The Lives and Afterlives of Plastic: Week Two

We’re now into the second week of The Lives and Afterlives of Plastic, an onlinbe conference that I’m helping run as part of the Political Ecology research Centre at Massey University.

This week, we have a Keynote from Professor Gay Hawkins entitled Governed By Plastic, as well as having four panels. These look at 1) Packaging Life Cycle Analysis and Design, 2) Representations and Aesthetics, 3) Materiality and 4) Marine Microplastics.

It’s been wonderful watching the diverse and brilliant ways that people have responded to and challenged the idea of what an online version of a conference paper might look like, and it’s been fascinating to watch and hear about such a broad range of projects relating to plastic.

It’s also been really interesting to see how the diverse forms of scholarship form the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities speak to one another.

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Arts of the Political – Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin

Arts of the Political is the new release penned by cultural geographers Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin, and which explores various manifestations of left wing politics and political movements in order to consider why movements based around equity and community have seemingly achieved so little over the past thirty odd years in the face of neoliberalism. Indeed, this question is particularly pertinent given the financial crisis of 2008, and the inability of the left in places such as the UK (where both Thrift and Amin teach at Warwick and Cambridge respectively) to form a movement seemingly capable of enacting widespread positive changes, or even mounting a serious campaign to challenge the Conservative narrative of enforced austerity as a means for enacting further cuts to public services – a policy David Cameron has recently felt sufficiently emboldened to openly state is a reflection of ideology rather than a situation enforced by economic circumstances.

One might argue that the sweeping cuts made by the Tory/Lib Dem coalition are a prime exemplar of what Naomi Klein has termed the shock doctrine – the neoconservative leveraging of moments of critical instability to enact sweeping changes which increase inequality and benefit elites through privatisations which would likely be too unpopular to pass outside of these specific moments. The question then, is why has the right been so successful at exploiting these opportunities whilst the left has not.

For Thrift and Amin, the answer is primarily that the left has historically been successful when it has been able to articulate new visions, new desires and new organisations which expand the terrain of what is understood to be politics itself, and by doing so energises mass movements through articulating the possibility for a better collective future.

 Movements campaigning for the rights ofwomen, the working class, and other neglected and downtrodden subjects managed to turn engrained orthodoxies on their head in the quarter-century before the First World War by building mass support and accompanying socio-political reform. Although these movements applied particular principles and practices, the record shows that their acts of redefinition went far beyond what was originally intended. These movements freed up new imaginations, invented new political tools, pointed to elements of existence that had been neglected or concealed, and created a constituency that, once constructed, longed for another world. In other words, these movements produced a new sense of the political and of political potential. 1he emerging Left both opened the doors of perception and provided the tools with which to do something about these new perceptions. This is what was common, in our view, in the disparate examples we consider, from the American Progressive Movement and British feminism to German Marxism and Swedish social democracy. In their own way, each of these movements disclosed new desires.

The thesis that drives this book is that progressive movements should pay more attention to such world-making capacity, understood as the ability not just to produce a program in the future but also to open up new notions of what the future might consist of. The most important political movements, in our estimation, are those that are able to invent a world of possibility and hope that then results in multiple intertventions in the economic, social, and cultural, as well as the political sphere. They free thought and practice and make it clear what values are being adhered to, often in quite unexpected ways. p9

Thrift and Amin contend that three areas (or arts) of the political which it is crucial for the left to pay close attention towards are invention, the process of bringing forth tangible futures which hold the promise of a better life; organisation, the practices which are used to bind and articulate these movements; and the mobilisation of affect, considering the ways that political decision making goes beyond rational information processing:

In particular, we consider the whole phenomenon of what Walter Lippmann (1961) called the manufacture of consent: how it is being bent to the needs of the Right and how it could be mobilized more effectively by the Left. At the same time, we attend to how the consideration of affect brings space into the frame. A whole array of spatial technologies has become available that operate on, and with, feeling to produce new forms of activism, which literally map out politics and give actors the resources to kick up more and across more places.3 In other words, the practical mechanics of space must be part of the politics of the Left. p15

Thrift and Amin begin by exploring a range of historical examples whereby left wing politics was able to achieve the kind of redefinition of the political they seek, considering the German Socialism of the SPD before world war 1, Swedish Social Democracy, the British Suffragette movement, and progressive capitalists in the US circa 1900. Thrift and Amin contend that:

In all cases, progress depended on prizing open newpolitical ground and filling it with real hope and desire. Appeal and effectiveness-at a time heavily laden with the weight of tradition, vested power, restricted social force, and new capitalist imperative-had to come from an ability to imagine and build community around the yet to come or the yet to be revealed. This meant inventing new historical subjects, new technologies oforganization and resistance, newvisions of the good life and social possibility, new definitions ofhuman subjectivity and fulfillment, and new spaces of the political (such as “direct action,” “voting,” “public involvement,” “class struggle,” “welfare reform,” “government for the people,” “women’s rights”). A possible world had to be fashioned to render the old unacceptable and the new more desirable and possible. The Left today seems to have less desire or ability to stand outside the given to disclose and make way for a new world.

In seeking to formulate areas where there is the potential for opening up analogous new political spaces, Thrift and Amin incorporate theoretical material from Bruno Latour regarding the status of democracy and agency with regards to nonhumans, arguing that the traditional binaries between sovereign human subjects and inert and passive nonhuman objects is an area which can productively challenged by a revitalised left wing politics.

bow. We want to take up Bruno Latour’s (1999) call for a new parliament and constitution that can accommodate the myriad beings that populate the world, a call that entails acts of definition and redefinition of “actor” so that many humans and nonhumans can jostle for position, gradually expanding the scope and meaning of”collective”
politics. p41

This leads T&A to consider the human as a distributed being, whose processes of cognition stretch far beyond the boundaries of the skin, coming close to Deleuze and Guattari’s positions around ecological machinic flows of matter. Arguing from a position which begins to sound fairly close to some of Bernard Stiegler’s work, they contend that:

Human being is fundamentally prosthetic, what is often called “tool-being.” We are surrounded by a cloud ofall manner of objects that provide us with the wherewithal to think. Much ofwhat we regard as cognition is actually the result ofthe tools we have evolved that allow us to describe, record, and store experience. Take just the example of the craft of memory. 1his has extended its domain mightily since the time paintings were made on the walls of caves, and as a result, a whole new means of thought has come into being…

Memory is a compositional art depending on the cultivation of images for the mind to work with. This state of affairs has continued but has been boosted by modern media technology and its ability to produce communal rhetorics that would have been impossible before and that are inevitably heavily political, especially in their ability to keep inventing new variants of themselves that can be adapted to new situations. p50/51

This sense of distributed being and agency is used to reinforce the Latourian argument surrounding the agency of objects, and thus their importance in a new an enlarged sense of politics and democracy. Using Gilbert Simondon’s notion of transduction T&A explore:

The way in which tools and other symbiotes can produce environments that are lively in their own right, that prompt new actants to come into existence. To illustrate this point, we need to look no further than the types of digital technology that have become a perpetual overlay to so many practices and the way in which they are changing political practices. Here we find a domain that has gained a grip only over the past ten years but is now being used as part of an attempt to mass-produce “ontological strangeness” (Rodowick 2007) based on semiautomatic responses designed into everyday life through a combination of information technology based tools and the practices associated with them (from implants and molecular interventions to software-based perception and action). In particular, these automatisms are concerned with the design and prototyping of new kinds of space that can produce different affective vibrations. p64

T&A bring this discussion back in to realm of the more conventionally political by using distributed agency and co-evolutionary strategies as a way of opening up though surrounding ecological crises and how a coherent left political response to climate change requires precisely the type of expanded politics which they characterise as world making:

What is needed instead is a leftist politics that stresses interconnection as opposed to the “local,” however that is understood. What is needed is “not so much a sense of place as a sense ofplanet” (Heise 2008, ss) that is often (and sometimes rather suspectly) called “eco-cosmopolitanism.” Thus, to begin with, the experience of place needs to be re-engineered so that its interlocking ecological dimensions again become clear. This work of reconnection is already being done on many levels and forms a vital element in the contemporary repertoire of leftist politics: slow food, fair trade, consumer boycotts, and so on. Each of these activities connects different places, and it is this work of connection that is probably their most important outcome. Environmental justice then needs to be brought into the equation. The privileges of encounters with certain ecologies, as well as the risks associated with some branches of industry and agribusiness, are clearly unevenly distributed, and it may well be that certain environmentally unsound practices have been perpetuated because their effects go unnoticed by the middle class. Again, environmental justice movements have to refigure spaces, both practically and symbolically, so that interconnection becomes translucent. Finally, we need new ways to sense and envisage global crowds that are dynamic. The attempts to produce people’s mapping and geographic information systems, to engage in various forms of mash-up, and to initiate new forms of search are all part and parcel of a growing tendency to produce new lands of concerned and concernful “Where are we?” Politics starts from this question. p75

This is followed by a a chapter which claims to look at contemporary leftist politics, surveying the landscape through the apertures of anti-capitalism, reformist capitalism, post-capitalism and human recognition. What is striking about the majority of these contemporary left wing political movements is that they aren’t actually political movements.  Anti-Capitalism is not approached through Occupy or Climate Camp, it is Zizek, and Badiou alongside Hardt and Negri – which conflates two very different theoretical perspectives on anti-capitalism – and is summarily dismissed as hopelessly over-optimistic and unable to visualise a future. Reformism is not Syriza/The Five Star Movment/Bolvarian Socialism, it is Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens’s reflexive modernity and third way. By post-capitalism T&A mean ‘A third leftist stance on the contemporary world can be described as “poststructuralist,” in that it draws on feminist, postcolonial, antiracist,and ecological thinking, much of which heavily influenced by poststructuralist ideas’ p91. Conceptually that would seem to fit Hardt and Negri quite well, but here T&A refer instead to GIbson-Graham’s work on small scale, local, co-operative ethical and sustainable, which could have been productively mapped onto the actions of groups and initiatives such as transition towns, permaculture groups, feminist networks, Greenpeace and other NGOs and the broad range of groups and movements who actually practice some of these ideas, but instead is again explored as a mere theoretical argument rather than political praxis. Human recognition is used to refer to a liberal left based around ethics derived from Wendy Brown’s writings – again rather than exploring groups who actually employ this mode of left politics, probably best embodied by online liberal campaign groups such as Avaaz or 38 Degrees. Finally T&A return to Latour and the notion of Dingpolitik and the role of bringing objects into democracy, a position which has been criticised within academia for being politically conservative as Latour’s works tend to entirely ignore issues surrounding inequalities and exploitation, content instead to simply map actor networks, in contrast with more politically engaged posthuman scholarship from the likes of Felix Guattari or Manuel DeLanda. Perhaps there could have been an interesting dialogue here between T&A’s Latourian positions and the actions and ideologies of animal rights groups or deep ecologists, but again for T&A the left today does not consist of movements of people actually campaigning, occupying, protesting and organising, it simply appears to be a disparate collection of academics.

Put simply, this was what was most frustrating about Arts of the Political, rather than engaging with the broad and varied range of social and ecological activisms which currently exist, the left is reduced to academic thought, whilst the authours proclaim themselves to be engaged in materialist analysis. Perhaps it is simply indicative of the fact that the book’s authors are ageing men living and working in universities who are so totally detached from the actual practices of the left wing groups they claim to represent that they are barely able to acknowledge their existence. Indeed, Thrift has seen protests and occupations from students at Warwick surrounding his astronomical pay increases as Vice Chancellor of the University of Warwick over the past couple of years (from 2011 to 2013 Thrift’s salary has increased from £238,000 to £316,000 at a time when tuition fees have tripled for his institution’s students). That as a background perhaps helps explain why the actually existing left is almost entirely absent from T&A’s exploration of left wing politics.

In the following chapters where T&A discuss organisation, there is a mixture of some interesting thoughts surrounding ecology, using Stengers, Deleuze and Guattari, to consider the notion of ‘addressing the political as an ecology of spatial practices’ p133 alongside a consideration of the organisation of the EU as a potentially fruitful model for the left, as it involves multiple parties across different scales having to cooperate. Such a politics of pragmatic cooperation could of course be understood as a mainstay of anticapitalist politics since the 1990s – the alter-globalisation movement and its manifestations within the world social forum, the peoples global assembly and Indymedia all sought to embody a politics of the multiple, as theorised by Hardt and Negri, and similar claims could be made regarding the anti-war movement, climate change activism and Occupy. But in keeping with their refusal to actually engage with left wing movements, we instead get a lionisation of the EU at a time where elements of the actually existing left are campaigning against the EU’s proposed free trade deal with the US which would effectively allow corporations to sue governments using secret panels to bypass parliaments.

This is a shame, as some of theoretical material around affect, space and that relating to the need to build positive visions of a left wing future articulated by T&A are in places very strong. The central argument that the left needs to find a way to escape what Mark Fisher has called Capitalist Realism, the notion that neoliberalism is the only possible game in town (with the alternative being an eco-apocalypse), is undoubtedly correct, and the politicisation of affect and the reorientation of politics towards an ecology of ethical practices are both concepts worth pursuing. However, they require consideration in relation to the actual practices of political movements, rather than simply as abstract theoretical constructs.

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Culture Machine vol 13 (2012) Paying Attention

During my several months of failing to blog I’ve had a paper published in a special edition of the journal Culture Machine, which is an open access journal, meaning that unlike much of academia it isn’t up behind a paywall.

The article is called Escaping Attention: Digital Media Hardware, Materiality and Ecological Cost, and it looks at ways that discourses around the attention economy and immateriality tend to obscure various material ecological impacts of digital technologies. It’s part of a special edition on the attention economy which was co-edited by Patrick Crogan and Sam Kinsley from the the Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE. Material for the journal was drawn from the 2010 European Science Foundation funded conference entitled ‘Paying Attention: Digital Media Cultures and Generational Responsibility,’ which was convened by the Digital Cultures Research Centre.

Alongside my contribution, the special edition features a substantial introduction by the editors, which presents a critical examination of the workings of the ‘attention economy’ in the context of today’s rapidly emerging realtime, ubiquitous, online digital technoculture. It re-focusses work on this theme of attention in light of the current and emerging digital technocultural media sphere of smart devices, the pervasive mediation of experience, and the massive financial speculation in the attention capturing potential of social networking media. The special issue includes an interview by Kinsley with peer2peer co-founder, Michel Bauwens, essays by key theorists of attention Jonathan Beller, Bernard Stiegler, Tiziana Terranova, and several papers on topics from Facebook and Free and Open Software, to the problematic role of digital social networking in Istanbul’s recent (2010) European Capital of Culture project. Its really great to be published alongside such thought provoking and insightful pieces.

http://payingattention.org/2012/07/24/paying-attention-special-issue-of-culture-machine/

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Social and Ecological Costs of Technology: Audio Stream From BarnCamp

Over the weekend of the 11th and 12th of June I was at BarnCamp, a fun filled weekend of tech activist related tomfoolery organised by the Hacktionlab network. On the Sunday I gave a talk about the Social and Ecological costs of Technology, which was recorded by the Catalyst radio collective, who launched a 24 hours a day seven days a week at BarnCamp. The talks are available for streaming here.

The first talk on the audio stream is on the Luddite movement and the contemporary relevance of their actions ahead of the bicentenary of the Luddite rebellion in 2012, the second is some thoughts on technology, the self and upgrade culture, and my talk is on third, about 35 minutes in.

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Re-Rooting Digital Culture – Media Art Ecologies

On Friday I was in London for an unconference hosted by Furtherfields.org at the University of Westminster, London which approached the subject of re-rooting digital culture from an ecological perspective. Here’s the brief for the event:

Over the last decade the awareness of anthropogenic climate change has emerged in parallel with global digital communication networks. In the context of environmental and economic collapse people around the world are seeking alternative visions of prosperity and sustainable ways of living.

While the legacy of the carbon fuelled Industrial Revolution plays itself out, we find ourselves grappling with questions about the future implications of fast-evolving global digital infrastructure. By their very nature the new tools, networks and behaviours of productivity, exchange and cooperation between humans and machines grow and develop at an accelerated rate.

The ideas for this transdisciplinary panel have grown out of Furtherfield’s Media Art Ecologies programme and will explore the impact of digital culture on climate change, developing themes adopted in grass-roots, emerging and established practices in art, design and science.

One thing which left me somewhat confused was why the event was billed as an unconference, when in reality it was a fairly straightforward event with three speakers and a short Q+A after. Listening to three presentations (with accompanying powerpoints and prezis) and then having the chance to ask a few questions at the end is not a participant driven meeting, its the same format as you find at any conventional conference panel.

The first speaker was Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives. Bauwens began by prescribing the central problems of the contemporary socio-economic system with regards to sustainability and equity. The first problem he outlined was that of pseudo-abundance: the aim of achieving infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources and the externalisation of ecological costs from our limited understanding of economics. The second problem he delineated was that of artificial scarcity: the ways in which intellectual property is enforced via patents and copyrights which create scarcity around assets whose cost of reproduction often approaches zero with digital networked technology. This Bauwens argued, leads to the stifling of innovation, which prevents the types of solutions to ecological crises being developed as commonwealth, outside of a profit driven market framework. The final problem Bauwens diagnosed was that of social justice, as exemplified by the cavernous (and growing) divide between rich and poor on a global level.

Bauwens’ suggestions around potential solutions to these problems is primarily through commons based peer production. In commons based peer production, individuals are able to voluntarily self-aggregate into distributed networks based on coordination through networked telecommunications. While Bauwens presents this as an entirely new phenomena, afforded by the massive increase in computational power and networked connectivity associated with the information revolution, it is worth mentioning that voluntary self-aggregation and democratised and decentralised ownership of projects has long been a foundational concept of anarcho-syndicalist thought. What appears to be different about P2P networks in the contemporary context however are their ability to connect peers outside of a localised context through digital telecommunications networks, and also for the projects to be scaled up accordingly in terms of size and scope. These affordances have the potential to enable commons based peer production to out-compete market based initiatives in many circumstances, however what is potentially of greater significance than the efficiency gains P2P networks can provide is the alternative set of values they tend to embody.

Bauwens used examples of numerous forms of consumer electronics as instantiations of planned obsolescence, whereby the company making the product has a financial incentive to create a product which has a highly limited shelf life, and whose design is not modular, so that failure of individual components leads to users replacing the entire device. While the manufacturer profits each time this cycle continues and new items are bought, the ecological costs increase, however these are externalised from the market transaction. By contrast the open design methodology is based around values whereby the user/designer (the term prouser was suggested) wants their device to be as durable and long lasting as possible, and for a modular design to exist which eanables them to easily replace any parts which are damaged over time. Consequently the argument Bauwens promoted was that the values of the open design movement present an ethical alternative to market production whereby ecological sustainability and social justice can be built into the production process itself.

Bauwens argued that this argument was not merely utopianism but was based on a material analysis of the prescient features of contemporary capitalism, which he argued already needs commons based peer production in order to remain profitable.

The second speaker was Catherine Bottrill of Julie’s Bicycle, an organisation which works with arts ‘buisnesses’ to reduce their carbon footprint. While I’m sure the organisation does good work, the scheduling seemed somewhat odd. Following a talk about the problems of contemporary capitalism and the necessity to replace it with a system with alternative ethical values created via grassroots and decentralised P2P networks we had a talk which seemed to imply that if the major record labels reduced their carbon footprint slightly and their star acts planned their world tours slightly differently there would be no ecological crisis.

It was problematic that Bottrill didn’t address any of the concerns or solutions Bauwens had just raised, and one slide in particular caused (presumably) inadvertant entertainment with her diagnosis of contemporary challenges to society. First came recession, second came the Middle East Crisis, followed by cuts to Arts Council funding. I’m not sure what came next because I was laughing too hard. On a more serious note though, for a group of uniformly white middle class people at a posh London university to listen to someone raise arts funding cuts as a major social problem above the other aspects of the government’s austerity programme; cuts to disability benefits, cuts to welfare, cuts to education, the privatisation of the NHS etc was somewhat depressing.

The final presentation was from Ruth Catlow of Furtherfields.org on ecological approaches to networks, tools and digital art. Catlow began with a delineation of network topography, referring to a 1964 RAND corporation diagram on various forms of structure

Catlow argued that while mass media networks resemble the centralised structure on the left, the Internet is a mixture of the decentralised (via the cables and gateways that make up the material apparatus of connectivity) and distributed (as each computer functions as a node in a distributed network). While this has been a traditional way that the Internet, and its potential for creating a democratic media system has been trumpeted for over two decades now, this analysis misses a crucial part of the picture. Recent research into the structure and connectivity of complex networks such as the World Wide Web (which is the most common encounter people have with the Intenet) reveals that far from a distributed system in which all nodes are equal or every blogger is a pamphleteer, the structure of these networks is that of a power law, with a few preferentially attached ‘superstars’ such as Google, Facebok, Twitter and Amazon, while the vast majority of content resides in the ‘long tail’ where it receives scant attention.

Systems as diverse as genetic networks or the World Wide Web are best
described as networks with complex topology. A common property of many
large networks is that the vertex connectivities follow a scale-free power-law
distribution. This feature was found to be a consequence of two generic mech-
anisms: (i) networks expand continuously by the addition of new vertices, and
(ii) new vertices attach preferentially to sites that are already well connected.
A model based on these two ingredients reproduces the observed stationary
scale-free distributions, which indicates that the development of large networks
is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars
of the individual systems
Barabasi and Albert 1999

When we talk about network topology we need to engage with these findings, as while the power law functions as an attractor which partially determines the distribution of the network, there has been some research which suggests that this is not a fixed and finite determinism and that there may be methods or tactics which communities can use to make these networks more equitable. But for me, that discussion is the interesting one to be having about network topologies now, not merely a recapitulation of the earliest models.

Following this, Catlow went on to detail a number of projects which Furtherfields have been involved in, including the Zero Dollar Laptop Project; which is an innovative way of both mitigating the ecological cost of contemporary computing hardware while also providing social benefits to disadvantaged groups, We Wont Fly For Art, a project designed to mitigate the carbon emissions created by artists and the Feral Trade Cafe, a project by Kate Rich which establishes social networks to ethically trade goods.

Overall the event was worth attending, Bauwens’ talk in particular being a highlight.

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Media Ecologies Prezi and Bibliography

Yesterday I gave a guest lecture for to MA students at the University of Western England on Media Ecologies… Here’s a copy of the Prezi that went along with the lecture, and a selected bibliography for some key readings associated with the field. I’ll try and find some time to write my notes up into a blog post sometime soon

Link to Prezi: Media Ecologies on Prezi

Media Ecologies Bibliography

Eco-Philosophy

Bateson, Gregory, (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind; Collected essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology, Northvale New Jersey, Aronsen Inc.

Capra, Fritjof (1996) The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, New York, Anchor Books

DeLanda, Manuel, (1992) ‘Nonorganic Life’, in Jonathan Crary & Sanford Kwinter (eds), Zone 6: Incorporations, New York: Urzone, pp. 129-67

DeLanda, Manuel (2002) Intensive Sciences and Virtual Philosophies, London and New York, Continuum

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1972, trans 1977) ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,’ Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R Lane, London & New York, Continuum

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1980, trans 1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Translation by Brian Massumi, London & New York, University of Chicago Press

Guattari, Felix (2000) The Three Ecologies, trans Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London, Athelone Press

Maturana, Humberto and Varela Fransisco (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition, Dordrecht, Holland, Reidel,

Prigogine, Ilya in collaboration with Stengers, Isabelle (1997) The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature, New York, The Free Press

Posthumanism

Haraway, Donna (1982) ‘Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’ in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature New York; Routledge, 1991, pp.149-181.

Hayles, N Katherine (1999) How We Became Posthuman Chicago, University of Chicago Press

Hayles N Katherine (2007) Deep and Hyper Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Models, http://www.mlajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1632/prof.2007.2007.1.187

Latour, Bruno (1991) We have never Been Modern, Translated by Catherine Porter
Cambridge, Massachusettes, Harvard University Press,

Stiegler, Bernard (2009) For a New Critique of Political Economy, translated by Daniel Ross, Polity Books, UK

Media Ecologies

Fuller, Matthew (2005) Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Technoculture, Cambridge MA, MIT Press

Matthew Fuller (ed) (2008) Software Studies: A Lexicon, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press

Jussi Parikka (2007) Digital Contagions: A Media Archeology of Computer Viruses, Peter Lang Books

Jussi Parikka (2011) Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology, University of Minnesota Press

Jussi Parrika (ongoing) Machinology http://jussiparikka.net/

Rawlings, Tomas (ongoing) A Great Becoming http://agreatbecoming.wordpress.com/

Taffel, Sy (ongoing) Media Ecologies and Digital Activism https://mediaecologies.wordpress.com/

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Fate of the World Beta

While being ill over the last week or so, I’ve spent some time playing the beta version of Fate of the World, a forthcoming PC game based around climate change which has generated quite a lot of interest in the mainstream media ( see here and here)

The game essentially puts you in command of a global organisation whose mission is to prevent catastrophic climate change (defined in the beta mission as 3 degrees of warmth), maintain a human development index above 0.5 and keep people happy enough to stop more than a certain number of geographical regions from kicking you out by the year 2020.

To achieve these goals you have a variety of tools at your disposal; projects which include boosting renewable energy, deploying CCS technology and subsidising electric cars, environmental and social adaptation/mitigation measures such as drought prevention measures, healthcare programmes and advancing regional water infrastructure, policy measures such as banning oil from tar sands or deploying algae based biofuels, and political measures such as deploying peacekeepers to troubles regions and black ops (including covert steralisation programmes?!).

From a game studies perspective the game is interesting as it provides users with a complex simulation whereby numerous interdependent factors are required to be dynamically balanced in a way that goes far beyond the usual kill or be killed binary prevalent inb most computer games. While there are of course alternatives, particularly in the realm of sandbox simulation games from SimEarth to Civilisation 5, Fate of the World is interesting insofar as it uses data taken from climate models to simulate not a fictional alternative world, but possible futures of this planet, presuming that the current data from climate models are broadly accurate. As such by experimenting with different variables users can glean a different kind of insight pertaining to the challenges posed by Anthropogenic Climate Change to engaging with traditional forms of media, such as watching a documentary or reading the scientific literature. By being able to manipulate how regions react through play, users get a different kind of experience, one driven by feedback, configuration and systemic thinking rather than narrative, affect or rhetoric. While such models will always be highly reductive simplifications of real world complexity, they could provide a useful way of approaching some of the complex social and environmental issues currently facing us, and indeed this kind of argument has been powerfully advanced by game studies scholars such as Stuart Moulthrop, who have advanced the argument that when dealing with complexity, configurational thinking is likely to present users with a better understanding of the area than linear narrative based approaches.

One criticism I have of the game in its current state is that the processes of feedback which reveal how a user’s interventions are effecting the relevant systems are often relatively obscured by their placement two menus deep, and I suspect that many players will struggle to find the data which actually spells out what the the consequences of their actions have been, and without this crucial information actions can appear opaque and indeed this criticism has been made on gaming forums discussing the beta. Hopefully this will something that is addressed before the game is released, as if players don’t understand what effects their decisions have entailed, then the game isn’t achieving its goals.

One aspect of the game which I found highly intriguing is the disparity between the aims and activities the game sets for users and the claims and actions of really existing nation states and supranational institutions. The beta mission in the game sets success as avoiding a rise of 3 or more degrees over pre-industrial temperatures by 2120, which is  below the midpoint of the IPCC projections of 1.5-6 degrees of warming this century (dependent on a range of factors, but primarily human measures), but which is considerably higher than the figure of a 2 degree rise which nation states couldn’t agree upon at the COP15 conference at Copenhagen last year. The reason states couldn’t agree upon that figure wasn’t the complete lack of concrete measures designed to practically bring about that change, but because a large number of nations, primarily the 131 countries represented by the G77 group, declared that a 2 degree temperature rise was too high. Earlier this year those nations convened in Bolivia at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, where they drafted a people’s agreement which stated

If global warming increases by more than 2 degrees Celsius, a situation that the “Copenhagen Accord” could lead to, there is a 50% probability that the damages caused to our Mother Earth will be completely irreversible. Between 20% and 30% of species would be in danger of disappearing. Large extensions of forest would be affected, droughts and floods would affect different regions of the planet, deserts would expand, and the melting of the polar ice caps and the glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas would worsen. Many island states would disappear, and Africa would suffer an increase in temperature of more than 3 degrees Celsius. Likewise, the production of food would diminish in the world, causing catastrophic impact on the survival of inhabitants from vast regions in the planet, and the number of people in the world suffering from hunger would increase dramatically, a figure that already exceeds 1.02 billion people. The corporations and governments of the so-called “developed” countries, in complicity with a segment of the scientific community, have led us to discuss climate change as a problem limited to the rise in temperature without questioning the cause, which is the capitalist system…

Our vision is based on the principle of historical common but differentiated responsibilities, to demand the developed countries to commit with quantifiable goals of emission reduction that will allow to return the concentrations of greenhouse gases to 300 ppm, therefore the increase in the average world temperature to a maximum of one degree Celsius.

With atmospheric CO2 concentrations currently at 387ppm, and even the most ambitious campaigners in the developed world calling for a reduction to 350ppm, the aims set out at the World People’s Conference appear laudable, but completely unrealistic. Indeed, the goal loosely set out at COP15 of reducing warming to no more than 2 degrees, but with no mechanisms to try to achieve this have been widely criticised by groups such as the International Institute for Environment and Development;

The Accord is weak. It is not binding and has no targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (countries that signed it have until 31 January to list their voluntary actions in its appendix). The low level of ambition will make preventing dangerous climate change increasingly difficult. What countries have so far proposed will commit us to a 3 to 3.5-degree temperature increase, and that is just the global average.

In some ways this may be the most useful role the game plays; highlighting the distance between the rhetoric of political and business leaders who are currently seeking to greenwash the issue, and present their inaction beyond rhetoric as somehow being constitutive of a viable solution to the problems posed by ACC. Despite taking concerted action throughout the game it is hard to maintain warming of under 3 degrees without society collapsing due to a lack of mitigation and adaptation measures, widespread war and civil unrest or widespread poverty and famine in the face of increasingly severe climate related disasters as the next 110 years unfold. In some ways this isn’t that much fun; being told that your actions are resulting in millions starving and armed conflict doesn’t spread warmth and joy, but it does give some indication of how hard things are likely to get as time passes.

One thing that becomes abundantly clear from the game is that the sooner action is taken to dramatically curb CO2 emissions (particularly in wealthy nations where emissions per capita are far higher), the less severe the consequences will be further down the line. This is a lesson we would do well to heed.

World People’s Conference on Climate Change

and the Rights of Mother Earth

April 22nd, Cochabamba, Bolivia

PEOPLES AGREEMENT

Today, our Mother Earth is wounded and the future of humanity is in danger.

If global warming increases by more than 2 degrees Celsius, a situation that the “Copenhagen Accord” could lead to, there is a 50% probability that the damages caused to our Mother Earth will be completely irreversible. Between 20% and 30% of species would be in danger of disappearing. Large extensions of forest would be affected, droughts and floods would affect different regions of the planet, deserts would expand, and the melting of the polar ice caps and the glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas would worsen. Many island states would disappear, and Africa would suffer an increase in temperature of more than 3 degrees Celsius. Likewise, the production of food would diminish in the world, causing catastrophic impact on the survival of inhabitants from vast regions in the planet, and the number of people in the world suffering from hunger would increase dramatically, a figure that already exceeds 1.02 billion people. The corporations and governments of the so-called “developed” countries, in complicity with a segment of the scientific community, have led us to discuss climate change as a problem limited to the rise in temperature without questioning the cause, which is the capitalist system.

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NOAA: State of the Climate Report

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recently released a report entitles State of the Climate 2009, which is downloadable in its entirety as a pdf from here, with a web page summarising the report available online here.

The findings of this report, which involved over 300 scientists from 48 countries around the world are further corroboration of the evidence that ‘t the past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years.’ What is interesting about the report, is that it uses a methodology which is well suited to examining a broad range of climactic indicators to build a fairly comprehensive overview of numerous ecological systems and so to be able to map the changes these systems are currently undergoing.

Based on comprehensive data from multiple sources, the report defines 10 measurable planet-wide features used to gauge global temperature changes. The relative movement of each of these indicators proves consistent with a warming world. Seven indicators are rising: air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, air temperature over oceans, sea level, ocean heat, humidity and tropospheric temperature in the “active-weather” layer of the atmosphere closest to the Earth’s surface. Three indicators are declining: Arctic sea ice, glaciers and spring snow cover in the Northern hemisphere.

By utilising a broad range of indicators, and finding such broad agreement between them the NOAA report provides a good example of the way in which the science behind anthropogenic climate change is based on a vast array of observations which corroborate with the physics behind the greenhouse effect, which gives a causal mechanism to the observations seen in these global climactic systems.

As John Cook from SkepticalScience points out in an article for the Guardian, this kind of rigorous scientific research which seeks to give a good overview of global systems by combining and comparing the observed data for numerous global systems is diametrically opposed methodologically to the kind of material promoted by most climate change skeptics, who seek to prevent meaningful action being taken to reduce the severity of ACC by entirely ignoring the bigger picture – the enormous breadth of data from global systems – instead focusing on minute details such as the choice of proxies used in decade old papers on paleoclimatic reconstructions (the repeatedly vindicated Hockey Stick paper published by Mann Hughes and Bradley) or the choice of wording in private emails between climate researchers (such as Phil Jones’ phrase ‘hide the decline’ to describe the divergence between one particular set of trees used as as a climate proxy and the observed temperature record, which was covered in the published literature on that proxy set).

As the NOAA report highlights, when you look at the big picture, rather than concentrating on minute details, the evidence is that the planet is heating up, that human activity is largely the cause, and that the medium to long term ramifications of these changes will make life far harder for hundreds of millions of people as well as causing the extinction of innumerable other species less capable of adapting to a changing climate. As time goes by and more research is being done, that evidence is only getting stronger as more and more datasets which confirm the findings of the IPCC emerge. However despite this mountain of evidence, the political action that would make meaningful action to mitigate the worst of the potential consequences is still a long way off, with the US Senate’s decision not to even try to get a massively compromised bill through following in the wake of the inability of the world’s political leaders failure to reach any deal at COP15 in Copenhagen last December to succeed the emissions cuts of developed nations agreed under the Kyoto Protocol. With the US seemingly steadfast in its refusal to make any kind of cuts to its emissions, it seems unlikely that other developed nations are going to volunteer further reductions to their own emissions, no matter what the science says, as politicians are too fearful for their own careers, which are largely dependent on short term economic success rather than longer term sustainability.

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Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the edge of Chaos – Graeme Chesters and Ian Welsh

This book, published by Routledge in 2006, is a recent attempt at a sociological analysis of the alternative globalization movement (AGM) using a theoretical framework based on an almagamation of the works of Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri and Gregory Bateson, with complexity theory via D&G deployed to provide qualitative analysis of events such as the May Day 2000 demonstration, the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle and Prague, the actions of the Zapatistas and the emergent forms of global civil society which seek to impact on globalized capitalism such as the World and regional social fora.

In their introduction, Chesters and Welsh describe their work as ‘offering ‘a qualitative sociology of the philosophical postulates of Empire and Multitude advanced by Hardt and Negri, rendering tangible the agency and constitutive processes immanent within their works,’ (p3) although in several key areas Chesters and Welsh go beyond Hardt and Negri’s works, which in places can seem overly centred on finding a revolutionary subject for the network society, by mapping the vectors of contemporary social movements and seeking practical instantiation of how these movements connect and combine to create emergent formations capable of challenging neoliberal capitalism.

The approach pursued by Chesters and Welsh does closely correlate with Hardt and Negi’s theoretical works closely in several important ways however; firstly in contesting that ‘One must look outside the state at networked processes of interaction between state and non-state actors. This does not mean that the state is no longer important, but that we must consider the meshwork of national and extra-national political institutions, corporate and civil society actors that co-produce the effects of the global.’ (p95) That capitalist globalization and the rise of the network society means that activism can no longer be effective if aimed purely at a local level, as the larger scale assemblages of global finances can overcode and render such localism ineffective as an activist strategy.

A second important point of agreement between Hardt and Negri and Chesters and Welsh is that the formal structuring of activist movements plays an integral role in the way that they function, that an organization’s internal structure will effect the way that organization operates, and furthermore that contemporary AGM activism is centred around the form of the decentred network, and that this structure allows for a more inclusive and democratic mode of action than the 20th century models of the people’s army, unions or political parties. Indeed, while Chesters and Welsh stress the diverse array of influences on the AGM, socialism, liberalism, environmentalism and situationism, they emphasise the central role of anarchism in the democratic, reflexive and inclusive structuring of the movments ‘The logic of an anarchist stance is that revolution cannot be led by a vanguard party or sedimented through a revolutionary government or state as these forms lead back to the establishment of old habits of mind. Instead revolution requires the dissipative undermining of established institutional forms, not their re-titling.’ (p145)

Finally, Chesters and Welsh approach Hardt and Negri’s work in the way that they highlight the importance of information communications technologies and their usages to contemporary social movements, briefly examining the Zapatistas use of digital communications, and broaching the role played by Indymedia in the AGM.

‘These processes of physical interaction that characterise the global social movements – the protest actions, encuentros and social fora are further understood to be dynamically interconnected and co-extensive with a digital commons that underpins computer mediated communications and which co-constructs the rhizome of the AGM.’ (p103)

The area of media is frequently touched upon by Chesters and Welsh, both in terms of the mainstream media’s portrayal of the AGM as thugs which prevents communication of their goals and beleifs, and also in terms of Indymedia as an alternative to the mass media which presents a decentralized, less hierarchical and more transparent alternative, however one area where this book is perhaps lacking is an in depth investigation of Indymedia, and how Indymedia alongside other elements of the digital commons underpin the physical movements which are covered in considerably more depth through case studies.

Chester and Welsh describe the AGM as operating as:

‘a strange attractor reconfiguring public opposition to global neoliberalism whilst simultaneously creating ‘spaces’ where Alternatives Globalisation pathways are fused through a multiplicity of engaged actors. This is not an anti-movement, this is not a movement that can be subordinated to national analytical frameworks, this is not a movement that is going to go away.

This is a movement which prefigures social forms, social processes and social forces which will become normalized as mobility and the information age redistribute the affinities historically associated with space and place. (p1)

For Chesters and Welsh then, the AGM presents an embryonic set of processes whose dynamism and flexibility provide socially and environmentally sustainable alternatives to neoliberalism whose properties will become dominant social forms. Such claims are perhaps exaggerated, but nonetheless provide a valuable starting point for thinking about how the nonhierarchical, dynamic forms of direct democracy practised by actors within the AGM can be mobilised into dominant social forms, how activist practices can become mainstream.

Similar to Hardt and Negri, Chesters and Welsh are keen to stress that the AGM is not an anti-movement which seeks to resurrect a romanticized pre-globalized version of the nation state, but instead seeks to create sustainable and ethical alternatives to the inequalities wrought by neoliberal globalization, quoting Z magazine founder Michael Albert, who says

we want social and global ties to advance universal equity, solidarity, diversity and self-management, not to subjugate ever wider populations to an elite minority. We want to globalise equity not poverty, solidarity not anti-solidarity, diversity not conformity, democracy not subordination, and ecological balance not suicidal rapaciousness. (Albert 2001, www.globalpolicy.org) (p94)

Chesters and Welsh introduce the concept of an ‘ecology of action’ in an attempt to formulate how contemporary activist interventions effect social ties and structures.

The key to understanding the AGM is not to be found amongst individual actors be they groups or organisations. Instead we must focus our attention upon the processes of interaction between actors, to the iterative outcomes of reflexive framing and to the emergence of an ecology of action within Global Civil Society that is actualised through the AGM.(p101)

This concept is grounded in Bateson’s ecology of mind, in which pathalogical epistemological constructions had to be erased in order to conceptualize the subject outside of the boundaries created by conscious purpose (the ego). Chesters and Welsh seek to scale this concept upwards through Bateson’s three ecologies, from the ecology of mind to the ecology of society, specifically examining ways in which social forms and actions impact upon the social ecology, with a view to mobilising effective activist campaigns in order to affect change in the world.

In conclusion then, in Complexity and Social Movements Chesters and Welsh provide a sociological investigation into certain aspects of the Alternative Globalization movement, and contextaulise this within a theoretical framework drawing on complexity theory, Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, Bateson, Melucci and Goffman to provide a map of what they see to be an ecology of action, with the intent of understanding contemporary developments in activism with a view to energizing the ecology of action and creating positive changes in the world.

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The Three Ecologies – Felix Guattari

The Three Ecologies is one of the final works published by Felix Guattari (1930-1992), a French philosopher, political militant and institutional psychoanalyst. While Guattari is perhaps best known for his co-authored projects with Gilles Deleuze; Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy; The Three Ecologies provides an excellent insight into Guattari’s stance on politics, social movements and subjectivity.

The concept of the three ecologies; three interconnected networks existing at the scales of mind, society and the environment, was originally formulated by influential theorist Gregory Bateson in Steps to An Ecology of Mind, however Guattari seeks to elaborate and refine the concept in more detail, while additionally adding a more radical form of poststructuralist Marxism to Bateson’s ecological system.

Pre-empting the global networks of power and resistance described by Hardt and Negri in Empire and Multitude, Guattari argues that ‘The only true response to the ecological crisis is on a global scale, provided that it brings about an authentic political, social and cultural revolution, reshaping the objectives of the production of both material and immaterial assets.’ (28) Whereas previous revolutionary movements have concentrated on creating political changes at the level of the nation state, Guattari claims that the shared nature of the environment that we live in, and our collective impacts on it such as anthropogenic climate change, reveal the commons on which we are ultimately dependent, and thus the ecosophical position he advocates is one of global resistance to what he describes as ‘Integrated Wold Capitalism,’ which is very close to a less deeply theorised version of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, and resonates with Castells’ delineation of the rise of the network society, and Jameson’s understanding of postmodern capitalism.

Such a global and unificatory position may at first appear to contrast sharply with commonly understood models of postmodernism, which following Lyotard claim that postmodernity is marked by the death of the modernist meta-narrative, and indeed some such as George Myerson have claimed that ecology, and ecological crises mark the end of the fragmented and partial era of postmodernism. To such claims, Guattari argues that ‘The ecosophical perspective does not totally exclude unifying objectives such as the struggle against world hunger, an end to deforestation or to the blind proliferation of the nuclear industries; but it will no longer be a question of depending on reductionist, stereotypical orderworlds which only expropriate other more singular problematics and lead to the promotion of charismatic leaders.’ (34) While ecosophy can hold unifying ideas and objectives, these do not insist on a scalar homogeneity – difference and plurality are encouraged at each of the levels of ecology, mind, society and environment – however these differences themselves are not absolute, and so limited unifying objectives aimed at securing freedoms and rights for all subjects are possible under such a philosophical framework.

Consequently Guattari’s argument is that ‘Environmental ecology, as it exists today, has barely begun to prefigure the generalised ecology that I advocate here, the aim of which will be to radically decentre social struggles and ways of coming into one’s own psyche… Ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority. Ecology in my sense questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power formations.’ (2) For Guattari then, as with Bateson, ecology is far more than a concern for the environment, it is an epistemological system based on an understanding of nonlinear systems governed by feedback loops and nonlinear causality. An understanding of connectivity, of balanced systems, network topography and complexity theory are fundamental to the way in which this ecosophical model operates. In contrast to a capitalist system predicated on economic growth, Guattari’s ecosophy seeks balance allied with a reevaluation of what we value; going well beyond GDP as an indicator of quality of life, in what can be understood as a decentred socialism, or ecologically informed variant of anarchism, where goals are collectively negotiated rather than dictated by economic elites.

According to Guattari, creating such an ecosophical society requires a reorientation of thought, so that we understand ourselves, the society we live in and the ecosystem we inhabit as three different scales of ecology, linked by a series of processes (or abstract machines). ‘Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mecanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think ‘transversally’. (43) Indeed Guattari goes as far as to argue that ‘It is quite wrong to make a distinction between action on the psyche, the socius and the environment. Refusal to face up to the erosion of these three areas, as the media would have us do verges on a strategic infantilization of opinion and a destructive neutralization of democracy. We need to kick the habit of sedative discourse, particularly the ‘fix’ of television, in order to apprehend the world through the interchangeable lenses of the three ecologies.’ (42)

The role of mediated communications occupies a central position for Guattari, and he is particularly scathing about the effects of television as a centralising and hierarchical media which privileges economic and social elites’ perspective on public discourse, effectively negating the potentiality for a dialogic and democratic debate about how to create more sustainable and equitable relationships within and between the three ecologies. Indeed, Guattari states that ‘An essential programmatic point for social ecology will be to make the transition from the mass media era to the post-media age, in which the media will be re appropriated by a multitude of groups capable of directing its resingularization. Despite the seeming impossibility of such an eventuality, the current unparalleled level of media-related alienation is in no way an inherent necessity.’

The three ecologies was written a few years before the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee, and Guattari’s death meant that he never saw the explosion of user-generated content and dialogic forms of communication which are currently to be found online, and it would have been fascinating to learn as to whether Guattari would classify some of the co-creative models for collaborative communication such as; Indymedia’s open publishing or the wiki’s used by sites such as Wikipedia and Crocodyl, as examples of ecosophic media.

One hugely positive message to be found within the ecological warning of impending disaster across all three ecological registers (the increase of mental health disorders and stress related disorder; warfare, failed states run by competing warlords, the rise of right wing religious fundamentalisms in both the East and the West, and of course the ecological crises of anthropogenic global warming and natural resource depletion) is that the solutions to these problems are already at our doorsteps. ‘Wherever we turn, there is the same nagging paradox: on the one hand, the continuous development of new techno scientific means to potentially resolve the dominant ecological issues and restate socially useful activities on the surface of the planet, and, on the other hand the inability of organised social forces and constituted subjective formations to take hold of these resources in order to make them work.’ (31) Industrial capitalism has enhanced our knowledge and technological capabilities beyond belief. Yet despite this technical and scientific advancement we still are faced with massive inequalities of wealth, poverty on an enormous scale, millions of annual deaths from easily treatable diseases and numerous wars, both between and inside states. As Martin Luther King famously stated back in the 1960’s “We have learned to swim the seas like fish, and fly the skies like birds, but we have not learned to walk the earth like brothers.’ Guattari’s ecosophy then is a philosophical attempt to remedy this situation, calling for a new way of understanding the world and our place in it allied with a new method of being to create an ecologically sustainable and socially equitable world.

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