Guattari waiting for? We have nothing Deleuze.

Reading Terranova is a great way to tie the semester together, reintroducing ideas of information and "digitation" to a very Deleuzonal/Guattaric reading of networks. To tell the truth, I was stunned at the relatively few mentions of D/G, whose vocabulary she uses unabashedly and whose "Anti-Oedipus" and Thousand Plateaus could be tied to the great majority of her arguments. I admit, I thought the fourth chapter was maddeningly repetitive, where usually Terranova's analysis is terse and dead-on. Also, I haven't read the last chapter yet, so apologies if certain connections I make are redundant/noisy.

The first chapter of Network Culture seems to support my week-old theory that one might read the field of information as a body without organs: "Information is no longer simply the first level of signification, but the milieu which supports and encloses the production of meaning.(9)" Information is a flow, an "unfolding process of material constitution" through which certain signifying and a-signifying practices emerge. It is a backdrop against which any number of parties attempts to communicate, clarify, designate, sabotage, scramble. As a flow of material intensities, noise (whether through faulty hardware or crossed signals) can both derail a message or become the message.

Information, as a field of probabilities, is a field of virtualities. A power struggle is a struggle to reduce the flow to binary terms, to the duality of reality and possibility, "deal or no deal"; social struggle turns Langlois' a-semiotic genetic encoding into the selfish gene, an actor faced with the binary of co-operation or self-determinism. At the same time--and I'm not quite clear on this--these stiffly metaphysical moves simultaneously open up a "quantum jump onto another plane"; they somehow guarantee the deterritorializing play of the virtual. Perhaps this is because the social and the political infiltrate a network as material intensities, open it up to a certain volatility which needs to exist in the context of "soft control":

"The network, that is, is not a closed electronic space, but it is literally contracted by the intensity of the informational flows that reach it from the outside, an intensity which rises and declines, disperses and diversifies again to the rhythms of the geopolitical events, social debates and cultural trends that are the whole onto which a network duration opens.(71)"

"An open network should always be potentially extensible, and therefore should be structurally equipped to deal with irreconcilable tensions by leaping to a new level of generality that would thus allow such differences to connect within a common space.(57)"

Hence, the ability to change scale, as a the tree and the wind suddenly form a rhizome, as the hacker who breaks a protocol simply opens onto another broader one. And hence, the notion of imperialism as "inclusive" rather than "exclusive"--open, vulnerable, but enormously productive for its openness.
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I also thought chapter three tied in very well with "Anti-Oedipus," for reasons I will briefly outline. Basically, the idea of labor being separated from employment seems to allow for the extension of the idea of production. People who chat on AOL, just as much as free-lance coders, are implicated in a machine of social and capitalistic production--on websites like Amazon, it is a capitalistic intensity that designates the social position of the user as consumer. There is "an investment of desire into production,(84)" meaning that capitalism is not some greedy, flesh-rending cyborg-monster, but an open network in which socializers as well as entrepreneurs incorporate themselves.

And where we find talk of capitalism and networks, we encounter the idea of the production of production. Terranova observes, on the Internet, an increasing ephemerality and transparency of the actual commodity, a privileging of quick turnaround and updated content, in short, of the process of production. In this sense, the product is production. Where you find interrupting machines (data packets, discrete rather than continuous coding), where you find knowledge as both "[autonomous] from production" and yet the "principal productive force," you find the production of production.