The Pretender and Deflecting Strategies of Resistance

Virno and Lazarrato do quite a bit to further our understanding of immaterial labor. Simultaneously they describe strategies for insuring wide scale libidinal investment in capitalism. Two swaths of the argument here: Lazarrato’s use of Benjamin and acquisition of previously aura saturated items is a good way to explain systematic false consciousness and Virno’s reading of cynicism is a defense mechanism par excellence for simply rationalizing not fighting capitalism. These strategies for resolving challengers against capitalism are contingent on Immaterial Labor both through the development of cognitive skills in the work force and the particular psychic economy of upward social mobility.

Lazarrato argues that it is breaking barriers that creates the prospect for creating new barriers. This is a criticism of most purely material political strategies. If the dominant regime of your day is designed to allow you to succeed, then your struggle to break down those barriers feeds into the psychic economy of your oppression. This has come up twice before in class, as the dejection of fans of the first Matrix movie when encountering the later installments and in a very early argument about the nature of the super ego demands of the symbolic father figure. In both cases the answer to the answer is not to resist or fully assume the mantle of fighting the system but to fight the system of enjoyment that has created those chances for domination to exist in the first place. Neo transcends the metaphysical rules of the universe writ large, expanding his resistance well beyond the constellation of the existing order. The passage is useful in defining what immaterial labor is and in showing how an apparent resistance strategy is dime store slight of hand, quite literally in the case of ugly fashions. Is this analysis somewhat trite, yes, but that does not make the argument go away, it might say that the nuances of public reception of aesthetic objects is slightly more complex then this presentation of false consciousness would let on, but this false consciousness argument is played out so successfully in so many places that to dismiss it would be equally dull. Regardless of your take on my conflations, you can always “have it your way.”

Virno frames the strategy of cynicism quite accurately. Truly deskilled workers would need to be really smart, to shift jobs regularly is a task of immense proportions. NBC had a show in the mid/late 90’s titled “the Pretender.” For being a non-core show (fri/sat at 7) the show was reasonably interesting and not nearly as bland as Walker Texas Ranger. The protagonist would inhabit the social spaces of others, surgeons, astronauts, lawyers and all comers with some symbolic mandate to special knowledge. A brief section of the theme song described how our hero was in fact one of the smartest people alive and was highly vaunted as a part of a government program to harness the power of these truly post-skilled laborers. Why does a moderately hackneyed sci-fi show have to do with cynicism? Virno argues that cynicism is a product of subaltern knowledge where the sure veracity of impersonality has stripped affective relationships bare. The individual then can be educated to the extreme, they in fact should be highly educated because the question for these individuals is not so much IF they know that they are oppressed but WHY they choose not to care about taking action. Highly educated workers then are deterratorialized and utilized in a variety of settings, and they know that they are too smart to even bother resisting or demanding equality.

--dan