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TrickE-Business: Malcontents in the Matrix 9
Networks connect by a utilitarian logic, a logic of instrumental
rationality. Webs are tactile, experiential rather than calculating,
their reach more ontological than utilitarian. (Lash 2002: 127)
In his Practices of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1988) criticizes the
expansionary nature of various systems of production that produce a society
dominated by commodity value. He argues that resistance to such disciplining
forces can be found in the various day-to-day subversions people carry out as they
consume the products of such a dominant order. He uses the example of the
indigenous Indians of South America who, although they superficially accepted the
framework of the Catholic Church imposed upon them by the Spanish colonizers,
in fact managed to develop various practices that kept their traditional values alive
beneath the veneer of such acceptance and assimilation. In a similar fashion, he
advocates the development of various strategies to resist the uniform, disciplinary
effects of capitalism upon social life including the reappropriation of otherwise
ordered urban environments in preference for more dynamic, liberated expressions
of local particularities and interactions. De Certeau thus seeks escape routes from
the circumscribing effects of the sorts of productive and organizational matrices
previously described:
We witness the advent of number. It comes with democracy, the large
city, administrations, and cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous
mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a
multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become
the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and
rationalities that belong to no one. (De Certeau, 1988: v)
De Certeau’s identification of the tightly woven nature of fabric that accompanies
“the advent of number” provides an earlier analysis of the subsequent focus
upon capitalist networks such as that provided in the above quotation from Lash.
Where De Certeau describes a cybernetic ‘fabric with neither rips nor darned
patches’, Lash similarly talks of the ‘flawless’ nature of a utilitarian network. Lash
proceeds to contrast the inherently disciplinary nature of such networks with the
more organically libratory potential image of webs. He adopts Lefebvre’s (1991)
association of spiders’ web making with the creation of autonomous spaces to
make parallels with the potentially empowering web-forming activities of the new
informational order’s technoculture workers. In a very similar vein, Klein conceptualizes
anti-corporate opposition as web-using spiders:
… the image strikes me as a fitting one for this Web-age global activism.
Logos, by the force of ubiquity, have become the closest thing we have
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