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Urgent Aphorisms: Notes on Organized Networks for the Connected Multitudes

22-Oct-09

[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! More…

Translating the Indifference of Communication: Electronic Waste, Migrant Labour and the Informational Sovereignty of Logistics in China

30-Sep-09

[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 More…

  1. A parallel can be found here with Schumpeter’s logic of ‘creative destruction’, where failure becomes the source of renewal in the reproduction of capital. The prospects for a politics of refusal within such a system become extremely depressing in so far as it is unlikely to do much more than reinforce the power of the hegemon. Such a scenario returns us, yet again, to the core question: what is politics?
  2. See Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. See also Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. David Macey, London: Allen Lane, 2003 and Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, edited by Michel Senellart, trans. by Graham Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Winter Camp 09: From Weak Ties to Organized Networks – Ideas, Reports, Critiques

14-Aug-09

By Gabriella Coleman, Geert Lovink, Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle

Winter Camp 09 Visions
Wherever we look, there is a Will to Network. In most areas of the (post-)industrial world, networks are becoming a ubiquitous feature – of life, work and play. If they can – and are allowed to – teenagers spend hours texting, blogging, dating, chatting, twittering and social networking. In fact, the network addiction transcends age and cultural barriers, with business men and women hooked to their CrackBerries (Presidents too!) and older folks texting away on buses. Garbage men in the Chinese city of Ningbo check out commodity prices of waste copper from their mobiles each morning. Activists organize transnational campaigns online. Web 2.0 companies profit from the free labor and attention provided by the networks of users. More…

Organized Networks: Questions of Politics, Translation and Time

13-Aug-09

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.

Organizing Networks: Notes on Collaborative Constitution, Translation, and the Work of Organization

16-Jun-09

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.

The Digital Given – 10 Web 2.0 Theses

16-Jun-09

By Ippolita, Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter

0. The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession. As an indifferent bystander it doesn’t lend itself easily as a revolutionary tool. The virtual has become the everyday. The New Deal is presented as green, not digital. The digital is a given. This low-key position presents an opportunity to rethink the Web 2.0 hype. How might we understand our political, emotional and social involvement in internet culture over the next few years? More…

Urban China – Counter-Mapping Creative Industries (Special Issue)

18-Jan-09

Special Issue: Mónica Carriço, Bert de Muynck, Ned Rossiter (eds) ‘Creative China: Counter-Mapping the Creative Industries’, Urban China 33 (November, 2008).

Designed by Hendrik-Jan Grievink

This issue of Urban China sets out to critique and redefine the idea and practice of ‘mapping’ the creative industries. Foregrounding the experimental process of collaborative constitution, we are interested in the multiple idioms of expression that make creative industries intelligible beyond the blandness of policy discourse. Activist researchers, artists and writers in Europe, Brazil and India have been particularly inventive in combining collaborative techniques of production with social-political critique via media of communication. We see this work as part of the prehistory and global dialogue around how to create new spaces and transdisciplinary knowledges able to negotiate the complexities and politics that attend the economization of culture.

Screen shots of section introductions.

Chinese with select texts published in English

Full and downloadable issue here.

It may be possible to order copies from here, though the issue has sold rapidly and is in limited supply.

Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception

18-Jan-09

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.

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 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? More…

A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits of Collaboration

27-Nov-08

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. More…

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Organized Networks by Ned Rossiter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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