Some Links

Game art/activism. Lots of great stuff:
link
Turbulence blog (tons of new media projects, great place to find paper subjects):
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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:
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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: