[Nettime-bold] "roaming producers" [make world paper]

[sebastian@rolux.org]

"Roaming Producers" [make world paper]

Like many other panelists before, I have to start with the statement that all I
knew until today was the title of the conferece and the title of the panel:
"Roaming Producers". But then it turned out that even the title was a
misunderstanding, a bad translation.

It is derived form a book titled "Umherschweifende Produzenten" (that i will not
be referring to). But the guy who did the book was complaining the other day
that "roaming" would not fit "umherschweifen", since "umherschweifen" was
referring to the Situationist concept of the "dérive", whereas "roaming" was
something quite different. I don't know, I guess anyone who has a mobile phone
might have an idea what "roaming" is.

So the title is the first part of the mess. But now, things will get even
messier. Because then, I was imagining "Roaming Producers", trying to figure out
what this could mean: people who move while producing and produce while moving.
And then, I noticed that, actually, I don't like these people. Or rather, I'm
even afraid of "Roaming Producers". Some of them really scare me.

And that is because I was not so much thinking of Roaming Situationists, but
rather of Roaming Deleuzians. These are people who see themselves as nomadically
roaming the rhizomes of Capitalism. People who have a fan relation to some of
these Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts. There were a lot of them around during the
Nineties, and probably still today.

So I started a typology of some of these Roaming Producers, which, until now, is
titled "Some Roaming Producers I Do Not Like". I have found five or six distinct
types, but I'm going to stick to three of them now. One is the Ecstatic
Entrpreneur, one is the Networking Nomad, and one is the Traveling Theorist.
(The Schizophrenic Student will have to be addressed seperately, at another
occassion.)

There is still one thing I should point out before I begin, since I will not be
referring to that later: These Roaming Producers are of course all White
European or American Males, so my analysis is limited to these.


1. The Ecstatic Entrepreneur

The mindset of the Ecstatic Entrepreneur has been quite nicely analyzed by
Richard Barbrook in his text The Californian Ideology. The Ecstatic Entrepreneur
is basically a libertarian who has his roots in the Sixties, specifically in the
west coast Hippie movement, and who was, during the Nineties, applying that
libertarianism to the digital economy. So, to give you an idea: Wired was
definitely the Pravda of this ideology, promoting the infinite joys of the free
market.

What the Ecstatic Entrepreneur loves in Deleuze is of course the vitalism, plus
the idea that Capital is such a magnificent force when it comes to eradicating
borders of all sorts. The Ecstatic Entrepreneur is enthusiastically embracing
biological metaphors. A very good example is Kevin Kelly, former editor of
Wired, and his book Out Of Control.

Not only there you will see that the Ecstatic Entrepreneur, and that is his main
point, sees Capital as nature. He sees Capitalism as a biosphere in which both
money and people behave like swarms, flocks, waves etc. He truly believes that
the global economy is the Body Without Organs, and he is a fan of this obscene
misunderstanding.

But that's his conception of roaming and producing: the permanent floating of
money around the globe, the floating of people, the floating of ideas, and so
on. But then, since he loves the market, he is of course a Darwinist, so only
the good ideas are going to make it, and only the people who have the good ideas
are going to catch some of the money.

But for the Ecstatic Entrepreneur, the great thing is that Capital takes care of
all that. ("Change is good", Wired once announced, and that's because noone has
to discuss, to question or to justify this kind of change anymore. Things are no
longer changed by people, they change by themselves, automatically. And the
ultimate killer application, the robot that is able to repair itself, is of
course the global market.) So all he has to do is sit back, float and enjoy the
ecological economy of the planetary market machine.

There are of course other sub-categories of the Ecstatic Entrepreneur, like the
Flexible Freelancer, who has been comprehensively analyzed by a Chicago magazine
titled The Baffler. The Flexible Freelancer believes in the freedom of
freelancing. He is switching from internship to internship, he is an artist
today and a programmer tomorrow, and then he is a tourist, and then he is
starting a business. The Flexible Freelancer is the guy who assumes all this is
happening because of his own non-conformism and creativity, and who can't think
of any exterior reason for this. He has never imagined that the new economy
might just be forcing him to be that flexible and that his subjectivity might be
structured by the very same forces that structure the world outside him.

Finally, I even think that the concept of Communication Guerrilla is part of the
Ecstatic Entrepreneur phenomenon, since the Communication Guerilla is working in
the same field of marketing and public relations and sharing all its
blindnesses. What the Communication Guerilla will borrow from Deleuze is of
course rather a vague idea of Capitalism as a semiotic system. So at the very
core of their strategies lies hardly more than the conviction that if the
signifier starts roaming, everything will be fine. But of course, anti-marketing
is marketing as well. It may just be an internship. First you do Toywar, and
then you'll work with IBM.

Needless to say that the term Communication Guerrilla is an insult to all the
real Guerrillas of the world. (Today, we even have Guerrilla Marketing, and if
I'm not completely wrong, there is even a Webby Award for that category.) What
we are witnessing here is a complete misconception of what Guerrillas have been,
in what kind of wars they have been involved, what was at stake at these wars
and who their adversaries were. If the actual Guerrillas have a counterpart in
the "virtual" domain, then for sure it's not someone who is globally
communicating and counter-communicating all day long. If there is such a thing
as an info war, then it's the war against information. This war has hardly even
begun, and there is no genealogy of its great leaders yet (and once there will
be one, it will not be published as an art catalogue).


2. The Networking Nomad

With the Networking Nomad, I have two fundamental problems. One is the
Networking, one is the Nomad.

The Networking Nomad is the figure that believes to aimlessly wander through the
electronic networks, to connect and disconnect at his own will, to drift from
continent to continent via phone lines, cables and satellites, freed from any
restriction of physical territoriality.

The Networking Nomad may be a character initially derived from the famous figure
of the Data Dandy, but while the Data Dandy was clearly a Punk, that is, a
materialist, the Networking Nomad is a Hippie, driven by some esoteric idealism.

He doesn't collect objects, he just lets them go. He doesn't build systems, he
just tears them down. And he is not, as the Data Dandy, a narcissist. There are
no mirrors in his world, all he knows are surfaces to surf, surfaces without any
reflection.

The Networking Nomads favorite network is, of course, the Internet. But digital
Deleuzianism, I'm sad to announce, is just another misunderstanding. Even if the
whole century may have been Deleuzian, as Foucault said, the Internet will never
ever have been Deleuzian.

In the Short Summer of the Internet, back in 1995, there was a lot of electronic
enthusiasm, some sort of crazy theoretical over-production along (and over-
affirmation of) Deleuzian concepts that, at its time, was probably fully
legitimized.

But years later, you have to acknowledge that most of these things do not work.
These guys were not becoming women in chatrooms. They have not lost their
genders or gotten rid of their bodies. They have not changed the way they think
though hypertext (whatever that was). And noone of us has deterritorialized from
anywhere through the Internet. We are all still here.

So, please, let's admit: The Network is not the Rhizome. Much more, the Network
is the new mode of work in the Societies of Control, the new mode of production
in the Global New Economy. Like Johan Sjerpstra said: "When I hear the term
'network', I grab my gun and shoot."

This term is not so much a noun, but rather a verb. Networking is a way of
interconnecting all the new forms of digital labor and digital leisure, of
amalgamating computerized pleasure, excess, scarcity and slavery into the new
world-wide 24-hour working day. Networking constitutes a digital continuum that
most of us are more or less familiar with, a mode of production which, at the
same time, is such fun and such terror. To quote Netscape Messenger: "You have
247 new mails." This kind of networking doesn't look like a concept to
enthusiastically affirm, but rather to study, and then to resist.

The second problem, as I said, is the Nomad, as a romantic concept for movement
without aim, without border, without direction and without restriction.

Very contrary to popular belief, Nomads are people who are desperately trying to
stay where they are. If you don't believe me, please re-read Deleuze. Nomads
will always avoid to move, and they will only move if they are ultimately forced
to. For the Nomad, there is no global surface to slide up or down, but only a
local territory with all its looming segmentations. The nomadic concept of space
is the very opposite of "mobility", and it's really hard to see how people can
constantly mix up the two.

But in the case of our Networking Nomad, things are even worse. He will even
assume that his Nomadic existence is based on the fact that he is a surfer: a
surfer of the networks, a surfer of the digital waves.

But being a surfer is of course the ultimate disqualification. The territories
of the Nomad, as most of us might vaguely remember, are the deserts, since these
are the most suitable zones for minimized movement.

The idea of surfing in the desert is absolutely absurd. There is no such thing
as sports in the desert. So you may push or attack the Nomad: then he will move.
You may even put him on some airplane, using physical force: then he will
travel. But even then, the Nomad will resist to surf. You may drop him over the
ocean: all he will do, of course, is simply drown.

So all in all (and even if you don't follow my drastic illustrations), there is
quite an urgent need to save the Nomad from his fans. Historically, the Nomad
has always had enemies to flee, but rarely has he be dragged around as
shamelessly as in the Deleuzian Nineties.


3. The Traveling Theorist

The Traveling Theorist is probably the saddest of these Roaming Producers. (So
here comes all the bad news for all of us.) The Traveling Theorist is the
frequent-flyer academic, the critical avantgarde that populates the business
lounges all across the planet.

Obviously, the Traveling Theorist is traveling from conference to conference.
You will find him standing on a rooftop overlooking Istanbul, then, the next
day, browsing through American journals in a small Venice bookstore, and a week
later enjoying the exotic ambience of dinner party in the hills of Rio de
Janeiro.

The Traveling Theorist is a harsh critic of what he calls globalization. But at
the same time, he is one of its most prominent promoters. His view on the global
cities is the aerial view of the landing passenger, and once he has safely
reached the ground, he becomes part of the very class that he believes he is
opposed to: a class that, over the past twenty years, has turned numerous cities
from places to live into mere interfaces for a frequently flying global elite of
transcontinental commuters.

The aerial view of the landing passenger, his view from above on the suburban
grid, is already a troubled one. Obviously, noone really likes to fly, or, even
if, to start or to land. But then, another aspect of his eerie feeling is of
course the anticipation of what is awaiting him on the ground.

It is widely believed that international conferences were places of vivid
theoretical debate. But of course they have never been such places. Theorists
from all over the world are carried all across the globe to present ideas they
have developed way before at home. Then they have to listen to other theorists'
ideas, and these are ideas that they are not only extremely familar, but bluntly
bored with. They have been to other conferences, they have listened to all this
over and over again. Then, instead of a debate, everyone has to catch their
planes. "It was good to see you!" - "Yeah. Didn't we meet in Helsinki last
year?" - "No. I was invited, but I could come."

But even given all this, it is still widely believed that international
conferences were at least occasions for fruitful discussion among the local
public. But again, there is hardly ever a local public, apart from the obvious
journalists. It takes only one or two of them to turn a public congress into a
press conference, and these are not that much fun either.

International conferences are theory fairs, and the general lack of theoretical
interest tells a tale about the state of the theory business. Today, these
conferences function as simple events, that is: culmination points of city
marketing. Take this one here, which is of course one of the rare and wonderful
exceptions. The city of Munich is so desperately needing an international
internet congress that they are now even willing to do one on open borders. But
from the city marketing perspective, that still makes sense. Hundreds of people
in airplanes are tourism. It doesn't matter if they are carrying critical ideas
or not.

In the end, the Traveling Theorist becomes the Academic Tourist, caught in a
permanent state of consumption, in a time-space continuum called restaurant-
taxi-hotel. (Earlier, when preparing this paper in the café, not only was I
asked to order: I was asked to order twice.)

Of course, the Traveling Theorist doesn't enjoy all this. When he arrives on
stage, he is stressed, jet-lagged, unconcentrated, and often he may even have
caught a strange disease on his way, or at least a common disorder. One of the
most insightful late statements of Gilles Deleuze is that traveling for hours in
modern trains and airplanes is an almost unbearable experience. And if you don't
believe the late Deleuze, then go and ask a rock band about touring. Traveling
is really not a solution.

The Traveling Theorist is aware of all this, but he can't get out of it. He is
already booked for Sao Paulo next week, then directly to an anti-globalization
meeting in Bruxelles, and then he will have to present his critique of simulated
urbanism at a conference in Kuala Lumpur.

The Traveling Theorist may be the end of all these roaming producers, since he
is self-reflective, but lost in closed circuits. It is hard to theorize space if
you're lost in space to such an extent, and it is hard to theorize time if you
are constantly running out of it. After all, Traveling Theorism tends towards a
state that can't even be justified with Deleuze anymore.


* * *

So what is my intention here? My intention is not to establish any kind of
theory police. You are of course allowed to do all this, to follow all these
"Roaming Producers".

My intention is neither to discredit Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the book
as a toolbox. Ideas are tools. There are brilliant ideas in Deleuze and
Guattari. Please, pick them, use them as tools, that's just wonderful. But do
not over-estimate them. Under certain conditions they may be useless, and under
certain conditions they may be counter-productive or even dangerous. To avoid
this, please consider reading the rest of the book as well. It might be the
manual.

(Someone I discussed with while writing this paper asked me if not even Hardt
and Negri had stated in Empire that every tool was a weapon. Unfortunately, that
is only half true, and only half of the story. In fact, this phrase is by Ani
DiFranco, and it is the very beginning quote of Empire, so most readers may have
read it. But it's not the full quote. The full quote is: "Every tool is a weapon
if you hold it right.")

But my actual complaint about "Roaming Producers" lies somewhere else. While
most of us are familiar with analyzing the terror of producing, we still have to
fully trace and track the terror of roaming, which reaches from forced
freelancerism to forced migration. If we refrain from romanticizing about the
freedom of flexibility, then we should neither have any nostalgia for Rhizomatic
Refugees.

I guess that we have to rethink our conception of the struggle for freedom of
movement. There is no such thing as freedom of movement if it does not include
the freedom not to move, the right to stay where you are. And we are not engaged
in a struggle for migrants and migration if that is only a struggle for the
abolition of any barrier that is still keeping people from moving around the
globe in perfect congruence with Capital's lines of flight. Even if Capital's
borders equal zero, there is still a desire for other modes of movement, and one
of them is no movement at all.


[video: http://make-world.org ...]

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