume the identity of the people or the public. The common does not operate within the logic of representation, in other words, and instead is a force mobilized through non-representational relations and the multiplication of biopolitical labour. Nor is the common a resource underscored by the logic of scarcity. And while the common holds an economic potential – something that is made clear in the moment of expropriation – its ‘wealth’ is not inherently economic. As I have written elsewhere with Soenke Zehle, ‘If we understand the commons to refer both to the material context and the consequence of practices of peer-production, the common is the political potential immanent in such practices. Such an understanding of the common situates it conceptually as the latest iteration of the political; just as there exists an “excess of the political over politics”, the affirmation of the common is offered as a condition of possibility for collaborative constitution, for the sharing of affects of love, solidarity or wrath, and for the translation of such affects and experiences across the “irreducible idiomaticity” of ethico-political practices’.⁸

Casarino makes the ‘important qualification’ that there is always a remainder of the common that is not appropriated by capital. There is the suggestion that this ‘outside’ or ‘externality’ provides the point of separation between capital and the common, which otherwise risk becoming indistinguishable. The precise content of this common is left without elaboration by Casarino. My sense is that asymmetrical institutional-social temporalities between capital and the common are key here. Where the university is often accused of being ‘out of time’ or ‘too slow’ by those who heavily identify with the business sector and industry, perhaps one could also suggest that the time of the common and living labour holds a special complexity that refuses absorption into capital’s apparatuses of capture and regimes of measure, which are always circumscribed in a way that living labour is not. I can only note such speculations in passing – the empirical-conceptual content here is the stuff of future research.

When transferred to the setting of the university and its transformation under conditions of economic globalization, questions such as the following emerge: How does the social production of value (brand desire, affect, subjectivity, online social networking, etc.) shape the commodity value of the university degree? What relation does this have with the globalization of higher education? And how does the informational university – defined increasingly by privatization (as distinct from being a public good), labour flexibility and informational management – relate to the social production of value?

Let me outline in concrete fashion how the social production of value shapes the commodity value of the university degree. Anyone who is astute to the conditions of cognitive labour within universities will not have trouble making the connection between diminishing numbers of full-time faculty, increasing casualisation of teaching staff, the massive expansion in administrative labour and the viral-like proliferation of managerial personas, the structural reproduction of adolescent research subjectivities through short-time contracts for junior researchers on cross-university projects and what I would term the incapacity of the disciplines to invent new conceptual and methodological idioms of practice.

It is a well known if rarely articulated strategy of refusal for coordinators of course modules to reissue the same material for students year in and year out. Admittedly this is a practice that has gone on for years in universities, but it takes on substantially different hues with the shift from the public-state university to the pseudo-corporate and informational university. Whereas the academic of the public university who trotted out the same module outline every year was justifiably accused of intellectual and pedagogical laziness, these days it is more a matter of survival as academics struggle to manage an enormous increase in managerial and administrative workloads that accompany the ever-expanding mechanisms that define the madness of audit cultures (another feature that defines the informational university). Come the start of a new semester, it is not uncommon for academics who have spent whatever recess from teaching duties by writing grants, undertaking marking, fulfilling administrative duties, meeting with dissertation students and maybe, if lucky, engaging in some research, to then find themselves having no time to redevelop old course materials (forget about producing new materials), and thus resort out of desperation and self-survival to repeat whatever it was that they taught the previous year.

The result of such practice – which I would expect to be widespread across the sector – is that disciplines become impoverished. You might counter this charge by telling me it is the job of research to provide the material of innovation for the disciplines. To do so falls into the trap of privileging research and thus dividing the important and mutually informing relationship between research and teaching. Moreover, it assumes that research activity is actually doing the job of disciplinary reinvention. I would suggest that, to the contrary, the vast majority of national and supranational funded research – especially in the humanities – is funded on the grounds that it reproduces the orthodoxies of the disciplines, in which case very little is gained by way of disciplinary innovation.

This brings me to the social production of value. When academics no longer have the time and perhaps intellectual stamina let alone curiosity to test the borders of their disciplines, what do they do? Well, in similar fashion to capital – and indeed, precisely because they are subjects of the corporate, informational university – they look to appropriating the creativity of the common. In my own field of new media studies, it has become very clear over the past 10 years that academics have contributed very little by way of conceptual and methodological invention. Such work has been undertaken outside and on the margins of the academy by artists, activists, computer geeks and media theorists.

How is such work undertaken? It is undertaken through practices of collaborative constitution and the multiplication of labour made possible by the mode of information and the media of digital communication.⁹ The key social-technical features here of flexibility, adaptation, distributive co-production, informational recombination, open/free content and code, and modulating axes of organization (both horizontal and vertical) all define the culture and labour of networks. And as the generative content of the common is absorbed and more often enclosed by non-generative proprietary regimes that function to shore up the borders of the corporate university, there is also an informational dimension of open and generative network cultures that is carried over and interpenetrates the institutional dynamic of the university.

Actually, an increasing number of universities are recognizing the value of adopting open content practices – MIT’s OpenCourseWare being one of the more widely known examples.¹⁰ The reason for this has to do with the fact that there is very little ‘product differentiation’ across degree programs from one university to the next, and universities are slowly but surely understanding that economic leverage for higher education comes not from the sale of pre-packaged, static material (although this is still the dominant economic model). Rather, they see their business as that of awarding degrees (i.e. granting an institutional/symbolic legitimacy upon a learning experience, which is the basis of determining tuition fees) and service delivery. This is a model that effectively duplicates the business model of open source software providers who understand that users (including educational institutions, corporations, small businesses and organizations) expect to download content (operating systems and office software, for example) for free, but are then willing to pay for labour that customises the software to specific institutional needs, with follow-up service as required.

The Uneven Distribution of Expertise

What is the relation between the informational university and the uneven distribution of expertise across the higher-education landscape? Indeed, what is expertise and who is an expert? And what are the geocultural configurations upon which such relations might be mapped out? With the rise of Web 2.0 and its attendant self-publishing and promotion platforms such as blogs, wikis, Twitter and YouTube, everyone these days is an expert. In some respects this seeming democratization of knowledge production is a structural phenomenon brought about by the outsourcing of labour and content production in the media industries. These days, even the corporations want everything for free. And with the social production of value, which in the case of news media comes in the form of citizen-journalism that willingly supplies content for free, the cost of labour is effectively removed from the balance sheet.

How, though, does this Cult of the Amateur impact upon the distribution of expertise within the university? With the rise of mass education and user-pay systems, many academics nowadays complain of the ‘dumbing down’ of curricula. Academic departments have become in most cases almost entirely dependent on income derived from student fees, with international students making up a substantial portion of annual budgets. This is especially pronounced in universities in Australia where, after two decades of partial deregulation and massive cuts in government expenditure on education, it has become a routine practice for academics to slide students over the ever diminishing hurdles of assessment. If they didn’t, then the security of their own jobs would be at stake.

Similar practices are the norm in British and North American universities, no matter what the ‘quality assurance’ reports might say to the contrary. Such systems of measure long ago lost any relationship with their referent and function in a very similar way to the production of public opinion, which does not exist according to Bourdieu’s compelling thesis.¹¹ What does exist is the ever-increasing extension of self-referential reporting measures into the time of academic work. The tyranny of audit cultures inscribes academic subjects into discursive practices of accountability and conditions the over-production of administrative functionaries, whose job is to keep track of the bureaucratic madness that such systems guarantee.

Not only has the dependency relationship on student fees had substantive impacts on the design and content of curricula, it has also exacted a toll on the capacity for academics to keep abreast with – let alone make contributions to – advances in their field. Increasingly, the insistence by students and administration for entertainment-on-demand styles of not so much teaching but ‘course delivery’ has resulted in more academic time expended on maintaining online administration and content management systems such as the notorious WebCT and Blackboard. (Although for reasons I fail to understand, such systems are embraced with an obsessive degree of delight by some colleagues I’ve worked with over the years.)

Within conditions such as these, which again are typical of the informational university, it would seem the very notion of expertise is in crisis. And arguably it is. But there are also ways in which expertise is upheld, since once it can be quantified as measure a crucial symbolic value can then be accrued that can then be transferred as brand value for individual academics and their institutions. This in turn results in a capacity to charge higher student fees and attract the much vaunted external research funds, whose board of assessors place great emphasis on so-called ‘esteem indicators’ provided by journal ranking systems and citation indices which hold their own geocultural and political economic bias that reinforces what Harold Innis termed ‘monopolies of knowledge’.¹² Such measures supposedly confer upon the body of academic research a ‘quality assurance’ that effectively removes from the assessor the task of critical assessment, which is now designed to be as automated and therefore as time efficient as possible. Again, these are some of the key features that characterise an informational mode of knowledge management. Though it remains to be said, the calibration of such systems of automation are deeply ideological and underscored by cabals of self-interested academic groups and individuals.

This brief survey of teaching and research practices within the informational university comprise what Andrew Ross has termed the ‘new geography work’. A far-from-uniform informational geography of intellectual property regimes, content management systems, database economies, flexible labour and open content production becomes integrated with a geocultural system that valorises the reproduction of Western knowledge traditions and hegemony of global English.¹³ There are further implications here for disciplinary innovation and the production of subjectivity. With the rise of the global university, local knowledge traditions and expertise have very weak purchase within an educational-machine that demands modes of flexible, just-in-time delivery provided by staff in contract positions whose structural and ontological insecurity is offset by largely generic course modules whose uniformity ensures a familiar point of entry for the next short-term academic hired by the global university. 

The Racialization of Labour

In which cases might a racialization of labour underscore the informational university? In short, what are the labour inequalities that shape the market of higher education on a global scale and how are new (or, as the case may be, neo-colonial) class subjectivities being reproduced? There are multiple hues of labour differentiation across universities at a global level. To make the claim of differentiation along the lines of race is to suggest a reproduction of the 19th century biological category of race as the basis upon which division is operating. The official positioning of universities across the world would be most defiant in maintaining this is certainly not the case, and indeed may be inclined to issue legal writs against anyone making such a charge, if it was perceived that brand damage was a stake.

Nearly twenty years ago, Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein observed that ‘in traditional or new forms (the derivation of which is, however, recognizable), racism is not receding, but progressing in the contemporary world’.¹⁴ Arguably, this is no less the case today, and one of the sites upon which racism has become reproduced, albeit in new guises, is that of the informational university. The category of race, as Balibar and Wallerstein go on to analyse, is one of the key modalities enlisted in the construction of the ‘people’, or what Foucault analysed in terms of the biopolitical production of territory, populations, security and subjectivity.¹⁵ Other social-political devices through which populations are constituted include the nation, class, ethnicity, gender and broadcast media of communication. How the category of race intersects with these technologies of governance that define the rise of the nation-state and industrial modernity has been a matter of considerable research, which is in no way exhausted yet. It may seem a surprise to many that the seemingly archaic category of race should figure within the time and space of informational modernities. But, as I go to show, forms of institutional racism are central to the problem of labour within the global university.

Let me conclude by briefly documenting the operation of what Balibar terms ‘racism without races’ with reference to the division of labour and uneven distribution of expertise operating at global universities present in China. How to situate the differences between labour regimes in the global university and those of 19th century colonialism? In form they are similar. In both cases indigenous elites are enlisted as administrators to provide the linguistic and cultural interface between the imperial institution and local populations, which include government officials and industry representatives. But one key difference is that a relatively high ranking official such as myself in the 19th century could freely have lavished all the racial epithets on the lower ranking colonials. Today, however, someone such as myself has to be careful about how the discourse on race is handled since it could endanger my position, to say nothing of the offence it may provoke. There’s a difference here with the 21st century variants of differential racism that needs to be analysed. And the concept of ‘racism with race’ helps such analysis part of the way. Racism without race is predicated on modes of division that while not invoking the biological category of race are nonetheless reproducing the logic of racism – namely, to divide and exclude on the basis of race – through other means but which at their heart are racist in orientation, no matter how unconscious or unintentional that may be.¹⁶

A notable feature across global universities operating in China today is the substantial presence of domestic Chinese in the administrative ranks, with considerably fewer Chinese working as academic faculty. While smaller scale operations may combine academic and administrative roles and have those carried out by foreigners on casual contracts familiar with the ‘culture’ of the national system within which they are working, the larger universities employ local Chinese for administrative work on an almost exclusive basis. These staff often hold an undergraduate degree from a US, British or Australian university, and many will also have postgraduate qualifications from an overseas university. In many cases their degrees will have been awarded from their current employer, which again ensures familiarity with the culture and administration of their particular institution.

In principle, the Chinese administrators working within global universities in China are not there because they are Chinese but because they have met the job selection criteria – relevant degree or diploma, competency in English language, good interpersonal skills, relevant experience, etc. The official positioning is thus definitely not about race in its classic 19th century articulations. On the other hand, if these administrative staff were not Chinese, then they most likely would not be working in these universities. Why, then, are there so few and in enough cases no non-Chinese staff comprising the administrative ranks at these global universities?

If it was just a matter of holding the appropriate qualifications and skills, then there could be people from any number of racial and ethnic backgrounds working as administrators in these universities. As noted earlier, while the primary administrative and teaching language of these universities is English, there is a need for at least some administrative staff to have a high proficiency in Putonghua in order to interface at linguistic and cultural levels with local and national government departments and businesses. But there is no obvious reason or need for all administrative staff to be of Chinese origin. It would seem that there’s an important subjective desire at work for Chinese administrative staff with largely Anglophone qualifications to find work back home. What emerges from this phenomenon is a dual-language system where intra-institutional and transnational administration and engagement with academic staff is conducted in English, whereas the informal socialisation among administrative staff and their interaction, to some extent, with Chinese students is conducted in Putonghua or local dialects. 

To not be Chinese, in other words, means to not be participating in those institutional and social circuits conducted exclusively in Chinese. This enlisting of the (middle-class) elite ‘locals’ in administrative positions strikes me as very similar to the colonial strategy of engaging indigenous elites to administer colonial institutions (India being the classic example) and in so doing reproduce and reinforce (or in some cases produce) a local class system. My understanding of such operations is that racial distinctions determined the institutional positions and conditions of the labouring subject. Institutions of globalized higher education provide the institutional settings and organizational cultures through which the logic of differential racism is played out today.

Moving to the question of academic faculty and the international staff that compose its ranks, the opposite display of racialized labour becomes notable: namely, the tendency for Chinese to not be among those holding academic positions. Perhaps this is even more remarkable than the case of the Chinese majority within administrative positions. The opportunity for movement within administration from a US or British university to a global university operating in China, or some other country, for that matter, is less likely than in the case of academics, who tend to be much more mobile within both national and global settings. Why, then, do so few Chinese academics comprise the ranks of faculty within global universities in China? One reason has to do with remuneration. Local Chinese are paid substantially less than their international colleagues, and in this respect the economy of labour in global universities reproduces that of most other businesses in China. Unlike other business sectors, however, the global universities do not – at least not yet – fill their academic ranks with local Chinese in order save on labour costs. Key to the brand value of the global universities is the assurance these institutions make to students that they are receiving a product and experience that essentially reproduces what they could expect if they were enrolled at the ‘home’ institution. An important part of that assurance thus rests on a significant portion of academic staff who are either on secondment from or at least familiar with the workings of the home institution. There are also administrative practicalities for this practice associated with the running of equivalent programs, submission and moderation of grades, establishment of academic and administrative committees, and so on and so forth.

From the perspective of the Chinese academic who may give thought to shifting from a Chinese university to one of the increasing number of global universities setting up shop in China, a number of practicalities need to be considered. The linguistic barrier presented by the necessity to have a working command of English is just one of various factors to take into account. While the low pay may be equivalent between Chinese and global universities, the Chinese academic will have to forego the frequently informal ways in which income is supplemented within the Chinese system. The household items and food parcels supplied by the national teacher’s union, for example, would not be part of academic life in a global university. Moreover, they will have to suffer the knowledge that for effectively the same labour they are being paid a fraction of the amount received by their international colleagues. It must be said that such differentiation of remuneration levels is not based on whether one is Chinese or not. The same applies for those international teachers who have entered the global university from within China, and thus are structurally positioned as part of a domestic labour force. Nonetheless, the material effect of these multiple forces results in an academic body that is largely absent of Chinese staff.

While the differentiation of work across the spectrum of academic and administrative life points to standard divisions of labour in universities around the world, often enough both the individual worker and collective experience will embody these distinctions in singular ways and thus becomes a subject who multiplies rather than divides the borders of labour. This process whereby the borders of labour become multiplied is made clear in the relation cognitive labour holds with the social production of value, as sketched earlier in this essay. The racialization of labour, on the other hand, serves as a technology of division in the case of global universities currently operating in China.

Both the multiplication and division of labour are features of the informational university and its expropriation of the social production of value. Cognitive labour includes modes of peer-to-peer production that make available resources in the form of an informational commons. While more immediately understandable as a technology of division, the racialization of labour also feeds into the symbolic production of a commons in terms of the image repertoire and affective registers that are communicated about the global university as a site for international experience and certification. When situated within China, such an imaginary is reproduced in material ways in terms of the domination of mainland Chinese in administrative ranks coupled with the general absence of Chinese academics from faculty programs.

The relationship between the multiplication and division of cognitive and racialized labour, however, is substantially different in terms of how they connect with the social production of the common, which can be understood as the political potential that subsists within and conditions the possibility of the commons. The point of connection between such immediately distinct modes of labour lies precisely within the ways they shape the brand value and thus economy of the informational, global university. While there is unlikely to be political affiliation between transnational cognitive labour and Chinese administrators in global universities operating in China (the geocultural disparities being largely insurmountable), there is potential for relations to be forged between workers who experience the informatization of labour as it manifests in both global and national academies. It is at the point of shared experience borne out of struggle that the possibility arises for differential inclusion in the social invention of the common. Both the racialization of labour and the uneven distribution of expertise hold the capacity to be a part of such a process.

As the hegemony of the Chinese state unfolds and exerts its power across the geocultural terrain of global institutions, it should come as no surprise that the composition of labour within those institutions becomes increasingly comprised of mainland Chinese workers whose skills, expertise and symbolic value is no longer perceived as second tier. Such a transformation will occasion new lines of struggle in the globalization of higher education. The challenge for biopolitical labour will be to assert the autonomy of the common from emergent apparatuses of capture. A key part of this struggle will involve refusing the informational technologies of measure.

Notes
Thanks to Brett Neilson and Justin O’Connor for comments and suggestions and co-panellists Paolo Do and Jon Solomon for their dialogue on themes and conditions addressed in this essay. Thanks also to Wang Xiaoming for hosting the edu-factory presentation at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, 7 December 2009.

Unique visitors to post: 10

[Forthcoming in Mark Deuze (ed.) Managing Media Work, Sage, 2010]

By Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (The OrgMen)

Four Stages of Web 2.0 Culture: Use. Modify. Distribute. Ignore. – Johan Sjerpstra

In between the blog posting and the tweet there is the aphorism, a centuries old literary form that should do well amongst creative media workers. Zipped knowledge of the 21st century.

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Already for 18th century German experimental physicist and man of letters, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, there was an impossibility for knowledge to capture the totality of things. ‘It is a question in arts and sciences whether a best is possible beyond which our understanding cannot go’ (Lichtenberg). The answer to Twittermania is not the thousand page magnum opus. Today, in a techno-culture where the link never ends, there is a need to give pause to thought. This is the work of the aphorism. Karl Kraus: ‘An aphorism doesn’t have to be true. The aphorism should outstrip the truth, surpassing it in one sentence’. This text is dedicated to the creative workers, migrants, vagabonds, activists, intellectuals of this world: Abandon the state, create multiple expressive forms, engage in transborder relations (affective, intellectual, social, political), invent new institutional forms!

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Where to situate the study of network cultures? It hovers between a public form of ‘mass informality’ and hardcore techno-determinism. The social noise we see scrolling down our screens is a waste product of techno-settings in which our sweet entries are situated. Interface is King, with the consequence that real techno-aesthetic intervention increasingly becomes a lost archive in the history of network cultures.

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In retrospect Friedrich Kittler’s techno-determinism remained an unfinished project. Kittler’s post-1968 German media theory has not gone through many alterations since the early 1990s. The once bold statement ‘media determine our situation’ doesn’t shock anyone these days and has become an empty phrase. The media a priori is so obvious that it seems to have drifted into the realm of the collective unconscious. Henceforth no Kittler school. The grownup Kittler-Jugend are dedicated to scattered projects on the margins of academia. People once again obsess over their small careers and seem to have forgotten the primal energy that collective imagination can unleash. New generations read German media theory with interest but simply no longer have the time to read the necessary libraries to fully enjoy the details. Kittler himself abandoned contemporary techno-analysis and retired in imaginary Old Greece. How can there be a critique when such a position itself is still obscure and on the brink of disappearing? You start to sympathize with the programmer geeks when techno-determinism is sublimated by the highly attractive commercial sheen of Web 2.0.

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Why network? We ought to ask this question. Why is the network, this empty signifier, the emerging-becoming-dominant paradigm of our age? Most of us will grow into network(ing) like children grow in and out of clothes. It takes some time to realize that we dedicate fixed periods of the day to the social-technical networks that are out there without factoring it in. Networking and communicating through email, chats, Twitter and social networking sites are technological forms of day dreaming, a sphere you enter into and then come out of. The dreamtime in the techno-cloud could be compared to the siesta at the village square or chats in the local bar. It is time dedicated to the social. What we get out of it is diffuse and impossible to quantify.

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Why organize(d) networks? Ever since we launched this concept in 2005 we have seen organized networks (or orgnets) as just one of many possibilities. But if the tendency that networks, over time, will simply have to become more structured, then why bother? Long live techno-social determinism. The org.net question should be precluded with: Why do we still talk about organization in an era that seems to celebrate looseness and non-commitment? The Organization Man (William H. Whyte, 1956) is alive and well to this day. He did not disappear with the so-called end of industrialism. In fact, his powers have multiplied even if his ‘mind and soul’ is no longer exclusively beholden to the demands of The Organization. Today, Organization Man has moved beyond that institutional terrain and penetrated the life of networks. Everyone is Organizing. Such was the great masterplan of the ‘organizational complex’ (Reinhold Martin). Cooked up as a Cold War dream to extend the military-industrial complex into the realms of aesthetics and technology, the organizational complex fused the modulation of patterns from the Bauhaus School with the cybernetic programming of control. ‘Media organize’. This McLuhan-inspired maxim by Reinhold Martin truncates even further Friedrich Kittler’s earlier synthesis, ‘media determine our situation’. The key difference being the organizing capacity of communications media, which carry with it the organization man updated. This leaves us with the question: are we The Org Men? Wouldn’t it be great to deconstruct the very .org concept to pieces in order to get rid of it, once and for all? Isn’t there behind any call to organize a desire to restore the über org-anism once called tribe, church, society, nation-state?

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Not all online group initiatives work. Many fail. So can orgnets. The failure of a network is, however, not entirely without some work. There is a labour involved with failure. So we are using the notion of work in a different sense. We wish to invoke the idea of sustainability as a core feature of the work of networks. Failure is all too often the common of fragile conditions and the fragments of demands placed upon those involved in building and guiding the network. Social dust is a necessary precondition of the will to scale.

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‘We are here to stay’. The sustainability issue is a highly political one. Once a network becomes sustainable it addresses the problem of time, which tends not to be the default of networks. More often networks are about the dimension of space – quite frequently, they are transnational in orientation. The material property of spatially distributed social-technical relations that are forever being remade through the logic of connection and speed provides sufficient grounds for distraction from the problem of time understood as the experiential condition of duration. This was the analysis of Canadian communications theorist and political economist Harold Innis, whose writings in the late 1940s and early fifties sought to address how it was that ancient civilizations rise and fall due to the spatial or temporal bias of their communications media and transport systems. The biases of our time are known to all, but ignored by even more.

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‘There ain’t no time, only over time’. The political aspect of networks is closely associated with the sustainability of time. The annoying network is the one that lasts the test of time and refuses to disappear. Networks as technoversity are connected to develop a diverse range of standards, practices, modes of governance, techno-social relations. They collectively produce their own idioms of knowledge, one platform or system distinct from the next, all predicated on the will to communicate. The technoversity of networks is not simply about distribution across space but about maintaining lines of differentiation over time.

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The realization of the social is no longer possible outside an understanding of the constitutive power of technologies. There is no pure social realm. The social is inseparable from the technology. We speak of healthy bodies and populations, but what is the healthy techno-social body? Why are fluidity and transformation such celebrated values these days? How can we design the care of the self for a social-technical network?

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With so much real concern around ecological futures, how come there is so little concern within networks of techno-social futures? The net-cultural preoccupation with immediacy works against both the histories of the present as well as present conditions of the future. Network cultures have their own distinct apparatus of capture: Respond, Now! To cleave out time from the work of networks requires a certain act of refusal through the practice of delay or, if you happen to be a member of the techno-economic elite, you simply log off. But these are not options for the networked masses. How, then, to reinvent a politics of autonomy in the time of networks? Such work requires new modalities of organization whose ambition is singular: conspire to invent new institutional forms.

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Networks are not renowned for their managerial efficiency. Indeed, the very term ‘management’ is one that makes many within networks actively hostile and they recoil with deep distaste. Networks are more inclined toward anti-authoritarian tendencies. They ‘unmanage’ their cultural formation with little interest in purpose-driven, performance indicators and procedural guidelines. And it’s no wonder they do this. Such practices are embedded in the highly dysfunctional audit cultures of dominant institutions. Networks are not goal driven. They are galvanized around shared issues and the production of passions and the cultivation of clouds. The network blurs all purpose. That’s why we wish to raise the question of management in terms of organization. There can be no successful managerial science for networks. Please listen, once and for all, you brothers and sisters in consultancy land. Shy away from top-down decisions and impulses driven by regulatory ressentiment. IT-administrators belong in that category – their burning ambition is to ensure that networks never work.

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Organized networks are best understood as new institutional forms whose social-technical dynamics are immanent to the culture of networks. Orgnets are partly conditioned by the crisis and, in many instances, failure of primary institutions of modernity (unions, firms, universities, the state) to address contemporary social, political and economic problems in a post-broadcast era of digital culture and society. In this sense, organized networks belong to the era and prevailing conditions associated with post-modernity. Organized networks emphasize horizontal, mobile, distributed and decentralized modes of relation. A culture of openness, sharing and project-based forms of activity are key characteristics of organized networks. In this respect, organized networks are informed by the rise of open source software movements. Relationships among the majority of participants in organized networks are frequently experienced as fragmented and ephemeral. Often without formal rules, membership fees, or stable sources of income, many participants have loose ties with a range of networks.

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The above characteristics inevitably lead to the challenge of governance and sustainability for networks. It’s at this point that networks start to become organized. With a focus on the strategic dimension of governance, organized networks signal a point of departure from the short-termism and temporary political interventions of tactical media. At first glance orgnets are a natural, almost inevitable development of the ‘network society’ as described by Manuel Castells. Yet nothing is ‘natural’ in virtual environments. Everything needs to be constructed. And if so, under whose guidance? Who sets the very terms under which networks will cultivate their roots into society? Will this process of institutionalization have a (built-in) financial component?

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As a political concept, organized networks provide what urban theorist Saskia Sassen calls an ‘analytical tool’ with which to describe ‘the political’ as it manifests within network societies and information economies. The social-technical antagonisms that underscore ‘the political’ of organized networks are instantiated in the conflicts network cultures have with vertical systems of control: intellectual property regimes, system administrators, alpha-males, a tendency toward non-transparency and a general lack of accountability.

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How to rebuild labour organizations in the network society? This was one of the many unrealized ambitions of the anti- and later alter-globalization movements. And, for the most part, the unions never quite realized that life and labour within a digital paradigm had become the norm. Let us sketch out some of the current conditions challenging political organization within network societies. First, we need to problematise labour as some kind of coherent, distinct entity. We know well that labour in fact is internally contradictory and holds multiple, differential registers that refuse easy connection (gender, class, ethnicity, age, mode of work, etc.). This is the problem of organization. How to ‘organize the unorganizables’?, to borrow from the title of Florian Schneider’s documentary film. Second, we need to question the border between labour and life – contemporary biopolitics has rendered this border indistinct. Techniques of governance now interpenetrate all aspects of life as it is put to work and made productive. The result? No longer can we separate public from private, and this has massive implications for how we consider political organization today. What, in other words, is the space of political organization? Paolo Virno, for instance, speaks of a ‘non-state public sphere’. But where, precisely is this sphere? All too often it seems networked, and nowhere. This is the trap of ‘virtuality’, understood in its general sense. Of course there can be fantastic instances of political organization that remain exclusively at the level of the virtual, which is the territory of today’s ‘info-wars’. Here, we find the continued fight over the society of the spectacle. Yet the problem of materiality nonetheless persists, and indeed becomes more urgent, as the ecological crisis makes all too clear (although this too is a contest of political agendas played out within the symbolic sphere).

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Slogans ‘R’ Us * T-shirt label: Made for Asia * Today Your Friend, Tomorrow the World * Book title: ‘Stimulus and Indifference’ * Praise Exodus – Blast Decay * Support My Exit * ‘Children of the Deconstruction’ * The Institution is the Message * Project: Deleting Europe * I Joined the barcamp on anticyclic resistance and all I got is this lousy USB stick * ethics is moral punk * Romantic Mobility * Sillicon Friends™ * The Art of Attack (3 days intensive) * Post-Exotic: The Boring Other as Kulturideal * Buy More Consume Less * ‘Networking is Great to Waste Time Before Dying’ * Rejected EU proposal: ‘Dialectics of Innovation – Creative Warfare in the Age of the Relaxed Crisis’ *

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There are benefits in adopting a combinatory analytical and methodological approach that brings the virtual dimension of organization together with a material situation. This may take the form of an event or meeting, workshops, publishing activities, field research, urban experiments, migrant support centres, media laboratories … there are many possibilities. In Italy, uninomade and the media-activist network and social centre ESC are good examples of what we are talking about here. Sarai media lab in Dehli would be another. In the instance of bringing many capacities together around a common problem or field of interest we begin to see the development of a new institutional form. These institutions are networked, certainly, and far from the static culture and normative regimes of the bricks and mortar institutions of the modern era – unions, firms, universities, state. Their mobile, ephemeral nature is both a strength and a weakness. The invention of new institutional forms that emerge within the process of organizing networks is absolutely central to the rebuilding of labour organizations within contemporary settings. Such developments should not be seen as a burden or something that closes down the spontaneity, freedom and culture of sharing and participation that we enjoy so much within social networks. As translation devices, these new institutions facilitate trans-institutional connections. In this connection we find multiple antagonisms, indeed such connections make visible new territories of ‘the political’.

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Reading Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (1987) two decades later makes you wonder how such an independent study would look like, post-Cold War, post-9/11, in the age of the Internet and globalization. Jacoby’s description of the ‘impoverishment of public culture’ has not come to a halt. No dialectical turn here. As predicted, the figure of the ‘public intellectual’ has disappeared. ‘Intellectuals no longer need or want a larger audience; they are almost exclusively professors who situate themselves within fields and disciplines’. The nonacademic intellectuals, an endangered species in the 1980s, have vanished for good. The academics who replaced the general intellectuals created ‘insular societies’. There is a widespread fear here of the ‘single-minded men’. But are we really living in the Age of the Expert? It is not the expert knowledge that has become the dominant voice in the media age. Instead, we have witnessed the rise of the celebrity, and the ‘celebrification’ of all spheres of (mediated) life. The professional is hiding inside the walls of the office culture. Instead of a Triumph of the Professional we witness the Cult of the Amateur (Andrew Keen), neither of them claiming any of the virtues of the General Intellectual. Nothing in Jacoby’s study points at the appearance of ‘citizen journalism’, ‘participatory culture’ (Henry Jenkins) and the decline of professional work due to the rise of free content found in free newspapers and through the Internet. Yesterday’s public intellectuals of mass media were not exactly unpaid fellow travellers. What would Jacoby’s strategy be after the ‘de-monetarization’ of the media markets?

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Communication conditions the possibility of new political organizations. We could say that ‘the political’ of network societies is comprised of the tension between horizontal modes of communication and vertical regimes of control. Just think of the ongoing battles between Internet and intellectual property regulators such as WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and pirate networks of software, music or film distribution. Collaborative constitution emerges precisely in the instance of confrontation. In this sense, the horizontal and vertical axes of communication are not separate or opposed but mutually constitutive. How to manage or deal with these two axes of communication is often a source of tension within networks. Here, we are talking about models of governance, without universal ideals to draw on. More often than not, networks adopt a trial-and-error approach to governance. It is better to recognize that governance is not a dirty word, but one that is internal to the logic and protocols of self-organization.

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The ‘participation economy’ of Web 2.0 is underscored by a great tension between the ‘free labour’ (Tiziana Terranova) of cooperation that defines social networks and its appropriation by firms and companies. How is the ‘wealth of networks’ (Yochai Benkler) to be protected from exploitation? Unions, in their industrial form, functioned to protect workers against exploitation and represent their right to fair and decent working conditions. But what happens when leisure activity becomes a form of profit generation for companies? Popular social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, del.icio.us and the data trails we leave with Google function as informational gold mines for the owners of these sites. Advertising space and, more importantly, the sale of aggregated data are the staples of the participation economy. No longer can the union appeal to the subjugated, oppressed experience of workers when users voluntarily submit information and make no demands for a share of profits. Nonetheless, we are starting to see some changes on this front as users become increasingly aware of their productive capacities and can quickly abandon a social networking site in the same manner in which they initially swarmed toward it. Companies, then, are vulnerable to the roaming tastes of the networked masses whose cooperative labour determines their wealth. This cooperative labour constitutes a form of power that has the potential to be mobilized in political ways, yet so rarely is. Perhaps that will change before too long. Certainly, the production of this type of political subjectivity is preferable to the pretty revolting culture of ‘shareholder democracy’ that has come to define political expression for the neoliberal citizen.

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The precarity debate was, correctly, about the material conditions of labour and life. Mistakenly, the precarity discourse remained fixated on the rear-view mirror of Fordist production and the welfare state. But there is more to precarity than this. Judith Butler wished to extend the term to include emotional states and affective relations. Yet somehow precarity doesn’t satisfactorily capture the intensity – and dullness – of the contemporary soul. What comes closer is the image of the nervous, electric body in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as diagnosed in sociological accounts of urban transformation. Think Georg Simmel, Gabriel Tarde, Walter Benjamin. The image of digital disembodiment was perhaps a 1990s attempt to update the electric body, but nowadays such a notion just looks sadly comical and misplaced, which brings us back to the materiality of communication vis-à-vis Kittler. Today we have not so much digital disembodiment but the violence of code that penetrates the brain and the body. It is the normality of difference, sending out constant semiotic vibrations, that numbs us. What the precarity meme doesn’t catch is the cool frenzy. There is an aesthetics of uncertainty at work. An impulse to Just Do It! Extreme Sports. Risk Societies. Financial Derivatives. Creative Classes. Porn Stars. Game Cultures. Today, it seems impossible to escape the network paradigm that is always economically productive, even if it never returns the user a buck. The non-remunerated body remains a body in labour. And it’s increasingly exhausted. The brain encounters the limits of the day and everything that is left uncompleted. The endless task of chores ticked off slide over from one day to the next. One becomes tired by looking at the ‘to-do’ list, which reproduces like a nasty virus. Bring on the remix.

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The shift from Fordist modes of assembly production to post-Fordist modes of flexibilization cannot be accounted for by reference alone to capital’s demands for enhanced efficiency through restructuring and rescaling. The 1970s in Italy saw the rise of operaismo (autonomist workerism) who refused the erosion of life by the demands of wage labour. Importantly, their unique ‘refusal of labour’ demonstrates, in theory, a clear capacity of workers to change the practices of capital, for better and worse. The Italian collective strike is a one-off concept workshop, blending the radical with the general. It is in this power of transformation that ‘the common’ is created (unlike so many other struggles and forms of dissent in Europe). The ongoing challenge remains how to organize that potentiality in ways that produce subjectivities that can open a better life – in Italy, and beyond.

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Workfare, flexicurity or ‘commonfare’ – all of these options are variations on the theme of state intervention that is able to supply a relative security to the otherwise uncertainty of labour and life. Such calls are misguided. They presuppose that somehow the state resides outside of market fluctuations and the precarity of capital. The state is coextensive with capital. The 2008 credit crisis has shown the state has little command over the uncertainties of finance capital. How, then, can the state guarantee stability? Furthermore, to whom does the state offer security? Certainly not to undocumented migrants. The call for flexicurity is a regressive, nostalgic move that holds dangerous implications vis-à-vis the formation of zones of exclusion. There is no pleasure principle in being underpaid. The price of freedom is a high one and it is only a handful of lucky outsiders in the Rest of the West who can afford to work for free, enjoying unemployment while living off a small income. It is a secret lifestyle choice for a diminishing elite of cultural conceptualists and their outsourced army of semiotic producers. This is not what the dreams of the multitudes aspire to realize. There is much political value in targeting not the state but the companies – especially those engaged in the Web 2.0 economy – and insisting on a distribution of income commensurate with the collective labour that defines the participation economy. This may be a more effective strategy for broadening the constitutive range of labour organizations.

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If social movements are serious about addressing the economic conditions of workers and engaging the complexities of the political they would put an end to the mistaken faith in the state as the source of guarantees. Moreover, the logic of the state as a provider of welfare is special to Europe – it does not translate to the situations of workers in many Asian countries, for example. So what are the borders of connection among workers? Does the movement simply reproduce the borders of the EU? Or does it engage in the much harder but no less necessary work of transnational connection? If so, then targeting the state does not especially help facilitate a common territory of organization. The global circuits of capital are where radical politics should focus their attention. But global capital is in no way uniform in its effects, techniques of management or accumulative regimes. Political intervention, in other words, must always be situated while traversing a range of scales: social-subjective, institutional, geocultural. The movement of relations (social, political, economic) across and within this complex field of forces comprises the practical work of translation. Translation is the art of differential connection and constitutes the common from which new institutional forms may arise.

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Practices of collaborative constitution are defined by struggle. There is no escape from struggle and the tensions that accompany collaborative relations. This is the territory of the political – a space of antagonism that in our view is much more complicated than the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction. Again, it is the work of translation that reveals the multiplicity of tensions. As Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon have written, translation is not about linguistic equivalence or co-figuration, but rather about the production of singularities through relational encounters. But let’s get more concrete here. What is a relational encounter? It occurs through the instance of working or being with others. Of sharing, producing, creating, listening. Sustaining a range of idioms of experience is a struggle in itself – one that is rarely continuous, but rather continually remade and reassembled. This in turn is the recombinatory space and time of new institutions.

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Let’s unpack the idea of new institutions and their relation to precarity. If we say that precarity and flexibility is the common condition – one that traverses class and geocultural scales – then we can ask: what is the situation within which precarity expresses itself? The situation (concept + problem) will define the emergence of a new institution. Situation, here, consists of virtual/networked, material, affective, linguistic and social registers. We are of course always in a situation, but how to connect with others? The point of connection brings about tensions – the space of the political – and the ensemble of relations furnishes expression with its contours. Real power lies not in the spectacle of the event, but rather subsists within the resonance of experience and the minor connections and practices that occur before and after the event. That is the time and space of institution formation. The rest is a public declaration of existence.

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The question of organization persists: Who does it? How is organization organized? For Keller Easterling, this is the role of the orgmen: ‘Different from the deliberately authored building envelope, spatial products substitute spin, logistics, and management styles for considerations of location, geometry, or enclosure. The architect and salesman of such things as golf resorts or container ports is a new orgman. He designs the software for new games of spatial production to be played the same way whether in Texas or Taiwan. The coordinates of this software are measured not in latitude and longitude but in the orgman argot of acronyms and stats – in annual days of sunshine, ocean temperatures, flight distances, runway noise restrictions, the time needed for a round of golf, time needed for a shopping spree, TEUs, layovers, number of passengers, bandwidth, time zones, and labor costs. Data streams are the levers of spatial manipulation, and the orgman has a frontier enthusiasm for this abstract territory. He derives a pioneering sense of creation from matching a labor cost, a time zone, and a desire to generate distinct forms of urban space, even distinct species of global city’.

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The OrgMen of networks, then, share something with the alpha-males and sysops (system operators). Both administer behaviours in symbolic or technical ways, shaping patterns of relation. Indeed, the software architecture used by any network is its own orgman. Organized networks would do well to diversify their platforms of communication, adopting a range of software options to enable the multiplication of expression and distribute as much as possible the delegation of network governance. If one platform starts to fall flat – say a mailing list – then perhaps the collective blog is going to appeal to more. Whenever the collective labour of a network can be galvanized around forms of coproduction (making an online journal, organizing an event, setting up a file-distribution system, producing a documentary, identifying future directions, staging a hack, designing slogans) then the life of the network finds that it has a life. Such techniques of collaborative constitution keep in check the proto-fascistic tendencies of the orgman that lurks within every network. The tension between these two registers of network sociality is a necessary dynamic. The challenge is to keep the game in play, gradually shifting the limits of the network disposition.

*

If we were to reinvent cybernetics (as an organizing logic of recombination, feedback, noise, etc.), outside the military-industrial context of the Cold War, what would it be? First of all, it would no longer be obsessed with biology and bio metaphors. The aim of computer networks is not to mimic the human by copying or improving human features such as the brain, memory, senses and extensions. The question of agency and the relation between humans and non-humans, as thematized by for example Bruno Latour and the actor-network theory crowd, is a typical remainder of the cybernetics 1.0 era. In the past cybernetics tried to figure out how to connect the individual (human) body to the machine. It presumes we still have an issue with ‘intelligent machines’. The cybernetic 1.0 age was both worried and drawn to the idea that the human can(not) be replaced by thinking machines. The result of this was an irrelevant debate for decades over artificial intelligence (AI). These days no one is concerned if and when the machines take over. Have you ever been scared by the idea that a computer can and will beat you at chess? Sure it can, but so what? We know Big Brother is storing all the information in the world. AI is here to stay but is no longer a key project in technology research. Whereas cybernetics 1.0 tried to schematize human behaviour in order to simulate it through models, cybernetics 2.0 is concerned with the truly messy, all too human, social complexity. We are not ants. We are more and behave as less. Our understanding has to go beyond the boring mirror dynamic of man and machine. Computer science will have to make the leap into inter-human relations in the same way as humans are adapting to the limits set by computer interfaces and architectures. Stop the mimicry procedures, and restart computer science itself.

*

Reinhold Martin: ‘Norbert Wiener argues that what counts is not the size of the basic components (such as neurons, which are similar in humans and ants) but their organization, which determines the “absolute size” of the organization’s nervous system – its upper limit of growth and index of social advancement. An organism’s social potential, conceived in terms of its ability to organize into complex communication networks, is thus measured as a function of the size of its internal circulatory and communications system, which is a function, in turn, of their own organizational complexity. The original analogy between the social and biological organism is thus collapsed, as the two become directly linked as part of the same network…. A relational logic of flexible connection replaces a mechanical logic of rigid compartmentalization, and the decisive organizational factor is no longer the vertical subordination of parts to the whole but rather the degree to which the connections permit, regulate, and respond to the informational flows in all directions’.

*

What are the limits of potentiality for the organized network? While impossible to answer in terms of content (every network has its own special attributes), we can say something here about form. Form furnishes the contours of expression as it subsists within the social-technical dynamics of digital media. How these relations coalesce as distinct networks situated within and against broader geopolitical forces becomes a primary challenge for networks desiring scalar transformation – a movement that also consists of trans-institutional, disciplinary, subjective and corporeal relations whose antagonisms define the multiple registers of ‘the political’. The question of limits takes us to the transcalar practice of transversality – the production of multiple connections that move across a range of social, geocultural and institutional settings. There are also strategic questions: Who do you collaborate with? How local are you? Are you willing to deal with the cynical professionals of traditional media? Do you believe in Meme Power, viral marketing and subliminal dissemination with the chance of hitting the Zeitgeist lottery, or in the hard work of political campaigning?

*

Collaboration is always accompanied by conflict and struggle. This is a matter of degree. And there’ll be plenty of exhilaration that keeps the momentum going. But tensions will always be present. Better to work out an approach to deal with this, otherwise you’ll find your projects go kaptuz!

References

Anderson, Chris. Free: The Future of a Radical Price, New York: Hyperion, 2009.

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale: Yale University Press, 2006.

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society, Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996.

Easterling, Keller. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

Innis, Harold A. The Bias of Communication, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.

Innis, Harold A. Empire and Communications, Victoria and Toronto: Press Porcépic, 1986.

Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectual: American Culture in the Age of Academe, New York: Basic Books, 1987.

Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, New York: Doubleday, 2007.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. & intro. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Kraus, Karl. Aphorismen. Sprüche und Widersprüche, Pro domo et mundo, Nachts: Suhrkamp, 1986.

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. The Waste Books, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, New York: New York Review of Books, 2000.

Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 2007.

Lovink, Geert and Rossiter, Ned. ‘Dawn of the Organised Networks’, Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/lovink_rossiter.html

Martin, Rheinhold. The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.

Neilson, Brett and Rossiter, Ned. ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception’, Theory, Culture & Society 25.7/8 (2008): 51-72.

Rossiter, Ned. Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006.

Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Sakai, Naoki (2006) ‘Translation’, Theory, Culture & Society 23.2/3: 71-86.

Sassen, Saskia (2006) Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schneider, Florian. Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), http://wastun.org/v2v/Organizing_the_Unorganizable

Solomon, Jon (2007) ‘Translation, Violence and the Heterolingual Intimacy’, translate, http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/1107/solomon/en

Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, 2004.

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. James Cascaito Isabella Bertoletti and Andrea Casson, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Whyte, William H. The Organization Man, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956.

Unique visitors to post: 48

[Published in International Review of Information Ethics 11 (2009)]

‘As long as there are people on this planet, the waste industries will never die. So we’re not worried about the future of the industry’.
– Owner of a small e-waste processing business in Ningbo, China.

This essay is interested in the relationship between electronic waste and emergent regimes of labour control operative within the global logistics industry, the task of which is to manage the movement of people and things in the interests of communication, transport and economic efficiencies. Central to logistics is the question and scope of governance – both of labouring subjects and the treatment of objects or things. The relation between labour and electronic waste constitutes a milieu (environment) and population (of human and technological life) whose communication comprises a unique multi-scalar space that severely tests techno-systems of governance. In registering the contingency of governance – its capacity for failure or oversight – this essay signals the uncertainty that underpins the technics of control special to logistics.¹ At stake is the connection between the milieu and the labour of human life.²

Paradoxically perhaps, conflicting governance regimes make possible the production of non-governable subjects and spaces. Electronic waste and many of those working in its informal secondary economies can be considered as occupants that reside off the grid. Such positioning in itself does not constitute a political program or articulated agency. Non-governance should not, in other words, be assumed to be synonymous with some kind of counter-political force. This would be the error of translation understood as a system of equivalence in which an a priori relation exists between, for instance, non-state actors and political agency. Indeed, it may even be desirable for biopolitical powers to ensure a non-governable dimension in order to manage the political, economic and environmental problem of electronic waste – the maintenance of unregulated informality serves as one of the structural resources that sustains the current economy of waste. Since there is no globally implemented consensus or treaty and quite frequently an absence of national legislation on how to address the economic and social life of electronic waste, it helps to reflect on the question of e-waste by taking this ‘indifferent’ status of e-waste as a point of departure – both technically within logistics software and politically within the institutional limits of the state apparatus. As I argue below, such indifference comes at a potential political and social cost, one that sees a further expansion and penetration of biopolitical technologies of control over the relatively autonomous aspects of labour and life.

To complement the various hypotheses above, this essay also addresses the relation between regions and the composition of labour in electronic waste industries in China. The multiplication of regions through practices of translation coextensive with the movement of people, language, technological protocols and things presents a serious challenge to regions as they are defined by hegemonic orders and interests. A region such as the European Union, for example, is translated as a legitimate political, economic and social entity through an ensemble of institutions (state governments, international institutions, universities, cultural organizations, labour unions, etc.). While there may be numerous instances of dispute and conflict between such actors, ultimately the fact of their relation serves to mutually reaffirm the legitimacy of the EU as a region. But to reduce the configuration of a region to such translation devices alone is to overlook the diverse practices and technics through which spaces and populations are comprised. The battle of hegemony, in this sense, is a contest over idioms of translation.

Similarly, the social practice of translation brings into question the analytical modalities that assume the existence of the region as a set of stable coordinates and coherent institutional practices that facilitate economies of depletion.³ In the case of the global logistics industries, the rise of secondary resource flows accompanying the economy of electronic waste is coextensive with the production of non-governable subjects and spaces. I suggest that the relation between these entities constitutes new regional formations that hold a range of implications for biopolitical technologies of control.

Multiplication and Division

With their capacity to adapt flexibly to a range of circumstances and skill requirements, the rural migrant worker in China is arguably the exemplary post-Fordist subject rather than, as often assumed, the specialist work of the designer, architect, filmmaker or ad-man attributed to the figure of cognitive, creative or immaterial labour. Such a distinction in the body of labour-power points also to the residual class dimension of post-Fordist labour, which in this case is frequently underscored by the spatial division between rural provinces and metropolitan centres. Ethnic divisions also prevail, with the rural migrant worker often enough not belonging to the Han Chinese majority population.⁴

Fieldwork undertaken earlier this year with my MA students in Ningbo – a 2nd tier and major port city a few hours south of Shanghai – began to make visible (at least for us) the ‘division and multiplication of labour’ within the electronic waste industries.⁵ Mezzadra and Neilson:

By speaking of the multiplication of labor we want to point to the fact that division works in a fundamentally different way than it does in the world as constructed within the frame of the international division of labor. It tends itself to function through a continuous multiplication of control devices that correspond to the multiplication of labor regimes and the subjectivities implied by them within each single space constructed as separate within models of the international division of labor. Corollary to this is the presence of particular kinds of labor regimes across different global and local spaces. This leads to a situation where the division of labor must be considered within a multiplicity of overlapping sites that are themselves internally heterogeneous.⁶

And as Neilson elaborates elsewhere:

It is crucial to note that the multiplication of labour does not exclude its division …. Indeed, multiplication implies division, or, even more strongly, we can say multiplication is a form of division.⁷

Hierarchies of labour separate the first stage of waste processing and storage from the initial collection of unwanted trash in the cities of China. The looped tape recording of diannao (computer/electronic brain) and kongtiao (air conditioner) rhythmically alerts locals to the arrival of the junk men and women as they move about neighbourhoods on a bicycle equipped with a flat tray for the transport of waste. Situated among those at the bottom of the supply chain of electronic waste industries (others working in particularly toxic conditions include children who dissemble electronic products, stripping copper from plastic casings while inhaling poisonous fumes from incineration), the junkmen are among the most transient in the economy of e-waste. The working life of junkmen is one of low income and frequently changing low-skill jobs determined by the fluctuation of market economies and the informal social networks and family demands that shape the movement of populations from country to city, job to job. Here, we see the multiplying effect of labour: while hierarchically distinct from other modalities of work in the economic life of electronic waste, the job of the junk men and women is underscored by mobility and uncertain transformation. It is unlikely, in other words, that waste collection is a job for life.

A different story prevails, however, in the case of many of the small businesses that deal with the sorting of electronic waste. Like many Chinese cities, the waste collection centres dispersed across the neighborhoods and districts of Ningbo are pivotal sites in the social and economic life of electronic waste. Often run as small family businesses, these recycling centres can be divided along formal and informal lines, both with differing degrees of toxicity in terms of the type of waste materials collected. Of the thousand or so businesses with official licenses to operate in Ningbo (a legal requirement in Zhejiang province), there are many more that exist illegally. At 6000 RMB (approx. 600 Euros), the annual license fee is a costly obstacle for many, yet it offers a level of economic and political security not afforded by the illegal collection centres. The official sites tend to have a regular network of waste suppliers based on guanxi (social relations or networks) and, unlike the illegal sites, do not negotiate prices. This in turn affords the junkmen a level of guaranteed income, albeit with wildly fluctuating and typically declining prices over the past year. Trading prices for metals are set each morning according to futures markets, which are usually accessed as daily updates by mobile phone more often than through computers.

External and internal forces have placed enormous pressure on the recycling industry and labour conditions across China. The owner of one small licensed recycling company we spoke to, who had been in business for 15 years, made note of the Chinese Labor Contract Law, which came into effect in January 2008, making it harder for companies to sack employees.⁸ He offered this reference as an indication of the more stable and secure working conditions for the migrants he employs from Jiangxi and Húnán provinces to the west of coastal Zhejiang.

By contrast, reports produced by various human rights NGOs and environmental monitoring organizations document numerous instances where workers’ rights are violated in the electronics factories and recycling industries, with excessive and often unpaid working hours, hiring of child labour, gender divisions, dangerous working conditions, suppression of efforts to organize labour and strike actions, fines and punishments for violation of highly punitive rules (correct haircuts, smoking in designated areas, improper attire, wastage of water, making noise, posting or distributing unauthorized articles, etc.).⁹ More broadly, in her assessment of the legislative reform of labour conditions, Jenny Chan notes ‘severe rights violations in at least three major areas: job security; the use of contingent labor; and fair, fixed-term labor contracts’.¹⁰ Worker layoffs from factories have also been on the rise since the end of the Chinese new year – the social effects of this became rapidly clear, if relatively short-lived, on the streets of Shanghai and Ningbo, with increased numbers of homeless migrants and visible instances of untreated mental illnesses.

Improved labour conditions are often perceived by businesses and investors to come at a cost rather than a benefit in terms of higher productivity through workplace stability. Other economic forces impact in more immediate ways. Since 1st of January 2009, recycling companies have had to absorb the cost of a 17% value added tax – a burden not suffered by other industries. This comes on top of an enormous drop in prices of around 50-60% for recyclable metals due to the global economic recession. With successive months of depressed prices, the global recycling economy is now dire. In China, this manifests in the form of massive stockpiling of waste that cannot be sold. There are additional storage costs and increased health risks associated with prolonged exposure to inventory accumulation of toxic metals, to say nothing of increased pressures on labour.

Another owner of a Ningbo recycling business, Mr Yu, assessed the situation in the following way earlier this year:

Metals and papers are online transactions. Copper and aluminum are sold and bought in the futures markets. For China, marketing Chinese products is fine, however, in the global market it is hard to do good business. I have to purchase and sell the waste at cheap prices. I suppose the economy will improve. Copper makes more profits, however it makes me lose more money. Now the price of copper is 17 yuan/500 grams compared with the previous price (27/28 yuan / 500g) – we lose 10 yuan per 500g. We are a small business. Foreign waste such as plastic, copper and aluminum are packaged and put into containers that are transported to Beilun dock.

The Battle of Standards

The connection made here between electronic waste and the maritime industries is worth noting. Despite the fact that importation of electronic waste in China has been illegal since 1996, much of the movement of waste from North America, Europe, East Asia and Australia is channeled through the ports of China.¹¹ There’s a story to be told here about the global logistics industry. In short, logistics is concerned with the management of global supply chains and labour regimes. The electronic waste industries obviously fit into that schematic. Aided by software applications and database technologies, logistics aims to maximize efficiencies at all levels. In terms of labour management, the optimum state of governance arises at the moment in which the execution of a task, or Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), is registered in the real-time computation of Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs). In other words, the labour control regime is programmed into the logistics chain at the level of code. Similarly, the governance of labour is informatized in such a way that the border between undertaking a task and reporting its completion has become closed or indistinct. As such, there is no longer a temporal delay between the execution of duties and their statistical measure.

The potential for escape, invention and refusal become severely compromised within such a biopolitical regime of control, one that is already dominant for millions working across the world in different industries articulated with global logistics systems. Moreover, and most oddly, it would seem that the capacity for capital to renew itself is substantially challenged within such a system: logistics aims to diminish the force of contingency, which plays a key role in the emergence of innovation upon which the reproduction of capital depends. Do we find here, then, an instance whereby capital programs its own obsolescence?

An important control device in the maritime industries is radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, which registers the geographic position of ships and goods and assists in the management of inventories and the efficiency of supply chains. While RFID technologies are indifferent to the matter of things, and thus do not discern between, say, automotive parts or textiles on the one hand, and electronic waste on the other, their database logic nonetheless identifies the content of motion. In other words, the database provides a record of that which migrates from one place to another. And in the case of electronic waste, there are strict national and international regulations governing its transport and treatment. But since, as noted earlier, electronic waste is deemed an illegal import in China, it is questionable whether it falls into the purview of the database and its informatized sovereign power. Like many countries, electronic waste holds a contradictory status within the rule of law in China, with waste businesses requiring a license to operate, as mentioned previously.

In another respect, the connection between electronic waste, logistics and software systems constitutes the battle of standards across idioms of translation. The governance of labour associated with electronic waste varies enormously depending upon whether or not the movement, economy and treatment of e-waste is made visible by logistics software used in maritime logistics, to take one example. In such a case, there are industry, state and union standards that shape the conditions of labour and management of waste. Logistics software facilitates such relations by tracking cargo movement, registering times of passage in global supply chains and accounting for inventory accumulation. The standards established in such an economy run into conflict, or are just modulated differently, when the circuits of labour and resource flows associated with electronic waste are translated through less formal standards found in economies not officiated by the state. The case of electronic waste in China is one of these economies. The sex-trade in and across many countries and regions would be another.

Translation can be understood in one sense as the process of establishing standards expressed through a community of practice. In Naoki Sakai’s terms, this is the ‘homolingual’ operation of translation.¹² Yet such an occasion should not be seen as the end-point of translation, but rather in terms of the instantiation of a particular border that promulgates new modes of practice and relation. Indeed, it is precisely the scene of conflict that attends the drive toward standardization that raises the problem of translation.¹³ The example of standardization in the shipping and transport industries helps clarify this process.

The standardization of shipping containers from the 1950s was accompanied by disputes between engineers, corporations and governments over competing economic and geopolitical interests in the transport industries.¹⁴ By the 1970s a global standard in containerization had been established, around the same time economic globalization came into full swing following the end of the Bretton Woods Accord in 1971 and the oil crisis of 1973. Such cursory contextualization indicates that standard containers did not alone determine or create economic accumulation (the same might be said for logistics software). Marc Levinson notes that by the late 1960s,

The economic benefit of standardization … was still not clear. Containers of 10, 20, 30 and 40 feet had become American and international standards, but the neat arithmetic relationship among the ‘standard’ sizes did not translate into demand by shippers or ship lines. Not a single ship was using 30-foot containers. Only a handful of 10-foot containers had been purchased, and the main carrier using them soon concluded that it would not buy any more. As for 20-foot containers, land carriers hated them.¹⁵

Conflicts over standards in logistics and software systems define the terrain of translation in more recent years. Logistics, as defined earlier, is concerned with maximizing efficiencies in global supply chains and labour regimes. Once the logistical problem of container standardization had been resolved, the work and political economy of translation shifted to data standards. While present in a primitive form in the 1960s, the computerization of transport industries did not really take off until the 1980s following the standardization of shipping containers and the advent of just-in-time production. Effectively integrating and simulating the logic of containerization in order to produce enhanced efficiencies, the information architecture of code can also be understood as a container or silo formation.¹⁶ Again, the drive toward interoperability across different software systems is an example of translation as homolingual address or equivalence.¹⁷ Software technologies are key devices in the translation of labour and the mobility of things as actionable, visible and subject to control and instrumental consolidation. Once registered within the database logic of informatized sovereignty, electronic waste and its modalities of labour and social life become governable within the economy of real-time. Such an idiom of translation is one of co-figuration and equivalence, to draw on the formulation of Sakai. Yet logistics software consists of multiple standards whose disparities in code produce conflict and competition in the effort to determine systems commensurate with the demand for intermodal freight transportation, pervasive labour management and economic hegemony. Such tensions over standardization give rise to the heterolingual dimension of translation – its social practices of ‘differential inclusion’, struggle and multiplication – that confers a non-governable potential to electronic waste.¹⁸

While I am in no way idealizing such practices – as noted earlier, there is enormous social, environmental and individual damage that attends the toxic life of electronic waste – I wish to stress that once captured within the instrumental world of logistics that economizes labour, life and space according to efficiencies in time, the work of translation becomes automated and effectively annulled. And it is precisely at this moment of informatization coupled with logistics that the region becomes constituted within the sovereign space of the database. Once code is king the variable capacity of labour, life and things finds itself subject to an intensive form of territorial and proprietary control that formal settings such as ASEAN, APEC and NAFTA can only gesture towards.¹⁹ But no matter how much communication regimes may be indifferent to noise, contingency, feedback and indeed life itself, the difference necessary for the work of translation is never entirely eradicated by techno-scientific systems.²⁰ More likely certain modes of labour and life simply migrate off the radar and subsist instead in a world of non-governance, by which I mean idioms of expression, practice and economy external to the state-corporate nexus that defines contemporary sovereign power.²¹

The Limits of Translation

With its indifference to matter, substance or qualities and concern instead with the management of mobilities and efficiencies of action, logistics dispenses with borders that distinguish labour, life and milieu.²² In doing so, the constitutive differences that make possible the translation of relations between labour, discourses, social-technical practices, economies and geocultural formations is surrendered to the world of ubiquitous homologies.²³ What I am calling ‘ubiquitous homologies’ stems from the political economy of globalizing design industries (where architecture begins to resemble a sports shoe, toothbrush, motorbike, office chair, computer monitor, etc.), and shares something with what Sakai terms ‘co-figuration’, ‘linguistic equivalence’ and ‘homolingual address’ – all of which are homogenizing operations of translation that comprise the sovereign power of the nation-state.²⁴

This is the limit of translation, and hence the scene of the political. With borders (limits) comes struggle. It may seem a contradiction is at work in this formulation: the subtraction within logistics of constitutive differences does not immediately lend itself to the idea of the political as the struggle with borders. Nor does such a formulation of logistics as a system of techno-social and economic practices of indifference to borders correspond with the concept of translation, which both assumes and requires difference as a condition of operation. How, then, to address the political and conceptual challenges that attend the rise of new indifferent forms of communication and governance? The erasure of constitutive differences through the biopolitical power of logistics defines the limits of translation. But the occlusion of difference should not be taken as some kind of finitude since the coding of indifference in itself multiplies the fields of distinction through the force of relations.²⁵ There are and always will be relations. In this process new border struggles are comprised and the work of translation is remodulated in ways coextensive with the production of subjectivity.

The analysis of electronic waste flows serves to cleave the inter-relations of software, labour and logistics in order to identify how the indifference of communication special to logistics technology points to the limits of translation, which holds implications for biopolitical regimes of governance. The heterolingual address of translation is the analytical method that makes visible the possibility of escape from biopolitical technologies of control at work in the global logistics industry. Or, rather, the non-governable dimension of social and economic life within the electronic waste industries asserts a singular indifference to the regulatory control of logistics. This is the practice of refusal. The extent to which labour and life can withstand the encroaching predisposition of logistics as a control system par excellence is – in part – a matter of time, capital and the sovereign demand that populations comply with technologies of governance.

A study of the economies and socialities of electronic waste in China helps illuminate the political status and potential of non-governable subjects and spaces. The earlier discussion of labour and the circuits of exchange in Ningbo’s electronic waste industries are a case in point. As forms of social relation, the labour and economy in Ningbo’s e-waste industries operate outside the scope of state-corporate regimes of governance supported by logistics technologies of control. Of relevance here is the constitution of regions and the politics of translation in order to address an emerging tension of scale that extends more broadly to the global management of labour and life at play in the logistics industry. Such an analytical strategy indicates how the problematic of non-governable spaces and subjects – for better and worse – reside beyond the ‘informational sovereignty’ that imbues the biopolitical power of logistics. The social practice of translation (re)constitutes regions as they figure around the economy of electronic waste. Translation here is not so much a conscious act on the part of workers in electronic waste industries – at least not in any way that I am capable of discerning – as a social-technical relation of exteriority that arises through structural conditions and the techno-social operations of logistics software managing the movement of labour, commodities, resources and finance. What I am calling a social-technical relation of exteriority extends to the challenge of method and analysis: there is always the subject that resides beyond comprehension, that refuses to be known as such – something Gayatri Spivak carefully analyzed as the politics of the subaltern condition.²⁶

In so far as that which is perceived or manifests as non-governable – the labour and economy of electronic waste, in the case of this essay – some final points can be proffered. The spatialities of non-governable subjects constitute regions in ways that do not readily correspond with more hegemonic regional formations. Translation thus becomes a form of inventing new circuits of movement. Within such a context, regions become contested geocultural and political spaces, bringing into question the dominant understanding of regions as defined within the political-economic discourses of trade agreements, innovation and knowledge transfer and statist formations of geopolitical equivalence such as ASEAN and its expansion into ASEAN+3 (China, Japan, South Korea) and ASEAN+6 (Australia, New Zealand, India). Regions, when understood as conflictual constitutions underscored by the movements and frequently informal practices of language, culture and labour, comprise geocultural formations that seriously question the power of border technologies such as trade formations, migration and labour regimes, state alliances and global logistics. Moreover, the analytical method of translation as social practice and heterolingual address initiates a critique of sovereign power by elaborating the tensions embedded within the informal and formal dynamics of geocultural configurations. Sovereign border regimes, in other words, are brought into question with the rise of non-governable subjects and spaces associated with the social-economic life of electronic waste.

Informal circuits of exchange comprise the multiplication of economies that attend the movement of electronic waste. Such configurations may be territorial in terms of the distribution of waste, as seen for example in the intra-national or trans-regional economies of electronic waste. Within this complex of relations there is a sense in which the non-governable aspects of labour, waste and economy reside outside the biopolitical power of logistics technologies.

While this essay has concentrated on the very localized case of electronic waste in Ningbo, there are always multi-scalar dimensions and circuits that both manifest in the local and connect the local to the trans-territorial whose specificities reconfigure how the regional comes to be understood. As long as the movement and treatment of electronic waste evades the sovereign power of informatized logistics, then the connection of waste with regions remains open to the possibility of multiple configurations.

Notes
Thanks to Soenke Zehle and Brett Neilson for comments and critique of earlier drafts of this essay. The text also benefitted from questions and discussion at the Inter-Asia Cultural Typhoon Conference, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 3-5 July, 2009.

Unique visitors to post: 9

1. In this talk I would like to address the question of time and translation as they relate to the political concept of organized networks. The Blue House project, in as much as I understand it, is an experiment in sociality, politics and culture which subsist in the space of an urban intervention. Always temporary, such spaces are shadowed by the certainty of termination. The clarity such knowledge provides is frequently the condition of singularity and intensity for such urban laboratories. No matter how formal or informal experimental platforms may be, their imminent decline provokes the question of sustainability, which for me is a question of time and energy. How to find continuity within social-technical formations that are, by default, unstable, often fragmented, and more than likely short-term? The logic of multiplication and movement is key to addressing the question of sustainability for network cultures.

2. Urbanism shares with the social-technical system of networks a bias towards space. The material property of spatially distributed social-technical relations that are forever being remade through the logic of connection and speed provides sufficient grounds for distraction from the problem of time understood as the experiential condition of duration. This was the analysis of Canadian communications theorist and political economist Harold Innis, whose writings in the late 1940s and early fifties sought to address the rise and decline of ancient civilizations due to the spatial or temporal bias of their communications media and transport systems.

3. In Out of the Blue, we find ourselves in a similar situation, where the logic of the experiment is organized as a program on urban space in which the ephemerality and contingency of time underscores the dimension of experience. Within such conditions, what constitutes the work of politics? As I have written elsewhere with Brett Neilson on the occasion of an experiential experiment which took place in September 2005 at Naushki train station that marks the border between Russia and Mongolia:

‘Action, in these circumstances, is predicated on not knowing, of being uncertain about what is to follow. Organization becomes structurally unhinged from any causal temporality. Indeed, it is precisely this ‘not knowing’ that serves as the precondition of experiencing action as that which can only ever be temporally present. Here we get a suggestion that the time of the present has multiple registers and dimensions. It is within this temporal cartography that action is without reaction’.

4. How, though, to reconcile this idea of a kind of autonomous, spontaneous expression with the problematic of sustainability, which is usually understood as continuity over time? Here, I find, lies one of the central questions of organization as it relates to the culture of networks. I will spend the rest of this talk elaborating some of the core features of organization, network cultures, politics and the social practice of translation. My hope is that in doing so, aspects of both The Blue House and Out of the Blue might be illuminated in ways that open up the possibility of sustainability understood as the translation of resonance across time and space. Such a proposition does not assume time as continuity, but rather continuity through discontinuity and multiplication that marks the culture of networks. I will return to this idea at the end of my talk, and just say for now that the distributive, social capacity of networks is key to their sustainability over time.

[read rest of paper below]

‘Organized Networks: Questions of Politics, Translation and Time’ [Keynote Address], Out of the Blue: Instant Urbanism, Hospitality and History, The Blue House, Amsterdam, 3-8 August.

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Abstract
The return of political ontology and its critique of representation contribute to a retrieval of the antagonistic registers of “the political.” A corresponding interest in processes of collaborative constitution has explored alternative modalities of the (conflictual) production of (political) subjectivity. Because such efforts necessarily attend to the status of a principle of the actionable, this essay suggests that the question of a “beyond” as it relates to a politics of the actionable calls for a conceptual elaboration of “organized networks.” The essay argues that a broader analytical perspective is opened by reengaging the practice of translation.

Keywords: organization, networks, non-representational politics, collaboration, translation

Zehle, Soenke and Rossiter, Ned. ‘Organizing Networks: Notes on Collaborative Constitution, Translation, and the Work of Organization’, Cultural Politics 5.2 (2009): 237-264.

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Abstract
In 2003, the concept of precarity emerged as the central organizing platform for a series of social struggles that would spread across the space of Europe. Four years later, almost as suddenly as the precarity movement appeared, so it would enter into crisis. To understand precarity as a political concept it is necessary to go beyond economistic approaches that see social conditions determined by the mode of production. Such a move requires us to see Fordism as exception and precarity as the norm. The political concept and practice of translation enables us to frame the precarity of creative labour in a broader historical and geographical perspective, shedding light on its contestation and relation to the concept of the common. Our interest is in the potential for novel forms of connection, subjectivization and political organization. Such processes of translation are themselves inherently precarious, transborder undertakings.

Keywords: precarity, Fordism, regulation school of economics, translation, creative labour, political organization, borders, networks, the common, new institutions

Neilson, Brett and Rossiter, Ned. ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception’, Theory, Culture & Society 25.7/8 (2008): 51-72.

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[text forthcoming in special issue of Television & New Media on 'MyMedia Studies'.]

Sociality is always immanent to institutional arrangements. This was the analysis of Althusser and later Foucault. The state, family, school, prison, hospital, madhouse. During the time of Western modernity, as it is commonly understood, we can add the firm, the union, the university. Foucault’s tendency was to see these institutional fields as technologies of discipline. My interest is to consider technologies of invention. What institutional form might such technologies assemble? What are the conditions of their emergence? What are the technics of governance that distinguish new institutions from their modern counterparts? How do they connect to other institutions and what is their economy? What is the relation between the construction of the common—understood as processes of translation constituted through struggles of labor—and its differential potential or multiplying affects?[1] And how might this relation constitute a new institutional form?

In the past few years, I have been co-developing the political concept of “organized networks” in an effort to think the possibility of new institutional forms immanent to the culture of networks. My curiosity is how social-political organization within networked settings might be understood in terms of the invention of new institutional forms. Along with the influence here of the work of Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno and insights gained from the history of operaismo more broadly, there is also a debt to medium theory, particularly the work of Canadian political economist and communications theorist Harold A. Innis. Collaborative practices within network cultures can be understood in terms of formation and form. Formation corresponds with the processual relations through which expression emerges. Form, on the other hand, furnishes the contours of expression as it subsists within the social-technical dynamics of digital media. How these relations coalesce as distinct networks situated within and against broader geopolitical forces becomes a primary challenge for networks desiring scalar transformation—a movement that also consists of trans-institutional, disciplinary, subjective and corporeal relations whose antagonisms define the multiple registers of “the political.”

Trans-institutional practices are practices in translation. Neither linguistic equivalence nor “co-figuration” (Sakai 2006), translation is understood “as a mode of social praxis rather than a mode of epistemological mapping” (Solomon 2008). The process of invention is a practice of translation. Translation is the common from which methodological iterations emerge. As an assemblage whose spatial and temporal coordinates undergo constant transformation, the relation between inside and outside is subject to processes of translation. We are always in translation. This is the differential potential of the common.

The problem of translation across and within a network of networks becomes one of the key difficulties for transnational collaboration. An organized network is one that instantiates the political in the moment of transversal engagement with seemingly antithetical institutional forms: the state, the firm, the NGO, the union, the university. It is through such confrontations that the temporal rhythms and spatial coordinates of a network are made most clear. The tensions that ensue in this transversal encounter constitute new subjectivities.

Within the porosity of institutional borders subsists a potential for new economic interventions. The question of economic autonomy is a key issue for organized networks, and is a matter that has to be taken seriously. The social-technical endeavors in institution formation might operate as what Fabian Muniesa and Michel Callon (2007) term “economic experiments” that shape the construction of markets. The communication of relations between emergent institutional forms and their invention of markets is underscored by the technics of mediation.

Mediation, in turn, is registered in the following key ways: systems of governance, rituals and materialities of practice, discourses with uncertain borders and technologies of collaborative constitution. The arrangement of these elements produces new territories for potential exploitation by capital. The political and economic challenge is to produce interventions into markets that enable economic resources for experiments in organizing networks and living wages for participants. How, for instance, might resources created within any particular network be adapted and recombined by another? Not only are there distinct linguistic-cultural differences that delimit one network from another. To recast Virno, there is also the grammar of networks to consider: socialities of communication, formats of code, techniques of governance, materialities of investigation, etc.

Spatial distributions and temporal rhythms further complicate the capacity for networks to undergo scalar shifts. The network-institution nexus is not one that corresponds with what Mary Kaldor (2003) and Chantal Mouffe (2005) loosely term “global civil society” networks. The singular qualities of network cultures underpin my contestation with political theorists invested in reinvigorating democracy as we know it. I have serious doubts about persisting with models of democracy, especially when they are simplistically grafted on to the Internet. E-democracy? No thanks. Given that representative models of democracy frequently correspond with modern institutions of the nation-state—institutions arguably in crisis—I continue to wonder how appropriate the burden of democratic theory is to describe the political culture of embryonic institutional forms within networked settings. My preference is for a non-representational politics constituted through relations rather than procedures. This poses significant challenges for the governance of networks, and the way these are handled play out on a case by case basis.

It would be too crude to say neoliberalism generates new institutional forms. But if precarious labor and life are the norm, and not the exception, then it follows that the institutional spaces of precarity subsist as the common within a neoliberal or post-Fordist condition (Neilson and Rossiter 2008). So how to explain the social impulse to invent new institutional forms at the current conjuncture? Why now, in other words? In many ways the type of institutions I am speaking of are internal to the logic of capital. Certainly, it would seem they cannot exist outside of neoliberalism. By way of conclusion, I wonder if the incessant peer-to-peer drive to collaborative production—exemplified most starkly by the advent of web 2.0 and social networking sites—is not symptomatic of capital’s quest for new economies of scale that minimize the cost of labor. Perhaps the invention of new institutional forms needs to be accompanied by a reassertion of wage labor and modes of collectivization. Maybe that will be the specter that comes to haunt neoliberalism and its Will to Outsourcing.

Notes
1. This definition of the common draws on Mezzadra and Neilson (2007). See also Neilson and Rossiter (forthcoming 2008).

References
Kaldor, M. 2003. Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Cambridge: Polity.

Mezzadra, S. and B. Neilson. 2007. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Unpublished paper.

Mouffe, C. 2005. On the Political. London and New York: Routledge.

Muniesa, F. and M. Callon. 2007. Economic Experiments and the Construction of Markets. Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Markets. Eds. D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa and L. Siu. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 163-189.

Neilson, B. and N. Rossiter. (forthcoming 2008). Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception. Theory, Culture & Society.

Sakai, N. 2006. Translation. Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2-3): 71-86.

Solomon, J. 2008. Re: A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits of Collaboration. Posting to edu-factory mailing list, 23 January. Retrieved 28 July 2008 from http://listcultures.org/pipermail/edufactory_listcultures.org/2008-January/000129.html.

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Earlier this year the edu-factory organizers invited me to comment on the passage from hierarchisation to autonomous institutions. Indeed, I think it appropriate to maintain the connection between hierarchy and autonomy. This constitutive tension is apparent in the political economy and social-technical dimensions of both open source and proprietary software that provides the architecture for communicative relations. And it manifests on multiple fronts in the modalities of organization that attend the creation of autonomous spaces and times of radical or alternative research and education projects, experiments and agendas. There is no absolute autonomy, but rather a complex field of forces and relations that hold the potential for partial autonomy, or ‘the difference which makes a difference’ (Bateson). How to move and direct such complexities in such a way that make possible autonomous education is what I understand to be the program of edu-factory.

And in such guidance – a combination of collective investigation and top-down decision-making – one finds the movement between hierarchy and autonomy. This is a matter of governance for networks. Protocols come in to play, and dispute, disagreement and alliance shape the culture of networks in singular ways. At the technical level there are some near universal features of networks: TCP/IP, location of root-servers according to the geo-politics of information, adoption of open source and/or proprietary software, allocation of domain names, etc. But as the debates around the UN’s World Summit on the Information Society (2003-2005) amply demonstrated, it quickly becomes analytically and politically implausible to separate the technical aspects of information from social and cultural conditions. Autonomous education that makes use of ICTs will always be situated within a geography of uneven information. Hierarchies will always prevail.

The possibility of transnational collaboration that aspires to autonomous education thus becomes a problem of translation, as Jon Solomon and others have discussed in rich ways on this list. There will be no ‘construction of an autonomous global university’. How, then, might autonomous education initiatives engage in scalar transformation in such a way that makes transnational relations possible? This seems to be the ambition of the edu-factory. But what is the desire for transnational connection? Why not keep things local, rooted in the geographies of the city, neighborhood or village? Who is the subject of, let us say, not a global but transnational education project that resides sufficiently outside the corporate university?

Part of the brilliance of the edu-Summit held in Berlin last May was to finally break with the anti- or alter-globalization cycle of staging protests according to the diary of the WTO, G8, etc.[1] Autonomy begins with invention that is co-emergent with conflict, crisis, frustration, curiosity, depression, wild utopian desires, boredom, etc. The sites of conflict are multiple: individual, institutional, social/collective, corporeal, affective, ecological, cultural, disciplinary, geopolitical, governmental, etc. Underscored by heterolingual tensions and incommensurabilities, the edu-factory organizers’ call for and presupposition of ‘the realization of our collective project’ is nothing short of complex (a problematic acknowledged by edu-factory organizers and participants). But one needs to take care not to allow complexity to displace the conflict that takes place in occupying a line or position. This is the space of the political.

What is the situation of autonomous institutions? Paolo Do: ‘Talking about an autonomous university is to find a starting-point to attack and to occupy the spaces belonging to the enemy’.[2] Such an approach is a reactionary one if it is to be reduced to a takeover, say, of the institutional spaces of the university. The conservatism in such a move lies in a responsive mechanism determined by the space and time of ‘the enemy’, or hegemonic institution (the university as we know it). To simply occupy the spaces of the enemy is to repeat the failure Foucault saw of revolution: the end-result is a reproduction of the same. This amounts to a reformist agenda and, in the case of the transformation of universities over the past 20 or so years, succeeds in the production and proliferation of managerial subjectivities.

There are, however, different registers of occupation, and I will assume this to be the interest of Paolo. A good example can be found in the case of domestic workers in Hong Kong and their invention of new institutional forms that arise through the practice of occupation. The potential for commonalities across labouring bodies is undoubtedly a complex and often fraught subjective and institutional process or formation. The fractured nature of working times, places and practices makes political organization highly difficult. Where this does happen, there are often ethnic affinities coalesced around specific sectors – here, we are thinking of examples such as the ‘Justice for Janitors’ movement in the U.S., a largely Latino immigrant experience of self-organization.[3]

In Hong Kong, domestic workers gather on Sundays within non-spaces such as road fly-overs, under pedestrian bridges and in public parks. The domestics are female workers for the most part, initially from the Philippines with a new wave of workers in recent years from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.[4] And as cultural critic Helen Grace notes, ‘there are also mainland migrant workers with limited rights, working in all sorts of low-paid jobs, moving backwards and forwards and living with great precarity’.[5]

The domestic workers transform the status of social-ethnic borders by occupying spaces from which they are usually excluded due to the spatial and temporal constraints of labour. Sunday is the day off for domestic workers, and they don’t want to stay at home, nor do their employers wish to have them about the house. The Norman Foster designed headquarters for HSBC bank located in Central district nicely encapsulates the relation between domestic workers and capital and the disconnection between state and citizen. This bank is just one of many instances found globally where the corporate sector makes available public spaces in the constitution of an ‘entrepreneurial city’.[6]

Yet the actions of undocumented workers mark a distinction from the entrepreneurial city and its inter-scalar strategies of capital accumulation in the form of property development and business, financial, IT and tourist services. With a first floor of public space, workers engage in praying and study groups reading the Koran, singing songs, labour organization, cutting hair and dancing while finance capital is transferred in floors above the floating ceiling of the HSBC bank. Used in innovative ways that conflict with or at least depart from how these spaces usually function, there is a correspondence here with what Grace calls a ‘horizontal monumentality’, ‘making highly visible – and public – a particular aspect of otherwise privatized labour and domestic space’.[7]

Not described in tourist guides and absent from policy and corporate narratives of entrepreneurial innovation and development, the domestic worker is a public without a discourse. For many Hong Kong residents their visibility is undesirable, yet these workers make a significant contribution to the city’s imaginary: their visibility on Sundays signals that the lustre of entrepreneurialism is underpinned by highly insecure and low-paid forms of work performed by non-citizens. The domestic worker also instantiates less glamorous but nonetheless innovative forms of entrepreneurialism. An obvious example here consists of the small business initiatives such as restaurants, deli’s and small-scale repairs and manufacturing that some migrant workers go on to develop, making way for new intakes of domestic workers in the process and redefining the ethnic composition of the city. Such industriousness provides an important service to local residents and contributes in key ways to the social-cultural fabric of the city.

The competition of urban space – particularly the use of urban space – by the domestic worker also comprises an especially innovative act: the invention of a new institutional form, one that we call the ‘organized network’. The transnational dimension of the domestic workers is both external and internal. External, in their return home every year or two for a week or so – a passage determined by the time of labour and festivity (there is little need for domestics during the Chinese New Year). External, in their return home every year or two for a week or so – a passage determined by the time of labour and festivity (there is little need for domestics during the Chinese New Year). Internal, with respect to the composition of the group itself. In this case, there exists ‘a multiplicity of overlapping sites that are themselves internally heterogeneous’, as noted by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson in their posting to the list.[8] Here, I am thinking of the borders of sociality that compose the gathering of domestics in one urban setting or another – as mentioned above, some choose to sing, engage in labour organization, hold study groups, etc. Ethnic and linguistic differences also underscore the internal borders of the group.

Can the example of domestic workers in Hong Kong be understood in terms of a transnational organized network? I suspect not. The domestics only meet in particular times and spaces (Sunday in urban non-spaces). Such a form of localization obviously does not lend itself to transnational connection. Perhaps NGOs and social movements that rally around the conditions of domestic workers communicate within a transnational network of organizations engaged in similar advocacy work. But if this is the case, then we are speaking of a different register of subjectivity and labour – one defined by the option of expanded choice and self-determination.

In this sense, we can identify a hierarchy of networks whose incommensurabilities are of a scalar nature: local as distinct from transnational. For domestic workers, much of this has to do with external conditions over which they have little control: Sunday is the day off work, exile from their country of origin is shaped by lack of economic options and the forces of global capital, their status as undocumented or temporary workers prevents equivalent freedom of movement and political rights afforded by Hong Kong citizens, etc. But within these constraints, invention is possible.

Part one of this second round of discussions on the edu-factory mailing list identified many of the conditions at work that shape the differential experience of labour and practices of education. How to make the transition to institution strikes me as the task now at hand.

Notes
Parts of this text are drawn from a forthcoming article: Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception’, Theory, Culture & Society 25.7 (2008).

1. Summit: Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture, Berlin, 24-28 May, 2007, http://summit.kein.org

2. Paolo Do, ‘Open University’, posting to edu-factory mailing list, 14 January, 2008, http://listcultures.org/pipermail/edufactory_listcultures.org/2008-January/000113.html

3. See Florian Schneider, ‘Organizing the Unorganizables’, 2002, http://wastun.org/v2v/Organizing_the_Unorganizable

4. See Nicole Constable, ‘At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns’, Cultural Anthropology 14.2 (1999): 203-228 and Lisa Law, ‘Defying Disappearance: Cosmopolitan Public Spaces in Hong Kong’, Urban Studies 39.9 (2002): 1625-1646. [both articles available online - do a search]

5. Helen Grace, personal email, 15 January, 2008.

6. See Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, ‘An Entrepreneurial City in Action: Hong Kong’s Emerging Strategies in and for (Inter-)Urban Competition’, (no date), http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/digitalfordism/fordism_materials/jessop.htm

7. Helen Grace, ‘Monuments and the Face of Time: Distortions of Scale and Asynchrony in Postcolonial Hong Kong’, Postcolonial Studies 10.4 (2007): 469.

8. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor’, transversal (2008), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en.

English version of: ‘Una gerarchia di reti? ovvero, reti geo-culturalmente differenziate e i limiti della collaborazione’, in edu-factory collective (eds) L’università globale: Il nuovo mercato del sapere, Roma: Manifestolibri, 2008.

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