[Nettime-bold] Re: New Rules for the New Actonomy

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha68@yahoo.com>]

Apropos of 'New Rules for the New Actonomy' 

This is in response to  'New Rules for the New
Actonomy' by Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider,
posted on the Nettime List and forwarded on to the
Reader-List by Jeebesh.

While I am in broad agreement with what Geert and
Florain have written, what I am writing here is what I
think are a few more postulates that I hope will lead
to further provocations for  'New Actonomists',
wherever they may be. Let more rules lead to the
further bending of rules !

It is really heartening to see that the police and
paramilitary forces of the major nation states of the
world are nervous about the times that we live in. it
is heartening to see the anxiety in the faces of the
powerful about the people they govern. True, the
massive surveillance mechanisms that they are begining
to put in place are signs of their  far reaching
power, but they are also symtomatic of their profound
vulnerability. Not even the posession of a stockpile
of nuclear weapons, or billions in the bank can make
power rest assured in its infinite invulnerability. 

 It is also encouraging to see that corporations are
genuinely worried about protecting themselves and that
they now rent nuclear shelters to keep their mainframe
computers safe. Power is scared of its adversaries,
because we are witnessing the emergence of a  new kind
of adversary, who does not seek power, or speak
power's language.

And it is because of this, that after a very long
time, it seems as if that power (both the state and
corporate faces of the chimera of power) and its
adversaries are on some sort of equal ground. Because
the adversaries of power dont want or need to fight
back with weapons well known to the state and to
corporations. And because the emerging adversarial
positions care less for legality and more for
effectiveness.Power stands momentarily paralysed,
unsure of how to anticipate the adversaries next move.
How long this stateof affairs continues is anybody's
guess. But if the adversaries resist the temptations
to form cabals, that are proto-states or
mini-corproations on the make, if all their secrets
are public secrets, if their transparency is their
mantle of invisibility, then perhaps they will be able
to resist for a long enough time the infiltration and
the infection of power.

As of now  the adversaries betray no centralised
agency, or single location,  no 'foreign hand' whose
interest they serve, no 'evil empire' whose minions
they are. This makes it difficult for power to handle
them. It is no longer possible for power to queer the
pitch of resistance by blaming any one tendency or
even to level accusations of  treason,or to distract 
those it governs with insinuations that the
adversaries are '  on the payroll of', or  ' lackeys
of ' any 'other' power.There is  simply no 'other
power. This solitude of power is its greatest weakness
today. it does not even have a mirror to look at
anymore. All it faces is a network of resistance that
can stay alive only if it changes shape, size,
location and colour by the minute.

East and West, North and South, - this 'not being able
to put your finger on it-ness' has been the source of
the greatest advantage to the adversaries of power.
That they should act for no one but themselves and in
the name of no easily identifiable organisation,
state,  party or mass movement. The explicit
visibility of the invisibility of resistance is its
greatest strength. And this must remain if the
adversaries are to meet any of their objectives. 

(An Aside : As Grant Morrison had whispered into the
ears of a million comic book readers of the 
'Invisibles' series - "When Big Brother is watching
you, it is better to be invisible"...)

Any dilution of the invisibility, or the intangibility
of the 'resistant' intensity of adversarial action  to
accommodate the interests of any faction of global
capital (say, by acting or by seeming to act in
consort with the interests of those who rule so called
'third world' states, or of the mafia bosses of
'oppressed nations', or 'cultural minorities', or
other leaders of interest groups or identity gulags,
while protesting against 'globalisation' will only
lead to a loss of autonomy on the part of adversarial
positions, and what may be gained is only a dubious
solidarity with third world mafiosos.)

There is a disturbing trend in the
'anti-globalisation' protest milieu in Europe and
North America to uncritically embrace any and every
voice that claims to speak for the 'Third World' or,
for oppressed minorities who are attacked by
'Globalisation'. What these voices often demand is the
freedom from global interference to continue unabated
the violence of the state and of this or that faction
of global capital in their own little backyard. They
do not challenge the continued existence of the state,
or the rule of money.They just want, 'their state' and
want to mint the money that smells to them of the mud
of their corner of the earth. To ally with them is to
lose the battle before it is joined. Actonomists,
beware of anyone flying any flag, of any colour!

This is because the possibilities of seizing the state
and its power as transformative acts, or channelizing
the 'productive energies of the market' are now only a
set of exhausted jokes, anywhere. 

It is no longer a question of whether or not you can
seize power (within the state, within cultural
institutions, the media ,or within the managing board
of a company through representation of the union on
the managing board), rather it is a question of
whether you can deploy means and responses and
initiatives that take power by surprise. That threaten
to dissolve power at every step and every turn.

While agreeing with Geert and Florian, that there
should be no hesitation to learn from Power about the
techniques it uses to survive, or to use its money, or
to instrumentally deploy existing institutional
mechanisms, I think it is at the same time necessary
to invent and deploy means of resistance that are
un-anticipated and as yet un-imagined.

The fact that a close attention is paid to financial
balance sheets by saboteurs, is natural, and it does
take power by surprise, whenever we are 'better
researched' on the dynamics of business and capital.It
is necessary to know power better than it knows
itself. But that is a necessary and not a sufficient
condition of effective resistance.

Gone are the days when we would have thought that all
that is required is for the right people, for the true
representatives of the 'democratic will' to be in
positions of power, for power itself to turn benign.
What is required now is a saboteurs imagination that
will render existing relations of power
unworkable,that will render 'representative politics'
unworkable, not on sporadic and spectacular levels,
but on an everyday basis.

What is required also is the act of bringing into
existence modes of creative and resistant action that
hold in abeyance the conventions of existing
institutional frameworks of bieng. That point to more
and not less pleasurable ways of being. 

That demand not self-abnegation, sacrifice, or
austerity on the part of the resisters, but a far
greater assertion of desire than even the consumer
economy can accommodate. This means also that we have
to bring into being ways of being together that are
conducive to the personal, bodily security of each
individual. A resistant politics must pay attention to
the insecurity that say being in a city entails, and
which is always the argument of last resort that the
apologists of the state turn to when they say - "You
need the state to ensure that you don't get murdered
on the street". 

The fact is, you do get murdered on the street, and
often it is the state that murders you, but we have to
pay attention to and address the fear that makes
people accept the impersonal and continous violence of
the state as a guarantor to the threats to their
immediate bodily well being.We have to ask ourselves
how we might begin to answer this fear in terms that
are not platitudes or slogans.

The market must be rejected ultimately because it
bores us to death. And the sate because it leaves us
feeling profoundly, personally insecure and unsafe. We
cannot leave the market for a regime that offers
monotony, or the state for a dystopic escalation into
generalised violence. A resistant politcs needs to
listen carefully to desire and to fear.

We must reject the existing order not because we want
to return to a more modest way of living, but because
we demand more. The failure of the state and the
corporations must  rest on the fact that they were
unable to meet the desires of those they governed. A
resistant politics that tries to premise itself on
offering less than what the present order holds out
might as well forget attracting any reasonable person.
Why should I join any protest movement that first of
all asks of me that I be content with less than what
capitalism offers me. This is why most 'green'
politcs, particularly but not only in the third world
appeals either to those who are fighting for survival,
(say, people who are threatened with displacement by
dam projects) or to self abnegating urban activists.
Neither the imperative of survival alone and by
itself, nor the anguish of self denial has any
capacity to transform the world.

And to seek to do so on the basis of 'threatened
survival' or of 'guilt' is to miss the point. The
focus of resistance cannot and must not be
'technology' itself, or the things that people buy as
commodities. Rather it must ask hard questions about
what relations of power are embedded in which
technology, or what social conditions give rise to the
creation of those commodities. It must then engender
and practice those social relations and create the
technologies that can give rise to practical
altrernatives to the way we live now. The task of
doing this cannot be held in abeyance, and in a
perrenial wait for the revolution to arrive. It has to
be the substance of a lived, perennial and everyday
global revolution.This means more attention to  the
creation of technologies, not less. Neo-luddites, can
rest and rust in peace, nothing that they can do will
ever affect anything.

Unless and until the resistance to Nike shoes is also
able to provide a reasonable and explicit  affirmation
to the desire to wear well designed, beautiful and
comfortable shoes ( which are produced ethically) it
might as well forget getting anywhere with most
people.It means adversaries of power must also be
designers, creators and producers, both of objects of
use and of beauty. 

Too little attention is given within the adversarial
milieu to what we might need to learn and do to be
able to produce better and more efficiently than the
existing arrangements of power. This means that we
need to be smarter with technology,and learn how to be
seductive with what we do. It means we must be better
than the market at addressing the domain of desire,
and comfort.

It means for instance that the free software movements
resistance to corporate control over software needs to
be based also on the promise of offering code that is
not customised for the puritan preserves of geekdom
but that users who are not going to ever enter a
'command line culture' can feel comfortable with. 

This is not dumbing down, this is not compromise, it
is about learning to be smart and seductive as a
positive subversive virtue. The imperative of
"speaking truth to power" must now be enlarged to
include the necessity of being more beautiful than
power, more comfortable than power, more convivial
than power and even of being sexier than power.The
days of dullness must end.

It is only when the everyday business of going about
life requires that the majority of people willingly
abandon the rules and restraints that tie them down ot
the state and to corporations that power will be
defeated.Adveraries of power must work with all their
imaginations to make that option pragmatic, and
attractive, on a daily basis.They must do this with as
much energy as they now put into the camapaigns
against this or that manifestation of power. Protest
that is un-accompanied by creativity is a dead bore.

To state all this is not a retreat into some "utopian
high ground", or to spiral into a plethora of small
creative actions that ignore the big refusal.The
rejection of power on an everyday basis demands the
creation of a climate of positive actions. We need to
build new  free software, not becase we are hobbyists
(although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with
that)but because we reject the commodification of code
and culture on a fundamental level. By the same token,
our rejection of the regime of 'Intellectual Property'
is an empty exercise if it is not at the same time
accompanied by a daily practice of other
non-propreitorial forms of the creation of value, or
objects of value. This is the only way we can make the
rejection of power a substantive, living practice.
Something worth doing becase it is pleasurable and
fun.

It is utopian to assume that you can reform the state,
find breathing space within existing institutions,
find freedom within the market, or convert the
military industrial apparatus into a benign charity.
Only a principled refusal to be "useful" for any of
the above instituions can sustain the adversary to
power. 

This refusal to be "useful" does not mean that we
should refuse to "use" what is available to us. There
is at present nothing outside capitalism. There is no
space that is not a nation state. We must use every
means that we have at hand, without pretending to
ourselves that the mere fact of our using this or that
agency of the state, or this or that piece of the
market pie, in any way renders it humane or worthwhile
or in the least democratic.

We use them because we have to, because they are
enmeshed into our everyday and working lives. But we
must refuse to see them as objects capable of
tranformation. They may well transform us, but we can
never transform them (which is why we should never
grow attatched to anything that we use, and treat all
means as provisional, to be jettisoned, the moment
other means appear that are better able to meet our
purposes) 

This does not mean that you ignore institutions, or
retreat into some kind of 'new age' oblivion from
everyday life. It means that you take what you can
from those in power  who can be persuaded, or fooled
into parting with what they have - money, space,
machines, facilities. and then do exactly what you
want to do with them, while preparing diligently the
annual reports and statements that are necessary to
further your actions.  

In the nineteenth century, those who protested against
power, especailly some anarchists and people who were
involved in the then international working class
movement had sometimes to resort to bank heists to
sustain their activity, their printing presses and
their lives.

Given that all banks nowadays have surveillance
cameras, the latter day resister's "bank heist" (which
in civilised speech we may call "the social
appropriation of accumulated surplus value" ) may well
need to be the well written and well researched 
proposal and the "quick get away car" may well be the
well written report. High levels of research,
preparedness and discipline are required for both
these honourable forms of resource mobilization. The
milieu within which adversaries of power tend to act,
places a valuable premium on slackness and indolence,
alternating with periods of frenzied, exhausting
activity. The discipline of subversion requires higher
forms of diligence, which must accomapny the necessary
pleasures of idle fraternization, also known as
partying.

There should be no shame attendant to the hard work
required to milk philanthropy in order to further
subversive agendas. Those who do this work are
'operators' and they should be able to say this
without the slightest sense of  remorse, nor should it
aggrandize them with any pride, their work is as
necessary as that of the visionary, no more, no less.

The money that is held in the bank accounts of
foundations and grant givers, comes from the socially
produced surplus all over the world. Why should anyone
be hesitant to lay claim to that surplus. The money
that is in the state's treasury comes from the direct
and indirect  taxes that we pay the state to be on our
backs. It is a shame that we should have to work hard
to get it back where it rightfully belongs.

Of course, this brings with it the risks of being
co-opted, but that means that every adversary of power
must be cleverer than power itself. So that the
revolution continues to have the cash it needs to buy
computers and modems, to learn the skills needed to
create astonishingly beautiful objects of subversive
pleasure and provocation.

Finally, do not ever be afraid of setting the agenda
for a new global politics, or a new info-politics, of
declaring what you think is necessary, before moving
on to doing it. 

Do not ever be afraid of staying ahead of power, of
being smarter and quicker and more agile than power
can hope to be.Do this anonymously if that suits you,
or adopt disguises, or speak with the honesty of your
own name intact, but by no means let reticence rule
your motives and actions. Be invisible, but present
everywhere, be silent, but leave your message on the
walls for people to glance at as they trudge to work.
Be accessible yet difficult to locate. Be everywhere.

Anything that anyone may have to say may come in hand
in the big fight. The false modesty and the aggravated
despair of the self-defeated leftist milieu of the
twentieth century needs to be trashed and trashed
hard. This modesty is the mask of eclipsed arrogance.
The state and corporate interests are not moved by our
sensitivities, by our despair, or by our modesty, they
are moved by the fear that we might actually mean what
we say, and that we might act on our desires. Let us
just begin to do so.


=====
Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Correspondent,Free Agent & Witness
of Interesting Times

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/


_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold