Commons as contentless

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

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

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' "

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

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

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

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 --