Originally published by Possible Futures, a project of the Social Science Research Council.

The question of demands infused the initial weeks and months of Occupy Wall Street with the endless opening of desire. Nearly unbearable, the absence of demands concentrated interest, fear, expectation, and hope in the movement. What did they want? What could they want? Commentators have been nearly hysterical in their demand for demands: somebody has got to say what Occupy Wall Street wants! In part because of the excitement accumulating around the gap the movement opened up in the deadlocked US political scene—having done the impossible in creating a new political force it seemed as if the movement might even demand the impossible—many of those in and around Occupy Wall Street have also treated the absence of demands as a benefit, a strength. Commentators and protesters alike thus give the impression that the movement’s inability to agree upon demands and a shared political line is a conscious choice.

Anyone who is familiar with the internal dynamics of the movement knows that this is not the case. Even if some occupations have released lists of demands, the entire question is bitterly contested in New York, where only independent organizations such as labor unions have released their own demands. In this essay, we claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons. Before addressing the politics of the commons, however, we dispel three common objections that are raised against demands during general assemblies, meetings, and conversations people have about the Occupy movement.

First, demands are said to be potentially divisive as they may alienate those who disagree with them and discourage newcomers from a variety of backgrounds from joining it. The argument is that insofar as Occupy aspires to be a movement that expresses the views and interests of the vast majority of the social body, every attempt to define it through a politics of demands entails a reduction of this potentiality. We call this the anti-representational objection. Second, it is argued that demands reduce the autonomy of the movement insofar as they endow an external agent—notably, the government or some other authority—with the task of solving problems the movement cannot solve for itself. This second objection is usually accompanied by the argument that the movement should focus on “autonomous solutions” rather than demands. We call this point of view the autonomist objection. The third common objection, which stems from the second, is that by meeting some demands the government would be able to divide and integrate (parts of) the movement into the existing political landscape, thus undermining the movement’s very reason for being. We call this the cooptation objection.Some counteract this third objection with the idea of releasing “impossible demands,” i.e. demands that cannot be met without igniting a radical transformation of the system. The very impossibility of the demands is said to demonstrate the rigidity of the system, its inability to encompass much needed change. Impossible demands thus cannot be co-opted. This proposition is in turn rebuffed by pragmatists who argue that if demands are to be issued they should focus on attainable objectives so as to show that the movement can achieve concrete and measurable changes.

Let us first consider the anti-representational objection. The objection begins from a basic and unspoken assumption about OWS, namely, that the movement is an organic and undifferentiated bloc comprised of people from all walks of life, and all racial, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. From this perspective, the slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” is seen not as a rhetorical strategy and political fiction but as the designation of an existing sociopolitical entity that would define itself in opposition to the 1 percent.

The anti-representational objection takes two primary forms. In its first, it insists that it is too early for demands. Because the movement is still young, it is argued, there has not been sufficient time for the 99 percent to reach consensus on the issues most important to it. Introducing demands now would hinder the organic unfolding of a collective discussion whereby the movement can articulate its own interests and desires. In the second (and more radical) form, the anti-representational objection argues that it is never the right time for demands. Demands always and necessarily activate a state apparatus apart from and over and against society. For example, anarchists and libertarians in the movement have repeatedly blocked proposals for introducing taxes on financial transactions and stronger oversight of the banking sector on the grounds that such proposals would expand the size of the government and the scope of its intervention.

Both the not now and not ever versions of the anti-representational objection obfuscate the fact that the 99 percent is not an actual social bloc. It is rather an assemblage of politically and economically divergent subjectivities. The refusal to be represented by demands is actually the refusal or inability to make an honest assessment of the social composition of the movement so as to develop a politics in which different forces and perspectives do not simply neutralize each other. Such inability is further obfuscated by emphases on democratic processes and participation. In order to avoid conflicts and pursue the myth of consensus, the movement produces within itself autonomously operating groups, committees, and caucuses. These groups are brought together through structures of mediation such as the General Assembly and the Spokes Council, which struggle to find a common ground amidst the groups members’ divergent political and economic positions. In other words, the emphasis on consensus, the refusal of demands, and the refusal of representation may well have served the purpose of inciting political desire and expanding the social base of the movement in its first phase. Nonetheless, it has installed in the movement a serious blindspot with regard to real divergences, a blindspot that has high costs in terms of political efficacy as serious proposals get watered down in order to meet with the agreement of those who reject their basic premises.

Nonetheless, there is a truth in the anti-representational objection: demands are divisive. They animate distinctions between “for” and “against” and “us” and “them.” This is the source of their mobilizing strength insofar as the expression of a demand provides not something that people can get behind but something that they must get behind if they are part of a movement or on the same side in struggle.

The autonomist objection is certainly better founded than the anti-representational objection. For autonomists (and anarchists), the practice of occupation and the very mode of existence of the movement are themselves prefigurative of a new, more democratic and more egalitarian world. The modes of action and interaction associated with occupation attempt to “be the change they want to see in the world.” Participants work to act in accordance with the ideals of mutuality and egalitarianism animating the movement against exploitation and inequality. The autonomist approach, then, emphasizes the creation of autonomous structures and new political organizations and practices. From this perspective, the problem with demands is not only that they provide life support to a dying system, but that they direct vital energies away from building new forms of collectivity ourselves. Demands focus the movement’s attention outside when it should be focused inside.

As with the anti-representational objection, the autonomist objection proceeds as if the multiplicity of political and economic interests of the 99 percent could immanently converge. Yet where the anti-representational objection ignores political differences, the autonomist objection overlooks economic ones. The practice of occupation that the autonomists imagine is full-time. It demands total commitment—living, breathing, and being the movement. The politics of remaking the world is anchored in supporting the occupation, primarily logistically. Many of the activities of logistical support, however, of necessity are not prefiguring at all but rather require interaction with dominant arrangements of power. Legal support involves lawyers, permits, injunctions. Someone has to pay for and someone has to make the tents and sleeping bags. Someone has to do the work of growing and preparing food. So the very practices of prefiguration in fact rely on infrastructures, goods, and services that are by and large provided, maintained, and distributed through capitalist means and relations. Additionally, many who would like to support the movement work to earn an income. With needs, debts, and responsibilities of their own, they want to participate in the movement yet not give up their jobs. Bluntly put, their economic position doesn’t give them the time that the practice of permanent occupation demands.

Both the anti-representational and the autonomist objections fail to recognize two key features of demands. First, we can make demands on ourselves. Second, demands are means not ends. Demands can be a means for achieving autonomous solutions. When demands are understood as placed on ourselves, the process of articulating demands becomes a process of subjectivation or will formation, that is, a process through which a common will is produced out of previously divergent positions. Rather than a liability to be denied or avoided, division becomes a strength, a way that the movement becomes powerful as our movement, the movement of us toward a common end.

If the truth in the anti-representational objection lies in its insight into the divisive nature of demands and the truth of the autonomist objection lies in its emphasis on making the world we want to live in, the truth of the co-optation objection is its recognition of antagonism and division. The problem is that the objection as it has been raised in the movement misconstrues the location of the division that matters. The co-optation objection presents the problem as between the state and the movement rather than as a division already within, indeed, constitutive of, the movement itself. Instead of grappling with the multiplicity of different positions in the actuality of their economic conditions, the fear of co-optation posits that the strength of the movement comes from a kind of unity of anger and dissatisfaction that will dissipate in the face of any particular success. Thus, the anti-co-optation argument initiates a discussion about particular proposals, playing out their pros and cons. Will the demand for a national jobs plan mean that the movement has been co-opted by the unions? Will a push for a constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate personhood fold the movement into the Democratic Party? And isn’t the support of partisan organizations such as MoveOn a symptom that this co-optation is already under way? In pursuing such a discussion, the co-optation objection obscures actual and potential connections among different proposals. It thus reinforces, in the attempt of preventing it, the very fragmentation that has long plagued the contemporary Left.

The problem that cuts through all the objections to demands is the movement’s inability to deal with antagonism. So the very question of demands brings to the fore the fact of division within the movement, a division that many—but not all—have wanted to deny.

Fortunately, the truths animating each of the objections suggest a way forward. In order to metamorphose from a protest movement into a revolutionary movement, Occupy will have to acknowledge division, build alternative practices and organizations, and assert a commonality. The set of ideas and practices built around the notion of the commons fulfills this function. The commons is a finite resource whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of its users and producers. The finitude of the commons enables us to address social inequality and environmental limits to capitalist development in their dialectical unity.

Against those who claim private rights and particular interests, then the idea of the commons asserts the primacy of collectivity and the general interest—an idea found in Aristotle’s emphasis on the common good as well as in the work of contemporary theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Iain Boal, Elinor Ostrom, Eben Moglen, Slavoj Žižek, and others.

A politics of the commons acknowledges division in that it begins from the shocking recognition that the commons does not exist. Destroyed and privatized by over two centuries of capitalist enclosure and “accumulation by dispossession,”¹ what Elinor Ostrom calls “common-pool resources”² have been reduced to tiny pockets of the world economy. To be sure, informal economies and communal practices such as worker-owned cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, community gardens, occupied and self-managed social centers and houses, free and open source software, are diffused at a molecular level everywhere. Yet the natural and social resources such practices mobilize are quantitatively irrelevant when compared to the wealth that is appropriated and exploited by capital. For instance, while cyber-enthusiasts such as Yochai Benkler point to the Internet as a vast repository of knowledge accessible to everyone and often managed in common by the Internet users themselves,³ these same technophiles overlook the fact that industrial production and agriculture rest by and large in private hands. Further, the apologists of the information commons often fail to recognize that such commons can be, and in fact is, functional to capitalist development as long as their fruits are productively reintegrated within the capitalist cycle. (One may think of the use of Linux in the public administrations of several developing countries and the adoption of open source software by corporations and military.)

If this is true, then the first question that stems from a radical politics of the commons is “how can truly anti-capitalist commons be created, recreated, and expanded”? It goes without saying that such a question points directly to the centrality of private property to capitalist accumulation—an issue that looms so large that most activists prefer to avoid it altogether. Demanding the creation and expansion of commons that are not subject to the imperative of accumulation and profit would make the divisions that are latent in the 99 percent apparent. Weary of the historical failure of actually existing socialism—and lacking large-scale models of alternative development—most Occupiers seem to content themselves with a neo-Keynesian politics that begins and often ends with demands for fiscal reform and government investment in strategic sectors such as infrastructure, green technologies, education, and health care. As we have noted above, however, these demands cannot be properly articulated as they meet the opposition of anarchists and autonomists who reject demands and focus instead on communal processes of self-valorization and self-organization. For the autonomists, the organizational forms of the movement are already functioning, in many ways, as institutions of the commons. Such a perspective fails to recognize that the vast majority of the resources managed by the movement are produced and distributed according to capitalist logic.

In this respect, while neo-Keynesian and socialist positions downplay and overlook existing processes of self-organization, the autonomist perspective cannot address the issue of the long-term sustainability of the movement insofar as it fails to recognize that the massive accumulation of wealth in the private sector is a major obstacle for an expansive politics of the commons. In our view, the autonomous organization of the movement and a politics based on radical demands have to go hand in hand if durable transformations are to be achieved. Once an expansive politics of the commons is adopted as the centerpiece of the movement’s strategy, demands become tactical devices in the service of such strategy rather than floating signifiers power can use to divide and conquer. From this perspective, every attempt the state makes to co-opt the movement through concessions enables an expansion of the communal management of common-pool resources—setting in motion institutional transformations whose political and symbolic power should not be underestimated.

Because a broad-based politics of the commons does not yet exist (even as the conditions are ripe for it) and will not emerge over-night, the tactical use of demands creates opportunities for testing and learning from experiments in managing the commons. For example, what if the environmental movement against hydraulic fracturing were to envision a national campaign to declare the ground waters a commons? This not only would prevent gas companies from putting at risk the lives of millions, but it would immediately empower water management boards elected by local communities with unprecedented powers. How would these governing bodies be constituted and how would they be run? Following this logic, we may also ask similar questions in regard to education, health care, and the production of energy. In each of these sectors, we may have to design solutions to manage these resources not as commodities but as goods whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of their users and producers.

Such questions are only the beginning of a larger investigation that takes the commons not as a one-size-fit-all solution but as a mobile concept that can and should operate at different levels of granularity and on different plateaus. As a preliminary exploration, we suggest that a politics of the commons should operate on three levels: 1) the management of land and natural resources; 2) the production and reproduction of social life (including care work, housing, education, and labor); 3) the production and allocation of energy, knowledge, and information. Because these three layers interpenetrate one another, multiple conflicts arise as soon as one attempts to set priorities. Yet it is also clear that there are elements that cut transversally across these areas, namely, the understanding that the commons is a finite resource that can not only be extracted but needs to be actively reproduced. Such a notion, we believe, marks a decisive break with the capitalist system of production. This system has been thriving by constantly overcoming the limits to its own expansion—with the result of producing an unprecedented demographic explosion while bringing the life support systems to the brink of total collapse. The Occupy movement is an extraordinary opportunity to rethink this model. But in order to do so, the movement has to dispel the illusion that all proposals and visions are equivalent as long as they are democratically discussed, and begin to set priorities on the road to a truly transformative and visionary politics.

While Luddism is commonly associated with a technophobic attitude, historians of the labor movement agree that the English Luddites did not reject technology as such, but the introduction of new labor-saving machines in the textile industry. Further, recent historiography has shown how by taking their name from a fictional eponymous leader, the Luddites invented a sophisticated rhetorical strategy aimed at empowering different segments of the English working class.

This paper draws from this nuanced reading of Luddism to discover analogies and differences between the hacker network Anonymous and the Luddite movement. Three important analogies are first considered: 1) If Luddism emerged at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, Anonymous appears in the early stages of informational capitalism, that is, both movements can be read as a self-organized response of specific sectors of the working class to a radical restructuring of the relations of production; 2) Both the Luddites and the Anonymous subjectivity express themselves by means of a collective pseudonym—what I call an “improper name”—whose symbolic power is appropriated by various groups and individuals to advance a diversified set of demands; 3) Both Anonymous and the Luddites direct their attacks against a specific kind of machines and technologies.

Building from the third point I expand on the differences between Anonymous and the Luddites. Here I combine Marxist theory and cybernetic theory to root the difference between Luddism and Anonymous in a fundamental operational difference between industrial machines and cybernetic machines. While in the industrial factory information is employed vertically to control the worker’s productivity and convert living labor into exchange value and dead labor, in the information society information flows rhizomatically as “the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 458). As Deleuze and Guattari point out, the body of the factory worker is subjected to a machine that is extrinsic to it whereas the cybernetic worker is enslaved to a machine of which he/she has become one of its components. From this angle, it is no accident that Anonymous’ attacks are not directed against the network in which the cyber-worker is integrated, but against governmental and corporate attempts to enclose, monitor, and privatize it.

Yet, if we consider that the accumulation and control of (sensitive) information is fundamental to the contemporary accumulation of capital, we can see how Anonymous’ cyber-attacks can be also read as an attack on the new technical composition of capital emerging from the Information Revolution in the same way as the Luddite destruction of industrial machinery was an attack on the new technical composition of capital emerging from the Industrial Revolution. In an age in which every Internet user is de facto (an unpaid) cyber-worker, Anonymous expresses the organized power of these users to reclaim unrestrained access to information—thereby threatening the artificial scarcities through which capital segments the workforce and valorizes itself.

Dear Eric,

the seminar sounds interesting as usual, but I think that the blurb does not make justice of the fascinating title, which suggests that “the medium IS the square.” This proposition is in my opinion much more interesting than a more traditional take on social movements media as extensions of social movements praxis.

Let us assume for a second that the act of occupying a square is in fact an act of disintermediation that follows and complements the great disintermediation of the Internet. As Franco Berardi puts it, we are now entering a phase in which “the general intellect is looking for the erotic and social body that has been lost in the process of virtualization and precarization.” We have spent way too much time in front of computer screens. This has increased our cognitive abilities, decreased collective bargaining power, and cut the feedback loops that turn for example a rich intellectual exchange IRL into a pleasurable bodily experience.

If this is the case, then we should not concern ourselves primarily with the media that draw the masses to the squares. Rather, we should begin our analysis from the forms of embodied communication and social organization that occur within the medium of the square. These may include the language of hand signs in mass assemblies; the spatial distribution of people, tents, gazebos, banners, and stages; the manifold collaborations (and conflicts) among collectives, committees, and affinity groups; and the molecular forms of communication that escape aerial shots, radio and TV coverages, even activist micro-media. There is so much more going on in each of these Media Squares than all the media can possibly tell.

To be sure, the Medium Square is still filled with media of all sorts and kinds. But the function of disembodied media seems to be in this context more prosthetic than creative. Traditional media–including digital media–enable these movements both to reach beyond their locale and connect components that do not always communicate IRL. However, the fulcrum and kairos of these media still lie in the Media Squares. It is in the square-as-medium that communication intensifies as the affective and bodily dimension of thoughts unfolds to make worlds that cannot be perceived on a computer screen, a radio, a TV set. Such communication is not truer nor more authentic than mediated communication. It is simply richer as it contains a kind of information that has not been reduced to a set of probabilities, that mobilizes the five senses, and in which signal and noise have not been separated.

All of this is to say that if Media Squares are becoming the event of our times, then such an event calls for new modes of reading its emerging properties. Perhaps it even calls for a relocation of our conferences and programs in the very Media Squares we are beginning to approach, as scholars and activists, from many different angles.

Cheers,
Snafu

Eric’s response to my post can be found here.

Course Description

With their emphasis on constant sharing and updating, social network sites, blogging platforms, photo and video sharing services, are reshaping contemporary culture by providing virtually infinite opportunities for self-expression and conversation. While theorists such as Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, and Yochai Benkler celebrate the democratic potential embedded in online participatory culture, political scientists and philosophers such as Cass Sunstein, Slavoj Zizek and Jodi Dean maintain that the echo chamber effect of social media as well as the possibility of realizing one’s fantasies in digital environments have the unintended effect of obfuscating actual power structures and therefore our ability to act upon them. By addressing this bifurcation in contemporary theorizations of cyberculture, the course analyzes online participatory culture not only for its content but also as an extension of the media that enable it. In particular we will be asking what kind of forms of subjectivity are set in motion by media that demand users to provide constant responses, sharing, and updates. Further, students will have the opportunity to test these critical and theoretical problems by analyzing web-based phenomena such as online role-playing games, social network sites, blogs, viral videos, image boards, and news aggregators.

Week 1. Introduction to the Public Sphere

August 29

Class Introduction

August 31

Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, pp. 1-12, 27-37. Available on Blackboard.

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 1-16, pp. 180-185. Available at http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf

Week 2. Criticism of Habermas’s Public Sphere

September 7. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25-26 (1990): 56-80. Available on Blackboard.

Week 3. Secrecy and Transparency in the Networked Public Sphere

September 12 (Emily)

Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy, pp. 15-19, 34-46. Available on Blackboard.

Raffi Khatchadourian, “No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency,” The New Yorker. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?printable=true

September 14 (Max)

Jay Rosen, “The Afghan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, The World First Stateless News Organization,” Press Think. Available at http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2010/07/26/wikileaks_afghan.html
Farhad Manjod, “The WikiLeaks Paradox. Is radical transparency compatible with total anonymity?” Slate. Available at http://www.slate.com/id/2262066/

Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens, “Ten Theses on Wikileaks,” available at http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2010/08/30/ten-theses-on-wikileaks/

Jack Z. Bratich, “Kyber-Revolts: Egypt, State-friended Media, and Secret Sovereign Networks,” MediaCommons, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/kyber-revolts-egypt-state-friended-media-and-secret-sovereign-networks

— Projects: End of Ideation (individual) —

Week 4. Web 2.0: The New Architecture of Participation

September 19 (William)

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Chapters 1-3, pp. 1-54

September 21 (Dorry and Mario)

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, pp. 55-80

Watch “Clay Shirky on Institutions vs. Collaboration,” TED Talk, available at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

Watch Clay Shirky, “How Social Media Can Make History,” TED Talk, available at http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

Week 5. …and Its Critics

September 26 (Mollie)

Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0, pp. 46-96. Available on Blackboard.

September 28 (Amy)

Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy, available at http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8781.pdf

Jodi Dean, Blog Theory, pp. 1-13.

— Projects: End of Brainstorming and Design (collective) —

Week 6. The Open Source Revolution & Commons-based Peer Production

October 3 (Lynlea)

Watch Revolution OS, USA, 2001. Available at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, pp. 237-259.

Recommended:

Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Chapter 2, available at http://manybooks.net/titles/levystevetext96hckrs10.html

October 5 (Amanda)

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Chapter 5, pp. 109-142

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 59-81, available at http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf

Week 7. Network Theory & Power-Law Distributions

October 10 (Daria)

Albert Lazlo Barabasi, Linked, 9-54. Available on Blackboard.

October 12

Albert Lazlo Barabasi, Linked, 55-92. Available on Blackboard.

— Projects: End of Execution (collective) —

Week 8. The Twitter Revolution Must Die

October 17 (Julia)

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, pp. 143-160.

Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted,” The New Yorker, available at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

October 19

Ethan Zuckerman, “Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention”

http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/02/22/internet-freedom-beyond-circumvention/

Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, pp. 67-81. Available on Blackboard.

Ulises A. Meijas, “The Twitter Revolution Must Die,” http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2011/01/30/the-twitter-revolution-must-die/

— Projects: End of Outreach (collective) —

Week 9. A Week Without Google

October 24 (Veronica)

Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything, pp. 51-72. Available on Blackboard.

Listen to “The Case Against Google,” On the Media,  http://www.onthemedia.org/2011/aug/12/case-against-google/

Thomas Claburn, “5 Reasons Google+’s Name Policy Fails,” Information Week, http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/privacy/231500512

October 26

Projects: Reports and Presentations

Week 10. Affective Networks

October 31

Jodi Dean, Blog Theory, pp. 19-53.

November 2

Jodi Dean, Blog Theory, pp. 61-69, 75-86, 99-104, 108-126.

Week 11. The Force of Anonymity

November 7

Michele Knobel & Colin Lankshear, “Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production.” In A New Literacies Sampler, pp. 199-228. Available on Blackboard.

Julian Dibbell, “Radical Opacity,” Technology Review, http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/radical-opacity/

Michele S. Bernstein et. al. “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community,” http://projects.csail.mit.edu/chanthropology/4chan.pdf

November 9

Adrian Crenshaw, “Crude, Inconsistent Threat: Understanding Anonymous,”

http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/understanding-anonymous

Gabriella Coleman, “From the Lulz to Collective Action,” MediaCommons,

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/anonymous-lulz-collective-action

— Projects: End of Ideation (individual) —

Week 12. Managing Friendship and Status in Social Network Sites
November 14
danah boyd, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” Available at http://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pdf
danah boyd and Alice Marwick, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience,” New Media and Society. Blackboard.

November 16

Mizuko Ito et. al., Hanging out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, pp. 79-115. Available on Blackboard.

Week 13. Social Network Sites and Privacy

November 21

danah boyd and Eszter Hargittai, “Facebook Privacy Settings: Who Cares?” First Monday, http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3086/2589

danah boyd, ”Facebook and Radical Transparency (a rant),” Apophenia, http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-transparency-a-rant.html

— Projects: End of Brainstorming and Design (collective) —

Thanksgiving Break

Week 14. Gaming

November 28

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, pp. 1-27. Available on Blackboard.

Gonzalo Frasca, “Simulation vs Narrative: Introduction to Ludology,” available at http://www.ludology.org/articles/VGT_final.pdf

November 30

Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, pp. 1-38. Available on Blackboard.

Watch “Jane McGonigal: Games Can Make a Better World,” TED Talk, available at http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

Week 15. Network Exploitation or Network Expropriation?

December 5

Christian Fuchs, “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet,” available at http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/class.pdf.

December 7

Adam Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni, “Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet. A Reply to Christian Fuchs.” Available on Blackboard.

— Projects: End of Execution and Outreach (collective) —

Week 16. Digital Socialism & Remix Culture

December 12

Kevin Kelly, “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online,” Wired, http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism

Jaron Lanier “On Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” available at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html

December 14

Watch Rip: A Remix Manifesto, 2009. Available at http://ripremix.com/getdownloads

Projects: Report and Presentation

Final Comprehensive Take-Home Assignment

“This volume addresses contemporary activist practices that aim to interrupt and reorient politics as well as culture. The specific tactics analyzed here are diverse, ranging from culture jamming, sousveillance, media hoaxing, adbusting, subvertising, street art, to hacktivism, billboard liberation, and urban guerilla, to name but a few. Though indebted to the artistic and political movements of the past, this form of activism brings a novel dimension to public protest with its insistence on humor, playfulness, and confusion. This book attempts to grasp both the old and new aspects of contemporary activist practices, as well as their common characteristics and internal varieties. It attempts to open up space for the acknowledgement of the ways in which contemporary capitalism affects all our lives, and for the reflection on possible modes of struggling with it. It focuses on the possibilities that different activist tactics enable, the ways in which those may be innovative or destructive, as well as on their complications and dilemmas.”

The PDF of my article is available here. Other articles can be downloaded from the Ingenta Connect database. The book is also available from Amazon.

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Note that the tweet is signed “-KC,” which means that it was either penned or approved by the designer himself. After widespread outrage and several parodies on Twitter, Cole deleted the post and apologized on Facebook. While the apology was met with sarcasm and skepticism, somebody decided to take it one step further and reposted or rather re-pasted the tweet in the form of a slick decal on a KC store window in San Francisco:

In the1980s-1990s culture jammers attacked billboards and TV ads to denounce the “infoxication” of our urban and media environment. By turning Joe Camel in Joe Chemo and the “Hit” of the “New Exxon” in the “Shit” of the Exxon Valdez disaster they were also exposing the kind of information corporations spend so much money on to greenwash. Contemporary culture jammers can limit themselves to return this information where it belongs.

In my work, I use the term “disowning-function” to describe the decoupling of property and propriety, matters of ownership and matters of reputation. As Mark Rose has shown, modern bourgeois authorship was able to conflate property and propriety by suggesting that authors should be economically rewarded for what society (identified here with the marketplace) considers appropriate. If today such a conception has been naturalized, Rose notes how until the early modern period the author was considered a disinterested gentleman whose writings, knowledge and scientific findings were considered honorable precisely because un tainted by personal interest. With the introduction of modern copyright law, the opposite becomes true as ownership and reputation, royalties and fame, are conflated and tend to find their identity in the marketplace. (Simply put, by market standards best-selling authors enjoy a higher reputation than non-best-selling authors).

My argument is that the disowning-function is a crack in the author-function that becomes visible when what is proper appears as inappropriate and vice versa. For instance, Hollywood film directors have shared the pseudonym Allen Smithee (or Alan Smithee) for over three decades to disown films re-cut by a film production against their will. In this way, Alan Smithee allowed directors to formally honor their contract while working outside of their reputation. More recently, the Catalan art-activist collective YoMango! has shown that shoplifting from corporate chain stores can be a creative, edgy, controversial, and therefore reputable activity (at least within the language-game of the contemporary art world).

In the case of the KC intervention, re-pasting a tweet on a store window is a simple gesture of returning what has been quickly disowned to its legitimate source and referent. No matter how hard Cole tries to disown his (trademarked) speech, Twitter’s persistence creates a record that is available to millions of users, who can appropriate it, without even having the need of altering it. Through a simple recontextualization, the ready-made decal reminds the designer himself that what he said really belongs to him as any other tweet, any other marketing campaign. On the other hand, it reminds us that there is a limit to the more or less calculated cynicism of marketing campaigns, the obliteration of the actual suffering and courage of millions of people, the endless play of simulacra. In other words, this cynical game is not only proper to a Kenneth Cole but reveals a culture–namely, how far brands can go in order to grab more eyeballs. Obviously, KC’s apology bespeaks how worried he must be for the negative impact this PR Waterloo may have on his brand. And yet this incident is also one of those powerful moments of truth in which the conflation of property and propriety, trademarked speech and the viral societal penetration of this speech, creates a backlash through which it is possible to glimpse at an effective cultural politics–a culture jamming that is native to the new information environment in which it operates.

Course Description

This course explores a wide range of culture jamming and guerrilla-communication interventions both in the media and public space. The course will be comprised of three distinct and yet intertwined layers: theoretical, critical, and pragmatic. By examining historic avant-gardes such as dada, Surrealism, and the Situationists as well as concepts such as Brecht’s estrangement effect, the Situationist notion of détournement, Foucault’s order of the discourse, and De Certeau’s distinction between tactics and strategies students will first acquire the theoretical foundations necessary for a critical understanding of culture jamming. This approach will be coupled with the review of a variety of culture jamming techniques and practices such as fake, camouflage, détournement, overidentification, invisible theater, multiple-use names, subversive affirmation, subvertising, and cybersquatting. At the same time, students will have the opportunity to renew and reinvent culture jamming by working on their own projects both individually and in group.

Required Text:

Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, New York: Theater Communications Group, 1985.

Optional Texts:

Situationist International Anthology, Ed. and trans. Ken Knabb, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 (Revised and expanded edition).

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Trans. Ken Knabb, London: Rebel Press, 2002.

Schedule of Classes, Readings, and Assignments

January 28. Course Introduction

Screening of Ceski Sen (Czech Dream), Dir. Vit Klusak & Filip Remunda, Czech Republic, 2004

February 4. Hacking the Order of the Discourse

Naomi Klein, No Logo, New York: Picador, pp. 279-309.

Mark Dery,  “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs,” available at http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/culture_jamming.html

Screening of Sonic Outlaws, dir. Craig Baldwin, USA, 1995

Recommended Reading:

Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language.” In The Archeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. Trans. London: Tavistock, 1972. 215-37.

February 11. The Politics of Aesthetics

Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, pp. 47-82.

Jacques Ranciere, “The Politics of Aesthetics,” May 5, 2006. Available at www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001877.php

Paolo Pedercini presents La Molle Industria at No Space

February 18. The Soviet Theory of Montage

Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Attractions” (1923) and “The Montage of Film Attractions” (1924). In Selected Works, Vol. I. Edited and translated by Richard Taylor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. 33-58.

Gerard Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007, pp. 149-169.

Screening of Man with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov, USSR, 1929.

February 25. Costructivism, Productivism and the End of the Soviet Avant-garde

Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer.” In Reflections. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Shocken Books, 1978. 220-238.

Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, Princeton University Press, 1992, pp.  14-50.

March 4. Estrangement Effect and Invisible Theater

Bertolt Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting.” In John Willett, Brecht on Theater, New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. 91-99.

Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, pp. ix-xiv, 107-109, 119-155.

March 11. Situationist Détournement

Situationist International Anthology, pp. 14-24, 36-43, 49-52, 62-70.

or

Guy Debord & Gil J Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” May 1956. Available at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm

Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations,” 1957 (excerpts). Available at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/report.htm

Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” December 1958. Available at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm

Situationist International, “Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation,” 1958. Available at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/1.situations.htm

Watch Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1973 (Part I). Available at www.ubu.com/film/debord_spectacle.html

First Midterm Due

March 18. Jamming the Art System and the Public Sphere

Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, No. 110 (Fall 2009): 51-79.

Greg Sholette, “Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter Public Sphere,” 2003.

Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pp. xi-xxiv.

Emily Forman presents CHAOS and Miles de Viviendas

March 25. No Class

April 1. April’s Fools

Joey Skaggs, Interview. In Re/Search #11: Pranks. Edited by V. Vale and A. Juno. San Francisco: V Search, 1987. 31-50.

Alan Abel, Interview. In Re/Search #11: Pranks. 103-109

Jenny Abel & Jeff Hockett present Abel Raises Cain, USA, 2006

April 8. Symbolic Exchange and Punk!

Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, London: Sage, 1993. Excerpts.

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Routedgle, 1979, pp. 1-51, 100-112.

Screening of The Filth and the Fury: A Sex Pistols Film, UK, 2000

April 15. Overidentification and Subversive Affermation

Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, New York: Verso, 1991, pp. 28-43.

Slavoj Zizek, “Why are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?” In Irwin: Retroprincip. 1983-2003. Edited by Inke Arns. Frankfurt au Main: Revolver, 2003. 49-50.

Inke Arns, Sylvia Sasse, “Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as Strategy of Resistance.” In Irwin: East Art Map. Edited by Irwin. London: University of the Arts London, 2006. 444-455.

Screening of Predictions of Fire, dir. Michael Benson, USA, 1996.

Second Midterm Due

April 22

Spring Recess

April 29. Faking as Mythmaking

Klemens Gruber, “Playing with the Media: Intermediality in Italy in the 1970s.” Unpublished.

Marco Deseriis, “Lots of Money Because I am Many: The Luther Blissett Project and the Multiple-Use Name Strategy.” In Theorizing Cultural Activism. Edited by A. Kuryel and O. Firat. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Forthcoming.

Screening of [V]ote Auction: Burden of Proof, dir. Ubermorgen, USA, 2000.

May 6. Culture Jamming in the Information Society

Tiziana Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information,” Social Text – 80 (Volume 22, Number 3), Fall 2004, pp. 51-73.

David Garcia and Geert Lovink. “The ABC of Tactical Media,” Nettime, May 16, 1997. Available at http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html.

Carbon Defense League, “Parasitic Media,” 2002. Available at http://english.neural.it/parasiticmedia.htm.

McKenzie Wark, “Strategies for Tactical Media,” Realtime, October 2002. Available at http://www.sarai.net/resources/event-proceedings/2002/tactical-media-lab/strategies.PDF

Screening of Spin, dir. Brian Springer, USA, 1995.

May 13. Hacktivism

Marco Deseriis, “No End In Sight: Networked Art as a Performative Form of Storytelling.” Available at http://deseriis.networkedbook.org

McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto [Version 4.0], ed. Joanne Richardson, subSol, 2003. .

Final Assignment Due