User:Tancre/Special Issue 8/Notes

Networks & Ideology Notes on the texts of Special Issue 8

Special Issue's texts

ART & DEMOCRACY | Chantal Mouffe

art as an agnostic intervention in public space public space as a battleground for the hegemony of a project vs reconciliation. Artistic practices can subvert the hegemony visualizing the repressed and destroyed by the consensus of post-political democracy.

Can art still be critical when compromised by advertising and atists become part of capitalist production? // I think yes but in a weak way, by showing its weakness

Boltanski, Chiapello - the new spirit of capitalism, 2005 demands for autonomy of the '60s has been used in the development of post-fordist networked economy and transformed in new forms of control. >> counterculture, authenticity, self-management, anti-hierarchicality, promote the new capitalist regulation vs the disciplinary framework of the fordist period.

Artistic and cultural production and critique, central role in capital valorisation through 'neo-management'. >> impossibility of art to be critical because automatically neutralized // in this way it is critical but paradoxically. weak criticism VS Andre Gorz - when self-exploitation central role in valorization, production of subjectivity as terrain of central conflict. by contrast it appear as a political dimention, extention of the capital, and rise the possibility of a resistance. // showing a flat and always same political dimention is a symptom of weakness and passive resistance >> opening of new strategies of opposition (living, consuming, collective appropriation of common spaces and everyday culture) // this is still a weak criticism

modernist avant-gard ideas are abbandoned but // a good way could be to rethink the avant-gard >> undermine the imaginary environment of total social mobilization of capital by inteveining in social spaces // is the intervention in social spaces a situationist reappropriation, so avantgardistic? it seems a weak act without memory, the ultimate act of screaming its sufference in a self-sacrification Brian Holmes - art as chance for society to reflect on the imaginary figures it depends, for its understanding and consistency // are the imaginary figures the very objects of art? does this means what is a space, form, color and how they are relate to each other and to the human being. are those the only things on which art really depend?

Possibility of critical role of art but only through understanding the dynamics of democratic politics, acknowledge the political in its antagonistic dimension and contingent nature of any type of social order. Only in this way is possible to grasp the hegemonic struggle of democratic politics where art can play a crucial role. // the real relation between art and human being create a political knowledge of how control methods are applied both to science and art compromising them. it is not only about understand the politics but about a understand better what is art, related to design and science to create a political system that doesn't exploit how those works. Let art develope its own ideology VS impose an ideology on art

The political as antagonism Difficulty in the post-political age to envisage problems in a political way. Political qeustions not as mere technical issues to be solved by experts (neo-liberal point of view) but choice between conflicting alternatives. Liberalism as philosophical discourse based on rationalism and individualism (wittgenstein - family resemblance) unable to grasp the pluralistic nature of social world, because there is no a rational solution but dimension of antagonism. Liberalism negate the antagonism as it see harmony in the totality of pluralities, and rationalise belief in the possibility of a universal consensus based on reason, while antagonism reveals the very limit of rational consensus.

Politics as hegemony In an ever-present possibility of antagonism, politics, requires coming to term with the impossibility, undecidability of a final ground, hegemonic nature of every kind of social order and society as order in a contingent context. Political as hegemonic insitution. In this sense political is different from social, sedimented practices that conceal their contingent political institution, taken for garanted as self-grounded and constitutive part of any possible society. Social and political as existentials (heidegger) as necessary dimensions of any social life. Political as hegemonic, involves the visibility of the acts of social institutions revealing its order from the temporary and precarious contingent practices VS logic exterior to itself (forces of production, laws of history, development of Spirit). Things can be always otherwise and every order exclude others. >> Political because expression of a particular structure of power relations >> Power as constitutive of the social Natural order in a given moment as a result of sedimented hegemonic practices, no deeper objectivity >> every order is political and based on exclusion of other possibilities that are repressed and can be reactivated. This process of order is a hegemonic practice, and every hegemonic prder can be challanged by a counter-hegemonic practice that attempt to disarticulate the existing order and install another hegemony.

Agonistic struggle as the core of a vibrant democracy, very configuration of power relations around which a society is structured. Struggle based on the opposition of unreconcilable hegemonic projects. In this optic, democracy requires to comes to term with the contingent hegemonic politicoeconomal articulation of a given society in a given moment. Precarious and pragmatic constructions that can be disarticulated and transformed in the agonistic struggle vs adversaries.

Liberal Models vs Recognize that society is always politically instituted and each hegemonic interventions is the autcome of a previous hegemoic practices that is never neutral. This is why it denies the possibility of a non-adversarial democratic politics and criticize who ignore the political dimension reducing it to a set of supposedly technical moves and neutral procedures.

the public space agonistic model of democratic politics for artistic practices, in visualizing the public space. Conception of public space as the terrain where consensus can emerge VS battleground where different hegemonic projects are confronted without possibility of riconciliation.

• Public spaces are always plural and the agonistic confrontation on multiple discursive surfaces.
• No unity or a predetermined center to this diversity of spaces. Diverse forms of articulation among them. no dispersion as post-modernist thinkers or 'smooth' space (Deleuze).

>> Public spaces are always striated and hegemonically structured, result of a specific articulation of a diversity of spaces. Hegemonic struggle as an attempt to create a different articulation between public spaces.

Habermas - public space as public sphere, place where deliberation aimed at a rational consensus takes place. But regulative idea, improbability to reach consensus. << but conceptual impossibility as ontological impediments, not empirical, because it would require the possibility of a consensus without exclusion, for the agonistic approach is impossible.

Arendt - agonism without antagonism. Emphasis on human plurality and politics deal with the community and reciprocity of human beings which are different. To think politically is to develop the ability to see things from a multiplicity of perspectives. ref to Kant - 'enlarged thought', so her pluralism is not fundamentally different from the liberal one, because inscribed in an intersubjective agreement, so a procedure to accertaining it in the public sphere. << but no plurality as the origin of antagonistic conflicts

Both envisage the public space in a consensual way. Zerilli - Arendt consensus results from the exchange of voices and opinions, streiten, agreement through persuasion VS Habermas rational discours, Kantian disputieren, exchange of arguments constraied by logical rules But neither of them is able to acknowledge the hegemonic nature of consensus and antagonism, the moment of wiederstreit (Lyotard - the differend). Both find their inspiration in Kant but they priviledge the beautiful in the aesthetic and ignore the sublime. this is related to their avoidance of the differend.

critical artistic practices and hegemony art and politics not as two separated fields but aesthetic aspect in politics and political in art. >> useless to distinct political and non-political art. In the theory of hegemony art maintain or challange the given symbolic order and this is its political aspect. The political concearn the symbolic order of social relation (lefort - mise en forme) and this is its aesthetic dimension. Which are the different typologies of critical art? those who advocate the creation of agonistic public spaces to unveil the repressed forms from the dominant consensus. vs artistic practices for consensus. Critical art foment dissensus by giving a voice to the silenced. Richard Noble - 4 distinct ways of making critical art

• engages critically with political reality (kruger, haacke, sierra)
• explore subject positions or identities defined by otherness,marginality,oppression,victimization (feminist art,queer art,ethnic or religious minorities art, wodiczko)
• investigates its own political condition of production and circulation (fraser, muller, dion)
• utopian experimentation, attempts to imagine alternative ways of living (hirshhorn, deller,gormley)

>> agonistic interventions in the public space with the aim to don't do a total break with the existing state of affairs to create something absolutely new. Avant-garde is no possible anymore for radical critique but not a reason to proclaim that their political role is ended, is needed the idea of be political means to offer a radical critique. this is intended badly as a neutralization such as who intend radicality as transgression or art in moralistic terms. But those approaches are anti-political because unable to grasp the specificity of the political. With the theory of hegemony you can see how artists play an important role in subverting the dominant hegemony by bringing to the fore the repressed character and contributing to the construction of new subjectivities, crucial dimension of the radical democratic project.

from RADICAL NETWORKS

themes
mass surveillance & over-commercialization of the www/ free and open internet/ computer networks/ DIY networking/ offline networks/ portable web servers/ mesh networks/ internet gateways/ localized networks/ experimental applications/political activism/ network security/ artistic use of networks/ personal networks/ bringing connectivity to rural areas/ experimental social networks/control and ownership of networks/ ethical hacking/stup own VPN/sniff packets/ map complex networks

questions
What would you do with your own network?
Why does it matter to understand how networks work?
Why do community networks matter?
How could free, open local networks benefit people?
What can networks be used for other than social networking and commercial use?

DECENTRALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENT | Sarah Friend

what is there outside of centralization that is still centralized?

political movements > decentralized socialism (mao)
economical > free-market
internet > re-decentrilize the web because early internet was decentralized (ARPANET / USENET) //idea of clusters or density

ARPANET - decentralization for survive catastrophic events but military motivation //theme of survive massive segmentation

quantifying decentralization
intersectional decentralization, interrelatedness

do people want decentralization? and which?

decentralized manufacturing > liber router / raspberry pi / 3d printer

can we decentralized the building of centralized networks?
specialization and centralization as connected concepts

Notes from PERVASIVE LABOUR UNION

Issue #1 | Terms of service

• the commodification of the image > the invisible body of terms of service
  

//how burocracy is hidden inside the software, exploits the soft part of software(code) has hard to read, burocracy as a formal code?

• network effect, life bounded with networks, exploitation hidden under 'social',
  

>>user data control and transparency from a bottom- up perspective, where users push for data controllers to respect their rights by means of negotiation, rejecting the fake binary approach upheld by social media monopolies
Issue #2 | Advertisement on Social Media
Issue #3 | Social graph
Issue #4 | User identity
Issue #5 | Like button
Issue #6 | Like button
Issue #7 | Immersive advertisement
Issue #8 | Smart city
Issue #9 | XMPP
daniel gultsch - conversations
xmpp / omemo
trust not mediated by an app + scale from large-centered services to small-decentralized
Issue #10 | Immateriality
Issue #11 | Entreprecariat
Issue #12 | Pervasiveness

BEYOND DISTRIBUTED AND DECENTRALIZED: WHAT IS A FEDERTED NETWORK | Institute of network

Paul Baran
1964 Paul Baran - On Distributed Network > distinction between centralized, decentralized and distributed networks.

Network
interconnected nodes, that can send and receive data, and can be organized in tdifferent ways building different types of network architecture:

Objects

• network
• node
• link
• server

Typologies
centralized > nodes send to a central node (server) that send back
distributed > no central server and each node is connected to other nodes. Data pass from node to node following the shorter route.
decentralized > distributed networks of centralized networks. If zoomed out seems decentralized, if zoomed in seems centralized with links to other central nodes.
Doesn't rely on a single server but split the risks.

Federation
Concept similar to the political one., union of states that are partially self-governing and independent but tranfer a set of responsabilities to a central government that unites them.

Federated Network
In the architecture of (alternative) social networks such as Diaspora, Lorea. But server architecture as a decentralized system, distributed network of centralized networks.

Is federation a synonym of decentralization?
Arvind Narayan - A critical look at decentralized personal data > analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of different network architectures. Distinction between federated and distributed networks, with decentralized as umbrella term.
In common to not being centralized.

Elijah Sparrow - Crabgrass social network > decentralized refer to peer-to-peer networks (distributed) while federated for client-to-server-to-server-to-client

Lonneke van der Velden - Meeting the alternatives > decentralization means that data is not stored on the servers owned by one central actor, but on federated servers. Federation as a mode of server organization that makes the network decentralized.

The social web
W3C - Federated Social Web, summit in 2010 > federation, in the context of social networks, means letting people on different social networks follow each other. Not focus on architecture but in the data exchange. Unified data architecture to let emerge an heterogeneous network-of-networks. Federation as data format.

federated network >> is a distributed network with each node of this distributed network being a centralized network. Such a federated network is a type of decentralized network, with another type of such a network being the distributed network.

FEMINIST SERVER MANIFESTO | Constant

control that allow insecurity? need of a safe space Paranode > nodecentrism, we focus on the node in a network, but multitude of paranodes in between which dont conform to the organising logic of network, and cannot be seen through the algorithms of the network. Not utopia, it is not nowhere but somewhere (beyond the nodes). Not a heterotopia, ince it is not outside the network. Paranodal as Atopia because it constitute a difference that is everywhere. ...

HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THE ALTERNATIVES? | HSBC

Pattern recognition
evolution of WhatsApp
2012 against adv and small rate for the service > 2014 bought by fb > 2016 add and sharing of private infos to improve the service (also fb messenger connect fb to your phone number)
search for alternatives (telegram,viber,snapchat,threema,allo,signal) but they all fail
There are no alternatives
Because they share the same model, centralized service which facilitate vendor lock-in and marketing related surveillance in the context of neolib free market. Example of Allo which started as no adv but allows investments by venture capital firms, ideology of make money by selling ad space and infos about their users. The problem is not the maker but the fact that there is no choice within the economic system.
Cryptography matters, but then it also doesn't
Latest competitive feature is the cryptography but you don't know well. In 2016 WhatsApp and fb messenger enabled end-to-end encryption to address increasing privacy but the problem of privacy in structural and economic.
Problem of metadata as product that produce an array of very personal infos in itself more valuable of our texts.
The wrong Signal
OWS developed the encryption algorithm for Signal (open source), the new alternative, but vs decentralization because hampers innovation.
Glutsch > internet as example of working federated network. The problem is in the fact that developers working on federated systems work for free so difficulty to monetise a system that can only succeed if open, difficulty of capitalisation.
He developed Conversation, app with a decentralize approach that relies on federation. No central server but can connect to different serves, so the provider is no important. This is allowed thanks to the XMPP protocol.
XMPP, the federated messaging
New XMPP community, OMEMO as extension protocol that provides multi-user end-to-end encryption. Interoperability allows the esistence of different free and open source software clients and to run your own server from home. Several clients such as Gajim, ChatSecure. Economic sustainability but constant work, client's economic viability in the capacity to capture users.
Approaches not Apps
No alternatives but, federative network as a fragile economic model. 2 main points: scale and trust:

• Scale communication to your community and allows to match your own threat model dealing with trust not mediated by an app
• Experiment with economic model other than large-scaleinfrastructures that involves surveillance and social graph fotr financial gain
• Learn DIY networks, share the costs, meetings, societal issues, without cut yourself from the rest of the world

CONTRA-INTERNET | Zach Blas | 2016

Killing the internet
Egypt 28/1/2011 protest vs Mubarak, government terminated national access to internet (kill switch) toblock protester ti coordinate and block dissemination in social media. It lasts only 5 days.
Order to ISP to cancel routing services + fiber-optic cables owned by the government >> 88% of internet connectivity suppressed. The only ISP active was the one used fot the stock exchange.
What does it mean to kill internet? can technical infrastructure be killed? Violation of human rights but confusing because this means that internet is on the side of the revolutionaries but infrastructure is controlled by the state. Desire of political change can only persist within telecommunications itself.

• 2007 Saffor Revolution in Myanmar
• 2014 Gezi protests in Istanbul (banned Twitter)
• from 2014 internet blackouts in Iraq, from 2005 in Nepal
• little or no access in North Korea but Kwangmyong network
• filtered websites in China (The Great Firewall of China) but also in UK
• extremist surveillance in US (tramp - kill internet vs isis recruiment)
• surveillance and censorship in YT and FB

everything vs a biopolitical subject engineered by corporation to use internet compulsively and being addicted while creating content and asking to click. Internet has extension of control VS McLuhan media as extension of man.

Disappearing the internet
2015 World Economic Forum, Eric Schmidt (Google) - Internet will disappear into our environments. Difference between killing and disappearing? So many sensor and devices that it will be present all the time. Dissolve infrastructures into materialities of the world, total intergration, impossibility to kill VS internet shutdown. Internet as a new chemical element. Transparent city, never stops to produce data, emergence of IoT, reengineer all objects and beings as ontologically networkable. Exacerbation of neolib condition, life as a networked, administrable and programmable. Internet as the last silicon valley's tool fot incessant global surveillance that while desappearing, reappear as e-waste. Internet disappear also into us becoming a mode of subjectivation, set of feelings, sense of longing, human condition, metanarrative. Internet as totality with no outside, alternative, ending.
Assange - is the future of internet also the future of the world? Once internet disappear ioto the world, and the world becomes a global image of the internet, does this means that to undo this teleological trajectory, it is necessary to think beyond the world? >> transform internet in order to locate the potentialities of a militant alternative or outside to the totality the internet has become.
Postcapitalist Politics
1996 Gibson-Graham - 'the end of capitalism (as we knew)' > particular feminist take on postcapitalist politics. Critique at marxist philosophers who argue that capitalism has no outside, effect of nullifying any anticapitalist project, including marxism. 'postcapitalist' not a time after the totalization of capitalism but echonomic alternatives at play within capitalism itself. Words as 'capitalocentric' critiques the left for not being able to think outside or beyond capitalism. Shifting from thinking totality to thinking possibility as intervent into anticapitalist politics.
What is thinkable when internet, as totalized and hegemonic form of contemporary life, in post-capitalist politics? 'Post-internet' as referring to network alternatives, like mesh network and cryptography practices. New vocabulary starting with 'internetocentric'. inability to think beyond or outside internet.
Contrasexuality
2001 Paul Preciado - 'manifesto contrasexuality' > refusal of sexual norms VS articulation of sexuality as naturalized. Against sexuality in the sence of against an undersatnding of sexuality as constituted by dominating and hegemonic powers. To enact it, is to performe and perversely produce contra-pleasures in the body, utopian horizon of political transformation.
Refusal and alternative.
How a contra-internet?
Contrasexuality through 'dildotectonics' , experimental contra-science of dildos, because external to the body vs body as totalized heterosexual unit. Body mapped as a dildo, sexually unnaturalized, reconfigured, transgressive prosthesis, transformed into pure contrasexuality. Not body as a phallus because not emblem of patriarchy. Penis as a meat dildo but not dildo as a plastic penis. Reveals the potentialities of sexuality beyond the heteronormative and the phallocentric. Dildotopia exercises.
What are the dildotectonics of internet? If dildos to expse the norms and constructions of sexuality, what for reveal the internet as totality? The network, internet comprised of networks, but not necessarly the internet. Networks links life to the dominant forms of governance and control today. If dildo external to the body, contra-internet external to internet, something other of a netwrok, outside the network?
Paranodes
2013 Ulises Ali Mejias - 'Off the network', 'the outside of network as a method for acting in the world' > Paranode, alternative to a network configuration vs nodocentrism (dominant model in assembling the social), from neuroscience, paranode is the space that networks leave out, negative space of networks, noise between nodes and edges vs topological and conceptual limits of the node.
Multitudinous form, collection of dildos for the internet.
David Berry, Alexander Galloway > we are trapped in a sort of network, reticular pessimism, no escape from the networks wxcept in term of networks themselves. New metanarrative, no alternative to invasive network, reticular pessimism as deeply cinical VS utopian thinking, alternatives.
Reticular pessimism destabilizes the node and edges of the network form. Cracks and fissures appear in the solid structure of the network. The paranodal appears, beginning of all contra-internet politics.
Antiweb
Hong Kong 2014 pro-democracy demonstrations vs chines government might surveil or shut down internet. FireChats does not break into paranodal but antiwebs or networking alternatives. Not isolated but also mesh networking. Emergent network militancy to expose the inadequacies of the internet as a political horizon + utopiam glimmer of another kind of network. End of the internet as we knew it, but paranodal beginning, horizon of futurity of the contra-internet practices. Paranodal as contra-infrastructure and theoretical model propose 2 militancies:

• practical search for antiwebs
• intellectual task of making thinkable, not only outside the internet but also beyond the network itself

As the Zapatistas might say, let us approach the internet at the speed of dreams.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT SELF-EXPRESSION | ROB HORNING | 2014

1.
Subjectivation > end product of producers who train individual to compliance and docility VS autonomy and freedom.Structuring codes for an internal psychic coherence but becoming yourself not as a growth but a surrender of possibilities, inherently limiting. Liberating as freeing temporarily from existential doubts. Social order is protected, not by preventing self-expression and identity, but by forcing people to limit and discipline themselves, take responsability to build and clean your own cage.
Social-media > flexible tool for social control. Expression through a codified network, construct a 'personal brand' identity, adopt incentive structures of capitalist social order as their own. (Big Data - more data you supply more the algorithms can determine your reality)

2.
Inner directed process of discovery VS outer-directed pseudo-creativity (pursuit of attention overwhelmed by desperation). Maybe inner-directed as an ideological illusion, interiority in relation to social world that enable us to survive, but social-media production sold as self-expressive creativity, as self discovery, but in reality narrowing of the self as reductive, defensive aim of getting recognition, reassurance of one's own existence. This creativity VS antisocial kind, reclused, social disappearence, indifference to reputation and social capital, being someone in a network. Self-invention in a social media perpetually in search of feedback, production of communication that gives value to the network (storing and selling data) VS self. Validation for creative effort is limited, restrict itself to a tool of attracting attention, blunt instruments of novelty and prrurience. The self tends to be new, exciting, confessional,sexy... because as advertisement. Identity as series of ads for an non existent product.
Social media intensify anxiety, focus into posts waiting for judgment.Quantifying metrics makes expression as a series of discrete items to be counted,ranked. Infrastructure for a feedback loop that orient expression toward anxiety of what numbers will be, self-monitoring to become more relevant.

Actual self-invention as self-dessolution VS social life and social bounds which shapes us

Alternative as a deep focus in isolation where to accept the incompleteness of being apart from an audience, not seeking final judgment letting the ambiguity, open-ended, of the moment VS archive of identity. The best way to be yourself is to not be anybody in particular but to just be.

3.
Is the solution to get off the Internet? to don't use social media becouse the structure social behavior? It is hard to escape from the 'connected world' and its addictiveness, but anyway social media are reshaping society collectively. Even if you don't use them your social being is affected by this reshaping, because social relations are not one-way. “I fell out of sync with the flow of life.” Reciprocity of social relations VS social medias that present social life as a personal computer consumption experience. Illusion scattered by the anxiety of waiting the response, whiplash alternation between onnipotence and vulnerability. Digital and physical interpenetrated, not a problem of technological mediated social reality. Neoliberalist idea of 'personal responsability' VS collective action, express oneself as an isolated self, free of social determination, exacerbated by a connectivity that atomizes rather than collectivizes. But because internet experience mediated by capitalist entities, by capitalism itself. Even if you go outside there is the same alienation. Capitalist imperatives are still shaping subjectivity, time and experience of leisure,work,life. The problem is capitalism no internet.
social media offer singular identity but our consciousness are multiple simultaneous identities, at once unique and social individual imbued with a collectively consctructed sense of value.
Internet and social media experienced from an isolated 'node' as capitalist subjects, intensifying the social relations familiar to capitalism (asymmetries and exploitation). Immaterial labour to produce commoidities and capital relationship.

4.
Exodus won't yeld freedom. not online self VS offline self. Online self doensn't corresponf with the offline because processing of digital traces.
Seems necessary a new way of augmented sense 'transindividuality' where social being is not VS individuality. A way out of the trap of capitalist subjectivity and compulsive production and anxiety. Discover the self as some transcendent thing at once unfettered by and validated through social mediation. Not using social media to master identity but use them to balance the multitude within.

COLLECTIVE INDIVIDUATION: THE FUTURE OF THE SOCIAL WEB | YUK HUI, HARRY HALPIN

Epoc of networks, world as space of interlocking networks of infinite variety (biological,productive,cybernetic,social). Image of the network, with obvious bias toward vision, as paradigmatic representation of understanding technological society, holistic entity that otherwise escape our cognitive grasp. No image is ideologically neutral, mediation between subject and object which inscribes a conceptual apparatus into the world: nodes and links.
Due to its grasp over our immagination, the network constitutes the horizon of possible invention (Simondon - Imagination et invention) .
Where did the concept of network comes form? not from social networks but pre-digital 1930 psychologist Moreno, the digital accelerated this conceptual apparatus. Anyway the social network influence the globe. Stiegler 'how does the what of FB constitute the who?'

The industrialization of social relations
Moreno > sociometry, value of graph-theoretic approach to social relationships. Before cybernetics and internet. Study in a school with a lot of girls, because of network of social relationships, so 'map the network', 'sociogram' mapping persons to nodes and relationships to links. Pattern visible through charting. 1941 Reorganize social relations organically through superimposition VS pre-existing networks, but produce an unaware society removed from human control.
Loss of control as central problem of the technical social networks >> question the ontological presuppositions hidden in the histoical development of socialnet anaysis.
Socialnet analysis as extreme expression of spocial atomism, presupposition that individuals (only humans)constitute the network, basic unchanging units of the socialnet.
Collectivity as the sum of the individuals, social relations as the map of the quantified social graph, mathematical precision to the concept of socialnet VS anthropology where collectivity exist beyond the mere sum of individuals and their relations, and embedded in technical,historical,zoological world (families,clan,tribes...), and pre-dates the notion of autonomous individual.

RW&RM texts

from SELECTIONS FROM THE PRISON NOTEBOOKS | Antonio Gramsci

HISTORY OF THE SUBALTERN CLASSES
Unity of the ruling class is realised in the state and their history. not only as juridical and political but results from the organic relations between state (political society) and civil society (see 'state and civil society').
Unification of subaltern classes is only possible in becoming a State, while their history is interwined with civil society, and history of states. necerrasy to study:
1. objective formation of subaltern social groups, developments/transformations in economic production, quantitative diffusion, origin and pre-existing social groups (mentality, ideology and aims).
2. their active or passive affiliation to the dominant political formations, attempts to influence the programmers of those to press claims of their own,and consequences in determining processes of decomposition/renovation/neo-formation
3. birth of new parties of the dominant groups to conserve the assent of subaltern groups and maintain control over them
4. formations in subaltern groups to press claims of a limited and partial character (trade unions)
5. formations which assert autonomy of the subaltern groups, but within the old framework (reformist parties)
6. formation which assert intgral autonomy (communist)
THE CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY
Ideology was an aspect of sensationalism (1700 french materialism). 'science of ideas' which analyse ideas, investigation of ideas. Ideas had to be broken in their original elements that could be just sensations. Ideas derived from sensations.
but sensationalism associated with extreme belief of 'power of the spirit' and its 'immortal destinies' (manzoni) even after its conversion. Chatolicism adhere in principle to sensationalism until philosophy of rosmini.
How historical passage from 'science of ideas' to 'system of ideas'?
Freud as the last of ideologues and also De Man (interest of Croce and Crocean)
Bukharin - popular manual, trapped in ideology whereas marxism as a distinct advance and historically in opposition to ideology. Ideology in marxism as negative value and excludes ideas as sensations for its founders, but in phisiology. Ideology must be analysed historically as a superstructure.
Element of error in assessing the value of ideologies because name ideology in both
necessary superstructure of a particular structure / arbitrary elucubrations of particular individuals
The bas sense has become widespread with the effect of a modified and denatuirates analysis of this concept. The process leading to this can be resumed:
1. ideology identified as distinct from the structure, and assertion that ideology changes the structure and not viceversa.
2. it is asserted that a given political solution is ideological (not sufficient to change the structure althought it thinks that it can, so it is stupid, useless)
3. assertion that every ideology is pure appearence, useless,stupid
But one must distinguish between historically organic ideologies (necessary to a given structure) and ideologies that are rationalistic, arbitrary, willed. To the extent that ideologies are historically necessary they have a validity that is psychological, organise human masses, create terrain on which man move, acquire consciousness of their position,struggle ... While the arbitrary creates individual movements, polemics and so on (tho not completely useless, since they function like an error which by contrasting with truth, demonstrates it).
Marx 'solidity of popular beliefs' as a necessary element of a specific situation, a popular convinction often has the same energy as a material force.
Analysis of those propositions tends to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which material forces are the content and ideologies the form, tho distinction between form and content has didactic value, since material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and ideologies individual without material forces.
CULTURAL THEMES:IDEOLOGICAL MATERIAL
study of how the ideological structure of a dominant class is organized:material organization to maintain/defend/develope the theoretical or ideological 'front.' Most prominent and dynamic part is the press: publishing houses (which have an implicit and explicit programme and are linked to a particular tendency), political news, periodicals, bullettin...
This study in a national scale would be gigantic but in a city or more. A news editor should have this study as outline for his work, make his own version. Press as the most dynamic part of ideological structure, but not he only one. Everything which is capable to influence public opinion, directly or not: libraries, schools, associations, clubs, architecture, the layout and names of streets.
Position in the Church in modern society through the constant effort to develope continuously its material structure ideology. Very importance of this study!!! living historical model + accustom to a more cautious and exact estimate of the forces acting society. What resources can be used against this formidable complex of trenches and fortification of the dominant class? Spirit of scission, progressive acquisition of the consciousness of its own historical personality, aim to spread itself from the protagonist class to the potential allies classes. All this requires a complex ideological labour, exact knowledge of the field that must be cleared of its element of human 'mass'.

THE RULING CLASS AND THE RULING IDEAS | Marx & Engels

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas
who rule the material force of society (means of production) automatically rule the intellectual force (mental production).
Ruling ideas > ideal expression of the dominant material relations.

Individuals in the ruling class possess consciousness and think.
As they determine the extent, compass of anhistorical epoch, regualte production and distribution of the ideas of their age > ruling ideas of the epoch (presented as eternal laws ex. 'separation of powers').
Division of labour (one of the chief forces of history) manifests itself also in the ruling class:

• mental - formation of the illusions of the class
• material - passive to the illusion but active members of the class

If conflict that endangered the class, automatically vanish, and vanish also the appearence of the ideas as not the idea of the ruling class because distinct power from the power of the class. Existence of revolutionary ideas presuppose revolutionary class.
If ideas are independent but the class gives to those ideas universality presenting them as the only rational, to carry their interest as the common interest, expressed in ideal forms.

The class making revolution comes forward only if opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole society VS one ruling class. It can do this because pressure of existing condition while not yet being able to develop a particular interest of a particular class. Its victory benefits individuals of other classes, not as dominant but enable them to raise into the ruling class. (Frenche revolution could have allowed proletarian to raise). Every new class achive domination only on a broader basis than the one before, but also more sharply and profoundly opposition.
This determine the fact that all the struggle against this new class becomes more radical negation of the previous conditions of society than all previous classes could have.
This whole appearence of the rule of aclass as only the rule of certain ideas, comes to and end with the end of class rule as form in which society is organised, when it is not necessary to represent a particular interest as general or general interest as ruling.

Once ruling ideas separated from ruling individuals and material relations, with the conclusion that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract 'the Idea' as the dominant force in history, and separate ideas as 'forms of self-determination' of the main concept. So all the relations of man cames from the concept of Man (speculative philosophy, Hegel).

Trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history confined in 3 attempts:

• separate ideas of those ruling for empirical reasons, empircal conditions and as corporeal individuals, from these rulers, and thus recognise the rule of ideas or illusions in history
• order into this rule of ideas, prove mystical connection among the successive, by regarding them as 'forms of self-determination of the concept'
• remove mystical appearance of this 'self-determining concept' it is changed into a person 'self-consciousness' or series of persons who represent the 'concept' in history, into the ideologists as the manufacturers of history, 'council of guardians', as the rulers. Eliminate materialistic elements from history and given to the speculative steed.

This method reigned in Germany, illusion of ideologists in general, dogmatic dreamings and distortions, explained from theis practical position in life, job, division of labour.
While shopkeeper can distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, historiograph has not this insight and takes what words about itself says of an epoch as truth.