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I have written before on acephalous institutions, trying to connect the organisational principles behind the shadow banking system, al-Qaeda and Anonymous, as examples of loose, unstructured, self organising yet homologous and efficacious organisations. All three mirror the structure of the internet, created by the US military as decentred network without a central node, which could survive an attack on any one part of the system, and was thus self organising and non-hierarchical in its construction. We are now seeing the social and institutional ramifications in new forms of organisation that are starting to dominate the narrative of our times, types of organisation that have proved impossible for the structured, top-down, embedded organisations characteristic of the twentieth century to effectively contain, precisely because of this radical new principle of their organisation.
I now want to develop this thesis to suggest three things – firstly that the recent riots are very much part of this pattern. Secondly, that as with my above examples, communications technology is at the heart of this new ability to organise laterally and de-centrally. Thirdly, that the nexus of communications tech and social form is, along with globalization, the defining metanarrative of our time, contra Lyotard.
Several things are immediately clear about the riots – they were not planned in advance, they were not lead from a central source and they were geographically dispersed. The psychology of rioting would suggest that to some extent all forms of rioting are unpremeditated and that crowd dynamics, “the moment”, takes over, rendering command structures, discipline, in short, organisation, impossible. While this is true these features were more pronounced last week, largely because of the geographic spread of the disturbance. Previous UK riots had specific loci – think Brixton in the 80s or Bradford in the Noughties – that provided a well defined casus belli, which in turn provided ideological support, obvious ring leaders and a clear space (defined geographically but also conceptually and morally) or theatre within which the events were to take place. What we have today is a hydra headed, distributed, multi-purpose, self replicating but non-identical riot – one that functions much like al-Qaeda, say. There is no one bounded and unitary focus to the riots, to their goals, tactics and principles and hence they are completely self organising, genuinely anarchic, more so than most riots in the past.
That it was communications technology that enabled this form of rioting (geographically spread, notionally “triggerless”) is also clear. This happened in two principle ways. The first and most discussed is the use of Blackberry Messenger, and other instantaneous many-to-many digital communication networks to allow rapid, viral, self organisation amongst the social groups across London and around the UK. Without the ability to spread messages widely at will, these riots would have been impossible. Secondly, rolling saturation media coverage enabled everyone to see the initial outburst, implanting the idea and, in my view, directly leading to the subsequent waves of riots which were legitimated in the rioters minds by the previous riots, and so on throughout the conflagration. Communications technology is not just a sideline to the main story about the riots, but should be seen as central to the whole fact of these riots – without it they would not have been possible, and would never have spread. As with so much the defining principle of the riots exists in projection, information and communication.
Now I will press my third claim – that this collision between social organisation and communication tech is a defining metanarrative of our time.
Let’s take several steps back. Jean-Francois Lyotard argued that the postmodern, that is, the contemporary era, is defined by the collapse of metanarratives, understood as the epochal structuring forces and stories that create the social and ideological formations of a discrete era. So, for example, Christianity and feudalism might be seen as the great metanarratives of the Medieval time, whilst imperial conquest, Christian morality, industrialisation and free trade could be construed as the metanarratives of Victorian Britain. The postmodern condition, however, is when such metanarratives collapse, when the pillars around which a society organises itself wither away and we are just left with a Babel of relativised, competing narratives of superficially equal force. My problems with this are common – that there is an obvious metanarrative to our time, and that is advanced, or if you are Fredric Jameson, late capitalism, and secondly, that a more likely understanding of postmodernism is to say that its defining metanarrative is the appearance of the collapse of metanarratives, the collapse of metanarratives being itself a metanarrative.
The concept of metanarrative is helpful, and when viewed from that vantage never went away in the first place.
Lyotard was writing in the 1979. Since then we have seen such enormous transitions, as in every age, that the label postmodern is to my mind outdated – we need something new to both label and understand our world, yet nobody in academia has really risen to the challenge, or become widely accepted, as having provided a new label, a new set of metanarratives for now. And the whole post-postmodern thing is old and ridiculous; we are living beyond negatives and prefixes.
While I would shy from a label, I want to suggest two metanarratives that have supplanted those of postmodernity, the first being globalization, understood as a massive increase in the financialization of the economy and the world, forming an autonomous and basically systemically omnipotent metanarrative underpinning everything, and second, the communications-organisation nexus, which exists in dialectic with globalization. In concrete terms I am talking about hedge funds and futures, the internet and digital media. CDOs and Tweets alike are the emblems of our times, and at a fundamentally level are mutually dependent and co-created.
Communication technology has undergone successive revolutions beginning with the printing press, through the mass distribution of books and periodicals, via semaphore, exploding with the telegraph and then the telephone, coming of age with the mass media, radio, television and film, and reaching apotheosis with a grand convergence of them all through digitisation. Time and space are warped, shrunk, preserved through these phases of development, becoming progressively more tamed (see Innis and his theories on the difference between time binding and space binding communication mechanisms). Each new communications technology expands the forms and possibilities of the societies that adopt it, such that the pre-WW1 economic system was built on the telegraph, so the 21st economic system is built on racks of supercomputers and instantaneous data transmission around the globe. The forms and boundaries of communications technology, in other words, describe the form and boundary of what is possible within a society. Each stage on this journey has meant a widening in the sphere of the possible for humanity, new forms of communication allowing new understandings and social formations, such that we are now at a point where many-to-many communication is ubiquitous and occurs aside from geographical distance and the resource of the user.
Just as the internet was the age when the abstracted network become a dominant motif, so we now live in the age when the acephalous self organising system is the dominant, or at least most powerfully emergent, structural principle. We are moving to a kind of swarm dynamics. Examples of this are widespread and well known, and usually described in excited terms as the hallmarks of web 2.0: flashmobs, Wikipedia, Apache, P2P, the protests across the Middle East, citizen journalism, surges of public opinion on Twitter. Yet I would argue many other phenomena work on this principle and have become heightened if not created in our age: terrorist cells; stock market fluctuations and crashes; multinational businesses and new kinds of media and finance organisation (agencies, hedge funds); resistance networks against regimes everywhere and their counter-parts (reactionaries in the Middle East/Tea Party); riots in the UK; hacker collectives; the phenomenon of Open Government. It took centuries for the fruits of the printing press to be felt in all areas, and we are only around 20 years in to this latest phase of communication technology (incidentally I believe communications technology will go through a period of stasis over the next 100 years – biotech, not telecoms, will be the transformative tech of the 21st century). We should therefore expect this kind of organisation to increase, and we should expect to see many more examples cropping up in the next decades, with the riots being one instance when long term industrial and therefore capital trends intersect with the capabilities unleashed by many-to-many networks to form destructively self organising movements.
The riots aren’t anomalous. They aren’t even simply deeply rooted social problems. They are utterly typical of a new age, governed by new metanarratives, which they perfectly encapsulate.
Light Reading - the FT on digital publishing -
Generally a good well rounded overview of the State of Digital Publishing, Summer 2011, with comments from some guy at Profile Books.
Modern right wing movements have almost completely rejected the Enlightenment, which has provided the back bone to economic growth, political stability and general well-being for 300 years. This manoeuvre has catastrophic consequences not just for the waning powers of the West, but for the world as a whole.
The Enlightenment is difficult to nail down and define – scholars have deconstructed it, broken it up into national flavours, teased out inherent and glaring contradictions (empiricism versus rationalism, the noble savage versus the bureaucratic state etc) and noted how this loose movement can be broken into successive and ruptured temporal phases. We can accept all of this while still maintaining that there is such a thing as the Enlightenment, whose fundamentally principles are better understood in retrospect than at the time, and whose fundamental principles are drawn out collectively from amidst the differences of the movement.
These might be seen as a commitment to the idea of reason, and to being able to solve problems with reason, upheld with a disinterestedness, founded in experimental method and on dialogue. From this attitude came about the scientific revolution, the economic revolution, and from a combination of both the industrial revolution, democratic government, modern technology and prosperity and understanding of the world more widely dispersed than at any time in history.
A great debate rages about the Enlightenment – many, notably of the Frankfurt School such as Adorno and Horkheimer, and counter-Enlightenment post-structuralists like Foucault and his many followers, have critiqued the Enlightenment has being responsible for the horrors of modernity, tracing a thread from the salons of the intellectuals in the seventeenth and eighteenth century to the rationalised and industrialised mass murder of the Holocaust. Moreover the Enlightenment is in fact a facade, the presentation of reason founded on irreason, as a means of domination and control, logic a fig leaf to despotism of a newly evolved, capitalist, more overtly materialist, consumerist and ultimately totalitarian form.
My problem with this argument is simple: in arguing this point, which has some force, the critics of the Enlightenment fail to specify that criticism of the Enlightenment is a product of the Enlightenment, that without the free thinking, closely reasoned and progressive points of view engendered therein, and without the concomitant institutions it spawned, the conditions of possibility of a critique of the Enlightenment would never have been there. This is precisely the strength of the Enlightenment, that it provides us with the legacy and with the tools that are free to do as they will, including reflexive auto-critique. The counter-Enlightenment is not just the child of the Enlightenment, but is fully encompassed within it, as an extension of it.
There are also contemporary, trenchant defenders of the tradition, amongst whom I count Jonathan Israel as the leader. Israel’s towering scholarship has produced a powerful and vast view of the Enlightenment as springing from the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, and he draws a strong line from Spinoza to many of the best hallmarks of modernity: freedom of religion, speech, conscience, action; the idea of human rights; the liberal-democratic nation state. Israel fiercely argues that without the Enlightenment, we would have none of these things, and the positives stemming from the Enlightenment are not so much out balancing the negatives, as being completely indispensable to any conception of a decent world, a view to which I subscribe.
We are currently witnessing the wholesale dismantling of the legacy of the Enlightenment, a destruction that is most apparent in the startling ignorance and aggressive tactics of the Tea Party. Here are three examples of how they constitute a grave threat to this legacy:
Ideologies are really constellations, composites of different but aligned positions, that collectively produce the general tenor of the beliefs, which in the case of Tea Party conjoins a fundamentalist (I would say bizarre and inaccurate) interpretation of Christianity, a hatred of Obama, rampant paranoia of Muslims, socialists and terrorists, tacit racism, religious faith in the power of unfettered free markets, denial of global warming, anti-abortion etc etc. Characteristic of this noxious brew is both the absence of reason presented as reason (witness Fox News, which uses the word balance repeatedly, while offering no such thing, something seemingly unapparent to, or wilfully suppressed by its viewers) and a denial of the contradictions involved in the thought process.
Let us look at such a contradiction. Firstly we have seen there is a consistent anti-science but “pro-business” streak to the Tea Party. Putting aside that pro-business is a position held by all major parties, and is here meant as being total freedom of company, even to the detriment of the populous and the nation, it is seems to me that a) most growth in the West will come from innovation, technology and the knowledge economy. B) that these depend pre-eminently on a well educated scientifically literate work force. C) that the well spring of a modern economy, is precisely the same as the things which claim evolution is true and man causes global warming. If you believe in airplanes, why don’t you believe in the greenhouse effect?
To sum up, I want to conclude several things. Firstly that the Tea Party is fundamentally anti-Enlightenment. Secondly that this is bad, as the Enlightenment is the foundation of prosperity and security, and is the only reasonable basis the world can function at a high level in the face of numerous threats and difficulties. Lastly I want to suggest that many of the anti-Enlightenment facets of the US right, can also be discerned elsewhere in right wing factions. I will examine this last claim in another post. My contention will be that, with Jonathan Israel, the Enlightenment is radical, and implies a radical politics; that the anti-Enlightenment of the right is a mechanism of forestalling this radicalism so that inequalities and quirks of the system may be maintained by those who benefit most from them, and that there is a very clear axis between anti-Enlightenment thought, the modern Right and the artificial and unjustified maintenance of privileges of the few; that to a large extent this axis can explain the parlous economic situation of the West, will serve the continued decline of the West and will ultimately lead the world into environmental and conflictual disaster.
A new critical commonplace is occurring in music. And to paraphrase Run DMC, it goes a little something like this: contemporary music is dead; it has lost all sense of originality and differentiation, and simply recycles the sounds, styles and motifs of previous generations. It is hence devoid of true artistic merit, atemporal, decontextualised and lacking when compared to the musical innovations of, say, 1979 or 1993. Modern music, the argument goes, is utterly empty, pointless, innane.
This view has been espoused by Simon Reynolds in Wired magazine, Jaron Lanier in his book You Are Not A Gadget and Dan Barrow on The Quietus amongst others.
This view is not only absurd, but actively embarrassing for those holding it.
It is absurd because untrue, and rather naive, embarrassing because all these writers have essentially taken the conservative Establishment position that they would no doubt define themselves against. They would, I suspect, align themselves on the side of progress, innovation and the avant-garde, yet they have become the custodians of an old tradition, scoffing at the new comers who just don’t get it, with their bad and vulgar taste. They are the same as all those nay-sayers who hated Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, The Sex Pistols etc etc. They are the boring old men for whom it was perpetually better in their day. They are the hoarders of economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital desperately fending off the barbarians at the gate who have a vested interest in clawing that to themselves.
As with so many things, when you put it like that, it becomes clear they haven’t been reading French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. If they had things would be so much clearer.
There are two arguments from Bourdieu relevant to this case. Some background: Bourdieu sees society as being made up of interlinking fields, each of which to a certain extent obeys its own logic, with actors in those fields taking positions to gain capital, defined loosely, according to that logic of the field. Culture generally is one such field and has a number of interesting characteristics that set it apart from most others fields.
Argument one: within the cultural field there is a polarization between commercial culture on the one hand and avant garde culture on the other. Commercial culture is that which very closely ties in to the project of accumulating of economic capital, and thus its modes are always very much adapted to an audience, that is, they attempt to anticipate popular demand, and so tend towards orthodoxy and conservatism in their style, and short-termism in their outlook. On the other hand avant-garde culture is distinguished by an unusual autonomy from the demands of economic capital, instead it is deployed to gain symbolic capital (recognition) from a small group of fellow producers and critics who ascribe its value, realised monetarily only later down the line after it has accumulated enough symbolic capital that it has a position of some dominance within the cultural field. Not made for a pre-existing audience, this culture requires that an audience be made for it, even as that audience “produces” it by recognising it as a legitimate new cultural form. According to the logic of this area, the less a work partakes of the commercial realm the better, and hence within the avant garde there is always a tendency towards more pure (self referential and abstract) works.
Critics are mixing up commercial and avant garde culture, or rather, they are judging the legitimacy of the popular culture by terms in which it doesn’t – and never has – judged itself, thus missing the point. Commercial culture has never been particularly innovative, and always recycles itself, because of its underlying homology with the economic logic at work in society, and its connections to the dominant culture of the day. This was a true in the 1880s, as it was in the 1980s as it was in the 2000s. This is not to say it doesn’t change, just to say that by its very rationale for existence it is more prone to producing the easy, banal and familiar. Criticising contemporary music for this is baseless, without purpose and is not especially true of now more than any other time in history.
Argument two: the dialectic at work within the avant garde field itself is also instructive. Let’s pretend that the critique of music is just directed at those works which would fit into the avant garde, that is, are oriented more towards the accumulation of social and symbolic capital than economic capital. All fields are composed of position-takings of actors, who take positions according to their judgement of which out of the options available to them within the prescribed boundaries of the field will be most advantageous in terms of the field. The history of the avant garde is hence a history of position and counter position takings, which work as a dialectic of new extremes to “out avant garde” the last generation, and by doing so accrue symbolic capital as recognised by peers, a move which will always rile the older and once avant garde generation as it undermines the dominant position they have. The result of this series of moves is that each position-taking is inscribed with a history of the field, of all the previous position takings, as a position taking is always taken in reference to something else. Bourdieu argues that even if one were to produce an identical work but several generations down from the “original” that intervening history imbues the new work with meanings wholly unheard of before. There is no simple repetition, no straightforward recycling, unoriginality or return to the past. Each work contains the revolutions of the past within it, and so goes beyond them, even as there is an inter-generational struggle for legitimacy as artists seek the accumulation of symbolic capital.
This has two implications for those arguing that modern music is boring and unoriginal. Firstly they have totally misunderstood the functioning of the cultural field, and how returns to the past are always impossible, and are always actually steps forward. They are always inflected by, comment on and transform that which went before. They exist in dialogue with the past yet also supercede it. Arguing for blandness and unoriginality, saying that new sounds are not occurring, is a futile argument, as it is in the nature of how culture advances that old sounds will always be recombined, and progression always contains within the complete sum of all the previous moves.
Secondly it is quite clear that they are now in the position of being the older generation, people with a stake in what has already been, who are now trying to de-legitimise new forms of music that exist outside their domain. This is a move that has been done countless times throughout history, indeed, has been done every time there is newness of some kind, which is every generation. The sad thing here is that a) these lot still, inevitably, try to co-opt the position of the legitimate avant garde when they are the opposite and b) they think they are very knowing and superior and cool, but they aren’t.
They’re just old fuddy duddies, old washed up rockers and ravers who’ve got old and don’t understand modern music and don’t really understand the operations of culture within society. Yesterday I listened to two bands I hadn’t heard before: Ghostpoet and Bring Me To The Horizon. Very different music styles but both defiantly of the moment. They couldn’t have been made in any other age but this one, and if people don’t like that they should retreat to their bedrooms and listen to Joy Division (Full Disclosure: I do this to).
Leadenhall Building render from Preconstruct.
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