Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (review)

Organized Networks asserts there is urgent need for new institutional forms that reflect "relational" processes to challenge existing systems of governance and outmoded representational structures. Emergent forms are radically dissimilar to the ways in which social relations are organized under the "moribund technics" of modern institutions (such as the university or the state). These older forms, referred to as "networked organizations," are hierarchical and centralized despite their pretensions toward fair representation. In contrast, emergent "organized networks" are horizontal, collaborative and distributed in character, offering a distinct social dynamic and transformational potential. The key difference is how institutions have responded to developments in networked communications technology and the issue of intellectual property rights: on the one hand, networked organizations using this as a regulatory mechanism to enforce or extend existing power structures, and on the other, organized networks advocating open source culture. If all this sounds rather too straightforward, Rossiter elaborates on the complexities, uncertainties and contradictions associated with sociality, labor and life in general.

The book is split into three main sections, each with two chapters: the first, addressing the limits of democracy and organized networks; the second, tackling the creative industries, precarious labor and intellectual property; and the third, the virtuosity of general intellect and "processual democracy." Previous versions of many of the chapters have already been published, but together they make a powerful interlacing argument for network criticism demonstrating a depth of research to highlight the key issues for political intervention (a companion volume might be Tiziana Terranova's Network Culture [Pluto 2004]). Acknowledging the peer intellectual support of the Nettime and Fiberculture mailing lists, Rossiter, perhaps not surprisingly, demonstrates an impressive but familiar range of resources (including immanent critique and negative dialectics of the Frankfurt School, the concepts of general intellect and immaterial labor in Autonomous Marxism, and the constitutive role of the outside and immanence in Deleuze's philosophy, among others), taking a transdisciplinary approach that he likens to the collective ethos and protocols of the network itself.

A sense of project is clear, passionate and full of hope: "It is about conditions of possibility, the immanent relation between theory and practice ... and a resolute belief ... in the concrete potential of transdisciplinary institutional forms that enlist the absolute force of labour and life" (p. 17).

The potential to transform social relations is somewhat demonstrated in the socio-technical dynamics of mailing lists, blogs, wikis, content management systems and so on. However, it is the institutional nature of this, as a description of the organization of social relations, that makes it thoroughly political. An example is the section on creative industries, where the instrumental ways in which creativity has been exploited in the realm of policy are mapped against "a concept of communications media that acknowledges the constitutive role of the outside" (p. 103). Creative industries indicate two aspects of the book's argument: antagonism in the form of the exploitation of creative labor power underpinned by the increasing regulation of intellectual property as a consequence of the drive to commodify collective and communicative knowledge (the appropriation of general intellect, in other words); and also, the affirmation of creative labor that holds the potential for self-organization through its networked capacity (where organized networks emerge). By focusing on the exploitation of immaterial labor-power, or what Rossiter refers to as "disorganised labour-power," the underlying conditions are exposed, but so too are new forms of agency. Organized networks represent relative institutional autonomy but do not do so in isolation; they are also required to operate tactically, engaging horizontal and vertical modes of interaction:

The tendency to describe networks in terms of horizontality results in the occlusion of the "political," which consists of antagonisms that underpin sociality. It is technically and socially incorrect to assume that hierarchical and centralizing architectures and practices are absent from network cultures

(p. 36).

Networks are clearly not...