[ICTs-and-Society] Pre-Conference Online Discussion

[Marcus Breen]

Hi Everyone,

The questions around institutional politics  are significant because when they are unpacked they lead to theoretical opportunities about the organization of society. I have argued in Uprising: the Internet's Unintended Consequences that the unregulated Internet has generated a new proletarianization. Here, even the abject can find a voice, represent themselves and seek emancipation. How this plays out is not with the end of institutions, rather the formation of new ones. This is where Zizek is helpful - we will see emancipation of the abject without recourse to bourgeois morality and at the same time we see the bourgeoise state apply itself to emancipation from established standards of behavior in the interests not so much of citizens as what Veblen called vested interests. The outcome will be new institutions that facilitate massive autonomous domains of existence in a complex, distributed system. This is also the moment Hardt and Negri have discussed.

Cheers,

Marcus

Marcus Breen
Professor, Head of School
Communication and Media
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Bond University, Gold Coast
Australia

On 23/01/2012, at 12:54 AM, "Louis Suárez-Potts" <luispo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Good points all and my response here does not do them justice…. but
> one comment below:
> 
> On 21 January 2012 04:37, Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>> Foucault writes in Security Teritory Population that politics mediates
>> between populations and environments. The question then is this: at what
>> stage can a population become its own environment, and thus do away with
>> the necessity for institutional politics?
> 
> Let's reverse things and suppose that rather than wait for the
> institution to institute a political movement, that populations
> ("public", in Warner's usage) make themselves more by accidental or
> casual assemblage than anything planned according to institutional
> precepts, and it is only *after* the assemblage is in fact *there*
> that it gains the imprimatur--appellation--of being. That is, I think
> that one thing ArabSpring has demonstrated, as well as the Occupy
> incidents, is that action happens even without a clear politics, but
> that for it to sustain itself, it really does need to enter into the
> economy of identity structured by the forms of power and thus politics
> we are all familiar with.
> 
> But that doesn't mean that "subversion" (sigh… so 80s) is impossible:
> quite the opposite. It's rather happening all the time, everywhere,
> and more such events will take place and then, one day, the cultural
> and political landscape really will be different, though it will
> persist in seeming the same. And ICT is accelerating that, just as--as
> Zizek pointed out in his recent LRB article--it's also accelerating
> the opposite.
> 
> Cheers,
> louis
> t is
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