Matteo Pasquinelli writes:

"Radical Machines Against Techno-Empire"

Matteo Pasquinelli

Deleuze and Guattari took the machine out of the factory, now it is up to us to take it out of the network and imagine a post-internet generation.

        Everyone of us is a machine of the real, everyone of us is a constructive machine. -- Toni Negri



        Technical machines only work if they are not out of order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage of this property by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring production is used to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction.-- Gilles Deluze, Felix Guattari, L'anti-Oedipe
 

What is knowledge sharing? How does the knowledge economy function? Where is the general intellect at work? Take the cigarettes machine. The machine you see is the embodying of a scientific knowledge into hardware and software components, generations of engineering stratified for commercial use: it automatically manages fluxes of money and commodities, substitutes a human with a user-friendly interface, defends private property, functions on the basis of a minimal control and restocking routine. Where has the tobacconist gone? Sometimes he enjoys free time. Other times the company that owns the chain of distribution has replaced him. In his place one often meets the technician. Far from emulating Marx's "Fragment on Machines" with a Fragment on cigarette machines, this unhealthy example is meant to show how postfordist theories live around us and that material or abstract machines built by collective intelligence are organically chained to the fluxes of the economy and of our needs.

"Hieroglyphs of the Future:

Jacques Rancière and the Aesthetics of Equality"

Brian Holmes

"We're not surplus, we're a plus." The slogan appeared at the demonstrations
of the French jobless movement in the mid-nineties, in journals, on banners,
on tracts printed by the political art group Ne pas plier. It knitted the
critical force and the subjective claims of the movement into a single phrase.
To be "surplus" (laid off, redundant) was to be reduced to silence in a
society that effectively subtracted the jobless from the public accounts, that
made them into a kind of residue -– invisible, inconceivable except as a
statistic under a negative sign. Excluded, in short: cut out of a system based
on the status of the salaried employee. Until they finally came together to
turn the tables, reverse the signs, and claim a new name on a stage they had
created, by occupying unemployment offices in a nation-wide protest during the
winter of 1997-98. The people with nothing erupted onto the public
scene. "We're a plus," they said, intruding through the TV cameras into the
country's living rooms. Which also meant, "We'll drink champagne on Christmas
eve."

One way to grasp the aesthetic language of the French social movements in the
nineties -– and of the transnational movements now emerging -– is to read
Jacques Rancière's work on equality.

"Bombs and Bytes"

Anustup Basu, metamute

Fascism without a Fuhrer? During the build up of support for the war
on Iraq, no functionary of the US government publically stated that
Saddam Hussein had an active role in the devastation of September 11,
2001. Nevertheless, an alarming number of Americans believed that the
Iraqi despot was involved in the conspiracy and its execution.
Anustup Basu looks beyond the big lie, to show how information itself
short-circuits knowledge.

INTRODUCTION

During the publicity drive towards building up domestic and international
support for the 2003 war on Iraq, no functionary of the United States
government actually made a public statement to the effect that Saddam Hussein
had an active part to play in the devastation of September 11, 2001.
Nevertheless, it was subsequently noted in the opinion polls that an alarming
number of American people believed that the Iraqi despot was involved in the
conspiracy and its execution. Hence the two propositions -– Saddam the evil
one, and 9/11, the horrible crime -– seem to be associated in a demographic
intelligence without having any narrative obligation to each other; that is,
without being part of the same ‘story’. The outcome, it seems, was achieved by
a mathematical chain of chance, by which two disparate postulates, in being
publicised with adequate proximity, frequency, and density, gravitate towards
each other in an inhuman plane of massified thought. They, in other words, are
bits and bytes of newspeak which have come to share what I will call
an ‘informatic’ affinity with each other, without being organically conjoined
by constitutive knowledge. The formation of the latter entity is of course
something we are prone to consider a primary task of the philosophical human
subject, who is also the modern citizen with rights and responsibilities.