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

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

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)

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

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.