potentially useful quote from Lazzarato on immaterial labor, de-consumerizing

This is quoted in Coté and Pybus's article for Ephemera 7:

The activation, both of productive cooperation and of the social relationship with the consumer, is materialised within and by the process of communication. It is immaterial labour which continually innovates the form and the conditions of communication (and thus of work and of consumption). It gives form and materializes needs, images, the tastes of consumers and these products become in their turn powerful producers of needs, of images and of tastes. The
particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labour (seeing that its essential use value is given by its value contained, informational and cultural) consists in the fact that this is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but enlarges, transforms, creates the ‘ideological’ and cultural environment of the consumer. This does not produce the physical capacity of the workforce, it transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labour produces first of all a ‘social relationship’ (a relationship of innovation, of production, of consumption); and only if it succeeds in this production does its activity have an economic value. This activity shows immediately that which material production ‘hid’: in other words, labour produces not only commodities, but first and foremost the capital relationship. (Lazzarato, 2001)

Immaterial labor produces certain sorts of measurable, value-generating social relations. And like all labor, it reproduces capitalism as a set of relations revolving around commodities.

I guess I would argue that immaterial labor fashions a commodity in the form of relationship that veils the value that can be harvested in its "circulation," which has to be understood not as a transfer of property by as networked communication. "Immaterial" commodities mask the process of commodification and value extraction precisely because there is not tangible property involved, but instead a proprietary claim to communication flows. Immaterial labor is another way of saying the commodification of communication. It allows companies to extract a rent from meaning-making and symbolic exchange. Because it involves a relation and communication, it foregrounds the ways in which consumption is productive. It's "labor" insofar as it produces harvestable value, but it doesn't make the consumer a laborer; rather it hides the value that consumers create because their value creation doesn't appear to them as labor. This is why the critique is to stress consumer's productivity, and to try to strip the pleasure from this kind of production only so that consumer-producers will make an effort to disentangle their consumption from the reproduction of capitalist forms. We mustn't be distracted by how we are paid in affect for immaterial/communictive/consumeristic labor from the ways in which this labor reproduces capitalism. The question becomes how to withdraw affect from this circuit, how to extinguish its value in the process of consumption instead of producing it in a recirculatable way (i.e. in social networks). The trend is running in the other direction: we are being subjectivized to only experience pleasure (or positive affect) when our affect is captured in networks and "shared." It's only real feeling if it is mediated, preserved, not "destroyed." Pics or it didn't happen, even for yourself.

Not sure if that is theoretically coherent. Basically, consumerism reproduces capitalist relations because the consuming process makes capitalist value. Only the consumer can intervene and de-consumerize their consumption (I wonder) through a consciousness of the value they are producing and then ... what? An effort to destroy it or deny it or claim its value for themselves?

The authoritarian commodity

This manifesto from Tiqqun, "Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl"makes a lot more sense to me if you replace "Young-Girl" with "hipster." The idea of using "young-girl," which the authors insist is a "not a gendered concept," is apparently to suggest something about the sort of power this new cultural type generated at this stage of consumer capitalism can exercise through apparent vulnerability and submissiveness to fashion and peer pressure. Updating Marcuse's notion of repressive tolerance, Tiqqun suggests that social control is administered through the coercive appeal of youthful fun and permissiveness, through flattery and seduction, through transforming liberalist autonomy into debilitating desire and tractable envy:

The function of the Young-Girl is to transform the promise of liberty contained in the achievement of Western civilization into a surplus of alienation, a deepening of the consumer order, new servitudes, a political status quo. The Young-Girl lives in the same horizon as Technology: that of a formal spiritualization of the world.

I can't figure out what that last sentence is supposed to mean, but I agree that technology is a prime culprit in lodging a higher degree of sensitivity to fashion deeper into our subjectivity. New communication technology -- smartphones, etc. -- allow for more self-surveillance and more access to the reassuring judgments of others. It amplifies our self-consciousness and our sense of the self as a performance. Identity doesn't drive our behavior but is the end result of it, a product. The "young-girl" epitomizes this, serving as a model (the "authoritarian commodity") that can direct the endless self-fashioning and give meaning to all the opportunities we now have to declare what we are.

"What we are" becomes a problem only when technology allows for it: Once we can mediate identity, we become aware of identity as a malleable, manageable thing, which of course makes our sense of self far more insecure. Tiqqun, I think, is using "young-girl" as shorthand for all the ways in which our sense of self is rendered more insecure in the social networks that are becoming more material, surveillable and elaborated. Subjectivity has insecurity built into it: "In the world of the authoritarian marketplace, the living recognize, in their alienated desires, a demonstration of power that has been made inside them by the enemy."

I think this is the legacy of the hipster, regardless of whatever new term comes into fashion to discuss them. The hipster is the authoritarian commodity that uses only soft power, regulating all who come into contact with it by inspiring feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, envy, boredom, etc. The effective hipster/young-girl signifies a plenitude of cool that it cannot actually possess but that nonetheless inspires a kind of hopelessness that you yourself will never measure up or be seen enough for what you are. The hipster/young-girl was the bellwether for the sort of subject that only understands itself through surveillance, through the assumption that its every desire is being judged, and that desire is pointless unless it can be displayed and surveyed. "Social" technology has made this sort of anxiety commonplace, the feeling that it's, say, pointless to read something if you are not going to Tweet out the highlights, or pointless to listen to something if Spotify won't notify everyone in your social network. I want to blame hipsterism for this, but they were merely the first victims of this more aggressive phase of the society of the spectacle. They were the first to see no alternative to seeing themselves as a commodity among commodities and to try to find the advantages of that, the pleasures.

Managers not to blame for capitalism

The main thing I am taking away from In the Age of the Smart Machine is Zuboff's effort to view technology as a possible way to save capitalism from itself and resolve the tension between capital and labor. If only information technology was used correctly, managers would share authority and all workers would become well-respected knowledge workers who are not alienated but enhanced and fulfilled by their working life. Authority would never again be a matter of exploiting anyone but instead would become a way of collectively negotiating the best way to seize the "innovative" possibilities that ubiquitous data about work processes make possible.

Zuboff never ceases to be amazed that managers would make the apparently petty decisions to use technology to spy on workers and shift blame and protect their prerogatives and power rather than to seize opportunities to "informate" the workplace and develop the skills of blue-collar "operators." She likens the belief in managerial authority to a spiritual faith, a sort of false consciousness holding back cooperation and the general intellect. "The informating process sets knowledge and authority on a collision course," she claims, but what that means in practice is that middle managers are getting proletarianized, having their managerial leverage eroded by automation.

As long as organizational members are unwilling to critically examine their faith in this system, individuals at every level will remain like weeds in the wind, able to do only as much as their roles prescribe, seeking the psychological equivalent of the graveyard shift in order to test one's wings, only to be pulled back daily by the requirements of the faith.

Capitalism is premised on those prescribed roles. They are not a flaw in the system but its essence. Capitalism is a way of organizing production precisely so that individuals become "reeds in the wind" without sufficient agency to redirect the system toward a goal other than profit (like, say, empowering or enriching the lives of all workers and not merely the managing elite or property owners). They are brought to be dependent on the system and generally have incentive only to protect their own interests. The system invests them in the existing hierarchy and precludes alternatives. It's not a failure of the individual imagination that such alternatives don't appear to workers and managers; it's a failure to organize, a failure to believe in a collective imagination worth fighting for. The alternative is to embrace class struggle.

Without a capacity to imagine an alternative, it is likely that our work organizations will continue to reproduce relationships that impede a powerful understanding of the economic and social potential of new technology.

Yes, that is capitalism's purpose — to reproduce its necessary relations, which are ones in which managers (representing capital) maximally exploit workers. Workers must organize resistance to this; they can't count on technology to resolve the struggle with better data and managers' sudden beneficent desire to communicate better. If communication is "improved" by management, it is in service of extending exploitive opportunities and subsuming more of workers' capacities to capital, to the production of surplus value. The "powerful understanding" of technology's potential involves undoing capitalism, so it's useless to expect capitalist managers to recognize it and nurture it. The extent to which they see it, they will thwart it in their institutional capacity. They have to operate outside or against the firm to nurture it.

Technology is neutral, but authority is necessary to exploitation, which is necessary to maximizing profit and justifying patently unfair distribution of the surplus. Technology, that is, doesn't automatically solve exploitive relations in capitalism but merely exacerbates them, moves then to a higher and deeper level, absent the sort of deliberate politics to prevent such deepening. Politics solves capitalism's inhumanity, not technology.

Quantified self as executive unfitness

Notes on Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988)

1. The effect of information technology and increasing mediation of personal interaction and communication in the workplace (and the social factory) is to make the "acting-with" skills of the executive function seem even more mystified and ineffable. Executive skills are defined by a negative theology; they are precisely everything that can't be quantified. As Zuboff puts it "the work of the executive has been, by definition, work that is not subject to rationalization." They are defined ex post as intuition or feel or comfort with authority or leadership. The executive function consists of the remainder after everything else has been rationalized. It is primarily a mode of distinction, not a tangible and transmittable set of skills. The transferability of other skills is what makes them non-executive. They are like all other information subject to digitization and redistribution: radically devalued.

2. In other words, information technology abets the process of purifying the executive function of its quantifiable components, leaving the perfectly mysterious executive, whose power can only be understood through a cult of personality, in terms of charisma. The boss operates on inscrutable hunches that can't really be challenged; these form the basis of the boss's authority.

3. When an individual's contributions to a productive process (and sociality is a productive process) are quantified, they can accrue no surplus. They lose the ability to negotiate for compensation on the basis of something arguable, intangible. ("Your tweets had a declining retweet rate of 24%, therefore your pay will be reduced accordingly.)

4. People who choose to self-quantify, who seek out ways to turn themselves into data, are in essence opting out of executive responsibilities, then. They are volunteering to be deskilled and controlled. The logic of their decisionmaking is not a matter of hunches but a matter of data, and thus a decision anyone could make for them, given the same data.

5. To put that in reversed form: the quantified self, the data self, is a means for excluding people from qualifying for executive decisionmaking. Because production is shifting to the social factory, and most people's social lives are being quantified in social media, that suggests that self-quantification is a way of extending the workplace hierarchy into the social sphere that once at least appeared to be sheltered from it. If your friendships are mediated and quantified, they are controlled; the network is stabilizing them and draining them of their potential for power or value creation independent of pre-existing systems of sociopolitical management. They are internal to the "System." Maybe sociality, identity, etc., are always internal to the System. But the quantification of sociality strengthens the prison bars. Sociality in everyday life ceases to be a resource for resistance to the system; it becomes a source of innovation for refining it, perfecting it, completing its totality. (Our destiny: Everything is subsumed.)

6. Maintaining the ineffability of social behavior becomes a primary form of resistance as well as a way to claim bureaucratically acknowledged power, since power in bureaucracy is distilled into ineffable, unquantified forms. That is, to maintain power in the social factory, one has to evade quantification and preserve the sense of being a subject of the social process more than its object. The more of your social life revolves around uncaptured face time, the more you are the executive of your own productive social life. The more your social life is captured in media, the more you are an employee in your own social life "acting-on" others rather than "acting-with" them, to adapt Zuboff's terminology. (Acting-on means you are a body transforming other objects through direct labor; acting-with means you coordinate, communicate, produce cooperation, do all that general-intellecty virtuosity stuff.) The quantification of the self implies the management by an outside force, even if the nature or identity of that outside force is known, or even if one believes it is oneself doing the managing. Self-quantification still limits one to instrumental tasks, even in the social realm, and prohibits one from assuming the power-accuring qualitative, charismatic tasks.

7. Leadership means refusing to be quantified.

8. Will Davies argues in this paper about the "Emerging neo-communitarianism" that neoliberalism is a technocratic means to guarantee liberalism's idea of freedom as rational choice. It's technocrtatic instrument is quantification to ensure efficiency, which verifies freedom in the way it understands liberalism.

Bureaucrats, teachers, social workers and so many other professionals are all ultimately trusted to take their own decisions in a neoliberal society, but only on the basis that their outputs are made explicit, so that this trust can be reviewed at regular intervals. The liberal faith in individual reason just about survives, but freedom is now located within carefully designed systems of audit and incentive management, which by the 1990s had become collectively referred to as ʻgovernanceʼ. The task of neoliberal government is to quantify the outcomes of social and economic behaviour, such that individuals are able to exercise choice in an informed way, whether inside or outside of markets.

That analysis fits well with my contention that Facebook and other social media are neoliberal policy tools, or how I usually put it, that they prop up neoliberlist ideology and support/constitute neoliberal subjectivity. The point is that quantification is a modality of control more than of information; it is about auditing and not self-empowerment. If you think it is about self-empowerment, that is because you are mistaking self-auditing as not being in service of existing external authorities. Quantification is confessing yourself to the authorities. (Foucault's view of confession's function applies here.)

9. Quantifying the self is doing the neoliberal state's work for it; it's collaborating rather than resisting. It is making oneself subject to power, circumscribing the space in which one might be free to operate. Instead one inscribes oneself in the space delineated by incentives and targets and goals, all of which are subject to optimization not on the self's behalf but for the state or the firm.

10. A quantified self is a neoliberal self is a postauthentic self is a data self. (?) It is the sum of information that can be known about itself and processed; its goals are to more precisely quantify itself, elaborate its connections, and perhaps perfect its feedback mechanisms to achieve some short of ecstatic short circuit of self-reflexive identity. Information wants more information. It doesn't want to be free, it wants to replicate and proliferate. That is, the data self wants to broadcast richer and richer data sets of itself in an attempt to make life more meaningful. It can no longer find meaning through action; it can only be processed into meaning.

notes from Machine Dreams

Economics as the search for a meaningful definition of "rationality" -- the impact of computer science on economics has been to dissolve the illusion of the individual as the "rational subject" or agent, and to instead regard individuals as cellular automata of a larger "rational subject" that subsumes them. Rationality in the economic sense -- the sense of the most efficient distribution of resources, etc. -- is an aggregate phenomenon that exceeds the individual's grasp.

The market is then viewed as the "rational agent," as a cyborg entity that computes and wills outcomes and so on. Individual humans, with their limited and irrational self-directed goals, are subroutines to the market's higher functioning and purpose.

Mirowski cites a 1993 paper by Gode and Sunder that pits autonomous automata against one another in a double auction, revealing that this framework "had managed to induce 'aggregate rationality not only from individual rationality but also individual irrationality.' ... aggregate rationality had no relationship to anything the neoclassicals had been trumpeting as economic rationality for all these years." (554) The most idealized neoclassical market model "produces its hallowed results in experimental settings with severely impaired robots."

The individual's calculations, such as they are, need not be "rational" to yield rational macro outcomes. Motives at the individual level are ultimately inscrutable -- their logic cannot be inferred from outside analysis of achieved outcomes. Their unique rational choices not necessary to the larger outcome, which can be produced by AI agents operating on simple automatic imperatives. People have reasons for what they do but they can't be connected with economically rational outcomes.

(Mirowski argues -- I think -- for regarding multiple market forms themselves as automata in an evolutionary competitive process seeking an emergent "allocative efficiency." The scary thing is we are enmeshed in the process, though the "efficiency" it discovers may have nothing to do with our limited human notion of individual thriving or social justice, etc. We may be agents serving the flourishing and reproductions of markets for their sake and their incomprehensible ends.)

I think there is an analogy to spy fiction and the chaotic behavior of individual spies caught in the infinite regress of double-triple-quadruple agents and simulated opponents and disinformation and the rest. Personal agency is meaningless in this context; the game is on a whole other level, so to speak. Individual spies may have all sorts of complex reasoning to defend their acts, but it is all local rationalization, irrelevant to the broader outcome or bigger logic. They are just individualist ideology that demands the assumption that their choices are constitutive of outcomes, but really the logic of the rational outcome only comes when their choices are merged with reactions and choices of a host of other agents whose moves can't be anticipated or incorporated in the individual's thinking process. Spies (like individuals in markets) don't know how their acts shape the rules of the game they are playing; they think the rules are perhaps already fixed (their limited individual scope -- the mistake the way they are programmed in their subroutine for the entirety of the software) when the whole system is calculating something they don't understand or even know of. Like the humans on Earth in Douglas Adams's books, part of an organic computer program determining the question of meaning.

The rationality of the espionage system perhaps exists at the level of national goals, or perhaps nations are players, automata is a larger game/market of war that has its own agenda, its own equilibrium that has nothing to do with human thriving or human goals.

Facebook, Projective City, Post-authenticity, Data Self

material on abstract labor cut from Theorizing the Web presentation

Another way of understanding the dynamism of capitalism is through its continual need to produce a flow of “abstract labor” as well as opportunities for profit. Capitalism presupposes an ever expandable amount of needs to satisfy with commodities and thus an ever growing amount of potential work to produce those commodities. Thus it requires a general sense that work is fungible or “abstract”, measurable as a certain amount of money (a wage). And it requires a sense that any activity whatever on the part of a worker can be productive, as value inheres in human effort itself. In capitalism, the value of labor is not contextual and contingent, not dependent on traditions and secure, stable structure of productive relations (think the mythical precapitalist community, with little class mobility and hereditary rank and occupations), but is “liberated” to be deployable in whatever ways suit capital; capitalism thus remakes local, traditional arrangements in its image. Workers becomes nothing (no integral identity is given, in theory), but have the potential of making anything, and must make something of themselves. This is the source of capitalism’s power to bring novelty into the social world. The formation of social bonds becomes a source of value -- the power of cooperation, the creation of value that exceeds the independent effort of any one person.

Capitalism must be able to attract or codify this sort of “living labor” and render it “abstract labor” amenable to rationalization, measurement and control -- the sort of labor that can be the input to a profitable production process. Hence a fundamental problem for capitalism: how to maintain a supply of workers who are (a) flexible, creative, and motivated at the same time they are (b) manageable, controllable, and predictable.

Living labor can be understood as identity-making effort (in the absence of traditional prescriptions); it is the productivity of open-ended potentiality
Abstract labor is the quantification of the self, making that labor of self-creation and identity shaping productive by allowing it to conform to pre-existing measuring tools that allow for commodification. A matter of fitting oneself to the yardstick.

The capitalist development of technology has in part been driven by a need to render “living labor” into “abstract labor” without snuffing it out altogether. Put another way, it’s not only machines that embody technical knowledge to improve productivity, but also subjects, who are freed to produce new needs and hence new opportunities for profit. Subjectivity becomes a developed from of capital, with an enhanced productive potential. (We think to want more; we are determined to express ourselves in original ways; we are driven to discover ourselves rather than take our identity as given and fixed.) The development of machinery and now computer technology and augmentation nullifies inherent differences and particularities in users, leveling pre-existing human variety while producing an urgent need to manufacture new distinctions. It takes pre-existing qualities, makes the quantifiable and then uses those quantities to impel production.

Capitalism requires labor as such (abstract labor). But this prompts the critique that work is personally meaningless, alienating. To answer this critique, capitalism must make the process of valorization in production into a kind of self-production for workers at the same time. What enables this is the underlying ability to transform life experience (self-production, self-expression, relationship forming, etc.) into something abstract and redeployable behind the scenes by capitalist firms: data. Work (now becoming -- in ideology, if not in actual fact -- a matter of “immaterial labor” -- the filtering of production through lifestyles, branding, symbolic layering) can become meaningful and social and self-fulfilling because it is at the same time generating data. The data self is the sort of capitalist subject that experiences its “alienation” as liberation and an open-ended process of self-discovery; it experiences the quantification of life (once strictly a matter of reducing human effort into abstract labor power measured in wages) not as alienating and reductive but as positive, descriptive, self-defining, revealing.

All Facebook profiles in theory are born equal; they allow the same exact repertoire of actions to shape and improve them. It seems like an opportunity and a medium in which to develop the self, but it is also a way to contain and control those efforts, making sure they are producing value within capitalism (rather than liberation from it).

Social media extend the experience and range of applicability of living labor while simultaneously transforming it into “abstract labor” -- into fungible data. They attempt to control and capture the productive capital of subjectivity engendered by capitalism in liberating us from our stable place in traditional hierarchies and so on. They give shape to the emerging social factory, integrating it into existing ways of doing business, prompting investment flows, and harvesting and distributing profit.

Social media are part of the new spirit, part of network-driven capitalism’s effort to justify and limit itself to make sure it doesn’t become too immiserating to continue. Social media presuppose the conditions of their popularity (network capitalism) are permanent, present themselves as solution to what they are actually instrumental in causing and perpetuating. They ameliorate the ideological crisis that stems from the conflict between abstract and living labor.

Social media are ways to contain and recapture the productive and potentially disruptive energy of the cooperation engendered by the capitalist production process, which depends on bringing workers together, dividing labor among them, and generating/capturing the surplus that emerges from their effort to work together. Cooperative efforts are captured within social media and made into data -- that is, they are made fungible, abstract, countable. This data can set cooperative workers back into competition with one another, now competing over and in terms of measurable influence, attention, contribution, network links and so on.