Networks: modes of action and production in the global society
Monographic course of lectures directed by Jesús Carrillo
12th, 13th, 19th and 20th of April, 2005. 7pm – 9pm.
The course of lectures attempts an analysis of contemporary culture using as a starting point the reality of an expanding new paradigm - the net – which has made itself part of the organisation of processes of economics, politics and social interaction, and which derived from an intensification of the communicational flow during the last third of the 20th Century. The course will define and open up debate on some basic concepts of sociology and the theory of contemporary culture in the light of the analysis of specific phenomena and behaviour patterns in some way connected to the new net model, from the construction of subjectivity to the new world order.
Part of Desacuerdos. Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado español (Disagreements. On Art, Politics and the Public Sphere in Spain), a joint research project by the Arteleku-Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (UNIA arteypensamiento) and an exhibition and activities project jointly produced by these institutions and the Centro José Guerrero-Diputación de Granada.
Jesús Carrillo is a lecturer in Art History at the Madrid Universidad Autonoma. He is part of the Desacuerdos research team.
Programme
TUESDAY 12TH APRIL Network society: an introduction. A brief genealogy of the communicational society, technology and culture; the limits of technological determinism, real times and virtual spaces, and the intensification of communicational flow; neo-liberalism or liberation, the superposition of the global and the local, terror and the "new world order".
The starting point is the famous phrase coined by Manuel Castells, "network society" attempting a critical revision of the concepts and maxims of contemporary social analysis, with particular emphasis on the ambivalence and complexity of the processes which this describes, and pointing out the circularity of many of its arguments.
Both everyday situations and international events will be analysed in the light of the net model.
WEDNESDAY 13TH APRIL The virtualization of culture: new and old media, hypertext as a new "symbolic form", interfaces, modes of non-material production, event and simulacrum, art on the web and the web of art.
The last few decades have seen an enormous increase in technologically mediated processes of information and communication, making this kind of mediation the main field of production, and absorbing all the other processes of cultural production into its own logic, along with the very definition of knowledge. The art world has not escaped these processes, making an attempt, within its modes of production and exhibition, at assimilating these new methods of spreading culture, while at the same time engaging in aesthetic analysis of them.
TUESDAY 19TH OF APRIL Construction of worlds. Utopias and dystopias: modes of subjective construction and community life on the net: avatars, MUDS, chatrooms, digital cities, junk space; Internet as generic city, the womb (the matrix) defeats the phallus; cyberfeminist utopia.
The popularization of Internet in the 90's and the increasing centrality of technologically mediated communication processes have brought about a constellation of new types of interpersonal relationships and of new subjective positions and identity constructions. These can either be seen as throwing off the shackles and compartmentalisation of a disciplinary and patriarchal society, or, on the other hand, as subjectivity being placed totally at the service of the intensification of communication flows.
WEDNESDAY 20TH APRIL The reconfiguration of political agency: citizenry or multitude? the notion of the biopolitical, new modes of activism; hackers, pirates and nomads, Temporarily Autonomous Zones, the Indimedia, global resistance networks.
Both the exercise of citizen rule in representational democracy and mechanisms of antagonism based around the class struggle have been overtaken, on the one hand, by the absolute imposition of the logic of capital and its colonization of desire, and on the other, by the fragmentation and dispersal of the fronts of political struggle. If the qualitative concept of citizenship is being overtaken by the quantitative and less structured concept of the multitude, dissidence too is adopting equally discontinuous and de-territorialized patterns of behaviour. In both cases, that of the multitude and that of the activist movements, the field of action and of battle is the realm of communication.
The classes will be accompanied by a specific bibliography and list of specific case studies.