[abstract]
If the basic political problem during industrial capitalism and Fordist society was physical control of labour force in definite places like the factory and its (biological) protection in the Welfare State, in the knowledge society this problem is how to govern and control a labour force that is mental, immaterial and communicative and exists only as knowledge in time. To control boundless, amorphous and restless mind, modern capitalism needs to occupy its whole environment.
Jussi Vähämäki, Ephemera, Controlling the Multitude
The constitutive political problem in the knowledge society or knowledge economy is basically the same as it was in the industrial capitalism: how to govern, organize and control the labour force. What has happened in the last decades is that the concept of labour force has lost more and more of its physical and biological aspects. It has detached from its specific uses or ends and become, paraphrasing the famous expression of Marx, a real abstraction. Today, the labour force is primarily a mental category. And it is impossible to organize, control and locate mind through the place it belongs to and thorough the deeds it does. The mental labour force does not have strict spatial and temporal (linear) coordinates. This forces contemporary capitalism to develop new kinds of tools (that) characterize the digital era: tools of mind (John Zysman). These new tools focus directly on the elementary faculties of humans and not on their performances or products. New tools of mind are developed to increase the efficiency of the elementary faculties of the human mind and to control the use of these faculties. As tools of mind they have to respect the abstract reality of the human mind, its spatial boundlessness and its temporal endlessness (nonlinearity). They have to be abstract, but at the same time these new tools have to have real efficiency to guide and control action and reasoning. This article takes the concept of commonplace as a model to the new tools of mind and tries to unfold some of the basic aspects of this linguistic real abstraction in the knowledge economy and the mystical interconnection it has with the sensibly-concrete that counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general.
[excerpt]
The vagueness of knowledge production means that the arkhe of organizing in contemporary economy is deficit of information. It is from this deficit of information that the new methods of organizing and controlling work and production grow in contemporary society. Using the expression of Gilles Deleuze, they do not mould action, but they model it. This means that new tools of the mind are basically mimetic or imitative in their nature.
Control is exercise of power as a mental attitude which has become public opinion. It is not at all necessarily disciplinary or, as Gilles Deleuze says:
Highway is not a means to hold anyone in place, but by building more highways the means of control become multiplied. I am not saying that this is the only purpose of highways, but they may be driven endlessly and .freely. without never becoming held up, and still you are all the time in total control. (Deleuze, 1989).
The problem with mimetic or mass behaviour is fundamentally the deficit of information. It is impossible to control and guide mimetic behaviour with such traditional means as information or fear. What is needed is a persuasive technology that can change what people believe and what they do in a way that no one knows exactly why she believes in this or behaves in that way.
The modern media system or knowledge society grows from the crisis of
transmitting information (and not from the information glut).
For the clearest political definition of the concept [of the multitude], see Virno (2002). Virno’s little book is one the best analyses of the significance of the concept and the clearest summing up of its different aspects. Negri says in his interview book Il ritorno that the concept of multitude has different meanings: First a philosophical and positive: The multitude is a multiplicity of subjects...The multitude is an indivisible multiplicity, an infinite quantity of points, a differentiated set, absolutely differentiated. (2003: 139). Secondly .the multitude is a class concept: the class of the productive singularities, the class of the workers of the immaterial labour.
A class that has no unity, but that despite of that is the ensemble of the creative powers of labour. Third aspect: the multitude is a ontological power. It incarnates a dispositive that has a capacity to potentialise the desire and transform the world. Or better still: it wants to create the world as its own image. (2003: 140-141).
When mind or spirit turns out to be the main target of governance use and user instead of production and producer seem to dictate the future of society. The passage from society of producers to the production of society has its echoes on different levels of contemporary society. It is possible to discern symptoms almost everywhere. Cynicism, greediness and opportunism are prevailing emotions and transform other people and the world into mere objects for use.
The new middle class and society of services save us from class-conflicts. In
philosophy and cultural studies critique of metaphysics and ontology dominates
at the same time as people live one of the biggest revolutions in their
everyday life, in their habits, and are in desperate need of depth and
perspective to orientate themselves in the world.
پنجشنبه، آبان ۰۷، ۱۳۸۳
they continue to look back
Jussi Vähämäki, Ephemera, Controlling the Multitude
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Check this out for another take on MultitudeThanks for the link to this issue of Ephemera!
پاسخحذفdear friends,
پاسخحذفfollow the link above and find the link to full text of hardt and negri's empire.