[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.34In the real and proper non-place of spectacle, there is still the possibility, thehope, of a common good.To channel this positive possibility against it, againstthe communicative capitalism that produces, reinforces, and relies on it, is thetask for politics.And this politics will not be given; rather, it will have to beconstructed through a complex and multileveled politics of articulation, struggle,and representation.AcknowledgmentsI m grateful to Kevin Dunn, Paul Passavant, and Lee Quinby for comments on aprevious draft of this paper.Notes1.I take the term  communicative capitalism from Paul Passavant, who used itduring our discussion on a panel on Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2000) at the 2001 meeting of the Law and Society Association in Budapest.Iowe many of the points raised in this paper to our three years of discussing,THE NETWORKED EMPIRE 287teaching, and writing about Empire.Any mistakes are thus his.References toEmpire are given parenthetically throughout the text.2.See Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-FirstCentury, trans.James Newell (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1989).For anexcellent account of autonomist Marxism and information technologies, see NickDyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-TechnologyCapitalism (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999).3.For a critical examination of various notions of what an information society mightbe, see Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (London: Routledge,1995).4.Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,1996), 32.5.See Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of theInformation Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1996), esp.54 57, 90 93.6.See Jodi Dean, Publicity s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), chap.3.7.Castells, Network Society, 32.8.As Dyer-Witheford makes clear, the restructuring of work brought about byinformatization is part of a devastating attack on the worker.Systems ofcomputerized flow control, he explains:permit management to sever the solidarity of the assembly line by cuttingit into competing  work teams supplied by robot servers, shrinking thelabor force, and in some cases approaches the  lights out scenario of fullyautomated factory production.The strategic advantage afforded capital bythis disaggregation and downsizing is then reinforced bytelecommunications systems that permit the centralized coordination ofdispersed operations, making feasible the transfer of work from hot-spots ofinstability either to domestic  greenfield sites uncontaminated by militancyor to offshore locations.(78)9.Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: The New Press, 1998),143 145.10.For more elaboration, see my argument in Publicity s Secret.11.Castells, Network Society, 469 478.Castells writes:  Networks are openstructures, able to expand without limits, integrating new nodes as long as they areable to communicate within the network, namely as long as they share the samecommunication codes (for example, values or performance goals)&.Sincenetworks are multiple, the interoperating codes and switches between networksbecome the fundamental sources in shaping, guiding, and misguiding societies(470 471).12.See Nick Dyer-Witheford,  E-Capital and the Many-Headed Hydra, 129 163, andBrian Martin Murphy,  A Critical History of the Internet, 27 45, both in CriticalPerspectives on the Internet, ed.Greg Elmer (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield,2002).13.This double determination of the content of spectacle is itself spectacularly under-determined [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]