Multitude

Notes and some quotations

Can Art's pluralities, aesthetic

transformations,bifurcations, typologies, and simulations conspire

as the radical indifference of reproducibility in

collective, social network[s]? Do they act together to produce

an 'art' of self-government'? If'Governmentality' [as defined by

Michel Foucault] is an art, in the widest sense, i.e. that the idea

of government is not limited to state politics alone,that it

includes a wide range of control techniques,and that it applies to

a wide variety of objects,from one's control of the self to the

biopolitical [to the bio-power of control of populations], is there

such an entity as a Multitude to exercise such self-governance? In

the rupture [or disobedience] from neo-liberalism's market

mechanisms, is the Multitude manifested best in a 'call to

arms'? Is an'exodus' possible to meet the remit of Virno's

conceptual analysis? How do the mechanics of the Multitude 'make

and do' for any realisation of its'absolute' democracy?

We offer some related points of reference:

"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life

grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated

but only understood.The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with

the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of

Right.

"Even as we seek to have a sense of orientation which will allow us

to protect ourselves, we also perceive, often in

retrospect, various forms of danger. Paolo Virno

"...and he who listens will go away not only charmed, but wiser, for

we know all the ills"

"My name is Nobody..." [Odysseus in The Odyssey,Homer]

"...he was walking back from the Trojan War with Nestor and Idomeneus, and stepped into

the cyclone village. Then the great giant and star of the cyclones,Polyphemus, who

would eat anyone who stepped in the village, asked, "Are you one of those heroes?" Then

Odysseus replied,"Me, I am nobody, in fact my name is nobody." The giant let him

go, and then in the middle of the night Odysseus snuck over to the giant and stuck a

big wooden block into his belly. In the morning the giant cried, "Nobody is hurting

me."Odysseus came over and said, "My name is not nobody my name is Odysseus,remember

that!"

"How can I care what you do?"

"I am what I do," said Celia.

"No," said Murphy. "You do what you are..."[from 'Murphy', Samuel Beckett]

A priest once came across a Zen master and, seeking to embarrass him, challenged him

as follows: 'Using neither sound nor silence, can you show me what is reality?'

The Zen master punched him in the face. [anon] 

Two, since One is Not [anon]  

THE MULTITUDE   ^

'We can say that this destiny of marginality has now come to an

end. The Multitude, rather than constituting a "natural" ante-

fact, presents itself as a historical result, a mature arrival

point of the transformations that have taken place within the

productive process and the forms of life. The 'Many'are erupting

onto the scene, and they stand there as absolute protagonists while

the crisis of the society of Work is being played out. Post-Fordist

social cooperation, in eliminating the frontier between production

time and personal time, not to mention the distinction between

professional qualities and political aptitudes, creates a new

species, which makes the old dichotomies

of'public/private' and 'collective/individual' sound

farcical. Neither 'producers' nor 'citizens', the modern virtuosi

attain at last the rank of Multitude.'From 'Virtuosity and

Revolution', Paolo Virno

http :// makeworlds . org / node / 34

'In control society, subversion is rarely public(because the public

is citizens with names, a supposedly open and accountable space for

visible,autonomous and recognisable subjects, but operative only in

a context of legality and liberal rights). One of the unrecognised

potentials of the Internet lies in the anonymity of the user, the

opportunity it provides for people whom for whatever reason have

been excluded from the old form of public life. It allows for those

who do not have a name to speak for themselves. Control society

needs to be subverted rather than limited,and this is not a matter

of public dissent but rather of making subversion at once

public (in the sense of shared) and invisible, of dispersing

through multiple points of attack. Control society is not stopped

by a re-assertion of the private, data protection acts, and civil

rights activism. Ours is not merely a libertarian agenda nor is it

an attempt at preserving a constructed category of individual

freedom, but it is the very opposition to individuation through

forms of socialised disobedience, networked and spread as a form of

constitution of new social realities of cooperation as well as

exodus. Rather than the visible networks of accountable individuals

speaking in the name of others, we are interested in invisible

networks,those that cannot be represented due to the content of

their association.' From 'The Dark Side of the Multitude', Arianna

Bove and Erik Empson 

http :// makeworlds . org / node / 36

Theodor Adorno's most timely and important contributions to

contemporary politics are captured in his writings on

pedagogy, education, and school reform. His work on education

cannot be read separately from an engagement with either his

philosophy or his aesthetics but rather as the nodal point through

which the latter two become socially transformative. Adorno will

advocate reconciliation between Freudian psychoanalysis and

Marxism.With these tools, does pedagogy become equipped to "work

through" to a common virtuosity in Multitude?

To chart the internal relations among philosophy,aesthetics, and

education through their shared rejection of [fascist] resentment

Adorno's entry points are through aesthetics [which maps out the

psychology of fascism as the antagonist of democratic virtues; but

it is through pedagogy that fascist social violence, amnesia, and

racism are to be assembled [in the process of a critique]combated.

In order to accomplish this goal, education for Adorno must offer

practitioners and students the opportunity to reflect upon

institutional forms reproducing anti-democratic proclivities. Yet

we must ask: What are the critical tools necessary to address the

pedagogical problematic of such resentment? 

The urgent need for an appearance of a pedagogy suggests the

development of new consciousness of social subjectivity, within

social subjectivity. That is to say it marks some index of activity

within society that marks its own consciousness of itself.At the

moment however the sense of the need to represent the plenitude of

different activities, i.e.Virno's 'acting minorities' conflicts with

the implicit imposing of outer limit on the possible forms of its

expression - this is ultimately the self-identity of the

Multitude. That is in so far as the Multitude is always giving

itself expression, generating and creating itself in different

configurations and forms acting as constitutive power it is

constantly evading definite capture as a quality other than this

process itself. Diverse points of alignment, register

disassociation from Nationalist

identification;refugees, exiles, migrants. [Cultural

miscegenation,cultural subsystems, resistances and underground

movements, subjects that speaks in different languages: that do not

appeal to the traditionally ascribed centres of sovereign power.]

[Virtuosity]: [i]

A question is posed to the strategies of 'belonging',of

conforming: to the mechanics of [passive -aggressive] conformity, as

problems inherent in any attempted move from resistant strategies

of'refusal' to accommodating strategies of'acceptance'. 

[Refusal]:

Or in other words, when everything is 'permitted' [except truth] how

do we do what is 'not', if'permission', as a bi-word for the 'super-

ego'injunction of a human to enjoy Man's right to'opinion', is

incapable of initiating and constituting a universal truth [art

being precisely a truth-process],how do student and teacher begin

properly to re-set the languages [simulacra] of opinions that claim

to be true, in terms of the subject language of truth? Through

the 'conditioning' of art? 

Badiou: "There can be no irreplaceable subject without engagement

in a process in which, in principle, any subject might take part."

[A Pedagological Handbook] [after Paolo Freiré] 

Note: Pedagogy is also sometimes referred to as the correct use of

teaching strategies (see instructional theory). For

example, Brazilian Paulo Freire, one of the most influential

educators of the 20th century, referred to his method of teaching

as"critical pedagogy". In correlation with those teaching

strategies the instructor's own philosophical beliefs of teaching

are harboured and governed by the pupil's background knowledge and

experiences, personal situations and environment as well as

learning goals set by the student as well as the teacher. This is

not to make claims at all for the 'other' but to create a plane of

engagement where there is no 'other'.

Is it possible in these situations, to ascribe the dialectic of a

subjective process to 'the individual',the teacher and the

student, to 'induce' a singular,irreplaceable [and therefore

universal] subject, 'in the body' of what was previously,

'indifferent'individuals? The term 'indifferent' is ambiguous and

generates discourse. Can indifference be re-situated to what is not

true, so as to configure an ethics of singular truths [ and their

disagreements]and thus to an ethic relative to particular

situations?

'We must also take into account the network of relations it [a

situation] sustains, which involves making sense of the way a

multiple appears in a situation.' Badiou, Introduction, Ethics.

A network's disposition as 'multitude', is measured in its

collective assembly of resistances to a common refusal, or by a

greater general intelligence [a shared knowledge, skill] to never

have cause to serve to reinforce individual ego, to adapt

individuals to the needs and 'nature' of society, to having fully

developed a strategy for tactical 'disobedience', to an independent

constituency and self-valorisation [without recourse to constituted

government.] As Badiou asserts, 'emancipatory politics [Manifesto

for Philosophy]must be at least equal to the challenge of

capital.'What is tested under a semantic torsion is the

term'virtuosity' located in Gwynneth Porter 'advice' to a young

artist with regard to her potential, to a'success' story of

networking in the case of a network, that fits all the

categories, From the moment of hesitation on graduation, before

entry into the [art world] status quo, to the embrace of its

milieu. Emerging from a western neo-liberal educational system, she

will have followed the aesthetic / social protocols, rights of

passage, entry initiations and final 'acceptance' at court [conform

or face exclusion, expulsion, permanent humiliation] practice an

etiquette of disinterest, in style and grace of manners, to acquire

thereof, the practice of a 'virtuosity', both finding

it 'charming'and financially rewarding to belong, Dan Graham

compares these behaviours as 'courtly' manners, in'Two Way

Mirror' he compares politics as currency in art worlds, albeit not

centred in one authority,yet modus operandi of a culturally diffuse

dominance, with that of Louis 14th and the 'court' of the Sun

King. If he [as King, and therefore State]was heard to say of you,

'I know him not', you were doomed forever. One should, only at

one's 'peril'break 'trust' in a network of power. Or is there a

chance, a wager to be risked to develop a fidelity to the work of

art that can be educated and transmitted and will encourage such a

break?

'...One of the founders of China Art Objects Galleries, the late

Giovanni Intra, had left New Zealand in 1996, where he had been

instrumental in the excellent Auckland artist-run space

Teststrip,to do something stupid and expensive that would no doubt

result in something charming, successful,and sure to expose

conservatism in thinking. In an article written for the 2001

exhibition Circles in Karlsruhe, Germany, (ostensibly about

artists'circles), Intra explained why pure abstinence from the

financial scene was counter-productive: 'The shift from alternative

venue to something more economically opportunistic - from simply

exhibiting artists to representing them - wasn't the result of a

gradual change in principle, but a conscious adaptation in order to

best exploit the potentialities at hand... We have

discovered, after years of research, that money doesn't compromise

an exhibition programme. If I keep returning to

this'alternative' point it is because of the pleasure I have taken

in betraying its principles. Selling art is a lot of fun. To make

money out of art is a kind of revenge against the expense of

graduate education and the political imperative, which suggests

that it is compulsory for young artists to attend school for

extended periods and go into debt... Most days there's a lot of

laughter in our gallery, and it often surrounds the perversion of

the art system and our part within it.'

Intra's belief of achieving a micro-network qua 'the

network' suggests that he may have fallen into the simulacrum of

self-delusion, given the premature sense of sanctioned

victory, grace and glory. 

The phrase 'our part within it' is highly disturbing when we hear

that Intra was later honoured for his'work' [Best Booth, Art

Basel] by the Art Fair's bureaucratic community's 'jury'. A gold

medal indeed awarded from the 'sovereign'. Is this the only

narrative of 'virtuosity' and 'governmentality''we can speak

of? Alain Badiou's cuttingly clear words resound in the mirrored

halls of art's'visibility' where the veracity and 'statist' / market

valorisation is performative, acknowledgement of the ethics of

a 'free market', 'evidence' of the success of neo-liberalist

democracy, yet the evidence of an absolute sophistry of its

prescribed'ethics'.  

'When those who uphold the contemporary ideology of 'ethics' tell us that the return

to Man and his rights has delivered us from the 'fatal abstractions' inspired by 'the

ideologies' of the past they have some nerve. I would be delighted to see so constant

an attention paid to concrete situations, so sustained and so patient a concern for

the real [le réel], so much time devoted to an activist inquiry into the situation of

the most varied kinds of people- often the furthest removed, it might seem,from the

normal environment of intellectuals - as that we witnessed between 1965 and 1980. In

reality there is no lack of proof for the fact that the thematics of the 'death of

man' are compatible with rebellion, a radical dissatisfaction with the established

order, and a fully committed engagement in the real of situations [dans le réel des

situations] while by contrast, the theme of ethics and of human rights is compatible

with the self-satisfied egoism of the affluent West, with advertising, and with the

service rendered to the powers that be.Such are the facts.' [From 'Does Man exist?'

'Ethics, An Understanding of Evil'], Verso 2001.

Quote "We are diminished to report the death of Giovanni Intra in New York City on

December 17th 2002. Giovanni, artist, critic,gallerist went east to stir up the LA art

scene and established the gallery, China Art Objects, and its location, Chinatown, as a

fresh new locus that, "changed the landscape" of the West Coast art world and was

internationally regarded as one of the most influential new galleries. Giovanni was

remembered in Art Forum, LA Times, New York Times, Las Vegas Sun, and The

Independent. The British style bible i-D magazine recently selected China Art Objects

as one of international art's"outstanding galleries" (April 2001) - high praise for a

gallery on the fringes of the conventional art-scene. At last year's prestigious Basel

Art Fair in Switzerland China Art Objects was awarded "Best Booth, Established

Galleries". In addition,Intra was a regular and highly regarded writer-editor within

the pages of Artforum and Artext. Connie Butler, curator at the Los Angeles Museum of

Contemporary Art: "He and the presence of China Art Objects have made an incredible

mark on the art community here, in fact changed the landscape. Chinatown is now the

freshest and consistently most interesting context for young artists' work and the

spirit of China Art Objects is largely responsible for this. Their program is a

provocative mix of emerging artists and more mature artists'work that is seldom seen

in Los Angeles. I admire Giovanni's energy and intelligence,and his low key ambition

is a welcome addition to the community." Intra's networking fits the RAND research

into networks and their organisational, tribal formation and reformation of the

landscape- neatly simulating their own. 

And concerning a 'general intelligence' of subversion at work among artists

disparaging the 'discontents' of the closeted, [moneyed], art world establishment and

its conservative 'art-fair'aesthetic, Porter unwittingly adds insult to injury:

"...Perhaps they are playing with the oft-quoted idea from Negri and Hardt's

Empire [ed. also Multitude] that 'there is no outside' when it comes to capitalism, or

maybe not. But one thing was for certain;there was no point in going outside for long

at Art Basel because it was too damn hot.The interior spaces of the exhibition centre

were of course luxuriously air-conditioned,and the astounding dumbness of this

coolness made the Basel art fair, in my mind, even more of a sinister social text.This

feeling was compounded by the selection of the winning pavilion at the Venice Biennale

the week before. As far as we could make out, the only reason Luxembourg won was that

their show, 'Air-Conditioned', lived up to its name and,unlike the rest of the

Biennale, remained beautifully cool during a comic heat wave. I can understand why

taking advantage of this milieu would appeal so much to these cunning community-minded

young gallerists - but as Intra once quipped[cynically] 'it's not exactly riding the

jock of genius.' Gwynneth Porter is herself also a member of an artist-run gallery

project,Cuckoo. From Metamute . com  M27.

On the aesthetic model of immaterial labour, Maurizio Lazzarato writes: "...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 labour 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

labour." 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 labour and its forms of

reproduction." 

The Aesthetic Model [from Immaterial Labour, Maurizio Lazzarato]

Is there constituent a multitude composed of 'immaterial labour', which performs a

complex and general 'virtuosity' from'within' the global market institution? 'The

strategy of refusal', a seminal essay by Mario Tronti, written in 1965 was

applied'inside' capitalist development, yet 'against it'. Setting up a process of self-

valorisation, [The Situationist project was such a collective endeavour of 'self-

valorisation',an emergence of social relationships,through which it was possible to

discover that "what gives the individual a social value is their variability of

behaviour in relation to other people" [Asger Jorn:Critique of Economic

Policy (1960)] Tronti's thesis was later developed into a subversive idea of virtuosity

in literature from thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari, Antonio Negri, and Paolo

Virno.

On the Multitude, Paolo Virno writes: '...The Multitude obstructs and dismantles the

mechanisms of [political] representation. It expresses itself as an ensemble of 'acting

minorities', none of which, however, aspires to transform itself into a majority. It

develops a power that refuses to become government.'

(Virno, Radical Thought in Italy p. 201)

Tronti advances this concept that Paolo Virno extends in 'virtuosity' to generate

subjects, capable of forming new social and creative relations, communities, yet, which

are now subsumed in an arena where virtue and the virtual blur to obtain a more

nuanced, and less revolutionary 'strategy of acceptance'. The racist, imperial Right

also has learnt of 'multitudinal' tactics to reconceive dominance through its 'counter-

insurgencies'. [Such as 'Leaderless Resistance']. If this stand-off exists in cunning

dissimulation, between 'Art as Network' and the Ego re-enforcement through 'artist-as-

networker' can there be nominated any evidence of a rigorous and affirmative politics

of the aesthetic, both fully contemporary, 'modern' and fully'democratic'? 

Or is an Imaginary, rooted in an ideological identification with the a priori, as

governing status-quo, a passive conformity dissimulated in rhetoric to produce

its 'seat of illusions'? The radical proposition is that the Multitude counterpoises

the power of'exodus' to the machinations of imperial governance: 'Democracy today takes

the form of a subtraction, a flight, an exodus from sovereignty.' Michael Hardt and

Antonio Negri [2004] Multitude 

Steve Wright argues that '...Negri is of the opinion that in a time of increasingly

complex and skilled labour, and of a working day that more and more blurs the

boundaries with (and ultimately colonises)the rest of our waking hours, value can no

longer be calculated. As he put it a decade ago, in such circumstances the

exploitation of labour still continues, but 'outside any economic measure: its

economic reality is fixed exclusively in political terms.' [Negri,A. (1994) 'Oltre la

legge di valore',DeriveApprodi 5-6]

'...Hardt and Negri are often uncritical and credulous in the face of orthodox

propaganda about globalization and immateriality ... They assert that immaterial

labour - service work, basically - now prevails over the old-fashioned material

kind, but they don't cite any statistics: you'd never expect that far more Americans

are truck drivers than are computer professionals. Nor would you have much of an

inkling that three billion of us, half the earth's population, live in the rural Third

World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil.' [Henwood, D. (2003) After

the New Economy. New York: New Press,pp.184-5] from an essay by Steve Wright,in

Metamute.com Reality check: Are We Living In An Immaterial World? M30::14.12.05

[ii] Histoire[s] d'une Multitudine [to be reconfigured in a critique 'Multitude']

Openness in dissent   ^

The Multitude as a political concept aims to capture a form of

subjectivity based on dissent, on certain types of refusal, on its

disobedience and other forms of action, movement and production

that are neither constituted power nor necessarily a direct

negation of that power. The Multitude relates to the political as

its constitutive force (cf: Negri ,Insurgencies) i.e. it is the

substance of power and it is to what established power

relates. Multitude is the current bearer of constituent power for

an aleatory materialism... 

In the last few years however, the term has had a particular

renaissance in certain areas of political thought, as a more loaded

category, destined to express not only quantity but also a

distinctly qualitative entity, something of substance. As a

distinct political concept it captures a historical development and

represents a movement away from previous configurations. The

Multitude registers a fluid, multi -dimensional reality from the

point of view of agency. Yet this is not just a new concept of

agency, some new concoction of social theorists but also a

different conception of politics. [citation needed on 'agency']

Hence this concept reflects the reality of an openness in

expressive totality, but is invented also to work towards it, to

work towards communication between its elements in the form of

decentralised networks (see Henwood - Hardt Interview; in this

interview Hardt also points to the parallel process of de-

colonisation). The tension is this inscribing of political unity

into the reality, gained from the potential of the concept rather

than the actuality of what occurs on the ground. The multitude

should resist any given, a priori conception of what constitutes or

limits its subjectivity. The great benefit of the idea is that it

precludes a reductionist inscription of necessary political unity

into the ontology of the category.

The process of the production of communication tends to become

immediately the process of valorisation. 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.

Virno writes: '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. 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 under stood as the articulations of an actual

productive cycle. 

The 'author' must lose its individual dimension and be transformed

into an industrially organized production process (with a division

of labour,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.  

... subversion is rarely public (because the public is citizens with names, a

supposedly open and accountable space for visible,autonomous and recognisable

subjects, but operative only in a context of legality and liberal rights). One of the

unrecognised potentials of the Internet lies in the anonymity of the user, the

opportunity it provides for people whom for whatever reason have been excluded from

the old form of public life. It allows for those who do not have a name to speak for

themselves. 

Control society needs to be subverted rather than limited, and this is not a matter of

public dissent but rather of making subversion at once public (in the sense of

shared) and invisible, of dispersing through multiple points of attack. Control

society is not stopped by a re-assertion of the private, data protection acts, and

civil rights activism. Ours is not merely a libertarian agenda nor is it an attempt at

preserving a constructed category of individual freedom,but it is the very opposition

to individuation through forms of socialised disobedience,networked and spread as a

form of constitution of new social realities of cooperation as well as exodus.

Rather than the visible networks of accountable individuals speaking in the name of

others, we are interested in invisible networks, those that cannot be represented due

to the content of their association. Drugs, theft, absenteeism, are just a few examples

of what are increasingly widespread responses to the criminalisation of any aspect of

life that refuses obedience. Expressed in their own terms, none of these instances of

often quite individuated actions seems to carry much weight and their non-

representability complicates their articulation as common forms of action.

Our power stares us in the face because we know very much from our own experience that

fear, panic, depression and paranoia, can be challenged and turned around. Confidence

is infectious and cooperation and association with other actors increases ones

power. Because subjectivity is inherently social, multiple becoming of instances of

immanent connections in life - introspection and self-reflection are the very opposite

of this process, they rarely have any constitutive effect. Where the one relates to

itself as one, it is really none, and thus in control society, sovereignty (of the

individual) is absolutely subverted. Hence the network appears where there is a

consciousness of that power. The reason why there are no leaders in the movement is

that everyone has become a leader of sorts, more or less effective at certain times of

being able to give expression to the common, one formed activity and example.

[iii]

[Pure surfacing] of the Multitude

Swarm as aesthetic   ^

Brainstorming the One, disunity of extremes, the eventful Two in

revolt. The One is not.

Leaderless Resistances versus the Host -

The Semantic Web - Net-wars

The Net-work (internet and intranets) is described by computer

science as having properties of a nonlinear complex system, yet

unified as a homogeneous surface - semiotic. It functions

paradoxically as a 'dissimulation' [to hide, as knowledge, under a

false appearance] of interaction and immediacy. A network is in

potential a 'reflexive' mega structure, calling itself up from an

infinite archival intelligence].Considering the network semiotic as

a linguistic system in which signs and symbols function as complex

interactions of information agencies, such a semiotic will

incorporate a nonlinear dynamic from which an 'entailment

meshwork' emerges,including all domains for information association

and function. An entailment is a set of rules pertaining to the

emergence of self-organization by a system in which uncertain

conditions and influences are present. Emergent

conversation(brainstorming) results from self-organizing entailment

processes from which inferencing emerges. [Inferencing is the

process of deducing[inferring] new information from information

already known. This is a very promising concept coming out of the

Semantic Web that offers the ability to discover new relationships

and new insights across large amounts of seemingly unrelated

data.] An entailment mesh was thought to be the principal semiotic

agency [data pattern]responsible for concept inferencing resulting

from information filtering, association, referencing and

substitution. Research involving machine/machine conversation

demonstrated entailment as a complex autocatalytic feedback loop in

which sub-systems influence a tendency for adaptation towards less

than optimum goals. That is, there seem, in dissimulation, no

specific objectives or purposes guiding the conversational

system, in its immediacy and interaction. 

Art as Network, [as the electronic sphere of discourse in any

defining of Multitude, as subject,and 'netwar'] verifies the

complexity of a semiotic that meshes an aesthetic forged of

uncertainty and innovation, into a potential for

resistance / virtual war: a nonlinear dynamic between self-

organization, homogeneity, and dissimulation alternates, to

establish a wobbly framework of illusions of the real [art] in

which are present disorganisations of prescribed thinking precisely

aimed to destroy the illusions of hegemony. This does concur with

Badiou's 'puissance' or power of truth which may be of the order of

a re-organisation of non-truths, opinions and rhetoric,e.g. a

typical case here being an art-fair that contains partial

truths [badly presented works of art] in non-alignment, could be de-

concealed as socially organized, yet falsifying? [citation needed] 

As Rand's own researchers have observed: 'The point is that these

debates between social and organizational networks are far from

settled.Meanwhile, where netwar is the object of concern -as in

assessing the degree to which an adversary is or is not a netwar

actor, and how well it is designed for particular strategies and

tactics - the analyst should be steeped in the organizational as

much as the social approach. Organizational design is the decisive

factor (even when the actors are individuals).

'...In netwars, swarming often appears not only in real-life actions

but also through measures in cyberspace. Aspirations for a

leaderless swarming doctrine, beginning with a rationale and a

capability for "electronic civil disobedience," show up among

hacktivists who advocate the usage of online tools to

flood (i.e., overwhelm) a target's computer systems, e-mail

inboxes, and Web sites, thereby disrupting and even defacing

them (see Wray,1998). Virtually anybody can log into one of these

tools and, with a few commands, mount an automated DDOS attack. For

example, a device called FloodNet, developed by a collectivity

named the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), has been used since

the late 1990s against government and corporate sites in

Mexico, the Middle East, Europe,and the United States (e.g., against

Etoys).Hacktivists associated with the EDT would like to create a

new device named SWARM (after our writings), in order to

move "digital Zapatismo"beyond the initial emphasis on FloodNet and

create new kinds of "electronic pulse systems" for militant

activism. A newer device, called Tribal FloodNet,evidently

programmed by a German hacker named Mixter, is technically more

powerful. It can enable a lone anonymous individual to mount a far

more massive DDOS attack than is the case with FloodNet, which

requires publicly announced mass participation (a virtual sit-

in) to function well. Tribal FloodNet gained notoriety for its

usage in shutting down Yahoo! and other U.S. sites early in

2000. But since then, the contrast between the two systems has led

to an ideological controversy. Hacktivist proponents of

FloodNet - not only in the EDT, but also in the Electrohippies

and, to a lesser extent,the Cult of the Dead Cow - prefer to

assert "the presence of a global group of people gathering to bear

witness to a wrong." They criticize the Tribal version for being

undemocratic and secretive."

'The fact that more free music is being downloaded and shared by

loose peer-to-peer networks since Napster's activities were

curtailed by legal action gives some indication of the power of

this advance.It also reveals once again, as seen notably with

Colombian drug cartels in the 1990s, that smaller,more nimble

networks may spring up as successors to a defeated large network

like the Medellin or Cali cartel.

'Yet, net-war can be waged without necessarily having access to the

Internet and other advanced technologies. This level may mix old

and new, low-and high-tech capabilities. Human couriers and face-to-

face meetings may still remain essential,especially for secretive

actors like terrorists and criminals.

'It's making sure, even though everybody was independent to do it

their own way, they cared enough to keep us all informed so that we

all had the power of the smoke-and-mirrors illusion of this huge

machinery... And it was, again, the follow up,the constant

communication, the building of trust.Trust, trust, trust. The most

important element is this trust as its political dimension. Once

you blow trust, you've blown it all. It's hard to rebuild"  

'The tendency in some circles to view networks as amounting to configurations of

social capital and trust is helpful for analyzing this level. But there are other

important concepts as well, notably about people forming "communities of practice"

(Brown and Duguid, 2000), and "epistemic communities" (Haas, 1992). In a sense, all

these concepts reflect the ancient, vital necessity of belonging to a family, clan, or

tribe and associating one's identity with it.

'Meanwhile, the traditions of social network analysis and economic transaction

analysis warn against the risks of having participants who are "free riders" or lack a

personal commitment to teamwork. Indeed,compared to tribal/clan and hierarchical forms

of organization, networks have more difficulty instilling, and enforcing, a sense of

personal identity with and loyalty to the network. This is one of the key weaknesses

of the network form - one that may affect counternetwar designs as well. It extends

partly from the fact that networks are often thought to lack a "center of gravity" as

an organization. 

'...Peer-to-peer computing can enable its users to prevent censorship of

documents,provide anonymity for users, remove any single point of failure or

control, efficiently store and distribute documents, and provide plausible deniability

for node operators. See Oram (2001).

'...The Russians did succeed in killing Dzhokhar Dudayev during the first (1994-

96) Chechen War - triangulating on him while he used a cellphone - but the networked

Chechens did quite well even without their 'leader.'

Considering two formulations [fromMultitudes - WEB ]

1) Video and computer gaming demonstrates the extraordinary success of cognitive

capitalism in enclosing emergent forms of general intellect in a smoothly

integrated, constantly expanding global circuit of commodification. In production it

demonstrates the foundation of a new industry built on the mobilization of an elite

immaterial workforce, whose activities are supported by a penumbra of vital but un-or

low paid activities conducted either by volunteer prosumers, and underpinned by the

immiseration of maquiladora labour. At the level of consumption and social

reproduction, games disseminate virtual scenarios appropriate to hyper-militarized

finance capital with primary investment interests in the cyborg arenas of

biotechnology and digitization. To this extent, video and computer gaming exemplifies

the triumphant subsumption of biopower by the forces of cognitive capital.

2) Video and computer games demonstrates how general intellect drives toward the

supersession of capital. At the level of production, they reveal the dependence of new

media on forms of " dot. communist " activity, such as open source and freeware, and

the implosion of the commodity form under the pressure of the escalating piracy

inherent to networks.More generally, the digital socialization of youth through gaming

discloses a subversive face in a proliferation of cyberactivist and hacktivist

practices that both explode within game culture and overspill into more manifestly

political spheres. By circulating the skills and technology necessary for virtual

experimentation with social organization,video and computer games have unwittingly

democratized capacities for popular planning and collective self-organization hitherto

been concentrated in the hands of capitalisms military and managerial

cadres. Interactive play thus demonstrates the corrosive force with which contemporary

biopower undermines cognitive commodification.

Both statements are true. It is by the enfolding of their simultaneously existing yet

mutually destructive affirmations that the conditions of class struggle in cognitive

capitalism are defined. Hic rhodus, hic salta--or, very loosely translated, here is the

game, let's play [Dyer-Witheford, Nick"Cognitive Capitalism Contested: the Class

Composition of the Video and Computer Game Industry," 

In light of the ground-breaking philosophical work of Alain Badiou who outlines a

series of eventful procedures through which an individual becomes an ethical subject

of truth, what happens when Badiou's ethical subject is incommensurable with and

interrupts, as an alternative, the neo-liberal subject?

AIR CONDITIONED -

A HANDBOOK FOR A MULTITUDE   ^

On Art's bifurcations, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose

the concept of 'machinic phylum'to reference the overall set of

self-organizing processes within a system (including complexity) in

which previously disconnected elements suddenly reach a critical

point at which they begin to'cooperate' to form a higher level

entity. This'evolution' is indicative of a set of adaptive

alternatives, a systems machinic phylum, through which it may or

may not bifurcate. 

"It has become inaccurate to discuss the 'the web'as a single

entity since this use of a definite article belies the increasingly

electrical interconnectedness of a plethora of

devices,processes, information and indices. 'The web' is inadequate

because it implies a coherence that is not evident in the use of

many incompatible formats, private networks, and non-indexed

sections of network. This incoherent, frayed mess

of networks is like an expanding and obscure territory for which there are no maps, or

at least, no maps with standard keys, scales or control coordinates. In some

ways 'surfing' or 'browsing' are increasingly appropriate metaphors for the superficial

and indiscriminate ways our browsers allow us to use the web. These limited research

excursions are almost entirely dependent on the indices of one of the major search

engines (Google in most cases) which has become the limit of the network; everything

else is uncharted,unconnected and therefore largely inaccessible." From 'Freemasons Of

The Future'

M27:: 12.01.04 [Saul Albert, Simon Worthington, and Fabian Thompsett]

 

The Undetected Multitude   ^

The special issue on Multitude welcomes projects

that, in 'open' media formats. Can there be an art of disruption to

neo-liberalist genealogy. Through audio-visual frameworks that

consider the contemporary conditions of globalization we invite

works that are 'intra-philosophical'. In Inaesthetics Alain Badiou

redefines a relation of truth over beauty within the contested

field of aesthetics,focusing upon modernism in the arts, to define

a new schema for that which comes after the aesthetic, the

anaesthetic, which is:

...a relation of philosophy to art which, maintaining that art is

itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn art into an

object for philosophy.Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics

describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the

independent existence of some works of art.

NOTES / REFERENCES

From P. Virno's 'The Grammar of the Multitude' So,the dividing line

between fear and anguish,between relative dread and absolute

dread, is precisely what has failed. The concept of "people,"even

with its many historical variations, is closely bound to the clear

separation between a habitual"inside" and an unknown and

hostile "outside." The concept of "multitude," instead, hinges upon

the ending of such a separation. The distinction between fear and

anguish, just like the one between relative shelter and absolute

shelter, is groundless for at least three reasons.

The first of these reasons is that one cannot speak reasonably of

substantial communities. In today's world, impulsive changes do not

overturn traditional and repetitive forms of life; what they do is

to come between individuals who by now have gotten used to no

longer having fixed customs, who have gotten used to sudden

change, who have been exposed to the unusual and to the

unexpected. What we have, then, at every moment and no matter

what, is a reality, which is repeatedly innovated. It is therefore

not possible to establish an actual distinction between a

stable"inside" and an uncertain and telluric "outside." The

permanent mutability of the forms of life, and the training needed

for confronting the unchecked uncertainty of life, lead us to a

direct and continuous relation with the world as such, with the

imprecise context of our existence.

What we have, then, is a complete overlapping of fear and

anguish. If I lose my job, of course I am forced to confront a

well-defined danger, one which gives rise to a specific kind of

dread; but this real danger is immediately coloured by an

unidentifiable anguish. It is fused together with a more general

disorientation in the presence of the world in which we live; it is

identified with the absolute insecurity, which lives in the human

animal, in as much as the human animal is lacking in specialized

instincts. One might say: fear is always anguish-

ridden; circumscribed danger

always makes us face the general risk of being in this world. If the substantial

communities once hid or muffled our relationship with the world, then their

dissolution now clarifies this relationship for us: the loss of one's job, or the

change which alters the features of the functions of labour, or the loneliness of

metropolitan life-all these aspects of our relationship with the world assume many of

the traits which formerly belonged to the kind of terror one feels outside the walls

of the community. We would need to find a new term here, different

from "fear" or"anguish," a term which would take the fusion of these two terms into

account.What comes to mind for me is the term uncanny. But it would take too much time

here to justify the use of this term (Virno,Mondanita: 65-7).

Let us move on to the second critical approach. According to traditional

explanations, fear is a public feeling, while anguish pertains to the individual who

has been isolated by a fellow human being. In contrast to fear (which is provoked by a

danger pertaining virtually to many members of the community and which can be resisted

with the help of others), the anguished feeling of being lost evades the public sphere

and is concerned only with the so-called interior nature of the individual. This type

of explanation has become completely unreliable. For certain reasons, in fact, it must

be overturned.Today, all forms of life have the experience of "not feeling at

home," which, according to Heidegger, would be the origin of anguish.Thus, there is

nothing more shared and more common, and in a certain sense more public, than the

feeling of "nor feeling at home." No one is less isolated than the person who feels

the fearful pressure of the indefinite world. In other words, that feeling in which

fear and anguish converge is immediately the concern of many. One could

say, perhaps, that "not feeling at home" is in fact a distinctive trait of the concept

of the multitude, while the separation between the "inside" and the"outside," between

fear and anguish, is what earmarked the Hobbesian (and not only Hobbesian) idea of

people. The people are one, because the substantial community collaborates in order to

sedate the fears that spring from circumscribed dangers. The multitude, instead, is

united by the risk which derives from not feeling at home," from being exposed

omnilaterally to the world.

SOURCE MATERIAL - from Paolo Virno 'The Grammar of the Multitude'  

Dread / Refuge   ^

Now let us consider the third and last critical

observation, perhaps the most radical. It concerns the same

dread/refuge coupling. What is mistaken in this coupling is the

idea that we first experience a sense of dread and, only then, we

set ourselves the task of procuring a source of refuge. These

stimulus-response or cause-effect models are completely out of

place. Rather, one should believe that the original experience

would be that of procuring some means of refuge. Above all, we

protect ourselves; then, when we are intent on protecting

ourselves, we focus on identifying the dangers with which we may

have to concern ourselves. Arnold Gehlen used to say that

survival,for the human animal, was an oppressive task, and that in

order to confront this task we need, above all, to mitigate the

disorientation which results from the fact that we are not in

possession of a fixed"environment" (Gehlen, Man: His Nature). Within

one's living context, this groping attempt to cope with life is

basic.

"Even as we seek to have a sense of orientation which will allow us

to protect ourselves, we also perceive, often in

retrospect, various forms of danger.

There is more to the story. Not only does danger define itself

starting with the original search for refuge, but, and this is the

truly crucial point,danger manifests itself for the most part as a

specific form of refuge. If we look carefully, we see that danger

consists of a horrifying strategy of salvation (one need only think

of the cult of some ethnic "enclave"). "The dialectic between danger

and refuge is resolved, in the end, in the dialectic between

alternative forms of protection. In contrast to the sources of

refuge to be feared we find the second rank sources of

refuge, those that are capable of serving as an antidote to the

poisons of the former sources of refuge. From the historical  

and sociological point of view, it is not difficult to see that evil expresses itself

precisely as a horrible response to the risk inherent in this world, as a dangerous

search for protection: we need only think about the propensity for entrusting oneself

to a sovereign (either in the flesh, or one of those operetta types, it doesn't

matter), or about the feverish elbowing to get to the top in one's career, or about

xenophobia.We could also say: being truly anguish-ridden is just a certain way of

confronting anguish. Let me repeat: what is decisive here is the choice between

different strategies of reassurance, the opposition between extremely different forms

of refuge. For this reason, let me say in passing, it is foolish either to overlook

the theme of security, or (and this is even more foolish) to brandish it without

further qualification (not recognizing the true danger in this very theme, or in

certain of its types).

The experience of the contemporary (or, if you prefer, of the postFordist) multitude is

primarily rooted in this modification of the dialectic of dread-refuge. The many, in

as much as they are many, are those who share the feeling of "not feeling at home"and

who, in fact, place this experience at the centre of their own social and political

praxis. Furthermore, in the multitude's mode of being, one can observe with the naked

eye a continuous oscillation between different, sometimes diametrically

opposed,strategies of reassurance (an oscillation which the people, however, do not

understand, since they are an integral part of the sovereign States).

HANDBOOK FOR A LEGION

THE MULTITUDE [THE ARTIST AS EVERYBODY]   ^

http :// www . generation - online . org / c / fcmultitude3 . htm

Abstract intelligence and immaterial signs have become the major

productive force in the post-Fordist economy we are living in and

they are deeply affecting contemporary structures and

mentalities. Virno's essay examines the increased mobility and

versatility of the new labour force whose work-time now virtually

extends to their entire life. The "multitude" is the kind of

subjective configuration that this radical change is

liberating,raising the political question of what we are capable

of. " Foreword, The Grammar of the Multitude, P.Virno [ Semiotexte]

How does the recently much-invoked 'Post-Fordism' in an essential way affect our

existence, our conception of the subject and our labour relations? If it is the case

that nowadays 'virtuosity' is in demand and that language and communication have

become the decisive powers of productivity, then this has to have consequences also

for the production of art. 

[ Events ]

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