Temporary Affective States (TAS): snow witches, roller bitches, and the production of radical imaginations

The Gaze of the Snow Witch

In director Tanaka Tokuzo's 1968 Japanese ghost film, Kaidan Yuki Jorou (Ghost Story of the Snow Witch) an impoverished apprentice sculptor becomes enchanted by a witch and marries her. Unbeknownst to him, she has taken on human form after falling in love with the apprentice after a fatal encounter with his master in the forest. Towards the end of this film which interbraids themes of love, trust, class and power, the young sculptor is frustrated by his inability to complete an important statue of the Goddess of Mercy and Compassion, Kannon. He has spent five years waiting for the wood from a sacred tree to cure, followed by a long and challenging time carving the form. Kannon's features gradually become increasingly lifelike, however, the details of her face elude him, particularly the necessary expression of her eyes. Thus her intrinsic essence remains unknown to her creator. Inspiration eludes him as the completion deadline draws closer. When inadvertently he breaks an oath he made to the Snow Witch and her true state is revealed, she chooses to return to her liminal world rather than killing her husband. As she looks upon their young son with extreme tenderness for the last time, the sculptor recognises the expression he must convey in Kannon's face, that of compassion, and he completes the artwork. This single insight made the difference between him producing a well-crafted yet soulless work, and one which would possess an authenticity communicating the metaphysical dimension of compassion to the villagers who would revere her.

I watched this film a few nights ago, having stumbled across a description of it on the internet, and subsequently downloading it from Demonoid. A friend had invited me for a Japanese meal at her home, and we watched it together after dinner. Leaving a digital copy of the film with my my friend (who would start a search for a better technical copy), I returned home with a parcel of food. We humans nourish ourselves by sharing not only food, also cultural resources. Just as traditional recipes are passed down through generations, and cross over into new locations and contexts through migration and shifting political boundaries, so too are cultural works shared within their originating contexts and far beyond in time and space. It is in our nature to share. And though this sharing to produce new imaginaries together. Not only of ghost worlds, but also of other liminal worlds, hovering on the threshhold of a future we are compelled to create together.

Whilst I lack a snow witch to generate an overarching insight, Kaidan Yuki Jorou resonates for me as I reach the final stages of my own sculpture of ideas crafted in words which have also been curing for years. Throughout the processes of gathering raw materials and chipping away at them a becoming-form has been emerging, a form containing traces of the raw materials but changed as they combine with one another. I must now stand back from the work, to see what it reveals about a larger dimension of human experience and potential

Material Mediated Practices, Socialised Technologies, and Cultural Activism

This has been a story about people and production, people emplaced in starkly different localities and cultural contexts, who nevertheless are producing essentially the same things. Each project is continually evolving a distinctive and rich media ecology that is simultaneously culturally specific and universally resonant at this juncture in information capitalism. The 'information revolution' under the star of neoliberalism has created both relatively affordable professional production tools along with both a technologically-competent but un(der)employed creative class, and also vast numbers of people who are digitally disengaged due primarily to lack of opportunity and/or perceived relevance. The three case study projects draw in participants along the spectrum of digital literacy, and through their cooperative, unpaid biopolitical labour an exceptional flowering of socially-engaged production. These 'social laboratories' are producing creative experiments and tangible artefacts, digital contexts and social processes for collective learning, innovative forms of social space, socialised technologies, embodied networks, and, importantly, new social imaginaries. The social imaginations nurtured takes on different expressions, reflecting the socio-cultural specificity of each project, but all are directed towards supporting radical transformation on a planetary scale which necessarily must be initiated from below.

My doctoral thesis examines three very different cases that initially appear to not have much in common. Yet these grass root cultural projects exemplify different aspects of what Terranova (2004) conceptualises “network culture.” The Container Project,1 situated in the underdeveloped context of the global South, presents a critique of developmental and education practice. Furtherfield,2 situated in the post-industrial context of the global North, presents a critique of contemporary art practice. Hong Kong In-Media,3 situated in the newly-industrialised context of the Periphery, presents a critique of journalistic practice. All three cases harness Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) to transform social relations. Their distinctive forms of collaborative cultural production range from artist-driven digital literacy and creativity programs elaborated within innovative street-oriented architectures, network art practices manifesting over the internet and in localised space, and citizen journalism practices interweaving electronic words with embodied actions. These three projects typify the diversity of countless other emancipatory projects that use informational capitalism's networks and products to contest the logic of capitalism, and neoliberal principles and practices.

My empirical evidence supports some of the generalisations made by theorists about the universal potential of the digital to transform social relations, and throws others into question. Paradoxes become evident, such as whether or not the The Container's production of a new group of digitally-literate creators in Jamaica could challenge existing power relations, or simply provide capital with a new source of biopolitical labour to exploit. While it is beyond the scope of this thesis to address such questions in detail, I flag them as subjects meriting further discussion.

What becomes clear is the need for more such research across the spectrum of digitally-enabled cultural and social activism projects. With more detailed analyses of how different grass roots groups are developing and socialising technologies for projects that in one way or another challenge the status quo, we can build up a archive of particular instances. A critical analysis of such an archive could support theoretical propositions and existing empirical research by sociologists such as Manuel Castells and “militant researchers” like Stevphen Shukaitis that point to the existence of an emergent, transglobal, networked phenomenon. This phenomenon has been variously depicted as a “movement of movements,” “counter-globalisation,” “the multitude,” the “anomalous wave,” amongst other terms. As we develop our understanding (through both formal research, informal observations, and lived experiences) of how it is being made manifest, we can better apprehend the new constitutive subjectivities that are arising from it. From this we can detect the shadowy form of a transformational world order that these kinds of projects and their agents simultaneously are prefiguring and creating. If we too are committed to fundamental social change then it serves our interests to understand both the maps and the territories of the contested domains of human existence and experience.

One of the qualities that makes the case study projects exceptional is that they have not only gone beyond adopted ICTs to further their aims, they have socialised the technologies, as my research demonstrates. The praxis of socialising the materiality of ICTs now seems so normal to me, after five years immersion in my research, that it now comes as jolt to realise that this is a state of exception within the larger field of how technology is commonly situated within society. This realisation became apparent in May 2010 when I watched an online three-dimensional animation4 of an architectural 'fly-through' of the proposed 15 million dollar extension to Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). My gaze was propelled through the virtual white corridors and spacious exhibition galleries into the “Centre for Creative Learning,” a site of “national significance” comprising workshop spaces for school students and “young people with special needs,” along with other special purpose rooms. The “digital classroom” was a large room furnished with rows of trestle tables holding large computer monitors, drearily reminiscent of a Victorian-era school room. With such lack of architectural imagination, how could this sterile environment when built generate anything more than disaggregated strangers staring at screens and each others' backs. The MCA's supposedly leading edge design for the harbour-front cultural precinct typifies the complete lack of interest demonstrated by well-funded culture industries in socialising technology, and is unsurprising if we agree accept theorist Gerard Raunig's proposition that the creative industries operate as “propaganda tools for neoliberal policies.”5

In contrast to the above scenario, the three cases have imaginatively integrated the technological into the social domain, thereby capturing the potential of the digital to transform social relations. By now taking a holistic view, shuttling between these projects' individualised aims and expressive outcomes, and the info-capitalism's generalised flows and trends, we can conceptualise the cases as exemplars within an emergent transglobal field. Concepts borrowed from post-autonomism and related discourses illuminate interconnections to a bigger picture. A key question is how do the cases embody and reflect the qualities of contemporary informational capitalism, and simultaneously typify the structures and processes of a loosely-defined and uncoordinated planetary project of counter capitalism? A related question is how integral are ICTs themselves to the production of new forms of social and political agency? Prior to tackling these questions, we must identify what these exemplary projects' practices have in common by referring back to the original four lines of analysis: drivers, program, specificity, and liberation.

Firstly, all three projects posit creative interactivity against social hierarchy, in opposition to prevailing informational orders within the fields of developmentalism and education, art and journalism. This is an egalitarian expression of creativity, everyone is, or has the potential to be, an expert, an artist, or a journalist. The projects are driven by their protagonists' desire to engage in discursive, symbolic and direct actions aimed at countering the logic of capitalism, neoliberalism and corporate globalisation. It is a loosely-defined political stance differentially articulated by participants who are drawn together not by adherence to a singular ideology but by a common belief that 'another world is possible'. The corollary to this affirmation is that other possible worlds must be constructed from the ground up by its future inhabitants. With no overarching blueprint, the world can only be made manifest by collective experimentation that is globally aware, communicative and networked. The three cases are part of an emergent phenomenon of similarly-driven grass roots cultural and political activity that produces subjectivity, a subjectivity Hardt and Negri describe as “the multitude.” The multitude makes itself through “an uninterrupted process of collective self-transformation,” a “metamorphosis grounded in the common” (2009: 173).

This brings us to our second line of analysis, platforms and process. All three projects have built techno-social platforms for the production of the common. These platforms originate in and reach local spatialised environments, whilst simultaneously contributing to and taking from a dispersed digital commons. The resultant creative processes generate distinctive, interconnected forms of contemporary media, including tactical media, participatory media, and relational media. The output produced through socially inclusive forms of creative interaction become either owned in common, 'commonised', or returned to a knowledge commons. These differential approaches to ensuring that what is produced in common stays in common establishes an oppositional precedent to the corporate will to enclose and privatise. Free platforms for free expression that will not be sold off indicates a different set of principles in play in contrast to the tendency of mass social networking platforms, search engines, and the latest technological tools to monetise and commodify 'user data,' 'user-generated content,' and technological innovation via a interlocked systems of digital and knowledge enclosures.6 Thus core social and political principles are implicitly embedded within the platforms, just as the General Public License (GPL) attached to innumerable free software applications is a principle explicitly embedded through a legal mechanism into computer programs.

Thirdly, each project draws on local knowledges, social and (sub)cultural traditions, and feeds off local contexts, to embed new digital practices in familiar cultural spheres. New electronic and physical spaces are socially produced, and reproduced. Processes of localisation and spatialisation consolidate and magnify the projects' legitimacy amongst their core and wider communities and audiences, whilst also modifying existing traditions by their activities. As dimensions of the local are comparable across different cultural contexts, processes of inspiration and transference connect other projects and communities. That is, this localisation can virally mutate and jump to other communities, places, campaigns, experiments. So there is a continual interplay between local and global contexts and connections.

Finally, these are transformative projects that, to greater and lesser extents, are producing long term impacts. They are not only producing discrete programs, platforms, and situations that are ends in themselves, but they also are producing a new social imaginary. Protagonists seek to change the larger social field by experimenting with alternative forms of organisation, production and distribution on the micro scale. As a consequence, changes are occurring in collective imaginations, self-representations, external perceptions, and degrees of agency. The overall vision is for a transition from a state of atomisation, deterritorialisation, and hierarchy, towards a state of aggregation, reterritorialisation, and horizontalism. The collective energies, socially-engaged creative interventions, and political achievements inspire people in other locations and areas of activity to undertake their own culturally-attuned emancipatory projects within and across all informational fields. The image of the “anomalous wave” used by activists in the transversal struggles across a global educational field can be applied here.7 It connotes a building of momentum from below, drawing strength from diversity, a purposeful movement forward in growing acts of radical solidarity.

Whilst they are articulated across radically different locations (under-developed, post-industrial/over-developed, and newly-industrialised) and informational fields (development and education, art, and journalism), these projects have generated comparable philosophies and practical approaches. The similarities suggest that digital projects of this nature offer a shared dynamic and potentiality that we can characterise as socially-generative digital interactivity. Such projects purposefully generate a specific form of sociality that offers modes of collective imagination, inspiration, creativity, experience, and belonging. This in turn allows an assertion of social subjectivity on the basis of local lineages, lineages that are connected also to other local nodes and transglobal flows.

The power of this emergent techno-social phenomenon resides in its capacity to reterritorialise dominant modes of hierarchic, objectifying, atomising, static informational fields. Informational domination is deeply embedded within postindustrial society; our corporeal and data bodies are surveilled, monitored, controlled and even stolen by material means that were the stuff of science fiction a decade or two ago. Control systems are outsourced to the industrialising world, keystrokes and call centres produce affects across oceans, whilst migrating bodies with nothing to lose but their freedom or lives cross oceans driven by affective needs. The deeper the domination, the greater the yield of exhilaration is experienced when liberated from its bonds.

The Cultural is Political

Cultural production can be a political act. We only have to consider the suppression, censorship, imprisonment and assassination of writers, visual artists, journalists, film makers and others who work in the realms of imagination and social information to verify this assertion. If we include the formation of revolutionary bodies and social structures within the ambit of culture the list of those silenced grows. The production of culture, and consequently the production of society itself, centres on the production of ideas, and the construction of forms through ideas are transmitted and reiterated. Ideas are infinitely scalable, repeatable and mutable, populating and evolving over a multiplicity of human and technological channels and networks. Cooperatively-generated radical ideas can be particularly destabilising to the status quo as they crystallise the desires and demands of the many, compelling the attention of the few. Suppression of dangerous ideas can send them temporarily underground but eventually leads to new solutions being found for their continued expression. Increasingly the digital plays a role in countering those who attempt to silence the dangerous idea, whether this idea be in the domain of the factual or the artistic.http://wikileaks.org and http://www.thefileroom.org for example" href="#footnote8_jq3bn8s">8

Coupled with the historical tendency by an elite class to sequester cultural production's most threatening fruits, is a more recent tendency to also isolate politically innocuous products and processes of the intellect. The motive is short term monetary profit, with its long term corollary of increasing social and political power. Contemporary information society valorises the results of mental labour, and consequently it institutes new regimes of commodification to ensure the unfettered monetisation of mental labour. Even labour given voluntarily within leisure settings (such as contributions to social networking sites) can be converted into demographic data and sold. The media conglomerates' new rivers of gold flow away from those playful info-serfs who have produced their ideas out of literally nothing more than their inherent communicative capacities and into the deep pockets of the digital gentry. The commodification of popular culture has its roots in the twentieth century, but the unwitting and unnamed labouring of the many for the benefit of the few has taken a new turn with the rise of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is in essence the socialisation of technology from above, and broadly speaking encourages an apolitical and narcissistic engagement with its platforms and constituents, although there exist notable exceptions to this tendency.

As the deep integration of information technology into all aspects of personal life and societal functioning has accelerated and proliferated across national borders and professional sectors, the sites of power are no longer localised and visible, but rather networked, invisible, and increasingly unaccountable (Terranova 2004, H&N, Marazzi). At first glance it appears that the nomadic nature of power makes the work of social and cultural activists harder, as the territory on which to conduct struggles is no longer clearly defined. However, the increasing interdependence, interconnectedness and deterritorialisation of systems of control, production, and exchange—the formation of what Castells famously terms "network society"—is a boon to those working towards social transformation, as they too can harness the power of networks. Moreover, activists using non-linear processes can operate within techno-social networks much more nimbly than State and corporate entities, who are generally more rooted in older hierarchical methods and mindsets. Today every “cultural...formation, any production of meaning” is connected to “wider informational processes” within a “hyperconnected planet” (Terranova 2004: 2). The emergent network culture arising from the “acceleration of history and an annihilation of distances” is a “productive moment” propelling “social potentials for transformation” (2-3, emphasis in original).

It is useful to return to the ideas of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) who identified the changing form of power, and hence resistant possibilities, in their 1994 seminal book The Electronic Disturbance9. Both the location of power, and therefore “the site of resistance,” manifest in a borderless “ambiguous” zone, transiting between “nomadic dynamics and sedentary structures” (CAE, 1994: 11). Political activists, and “cultural activist[s]” (whom CAE depict as “anachronistically known” as artists) can still exploit this “awkward situation” that favours the “nomadic elite” to “produce disturbances” (12, 17). This nomadic elite is not so much a class as it is an “aggregate” of those sharing “political and economic interests” (17). Therefore traditional counter strategies of “subversion” must be abandoned, as they assume that oppressive forces are “stable,” identifiable and separable, and moreover, can be readily co-opted (ibid.). Instead CAE propose activists continue the “gamble” initiated in earlier times (by de Sade, Duchamp, Dada and others) by adopting strategies of disturbance that entwine “the cynical and the utopian,” thereby reinjecting “the dream of autonomy with the amphetamine of hope” (12-14).

The production of ideas

Ideas that are utopian in nature, but cognizant of political realities, are central to each of my cases. Project protagonists and participants use cultural forms across digital networks to collectively express, test, evolve and materialise their streetwise utopian ideas. In one way or another they grapple with capitalism and a globalised neoliberal agenda, with reference to the societies and subcultures from which the projects have originated, and to which they have migrated. Whilst politicians and economists massage statistics, the lived experience of millions suggests that neoliberalism has failed to deliver the promises of its rhetoric. Neoliberal practices have impacted in different ways on the countries where the case study projects are located. England under Margaret Thatcher was one of the first nurseries for neoliberalism, and its detrimental effects were experienced by many. Jamaica, already ravaged by the consequences of developmentalism, was compelled by its obligations to the international banking and trade systems to adopt neoliberal policies, which similarly impacted negatively on its citizens. Hong Kong presents a different case because of its transition from a British colony to return to Chinese rule, whilst retaining its extreme laissez-faire market economy. Yet it too has endured waves of privatisation, from the corporatisation of the education sector to the privatisation of public spaces and infrastructures. Hence participants in all three cases share first-hand experience of living under neoliberal rule.

However, they resist complying with its logic, and reject the inevitability of its dominance as the global system of everything. Rather, participants contest that the intrinsic worth of ideas, goods, and services is reducible to monetary value. They establish and connect into circuits of exchange that combine gift economies, barter systems, and other informal systems of trade. They challenge the supposedly socially beneficial privatisation of public knowledges, resources, and spaces by commonising their ideas, knowledge bases, and material/digital resources and spaces. While neoliberalism was successful in fragmenting and disempowering representative bodies of paid working bodies—the trade unions—these projects are sites of class recomposition, directly empowering unpaid working bodies through collective labour processes producing new social imaginaries.

The rejection of neoliberalism's authoritarian premises and practices links in to other ideas the projects express. For instance, Furtherfield's protagonists share the conviction that cultural production is richer when it is democratised. Influenced by precedents from Fluxus and punk, they use technological networks to create social spaces for artistic risk and cultural experimentation. Furtherfield was gestating at the same time as the Young British Artists,10 an elite cadre of self-interested poster children for postindustrial capitalism, were manufacturing individual objects tactically crafted for sale to speculative markets' highest bidders. In contrast, the Furtherfield Do It With Others (DIWO) model produces relations as well as artefacts, with both outcomes resisting commodification. Such democratisation gives rise to active communities of makers, rather than passive bodies of consumers. We could view Furtherfield's work as fitting with the rubric of relational art as discussed by curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, that is artworks establishing “intersubjective encounters...in which meaning is elaborated collectively” (Bishop 2004, 53-54).11. But I think it is more useful to consider their praxis as producing relational media, a topic I will pick up later in this chapter.

The Furtherstudio12 project neatly illustrates some of the above propositions. Recall that the heart of Furtherstudio was a software enabling artists to set up a public access window on their internet-connected desktops enabling people to 'drop in' to their digital studios to explore work in progress and interact with them. The overall project was initiated by Furtherfield in response to an expressed need by a new media artist whose mobility and chances for social interaction were limited due to physical disability issues (Jess Loseby). The software program itself had been developed by an artist programmer in the Furtherfield “neighbourhood” (Neil Jenkins) who tapped into other networks of digitally-engaged artists for inspiration and technical refinement. Furtherstudio was a social software to address specific needs around access and communication, and it also became a platform for production of collaboratively-authored internet artworks in which participants entered into imaginal worlds created by a series of artists-in-residence and joined in the play. The resultant artworks bore the stamps of their individual originators who had set up conceptual frameworks and aesthetic parameters, and the traces of all those who had been inspired to contribute thoughts, words, and digital artefacts. The software enabled artists to transition from a Do It Yourself (DiY) starting point to a DIWO experience. Thus Furtherstudio is much more than a net art software program or a cultural production/distribution platform, it is a generator of social spaces and social relations.

What used to visibly remain of this project was an online archive of the net art and mailing list discussions it facilitated. However, Furtherstudio's intangible products, the web of social relations it engendered and which extended into the future, could not be experienced by exploring the archive. This provides a clue to the paradoxical nature of relational media, which appears to be simultaneously ephemeral and enduring. Relational media leaves some material traces in the archaeological digs of digital space, but the 'real value' of the productive, communicative, social processes is much more difficult to ascertain without engaging in dialogue with the original sets of players. There is a game-like quality to relational media, a playfulness that requires being present in the moment, as if meditating. We leave our individually-experienced Real World to enter another space, a liminal space of the imagination inhabited by others who have entered the game. This space does not disappear when we log out, we hold it within us, as memory and affect. This makes it hard to quantify but makes it no less real. The forest still exists without the presence of the observer, or at least that is the philosophical position I am taking here.


An Ecstatic Multitude, or, Too Deadly, Here Come the Roller Bitches

Relational media that generates social spaces and social relations can exist in the absence of digital technologies and internet connections. How does the digital amplify or extend the potential of cultural projects to inspire imaginations and provoke actions? A comparison with another kind of relational phenomenon could help clarify the distinction. I recently attended my first roller derby match as an audience member. Around the world all-women roller derby has re-emerged from a decades-long hiatus to become a popular performative matrix blending athleticism, DIY ethos, and a fusion of punk/burlesque/feminist/queer attitude and aesthetic. The queerness and deliberate aesthetic set it apart from other traditional 'amateur' sports. The game itself requires physical risk (many of the 90 second 'jams' end in multi-player pile-ups on the concrete floor) and tenacity. Self-organised teams, bouts and series attract heterogeneous crowds of considerable numbers for an amateur league. The Adelaide Roller Derby League13 match between the Wild Hearses14 and the Road Train Rollers15 on 8 May 2010 drew around 2000 people, and a show of hands at half-time revealed that for about a third of them it was their first taste. Serious fans were costumed in their teams' colours and styles (royal blue naughty nurses and chambermaids16 versus orange/purple goths and ghouls17). The audience was also self-organising, with most bringing along their own chairs and blankets, and leaving space for late-comers to park their arses. Prices were low at 10AUD, and the general atmosphere reminded me both of early punk gigs (minus everyone being totally off their faces), experimental electronic music events, and dorkbot gatherings.

Roller derby uses the internet both to promote bouts, and, significantly, as a space to create team narratives and team member personas. Links from the Adelaide site shoot out to Facebook18, MySpace19 fan Flickrs20, and Twitter21 feeds. Thus the net contributes to the affective dimension of the phenomenon, both for players and fans, creating a space for the production of real and performative social relations that exist outside of the three or four hours of embodied engagement at the venue (one hour socialising in picnic-atmosphere ticket queue, one hour of warm up events, two 30-minute 'jams' plus half-time, post-match activities like raffle contests to arm wrestle with the derby player of your choice). Whilst not a central component of the relational world of roller derby, the internet extends the phenomenon's presence through time and space. We could consider roller derby as not so much relational media but relational performance, in its creation of spaces for stylised athletic play (it recalls popular wrestling in a comparable construction of personae), direct interaction with audience, temporary suspension of real world concerns, injection of elements of the carnivalesque (costumes, props and character-driven improvisations), and the formation of personal and temporary semi-tribal relationships. This is grassroots cultural activity that has political dimensions in terms of its DiY self-organisation, horizontalism, social inclusion, and implicit queer feminist currents. The phenomenon is constituted by voluntary affective labour, and is generating its own transglobal multitude22 comprised of players and fans. Roller derby might not be 'art', but it is definitely not merely 'sport,' and the kinds of collective social relations and processes it engenders are perhaps a manifestation of an ecstatic multitude that prefigures more self-reflexive forms of politicisation.


From the Spinning Jenny to the Screaming Jennies

**need intro para linking roller derbys to linda dements bloodbath project, and industrial rev'n labour to adelaide punk circa 1981

“It is from rage that thought is born,” asserts neo-Marxist sociologist John Holloway (2005: 1). Holloway (ibid.) uses the trope of a scream, a scream encompassing “horror...anger...refusal” to identify the affective, non-reasoned ground zero for the production of individual and collective radical imaginations. This scream is brought into being by reflection upon our own experiences, as we realise that the socio-political situations which anger us “are not isolated phenomena” but rather are interconnected (ibid.). As our imaginations are enlargened, so are we prompted to take action to change the world. Increasingly these actions desert the channels of conventional representative politics, and take the form of direct action. This direct action expands the familiar lexicon of oppositional acts attached to localised material spaces (from strikes, occupations, property destruction, to kidnappings, bombings, assassinations, and so forth) to include new symbolic, discursive and symbolic repetoires both spatialised, and across networked, dematerialised domains. Our shared experiences and interventions make us feel not alone in our anger and frustration. Instead we identify as “an antagonistic 'we' grown from an antagonistic society” (Holloway op. cit. 5). As “flies caught in a spider's web,” we must start to critically and collectively emancipate ourselves from this “tangled mess” (ibid.). The scream is productive, as it is born not only from despair but also from hope. Hence it seeks out openings and possibilities for the production of a “radical otherness” (Holloway op. cit. 6).

The scream “shatter[s]” our previous understandings of the world, says militant investigator Stevphen Shukaitis (2007 n.p.), as he searches for diverse manifestations—from graffiti to marching bands—of radical otherness. Through a combination of serendipity and purposeful drift we can sense “beacons” that signpost the “travels” of others struggling against the world's bloody machinations “not with a sense of stoic ardor but rather of insurgent joy” (ibid.). (recall Laure's poetry). He sees in a plethora of grass roots cultural forms, not the old modernist positioning of art as a special activity to be practised by specialists, but instead “a refusal to separate aesthetics from the flux of the ongoing social domain” (ibid.). These creative practices generate “fleeting moments” from which a self-instituted “radical imagination” is born. This imagination “unfolds through a process of affective composition in aesthetic politics,” an aesthetics that comes from the emergent “relations and experiences” within collective creation processes (ibid.). The art content takes a back seat in this frame as the driving energy comes from the productive relations that create “a space where the art of politics is possible.” The work of art, that is, the labour of art, takes primacy over the art work. Participants in all the various projects of radical otherness are building “affective space[s]” that are the “necessary” precursors to new “connections, discussion, and communities” (ibid.)

Social engagement through art fosters broader processes of political engagement, both prefiguring and building experimental alternative societies on a micro scale. The work of cultural “pioneers” can be compared with that of the internet pioneers, whose “strategic acts” were “idealistic endeavours doomed to fail as more general solutions, yet...powerful as exercises in the process of establishing exceptions,” according to Nettime mailing list contributor Zeljko Blace.23 The ambitious network art projects of Furtherfield also “establish exceptions,” exceptions to the continuing myth of single authorship of cultural works, to the notion that art must have a material and fixed form, and to the hierarchical and exploitative nature of an art world that has allowed itself to be absorbed into the profit-driven juggernaut of the so-called cultural industries driven by 'economic rationalists'.

Hong Kong In-Media take a comparable notion about the democratisation of cultural production in a different direction. The technological platform and cultural method they have developed for online citizen journalism encourages new forms of collective subjectivity through inspiring people to engage in a mix of direct, discursive, symbolic and self-reflexive actions. Just as Furtherfield's DIWO initiatives were democratising one form of cultural production, the accumulation of acts of shared doing in Hong Kong builds democratisation within the media production sector. Moreover it contributes to the popular struggle focussed on a higher-level aim, that is, the achievement of representative democracy and empowered political citizenship. Many members of the loosely-configured Hong Kong In-Media network are also exploring more radical forms of social relations arising from direct democracy. Thus cultural politics leap frogs over the plane of state politics, with its mediated material practices providing a staging ground to experiment with collective organising and self-management, horizontal decision-making, and building new circuits for production and distribution. .

Let us revisit Hong Kong In-Media's role in the campaign to save thirty threatened trees at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in terms of ideas, experimentation, states of exception and relational media. The public exposure of a secretive plan for campus redevelopment did not create much impact beyond the university community initially. Investigative work by citizen journalists uncovered more facts and Hong Kong In-Media's readers/writers began reframing the trigger issue of tree felling as just one instance of a more pervasive and entrenched problem of the corporatisation and internationalisation of the education sector. This recasting of a small localised issue as a spatialised manifestation of globalised neoliberalism attracted a groundswell of energy and labour towards the emergent environmental campaign. The campus redevelopment was everyone's problem, as it exposed the currents of power and privilege that run through this paternalistic society.

Hong Kong In-Media's promotion of action media, whereby activists and journalists are encouraged to write themselves into the script of unfolding events, inspired people to engage creatively with the campaign, with in-situ embodied symbolic performances and art installations transforming the space into one belonging to the people rather than to a faceless, unaccountable bureaucracy. Each action was an experiment with unknown outcomes, but people were prepared to trust the process . The online reportage of the actions generated further involvement, so what was being produced was a growing set of social relationships amongst a field of strangers. In Shukaitis's (2007 n. p.) terms, action media was causing “affective resonance” as identified with the protestors who were standing in for the vulnerable trees themselves. Often the process of “affective composition” starts from “minor moments and interactions” through which “spaces of commonality” generate “new relations and interactions” (ibid.). Thus the trajectories of the micro-political, those emergent, unpredictable lines of flight, can create significant disturbances within the macro-political field, as happened in Hong Kong.

The escalation and intensity of campaign events startled the CUHK administration into taking belated consultative action, with the end result that the trees were protected. By pooling ideas, reframing and contextualising a micro issue within a macro-political frame, and designing and enacting mediated interventions in electronic and physical space, participants had created interconnected social spaces for political experimentation. Embodied action and its discursive representation were democratised, and an emergent intersubjective sphere offered an electronic site for critical reflection. An unfolding process of affective composition coalesced different groups, not only those directly associated with the university as students, teachers, alumni and workers, but others demanding to be included in urban planning processes. The tree campaign had established a state of exception, and future campus development issues now had to deal with a radicalised and heterogeneous body that could come together rapidly. Power had shifted through networked affective and material practices.


Immaterial Labour, Affective Labour, Hybridised Labour

As industrialising and postindustrial societies transit to informational economies, different forms of labour and labouring processes come into being. These labouring processes also come to assume greater importance within mixed economies. The result is that “information, communication, knowledge, and affect” now play a “foundational role” in production (Hardt 1999: 93). Previously, industrialisation within the secondary production sector (manufacturing) changed the way that primary production also was structured, leading to the industrialisation of agriculture. Similarly, the informatisation of the tertiary production sector (services) has flowed through to secondary production, with “informationalized industrial processes” typifying the apex of contemporary manufacturing, as Just-In-Time and other communicative systems determine production and distribution cycles (ibid.).

As the production of services creates “no material and durable good,” the labour involved in this production has been defined by post-Autonomists as immaterial labour, that is, “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication” (Hardt op. cit. 94). In the English language the term “immaterial labour” is somewhat ambiguous. The word immaterial, derived from the Latin immaterialis, can mean not only “not formed of matter; incorporeal” but also “not important or relevant.” Consequently, immaterial labour can suggest that the labour expended in producing data, knowledges, affects, and channels for their delivery, is somehow inconsequential when compared to the 'real work' of manual labour involved in primary and secondary production processes (notwithstanding the increasing informatisation of these sectors). However, when we maintain our focus on the concept of immaterial labour as being that which produces things “not formed of matter,” and place this idea within the context of network society and informational economy, the kinds of processes and outcomes this labour generates, and its potential to be an engine for social change become more tangible.

It is important to note that the distinctions between material and immaterial labour, between automation and informatisation, are not as clear cut as post-autonomist theory often depicts. Rather than these being discrete modes of practice, there is frequently a bleeding across categories as forms of labour and production become hybridised. Current empirical research by Armin Medosch (pers. comm. 16 May 2010) in the form of interviews with Austrian industrial sociologists and trade union activists on the subject of labour in post-Fordism reveals the evolution of more hybrid forms of production. For example, the “deep integration” of information technologies in factory assembly lines system that enables rapid market-driven retooling, does generate interesting new tasks for highly skilled workers but these are followed by a return to monotonous tasks, in a cycle of the “re-Taylorisation of labour” (ibid.). So the increased freedom of “communicative” workers is “very limited,” with their creativity “channeled into very narrow corridors of possibilities” whilst time management increases the pressure on them (ibid.).

One of the various forms of immaterial labour is affective labour, a form of labour as defined by Hardt (1999: 89) as involving “the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities.” Affective labour is constituted by practices that produce subjectivities, “sociality,” and eventually “society itself” (ibid.). Even more fundamental than society is life, and Hardt (op. cit. 98) contends that what is being created in the “networks of affective labor” is “a form-of-life.” His proposition suggests that affective labour is a key to revolutionary change, because not only is it creating society, but it is creating life. Affective labour taps into imaginations and mental processes, employing verbal and symbolic languages to foment new ideas, new patterns of thinking, new ways of behaving, and new forms of production and circulation outside of the hegemonic capitalist paradigm. However, at the same time, it is labour that still fits within capitalism, to the extent that in the postindustrial era this particular “face” of immaterial labour now sits “at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of laboring forms” (Hardt op. cit. 90). It is the paradigmatic form of labour that influences how other forms of labour are structured.

It is precisely in its value to capitalism, and in its embeddedness within a deeply integrated, globalised informational economy, that affective labour holds the “enormous potential” for “subversion and autonomous constitution” within “anticapitalist projects” (Hardt op. cit. 97, 90). As affective labour produces “social networks, forms of community, [and] biopower,” it can be a generative force in the creation of constitutive collective identities and projects building scalar alternatives to the dominant paradigm (Hardt op. cit. 96).
However, this anodyne theoretical construction of affective labour needs to be anchored in empirical reality to enable its further elaboration. Affective labour in the care sector is becoming partially informatised and hybridised in a way that is hardly liberatory, Medosch (pers. comm. 16 May 2010) concludes from his field research. For instance, mobile care workers have shifted from a position of enjoying a “relatively high level of autonomy” to that of being subject to “enormous Taylorisation pressures” as GPS devices track their moves, and precisely timed patient management plans are issued and monitored (ibid.). Hand in hand with this industrialisation of the affective care realm goes new divisions that segregate and reimburse workers based on the notional expertise associated with specific tasks, and unsurprisingly, the most intimate forms of care (washing, feeding) are rewarded with the least amounts of pay and security. The traditional kin work of “social interactivity” remains with family or neighbours (perhaps explaining the popularity of television series set in hospitals which depict a fantasy world in which nursing staff have the time to perform this labour as well). The hierarchies of precarity impact on all workers, but there is a definite bottom of the pyramid. The end result, says Medosch, “is a deterioration of relations between patients and care workers who then both suffer from dehumanised Fordist conditions of labour.”

Medosch's research draws attention to the way in which capital is increasing and diversifying its means of control over affective and other immaterial labourers in postindustrial contexts. However, labourers are challenging these new impositions just as they have within industrial settings. In Austria for example, unions are using new ways of organising through implementing what they call “Strategic Unionism” (ibid.). Previously in this thesis we have discussed the transglobal coalescing of many different labour struggles within the education sector as is being documented and partially coordinated through network-based platforms such as edu-factory. We have flagged also the circulation of differentiated labour struggles that the Chainworkers collective has been instrumental in aggregating, using innovative forms of cultural production to crystallise issues and instigate social interconnections amongst members of disparate groups and sectors. The predominant form of labour power used to be spatially aggregated in the factory, which then became the logical site of resistance through a combination of strategies including sabotage, occupation, refusal to work, and strikes. As power and control have become spatially disaggregated and distributed over both local and transglobal networks, and as capitalism relies increasing on coordinated mental labour, resistance is now similarly networked, communicative, transversalised, and, increasingly, deploying cultural products and processes as tactical resources to broaden public understanding of the interconnectedness of contemporary struggles.

Participate or Perish: Art Strikes, Participatory Absence, & Strategic Retreats

We can turn to art history for a fascinating, if arguably failed, precedent in the incorporation of the cultural into resistance and the production of radical imagination.24 In his keynote address at the 2010 Adelaide Festival's Artists Week Gerard Raunig highlighted the Art Strike initiated by the stateless artist, Fluxus participant and pioneer of auto-destructive art, Gustav Metzger. In 1974, in the early years of the “crisis of Fordism,” Metzger and the Art Worker Coalition proposed an international art strike in which artists would engage collectively in a refusal of labour for a substantial period. During these “years without art,” artists would still be active as an “avant-garde of refusal in the post-Fordist mode of production.” In place of the production of art objects/events for a corrupt and hierarchical gallery system, people could spend time reflecting on society and the historic place of art within it. Thus they would build up the “critical potential of art,” and in three years artists would have a new collective understanding about culture and its potential to influence social transformation. Metzger's appeal was not taken up, but nevertheless between 1977 and 1980 he conducted his own Art Strike. Metzger's actions prefigured what a strike could look like in post-industrial times, says Raunig, but failed because he wanted to “transfer old resistance from industry, unchanged, to the present.” Nevertheless, a collectively-practised “deterritorialisation of refusal” interlinked with a “reterritorialisation of reflection” has the potential to be a productive force in the construction of new possibilities.

In the “post-Fordist participation-based economy” where labour is performed “in the metropolitan factory” by multitudes who “recombin[e] ideas and images through social networks and technologically mediated forms of communication,” returning to the notion of the Art Strike can help us rethink the “movement-building potential of cultural production,” suggest Shukaitis and Biddle (2009, n. p.).25. In an era where participatory production is de rigueur in some sectors, what I conceptualise as participatory absence is a direct affront to the logic of capital (and also to the growing hegemony of corporatised social networks).

In 1989 Stewart Home and other Neoists recuperated Metzger's proposition, calling for the cessation of all art work for the following three years. This iteration of the Art Strike reaches beyond the gallery system to “a more general consideration of artistic production and...the role of the artist” (ibid.). Most recently, in 2009 Redas Dirzys and a Temporary Art Strike Committee have declared an Art Strike. Their response to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius being branded a European Capital of Culture is to reject the “strategy of capitalist valorization through the circulation of cultural and artistic heritage” (ibid.). In this instance the Art Strike expanded its remit, now challenging “the ways in which artistic and cultural production are infused throughout daily life and embedded within the production of the metropolis” (ibid.).

What is the relevance of this expression of cultural activism to the larger discussion of collective immaterial labour within informational capitalism? From an autonomist perspective, it provides a lens to examine the “two compositional modes contained within the statement 'everyone is an artist'” (ibid.). Capital expands by capturing “emerging political compositions into technical compositions of surplus value production.” The labour of “imagination and recombination” has been co-opted and commodified for the service of capital as never before, when informational capitalism is deriving extreme profits from often unpaid (see Facebook), and at the very least underpaid (see iPhone factories), forms of labour (ibid.). Consequently, the Art Strike exposes the class-based tension in the generalised situation in which labourers must continually shunt new ideas and creativity upstream to be enclosed and exploited. By re-proposing an Art Strike at a time “when artistic labor is both everywhere and nowhere” takes this tactic of refusal beyond the confines of the art world into a wider terrain of struggles connected through the condition of precarity (ibid.).

Thus the Art Strike evolves from its starting point as “social action by artists” to potentially inspire a form of activism relevant to many others whose “creativity and imagination [are] exploited within existing productive networks” (ibid.). Hence a horizontally-organised transversal, participatory absence (which could operate both overtly and clandestinely) could produce both scattered disturbances throughout the networks of capital, and an emergent class composition of labourers (paid and unpaid) in differentiated sectors connected by their shared experiences of precarious existence. By inverting the pressure to what I term 'participate or perish' by invoking a common right to not-participate, to unparticipate, we could have a contemporary manifestation of the original form of industrial sabotage. But instead of workers hurling their wooden shoes into the machines, we have workers retracting their ideas and their multifarious expressions from the networks.

Many cultures and philosophies recommend taking a pause for reflection. The Zapatistas took a collective pause, a “strategic retreat,” for a short period in the 1990s where they literally retreated deeper into the Lacandon jungle, ceased all communications with the outside world, and took stock of their actions, achievements, and challenges. This involved the performance of a different kind of affective labour. When they emerged some six months later, they recommenced their communiques and campaigns with renewed vigour, one of the affective benefits gained from this reflective period. The invention of micro-political strategies and their enactment from below will always necessarily precede their subsequent co-optation and appropriation by hegemonic regimes of power and capital. A retreat from the logic of info-capitalism, a collective refusal to use all (or any) of one's powers of invention and affection for the perpetuation of a world order that is increasingly intolerable, an exodus from the fray into a contemplative space, all these actions can generate processes of revitalisation and renewal. When one is ready to emerge, to make the return journey back into the world, then the digital can be deployed to communicate what has been learnt or conceived, to once more connect and transversalise the struggles in fresh waves of challenge to the prevailing order.

Temporary Affective Spaces (TAS) within the Container Project

The Container Project frequently smudges the notional boundary between manual and immaterial labour as it generates creative products and events, educational and digital services, and affective transformations. Participants enact a kind of liminal labour, that which exists on the shoreline betwixt and between the concrete and intangible realms.

Let us recall the conversion of the shipping container into a digital media centre. Before one rivet was drilled much communicative labour had been expended as mervin Jarman had talked up the project to potential partners, using schematics and graphics to illustrate his idea, and promoting it via interviews and websites. His labour initially generated affects such as curiosity and excitement, and ultimately produced a donated shipping container, freight costs, second-hand equipment, and the committed labour of cultural activists from the global North towards setting up the space and running workshops in the global South. These volunteers were attracted to this project of “radical otherness” and wanted to help build its “affective space,” a space consistently described as being one of hope and emancipation.

Their labour soon was augmented by collective manual and immaterial labour by Palmers Cross residents. For five years the Container Project had existed primarily as an idea that could only be realised by cooperative work. As the community was building the space physically themselves, not only was a range of learning happening, from geometry to cooking, but, importantly, the production of a social architecture and a renewed sense of localised neighbourhood were also being built. Part of the immediate affective power of the project was the aura of mystery surrounding the shipping container's physical transformation. Whereas the Container Project had been overtly explained to sponsors and workshop facilitators, this vision was kept under wraps in Jamaica, in order to heighten local curiosity. There is a parallel here with the action media of Hong Kong In-Media, in which activists do not predetermine or over-determine campaign “scripts” in order to broaden participation. The quality of openness in these spatialised situations leaves room for people's imaginations and contributions.

The local environs changed further over time as the original container was refitted and rewired, and other containers being made into shops. The social architecture also evolved with ebbs and flows in activity, in response to material circumstances (no electricity for a year) and the periodic nature of the workshop programs. The affective space of the Container similarly evolved, as community attachment to their “institution” deepened, and each new wave of visiting artists and activists made their mark. As the Container grew its network so too did its affective space become transmittable along new currents and lines.....

These are liminal constructions, defying time as they transcend or disrupt the temporal history of the spatialised location. Events and prejudices rooted in the past which had produced and maintained social divisions were breaking down for the first time in collective memory. These liminal constructions being built in the present seemed to be productive of a future few would have foreseen.

mervin Jarman was driven by an intuition that if other marginalised people like him were exposed to certain opportunities, they then would have a real choice in turning around their lives. To test this hypothesis he brought a literally half-full container to Jamaica, along with a small creative and technical team, to see what others would add to it energetically, and how they would use the human and material resources. The project could only work if it inspired people to affectively engage with it. Significantly, mervin did not arrive with a set digital literacy program, art syllabus, traditional teachers, or proscriptive rules about borrowing equipment. Rather he came with a basic architectural structure, some unassembled second-hand machines, and a handful of people prepared to share their skills with whomever was interested. The digital tools, the material building, the foreign visitors, operated as pathways into the affective realm.

As community members were building the physical environment they were also building a common social space. The joint participation by people who subscribed to either one or the other of Jamaica's two political factions created a state of exception, as political tribalism was put aside in favour of cooperative labour by day and merrymaking by night. Here we have a clear example of a project of cultural activism generating a new “affective resonance” that has come into being as “imagination shifts through the interacting bodies” (Shukaitis 2007 n. p.). A new social formation, an affective composition, brought about through cultural activism, was constituting itself. The driver was from within the community, instigated by one of its own who, like many Jamaicans, had gone beyond, and returned home, changed. The impact of breaking down of political tribalism cannot be underestimated, because if this was possible, what other transformations could be possible?

This common space expanded beyond the perimeter of the Container yard, as people borrowed portable digital equipment and recorded their own stories in locations in this “high crime area” that had meaning to them. Yet expensive computer equipment left the yard, and returned to the yard, with no problems. This suggests that the affective space created by the Container Project was not limited by specific geographical boundaries, the X-Y-Z coordinates of Cartesian space, but existed in an emergent collective imagination that associated the project's resources with collectively-agreed upon core principles of mutual respect and trust. This affective space was the combined product of the affective labour of mervin, his invited guest facilitators, and the local community.
Over time, comparable temporary affective spaces & states (we could consider these as manifestations of TASS, playing off Hakim's Bey's notion of TAZ or Temporary Autonomous Zone) have been generated through other Container initiatives, and notably through the iStreet Lab workshops. The aim is to produce changes within and amongst individuals, changes that come from an awareness that one has a choice about how to conduct oneself, how to live life. Technology is a lure and a means of communication and expression, and involves technical learning, but is not the end point.

How does my concept of a Temporary Affective Space (TAS) differ from Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)? The notion of TAZ has influenced or resonates with countless projects of social and cultural activism, from large events like Reclaim the Streets and Critical Mass to smaller clandestine actions that demarcate and recuperate urban precincts such as street stencils and paste-ups. While TAZ denotes the undertaking of collective creative anarchic actions, and implies these actions will generate joyous, uninhibited emotions and empowering states of being, there is little focus on the processes that underpin the production of affect. The TAZ rises up from a ground of alienation and frustration and repression, dances wildly in the streets, and then subsides again, until the next kraken reawakening.

In contrast, the TAS concept has the production and circulation of affects at its heart. These affects come into being through cooperative affective labour, and whilst this labour may be playful it also contains aspects and preparedness to follow through projects that the intermittency of TAZ often lacks. Nevertheless, despite the need for some kind of constancy of commitment the TAS needs to be temporary and not permanent. Permanent structures and programs are too easy to be decoded, captured, commodified and recuperated by the totalising instruments of the information state and info-capital. Being temporary guarantees freedom along the temporal plane, freedom to dissolve, disappear, reappear, regroup, mutate. As the very condition of existence is precarious these days, we can use precarity and impermanence to strategic advantage. TAS must be or have a space; it needs to be embedded in something. It needs to be locally present, but the production of locality can occur on the electronic dimension and not necessarily be confined to geographic co-ordinates. Space is somewhere to gather our imaginations and possibly our bodies, somewhere to make, to be made, to replenish and feed. TAS can generate Transformational Affective States (TAS2), positive experiences shared with others, the becoming-we that Holloway discusses.

To summarise, temporary affective spaces employing customised digital technologies generate socially-engaged creative contexts that can produce transformational affective states, which in turn shape emergent collective social imaginaries, new affective compositions. Whilst the TAS reterritorialises material and electronic realms for periods of unknown duration before disappearing or reforming itself, what endures is the certainty that transformation is possible. An ongoing challenge for the new forms of affectively composition is how to resist “spectacular recuperation and the solidification of constituent moments and possibilities into fixed and constituted forms that have lost their vitality” (Shukaitis 2007 n. p.).

Let us consider the iStreet Lab as an example of a Temporary Affective Space. Although the shipping container media lab had been an unquestioned success in both changing the dynamics of the community in which it was emplaced, and inspiring other Jamaican towns to develop their own media art programs, its achievements and community acceptance both prevented it from leaving Palmers Cross and led some of the target participants to self-exclude. It had lost some of its distinctive edge through its laying down of roots. In contrast, the iStreet Lab was conceived as something that would constantly be on the move, coming in and out of community settings for short periods of time, negotiating with community leaders to identify the “hardest to reach” groups, and providing them with intensive skilling and creative contexts for long-term empowerment. The iStreet Lab workshops are process-based rather than product oriented, tapping into the street's resources of risk-taking, ingenuity and problem-solving, and chanelling them in new directions.

The physical qualities of the wheelie bin lab make it into something that will always be a temporary fixture in any location in which it is emplaced. Yet this quality paradoxically engenders feelings of ownership and connection amongst workshop participants, as they must help mount and demount the lab each day. This construction involves light manual labour and some challenging mental labour as all the hardware and peripheral devices are wired up. The “twisty, windy way of the streets,” that is, real street knowledge, are brought to the lab's street technology by participants, and their collective labour produces the lab afresh each day. The iStreet Lab is a “voltage producer,” re-energising social dynamics and cultural traditions, generating positive affective states. Its mobility make it a kind of boundary object, designed to enter globalisation's “trenches,” attract participation, then exit, leaving behind changes that are more affective than material.

Trust and Risk

I have discussed affective composition and Temporary Affective States. I now discuss the production and performance of an affective state which is central to the cases, that is, trust, and its relationship with the digital. And along with trust goes a willingness to take risks, risks that are not physical but emotional. The digital can support the development of relationships of trust within these very different socially-engaged projects, which leads me to extrapolate that this could be a universal quality.
Participants in these projects trust the techno-social processes that manifest through the projects. They trust in the principles of self-organisation and management, of collaborative creative labour, and of collective power sharing. They are engaged in exploring how ICTs can be used to enact these principles in practice. They trust that although the tools of info-capitalism come with their own historical legacies and contemporary social and environmental baggage—from sweatshop labour to the pollution caused by IT landfill—their negative aspects can be partially balanced out by people deploying the tools within emancipatory projects. Such projects can contribute to redressing these systemic problems both directly (such as a citizen journalism campaign around factory conditions

) and through the global circulation and interconnection of struggles.

Trust involves the willingness to take individual and collective risks, as people publicly communicate and creatively interpret their ideas and knowledges. As education becomes increasingly normalised and commodified across an expanding globalised informational field, trust and risk take on heightened value, as they are less likely to be encouraged within top-down formal systems of 'learning' that is now more inclined towards industry-oriented training rather than encouraging critical thinking, purposeful inquiry, discovery-based evidence, and artistic creativity as ends in themselves. And for people who have been excluded from education systems, as mervin Jarman notes, risk-taking is a normal part of street behaviour, and a survival skill which can return collective benefits when transferred to creative contexts of production.

Trust is an affective state that involves a mutual respect amongst agents, and with regards to the three cases, a sense of being bound together by common circumstances, visions or goals. Each project has developed techno-social platforms to engender an atmosphere of trust in the processes and the participants. The Container Project, for example, built innovative architectures interweaving the material, the social and the digital. These “social architectures,” whether they were contained in fixed structures like the shipping container, or ephemeral mobile units like the wheelie bin, operated firstly by instigating affective responses such as curiosity, excitement, and even scepticism in potential participants. Initial affective engagement was followed by material exploration of the unfamiliar digital tools for self-expression, a stage that required technical learning from others and exchanging ideas. People had to trust that they had the mental capacity to learn new skills and that they could produce something of meaning. They had to risk their self-esteem and challenge their self-confidence, overcoming ingrained negative scripts about themselves and their abilities. These are no small matters. These intra- and inter-personal processes eventuated in the production of a range of material and social outcomes, from music, photography, video and dance performances, to enrolment in formal education courses, to the acceptance of IT job offers. To move from a position of no experience with the digital world, to one of digital literacy and digital creativity just one week, demonstrates that people trusted the process enough to overcome their fears, inhibitions, shame, and self-doubts, to engage with the technologies and their fellow students. When this trust and risk-taking behaviour is rewarded by positive outcomes including skills acquisition, public accolades, and employment, a new set of affects comes into being: enhanced self-esteem, confidence, and optimism.

Most importantly, the collective trust in the process brings about shifts in social relations that impacts upon local and external perceptions of classes of people, and existing currents of power. Following the iStreet Lab interventions we have people who have been considered and treated as problems by their communities, and the state, now perceived and treated quite differently. Their achievements have precipitated an acknowledgement that they are now active producers within a local knowledge economy which has global links. People written off in the past as being incapable of learning are now perceived as the teachers and knowledge workers of tomorrow. Hence the public perception of a whole sub-class of people begins to shift from within and without the workshop groups. This this brings us back to the notion of affective composition, as these people themselves also view themselves and their cohort differently. A collective realisation dawns that they can no longer be ignored or discounted. This recalls the conscientization processes activated by application of the radical pedagogy of Paolo Freire in comparable social contexts. This time the expanded literacy skills acquired through participation in the art and education programs are in high demand by the needs of globalised info-capital.

Moreover, people have been learning these skills at a unique time in history, when the means of digital production have become so affordable, and the impact of free software platforms, so that once skilled, everyone can be a producer, an “upsetter of the future.” We are living in a era of participatory media, but, with some notable exceptions such as Iranian protesters' use of social networking platforms to advance their causes, Web 2.0 has mainly been taken up by 'Generation Privilege' and used for narcissistic, politically-vacuous forms of self-expression. When groups of marginalised people begin using these same mass communication tools, such as is the case with Container workshop participants, they begin changing the global informational terrain, creating disturbances and differentiation in what has been perceived (in the West/global North) as a relatively homogeneous topology of power.
This has implications not only for these but others in similarly discredited positions within their local communities and wider societies. For example, the Container Project has inspired organisations and groups in other countries to experiment with adapting its philosophy and pedagogy to suit local circumstances. A ten-week workshop tour conducted by mervin Jarman in Australia between March-May 2010 has resulted in expressions of interest by State Libraries, charitable foundations and artist-run organisations to host mervin and a team of Jamaican Container 'graduates' to run year-long and triennale programs with their constituents.

With Hong Kong In-Media operating in a different informational field and cultural context, trust and risk-taking manifested differently. Social and media activists occupying differing ideological positions on the left agreed that existing activist organisations were hampered by various problems. These problems included a divisive adherence to fixed ideological positions that fragmented the wider activist community, excessive caution and compliance with authorities, over-concentration on localised struggles at the expense of the global picture, and, with some exceptions, disinterest in using ICTs to further their aims. Whilst Hong Kong In-Media's initiating group lacked technical expertise and hands-on experience of online citizen journalism, they trusted in the social processes of horizontally-organised open publishing.

This trust made them willing to confront a range of risks. The group risked that the nascent citizen journalism site would not attract a critical mass of reader-writers, a problem that has beset comparable projects internationally after initial enthusiasm has ebbed. They risked that without a known community of activist geeks to draw upon, the project could become stymied by technical issues, frustrating users who would desert the site. They risked that their desire to experiment with the untried format of action media through would not be shared by enough people to make a political impact.

Action media contains elements of the tactical, the participatory, and the relational, and carries another very real risk for citizen journalists. It requires that people literally put their bodies on the line, writing themselves into unfolding scripts for social change, scripts that are then broadcast and reflected upon by a larger community of reader-writers. These in turn generate new scripts for escalating cycles of action and reflection. Although Hong Kong has a history of mass protests where some degree of safety in numbers operates, the performance of more nuanced embodied symbolic and direct actions interventions by small groups was not well established. Performances easily attributable to recognisable subjects carry their own risk of repressive State response, especially when digitally captured and broadcast online, facilitating identification of individuals, as has happened even with mass protests in other places. This danger is exacerbated if campaigns focus on taboo subjects such as Tiananmen Square or Taiwan. So participants needed to trust that although they were engaging in risk that could be amplified by digital communication circuits, these circuits could also provide a measure of protection for them, by keeping the struggle in the public domain, locally and internationally.

The interplay and feedback loops running between the geographically-dispersed, asynchronous, discursive processes and the emplaced, synchronous, embodied actions generated a collective trust. The horizontal structure allowed everyone to participate by expressing opinions and reservations, suggesting strategies, critiquing goals and methods, and sharing ownership and responsibility for the campaigns. People put names to their online comments, and faces to their actions, enabling participants to know and trust one another, and develop mutual respect, despite differences of opinion. As camaraderie evolved through the different collective processes on- and offline, risk was dispersed amongst the collective identity even if it was embodied individually. These are the embodied intersubjectivities discussed by Kevin McDonald (2006: 3), the “forms of sociality” that “transform the relationship between individual and collective,” in what he terms “global movements.” This is a sociality in which the “embodied and sensual,” and, I argue, the digital, plays a critical productive role. The Cartestian mind/body dualism is replaced by a holistic model of being human, and being a political subject, in which the senses and body are emplaced “within action” (McDonald 2006: 37).

So let us further examine the role of the digital in the formation of mutual trust and new kinds of collective agency. The campaigns we have examined in detail—the trees, the WTO protests, the ferry piers—have benefited through a diversity of protest and mediated actions. The “network paradigm” is producing “individuality” rather than “generality” argues McDonald (2006: 33), drawing upon Alberto Melucci's work. It follows that personal experience can be a productive force, as the “logic of generality and equivalence” is no longer the dominant feature of contemporary existence in postindustrial societies (McDonald 2006: 32). Informational capitalism has found ways to commodify the personal by exploiting the immaterial labour and sociality of subjects. In contrast, projects of counter-capitalism are decommodifying the intimate, the lived, and the imagined, using sociality to make ideas and experiences shared resources for common projects.

Again we come to the notion of affective composition, and also to the construction of a multitude comprised of self-representing individuals. The multitude is a diverse many, rather than a consolidated, undifferentiated, totalising mob or people. “Multitude equals singularity plus cooperation,” states Michael Hardt (quoted in Hawthorne 2006 n. p.) who enjoys encapsulating complex ideas as “formulas,” likening multitude also to “autonomy plus association.” 26 The multitude allows us to conceive of “a form of political organisation and of social life that is based on a relation of differences” (ibid.). The quality of difference, of differentiation of experiences, perspectives and positions, becomes a generative force producing new social imaginaries that flow into changes in material relations.27

The Hong Kong In-Media online platform allowed participants to know one another as members of a loose-knit community of shared interests. Whilst some activist organisations criticised Hong Kong In-Media for its refusal to adopt a clear-cut ideological position, this supposed weakness is a strength. With no rigid party line to cross, people could freely express and debate a range of opinions. Contemporary activism and its “theoretical reflection” by “what the Zapatistas call 'the generation of 94'” is marked by “the plurality of thinking without division into camps,” says Hardt (Kinsman 2007). 28 We can now create situations in which people work collaboratively “without insisting that we must always agree,” a trend which enables anarchists, communists and the non-aligned to work together (ibid.). This tendency began in the 1990s, as people realised that “autonomy and difference” actually “build movements” (ibid.). So what was happening in Hong Kong in the early twenty-first century reflected a global shift in how social movements constituted themselves.

Hong Kong In-Media's online forum enabled deep and continuing dialogues over lengthy time periods, facilitating strategic consensus on how to frame localised issues within global contexts, and encouraging divergent tactical approaches within multi-layered campaigns. Tolerant editorial moderation policy allowed all contributions, unless they contravened editorial guidelines around hate speech and other inflammatory modes. As with the Container Project participants agreed to follow basic principles about respecting each other and the space, enabling a form of open community in which all have the right to express themselves. Rather than be repressed, denounced or ignored, political and philosophical differences could be communicated openly through the web platform via articles and comments, and expressed through differentiated embodied actions within the contested spaces. Thus, whilst not agreeing with opposing views, people had the chance to understand where others were coming from, and develop trust in their positive intentions. Thus the online platform generated an emergent affective space encompassing heterogeneity that arguably periodic offline events such as public meetings would have failed to achieve, because real trust amongst strangers cannot be manufactured in short time frames.

Trust in the power of the digital to mobilise rapid responses to emerging situations in contested sites also strengthened social bonds within the network. For example, internet and mobile phone transmitted news of the arrest of a single pier protester resulted in numerous individuals arriving at the site to form a human chain in solidarity with the arrestee. Subsequent transmission of the unfolding events via digital modes prompted further actions, and operated on the affective plane also, as people emotionally engaged with the protesters' situations. Similarly, the piers' hunger strike and its reportage online and via the mass media worked in this way. Some campaign actions were highly mediated, such as the yellow ribbons wrapping around the CUHK trees that were designed as an affective provocation which would be effective in situ and also online. The colour yellow was a well-understood code denoting solidarity, and signatures posted online were harvested, transcribed and placed around the trees.

The above examples from two of the cases clearly demonstrate the role of the digital within the social realm, and the importance of forming conditions of trust to underpin individual and collective actions. In the Container Project digital technologies emplaced in innovative material architectures were a seductive lure that encouraged people to move beyond internalised fears and doubts, and external assumptions about their capabilities, to take the risk to learn new skills and creatively apply them. With Hong Kong In-Media, a society in which the digital was pervasive even if internet uptake was lagging behind some other industrialised countries, people did not need to be seduced into engaging with the technology per se, but they did need to trust the contexts in which it was being used.

The General Intellect Revisited

A striking area of commonality amongst the projects is their assertion that everyone is a cultural producer of one sort another. As an art project, Furtherfield fuses Joseph Beuys' famous assertion that “everyone is an artist” with Punk's exhortation to “do it yourself,” transposing these ideas to the domains of network art and other inherently participatory forms of artistic expression. As a journalism project, Hong Kong In-Media looks to Indymedia (“be the media”) and similar citizen journalism ventures, and declares that everyone is a journalist. The Container Project operates across education and development fields, drawing inspiration from a network of autonomous and often self-taught artists and activists, and announces at every workshop that “everyone is an expert.”29 These exhortations operate as self-fulfilling prophesies, as once someone has participated in a network art event, published an article, or taught someone else their newly-acquired skill, they are immediately a net artist, citizen journalist, or IT trainer.

By acknowledging the cultural knowledges and communicative capacities that participants bring with them, these projects, and many like them, counter the hierarchies of specialist and secret knowledges that have divided and classed people since at least the establishment of professional guilds in Western history. They flatten the production paradigm, making it a horizontal rather than a vertical plane of action. Project coordination, moderation, and gate-keeping functions are shared amongst a small cadre within each case, but there is the ability for participants to take on more responsibility within individual projects and campaigns according to their interests and skills. ICTs augment production and exchange by aggregating the products and sources of imagination, intelligence, and data, creating common archives and circulation channels. This is a socially-produced digital commons which in theory is infinitely scalable as there are no (inherent) limits to human intelligence and its expression. Can we consider the valorisation of peoples' experiences and expertise in these and similar projects as exemplifying the post-autonomist reworking of the theory of the general intellect? And if so, what are the emancipatory implications in terms of social change?

Marx developed his prescient theory of the general intellect in 1858 at a time when the popular revolutions throughout Europe had failed, and as the automation of industrial processes prevailed across Britain's manufacturing sector. Technical processes of automation follow those social processes of labour control that introduced the division of labour and atomisation of skills and tasks incrementally across the manufacturing domain. In other words, the social drives the technological, which in turn feeds back into the social. In the short section of the Grundrisse generally referred to as 'Fragment on Machines' Marx argued that as industrialisation proceeds manual labour will become less necessary to capital accumulation. Instead surplus value will be derived from the accumulated “abstract knowledge” embodied in the machines themselves. Machines are “organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified” (Marx, 1973: 706, emphasis in original).

The term “general intellect” was coined by Marx (ibid.) to signify this body of “general social knowledge.” The prevalence of “automatic system[s] of machinery” within a society indicates the extent to which general intellect “has become a direct force of production,” and how “the process of social life itself” consequently has been “transformed” (692, ibid.). The generic automaton consists of “numerous mechanical and intellectual organs” with workers “cast merely as its conscious linkages” (692). Whereas previously workers “animate[d]” their tools through their “skill and strength,” handling their “organs” with “virtuosity,” in the age of automation the machine “possesses skill and strength,” becoming the “virtuoso” itself (693). The workers are mute, obedient, and adjacent to the production process, their “activity” controlled by the rhythm of the mechanical systems, their experiences increasingly alienated. Labour is a “conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers” and “subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself,” diminishing the individual who is now merely “a link” perfrorming “insignificant doings” (ibid.). However, as production based on exchange value breaks down, emancipatory possibilities for a communist form of society are opened, Marx argued.

How has Marx's theory been interpreted within the frame of post-industrial society? Automation has not led to more free time but rather to “new and stable forms of domination” as capitalism's processes of capture and commodification have extended into the whole of private and social life, with labour a 24/7 experience for many (Virno 2001 n. p.). Workers' “disposable time” manifests “as poverty” in the forms of “redundancy, early retirement, structural unemployment and the proliferation of hierarchies” (ibid.). However, this situation can still seed liberatory change, as capital's gravediggers communicate their transformative agendas and coalesce their struggles and resources.

The general intellect forming the “epicentre of social production” for Marx entailed knowledges “objectified in fixed capital and embedded in the automated system of machinery” (Virno 2001 n.p.). Hence it was still owned and controlled by the elite class. But what happens when the general intellect is re-imagined as being unleashed and unbounded, residing within human beings themselves, the producers of the ideas and knowledges that are captured within the dead machines. This general intellect manifests as “living labour”; it exists as potentials and capacities that are at the core of what it is to be human (ibid.). These include the ability to create novel linguistic utterances and language, the power of mental computation and imagination, the tendency to develop self-reflexive moral and ethical frameworks, and so on. “Thoughts and discourses function in themselves as productive ‘machines’ in contemporary labour,” with no need for mechanical bodies or electronic souls (ibid.). When we consider the general intellect as intrinsic to cooperative biopolitical labour rather than embedded in the masters' machines, its emancipatory potential becomes clear.

The general intellect produces an egalitarian “mass intellectuality” as most individuals possess an innate capacity for learning, memory, abstraction, symbolic and verbal communication, and the production of unique thoughts and utterances (ibid.). This intellectuality therefore is not limited to an elite learned class, but is something belonging to everyone, to all speakers. Whereas Marx's theory the general intellect was owned by capitalists, by those whose exploitation of living labour enabled them to purchase the machines that embodied millennia of accreted human knowledge, in the post-autonomist view, everyone manifests the general intellect as it is an internal not external condition.

Let us place the example of the Furthernoise30 project within this revised framing of the general intellect. Here we have a geographically-dispersed network of experimental musicians, sound artists and aficionados using the internet to constitute themselves as an international community of cultural producers. As members of this community they can directly showcase, research and exchange works, and form new creative collaborations without their actions being monitored, mediated, and charged by corporate, content owners. Rather than original material being privatised and enclosed by copyright regimes (that operate as postindustrial equivalents of Marx's machines, crystallising multiple knowledges without acknowledgement and placing a premium and limits upon their use), creators can freely choose what prices and limits (if any) they place upon their artefacts.

in progress....more stuff to say

From this revised notion of the general intellect we come to refer to a related concept, that of the “public intellect” (ibid.). Rejecting the philosophical tradition that constructs mental thought processes as “solitary” activities with “no exterior manifestation,” the intellect has a “public character” (ibid.). There are two important effects of this public intellect. The first is a continuation of power by other means, as a “hypertrophic growth” of the State's administrative apparatus assumes dominance over the parliamentary system, becoming “an authoritarian concretion of the general intellect” (ibid.). The second effect is potentially more liberating, as the traditional division of labour in which tasks are ever more broken down and made more alienating is replaced by a “common participation to the ‘life of the mind’, the preliminary sharing of generic communicative and cognitive skills” (ibid.).

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I conclude with some words I found in the readme file of the wonderful Sparaconcetti31 software this morning. The Roman group Minmega devoped this free software in the 1990s specifically for use in the anarchist/free raves in the italian squatted social centres. People could incorporate pre-written poetic/political/passionate texts into the video mixes at the squat raves. the software (PC platform) is less than 30K to download (!), and is easy to use. It comes with this text file:

reject of the human society, come to be wilde in the city jungle.
one day the dream will be reality.

a day of love and resistance against the musts.
we get down in the street armed with our creations
we want to satisfy our needs on the street
to express our immagination on the street
to realize our will on the streets

in the global net of neocapitalism a virus is raising.
that's us.

*Note: This text is a cut and paste from the first draft of the Conclusion to my thesis... it has a long way to go still!

• 1. http://www.container-project.net
• 2. http://furtherfield.org
• 3. http://www.inmediahk.net/
• 4. http://www.mca.com.au/default.asp?page_id=81&content_id=6750
• 5. Raunig presented a talk entitled "The industrial turn -- smooth time, striated time" at Artists Week during the 2010 Adelaide Festival.
• 6. These range from selling user preferences to advertisers (Facebook), to embedding output in proprietary online viewers (YouTube), to hardwiring Digital Rights Management (DRM) into material devices (iPhone), to monetising previously free (gratis) tools and platforms (Ning). The Ning community are very pissed off about the recent monetisation of their free labour. See blog comments at http://blog.ning.com/2010/05/introducing-ning-pro-ning-plus-and-ning-min...
• 7. http://www.edu-factory.org
• 8. See http://wikileaks.org and http://www.thefileroom.org for example
• 9. http://www.critical-art.net/books/ted/
• 10. http://tinyurl.com/stallabrass-saatchi
• 11. http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/claire%20bishop-antagonism&r...
• 12. As of May 2010 this project is no longer online
• 13. http://adelaiderollerderby.com
• 14. http://adelaiderollerderby.com/teams/wild-hearses
• 15. http://adelaiderollerderby.com/teams/road-train-rollers
• 16. http://adelaiderollerderby.com/teams/road-train-rollers/profiles/bride-o...
• 17. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rhysnotrice/4591683376/in/set-7215762389833...
• 18. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Road-Train-Rollers/83806448227?ref=ts
• 19. http://www.myspace.com/miledieclub
• 20. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rhysnotrice/sets/72157623898339699
• 21. http://twitter.com/search?q=wild%20hearses
• 22. http://greatsouthernslam.com.au
• 23. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1004/msg00027.html
• 24. All quotes in this paragraph are from my transcribed notes of Gerard Raunig's Artists Week talk in February 2010.
• 25. See Shukaitis, S. & Biddle, E. 2009, 'Never Art/work!' Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, no. 7, viewed 23 February 2010 .
• 26. See http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/hardt-emergency-interview
• 27. The experience of second wave feminism which declared that “the personal is political” and subsequently led to new cooperative relations amongst previously separated groups and individuals could be brought to bear on this. Like feminism, the multitude is an “organisational project,” which requires active organisation from below to be made manifest; hence Hardt speaks of a “not yet multitude” (quoted in Hawthorne 2006 n. p.). One of the critiques of second wave feminism was that it was driven largely by White privileged elites who ignored the concerns of other groups of women (Indigenous, non-White, poor, etcetera). Whilst these excluded groups have been driving many of the circuits of anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism, anti-neoliberalism, their voices continue to excluded from theoretical discourse with notable exceptions such as the Zapatistas.
• 28. See http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/05-from-the-perspective-of-resi...
• 29. Some digital culture theorists and commentators use the term “produser” to describe the role of the grass roots cultural producer (see, for example, Bruns 2005). However I avoid using this term because of its associations with the often vapid Web 2.0 discourse.
• 30. http://www.furthernoise.org
• 31. http://ordanomade.kyuzz.org/Spara.htm