Brian Holmes's blog

Periodization, again

Brian Holmes — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 18:46:49 +0000

Here's the difficulty I have with Kondratiev waves: it really seems to take two waves to create a complete cycle. What Perez calls a "technological style" actually unfolds over two Kondratiev waves. Between the two there is a regulation crisis with some kind of "successful" resolution (although it is very hard to call WWII "successful"); and then at the end, a kind of chaotic period during which the technological style begins to change.

Here is Perez's basic thesis, first stated in a 1983 article in the journal Futures:

“We propose that the capitalist system be seen as a single very complex structure, the sub-systems of which have different rates of change. For the sake of simplicity we can assume two main subsystems: on the one hand a techno-economic, and on the other a social and institutional, the first having a much faster rate of response. The long waves would be successive phases in the evolution of the system, or successive modes of development. The root cause of the dynamics of the system would be the profit motive as generator of innovations, understood in the broadest sense as a way of increasing productivity. Each mode of development would be shaped in response to a specific technological style understood as a paradigm for the most efficient organization of production.”
[...]
"A structural crisis (ie the depression in a long wave), as distinct from an economic recession, would be the visible syndrome of a breakdown in the complementarity between the dynamics of the economic subsystem and the
related dynamics of the socio-institutional framework. It is, in the same movement, the painful and conflict-ridden process through which a dynamic harmony is reestablished among the different spheres of the total system."

http://carlotaperez.org/papers/scass_v04.pdf

The problem is, Perez never makes it clear that the "technological style" unfolds over TWO waves. Yet if you look in the article above at her discussion of the way that Fordism emerged during the Third Kondratiev, it is clear. In fact, she begins with a discussion of Taylor's organizational innovations at Bethlehem Steel in 1898-1901. So the technological style originates directly with the key capital-goods industry of the Third Kondratiev, namely steel. After the regulation crisis of the 30s and its successful Keynesian resolution, it then expands from capital goods (Marx's Dept. 1) to a vast range of consumer goods in the Fourth Kondratiev. In this sense, the "technological style" of factory mass production extends from the late 1890s all the way to the early 1970s (with plenty of residual effects in our time, for sure).

What this gives you, I think, are three major technological styles and three corresponding regulation crises:

--Steam power and railway development - with innovation by individual inventor-entrepreneurs under the organizational form of the joint-stock company - begins in the 1830s and produces significant results in the 40s, followed by the crisis of 1848 and then a long period of development (Second Kondratiev). During this mature phase, craft-based manufacturing (and in the US, the so-called "American System of Manufactures") provides the basis of mass employment.

--Mass manufacturing - with national innovation systems under the organizational form of the vertically integrated corporation - begins in the first decade of the 20th century and produces significant results by the 20s, followed by the institutional crisis beginning in '29, then a long period of development in the postwar period (Fourth Kondratiev). During this mature phase, assembly-line factories provide the basis of mass employment, with a major expansion of the middle strata for management, engineering, research, social services etc.

--Informationalism - with a transnational open-innovation system under the form of the networked enterprise - begins in the 70s and produces significant results by the 90s, followed by the institutional crisis which begins in 2008. If the crisis is resolved, the information-based technological style could expand (nano-bio-cogno, health and ecological services) and produce the Sixth Kondratiev. What's missing now is exactly what the new wave would supply, a basis of mass employment and a new role for the educated middle strata.

For me, the above periodization finally works. In this scheme, the five historical Kondratiev waves each have their own key technologies and their own upswing and downswing, but waves 1, 3, and 5 are all marked by the rollout of a new capital-goods sector, while 2, 4, and potentially 6 would give the new technological style a basis in mass prosperity. The currently declining wave, number 5, has already produced a lot of prosumer technology (the PC is comparable to the ModelT! and Steve Jobs is the Alfred P. Sloan of the Fifth Kondratiev!) but the new productive technology and the networked organizational form has totally destroyed the former social basis of capitalism in the advanced economies. Mass prosperity was on credit-drip life support till 2008 and has now collapsed. The working classes have been destroyed in the core countries and therefore, the middle-managerial classes too.

I would have some further remarks about how the decline of British hegemony influences the Third Kondratiev, and how the decline of American hegemony influences the Fifth, but that's for another day.

best, Brian

So what will the 6th Kondratiev look like?

Brian Holmes — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 15:28:01 +0000

Industrial investment at the end of the Great Recession will likely be in the new generation of robots, used in both manufacturing and distribution.

John Markoff's wide-ranging article in the New York Times is more convincing to me than the many reports claiming that a new manufacturing paradigm based on 3-D printing will emerge in the upcoming decades. Not to say those printers won't change things; but people won't be able to make highly specialized items in their basement. They will get them from distant factories and the new robots will both make them and play crucial roles in delivery. A new employment crisis will contribute to social unrest and neoliberlism can't deal with it except through repression. I think this new wave of automation, widely reporte in the last couple of years, is a key piece of the central technopolitical question: Which new machines will emerge from the "stalemate in technology"?

Markoff's article is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-c...

He quotes a new book entitled "Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy." Long quote below. That book can be downloaded (probably for a short time only) from this address:

http://filepost.com/files/41167md9/0984725113Race_Against_The_MachineB.rar/

You need an Epub reader for that (FBReader is in the repos of Ubuntu 12.04).

Quote:

"We wrote this book because we believe that digital technologies are one of the most important driving forces in the economy today. They’re transforming the world of work and are key drivers of productivity and growth. Yet their impact on employment is not well understood, and definitely not fully appreciated. When people talk about jobs in America today, they talk about cyclicality, outsourcing and off-shoring, taxes and regulation, and the wisdom and efficacy of different kinds of stimulus. We don’t doubt the importance of all these factors. The economy is a complex, multifaceted entity.
"But there has been relatively little talk about role of acceleration of technology. It may seem paradoxical that faster progress can hurt wages and jobs for millions of people, but we argue that’s what’s been happening. As we’ll show, computers are now doing many things that used to be the domain of people only. The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications. Perhaps the most important of these is that while digital progress grows the overall economic pie, it can do so while leaving some people, or even a lot of them, worse off.
"And computers (hardware, software, and networks) are only going to get more powerful and capable in the future, and have an ever-bigger impact on jobs, skills, and the economy. The root of our problems is not that we’re in a Great Recession, or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring. Our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind. So it’s urgent that we understand these phenomena, discuss their implications, and come up with strategies that allow human workers to race ahead with machines instead of racing against them."

"The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy"

Brian Holmes — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:01:43 +0000

While in China I read an extremely significant book about the development of the world-economy in the neoliberal period, by the expatriate Chinese economist Minqi Li.

I had read the title article and thought the book was reducible to that, but I was wrong. True, the guy is a world-systems theorist, who begins from the basic observation that capitalism, unlike the hydraulic empires of old, is a world-economy without a world-government, that it is based on interstate warfare, imperial plunder and unequal exchange, and that it has gradually destroyed and absorbed the old empires (such as the former "Middle Kingdom"). These and many other ideas are pure Wallerstein; and when well deployed, they are very convincing. Minqi Li's grasp of this theoretical framework and his ability to express it succinctly are excellent. But he is also a Tiananmen veteran, with a lived experience of complex struggles. And that adds something fundamental.

As the events of 1989 unfolded he understood that Chinese intellectuals, demonstrating for liberal freedoms, and Chinese workers, supporting them for social rights, were not standing in the same shoes or on the same ground. According to the way he sees it, the former became the managers of Deng's neoliberal reforms while the latter got shot in the streets, before being sacked from the state owned enterprises. Li, who had been trained in Chicago School economics like his peers, spent two years in prison (apparently for advocating free-market principles!) and there he read Marx, Mao, Arghiri Emmanuel and others. He has gone on to become a major figure of the Chinese New Left, and now, to make what I think is a decisive contribution to world-systems theory.

Wherever Wallerstein declines into vague approximations and rhetorical conclusions, Li produces precise statistics and original analyses, whether on the relations between social classes and the regional hierarchy of states, on the conditions underlying the regain of corporate profit in the 1990s-2000s, or on the geopolitics of capitalist expansion since the 1980s. His strongest point, however, is to fully integrate the data on climate change into political economic theory, and to draw the at once sober and necessarily exorbitant conclusions from that integration. For Li, the destructiveness of capitalism has been proven by the world wars of the mid-twentieth century and it will be proven again, this time absolutely, by the consequences of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. He believes that, given the much higher degree of access to knowledge and organizing capacities that the expanded working classes now enjoy, there is some possibility of a socialist world-government emerging to coordinate a draw-down of the failed industrial-capitalist economy in the mid-21st century, as extreme conditions begin to necessitate extreme solutions. Of course he believes this with the deep lucidity and keen awareness of other possible outcomes that such a study as his own must inevitably produce.

More specifically on American decline, Li does not see any corresponding "rise" of China to a new hegemonic position. He doesn't think the expansion of the Chinese economy is sustainable, either technically, environmentally or socially, nor does he believe that the Chinese can achieve a military or cultural hegemony equalling that of the US in the 20th century. Based on the good reasons he gives for these judgments, I would say that one can expect a major social crisis in China sometime soon, consequent on either drought, famine, surging inflation, energy shortage or most likely, some simultaneous combination of the four. Perhaps this crisis will even be provoked by the current Chinese response to the still-unfolding crisis of overaccumulation. That response is a massive, debt-fueled, state- and city-orchestrated building campaign, a "spatial fix" on an unprecedented scale, which replaces the loss of Western consumer markets by the construction of immense new urban developments which appear to my eyes totally unsustainable, too big to supply with energy, clean water, clean air, and above all (from a capitalist viewpoint) inhabitants wealthy enough to pay the enormous costs of forcing such a wager to work. What happens if even authoritarian rule cannot keep this new spaceship up in the air? The resolution of THAT crisis will be decisive for the next fifty-year period, since Obama's America has lost its chance to imprint any direction whatsoever on world affairs, and indeed, seems increasingly likely to decline into Japanese-style economic stagnation.

The question, of course, is whether the Chinese state could resolve any major crisis directly affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of inhabitants? Can the party - or the people - acting perhaps with some Latin American encouragement, open a new era of green capitalism, as a prelude to a socialist world-government? Or is it more likely that an intensification of police-state neoliberalism will spread around the world, as it has done incipiently since 2001, outpacing the socialist turn that began in Latin America around that same time? Li does not deal with these questions. There is some important work to be done in his wake, I would say.

Li, Minqi. 2008. The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy. Pluto Press.

The book is available for download here (sign up first, it's worth it):

http://aaaaarg.org/text/19996/rise-china-demise-capitalist-world-economy

For more on the "spatial fix," this New York Times article is very good:

http://tinyurl.com/china-overbuild

Continental Drift through the Pampa

Brian Holmes — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 04:05:43 +0000

Recently I and Claire Pentecost went on an artistic research trip in Argentina with local collaborators. What we call a "Continental Drift." This was a perceptual encounter with the productive processes of a country subject to intense neoliberal restructuring. Hopefully next year we will do more collaborative research in a public seminar context in Buenos Aires, both to define Argentina's position as a hi-tech agro-exporter within Neoliberal Informationalism, and to contribute in some small way to the political breakdown of that hegemony, which is being actively sought by many on the official Argentine left. In the meantime you can read the one post I wrote in English during the experience:

http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/this-way-to-the-port

Three Crises: 30s-70s-Now. A self-organized seminar at Mess Hall in Chicago.

Brian Holmes — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 03:48:09 +0000

Here is the outline of an autonomous technopolitics course which I plan to co-teach next fall with a Chicago collective. The focus is on US conditions but it's meant to have use-value for everyone involved, whether close or afar. Significant comments will result in changes to the outline. Selected readings and a full bibliography will eventually be added.

*****

GOALS: The seminar program seeks to develop a framework for understanding the present political-economic crisis and for acting against and beyond it. Historical study is integrated with militant research and artistic expression. The program is a first step toward a self-organized university, including Internet resources for sharing research notes and reference materials.

FORMAT: Eight two-part sessions, each four hours long with a half-hour break in the middle. The first part of each session will be a course delivered by Brian Holmes, with readings that may be done in advance or afterwards. Each installment of the course will be accompanied by another presentation, screening, artistic event or organizing session offering some parallel to or resonance with the material; these are developed by a collective working group. Readings will be posted on the web and full course notes as well as reference materials will be made available immediately after each session. Distanced participation or parallel sessions in other cities are welcome.

CONCEPT: The development of capitalism is marked, every thirty or forty years, by the eruption of extended economic crises that restructure the entire system in organizational, technological, financial and geopolitical terms, while also affecting daily life and commonly held values and attitudes. In the course of these crises, conditions of exploitation and domination are challenged by grassroots and anti-systemic movements, with major opportunities for positive change. However, each historical crisis has also elicited an elite response, stabilizing the worldwide capitalist system on the basis of a new integration/repression of a broad range classes, interest groups, genders and minority populations (whose definition, composition and character also change with the times). In the United States, because of its leading position within twentieth-century capitalism, the domestic resolution of each of the previous two crises has helped to restructure not only national social relations, but also the international political-economic order. And each time, progressive demands that emerged from the crisis period have been transformed into ideologies covering a new structure of inequality and oppression. By examining the crises of the 1930s and the 1970s along with the top-down responses and the resulting hegemonic compromises, we will cut through the inherited ideological confusions, gain insight into our own positions within neoliberal society, identify the elite projects on the horizon and begin to formulate our own possible agency during the upcoming period of instability and chaos

SESSIONS:

1. Introduction: technopolitical paradigms, crisis, and the formation of new hegemonies.

We begin with a theoretical look at more-or-less coherent periods of capitalist development, known as technopolitical paradigms. During twenty to thirty-year periods, technologies, organizational forms, national institutions and global economic and military agreements all find a working fit that allows for growth and expansion, up to a limit-point where the paradigm begins to encounter conditions of stagnation, internal contradiction and increasing crisis. Autonomist Marxism helps us understand the dynamics of grassroots protagonism during the crisis periods. To grasp the mechanisms whereby systemic order is recreated, we can draw on Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as the construction of a set of discourses and practices that articulate the behaviors of the diverse classes, in order to secure their consent to a new social hierarchy. Hegemony is first achieved at the national level; but when its formation is successful it spreads throughout world society. The ingredients of a hegemony are moral, aesthetic, philosophical and epistemological; but these abstract categories of thought and imagination soon become intertwined with economic practices and institutional forms. Hegemony is the force of desire and belief that knits a paradigm together and sustains it despite manifest injustices.

2.Working-class movements and the socialist challenge during the Great Depression.

This session describes the emergence of Fordist-Taylorist mass production in the United States, then turns to economic and geopolitical conditions following the Crash of ‘29. We follow the interaction between labor movements and socialist/communist doctrines, while examining the major institutional innovations of the Roosevelt administration. Can the 1930s be understood as a “regulation crisis” of assembly-line mass production? What are the forces that provoked the crisis? Has the “New Deal” become an idealized figure of class compromise for succeeding generations? What does it cover over?

3. The Council on Foreign Relations during WWII and the US version of Keynesian Fordism.

Only after 1938 was the economic crisis resolved through the state orchestration of innovation and production, effected by wartime institutions. Corporate leaders from the Council on Foreign Relations were directly inducted to the Roosevelt government and planned the postwar monetary and free-trade order enshrined in the Bretton-Woods agreements. How was the intense labor militancy of the 1930s absorbed into the Cold War domestic balance? To what extent did the American experience shape the industrial boom in the Keynesian social democracies of Western Europe and Japan? How were the industrial welfare states supported and enabled by neocolonial trade and resource extraction?

4. The ‘60s revolts, Third-World self-assertion, stagflation and the monetary chaos of the ‘70s.

The brief convergence of labor movements, student revolts and minority rights campaigns in 1968 was a global phenomenon, spurred on by Third World liberation and the struggle in Vietnam. Wildcat strikes, entitlement claims and the political imposition of higher resource prices (notably by OPEC) were all key factors in the long stagnation of the 1970s. We examine the breakdown of Bretton-Woods and the conquest of relative autonomy by Western Europe and Japan, along with the Third World push for a New International Economic Order; we also look at the fear and anxiety that the '68 revolts produced in ruling classes across the world. Does the US internalize global economic and social contradictions during this period? Which aspects of the social and cultural revolts posed real obstacles to the existing economic structure? Which ones became raw materials for the formation of a new hegemonic compromise?

5. The Trilateral Commission and the transnational hegemony of Neoliberal Informationalism.

The launch of the Trilateral Commission by Nelson Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973 is an elite response to the crisis, with concrete political effects: some twenty members of the Commission were named to the Carter administration in 1976. During the decade the coming of “postindustrial society” was announced by sociology, while technoscientific innovations like the microprocessor went into production. Cooperation among trilateral elites was paralleled by financialization, the rise of networks, the creation of transnational futures and options exchanges, etc. However, the Treasury-induced US recession of 1980-82, the “Star Wars” military buildup and the emergence of a new innovation system are specifically American contributions to the new technopolitical paradigm that takes shape in the US in the 1980s, before going global after 1989. So we have to understand the difference and complementarity of Republican and democratic responses to the crisis (the right-wing Heritage Foundation was also founded in 1973). What are the defining features of Neoliberal Informationalism? Who are its beneficiaries – and losers? How is the geography of capitalist accumulation transformed by the new hegemony? What sort of commodity is transmitted over the electronic networks? And what does it mean to be a consenting “citizen” of the trilateral state-system?

6. BRIC countries, counter-globalization, Latin American and Middle Eastern social movements.

With the breakdown of the USSR in 1989, followed by the first Gulf War, the world-space is opened up for transformation by the trilateral economic system. The 1990s witnesses the largest capitalist expansion since the postwar industrial boom, driven by Neoliberal Informationalism. The global boom of the net economy was supposed to be synonymous with "the end of history” and the universal triumph of liberal democracy – but that soon hit the dustbin. After tracking the expansion of trilateral capitalism we focus on the economic rise of the Gulf states and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), as well as the political currents of the counter-globalization movements, Salafi Jihad, Latin American Leftism and finally, the Arab Springtime. Do these diverse economic and political assertions mark the end of the trilateral hegemony and the reemergence of a multipolar order?

7. Financial crisis, climate change and elite attempts to stabilize Neoliberal Informationalism.

Here we examine the inherently volatile dynamics of the informational economy, culminating in the Asian crisis of 1997-98, the dot-com bust of 2000 and finally, the credit crunch of 2008 and the ongoing fiscal crisis of the neoliberal state. The central product of Neoliberal Informationalism now reveals itself to be the financial derivative. Little has been done in the United States to control finance capital, but the debt crisis has massively punished the lower ranks of society and seriously eroded the status of the middle classes, with a major attack on the public university system and a move to cut all remaining welfare-state entitlements. What is the significance of the bailout programs? How have the European Union and Japan faced the crisis? What paths have been taken by the Gulf states, and above all, by China? Is contemporary economic geography now changing? Do we see the beginnings of new alliances among international elites, outside the traditional arenas of trilateral negotiation?

8. Perspectives for egalitarian and ecological social change in the upcoming decade.

In the absence of meaningful reform and redistribution, continued financial turmoil appears certain, along with a reorganization of the monetary-military order. Meanwhile, climate change is already upon us, advancing much faster than previously anticipated. The result of all this is unlikely to be business as usual. What we face is a triple crisis, economic, geopolitical and ecological, with consequences that cannot be predicted on the basis of past experience. Can we identify some of the central contradictions that will mark the upcoming years? Which institutions and social bargains have already come under severe stress? In what ways will the ecological crisis begin to produce political responses? How will class relations within the United States interact with crossborder and worldwide struggles? Is it possible to imagine a positive transformation of the current technopolitical paradigm?

The Stalder/Holmes debate on technopolitics

Brian Holmes — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 21:02:27 +0000

This continues the series of "Three nettime posts on the Egyptian Uprising." Felix launched this debate by suggesting that the fall of Mubarak was the end of the process of eliminating outmoded central-planning and dictatorial state-forms that started in 1989. I proposed it was beginning of the breakdown of a 30-year attempt to stabilize the new conditions of globalization. The discussion then shifted onto technopolitical ground in the posts below, as I tried to describe the paradigm of neoliberal informationalism and Felix sorted out what he would and would not accept in that description. This pushed me to finally accept (in a slightly modified form) the idea that the current crisis is a regulation crisis of informationalism. Great debate!

FS:

On Wednesday February 9 2011, Brian Holmes wrote:

> We think there is a link between financially driven globalization,
> just-in-time production, smart-weapons warfare and the rise of the
> Internet: all of that begins in the early 70s, starts to develop
> seriously in the 80s and comes to a peak in the late 90s and early
> 00s; and it's all associated with changes in organizational forms,
> media, cultural values, even the very definition of money. In short,
> it's a different paradigm.

Well, the question is, what kind of links? If I read you correctly, these are the some of the dimensions that make up the paradigm you call informationalism, and if one goes down, the other go as well. The revolt in Egypt then is just the latest sign of the whole edifice unraveling, aka the beginning of the end.

I'm not sure I can follow you here.

First, I don't think the revolts in the Arab world are a product of the financial crisis, or, even react to the same underlying structural problems. I think they react to different things: a combination of the rise in food prices (relating to a real degree to global warming issues, e.g. Russia not exporting any grain due to record droughts last summer and Egypt being the world's biggest grain importer [1]), corrupt and sclerotic regimes way past their time, and empowered youth thanks to digital technologies. The regimes are sclerotic not because they are run by very old men, but because they embody structures that are outdated and cannot reform themselves to a new environment. We saw this happening in Russia and its periphery and now we are seeing happening again in Arab World. It's perhaps not a co-incidence that Mubarak was trained as an air force pilot in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, a time when Arab nationalism was left wing. This is why I compared it to Berlin 1989, not because I think the outcome of these uprisings will be the same.

I think it would be a analytical mistake not to account sufficiently for the degree to which major institutions can lag behind other currents in society (most importantly, the economy and civil society) and the fact that several logics can and do co-exist on different levels at the same time. And geo-political arrangements are certainly among the most complex forms of governmental institutions so there is no surprise that they can outlive the conditions that produced them for a long time, at least in certain areas, such as the middle east. This why I see this as the end of the end.

Second, I don't think the things in the quote above are in the same category, thus they should not be lumped together even though they are linked. Let me explain. In my view, informationalism is an particular organizational paradigm that enables to combine flexibility and scale at previously unmanageable levels of complexity, based high-speed, high-volume information flows. It does not relate to a particular political or economic program. Financial globalization is one way to implement this organizational capacity to achieve particular economic and political ends. Just-in-time production is another, but also the rise of a global civil society, the alter-globalization movement, the global criminal economy and whatnot. They all belong together because they implement this organizational paradigm and some of its basic values such as diversity, flexibility and networking. Still, they are not a solid edifice where one element depends on the other. Rather, they comprise a mess of competing agendas and power struggles.

So, unless you are talking about "de-growth" and real subsistence economy, you will be stuck within the informational paradigm. Personally, I think this is a good thing, because it's informationalism that allows to ggregate people's intelligence in new ways and create new kinds of (post-representational) politics. Parts of that are played out in central Cairo. So, rather than seeing this as the peak of the paradigm, it's the very paradigm triumphing yet again over the previous, obsolete one.

Felix

[1]
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/agr_gra_whe_imp-agriculture-grains-whe...

******

BH:

On 02/09/2011 09:02 AM, Felix Stalder wrote:

> rather than seeing this as the peak of the [informational] paradigm, it's the very paradigm triumphing yet again over the previous, obsolete one.

Felix, your view is the intuitive one, which sees the hoped-for collapse of the Mubarak regime as a consequence, more or less, of the freedom to communicate: in a situation made tense by rising food prices, liberal informationalism finally exerts its effects. I don't have any argument with that as far as it goes, but my counter-intuitive view looks into the future and asks, What could this springtime of the Arab world mean for geopolitical alignments based on the hegemonic role of the US, not only as a military power but as the society which has defined the current "information era"? Responding to my post, Charles Turner makes the point that "fortunately, the people of Egypt don't have to assimilate all of this to know what to do." Still, everyone including the Egyptians will have to assimilate a basic change in the geopolitical order, equivalent in magnitude to the one that took place after 1989, if such a change does in fact occur. That's what seems so fascinating to me in the present!

I do disagree when you say that "informationalism is a particular organizational paradigm that enables to combine flexibility and scale at previously unmanageable levels of complexity, based high-speed, high-volume information flows. It does not relate to a particular political or economic program." The reason I disagree is simple path-dependency: that organizational paradigm DID relate to a particular political and economic program, which responded to an historically particular kind of crisis, namely the one of the 1970s. Eactly this is what gives a specific character to a period. In addition to the general decline in corporate profitability, the key factors of the crisis of the seventies were the self-assertion of resource-providing "third world" countries (such as Vietnam, the OPEC group, Iran); the uncertainties brought by floating exchange rates after the breakdown of Bretton-Woods; and domestic pressure for a more open, less repressive and materialistic society. The response ultimately produced a characteristic set of relations between financialization, just-in-time production and what's usually called "the revolution in military affairs." Now, I am not trying to say that information technology can't be used for other things (global civil society among them). But I am trying to say that a certain form of stability and order, however repressive and environmentally damaging, has been characteristic of the age in which information technology became the mainstay of the world economy, and I really think that is what should be called informationalism. Funny enough, this is exactly the way Manuel Castells sees it in what I think is his best book, The Informational City (1989). He defines informationalism not just as an organizational paradigm but as a full-fledged and specific mode of development:

"Modes of development emerge from the interaction between scientific and technological discovery and the organizational integration of such discoveries in the processes of production and management... The transition between modes of development is not independent of the historical context; it relies heavily on the social matrix initially framing the transition, as well as on the social conflicts and interests that shape the transformation of that matrix. Therefore, the informational mode of development will emerge from the interaction between its technological and organizational components, and the historically determined process of the restructuring of capitalism."

For Castells, this emergence of informationalism as part of economic restructuring clearly occurred under US hegemony. He goes on to talk about the shift from the "urban welfare state" to the "suburban warfare state," detailing Reagan's historic increase in defense budgets devoted to information technologies (Star Wars). In his analysis, military investment became the driver of ICT development in the eighties. Quite interestingly, the USA's first joint military production project with Israel was in the mid-eighties, and it was for a tactical drone, which the Israelis had started working on after the Yom Kippur War. With real insight into what was going on, Castells writes:

"The political crisis suffered by the American state both domestically (Watergate) and internationally (Vietnam; Iran; the erosion of its political control in Africa and Central America; increasing economic and technological competition from new powers, particularly Japan; strategic parity achieved by the Soviet Union in the arms race) called for a state of emergency in which the greatest power on earth would flex its muscles to show, in a responsible yet determined manner, that it was ready and willing to engage in sharp confrontations to preserve its status and power. Business interests, both in the US and internationally, redeploying themselves on a planetary scale in the aftermath of the crisis, welcomed this newfound resolution in the leader of the free world, both for its symbolic value and for its global practical concerns."

Castells must have often thought of this sentence while the great coalition for the first Gulf War was being assembled in 1990, in the immediate wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He was right: America was definitely making a bid to guarantee the stability and security of the world-system for the tremendous period of capitalist expansion that was to follow. And it was doing so with smart bombs and laser-guided missiles in the Middle East.

The historical relation between financialization and the spread of networked technologies seems obvious to me: not only in the tech boom of the 1990s, when capital was raised and allocated by the financial markets for the cabling of the entire planet; and not only in the tremendous expansion of the financial markets that this global installation of IT allowed, till the point where by mid-2008 you had a notional $683 trillion of derivatives contracts circulating around in a seemingly infinite electronic financial sphere. Finance also mattered culturally: the dematerialization of labor, the slosh of funny money in the job markets and the expressivity allowed by a personalized media system absorbed most of the lingering middle-class complaints about the repressiveness of American society, at least for a while. In addition to that, the really amazing thing has been the development of just-in-time production (originally used by Toyota for automobiles) into a modus operandi for globalized industry and distribution, under the new name of "global supply chain management." The biggest corporate database is now Wal-Mart's (70 terabytes). Global supply chain management is what allowed the almost complete delocalization of the US low- and medium-tech manufacturing sector, through the creation of the mysterious bicontinent "Chimerica," or what's also called "Wal-Mart world" (and of course I agree with Joseph Rabbi, this was done by Western corporate elites who are the real yellow peril). Now, all that forms a densely interrelated complex of capital expansion, a "mode of development" as Castells would say. The question is, what's gonna happen as that mode of development goes into crisis?

The financial meltdown is a serious contradiction, because it was the networked financial system (first currency futures, then through a vast panoply of derivatives) that made global just-in-time production possible, by offering insurance against the fluctuation of exchange rates in the post-Bretton Woods currency system. The dates on this are very precise: the Reuters Monitor, which is the first networked trading platform, came out in 1973, and networked finance has grown exponentially ever since, all the way to today's high-frequency trading. Nothing serious has been changed in this system since the meltdown, so its wild gyrations will continue to throw the whole globalized economy into danger. Another, even more extreme contradiction is climate change, intensified by massive industrial development of just-in-time globalization: that's a central factor in the current spike of food prices, and it will get worse, creating havoc in a world where food production is totally commodified and everyone depends on the global market to eat. Then, a third contradiction is that with the transnationalization of US hegemony, the formerly "domestic" resistance to oppressive practices goes global as well, facilitated by IT. The combination of all this instability produces an outright geopolitical crisis: a potential change in the whole structure of US military alliances in the Middle East. Are we not looking at a possible transmutation of the military-informatic-financial mode of development that emerged in the US in the 1980s, and then went on to play the central structuring role in the post-1989 world system?

The US has thrown in its stake with repressive Arab regimes (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi etc) because they apppear to guarantee the flow of oil while accepting to coexist with the great American ally in electronic warfare, Israel. The military fear is now destabilization of the region, refusal to stand idly by at the next Israeli invasion of Gaza or Lebanon, and possible war on a large scale. But America loves to focus on this kind of military fear, because that is how it has built up its linchpin role in globalization. What actually seems more likely to me is a democratization of the region, spurred by the demands of people who have been cut out of global development, with attempts to overcome some of the inequalities and allow people to engage in more productive activity. Yet to the extent that the US goes on supporting Israel and Saudi, it clearly cannot shape this transition. What you see in Latin America, East Asia and now the Arab world, is a serious decline of hegemonic influence. This can only bring a deep reconfiguration of social relations, including the relations to information technology and its associated organizational forms.

By 1989, Castells, Harvey and others were able to explain in detail the shift from the Keynesian Fordist industrial economy to Neoliberal Informationalism. Good for them. What's more difficult is to try to look from a position within the current crisis and see the beginning of the end of the technopolitical paradigm of Informationalism. I think it's worth trying to do this, because it's almost sure that the generations growing up in these tumultuous years are going to be part of deep technological, social, cultural, geopolitical and ecological change. In short, they will face the conditions of a paradigm shift. Hopefully they will be able to guide it in a more positive way than the last time around, where the hopeful and generous revolutions of 68 ultimately helped produce neoliberalism and financialization (but some other good things too: the global civil society you mentioned). When you look at it from a world perspective, these years since the financial crisis of 2008 have been incredibly agitated, and this is only the beginning. Big things will happen and great things can be achieved. May the Egyptian people -- including the young leftists who helped spark this revolution -- find fulfillment on their path to a more just and more egalitarian society.

utopistically yours, Brian

*****

FS:

Dear Brian,

it took me a while to absorb this. I agree with you as far as the three main crises are concerned and the exceptional challenges they pose to the US (and, in to a lesser degree, Europe and Japan): financialization (compensating for the loss of productive capacity with credit, allowing to hide rising social inequality and ignore demographic challenges), climate change (necessitating the reorganization of global energy flows) and the transformation of hegemony (shifting from a center/periphery structure into a network that internalizes everything).

What I still don't agree with you is the characterization of informationalism and its supposed inherent path-dependencies. The concept of 'mode of development' only make sense in conjunction with the concept of 'modes of production'. One is a techno-organizational, the other is a political paradigm. One is about means, the other is about ends. Of course, historically, they are always deeply intertwined, because it is the end that produces the means.

Joseph Weizenbaum realized in the mid 1970s that the techno-organizational transformation where actually stabilizing the political system, rather than challenging it:

“Many of the problems of growth and complexity that pressed insistently and irresistibly during the postwar decades could have served as incentives for political innovation....Yet, the computer did arrive ‘just in time.’ But in time for what? In time to save--and to save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize--social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them. The computer, then, was used to conserve America’s social and political institutions. It buttressed them and immunized them, at least temporarily, against enormous pressure for change.”

Yet, the context of their invention does not determine their development, let alone their use. The Internet was initially developed by the military, but it's no longer a military technology.

I think it is necessary to separate Keynesianism from Fordism (or more generally, industrialism), and neoliberalism from informationalism. Historically, Fordism has been a mode of development in a variety of political systems, one of them being Keynesisan capitalism, but also in Soviet statism (to use another of Castells expressions), where it was oriented towards very different political ends.

The same thing is with informationalism. Its emergence is connected to the political transformations of the late 1970s and 1980s, that is, the transformations of capitalism, which were essentially about preserving its core features. But the resulting neo-liberalism is not the only political system that can embody. China, it is my suspicion, makes very different use of capacities of informationalism, it's certainly not neoliberal.

Thus, when I speak of the role of social media in the Egyptian revolution, I'm not a starry-eyed web2.0 enthusiast claiming Facebook will set you free. What made the revolution 'liberal' are the universal aspiration of freedom, democracy, individual dignity expressed by the people. Zizek is quite right about this. The exactly opposing values are advanced by global jihadists, who are using the informational paradigm for their ends.

There is a relationship between informationalism and political dynamics, but it's much more open. And, finding ways to act within the contemporary macro-transformations is exactly about articulating this openness. Otherwise, we have wait for the full crash before anything new can happen.

Felix

*****

BH:

Hi Felix,

This exchange has been extremely interesting for me, it has caused me to think in detail and revise my ideas, so I thank you, what a pleasure.

The quote from Weizenbaum is great (gotta read that book someday). Indeed the deployment of radically new computer tech in order to keep entire patterns of governance the same would seem to be what has happened with the national power complex. Yet I agree with you, the Internet as we know it (TCP/IP, an extremely open, unformatted protocol) has and continues to be a game-changer with respect to the hierarchical controls of what Keith Hart is calling "national capitalism." Information technology enables new organizational forms, new public spaces, new political tactics and strategies. If we pursued the argument over "informationalism" it would be purely semantic, and what's in a word? The interesting thing is what's happening now, the transformation of those controling structures.

As you write:

> I think it is necessary to separate Keynesianism from Fordism (or more
> generally, industrialism), and neoliberalism from informationalism.

This seems to be the key, and I'll add a twist that might make it even more persuasive. It has always been puzzling to me that leftist circles have so easily taken to the term "Fordism" to designate the post-WWII boom, despite the fact that Ford's great invention came in the 1910s. Within twenty years, Detroit, one manufacturing center, was producing some 2/3 of the world's cars, exporting them across the earth. A huge transformation had already occured during Ford's own lifetime. So why call the postwar system by this antiquated term, Fordism? History geeks who have read James Beniger's great book The Control Revolution know that the auto industry is no isolated case: the assembly-line mass-production revolution had been gathering steam (and electricity, and petrol) in both Germany and the US since the close of the 19th century, i.e. since the Great Slump of the 1880s. Yet there was a crisis, 1929, the Great Depression. As you have gathered, I think this kind of crisis is fundamental. For a decade or more it disrupts everything, socially, industrially, geoplitically. It marks a paradigm shift. But what does that mean, a paradigm shift? Does it change everything?

When talking about the postwar period, I always say "Keynesian Fordism." And I think of it as *at once* a new paradigm, in social, industrial, geopolitical and many other terms, *and* as a stabilization of the tremendous productive energies unleashed by the techniques of assembly-line mass production. The postwar boom brought order after a period (1890s-1940s) which also constituted a long wave of development, but one that was marked by intense and violent disruptions. It was stabilized, within the developed countries at least, by the Cold War balance and the welfare-state constructions. Now, just to be precise, I actually think Keynesian Fordism is a variety of state capitalism, and in that sense, while there are obviously differences of kind between the US cybernetic/military Keynesianism, the European social-democratic flavors, and the Soviet formula of central planning (and don't forget the Japanese MITI green-tea variety either), nonetheless I think all these constitue a broad worldwide paradigm or range of paradigms which emerges as the resolution to what you might call the "regulation crisis" of the assembly-line mass production system. This, by the way, is also what Alex Foti thinks, in his text on "The Grid and the Fork" published on nettime some years ago; and you find similar ideas in the work of different thinkers across the political spectrum, Carlota Perez being a notable one on the techno-financial-geeky side of things. Yet most of these versions (maybe not Alex's) are too simplistic, and the techno-financial ones are far too rosy.

For years in the late 1990s and then disturbingly, for way too many years after the bursting of the New Economy bubble, the ambient discourses stressed only the breakthroughs of the new informational toolkit. Because of that overemphasis, I've oriented a lot of my research over the last five or six years to the actual political-economic conditions in which that toolkit came together with other societal factors to form a very unstable paradigm, one which is actually founded on various sciences of crisis-management. I'm talking about neoliberalism, or neoliberal informationalism. I do think this kind of paradigm formation is the technical meaning of the term "mode of development" which Castells borrows from the Regulation School economists: it refers to the ways in which a technology set and its associated organizational forms are intergrated into other social, institutional, economic and political dynamics, so as to achieve a relative balance and make things predictable for at least twenty or thirty years. But again, let's not worry too much about semantics. What I'm trying to say is that I agree with you: what is coming into crisis now is the neoliberal form given to informationalism, which so far has decisively shaped the major deployment of the computer/network toolkit and has overdetermined most of its functions (look at finance, logistics, biotech, surveillance, weaponry, e-commerce, all the sectors in which informationalism has been put into major production). But this has not closed off all the doors, not by any means. On the contrary, what we have seen since the Asian Crisis of 1997-98 revealed the dead-end of neoliberalism, is a rising tide of contestation taking many different forms, most of which are somehow centrally enabled by the computer/network toolkit. One example of that enabling role can be found in the Egyptian revolution that has just happened: but as our friend Armin Medosch argues, it is still human beings, and not computer networks, who play the central role. Hopefully we will learn more about how this revolution was done, very soon.

So what our conversation makes me see much more clearly is that the current crisis is something like the regulation crisis of informationalism. This has to be faced in its fullest implications. Because of the fact that informationalism in its neoliberal form has been so tied up in the maintenance of the US-centered power system, this regulation crisis could involve a huge nasty shooting war, or a series of wars, or a period of global civil war (as we already have at low intensity) or many other unsavory outcomes, including lots of dark police-state stuff. Keith Hart makes that point very clearly in his last brilliant post. However, as Keith points out, this crisis could also involve extremely positive things, like the exploration and use of the democratic potentials of networked communications, and also the inventive potentials of a debate across borders and continents, the two of which together are at the heart of any positive outcome to this crisis of the uses of information. Such an outcome has to make equality rhyme with ecology: that is the only way to avoid the kind of "descente aux enfers" that we saw in the 20th century.

People all around the world are longing for access to the fruits of technical progress, the fascinating and engaging pleasures of cosmpolitanism, and the satisfaction of seeing the members of their own national, linguistic or religious communities rise out of poverty and enter a brighter future. The wealth has to be shared, the access to productive activity has to be shared. At the same time, the whole world is heating up with the acceleration of capitalistically oriented technical progress, and this negative dynamic, like the surveillance/warporn complex, works against the positive ones. You can see that so clearly in China, where, despite the best efforts, the huge deployment of industry creates the kinds of ecological disasters that we already have in North America and Europe. You can feel it in Korea, where in the spring and the fall, people wear face masks against the sandy wind that blows across the ocean from the breakneck industrial development of northern China. And this kind of environmental abuse originated in Europe and especially in the United States, where we are still facing the same things: Halliburton everywhere, they're drilling in the backyard, poisoning the water. Just-in-time is too much, too fast, with no thought for the future. A whole universe of ideas that accompanied the development of informationalism, namely the ecological side of the various versions of complexity theory, has been largely abandoned under the neoliberal paradigm. There is tremendous cooperative work to be done in order to surmount the dissolution of that paradigm and find new pathways toward the peaceful, egalitarian and ecological development of the constructive and destructive energies unleashed by informationalism. This is what intellectuals and artists and scientists can contribute, along with all kinds of other people, in the upcoming years. Let's bring some flowers to the Arab Spring.

Thanks again for so many ideas -

Brian

PS - For bibliography on the version of neoliberalism that has developed in China, in terms of ownership structure, labor markets, citizens' rights, entrepreneurialism, corporate involvement, trade patterns and cultural forms, see the footnotes in my text "One World One Dream."

Three nettime posts on the Egyptian uprising

Brian Holmes — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 04:29:06 +0000

English

Technopolitics

Egyptian uprising; crisis

1. A comment on a Hernando de Soto article in the Wall Street Journal:

Thanks for this, Patrice:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870435870457611868391303288...

De Soto's analysis is striking and the problems he reveals are part of what needs to be addressed. One area where neoliberals a la Hayek have been right is that the self-organization of individuals and small groups is more effective than attempts at total state planning of production and distribution. The problem is they draw from that an ideology of abolishing the state, while in reality the state reshapes itself to favor the self-organization of... huge corporate oligopolies whose first rule of business is 'don't let anyone else into the market.' As I understand from reading, the most ever done to help Egypt's rural poor was land redistribution (with or without ownership title, I am not sure) under the socialist Nasser. To help poor people in the Middle East and elsewhere overcome basic problems, we need to forge a new conception of the state as an enabler of everyday life and not as a driver of corporate growth. Failing this, the Middle East is set to become the ground zero of a world war marking the end of American hegemony.

Right now there is a food crisis in the world, which I am sure no one on this list has noticed except maybe in a few specialized articles. But people in Tunisia and especially Egypt have noticed it, to the point where many think it is a proximate cause for the uprisings (not of course the only one, far from it). Food availability is an issue of global well-being (a better concept than global security). To achieve it requires the suppression of commodity speculation and the provision of emergency funds on the global scale, the way bail-out funds are provisioned except, of course, only a tiny percentage of such funds would be needed. However, none of that essential stuff is gonna work in any country where the state does not facilitate individual and above all, community self-organization, not just so that money can change hands but so that vital needs can be met and communities can flourish.

Can capitalism as we know it today deliver such a solution? De Soto's implication is that it would, if we just allowed its true nature to shine through. Reminds me of the arguments about really-existing communism. What we see with really-existing capitalism is the intensification of global oligopolies on the one hand, and the maintenance of oppressive regimes in the name of order and stability, on the other. With Israel armed to the teeth and marauding sadistically every year, with Iran developing a nuclear bomb, with Hezbollah showing the world how to organize both a victorious army and an effective solidarity system on the ground, and with the US pledged to intervene in favor of its key allies (Israel, Saudi Arabia), it is not even sure that a starving Egypt is required to set off the biggest war this world has seen since the 1940s.

Voices ask, rightly of course, what does the blather on lists like this really mean? They know it does not mean much. But we are all more or less intellectuals, of the organic kind that Gramsci described. What we need to do is to conceptualize and to demand a new kind of state. Techno-fetishism is over, it was never worth anything and it has played into the hands of the key producers of neoliberal ideology in the US and Britain. Rather than celebrating the prowess of technology in creating more or less failed revolutions, or alternately, moaning about one's inability to do anything except pointlessly blather, the thing to do is to create and demand an effective understanding of how we are going to survive the historical crisis that is opening up right now before our eyes, since the financial meltdown. You can do that, each one of you, in whatever functions you occupy as an organic intellectual, and not just in teaching or direct politicking. Because the threat is real. There is no one-off solution. We need a people-state, operating at different scales -- global, continental, national, territorial -- and allowing community self-organization for survival and cultural flowering.

warmly, Brian

2. Felix Stalder's post: The End of the End

The Al Jazeera stream has been running for the last week nearly
non-stop in my living room.

I'm reminded of Berlin 1989. Again, courageous people, highly
articulate and self-organized, are pushing aside a sclerotic regime
and its oppressive apparatus that threatened to swallow the future.
Just a few weeks ago the regime seemed to last forever. Suddenly, it
seems amazing that it lasted so long.

The similarities belie all talk about the 'facebook/twitter
revolution'. It's a true popular uprising, intelligent, peaceful,
using whatever is available to channel its own energies. Sure, the
means of communication are important. But, in the end, they are
secondary to the will to communicate.

But it seems appropriate to connect Berlin to Cairo for other reasons
as well. If the former stands for the beginning of the end of the cold
war geopolitical order, then Cairo could well stand for the end of
the end of that order. Many of the now crumbling dictatorships in the
middle-east managed to extend their lease on live within the American
empire by switching from anti-communism to anti-islamism, for the sole
purpose of keeping their privileged positions within periphery of the
empire. That bluff has been called now by the people.

Thus, it's perhaps only now that the 20th century is truly over. How
fitting it is, that this event is broadcasted not by CNN but by Al
Jazeera.

3. My reply: The Beginning of the End?

Felix's sense of an ending jibes with mine, but our reasons are so different that this cannot just be a comment. The Cold War military order ended along with the Keynesian-Fordist industrial paradigm way back in the 1970s. The crisis that is opening now (for the last three years) will spell the end of American-led, financially driven neoliberal globalization. Since that period can also be dubbed "Informationalism" I think does matter to nettime. The "immanent critique of the internet" is now talking place in the flesh on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria.

Beginning with the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the focus of global warfare and the principle justification for the gigantic national arms-manufacturing complexes shifted from Asia (which had occupied that role during the Cold War) to the Middle East. US defeat in Vietnam officialized the shift. Meanwhile, the stunning victory of Egypt in the 1973 Israeli-Egyptian War, coupled with the first oil embargo, brought about a new reaction in the form of a strategic alliance between national militaries, arms manufacturers and oil extractors that is now visible to all as the ugly fist of Anglo-American imperialism. We are talking about a shift from the Cold War atomic-weapons conflict to the hot wars all aimed at maintaining control over the dwindling oil of the Middle East. Felix is right to say that Islamism replaced Communism as the threat required to maintain this military-industrial-extractive complex. That shift occured in the period from 1979 (Iranian Revolution) to 1981 (Anwar Sadat's assassination, commonly attributed to the Muslim Brotherhood, but in fact done by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad now led by Ayman al-Zawahiri). With the monetary turn in the economy and the ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher, that same period marked the beginning of the financially driven political-economic formula of neoliberalism, which went global after the fall of the Soviet Union's hollow facade in 1989.

We all lived through the globalization boom in the 1990s, but most did not realize it was already marking the "financial autumn" (in Braudel's famous phrase) of the American Century. Some of us did: we watched the Asian countries react to the 1997 financial crisis by refusing any new Western loans and ramping up their exports; we followed the deliberate engineering of the property/derivatives bubble after the industrial expansion of the 1990s collapsed in the year 2000; we were not surprised by the scope and severity of the 2008 krach, because we were well aware it had started in the summer of 2007. From this perspective it appears that the American system - or at the very least, the neoliberal version of it - is now on the way out. But the process is only beginning.

Throughout the era of US imperial dominance, the central issue has been opening the markets of subordinated countries to American (and more broadly, Western) trade, on American terms. This began at least as far back as the late 1920s, when the Ford Motor Co. was producing around two thirds of the cars sold in the world. However, the pattern of trade changed decisively in the 1970s, when the US started running very serious balance-of-trade deficits in manufactured goods including automobiles. Many people thought THAT was the beginning of the end. Instead the US continued to ramp up its exports of high-end engineering, of services and immaterial goods of all kinds, of legal frameworks, scientific paradigms and managerial brainpower, and finally, most decisively, of financial flows, which it did not so much supply itself as coordinate, with the help of Tokyo and the City of London, via the new electronic networks. The fiber-optic cable laid in the 1990s permitted the raising and allocation of speculative capital all over the world, giving rise to the tremendous burst of urbanization and indeed, of industrial development, that we have seen in and around the major global nodes since the late 1990s. This financially driven globalization culminated with the entry of China to the WTO in 2001. And indeed, in China it shows its true face: authoritarian state capitalism, information without democracy. The utopia whose promise so many of us felt in the 1990s has reversed into a nightmare. It is not over yet - but a major crisis began in 2007, and by 2008 it was already clear that the crisis would be geopolitical. The unipolar system of globalization has fallen apart. What I call "continental drift" has begun in earnest.

How will world development be coordinated in 10 or 15 years? No one yet knows. But it is known that the great promise of informationalism aka financialization was a lie and a failure. One the one hand it has maintained and even worsened the harshest domestic inequalities (witness Egypt); and on the other, with the deliberate cultivation of the Islamist enemy, it has produced a new form of super-empowered, laser-guided warfare and a process of intensive global policing whose hallmarks are satellite surveillance and assassination by unmanned drones (classic information technologies). Since 9/11 both these developments have made the new-look American imperium even more unpopular than the old one. First Latin America peeled away from what had been called the "Washington Consensus" (Thomas Friedman admiringly called it the "golden straightjacket" but no one wants to put it on anymore). Then, in the wake of the 2008 crisis, China began to assert itself as a fully autonomous and sovereign industrial power. And now, the people in the Middle East can no longer stand to be held in a state of arrested development (if not outright arrest for the slightest critique of their American-backed regimes). But I am sure this is only a beginning.

We are now going to face 10 or 15 years of economic and military chaos, while a new geopolitical order is worked out and a new industrial order emerges to face, for better or worse, the challenges of an ecologically transformed planet. Will this period of chaos entail a great war involving atomic weapons and centered on the Middle East? Will it see the militarization of China? Will it see the continued hardening of the class structure in the Western societies, with the spread of personal-security technologies and the proliferation of sealed borders? Will it see the generalization of GMO farming and the consequent destruction of arable land all over the earth? Or can all these negative trends be halted, in the face of their evident dead-end nature for most of the world population? Will a new ecologically conceived toolkit emerge out of the ruins of financial globalization? Will world development patterns be changed so as to allow everyone, everywhere, to find meaning in their lives by participating in the caretaking of human society?

These are the questions and let us be glad they are now at last coming explicitly on the table. Crisis is welcome, it interrupts the business-as-usual that inexorably makes things worse. My friend and collaborator Armin Medosch is right to insist on the mass intelligence of the Egyptians acting courageously in the street right now: it is impressive, it is beautiful, and even as it marks the beginning of the end of Informationalism it realizes part of the promise of the knowledge economy that neoliberal management killed and abandoned: because listen, remember, the people on the streets are in fact known to many in Egypt as "the digital generation." That kind of intelligence, unfolding in many different forms and at different scales, is in my humbly visionary opinion what will provide the joy of the upcoming difficult years. What the "digital generation" has to invent is not the stiffening of a repressive hyper-technological order. What we have to invent, beyond what we used to think of as "ourselves," is a way through chaos, a way beyond repression, a way out of planetary hegemonies: a chance to coexist in the twenty-first century.

Do Containers Dream of Electric People?

Brian Holmes — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:20:51 +0000

This article is a first attempt to specify some technical and conceptual aspects of the productive process under Informationalism, and to cut through some of the ideology surrounding it. The text suggests the role of the imaginary both in enabling and potentially disabling this social form (i.e. the value-form as expressed in contemporary society); but it doesn't deal with the integrative processes. Some research on migrant labor struggles in the US intermodal and warehouse sectors is underway, so hopefully we will publish something on it soon. All comments welcome, changes can still be made. Thanks to Armin for the just-in-time critique on version 1.0.

DO CONTAINERS DREAM OF ELECTRIC PEOPLE?
The social form of just-in-time-production

The British sociologist John Urry has come up with an unusual idea: defining society by the ever-accelerating mobility of its members. To do this he proposes the concept of mobility-systems: “Historically most societies have been characterized by one major mobility-system that is in an evolving and adaptive relationship with that society’s economy, through the production and consumption of goods and services and the attraction and circulation of the labor force and consumers.... The richer the society, the greater the range of mobility-systems that will be present, and the more complex the intersections between such systems.”1 Urry devotes chapters of his book Mobilities to four infrastructural systems: pathways, trains, automobiles and airplanes. Interestingly, he suggests that these infrastructures are complemented by cultural systems serving to represent the movement of people and things, to communicate about it and to imagine its further possibilities. Yet strangely, in a book that gestures toward the concept of a technological unconscious, he says next to nothing about production and distribution. What's missing from his “mobilities paradigm” are container shipping and intermodal transport, with their associated representational, communicational and imaginary techniques. What’s missing is the social form of just-in-time production.

Like Margaret Thatcher, Urry believes that in the postnational era “there is no such thing as society.”2 He’s against what has been called the “container theory” of the social, which relies heavily on spatially bounded categories, reinforcing methodological nationalism.3 In Mobilities he refers to Foucault’s concept of governmentality, observing that “state sovereignty is exercised on territories, populations and, we may add, the movements of populations around that territory.” In contrast he insists on the increasingly transnational movement of populations, and claims that “such a ‘mobile population’ is immensely hard to monitor and govern.”4

Urry is an innovative sociologist, seeking patterns of emergent order in the vertiginous circulations of neoliberal globalism. At its best, his work reads like a kaleidoscopic register of contemporary life. However, like other complexity theorists describing the dynamics of open systems, he fails to take into account the powerful drive toward closure that inhabits all large-scale system design. Thus he ignores the determinant social form of informational capitalism – as though, entranced by mobilities that exceed the capture of the nation-state, he had fallen into the very unconsciousness that contemporary technologies impose.

How to awaken from electric dreams? In this text I will describe both the technical and the cultural dimensions of what is arguably the major mobility-system of our time: the distributional machinery of intermodal transport that circulates commodities through the global economy. The vector I will use to approach this far-flung system is an imaginary one: the artistic image.

Contained Mobility

Picture a video projection on the walls of a global museum (but it could also be your laptop, or an iPhone in the city). The video opens with the sound of a female voice against the background of a swelling sea. It then resolves into two contrasting scenes. On the left, the computerized view of a container port, showing ships at berth or in motion through the channel. On the right, a surveillance camera inside a container, where a robust-looking man in an orange shirt moves between the spartan furnishings of an improvised room (bed, desk, table lamp, maps on the corrugated wall). The scenes shift back and forth from screen to screen; the graphics change in content, granularity and focus. The man gets up, sits down, strides about, meditates, sleeps. His name is Anatol Kuis Zimmermann.

A scrolling text recounts his destiny: born in 1949 of a Belorussian mother and an ethnic German father who were deported to Siberia; childhood in Brest near the Polish border; university in Minsk; marriage, children, displacement of the family after Chernobyl; liberal, pro-European political activities and attempted migration to Germany. Thus begins an odyssey of deferral, transit and legal limbo, carrying this asylum-seeker through nearly every country in Europe. Life as a geography of refusal. The container, we are given to understand, is now his only home. As the off-screen voice explained at the outset, Anatol Zimmermann has “come ashore in an offshore place, in a container world that only tolerates the translocal state of not being of this place – not of any other really – but of existing in a condition of permanent non-belonging, of juridical non-existence.” He slips into his makeshift bed as a closing text appears on the left-hand screen: “Everything new is born illegal.”

The video by Ursula Biemann is entitled Contained Mobility (2004).5 It’s an extradisciplinary investigation, by which I mean an artwork that seeks knowledge of the world through a confrontation with technical operations and discourses. A crucial part of this search is the interview leading to the reconstruction of Zimmermann’s itinerary. But that’s classic documentary, and as such, it’s not even shown. Nor is the location of the container given. What makes the artwork so striking, and so useful for an examination of contemporary social relations, is the juxtaposition between the existential narrative of refusal and the abstracted imagery of global transport. One feels they are mirrors of each other. As Biemann notes, the visuality of the work is based in every respect on simulation: “None of the images of Contained Mobility document reality. Every image is an artificial construct: a simulated seascape, a visual rendering of digital data, a webcam set up for a staged scene. The video is a conceptual statement about a particular state of being in this world.”6

The question that emerges from the conceptual image is double. First, what materially constitutes “the translocal state of not being of this place”? And second, what is the relation between this displaced mode of existence and the representational techniques of computer simulation?

Logistical Living

Let’s try to answer that first question. Intermodal transport, a.k.a containerization, is based on three pillars: rigorous standardization of the box allowing for stackability in ships and transfer by specialized cranes to truck or rail; continuous traceability thanks to a machine-readable bill of lading; and finally, the ability to lock a shipment from initial departure to final destination. Locally standardized containers had been used for land and water transport since the late 19th century, but the onset of intermodalism dates to April 26, 1956, when Malcom McLean loaded 58 aluminum truck bodies onto a tanker named the Ideal-X for shipment from Newark to Houston.7 The water-to-wheels concept offered increases in speed and security as well as big savings on labor, all of which was recognized by the US government and the military, spurring a national standardization process that was ratified by the International Standards Organization in 1970. Deregulation of the US transport industry began around the same time, as a crucial component of the emerging neoliberal order; it was completed in all branches by the early 1980s. The rationalization of the docks broke the power of the longshoremen’s unions, historically the strongest and most internationalist sector of the labor movement.8 These developments smoothed the way for an integrated intermodal system that spread rapidly across the world, slashing freight costs and making logistics the key operational discipline of a globalizing economy. Given the military origins of logistics, it’s significant that the first big government contracts with McLean’s Sea-Land corporation were for war matériel to Vietnam. And it’s equally significant that Sea-Land’s wartime business became immensely profitable when McLean realized that the returning containers could be filled with the rising tide of manufactured goods from Japan.

The late 1960s saw the take-off of the Japanese economy, first in light consumer goods and then, after the oil shock of 1973, in fuel-efficient automobiles. Already the Toyota Motor Corporation had developed its system of continuous information flow between manufacturer and supplier, allowing for the delivery of custom-built parts in exact proportion to current needs without costly warehousing. The advent of containerization meant that “just-in-time” production could be extended to an entire East Asian maritime network including the “Four Tigers” of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea – a network that would ultimately recenter on coastal China.9 In the wake of Toyota’s success, just-in-time or “lean” production imposed itself on global auto-makers. It received wider attention through a best-selling industry study entitled The Machine that Changed the World (where “machine” refers not to a single device but to an integrated process).10 JIT is what made the world translocal. However, its adoption by Western corporations after 1989 turned it into something very different from the trust-based relations between manufacturer and supplier extolled by the venerable Mr. Toyoda. What emerged from the open markets of neoliberalism was a vast delivery system commanded by retailers engaged in a vicious search for the best possible price. And that turned out to be the “China price”: the lowest number on the planet for any category of basic manufactured goods.

By 2005, Wal-Mart imported some 350,000 forty-foot containers a year of manufactured goods. That’s almost thirty thousand tons per day, the majority from China.11 The containers pass through the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles before departing by rail to truck transshipment centers feeding warehouse-sized stores. Thus “the box” spawned “the big box” – and with it, a whole new science of supply chain management, whose effect has been to drive both prices and wages to rock-bottom levels.12 Though big-box retailing is most common in the USA, a list of global firms operating on the Wal-Mart model now includes “Carrefour, Aldi, Metro, Royal Ahold, Tesco, Ito-Yokado, Kingfisher, and IKEA, as well as Home Depot, Costco and Best Buy.”13 What began as a formula for automobile production has led to a world-wide rearticulation of industry, merchandising and consumption.

Since its origins in the early 1980s, supply chain management has become the obligatory model for globalizing businessmen, who adopt just-in-time principles as a logistical ethos for corporate existence. As a technical manual explains, “the footprint of the firm’s global facilities... for sourcing, research and development, production, distribution and retail sales, and the effective coordination and management of all flows between them (information, physical/product, and financial flows) become the major determinants of competitive success.”14 Marc Levinson, author of The Box, describes the effects such practices had on an American consumer icon as early as the mid-1990s: "Workers in China produced her statuesque figure, using molds from the United States and other machines from Japan and Europe. Her nylon hair was Japanese, the plastic in her body from Taiwan, the pigments American, the cotton clothing from China. Barbie, simple girl though she is, had developed her very own global supply chain."15

Logistics assembles the raw material of our lives. It is in this sense that everyone – not just Anatol Zimmermann – lives in a “container world.” But crucial questions emerge, when logistics is generalized into supply chain management. How are global flows coordinated with local markets to make a profit in real time? And what effect do the giant distribution machines have on the stationary people who ultimately receive and consume the mobile commodities?

Real-Time Unconscious

To answer those questions we must deal with the representation of mobility-systems. At stake are the abstract models that regulate the temporal and spatial functioning of large and complex production lines. Surprisingly, it turns out that by the late 1950s the major problem of the big-box retailers – coordinating the levels of accessible stocks with the rates of flow through stores – had already been solved, theoretically at least, by a pioneer of computer simulation.

Jay Wright Forrester was a servomechanisms engineer in WWII, then head of a program to build the Whirlwind, a multipurpose digital computer that was initially to be used in a flight simulator. That project morphed into the basis of the SAGE radar-defense system (for “semi-automatic ground environment”).16 By 1956, after inventing magnetic core memory and overseeing the rise of IBM as the USA’s mainframe supplier, Forrester decided that the excitement in the computer field was over, and switched to management studies. His breakthrough came two years later when General Electric executives asked him to examine their appliance factories, which would oscillate wildly from peak demand to near inactivity, irrespective of business cycles. He immediately recognized the classic “hunting pattern” that occurs when a servomechanism receives undamped feedback from an initial action, then overcorrects, generating more distorting feedback.

Forrester was convinced that industrial mangers were unable to grasp the multiple rhythms of giant plants hooked into even larger distribution systems, and were actually worsening their problems instead of curing them. He designed a non-linear computer modeling program to show how policy decisions affecting the rates of flow between five interconnected categories of stocks – materials, orders, money, capital equipment and personnel – could be represented graphically in their effects over time, so as to reveal the unforeseen consequences of single interventions. The policy decisions could then be corrected via a sixth category, coordinated feedback information. This analysis laid the basis of a new managerial logic, known as system dynamics.17

Most histories of cybernetics never mention engineers, focusing instead on scientists and the occasional philosopher.18 Yet Forrester is undoubtedly the single most influential cybernetician, since his work has allowed the coordination of vast production, distribution and consumption processes taking place on opposite sides of the planet. It is fascinating to realize that his SAGE radar-defense program led very quickly to SABRE, or “semi-automatic business-research environment,” which is still the world’s largest airline ticketing network. The ease with which we ignore the very existence of such crucial transport systems has everything to do with the technological unconscious, arising from the automation of large numbers of routine actions to which we no longer pay the slightest attention. Nigel Thrift explains this computerized repetition-compulsion: “Through the application of a set of technologies and knowledges (the two being impossible to separate), a style of repetition has been produced which is more controlled and also more open-ended, a new kind of roving empiricism which continually ties up and undoes itself in a search for the most efficient ways to use the space and time of each moment.”19 As the designer of semi-automatic environments including human beings in subordination to mechanical and computational devices, Forrester was at the origin of this roving technological unconscious. Yet he found that his ideas could not be understood by the corporate class he was addressing. Only in the 1980s did they start making intuitive sense to managers.20

There was a technical reason. In the 1960s-70s, Forrester’s simulations could not yet run with real-time information. Instead, approximate models were created and statistical forecasting techniques were employed. From the 1980s onward, quantum leaps in data-gathering and communications technology transformed all that. With the advent of electronic data interchange (EDI), every aspect of production, transport, display and sales could be recorded, communicated, represented and analyzed, so as to continuously map out the position and trajectory of each single object being handled by a world-spanning corporation.21 The result is an “executive information system” that gives managers centralized access to a continuously evolving set of logistical data, bringing dynamic simulation over the line into real-time representation. This provides the unprecedented ability to rationalize labor at every point along the chain, accelerating the pace and squeezing workers for higher levels of productivity. Still it’s not enough for contemporary capitalism. As systems designer Paul Westerman explains, “Aggressive retailers (like Wal-Mart) will not stop there; they will continue until all company data is available for analysis. They will build an enterprise data warehouse. They give all this information to their internal users (buyers) and external users (suppliers) to exploit and demand measurable improvement.”22 Such is the formula of global supply chain management, in an information-age economy where the “push” of Fordist industrial production and state planning has been replaced by the “pull” of giant retail conglomerates.

With enterprise data warehousing, the just-in-time machine becomes both extensively and intensively pervasive. EDI is correlated with cash-flow, marketing and financing information. Point-of-sale data is associated with individual names on credit cards, then combined with cascades of other data gleaned from the Internet, generating behavior profiles that can be used for the fine-tuning of display and advertising strategies. The models of optimal future performance built on the analysis of past actions are then relayed upstream to govern the behavior of workers, middle managers and suppliers, and downstream to influence consumers, creating what Westerman calls a “unified data system” (UDS) embracing every aspect of corporate planning. The big boxes of Wal-Mart now cast a 70-terabyte information shadow. To be sure, the possibilities of UDS have not yet been fully implemented. EDI is still rare among Chinese suppliers, while surveillance operators like Google and Facebook are only beginning to codify and sell our intimate data-bodies. There is no need to exaggerate the deployment of data integration. But even less can one ignore the tremendous advances in communication between manufacturers and distributors, the increasing granularity of representation that this communication makes possible, and last but not least, the accelerating absorption of consumer imaginaries into the managed flows of the pull economy.

What appears on the horizon is a self-shaping or “autopoetic” modeling process that can integrate hundreds of millions of individuals and billions of discrete objects and desires into a single mobility-system, where every movement is coordinated with every other in real time. The integrative capacity of this kind of autopoetic system is what defines the boundary of each corporate entity, struggling against all others to increase the market-share that it controls. Under these conditions we live in an “open” world of universal free trade across national borders, where giant organizations strive to impose closure on mobile populations. Their computerized map becomes our intimate territory.

Such a dystopian state was once the exclusive province of science fiction: Philip K. Dick novels, where androids dreamed of electric sheep. But the container, having spawned the big box, now seems destined to bring a world-spanning containment strategy into being. The electronic dream is to maintain continuous contact between a global production system and you, the consumer, whose mobility need not signify uncertainty of behavior. According to this dream, no desire should linger free without a sale. The representational techniques that enable such a strategy have seen vast changes since the 1960s. Today they include multi-agent systems, where the decisions of autonomous actors are simulated on both the supply and the demand sides of the equation.23 On the basis of such simulations, multiple autopoetic systems are orchestrated into smoothly functioning machines serving unified purposes. Yet behind such sophisticated devices one can still recognize the outlines of semi-automated environments, where the individual flow-chart of every object and actor is analyzed into the coordinated curves of system dynamics.24 Like an architectural plan for a global factory in motion, those intersecting curves define the social form of just-in-time production.

Escape

To tie up the threads of this argument, let’s return to what started the whole thing rolling: John Urry’s intriguing but radically undeveloped concept of mobility-systems. It’s ironic to find Urry, in Sociology Beyond Societies, reflecting that his own discipline will not survive its transition to the global scale if it does not once again link its destinies to social movements.25 Had he done exactly that with the social movement closest to his own concerns – namely, transnational migration – he might have seen how the spatially bounded “containers” that formerly defined national societies are being replaced, not by the liberal ideology of “open systems,” but instead by postliberal constructs like the big-box retailers, whose JIT distribution machines are enabled both by advanced technology and by deterritorialized state-functions (monetary regimes, transport surveillance programs, selective border controls, “foreign trade zones” inscribed in domestic territories, etc.). The exploitation and oppression that such hybrid constructs exert on cut-price migrant labor has been made explicit by recent struggles of workers in the intermodal transport industry.26 And the society shaped by these “postliberal aggregates” has been theorized by a group of sociologists who take their stand with the migrants.

In a book entitled Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century, these theorists find an example of social form in the automobile industry: the recently opened BMW plant in Liepzig, designed by the architect Zaha Hadid. As they explain, “the building enables innovative working-time models and operating times of 60 to 140 hours per week, and because of this the plant can react quickly to specific changes in the market.” What the just-in-time factory reveals is the peculiar articulation of openness and closure that defines a contemporary mobility-system:

"The BMW plant is an interactive order, neither open nor closed, but open as soon as it incorporates the actors necessary for its functioning, and closed as soon as it can protect and sustain its functionality. The plant is not maintained by its exclusivity nor by an internally generated authenticity, but rather by a fluid belonging of different independent trajectories to an effective system of production. It is an aggressive structure, opposing everything that sets limits to its own internal interests or tries to infuse it with impurity. The BMW plant reacts aggressively to the fear of viruses, it is aseptic, clean, pragmatic: Western oblivion at the highest level.”27

Hadid’s jaggedly flowing architecture enables the material process of inclusion/exclusion in today’s society, while helping the public to forget its very existence. Here again, semi-automated flows create unconsciousness, erasing histories of emancipation. For the authors of Escape Routes, the coercive structures of postliberal globalization took form as “the answer to the wild insurgency and escape that emerges after the Second World War.” This insurgency reached a peak in 1968 when the nation-state’s promise of rights and representation (“the double-R axiom”) was challenged by excluded minority subjects. Yet the opening of borders and the relaxation of social strictures soon gave way to the new state-corporate aggregates, operating in transnational zones of exception without any requirement of legitimacy. Under these conditions, demands for class, ethnic and gender equality lose their effectiveness. The paradoxical response is a “politics of imperceptibility,” whereby migrants in their fleeting singularity become invisible to postliberal power formations. Recalling the liminal figure whom we encountered at the outset, the authors of Escape Routes might claim: “We are all Anatol Zimmermann.”

The incongruity of the asylum-seeker, abandoned in his improvised dwelling amid technological desolation, could evoke this sense of newfound freedom. As Ursula Biemann claims, “Everything new is born illegal.” On a more troubling note, however, Biemann recounts that at one point in her interviews with Zimmermann she felt compelled to drop her documentary neutrality, offering to buy him a counterfeit Polish passport that would eventually grant him entry to the European Union: “Anatol declined. Salvation would have meant the death of his problem, which by now was obviously not only a burden but also the condition with which he has come to identify: to march in the cracks between nations as the post-migratory subject into which he has mutated.”28 Are we to understand the migrant’s fate as double, permanently excluded from a fully satisfying life, yet irremediably attached to the mirage of inclusion? Would this be the condition of life in a container world?

I’ll close, not with an answer to those questions, but with a restatement of the enigma constituted by the social form of just-in-time production. As we’ve seen, global society is filled by a rising tide of inexpensive goods, managed by increasingly automated systems and destined for consumers whose very desires are modeled by the supply chains. This is the world of the commodity, whose concrete promise of use-value is constantly belied by its abstract form as exchange-value. The conditions of exchange are such that despite the productivity gains of technology, work is still devalued to a bare minimum: the working day as the “socially necessary labor time” required for the purchase of a minimal basket of commodities. Today it is the price of an exploited Chinese working day that exerts downward pressure on wages everywhere, throwing other workers out of a job even as it floods our lives with cheapened goods that must be thrown away almost immediately. In this sense, society reallyis defined by the ever-accelerating mobility of its members: workers, managers, consumers, all differently caught within the same compulsion to step on the pedal. The Marxist philosopher Moishe Postone points out that this dynamics of commodity production amounts to a strange destiny of “domination by time.” His abstract statement of the problem reads like a concrete description of existence in the capitalist mobility-system:

"As a result of the general social mediation, labor time expenditure is transformed into a temporal norm that not only is abstracted from, but also stands above and determines, individual action. Just as labor is transformed from an action of individuals to the alienated general principle of the totality under which the individuals are subsumed, time expenditure is transformed from a result of activity into a normative measure for activity.... This process, whereby a concrete, dependent variable of human activity becomes an abstract, independent variable governing this activity, is real and not illusory. It is intrinsic to the process of alienated social constitution."29

Cigar-smoking billionaires still exist, of course: I saw them last night in Oliver Stone’s new film, Money Never Sleeps. But the enigma of our era is the depersonalized principle that governs the estranging machine. Capital itself, in all its abstraction, is the electric dream. For those who do not feel at home in its translocal container world, nor free in the “wild anomaly” of imperceptible wanderings, awakening will have to come through an as-yet unimagined social subversion of capitalism's universally represented and constantly communicated laws of motion. It's a matter of somehow altering society's unconscious rhythms. A tiger’s leap just out of time?

NOTES

1 John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 51.

2 John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 5.

3 Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity, 2000/German ed. 1997), pp. 23-24; John Law, John Urry, “Enacting the Social” (Department of Sociology / Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 2003), at www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Urry-Enacting-the-Social.pdf.

4 Urry, Mobilities, op. cit., pp. 49-50.

5 The video can be seen in two parts on YouTube, at http://tinyurl.com/contained-mobility. Also see http://geobodies.org/01_art_and_videos/2004_contained_mobility.

6 Jan-Erik Lundstrom, ed. Ursula Biemann: Mission Reports (Bristol: Arnolfini Gallery, 2008), p. 59. The same book includes my essay, “Extradisciplinary Investigations,” also at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106.

7 Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 1 and passim.

8 For a photo/text reflection on containerization’s consequences for labor, see Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Rotterdam: Witte de With/Richer Verlag, 1995).

9 Peter J. Katzenstein, Takashi Shiraishi, Network Power: Japan and Asia (Cornell UP, 1997); Ho-Fung Hung, “America's Head Servant? The PRC's Dilemma in the Global Crisis,” New Left Review 60, November-December 2009.

10 Womack, Jones, Roos, The Machine that Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production (New York: Rawson Associates, 1990).

11 Edna Bonacich, Jake B. Wilson, Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor and the Logistics Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 25.

12 See the PBS documentary, Is Wal-Mart Good for America? ( 2004), available at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart.

13 Misha Petrovic and Gary G. Hamilton, "Making Global Markets: Wal-Mart and Its Suppliers," in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Wal-Mart: The Face of 21st Century Capitalism (New York: New Press 2006), p. 108.

14 Kouvelis and Su, "The Structure of Global Supply Chains," special issue, Foundations and Trends in Technology, Information and Operations Management 1/4, 2005, pp. 1-2.

15 Marc Levinson, The Box, op. cit, p. 264.

16 For Forrester’s involvement in SAGE, see Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), chaps. 2 and 3.

17 Jay W. Forrester, Industrial Dynamics (Waltham, Mass.: Pegasus Communications, 1961); Principles of Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press, 1968).

18 A notable exception is David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

19 Nigel Thrift, “Remembering the Technological Unconscious,” in Knowing Capitalism (London: Sage, 2005), p. 223.

20 See Lawrence Fisher, "The Prophet of Unintended Consequences,” in Strategy + Business 40 (Fall 2005), p. 7.

21 For definitions of EDI, see Gene Boone, David Kurtz, Contemporary Business, 13th Edition (Hoboken: Wiley, 2010), pp. 219-20, as well as Bonacich and Wilson, Getting the Goods, op. cit., esp. pp. 5 and 35.

22 Paul Westerman, Data Warehousing: Using the Wal-Mart Model (San Diego: Academic Press, 2001), p. 26.

23 For a definition see any of the recent business manuals, such as Brahim Chaib-draa, Jörg P. Müller, eds., Multiagent based Supply Chain Management (Springer, 2006).

24 This is the thesis of H. Akkermans, N. Dellaert, eds., “The Dynamics of Supply Chains and Networks,” special issue, System Dynamics Review 21/3 (2005).

25 Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies, op. cit., p. 18.

26 See the articles at http://www.warehouseworkersunited.org.

27 Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century (London: Pluto, 2008), p. 26.

28 Ursula Biemann: Mission Reports, op. cit., p. 59.

29 Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (New York: Cambridge UP, 1993), pp. 214-15. Among many commentaries I recommend Howard Slater’s text on counter-cultural artistic practice as a political cure for alienation: “Toward Agonism – Moishe Postone’s Time, Labour & Social Domination” (2006), available at www.metamute.org/en/toward-agonism.

Ten Postulates for Technopolitics

Brian Holmes — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:44:15 +0000

English

Technopolitics

technopolitics

The point of the technopolitics project is not so much to carry out an original historical analysis of industrial capitalism, but instead, to test and modify the existing theories and then use them for engaged cultural critique. That requires a lot of reading and evaluating of ideas. To get through the existing literature without getting lost along the way, we’ll periodically have to reformulate what we're talking about. Each reformulation will add something, subtract something, forget something; but the essence is to keep on working cooperatively. To that end I want to propose ten postulates. They revisit what has already been written in the programmatic text on technopolitics, but with a different emphasis, mainly in terms of geography, culture and the cumulative nature of historical sequences. They're not set in stone, just some departure points, and it may be that a magical eleventh postulate is needed. Here they are:

1. Technopolitics describes the influence of social, governmental, economic and cultural factors on industrial development, and vice-versa. In the history of industrial capitalism we can distinguish at least five successive technopolitical paradigms, originating in particular places at particular moments, sparking innovations and rivalries, gaining in capacity to structure society, then losing that capacity in a phase of decline until they are finally replaced by another paradigm. The full historical development of a given paradigm constitutes a period or era, as seen from a particular hegemonic center or from one of its many "edges" (devalorized class, cultural or geographical positions). The periods of technopolitical development are our basic units of study. Viewpoints from the edges are the basis of our critique.

2. In each of the periods a set of “lead technologies” is associated with particular work processes and social relations of production (that is, capital-labor relations), as well as specific modes of financing the fixed-capital investments and marketing the finished products. The central technologies and organizational forms take on a pace of production-distribution-interaction-innovation that helps define the rhythm of an entire era. But the interesting thing are the interruptions, the bifurcations. Moments of crisis in social relations and in finance can be read as turning points in the class struggle, but also as episodes in the rivalry between different interest groups, industrial or financial sectors or regional alliances of capitalists (eg continental blocs). One of the big questions for our approach is whether geographical divides, cultural inventions and perhaps even scientific breakthroughs can be seen as effective forces of what the existing Marxist interpretations of cycle and crisis have mainly analyzed as class struggle.

3. Each paradigm extends its characteristic social relations and its modes of financing and marketing outwards from its points of origin to attain a maximum geographical scale, which includes some countries and regions in a hierarchical order and leaves other countries and regions partially or totally out of the circuits of exchange (as more or less lawless peripheries subject to "primitive accumulation," or as battlegrounds). The dynamics of geographical extension brings geopolitics to the fore, and demands that inter-state relations be analyzed in direct connection with the relations between classes and fractions of capital. This means that to understand how a productive paradigm develops in a given nation we also have also to define the changing nature of the state, its legitimacy and characteristic forms of governmentality, and its position in the inter-state system at any given moment. And in the contemporary period we have to go further: we have to define how a productive paradigm unfolds with respect to the transnational state functions that characterize globalized capitalism.

4. The duration of each period seems to follow a roughly similar sequence of phases, including a tumultuous moment of financial crisis in the middle of its development and another phase of saturation and decline at the end. Over the two centuries of industrial capitalism these periods have typically lasted from 45 to 60 years, following a wave-like pattern of fluctuation first identified by Kondratiev. However, the Kondratiev cycles by themselves are merely formal, they explain nothing of any value. Rather they ask us to specify, not just the "success" of a particular technological tool-kit, but above all the full set of class struggles, cultural upheavals, inter-capitalist rivalries and inter-state conflicts whose temporary resolutions give consistency to each phase. And they also ask us to find out what changes irreversibly with the end of each era, such that the underlying pattern of capital accumulation can never be the same again.

5. So let's get specific. The technopolitical paradigm of assembly-line production that originated in the US in the first decade of the 20th century, based on the lead technology of the automobile, was marked by a particularly barbaric first phase culminating in sweeping class struggles, financial crises and terrible inter-state conflicts (1929-45), but also by an extremely coherent resolution of class, inter-capitalist and inter-state conflicts during the maturity phase (the postwar boom). This resolution or "regulation" of assembly-line production involved the redefinition of the working classes as the key consumers of industrial products, or, in Keynesian terms, as sources of "effective demand" supported by welfare-state financing. Broadcasting technologies permitted not only the massive stimulation of desire for product lines, but also the installation of feedback loops based on the statistical measurement of consumer choice (Neilsenism). Major increases in the provision of education, leisure time and other entitlements to subordinated groups gradually brought changes to the cultural systems of the developed countries, crucially transforming gender roles and to some degree curtailing the preeminence of historical bourgeois aesthetics with its swings between vanguard modernism and nostalgic imitation of the aristocracy.

6. The social/cultural crisis of 1968 and the long economic downturn of the 1970s put an end to the capacity of assembly-line production to shape society through a consumption norm centered on the automobile. It revealed the continuing importance of labor struggles in the developed economies, as well as the new agency of former peripheries within the global economy. It also showed that in a moment of crisis, the stabilizing role of programmed mass consumption and welfare-state entitlements becomes a "cultural contradiction of capitalism," not only at universities where devalorized groups can elaborate their own self-understandings, but also directly on the markets of art and entertainment, and even more importantly, within the relational realms of everyday life. It’s during such moments of crisis - and undoubtedly, only then - that the "worker's autonomy" described by the Italian theorists of the 1970s becomes fully effective, that is, able to help shape the resolution of a crisis. Yet the effectiveness of this autonomy is double-edged because it weakens traditional solidarities and at least partially invalidates earlier conceptions of class consciousness.

7. The new paradigm of informationalism, based on the lead technology of the networked computer, originates once again in the US with major advances in semiconductors and networking technologies in the late 60s and throughout the 1970s; but it only gains its capacity to shape the industrial labor process through an influx of Japanese management techniques in the 80s (just-in-time production, quality circles, ergonomics, etc). Informationalism is inseparable from a dramatic expansion of the geographical envelope of capitalist social relations, along with a temporal intensification of production, financing and marketing. This expansion/intensification became obvious with the collapse of Eastern-bloc socialism in 1989, but its decisive episode has been the integration of China and India to the world-economy in the 2000s. Logistics becomes central to the new work process. The spatial redeployment of capital means that class, under informationalism, becomes geographical: a large percentage of the Western industrial working class now resides in East Asia, with further concentrations in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

8. Informationalism adds a new layer to social relations: without owning any significant capital themselves, fractions of the former working/consuming classes of the core countries – some of whom even work independently - are now called upon to use computers to manage the circulation of capital both nationally and transnationally, and to assure the sale of products on the world markets. Flexible labor and incentive-based organization are key social forms of the computer era. The cultural contradictions of 1968 are resorbed by the financialization of every aspect of the life-world: information networks become vectors for the corporate micromanagement of desire, carried out by hyperindividualized surveillance, statistical profiling and the stimulation of consumer behavior. The new consumption norm focuses on prosumer technologies and services, which promise access to managerial status and therefore, to speculative investments (in financial products, housing, and above all, in one's own "human capital"). The linchpin of control is the selective provision of credit, which governs class mobility. The Keynesian management of effective demand by welfare entitlements is transferred to speculative finance dominated by hedge funds and global investment banks.

9. Informationalism has traversed its development phase and has been hit with a major series of industrial and financial crises beginning in the year 2000 and culminating in 2007-08, with fiscal crises of the states and municipalities still to come. The financial crises have been accompanied by crises in capital-labor relations, cultural upheavals and inter-state conflicts. The attempt to replace welfare-state financing of consumption by corporate-managed credit has broken down and what is at stake now is either a continuing slide into economic chaos, or the invention of a new strategy for the stabilization of the transnational class structure generated by networked technologies. Workers' autonomy - and maybe something like middle-managers' autonomy - reappears with the cycle of counter-globalization struggles beginning in 1999, but is limited by the deep fragmentation of the global division of labor. To support the failing electronics markets and reassert control after a decade of extreme deterritorialization, the state invests heavily in surveillance and sorting technologies. One culturalized component of contemporary class struggle, Islamism, is systematically exacerbated by transnational elites in a bid to relegitimate police and military authority and to thwart any global articulation of oppositional movements.

10. The globalization of informational capitalism, while not resulting in the complete integration of all the world's populations, has dramatically sped up industrial expansion and thereby introduced an unprecedented factor, that of environmental crisis due to the saturation of the planetary living space by what were formerly considered the "externalities" of industrial production. This ecological limit to growth will influence the resolution of the current series of crises and the emergence of any succeeding technopolitical paradigm. Both the tragic nature of this new contradiction and the forms of hope and striving to which it gives rise will take their place alongside the others that have been generated by previous phases of capitalism. The unique predicaments and affects of the ecological crisis will figure powerfully in the new kinds of struggles, the new forms of art and culture, and the new varieties of cooperation and solidarity that are just now starting to emerge.

Vision in Networks (1)

Brian Holmes — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:33:37 +0000

English

Technopolitics

Whether it originates from statistical tabulation or remote sensors, whether it flows in real time or out of recombinant databases, whether it serves the needs of private individuals, globe-spanning corporations or government agencies, information visualization is the operative technology of the networked age, a language of vision for the control society. Infoviz proliferates on the screens of factory workstations, financial trading floors, military commands and surveillance watchspots, everywhere that decisive movements are subject to managerial scrutiny. The graphic flow chart is history because social and productive dynamics can no longer be planned in advance, they can no longer be fixed on paper; instead they are modulated in the present by those with access to the strategic technics of representation. The visualization technologies will continue developing prodigiously, at the pace of information networks. The question for theorists and cultural producers is who will appropriate them aesthetically, in which media, with what sensibility, for what ends.

At stake is the capacity to invent an aesthetic twist on a mode of representation that itself is already one or several degrees away from its primary objects. In other words, it's about the capacity to intervene on the existing visual forms that serve to organize the fit between the individual and society. This kind of aesthetic twist has a long and fascinating history in the 20th century. Each time there is a quixotic attempt to create a regulatory form, a perceptual touchstone, whereby the course of technopolitical development can be apprehended, measured, and inflected despite all the structural traps and contradictions of capitalist democracy. It’s the vision thing. Many such turning points in cultural vision can be identified, in different places, at different moments, and perhaps most crucially, at different scales. I'm going to recall just a few, focusing on major cases where cultural forms intersect with the operational representations of political economy, first during the period of industrial mass production, then in the current information age. In conclusion I will let the historical analysis erupt into debates about the present and its artistic figures. Urgent debates about the need to bring an aesthetic twist to the ruling techniques of vision in networks.

Architectural Vision
The difficulty but also the interest of this approach is the idea that the key cultural forms do not represent or even directly shape “objective” reality, but rather seek to inflect and modify the dominant modes of representation, aiming for a regulatory effect. This was a major issue for artists, filmmakers and architects at the outset of the 20^th century, after the revolution of assembly-line production introduced by Ford in 1908 had revealed its tremendous destructive power in World War I, with continuing destabilization in a tumultuous interwar period marked by great power competition, labor unrest, the challenge of communist revolution and the recurrent disruptions of economic crisis. How could artistic forms achieve a new mediation between the individual and industrial society? And which existing trends would they have to overcome or transform in order to do so?

To begin, consider the way that the Bauhaus artist and theorist, Moholy-Nagy, discussed the relation between Cubism and filmic representation:

"The cubists hoped to develop a method to penetrate reality more thoroughly than had been possible with persepctive-illusion. They had an intimation of the coming forceful visual monopoly of the movies, and tried to escape from it by all means. The principle of the motion picture was a new method of rendering three-dimensional reality. The film was able to show any object in space from many different sides in quick succession. The cubists began to produce such a rendering by 'looking around the corner,' and looking from above, from every side - invalidating the monocular vision of the previous painters.... Besides the emotional upheaval caused by the startling extension of the traditional pictorial elements in a new vision, the distortions and strange transformations of the well-known subject matter produced, in addition, an attack on all pictorial fixations originating in the renaissance. The analysis of binocular vision in motion led the cubists to render objects with a multitude of details seen from every point of view. For this they employed a method of dissolving the whole shape into small geometric units, and saw to it that the multitude of elements did not destroy the original subject matter as a totality."

Taken from a late biographical sketch entitled “Abstract of an Artist” (1944), this quote encapsulates multiple aspects of Moholy's long trajectory, spanning three decades and traversing three major cities (Berlin, London, Chicago). From 1923 to 1928 Moholy had been a teacher of the foundation course at the Bauhaus, which was struggling to achieve a synthesis of artistic creation and machine technology in a cultural climate marked both by the lingering nostalgia of nineteenth-century craft ideals and by the actively regresive forces of Volkisch ideology. Today, a reductive view of the Bauhaus sees it only as a laboratory for the rationalist discipline of functional design, eliminating the artist’s subjectivity and culminating in the International Style of postwar corporate architecture. But the school’s founder, the architect Walter Gropius, in fact sought a more complex fusion of artistic and industrial methods. As he noted in 1922: “Young artists are beginning to face up to the phenomena of industry and the machine. They try to design what I would call the ‛useless’ machine (works of Picasso, Braque, Ozenfant, Jeanneret, the new Russian and Hungarian schools, Schlemmer, Muche, Klee, etc.).” What Gropius sought was not the elimination of what Kant had termed "the productive imagination" or "the free play of the faculties," but instead, its displacement onto a plane coterminous with design and engineering. The geometrical figure of the grid that dominates Bauhaus iconography is a mediator between art and industry: a technique for the rendering of pictorial form into reproducible products, but also the abstract basis for a free exploration of new physical and cultural environments.

Moholy-Nagy, a representative of the new Hungarian schools strongly influenced by Russian constructivism, was an all-terrain artist and theorist of the “useless machine,” translating the early 20th-century breakthroughs of pictorial form into photography, sculpture, film and experiments with projected light. At the close of the decade and the end of his own Bauhaus years he wrote his first pedagogical synthesis, Von Material zu Architektur (1929, translated in English as The New Vision). In this book he saw the Cubist vocabulary of simultaneous viewpoints, distortions, disolcations, superimpositions etc as a strategy to clear away the inherited hierarchies of visual representation and move toward the more dynamic forms of light projection and kinetic sculpture, which in his view were uniquely able to shape a sensibility for contemporary architecture. With them the visual artist could contribute decisively to the construction of a new urban environment, by opening the senses of the public to "the actual felt quality of spatial creation, the equilibrium of taut forces held in balance, the fluctuating interpenetration of space energies" -- i.e. the specific characteristics of modernist architecture, masked by the inherited forms of the traditional fine arts. From this perspective, the Light-Space Modulator or "Light Prop," constructed in 1930 after eight years of investigation and planning, appears as the culmination of Moholy’s artistic research. It was a complex metallic sculpture mounted on a rotating base and outfited with an array of electric bulbs so as to project a changing sequence of shadows and lights into the volume of an architectural space. As he writes:

"In this experiment I tried to synthesize simple elements by a constant superimposition of their movements. For this reason most of the moving shapes were made transparent, through the use of plastics, glass, wire-mesh, latticework and perforated metal sheets. ... When the 'light-prop' was set in motion for the first time in a small mechanics shop in 1930, I felt like the sorcerer's apprentice. The mobile was so startling in its coordinated motions and space articulations of light and shadow sequences that I almost believed in magic. I learned much from this mobile for my later painting, photography, and motion pictures, as well as for architecture and industrial design. The mobile was designed mainly to see transparencies in action, but I was surprised to discover that shadows thrown on transparent and perforated screens produced new visual effects, a kind of interpretation in fluid change."

Here as throughout Moholy’s Bauhaus teaching, the ultimate aim was a cinema of perceptual experience, freely embodied by the inhabitants of the Großstadt (metropolis). The Cubist vocabulary, mobilized and projected into space, would offer new means for the apprehension of architecture, and more importantly, a transformed environment in which the viewer could generate expressive correspondences between his or her own inner emotional states and the articulations of industrially produced architecture. Through this exploratory process, the view would be transformed into an active, creative agent of technological modernity, shedding inherited social hierarchies and psychic constraints along with outmoded beaux-arts symbolism. Far from the regimented mechanization that had become the terrifying face of nationalism during WWI, the double nature of the grid appears perfectly in the polished metal latticework of the rotating machine parts. Through the projective abstraction of art fused with industrial technology, the Bauhaus pioneers sought to establish and inhabit the machine process as the vector of a trans-identity.

The intimate coloristic figures of Klee, the rhythmic geometric murals of Kandinsky, the expressive space-exploring gestures of Schlemmer’s choreography, but also the cool, functionalist volumes, stackable furniture and smoothly rounded appliances of the experimental house designed for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar are all condensed into the mobile transformations of the “useless machine” that was the Light-Space Modulator, which appears in retrospect as a supremely theoretical device, anticipating decades of multimedia work in the postwar period. Yet as he recounts in “Abstract of an Artist,” Moholy was depressed not to find a public for the direct exercise of this new vision, and he was compelled to translate it into an experimental film, entitled Lichtspiel, Schwarz-Weiß-Grau (Light Display: Black-White-Gray). With its mobility safely contained in two dimensions, the film was a compromise, an attempt to met the viewer half-way. And though Moholy claims “a certain success” for his creation, it could be more important to investigate the sources of his frustration and depression. In reasity the German public of the time was fascinated not with the tonal abstractions of Schwarz-Weiß-Grau but with the cinema of Grauen (horror), shaped by the dark psychological intensities of Expressionism and the obsessive romantic theme of the Doppelgänger, which revealed a split personality at the basis of everyday social relations.

The mismatch between the affective drives of the viewing public and Moholy's artistic concept of architectural liberation through projected light seems to encapsulate the entire Bauhaus experience, as a failed attempt to transform the traditional visual arts into a regulatory aesthetics for a chaotically changing industrial society. Instead, it was Expressonist cinema that set the affective tone of urban experience. As Fritz Lang wrote in 1926: "Perhaps never before was there a time which sought new forms through which to express itself with such reckless determination. The fundamental upheavals in the fields of painting and sculpture, architecture and music speak eloquently enough for the fact that people today are looking for, and also discovering their own means of shaping their imagination." As the indisputable master of the crime film, Lang was able to develop the taste for irresolvable conspiracy and psychological turmoil that gave popular expression to the pervasive uncertainty of the time. Though far more “realistic” in its approach to representation, his work rejoins the Expressionism of Wegener, Wiene and Murnau through the themes of angst, violent excess, insanity and the perverse or arbitrary manipulation of unwitting victims.

Today, academic criticism disputes Siegfried Kracauer's claim that the German cinema of the 1920s offered a "premonition of Hitler." In effect, neither expressionist pathos nor the ghostly cinematic figures of the Doppelgänger can stand in for the deep regimentation and mechanization of society carried out by the Nazis under the aegis of a national myth. Nonetheless, it is clear that Lang himself came to see one of his most popular creations, the criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse, as exactly such a premonition. The corruption of top officials by a ring of underground criminals, the deliberate release of counterfeit notes to debase the currency, and finally the uncontrollable fire unleashed in a Berlin chemical plant as the culmination of a plot to destabilize the government, all make the last film of Lang's Weimar period, Das Testament des Doktor Mabuse (1932), into a powerful allegorical portrait of the collapse of the Weimar democracy and the entry into fascism after the Reichstag fire. The dream of a trans-identity able to surmount the shocks and contradictions of industrial modernity was over. For the artists and teachers of the Bauhaus, as for Lang himself, there was only one solution: flight to France, to England and ultimately to America.

To be continued....

***

[Friends, this is only the first part of a text on the attempts at developing a regulatory aesthetics for the mass-manufacturing age, and then for the information society. It is naive, highly narrative, almost popular and I might even keep it that way, unless the criticism is too intense and then I will have to go back and find a more valid language for this kind of investigation. On that score, criticism is obviously welcome! Next sections and notes should come soon....

Following sections will include:

--Vision in Motion (Moholy, Kepes, Fuller and Cybernetic America)
--Psychedelic Visions (Black Mountain College, Cage, La Monte Young and the Merry Pranksters)
--Mondovision (I guess this has somehow to be about satellite TV and globalization)
--Vision in Networks (Lev Manovich and Tactical Media via Cognitive Science and A Thousand Plateaus)

→ So hang on for the ride!]