Is network theory the ideology of Empire?
Excerpted form Micah White’s article on the birth of the altermodern, this is summary of Zizek’s critique of network ideology as complicit in neocapitalist efforts:
“According to Slavoj Žižek in the final chapter of his book Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, the exemplars of Deleuzian philosophy are not the anarchists but the late-capitalists: “In short, and stated even more pointedly, the thought of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, the ultimate philosophers of resistance, of marginal positions crushed by the hegemonic power network, is effectively the ideology of the newly emerging ruling class.” For Žižek, the misapprehension of Deleuze as a philosopher of resistance has led to the awkward situation where major alterglobalization theorists are espousing a suspiciously similar rhetoric to that of the globalizers. Singling out Naomi Klein, Žižek continues, “So, when Naomi Klein writes that ‘[n]eo-liberal economics is biased at every level toward centralization, consolidations, homogenization. It is a war waged on diversity,’ is she not focusing on a figure of capitalism whose days are numbered? Would she not be applauded by contemporary capitalist modernizers? Is not the latest trend in corporate management itself ‘diversify, devolve power, try to mobilize local creativity and self-organization?’ Is not anticentralization the topic of the ‘new’ digitalized capitalism?”
The significance of Žižek’s stinging critique of Klein is that it effectively tars an entire lineage of leftist political theory leading from Deleuzian multiplicities to Hardt and Negri’s multitude. And in light of there having been no compelling response to Žižek’s critique, it is hard not to doubt the postmodern tactics we’ve been using. Could it be that while we’ve been smashing boundaries and crossing borders, consumerism has quickened its global expansion by piggybacking on our identity-blurring efforts?”
August 30th, 2010 at 12:00 am
Zizek is nuking sea monkeys in a pipette by going after Klein. But is he confusing form (networks) with content (capitalism)? I can’t help but notice that he writes books, and that business consultants also write books…
September 1st, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Well, capitalism itself is a structure. Nevertheless, it’s quite cheeky of Zizek to take corporate management’s official policies at face-value, without providing an analysis of what they’re actually doing. If networks truly are effective, then it is logical the slave-holders would use their culture to get more out of workers. How that is an indictment of decentralization or networks, again, I’m not sure.
I thought corporate management deserved to go as such, not that we had to support the contrary of everything corporate management happens to support at the present moment because it just suits them.