Degree Zero of Politics: Virtual Cultures & Virtual Social Movement

Abstract

This paper looks at the emergence of networked forms of political organisation and the role played by mailing lists and online conversations in the constitution of the movement for global justice. It argues that the relationship with the medium is an important part of the 'content' of virtual social movement. The Internet as a medium, with its capacity to connect and disconnect, functions as a way to experiment the consequences of a necessary return to a 'degree zero of politics' and therefore to the question: where does power come from and how should it express itself?



...Mailing lists present virtual social movements with the possibility to continuously formulate and reformulate the types of problems they wish to address on the basis of collectively produced information. They connect individuals and groups to eachother but also disconnect them from the totality of Internet users in order to focus on specific issues. They introduce users to a variety of opinions and information whilst also filtering and re-arranging for them the chaotic abundance of available information on the Internet.

What is the status of this online material in the context of my research? One thing I am concerned not to do is to look at the results of this work of monitoring, reading and participating simply in terms of ‘discursive constructions'. The notion of discourse, infact, as it has become widely used within some sectors of cultural studies, implies that reality is constructed by and through language. Language is understood as a signifying system, or a system of signs, that divides and orders the world of objects for human understanding and activity. From this perspective, then, all linguistic expression is a mediation that constructs different types of reality. It could appear to some, then, as the best obvious strategy to deal with this material.

However, I have chosen to use this material in a different way, not as a representation but as the production of a cultural and political practice which is not limited to the reproduction of signs. This is part of an effort throughout the book to produce a non-representational and non-representative analysis of the Internet. This rejection of are presentational method of cultural analysis does not aim to produce an unmediated truth on Internet cultures. On the contrary it is about the conscious choice of looking at Internet debates at the level of a specific cultural and political engagement with the medium, the types of communication that it enables and its relationship with the larger cultural context of late capitalist societies. In this sense, I am interested in how the Internet materialises what Pierre Levy has described as a ‘collective intelligence' and Paolo Virno, following Marx a ‘general intellect', a collective assemblage of bodies and machines where connectivity implies the release of a surplus value of potential.

What I aim to do in the book is to follow the features of these practices and engage with them at a conceptual level, relating them to issues debated in cultural and media studies.This means that within this paper I will not attempt an all-encompassing analysis of contemporary networked social movements. I will rather concentrate on those parts of these cultural and political practices that seem to be concerned more specifically with the media and their role in the constitution of different types of political cultures.

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