Crisis and Control: The Exploit
Control After Decentralization
“Perhaps there is no greater lesson about networks than the lesson about control: networks, by their mere existence, are not liberating; they exercise novel forms of control that operate at a level that is anonymous and non-human, which is to say material.” (5)
“It will not do simply to assign a political content to a network form. Worse would be to claim that a network form is innately reactionary or progressive. It is foolish to fall back on the tired mantra of modern political movements, that distributed networks are liberating and centralized networks are oppressive. This truism of the Left may have been accurate in previous decades but must today be reconsidered.” (13)
“As we shall see, protocological control brings into existence a certain contradiction, at once distributing agencies in a complex manner while at the same time concentrating rigid forms of management and control. This means that protocol is less about power (confinement, discipline, normativity), and more about control (modulation, distribution, flexibility).” (31)
“Hardt and Negri’s argument is never that distributed networks are inherently resistive. The network form is not tied to any necessary political position, either progressive or reactionary.” (152)
“Because both empire and the multitude employ the distributed network form, it is not sufficient to remain politically ambiguous on the question of distributed networks. A decision has to be made: we’re tired of rhizomes. One must not only analyze how distributed networks afford certain advantages to certain movements; one must critique the logics of distributed networks themselves. Many political thinkers today seem to think that “networked power” means simply the aggregation of powerful concerns into a networked shape, that networked power is nothing more than a network of powerful individuals. Our claim is entirely the opposite, that the materiality of networks—and above all the “open” or “free” networks—exhibits power relations regardless of powerful individuals.” (153)
Scale
“A control is not a discipline. In making freeways, for example, you don’t enclose people but instead multiply the means of control. I am not saying that this is the freeway’s exclusive purpose, but that people can drive infinitely and “freely” without being at all confined yet while still being perfectly controlled. This is our future.” (Deleuze “Having an Idea in Cinema”)
“Networks are elemental, in the sense that their dynamics operate at levels “above” and “below” that of the human subject. The elemental is this ambient aspect of networks, this environmental aspect— all the things that we as individuated human subjects or groups do not directly control or manipulate. The elemental is not “the natural,” however (a concept that we do not understand). The elemental concerns the variables and variability of scaling, from the micro level to the macro, the ways in which a network phenomenon can suddenly contract, with the most local action becoming a global pattern, and vice versa. The elemental requires us to elaborate an entire climatology of thought.” (157)
The Exploit
“A wholly new topology of resistance must be invented that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network was in rela- tionship to power centers. Resistance is asymmetry. The new exploit will be an “antiweb.” It will be what we call later an “exceptional topology.” It will have to consider the radically unhuman elements of all networks. It will have to consider the nonhuman within the human, the level of “bits and atoms” that are even today leveraged as value-laden biomedia for proprietary interests. It has yet to be invented, but the newly ascendant network sovereigns will likely breed the antiweb into existence, just as the old twentieth-century powers bred their own demise, their own desertion.” (22)
Ideology and/or Structural Critique
“Analyses of power relations often spend a great deal of time on the ideological content of political struggle: how the values of Islamic fundamentalism, or U.S. arrogance, produced within a certain historical context, lead to or justify violent actions. However, there is another view that focuses on the architecture of power, not just on its ideological content.” (106)
Transition to Chun, Exploits and Crises:
“This article responds to this apparent paradox by arguing that crises are not accidental to a culture focused on safety, they are its raison d’être. In such a society, each crisis is the motor and the end of control systems; each initially singular emergency is carefully saved, analyzed and codified. More profoundly and less obviously, crises and codes are complementary because they are both central to the emergence of what appears to be the antithesis of both automation and codes: user agency. Codes and crises together produce (the illusion of) mythical and mystical sovereign subjects who weld together norm with reality, word with action.” (Chun 92)
“In Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun engages in a sympathetic critique of Deleuze, describing his analysis as “arguably paranoid” because of the way in which it appears to overestimate the technical potential of computation as a mode of social regulation and thus unintentionally fulfills the “aims” of control.” (Franklin 20)