At first glance the concept of “organised networks” appears oxymoronic. In technical terms, all networks are organised. There are founders, administrators, moderators and active members who all take up roles. Think also back to the early work on cybernetics and the “second order” cybernetics of Bateson and others. Networks consist of mobile relations whose arrangement at any particular time is shaped by the “constitutive outside” of feedback or noise.[1] The order of networks is made up of a continuum of relations governed by interests, passions, affects and pragmatic necessities of different actors. The network of relations is never static, but this is not to be mistaken for some kind of perpetual fluidity. Ephemerality is not a condition to celebrate for those wishing to function as political agents.

Why should networks get organised? Isn’t their chaotic, disorganised nature a good thing that needs to be preserved? Why should the informal atmosphere of a network be disturbed? Don’t worry. Organised networks do not yet exist. The concept presented here is to be read as a proposal, a draft, in the process of becoming that needs active steering through disagreement and collective elaboration.[2] What it doesn’t require is instant deconstruction. Everyone can do that. Needless to say, organised networks have existed for centuries. Just think of the Jesuits. The history of organised networks can and will be written, but that doesn’t advance our inquiry for now. The networks we are talking about here are specific in that they are situated within digital media. They can be characterised by their advanced irrelevance and invisibility for old media and p-in-p (people in power). General network theory might be useful for enlightenment purposes, but it won’t answer the issues that new media based social networks face. Does it satisfy you to know that molecules and DNA patterns also network?

There are no networks outside of society. Like all human-techno entities, they are infected by power. Networks are ideal Foucault machines. They undermine power as they produce it. Their diagram of power may operate on a range of scales, traversing intra-local networks and overlapping with trans-national insurgencies. No matter how harmless they seem, networks ignite differences. Foucault’s dictum: power produces. Translate this over to organised networks and you get the force of invention. Indeed, translation is the condition of invention. Mediology, as defined by Régis Debray (1996), is the practice of invention within the social-technical system of networks. As a collaborative method of immanent critique, mediology assembles a multitude of components upon a network of relations as they coalesce around situated problems and unleashed passions. In this sense, the network constantly escapes attempts of command and control. Such is the entropic variability of networks.

The opposite of organised networks is not chaos. Organised networks routinely intervene into the radical temporality of today’s mediasphere. Short-termism is the prevailing condition that inflicts governments, corporations, and everyday life. Psycho-pharmacology is the bio-technical management of this condition (Bifo, 2005). Organised networks offer another possibility – the possibility of creativity, invention and purpose that is not determined in the first instance by the creaking, frequently bewildered grasps at maintaining control, as witnessed across a range of institutions that emerged during the era of the modern state and persist to this day within the complex of the corporate-state, which continues to maintain a monopoly on legitimate violence.

Network users do not see their circle of peers as a sect. Users are not political party members. Quite the opposite. Ties are loose, up to the point of breaking up. Thus the ontology of the user, in so many ways, mirrors the logic of capital. Indeed, the “user” is the identity par excellence of capital that seeks to extract itself from rigid systems of regulation and control. Increasingly the user has become a term that corresponds with the auto-configuration of self-invention. Some would say the user is just a consumer: silent and satisfied, until hell breaks lose. The user is the identity of control by other means. In this respect, the user is the empty vessel awaiting the spectral allure of digital commodity cultures and their promise of “mobility” and “openness”. Let us harbour no fantasies: sociality is intimately bound within the dynamic array of technics exerted by the force of capital. Networks are everywhere. The challenge for the foreseeable future is to create new openings, new possibilities, new temporalities and new spaces within which life may assert its insistence for an ethico-aesthetic existence.

Notworking is Networking

Organised networks should be read as a proposal aimed to replace the problematic term virtual community.[3] Organised networks also supersede the level of individual blogging, whose logic of networks does not correspond with the concept we develop here. It is with some urgency that internal power relations within networks are placed on the agenda. Only then can we make a clear break with the invisible workings of electronic networks that defined the consensus era. Organised networks are “clouds” of social relationships in which disengagement is pushed to the limit. Community is an idealistic construct and suggests bonding and harmony, which often is simply not there. The same could be said of the post-911 call for “trust”.

Networks thrive on diversity and conflict (the notworking), not on unity, and this is what community theorists are unable to reflect upon. For community advocates, disagreement equals a disruption of the “constructive” flow of dialogue. It takes effort to reflect on distrust as a productive principle. Indifference between networks is one of the main reasons not to get organised, so this aspect has to be taken seriously. Interaction and involvement are idealistic constructs. What organised networks also do is question the presumed innocence of the chattering and gossiping networks. Networks are not the opposite of organisations in the same way as the real is not opposed to the virtual. Instead, we should analyse networks as an emerging social and cultural form. Networks are “precarious” and this vulnerability should be seen as both its strength and its weakness.

In the information society passivity rules. Browsing, watching, reading, waiting, thinking, deleting, chatting, skipping and surfing are the default conditions of online life. Total involvement implies madness to the highest degree. What characterises networks is a shared sense of a potentiality that does not have to be realised. Millions of replies from all to all would cause every network, no matter what its architecture, to implode. Within every network there are prolonged periods of interpassivity, interrupted by outbursts of interactivity. Networks foster and reproduce loose relationships – and it’s better to face this fact straight in the eye. They are hedonistic machines of promiscuous contacts. Networked multitudes create temporary and voluntary forms of collaboration that transcend but do not necessary disrupt the Age of Disengagement.

The concept of organised networks is useful to enlist for strategic purposes. After a decade of “tactical media” the time has come to scale up the operations of radical media practices. We should all well and truly have emerged from the retro-fantasy of the benevolent welfare state. Networks will never be rewarded and “embedded” in well funded structures. Just as the modernist avant-garde saw itself punctuating the fringes of society, so have tactical media taken comfort in the idea of targeted micro interventions. Tactical media too often assume to reproduce the curious spatio-temporal dynamic and structural logic of the modern state and industrial capital: difference and renewal from the peripheries. But there’s a paradox at work here. Disruptive as their actions may often be, tactical media corroborate the temporal mode of post-Fordist capital: short-termism.

It is retrograde that tactical media in a post-Fordist era continue to operate in terms of ephemerality and the logic of “tactics”. Since the punctuated attack model is the dominant condition, tactical media has an affinity with that which it seeks to oppose. This is why tactical media are treated with a kind of benign tolerance. There is a neurotic tendency to disappear. Anything that solidifies is lost in the system. The ideal is to be little more than a temporary glitch, a brief instance of noise or interference. Tactical media set themselves up for exploitation in the same manner that “modders” do in the game industry: both dispense with their knowledge of loop holes in the system for free. They point out the problem, and then run away. Capital is delighted, and thanks the tactical media outfit or nerd-modder for the home improvement.

The paradigm of neoliberalism is extensive throughout the bio-technical apparatus of social life. And this situation is immanent to the operation of radical media cultures, regardless of whether they are willing to admit it. The alarm bells will only start ringing when tactical media cranks up its operations. And when this happens, the organised network emerges as the modus operandi. Radical media projects will then escape the bemused paternalism of the state-as-corporation.

But make no mistake, the emergence of organised networks amounts to an articulation of info-war. This battle currently revolves around the theme of “sustainability”. It is no accident that sustainability is the meme of the moment, since it offers the discursive and structural leverage required by neoliberal governments and institutions wishing to extricate themselves from responsibility to annoying constituencies. Organised networks are required to invent models of sustainability that go beyond the latest Plan of Action update, which is only then inserted into paper shredders of member states and “citizen friendly” businesses.

The empty centre of neoliberalism is sociality. The organised network is part of a larger scramble to fill that void. The competing interests that surround the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) debates and activities is just one example. On a more mundane, national level, one only has to cast an eye toward the new legitimacy granted to the church as a provider of social “services”. Civil society, in short, is replacing the ground of the social. But the assertion of the social is underpinned by ongoing antagonisms. The rise of rightwing populism is an example of how open the empty centre is to a tolerance of fundamentalism.

New Institutional Forms

Organised networks compete with established institutions in terms of branding and identity building, but it is as sites of knowledge production and concept development that primarily defines the competitive edge of organised networks. These days, most bricks and mortar institutions can only subtract value from networks. They are not merely unwilling but in fact incapable of giving anything back. Virtual networks are not yet represented in negotiations over budgets, grants, investments and job hiring. At best they are seen as sources of inspiration amongst peers. This is where the real potential of virtual networks lies – they are enhancement engines. When they work well, they can inspire new expressions, new socialities, new technics.

The organised network is a hybrid formation: part tactical media, part institutional formation.[4] There are benefits to be obtained from both these lineages. The clear distinction of the organised network is that its institutional logic is internal to the socio-technical dimensions of the media of communication. This means there is no universal formula for how an organised network might invent its conditions of existence. There will be no “internationalism” for networks.

While we have outlined the background condition of neoliberalism as integral to the emergence of organised networks, it also has to be said that just as uneven modernities created vastly different social and national experiences and formations, from the East to the West, from North to South, so too does capital in its neoliberal phase manifest in a plurality of ways. The diversity of conditions attached to free-trade agreements is just one example of the multiple forms of capital. From the standpoint of analysis, the understanding of capital is always going to vary according to the range of inputs one defines as constituting the action of capital. Similarly, no two organised networks will develop in the same manner, since their conditions of emergence are always internal to the situation at hand.

Eventually organised networks will be mirrored against the networked organisation. But we’re not there yet. There will not be an easy synthesis. Roughly speaking, one can witness a “convergence” between the informality of virtual networks and the formality of institutions. This process, however, is anything but harmonious. Clashes between networks and organisations are occurring before our very eyes. Disputes condition and are internal to the creation of new institutional forms. Debris spreads in every possible direction, depending on the locality. The networked multitude, one could say, is constituted – and crushed – as a part of this process. In this sense, a new political subject is required, one that emerges out of the current state of disorganisation that defines the multitude. It is naïve to believe that, under the current circumstances, networks will win this battle (if you want to put it in those terms). This is precisely why networks need their own form of organisation. In this process they will have to deal with the following three aspects: accountability, sustainability and scalability.

Let’s start with the question of who networks represent, or if indeed they hold such a capacity, and what form of internal democracy they envision. Formal networks have members but most online initiatives don’t. Let’s face it. Networks disintegrate traditional forms of representation. This is what makes the question ‘Did blogs affect the 2004 US-election?’ so irrelevant. The blogosphere, at best, influenced a hand-full of TV and newspaper editors. Instead of spreading the word, the Net has questioned authority – any authority – and therefore was not useful to push this or that candidate up the rating-scale of electoral appeal. Networks that thrive higher up will eventually fail because they will be incorporated and thus degenerate into the capitalist mainstream. No matter what you think of Derrida, networks do not deconstruct society. It is deep linkage that matters, not some symbolic coup d’état. If there is an aim, it would be to parallel hegemony, which can only be achieved if underlying premises are constantly put under scrutiny by the initiators of the next techno-social wave of innovations.

The rise of “community informatics” as a field of research and project building could be seen as an exemplary platform that could deal with the issues treated here.[5] Yet for all the interest community informatics has in building projects “from below”, a substantial amount of research within this field is directed toward “e-democracy” issues. It is time to abandon the illusion that the myths of representational democracy might somehow be transferred and realised within networked settings. That is not going to happen. After all, the people benefiting from such endeavours as the World Summit of the Information Society are, for the most part, those on the speaking and funding circuits, not people who are supposedly represented in such a process. Networks call for a new logics of politics, one based not just on a handpicked collection of NGOs that have identified themselves as “global civil society”.

Networks are not institutions of representative democracy, despite the frequency with which they are expected to model themselves on such failed institutions. Instead, there is a search for “non-representational democratic” models of decision making that avoid classical models of representation and related identity politics. The emerging theme of non-representative democracies places an emphasis on process over its after-effect, consensus. Certainly, there’s something attractive in process-oriented forms of governance. But ultimately the process model is about as sustainable as an earthworks sculpture burrowed into a patch of dirt called the 1970s. Process is fine as far as it integrates a plurality of forces into the network. But the primary questions remain: Where does it go? How long does it last? Why do it in the first place? But also: who is speaking? And: why bother? A focus on the vital forces that constitute socio-technical life is thus required. Herein lie the variability and wildcards of organised networks. The persistence of dispute and disagreement can be taken as a given. Rational consensus models of democracy have proven, in their failure, that such underlying conditions of social-political life cannot be eradicated.

Money Matters

Organised networks have to be concerned with their own sustainability. Networks are not hypes. We’ve passed the nineties and that potlatch era will not return. Networks may look temporary but are here to stay, despite their constant transformations. Individual cells might die off sooner rather than later but there is a Will to Contextualise that is hard to suppress. Links may be dead at some point but that’s not the end of the data itself. Nonetheless networks are extremely fragile. This may all sound obvious, but let’s not forget that pragmatism is built upon the passions, joys and thrills of invention. Something will be invented to bridge time and this something we might call the organised network. Time has come for cautious planning. There is a self-destructive tendency of networks faced with the challenge of organisation. Organised networks have to feel confident about defining their value systems in ways meaningful and relevant to the internal operations of their social-technical complex. That’s actually not so difficult. The danger is ghettoisation. The trick is to work out a collaborative value system able to deal with issues such as funding, internal power plays and the demand for “accountability” and “transparency” as they scale up their operations.

So let’s get monetary. Organised networks first and foremost have to keep their virtual house in order. It is of strategic importance to use a non-profit provider (ISP) and have backups made, or even run a mirror in another country. Also, it is wise not to make use of commercial services such as Yahoo!Groups, Hotmail, Geocities or Google, as they are unreliable and suffer from regular security breaches. Be aware of costs for the domain names, e-mail addresses, storage and bandwidth, even if they are relatively small. Often conflicts arise because passwords and ownership of the domain name are in the hands of one person that is leaving the group in a conflict situation. This can literally mean the end of the project.

Networks are never 100 per cent virtual and always connected at some point with the monetary economy, which, in case we’ve forgotten, is in so many ways a material culture. This is where the story of organised networks start. Perhaps incorporation is necessary. If you do not want to bother the network with legal matters, keep in mind what the costs of not going there will be. Funding for online activities, meetings, editorial work, coding, design, research or publications can of course be channelled through allied institutions. Remember that the more online activities you unfold, the more likely it is that you will have to pay for a network administrator.

The inward looking free software world only uses its paradise-like voluntary work rules for its own coding projects. Cultural, artistic and activist projects do not fall under this category, no matter how politically correct they might be. The same counts for content editors and web designers. Ideally, online projects are high on communitarian spirits and are able to access the necessary skills. But the further we leave behind the moment of initiation, the more likely it will be that work will have to be paid. Organised networks have to face this economic reality or find themselves marginalised, no matter how advanced their dialogues and network use might be. Talk about the rise of “immaterial labour” and “precarious work” is useful, but could run out of steam as it remains incapable of making the jump from speculative reflection to a political agenda that will outline how networks can be funded over time.

Organised networks are always going to face great difficulty in raising financial resources through the traditional monetary system. It is not easy to attract funding from any of the traditional sectors of government, private philanthropy or business. Alternatives need to be created. Arguably, the greatest asset of organised networks consists of what they do: exchanging information and conducting debates on mailing lists; running public education programs and archiving education resources; open publishing of magazines, journals and books; organising workshops, meetings, exhibitions and conferences; providing an infrastructure that lends itself to rapid connections and collaborations amongst participants and potential partners; hosting individual web sites, wikis and blogs, etc.

All of these activities can be understood as media of communication and exchange. This quality lends itself to translation into what Bernard Lietaer – co-designer of the Euro and researcher of “complementary currencies” – defines as currency in its multiple uses and forms: ‘an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange’ (Dykema and Lietaer, 2003). Lietaer says there are over 4000 forms of complementary currencies worldwide, from the customer loyalty systems of frequent flyer memberships to community development currencies in Bali. The LETS system is perhaps one of the better known alternative forms of complementary currency for those in the West.

In Japan, credit-for-care tickets can be accumulated for services not supported by the national health insurance system. Credits can then be used to pay for university tuition fees, or they may be transferred to another family member who is in need of domestic assistance. Lietaer makes reference to a survey in which elderly people in Japan preferred care services paid for with “fureai kippu” (caring relationship tickets) over services paid for in yen. Such a form of affective labour addresses many of the problems and difficulties faced by aging populations.

The primary difference between conventional and complementary currencies rests on the different regimes of value inscribed upon the mode of labour and the logic of exchange. Lietaer: ‘Conventional currencies are built to create competition, and complementary currencies are built to create cooperation and community…’. The tension between multiple currency systems constitutes a form of mixed economies, and mitigates any tendency to get washed away by the euphoria of feel-good complementarity.

If there is a decision to be made, and an enemy to be singled out, it’s the techno-libertarian religion of the “free”. It’s high time to openly attack the cynical logic of do-good venture capitalists that preach giving away content for no money while making millions of dollars in the back room with software, hardware and telco-infrastructure, which the masses of amateur idiots need in order to give and take for free. Organised networks are wary of the gurus on high consultancy fees who “inspire” others that they should make a living out of selling t-shirts: ‘You poor bugger, fool around with your funky free content, while we make the money with the requirements’. It is time to unveil this logic and publicly resist it. Knowing is not enough.

The key point of networks is not so much their form of organisation but the fact that the business model has been on the agenda. The networked organisation, however, is setting the terms for entry into economic sustainability. Whereas the precursors to the organised network – lists, collaborative blogs, alternative media, etc. – are used to being on the vanguard of inquiry and practice, at the same time there is an undeniable distrust towards the networked organisations. For too long the ghetto of list cultures has resulted in a self-affirmation that is now a major obstacle to the possibility to scalability. What is required for the organised network to scale up? A transparency of formalisation and shift in the division of labour? It is well known that formal networked organisations are the darlings of funding bodies, whereas real existing networks miss out because they fail to undertake the proper lobby work and cannot adequately represent themselves. It is ironic that it is exactly the global nature of networks that makes it next to impossible to fund them. There are no global funds for global networks – despite all the nineties rhetoric.

Scalar Relations

Let’s turn, now, to perhaps the least investigated aspect of scalability. Why is it so difficult for networks to scale up? There seems to be a tendency to split up in a thousand micro conversations. This also counts for the “social software” blogs like Orkut, Friendster and LinkIn, in which millions from all over the globe participate. For the time being it is only the geeky Slashdot that manages to centralise conversations amongst the tens of thousands of its online users. Electronic mailing lists do not seem to get above a few thousand before the conversation actually slows down, heavily moderated as it often is. The ideal size for an in-depth, open discussion still seems to be somewhere between 50 and 500 participants. What does this mean for the networked multitudes? To what extent is this all a software issue?[6] Could the necessary protocols be written up by women? Well, of course, but what protocols would be adopted in such a case? Can we imagine very large-scale conversations that do not only make sense but also have an impact? What network cultures can become large transformative institutions?

Perhaps organised networks will always remain virtual. This option should never be dropped. There is no secret plan to institutionalise in the brick and mortar world. Maybe organised networks cannot work in collaboration with existing institutional structures. If so, how might the virtual be formalised? By this we don’t mean formalisation in the old sense whereby the network takes on a hierarchical structure made up of a director, an elected secretariat, and so forth. Such a model was adopted by the grassroots movements of the 60s and 70s, and is now the primary reason why such entities are unable to deal with the demands and realities of networked sociality. Against this mode of formalisation, how might informality acquire an organised response to the unpredictability of needs and crisis and the rhythms of global capital?

As unstable as this model may sound, perhaps it is the form best suited to the habitus of networks, as we’ve sketched out above. It is necessary, after all, to identify the characteristics, tendencies and limits – that’s to say, the short history – of the network, and develop a plan from there. There’s no point assuming that established patterns of communication and practice can somehow be evaporated and entirely new projects started afresh. To do so would mean the invention of a new network, and that would mean undertaking that time-consuming work of defining practices and protocols through experimentation, trial and error. By all means, let’s see new networks emerge – they will in any case. But the solution is not to abandon the hard labour, accumulated resources, and curious network personas – or brand, if you like – that have already been cultivated. Let’s take the next step.

While it seems that we’re forever in some perpetual crisis and phase of transition, now really is the time for the organised network to establish the ground upon which new politics, new economies, and new cultures may emerge within the dynamics of the social-technical system. In this way, the network opens up to an entirely new range of external variables that in turn function to transform the internal operation of the network. Such is the work of the constitutive outside – a process of post-negativity in which rupture and antagonism affirms the future life of the network. The tension between internal dynamics and external forces comprise a new ground of “the political”.

Radical democracy theorists are still so slow and far away from recognising this new field of techno-sociality. Where they posit a negation of social antagonisms within ideologies such as the Third Way, and thus identify the disintegration of liberal democratic principles, the emergence of organised networks, by contrast, are constituted precisely in this denial of antagonisms by the culture of liberal democracy. The institutional structures of liberal democracy have become disconnected from the field of sociality, and in so doing are unable to address the antagonisms of the political. Antagonisms do not evacuate the scene so much as take flight into new terrains of communication. The organised network is open to the antagonisms that comprise social-technical relations. For this reason, it is urgent that organised networks confront the demands of scale and sustainability in order to create new institutional horizons within which conflicts find a space of expression and a capacity for invention.

Accompanying such a transformation is the recognition of power structures and the fact that organised networks will always be shut out of them. There are also internal informal power structures – a recognition of which is the first step towards transparency. Too often the denial of existing structures prevents a discussion of how new forms of organisation could emerge. The prevailing assumption of decentralisation shuts down debate and imagination of how things could be done differently. Moreover, it reproduces the absolute power of the geeks. For them, it’s not an issue because they can safely continue their engineering class without having to confront the urgency of translation that accompanies networks seeking to deal with the turmoil of new socialities.

Similarly, the structures that call themselves networks deny how centralised they are. Here, we are thinking of the proliferation of “research networks” within universities. There is an amazing confusion about what networks are within these settings. In many ways, such obfuscation is quite deliberate: since the institution of the university – a networked organisation – is beyond repair and unable to deal with the complexities of an informatised society, it is no wonder that we see this latest attempt at window dressing. There is a bizarre assumption that if governments and funding bodies throw money at projects that demonstrate a correspondence with networks – whatever that might mean – then, by some peculiar magical process, “innovation” (another quite meaningless term) will emerge. And what do you know, the procedure for submitting proposals, developing research partners, justifying budgets, outlining time schedules, undertaking research, and so on and so forth is exactly the same as the previous year of harvesting. The result: the existing elites are rewarded, and power is consolidated through the much more accurate model of the “cluster” (a rather ugly word that finds its birthplace in the school playground). There is no chance for these so-called networks to encounter infection. Quarantined inquiry is what these research networks are all about. Why? Because there is a complete failure to engage the technics of communications media in the first instance, to say nothing of the dependency model of funding which simply functions to reproduce the same.

Libertarian Legacies

Organised networks have their own problems to confront. Because of the lack of transparency about who is in charge of operations and project development, they are considerably slowed down. This is also a question of software architecture – the fact that we can’t vote every month for who is the moderator for the month. There’s no technical reason why we don’t have this. Rather, it points again to the culture of networks – these can change fast in terms of applications, but not in terms of ideologies. To illustrate these issues, we’ll turn now to a discussion of blogs, wikis and Creative Commons.

The blog is another technology of networks, one whose logic is that of the link. The link enhances visibility through a ranking system. This is how the blogger tackles the question of scale. But the question of scale cannot be reduced to one of scarcity. The technics of the blog don’t add up to what we’re calling organised networks. The blogger does not have infinite possibility but is governed by a moment of decision. This does not arise out of scarcity, since there is the ability of machines to read other machines. Rather, there are limits that arise out of the attention economy and out of affinity: I share your culture, I don’t share you culture; I like you, I don’t like you. Here we see a new cartography of power that is peculiar to a symbolic economy of networks.

Quite importantly, the decisionism of the link constitutes a new field of the political. This is where schizo-production comes to an end. The naïve 90s Deleuzomania would say everything connects with everything. Technically speaking there’s no reason why you can’t include all the links of the world – this is what the Internet Archive does. The blog, however, is unable to do this – not due to a lack of space, since space is endlessly extensive through the logic of the link. Nor is this really an issue of resources. Instead, it is an issue that attends the enclave culture of blogs. They are zones of affinity with their own protectionist policies. If you’re high up on the blog-scale of desirable association, the political is articulated by the endless requests for linkage. These cannot all be met, however, and resentment if not enemies are born. The enemy is always kept on the outside. They remain invisible. As such, the blog is closed to change. Blogs can thus be understood as incestuous networks of auto-reproduction.

Since organised networks comprise new institutional forms whose relations are immanent to the media of communication, we can say that ultimately the blog does not correspond with the organised network. The outside for organised networks always plays a constitutive role in determining the direction, shape and actions of the network. This is not the case for the blog, where the enemy is never present, never visible, since the network of the blog is the link, and the link is the friend.

Having said this, why is the blog visible in the mainstream media in a way that the organised network is not? Blogging started as a commentary on the mainstream media: TV, newspapers and their websites. At a discursive level the blog was operating internally to mainstream media. In a genealogical sense the blog was part of the news industry. The main controversy within the news industry has been whether or not bloggers can be considered as qualified journalists. This is part of a broader problem of categorisation of the blogger: they are not poets, writers, scholars, etc. Nowadays, the blogger has become a profession with a professional code of ethics and job description, yet they are still working in conditions we associate with post-Fordist flexible labour. Paradoxically, then, the blogger is currently expunged and questioned by the networked organisation.

The deep necessity or precondition of the blogger is not so much their networking capacity, since they are performing the self. Networking is secondary. But if you had a blogger who is self-performing without linking, they would remain invisible. Without the link you are non-existent. Thus their self-performance is identical to linking. However, there is a difference between networking and linking. There is a strong social network amongst bloggers, one that is highly intimate and highly disclosing of personal details. In that sense we can see a correspondence between the blog and reality television – the latter, of course, is pretty much completely opposite to the logic of networks. So in terms of remediation, to what extent does this anti-networking character of reality TV carry over to blogs?

This is where we need to readdress the idea of the political. As we have noted, with the blog, the political corresponds with the moment of linking, which is technically facilitated by the software, how it works, and the decisions that need to be made. Just as the blog is a self-performance, so too is the instantiation of the political. Both are an invisible undertaking. The fact that I do NOT link to you remains invisible. The unanswered email is the most significant one. So while the blog has some characteristics of the network, it is not open, it cannot change, because it closes itself to the potential for change and intervention. With the blog, you can comment but you cannot post. Your comments might even be taken down.

The blog, along with other social networks such as Friendster, Orkut and so forth, is finally characterised in terms of the software that refuses antagonisms. The early version of Orkut had a software interface that cut straight to the issue: ‘Are you my friend? Yes/No’. Only very few have the courage to tell someone straight in the face: ‘No’. Seriously, what choice is there here, except to create an inflation of friends? We all want them. We find ourselves back to the 17 stages of joy. Nirvanaland. This is New Age revivalism at work, desperately insecure, and in search of a “friend”.

The wiki offers another example of organised networks with its own specific social-technical characteristics. Here a collective intelligence is created, produced as a resource immanent to the media form. Yet it’s important to understand that the wiki model will not work in all cultures and countries. The wiki is specific. It is a collaborative operation. You can have as many ideas as you want but this doesn’t mean they will translate into a resource. The technical facilities on their own will not explain the story. Japanese and Chinese cultures, for example, do not like full visibility: to be seen, heard, or read. Why would they collaborate on these projects? Then think of the political histories of countries. The wiki presumes there is a willingness to work in the public and share knowledge. These are not universal values or aspirations.

The key to networks is the tension between open and closed systems of communication, ideas and action. For the most part, e-democracy folk are unreconstructed techno-libertarians. The Creative Commons movement is also caught up in this persona, as if it’s still 1999. Increasingly, we are seeing advocates of the Creative Commons license claiming they are “not political”, as if this gesture will somehow enamour them to old-style institutions and publishing industries they are seeking to coax over to the other side. There is a naïve assumption that if Creative Commons can dissociate itself from leftist movements in particular, then they will have greater success in promoting Creative Commons as a dominant alternative to the strictures of IP regimes. There is, however, no escape from politics, and the libertarian ethos of Lessig and his cohorts would do well to be more clear about this.

The rhetoric of openness, shared by advocates of Creative Commons and libertarians, has purchase on governments who also trade in political populism. Yet it disguises the political motivations and economic interests at work in these projects. The libertarian geek elite has so far effectively stopped networks from mobilising their own financial resources. Most famously, there is the inability of networks to effectively work with micro-payment systems in the form of membership fees, software, etc. The libertarian geek option gives you one option: you give everything away for nothing and we’ll take the money. Academic databases are an exception, where content (business data, reports, articles, etc.) can be accessed for substantial subscription fees. Institutions are fine with this arrangement, and don’t seem too concerned about subsidising these information services and publishing industries. The telcos also do okay – it’s the poor hackers, activists, artists and amateur intellectuals that get burnt.

The provocation of organised networks is to unveil these mechanisms of control and contradiction, to discuss the power of money flows, and to redirect funds. The organised network struggles with its own informality. This isn’t a case of wanting a piece of the pie – organised networks don’t even get a taste. No, organised networks want the whole bloody bakery! They are not examples for the network economy. Even in the case of Creative Commons, which do have a beta model of redistributing finance, this in fact is incredibly retrograde since it multiplies the necessity of intermediaries – a function eradicated in post-Fordist economies. You cannot earn money from content, only provide services around it. In this 90s model of an information economy, the thing itself borders on being an untouchable sacred object, despite its banality. Again: the organised network has to break with the “information must be free” logic in order to move towards sustainability.

Angel Investors

The libertarian ideology hides its own mechanisms of making money. Libertarian open source movements are no different at the level of structure, organisation and financing from the monopoly of corporations involved in video game production. Tactically they focus on the right to remix, the basis of all creativity. Sure, this is nice. It goes back to the idea that all culture is distilled from a basic, common source. Organised networks wish to undertake projects, and to do this requires resources and financing beyond simply a capacity to mix code. In this sense, there is a parallel here to organised crime, whose aim is to redistribute stolen resources and property.

Organised crime is involved in translation. In terms of what networks are and ought to be, this element is consciously excluded in the software architecture and beyond. The repurposing and redirecting of financial resources appropriated by organised criminal networks is precisely what enables them to proliferate. Organised networks have a lot to learn from the creativity of criminal industries if they wish to address the problem of sustainability (see Gye, 2004). So here’s your “get out of jail free” card: criminal networks can be understood as an equivalent resource to the ‘presence of organised networks of individual angel investors’ (ELF, 2002).

Since organised networks are seemingly in a condition of perpetual exclusion from conventional, institutional modes of financing, then there is really only one option left: to leave the network, or alternatively, to understand the logic of crime. There isn’t much to obtain from the open source gurus. At least they have not totally captured the attention of so-called Internet culture and research. Instead, they have migrated over to traditional cultural institutions, which now consider open source as the primary model. This will be an interesting experiment to observe, since the open source model goes against the border controls of the traditional institution. Whether such institutions are able fully to embrace the logic of open distribution and retain both their brand and funding capacity remains to be seen.

Given that the organised network has no financial basis for its activities, why, then is accountability an issue here? This, of course, relates back to the question of transparency, governance and control, and thus the structural dynamics of networks. This is a matter of making visible the capacities of the network to undergo transformation precisely due to the way in which accountability reveals limits. What does accountability mean outside the framework of representation? What does representation mean within a post-representative political system? How does it work?

Networks represent themselves and not an external constituency whose interests require distillation within a party-political form. There is always the temptation to present networks as constituencies that are somehow obliged to be capable of articulating the needs and interests of what is by definition, at the social-technical level, a mutable formation. There is no permanency here. People come and go according to what holds a passing affinity and interest for them. This, perhaps above all else, is the primary condition networks must address if they are to undertake the passage of organisation.

Authors’ Biographies

Geert Lovink is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and activist. In January 2004 he was appointed as senior researcher/associate professor at Amsterdam University (HvA/UvA) where he founded the Institute of Network Cultures [www.networkcultures.org]. He is organiser of numerous new media conferences, festivals and (online) publications and the co-founder of numerous Internet projects such as Nettime and Fibreculture. He recently published Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002), My First Recession (2003) and The Principle of Notworking (2005).

Ned Rossiter is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster and an adjuct research fellow at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to David Teh and Brett Neilson for their comments and editing suggestions. You both gave us ideas for the next round.

Notes

[1] For elaboration on the concept of the “constitutive outside” as it relates to media theory and the politics of information, see Rossiter (2004).

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[2] See the discussion on the Fibreculture mailing list about list governance, censorship and organised networks in November/December 2004: www.fibreculture.org, go to: list archive. More recently, discussions on the Spectre mailing list on media art and culture in Deep Europe have broached the topic of new institutional forms and models of organisation in the field of media art. See the thread on ‘ICC and for the media art center of 21C’, August 2005: list archive.

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[3] See also the introduction and conclusion of Geert Lovink’s My First Recession (2003). The theory of organised networks should be read as a follow up of this book.

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[4] Jeff Juris (2005) describes similar tensions between what he terms “horizontals” (self-organising activist movements) and “verticals” (traditional institutions) as they played out across the various Social Forums in recent years. In reality, all forms of techno-sociality combine both horizontal and vertical forms of organisation. Our argument is not so much that a hard distinction separates these modes of organisation as a degree in scale.

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[5] One of the many crossovers between computer science and humanities, as proposed by Michael Gurstein and others. Some of their texts can be found at http://www.netzwissenschaft.de/sem/pool.htm.

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[6] Here we’re thinking of collaborative, peer-to-peer “software solutions” such as Paper Airplane http://paperairplane.us. Thanks to Soenke Zehle for bringing this site to our attention.

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References

Bifo (Franco Beradi). ‘Biopolitics and Connective Mutation’, trans. Tiziana Terranova and Melinda Cooper, Culture Machine 7 (2005), http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/frm_f1.htm.

Debray Régis. Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Raut (London and New York: Verso, 1996).

Dykema, Ravi and Lietaer, Bernard. ‘Complementary Currencies for Social Change: An Interview with Bernard Lietaer’, Nexus: Colorado’s Holistic Journal (July-August, 2003), http://www.nexuspub.com/articles/2003/july2003/interview.htm.

Edward Lowe Foundation (ELF). ‘Building Entrepreneurial Communities’, 2002, http://edwardlowe.org/pages/documents/building.pdf.

Gye, Lisa. ‘POS: Organised Networks’, posting to fibreculture mailing list, 24 November (2004), http://lists.myspinach.org/pipermail/fibreculture/2004-November/004237.html.

Juris, Jeffrey S. ‘Social Forums and their Margins: Networking Logics and the Cultural Politics of Autonomous Space’, ephemera: theory & politics in organization 5.2 (2005): 253-272, http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/5-2/5-2juris.pdf.

Lovink, Geert. My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition (Rotterdam: V2_/NAi Publishers, 2003).

Rossiter, Ned. ‘Creative Industries, Comparative Media Theory, and the Limits of Critique from Within’, Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (Spring, 2004): 21-48.

‘When capital invests the whole of life, life appears as resistance’.
Antonio Negri

The concept of the “learning organisation” plays a pivotal role in contemporary management theory and practice.[1] In the idealised view of its advocates, the learning organisation is a mobile, self-deconstructing system, perfectly suited to the unstable environments of “post-industrial” or “informational” capitalism. Flexibility and innovation, in this system, are achieved by reversing the traditional top-down flow of information from managers to workers. Workers use their “tacit knowledge” of processes of production and market activity to autonomously transform their conditions of work. The practical question for contemporary management and human resources (HR) theorists is how to create the kinds of workers that are capable of accumulating tacit knowledge and using it in the service of the organisation . This is a problem of control; it is not without its paradoxes. This paper takes an unorthodox perspective on the problem of control, informed by the theory of biopolitics developed by Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1990: 2000a). Drawing on Foucaultian and post-Foucaultian literature, we seek to model the biopolitics of the learning organisation .

We try to take a non-cynical approach to the learning organisation as a phenomenon. There is good reason, we think, to see the advent of the learning organisation in a positive light.[2] Still we cannot overlook the “dark side” of these organisations – their insidious power of “normalisation”. While learning organisations have, for the most part, dispensed with the disciplinary-diagnostic controls that characterised the hierarchical, bureaucratic organisations of the 20th century, they are shot through with “soft” controls that operate on the emotions, attitudes and desires of workers. The ostensible strategy of these control techniques is to liberate and empower workers, to prepare them to activate and engage processes of organisational transformation. However, many of these techniques focus on generating communal values, common ends and a shared ethos, and thus they are implicitly normalising. Viewed in terms of its controls, therefore, the learning organisation presents a systemic paradox. The soft power that is employed to produce autonomous, proactive, sociable subjects – “change agents” or “net-workers” – is ultimately a normalising power, in that it promotes the standardisation of values, ends and ethos.

Such an analysis seems to give lie to the claim – often encountered at the “boosterish” end of the business and management literature – that the conditions of work in post-industrial organisations call for “insurgent” subjectivities – workers who ‘do not take orders and mistrust authority’.[3] Rather, it would seem that individuals in these organisations have so deeply internalised controls that they have come to enact them spontaneously under the guise of autonomous human creativity. There is a perverse beauty to these post-industrial control techniques, which normalise individuals precisely by granting them their freedom – the freedom to achieve their identity in pursuit of organisational goals.

Notwithstanding this critique, it would be a mistake to cast the creative organisation as a colony of drones. While we may question the inflated claims of learning organisation theorists,[4] it is clear that the changing conditions of competition in post-industrial capitalist environments over the past twenty or so years have demanded an increased level of innovation and flexibility on the part of organisations. Technological and geopolitical developments, in the second half of the twentieth century, decisively challenged the equilibrium of Fordist-Keynesian competition, radicalising global economics and replacing relative stability with a market-driven flux (see Harvey, 1990; Appelbaum and Blatt, 1994; Castells, 1996). We believe that, ultimately, learning organisation theory represents a pragmatic response to these changes. We are far from the regimented and inflexible regimes of twentieth century industrial production, and equally far from the “docile bodies” of the Fordist-Taylorist factory (Foucault, 1991).

Granting that learning organisations are genuinely committed to the promotion of innovation, however, only makes the paradox of control more puzzling. The power that produces ‘change agents’ is a normalising one. Yet this normalising power is designed to give rise to genuine processes of innovation and change. The paradox is compounded: control is both normalising and facilitative of change.

This paper seeks to resolve the paradox of control by developing a transdisciplinary theory of the biopolitics of learning organisations. Section 1 introduces the learning organisation, presenting it as an historical event emerging within a specific economic, political and technological context. Section 2 provides a closer examination of the role of HR controls in learning organisations in order to clarify the paradox of control. Section 3 draws on the work of Foucault, as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to resolve – or better, reproblematise – this paradox. Our aim is to show that this paradox is, in fact, an enabling one.

Our argument is as follows. We call the total set of discourses, practices and techniques that generate communal values, common ends and a shared ethos within an organisation the regime of “major” biopolitical control. In contemporary organisations, a major regime of control coordinates, inspires and facilitates formal and informal modes of team activity, producing the normalised bodies and minds required for flexible network production. But major biopolitics is not the seat of organisation learning, nor does it produce organisational change. Major biopolitics is simply the “steering system” of the learning organisation. Organisational learning and change, instead, emerge out of the tension or dynamic that is produced by the major biopolitical regime. This dynamic – the material expression of the paradox of control – provides the generative conditions for the emergence of modes of “minor” biopolitics, the creative “cutting edge” of the corporate biopolitical system.[5]

What is a Learning Organisation?

In the industrial capitalism of the early twentieth century, firms derived competitive advantage from economies of scale and scope. As a consequence, small groups of oligopolists were able to dominate major industrial markets and standardise their product ranges to capture scale savings (Chandler, 1992). The model of organisation that dominated this period was grounded in diagnostic control and notions of punctuated equilibrium (Giglioni and Bedeian, 1974). Competition was a ‘war of position’ won by ‘building and defending market share in clearly defined product or market segments’ (Stalk et al., 1992).

In the latter part of the twentieth century, rapid technological developments ruptured market equilibrium by facilitating new forms of competition based on customisation and agility. In the manufacturing industries, microprocessor-based technologies reduced the cost advantages of mass production (Appelbaum and Blatt, 1994). Further down the production-to-consumption “value chain”, advances in data analysis and communications technologies created new sources of potential advantage such as improved market responsiveness and supply chain efficiency (Stalk et al., 1992). These technological developments both miniaturised the nature and globalised the scope of competition. On the one hand, new information and communications technologies (ICTs) allowed competitors to target specific stages of a firm’s production-to-consumption value chain (Evans and Wurster, 2000). This initiated the demand for continuous control at all levels of the organisation and drove diagnostic reporting systems deep into the organisational fabric. On the other hand, advances in communications enabled the coordination of trans-national networks and supply chains, globalising the scope of competition. This was aided and abetted, through the 1980s and 1990s, by a neo-liberal shift in international politics and economics that touted fiscal conservatism and “free” market competition as the fundamental sources of national prosperity.

In combination, these political, economic and technological changes resulted in an exponential increase in the complexity and overall uncertainty of the business environment. Firms can no longer draw up long-term plans on the basis of recent history or linear trends. Instead they must constantly monitor market signals and competitor moves, be alert to the possibility of sudden seismic shifts and be prepared to adjust their behaviour accordingly (Stacey, 1992, 1996; Kaufmann, 1995; Evans and Wurster, 2000). The emergence of learning organisation theory in the late 1980s can be understood as a pragmatic response to this new competitive environment.[6] Learning organisation theorists advocate replacing mechanistic conceptions of organisations with models that characterise them as complex information processing systems. Crucially, systems must be organised from the bottom up – it is the co-ordinated activities of workers that determines the structure of the system, not an exhaustive plan or program imposed from above.

While various versions of this theory have been in circulation since the late 1980s, the canonical accounts are generally considered to be Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline (1990) and Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne and Tom Boydell’s The Learning Company (1991). Senge’s book was an international bestseller, and has had significant influence on management practice (Symon, 2002). The work of Pedlar et al. was based on an extensive empirical study and is generally accorded greater academic significance. In the mid-1980s, the United Kingdom’s Manpower Services Commission retained Pedler et al. to conduct a review of new models of organisation. This study was motivated by a concern that the organisational structures and management techniques that dominated British industry were a potential source of competitive disadvantage in the global economy. The resulting Learning Company Report (Pedler et al., 1988) aimed to provide British industry with a prescription for enhanced competitiveness. Pedler et al. claimed that this could be achieved through practices facilitating employee empowerment and the establishment of a more flexible, harmonious workplace.

We find in the work of Senge and Pedler et al. a set of core principles that define the learning organisation as an ideal form (after Symon, 2002). By way of introduction to the concept of the learning organisation, let us divide these principles into three groups: those pertaining to corporate values, perceived ends and prescribed ethos respectively. What unites these three sets of principles is their common concern for the “human fabric” of the learning organisation. Having defined the learning organisation as an ideal form, we will go on to discuss the regime of controls that work this human fabric, so to identify the implied paradox in this system of control and the possibility of its circumnavigation.

1. Values. The first principle of the learning organisation is that this organisation must be built on shared values and visions. In the face of continuous competitive threats, workers and management are called on to work together to ensure the ongoing survival and success of the organisation. It is not enough for employees to simply work side by side for the sake of equitable remuneration. Workers must actively seek to improve the organisation – this must become their highest value and goal.
2. Ends. The second principle is that the learning organisation must be its own incentive, in that it provides employees with a rich and rewarding learning environment. It is vital that workers perceive the organisational environment as an end in itself – a site for relational development, personal discovery and enhancement. Learning organisation theorists argue that in an environment of market-driven flux, the fate of the organisation is ultimately in workers’ hands. Constantly changing conditions demand the proactive engagement of workers in the perpetual transformation and improvement of the organisation. In particular, the tacit knowledge of frontline employees must be mobilised for the benefit of the organisation (Nonaka, 1991: 96-97).[7] Since frontline employees are typically best placed to identify new markets, new product opportunities and dominant emergent technologies, the learning organisations’ culture, structure and processes must be set up to allow them to generate knowledge on these matters, to communicate this information upwards and thereby challenge the status quo.[8] The first step towards achieving this end is to ensure that workers view the organisation not only as a site for personal advancement but for self-discovery and development. Ideally, the ends of the organisation and workers’ personal ends will be synonymous.
3. Ethos. In addition to values and ends, learning organisations require workers to assume an ethos of proactivity and self-development. As changes in the external environment place new demands on the organisation and its members, it is necessary that employees are motivated to continually seek out development opportunities both on a personal and organisational level. The virtue that links personal and organisational development is the spirit of entrepreneurship, manifested in an interpersonal engagement directed towards innovative solutions for common problems. Creative organisations function best when they are driven by the desire of workers to engage the organisational structure, to prove themselves capable of intervening in established processes and of effecting positive transformation.

Advocates of learning organisations typically present them as a utopian scenario – as Michaela Driver puts it, a ‘workplace paradise for employees resulting in phenomenal organisational performance and success’ (Driver, 2002: 1). Critics, however, are less convinced. Some argue that the most powerful members of an organisation will inevitably dominate the learning process and determine the ends the organisation will pursue (Coopey, 1995; Easterby-Smith, 1997; Symon, 2002). Even in the most egalitarian organisations, it is said, learning that would genuinely challenge established norms will be declared off-limits (Hendry, 1996). The insistence that all members of the organisation constantly pursue personal development has been depicted as less a matter of becoming highly skilled and ‘more about being highly moulded into what the employer wants the employee to be’ (Symon, 2002: 166, after Du Gay, 1996). Similarly, the ‘community of learners’ has been portrayed as a nexus of coercive, normalising forces that can result in painful employee experiences (Rifkin and Fulop, 1997; McHugh et al., 1998).

These critical perspectives appear to amount to a comprehensive rejection of the idea that learning organisations emancipate workers and encourage genuine innovation and diversity. The practices of learning organisations are seen instead as manifestations of a normalising power that aggressively shapes the identities of their members. Such criticisms bring the paradox of control in learning organisations into stark relief. To what extent do learning organisations genuinely promote freedom and creativity, and to what extent do they promote conformity? While we agree with these critics that learning organisations exert a normalising power over their employees and concede that this can be a source of pain, we do not believe that this normalisation precludes the possibility of organisational creativity and change. On the contrary, it is precisely from out of these acts of normalisation that the conditions for creative insurgency emerge. There is an immanent tension between social-affective normalisation and the exigency of creation in learning organisations. This tension, we shall argue, provides the grounds for the emergence of modes of minor biopolitics, triggering genuine processes of organisational change.

Control and Creative Organisations

To prepare for this argument, let us now transfer the discussion to a practical level, and consider the kinds of controls that are used to enable organisational learning. We will utilise once again the division between values, ends and ethos that we have applied in the analysis of the principles of the learning organisation. This time, however, we are interested in the mechanisms and techniques that are employed to put these principles into action. With a view to further specifying the paradox of control and its implications for the learning organisation, we are particularly interested in identifying the normalising effects of these mechanisms and techniques.

1. Values. The most obvious means of generating an appropriate set of values in a body of workers is through the manipulation of the wage regime. Deleuze argues that in the Fordist factory, the science of remuneration sought to establish ‘an equilibrium between the highest possible production and the lowest possible wages’ (Deleuze, 1995: 179). The deregulation of labour markets through the 1980s and 1990s, concomitant with the rise of contractualisation and “precarious” labour, was part of a strategy to shatter this homeostasis and the system of values it produced. By depriving individuals of the security of a guaranteed income, and by introducing ‘a deeper level of modulation into all wages’, corporations instilled ‘an inexorable rivalry’ into the workplace – a rivalry, moreover, ‘presented as healthy competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against each other and…[divides] each within himself’ (Deleuze, 1995: 179). Through the manipulation of the wage regime, the pain of precarious labour is mobilised to produce hyper-engaged and competitive subjectivities. This form of subjectivation is exemplified in creative industries such as film-making in which the radical insecurity of short-term, project-based employment leads the lowest-ranked workers to treat each role as an opportunity to display their boundless commitment and capacity for learning (DeFillippi and Arthur, 1998). In a workplace environment every bit as hazardous and uncertain as the wider realm of capitalist competition, workers tend to assume values and visions similar to those of corporate management.

   A second way to use wage regimes to inspire appropriate values is through the deployment of financial incentives such as stock-option packages and performance-based remuneration. High-growth technology companies, for example, offer workers relatively low salaries plus stock options packages that can yield huge rewards if the company prospers. These systems are ostensibly intended to give workers a sense of “ownership” in the company. Perceived in light of systems of control, they can be seen as value-inducing measures that work to coordinate workers’ personal sense of evaluation with the general interests of the company. By apportioning to workers a share of the risk taken on by investors, stock options directly link the threat of corporate failure to workers’ sense of self-preservation, presenting them with a vested interest in furthering the fortunes of the company.

   A subtler means employed in learning organisations to instill appropriate values is the establishment of a pervasive organisational culture. Numerous techniques are used to achieve this culture, including the definition and promotion of a clear and powerful “corporate mission”, team-building exercises, various formal and informal publications (company newspapers, zines, etc.) and events. Driver suggests that a well-defined organisational culture ultimately serves as an even ‘stronger and more effective control system’ than the rigid processes of performance monitoring and reward found in traditional organisations (Driver, 2002: 3). By generating idealised images of the work environment, representations of organisational culture serve to promote fundamental norms of attitude and behaviour coordinated about a predetermined set of corporate values. Employees “choose” to identify with this culture in order to be “part of the team”.

   We should note that the kind of normalisation that is generated by a corporate culture is not a “disciplinary” mode of normalisation. Disciplinary normalisation, as defined by Foucault, derives from repetitive exercise – drill or “dressage” – applied to the materiality of bodies. Discipline dissolves and forges habits, creates capacities and generally optimises the body as a useful resource. Control, on the other hand, rarely directly treats the body as such. Whereas discipline drills norms into individuals, control normalises in the process of setting individuals free. As Manuel Castells maintains, regimes of informational production call for self-empowered and autonomous workers to deliver the full promise of their productive potential (Castells, 1996: 257). It is clearly counter-productive in this context to discipline workers. Instead of moulding bodies, the attitudes and desires of self-directing subjects must be modulated and controlled. While the forms of subjectivity produced within regimes of control are infinitely more fluid and transformable than those produced within disciplinary regimes, we believe it is correct to say that they represent normalised subject-forms nonetheless. Such normalisation transpires through the gradual modulation and standardisation of behaviour. It unfolds on the level of affect and desire; it is manifested, as Deleuze claims, in ‘a strange craving to be “motivated”‘, the pursuit of ‘special courses and continuing education’ (Deleuze, 1995: 182).

2. Ends. To encourage employees to freely mobilise tacit knowledge for the benefit of the organisation, it is important that individuals are convinced that their personal ends and the ends of the organisation coincide. To this end, learning organisations make it their first end to promote a work environment that facilitates ongoing relational development and self-discovery (Senge, 1990). The task of establishing such an environment typically falls to the HR department in the organisation. The training sessions and team-building exercises hosted by HR not only have the end of equipping workers with the technical skills required for their day to day labours, but of facilitating the kind of rich relational fabric that is required for flexible network production. Beyond its essential function of binding networks together, this relational field serves as a dynamic plane of affective production and consumption. Relationality is not only the condition of informational production, but also an important source of workers’ happiness and sense of well-being. As such, this biopolitically-mediated field functions as the nexus of individual and organisational ends, and the nucleus of flexible network production.

   HR training programmes produce “net-workers” – workers able to thrive within a complex, ever-changing web of relations and contacts. This training crucially involves taking on board certain social-affective norms necessary for the functioning of networks. These affective norms play an instrumental role in the construction and maintenance of networks of communication – thus they are an end of the learning organisation. But affectivity also has intrinsic benefits for workers in that it assists in forming relations, bonds and intimacies. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put a political spin on this point (to which we shall return): ‘What affective labour produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 293). The learning organisation would be incapable of functioning without its fundamental affective charge, where the intelligence and emotions of workers are indistinguishable from the operation of network production itself.[9]

3. Ethos. Creative organisations are ideally driven by a desire on the part of workers to proactively engage and transform the operations of the organisation. To achieve this state of affairs, workers in these organisations are encouraged to assume an ethos of self-development based on a norm of perpetual self-improvement. As Senge would say, employees are set on a ‘life-long quest’ for ‘personal mastery’ (Senge, 1990). In addition to more obvious measures, such as financial incentives and review processes, which create a demand for personal development, this norm is created through the management of the identity of workers – or more precisely, through the ‘[incorporation of] managerial discourses into narratives of self-identity’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2000: 622). The control of narrative-identity is an essential technique in the normalisation of corporate ethos. As Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott remind us, it is important not to assume that workers are merely passive, malleable objects in these processes (Alvesson and Willmott, 2000: 636-637). The ethos that is required for network production is inseparable from new technologies of the self, which enable active individuals ‘to give their lives a specifically entrepreneurial form’ (Lemke, 2001: 202).

   Technologies of the self are merely one aspect of a complex “major” regime of biopolitical control. This is a regime that encourages individuals to fashion themselves as proactive, perpetually self-improving subjects. With the normalisation of personal ethos, this regime of control is complete. In preparing themselves for perpetual self-improvement, workers actively produce the human resource that is required for ongoing organisational learning, willingly fashioning themselves as the enabling elements of self-deconstructing systems.

   Are learning organisations simply normalising machines? If so, how could they foster creativity? Some would argue that those who promote and implement organisational learning structures are not genuinely concerned with such matters. On this account, the paradoxical presence of normalising controls in the training regime for corporate technicity and culture reveals the emptiness of the learning organisation rhetoric. The appeal to creativity is seen as nothing more than a decoy – serving to distract us, perhaps, from the fact that the adoption of team-based “learning” practices promotes self-managing workers, thus preparing the way for the replacement of middle managers with costless coercive controls.

   Contrary to this position, we will take an affirmative view. We believe that the tension in learning organisations between the exigency to create and the processes of normalisation that are required to facilitate this creation amounts to a genuine paradox. However, we also believe that real processes of collective innovation are driven by the paradox of control. The paradox of control is generative – it gives rise to collective, creative insurgencies. Learning and insurgency in creative organisations go hand in hand – both are inspired by the paradox of control.

Biopolitics, Learning and Insurgency

To establish this argument, we need to introduce a new theoretical vocabulary into our discussion: the Foucaultian discourse of “biopolitics”. In a series of groundbreaking studies through the late 1970s, Foucault associated the rise of the modern administrative state with the development of a new mode of power over life: “biopower”. Unlike the sovereign power that preceded it, which assumed a transcendent relation to subjects, wielding power by taking life or letting live, biopower engages life from the inside, infiltrating bodies, their capacities, habits, affects and dispositions, through innumerable disciplinary practices and micropolitical controls. The biopolitical strategy is to ‘incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimise, and organise the forces under it: [biopower] is a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them’ (Foucault, 1990: 136). Instead of taking life, biopower places it in an organised system, fosters, nurtures and exploits it.

Foucault’s concept of the relationship between power and life in modern societies casts the politics of capitalist production in a new light. In particular, the biopolitical perspective disrupts the historical necessity of the “working class”. The proletariat did not spring fully formed from relations of production – they are the product of disciplinary-biopolitical relations that are presupposed by the capitalist apparatus. Works such as Discipline and Punish (1991) analyse the technical and institutional means by which the proletariat qua productive subjectivity has been produced. To create productive subjectivities, Foucault claims,

an operation is necessary, or a complex series of operations, by which men are effectively…bound to the production apparatus for which they labour…. A web of microscopic, capillary political power had to be established at the level of man’s very existence, attaching men to the productive apparatus, while making them into agents of production, into workers. (Foucault, 2000b: 86)

This same rule applies to contemporary learning organisations. Construed in a Foucaultian light, the mechanisms and techniques that we have discussed in Section 2 can be seen as biopolitical controls – a ‘complex series of operations’ that serve to bind individuals to the productive apparatus, that foster, optimise and organise those elements of human life required for flexible network production. Through the standardisation of specific elements of life (values, ends, ethos), biopolitical controls produce specific forms of identity and normalised types. To isolate this biopolitical regime (together with its human product), we call the whole operation a regime of “major” biopolitical control. In contemporary learning organisations, regimes of major biopolitical control create functional and motivated workers dedicated to productive activities. Since these activities centrally involve teamwork and fluid communications, it is particularly important that the major regime fosters the somatic-affective conditions necessary for the collective production of knowledge.

How does the concept of major biopolitical control shine new light on the paradox of control? To answer this question, we must consider the specific affective register of this paradox. The paradox of control is experienced by workers as an abiding tension between the “rules of the game” (implicit in the values, ends and ethos of the corporate culture) and the overarching exigency of creativity. Viewed relative to the logic of the major biopolitical regime, this tension appears as a surplus, a problematic remainder. Viewed as part of the overall economy of the corporate biopolitical system, however, it is seen as an origin – a dynamic source of energy with huge implications for organisational politics and culture. It is from out of this tension, this surplus, that genuine moments of collective innovation arise. Through the construction of autonomous, proactive, sociable bodies in a context that confounds the genuine expression of creativity, major biopolitical control produces an incorporeal fabric of insurgent energies and desires, thereby nurturing the emergence of minor biopolitical planes that self-organise, innovate and produce.

Up to now, we have conceived of workers as normalised individuals. Workers are normalised as individuals through a regime of major biopolitical control. At this point, we need to shift focus from the individuation to the “dividuation” of workers. It is by becoming-dividual that workers comprise minor biopolitical planes of collective activity. Deleuze was first to associate processes of dividuation with societies of control (Deleuze, 1995: 179-180). We understand his argument as an extension of the theory of “minoritarianism” that he developed in his work with Guattari. Our distinction between major and minor biopolitics corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between “majoritarian” and “minoritarian” forms of life. For Deleuze and Guattari, a majoritarian, or major, form of life comprises a type or standard by which all other forms of life are evaluated (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 105). In opposition to major norms, Deleuze and Guattari affirm processes of “becoming-minoritarian”, involving subliminal flows of mass intelligence and desire that rend us from major norms and carry us away on “lines of flight” (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 105-106, 291-293).

In parallel with this argument, we understand a major biopolitics as a regime of behavioural modification and enhancement that produces exemplary, normalised types. Yet, even as major biopolitics constructs the types required for network production, it fosters a proactive insurgency and desire for change, and thereby prepares the ground for the spontaneous emergence of informal constellations of workers that band together in pursuit of goals that are neither established nor sanctioned by management. Modes of minor biopolitics emerge out of the immanent tension established by the major regime of control. This tension sunders the constants of normalisation, fractures the subjectivities of workers, and produces spontaneous moments of collective innovation.

What is a minor biopolitics? One way of understanding this concept is to compare it to Hardt and Negri’s concept of the “multitude”. Hardt and Negri define a multitude as ‘an open network of singularities that links together on the basis of the common they [the singularities] share and the common they produce’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 129). To illustrate this idea, Hardt and Negri refer to the phenomenon of ‘economic innovation in networks’. Innovation, they argue, ‘necessarily takes place in common…. We have to rid ourselves of the notion that innovation relies on the genius of the individual…. If there is an act of genius, it is the genius of the multitude’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 338).

There is clear proximity between the concepts of the multitude and minor biopolitics. Both concepts refer to biopolitical phenomena. Hardt and Negri understand (minor) “biopolitics” in terms of Marx’s notion of “living labour”. In the post-industrial economy, they argue, living labour has overspilled the factory walls and become immanent to society, generating an abundance of productive relationships through various forms of collaborative praxis (see Hardt and Negri 2004: 95). Qua biopolitical phenomena, both the multitude and minor biopolitics emerge on the basis of a somatic-affective fabric knit together by a common desire for innovation. Both are directed towards “flight”, or escape, from the impasses of capitalist production; both represent a kind of “exodus”, fired by the dream of genuine innovation and the radical transformation of circumstances (Virno, 1996; Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004).

Yet, while it points us in the right direction, the concept of the multitude is ultimately too expansive for our purposes. This concept is ideal for theorising transversal movements in a context of radical social, cultural and political difference. But it is out of place in the normalised environments of the learning organisation. Whereas the multitude arises on the basis of radical difference (coordinated by that held in common), a minor biopolitics emerges out of a regulated sameness to establish a difference in the moment of innovation. More decisively, there is a metaphysical dimension to this concept that is absent from (or at least not required for) the concept of a minor biopolitics (see Rayner, 2005). Far from an expression of the “always-already” of constituent power (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 221-222), a minor biopolitics is an historically and institutionally determinate figure arising out of the political dynamics of post-industrial production. Whereas the multitude is sui generis, a minor biopolitics is a systemic aberration.

A superior strategy for understanding the idea of a minor biopolitics is to start with the normalised individual and to ask how this individual is transformed in its engagement in minor biopolitical activity. Individuals in learning organisations derive their identity as individuals from the machinations of major biopolitical control. Despite the collective conditions of work in these organisations, individuals tend to cling to their sense of identity as a prized possession. With the emergence of a minor biopolitics, however, these identities are shattered and dissolved into collective modes of experience. The individual becomes “dividual”: an emergent subject-form that is shared in common with others (see Deleuze, 1995: 180).

To illuminate the process of becoming dividual, let us imagine the fluid interplay of communications that comprises the day-to-day labour of net-workers. We must recall that these workers are stricken by the incompatibility of the demand for innovation with the normalisation of the major biopolitical regime. The net-worker endures the impossibility of genuine creation on an immanent basis. Imagine the interest, therefore, when in the play of communications, they acquire the sense that something new is taking shape – something inchoate and ill-defined, perhaps, but a possibility nonetheless – a chance for innovation. A ripple of excitement runs across the surface of the network, registered in synapses and nerves, the flutter of pulses, the tensing of muscles. Well before an actual community of individuals has emerged to bring this perceived opportunity to life, a community is established on the virtual level – a community of common desire and affect focused about the potential for innovation.

This virtual collective is a minor biopolitics. It is crucial to note how the concept of minor biopolitics transforms our understanding of informational work and workers. Strictly speaking, in being drawn into a minor biopolitics, the individual ceases to be an individual. Individuals become-dividual, assuming a consciousness that is divided within itself and shared with others. A minor biopolitics is a cluster of dividuals – a plateau of technologically mediated desire that is itself pre-individual, a singularity (see Deleuze, 1990: 52). In the science of non-linear dynamics, a singularity is the preferred position of a complex system, such that the system will evolve towards this position unless it is constrained by other factors (see DeLanda, 2002: 15). To become-dividual is to be drawn into the basin of attraction of a virtual singularity. A mass of individuals becoming-dividual, gravitating on a pre-reflective level towards a common point of view: this is the definition of a minor biopolitics. These virtual formations, which essentially operate outside the control of management, are the cutting edge of contemporary organisational learning systems.[10]

We are now in a position to define the operation of the corporate biopolitical regime as a whole. To lend focus to this account, it will help to contrast our view with Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of capitalist production. Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism is defined by a minoritarian tendency towards ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 453-473). In a parallel manner, we argue that, in a system of competition defined by market-driven flux, in which profits are derived from the possession of transitory relative advantage as opposed to stable positions of superiority, the capitalist is called upon to nurture rather than repress innovation and difference. Far from claiming that the normalising aspects of major regimes of control work to cancel out processes of collective innovation, we perceive them as the preconditions of these processes. Increasingly, management is learning how to manipulate major biopolitical regimes so as to nurture the tensions that give rise to productive minor insurgency.

Deleuze and Guattari are thus completely right, in our view, to emphasise the deterritorialising logic of informational capitalist production. Their mistake is to emphasise this logic of deterritorialisation at the expense of detailing the technological and biopolitical systems used to facilitate deterritorialisation. At this point, we side with Foucault against Deleuze. As Hardt and Negri complain, Deleuze and Guattari discover the immanence of minoritarian production only to articulate it ‘superficially and ephemerally, as a chaotic, indeterminate horizon marked by the ungraspable event’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 28). They forget that absolute deterritorialisation is the asymptote of capitalism’s lines of flight, representing both its underlying tendency and its ultimate constraint.[11] The limit of absolute deterritorialisation lies in the strategies and systems that make it possible. Pursuing this intuition, we have sought to recommend a post-Foucaultian perspective on the generative operation of major biopolitical control.

Our argument brings to light the “politics of immanence” in contemporary capitalist organisations. Leading edge corporations aim not only to cultivate minoritarian becomings (since these are the source of differentiation, innovation and value creation) but also to constrain them (since taken to the extreme, they threaten to overthrow the organisational regime). This dynamic marks out a singular site of struggle in contemporary organisations. Learning organisations proceed from crisis to crisis; wherever net-workers grasp the value of their tacit production and mobilise knowledge to their advantage, the role and legitimacy of management is called into question. Clearly, capitalism has purchased its flexibility at the price of a significant risk. By promoting the constant modulation of systems while seeking to preserve an overall metastability, corporate capitalism aspires to a state of ‘controlled schizophrenia’ (see Hardt, n.d.). We should not be surprised to witness unforeseen reactions resulting from such a volatile state of affairs.

Authors’ Biographies

Paul Newfield is a management consultant, working in the areas of organization design and strategy. He holds graduate degrees in Management Studies and Philosophy from the University of Cambridge and the University of Auckland.

Timothy Rayner teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has published in Radical Philosophy, the Continental Philosophy Review, and Theory and Event . He is an editor of Contretemps: An On-Line Journal of Philosophy .

Notes

[1] See Senge (1990), Pedler et al. (1991), Casey (1993), Chawla and Renesch (1995), Baets (1998), also the journal The Learning Organisation (Bradford: MCB University Press, 1999).

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[2] In a sense, the learning organisation represents the ‘democratisation’ of the business unit, insofar as the nature and direction of the business is determined by frontline staff. It would be a mistake, however, to see in this the emergence of a politically horizontal organisation. Commentators on “horizontal organisations” all too often elide the theme of power in business organisations – it is as if power did not exist! But a determined ignorance does not detract from the existence of disparate relations. What we are witnessing is not the dissolution of power in the business organisation but the constitution of an original political dynamic. Democratic powers, in contemporary corporations, have been incorporated within a new productive system – this is the key to our concept of the learning organisation.

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[3] Per Bäckius cites the viewpoint of an anonymous project manager: ‘”What you must be fully aware of…is that we are now dealing with a new individual – a new consumer and a new employee. The new individuals do not take orders and mistrust authority. They are in charge of their own lives and make their own choices. They take crap from no one. You have to design your business as well as your organisation in accordance with their dispositions otherwise they will leave you. This is the most significant change we are witnessing today. If you were born after 1968 you are a part of this, you are the new individuals”‘ (2002: 282-282).

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[4] For a critical perspective on this literature, see Thompson and O’Connell-Davidson (1995), Alvesson and Willmott (2002), and Symon (2002). These commentators contend that the discourse of “turbulence” that underwrites the call for ongoing organisational change is a construction that has been used to legitimate the imposition of new controls or the silencing of worker dissent (Symon, 2002: 163).
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[5] This argument provides a theoretical underpinning for the accounts of collective creativity common in the business and management literature. Michael Fradette and Steve Michaud, for example, argue that leading corporations today are specifically designed to facilitate “market events”, in which autonomous teams of workers, uninstructed by management, seize on ‘unpredictable market opportunities’ and together create ‘a totally new kind of product or service’. Fradette and Michaud claim: ‘The event begins when the active, inquiring mind of a worker spots an opportunity. It takes wing as the worker forms an ad hoc team of colleagues to pursue and refine the idea and realise its potential. They make it happen. They create new ways to operate….They innovate with suppliers, partners, and competitors. They invent new businesses’ (Fradette and Michaud, 2000: 207). The concept of a dynamic relationship between major and minor biopolitics also provides an explanatory perspective on the interrelation of what Ralph Stacey calls ‘legitimate’ and ‘shadow’ systems in organisations. Stacey argues: ‘Every organization must perform a set of primary tasks, tasks that members must jointly carry out if… they are to attract sufficient support from other systems they need to interact with. To perform its primary tasks an organization must have a system for carrying them out;… this is the purpose of an organization’s legitimate system with its dominant schema. However… people do not come together in organizations simply to perform primary tasks. While they work they also socialise with each other to form a shadow system. They may use this system to sabotage the primary task or to constitute a learning community that assists the legitimate system to function in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty by circumventing its rules….The legitimate and shadow systems clearly interact within one another. Indeed, I suggest that the basic dynamics of an organization are determined by the manner in which these two systems interact’ (Stacey, 1996: 167-168; our emphasis).
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[6] The “creative industries” (in particular, film production) are commonly cited as prototypical examples of the destabilisation and dis-integration of traditional industry structures (see, for example, DeFillippi and Arthur, 1998; Evans and Wurster, 2000). The decline of the oligopolistic Hollywood studio system in the 1950s and the corresponding emergence of project-based production ventures are seen as precursors of changes that would later occur in other industries. Where an increasingly complex competitive environment forces firms to rely on employee creativity, more flexible organisational structures become essential for survival.

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[7] As Baets claims, ‘tacit knowledge… is the real value adding knowledge in a company’ (Baets, 1998: 44).

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[8] A recent interview (personal communication) conducted with a senior manager at a global software company sheds light on the specific attitude and social skills required for this task. Asked about the most essential requirement for success in the organisation, he replied: ‘A lot of it you would summarise as relationship and people skills and being able to manage up….”Managing up” means you have high levels of communication with your managers and their managers, you explain your rationale really clearly to people and you really genuinely make yourself open to feedback from people. Those sorts of skills allow you to have the sorts of conversations with people that allow you to change things’.

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[9] Paolo Virno claims that professionalism today is ‘nothing other than a generic sociality, a capacity to form interpersonal relationships, an aptitude for mastering information and interpreting linguistic messages, and an ability to adjust to continuous and sudden reconversions’ (Virno, 1996: 248).

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[10] Hence Baets is correct: ‘A company’s attempt should be to identify the emergent faster….The interaction between the authorized and the emergent creates a “generative strategy”: this is the sense making process of the company. This way of looking to a company considers the organisation as a platform, rather than as a (fixed) structure’ (Baets, 1998: 207).

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[11] Deleuze and Guattari are not unaware of this point – they simply underplay it. See Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 33-35).

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Everyone engaging with the theme of this special issue would agree on two premises: the post-Fordist global economy is radically new, with profound impacts on social organization and forms of consciousness; and new information technologies play a major role in this newness. In our article we will not add to the set of case studies in particular areas, or develop a new theoretical argument, as others in the issue will be doing. We believe there is space, with so new a phenomenon, for a more speculative form of enquiry, digging around the roots of these basic premises to ask some open questions: how new is this new information era, and is it so radically different? Is it useful to call it a “revolution”, using the term in the considered sense it had for Marx, however much it has been over-used and trivialized by later thinkers?

We take the term virtuality as the focus for our enquiry. Castells influentially makes the Network Principle primary – ‘The Network is the message’ as he adapts McLuhan’s famous slogan (2001: 75) – but he also discusses virtuality at length, as a quality that pre-existed the information revolution but has taken new forms. Virtuality is an attribute of any symbol in any media, he says, including perception and thought; virtuality in itself does not constitute a revolution. But he sees a development in virtuality, sufficiently new to be remarked on; Castells’ interest is in the way the new technologies can now dissolve the boundary with reality into what he calls ‘a culture of real virtuality’ (2000: 358). “Virtuality” in common usage does other things, becoming a promiscuous attribute of all products of information technology – “virtual producers”, “virtual consumers” of “virtual knowledge” in “virtual communities”, organised by “virtual chains” of ownership, finance, management, design and distribution, enabled by computers and networks. The term is morphing into the heart of the new system.

In order to test the scope of the new virtuality, we set our concern with the conditions of new media (digital) labour in the wider framework of the new conditions of all labour, seeing how far virtuality, as a property of all media, has penetrated and affected all modes of production. Has virtuality made all the primary categories of Marxism obsolete? Or is virtuality constructing a new global entity, a multitude, heir to Marx’s predictions on behalf of his proletariat and their mission to end history?

Our strategy is to play with a double focus, from Marxism and the world of business, interrogating modern business writers (agents of this supposed revolution) against a conceptual background developed from Marx. We will find that virtuality poses new questions for Marxism that provoke surprising new answers. Nor is there a simple outcome of the juxtaposition. Although Marx’s works (including those he co-authored with Engels) still provide a powerful, relevant framework, these writers have a window into a world Marx never saw.

The Ideology of Virtual Business

We begin with claims from within contemporary capitalism that there has indeed been a virtual revolution. Is this hyperbole to be taken seriously? How should we situate such claims in a Marxist framework?

Writers from the field of business are supposedly practical people concerned with practical things like ‘bottom lines’, not with grand visions of new worlds. Yet there is a strong strand of work on ‘virtual business’ now that is taken very seriously in business. Some of this work makes moderate claims. Efteland and Martina, for instance, begin soberly: ‘The emergence of virtual factories has been painfully slow, and, to date, their promise has been largely unfulfilled’. Yet despite this apparent evidence to the contrary, they still declare: ‘However, we are clearly at the threshold of a revolution that will change the manner in which not only manufacturing but also business in general is conducted’ (1996: 184). Hinks writes from just across the threshold: ‘The development of virtual working practices heralds a technology led revolution in the way of working for some types of business’ (2002: 172). Coates and Wolff announce that: ‘The infotech revolution is only just beginning’, in the title of an article, which warns: ‘It is a false comfort to think that all the basic development in information technology have occurred’ (1998: 7).

It is interesting to note that for all these writers a virtual revolution is now a fact, yet it has a curious status, as something that has already happened yet is also in important ways only now about to happen. The ‘virtual revolution’ is a ‘virtual fact’, what Castells called ‘a culture of real virtuality’, yet this effect here seems to owe nothing to new information technologies themselves.

As our guide to the world of such writers we will take a manifesto for ‘Virtual Business’: Business in a Virtual World (Czerniawska and Potter, 1998). This book announces the new paradigm: ‘competitive advantage in this context comes from transforming the “rules of the game” almost overnight, throwing away the old way of doing things and creating new industry paradigms’ (1998: 5). Such is the force of this revolution that great companies will perish overnight, these authors say, unless they learn the new rules of the only game in town.

Not only is their rhetoric of revolution strangely reminiscent of Marx’s words, so are parts of their analysis. They like Marx talk of the double nature of commodities:

Even the most “physical” industries have an information aspect to them… Every product sold consists of information that can be sold and manipulated along with the atoms that make up its shape. (1998: 6)

But this is not Marx’s theory of commodities, whose double nature, as material and ideological, specifically included the social powers of labour. They oppose material and informational, and exclude labour. This is no harmless oversight. The aim of virtual business is to remove human labour as far as possible. For instance they recommend ‘disintermediation’: removing ‘the middle man’ in production and exchange (1998: 4).

Their manifesto for this new paradigm is worth quoting in full:

The use of information is a revolutionizing force: enlightened companies have realised that the trick of winning this battle is to hold off converting their product into its physical form until the last possible moment. Information – unlike physical goods – can be transmitted round the world literally at the speed of light; it can be manipulated with computers far faster than any physical object can be changed; it can be duplicated at no cost, whereas reproducing physical goods is a slow and expensive business. It makes sense, therefore, for as many activities as possible – product development, sales, marketing and distribution – to be performed in the virtual world, thereby increasing speed and decreasing costs. (1998:7)

We note the hyperbole, ‘revolutionizing force’, a term from Marx’s core vocabulary. Yet this revolution seems only a “trick” in a battle or game: a simple trick that surely everyone can learn and neutralise, and then go on to try another trick in another game. This way of seeing their project is expressed in another slogan they use, ‘competitive advantage’, a term which implies a game in which some are winners but the game itself goes on.

The underlying logic on which this inevitable triumph will seemingly be based is contained in claims that the shift to the virtual world will ‘increase speed and decrease costs’. The two effects are put together as though they are cause and effect, linked by an inverse law: the faster the speed the lower the costs. But this assumption rests on other assumptions made in this passage, that information flow is all that matters, along networks that magically exist. Human labour to make this happen does not have “no cost”. Software is not free. Material instruments of production are made invisible in this fantasy of instant power.

This ideology imagines what it wants to produce: a world in which all human labour has ceased to exist, operated by technicians whose work is indispensable to the new capitalists yet who do not exist in the scheme. We call this tendency invisibilisation , the virtual equivalent of “downsizing”. But invisibilisation has a complex relation to physical downsizing. Invisibilisation makes it thinkable that production can do without labour, which can underpin downsizing plans. It can equally create a state of mind in which the value and need for labour is minimised, leading to lower pay, less care and regard for the work force: more profit simply by more exploitation. Many core strategies of globalisation such as “out-sourcing” operate under the cover of virtual operations. A company removes from its balance sheets the cost of its own workers, but the work is still done somewhere, which is virtual for them though real for those who do it, in the home economy or exploited workers in poorer countries.

It could seem as though nothing has changed. Capitalists still want the same thing, and they still run the system. However, in our analysis this is only true of their fantasies, not of the inconvenient world they seek to rule. The new class of virtual labour must expand, in spite of its paradoxical minimisation in the ideological map of “virtual business”. Management might like to see digital labour as dispensible, precarious, but actually removing them is another matter. When they get specific, Czerniawska and Potter stress, briefly but definitely, how useful, how indispensible IT people now are to modern executives. If digital labour power is a scarce commodity which contributes substantially to the value of commodities, then its price will rise, creating a division within the workforce, in spite of the capitalist’s wish, a constant in capitalism now as when Marx wrote, to pay workers as little as possible and expropriate their labour to the maximum.

This is all familiar as what Marxism labels ‘ideology’: a poor guide to business practice, unreliable evidence of a real “virtual revolution”. This is the world as it should be for capitalists to become ever richer, using digital technology that magically keeps improving to serve their needs. This text celebrating a “digital revolution” is not produced by new (digital) technologies but by the old practices that Marx already knew well. These prophets of the virtual revolution are re-cycling an old fantasy as if it were new common sense. Thus far, it is hard to see anything here that could justly be called a “revolution”.

A Marxist Framework and the Category of “Revolution”

The word “revolution” is so over-used in cyber-hype like that of Czerniawska and Potter that it has lost much of its meaning and value, yet it is still needed to describe dramatic kinds and scales of change. We will try to ground the term in Marx’s seminal work, in which it has a definitively strong sense, connecting it with Marx’s theories as a whole.

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 contains Marx’s extraordinarily prescient insight into globalisation, in a framework in which “revolution” plays a key role. He describes the role of the bourgeoisie as ‘revolutionary’: not only how they became a new dominant class, but how they function as one:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them, the whole relations of society. (Marx and Engels, 1848/1970: 38)

Globalisation even in 1848 was a major strategy:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. (Marx and Engels, 1848/1970: 38).

Passages like this demonstrate that Marx would not have been surprised by modern globalisation. On the contrary, we find the surprise in our students as they read such texts. It is a time warp in reverse. How could he have known? they ask.

The generators of the revolutions are changes in instruments of production, and these explicitly include modes of communication (for Marx as for McLuhan, these included systems which transport goods and bodies as well as information):

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. (Marx and Engels, 1848/1970: 39).

The still early Wage Labour and Capital describes the key relationships involved:

Social relations within which individuals produce, the social relations of production, change, are transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, the productive forces. The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations of production, society, and specifically, a society at a definite stage of historical development, a society with a peculiar, distinctive character. (Marx, 1849/1970: 80)

Three sets of question arise for us from these statements:

1. What is a “revolution” if it sometimes produces a change of epoch, a change of the totality, as between feudal and bourgeois society, and sometimes, as in the case of the bourgeoisie, does not produce such a change? If we call the revolutions that mark transitions from one totality to another Type A revolutions, then the frenetic, continuous revolutions of the bourgeoisie, Type B, seem often to prevent or delay the onset of a revolution Type A. But what of the cumulative effect of revolutions Type B? May they not make up a qualitative change in society that makes it different in kind?
2. The “communication revolution” since 1848 appears so extensive, it has surely made a difference, cumulatively and systemically. By what criteria is it declared to be still a series of Revolutions Type B, not a catalyst for a Revolution Type A?
3. What is the explanatory value of insisting that the present epoch is still just a phase of the Capitalist totality (often called “late capitalism” by Marxists)? Are there no significant differences in the forms and strategies of global capitalism in a global market, enabled by “information revolutions”?
   • Virtuality is a significant dimension determining value, in on-going interaction with labour and instruments of production. “Surplus value”, expropriated wherever possible by capitalists, can be taken from value added by labour, by instruments of production, or by virtual, semiotic production.
   • “Virtual labour” refers to an aspect of all operations of labour and capital, including what Marx calls ‘labour power’, and also capital itself, which is labour virtually concreted into the form of instruments of production.
   • Labourers in virtuality (using instruments of communication) constitute a special category of worker, even though it is an impure category (overlapping continually with material workers co-opted to produce virtual commodities on an unacknowledged, part-time basis, with labour and workers both invisibilised).
   • The inclusion of virtuality disrupts the determinism of binary logics (whether the triumph and catastrophe of capital, or the triumph without catastrophe of virtuality), making prediction impossible over many iterations.

It is not in doubt that we are living in times of great change. Castells’ influential work describes it as ‘a process of profound restructuring’ of Capitalism, an ‘information technology revolution’ (2000: 1, 29) The drivers of change now include forces of production, material and symbolic, and forms of communication, material and symbolic, understood as a totality. As Czerniawska and Potter say, material processes are interwoven with symbolic (“chips with everything”), and symbolic processes are packaged as commodities (hardware, software, infrastructure). Virtuality effects are not contained within a separate sphere (non-material “virtual space”) but act in and through their effects on a totality in Marx’s sense. Perhaps it is indeed a revolution Type A, not quite complete. Or perhaps we need a new category, a revolution which is both Type A and not Type A, a far-reaching transformation which however has not (yet) led to a change in the ruling class or the basis of its rule.

Intimations of Virtuality in Classic Marxism

“Revolution” as a term spans Marx’s time and ours, but “virtuality” does not seem to have its digital sense before the computer age. At first these differences of vocabulary may seem to block our enquiry into deep-seated continuities or revolutions. But as we have seen, Castells interprets virtuality in a wide sense, to refer to the symbolic dimension of all media, in addition to a specifically digital referent. Czerniawska and Potter likewise emphasise the digital affiliations of “virtuality”, but to give it its central place in the new form of business they give it a wider sense: ‘virtual elements are items such as information about customers, knowledge about how to get the best from a manufacturing process and the rights to exploit a particular invention’ (1998:viii). And “virtuality” did exist as a word in Marx’s time, even though not including its digital sense.

In this context it becomes interesting to follow two complementary lines of question: whether or how far was Marx aware of the concept underlying “virtuality”, and how might he have understood the word in his time? Our procedure here may seem unduly speculative, imposing later meanings on Marx’s thought, but our intent is different: to set up terms for a dialogue across the two periods, without which we would never be able to tell whether there was indeed a revolution or not.

We begin with the 19th century virtual, and its place in a history of thought Marx knew well. Something like its modern sense can be seen in its use in optics, the 19th century science of images. Webster’s Dictionary of 1905 has this entry:

Virtual image in Optics is a point or system of points, on one side of a mirror or lens, which, if it existed, would emit the system of rays which actually exists on the other side of the mirror or lens. (Clerk Maxwell, 1905, cited in Webster, 2005: 729)

Virtuality in this sense is the ancestor of its modern sense in information technology. It relates to an image (not words or information) projected by mathematics. It refers to a non-existent point, yet it guarantees the reality of the image. In a sense it has a greater reality than the image itself, even though it does not exist. The image is only a copy of reality, so the virtual image exists at two removes from physical reality, yet this unreality has a higher scientific status than both reality and image.

“Virtuality” in this sense came from Mediaeval Latin virtualis, usually traced back to the Latin virtus (force, or moral virtue). This was a key category in mediaeval philosophy, which built on Aristotle’s profound pun on ‘virtue’ (as force, goodness, and essence of a thing or argument). This complex structure of meanings suited the aims of catholic theologians, by creating a form of “science” in which laws of nature were the laws of God, as inscribed in the doctrines of the Church.

Marx knew this philosophical tradition well. He fiercely attacked its 19th century incarnation, in Hegelian idealism, which attributed a similar world-shaping power to “spirit”. The early Marx called this “ideology”, and described it in a famous image:

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-processes. (1846/1976: 42)

Marx does not use the word “virtual” but his field of reference is, like Clerk Maxwell’s, the physics of perception and the instruments by which images are reproduced. Ideology is the product of mind working like a virtuality machine, which operates much like a modern camera or computer. Ideology and virtuality are not unique products of the computer age. Ideology is a general process of constructing and manipulating images by any means, by minds as well as computers. If there is a new virtuality in this sense, then, it would be in view of a new strategy for materialising the imagination.

In spite of our etymology, there are good grounds for distinguishing Ideology from virtuality. Virtuality as a cover category includes (as Castells says) all ways of producing meaning. Ideology is one form, along with art and advertising in all media, including also mathematics, and information. The defining characteristic of the virtual in this sense is not distortion or illusion (technology can reduce distortion without making an image any less virtual) but rather its imaginary origin in an abstract, non-material space, geometrical for Clerk Maxwell, metaphysical for Marx, digital for Czerniawska and Potter.

The term “ideology” does not figure prominently in Marx’s later work, but the concept, and the image of virtuality, are still recognisable in his famous description of the commodity:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties… the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. Yet as soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head. (1959a: 71)

What Marx here calls ‘metaphysical’ he would earlier have called ‘ideological’. Like Czerniawska and Potter, Marx imputes to the commodity a double character, formed by the co-presence of material and “virtual” (metaphysical, ideological) entities. For Marx as for Czerniawska and Potter this double character is basic to the economic system and its social effects. For Marx it underpins the conditions under which human labour power is sold as a commodity, alienating workers from the commodities they produce. As commodities, containing this virtual dimension, are translated into numbers (with or without the aid of computers) we can see a further effect. Virtuality is multiplied, producing what we call a greater density of virtuality. As numbers applying to commodities accumulate and are manipulated through the stock exchange, the density of virtuality grows into ever stranger forms. When commodities are traded as futures, the degree of virtuality grows greater, reaching a density which can only be managed by computers.

In the virtual dimension, the commodity has and becomes its price, a virtual equivalent to a multiplicity of things, all of which can be exchanged for a price. This interweaving of virtuality and materiality is intrinsic to the logic of capitalist modes of production, and to its forms of organisation. From this point of view, virtuality appears not as a break with capitalism but intrinsic to it. Computers merely accelerate a basic process.

Marx’s theory of commodification was bound up with his theory of labour, where virtuality plays a crucial role. Between 1848 and 1859, according to Engels (1970:65), Marx made a conceptual breakthrough in his theory of labour. Previously he had talked, like the neo-classical theorists, of labour as what was turned into a commodity and sold by workers. He came to insist that what was sold was “labour power”, potential labour, not the work itself. “Power” in this sense is equivalent to “potential” or “virtual”: so the commodity they sell is virtual labour. In this form, made virtual, it is ready to be manipulated, bought and sold in the virtual world of Capitalism, by a logic today sustained by information technology.

Our aim in this section has not been to show ‘what Marx really thought’, just to establish a basis for comparison. In these limited terms, the relation we outline between “ideology”, “virtuality” and symbolic production is suggestive. It brings the modern ideologues into significant contact with Marx, and vice versa. It is salutary to see that what they prefer to call “information” is labeled “ideology” by Marx, and that both theories situate virtuality in the economic base. But do such differences signal a revolution, or just the different perspectives to be expected from such different traditions?

Chaos Theory and the End of Certainty

Czerniawska and Potter are prophets of their virtual revolution, using a seductive line of reasoning popular among modern prophets, including Marx in some moments. This kind of prophecy rests on so-called “laws” which mimic a form of science that is capable of making certain predictions. For example Czerniawska and Potter refer to ‘ Moore’s law’, a foundation myth of cyber-prophecy (1998: 14). In 1965 Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors contained within an integrated circuit would double every 18 months, producing an inverse relation between size (and hence cost) and computing power. As Czerniawska and Potter boast, this law produces an exponential curve which accelerates over time – just as computer technology has done. They do not add that this curve finally heads off the chart, towards infinity, producing either infinite computing power for a standard unit size and cost, or zero size and cost for standard computing power. Either way, a scenario that sounds fine for a while inevitably produces catastrophe, if no other factors intervene. This is a virtual image in Clerk Maxwell’s sense, and ideology in Marx’s.

Marx was fond of laws of this kind, establishing an inverse relation between capital and labour, with the enrichment of the one and the misery of the other – Capitalism ‘establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding to the accumulation of capital’ (1959a: 645) – with also an inevitable reversal of this trajectory, leading to the triumph of the proletariat. He based some of his most striking prophecies on this premise:

What the bourgeoisie produces, above all, is its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. (1848/1970: 46)

This claim is still seductive, as the success of Hardt and Negri’s Empire shows. For these writers, “Empire” subsumes all previous national powers into a single abstract (“virtual” in our terms) entity, facing the re-named heirs of Marx’s proletariat, “the multitude”: ‘The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: xv). Regrettably, we see no evidence that this new version of Marx’s laws predicts any better than the old did. This ‘multitude’ is virtual in one sense, produced in abstract space by extrapolating from Marx’s laws, but the real test must be empirical. The processes of world capitalism (“Empire”) produce many losers, but how will they become an entity with political effects? Users of the Internet potentially (“virtually”) can connect with everyone else, constituting a “virtual” multitude, but is this, at the moment, much more than ideology?

However, Marx is not just a (failed) prophet. There are significant disclaimers by Marx that his “laws” should be understood in a linear sense:

Under capitalist production, the general law acts as a prevailing tendency only in a very complicated and approximate manner, as a never ascertainable average of ceaseless fluctuations. (1959b: 159)

Marx’s work contains suggestions of something more powerful and exciting than caution: traces of a remarkable premonition of what has been called “chaos theory”, a postmodern form of science.[1]

For instance, his early lecture Wage labour and capital begins by discussing price fluctuations. He criticises classical economists who dismissed these fluctuations as ‘accidents’ which obscured the reality of the equivalences between prices and costs. Perhaps it is the anarchy of the fluctuations which is the reality, he says: the equivalence is the accident, and the ‘total movement of this disorder is its order’ (1849/1970: 78). Seen from the vantage point of chaos theory, classical economists treated price as an equilibrium system which tends always towards a “point attractor” (a stable point towards which the system always returns after any perturbation). Marx seems to envisage what has been called a “strange attractor” (see Lorenz, 1993), a pattern of oscillations in which each oscillation is unique, never repeated, circling around an area, not a point. Lorenz’s strange attractor exists in “phase space” (a mathematical or “virtual” state). So do Marx’s price movements. Lorenz’s attractors are mathematical abstractions which correspond to physical events and systems. The driver of Marx’s scheme is the all-pervasive social fact of struggle: here, between buyers and sellers, supply and demand, ‘inquiry’ and ‘delivery’. This struggle in the material world is expressed in the virtual world of prices.

Lorenz’s phase space is three dimensional, the minimum number of dimensions, he says, in which an attracter can be ‘strange’, never fully predictable. Significantly Marx begins his discussion of prices in a ‘three-sided’ scheme co-determined by the competition between buyers and sellers, by relations between supply and demand, and by something he called ‘inquiry and delivery’ (Marx 1849/1970: 75). Phenomena co-determined by three autonomous but interdependent systems were the focus of Henri Poincaré’s analysis of three-body systems, which in 1890, forty years after Marx’s work, showed that such systems in principle are never predictable. Another century later, Poincaré’s insight became a foundation of what came to be known as chaos theory, a new form of science in which prediction and certainty are no longer defining qualities. In 1849, Marx did not have the terms to express or systematise this radical new insight, yet he produced it nonetheless.

If Marx’s “laws” are understood not as universal like those of physics but as vectors of capitalism then it is legitimate to use them (as he mostly did in practice) to show the reductio ad absurdum of the linear capitalist mind-set if pursued to its limit, in its own form of ideal conditions. It will produce outcomes that jeopardise its conditions of existence, when only one principle, the profit motive, acts uni-directionally in a world reduced to two classes, capitalists and workers.

To be true to Marx’s insights rather than his system, Marxism needs a three-body analysis of the many-bodied systems which jostle unpredictably in the chaos of the globalising world. We posit virtuality as a third body, already recognised by Marx. Virtuality in this sense includes value added to commodities by the symbolic dimension. As one instance, brands like Adidas add greatly to the price of their commodity. Czerniawska and Potter claim that brands will become irrelevant in virtual business, because customers will use the net to obtain the real information which brands only promise. But the two strategies may not be so different. In the past a brand signified skilled and expensive labour, hence higher cost, justifying a higher price. Now out-sourcing may allow cheap overseas labour to produce a cheaper commodity, which still has a high price, because of the virtual meaning contained in the brand. Brands promised (though did not guarantee) desirable qualities in the commodity. So does “information” they may get from the net. That information is likely to include soft meanings, just as the brand implies hard meanings (quality controls, etc.). As Galbraith remarked, of an earlier stage of capitalism: ‘The economy for its success requires organised public bamboozlement’ (1972: 294). It needs it now as it did then, because symbolic value is still a key to exploitation of the other two kinds of value.

We will combine the two binary schemes, Marx’s and Czerniawska and Potter’s, in a single three-body system, including Marx’s key terms, labour and capital, along with virtuality and forces of communication. ‘Value’ is at the center, affected by interactions between all three:

This diagram attempts to capture a number of points:

Virtuality and the Global Workplace

We suggest that virtuality is an intrinsic dimension of two kinds of worker in contemporary capitalism. Digital workers form a first category created by and for the new instruments of communication production. The second category is implicit in the program of virtual business, whereby all workers now are virtualised, to a greater or less degree, as a condition for participating in the current form of capitalist production. Just as the commodity in Marx’s analysis is formed by the fusion of material and metaphysical dimensions, producing contradictions and complexities, so virtuality, implanted in workers whether or not classified as digital workers, introduces a new, paradoxical character into labour.

As our way in to this theme, we take an article in the Mexican edition of Network Computing on Remote Access Servers (RAS).

Distances do not only create alienation between people, they also create problems of business efficiency. If a mobile work force cannot use the resources of the net of its company, kilometers can translate into red figures on the balance sheet. With a remote access server, frontiers can be erased.

Remote access servers are the vital link with the LAN (local access network), and on it depend as much workers at a distance, lounging in their favorite arm chair in their home, as sales reps, reporting from Beijing after 20 hours without sleep. To connect users with the resources of a LAN is a standard operating procedure in many corporations, which is employed with ever greater frequency for people who work in remote sites. (Webster, 1999: 20)

This text is written by and for workers in virtuality, playing with the potent fantasies of cyber-speak. It written about non-digital workers who interface with each other as partly virtualised workers, but still also live and work in a material world. The text repeats the foundation myth, the legitimising ideology of cyberculture: in the beginning was a globalised world without computers, alienated (another term from Marx) and inefficient, not truly capable of globalisation. The mobile work force of globalisation was in darkness without the net to connect with the resources of virtuality, assumed here to be as unquestionably powerful as Czerniawska and Potter claim. A single device fulfils the promise (so often made, always needing to be repeated), the final elimination of borders.

The second paragraph inserts this device in the assemblage without which it would not function. This forms concentric circles, the innermost the core, the next level the LAN, which has (in this account) already transformed conditions of work for the imaginary corporation. RAS completes the final circle, dominating the globe through virtuality.

This virtual world, created through words on a page, consists of a virtual community of concentric circles, each containing nodes with multiple connections at the respective levels. In its virtual form this elegant alternative world is so interconnected it is not clear whether it offers an illusion of decentralisation or an illusion of centralisation, or both, oscillating between each other, super-imposed on a material world organised in intractable other terms. In current practice the flows will be mostly be what Bickerton et al. (1999) call presentations, linear communications dominated by the centre, consisting of reports (from periphery to center, shown by light arrows) and instructions (from centre to periphery, shown by dark arrows).

In the idealised (ideological, virtual) version, the RAS creates a better-informed centre, and more responsive workforce. In practice the layers of virtuality make it likely that “information” will be distorted, partial, irrelevant or misleading, each step along the chain adding a degree of virtual density. Given dense virtuality and continual interaction between material and virtual systems, both chaotic, the ideal will never be achieved.

Beneath the ideology this text shows glimpses of material situations and people, working far from home, or working from a home that (in spite of the beloved armchair) has been converted into a work place. The salesperson in Beijing has worked for 20 hours without sleep. Real time continues to act on workers, whether linked to a computer or not. This is invisibilised in the dominant picture which has given the phrase “24/7″ to the U.S. dialect of the English language, in which time has been eliminated, or invisibilised. In this text, invisibilisation acts with characteristic ambiguity, erasing the real time in which real bodies live, and coercing those bodies to act differently. A LAN allows weekends to be invaded as though they did not exist, invisibilised. Workers are expected to check emails, download data and respond to urgent requests before work officially begins on Monday. The extra hours involved in “flexibilisation” are invisibilised, and in this form they are more readily appropriated as surplus value.

Workers who connect to a global intranet, like prospective users of this device, are not necessarily de-skilled, because of the complex tasks it opens up. Partial virtualisation enables them to defy, to some degree, the tendencies coded in Marx’s inverse law of labour impoverishment. The RAS, as part of an assemblage, makes complex skills and local initiatives more possible, more valuable, even indispensable, to multinational corporations, because the technology does not solve all problems after all. In terms of our three body model, in which virtuality, along with labour and capital, affects price, value and wages, unpredictability is introduced. Wages are sometimes stable or increased as a result of virtualisation, in what is then called “skilled labour”, though capital can flow rapidly to labour markets, like China and India, where for the moment skilled labour is paid cheaper rates. In other cases “unskilled labour” is increasingly impoverished. The capitalist profit motive always exists but is not always equally gratified. It is never beyond challenge, in a context of struggle in which virtuality can work in complex ways.

We found this magazine in Mexico, translated into Spanish for Mexican readers, presumably digital workers likely to be employed by Mexican branches of American-owned multi-national corporations, for whom Mexico is not much different from Beijing. The text, originating from the USA, undergoing the translocation typical of globalisation, produces new fissures in the ideology. The two categories of worker, digital and physical, are seamlessly woven together in the text, one at “home”, the other abroad, but in Mexico they face each other more directly in the same country.

As a short hand way of invoking this Mexican context outside the ideology of virtuality, we quote from a report on poverty in Latin America by Celam, the Catholic Council of Bishops of Latin America. By a nice irony they echoed Marx’s critique so closely he would have been surprised, but the diagnosis would have been all too familiar:

The great transnational consortiums, principal agents in the process of integration of economic blocks, are located in those nations where they obtain most benefits and where the salaries or government charges are lowest, and as globalization advances, they are organized to assume more power and dominion.

In this way, multinational industries are turned into true financial powers who enter into competition with the economies of nations, they weaken them and destroy the means of sustenance of marginalized and rural communities; thus, at a time when the generation of wealth diminishes in many countries, because of international competition, the distribution of income becomes all the time more unequal, to the detriment of the weakest. (Roman, 2004: 45)

This is Marx’s “law” of the increasing impoverishment of the working classes, still working 150 years after he wrote, now part of a consensus. We make three points arising from it:

1. This analysis, from such a source, seems to vindicate Marx as prophet, but it is a repetition, not an extension from Marx’s original analysis. The logic of capitalism is not a straight line extrapolating from 1850 to 2005, but another return to a now different situation, with a trajectory that is unpredictable in both directions. As Marx said, ‘the total movement of this disorder is its order’.
2. The bishops do not isolate the role of the “virtual revolution” in the processes they describe, yet it is surely there, providing the new sinews (including the humble RAS along with many others) that hold together the monstrous limbs of a new kind of gigantic beast, Multinational Corporations, which could not survive or function without them.
3. Meanwhile back in Mexico we can see the contradictory movements which constitute the latest stage in the “revolution”: impoverishment of many, yet new opportunities for some Mexicans to co-operate with some capitalists; digitalisation a source of opportunities that many are taking, from the top (Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico does good business with Bill Gates’ Microsoft) to somewhere above the middle. And from the bottom, from the ranks of the dispossessed who worry the Catholic bishops, there is a groundswell expressed most notably by the Zapatista rebels, organising resistance by creative use of old and new media from the jungles of south-east Mexico (see Coronado and Hodge, 2001).

But is it a Revolution?

Capitalism has developed a new array of devices to fulfill its old aim, to extract surplus value wherever it can. All these devices to some degree draw on resources of virtuality: “virtual surplus value” makes it easier to appropriate other kinds of surplus value. All these forms of expropriation are usually presented in ideological form, in Marx’s sense, which is virtual in Clerk Maxwell’s: an inverted image made to seem the right way up.

Yet these are only the dreams of one class, shadows projected onto the screen of virtuality, which has space for many other projections. Outside the camera obscura of capitalist ideology the struggle continues, precarious or strong labour against strong or precarious capital, in a field of struggle unpredictably affected by new technologies of production and information. Virtuality has conditioned all forms of labour to some degree, creating different classes of worker, set against each other, not conscious of the web of virtuality that links them all into a single multitude. That unity is virtual in one sense – a potential that could be activated by virtuality in another sense, the resources of the net. The connections are not being made at the moment, by the real users who are the only ones who could make this grand alliance virtual, and thence real. But will they?

“Virtuality” is not unique to today’s world, but because it is so basic a category, the huge changes of virtuality enabled by the “information technology revolution” make it a type B revolution. It impacts on other revolutions in unpredictable ways to produce outcomes that Marx did not imagine, and capitalists cannot predict or control. Will all this one day precipitate a change so wide-ranging that few would deny its status as a “Revolution Type A”? We do not presume to know.

Authors’ Biographies

Bob Hodge is Foundation Professor of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney. His main current research interests are in the development of chaos theory and fuzzy logic as applied to the social sciences, especially in the areas of globalization and the issue of postmodernity. His most recent books have been Social Fuzziology (2002, with Vladimir Dimitrov) and El hipertexto multicultural en Mexico posmoderno (2004, with Gabriela Coronado).

Gabriela Coronado is Senior Lecturer in Organisational Studies in the School of Management at the University of Western Sydney. Her current research interests include cross-cultural management and global strategy, using theories of chaos and complexity. Her most recent books have been Las voces silenciadas de la cultura mexicana (2003) and El hipertexto multicultural en Mexico posmoderno (2004, with Bob Hodge)

Note

[1] See Hodge (1995) for an outline of this argument, and Coronado and Hodge (2004) for application to issues of globalisation.

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References

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______. El hipertexto multicultural en México postmoderno (Mexico: CIESAS/Porrua, 2004).

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(Includes Manifesto of the Communist Party 1848, Wage Labour and Capital (K. Marx) 1849).

______. The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).

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______. Capital Vol 3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1959b).

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Webster, N. International Dictionary of English (Springfield: Mirriam, 2005).

This article is a critical reflection on the dot.com boom and the volatile industry, discipline and conditions of labour it has spawned. It offers an autobiographical insight into my past experiences as one of its labourers, as well as my current perspective as an academic responsible for cultivating these industry professionals. Autobiography offers an opportunity to impart my observations as a practitioner in the multimedia industry during its heyday, and lends to them an ‘experiential authority’ (Clifford, 1988: 35) which has been largely ignored in dot.com studies. According to Stanley (1997), autobiography offers a connection between the individual and the social, in this case, the individual new media worker and larger industry of which I was part. In addition, as an educator I am familiar with the importance of reflective practice in experiential learning (Boud and Miller, 1996: 3; Beaty, 1992: 13) and have access to the experiential data of my students to examine the role of creativity in multimedia practice.

The empirical work which informs this article ranges from ‘retrospective ethnography’ (Greed, 1990: 147) of my participation in the dot.com industry to survey responses from students outlining their perceived requirements for entering a technology-related industry. Both sets of data illustrate the precarious state of a “creative industry” such as interactive multimedia, and the labour which constitutes such an industry. They also point to some tentative explanations for this insecurity: firstly, the interdisciplinarity of interactive multimedia lends an inherent uncertainty to the field. Secondly, the youth of the field, in terms of the age of the multimedia industry and the profile of its workforce, leads it to have somewhat ahistorical tendencies. This is manifest in its preoccupation with ease and speed, as well as its weak connection between theory and practice.

Such unstable relationships undermine the notion of “creative organisation”. Indeed, further interrogation of this term implies an oxymoron in both definition and experience. As mentioned above, multimedia is hardly organised – as an industry, discipline or labour movement. In part, this is because creativity appears to require a degree of disorganisation, given its popular interpretation as occupying the middle territory between brilliance and insanity. Lateral or creative thinking, commonly regarded as the antithesis of logical thinking, connotes an ability to think creatively, tangentially, abstractly, beyond set boundaries (Banks et al., 2002: 257). While the dot.com industry is most definitely disorganised (and thus has the potential to provide a creative environment), I will argue that its pace and pressure are not conducive to fostering creative dispositions, processes or cultures (Tan, 1998: 23).

The volatility of the dot.com industry as seen in the short period between its boom and bust indicates at some level a culture of risk-taking which is necessary to establish a climate of creativity (Isaksen and Lauer, 2002: 81). Yet the numerous casualties of this era when popular expectations and aspirations for the Internet were at their peak, suggest that it is an industry which does not generally embrace critical self-reflection. As Shedroff says:

This looking back over the shoulder is critical because most technological industries have almost nonexistent attention spans and proclaim it worthless to look ahead more than six months. This short-sightedness is one of the reasons the industry is so hit-and-miss, having soaring successes as well as spectacular failures – and many more failures than successes. (Shedroff, 2001: 22)

The fast-moving nature of the industry is intrinsic to its disorganisation and lack of introspection. I was swept up in the dot.com riptide in the late 1990s when I returned to Australia after years of London living. Having no experience in the industry up to that point, I landed a job as a producer/project manager at a multimedia production agency. I was swimming with the current, which at that time, was pulling in people with no experience, to its ultimate detriment, when the resulting tidal wave took most of them under. What follows is an autobiographical construction of ‘then through now’ (Stanley, 1992: 48), in an attempt to make sense of the macro at the level of the micro.

Call Us, We won’t Call You

The agency had advertised for staff in a metropolitan newspaper. However, I had interpreted the advertisement to be for an employment agency looking for multimedia professionals to recruit. That is, the ad had been written in such as way as to suggest a transient kind of employment; a promiscuous sort of relationship with no obligation of commitment from either side. The agency was also seeking various types of people rather than one particular person to fill a designated role. So I sent in my CV expecting the usual process of being contacted by a nonchalant recruitment consultant wanting me to come in for an interview, then telling me I’ll be contacted when something suitable comes up.

It wasn’t entirely unanticipated that nobody called. So as per convention, I made the follow-up phone call to ask if my CV had been received. The receptionist put me through to ‘Simon’ who confirmed that he had received my CV and asked me to come in for an interview that afternoon. Feigning enthusiasm, I agreed, believing it was probably better to tackle the questionnaires and tests required in order to register with the agency sooner rather than later.

When I arrived, it became apparent that the agency was not a recruitment consultancy, but a production house for various types of media, including multimedia. Thus, completely unprepared, I was ushered into the boardroom for an interview for a position within this organisation with ‘Simon’, who turned out to be the managing director. As mentioned previously, I had no experience in the industry, but made a persuasive argument for the parallels between what I did as an educator who had developed new degrees in multimedia studies (that is, facilitate, organise, coordinate) and what I was to do as an industry practitioner. He offered me a position as a ‘freelance project manager’ beginning the following week on my ambitiously requested hourly rate.

While this experience marked my entrance into the industry, it is not atypical in terms of the other similar types of “creative organisations” I encountered during that boom time. Firstly, it is indicative of the lack of hierarchy prevalent in such organisations: easy access to senior management was evident not only during the recruitment process, but also in the open plan offices which sat MD next to coder. While this could be commended as egalitarian office politics, the open plan of the workplace was also representative of the ‘organic structure’ required to support creativity within an organisation, as recommended by Tan (1998: 28).

Therefore, a second characteristic of the creative organisation, and a by-product of its lack of hierarchy, is a lack of structure. With only a small number of permanent staff, the organisation expands and contracts in accordance with each breath of the business. In her discussion of the evolution of the web development team, Burdman (1999: 27-28) identifies the project manager, technical lead, designers and web developer as the core members. In this particular agency, these roles were occupied entirely by freelance contractors, with the skeleton of the company consisting of the managing director and senior producers.

Thirdly, the constant state of flux in these organisations leads them to be highly disorganised, or rather “creative disorganisations”. As people move in and out of the company, projects are left stranded without caretakers, as happened in the project I was assigned to troubleshoot. The resignation of the company’s production manager, who was also the supervising producer on the project, left only an inexperienced web developer in charge. Soon, the large multinational client was asking questions about why the project was running months behind schedule and I was thrown in to answer them.

Fourthly, amid such chaotic conditions, it is unsurprising that the labourers within these “disorganisations” are themselves not organised in terms of demanding their entitlements. As Banks et al. (2002: 256) note, apart from the small to medium enterprises, the remainder of the “creative industries” is constituted by freelancers, sole traders and the self-employed. With so many freelancers employed as needed at the agency, at times there was not enough office space or computers to accommodate them. Some had to bring their own computers in at no extra cost, graciously absorbing the effort and expense into their hourly rate. When the managing director announced that the company was experiencing a cashflow problem which meant that we would not be paid for ‘a couple of days’, there was not a bat of an eyelid. As the couple of days translated into over a week, the workers continued on projects that were supposed to be referred to in the past tense, often working around the clock and on weekends to meet the impossible deadlines of a client. Having sat with programmers on a number of occasions until the early hours of morning, I found that as a self-proclaimed member of Generation X, I simply could not keep up let alone understand the motivations of the younger, invariably childless, mostly single Generation Y members with whom I was working.

Generation Y-not?

Why not work for 24 hours without sleep? Why not be seduced by the appreciation shown by the company through the endless supply of Mountain Dew, CabCharges and takeaway meals? The apolitical orientations of these new media workers was as much a product of their demographic as the industry. Allegiances were difficult to form, and even more difficult to maintain, in the absence of any sense of history or continuity. During the ‘utopian moment’ (Dovey, 1996: 114-135) of the Internet, one was always in the present or literally “in the moment”, so to speak. This is beautifully articulated in the risky existence of the freelancer and their transient affiliation to an organisation. Like the y axis of a Cartesian graph, they only intersect with a workplace at a certain point in time, lying perpendicular (and therefore oblivious) to its lineage (or x axis). With no individual or collective past in the new media industry, positioning oneself in the present and the future was problematic. It is only in autobiographical hindsight that I can re-present the historical moment (Stanley, 1992: 48).

At the level of industry, the absence of precedence and past was both contrived and circumstantial. To assume the mantle of “new media” has meant distancing the traditional, and a reluctance to be perceived as part of a historical trajectory of older media (Bobo, 1993: 273). The scramble for multimedia to find its own niche has meant that it has isolated itself from other disciplines, yet the inherent interdisciplinarity of the field has also made problematic its historical positioning. The disciplines involved in designing digital experiences (Norman, 1998) – anthropology, sociology, psychology, engineering, architecture, industrial design, technical communication – have been applied disparately without much consideration or consolidation of the theoretical traditions and rich histories of each. As Shedroff (2001: 2) asserts, it is an area with an ambiguous identity since it has ‘simultaneously … no history (since it is a discipline only recently defined), and the longest history (since it is the culmination of many ancient disciplines)’.

This dearth of theory and history in commercial multimedia production has led the discipline to become highly pragmatic and relentlessly sensible, more so than its film and broadcast media counterparts. Nowhere is this more evident than in the notion of “usability”, whereby the Web is regarded as a utility, and users are seen as having only utilitarian motives for their online activities. The premise of usability is to make the achievement of online tasks easy and efficient for users such that web sites must have ‘zero learning time or die’ (Nielsen, 2000). In the words of usability expert, Steve Krug (2000), ‘don’t make me think!’. In a fast-paced industry, such ideas are quick to circulate, disseminated amongst industry practitioners by industry practitioners, but slow to ferment. Rather than expansion and mutation of such ideas, they are, instead, condensed and distilled into a series of rules. Nielsen, with his famous mantra ‘usability is king’, developed a set of ten general heuristics (Nielsen, nd) and 117 guidelines for implementing Flash in web design (Macromedia, 2002).

With such ideas elevated to the canon in the area of digital media development, the tenuous connection between theory and practice becomes apparent. Cognitive labour becomes sublimated to manual labour, as the basic tenets of usability are not only applied to ensure an easy and speedy online experience for the Web user, but also to facilitate effortless and expedient production by the Web developer. While the rise of the creative industries is the result of the post-industrial transition from manual and mechanial modes of production to informational, symbolic and knowledge-based ones (Banks et al., 2002: 256), it seems that new media enterprises are shifting backwards with labour-intensive notions of “building” and “hand-coding”. Thus new media labour becomes akin to a “trade” in its favouring of practice over theory, with a literal trade-off between doing and thinking. A professional environment such as this translates into pervasive beliefs amongst Generation Y-not members about what skills are essential to working in the field.

The Industry Context and its effect on Expectations of Students of Interactive Multimedia

The occupational pragmatism that is represented in the notion of usability is inevitably articulated in the expectations of multimedia practitioners seeking professional development. The dislocation between theory and practice is apparent in the desire for technical expertise, suggesting they identify themselves less as knowledge workers and more as manual labourers. In this respect, multimedia seems to be the antithesis of a creative industry in that the necessity of technical skill outweighs other components that have been defined as crucial to creativity – that of innovation, experimentation, people management or teamwork (Banks et al., 2002).

As coordinator for a suite of postgraduate courses in interactive multimedia, empirical data gathered from students through regular and formal subject evaluations[1] indicate that multimedia practice is often interpreted as largely embodying software skills:

‘Try to work more in the workshops, because that is the main purpose of the course and experience of Flash is the most important’.

‘I would be disappointed not to be able to explore Flash action scripting in the course and 100% Flash dynamic database. Also, we learn about audio/sound, but how about video?’

‘Give some workshop on technical skills such as Photoshop’.

‘More theories, hands on Photoshop workshop’.

‘Like most university subjects, there is not enough hands on, practical content’.

Students’ attitudes towards learning can be seen to be partly informed by their experiences of working in the industry, as well as reflective of an industry perspective of professional development. However, they also imply more pervasive social attitudes towards technology which equate technological progress with social progress (Henwood et al., 2000: 11), and subsequently, technical knowledge with social power. That is, those with technology skills are perceived to be at the forefront of social change. Therefore, if social development is technologically determined, then those working in the technology industries influence society. According to Wyatt (1998), such beliefs about the power of technology are as popular as they are pervasive, and need to be taken seriously. This sense of technological determinism in which technology is seen to lead development processes, also came to the fore:

‘More technical details would be useful’.

‘I’d be most disappointed not to gain the latest ideas and technologies when the course is finished’.

‘Maybe we can put more focus on technology, because some of us don’t have experience of the digital media industry’.

‘More technological development and current issues. More technical issues’.

Students’ preoccupation with technical skill would suggest less value is placed on ‘soft’ skills, those which are often associated with creativity (Tan, 1998: 28). This is often manifest in a belief that activities such as reading and research, which provide a framework for the creative generation, debate and play of ideas (Isaksen, 2002: 80-81) will not help them attain or even complement their desired technical skills. Again, this would seem to point to the misfit between theory and practice in multimedia, particularly the absence of theoretical underpinnings to multimedia practice:

‘Less readings because the sum of all readings across the course is really a problem to overcome’.

‘Less time / lectures on the “theory” of groupwork’.

‘Give less of theory, more of real practical experience’.

There is a symbiotic relationship between how students approach their studies and how they consider they will be working in the multimedia industry. For students already working within the multimedia industry, the pace and pressure under which they work is also transferred to their studies. This is not helped by the multimedia industry’s notoriety for “churning and burning” its members, a reputation which was sealed during the dot.com boom years. Therefore, the pressure of time and currency also featured in students’ responses to subjects they were studying, as demonstrated by the need to keep up to date with the latest technological developments and dispense with creative and academic practices which require freedom and time for critical reflection but may not produce a solution. Students placed a high value on their time, and felt compelled to learn as much and as quickly as possible. As multimedia practitioners, they adopt principles of user-centred design by simplifying and reducing the time needed for a user task (Soloway and Pryor, 1996). This is subsequently applied to their postgraduate study so that learning activities are perceived as utilitarian exercises to be performed as quickly and easily as possible. The belief that postgraduate study in interactive multimedia is essentially formal training for working in the industry is expressed in the desire for “real-world” practices to be taught in the classroom:

‘Bring some real project process into class’.

‘Some practical work from real life would add value on this subject’.

‘We need to learn how things should be done, not guessing them’.

‘More readings illustrating real-life processes… would be more interesting and more useful than theoretical readings on multimedia practices’.

‘Provide a more real-life approach’.

While this perception of “real life” can be taken to mean industry-standard conventions and processes, it implies more profoundly its perceived differentiatation from academic practices and theoretical approaches to studying interactive multimedia. If study is approached in the same manner as professional work, it follows that students may then regard learning as just a ‘new form of labour’ (Eden et al., 1996), or perhaps another form of labour:

By integrating working and learning, people learn within the context of their work on real-world problems. Learning does not take place in a separate phase and in a separate place, but is integrated into the work process. (Fischer, 2000)

I Think and Do, Therefore I Am…

Fischer’s definition of lifelong learning supports this alignment between work and education. However, this is challenging within an industry where the appreciation of theory and critical reflection is limited because knowledge is endemically acquired “just in time”.

I am aware of the limitations of this paper: it is autobiographical and therefore subjective in nature. But it has been a means of distinguishing between lived experience and popular representation of the multimedia industry. It has also faciliated experiential learning upon which theory and future action can be developed (Miller, 1993: 88-92). Furthermore, it has attempted to mitigate this subjectivity by drawing from empirical data to examine how the multimedia industry has professionally and educationally affected individuals, namely students of interactive multimedia. In exploring the alignment between my own experiences as a multimedia practitioner and the stated learning objectives of my students, it has offered a critical reflection on the industry from its edge, at its interface with education.

My current position as an educator on the peripheries of the dot.com industry has enabled me to undertake a “retrospective ethnography” of my experiences working in the centre of the industry during its boom years. This personal and historical interrogation has merely identified a problem (the conditions under which a multimedia practitioner labours that are incongruous with being part of a “creative industry”) but not offered a solution (in terms of how students’ expectations might be transformed in the educational process, which in turn may change the culture of the industry). However, it has highlighted the risks faced by multimedia practitioners who are constantly on the precipice of un/employment: the insecurity of their freelance existence necessitates a cautious balance between churn and burnout. It has also drawn attention to the difficult relationship between studying and working in interactive multimedia, between academic and industry practices.

These precarious ties are illustrative of the tenuous connection between technology and creativity. The disorganisations of multimedia – as a discipline, in an agency environment, as an industry and in terms of its labourers – undermine its definition as a creative industry. Given a broad definition of creativity as the product of individual disposition, development processes and organisational culture (Tan, 1998: 23), it is clear that creativity is affected by forces more encompassing and powerful than technology alone. Rather, the social and industrial context in which it exists is a more influential determinant of its outcome than the number of people in an organisation who can be categorised as “creatives”.

Author’s Biography

Dr Linda Leung is Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Interactive Media and Learning. She has previously taught and/or conducted research at the universities of London, East London, North London, Miami and Western Sydney. Her research is concerned with ethnicity and technology, particularly the ways in which ethnic communities are participating in cyberspace. Her forthcoming book Virtual Ethnicity: Race, Resistance & the World Wide Web, published by Ashgate, will be released in 2005.

Note

[1] In the case of these postgraduate courses, feedback from students is formally sought up to twice per semester for each core subject in interactive multimedia, of which there are six. Thus, in a Masters program, student suggestions are gathered on twelve occasions before reaching the capstone subject.

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References

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Burdman, Jessica. Collaborative Web Development: Strategies and Best Practices for Web Teams (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1999).

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Greed, Clara. ‘The Professional and the Personal: A Study of Women Quanitiy Surveyors’, in Liz Stanley (ed.) Feminist Praxis: Research, Theory and Epistemology in Feminist Sociology (London: Routledge, 1990).

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______. ‘Graduate Destinations Survey: Interim Report’, unpublished paper (2003).

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______. ‘Ten Usability Heuristics’ (n.d.), http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html.

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The digital games industry comprises a significant part of the creative industries, with revenues comparable to the box office intakes of the Hollywood film industry. A recent report published by British market research firm Informa Media values the global games market in 2003 at 33.2 billion US dollars (Thomas, 2004). Loren Shuster notes: ‘To put those figures into context, the size of the gaming industry is now approaching the music industry, which is worth around $38 billion, and has already surpassed the motion picture industry in terms of box office revenue. Moreover, gaming is growing, and may actually exceed the value of the music industry by the end of 2004′ (Shuster, 2003).

This success has led to an industry-wide concentration process, in the course of which smaller developers and publishers have either been taken over by large corporations such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, or pushed out of the market altogether. But even for the big players, profit margins are so slim that they rely increasingly on licenses and sequels to ensure profitability (see Kline et al., 2003). However, this risk-averseness is counter-balanced by the growing number of players who are not content just to consume games, but prefer to create their own games using the tools provided by the games’ manufacturers, or, in the absence of these, creating their own tools and utilities.

Computer game modification, or “modding”, is an important part of gaming culture as well as an increasingly important source of value for the games industry. The example of Counter-Strike, originally a modification of the first-person shooter Half-Life, and subsequently sold as a stand-alone product for Xbox and PC, shows that “mods” can not only increase the shelf-life of the games industry’s products, but also inject a shot of much-needed innovation into an industry seemingly unable to afford taking commercial risks.

Modders, however, are rarely remunerated for taking the risks the industry itself shuns. While successful modders, such as Counter-Strike’s creator, Minh Le, enjoy a celebrity status that enables them to find employment in the games industry, many modders are either uninterested or unable to translate the social capital gained through modding into gainful employment. The precarious status of modding as a form of unpaid labour is veiled by the perception of modding as a leisure activity, or simply as an extension of play. This draws attention to the fact that in the entertainment industries, the relationship between work and play is changing, leading, as it were, to a hybrid form of “playbour”.

The following paper analyses the relationship between the modding community and the games industry from a political economy perspective, without disregarding the pleasures and rewards individual modders may derive from their work. Within this context, the questions of whether modders can be regarded in terms of a “dispersed multitude”, and how the power that comes with this status can be realised more fully, deserve special attention. At the same time, this paper seeks to gain insight into the changing relationship between work and play in the creative industries, and the ideological ramifications of this change.

The History of Modding

Since the early 1990s, the relationship between the digital games industry and the consumers of digital games has changed significantly. To a large extent, this is due to the emergence of computer game modification, or “modding”, as a widespread cultural practice. While Castle Smurfenstein (1983), a modification of the classic Castle Wolfenstein, is commonly seen as the first mod, modding did not come into its own until after id Software’s publication of the Doom source code in 1997, and the subsequent development of level editors such as WorldCraft by the players themselves. In a Popular Science article on modding David Kushner (n.d.) notes that ‘[t]he Doom Editor Utility was a watershed in the evolution of the participatory culture of mod making. Anyone with the interest could create a level of a complex game, the equivalent of writing a new chapter into a book, and then, via the Internet, publishing that creation’.

The unplanned and unexpected proliferation of Doom mods turned out to be a stroke of luck for id Software, since the mods required the original software to run on players’ computers. As James Wagner Au (2002) points out: ‘Not only did this tradition of communal self-policing create a bond between id and their best fans, it benefited the company commercially – to enjoy all the free fan-created content now coming available, you first had to pay your toll to id and Apogee’. As a consequence, subsequent id products such as Quake and Quake II were shipped with powerful level-editors that allowed players to make their own mods.

The most successful Quake II mod, however, was not a fan-created modification, but a commercial product: ‘[T]wo former Microsoft programmers were investing their time and money in a new venture. They called it Valve Software, and without any prior industry experience, Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell were hoping to transform the state of games with a title that would become “Half-Life” (1998). After a visit to the id offices in Mesquite, Texas, they chose to build the game on top of the original “Quake” 3-D rendering “engine”‘ (Au, 2002).

And of course it was Half-Life itself that gave rise to the most successful mod in computer game history: Counter-Strike (1999). Created collaboratively by Minh “Gooseman” Le and some of his fellow students, Counter-Strike quickly became the most popular online game – a title it still holds at the time of this writing, almost five years after its release. Le eventually found employment at Valve and sold Counter-Strike to his employer for an undisclosed sum. Counter-Strike is now a well-established Valve brand, with over a million copies sold, and a single-player version (Counter-Strike: Condition Zero) an instant success.

In the light of this success, it is hardly surprising that Valve remains dedicated to strengthening the ties between the modding community and the games industry. In 2002, Valve launched Steam, a distribution network that ‘will create a smoother transition between the amateur world and the professional world’ (Au, 2002). This smooth transition, however, comes at a price. Valve’s Gabe Newell explains the business model behind Steam as follows: ‘We are going to be offering mod teams a $995 engine license plus royalty to allow them to distribute their mods over Steam….Once a mod team has developed an audience they could think about either being aggregated into some other offering or going all the way to publishing their game over Steam’ (quoted in Au, 2002).

The Economy of Modding

The fact that game developers frequently license other companies’ game engines – as in the case of Valve licensing the Quake engine for Half-Life – draws attention to the close similarities between the modding community and the games industry. In effect, a game like Half-Life is no less derivative than some of the more ambitious products of the modding community. However, while Valve was able to capitalise on its creation due to their payment of a licensing fee to id Software, modders are barred from this option by the very restrictive end user license agreements (EULAs) they have to agree to when installing the games. The EULA for the Half-Life SDK (“software development kit”), for example, states that:

Valve hereby grants Licensee a nonexclusive, royalty-free, terminable, worldwide, non-transferable license to:

(a) use, reproduce and modify the SDK in source code form, solely to develop a Mod; and

(b) reproduce, distribute and license the Mod in object code form, solely to licensed end users of Half-Life, without charge.

In effect, this means that the game developer retains the intellectual property rights of all mods created using the SDK shipped with the game. On the surface, this looks like a fair deal – modders are granted the right to play with the source-code of the game, but cannot sell the products thus created. But a closer look reveals that this is by no means a straightforward agreement – after all, Valve benefits immensely from its large modding community. But what exactly are these benefits? I will illustrate this using the example of Counter-Strike.

First of all, the game’s developer and publisher did not have to create and establish the Counter-Strike brand: this was done for them by the creators and players of the game. In a highly competitive market such as the games industry, in which marketing costs often comprise one of the largest slices of a game’s budget, this is an invaluable asset. Once a brand is established, it becomes quite easy to sell a game – as evidenced by the industry’s growing reliance on film and other licenses. The importance of successful branding in the digital games industry is highlighted by Kline et al., who assert that ‘Nintendo, Sega, and other games companies became pioneers of branding on the electronic frontier, enveloping game play in a branded ambience of custom, myth, status and craft-lore’ (Kline et al., 2003: 57).

A prime example of the effect of successful branding is the game Enter the Matrix, which was released simultaneously with the second instalment of the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy, Matrix Reloaded. The predetermined shipping date led to a premature release of the game, which left it riddled with bugs and glitches. Despite these shortcomings, several million copies of Enter the Matrix were sold – purely on the strength of the Matrix brand. Similarly, established videogame brands such as Doom, Tiger Woods Golf and Colin McRae Rally do not require extensive marketing, but sell on the strength of previous products.

Secondly, mods add to the shelf-life of the original product. 2004 saw the release of Half-Life: Generation – a reissue of the original title bundled with the two add-ons Opposing Force and Blue Shift as well as the two most successful Half-Life mods: Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic (the latter was originally a Quake mod, which was re-implemented in the Half-Life SDK). While it is not unusual for successful games to be re-released at a bargain price a year or two after the original publication, Half-Life: Generation was exceptional insofar as it sold as a “full-price” product, despite being more than five years old. Compared to a game’s average shelf-life of around six months, this is a truly outstanding performance. In Kushner (n.d), Gabe Newell of Valve is quoted as saying: ‘A mod extends the shelf life of the product over time’.

Thirdly, mods increase customer loyalty. Valve’s support for the modding community has gained the company an online cult following that monitors the company’s every move with rapt attention. The hundreds of websites dedicated to Half-Life and Counter-Strike are witness to this strong loyalty. While this is certainly to a large extent due to the company’s own products – according to the Valve website, the game has won ‘more than 50 Game of the Year awards’ – the many mods available for Half-Life add immensely to this appeal. The fact that Half-Life 2 mods were available even before the game’s release is strong evidence that the “modability” of Valve’s games lends the company credibility and kudos in the gaming community. As Hector Postigo points out: ‘[M]ods can play a role in extending the sales of the original game or developing a devoted fan base’ (Postigo, 2003: 596). In effect, this can be seen as an effective branding strategy that aims to ‘”close the loop” between corporation and customer [by] reinscribing the consumer into the production process’ (Kline et al., 2003: 57).

Furthermore, modding is an important source of innovation in the digital games industry. Without the creativity of modders, developers would be hard-pressed to come up with new ideas, and it would prove hard to implement these ideas in the high-risk gaming market were it not for the huge “test-market” the modding community provides. It could even be argued that Valve’s decision to cast Half-Life 2′s physics engine in a central role is at least partly due to modders’ experiments with the rudimentary physics of the prequel, such as changing gravity and friction. In the case of Counter-Strike, team-based combat proved to be such a strong gameplay idea that the market was soon flooded with dozens of similar products.

In effect, the creativity of modders significantly reduces game developers’ R&D and marketing costs. Postigo puts it succinctly when he says that ‘this process manages to harness a skilled labour force for little or no initial cost and represents an emerging form of labour exploitation on the Internet’ (Postigo, 2003: 597). The importance of this “free” source of innovation can be hardly overestimated. As Kline et al. note, the digital games industry is part of the ‘perpetual innovation economy’ (Kline et al., 2003: 66), which is characterised by ‘the need for constant creativity in finding new ways to build audiences’ and a ‘constant reworking of genres and styles’ (Kundnani, 1998-99, quoted in Kline et al., 2003: 66).

Finally, the modding community is used as a recruiting pool for the games industry. As Wagner James Au (2002) points out: ‘[Valve employees] Keranen, Carlson, and many more would be hired by game companies largely on the strength of their mods’. The modding community produces highly trained programmers, 3D-artists and animators without the industry having to spend money on training facilities and teachers. The employment of Counter-Strike’s creator, Minh Le, is a point in case. Modders do not even have to be provided with the requisite software, as many modders will be content to use cracked software obtained through file-sharing networks. The fact that high-level modding requires costly software tools such as 3Dmax and Maya, and the legal consequences of using pirated software are rarely acknowledged by the games industry.

The games industry’s use of modding culture as a recruiting pool also results in a feedback loop that effectively prevents the industry from embracing new market segments outside the core audience of young males. In regard to Counter-Strike, Kline et al. point out that

[f]rom one perspective, this pattern of consumer-led game modifications is an inspiring story of participatory and democratic design, with developers facilitating a series of player-led initiatives in a mutually beneficial manner. But it is not coincidental that the participants come from a young male technoculture fascinated by scenarios of violence – for it is exactly there [...] that the game industry has cultivated its most devoted and technically adept consumers. (Kline et al., 2003: 253)

While it is impossible to estimate the monetary value of these benefits from modding, the sale of 1.5 million copies of Counter-Strike by the end of 2003 (Computer Gaming World, 2003) indicates that modding is an important economic factor in the digital games industry: ‘From a labour theory standpoint, it seems that modders add a considerable amount of value to commercial games’ (Postigo, 2003: 602). Some even claim that ‘[p]layer-created additions to computer games aren’t a hobby anymore – they’re the lifeblood of the industry’ (Au, 2002). Nevertheless, modding is still primarily seen as a leisure activity that modders engage in for fun rather than profit.

Modding as “Playbour”

The problem with that is that the modders’ leisure is being commodified by the games industry. While the commercialisation of leisure is hardly a new phenomenon – for example, Fulcher notes that ‘[l]eisure was [...] the creation of capitalism [...], through the commercialization of leisure’ (Fulcher, 2004: 8) – it seems a radical departure from the established business models of the leisure industries that the games industry not only sells entertainment products, but also capitalises on the products of the leisure derived from them.

In order to gain a firmer grip on this slippery issue, it seems necessary to differentiate forms of “productive leisure” from unproductive leisure. While there have always been forms of productive leisure – crafts such as knitting and woodworking as well as hunting, gardening and fishing come to mind – the products of these activities may have never made a significant appearance in the marketplace in capitalist societies. Arguably, this has only changed with the advent of affordable digital technology that enabled their consumers to mass-produce high-quality digital artefacts at low cost and without loss of quality.

In this respect, modding is quite similar to another form of collaborative digital production – open-source software development. Both forms of cultural production are usually collaborative project that result in a non-commercial product – although the example of Linux has shown that clever packaging and marketing can ensure the commercial viability of open-source software, even in a highly competitive marketplace, such as the PC operating system market. However, large-scale open-source productions such as Linux and its various distributions are more similar to independent game development than modding.

A closer kinship exists between mods and homebrew macros and plugins for commercial software. But while the former usually remain the property of the makers of the original game, the latter are frequently published under a General Public License (GPL). A December 2004 post to the [gameprogrammer] mailing list, for example, advertises a shell extension for Windows XP that allows users to view thumbnails of game-specific image formats such as DDS, TGA and PCX. The author asserts that ‘[i]t’s open source, GPL’ (Johansson, 2004) and points to a download website on sourceforge.net. Sourceforge itself lists hundreds, if not thousands, of “open-source” plugins for commercial software such as Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, etc.

The most important distinction, however, between open-source software development and modding are to do with the cultural status of these activities rather than the intellectual property regimes they fall under. Partly due to the commercial success of open-source software such as Linux and StarOffice, the development of “free” software has come to be seen as a valid, if slightly eccentric, form of work. Modding, on the other hand, still has to struggle to free itself from the negative connotations of play: idleness, non-productiveness and escapism. And while the digital game industry increasingly acknowledges the contribution of modders, they have no incentive to contest this view: the perception of modding as play is the basis of the exploitative relationship between modders and the games industry.

While the industry faults “piracy” and file-sharing for their dwindling revenues, the digital games industry actually benefits from the fact that mods can be produced on personal computers and distributed at negligible cost over the Internet. More importantly, however, it benefits from a perception that everything to do with digital games is a form of play, and therefore a voluntary, non-profit-oriented activity. There are strong indicators, however, that this concept of play is no longer appropriate. Due to the fact that work has been rendered more “flexible” in regard to its temporal, spatial and institutional contexts, more and more people can now be said to “play for a living”.

The shift from disciplinary societies to societies of control noted by Gilles Deleuze (1992) has led to a “deregulation” of work in which the primary source of coercion is no longer the institution an individual works for, but the individual herself. It is this regime of self-discipline that allows us to describe new forms of labour in the information society in terms of play, or, more specifically, in terms of freedom and rules. The solitary player is the archetype of the individual who upholds the rules simply for the sake of the pleasure she derives from submitting to them, since, paradoxically, her freedom results from her submission to the rules of the game.

Modding as Precarious Labour

Arguably, the precariousness of modders “playbour” lies in the fact that it is ‘[s]imultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited’ (Terranova, 2000: 32), because this renders it unclassifiable in traditional terms of work and leisure. Modding and other, similar forms of “free labour” do not fit the categories of wage labour, freelance or voluntary work, and neither do they fit the categories of leisure, play or art. While free labour, or “playbour”, shares traits with all of these occupational types, it can only be understood on its own terms.

Modding and productive forms of waged labour are comparable in regard to the fact that the creators of the produced goods do not “own” their products. By the terms of the original game’s EULA, mods usually remain the property of the game’s manufacturer, and while some modders have received payments by game developers, they are usually barred from receiving royalties, as explicitly stated in the Half-Life SDK’s EULA quoted above. This draws attention to the fact that mods enjoy a rather dubious status in terms of intellectual property rights, as they are usually created under terms that prevent their creators from claiming these rights. Nevertheless, some regard modding as ‘an attempt to transcend alienation’ (Postigo, 2003: 601). Drawing on the work of Thomas (1997), Postigo argues that ‘[o]wnership of the productive process, even when this process is not physical, is what makes the workers in Thomas’s study non-alienated from their work, and I believe it is the same process that compels modders to work hard for and identify with their labour’ (Postigo, 2003: 601).

At the same time, modding can be seen as similar to freelance work, as modders bear the full financial and legal risk that results from their activity. The Half-Life SDK’s EULA states in no unclear terms that the

Licensee shall defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Valve [...] against any and all claims, damages, losses, or liabilities whatsoever arising out of Licensee’s creation, distribution, or promotion of the Mod’ and that ‘[n]either this Agreement nor the disclosure or receipt of Information shall constitute or imply any promise to or intention to make any purchase of products or services by either party or its affiliated companies or any commitment by either party or its affiliated companies with respect to the present or future marketing of any product or service [...].

Modding shares some traits with voluntary work as well, as it is neither motivated directly by financial motives or coercion. Furthermore, as Postigo points out that one of the most important motivations for modding is the ‘sense of community they derive from the experience’ (Postigo, 2003: 599) a motive that also plays a part in many forms of voluntary work. However, voluntary work is usually confined to non-profit organisations, while modding is closely aligned with the highly profit-oriented digital games industry. One of the reasons why this industry has been able to recruit such a large number of voluntary workers might be the fact that the industry has been careful to project an image of itself that highlights its dedication to high-quality games and deemphasises its dedication to profit.

Simultaneously, the games industry ‘tries hard to maintain the impression that computer gaming constitutes “a people’s technology which encourages and enables participation by all who wish to participate”‘ (Huhtamo, 1999, quoting Skirrow, 1986). But, Huhtamo continues, ‘it is becoming more and more evident that such a position constitutes a fabrication and, above all, an ideology’. This ideology contributes to the precarious status of modders, as it disguises the power structures within which the modding community operates. This is also evident in Will Wright’s assertion that game production will become ‘a very collaborative process between the game developers and the players’ (quoted in Au, 2002). This statement is hardly surprising, considering the fact that Wright’s The Sims has profited immensely from player-created content.

In total, these factors – modding’s uncertain status in respect to traditional notions of work and leisure, the deprivation of modders of their intellectual property rights, the game industry’s outsourcing of risk to the modding community and the ideological masking of modding as a collaborative process – make modding appear as a very precarious form of labour indeed. However, the games industry’s increasing dependence on the modding community gives rise to the question of whether modders are at least partly responsible for the precarious status of their work. The modding community is divided in respect to whether collaborating with the games industry constitutes a form of “selling out”, and, as a result, they lack the necessary political organisation to improve their status.

The Modding Community as a Dispersed Multitude

In respect to modding and other forms of free labour on the Internet, Postigo has pointed out that ‘perhaps information communication technologies have allowed hobby and leisure to become commodities that are massively produced and consumed, a process by which cultural forms are created by the masses for the masses’ (Postigo, 2003: 605). While the mass production of leisure is hardly a new phenomenon, the logic of digital media has indeed led to a change in its economic structure. The capital investment necessary to mass-produce leisure has decreased to the point where small groups of individuals have access to the necessary technologies and practices. In effect, this means that the number of media producers has grown significantly in relation to the number of consumers, leading, as it were, to a new pattern of “prosumption”.

However, the metaphorical figure of the “prosumer” is misleading insofar as it suggests that every user of digital media is simultaneously a consumer and a producer, and by implying an empowerment of the user that is, in reality, counteracted by the shift from production to distribution that characterises the new media economy. As Douglas Thomas has pointed out, ‘reproduction, as a function of movement, has become synonymous with distribution. As a result, piracy and ownership in the digital age, from software to emergent forms of new media, are more about the right to distribute than the right to reproduce’ (Thomas, 2002: 85). While the Internet functions as a vast distribution network for mods and other products of free labour, it also effects a dispersal of these products that can only be neutralised through the investment of financial or social capital.

While the games industry is rich in financial capital, which is mostly used for the marketing of new products, the modding community itself commands huge social capital due to the tightly woven networks it has developed. As evidenced by successful mods such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, mods can reach a vast audience simply by virtue of innovative gameplay mechanics and the support of the modding community. However, it seems as if modders are scarcely aware of the position of power this puts them into. As a dispersed multitude, they are vulnerable to exploitation by the games industry, and the different motivations and ideological positions within the modding community further add to their inability to realise their potential as political actors.

The different positions within the modding community are summed up succinctly, albeit simplistically, by the following two quotes from Kushner (w/out year): ‘The whole point of making a mod is to be free and not have some company telling you what to do’, says Chris Rogiss, a programmer who worked on the popular Quake mod, Urban Terror . On the contrary, says Tom Mustaine, a mod maker whose work led to a full-time job at Ritual Entertainment, a game company: ‘The secret desire of every mod creator is to get recognition from the companies who are making the games’.

These two standpoints seem almost impossible to reconcile, but in the long run the stance modders take vis-à-vis the games industry will determine whether modding can survive as a counter-culture or whether it will fall prey to the neo-liberal ideology of the games industry. Already, professionalisation and commercialisation are beginning to take their toll on modding: ‘”The trend seems to be toward higher and higher production value, larger teams and longer development times”, says Valve’s Keranen. ‘In other words, mods are becoming very similar to commercial games in all but the way they are [not] funded”‘ (Au, 2002).

After all, “higher production value” seems nothing but a thinly veiled euphemism for “commercial viability”, and once modding becomes market-oriented, their motivation to innovate is likely to go out the window. Wagner James Au (2002) sums up these concerns succinctly when he asks game designer Rich Carlson: ‘What happens when modders begin paying to download and make what they once built and traded with each other just for the community spirit and the pure love of creating?’ And Carlson’s answer is far from reassuring: ‘It’s kind of frightening’, he says, ‘but the popularity of mods could spell the eventual doom of freeware levels and modifications’ (quoted in Au, 2002). Au suggests that a mutually beneficial ‘partnership of inspiration and investment’ might be possible in the future, but in the light of the games industry’s aggressive courting of the modding community, this seems highly doubtful.

The Future of Modding

If the modding multitude were able to play their dispersal to their advantage – for example, by collaborating with other free labourers on the Internet, the result would be a genuine democratisation of the production of digital games. But this would require awareness on the modders’ part that their work is indeed a form of precarious labour, and that a politically organised position vis-à-vis the games industry is indispensable for the survival of modding as a creative digital counter-culture. The obstacles the modding community faces – recognition of their status as creators of value for the industry and gamers alike, claiming their intellectual property rights and overcoming the ideological representation of modding as a mere hobby – seem like a tall order.

Nevertheless, there are signs of hope. In 2003, Second Life developer Linden Labs changed its terms of service ‘to recognize the ownership of in-world content by the subscribers who make it’. At the State of Play conference in New York, Linden Lab founder and CEO Philip Rosedale declared that ‘our new policy recognizes the fact that persistent world users are making significant contributions to building these worlds and should be able to both own the content they create and share in the value that is created’. In response, IP rights activist Lawrence Lessig stated that ‘Linden Lab has taken an important step toward recognizing the rights of content generators in Second Life. [...] As history has continually proven, when people share in the value they create, greater value is derived for all’ (Linden Lab, 2003).

This development could spell a brighter future for modders as well. As the modding community ‘move[s] toward the center of the game industry’, (Kushner, n.d.), it is becoming harder for the industry to uphold the claim that modding is merely a marginal activity that has no economic implications. Once the gaming community at large wakes up to the fact that much of the innovation in the world of digital games stems from modding, the industry will be forced to acknowledge this, and grant modders more extensive rights to their creations. Ultimately, this is a matter of self-interest if the digital games industry does not want to be caught in a vicious circle of ever more derivative products.

As precarious labourers, then, modders are caught between a rock and a hard place. Recognition of their work will not come easy, and will require a firm stance against the profit-hunger of the digital games industry. But modders are also in a unique position to challenge the way we think about the relationship between work and leisure in the post-industrial age, and to explore new modes of non-alienated labour. Modding could emerge from its dilemma as a cultural practice that extends beyond the confines of digital games. After all, modding is a practice that transcends the rules we have come to take for granted, and this attitude should prove invaluable in dealing with the challenges society will face in the future.

Author’s Biography

Julian Kücklich is a currently a part-time game researcher and PhD candidate in the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster. His research interests include all areas of gaming culture, especially computer game modding, cheats and products of fan culture. He is the author of an MA thesis on computer games and literary theory, and has published several articles on this subject. He regularly contributes to Medienobservationen and Game Research as well as Philologie im Netz and Dichtung-Digital .

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Putting Play to Work in Games of Empire

This article is a preliminary portrait of work in the video and computer game development industry, a sector of creative, cognitive labour that exemplifies the allure of new media work. For millions of young men (and many aging ones, and some women) from Shanghai to Montréal, a job making virtual games seems employment nirvana – a promise of being paid to play. But just as game development studios typify the gloss of new media labour they also expose its dark side. Drawing on interviews we conducted with game developers in Canada, this article examines the conditions of digital game labour, this cultural industry’s “work as play” mantra, the pleasures and potentialities of game production, the blemishes that mar this attractive vista, and the new infractions these tensions provoke.

In addition to looking at how game labour is mobilised in commercial game development, we also consider in this article how game labour is counter-mobilised – dissident directions that are emerging in the subjectivities, organisation, and creations of this form of new media labour. From tactical games created in the context of political activism to experiments in open-source game development, there are promising signs of game designers and audiences creatively reorienting their playful dispositions and intellectual capacities toward the subversion of the very logics of expropriation, commodification, and corporatisation that sustain the digital play industry in particular and global capital in general.

We should note at the outset that our inquiry into the composition of game labour is part of a longer study of computer and video games. Our study proposes that interactive games are the paradigmatic media of “Empire”, using that term in the inflection given to it by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their companion books, Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004). Our hypothesis is that digital games are produced by and productive of the multi-layered arrangement of military, economic, and subjective forces associated with the form of imperial power theorised by Hardt and Negri. To indicate the conceptual grid through which we view game labour, below we briefly outline the five reasons we think digital games are exemplary creations of Empire:

1. Interactive entertainment illustrates the operation of Empire as an ‘apparatus of capture’, demonstrating, in particular, how capitalist development and technological innovation are propelled “from below” by subversion and autonomous activity (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 62). Early digital games were created during the Cold War by hackers and hobbyists within the military-academic complex. The creations of this autonomous invention power were only later harnessed by entrepreneurs – the act of capture that set in motion a multi-billion dollar cultural industry (Kline et al., 2003: 86-88). Since its inception, the digital play industry has continually discovered profitable new strategies by capturing counter-play.
2. Befitting capital’s transnational sphere of manoeuvre in the age of Empire, the corporate organisation of the game industry spans the “world market” (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 254-256). Game companies roam the entire planet in search of workers and consumers, establishing a globe-girdling network of production and consumption. The largest game firms and markets are located in the United States, Japan, and Europe, though South Korea and China are quickly becoming burgeoning regions of game-capital’s expansion. To profit maximally from the differential “ranking” of labouring populations in the ‘global hierarchy of production’, components of the game production process are conducted in places from Vancouver to Vietnam (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 288). The transnational architecture of game production reminds us that the world market may be a “smooth” space but it’s far from level (Hardt and Negri, 2000: xiii).
3. The storylines, missions, and emotionality of countless video and computer games express and reinforce the military, economic, and political logics of Empire. One need not deny the players’ active role in making meaning to suggest, as we do, that America’s Army, with its recruitment and training goals, The Sims, with its simulation of extreme consumerism, Impossible Creatures, with its bio-engineering experiments, and Vice City: Grand Theft Auto, with its cynicism and violence are virtualities produced by and productive of Empire. Digital games are, in this respect, an important part of the affective and symbolic “ether” of culture and communication – a ‘fundamental medium of imperial control’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 346).

Most central to this article are the next two reasons we offer as support of our claim that digital games are a paradigmatic media of Empire:

4. Digital games exemplify Empire’s mobilisation of “immaterial labour”. This is a locus of a contemporary “biopower” that utilises manifold forms of life – from language to imagination – as privileged means and sites of capitalist valorisation (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 289-294). The concept of immaterial labour was initially proposed in response to the extraordinary extent to which creativity, communication, emotion, cooperation, and values were ‘put to work’ in post-Fordist production processes (Lazzarato, 1996: 146). The activity of making and playing games combines the range of qualitative features of immaterial labour: scientific know-how, hi-tech proficiency, cultural creativity, human sociability, and cooperative interactivity. Immaterial game labour also reveals the blurring of work and non-work time, and the severely uneven nature of the kinds of immaterial jobs available (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 356-359).
5. Interactive games are exemplary of the “multitude” (Hardt and Negri, 2004; Virno, 2004). The heterogeneous oppositional agencies associated with the multitude use the tools and tendencies of Empire but to different ends, struggling within and against the imperial socio-symbolic order. The concept of immaterial labour invites us to assess the multitudinous potentialities of the new forms of work. And as we shall see later, discontented game workers have recently ignited controversy around exploitive practices, like excessive hours, that are common in “cool” media industries. Furthermore, non-commercial, dissident applications of digital play have emerged in the context of the counter-globalisation movement – from feminist game art to game-inspired experiments in distributed counter-planning.

In analysing video and computer games within the context of “Empire” we are not seeking merely to confirm the validity of Hardt and Negri’s categories. Even though we hope there is real value in an empirically grounded case study of concepts that have generally been both presented and criticised at a high level of abstraction, our ambitions go beyond simply ratifying – or rejecting – a given critical lexicon. A concept such as immaterial labour, for example, enables us to defamiliarise interactive play, reconceive it, and glimpse aspects that are often occluded. Cultural theorists are accustomed to understanding earlier generations of media as manifestations of complex social formations that interlink forms of property, dispositions of labour, technological deployments, gendered embodiments, and ideological constellations – and contestations of all of these. This is how we perceive, say, the “Golden Age of Hollywood” as crystallising the economic, technological, and cultural logics of a burgeoning Fordist regime of accumulation. Despite the recent rise of academic Game Studies, little has been done to conceive digital play in such a perspective. The concept of Empire and the discussions surrounding it, provide, we argue, a rich and coherent – although also eminently debatable – depiction of post-Fordist, transnationalised capitalism. By examining game work in terms of immaterial labour we can start to show how it relates to other aspects of this social field – participating, for instance, both in the structures of “networked power” that uphold contemporary sovereignty, and the insurrections of the “multitude” that challenge it. This is something that neither formalist studies of individual games nor fragmented critiques of game violence can do.

‘Indentured Servitude’: The Corporate Organisation of Game Creativity

The wellspring of the $23.5 billion global digital play industry is the creative labour of game developers (DFC, 2004). Development studios and publishing companies are the two interacting institutional entities that make up the basic organisational structure of the game industry, within which autonomous creativity is captured and converted into “intellectual property” (see Rossiter, 2003). To draw an analogy to the music industry, the game publisher is like the record label, the developer like the band. Developers make games, while publishers finance, distribute, and market them.

Publishers include the colossal video game console-makers (Microsoft, with its Xbox, Nintendo, with its GameCube, and Sony, with its PlayStation II), a collection of transnational publishing conglomerates (e.g., Electronic Arts, THQ, UbiSoft), and a number of smaller but still powerful publishers. Publishers exert massive influence over what games are made and when, largely because of their control of financing and marketing levers. In addition to operating their own in-house development studios, publishers contract “third-party” development studios to make games for their publishing label. Contracts primarily cover developers’ wages. Royalties – usually about 20% on sales – are not paid to a studio until all of the publisher’s investment costs have been recouped. Publishing is the site for strategic control in the games sector because their marketing campaigns – which today account for as much as a third of a game’s total costs – command the all-important distribution bottleneck, influencing what games actually make it to a store shelf. Licensing is of increasing importance in the game industry as digital play is woven into the promotionally integrated multimedia fabric, with game, film, sport, and music companies flipping storylines, characters, athletes’ images, and soundtracks back and forth. Not surprisingly, ownership in the publishing sector is highly concentrated, with tremendous control consolidating in the hands of one company in particular, Electronic Arts (EA).

Employing the people who make games, development studios vary widely in company size, creative autonomy, and financial security. At the top are a handful of mammoth developers with between five hundred and over two thousand employees, releasing dozens of titles each year. Some but not all of these are part of vertically integrated publishing giants, such as the ones mentioned above. Below these is a stratum of mid-sized studios that enjoy an established record with one or more publishers, have more than one hundred employees, and release a couple of games each year. Then there is an echelon of small studios with less than one hundred employees, producing one game every eighteen months or so, often scrambling from one contract to the next. Finally, there are innumerable start-ups – typically digital “garage” operations developing prototype games in the hope of getting a publishing deal. Many, perhaps most, perish.

Developers are significantly disadvantaged in relation to publishers, to whom all but the largest or most famous studios relinquish creative control and intellectual property rights. One studio manager describes the power relationship of a developer to a publisher as ‘indentured servitude’. [1] Remarking that ‘publishers like you to be totally beholden to them’, a representative of a small developer describes how his studio tried to enhance its financial stability by working on a couple of game titles at one time, ‘juggling’ two different publishers, only for it to result in punishing treatment from the first publisher. Without a blockbuster game to their record, developers are ‘the David; the publisher is the Goliath’. To that, publishers point out the ’95% failure rate’ of games in a hit-driven business – a ratio that means publishers contract developers knowing most games sink without a trace (IGDA, 2004a: 7). Indeed, it is not uncommon for publishers to cancel a development contract mid-way.

It is to the immaterial game labour that is performed in this churn-and-burn cultural economy that we turn next.

(Im)material Labour of Game Development

Earlier, we suggested that game development is an exemplary site of “immaterial labour”. This term is used by autonomist theorists to designate the ‘distinctive quality’ of work in ‘the epoch in which information and communication play an essential role in each stage of the process of production’ (Lazzarato and Negri, 1991: 86). Hardt and Negri (2000: 289-294) distinguish various sub-categories of immaterial labour, including work with computers and networks, work manipulating and managing emotion, work involving communication and images, and work entailing high levels of coordination and cooperation. The net of immaterial labour is cast widely: bio-tech lab technicians and game designers – as much as call centre operators, childcare providers, and even virtual game players – are engaged in immaterial labour. Maurizio Lazzarato (2003) emphasises the centrality of ‘inventive work’ to contemporary production, an aspect of the performance of immaterial labour that he contrasts to the ‘reproductive work’ characteristic of the mass production of similar goods in the Fordist era. These multiple modalities of immaterial labour are mobilised in the game development labour process: just think of the combination of audience research, imagination, programming, graphics, and sound creating the feeling of terror when playing Doom 3, and the teamwork this integration demands.

Today’s most visible immaterial workers are those in high-tech milieu and in cultural industries. But the category of immaterial labour hinges, controversially, around a contrast with the materiality of manufacturing work: at the extreme end of one side, an artificial intelligence engineer is programming at the end of a fibre optic cable; at the other end, an assembly worker stands on a factory line. We want to stress that digital games are “immaterial” commodities and they may be designed by “immaterial” labourers – but at some point in the production chain some unmistakably material labour is required, producing a tangible good, whether that be a game cartridge or a game console. Elsewhere, we, and other researchers, have examined the international division of labour in the game industry, showing that gaming hardware is manufactured by a super-exploited, largely female, workforce in maquiladoras and in other so-called free enterprise zones of the planetary South (Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Dyer-Witheford, 2001; Kline et al., 2003; Lugo et al., 2002). Here in this article, however, we focus our attention on the labour at the “high” immaterial end of the game value chain in the North, and the unique forms of incentive and discipline it incites.

Despite ‘a mythology in the game industry about this boy genius’, the day of the lone-wolf commercial game developer is definitively over. Intensely cooperative, the labour of developing a single game can evolve over a period of between six and twenty-four months, and involve teams of between twenty-five and one hundred people. Increasingly sophisticated technologies and mushrooming team sizes are driving the costs of game creation upward: the burn-rate for a thirty-person development team is about $250,000 a month. Most big games cost $5-10 million to produce, and $25 million budgets are ‘around the corner’ (IGDA, 2004a: 7).

The main job types in game development include design, production, art, programming, and testing. Designers establish the basic game concept, characters, and play mechanics. Artists develop characters, virtual worlds, animation, special effects, and sound. Programmers, or engineers, develop “game engines” and write the code on which a game’s functionality is based. Producers have a “leadership role” in administering the budget, coordinating the project, and managing the development team; they are charged with maintaining a coherent vision of the game’s design, facilitating communication among the sub-teams, and addressing “personnel and motivational issues”. Finally, testers play a game to evaluate it for “bugs” and playability.

Game development typically involves four stages. In “pre-production” the conceptual infrastructure for the game is designed, its look mapped, schedules created, and resources assigned. In “prototyping” programmers create the tools that build the game, and the rendering tools which iterate animation or special effects, permitting artists to design, review, and edit their creations. Artists are working on two- and three-dimensional models, developing textures, and animation for characters and the game world, while software engineers code the game mechanics and the story. The third stage is “production”, with its sub-stages of alpha, beta, and final. Game engines are now complete, and characters and animation are embedded in a working game. At “alpha” the game isn’t fully stable, but all the art, code, and features are present. Testers are evaluating levels, and returning them for correction to the development team. At “beta” the game should be full and stable, adapted to the “platform” it will play on, and it is undergoing play testing. At “final” the product is shipped to the publisher, who will run its own tests before approving a game for release.

Who performs this immaterial labour?

Profile of the Virtual Game Workforce

The empirical basis for the analysis that follows is a three-year study of the Canadian video and computer game industry. We conducted personal interviews with about forty games workers, including producers, artists, programmers, designers, testers, studio executives, and owners. [2] Comparable to the Australian situation, the Canadian game industry is a small but significant node in the global digital play business. Canada hosts a number of renowned developers, like BioWare Corp. and Relic Entertainment; several multinational mega-publishers, like EA and Rockstar Games, operate (and buy out) studios in Canada; and the cities of Montréal and Vancouver are internationally recognised metropolitan hubs of game creation. The Canadian game sector mainly services publishers based in the United States and Europe who want to take advantage of a lower-valued Canadian currency, a skilled labour force, and, in Montréal especially, attractive government subsidies. The developers we interviewed indicate that in terms of workplace conditions the Canadian situation is broadly representative of industry norms in the United States. As for the composition of the virtual game workforce, a preliminary profile can be drawn: relatively young, generally well paid but unevenly precarious, and overwhelmingly male.

The largest proportion of the game workforce is between their late-teens and early-thirties, a generational bracket that jives with the twenty-nine year-old age of the “average” gamer (ESA, 2004). Related to this relatively youthful composition is the finding that many game industry employees are less likely to have ‘binding commitments’ (IGDA, 2004a: 32). Here we note that capital has long favoured young labouring bodies for their supposedly more “mobile” life situations (Mitterauer, 1993: 120). The steady influx of graduating-age employees, in combination with a sensibility of media-industry “cool”, contributes to a strong concept of “youthfulness” in studio culture. Later in this article we will see that what Angela McRobbie (2002: 110) calls ‘enforced youthfulness’ is a pervasive disciplinary technique in many game workplaces, fitting hand-in-glove with myriad exploitive and exclusionary practices. In terms of educational background, many new recruits to game jobs hold college or university degrees in areas such as computer science, physics, and fine arts. There are few university-level specialised game programs, though in 2004 EA – a company that sees ‘universities as the next-generation of talent’ – donated US$8 million to help launch just such a program (Rueff cited in Delaney, 2004).

Collecting reliable data on wages in the game industry is difficult. If interviewees divulged income details, they did so voluntary. What we do know is that a hierarchy is in place, with salaries varying widely according to age, rank, and department. “Celebrity” designers can earn $500,000 or more; programmers and artists, about $60,000; and game-testers are often paid minimum wage. Many games workers (with the obvious exception of testers) indicated they are satisfied with their salary, though a study conducted by the International Game Developers Association suggests otherwise, with one interviewee reporting, for example, ‘games is a big salary hit’ (cited in IGDA, 2004a: 77). Earnings also depend on location. Most studios are in metropolises like London, Los Angeles, and Vancouver where the cost of living is high. There are, however, a growing number of developers setting up in smaller towns, due to the growing supply of skilled labour and the lure of reduced overhead costs – including lower wages.

The game workforce is, by and large, male. Although the number of female game players has grown since the mid-1990s, female game workers themselves express doubt over industry reports that nearly 40% of gamers are female (ESA, 2004). Women we interviewed point out that there remains ‘huge risk aversion’, with publishers concentrating on males as the ‘core demographic’ of avid game players. Even if there has been a shift in the gender of game players, ‘there’s not much of a change in hiring numbers’. One estimate we received is that women account for an average of ten to fifteen percent of a developers’ staff. Of these, few are in senior positions; most are in administration, human resources, or marketing, and, in development, in art or producer roles. The verdict of most women insiders is scathing: ‘It’s a total old boys club’. Projects to explore paths beyond the gender clichés in virtual game content ‘do not get support in the industry at all…. [Y]ou have a really dominant gender leading and they’re the ones who have the purse strings’. This gender imbalance is perpetuated at multiple levels, from the industry’s historical bias of ‘militarized masculinity’, to a lack of funding for experimental start-up developers, to the reinforcing loop between the gender of avid gamers and of those who go on to make games (Kline et al., 2003: 247). Some male game workers express a desire for ‘change’, but acquiescence to the imbalance is common: ‘there’s not too much that we can do about it right now’.

We’ll remark further on age, wage, and gender later in our discussion of the “dark side” of game work. But next we want to consider a few of the pleasures and potentialities of work in game development.

Pleasures and Potentialities of Game Labour: Creative, Cooperative, Playful

Creative expression, cooperative activity, and a “playful” environment arose again and again in our interviews as prime sources of enjoyment in game work. Many developers tell us that one of the greatest rewards of their jobs is the everyday pursuit and expression of creativity, and the sheer variability of their activities. A “lead” designer at a major studio conveys a sense of what work in game development offers those in its upper echelons:

The best thing is the flexibility and the fact that I can continue to learn new things. It’s never really the same. It never gets boring. If I do have a task that is in some way tedious, it’s not going to be that way forever. I know that I’m not doing the same thing over and over again. That’s absolutely the best thing.

Responsible for generating original concepts for new games, this designer explains that he has ‘a huge amount of flexibility and autonomy – and a huge amount of support in terms of getting resources for realising these ideas’. If one of his ideas is ‘realised’ it would translate into personal recognition or royalties – but ‘from my perspective’, he says, ‘it doesn’t need to – it’s mostly about idea ownership and working on your own idea’. This designer admits, however, that the prospect of achieving this independence – let alone actually realising an “original” idea – is increasingly difficult in a risk-averse industry that prefers formula to experimentation. Yet the possibility of that creative autonomy arrests the imagination and secures the loyalty of countless aspiring developers.

Those on the technical side of game development cite similar attractions of work in digital play. ‘Being creative at work and still using my technical skills’ is a sentiment often expressed by those who come to game development via a computer science educational background. One engineer tells us ‘intellectual freedom’ is a key joy of his game labour:

There’s nobody telling you how to do something. There’s no paperwork getting in your way. There are no set rules that you have to follow – rules that you don’t feel are necessary. There’s no formal way that you are supposed to do a technical design.

Others comment that game development is satisfying because the sector appreciates the creative aspect of techno-science in a way that their other employment options wouldn’t. A physics engineer, for example, locates the thrill of his job in acts like solving a physics problem he hasn’t seen solved elsewhere and then programming a model that enables an immersive play experience:

The structures that we build are really fascinating sometimes. It’s like architecture and engineering rolled into one: you’re building structures that do things. Sometimes you design something that is so beautiful and it is immediately simple. But it just works together so beautifully.

That quote could equally describe a second pleasure of game development: cooperative sociality. Game developers often talked about space for creative freedom in relation to their studio’s “flat” organisational structure, which seems to be most common in small to mid-size studios. ‘There’s little bureaucracy. It’s just people doing their thing to make good games’, explains one programmer. Others stress the self-organised character of the collaborative process:

We have very little hierarchy, very little formal structure, very little “understood” ways of doing things…. In a situation where everyone more or less knows their role, it works out well: everyone just divides the work, you work on your bit, and everyone knows what to do. It just works out.

One studio founder calls this model of cooperation ‘working anarchy’. To function smoothly, though, a smooth, open play of communication is required. One programmer at a mid-size studio uses the “matrix” concept to describe such a communication set-up on his development team:

Everybody is crossing paths with everybody else. I have been very impressed that there aren’t any barriers to communication. I can go to talk to someone in our tools department or I can go to talk to someone on the art side. I’m not going to run into their “director” later, who’ll say to me, “Why didn’t you go through me?” We keep each other informed.

These descriptions provide a glimpse into the extent to which, in certain game studios, the “management” of collaboration is increasingly immanent to, rather than externally imposed on, game labourers.

Cooperation within and among the sub-groups of a development team is cited by game workers as a most gratifying aspect of their work. Specific inflections are wide-ranging: ‘a source of great solidarity’, ‘fun’, ‘the rush of being involved in a big project’, ‘a lot of teamwork’, making ‘really good friends’, and, of course, creating a functioning game:

Software is a very dynamic, huge system: this is something I find attractive about the games industry. You have all these different components: artists, programmers, legal, production, data. You’ve got all these people that don’t understand each other’s jobs. And (yet) you have to make that all come together as one cohesive piece of art.

A third pleasure of game development is what we call the work as play ethos – a central strategy deployed by game-capital to mobilise immaterial game labour. The idea that work is play has been cultivated since the early days of Atari, whose founder advocated a ‘work smart, not hard’ philosophy, in response to the fact that a good portion of his staff was drawn from the Californian counter-culture (Kent, 2001: 110). The work as play milieu of contemporary game studios spans a varying range of perks and promises: flexible hours, lax dress code, free food, fitness facilities, parties, and funky interior design; and it also encompasses a host of intangible qualities, from “rebelliousness” to twisted humour to self-expression. One developer conveys a popular self-understanding of work connected to the work as play ethos:

Generally, when you go to work, it’s not, “Ah, I gotta go to work”. It’s, “I’m going to work, cool!” You come in, you see your friends, you get to make video games, and you get to play some. It’s pretty cool. It’s really not even so much like work here.

Our interviews confirm that studios bend to a work as play model in part because singularity and openness is understood to facilitate the flow of creativity. As Lazzarato (2003) remarks: “Creation is only possible when there’s a certain type of confidence, of friendliness and cooperation between the people who are participating in the work”. This affective situation is achieved in studios through a variation on what Andrew Ross (2003: 123-60) calls the ‘industrialization of bohemia’ – in particular the idea that games corporations aren’t actually part of the ‘corporate world’. One game producer tells us:

I’ve never been in the “corporate world”. You hear stories about it being impersonal and formal feedback reviews and all that kind of hideous stuff….None of our people would ever attend a meeting in a suit.

Many games workers, from testers to managers, referred to ‘a sort of rebelliousness’ in studio culture. Stories to confirm this were told like legend, like the one about the ‘programmer who weighed about 220 pounds [who] always made a point of taking off his shirt in meetings saying he’s “hot” or whatever!’ Similar anecdotes of spontaneous transgression and self-expression were happily offered to us to show that ‘[i]n the industry there are a lot of very bright, very jaded people’. To tap this “jaded intelligence” game studios tend to elaborate a work as play ethos that promises great ‘leeway to express yourself’: ‘People have to be entirely comfortable to be who they are to come up with anything spontaneously, to have that real dynamic’, says one producer. The “anti-corporate” culture of many game studios would seem to be exemplary of McRobbie’s (2002: 109) incisive critique that, in creative workplaces, ‘[w]hen the individual is most free to be chasing his or her dreams of self-expression, so also is postmodern power at its most effective’.

Another reason studios bend to a work as play model is because many companies have a recruitment and retention problem. And here the autonomy of game labour is most bare. ‘Keeping your people is this almost maniacal focus for the people that run [games] companies’, says one studio manager. As a result, various disciplinary mechanisms are employed so to say to staff: ‘Oh my God, you don’t want to leave here!’ The campus-like Vancouver-area studio of EA provides a striking example. Employing 1000 people, the sleekly designed complex features a gym, pool tables, basketball courts, a soccer field, subsidised gourmet food, and snowboarding fieldtrips, among other “bonuses”. Executives tell us this is because of ‘a lack of qualified talent in the games industry’. Studio executives are anxious to not only attract new youthful employees but also prevent current team-members from leaving midway through the production schedule, or defecting to a competing studio or another industry.

The above-discussed dimensions of the labour of game development – the capture of human creativity, the high level of cooperation, the re-making of work as play – resonate strongly with the hypothesis of Paolo Virno (2004: 110) that post-Fordist production is, in a profound paradox, the ‘communism of capital’. Indeed, the autonomy of invention power – so central to the concept of the multitude – was eloquently described by many of the developers we interviewed. Not surprisingly, studio executives were fearfully aware of this autonomy:

[T]he machinery and equipment now is the mind of all these people who have come up with these great ideas….Our “collateral” walks out the door every night. And you hope like heck that they are going to show up on Monday.

But then he adds:

[M]aybe they’ll show up with some great ideas. And unlike machinery that stops working at 5:00, ours might be home, but they’re thinking of new ideas, and their whole life experience is creating the potential for new ideas.

In this respect, the work of game development is a striking illustration of ‘inventive time’ (Lazzarato, 2003), with the space-time of value-generation stretching across nothing less than what our studio executive calls ‘whole life experience’.

The Dark Side: Passionate Play Slaves, Precarious Global Developers, and Free Networked Labour

Our interviews showed that developers initially delighted by their “work as play” jobs often found that the very factors that first appear so attractive – individual autonomy, flexibility, “cool” corporate culture, and even playing games – had a dark side. We turn now to instances where the logic of work as play breaks down, revealing varieties of play slaves and a ratcheting of corporate drone. Here the command mechanisms of expropriation, the process of corporate rationalisation, and the precarity of immaterial game labour are brought into sharper view.

In conditions of Empire, the space of exploitation may be boundless, but place still matters. The length of the working day in game studios varies widely depending on company, rank, and stage of development. Often adapting a “flex-time” policy, studios open their doors to extreme hours of digital drudgery: ‘forced workaholism’ is the diagnosis in IGDA’s recent study of Quality of Life in the Game Industry (2004a: 6). Most North American developers are salaried, so the extraordinary overtime put in at game studios is unpaid labour. The personal accounts we received give every indication that studio workplaces are, with varying degrees of intensity, obsessively hard-driving and punishingly disassociated from domesticity, sleep, and nourishment. ‘Just candy’ is how a former EA executive views the playful offerings of his company’s largest studio: ‘Here it is, 3:30, a gorgeous afternoon, and my soccer field is empty. But I can tell you that at 3:30 this morning, there will be 75 people in this building working their butts off’ (Wong cited in Taylor, 1999). EA employees report that ‘work inside the company more resembles a fast-moving, round-the-clock auto assembly line’ (Wingfield and Guth, 2004). In Canada, EA has been an active lobbyist against attempts to regulate hours in high-tech industry.

Excessive hours are widespread but disproportionately endured by younger developers. ‘[S]o many people in the video game industry are like nineteen or twenty – just fresh out of school’, explains one game artist. He recalls his first game job:

I was working fourteen-hour days and never seeing the light of day….I just stayed there all the time….[This] partly has to do with the fact that they promote, you know, “Hey, we have a couch here! You can sleep here all night”.

Another developer refers to a tacit understanding that new recruits are ‘paying their dues with grunt work during their first year’ (cited in IGDA, 2004a: 16). This “sacrificial” view of hours of work and rates of pay is endemic in knowledge and creative industries (Ross, 2000). And game companies like EA harness it to great profits. One computer science professor who spent a semester-long “residency” at EA reports that the game giant – which he describes as a ‘ruthless meritocracy’ – prefers to hire young students directly from university not only because of their up-to-date technological know-how but also because of their discounted salaries and heightened ‘idealism’ (Pausch, 2004: 7, 14). At least one manager we talked to was deeply critical of studios that

get these young guys that come out of film school, game programming school, or art school and get them to work their asses off….If I had a dime for all the people I knew who are sort of resentful of their experience at their first or subsequent game industry job because the corporate culture was very subtly coercive: “You should be working here at 8:00 at night and, if you aren’t, then you’re slacking off!”

Excessive hours spring from many sources, including the patently obvious interest of game companies in extracting more labour for less from their workers. Another factor is the nature of the revenue model that keeps most third-party development studios afloat: a developer receives a payment when they meet a “milestone” set with their publisher, normally triggered when a developer dispatches a component part of the final game product. Developers with a hit game behind them may be able to negotiate tolerable deadlines, but vulnerable start-ups and small studios – in a deeply competitive business – often can’t. ‘Sometimes companies are just so intent on getting that contract that they’ll promise anything – at the expense of these poor programmers who have to make the bloody thing’. Another factor lies in the accelerated game development schedule associated with “serialised” game production, a business model in which studio-factories release updates to a franchise on an annual basis.

All of these factors contribute to an unprecedented pace of work in game studios: ‘never has the pressure to work hard and fast been stronger than it is today’ (IGDA, 2004a: 22). Here so-called “crunch time” comes into the picture. Referring to extended hours in the name of meeting a production deadline, crunch time was once limited to the final stages of a game’s development process. But crunch time is growing, in some cases encompassing the entire period of a game’s development. Of course, from game-capital’s point of view the construction of crunch time as a “normal” part of game work serves to substantially reduce labour costs, deepening the rate of exploitation and reducing the expense of hiring additional developers (IGDA, 2004a: 19).

This ruthless work regimen reflects and reinforces divisions based on age, gender, and parenthood. Those in long-term relationships, those who have children or want to start a family, or those who simply don’t want to reduce the time of life to time spent at work, are ostensibly excluded from the game sector, or will find it tremendously difficult to commit to the ludicrous hours that can be expected of them. Enduring excessive hours without complaint is tied to the game industry’s ‘hard work ethic’ (IGDA, 2004a: 31), which we would add has a machismo quality to it that joins the other manifestations of sexism that have functioned to exclude women from working in game studios. The candid remarks of some male games workers give us a window into the depth of sexism in the game industry, like the developer who explained that ‘girls’ often don’t have ‘the right ideas’ about games or another who advised us that it ‘looks good’ for a developer to employ ‘some girls’. As the female workers we talked to remind us, the gender composition in this sector is ‘not a video game problem; it’s much bigger than that’.

Some games workers explain their reasons for consenting to these conditions, despite having major concerns about them. Excessive hours and punishing work rhythms is fed by, according to one developer, the game sector’s ‘concept of ownership’:

When you are responsible for something in a game, you “own” it. If something goes wrong with that part of the game after release, you can pretty much kiss your ass goodbye….That’s where a lot of the stress comes from….You’re not supposed to do overtime, but you don’t mind doing it because you’re given “ownership”.

Here we catch a view of the demanding practices of self-regulation in game studios, an aspect of Empire’s search for ways of realising ‘unmediated command over subjectivity itself’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 135; see also McRobbie, 2004). Consider this developer’s remarks:

When you work in this industry you are judged for what you’ve done. So you want to make a good name for yourself. You want people to consider you a hard worker, a good worker – a guy that can do a bit more than what’s expected. Because the thing with the game industry is that it is, really, a small business.

Punishing hours are, however, generating the conditions of a crisis for game-capital. Stress is a major problem in development studios. Referring to the exhausting rhythm of work, one game artist comments: ‘I don’t think it’s good for you to work like that, that often. And to be creative all the time without a break – it just isn’t good for your brain, or for your creativity, potentially’. Moreover, a growing number of game developers are responding to the “crunch time” of work in game development by fleeing the sector altogether. The turnover rate in the game industry is described as ‘nothing short of catastrophic’: over 50% plan to leave the industry within ten years, 35% within five years (IGDA, 2004a: 17).

Until now, when a studio faces discontent about overwork, they have tended to employ new strategies to bind their “lead” workers to the accumulatory rhythm of studio production. One such strategy is what one studio manager calls ‘the golden shackles’:

You work on a game and they offer you a profit-sharing agreement – but you have to stay at the company to take advantage of it. So you work for two years on a game, with the intent that if it sells a lot, then you’ll get a share of that. Then it takes another six months to get the game to market. And then it takes another six months before the money starts to filter back. So you’ve got this employee who stuck around for at least another year to get in on that profit-sharing, and by this time they’ve already started on another game and are sort of stuck there.

Game-capital also relies upon legal control mechanisms to get workers ‘stuck’ to a workplace. The corporate capture of invention power and its conversion into “IP” is an aspect of game work that begins with the employment contract. ‘Normally, you sign a contract of employment with a company and any idea you have becomes theirs’. Although we encountered at least one mid-sized company that had a remarkably progressive policy of assuring employee’s rights to ideas they enunciated, this is typically not the case, and many studios are rife with quiet suspicion about ideas being ‘stolen’.

The seriousness of IP issues in the game studio system is revealed in a legal battle between two major multinational publisher studios in Canada. Five “star” designers at UbiSoft’s Montréal studio left in 2003 to work at EA. UbiSoft took its ex-employees – and EA – to court. The five had signed “non-compete” agreements and this legally blocked them from working for another North American games company for one year after terminating their employment. A court judged in favour of UbiSoft. Although EA’s motivations are transparent enough, one spokesperson for the company aptly remarked: ‘It seems that UbiSoft thinks of Montréal as a plantation – any worker who dares to escape will be hunted down by lawyers and forced out of business’ (cited in Feldman, 2003).

The UbiSoft-EA conflict reveals the extent of the corporate rationalisation of game creativity today. Many of the designers, artists, and programmers whom we talked to lament the deteriorating state of creativity in game development: ‘No one is doing any original games’. Another start-up developer remarks: ‘the industry is making so much money selling established product, there seems to be very little incentive to break out of it and try new stuff’. This tension is intensified as publishers (most of which are publicly traded) grow more conservative, preferring the market predictability of proven franchises, established genres, and celebrity cultural icons to experimentation in new game concepts. Almost all those we talked to indicate, in one way or another, that ‘[p]retty much everyone would rather be working on their own project, some original and creative game’.

Ruthless market logic also threatens the cooperative self-management of game development – a commonly cited attraction to work in digital play. As team sizes expand to facilitate speeded-up product release schedules, and as smaller studios are acquired by larger ones, “team management” takes on greater prominence in the development process. This is something game-capital tries to balance delicately, not least because excessive corporate-style management risks undermining the very aspects of the workplace that foster creativity. In fact, game workers’ disenchantment with the effects of corporate rationalisation on creativity is often what causes developers to leave their employer – often to launch a start-up. This dialectic of exodus and entrepreneurialism serves game-capital well, frequently leading to an expanded “cluster” of developers in one city. Ironically, over the period during which we conducted our interviews, two of the developers who had waxed most eloquent to us about self-management, flattened hierarchies, and creative control sold their studios to multinational publishers for millions.

As independent studios pass into multinational hands we expect to see a deepening of the precarious status of game development labour. Game workers at all but the executive levels of the corporate hierarchy hint at a persistent sense of instability, with rationales ranging from fear of a studio buy-out, to increasingly powerful publishers that can simply dump a contract midway, to the often implacable ethos of “ownership” for oversights – all of which could result in abrupt job loss.

In terms of precarity, one segment of game labour that stands out is “bug catchers”. Game testers, or Quality Assurance (QA) employees, are notorious for being the lowest paid and worst treated workers in the studio system: ‘the bottom of the barrel’. Many testers make a minimum wage, and at larger developers, are in temporary, contract-based employment. ‘We’re treated no differently than the janitorial or the cafeteria staff, who make more money than us anyway. I’m not belittling other jobs but…’, one tester explains. Their level of input varies greatly from studio to studio: some provide feedback on qualitative aspects of game design, whereas other testers’ role is limited to checking for bugs, recording them in a database, and sending the results to the development team for fixing. Large studios are reportedly exploring the use of technologies to auto-track the incidence of likely bugs, which can become a sore point with testers, especially when used to monitor productivity: ‘A lot of the QA testers are very angry, because they’ll hear that their bug count isn’t as “high”. But it isn’t fair because certain areas of the game just don’t have any bugs’. One tester says his department is filled with ‘really angry people, because you work fourteen-hour days and we save each game probably millions of dollars. If it weren’t for us, the games would probably suck’. Another describes the most stinging part of his job:

When you’re sitting in QA – making what I make – it’s pretty frustrating because you’ll get an e-mail of the quarterlies. When you see that number, you get pretty pissed. The profits are astronomical.

These astronomical profits take us squarely to how game companies, particularly the largest ones, are beginning to play game development labour on a transnational scale. Some executives we talked to indicate that the state of the North American game industry itself is more precarious than many care to admit. Referring to Vancouver’s current status as a “hub” of game creation, one studio executive warns:

In my opinion, it’s always been just a matter of time before, say, you get a place like Prague that has the same set of circumstances with a highly skilled workforce – and their discrepancy between the currencies is even greater. The other one that kind of scares everybody is Bombay – this big high-tech scene in India. It’s the same thing: you’ve got a lot of talented people and they can undercut us. You know, it’s only a matter of time.

And that time inches closer as game studios begin to experiment in “outsourcing”. At present, game development is firmly centered in global cities in the North. But as high-technology capitalism rips its course round the world in search of new markets and “cheap” labour, “talent” begins to incubate in the Global South, giving game-capital increased mobility. Today studios can be found from the former Soviet bloc to the Indian Subcontinent. A number of major game studios are subcontracting elements of a game’s development outside of game-capital’s geographic “core”, furnishing an interim response to accelerated production deadlines and Northern wage levels. EA, for example, outsources development work to India (Overby, 2003); and EA, Nintendo, and Microsoft, among others, have outsourced game work to a Vietnamese firm (Gallaugher and Stoller, 2004). Based in Ho Chi Minh City, Glass Egg Digital Media offers Northern game firms extraordinary reductions in the cost of game labour: a Vietnamese programmer could make about $4000 a year, whereas ‘comparable US talent would earn $70,000-$100,000′ (Gallaugher and Stoller, 2004: 12). Further savings stem from a Glass Egg scheme that pays new recruits a paltry fifty bucks a month for six-months “training” (Gallaugher and Stoller, 2004: 11). This globalisation of immaterial game labour reminds us that the North’s current monopoly on high-tech jobs is not ironclad.

But the diffusion of game labour is presenting game corporations with not only discounted but also free labour.

Over the last decade or so, “authoring tools” have been increasingly packaged with computer games, helping to foster a vibrant participatory culture of game “modding”, or modification. “Modders” deploy a range of techniques, from changing characters’ appearances – “skins” – and weapons, to designing new scenarios, levels, or missions, up to radical departures that amount to building a whole new game – a “total conversion” – using various authoring tools (Sotamaa, 2003). Some recent computer games, such as Neverwinter Nights, are in fact more a demonstration of the capacities of the editing tool-kit that comes with the game than it is a standalone experience. But when young “hardcore” gamers spend their evenings modding a level of a computer game, or sculpting an avatar for a multiplayer virtual world – or, for that matter, contributing to their favourite developer’s online “community” forum – the boundaries between “play” and “content provision” subtly dissolve. They join the legion of ‘free labor’ that Tiziana Terranova (2000: 50) observes is a major source of value creation in the networked economy, as capital learns to digitally tap, outside all boundaries of work-time or -place, a diffuse “collective intelligence”. This space-defying process of exploitation extends deeper yet in functioning as informal training, preparing the game development workforce of the future.

Mod culture is an increasingly integral part of game industry practices. Indeed, the first virtual game, Space War, was an avant la lettre “mod” of military simulation that created the basis for the industry; commercial games spread the interest and know-how that enabled a gamer multitude to alter its products; and now game companies reabsorb these DIY experiments as a new source of IP and surplus-value. Now development companies often “buy back” successful mods, and hire the teams that created them en masse. In 2003, Epic Games and Digital Extremes set up a competition with a one million dollar prize for mods of their shooter, Unreal, and also offered video training modules in using their authoring tools (Todd, 2003). Modding thus perfectly displays the spiral of transgressive innovation and corporate recuperation that fuels digitally networked corporations in the age of Empire. What’s more, best-selling games like Counter-Strike have been developed by remote modding teams, establishing a profitable precedent of a “virtual studio” model of game development. In that aspect, and in the modes of distributed content provision evidenced by the mod community, free networked labour in the gaming sector is perhaps prototypical of work in what has been dubbed the coming ‘firms without factories’ (Virtanen, 2004: 223).

In the next section we look at how the dark side of game work and the rise of participatory gamer culture set the stage for a counter-mobilisation of immaterial game labour.

Lines of Fight and Flight: Counter-Mobilising Immaterial Game Labour

On 10 November 2004, a letter under the title ‘EA: The Human Story’ and signed anonymously by ‘EA Spouse’ (2004a) was posted to a blog. Written by a self-described ‘disgruntled spouse’, ‘EA: The Human Story’ told of ‘eighty-five hour’ work weeks at EA; of the normalisation of hyper-extended ‘crunch’ time; of the absence of compensation in the form of either ‘overtime’ pay or ‘compensation time’; of the ‘put up or shut up and leave human resources policy’ of EA; of the allegedly ‘illegal’ failure of EA to pay overtime; and of the rapid concentration of ownership in the game development industry.

Igniting a firestorm of controversy, the communiqué swiftly reached game workers, with the letter circulating widely via e-mail and linked from countless game-related websites. The press was quick to cover it, too, announcing ‘Discord on Labor Issues’ at EA (Wingfield and Guth, 2004). The reverberations of ‘EA: The Human Story’ are only beginning to register as we write this article. At minimum, as one industry commentator put it, ‘the general perception of EA’s overall sliminess has increased exponentially’ (Sakey, 2004). More substantially, the game industry’s “work as play” mantra is suffering a devastating blow of truth, and game workers have started to rethink their conditions of labour.

Direct challenges to systemic unpaid labour in development studios had been brewing for some months before the publication of EA Spouse’s missive. In July 2004, for example, it was reported that a developer at a Vivendi studio in Los Angeles filed a lawsuit alleging managers regularly ‘falsified timesheets to avoid paying overtime’ (Jenkins, 2004). More recently, a class-action suit was filed by a group of current and former EA employees in the name of obtaining compensation for ‘unpaid overtime’ (cited in Feldman and Thorsen, 2004). A key contention of these challengers is that EA illegally categorises many of its developers as “professionals”, a designation permitted by Californian law that exempts employers from having to pay overtime. The play slaves are resisting.

‘EA: The Human Story’ echoes grievances reported months earlier in a study published by the International Game Developers Association (not a union but a professional association), Quality of Life in the Game Industry (IGDA, 2004a). It presents a well-researched, impassioned critical view of the ‘horrible conditions of work within much of the industry’ (IGDA, 2004b). While IGDA declares a preference for a conciliatory rather than antagonistic approach to transforming game work, the terms in which their findings are cast suggest otherwise. Potentially. The central thread in the IGDA report, as its title makes obvious, are matters of life and the cost exacted on it by the game industry’s severe work regimen. EA Spouse (2004a) sets up a similar target, telling us that this game industry behemoth presses developers ‘to individual physical health limits’. And EA Spouse’s remark in the letter that her/his ‘happy supportive smile is running out’ lays bare the “labour of reproduction” that is performed outside of the game “workplace” but nonetheless contributes to the sustaining of game labour (see Dalla Costa and James, 1972).

It is interesting (but by this point unsurprising) to note that when it comes round to proposing possible solutions a recurring theme in the IGDA report and discussion around it and the EA Spouse letter is the need to slow the production process and reduce the amount of time individual game workers surrender to work. One subsection of IGDA’s study bears the title ‘Everyone Works Too Much’ and notes the ‘Take Back Your Time Day’ initiative, putting the particular situation of game labour into the general context of the “work society” (IGDA, 2004a: 10). This broached, we are tempted to sketch one possibility: just as the intermittents in France’s movie business are helping to further discussion of a ‘continuous income’ in light of ‘discontinuous work’ (Lazzarato, 2003; see also Global Project, 2004), perhaps the developers in North America’s game business might help to further a discussion of a reduction of the time and pace of work in light of a normalisation of excessive hours. [3] In any case, this outbreak of discontent over “quality of life” in development work is providing game-capital with instructions on how to manage biopower more effectively. IGDA’s gambit, for example, is that studios that reduce their hours will get ‘more productive and creative workers’ (IGDA, 2004b). And only because it is being forced to, EA is promising workplace ‘reform’ (Frauenheim, 2004). We also suspect game-capital will react to the threat of decreased access to unpaid labour by increased outsourcing to studios that operate in regions that are more amenable to the industry’s current labour practices.

Although there is no shortage of virtual games, like Red Faction, whose storyline is based on evil corporations who ruthlessly exploit their employees, we are not aware of “real life” collective labour organisation in the game development industry. We have heard of game workers participating in strikes in France. Generally, though, game studios in North America are very far, culturally and politically, and often geographically, from the traditions of trade unionism. Much of the “work as play” ethos would seem to obstruct trade unionism’s penetration of the digital play sector; the above-described discontent might change that assumption, though.[4] Indeed, unionisation might provide game workers with a form of self-management that extends to greater control over game content, thereby responding to the desire – expressed so often by game workers – to work on ‘more creative projects’ (see Ross, 2000: 18-19).

The video game industry is, however, haunted by clandestine subversions – dissident activity that counter-mobilises the immaterial labour set in motion by game-capital. In the remaining space of this article we scan four lines of counter-mobilisation involving the immaterial subjectivities that make and play virtual games: digital piracy, autonomous production, tactical games, and simulated counter-planning. These resonate in many respects with the counter-globalisation movement, for example, in an opposition to the commodification of life forms, in a commitment to experiment in alternative modes of human cooperation, and in the elaboration of non-commercial applications of new media.

The counter-mobilisation of immaterial labour that currently causes industry managers most anxiety is the growing network of game pirates. Their software is encrypted to prevent illicit copying, but, says one games executive, ‘[p]eople always work around them. They’ll find the cracks’. ‘We’re moving, they’re moving – it’s a perpetual thing’. If comparative stealth will decide the outcome, statistics reveal the score: games have a piracy rate of nearly five times that of the music industry (Holloway, 2003). The transnational “warez” scene that helps supply a networked economy of free play is well known. Not as widely acknowledged is that pirated product often springs from within development studios themselves. “Zero-hour” releases – an issue recently highlighted by hacks of high profile games such as Doom 3 – are frequently the results of insider knowledge. If the industry benefits from the ethos of work as fun, it meets its nemesis on the flipside of this formula, where property becomes a game. In all its contradictory multiplicity, game piracy shows that in mobilising immaterial labour Empire sets in motion potentialities it cannot contain.

Other forms of rebellion go beyond illicit reproduction to forms of autonomous production. As we already mentioned, game culture features a vibrant practice of gamer-made mods of existing games. But some forms of modding pose serious problems for the Game Factory. More troublesome for game-capital, though, are the intellectual property implications. Modders often import content for an altered game from some other pop culture artefact – either from another game, perhaps owned by a company other than the one that made the original game, or from another media, such as a film. In doing this, these modders are constructing a “commons” of images, characters, and themes, in violation of the corporate enclosures that divide them up into carefully policed proprietary domains.

The conflicts arising from this practice have led to the coining in gaming circles of a new term – “foxing” – designating the prosecution of copyright-infringing modders. This term arises from the first known incident of such a prosecution, when 20th Century Fox Corporation ordered the shut down of the Quake “Aliens vs. Predator” mod, based on characters from those two films. Since then, Fox has sustained its aggressive stance toward the digital re-mixing of proprietary imagery. This mammoth media corporation has been known to contact individual mod authors and demand that production cease, that the website that hosts the mod be removed, that all files from the mod be placed in Fox’s ownership, with all other copies destroyed, and that the real-life names and addresses of all mod team members be sent to Fox (Kahless, 2001). Other “foxed” mods include a Quake II add-on closed down by Id Software because it used levels and graphics from several of the developer’s previous titles (Smith, 2001).

Modding, like piracy, carries both potentialities and limitations. Usurping the corporate control over the direction of game development, modders are intriguing figures of autonomous production. In this, modding is exemplary of Exodus. This possibility may be what the dissident game-making authors of the ‘Scratchware Manifesto’ (2002) had in mind when, in the wake of the battle of Seattle, they wrote: ‘We need to get out from under the thumb of the corporations, either by tearing them down or making them obsolete’. But although modders often violate the formal, legal rules of the media industry (and get in trouble for it), the content of their adaptations is usually far from subversive. Most modding is conservative, undertaken by technically accomplished fans who love a particular game and want more of it – more weapons or more monstrous opponents for shooters, different campaigns and battles for war games. In other words, modifications don’t necessarily modify much, often only amplifying the spirit of the original game. Recently, however, the capacities for autonomous production represented by modding have taken a more radical inflection, with game savvy artists and activists keen to challenge game culture’s militarised masculinity and the way that that sad assemblage supports the wider ideologies of Empire.

Learning from examples provided by earlier generations of media activists, a cacophony of rebellious gamers and game-makers are re-appropriating the general intellect of games, re-organising it autonomously, and re-directing it toward a critique of Empire (see Frasca, 2004). The wide diffusion of game-making know-how, and the availability of easy to use authoring devices, such as Flash, has led to a spate of alternative games that contribute to the circulation and provocation of struggles associated with feminist, counter-globalisation, and anti-war movements. These counter-mobilisations of immaterial game labour, though without guarantees, expose a playful multitude beginning to sculpt, in and through the digital fabric, ‘institutions of knowledge, of creation, of care, of invention and of education that are autonomous from capital’ (Berardi, 2002).

A fragmentary list of radical experiments in tactical, activist-oriented game creation includes: the various anti-war interventions, such as Velvet Strike and OUT, curated on OpenSorcery; game “hacks” by radical media art collectives like Critical Art Ensemble in the US; Escape from Woomera, involving Australia’s selectparks, a game development project bringing together refugee activists, new media artists, media theorists, and game designers to create a game that exposes the operation of power in refugee detention camps; Italian collective, Molleindustria, whose small but hilariously effective web-based games deal sardonically with post-Fordist precarious employees; the media art group, Kingdom of Piracy, which is dedicated to the creation of an online ‘Games Commons’; ‘Developers in Exile’, an actual-virtual project in building non-commercial spaces of game-making and playing; and Eastwood: Real Time Strategy Group, a game art group that sees in game modeling technology an ideal tool to map the cartography and class composition of the information society. This last project, ironically named ‘Civilization IV: Age of Empire’, includes on its map the ‘military-entertainment complex’, ‘immaterial labor’, the ‘net economy’, ‘surveillance mechanisms’, ‘governmentality’, and so forth. This snapshot of multitudinous gaming activity shows us that radical theory, game development, and the wide distribution of immaterial game labour are beginning to feed into and spiral round one another, creating new oppositional turbulences, and combining with other social movements that are striving to ‘[create] the outside itself, an embodied critical gap with the prevailing norms’ (Holmes, 2004).

But is it possible to envisage more radical horizons for interactive games where they might make a contribution to an “escape option” that would build another, more just and equitable, society? Perhaps. After all, interactive games are a ludic exploration of the possibilities of collective human development, up to and including fundamental socio-economic, environmental, and biological alterations. As military training camps and management schools constantly demonstrate, networked simulation is not just a matter of entertainment. But how might capacities for virtual rehearsal and planning be linked to radical social agendas? Can we conceive a world where, for example, the capacities honed by generations of young people informally trained in game simulations have some place in non-hierarchical, distributed planning of economic and environmental possibilities? Such questions are now being opened. ‘agoraXchange’, a collaborative open-source game development and art project, has the goal of creating a massively multiplayer online game simulating a future where there has been a radical change in political institutions. And researchers at University of British Columbia in Canada are, alongside ecologists and urban planners, developing prototypes of sim-style game interfaces and technologies as part of an attempt to elicit decentralised, localised participation in “real world” eco-social planning.

The interactive entertainment industry, we should remember, emerged only four decades ago from the playful hacks of researchers seeking light-hearted respite from military tasks. In today’s dissident games and warez networks, these autonomous capacities of immaterial labour break loose again. The experiments of this playful multitude, as modest and preliminary as some may be, flow into the wider currents of tactical media, hacktivism, free and open-source software, and distributed computing generating tumults throughout the circuits of Empire. The ideology of work as fun has given game-capital an effective but increasingly brittle formula for containing and channeling the biopolitical powers of its immaterial workforce; but there may yet prove to be more “play” in the system than game-capital ever imagined.

Authors’ Biographies

Greig de Peuter is a PhD student in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He is co-editor, with Mark Coté and Richard Day, of Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming).

Nick Dyer-Witheford teaches in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1999).

de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford are writing a book about video and computer games from the perspectives of autonomist Marxism and post-structuralism, entitled Games of Empire . They are, with Stephen Kline, the co-authors of Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003).

Acknowledgments

We want to express our gratitude to the developers whom we interviewed for this study; to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding this research; and to Enda Brophy, Mark Coté, Marcelo Vieta, and two anonymous Fibreculture Journal referees for comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

[1] All unreferenced quotations are from interviews we conducted with game industry workers; because they deal with volatile issues in a tight-knit business with little job security, we have preserved the anonymity of informants.

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[2] This portrait matches the audience of respondents to a survey published in 2004 by the International Game Developers Association: 92.9% men; 18.4% over 35; and about 80% without children (IGDA, 2004a: 15).

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[3] Much like the intermittents, the IGDA recommends that studios that do go contract to contract ought to “pay people during down time” (IGDA, 2004a: 46).

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[4] “EA Spouse” (2004b) is setting up an ‘open-source’ ‘non-corporate sponsored watchdog organization specifically devoted to monitoring quality of life in the game industry’.

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Sites

‘agoraXchange’, http://agoraxchange.net/

Critical Art Ensemble, http://www.critical-art.net/

‘Developers in Exile’, http://zerogame.tii.se/projects_devexile.htm

Eastwood: Real Time Strategy Group, http://www.eastwood-group.net

Escape from Woomera, http://www.escapefromwoomera.org

Kingdom of Piracy, http://residence.aec.at/kop/

Molleindustria, http://www.molleindustria.it/

OpenSorcery, http://www.opensorcery.net/

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Origins of San Precario

Noi siamo la generazione post-socialista, la generazione del dopo guerra fredda, della fine delle burocrazie verticali e del controllo sull’informazione. Siamo un movimento globale e neuropeo, che porta avanti la rivoluzione democratica scaturita dal Sessantotto mondiale e lotta contro la distopia neoliberista oggi al culmine. Siamo ecoattivisti e mediattivisti, siamo i libertari della Rete e i metroradicali dello spazio urbano, siamo le mutazioni transgender del femminismo globale, siamo gli hacker del terribile reale. Siamo gli agitatori del precariato e gli insorti del cognitariato. Siamo anarcosindacalisti e postsocialisti. Siamo tutti migranti alla ricerca di una vita migliore. E non ci riconosciamo in voi, stratificazioni tetre e tetragone di ceti politici sconfitti già nel XX secolo. Non ci riconosciamo nella sinistra italyana.

We are the post-socialist generation, the post-cold war generation, the end of vertical bureaucracies and of information control generation. We are a global and neuropean movement, which brings forward the democratic revolution started in 1968 and the struggle against the neoliberal dystopia at its peak today. We are eco-activists and media-activists, we are the libertarians of the Net and the metroradicals of urban spaces, we are the transgender mutations of global feminism, we are the hackers of the terrible real. We are the agitators of precariat and the insurgents of cognitariat. We are anarcho-unionists and post-socialist. We are all migrants looking for a better life. And we do not recognise ourselves in you, gloomy and tetragon layerings of political classes already defeated in the XX century. We do not recognise ourselves in the Italyan Left.

Manifesto Bio/Pop del Precariato Metroradicale [1]

Since February 2004 San Precario, patron saint of precarious, casualised, sessional, intermittent, temporary, flexible, project, freelance and fractional workers, has appeared in various Italian cities. The saint appears in public spaces on occasions of rallies, marches, interventions, demonstrations, film festivals, fashion parades, and, being a saint, processions. Often he performs miracles. Although the first appearances are recorded on 29 February 2004, San Precario has multiplied and materialised in different disguises. Equitable in his choices, San Precario does not privilege one category of precarious worker over another, and he can appear in supermarkets in urban peripheries, in bookstores or, glammed up, at the Venice Film Festival. San Precario is also transgender, and it has appeared also as a female saint. A “cult” has spread rapidly and has led to the development of a distinct and colorful iconography, hagiography and rituals. Appropriating the Italian Catholic tradition of carrying saint statues in processions in urban spaces, the cult of San Precario functions at the same time as détournement, as a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), as carnival. It is also a tactic to make visible issues arising from the increasing casualisation of the work force. At a different level it can be considered a site of mythopoetic production. The story of San Precario, its beginnings, transformations and spreading, is here brought into play to explore the current politics and poetics of precarity in Italy.
San Precario
Image by Chainworkers Crew (after a work by Chris Woods)

It is necessary here to stress that the words “precarious-precarity-precariat” are a linguistic innovation, which in the last year has spread from Italy and Spain to all the European networks engaged in a reflection on casualisation. Superseding the better known terms “flexibility-flexworker”, the introduction of “precarious-precarity-precariat” marks the emergence of struggles that are constituent of a new terminology and new imaginary from which, in turn, new rights come to light. The Italian expression esercizio del comune, the exercise of that which is common, indicates multifaceted innovations in the production of political subjectivity, which appear not only as direct actions, but also as innovations created “in common” at a linguistic and symbolic level. The surfacing of a new terminology emphasises the centrality of communication in contemporary society, while at the same time stressing that each “new right” needs “a new language”, because there is a new political subject voicing these rights.

San Precario functions as a rhetorical device to move into the public arena a critical awareness of the changes in conditions and forms of work, of the shift from permanent positions to casual (in Italian precario/a) modes of employment. This shift, common to other European countries, particularly France and Spain, acquires a traumatic quality in Italy, where il posto fisso, a permanent position, was one of the tenets of post-war imaginary. A full time, permanent position was indeed considered the typical form of employment. Against this canon a new bureaucratic definition had to be coined to describe the growing variety of casualised workers who could not fit in the category: i lavoratori atipici, non-typical workers. It is useful here to remember that in Italy there is no equivalent of the social security system as found in Australia and other countries. The gaps between the end of one contract and the beginning of another are simply periods of no income. Post-Fordist generations do not necessarily seek a permanent position. Similarly, they do not desire to be in a singular life-long position. On one hand they have assimilated the “refusal of work” of the 1970s movements, and on the other they have developed a concept of work centred on the notion of “free flexibility”: flexibility freed from salary and capitalist control. In this sense one of San Precario’s key requests is “flexicurity”: a new form of welfare to protect workers without renouncing flexibility.

The casualisation of the workplace in Italy is not a recent phenomenon. In 1984 new legislation (legge 863) extended the possible application of part-time contracts, while other legislation (legge 56) in 1987 established the fixed term contract (Fumagalli, 2003). In 1997 Il pacchetto Treu (The Treu Package, named after the centre-left government minister for workplace relations at the time) introduced and normalised new typologies of temping, fixed terms, apprenticeships, professional development, and part-time contracts (Fumagalli, 2003). Although the legislation was promoted as an opening towards more flexible work conditions, and as a strategy to reduce unemployment, in practice il pacchetto Trau sanctioned the shift in the job market from continuing contracts to new forms of casualised contracts. In 2003 la legge Biagi or legge 30 (named after Marco Biagi, the professor at the University of Modena employed as a consultant by the Ministry for Welfare who was killed in Bologna by the Red Brigades, 19 March 2002) finally deregulated the job market. According to this legislation the job market would be managed through the development of private job agencies, including temping agencies. Unemployment benefit (a fiction at best) in the legge Biagi is connected to professional development and training. Apprenticeship and professional development constitute new forms of contracts, and the line between apprenticeship and work experience is blurred, opening up the possibility of employing at no cost high school and university students. One of the most tragicomic paragraphs of the guidelines to the legislation states that: ‘those work experiences that cannot be considered work relations are to be included in the category of so-called apprenticeships, through which the young person becomes familiar with the workplace, develops skills and enables employers to appreciate her/him’ (Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali, 2004). The legge Biagi also provides a new taxonomy of flexible contract work: “part-time” contracts, “intermittent” work, job sharing, freelancing (lavoro a progetto), “occasional” work in the service and care industry (Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali, 2004). The rhetoric of flexibility is applied also to industrial relations. In a parallel fashion, as casualised employment replaces continuing contracts, individual agreements replace state awards (Fumagalli, 2003; Ferrara, 2004). [2]

The shared experience of casualisation, in its multiplicity of forms, gives rise to struggles which emphasise immaterial labour, biopolitical production and precarious conditions. These are recognised as intrinsic to social cooperation and as such they mark a departure from the 20th century political and unionist tradition of struggles based around collective bargaining. Immaterial labour in this context is not only to be interpreted as the post-Fordist and post-modern shift from jobs based in industry to jobs based in the service industry, namely producing communication, information and knowledge. Jobs based in the care industry, ‘affect labor’ according to Hardt, also produce immaterial goods, such as affect, social relations and desire (Lazzarato, 1996, 1997; Hardt, 1999a; Hardt and Negri, 2000). These jobs, as already indicated, constitute the largest typology of casualised, or to use a more poignant term, precarious labour. Senses of instability, peril and uncertainty coalesce around the notion of precarity. Indeed, according to a 2004 NIDL CGIL Associazione Nuovo Welfare’s survey on typologies of “new work”, 42.5% of casualised workers describe flexibility as synonymous with fewer rights, and 24.6% as a necessary evil. The impact of flexibility on life conditions is reflected in the fact that 35.8% of the respondents to the survey live with their family, 32.5% with their partner, and only 12.7% live alone (NIDL CGIL Associazione Nuovo Welfare, 2004). Even more tellingly, 71.6% do not have children. The yo-yo hours and days typical of flexible employment also disrupt the conditions and environment of sociality and the possibility of constructing sociality itself (Chiara@CW, 2004).

Precarity becomes a modality of control over the life itself of the casualised workforce: its meaning blurs here with the English word precariousness, which refers to an ontological condition (Butler, 2004). In this sense it can also be read as an articulation of biopower, intended as the prerogative of a government’s power to manage and control life from its interior (Foucault 1978: 135-45). Conversely, adopting Hardt’s perspective, it is possible to consider biopower not exclusively from the sovereign standpoint “above” society, but also from the point of view of labour involved in biopolitical production from “below”: ‘By biopower I understand the potential of affective labor. Biopower is the power of creation of life; it is the production of collective subjectivities, sociality, society itself’ (Hardt, 1999a: 98; see also Hardt, 1999b).

Immaterial labour, biopolitics and precarity become central in the construction of struggles, not only because they are funding elements of post-Fordist societies, but also because they are produced by and produce individual and shared forms of subjectivity. Maurizio Lazzarato describes a similar dynamic in a recent article on ‘coordination’ in the French movements (Lazzarato, 2004). Lazzarato argues that contemporary movements break away from socialist and communist traditions because they are articulated not according to contradiction but according to difference. Difference here does not mean absence of conflict, struggle or opposition, but a radical shift, articulated in the two asymmetrical terrains of ‘refusal and constitution, destruction of what is unbearable and deployment of new possibilities’ (Lazzarato, 2004: 107). The first terrain of refusal is expressed as the political movements’ flight from institutional forms and the rules of politics. However, this oppositional character is accompanied by the constituent quality of the second terrain, where ‘the individual and collective singularities which constitute the movements deploy a dynamic of subjectification, which is both a constitution of collective rights (droits collectifs) and a differential affirmation of expression and life’s practices’ (Lazzarato, 2004: 106).

Precarity and immaterial labour are brought together in the name chosen for the network of casualised workers, the Precogs. This neologism combines two essential qualities: precari/e + cognitari/e, precarious + cognizant. The name is appropriated from Philip K. Dick’s story (Dick, 1989) and Spielberg’s movie Minority Report (2002). As with the precogs in the story and the movie, trapped and immersed in a solution and seeing events that take place in the future, the precog network is characterised by strong and imaginative power, the expression of a collective intelligence. But as the life of the precogs in Minority Report is controlled and managed through the supply of nutrients, the name precog also alludes to the control of lives through the supply of flexible work and intermittent income. The Italian word governare, with its double meaning of “to govern” and “to feed”, describes this dynamic well. Flexibility, and its deployment in the 31 different forms of contract work included in the legge Biagi, becomes then a control device of living labour. In this sense the typologies of fixed term contracts are the means through which workers are effectively policed. In Foucauldian terminology, they are modes of governmentality (Foucault, 1991: 102-103). However, the name, according both to Minority Report and to tradizione operaista, also signals the ability to see innovation, and to be immersed in it:

Precognition is also that activity of the movement which enables us to anticipate the developments of both capital and biopolitical struggles. Although we are not workerist fundamentalists, we are still convinced that the expression of subjectivity through conflict precedes and determines the counter-trends of capital and power. (Globalproject, 2004b)

Similarly the struggles originating from the central issues of casualisation and flexibility are not simply pragmatic responses to sporadic events or concerns. On one hand numerous casualised workers exit traditional forms of political aggregation, such as parties and the three major unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL), to re-organise around oppositional struggles against precarity. On the other hand these struggles not only aim at putting forward a magna carta of proposals, but are also at the core of the production of political subjectivities. Thus the struggles and actions originating around precarity are characterised as constituent conflicts where the production of a common imagery plays a central role.

Appearances and Disappearances of San Precario

Milano, Coop supermarket, 29 February 2004

Shoppers don’t quite understand why there is a procession at the deli counter of the supermarket. On closer inspection the statue of the saint is a bit odd. First, the saint is dressed a supermarket worker. Second, it has too many arms. Third, it holds a telephone, newspapers with job ads, and McDonald’s chips. The statue is carried on sticks by a group of young people, and a priest, a friar and a nun are with them. There is even a cardinal. They distribute saint cards: San Precario is the name of this saint. Most people haven’t heard of him. But then the young people say a miracle has happened and there is a 20% discount on shopping today. And with prices going up every month – prices have doubled since the euro was introduced – and the superannuation money being always the same, and the grandkids who cannot find a job for more than three months even if they went to university and studied law….

The handbook Comunicazione Guerriglia defines cultural grammar as the system of rules and regulations that structure social interactions and relationships (Autonome a.f.r.i.k.a gruppe et al., 2001: 26). Far from being neutral, cultural grammar is the expression of specific power relations, and its rules play a role in the production and reproduction of the power relations themselves. Cultural grammar pervades the whole of society, and in this sense it cannot be separated from political practices. On the contrary, it is recognised that political practices are also articulated through cultural forms. Intervening in the cultural grammar of a specific place, time or situation can therefore lead to a change that is not only culturally but also politically subversive. In order to subvert a dominant cultural grammar it is in the first place necessary to understand it and to deconstruct it (Autonome a.f.r.i.k.a gruppee et al., 2001: 27-30).

To analyse the San Precario saga it is necessary to understand different and intersecting cultural grammars. At a macro level, one such grammar is given by the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist system of production and its repercussions at a social and cultural level. More specifically, immaterial labour transfers the site of production into the spheres of communication, knowledge, information, affect and desire (Marazzi, 1999). The response therefore can only be articulated with interventions that mobilise communication, information, knowledge, affect and desires, and interventions, in other words at the symbolic and imaginary level.

San Precario also refers to the cultural grammar of popular religiosity. Other localised grammars, from the peculiar ones that govern supermarkets to the Venice Film Festival ministerial protocols, are deconstructed and détourned in specific apparitions.

The aesthetics of protest are therefore produced according to a post-Fordist blueprint. Characteristics of this blueprint include a flexible and variable production for niche markets, “just in time” stock management that delivers supplies only on request, the use of new technologies, multi-skilling of workers, emphasis on horizontal production processes, deterritorialisation, a shift from material to immaterial labour and to the production of communication, knowledge, information. The modes of activism used in the telling and performing of the life and deeds of San Precario mirror and appropriate through détournement these characteristics. Flexibility, deterritorialisation and horizontal relations are thus mirrored, and distorted, in the story and performances of San Precario.

The Italian expression ‘non so a che santo votarmi’ (‘I don’t know which saint to pray to’) is used to express utter loss of any hope. According to popular religiosity and the Catholic religion, each saint in the calendar has a field of expertise and intervention. Some saints have multiple skills, others preside over diseases, others over professions. Saint Agata is the patron saint of breastfeeding mothers, Saint Gabriel of postal workers and diplomats, Saint Eustachio of hunters and gamekeepers, Saint Rita of unhappily married women and general desperate situations and so on. It is easy to imagine Italian casualised workers looking at each other and sighing after the end of yet another contract, ‘I don’t know which saint to pray to’. It is easy to imagine that after a while somebody came up with the idea that if none of the existing saints could help, a brand new saint should be specifically invented. San Precario was first conceived by a crew of Milanese activists, the Chainworkers, one of the groups sharing the Milanese space Reload. This space, in turn, is part of the constellation of groups that organised the 2004 Euro May Day parade, including the Milanese Critical Mass crew, which already had its own protector saint, Santa Graziella (Graziella being both a female name and the name of a basic type of bicycle). To give Santa Graziella a companion, the Chainworkers crew created a male saint (Romano, 2004): San Precario was born, with all the traditional accessories of sainthood. It has statues (several and very different) to take on processions, iconographical attributes, a hagiography, a saint card, a prayer, and a field of expertise. It even had its own sanctuary, in a gazebo of the occupied beach of Lido di Venezia, Global Beach. Most importantly it has a growing number of followers.

From the beginning San Precario was imagined as a détournement of popular tradition. This tradition is at once appropriated in its formal aspects and subverted in its contents. San Precario’s life, for instance, is narrated in the popular religious genre of the lives of saints, and it follows all the traditional formulaic developments. The story tells of a young man born in a rich family who, after studying “creative finance” and in search of an answer, goes to visit a man, Silviodoro (Goldensilvio) who through divine intervention had received enough money to found three television channels. On the way back he meets a group of people protesting against the closure of the farm where they worked. The sacked workers tell him they plan to migrate, as the only jobs available in the area are on short contracts and cannot guarantee a decent life. The story continues, with Precario wanting to test the truth of such an affirmation by working in a fast food tavern, then being refused a mortgage to buy a television, and finally converting to the precarious workers’ cause (Globalproject Milano, 2004). San Precario’s prayer, based on the Catholic Lord’s prayer, asks for paid maternity leave, protection for commercial chain workers, call center operators, holiday, superannuation contributions, free services and income guarantees. [3]

Similarly San Precario comes with a product placement campaign including stickers and saint cards which subvertise religious saint cards. [4] San Precario’s card was adapted by Chainworkers from the work of Canadian artist Chris Woods. On it, San Precario is represented wearing a uniform. The card includes the saint’s attributes which, following traditional iconography, are also the signs of his martyrdom. They include income, housing, health, communication and transport. Another product is the table game Precariopoli, invented by Chainworkers, which subverts Monopoly by introducing the hurdles in a casual worker’s life. [5]

It was decided that San Precario had to have his own celebration day and that the right day to celebrate the saint of precarity and casualisation was the 29th of February, a Sunday. This date has a double symbolic value: on one hand it is an “intermittent” date, occurring only every four years, on the other in 2004 it was a Sunday, a day that with casualisation has lost its connotations of rest and time off work to become just another working day. The first apparition of San Precario, scheduled in a supermarket COOP (a supermarket chain in North Italy) was meant to draw attention to the erosion of time for living, and to the transformation and normalisation of holidays like May Day and Sundays into working days. This normalisation, it was argued, also leads to the deterioration of social relationships and of the social fabric. Organised by the Chainworkers, performed and narrated by about twenty other groups, collectives and communities, the first apparition of San Precario was deployed according to the rules of religious processions. [6] A statue was carried in the streets, preceded by assorted clergy including a cardinal reciting prayers over a loudspeaker, and followed by pious people. This particular procession started at the social centre Reload, home of the Chainworkers, and involved a fake friar, a priest, a nun, a cardinal, and a sound system. It traversed the streets of Milan’s periphery until it reached the supermarket COOP, where it continued through the aisles. Every now and then it would stop for collective prayers and collection of offerings. Devotees meanwhile distributed San Precario saint cards to shoppers, or used the cards to replace price tags (Reload Video Crew, 2004; Riot Generation Video, 2004).

In the Catholic tradition each saint is recognised by specific iconographic attributes, which generally refer to the saint’s miracles or martyrdom. San Precario, in his first apparition, was represented wearing the uniform of supermarket employees. The statue had several arms, indicating the multiplicity of casual contracts and jobs, but also the necessary ability of the casual worker to develop multi-skilling and to juggle several jobs. The references to martyrdom are held in each hand, listing obliquely an array of typically precarious jobs: the job advertisements sections of newspapers, a bag of McDonald’s chips, a telephone from a call centre.

Since 29 February 2004, San Precario has appeared numerous times in different locations, from Trieste in north-east Italy to Salerno in the south, from Bologna in the north to Rome, from Bari in the south-east to Venice. The apparitions have targeted specific workplaces with a high percentage of casualised workforces. A map of the apparitions roughly coincides with the map of casual employment typologies: national and international chains such as McDonald’s outlets and supermarkets; bookstores and libraries; temping agencies; and finally the Venice Film Festival, in honour of all the casualised workers in the film industry. San Precario does not belong to a specific location but appears in various places, sometimes simultaneously: ‘the idea is to have several actions, different in theme and mode, happening simultaneously in different cities, or in different places of the same city’ (Foti, 2004a). As a multi-skilled and multiply employed casualised worker, precariously teetering from one job to the next and often juggling several jobs at once, the saint has no fixed identity. San Precario is a floating signifier. Rather than being, the saint becomes, constructing lines of flight according to need, personal inclination and group affiliation.

We present as an example the event and the media campaign created and orchestrated by the Milanese crew Chainworkers in collaboration with casualised workers in the fashion industry, on the occasion of Milan Fashion Week on 26 February 2005. This event also marks the beginning of a transformation of San Precario and signals its ability to mutate “just in time” into a new imaginary. In Milan Fashion Week 2005, San Precario morphed into its anagram, Serpica Naro, an emerging and controversial Anglo-Japanese designer with her own book and a website that perfectly mimics the look and content of hundreds of other emerging designers’ sites, down to the choice of typographical font, while the animation and sound of the site are reminiscent of the abbreviated, bite-size style of fashion television shows. Similarly the (invented) press-cuttings mirror the graphics of fashion and style magazines. Serpica also had a press office sending out inspired releases, and a head office in Tokyo. [7] A generic website, filtering information gleaned from the network of precarious workers in fashion media, promised “reserved” information for journalists who subscribed to the site.

Serpica Naro was born: a young, edgy designer; famous, we read in her biography, for the use of technological textiles and innovative cutting techniques. [8] She was registered with the official body that governs Fashion Week, la camera della moda, to take part in the 2005 shows. To give Serpica more presence, Chainworkers, operating within an expanding network of disgruntled casualised workers in the industry, also created a controversy on queer websites, accusing Serpica of having somewhat exploited the Japanese gay community by copying and commercialising their look after pretending to collaborate with them. [9] A similar operation, it was hinted, was about to be carried out in Milan, where Serpica wanted to show at Pergola (Chainworkers and other activist groups’ headquarters) paying little rent money, and thus attracting San Precario’s anger and a lot of media attention. The event itself – the fashion show – comprised eight models specifically designed for Serpica Naro on the theme of precarity and precarious work conditions, and was followed by a show of young designers, such as the British Conscious Fashion Week and the Catalan Yo Mango, who refuse to engage with the fashion system. [10] During the show it was announced that Serpica Naro does not exist, and the whole prank was revealed to the media, which duly reported the entire the story thus highlighting the issues of casualised work behind the glitter of Milan fashion week.

One of the key issues of precarity is the fragmented temporality of flexible employment. While working conditions are “flexible”, “part-time”, “casual”, “temporary”, so is the time frame of protest. San Precario’s nomadic apparitions can be considered tactical, according to the now famous (but not in Italy) distinction made by Michel de Certeau between strategy and tactic. While a strategy operates from a proper or institutional space, tactics are located in improper spaces. ‘A tactic’, de Certeau argues, ‘can only insinuate itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety’ (de Certeau, 1988: xix). Likewise San Precario makes temporary incursions into the places of others: supermarkets, the Venice film festival, the catwalk, temping agencies, libraries. More importantly, de Certeau points out, whereas a strategy relies on space, a tactic depends mostly on time: ‘it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized “on the wing”. Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into “opportunities”‘ (de Certeau, 1988: xix). If the apparitions of San Precario are orchestrated tactically, what kind of time do they rely on to create opportunities? Part TAZ, part carnival, San Precario’s apparitions are meant to be temporary and impermanent. In TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Hakim Bey advocates the “temporary” time of insurgence and uprising, against the “permanent” time of revolution (Bey, 1985: 97-102). An insurgence opens up possibilities, we could say it imagines lines of flight, to disappear and appear again in a different time and space as soon as it is named, represented, or mediatised. Temporality is paired with invisibility as a tactic of resistance in front of the omnipresence of State control (Bey, 1985: 97-102). Intermittent temporality, like the one described by Bey, and a viral proliferation of events in different places is a tactical choice to exit and evacuate control. The imperial complexity of today’s society can no longer be contrasted with a direct, antagonistic conflict. The disappearance of San Precario is in this sense as important as its appearance.

Epoesis, Mythopoesis, Videopoesis

So, does San Precario do something other than appearing to fleetingly subvert, maybe organise 20% off your shopping for the day, and disappear again in the familiar refuge of cultural activism? Is San Precario any different from the hundreds of actions of cultural jammers, subvertisers, artivists, hactivists, mediactivists and creactivists worldwide? What does San Precario do between one appearance and the next?

San Precario, as the apparition that rhyzomatically pops up in different cities wearing different faces to reclaim paid maternity leave, holidays and superannuation, operates tactically. But San Precario is also part of a wider political debate that brings together, as seen during its appearances at Euro May Day, diverse activist groups, networks and independent unions. One of the images used by another group, the Globalproject activists, to describe the way precarious workers are organised, is the archipelago, an environment made of ‘islands in the net, connected by quick and colorful links….’ (Globalproject Venezia, 2004). The archipelago is the mirror image of the decentralised production mechanism of post-industrial society and a post-Fordist system. The archipelago recalls Sterling’s cyberpunk romance Islands in the Net (1956), where the islands are autonomous experiments in social cooperation and ways of living, linked by the Net. The archipelago of precarity is in the same way organised as a multiplicity of individuals, groups, and collectives linked up through intersecting networks:

An archipelagos of rebel communities, stuck between forests of skyscrapers and metro-radical beaches, climbing plants and sea-stars, cactus and sails, inside Empire’s map it defines an irregular perimeter like a dotted line, and each dot is sealed with the stamp H.S.L. Hic Sunt Leones [here there are lions, acronym used by Romans to describe uncolonised and uncolonisable territories] are those sites where power is evacuated, where women and men decided that Imperial Law, Government and Normativity have no value in their lives. (Globalproject Venezia, 2004)

The networks, in particular the Precog mailing list and Globalproject, play an important role in producing narr/actions. The centrality of networks reflects a general shift in the Italian movement towards a political praxis that produces and is produced through communication. The production of imagery, of a system of signification, becomes the constituent elements of political subjectivities and of communities.

The auto-organised islands or communities have distinct genealogies and political alignments. Although there are cross-overs and overlaps as individual activists traverse different nodes, each directing its actions and attention to specific issues. Communities congregate around precarity, communities as diverse as SexyShock post-feminists, the North-Eastern bio-unionists Invisibili, independent unions (sindacati di base), chainworkers, brainworkers, Globalproject activists, guerrilla communicators, and hackers’ collectives. San Precario, although invented by the Chainworkers crew, is in this sense a common product and production.

As such San Precario is a mythopoetic figure: it narrates and performs a community into existence. The narration thus become narr/action, the ability and desire to create a sense of cohesion, based on shared histories and experiences which in turn became the starting point for continuing debates and for imagining new possibilities and events. Narrations in general become mythopoetic when, as in the description of Riot Generation Video, one of the islands producing videos in (and outside of) Globalproject, they are ‘words that produce actions, and actions that produce words’ (Ferraro, 2004).

Wu Ming 1, storyteller of the collective Wu Ming, previously known also as Luther Blisset, has dedicated much reflection to the notion of mythopoesis, and has defined it as:

The social process of constructing myths, by which we do not mean “false stories”, we mean stories that are told and shared, re-told and manipulated, by a vast and multifarious community, stories that may give shape to some kind of ritual, some sense of continuity between what we do and what other people did in the past. . the Italian social movements were able to emerge as multitudes of people describing themselves by an endless, lively flow of tales, using those tales as weapons in order to impose a new imagery from the grassroots. When we talk about “myths”, we mean stories that are tangible, made of flesh, blood and shit. (Wu Ming, 2002)

The tangibility of these stories is also of interest here. Together with the general intellect producing the ideas around San Precario, there is the need to introduce another notion: that of the general body, as San Precario’s saga is at the same time narrated and performed, or performed while narrated. The use of technologies such as video, radio, the net, websites, and sometimes satellite television, enables the narration of actions and events almost in real time. The label “mediactivist” acquires here a particular meaning, where media is only one of the possible forms of activism. Actions and events are created, constructed and acted out by the same people. Narrations, in short, are not a super-imposition after the event on some sort of pre-narrative condition, but are an integral part of political action. In this sense mythopoesis, which in this case we might call e-poesis or videopoesis, is tangible, made of flesh, blood and possibly shit.

Subjectivity is constituted also in bodily manner, not simply at a cognitive level. The intermittent time and fragmented space of demonstrations/actions/events/processions, what can be called a time of insurgency, produce a process of subjectification based on intercorporeality. Affect is central to this process. The idea of intercorporeality was originally inspired through notions of embodiment and flesh, namely through Merleau-Ponty (1968: 130-155). In recent times the Italian anthropologist Tamisari, in her work on dance and performance, explores a social and collective dimension of embodiment (1998: 274-286). What happens then in the intercorporeality of demonstrations? There is a need to recover the notion of empathy and, with Edith Stein, to argue that empathy and empathic acts can only happen in a bodily manner, through one’s body (understood as the individual psycho-physical unity). The possibility of sensual empathy, or “a sensing-in” according to Stein (1989: 58), constitutes the experience not only of the other but also of the self. This sensual empathy, deployed as TAZ but already spilling out in other experiments, constitutes subjectivities and communities. This sensual empathy, perhaps, is the response to the precarity and precariousness not only of work but also of contemporary life.

Authors’ Biographies

Marcello Tarì teaches ethnography at the Università degli Studi di Bari, Italy. His research interests are the cultural anthropology of Italian activism and subaltern studies in Italy.

Ilaria Vanni works at the Institute for International Studies, University of Technology Sydney. Her broad research interests are in visual and material culture and identity. Her current research is on the production of imagery in Italian activism.

Acknowledgments

The research for this article was made possible by an Early Career Research Grant from the University of
Technology Sydney.

Notes

[1] Il Manifesto Bio-Pop del Precariato Metroradicale was written collectively and posted to several discussion lists. This quotation is from the Globalproject broadsheet Il Fascino Indiscreto del Precariato, May 2004, 1.6.

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[2] According to the Italian Bureau of Statistics (ISTAT), in 2002 there were 31 different typologies of casualised work (lavoro atipico), with an increase of 68% since 1996 (Fumagalli, 2003). The 7 million casualised workers in Italy amount to the 27.1% of the total workforce: more than one worker in four is casualised (Foti, 2004c). Given these figures, the category of lavoratore atipico, precarious or flexworker, is not homogeneous and includes a multiplicity of jobs, forms of labour and degrees of “flexibility”. There are casualised workers employed in the care and service industry – generally migrant workers, and casuals working in international and national chains such as McDonald’s or supermarkets. There are fixed term university researchers and flexible entertainment industry workers. According to recent research by one of the major unions, CGIL, 70% of lavoratori atipici are women, 63.4% are under 35, 32.1% have a tertiary education degree and 52.2% a secondary education degree (NIDL CGIL Associazione Nuovo Welfare, 2004: 42-46). The jobs performed by lavoratori atipici follow the pattern of change described by Hardt and Negri with the terms “informatisation” and “immaterial labour”, as a migration of labour from industry to service jobs (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 285). Only 8.2% of precarious workers are manual labourers, whereas 31.3% are employed in clerical roles, 17.2% are freelancers, 15% are call center and switchboard operators (NIDL CGIL Associazione Nuovo Welfare, 2004: 47-48).

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[3] See http://www.euromayday.org/prop.html.

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[4] See http://www.euromayday.org/prop.html.

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[5] See http://www.euromayday.org/milano/precariopoli.html.

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[6] The following communities took part in the first appearance of San Precario: I Precari e le Precarie, CW, Reload, Bulk, Pop Lab, Collettivo Monzese, Collettivo Contro la Precarizzazione t. 28, Confederazione Cobas, CUB, Ambulatorio Medico Popolare, Cantiere, Casa Loca, PRK 251, Rete per il Reddito di Bologna, XXY, Torchiera, Baraonda (Romano, 2004).

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[7] See http://www.serpicanaro.com/press.

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[8] See http://www.serpicanaro.com/website/index.html.

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[9] See http://www.pornflakes.it.

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[10] See http://www.serpicanaro.com/press.

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Sites

http://www.chainworkers.org

http://www.euromayday.org

http://www.Globalproject.info

https://www.inventati.org/mailman/listinfo/precog

http://www.serpicanaro.com/

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In Florian Schneider’s documentary Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), Raj Jayadev of the DE-BUG worker’s collective in Silicon Valley identifies the central problem of temporary labour as one of time. Jayadev recounts the story of ‘Edward’, a staff-writer for the Debug magazine: ‘My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays without me knowing it. And I lose track of time and I lose hope with what tomorrow’s going to be’. Jayadev continues: ‘What concerns temp workers the most is not so much a $2 an hour pay raise or safer working conditions. Rather, they want the ability to create, to look forward to something new, and to reclaim the time of life’. How does this desire to create, all too easily associated with artistic production, intersect with the experiences of other workers who engage in precarious forms of labour?

With the transformation of labour practices in advanced capitalist systems under the impact of globalisation and information technologies, there has arisen a proliferation of terms to describe the commonly experienced yet largely undocumented transformations within working life. Creative labour, network labour, cognitive labour, service labour, affective labour, linguistic labour, immaterial labour; these categories often substitute for each other, but in their very multiplication they point to diverse qualities of experience that are not simply reducible to each other. On the one hand these labour practices are the oppressive face of post-Fordist capitalism, yet they also contain potentialities that spring from workers’ own refusal of labour and subjective demands for flexibility – demands that in many ways precipitate capital’s own accession to interminable restructuring and rescaling, and in so doing condition capital’s own techniques and regimes of control.

The complexity of these relationships has amounted to a crisis within modes of organisation based around the paranoid triad: union, state, firm. Time and again, across the past fifteen years, we heard proclamations of the end of the nation-state, its loss of control or subordination to new and more globally extensive forms of sovereignty. Equally, we are now overfamiliar with claims for the decline of trade unions: their weakening before transnational flows of capital, the erosion of salaried labour, or the carefully honed attacks of neoliberal politicians. More recently, the firm itself is not looking so good, riddled with internal instability and corruption for which the names Enron, Worldcom, and Parmalat provide only the barest index. Clearly, the “networked organisation” is not the institutional form best suited to the management of labour and life within information economies and networked socialities. But it is not these tendencies themselves as much as their mutual implications that have led to the radical recasting of labour organisation and its concomitant processes of bargaining and arbitration.

Within the ambit of social movements and autonomous political groups, these new forms of labour organisation have been given the name precarity, an inelegant neologism coined by English speakers to translate the French precarité. Although the term has been in circulation since the early 1980s, it is really only over the past two or three years that it has acquired prominence in social movement struggles. Particularly in the Western European nations, the notion of precarity has been at the centre of a long season of protests, actions, and discussions, including events such as EuroMayDay 2004 (Milan and Barcelona) and 2005 (in seventeen European cities), Precarity Ping Pong (London, October 2004), the International Meeting of the Precariat (Berlin, January 2005), and Precair Forum (Amsterdam, February 2005). [1] According to Milanese activist Alex Foti (2004), precarity is ‘being unable to plan one’s time, being a worker on call where your life and time is determined by external forces’. The term refers to all possible shapes of unsure, not guaranteed, flexible exploitation: from illegalised, seasonal and temporary employment to homework, flex- and temp-work to subcontractors, freelancers or so-called self-employed persons. But its reference also extends beyond the world of work to encompass other aspects of intersubjective life, including housing, debt, and the ability to build affective social relations.

Classically, the story told about precarity is that it was capital’s response to the rejection of “jobs for life” and demands for free time and flexibility by workers in the 1970s. Thus the opposite of precarity is not regular work, stable housing, and so on. Rather, such material security is another version of precarity, consuming time, energy, and affective relations as well as producing the anxiety that results from the ‘financialisation of daily life’ – to steal a felicitous phrase from Randy Martin (2002). Among other things, the notion of precarity has provided a rallying call and connecting device for struggles surrounding citizenship, labour rights, the social wage, and migration. And importantly, these struggles are imagined to require new methods of creative-social organisation that do not make recourse to social state models, trade union solidarities, or Fordist economic structures.

The political challenge is to determine whether the uncertain, unpredictable condition of precarity can operate as an empirical object of thought and practice. Precarity would seem to cancel out the possibility of such an undertaking, since the empirical object is presupposed as stable and contained, whereas, the boundaries between labour, action, and intellect appear increasingly indistinct within a post-Fordist mode of production. Can common resources (political organisation) be found within individual and collective experiences of permanent insecurity? Furthermore, is there a relationship between the potential for political organisation and the technics of communication facilitated by digital technologies? In sum, what promise does precarity offer as a strategy and why has it emerged at this precise historical moment as a key concept for political thought and struggle?

In order to address these questions, we first outline the distinction between “precarity” and “precariousness”. In surveying the various ways in which these terms have circulated, we wish to establish a framework within which questions of labour, life and social-political organisation can be understood. The various uncertainties defining contemporary life are carried over – and, we argue, internal to – the logic of informatisation. Our aim, however, is not to collapse respective differences into a totalising logic that provides a definitive assessment or system of analysis; rather, we seek to identify some of the forces, rhythms, discourses and actions that render notions such as creativity, innovation, and organisation, along with the operation of capital, with a complexity whose material effects are locally situated within transversal networks. Where there are instances of inter-connection between, say, the work of migrants packaging computer parts or cleaning offices and that of media labour in a call centre, software development firm or digital post-production for a film studio, we see a common expressive capacity predicated on the dual conditions of exploitation and uncertainty.

Yet to cast the experience of informational labour as exclusively oppressive is to overlook the myriad ways in which new socialities emerge with the potential to create political relations that force an adjustment in the practices of capital. Such collectivities are radically different from earlier forms of political organisation, most notably those of the union and political party. Instead, we find the logic of the network unleashed, manifesting as situated interventions whose effects traverse a combination of spatial scales. The passage from precarity to precariousness foregrounds the importance of relations. It makes sense, then, to also consider the operation of networks, which above all else are socio-technical systems made possible by the contingency of relations.

Uncertainty, Felixibility, Transformation

To begin to grapple with the sort of questions sketched above it is necessary to acknowledge that the concept of precarity is constitutively doubled-edged. On the one hand, it describes an increasing change of previously guaranteed permanent employment conditions into mainly worse paid, uncertain jobs. In this sense, precarity leads to an interminable lack of certainty, the condition of being unable to predict one’s fate or having some degree of stability on which to construct a life. On the other hand, precarity supplies the precondition for new forms of creative organisation that seek to accept and exploit the flexibility inherent in networked modes of sociality and production. That the figure of the creative, cognitive, or new media worker has emerged as the figure of the precarious worker par excellence is symptomatic of this ambivalent political positioning. Some commentators have gone as far as to suggest that the collaborative processes and affective relations that characterise artistic work reveal the inner dynamics of the post-Fordist economy. By questioning the boundaries between social labour and creative practice, for instance, Brian Holmes (2004) follows one of the central themes of Italian post-operaista thought, arguing that creative linguistic relation (the very stuff of human intersubjectivity) has become central to contemporary labour regimes.

No doubt there is some truth to the claim that the dynamic relationship between material production and social reproduction converges, under contemporary capitalism, on the horizon of language and communication. This argument, as developed in the work of thinkers like Christian Marazzi (1999) and Paolo Virno (2004a, 2004b), has been redeployed in any number of contexts to question the boundaries between creative action and social labour. It would be foolish to underestimate the utility of these interventions. But implicit in this tendency to collapse otherwise disparate forms of labour into the containing category of creativity is an eclipse of those forms of bodily, coerced, and unpaid work primarily associated with migrants and women (and not with artists, computer workers, or new media labourers).

In this sense, it is probably not a good thing that precarity has become the meme of the moment. Proclamations of the epoch-breaking character of contemporary labour market transformations, while doubtless augmenting the rhetorical force of the struggles surrounding precarity, inevitably occlude two important facts. First, the current increase of precarious work in the wealthy countries is only a small slice of capitalist history. If the perspective is widened, both geographically and historically, precarity becomes the norm (and not some exception posed against a Keynesian or Fordist ideal of capitalist stability). With this shift in perspective the focus also moves to other forms of work, still contained within the logic of industrial or agricultural production, that do not necessarily abide the no-material-product logic of so-called cognitive, immaterial, or creative labour. Without denying that neoliberal globalisation and the boom-bust dot.com cycle of information technology have placed new pressures on labour markets in the wealthy countries, it is also important to approach this wider global perspective in light of a second fact: that capital too is precarious, given to crises, risk, and uncertainty.

Clearly, the dynamics of capital are intimately linked to social patterns and transformations. To take one example: a glance at the relationship in advanced economies between ageing populations, declining population growth (i.e., birthrates), and a shift away from salaried work points also to the precarity of capital. How to fund a retired population is one of the key policy and electoral issues faced by governments in the advanced economies. The substantial increase in the ranks of retirees over the next two decades coupled with the trend towards casualisation of labour, a decline of growth in the labour force, and a corresponding decline in income tax revenue puts enormous pressure on the funds available for pension schemes (Neilson, 2003). As Henwood (2005) notes, this is an issue for both public and private retirement systems. The “pension crisis” has been part of a government scare campaign aimed at encouraging baby-boomers to redirect pension funds into private schemes and stock market investments. Not only does this have the effect of weakening the public system, but it also increases the level of risk for those investing in the private system, which has a periodic pattern of crashes, market fluctuation, and uncertain returns (see Bakshi and Zhiwu, 1994; Marazzi, 1998; Blackburn, 2002; Starr, 2005).

At the economic level, then, the problematic of an ageing demographic goes beyond both welfarist and neoliberal ideologies – either way, considerable pressure will be placed on the capacity of the capitalist system to effectively deal with the distribution of funds across areas of need (health, education, military expenditure, civic and corporate infrastructure, etc.). One solution proposed by governments has been to extend the age of retirement and swell the ranks of precarious labour. Ultimately this only expands a minimum taxation base and not growth in the labour force, the combined result being a slowdown in economic productivity and GDP (Henwood, 2005). Whether workers directed funds into public or private systems does not detract from the precarity of capital; rather, the example of an ageing demographic and diminishing labour force points to the way in which capital increasingly becomes a system of heightened insecurity.

Labour, Communication, Movement

Importantly, capital has always tried to shore up its own precariousness through the control of labour and, in particular, the mobility of labour. It is the insight of Moulier-Boutang’s De l’esclavage au salariat (1998) to identify the subjective practice of labour mobility as the connecting thread in the history of capitalism. Far from being archaisms or transitory adjustments destined to be wiped out by modernisation, Moulier-Boutang contends that labour regimes such as slavery and indenture are constituent of capitalist development and arise precisely from the attempt to control or limit the worker’s flight. In this perspective, the figure of the undocumented migrant becomes the exemplary precarious worker since, in the current global formation, the entire system of border control and detention technology provides the principal means by which capital controls the mobility of labour. Because the depreciation and precarisation of migrant labour threatens to engulf the workforce as a whole (and because the subjective mobility and resistance of migrants tests the limits of capitalist control), their position becomes the social anticipation of a political option to struggle against the general development of labour and life in the contemporary world (Mezzadra, 2001; Mezzadra, 2004).

A similar argument can be made regarding the un- or under-paid labour of women, both as regards the status of the patriarchal family as the locus of the reproduction of labour power in capitalist societies and preponderance of women in precarious sectors such as care-work, house-work, or call centres (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 292-293, 2004: 110-111; Huws, 2003). Indeed, the Madrid-based group Precarias alla Deriva, which has always resisted the temptation to use the term precarity as a common name for diverse and singular labour situations, has devoted much of its research to the feminisation of precarious work. And the sheer proliferation of women in contemporary labour migration flows means that there is a great deal of convergence between approaches that emphasise the role of border technologies in capital’s attempts to minimise its precariousness and those that focus on the ongoing marginalisation and undervaluation of women’s work (Anderson, 2000; Gill, 2002; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Parrenãs, 2001; Huws, 2003).

The point is not to replace the figure of the creative worker with that of the migrant or female care-worker in the discussions and actions surrounding precarity. Nor is it to collapse these various types of labour practice into a composite category, such as the much circulated term precariat (which combines the words precario and proletariat in a single class category). Equally, it is insufficient to subordinate these very different labour practices to a single logic of production (which is the tactic followed by Hardt and Negri when they argue that all forms of labour in the contemporary world, while maintaining their specificity, are transformed and mastered by processes of informatisation). In terms of political practice and strategy, we believe there is something to be gained by holding these labour practices in some degree of conceptual and material separation but articulating them in struggle.

For instance, the fight for open architectures of electronic communication pursued by many creative workers cannot be equated with the subjective practices of mobility pursued by undocumented labour migrants. While these actions might be conjoined on some conceptual horizon (through notions such as exodus or flow), they have distinct (and always highly contextual) manifestations on the ground. There are clearly important differences between copyright regimes and border control technologies, even if both are ultimately held down by the assertion of sovereign power, whether at the national or transnational level. Recognising this, however, does not mean that the struggles surrounding free software and the “no-border” struggles surrounding undocumented migration cannot work in tandem or draw on each other tactically. As the editorial team of Makeworld Paper#3 writes: ‘the demand to combine the freedom of movement with the freedom of communication is social dynamite’ (Bove et al., 2003).

Precarity, then, does not have its model worker. Neither artist nor migrant, nor hacker nor housewife, there is no precarious Stakhanov. Rather, precarity strays across any number of labour practices, rendering their relations precisely precarious – which is to say, given to no essential connection but perpetually open to temporary and contingent relations. In this sense, precarity is something more than a position in the labour market, since it traverses a spectrum of labour markets and positions within them. Moreover, the at best fleeting connections, alliances and affiliations between otherwise distinct social groupings brings into question much of the current debate around the “multitudes” as somehow constituting a movement of movements. Such a proposition implies a degree of co-ordination and organisation that rarely coalesces at an empirical level beyond the time of the event.

Instances where such affilations have occurred – such as the much mythologised “Battle of Seattle” and subsequent WTO protests – have not, at the end of the day, amounted to any sustained alternative force. The high moment of 2003, which saw a global mobilisation of protestors against the Iraq War, has become lost in the spectral debris of an informatised society. The massive anti-war protests of 15 February 2003 proved impossible to match. And this loss of momentum prompted the recourse to depoliticising debates, such as the perennial toss-up between violence and non-violence in protest and disobedience. While the World Social Forum (WSF) events in Porto Alegre and Mumbai, the European Social Forum (ESF) and, more recently, the participation of civil society in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), have acquired a degree of momentum, it would be a mistake to view such activity in terms of some kind of coherent project of opposition or refusal. Arguably, the new discursive legitimacy obtained by civil society within supranational institutions associated with WSIS is conditioned by the increasing need amongst neoliberal governments for NGOs and social justice organisations to fulfill the role of service provision in the wake of a decimated state system (Rossiter, 2005). [2]

There is little chance, then, that a coherent political opposition will emerge from the organised activities of civil society. Rather, what we see here is a further consolidation of capital. More disconcerting is the likelihood of civil society organisations becoming increasingly decoupled from their material constitution – that is, the continual formation and reformation of social forces from which they were born. This is a predicament faced by activist movements undergoing a scalar transformation. The system of modern sovereignty, which functioned around the dual axiom of representation and rights, cannot encompass these new modes of organisation. Nor can the postliberal model of governance, which rearranges vertical relations into a horizontal order of differentiated subjectivities. Nonetheless, the problem of scale remains. In the case of social movements that begin to engage with what passes for global civil society, this can entail an abstraction of material constitution that is often difficult to separate from the histories and practices of abstract sociality vis-à-vis capitalism. Such a condition begins to explain why there is a tendency to collapse the vastly different situations of workers into the catch-all categories of the multitudes and precarity. This, if you will, is the logic of the empty signifier. And here lies the challenge, and difficulty, of articulating new forms of social-political organisation in ways that remain receptive to local circumstances that are bound to the international division of labour.

Paradoxically, the increased institutional visibility that attends the action of speech – as seen, for example, by civil society actors participating at WSIS – compounds the invisibility of material constitution. This is why radical political movements must face the question of institutions – a question that brings to the fore fundamental issues surrounding the subject of security, both from the political and anthropological points of view. With shifts in the level of scalar organisation, pressures come to bear upon the primary organisers or advocates of social movements from participants and other actors who demand forms of accountability and transparency. Networks cannot hope to entirely transcend this relation. Even those movements that bring precarity to the fore risk disconnecting from the subject that conditioned their emergence. Thus while networks can be understood as non-representational modes of organising political and social relations, they are nonetheless bound to prevailing discourses and expectations surrounding notions of networked governance. These kinds of tensions may operate as a generative force, resulting in the development of protocols and modes of engagement that enhance the capacities of the network, but they can also result in dysfunctionality and eventual breakdown.

The unresolved relation between social movements and institutions can thus have a distracting effect that obscures the position and actions of the precarious worker. How, for example, are networks to account for the invisibility of exploited workers engaged in the production process? Who, for instance, is the constituent subject of the creative industries? Not, it would seem, those engaged in activities of production and creation – the primary base for ‘the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’. Given that invisibility becomes common, how, then, does a politics of precarity take form? This imperceptibility is, of course, crucial for undocumented migrants who destroy their papers as a means of avoiding the sovereign world of border administration. But such a strategy of invisibility need not obscure the fact that the dark underbelly of the creative industries consists of undocumented labour, domestic labour, those engaged in the assembly production of micro-chips, the toxic impact of such manufacturing on the environment and health of those living adjacent to these industries, and so on and so forth. These actors comprise the subaltern of the new economies. For all the interest by government, business and academic stakeholders to “map” the “value-chain” of the creative industries, there is a tendency to overlook the actual relations of production that enable the internal clusters of creative industry. [3] In this sense, the mapping documents function as agents that proliferate the fantasy of the creative industries as somehow new rather than, as Ursula Huws notes in her feminist political economy of information technology and domestic labour, ‘a continuation of a process that has been evolving for a least the past century and a half’ (2003: 136).

Amid this fluctuating and transforming terrain, it is no accident that the motif of precarity has emerged in recent times as the central platform of the EuroMayDay parade and supposed revitalising force of social movements. Without denying the enormous inventive energy poured into efforts like the San Precario stunts in Italy or the Intermittents du Spectacle campaign in France, it is necessary to ask why precarity presented itself as an important focus at precisely this moment. Certainly it is difficult to correlate this with any sudden jump in the numbers of precarious workers, since in the advanced economies their ranks have been gradually swelling since the onset of post-Fordist capitalism. Nor is it sufficient to attribute this move to a vanguard logic by which a central core of activists used the notion of precarity to grow (or replenish) the ranks of social movements. This is so even though the “subvertising” efforts of groups like Chainworkers and Molleindustria self-consciously deploy networked communication and design as a means for making radical political activity attractive to young people who purportedly have no memory of class struggle.

Crucial to understanding the turn to precarity in nongovernmental politics is to situate it historically in relation to the anti-war protests and the difficulty in maintaining their momentum as the U.S. led invasion of Iraq unfolded. For many who had protested for the first time (or for the first time in many years) in 2003, the failure of the anti-war actions to stop the invasion of Iraq was a severe object lesson, a harsh warning about the limits of political expression. Doubtless there were tactical errors and, in many contexts, the anti-war movement swelled its ranks by appealing to nationalist sentiments that immediately modulated into support for the troops once the hostilities began. This lead to difficulties of organisation and mobilisation that severely tested the upbeat and progressive logic of expansion and multiplication that many had applied to the movement from the time of Seattle. At the same time, there was an increased awareness of security in the post-911 environment with heightened rhetoric about terrorism in the mainstream media, images of detainees bound and gagged in Guantanamo, and the first news of the kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq. As many have argued, a pervasive politics of fear settled over the advanced capitalist nations, somewhat independently of whether they deployed troops in Iraq or not. Is it any accident that the concern with precarity and the increased instability of labour came to the fore in this situation of perceived insecurity?

We suggest the emergence of precarity as a central political motif of the global movement relates not only to labour market conditions but also to the prevalent moods and conditions within advanced capitalist societies at a time of seemingly interminable global conflict. Once again this brings the doubled-edged nature of precarity to the fore. For while precarity provides a platform for struggle against the degradation of labour conditions and a means of imagining more flexible circumstances of work and life, it also risks dovetailing with the dominant rhetoric of security that emanates from the established political classes of the wealthy world. This is particularly the case for those versions of precarity politics that place their faith in state intervention as a means of improving or attenuating the worsening conditions of labour.

Prominent among these is the call for flexicurity, which involves a campaign for a new form of welfare to protect workers without renouncing to flexibility. While such proposals have had little traction in English-speaking countries where state-funded unemployment benefits have morphed into work-for-the-dole and Third Way “mutual obligation” schemes, they have in Western Europe often taken the form of calls to extend Dutch labour market reforms to the whole of the E.U. (see, for instance, Foti, 2004). These reforms, which guarantee flex workers more secure employment, better pay and welfare entitlements as their duration in this type of work increases, are not neglible for regularised citizen-resident workers. But they certainly do not extend to undocumented migrants. Moreover, the recourse to state policy as a means of reducing precarity fosters the belief that the state can and must stabilise the precariousness of capital.

This applies equally to those calls for flexicurity that go beyond the Dutch reforms by calling for a social wage or guaranteed income that the state would pay to citizens in recognition of the fact that it is now life itself and not just labour that contributes to the production of wealth (Fumagalli, 2005). Quite apart from the tireless question of revolution versus reform, there is the danger that this sort of measure, insofar as it casts the state (or perhaps sovereign power in some other-than-state form) as the provider of continuity and certainty, reinforces the dominant rhetoric of security in a period of global war. For while the circulation of media rhetoric about terror has generated a heightened sense of insecurity in the wealthy countries, the sovereign response to this situation has been an unprecedented subtraction of liberties and increasingly rigorous policing of society – on all scales and often in novel and flexible forms. It is thus understandable that the term flexicurity, which usually applies to labour reforms in the Northern European countries, might be mistaken as a description of those new, more flexible strategies of global policing that the U.S. military has adopted following the model of one of the most prolific employers of precarious labour in North America, Wal-Mart (see Davis, 2003).

Ontological Insecurity in the USA

Undoubtedly, current perceptions of insecurity are complex and cannot be traced to a single source such as global terrorism, precarity at work, environmental risk, or exposure to the volatility of financial markets (say through pension investments and/or interest rates). At the existential level, these experiences mix or work in concert to create a general feeling of unease. And the conviction that the state (whether conceived on the national scale or in terms of some more extensive sovereign entity like the E.U.) can provide stability in any one of these spheres is not necessarily separable from the notion that it can eliminate risk and contingency in another. Not only does this imply that the struggle against precarity, if not carefully conceived, may bolster and/or feed off state-fueled security politics, but also it suggests that there is something deeper about precarity than its articulation to labour alone would suggest – some more fundamental, but never foundational, human vulnerability, that neither the act nor potential of labour can exhaust.

This is certainly the sense in which Judith Butler, in Precarious Life (2004), confronts what she calls precariousness (which should be distinguished from precarity intended in the labour market sense). For Butler, precariousness is an ontological and existential category that describes the common, but unevenly distributed, fragility of human corporeal existence. A condition made manifest in the U.S. by the events of 911, this fundamental and pre-individual vulnerability is subject to radical denial in the discourses and practices of global security. For instance, Butler understands President George W. Bush’s 921 declaration that ‘our grief has turned to anger and our anger to resolution’ to constitute a repudiation of precariousness and mourning in the name of an action that purports to restore order and to promote the fantasy that the world formerly was orderly. And she seeks in the recognition of this precariousness an ethical encounter that is essential to the constitution of vulnerability and interdependence as preconditions for the “human”.

Key to Butler’s argument is the proposition that recognition of precariousness entails not simply an extrapolation from an understanding of one’s own precariousness to an understanding of another’s precarious life but an understanding of ‘the precariousness of the Other’. Her emphasis is on the relationality of human lives and she sees this not only as a question of political community but also as the basis for theorising dependency and ethical responsibility. Rather than seeking to describe the features of a universal human condition (something that she claims does not exist or yet exist), she asks who counts as human. And with this reference to humans not regarded as humans, she seeks not a simple entry of the ‘excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade?’ (2004: 33). At this level, the theorisation of precariousness impinges on fundamental ontological questions and, to this extent, it suggests a means of joining some of the actions and arguments surrounding precarity to a more philosophically engaged encounter with notions such as creativity, contingency, and relation.

As noted above, Butler’s argument, while claiming to affect an ontological insurrection, takes shape above all in the post-911 United States. A passionate appeal for the necessity of critique under circumstances where popular energies have rallied around the executive branch of government, Precarious Life understandly focuses on the progress of global war and the transformations of life within the U.S. polity. But it also presents precariousness as a general principle of the human (and who counts as such). And while it emphasises the uneven distribution of this basic human fragility, it does not analyse the workings of this unevenness in detail (as if they were merely given, coincidental and outside the realm of fundamental ontology). In other words, Butler does not explore the whole problematic of global capitalism and its relations to the current conflict. [4] Certainly these relations are of a complex order and cannot be reduced to the simple formula (“no blood for oil”) that would have war working always in the service of capital and vice versa.

In a world where the operations of the global market (by which any object, regardless of location, can be valued and ordered) do not necessarily accord with the logic of strategy (by which spatially fixed resources, subject to calculation and command in the aggregate, are brought under control by state actors), there are likely discrepancies to exploit between the workings of capital and the enterprise of security (Neilson, forthcoming). For instance, the effort to block the flow of laundered money that funds terror networks requires a tightening of regulation on that very institution that lies at the heart of global neoliberal enterprise, the deregulated financial market (Napoleoni, 2003). Indeed, it may be in these gaps, where security and capital come into conflict, that the motif of precarious life receives its most radical articulation, where precariousness meets precarity, and the struggle against neoliberal capitalism that dominated the global movement from Seattle might finally work in tandem with the struggle against war. Such a realisation must be central to any politics that seeks to reach beyond the limits of precarity as a strategy of organisation.

Butler’s recognition of precariousness as a fundamental condition of human relation is not without its relevance for the debates surrounding current networked economies and labour market trends. Far from asserting some foundational base of human nature, she focuses attention on the never-stable relations that invest human patterns of interdependence and cooperation. To this extent her understanding of the human veers, on the one hand, from the cognitivism of say Noam Chomsky (1988), who asserts that the human is possessed of an innate creativity due to the innovative capacity of language, and, on the other, from the anthropologism of Arnold Gehlen (1988), who contends that the human propensity for flexible adaption to the environment is the font of restless creativity not shared by animals.

Importantly, the emphasis on vulnerability and injury that invests Butler’s account of the politics of relation challenges the social philosophies that follow from these lines of thought: the need for human society to foster innate creative capabilities under the sign of social justice (Chomsky) and the need for authoritarian social institutions to control and direct the human capacity for flexibility (Gehlen). But if her thought is to be adapted to suit the conditions of a labour market that values flexibility and communicational-linguistic relations, it is necessary to add the element of innovation to the ontological mix. Otherwise, her valuable ethical and political insights risk detachment from the organisational and biological circumstances of contemporary capitalist relations.

Innovative Capacities and Common Resources

Key to understanding the human capacity for innovation is the recognition that such change is not the norm but the exception, something that occurs rarely and unexpectedly. Virno (2004b) pursues a reading of paragraph 206 Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, concerning the impossibility of applying rules, in an attempt to understand the conditions of such an exception and their radical difference from organisational models that aim to extract an economic value from creative practices. Crucial for Virno in Wittgenstein’s understanding of normative or rule-governed behaviour is that the rule can never specify the conditions of its application – e.g., there is no rule that specifies how high the tennis ball can be thrown during service. For such a specification to be made, another rule about the application of rules would have to be instituted, and so on to an infinite regress, just as in the normative legal system of judicial precedent. Creative innovation, however, requires a mode of action that escapes this formal space of regulation.

The parallel here to the theory of the political state of exception (explored by thinkers such as Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben) is intentional. Just as Schmitt bases his political theory on the notion of the sovereign decision, which cannot be reduced to the infinite regress of legal precedent, so Virno contends that the innovative action must break with the regularity of habit and the regulation of convention. In the exception, the rule becomes indistinguishable from its application, or, to put it another way, each event or action rewrites the grammar of the system. The innovative action is thus not simply a transgression that breaks the rules – a kind of avant-garde contestation of existing institutional arrangements. Rather, it is an action that involves an abrogation of rules, a fundamental recasting of grammatical propositions, and a consequent redefining of future generative possibilities. For all this, it is not a sovereign action (a kind creatio ex nihilo that finds its apotheosis in the romantic ideal of the artist as god). Innovative action is necessarily intersubjective action, forged in the complex and unstable relations between brains and bodies. Its model is not the sovereign who decides on the exception but the language or form-of-life that changes through what might be called a non-sovereign decision, at once distributed and diffuse, or, if you like, an exception-from-below. This is why phrases such as “innovation culture” or indeed “creative industries” ring of an oxymoronic disingenuousness that wants to suggest that innovation can coexist with or become subordinated to the status quo. In this context, innovation becomes nothing other than a code word for more of the same – the reduction of creativity to the formal indifference of the market.

At the same time, Virno recognises that this reduction is precisely what contemporary capitalist production mandates. If, for Butler, human relation is possessed by a precariousness that furnishes a complex sense of political community, Virno argues that this same instability comes to invest the labour relation that, under post-Fordist capitalism, demands creative linguistic innovation. At stake for him is an affirmation of Marx’s notion of general intellect. Common to the disparate situations and conditions of individuals and their social horizons is a shared capacity to draw on the resources at hand. And this is why Virno and other postoperaista thinkers have advocated exodus as opposed to revolution as a political tactic. Such an advocacy of escape or “engaged withdrawal” does not imply a hermetic retreat from modernity. Rather, it involves both the recognition that capitalism removes the means for living other than by recourse to wage labour and the imperative to search for strategies and opportunities that allow collective intellect to subtract its creativity from the integuments of productive labour. What interests us is the form that such an exodus might assume within contemporary socio-technical formations characterised by a proliferation of networks alongside a host of institutions that are becoming increasingly burdened and recondite.

Whatever the current possibilities for desertion or exodus, it is hard to escape the observation that the corporate-state nexus increasingly asserts a sovereign command over the very matter of our bodies. With the informatisation of social and economic relations, intellectual property is the regime of scarcity through which control is exerted over the substance of life. Think of the rush to patent recombinant DNA sequences or the pressure placed upon agricultural industries and government representatives to adopt genetically modified organisms. Despite the dot.com crash of 2000, stocks in biotech industries are again yielding substantial profits – a phenomenon fueled in part by aging populations anxious to invest in narratives of security and technologies of arrested decay. This revival of biotech stocks can also be seen as a response to the affective economy associated with the shift of venture capital into the business of bio-terrorism and a move from what Melinda Cooper (2004) calls the irrational exuberance of nineties speculative capital into an era of indefinite insecurity and permanent catastrophe within a post-911 environment.

Yet where resides the space of commons exterior to both the state and the interests of the market? Indeed, is it even possible to invoke this sense of exteriority within an ontological and social-technical field of immanence and political economy in which capital interpenetrates the matter of life? It is no longer feasible to draw a homology between the commons and the notion of the public – a social body too easily assumed as co-extensive with the citizen-subject. Both the citizen-subject and the public are categories that refer particularly to European and North American political legacies that have long since declined as constituent powers of democratic polities (see Montag, 2000 and Nowotny, 2005).

If “the public” has become a non sequitur vis-à-vis the informational state, there is nonetheless a persistence of social desires to create ‘modulations of feeling’ whose logic of expression is antithetical to the strictures of control set forth by the informational state. [5] The widespread practice of file-sharing within peer-to-peer networks is routinely cited by many as an exemplary instance of resistance to the closure of the commons by IPRs. The increasing adoption of open source software and Creative Commons by governments and businesses across the economic spectrum is another example of a kind of reverse engineering of the super-structure by the educative capacity of civil society and informational social movements. Certainly, we would not want to underestimate the positive potential of such transformations and redefinitions of information societies. Yet just as it is clear that such activities endow networks with an organisational force, so too is it uncertain whether substantive change will eventuate in the material situation of precarious labour and life.

One could also speak of a continuum of affect, of communication and sociality, that functions as the pre-individual reality or common from which the refrain of precarity is individuated as a series of iterations on labour and life. To be sure, there is a common material basis at work here, one whose constituent forces emerge from a growing indistinction between intellect, labour and political action. This intermingling, however, is accompanied by a mutable process of adaptation in which a symbiotic relation between labour and capital ‘has given life to a sort of paradoxical “communism of capital”’ (Virno, 2004a: 111). Such a transformation of capital is manifest in the attacks made in the 1960s and 70s “failed revolutions” against the determining power of the Fordist welfare state and corrosive effects of wage labour upon life in general. Again, it is the doubleness of precarity that is the substrate of post-Fordist capital – a desire for greater flexibility and perceived freedom to choose one’s style of work (the expressive capacity of labour-power) coupled with an increased uncertainty, not to mention frequent struggle, that is normative to the experience of life (ontological insecurity).

Communicative Networks and Creative Expression

It is one thing to think innovation as a common resource outside the phantasm of total market control; it is another to consider the operation of such a resource. Here we find it necessary to engage the materialities of communication in order to illuminate further the exceptional quality of innovation. In so doing we introduce the political concept of the “constitutive outside” and proceed to an analysis of the creative industries. Our interest is to discern the ways in which the ontology of precariousness is immanent to networked systems of communication. How, we wonder, do the internal dynamics of social-technical communication constitute an ontology that oscillates between uncertainty, fluctuation, and fleeting association on the one hand, and moments of intensity, hope, and exhilaration on the other? In what ways are global information systems embedded in singular patterns of life? Is it possible for the pre-individual, linguistic-cognitive common – or general intellect – to operate as a transcendent biopolitical force by which living labour asserts a horizon of pure virtuality (unforeseen capacity to create and invent)? How might an ontology of networks be formulated, and does creative potential subsist in networks of social-technical relations?

The technics of communication are always underpinned by a “constitutive outside” (Rossiter, 2004). The outside holds an immanent relation with the inside. While the outside occupies a minor status within systems of communication, it nonetheless operates as a field of material, symbolic and strategic forces that condition the possibility of emergence of the inside (Mouffe, 2000: 12; Deleuze, 1988: 43). At the level of discourse, the constitutive outside functions to establish the limits of expression. Most creative industries policy and academic research, for instance, is still to address the casualised insecure working conditions of those who generate the intellectual property that is exploited within an informational, knowledge economy. [6] In this case, the needs, interests, demands and effects of precarious labour are excluded from the discourse of creative industries, yet, paradoxically, they are a primary element in the network of conditions that make possible the economic development derived from cultural production and service labour.

At the level of materiality, the constitutive outside precedes the exteriority of technical, economic, geographic, institutional, social and cultural configurations that shape the hegemon of communication systems. The constitutive force of the outside enables the exteriority of relations that comprise the complex form of informational, economic and social systems. Complexity, however, is not something that is easily accommodated in the genre of policy and the activities of what remain vertically integrated institutional settings. Much creative industries discourse in recent years places an emphasis on the potential for creative clusters, hubs and precincts as the social-urban arrangement or model that is supposedly the conduit best suited to the establishment of cultural economies. Along with “mapping documents” that set out to demonstrate “value-chains” of innovation based on the concentration of a range of cultural activities and stakeholders, this focus points to the inherent fragility of cultural economies.

In short, there is little empirical correspondence between the topography of “mapping documents” and “value-chains” and the actual social networks and cultural flows that comprise the business activities and movement of finance capital, information and labour-power within creative economies. Such attempts to register the mutual production of economic and creative value are inherently reductive systems. Capital always exceeds regimes of control, inevitably destabilising the delicate balance between determinacy and indeterminacy, regulation and inherent precariousness. And for this reason we maintain that capital is a force whose dynamic is shaped considerably by cultural and social inputs whose register, while largely undetected, comprises a common from which new social forces and modes of creative organisation may proliferate.

Political economy remains a useful idiom of analysis in the identification of the uneven distribution of resources that enable the vertical organisation of capital. Such critical approaches can be usefully expanded by incorporating work like that of Niklas Luhmann, which understands communication systems to necessarily involve a moment of organisational closure. For any communicative system to cohere, there must be an instantiation of closure, however temporary and contingent that may be. Such closure is nonetheless subject to the interpenetrative force of the outside. This is necessary if a system is to remain dynamic and hold a capacity for change. Feedback is internal to the organisational closure of communication systems (Bateson, 1972; Rossiter, 2003). These features of communication systems correspond with the operation of networks. An ontology of networks is thus precipitated by the combinatory dynamic of feedback, the outside and temporary closure. Given its transformative capacity, the outside can be seen as resource for strategic renewal and intervention. Thus the outside can be understood to correspond with a commons of otherwise distinct forms of labour and life.

The implication for creative expression as it manifests in the variegated patterns of labour within informational economies can be summarised as follows: the regulation of labour-power is conditioned by the dual regime of scarcity and border control. Scarcity consists of that which is perceived and constructed as finite and inscribed with economic value (e.g., the logic of IPRs). Boundaries confer the expressive form of creative labour and its concomitant networks with either discursive legitimacy and economic value or disavowal and the suspension of movement. The governance of networks, however, is not so straightforward or easily defined. If the ontic of networks is underscored by interpenetration and disequilibrium – as evidenced, for example, in the fragile life of mailing lists, prone as they are to rapid destruction, irrelevance and closure if actors such as “trolls” are unchecked (Lovink, 2003) – then it becomes much harder to generalise about the expressive capacity of social-technical life as it subsists in a state of permanent construction.

For all the talk in creative industries policy and analysis of unleashing the creative potential of cultural workers, what comes to pass is the reproduction of the same. Such an economy is, after all, exercised through the model of clusters. Who ever said Feudalism was eclipsed by the modern state system? Despite the pervasiveness of creative and cultural networks within government policies and academic literature, one is hard pressed to find evidence of networks in any operative sense. Projects that assemble a range of actors or stakeholders within a cultural precinct or business park are simply not the same as networks. For our purposes, networks consist of social-technical relations that are immanent to the media of communication. The collaborations that ensue within communicative networks are frequently promiscuous, unlike the “old boys” style of partnerships developed in what is much better defined as the cluster model of the creative industries.

This structural feature of the creative industries gives rise to the alienation of living labour in ways that are essentially the same as the mechanisms by which industrial capitalism exerted its demand for surplus value premised on class distinctions. It is no wonder that enthusiasts within the creative industries expend great rhetorical energy on proliferating the meme of horizontal distribution and connection. Such a technique of obfuscation serves as a generative device and electoral panacea for governments desperate to promote an antidote to the problem of how to best manage and control populations perched on the edge of chronic unemployment in an increasingly automated economy which casts the task of material labour to the countries with a lower cost of labour.

It is highly unlikely that the creative industries will begin to register in their mapping documents or annual reports the dark side of labour (domestic, care and migrant labour, for instance) and environmental degradation that attends any process of industrialisation. Similarly, young people working in the cultural and new media industries will most certainly be deprived of realising any ambitions of creative autonomy. Despite the various efforts to benchmark economic productivity, creative activities and partner linkages within the creative industries, there is great variation in terms of what creative industries mean for various stakeholders. The material complexity of cultural production is a rarely evident in creative industries policy, which is consistently unchanging. And while this is indicative of the limits of policy as a genre of expression and routine of practices, there is nevertheless an implicit belief that government and business interests can be realised in some sort of instrumental fashion.

Arguably, the tendency by both academics and policy-makers to adopt economistic approaches to understanding creative industries discloses an uncertainty about how economies are shaped by diverse forces that often have cultural and social underpinnings non-assimilable to the genre of the policy report or academic treatise. This can lead to a misrecognition of the material conditions affecting finance markets and an overestimation of the kind of economic benefits accruing for creative workers. The international push to develop so-called “creative cities”, for example, will more readily support a tourist and service economy that enhances speculative capital associated with urban real-estate developments than it will instantiate the creative autonomy of workers in the media, design and cultural industries. In any case, all markets are subject to volatile and largely unpredictable fluctuations, a point not lost on Justin O’Connor in his recent essay on “innovative clusters” and “tacit knowledge” in “creative cities” (2004: 133). Creative innovation within a regime of intellectual property rights is a contradiction of terms. And while an increasing number of creative industries style projects adopt a Creative Commons licence, a normative juridical framework nonetheless underpins the trajectory of creativity. Parallel to these utopic ghettoes for those in possession of disposable incomes and investment portfolios will be an ongoing preoccupation within government for expanding security legislation and border control.

In focussing here on labour-power and the ways in which exclusion makes possible the internal coherence of creative industries, our intention is not to somehow make secondary the situation of precarious life. The various forms of exclusion detailed hold implications for the capacity of living labour to maintain a sense of renewal within a state of ontological insecurity. Indeed, as maintained earlier, labour and life occupy a common space of indistinction. Yet stripped of all guarantees, life and labour have one option left: political action. And the potentiality for political action as a transformative force is what cultivates the generation of fear by the dominant political powers. Potentiality itself is an uncertain force – a precarious resource common to labour and life – and as such, is the basis for innovation from which new forms of organisation and life may become instituted.

Freedom without Security

It is worth recalling that the precondition of surplus-value is cooperation. In this sense, the potential for alternative modalities of organising creative labour is inseparable from the uncertain rhythms, fluctuations and manifestations of global capital. Indeed, it is precisely this relation between labour-power and capital that defines the immanence of socio-technical networks. Given these mutual dependencies, it is not beyond reason to imagine that variations of living labour might, as Jayadev noted at the start of this essay, ‘reclaim the time of life’. Such interventions are not as radical as they might sound. But they nonetheless involve transforming precarity as a normative condition precipitated by the demands of capital.

In the case of creative labour, a reclaiming of the time of life entails a shifting of values and rhetoric away from an emphasis on the exploitation of intellectual property (and thus labour-power) and reinstating or inventing technics of value that address the uncertainties of economic and ontological life. Engaging rather than sublimating the antagonisms inherent to such experiences is, in part, a matter of rethinking networked modes of relation. The many accounts, events and analyses on precarity documented earlier in this essay begin to tell the story of social-political networks seeking to institute creative projects responsive to situations of living labour. The communication of such efforts begins to comprise a history of networks as they subsist within an informational present. Moreover, we find here a common resource from which lessons, models, and ideas may be exchanged and repurposed as transformative techniques.

Such processes, however, are by no means straightforward. By posing the question of the unstable ontology of networks alongside that of migration and border control, we are forced to think together the precarity that invests the labour relation and the regime of border reinforcement, which is one of the primary registers of the current ubiquity of war. Earlier we cited the creators of a free newspaper and collaborative filtering project who described as ‘social dynamite’ the attempt to combine freedom of communication with freedom of movement. But the effects of this social dynamite are disparate and, in their very multiplicity, inflate the tendency to treat these phenomena as separate moments. Such a disconnection again poses the question of commonality and the resources it might supply for the imagination of alternative forms of life.

The ongoing tussle between those who cast the creative worker as the precarious labourer par excellence and those who assign this role to the undocumented migrant is one symptom of this divide. Such a debate is certainly worth having, but it also misses the point: that being, to alter the circumstances in which capital meets life. All too often the precarity struggle revolves about the proposition life is work. But the challenge is not to reaffirm the productivism implicit in this realisation but rather to take it as the basis for another life – a life in which contingency and instability are no longer experienced as threats. A life in which, as Goethe wrote in Faust II, many millions can ‘dwell without security but active and free’.

Authors’ Biographies

Brett Neilson is senior lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, where he is also a member of the Centre for Cultural Research. He is author of Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle … and Other Tales of Counterglobalization (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

Ned Rossiter is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster and an adjuct research fellow at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney.

Notes

[1] Over the past year there has been a proliferation of magazines, journals and mailing lists exploring the theme of precarity and the associated problematic of labour organisation. These include Greenpepper, Mute, Multitudes, republicart, ephemera, European Journal of Higher Arts Education, Derive Approdi, and aut-op-sy.

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[2] These issues were among many debated at the recent incommunicado.05: information technology for everybody else conference held in Amsterdam, 16-17 June 2005, http://incommunicado.info/conference. See also Incommunicado mailing list archive.

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[3] The articles on “creative networks” published in an issue of Media International Australia edited by O’Regan, Gibson and Jeffcut (2004) adroitly diagnose the shortcomings of the “creative cluster” model. The analyses of inter-linkages between local practices of production and consumption and global policy frameworks goes some way toward identifying the complexity of network systems. And their advocacy for ‘strategic research and policy…[that] build[s] situated knowledges’ is something we also support. Even so, their discussion of “creative networks” nevertheless falls short of attending to the problem of precarity that defines the situation for many within the creative industries. The contribution by Chris Gibson and Daniel Robinson (2004) on creative networks and working conditions in regional Australia is an exception. But their analysis of employment statistics and informal social networks is divorced from a consideration of the subjective dimension of socio-technical systems and the substantive role of subjectivity in the construction of networks.

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[4] While more expansive on the global dimensions of this problematic, David Harvey (2003) also remains primarily within a U.S. political imaginary. See also Arrighi (2005a, 2005b).

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[5] Our use of ‘modulation of feeling’ is opposite to that of Massumi (2005: 32), who attributes such an operation of biopower to the Bush administration’s need to manage populations in a post-9/11 environment in which ‘timing was everything’.

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[6] While a recent UNCTAD (2004: 3) policy report notes that ‘too often [creative industries are] associated with a precarious form of job security’, such observations remain the exception within much policy-making and academic research on the creative industries. A recent issue of The International Journal of Cultural Policy, edited by David Hesmondhalgh and Andy C. Pratt (2005), tables some of the most sophisticated research on cultural and creative industries to date. See also O’Regan, Gibson and Jeffcutt (2004), Gill (2002), and Ross (2003).

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Sites

aut-op-sy mailing list, https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aut-op-sy/

Chainworkers, http://www.chainworkers.org/dev

Derive Approdi, http://www.deriveapprodi.org/

DE-BUG: The Online Magazine of the South Bay, http://www.siliconvalleydebug.org/

Dutch labour market reforms, http://www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int/1999/01/feature/nl9901117f.html

ephemera: theory & politics in organization, http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/4-3index.htm

EuroMayDay 2004 (Milan and Barcelona), http://www.euromayday.org/

EuroMayDay2005 (in seventeen European cities), http://www.euromayday.org/index.php

European Journal of Higher Arts Education, http://www.ejhae.elia-artschools.org/Issue2/en.htm

Flexicurity, http://www.chainworkers.org/dev/node/view/102

Greenpepper Magazine, http://www.greenpeppermagazine.org/process/tiki-index.php?page=Precarity+%3A+Contents+Page

Incommunicado, http://incommunicado.info/

Intermittents du Spectacle, http://www.intermittents-danger.fr.fm/

International Meeting of the Precariat (Berlin, January 2005), http://www.globalproject.info/art-3264.html

Molleindustria, http://www.molleindustria.it/

multitudes, http://multitudes.samizdat.net/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=458

Mute Magazine, http://www.metamute.com/look/issue.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=29

Organizing the Unorganizables, (dir. Florian Schneider, 2004), http://kein.tv/

Precarias alla Deriva, http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm

republicart, http://www.republicart.net/disc/precariat/index.htm

Precair Forum, (Amsterdam, February 2005), http://precairforum.nl/ENG/index.html

Precarity Ping Pong, (London, October 2004), http://greenpeppermagazine.org/pingPong.html

San Precario, http://www.sanprecario.info/

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Davis, Mike. ‘War-Mart: “Revolution” in Warfare Slouches toward Baghdad, It’s all in the Network’, SF Chronicle, 9 March (2003), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/03/09/IN8529.DTL.

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Foti, Alex. ‘Precarity and N/european Identity. Interview with Merjin Oudenampsen and Gavin Sullivan’, Greenpepper (2004), http://www.black-international-cinema.com/BIC05/XX.BIC2005/HTML/articles/article_08.htm.

Fumagalli, Andrea. ‘Precarietà: Questione di flexicurity’, Il Manifesto, 12 May (2005), http://precaristat.clarence.com/permalink/196835.html.

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Gibson, Chris and Robinson, Daniel. ‘Creative Networks in Regional Australia’, Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 112 (2004): 83-100.

Gill, Rosalind. ‘Cool, Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-based New Media Work’, Information, Communication & Society 5.1 (2002): 70-89.

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______. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).

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Holmes, Brian. ‘The Spaces of a Cultural Question. An Email Interview with Brian Holmes by Marion von Osten’, republicart (April, 2004), http://www.republicart.net/disc/precariat/holmes-osten01_en.htm.

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Huws, Ursula. The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

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______. ‘Capitalismo, migrazioni e lotte sociali. Appunti per una teoria dell’ autonomia delle migrazioni’, in Sandro Mezzadra (ed.) I confini della liberta: Per un’ analisi politica delle migrazioni contemporanee (Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2004).

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______. ‘The Market and the Police: Finance Capital in Permanent Global War’, in Jon Solomon and Naoki Sakai (eds) Traces 4, Special issue on ‘Addressing the Multitude of Foreigners’ (forthcoming).

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______. ‘Creative Industries, Comparative Media Theory, and the Limits of Critique from Within’, Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (Spring, 2004): 21-48.

______. ‘The World Summit on the Information Society and Organised Networks as New Civil Society Movements’, in Michael Fine, Nicholas Smith and Amanda Wise (eds) Mobile Boundaries/Rigid Worlds: Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference of the CRSI, Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University (May, 2005), http://www.crsi.mq.edu.au/mobileboundaries.htm.

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Broadly speaking, this issue of Fibreculture Journal is interested in the problem of political organisation as it relates to the overlapping spheres of labour and life within post-Fordist, networked settings. It’s becoming increasingly clear that multiple forms of exclusion and exploitation within the media and cultural industries run along the lines of gender, ethnicity, age, and geography. New forms of class division are emerging whose locus of tension can be attributed to the ownership and control of information.

The mobile capacity of information corresponds, in many instances, with the flexible nature of work across many sectors of the media and cultural industries. And it is precisely the informatisation of social relations that makes political organisation such a difficult – even undesireable – undertaking for many. Without recourse to traditional institutions such as the union, new technics of organisation are required if the common conditions of exploitation are to be addressed and transformed.

Precarious labour practices generate new forms of subjectivity and connection, organised about networks of communication, cognition, and affect. These new forms of cooperation and collaboration amongst creative labourers contribute to the formation of a new socio-technical and politico-ethical multitude. The contemporary multitude is radically dissimilar from the unity of “the people” and the coincidence of the citizen and the state. What kinds of creative organisation are specific to precarious labour in the era of informatisation? How do they connect (or disconnect) to existing forms of institutional life? And how can escape from the subjectification of precarious labour be enacted without nostalgia for the social state or utopian faith in the spontaneity of auto-organisation? These are some of the key questions the articles gathered here set out to addresss.

This issue is launched just months, perhaps, after memes such as the “multitude” and “precarity” have reached their high point. We find that it is all the more instructive to be publishing this collection of articles at such a time, since the urgency to organise is greatest when the novelty of slogans begins to flat-line, when routine and fatigue perhaps kick in again. Such occasions mark a transition period of regeneration and imagination, of working out what works and what doesn’t in order to gather resources and begin the creative composition of living labour.

We thank the contributors for their patience in seeing this issue come to a conclusion of sorts. Good food takes care to prepare. And we thank the referees for their prompt and constructive feedback on these pieces. Thanks also to Andrew Murphie for his guidance and advice. And a special thanks to Lisa Gye for her work on getting it all online.