http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/may2009/parikka_animal.html
Animal Spirits A Bestiary of the Commons
by Matteo Pasquinelli
NAi Publishers / Institute of Network Cultures, Rotterdam & Amsterdam, 2008
240 pp., illus. Paper, 23.50
ISBN: 978-90-5662-663-1.
Reviewed by Jussi Parikka
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
Stemming from the same soil as Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, Franco "Bifo"
Berardi and Maurizio Lazzarato, Matteo Pasquinelli is trying to claim a
position as a pornographer of media theory. His Animal Spirits. A Bestiary
of Commons is filled with a fresh breath of provocative statements and
topics that are well up-to-date with recent trends in various fields from
political economy of biopolitical production to net porn and the "machinic
excess" of network culture. For Pasquinelli, it's the psychopathologies of
contemporary culture that act as vehicles to the broader contexts in which
he is able to discuss post-Fordist theories of culture, Bataille-inspired
notions of excess and what brands the book in general: the insistence on
the importance of animality in contemporary media culture.
For Pasquinelli, what media studies has forgotten are the "unpredictable
human drives", or what Keynes called "animal spirits" that are part and
parcel of the supposedly non-human logic of economic cycles. Pasquinelli
uses the notion to tackle what he calls the two key dominating fallacies
inherent in current media theory: code and flow. Pasquinelli reads the
emphasis on (digital) code as a continuation of the older language-centred
analyses of structural kind, and the paradigm of (desiring) flows as the
modus operandi of network society. To a large extent, Pasquinelli is able
to pinpoint the shortcomings of various positions of which especially
Zizek is the main enemy that leads to what Pasquinelli calls "code
claustrophobia" and the impossibility of any resistance; for the code
claustrophobics, everything is anyway subsumed under the Code of the big
Other. Pasquinelli is in various points able to pinpoint the melancholic
pessimism of postmodernist writers--and also extends a lot of critique
towards Baudrillard. As for the critique of flows, Pasquinelli is a bit
vague at times, even though this could be seen to be connected to his
quite forceful critique of the ideology of liberated flows and egalitarian
communication in the age of Web 2.0. Here, against political correctness
Animal Spirits targets various discourses and practices which presume that
communication in the age of networks is frictionless, costless and based
in idealized modes of sharing--hence, peer to peer sharing, Creative
Commons and other recent attempts to rethink modes of production based in
the assumption of "natural goodness" of the human kind in the age of
globalized info capitalism come under attack.
It is in such contexts that his idea of animal spirits becomes clearer. No
digital mode of communication or sharing is separated from the animal, so
to speak. Concretely this means that what is celebrated as the common has
to be established only through the notions of labour, pain, risk, waste
and conflict--the mode of networking that is the actuality of life in
network cultures. There are "real physical forces producing" the common,
and animal spirits are behind every claim to immateriality of network
communication.
Even if at times more than apt, Pasquinelli is not always clear what is
the regime of the notion of animal spirits. At least this reader was left
under the suspicion that there is a fair amount of mysticist danger in
raising the notion of animal spirit--as if a call to a primordial,
uncivilized, unmediated animality--as the necessary grounding for the
high-tech practices. Instead of adding complexity to the assemblages of
digital communication, and political economy of biopower, such a notion is
in danger of only exposing the dialectic other of the digital, i.e. a myth
of animality--and, hence, revert back to dualisms of flesh vs. mind.
Having said that, Animal Spirits is not a naïve celebration of the
archaic. At times, Pasquinelli seems to be trying to contextualise his
materialist ontology in some of the emerging currents of "new materialist"
thought (e.g. Delanda) but the connection between the Bataillean animal
spirits and some other theories could have been more elaborated. Only
later comes a reference to Deleuze's Bacon-book made, and an elaboration
of the ontology of the image as one of meats and nerves--a point that
could have been extended to notions relating to economy of attention that
were discussed a bit earlier. Perhaps Pasquinelli is suggesting in a
Baconian/Deleuzian way to make invisible forces of the animal visible but
not completely connecting the section to the wider argument of the book.
The bits about "zoology of machines" and "the new 'animal' model for
digital culture" are titillating passages, and could have been
elaborated--so as to be more specific and hence effective modes of
analysis of current modes of digitality whose materiality is borrowed both
from complex mathematics and physics but as much from a non-human
animality such as insects (think about the amount of insect related
research in the context of digital culture from swarms to distributed
networks etc.)
As said, at times Animal Spirit's critique against e.g. digital studies is
too broad, and hence is itself in danger of losing some accuracy both in
its critique and its own argument. It does not give a wide enough picture
of the emerging field of software studies that focus on digital code in
terms of mapping the crucial relays software has with other modalities of
culture. Bioart on the one hand is not, as Pasquinelli claims, reducing
life to genetic and digital code but actually involving itself quite
seriously in the messy and fleshy rethinking of materiality beyond the
human-centred celebration of the organism. At this point (p.57),
Pasquinelli himself is implicitly in danger of succumbing into a nostalgic
human-centred mode of analysis and a pessimism that reminds one of
Baudrillard. Similarly, even if Animal Spirits seems to imply a broad
neglect of "the body and nerves that constitute" our digital culture, he
does not take into account for example the long and meticulous theoretical
work in material feminism by Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz or for
example Luciana Parisi that have engaged with the changing relations of
flesh being remodulated, abstracted and reoriented in new contexts of
technologies.
Despite some of its theoretical contradictions and perhaps misaimed
critiques, the analysis Animal Spirits offers of various connections
between political economy and psychopathologies of current media culture
are enjoyable. There is an air of freshness a times in Pasquinelli's take
when he attempts to read a whole analysis of current libidinal economies
in network culture through J.G.Ballard (although heavily relying mostly
only on Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, a fact that raises several
issues and questions). The at times excellent use of language backs up the
gluing of notions of attention economy with modes of gentrification and
for example rent as the key mode of contemporary capitalism of symbolic
and cultural values. This is where Pasquinelli points out the powers of
capitalism in turning alt(ernative) cultures into a perfect brand for a
tolerant and innovative profit making--that actually does not in any way
challenge the actual economy of ownership. Writing this review in Berlin,
one is able to pick up on Pasquinelli's points from an everyday grass
roots perception of the changes from subcultures of Berlin to nicely
branded creative industries hype and the parallel gentrification from
Prenzlauer Berg to Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg.
Even if the later sections on pornography, desire, the image and warporn
are perhaps the catchiest ones in terms of the language and expression,
some of the arguments are not as solid as the rest of the book. Here for
example in the Warpunk against Warporn-text the analysis turns actually to
something resembling, not critical, of Baudrillard and Freud (even if with
nods towards Deleuze for example). Also one could question whether the
strong emphasis on narratives for the collective imaginary and myths fits
in with the earlier acclaimed materialist methodology of the book. Again
the danger is that focusing on "narratives" as the key form of resistance
does not fully take into account the singularity of the media in which
"narratives" are formed. For sure, one has to admit that Pasquinelli does
talk a lot about for example the crucial role of videophones in bringing
in the unwanted images from Iraq to the mainstream media but this line of
argumentation is not developed to its logical conclusion. The argument
concerning warporn would also have profited from a look into Klaus
Theleweit's Männerphantasien , an analysis of the warporn stemming from
the dirty libidinal imagination of First World War troops. In the last
instance, this reviewer remained a little unsure of what Pasquinelli's own
position regarding the role of pornography in the libidinal biosphere of
media culture is.
Pasquinelli has a good talent for really picking up fresh perspectives and
topics, but with a bit more consistency in the argument, he could turn the
good analyses into brilliant ones. His perspectives have much resonance
with other media studies perspectives that are there to challenge some old
fashioned conceptualisations--the clearest parallel to this reviewer is
the work on "evil media theory" by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey (in
The Spam Book , forthcoming from Hampton Press.) Is it time for media
theory to turn sour, mean and evil, and tackle head on the unwanted,
unsolicited and psychopathologic sides of contemporary culture?
-------------------------------------------[ RK ]
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