Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From

Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From

I just finished reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From. Unexpectedly, the book connected with a lot of my reading from a recent seminar called Queer Indigestion and the University. Thierry Bardini’s Junkware was the first text that I thought of when I read Johnson’s notion that good ideas are composed of spare parts: “Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are, and ensuring that you’re not just recycling the same old ingredients” (Johnson 42). He uses an example from Stephen Jay Gould, who praises the ingenuity of sandals made from old tires. Johnson refers to Gould later because of his concept of exaptation, a concept in evolutionary biology where a trait developed for a specific purpose is re-purposed for a different function. Gould himself “exapts” the ‘tire sandals,’ translating it to nature: “The tire-to-sandals principle [. . .] [makes] nature as inventive as the cleverest person who ever pondered the potential of a junkyard in Nairobi” (Gould qtd. in Johnson 29). Johnson will refer several times to the innovative power of recycling. Brent Constanz, for instance, in his project to grow coral reef that may eventually result in material for cities, discovered a new way to use excess CO2 from factories. We consider CO2 as “waste,” but through innovative thinking it becomes useful again. This may be one issue with Bardini’s narrow definition of junk, which he wants to distinguish from forms of garbage, waste and trash for (admirably) semantic reasons. He tries to describe junk as something that retains some of its affect (whereas trash, garbage, and waste, we just want out of sight, out of mind). This affect gives us “hope” in junk and possibly a “redemption,” language he draws from Phillip K. Dick’s SF Gnosticism. Toward the end of the text, he further generalizes: “junk is always the present potentiality of a renewed function” (Bardin 213).

 Either Johnson is not careful enough in his distinctions, or Bardini’s distinctions earlier in the text fall apart right here. Should we think junk as a renewed function in the sense that its initial function returns? I do not think Bardini means it in this sense, since he also wants to speak of “spare parts,” but in more ‘organic’ terms, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s Bodies without Organs. He uses the term Organs without bodies. Bardini cites the Tissue Culture and Art Project as claiming that their work is about “producing spare body parts” (204). Both of the texts seem to point toward innovation, but Johnson’s concept of “platforms” takes us out of the rhetoric of redemption/salvation. At the same time, we have to recognize that while Johnson’s work succeeds at discussing innovation, it rarely touches on the difficult subject of ethics of innovations and technology. Thus, Johnson avoids any discussion of the ethical consequences of “good ideas.” This is a limitation of Johnson’s book that should be acknowledged, but not harped on. Johnson hints at political and organizational concerns, but never directly addresses them, as it is not the thesis of his book. So, in a sense, perhaps it is disingenuous of me to compare Johnson and Bardini’s work.

Yet, we may want to look at one more moment in Johnson’s text that intersects with Bardini. Junkware begins with a historical narrative of Crick and Watson’s discovery of the Central Dogma. Bardini points out that a lot of the decisions made concerning the Dogma was made outside of the laboratory, in letters and informal meetings. In our course, we were a bit surprised by this and poked fun at the kind of arbitrary decisions made. Johnson offers a slightly alternative reading, where he shows how Watson and Crick’s tinkering and combining different disciplines led to their theories of DNA (Johnson 168-69). Bardini admits that Watson and Crick’s Central Dogma was useful at one time, but eventually grew into an actual dogma that limited possibilities of research (Bardini 211). Thus, the issue for Bardini is not the innovation/idea itself, but rather its rigidity and its ability to exclude work that, we have since learned, is less “counter-productive” than W&C initially had thought. How would we understand Watson and Crick’s work in Johnson’s terms of platforming?

Johnson modifies the basic Kuhnian paradigm structure, arguing that “modern scientific paradigms are rarely overthrown. Instead, they are built upon. They create a platform that supports new paradigms above them,” such as the molecular genetics revolution triggered by Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA (190). Although Johnson is clearly right here, he does not take into account that the way Watson and Crick defined what was “useful” and what was “garbage” within the DNA would marginalize certain research as invalid or, frankly, crazy. Perhaps Johnson would explain this phenomenon in terms of the concept of the adjacent possible? Bardini refers to one of the (now) famous Barbara McCintock, who was dismissed early in her career but eventually won the Nobel Prize. Perhaps Johnson would argue that McClintock’s ideas could not flourish in the early environment. But maybe it was because of Watson and Crick’s Dogma that they closed off the adjacent possible.

We may be able to see such definitions/dogmas of Watson and Crick as an elimination of “commons.” By calling most of DNA “junk” or “garbage,” actually get a very politically charged conception of human body where there are “productive” genes (‘coding’) and parasitic genes that have little function and just sort of ‘tag along’. I am struck by the similarity of this to the dominant trend in thinking that there are job “creators” and then there the people who depend on these job creators for their livelihoods. The 99% sucking off the 1% etc.

Perhaps the most relevant work on the problem of the “commons” is elucidated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Commonwealth. The “commons” is neither private nor public, but autonomous from both. Indeed, the commons goes beyond the idea of “property” and so even “public property” is still in some sense “private” compared to the openness of the commons (Hardt and Negri 282). “The common” and what Hardt and Negri, following Foucault, call biopolitical production create surplus value, but are not subject to the logic of scarcity:

Biopolitical production puts bios to work without consuming it. Furthermore, its product is not exclusive. When I share an idea or image with you, my capacity to think with it is not lessened; on the contrary, our exchange of ideas and images increases my capacities. (283-284)

This new “social sensorium” is what much labor (at least in the United States) now works towards. We need to start thinking the commons because the internet has allowed for increased and productive circulation of ideas and images. It is through the free circulation of ideas and tools that innovation comes about.

Indeed, since ideas and imagesdo not operate on the logic of scarcity, we have to construct artificial barriers that protects them from circulation. Stephen Johnson writes that, although efficiency tends to be the goal of every economy, and economy that “traffic[s] in ideas”  must build inefficient markets:

And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we’ve erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others. (232)

Of course, ideally, there is one place where ideas should circulate freely: the university. The modern research university, argues Johnson, participates in “fourth quadrant” research; that is, it is decentralized and nonmarket driven. Of course, as many writes have recently pointed out, markets have taken over funding for research and many people consider the Humanities type of research (what Christopher Newfield refers to as “cultural knowledge”) as useless. So, in one sense, the University may be in danger of becoming a market-driven institution. But, again, ideally, university research goes like this: “new ideas are published with the deliberate goal of allowing other participants to refine and build upon them, with no restrictions on their circulation beyond the proper acknowledgment of their origin” (Johnson 233).

Johnson and Hardt and Negri, I think, are actually remarkably close in what they seem to be arguing for, even though Johnson is less extreme. Johnson admits that there is no “ready-made political vocabulary for the fourth quadrant, particularly the noninstitutional forms of collaboration that have developed around the open-source community” (235). I would suggest that this type of thinking may correspond to what Hardt and Negri calls “the multitude.”

Both Hardt and Negri see the concept of the city and the metropolis as a key requirement for what Hardt and Negri call “biopolitical production” and what Johnson calls simply “good ideas.” The city, also, is the location of the political collective Hardt and Negri call the multitude: “The metropolis is the site of biopolitical production because it is the space of the common, of people living together, sharing resources, communicating, exchanging goods and ideas [. . .] The metropolis is a factory for the production of the common” (250). For Hardt and Negri, the city is important because it fosters “unpredictable encounters,” the task of which is to transform “conflictive encounters” into “joyful and productive ones” (252-255). This focus on encounter and collisions corresponds with Johnson’s idea of ‘collisions’: “Collisions [lead to creativity]—the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space” (Johnson 163).

But Johnson argues that the idea of the ‘commons’ is limited for two reasons. First, he notes that it is conventionally used in “opposition to the competitive struggle of the marketplace” and innovation environments are not necessarily hostile to market competition (244). I think Hardt and Negri would respond that biopolitical production is, rather than ‘hostile’, simply overflowing the market. That is, it creates surplus value that is difficult for capital to appropriate and hold onto: “Cognitive labor and affective labor generally produce cooperation autonomously from capitalist command” (140). The second limit Johnson points out is that the commons (which, admittedly, maybe this is different from the “common” without an ‘s’)

doesn’t suggest the patterns of recycling and exaptation and recombination that define so many innovation spaces. When you think of the commons, you think of a cleared field dominate by a single resource for grazing. You don’t think of an ecosystem. The commons is a monocrop grassland, not a tangled bank (244)

Indeed, Johnson argues for a metaphor ‘drawn from nature’ that more explicitly recalls an ecosystem. I think both Johnson and Hardt and Negri are trying to go beyond a state-controlled socialism or capitalism. Both are interested in a careful balance between order and chaos and both believe that creativity and innovation stem from decentralized, non-hierarchal aggregates that allows a free flow of ideas. It’s possible that Hardt and Negri have a larger task, as they are seeking to think of a new way of governance. Johnson, too, however, points to the possibility that the ideas he identifies toward innovation should be applied to government, but in a different way.

Hardt and Negri argue that revolutionary institutions must be

1.) Based in conflict

2.) create their own forms of habits and practices

3.) open-ended, susceptible to change give the singularities that make it up

They go on to say that this form of institution can be derived through the metaphor of network in cybernetics (357-358). 

However, I think Hardt and Negri, although attuned to the environment of the metropolis, lack discussion of how we are related to other beings besides other humans. Johnson's metaphor of the "coral reef," which emphasizes recycling and sustainability as well as innovation and 'common' spaces I think is a powerful addition to Hardt and Negri's book. Rarely is what we typically call "nature" introduced into Hardt and Negri's discourse. The only except is the Wasp and Orchid, uh, 'parable' if you allow the misnomer:

Wasps who love orchids, instead, point toward the conditions of the biopolitical economy. How could these wasps be a model for economic production, you might ask, when they don't produce anything? The bees and flowers produce honey and fruit, but the wasps and orchids are just hedonists and aesthetes, merely creating pleasure and beauty. It is true that the interaction of wasps and orchids does not result primarily in material goods, but one should not discount their immaterial production. In the encounter of singularies of their love, a new assemblage is created marked by the continual metamorphosis of each singularity in common. Wasp-orchid love, in other words, is a model fo the production of subjectivity that animates the biopolitical economy. (188)

Perhaps it would be prudent here to at least note the difference of Johnson's project and Hardt and Negri's. Hardt and Negri are trying to elucidate a theory of radical institutions and governance that would produce new subjectivities. Johnson, however, is simply trying to think about how innovation happens and what we can do to foster it. Both, again, are focusing on the creative potential of the overflow of ideas in a kind of "commons," but Hardt and Negri clearly lay out a political project.

I think what Johnson can add to the conversation is language focusing on environment, recycling, and sustainability that spurs on innovation and creativity. Bardini's definition of "junk" also helps this project. Maybe the important aspect is in realizing that institutions do not only have to exist to preserve the status quo, but that institutions can be creative in a similar way that technologies and "platforms" are created.

I am not sure if any of these connections matter, but, as Johnson recommends, I am simply trying to write it all down. It's just a slow hunch, albeit poorly defined.

Commonwealth--Hardt and Negri

Besides an extraordinary amount of repetition of their points (which, who knows, may have bee necessary to connect all of their analyses) Hardt and Negri offer an immensely powerful critique of capitalism in light of biopolitics and biopower. Their philosophical geneology traces from Augustine, to Spinoza, to Deleuze and they draw on a diverse range of political and economic theories along the way.

If I have complained before about the lack of clear cut distinctions in other texts, Hardt and Negri may be guilty of the opposite. Their characterizations of positions such as modernity, anti-modernity, and altermodernity (corresponding in part to what Haroway mentions as autremondalisation) are broad concepts, but they deploy them with such purpose and confidence that such distinctions are effective. If modernity is characterized by oppression and colonial forces, and anti-modernity is characterized by resistances to this modernity (an important, but, according to H&N insufficient because it is stuck in opposition), altermodernity "constitues a dispotif for the production of subjectivity" (115). 

Altermodernity, as concerned with producing subjectivities, differs from hypermodernity and postmodernity. Hypermodernity, aligned with theorists  such as Jurgen Habermas, contends that do not propose to break with but to reform and transform modernity's basic institutions. According to H&N, hypermoderniity, "simply continues the hierarchies that are central to modernity, putting its faith in reform, not resistance, and thus does not challenge capitalist rule" (113). Postmodernity, in contrast, is characterized by "negative thought," whose solutions are "weak" and "aesthetic," often drifting into theology (114). 

Alternmodernity is necessary in the age of the biopolitical, where much of what is produced cannot be controlled by capitalists even though they can draw wealth from it. Labor does not only produce products, but produces "forms of life" and various subjectivities, characterized by immaterial products: cognitive and affective. In a way, does this not correspond to the shift in advertisement from the 'product' itself to selling the lifestyle that one could have should one buy the product? But now, it is not even a matter of product. Rather, according to H&N such production happens in the realm of the common rather than privatized copyright and patents. Since biopolitical labor no longer corresponds to the law of scarcity, an idea, image, affect, etc. does not exhaust itself. Rather, "if you use that idea productively, I can use it too, at the very same time. In fact the more of us that work with an idea and communicate about it, the more productive it becomes" (381). This kind of labor and value is increasingly autonomous from capital: "an increasingly autonomous labor-power and, consequently, a capital that becomes increasingly pure command. Labor-power is thus no longer variable capital, integrated within the body of capital, but a separate and increasingly oppositional force" (292). 

So, what social form corresponds to altermodernity in the age of the biopolitical? The multitude. The multitude of the "poor" is where H&G suggest we start. However, the "poor" is not necessarily just those who we consider 'poor' today materially, but basically consists of those who are marginalized and who are for what H&N call "the common." The multitude is composed of singularities who set up encounters which in turn transforms their subjectivities. The multitude shifts from identity to singularity. In a particularly powerful chapter on identity politics, H&N argue that we must start with identity politics but cannot end with them. In fact, identity politics should "strive for their own abolition" (332). Not, mind you, to rid us of difference, but in order to prepare the way for further becoming. In order to become something other, something else, you have  to forget identity. Then, the way is open for differences to flourish. H&N rightly characterize this process as monstrous and violent: "the most terrifying violence confronting revolutionaries may be the monstrous self-transformation we find in the revolutionary streams of identity politics" (371). 

The imagery of the singularity, multitude, swarm, the monstrous, etc. stem from the alternative geneology of philosophy I mentioned earlier--headed mostly by Spinoza and Deleuze (and his reading of the former). Another theorist that seems to be working in a similar vein (although perhaps a bit more ambivalent than H&N) is Gerald Raunig, in his book A Thousand Machines. If nothing else, Raunig explores the importance of a new conception of cognitive labor. Labor is less about new products and more about creation and innovation: "the raw material and means of production of living labor is the capacity for thinking, learning, communicating, imagining, and inventing" (Raunig 115). Both H&N describe the multitude in musical terms as a composition with a composer or orchestra without a conductor. No one person or force seems to be "in charge" of this multitude. I think Raunig's conclusion is a great summary of both his book and H&N's: 

It is precisely in this that the quality of the machine beyond humanist, mechanistic, and cybernetic interpretations consists: in the insistence of a dissonant power, a monstrous potency and enjoyment, in the ambiguous re-invention of verker as a non-conforming concatenation of differences, singularities, and multitudes in an a-harmonious composition without a composer. (119)

However, H&N go much further in their book with more specifics on what they would like to see and their analysis of society. Raunig is working primarily with the concept of the machine--a concept of the machine as a social entity rather than how we generally understand machine: "the thesis of this book is that there is an AND, living and mechanical, that is nto all to be found only in the progressive merging of man and technical machine" (110). Both are working out of D&G, but H&N are more attentive to organized resistance and revolution than Raunig, who almost has an an-archic strain in his thought.

In contrast, H&N propose that the multitude needs to create institutions, but institutions based in conflict rather than institutions that solidify an already pre-formed identity: "the central difference, perhaps, has to do with the locus of agency: whereas according to the conventional sociological notion institutions form individuals and identities, in our conception, singularities form institutions, which are thus perpetually in flux" (358). Institutions that are not created based on what people are, but always moving toward becoming something other.

revolt becomes powerful and long-lasting only when it invents and institutionalizes a new set of collective habits and practices, that is, a new form of life [. . .] common practices and behaviors as well as their original set of gestures and affects. (356)

The way H&N propose this creates a different way of thinking revolutionary event. Indeed, H&N are critical of many thinkers of the Event, including Alain Badiou: "In Badiou an event [. . .] acquires value and meaning primarily after it takes place. He thus concentrates on the intervention that retrospectively gives meaning to the event and the fidelity and generic procedures that continually refer to it" (60). For H&N, Foucault's notion of the event requires a more "forward looking gaze," and has a bit more 'queerness' to it:

The biopolitical event, in fact, is always a queer event, a subversive process of subjectivization that, shattering ruling identities and norms, reveals the link between power and freedom, and thereby inaugurates and alternative production of subjectivity. (63)

Later in the book, queer is associated not with a particular identity but a "critique of identity" (335). We see this same move toward an acknowledgment of the multiplicity of differences in Donna Haraway's When Species Meet. How can we foster queer indigestion in the political and economic realms? Complementary to Donna Haraway's language, H&N suggest that we must "nourish indignation," which they think "love" may  help to foster (246).

The Common and Occupy Wall Street

Reading this text I could not stop thinking about how Occupy Wall Street may be a practical enactment of the multitude. They have created their own gestures and behaviors and guidelines for self-organization. A recent segment of Colbert Report explained the various gestures they use to signify consensus. While I have a difficult time not laughing at such ridiculous gestures and behaviors, I am at a loss to explain why! Its like a whole new system of parliamentry procedure! Furthermore, we see the movement formed of what Raunig deems the "precariat," a term that H&N almost use as well. The "precariat" are the people whose jobs are unstable and whose 'class' is hard to define (see Raunig 80-83). H&N write that what is also precarious is the division between work and leisure time: "precarity is a mechanism of control that determines the temporality of workers, destroying the division between work time and non-work time, requiring workers not to work all the time but to be constantly available for work" (146). When you are working in precarious situation "none of your time is your own" (147). But biopolitical production requires the "freedom of producers to organize their own time" (147). To me, this sounds an awful lot like academic labor.

But space is another important aspect of the common. In fact, H&N argue that "the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class" (250). In other words, it makes sense that people are occupying an entire city. In fact, the Occupy Wall Street logic has analogies to the piquetos in Bolivia who decide to 'picket the city' (see H&N 259) as well as events Raunig discusses in his book. Raunig writes, "the machinic practice of inventing and concatenating bodies and signs, the theatricality and the flight from representation generated different qualities and quantities of reappropriating the city and discuvsive space in the various local contexts" (88).

Practical Actions


Hardt and Negri suggest some really radical proposals toward the end of the book that would move us toward a more democratic and just society. This is, in my opinion, the most radical:

A reform that would grant freedom of time is the establishment of a minimum guaranteed income on a national or global scale paid to everyone regardless of work. Separating income from work would allow everyone more control over time. (309)

Wouldn't this be nice? Perhaps their diagnosis of biopolitical labor as labor that is immaterial, cognitive, and separated from capitalists is a justification for their position that everyone should have a guaranteed income. Is this not, basically, the ultimate welfare state? Who would pay for this? What kind of utopia do these guys live in where people will just "do work" even though they don't have to work to get an income for the basic necessities of life? What are these "basic necessities of life" or "bare life" --food? shelter? tvs? computers? How do we define "life" here?

In order for this to work at all, we would have to have a major culture shift--something I think H&N thinks can be done. But really, we have to be realistic when we realize that many people just don't give a shit.

On the other hand, could we say that I am actually living under this system? I have a "fixed income" every 2 weeks, which is for teaching classes, prep work, grading papers, etc, but I have relatively complete control over my time. Still, the process of organizing one's own time productively is a terribly difficult thing to do--even for an intelligent, educated man such as myself--with such meaningless distractions of the entertainment industry. What incentive do I really have to produce ideas? Mostly it is a feeling of "I need to work." However, I am convinced that not everyone believes that.

In other words, although I find H&N's critique and formation of the multitude productive--particularly with regard to institutions and their becomings, I find their concrete practices that they suggest a bit optimistic about human potential in general.

On another note, is it not the case that H&N's points have been made by others in less bulky (and less explicitly Marxist terms) by John Dewey in his Reconstruction in Philosophy?

Society is the process of associating in such ways that experiences, ideas, emotions, value are transmitted that made common. (161)