Information – what's next?

The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:48 +0000

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree”, many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal – there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources – students, librarians, scientistsyou have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not – indeed, morally, you cannot – keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral – it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it – their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Wiederabdruck
Der Text wurde 2008 von Aaron Swartz geschrieben und am 7. August 2011
unter http://thescienceofdestruction.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/the-guerillaopen-access-manifesto/ [22.3.2013] veröffentlicht.

Das neue Spiel: Prism vs. Kontrollverlust

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:46 +0000

Eigentlich sind die Enthüllungen von Snowden alles andere als überraschend. Bei Anne Will sagte der Politikberater Andrew B. Denison es ganz unverblümt: Geheimdienste seien dafür da, die Gesetze anderer Staaten zu übertreten. Er hat damit nicht unrecht, so zynisch diese Einsicht auch klingen mag. Wir wussten immer, dass Geheimdienste Regierungen, Terroristen, Militärs bespitzeln, und wir machten uns keine Illusion darüber, dass sie sich dabei an die hiesigen Gesetze halten würden. Für diese Erkenntnis reicht auch rudimentäres James Bond-Wissen. Was also ist das revolutionär Neue an den Snowden-Enthüllungen?
Es ist die Dimension der Überwachung und ihre Grenzenlosigkeit. Die NSA hört in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Britischen Geheimdienst GCHQ nicht mehr nur terroristische, militärische oder gar politische Ziele ab, sondern uns alle, die Zivilgesellschaft. 500 Millionen Mal im Monat, alleine in Deutschland. Das ist nicht vergleichbar mit einer gezielten Abhöraktion, wie wir sie kennen. Dies betrifft alles und jeden und zwar nicht aus Versehen. Alles, was wir tun und sagen, wird beobachtet.
Und doch sind es nicht die Geheimdienste, die sich verändert haben. Es ist die Technologie. Geheimdienste sollen Informationen beschaffen. Das taten sie zu allen Zeiten und schon immer tun sie es mit den Mitteln, die ihnen zur Verfügung stehen. Diese Mittel waren vor 30 Jahren angezapfte Telefonleitungen und Tonbandgeräte. Heute sind es eben gesplicete Glasfaserkabel und Rechenzentren. Die Reichweite der Geheimdienste wuchs mit ihren Möglichkeiten. Die Echtzeitüberwachung eines Großteils der Weltbevölkerung ist zur überbordenden Realität geworden. Weil es geht.
Die Kraft, die dieser Entwicklung Vorschub leistet und auf der die NSA mit ihren wachsenden Überwachungsmöglichkeiten wie auf einer Welle reitet, hat uns auch in allen anderen Bereichen eingeholt. Wir haben die Kontrolle verloren. Über unsere Daten im Internet und über unsere Informationen auf der Welt. Die Komplexität der Erzeugung, Akkumulation und Interaktion von Daten in Zeiten der totalen Vernetzung übersteigt schon seit langem alle Vorstellungskraft des Menschen. Wir leben in Zeiten des Kontrollverlusts.

Es gibt kein analoges Leben im Digitalen
Eines der ersten Dokumente, die über Edward Snowden an die Öffentlichkeit gelangten, war eine Anordnung des geheimen Überwachungsgerichtes in den USA (FISC), das den Mobilfunkprovider Verizon dazu aufforderte, Verbindungsdaten – so genannte Metadaten – an die NSA weiterzugeben.
Mussten früher noch Menschen mit Schlapphüten hinter einem hergehen, um herauszufinden, wie man sich im Raum bewegt, reicht heute eine Funkzellenabfrage. Wir alle tragen eine Wanze mit uns herum, unser Handy. Anhand der Verbindungsdaten lässt sich nun der Aufenthaltsort jedes Verizonkunden zu jedem Zeitpunkt im Nachhinein feststellen. Noch genauer geht das mit GPS, der satellitengestützten Ortung, die heute in jedem Smartphone installiert ist.
Als der amerikanische Softwaremagnat John McAfee auf der Flucht vor den Behörden untergetaucht war, gab er einem Journalisten der Vice ein Interview. Das Foto zum Interview wurde mit einem Smartphone gemacht. Eigentlich hätte McAfee wissen müssen, dass Smartphones die Angewohnheit haben, alle möglichen Daten mit in die Bilddatei zu schreiben. In diesem Exif-Format fand sich auch die metergenaue Position von McAfee in Guatemala. Die Flucht war beendet.
Die Millionen Kameras und Mikrofone auf den Straßen und in unseren Hosentaschen sind aber ebenfalls erst der Anfang. Nächstes Jahr will Google sein Produkt „Glass“ herausbringen, ein Smartphone, das man statt in der Hosentasche als Brille im Gesicht trägt. Jederzeit aufnahmebereit. Datenschützer gruseln sich nicht ohne Grund vor dieser Technologie. Livestreams aus der First-Person-View sind keinesfalls etwas Neues. Aber ein einziger 24/7-Livestreamer pro Stadt dürfte reichen, das „Recht am eigenen Bild“ aller Bewohner zur Makulatur werden zu lassen.
Modellflugzeuge gibt es seit langer Zeit, aber erst seit kurzem sind sie so leistungsfähig und präzise steuerbar, dass man sie sinnvoll für Kamerafahrten nutzen kann. Diese privaten Kameradrohnen kosten nur noch schlappe 300 Euro und damit ist es schon heute jedem möglich, seine ganz private Luftraumüberwachung zu bewerkstelligen. Drohnen sind aber in Zukunft für viele Zwecke einsetzbar, von der vollautomatischen Paketpost bis zur Bauabnahme. Schon in naher Zukunft, so die Prognose, werden sie allgegenwärtig durch die Luft schwirren. Nur wenig wird ihnen dabei entgehen.
Währenddessen stellen wir uns die neue Spielkonsole von Microsoft – die XBox One – in die Wohnung. Deren Sensorik ist so ausgefeilt, dass sie in Echtzeit eine 3D-Repräsentation des Raumes generieren kann – inklusive der sich in ihm bewegenden Menschen. Diese Menschen kann sie nicht nur von einander durch Gesichtserkennung unterscheiden, sondern auch deren Puls messen – anhand von kleinsten Farbveränderungen der Hautpigmente.
Den Rest über unsere Lebensführung wird das „Internet der Dinge“ ausplaudern. So nennt man die Totalvernetzung von Alltagsgegenständen. Anfangen wird es mit smarten Stromzählern, die heute bereits verbaut werden und mit deren Hilfe man zum Beispiel nächtliche Essgewohnheiten oder Schlafstörungen ferndiagnostizieren könnte. Wenn der Kühlschrank erst automatisch Essen nachbestellt, kann man sich auch aus der Ferne über unseren Kalorienverbrauch genauestens informieren.
Durch die Allgegenwart von Sensoren schreitet die Digitalisierung aller Lebensbereiche voran. Wer Teil der Welt sein will, wird Teil des Internets sein.

Der Napster-Schock der Politik
Prism, die zweite Snowdenenthüllung, betraf die großen Internetkonzerne: Google, Facebook, Microsoft und Apple. Auf fast unleserlich hässlichen Powerpointfolien ist dokumentiert, dass die NSA direkten Zugriff auf die Datenbanken dieser Dienste habe.
Cloud Computing war eines der Buzzwörter der letzten Jahre und heute nutzen fast alle Webmailer wie Gmail im Browser, spielen ihr Backup in die iCloud oder tauschen Daten auf Dropbox. Und Hand aufs Herz: Wer ist heute nicht bei Facebook?
Ach, Sie sind nicht auf Facebook? Wetten doch? Facebook lädt alle seine Nutzer ein, ihnen das eigene Adressbuch zur Verarbeitung freizugeben. Der Friend Finder gleicht das Adressbuch dann mit den Facebookdaten ab und schlägt einem alle Bekannten zum „Befreunden“ vor. Was Facebook mit den Adressbuchdaten von denjenigen macht, die noch nicht bei Facebook angemeldet sind, stellte sich letztens per Zufall heraus. In der Datenexportfunktion war ein Programmierfehler, der nicht nur die Daten der Freunde, sondern auch die Schattenprofile all der Leute ausgab, die offiziell gar kein Facebookprofil haben.
Datensammeln kostet ja nichts. 1981 kostete ein Gigabyte Festspeicher ca. 300.000 Dollar, 2004 nur noch einen einzigen. Heute sind wir schon bei 3 Cent und bald schon wird Gigabyte keine relevante Maßeinheit mehr sein, weil alle Welt nur noch in Terabyte denkt. Speichermedien werden in dem Maße billiger, wie Prozessoren schneller werden, eine Halbierung des Preises alle 18 Monate zieht sich als Ausprägung von Moore‘s Law wie eine Naturkonstante durch die Geschichte des Computers.
Die NSA baut gerade an einem neuen Datencenter in Utah. Auf 100.000 Quadratmeter sollen Schätzungsweise 5 Zetabyte (ca. 5 Milliarden aktuell handelsübliche Festplatten) an Daten gespeichert und verarbeitet werden. Umgerechnet auf die Weltbevölkerung wären das 700 Gigabyte pro Person. Das Rechenzentrum soll noch dieses Jahr in Betrieb genommen werden.
Aber die Datenmassen wachsen ebenso schnell wie ihre Speicher. Das gesamte weltweite Datenvolumen verdoppelt sich alle 2 Jahre. 2010 behauptete Eric Schmidt, der damalige CEO von Google, dass in 48 Stunden so viele Daten produziert werden, wie seit Beginn der Menschheit bis 2003.
Man muss gar nicht die NSA sein, um an all die Daten heranzukommen. Datenbankhacks großer Unternehmen werden so langsam zum Alltag. 2012 waren es im Schnitt zwei pro Tag. Viele bekannte Namen finden sich darunter: Visa, Adobe, LinkedIn. Daten, die hinterher in unkontrollierbaren Schwarzmärkten gehandelt werden, oder gleich auf Tauschbörsen wie Bittorrent verteilt werden.
Der Computer wird gerne „Rechenmaschine“ genannt. Das ist aber nicht mal ein Viertel der Wahrheit. Der weitaus größte Teil einer jeden Prozessorarchitektur widmet sich ausschließlich dem Kopieren. In der symbolischen Welt der Bits und Bytes wird jede Information, die bewegt werden soll, kopiert statt verschoben. Wenn wir eine E-Mail senden, wird sie nicht „verschickt“, sondern an den Empfänger kopiert. Wenn wir im Netz Musik hören, wird diese Musik auf unseren Rechner kopiert, und selbst wenn ich ein Bild im Browser anschaue, dann schaue ich auf eine Kopie des Bildes im Hauptspeicher meines Computers.
Die immer weiter steigende Leistungsfähigkeit und Verfügbarkeit von Datenspeicher und Leitungen verflüssigt in der riesigen Kopiermaschine Internet auch noch so große Datenmengen. Der Wikileaks Whistleblower Bradley Manning konnte 251.287 Botschaftsdepeschen, 71.911 Afghanistan- und 391.832 Irak-Dokumente auf einer einzigen DVD unbemerkt heraustragen. Vor 30 Jahren hätte es in den USA keinen LKW gegeben, der so viele Dokumente hätte fassen können.
Als 2010 die Internetdienstleister von Wikileaks auf Druck der US-Regierung die Zusammenarbeit aufkündigten und die Website drohte, nicht mehr erreichbar zu sein, fanden sich in Windeseile 1426 Aktivisten, die die kompletten Daten der Wikileaksserver kopierten und ihrerseits der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich machten.
Wikileaks war das Napster der internationalen Politik. Mit Snowden sind wir jetzt bei Kazaa angekommen.

Die Krankenakte des Tutanchamun
Seit 2008 ist bekannt, dass die NSA eine selbstentwickelte Big-Data-Technologie namens Accumulo einsetzt. Mit ihr lassen sich gut „Pattern Recognition“-Analysen bewerkstelligen. Will man eine Nadel im Heuhaufen suchen, ist normalerweise jeder Strohhalm einer zu viel. Big Data ist da anders, Big-Data mag Heu. Jeder Strohhalm ist anders als alle anderen, deswegen will Big-Data möglichst viele Strohhalme kennenlernen. Denn je besser das Verständnis des Computers für Heu ist, desto schneller findet er darin die andersartige Nadel. Die NSA braucht eine Menge Kommunikationsdaten, denn je besser der Computer versteht, was „normale Kommunikation“ ist, desto eher findet es die „verdächtige Kommunikation“.
Auch liegt es nahe, sich anhand der Analyse der Metadaten der Kommunikation ein genaues Bild darüber zu verschaffen, wer mit wem kommuniziert und auf welche Weise einzelne Gruppen untereinander vernetzt sind. Die so genannte Graphen-Analyse ist heute ein gängiges Verfahren, um versteckte Zusammenhänge zwischen Personen oder Fakten in großen Datenmengen zu finden und Accumulo ist ausgewiesenermaßen darauf spezialisiert.
Dabei ist Big Data eigentlich ein großer Durchbruch in der Wissenschaft. Statt Hypothesen aufzustellen kann man große Datenmengen für sich sprechen lassen. Big Data kann Zusammenhänge aufzeigen, die niemand sonst je hätte erdenken können. Tomtom erkennt zum Beispiel in Zusammenarbeit mit Vodafone Staus. Verändern sich die Standortdaten vieler Handys auf Autobahnen über einen längeren Zeitraum nur noch wenig, ist das ein sicheres Zeichen für einen Stau, der dann in Echtzeit auf den Tomtom-Geräten angezeigt werden kann. Datenschützern wird versichert, dass die Daten zu diesem Zweck natürlich anonymisiert werden.
Paula Broadwell, die heimliche Affaire des Ex-CIA-Chefs Petraeus, flog auf, obwohl sie nicht unbedarft darin war, ihre Identität zu verstecken. Sie betrieb einen anonymen E-Mail-Account, in den sie sich nie von zu Hause aus einloggte. Sie suchte sich immer öffentliche Plätze, um ins Internet zu gehen und manchmal auch Hotels. Das war ihr Fehler. Das FBI korrelierte die Gästelisten vieler Hotels mit den Internetadressen des Petraeus-Mailverkehrs. Es reichten wenige übereinstimmende Datenpunkte, um Broadwell zu entlarven.
Neuerdings ist es unter Wissenschaftlern eine Art Big-Data-Sport geworden, große anonymisierte Datensets wieder zu deaonymisieren. Am MIT in Cambridge extrahierten sie aus den rohen Handy-Funkzellendaten nicht nur genaue Bewegungsprofile, sondern fanden heraus, dass es lediglich 4 Datenpunkte benötigte, um Nutzer mit 95% Genauigkeit zu identifizieren. Solche Datenpunkte können Checkin-Informationen auf Diensten wie Foursquare sein oder aber die Geokoordinaten in Fotos oder Tweets.
Bereits 2004 wurde ebenfalls am MIT das Programm „Gaydar“ entwickelt. Es zeigt, dass eine einfache Netzwerkanalyse der öffentlich einsehbaren Kontaktinformationen auf Facebook ausreicht, um mit 86%iger Sicherheit vorherzusagen, ob jemand homosexuell ist – natürlich ohne, dass derjenige das öffentlich angegeben hat.
2005 brachte eine Computertomographie zu Tage, dass Tutanchamun, der ägyptische Pharao vor 3000 Jahren nicht erst mit um die 30, sondern schon im Alter von 18 bis 20 gestorben sein muss. Über die Todesursache ist man sich allerdings bis heute uneins, denn Tutanchamun hatte viele potentiell tödliche Leiden. Verletzungen am Schädel, ein gebrochener Oberschenkel, ein eventueller Tumor, Skoliose und Malaria. Tutanchamun und seine Zeitgenossen wären nie auf die Idee gekommen, was für ausgefuchste Methoden der Analyse seines uralten Leichnams ihm eines Tages eine nachträgliche Krankenakte bescheren würden.
Wir alle sind Tutanchamun. Wenn wir ein Foto posten, einen Tweet absetzen, in ein Hotel einchecken oder uns einfach nur im Raum bewegen, wissen wir nicht, was morgen schon aus diesen Daten herauslesbar ist. Daten haben die Eigenschaft, verknüpfbar zu sein, und sie sind es morgen viel mehr noch als heute. Was heute Rauschen ist, sind morgen wertvolle Informationen, was heute unbedeutend ist, kann morgen einen Skandal auslösen. Wir wissen so wenig wie Tutanchamun, was Daten morgen sein werden.

Ein neues Spiel
Und nun stehen wir vor Prism und uns wird langsam bewusst, dass wir die Kontrolle auch nicht wiedergewinnen werden. Als abstrakte Bedrohung aus dem Off konnte die Erzählung von mitlesenden Geheimdiensten den Diskurs über Privatsphäre-Technologien und Datenschutz sogar noch anfeuern. Als konkrete und überbordende Realität steht man davor, als hatte man eben noch vorgehabt, mit einem Klappmesser einen Wal zu erledigen.
Datenschutzerklärungen sind auf einen Schlag null und nichtig, Datenschutzgesetze wirken wie Hohn gegen die internationalen Spionagenetzwerke. Auch der bange Blick zur Politik wird mehr als nur enttäuscht. Es stellt sich heraus, dass all das nicht nur im Einverständnis, sondern in enger Zusammenarbeit mit den deutschen Diensten, also auch der Regierung, geschieht. Das vom Staat so pathetisch gewährte Grundrecht auf „Informationelle Selbstbestimmung“ war lediglich Opium fürs Volk, das jederzeit mit Füßen getreten werden darf – jedenfalls von den „Richtigen“. Und wer glaubt, dass ein Regierungswechsel irgendetwas verändern würde, hat sich noch nicht mit den damaligen und heutigen Positionen zur Überwachung bei der SPD beschäftigt.
Aus der Hackercommunity kommen derweil die Ratschläge zur Selbstverteidigung: „Verschlüsselt doch Eure Kommunikation!“ Aber obwohl es noch nie so einfach war wie heute, ist es immer noch viel zu kompliziert für den größten Teil der Bevölkerung. Viel einfacher darf es auch gar nicht werden, denn um Verschlüsselung für Kommunikation einzurichten, muss man sich bereits mit dem Verfahren soweit vertraut gemacht haben, dass Fehler vermieden werden können, die die Sicherheit sofort kompromittieren. Passt man zum Beispiel nicht auf und vertraut der falschen Signatur, kann sich schnell jemand als mein Kommunikationspartner ausgeben oder mit einer Man-in-the-Middle-Attacke dennoch meine Daten abhören.
Eine Lösung gegen die NSA ist Verschlüsselung sowieso nicht, denn auch wenn die Kommunikationsinhalte nicht lesbar sind, bleiben die Metadaten der Kommunikation weiterhin überwachbar. Sie sind es aber, für die sich die NSA ganz besonders interessiert. So praktisch Verschlüsselung im Einzelfall sein kann, eine gesellschaftliche Antwort auf Prism kann auch sie nicht bieten.
Der Hacker Jacob Applebaum schlägt zudem noch vor, dass wir aufhören sollen Smartphones zu benutzen, keinen Facebookaccount haben und nur noch über Anonymisierungsdienste im Netz unterwegs sein sollten. Doch Kommunikationssicherheit als Lebensaufgabe, sich selbst sozial und technisch einschränken und sich letztendlich zu verstecken ist nicht gerade das, was außerhalb der Hackerwelt als „Freiheit“ empfunden wird. Zu Recht.
Viele Hacker und Datenschützer sind bis heute überzeugt, dass es beim Kampf gegen Überwachung um Privatsphäre ginge, und versuchen weiterhin – zunehmend verzweifelt – den Kontrollverlust einzudämmen. Sie spielen immer noch ein Spiel, das längst verloren ist. Die Privatsphäre ist tot, die NSA hat nur noch mal ihren Stempel darunter gesetzt.
Der Kontrollverlust ist der Tsunami und Prism nur eine der Schaumkronen. Die Allgegenwart der Sensoren, die steigende Volatilität der Daten und die nicht einzugrenzende Aussagefähigkeit vorhandener Datenberge durch neue Analysemethoden sind die drei Treiber des Kontrollverlustes. Bedingt durch die Weiterentwicklung der digitalen Technologie, die alle 18 Monate ihre Leistungsfähigkeit verdoppelt, wird der Kontrollverlust zur exponentiellen Konstante der Weltverdatung. Unaufhaltsam, allgegenwärtig, grenzenlos.

Aber deswegen aufgeben?
Der erste FBI-Chef J. Edgar Hoover führte seinerzeit Akten über jeden wichtigen Politiker, jeden mächtigen Wirtschaftsboss und alle möglichen Journalisten in den USA. Das halbe Land musste nach seiner Pfeife tanzen, denn er war in der Lage, jeden zu kompromittieren. Überträgt man Hoovers Ruchlosigkeit auf die Möglichkeiten der heutigen NSA, ist dasselbe in globalem Maßstab vorstellbar. Eine solche Machtakkumulation droht nicht nur die amerikanische Demokratie auszuhebeln, sondern bedroht auch die Integrität der Politik auf der ganzen Welt.
Es lohnt sich, weiterhin gegen Überwachung zu kämpfen, aber aus anderen Gründen und mit anderen Mitteln. Der Kontrollverlust hat nicht nur die Spielregeln verschoben, sondern wir befinden uns in einem komplett anderen Spiel. Ein Spiel, das man nicht gewinnen kann, wenn man es gegen seine Schwungmasse spielt.
„Snowden besitzt genügend Informationen, um der US-Regierung innerhalb einer Minute mehr Schaden zuzufügen, als es jede andere Person in der Geschichte der USA jemals getan hat“, ließ der Guardian-Journalist Glenn Greenwald, mit dem Snowden in engem Kontakt steht, in einem Interview durchblicken. Im neuen Spiel kann ein Einzelner ohne große finanzielle Mittel Supermächte in arge Bedrängnis bringen.
Julian Assange, Bradley Manning und nun Edward Snowden spielen erfolgreich das neue Spiel. Es heißt: Transparenz gegen Überwachung.
Der Kontrollverlust hat nicht nur uns gegenüber den Geheimdiensten transparent gemacht, sondern auch die Geheimdienste gegenüber uns. Der Kontrollverlust macht alles und jeden transparent. Fragt sich also, wer dadurch mehr zu verlieren hat.
Es kann in diesem Spiel nicht mehr darum gehen, Leute davon abzuhalten, Daten zu sammeln. Es muss darum gehen, den Geheimdiensten kein Monopol auf Daten zu gewähren. Ihre eigenen klandestinen Strukturen, die Deutungsmacht über die Realität, der Informationsvorsprung gegenüber der Restgesellschaft sind der Stoff, aus dem die Dienste ihre Macht beziehen. Ihre Macht zu brechen heißt, sie ins Licht zu zerren, ihre Datenbanken zu öffnen und allen Zugang zu gewähren. Sie haben viel zu verlieren.
Dass die Menschen untereinander transparenter werden, scheint ihrem politischen Einfluss dagegen nicht zu schaden. Nie war es so leicht, sich zu finden, sich auszutauschen, sich zu organisieren und sich zu vernetzen. Nie wurde die Kraft der Massen schneller und effektiver auf die Straße gebracht als heutzutage. Vom ägyptischen Tahrir- bis zum türkischen Taksim-Platz erfahren wir eine ganz neue Macht der Öffentlichkeit, die selbst noch erst ihre Möglichkeiten im neuen Spiel begreifen muss.
Die NSA hat jährlich ca. 10 Milliarden Dollar Budget zur Verfügung, um uns zu überwachen. Doch wir, die Restweltgesellschaft, geben allein dieses Jahr 3,7 Billionen Euro für Informationstechnologie aus. Im neuen Spiel haben wir mehr Köpfe, mehr Rechenpower, mehr Daten zur Verfügung als die NSA je haben könnte und mit dem Internet haben wir ein Instrument, all diese Kräfte zu organisieren. Die Zivilgesellschaft hat allen Grund für ein völlig neues Selbstbewusstsein. Eines, das sich nicht mehr durch alle 4 Jahre angekreuzte Zettel zum Ausdruck bringt, sondern unvermittelt, disruptiv und unkontrollierbar.
Im neuen Spiel sind Datenschutzgesetze gegen Prism nicht nur unwirksam, sondern stärken die Macht der Institutionen, denn sie schränken in erster Linie die Zivilgesellschaft ein, nicht aber die Dienste. Jede Regulierung des Kontrollverlusts wirkt in dieser Mechanik wie ein Datenauswertungsmonopol der Mächtigen und stärkt deren Deutungsmacht. Dasselbe gilt für Urheberrechte und alle anderen rechtlichen Bestimmung zur Datenkontrolle.
Im neuen Spiel gehört private Kommunikation den Kommunikationspartnern und der NSA. Private Statusmeldungen auf Facebook gehören dem Freundeskreis und der NSA. Alles, was man in der vermeintlichen Vertraulichkeit einer gesetzten Privacyeinstellung oder der gesetzlichen Zusicherung des Staates tut, gehört der NSA. Nur was öffentlich für alle erreichbar ist, verlinkbar, zitierbar ist, kann die NSA nicht als Informationsvorsprung für sich nutzen.
Im neuen Spiel gibt es keine Privatsphäre, es gibt nur noch Verschlüsselung. Das ist nicht das gleiche. Sie mag als gesellschaftliche Lösung nicht taugen, aber um zeitweise Residuen des Unbeobachteten zu schaffen, ohne den Geheimdiensten neue Macht in die Hände zu spielen, kann Verschlüsselung nützlich sein.
Für das neue Spiel brauchen wir zivile und auch aktivistische Big-Data-Projekte. Wir müssen die Kraft der Daten für die Zivilgesellschaft nutzbar machen. Viele der Werkzeuge gibt es Open Source, doch in der Aktivisten- und Hackerszene gibt es noch Berührungsängste, die das alte Datenschutz-Paradigma weiterhin reproduzieren.
Der Feind sind im neuen Spiel nicht die Amerikaner. Die Grenzen verlaufen bei der Überwachung nicht zwischen den Staaten, sondern zwischen oben und unten. Eine globale Regierungselite hat sich zusammengetan, um gegenseitig ihre Bevölkerungen auszuspähen und die Daten dann auszutauschen. Wir – die Weltöffentlichkeit – können den Regierungen in dieser Frage nicht vertrauen. Es kann deswegen nicht darum gehen, die Geheimdienste unter eine vermeintlich bessere Kontrolle zu bekommen. Ziel des neuen Spiels muss die restlose Transparentmachung und schließlich Abschaffung aller geheimdienstlicher Aktivitäten sein.
Das neue Spiel wird anspruchsvoller als das alte. Vor allem müssen wir uns erst selbst in die neue Rolle einfinden. Wir müssen Gewissheiten aufgeben, Sicherheiten abhaken, in vielen Dingen umdenken. Aber das neue Spiel ist keinesfalls aussichtsloser als das alte. Im Gegenteil. Alles auf Anfang.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: SPEX # 347, August 2013, S. 116.

FREE

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:45 +0000

– Who wants to know? – I want to know.
– What do you want to know? – I don’t know!

At some point last year I proposed within my institution, Goldsmiths, University of London, that we develop a free academy adjacent to our institution and call it “Goldsmiths Free.” The reactions to this proposal, when not amused smirks at the apparently adolescent nature of the proposal, were largely either puzzled – “What would we get out of it? Why would we want to do it?” – or horrified – “How would it finance itself?” No one asked what might be taught or discussed within it and how that might differ from the intellectual work that is done within our conventional fee-charging, degree-giving, research-driven institution. And that of course was the point, that it would be different, not just in terms of redefining the point of entry into the structure (free of fees and previous qualifications) or the modus operandi of the work (not degree-based, unexamined, not subject to the state’s mechanisms of monitoring and assessment), but also that the actual knowledge would be differently situated within it. And that is what I want to think about here, about the difference in the knowledge itself, its nature, its status, and its affect.
The kind of knowledge that interested me in this proposal to the university was one that was not framed by disciplinary and thematic orders, a knowledge that would instead be presented in relation to an urgent issue, and not an issue as defined by knowledge conventions, but by the pressures and struggles of contemporaneity. When knowledge is unframed, it is less grounded genealogically and can navigate forwards rather than backwards. This kind of “unframed” knowledge obviously had a great deal to do with what I had acquired during my experiences in the art world, largely a set of permissions with regard to knowledge and a recognition of its performative faculties – that knowledge does rather than is. But the permissions I encountered in the art world came with their own set of limitations, a tendency to reduce the complex operations of speculation to either illustration or to a genre that would visually exemplify “study” or “research.” Could there be, I wondered, another mode in which knowledge might be set free without having to perform such generic mannerisms, without becoming an aesthetic trope in the hands of curators hungry for the latest “turn”?
Heads will surely be shaken! The notion of “free” is currently so degraded in terms of the free market, the dubious proposals of the new “free” economy of the internet, and the historically false promises of individual freedom, that it may be difficult to see what it might have to offer beyond all these hollow slogans. Nevertheless, the possibility of producing some interrogative proximity between “knowledge” and “free” seems both unavoidable and irresistible, particularly in view of the present struggles over the structures of education in Europe.
The actual drive towards knowledge and therefore towards some form of expansion and transformation seems far more important than simply a discussion of the categories it operates within. In order to attempt such a transition I need to think about several relevant questions:
1. First and foremost, what is knowledge when it is “free“?
2. Whether there are sites, such as the spaces of art, in which knowledge might be more “free” than in others?
3. What are the institutional implications of housing knowledge that is “free”?
4. What are the economies of “free” that might prove an alternative to the market- and outcome-based and comparison-driven economies of institutionally structured knowledge at present?
Evidently, en route I need to think about the struggles over education, its alternative sitings, the types of emergent economies that might have some purchase on its rethinking, and, finally, how “education” might be perceived as an alternative organizational mode, not of information, of formal knowledges and their concomitant marketing, but as other forms of coming together not predetermined by outcomes but by directions. Here I have in mind some process of “knowledge singularization,” which I will discuss further below.
Obviously it is not the romance of liberation that I have in mind here in relation to “free.” Knowledge cannot be “liberated,” it is endlessly embedded in long lines of transformations that link in inexplicable ways to produce new conjunctions. Nor do I have in mind the romance of “avant-garde” knowledge, with its oppositional modes of “innovation” as departure and breach. Nor am I particularly interested in what has been termed “interdisciplinarity,” which, with its intimations of movement and “sharing” between disciplines, de facto leaves intact those membranes of division and logics of separation and containment. Nor, finally, and I say this with some qualification, is my main aim here to undo the disciplinary and professional categories that have divided and isolated bodies of knowledge from one another in order to promote a heterogeneous field populated by “bodies” of knowledge akin to the marketing strategies that ensure choice and multiplicity and dignify the practices of epistemological segregation by producing endless new subcategories for inherited bodies of named and contained knowledge.
There is a vexed relation between freedom, individuality, and sovereignty that has a particular relevance for the arena being discussed here, as knowledge and education have a foothold both in processes of individuation and in processes of socialization. Hannah Arendt expressed this succinctly when she warned that
Politically, this identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will. For it leads either to a denial of human freedom – namely, if it is realized that whatever men may be, they are never sovereign – or to the insight that the freedom of one man, or a group, or a body politic, can only be purchased at the price of the freedom, i. e. the sovereignty, of all others. Within the conceptual framework of traditional philosophy, it is indeed very difficult to understand how freedom and non-sovereignty can exist together or, to put it another way, how freedom could have been given to men under the conditions of non-sovereignty.¹
And in the final analysis it is my interest to get around both concepts, freedom and sovereignty, through the operations of “singularization.” Perhaps it is knowledge de-individuated, de-radicalized in the conventional sense of the radical as breach, and yet operating within the circuits of singularity – of “the new relational mode of the subject” – that is preoccupying me in this instance.
And so, the task at hand seems to me to be not one of liberation from confinement, but rather one of undoing the very possibilities of containment.
While an unbounded circulation of capital, goods, information, hegemonic alliances, populist fears, newly globalized uniform standards of excellence, and so forth, are some of the hallmarks of the late neoliberal phase of capitalism, we nevertheless can not simply equate every form of the unbounded and judge them all as equally insidious. “Free“ in relation to knowledge, it seems to me, has its power less in its expansion than in an ultimately centripetal movement, less in a process of penetrating and colonizing everywhere and everything in the relentless mode of capital, than in reaching unexpected entities and then drawing them back, mapping them onto the field of perception.

STRUGGLES
In spring and autumn of 2009 a series of prolonged strikes erupted across Austria and Germany, the two European countries whose indigenous education systems have been hardest hit by the reorganization of the Bologna Accord; smaller strikes also took place in France, Italy, and Belgium.² At the center of the students’ protests were the massive cuts in education budgets across the board and the revision of state budgets within the current economic climate, which made youth and the working class bear the burden of support for failing financial institutions.
The strikes were unified by common stands on three issues:
1. against fees for higher education
2. against the increasing limitation of access to selection in higher education
3. for re-democratization of the universities and re-inclusion of students in decision-making processes
Not only were these the largest and most organized strikes to have been held by school and university students since the 1980s, but they also included teachers, whose pay had been reduced and whose working hours had been extended, which, after considerable pressure from below, eventually moved the trade unions to take a position.
The concerns here were largely structural and procedural, and considering all that is at stake in these reorganizations of the education system, it is difficult to know what to privilege in our concern: the reformulation of institutions into regimented factories for packaged knowledge that can easily be placed within the marketplace; the processes of knowledge acquisition that are reduced to the management of formulaic outcomes that are comparable across cultures and contexts; “training“ replacing “speculating“; the dictation of such shifts from above and without any substantive consultation or debate. All of these are significant steps away from criticality in spaces of education and towards the goal that all knowledge have immediate, transparent, predictable, and pragmatic application.
The long, substantive lines that connect these struggles to their predecessors over the past forty years or so, and which constitute “education” as both an ongoing political platform and the heart of many radical artistic practices, are extremely well articulated in a conversation between Marion von Osten and Eva Egermann, in which von Osten says of her projects such as “reformpause”:
Firstly, I tried to create a space to pause, to hold on for a moment, to take a breath and to think – to think about what kinds of change might be possible; about how and what we might wish to learn; and why that which we wished to learn might be needed. I guess, in this way, both Manoa Free University and “reformpause” shared similar goals – not simply to critique the ongoing educational reforms and thereby legitimize established structures, but rather to actively engage in thinking about alternate concepts and possible change.
Secondly, there is a long history of student struggles and the question arises as to whether or not these are still relevant today and, if they are, how and why? The recent student struggles did not simply originate with the Bologna Declaration. The genealogy of various school and university protests and struggles over the past forty years demonstrates that we live in an era of educational reforms which, since the 1960s, have led to the construction of a new political subjectivity, the “knowledge worker.” This is not just a phenomenon of the new millennium; furthermore, many artistic practices from the 1960s and 1970s relate to this re-ordering of knowledge within Western societies. This is one of the many reasons why we so readily relate to these practices, as exemplified by conceptualism and the various ways in which conceptual artists engaged with contemporary changes in the concepts of information and communication.³
All of this identifies hugely problematic and very urgent issues, but we cannot lose sight of the status of actual knowledge formations within these. When knowledge is not geared towards “production,” it has the possibility of posing questions that combine the known and the imagined, the analytical and the experiential, and which keep stretching the terrain of knowledge so that it is always just beyond the border of what can be conceptualized.
These are questions in which the conditions of knowledge are always internal to the concepts it is entertaining, not as a context but as a limit to be tested. The entire critical epistemology developed by Foucault and by Derrida rested on questions that always contain a perception of their own impossibility, a consciousness of thinking as a process of unthinking something that is fully aware of its own status. The structural, the techniques, and the apparatuses, could never be separated from the critical interrogation of concepts. As Giorgio Agamben says of Foucault’s concept of the apparatus:
The proximity of this term to the theological dispositio, as well as to Foucault’s apparatuses, is evident. What is common to all these terms is that they refer back to this oikonomia, that is, to a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient – in a way that purports to be useful – the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings.⁴
So the struggle facing education is precisely that of separating thought from its structures, a struggle constantly informed by tensions between thought management and subjectification – the frictions by which we turn ourselves into subjects. As Foucault argued, this is the difference between the production of subjects in “power/knowledge” and those processes of self-formation in which the person is active. It would seem then that the struggle in education arises from tensions between conscious inscription into processes of self-formation and what Foucault, speaking of his concerns with scientific classification, articulated as the subsequent and necessary “insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” in which constant new voices appear claiming themselves not as “identities,” but as events within knowledge.⁵ The argument that Isabelle Stengers makes about her own political formation has convinced me that this is a productive direction to follow in trying to map out knowledge as struggle:
My own intellectual and political life has been marked by what I learned from the appearance of drugs users’ groups claiming that they were “citizens like everyone else,“ and fighting against laws that were officially meant to “protect“ them. The efficacy of this new collective voice, relegating to the past what had been the authorized, consensual expertise legitimating the “war on drugs,“ convinced me that such events were “political events“ par excellence, producing – as, I discovered afterwards, Dewey had already emphasized – both new political struggle and new important knowledge. I even proposed that what we call democracy could be evaluated by its relation to those disrupting collective productions. A “true“ democracy would demand the acceptance of the ongoing challenge of such disruptions – would not only accept them but also acknowledge those events as something it depended upon.⁶
Knowledge as disruption, knowledge as counter-subjugation, knowledge as constant exhortation to its own, often uncomfortable implications, are at the heart of “struggle.” The battle over education as we are experiencing it now does not find its origin in the desire to suppress these but rather in efforts to regulate them so that they work in tandem with the economies of cognitive capitalism.

ECONOMIES
The economies of the world of knowledge have shifted quite dramatically over the past ten to fifteen years. What had been a fairly simple subsidy model, with states covering the basic expenses of teaching, subsidizing home schooling on a per capita basis (along with private entities incorporated in “not -for-profit” structures); research councils and foundations covering the support of research in the humanities and pure sciences; and industry supporting applied research, has changed quite dramatically, as have the traditional outlets for such knowledge: scholarly journals and books, exhibitions, science-based industry, the military, and public services such as agriculture and food production. Knowledge, at present, is not only enjoined to be “transferable” (to move easily between paradigms so that its potential impact will be transparent from the outset) and to invent new and ever expanding outlets for itself, it must also contend with the prevalent belief that it should be obliged not only to seek out alternative sources of funding but actually to produce these. By producing the need for a particular type of knowledge one is also setting up the means of its excavation or invention – this is therefore a “need-based” culture of knowledge that produces the support and the market through itself.
So, when I speak of a “free” academy, the question has to be posed: if it is to meet all the above requirements, namely, that it not be fee-charging, not produce applied research, not function within given fields of expertise, and not consider itself in terms of applied “outcomes,” how would it be funded?
In terms of the internet, the economic model of “free“ that has emerged over the past decade initially seemed to be an intensification or a contemporary perpetuation of what had been called by economists, the “cross-subsidy“ model: you’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service. This primary model was then expanded by the possibilities of ever increasing access to the internet, married to constantly lowered costs in the realm of digital technologies.
A second trend is simply that anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs. And so it goes, too, for everything from banking to gambling, check it out! The moment a company’s primary expenses become things based in silicon, free becomes not just an option but also the inevitable destination.⁷ The cost of actually circulating something within these economies becomes lower and lower, until cost is no longer the primary index of its value.
A third aspect of this emergent economic model is perhaps the one most relevant to this discussion of education. Here the emphasis is on a shift from an exclusive focus on buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, to a tripartite model, in which the third element that enters does so based on its interest in the exchange taking place between the first two elements – an interest to which it contributes financially. In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is “free to air,” and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market.
In a sense, what the Web represents is the extension of the media business model to industries of all sorts. This is not simply the notion that advertising will pay for everything. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, “value-added“ subscriptions, and direct e-commerce. Now an entire ecosystem of Web companies is growing up around the same set of models.⁸
The question is whether this model of a “free” economy is relevant to my proposal for a free “academy,” given that in an economic model the actual thing in circulation is not subject to much attention except as it appeals to a large public and their ostensible needs. Does this model have any potential for criticality or for an exchange that goes beyond consumption? Novelist, activist, and technology commentator Cory Doctorow claims that there’s a pretty strong case to be made that “free” has some inherent antipathy to capitalism. That is, information that can be freely reproduced at no marginal cost may not want, need or benefit from markets as a way of organizing them. . . . Indeed, there’s something eerily Marxist in this phenomenon, in that it mirrors Marx’s prediction of capitalism’s ability to create a surplus of capacity that can subsequently be freely shared without market forces’ brutality.⁹
The appealing part of the economy of “free” for debates about education is its unpredictability in throwing up new spheres of interest and new congregations around them. It has some small potential for shifting the present fixation on the direct relation between fees, training, applied research, organization-as-management, predictable outputs and outcomes, and the immediate consumption of knowledge. This however seems a very narrow notion of criticality as it is limited to the production of a surplus within knowledge and fails to take on the problems of subjectification. And it is the agency of subjectification and its contradictory multiplicity that is at the heart of a preoccupation with knowledge in education, giving it its traction as it were, what Foucault called “the lived multiplicity of positionings.” The internet-based model of “free” does break the direct relation between buyers and sellers, which in the current climate of debates about education, in the context of what Nick Dyer-Witheford has called “Academia Inc.,” is certainly welcome. But it does not expand the trajectory of participation substantively, merely reducing the act of taking part in this economy of use and exchange. The need to think of a “market” for the disruption of paradigms emerges as an exercise in futility and as politically debilitating. To think again with Agamben:
Contemporary societies therefore present themselves as inert bodies going through massive processes of desubjectification without acknowledging any real subjectification. Hence the eclipse of politics, which used to presuppose the existence of subjects and real identities (the workers’ movement, the bourgeoisie, etc.), and the triumph of the oikonomia, that is to say, of a pure activity of government that aims at nothing other than its own replication.¹⁰
What then would be the sites of conscious subjectification within this amalgam of education and creative practices?

SITES
Over the past two decades we have seen a proliferation of self-organized structures that take the form, with regard to both their investigations and effects, of sites of learning.¹¹ These have, more than any other initiative, collapsed the divisions between sites of formal academic education and those of creative practice, display, performance, and activism. In these spaces the previously clear boundaries between universities, academies, museums, galleries, performance spaces, NGOs, and political organizations, lost much of their visibility and efficaciousness. Of course, virtually every European city still has at least one if not several vast “entertainment machine” institutions, traditional museums that see their task as one of inviting the populace to partake of “art” in the most conventional sense and perceive “research” to be largely about themselves (to consist, that is, in the seemingly endless conferences that are held each year on “the changing role of the museum”). These institutions however no longer define the parameters of the field and serve more as indices of consumption, market proximities, and scholastic inertia.
What does knowledge do when it circulates in other sites such as the art world?
As Eva Egermann says:
Of course, the art field was seen as a place in which things could happen, a field of potential, a space of exchange between different models and concepts and, in the sense of learning and unlearning, a field of agency and transfer between different social and political fields and between different positions and subjectivities. In a way, the exhibition functioned as a pretext, a defined place for communication and action that would perhaps establish impulses for further transformations. So, the project functioned as an expanded field of practice from which to organize and network between many different groups, but also to question and experiment with methods of representation and distribution for collective artistic research. We wanted to disseminate our research for collective usage through various means, such as the study circle itself, a wiki, publications and readers and through the model of a free university.¹²
More than any other sphere, the spaces of contemporary art that open themselves to this kind of alternative activity of learning and knowledge production, and see in it not an occasional indulgence but their actual daily business, have become the sites of some of the most important redefinitions of knowledge that circulate today.
As sites, they have marked the shift from “Ivory Towers” of knowledge to spaces of interlocution, with in between a short phase as “laboratories.” As a dialogical practice based on questioning, on agitating the edges of paradigms and on raising external points of view, interlocution takes knowledge back to a Socratic method but invests its operations with acknowledged stakes and interests, rather than being a set of formal proceedings. It gives a performative dimension to the belief argued earlier through the work of Foucault and Derrida, that knowledge always has at its edges the active process of its own limits and its own invalidation.
In setting up knowledge production within the spaces and sites of art, one also takes up a set of permissions that are on offer. Recognizing who is posing questions, where they are speaking from, and from where they know what they know, becomes central rather than, as is typical, marginal qualifications often relegated to footnotes. Permission is equally granted to start in the middle without having to rehearse the telos of an argument; to start from “right here and right now” and embed issues in a variety of contexts, expanding their urgency; to bring to these arguments a host of validations, interventions, asides, and exemplifications that are not recognized as directly related or as sustaining provable knowledge. And, perhaps most importantly, “the curatorial,” not as a profession but as an organizing and assembling impulse, opens up a set of possibilities, mediations perhaps, to formulate subjects that may not be part of an agreed-upon canon of “subjects” worthy of investigation. So knowledge in the art world, through a set of permissions that do not recognize the academic conventions for how one arrives at a subject, can serve both the purposes of reframing and producing subjects in the world.
Finally, I would argue that knowledge in the art world has allowed us to come to terms with partiality – with the fact that our field of knowing is always partially comprehensible, the problems that populate it are partially visible, and our arguments are only partially inhabiting a recognizable logic. Under no illusions as to its comprehensiveness, knowledge as it is built up within the spaces of art makes relatively modest claims for plotting out the entirety of a problematic, accepting instead that it is entering in the middle and illuminating some limited aspects, all the while making clear its drives in doing so.¹³
And it is here, in these spaces, that one can ground the earlier argument that the task at hand in thinking through “free“ is not one of liberation from confinement, but rather one of undoing the very possibilities of containment. It is necessary to understand that containment is not censure but rather half acknowledges acts of framing and territorializing.

VECTORS
In conjunction with the sites described above it is also direction and circulation that help in opening up “knowledge” to new perceptions of its mobility.
How can we think of “education” as circulations of knowledge and not as the top-down or down-up dynamics in which there is always a given, dominant direction for the movement of knowledge? The direction of the knowledge determines its mode of dissemination: if it is highly elevated and canonized then it is structured in a particular, hierarchical way, involving original texts and commentaries on them; if it is experiential then it takes the form of narrative and description in a more lateral form; and if it is empirical then the production of data categories, vertical and horizontal, would dominate its argument structures even when it is speculating on the very experience of excavating and structuring that knowledge.¹⁴
While thinking about this essay I happened to hear a segment of a radio program called The Bottom Line, a weekly BBC program about business entrepreneurs I had never encountered before. In it a businessman was talking about his training; Geoff Quinn the chief executive of clothing manufacturer T. M. Lewin said he had not had much education and went into clothing retailing at the age of sixteen, “but then I discovered the stock room – putting things in boxes, making lists, ordering the totality of the operation.”¹⁵ He spoke of the stockroom, with a certain sense of wonder, as the site in which everything came together, where the bits connected and made sense, less a repository than a launch pad for a sartorial world of possibilities. The idea that the “stockroom” could be an epiphany, could be someone’s education, was intriguing and I tried to think it out a bit … part Foucauldian notion of scientific classification and part Simondon’s pragmatic transductive thought about operations rather than meanings – the “stockroom” is clearly a perspective, an early recognition of the systemic and the interconnected, and a place from which to see the “big picture.” While the “stockroom” may be a rich and pleasing metaphor, it is also a vector, along which a huge range of manufacturing technologies, marketing strategies, and advertising campaigns meet up with labor histories and those of raw materials, with print technologies and internet disseminations, with the fantasmatic investments in clothes and their potential to renew us.
Therefore what if “education” – the complex means by which knowledges are disseminated and shared – could be thought of as a vector, as a quantity (force or velocity, for example), made up of both direction and magnitude? A powerful horizontality that looks at the sites of education as convergences of drives to knowledge that are in themselves knowledge? Not in the sense of formally inherited, archived, and transmitted knowledges but in the sense that ambition “knows” and curiosity “knows” and poverty “knows” – they are modes of knowing the world and their inclusion or their recognition as events of knowledge within the sites of education make up not the context of what goes on in the classroom or in the space of cultural gathering, but the content.
Keller Easterling in her exceptionally interesting book Enduring Innocence builds on Arjun Appadurai’s notion of “imagined worlds” as “the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe … these mixtures create variegated scapes described as “mediascapes and “ethnoscapes.” Which, says Easterling, by “naturalizing the migration and negotiation of traveling cultural forms allows these thinkers [such as Appadurai] to avoid impossible constructs about an authentic locality.”¹⁶ From Easterling’s work I have learned to understand such sites as located forms of “intelligence” – both information and stealth formation. To recognize the operations of “the network” in relation to structures of knowledge in which no linearity could exist and the direct relation between who is in the spaces of learning, the places to which they are connected, the technologies that close the gaps in those distances, the unexpected and unpredictable points of entry that they might have, the fantasy projections that might have brought them there – all agglomerate as sites of knowledge.
We might be able to look at these sites and spaces of education as ones in which long lines of mobility, curiosity, epistemic hegemony, colonial heritages, urban fantasies, projections of phantom professionalization, new technologies of both formal access and less formal communication, a mutual sharing of information, and modes of knowledge organization, all come together in a heady mix – that is the field of knowledge and from it we would need to go outwards to combine all of these as actual sites of knowledge and produce a vector.
Having tried to deconstruct as many discursive aspects of what “free” might mean in relation to knowledge, in relation to my hoped-for-academy, I think that what has come about is the understanding of “free” in a non-liberationist vein, away from the binaries of confinement and liberty, rather as the force and velocity by which knowledge and our imbrication in it, move along. That its comings-together are our comings-together and not points in a curriculum, rather along the lines of the operations of “singularity” that enact the relation of “the human to a specifiable horizon” through which meaning is derived, as Jean-Luc Nancy says.¹⁷ Singularity provides us with another model of thinking relationality, not as external but as loyal to a logic of its own self-organization. Self-organization links outwardly not as identity, interest, or affiliation, but as a mode of coexistence in space. To think “knowledge” as the working of singularity is actually to decouple it from the operational demands put on it, to open it up to processes of multiplication and of links to alternate and unexpected entities, to animate it through something other than critique or defiance – perhaps as “free.”

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: e-flux Journal, Education Actualized, #14, 03/2010 unter: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/free/ [07.06.2013].

1.) Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” Chapter VI “Revolution and Preservation” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, (ed. Peter R. Baehr) (Penguin, London:, Penguin, 2000), 455.
2.) See Dietrich Lemke’s “Mourning Bologna” in this issue, http://e-flux.com/journal/view/123.
3.) Marion von Osten and Eva Egermann, “Twist and Shout,” in Curating and the Educational Turn: 2, eds. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (London: Open Editions; Amsterdam: de Appel, forthcoming).
4.) Giorgio Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, eds. and trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 12.
5.) Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (London: Harvester, 1980), 81.
6.) Isabelle Stengers, “Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism,” in Subjectivity 22 (2008): 38–59.
7.) This is Chris Anderson’s argument in Free: The Future of a Radical Price (New York: Random House, 2009).
8.) See http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free.
9.) See Cory Doctorow, “Chris Anderson‘s Free adds much to The Long Tail, but falls short, “ Guardian (July 28, 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/28/cory-doctorow-free-chris-anderson.
10.) Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” 22.
11.) See for example: Copenhagen Free University, http://www.copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk/freeutv.html Universidad Nómada, http://www.sindominio.net/unomada/ Facoltà di Fuga, http://www.rekombinant.org/fuga/index.php
The Independent Art School, http://www.independent-art-school.org.uk/ Informal Universityin Foundation, http://www.jackie-inhalt.net/
Mobilized Investigation, http://manifestor.org/mi
Minciu Sodas, http://www.ms.lt/ , including http://www.cyfranogi.com/, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/backtotheroot/, http://www.onevillage.biz/
Pirate University, http://www.pirate-university.org/
Autonomous University of Lancaster, http://www.knowledgelab.org
Das Solidarische Netzwerk für offene Bildung (s.n.o.b.), Marburg (Germany), http://deu.anarchopedia.org/snob
The Free/Slow University of Warsaw, http://www.wuw2009.pl/
The University of Openness, http://p2pfoundation.net/University_of_Openness
Manoa Free University, http://www.manoafreeuniversity.org/
L’université Tangente, http://utangente.free.fr/
12.) Von Osten and Egermann, “Twist and Shout.”
13.) See Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling – An Embodied Criticality, “ available on the website of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies,
http://eipcp.net/dlfiles/rogoff-smuggling.
14.) See Lisa Adkins and Celia Lury, “What is the Empirical?” European Journal of Social Theory 12, no. 1 (February 2009): 5–20.
15.) Geoff Quinn, interview by Evan Davis, The Bottom Line, BBC, February 18, 2010, available online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qps85#synopsis
16.) Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Masquerades (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 3.
17.) Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), xi.

Seelen-Katapult

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:44 +0000

Passt in jede Hosentasche und produziert die maximale Utopie: Das Seelen-Katapult ist eine Souveränitäts-Maschine, die unsere Gesellschaft neu definiert, bevor sie verloren geht. Gleichzeitig ist es ein weltveränderndes High-Tech Produkt, beendet den Untergang des Kapitalismus und bringt das lang ersehnte Wachstum 3.0 an den Start. Auf dem Weg dorthin muss man ein halbes Essay durch die Hölle der Gegenwart wandern, um sich dann genau so lange im Paradies der Zukunft sonnen zu können.

Dystopie
Fakt ist: Der vernunftbegabte Verstand als intellektuelle Grundlage des aufgeklärt-emanzipierten Individuums, verbunden mit der anteilnehmend-sozialen Empathie humanistischer Herzensbildung, wird durch die hegemoniale, neoliberale und kommerzielle Zwecksetzung der Lebenswelten der Gegenwart konsequent zergliedert und in kleinstmöglichen bis ins Schizophrene gesteigerten mentalen Effizienzeinheiten mit jeweils größtmöglichem Gewinn verkauft. Ein digital-mediales Dauerfeuer von wechselweise belastenden und entlastenden Inhalten, von Dos and Don’ts, A-B-C-D-E-Prominenten, Diät-, Sex- und Sportergebnissen liefert den Beat dazu. Symbol und Symptom dieses Zustands ist der so opportunistisch-rationale wie chronisch-überforderte und pathologisch-gefühlsgestörte Burn-out-Bürger in der erbarmungslos ratternden Mühle des demographischen Wandels. Wobei ein und derselbe sowohl als surfender Silver Ager wie auch als alkoholisierter Sozialfall in Erscheinung tritt. Je nachdem auf Trab gehalten vom Wellness-Trip der neuesten Medikamente oder vom fürsorglich-fordernden Monstrum einer allgemeinen Schicksalsverwaltung, die das künstlich verknappte Universalmedium Geld an all jene verteilt, die zum Konstrukt der volkswirtschaftlichen Wertschöpfung keinen kalkulierbaren Beitrag mehr leisten.
Den professionellen Kommentatoren bleibt in dieser Situation nur sorgenfrei-sorgenvoll ihr Handwerk zu pflegen und sich entweder auf Affirmation, Eklektizismus, Ironie oder die neue-alte, calvinistisch-nüchterne und technokratisch-informierte Ernsthaftigkeit zu spezialisieren. Das Wehklagen führt dabei eine traurig-bequeme und sich ständig mit dem eigenen Populismus verkrachende Existenz der nicht eingelösten Alternativen. Malte man dieses Sittengemälde, dann ähnelte die westliche Gegenwart den Gemälden von Brueghel: Einem Kampf zwischen Karneval und Fasten, zwischen (noch) Schlaraffenland und dem bereits absehbaren Triumph des Todes. Denn der weitere Verfall ist offensichtlich. Wir sind auf einem Irrweg, der anscheinend erst bis zum bitteren Ende gegangen werden muss, um als solcher erkannt und überwunden zu werden. Wobei schon heute in apokalyptischen TV-Formaten das Fegefeuer geprobt wird: Ein sonnenbebrillter Vulgär-Vitalismus, in dessen Ring der jeweils formbarste Charakter gewinnt, um bereits während der Preisverleihung angezählt, weggeräumt und der medialen Reste-Verwertung zugeführt zu werden.
Die entscheidende Frage heißt darum: Wie viel Geduld wollen wir damit noch haben? Wie viel Lebenswelt, Zeit und Zukunft lassen wir das überforderte System 1.0 noch vernichten? Wie lange gestatten wir seiner deformierten Casino-Clique weiter, die Werte 2.0 zu enteignen und die civitas maxima einer Gesellschaft 3.0 zu verspielen?
Es ist klar: Ohne klug organisierte Sterbehilfe wird sich diese beschämend ratlose conditio humana, die jede Souveränität und Würde im Furor der mit Nullsummen ins Leere gespiegelten Egos verloren hat, noch jahrzehntelang dahinschleppen und als infektiöse Ideologie mit immer neuen Casting-Shows versuchen, weitere Generationen, Erdteile und Kulturen anzustecken. Das haben diese aber ganz sicher nicht verdient. Und nicht selten scheint es so, als wären auch die Protagonisten froh, wenn endlich mal die Ablösung kommt, um sie aus dem quälenden Endlosjingle ihres sinnlos gewordenen Mantras zu befreien. Soweit und drastisch die Gegenwart als Dystopie.
Doch Kultur-Pessimismus war gestern: Keine Aufklärung ohne Inquisition, keine Revolution ohne Passion. Die Utopie kommt dialektisch auf die Welt: als Innovationssprung.

Utopie
Dieser elementare Innovationssprung ist nur noch wenige Jahre entfernt: Das Seelen-Katapult wird den Kern einer neuen Gesellschaft formen. Als digital device bildet es die Potenz aus Alphabetisierung, Buchdruck, Computer, Mobiltelefon und World Wide Web, indem es deren Qualitäten und Infrastrukturen vereint und verbunden mit seiner originären Funktion auf ein neues und globales Level führt. Das Seelen-Katapult verändert unser Bewusstsein und bildet den Ausgang aus der selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit des postmodernen Individuums. Es ist ein Medium, das unsere Wahrnehmung mit den weiterentwickelten Technologien der Elektroenzephalografie (EEG) revolutionieren wird: Es führt Interaktivität auf eine neue Stufe und macht jeden potentiell zum Sender, der bisher nur Empfänger war. Es befreit uns aus der Informationsflut der Gegenwart, die zugleich Ursache und Lösung der Krise des Systems ist, weil sie die bestehenden ökonomischen, kulturellen, sozialen und politischen Institutionen und Praktiken zerbersten lässt: Aktuell generieren die digitalen Prozessoren und Systeme eine Eigenlogik, die unser individuelles und gesellschaftliches Leben immer weiter verformt und entfremdet. Der Grund dafür ist, dass uns die Interfaces zum Anschluss der Prozessoren an den menschlichen Bewusstseinsstrom fehlen. Denn medientheoretisch gesehen meißeln wir im fahlen Licht der Bildschirme mit Fingern und Tastaturen immer noch Zeichen in Stein, während die Rechner parallel und in der wireless cloud vernetzt, ganze Lebenszyklen und Identitätseinheiten in Form von Daten, Apps, Programmen miteinander tauschen. Wir kennen nicht einmal einen Bruchteil davon, da wir sprichwörtlich nur die Schatten an der Wand der Höhle sehen. Erst das Seelen-Katapult wird das grundlegend ändern, indem es Informationen und Emotionen von überkommenen Trägermedien und Eingabeinstrumenten befreit und uns in Weiterentwicklung der Transkraniellen Magnetstimulation (TMS) per Neurostream und Bioport direkt an die biologischen und digitalen Datenströme und -strukturen koppelt. Dabei werden seine Baupläne Open-Source zur Verfügung stehen, die Hardware dezentral im Internet der Dinge produziert und die Software interkulturell und plattformübergreifend von hochspezialisierten Nerds genauso wie von pubertierenden Highschool-Students entwickelt. Für Seelen-Katapulte wird es so viele Hersteller und Händler geben, wie es heute Verlage und Buchläden gibt.
Darum darf die Utopie so euphorisch formuliert werden, wie die Dystopie polemisch ist. Sie lautet: Sobald die ersten Seelen-Katapulte funktionieren, beginnt eine Kulturrevolution, deren überbordende Erkenntniskraft eine Renaissance der menschlichen Kultur und Gesellschaft einläuten wird. Über den Kapitalismus zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts und seine Krisen im Sandkasten des Bewusstseins werden wir dann ebenso heiter sprechen, wie über unsere heutige Angst, es neu lesen zu lernen. Auch das Seelen-Katapult wird dann sicherlich ganz anders heißen, doch seinem Namen gerecht: Es holt unsere entkoppelten Seelen da ab, wo sie zur Zeit noch gefangen sind und katapultiert sie in eine helle Zukunft, die man sofort erfinden müsste, wäre sie nicht fast schon da.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien am 20. April 2013 in der taz.lab, einer Beilage der taz.

Immaterial Labor

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:41 +0000

A significant amount of empirical research has been conducted concerning the new forms of the organization of work. This, combined with a corresponding wealth of theoretical reflection, has made possible the identification of a new conception of what work is nowadays and what new power relations it implies.
An initial synthesis of these results – framed in terms of an attempt to define the technical and subjective-political composition of the working class – can be expressed in the concept of immaterial labor, which is defined as the labor that produces the informational and cultural concent of the commodity. The concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor. On the one hand, as regards the “informational content” of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labor processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces the “cultural content” of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as “work” – in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion. Once the privileged domain of the bourgeoisie and its children, these activities have since the end of the 1970s become the domain of what we have come to define as “mass intellectuality.” The profound changes in these strategic sectors have radically modified not only the composition, management, and regulation of the workforce – the organization of production – but also, and more deeply, the role and function of intellectuals and their activities within society.
The “great transformation” that began at the start of the 1970s has changed the very terms in which the question is posed. Manual labor is increasingly coming to involve procedures that could be defined as “intellectual,” and the new communications technologies increasingly require subjectivities that are rich in knowledge. It is not simply that intellectual labor has become subjected to the norms of capitalist production. What has happened is that a new “mass intellectuality” has come into being, created out of a combination of the demands of capitalist production and the forms of “self-valorization” that the struggle against work has produced. The old dichotomy between “mental and manual labor,” or between “material labor and immaterial labor,” risks failing to grasp the new nature of productive activity, which takes this separation on board and transforms it. The split between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the “labor process” and reimposed as political command within the “process of valorization.”

The restructured worker
Twenty years of restructuring of the big factories has led to a curious paradox. The various different post-Fordist models have been constructed both on the defeat of the Fordist worker and on the recognition of the centrality of (an ever increasingly intellectualized) living labor within production. In today’s large restructured company, a worker’s work increasingly involves, at various levels, an ability to choose among different alternatives and thus a degree of responsibility regarding decision making. The concept of “interface” used by communications sociologists provides a fair definition of the activities of this kind of worker – as an interface between different functions, between different work teams, between different levels of the hierarchy, and so forth. What modern management techniques are looking for is for “the worker’s soul to become part of the factory.” The worker’s personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command. It is around immateriality that the quality and quantity of labor are organized. This transformation of working-class labor into a labor of control, of handling information, into a decision-making capacity that involves the investment of subjectivity, affects workers in varying ways according to their positions within the factory hierarchy, but it is nevertheless present as an irreversible process. Work can thus be defined as the capacity to activate and manage productive cooperation. In this phase, workers are expected to become “active subjects” in the coordination of the various functions of production, instead of being subjected to it as simple command. We arrive at a point where a collective learning process becomes the heart of productivity, because it is no longer a matter of finding different ways of composing or organizing already existing job functions, but of looking for new ones.
The problem, however, of subjectivity and its collective form, its constitution and its development, has immediately expressed itself as a clash between social classes within the organization of work. I should point out that what I am describing is not some utopian vision of recomposition, but the very real terrain and conditions of the conflict between social classes. The capitalist needs to find an unmediated way of establishing command over subjectivity itself; the prescription and definition of tasks transforms into a prescription of subjectivities. The new slogan of Western societies is that we should all “become subjects”. Participative management is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the “subjective processes.” As it is no longer possible to confine subjectivity merely to tasks of execution, it becomes necessary for the subject’s competence in the areas of management, communication, and creativity to be made compatible with the conditions of “production for production’s sake.” Thus the slogan “become subjects,” far from eliminating the antagonism between hierarchy and cooperation, between autonomy and command, actually re-poses the antagonism at a higher level, because it both mobilizes and clashes with the very personality of the individual worker. First and foremost, we have here a discourse that is authoritarian: one has to express oneself, one has to speak, communicate, cooperate, and so forth. The “tone” is that of the people who were in executive command under Taylorization; all that has changed is the content. Second, if it is no longer possible to lay down and specify jobs and responsibilities rigidly (in the way that was once done with “scientific” studies of work), but if, on the contrary, jobs now require cooperation and collective coordination, then the subjects of that production must be capable of communication – they must be active participants within a work team. The communicational relationship (both vertically and horizontally) is thus completely predetermined in both form and content; it is subordinated to the “circulation of information” and is not expected to be anything other. The subject becomes a simple relayer of codification and decodification, whose transmitted messages must be “clear and free of ambiguity,” within a communications context that has been completely normalized by management. The necessity of imposing command and the violence that goes along with it here take on a normative communicative form.
The management mandate to “become subjects of communication” threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labor (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the production of value. Capital wants a situation where command resides within the subject him- or herself, and within the communicative process. The worker is to be responsible for his or her own control and motivation within the work group without a foreman needing to intervene, and the foreman’s role is redefined into that of a facilitator. In fact, employers are extremely worried by the double problem this creates: on one hand, they are forced to recognize the autonomy and freedom of labor as the only possible form of cooperation in production, but on the other hand, at the same time, they are obliged (a life-and-death necessity for the capitalist) not to “redistribute” the power that the new quality of labor and its organization imply. Today’s management thinking takes workers’ subjectivity into consideration only in order to codify it in line with the requirements of production. And once again this phase of transformation succeeds in concealing the fact that the individual and collective interests of workers and those of the company are not identical.
I have defined working-class labor as an abstract activity that nowadays involves the application of subjectivity. In order to avoid misunderstandings, however, I should add that this form of productive activity is not limited only to highly skilled workers; it refers to a use value of labor power today, and, more generally, to the form of activity of every productive subject within postindustrial society. One could say that in the highly skilled, qualified worker, the “communicational model” is already given, already constituted, and that its potentialities are already defined. In the young worker, however, the “precarious” worker, and the unemployed youth, we are dealing with a pure virtuality, a capacity that is as yet undetermined but that already shares all the characteristics of postindustrial productive subjectivity. The virtuality of this capacity is neither empty nor ahistoric; it is, rather, an opening and a potentiality that have as their historical origins and antecedents the “struggle against work” of the Fordist worker and, in more recent times, the processes of socialization, educational formation, and cultural self-valorization.
This transformation of the world of work appears even more evident when one studies the social cycle of production: the “diffuse factory” and decentralization of production on the one hand and the various forms of tertiarization on the other. Here one can measure the extent to which the cycle of immaterial labor has come to assume a strategic role within the global organization of production. The various activities of research, conceptualization, management of human resources, and so forth, together with all the various tertiary activities, are organized within computerized and multimedia networks. These are the terms in which we have to understand the cycle of production and the organization of labor. The integration of scientific labor into industrial and tertiary labor has become one of the principal sources of productivity, and it is becoming a growing factor in the cycles of production that organize it.

“Immaterial Labor” in the Classic Definition
All the characteristics of the postindustrial economy (both in industry and society as a whole) are highly present within the classic forms of “immaterial” production: audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities, and so forth. The activities of this kind of immaterial labor force us to question the classic definitions of work and workforce, because they combine the results of various different types of work skill: intellectual skills, as regards the cultural-informational content; manual skills for the ability to combine creativity, imagination, and technical and manual labor; and entrepreneurial skills in the management of social relations and the structuring of that social cooperation of which they are a part. This immaterial labor constitutes itself in forms that are immediately collective, and we might say that it exists only in the form of networks and flows. The organization of the cycle of production of immaterial labor (because this is exactly what it is, once we abandon our factoryist prejudices – a cycle of production) is not obviously apparent to the eye, because it is not defined by the four walls of a factory. The location in which it operates is outside in the society at large, at a territorial level that we could call “the basin of immaterial labor.” Small and sometimes very small “productive units” (often consisting of only one individual) are organized for specific ad hoc projects, and may exist only for the duration of those particular jobs. The cycle of production comes into operation only when it is required by the capitalist; once the job has been done, the cycle dissolves back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities. Precariousness, hyperexploitation, mobility, and hierarchy are the most obvious characteristics of metropolitan immaterial labor. Behind the label of the independent “self-employed” worker, what we actually find is an intellectual proletarian, but who is recognized as such only by the employers who exploit him or her. It is worth noting that in this kind of working existence it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish leisure time from work time. In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work. This labor form is also characterized by real managerial functions that consist in (1) a certain ability to manage its social relations and (2) the eliciting of social cooperation within the structures of the basin of immaterial labor.
The quality of this kind of labor power is thus defined not only by its professional capacities (which make possible the construction of the cultural-informational content of the commodity), but also by its ability to “manage” its own activity and act as the coordinator of the immaterial labor of others (production and management of the cycle). This immaterial labor appears as a real mutation of “living labor.” Here we are quite far from the Taylorist model of organization.
Immaterial labor finds itself at the crossroads (or rather, it is the interface) of a new relationship between production and consumption. The activation of both productive cooperation and the social relationship with the consumer is materialized within and by the process of communication. The role of immaterial labor is to promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of communication (and thus in work and consumption). It gives form to and materializes needs, the imaginary, consumer tastes, and so forth, and these products in turn become powerful producers of needs, images, and tastes. The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labor (its essential use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content) consists in the fact that it is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, transforms, and creates the “ideological“ and cultural environment of the consumer. This commodity does not produce the physical capacity of labor power; instead, it transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labor produces first and foremost a “social relationship“ (a relationship of innovation, production, and consumption). Only if it succeeds in this production does its activity have an economic value. This activity makes immediately apparent something that material production had “hidden,“ namely, that labor produces not only commodities, but first and foremost it produces the capital relation.

The Autonomy of the Productive Synergies of Immaterial Labor
My working hypothesis, then, is that the cycle of immaterial labor takes as its starting point a social labor power that is independent and able to organize both its own work and its relations with business entities. Industry does not form or create this new labor power, but simply takes it on board and adapts it. Industry’s control over this new labor power presupposes the independent organization and “free entrepreneurial activity” of the labor power. Advancing further on this terrain brings us into the debate on the nature of work in the post-Fordist phase of the organization of labor. Among economists, the predominant view of this problematic can be expressed in a single statement: immaterial labor operates within the forms of organization that the centralization of industry allows. Moving from this common basis, there are two differing schools of thought: one is the extension of neoclassical analysis; the other is that of systems theory. In the former, the attempt to solve the problem comes through a redefinition of the problematic of the market. It is suggested that in order to explain the phenomena of communication and the new dimensions of organization one should introduce not only cooperation and intensity of labor, but also other analytic variables (anthropological variables? immaterial variables?) and that on this basis one might introduce other objectives of optimization and so forth. In fact, the neoclassical model has considerable difficulty in freeing itself from the coherence constraints imposed by the theory of general equilibrium. The new phenomenologies of labor, the new dimensions of organization, communication, the potentiality of spontaneous synergies, the autonomy of the subjects involved, and the independence of the networks were neither foreseen nor foreseeable by a general theory that believed that material labor and an industrial economy were indispensable.
Today, with the new data available, we find the microeconomy in revolt against the macroeconomy, and the classical model is corroded by a new and irreducible anthropological reality.
Systems theory, by eliminating the constraint of the market and giving pride of place to organization, is more open to the new phenomenology of labor and in particular to the emergence of immaterial labor. In more developed systemic theories, organization is conceived as an ensemble of factors, both material and immaterial, both individual and collective, that can permit a given group to reach objectives. The success of this organizational process requires instruments of regulation, either voluntary or automatic. It becomes possible to look at things from the point of view of social synergies, and immaterial labor can be taken on board by virtue of its global efficacy. These viewpoints, however, are still tied to an image of the organization of work and its social territory within which effective activity from an economic viewpoint (in other words, the activity conforming to the objective) must inevitably be considered as a surplus in relation to collective cognitive mechanisms. Sociology and labor economics, being systemic disciplines, are both incapable of detaching themselves from this position.
I believe that an analysis of immaterial labor and a description of its organization can lead us beyond the presuppositions of business theory – whether in its neoclassical school or its systems theory school. It can lead us to define, at a territorial level, a space for a radical autonomy of the productive synergies of immaterial labor. We can thus move against the old schools of thought to establish, decisively, the viewpoint of an “anthropo-sociology” that is constitutive.
Once this viewpoint comes to dominate within social production, we find that we have an interruption in the continuity of models of production. By this I mean that, unlike the position held by many theoreticians of post-Fordism, I do not believe that this new labor power is merely functional to a new historical phase of capitalism and its processes of accumulation and reproduction. This labor power is the product of a “silent revolution” taking place within the anthropological realities of work and within the reconfiguration of its meanings. Waged labor and direct subjugation (to organization) no longer constitute the principal form of the contractual relationship between capitalist and worker. A polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form, a kind of “intellectual worker” who is him or herself an entrepreneur, inserted within a market that is constantly shifting and within networks that are changeable in time and space.

The cycle of immaterial production
Up to this point I have been analyzing and constructing the concept of immaterial labor from a point of view that could be defined, so to speak, as “microeconomic.” If now we consider immaterial labor within the globality of the production cycle, of which it is the strategic stage, we will be able to see a series of characteristics of post-Taylorist production that have not yet been taken into consideration.
I want to demonstrate in particular how the process of valorization tends to be identified with the process of the production of social communication and how the two stages (valorization and communication) immediately have a social and territorial dimension. The concept of immaterial labor presupposes and results in an enlargement of productive cooperation that even includes the production and reproduction of communication and hence of its most important contents: subjectivity.
If Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, post-Fordism integrates communication into it. From a strictly economic point of view, the cycle of reproduction of immaterial labor dislocates the production-consumption relationship as it is defined as much by the “virtuous Keynesian circle” as by the Marxist reproduction schemes of the second volume of Capital. Now, rather than speaking of the toppling of “supply and demand,” we should speak about a redefinition of the production-consumption relationship. As we saw earlier, the consumer is inscribed in the manufacturing of the product from its conception. The consumer is no longer limited to consuming commodities (destroying them in the act of consumption). On the contrary, his or her consumption should be productive in accordance to the necessary conditions and the new products. Consumption is then first of all a consumption of information. Consumption is no longer only the “realization” of a product, but a real and proper social process that for the moment is defined with the term communication.

Large-scale industry and services
To recognize the new characteristics of the production cycle of immaterial labor, we should compare it with the production of large-scale industry and services. If the cycle of immaterial production immediately demonstrates to us the secret of post-Taylorist production (that is to say, that social communication and the social relationship that constitutes it become productive), then it would be interesting to examine how these new social relationships innervate even industry and services, and how they oblige us to reformulate and reorganize even the classical forms of “production.”

Large-scale industry
The postindustrial enterprise and economy are founded on the manipulation of information. Rather than ensuring (as 19th century enterprises did) the surveillance of the inner workings of the production process and the supervision of the markets of raw materials (labor included), business is focused on the terrain outside of the production process: sales and the relationship with the consumer. It always leans more toward commercialization and financing than toward production. Prior to being manufactured, a product must be sold, even in “heavy” industries such as automobile manufacturing; a car is put into production only after the sales network orders it. This strategy is based on the production and consumption of information. It mobilizes important communication and marketing strategies in order to gather information (recognizing the tendencies of the market) and circulate it (constructing a market). In the Taylorist and Fordist systems of production, by introducing the mass consumption of standardized commodities, Ford could still say that the consumer has the choice between one black model T5 and another black model T5. “Today the standard commodity is no longer the recipe to success, and the automobile industry itself, which used to be the champion of the great ‘low price’ series, would want to boast about having become a neoindustry of singularization” – and quality.¹ For the majority of businesses, survival involves the permanent search for new commercial openings that lead to the identification of always more ample or differentiated product lines. Innovation is no longer subordinated only to the rationalization of labor, but also to commercial imperatives. It seems then that the postindustrial commodity is the result of a creative process that involves both the producer and the consumer.

Services
If from industry proper we move on to the “services” sector (large banking services, insurance, and so forth), the characteristics of the process I have described appear even more clearly. We are witnessing today not really a growth of services, but rather a development of the “relations of service.” The move beyond the Taylorist organization of services is characterized by the integration of the relationship between production and consumption, where in fact the consumer intervenes in an active way in the composition of the product. The product “service” becomes a social construction and a social process of “conception” and innovation. In service industries, the “back-office” tasks (the classic work of services) have diminished and the tasks of the “front office” (the relationship with clients) have grown. There has been thus a shift of human resources toward the outer part of business. As recent sociological analyses tell us, the more a product handled by the service sector is characterized as an immaterial product, the more it distances itself from the model of industrial organization of the relationship between production and consumption. The change in this relationship between production and consumption has direct consequences for the organization of the Taylorist labor of production of services, because it draws into question both the contents of labor and the division of labor (and thus the relationship between conception and execution loses its unilateral character). If the product is defined through the intervention of the consumer, and is therefore in permanent evolution, it becomes always more difficult to define the norms of the production of services and establish an “objective” measure of productivity.

Immaterial Labor
All of these characteristics of postindustrial economics (present both in large-scale industry and the tertiary sector) are accentuated in the form of properly “immaterial” production. Audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, software, the management of territory, and so forth are all defined by means of the particular relationship between production and its market or consumers. Here we are at the furthest point from the Taylorist model. Immaterial labor continually creates and modifies the forms and conditions of communication, which in turn acts as the interface that negotiates the relationship between production and consumption. As I noted earlier, immaterial labor produces first and foremost a social relation – it produces not only commodities, but also the capital relation.
If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the “raw material” of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the “ideological” environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the reproduction of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator – and to construct it as “active.” Immaterial workers (those who work in advertising, fashion, marketing, television, cybernetics, and so forth) satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand. The fact that immaterial labor produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capitalist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power, and knowledge. The process of social communication (and its principal content, the production of subjectivity) becomes here directly productive because in a certain way it “produces” production. The process by which the “social” (and what is even more social, that is, language, communication, and so forth) becomes “economic” has not yet been sufficiently studied. In effect, on the one hand, we are familiar with an analysis of the production of subjectivity defined as the constitutive “process” specific to a “relation to the self with respect to the forms of production particular to knowledge and power (as in a certain vein of poststructuralist French philosophy), but this analysis never intersects sufficiently with the forms of capitalist valorization. On the other hand, in the 1980s a network of economists and sociologists (and before them the Italian postworkerist tradition) developed an extensive analysis of the “social form of production,” but that analysis does not integrate sufficiently the production of subjectivity as the content of valorization. Now, the post-Taylorist mode of production is defined precisely by putting subjectivity to work both in the activation of productive cooperation and in the production of the “cultural” contents of commodities.

The aesthetic model
But how is the production process of social communication formed? How does the production of subjectivity take place within this process? How does the production of subjectivity become the production of the consumer/communicator and its capacities to consume and communicate? What role does immaterial labor have in this process? As I have already said, my hypothesis is this: the process of the production of communication tends to become immediately the process of valorization. If in the past communication was organized fundamentally by means of language and the institutions of ideological and literary/artistic production, today, because it is invested with industrial production, communication is reproduced by means of specific technological schemes (knowledge, thought, image, sound, and language reproduction technologies) and by means of forms of organization and “management” that are bearers of a new mode of production.
It is more useful, in attempting to grasp the process of the formation of social communication and its subsumption within the “economic,“ to use, rather than the “material“ model of production, the “aesthetic“ model that involves author, reproduction, and reception. This model reveals aspects that traditional economic categories tend to obscure and that, as I will show, constitute the “specific differences“ of the post-Taylorist means of production.² The “aesthetic/ideological“ model of production will be transformed into a small-scale sociological model with all the limits and difficulties that such a sociological transformation brings. The model of author, reproduction, and reception requires a double transformation: in the first place, the three stages of this creation process must be immediately characterized by their social form; in the second place, the three stages must be understood as the articulations of an actual productive cycle.³
The “author” must lose its individual dimension and be transformed into an industrially organized production process (with a division of labor, investments, orders, and so forth), “reproduction” becomes a mass reproduction organized according to the imperatives of profitability, and the audience (“reception”) tends to become the consumer/communicator. In this process of socialization and subsumption within the economy of intellectual activity the “ideological” product tends to assume the form of a commodity. I should emphasize, however, that the subsumption of this process under capitalist logic and the transformation of its products into commodities does not abolish the specificity of aesthetic production, that is to say, the creative relationship between author and audience.

The specific differences of the immaterial labor cycle
Allow me to underline briefly the specific differences of the “stages” that make up the production cycle of immaterial labor (immaterial labor itself, its “ideological/commodity products,” and the “public/consumer”) in relation to the classical forms of the reproduction of “capital.”
As far as immaterial labor being an “author” is concerned, it is necessary to emphasize the radical autonomy of its productive synergies. As we have seen, immaterial labor forces us to question the classical definitions of work and workforce, because it results from a synthesis of different types of knowhow: intellectual skills, manual skills, and entrepreneurial skills. Immaterial labor constitutes itself in immediately collective forms that exist as networks and flows. The subjugation of this form of cooperation and the “use value” of these skills to capitalist logic does not take away the autonomy of the constitution and meaning of immaterial labor. On the contrary, it opens up antagonisms and contradictions that, to use once again a Marxist formula, demand at least a “new form of exposition.”
The “ideological product” becomes in every respect a commodity. The term ideological does not characterize the product as a “reflection” of reality, as false or true consciousness of reality. Ideological products produce, on the contrary, new stratifications of reality; they are the intersection where human power, knowledge, and action meet. New modes of seeing and knowing demand new technologies, and new technologies demand new forms of seeing and knowing. These ideological products are completely internal to the processes of the formation of social communication; that is, they are at once the results and the prerequisites of these processes. The ensemble of ideological products constitutes the human ideological environment. Ideological products are transformed into commodities without ever losing their specificity; that is, they are always addressed to someone, they are “ideally signifying,” and thus they pose the problem of “meaning.”
The general public tends to become the model for the consumer (audience/client). The public (in the sense of the user – the reader, the music listener, the television audience) whom the author addresses has as such a double productive function. In the first place, as the addressee of the ideological product, the public is a constitutive element of the production process. In the second place, the public is productive by means of the reception that gives the product “a place in life” (in other words, integrates it into social communication) and allows it to live and evolve. Reception is thus, from this point of view, a creative act and an integrative part of the product. The transformation of the product into a commodity cannot abolish this double process of “creativity”; it must rather assume it as it is, and attempt to control it and subordinate it to its own values.
What the transformation of the product into a commodity cannot remove, then, is the character of event, the open process of creation that is established between immaterial labor and the public and organized by communication. If the innovation in immaterial production is introduced by this open process of creation, the entrepreneur, in order to further consumption and its perpetual renewal, will be constrained to draw from the “values” that the public/consumer produces. These values presuppose the modes of being, modes of existing, and forms of life that support them. From these considerations there emerge two principal consequences. First, values are “put to work.” The transformation of the ideological product into a commodity distorts or deflects the social imaginary that is produced in the forms of life, but at the same time, commodity production must recognize itself as powerless as far as its own production is concerned. The second consequence is that the forms of life (in their collective and cooperative forms) are now the source of innovation.
The analysis of the different “stages” of the cycle of immaterial labor permits me to advance the hypothesis that what is “productive” is the whole of the social relation (here represented by the author-work-audience relationship) according to modalities that directly bring into play the “meaning.” The specificity of this type of production not only leaves its imprint on the “form” of the process of production by establishing a new relationship between production and consumption, but it also poses a problem of legitimacy for the capitalist appropriation of this process. This cooperation can in no case be predetermined by economics, because it deals with the very life of society. “Economics” can only appropriate the forms and products of this cooperation, normalizing and standardizing them. The creative and innovative elements are tightly linked to the values that only the forms of life produce. Creativity and productivity in postindustrial societies reside, on the one hand, in the dialectic between the forms of life and values they produce and, on the other, in the activities of subjects that constitute them. The legitimation that the (Schumpeterian) entrepreneur found in his or her capacity for innovation has lost its foundation. Because the capitalist entrepreneur does not produce the forms and contents of immaterial labor, he or she does not even produce innovation. For economics there remains only the possibility of managing and regulating the activity of immaterial labor and creating some devices for the control and creation of the public/consumer by means of the control of communication and information technologies and their organizational processes.

Creation and intellectual labor
These brief considerations permit us to begin questioning the model of creation and diffusion specific to intellectual labor and to get beyond the concept of creativity as an expression of “individuality” or as the patrimony of the “superior” classes. The works of Simmel and Bakhtin, conceived in a time when immaterial production had just begun to become “productive,” present us with two completely different ways of posing the relationship between immaterial labor and society. The first, Simmel’s, remain completely invested in the division between manual labor and intellectual labor and give us a theory of the creativity of intellectual labor. The second, Bakhtin’s, in refusing to accept the capitalist division of labor as a given, elaborate a theory of social creativity. Simmel, in effect, explains the function of “fashion” by means of the phenomenon of imitation or distinction as regulated and commanded by class relationships. Thus the superior levels of the middle classes are the ones that create fashion, and the lower classes attempt to imitate them. Fashion here functions like a barrier that incessantly comes up because it is incessantly battered down. What is interesting for this discussion is that, according to this conception, the immaterial labor of creation is limited to a specific social group and is not diffused except through imitation. At a deeper level, this model accepts the division of labor founded on the opposition between manual and intellectual labor that has as its end the regulation and “mystification” of the social process of creation and innovation. If this model had some probability of corresponding to the dynamics of the market of immaterial labor at the moment of the birth of mass consumption (whose effects Simmel very intelligently anticipates), it could not be utilized to account for the relationship between immaterial labor and consumer-public in postindustrial society. Bakhtin, on the contrary, defines immaterial labor as the superseding of the division between “material labor and intellectual labor” and demonstrates how creativity is a social process. In fact, the work on “aesthetic production” of Bakhtin and the rest of the Leningrad Circle has this same social focus.
This is the line of investigation that seems most promising for developing a theory of the social cycle of immaterial production.

Translated by Paul Colilli and Ed Emery
Notes
1. Yves Clot, “Renouveau de 1’industrialisme et activité philosophique,» Futur antérieur, no. 10(1992);
2. Both the creative and the social elements of this production encourage me to venture the use of the «aesthetic model.» It is interesting to see how one could arrive at this new concept of labor by starting either from artistic activity (following the situationists) or from the traditional activity of the factory (following Italian workerist theories), both relying on the very Marxist concept of “living labor.“
3. Walter Benjamin has already analyzed how since the end of the nineteenth century both artistic production and reproduction, along with its perception, have assumed collective forms. I cannot pause here to consider his works, but they are certainly fundamental for any genealogy of immaterial labor and its forms of reproduction.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien in Englisch unter http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm [6.9.2013].
In deutscher Übersetzung erschien er in: Toni Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato und Paolo Virno: Umherschweifende Produzenten. Immaterielle Arbeit und Subversion, ID-Verlag, 1998, S. 39–52.