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TrickE-Business: Malcontents in the Matrix 9<br />
Networks connect by a utilitarian logic, a logic of instrumental<br />
rationality. Webs are tactile, experiential rather than calculating,<br />
their reach more ontological than utilitarian. (Lash 2002: 127)<br />
In his Practices of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1988) criticizes the<br />
expansionary nature of various systems of production that produce a society<br />
dominated by commodity value. He argues that resistance to such disciplining<br />
forces can be found in the various day-to-day subversions people carry out as they<br />
consume the products of such a dominant order. He uses the example of the<br />
indigenous Indians of South America who, although they superficially accepted the<br />
framework of the Catholic Church imposed upon them by the Spanish colonizers,<br />
in fact managed to develop various practices that kept their traditional values alive<br />
beneath the veneer of such acceptance and assimilation. In a similar fashion, he<br />
advocates the development of various strategies to resist the uniform, disciplinary<br />
effects of capitalism upon social life including the reappropriation of otherwise<br />
ordered urban environments in preference for more dynamic, liberated expressions<br />
of local particularities and interactions. De Certeau thus seeks escape routes from<br />
the circumscribing effects of the sorts of productive and organizational matrices<br />
previously described:<br />
We witness the advent of number. It comes with democracy, the large<br />
city, administrations, and cyber<strong>net</strong>ics. It is a flexible and continuous<br />
mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a<br />
multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become<br />
the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and<br />
rationalities that belong to no one. (De Certeau, 1988: v)<br />
De Certeau’s identification of the tightly woven nature of fabric that accompanies<br />
“the advent of number” provides an earlier analysis of the subsequent focus<br />
upon capitalist <strong>net</strong>works such as that provided in the above quotation from Lash.<br />
Where De Certeau describes a cyber<strong>net</strong>ic ‘fabric with neither rips nor darned<br />
patches’, Lash similarly talks of the ‘flawless’ nature of a utilitarian <strong>net</strong>work. Lash<br />
proceeds to contrast the inherently disciplinary nature of such <strong>net</strong>works with the<br />
more organically libratory potential image of webs. He adopts Lefebvre’s (1991)<br />
association of spiders’ web making with the creation of autonomous spaces to<br />
make parallels with the potentially empowering web-forming activities of the new<br />
informational order’s technoculture workers. In a very similar vein, Klein conceptualizes<br />
anti-corporate opposition as web-using spiders:<br />
… the image strikes me as a fitting one for this Web-age global activism.<br />
Logos, by the force of ubiquity, have become the closest thing we have<br />
Copyright © 2003, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written<br />
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