Brian Holmes on Sat, 5 Jan 2002 18:24:02 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] The Flexible Personality, part II |
(The Flexible Personality, part II) Beneath A New Dominion If I insist on the _social form_ assumed by computers and telecommunications during the redeployment of capital after the recession of the 1970s, it is because of the central role that these technologies, and their diverse uses, have played in the emergence of what Manuel Castells conceives as the global informational economy. Describing the most advanced state of this economy, Castells writes that "the products of the new information technology industries are information processing devices or information processing itself."29 Thus he indicates the way that cultural expressions, recoded and processed as multimedia, can enter value-adding loop of digitized communications. Indeed, he believes they _must_ enter it: "All other messages are reduced to individual imagination or to increasingly marginalized face-to-face subcultures."30 But Castells tends to see the conditions of entry as fundamentally technical, without developing the notion that technology itself can be shaped by the patterns of social, political and cultural relations. He conceives subjective and collective agency in terms of a primary choice or rejection of the network, followed by more or less viable paths within or outside the dominant system. The network itself is not a form, but a destiny. Any systemic change is out of the question. A critical approach can instead view computers and telecommunications as specific, pliable configurations within the larger frame of what Michel Foucault calls "governmental technologies." Foucault defines the governmental technologies (or more generally, "governmentality") as "the entire set of practices used to constitute, define, organize and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals, in their freedom, can have towards each other."31 At stake here is the definition of a level of constraint, extending beyond what Foucault conceives as freedom - the open field of power relations between individuals, where each one tries to "conduct the conduct of others," through strategies that are always reversible - but not yet reaching the level of domination, where the relations of power are totally immobilized, for example through physical constraint. The governmental technologies exist just beneath this level of domination: they are subtler forms of collective channeling, appropriate for the government of democratic societies where individuals enjoy substantial freedoms and tend to reject any obvious imposition of authority. It is clear that the crisis of "ungovernability" decried by Huntington, Thatcher and other neoconservatives in the mid-1970s could only find its "resolution" with the introduction of new governmental technologies, determining new patterns of social relations; and it has become rather urgent to see exactly how these relational technologies function. To begin quite literally with the hardware, we could consider the extraordinary increase in surveillance practices since the introduction of telematics. It has become commonplace at any threshold - border, cash register, subway turnstile, hospital desk, credit application, commercial website - to have one's personal identifiers (or even body parts: finger- or handprints, retina patterns, DNA) checked against records in a distant database, to determine if passage will be granted. This appears as direct, sometimes even authoritarian control. But as David Lyon observes, "each expansion of surveillance occurs with a rational that, like as not, will be accepted by those whose data or personal information is handled by the system."32 The most persuasive rationales are increased security (from theft or attack) and risk management by various types of insurers, who demand personal data to establish contracts. These and other arguments lead to the internalization of surveillance imperatives, whereby people actively supply their data to distant watchers. But this example of voluntary compliance with surveillance procedures is only the tip of the control iceberg. The more potent and politically immobilizing forms of self-control emerge in the individual's relation to the labor market - particularly when the labor in question involves the processing of cultural information. Salaried labor, whether performed on site or at distant, telematically connected locations, can obviously be monitored for compliance to the rules (surveillance cameras, telephone checks, keystroke counters, radio-emitting badges, etc.). The offer of freelance labor, on the other hand, can simply be refused if any irregularity appears, either in the product or the conditions of delivery. Internalized self-monitoring becomes a vital necessity for the freelancer. Cultural producers are hardly an exception, to the extent that they offering their inner selves for sale: at all but the highest levels of artistic expression, subtle forms of self-censorship become the rule, at least in relation to a primary market.33 But deeper and perhaps more insidious effects arise from the inscription of cultural, artistic and ethical ideals, once valued for their permanence, into the swiftly changing cycles of capitalist valorization and obsolescence. Among the data processors of the cultural economy - including the myriad personnel categories of media production, design and live performance, and extending through various forms of service provision, counseling, therapy, education, and so on - a depoliticizing cynicism is more widespread than self-censorship. It is described by Paolo Virno: "At the base of contemporary cynicism is the fact that men and women learn by experiencing rules rather than "facts"... Learning the rules, however, also means recognizing their unfoundedness and conventionality. We are no longer inserted into a single, predefined "game" in which we participate with true conviction. We now face several different "games," each devoid of all obviousness and seriousness, only the site of an immediate self-affirmation - an affirmation that is much more brutal and arrogant, much more cynical, the more we employ, with no illusions but with perfect momentary adherence, those very rules whose conventionality and mutability we have perceived."34 In 1979, Jean-Francois Lyotard identified language games as an emerging arena of value-production in capitalist societies offering computerized access to knowledge, where what mattered was not primary research but transformatory "moves" within an arbitrary semantic field.35 Here, cynicism is both the cause and prerequisite of the player's unbounded opportunism. As Virno notes: "The opportunist confronts a flux of interchangeable possibilities, keeping open as many as possible, turning to the closest and swerving unpredictably from one to the other." He continues: "The computer, for example, rather than a means to a univocal end, is a premise for successive 'opportunistic' elaborations of work. Opportunism is valued as an indispensable resource whenever the concrete labor process is pervaded by diffuse 'communicative action'... computational chatter demands 'people of opportunity,' ready and waiting for every chance."36 Of course, the true opportunist consents to a fresh advantage within any new language game, even if it is political. Politics collapses into the flexibility and rapid turnover times of market relations. And this is the meaning of Virno's ironic reference to Habermas's theory of communicative action. In his analysis of democracy's legitimation crisis, Habermas observed that consent in democratic societies ultimately rests on each citizen's belief that in cases of doubt he could be convinced by a detailed argument: "Only if motivations for actions no longer operated through norms requiring justification, and if personality systems no longer had to find their unity in identity-securing interpretive systems, could the acceptance of decisions without reasons become routine, that is, could the readiness to conform absolutely be produced to any desired degree."37 What was social science fiction for Habermas in 1973 became a reality for Virno in the early 1990s: personality systems without any aspiration to subjective truth, without any need for secure processes of collective interpretation. And worse, this reality was constructed on distorted forms of the call by the radical Italian left for an autonomous status of labor. The point becomes clear: to describe the immaterial laborer, "prosumer," or networker as a _flexible personality_ is to describe a new form of alienation, not alienation from the vital energy and roving desire that were exalted in the 1960s, but instead, alienation from political society, which in the democratic sense is not a profitable affair and cannot be endlessly recycled into the production of images and emotions. The configuration of the flexible personality is a new form of social control, in which culture has an important role to play. It is distorted form of the artistic revolt against authoritarianism and standardization, a set of practices and techniques for "constituting, defining, organizing and instrumentalizing" the revolutionary energies which emerged in the Western societies in the 1960s, and which for a time seemed capable of transforming social relations. This notion of the flexible personality, that is, of subjectivity as it is modeled and channeled by contemporary capitalism, can be sharpened and deepened by looking outside of France and beyond the aspirant managerial class, to the destiny of another group of proto-revolutionary social actors, the racialized lumpen proletariat in America, from which arose the Black, Chicano, and American Indian movements in the sixties, followed by a host of identity-groups thereafter. Here the dialectic of integration and exclusion becomes more apparent and more cruel. One the one hand, identity formations are encouraged as stylistic resources for commodified cultural production. Regional cultures and subcultures are sampled, recoded into product form, and fed back to themselves through the immeasurably wider and more profitable world market.38 Local differences of reception are seized upon everywhere as proof of the open, universal nature of global products. Corporate and governmental hierarchies are also made open to significant numbers of non-white subjects, whenever they are willing to play the management game. This is an essential requirement for the legitimacy of transnational governance. But wherever an identity formation becomes problematic and seems likely to threaten the urban, regional, or geopolitical balance - I'm thinking particularly of the Arab world, but also of the Balkans - then what Boris Buden calls the "cultural touch" operates quite differently and turns ethnic identity not into commercial gold, but into the signifier of a regressive, "tribal" authoritarianism, which can legitimately be repressed. Here the book _Empire_ contains an essential lesson: that not the avoidance, but instead the stimulation and management of local conflicts is the keystone of transnational governance.39 In fact the United States themselves are already governed that way, in a state of permanent low-intensity civil war. Manageable, arms-consuming ethnic conflicts are perfect grist for the mill of capitalist empire. And the reality of terrorism offers the perfect opportunity to accentuate surveillance functions - with full consent from the majority of the citizenry. With these last considerations we have obviously changed scales, shifting from the psycho-social to the geopolitical. But to make the ideal type work correctly, one should never forget the hardened political and economic frames within which the flexible personality evolves. Piore and Sabel point out that what they call "flexible specialization" was only one side of the response that emerged to the regulation crisis and recession of the 1970s. The other strategy is global. It "aims at extending the mass-production model. It does so by linking the production facilities and markets of the advanced countries with the fastest-growing third-world countries. This response amounts to the use of the corporation (now a multinational entity) to stabilize markets in a world where the forms of cooperation among states can no longer do the job."40 In effect, the transnational corporation, piloted by the financial markets, and backed up by the military power and legal architecture of the G-7 states, has taken over the economic governance of the world from the former colonial structure. The "military-industrial complex," decried as the fountainhead of power in the days of the authoritarian personality, has been superseded by what is now being called the "Wall Street-Treasury complex" - "a power elite a la C. Wright Mills, a definite networking of like-minded luminaries among the institutions - Wall Street, the Treasury Department, the State Department, the IMF, and the World Bank most prominent among them."41 What kind of labor regime is produced by this networking among the power elite? On June 13, 2001, one could read in the newspaper that a sharp drop in computer sales had triggered layoffs of 10% of Compaq's world-wide workforce, and 5% of Hewlet Packard's - 7,000 and 4,700 jobs respectively. In this situation, the highly mobile Dell corporation was poised to draw a competitive advantage from its versatile workforce: "Robots are just not flexible enough, whereas each computer is unique," explained the president of Dell Europe.42 With its just-in-time production process, Dell can immediately pass on the drop in component prices to consumers, because it has no old product lying around in warehouses; at the same time, it is under no obligation to pay idle hands for regular 8-hour shifts when there is no work. Thus it has already grabbed the number-1 position from Compaq and it is hungry for more. "It's going to be like Bosnia," gloated an upper manager. "Taking such market shares is the chance of a lifetime." This kind of ruthless pleasure, against a background of exploitation and exclusion, has become entirely typical - an example of the opportunism and cynicism that the flexible personality tolerates.43 But was this what we really expected from the critique of authority in the 1960s? Conclusions The flexible personality represents a contemporary form of governmentality, an internalized and culturalized pattern of "soft" coercion which nonetheless can be directly correlated with the hard data of labor conditions, bureaucratic and police practices, border regimes and military interventions. The study of such coercive patterns, contributing to the deliberately exaggerated figure of an ideal type, is a way that academic knowledge production can contribute to the rising wave of democratic dissent; in particular, the treatment of "immaterial" or "aesthetic" production stands to gain from this renewal of a radically negative critique. Those who admire the Frankfurt School, or closer to us, the work of Michel Foucault, can hardly refuse the challenge of bringing their analyses up to date, now that a new system and style of domination has taken on increasingly clear outlines. Yet it is not certain that the mere description of a system of domination, however precise and scientifically accurate, will suffice to dispel it. And the model of "governmentality," with all its nuances, easily lends itself to an infinite introspection, which would be better avoided. The timeliness of critical theory, today, has to do with the possibility of refusing a highly articulated and effective ideology, which has integrated and neutralized a certain number of formerly alternative propositions. But at the same time it is important to avoid the trap into which the Frankfurt School, in particular, seems to have fallen: the impasse of a critique so totalizing that it leaves no way out, except through an excessively sophisticated, contemplative, and ultimately elitist aesthetics. Critique today must remain a fully public practice, engaged in communicative action and indeed, communicative activism: the recreation of an oppositional culture, in forms specifically conceived to resist the inevitable attempts at co-optation.44 The figure of the flexible personality can be publicly ridiculed, satirized, its supporting institutions can be attacked on political grounds, its traits can be exposed in cultural and artistic productions, its description and the search for alternatives to its reign can be conceived not as another academic industry - and another potential locus of immaterial production - but instead as a chance to help create new forms of intellectual solidarity, a new collective project for a better society. When it is carried out in a perspective of social transformation, the exercise of negative critique itself can have a powerful subjectivizing force, it can become a way to shape oneself through the demands of a shared endeavor. The flexible personality is not a destiny. And despite the ideologies of resignation, despite the dense realities of governmental structures in our "control societies," nothing prevents the sophisticated forms of critical knowledge, elaborated in the peculiar temporality of the university, from connecting directly with the new and also complex, highly sophisticated forms of dissent appearing on the streets. This type of crossover is exactly what we have seen in the wide range of movements opposing the agenda of neoliberal globalization. The initial results are before our eyes. The communicational infrastructure, largely externalized into personal computers, and a considerable "knowledge capital," shifted from the schools and universities of the welfare state to the bodies and minds of the immaterial laborers, can be appropriated by all those willing to simply use what is already ours, and to take the risks of political autonomy and democratic dissent. The history of radically democratic movements can be explored and deepened, while the goals and processes of the present movement are made explicit and brought openly into debate. The program is ambitious. But the alternative, if you prefer, is just to go on playing someone else's game - rolling the loaded dice, again and again. Notes 1. The World Social Forum, held for the first time in Porto Alegre in January 2001, is symbolic of the turn away from neoclassical or "supply-side" economics. Another potent symbol can be found in the charges leveled by economist Joseph Stiglitz at his former employers, the World Bank, and even more importantly, at the IMF - the major transnational organ of the neoclassical doctrine. 2. For a short history of cultural studies as a popular-education movement, then a more theoretical treatment of similar themes, see Raymond Williams, "The Future of Cultural Studies" and "The Uses of Cultural Theory," both in The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989). 3. See Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, et. al., Resistance through Rituals (London: Routledge 1993, 1st edition 1975), esp. the "theoretical overview" of the volume, pp. 9-74. 4. The reversal becomes obvious with L. Grossberg et. al., eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), an anthology that marks the large-scale exportation of cultural studies to the American academic market. 5. The methodological device of the ideal type was developed by Max Weber, particularly in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; as we shall see, it was taken up as a polemical figure by the Frankfurt School in the 1950s. 6. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996/1st ed. 1973), p. 116. 7. Herbert Marcuse, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1988), pp. 143, 158. 8. The term "state capitalism" is more familiar as an indictment of false or failed communism of the Stalinist Soviet Union, for instance in Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia (London: Pluto Press, 1974); however, the concept as developed by the Frankfurt School applied, with variations, to all the centrally planned economies that emerged after the Great Depression. 9. Friedrich Pollock, "State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations" (1941), in ibid., p. 78. 10. Otto Kirchheimer, "Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise" (1941), in ibid., p. 70. 11. T.W. Adorno et. al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950). 12. T.W. Adorno, "Commitment" (1962), in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, op. cit. p. 303. 13. Ibid., p. 304. 14. M. Crozier, S. Huntington, J. Watanabi, The Crisis of Democracy (Trilateral Commission, 1975), p. 74. 15. In the words of the Paris enrages: "What are the essential features of council power? Dissolution of all external power - Direct and total democracy - Practical unification of decision and execution - Delegates who can be revoked at any moment by those who have mandated them - Abolition of hierarchy and independent specializations - Conscious management and transformation of all the conditions of liberated life - Permanent creative mass participation - Internationalist extension and coordination. The present requirements are nothing less than this. Self-management is nothing less." From a May 30, 1968 communique, signed ENRAGES-SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE, COUNCIL FOR MAINTAINING THE OCCUPATIONS, made available over the Internet by Ken Knabb at: <www.slip.net/~knabb/SI/May68docs.htm>. 16. Juergen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975/1st German edition 1973), p. 36. 17. The Crisis of Democracy, op. cit., p. 113. 18. The origins of the "conservative revolution" are described by Keith Dixon in an excellent book, Les evangelistes du marche (Paris: Raisons d'agir, 1998). 19. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 8. 20. Thomas Frank, ibid., p. 229; the references to Harvey are on pages 25 and 233. 21. Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (New York: Basic Books, 1984); excerpts in R. Koolhaas, S. Boeri, S. Kwinter, et. al., Mutations, exhibition catalogue, arc en reve centre d'architecture, Bordeaux, 2000, pp. 643-644. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). As the title suggests, the authors draw on Weberian methodology to propose a new ideal type of capitalist entrepreneur, the "connectionist man." Unlike the Frankfurt School, and myself, they do not systematically relate this ideal type to a sociopolitical order and a mode of production. 25. Andrea Branzi, one of the north Italian designers who led and theorized this transition, distinguishes between the "Homogeneous Metropolis" of mass-produced industrial design, and what he calls "the Hybrid Metropolis, born of the crisis of classical modernity and of rationalism, which discovers niche markets, the robotization of the production line, the diversified series, and the ethnic and cultural minorities." "The Poetics of Balance: Interview with Andrea Branzi," in F. Burkhardt and C. Morozzi, Andrea Branzi (Paris: Editions Dis-Voir, undated), p. 45. 26. In L'individu incertain (Paris: Hachette, 1999, 1st ed. 1995), sociologist Alain Ehrenberg describes the postwar regime of consumption as being "characterized by a passive spectator fascinated by the [television] screen, with a dominant critique marked by the model of alienation"; he then links the positive connotations of the computer terminal in our own period to "a model of communication promoting inter-individual exchanges modeled on themes of activity and relationships, with self-realization as the dominant stereotype of consumption" (p. 240). Note the disappearance of critique in the second model. 27. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 141-148. 28. In the text "Immaterial Labor," Maurizio Lazarrato proposes the notion of aesthetic production: "It is more useful, in attempting to grasp the process of the formation of social communication and its subsumption within the 'economic,' to use, rather than the 'material' model of production, the 'aesthetic' model that involves author, reproduction, and reception.... The 'author' must lose its individual dimension and be transformed into an industrially organized production process (with a division of labor, investments, orders, and so forth), 'reproduction' becomes a mass reproduction organized according to the imperatives of profitability, and the audience ('reception') tends to become the consumer/communicator." Today, the computer is the key instrument allowing for the industrial organization of aesthetic production. In: Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 144. 29. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (London: Blackwell, 1996), p. 67. 30. Manuel Castells, ibid., p. 374. 31. Michel Foucault, "L'ethique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberte," interview with H. Becker, R. Forner-Betancourt, A. Gomez-Mueller, in Dits et ecrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. IV, p. 728; also see the excellent article by Maurizio Lazarrato, "Du biopouvoir a la biopolitique," in Multitudes 1, pp. 45-57. 32. David Lyon, Surveillance Society (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001), p. 44. 33. For an analysis of the ways that (self-) censorship operates in contemporary cultural production, see A. Corsani, M. Lazzarato, N. Negri, Le Bassin du travail immateriel (BTI) dans le metropole parisien (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996), pp. 71-78. 34. Paolo Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment," in Radical Thought in Italy, op. cit., pp. 17-18. 35. Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir, Paris, Minuit, 1979, esp. pp. 13-14 et 31-33. 36. Paolo Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment," op. cit., p. 17. Compare Sennet's discussion of a 1991 U.S. government report on the skills people need in a flexible economy: "in flexible forms of work, the players make up the rules as they go along... past performance is no guide to present rewards; in each office 'game' you start over from the beginning." Richard Sennet, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 110. 37. Juergen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, op. cit., p. 44. 38. Can research work in cultural studies, such as Dick Hebdige's classic Subculture, the Meaning of Style, now be directly instrumentalized by marketing specialists? As much is suggested in the book Commodify Your Dissent, edited by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 73-77, where Frank and Dave Mulcahey present a fictional "buy recommendation" for would-be investors: "Consolidated Deviance, Inc. ('ConDev') is unarguably the nation's leader, if not the sole force, in the fabrication, consultancy, licensing and merchandising of deviant subcultural practice. With its string of highly successful 'SubCultsTM', mass-marketed youth culture campaigns highlighting rapid stylistic turnover and heavy cross-media accessorization, ConDev has brought the allure of the marginalized to the consuming public." 39. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 198-201: "The triple imperative of the Empire is incorporate, differentiate, manage." 40. Piore and Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide, op. cit. 41. Jagdish Bhagwati, "The Capital Myth," Foreign Affairs May/June 1998; electronic text available at <www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/Deadline/bhagwati.htm>. 42. "Une crise sans precedent ebranle l'informatique mondiale," Le Monde, June 13, 2001, p. 18. 43. The ultimate reason for this tolerance appears to be fear. In Souffrance en France (Paris: Seuil, 1998), the labor psychologist Christophe Dejours studies the "banalization of evil" in contemporary management. Beyond the cases of perverse or paranoid sadism, concentrated at the top, he identifies the imperative to display courage and virility as the primary moral justification for doing the "dirty work" (selection for lay-offs, enforcement of productivity demands, etc.). "The collective strategy of defense entails a denial of the suffering occasioned by the 'nasty jobs'.... The ideology of economic rationalism consists... - beyond the exhibition of virility - in making cynicism pass for force of character, for determination and an elevated sense of collective responsibilities... in any case, a sense of supra-individual interests" (pp. 109-111). Underlying the defense mechanisms, Dejours finds both the fear of personal responsibility and the fear of becoming a victim oneself; cf. pp. 89-118. 44. Hence the paradoxical, yet essential refusal to conceive oppositional political practice as the constitution of a party, and indeed of a unified social class, for the seizure of state power. Among the better formulations of this paradox is Miguel Benassayag and Diego Sztulwark, Du contre pouvoir (Paris: La Decouverte, 2000). _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold