marginal utility annex

The fallacy of the voluntaristic capitalist subjectivity and how to overcome it

2012-01-16T20:47:00.001-05:00

From "What Is to be Done?" by the Endnotes group; the first essay in Communization and Its Discontents, Ed. Benjamin Noys.

Though this analysis is grimly pessimistic, I think it's largely right:

Since such supposedly liberated places cannot be stabilised as outside of ‘capitalism, civilization, empire, call it what you wish’, they are to be reconceived as part of the expansion and generalization of a broad insurrectionary struggle. Provided the struggle is successful, these alternatives will not turn out to have been impossible after all; their generalization is to be the condition of their possibility... But all of this is without any clear notion of what is to be undone through such a dynamic. The complexity of actual social relations, and the real dynamic of the class relation, are dispatched with a showmanly flourish in favor of a clutch of vapid abstractions. Happy that the we of the revolution does not need any real definition, all that is to
be overcome is arrogated to the they – an entity which can remain equally abstract: an ill-defined generic nobodaddy (capitalism, civilization, empire etc) that is to be undone by – at the worst points of Call – the Authentic Ones who have forged ‘intense’ friendships, and who still really feel despite the badness of the world.

But the problem cannot rest only with this ‘they’, thereby fundamentally exempting this ‘we of a position’ from the dynamic of revolution. On the contrary, in any actual supersession of the capitalist class relation we ourselves must be overcome; ‘we’ have no ‘position’ apart from the capitalist class relation. What we are is, at the deepest level, constituted by this relation, and it is a rupture with the reproduction of what we are that will necessarily form the horizon of our struggles... In this period, the ‘we’ of revolution does not affirm itself, does not identify itself positively, because it cannot; it cannot assert itself against the ‘they’ of capital without being confronted by the problem of its own existence – an existence which it will be the nature of the revolution to overcome.

The point is that one cannot voluntarily opt out of the ways we are subjectivized by capitalism, by its relations, by the ways it allows for the reproduction of the everyday life it requires. We are always within this, thinking through it, whether we want to be or not, and it would hubris to believe that one could will oneself out of being contaminated by capital and its values. Further, the fable of voluntaristic self-exemption feeds capital's capacity to reproduce subjects on its terms; it's a useful alibi, a reassuring fiction of individual autonomy and the supposed viability of de-capitalistic zones.

The essay has little reassuring to say about what granting this point gains us. Their point that "It is only in the revolutionary undoing of this totality that these forms can be overcome" is pretty cold comfort. They explicitly reject the idea of revolutionary exodus -- "there is little need in the present moment to cast around for practical tips for the re-establishment of some insurrectionary practice, or theoretical justifications for a retreat into ‘radical’ milieus" -- which I interpret as a rejection also of all forms of the politics of authenticity, of committing oneself to practice at the individual level in a quasi-competitive fashion. I will be more ascetic and authentic and dialectical and so on than anybody else and thereby personally win the revolution by the force of my will.

Still, this essay dissatisfied me because it doesn't theorize a possible way out but instead vaguely gestures toward some sort of magic dialectics by which communist theory works in spite of itself as a "real negative presence": "Communist theory is produced by – and necessarily thinks within – this antagonistic relation; it is thought of the class relation, and it grasps itself as such. It attempts to conceptually reconstruct the totality which is its ground, in the light of the already-posited supersession of this totality, and to draw out the supersession as it presents itself here." That seems like double talk to me. It sounds as though they are saying doing communist theory is akin to what Wittgenstein said about doing philosophy: what can be articulated is all tautological nonsense and the real action is what is implied in the process but inherently inarticulable.

What Endnotes says about occupation as a tactic and the demand for no demands sort of fits with this too:

Caught between the necessity of action, the impossibility of reformism, and the lack of any revolutionary horizon whatsoever, these struggles took the form of a transient generalization of
occupations and actions for which there could be no clear notion of what it would mean to ‘win’.

So we are stuck with the inability to deliberately try much of anything for fear of lapsing into a voluntaristic we/they patterning that oversimplifies the real conditions, and at the same time we must make patently wrong articulations of the totality because only through these attempts will we experience analytic clarity, even though we can't express it. The question then is whether this experience is something that can be made collective, can be shared and used to build solidarity, or whether it simply isolates us as well, as thoroughly as fantasies of individual revolutionary virtue. How to collectivize the futile process of thinking the totality so it can succeed and unite us without anyone actually expressing it. And how to make this inarticulate thing practical? Does the experience of it automatically alter subjectivity, not as a matter of our choice and ego but as a matter of having the a prioris of our experience altered? This sort of thinking would serve as a mode of resubjectivization perhaps, though with none of the overt rewards that capitalist subjectivity has trained us to expect and is so good at doling out.

Demand doesn't always precede the market

2012-01-03T18:55:00.000-05:00

From "Post-Fordist Desires: The Commodity Aesthetics of Bangkok Sex Shows" by Ara Wilson (Feminist Legal Studies (2010) 18:53–67)

"Capitalist markets encroaching new spheres or intensifying commodiﬁcation within existing spheres do not simply realise or liberate existing erotic desires but produce new modes of sexuality."

The paper's subject matter, sex tourism, is a bit sensationalistic. (Most academic papers don't have sentences like this one: "My symptomatic reading of pussy shows argues for a more complex understanding of the place of commodiﬁcation in the transnational sex trade.") But its general point seems apt: Markets are a means of creating new desires, or at least commercializing unreified social longings by making them into products. Commoditization makes new desires; it isn't a response to pre-existing ones. Arguably in advanced capitalist societies, it is hard to imagine desires that do not take the form of some sort of product. Wilson points out how sex tourists themselves complain of being commodified, as commodified as the sex workers.

Another way of saying the same thing: Markets seem to simply the process of fulfillment but making satisfaction a transactional thing -- a simple exchange of money for the desired thing that satisfies us. But this means that convenience is ultimately the only sort of satisfaction one can purchase; the more fleeting desires escape commodification even as the marketplace teeming with goods crowds such desires out of our consciousness.

It seems as though Wilson leans pretty heavily on Jason Read's book, The Micropolitics of Capital, which I need to read soon.

The paper also has a section on Wolfgang Haug's Critique of Commodity Aesthetics that makes me think I should re-read it; Wilson regards it as precipitating analyses that focus on immaterial labor and productive consumerism (and makes it sound far more bizarre than I remember it).

Exhaustion of generic raw material

2011-12-30T17:18:00.000-05:00

From Fredric Jameson, "Realism and Utopia in The Wire" (pdf)

Jameson points out how formulaic pop culture is losing some of its vitality with the reduction of all possible motives to one: greed. Capitalism, presumably, persuades us all that material advantage is the master motive: follow the money.

But we must also enumerate the shrinkage of motives for that indispensable ingredient: the murder. Not only did there used to exist an interesting variety of motives, they could be investigated by an interesting variety of private detectives, a species that seems to have become extinct. Social respectability — that is, the possibility of scandal and its damages; family structure and dynastic or clan systems; passions and obsessions of all kinds, from hatred and revenge to other complex psychic mechanisms—these are only some of the interesting sources for motivation that have become increasingly irrelevant in the permissiveness of contemporary society, its rootless and restless movement and postregionalism,
its loss of individualism and of bizarre eccentrics and obsessives — in short, its increasing one-dimensionality.

Thus today, paradoxically, the multiplication of consumer niches and the differentiation of “lifestyles” go hand in hand with the reduction of everything to the price tag and the flattening out of motivations to the sheerly financial: money, which used to be interesting in the variety of its pursuits, now becoming supremely boring as the universal source of action. The omnipresence of the word greed in all national political vocabularies recently disguises the flatness of this motivation, which has none of the passionate or obsessive quality of older social drives and the older literature that drew on them as its source. Meanwhile,
the psychic realm has also been drastically reduced, perhaps in part as a result of the omnipresence of money as an all-purpose motivation, perhaps also as a result of the familiarities of universal information and communication and the flattening of the individualisms... society today is one from which, for all kinds of reasons (and probably good ones), difference is vanishing and, along with it, evil itself.

This means that the melodramatic plot, the staple of mass culture (along with romance), becomes increasingly unsustainable.

Evil becomes inconceivable because greed is all too conceivable, and is written into everyone's character to varying degrees. Some will obey the rules placed around when and how to rationally pursue one's advantages; others won't. As a result, pop culture becomes increasingly unable to deal credibly with moral subjects.

It never ceases to startle me that a brilliant thinker can be such a bad writer. It challenges some of my preconceptions about language and thought.

Collective identity and the coming festivalization of culture

2011-12-28T19:01:00.002-05:00

Interesting bit from Bill Wasik's Wired article about technology and riots:

To Stott, members of a crowd are never really “on their own.” Based on a set of ideas that he and other social psychologists call ESIM (Elaborated Social Identity Model), Stott believes crowds form what are essentially shared identities, which evolve as the situation changes. We might see a crowd doing something that appears to us to be just mindless violence, but to those in the throng, the actions make perfect sense.

By contrast, Stott sees crowds as the opposite of ruleless, and crowd violence as the opposite of senseless: What seems like anarchic behavior is in fact governed by a shared self-conception and thus a shared set of grievances. Stott’s response to the riots has been unpopular with many of his countrymen. Unlike Zimbardo, who would respond—and indeed has responded over the years—to incidents of group misbehavior by speaking darkly of moral breakdown, Stott brings the focus back to the long history of societal slights, usually by police, that primed so many young people to riot in the first place.

Fits in with the idea that collective subjectivity is real but was systematically surpresed by top-down media in the 20th century. Protocols of neoliberalism and post-Fordism has necessitated the loosening of those strictures to capitalize on cooperation and Virnoesque virtuosity and immaterial labor and so on, but along with that loosening comes the potential formation of these spontaneous rogue mob subjectivities that avenge the ongoing exploitation. Seems to me this in turn will lead to an increased festivalization of culture, with programmed carnivals designed to form these collectives in controlled space-times and vent their anti-establishment energies.

It’s about being part of a group that has long felt invisible (no radio, no TV) despite the existence of enormous numbers. One might call this the emergence of mega-undergrounds, groups of people for whom the rise of Facebook and Twitter has laid bare the disconnect between their real scale and the puny extent to which the dominant culture recognizes them. For these groups, suddenly coalescing into a crowd feels like stepping out from the shadows, like forcing society to respect the numbers that they now know themselves to command.

Social media and the "prestige area"

2011-12-15T13:59:00.001-05:00

I have been reading C. Wright Mills's White Collar, which is by turns excruciatingly dull and empirical, and then brilliantly prescient and polemical. It's boring when he is doing the impossible work of describing society in terms of how many people are doing this job or that job and so forth, but great when he starts coining phrases like "cheerful robots" and "managerial demiurge" and begins speculating on how media intersect with emerging middle-class ideology.

In a chapter called "The Status Panic" Mills analyzes the function of prestige in the U.S., where the bases for it are "ambivalent and unstable" and as a result, "the enjoyment of prestige is often disturbed and uneasy." Mainly he's talking about the shift from work-based prestige to consumption-based prestige, which is one way of understanding how consumerism came to be dominant. He details the different "prestige areas" that different strata have to operate in and how media create new ones, or expand those which already exist. Traditionally you were dealing with neighbors and townsfolk and so on. The media prompts invidious comparison wiht idealized insecurity-making celebrity types. Social media means you are dealing with everybody you have ever known and lots of other curious strangers.

Mills connects communication with prestige, pointing out that communication can be geared to not convey information but prompt invidious comparison.

Some communication system is needed to cover any prestige area, and in modern times, with the enlargement of prestige areas, 'being seen' in the formal media is taken as a basis of status claims as well as a cashing of them.

The media thereby creates "status markets" in which the signifiers of prestige begin to more rapidly turnover. Media also allowed different strata to observe others outside of their ordinary run of life and develop disproportionate expectations for themselves.

I wonder if the prestige area generates the media system appropriate to it, as Mills seems to be thinking, or if the media system enables new forms of prestige, defines new prestige areas technologically, as the brief history of social media suggests. I think the key idea is Mills's sense that media "agitate" prestige areas -- they generate a "status panic" which churns the meanings of status symbols and generates incentives for a variety of consumer behaviors.

When media coverage was a scarcer good -- when media was more tightly controlled and required more capital to transmit -- pure visibility signified status. Obviously social media is in the process of changing that, but there seems to be a ideological hangover that leads us to still think of attention in the abstract as being prestigious.

This HBR article by Daniel Gulati notes that Facebook is "creating a den of comparison" -- that is, it is broadening the prestige area, leaving less space for us to operate outside of the concern for how we are coming across. I don't live in a Brooklyn neighborhood for this reason; I want to go home somewhere that I won't feel perpetually judged (assuming I can quell internal paranoia). Facebook means you can never go home, never escape. It wants to open the possibility that the whole of life be subsumed within a prestige area by mediatizing everything.

thoughts inspired by Jacobin/Dissent panel on OWS

2011-11-29T18:18:00.000-05:00

None of the speakers on the panel actually talked about any of this directly; the question of the hipsterization of protest was already on my mind. I think the complete absence of theory from the discussion had me daydreaming about protest as means for reshaping subjectivity and laying the groundwork for lasting social change. If capitalism produces the sort of subjectivity that allows it to perpetuate itself -- if we learn to become selves and fulfill ourselves only by adopting capitalism's incentive scheme -- then resistance must ultimately be a matter of disrupting that subjectivity and creating a time-space where a different kind of subjectivity can be fostered. It seems to me that this is what the Occupy protests must do long-term, or else they are more or less irrelevant. All they would do is readjust the distribution creating by an inherently unjust and stress-producing system. Workers would still bear disproportionate social risks and absorb the stress and dissonance of capitalism's contradictions in their own psychology; in other words, we'll still be precarious and depressed.

But while the protests must be about reshaping subjectivity, they must not be about policing authenticity. The spaces of protest are not about generating a more genuine or more laudable individual identity. That is the pitfall of green consumerism or personal boycotts or other heroic stances that always resolve into one's having improved one's own cultural capital in some way without making much of a difference in the operation of the world. In fact, there's some incentive in hoping the world continues to be bad and wrong so that one's own gestures stand out as courageous and valuable. But even if there were a virtuous cycle of oneupmanship in terms of good deeds ("everyone drives a Prius, so now I need to go one step further and put solar panels on my roof"), the underlying structure of competitive individualism, so vital to capitalism, would be preserved, and along with it all the exploitation and Hobbesean mutual suspicion it justifies. It becomes easy to mistake winning status as virtue, an elision capitalism counts on for its ideological hegemony.

So the protests can't be about maintaining some sense of what a genuine protester should look like, which means participants can't get derailed into worrying about whether or not the protests are being hipsterized. Maybe only people like me actually worry about this, because hipsterism and the attention mongering and myopic behavior that goes along with it does seem alienating and off-putting. But I am prone to fall into such traps myself, engaging in zero-sum protection of the cultural capital it requires to pronounce someone else as inauthentic or narcissistic. What accusations of hipsterism or inauthenticity often amount to are pleas to preserve the private ownership of a resource -- identity -- that could be held in common.

Not saying anything new here, but since no one was saying it last night, I feel like I should. The protests offer an opportunity not merely for organizing electorally but for allowing for a new kind of subject to emerge, one that is collective in character and can exist comfortably in parallel with a private, individual self. Capitalism, particularly with its current emphasis of media and communications as a source of profit, prompts us to regard the public and private self as the same individualistic identity, negating the space for a civic persona. (This is Richard Sennett's argument in Fall of Public Man.) Protest can allow for a public persona to be reclaimed through the process of struggle, which then becomes not a hardship or an ascetic procedure of self-effacement but a source of deep pleasure -- this is why unlikely people report being energized by General Assemblies, when in the abstract they sound like tedious nightmares. The process becomes constitutive of a civic, collective self, which is liberating -- it allows the private self to go private again, releasing us from the anxieties of ostentatious displays of identity. That means the use of social media is liberated from the personal-brand-building bullshit and becomes more about transmissions that orchestrate solidarity among politically engaged groups. In a sense, the personal ceases to be political; everyday life in public begins to be lived in a civic space rather than a commercial one, and private everyday life ideally starts to escape capture.

So the aim of the protests, I think, should be to permit the personal brand to be crowded off the stage by the return/emergence of a collective, civic subjectivity held in common and in parallel to a private self whose economic significance as a "prosumer" begins to be dismantled or more thoroughly anonymized. Paradoxically enough, I hope these highly public and publicized protests are actually about the re-creation of privacy.

individuation in the panopticon; the struggle for collectivity

2011-11-17T17:53:00.001-05:00

From this post about Foucault By Jeremy Antley.

Antley quotes from Foucault's lectures published as Psychiatric Power.

the panoptic design gives the center a means of obtaining 'mind over mind' power. This is accomplished by the individualizing nature of the panopticon, as it places the focus of the gaze, the body, on a singular subject. The result Foucault notes,
...means that in a system like this we are never dealing with a mass, with a group, or even, to tell the truth, with a multiplicity: we are only ever dealing with individuals. ... All collective phenomena, all the phenomena of multiplicities, are thus completely abolished. (75)

Worth remembering in light of the difficulties of imagining collectivity or solidarity even in the cauldron of protest, and why it can seem as though protest is an ego-mode of political action akin to recycling, etc. "I am doing my part" without worrying about how or whether it fits into larger coordinations of action. Such political action reinforces the basis of panoptic society while seeming to enact the freedom to "make a difference."

Antley suggests panoptic subjectivation can be thwarted with new technologies of augmentation that allow lateral communication between cells -- that more or less supplant panopticon with a rhizomatic network structure. Not sure about that. My pessimistic thought is that the cells are dependent on the center for the subjectivity they have learned to treasure, and structure their protest and political participation in such a way as to preserve the center's monopoly on authentication of selves. Social recognition still must flow through a "center" of some sort to be legitimized.

Against convenience

2011-11-09T18:44:00.000-05:00

From ephemera 4(3): 233-245. "Controlling the Multitude" by Jussi Vähämäki (pdf):

Passage below is a good rant about the tyranny of design and its implicit goal of stymying us with convenience (my bold). Foreshadows Mark Fisher's idea of "precorporation." We expect our goods to come preconsumed, and that preconsumption is passed off as user-friendliness. The interface already encorporates and directs how a good will be used yet leaves users with positive feelings about the freedom the good supplies them -- freedom from having to figure it out, freedom to use it immediately (albeit in the encoded ways laid out for them). I don't think "commonplace" is the best word -- I think the writer wants to suggest by it technological affordances that are once cliches.

The slogan of modern technology is ‘make things easy’; people have to have easy access to modern technology. They have to use it without noticing why they do this or that. The message is that people do not want to waste time, they do not want to read huge manuals before they start to play computer games or to watch a film from their DVD player. They want their food already semi-cooked as well as they want their lives already lived. The idea is that a good product is consumer-friendly, meaning it does not take time and thought, hesitation or frustration to consume it. A good product is easy to accept without discussion and without contestation. It must be familiar, natural, commonplace and self-evident. When you take the thing in your hand you seem to know how to use it, even if you are seeing the item for the first time in your life. Production process has to create self-evidences, commonplaces and anticipated items, products that in a way contain already the experience of the user/consumer. This means that ‘to make things easy’ the modern production system has to create customs and habits, slogans and phrases, styles and ideas (it does not create concepts, even though commonplaces do look like concepts and smell like concepts, they are only copies of concepts. They lack the contradictory or paradoxical character of a concept)....

‘Making things easy’, production of commonplaces, is production of goods or products that are structured like commands. It is production of ‘you have to’, production of a kind of Kantian moral imperative. This means that it tries to produce a sort of atmosphere in which you speak and work even if you have nothing to say or you are without a work. It creates humble and flexible personalities who are willing to learn and use every possible device, and who are always present for use.

That seems almost self-contradictory. Part of it seems to run against the idea that consumption has become more like production and is more active, or even self-actualizing. But I think design works as a series of soft commands that use aesthetics to secure our assent to tacit authority. The use of Apple products is paradigmatic for this. We don't experience goods as commands but as affordances, opportunities, implicit expressions of fantasies of freedom, the autonomy of our vicarious imagination -- that is, the limited, physical good is in our hands but it authorizes an imaginative flight of fantasy augmented by all the immaterial labor that has gone into that good.

We are commanded to be productive, just like in old-time factory discipline, only the discipline often takes the form of self-chosen entertainment consumption. User interfaces become covert shop-floor foremen.

Lazzaurato: "From Capital Labor to Capital Life"

2011-11-04T14:56:00.001-04:00

From this article (pdf) in Ephemera 4(3) -- a more arduous articulation of immaterial labor thesis, how consumption is productive and how the distinction is ideologically sustained.

first of all, the enterprise does not create its object (goods) but the world within which the object exists. And secondly, the enterprise does not create its subjects (workers and consumers) but the world within which the subject exists.

Think this is an interesting statement with regard to social media companies, which provide the space for self-creation but make no claims to produce anything or direct production overtly toward particular outcomes (the means to achieving the companies' preferred products/outcomes are built into the architecture, the affordances for users). These companies create conceptual space that users can inhabit and create expropriatable value while remaining ostensibly autonomous and self-directed -- self-actualizing, even.

Lazzarato later elaborates:

The ‘work’ of the company and its employees consists in a one-sided capture which aims at transforming the multiplicity of ‘collaborators’ (monads) into a multiplicity of ‘customers’. Its employees (not only engineers but also marketing people, lobbyists etc. trying to guarantee its monopoly) constitute an interface with the cooperation between minds, and their work activity consists of the neutralization and deactivation of the co-creation and co-realization of multiplicity. The power of arrangement, instead of being distributed in a heterogeneous way in the cooperation between minds, is concentrated in the cooperation of the company.

The necessity to brand manufactured goods leads to a semioticization of all things, which essentially makes all goods into lifestyle services:

All production is production of services, that is, a transformation of “the conditions of activity and the capacity for future actions of customers, users, and the public”, which in the end always aims at the ‘mode of life’.6 The service does not satisfy a pre-existing demand, but it must anticipate it, it must ‘make it happen’. This anticipation takes place entirely within the domain of the virtual by mobilising resources such as linguistic resources and language, communication, rhetoric, images etc. The anticipation of services by the virtual and signs has the advantage, on the one hand, to be able to use all properties of language, thus opening up the exploration of several possibles, and, on the other hand, to enable work on sense through communication.

In the sense that they depend on mutually agreed upon sign values in a population -- on immaterial labor and cooperation -- the goods now made are commons: "These goods, unlike the tangible, appropriable, exchangeable, consumable products of the capital-labour relationship, are intelligible, inappropriable, inexchangeable, inconsumable.... Any consumption of a common good can lead immediately into the creation of new knowledge or new masterpieces. Circulation becomes the fundamental moment of the process of production and consumption."

The shift in how capitalism is organized (profits dependent on intellectual property rights, not property; not selling discrete goods so much as commandeering cooperative, value producing audiences) changes the nature of production in general:

Contemporary capitalist economy follows literally the cycle of capital accumulation described by Tarde: invention, as the creation of the possible and its process of actualisation in the souls (of consumers as well as workers), is the real production, whilst what Marx and the economists call production is, in reality, a reproduction (or a manufacture of a product or a management of a service even if in this case the things are a bit more complicated).... the power of co-creation and co-realization, instead of being divided in a heterogeneous way in the multiplicity, is divided between the invention which is assigned to the company (and to the ‘workers employed’) and the reproduction which is assigned to the public/customers. The categories of political economy impose a division between ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ which does not hold any more in the cooperation between minds.

Political economy works idelogically to maintain a difference between production and consumption to mask the productive power of cooperation that capitalist exchange of semiotically rich goods yields.

Intellectual property has thus a political function: it determines who has the right to create and who has the duty to reproduce. The enterprise and the capital-labour relation not only prevent us from seeing the social dimension of the production of wealth, but they determine the new forms of exploitation and subjugation. Unemployment, poverty and precariousness are the direct result of the action of companies (and the politics of employment): the capture of social productivity imposes a social hierarchisation, a division between what is ‘productive’ and what is not. The company exploits society above all by exploiting workers.

That seems to be the creation story of the creative class.

The upshot of all this is that the new modes of producing collectively renderes traditional jobs and titles misleading -- or rather it exposes the function they have mainly had in "societies of control" of rationalizing the status hierarchy.

The paradigm of work-employment is actively involved in, and complicit to, this destruction since it legitimizes the organizing mechanisms of power and appropriation in societies of control. On the one hand, it legitimizes the appropriation (largely for free) of the multiple relations constituting the worlds without any distinction between work and non-work, between work and life. On the other hand, it legitimizes and organizes a distribution of income still bound to the exercise of employment, to the subordination to a private or public superior.

cooperation, the social individual, cooperative consumption

2011-10-31T17:48:00.001-04:00

Jason Read:

The individual of the sphere of circulation may be the isolated individual of freedom, equality, and Bentham, but the individual of production is a “social individual,” an individual whose capacities and abilities can only come into being with the necessary presence of others. The cooperation of these individuals constitutes a particular kind of surplus, a social surplus above and beyond the difference between necessary and surplus labor. Moreover, this surplus is obscured by the dominant representation of capital, by the images produced by the sphere of production, which present only isolated individuals contracting in their mutual interest. To the extent that this surplus appears at all, it appears as the power of capital, its miraculous capacity to produce surplus, what Marx refers to it as a “free gift to capital.”[xxiv] Thus, the sphere of circulation becomes a truly miraculous power, it generates the image of society made up of isolated individuals, and appropriates whatever exceeds this, by making it appear as capital itself....
there is the cooperative social individual of the hidden abode of production. However, this second individual does not appear, does not see itself in institutions and structures, instead what is immediately visible is the fetishism of commodities, money, and the power of capital itself.

Consumerism posits a value system that makes commonality read as inconvenient -- sharing and human interaction and all that are only so much hassle. This allows capital to appropriate the surplus value from cooperation that takes place anyway, under the guise of contested social relations, under the guise of status games and competitive identity displays?

Does collaborative consumption upset this ideological balance, making explicit the ways in which the benefits of cooperation are stolen by capital, or is it a way to attempt to preserve that value for "social individuals"? Or is an attempt to recapture the cooperative surplus and recirculate it as a commodity while leaving the underlying ideological construct of a society of atomized individuals intact?

Read argues that "never have human beings been more social in their existence, but more individualized, privatized, in the apprehension of their existence." As capitalism subsumes more of everyday life, sociality, etc., this contradiction widens, perhaps reaches an untenable level of dissonance. Pursuing the social life deepens one's isolation under capital. At some point the individual will cease to pursue the social within such a system and seek a way to escape or destroy it.

What Kind of New World Order Do You Want?

2011-10-21T19:04:00.001-04:00

Keep up With David's Changes

2011-10-21T19:01:00.001-04:00

Pop optimism and the guerrilla self

2011-10-13T13:41:00.000-04:00

From Ellen Willis, "Tom Wolfe's Failed Optimism":

Pop sensibility -- loosely defined as the selective appreciation of whatever is vital and expressive in mass culture -- did more than simply suggest that life in a rich, capitalist consumption-obsessed society had its pleasures; the crucial claim was that those pleasures had some connection with genuine human feelings, needs, and values and were not -- as both conservative and radical modernists assumed -- mere alienated distraction.... Pop implied a more sanguine view of the self as a guerrilla, forever infiltrating territory officially controlled by the enemy, continually finding new ways to evade and even exploit the material and psychic obstacles that the social system continually erected.

I find that a seductive position. I want to have a guerrilla self. I want to fight the cultural industry with the weapons it forged for my appropriation.

It's a very glamorous reconfiguration of what I am doing when I am, say, watching Game of Thrones. I am exploiting psychic obstacles and subverting the enemy on its terrain at the same time as I am watching two slave-whores make out.

But Willis's definition raises more questions than answers. The largest and most obvious problem, it seems to me, is the invocation of "genuine" needs and feelings. Consumerism produces needs, and "genuineness" is one of its most successful and desirable products. Alienated distractions are just as genuine as anything else. Embedded in the privileging of some mythical genuine need is the idea that we are all on a quest to find our "real self" through the right cosmic combination of goods that unlock our inner potentialities. It is assumed that pleasures are typically reducible to the pleasures of increasing self-knowledge, but isn't it more often the case that pleasure is a matter of forgetting? And that pop pleasures in particular are about surrendering the pursuit of authenticity in favor of merging with the palpable zeitgeist? The guerrilla self is still the individualistic hero of romanticism, amid the "masses" but never merging with them, instead redeeming their presumptive mediocrity, which offers the background against which the guerrilla self can stand out.

Other terms in Willis's phrasing are just as ambiguous. On what basis is the "selective appreciation" conducted by pop connoisseurs? What makes this "exploitative" or subversive? What constitutes "vitality"? Is it simply an ineffable sensation of life itself? A measurable amount of energy amid the "masses"? A personal and private feeling of having been energized? A sense that one has been swallowed by mass enthusiasm? It seems like a mystification to me.

The same with "expressive" -- what isn't expressive in the pop-cultural milieu? The whole edifice is shot through with significations of status, information asymmetries that create and consolidate cultural and social capital. Social class can't be undone by democratizing tastes; the material bases for class distinctions always generate new ways of expressing cultural distinctions. A "liberated" taste for pop "trash" is inescapably an expression of habitus; one can't consume pop culture in some sort of politically populist way. Consumer society gives us ample access to its particular modes of pleasure that guarantee our consent and effort in reproducing it as a system. There is no subversive way of consuming its products; subversion would consist of ignoring them. I don't think these are particularly radical claims, post-postmodernism.

That's not to say that we don't long for pop culture to be a means for experiencing belonging. Through pop participation we hope to dissolve the agonies of isolated identity in a collective expression of enthusiasm even as we look to deploy these widely recognized cultural signifiers in a unique and distinctive way. "Pop" is an especially ironic label for the material culture of consumerism. It masquerades as a democratic forum for "pleasures" but arguably the chief pleasure of engaging in the milieu is finding vicarious satisfaction in status, or winning the zero-sum battles of uniqueness in expressions of personal identity. Pop culture may mimic forms of collectivity, but in a consumer society, consumption is always an arena of self-expression. The price of pop pleasures is the surrender of the ability to consume neutrally, to consume without sending a message about what sort of person you are or what sort of social and cultural capital you are putting in play. The "guerrilla self" Willis describes -- an idea that often underpins much of the enthusiasm for "prosumerism" -- always threatens to become the sort of hipster cultural capitalist that, for example, Rob Walker profiled in Buying In. The guerrilla self becomes the cultural entrepreneur.

Social media has made this evolution harder to resist, as it gives even casual participants in cultural production the necessary platform for distribution and reputational accounting. Social media is the "territory" that the guerrilla self now seeks to occupy, and the owners of that territory are more than happy to have us invade. The whole business model of social media depends on such invasions. The "psychic obstacles" presented by capitalism become necessary, cherished spurs for personal self-development -- they refigure planned obsolescence in fashion and style as renewed opportunities for us to become better selves. Novelty becomes our "genuine" value, not capital's -- we demand the new because choice among new options is what we experience most viscerally as "vital" and "expressive" freedom. Consuming the "new" is how we experience personal growth; novelty becomes the basis of identity.

Prosumerism is not an expression of evasion and subversion; instead it is a core principle of post-Fordist capitalism. The productivity of the pursuit of personal identity, as captured in digital networks, advances the subsumption of everyday life to its highest degree yet. The radical ontological insecurity -- the "gig economy" and precarity and so on -- is normalized and valorized as the opportunity to unlock inner troves of personal creativity. Yet this creativity can take on only a limited and arguably degraded form. It can only conceive capitalistic aims: So we have the facile manipulation of signs to grow quantified, reified measures of influence -- which is limited to the ability to influence others to "spend" their attention or money.

Of course, that may seem to posit some "genuine" form of creativity outside of capitalism. But I don't mean to imply it is more genuine, only that it is different, that it would anchor a different kind of society, with different ways of conceiving and organizing collective identity. Instead of proliferating hierarchies of taste and competitive feats of prosumerism, why not something else, something worthy of optimistic hopes? Rather than a mass of guerrilla selves fighting a phony war against one another for who can lay the most genuine claim to pop pleasures, why not accept that taste can't be democratic and worry instead about those aspects of social participation that can be. We could spend less time worrying about what we like -- and what we "Like" through social media -- and see what sort of social pleasure lies beyond that.

"The Soviets of the Multitude" -- interview with Paolo Virno

2011-09-30T00:48:00.000-04:00

This interview with Virno, conducted by Alexi Penzin (of chto delat), helped clarify some things for me about how the collectivity of the multitude is supposed to work in theory. The idea is still predicated on what seems to me a faith-based notion of the general intellect, but here the general intellect becomes a political organizational principle, leading to neo-Soviets that challenge the state's monopoly on decision-making by co-opting its provisional functions.

1. Penzin describes artists as the ultimate expression of post-Fordist "living labor": "contemporary art provides the quintessence of virtuosic practices: the subjectivity of the contemporary artist is probably the brightest expression of the flexible, mobile, non-specialized substance of contemporary 'living labor.' " Interesting. This is part of my suspicion of performance artists, and narcissist art: at its core, it is an expression of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism perfected would consist of a world where we are all performance artist-entrepreneurs creating value through their innovative lives, all of which will be atomized and mediated and reprocessed within the various commercial/advertising social-media networks -- a world where the perpetual making of personal subjectivity is the generalized productive process powering the economy. (A legitimate question is whether that is so bad -- the question Virno, et al., pose by reconfiguring such uber-neoliberalism as a sort of communist liberation.) I think there is something sinister in the real subsumption of selfhood, the condition in which we can only have identity on such terms, as a mediated, reified consumer-good-like product -- one that comes with a great deal of insecurity and unmitigatable risk. (Has there ever been an alternative?, cynics might ask.)

2. Penzin describes Virno's view of subjectivity by way of Gilbert Simondon: "You take as a point of departure Gilbert Simondon’s conception of the collective as something that is not opposed to the individual but, on the contrary, is a field of radical individualization: the collective refines our singularity. Recalling Marx’s notion of the 'social individual,' which presupposes that the collective (language, social cooperation, etc) and the individual coexist, you elaborate quite a paradoxical definition of Marx’s theory as a 'doctrine of rigorous individualism.' " Virno refers to Vygotsky. But the premise is the same before the I comes a primordial us. Vygotsky: "the real movement of the development process of the child’s thought is accomplished not from the individual to the socialized, but from the social to the individual." Virno posits that this is an ongoing move that echoes throughout our lives: "We constantly have to deal with the interiority of the public and with the publicity of the interior." This view of subjectivity corresponds to the idea of capitalist society providing the preconditions to experience a particular form of possessive individualism as subjectivity, one that is then represented in ideology as being "natural" and/or "rational." We must be socialized into individualism, as paradoxical as that may sound. For Virno, virtuosic post-Fordist labor is the performance of this transformation, of the social becoming simultaneously individuated in a group of subjects working together: "The virtuosic execution stages this transformation. If we think of contemporary production, we must understand that each individual is, at the same time, the artist performing the action and the audience: he performs individually while he assists the other’s performances." The emphasis on "performance" is not accidental -- his theory basically posits the performance of the self's individuality among others as the main mode of production, as the way post-Fordist production happens.

3. Penzin sums up Virno's theory of "human nature" as permanent precarity under neoliberalism:

As you say, what we nowadays call “human nature” is the basic “raw material” for the capitalist production. “Human nature” interpreted as a set of “bio-anthropological invariants,” as a kind of potentiality referring to the faculty of language, to neoteny as the retention of juvenile traits in adult behavior, to “openness to the world” (i.e. the absence of fixed environment), etc. You state that these anthropological invariants become sociological traits of a post-Fordist labor force, expressing themselves as permanent precariousness, flexibility, and the need to act in unpredictable situations. Post-Fordist capitalism does not “alienate” human nature, but rather reveals it at the center of contemporary production, and by the same move, exposes it to apparatuses of exploitation and control. Former ways of easing the painful uncertainty and instability of human behavior through ritual mechanisms and traditional social institutions melt into air.

Neoliberalism takes some aspects of our species and configures them as mandatory atomization and competitive entrepreneurialism, as requisite and ongoing insecurity, as the "permanent revolution" of capitalism in action.

4. I wish I understood what this meant in practical terms: Virno says, "If examined as productive realities, the micro-collectives you mention have mainly the merit of socializing the entrepreneurial function: instead of being separated and hierarchically dominant, this function is progressively reabsorbed by living labor, thus becoming a pervasive element of social cooperation. We are all entrepreneurs, even if an intermittent, occasional, contingent way." How exactly do these ad hoc collectives socialize the entrepreneurial function? Is he talking about nonprofits replacing for-profits? Or something more nebulous? If we are all entrepreneurs, what is wrong with neoliberalism harnessing that potential? What good is it to characterize creativity as entrepreneurial? That seems to imply zero-sum competition for economic resources via innovation, spurious or otherwise. Seems like cooperation would replace entrepreneurship rather than emulate it. I need someone to explain this passage to me -- has something to do with these new work organizational forms as enacting an "enterprising subtraction from the rules of wage labor." Seems like he is talking about free labor, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, wealth of networks kind of thing. The freely supplied labor of many is whittled down to something productive/useful that is "owned" collectively.

5. That's how Penzin seems to develop the idea anyway:

under the conditions of post-Fordism, collective work can be organized through “subtraction” when the result of the work is inferior to the sum of the collective effort. This becomes a sort of exception, an unexpected innovation (“the whole is less than the sum of the parts”). On the other hand, if not considered in terms of products, such collective work produces a feeling of strong subjectivity and strength, valorizing each member of the collective.

The last bit is a hopeful assertion, it seems to me; that those whose effort is subtracted will still feel like a meaningful part of the team and affirmed in their individual contribution. Virno replies with a similar faith-based claim, that this mode of production creates a ghostly surplus, a sort of accursed share: "Nowadays, the quota of collective intelligence that is thrown away in the production of goods is not physically destroyed, but somehow remains there, as a ghost, as a non-used resource that is still available. The power that is freed by the sum of the parts, even if not expressed in its whole, meet a very different destiny. Sometimes it becomes frustration and melancholic inertia, or it generates pitiless competition and hysterical ambition. In other cases, it can be used as a propeller for subversive political action." He just asserts that this energy exists, waiting to be unleashed or corralled or channeled or dissipated. It may very well be that the extra collective intelligence in social production is wasted, used up, extinguished, dissipated in the act of production and does not linger, does not generate a resource for resistance. This supposed energy is akin to Shirky's digital surplus -- a theoretical possibility that may not manifest itself.

6. Penzin and Virno have an exchange about real vs. formal subsumption of the general intellect. Penzin attributes to Virno the idea that formal subsumption has returned with post-Fordism, in contrast to the Negrian view that real subsumption has proceeded further, subsuming more of everyday life. "Referring to Marx’s dichotomy, you say that this means a return to 'formal subsumption.' Therefore, capitalists do not organize the whole chain of production process, they just capture, and commodify, spontaneous, 'self-organized' social collaborations and their products." I think that is how understand the business model of social-media companies -- they provide the playing field for self-creating labor that can be harvested for other purposes, made profitable for the field providers. Facebook is the social factory. Virno articulates it using a motif Zizek has also used: contemporary work conditions "order us to be spontaneous" -- this contradiction, Virno calls formal subsumption. It seems to me that to the degree that this command is general, you get the sort of psychic maladies that Bifo talks about in his nutty e-flux articles. Living that contradiction is psychic precarity; it is a manifestation of capital's impossible demands for endless innovation, endless accumulation, appropriating and devouring everything subjects need to sustain themselves spiritually (to get all metaphysical myself).

7. I thought Virno's summation of his intellectual tradition was pretty compelling:

The critique of that modern barbarity that is wage labor, dependent on the employer, the critique of that “monopoly of the political decision” that is the State — these were our references in the 1960s and 1970s, and they still are today. These references made us enemies of the real and ideal socialism. From the beginning, our tradition longed for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the CPSU. It was divorced from the culture and the values of the “labor movement,” and this allowed it to understand the meaning of the labor fights against the wage. It recognized capitalism’s devotion to “permanent revolution,” to the continuing innovation of the labor process and ways of life, in order to avoid astonishment or lament, since the production of surplus value is no longer connected to the factory and sovereignty does not coincide any more with the nation-states.

He goes on to connect this with the new soviets, how they can work to dismantle the state. "The leagues, the assemblies, the soviets — in short, the organs of non-representative democracy — give political expression to the productive cooperation that has at its core the general intellect. The soviets of the multitude produce a conflict with the State’s administrative apparatuses, with the aim of eating away at its prerogatives and absorbing its functions." I wish that came with specific concrete examples too. Does he mean the way Palestinian groups and the Taliban provide welfare services to win consent? Does he mean something more spontaneous and less tactical? Such a view can easily devolve into compassionate conservatism, where the state retreats from welfare-state functions but retains the monopoly on violence and power, using it to protect capitalist interests and the "level playing field" market and the legitimations that stem from it.

Bauman's Consuming Life, cont'd

2011-09-28T20:03:00.002-04:00

The corpse of this text has grown cold for me -- read it to long ago to make much sense of my notes at this point. But I won't be able to let it go until I dutifully record them here.

See if I can remember where I left off -- the book is open on my desk to this marginal note: "consumption to consumerism -- life organized around consumption as work, not as an opposition, though, but an integration." Bauman is extrapolating from Mary Douglas's work on the uses of consumption to organize communities and identity, to illustrate who is inside and who is outside and so on. Identity derives not from performing some useful production for society but from consuming in an overtly meaningful way respected by the community. Whether one has thee capability to consume in this way may or may not be a consequence of having done some productive work at some point. Bauman stresses that identity derives from consuming rather than producing in consumerist societies; I think it leads to consuming being synonymous with producing, albeit on the level of signs -- as Baudrillard's work suggests, consumerism is a matter of the production and circulation of signs; it requires a society in which signs are fungible, readily malleable, liquid, as Bauman would say.

This leads to a liquid self-identity, to insatiability as an index of one's capacity for "life" -- which is quantified in terms of commodities consumed.

On the road to the society of consumers, the human desire for stability has to turn, and indeed does turn, from a principal systemic asset into the system’s major, perhaps potentially fatal liability, a cause of disruption or malfunction. It could hardly be otherwise, since consumerism, in sharp opposition to the preceding forms of life, associates happiness not so much with the gratification of needs (as its ‘official transcripts’ tend to imply), as with an ever rising volume and intensity of desires, which imply in turn prompt use and speedy replacement of the objects intended and hoped to gratify them; it combines, as Don Slater aptly put it, an insatiability of needs with the urge and imperative ‘always to look to commodities for their satisfaction’

Consumer societies rely on subjects who are compelled to accelerate their consumption as a way of experiencing it as pleasurable and meaningful; this compulsion requires vigorous ideological support, as such behavior generates a great deal of insecurity, ontological and otherwise. "Consumer society thrives as long as it manages to render the non-satisfaction of its members (and so, in its own terms, their unhappiness) perpetual." (47) It must manufacture frustration and make it seem like an appealing new commodity.

The ideologically glorified acceleration leads to an accompanying feeling of perpetual harriedness. pleasure-disappointment cycles accelerate with consumption, which fragments into a series of disconnected moments, each an attempt to achieve a "big bang" of retail joy. Bauman suggests that integration of desires over time into a coherent identity becomes secondary to this impulsivity. At the same time, this fragmentation masks the effort required to sustain pleasure from consumption. It militates against connoisseurship as effort, offers connoisseurship as superficial cataloging of experiences. (36) He quotes Eriksen: "information society offers cascades of decontextualized signs...it becomes increasingly difficult to create narratives, orders, developmental sequences. The fragments threaten to become hegemonic."

Procrastination emerges as a form of quasi resistance, necessary for keeping options open in accordance to consumerist ethos, but generally experienced as shameful. Sustained effort on one particular endeavor is at the same time a forfeiture of other consumption chances; procrastination is a flawed attempt to pre-empt inefficient consumption. Bauman, anticipating Bifo, identifies "melancholy" as another involuntary mode of resistance. Both are ways to suspend investment and flatten affect in response to an overload of information and resulting combinatory possibilities for identity construction. Bauman calls melancholy the "life strategy of last resort" that results from "the fatal encounter between the obligation and compulsion to choose/the addiction to choosing, and the inability to choose" (42).

Bauman claims that in consumerist societies "the pursuit of happiness – the purpose most often invoked and used as bait in marketing campaigns aimed at boosting consumers’ willingness to part with their money (earned money, or money expected to be earned) – tends to be refocused from making things or their appropriation (not to mention their storage) to their disposal." Bataille's concern with expenditure perhaps ties in here -- the hidden yet compelling need to waste and destroy through consumption that on its face presents itself as a mode of accumulation of stuff for consumers. Always the hidden tension between consumerism as amassing material property and consumerism as effective demand and consumption -- clearing the surplus for subsequent cycles of capitalist production. I think this is the best way to understand the elevated cultural profile of hoarding. Damaged subjects refuse to inhabit the mandatory contradiction and begin accumulating without wasting.

"Expenditure" (waste, deciet, etc.) thus serves the collective purpose of supporting a capitalist system even if it appears irrational, impulsive, destructive, gratuitous, etc., at the individual level. These are not malfunctions, but proof of functioning.

In consumer societies, "frictionless" exchange serves as a model for sociality, since affective labor (like all labor) can't be regarded as pleasurable in its own right. All performance, Bauman notes, are "solo performances." Instead of the pleasures of collaboration, consumerism seeks to structure such affective labor involved in cooperation, politeness, etc., as a competitive attention war, a game of status. The ethic of convenience that accelerates consumption hypostatizes and becomes a way to interpret affective labor as something that one must capitalize on, not "give away" for its own sake, or sake of collective solidarity.

Hence this disturbing observation:

It is just as Emmanuel Levinas adumbrated when he mused that rather than being a contraption making peaceful and friendly human togetherness achievable for inborn egoists (as Hobbes suggested), ‘society’ may be a stratagem to make a self-centred, self-referential, egotistic life attainable for endemically moral human beings – through cutting out, neutralizing or silencing that haunting ‘responsibility for the Other’ which is born each time the face of the Other appears; indeed, a responsibility inseparable from human togetherness . . .

Being "social" in consumer capitalism means being empowered to be selfish in the face of what Levinas believes are self-evident moral obligations. Society lets discard them in the name of productivity, etc. "Society" means permitting individuals to rationalize their choice of convenience over responsibility to others, calling it productivity. (Seems applicable to this.) Convenience is the means by which more and more of everyday life is subsumed to the individualist ethos and morality of endlessly acquisitive capitalism.

The second chapter of Consuming Life deals with "flawed consumers," the have-nots who are held responsible for their own condition because to think otherwise would be to upend the ideology about consumer choice being equivalent to democracy. It would expose the hollowness of one's own power.

Consumption, again, is not for pleasure. Bauman suggests that consumers view goods as personal-brand investments. Consumption has become production; attention to semiotic value of goods a kind of necessary capital. But the key effect for Bauman is self-commoditization -- regarding oneself as a consumer good in a society that only knows how to measure the value of consumer goods:

The crucial, perhaps the decisive purpose of consumption in the society of consumers (even if it is seldom spelled out in so many words and still less frequently publicly debated) is not the satisfaction of needs, desires and wants, but the commoditization or recommoditization of the consumer: raising the status of consumers to that of sellable commodities.... Members of the society of consumers are themselves consumer commodities, and it is the quality of being a consumer commodity that makes them bona fide members of that society. (57)

We have no choice but to self-brand because it is the only way to take the measure of ourselves.

The entrepreneurial risks involved with self-commodification and identity building cannot be defrayed by government -- they are beyond the welfare state and can be argued by neoliberalists to obviate it. Social success on the measure of identity invalidates collectivity as a goal -- the point is to be recognized as a unique individual who has invested in personal brand wisely, who has consumed well, whose consumption tastes are valuable.

In consumer societies, groups are supplanted by leaderless "swarms" held to together by mediated imitation and tactical conformity. As a result, "Consumption is a supremely solitary activity (perhaps even the archetype of solitude), even when it happens to be conducted in company." It generates no "lasting bonds," Bauman avers, in the face of cultural theorists who claim consumption communities around culture-industry products. Bauman is thinking more about things like fast food:

We may suppose that the ‘unintended consequence’ of ‘fast food’, ‘take-aways’ or ‘TV dinners’ (or perhaps rather their ‘latent function’, and the true cause of their unstoppable rise in popularity) is either to make the gatherings around the family table redundant, so putting an end to the shared consumption, or to symbolically endorse the loss, by an act of commensality, consuming in company, of the onerous bondtying and bond-reaffirming characteristics it once had but which have become irrelevant or even undesirable in the liquid modern society of consumers. ‘Fast food’ is there to protect the solitude of lone consumers.

Lost community is recast as convenience, which is designed to protect the subject's ability to consume rather than confer and consort with others.

In chapter three Bauman discusses "consumerist culture," which is distinguished by the inversion of productivist virtues, like procrastination, duration, endurance, etc. "The ‘consumerist syndrome’ is all about speed, excess and waste." Hence, you can see hoarder shows as ideological training in this perspective. "The nightmares that haunt Homo consumens are things, inanimate or animate, or their shadows – the memories of things, animate or inanimate – that threaten to outstay their welcome and clutter up the stage . . . (99)"

He quotes Bourdieu on how "coercion" has been replaced by "stimulation" -- a variant on the Frankfurt School/Foucauldian theme that people are dominated through pleasure and gratification. New desires are aroused and graitfied as a mode of control, as opposed to the inculcation of ascetic etiquette. This is sold as a kind of personal responsibility to please oneself -- "you owe it to yourself to consume like you deserve."

‘Responsibility’ now means, first and last, responsibility to oneself (‘you owe this to yourself’, ‘you deserve it’, as the traders in ‘relief from responsibility’ put it), while ‘responsible choices’ are, first and last, those moves serving the interests and satisfying the desires of the self.

This is the application of "enlightened self-interest" in consumerist terms -- playing on the concept of the rational as the self-serving. And it's our duty to be rational, after all.

Consumerist subjectivity also hinges on making waste rational, on instituting the pleasures of destruction and wasting, the relief of clearing the deck for further consumption, the necessity of being up to date in what you consume. "The ‘presentist culture’ ‘puts a premium on speed and effectiveness, while favouring neither patience nor perseverance.’ We may add that it is this frailty and apparently easy disposability of individual identities and interhuman bonds that are represented in contemporary culture as the substance of individual freedom." Convenience is freedom from human interaction is freedom in general, an escape into the present away from death, responsibility. Then communications technology develops to accommodate this -- allowing for control over disconnection (107). "The safety device that allows instantaneous disconnection on demand perfectly fits the essential precepts of the consumerist culture; but social bonds, and the skills needed to tie them and service them, are its first and principal collateral casualties."

Identity ceases to be an incremental developmental process, but becomes liquid assembly of static signs, a constant burden requiring service, requiring display for validation, strategic development, etc. (111). "Rather than a gift (let alone a ‘free gift’, to recall the pleonastic phrase coined by marketing advisers), identity is a sentence to lifelong hard labour."

Here's a summary paragraph of the book's ideas -- producerism has given way to consumerism; work no longer anchors identity but consumerism and mastering its code and manufacturing identity in media is an effort to restabilize it:

Contemporary society engages its members primarily as consumers; only secondarily, and in part, does it engage them as producers. To meet the standards of normality, to be acknowledged as a fully fl edged, right and proper member of society, one needs to respond promptly and effi ciently to the temptations of the consumer market; one needs to contribute regularly to the ‘demand that clears supply’, while in times of economic turndown or stagnation
being party to the ‘consumer-led recovery’. All this the poor and indolent, people lacking a decent income, credit cards and the prospect of better days, are not fi t to do. Accordingly, the norm broken by the poor of today, the norm the breaking of which sets them apart and labels them as ‘abnormal’, is the norm of consumer competence or aptitude, not that of employment.

So is the answer a general boycott? a refusal to be effective demand to sustain consumerism? What induces subjects formed by consumerism to surrender the pleasures of it, if they are in a rough equilibrium with its insecurities and depredations?

Bonus notes:
Bauman quotes Alain Ehrenberg on the idea that suffering comes from a surfeit of possibility rather than from prohibitions. Seems a little myopic not to consider material deprivation.

Reputation systems are a mode of social deskilling.

Pictures of clouds

2011-09-23T15:44:00.001-04:00

Real and formal subsumption

2011-09-15T14:05:00.001-04:00

I have been trying to read Negri's Marx Beyond Marx. Frequently I have a hard time figuring out what is even at stake in the arguments he's making; it seems as though he is trying to ground a proof of working-class agency in some finely wrought quasi-Hegelian piece of dialectical deduction. I don't find this particularly useful, but I am still drawn to his reading of Marx's ideas about technology and "real subsumption."

What follows is my attempt to make some sense of those idea. To begin with, I found this definition, from the "What in the hell..." blog, useful in figuring out what some of the stakes are in Negri:

Marx defined real subsumption of labor in the “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” the so-called unpublished sixth chapter of Capital Volume One (a translation here). Real subsumption is defined in contrast to formal subsumption of labor. Formal subsumption occurs when capitalists take command of labor processes that originate outside of or prior to the capital relation via the imposition of the wage. In real subsumption the labor process is internally reorganized to meet the dictates of capital. An example of these processes would be weaving by hand which comes to be labor performed for a wage (formal subsumption) and which then comes to be performed via machine (real subsumption). Real subsumption in this sense is a process or technique that occurs at different points throughout the history of capitalism. For some thinkers, such as Antonio Negri, real subsumption of labor is transfigured into real subsumption of society such that all of society becomes a moment of capitalist production. In this version of real subsumption is an epoch, a stage of capitalism within a historical periodization, analogous to postmodernity.

"Real subsumption" is akin, then, to post-Fordism or the "social factory"; the move from formal to real subsumption is arguably a matter of technological development, as directed by capitalism. Technology reorganizes society to lend support to the imposition of wage labor, and the commoditization of more and more of everyday life, of "living labor" or even life itself, as a presupposition, a given. So those of us who precede the "digital natives," for instance, are subject to "formal" subsumption of friendship -- suddenly being "paid" a kind of wage for translating their social lives into preformatted data. Digital natives will be subject to "real" subsumption, in that using social media, etc., will seem like the necessary precondition for friendship.

I don't know how useful that jargon is, ultimately, but it captures an important "passage," as Negri would say, in the conjoined development of technology and capitalism. Capitalism continues to expand as it must by subsuming more of social life to the way it organizes relations, configuring encounters as opportunities for commodification and profit extraction, as moments of competition between exchanging parties -- as moments of class struggle, in Negri's account.

The point of emphasizing the passage from formal to real subsumption is to highlight it as a point around which resistance can be organized. In general, if you accept that our being or subjectivity is economically determined, then the function of dialectical criticism is to open up imaginative spaces in which resistance to determinism can be conceived -- cracking open the surface of relations to reveal hidden "contradictions" as moments of possibility, of alternatives, of autonomy and opportunity for self-determination.

A critique of technology can be organized around preventing the formal-to-real-subsumption passage, preventing the implementation of technology to grease the skids of this epochal transformation. One way is the "Luddite" approach of rejecting technology, breaking machines, clinging to outmoded work processes that may limit productivity gains but also prevent deskilling from being implemented by management through technology. Or to expand that to Web 2.0 conditions, one rejects social media to prevent social deskilling, the erosion of social skills. We refuse to let convenience and efficiency govern social lives, avoid the seductive trap of narcissism that technology lays out for us, and instead choose slow, more difficult social relations characterized by less frequent but more intensive face-to-face communications. The point is to resist the mediation of sociality, resist turning our various intimate communications into moments for capitalistic commodification, even when they promise to enhance our personal brand or bring us profit/attention/social recognition (on capitalism's terms). But this strategy has the disadvantage of forcing those who adopt it to live separately from the mainstream of society, as conscientious rejectors, which ultimately isolates them and makes them an ignorable subculture within a capitalist society that proceeds without them.

One can alternatively proselytize for dropping out. One could try to use subversively the technology that capitalist development has brought, deploying it against the real subsumption it is designed to foster. In other words, one could use social-media technology to continually announce the dangers incipient within it.

That seems somewhat facile (the subsumption captures resistance; it makes Che into Che T-shirts) and open to accusations of hypocrisy (though it is basically what I do -- I'm doubling down on hypocrisy here), which is probably why Negri and his followers advocate pushing through this passage, totalizing it, and seizing that complete unification of the working class in social life as always already production as the condition of the transition to communism. But such a program still seems like cooperating with capital, merely relabeling its prerogatives with radical terminology. At this point I am content to try and think about how formal and real subsumption are progressing on the front of everyday life. The relevant terminology for that seems to be things like affective labor, immaterial labor, emotional labor, erotic capital. One way of understanding neoliberalism, too, is to see it as the passage to real subsumption.

Anyway. Even when I can't figure out what Negri is getting at in his glosses in Marx Beyond Marx, he consistently excerpts fascinating passages from the Grundrisse. I think this is pretty awesome, for example:

Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself.

This strikes me as a key idea about technology with respect to capital. Pursuit of profit (i.e. the elaboration of the capital relation) drives us to extend our ideas of what is "necessary" in life -- beyond the classic Conan formulation of "Crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of the women," if you will. So cooperation with capital appears to be an extension of the self, McLuhan style -- an opportunity to become more "all-sided" and thus consume/enjoy more, and regard these acts of consumption as fundamental to who are. That is, we start to regard consumption as "productive," as expressing our basic capacity to do things. Marx seems to suggest here that "individuality" as we experience it is actually contingent on capitalism -- the degree to which we are constituted by the relations it posits. This is why "individualism" should be held in some suspicion -- this seems easier to do, actually, with the advent of technology, as this kind of individualism now so obviously manifests as personal branding. (Maybe there is some sort of negation of the negation at work. Individualism that was once a product of "real subsumption" suddenly seems an alien thing that we are obliged to operate, develop.)

It seems to me that we then come to depend on the technology, as it is embedded in capitalism, that elaborates consumption as opportunities for self-expression. Mediating consumption makes it appear productive: To the consumers, it makes it expressive of the self to an audience as opposed to a private moment of sustenance, and to capital, mediation makes consumption into data that is raw material for further production (i.e. it becomes more capital). We cooperate willingly with the subsumption process because it appears as a kind of liberation into a new of wonderful all-sidedness, even though these new sides are opened to us only as moments of exploitation, ultimately -- the new sides are just new ways to work for someone else through the technology. But the hope is that we can reclaim these new sides to ourselves and render them autonomous from capital. That seems to be Negri's hope anyway, and the healthy gist of the argument in Multitude as I understand it.

Gamification as ideological vector

2011-09-09T14:14:00.000-04:00

Sorry about the abstruse title, but I couldn't think of a concise way of summing up the point I want to make, inspired by this innocuous-seeming tout on Lifehacker for a browser extension that turns responding to emails into a game. (Also I've been reading Negri -- not good for anyone's prose style.)

This summmary touches on all the rhetoric that makes gamification so insidious:

The developer behind The Email Game reminds us of the time when getting email used to be fun, and says it can be again with the help of The Email Game. If you're the type who can't help but earn arbitrary points and badges in online games, The Email Game is perfect for you.

Each message you open or respond to starts a timer, and you'll get points based on how quickly you decide what to do with it or how quickly and concisely you respond to it. Accumulate enough points and you'll level up. In the end, the goal is to get you to play your way to a cleaner inbox and better email management habits.

Gamification delivers on what the internet promises in capturing people's attention -- it closes the trap the internet sets, locking us into patterns of compulsive productivity that have little to do with us, substituting placatory and infantilizing pseudo-goals for whatever motivations and larger personal aspirations we might otherwise have had.

The ruse behind gamification is to seize upon apparently innate human addictive tendencies, the irresistibility of having ourselves mirrored in quantified form, and exploit them for seemingly benign purposes of enhanced personal productivity or "fun". Who doesn't want to have fun? But gamification takes as its starting point that most tasks are inherently not worth doing (a generalization of the stultifying effects of the division of labor and the alienation of wage labor) and contrives a motivational system that precludes the possibility of working from inspiration, in accordance with some intrinsic personal desire, some self-conceived goal. Instead gamification tells us that no motivation we can draw on from our inner resources is likely to amount to anything -- the soul's vocation is irrelevant to relations in capitalist society. There's no badge for not selling out.

What is relevant is competition for its own sake, a theoretically unlimited need to beat others and to take satisfaction in that simple fact alone. And in return for this satisfaction, one voluntarily quantifies one's behavior and allows oneself to be represented online as captured data. One participates in turning oneself into what Deleuze calls, in the "Postscript on Societies of Control" (pdf), a "dividual" -- less a self than a floating set of code open to manipulation and reconstitution by outside institutional programmers. (Robert Gehl notes the link between Web 2.0 protocols and dividuation in this paper at First Monday.) Becoming a dividual allows, for example, recommendation engines and content filters to tell us what we want to have, what we want to know, and thus to a degree what we will become. The more we restrict ourselves to online activity -- another bonus of gamification is that it weds us to online forums -- the more data we generate about ourselves, and the more our "self" and our subjectivity can be redeployed, reconsitituted by outside institutions.

In online gamification, competition for its own sake requires no concrete opponents; their presence can be taken as implied by the openness of the network and is translated by the structure of many gamification schemes into a series of levels that can imply different percentiles of achievement. In this post, this tactic is explicitly stated in the idiom of role-playing games ("leveling up"), whose seemingly gratuitous appearance in the Lifehacker post serves to reinforce the alleged appropriateness of that language for articulating adult problems and personal goals. Life is a mere matter of the raw accumulation of quantities of experience and achievement, which leads to more or less linear progress up a hierarchy whose arbitrariness we accept unquestioningly. It's a variant on the idea that the person who dies with the most toys "wins" -- whoever is the most efficient and productive "wins" (no matter who profits by it). This, the post suggests, will restore the lost "fun" of engagement with the world, which always disappoints or burdens us with unwanted and ambiguous responsibilities. The game simplifies everything; it makes motivation clean and convenient.

But maybe gathering experience is not a game of quantities, not a matter of mere accumulation. Maybe convenient "fun" is not the only reason to rouse oneself to action. Maybe personal development is not a linear matter of acquiring more experience, more things. Gamification discourages us from seeing alternative possibilities to what is an essentially capitalistic imperative. "Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets."

Tidbits from Bifo's "Time, Acceleration, and Violence"

2011-09-07T13:03:00.001-04:00

This rambling essay by Franco "Bifo" Berardi is full of provocative yet unsubstantiated prophetic statements about semiocapitalism and the like, so naturally it appealed to me. His argument, such as it is, hinges on the relation of time, money and value: "capital is value, or accumulated time," Bifo claims, drawing on the labor theory of value. Socially necessary labor time in the abstract is objectified and stored as money; labor time is directed into projects through investment.

But this way of understanding value and the meaning of money breaks down when one considers immaterial labor: "try to decide how much time is needed to produce an idea, a project, a style, a creation, and you find that the production process becomes semiotic, with the relationship between time, work, and value suddenly evaporating, melting into air." The links between these concepts thus function in a purely ideological way -- we think they denote equivalences but they mask inequities, exploitations.

Time is no longer an objective measure of labor (if it ever was), but begins to vary in intensity; it becomes subject to acceleration. Bifo argues that "if you want a growth in productivity -- which is also a growth in surplus value -- you need to accelerate work time. But when the main tool for production ceases to be material labor and becomes cognitive labor, acceleration enters another phase, another dimension, because an increase in semiocapitalist productivity comes essentially from the acceleration of the info-sphere -- the environment from which information arrives in your brain."

In tandem with this acceleration in productivity comes a sort of inflation in semiotic saturation: "you need more and more signs, words, information, to buy less and less meaning. It is hyper-acceleration used as a crucial capitalist tool." There are more and more floating signifiers, but no one is sure what are the signifieds. This is source of endless competition -- who gets to affix signifieds to signifiers with socially acknowledged authority. This is what it means to have cultural capital, to have "cool." Bifo connects unbridled competition with fascism; what happens in semiocapitalism is perhaps a kind of fashion fascism.

Part of the point is that knowledge is inhibited by an overflow of data -- individuals are becoming dividuals, to adopt Deleuze's term. (See this paper by Robert Gehl) This makes subjects easier to control, makes us more susceptible to control by technology, to giving in to the way technology is developing to accelerate our consumption for its purposes rather than our own. We start consuming to keep up rather than to experience pleasure or to meet any other personal need.

When more signs buy less meaning, when there is an inflation in meaning, when the info-sphere accelerates and your attention is unable to keep up, what do you need? You need someone who makes things easy for you.

And that "someone" is pharmaceuticals, amphetamines, infantilizing GUIs, recommendation engines, and all the other so-called innovations that substitute convenience for engagement or experience. As Bifo concludes, "Our relationship to the world will become purely functional, operational—probably faster, but precarious."

This is several removes from the sort of precarity that comes with being food-insecure or undocumented or unemployed, but it is precarity nonetheless, an unsustainable relation to the realm of information that one comes to feel one must maintain to be employable or to have a valuable brand. We start to believe we must keep up with the flow of information in order to be able to produce meaning that has current value; we need to remain in tune with novelty. But the cycles of fashion are so rapid that it is nearly impossible to keep up; the edifice fractures into hyperparticular niches, all of which are defining their own versions of contemporary cool, and we can be masters of some few of these while the mass of other niches serve to keep us feeling inadequate, insecure.

RIsk rhetoric, neoliberal ideology, Langdon Winner

2011-09-05T21:37:00.000-04:00

I recently read Langdon Winner's The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. It turned out to be more about environmental policy and politics than, say, media and information technology, the particular forms of tech I am looking for limits for. (Winner frequently mentions replacing nuclear power with solar power and devotes a chapter to the "appropriate technology" movement, sort of a proto-green movement with what strikes me as better branding.)

In the most interesting chapter to me, "Mythinformation", Winner points out that while artifacts may imply political arrangements and path dependency constrains future political options, no technology obviates the need for collective action to shape the future of society. Nothing is inevitable in any technological development; technology is always shaped by (and then begins to shape) the social context in which it is embedded. The temptation to talk about what "technology wants" is an attempt to eliminate the political dimension of technology and let that context be shaped undemocratically by those with the most direct financial investments. That is, it is a plea to let capitalism dictate the use of technology to transform society in ways that make it more amenable to capitalist accumulation and the extraction of profit and the molding of behavior by individual incentivization. Politics is, to a large degree, a public debate about the parameters of acceptable social ideas; it makes no sense to pretend technology is (a) developed without a vision of society in mind and (b) that it dictates the future automatically. Winners and losers are not predetermined by a technology but by how it is adopted and developed and implemented, etc. "For those willing to wait passively while the computer revolution takes its course, technological determinism ceases to be a mere theory and becomes an ideal: a desire to embrace conditions brought on by technological change without judging them in advance." This doesn't go far enough; it is quietism in the face of parties protecting their status quo interests by co-opting technology.

It seems wise to remember, as Winner puts it, that "Those best situated to take advantage of a new technology are often those previously well situated by dint of wealth, social standing, and institutional position. Thus, if there is to be a computer revolution, the best guess is that it will have a distinctly conservative character." It still requires political intervention to allow technology to address social inequities, no matter how magical the technology may seem.

What the ideology of technological determinism can mask is the choices we have about the tendency of capitalism to use technology to accelerate exchanging, to speed up obsolescence, and so on. The accelerated information-processing approaches to everyday life crowd out the slower "ways of knowing." Tech determinism becomes a trojan horse for introducing and reinforcing capitalist values about the importance of individualism, convenience, efficiency and so on. It makes us "consumers of change," as Winner notes, which corresponds with the subject position we;ve learn to adopt and inhabit comfortably.

Winner points out that "people must be convinced that the human burdens of an information age -- unemployment, deskilling, the disruption of many social patterns -- are worth bearing." This is the primary positive ideology at work in the "information age" discourse -- the benefits of social media, etc., make any sacrifices seem small, irrelevant, and to complain about them makes one ungrateful, inconsiderate, uncool. The general media worship of Steve Jobs epitomizes this.

Another aspect of the positive tech ideology is pushing convenience as more important than sociality. Winner notes how much of innovation heightens efficiency, productivity, and convenience at the expense of collective action, community- or social-bond-building collaboration. It tends to represent social interaction as a nuisance rather than an opportunity, turning social connection into something that is more contrived, deliberate, something that must be consciously chosen rather than evolving out of given circumstances. That can be represented as an advantage, as a stride toward authenticity since one would be choosing people who fit with the "real" them rather than having friends thrust upon them by circumstances. But those circumstances usually allow other people's personalities to show in a genuine rather than contrived, controlled, personal-brand sort of way. Those circumstances allow for more genuine sociality, it seems to me, than the opportunities designed into the functionality of tech applications.

Winner mounts a critique of the rhetoric of risk management and cost-benefit analysis, the idea that society should accept small risks in order to receive the massive benefits of technology. Such discourse frames danger as something inevitable, reasonably manageable. Also it casts those who reject accepting more danger as irrationally phobic. The discussion of inescapable and necessary risk plays into the dissemination of entrepreneurial rhetoric, which leads to the ultimate celebration of risk as separating the capitalist heroes from the pretenders. Winner: "There is, then, a deep-seated tendency in our culture to appreciate risk-taking in economic activity as a badge of courage." Those willing to take risks are courageous; those who aren't are cowards. This leads to the "damn the torpedoes" brand of conservatism, Winner argues, in which technological innovations are introduced if profitable and then mitigated later if there harm becomes unmanageable, unmaskable. As Winner puts it, this sort of conservatism encourages society in "renovating human needs to match what modern science and engineering happened to make available." This becomes an ethos of "We don't know where we are going but we are on our way."

Sherry Turkle's Alone Together

2011-09-02T19:43:00.000-04:00

In this book, Turkle fuses a section about sociable robots with a section about social media usage to basically argue this: social media accustoms us to instrumentalized friendship, and once we are used to that, we are open to crypto relationships with robots, since they offer nothing more than instrumental value. Since we don't want the "drama" of reciprocal real-time sociality anyway, there is basically no difference from our point of view between another person and a robot. They are both merely mirrors for ourselves anyway. To a narcissist, every other person is always already a robot.

The book is mainly anecdotal, full of little kids' reactions to robots and teenagers' accounts of their feelings about having to route their social lives through online social networks and text messages. My favorite is Brad, who is my hero, having restored my hope for teenagers. He quits Facebook and is very articulate about the suffocating, stultifying reflexivity social media induce. Turkle's commentary can be maddeningly repetitive at times. She tends to come across as a "What about the children?!" concern troll, deploying all sorts of rhetorical questions to try to persuade us that children are going to be psychologically harmed by the current drift of technology. She is prone to assuming that digital life is subordinate rather than complementary to social life in general, and that online identity is inherently inauthentic rather than partially constitutive of identity in general. It's not as though digital identity is an inauthentic or falsified representation of "real" identity; identity in general is fluid, multiple. Turkle sometimes seems to worry that "real" identity is being thwarted by online sociality, which fosters some sort of inauthentic identity. But while her subjects sometimes use those terms to describe their predicament, they are misleading. Authenticity is a pressing personal issue now not because it has been suddenly lost, but because it has become the accounting system for a different form of mediated selfhood; it has become another metric in the attention economy, measuring how believable one is to oneself in the process of broadcasting a self.

Wise young Brad notes that "Online life is about premeditation" -- but so also is the concern for authenticity. It entails a kind of alienation so that you can judge yourself in terms of some ideal for yourself that is supposed to be not an ideal at all but one's natural self. But it is altogether unnatural to be checking in with yourself about how natural you are being. Direct experience of oneself is impossible, so assessing one's authenticity is too -- but one can
judge the authenticity of one's online profile, or the impression others seem to have of you. That is the narcissistic trap social media sets out for us.

But it is a trap also to imagine one can have some sort of direct experience of others, as if you could see the "real" person outside social media. We can't access the other's consciousness; it is always an objective performance from the outside. Nobody can ever show you their "real" self.

Worker=hipster redux

2011-09-01T18:02:00.000-04:00

From an Edge.org conversation with Jaron Lanier

And there is a disturbing sense in which I feel like that's the world we're entering. I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. There are just a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet seen by somebody once in a while gets them enough ego gratification that it's okay with them to still be living with their parents in their 30s, and that's such a strange tradeoff. And if you project that forward, obviously it really does become a problem....

To me, a lot of the culture of youth seems to be using the Internet as a form of denialism about their reduced prospects. They're like, "Well, sure we can't get a job and we need to live with our parents, but we can tweet", or something. "Let us tweet!"

I wrote a few posts a while ago about this question -- young people being paid in personality and attention for their freelance immaterial labor on social networks. It was in the context of the debate over whether U.S. unemployment was cyclical or structural, that is, whether it because of the recession and lack of effective demand, or if it was because entire sectors of the economy could no longer productively support hiring. (It cost more to hire new workers than those workers could add in profit potential.) If unemployment is indeed structural then no job creation will be forthcoming until we devise new sectors of employment. I wondered if online immaterial labor -- basically self-fashioning in social networks to generate data about what is cool to whom -- might be the new job sector, in which the worker-hipsters would be perpetual freelancers at best. At worst, they would be paid in attention and virtual pats on the head.

That seems to be what Lanier is talking about here -- that the best use capitalism could come up with for social media is to placate the precariat.

Somewhat unfairly, I think, Lanier stresses the failure of young people to demand more. Young people are not responsible for the situation neoliberalism has put them in. They didn't "trade" better economic opportunities for social media. If anything, the deal was done to them.

In fact, the economic conditions wrought by neoliberalism basically compel people to use social media in the ways Lanier implicitly condemns, to self-brand and publicize oneself (I argued that case here; Alice Marwick makes a similar case in her dissertation (pdf) (my notes on it, for what they are worth). It's not "denialism" when people use social media to self-promote; it's a somewhat desperate act of survival. I find it hard to imagine that Lanier would prefer them to go the Tottenham route and have kids rioting in the streets and looting.

Instead he makes a curious comparison of young people engaged in the attention economy to Tea Partyism, suggesting that both are preoccupied with formal freedoms of expression and individuality rather than the real autonomy that comes with money:

This "rights" kind of stance, as opposed to a "wealth" kind of stance, it's exactly the mirror image of what you see in Tea Party older America, of "we don't want our healthcare paid for. What we want is the right to not have our healthcare paid for, and that's more important to me."

Or something. I find that a bit elliptical. Perhaps what he means is that both groups are missing the point about what is actually driving the economy and the sort of opportunities non-privileged people receive within it. But it seems to me that the Tea Party and heavy Internet users (file sharers/social networkers) are on opposite sides of things.

Some leftists argue that the internet is fostering an alternative to individual wealth in the form of the common, something akin to what the government used to marshall resources for when it used to provide a safety net. The Tea Partyers reject the common, reject government guarantee of basic levels of welfare for all -- they are completely on board with the neoliberal program that basically thrusts workers into a Hobbesean war for survival. Everyone has the "right" to fend for themselves, and it is more important that nobody get a "handout" than some sort of social standard be upheld.

But does Lanier think that the kids who use social media as a consolation are on board with that ideology? Seems as likely that they are more idealistic about what online "sharing" might portend for society. It is not merely that they worry about their "right" to have shared material distributed as widely as possible. It's that they see digitizable cultural wealth as easily distributable to whoever wants it, and thus it is no longer a realm of scarcity. We can focus on other, genuine kinds of scarcity.

So they may self-brand as neoliberalism forces them to -- they may participate in that indirectly productive institutionalized narcissism on Facebook and elsewhere -- but they also extract the cultural surplus and engage in forms of collaborative production that promise to elude capital while remaining socially useful.

Throughout the Edge conversation, Lanier makes apt complaints about the way the internet is facilitating what he calls the "seedier side of capitalism" while exacerbating wealth inequalities, but he doesn't seem willing to accept that capitalism itself, particularly in its Silicon Valley entrepreneurial aspect, has guided technological development in this way. The problem is with the incentives that entrepreneurial capitalism requires of innovators -- create a demand for something that can be sold for profit; reconfigure society around those desires; commodify, commodify, commodify.

Because he embraces capitalism's ethos, Lanier makes this kind of declarations:

There's a sense of, if you're adding to the network, do you expect anything back from it? And since we've been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn't expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren't worth money, very much like we think we shouldn't be paid for parenting, or we shouldn't be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because there's still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did.

He doesn't seem to get that this is a false dichotomy. Why should we expect money rather than recognition for our contributions? This isn't inherent to human behavior; it's a useful abstraction that suits the project of capital accumulation. Money isn't the necessary measure of a person's social contribution. By making such reification of socially necessary effort mandatory, capitalism ensures that technology will continue to betray its revolutionary promise of improving the lives of everyone rather than the fortunate few.

Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life

2011-08-30T20:50:00.002-04:00

Bauman argues that a consumer society means not that people are preoccupied with consumer goods at the expense of meaningful work, or even that consuming has become most people's idea of meaningful work, but that it is a society in which all agents are commodities, consumer goods.

Under whatever rubric their preoccupations would be classified by governmental archivists or investigative journalists, the activity in which all of them are engaged (whether by choice, necessity, or most commonly both) is marketing. The test they need to pass in order to be admitted to the social prizes they covet demands them to recast themselves as commodities: that is, as products capable of catching the attention and attracting demand and customers.

This fits in with an attention-economy analysis of society, as well as an analysis that focuses on neoliberalist governmentality pushing social change and changes in prevailing forms of subjectivity. Thrust into precarity, we must spend increasing portions of our consciousness on self-marketing for survival, for social recognition, for reassurance that we won't be excluded. The attention economy recasts us as consumers of one another, precluding other forms of association. The consumer society justifies itself by redefining freedom as a kind of personal development -- the opportunity to measurably improve your value on the various markets that have begun to supplant family, friendship, community and other social relations (or reshape them in the image of markets). Social relations are characterized as exchanges, and personal traits as both capital and commodities.

Bauman argues that capitalism is reproduced by reproducing the wage relation -- labor bought by capital. For this to routinely occur uninterrupted, labor must be "attractive" to capital: It must be well groomed and compliant, dependably instrumentalized. It must be perpetually recommodified. Once upon a time, the welfare state took partially responsibility for this, helping people become presentable to capital as potential workers (skilled, fed, socialized, etc.). Neoliberalism has made this the individual's responsibility. The result, Bauman claims, is that labor starts to become less desirable-seeming, competition in the labor market intensifies, and atomistic individualism is thereby reinforced. The risk of being a "zero-marginal-product" worker has been shifted to individuals, who fight amongst themselves in a zero-sum game.

So the overall task of sustaining the saleability of labour en masse is left to the private worries of individual men and women (for instance, by switching the costs of skill acquisition to private, and personal, funds), and they are now advised by politicians and cajoled by advertisers to use their own wits and resources to stay on the market, to increase their market value or not let it drop, and to earn the appreciation of prospective buyers....

Shifting the task of recommoditizing labour to the market is the deepest meaning of the state’s conversion to the cult of ‘deregulation’ and ‘privatization’....

In the society of consumers no one can become a subject without first turning into a commodity, and no one can keep his or her subjectness secure without perpetually resuscitating, resurrecting and replenishing the capacities expected and required of a sellable commodity. The ‘subjectivity’ of the ‘subject’, and most of what that subjectivity enables the subject to achieve, is focused on an unending effort to itself become, and remain, a sellable commodity.

LinkedIn and Facebook and so on make for obvious vectors for this ideology -- providing preformatted spaces and networking mechanisms with which to sell oneself. Personal branding and competitive identity-making both reinforce the naturalness of individualism, of the individual self as a kind of property belonging to oneself. Proving you are an individual amounts to protecting that property, proving its existence, establishing the claim to that latent self-capital. To forgo the personal identity as brand begins to feel like a forfeit of capital rather than an attempt to preserve autonomy, to escape economic determinism. We end up rejecting subjectvity that is not monetizable, self-construction that is not sold out as a prerequisite.

Bauman coins the term "subjectivity fetishism" to describe the means by which we lose sight of our self-construction -- this permits every subject to believe itself unique and autonomous though all our built out of the same commodities and brands.

Bauman connects this self-commoditization and self-exploitation to the pursuit of fame for its own sake. The preoccupation with celebrity is a manifestation of the attention economy's primacy in our efforts to imagine our economic viability, our economic survival. It reflects the personality training we all must submit to in order to qualify for work in tightening labor markets, in which more and more jobs have affective/service components. Bauman wants to link the attention economy to consumer society directly; fame is simply necessary self-commodification, to fit into the social world made entirely of consumer-commodities. This leads to "social deskilling" -- necessitates treating others as objects for instrumental use. Thus is born the convenience ethic that rules consumerism -- consumption efficiency (and the resulting acceleration of exchange and consumption) trumps the complexity of mutual social relations, collaborative identity, etc. Better to consume others, count up their attention, than to make something together with mutual, reciprocal attention. Relations in consumer society can only be conceived as an exchange -- a "contract in our mutual interest," as the Gang of Four song goes. Noninstrumental human contact registers only as a nuisance.

Thus consumerist subjectivity makes love more or less impossible by precluding the emotional effort it requires in favor of mutual manipulation and quid pro quo exchanges.

Love, we may say, abstains from promising an easy passage to happiness and meaning. A ‘pure relationship’ inspired by consumerist practices promises that passage to be easy and trouble-free, while rendering happiness and meaning hostages to fate – more like a lottery win than an act of creation and dedicated effort.

---

Chapter one differentiates between consumerism and consumption, with the former defined as an ideological condition in which consumption becomes people's reason for living:

We may say that ‘consumerism’ is a type of social arrangement that results from recycling mundane, permanent and so to speak ‘regime-neutral’ human wants, desires and longings into the
principal propelling and operating force of society, a force that coordinates systemic reproduction, social integration, social stratification and the formation of human individuals, as well as playing a major role in the processes of individual and group selfidentification and in the selection and pursuit of individual life policies. ‘Consumerism’ arrives when consumption takes over that linchpin role which was played by work in the society of producers.

Buying things replaces doing things as a chief source of one's self-concept. But Bauman needn't set this up as an opposition, as a replacement. Consumer societies are ones in which the nature of work has changed to embrace consumption as a form of labor. They are societies in which life is organized around consumption as work rather than leisure. This organization manifests as an overriding concern with personal identity as conveyed through commodities functioning as signifiers. Self-fashioning permits consumption to become productive, creating semiotic value for the panoply of commodities (goods and services) brought to market. The suppression of class and rise of the more amorphous status as the indicator of where one is in the social hierarchy also allows consumerism to thrive, as it becomes the means of attenuating subtle shades of distinction through consumption tastes and the modes of expressing/publicizing them.

ego depletion and freedom of choice; semiocapital as the power to overwhelm with decisions

2011-08-18T13:47:00.000-04:00

1. Consumerism is sustained by the ideology that freedom of choice is the only relevant freedom; it implies that society has mastered scarcity and that accumulating things is the primary universal human good, that which allows us to understand and relate to the motives of others. We are bound together by our collective materialism. Choosing among things, in a consumer society, is what allows us to feel autonomous (no one tells us how we must spend our money) and express, or even discover, our unique individuality. The belief that more is better carries over to this sphere so that making more choices seems to mean a more attenuated, bigger, more successful self. The more choices we can make and broadcast to others, the more of a recognized identity we have. We are winning.

If we believe this, then it seems like good policy to maximize the opportunities to make consumer choices for as many people as possible. This will give more people a sense of autonomy, social recognition and personal meaning. Considering the amount of time and space devoted to retail in the U.S., it seems as though we are implementing this ideology collectively. The public policy goals become higher incomes, more stores, and reliable media through which to display personal consumption. This will yield a population that is fulfilling its dreams of self-actualization.

2. But when you add the possibility of ego depletion to this version of identity, it no longer coheres. If we think we want more choices to manifest who we really are, then it can't be that having to make more choices exhausts our capability to make decisions we will stand behind over time. Rational choice theory obviously depends on the chooser being rational; but if making choices depletes the capability for rational thought, then the whole edifice crumbles. Instead of elaborating a more coherent self through a series of decisions, one establishes an increasingly incoherent and disunified self that is increasingly unpredictable and illegible to others.

As this NYT piece by John Tierney explains, sustaining a sense of self requires constant energy; choice making drains that energy, blurring the outlines of the self we are projecting to others and ourselves. We lose the energy to think about who we are and act accordingly, and we begin acting efficiently instead, with increasingly less interest in coherence, justice, consistency, morality, etc. Economists would have us believe their is an authenticity in efficiency itself, that it is the real underlying all of our incentive-driven behavior. But it may be that efficiency is merely part of pre-consciousness; it is a residual, a placeholder, what remains when subjectivity can't be achieved.

3. Considering ego depletion and its possible link to impulsivity, one can see how overloading individuals with opportunities to choose can become a deliberate strategy to encourage exhaustion and render people easier to control. As decision fatigue sets in, morality and personal idiosyncrasies are overridden by one's underlying desire for conservative efficiency, which is eminently predictable. Maximizing choices doesn't foster autonomy and creativity in self-realization; it does the opposite, reducing people to more or less uniform impulses. Tierney points out: "Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav, the Stanford professor, demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars." The more options and so forth we are confronted with, the less resistance we can mount and the more likely it is we can be brought to the decision that the other parties want us to reach. Complexity, elaborate customization possibilities, are a strategy for controlling people, not for giving them the opportunity to mirror their uniqueness in a particular commodity. Customization is a mode of control rather than liberation.

Likewise, consumerism generally is a control strategy based on exhaustion, not fulfillment. "When you shop till you drop, your willpower drops, too," Tierney writes. And without will, there is no individual self, no responsible citizen.

4. Franco Berardi's theory of "cognitarian subjectivation" seems to be about this: "Today it is the social brain that is assaulted by an overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. The social factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of networked production is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the cognitive class." So what is at stake in the attention economy is this level of energy that individuals can commit to forming a resisting self. The economy is being organized increasingly to harness the energy we spend making consumerist choices to create our identity within consumerism's code; we are being driven to spend energy in that way -- in making choices that deplete us emotionally. The mode of exploitation is oversaturation.

But we are articulating our identities not outside attention-depleting media but within them. As Bauman points out in Consuming Life, we make ourselves into commodities to complete for attention in a consumer society, in which recognition is parceled out chiefly to commodities and all evaluative criteria are derived not from morality or religion but from consumer markets. Since we fashion ourselves as personal brands, we insert ourselves deliberately into broadcast media rather than, say, constructing ourselves within a local community, whose limits and contingencies we accept as the price of a coherent self. Personal branding promises the limitless self, along the same lines as the fantasy of the growing self made possible by the endless series of choices. What Berardi declares can't be repeated enough, as a form of ideological inoculation: "Acceleration leads to an impoverishment of experience. More information, less meaning. More information, less pleasure."

Information kills pleasure. It requires processing that proscribes pleasure but seduces us with the possibility that processing can be pleasure -- it can, but only if you will yourself into autism. (If you become an "infovore," as Tyler Cowen calls it.

The surfeit of information makes it harder and harder for us to be, to emerge as a self from the morass of choice. Efforts to accelerate consumption should be regarded with suspicion -- these do not help us achieve more; they revert us to the pre-identity of efficiency and serve the prerogatives of capital. As Berardi puts it (cryptically): "Capital becomes the generalized semiotic flux that runs through the veins of the global economy, while labor becomes the constant activation of the intelligence of countless semiotic agents linked to one another." In the future, we'll have an economy based on the labor of sociality in social media networks that are subsumed by capital: that is, we'll fight for attention on Facebook, etc., and that effort will be harvestable as data by the firms that own the networks, who will sell us tools derived from that data to abet our struggle for more attention. "Semiocapital" is the amalgam of attention-grabbing uses of language and other signs, and the conduits for circulating them. It is the value in being able to guarantee moments of short-circuiting decision overload in a population; to possess semiocapital is to have is the ability to overwhelm with novelties, the power to implement fashion change at an increasing rate.

dividuals and social media; premediated identity

2011-08-16T19:18:00.001-04:00

From Digital Suicide and the Biopolitics of Leaving Facebook, by Tero Karppi in Transformations 20:

Karppi discusses social media in terms of "premediation," which is not clearly defined. But one can get a sense of what it might mean in this example: Maybe the most evident example that shows the premediation in actions happens when one tries to deactivate one’s Facebook account.... Not only the present situation of choosing to confirm the disconnection is mediated but also the future is premediated by showing a set of pictures of friends “who will miss you” after deactivating the account. Here premediation relies heavily on the affects created by profile pictures and names of the user’s Facebook friends. Notably these images are not limited to profile pictures but also posted pictures where the user appears tagged with a friend or a sibling may be shown.

One cannot stress enough the importance of the posted image next to the profile pictures among friends who are said to miss one after disconnection since it leads towards the logics of how Facebook works and also what many of the users who are afraid of losing their privacy dread: it is the content the users themselves create that is used for different purposes which escape their original intentions. Entering to the time of premediation means also entering to a time of databases and data mining, where any piece of data may be accessed and used at any given point of time (Savat 52-53). It is here where the subjectivity of the user starts to unfold. When entering social networks we move from being individuals towards the being of what Deleuze calls “dividuals.” In social networks we become codes, images, posts that cannot be reduced to our offline presence.That is, the divide bewteen a "real" offline self and an online self that merely represents it is untenable -- online and offline behavior blend seamlessly in elaborating an identity that persists across online and offline spaces. Another way of putting that is that the self is augmented by online behaviors, not merely represented. The significance, according to Karppi and his sources, is that the self, far from preceding the online representation of itself, is actually constructed according to the infrastructure established by digital networks. (I've been arguing something similar for a while, that social media invite ongoing self-fashioning, worsening the sense of ontological crisis brought on by modernity.) Subjectivity is "premediated," preformatted to suit information-processing needs. How we are processed then feeds back into the self's ongoing construction, determining what information it sees, who sees it, what sort of recognition it receives, and so on. The term dividual is a kind of shorthand for a constructed self that is not entirely within one's own control -- a quantified self that comes alive in how the data is parsed in technological systems, not a self that can exist autonomously.

We begin to exist simultaneously in different databases, information banks and other technomaterial assemblages. This, in fact, is what many of the Facebook users fear and loathe: their data being used, distributed and exploited by third parties such as marketing ventures or central intelligence agencies. As Genosko writes, “offline individual” is merely one actualisation of the dividual because “nobody totally corresponds to their data double or silhouette” (101). The catch is that after logging in to a social network service there really is no return to the offline individuality. Even if we deactivate our account we remain in the databases of Facebook as a potential resource for exploitation.

Lost in the somewhat obvious point that Facebook exploits our "sharing" via partnerships with data miners and advertisers and so on is the more interesting claim that a particular identity is realized for ourselves through that process, one that threatens to become more significant from whatever one we might be more actively constructed for ourselves in the moment, or in other sorts of networks. This is different that the "digital divide" fallacy; the problem is not that the online self is "inauthentic" and the offline self is real; it's that the self derived from the data processing of our digital traces doesn't correspond with our active efforts to shape an offline/online hybrid identity for our genuine social ties. That identity gets usurped by the "dividual" one generated for commercial and social-control purposes, and reintrojected into our lives by virtue of the ways institutions can distribute that dividual self in social networks.

That is a terrible explanation of what I mean. Let me try again: we are actively using social media to create and share a self, one we think is consistent and autonomous, not dependent on the medium itself for its genuineness. But this data we generate online is combined with other digital traces we generate unknowingly, and then reprocessed by institutions and companies to create our demographic "dividual" self -- the self relevant to marketeers and the state. This construct then guides what we see online (through recommendation engines and tailored pages and filtering and so forth), reinforcing that dividual construct -- our active identity begins to merge with the one that emerges from how our data is processed in the media we use. It also shapes what about us presented to others in our networks. Others are as overwhelmed as we are and just as subject to be manipulated by selective filtering. All this is possible because we don't own the networks or the filters; the companies that do own social media (an unprecedentedly powerful means of public identity construction, mediation, and sustenance) want to create us as subjects that suit their ends. (Is that at all clearer?)

Social media are mirrors and projectors, but we don't control the images that result in either case, though we are led to believe that we do. So not only do we chase some illusion of a final, authentic, autonomous self through broadcasting with these media, the very process of broadcasting steers us toward elaborating a self that has less to do with our intentions and more to do to formatting ourselves ("premediating") for more efficient processing. We turn ourselvs into useful data, but it's not necessarily useful for us, even if we are aggressive about using social media for self-branding purposes -- itself a dubious practice with regard to escaping reflexivity and engaging with some sort of "natural" self. But if there is no natural self to discover, then the reflexivity just reflects the always present alienation that derives from being constructed by our social environment; the subjective experience of how our subjectivity is constructed is to desperately try to direct the construction process ourselves after the fact. Self-consciousness is a residual aftereffect of being constituted as a self by outside forces that presents itself to consciousness as preceding the fact. In other words, the things we seize upon to construct our identity have already constructed us; that's why they are ready at hand.

Lazzarato makes this point in "The Machine," an essay Karppi cites. Lazzarato is talking about TV and voting, but his (somewhat overstated) points hold for all social media, I think:

On television, you are always in danger of being trapped in the dominant meanings and subjectivations, no matter what you say or do. You speak, but you run the risk of saying nothing of what really matters to you. All the enunciative devices in our democratic societies -- surveys, marketing, elections, political and union representation, etc. -- represent more or less sophisticated variations on this division of the subject whereby the subject of enunciation must be reflected in the subject of the statement. As a voter, you are called upon to give your views as a subject of enunciation, but you are simultaneously spoken as the subject of the statement since your freedom of expression amounts to nothing more than a choice from among possible options which have already been codified and standardized. The election, like surveys, marketing, and political and union representation, presupposes a consensus on issues on which you haven’t actually been consulted. The more you express yourself and speak and the more you interact with the machine of communication, the more you abandon what you actually wanted to say, because the communicational devices disconnect you from your own collective arrangements of enunciation and draw you into other collective arrangements (television, in this instance).

Karppi then asks a good question: "If our every action in Facebook is premediated and controlled by pre-emptive strategies, for which we ourselves provide the means by sharing content and information, how are we ever able to disconnect from these services?" Implicit in the question is the notion that we become dependent on the preformatted selves these services give to us and distribute in our name (or as our name). The rest of the essay deals with services that allow for "digital suicide" -- these seem like peripheral phenomena to me, stunts, even if they do "introduce different potential ways to exist in social networks." These amount to being present as a nonpresence, static and thus generating no usuable data.

Alice Marwick's "Status Update" (chapters 5-8)

2011-08-04T10:21:00.008-04:00

Chapter 5 (chapter about self-branding)

1. The personal brand is, Marwick argues, "an edited self, requiring emotional labor to maintain a business-friendly self-presentation despite the advocacy of transparency and openness by social media culture." This is a key point: personal branding requires ceaseless labor, akin to the perpetual retraining required by post-Fordism and labor conditions or precarity. Social media self-creation is not (merely) a liberating opportunity at self-expression, as it may naively be conceived, but is instead a mandatory form of discipline and self-monitoring that workers must perform to enhance their employability. "Self-branding is not about living publically. It is about constructing a strategic self-image to appeal to a particular audience and furthering that image through every online and offline action." It has nothing to do with authenticity but the fantasy of authenticity becomes a prod to continual maintenance of the self.

"The branded self that results is highly visible and relentlessly self-promoting, creating a new version of the entrepreneur known for his or her performed identity rather than accomplishments." (299) Or you might say the only possible accomplishments for neoliberal subjects are performances of the self, the chief accessible capital to grow and invest is that which is rooted in the personal brand. Careers are replaced by personal brands or enterprise selves. This sort of identity suits the risk shifting under neoliberal regimes: "Self-branding encourages people to take on the responsibility of economic uncertainty by constructing identities that fit current business trends" (305).

By creating an atmosphere of lateral and almost passive surveillance, capitalist social media create and sustain the requirement of perpetual self-editing work: "the collaborative, networked audience of social media requires people to engage in unpaid emotional and immaterial labor to keep their brand image pure" (347). Marwick notes that social media need not automatically function this way, to enforce neoliberal subjectivity (she argues that early social media allowed for free play of identity). But social media have been subsumed by capital, have be enlisted by capital, and have achieved scale through accommodating capitalist aims. "These are not values that are somehow inherent in internet technologies; rather, they are market values being mapped over a particular use case of social media."

But why this mapping over? I think the scaling up of networks to increase their efficacy meshes with capitalist imperative of growth -- early social media withered away because they didn't scale, and failed to achieve the size for network effects to kick in. Google's insistence on real identities in Google+ seems related to the need for authenticatable identity in order for network effects to kick in. Real identities leads to the kind of participation that scales; free play is disintegrative. And capitalist incentives also kick in to help nascent networks grow; interested parties market them, instrumentalize them, etc. Free-play networks only rely on pleasure to expand, and pleasure is not about growth, size, organization; pleasure is entropic, ephemeral.

Capitalism appropriates social media, and ideology of tech utopianism, to generalize neoliberal subjectivity and enforce it upon everyone. Other potentialities in social media are suppressed, never reach efficacious scale -- they are pre-empted by commercial social media, among other things. Self-branding is not a personal choice; it is a requisite survival mechanism.

2. Marwick works through the usage of neoliberalism to settle on a meaning derived from Foucault and Aihwa Ong: neoliberalism involves governmentality through the broadened use of markets as metaphors for how human social behavior must be organized. People become subject to the fun morality in that they must maximize utility in the form of commodified, quantified pleasure to be "normal." The self becomes legible only insofar as its behavior fits this general imperative.

3. This is a useful distinction between identifying with corporate brands and self-branding: "Self-branding is significantly different from the use of brands as identity markers, since it actively teaches people to view active identity construction as a product. Thus, people define themselves both through brands and as brands. This ability has been amplified by the internet" (312). Rather than augment the self with the overtones of an external brand, self-branding involves limiting identity to a factitious creation entirely government by its marketing potential. A layer of reflexivity is added to one's conception of oneself: the level of editing the self and to fully become the redacted version of oneself.

4. Self-branding thrives given the technological "affordances" of social media: "Social media configures these values through technical status affordances, bringing the potential audience to the forefront by turning ephemeral status or reputation information into quantifiable metrics, such as blog analytics, number of Facebook friends or Twitter followers. Comments, references, and Twitter @replies become indicators of successful self-branding, demonstrating value through the awareness of others" (315). Social media allows us to quantify our personal branding efforts and subject them to cost-benefit-style analyses. It permits the sort of alienation required to craft identity as a product while still inhabiting it.

5. Long fieldwork section of anecdotes of self-branders in Silicon Valley. Not surprising that these people would use social media to commodify themselves; yearning to see an account of the more subtle ways this affects people who are not professionally implicated in the roll-out of Web 2.0. She looks at some moronic-sounding self-help books that basically argue that if financial success doesn't result from assiduous self-regard, it's your fault and you need to work harder or believe in yourself more: "failing to achieve economic success is not due to structural equality, a lousy economy, or stagnating wages; instead, it is the fault of the worker, who is positioned as an entrepreneur without a safety net." That's pretty much the neoliberal order in a nutshell. "The entrepreneurs of Web 2.0 are proof of concept that neoliberalism can work," she claims, but they are uniquely incentivized to buy into neoliberal subjectivity to the degree that it can be used to render their tech firms and skills socially necessary. They try to generalize an ethos embodied by the tech they have develop capitalistically. They have invented tech that supports capitalism because capitalism was the reason for its development (if that is not too tautological). The tech ends up being deterministic in that sense; it is developed to replicate the capitalism that enriches its developers.

6. This is the characteristic consequence of self-branding on friendship: "People also had to demonstrate relational ties between themselves and members of their audience, and this often required performing intimacy and interest in others, even when it was lacking. Interpersonal relationships were intertwined with self-branding edicts, and the two often clashed." There is no way to gauge what is strategy and what is concern for the other. It is impossible to figure out when you are not merely being used.

7. Marwick argues that social media fosters a new sort of entrepreneur. Neoliberalism presumes an entrepreneurial self, but the nature of what entrepreneurship means changes within the field supplied by social media. People pursue attention, celebrity, an expansive identity, personal brand equity moreso than traditional forms of capital. These new forms of capital may begin as intermediary steps toward accumulating traditional hard capital, but become goals in their own right. Amassing personal brand equity becomes necessary for survival, much as accumulating capital is necessarily for the survival of firms in Marx's analysis (accumulation as the Moses and prophets" for capitalists).

8. Marwick fuses Lazzarauto's immaterial labor with Hochschild "emotional labor" to describe social media behavior as "immaterial emotional labor" -- not entirely sure how this is different from "affective labor," which Hardt and Berardi among others use. Marwick is mainly concerned with the emotional effort required to share and self-promote and kiss ass and so forth, the sort of labor that is vastly expanded by perpetual, open-ended connectivity. She links the problem to social media's dogmatizing of "authenticity" -- a fictional construct used to browbeat people into greater performativity in search of that alleged inner truth. There is no authenticity, only contexts that prompt us to behave in various ways, emphasize different dimensions of our potentiality.

9. I don't get why Marwick want to defend self-branding in abstract but condemn it in its neoliberal expression. I don;t think these are separable. Personal branding is contingent on neoliberal ideology's ascendency. There isn't one without the other. So this seems right: "The problem is that self-branding, as a practical technique, is limited and will only be successful for a slim sliver of the population, yet it is being advocated as a universal solution to the economic downturn that can be adopted by anyone." It is always and ever a "practical technique." that is it's inherent definition. There is no such thing as impractical self-branding. You only brand because it is entrepreneurially useful, and the celebration of self-branding is always an ideological justification of inequality of opportunity and outcomes, of generalized precarity as a way to separate the deserving from the undeserving on the basis of how much cultural capital they have coming into the game and how willing they are to debase themselves in feats of flexibility.

Chapter 6 (chapter about "lifestreaming" and lateral surveillance)

1. Disclosure is a form of publicity for the personal brand. It is the attempt to attract an audience similar to the way a TV show tries to draw ratings. Makes one an attention broker -- you can sell the attention you receive to a third party (i.e. an advertiser).

2. "networked lifestreaming often creates anxieties about performing identity in front of an audience, and the extra layers of social information can result in intense social problems colloquially referred to as drama" -- you can say that again. It invites "remixing" of others' lives for entertainment, self-promotion or sheer impishness.

3. After listing some of the supposed benefits of "lifestreaming" (it simulates co-presence), Marwick nails the problems with it: "First, that the lifestream and networked audience creates and publicizes social information that, when combined, is more revealing than the sum of its parts. Second, that intimacy and conflict are often performed for an audience, or to elicit reactions from others. And third, that the context of constant self-monitoring often instigates paranoia and surveillance." Personal information becomes decontextualized and available for ready remixing.

4. "Context-collapse" problems of lifestreaming -- the supply of material that is removable from its immediate context and can be used for other purposes (gossip mongering; advertising; profiling; surveillance, etc.). "First, social media encourages people to reveal or publicize information within a context that may feel social (e.g. performing for a networked audience made up of friends and acquaintances), but in reality is accessible to anyone." Then "the combination of digital information from many disparate sources into the lifestream results in emergent social information that is more than the sum of its parts." In sharing, we believe we have a certain amount of control of how the info will be interpreted, but in reality we have no clue, considering the vast amount of cross-referencing and recombinations that are possible. We surrender control of the stories that can be plausibly told about us but sharing habitually across various persistent platforms. "The accessibility and persistence of personal information tracked and broadcast through social media creates an extra layer of relational data that is not easily explained by the dichotomy of public or private" (402). Following danah boyd, Marwick argues we should view these problems through the lens of the public/publicity dichotomy (not public/private). "Information that is public can, in theory, be accessed by virtually anyone, but in practice will probably only be seen by a few. Information that is publicized is strategically made visible to a greater audience through three dimensions: the effort it takes to find information, the ease of locating that information (e.g. searchability), and the interest in that information" (404). Participating in social media is an act of publicity, whether we want it to be or not, it seems to me. Social-media companies try to play it both ways, but in the end, they encourage the repurposing of information to make it more attention-grabbing -- they are in the attention business, and all content can usefully be "improved" by making it more enticing to more people, regardless of the original intentions of the person who supplied it. That is why it is so important that Facebook and not users own the content served by Facebook. They want to use your public information and make it publicity.

5. Mandatory publicity and lateral surveillance tends to be justified with cant about the authtentic person having nothing to hide or fear from "living in public": But "the idea of a single, authentic self, although it carries a great deal of currency in contemporary American culture, is a social construction, and at odds with actual social practice." Publicity leads to more time spent in self-justification rather than in living; boundaries allow for minimal time and energy wasted on identity management. Boundaries allow for relatively shallow identities to be inhabited to facilitate action in the moment. Without boundaries, "chilling effects" set in, where people refuse to act from fear of having to be permanently associated with a particular deed and have to integrate it into a unitary identity.

Marwick points out the dubious functions of openness ideology:

First, promoting absolute openness disregards the privilege of most people in the tech scene. It is one thing for a wealthy, white male programmer to admit that he sometimes smokes pot. It is another for an undocumented worker to publicize his immigration status, or for a woman escaping a domestic violence situation to reveal her home address. Advocating openness ignores the very circumstances that may make transparency dangerous. Second, upholding personal transparency
as an ideal supports the business models of social software, which profit from information disclosure.

(414) Openness cant, like most things that increase surveillance, serves the interests of tech companies and the state; it preserve status quo distributions of power.

6. Editing the mandatory lifestream (mandatory for purposes of personal branding in the neoliberal economy) becomes a major amount of work -- of "immaterial emotional labor" (419) in Marwick's phrase -- the effort to seem authentic and connected online to make your personal online brand seem legitimate. It is generally uncompensated affective labor that nonetheless throws off useful marketing information and so on. Marwick also includes "monitoring" in this category -- checking ot see that other people in your network are not sharing things about you that tarnish the story you are telling about yourself -- there is no end to that sort of labor, and no guarantee it will even be efficacious.

Chapter 8: Conclusion
1. Good summation:

I argue that Web 2.0 discourse as instantiated in software inculcates a neoliberal subjectivity which encourages people to see themselves as users, products, and packaged commodities. Social media teaches users to create an edited persona, whether based on a celebrity or a brand, and use it to boost social status by strategically appealing to viewers and sharing personal information. Status, a primary motivator for human action in all social contexts, is measured in these applications primarily by attention, visibility, and access to others; people are rewarded for engaging in behaviors that get them attention. These behaviors and methods of identity construction constitute emotional, immaterial labor, which is both creative and affective. This labor is exchanged for the relational and personal benefits provided by social media, such as support, intimacy, and connection. The labor value is converted into literal capital by social media companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, who profit from personal disclosure and the attraction of users to their products. This exchange commodifies identity, emotion, and relationships within a digital context. Social media, which teaches this way of thinking about the self, constitutes a technology of subjectivity. This subjectivity incorporates strategies of commodification and promotion drawn from advertising, marketing, and celebrity culture and applies them to the self and its relationships to others. Web 2.0 therefore teaches a way of understanding oneself that supports a neoliberal culture in which market-based principles are used to evaluate success or failure in daily life. These principles in turn support the business models of social technologies, which depend on selling eyeballs to advertisers or personal information to data-mining firms (both which treat the user, or the user‘s digital dossier, as a salable commodity).

Yes yes yes. Social media, as a technology of subjectivity, ends up shaping the ways we can conceive of ourselves, encouraging us to see ourselves as consumer goods. This ties in nicely with the thesis Zygmunt Bauman elaborates in Consuming Life and suggests how social media support consumer society as well as neoliberalism.

2. Also worth remembering: "While the networked audience provides external validation, emotional support, and a general feeling of ambient awareness for many users, it also consciously or unconsciously limits and circumscribes self presentation choices." Surveillance makes you feel known, obviously, but it limits you to behaving in ways that can be countenanced, regardless of whether they suit some inner sense of self. Whether that inner sense is a real, ontological thing is another question.

Social deskilling

2011-08-03T12:10:00.003-04:00

I picked up the term social deskilling from sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's book Consuming Life. It's a variant on Harry Braverman's concept of labor deskilling (outlined in Labor and Monopoly Capital), management's effort to control knowledge of labor processes and thereby make labor itself more abstract and workers interchangeable. Jobs are deskilled when management controls the division of labor and restricts individual workers' understanding of the total process, reducing them to minutely defined job functions and training them to rely entirely on following orders.

Social deskilling is an erosion of the skills necessary to maintain relationships. As with labor deskilling, social deskilling involves a radical simplification of what individuals are expected to do to fulfill their role in denoting the existence of a relationship. Social media facilitates this streamlining in the name of convenience (think friending, push-button liking, etc.). Social media commodify friendship, encourage us to consume it as though it were a quantified, reified good rather than engage in it as an ongoing practice. Social relations no longer are supposed to require reciprocal co-presence and attention; instead they are timeshifted like TV programs and consumed at each individual party's convenience. They are expected to provide novel sensations and not fall into the routine cycles of human association, the mundane frailties that drive us to seek comfort from one another.

Bauman links deskilling to the commodification of life necessitated by the "society of consumers." Because consumer goods embody our culture's values, we are driven to emulate their form and commodify ourselves to receive the kinds of recognition we are familiar with from consumer society. Once we have commodified ourselves, friendship occurs as exchanges in markets. Bauman points to online dating services as paradigmatic:

Clearly, the people turning to internet agencies for help have been pampered by the user-friendly consumer market which promises to make every choice secure and every transaction one-off and without obligation, an act with ‘no hidden costs’, ‘nothing more to pay, ever’, ‘no strings attached’, ‘no agent will call’. The side-effect (one could say, using the currently fashionable expression, the ‘collateral casualty’) of such a cosseted existence – minimizing risks, heavily reducing or abdicating responsibility and carrying an a priori neutralized subjectivity of the protagonists – has proved however to be a considerable amount of social deskilling....
Internet agencies derive most of their attraction from recasting the sought-after human partners as the kinds of commodities which well-trained consumers are used to confronting and know how to handle. The more seasoned and ‘mature’ their clients become, the more they are taken aback, confused and embarrassed when they come ‘face to face’ and discover that the looks must be reciprocated and that in ‘transactions’ they, the subjects, are also objects.

I think social media have picked up where dating services leave off (remember early social networks like Friendster were rooted in dating), subsuming as much of social experience as it can cajole its users into performing within their confines. Social media supply a structure for social experience that seems to absolve it of its necessary awkwardness. But this leaves us less equipped to deal with the inevitable friction involved in forming groups or any other social interaction, making us more reliant on technological interfaces to mask tensions and obviate the need for negotiation. This doesn't seem to bode well for political organization, let alone intimacy (the friction and tension is the substance of the relation, ultimately, not its unfortunate by-product -- meeting and accepting the reality of the consciousness of the other is difficult). It does bode well for commercial interests and intensified consumption. The explosion of online pornography and its growing acceptance is another aspect of social deskilling -- maybe what you might call sexual deskilling. The complexities and unpredictability of sexual intercourse is replaced by the rapid consumption of images in an instrumental fashion. The skills of seduction and alert sympathetic attention to the other are replaced with a passive ability to process images, attenuate visual fetishes.

Bauman is a bit mechanistic in his description of how advertising works to brainwash us into accepting this, but I think his account of commodified social relations and their emphasis on convenience over caring is otherwise apt:

As the skills needed to converse and seek understanding dwindle, what used to be a challenge to be confronted point blank and then coped with turns increasingly into a pretext for breaking off communication, for escaping and burning bridges behind you. Busy earning more for things they feel they need for happiness, men and women have less time for mutual empathy and for intense, sometimes tortuous and painful, but always lengthy and energy-consuming negotiations, let alone for a resolution of their mutual misunderstandings and disagreements. This sets in motion another vicious circle:the better they succeed in ‘materializing’ their love relationship (as the continuous flow of advertising messages prompts them to do), the fewer opportunities are left for the mutually sympathetic understanding called for by the notorious power/care ambiguity of love. Family members are tempted to avoid confrontation and seek respite (or better still a permanent shelter) from domestic infighting; and then the urge to ‘materialize’ love and loving care acquires yet more impetus, as the more time-consuming and energy consuming alternatives become ever less attainable at a time when they are more and more needed because of the steadily growing number of points of contention, grudges to be placated and disagreements clamoring for resolution.

When friendship is commodified, it becomes subject to the acceleration pressures built in to consumer-capitalist ideology: that is, it must be up-to-date, collectible, easy to use, easy to deploy as a signifier, and it must complete with all the other packaged experiences that we must consume to experience and enrich our status and enhance the fullness of our lives. Technology is often sold to us with this implicit agenda: it will allow us to consume more faster, turning experience into information that can be processed and rebroadcast for our own identity-constructing purposes. Consumerism presupposes that the purpose of life is to "experience" as many consumer goods as possible by buying them or at least by exercising our vaunted freedom of choice to select them. What matters is not the sensual experience to be derived from goods but the signifying power they have in networks to communicate our status -- how much we know and can access. At the same time, the accelerated rate of exchange (of goods and information, or increasingly, informational goods, the only sort there is) increases the circulation of goods and allows for more money to change hands and more opportunities for profits to be realized.

social currency; reputational currency obviates trust by abstracting it

2011-08-02T14:43:00.001-04:00

From this article by Eli Gothill.

Prior to the web, social assets like individuals’ reputation were stored in the collective memory of the communities they belonged to. As people within a community listen to your jokes, they begin to seek out your company more, and word gets around that you’re funny. However, if you were to move to a different place, your reputation would not come with you. Online, as reputation can now be measured in the form of social gestures, we have a way of making it explicit, publicly recorded, and therefore available more globally, albeit in different ways.

Trust becomes disembedded, fungible, abstracted. But this seems to alter the fundamentally local nature of trust as traditionally understood, opening up the concept to various subversive strategies, to possibilities of manufacturing a sort of ersatz trust that is rooted in captured online gestures but has no basis in community interaction or sustained commitment to a group's well-being. That is, it reduces the broader notion of trust (which has to do with community values being sustained) to reputation (which has to do with strictly personal goals and tactics for achieving them).

Social currency -- the term the author is using for these captured social gestures -- is a bit of a misnomer since it posits individuals who participate in collective behavior only to augment their strictly personal reputation. Individual identity is rigorously maintained in the face of groups that form, militating against the possibility of group identity or group responsibility. Basically social currency is a euphemism for personal branding, exploiting social interactions to build personal brand equity under the assumption that all social interactions are governed by a consumerist ideology and take a market-like form. In other words, when ever we have a social encounter, we meet as traders looking for a profitable exchange to enhance our brand value. The purpose of social encounters is strictly for exchange and not for any ephemeral or misconstrued pleasures that supposedly come from uninstrumentalized company-keeping.

Obviously social media encourage this kind of reputational accounting. It makes them the central banks of the new "social currency," the management of which puts them at the heart of social exchange. This allows them to broker attention (selling ads to third parties which can be interjected as the social media companies oversee social exchanges) as well as theoretically collect interchange fees for guaranteeing trust between parties. But the quantification of reputation in social media also encourages us to regard building trust as the goal of behavior rather than its by-product, a condition that upends the standard logic of social behavior. It allows trust to stand independent of relationships and casts social relations into the form of a game we play to further exogenous goals. (We have "friendships" to enhance trust scores; friendship in itself becomes apparently worthless if it's not improving our metrics.)

Reputation-measuring systems are a mode of social deskilling. Social media companies has an incentive to erode our natural skills of etiquette and social navigation so that we become more reliant on the companies to manage our awkwardness for us.

attention as currency (1)

2011-08-01T13:37:00.003-04:00

Apologies in advance for the level of abstraction in this post. Much of this is derived from Georg Franck's essay The Economy of Attention.

A good way to think about social media is to see them as producing attention as a commodity, extending the function of earlier forms of media. Media broker audiences of varying qualities, selling them off to firms that try to transmute attention into other forms of profit. Advertising is traditionally the means of exchanging attention for money, though the rate of exchange is affected obscurely by the nature of specific ads, which can attract attention on their own and are of varying effectiveness in converting attention into action, sales. Media secure measurable amounts of attention (volume of attention, nature of those paying it) and sell it to advertisers and marketers (first attention-money conversion), who then apply the attention to some advertising content in hopes that this application will lead to increased sales (second attention-money conversion). Attention is the locus of value, not the information being paid attention to. The information may inflect the value of attention but it is not the source of value. It is attention's alibi, as Baudrillard might say. Information is the medium of which attention is the content (not vice versa).

But is the value in attention merely a matter of what sort of increased sales it can lead to? Or is attention more akin to labor as a commodity -- is attention a form of exchangeable abstract labor? When attention is sold, what is sold is the ability of those paying attention to valorize what they are made to pay attention to? This may take the form of buying an advertised good, but it may also take the form of increasing the status of the objected paid attention to, enriching its potential store of symbolic meanings, etc.

Celebrity, fame, prominence have no meaning outside the media that circulates them, determines their relative amount; it doesn't refer outside the system. When it seems to, it is an illusion, or it is the fame system parasitically attaching itself to a different system for distributing recognition. To put that more clearly: the attention economy takes the value of attention for granted and treats it as abstract (it doesn't refer beyond itself to some other source for its meaning or its value). But human recognition outside of the attention economy depends on the content of what is being recognized, and does not treat that recognition as an exchange or an investment (it is not strategic, not an effort to enhance value of attention being paid).

Attention can function as a currency, measuring the worth of something in terms of how much attention is congealed (like living labor, say, in Marxist theory) in it. Attention itself is a matter of time and a matter of the quality (or prominence) of the person paying it, however, which makes it a highly variable, unstable currency, leaving unanswered the question of what makes a person paying attention more valuable than another -- is it simply a matter of how much congealed attention a particular attention-payer previously accrued and now embodies? Also, attention varies not only in time and quality of mind paying attention, but in intensity -- so it appears it may be infinitely subdivided. It can be increased in the face of limited time by making attention paid more intense, by making the person paying it more valuable (but again, by what measure?), by increasing the number of objects in the relevant field of attention. Production in this field relates directly to what may the ultimate source of economic value: human engagement.

Social media increase the amount of attention paid by people to other people, enhancing the quality/prominence of attention payers (they embody more attention) and thus increasing the value of aggregate attention pool, the amount of attention-value that can be attached to other things, can be exchanged, and so on. Social media liberate prominence from the need for particular talents -- removes the scarcity of media space within which to manufacture prominence, celebrity. Not everyone will be as famous as everyone else, but everyone can be increasing their notoriety at varying rates within social media, offering those media ongoing opportunities to sell more attention to third parties outside the vaorizing person-to-person attention exchanges. In other words, in social media we pay attention to each other, increasing the value of our attention to third parties, to whom it is sold, either as potential (we can be induced to pay attention to some third party thing in the future) or as a fait accompli (we can be sold as having paid attention to some third party thing, glamorizing it a little bit with our own prominence).

Franck defines the media business model this way, as hinging on the separation between wages paid in attention and those paid in cash. Media companies can rake in cash and pay out mainly attention. The key point, though, is that media function as a business because they produce and distribute attention, NOT information. Information production and dissemination is subordinate, inessential to media business.

Without the attention income promised by publication, not even the publishing trade would have developed in any significant way. If only material certain of commercial success had been published in books and periodicals, today's literary scene would look different from the way it does. Solely the fact that authors calculate in the currency of attention can explain their willingness to toil for the best expression of an idea in return for starvation wages. The ingeniousness of the publishing trade's business idea lies in splitting up the returns in terms of financial and attention currency. The production conditions of our literary culture are such that the publisher gets the money and the author gets the attention.

Franck claims (albeit with little substantiation) that a medium "diverts feelings of objection or reservation away from persons on to itself, the medium. Somehow it happens that we extend interest, liking and fascination to the persons who appear, but that we direct our rejection, objection, or indignation at the medium. Instead of being annoyed about the disproportion between the prominence of persons and the substance of their presentation we call television stupid." In social media this phenomenon (if it is real) would extend protection to those sharing on them, knowing that people will claim Facebook or Twitter are stupid or trivial or lame or whatever rather than remove bricks from their network to improve the general level of information.

Attention as currency reinforces atomization: attention is always a matter of exchange rather than integration; attention can be aggregated but not synthesized in being measured. We realize the value of attention in exchanging it, not merging it with others in collective focus or practice. We are maximizing its value in exchange rather than directing it as an inexhaustible flow. Attention economy metrics require alienation, self-commodification, as a prerequisite; it compensates by giving us discrete hierarchies to climb, fleeting reassurances about our progress up a status ladder.

Another important function of the attention economy is to provide a rationalization for ongoing unequal distribution of social opportunities. The distribution of attention-worthiness is unequal, and the media exacerbates this original unevenness. But social media extends the tools of attention seeking equally, making it one's own fault if one can't avail oneself of the opportunities, find hierarchies to dominate, and so on. The responsibility for risk of being at a social disadvantage is shifted to the individual (a la neoliberal ideology), absolving society and state of responsibility for addressing inequality. As Franck notes, "natural differences in talent have always been intermingled with social privileges or deprivations;" a mediated society allows those natural differences to justify and excuse the other deprivations. It rationalizes exclusion, even dignifies it. Attention economy arbitrates distinction in a seemingly fair manner, as it takes place in an apparent market, which reads in capitalist ideology as just. At same time, it requires self-commodification as a prerequisite to experiencing ontological security within society -- to know your place, know you are appreciated, you must be a commodity traded on attention market. Social media are rapidly becoming the generalized infrastructure for this. Franck:

The objectivity of the medium has such overwhelming power over human comparisons that it would seem ridiculous to react with feelings of envy or jealousy to the unjustified distribution of attention. In the media the supra-personal rules of distribution practically become a completely anonymous mechanism of which all of us are part and whose method of accounting inadvertently assumes the effectiveness of an automated payment system.

Obviously social media make this seem outdated. Attention is not distributed on them anonymously. But the larger point about the seemingly spontaneous appearance of an attention accounting system that seems inarguable is apt. Social media seem to promise us all some attention in exchange for our participation in their vast unequal system, for allowing the media to sell us according to the rank they assign us and to appropriate anything we contribute that can be repurposed. The existence of quasi-democratic social networks masks the inequalities between different configurations of the networks. We all can belong, but belonging to Facebook, say, confers uneven benefits to users. Some are net gainers, some are net losers (with respect to time invested, attention received, value and social capital extracted); Facebook, of course, always gains.

(Zygmunt Bauman stresses a similar point in Consuming Life, which I'll go through in an upcoming post.)

Within the attention economy of social media, attention signifies assent over and above whatever else we communicate in the process of paying attention. Franck argues that growth of media leads to an expansion of "reality produced to attract attention" and the epistemological corollary, that "only that which retains our attention is real." Attention becomes a truth procedure, conferring truth where we notice we have assigned it. The stakes of the attention economy are the ability to define the real; commanding greater sums of attention means that within this world you can dictate more of what will be regarded as real, as social fact.

Notes on Angela McRobbie, "Reflections On Feminism, Immaterial Labour And The Post-fordist Regime"

2011-07-16T00:15:00.000-04:00

Someone at the Postautonomia conference recommended this article by Angela McRobbie, which gives an overview of the post-Fordist/immaterial labor thesis and then examines how asymmetric gender relations fit in with it. I hope this will help correct my tendency to ignore the way the burden of neoliberal subjectivity is borne differently depending on gender -- how creative-class labor is experienced and compensated differently, and entrepreneurial opportunities are unevenly distributed; the ways in which productive consumption and affective labor have long been uncompensated or unrecognized female contributions to reproducing the existing social relations, etc.

McRobbie poses the question this way. Given post-Fordist work conditions -- the general intellect and the dissolving work-leisure divide, and all that -- individuals experience precarity as a kind of anxious freedom, a requirement to be entrepreneurial with the personal brand: "Joyful ideas of communality and even communistic sentiments are countered by a powerful regime which inculcates cynicism and opportunism, manifest in the context of the party and events culture of network sociality where self-promotional public relations holds sway." Of course, social media fits right into that diagnosis, helping administrate these requirements, permitting us to be self-promotional with less pain and shame, while naturalizing the necessity of such selling oneself out, rationalizing the self-exploitation. McRobbie asks, "How do young men and women experience distress differently in their attempts to make an independent living in these new informal fields of work?"

McRobbie notes that post-Fordist relations of production have led to a feminization of the workplace -- more women working as a result of neoliberal policy (safety net elimination), work becoming more service-oriented and communication-based (affective work traditionally performed by women), the "mancession," the centrality of tastemaking (drawing on women's traditional role as discriminating shopper), and so on all play into this. But at the same time, though this provides more opportunities for women, the freelance precarious nature of the work means the weakening of institutional protections against harassment and discrimination.

as both Gill and Scharff point out, the informal conventions of network sociality in fact negate the relevance of legal entitlements associated with ‘normal work’. This makes it difficult for questions about sexism or racism to be raised. Instead there is a privatisation of grievances or, as Scharff argues, young women begin to see sexism as simply another obstacle which, by sheer grit and determination, they must be able to overcome individually. Nothing, she claims, is more ‘uncool’ than appearing to be a feminist in these workplaces. It is this same privatised and deeply individualised culture which gives rise to intense forms of mental stress, breakdown and dependence on drugs or alcohol.

These are the realities of the neoliberal risk shift, which are perhaps more ambivalent for women experiencing new economic opportunities. Successful women can end up being allied with neoliberalism against its left critics, against the less fortunate among the so-called precariat.

Criticizing naive optimistic takes on the rise of the entrepreneurial self, McRobbie suggests that left critics, for example, pay "more attention to the role of female models and the image industry in the creation in the last two decades of the feminised and hyper-sexualised consumer culture." Through this we might see "the pivotal place of (mostly young) women as consumers and producers in the global corporations of the fashion and beauty complex." That is to say women are instrumental in creating and circulating the symbolic meanings that enhance the value of goods. As sexualized objects whose images are themselves trafficked, they are the medium of circulation as well as a circulating agent.

With women's role in creating value becoming more formalized in the economy, moving beyond unwaged domestic carework and consumption, a political opportunity emerges for women, which in turn generates new countermeasures.

Where women’s centrality to contemporary production could mark out the contours of a new form of gender power, this political potential is decisively pre-empted by the intense forms of biopolitical governmentality which constantly address women and their bodies (through media and magazines in particular) so that earning power is inextricably tied up with consumer culture and the promises of personal satisfactions therein.

McRobbie doesn't say this, but perhaps women's economic and creative power ends up being bound up with their value as a gendered, sexualized object -- in beauty and charisma that is inherently precarious, at the mercy of time's ravages and male judgment. The power is circumscribed and redirected toward personal beauty achievements -- becoming a better, more revered object rather than expanding power and autonomy.

McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

2011-07-05T20:32:00.000-04:00

I recently read McLuhan's Understanding Media, and I underlined a few things. Most of the book seemed pretty obvious or uselessly hyperbolic or needless obscurantist, with unnecessary and obfuscatory neologisms. The general gist is that print media support individualism and economistic rationality: "If Western literate man undergoes much dissociation of inner sensibility from his use of the alphabet, he also wins his personal freedom to dissociate himself from clan and family" (88). Literacy in his view makes capitalist-style consumer markets possible: "Nonliterate societies are quite lacking in the psychic resources to create and sustain the enormous structures of statistical information that we call markets and prices.... The extreme abstraction and detachment represented by our pricing system is quite unthinkable and unusable amidst populations for whom the exciting drama of price haggling occurs with every transaction" (137). This ties in to the idea that humans must learn to be rational in an economic sense; that such calculation is not inherent but socially constructed. Capitalist society equips us with this form of reason during the process of subjectivation.

But the atomized, anonymized individuals of the literate world are prone to anomie, to being "massified." Whereas subsequent media (more immersive and real-time; accelerated) are returning culture dialectically to a more "tribal" orientation -- the "global village." We collectively try to defeat time by pursuing the instantaneousness of new media; this speed, this accelerated transience begins to undo economism in favor of some new collectivity. "Fragmented, literate and visual individualism is not possible in an electrically patterned and imploded society" (51). So it's obvious why the P2P types and the technoutopian futurists are attracted to McLuhan, who more or less established their rhetorical mode. But McLuhan occasionally issues some warnings about the mediated future as well. This, for example, seems like a prescient critique of the attention economy and recommendation engines:

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.(68)

And later he writes, "The avid desire of mankind to prostitue istself stands up against the chaos of revolution" (189). In other words, technology will be commercialized rather than subversive of authority.

But throughout the book, McLuhan doesn't really build arguments; he just piles on assertions and makes plausible sounding speculations -- kind of what I do, I guess. Below are a few of the assertions that struck me as worth considering further.

McLuhan claims that "the effect of electric technology had at first been anxiety. Now it appears to create boredom" (26). That is, it exacerbates the paradoxes of choice, encourages us to suspend decision making for as long as possible, since switching among a newly vast array of alternatives appears easy. But such suspension, such switching may have hidden cognitive costs, may contribute to ego depletion. He points out how technology tends to accelerate exchange, noting that, for example, "by coordinating and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange." This seems to be a structural fit with capitalism's need to maximize exchange to maximize opportunities to realize profit. Photographs, too, create a world of "accelerated transience" (196).

McLuhan notes that certain technologies seeks to make self-service labor possible, eliminating service requirements and prompting us to take on more responsibility for ourselves as a form of progress (36). He also predicts the rise of immaterial labor, as "commodities themselves assume more and more the character of information" -- they become signifiers, bearers of design distinctions and lifestyle accents. "As electric information levels rise, almost any kind of material will serve any kind of need or function, forcing the intellectual more and more into the role of social command and into the service of production." Hence the rise of the "creative class" and the importance of social production, building brands and meanings and distributing them authoritatively. Manufacturing becomes a pretense for information, where the real profit margins are:

At the end of the mechanical age people still imagined that press and radio and even TV were merely forms of information paid for by the makers and users of "hardware," like cars and soap and gasoline. As automation takes hold, it becomes obvious that information is the crucial commodity, and that solid products are merely incidental to information movement. The early stages by which information itself became the basic economic commodity of the electric age were obscured by the ways in which advertising and entertainment put people off the track. Advertisers pay for space and time in paper and magazine, on radio and TV; that is, they buy a piece of the reader, listener, or viewer as definitely as if they hired our homes for a public meeting. They would gladly pay the reader, listener, or viewer directly for his time and attention if they knew how to do so. The only way so far devised is to put on a free show. Movies in America have not developed advertising intervals simply because the movie itself is the greatest of all forms of advertisement for consumer goods.

McLuhan insists that "the product matters less as the audience participation increases" -- that is because that participation is the product, the manfactured good, the pretense. "Any acceptable ad is a vigorous dramatization of communal experience," McLuhan claims (228); by this I think he might mean that ads plunge us into visceral experience of what Baudrillare calls the "code" of consumerism. McLuhan asserts that ads draw us into neo-tribal experiences of collectivity; I think this claim is undermined by the rise of personalization and design ideology. We collectively participate in the idea of customizing our consumer goods, but finding a unique angle on this common culture is the main avenue for hipster distinction.

I really wanted to get a lot out of the chapter "The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis" -- media allows people to be stupefied by their own self-creation and closes them off from experience and other people, leaving only gadgets that make the self. That's what I hoped McLuhan would write, anyway. Instead the chapter goes in some weird physiological directions to substantiate his ideas that media are "extensions of man" that cause "numbness" and lead to "autoamputation." I had a hard time understanding any of this in these terms, but I think McLuhan is basically right when he asserts that the more media there are in our lives, the more we need to be able to numb ourselves to what those media allow us to ingest. As a result, McLuhan suggests, we develop methods for strategic apathy. But if someone can explain to me what "In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin" means, I'd be much obliged (47).

In the last chapter, McLuhan says this of the future of work:

The future of work consists of earning a living in the automation age. This is a familiar pattern in electric technology in general. It ends the old dichotomies between culture and technology, between art and commerce, and between work and leisure. Whereas in the mechanical age of fragmentation leisure had been the absence of work, or mere idleness, the reverse is true in the electric age. As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved, very much as with the artists in all ages.

This sounds a lot like the autonomist idea of the general intellect, which kicks in after automation becomes standard in industry. (McLuhan's way of putting it: "Many people, in consequence, have begun to look on the whole of society as a single unified machine for creating wealth.... With electricity as energizer and synchronizer, all aspects of production, consumption, and organization become incidental to communications." McLuhan suggests that the only profession of the future will be teacher. We will be all teaching each other new ways to please and divert ourselves, new ways to want more things. Learning itself becomes "the principal form of production and consumption" (351). When the alleged structural unemployment subsides, this is the sort of service economy we will be left with -- the full flowering of communicative capitalism. We are consigned by automation to industrialized, mass-produced individuality that we must never stop blathering about.

Alice Marwick's "Status Update" (chapters 1-4)

2011-06-17T18:17:00.001-04:00

From Alice Marwick's dissertation,"STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB 2.0." (pdf) As the title makes obvious, this is very pertinent to the line of thinking I have been developing lately, that social media is essentially a self-branding platform and as such a pillar of support for neoliberal enterpreneurial subjectivity (as Foucault lays it out in the 1977-79 lectures). It supplies the compensatory salve for subjects who must assume increasing amounts of risk under neoliberalism and post-Fordism; it transmutes ontological insecurity into pleasurable sharing while habituating users to perpetual reflexivity and strategic identity development in media (in lieu of direct and spontaneous access to life experience).

I'm going to read through Marwick's paper and cull interesting bits, then paste them below with any commentary I think they warrant.

1.

I aim to bring to light some of what the predominant discourse of Web 2.0 has obscured: social media‘s physical and contextual location in a particular entrepreneurial techno-culture of Northern California. This is a highly commercial milieu which draws partly from a rich history of Silicon Valley technology development, valorizing the young entrepreneur, the possibility of massive wealth, and self-actualization through constant labor. These capitalist, status-conscious values have influenced the affordances of contemporary social media, and how they are perceived and used.(4) ... The specific modes of status building enabled through social media (that is, life-streaming, micro-celebrity, and self-branding) are not accidental but, rather, are afforded by the design characteristics of the technical foundations of social media (5)

This reminds me a bit of Adam Curtis's argument in the first installment of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: embedded in technology is the libertarian biases of start-up founders, and this technology in turn socializes users into an extremist ideology of individualism. I accept this interpretation to a degree but am wary (believe it or not) of lapsing into a conspiratorial view. I don't think neoliberalist viewpoints are limited to Silicon Valley; I think they are pervasive in U.S. society and are merely reflected in venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. But the defaults of social media have been shaped by the Silicon Valley outlook that presumes sharing, no privacy, perpetual work, etc. as norms and not radical innovations to norms. Yet my intuitive feeling is that the users of social media services have not found off-label uses to counter these biases, and have in general extended them.

2.

Social media promotes an individualistic view of technology use which encourages and rewards focus on the self and competition with others in a process similar to the mythology of an unfettered free market. Self-presentation becomes a strategic way to display and garner status, and tangibly translates into material rewards.(10)

Marwick rightly asks why it turned out this way; that is, why didn't the internet dissolve individualism and give way to collective identity or multifarious identity as many anticipated? Is it because social media evolved to facilitate ego surfing and keeping score in various ways (number of likes, friends, followers, comments, retweets, etc.)? Or was it assimilated to capitalistic social relations, which inculcate individualism as "reality" and collectivity as "virtual" or utopian or inherently unreal? That is, the designers of social media would have needed to build anti-capitalist bias into the services they made in order to stave off this assimilation to capitalist ideology and market rationality; instead they had already embraced that rationality and designed their services to reproduce that ideology in the new social spaces generated by internet connectivity.

3. "Social media‘s accessibility has transformed celebrity from something a person is to something a person does, and exists on a continuum rather than as a singular quality" (13).
Celebrity no longer has to do with achieved levels of fame; it is a set of online practices that fosters the illusion of fame, permits fantasizing about fame, intensifies the vicarious pleasures of identifying with the genuinely famous. In other words, "celebrity," as Marwick is using it, refers to the ways in which social-media users act as though they are being followed as intensely as they themselves may follow real celebrities. Or does this mean that celebrity is a matter of consciously using social media to promote oneself as someone worth following, adopting whatever tactics happen to be attracting attention at a given time online? Maybe what is at stake here is the pseudo-democratizaton of fame, which masquerades as a right rather than an accomplishment in the ways social-media companies promote their services.

4.

Although Web 2.0 discourse positions self-branding as a way to find personal fulfillment and economic success, it explicitly instructs people to inculcate a self-conscious persona which positions self-promotion, visibility, and comfort with idioms of advertising and commercialism as positive, high-status virtues. A successful self-brander is a tireless self-promoter who focuses entirely on work. I argue that this persona is an edited self, requiring emotional labor to maintain a business-friendly self-presentation despite the advocacy of transparency and openness by social media culture. This self-monitoring can be quite stressful for its practitioners. Although the type of freelance project-based culture that is optimal for self-branding can be creatively fulfilling, the difficulty in continuous self-monitoring demonstrates the disconnect between neoliberal ideals of identity as self-regulating, entrepreneurial, enterprising, and responsible, and the reality of day-to-day life. Successful self-branding is possible only for a few, yet advocates position it as a universal solution to the structural problems of neoliberal work conditions.(16)

I like the emphasis on the emotional work of self-branding, which tends to vanish in pro-self-branding discourse. Self-exploitation requires as much "carework" as any other service position, except one performs the affective labor on oneself. Because one experiences much more insecurity and instability, one has to treat oneself much better and with much more deliberation, which requires time and money and probably more time and attention from others. Later Marwick coins a term for it:

I introduce the concept of immaterial emotional labor to describe the practices that people go through to create and promote this self, which involves creating and establishing relationships with others, revealing vulnerable information in a performance of authenticity, and complete identification with the enterprise subject (58).

5. "While authenticity is held up as a virtue, social media encourages highly constructed and edited forms of self-presentation that are carefully created to boost popularity and gain status without alienating potential customers (19)." Yes. Authenticity is the product being peddled on social media. Not a means to exposing actual authenticity, but a discourse for constituting it as a commodity.

6. "aspirational production is the production of cultural content in an attempt to claim a certain status position." I think that is a useful phrase for describing the compulsion to share in social media. Here's how Marwick defines it:

The aspirational producer is a social media user who creates content portraying themselves in a high-status light, whether that be as a beautiful fashionista, a celebrity with thousands of fans, or a cutting-edge comedian. Aspirational production positions the creator to be discovered, either by amassing a huge number of fans or by gaining legitimacy from mainstream media. Therefore, the content produced by aspirational production can be said to have a particular goal: increased status and popularity.

It seems to me the emphasis on status here is a bit misleading; I think it's more important to recognize this as an attitude toward cultural production, a reorientation of the reasons for creating something away from expression and toward manipulation/strategy. Expression becomes wholly self-presentation ratehr than older traditions of artists as self-abnegating, as embodying "negative capability" as Keats put it. Marwick argues that aspirational production is "about coveting the types of attention given to celebrities," but I wonder if the concept is more useful as a description of an aspiration to be able to count oneself among the "creative class" -- to be socially recognized as being able to make clever things (memes, quirky crafts, etc.)

7. "I frame self-branding as a neoliberal fantasy of how social media could best be used." Calling it a fantasy is interesting, highlighting the counterhegemonic ways social media can be used. But I think social media's architecture realizes the fantasy, and it takes concerted resistance to engage with social media without adopting/conforming to self-branding ideology.

8. This is a summation of the general conclusions Marwick draws, most of which highlight the doubleness of social media. They offer tangible benefits that encourage one welcome interpellation on neoliberalist terms. Less cryptically; social media make buying into the system of neoliberaism (the free-agent nation and the governmental policy that secures it) more appealing without mitigating it:

A verifiable identity makes it possible to leverage status across websites, but it also makes it simple to track people as they move around the web. A strong self-brand is a self-regulating mechanism that functions as a response to economic uncertainties. And while the social information created and shared through social media strengthens social ties, it does so in a limited way. ―Authenticity‖ and ―being yourself‖ become self-marketing strategies that encourage instrumental emotional labor. Social media furthers an individualistic, competitive notion of identity that encourages individual status-seeking over collective action or openness (60).

9. Good definition of Web 2.0 as an ideology rather than a technological development:

Web 2.0 is more accurately described as a set of applications and general philosophy of information and technology than a technical development. This philosophy espouses transparency, openness, creativity, participation, and freedom. It holds that if you allow people to collaborate and create their own content—writing, news reporting, entertainment, music, videos—the grassroots results will be superior to those produced by mainstream media or any centralized organization: more diverse and less subject to interference from corporate interests. Social media is said to facilitate activism, direct interaction with corporations and governments, and creative forms of protest. The discourse of Web 2.0 celebrates individual use of the raw material of popular culture for self-expression, and frowns upon attempts by large corporations or media conglomerates to rein in this creativity (86).

10. One of Marwick's key arguments is that the culture and ideology of Silicon Valley -- particularly its post-Fordist/New Economy way of structuring work -- is reproduced in Web 2.0 application; written into its DNA as the cliche goes.

much of the culture pioneered by dot-com companies, itself massively influenced by the work culture of Silicon Valley, persisted into the social media era: flexibility, entrepreneurial labor models, creativity, self-actualization through work, and the bootstrapped startup are all common to both. (118)

Later she uses "value in design" theory to talk about the "affordances" of particular technologies. Hence: "Twitter affords status display in three different ways: follower numbers, re-tweets, and @replies" (207).

11. Another good succinct definition: "the concept of micro-celebrity, a way of thinking about the self as a persona presented to an audience of 'fans' " (219). The point is not the actual accomplishment of fame but the way one presents oneself as though others are an audience rather than peers. Only people at the margins thought of themselves in these terms before the Internet become ubiquitous. Celebrity is, as Marwick emphasizes, a practice, not a condition.

Micro-celebrity can be understood as a mindset and set of practices in which one‘s online contacts are constructed as an audience or fan base, popularity is maintained through ongoing fan management, and self-presentation is carefully assembled to be consumed by others. These practices are intimately connected to social media. (230)

Commons as contentless

2011-05-31T19:52:00.000-04:00

From an essay by Evan Calder Williams called "A Fire to the Commons," a critique of (among other things) "the thought that 'the commons' constitute a rupture in the reproduction and circulation of value (that is, that they are disruptive or 'unthinkable' for capital)".

The crucial point is that even that which can't be capital isn’t so because of an essence or property of its own, because of a fundamentally “uncapitalizable” content: if it had anything so unique, capital would be sure to find a way to make use of it. It is what simply doesn't compute in this relation, the material of the contradiction thrown to the side, the slag of the dialectic, what Adorno would call the “non-identical.”

The implication seems to be that "commons" are not an alternative to capital but are already implicated in reproducing capital as a social relation, in letting capitalism's organization of work and efficiency and precarity and so on persist. It doesn't do away with the abstractions involved with a capitalistic conception of work. So there is no going backward to pre-capitalist commons; instead, we must go through the different sort of common that capitalism generates -- that of "general equivalence" without specific content: "The full subsumption of experience to the law of equivalence, accelerated all the more during a period of the 'socialization of labor,' therefore produces with it a hollow identity that defines man, an echo chamber of value with itself." Subjectivity is conditioned as "labor capacity" -- we have in common the reduction to flexible employability, blank potentiality, something analogous to floating signifers.

What is common across us, the reserve of common ground to which those “without-reserves” could turn, the site on which the universal class begins, is nothing but the rendering of all things as formally common to each other (belonging to none, able to be endlessly circulated and reproduced) and of ourselves as the grounding unit of that dissolution of particular content.

I'm still not sure what to make of this, but for some reason it was bound up in my mind with critiques of meritocracy and various versions of the "crisis in value." The "value" of capital is not in its objective usefulness but in the social relations in reproduces -- the division of society's resources it sanctions. It enables an organization of work as exploitation under the ideology that not nearly as much would get done otherwise.

China and industrial policy

2011-05-18T05:33:00.000-04:00

From this post at Naked Capitalism, about a paper (pdf) by Andrew Haldane and Richard Davies of the Bank of England. They find that myopic short-term investing is worsening, with "excessive discounting" over longer time frames. Yves Smith notes, "The result is that projects with long-term payback, beyond the 30 to 35 year timeframe, are treated as having no value. No wonder we don’t fund basic science, infrastructure, or climate change related projects."

Then she adds this point about China:

The irony is that China, with its command economy, is more willing to make long-term investments than capitalist economics which rely on the supposedly superior wisdom of having the capital markets play a dominant role in the pricing of risk funding. Now I’m of the school that China will likely have a bad stumble; there’s ample evidence that its unprecedented level of investment, which is fueled by lending, is scoring lower and lower returns. But the West’s short-sightedness increases the odds that this massive gamble might work out pretty well by moving into the type of projects that myopic capitalists are unwilling to take on.

Don't have much to say about this but found it interesting. Presumably the cold war prevented this dynamic from coming into being back when the Soviets were running a massive command economy; China also amasses western capital for command-directed investment from having a sector that caters to short-termism in the west by offering cheap labor (at least I suspect those are connected, but I lack the time and knowledge to articulate it right now). Western consumerism undermines Chinese infrastructure, while Chinese consumerism is deliberately restrained by policy and ideology. Politician in the US already regard Chinese prosperity as inherently threatening to American interests. How long can this go on before a Cold War dynamic re-emerges in earnest?

Reality TV and social media

2011-05-11T16:02:00.000-04:00

I was excited to see that Kelefa Sanneh's review article on Reality TV books in the New Yorker cites Mark Andrejevic, whose work I had just been reading recently. Sanneh cites Andrejevic's book Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (which you can find on aaaaarg.org if you are so inclined) and quotes this passage:

The Illinois housewife who agrees to move into a house where her every move can be watched by millions of strangers to compete for a cash prize exhibits more than an incidental similarity (albeit on a different scale) to the computer user who allows Yahoo to monitor her web-browsing habits in exchange for access to a free e-mail account.

This is, of course, true of social-networking sites as well. His point is that reality TV is entertainment suited for a lateral-surveillance society in which the people's conduct in everyday life can be transformed into a valuable source of innovation and marketing data.

Work and leisure are thus no longer separable, much like reality and the fakery of mediated entertainment. Sanneh summarizes:

Similarly, the “Real Housewives” shows, despite the name, feature very few actual housewives and lots of working women (not all wives or mothers), every one of them eager to sacrifice time, not to mention privacy, for a small payment and a less small portion of notoriety. This is the opposite of leisure, and it may also be a sign of the end of leisure -- the end, that is, of our ability to spend long stretches happily engaged in non-work.

We can't avoid being conscious of how what we are doing might be rebroadcast, and that it might be valuable or damaging to our reputation in some measurable way. So must professionalize increasing amounts of our everyday life, in the sense of being reflexive about how it might be consumed by others once it's mediated.

I thought Sanneh went astray when asserting that "There is no longer any need for surveillance," unless the point is that we've become completely accustomed to living in a surveilence society and don't need it dramatized and naturalized on TV anymore.

Paolo Virno's "Notes on the 'General Intellect' "

2011-05-10T19:16:00.000-04:00

In Marxism Beyond Marxism, Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, Rebecca Karl, Eds.

Virno ruminates over the significance of Marx's Fragment on Machines, from Grundrisse. He focuses on the notion of "general intellect" and what that implies about the productivity inherent in subjectivation. The general intellect, or mass intellectuality, Virno writes, can be found "in different functions within labor, but above all at the level of metropolitan habits, in linguistic usages, in cultural consumption." Sounds like he is talking about creative-class hipsters to me, regarding them as paradigmatic for all of the laboring class as old-school "hard labor" moves offshore. "Nonetheless," he continues, "it is precisely when production no longer seems to offer an identity that it projects itself onto each and every aspect of experience, that it beats into submission linguistic abilities, ethical propensities, and the nuances of subjectivity." So thanks to the general intellect's role in production, you can't use language (or do anything else in "everyday life" or "at leisure") without it being a kind of expropriatable labor. The general intellect "constitutes the fundamental component of contemporary capitalist accumulation" -- presumably in the sense of generating marketable data, commodified meanings, experiences, affects, enriched by contextual links supplied by individual consumers.

I don't quite follow the argument, but he argues that the general intellect constitutes a different "real abstraction" from the ones that previously dominated capitalism, namely money, which instantiates a principle of commensurability. As the general intellect comes to govern production, the equivalence principle is lost: "it prevents any unified representation of the productive social process; it capsizes the very foundations of political representation." This prompts, according to Virno, contemporary cynicism, which "relinquishes right away the search for an intersubjective foundation to its praxis, just as it also relinquishes the demand for a common criterion of moral evaluation." I think what he is getting at here is the way individual identity in its specificity has become productive, and this undermines the formation of a disgruntled class who can agitate for change in work conditions. Instead everyone is isolated in their particularity and goes along with existing work conditions in a sort of bad faith. But that is honestly just a guess. The idea makes more sense to me if I think about market anonymity and consumption rather than equivalence of productive labor. (Everything consumed is attached to a unique and discrete individual identity and used to place that individual within social relations.)

This is what strikes me as the key passage:

The collapse of the principle of equivalence, which is so intimately linked to exchange and the commodity form, manifests itself in the behavior of the cynic as a renunciation "without sorrow" of the possibility of equality to the very point that self-affirmation will take place precisely through the multiplying and making fluid of hierarchies and inequalities.

That is, cynics accept as inevitable the desperate scramble for a status hierarchy they can dominate and embrace social forms that mobilize hierarchies and offer new grounds in which to compete with other isolated individuals in zero-sum status games. The general intellect is the sum of these competitions, as opposed to some manifestation of a collective spirit through a collectivized subject. In other words the prevalence of the general intellect in late capitalism doesn't imply that it is producing a collective subject that will overthrow it. Worse, under this general condition, we form our identities precisely to be competitive; our subjectivity is conditioned by a need to dominate a niche. (Kind of like picking a specialization in graduate school.) We "affirm" ourselves through inequality, which makes political aspirations of reducing inequality always already hypocritical or at least open to suspicion. The burden of proof is never on the cynics.

Responsibilization

2011-05-03T00:50:00.000-04:00

Not the most euphonious word, but gets at a key aspect of neoliberal subjectivity -- getting people to recognize risk throughout everyday life and assume responsibility for managing it themselves, without help from the state, employers, or the community, but entirely by their own wiles through the help of the market (consumer purchasing power and advertising-assisted savviness) and technology. Mark Andrejevic, in his paper "The Work of Watching One Another: Lateral Surveillance, Risk, and Governance" (pdf), brings it together in the conclusion (after discussing some now outdated approaches to peer-to-peer surveillance that have been entirely supplanted by social media and its cult of positivity):

The dissemination of surveillance tools and practices has to be read alongside a climate of generalized, redoubled risk. The conjunction of risk and responsibility derives from another intersection: that of reflexive skepticism with the participatory promise of the market -- the injunction not to trust in discredited social institutions and traditional practices, but to take matters into one’s own hands through the mechanism that has helped corrode them. Management of family, optimization of personal relationships, and maximization of one’s own productivity are modeled on the enterprise model: maximized outcomes, enhance productivity, reduce risk. The market is promulgated as the anti-institutional institution, a big Other that relies neither on faith or tradition, but solely on the intersection and exchange of self-interest. As such, it inoculates itself against savvy critique, conceding before the fact the subterranean agendas revealed by every deconstructive gesture.

The point is that social media allows us to spy on each other, and thus fits the sort of DIY aspect of neoliberal subjectivity -- the part that also fits with the "personal brand" (the enterprise model) and with Žižek's idea of lost "symbolic efficiency" (the loss of trust in communication because of its decontextualization, etc.) and the prevalence of cynicism as an everyday affect, as a street-smart wisdom that thinks it sees through the culture but actually serves it and suits it perfectly. We rely on our ability to get to the bottom of things and think that serves us better than regulation, collectivity, community standards being enforced, etc. The pseudo-community of social media allows us to feel we can draw on a huge wealth of information while participating in social life at our own convenience, controlling it to our advantage as a way of managing risk without having to make any compromises or sacrifices to uphold/participate in communal values.

Surveillance and the shop window

2011-04-26T22:18:00.000-04:00

Another social media surveillance paper, "Deconstructing Bentham’s Panopticon: The New Metaphors
of Surveillance in the Web 2.0 Environment," by Manuela Farinosi (pdf) (via E. Morozov on Twitter).

This paper reports the findings from research into how Italian students conceive of social media and the sorts of metaphors they rely on to understand it. The "shop window" metaphor is prominent, according to the author, which fits my ideas about social media being primarily a space for a particular sort of self-display, which changes subjectivity.

Its communicative logic is primarily based on showing something to other people’s gaze. Its transparency has the capacity to create relationships and put the inside in touch with the outside of the shop. Nowadays the shop-window’s logic is spreading and is reaching out to the whole of society and people are virtually forced to live in a showcase (Codeluppi, 2007). The window’s visibility involves living in the middle between the private and public dimension. Online profiles can be read as full-blown virtual shop-windows, as a tool of self-promotion. The visibility of the shop-window entails the exposition of what is personal and therefore to learn how to build and manage personal identity is becoming one of the essential steps in order to live in web 2.0 environments.

This concept fits naturally with the metaphor of social media space as a theatrical stage. This feeling of being onstage becomes difficult to escape and eventually one is struck with the nagging feeling of having forgotten one's lines. No one gets to exit the stage, but must go on improvising.

The author's main point is that these are not top-down modes of control being reflected in the metaphors; social media is not experienced as "panoptic." Instead there is "participatory surveillance," which mitigates spying or makes it much worse depending on how you interpret it.

The horizontal control developed inside the web 2.0 environments
can be potentially empowering, unlike the panoptic visibility. It can represent one of the
key-elements for community building and online participation (Albrechtslund, 2008). Obviously, the
impacts of this continuous life sharing and the effects on offline life should not be underestimated, and it is necessary always keep in mind the possible risks associated with overexposure.

I tend to think of "horizontal control" as a way of inducing us to spy on another to generate useful marketing data while making it excusable, acceptable. Participation disguises the emptying out of privacy.

Self-surveillance, economism, the flux of embedded values in markets

2011-04-26T16:10:00.000-04:00

I have been reading a few papers lately about online social networking and surveillance. One of which, "Web 2.0, Prosumption, and Surveillance" by Christian Fuchs (pdf), was the impetus for the Arvidsson paper I wrote about before (a critique of Fuchs that I found convincing a priori).

Fuchs's paper spends a great deal of space rehashing doctrinaire Marxist positions on the labor theory of value and includes one of the most confusing charts I have ever seen outside a Lacan text.

The main things I took away from the paper was a useful tech-jargon phrase ("architecture of participation") and a tangential point about Marx's "critique of value" consisting in part of the forms value takes within a capitalist system. Ideology, practices, institutions, etc. combine to make value appear and become measurable only in certain ways, regardless of what the transcendental source of value qua value happens to be (which may ultimately be a theological question). You could read Marx as arguing that capitalism makes value appear only in commodity forms, which leads to the commercialization of everything, the subsumption of all forms of labor to capital, to the cash nexus absorbing and dictating more and more forms of human interaction. Value may be other than utility, but our social structure is such that we understand it mainly as a quantity to be maximized rather than, say, a condition or a set of harmonious and stable relations or whatever. It requires an increasing amount of active resistance on the part of individual subjects to think of value in alternative ways.

This is ultimately an ideological rather than an economic point, though mainstream economics is a discourse that rationalizes and supports the ideology, enshrines it as essential common sense and an infallible guide to policy. It becomes difficult to think "validly" outside of economism.

Fuchs also cites Mark Andrejevic's idea of the "digital enclosure" and his point about interactive technologies "generating feedback about the transactions themselves" -- which is to say the context and conditions of market practices are captured as a new kind of commodity even as the exchange is being facilitated. I find that extremely relevant but am still trying to figure out the arguments to express why. (Fuchs, alas, was not helpful on this front.) Technology becomes an engine for generating data about exchanges, which reshape the conditions of exchange themselves and the underlying social values embedded there. They change the bases of markets and the expectations market actors have about fairness, timeliness, credit, exploitation, boundaries to what can be commercialized, the way personal/private life should factor into economic decisions, etc. I guess that is why the word feedback jumped out at me; perhaps this is obvious, but the internet and data-driven commerce is reshaping the conditions of exchange in ways that ripple out into moral values (or alter the contours of subjectivity generally in a market-saturated society), and the process gains more momentum as it feeds on itself. It's not automatically bad (nor automatically good). But some reflexivity and feedback that can come from sustained critical attention seems like a good idea to counterbalance the uncritical embrace of the commercialized "social layer" that tech enthusiasts and business interests advocate.

But the main thrust of Fuchs's paper has to do with "prosumerism" -- an awful term dervied from futurist Alvin Toffler and which should be 86'd -- as a form of exploitation. I suppose I take that as sort of given, and don't especially want it translated opaquely into Marxist terms, where the critique seems to serve the agenda of "proving Marx right" rather than curbing the exploitation by changing people's minds about it. There is an important case to be made about the online medium being no less one-way that earlier mass mediums; that social media is, as Thomas Mathiesen (whom Fuchs cites) argued,

characterised by a one-way flow, from the relatively few in control of economic capital, symbolic capital and technical know-how, to the many who are entertained or who buy the products” and are thereby silenced.

The internet is a "system of silencing" no less than it is a prompt for a cacophonous babble of data and information. The power inheres not simply in the ability to broadcast but in controlling the means of filtering, of aggregating, of implementing huge data sets and integrating their implications with other lines of business outside media.

"Surveillance" is this context is basically another way of describing corporate data capture and attention brokering. Fuchs makes the point that users of Facebook, etc., "are double objects of commodification: they are commodities themselves, and through this commodification their consciousness becomes permanently exposed to commodity logic while they are online in the form of advertisements." I read that as getting at how online presence shapes self-consciousness, saturating us with awareness of the commercial potential of our activities. We become fatally aware of how we can sell ourselves, and thus intensify self-marketing practices. This leads to "self-surveillance" -- a grimmer way of describing online self-fashioning, or identity construction within social networks' interfaces.

More on that to come --

found on sticky note

2011-04-15T19:24:00.000-04:00

"frightening" growth of commodities that capitalism engenders -- recurrent problem for subjects within capitalism -- Marx's opening paragraph.

Can't tell why I wrote this, but it fits with my general concern with "overload" and capitalist subjectivity. Have been preoccupied lately with this idea of the instability of capitalist subjectivity, the many ways in which the contradictions inherent in a particular moment in time in socioeconomic history reveal themselves in problems for the subject, who internalizes them, holds himself responsible, works to solve them psychologically. Under neoliberalism and an expanding regime of immaterial labor, we have this sense of profusion and exhaustion, of the "fun morality" and freedom as a kind of drowning in culture.

Not sure what work of Marx's I was referring to -- probably Capital Vol. 1.

Think the solution for subjectivity being offered now comes through social media and its filtering mechanisms and its ability to make our lives coherent on the rationalistic principles of branding and self-promotion. At least its an ethos, in the face of the lived experience of entropic anomie. .

Fun morality

2011-04-06T15:14:00.000-04:00

From Jean Baudrillard's The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Baudrillard argues for the productive function of consumption, which makes consuming more or less mandatory within the consumerist system. "The order of production does not `capture' the order of enjoyment (strictly speaking, such an idea is meaningless) for its own ends. It denies the order of enjoyment and supplants it, while reorganizing everything into a system of productive forces."

I'm always arguing that social media (which capitalism ultimately needs more than we do) has made this dynamic more explicit and makes it harder for us to swallow the ideological alibis for consumption, which has more to do with producing status and signifiers than yielding direct personal satisfaction. In other words, consuming doesn't let us experience private pleasure, it binds us in a system of communication but forces us to speak of ourselves and identity as an alienated thing -- an object about which economic calculations are constantly being made. That is to say, consumerism allows capital to subsume the personal-identity-making process, creates "structural penury" at the experiential level.

Baudrillard connects this with the imperative to accumulate, the growth economy:

Because the system produces only for its own needs, it is all the readier systematically to hide behind the alibi of individual needs. Hence the gigantic growth of private consumption by comparison with public services (Galbraith). This is no accident. The cult of individual spontaneity and the naturalness of needs is, by its nature, father to the productivist option. Even the most `rational' needs (education, culture, health, transport, leisure), cut off from their real collective significance, are taken up, in the same way as the incidental needs deriving from growth, into the systematic future perspectives of that growth.

Here's the key graf where he defines one of my favorite crutch phrases, "fun morality":

There is no question for the consumer, for the modern citizen, of evading this enforced happiness and enjoyment, which is the equivalent in the new ethics of the traditional imperative to labour and produce. Modern man spends less and less of his life in production within work and more and more of it in the production and continual innovation of his own needs and well-being. He must constantly see to it that all his potentialities, all his consumer capacities are mobilized. If he forgets to do so, he will be gently and insistently reminded that he has no right not to be happy. It is not, then, true that he is passive. He is engaged in -- has to engage in -- continual activity. If not, he would run the risk of being content with what he has and becoming asocial.

Hence the revival of a universal curiosity (a concept to be explored further) in respect of cookery, culture, science, religion, sexuality, etc. `Try Jesus!' runs an American slogan. You have to try everything, for consumerist man is haunted by the fear of `missing' something, some form of enjoyment or other. You never know whether a particular encounter, a particular experience (Christmas in the Canaries, eel in whisky, the Prado, LSD, Japanese-style love-making) will not elicit some `sensation'. It is no longer desire, or even `taste', or a specific inclination that are at stake, but a generalized curiosity, driven by a vague sense of unease -- it is the `fun morality' or the imperative to enjoy oneself, to exploit to the full one's potential for thrills, pleasure or gratification.

I like the "invention of curiosity" angle in that; not autonomous but determined by socioeconomic relations. Novelty is not an intrinsic desire then (as evo-psych likes to imagine) but a structural product of the economy, something we recognize we must have for our economic survival

Under the sway of Galbraith's ideas about administered capitalism, Baudrillard writes, "We may therefore predict that the heyday of the system of individualist values is just around the corner, that system whose centre of gravity is currently shifting from the individual entrepreneur and saver, those figureheads of competitive capitalism, to the individual consumer, broadening out at the same time to the totality of individuals -- keeping step in this regard with the extension of the techno-bureaucratic structures."

I would adjust that slightly. I think consumption itself is increasingly viewed as entrepreneurial, and the self becomes a kind of small firm that one invests in through consumerist activities. Thus we become competing firms in the economic realm of "the industrial production of differences" as Baudrillard calls it -- the sytemic requirement to make new meanings for an economy capitalizing on sign values.

As a result "personalization consists in a daily realignment to the smallest marginal difference, seeking out the little qualitative differences by which style and status are indicated." That is the dismal fate of self-actualization aspirations in consumerist culture; pettiness and Freud's narcissism of small differences.

Facebook and credit worthiness; What is post-Fordism

2011-03-25T15:02:00.001-04:00

From the draft version of "VALUE IN INFORMATIONAL CAPITALISM AND ON THE INTERNET. A REPLY TO
CHRISTIAN FUCHS" by Adam Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni. (pdf)

This compelling paper starts by trying to discredit using the labor theory of value to critique "prosumerism" and "digital sharecropping"-- the harvesting of the value created by consumers through acts of consumption, collaboration, identity display network forming and general sociality. Seems like a bit of a side issue to me -- but it is a stepping stone to a much more interesting point about how social media produce value. The labor/value that Facebook harvests isn't a matter of time invested on the site but more a matter of how many connections are traced. These build it's brand, and brand equity isn't measured in time. The same is true for the emerging personal brand that Facebook facilitates in its image.

But I found this interesting: "If Facebook made a profit of $ 355 million in 2010 (according to its own figures), this would mean that each Facebook user was a ‘victim of exploitation of surplus value’ to the extent of $ 0.7 a year, and if we use the consulting company McKinsey’s most recent figure on the overall value created by audience participation on the internet globally, $ 100 billion, this becomes $ 59 per internet user per year, hardly an ‘a rate of exploitation that converges towards infinity’ as Fuchs claims." That's a good point, but I suppose the way to interpret that is that users are putting a lot of time in to create very little economic value; their work time can be inefficiently wasted since it is not a disutility to workers (they regard the labor as creating personal identity and living social life, not working) and because the social-media firms harvesting the "value" aren't paying much for it and have scaled up to the level of billions of unpaid "employees."

The authors appear very concerned about putting an accurate price tag on the value created through social media practices and volunteer brand building and so on, as they see such a calculation as the key to their argument that the financial valuation of social media companies and the like is the new means of capital accumulation and expropriation (not exploiting labor):

appropriation and realization of value in informational capitalism needs to be understood as part of an extended, society-wide process of finance-centered accumulation, where the link between reputational (or affective) value and access to financial rent becomes fundamental. This, we argue is particularly true for social media platforms, the values of which are very difficult to justify in terms of their non-financial revenues.

The finance system, they argue, and not commodities, is where the "value" appears in hard dollar terms that is generated by the social factory, or the general intellect, or informational capital, or immaterial labor, or whatever you want to call it. And there, I suppose, it accrues to the people who have the means, access, and know-how to manipulate value at that level -- bankers, large-scale investors, tech entrepreneurs, etc. Otherwise, they suggest, the value of the brand equity co-creation and the marketing data created by our social practices and mediated online can't be extracted. In other words, value in this realm isn't generated by a commodity's circulation; it comes through financial manipulation of the underlying platform for sociality, through instruments tied to those platforms conceived as assets, which then circulate in the commodities' stead. The value of these media platforms is tied inexactly to the amount of communication and "value creation" we do on and through them.

In other words, the setting of values on financial markets is a deliberative decision that mobilizes and builds to a large extent on the public reputation of companies, brands and related assets. This leads us to suggest that informational capitalism ever more deploys a reputational ‘law’ of value, where the value of companies and their intangible assets are set not in relation to an objective measurement, like labor time, but in relation to their ability to attract and aggregate intersubjective judgments of their overall value or utility in terms of mediated forms of reputation.

The authors add that "the value of brands depend less on the (directly measurable) quanta of labor time that go into their production, and more on their reputation and brand strength [and] in the case of knowledge workers, and in particular freelances, the value of skills is increasingly determined by their ability to create a ‘personal brand.’" That obviously rings my bell; my whole spiel lately revolves around social media as a vector for transforming subjectivity into personal branding, to make that feel like common sense and natural instead of alienating, self-centered and rude.

I am intrigued by the possibility of applying this whole line of thinking to individuals rather than firms and by the implicit idea that credit may be the way a "basic income" is extended to workers in "informational capitalism" (call them the creative class or the cognitariat, if you like) in lieu of stable wages. The level of credit access becomes an index to an individual's perceived contribution to the "general intellect" or alternatively, the value of their personal brand to the information economy. Credit scores may become vaguely tied to how hipsterish one is, how credible one's lifestyle and habitus and social network are and thus how valuable one is likely to be to the generation and circulation of valuable meanings/uses/brands/innovations to be attached to goods and services. Perhaps in the future Facebook status will be factored into one's credit worthiness (perhaps this is already happening, as it is with employment, and hirers using Facebook as a tool to evaluate candidates.) It seems that the authors welcome this possibility in their conclusion, with social media "democratically" determining personal worth. That sounds like the very definition of dystopia to me, as I see these sorts of technological systems as likely means to leverage preexisting social inequities.

Anyway, along the way, the authors offer a lucid account of the somewhat elaborate arguments that Negri/autonomist-derived terms"post-Fordism" and "multitude" and :immaterial labor" are supposed to serve as shorthand for. Under Fordist conditions (factories, big firms, Taylorist division of labor, rigid hierarchies) "concrete productive practices must be organized in such ways that they can be measured as expressions of a general equivalent: abstract labor time [and] the labor process must be organized in such ways that value creation can be easily attributed to individual actors or units. Both of these conditions become increasingly problematic as capitalist development proceeds ‘beyond Fordism’." That is to say, production in the sphere of informational capitalism is more collaborative and inspiration-driven; it isn't a matter of x number of employees putting x amount of hours in. Basically, "labor creates value in ways that are poorly related to quanta of time."

Thus the nature of the workplace must change from being a factory to the "social factory" -- meaning production can occur through sociality at any time, and requires that people get along with one another (thus building friendships becomes a work process too). The premier productive force and source of wealth is what Marx called "general intellect" rather than labor time -- updating that for contemporary times, that general intellect becomes the value of social being being captured and harvested all the time by various media.

As the authors note, Negri argued that this sort of labor is "outside capital" but it seems more that it broadens capital's nature to include platforms and networks and identity itself as resources to marshal and exploit. What is "valorized" is these media is not, as the authors notes, pageviews or clicks or audience eyeballs but social relations themselves -- that is what is being brokered and sold by Facebook. We create "webs of affective attachments around informational objects" -- I tend to call this "immaterial labor" or "meaning making" or "affective labor" or "communicative capitalism" depending on the context.

But the idea is that social media can capture the value in our efforts to make ourselves seem cool by sharing well-curated stuff and ideas with others (or in the authors' jargon, social media "trigger forms of ‘self valorization’ whereby the multitude itself confers the kinds of affective investments on an informational object that is able to render it interesting and worthy of attention"). These media encourage us to orient more and more of our self-fashioning efforts to that model -- to build our personal brand, our influencer status, which is measurable in terms of retweets and likes and so on. This engenders a new kind of alienation, a kind of perpetual reflexivity and calculating approach to our social behavior that ruins it as a respite. Identity and friendship become more and more explicitly competitive, and capital (social media companies and marketers, mainly) reaps the benefit.

The authors are anxious to stress that the economic value in these attached affects stems not from the time it takes to notice and like things but from "affective webs" among the "networked multitude" -- a kind of commons of social affinity that Facebook encloses.

From a business point of view this means that the strategic key to value is not the sheer
number of hits or hours of attention paid to a site but, on the one hand, the ‘virtuosity’ that is able to attract such affective investments by inserting an informational product at the right time and place in such communicative and affective flows and, on the other hand, the ability to control the platforms, like Facebook, on which such affective self-valorization takes place. Indeed the value of Facebook is not primarily built on its ability to attract attention time, but on its ability to control and objectify the affective flows that organize the attention and prosumer input on the part of the multitude, and, to tax these flows in some way.

They control the platform, and then they securitize it (via IPO, etc.) to transform it to financial value (leveraging implicit brand equity derived from all that immaterial labor the platform has attracted), to collect their tax. But who has paid the tax? That's what gets lost in the web of financial engineering chicanery.

inseparability of freedom and alienation

2011-03-16T15:24:00.001-04:00

It is hard to argue with those who say that Facebook is making their lives better. I complain about the nefarious nature of the social-networking company repeatedly, but I have a page myself and occasionally promote my anti-Facebook screeds on the site itself. The problem with Facebook is not that it is immediately immiserating, or that its mode of exploitation makes everyday life appreciably worse. Rather it changes how we perceive the everyday, what sort of criteria we use to evaluate the quality of our social lives. The problem is that it offers a freedom that is contingent on alienating and abstracting aspects of our lives that were once left outside the realm of economic calculation and marketability. It has brought us to think of our behavior, our friends, our beliefs, our tastes, our interactions, and so on inherently as products worthy of design and careful roll-out, and to think of ourselves as a sort of branded firm whose value can be tracked.

As Facebook adoption become near universal, this sort of self-concept becomes normative. Behavior must be interpreted in light of the assumption of a entrepreneurial self behind it; thus "sharing" is never innocent of calculation, but nor does that calculation connote a kind of guilt. It is simply expected and inescapable. Everyone assumes everyone else is stage managing their identity, so even if we aren't, it is as if we are. And soon it makes no sense simply not to, and that new level of reflexivity characterizes our consciousness "naturally," with no particular forethought. We become free to connect and share more, but that freedom also implies a certain kind of capture as well. We seem to have a greater control over our self-presentation and self-broadcasting but that's only because it's been rendered exploitable by capital -- it's been abstracted from specific practice and made available for general appropriation by third parties for a variety of purposes. Only by making something exploitable by others can we seem to exploit it for ourselves -- this is the condition of subjectivity under capitalism, which makes us discontented with our practices when they are unmeasured, uninvested, inaccessible for entrepreneurial growth. The capability for communion becomes technologized, itself subject to rational maximizing.

One of Marx's basic ideas is that labor power had to be liberated from feudal arrangements so that it could be exploited by capital. The Communist Manifesto offers perhaps the classic statement of this:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors', and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Workers became "free" to sell their labor power as an alienated thing, to trade on it in a market tilted against them by their need to survive, which gives capital all the leverage it generally needs to force bad bargains. But that new "freedom" was still probably experienced as such, as the ecstasy of possibility as well as the burden of autonomy. People could fantasize about social mobility even as they needed to worry about their livelihood. Capitalism's process of reinvigorating itself involves not only the clearing away of moribund ideological strictures -- what can feel liberating in and of itself -- but also the extension of its calculating logic, its entrepreneurial method, which offers a procedure for self-advancement even as it upsets other humanistic illusions. It allows us to become strategists, though it takes away our experience of the spontaneous givenness of life. Reducing social relations to the cash nexus means also an elimination of prejudice in favor of competition, whose fairness could at least theoretically could be perfected to a unblinkered neutrality. But in practice, workers are given the freedom to choose aspects of their work life so that the misery of work under capital (exploitation) becomes their responsibility. Freedom is offered because it generates competition that is useful for capital.

Probably this is obvious, but capitalism continually repeats this process, presenting us new forms of freedom and alienation simultaneously. The freedom capitalism offers generally comes through the objectification (the mobilization, or the subsumption under capital) of some aspect of life that never before seemed contingent and changeable. What had seemed an intrinsic part of us suddenly becomes a manipulatable trait, something we can manage to our advantage, however we choose to construe that.

What seems to be happening in "late capitalism" is that personal identity and intimate relations are increasingly being subsumed: friendship and identity are becoming alienated and commoditized, translated into quantities that can be efficiently managed, measured and valorized as capital -- made to seem to increase in a concretely measurable way. Those measurements can then rationalize various sorts of self-aggrandizing behavior, allow those behaviors register with us as new freedoms, new opportunities, new means for securing social recognition and personal gain. We have more and more abstract, externalized choices about how to present ourselves, and means to exhibit these choices to others in lieu of what once constituted social interaction. And again these freedoms of choice merely serve to set in motion interpersonal competitions which ultimately benefit capital, which doesn't compete but merely profits by staging the competition and collecting "entry fees" in the form of goods purchased and labor offered.

If before, labor power was liberated so it could be exploited, what is happening now is that identity-making power is being liberated to be exploited.

fashion and destroying calculating consciousness

2011-03-15T17:14:00.000-04:00

From The Fashion System by Roland Barthes. A very skimmable book because most of it is, as he writes, "purely imminent description of a particular system" and, as such, is little more than a bunch of fashion magazine copy subjected to quasi-rigorous semiological analysis. (I.e. it investigates in painstaking detail how something like "Layering different tones of the same palette has a graphically modern appeal" -- to grab a random sample from Lucky -- might mean something to someone, how it connotes the abstract idea of Fashion.) One need only read the foreword, the conclusions and the appendices.

This is from the forward; seems relevant to fast fashion, and fast fashion's relation to post-Fordist subjectivity, the consumer as producer, etc. :

Why does Fashion utter clothing so abundantly? Why does it interpose, between the object and its user, such a luxury of words (not to mention images), such a network of meaning? The reason is, of course an economic one. Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don't calculate; if clothing's producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation; Fashion, like all fashions, depends on a disparity of two consciousnesses, each foreign to the other. In order to blunt the buyer's calculating consciousness, a veil must be drawn around the object -- a veil of images, of reasons, of meanings; a mediate substance of aperitive order must be elaborated; in short, a simulacrum of the real object must be created, substituting for the slow time of wear a sovereign time free to destroy itself by an act of annual potlatch.

Only fast fashion has made the annual potlatch a biweekly one.

The idea that fashion works to make us suspend our calculating rationality is interesting -- but slightly wrong I think. I think it shifts the nature of our calculation away from material things and money and toward our self-construction. It allows us to be entrepreneurial in the medium of style (and, while that has cultural/social capital ramifications, only through a great deal of ambition and effort does that translate directly into real economic opportunity). We calculate not how to economize on material clothes but how to profit through using clothes to build our personal brand value. We now no longer need fashion magazines to affix meaning to clothes; we are part of the meaning-making process, helping destroy slow time and true economy.

the meaning of professionalization

2011-03-12T00:26:00.000-05:00

From John Holbo's "Graphs, Maps, Trees,Fruits of The MLA" in the collection of Valve essays about Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees. (pdf) (though this is mostly Moretti in this passage):

In his second paragraph Moretti lists a number of scholars on whose work he builds. “I mention these names right away because quantitative work is truly cooperation: not only in the pragmatic sense that it takes forever to gather the data, but because such data are ideally independent from any individual researcher, and can thus be shared by others, and combined in more than one way.”

That eagerness to suspend the self in a collective project reminded me of the ideal sometimes espoused by autonomistas about the multitude and productive cooperation and so on. The Virno interview I wrote about here gets into that idea, positing the possibility that a new kind of subjectivity emerges from this kind of cooperation. At least that is what I think he means here: "We could say: the One of the multitude collimates in many ways with that transindividual reality that Marx called the 'general intellect' or the 'social brain.' "

Moretti's point brings it home more concretely to me because I experienced first-hand in graduate school the shock of discovering that what I thought was collective scholarly enterprise really was to a shocking degree a lot of petty ego projects. And professionalization in literary studies seemed to be a matter of learning that lesson and embracing its ramifications. Choose your scholarly interests with entrepreneurial savvy and guard your turf jealously and you might just thrive in the profession and maybe even get on the tenure track. It's all about setting yourself up for life. The game is afoot and the poets and novels and theorists just make up the hand you deal yourself. I honestly thought academia was a place to transcend the ways capitalism subsumes one's life work and perverts it to serve its cause. In academia, those ways are merely more attenuated, more insidious -- or perhaps academia is a hold over of precapitalist relations that makes one grateful for the bourgeois pseudo-meritocratic takeover.

Holbo suggests Moretti's project might serve as a retroactive justification for the bloat of English departments in the U.S., a more justifiable reason than the need to marshal a bunch of composition instructors. "Actually existing academic literary
studies makes considerably more sense if something like Moretti’s project makes sense. So, on behalf of the institution, there should be a concerted effort to make sense of such projects." Something similar could be said about creative-class labor conditions generally -- they await the project that can justify them, and I hope it is not the analog of Moretti's quantitatively driven effort. But if social media is to be the sponge of all the excess mental energy of the creative class, they seem highly amenable to various actuarial accountings of ourselves; they are designed to quantify and archive everything we do and make our souls accessible to statistical processing.

Structuring the self as inherently entrepreneurial, Facebook as neoliberal state

2011-03-01T19:23:00.000-05:00

From Wendy Brown, "Neoliberalism and the End of Democracy" (pdf) in Edgework. This, I hope, will clarify what I am talking about with personal branding and the neoliberal subject. Once these are connected, it paves the way to a broader point I'm trying to argue: that social media is part of the project of establishing neoliberal subjectivity. Facebook, in other words, is an emerging institution whose function (while seeming open-ended and eminently flexible, as the film The Social Network emphasizes -- "We don't know what it's for, it's just cool") is to ground the neoliberal subject, supply it a field where it can be naturalized.

Brown attempts to pin down a definition of neoliberal political rationality -- that is to say, how neoliberalism works in practice and manages to justify itself in democratic societies despite producing manifest inequality. The neoliberal state exists only to generate economic growth, and subjects of such state must adapt to suit that goal, adopting individual entrepreneurial goals and values themselves.

First, Brown's overall point: "Neoliberal rationality, while foregrounding the market, is not only or even primarily focused on the economy; it involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player." The assumption that market values or economic rationality yield truth or justice or efficiency is exported into other spheres of social life to organize them, to tell the truth about them. Things that aren't conformable to economistic thinking don't exist -- they must be reshaped to become visible, processable by that type of rationality. Thus, incentives are said to be "everywhere," and all human behavior is held to be comprehensible by analyzing them. The analytical tool (economic rationality) posits the content suitable to it, gives it recognized being. Everything else disappears.

Brown puts it this way:

Not only is the human being configured exhaustively as homo oeconomicus, but all dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality. While this entails submitting every action and policy to considerations of profitability, equally important is the production of all human and institutional action as rational entrepreneurial action, conducted according to a calculus of utility, benefit, or satisfaction against a microeconomic grid of scarcity, supply and
demand, and moral value-neutrality. Neoliberalism does not simply assume that all aspects of social, cultural, and political life can be reduced to such a calculus; rather, it develops institutional practices and rewards for enacting this vision. That is, through discourse and policy promulgating its criteria, neoliberalism produces rational actors and imposes a market rationale for decision making in all spheres. Importantly, then, neoliberalism involves a normative rather than ontological claim about the pervasiveness of economic rationality and it advocates the institution building, policies, and discourse development appropriate to such a claim. Neoliberalism is a constructivist project: it does not presume the ontological givenness of a thoroughgoing economic rationality for all domains of society but rather takes as its task the development, dissemination, and institutionalization of such a rationality.

Social media has become one of those institutional practices, with its own set of rewards for reinforcing that sort of subjectivity (my bold above). Brown emphasizes that a subject driven exclusively by profit motive in all things must be constructed; such a subject is not simply given automatically by human nature. Social media assists the neoliberal project by making the development of a personal brand seem second nature. Reciprocal self-promotion seems like the inherent content of social interaction.

Brown describes the consequences of neoliberalism (and its elimination of social safety nets) for its subjects, who must assume full responsibility for outcomes despite unequal resources and opportunities. These new neoliberalist subjects reject collective action in favor of self-aggrandizing consumerism.

The extension of economic rationality to formerly noneconomic domains and institutions reaches individual conduct, or, more precisely, prescribes the citizen-subject of a neoliberal order. Whereas classical liberalism articulated a distinction, and at times even a tension, among the criteria for individual moral, associational, and economic actions (hence the striking differences in tone, subject matter, and even prescriptions between Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and his Theory of Moral Sentiments), neoliberalism normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life. It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for “self-care” -- the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions. In making the individual fully responsible for her- or himself, neoliberalism equates moral responsibility with rational action; it erases the discrepancy between economic and moral behavior by configuring morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences. But in so doing, it carries responsibility for the self to new heights: the rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action no matter how severe the constraints on this action—for example, lack of skills, education, and child care in a period of high unemployment and limited welfare benefits. Correspondingly, a “mismanaged life,” the neoliberal appellation for failure to navigate impediments to prosperity, becomes a new mode of depoliticizing social and economic powers and at the same time reduces political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity and political complacency. The model neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her- or himself among various social, political, and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options. A fully realized neoliberal citizenry would be the opposite of public-minded; indeed, it would barely exist as a public. The body politic ceases to be a body but is rather a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers ... which is, of course, exactly how voters are addressed in most American campaign discourse.

It's also how Facebook addresses its users, a bunch of isolated nodes connected by its graces and its software, all competing for one another's attention and approval, urged perpetually to up the stakes of their sharing by Facebook's algorithms, which determine whether their content will surface widely and reap the sought-after recognition. The bolded part above pertains to Facebook's success in encouraging us to "connect" on its commercial terms. Facebook has been credited with facilitating revolutions in the Middle East, allowing for groups to organize and communicate, but it's possible that it only serves that role in a crisis, through a subversion of its implied intended use of multiplying commercial communication, by people who by and large don't constitute the audience being sold to advertisers and marketers. The revolutionaries more or less freeload on the networks enabled by social media companies, with those companies possibly assuming that with greater freedom for protester/users will come greater chances for social media to harvest their activities commercially. Facebook is a transnational sort of neoliberal state -- a idealization of the actual neoliberal states, which are burdened with legacy welfare obligations -- whose citizenry need only fulfill the minimum requirements of working for free and scheming to be relevant.

personal brand as neoliberal subjectivity, fashion industry as modeling circuit for development of such a self

2011-02-28T13:13:00.002-05:00

There's probably some theoretical jargon I could find to describe what's going on with Google's initiatives in the fashion industry, but I can't think of it right now. From Silicon Alley Insider:

What Google has done for the industry is set up a digital listening post. By providing “Designer Analytics,” Google gives the boutique owners a deep dive into the habits of shoppers, telling them not just what they are buying, but why. They are given information about what specific products are “loved” or “hated”, what colors, shapes and patterns are resonating or not. Then there is a totally different, and broader, data set on the consumer trends. Here the designers learn what is happening in the aggregate to all designers, not just themselves. So industry trends in color, shapes and patterns can emerge from the general public.

Besides helping the designers find their audience, Boutiques.com is also designed to help the shopper find what he or she is looking for.

Google describes the service on the site this way:

“Boutiques.com is a personalized shopping experience, brought to you by Google, that lets you find and discover fashion goods through a collection of boutiques curated by taste-makers — celebrities, stylists, designers, and fashion bloggers. Boutiques uses visual technology to help fashionistas discover and shop their look and creates the opportunity for designers to showcase their collections and latest inspirations online.

“Boutiques.com is built on technology developed by our team of fashion experts who work with engineers to “teach” our computer systems to understand various patterns, pairings, and genre definitions. When signed into your account, Boutiques.com learns about your style and preferences and in turn, provides you better results and recommendations over time. Ultimately, Boutiques.com will provide shoppers with a much richer and interactive shopping experience and help drive traffic to retailers’ websites.”

Consumer behavior is fed more directly into production; it doesn't expend itself in the creation of the consumer's self-image. The pleasure consumers take in consuming by way of self-presentation is recaptured by manufacturers and used to shape subsequent designs, tightening the loop, accelerating it. We don't buy a shirt and wear it and that's that. Now the degree to which we are satisfied by the purchase, the various modes of satisfaction, are fed back into the production cycle as a component of the manufacturing process.

Consumption becomes much more directly a part of production. The self we postulate with the shirt in this example is already aware of itself as bearing that R&D responsibility; the personal brand is at stake in the degree to which one's personal efforts to be fashionable are recaptured. The success of the self depends on the success of its usefulness to industry as fashion R&D. Accordingly, the self is an ongoing experimental space, not ever anything secure or established -- it is always a capital stock to be risked in ventures, not something that exceeds or exists outside of the dynamics of the market. This is a triumph for neoliberalism and its imposing a fundamentally entrepreneurial subjectivity. We exist insofar as we see ourselves profiting, we see our personal brand equity growing (or, alas, shrinking). We don't exist when we refuse to see how our brand plays in the market-driven world.

The online repository becomes the site of the self -- the way in which the recommendation engines and tracking databases know better than we do what we want, what we should see, what we are going to do, what sorts of choices we would like to have presented to us to give us a sense of control over the actual surfeit of possibilities. The self naturally requires markets and retailers to supply it with the terms by which is can express itself, realize itself, give itself instantiated being. We rely on those accelerated exchanges, which are our opportunities to speak the self.

So we end up in symbiosis with digital devices which archive our identity-making gestures. Because the devices can record all our gestures, they all become identity making in the end -- no activity that is not overtly self-defining. To overstate it: One's identity can never be so strong as to render particular gestures negligible. The identity is always tenuous, always being rewritten anew by each addition to the archive. So it is cumulative at the same time it is totally discontinuous. Each addition generates an entirely new formulation from a selected set of gestures from the archive.

The neoliberal self is the personal brand, which depends on accelerated opportunities for consumerist exchange to augment and evaluate itself, know it exists.

MIchael Bull's Sound Moves

2011-02-22T22:00:00.000-05:00

A bit repetitive, as though it were article expanded into a book. It consists mainly of snippets from interviews with iPod users, and seems a little dated. Offers insight into a time before iPod's capabilities were taken for granted. The interesting aspect of the book is the argument about iPods reflecting post-Fordist subjectivity. They allow users to dictate the feel of the space they occupy and are invited to believe they have escaped the imposition of conformity by "mass culture". They can alter the sound world of the workplace to ostensibly suit their needs -- do they opt out of immaterial labor and the general intellect this way?

Urban life doesn't impose its rhythms and symbols on them so much as they impose a soundtrack on their journey through urban spaces, taking in from those spaces only what suits them and blotting out the rest. They "subjectivize space -- consume it as if it were a commodity. In the process, immediate experience is fetishized.... Users prefer to live in this technologized space whereby experience is brought under control -- aesthetically managed and embodied -- whilst the contingent nature of urban space and the 'other' is denied." Basically, iPods foster the illusion of control by imposing sensory deprivation. We become dependent on them to "feel free" and autonomous, withdrawing to its tiny space, where we are lord and master.

Because we can carry so much music with us, we stop letting music dictate a mood to us; we choose music to suit our attitude. We don't listen; we deploy music as mood enhancer or stimulant or whatever.

Also, iPods are a polite means by which we permit ourselves to ignore everyone else. "The use of these technologies simultaneously fulfills the desire for, or management of, social proximity." That is, we use them to control social presence, to moderate (through socially accepted means -- accepted perhaps because they are new technologies and that excuses the rudeness), our level of engagement with others in public spaces.

Rebranding the American system to include redistribution

2011-02-21T12:29:00.001-05:00

From Steve Waldman at Interfluidity:

Health care costs are millions of people’s livelihood, and inefficient health care costs are a big part of that. Much of how modern economies survive is by protecting information problems and barriers to competition that sustain overpayments. This broadens the wealth distribution while permitting recipients the fiction that flows of purchasing power involve no transfers (“welfare”), only proud, self-reliant income. The theory of labor unions and the theory of an inefficient health sector are identical, except one is more transparent and the other has proved more capable of buying political protection. The problem, in both cases, is not that there are transfers, but whether the distribution of transfers — to whom, from whom — is wise and fair. By forcing ourselves to pretend there are no transfers, we prevent ourselves from even posing the question.

Perhaps I am a creature of the conventional wisdom of my day, but I want to tell it strong. It is not those who advocate, but those who prevent, stabilizing transfers of purchasing power, who are the true Marxists. These self-styled capitalists do not espouse Marx’s theories, but they do something much worse: They perform them. They behave in precisely the way that Marx expected capitalists to behave. They cripple the American system’s greatest strength — its ingenuity, flexibility, adaptability. They prevent the sort of collective action through which earlier generations proved that capitalism could made be consonant with decent, stable, and broadly prosperous societies. In doing so, they risk proving Marx right.

Not only do I agree with the substance, here, but I think Waldman is doing something interesting rhetorically, which enacts the point he is trying to make.

The way I would put what he is saying is that with redistributionist welfare policies (which are necessary to stabilize a capitalist economy), ideology is everything. They must be presented in a way that masks incidental injustices and preserves the fiction of individual autonomy to the highest degree, for in that autonomy, more or less, resides the quality of life the system is erected to maintain. Not material wealth or endless distraction, but the sense that one is the author of one's own life within an essentially open social field. I would argue that we intentionally prevent ourselves as a society from "posing the question" of the fairness of transfers, since scrutiny unwinds the idea most of us are not in reality children at the mercy of a paternalistic government. Posing the question (Marxists might call it "highlighting the contradictions" or something like that) presents the possibility of disrupting the necessary transfers, which, as Waldman notes, are the way government solves the collective-action problem that capitalist accumulation creates (i.e. all capitalists must be rapacious and accumulate for its own sake or else be extinguished through remorseless competition). Instead the illusion of unrestricted freedom allows us to tolerate the hidden subsidies, the cronyism, the intermittently manifest inequality.

But whereas in other countries, this evolving regime of transfers is labeled social democracy or even socialism, Waldman tries to assimilate it to capitalism itself -- to the real "American system," not the conservative free-market fantasy version of it -- and argue that the only successful capitalist societies are the ones that take on these socialistic redistributionist elements. He's essentially rebranding American capitalism: it's not the deregulated libertarian marketplace; it's a mixed economy that balances entrepreneurial ambition with social welfare. Its innovative engine is not a matter of deregulating and finding new ways to profit, but in finding new and cleverer ways to solve capitalism's collective action problem.

The point then is to redefine the American system to include different standards of fairness and social welfare -- to fight on that ideological terrain -- without pretending to be making nonideological statements yourself. Instead, seem to concede to the opposing view will hijacking their preferred terminology.

Kunkel's LRB article about David Harvey and crisis

2011-01-29T19:57:00.000-05:00

From this LRB article, which more or less digests Harvey's 1982 book Limits of Capital.

Marx proposed that ‘the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself,’ and Harvey glosses the idea: ‘The necessary geographical expansion of capitalism is … to be interpreted as capital in search for surplus value. The penetration of capitalist relations into all sectors of the economy, the mobilisation of various “latent” sources of labour power (women and children, for example), have a similar basis.’ Hence both the involution and the imperialism of capital, commodifying the most intimate of formerly uncommodified practices (education, food preparation, courtship) as well as sweeping formerly non-capitalist regions (China and Eastern Europe) into the global market.

The expansion is always to accommodate the surplus value that is unaccounted for on the demand side -- nothing of value there to exchange for it in order to realize the profit. So capital absorbs new spaces and makes further claims on time, on future production (through credit).

I'm interested in social media as a manifestation of the subsumption process, the means by which "intimate uncommodified practices" become susceptible to commodification, circulation, valorization, etc. The quest for new profit opportunities, essentially -- enclosing commons.

Also interested in how acceleration serves capital's "overproduction" crises. The acceleration of exchange appears to absorb more production, and allow for valorization to exponentially expand, while at the same time suspending more money capital in the process. The danger for capitalism is always the money and commodities will cease circulating, as capital is critically a process, is always in motion in order to be at all. Static capital is not capital at all within capitalism; it is a pile of worthless shit.

Kunkel discusses three aspects of the Marxist "falling rate of profit" thesis.
1. full employment gives labor too much bargaining power (disproved by flexible capital in globalized system)
2. organic composition of capital shifts: "given increased technological and organisational efficiency, for using relatively less labour than capital in production. Since profitability reflects the ‘rate of exploitation’ – or the ratio of the surplus value produced by the worker to the wages he receives – using less labour relative to capital diminishes profitability, unless capital goods become cheaper or exploitation is ramped up. This problem too can be solved, at least in principle: the capital/ labour ratio can simply be rejigged by deploying more labour relative to capital." I think this problem also gets solved with "fictitious labor" -- immaterial labor invested in symbol/semantic production; and then through labor collected by capital through online networks without requiring the payment of wages. Need to think about this more, but the appeal of digitality for capital is that it allows for near infinite exploitation of labor per unit of hard constant capital. The network effect inverts the organic composition problem. (Would love someone's help/advice on what to read on that topic.) Social networks allow technology to increase the amount of labor that goes into a commodity, because the "commodity" is reshaped as a bottomless pool of information, an ever-refreshing occasion for data collection; the data becomes the product, the digital medium the occasion and means for data circulation. The circulation process becomes the source of utility, of use value, of pleasure. Am I on to anything with this?
3. underconsumption -- a restatement of the missing Surplus Value issue. Not enough paid out in wages to allow for the full realization of profit in exchange. The mother of all contradictions, as Kunkel would have it. Could be solved by ever expanding luxury consumption, but marginal utility of money declines as personal wealth increases, also positional goods and potlatch destruction attract more of the wealth, taking it out socially necessary investment circuit. Another way of saying that overaccumulation has occurred -- capital cannot be invested profitably; it can only be devalued -- but whose? "In social terms, this will take the form of a contest between creditors and debtors over who is to suffer more devaluation."

Not sure why this crisis is not solved by "quantitative easing" up until the point of inflation. This would allow for accelerated exchange in order to valorize capital. That gets you the Freidmanite idea of matching the money supply growth to the overall rate of growth.

Not so sure about this either:

The relationship between credit and commodities is in this way translated into spatial terms as an uneasy rapport between one kind of capital, highly mobile or liquid, and another kind – ‘fixed capital embedded in the land’ – defined by its inertness. Here, in the latent conflict between migratory finance capital and helplessly stationary complexes of fixed capital, including not only factories and office buildings but roads, houses, schools and so on, Harvey has found a contradiction of capitalism overlooked by Marx and his heirs.

New capitalism is all about flexibility, mobile capital finding sites of profit. "‘The disjunction of the quest for hypermobility and an increasingly sclerotic built environment (think of the huge amount of fixed capital embedded in Tokyo or New York City) becomes ever more dramatic.’"

This analysis depends on the extent to which fetish about land -- that its value always goes up -- is widespread. Misrecognizing housing as an investment rather than a commodity good. It depends how seriously we consider land to be better form of collateral than other assets. "Harvey’s bold and ingenious solution is to propose that, under capitalism, ground rent – or the proportion of property value attributable to mere location, rather than to anything built or cultivated on the land – becomes a ‘pure financial asset’" -- I kind of suspect that is pure assertion, a speculative postulate necessary for the subsequent analysis. The "spatio-temporal fix" theory sounds a lot like Austrian-ish "recalculation" -- investment in future production that turns out to be unwanted. Think the dematerialization of capital rescues it from its contradictions, not spatio-temporal fixes. The material detritus of the circulation process ceases to be capital when it ends up devalued in the hands of the end consumer -- what isn't written off as "consumption" of that material is just deadweight loss for the consumer. That is to say, this sounds about right: "Devaluation, being ‘always on a particular route or at a particular place’, might serially scourge the earth even as capital in general, loyal to no country, remained free to pursue its own advantage."

This seems like the key paragraph to me -- "crude" as it may be:

But it is the broader and more systematic Marxist perspective that ultimately and properly contains Keynesianism within it, and a crude Marxist catechism may be in order. Where does an excess of savings come from? From unpaid labour – for example, that of Chinese or German workers. And why would such funds inflate asset bubbles rather than create useful investment? Because capital pursues not ‘high social returns’, but high private returns. And why should these have proved difficult to achieve, except by financial shell-games? Keynesians complain of an insufficiency of aggregate demand, restraining investment. The Marxist will simply add that this bespeaks inadequate wages, in the index of a class struggle going the way of owners rather than workers.

That is something clear to rally people with. Profit is being extracted from the social system by capitalists, who choose to sit on it or compete with one another in status games or use it in high-finance gambling games that don't yield productive activity but rather lead to zero-sum redistribution.

The other game, in theory, is to have banks give credit to the poor so that they can consume the surplus, as long as they creditors don't get wise to the flimsy quality of the credit -- suppressed wages are replaced by credit until banks refuse to lend, don't think they can squeeze it out of the debtors. This is the classic Ponzi scheme/bubble scenario, which inevitably happens when investment becomes speculation -- think Minsky and Fisher might be as apt as Marx and Harvey on this subject.

cocktail napkin notes about personal branding

2011-01-27T23:24:00.001-05:00

1, Branding is a culture-wide idiom now for meaning-making. It provides the terms by which we conceive of and interpret the artistic, the authentic. It suggests the means of self-production, how to reflexively grasp the contours of the self and set goals for its elaboration. No longer dictated by tradition, the self can be conceived along the lines of a firm, with no limits to its growth or its lines of business.

2. Branding is a commodified and reified form of meaning, always already conceived for a market; it is meaning that is given coherence by the anticipated market. A personal brand is a deliberately commodifed form of self that anticipates the market's verdict to guide its development. Branding is meaning abstracted, decontextualized, reified. It is meta-meaning, an emodiment of the possibility to mean, with nothing particularly significant about the specific meaning evinced by any particular brand. The specifics are arbitrary; what matters is the market share and attention and loyalty it can garner, not what it putatively says.

3. Naomi Klein, recalling her No Logo in a Baffler article, notes that "creating meaning was the new act of production" for companies in the new economy -- reminiscent of Coca Cola's CEO declaring the beverage maker a "media company." As manufacturing jobs went abroad, the creative-class strata of jobs remained, the elaborate facets of brand management, marketing and design.

4. Brand equity is much more concrete and relevant to decisionmaking now, with the internet designed to measure it and actualize it, defining it with precision as a quantity (a number of hits, or followers, or searches, or what have you) rather than as nebulous balance-sheet estimate, or a vague quality of good will. Brands, thanks to the internet, are becoming means for rationally measuring communicative impact, for eradicating the nebulous guesswork of traditional marketing. Branding is embodied persuasion, the attention economy's equivalent of hard currency.

5. Brands are measurable concrete clusters of meaning, and their reach (the attention they can secure across a population) is a kind of brand equity that can be used to make rational calculations about risk and reward. It attempts to assimilate the mysterious process of self-fashioning and soulcraft into capitalist calculation, the sort of logic verified by social experience as "true" and practical and "realistic." It is not "realistic" to not regard oneself as a brand. It is an impractical romanticism, to be ridiculed.

6. The personal brand seems capable of capturing and controlling the risk we face in identity formation, giving us a calculus by which to proceed. This empties the self of its effervescent spontaneity, rendering it practically flexible instead; it can always be judged in terms of brand strategy regardless of the level of calculation in the moment. Retroactively, experiences are made to seem like brand-building ploys; anticipating this, we strategize more and more, let that frame of reference subsume more and more intimate and private behavior.

7. Wilde's link of socialism to unlimited individualism suggested this line of thought: Personal branding may be a manifestation of what the fabric of everyday life would be in a socialist society, in which it would incumbent on every individual to make explicit and manifest what his unique capabilities are, so that society could make the most use of them. There would be no hiding in corporate structures in meaningless wage work, no separating the work self from the private self. One would have to be an inveterate self-promoter to secure the social resources to fulfill one's potential, or to even develop the potential, expand the scope of ambition. Personal branding is an attempt to define one's unique blend of traits and interests as undeniably socially necessary. We need to justify our right to exist through some social code, some language which would most likely resemble branding. Self-marketing will not be eradicated but universalized in some utopian conceptions of socialism. Self-exploitation would supplant capitalist exploitation, which may be why some view digital sharecropping, volunteer free labor and the like as a revolutionary practice.

8. With the infiltration of the branding metaphor into our concepts of identity, branding can be misapprehended as one of the surest routes to self-knowledge -- the way to get to know oneself is to trace out one's abilities in terms of a brand and brand equity. This sort of thinking produces a reinforcing feedback loop. It seems empirical, the real self, socially validated and tested, supported and understood, not conjectural or provisional though certainly not fixed. Branding is a hermaneutic for identity and its social impact. It delimits the self to social impact and makes that impact interpretable.

9. Wrapped up in mediation and symbols; in the tenuous self and not the structuring systems that shape its form, its everyday reality. (?)

10. Brands are the total breakdown of communal collective identity, of relational identity. The personal brand obviates even the possibility of a "role player" sort of identity as in a traditional community. The personal brand grows itself on a balance sheet, and it is not limited by the context of a particular community. Like capital, it is theoretically infinite, which is why it appears preferable to the communal identity.

11. Ideas and innovation, immaterial wealth is credit coded in symbols and promises that steal material wealth from the future.

12. Flight from industrial materiality is a way of robbing the future, deferring materiality's limits (?)

13. Gamification seems like a another way to cement personal branding template -- leveling up, quantifying skills, doling out measured rewards, etc. Game mechanics are analogous to personal branding techniques

dialectical thinking about new capitalism, social media

2011-01-23T16:59:00.000-05:00

A key question for me is whether social media "solves" the contradictions of new capitalism that shifts all sorts of risk onto workers while disembodying itself or whether it facilitates that brand of capitalism's emergence. I suppose it does both at once, which is why it has managed to thrive. That which facilitates the change in capitalism also ameliorates the change for subjects within capitalism. Social media creates new opportunities for capital while it creates new mechanisms of solace for the increasingly isolated subject. Social media extends the compensations of consumerism for the meaningless sphere of production. We lose real skills of production, gain skill in making/communicating our self.

new capitalism, social media

2011-01-23T16:04:00.002-05:00

Miscellaneous thoughts inspired by Richard Sennett's Culture of New Capitalism:

1. Information technology deskills communication. It takes away the craft involved and makes it a brute force proposition -- matter of quantity and filtering rather than precision.

2. The ubiquity of advertising discourse and branding allows retailers to get rid of its own salesforce that once served as intermediary between consumer and goods, teaching them in a local context what to want and how to use it and what it is for. Now we rely on national advertising and personal networks for this information. It allows retailers to be big warehouses of stuff, like Wal-Mart.

3. Consumerism legitimates the subjectivity new relations of production require. It emphasizes future potential rather than achieved skill. The ability to desire new things instead of appreciate what one already has more thoroughly mirrors the denigration of skills in the new economy, which stresses flexibility, team building, starting over with skills development as the firm demands.

the flexible organization puts a premium on portable human skills, on being able to work on several problems with a shifting cast of characters, cutting loose action from context. The search for talent, in particular, focuses on people with a talent for problem solving no matter the context, a talent which skirts becoming too ingrown. Potential ability emphasizes the prospect of doing things one has yet to do; achievement and mastery are selfconsuming,the contexts and contents of knowledge used up in being used. Consumption of goods plays a key role in complementing and legitimating these experiences.

4. Sennett argues that "new capitalism" -- post-Fordism or whatever you want to call it -- changes workers relationship to time. That is, in its emphasis on flexibility and short-term goals and its dismissal of institutional culture and bureaucratic mediation, it shortens the scope of institutional time. Under old bureaucratic capitalism, a more stable work life supplied a coherent life narrative to workers and engendered committment, to the firm and to the delimited identity.

The secret of this militarized capitalism lay in time -- time structured so that people formed a life narrative and social relations within the institution. The price individuals paid for organized time could be freedom or individuality; the “iron cage” was both prison and home.

I wonder if social media now supplies a means for organizing people's experience of institutional time as real time -- the logical end point of new capitalism's development; which suggests Facebook is the ne plus ultra of the new capitalist firm). Does it supply users with an instantaneous sense of narrative agency that must then be constantly refreshing with further updates -- all this to compensate for the loss of less immediate and palpable but far more secure narrative agency derived from a stable life plan. "Insecurity is not just an unwanted consequence of upheavals in markets; rather, insecurity is programmed into the new institutional model. That is, insecurity does not happen to a new-style bureaucracy, it is made to happen." There needs to be counterveiling forces to this insecurity.

5. Sennett argues that new capitalism takes away the worker's sense of being useful -- institutional knowledge is neglected or destroyed, and firm organization and new communications technology allows for orders to be sent out wihtout workers mediating them or moderating them in accordance to their experience. They lose "voice" in Hirschman's sense. Again, social media compensates by permitting an ersatz usefulness through sharing -- social capital through voluntary participation, as though the nature of what is volunteered is as immaterial as the nature of what's consumed is immaterial to the pleasures of self it can facilitate. In capitalist society, capital perverts our sense of what is useful to what is profitable -- a worker has value to the extent of contributing marginally to the firm's profitability. "If only reformers could accept that usefulness is a public good, they could engage with the anxiety and fear of uselessness spawned by the most dynamic sectors of the modern economy."

Social media offers a concrete alternative to that ideology of value. But when social media in private hands means that control over the idea of "usefulness" remains private, subject to manipulation for other than the general, public good. Facebook can instigate sharing for marketing purposes, not out of social necessity; this undermines the social recognition that social media can otherwise organize. It becomes a field for personal branding within the capitalist ideology of value (profit) rather than a place to reorchestrate community hollowed out by capitalism.

6. Much childhood nostalgia is a nostalgia for the limits dependence imposed on us and for the deprivation that forced us to discover internal resources to compensate. How limits opened up the imagination, the exact opposite of how marketing encourages us to imagine the freedom of having no limit to what we can consume or be.

7. Sennett make the case that a return to craftsmanship can return the ideal of commitment to the lives of individuals -- an ideal systematically stripped by the flexible/precarious regime of new capitalism:

We’ve seen why commitment is in increasingly scarce supply in the new capitalism, in terms of institutional loyalty. The sentiment would be irrational — how can you commit to an institution which is not committed to you? Commitment is equally difficult in the new culture’s recipe for talent. Mental mobility eschews getting deeply involved; ability is focused on operational technique, as in the SAT, an exercise in problem solving rather than problem finding. Which means that a person becomes disengaged with the reality beyond his or her own control. Commitment poses a more profound question about the self-as-process. Commitment entails closure, forgoing possibilities for the sake of concentrating on one thing. You might miss out. The emerging culture puts enormous pressure on individuals not to miss out. Instead of closure, the culture counsels surrender — cutting ties in order to be free, particularly the ties bred in time.

This plays out across all sortos personal as well as professional relationships -- and most important, it plays out in our relationship to ourselves.

Personal prestige as strategic confusion

2011-01-21T15:52:00.000-05:00

In Culture of New Capitalism Richard Sennett makes a good point about how prestige manifests itself in new precarious-labor world.

A child of privilege can afford strategic confusion, a child of the masses cannot. Chance opportunities are likely to come to the child of privilege because of family background and educational networks; privilege diminishes the need to strategize. Strong, extensive human networks allow those at the top to dwell in the present; the networks constitute a safety net which diminishes the need for long-term strategic planning. The new elite thus has less need of the ethic of delayed gratification, as thick networks provide contacts and a sense of belonging, no matter what firm or organization one works for. The mass, however, has a thinner network of informal
contact and support, and so remains more institution dependent. It’s sometimes said that the new technology can somewhat correct this inequality, electronic chatrooms and affinity groups supplying the information a young person would need to seize the moment. In the work world, at least at the moment, this is not the case. Face-to-face matters. This is why techies go to so many conventions, and, more consequently, why people working from home, connected to the office only by computer, so often are left out of informal decision gathering and decision making.

A key question is whether online social networks like Facebook have changed this at all. I suspect Facebbok reinforces weak ties for the masses and makes their potentially strong ties weaker; that makes existing strong social-capital ties of the privileged relatively stronger -- they have "real" connections instead of the generalized fake ones materialized online. Friendship itself becomes a class privilege, a class marker; everyone else is left with competing brands and strategic partnerships.

"Terrorist advertising"

2011-01-16T14:55:00.001-05:00

I thought the slogans from this art project are all pretty interesting propositions:

ALL ADVERTISING CREATES THE ILLUSION THAT YOU ARE FREE TO CHOOSE

THE COPY HAS MORE POWER THAN THE ORIGINAL

TERRORIST ADVERTISING DECONSTRUCTS THE FAMILIAR IMAGE AND FEEDS IT BACK INTO THE SYSTEM

ORIGINALITY EXISTS ONLY AS A FIRST TIME EXPERIENCE FOR AN INDIVIDUAL

THE CONSUMER NOW HAS THE CHOICE OF BECOMING THE CREATOR OR DESTROYER OF THE ILLUSION

The last slogan encapsulates what is so heinous about "co-creation."

Juliet Schor's Plenitude

2011-01-11T23:17:00.000-05:00

I found this attempt to rebrand voluntary simplicity as a kind of wealthiness unconvincing. Schor hopes we will eschew growth and income as measures of prosperity and embrace more nebulous concepts, like how meaningfully our time is spent. Though I agree people should consume less, work less if they can, enjoy their work more, slow their consumption in general, and so on, I don't think impending environmental disaster will motivate them to do it. Yes, everybody would probably be happier and better off -- but the same would be true if we all became meditating Buddhists. Yet we are not all Buddhists. We can not will ourselves into taking a different view of what it means to be happy, or what happiness required -- that is conditioned into us as we come into our subjectivity and requires a great deal of sacrifice and discomfort to alter. Some manage to achieve it, but they are by definition extraordinary. Most want to cling to the kinds of pleasures and ideals that first brought them to themselves.

Sustainability is not sexy, and there is no point trying to make it seem so. Better that the concept retain its critical, adversarial edge, rather than be warped to fit with the prevailing consumerist spirit of self-preoccupation, consumerism, and abundance fetishism.

Sustainability, no matter how sexed up, is not enough in the face of the ideology of income and consumerism and symbolic goods and personal branding and so on, which I think the ideology of collaborative consumption colludes with more than undermines.

Schor raises the interesting point that prosperity erodes the idealized community of yesteryear, in which a kind of forced gift economy was necessary for collective survival. Instead we have temporary communities of affinity, which bear with them no responsibilities and can feel shallow.

I'm skeptical that forcing economic relations can replicate the lost relations of community that were forced on people when the world was less prosperous and technologically advanced -- when "convenience" didn't yet breed isolation but the necessity of dependence made people dream of that possibility. People have used income to reject community, and Schor implicitly suggests that they are going to have to re-accept community as environmental catastrophe strips us of income. (yet at the same time she suggests productivity gains from technology will make us all time-wealthy -- not sure I understand how that works, why that can't translate into conventional income measures.)

Essentially, Schor wants us to shift to an economy that generates less in profit without changing capitalist relations of production, which seems to avoid the source of the problem that has saddle us with environmental crisis in the first place.

Ebooks as template for media turnover

2011-01-06T18:05:00.001-05:00

This Ars Technica piece on e-books offers this synopsis of the rationale for their inevitable triumph.

In the case of e-books, the merits are there, as plain as day. In fact, they're some of the same merits that have driven other successful media transitions.

Convenience: One thousand songs in your pocket? One million books in your pocket. Carry your entire reading list with you at all times. No loose bookmarks. No dog-eared pages. No rips, tears, or smudges. No shelf space required. No trip to the store. Purchase and start reading in seconds. Read anywhere, any time, using only one hand. Stop reading at a moment's notice without fear of losing your place.

Power: Search the text instantly. Look up the definition of any word with a single tap or click. Add and remove highlighting an infinite number of times without degrading the text. Annotate without being constrained by the size of the margins. Create multiple bookmarks and links from one part of the text to another.

Potential: Consume, share, and remix all of the above with anyone, an unlimited number of times.

The incentives, the author contends, have always been the same in the development of supplanting media. Users want the above. But media companies, too, benefit.

My main concern is with the "potential" section -- the ability to redisseminate the materials with value added. Users down the road get some of that value, but importantly, so do the owners of the conduits for sending that material along.

Media evolves to allow for the capture of user's consumption as a form of production -- that is what e-readers are about.

That;s what business types mean when they talk about making things "social" -- making it so the products aren't just sold, but they also capture the labor of their consumption and send it back to be exploited by third parties.

This sense of personal consumption being productive is beneficial to the consumer, who uses that experience to reinforce the validity of their personal brand. It gives them something to share and makes them feel as though they are being social. But it is immaterial labor for media companies, etc., as well -- it allows them to redefine sociality as sharing info about goods in reified digital form and captures the usable information from the flow of that sharing back and forth, as it adumbrates networks and so on.

From the commodity self to the personal brand

2011-01-05T20:44:00.000-05:00

From Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson's "Advertising in the Age of Accelerated Meaning." Sorry, what follows is a bit repetitive, but important for me to make it clear to myself for future reference. The key point: ad discourse dissolves reality into free-floating signifiers and prompts us to adopt them as the language of self, replacing the identity-making role of tradition in a capitalist world that has eroded all traditional ways and demanded flexibility from its subjects. Design ideology makes that shift more palatable, and social media coincides with our taking a more active role circulating signs the way ads do. With social media we can readily represent ourselves as personal brands, and we shape our identity with that inescapable structuring metaphor in mind. We take the way ads may once have seemed to force us into a particular sort of cobbled-together self out of products and their associated signs and turn it into a positive active procedure, in which we build our personal brand and use our consumption as productive labor building our brand equity.

Some of this essay, from 1996, seems dated, mainly because it couldn't have anticipated how the internet would change what they call the "commodity self" -- the identity we fashion for ourselves out of signifiers put into play through advertising discourse. Their key point derives from Baudrillard's idea of the code -- ads detach signifiers from some sort of organic, natural constellation of meaning and makes them free-floating; ads marshal and mobilize signfiers and make them attachable to any product or idea. They become a kind of flexible language of images and memes that individuals can apply to their own identity construction; in fact, the chief accomplishment of ad discourse (of all the money put into making ads ubiquitous and their discourse and ideology hegemonic) is to make consumers bathe in ads and adopt its discourse as their own. "Advertising has established the premise that the most gratifying social relations are those associated with the confident, discriminating, sign user." You know, the hipster (the good, on-trend consumer). We hate hipsters because the system, ads as a discourse, is making a promise about what it will be like to be a hipster that actual people seem like hipsters can't live up to. The prevalence of ad discourse generates outsize expectations of those subjectivated by it. We wish they would stop so we could, but it's not them, it's the entire structuring discourse in all its ubiquity.

Omnipresent ads make us think the language of self should also be the language of ads, which seem by their ubiquity to be the surest way of securing social recognition. Social recognition comes from sounding/seeming like ads, which are manifestly the dominant mode of public discourse. The language of power, measured by exposure, is ad discourse (a consequence of money buying exposure, of commercial media and the leasing of public space to private companies); hence to be powerful, we try to speak of ourselves in that discourse. Of course, ad discourse, as Goldman and Papson point out, "tends to further the hegemony of commodity and market relations" without their being any conscious effort on the part of any evil masterminds ruling from the commanding heights. They "reflect the logic of capital" while they "disguise and suppress inequalities, injustices, irrationalities, and contradictions."

The authors argue that advertising was "in crisis" in the mid-1990s, but that seems to have been a misreading of the significance of advertising's reflexivity and self-deprecation. As Thomas Frank pointed out in Conquest of Cool, this has long been a cyclical strategy for replenishing potency of ad's messages. If anything, the language of ads and branding have become more accepted, almost embraced as a model for one's self-concept -- talk of the personal brand is not at all ironic in contemporary culture, and conceiving of personal goals along the lines of building brand equity are also becoming common as social media turns individuals into mini-media companies with logos/avatars of their own. This amateur population working to detach and recirculate signifiers has forestalled the "sign wars" they anticipated in the 1990s. Instead of advertising eating itself, co-creation and Web 2.0 and productive consumption and the like emerged. We have become the meaning makers and appropriators -- separating things from their ordinary context and allowing them to float free in social media and elsewhere through sharing.

Personal branding and actual product brand managers now complement one another -- we work alongside of advertisers to appropriate and reconfigure and remix signifiers, to generate new meaning possibilities that have value. The intermediate step from being subjected to ads to becoming little ad agencies ourselves lies in the promulgation of design ideology, as epitomized by Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style, to take one of many possible examples. The insidious creep of design ideology -- that we should choose fonts the express our inner truth, for instance -- works in conjunction with the ideology of advertisements, that magic self-transformation is possible through purchases, no logic required. Both assume that the inner truth can be expressed through manipulation and display of decontextualized signs (in one's appearance, or in one's online presence) rather than through sustained practices. Or rather in replaces all other possible practices with one, the practice of clever sign manipulation. Design ideology rationalizes the overflow of signs pouring in and over us, gives us a protocol for handling the plenitude, for how to slim down and screen some out. It makes the commodity self -- "based on the packaging of self as a collection or ensemble of commodity signs" -- tolerable. Designy-ness is a subjective response to ad culture that accelerates our transformation into a personal brand. It allows us to interpret the ads which saturate our lives as opportunities, as a positive condition, rather than an inescapable blight. Then, armed with design consciousness, we start conceiving of identity explicitly in branding terms.

In a sense, social media is a form of democratized bohemia, extending the design consciousness mentality and the opportunity for commodity-self-nourishing display to everyone, not just hipsters in the right neighborhhoods, or not just urban people generally. So social media not only allow for more peacocking personal display (more "sharing") but they also make it more pressing to have more signifiers at the ready, makign it expedient to collaborate with advertisers and toelrate them, let them and their detached signifiers into one's intimate life.

Sennett on the challenges facing neoliberal subject

2011-01-04T19:39:00.001-05:00

Neoliberalism demands a certain kind of subject able to tolerate precarity, evince flexibility, revise traditions on the fly and so on. This subject needs to inhabit postmodernity without remorse or much regret, without breaking down so much that he can't work efficiently. The subject needs to be more or less self-motivated to produce, to regard himself as a creative personal brand that generates economic value through the practices of everyday life as well as whatever wage work he is lucky enough to secure.

In The Culture of the New Capitalism, Richard Sennett examines what kind of individual could thrive in this environment. (my bolding)

Only a certain kind of human being can prosper
in unstable, fragmentary social conditions. This ideal
man or woman has to address three challenges.

The first concerns time: how to manage short-term
relationships, and oneself, while migrating from
task to task, job to job, place to place. If institutions no
longer provide a long-term frame, the individual may
have to improvise his or her life-narrative, or even do
without any sustained sense of self.

The second challenge concerns talent: how to develop
new skills, how to mine potential abilities, as reality’s
demands shift. Practically, in the modern economy,
the shelf life of many skills is short; in technology
and the sciences, as in advanced forms of manufacturing,
workers now need to retrain on average every eight
to twelve years. Talent is also a matter of culture. The
emerging social order militates against the ideal of
craftsmanship, that is, learning to do just one thing
really well; such commitment can often prove economically
destructive. In place of craftsmanship, modern
culture advances an idea of meritocracy which celebrates
potential ability rather than past achievement.

The third challenge follows from this. It concerns
surrender; that is, how to let go of the past. The head of
a dynamic company recently asserted that no one owns
their place in her organization, that past service in particular
earns no employee a guaranteed place. How
could one respond to that assertion positively? A peculiar
trait of personality is needed to do so, one which
discounts the experiences a human being has already
had. This trait of personality resembles more the consumer
ever avid for new things, discarding old if perfectly
serviceable goods, rather than the owner who
jealousy guards what he or she already possesses.

Basically the ideal neoliberal subject is driven by the quest for novelty, interprets its innovative consumption experiences as a kind of self-production and the source of identity (which is no longer derived from meaningful work or craft skills). That identity is never anchored in tradition or community or even continuity of life experience because it must always be revised to accommodate new experiences and pursuits. It must be frequently updated.

That is where social media comes into play. Social media serves to help shape neoliberal subjectivity along these lines and support it once it is established. It helps establish the personal brand model of the self and offers a broadcast channel for making consumption into meaning-making production (immaterial labor). And it offers a way to manage the plenitude that threatens to overwhelm people, sustaining the balance of productive curiosity and drowning in meaningless, futile choices. The social-network environment allows meaningless choice to become meaningful because concretely shared and tallied, and allows for accelerated consumption to seem not useless if not damaging to personal identity (not mastering anything for real) but extra efficient, as social-media sharing is a mode of processing that feels like mastery. This leads to more acts of communication, more data for media companies to attempt to monetize.

And in general, social media supports the ideal of convenience over difficulty, making dilettantism normative and making social behavior subject to time-shifting, that is, to be done alone at one's convenience rather than in periods of direct reciprocity and co-presence. Social media attempts to streamline affective labor, carework, which neoliberalism and neoliberal states by and large refuse to pay for.

I've just started reading the book, so I'll probably follow up with more posts, but this seems like a useful way to frame my subject -- how social media supports the neoliberal/post-Fordist subject faced with expectations of precarity and flexibility and novelty and co-creation and so on. Neoliberalism's flexibility and precarity => personal branding (mandatory self-reliance, productivity of everyday life and sociality) => social media (medium for personal brand, expediting accelerated consumption to extend identity and co-creation and generate marketing data for pigeonholing purposes). We work on our identities and mistake this for a politics and for entrepreneurship.

Jonathan Beller's "Paying Attention"

2010-12-29T18:00:00.001-05:00

For a while I have been interested in the way that attention can add value, as a form of immaterial labor that enhances the sign/symbolic value of things -- the attention that attenuates meaning. Attention qua attention may not entirely qualify as this sort of labor yet, but it may in the data trail that our attention produces online. This can be monetized in the connections it produces, the associations. "People who liked this also liked that" -- that sort of thing. One offers this data by virtue of using online media; even if one establishes credibility as an innovative tastemaker, one couldn't, as things stand, withhold the data trail one creates -- one can only choose disconnectivity. That sort of pursuit of isolation seems appealing only when you consider how you are being "ripped off" and having your identity-making "stolen" from you by marketers. But the climate of social media makes such conclusions seem reasonable, "realistic," ideologically appropriate.

Thinking about attention as capital implies that we are alienating our own attention span, abstracting it rather than allowing it to be a spontaneous consequence of our inner motivations. We spend attention rationally, as an investment or to win the exchange, rather than as a consequence of finding ourselves absorbed, giving over our attention with no expectation of future reward, simply for the pleasures of being engaged in the moment. Imagining we have some attention as capital to invest rationally for profit seems to spring up with the idea that we are a personal brand whose equity must be built. But if we are a brand investing our attention, what sort of "being" is behind those concepts to actually profit from the activity, and what form does the "profit" actually take? Mustn't our being engrossed in something be in its own reward? Otherwise, we have abstracted ourselves out of life itself. (Which is to say "value" to the individual is a matter of being engaged in something, absorbed with it. Otherwise the value is strictly theoretical, unable to be actualized. It's frozen, dead like Marx says of capital generally, which is why he occasionally expresses an ironic pity for capitalists, who are turned dead inside.)

Jonathan Beller's The Cinematic Mode of Production: Towards a Political Economy of the Society of the Spectacle is about these ideas, I think, but I haven't yet read it. In the meantime, I've read this 2006 essay in Cabinet, which presumably condenses the core ideas. In the essay, he also concludes that the "final subsumption of our cognitive-linguistic capacities by capital (and its huge industries dedicated to the production of signs) is the mark of the real subsumption of society by capital and the full economicization not only of culture but of what was once called 'human.' " That is, there is nothing beyond capital for its own sake -- no humans outside the system who are "using" capital for some other noble end, or even for self-satisfaction. The self disappears into capital; it is an effect of its circulation, not the thing that does the circulating. (That circulating happens automatically, presumably on account of the total system set in motion as capital was subsuming everything.) That we can talk about the "attention economy" without sounding insane means that the facility has been subsumed by capital, can be understood by its logic of measuring, commoditizing, circulating, and profit-seeking.

Beller's essay is densely theoretical and to my mind needlessly obscure, but interesting nonetheless. Still think a lot of what he's arguing has been superseded by recent and more comprehensible analyses of social media. Actually, Virno, whom Beller cites at the end, is way more lucid on the subject of the "general intellect" that our various media organize. Total mediation of experience means that all of that "general intellect" is captured in exploitable form and can be alienated from the common, privatized as proprietary information.

Beller draws on some of the management/marketing hoopla about the "attention economy," which is "built upon the premise becoming conviction, becoming fact, that human attention is productive of value." As I understand it, that is not the same as when our attention is the product being sold. When attention can be reliably measured, it can be monetized, it can be brokered and sold. This has long been the case with Nielsen's measuring "audiences" broken into demographics for mass media ("selling eyeballs"), but new internet micromedia and emerging social media have put individuals' attention span into play. In the economic climate of measurement and metering, we shouldn't assign (give is now the wrong word) our attention to anything without receiving something in return. Awareness of this "opportunity" is what threatens to prompt our self-exploitation. We are tempted to withhold genuine attention we would naturally give to something in hopes of some other reward than the fact we have been seduced. Beller describes this as a matter of humans being reduced (or reducing themselves in exchange for spectacle-pleasures) to a medium for data. (In his estimable prose: "This brutal calculus that renders human biomass into a mere substrate for information, is symptomatic of the qualitative transformation of the cinematic mode of production into the world-media system")

Attention as "creating value" is something slightly different. This makes attention into a kind of labor that seizes upon a thing and makes it richer. Knowing that you looked at a painting, say, and possibly commented on it and interpreted it could make it a more valuable object to everyone else. Beller writes: "Phenomena such as the cult of the celebrity or the fetish for the painted masterpiece are revealing—the celebrity is not an individual but a social relation characterized by the accumulation of attention, and similarly the masterpiece accumulates the value of all of the gazes that have fallen upon it."

At one level, this is another way of conceiving network effects -- the more people who use certain thing, the more utility it has for all the users and the more value it has for the owner of the network -- and presumably the more the owner can ultimately charge for its use. With social networks like Facebook, the users aren't charged directly; instead the value of their attention is expropriated and sold to advertisers. So this is not that different from the classic radio-TV model, nothing has really changed except the programming, which Facebook gets for free. "Network effects" measure utility benefits to users but also measure the size of the captive audience for the marketers parasitically attaching themselves to that utility (assuming the utility for users is not in the "information" that ads supply -- not as safe an assumption as it might seem).

But Beller has something different in mind. He associates moving images with assembly lines, and sees film viewers as paradigmatic attention-laborers. Then he drops this passage on our heads:

This new machine-body interface known as the cinema acted directly on the imagination to harness attention as a force of social production. The visible world and the Imaginary (the unconscious) became technologically linked and constantly retooled to create an industrial technologization of the Imaginary that today has become generalized. Moving images, the utilization of which valorizes their media as well as modifies spectators, result in the continuous modification of a collective, variegated operating platform that images the world and its relations in exchange for pleasure, social “know-how,” what-have-you. Thus “the image” creates the techno-social modifications necessary to engineer the adaptive forms of social cooperation that have become the pre-requisites for the preservation of capital and capitalist hierarchy.

What? Need help. I think he's saying that watching movies changes viewers by changing the sort of pleasure available to them, and then in exchange for that pleasure. These changed viewers are then more likely to reproduce the social relations needed for what sometimes gets called post-Fordist or postindustrial capitalism -- a capitalism that exploits worker cooperation and communication (or the "general intellect") to a greater degree. The key idea, I guess, is that cinema is a way (a "technology") to unlock the "Imaginary" to systematic exploitation -- making "spectacle" and "images" into salable commodities. The result is "socially produced stupidity": Beller asserts that "Americans are stupid by design."

In other words, cinema uses entertainment as manipulation; it is culture-industry product; it is a vector for ideological fine tuning. The media are the "practical organization of attention" and represent "the viral penetration of the logistics of capital into the life-world that turns revolutionary desires (for self-realization, for survival) into the life-blood of a growing totalitarianism." I've probably said similar things about Facebook. It reproduces the conditions that have allowed for inequality, thereby making them worse.

Not sure why he needs to stress visual culture when the problem is mediatization, which occurs in language as well. I suppose visual culture reifies images and accustoms us to that idea that they are on-demand, that pleasurable experience can be reliably bought. Beller wants to argue that capitalism has a vested interest in making culture more visual and less verbal; I don't think this distinction matters all that much; language and images can be equally degraded, and neither has a special, pure relation to being or reflexivity. Everything is always already mediated (reality and TV are "inseparable," as Beller says), but in language and images, right? I also don't think this lens helps clarify the plight of the "slum people," as Beller calls the people in impoverished cities outside of the major economies.

I kept waiting for Beller to define the "value" he's talking about attention creating, but this is simply assumed. People want your attention, thus it is valuable, thus value is created. But value here is divorced from any notion of ultimate utility. I wanted a look into attention as meaning-making.

"Digital exuberance"; always connected, never there

2010-12-26T23:18:00.001-05:00

From a Feb. 2006 Prospect article (pdf) by Will Davies.

This article lays out Davies's argument that as we move toward perpetual connectivity, we need a "new ethics of inconvenience" to preserve community in the face of the implicit individualism of gadgetry. "For every technologically enabled gain in convenience or efficiency, there is likely to be a cost to cohesion or stability." Yes. This is because we have come to understand convenience as a special kind of efficiency -- the elimination of the need for social compromise, for politics. Convenience has become the guarantor of the self, or "real identity" to ourselves, since it consists of the fantasy of complete personal autonomy, of total self-sufficiency in pleasing oneself. Against this fantasy stands the real "public value" of democratic institutions that create collective conditions of equality and fairness, that worth of which is easy to forget about in the midst of all the spectacle and self-regarding forced upon us.

Davies suggests that "technological bottlenecks can also be necessary conditions of social interaction or valuable moments of isolation." In the friction generated as we adopt new technology, we are reminded of what is jeopardized by it. Atavistic states of mind can suddenly no longer be taken for granted, and we see for the first time the conditions of everyday life as they are in the process of slipping away for good. Among these conditions are the kinds of makeshift strategies we have derived to sustain community and connection, which new communications technologies tend to supplant or facilitate to such a level of ease that they appear almost superfluous. Communication in many ways inheres in the friction, in the difficulty involved in making it happen, in achieving reciprocal understanding. This same difficulty also limits the degree our personal communications can be commercialized, though emerging social media work to overcome this, removing the stigma on smooth, broadcast interpersonal communication and ending the equation of difficult talk with authentic connection. We may lose sight of the "authentic" as a relevant category with regard to friendship or intimacy.

Davies points out how internet technology has brought benefits mainly to the consumer in terms of efficiency and ease of consumption. Technology makes consumption more convenient, mainly by removing the unpredictable human element. "The assumption underlying the digital model of progress is that we want fewer obligations, more immediate satisfaction, less contact with strangers in public spaces and more with those we already know." The result is a growing selfishness, or rather, a sense of entitlement of being left alone coupled with the delusion that one is at the center of everyone else's world because one is linked to them in a persistent network.

Digital technologies are generally personalised and ubiquitous, allowing us to opt in and out of social situations in a particularly egocentric fashion. Already, mobile phones offer us an almost permanent get-out clause from the here and now. As the ubiquity and bandwidth of the wireless internet grows, so the forms of technological connectivity that are constantly available to us will grow also.

Connectivity is, somewhat paradoxically, a way of never needing to be specifically present in a particular moment. Always connected, never there. It extends an on-demand sociality to every consumer of other people's conversation. You time-shift it to when you can be bothered with it. Synchronized reciprocity ceases to be a cultural norm. Collective identity derived from the habits or even the experience of co-presence is harder to achieve; politics becomes self-centered. Davies argues that "community depends on some sense of continuity and co-dependence, and a sense of the inescapability of social relations." Otherwise we imagine ourselves with limitless individual autonomy, and regard the inevitable limits as gross injustices. We seek to eliminate limits by shunting them onto someone else, gaining freedom at their expense instead of compromises for communal welfare.

Thus we must seek out the "beneficial checks on individualistic autonomy" and find some way to implement them. Davies hopes that the "economy of presence" -- the idea that co-presence, since rare, will come to seem valuable -- will reincentivize difficult communication and consumption inefficiency and inconvenience. But it may be that the passive pleasures of consuming media will more than compensate for the loss in aura that was once derived from face-to-face talk and live performance. He is right that "privilege will lie in access to rare face-to-face services" -- that granting facetime will carry more significance, that human customer service will be reserved for elites who can afford it while the rest of us deal with automated "help" that serves mainly to drive us to distraction until we give up our grievances.

But this basically means we only want human contact in a crisis of some kind, and under normal circumstances it is a democratic triumph that most of us are freed from the indignity of other people's frailties. Wanting to talk to a person in virtually any situation is a signal that everything is fucked -- that the self-sufficiency of the individual has been breached. We are forced to face our lack of autonomy, and we likely hope we can buy our way out of extended human contact -- that we can purchase help as commodified labor. When people recognize the need for each other, the need to unite in collective purpose, it is regarded as an extraordinary, and unpleasant, situation, an anomaly rather than the norm, let alone the ideal.

depression

2010-12-23T18:39:00.001-05:00

Will Davies quotes Alain Ehrenberg's The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age:

Depression began its ascent [in the 1960s] when the disciplinary model for behaviours, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves. These new norms brought with them a sense that the responsibility for our existence lies not only within us but also within the collective between-us. I try here to demonstrate that depression is the opposite of this paradigm. Depression presents itself as an illness of responsibility in which the dominant feeling is that of failure. The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.

I think I need to read this book. Depression, by this interpretation, is what happens when the burdens of sharing, etc., the incentives to self-actualize through communication, become overwhelming. That burden, arguably, has been progressively made heavier by "communicative capitalism" and its incentives and ideological cajoling it offers for us to develop our personal brand. Davies's gloss is that "the result is a paradoxical combination of narcissism and depression, whereby the individual projects an omnipotent ideal of who they truly are, but (like any ideal) one which their actions are never able to match." This, perhaps, is the "new narcissism." We grandiosely reconceive ourselves as a media company with a personal brand, but we never amass a sufficient amount of brand equity.

We must further attenuate our uniqueness and justify our precious sense of specialness, since it is no longer rooted in a traditional identity, in our social contribution to reproducing a particular community's way of life. With self-fashioning subsumed by capital, capitalist logic now governs it, meaning it must be commodifed (as data) and exchangeable and then turn some sort of profit in being circulated. It needs to continually valorize itself. Thus the self we must become is not a "steady-state" self but a self always on the verge of "creative destruction" -- a self that must continue to grow or die. We end up with an ideology that celebrates an entrepreneurial sort of self that is putatively free to fail, but a lived self that is ravaged or emptied by the perpetual insecurity.

Depression is a different way of conceptualizing a refusal to reiterate the requisite process of ceaseless self-destruction. It is a way of expressing a refusal of the freedom to fail by making a particular failure permanent. Depression is a kind of resistance that manifests as self-destruction, since the self has become caught up in the thing we long to resist in our souls.

Communicative capitalism, the compulsion to make more text

2010-12-20T19:51:00.000-05:00

From Jodi Dean, Blog Theory. Heavy on the Lacan, which I didn't find very useful; seems like this merely translates phenomena into a coded language more than anything else, which seems like a dead end. But there are several illuminating passages that seem detachable from the Lacanian superstructure.

The first is Dean's idea of "communicative capitalism" -- capitalist system where acts of communication are the main commodity being exchanged, where communication is the most lucratively exploitable -- at least that is how I understand it. Here is her definition:

I take the position that contemporary communications media capture their users in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. My term for this formation is communicative capitalism. Just as industrial capitalism relied on the exploitation of labor, so does communicative
capitalism rely on the exploitation of communication. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, “communication is the form of capitalist production in which capital has succeeded in submitting society entirely and globally to its regime, suppressing all alternative paths.” A critical theory of communicative capitalism requires occupying (rather than disavowing) the trap in which it enthralls and configures contemporary subjects. I argue that this trap takes the form that modern European philosophy heralded as the form of freedom: reflexivity. Communicative capitalism is that economic-ideological form wherein reflexivity captures creativity and resistance so as to enrich the few as it placates and diverts the many.

My way of putting this is that we develop our identity and seek recognition in ways that can be captured in networks and are exploitable for other ends. This invalidates the identity discovered through this process -- we are forced to be reflexive about our self-creation but the reflexivity makes identity more tangible but more inauthentic feeling. The key point is understanding reflexivity as a kind of trap, a kind of compulsion that generates more communication that doesn't serve the communicator -- the more we try to articulate the self, the further we are from grasping it, the more extensive becomes the alienation. This seems a matter of perspective on communication -- we are brought to understand it and sociality more generally as quantitative, abstract. The texture of life begins to vanish, but culturally available modes of pursuing it worsen the problem. She quotes Žižek: “Is not one of the possible reactions to the excessive filling-in of the voids in cyberspace therefore informational anorexia, the desperate refusal to accept information, in so far as it occludes the presence of the Real?” And she adds: "It’s like the feast of information results in a more fundamental starvation as one loses the sense of an underlying Real." Baudrillard explains this as being caught up in the simulacra. The "filling in" makes ambivalence about connectivity and information surfeit worse; the fantasies of completeness become more elaborate and thus more destructive, corrupting everything they touch. Anything digitized becomes suggest to completeness-mania. Intimacy in friendship is particularly corrupted. Others become "overpresent" -- they force upon us "unbearable intrusions of the other's jouissance." That's possibly my main problem with being on Facebook, I think. Others appear fulfilled in their happiness and presence and I am utterly superfluous to it. Always true, but not something i want to be reminded of.

One consequence of the "creative tools" afforded by Web 2.0 is a sense of inadequacy to the tools: "it’s stifling as it confronts users with their lack of skills and imagination." It structures enjoyment as quasi-social but ultimately solitary, a mode in which one needs not answer to anyone else, in which convenience is the guiding principle. "Convenience trumps commitment," as Dean puts it.

Central to Dean's interpretation of blogging is "whatever being" -- belonging as belonging, rather than to anything in particular. Participation for its own sake, as a mode of avoiding commitment, perhaps. It structures noncommitment: "With multiple convergent and turbulent media, I don't have to settle on any one direction or theme ... these multiple, circulating impulses incite in me a kind of permanent indecision or postponement, a lack of commitment – what else is out there?"

Online, we are not sure of who is watching, so our identity shaping gestures are tentative, incomplete, anxious. "We imagine ourselves one way, then another, never sure of how we appear because we don’t know before whom we appear." We inhabit simultaneous subject positions, which inhibits empathy in our observers, and in ourselves for the onlooker -- what Adam Smith was necessary for sympathy and moral responsiveness. "Caught in reflexive networks – always another move, another level – we lose the capacity for reflection. Our networks are reflexive so that we don’t have to be." I think we are reflexive; it just is expropriated and is a trap, a punishment within capital's networks.

The social media forms allow performance of authenticity as immediacy, as "spontaneity" which is a consequence of how messages are consumed rather than composed. We tend to forget in our "sharing" how exposed we are -- we think of it as something we do, not a passive state of vulnerability, as it actually is.

Online media concentrate us on the metadata: "Differently put, they track the fact of the spoken as they direct us away from what is said."

The key point for me in interpreting Web 2.0 has always been this: "Far from inaugurating a new creative, post-monetary commons, media practices like blogging and social networks ease the paths of neoliberal capitalism. Why should employers pay for work that we happily do for free?" Yes. Neoliberal capitalism seems to evolving in conjunction with social media, which lays down the infrastructure for its markets and for the modes of subjectivization it prefers -- creating influencers and hyperconsumers and so on. The nature of "unpaid work" has changed from domestic work to this sort of affective labor that can be conducted digitally inside corporately owned networks, establishing norms of civility and reciprocity within them and not opposed to them. But it also makes this work trackable, countable, so the way is paved to making it wage work, explicitly commodified and commercialized. People can reasonably demand payment to do it. The making of bonds becomes a kind of wage work in this emerging neoliberal capitalist society.

So basically this is how neoliberalism currently works: unpaid work in the commons (social being, etc.) is captured in networks where capital can exploit it and where it becomes reflexive for individual subjects. Then subjects have an investment, by capitalism's terms, to make that work pay, make it commodified abstracted labor. Thus capitalism internalizes more and more of experience to itself, its system, its interpretive lens -- more and more human behavior is understood in terms of maximization incentives. Other ideological incentives for action are suppressed. Sociality is thereby proletarianized.

Awkward incentives to communicate

2010-12-17T14:38:00.002-05:00

from this post by Will Davies.

Mobile telecom companies ... are so culturally pernicious because they are effectively flogging language itself. In an age when there is scarcely any limit to what can be mediated, and where or when it can be distributed, there is no relationship or artefact that isn't on sale at your nearest Vodafone stockist. Your granny, Coldplay, BBC, work, dating are all part of the package. It's everything.

As the scarcity of Everything gradually wanes, the companies are becoming bolder in their branding of the infinite. T-Mobile now has an advert asking 'What would you do with limitless texts?' with a photo of a happy punter saying things like 'I'd text everyone I know and put together the world's greatest super-group!' (sorry??). Infinite opportunity to say, share, broadcast everything all the time anywhere has to be sold as a positive achievement, with a tangible result. But the truth was sitting across the aisle from me on the 15.03 from Birmingham: a restless child, pawing at a toy which promised everything and delivered scarcely anything.... This isn't progress.

When communication itself is the product, what is communicated is irrelevant, abstract, all the same, all commensurable to the units of communication being traded. And an incentive is generated to spur communication for its own sake -- noncommunicative communication that doesn't facilitate understanding but necessitates more communication -- and this incentive embeds itself as ideology and finds its way into our reflexive subjectivity. We all suddenly feel like it's who we are to want to be "creative" and "share" so much online.

Davies looks at this through the lens of "economy of presence" -- telecoms have incentive to encourage us to choose to communicate with people who are not present, because they cannot monetize unmediated conversation taking place face-to-face. "The mobile phone company's task is to convince us that moving more of our lives into the column entitled 'Different place' is a form of liberation." It does this by making mediated sociality seem more convenient -- it flatters us, telling us we are too important and to have our individuality or our schedule compromised by the ardor of reciprocal conversation. Direct human interaction is figured as a de facto nuisance.

Its success at accomplishing this is testified to by our willingness to mediate more and more discourse in the name of it being more convenient because less reciprocal. The media companies sell us the ability to opt out of conversation and make discourse entirely asynchronous, on-demand -- akin to time-shifting television consumption. We start to consume conversation as though it were television; it becomes less spontaneous, more geared to our entertainment, otherwise we reduce it to the bare minimum: a text of "k" to confer agreement, etc.

The last hill for telecoms to conquer, Davies argues, is the nostalgia for actual presence: the feeling of "I was there" when something momentous occurred: "The 'But I was there!' plea is an attempt to cling to something that cannot be watered down and rendered worthless by over-production." Despite the ideological snow job, we still yearn for presence, for the limits on time and space that provide an aura of meaningfulness. This reminds me of a passage from Ortega's Revolt of the Masses in which he comments on time-space compression but views it as an enhancement of vitality: "we get a childish pleasure out of the indulgence in mere speed, by means of which we kill space and strangle time. By annulling them, we give them life, we make them serve vital purposes, we can be in more places than we could before, enjoy more comings and goings, consume more cosmic time in less vital time." It turns out that "vital time" is a real constraint that when superseded, empties cosmic time of its textural richness and fills it with abstract experiences to tally.

To preserve vital time in the face of telecom advertising hype and a general ideological climate that celebrates accelerated cultural consumption as an end in itself (more=better!) Davies advocates resistance, deliberate slowness, complexity, difficulty -- anything to interrupt information processing and invite contemplation and co-presence. But the increasing ubiquity of devices and connectivity militates against resistance. Davies notes that it even colonizes the simple pleasure in being there, transforms it into a mediated pleasure of announcing one's presence.

With telecoms inter-woven with everyday social life, be it long distance or otherwise, all varieties of space are being marketed. We're cajoled to relinquish our enjoyment of just being there, and when we refuse, we're sold a new package which allows us to shout 'but I was there!' It's suffocating.

That is Foursquare in a nutshell.

Gadgetry offers undeniable convenience but masks the price we must pay in surrendering nostalgia, contemplation, rich experience. Not only that, but widespread gadgetry adoption creates network effects that make not having gadgets more and more socially isolating; thereby tech holdouts are coerced into adoption themselves. As long as resistance leads to social isolation and loneliness, it will always be futile.

Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses

2010-12-16T12:52:00.000-05:00

Unrepentantly snobbish and of its time, Ortega's Revolt of the Masses (1930) looks down its nose at proto-fascistic "mass-men" -- the spoiled ingrates who never had to suffer for a more liberal world and who "automatically" take its plenitude for granted.

The common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.

As a result, mass men have "two fundamental traits: the free expansion of his vital desires, and therefore, of his personality; and his radical ingratitude toward all that has made possible the ease of his existence." The mass-man, who is of course "unintelligent," thinks "everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations."

Ortega posits two sorts of people, those who drift along contentedly, self-satisfied, and those "noble" souls of gold who are impelled to strive. With characteristic circumspection, Ortega proclaims:

For there is no doubt that the most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort toward perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves.

With the rise of mass-men, the buoys are in position to impose their coarse, common self-satisfaction on liberal institutions and thereby destroy them. The average man are hydraulically injected with "ideas" but he "lacks the faculty of ideation.

He has no conception even of the rare atmosphere in which ideas live. He wishes to have opinions, but is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion. Hence his ideas are in effect nothing more than appetites in words.

Ortega romanticizes at a safe distance the struggle of material deprivation. "There might be a deceptive tendency to believe that a life born into a world of plenty should be better, more really a life than one which consists in a struggle against scarcity. Such is not the case.... The abundance of resources that he is obliged to make use of gives him no chance to live out his own personal destiny, his life is atrophied."

"Communicative capitalism"

2010-12-10T18:34:00.000-05:00

From this conference paper (doc) by Jodi Dean, "Is Democracy Possible? Sure, This Is What Democracy Looks Like." Says do not cite, but no one reads this blog anyway.

It’s as if the dismantling of the social welfare state were somehow disconnected from the celebration of networked communication as the new ensemble of tools and skills and associations that will enable the individuals left exposed by the disintegration of a social safety net to compete, even survive, in the brutal environment of neoliberal capitalism. It’s as if the incitement to individualize and personalize were not an element of the diminution of a sense of the collective and the common—a sense that the protests are reinvigorating.

In other words, neoliberal democracy seeks to hyperindividuate so as to divide and conquer. It presents equality in communication as compensatory for economic inequalities. We resign ourselves to "capitalist realism," accepting this as the only real alternative. "Fixing democracy" is a cover story for accepting the status quo.

The conditions that enabled democracy to name an ideal have passed. Now it is a means of financialization and xenophobia. So to continue to appeal to democracy is in effect highly conservative, an instance of misplaced longing for a movement that has already been realized. No one contests democracy. No one says that people should not express their views, participate, get involved

At the same time, the economy is changing to something more communication driven.

My goal is to highlight the convergence of communication and capitalism in a formation that incites voice, engagement, and participation only to capture them in the affective networks of mass personalized media, networks that presuppose and intensify individualism such that widely shared ideas and concerns are conceived less in terms of a self-conscious collective than they are as viruses, mobs, trends, moments, and swarms. It’s odd, isn’t it, this transformation of publicity into the terms of epidemiology—an idea or image with an impact “goes viral.” Channeled through cellular networks and fiber optic cables, onto screens and into sites for access, storage, retrieval, and counting, communication today is trapped in the capitalist circuits it produces and amplifies.

Good description of social media as form of immaterial labor that reproduces the social as a set of atomized personal brands seeking synergy.

The two ideas get connected this way, through psychoanalytic idea of drive:

In drive, enjoyment comes from missing one’s goal, from the repeated yet ever failing efforts to reach it that start to become satisfying on their own. This is democracy for the left: our circling around, our missing of a goal, and the satisfaction we attain through this missing. Media companies love this—not only do they enable us to keep circling, ever more and ever faster, but they can capitalize our satisfaction, privatize and monetize our traces.

marx and value

2010-12-02T19:19:00.000-05:00

As Heinrich states, "Value does not arise somewhere to then be 'there'." Value is not a thing but rather a social relationship. It emerges neither through production nor through exchange, but presupposes both. It is a property something is assigned in relation to other things, which then gives the appearance of possessing it quite apart from such a relationship. As Marx insists on repeatedly, value is a ghostly or over-sensual property, not a substantial one. The conception of a commodity possessing its value objectivity independent of these relations is a semblance that transforms a social property into what is taken to be a natural one.
...

The same situation applies to Pierre Bourdieu's non-economic concept of capital. One must both work for one's capital, get an education, practice, and produce something which is recognised by the field of science or art in order to become a scientist or an artist, or else one becomes neither, regardless of what one has produced for the drawer or the hard disc. Similarly, the value-relation does not arise in exchange without a labour process, but without exchange, concrete labour would never be reduced to abstract labour either, and thus, no value would emerge. One might also bring to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein's by now famous, and to modern social sciences so significant statement, that one cannot have a private language. The same thing applies to the value, one cannot decide it on one's own.

from Eurozine article by Anders Ramsay about Marx's theory of value. Emphasis added. Value is a complex, condensed relation, not a transferable property. Its abstraction is always ideological, since it depends entirely on its specific embeddedness. It is a quality and never a quantity.

"doing" vs. abstract labor

2010-11-30T18:32:00.002-05:00

John Holloway's essay "Cracks and the Crisis of Abstract Labor" (pdf) in Antipode (the Journal of Radical Geography) offers an alternative terrain of struggle to the sort exemplified by unions and labor movements, which in his opinion have been beaten back and are played out, fatally compromised by their acceptance of "abstract labor" -- labor that has been alienated and made commensurate with all other labor, that is labor people do for money and not for joy or meaning or social connection. This is opposed to "doing" -- unabstracted work as manifestation of species being, as self-expression rather than for wages.

Holloway describes the alienation process forced on us by capitalist relations this way:

I bake a cake. I enjoy baking it, I enjoy eating it, I enjoy sharing it with my friends and am proud of the cake I have made. Then I decide that I will try to make a living by baking cakes. I bake cakes and sell them on the market. Gradually the cake becomes a means to gaining an income sufficient to allow me to live. I have to produce the cake at a certain speed and in a certain way so that I can keep the price low enough to sell it. Enjoyment is no longer part of the process. After a while I realise that I am not earning enough money and think that, since the cake-making is in any case merely a means to an end, a way of earning money, I might as well make something else that will sell better. My doing has become completely indifferent to its content; there has been a complete abstraction from its concrete characteristics. The object I produce is now so completely alienated from me that I do not care whether it is a cake or a rat poison, as long as it sells.

As a result of this sort of production-process-based alienation, under the social relations of capitalism, Holloway argues, sociality is sustained by the commensurability of labor.

When the baker sells her cakes and uses the money to buy a dress, then a social integration between the activities of the baker and the activities of the dressmaker is established through the purely quantitative measure of their labours. The abstraction of doing into labour (or the abstraction of labour from the specificities of doing) is both immediately oppressive for the doer and at the same time the creation of a social cohesion (a system) that stands outside any conscious
social control.

This is why the "system" seems faceless, difficult to pinpoint. We generate it when we value effort in money.

If abstract labor sustains capitalism and its lived relations -- if it defines what is "normal" and "realistic" -- then anytime we produce outside of that structure, anytime we are "doing" creates what Holloway calls cracks, which posits "extremely fragile spaces or moments in which we live the world that we want to create." These defy the logic of capital, force a reconceptualization of what sorts of activities and exchanges are "real." The struggle is of course ongoing; just as capitalism must reproduce itself and its hegemonic ideology from moment to moment, so resistance in the form of "doing" must be made again and again. Holloway writes: "The struggle to impose the discipline of labour upon our activity is a struggle fought by capital each and every day: what else do managers, teachers, social workers, police and so on do?"

Against this, we must fight to prevent the subsumption of all forms of production, of doing, under capital:

The root of the present crisis is our insubordination, our refusal to subordinate our lives totally to the logic of capital, to convert all our doing into abstract labour.

The internet is pivotal in this regard. For example, it potentially extends subsumption of everyday life under capital by subsuming identity production, by making our self-fashioning into a kind of exploitable labor that can be quantified. This is why tracking hits on posts and counting Twitter followers, etc., is so insidious. But the internet also promises an alternative method for gaining social recognition through facilitating sharing and the commons -- "collaborative consumption," as a recent business book calls it. It seems to me that social media subsumes the practices of friendship to capital and this is a terrible, terrible thing. It blurs the line between "doing" and "abstract labor" just as it blurs public and private, leaving a never-certain terrain where one can't be entirely comfortable in one's practices or know the scope on which they are being mounted. Sociality blends into surveillance; hobbies blend into social-factory labor; the self becomes an alienated brand, stranding consciousness, which finds it can't know itself in the moment, because identity has become an external thing. Holloway admits that "autonomist movements ... can certainly be co-opted into the decentralized structures of power characteristic of neoliberalism." The big media companies on the internet seem to be intent of doing this co-opting -- actually pre-opting, since most people are introduced to social media, etc., through corporate interfaces, which means whatever they do with them is contained and exploitable. Does it matter if individuals believe they are "doing" when their practices help sustain consumer capitalism? Are these moments "cracks" of resistance, or are they the mortar covering cracks over?

Somewhat grandiosely, I think of what we're trying to do with the New Inquiry in the light of a struggle against abstract labor, as a process of creating cracks, an open-ended social structure for facilitating "doing". Not for money or any of its proxies, but for social possibilities, for a sense of fulfilling the self conceived along different lines from that of an acquisitive self. It is ideally a space for autonomous intellectual activity, as an end in itself, an expression of human capability and creativity. That seems a bit squishy though: such a lofty purpose, when not experienced as a flow state, may seem a bit like purposelessness. The answer to "Why am I doing this" can never go beyond "because I want to" -- and that seems inadequate. The pursuit for social recognition is also slippery" can it be kept separate from capital's preferred yardsticks for recognition (money), which spill over into the perpetuation of status hierarchies. The question then is how to allow recognition to function in an egalitarian way without it being meaningless; also how to motivate human doing without relying entirely on metaphysical motives to be human.

From an interview with Elinor Ostrom

2010-11-05T16:06:00.000-04:00

This interview with Ostrom, about self-management of commons property.

If you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if community members don’t have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won’t organize, and there will be failures.

I would need to actually read her studies, but the key point here is that you need to define "good" when it comes to finding a "good means of communication." It is not simply synonymous with cheap or free or ubiquitous. My hypothesis is that social media is actually the opposite of a good channel of communication for self-management purposes, that it becomes a distraction from accomplishing commons goals and crowds out the space where good communication might otherwise take root. Social media seems atomizing and isolating to me even though it foments all sorts of weak-tie group formation. Suspect commons management requires strong, strong group ties and the ability to conceive a collective identity rather than a personal profile. I know they are not either-or, but social media seems to have a strong colonizing tendency, conquering other forms of identity making and other mediums for self-expression and assimilating them.

One of the costs of self-organizing is surrendering the individual identity to a certain degree, relinquishing its autonomy and its priority within one's own psyche -- and that flies in the face of social media and the tendency of consumer society generally.

Fittingly Ostrom encourages localism in decision making and rejects consumerism as model for economic growth -- in other words, rejecting nationalized standards for the good life that consumerism imports and preferring instead local notions of what it makes sense to have for a fulfilling life as individual and community member.

"The mirror of production" notes

2010-10-05T20:01:00.000-04:00

I read Baudrillard's The Mirror of Production recently and underlined a bunch of passages and scrawled lots of notes into the margins, but I wanted to move some of that material here, and see if any of it might prove useful down the road.

For Baudrillard, capital valorization is basically a process of investing signs with meaning, with "signs" designating the entire gamut of communicative objects and notions and practices. Commodities are only one example, or you could just redefine commodity as anything that can bear meaning within a structure of signification. Capital thus works to make everything signify and then to exploit that process, which extends consumption infinitely.

His specific target in this work, though, is the concept of production, the ideal of productivity, of turning things to account, of making things useful. "Everywhere man has learned to reflect on himself, to assume himself, to posit himself according to this scheme of production which is assigned to him as the ultimate dimension of value and meaning." Use value is a consequence of exchange value, not some pre-existing value inherent in a good. Likewise for being useful, which is an aftereffect, not something inherent in activity -- what counts as useful is tied to capitalist rationality. "Qualitative" accounts of labor only further mystify labor as the only "real" human practice.

This leads to a misrecognition of wealth as work: He quotes Marx: " 'Regarded materially, wealth consists only in the manifold variety of needs.' Is this not the program of advanced capitalist society?" In other words, wealth consists of a surfeit of "meaningful" things for people to do. It doesn't consist of a liberation from effort. Marxism is indicted for not moving beyond the fetishization of productivity and the manufacture of social needs as wealth. Baudrillard seems to have made up a Marx quote to condemn him, though this sounds like the "humanist Marx": "In a higher stage of community society... work will not be simply a means of living but will become the prime, vital need itself."

For Baudrillard, such a view is colluding with capital and transforming humans into alienated labor power in their very being.

in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power, as the "inalienable" power of creating value by their labor.

It seems to me that in this line of analysis, Baudrillard flirts with a kind of radical Luddism, a yearning to return to supposed freedoms of the stone age. At best, he espouses a Bataille-style advocacy of expenditure over productivity as the purpose of human life. The issue is "social wealth vs. symbolic wealth":

There is no way of getting around this. Marxist labor is defined in the absolute order of a natural necessity and its dialectical overcoming as rational activity producing value. The social wealth produced is material; it has nothing to do with symbolic wealth which, mocking natural necessity, comes conversely from destruction, the deconstruction of value, transgression, or discharge. These two notions of wealth are irreconcilable, perhaps even mutually exclusive; it is useless to attempt acrobatic transfers.

Capitalism has moved beyond the natural-necessity realm into generating "value" from symbolic wealth, which mocks the Marxist notion of production for human survival and autonomy against nature. Production just reproduces capital in the position of nature, as the controlling limit, as the force determining human capabilities. Capitalist economics and markets make scarcity; they do not solve it. Markets reproduce conditions that make endless series of alienating exchanges necessary.

Even Marxism's transcending perspective will always be burdened by counterdependence on political economy. Against Necessity it will oppose the mastery of Nature; against Scarcity it will oppose Abundance ("to each according to his needs") without ever resolving either the arbitrariness of these concepts or their idealist overdetermination by political economy.

Hence Marxism fails to move us out of the grip of political economy, which is an ideology that reproduces all the immiseration of capitalism.

Anyway, Baudrillard argues this sanctification of labor infects even the notion of play and imagination, which are also made useful and concerned with "quality". "The sphere of play is always merely the aesthetic sublimation of labor's constraints." Beauty is merely something to gamble on, productive of an exploitable result in meaning that justifies itself after the fact. Beauty is proved in its effects rather than a matter of intrinsic form. To put that in autonomista terms, work is opposed by immaterial labor that masquerades as non-work, but is also "productive," making meanings and reproducing labor power in reified, appropriatable form. We are still producing ourselves in non-work time, and producing value, valorizing capital.

***

Baudrillard mentions "the symbolic destruction of all social relations not so much by the ownership of the means of production but by the control of the code." He posits a "planned socialization by the code" via its being "monopolized" by the marketing apparatus -- this institutes "consumption as control." Since we are trapped at the level of symbolic consumption -- since everything we do is interpreted as a consumerist, self-branding gesture -- there is no possibility of affirming revolution. "Whatever one does, one can only respond to the system on its own terms, according to its own rules, answering it with its own signs." This is the consequence of the forces that homogenize every act to a single signifying dimension -- what Baudrillard means, I think, by monopoly essentially.

***
This is the heart of the critique of productivity:

Let us say that the system is structurally incapable of liberating human potentials except as productive forces, that is, according to an operational finality that leaves no room for the reversion of the loss, the gift, the sacrifice and hence for the possibility of symbolic exchange. The example of consumption is significant ... the crisis in 1929 marked the point of asphyxiation: the problem was no longer one of production but one of circulation. Consumption became the strategic element; the people were henceforth mobilized as consumers; their "needs" became as essential as their labor power. By this operation, the system assured its economic survival at a fantastically expanded level. But something else is at play in the strategy of consumption. By allowing for the possibility of expanding and consuming, by organizing social redistribution (social security, allotments, salaries that are no longer defined as the strict economic reproduction of labor power) by launching advertising, human relations, etc., the system created the illusion of a symbolic participation (the illusion that something that is taken and won is also redistributed, given, and sacrificed)... In spite of all its good will (at least among those capitalist who are aware of the necessity of tempering the logic of the system in order to avoid an explosion in the near future), it cannot make consumption a true consummation, a festival, a waste. To consume is to start producing again. All that is expended is in fact invested; nothing is ever totally lost.

We can't escape our consumption being productive at the level of the code; this reproduces capitalism and inscribes it deep into everyday life at the level of self-fashioning:

this also means that each individual, each consumer, is locked into the profitable manipulation of goods and signs for his own interest. He can no longer really waste his time in leisure.104 Inexorably, he reproduces, at his own level, the whole system of political economy: the logic of appropriation, the impossibility of waste, of the gift, of loss, the inexorability of the law of value.

Autonomy and participation are only illusory; they are circumscribed by structural system of production:

They would like to have participation, but participation is revealed each time as being only a better tactic for the wider reproduction of the system. The more autonomy is given to everyone, the more decision-making is concentrated at the summit. The autonomy of the faculties is, as we know, the best means of aligning them with capitalist productivity, just as the independence of colonial nations was the best means of perpetuating and modernizing their exploitation.

And so liberation is basically impossible where it has been reconceived as liberalization:

liberalization is only hyperrepressive. Needs which were once contingent and heterogeneous are homogenized and definitively rationalized according to the models of the system.

"Enlightenment as Mass Deception" revisited

2010-09-30T17:43:00.000-04:00

From an article in Fast Capitalism 2:2, "Compliance Fiction: Adorno and Horkheimer's 'Culture Industry' Thesis in a Multimedia Age" by Sam Caslin.

Basically, Caslin uses Adorno to call bullshit on "co-creation" -- marketers' beloved exploitation of consumers to do their job for them: "the actions of the Firefly/Serenity fans suggests an increasing rationalization of consumer culture whereby fans are no longer required to simply consume passively but to become actively involved in the mechanisms of production and market creation." In the same vein as Holt's awesome article about consumer refuseniks.

Co-creation is not an escape from passivity so much as it is a voluntary plunge into deeper exploitation at the level of fandom, of libidinal investment, or whatever you want to call it. The fans would deny that they are being exploited at all, of course, which moves them to a different level than those who cynically "see through" advertising and marketing but use the products and champion the brands anyway.

A good point about the limits of the term "culture industry": "the culture industry thesis critiques a specific type of gentrified, mass-produced artefact aimed at legitimating capitalism" -- that is, what defines culture industry product is that it engenders a specific sort of consumer, or audience that is predisposed to function within capitalism and would feel threatened when it is threatened -- it inculcates a dependence on capitalist structures for obtaining pleasure and self-knowledge, the commodities of knowledge and recognition and social know-how that have been disembedded from earlier modes of distribution. Entertainment is reified, etc., experience is commodity to collect rather than an immersion in the present unmediated (if such an ideal is possible).

"although consumers may have some power within consumer society this only negates the potential for them to have power over consumer society. Modes of production cannot be controlled or challenged from within." This also seems like it might apply to the internet and digital media -- if social media is the problem itself, it can't really be used to undo itself. Social media is a new way for capitalism to homegenize experience and re-present it as "content." What we win through such media strengthens the system that is depriving us of a larger freedom.

žižek on love

2010-09-22T01:03:00.001-04:00

In this essay in the New Left Review, Zižek makes some interesting claims about the nature of love, some of which I think I have read or heard elsewhere -- he seems to recycle certain of his own arguments. Anyway:

Love is a choice that is experienced as necessity. At a certain point, one is overwhelmed by the feeling that one already is in love, and that one cannot do otherwise. By definition, therefore, comparing qualities of respective candidates, deciding with whom to fall in love, cannot be love. This is the reason why dating agencies are an anti-love device par excellence.

That echoes to a degree Eva Illouz's argument in Cold Intimacies about the efficiency of relationships conditioned by modern communications technologies and technologies of the self. But it is an almost commonplace idea, really: Love strikes us as a compulsion, a craziness, an overwhelming of our resistance or our reluctance or our comfortable, established ways. It forces us to be different, to go against our grain.

Later Zižek, discussing possible modes of Left resistance in the era of biopower and so on, he declares: "An act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible -- an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility." That seems an even better definition of love, a leap into an impossibility that afterward seems to have been inevitable, inescapable.

What makes that leap possible? How do we act in the face of what is impossible? Falling in love perhaps models how we can suddenly find ourselves acting without an operative sense what is "realistic" or possible. "We will be forced to live ‘as if we were free’. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss, in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the new." Revolution would require a collective love for an idea that enchants each of us as if we were the only one.

Flexibility and resistance

2010-09-14T19:25:00.000-04:00

Though I don't think the coining of "altermodernity" is helpful, Micah White makes a good point in this essay:

Could it be that while we’ve been smashing boundaries and crossing borders, consumerism has quickened its global expansion by piggybacking on our identity-blurring efforts?
And now, entering a new era of humanity where postmodernity is slipping into altermodernity, we find that the binaries we rejected are not only blurring but finally collapsing. Unable to say with any certainty what is real or virtual, human or animal, organic or genetically modified, some wish to resuscitate again, but this time with nostalgia, the failed antimodern project of shattering distinctions. While the chorus – composed now of cyberpunks and activists joined by capitalists and technocrats – rejoices in the indistinguishable difference between online and offline, organic and synthetic, man and machine, the most crucial distinction of all – that between resistance and complicity – is collapsing as well. Unless we can discover a way to critique the system without furthering the system, we shall be lost.

One is tempted to say, No duh. Capitalism thrives on constant change and on circulation, not the rigidity of binary oppositions and the structures and hierarchies derived from them. Capitalism promises the chance to perpetually remake the hierarchies around terms that favor you; that's why so many can be induced to participate and support it -- they internalize resistance to capitalism into the system as healthy competition.

Resistance is always becoming complicity because of the labile nature of capitalism; it changes to co-opt resistance practices and make them lifestyle products. Thus subjects have to keep moving without necessarily becoming flexible in the post-Fordist sense and useful to capital as incubators of cool. The practice of resistance becomes the constant, inflexible thing, even though the specific nature of what is resisted must always be changing and perhaps intensifying. We must be ever flexible in our permanent resistance to novelty as an end in itself.

Time discipline and social networks as bridge to new forms of it

2010-09-10T17:20:00.000-04:00

The Fast Capitalism article I discussed int he previous post directed me to E.P. Thompson's essay "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" (pdf). It's makes for turgid reading, but it pays off in the last few sections.

Of note: He points out that the language used to sell the idea of rigorous time-keeping shifted:

There were a lot of timepieces about in the 1790s: emphasis is shifting from "luxury" to "convenience"; even cottagers may have wooden clocks costing less than twenty shillings. Indeed, a general diffusion of clocks and watches is occurring (as one would expect) at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronization of labour.

Time-discipline became ubiquitous, so it become "convenient" to obey it more perspicaciously -- no longer a luxury of the master imposing discipline; the discipline became internalized and a pressing psychological issue for workers themselves.

In the second to last section, he asks a key question:

In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to "pass the time". But how far did this propaganda really succeed? How far are we entitled to speak of any radical restructuring of man's social nature and working habits?

This is interesting in light of the supposed lax morals of, say Greece or Mexico, whose slack (from the point of view of industrial time discipline) workers are described thusly by one "engineer of growth" as Thompson derides them:

His lack of initiative, inability to save, absences while celebrating too many holidays, willingness to work only three or four days a week if that paid for necessities, insatiable desire for alchohol — all were pointed out as proof of a natural inferiority.

So is the price to pay for an orderly capitalist democracy the subjection to an intense and unpleasant propaganda about time-thrift and to have workers subjected to all sorts of scrutiny to prevent their shirking? Is that price worth paying? Should we envy Greece rather than regard them as Michael Lewis does as self-centered cheats who are incapable of civic duty?

Resisting time-discipline, Thompson argues, is always and everywhere a key site of resistance to capital, to the sort of subjectivation that capitalism imposes, well delineated in some industrial propaganda Thompson quotes:

Wilbert Moore has even drawn up a shopping-list of the "pervasive values and normative orientations of high relevance to the goal of social development" — "these changes in attitude and belief are 'necessary' if rapid economic and social development is to be achieved":
Impersonality: judgement of merit and performance, not social background or irrelevant qualities.
Specificity of relations in terms of both context and limits of interaction.
Rationality and problem-solving. Punctuality.
Recognition of individually limited but systematically linked interdependence.
Discipline, deference to legitimate authority. Respect for property rights . . . .
These, with "achievement and mobility aspirations", are not,
Professor Moore reassures us, suggested as a comprehensive list of the merits of modern man . . . The "whole man" will also love his family, worship his God, and express his aesthetic capacities. But he will keep each of these other orientations "in their place".

These are the values Lewis takes as being basic to civic life -- but that is only so in capitalist culture, where time discipline and wage incentives are all taken for granted. Duty becomes work discipline, not social life in the moment.

The problem of imposing time-discipline, Thompson notes, "may appear as it did in the early years of the Bombay cotton mills, as one of maintaining a labour force at the cost of perpetuating inefficient methods of production — elastic time-schedules, irregular breaks and meal-times, etc." Hmmm. That sounds suspiciously like post-Fordist work arrangements that blur work and leisure and allow for more worker flexibility (and less employer responsibility for their welfare). We appear to be returning to a pre-industrial attitude about work and leisure, only without the life-skills to handle it.

One recurrent form of revolt within Western industrial capitalism, whether bohemian or beatnik, has often taken the form of flouting the urgency of respectable time values. And the interesting question arises: if Puritanism
was a necessary part of the work-ethos which enabled the industrialized world to break out of the poverty-stricken economies of the past, will the Puritan valuation of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax ? Is it decomposing already ? Will men begin to lose that restless urgency, that desire to consume time
purposively, which most people carry just as they carry a watch on
their wrists ?

If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not "how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure ?" but "what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live ?" If we maintain a Puritan time-valuation, a commodity-valuation, then
it is a question of how this time is put to use, or how it is exploited by the leisure industries. But if the purposive notation of time-use becomes less compulsive, then men might have to re-learn some of the arts of living lost in the industrial revolution: how to fill the interstices of their days with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life.

I think social networks are fulfilling this function of helping people deal with the lost time-discipline -- it preserves the urgency of time-discipline in the leisure/social sphere (consumption is already made urgent as work -- the pressure for novelty, to keep up to be consuming as much as our time allows for and not miss anything, or waste any time not consuming commodities -- that is, idling away and lazing about thee way workers used to, the dismay of social improvers/engineers of growth). Social networks make sure that behavior is still measured, monitored, and archived, while still absorbing free time once micromanaged by Taylorist bosses. Facebook is the new Taylorist boss.

It is the fulfillment of this:

If men are to meet both the demands of a highly-synchronized automated industry, and of greatly enlarged areas of "free time", they must somehow combine in a new synthesis elements of the old and of the new, finding an imagery based neither upon the seasons nor upon the market but upon human occasions.

The social network is that new "imagery" -- remains for me to explain that in detail I suppose.