If modernism begins from a criticism of tradition, and postmodernism begins from the tearing of cultural fragments (memes) from their foundations to be used in new, playful, and sometimes ironic contexts (remixing), then what comes next and how does it begin?

(sidenote: If one wants a simple way to understand modernism and postmodernism, one needs only to watch the film Moulin Rouge! (2001). The film ingeniously tells the story of the birth of modernism using the strategies of postmodernism in both its cinematography and its soundtrack.)

If postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, as Fredric Jameson claims, then we should look to capitalism, with its constant cultural remixing for what comes next.

What characterizes a possible shift into something new? It is the tension in capitalism between its need to constantly remix and its need to mark property. With the internet, everyone is invited to participate in this grand remixing project. However, this would sooner or later have to run up against property. The question is asked: who owns the culture?

As the old way of looking at property has its last fits and death throws, we should be looking at what is now replacing it. Gilles Deleuze had the foresight to know that, while self-organization holds great promise for human activity, it could also be a new mode of control. His concept of the control society, in short, revolves around extracting free labor from self-organizing groups. This is precisely the logic behind Web 2.0.

The follow-up to modernism and postmodernism is the moment at which everyone is encouraged to participate in the remix — prosumers of participatory culture. What is going unsaid in the hype machine of the internet is the collapse of the distinction between information sharing and free labor (both “free” as in unpaid and “free” as in leisure activity). The multitude may be building a participatory culture, but it does not own it, and so far, attempts to build a commons have not solved the problem of property.

What then, poses any real threat to property? The concept of the swarm has been linked to the concept of noise by Alexander Galloway in his article “Starcraft, or, Balance” His argument is basically that noise is what cybernetic systems attempt to control. How they control is defined by the noise itself, the noise and the system are tied together in an immanent relationship of coevolution. Please forgive the following long quote:

“This leads to a second claim: the swarm is synonymous with organization and control. This is what is meant by the various references thus far to “balance.” In StarCraft, balance refers to the recuperation of the swarm as a set of variables and processes in algorithmic relation to the other members in the system. Cybernetic systems have always been defined, from Norbert Wiener forward, using the language of normativity, equilibrium, and homeostasis. (What happens when cybernetic systems skitter out of control? They go “offline.”) And this is why I may make the observation at the outset, perhaps offensive at first glance, that cybernetic systems are essentially sadistic in that they derive pleasure—they are affective, they are expressive—via the subduction of objects in their domain. It is no coincidence that one of the best simulations of swarm presence, StarCraft, is also one of the best examples of the RTS genre, the very genre that deals most strongly with normative, machinic management of complex systems. (Consider where StarCraft falls on the World of Warcraft/Counter-Strike gradient.) Thus with StarCraft there exists the swarm as the very exemplar of optimal flow and efficiency management. Balance then reemerges as the “virtue” of the cybernetic network. But it is a distinctly nefarious virtue bent on the subsumption of difference, be it the racial asymmetry of the Zerg swarm or the offline import of race itself. The game is, like Wikipedia or any number of contemporary digital phenomena, a “self-correcting text” in all senses of the phrase, politically reactionary and otherwise. This is where StarCraft becomes useful as allegory. The notion is not that the Zerg is a stand-in for this or that political force or that the Terrans refer to a certain terrestrial political formation to which one can point. Rather one must take the systemic equilibrium of these various political modes in sum: power today may leverage a variety of different formal modes (the sovereign fiat, modern disciplinary power, or informatic distributed control), all of which are eventually integrated and, via informatic simulation, brought into some sort of ecological balance such that the singular divisions of them are held up as utterly significant only to be denuded in the final calculation as completely inessential,” (101-2).

In the informal terminology of Web 2.0, the signal-to-noise ratio refers to the ratio between rational discussion and that which disrupts discussion. To deal with noise, once again, free labor is elicited from users to organize the content in such a way to reduce noise. Not only are we called upon to remix information to entertain ourselves, but also to organize that information so that others may also be entertained.

The noise is treated as a non-rational interruption — nonhuman, if you will. Which brings me to another long quote from Alexander Galloway’s often coauthor Eugene Thacker. Since I’m not sure how to end this piece or where this project is going exactly, I’ll take the easy way out by quoting him, especially because it refers nicely to my previous post, “The Autonomy of the Unhuman“:

“If the multitude, the many-as-many, is indeed `bottom up’ or self-organized, and if it does indeed refuse transcendental models of organization (the State, representational politics, institutions), to what degree is it centrally a human affair? Is there a presumption that the multitude reinscribes the agency of the individual subject by meta-individualizing it. But if the `life’ of the multitude is constituted at many levels - not the least being the relation between multitude, milieu and `world’ (to use Heidegger’s terms) - then to what degree is it centrally human? Are there `accidental multitudes’ or `nonhuman multitudes’? How to the social and political issues raised by `emerging infectious disease’, `natural disasters’ and environmentalism relate to the many-as-many? It ultimately leads to a consideration of the multitude as being nonhuman, a nonhuman politics of the multitude.”