Moreover, the ideological thrust of the spirit of networks lies in interweaving this new trade-off between social emancipation and individual emancipation around the axis of network technology. The promise of the spirit of networks in terms of increased individual emancipation and dealienation is presented as conditioned by the reorganization of social practices and social relations in accordance with networks. Simply put, emancipation is constructed as demanding the further flexibilization and privatization of work.
NETWORKS AS CRITI<sub>QU</sub>E?
The discourse on networks in its broadest understanding has recently become the centerpiece not only in discussions on the economy, labor, globalization, and production but also in the discursive and analytical toolkit with which much of the contemporary world is understood, talked about, and ultimately constructed. Moreover, the idea that the discourse on networks is of significant critical potency has been making strides in diverse social milieus, from popular culture to political theory and philosophy. Thus, dehierarchization, decentralization, emergence, and distribution are seen as inherently critical to the established power structures, as undermining them, and, hence, as socially transformative, progressive, and even revolutionary. For example, much of the discourse and practices of the so-called antiglobalization movement is founded on the spirit of networks. It entails the decentralized assemblages of disparate groups, which convene ad hoc around a specific political project. The movement is also dehierarchized: there is no overdetermination for any essentialist political analysis, project, or identity (Castells 1996). It is worth noting that to a large extent the target of this movement has been post-Fordist capitalism itself, and perhaps for that reason the spirit of networks is commonly assumed to harbor a critical potential.
Likewise, recent social theory has also employed the discourse of networks and elaborated on its critical potential. This is certainly true for academic and political discourses on cyberculture, hybridity, and cyberfeminism. But such approach also appears in theories concerned with critique of contemporary capitalism. Hardt and Negri (2001, 2005), for example, conceive of a decentralized, network-like “empire” and hope that the nonessentialized, atomized nodes of the “multitude” come together in meaningful political action (Hardt and Negri 2001, 2005). Others have offered a revival of the Italian autonomist tradition and note how the network structure of global capitalism might offer openings for a reconstitution of labor struggles (Dyer-Witheford 1999). And Christian Fuchs (2008) theorizes that the Internet facilitates two dialectically antagonistic tendencies of competition and cooperation. The hegemonic competitive form of contemporary social relations thrives on the network structure of the Internet but also gives rise to an emerging cooperative potentiality.
Networks as the Techno-political Culture of Post-Fordism
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