Dziejaslou | 62 (2013)
Quelle: http://www.eurozine.com/journals/dziejaslou/issue/2013-06-04.html
Archiv für Juni 2013
Disordering network theory: an introduction
Whereas theories of the information society/network society tend to regard networks as generally resilient and adaptable, the articles in this special issue treat disorder as inherently important in social theory and in the analysis of networks. By taking disorder seriously, the contributors recognize that it is something more than a correctable failure or a symptom of decay. This introduction makes five main claims about disorder. First, ordering networks can contain and generate their oppositions and produce what some of those within those networks call disorder. Second, networks of commodification, survival and the making of culture come into conflict. Third, information is necessarily distorted, or blocked, in information capitalism. Fourth, networks are sometimes functional precisely because they are unstable and ambiguous. And, fifth, disorder can be creative and indeed may offer hope of an escape from fatal ordering, but perhaps not into a new order.
Nonlinear causality in Castells’s network society: disorder as problem and opportunity under globalization
In this article I consider Castells’s network society trilogy as a key site for examining claims that globalization today is driven by a new paradigm, in which networks and digital technologies play a decisive role in producing revolutionary new forms of economics, politics, culture and society. To theorize this change I draw on a rich, explicit account of non-linear causal processes found in far-from-equilibrium cybernetics, foregrounding the all-pervasive, constitutive phenomenon of disorder, coming from below as well as above through a multiplicity of networks, old and new, digital and non-digital.
The tangled hydra: developments in transglobal peer-to-peer culture
Internet-enabled file sharing via peer-to-peer (P2P) systems is a transglobal activity involving millions of people circulating vast amounts of information. ‘Anonymous peers’ exchange data via autonomous networks that are simultaneously external to, and embedded within, market structures. A transnational alliance of technology and media industries and governments employs technological barriers, legal instruments and, belatedly, commercial alternatives to constrain the phenomenon. Such ‘digital enclosures’ trigger productive rebellious acts by programmers, intellectual property activists and file sharers inhabiting overlapping informal networks. Escalating cycles of retaliation and resistance spawn further disorder in the informational domain. The period 2009–12 has been a watershed for technological trends, landmark legal battles and supranational treaties. However, scant attention is paid to how ‘digital piracy’ disturbs the logic of capital by instituting material practices that tolerate contradictory positions on free culture and electronic freedom, creating new contexts for social experimentation and recomposition.
Humanitarian collective security: restoring order?
In 2005, the United Nations reinterpreted its charter to facilitate humanitarian intervention, defining military action to prevent serious human rights abuses as a legitimate means of maintaining international peace and security. Under circumstances of ‘genocide, ethnic cleansing and other such crimes against humanity’, states have a ‘responsibility to protect’ the victims and, if required, to use military means to do so. This new state responsibility is a response to new asymmetries in the exercise of sovereign power worldwide. In theory, it imposes new conditions on the exercise of state sovereignty that extend the principle of collective security beyond states to include all people. In practice, it gives those with the capacity to intervene, namely the dominant powers, the responsibility to intervene in the affairs of weaker ‘failing’ states. In this article, I use official texts to explore this new humanitarian collective security. Drawing on a range of accounts, including the Australian experience of intervention in East Timor, I argue that the grounds for humanitarian intervention lie as much in the defence of order as in the pursuit of justice. Dominant states assert their shared vulnerability and justify intervention as pre-empting presumed threats; they thus recruit humanitarianism for state security. Humanitarianism, however, is not so easily contained. As military practice collides with normative rhetoric, deep contradictions emerge between order and justice. Normative claims implode and spill over, feeding alternative humanitarianisms founded on mutuality and solidarity. The disordering order–justice dialectic can thereby prefigure reorderings beyond hegemonism.
The information society: permanent crisis through the (dis)ordering of networks
People often assume that computerized networks are relatively stable and well connected. This implies that the network society, or information society, is also relatively stable, well ordered and adaptive. However, computer software and networks repeatedly fail or prove inadequate, so we cannot assume that network society is stable. Similarly, misinformation is as expected and socially important as information. By taking this disorder seriously, it becomes possible to observe data that paradigms that primarily seek order exclude and to reveal some of the fundamental paradoxes of the information society that simultaneously both undermine and establish that society. By means of these informational paradoxes, I consider and elucidate some network and software failures from January 2011.
Second Italy: distance education in a Second-Life international studies project
Reflecting on recent literature on digital literacies, I consider the use of the virtual world Second Life in distance education. To do so, I draw on theories of learning that accommodate elements of instability and uncertainty. Tacit learning is the process of acquiring knowledge from interaction and experience, or mess and play growing out of interactive and networked processes, as opposed to understanding teaching as passing knowledge down. I explore these points through a case study, Isola del Giglio, which is a learning site built in Second Life as part of a double degree in international studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. In the article, I describe the students‘ learning experiences during their exchange year in Italy and the in-world learning experience in Second Life.
Democracy or autonomy? Indymedia and the contradictions of global social movement networks
In this article, I examine the indymedia movement as exemplar of a transnational network where the dynamics of democracy and local autonomy come into tension. Indymedia was launched during the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999. Since 1999, indymedia has mushroomed into a transnational social movement based network. Through the lens of indymedia’s networked structure, I examine the tension between participatory decision-making and local autonomy. In specific I look at the decision of the global indymedia network to reject a large grant from the Ford Foundation because of Ford’s history in the Argentine dirty wars. The heated episode, which almost forced the growing network to shut down, brings to the fore the complex contradictions of local autonomy and shared decision-making in the age of networks. Moreover, this episode and indymedia in general, brings to light the inability of decentralized networks to build proactive power, highlighting the disorganizing and at times debilitating logic of contemporary social movements.
‘Disorderly conduct’: on the unruly rules of public communication in social network sites
In this article, we examine typical styles and practices of public communication on social network sites (SNSs) in order to confront the traditional concept of publics as machines for creating order. Through an ethnographic case study of the SNS Facebook, we show how indeterminacy, ambiguity and constant irritation, rather than arguments or reason, produce the communicative order. A decidedly disorderly style of communication and connectivity emerges. Indeterminacy, from our point of view, is a solution to the problem of speaking privately in public and to an indefinite audience. We use these findings to problematize the insights of network theory and Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory that only out of noise can we generate order – we can also generate it through noise. Since order undermines itself through the creation of ambiguous communicative possibilities, a new kind of public sphere is created.
Worlds to endure: weathering disorder from Arnhem Land to Chicago
In this article I consider the cosmopolitical enfolding of Western and indigenous ontologies of order and disorder implicit in the production of a ‘carbon offset’ by the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement (WALFA) project. The resumption in Arnhem Land of broad-scale land management by indigenous fire ecologists and its reframing as ‘carbon farming’ is contextualized within an historical analysis of the distinctions made between ‘magical thinking’ and ‘rational’ notions of agency, causality and cosmic order. I move from the account of Australian totemism in classical anthropology, through cold war climatology, to the theories of rational expectations that support contemporary carbon trading. Examining the entangling of Aboriginal and late-modern pyrotechnical orders, I contrast ubietous (place-oriented) ontologies of land, law and cosmic order with their Western counterparts in sovereignty, land law and finance theory. Arguing that the elder Australians possessed a philosophically coherent political economy grounded in detailed earth sciences and topological networks of economic practices, I reverse the anthropological mirror back upon the economic doctrines of the neoliberal era, which advocate the reimposition of order on the wild climate by means of a comprehensive financialization.