Thinking is hard. Thinking critically is really hard. There are so many other diversions: television and the inner-tubes, tabloids, everyday life. And then the real ones: hegemony, forgetfulness, doubt, ignorance. I try to think something and then get pulled into the loop of knowing that someone else has said it better elsewhere, of knowing that I've said the same thing already, of realizing that I am forgetting what I had once known, if even I had only known it for a moment or two.
Writing is fast. Thinking is slow. Hence the appeal of Facebook and Twitter.
Anyway, a little inventory of elements of a critique of communicative capitalism. The primary intent--stop thinking in terms of the critical vocabulary and concerns of the late 60s; we are not in the same place. Why is it so hard to break with the old, to think differently? The answer is probably that the phrase is a slogan--Apple's "think different." It's a cooptation and like any really good cooptation it's true, obvious, desirable, and so easily convertible into its opposite. Now it's like a superegoic injunction that renders thinking impossible (analogous to the injunction to Enjoy! that effectively precludes enjoyment). The inventory:
1. Technological rationalism/instrumental reason is not the problem. On the one hand, our technologies and techniques are not rational. They are configured by users, capitalists, and trial and error. They are products of contingency as much as anything else. Think of any code Microsoft claims to own. Think of the constant changes and upgrades to anything made by Apple. This isn't technological rationalism at all.
On the other, what entraps us in our current setting is not a set of constraints that go under the name of reason. Rather, the networks are affective. We are entrapped because of our best feelings of connection and our desires to express our individuality. As Bifo describes it, the pathologies of the present are not those of repression but of "hyper-expression" (to be clear, this does not mean that no one is repressed; rather, it is part of a general description of the present setting; another way to think about it: repression operates at a different level, at that of the repression of alternative political possibilities; it's a repression in advance that differs substantially from the repressive socio-cultural formation of the 50s and 60s; still another way: enjoyment is structured differently--then, in terms of the logic of desire; now, in terms of the logic of drive).
2. Consequently, alienation is not the problem. We are not alienated (or, more precisely, alienation is not a primary characteristic of the dominant mode of production even as specific conditions of alienation persist for some workers in some sectors). The communicative and human relations approach to the workplace (Eva Illouz is excellent on this) rely on the cultivation of techniques and processes for an individualized approach to workplace issues.
Again, there are brutal work sites (Paul Apostolidis's Breaks in the Chain is great on this; it's also the case that the sort of brutality toward undocumented workers he describes could become more widespread as inequality increases). But insofar as communication is the primary vehicle for contemporary capitalism, the dominant tendency is a kind of absorption in the communicative, cultural, affective milieu.
Lots of people like their jobs (one of the books on struggles by women workers at Wal-Mart is interesting in that the workers interviewed talk about how much they like working at Wal-Mart: they like seeing their friends come and shop there; they like being helpful. What they don't like is the pay and the diminished opportunity for advancement). Piece work, contract work, work done on spec, freelance work, adjuncting, etc--for those who work under theses conditions, the problem is the condition--precarity--rather than the work. For those who are out of the paid work force, an additional part of the problem is disconnection (see Boltanski and Chiapello). I'll add here that this is a place where I disagree with Bifo--I don't think refusal of work makes sense as a tactic when there is high unemployment. If it is combined with the formation of alternative collectivities, then it needs to be a model of sharing of work and uncoupling work from the provisioning of housing, food, and health care.
3. Apathy is not the problem. People are engaged, sharing, expressing, creating. We register our opinions. In fact, we are caught up in an acceleration of engagement and participation such that we are constantly being "awared" of issues and incited to "get involved." Millions vote on "American Idol" and other shows that invite people to vote. People email their views to television shows. They call-in to radio shows. Apathy is not the problem.
4. We are not post-political.
Thus, the positive correlaries to the above:
1. affective networks
2. communicative interconnection
3. engagement
4. antagonism
Now these four components should then provide the conditions of possibility for revolutionary change. Why don't they? Because the first three are the ideological dimensions of communicative capitalism that fragment, disperse, and redirect the fourth.
This fragmentation, dispersion, and redirection is manifest in multiple ways (I typically index them with the idea of the decline of symbolic efficiency). Thus, they provide barriers to the formation of collective identies and the organization of an opposition with duration.
Options here? It could be that the new austerity will enable a different politicization of the three components I name above. That is, political activists, or, better, an organized, militant, party could treat these components as promises made by communicative capitalism and threatened by neoliberalism's despotic financialism. This is a pretty accomodationist strategy, though, perhaps kin to the compromises made by organized labor in the 40s. Ultimately, they sell out the least well off and simply postpone the inevitable, upcoming economic calamity--it's clear now more than ever that capitalism is coming to an end; the struggle is over what comes next.
Another option: emphasis not on collective identities and revolutionary subjects but on the objects produced by the setting: debts, foreclosures, homelessness, hoarding, obesity, suicide, decay, destitution; here, the press, force, and impact of these experiences rolls through the present producing something new. The problem here is that standing back is getting rolled over. It's the sure enabling of a more violent, more horrifying future, the one seized by those with present means, assets, and will.
The less violent path thus seems the way of the subject, the subject pressed into service by the objects in this setting.
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