<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">Peak Biopower</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><br><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">In a recent post I postulated a potential counter-force to the incorporation of humanity into the global market, into the states that support it, a force of consciousness. My thinking was based on the idea that in the same way that the global ecology is understandable as a closed system, where resources are being depleted (hence the petroleum analogy) so we could understand that there are a diminishing number of human beings who have not yet been incorporated into modern regimes of economic participation, and the kind of hegemonic control it uses. In the previous post I said, “Haven’t we reached a point where that biopower reserve is starting to shrink?” </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">I also postulated a role for the variety of ‘new media’ technologies, many of them centered around the cellphone, as the main route to a connection to a global information network for an increasingly large percentage of the world’s population. If one imagines that linking to that network, with its various capabilities for sharing text, images, and audio-visual material is something like access to a public sphere, then there is the possibility that that participation is ‘political’. Since the discussion thread had roots in a discussion of the ‘Twitter Revolution’ in Iran, this is a reasonable assumption. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">One of the questions that the notion of peak biopower opens up is that of class consciousness, or at least political consciousness. There are several other key questions I think. Does capitalism need a biopower reserve, a kind of ‘consciousness standing reserve’ in the same way that it needs a ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ and a natural resource reserve to be able to function? Another question that seems key to me is one around categorization, algorithms and notions of the political. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">Jodi Dean on another thread refers to efforts around ICT’s and education in the third world which seem to be ‘a factory for producing the subjects of communicative capitalism.’ I cant say that is not happening. I referred to experiences I had, specifically working with an NGO with communications technologies in Africa. But what I am seeing is more self-organized effort and choices. I don’t think these can be condemned out of hand, and what is more, it is possible that those subjects will be resistant ones. Jodi also notes in the Recursive Publics thread, “Whether or not people take advantage of these publics to develop counter-hegemonic discourses and new political powers is uncertain, it’s not implied by the form of the technology, but it is enabled by it.”</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">I do suggest that capitalism will have big problems operating in a world where a majority of humanity is organized in this way, a way that puts larger and larger numbers of people in the position of market, audience, and ‘produser’ My thought is that publics will emerge, often from unexpected places. Here is an excerpt of a story about a government mandated plan for inserting readable ID chips in all cattle in the US:</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">“ Rebellion on the Range Over a Cattle ID Plan” (Erik Eckholm, NYT June 28, 2009)</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">My main beef is that these proposed rules were developed by people sitting in their offices with no real knowledge of animal husbandry and small farms,” said Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms in Snow Hill, N.C., which rotates sheep, cattle, pigs, turkeys and chickens among three properties and sells directly to consumers and co-ops. “I feel these regulations are draconian,” Ms. Pridgen said, “and that lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture.”</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 10px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">Paul Hamby, owner of Hamby Dairy Supply in Maysville, Mo., and a vocal opponent of the plan, said, “It is very much an economic and class warfare issue. Fifty years ago,” Mr. Hamby said, “hundreds of thousands of farms raised hogs, and now very few players have control of the market. I believe one of the reasons for this plan is to consolidate the cattle industry.” </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 10px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 10px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">In other words, these are people who if one is categorizing by class might be small business people, petit bourgeoisie, or farmers, who define themselves in terms of class conflict -- a new kind of conflict that is very much part of the information age. The article suggests very much that they see the chip ID plan as being applied to people next. A key point is that these people represent the tiny percentage of American agriculture which is not beholden to agribusiness. This is central, in the sense that they represent in some way an emerging ‘mode of production’ and this gives them a position in some way outside the corporate mode that controls most of US agriculture and (although with increasingly diminished success) food politics. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">The other part of the Peak Biopower thesis is that these two movements, one of a world where peasants are disappearing and the other where global ecology is threatened are related; both affect global capitalism. I believe that capitalism as a system is one that must be buffered to work. It needs to be a subset of a larger world.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">As reserves dwindle, the chaotic aspect of the system gets more so. I used the analogy of ‘peak oil’ with its extreme price volatility, but we have seen the same thing with many many commodities recently. The other side of this coin is that as more and more esoteric derivative financial instruments are developed for a broader and broader variety of commodities the chaos increases as well. In fact, the US government is actually planning a “crack down” on futures trading. “U.S. Considers Curbs on Speculative Trading of Oil”, NYT July 8, 2009.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">On the Cusp of Shared Volition</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">To quote from Sean Cubitt’s post:</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px"><i> “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.” </i></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">Chaos theory isn’t a modality of the state, as far as I, a non-mathematician, can tell. Mandlebrot started with cotton prices. Lorenz with weather patterns. It can be used also to predict orbits in three body systems. Anyway, we’re talking about situations that are deterministic (and not completely random).</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">More significant for systems of control, or at least of management, is the search algorithm. The current state of the art offers us, as users/consumers more and more sophisticated algorithms, which will identify our future behavior based on our past practice. It is interesting because it derives information from a more active relationship than classic statistics, combining the large numbers of surveys with the pinpoint accuracy of focus groups and other marketing tools. And of course, the use of algorithms is billed as a service to the customer. You can imagine yourself as a well of subjectivity. That subjectivity is the final gold mine of capitalism in a country like the the US that has been heavily exploited for market potential. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">Modern electoral politics are built around demographics, issues and statistical assumptions. They are also built around internet-based fundraising.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">No matter how these systems function, however, they are not politics imagined as a liberatory moment of action. However, while the algorithm is still not politics, it might occupy the indeterminate edge where politics meet systems of control. Somewhere on the other side of the border might be people using Twitter to organize street demos as in Teheran.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">Algorith as Capitalist Utopia</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">The statement behind the algorithm would have to go something like this: It is possible to organize a global economy along capitalist lines. We will make markets as free as possible and organize production and distribution by using new internet tools to arrange the production and distribution of goods in such a way that the desires of consumers are linked painlessly and effortlessly to the productive capacities of global industry. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">My suggestion here is that as the system gets more organized and gains predictive power, it will become more chaotic, and less able to prevent the kind of chaos it seeks to avoid.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">In terms of governance, the 21st century state cannot capture volition, although information management tools allow it to get close. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px">I think that the arrival of ‘peak biopower’ means more extensive (extensively brutal and extensively sophisticated) efforts at global control and management. I also believe that it is a moment we have to engage with.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><font style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></font><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; ">Marty Lucas</div></body></html>