Kate Southworth

According to sociologist Manuel Castells, the distributed network is the organisational form of the Information Age and the Internet is its technological base. [1]  The significance of thinking the relationship between the distributed network and the Internet in this way cannot be over-stated.  Rather than viewing them as synonymous with each other, Castells argues that the Internet be understood as a tangible manifestation of the distributed network form.  Conceptualising the distributed network not merely in technological terms but as organisational form allows it to take up its place as part of a significant historical shift within capitalism and beyond, that informs the way that subjects, objects, processes and relations are organised. It is important to see here that the distributed form is a new structure emerging across at aspects of life and at all levels of generality.

It is important to see here that the shift from centralised to distributed structure impacts on the organisational form of non-technological entities as diverse as financial markets, categorisation of knowledge, universities, art galleries and art works, as well as on the development of new kinds of cultural and academic structures. If the network is the vehicle through which processes and relations of contemporary capitalism are intensified and distributed to areas of life hitherto outside the realm of the market, what does that mean for our day-to-day existence?

Whilst Castells referred to these changes as The Information Age, many prefer the term Globalization [2], and other terms such as ‘the post-industrial society, the information society, the network society, disciplinary society, control society, informatization, scale-free networks, small-worlds and smart mobs’ [3], are also used. Here, I shall use the term ‘network society’. Network society refers to the significant historical change in the decades since 1975 that historian Eric Hobsbawm suggests represent ‘the greatest, most rapid and most fundamental (set of changes) in recorded history’ [4]. Social theorist, Frank Webster, agrees that there is little reason to dissent from Hobsbawm’s view, suggesting that ‘indeed it is arguable that the last quarter of a century is without precedent in the scale and scope of historical transformation’ [5]. The exact nature and extent of this change is fiercely debated, and competing analyses are often rooted in claims and denials regarding epochal shifts, the decline or otherwise of the nation-state and corresponding transformations in social relations. At its heart, though, is the extent to which contemporary change is determined by technological advances such as the Internet, and whether such changes represent a break with or an intensification of existing capitalist relations. Political differences between these two positions inform analyses of the network society, and also, I suggest, have contextual significance for enquiry into contemporary art forms such as net art, relational art , expanded painting and net:art.

Suggesting that network society perpetuates and promotes long-term capitalist relationships enormously, Frank Webster declares that ‘while there is undoubted change taking place, and this at a speed and with a reach hitherto unimaginable, it is for the most part a matter of the continuity, consolidation and extension of established [capitalist] relations’ [6]. Whilst acknowledging the significance of information, knowledge, advanced communications and computing technologies to these developments, he urges resistance to any consideration that these are the cause or indeed privileged factors in contemporary change. [7] Instead, Webster identifies on-going features of capitalism such as: ability to pay; market criteria, competition, private ownership over state holdings, wage labour and commodification of activities as markers of network society. Accepting that his thesis is paradoxical, in that he acknowledges the significance of contemporary change whilst simultaneously identifying such changes as part of a socio-economic system that has been around for a long time, Webster theorises network society as the advancement of the enclosure movement. It is in the reorganisation as private property of what previously were publicly-held resources that has specific parallels with the great enclosures that took place in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Commodification and privatisation of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations accompanied the transformation of common, collective and state property rights into exclusive private property rights. Webster notes that through the great enclosures ‘people’s lives were very often torn asunder as, for the most part, they were brought into the sphere of market capitalism and required to adapt to new ways of working and new ways of conducting relationships (factory labour, the cash nexus, property rights, market rather than self-provision of goods)’. [8] Network society ‘brings further and rapid spread of market criteria and conditions’ such as these. [9]

This development has both extensive and intensive dimensions. On the one hand, it promises to enclose the entire globe and, as it does so, to introduce commercial rules and regulations which drive out alternatives (customary practices, public provision, non-market habits). On the other hand, it penetrates even deeper into private realms of life, with leisure, child-rearing, and even sexuality more and more subject to market intrusions. [10]

Indeed, it is the intensification of these processes of commodification; rendering social relationship as market relation by placing economic value on those activities not previously considered in economic terms that Christopher May identifies as a defining and central feature of capitalism. Responding to Webster, May identifies the concept of ‘enclosure’ as ‘a crucial and central element of information-based capitalism’ [11] and David Harvey argues that ‘the corporatisation and privatisation of hitherto public assets (such as universities)’ and ‘public utilities of all kinds indicat[e] a new wave of ‘enclosing the commons.’ [12] Following Castells, and Webster, May and Harvey’s positioning of network soiciety as a continuation and intensification of capitalist conditions, the distributed form, can be understood as global capitalism’s organisational structure and structuring logic. If the network is the vehicle through which processes and relations of contemporary capitalism are intensified and distributed to areas of life hitherto outside the realm of the market, its impact on day-to-day existence, inside and outside the cultural sphere, is phenomenal.

The displacement of social relationships with market relations brings about a qualitative change to the ways we interact with each other: a proceduralisation of the everyday that is characteristic of what Juergen Habermas calls the ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ occurs, in which rationalising systems infiltrate more and more areas of everyday life substituting protocols and procedures for informal modes of organisation. Given the network’s infiltration of increasingly more areas of everyday life, it is worth taking time to look at some of the consequences of this shift.

Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action’ [13] is concerned with whether increasingly rationalised contemporary societies are able to create conditions within which ‘communicative action’ can take place. He argues that the lifeworld which affords individuals the possibility of reaching common understandings with others through mutual, face-to-face encounters over time is becoming disabled by ‘non-communicative’ fully-rationalised systems. For Habermas, participatory democracy is possible through the balanced interaction between lifeworld and system; with lifeworld norms and values legitimizing systemic processes of accumulation. The lifeworld represents the processes and relations through which symbolic reproduction and the generation of influence and value-commitments that sustain the system takes place. The lifeworld is where the system itself is legitimised.

For Habermas and German sociologist, Max Weber, the archetypal manifestation of processes of rationalisation is the bureaucratic organisation. Weber, the first to use and describe the term bureaucracy defines it as ‘an organisational structure that is characterised by many rules, standardised processes, procedures and requirements, number of desks, meticulous division of labour and responsibility, clear hierarchies and professional, almost impersonal interactions between employees’. [14] Operating on an impersonal level with a well-established division of labour the bureaucracy is hierarchical and centralised with paid, full- time administration of officials that form a chain of command imposed by written rules and regulations. Designed to maximise the effective and efficient coordination, management and control of parts in a system, bureaucratic structures require well-defined boundaries between entities, clear lines of command, and rules to facilitate interaction between humans within the system and between humans and the system. By necessity, bureaucracies reinforce the distinction between self and other.

The repression of lifeworld forms of integration by systemic forms of integration (such as the market and bureaucracy) result in loss of meaning and freedom, and ultimately, in an uncoupling of lifeworld and system. The colonisation of the lifeworld replaces qualitative decision-making processes with actions mediated by economic and political logics. It makes possible a heightening of systemic complexity, which becomes so hypertrophied that it unleashes system imperatives that burst the capacity of the life-world they instrumentalize’. [15] Colonisation of the lifeworld directs the behaviour of the individual or group towards the protocols and procedures of the rationalized system: a system that engenders principles such as efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, minimising individual scope of action and decision-making. When action is ‘no longer embedded in relations of reciprocity’ [16] and when labour is a raw commodity ‘alienated from the life context of producers’ then ‘relations of indifference that mark the worker’s behaviour toward others and toward himself’ are generated. Such marks of indifference - expressed as labour power neutralized - are ‘constituted as abstract, “indifferent to the lifeworld,” and available for systemic imperatives’. [17] Thus, people ‘adopt an objectivating attitude to each other and to themselves; transforming social and intrapsychic relations into instrumental relations’. [18]


At the beginning of the 21st century the archetypal manifestation of rationalization is no longer the bureaucracy, but rather the network. It is into these established processes of rationalisation - enclosure and commodification - that new technologies insert themselves; [19] and through the emergence of the distributed network as organizational form [20] that the lifeworld within global capitalism becomes vulnerable to particular protocological forms of rationalization, and to an intensification of the rationalisation of the everyday. What is important to note here is that whilst the shift from bureaucratic and hierarchically ordered systems, taxonomies and relations to those informed by the logic of the network is having a significant impact on all aspects of cultural production, dissemination and consumption, it marks an extension and intensification rather than replacement of existing processes of rationalisation. But, the extension and intensification is so profound as to have the potential to be not just quantitatively but qualitatively different.

Notes

[1] Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, 1.

[2] See for example, Burbach and Robinson, "The Fin-de-Siecle debate: Globalization as epochal shift," 10-39.

[3] Thacker, “Foreword: Protocol is as Protocol Does,” xii.

[4] Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, in Webster, “Information, Capitalism and Uncertainty,” 70.

[5] Webster, “Information, Capitalism and Uncertainty,” 69.

[6] Webster, “Information, Capitalism and Uncertainty,” 70.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., p.72

[10] Ibid., p.72

[11] May, “Information Society, Commodities and Continuity: A response to Professor Frank Webster’s Information, Capitalism and Uncertainty,” 91.

[12] Harvey, The New Imperialism, 148.

[13] Habermas, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Vol. 2, The Theory of Communicative Action.

[14] https://www.toolshero.com/management/bureaucratic-theory-weber/# (retrieved 10th March 2020)

[15] Habermas, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Vol. 2, The Theory of Communicative Action, 155.

[16] Robinson, “Social theory and globalization,” 171.

[17] Habermas, Lifeworld and System, Vol. 2, 335-336.

[18] Ibid., 336.

[19] Robins and Webster, Times of the Technoculture, 97.