"Technical Innovation Class War". (Voiceover).

Can what goes in the preceding installments by the tag "formal" and that which almost disappears under the names "political" and "social" be reconciled? Using them, it seems that what is expressed in the former is repressed in the latter, and vice versa. What Rachel has called the "systems of innovation," and what Gloria usefully clocks in a disparity between the terms, as well as the critical and institutional accounts that attempt to make seamless stories about them, does perhaps provide an opportunity to open things up.

The net.art slogan "Technical Innovation Class War," and Microsoft's pale attempt to trump it with "Freedom to Innovate" points a way into this. We've seen that the difficulty of learning different types of code presents an obstacle to getting into practices that demand them. Care needs to be taken so this remains a critique rather than a complaint. Innovation is compulsion to upgrade, to re-skill and to stay in line, whether that's an art-historical timeline or an application's upgrade path. At the same time, the capacity for innovation belongs to those who are simply meant to receive it and adapt.

This kind of innovation is not simply an upside-down replica of corporate innovation (read that as "restructuring"). It is sometimes a question of style--think of the "technical" innovations of black music, or the empathic and connective revolt of the "movement of movements" against capitalism. It is sometimes a question of the collective and singular manufacture of existential drives. It is sometimes unnamable. It is not a form of innovation that conceives of itself simply in terms of building up a big enough block of users or participants by which mass politics or cultures are operated and considered dominant. Big enough, that is, to take on the other big block from whence innovation emerged and thereby overcome it.

One of the capacities of art is to create work that reflects on both the process and actualization of innovation. Lev Manovich isolates an attendant problem in passing by focusing on the way literary theory has tended to sublimate the traditions in which writing of various kinds can be seen to be a "technology-based cultural form." Needless to say, it is those theorizations and actuations of writing that are somehow extra literary that provides a way into such currents within literature, writing and print (e.g.: narratology, i,e. Gennette; histories of print, i.e. Febvre and Martin or Elsenstein; phenomenological, i.e. Ong and McLuhan; concrete poetry, i.e. Craig Saper's "Networked Art"; the novels that Sukenick calls the "counter-tradition").

Echoing this, what I'm interested in here is how the specific material qualities of a particular media system can be made to sing out their capacity for innovation. Such a capacity for innovation should be understood in terms that are both "formal" and "social," and in which both categories become useless as being indicative of the one excluding the other.

The poet jackson Mac Low had it this, not essentially his, way when he remarked that the poet is, "Pre-eminently the maker of the plot, the framework--not necessarily of everything that takes place within that framework...and creates a situation wherein he invites other persons and the world in general to be co-creators with him! He does not wish to be a dictator but a loyal coinitiator within the free society of equals which he hopes his work will bring about." Mac Low clearly knew what was at stake in the capacity of poetry to generate actual freedoms of perception and language, and, relevant to computational culture, the non-determinate processes of chance often built into his work. At the same time, the claims for the poet as a stable position, as master of signification, the situationist, which might be read into such a passage, need themselves to be thrown into the same processes. Franco Berardi, in an early text on computer-based media states, "Whenever a social universe forms adequate to the technolog ical and communications potential of actual social brainpower, we call it Renaissance,"

When the poetics of creation in Mac Low's terms expand to generate an unfolding of their full social, aesthetic and technical capacity for resonance, such a moment creates an explosion. Such an explosion can take place on different scales and various levels: the molar politics of class or individual; a flowering coalition of insight, rhythm and sensation familiar (but not often enough) to culture; or in those moments where absolutely nothing is left untouched.

MATTHEW FULLER is the author of a novel, ATM. He works on software, fiction and media ecologies, much of which is at http://www.axia.demon.co.uk. A current project, TextFm, in collaboration with Harwood and Public Netbase, Vienna is up at http://basecamp.netbase.org. He teaches Media Culture and Communications at Middlesex University, London.