May 21, 2006
Michael Cardenas
Deleuze's Ontology as Expressed in the Global Indymedia Network
Introduction: Delanda, Deleuze and Indymedia: In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel Delanda tries to explain Gilles Deleuze's ontology in straightforward language “for an audience of scientists and analytical philosophers of science” (Delanda, 7). He tries to untangle the language of Deleuze, a writer who allowed for much play in his language, jumping between various concepts and frequently renaming those concepts. Still, in his writing, Gilles Deleuze developed a rich ontological framework with which one can view the universe. This ontology is based on a rigorous mathematical approach which Delanda explains in great depth.
In this paper I will explain a few components of Deleuze's worldview, as explained by Delanda, using the example of Indymedia, the global Independent Media Center movement. The global Indymedia site, describes Indymedia as “a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth.” (Independent Media Center, About Indymedia.)
Within the network itself, each collective organizes itself autonomously, without a top-down leadership, while still acting within a framework created by the Global Indymedia Points of Unity. Throughout the paper I will refer to various texts written by different local collectives. My intention is not to create a complete, thorough representation of the network, which is global and very diverse, but to use a few samples which relate strongly to ideas expressed in Deleuze's ontology.
While I realize that Deleuze's ontology serves perfectly well to explain far more simple entities, such as a chair, it is my hope that this analysis will reveal some interesting dynamics because of the affinity between Delanda's motivations and those of the Indymedia network. Delanda states that one of the conclusions of his book is that “the very idea that there can be a set of true sentences which give us the facts once and for all, an idea of a closed and finished world, gives way to an open world full of divergent processes... the kind of world that would not sit still long enough for us to take a snapshot of it and present it as the final truth.” The Indymedia Network works to challenge the claim to objectivity, or truth, of corporate media outlets by providing a space where people can tell their own stories and comment on other's stories, in an ongoing process, in order to help create social change. The processes that create this space will be further illuminated throughout this paper.
Multiplicities not Things
Delanda explains Deleuze's how realist ontology replaces the concept of essences with “dynamical processes” and the “multiplicity”. (Delanda, 5) Where many realist traditions are based on the transcendental concept of essence, describing for example the ideological category of “a chair”, Deleuze replaces that simplistic idea with the multiplicity, “a nested set of vector fields related to each other by symmetry-breaking bifurcations, together with the distributions of attractors which define each of its embedded levels.” Delanda goes on to describe the relation of this concept to group theory and its difference from categories, which define individuals in a population a aberrations from the abstract instead of processes, which are defined by the set of individuals they describe.
The global Indymedia network can be seen as a result of a number of social, technological and economic processes itself: ubiquitous cheap internet access, a tradition of media activism including newspaper propagandists and pirate radio dj's, corporate globalization. At the same time, the Indymedia network is embodied by a number of processes.
Indymedia defines itself as a non-hierarchical network, not as a federation, coalition or collective. Networks are defined by communication among a disparate set of nodes. As a network, Indymedia can itself be seen as a population of collectives, or as a multiplicity described by the characteristics of the collectives in the network. The Global Indymedia Points of Unity, agreed to by all collectives in the network, state: “The Independent Media Center Network (IMCN) is based upon principles of equality, decentralization and local autonomy. The IMCN is not derived from a centralized bureaucratic process, but from the self-organization of autonomous collectives that recognize the importance in developing a union of networks.” (Independent Media Center, Global Indymedia Principles of Unity) As such, there is a wide degree of play across a number of variables such as number of participants, focus on various mediums, degree of cooperation with local communities, degree of transparency of process, openness to differing political viewpoints, amount of finances and more. Systems with many degrees of freedom can be seen as complex systems or dynamical processes. In addition, although there is an official collective that approves entry into the Indymedia network, over time some collectives fade away while others are closely integrated with projects outside of the network, making the strict definition of the network even harder.
Within the network, different collectives can also be seen as multiplicities, some more so than others. In particular, Portland Indymedia defines itself as “not a membership organization; it is a tactic, a concept, and a movement that can be effectively utilized in many different ways.” While some other Indymedia centers do have official membership, many do not and are based on loose affinities and degrees of individual participation. Unlike traditional unions or other forms of political organization with rosters of dues paying members, Indymedia is defined by a process of communication, affinity and participation. Delanda sums up Deleuze's view of things as processes saying “the alternative offered by Deleuze is to avoid taking as given fully formed individuals, or what amounts to the same thing, to always account for the genesis of individuals”. Further blurring the definition of membership in Indymedia is its Open Publishing policy where anyone can post to Indymedia websites, many people do and consider themselves part of Indymedia. As many Indymedia sites say “you ARE Indymedia.” (San Diego Indymedia)
Asking The Right Questions
Open Publishing was a founding concept of Indymedia in 1999, before blogs and myspace were commonplace. Open Publishing has been defined by people within the Indymedia network as “mean[ing] that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available.” (Arnison) The actual implementations of this vary widely and opinions on how open Open Publishing should be very widely even within local collectives. Delanda presents Deleuze's “problematic approach”, saying that “a solution always has the truth it deserves according to how well specified the corresponding problem” and goes on to say that “problems can replace fundamental law statements.” (Delanda 163) While Delanda's approach contains a high degree of rigor and describes specific mathematical models resulting in specific physical entities and populations, one can still see a high degree of correlation in Indymedia's approach of asking questions instead of promoting a party line. Unlike organizations that choose a linguistic statement of truth and promote that statement, Indymedia seeks to create a space for open publishing, diffusion of a variety of varying ideas and debate. The network does engage in editorial work on their sites, based on the Points of Unity which reject hate speech, but within that framework, they seek to ask questions, not provide answers.
The problematic approach is further exemplified by Indymedia's non-hierarchical structure. Since the Indymedia network “is not derived from a centralized bureaucratic process” (Independent Media Center, Global Indymedia Principles of Unity), there is no single set of statements that define the truth of what Indymedia is. There are principles that collectives in the network have agreed to, but those principles are subject to local interpretation and to change at any time by a network wide consensus. Indymedia is defined by a set of problems it is trying to address simply stated as corporate controlled media, not by the theories of any individual or the policies of any bureaucracy. As Richard Day states in Gramsci is Dead, there is “a shift away from hegemonically-oriented 'movements', and towards non-branded strategies and tactics such as Independent Media Center”. (Day 9) The Indymedia network is an example of a tactic for creating change which does not strive to promote a simple set of truths but a set of questions, an invitation.
Time and Communication in Delanda
Moving onto Deleuze's conception of time, Delanda delves into communication theory. While multiplicities can define populations, they still must have invariant properties within those populations that bind them, and “whenever we speak of the invariant properties of an entity we also need to describe an operator, or group of operators, capable of performing rotations, translations, projections, foldings and a variety of other transformations on that entity.. The quasi-cause is, indeed, this operator and it is defined not by its giving rise to multiplicities but by its capacity to affect them.”
The quasi-cause affects multiplicities and links them together. To explain the quasi-causal operator, Deleuze and Delanda use the example of an information channel. (Delanda 84) If one imagines the individual Indymedia collectives as multiplicities, then the information channel between them, the broader network, can be seen as this kind of operator linking them together. When Deleuze says “once communication between heterogeneous series is established, all sorts of consequences follow within the system. Something passes the borders, events explode, phenomena flash, like thunder and lightning,” (Delanda 150) one can see a clear parallel to the global information sharing within the network where the stories of burning tires from the streets of Argentina or of mass border crossings in Morocco are passed from country to country, city to city, through Indymedia.
Attractors and the Virtual
Delanda's book, in Describing Deleuze's ontology, is largely about the virtual and its effect on the actual world. Deleuze says “it is correct to represent a double series of events which develop in two planes, echoing without resembling each other: real events on the level of engendered solutions, and ideal events embedded in the conditions of the problem”. One critical example of a virtual entity is an attractor. “Attractors... may be defined as special subsets of state space, that is, as limit states” (Delanda 80) Later, in his definition of multiplicities, Delanda states that the attractors are “never actualized”. (Delanda 30) For example, the policy of having Open Publishing and the Global Indymedia Principles of Unity can be seen as being two attractors, or as being the virtual corresponding to the actual Indymedia network. While they are stated goals, varying collectives follow them to varying degrees, representing different states in the system at varying distances from the stated goal or the attractor. Deleuze states that “The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual... Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object”. The attractors that influence the trajectories of multiplicities are no less real because they are not actualized. They are observable.
Conclusion
Any attempt at a mathematically rigorous description of a thing so large, complex and nebulous as a social movement is bound to fail, or at best be inexact. This difficulty is compounded by a the fluidity of a network such as Indymedia. This paper is an attempt to describe the global Indymedia network as an entity within a Deleuzian ontology, while showing affinity between Deleuze's approach and that of Indymedia. Manuel Delanda's book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy is an attempt to construct a clear picture of Deleuze's ontology and to provide a detailed alternative to Deleuze's explanation of the mathematical foundations of dynamical processes. (Delanda 5) In bringing Delanda's text, which attempts to described specific physical processes, together with the study of social movements and media culture, there is a bit of inexactness. Nevertheless, as Delanda states, “we philosophers must invent devices to allow us to become 'the quasi-cause of what is produced within us, the Operator'”, and in that tradition this paper is an attempt to explain some of the connections I saw while reading Delanda. As the Zapatistas said in the Second Declaration of La Realidad “We are the network, all of us who resist.” (Graeber)
Works Cited
Arnison, Matthew. "Open publishing is the same as free software" March 2001. May 1, 2006. http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.html.
Day, Richard J.F. Gramsci is Dead. London: Pluto Press, 2005.
Delanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2002.
Graeber, David. "The New Anarchists". The New Left Review. Jan-Feb 2002. May 1, 2006. http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24704.shtml.
Independent Media Center. "About Indymeda". Independent Media Center. May 1, 2006. http://www.indymedia.org/en/static/about.shtml
Independent Media Center. "Global Indymedia Principles of Unity". Indymedia Documentation Project. May 2006. May 1, 2006. http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/PrinciplesOfUnity
Independent Media Center. "Indymedia FAQ". Indymedia Documentation Project. Jan 2005. May 1, 2006. http://www.indymedia.org/en/static/about.shtml
San Diego Indymedia. "About Us". San Diego Indymedia. Feb 2005. May 1, 2006. http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/static/aboutus.shtml
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Posted by jo at May 21, 2006 12:47 PM
