March 16, 19.15 hr.
SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul
→ Full program here
The February 2010 issue of The Economist reported that digital information is growing out of measure, out of the storage and computing capacity of the current network infrastructure. The article appeared to be very optimistic and comfortable about new business opportunities of such a trend, but some data provided by the report itself point to a structural contradiction. The question for us is whether the technological limits of the Turing universe will unveil a political limit: if the excess of social cooperation and communication feeding the mediasphere may turn into a sort of political singularity. Indeed, the current debate on network economy and new immaterial commons appears to have obliterated any notion of surplus or excess and to be dominated by metaphors of horizontal, linear, and symmetrical cooperation. Moving from the critique of the Marxian law of value also advanced by Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth, Matteo Pasquinelli will discuss the political models that are employed to describe the notion of surplus and how this should affects any politics of the commons today.
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Matteo Pasquinelli is a writer and theorist. He wrote Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008) and edited the collections Media Activism (2002) and C’Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader (2007). Together with Wietske Maas, he developed the art project Urbanibalism and he is a member of the international collective Uninomade.
