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 […]
Category Archives: Translation
Networks, Institutions, Translation
27-Nov-08[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 […]
A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits of Collaboration
27-Nov-08Earlier 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 […]
