The murder plot for "Public" by Jodi Dean

I honestly don't know where to begin with Dean. Thanks to Dan I have a better understanding of why her argument is structured as such - no historicity and constantly invoking a "we" or any number of the "we" variants ("us" and "ourselves" for example). I don't know what to do with my usual frames of argument (Who is this "we" anyway? And, am I really a part of it?) with the invocation of Lacan.

In the fragments I turn to Zizek and the article we read by him Ideology Reloaded. This isn't too crazy as Jodi Dean invokes the Matrix metaphor directly in this concluding chapter. In her reconfiguration of "neo-democracies", I think she is saying "Take the red pill."

Anyway - Zizek says,

"To put it in terms of the good old Marxist couple infrastructure/superstructure: One should take into account the irreducible duality of, on the one hand, the “objective” material socio-economic processes taking place in reality as well as, on the other hand, the politico-ideological process proper. What if the domain of politics is inherently “sterile,” a theater of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality? So, although economy is the real site and politics a theater of shadows, the main fight is to be fought in politics and ideology."

What does Jodi Dean want to say to this?
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On another note I want to link to an article about recent conspiracy-theorism and anti-war activists. Here's just a teaser quote from the article:

"There is a virus sweeping the world. It infects opponents of the Bush government, sucks their brains out through their eyes and turns them into gibbering idiots."

Thoughts on the Conclusion

Here is the gist of what I want to say about the conclusion. This will be a very long post. The last section is a recent bit from Dean about her idea of issue politics, that fragment is from Tuesday.

--dan

First, a characterization of alternative. The issue based alternative seems somewhat artificial at the end of the book. Issue based collations are not so much issue based but are contingent organizations that approach politics antagonistically. For example an anti-capitalist group would organize around resistance to a trade agreement, they wouldn't be generated by it. These groups would also have substantially different tactics from groups that are caught up in the fantasy of publicity. (172) Specifics about the movements operation or its ability to do bigger things aren't forth coming. We do know that this alternative is not to be read as a national program, page 153. Even if your not there yet, this entire argument is against the fantasy of fullness that constitutes communicative captialism, trying to pin a national alternative on here is not convincing. Quick aside, although it might be tempting and even interesting to start to roll out geopolitical examples, the block quote from Hozic should give us pause on page 172 as the focus on violence out there is another strategy to get right within communicative capitalism. This theory attempts to cut the link in fantasy between communicative capitalist political systems and agency. Dean is quite clear on 152 that a focus on sites of political action trades off with a focus on agency. I would suggest we read the conclusions conclusion as finishing a critique of the fantasy of fullness and a provisional approach to politics that would avoid these pitfalls. If you want a really nice readers digest of the fantasy of fullness argument check footnote 26. She also surveys a few other approaches here, that we are slightly more familiar with eg, radical pluralism and the Multitude. The most trenchant quote to support my reading that Dean is not offering a universal political program was on page 14, "the demand for reassuring alternative cuts to cut off critique before it starts." I am staging this as an "even if" type argument, even if you aren't satisfied with the alternative provided in the last ten pages the argument, she really didn't need it anyway. If anything that alternative is provided to ensure that we don't think she advocates the Leninist alternative that was salient in Zizek at that time. I wrote this entire paragraph to head off critiques of the alternative alone at the pass.

Second, I want to handle the Bush election/Larry Craig (LC herein) examples. Dean's take is on pages 160-1 and argues that Bush's performance of authority made him president. The footnote she constructs here is pretty interesting in constructing Scalia's argument as acting "as if" Bush were president. The legal decision was not the important aspect of election, but the affective power of the narrative after the election that allowed Bush to behave as if he were president. The LC example is handled as an aspect of the fantasy of transparency, which is itself caught up in the drive. (174) Page 162 backs this up effectively in that the feeling of lost legitimacy is actually a longing for it. LC then could be functionally vindicated through politics proper in terms of his function in Washington D.C. the new gaze that would be imposed on the residents of his district would really be the force that removes him from office.

Third, we should be wary of reading "technologies that believe for us" as some type of argument about the machines LITERALLY doing this. The account that Dean cites from Zizek in the Sublime Object is premised on Transference, the technology is a fetish object. To make a very short pop culture reference, Linus is to his blankey as the Cynical hipster is to myspace. We should really keep in mind when reading this that Dean is a Lacanian writing mostly about Zizek who was trained in Frankfurt school type political theory writing right now in Upstate New York. She is not an nostalgic Italian Communist or a disenchanted California Surfer turned Computer protege turned guru. Similar works in this genre are highly disorganized, are often internally and externally contradictory and are jargon packed. This particular piece is much easier and more coherent. I am somewhat skeptical of reading this a linear work to begin with for other reasons.

Fourth, Lacan driven work is somewhat different in terms of method from what we have read before. Historicity is not a goal for this type of analysis, Lacan is simultaneously structuralist and post-structuralist identifying the linguistically structured unconscious. To run this through my old school Universal Translator: these types of methods are looking for a universal set of reasons why people do things, not for the reactions of particular subjects to particular events. If we just have a discussion of core Lacan like the triad and pre-linguistic harmony I would be happy. One key note here, the version of drives that is getting picked up here is not the death drive thesis that has been discussed in much more detail in other venues. This theory of linguistic sublimation is far more similar to that of Copjec (of who I know little) or Stavrakakis (of who I know a whole bunch). This is my attempt at a spin move to get away form anti-Freud/anti-death drive stuff. That was my sports metaphor for the day.

This is a post from Jodi Dean's Blog from October 30 that might make her issue politics argument clearer. It doesn't really get played out that much as it appears almost at the very end of the book exclusively. This feels really straight forward. Here is Dean's text:

A good friend of mine has been working the past few years on an account of issue networks and issue oriented politics. Her basic point is no issue, no politics: politics unfolds or occurs through the spaces, conflicts, and connections produced by issues.

At first, I resisted this idea with the dismissal of "little issues struggling to be free." My point was that nothing is an issue prior to politicization and the tracing of an issue presupposes the politics it endeavors to reveal.

But, then I wondered if perhaps I could be wrong about this (and there are a few places in Publicity's Secret where I start to head in the direction of issue politics). What was appealing to me was theorizing a politics not rooted in identity (this is where I disagree with Laclau and Mouffe--they both continue to see politics as the construction/articulation/constitution of political identities). To ward off potential misunderstanding, I am thinking here of group identities, identities that necessarily require difference, that is, groups like those anchored in ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, gender, religion.

These days, I'm thinking that my first response was the better one. Colin Crouch's Post-democracy is persuasive on the ways that issue politics are fundamentally compatible with liberalism and neoliberalism. They fit perfectly with lifestyle politics and consumerism as temporary, momentary, particularized politics that refrain from governing, challenging the rules of the game, or confronting the economy. In a sense, issues can galvanize little groups around them and enable these groups, momentarily, to evade and avoid their fundamental disagreements.

Additionally, my friend is convinced that politics is never about lofty ideals of justice, fairness, equality, or freedom but about streets, dams, animals, and lightbulbs. Again, I disagree. I don't think the opposition between freedom and lightbulbs is useful. One can stand for the other depending on the context of the struggle or dispute.

But more, what I see on the ground, in the local campaigns for city council, is a great deal of investment in abstract notions--for the Republicans, the themes are safety and order; one of the Democrats urges process and community engagement in a collective process of forming a common vision of the city's future; the other Democrat--the incumbent--just seems to support continuity. When concrete questions of the lakefront come in (and this is one of the central issues in the debate), they tend to hide the disagreement that everyone knows is actually there. They hide it under technicalities and process, options and reports.

In fact, I should be clearer here: the Democrats (and Paul is VP of the local party so we've been doing lots of grunt work these days) have worked to make the lakefront the issue, to foreground it so as to made the difference between the candidates visible. This suggests to me that the issue is a tool or vehicle of political struggle, a site which can make options and alternatives apparent. But, this does not mean that the big themes are merely rhetoric, or that the party and community apparatus that produces and uses an issue is secondary to it. The issue doesn't come first. It's produced and used.

Let the technology believe for you

Here's my Powerpoint from today's class in case anyone is interested.
Powerpoint

Thoughts on Dean

It seems to me that one possible extension of Dean’s logic is to have the technologies not only believing for us, in an ideological sense, but having them knowing for us as well, in a technical sense. The more our collective and individual knowledges are uploaded to web servers and online communities, the more technologies become a receptacle for not only our beliefs but also our knowledge. Extending this logic, there would be no need to know. The technologies would know for us.

This relinquishing of not only our capacities to believe but to know is exacerbated by the move from a “critical” to a “consumerist” mode of agency. It is consistent with an age in which spectacle has replaced deliberation that the predominant characteristic of the public should be one of entertainment. It is certainly questionable just how much more “democratic” or deliberative or indeed informed access to the technoculture and its technologies makes us. Since it is “precisely those technologies that materialize a promise of full political access and inclusion [that] drive an economic formation whose brutalities render democracy worthless for the majority of people,” it then becomes (partly) a question of agency and of the willingness to retain our own critical capacity for full participation in a public, and to retain our knowledge and beliefs.

Warm & Fuzzy Concepts

I did not find Dean to be the especially quick read I had hoped for, which would have allowed me more time to work on the main semester paper.

In trying to make sense of this, I think it is sometimes useful to look at points in the text where a jump seems to occur--something on the order of the old New Yorker cartoon in which the scientist is looking at the chalk board full of gibberish followed by a blank space with [then a miracle occurs], followed by the answer.

For me, one such jump occurred in the paragraph that spans pp. 10 & 11. "Publicity" here seems to be equated with "revelation or exposure." This is part of her explication of the fantasies supporting the notion of "the public." She seems to be saying that "publicity" is being offered (by whom?) as some sort of urge, counter-balance, or response to "the secret." I get the part where she claims that a notion of the/a public who "wants to know" is presupposed in the idea ubiquitous secrecy, but I feel there is some fuzziness in these concepts here that is interfering with rather than promoting understanding. For example, don't most people make distinctions about the believability of different types of publicity? And aren't most people's ideas about information that they encounter via publicity fluid enough that they can believe something contingently, that is, believe, but with a hint of skepticism, an increased readiness for or alertness to disconfirming evidence? As evidence by, for example, my own attendance in class and my participation in discussion in the face of uncertainty, it seems empirically to be the case that people operate under conditions of uncertainty and partial information all the time. We just make the best conclusions we can, come to class, shake our heads, move on, and wish we had spent more time on the big paper for the semester. And, with apologies for being too totalizing, I suspect that Mark wishes we spent more time on the big papers, too.

And this is being materialized in a headache....

I do greatly appreciate the posts of those who can reveal Dean's secrets better than I.

The Uncanny and the Curious: Publicity and the Mulitutde

When reading Dean, I asked myself throughout how this related to most of what we’ve read thus far in class, particularly the autonomist Marxists and their disciples. Lacan and Žižek seem like distant memories (one can only hope they will stay that way). I tried to make connections between Virno and Dean, but perhaps I'm just grasping at straws.

Unheimlich. Dean’s description of the paranoid, conspiring, knowing subject interpellated by the ideology of publicity materialized in technoculture seemed at times very reminiscent of uncanny condition of the multitude. Dean explains, “The conspiring subject, then, is like the hysterical subject, always seeking, always uncertain, never satisfied”118). Elsewhere she notes, “Critiques of conspiracy [...] normalize paranoia as a predominant logic of the public sphere” (61).

This idea of an unstable and uncertain subject, in the context of the technoculture where insider and outsider collapse and the gap between the public-supposed-to-believe and public-supposed-to-know falls off, is at times reminiscent of Virno’s multitude: “The concept of multitude instead hinges upon the ending of such a separation...We have a reality that is repeatedly innovated. It is therefore not possible to establish an actual distinction between a stable ‘inside’ and an uncertain telluric ‘outside’” (33). Later, Virno explains, “The multitude is united by the risk which derives from not feeling at home...The many are those who share the feeling of not feeling at home and who place this experience at the center of their own social and political praxis (34-35).

Curiosity. Virno describes curiosity as an attribute of the contemporary multitude. He explains, “the media trains the senses to consider the known as if it were unknown, to distinguish an enormous and sudden margin of freedom even in the most trite and repetitive aspects of daily. At the same time, however, the media trains the senses also for the opposite task: to consider the unknown as if it were known, to become familiar with the unexpected and the surprising, to become accustomed to the lack of established habits” (93).

When Dean speaks of the gaze and reflexive communication, I couldn’t help but think of ‘greed of sight’ especially when Dean says, “Pundits view conspiracy thinking as political pornography” (67). Later, “The materialization of watching in technoculture, then, brings about a twist: viewers don’t believe something just because they see it on television. Practices of watching, clicking, and opining now materialize belief in a politics of encryption and disclosure such that technologies can believe for us even as we are interpellated as suspicious subjects wanting to know” (69). I need to give it some more though, but I was trying to think about whether the curiosity typical of the multitude is at all relatable to the desiring subject interpellated by publicity.

I was trying to think whether the public destabilized by Dean is perhaps synonymous with the multitude and whether the multitude is a problematic concept eliding difference and distracting from political antagonisms. I haven't elaborated on the cynical emotional tonality highlighted by Virno and emphasized by Dean in her discussion of Zizek's notion of ideology and the system of distrust, because Dan has already alluded to these similarities elsewhere.

In other news...

Many-to-many. The panacean solution to the disavowal of difference and the Real that I felt was Rheingold’s strongest argument against his critics seems to be more problematic in Dean’s account. Rheingold says, “The pictures we were able to piece together of what actually might be happening turned out to be considerably more diverse than the one obtainable from the other media available through conventional channels…the Net became a global backchannel for all kinds of information that never made it into the mass media” (Rheingold Chapter Nine – Grassroots). Dean, on the other hand, seems to point to this excess of information as fueling the paranoid, uncertain conspiring subject and the problems associated to an inclusive public: “The dispersion of media makes it hard for us to now what to believe, whom to trust” (Dean 70).

Sovereign publicity – sovereign power. When Dean mentions Habermas’ take on publicity in Chapter 2, I couldn’t help but think of Galloway’s Protocol. “The sovereign’s publicity was an irrational aura of power that was fashioned through practices of display before an audience” (Dean 30). I began to wonder whether this spectacular publicity of the sovereign could be related to sovereign power and whether the changes to publicity given technoculture could be mapped to changes in disciplinary power and finally biopower (a concept I’m afraid still eludes me). Dean's interpellated subject - both knowing and known - reminds me of the subject internalizing the normative panoptic gaze. I am having a bit more trouble thinking about this in the context of societies of control, protocol, and biopower, but I’ll work on it.

Ideology and cynical distance

Thanks to Dan for highlighting Terranova's reformulation of ideology (Zizek-style) -- this is a key component of her argument and perhaps addresses some of the class themes we've been discussing. I'm not quite sure that the move here -- the location of ideology in practices rather than ideas -- escapes the problem of condescension rather than deferring it (aren't we misrecognizing our practices?), but it seems worth a try. How convincing is this account? I don't think it makes much sense unless it's situated against the background of the "real" of capital (that she references in chapter 4), but that could just be me. Specifically, this move allows Dean to argue that "the valorization of fragmentation and contingency" benefits "global capital b prventing it from being understood as a totalizing modality of power" (8). Anyone interested in launching a critique of Dean's critique of ideology? It's perhaps worth noting here the difference between a totalizing modality and totalization itself (is there one? -- that is to say, one might imagine the possibility of a modality that strives for totalization (such as, for example, "all connections between various forms of oppression are necessarily contingent) that nevertheless fails to achieve totality." OK, I'm messing around a bit -- just wanted to point out the totalizing character of the assertion of universal contingency.

Emergent relations of readings as we move into Dean

On Terranova and Robins:

Terranova's intriguing, difficult and dare I say fluid thesis compels me to rethink the concept of the multitude. I believe what she offers is a dynamic account of more precisely how the ambivalence of the multitude operates - vis a vis Virno and Hardt and Negri. At once, the multitude arising from a (social) network of relations comes up through "soft" structure, and thus the need to discuss the biological vocabulary of "microdeterminism" on the one hand; on the other hand, the multitude engages in the production of its own autonomism, and thus the discussion of the vocabulary of emergent properties that "transcend" their own structuring rules. While this ambivalence occurs, social taylorism persists in the attempt to "control" it externally (government regulation of the internet); as well, corporations attempt to replicate it for capital internally (growing a reproduction of social relations in reality tv).

Terranova offers interesting biological and mechanical metaphors to further explicate the more fluid dynamics of the social operations at which all these relations intertwine. I do wonder, though, what advantage these organic metaphors possess over theoretical musings like in Virno. If we have a genuine desire for emergence, for transcendence, do we want to think ourselves at the level of structure or experiment at the level of transcendent production?

Laslty, Robins can be made sense of via a pessimistic reading of the possibility for the emergence of a genuine, fluid, multitude of forces that grow more "naturally" or autochthonously from a conceptualization of pure difference. This seems to point to the democratic stakes in all of this - we wish to grow a bottom up democracy that will not be "hijacked" as Terranova puts it. For Robins, a "nearness" that reduces the otherness of the other through the communal internet risks this problem in a way. So the question seems:

How ought we account for the "better" emergent property that is sociality when socialty is but the transcendental emergence of that which we cannot "control?" Just as the mind is beyond the brain, just as the general intellect is an emergent social product "I" do not control, the "public sphere" is beyond its mere participants - so what ontological status does a social sphere obtain and how can it be measured outside of the concepts used to produce it in the first place; i.e. how can we argue for what it ought to be when those arguments loop back to make it what it is? Who or what performs the measuring seems exactly the political question and not merely the philosophical one. However, the first realization "should" lie in the recognition that our own metaphors to conceive ourselves as part of this dynamic are thoroughly implicated in this politics and do not "transcend" it.

After the very charitable reading we gave Rheingold in his conclusion, the point of distinction between the two seems to become substantially smaller. The read of Rheingold that seemed to have currency framed his alternative as a resistance strategy derived from a close personal attention to particular issues, which really isn't that different from the issue based politics that
get spelled out in Dean's conclusion.

As for the quote about ideology, Dean runs an argument that ideology, particularly the ideology of publicity is sustained by fantasy. This then is derived from the particular definition of ideology that Dean is appropriating from Zizek in the Sublime Object, which might inform our discussion of ideology. Of particular interest should be her argument that communicative capitalist ideology is without hegemony. This ideology is different then from ideology that we have read about thus far as the central organizing principle for this system of thinking is best kept secret and is an instance of the title.

Page 8- "fantasy, then, covers the gaps, antagonisms, inconsistencies, and lacks that pervade the social field."
Page 9- "fantasy is the social unit that animates belief in the public."
Page 17- As theorized by Slavoj Zizek, ideology refers to the "generative matrix that regulates the relationship between the visible and the non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as changes in this relationship" (this is a quote of a quote)

This book is running arguments against a few highly pronounced fantasy structures of the public.

Here are a few questions that might frame things about the conclusion:

Practically is there any real difference between the issue linkage paradigm that Dean proposes and the political systems proposed by the other authors we have read? To put this in practical terms, did the DNC try this strategy in the last few presidential elections and fail?

Is Dean beating a dead horse by going after Habermas?

--dan

Secrecy and the Electronic Agora

The point of reading Jodi Dean right after Rheingold was to provide a slightly different spin on the relationship between publicity, democracy, and interactive/digital media technologies. How might you apply Dean's analysis to Rheingold (and his "ilk")? How convincing to you find her diagnosis? Yet again the central role played by capitalism crops up ("recognizing the new configurations of power brought about by the technocultural materialization of publicity and struggling within and against them may well entail a political choice to view communicative captialism as the hegemonic formation to be registered today" 7): although the claim is made that a totalizing formation doesn't necessarily constitute a totality (it may fall short of the very totality to which it aspires). One of the lurking charges here is that the emphasis on "plurality and multiplicity" we have encountered in various guises in class works to "naturalize" communicative capitalism. Which of her arguments do you find most convincing regarding the relationship between communicative capitalism and the "technoculture" -- which are most vulnerable?

Reality Games and Soft Control

I wonder it was only me that had to think that reality game in Terranova’s description and our “real” lives, regardless of on or off line, are not much different with each other. Let me compare reality games and our lives. Also see p. 127 for more details.

1. Reality games demand the impossible from their willing participants. - I think so many people who have gone through neo-liberal changes in their society or workplaces would say similarly from their experiences.
2. They relinquish their privacy by being continuously placed under the surveillance gaze of a camera – I am so happy we do not have surveillance camera in the library because at least whether or not study is under my decision, not anybody else’s. It is no secret that companies install surveillance camera not only because for security but for surveillance of employees. Not to mention, online itself is a jungle of surveillance.
3. Reality games demand then a self that is stripped down to the capacity to collaborate and punishments and rewards – This is exactly what Dilbert talks about everyday and exactly what many people at workplaces experience. Online? It depends on which side you stand on. I feel I am continuously stripped down while online. To many people it is reality that they have to delete cookies and stored passwords when they stop browsing the Internet. What about information society at large? If I say that anyone should give up privacy and individuality to live in an information society, will it be too much?

Terranova makes a statement: “The group dynamics that are engendered by the distribution of the space, the set of initial and the rules applied by a transcendent entity (Big Brother’s voice…) produce a kind of ‘emergent entertainment.’

I think she is saying in this analogy that we all are participants in an emergent entertainment, a reality game, entitled “network society.” To join the reality show, you have to surrender to the rules of the game. You have to repeatedly confess your feelings to the camera. You are under surveillance while even sleeping. While many of us can rationalize and glamourize our experience of being in an emergent entertainment of “biological computing,” we are under soft control of Big Brother. So, we are n the “unhappiness factory.” I think the reality game analogy make lots of sense, at least to me.

Articles of interest

Two interesting articles from trade publications:

First, social networking market to go stale soon:
http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2007/10/24/social-networkings-explosive-growth-to-plateau-in-five-years/

Second, click fraud is way up which could shift how the ad money in the interweb flows:
http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2007/10/24/pay-per-click-fraud-rate-hits-162-percent-in-q3/

Anniversary

It's our 100th post!

Come on...THAT's gotta be worth some Pez.

Rheingold Interview

Oh Rheingold...

I think this might be the interview Eve mentioned in class.

The examples he uses in this one don't have the weight of the ones from 1993 (see picturephones on p.2), and his line hasn’t changed much: everything cyber will bring us together in a big ol’ cyber love fest gift economy.

I see how the luster of the 1993 book fades by keeping this up. I think he might be missing the Google forest...eh, I need to think on it a little more.

Capital takes another little piece of the gift economy

I've decided to add theme songs to my posts:
Not a ploy for Pez, I just had stuff to say. But if you feel compelled to share your Pez with me, I wouldn't refuse it.

Last week we broached the subject of the Net as a neutral tool (which I was sure had to be fraught with blind spots, so of course I had to investigate). I came upon "net neutrality" which is not quite what I had in mind, but is an important issue nonetheless -- and yet another front on capital's offensive. In this case, neutrality refers to the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user.

Companies that own the "pipes" wanting to implement a tiered system is but one way this neutrality is under fire.

Over the weekend, Comcast got caught blocking Internet traffic: the Associated Press conducted tests showing that peer-to-peer files were blocked or delayed. While Comcast denied blocking traffic, they did say yesterday that "its bandwidth management technologies may slow a peer-to-peer service as part of a technique known in the industry as bandwidth shaping, which is the targeted constraining of delivery pipes. This could delay the delivery of a file but not block it." (I'm guessing this was also said with a straight face.)

Though Business Week appears to be against this kind of tiered system (if only for the small businesses and enterpreneurs), the Justice Department in September told the FCC that a net neutrality regulation would "hamper development of the Internet and prevent service providers from upgrading or expanding their networks." (I assume they said this with a straight face.)

What to do? Last summer, Sens. Snowe (R-ME) and Dorgan (D-ND) co-sponsored the Internet Freedom Preservation Act (s. 2917) which is now languishing in the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Might this Comcast stir be enough to revive this bill?

Maybe, but we'll have to stoke the flames a little.

Here are contact links for the sponsors of the bill: Sen Olympia Snowe [ME]; Sen Byron Dorgan [ND]; Sen Barbara Boxer [CA]; Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton [NY]; Sen Christopher J. Dodd [CT]; Sen Daniel K. Inouye [HI]; Sen Patrick J. Leahy [VT]; Sen Barack Obama [IL]; Sen Ron Wyden [OR].

I see some presidential candidates in there, which is an additional avenue -- or an alternate, in case you don't have the weight of being from any these states (which only means they can't respond to you, but they can still receive your comments on their work).

And here are contact links for Iowa Senators Harkin and Grassley.

Shall we put this InterWeb thingy to use?

Response to Mark on D-W

This is in response to Mark's post about Dyer-Witheford yesterday. Since it's already off the front page I'm not posting this as a comment.

I think this basically makes sense, but only in an idealized situation can the common denominator of class-based oppression become the grounds for solidarity. By “idealized” I mean in the absence of an ideology that effectively reverses the situation of oppression as D-W outlines it. If contingent forms of oppression are exactly those investments that do the work of covering over class-based oppression, does it not follow that they must be addressed prior to any formation of solidarity based on class-based oppression? Let me try out an argument that opposes part of what D-W is saying:

Doesn’t the concept of “ideology” necessarily suggest that the subject in some way misrecognizes the real conditions of its social existence? Unless we are going to do away with the idea of ideology altogether, then we must ask what is being misrecognized and how. In D-W’s model of oppression, it seems we are dealing with a definition of ideology of the “false-consciousness” type, where the real conditions of the social (class-based oppression) can be recognized through a procedure of locating a grounds for solidarity. From the perspective of this model, however, “contingent” modes of oppression (ethnicity, gender, etc.) are precisely those forms of social relations that support misrecognition. Contingent oppression, in other words, is the vehicle through which class-based oppression is covered over, representing the operation whereby structural oppression at the level of class is misrecognized as merely contingent and contingent oppression at the level of individual difference is misrecognized as primary and universal. In this way, contingent oppression is necessary (and thus not contingent at all) to the continuance and reproduction of class-based oppression. The dis-articulation of so-called contingent oppression from class is, in short, ideology itself. There is a strange reversal where what is universal, because it is universal, comes to appear as merely contingent or common to all and thus not really a form of oppression, and what is specific, because it is specific, operating on the basis of particular differences, comes to appear as the really oppressive and discriminatory mechanism that prevents society.

What we have in D-W is a reproduction of the base-superstructure model, where class-based oppression determines the character of contingent oppressions (this is why, in fact, they are contingent and subject to change. If the base no longer requires them, as D-W says, then they can be done away with). What is presupposed in this model is the relatively fixed identity of the subject. However, it has been increasingly recognized that this fixity is a fiction, that, as Laclau says, the subject is “nothing but the unstable articulation of constantly changing positionalities.” Having recognized this, the theoretical basis for “misrecognition” as it is applied in the theory of false consciousness disintegrates. Rather than the either/or situation presented in the previous paragraph, where class-oppression and contingent oppression, depending on how one (mis)recognizes them, assume a primary position, with Laclau we have a both/and. The proposition is that no form of oppression can assume a primary position with respect to the others because hegemony is stitched together on the fly: all hegemonic regimes are non-total, opportunistic, and contingent. To make this a bit more concrete, we could say that more recent theories of ideology suggest that it is the drive to posit stability itself that is ideological—discursive operations that postulate a “subject of class oppression” prior to any “contingent oppression” are themselves ideological because they represent a “will to totality” in which the fundamental antagonism of society is denied, or, is itself cast as “contingent,” resolvable. Laclau explains: “The ideological [does] not consist of the misrecognition of a positive essence, but exactly the opposite: it consists of the non-recognition of the precarious character of any positivity, or the impossibility of any ultimate suture.”

D-W’s distinguishing between contingent and non-contingent forms of oppression attempts to resolve the essential impossibility of society by offering a model in which society is represented as a totality and the subject is represented as stable. To put it another way: class-based oppression cannot materialize as the grounds for solidarity across contingently oppressed groups because it would require taking up a fixed position relative to class, which is impossible without dropping the antagonisms of individual difference, which necessitates working through contingent oppressions prior to the formation of a class alliance. Because class-oppression is only made possible by a number of stitched together contingent oppressions that support the stability of a hegemonic regime, the appropriate object of critique are the sustaining mechanisms as a whole.

Social formations are organized around fundamental antagonisms. These antagonisms are denied through a hegemony that sustains itself through ideological misrecognitions. These misrecognitions are reproduced through a fabric stitched together from a number of oppressive strategies based on difference. The anti-ideological aim should thus be to fully assume the impossibility of “closure” and try to discern how social formations are knit together in specific ways that sustain oppression. We are not dealing with an “arborial” structure where the root is the material base, but rather with a “rhizomatic” structure—a network, a matrix, whatever—in which all configurations of oppression are contingent because it is antagonism (incompleteness) itself that is primary, not capital. This is why, for Laclau, ideology consists in not recognizing that discourses which posit the social as a totality are attempting to suture the subject into a space that stabilizes it for the purposes of extracting surplus.

Howard Rheingold Interview 2007 on Second Life

So, I can't find the interview that I was thinking about with Rheingold. This might mean that it didn't exist. ;^) (oops) But there is a recent interview with Rheingold that took place on Second Life. This can potentially help us see where he is in transition from then (when he was writing in 1993) to now. To me it seems as if not much has changed with the argument he is running. Here is the link to the full article, and also a quote of interest I pulled that is telling of what Rheingold currently thinks and connects to previous class discussions as well:

What did you think of Time magazine's naming "You" as person of the year?
Rheingold: Time usually names a phenomenon when it mainstreams. Although it's typical that they used "you"--as opposed to "us," the editors--instead of "us." But it mainstreams commons-based peer production, which is way too stuffy a term for most people. The idea that people only act for profit is pernicious and outmoded. Sometimes, self-interest adds up to more for everyone. And sometimes, if it's easy enough, most people will do things for altruistic purposes. The research on open-source production seems to indicate that a mixture of motives is necessary for creating public goods like open-source software, Wikipedia, etc. Reputation, profit, learning, fun, altruism. Profit is in there, for sure. It's just not the only motivation.

Self-Discipline on the Web

I now have to reconsider the statement on my Facebook profile, “I like cookies.” I think there is a panoptical aspect to the structure and organization of the web and web communities but also a disciplinary aspect. I think Fernback makes the pantoptical characteristics of web “communities” pretty clear: “Clearly, we can be enticed by the convenience of online shopping and by the social needs of community to participate in our own surveillance”(12). Perhaps the ultimate goal for the panoptic gaze is to create a desire or at least a willingness in the objct/subject to self-monitor and self-discipline. How does this translate to Fernback’s reading of online communities as panopticism? Preferences for fashion, music, and other cultural artifacts aren’t just self-policed within such online “communities” as MySpace, what’s more, that is the primary structure and goal of myspace – to have a community in which the primary activity is self-policing through having one’s identity being represented as the totality of their cultural accumulation, or at least the portion they are willing to show others.

This representation of self “as stuff” reflects the shift from Rheingold’s characterization of online communities as a place where one’s physical appearance becomes irrelevant due to inaccessibility (8) to the current aesthetic, in which images, supposedly the aggregate of which comes to represent the person, abound. Perhaps it was inevitable (although those arguments are always dangerous) or perhaps capital managed to create the imperative of representation of self “as stuff,” but either way there has been a marked shift from Rheinhold’s “transmitters of ideas and feeling beings” to the very carnal vessels he saw as beneficially absent.

My Beef with Robins

In an earlier post, I accused Robins of being reductionist and light on evidence. I'm obviously obligated to explain myself.

1. I think Robins unfairly characterizes the Internet=Good camp's position as a straw man argument. On the 4th page of his article he writes: "this simplistic discourse on distance (bad) and intimacy (good) has been able to present itself as the foundation for a broader social and political vision." He goes on further to say on the 6th page: "virtual communitarians...consider geographical determination and situation to have been the fundamental sources of frustration and limitation in human life."

This is a little like treating the symptoms and not the disease...the underlying impulse to connect online is to connect. Sure, people may come together based on a common interest initially, but there exist a variety of perspectives on that common topic. And let's not forget that people don't live their entire day inside that topic. Much more of their day is taken up by everything else in their lives (work, family, location, etc.) that makes them different from the strangers at a distance.

2. Robins also suggests that the Net Gushers (to borrow from Larissa) end up in a bland gob of similarity and argues in favor of a "democratic culture...founded on the differences and distances between strangers" (11th page). I think Rheingold and others would say that difference and distance remain intact. Rheingold gives examples of heated debate and face-to-face meetings with WELLites who turn out to be very different from him, and who remain different, their WELL-based familiarity notwithstanding. They do, in fact, retain the "otherness" Robins champions. In addition, Rheingold gives examples of democratic deliberation (Big Sky, SHWASHLOCK) that demonstrate the coming together of diverse perspectives on a common topic. Furthermore, the barn-raising he describes (as well as some that I have experienced) also keep distance and "passage" alive and well. That the members of his online community were able to converge and help out their fellow member who was ill halfway around the world is amazing because of the distance, not in spite of it.

Okay, I think that's two cents worth...see you in class.

I've been giving some thought to the question of why the rise of the internet provoked such an enormous quantity of gushing regarding its potentialities as the near-messianic solution to all the world's problems. Of course, some of this is probably inherent to the emergence of any new technology; I know that there were many paeans to the powers of the television during its early years. Still, I think the claims for the internet were different, and I've wondered how much of this has to do with the fact that it was the first major communications technology to break out of the broadcast model. For a few hours, I've thought about what other sorts of technologies fit that description, and I can only think of examples- like CB radios- that never gained particularly widespread acceptance.

Taking this a step further, I would argue that this move away from the broadcast model is what made the internet feel so revolutionary, especially in an anti-capitalistic sense. (Obviously, this has changed as the internet has developed and capital has attempted to take advantage of its possibilities from every angle imaginable.) I haven't figured out all of the ramifications of this, but I think it's interesting to consider this perspective in conjunction with some of the ideas we've discussed regarding the proliferation of free labor during the early years of net culture.

virtual community and the new class

I thought I'd draw a connection between the concept of virtual community and that of the "new class" mentioned in the Liu text. I was intrigued by the idea of a "cultural" rather than economic class, as Bourdieu envisions it, and I was wondering whether the "the virtual community" could be divided up in a hierarchy of "cultural classes". I am personally not at all convinced by the concept of a social class detached from economics; after all, how can you detach "culture" from political economy and the power relationships it functions on? Liu is right to criticize Bourdieu, but he could have gone further and discussed the relationship between culture and economics. Fernback makes some good points when arguing for an economic hierarchy within the "virtual community": "only those with good credit or lots of disposable income may end up being targeted" (p.8), "individuals are ranked according to their estimated propensity to pay/default and their creditworthiness" (ibid.) etc.

Proposition and Corollaries on Technology and its Social Use

Its time for me to channel Terranova for a bit....

Proposition I: Technology is simultaneously a social product and a social tool.
Corollary Ia: Discussions of technology are then discussions of the societies that produce the technologies, not just discussions of the technologies themselves.
Corollary Ib: The use of the developed technology depends upon the organization of the society that utilizes it.

Rheingold's tale is the discussion of the social use of technology - specifically the development of the internet in all its various forms throughout its development. It's a little warm and fuzzy at times, but not too far off (remember - this is written in 1993). For example - I have a Facebook account and it was a happy moment when a few old college friends I hadn't heard or seen in years contacted me through this social networking site. Since then we have exchanged contact information, and played a few "facebook"-type online games, but there is a distance between my old friends and I despite our connection on Facebook. In no way do our Facebook conversations have the same intimacy or energy as our 3 a.m. conversations at Denny's over pots of coffee. This change of intimacy doesn't necessitate that all conversations spurned on by Facebook exchanges are necessarily "banal" (Robins p. 6), but some are. Not all conversations on the telephone are deep and meaningful either.

This is one possibility of the social use of a social networking site. Of course - why have these sites developed? What is the social need/desire that has triggered this development?

Remember, Rheingold does posit the other side of the tale of the social use of the then developing internet - "The odds are always good that big power and big money will find a way to control access to virtual communities; big power and big money always found ways to control new communications media when they emerged in the past. The Net is still out of control in fundamental ways, but it might not stay that way for long."

To get back to my proposition and corollary Ib I'll quote from Fernback, "Like other commodities of the industrialized world, community can be exploited as a form of wealth," (10). Can we imagine a society where it would be anathema to commodify the Rheingoldian use of the internet? What, then, would the use of this technology look like? What would this society look like? What would the technology look like?

It is probably no big surprise to those of us living in late-capitalism, or post-Fordism, or post-modern capitalism (?), that "virtual communities" would be subsumed into profit-making endeavors. This is a reflection of the society we live in and particular societal values. Even Rheingold could forsee this in 1993.

I suppose the benefit to the Rheingold piece is that he is trying to imagine another world - another social use of the technology (conditions of possibility, anyone?). This is built upon his experience at the WELL. Fernback's piece is telling us of the social use of the technology for the profit of private entities (and for the surveillance of the citizenry by the government). To bring us back in time, then, I ask the same question Lenin asked, "What Is to Be Done?"

If Proposition I, Corollary Ia, and Corollary Ib are correct, it follows that the only way to change the social use of the technology is to change the society itself. Otherwise, warm and fuzzy "virtual community" style uses of the internet will remain and they will continue to be valuable for certain uses/connections. At the same time - these uses will run alongside the more insidious data collecting and profiling that Fernback describes. The "virtual community" uses do not challenge the "profiling" uses, and can both co-exist on the same network. One may also serve to support the other...

What is the autonomist answer to all this? "Exit"? "Virtuousity"? I'm not exactly sure to be honest. As this post is long enough, I think I will take a rest for now.

Virtuosity: Forest or Trees?

After reading Nostradamus Rheingold against Robins, Fernbach and the backdrop of the autonomists, I can't help but wonder if Rheingold isn't being given a fair shake.

From the tone of the prompt, one would think Rheingold's piece commits some egregious error like being reductionist or light on concrete examples (of which Robins is the culprit, if anyone). It appears Rheingold's only crime is a starry-eyed outlook on the future.

If I understand the autonomist view correctly, it bemoans the immaterial and affective labor on which capital depends. while advocating resistance "from below" or outside traditional structures. This seems to set up a tension between free labor and the virtuosity of the multitude -- where is the line between these two? Let me clarify my question:

What Rheingold lauds as virtuosity in the intro and chapters 3 and 9, some autonomists (the fire-and-brimstone ones, anyway) would call free labor (medical advice, printer support, software sharing, etc.). Thus, Rheingold might be criticized for missing the free labor forest for the virtuosity trees. Rheingold, of course, would say just the opposite, and I'm inclined to agree with Rheingold. It seems that the virtuosity of Virno's multitude is a key element of the resistant action that autonomists call for -- and what Rheingold is describing in real terms. So why are some so eager to brush him aside? Which one of these (free labor or virtuosity) is the big picture, the more important focus?

To be fair, at the time Rheingold is writing, these online communities emerged relatively unfettered by the data mining that is so ubiquitous today (wasn't part of his book a call to arms to fend off that eventuality?) But now that we're at this point in time, where everything Rheingold predicted is in process, does this mean that everything is subject to subsumption? And if capital is able to extract any surplus value out of some important work on the resistance front, does that negate its resistance value entirely? I say no.

In another class today, someone mentioned that guitar lessons are at an all-time low, presumably because there are so many tablature transcriptions available for free online. Granted, it's not Guitar Lessons, Inc., but it is an example of people bypassing a capital structure.

The example that's really sticking out in my mind is the online community that rallied around me when my dog died, but it's late and this post is long. I'll come back to this one tomorrow.

I admit, I've got my Rheingold-brand rose-colored blinders on, so I wouldn't be shocked to find that I'm overlooking something important...I'm sure someone can set me straight in class.

DW Redux

So I've been thinking about the Dyer-Witheford discussion on Thursday, and I'm not going to bring this up again in class, at least not for a while, but I'm having some second thoughts about the way in which we dealt with his arguments. To recap, I think the substance of his claim regarding the role played by capitalism in social struggles is not so much one of ethical hierarchy (that capitalist forms of oppression take precedence or priority over other forms of oppression in terms of gravity) as it is one of social structure: that within a capitalist society other forms of oppression will, in some way or other, manifest themselves necessarily in economic form (because of the central role played by the economy as an autonomous entity (not purely subordinate to other societal institutions) in the era of global capitalism). This interpretation seems to explain his claims that:
1) All other social struggles will necessarily run up against capital at one point or another (and the weight here is on necessity -- this is not a purely contingent connection). That is to say, sexism, racism, homophobia, will, in important ways, manifest themselves in economic terms, because of the important role played by the market in a capitalist society. So, for example, struggles will, at some point, encounter the manifestation of discrimination in economic forms: employment, housing, access to information, education, etc.
2) that claim no. 1 is not reversible. I.e., that is it not necessarily the case that struggles against class-based forms of opression will run up against racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. The deeper substance of this claim, as I understand it, is that, in a capitalist society/world economic relations play a necessary role in the organization of social relations, whereas, other forms of oppression aren't necessary to capital per se. That is to say, capitalism might be able to function without race-based, gender-based, etc. forms of oppression (although it hasn't done so to date) but it cannot function without class-based forms of oppression.

What follows from these claims?
I don't think it's the claim that non-class based forms of oppression are less important to register or oppose. Rather, I think it is the claim that there are non-contingent grounds for solidarity across forms of oppression. What is so crucial about this point? Why not assert contingent grounds for solidarity and leave it at that? As I understand it, his response is that a historically grounded approach needs to recognize the non-contingent role played by capitalist social relations in other forms of contemporary oppression, or to risk misrecognizing, misunderstanding or mischaracterizing the sytem that is being challenged.

Those seem to be somewhat different claims than the ones we addressed in class, so I thought it might be worth laying them out for further debate/critique: have at them!

Defending Rheingold

Although Rheingold deploys the metaphor of "Athens without the slaves" his position becomes more nuanced by the end of chapter 10. He qualifies this by the end of the paragraph, the condition being a proper understanding of the use of technology in democracy. Rheingold slow plays his alternative conception, only in the closing moments of the text does this get spelled out as the strategic use of technology for particular political ends that entail a commitment to civil discourse. This view requires that individuals cultivate a particular interested attention to democracy and that this attention maintain a distance from the medium.

Rheingold is careful to separate his position from Habermas, he does not think that the internet provides a regenerated public sphere, this view is confirmed in his story of the Santa Monica BBS, the city of Santa Monica did not move online, but citizens got easier access to resources for the democratic process. In literal terms, the internet stepped in to function like a big city newspaper in a market where that type of newspaper would not be economically viable. This does not depend on the city council being an ideal speech situation but depends on a particular way of using the information on the web. It is hard to find a way to apply this on the level of national politics.

The critique from Debord and Baudrillard is harder to defend against. The spectacle is independent from all reference to reality it is a self-sustaining system. Rheingold has a fairly moderate reading of Baudrillard, situating his work as Virtual communities and politics would be more real then reality, the responses faster the debates more heated and the impact non-existent. This kind of political activity would modeled after a flame war, it would not model the civic dialog model that Rheingold believes that internet driven democracy would take. The second facet Rheingold deploys is a distinction between mediated politics (meaning political spheres existent through technology alone) and the use of mediated technology for other politics. The specific quote describes the difference between a conference call and a town meeting, supporting our reading of chapter three. It would be fair to line up Robbins in this set of arguments.

Rheingold is not saying that the internet constitutes the public sphere or that he has a vision for reconnecting the human experience through the internet, but that the internet can be deployed for particular ends by people if they have a clear vision of how they intend to utilize it. This strategy gives users of technology a good deal of credit in their use of technology.

Tardy Prompt

So, in the spirit of keeping some kind of online discussion of the readings going (thanks to all of you who have contributed and continue to do so), I'm going to propose some topics for consideration with respect to the readings on online community. First of all, I think it might be helpful for us to outline the realms of ambivalence. Rheingold frames this in terms of the panopticon vs. the electronic agora, Robins and Fernback offer two critiques of the deployment of the promise of online community. Rheingold is perhaps the easier target -- anyone interested in defending him in terms more nuanced than his own? What might the autonomist perspective we've been exploring have to say about the way in which Rheingold frames his tale of online community? How might the type of promises he invokes by rearticulated or recast in their terms in useful ways (if at all)? Can we use the discussion of alienation to shed light on his version of online community and the critiques to which it might be subjected? Virtual community feels like such a 90s concept -- what does it have, if anything, to contribute to the discourses on social networking and web 2.0?

Dilbert & The New Class

"The class of knowledge workers is just an assemblage, or, in Erik Olin Wright's important formulation, a "contradictory class." It is the class of morphs, or amorphous class..."The new class is the shapeshifter seen in the deliberately underdrawn characters of Scott Adam's Dilbert comics, where weakly individuated office workers (characterized more by occupational stereotype than personality) occupy a common, generic space of information technology" (Liu, pp. 33-34).

Since the beginning of the semester, every time I saw the Dilbert cartoon I was reminded of our class discussions: transformation of labor, culture of workplaces, hyper capitalism and labor, individuality and subjectivity, relentless surveillance, multitude, endless competition for something that is not in my interest and is not mine....
And my identity is not mine anymore, as we see in Dilbert, because I have to incessantly change or am forced to change, or need to at least disguise, my identity to be able to survive. I was pleased to find Dilbert in Liu's book. I believe there are a lot more people who get the same feelings from the cartoon, although not theoretically. So what? I need theories but they keep slipping away from my understanding :(

Matter matters, part II

Not that anyone doubted it, but with all this talk of immaterial labor and general intellect, I have the recurring impulse to point out not just the human infrastructure of networks, but also the material one, the silicon and fiber optics that can be privately owned and controlled. Comcast is using its control over networks to slow down file sharing by those who use its services for internet access.

Cinema of Globalization

I thought since this week's topic was globalization I'd quickly post some online videos referenced in a book by Tom Zaniello, The Cinema of Globalization: A Guide to Films about the New Economic World Order.

He lists a bunch of films - domestic and international, wide and limited release - that deal with all sorts of issues pertaining to globalization. If nothing else, they might be amusing things for your Rhetoric class...

Some of the videos available online:

Re-Code.Com Commercial - http://www.re-code.com/movies/commercial1.mov

EPIC 2014 - http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/

The Diamond Life - http://gnn.tv/videos/2/The_Diamond_Life

Outsource This! - http://www.outsourceoutrage.com

Where's Rosie the Riveter? - http://www.nlcnet.org/campaigns/he-yi/rosie.shtml

Why Cybraceros? (use the Watch It! pull-down) - http://www.invisibleamerica.com/whycybraceros.shtml

Animaquiladora (click on the camera at the right)- http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?ANIMAQUILA

Papapapa (click on the camera at the right) - http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?PAPAPAPA

Immaterial Dining

Generate useful information while you eat:

WAGENINGEN, Netherlands (Reuters) - Does service with a scowl put you off at lunch? Will you eat more greens if you are surrounded by plants? Does romantic, pink lighting encourage you to linger over your fruit salad?

A new research center -- dubbed the "restaurant of the future" -- at the Dutch university of Wageningen hopes to help answer these questions and more by tracking diners with dozens of unobtrusive cameras and monitoring their eating habits.

"We want to find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel. We try to focus on one stimulus, like light," said Rene Koster, head of the Center for Innovative Consumer Studies, as overhead bulbs switched through green, red, orange and blue.

Toddlers Online

I think when watching Nickelodeon this morning (yes, I watch Nickelodeon on occasion) I may have found the solution to Castells's critique that "most public schools are simply not up to the task of producing the new, information labour force" (9).

Introducing, the Fisher Price Easy Link Internet Launchpad. The Easy Link allows children to explore sites (like Elmo's Potty Time) when they plug a figure of a character into the Launch Pad. They can click through links and play games with limited access to the internet.

Let's get one of these in every Third World home!

For an article on other internet-based toys: http://www.commercialexploitation.org/news/toysandinternet.htm

This Post is Too Long

Cultural Imperialism, the Multitude, and Empire. Dyer-Witherford talks about cultural imperialism of sorts, but I find this idea difficult to reconcile with Negri and Hardt’s idea of Empire. “Such a global projection of consumerism into zones previously relegated to economic marginality demands a reconstruction of needs and desires – of cultural traditions, religious prohibitions, dietary habits, sexual mores, traditions of self-sufficiency – similar to that experience by the Euro-American proletariat in the first part of the twentieth century, but exceeding in scale (137).

My best effort to reconcile the concepts came when Dyer Witherford admits to a relentless uniformity or systematicity to this “global bazaar”: “Every human aspiration, desire, and creative impulse will find its place within the commodity-form” (138). I guess this is what Deleuze and Guattari saw “capital as fluid, inventive, and adaptive, using every obstacle put in its path to rebound and move forward again” (Virno 12). Similarly, Bowring explains, “Empire exercises universal integration through a neutralizing liberal indifference to biological diversity and difference, combined with a pluralistic affirmation of those ‘merely cultural’ difference which do not threaten social order...The divisions that derive from these differences are managed as a means of hierarchising and controlling labor power, as well as diversifying and multiplying global markets” (Bowring 121-122). This last bit seems to speak to what Dyer-Witherford mentions later on, “capital strives to prevents its variegated opponents from combining forces: dividing, splitting, and fracturing in order to maintain the systemic integrity of its world system” (190).

However, I must admit that I then get very confused when I read Castells. He explains, “Networks readapt, bypass the area (or some people) and reform elsewhere, or with someone else. But the human matter on which the network was living cannot so easily mutate. It becomes trapped, or downgraded, or wasted. And this leads to social underdevelopment” (7). I see the hierarchising of Empire in action, but the exclusion of regions seems contradictory to the subsuming phagocyte that is Empire. I guess it’s worth adding a caveat to that notion of Empire of valorization; what has no value is discarded by Empire. I feel like Negri and Hardt are laughing at me.

Another chink in Empire’s armor seems to be Castells notion of the network state (5). It seems that post-Fordism has left the nation-state in the dust, and Empire “legitimizes the economic and military disregard for the sovereignty of nation-states” (Bowring 120). I’m not sure if the concept of “network state” is at odds with Empire, but it would seem to have some widespread consequences, especially when I think of nationalism and the construction of political subjectivities.

Capital versus Labor: Take 2. In last week’s post, I noted that Harvey’s narrative seems to give capital more agency: the change to flexible accumulation is attributed to capital’s reduction of crisis in overaccumulation (and the implied efforts to maximize profits). I bring this up again because Dyer-Witherford relies on the primacy of labor struggles as determining capital’s flows to inform his concept of “socialized worker.” Oddly enough, he borrows Harvey’s language to describe how globalization is really a response to “mass worker” unrest in the 60s (and, of course, all that other social unrest which was really a response to capital, too): “By the early 1970s, it became clear that, from capital’s point of view, the old “triplanetary” division of the world wasn’t working. With profit rates in the old centers of accumulation tumbling, the search for a reorganization of capital’s global circuits that would allow it to escape worldwide pressures of social unrest was on” (133). I’m buying his labor-determines-capital narrative less and less each time I read it.

Some other Quick Hits:

Doesn’t this fly in the face of what we’ve encountered on immaterial labor: “It is only when new information and communication technologies empower humankind with the ability incessantly to feed knowledge back into knowledge, ... that there is, ... an especially close link between the activity of the mind, on the one hand, and material production, be it of goods or services, on the other” (Castells 11).

Micropolitics and Fascism. I have not read A Thousand Plateaus where I know Deleuze and Guattari get into micropolitics and fascism; let me just say, I found this discussion really problematic. Anyone have a copy I could borrow? For those who have read it, at least assure me that it's more nuanced than DW lets on!

Deflection versus Appropriation: a note on argumentative strategy

It really feels like D-W focuses on side stepping criticism rather then assimilating it. Before the implication driven analysis, I just want to note that this doesn’t pass the mirror test, D-W’s accounts often would apply to his own work more then to others. My impact won’t be contradictions bad, but there are some really important insights he could use to make his alternative better. D-W wants to read D&G with out getting into their critique of psychoanalysis and normalization. If the concrete is desirable the schizophrenic patient is not where your going to find it. D-W seems to read D&G through a secondary text written by Negri and Guattari. It feels like there is some shadow side work happening here to distinguish D&G from Guattari alone or Guattari and Negri. This might get to a capitalism critique minus the critique of psychoanalysis. His footnotes didn’t have a full cite for this, as best I can tell it is the book “Communists like us” which doesn’t appear much in the literature, there are some nettime postings about it from the mid 90’s and not much more. If you have a copy I would like to borrow it. This citation is particularly troubling for me as it is the source for D-W’s reading of the US anti-nuclear movement, the reading utilized in CyberMarx seems to be quite clearly at odds with the prevailing reading of these events in the Org Comm literature. As for his attempts to dismiss potentially complementary authors I have two particular implications for this argument.

For the first time in chapter 6 he actually cites Haraway. D-W moves away form haraway because she doesn’t have clear enough divisions between strategy and tactics, meaning that almost everything could be a cyborg so the argument wouldn’t be analytically useful. The point of modernity is that it colonizes many social relations particularly through self valorization, which means that a resistance strategy that permeates the field of social relations has unique potential relative to a strategy that focuses on single instances of resistance. What this means is that he could appropriate and extend her analysis to explain how his multitude could be actualized. Absent some wide reading of inclusion in a moment/identity it is unclear where resistance will come from.

Radical democracy can inform his project to create larger social ends, instead of reading Laclau and Mouffe and dismissing them he should appropriate their theory. Example: a provisional hegemony between garment workers would be a productive collation for Laclau and Mouffe where he could use their work. To develop a more robust theory of social movements which would get him out of problems with examples and other arguments. He could position CyberMarx then to have a resistance strategy with some easier praxis. I often find myself feeling like CyberMarx is Zizek written by someone with a more organized thought process. Zizek often tries to handle radical democracy through ideological critique which is not nearly as trenchant in D-W.

In seeing D-W’s answer to hybrididty the social struggles he isolates would get swamped as well. If Bhabha can be effectively answered by conflating all acts of valorization with defeat then there really are no strategies for refusing the power relations of the status quo. Consider it this way; if any risk of valorization would swamp the Subaltern then only a strategy of pure refusal would constitute a workable strategy. H/N handle this effectively in the excerpt from Empire from last Tuesday defeats a pure withdrawal from global systems. This really should be no surprise as our earlier readings of D-W were finding his accounts of resistance quite thin, he didn’t cite Bhabha but Arif Dirlik who cites Bhabha. This has important implications for how he runs his argument, the window where resistance is effective but not captured by capitalism is really small.

D-W would do well to appropriate challengers rather then to try to dismiss their alternatives.

--dan

Ugly MySpace Power

Creating an Ugly MySpace page is subversive? Check out the argument here. Money quote from the show related to our arguments,

"Emerging spaces on the internet may have functions that you can't even predict. For example, I got a message on MySpace, which I thought was about making friends, that said 'I'm curious about why you don't do more with your MySpace page. It seems like you drive more traffic to your official site.'

Thats why MySpace is so ugly! People are trying to drive traffic elsewhere!

Over the next 2 weeks, I'm gonna try to make my MySpace page as ugly as possible."

Lazzarato on Biopower

There seems to be a reading of the zoe-bios distinction in Cote/Prybus that they remember form Lazzarato which was not in our materials. I followed the endnotes and found an article where Lazzarato develops his critique of Agamben and ferrets out his take on biopolitcs.

http://www.geocities.com/immateriallabour/
lazzarato-from-biopower-to-biopolitics.html

This paragraph feels important:

Giorgio Agamben, recently, in a book inscribed explicitly within the research being undertaken on the concept of biopolitics, insisted that the theoretical and political distinction established in antiquity between zoe and bios, between natural life and political life, between man as a living being [simple vivant] whose sphere of influence is in the home and man as a political subject whose sphere of influence is in the polis, is “now nearly unknown to us.” The introduction of the zoe into the sphere of the polis is, for both Agamben and Foucault, the decisive event of modernity; it marks a radical transformation of the political and philosophical categories of classical thought. But is this impossibility of distinguishing between zoe and bios, between man as a living being and man as a political subject, the product of the action of sovereign power or the result of the action of new forces over which power has “no control?” Agamben’s response is very ambiguous and it oscillates continuously between these two alternatives. Foucault’s response is entirely different: biopolitics is the form of government taken by a new dynamic of forces that, in conjunction, express power relations that the classical world could not have known.

--dan

The Persuaders

Frontline put out a documentary called The Persuaders not too long ago, exploring the advances of those working in advertising and what the new frontier for advertising could be in this day and age.

Follow the link and take a look. I recommend #4 "The Science of Selling". Check out what this Clotaire Rapaille character says about consumers. I swear he is the modern day Frederick Taylor. Instead of workers on an assembly line, this man plays with participants in a focus group setting.

Some Links

Game art/activism. Lots of great stuff:
link
Turbulence blog (tons of new media projects, great place to find paper subjects):
link
Download "Super Kid Fighter," the game by Critical Art Ensemble (and Carbon Defense League) mentioned in "A Playful Multitude." It's a game about a kid searching for his sexual identity:
link
McVideoGame, a game about how McDonald's is destroying the planet:
link

Virtual Job Fair on Second Life

Check this out:

People create avatars and attend job fairs in Second Life...and GET JOBS.

"...Companies that have interviewed candidates at the virtual job fairs included Sodexho, the food management company that hired Giordano, as well as Microsoft and Verizon, among others."

Full story here.

Clunky neologism of the week

As mentioned in class, here's Axel Bruns piece on "produsage." If you want to see what the creative industries ideologists of "Web 2.0" are coming up with, it's worth a look. Plus, it's got a diagram -- gotta love the diagram.

A Rethinking of Superstructure?

Although admittedly not familiar with the details of the argument, I understand there has been, and is, an ongoing debate about the relationship between the base and superstructure in capitalism. In traditional Marxist political economy, I think there is a pronounced and linear relationship between the two: the superstructure arises from – is based upon – the base, or the mode of production.
Our discussions of immaterial, and as a subcategory, affective labor, illustrate to me, not necessarily a full reversal of the relationship of base to superstructure, but definitely a profound modification. It is no longer the case that culture, morality, and subjectivity get directly and linearly informed by production. However, I wonder if that was ever the case. Harvey, discussing changes that had to be made within the Fordist era of production, writes that “the state of class relations throughout the capitalist world was hardly conducive to the easy acceptance of a production system that rested so heavily upon the socialization of the worker to long hours of purely routinized labour . . .” (128). Here we see that first the socialization of the worker to the imperatives of capital must take place, and not socialization as a product or even side-effect of the mode of production. Harvey also states that Ford sent social workers to the “privileged” immigrant workers’ houses to “ensure that the new man of mass production had the right kind of moral probity, family life, and the capacity for prudent and rational consumption . . .” (126). In other words, it seems that a certain culture, one conducive to and malleable for capitalism must be created before the mode of production can reach what capitalists see as its ideal level of production and efficiency.
This change in the relation between base and superstructure becomes even more obvious, and perhaps, simultaneously, more detrimental to agency, in post-Fordism or the era of flexible accumulation. However it takes on a different character. Previously, in Fordism, superstructural values were created, harnessed, or refined to increase production. Through the postmodernisation or informatisation of the economy, superstructural elements such as culture and subjectivity are no longer just used to increase efficiency in production but as the modes of production themselves.

Exodus is Pointless and Other Questions

Several questions were triggered by the readings.

(1) Subaltern Development. Eve has mentioned in several posts the nationalizing attempts in Latin America as models for counterhegemonic resistance, but it seems that Hardt and Negri see these movements as mistakes. “As an alternative to false development pandered by the economists of the dominant capitalist countries, the theorists of underdevelopment promoted real development, which involves de-ling an economy from its dependent relationships and articulating in relative isolation an autonomous structure...Any attempt at isolation or separation will mean only a more brutal kind of domination by the global system, a reduction to powerlessness and poverty.” How does the idea of “exodus” (Hardt/Negri) or “defection” fit in as resistant if leaving the Empire does more harm than good?

(2) Individual versus Collective. I am having trouble reconciling Virno’s multitude with the the panoptic individuation in post-Fordism I agreed with when reading Robins & Webster (and elaborated by Harvey – “a general shift from the collective norms and values that were hegemonic in working-class organizations...towards a much more competitive individualism as the central value in an entrepreneurial culture” (171))

(3) The ephemeral commodity. I was very encouraged by Terranova’s concept of the ephemeral commodity – its transparency making the labor process more evident thereby eliminating the fetishism of the mass-produced commodity. Harvey seems to speak to this less durable, ephemeral product but it seems less empowering here, a mere ploy by capital to accelerate the turnover time of consumption: “The relatively stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism has given way to all the ferment, instability, and fleeting qualities of a postmodernist aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification of cultural forms” (156).

(4) “The assembly line has been replaced by the network” – what a strange way to speak of informatization and post-modernization given that the assembly line is the Taylorist labor control model of production par excellence. Perhaps Taylorism or scientific management isn’t “post,” but rather it has changed with the primacy of consumption dictating production.

(5) Capital versus Labor. Dyer-Witherford argued that capital is not the agent, but rather is simply reacting to strengthening labor opposition; however, Harvey seems to narrate a much more complex story with roles played by the state, capitalist, and labor. Harvey’s narrative seems to give capital more weight: this change to flexible accumulates is attributed to capital’s reduction of crisis in overaccumulation (and the implied efforts to maximize profits). In fact, I’m trying to reconcile the Hardt and Negri and Dyer-Witherford concept of the “socialized worker” with the labor under flexible accumulation described by Harvey (a hybrid of highly productive Fordist production coexisting with resurgent traditional (i.e., paternalistic, familiar, artisanal) labor). The idea of peripheralized, casualized labor (more common to tertiary service sector labor) seems to be a common thread in both.

(6) The role of the welfare state in Fordism. Most of the reading speak about the government and the welfare state of the 1930s-1970s as an integral part to the relative success and stability of Fordism: “What is remarkable is the way in which national governments of quite different ideological complexions engineered both stable economic growth and rising material living standards through a mix of welfare statism, Keynesian economic management, and control over wage relations. Fordism depended, evidently, upon the nation state taking a very special role within the overall system of social regulation” (Harvey 135). However, Hardt and Negri speak about the welfare state in very different terms in the section on the commons, views as a public space appropriated by private interests: “The rise and fall of the welfare state in the twentieth century is one more cycle in this spiral of public and private appropriations. The crisis of the welfare state has meant primarily that the structure of public assistance and distribution, which were constructed through public funds, are being privatized and expropriated for private gain."

Long post. Had to get this out.

gendered dimensions of becoming human

This will be a polemic response to the question:

"1. (Polemically) Do we concur with Hardt on these two assertions?:
a. Modernization has come to an end (second Paragraph after “informatisation”)
b. Postmodernisation marks a new mode of becoming human (last paragraph before "sociology of immaterial labor")"

Some of my responses thus far (see my polemic about D-W) have been to point out what I think to be a profoundly disturbing lack of feminist (or other oppositional) theories utilized by most if not all of the authors we have read. There seems to be a strange compensatory feminism in the arguments about immaterial labor and post-Fordism, which means that a reviewer or editor compelled the authors to acknowledge gender, the authors are astute enough to include this dimension on their own, or there is a fundamental gender dimension implicit in the totality of informatisation.

Although I find these readings very stimulating and potentially useful to my own research and understanding of new media production, I still think that there are some underlying assumptions about immaterial labor that bear a distinctive phallocentrism. Perhaps we are not reading the existing feminist critique of these authors, but then I have to ask why feminists should have to be adding a critique to theory in this stage of the game.

With that in mind, here is my feminist critique in response to whether I concur with Hardt & Negri's claims above. Short answer if you want to stop reading: not entirely.

a. "The jobs [of the tertiary sector] for the most part are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More important, they are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication" (p. 4).

The latter part of this quote is clearly a signification of immaterial labor as it stands (now in dominance) in opposition to its binary, material labor. Both, however, are conceptualized as masculine forms of labor-in-dominance. I don't mean that women are incapable of either. I would argue quite the contrary. But we cannot combine the terms knowledge-information/affect-communication into a single definition of immaterial labor without noting the gendered genealogy of each of these terms (how convenient, I can put a slash in the middle). Hardt and Negri's articulation of immaterial labor begins with knowledge-information and ends with affect-communication (the later attributed to feminist analyses of women's work).

Only through an explicit acknowledgment of the gendered dimensions acting in concert through the dyad of immaterial labor can I partially accept the assumption that we are entering a new phase of becoming human. I say partially because I do not think that we can say at this point that the four qualities of immaterial labor are equally valorized. Knowledge and information seem to occupy a primary place of importance in comparison to affect and communication. Still, if we accept for a moment that these four qualities manifest themselves in the subjectivity of every worker, regardless of his or her gender, then we are moving into a third space (not an exit!) of consciousness that has the potential to overcome one form of domination.

And seeing as I might have just inadvertently wandered into a sex-role type of argument, I will end this post now.

Comic Relief

A few years ago I worked on an art project called Peoples Jeans. The site isn't up anymore, but archive.org has most of it here.
The idea was to create a business that generated capital out of the surplus product of clothing manufacturers. If you remember, about 5 years ago blue jeans with machine-produced holes in them were all the rage. We thought that people might prefer genuine holes to the artificial ones. We also realized that there was a seriously under-utilized form of potential labor we could capitalize upon: the lived experience of the worker. In today's marketplace authenticity is one of the most valued commodities. And who's more authentic than sweatshop workers, prisoners, or urban youth? Our idea was to have the people producing the jeans (and other people whose authenticity was being wasted) wear them as they worked, producing a line of pre-worn apparel that had authentic, lived experience worn right into the product. My favorite part was that you would get a little baseball card with the picture and story of the person who wore your jeans. And also, a "portion of profits" would be put back into the communities that wore the clothes, so consumers could feel as if they were actually combating sweatshop labor (or poor prison conditions, urban poverty, etc.) by purchasing the product (click on "Company Vision"). As a business model, I think it would have worked. The art project part of the idea was to go to a bunch of fashion trade shows and pitch our repulsively offensive product to manufacturers and produce a documentary film of it, but unfortunately we couldn't come by any funding.

I thought this project was relevant to a lot of the issues we've been discussing, so I thought I'd post about it. When I went to see if the website was still up though, I saw this.
I don't know what's going on there. Maybe whoever bought the domain name thought the project was real.

Edit: found another image from the site: