Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity

I’m sitting in LAX after the AAG conference and my computer is about to die, but I wanted to get a post out there about the book I was reading on the plane flying down, the book I mentioned in both the panels I participated in. I’m only halfway through Gerald Raunig’s new Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, but I think it speaks to posts on this site by Amy and Gene.

Three of the primary points to which I’m currently connecting are as follows:

1) The idea of “gently striating” or “streaking” smooth space. In his elaborations on Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk,” Raunig tells us that in order to express some sort of solidarity, we need little reterritorializations (“never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us”). In his telling of the story, the mouse folk are constantly on the move, generating smooth space, chattering away. But when meek Josephine sings, they all stop to listen: the chattering subsides, the flows coagulate and the mouse people are together, focused on her performance, temporarily. She is no figurehead, no despot, but rather one who is actualized out of the multitude through her performance. I undoubtedly see connections to Ranciere here (see my previous post), but in this context I’m even more interested in how this idea applies to both our Seattle-based reading group and this little experiment called Nomad Scholarship.

2) In the chapter entitled “In Modulation Mode: Factories of Knowledge,” Raunig discusses the edu-factory, a mailing list that started in 2006. The primary point I want to draw from this discussion is what he calls their central mission: “the struggle for autonomous free spaces in the university and simultaneously self-organization and auto-formazione beyond existing institutions” (49). I immediately turn to what we’re doing here as one instance of this sort of autonomy, and I immediately think of ways to “increase the number and complexity of connections” (I’d love to cite this, but I don’t remember if it’s D&G, Hardt, the Invisible Committee, or someone else?).

For example, one of the participants on the panel Cheryl and I organized told me about the D&G reading group in which he participates at University College London. I told him about this online experiment and he said they’d been struggling with their own sort of virtual home. Needless to say, I’m going to try to get them linked in to this site as well. Another example: our panel, I think, was very well-attended, and I mentioned at the end that people other than panelists who wanted to continue the conversation should send us an email, so we could try and cobble together a sort of D&G/Urban Theory email list. It would be a small step, but after seeing the growing pains through which urban theory is going this morning, I think it could lead to an incredibly rich dialogue.

3) Lastly, and again with similarities in Ranciere’s idea of the ignorant schoolmaster, I’d like to mention Raunig’s investigation of Foucault’s last College de France lecture series, The Courage of Truth. In this lecture, Foucault allegedly outlines three roles of the teacher w/r/t discourses of truth: the teacher as “expert,” “wise man,” and “prophet.” I won’t elaborate on the details here, but Foucault evidently sees a fourth role that goes beyond these three roles and it’s called parrhesia, or “truth-speaking.” Though their are multiple modes of parrhesia, Raunig (or perhaps Foucault) seems to be saying that “ethical truth-speaking as Socratic test and exercise leading to care for the self and others” (58). This, Raunig argues, is a form of teaching that “leads people to take of themselves” (59). Of course, this is much like Deleuze’s remarks about the swimming instructor teaching one not to move like the waves, but rather move as the instructor moves, in his motions that express the truth of swimming. Nevertheless, it’s a compelling argument and I think it speaks to the organization of these autonomous zones and experiments in which we are all participating: the democratic self-organization of the groups, the non-hierarchical organization of the discussions, and so on.

Microsoft Citizenship

In our meeting today* I found myself talking a bit about the market friendly cures to market failure — sometimes referred to as philanthrocapitalism — that seem to be emerging in and around Seattle. I’m most familiar with the Global Health NGOs, as described here by the UW geographer Matt Sparke, but Branden read a portion of this article on World Water Day; here’s an excerpt:

His belief that market-based solutions can slow that train are shared by others in the sector.

“Let’s not see them as poor people we’re trying to help, but see them as potential customers,” says Amelia Lyons, of Splash, a Seattle-based international water and hygiene organization, who attended Sealth’s World Water Week.

“Coca-Cola doesn’t say ‘These people are too poor to buy Coke.’ They see them as customers, and they go out to sell them Coke, and they buy Coke.”

It surprised me to hear that one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time might be solved through free markets and lessons learned from multinational corporations — it feels distant from the “clean water and sanitation is a basic human right” language that I’m used to hearing.

But then I thought back to all the Cokes I drank while on that water-reporting trip in eastern Africa — because it was the only drink available that I knew wouldn’t make me sick.

Couple this discussion with my recent — like five minutes ago — discovery of the Microsoft Citizenship program, and I am sent into this spring break with refreshed insight into the social aspects of some of our region’s major employers.

* We read Hardt’s intro to Radical Thought in Italy, but since we just discussed the Virno essay a few months ago, we substituted Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” and the Ranciere essay I recently posted. We’re looking forward to touching back down with the OSU students over the anarchism readings in two weeks, as well as the subsequent Ranciere smorgasbord.

Multitude and Mediation

Along with Mark and Gene, I found Mazzarella’s “third way” less than compelling, but it nevertheless piqued my attention with respect to what the author calls the “all-too-familiar zero-sum opposition between potentiality and domination, between emergence and mediation” (714). Perhaps I’m guilty of seeking my own third way, but my inclination is to snap the latter emergence-mediation dichotomy, and try to think about how a relationship between the two could give us a way to think about how a practical multitude might be constituted.

In contrast to Mazzaralla’s attempt to develop “a theory that would not pit ‘order against desire’ but would rather be able to track their dialectical co-constitution” (716), I am thinking more along the lines of Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator. For him, the theater is undoubtedly an externality, but he is quick to point out that this does not make it a Debordian spectacle, because the spectacle is, by definition, contemplated as an appearance divorced from its truth. If, instead, theatrical performances – or mediations, in the present discussion – seek “to teach their spectators ways of ceasing to be spectators and becoming agents of a collective practice,” (7-8) then it seems that mediation can actually become a locus about which a multitude can form (the reading list that serves as the basis for the discussions on this blog is a perfect example).

It’s important to note too that, in Rancière’s formulation, singularity is not diminished. Instead, individual difference is cherished and cultivated, while the emergence of the collective is based on shared experiences relating to the externality:

“The collective power shared by spectators does not stem from the fact that they are members of a collective body or from some specific form of interactivity. It is the power each of them has to translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as this adventure is not like any other. This shared power of the equality of intelligence links individuals, makes them exchange their intellectual adventures, in so far as it keeps them separate from one another, equally capable of using the power everyone has to plot her own path” (16-17).

Rancière actually calls the performance itself a vanishing mediation, but after reading Arditi’s piece, I’m also inclined to grant the mediation an existence of its own, even if it’s only residual. To require it to vanish in the formation of a collectivity reeks of a dialectical aufhebun, which seems apt if Jameson is indeed the original theorist of the vanishing mediator (as Arditi suggests). Instead, why not acknowledge what Guattari calls the “stickiness” of affects evoked by mediations, and use them as common building blocks to construct the multitude in the way that Rancière suggests?