[iDC] netporn midlife crisis?

[Matteo Pasquinelli]

Hi list, just a note:
my comment on the Lizzy Kinsey Report
‘Maggots and Parasites: Bites of a Modest Dystopian Pornography’
http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/DystopianPorn.pdf

is an abridged and colloquial version of an essay I published months  
ago:
'Libidinal Parasites and the Machinic Excess: On the Dystopian  
Biosphere of Networks'
http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/LibidinalParasites.pdf

Best, M


---

Libidinal Parasites and the Machinic Excess:
On the Dystopian  Biosphere of Networks



       A widespread taste for pornography means that
       nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
       — J.G. Ballard, “New from the Sun”[1]

       Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind
       of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort
       device for throwing a wild joker into the game?
       — J.G. Ballard, Myths of the Near Future[2]




1. Porn on Diazepam and the technopathology of immaterial labour

Many western intellectuals reassured us that pornography is nothing
but the ultimate embodiment of the society of spectacle and late
capitalism commodification (Baudrillard[3], Agamben[4], Zizek[5],
Shaviro[6], to name only few). They say that it is nothing
politically liberating, and at the same time nothing dangerous. In
the intellectual world there is clearly an attempt to sanitise
pornography, whereas we witness the rise of a politically-correct
pornography (the so-called indie porn or alt porn) and a spectrum of
subcultural indie flavours that neutralise its obscenity potential[7]
(an inflationary process of the mediasphere quite similar to that
“nihilistic impulse”[8] that Geert Lovink detects as the very nature
behind the disseminations of blogs). However we have to admit that
today porn is no more that porn. Interestingly there is no genealogic
attempt to understand why today we talk so much about pornography and
why we observe a pervasive “pornification” of  the collective imagery
(what it has been ironically defined as the “rise of the netporn
society”[9]). Today we have gathered around porn respectively: moral
complains, fervent subcultures, minimizing theorists. Talking about
the last mentioned, we still smell a lot of postmodernist Diazepam
(aka Valium) in the air, being Post-modernism a sort of cultural
therapy (or cultural alibi) for western anxiety. Ballard – once again
a novelist – grasps western psychosphere better than a PoMo
philosopher and provides a less comfortable scenario when he says: “A
widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to
some threat of extinction”[10]. Ballard’s warning recalls the
libidinal breakdown that he depicts in all his novels – the breakdown
of an Empire at its sunset. But what is the reason of such a
bankruptcy of desire? In the last half century pornography has become
a mass and cheap commodity (and a public utility, why not), almost
free in the age of the internet. Pornography is the ultimate by-
product of an exhausted technological Empire – an everyday life
“affective commodity” absorbing many social energies. The Gnostic
utopia of media culture has left behind the dark sides of digital
networks and did not track such a by-product. Indeed the internet
managed to map point-to-point and express all the shadows of the
collective unconscious – “technopathology” we could define this under-
investigated field of research, a crucial buy yet young discipline,
today carried on by few pioneers like Mark Dery[11] for instance (a
modern Virgilio of the internet Inferno).
	Ballard reminds us that  our ancestral reproductive instinct has not
been suffocated by a stratification of layers and layers of
technology: it finds anyhow its path through the channels of a
pervasive mediascape and devours pornography. Ballard keeps his
antennas well tuned up on the frequencies of the collective
unconscious but he has no insight of the genealogy of such a global
mood. Less ancestral but not less dystopian, another
technopathologist like Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi connects clearly the
proliferation of pornography to the digital revolution that has
absorbed our bodies in a completely virtualised communication where
natural sensuality is missing. “In the saturated infosphere the
immediate way of perception of the body is pornography”[12], Berardi
says.

"The electronic excitation conveyed through the entire Mediascape
puts the sensitive organism in a state of permanent electrocution.
Time for linguistic elaboration of  a single input is reduced as the
number of inputs increase, and the speed of the input gets higher.
Sex is not speaking anymore. It is rather babbling, and faltering,
and it is also suffering of for it. Too few words, too little time to
talk. Too little time to feel. Porn is an essay in emotional
automation and uniformity of emotional time of response. Don’t miss
the implication between permanent electrocution, shortening of
linguistic attentive elaboration, atrophy of emotional response.
Pornography is just the VISIBLE surface of this neuro short-circuit.
The connective generation is showing signs of an epidemic of
emotional atrophy. The disconnection between language and sexuality
is striking. Pornography is the ultimate form of this disconnection."

Berardi seems sceptical about the adaptability of humankind to a new
technological environment. Ballard, on the contrary, suggests that
pornography (or any violent phenomenon like that) might be precisely
a “wild joker” thrown into the genetic game to trigger a different
destiny. However, we may not exclude that a new generation of human
beings will develop cognitive and physical skills to adapt their
sexual life even to an over-stimulating mediascape. For now we have
to admit that internet pornography is the dark side (or grey side) of
the computer-based production, a side effect of the cognitive
energies co-opted by the revolution of digital machines. Statistics
[13] on hand, we should not talk anymore about network society and
immaterial labour without mentioning netporn.


2. Thermodynamics of pornography

Usually we defend pornography just on the basis of  a free expression
and free speech paradigm – we say, we don’t need theory to deal with
our bodies. On the contrary the pornography debate applies
unconsciously different models of pleasure and desire. Even when we
are defending a free expression scheme with the typical liberal
detachment, we are using each time a specific model of pleasure.
Generally speaking we can introduce two distinct schools: those who
believe that libido is a limited energy and those who believe that
libido is an endless flux. Deleuze – following Nietzsche against
Freud – introduced desire as an affirmative repetition in his book on
masochism, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch[14] (whereas Freud on the
opposite considered obsessive repetition as a manifestation of the
death drive in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle[15] – and obsession
repeatedly returns even in any discourse around netporn). In the
following works with Félix Guattari Deleuze’s notion of desire
embraces an ever-expanding schizo-machinic Spinozism (starting from
Anti-Oedipus). Berardi criticises Deleuze and Guattari precisely
because they did not foresee depression as a possible natural
consequence of their schizo enthusiasm[16], even if somehow Deleuze
and Guattari covered depression in the chapter "How do you make
yourself a body without organs?"[17], where different kind of bodies
are introduced (hypochondriac body, paranoid body, schizo body,
drugged body, masochist body, etc.). The basic assumption behind
Berardi’s position is that libidinal energy is limited and that we
cannot party all the time.
	There is no reason why a “flux” should be strictly framed as a
physical or biological flow of matter (and therefore “measured” as
limited). However it could be interesting to re-design a
thermodynamics of desire after Deleuze and Guattari and their
hydraulics of feelings and machines and flows. If we put an eye on
the human being, we are inclined to translate the First Law of
Thermodynamics in “In any process, the total desire remains constant”
and the Second Law (more interestingly) in “The entropy of desire
constantly increases” – that means in other words that our energy
goes senile. Pornography is unconsciously framed by its detractors as
an assault on the whole energy capital of an individual or society.
There is a sort of thermodynamic parsimony applied by right-wing
censors or left-wing sceptics to the consumerism of pornography. But
even porn producers and heavy downloaders know that porn can not be
consumed under unlimited conditions. Curiously porn imagery is the
only imagery whose “meaning” is directly connected to our degree of
physical excitement: have you ever tried to watch a porn movie at
breakfast or in any unusual situation? The libidinal “significance”
vanishes for the most. Porn images are quite peculiar, they talk to
our animal scopophilia, a sort of ancestral cinema for our reptile
nervous system. It is impossible to judge a porn picture because each
of us has a completely different quality of libidinal desire – and we
should be tolerant of pansexuality as well as asexuality, of high
degrees as well as low degrees of libidinal excitement.
	Pornographic images consume our flows of desire and at the same time
they are produced by those. How to deal with this libidinal economy?
Before an aesthetics (of porn, in this case), there should be a
materialist ethics of energies and forces. However this scenario is
never simply binary. Between the school of “endless flux” on one side
and the one of “limited libido” on the other, we encounter for
example Bataille and the human drive for excess. In Bataille[18]
sexual instincts constantly challenge and destroy our identity and
are tied up in a double-bind with beauty and animality, unable to
escape contradictions and impossible to be reduced to a quasi-
thermodynamic paradigm. There is never equilibrium according to the
second law of the thermodynamics of desire. Even when we defend
pornography we deal with a desire that it is never definable and
predictable. “Technical machines only work if they are not out of
order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as
they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning
properly”, Deleuze and Guattari say[19].  There is always a surplus
of libido drifting around. Here I am trying to frame the
materialistic forces behind desire and not to develop a “porn
ethics” (an useful experiment, by the way). As Andrew Ross warn us,
it is difficult to civilise desire:

"Finally, we must take into account the possibility that a large part
of pornography’s popularity lies in its refusal to be educated; it
therefore has a large stake in celebrating delinquency and wayward or
unauthorized behavior, and in this respect is akin to cultural forms
like heavy metal music, whose definitive, utopian theme, after all,
is “school’s out forever”. To refuse to be educated: to refuse to
taught lessons about maturity and adult responsibility, let alone
about sexism and racism; to be naughty, even bad, but mostly naughty;
to be on your worst behavior—all of this may be a ruse of patriarchy,
a ruse of capitalism, but it also has something to do with a
resistance to education, institutional or otherwise. It has something
to do with a resistance to those whose patronizing power and
missionary ardor are the privileges bestowed upon and instilled in
them by a legitimate education. Surely there is a warning here for
intellectuals who are committed today, as always, to “improving” the
sentimental education of the populace."[20]


3. Libidinal parasites and the negentropy of machines

Digital machines have always been framed as symmetrical devices,
where energy gets in and gets out and input energetically equals to
output, according to a widespread belief in the smooth, free and
painless reproducibility of binary data. Media culture (but more
brilliantly digital music[21]) tried to focus on the status of errors
and glitches but only within the combinatory structure of the digital
code – a claustrophobic perspective with no attention to the
biological and analogue context that machines have to inhabit. At the
beginning of “machine criticism” and dystopian literature, decades
before the proliferation of Turing machines, Samuel Butler claimed a
continuum between organic and machinic world in his novel Erewhon
[22]. As McLuhan comments: “As early as 1872, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon
explored the curious ways in which machines were coming to resemble
organisms not only in the way they obtained power by digestion of
fuel but in their capacity to evolve ever new types of themselves
with the help of the machine tenders. The organic character of the
machines, he saw, was more than matched by the speed with which
people who minded them were taking on the rigidity and thoughtless
behaviourism of the machine”.[23]
	I illustrated an entropic model around netporn to show how the
dominant technoparadigm is partial in its fetishism of digital code
and abstract spaces: there is always a dissipation of energy, a
“nihilist impulse” affecting machines too. However there is an
opposite process that is more interesting: the accumulation of living
energy against natural entropy, what Erwin Schrödinger calls
negentropy in his book What is Life?[24] and that makes a biological
model more intriguing than a thermodynamic one. Machines like organic
cells consume and dissipate energy but at the same time they are able
to accumulate, condense and store energy. Material or immaterial
objects produced by machines can be considered such concretions of
energy. Machines are defined usually as devices that transmit or
transform energy, and – we could add, more interestingly – that store
energy. However I do not suggest that machines may belong to a
separate autonomous realm as in a predictable sci-fi plot. Media and
humans have been always interconnected in a collective system of
communication that functions as a big condenser of information and
attractor of attention. Networks can be seen as a massive device for
accumulation, re-distribution and storage of energy. Networks grow
everyday – continuously  bigger than the previous day. As soon as
they reach a critical mass, as new biological species do, they
trigger a new process. Internet itself has grown from BBS to Second
Life and its form of organisation has passed through different stages
of accumulation, condensation, hegemony and crisis.
	After the desiring capitalism depicted by the Anti-Oedipus, the
affective dimension of contemporary production has been highlighted
by Negri and Hardt in Empire and other works[25] on “affective
labour” (ending up in the celebration of the power of joy in Saint
Francis of Assis). What they call “biopolitical production”
translates Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring production”, but with the
difference that Hardt and Negri push on the conflict of living labour
to give a tensive arrow to an “immanent plane of desire” that
otherwise would appear too indeterminate:

"Deleuze and Guattari discover the productivity of social
reproduction (creative production, production  of values, social
relations, affects, becomings), but manage to articulate it only
superficially and ephemerally, as a chaotic, indeterminate  horizon
marked by the ungraspable event."[26]

However Hardt and Negri’s ontology is not very specific about the
spectrum of affective productions and it is not covering many
perverted, contradicting and obscure feelings of contemporary
psychosphere (including the so-called “dark side of the multitude”
and its amphibious nature[27]). Anyhow even with respect to Deleuze
and Guattari’s intuitions, we should look more carefully at these
dirty engines to grasp the extraction of libidinal surplus-value.
What defines a machine (or a network) is always a relation to a
surplus. Media like biological organisms function in an unclean an
viscous way – eating and defecating, but there is always an
unforeseen tension towards accumulation of new energy. Actually
Deleuze and Guattari introduced three kinds of desiring machines and
not simply one: desiring machines that produce, cut or consume – but
it seems that only a generic type met success. Their mecanosphere
frames capitalism in quite a complex scenario, crossed by a chaotic
interlacement of flows, on the basis of an continuous energy
streaming above. For Deleuze and Guattari desire is an infinite flux.

"[
] every machine is a machine of a machine. The machine produces an
interruption of the flow only insofar as it is connected to another
machine that supposedly produces this flow. And doubtless this second
machine in turn is really an interruption or break, too. But is such
only in relationship to a third machine that is ideally – that is to
say, relatively – produces a continuous, infinite flux: for example,
the anus-machine and the intestine-machine, the intestine-machine and
the stomach-machine, the stomach-machine and the mouth machine, the
mouth machine and the flow of milk of a herd of dairy cattle (“and
then, and then, and then“). In a word, every machine functions as
a break in the flow in relation to the machine in which it is
connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the
production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it.
This is the law of the production of production."[28]

Deleuze and Guattari highlighted here more the assemblage of machines
and production rather than the accumulation of energy. The libidinal
“accumulation” – in the form of collective investment – happens
around paranoid poles (the Father, the Family, the State, etc.).
Which function do media have in a scenario of widespread libidinal
accumulation? Traditionally media have been described as information
channels, body prostheses and mimetic devices. I try to frame them as
libidinal organisms, more specifically symbionts or better libidinal
parasites under the concept of the extraction and accumulation of
libidinal surplus-value. Surplus-value is another way to name the
excess of energy and its exploitation or enjoyment. Libidinal surplus-
value is a way to name the tension that drives the media economy and
evolution. As an example we can frame internet pornography videos as
symbiotic organisms being a structural part of digital networks. The
simulacra of pop stars are affective parasites as well. “Spectacular”
machines indeed work as parasites because they channel our libido and
accumulate it – in a very physical way. Media parasites absorb our
libidinal energies as a surplus and condense it in the form of
attention and fetishism towards brands, technology, material and
immaterial commodities. By the word ‘parasite’ no moral judgement is
implicit – perhaps libidinal parasites are just a new generation of
old organisms (together with “emotional media” and “affective
commodities”) which we are just starting to get familiar with.
	Michel Serres in his book The Parasite[29] described human relations
as a never-ending parasitic chain – “the parasite parasites the
parasite”. Each organism is a parasite of another. Human beings
themselves are parasites of the whole nature. The global
communication system itself is a parasitic system. What is missing in
this picture of the parasite is the accumulation and extraction of a
surplus, that are typical of any form of life (and organisation). I
suggest here to introduce the concept of parasite as an engine of
accumulation rather than an element of “pure mediality”.[30]


4. Vortices accumulating crystals of time

What has to be clarified about the critical discourse around
communication machines (i.e. media culture and activism) is that they
are never a neutral tool for free speech, free culture and free
cooperation – not such a serene and peaceful scenario, they
incessantly accumulate energy below the surface. The accumulation of
the surplus-value in any form (libido, attention, information, data,
even electricity) and its breaking-point should be the political
focus of a critical media culture, as much as the discourse about
free cooperation[31] and free culture.[32] For sure all the forms of
collective intelligence and creative commons driven by technology may
represent a real hazard against capitalistic accumulation of surplus-
value, but beside or underneath the immaterial layer there is always
a material by-parasite that is never seriously confronted. The
interesting part of the movie The Matrix (indulging in a plot that
everybody knows) is less the virtual reality game than the parasitic
role of the digital world above the human bodies: in the year 2199
intelligent machines have taken control on human beings and exploit
them as energy source, growing countless people in pods and
harvesting their bioelectrical energy and body heat. Beside and
thanks to any digital commonism, accumulation still runs.
	Squeezing the usual Foucauldian paradigm, we may say that such
molecular and pervasive parasites embody a biopolitical function
previously performed by old media and institutions on a broader
scale. Lazzarato is more precise and accurate in his book
Videofilosofia when he writes that electronic technologies freeze
“crystals of time” out of the living time of their users – those
“crystals” are but moving images that become parts of the immaterial
assembly line of Post-Fordism.

"The central hypothesis around which our work is organized is that
electronic and digital machines, as well as intellectual labour,
«crystallise time».[33] Image is never something that works upon
lack, absence, negativity. Image  is not something added to the real
to represent it, but it is the texture itself of the being."[34]

Here Lazzarato frames video-electronic media as autonomous engines
able to produce and accumulate time in the same way that as memory
and imagination do. The accumulation of “crystals of time” through
moving images is a crucial intuition that Lazzarato clarifies in the
same years of the book Lavoro immateriale, but only an abstract
understanding of the concept of immaterial labour has been well
received. Following Bergson and Deleuze, Lazzarato develops a
sophisticated notion of moving image that is no more the flat
simulation of postmodernists but a device screwed into flesh and
reality. I take the intuition of video technologies as engines of
time accumulation to introduce them as parasites of libidinal
accumulation as well – where Lazzarato put duration and time we can
put desire and libidinal energy.

"Electronic and digital technologies (but even the cinema) are
«mechanics» that autonomously produce image. Retaking one of
Simondon’s intuitions, instead of defining them as simply external
extensions of the senses of the human being (as a lens in respect to
an eye), they should be understood as “engines” capable of a
“relative autonomy” in respect to the man. Different from mechanical
and thermodynamic engines «that take a [kinetic and potential]
energy from the outside», they are indeed engines that accumulate
duration and time. And if memory and imagination can be defined as
«organic engines» that accumulate and produce time, video technology
and computers may be defines as non-organic engines that work upon
the same principle."[35]

Out of any virtual reality dream, back to the analogue world, each
media assemblage becomes a small or big vortex of accumulation, each
device an energy parasite. Time and desire are attracted and
crystallised, and then transformed and condensed in other forms. What
has to be clearly pointed out is that parasites are never
“immaterial” – they transform always our fluxes in something really
tangible. Neptorn convert libidinal flows into money flows and siphon
daily a huge bandwidth on a global scale. Netporn transforms love in
pure electricity. File-sharing networks reincarnate as an army of MP3
players. Free Software helps to sell more IBM hardware. Second Life
“avatars consume as much electricity than Brazilians”. The libidinal
surplus is extracted and channelled across the technological
infrastructure and invested into the infrastructure itself, the
imagery carried by that or other devices connected and depending upon
that network. Accumulation of libidinal surplus turns easily into
money, attention, visibility, spectacle, material and immaterial
commodities.


5. Hunting for surplus

This overview tries to wrap some concepts around the notions of
energy surplus and desire, investigating entropy and negentropy
within the media “biosphere”. Moving from Marx’s accumulation of
surplus-value to Bataille’s excess, and from Deleuze and Guattari’s
desiring production to Schrödinger’s negentropy, I have tried to
condense a nodal point in the theoretical figure of the libidinal
parasite. To escape the impasses of the current media theory, I have
suggested to defines a machine (or a network) as something always in
relation to an external surplus and not as a virtual system apart.
Following Michel Serres we can describe the whole mediascape as a
parasitic chain. The field is vast and we need a more detailed
cartography to investigate in a proper way different intuitions such
as Ballard’s visions about media and ancestral instincts, Berardi’s
“pathologies of hyper-expressivity” and Lovink’s “nihilist impulse” –
all affecting the contemporary mediascape. Personally I focused on
internet pornography as it represents a radical case study about the
extraction of libidinal surplus-value by the society of the spectacle.
	Pornography could be considered the ultimate commodity because the
instinct of the Kind become itself the basis for the extraction of
surplus-value by the mega-Machine – there is something truly
apocalyptic in this. Paradoxically there is no alienation (and no
subversion): in the context of softcore advertisement or hardcore
pornography our sexual desire reinforces the new electronic
superstructure of humankind. At the end pornography is concerned
about the preservation and reproduction of humankind as much as any
fundamentalist church, even if in the form of a wild joker as
Ballard says.


Berlin-Amsterdam, May-June 2007.





[1] J.G. Ballard, “News From the Sun”, 1981. In J.G. Ballard, The
Complete Short Stories, London: Flamingo, 2001.
[2] J.G. Ballard, Myths of the Near Future, London: Cape, 1982.
[3] Jean Baudrillard, "What Are You Doing After the Orgy?",
Traverses, October 1983, 29.
[4] Giorgio Agamben, La comunità che viene, Torino: Einaudi, 1990.
Trans.: The Coming Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991. “To appropriate the historic transformations of human
nature that capitalism wants to limit to the spectacle, to link
together image and body in a space where they can no longer be
separated, and thus to forge the whatever body, whose physis is
resemblance—this is the good that humanity must learn how
to wrest from commodities in their decline. Advertising and
pornography, which escort the commodity to the grave like
hired mourners, are the unknowing midwives of this new body
of humanity.”
[5] Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, 1997.  And
“No Sex, Please, We’re Digital!”, in On Belief, Routledge: 2001.
[6] Steven Shaviro, “Survey on pornography”, Text Zur Kunst, 'Porno'
issue (n. 64, December 2006).
[7] See Florian Cramer, “Sodom Blogging: Alternative Porn and
Aesthetic Sensibility”, in K. Jacobs, M. Pasquinelli (eds), C’Lick
Me: A Netporn Studies Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network
Cultures, 2007.
[8] Geert Lovink, “Blogging, the nihilist impulse”, in Zero Comments,
New York: Routledge, 2007, www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-02-
lovink-en.html
[9] One of the topic of “The Art and Politics of Netporn” conference,
Amsterdam, 2005 www.networkcultures.org/netporn
[10] J.G. Ballard, “News From the Sun”, cit.
[11] Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the
Brink. New York: Grove, 1999. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the
End of the Century. New York: Grove, 1996.
[12] Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, “The Obsession of the (Vanishing) Body”,
in C’Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader, cit.
[13] See for instance: “Caslon Analytics: adult content industries”,
accessed June 2007, www.caslon.com.au/xcontentprofile.htm
[14] Gilles Deleuze, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch: le froid et le
cruel, Paris: Minuit, 1967.
[15] Sigmund Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Leipzig:
Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. 1920.
[16] Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Félix, Roma: Luca Sossella Editore, 2001.
[17] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Paris:
Minuit, 1980.
[18] Georges Batailles, L'érotisme, Paris: Minuit, 1967.
[19] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Paris: Minuit,
1972.
[20] Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, New
York: Routledge, 1989
[21] See: Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: Post-Digital
Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music”, in Computer Music
Journal, Winter 2000, Vol. 24, No. 4, MIT Press.
[22] Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or Over the Range, published
anonymously, 1872.
[23] Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial
Man. New York: Vanguard Press, 1951.
[24] Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the
Living Cell, Cambridge: University Press, 1948.
[25] Hardt, M. (1999) “Affective labour”, in Boundary 2, vol. 26, no.
2, Summer. A. Negri, “Value and Affect”, in boundary 2, 26, no. 2
(Summer 1999)
[26] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000.
[27] Paolo Virno, “La multitud es ambivalente: es solidaria y es
agresiva”, interview, Pagina 12, Buenos Aires, 25/9/2006,
www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/dialogos/21-73518-2006-09-25.html
[28] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, cit.
[29] Michel Serres, Le Parasite, Paris: Grasset, 1980. Translation:
The Parasite, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
[30] As “pure mediality” in: Stephen Crocker, “Noises and Exceptions:
Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben”, Ctheory, 3/28/2007,
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=574
[31] Trebor Scholz and Geert Lovink (eds), The Art of Free
Cooperation, NY: Autonomedia, 2007.
[32] Lawrence Lessing, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology
and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, New York:
Penguin, 2004.
[33] Maurizio Lazzarato, Videofilosofia. La percezione del tempo nel
postfordismo. Roma: Manifestolibri, 1996, p. 14 [translation mine].
[34] Ibid., p. 15.
[35] Ibid., p. 83.