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<TITLE>Re: [iDC] Class and the Internet, New Capitalism, and (True New) Socialism for the 21st Century/ Peak Biopower?</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>That’s hugely important thinking Marty. Two thoughts: one is the UN population report this year indicating the scale of population flows into the cities. With the extraordinary exception of the Chinese gerontocracy, who appear to have learned from the savage deregulation if the USSR and have determined to make changes slowly, no government I’m aware of has plans to reduce that flow. The urbanisation - thinking Mke davis’ Planet of Slums – is probably more bare life than slumdog mllionaire. This is where politics arises, according to ranciere: in the realisation that there is a population previously excluded from the citizenry who must be dialogued with, even tough they are ‘external’. In Europe, this is the case with migrants, who no longer have ex-colonial ties, linguistic commonality, separation from ‘home’ or any usefully static type of community (being very ready to move from Ireland to Poland as the money goes). The presence of a vast newly urban population will do the same for the megacities and many regional cities. They in turn will impact on the still vast numbers who remain. If we haven’t burned the planet by the, there might be the most outrageous changes. <BR>
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The second is probably more appalling: Castells short, terrifying chapter on sub-Saharan Africa suggesting that unless the Republic of Sough Africa succeeds, and can become the regional hegemon, the vast majority of the population are surplus to requirements. <BR>
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The race is on<BR>
S<BR>
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On 28/06/09 4:50 AM, "Martin Lucas" <<a href="mlucas@igc.org">mlucas@igc.org</a>> wrote:<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica, Verdana, Arial"><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14pt'>Peak Biopower<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"><FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14pt'><I>Today the standing-reserve is not just the unconscious material world. It includes the human – as population, as biomass, as mechanism of aggregate consumption.</I></SPAN></FONT><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14pt'><FONT FACE="Helvetica, Verdana, Arial"> Sean C.<BR>
</FONT></SPAN></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica, Verdana, Arial"><FONT SIZE="1"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:9pt'><BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14pt'>I am trying to relate Sean’s thoughts to insights I’ve gained engaged with video and mobile media activism in Africa. One reality that Africans confront is the end of a global peasantry, one that historically existed outside of the economic system of capital in certain ways, as subsistence farmers. Basically, peasant farmers cannot compete, even at the most severe levels of self-exploitation, with a system that combines global agribusiness with the subsidization of agriculture in the industrialized nations. <BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14pt'>About two years ago the planet crossed a point where peasants are no longer the largest part of the population. Put another way, more people live in cities now than in the countryside. So as a reserve in the ‘reserve army’ sense and in the sense of being part of a world that is a buffer for capitalism, in the sense of ‘nature’ or ‘standing-reserve’, we’re talking about a shrinking resource. <BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14pt'>Saul Ostrow points out most people with computer access are middle class by some definition. But people with mobile access are a vastly broader group, one that includes large numbers of subsistence farmers. Currently tens of millions of Africans are investing in mobile devices and infrastructure in a way that allows them in a certain way to occupy what Hegel called ‘the stage of history.’ They can at least potentially be considered ‘players’ in a way that the Iranian people are at the moment for instance. Put another way, the human part of the standing-reserve is now a ‘mechanism of aggregate production’, at least in potential. That would be where class consciousness emerges, and it is not a classic ‘working’ class or middle class, but a class that is emerging and defining itself in action, putting itself past the worker/middle class split that is so effectively exploited here in the US (and clearly delineated in this thread.)<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14pt'>Africans pay a high price for globalization both in terms of environment and economics, both in the destruction of non-commodity agriculture and in having it replaced with the most egregious forms of industrial (and cultural) exploitation. Their desire to embrace modernity in the form of communications tools bears thinking about. <BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14pt'>As a media activist I have always believed that access to communication tools offers a liberatory potential, and acted on that belief. Clearly, what you do with the tools is part of the deal. If an Iranian woman sends a post from a demo in Teheran, that can be a political act, a ‘production of truth’ in Badiou’s sense. In a similar vein, a 13 year old girl in rural Africa posting an SMS question about sexuality and AIDS is inserting herself into a global discussion and enlarging the public sphere in a way previously unimaginable.<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14pt'>The question that hit me, in the context that Sean Cubitt frames, is: Haven’t we reached a point where that biopower reserve is starting shrink? What might that mean? Could it be the end of a system of exploitation that depends on both cultural consciousness reserves and on natural reserves? <BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14pt'>As Christian points out we’re in a moment that is the least communist from a point of control, and a most communist from a point of the potential for real politics/economics. To go back to Marx, the notion of capitalism’s chaos means that as more and more of everything gets incorporated into a capitalist system, the more things will tend to hugely chaotic moments, something that Sean refers to. The response from a class that definitely does exist ‘for itself,’ the ruling class, is visible around us. But if we are increasingly all plugged in, as I suggest, then there is no turning back.<BR>
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Marty Lucas<BR>
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On Jun 27, 2009, at 12:35 AM, Sean Cubitt wrote:<BR>
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Slowly mulling the class-consciousness thing, and also reminded otherwise of Roy Ascott’s facsination with consciousness in another sense, I began to wonder whether there is mileage in the rather passé but still geologically presumed heideggerian thesis of the standing –reserve (no, I’m not a heideggerian, on the contrary – but the idea has constantly to be struggled with in history of media/technology)<BR>
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Today the standing-reserve is not just the unconscious material world. It includes the human – as population, as biomass, as mechanism of aggregate consumption. The question about conscdiousness is whether (to use another heiddegger word) ‘thinking’ is already party to this conversion of humanity into standing-reserve, either when, as in de Landa’s case, we popularise the idea of humanity as biomass etc; or when by refusing to self-publish the self-censor the virtuality (capacity to create the new) of new thinking? Ie, again, damned if we do and damned if we don’t<BR>
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If we understand the standing-reserve as biopolitical and commodifying, we can add some terms: it concerns averages, and it concerns whole-number enumeration. It thus misses both the specificity and the ‘starting’ micro-conditions and so opens itself up to cascading chaotic and emergent structures in spite of itself. This is one way of thinking the schiz as a political consciousness which is nonetheless neither unified nor pleasant to experience. The periodic return to order from such chaotic episodes (as I think happened in the disciplining and monetarisation of the pre-dot-bomb web) may then be predictable but nonetheless not without influence (see also post-countercultural hip capitalism)<BR>
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Sorry to blip in and out of existence like this: I appear to be powered by an improbability drive<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="2"><FONT FACE="Consolas, Courier New, Courier"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:10pt'> </SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Prof Sean Cubitt<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Prof Sean Cubitt<BR>
<a href="scubitt@unimelb.edu.au">scubitt@unimelb.edu.au</a><BR>
Director<BR>
Media and Communications Program<BR>
Faculty of Arts<BR>
Room 127 John Medley East<BR>
The University of Melbourne<BR>
Parkville VIC 3010<BR>
Australia<BR>
<BR>
Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667<BR>
Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494<BR>
M: 0448 304 004<BR>
Skype: seancubitt<BR>
<a href="http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/">http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/</a><BR>
<a href="http://www.digital-light.net.au/">http://www.digital-light.net.au/</a><BR>
<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/">http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/</a><BR>
<a href="http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/">http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/</a><BR>
<a href="http://del.icio.us/seancubitt">http://del.icio.us/seancubitt</a><BR>
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Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series<BR>
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