"beyond the mother stands out the image of the father who will turn a blind eye to desires, this marks the true function of the father which is to fundamentally unite, not oppose a [manifestion of] desire to the law"
- Jacques Lacan
Rather, power is a set of actions on possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; it releases or contrives, makes more probable or less; in the extreme, it constrains or forbids absolutely, but it is always a way of acting upon one or more acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.
- Michel Foucault
Agreeing with Foucault, but using a poststructuralist scrim, [Lazzarato] still believes that sovereignty is interested in exercising its power by neutralising difference with repetition in order to reduce the power of variation (the difference that makes a difference), by subordinating it to reproduction. [In discipline,] the function of the training of bodies is to prevent the bifurcation, to eradicate any possibility of variation, any unpredictability, from action, conduct, and behaviour. But in the field of the Society of Control, the body is coerced through invisible and sublime intensive loops that incorporate it within itself to homogenise the heterogeneity. The unruly body/mind of the multitude, in all of its possibilities, must also be constrained and contained in the wide–open spaces of the world picture/movie. Accordingly, new and more sophisticated technologies are instituted for the control of the mental at a distance.
- Warren Neidich
Thus, noopower and the Society of Control center on the modulation of the possibilities of noopolitics, the insertion of thought before thought. They require the induction, seduction, enhancement or constraint of the possibilities of thought itself, seeking to eliminate radical differences of opinion — differences that could make a difference — with repetitious thoughts: intensive loops and repeated messages that subjects incorporate into their own perceptions. We are free to think, but there are thoughts that precede ours, that shape ours, thoughts that we confront as concretized in specific institutions and architectures (Ebensperger, et al., 2010). These are real abstractions that help us think while subtly containing what we think about. Our memories are of course our own, but they are also supplemented with media prostheses, helpful tips, “intuitive” interfaces, and outright limitations.
It is not certain that evaluating cognitive work or produsage in any of its manifestations is possible. In fact, theorists of cognitive labor argue that value itself, as a conceptual object, is in crisis, precisely because the older system of evaluation by the exchange of equivalents (that is, the classical commodity capitalist system) is eroding (Virtanen, 2004; Boutang, 2010). But setting this crisis aside, much effort is going into conducting the thoughts of subjects. Drawing on Gabriel Tarde, Maurizio Lazzarato notes that institutions such as polling firms, mass media, and education are the best exemplars of noopower insitutions. These are the institutions capable of modulating the thoughts produced in the social factory, to the ends of managing knowledge production across the social spectrum, from within firms to within stores to within homes.
Beyond the social factory, noopower is the domain of global politics. Global financial markets now deal more in perception than in actual commodities; when a brand or market is perceived to be weak in London or Hong Kong, billions of dollars evaporate in New York as stock prices erode. Perception of a brand trumps actual products. The Global War on Terror is as much a war of ideas and information as it is a “kinetic” conflict between fighters (Lawson, in press). Leaders in the United States regularly speak about “Brand America,” seeking to bolster or repair global public perceptions of that brand. Nations increasingly seek to secure their knowledge assets (intellectual property, trade secrets, scientific discoveries) against so–called “theft” by hackers and downloaders. Again, all of these practices cohere into noopower institutions such as polling firms, media systems, and education which seek to shape how we think about the global knowledge economy.
For the purposes of this paper, and in the larger spirit of the Unlike Us project, I would add social media monopolies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter to this list of institutionalized noopower. These social media monopolies provide architectures that both incite, induce, and seduce, while constraining or forbidding, thoughts. In other words, these sites are capable of neutralizing differences in thought via repetition, even as they incite difference via openness. As such, these sites channel noopolitical production and make it productive for other institutions of noopower, most notably marketers, pollsters, and states. What follows is an overview of how social media monopolies will have become central nodes in networks of noopower.
- Robert GehlTo this linguistic partition there corresponds the partition of the real into two correlated but distinct spheres: the first ontology in fact defines and governs the sphere of philosophy and science; the second, that of law, religion, and magic. Law, religion, and magic—which originally it is not always easy to distinguish—constitute in fact a sphere in which language is always in the imperative. Indeed, I believe that a good definition of religion would be that which characterizes it as the attempt to construct an entire universe on the basis of a command. And not only does God express himself in the imperative, in the form of the command, but curiously, human beings also address God in the same way. Whether in the classical world or in Judaism and Christianity, prayers are always formulated in the imperative: “Give us this day our daily bread.”
This means that, in a type of what psychoanalysts call “return of the repressed,” religion, magic, and law—and with these, the whole sphere of nonapophantic discourse, which have been driven into the shadows—in reality secretly govern the functioning of our societies that wish to be lay and secular.
Indeed, I believe that a good description of the so-called democratic societies in which we live consists in defining them as societies in which the ontology of the command has taken the place of the ontology of assertion, yet not in the clear form of an imperative but in the more underhanded form of advice, of invitation, of the warning given in the name of security, in such a way that obedience to a command takes the form of a cooperation and, often, of a command given to oneself. I am not thinking only of the sphere of advertising and that of the security prescriptions given in the form of an invitation, but also of the sphere of technological apparatuses. These apparatuses are defined by the fact that the subjects who use them believe themselves to command them (and in fact push buttons defined as “commands”), but in truth do nothing but obey a command inscribed in the very structure of the apparatus. The free citizens of democratic technological societies are beings who incessantly obey in the very gesture with which they impart a command.
Architectures are reality engines. Political instruments. Apparatuses. From examples like the 3000-year-old Hypostyle Temple at Karnak, Nile plain agriculture land measuring and partitioning instruments, to the planned city Kahun, designed as a culture-factory to produce the pharaoh’s tombs and coffers, power and reality; to more recently, suburbs, parks, tourist resorts and infrastructure, Silicon Valley tech headquarters, software design offices, data storage centres, global digital satellite networks, hallucinogen drug ritual retreats for precarious creative workers; to nano-bio tech and pharmaceuticals that re-design the architecture of our sexes, organs and minds. These disparate examples share something critical in common: a reproduction of monopoly on decisions and command. As indexes and components of a larger assemblage with mythology, law, ‘culture’, science and so on, they destroy and re-order, ‘freeing’ but instantly then re-order our irreducible singularity and the becoming of a thousand of tiny little sexes into reductive, instrumentalising forms.
Fake binaries, like sexes and classes are created and reproduced through destroying/uprooting, and differentiation. But we are also violently integrated, unified and homogenised. As older modern ‘disciplinary’ apparatuses like housing typology and its interior programmatic divisions, values and nuclear family roles are rejected or exceeded by the same wild creative power architects conjured up to invent them, new soft or ‘invisible’ apparatuses ‘modulate’ life in increasingly open space. But the ancient is never really exceeded: gods, mythos, states and ‘family’ ally with nanotech. Apparatuses have always worked via fatal attraction, mirror capturing our refusals to be instrumentalised, and evolving to increasingly give us a semblance of power and control. Thus, through the very same gesture with which we command, we obey commands inscribed in their structure. We are typified.
However, in a positive sense, deepening colonisation’s conjuring of our wild destructive/creative forces only hastens an exposure and suspension of our ‘stunning’ or capture in habits, environments, genetic coding, and any supposedly natural order of things. We become inessential beings who lack any preordained work, nature, or destiny - this is precisely why we have the possibility of Politics and Architecture. Therefore, we cannot reject the apparatuses. Instead, our architecture might expose and suspend their instrumentalising functions, ‘misuse’ them, and provoke experiments with forms-of-architecture-and-life that have joyously forgotten any goal.
- Brendon Carlin
