1. The problem:
A large number of social theories of networked and mediated power
which have a common interest in some blend of emancipation,
but contain different strategies and risks, not to mention extremes
of optimism and pessimism for technology.
Post-autonomist media theory:
an global immanent plane of sovereignty and biopolitics
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Where is power located?
How to mobilize a global political class?
How to produce non-oppressive institutions?
Where do we locate sovereignty today?
... and how do we reclaim it?
Key texts:
Insurgencies (Negri, 1999)
Empire (2000),
Multitude (2004),
Commonwealth (2009).
Secondary texts:
The Labor of Dionysus (1994),
Declaration (2012),
Grammar of the Multitude (Virno, 2003)
Art and revolution (Raunig, 2007)
Time for Revolution (Negri, 2003)
The Labor of Job (Negri, 2002),
Radical Thought in Italy (edited collection, 1996)
The Network Society:
the sociology of resistance
Manuel Castells
How is the network society organised?
How can we theorise relationships between networks?
How can we take charge?
Key texts:
Communication Power (2009)
"A network theory of power" (2011).
Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012)
Secondary texts:
The Network Society, v. 1-3 (1996, 1997, 1998)
The ancien regieme of post-structuralist power
Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari
What are the metaphysics of power?
How has power transformed?
What is are the historical expressions of its emergence?
Key texts:
Discipline and punish
History of sexuality
A thousand plateaus
Antidotes:
The pharmakon of the power debate
Giorgio Agamben
- commentaries on homo sacer and sovereignty
- criticism of Foucault, Schmitt, Negri.
Christian Fuchs
- extensive criticism of both Negri and Castells
- ardent 'orthodox' Marxist
Nick Dyer-Witheford
- early English-language theorist of autonomism
- extensive analysis of the pol. ec. of communication devices
Bernard Steigler
- metaphysical approaches to the effects of networks on subjects
- conceives of algorithmic means of network destabilisation.
Discourses of networked power:
Comparing Castells' and Negri's conceptions of power
Robbie Fordyce
School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Negri
Constituent power - potere
- the possibility of acting in the world, of changing it.
- recognisable in its expressions in labor, creativity, invention, and affect
- innately political and innately economic;
i.e. no separation between economic and politics
Constituted power - potenza
- the institution of power, instituted in machines, organisations,
social and cultural codes, discipline, economic standards.
- produced by constituent power, but also subordinates constituent power
Sovereignty, or Empire
- dislocated in the sense that it is no longer internal to
an institution or individual
- all things are sovereign in some sense, but this power is distributed asymmetrically
Castells
Internal powers - the level of organisation
Network power
- the power of the protocol over the actors in the network
Networked power
- the power of one actor over another within a network
- the internal asymmetries of power
- identifies a gradient of power within a network
External powers - the level of exclusion
Networking power
- the deployment of the network against an external object
- the power that comes from mobilising a network towards some goal
Network-making power
- the most privileged form of power
- the ability to include or exclude from sites of power
- analagous to a form of sovereignty
Current conclusions:
- Castells' critiques focus on digital media excellently;
yet write the concept of the network onto other media formats.
- Castells' solutions for an 'alter-power' are simply more of the same.
- For Hardt and Negri, few of their stated solutions match their theory,
and those that do are untenable.
- Their concept of media is general enough that it is widely applicable,
and allows for the space of immediate affective personal communication.
- Negri's framework of philosophical immanence ignores a distinction
between politics and economics - for better or worse.