Empire, or Cyborg governance: divining systemic power

Version 1.0

Marshall, Jonathan Paul

ARC Research Fellow
School of Social Inquiry
University of Technology Sydney.

Room 416 Bon Marche Building
University of Technology Sydney
Broadway 2007
Australia

Jon.marshall@uts.edu.au
jmarshal@ol.com.au
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Empire, or Cyborg Governance: divining systemic power

Abstract
The web of post-modern power appears nomadic, elusive and always elsewhere.  Like our online presences, it has no obvious boundaries and appears as spirit-like, a magic life haunting the net and the world.  We cannot act upon it, and the traditional modes of protest, such as occupying the streets or a building, are no longer effective.  Becoming cyborg means being controlled through this dispersed location of control.  Responsibility is distributed while the impact of power focused.  Power is seemingly emptied out of a place so that power can become total, as in Guantanamo Bay, where people are kept under U.S. restriction while outside the presence of that country’s laws.  Government becomes liminal. “Liminal identities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom and ceremonial” to quote Victor Turner.  This liminality in the government and the corporation’s case, or in the systems case, allows it to govern strongly almost without resistance.  

Antonio Negri’s term ‘Empire’ is perhaps unfortunate, for Empire implies an Emperor.  Hence I use the term ‘cyborg-governance’ to refer to this confluence, without implicitly diluting its physiognomy of being systemic, of having distributed responsibility, and of appearing elsewhere with no apparent origin.  Empire creates multitude and multitude creates the Empire of distributed power.  Here the term ‘multitude’ implies the fall of the singularity which is empire, when it itself makes up part of its systemic distributed dynamics – no overthrow or freedom, need arise from this participation.  

Introduction
This paper, you are warned, is political and subjective; but it is also, I hope, sociological, even if extremely incomplete, and at least points somewhere different to what is already known.  I am going to suggest that the organisation of power relations in the ‘North’ has changed significantly since the 1960s, from being participatory within the State, to being distributed throughout a (world) system.  This is not only linked with what seems like a real increase in the ratio of power which can be attributed to the corporate sector, but also confusion, as power also always seems elsewhere – possibly even to those who appear powerful.  Domination must not be confused with control.  Analytically power not only seems liminal but the more powerful use liminality to increase their power, wether deliberately or not.  As a result, the social order seems to become more magical and can only be divined rather than perceived.  This power can be also linked to cyborg imagery, and the cyborg becomes a metaphor for systemic helplessness rather than, as often argued, for liberation.

The Growth and Decline of the Modern Nation State
We may characterise the ‘Modern Period’ in terms of the growing inclusion of the State.  This view primarily sees the State as not just a site for rule, but as a site where factions compete and compromise to varying degrees.  The more democratic the State, the more open it is to roughly equal participation and internal competition.  During the 19th Century, and for the first 75 or so years of the 20th Century, those represented, or able to participate, moved from males of property and the correct religion, to males of less property, males of other religions, women, younger people and so on.  Rotten boroughs were destroyed and electorates shifted to the industrial towns.  This increase in participation was fairly much marked by riots; disruption; unionisation; strikes; increased regulation of factory work, workers conditions and wages; increasing distribution of education; the beginning of social security and attempts to prevent destitution rather than punish the destitute and so on.  Much of the time, conservative and labour forces allied against ‘liberal’ capitalism and its perceived destruction of values, obligation, and living conditions.  The struggle seems to have taken longer in the US than in the UK, but nevertheless by the end of the Great Depression Keynesian economics had been embraced and established the radical idea of trickle up economics in which prosperity was induced by giving the poorer sections of the workforce more income, instead of the more traditional and repeatedly failed idea of increasing general wealth by making sure the wealthy have more income.

To some extent, the ‘middle classes’ came to exist because they filled positions within State and business bureaucracies.  They were required to be educated, and to fill a position between the owners of capital, or those with government authority, and those supposed to obey.  Thus they acted as something of a communication channel, and referee.  Valuation of expertise (‘the white collar’) which distinguished them from workers, helped overwhelm loyalty to a particular workplace in favour of professional evaluation i.e. that of other equals with similar concerns.  This was the beginning of the ‘knowledge worker’. 

The sixties saw the peak of this process, with increased participation of supposed minorities, ethnic groups, gays, even those defined as criminal, and possibly the citizens of other countries through NGOs and International bodies.  War in Vietnam had been shut down partially by incompetence, partially by a dedicated enemy, and partially by protest participation and international action.  It could be suggested that resources and wealth were not just being distributed to a “ruling class”.  This increase in participation could be seen as threatening.  For example, Samuel Huntingdon wrote:
The 1960s witnessed a dramatic renewal of the democratic spirit in America. The predominant trends of that decade involved the challenging of the authority of established political, social, and economic institutions, increased popular participation in and control over those institutions, a reaction against the concentration of power in the executive branch of the federal government and in favor of the reassertion of the power of Congress and of state and local government, renewed commitment to the idea of equality on the part of intellectuals and other elites, the emergence of the ‘public interest’ lobbying groups, increased concern for the rights of and provisions of opportunities for minorities and women to participate in the polity and economy, and a pervasive criticism of those who possessed or were even thought to possess excessive power or wealth (1975: 59-60).

Previously passive or unorganized groups in the population now embarked on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges, which they had not considered themselves entitled to before (ibid: 61-62).

Huntington goes on to argue that these events, which he calls “the democratic distemper” or an “excess of democracy” were problematic for good government, for governmental authority (on behalf of elites), and for American military hegemony (ibid: 105-6, 113).  To some extent we might see this reaction as a foreshadowing of what I will call ‘cyborg governance’.  Huntington’s oracle suggested that power no longer lurked in quite the right places and that the change threatened boundaries and control.  He argued that it needed to be cut back firstly by a focus on economic issues (ibid: 84-5) and encouraging voter apathy (ibid: 114). 

The 70s and onwards saw the, largely corporate, foundation of Right Wing, pro-capitalist “think-tanks” in both Britain and the US (Ricci 1993), whose mission was to restore the appeal of free-market economics.  This seems to have been done by associating the distrust of government, which arose during the Sixties and the Nixon years, with a free market agenda of ‘looking after oneself’, and cutting back on State intrusion.  Sometimes the implementation of these policies seems to have been carried out by not informing people of political intentions.  In the early 1990s, Peter Costello, the current right wing Australian Treasurer, when asked on the ABC election night broadcast why his party had lost a supposedly unlosable election, replied along the lines of “we told the people what we would do”.  In the same vein free market enthusiasts Milton and Rose Friedman cheerfully approved of a Canadian politician’s refusal to inform the electorate of his plans to cut the civil service by 25%, and abolish many government programmes (1984: 6).

Whether intentionally or not, as the 20th Century came to a close, access to the State has been rolled-back, participation of the less powerful has been diminished, income is no longer redistributed to the poorer sections of the nation, education is no longer free and is in crisis, and the tax burden has shifted from the corporate sector to wage earners.  This family of events would imply that the corporate sector has become the dominant sector of Western English Speaking Countries. 

Yet this has not clearly resulted in the appearance of a definite ruling class with recognisable members, and institutionalised control.

Post-modern Power
Without implying complete agreement, the following statement, from Castells, summarizes some of the taken for granted background of this essay
Capitalism itself has undergone a process of profound restructuring, characterised by greater flexibility in management; decentralization and networking of firms...; considerable empowering of capital vis-a-vis labour...; increasing individualization and diversification of working relationships; massive incorporation of women into the paid labour force, usually under discriminatory conditions; intervention of the state to deregulate markets selectively, and to undo the welfare state...; stepped up global economic competition.
[T]here has also been an accentuation of uneven development [not only between economies, but within them].
Social movements tend to be fragmented, localistic, single-issue oriented and ephemeral... people tend to regroup around primary identities: religious, ethnic, territorial, national... the search for identity, collective or individual, ascribed or constructed, becomes the fundamental source of social meaning (Castells 2000: 1-3)
We might summarise Castells’ position by claiming that Capital is now nomadic and flexible, able to strike where it will, and not easily locatable – whereas the majority of people are comparatively fixed and subject to these raids and movements.  Capital lives in the “space of flows”, and people in the “space of places” (2000: 408-9, 442ff).

To put it another way, the web of post-modern power appears nomadic, elusive and always elsewhere.  Because of this appearance, responsibility, and location of power is never clear, even to those who use it.  

In academic and official writings we may note the often reported tendency of the term governance to refer to some kind of abstraction rather than to intended action, and to something ‘new’. The official portal to the EU web site defines governance in terms of the ‘post modern form of economic and political organisations’ (Europa 2004).  Rhodes suggests that the term implies ‘a new process of governing; or a changed condition of ordered rule; or the new method by which society is governed’ (1996:  652). The term often seems to imply the importation of corporate managerial models, competition, profitability and so on into public life (ibid: 654-5). Stoker draws attention to a general agreement that “governance refers to the development of governing styles in which boundaries between and within public and private sectors have become blurred” (1998: 17).  It is usually tied up with the ideas of ‘deregulating’ markets and barriers to foreign investment, or in other words surrendering the participatory State to corporate desire.

As part of this syndrome, we note the increasing way that Politicians blame events elsewhere for results in their own State.  Thus ordinary wages decline due to foreign competition and the ease of exporting jobs elsewhere through information technology, while executive salaries increase due to the same international competition for the ‘best people’.  Responsibility can be put upon the impersonal market, as if the market was not influenced by human decisions, and as if the market was not a political, but a natural, force.  But although the market seems to demand policies which favour particular distributions of wealth, perhaps referring to it, also expresses the sense that even those at the top of the corporate sector have of not being in control 

The powerful seem mobile, able to be transferred elsewhere with ease, again largely through information technology.  The original idea of which was to extend command and control.  Power has no fixed base.  Corporations are motile when compared to States, even when the States are necessary to impose the laws that make corporations and business possible, and to suppress worker dissent. The ability of corporations to engage in ‘transfer pricing’ whereby they take their profits outside of national domains, though incur costs within national domains, means that traditional ways of raising tax from corporations do not work.  Similarly corporations can get States to compete for the lowest tax rates on their activities, or even subsidies.  The tax burden is shifted on to those smaller companies or wage earners who cannot shift their incomes off-shore. As a result the revenues of Nation States may decline, and proposed regulation of corporations (such as the suggestion of curbs to pollution), or tightening of taxation can be greeted with threats of corporate flight.

As a result it is often hard to hold corporations responsible, as with the escape of the Union Carbide company management from any obligations over the ongoing Bhopal disaster.  Union Carbide is now bought out by Dow Chemicals who deny any responsibility or obligation (Moro & Lapierre 2003: 385-6).  Governments in Australia, and I imagine elsewhere, use privacy agreements and commercial confidentiality to prevent people from discovering the precise nature of their agreements with the corporate sector and the precise degree of tax payer money involved, and even if cheaper contracts were available.  It also seems hard to hold any particular person in charge of a corporation responsible for the actions of that corporation.  This lack of responsibility does not always work, as seems to be being shown by the increased number of executives facing trial for fraud, although sometimes the responsibility seems strained, as in the recent James Hardie case in Australia.  In this case a corporation essentially made profit through poisoning their workers with asbestos.  When this was discovered they transferred ownership of most of their assets overseas, while leaving some money with a foundation in Australia to deal with people suffering asbestosis and mesothelioma.  This foundation did not have anywhere near the money needed to deal with the cases which were going to arise.  The company came to court and the Managing Director who set up the process was dismissed, after a huge payout to him. 

Sometimes it seems that responsibility is avoided through share holding, in that decisions are supposedly the responsibility of the shareholders, most of whom have little idea as to what is going on.  It often seems to be alleged that ‘the people’ own the corporations through their pension funds, but not only do ‘the people’ have no control over these corporations, they have little control over how their money is invested in the first place.  It would not be surprising if this supposed ownership was used to further diffuse corporate responsibility and to argue that we cannot have control over environmental issues, or whatever, because it may affect ‘your’ investments, and leave you penniless in your old age, and this is ‘your’ fault.

This condition of power being elsewhere is demonstrated clearly in elections where the people, rather than participating directly, are offered a choice of a bundle of things, many of which may be unmentioned, or largely undiscussed.  For example, the current Australian government after winning the last election claims a mandate for its industrial relations package, which had almost no discussion, and has not in any sense been approved by the electorate.  As well, both mainstream parties seem extremely similar in their policies and wary of who will campaign against them.  They may well fear what will happen to them if they don’t toe an undefined line set by imaginary markets, more than they embrace what they are doing.

However, it is wrong to imply that the State, or the corporate sector, has all the power and its paths of ‘deceit’ always work.  We can see the confusion produced in the current US Administration by the refusal of evidence to portray things as it thinks they are.  Thus, anyone, who read independent newspapers could have been better informed about the extent of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (largely due to leaks from intelligence agencies not wanting to be blamed for false results) than it seems the British, American and Australian governments were through their intelligence assessment offices.  Wearing combat fatigues and claiming that major combat operations are over does not mean that the death rate among US troops will not increase, and resistance become harder to deal with.  Photographs ‘escaped’ from Abu Graib, even if the prisoners could not.  Attempting to suppress the increase in terrorist attacks in a report draws attention to the figures.  Stacking supposedly popular ‘town hall’ meetings to support social security ‘reform’ (and there is a whole body of ideology in the use of that term) seems to increase resistance.  It might well be the case that the problem for the people running Enron, and HIH in Australia, was that they thought they understood how things worked.

Those outside the process tend to think that there is some vast conspiracy going on, because they assume that people in power can control things (that dominance equals control), and thus are engaged in dark unspoken plots. We might think that right wing media commentators who fill the media with denunciations of its left wing nature, are either suffering from delusions (precisely who do they think owns and controls the media, who are they being paid by?), or they are incipient totalitarians who want to engineer a condition in which they only read stories which agree with their opinions.  However, it is possible that they too are expressing the feeling that somehow, they don’t have power either, that somehow it escapes them and resides in another place, or that things are really out of control.  It is going beyond the evidence to suggest that even those who appear powerful, may not feel that power is elsewhere.

Physiognomy, Magic and Presence
In a way power is like our online presences.  It cannot be assumed to be only present or absent, it has no obvious boundaries and appears as spirit-like; a magic life haunting the net and the world, intangible but buried in materia.  It is what I have called ‘asent’ (Marshall 2000: Chapter 6 and passim).

As a result of this ambiguity of presence, power can only be divined, from landmarks, from general layout, from the visible surfaces.  In that sense, dealing with power becomes a Physiognomy, a divination from appearance.  Divination might even be defined as “modes of communication developed to bridge realms that are intimately related yet distinguishable—the realm of ordinary or ‘visible’ experience and the realm of unseen powers” (Pemberton nd: part 6). That is not to say that a divination cannot be an incipient science.  Physiognomy is related to weather forecasting and medical diagnosis.  Paracelsian Oswald Croll writes: “For every disease…  and its medicine, are of one physiognomony, chiromancy and anatomy” (1669).  The problem of divination increases when the inferences are less connected to actions, or the results of actions get buried in complexity.  Anthropologically, the divination systems most written about function as ways of detecting the source of evil, or of evaluating others and the roles they play in society.  For example speaking of Ndembu Divination Turner writes that “Divination seeks to uncover the private malignity that is infecting the public body” (1975: 16).  It comes about when the situation is beyond normal means, or we wish to check that our actions will succeed.  Divination is not free of politics, or attempts to negotiate a way of life amid multiple possibilities and potential catastrophes.  We attempt to live within the possibilities of power, and perhaps attempt to divine was has prevented our control of the situation.  In the west divining power may well be a part of the social process that leads to separation, and political polarisation, as we attempt to eliminate the truth expressed by the other.  

Physiognomy is based on the idea that the soul shapes the face, that the appearance reveals the inner, or that the world can speak to us if we are knowledgeable.  However, we might also see it as a more conventional form of divination in which a collection of random, noticed events, are used to tell us something about what is hidden.  To some extent that is what anyone in the global system must do.  It may be precise where power impacts them, but to tell where other power is, or even to tell what the power is (as it may be being denied) requires the collection of random events which we then impose into a theory.  But it is not the system itself that we portray, and in this situation we cannot.  A fragmentary pattern gets taken for a whole.  It seems, if we take them seriously, that people cannot tell their own place in that system.  Or perhaps it is simply that we expect too much to arise from power, that we don’t have power unless we control the situation completely – which is impossible.

Thus it is hard to act upon the system of power.  Traditional modes of protest, such as occupying the streets or a building, are no longer effective, and neither is the Internet.  Critical Art Ensemble point out it is actually the elite who can make use of cyberspace to make:
a diffuse power field without location, and a fixed sight machine appearing as spectacle... hostility from the oppressed is rechannelled into the bureaucracy which misdirects antagonism away from the nomadic power field. The retreat into invisibility of non location prevents [definition]... of a site of resistance... No longer needing to take a defensive posture is the nomad’s greatest strength (1994: 15-6).

Sterling’s book The Great Hacker Crackdown (1994) demonstrates that hackers were nowhere near as motile.  They tended to be arrested in their bedrooms. 

Divination tends to mean that it is not just that finding rules which becomes difficult, but that reading disintegrates in the face of too much meaning, or too much urge to live within what we have divined.  Texts may appear to have clues which reinforce what we have already determined to give sense to our sense lack of control or understanding. It seems to become impossible to interpret people according to their intention, and I’m not implying that this essay is immune to that – if it was then the situation would be different.  

Any exemplary case will be controversial, so it means that special effort has to be placed in the reader making the divination.  Let us take the recent case of academic Ward Churchill, although many others could be found.  Churchill seems, as far as I can see, to have argued in the rather strong language which is favoured nowadays, that you cannot simply extract the history of US action from people’s resistance to it, no matter how criminal the form that resistance takes.  His position was distorted (as far as I can see) and his livelihood threatened largely as a result of media activities.  The distortion seemed to be of a form which only aimed at destruction rather than at dialogue.  Partly because of the issue was raised of taking responsibility. It appeared impossible to answer a call for people to take responsibility for the consequences of the actions of people they classified themselves with.  That responsibility always has to be elsewhere.

We might say that Churchill was used to divine the problems of the war on terror, and then to allocate responsibility for its difficulty onto him.  To some, it appears that he was an example of the locus of the power that is endangering the US.  The actual power differential is only shown indirectly by the difficulties he seems to face in transmitting his own view in a way that can be read.

A related example in Australia occurred when the immigration minister, Amanda Vanstone, argued that people should not protest against the prolonged imprisonment of refugees, as it raised the hopes of refugees and would cause unnecessary pain.  Shortly after the attorney general Philip Ruddock (with his Amnesty International badge prominently displayed) argued that lawyers who attempted to represent those refugees able to get to court would be held responsible for the failure of their cases, because they were clogging up the courts.  This was despite the fact that most appeals to a court were successful, and if they took longer it was because the Department of immigration kept challenging them.  Yet again responsibility is differed onto a divined other.  It is not us who lock people up without trial that are cruel but the people who protest against it, or attempt to end it.

Responsibility is distributed while the impact of power focused on whom ever it is affecting or confining.  It seems common for power to be seemingly emptied out of a place so that the power of the emptying body can increase.  An example is Guantanamo Bay, where people are kept under U.S. restriction while outside the presence of that country’s laws, or outside international laws.  The result is that there is a war against terror but those detained in this war are not prisoners of war.  This may be disputed in courts, but it is a technique which seems to sit easy with the dynamics of distributed power.  The Australian Government after claiming that it is being blackmailed by refugees (ie is relatively powerless), then proceeds to excise parts of Australia from immigration law, in order to be able to imprison refugees without them having access to Australian courts and then to confine them in foreign countries, away from refugee advocates.  In these cases power is increased by officially being deleted, but the fact that governments have to do this also shows how they fear things will pass out of their control.

In this condition it is not really the refugees who become liminal (they are confined to a very specific place, under specific regulations, and very much outside); it is the government which becomes liminal. “Liminal identities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom and ceremonial” (Turner 1969: 95).  It, however, seems that this liminality is not being used to build any communitas in a communitarian sense, but it does attempt to deal with the disappearance, or increased vagueness, of marked hierarchy, clear rules, precise locations of power and responsibility.  Unlike Turner’s liminal states it is not “giving recognition to an essential and generic human bond” but trying to overcome that recognition or break bonds which may be recognised, but which are too threatening.  It is truly a rite of anti-structure, a fight against, or a flight from, a briefly recognised complicity. If it does create community then it usually does so against some other, rather than through risking participation, because participation may even further destabilise the tentativeness, or legitimation, of the power, and increase the sense of resistance or dispersion.  In this case there is another which has to be suppressed to bring the promised world which does not escape.  In some ways it is like the workers paradise that justified Stalinist oppression.  Except that the liminal image is not that clear. 

As a liminal player, the use of power is again always shifting, becoming something of a dark unsettling trickster figure, it further takes on characteristics of the magical, the numinous and the unclear.  

Negri, Empire and Cyborg Governance
In their recent books Negri and Hardt use the term ‘Empire’ to describe this kind of distributed governance, and they contrast it to what they call Multitude.  Negri defines Empire as “the transfer of sovereignty of nation-states to a higher entity”, but not to a World Nation, or to an existent nation like the United States (Negri 2004: 59).  It is “a network power” (Hardt & Negri 2004: xii), even though a country may have temporary dominance.  Empire is produced by the networks of capitalism and NGOs transcending any particular country and linked together by information technology.  They claim, as is argued by many people, that information technology is the basis for these transformations.

The term Empire is unfortunate in many ways.  Firstly Empire implies an Emperor, and a dominant State which contradicts its assumption that there is no such Emperor or State.  Secondly its singularity implies a level of deliberate co-ordination, rather than what seem to be levels of confusion and conflict.  Co-ordination may only arise because of the temporary ease of reinforcing particular pathways.  However this ease, may, as is often the case in complex systems change the way the system operates.  If the system seeks homeostasis, that homeostasis could be reached through the elimination of parts of the system.  Complex systems can almost always escape us.

Hardt and Negri imply that the informational economy will free liberation movements of the necessity of becoming organised in hierarchies, or of having to impose order after the chaos of revolution (2004: 68-78.) and thus revolutionary freedom will finally be possible.

Here, the Multitude replaces ‘The People’.  Hardt and Negri argue that “The People” were fundamental to modernism in establishing authority and legitimating violence.  The People were posed against the [aristocratic] state, but in fact always legitimated the authority of an elite (2004: 79). The idea of the People “reduces... social differences into one identity” (2004: 99).  The multitude is composed of singularities, but is not a mob, crowd or mass, as these easily collapse into an “indifferent whole”.  The Multitude acts “not on identity or unity... but on what it has in common” it can be the rule of everyone by everyone (2004: 100).  The multitude is singularities which act in common (2004: 105).  The multitude is defined as all those who labour and produce under capital, and it is asserted that the differences which divide labour no longer exist (Hardt & Negri 2004: 107).  

This reduces the organising principle of categories to similarities, rather than accepting that members of categories can be linked by different commonalities, which would make the idea of Multitude stronger.  However, the prime problem with their method of categorisation is that it ignores the ways that members of the multitude could differ or come into conflict.  In some ways the term imposes uniformities on the World which do not exist, and obliterates differing and incommunicable cultures.  We can see this apparent incommunicability and hostility within the Multitude of our own Western societies, which may even have been increased by information technology, without having to assume that conflictual differences will not exist within the complexity of the World.  

There is little evidence that the differences which divided labour no longer exist.  It would appear that some labour movements have been coopted by the corporate classes in the US (Frank 2004) – again the problems with divination, and in the last election in Australia where timber workers supported the government against forest conservation.  Active snobberies might divide the multitude – such as the “aspirational” classes the leader of the Australian Labour Party Mark Latham separated from the worthless poor, not to mention race and gender divisions.  Finally, if Multitude is linked in information technologies, ignoring the vast parts of the world which are not, then they may well be divided by work based knowledges which are not widely distributed, and which do not allow much in the way of intercommunication.

However, it is also possible that ‘level organisations’, through information technology can also extend the reach of the centre.  The Bureaucracies separating the periphery from the centre, allow that periphery some degree of escape, things could be adapted to local conditions and local loyalties, because the centre could never see, and rarely would directly direct.  What was done did not have to fit in with a computer program.  Furthermore even if power is decentered and distributed, this does not necessarily mean that the system is likely to become democratic.  If power is experienced as elsewhere then it probably cannot. That the networks interact and thus communicate, as say ants do automatically, gives no need for these communications to be meaningful, or to allow us to find commonality as is suggested (Hardt & Negri 2004: xiii, xv).  The interaction of groups which then polarise or separate is also communication and can result from networks.  This interaction may also continue to produce what they have in common, such as separation, hatred etc.  Communication and connection is not an unrelieved good always bringing harmony, or construction.

Negri and Hardt do recognise that in the present this transformation does not necessarily liberate the worker.  Contracting makes labour and income more precarious.  The distinction between work and non-work is being blurred in favour of work, and in ‘emotional work’ our personal ‘private’ lives and being also become work (2004: 66, 111).  Workers have to become flexible, ie fit in with the demands of capital (2004: 112).  The rhythms of work become governed by ‘Just-in time’ production (Hardt & Negri 2000: 290), with its casual employment routines.  Given that these transformations do not seem to be libratory, then there is no necessity to see this economy as potentially democratic.  Others, for example Galbraith, see the increased penetration of the state public sector by the corporate sector and hence co-opted by members of that sector (2004: 47-51), and also see small business in decline: “For the small retailer, Wal-Mart awaits. For the family farm, there are the massive grain and fruit enterprise and the modern large-scale meat producer” (ibid: 37).  In this view the power of self provision, of self determination is destroyed and replaced with dependent employment.  The worker no longer has their own responsibilities, it is the corporation which allows or shapes what is possible.

Networked communication can be paradoxical communication.  Incessant ‘communication’ can be a way that alternate paths are suppressed (Hardt & Negri 2000: 347).  The format, as much as broadcast media, suppresses exchange.  Dean suggests that this communication no longer forms as a way of building connection through exchange but acts as an economic form – yet another way of alienation (Dean 2004: 273).  Hence everyone feels separated from the modes of communication. 

Messages do not exist to elicit a communicative response, but are broadcast to produce a behavioural response.  Their meaning is the response engendered.  This is the power of communication devoid of anything else.  In the World Wide Web and the blog format, this has been embraced as the main way to communicate.  Messages become subsumed as isolate propaganda, the appropriateness of most of which is determined by the mainstream media bringing responses forth which it largely ignores.  As Dean points out “the more opinions or comments that are out there, the less of an impact any given one might make” (2004: 274). Within, this domain of saturated non-messages it is always possible to find a conspiracy, and some of them may even be real.

I use the term ‘cyborg-governance’ to refer to this confluence of distributed power and information systems, without implicitly diluting its physiognomy of being systemic, or resembling a cybernetic system, of having distributed responsibility, and of appearing elsewhere with no apparent origin.  

Cyborg governance implies that the environment (and that includes our own lives, for lives cannot be separated from the system they emerge within), is permeated with machinery and the demands of human will, its subversions, and the possibility of unexpected transformations. 

In this view, becoming cyborg means being controlled through this dispersed location of control.  This is contrary to the usual libratory view of the cyborg. The idea of cyborg governance is intended to imply the dangers of cyborg theory

Against Cyborg Liberation
The idea of the cyborg as a metaphor for liberation originates with Donna Haraway, but as I have suggested in my other essay at this conference, the cyborg myth has its own directions and pointers which might steer in another direction.  The power might reside with the myth rather than with the intention of the tellers.  

Haraway argues that the cyborg can be a model for re-imagining liberation.  
In the traditions of “Western” science and politics...- the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.  The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination (1989: 150).  

It could easily be argued that the border wars have been fought and won, by the dominant groups extending the machine into the regulation of, or incorporation of, the subordinate.  Thus it is largely working people who have rebelled against the extension of the machine, and the regulation of their lives by machine – because it is they who become fodder for a machine programmed elsewhere with no regard for their lives.  Hence, perhaps the general class based (‘knowledge worker’) contempt for Luddites, who have doubts about the machines.  The original Luddites where attempting to defend their livelihoods and their way of life and were crushed quite brutally by the owners of automation (Sale 1995).  What contemporary Luddites observe is that the complexities of their lives are invisible to the program (Brown 1977: 66-7, 161-4, 171-2).  If this is accepted, then the cyborg could be thought of as an extension of industrial power into the human realm – a way of making work total, rather than undermining spurious unities.  If people object then they can always be reprogrammed.  However there is little doubt that some of these machines can also be seen as ways of extending certain people’s power into the world as well, of extending their boundaries – it is not equitable, and does not respect difference, least of all that difference which would be apart from the extension of machine and work. 

It is easy to imagine a world in which machines colonise humans, making them cyborg in the name of authority.  Hierarchical patriarchal discourse may tend to assert the inferiority of humans to machines and thus assert human subordination, especially humans of a particular class/race/gender.  Cyborgs can have hierarchies and that is part of our imagining of them.  Dr. Who’s Cybermen think of themselves as superior, but they seem a grotesque diminution to lesser humans.  Not all transformations of the body might be beneficial (whatever one’s criterion of beneficial might be). 

Thus although Haraway might suggest that cyborgs have no dependency (1989:151), seeing them as extensions of power transforms them.  Cyborgs must depend on machines and servicing, probably machines they cannot make, even while these machines may be elsewhere or under the control of others.  In this sense the Cyborg epitomises the syndrome of distributed power always appearing elsewhere, and of direct input being difficult to impossible.  Cyborgs are embedded in systems which may have programs of which they may be unaware.  Any independence here is hidden.  In some senses this realisation of dependence might be useful, if it helped prevent people thinking they were self made rather than emergent within a society and a world and needed to cooperate.  But it seems unlikely that if the dependence of is not recognised in the foundational document it will not be recognised elsewhere.

People can recognise that the extension of the cyborg could lead to “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet” (1989: 154) – computers are heavily involved in the control of work and in the command structures of corporation and military, and yet come to ignore this in fantasies of transcendence.  If power is elsewhere, perhaps it can appear nowhere.

Attempting to avoid being seduced by organic wholeness through theoretical fragmentation may confuse the act of attempting to become a whole, with the uses of wholes, as systems, in theory – a strong part of cybernetics and hence of real cyborgs.  Fragmentation embraces the modernist or masculinist (if you wish), trend of breaking things into independent parts, without bothering to see how they might interact in complex systemic ways.  Thus it becomes acceptable to introduce or appropriate species (rabbits, cane toads, gamba grass) as fragments without thinking of the wider systemic consequences.  It is because such systems are so complex that minor changes in a certain place can have huge effects.  If we claim everything is fragmentary, then we ignore the potential for system crash or for system transformation.  We also loose the main ecological objection to genetic modification – that systems are complex, not immediately predictable and not containable – an objection which has nothing to do with maintaining genetic purity, as Haraway implies (1997: 60-2).

Despite claims of cyborgs being unspecist, mechanic control of animals does not seem particularly unspecist.  If we build robotic animals will we come to treat animals as Robots? If machines are used to “lift” humans “out of” the environment, then humans become even more (conceptually) separated from others.  Cyborg theory blends with the fantasies of capitalism about taming the earth and controlling it, about independence from our environment, or of finding that other species are irrelevant as we can grow/invent what we want and need.  We can leave this poisoned world behind us for cyborg bliss.

The cyborg’s, posthuman connection with militarism and fordism (warfare and total capitalism; patriarchal violence and transcendence or destruction of the “natural world” etc.) does not seem to be something which can be ignored (‘the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense’ (Haraway 1989: 150)) or dismissed by naming this descent ‘illegitimate’ (1989: 151).  Later, Haraway seems to argue that the cyborg can be kept distinct from the android or robot by the choice of narratives employed, but this seems unlikely and contradicts claims of border flexibility or vagueness (Haraway & Goodeve 2000: 127-29).  As an example we might note that Schwarzenegger’s character in Terminator 2 seems to come up in most discussions of cyborgs, when technically the character is not a cyborg – it is a robot or android.  If nothing else this shows the ambiguity of boundaries and the ease with which the mechanic overrides the human in narrative.  Narratives and myths have their own dynamic, and their own connotations, which may escape our attempts at flexibility – and is that flexibility not also demanded from us by our workplaces?

This also might imply, as suggested above, that cyborgisation is often not driven by people embracing it, but by it being inflicted upon them, perhaps as an unintended consequence of transnational corporation and military control and communication.  However it is possible that both infliction and embrace might be true – the boundary is not clear, certain or fixed.  

However, it seems likely that the ‘hybrid’ composed of Dupont and University research departments retains more of the inclination of the corporation than of the campus.  Its genetic engineering becomes not an exploration of strange boundaries but acts as a way of extending copyright regimes, and totalising corporate ownership of the new cyborg nature (Haraway 1997: 90-7).  As when corporations allow their genetically modified crops to escape into the fields of farmers who don’t want to use them and then sue for theft or breach of copyright. 

Seeing relatively oppressed groups as active, resistant and not powerless, does not require us to transform either them or ourselves into cyborgs, and Haraway later admitted that including third world women working in electronics factories within the “we” of the cyborg was problematic (1991: 12).  There is, at the least, a status difference between a consumerist cyborg and the enforced cyborg, as well as a difference in what they are able to do.  Despite the intention to avoid narratives of wholeness, the cyborg is often treated as if one, even though rent with status and class differences.

Haraway continues that:

Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.  That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine.  ....  (1989: 176).

‘Noise’ in this circumstance is ambiguous, but ultimately means apparently random signals.  Noise which constructs or disrupts, might well be lost without effect, circumvented by the tendency of distributed systems to bypass damage.  The noise which stops us from thinking, and the pollution which stops us from breathing or eating, might already be provided for us at overwhelming volumes by those who already dominate. 

There is nothing radical in noise.  There is no reason “Phallogocentrism” cannot use unclarity for its advantage.  Vagueness is part of the way transnational corporations or the military seek to avoid regulation, to shift profit away from the place of origin, to destroy public participation in public life, or to make their workforce more vulnerable.  Or again, perhaps the contradictions, which others call lies, are actually responses to situations which are out of control, or which resist divination.

The political establishment has used cyborg theory: promoting social justice and democracy through internet connections and “open” communication rather than through participation in the State; the abolition of race and gender as problems by ignoring them (as supposedly occurs online); supposedly “safe warfare” through cyborgs, machines and overwhelming technological dominance; denying that there is a whole we might call society; destroying unions in the name of individual freedom; using lack of history and memory; pastiche of messages; declaring inequality arises from individual difference so on.  

To repeat, power seems in a liminal position, it can move almost wherever it wants without obstruction and transform in myriads of different ways, even if it cannot achieve dominance because of the complexity of the whole.  They almost cannot be touched, or acted on, by anything.  Contradictions and ‘logical reality’ disappear in the world ‘they’ create.

The idea of the cyborg ignores what we might call the sandpile problem.  One grain of sand is not a ‘heap’ but 100,000 grains might be, and the boundary is never going to be clear.  To use a cyborg cliché: imagine you have a human, you keep adding machinery and subtracting flesh, at what point does it stop being human?  How many fragmented cells makes a human?  This is the nature of many categories.  Putting in a hybrid third merely allows the poles to separate while pretending to overcome them.  Categories usually have some kind of bounding, and such boundaries become a way of conception.  They will always appear somewhere.

It is the way of categories that a category which seems a disrupter of other categories sometimes becomes subservient to them, apparently privileging one side.  Perhaps we should ask what this apparent privileging allows the privileging of elsewhere, and what kind of dominance it is part of.  We might even suggest that such disposals of the body suggest, not that the old forms of authority are disposed of, but that they are intensified.  In any case we cannot choose the histories of words, nor exactly what their connotations will be.  In the same way as Haraway suggests that criticism of genetic modification is haunted by racism (1997: 60-2) so her own cyborg is haunted by totalising techno-capitalism.  

In a slightly more pessimistic turn Cecil Helman suggests that the (cyborg) body of artificial parts like “Frankenstein’s monster” symbolises a type of society which is an assemblage of disparate parts animated by science and electricity, but with the brain of a criminal and, we might add, “out of control” (1992: 24). It certainly seems the case, that to our mythic imaginations the danger of machines taking over, is more pronounced than that of us becoming one with them in an empowering sense. 

Cyborg governance and the Multitude
We cannot separate distributed cyborg governance from itself in the way that Negri separates Empire and Multitude.  Empire creates multitude and multitude creates the Empire of distributed power.  Certainly we may be able to divine where the balance of power seems to lie, but this does not give us a binary of capitalists and everyone else, it gives us a more fragmented world, split into local and global particularisms, and which may separate as much through information technology as they might cooperate.  It may well be that this distributed governance results from the systemic limits of participatory government under the old State.  To destroy the symmetry of cyborg governance and cyborgs we might want to introduce at least a third term, an Xn, to cover those who escape, without assuming they are the same either.  

Cyborg governance and cyborgs are both symptomatic of the same thing.  One does not have to be in opposition to the other, even though we might say that the system is on a destructive bent and will take its cyborgs with it, if they are not careful.  The cyborg is within the system, and given life by it, as such it is directed by the system. It makes up part of its systemic distributed dynamics – no overthrow or freedom, need arise from this participation.  

Indeed while industrial capitalism depended on the existence of a class which possessed relatively little capital, so information capitalism may require the creation of a class with relatively little ‘knowledge’ and relatively little recognised ‘creativity’.  

Conclusion
This is an essay in sociology not politics, even if it is political, so there is no need for a triumphant or cautionary conclusion.  What can be presented is only a divination, and a very incomplete one at that.

It is not possible to engage in fantasies of restoring the participatory state, or to hope that becoming cyborg is a way to freedom, or that the Multitude are independent of the system of which they are a part.

It is useful to recognise that the system appears to be magical, and that cargo cult is not a way forward.  However, the system may not be under the control of the elites who pretend that it is theirs.  One of the characteristics of cyborg governance is that the opposition seems everywhere, or mystically powerful, when the resistances may be systemic and simply escape control.  The pretence of elites is also an act of magic, a magic which works to some extent by evacuating power to increase it, but magic subverts itself, evacuation could possible become real, and distracts from the real networks of power of which they participate.  It may be possible to find gaps within this power, places in which the system is not so well set up, not making everyone cyborg.  At these places of interstitial power, it may be possible to act – for good or for ill – to set up a tipping point which brings it all down.  But there is no guarantee that will be an improvement. If the system falls, so might the world.    

Politics requires caution, when the ripples of a stone in a pond might create a tidal wave.

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