Distributed communities and nodal subjects

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new media & society Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi Vol8(1):33–51 [DOI: 10.1177/1461444806059867]

ARTICLE

Distributed communities and nodal subjects ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

PHILLIP H. GOCHENOUR Totalmass Inc., USA ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Abstract Drawing upon cognitive science and systems theory, this article examines a number of issues commonly undertaken in theorizing ‘online communities.’ The thesis is that current approaches to online community that focus on specific online ‘places,’ such as LamdaMOO, may overlook the actual practices engaged in by current internet users, which focus on ad-hoc interactions with a distributed community. Systems theory, as developed by Vilem Flusser, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, is used to examine the relationship between communication and community. Through this examination a definition of community as a distributed communications systems, in which individuals function as nodes in the overall system, is developed. The conclusion considers the significance of this definition for the evaluation of the internet as a tool for political action and self-realization.

Key words Flusser • Maturana • nodal subject • online distributed community • systems theory • Turkle • Varela

Since the publication of Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Communities in 1994, considerable change has taken place in the world of online communities. At that time, the foci of Rheingold’s interest were MUDs and MOOs, IRC channels and bulletin boards like the WELL. Others interested in the topic of online communities have tended to focus on well-defined ‘places,’ like LamdaMOO (Dibbell, 1993; Mnookin, 1996) MicroMuse 33 Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com by Giorgio Bertini on October 11, 2010

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(Duval Smith, 1999), Phish.net (Watson, 1997), FurryMuck and JennyMUSH (Reid, 1999), to name just a few. The method of analysis employed largely focuses on the development, within these ‘places,’ of structures that resemble ‘civil society’ as defined within an implicitly Enlightenement or explicitly Habermasian framework (Dibbell, 1993; Mnookin, 1996; Poster, 1997), or upon a kind of anthropological study of evolving social structures within these ‘places’. (Cherney, 1999).

If you were to take a survey of contemporary undergraduates, however, you would find that their experience of ‘online community’ has very little to do with these kinds of ‘places’ or experiences. Indeed, while teaching a lecture course on digital media at the University of Virginia, I asked a hall of over 100 students to raise their hands if they had ever been in a MUD. Only a handful of students, most of whom were in computer science, raised their hands. Almost all the students, however, used Instant Messenger, email, and IRC to stay in touch with established friends and, occasionally, meet new people. Rather than turning to the internet to become members of specifically online communities, they were using it as infrastructure to communicate with a geographically distributed network of friends and family.

This shift in the typical experience of online community can also be seen in the rise of social networking applications such as Friendster and tribe.net.

These applications use an overt network structure, in which each individual functions as node, to allow users to stay in touch with known friends, find connections to new ones, and to organize events. Unlike LamdaMOO or other online ‘places’, these applications, which have enjoyed tremendous growth (and venture capital funding), make no pretense as functioning as ‘civil societies’; rather, they provide linking mechanisms for individuals to form networks, which can then be leveraged for social, political, cultural, and economic purposes.

This shift in user experience away from well-defined places one ‘goes to’ on the net, to tools one uses to maintain a network, suggests that we should also perhaps begin to consider other analytical tools for understanding whether or not these ‘networks’ can also be considered communities, and what the nature of the ‘node’ is within them. Rather than talking exclusively about ‘online communities,’ for example, which suggests that there is something that happens ‘within’ online space, perhaps we should also begin talking about ‘distributed communities’, which suggests that the internet provides a mechanism for widely-dispersed individuals to interact with one another. And while discussion of online communities has often focused on the nature of the subject within the community (Bruckman, 1993; Donath, 1999; Ito, 1997; Turkle, 1995), discussion of distributed communities may enable us to see how individuals function in a polyvalent way outside of specific spaces.

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Gochenour: Distributed communities and nodal subjects

What I would like to do in this article is to explore the concept of distributed communities and nodal subjects utilizing a different method of analysis, one that draws upon systems theory as developed by such theorists as Vilem Flusser, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann. I won’t dispute that the analyses of MOOs, MUDs, and other online communities that draw upon the civil society models described above have value, since, at the very least, they force us into constant reconsideration of meaningful political action, in the widest sense of the term.

My concern, however, is that these analyses require a strong ‘cultural scene,’ such as a MOO, for their undertaking, and cannot adequately consider a distributed community which is composed of communication exchanges between members, and that they do not focus on actual experiences of community which are common among contemporary users of the internet.

What I hope will result from my exploration is the beginning of a shift away from thinking about ‘online community’ that happens in a specific place, to thinking about ‘distributed community’ as something that utilizes the internet as an infrastructure to compose itself. Along the way, I also want to explore the way in which communication serves as a constitutive practice of community, and of the subject. In conclusion, I hope to also point to some very positive outcomes, for both the individual and society, which result from people coming together through this medium.

DISTRIBUTED COMMUNITIES: THE COMMUNITY AS NET The original impetus for this article was a quotation from an essay by Vilem Flusser that has served as the focus for many of my intellectual inquiries over the past years. In ‘Die Stadt als Wellental im der Bilderflut’ (1988), Flusser gives this description of the city: Interpersonal relationships are spun of differing densities at different points on the net. The more dense they are, the more ‘concrete’ they are. These dense places develop into a wave trough in the field that one would have to imagine as moving back and forth. At these thick points the knots [human subjects] draw closer to one another, they ‘actualize’ themselves reciprocally. In these wave troughs the possibilities embedded in interpersonal relations become ‘more actual.’ The wave troughs have an ‘attracting’ effect (in the gravitational sense) on the surrounding area, ever more diverse interpersonal relationships are drawn into them. Every wave is a focal point for the actualization of interpersonal virtualities. Such wave troughs are called ‘cities.’ (p. 154)1

Although certain aspects of Flusser’s conception need further explanation, his concept of the city is straightforward enough: a particularly dense field of intersubjective relations, which has the tendency to form a ‘gravitational field’ that draws in even more relations. This is a model of the city, the community, as a system, and that system is conceived of as a net that is 35 Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com by Giorgio Bertini on October 11, 2010

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more thickly ‘knotted’ in places than others. Those knots are composed of interpersonal relationships, and the subjects of those relationships are knots themselves, their subjectivity composed out of the relationships in which they participate. The system of relationships that forms the city forms the subject as well.

A way to visualize this model of the community can be found in Paul Baran’s (1964) essay for the RAND corporation, ‘On Distributed Communications’. In considering the problem of survivable communications in the event of enemy attack, Baran diagrams three different communications structures: centralized, decentralized, and distributed (Figure 1). In the distributed system, nodes serve as the linkage points for the overall system, but if one node is eliminated or destroyed, communications can simply be routed through another node. Additionally, there may be several routes to the same destination, as any message is broken up into packets that are sent along various routes and re-assembled at the destination, with error-checking procedures to fill in any information that may have been lost in the process. In contrast to a centralized system, which features an active ‘broadcaster’ and several passive ‘receivers,’ or the decentralized system, with an active broadcaster, several relays, and passive receivers, the nodes of the distributed system must all play an active part in working with one another to construct the message that is being sent.

For Baran, the nodes and links have hardware equivalents, servers, IMPs, and physical lines of communication. But is also easy to see how these

Centralized • Figure 1

Decentralized

Distributed

Representations of centralized, decentralized, and distributed communications networks. From Baran, P. (1964).

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nodes can represent individuals, with the links formed between them by communication and interaction. Or, to use terminology from the realm of social studies, we can imagine the nodes as individuals, and the links as the ‘strong ties’ and ‘weak ties’ that are established between them.2 To fully map the complex field of human relations we might prefer a 3D map to the plainly topographical sketch proposed by Baran, but in either case, we have here an illustration of Flusser’s city, a dense field of intersubjective connections that is created only as subjects ‘actualize’ themselves in opposition and relation to one another.

The nature of the subject in this city, and the relations that bring them into relation to one another, need further exploration, but for the moment we should consider how this mapping of the community as a distributed system bears upon the question of online communities. Put plainly, if we can accept this diagram as a model of the community, and if we can also accept that community is constituted through the relations that one subject undertakes with another, then there is no real difference between distributed communities and ‘real’ communities. In Baran’s diagram it is a simple matter to imagine the links being established through a multitude of means, which include face-to-face interaction, letter writing, email, IRC and semaphore signals, whatever facilitates the ability of one subject to communicate and interact with another. Communication is a constitutive element of community, since without it, nodes become isolated and non-functional.3 All communities are distributed systems of nodes in interaction with one another. What has limited the concept of community to specific spaces has been the limitations on interactions imposed by the limitations of communication technology. Before there were long-distance communication technologies, whether they were postal routes, telephones, or telegraphs, community was limited to those persons whom one had the potential to interact with on a face-to-face basis. As long-distance communications have become commonplace, community has shifted from the space of direct interaction, to the virtual (e)space4 of distributed relations. The concept of community as relating to physical space was a direct result of the limited interactions that were available on a daily basis; however, community is always about the interaction of individual subjects with one another through some means of communication.5 This is what long-distance, and even global, communications systems should now make clear to us – we can begin to conceive of community as constituted by a network of relations unbounded by physical location. This is not to say that limitations are not imposed on this network, and, indeed, many commentators (Breslow, 1997; Lockard, 1997, for example), have made salient points about the technical and economic limitations of such a utopian vision. Given that these are limitations that also impose restrictions on the development of community, and the coming-into-being of subjects, I see these as ethical problems, but I 37 Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com by Giorgio Bertini on October 11, 2010

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will discuss this further in a subsequent section. For now, I want to think further about the nature of the node in this system, the subject, and how its existence is a product of the system itself.

THE NODAL SUBJECT In an earlier section of the essay quoted above, Flusser writes: The subject can no longer be seen as an individium, but in contrast as a thick spectrum of parts; the subject is calculable. The infamous ‘Self ’ can be seen as a knot, in which different threads cross, for example the many physical threads with the ecological, the psychic, and the cultural. The infamous ‘Self ’ reveals itself not as a core, but rather as a shell. It gathers the scattered parts together, it holds them. It is a mask. (Flusser, 1988: 152)6

Like the nodes of Baran’s distributed communication system, in which different lines cross and come together, Flusser’s conception of the Self is one in which different lines are gathered together and contained. This is an idea that has been examined in some depth, especially in relation to online communities, most notably by Rheingold (1994) and Turkle (1995). In Life on the Screen, Turkle devotes considerable attention to the phenomenon of multiple online identities, and invokes such concepts as Lifton’s ‘protean self ’ and Bruckman’s ‘identity workshops’ to arrive at the conclusion that online communities provide a space for the expression of multiple identities, and that the self is in fact a fluid identity capable of multiple expressions. As she puts it: ‘Today, people are being helped to develop ideas about identity as multiplicity by a new practice of identity as multiplicity in online life’ (1995: 260).

Flusser’s subject as ‘knot’ is composed of similar multiplicities. Flusser describes the threads that are knotted together and comprise the core of the subject as crossing ‘for example the many physical threads with the ecological, the psychic, and the cultural’ (1988: 158). These threads and the knots they form construct a net, which, like Baran’s diagram, map the field of relations in a community. As Flusser describes it further: We have to imagine a net of intersubjective relations, an ‘intersubjective relations field.’ The threads of this net can be seen as channels, through which information such as imaginings, feelings, intentions or realizations flow. These threads knot themselves together provisionally and into what we call ‘human subjects.’ The totality of the threads construct the concrete lifeworld, and the knots within it are abstract extrapolations. One recognizes this when one unties them. They are without a core, like an onion. Put another way: The ‘Self ’ (‘I’) is an abstract, conceptual point, around which concrete relationships are wound. ‘I’ am that to which ‘you’ is spoken. (Flusser, 1988: 153)7

There are differences, however, between Turkle’s subject and Flusser’s. In contrast to Turkle’s multiple or fragmented self, which exists prior to social 38 Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com by Giorgio Bertini on October 11, 2010

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relations, and which projects aspects of itself into the social field, the knotted or nodal self comes into being only through the field of social relations. Remove the threads or channels that connect a node to other nodes, and the node ceases to be. ‘I’ exist only so long as there is another who speaks ‘you’ to me. When we withdraw from a social field, we haven’t just ‘worked through’ some aspect of our being; we have, in fact, lost something of ourselves that arises in relation to the other nodes with which we interact.

The difference in these concepts of the subject has significant bearing on the question of distributed community, because it points back to one of my original questions: what is the role of communication in community? In Flusser’s model of the subject, the self is constructed entirely from the field of social relations, which is mediated by language; ‘I’ am only if there is another to speak ‘you’ to me. In Turkle’s model, the subject is pre-existing, though it may consist of multiple aspects; it enters into social relations only to exercise or play with these parts. In Flusser’s model, community is the field of ‘intersubjective relations’ in which subjects come into being through language, making community the primary field of all human experience. In Turkle’s model, the interior life of subjects is primary, and while that interior life might be influenced by social relations, one does not cease to be when one withdraws from the social field. Indeed, withdrawing from a social field may simply signal the working through and integration of an aspect of the self, a projection that can now be brought back to the interior.

Here, community plays a significant, though not primary, role in the life of the subject. Turkle’s methodology points to this favoring of subjects over community; her analysis of MUDs does not lead us into a consideration of the connections between individuals, the constitution of community, but rather falls back on the case study analysis of the individual’s past history, to give meaning to experience.

Flusser’s concept of the subject takes its basis not from psychoanalysis, but from conceiving of subjects as the combinatory effects of systems. As he says: Such an image of humanity is suggested not only thanks to psychoanalysis and existential analysis, but on the contrary it is also equivalent to the operational concepts in many other areas, for example that of ecology – organisms are combinations of eco-sytems; that of molecular biology – phenotypes are combinations of genetic information; or that of physics – bodies are combinations of the four field strengths. (1988: 154)8

If we turn our attention to a more articulated version of systems theory, deriving from cognitive science, we can indeed see the role played by communication, and language, in forming both the human subject and the community.

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SYSTEMS THEORY: AUTOPOESIS, STRUCTURAL COUPLING, LANGUAGE, AND COMMUNITY Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s The Tree of Knowledge (1998) is a foundational yet basic introduction to the concepts of cognitive science. Its origins are in a series of lectures delivered between 1981 and 1983 to the Organization of American States. The purpose of these lectures was to present ‘a coherent formulation of the foundations of communication as the biological basis for man’ (p. 13). The goal is to show how communication is the basis for being, but to do so from a biological perspective. There is good reason to believe that this work may have had an influence on Flusser’s (and Lyotard’s [1997]) conception of ‘nodal subjects’.9 While scarcely known outside of the field of biology in the USA, the work of Maturana and Varela, along with that of Heinz von Foerster, contributed significantly to the formation of the ‘radical constructivist’ school of thought in Germany, which had significance not just for the world of AI research and cybernetics, but for theories of social systems as well. Niklas Luhmann, for example, had Maturana as a guest lecturer for his seminars at Beilfeld, and terms such as ‘autopoesis’ gained considerable currency in the academic exchanges of German social theory.

For Maturana and Varela, all organisms are autopoetic systems. That is, they are self-generating systems that are formed in relation to their environment through a series of dynamic interactions with that environment. Using the example of a cell forming through cell metabolism and producing a cell membrane, Maturana and Varela write: this membranous boundary is not a product of cell metabolism in the way that fabric is the product of a fabric-making machine. The reason is that this membrane not only limits the extension of the transformation network that produced its own components but it participates in this network. (1998: 44–6)

There is no separation, in other words, of cell dynamics (metabolism and internal processes) from boundary. To use a phrase from Gregory Bateson (invoked by Maturana and Varela as well) the cell membrane is the difference (between organism and environment) that makes a difference.

It is important to note, however, that as this autopoetic system goes about its functioning, as it organizes itself into an autonomous system that is distinct from the environment in which it is found, it does not undertake this organization in a sequential fashion. As Maturana and Varela explain it: It is not that first there is a boundary, then a dynamics, then a boundary, and so forth. We are describing a type of phenomenon in which the possibility of distinguishing one thing from a whole (something you can see under the microscope, for instance) depends on the integrity of the processes that make it possible . . . The most striking feature of an autopoetic system is that it pulls itself up by its own bootstraps and becomes distinct from its environment 40 Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com by Giorgio Bertini on October 11, 2010

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through its own dynamics, in such a way that both things are inseparable.

(1998: 46–7)

Fine and good for cells, we might say, but since the topic at hand is human subjects, can we say that the same processes hold true? Maturana and Varela see this as a general process of all systems, even complex (multicellular) ones: ‘Living beings are characterized by their autopoetic organization. They differ from each other in their structure, but they are alike in their organization’ (p. 47). From cells on up the ladder to humans, and then onward to social systems, what changes are the components of structure, but not the dynamics of organization. We may change in orders of magnitude and structure, but the processes remain the same. Significant differences in behavior will arise as the result of different internal components, such as nervous systems, but the process of autopoetic organization holds as the dominant process of formation.

Figure 2 is a sketch by Maturana and Varela of an autopoetic system in an environment. The system itself shows operational closure, but structural change can take place within the system, either as a result of interactions from the environment or as result of internal dynamics. Further, a second order unity can be created through structural coupling with another autopoetic system, as in Figure 3.

At this point we have something that looks very much like Flusser’s concept of the subject. An autopoetic unity arises only in relation to an environment from which it distinguishes itself, its own internal dynamics being inseparable from the environment in which it is found. In other words, there is no ‘I’ that exists prior to interaction (with the world, with others), and we might even be so bold as to say that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are the linguistic boundaries that determine the limits of this autopoetic system even more so than the boundary of the body itself.

• Figure 2

A system in relation to the environment.

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• Figure 3

Two systems in structural coupling with each other.

Before jumping to such a conclusion, however, it is worth looking more closely at this diagram of structural coupling, since we are concerned not only with elucidating a concept of the subject, but a concept of the subject in a community. Significantly, the arrows that illustrate the structural coupling do not indicate the transmission of information from one system to the other, but rather a recurrent process of interaction and coordination of behavior. This produces reciprocal changes in the course of development (the ontogeny) of each system. Each system (here, cells) ‘sees’ the other only as a source of further interactions that are indistinguishable from the environment itself. For this reason, Maturana and Varela can say: In describing autopoetic unity as having a particular structure, it will become clear to us that the interactions (as long as they are recurrent) between unity and environment will consist of reciprocal perturbations. In these interactions, the structure of the environment only triggers structural changes in the autopoeitic unities (it does not specify or direct them), and vice versa for the environment. The result will be a history of mutual congruent structural changes as long as the autopoeitic unity and its containing environment do not disintegrate; there will be a structural coupling. (p. 75)

Third-order couplings, as Maturana and Varela describe them, can arise between any two multicellular organisms with nervous systems that engage in recurrent interaction. The nature of these couplings, the behaviors that develop, and indeed the development of the organisms involved, are dependent on the structure of the nervous system found in the organisms.

As a basic example, Maturana and Varela point to ants, which engage in structural coupling through trophallaxis, the exchange of chemical substances.

From this continuous chemical flow . . . results the distribution, throughout the population, of an amount of substances (among them, hormones) responsible 42 Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com by Giorgio Bertini on October 11, 2010

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for the differentiation and specification of roles. Thus, the queen is a queen as long as she is fed in a certain way and certain substances that she produces are distributed among the colony members. Remove the queen from her location, and immediately the hormonal imbalance that her absence causes will result in a change in the feeding of the larvae which develop into queens. Indeed, all the ontogenies of the different members of the ant colony are bound together in co-ontogenic structural drift as they arise in a network of continuously changing trophallactic interactions. In any colony, the ontogeny of each individual is contingent on the ontogenies of the others. (1998: 86)

The question may arise: how does this relate to human subjects?

Certainly we do not interact through chemical exchange (or rather, we do so in a less primary way, as with pheremones), nor is our physical development dependant on the chemical composition of our overall hive (though we may also point out that the presence of certain chemicals in the environment can have a profound effect on our development). The answer relates back to the nature of our nervous systems, which have not evolved in relation to chemical interaction, but in relation to linguistic interaction.

These interactions do not effect the physical development of our bodies, but our development as subjects.

For Maturana and Varela, third-order couplings describe all social formations: We call social phenomena those phenomena that arise in the spontaneous constitution of third-order couplings, and social systems the third-order unities that are thus constituted. The form embodied by unities of this class varies considerably from insects to ungulates to primates. What is common to them all is that wherever they arise – if only to last for a short time – they generate a particular internal phenomenology, namely, one in which the individual ontogenies of all the participating organisms occur fundamentally as part of the network of co-ontogenies that they bring about in constituting third-order unities. (1998: 193; italics in original)

In short, ‘I’ develop only in relation to others as we all participate in the creation of a social formation. The creation of the social formation takes place through reciprocal coupling between individual organisms, a process of reciprocal coordination – the development of individual roles in a pack of dogs would be an example of just such coordination. This coordination of behaviors in a social system is what Maturana and Varela call ‘communication’: ‘We call communication the coordinated behaviors mutually triggered among the members of a social unity’ (p. 193). It is critical to note here that, just as there was no sequential process of boundary formation and internal dynamics at the level of the cell, there is no sequential process of action on the part of the individual, change in environment (change in the behavior of other organisms), or change on the part of the individual. The important point is that communication is the 43 Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com by Giorgio Bertini on October 11, 2010

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essential link in third-order unities, otherwise known as social systems, that coordinates behavior between members of the social system and mutually determines their ontogenies, the process of coming-into-being.

Here, we have arrived at an initial point of this essay, that there can be no community without communication, that no coordination or third-order coupling can take place between organisms without a system of communication. Community, from this standpoint, is contingent on communication. Obviously, human beings use language to communicate, which is different from other forms of communication, such as chemicals, and this bears further consideration. However, it should be plain that so long as humans are engaging in a process of recurrent communication, they are in a community, and it does not matter whether that communication is carried out through speech, telephone, handwritten letters, or typed words on a screen.

Language is a special form of communication, one that brings subjects into being in the same way that trophallactic exchange between ants brings them into being as workers, queens, soldiers, and so on. This would seem to be confusing two orders of being, however, as I pointed out above; hormones can shape bodies, but how does language shape the physical world, how does it determine our very notion of the self?

Maturana and Varela recognize that language, as an act of communication, plays a special role in forming the consciousness of human beings. Many creatures operate in what they call ‘linguistic domains’, systems of learned communicative behavior that arise between organisms as the result of their ‘particular history of co-existence’ (p. 207). When I have learned that a particular sound made by my cat as she runs back and forth between rooms means that the door to her room where the litter box and food are kept is closed, and she wants it open, the two of us are operating in a linguistic domain. It is crucial to note here that the communicative nature of this situation is not something pre-existing; that is, there is no special ‘meow’ in cat language that means ‘open the door, I’m hungry and need to use the litter box’; nor, on my part, is there an immediate recognition of what this behavior means. It is only recurrent interaction, trial-and-error on both parts, that leads to an act of communication between us. No information is ‘transmitted’ to me via my cat’s meow; rather, I respond to a behavior on the part of my cat through a behavior of my own, which in turn depends on the state of my organism and its capacity to respond to behavior – my nervous system actually enables me to recognize that a communicative behavior is taking place, where an ant would have no concept of any such thing. Together, my cat and I have fashioned the meaning of the ‘meow’ around a coordinated set of behaviors.

For Maturana and Varela, such behavior constitutes a linguistic domain, but is not language itself. Such behavior can form the basis for language to 44 Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com by Giorgio Bertini on October 11, 2010

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develop, but is not language. In one of the more difficult passages in their work, Maturana and Varela describe the essential difference (that makes a difference) as organisms in social formations go beyond the realm of communication, the coordination of action, into the realm of language: In the flow of recurrent social interactions, language appears when the operations in a linguistic domain result in coordinations of actions about actions that pertain to the linguistic domain itself. As language arises, objects also arise as linguistic distinctions of linguistic distinctions that obscure the actions they coordinate. Thus, the word ‘table’ coordinates our actions with respect to the actions we perform when we manipulate a ‘table,’ obscuring the actions that (as operations of distinction) constitute a table by bringing it forth.

In other words, we are in language, or better, we ‘language’ only when through a reflexive action we make a linguistic distinction of a linguistic distinction. Therefore, to operate in language is to operate in a domain of congruent, co-ontogenic structural coupling . . . language enables those who operate in it to describe themselves and their circumstances through the linguistic distinction of linguistic distinction. (1998: 209–10)

Here, Maturana and Varela construct a concept of language as a reflexive phenomena in which the coordinated behavior of linguistic domains itself becomes the object of a linguistic domain. Behavior is not only coordinated through communication in the linguistic domain, but that coordination itself can become an object of a linguistic domain as we undertake to describe it.

As in the communication between my cat and myself, language is about the coordination of behaviors, a response on the part of one organism to the perturbances that arise within it as a result of interaction with its environment; but it is different, because it allows us to draw further distinctions, ‘bringing forth’ an entire world based on the first and fundamental distinction between ‘you’ and ‘I’. If it were possible for me to say to my cat ‘When you meow, I come,’ and have her reply ‘yes, that is true, you come when I meow,’ then we would have made a linguistic distinction about a linguistic distinction in which ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘meow’ ‘come’ are now given meaning in relation to coordinated behavior.

In this model of language, no subjectivity pre-exists communication with others, and the subjectivity that develops is indeed multiple, a product of the various interactions in the different worlds that are brought forth with others. Many, if not all, of these worlds, will use the same language to coordinate behaviors within them, but the behavioral interactions that will arise between subjects will each be unique, different coordinations of behavior. This is a model of the nodal subject; subjects exist only through interaction and connection with others, and are themselves empty,10 arising as the coordination of the different states and behaviors in relation to changes in the environment.

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POLITICS AND THE NODAL SUBJECT So far I have concentrated primarily on two issues. The first is that of community and communication, and what I have tried to illustrate is the relationship between the practice of communication and the coming-intobeing of community. Community is understood here as a set of coordinated behaviors, and coordination requires communication between entities to take place. Whether those entities are ants, primates, or humans, communication of one form or another is required to coordinate behavior.

My second issue was to explore the model of subjectivity put forth by Vilem Flusser, to show its relation to the model of the subject in Maturana and Varela, and to use both as a way to illustrate the concept of a ‘nodal subject’. My primary goal here was to show that, just as there can be no community without communication, so too there can be no ‘I’ outside of language, a linguistic domain that arises as the result of coordinated behavior. As Flusser puts it, ‘“I” am that to which “you” is spoken,’ and this speaking takes place within the context of a community.

Both of these points are important for understanding the political consequences of distributed communities. As described above, a community arises through the coordinated behavior of individuals, and individual subjectivity is also a product of this interaction. A distributed community is one that uses an extended communications infrastructure to allow interaction and coordination of behavior among its members, each of which functions as a node within the overall system. There are numerous communities that have arisen as the result of being able to communicate with members who are widely distributed over a geographic area – we could consider the significance of the internet for gay and lesbian civil rights, for dozens of marginalized social groups, for Neo-Nazis and political dissidents. We have seen activists use the internet to great effect to organize against the WTO and the war on Iraq, and to raise funds for political campaigns. What all of these communities have in common is a movement toward action that is coordinated through the internet. These actions may often be spontaneous and ad-hoc, triggered by sending an email or an instant message. Though they are not as ‘visible’ as communities associated with ‘places,’ such as LambdaMOO, nor have they developed political institutions such as a voting or legal system, they are nonetheless communities that give members the ability to work together in taking action, whether that is organizing a rave or working for social justice. I think it would be fair to say that many communities, defined in this way, exist today that would not have existed prior to the development of the internet, and in this way, the internet has helped bring about a political revolution.

At the same time, participation by individuals in these distributed communities has contributed to the development of a new political subject.

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I am essentially in agreement with Mark Poster’s statement that ‘On the Internet, individuals construct their identities in relation to ongoing dialogues,’ (1997: 211), and would add that we are all in the process of undertaking multiple dialogues as members of multiple communities. As we become aware of our membership in a community, we also become aware of our own political identity, understood in the widest sense, and our potential for collective action, whether that is a simple social gathering or an attempt to influence legislation. As we practice our membership in various communities, through dialogue and action, we also become aware, in Flusser’s terms, of how we are simply knots that are constructed out of the various interactions we undertake with others and, perhaps more importantly, how connected we all are within the net of human relations.

In conclusion, my main goal in this essay has been to try and shift thinking about ‘online communities’ away from specific places and practices, and toward thinking about ‘distributed communities’ as arising from nodes that connected by a communications infrastructure. I have used systems theory as an entry into this discussion, and as a way of exploring the relationship between communication and community, and the development of the individual within a community. I have also used this discussion to throw a sidelight on the political ramifications of distributed communities, for both the larger political sphere and individuals within it. In the end, I believe I have shown that, whatever the specific structure of any distributed community might be, the development of distributed communities supported by an internet infrastructure holds considerable, if not revolutionary, potential for future political activity.

This leads to my last point. As I described above, one comes into being as a subject in relation to a community of individuals. Being forcibly prevented from participating in a community through, for example, having one’s access to the internet denied, amounts to having an aspect of one’s development as a subject denied. This is the ethical problem I alluded to in my introduction; if economic, social, or political forces deny me my participation in a community, then they also deny me the development of an aspect of myself, and the potential to allow meaningful communities to come into existence.

This is the reason that issues such as internet filtering, government restrictions on internet access, and the Digital Divide must be strongly addressed. I do not hold a particularly utopian view of the internet, meaning that I don’t believe it will necessarily usher in a new era of human decency and goodwill, but I do believe that it has the potential to allow individuals and groups a new means for self-realization and political action.

Some of this will certainly be bad, as the development of sites like Stormfront can attest, or the use of the internet by terrorist groups; some of this will certainly be good, in a liberal western sense, as can be seen in the development of sites like IndyMedia.org, and the ability to organize for 47 Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com by Giorgio Bertini on October 11, 2010

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social justice. Currently, there are groups around the world that are attempting to limit the access of individuals to the internet out of fear of the ways in which these individuals might gain political awareness, organize, and take action. As we begin to think about distributed communities as communities, we must also begin to think about their rights as communities in a global world, and the rights of individuals to realize themselves within those communities.

In the realm of distributed communities, we engage in daily acts of bringing forth new worlds with others, we recognize others as human subjects with whom we wish to co-exist, and who have equal rights to realizing their individual becoming. Because of this, as we undertake a selfexamination of ourselves as subjects and our relations with others, we are forced to consider the nature of the world we live in now, the system that has evolved to benefit the becomings of some components, while suppressing others. We do this not in an immaterial realm devoid of relation to the real, but in a concrete world of community, where the linguistic worlds that we bring forth with others have the potential to bloom into worlds of action.

Notes 1 Die zwischenmenschllichen Beziehungen sind an verschiedenen Orten des Netzes verschiedne dicht gesponnen. Je dichter sie sind, desto ‘konkreter’ sind sie. Diese dichten Stellen bilden Wellent¨aler im Feld, das man schwingend wird vorstellen mussen. An diesen dichten r¨ucken die Knoten einander n¨aher, sie ‘aktualisieren’ sich gegenseitig. In derartigen Wellent¨alern werden die in den zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen angelegten M¨oglichkeiten ‘aktueller’. Die Wellent¨aler wirken aud das unliegende Feld ‘anziehend’ (in das Gravitionsfeld einbeziehend), immer weitere zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen werden von dorther angezogen. Jede Welle ist ein Brennpunkt f¨ur Aktualisierung zwischenmenschlicher Virtualit¨aten. Solche Wellent¨aler sind ‘Stadte’ zu nennen. For all translations from the German in this article, I am indebted to the terrific assistance of my friend and colleague Stefanie Harris at Northwestern University.

2 Contempoary social networking applications, such as Friendster and Tribe.net, are struggling now to find ways of representing the difference between these types of links. On Tribe.net, for example, a user’s full name is visible only to people who exist at ‘one-degree’ of separation, representing a ‘strong link’ to those individuals.

Friendster’s inability to portray this distinction has made the service almost worthless, since it matters very little if I am connected to 250,000 people if there is no way to understand the strength of those connections.

3 An anthropologist friend, Jesse Sanford, suggested a modulation of this statement since, in his opinion, community is constituted by practices rather than physical proximity. My answer is that communication is constituted through a vast number of practices, only some of which are verbal. This point is expanded upon somewhat below, in my discussion of Maturana and Varela’s work.

4 This term and its suggestive connotations is originated within work being done by my colleagues Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann at the University of Virginia.

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5 That community is constituted through communications systems is a concept that reaches back to the very beginnings of sociology. In John Dewey’s ‘conjoint relations’ and Cooley’s research in to the role of newspapers in social thought, we can see the earliest germs of the type of model I’m describing here. However, in these early attempts to theorize the role of media and communications in society, the goal is still to arrive at an understanding of community consensus, and much of this thought is influenced by late 19th-century theories of ‘the crowd’ and ‘the mass’.

Here, the node is subsumed within the larger structure, while I would argue that a true understanding of distributed communities should focus our attention on flows, shifts, and action, rather than consensus and the development of ‘public opinion’.

For a concise summation of these early approaches to communication and community, see Czitrom (1982). Of course, the now canonical contemporary work on this subject is Anderson (1991). Also, in general, this concept of subjectivity arising through sets of network relations can be found in the Buddhist concept of ‘co-dependant arising’, which has had significant influence on Varela’s work, as discussed below.

6 Der mensch kann nicht mehr als ein Individuum, sondern muß als im Gegenteil als eine dichte Streuung von Teilchen angesehen werden: er ist kalkulierbar. Das ber¨uchtige ‘Selbst’ ist als ein Knoten zu sehen, in welchem sich verschiedene Felder kreuzen, etwa die vielen physikalischen Felder mit dem o¨ kologischen, psychischen und kulturellen. Das ber¨uchtigen ‘Selbts’ erweist sich dabei nicht als Kern, sondern als Schale. Es h¨alt die gestreuten Teilchen zusammen, ‘enth¨alt’ sie. Es ist eine Maske.

7 Wir haben uns ein Netz von von zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen vorzustellen, ein ‘insubjektives Relationsfeld’. Die Faden dieses Netzes sind als Kan¨alen zu sehen, durch welche Informationen wie Vorstellungen, Gef¨uhle, Absichten oder Erkenntnisse fließen. Diese F¨aden verknoten sich provisorisch und bilden das, was wir ‘menschliche Subjekte’ nennen. Die Gesamtheit der F¨aden macht di e konkrete Lebenswelt aus, und die Knoten darin sind abstrakte Extrapolationen. Das erkennt man, wenn man sie entknotet. Sie sind kernlos wie Zwiebeln. Anders gesagt: Das ‘Selbst’ (‘Ich’) iet ein abstrakter, gedachter Punkt, um welchen sich konkrete Beziehungen h¨ullen. ‘Ich’ ist, wozu ‘du’ gasagt wird.

8 Ein derartiges Menschenbild wird nicht nur dank Psychoanalyse und Existenzanalyse nahegelegt, sondern es entspricht auch den Feldbildern auf vielen andere Gebieten, ¨ zum Beispiel jenem der Okologie – Organismen sind Verknotungen von ¨ Okosystemen -, jenem der Molekularbiologie – Ph¨anotypen sind Verknotungen von genetischen Informationen – oder jenem der Kernphysik – K¨orper sind Verknotungen der vier Kr¨aftefelder.

9 It is well beyond the scope of this article to detail, but much of post-structuralist theory seems to owe at least part of its foundation to systems theory. Deleuze and Guattari make explicit reference to the work of systems theorist Gregory Bateson, and their rhizome is a distributed system of interactions; Foucault’s (1977) concept of the subject owes much to the concept of a subject constructed through social relations, and other theorists, including Lyotard, have made explicit reference to concepts from systems theory in their work.

10 Readers may note a similarity in language here to Buddhist philosophy, and so it should be pointed out that Varela, in fact, was a practicing Buddhist, and made considerable contribution to bridging the gap between empirical biology and Buddhist phenomenology. See his work with Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind (1993, MIT Press: Cambridge) for a detailed examination of the relationship between these approaches.

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Watson, N. (1997) ‘Why We Argue About Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.net Fan Community’, in S.G. Jones (ed.) Virtual Culture: Identity and Community in Cyberspace, pp. 102–32. London: Sage.

PHILLIP H. GOCHENOUR holds a PhD in comparative literature from Emory University. After working in the web industry, Phil took a position as a visiting assistant professor of digital media studies at the University of Virginia, where he taught courses on the history and cultural impact of information technology and digital media, online communities, and American science fiction. He currently resides in San Francisco, where he is a technical documentation consultant and a partner in Totalmass, Inc., a developer and publisher of content for mobile devices.

Address: 2215-R Market Street 115, San Francisco, CA 94114, USA. [email: phil_gochenour@earthlink.net]

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