Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

280 Brian Holmes
culture.” 15 The key notion came from Michel de Certeau, who, in Garcia and
Lovink’s reading, “described consumption as a set of tactics by which the
weak make use of the strong.” 16 At stake was the possibility of autonomous
image and information production from marginal or minority positions, in
an era dominated by huge, capital-intensive media corporations and tightly
regulated distribution networks. But de Certeau spoke primarily of premodern
cultures, whose intimate, unrecorded “ways of doing” could appear as an
escape route from hyperrationalized capitalism; whereas the media tactics in
question are those of knowledge workers in the postindustrial economy,
much closer to what Toni Negri and his fellow travelers would call the “multitudes.”
17 With their DVcams, Web sites, and streaming media techniques,
the new activists practiced “an aesthetic of poaching, tricking, reading,
speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring. . . . the hunter’s cunning, maneuvers,
polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike.” 18 This
was very much the spirit of n5m3, in the spring of 1999, just as the counterglobalization
movement was about to break into full public view.
The conWdence of tactical media activism represents a turnabout
from the extreme media pessimism of Guy Debord, whose work describes the
colonization of all social relations, and indeed of the human mind itself, by
the productions of the advertising industry. Antonio Negri’s theory of the
“real subsumption” of labor by capital, or in other words, the total penetration
of everyday life by the logic and processes of capital accumulation, appears at
Wrst to echo that pessimism, but in fact, it marks a reversal. Empire develops
the theory of the real subsumption through a reXection on Michel Foucault’s
concept of biopower, deWned as “a form of power that regulates social life from
its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it.” 19
Biopower is “an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and
reactivates of his or her own accord.” But this internalization of the control
function has the effect of offering the master’s tools to all the social subjects,
and thus it makes possible the transformation of biopower into biopolitics:
Civil society is absorbed in the [capitalist] state, but the consequence of this is an explosion
of the elements that were previously coordinated and mediated in civil society.
Resistances are no longer marginal but active in the center of a society that opens up in
networks; the individual points are singularized in a thousand plateaus. What Foucault
constructed implicitly (and Deleuze and Guattari made explicit) is therefore the paradox
of a power that, while it uniWes and envelops within itself every element of social life (thus
losing its capacity effectively to mediate different social forces), at that very moment
reveals a new context, a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncontainable singularization—a
milieu of the event.
Faced with the conditions of real subsumption, or total physical
and psychic colonization by the directive functions of capital, one of the