Tiziana Terranova: Network Culture (2004)

A sharp, dense, poetic work that draws from autonomist concepts and critical theory, Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture smartly combines philosophy, media studies, and (a critique of) political economy. “Network culture” may seem like a homogenizing term that smoothes over the incredible diversity of contemporary cultural activities, media practices, and technological devices. Terranova therefore begins by explaining that network culture is a “heterogeneous assemblage,” “a meshwork of overlapping cultural formations” that “unfolds across a multiplicity of communication channels but within a single information milieu.” Today, communication systems are increasingly interconnected, so that “informational flows” tend to “spill over” into each other. “What we used to call ‘media messages’ no longer flow from a sender to a receiver but spread and interact, mix and mutate within a singular (and yet differentiated) informational plane.” This “unprecedented abundance of informational output” and “acceleration of information dynamics” releases “social potentials for transformation. In this sense, a network culture is inseparable both from a kind of network physics (that is physical processes of differentiation and convergence, emergence and capture, openness and closure, and coding and overcoding) and a network politics (implying the existence of an active engagement with the dynamics of information flows).” Terranova’s first chapter analyzes the idea of information and overlaps in many ways with the work of N. Katherine Hayles. After surveying some popular conceptions of this notoriously elusive subject, Terranova argues, “information is neither simply a physical domain nor a social construction, nor the content of a communication act, nor an immaterial entity set to take over the real, but a specific reorientation of forms of power and modes of resistance.” She extracts three different definitions of information from Claude Shannon’s information theory and examines their “other interesting considerations or corollaries on informational culture.” These three definitions are: “information is defined by the relation of signal to noise; information is a statistical measure of the uncertainty or entropy of a system; information implies a nonlinear and nondeterministic relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic levels of a physical system.” She starts with the definition of information as that which stands out from noise. Shannon’s research aimed to discover how a signal could be accurately reproduced across a channel. In his model, information was “the content of communication” that was to be transmitted with a “minimum loss of quality.” But information in this sense “is not defined by meaning,” but rather by “a pattern of redundancy and frequency that allows a communication machine to distinguish it from noise.” Information theory tries to show how to “increase the effectiveness of the channel” “by excluding all interference, that is by holding off noise,” noise that is increasingly ubiquitous in informational culture. This technical conception of communication emphasizes “the imperatives of the channel and the code rather than . . . a concern with exchange of ideas, ethical truth or rhetorical confrontation. . . . It is not about signs, but about signals.” The treatment of communication as an “operational problem” calls forth a specific kind of political response. Opposing broadcasters and advertisers that exploit this “minimal condition” of communication are culture jammers from graffiti artists to the magazine Adbusters who work toward “disrupting the smooth efficiency of the communication machine” by distorting and hijacking channels. Terranova adds that the corporate adoption of this technical conception of communication might be extremely misguided “because it does not take sufficiently into account the powers of feedback or retro-action – increasingly cynical or even angry audiences/receivers or just a kind of social entropy that nonlinearizes the transmission of messages as such.” She briefly dives into the work of Gilbert Simondon to speculate that it might be better to consider “the conditions of turbulence and metastability that define information as a kind of active line marking a quantic process of individuation.” Terranova then turns to the second definition of information as “the communication and exclusion of probable alternatives.” This definition asserts that there is a closed system of possibilities, a field of probabilities, from which one alternative is selected and realized. Codification of a channel involves a “kind of containment of the openness of the situation to a set of mutually excluding alternatives.” There are clear ideological implications to this definition, since the determination of the set of probabilities, which allows the measurement and reduction of uncertainty, requires the containment and reduction of a more chaotic reality. One needs only to think of opinion polls or the false “choices” of democratic politics to see the power this definition of information offers. Terranova emphasizes that the containment of alternatives is never simply a technical problem of the limitations of the channel: there is always a complex interplay of codes and channels to resist. “A cultural politics of information is crucially concerned with questioning the relationship between the probable, the possible and the real. It involves the opening up of the virtuality of the world by positing not simply different, but radically other codes and channels for expressing and giving expression to an undetermined potential for change.” But although there is a politically-motivated tendency to reduce an informational milieu to the “couple ‘actual/probable,’” the extremely unlikely, the virtual, is never completely foreclosed. “What lies beyond the possible and the real is thus the openness of the virtual, of the invention and the fluctuation. . . . the cultural politics of information involves a stab at the fabric of possibility, an undoing of the coincidence of the real with the given.” The third definition of information “implies a nonlinear relation between the micro and the macro.” “[As] chaos theory showed, there is no linear and direct relation between the micro . . . and the macro . . . It is as the level of the micro, however, that mutations and divergences are engendered and it is therefore in the micro that the potential for change and even radical transformation lie.” New digital technologies have allowed ever closer approximation of the processes of the micro. In contrast to the previous era’s fixation on macro forms of representation and identity, power today operates through increasingly minute levels of segmentation, “microdissection,” and “modulation.” For example, marketing today relies less on representations of stable social types than on the tracking and capture of volatile (sub)cultural movements. Terranova’s second chapter analyzes what she terms “network dynamics” and complements Alex Galloway’s work on distributed networks in Protocol. She treats the network as a spatial diagram, but hesitates to privilege the Internet as a model of this diagram. The “communication topology of Empire,” the interweaving of numerous information and communication systems, forms a kind of “hypernetwork”: “[T]he network is becoming less and less a description of a specific system, and more a catchword to describe the formation of a single and yet multidimensional information milieu.” However, although such a hypernetwork cannot be reduced to the Internet, the latter “expresses an interesting mutation of the network diagram in its relation to the cultural and political assemblages of this twenty-first century neo-imperial formation.” She emphasizes that the Internet is not a network but rather a “network of networks.” The Internet was designed with an open architecture that allows “divergence and differentiation” while producing a “common space.” Internet Protocol (IP) and Domain Name System (DNS) enable the creation of a “single map” of the web, an “abstract and homogenous space” that she compares to the modernist ideal of the grid: “[There is a] chilling picture of a single information space, divided and distributed on a single grid containing all the possible addresses of all possible machines.” There are clear parallels between this picture of the worldwide web as a homogeneous space and critical accounts of the homogenizing effects of globalization, which replaces local cultural difference with global commercial sameness. But if the Internet and/or globalization produce such flattened spaces, wouldn’t they result in “frozen” systems of difference incapable of dynamic change? To answer this question, Terranova draws from Henri Bergson the concept of duration, describing how change occurs not just through the movement of information but also through the transformation, the becoming, of the topology of the entire network milieu. She then discusses how TCP/IP and common design protocols enable an open architecture by layering content, programs, and technologies, allowing the modulation of “the relationship between differentiation and universality.” “The result is a smooth space that is infinitely crossable by flows of information detached from enclosed milieus and allowed to spread throughout an electronic maze of coaxial and fibre-optic cables and now increasingly also wireless frequencies.” She notes how the architecture of the Internet seems to be a “technical solution” to the postmodern problem of how to acknowledge and celebrate (weak) difference and make it productive. More specifically, the Internet appears as a solution to problems relating to the social factory and immaterial labor because it aids the creation of “cooperation” among different workers and milieus scattered beyond the confines of the factory floor. Terranova then turns to packet switching, the technique through which messages are broken down into small packets that are sent out to find their own way to the message destination. In the Internet, there is not a single channel between sender and receiver but rather “an overall information space, constituted by a tangle of possible directions and routes, where information propagates by autonomously finding the lines of least resistance.” Important for the success of this distributed system is what is known as “fringe intelligence,” the programmed “delegation of responsibility” to nodes across the network that provides a basic kind of “end-to-end intelligence.” “The combination of packet switching, end-to-end intelligence and routing makes computer networks a kind of distributed neural network able to remember and forget. This fringe intelligence produces a space that is not just a ‘space of passage’ for information, but an informational machine itself – an active and turbulent space. This quality of informational space makes the Internet a space suitable to the spread of contagion and transversal propagation of movement (from computer viruses to ideas and affects).” Network politics therefore must involve the “pragmatic production of viable topological formations able to persist within an open and fluid milieu.” Cultural phenomenon on the web have to negotiate the line between being too solid and frozen and too dispersed and self-dissolving. “Any local, that is bounded, cultural phenomenon within the network is always caught on one side by the danger of being overwhelmed by the open network ecology; and on the other side by that of solidifying to the point of becoming a self-contained and self-referential archipelago of the like-minded.” Terranova concludes her chapter on network dynamics by indicating that the Internet intersects with other information flows from other media, and therefore might be situated within a larger duration that would expand to include the “global communication system.” Terranova’s third chapter draws from autonomist theory on the social factory to examine the increase in “free labor” on the Internet, the “voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” labor that includes “the activity of building web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists and building virtual spaces.” The autonomists showed how capitalism increasingly depends on capturing value produced outside of direct productive processes. Terranova interprets the rise of free labor as supporting this argument about “another logic of value.” Free labor is the product of a “compromise between the historically rooted cultural and affective desire for creative production [see Boltanski & Chiapello] . . . and the current capitalist emphasis on knowledge as the main source of added value.” For example, when thousands volunteered to host chat rooms for America On Line for free, “they were acting out a desire for affective and cultural production which was none the less real just because it was socially shaped.” But they showed how, in the post-Fordist economy, “knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.” Building on the work of Maurizio Lazzarato, Terranova argues that “immaterial labor” is a more general, less class-specific, category than “knowledge work”: “immaterial labour is a virtuality (an undetermined capacity) which belongs to the postindustrial productive subjectivity as a whole.” “The Internet highlights the existence of networks of immaterial labour and speeds up their accretion into a collective entity,” but “Capital wants to retain control over the unfolding of these virtualities and the processes of valorization.” She points out that popular accounts of networked collective intelligence strongly resemble the autonomist’s analysis of general intellect, but the former fail to relate their concept to capital, which is “the unnatural environment within which the collective intelligence materializes.” One reason capital has increasingly turned to free labor is the perhaps unique nature of digital commodities. Terranova claims that electronic, networked, or digital commodities often require more labor than more traditional industrial commodities, despite their apparent lack of materiality. She claims that “continuous, creative, innovative labour” is required to maintain the market value of commodities in the digital economy. For example, “a successful web site” requires constant updates and improvements in order to continue to attract users. “As a consequence, the sustainability of the Internet as a medium depends on massive amounts of labour . . . only some of which was hyper-compensated by the capricious logic of venture capitalism. Of the incredible amount of labour which sustains the Internet as a whole (from mailing list traffic to web sites to infrastructural questions), we can guess that a substantial amount of it is still ‘free labour.’” Terranova’s next chapter addresses recent work in biological computing, which includes artificial life, neural networks, and cellular automata. She claims the accomplishments of biological computing offer a “glimpse of the emergence of a kind of abstract machine of soft control – a diagram of power that takes as its operational field the productive capacities of the hyperconnected many.” For example, experiments with cellular automata attempt to create a set of initial conditions and filters that will allow useful emergent phenomena to appear and be captured. Control exists both at the beginning of the process in the selection of initial conditions and restrictions and at the end in the sorting and filtering of desired outcomes and variations. This soft control does not function by predetermining and/or completely controlling every step of the process but rather by latching on to the creative, productive power of emergent phenomena. Soft control builds on the “discovery of the immense productivity of a multitude, its absolute capacity to deterritorialize itself and mutate.” That is, “What we seem to have then is the definition of a new biopolitical plane that can be organized through the deployment of an immanent control, which operates directly within the productive power of the multitude and the clinamen.” Terranova concludes that this work in biological computing provides innovative ways to think about and create new forms of bottom-up organizing, but it also shows that self-organization is not a utopia of freedom but rather susceptible to insidious forms of control. Terranova’s final chapter discusses communication biopower. She claims, “these first years of the twenty-first century have consistently displaced the familiar opposition of the political spectrum . . . between left and right. What has displaced them, however, is neither the fetish of difference (as in post-1960s social movements) nor that of public opinion as a new superpower, but a more general compossibility of relations within a fluid and yet segmented bio-informational milieu.” A network politics needs to “synthesize not so much a common position (from which to win the masses over), but a common passion giving rise to a distributed movement able to displace the limits and terms within which the political constitution of the future is played out. . . . this political mode cannot but start with affects – that is with intensities, variations of bodily powers that are expressed as fear and empathy, revulsion and attraction, sadness and joy.”