I Hyperrealize?

(1) Cyborgs have no privacy (unless it’s simulated). After Tuesday’s class, I started thinking about how he posits a telematic society where publicity and privacy coincide. I have to admit, one of the things that really resonated, especially after class, was this idea of the Korean RRN. In Venezuela, we have a similar national ID number. We use it for any form, any public comment (e.g., letters to the editor are signed with this ID number). I kept on wondering why it is that these countries use this ID number so liberally whereas the confidentiality of the SSN in the USA is sacrosanct. It’s almost like in the USA we preserve this secret which means that we are entitled to privacy. If you take away secrets (total publicity) we have no ‘real’ privacy to preserve.

Bogard seems to posit a similar scenario, a cyborg or clone with an overcoded and precoded body (not private, already exposed because the code is known) that is perfectly known, is totally exposed, with no secret to keep and nothing to keep private, is perfectly anonymous and undistinguishable – total publicity = total privacy. This idea of the undistinguishable yet unique was tricky, but I was able to wrap my head around it a bit, when Bogard says, “As that path opens to all, fame itself definitively vanishes as a mark of distinction...everyone is instantly famous, instantly forgotten” (Bogard 141). “The orbitalization of privacy through the erasure of machinic-organic boundaries, and the forging of an indissoluble connection between simulation and surveillance technologies. The cyborg and the clone as the paradoxical figures of the hyperization of privacy and its fantastic, absurd crash into nothing. The clone and the cyborg are the ultimate Others, inscrutable because they are perfectly known” (Bogard 145).

Privacy is restored through simulation (the privacy/truth paradox Bogard goes into): either through simulated private space and intimacy or through information saturation (using language similar to Dean’s always frustrated conspiring subject): “Information saturation always leaves one with the suspicion that nothing has been understood, that in fact the crucial information has been left out or excluded...The very information that encloses and saturates them gurantees that they won’t be known, that they will always remain obscure and mysterious” (Bogard 151).

(2) The Soft Control of Simulated Surveillance. We (and Bogard himself) may dismiss Bogard’s telematic society as fiction, but his discussion about the control effected by this simulated surveillance was also really reminiscent of Terranova’s soft control. Simulated surveillance seems mighty similar to the forms of soft control we discussed in class weeks ago. Bogard explains, “The biomachinic assemblage works to erase permanently the already tenuous distinction between the individual and the totality, and substitute instead a kind of pure, cybernetic operationality or connectivity...This assemblage masks a rather simple aim to develop a closed system where all process can be translated and managed as flows from and back into information – no longer conformity to a historically variable and continuously contested system of norms, but rather, if you will, production, from and return to a singular, universal norm of norms” (Bogard 30). He continues, “[Simulated surveillance’s] strategy is always control in advance, hyperized, front-end, programmed control – regulation as a matter of feedback, models, circuitry design, interface, and integration” (Bogard 32).

Terranova discussed soft control in a similar way when discussing control mechanisms for acentred multitudes involving different levels: “the production of rule tables determining the local relations between neighboring nodes; the selection of appropriate initial conditions’ and the construction of aims and fitness functions that act like sieves within a liquid space, literally searching for the new and the useful” (Terranova 115). Terranova continues (and tell me this doesn’t sound like something straight out of Bogard), “The new place of the individual in the mode of immanent control is not as a model for the organization of a multitude, but as a tool that allows the overcoding and the ultimate containment of the productive power of flow...to the dissolution of the individual into the productive powers of the multitude, corresponds an over-coding of the multitude onto the individual element understood as a unit of code” (Terranova 123).

(3) Cyborg Work. Bogard’s description of cyborg work were also uncannily similar to a lot of the readings on immaterial labor, with a few additions that seemed answer some of the outstanding questions about and implications of this immaterial labor. For Bogard, in telematic societies, the project to extract surplus value (and exploit labor) entails exchanging “living labor for simulated labor, or what I call ‘cyber work,’ which doesn’t mean just work using computers, but the informatization and virtualization of the entire work environment (Bogard 98). Bowring described a similar trend when discussing Hardt and Negri’s Empire, “The increase in non-working time brought about by the expansion of large-scale industry outstrips the power of fixed capital, so that ‘the surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth.’ Instead we have the development of the collective powers of labor as an autonomous productive force (Bowring 115).

“In telematic societies, cyborg work is not simply unproductive, or even not-productive; it is in fact, ultraproductive, production as information and information as production...Information is what cyborgs ‘produce’” (Bogard 109). Similarly, Hardt uses the idea of a prosthesis and Haraway’s cyborg when discussing affective labor, “Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves...This type of immaterial labor is called ‘symbolic-analyitic’” (Hardt 95).

There are two concepts pertaining to our discussion of immaterial labor that Bogard problematizes (a) the collapse of valorization and the apparent end of Capitalism, and (b) the unalienated immaterial laborer. With regards to the former, “As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value must cease to be the measure of use value. The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth” (Marx, Grundisse). Bogard seems to allude to this same shift, “It is in the effort to transgress this limit, to consume the totality of living labor, that capital simulates labor, and in so doing begins the transition from a material productive order to a rematerialized, informated order of simulation, a cyborg order” (Bogard 103). But he uses Baudrillard to discuss the decline of the commercial law of value and instead describes, “The evolution of third-order simulacra constitutes the regime of simulation proper, governed by the structural law of value and the emergence of a hyperreal economy”(Bogard 109). I am having trouble understanding what this structural law of value is and whether it responds to this contradiction that Marx brings up in the Grundisse.

With regards to the latter, Bogard mentions this idea that labor owns the means of production [i.e., their brains] in the realm of immaterial labor, “The movement to close the gap between production and control also explodes the very principle on which Capital was founded, the alienation or externality of the product and the producer. Cyborg labor, in a paradoxical movement, supports capitalist production only to subvert historically sedimented relations of power in the workforce...when virtual production substitutes for production, control slips from the grasp of Capital” (Bogard 110). Bogard uses Baudrillard to kind of say, “So what if you own your brain?” “Cyborg work represents nothing more than a radical intensification of these processes: surveillance now saturates work to the point of defining it. Instead of ‘informing’ on work as it occurs, it informates work in advance, closing the gap between activity and its sign...the product of labor is simultaneously its record” (Bogard 115). Your options, your choices, your labor are already afforded by the program, the code.

(4) Beniger 2.0. This entire narrative could be the epilogue to Beniger’s The Control Revolution. Beniger’s narrative of continuity – discussing the need for speed and the rise of technologies in response to a crisis in control – seems to coincide with the historical growth of the technologies of surveillance in the 18^th and 19^th centuries that Bogard mentions: “The coevolution of energy utilization, processing speed, and control, the gains from control technologies that accrue through increasing reliability and predictability, and the increasing control required of control technologies themselves – account for the Control Revolution that has continued unabated from the 1880s to the present” (Beniger 293). Bogard also claims a narrative of continuity, “As a strategy of control [the simulation of surveillance] is a simple and ancient idea...the observation machine of postindustrial societies – is dromological; it operates on speed, on the time of movement...In the abstract, power is the policing of speed, of material flows, by the machinery of observation” (Bogard 26).

(5) Telematic Perversions. The paradoxes of the simulation of surveillance were very reminiscent of the perversions mentioned by Zizek in “The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversions.” Zizek posits the juxtaposition of the two aspect of perversion, “on the one hand, reduction of reality to a virtual domain regulated by arbitray rules that can be suspended” (omnipotent subject); “on the other hand, the concealed truth of this freedom, the reduction of the subject to an utter instrumentalized passivity” (mediatized subject). Bogard echoes this almost verbatim, “Simulated surveillance refers to a paradox of control. It is a fantasy of absolute control and the absence of control at the same time, total control and the end (perfection, cancellation) of control” (Bogard 22).