Autonomous
Knowledge and Power
in a Society Without Affects
autonomous knowledge, potentials
Walking through cities connected to world distribution networks,
we shift from one imaginary to the next, from Monoprix to
UGC, from Friskies to Guggenheim or Pinault
to MacDonald's. Each time we activate fields of relational,
communicational or sensational possibilities, equivalent and interchangeable.
The commodity-possibilities© offered by world supermarket culture
are born of desires and needs conjured up by advertising and the
media. They can only be actualized with the money we have at our
disposal, through our work and our credit at the bank. The richest
one has a good chance of being right, because he's got the cash
for it. He can create his own commodity-possibilities©, and
impose them on everyone else. An equation associating truth, money,
technology and power takes form: it allows you to work on your own
indoctrination, your own subjection. Foucault speaks of "regimes
of truth" by which he means the self-tightening circle in which
the subjection of individuals and the production of subjectifying
truths reinforce one another.
Different kinds of autonomy stand out from this context. They reveal
themselves in the rising power of diffuse intellectuality, diffuse
creativity and diffuse resistance, exercised by individuals and
collectives creating forms of life (expressive, dietary, passional,
urban), bringing forms of social or civil disobedience into play,
developing their skills and secreting meaning autonomously, critically.
These manifestations of autonomous knowledge/power provoke a crisis
in the monopoly of access to possibilities held by the productive
organizations of consumer society. Unlike a subjectifying truth-regime,
an autonomous form of knowledge acts by resonance, intensifying
the potentials of being and deconstructing the complex machines,
the unipolar totalities that constitute our environment: technological
and economic power; bureaucratic, cultural and sexual power. The
being who brings autonomous knowledge and power into play is a potential
being. S/he is not just there, frozen in a role or trained to seek
or desire a particular, normalized possibility, or to choose among
such possibilities. Her possibilities are not commodity-possibilities,
controlled and rationalized by the capitalist system, but real chances,
possible destinies brought into play by the activity of being.
deconstructing the complex machines, to reconstruct them unconventionally
Autonomous knowledge decolonizes possibilities, opens up the
existence and potential of being through horizontal exchanges of
knowledge and experience: Italian hacklabs, in the domain of informatics;
networks for the reciprocal exchange of knowledge; amateur practices
in biotechnology (critical art ensemble, a u.s.-based group of artists
and researchers); the struggle for access to extra-atmospheric space
(association of autonomous astronauts); video close to home (for
example, in brussels by the art group PTTL); struggles for the shared
organization and management of the environment (water, in the case
of the SEMAPA, a group of local inhabitants in cochabamba, bolivia);
fights for the use of networks, in the case of seattle wireless
(u.s.a.); struggles over land, in the case of the sem terra or landless
peasants' movement in brazil; struggles over urban space, in the
case of the squatters' movement in france; over the circulation
of people, in the case of kein mensch ist illegal (a social movement
originating in germany)... etc.
Autonomous knowledge can be constituted through the analysis of
the way that complex machines function. Deconstructing a program
or an operating system in order to reconstruct them unconventionally
is exactly what the hackers or the free software movements do. The
Italian hacklabs create an economy by placing knowledge of electronics
and informatics at the disposal of any interested person. They do
not furnish services. They are organizations that bring together
skills in a more-or-less informal way. They offer different kinds
of expertise, transmitting their knowledge and know-how for free.
The deconstruction of complex machines and their "decolonized"
reconstruction can be carried out on all kinds of objects, not just
computational ones. In the same way as you deconstruct a program,
you can also deconstruct the internal functioning of a government
or an administration, a firm or an industrial or financial group.
On the basis of such a deconstruction, involving a precise identification
of the operating principles of a given administration, or the links
or networks between administrations, lobbies, businesses etc., you
can define modes of action or intervention on these businesses,
lobbies or administrations. But to deconstruct a machine, you must
first have access to it and understand its functioning, or in other
words, you must access the information that constitutes it. However,
scientific and technical information, but also organizational information,
are of very limited access today. The drive to deconstruct the complex
machines is therefore doubled by a demand for free access to knowledge,
and its free circulation.
· Autonomous Knowledge and Power
· Strategy of Truth
· Wars of Information
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