Communicative capitalism, the compulsion to make more text

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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.