Habitual(Splash)

Massumi and Raley both articulate visions of what an oppositional politics could look like amidst the ubiquity of neoliberal common-sense embodied by digital culture. As we’ve been discussing, networks and neoliberalism both immerse us in systems that feel ubiquitous and inescapable; their omnipresence denies both the possibility of desisting and the perceptual distance that allows images to cohere. Massumi (channeling Deleuze) and Raley both suggest that accepting this condition and working within its constraints—surfing the wave or even deforming its surface—is preferable to trying to defeat the ocean. This proposition is not so much conservative as it is attentive to the inadequacy of older political imaginaries to defeating resilient systems that excel at and profit from incorporation.

Tactical media do not satisfy the project that Massumi lays out, but they offer a potential starting point. One issue with tactical media, bemoaned by Lovink and Rossiter, is that they mirror a post-Fordist short-termism (qtd Raley 28). But perhaps this can be addressed by bringing them into the domain of habit, which as we discussed on Monday, promises endurance. When the aesthetic-political rationale of tinkering or “minor modifications” becomes habituated, it allows us to “inhabit the world in a better way” (Bourriaud qtd. Raley 27). Against habit, the rhetoric of intervention in Raley’s text suggests an interruptive temporality; its connotations of messianic transcendence are familiar to us in the figures of the revolutionary and the ‘disruptive’ entrepreneur—figures whose ironic correspondence reiterates the need for different modalities of action. If instead we follow tactical media’s thread of inhabiting and habituation, we can arrive at a politics of collectivity and repetition that emphasizes quotidian struggle, endurance, even banality. Instead of punctual Dadaist provocation, this version of tactical media might better emulate the nonsensationalistic politics expressed in Raley’s phrase “designing rather than saving the world” (30).

Designing the world means hacking its environmental capacity to modulate behaviour through priming (Massumi 28). If we take up Raley’s interest in the power of tinkering and apply it to Massumi’s insight about environmental conditioning, but instead of reproducing the interruptive characteristics of tactical media, we take inspiration from Chun’s attention to habit’s longevity and capacity to update (that is, modulate), then we might get something like Keller Easterling’s theory of active forms. Easterling is an architect whose book Extrastatecraft explores the insidious, post-Westphalian power exerted by infrastructures and the ways that they might be made to do different things (to echo Chun on the technological characteristics of race). Easterling’s attention to infrastructure gets to the heart of the control society’s proliferation of a mode of power that is specifically “environmental” (Deleuze qtd. Massumi 38). This is where the infra-individual can meet its (infra)structural counterpart.

Infrastructures not only enable movement but are themselves dynamic. For Massumi, such dynamism holds potential: “control’s modulation can itself be modulated … its movement of becoming can be inflected” (42). We’re not limited to surfing but can also stage a “situational splash” that amplifies or deforms wave patterns (42). Countering neoliberalism’s agility with a corresponding “immanent counterontopower” (43) requires that splashing be both habitual and adaptable (i.e. updatable), that it take the form of a tactic which unlike a strategy allows for the “continual morphing” of resistance (Raley 13).

Easterling’s active forms begin to model this kind of counterontopower. For her, infrastructures (like software) are active forms that produce the world not in their content but through the ways that they organize relations, dictate growth protocols, enable certain activities while precluding others, and just generally do stuff. Infrastructures (we might add diagrams, environments) are spatial arrangements that exert force because they possess capacities, affordances, dispositions, potentials, and temperaments. Easterling argues that a critical understanding of these dispositions complemented by technical/design knowledge can enable us to ‘hack’ infrastructural operating systems through active forms—repeatable formulas or growth protocols such as ‘multipliers’ (coefficients that recondition across fields) and ‘switches’ (valves that suppress, redirect, or modulate flows). Echoing Massumi, the ‘active form’ denotes a way of reconditioning structures without having to burn them down. The rules of the game can be acted upon; control’s modulation can be modulated. Rather than replacing objects, this approach augments them with new powers and/or pleasures.