Beyond the 'Networked Public Sphere':
Politics, Participation and Technics in Web 2.0
Dr Ben Roberts, University of Bradford
School of Computing, Informatics and Media, University of Bradford
In some ways discussion of the political implications of Web 2.0
reinvigorates a debate about the democratising nature of the Internet
that began in the 1990s. The concept of participation is at the
heart of many current debates about politics and technology. There
are two main reasons for saying this. On the one hand is an ongoing
and increasing concern about public participation, or lack of it,
in modern (predominantly Western) democracies. This participatory
deficit is to be seen in falling voter turnout at elections, public
apathy on key political issues and scorn or indifference for elected
political representatives. On the other hand, there is a wave of
optimism concerning the potential of new technologies, particularly
the web, to enable new forms of participation in economic and public
life, to transform political debate and citizenship and to renew
the ailing (or perceived to be ailing) institutions of democracy.
This optimism around participation and politics, while it has played
a role in utopian visions of the internet more or less since its
inception, has been reinvigorated recently by the discussion around
the so-called Web 2.0. This article argues for a much more critical
or sceptical approach to the political promise of Web 2.0. Focusing
particularly on Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks,
it argues that current accounts of the participatory aspects of
web culture tend to take a rather narrow view of what such participation
might mean. However, aspects of the work of Bernard Stiegler, and
that of others in the Ars Industrialis group co-founded by Stiegler,
can help inform a more nuanced account of the relationship between
politics and participation. It looks specifically at the arguments
in Marc Crépon and Bernard Stiegler's book De la démocratie
participative, written during the recent French presidential
campaign, and will examine how the idea of participation articulates
with key themes in Stiegler's philosophy of technics. Finally it
suggests some ways in which this debate on participation might be
moved on.
Web 2.0 and Participation
The read/write web, encompassing weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis
and other technologies, is often seen as a key aspect of what is
understood by Web 2.0, marking a distinctive shift from earlier,
supposedly less participatory, web technologies. Leaving to one
side, for the moment, the question of whether the participatory
transformations ascribed to Web 2.0 are actually meaningful, there
is no question that these technological changes have been accompanied
by an increasingly strident optimism on the part of media commentators
about their transformative potential. To name just four recent examples
from an extremely rich field we have Clay Shirky's (2008) Here
Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations,
Tapscott and Williams's (2006) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration
Changes Everything, Charles Leadbeater's (2008) We-think:
The Power of Mass Creativity and Yochai Benkler's (2006) The
Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and
Freedom. The titles of these book alone testify to the almost-euphoric
sense of liberation that their authors ascribe to the participatory
and collaborative possibilities offered by these new technologies.
The argument about the democratising aspects of web participation
revolves, explicitly or otherwise, around a set of assumptions about
the nature of political communication and the functioning of what
is often referred to as the "public sphere". The general form of
this argument is that the Internet, or in this case Web 2.0, offers
a better medium for the creation of a public sphere in which a truly
democratic form of political debate can take place. This paper examines
critically these claims as they are made in Yochai Benkler's The
Wealth of Networks, which offers one of the most coherent and
rigorous attempts to outline and defend this thesis. What makes
Benkler's book interesting is partly that it puts arguments about
the democratising effect of the Internet in the context of long-standing
debates in political theory and political communication, most notably
Jürgen Habermas's ideas around the public sphere. But its other
strength is the central role that Benkler gives in the creation
of a new networked public sphere to the social, peer or "nonmarket
production" of content that are often said to characterise Web 2.0
(i.e. "User-Generated Content").
Benkler argues that a new network information economy, characterised
by nonmarket modes of participation and production, makes possible
a public sphere that better serves the exercise of political freedom
necessary in a liberal democracy. While Benkler's analysis of the
emergent network information economy is interesting, his subordination
of the changes we are seeing in this economy to normative models
of political communication and liberal democracy actually undermines
his more radical insights about nonmarket production.
The first part of the The Wealth of Networks argues for
the emergence of a new form of information economy, a 'networked
information economy' which replaces the 'industrial information
economy' which has been in force since the late-nineteenth century
(Benkler, 2006: 3). The primary feature of this networked information
economy, for Benkler, is the much greater role within it for 'decentralised
individual action' (Benkler, 2006: 3). This empowerment of individuals
is the result of two key changes in the new 'network information
economy'. The first is a change in the topology of information networks
from the hub and spoke model of mass media to a 'distributed architecture'
with 'multidirectional connections' (Benkler, 2006: 212). The second
is a dramatic reduction in or, as Benkler has it, the 'practical
elimination of', communication costs (Benkler, 2006: 212). Together
these changes allow a new, more democratic and participative, form
of political communication which Benkler calls the 'networked public
sphere':
The second major implication of the networked information economy
is the shift it enables from the mass-mediated public sphere to
a networked public sphere. This shift is also based on the increasing
freedom individuals enjoy to participate in creating information
and knowledge, and the possibilities it presents for a new public
sphere to emerge alongside the commercial, mass-media markets.
(Benkler, 2006: 10)
One important feature of Benkler's analysis of the 'networked public
sphere' is his claim that it is inherently more democratic than
the 'mass-mediated public sphere'. Benkler believes his argument
to be much more restricted than previous democratisation theses
about the Internet. As he puts it, 'any consideration of the democratising
effects of the Internet must measure its effects as compared to
the commercial, mass-media-based public sphere, not as compared
to an idealized utopia that we embraced a decade ago of how the
Internet might be' (Benkler, 2006: 10). The great strength of Benkler's
argument here is the understanding, derived from Habermas, that
participation, in and of itself, is not the key criteria by which
to assess the democratic promise of the web. The superiority of
the network public sphere over the mass-mediated public sphere cannot
be based simply on the ability of the web to give everyone a voice.
As Benkler is well aware, such an idea would fall foul of the Babel
objection: that is, that if 'everyone can speak at once, no one
can be heard' (Benkler, 2006: 10). If the network is to function
as a public sphere, in the Habermas sense, even the watered-down
version of Habermas that Benkler is propagating, it must do more
than this. Benkler therefore outlines a set of criteria, derived
from Habermas, by which to judge the efficacy of the new networked
public sphere. It must, according to Benkler show itself capable
of at least five things: Firstly, 'Universal Intake', in that it
must be open to everyone. Secondly, it must show itself capable
of filtering relevant information that is 'plausibly within the
domain of organised political action' (Benkler, 2006: 183). Thirdly,
it must have systems for accrediting information sources that are
likely to be reliable. Fourthly, it must be capable of synthesising
public opinion, bringing together disparate individual opinions
into a coherent public opinion. Fifthly, it must be independent
from government control.
Naturally Benkler goes on to argue that in fact the networked public
sphere does satisfy these criteria. This assertion is based largely
on research into the link structure of web pages, or the topology
of the network. What emerges from this research is that, according
to Benkler, far from being a massive collection of disparate information
and opinion, the web in fact presents a relatively organised network
topology. Benkler cites research showing 'that the number of links
that must be traversed from any point in the network to any other
point is relatively small' (Benkler, 2006: 252). This is because
creators of web pages tend to link to other material relevant to
their concerns. In this way, clusters or groups of pages emerge.
Bloggers link to stories in other blogs that they find to be topical.
Therefore a kind of order emerges from the chaos: pages that are
particularly topical or relevant find themselves being heavily linked
to and their ideas become more widely propagated. Benkler sees these
link structures or network topologies as evidence of the filtering
and salience necessary within a healthy public sphere. Benkler's
conclusion, backed by the research he cites in relation to network
topologies and a series of case studies, is that the network, in
particular, the blogosphere, does indeed provide a better form of
public sphere than mass media. As Benkler puts it, the network information
economy has, 'fundamentally altered the capacity of individuals,
acting alone or with others, to be active participants in the public
sphere as opposed to its passive readers, listeners or viewers'
(Benkler, 2006: 212).
Now there are a number of problems with Benkler's argument here
concerning the networked public sphere. The first set of problems
is with the way he uses Habermas. For Benkler's aim is quite explicitly
to incorporate the idea of the public sphere within liberal political
theory. Habermas's ideas tend to be associated, as Mark Warren points
out, with a more radical model of democracy (Warren, 1995: 167-8).
In particular Habermas's discursive model implies understanding
individual autonomy in terms of social relations which is in most
ways, as Benkler himself admits, quite alien to liberal political
theory (Benkler, 2006: 278-9; Warren, 1995: 172-3). Where Benkler
seems to think that Habermas's ideas can be blended with liberal
theory one might well wonder if the two aren't in fact completely
heterogeneous. Benkler's ideas of the public sphere, while drawing
heavily on Habermas in many respects, curiously ignore one or two
important aspects of his account. This becomes particularly evident
in the case studies that are used in the The Wealth of Networks
to demonstrate the operation of the network public sphere. The first
one concerns a plan by the Sinclair Broadcasting Group to air, a
week and a half before the 2004 US presidential elections, a documentary
critical of the Democratic candidate John Kerry's Vietnam war record.
Benkler's account shows how an online campaign, largely organised
around the BoycottSBG.com website, targeting advertisers
and local network affiliates, succeeded in undermining Sinclair's
stock price and eventually forcing the network to change its programming.
Benkler seems to see this case study as both an example of the power
of the mass-mediated public sphere (the assumed influence that Sinclair's
programme would have had) and of the ability of the network public
sphere to counter it. However, this is in fact a highly ambiguous
example of the networked public sphere. The Sinclair example demonstrates
the use of the web not particularly as a medium for the rational
debate of political policy, but rather as a tool for the organisation
of collective political action. Whilst this is interesting and commendable,
Habermas's conception of the public sphere explicitly excludes it
as a forum for collective action. The public sphere is a forum for
debate, not for political action. As Mark Warren puts it, 'Habermas
emphasises that public spheres cannot be organisers of collective
action...In any collective action, it is virtually impossible to
have symmetrical relations of power, even if relations are fluid
and voice is formally equal' (Warren, 1995: 171-2). It's very important
for Habermas that this sphere for rational debate is kept separate
from the political apparatus. The importance of this distinction
to Habermas - and Benkler's indifference to it - is telling. At
the very least it shows that while he thinks he claims to be operating
with a very 'limited definition' of the public sphere he actually
designates by this term in practice something much broader than
Habermas. Now this is not just nitpicking with Benkler's use of
Habermas but goes to the heart of his analysis: is "public sphere"
the right concept to describe the phenomena that Benkler is observing?
Why not describe them instead, for example, as new forms of sociality
or collectivity? The answer is that in Benkler's analysis new forms
of sociality and collectivity, for example, the social production
of content, are always subordinated to a basically liberal model,
the capability of the new network information economy to promote
'decentralised individual action'.
My point here is not, implicitly or otherwise, to argue for the
supremacy of debate to political action of vice versa. Nor am I
arguing for the absolute authority of Habermas's model of political
communication. The point is simply that, in as much as he misses
the significance of this distinction in Habermas, Benkler skews
the terms of the debate about the public sphere. By choosing, like
many others, to make Habermas's ideas around the public sphere the
reference point for his discussion of web participation, Benkler
is asking to be judged by the standards of that model. To satisfy
those standards Benkler really needs to find examples where online
discussion is defining the terms of political debate, independently
from state and other political apparatus, not merely being used
a tool to organise political action in response to a debate that
has already been constituted elsewhere.
But there is actually a wider point here. It's not at all clear
that "democracy", "citizenship", "participation" and so on are the
most relevant political concepts to describe the kind of changes
that we are seeing in relation to Web 2.0 and within what Benkler
calls the 'network information economy'. Other concepts that might
be just as useful would be "labour", "property" and "collectivity".
New forms of social labour are of course important to Benkler's
case, but they are important for what they make possible, which
is the better exercise of individual political freedom. Part of
the reason for this can be seen from within The Wealth of Networks
itself.
Nonmarket Production
One of the most interesting sections of Benkler's book is the chapter
entitled 'The Economics of Social Production'. The principal topic
of this chapter is the concept of 'nonmarket' production, the fact
that people who contribute to Wikipedia, social bookmarking
sites or even the blogosphere are collectively constructing works
of clear economic value but are, for the most part, not participating
in an economic market as such. For Benkler this raises three questions:
First, why do people participate? What is their motivation when
they work for...a project for which they are not paid or directly
rewarded? Second, why now, why here? What, if anything, is special
about the digitally networked environment...Third, is it efficient
to have all these people sharing their computers and donating
their time and creative effort? (Benkler, 2006: 91)
These are all, of course, good questions to ask but it's quite
telling that Benkler doesn't ask another question: is all this free
labour being exploited? This is, on the other hand, obviously a
question asked by others, for example Tiziana Terranova in Network
Culture:
Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited,
free labour on the Net includes the activity of building web sites,
modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing
lists and building virtual spaces (Terranova, 2004: 74).
Terranova rejects, or seeks to move on from, the answers that Benkler
finds to the questions he raises about nonmarket production (which
are, basically, gift economies and transaction-costs theory.) [1]
Terranova, drawing on the Italian autonomist tradition, prefers
a much more nuanced account of free labour, one that sees it as
symptomatic of transformations within capital and labour themselves.
The transformations within labour are not simply a product of the
networked information economy, or the technical affordances of the
internet as a distributed system, but are part of wider shifts in
the nature of labour in postindustrial societies:
The Internet does not automatically turn every user into an active
producer, and every worker into a creative subject. The process
whereby production and consumption are reconfigured within the
category of free labour signals the unfolding of another logic
of value, whose operations need careful analysis (Terranova, 2004:
75).
In fact there are two essential points that we can take from Terranova's
argument here. The first is that we ought to be suspicious of the
generalisation that the network, or as Benkler has it, the 'network
information economy', is turning the 'passive' consumers of mass
media into 'active' producers of the network public sphere. There
is in fact a long and distinguished tradition in media studies which
critiques the idea that audiences are simply 'passive' in their
relation with mass media.[2]
Consideration of this tradition might help to undermine the simple
association between activity/passivity and production/consumption.
The second point that Terranova is right to assert is that understanding
the kind of changes implicit in the social production of internet
content can't be simply a matter of understanding changes in network
technology, but must always be understood in relation to wider social
and economic changes. The significance of this point is underlined
by existing perspectives on technological change offered by Science
Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory, which tend to argue
that, as Andrew Feenberg puts it, 'technology is a social phenomenon
through and through' (Feenberg, 2003: 74). Although Benkler's approach
is undoubtedly more subtle than many net theorists, and despite
his own rebuttal of the charge of technological determinism (Benkler,
2006: 369-72), he continues to regard the transformations he describes,
such as social production or free labour, as fundamentally phenomena
of network communications, rather than as examples of wider social
change.
Moreover, although repeatedly making the claim about the centrality
of participation to democratic life, Benkler doesn't really attempt
to engage with the history of the concept of participation in democratic
theory. Although in many ways more rigorous than other attempts,
fundamentally Benkler's thesis is fairly commonplace: there's a
problem with the functioning of democracy in modern Western democracies,
this problem is largely due to the limited kind of political debate
that takes place in mass media, and the web can solve this by enabling
greater participation. But what does participation really mean here?
Benkler's response to this question is shaped in no small part
by his desire to reconcile his arguments with liberal political
theory. As Benkler is clearly aware there is a conflict between
on the one hand, arguing, as he does, that culture and the way it
is produced is important to the operation of democracy and the argument
that democracy is essentially the expression of individual freedom.
As soon as you question the autonomy or preexistence of individuals
in relation to culture, you are already at odds with liberal political
theory. Benkler tries to reconcile that as follows:
I claim that the modalities of cultural production and exchange
are a proper subject for normative evaluation within a broad range
of liberal political theory...Liberal political theory needs a
theory of culture and agency that is viscous enough to matter
normatively, but loose enough to give its core foci &mdash the
individual and the political system &mdash room to be effective
independently, not as a mere expression or extension of culture
(276-7).
As the above makes clear, the relationship between culture and
democracy here is essentially narrow. In fact for Benkler the benefit
of the networked public sphere &mdash and the participation that
it implies &mdash is that it renders culture more "transparent"
thereby minimising the effect of culture on individual agency or
autonomy. The kind of participation that Benkler describes is limited
to avoiding "culture" getting in the way of liberal democracy, rather
than any inherent change in the nature of democracy itself. Paradoxically,
then, despite the fact that his argument is entirely concerned with
participatory culture and its benefits for democracy, Benkler is
not very interested in wider questions of participation and democracy,
above all not ones that would question the liberal model.
In fact, surprisingly given its subject matter, Benkler's approach
raises two fundamental questions, without addressing them at any
great length. First, what is the relationship between technological
change and social and political change? Secondly, what role does
participation play in democracy? To comprehend the kinds of changes
Benkler is concerned with we really need to address and challenge
in a more radical fashion the relationship between technology, culture
and democracy.
Participation, Technics and Individuation
It's really the question about participation and new technology
that is addressed in Marc Crépon and Bernard Stiegler's De
la démocratie participative (On Participatory Democracy)
(Crépon and Stiegler, 2007). The essays which comprise this
volume were written during the French presidential election and
respond particularly to the campaign of Ségolène Royal,
which consistently evoked the idea of participatory democracy, as
evidenced by the website Desirs d'avenir (Desires for the
future) which solicited contributions from the public in the building
of her manifesto. Royal's commitment to participatory democracy,
apparently inspired in part by the work of Rancière, is treated
with some disdain by Crépon and Stiegler.
In his essay, 'La démocratie en défaut' ('Democracy
in default'), Crépon argues that this call for participatory
democracy must be analysed in terms of the coincidence of two phenomena:
the first is a crisis in representative democracy, characterised
by declining voter turnouts, disaffection with the political class
and so on; the other is the rise of the new technological possibilities
of the web. For Crépon this crisis in representative democracy
is itself twofold, divided between what he calls the 'attachment',
i.e., the attachment to hard-won democratic institutions, and the
'desire', i.e., the desire for democracy as a kind of open possibility.
This desire is explained by Crépon with reference to Derrida's
concept of a democracy that is always 'to come', which makes this
desire also, constitutively, a kind of default or lack défaut.
As Crépon puts it, this default 'maintains confidence in
the possibilities of untold and unprecedented social, moral and
political relations that democracy could or should still harbour'
(Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 27-28). For Crépon participatory
democracy can only be meaningful if it gives a chance to both the
attachment (to existing democratic institutions) and the desire
for democracy as an open possibility, democracy to come etc.). Without
addressing both these poles of the democratic crisis, participatory
democracy might be even worse than the crisis it seeks to redress.
Crépon says, 'the risk then would be that, in the call for
participatory democracy, the mirror of a direct participation, free
from all mediation, a trap (miroir aux alouettes), finishes
by effacing democracy itself'.[3]
In other words, the risk would be that such a participatory democracy
would descend into a kind of interactive televised populism.
Both Crépon and Stiegler see as dangerous the vision of
web participation in which it opens a 'closed' political establishment
to a new exteriority of public. The paradigmatic examples of this
would be the televised interactive debates of the Royal campaign.
Such participation makes great play of opening up debate to a class
of people who are not political insiders, of allowing anyone to
speak regardless of knowledge or expertise. But this utopian vision
displays a kind of naivety about the nature of political discourse.
As Crépon puts it, 'The words that everyone uses to voice
their opinion are rarely theirs. They are tributaries of sources
of information that are, for the majority of citizen-televison viwers,
televisual information' (Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 54).
How meaningful is such participation when its terms and vocabulary
are decided elsewhere? Indeed what can appear to happen in such
debates is a kind of staged engagement with the outside, one which
simply mirrors the political establishment. If the aim is to get
outside a manipulated media discourse, what one finds at that 'outside'
is merely a reflection of the inside, using the same language but
with the authority of the ordinary and the popular. The problem,
on the one hand, is that it can seem that apparently profound shifts
in communication really represent nothing more than extension of
the existing tools of political marketing or, '...a way to channel,
identify, catalyse and performatively transform political tendencies...because
what is targeted and solicited here is less an opinion than an audience'
(Crêpon and Stiegler, 2007: 106). The danger, on the other
hand, is that these forms of debate simply offer a way for the political
to appear more legitimate, appear more open and accountable, while
all the time de-legitimising and short circuiting the proper apparatus
of representative democracy.
In order to explore what true participatory democracy might mean,
Crépon invokes C.B. Macpherson's four models of democracy
(which are also presented to some extent in Macpherson as four stages
of democracy). These models are protective democracy, developmental
democracy, equilibrium democracy and participatory democracy. The
protective democracy model, which Macpherson associates with Bentham
and James Mill, serves primarily to protect the self-interest of
citizens from bad government. In this model, Macpherson argues,
'there is no enthusiasm for democracy, no idea that it could be
a morally transformative force; it is nothing but a logical requirement
for the governance of inherently self-interested conflicting individuals'
(Macpherson, 1977: 43). Developmental democracy on the other hand,
which Macpherson ascribes to John Stuart Mill, Dewey and others
contained within it, 'a moral vision of possibility of the improvement
of mankind, and of a free and equal society not yet achieved' (Macpherson,
1977: 43). Equilibrium democracy, the system which comes to prevail
in the twentieth century, abandons this moral vision and is to a
large extent for Macpherson a return to the values of protective
democracy: democracy reconciles the competing and diverse interests
of citizens through the party system where voters as consumers choose
from policies like products offered by the various parties. The
equilibrium model entails no sense of individual or social improvement
but simply a reconciliation of competing interests through the market
system of elections.
For Crépon, Macpherson's models of democracy are useful
because they help to diagnose the democratic crisis. Equilibrium
democracy situates the citizen as a consumer of political products
of which they have no control of the supply, as Crépon puts
it:
In making the citizen-electors hypothetical consumers of political
products over which they have no mastery of the supply (and of
which it must be analysed by what channels and which technologies
they are imposed on them), the equilibrium democracy model only
transposes the symbolic and spiritual misery of the market onto
the political domain.[4]
Here we can see the difference between Benkler and Crépon
in sharp relief. For Benkler the kind of participation empowered
by the web is not a move away from what is described here as equilibrium
democracy. Indeed, far from it: the best that can be said of Benkler's
'network public sphere' is that it fixes the equilibrium model by
empowering consumers and therefore enabling a 'freer' market in
the consumption of political products. For Benkler there is nothing
wrong with the political system per se, there is just a problem
with political communication that can be fixed by enabling a more
transparent form of communication, one 'freed' from the distortions
of mass media. For Crépon, on the other hand, it is because
culture is right at the heart of democracy that its industrialisation
in the form of mass media poses such a problem.
In this description we can also see Crépon moving the debate
into distinctively Stieglerian terrain with the concept of 'symbolic
misery' (as outlined by Stiegler in the two volumes of De La
misère symbolique (Stiegler, 2004a, Stiegler, 2005).
Stiegler defines symbolic misery as 'a loss of individuation which
results from a loss of participation in the production of symbols'.[5]
The loss of participation here is fundamental to the production
of culture in the equilibrium model. It cannot be corrected simply
by the appearance of a communication medium that harnesses 'decentralized
individual action'. In the first place this is because Crépon
and Stiegler have a very different understanding of the relationship
between culture and individual or group identity than Benkler's
narrow liberal model allows. This model can be seen in the reworking
of the relationship between 'technics' and 'individuation'.
The concept of individuation, which is central to Stiegler's work,
is itself derived from the concept of psychic and collective individuation
in the work of Gilbert Simondon. For Simondon the production of
the 'I', the individual and that of the collective 'we', the group
are inseparable.(Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 68n1). Collective
individuation is to be understood as a process of transformation
within a preindividual milieu and not as the coming together of
a set of preexisting individuals. The loss of individuation which
forms part of the condition Stiegler calls symbolic misery relates
to the theorisation of technics which Stiegler talks about in his
early work. For Stiegler philosophy is both founded on and founders
on what he calls 'technics'. What he means by technics is not to
be confused with technology in the modern sense. Technics encompasses
everything from primitive tools through systems of writing to modern
telecommunications. Stiegler even thinks under the terms technics
something like language, for example. For him, 'technics is the
condition of culture' and it would be 'absurd to oppose technics
to culture' (Stiegler, 2004b: 59). Technics in this sense is therefore
inseparable from culture and society and it makes no sense either
to talk of technics determining culture and society or vice versa.
Culture and society are not constituted by technics as if by cause
but rather constituted through it. Nor does technics in Stiegler's
sense represent scientific progress or a deterministic evolution;
rather, however strange this may seem, technics a kind of pure accidentality
or contingency. Indeed for Stiegler it is because of the exteriorisation
of the human into technics, artefacts or inorganic organized matter
that culture and society constitute themselves contingently.
Mortals, having no qualities except by default, prosthetically,
are on the contrary, animals condemned to seek ceaselessly their
quality, that is, their destiny, that is, their time [...] Humans
are only by default. That means, they are only in as much as they
become [6]
Technics thus understood is not merely instrumental, a means to
an end, where the 'end' remains a resolutely human need or desire.
Rather technics shapes what it means to be human in the first place
and the 'human' in this sense is constituted always already through
technics. Indeed it is the prosthesis of the human: the human is
constituted not by some interior capacity (e.g. consciousness) but
by a new prosthetic relationship with matter. If there is a crisis
caused by technics in the form of modern technology it is not because
something 'natural' or human is supplanted by something technological.
Rather it is because there has been a transformation in the essential
technicity that belongs to the human. To be more specific there
has been a transformation in a specific form of technics that Stiegler
calls 'mnemotechnics' or tertiary memory. All forms of technics
support a type of cultural, non-genetic or 'epiphylogenetic', memory,
but there is a subset that 'one must call mnemotechnics, to speak
properly',[7]
a type of technics that is specifically 'made for keeping memory'.[8]
One obvious example of mnemotechnics is writing and indeed Stiegler
dedicates a large part of the second volume of La technique
et le temps, 'La Désorientation', to a discussion of
the transformation in mnemotechnics represented by the shift to
orthographic writing.[9]
However, it is in a new transformation in the course of mnemotechnics,
one represented by the audiovisual tele-technologies of mass media,
that lies the cultural crisis of which Stiegler writes. In part
this is because these new forms of audio-visual recording introduce
a new class of industrial temporal object. Simondon argues that
the rise of the machine tool removes the ability of the skilled
worker to differentiate their labor from that of other workers:
'a loss of individuation' which Stiegler sees reproduced at the
level of consciousness by the new teletechnologies and their industrialization
of memory. The rise of these new 'orthothetic' analogue and digital
recording technologies marks a break with the recording technology
of orthographic writing.
[10] Moreover, the new industrial temporal objects of analogue
and digital recording represent a new relationship between singularity,
consciousness and time:
The society of industrial temporal objects thus transforms our
existences into a prefabricated series of clichés that
we string together without perceiving very much. The coincidence
of the time of the industrial temporal objects' flow with our
consciousnesses has the consequence that, in making them our objects
of consciousness, that is, of attention, we embrace and adopt
their time: we adhere to them in such great intimacy that they
come to substitute themselves for the proper temporalities of
our consciousnesses. Such is the catastrophic utilization, by
cultural industries, of the power of temporal objects, which results
in a ecological catastrophe in the milieu of spirit that is epiphylogenesis.
[11]
However sceptical one might be to ascribing passivity to the mass
media audience, it would seem that the industrial model of mass
media does situate the audience as consumers, passive or active,
of media products. To that extent mass media implies an asymmetric
relationship between producers and consumers. As Stiegler argues
in De la démocratie participative, whereas language
is an associative symbolic milieu, in that everybody who understands
a language is intrinsically a speaker of that language, mass media
represent a dissociative milieu in that they oppose producers to
consumers (being able to consume television doesn't imply being
able to make it) (Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 75-79). It's
obvious to both Benkler and Stiegler that in some sense the new
types of collaborative cultural production associated with Web 2.0
represent a potential challenge to the industrial and asymmetric
model of cultural production. However, Stiegler argues web participation
will only be meaningful politically if it brings about a new type
of associative milieu (and argues for government intervention to
promote these types of usage of the web). For Benkler, the main
benefit of the network is improved possibilities for communication
between already-constituted individuals, leading to enhanced possibilities
for 'decentralised individual action'. For Crépon and Stiegler,
the network's potential will only be realised in new forms of individual
and collective individuation, that is, new ways in which individuals
and groups are constituted, new forms of sociality. This leads them
to be much more cautious about participation as the achievement
or destination of Web 2.0.
The issue of participation is the pivot between those who understand
the web in the context of wider social and cultural transformations
and those who see it primarily as a communication medium. In Benkler
the problem of participation is construed negatively: the network
is 'freer' than previous forms of media and this removal of the
barriers of corporate ownership and control allows an organic decentralisation
and empowerment of individuals to occur. However, for Stiegler participation
to be meaningful must also represent a much more positive social
and economic empowerment. More widely, a true participation must
mean more than simply new technologies of participation, it is a
politico-economic project, not simply a technological one (Crépon
and Stiegler, 2007: 85). In a sense this echoes the argument we
have seen Terranova make earlier. Benkler (and others) are far too
ready to see web participation or nonmarket production as simply
consequences of network communications. However, participation,
like free labour, must be understood in the context of wider social
and economic changes and not simply as a network phenomenon.
Author's Biography
Ben Roberts is a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of
Bradford.
Notes
[1] On transactions-costs theory,
see Tapscott and Williams, 2006: 55-57; Benkler, 2006: 106-116.
[back]
[2] On the history and development
of this tradition, see for example Moores, 1993. [back]
[3] 'Le risque alors serait que,
dans l'appel d'une démocratie participative, le miroir d'une
participation directe, affranchie de toute médiation, miroir
aux alouettes, ne finisse par effacer la démocratie elle-même.'
(Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 29). [back]
[4] En faisant des citoyens-électeurs
d'hypothétiques consommatuers de produits politiques dont,
en réalité, ils ne maitrîsent pas l'offre (et
dont il faut analyser par quels canaux, avec quelles technologies
il leur sont imposés), le modèle de la démocratie
d'équilibre ne fait que transposer la misère symbolique
et spirituelle que produit le marché sur le plan politique.'
(Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 42).[back]
[5] 'Par misère symbolique,
j'entends donc la perte d'individuation qui résulte de la
perte de participation à la production des symboles' (Stiegler,
2004a: 33).[back]
[6] 'Les mortels, n'ayant pas de
qualités sinon par défaut, prothétiquement,
sont, au contraire, des animaux condamnés à rechercher
sans cesse leur qualité, c'est-à-dire leur destin,
c'est-à-dire leur temps. Cette temporalité se fonde
dans ce fait que, à l'origine, dans ce fait que, à
cet égard, les mortels n'ont pas d'origine. Les hommes ne
sont en quelque sorte que par défaut. C'est-à-dire
qu'ils ne sont qu'en tant qu'ils deviennent.' (Stiegler, 2004b:
43).[back]
[7] 'Il faut soigneusement distinguer
la technique comme milieu de la mémoire épiphylogenetique
en général, et ce que l'on doit appeler les mnémotechniques
à proprement parler' (Stiegler, 2004b: 59). [back]
[8] 'faite pour émoire' (Stiegler,
2004b: 60). [back]
[9] See Stiegler, 1996: 67-73. [back]
[10] 'Orthothetic' is Stiegler's
neologism of which Stiegler comments: 'I have had to construct this
neologism on the basis of the Greek words orthotès thésis.
The orthotès , and the thésis [position]. The utterances
that I call "orthothetic" (as is the case with alphabetic utterances)
set down [posent] the past exactly.' ('J'ai dû construire
ce néologisme à partir des mots grec orthotèsthésis.
L'orthotès 'exactitude, et la thésis . Les énoncés
que je dis «orthothétiques» (c'est le cas des
énoncés alphabétiques) posent exactement le
passé' (Stiegler, 2004b: 64-5). [back]
[11] 'La société
des objets temporels industriels transforme ainsi nos existences
en séries préfabriquées de clichés que
l'on enchaîne sans trop s'en apercevoir. La coÏncidence
du temps de l'écoulement des objets temporels industriels
avec le temps de nos consciences a pour conséquence que,
en faisant nos objets de conscience, c'est-à-dire d'attention,
nous en épousons et en adoptons le temps : nous y adhérons
en si grande intimité qu'ils viennent se substituer aux temporalités
propres de nos consciences. Telle est l'utilisation catastrophiques,
par les industries culturelles, de la vertu des objets temporels
: il en résulte une catastrophe écologique dans ce
milieu de l'esprit qu'est l'épiphylogenèse' (Stiegler,
2004b: 85-6). [back]
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