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ohsarajay's review against another edition
2.5
Many good thoughts but I am simply not smart enough to understand about half of them. The half I understood were incisive and interesting enough.
george_r_t_c's review against another edition
4.0
I think that as media theory / cyberphil / technoprogressive texts go this one is quite tame, straightforward, and fun. It reads very smoothly, and I enjoy Galloway & Thacker's careful but still exuberant prose, which indulges regularly but never to excess in many of the stylistic features of this avenue of theoretical writing: parataxis, insistent lists, metaphors, among other things. They also explicitly duplicate the content of their argument on the level of form: Galloway & Thacker are interested in the "metaphysics of networks," which consists of an expansion of the graph-theoretical concepts of the "node" and the "edge," and Part One of the book is called Nodes and Part Two is called Edges (118). Part one is also written in a deliberately self-recapitulating form: evenly distributed among the regular romanised paragraphs are pithy italicised paragraphs, central informatic points which the romanised paragraphs branch off from, "experimentally ... diversifiying" as they put it in their introductory note (vii). Whether or not this quite comes off is open to question: I just read straight through, so it was more like an alternating set of parallel tracks bound together by time, rather than a freely spatial emanation from a node. We might also be reminded of the italicised marginal notes that have been a fairly regular feature of certain types of publication for many centuries - for some reason I think mostly of the out-of-place marginal prose glosses to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" reproduced in some editions - but, more generously, perhaps the way Galloway & Thacker flag their formal experiment alerts us to the ways that historical texts that are less self-consciously fragmented could in fact be read in hindsight as networked. The romantic fragment of Coleridge or Schlegel becomes a kind of node, always reaching out edges without becoming self-complete.
I mentioned that this book partly has a metaphysical bent, and indeed one of the denser short passages of Part Two, titled "The Hypertrophy of Matter," is a playfully and explicitly Spinozist set of "Four Definitions and One Axiom," which slightly redefines, without fundamentally changing, the Spinozist concepts of immanence and substance, pairing them with "emptiness" (which denotes the edges of a graph, the space between things) and "indistinction" (which denotes a hypothetical third Spinozist attribute, "the ability to autogenerate distinctions," to form graph relations (142-143).
It is difficult to make out what is to be taken away from this metaphysical claim, which, as I mention, is not representative of the book as a whole - it actually moves very readably and informatively from computer programming to political philosophy to the way pandemics are handled by bioinformatic medical apparatuses (topical!) - which is why I flag this metaphysical passage here as something to reflect on should you choose to read it from the beginning.
The first noun of the metaphysical heading, "Hypertrophy," seems to denote a kind of acceleration(ism) for Galloway & Thacker, which perhaps represents the more controversial edge of their political project in this book. The less controversial edge would just be to insist to the reader that networks are not inherently egalitarian - instead, they make use of both human and nonhuman methods of organising and distributing power relationships through 'protocols.' This thesis is one that they concede can be found in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: "the network form is not tied to any necessary political position, either progressive or reactionary," but this realisation needs to be supplemented with a vision of a "new future of asymmetry," i.e. replacing the current symmetry, {networked sovereignty of the United States} / {networked straits of (bio)/(cyber)terroristic resistance} with something different, something which cannot be recuperated by the dominant political paradigm (152). They ask "From where will appear the anti-Web?" (153).
The flesh of this search for asymmetry seems to be provided by the claim that "hypertrophy" - which I assume is taken in its medical sense here, the swelling growth of matter, of flesh, as in 'hypertrophic cardiomyopathy' - "is the desire for pushing beyond. The goal is not to destroy technology in some neo-Luddite delusion but to push technology into a hypertrophic state, further than it is meant to go ... We must scale up, not unplug" (98). This reads somewhat like a standard statement of post-Deleuzian accelerationism, so I think the onus on us as readers is not to let the radical promise of the aforementioned transvaluation of the network fall away into a neoreactionary endorsement of technocapitalist rapture and implosion.
Although they do not say it anywhere, it is perhaps interesting that they share their neo-Spinozist metaphysics with Deleuze, who, along with Foucault, represent the key theoretical jumping-off point for this text: The Exploit is a kind of postscript to the Postscript to the Societies of Control, as well as a postscriptural critique of several key positions of A Thousand Plateaus. Perhaps the richest moment, though, if I may conclude by revealing my biases, is the moment when they engage at greatest length with Marx and Walter Benjamin, in the passage labelled "Codification, Not Reification." The thrust here is that where once it was the transformation of labour into commodity, the reification of a social relation into an object, now we have "the extraction of abstract code from objects" (134). Galloway & Thacker conclude with the dire suggestion that now, and more so in the future, it will not just be our bodies that we sell, but our genomic, immunological, and consumer data, in order to be "exploited informatically as well as corporally" (135). Dire to be sure! if not entirely surprising 13 years after publication. But the final line in this passage is "The biomass, not social relations, is today's site of exploitation" (135). Earlier they were careful to remind us that "we are referring only to protocological resistance and in no way whatsoever suggest that non-protocological practice should abandon successful techniques for effecting change such as organising, striking, speaking out, or demonstrating. What we demonstrate here is a supplement to existing practice, not a replacement for it" (82). This is one of the most important lines in the book, and I think we can recall it here in order to rethink this argument concerning reification: perhaps, instead, biomass is now another social relation, a relation that takes precisely the form of the exploitative network and engenders it at a more fundamental and inhuman, nonsocial level than we thought possible.
I mentioned that this book partly has a metaphysical bent, and indeed one of the denser short passages of Part Two, titled "The Hypertrophy of Matter," is a playfully and explicitly Spinozist set of "Four Definitions and One Axiom," which slightly redefines, without fundamentally changing, the Spinozist concepts of immanence and substance, pairing them with "emptiness" (which denotes the edges of a graph, the space between things) and "indistinction" (which denotes a hypothetical third Spinozist attribute, "the ability to autogenerate distinctions," to form graph relations (142-143).
It is difficult to make out what is to be taken away from this metaphysical claim, which, as I mention, is not representative of the book as a whole - it actually moves very readably and informatively from computer programming to political philosophy to the way pandemics are handled by bioinformatic medical apparatuses (topical!) - which is why I flag this metaphysical passage here as something to reflect on should you choose to read it from the beginning.
The first noun of the metaphysical heading, "Hypertrophy," seems to denote a kind of acceleration(ism) for Galloway & Thacker, which perhaps represents the more controversial edge of their political project in this book. The less controversial edge would just be to insist to the reader that networks are not inherently egalitarian - instead, they make use of both human and nonhuman methods of organising and distributing power relationships through 'protocols.' This thesis is one that they concede can be found in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: "the network form is not tied to any necessary political position, either progressive or reactionary," but this realisation needs to be supplemented with a vision of a "new future of asymmetry," i.e. replacing the current symmetry, {networked sovereignty of the United States} / {networked straits of (bio)/(cyber)terroristic resistance} with something different, something which cannot be recuperated by the dominant political paradigm (152). They ask "From where will appear the anti-Web?" (153).
The flesh of this search for asymmetry seems to be provided by the claim that "hypertrophy" - which I assume is taken in its medical sense here, the swelling growth of matter, of flesh, as in 'hypertrophic cardiomyopathy' - "is the desire for pushing beyond. The goal is not to destroy technology in some neo-Luddite delusion but to push technology into a hypertrophic state, further than it is meant to go ... We must scale up, not unplug" (98). This reads somewhat like a standard statement of post-Deleuzian accelerationism, so I think the onus on us as readers is not to let the radical promise of the aforementioned transvaluation of the network fall away into a neoreactionary endorsement of technocapitalist rapture and implosion.
Although they do not say it anywhere, it is perhaps interesting that they share their neo-Spinozist metaphysics with Deleuze, who, along with Foucault, represent the key theoretical jumping-off point for this text: The Exploit is a kind of postscript to the Postscript to the Societies of Control, as well as a postscriptural critique of several key positions of A Thousand Plateaus. Perhaps the richest moment, though, if I may conclude by revealing my biases, is the moment when they engage at greatest length with Marx and Walter Benjamin, in the passage labelled "Codification, Not Reification." The thrust here is that where once it was the transformation of labour into commodity, the reification of a social relation into an object, now we have "the extraction of abstract code from objects" (134). Galloway & Thacker conclude with the dire suggestion that now, and more so in the future, it will not just be our bodies that we sell, but our genomic, immunological, and consumer data, in order to be "exploited informatically as well as corporally" (135). Dire to be sure! if not entirely surprising 13 years after publication. But the final line in this passage is "The biomass, not social relations, is today's site of exploitation" (135). Earlier they were careful to remind us that "we are referring only to protocological resistance and in no way whatsoever suggest that non-protocological practice should abandon successful techniques for effecting change such as organising, striking, speaking out, or demonstrating. What we demonstrate here is a supplement to existing practice, not a replacement for it" (82). This is one of the most important lines in the book, and I think we can recall it here in order to rethink this argument concerning reification: perhaps, instead, biomass is now another social relation, a relation that takes precisely the form of the exploitative network and engenders it at a more fundamental and inhuman, nonsocial level than we thought possible.
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