Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

Acts of Translation

Organized Networks as Algorithmic Technologies of the Common

Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle

14

Exodus from the General Intellect

Defined by the informatization of life and labor, the networked condition is characterized by the comprehensive connection of users to circuits of capital via predominantly corporate communication and information infrastructures. The economic value of these engines of entry into a world of communicative commerce is largely determined by the very acts of communication they elicit, structure, and sustain. And as the proliferation of proprietary mobile devices separates a new generation of users from previous, more localized generations of personal computing, the corresponding establishment of cloud computing as the primary infrastructural paradigm of storage and service delivery aimed at eficient data-mining establishes a new technocentralism that should give the evangelists of decentralization-as-democratization pause for thought. At stake is, once again, the “authority to act” and, with it, the question of action itself.¹

A mere political economy of digital media cannot grasp this enmeshment of individual and institutional forms of afective articulation, expression, and inscription that fuels the production of value in today’s information economies. Why not? Because political economy cannot handle elusiveness terribly well, which makes it dificult for this approach to register subjectivity and afect as holding economic potential. By contrast, Paolo Virno has suggested that in contemporary ‘bio-linguistic capitalism … the capitalist organization of work takes on as its raw material the diferential traits of the species” and raises anew the question of human nature, thus returning us to the perspective of political anthropology.² While we find this vision too grand to ofer much analytical advice to the very actors whose transnational organizing eforts are all-too-quickly conflated into global movements and endowed with epochal agency, it is this primacy given to the communicative constitution of relations as the core element of labor and life that has also increased interest in conceptualizations of the common and the specific relation the common holds to the political as one of its contemporary iterations.

Transversal relations immanent to the media of communication underscore the production of the common—a form of relation that holds substantive conceptual and material distinctions from that which it is often confused and conflated with: the commons, which serve as a central resource for the information economy and are a defining feature of the network condition. If we understand the commons to refer both to the material context and the consequence of practices of peer production, the common is the political potential immanent in such practices. Such an understanding of the common situates it conceptually as the latest iteration of the political; just as there exists an “excess of the political over politics,”³ the afirmation of the common is ofered as a condition of possibility for collaborative constitution; for the sharing of afects of love, solidarity, and wrath; and for the translation of such afects and experiences across the “irreducible idiomaticity” of ethico-political practices and the production of subjectivity. 4

Frequent slippage occurs between the invocation of the terms the common and the commons. The latter is often understood as a collaboratively produced, open yet scarce resource to be protected from regimes of enclosure, as seen in the rise of intellectual property rights as the politico-juridical instrument for governing the circulation of cultural commodities within information economies. As we have noted elsewhere, “The common is not given as a fragile heritage to be protected against the ravages of new forms of primitive accumulation and enclosure. Rather, it is something that must be actively constructed, and this construction involves the creation of ‘subjects in transit.’”⁵ What strikes us as significant about what Hardt and Negri phrase as the “commonality of a potential community” is the question of form as it relates to the production of the common understood as a community to come, a potentiality held in common that may include but is not exclusive to the commons.⁶ How, in other words, does the common reveal itself if it is to manifest in more concrete, less elusive ways? Is there a materiality to potentia beyond sensation and afect (keeping in mind that sensation and afect are composed in acutely material ways)? We suggest that the multiple forms of movement, occupation, and encampment that intervene in public, state, and corporate spaces in recent months and years can be seen as material iterations of a political potential that distinguishes the common from the commons.

In proposing an exodus from the general intellect, we are calling not for an abandonment of the common. Such a force of potentia refuses any singular action, since the potentia is situated within the field of immanence and thus refuses capture or control, yet is modulated and revealed through the singularity of the event and the instantiation of expression. Again, the history of movements illustrates this point well. No matter how much news media is compelled by its form—column inches, airtime, and updates—to contain dissenting voices and reduce heterogeneity, the dispersed energies and interests of movements themselves are always in the process of transformation. While the production of the commons as an open resource is something to be welcomed, and even celebrated, we wish to sound a note of caution. Coextensive with the proliferation of open access systems (publishing, software, code) is the social production of value, which frequently becomes exploited as a resource or data set in the reproduction of capital. Within network societies, the general intellect is an informational mode of primitive accumulation or social production of value, and, as such, living labor is subjugated as labor-power without the classical exchange of a wage.⁷ Instead, a symbolic economy prevails at best and very rarely for most. The social-political challenge within such a horizon is to appropriate the means of biopolitical production.

Our interest is to question the valorization of the common less by drawing attention to the more obvious register of political economy and the exploitation of free labor than by highlighting the role of the common as a political potential in biopolitical assemblages organized around logistics industries and the politics of the human. As Fiona Jefries maintains, “One place where we find the common and the commons converge is in globalizing communication infrastructures.”⁸ It is from within this conceptual context that we want to raise the possibility of alternative cartographies of the political. The question of translation is a crucial element in the conceptual elaboration of these emergent configurations.

The Task of the Translator

Boris Buden has suggested that

culture has not, as it is often believed, simply pushed away the notion of society from the political stage and taken its leading role in theoretical debates and practical concerns of political subjects. The change is more radical. Culture has become this very stage, the very condition of the possibility of society and of our perception of what political reality is today. 9

This centrality of culture has given the practice of cultural translation new significance and a political purpose. From within the horizon of multiculturalism, its “political purpose is the stability of the liberal order, which can be achieved only on the grounds of non-conflictual, interactive relations between diferent cultures in terms of the so-called multicultural cohabitation.” Understood in the more radical (if still liberal) sense Buden derives from Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha, and Judith Butler, cultural translation refers to “the process by which the excluded within the universality is readmitted into the term,” which implies that “cultural translation—as a ‘return of the excluded’—is the only promoter of today’s democracy. It pushes its limits, brings about social change and opens new spaces of emancipation. It does so through the subversive practices, which change everyday social relations.” Over and against what remains an essentially liberal articulation of cultural translation, Buden turns to Spivak’s “strategic essentialism” to acknowledge that “she simply admits that there is no direct correspondence between these two languages” since the language of antiessentialist theory and of essentialist political practices “cannot be sublated in an old dialectical way by a third universal term which could operate as a dialectical unity of both. Therefore, the only possible way of a communication between them is a kind of translation.” Cultural translation is, then, the mise-en-scène that brings new visions of the political onto the stage of culture.

Such translation, at least in the sense of Walter Benjamin—translation is the “afterlife” of the original—necessarily does away with any notion of originality. In the case of universalism, “what is irretrievably lost in the translation, what died with the original and can therefore no longer be grasped in the translation, is the revolutionary meaning of the old concept of universalism, its practical aspiration to change the world.”¹⁰ Here, Buden adopts Paul Gilroy’s notion of a strategic universalism, which “was developed to close the nonreducible gap between two languages of our historical experience, between the language of reflexive critique and the language of political practice.” For Buden, this is an eminently practical question:

Is it not time now, after all the attempts to articulate a leftist political engagement in the sense of strategic essentialism, to try out the other, universalist strategy? The best that one can do in this dilemma is probably to make a decision for the dilemma itself. That means lingering in the gap that neither of the concepts can close. It would not mean evading all the extorted decisions and foul compromises once and for all, but rather recognizing them as such.

Lingering in the gap of a new politics of the universal is, then, our point of departure for reflections on alternative articulations of the global—understood as the “afterlife” of the universal, over and against which new visions of the political have to be created. A politics of the universal is not, of course, always-already a politics beyond liberalism. Quite the contrary:

Universalization is conventionally understood as a protodemocratic and thus also a proto-political event. An inherently particular position suddenly raises a universalist claim, thus evoking a new antagonism, which divides and newly articulates the given political field…. Strategic universalism … always remains bound to the hegemonic liberal-democratic order— and not its critique.

What strategic essentialism and strategic universalism “have in common is the vision of a gradual progress of emancipation that takes place as a clever balancing between the two poles of the existing political world order, the particular essentialist and the universal constructivist world order.” The task of critique, however, is diferent:

Today it is actually impossible to ofer resistance against global power that is politically efective at the same level. In the same way, it is impossible to articulate a reflexively efective critique at the local level. Local, political essentialism makes all critical thinking mute, just as reflexively universalist critique leaves every locally efective political act untouched. Seeking to overcome this division can be a noble task, but it is not the task of critique. It is not there to balance a world again that has lost its balance, but rather to probe the depth of the crisis in which this world finds itself.

To probe the depth of the crisis is, it turns out, to return to the question of culture; if culture is to be the stage for new productions—of subjectivity, of modes of relation—we need a better sense of the scope of scenography, of collaborative choreographies, of performative practices. And indeed of dominant articulations of the global over and against which a diferent politics of the universal (such as the common) could be articulated.

In his reflections on a politics of the universal, Étienne Balibar turns to the question of “the institution of the universal, or even the institution of the universal as truth.”¹¹ What complicates the task of critique is that “certain forms of universality at least derive their institutional strength not from the fact that the institutions in which they are embodied are absolute themselves, but rather from the fact that they are the site of endless contestations on the basis of their own principles, or discourse.” Balibar, following Hannah Arendt, proposes “equaliberty”—the right to have rights—not as another institution of the universal but as “the arch-institution, or the institution that precedes and conditions every other institution” in modern democracies. But if equaliberty, democracy, civic universality as the pursuit of equality and liberty are the horizon of a democratic politics of the universal, their “simultaneous realization is rarely seen or only visible as a tendency, as exigency.”

In the current call for democratic control of financial markets and processes of financialization, arguably the most influential figure of the global and perhaps the most dominant dynamic of universalization today, activists not only call the selfuniversalization of regimes of financialization into question but quite literally interrupt it through occupations that establish a cartography of sites through which the institution of financialization as the dominant figure of the global occurs.¹² Financialization is an instance of the global whose advocates have not failed to present it in the terms of the inevitability of a progressive universalization of its practices and policies, of the universal as truth. In the course of a series of financial crises, these truth claims have been visibly unmade, giving rise to contestations that are perhaps endless only insofar as they don’t envision a politics beyond a reconfiguration of the relationships between states and markets. But to conduct critique in and on exclusively these terms, retranslating it as a mere negotiation within the ontopolitical matrix of states, markets, and everybody else is to already cede the terrain of culture; instead, we want to reclaim a more radical sense of translation that takes seriously the return of the machine.

Contemporary social-technical arrangements are defined by ubiquitous media and their distinct formats of communication. Coupled with new geopolitical configurations of space shaped by the rise of what we call “logistical cities” and their infrastructural components,¹³ the predominance of supply chain and workplace software along with technologies such as RFID, GPS, and voice picking marks the inception of new systems of measure that govern labor performance across a range of trade sectors and service industries.¹⁴ This is the new horizon of politics and labor organization today.

The global logistics industry is an emergent regime of what Alexander Galloway terms “protocological control” that already shapes the conditions of labor and life for many¹⁵ and increasingly afects how knowledge production is governed and undertaken now and in the future.¹⁶ With military origins, logistics emerged as a business concept in the 1950s concerned with the management of global supply chains. The primary task of the global logistics industry is to manage the movement of bodies and brains, finance and things in the interests of communication, transport, and economic eficiencies. There is an important prehistory to the so-called logistics revolution to be found in cybernetics and the Fordist era following World War II. Logistics is an extension of the “organizational paradigm” of cybernetics. Both belong to what Foucault terms the “machine stream ensemble” of neoliberal economics as it emerged following the war.¹⁷ Common to neoliberal economics, cybernetics, and logistics is the calculation of risk. And to manage the domain of risk, a system capable of reflexive analysis and governance is required. This is the task of logistics.

Logistics, as it emerged in the period of the so-called Second Cold War (1979– 1985),¹⁸ operates as a kind of third force or articulating device that, on the one hand, negotiates the economic and structural demand for secure national and increasingly global supply chains, while, on the other hand, serves as an adjunct to the arms race by advancing new organizational systems aimed at eficiently managing labor, mobility, and the accountability of things. Logistics was later consolidated as a business management practice as the Cold War began to thaw in the 1980s, and Western economic interests began to penetrate the new markets and, more particularly, harness the surplus labor of ex-Soviet states. For Brian Holmes, “The 1980s were the inaugural decade of neoliberalism, which brought new forms of financialized wealth-creation and motivational management into play, alongside the militaristic technologies of surveillance and control that had been inherited from the Cold War.”¹⁹

Labor, Code, Logistics

Edna Bonacich and Jake Wilson date what they call the “logistics revolution” from the 1970s, with a particular emphasis on the Reagan and Thatcher eras of market and institutional deregulation along with neoliberal international free trade agreements.²⁰ They characterize this organizational revolution in terms of changes in production (flexibility and outsourcing), logistics (“intermodalization”), and labor (intensification of contingency, weakening of unions, racialization of labor, lower labor standards). Contemporary logistics aims to minimize inventory buildups, or overaccumulation, which leads to overproduction by manufacturers and retail overstocking (or understocking, as the case may be).²¹ In both instances, manufacturers and retailers strive for eficiency in communications to minimize overinvestment in stocks that decline in economic value over time.

The software applications special to logistics visualize and manage the mobility of people, capital, and things, producing knowledge about the world in transit. The political challenge today is to devise techniques and strategies that operate outside the territory of control exerted by logistics technologies and their software algorithms that shape how practices of knowledge production are organized, which in turns shapes the conditions and experiences of contemporary labor. As much as the emergent field of software studies celebrates the collective innovation of open source initiatives and radical gestures of hacker cultures, there is a much more profound and substantive technological impact exerted upon labor-power in the formal and informal economies concomitant with the global logistics industries that has not yet received critical attention in analyses of the cultures of code. The challenge of political organization within the logistics industries is steep. Not only are unionized forms of labor organization marginal, where they do exist—in the maritime industries of some countries, for instance—there is great pressure for workers and their representatives to conform to everincreasing demands for greater workplace productivity and enhanced eficiency modulated by computational systems that manage key performance indicators.²²

Against these pressures for increased labor productivity is the savage collapse of labor-power as economies across the world are saddled with the blowout of sovereign debt passed on by massive corporate welfarism in the form of state bailouts of financial institutions—the health of which politicians, shareholders, economists, and traders argue is necessary if consumer life is to continue on its merry path of planetary annihilation. Yet the very model of such institutional-social organization is never questioned—except by the people now mobilizing in urban squares and financial districts across the world. Do we understand this in terms of a politics of action, however, or can we gain greater analytical traction and organizational insight by seeing these movements as a politics beyond the actionable, foregrounding nonrepresentational practices rather than repowering the politics of representation $? ^ { 2 3 }$ Here, we need to return to the work of translation and collaborative constitution as social-political practices immanent to media of communication.