"This Is What the Future Looks Like" – an illustration of the "Machinic Authority of the vEmpire" by Dragan Kujundzic, University of Florida (BMW ad, on Hotel "Moscow," Moscow, Summer 2003.) John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (2000)
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005)
Keywords - globalisation, actor network theory, automobility, bioproperty, cyber-spatial civil society, multitude, Empire, machinic exodus
How does agency encounter the moment of the transnational? Is agency purely human? The problem of locating revolutionary agency within Marxist discourses, to compensate for so-called working-class ‘embourgeoisment’ and the failures of Stalinist bureaucratised communism, has variously looked to humanity as the new arbiter of revolutionary hope. The arguments of John Urry and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri engage in Marxist debates over locating political agency, by combining Marxist theory with post-structuralist and globalisation discourses to reconfigure a project of radical democracy.
John Urry draws on actor-network theory to explore the ‘complex mobile hybrids’ formed through mediations between humans, machines and technologies that reconstitute social relations in an age of extensive corporeal and virtual mobilities. He writes that, ‘People possess few powers which are uniquely human’ (Urry 14), and goes on to invert Marx’s famous dictum, proposing that this is ‘not to suggest that humans do not exert agency. But they only do so in circumstances which are not of their own making’ (Urry 14). Urry has written extensively on automobility, which he identifies as ‘a complex of interlocking machines, social practices and ways of dwelling’ (Urry 190).
As car-drivers, humans become intricately involved with their cars so that they lose subjective autonomy and are reformulated as ‘quasi-objects,’ entering the public sphere in their mobility (Urry 190). Similarly, cybernetic and electronic-based technologies refigure the human body as ‘technosocial,’ symbiotic with machines rather than defined by the boundaries of human skin, creating a powerful but unpredictable agency (Urry 70-1). The boundaries between humans and machines are thus transcended through instantaneous and virtual mobilities allowing a digital convergence of non-proximal local groups in what Urry calls ‘cyber-spatial civil society’ (Urry 74).
The Utopian possibilities of such ‘digital nomadisms’ are, however, underwritten by the ‘electronic fortressing’ of what Urry describes as a ‘new global medieval world’ (Urry 76, 13-14). Analogously, Hardt and Negri outline the privatisation of immaterial forms of property, such as mp3 files or Internet resources, as ‘Baroque’ and ‘neo-feudal’ (Multitude 196). The biopolitical productivity of the multitude, they argue, and its democratic ‘electronic commons,’ are being radically truncated by repressive re-privatisations, culminating in ‘bioproperty,’ or the ownership of life itself in the form of patented genetic codes for plants and animals (Multitude 185).
Empire’s rigid reterritorializations, argue Hardt and Negri, are symptomatic of its machinic authority, in which all movements are fixed within its system and can only exist within hierarchical and exploitative relations (Empire 39, 14). As the living alternative immanent within Empire, the multitude must consequently resist Empire’s rigid boundaries through a ‘machinic exodus’ that hybridises labourers and new productive technologies in ceaseless mobilities. Machinic tools, such as the computer, must therefore become ‘prostheses’ in the creation of ‘new posthuman bodies’ (Empire 215).
Like Urry, Hardt and Negri refer to the ‘new nomad horde’ that threatens Empire with its power to circulate, emigrate and rupture the repressive boundaries of the nation-state (Empire 213, 363). With its mobility and miscegenated hybridity, the multitude poses a radical act of resistance with the powers to actuate an already-extant but virtual global citizenship through irrepressible migrations, both legal and unauthorised. In this way, Urry and Hardt and Negri use the metaphors of the machine and of hybridity to reconfigure radical political agency, identifying Utopian moments within current processes of globalisation.
