Cities of Rhythm & Revolution

March 8th, 2010 | 1 comment

Voilà.! Some 5 years in the making, Circulation & the City.

With appropriate fanfare & deep bows, Will Straw & Alexandra Boutro’s edited volume entitled Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (McGill Queen’s UP, 2010) now graces the shelves. This book has been quite a few years in the works. The earliest drafts I have of work for the volume date back to 2005, and by the time we went to press, the final chapter I submitted on Henri Lefebre, rhythm, and revolution in the city had been transformed entirely from the words originally writ on rave culture and rhythm (funny thing: the new article I am finishing for Dancecult picks up on these earlier themes  – sometimes work must encounter different sets of theoretical concepts, and years of reflection, for the excavation of the intellect to yield its bounty). The book forms the third in a trilogy of publications from the Culture of Cities Project, a multi-university research endeavour that sought to unearth “the mix of universal and local influences in the everyday life of cities,” with research concentrated in Toronto, Berlin, Dublin and Montréal, and with researchers across Canada and the Continent. So, with the intent of lurking y’all into picking this up (or perhaps unwittingly scaring you off), I offer the introduction to my chapter “Cities of Rhythm & Revolution.”

Until August 2010, here be the 20% off code: enter BSTRAW10 at checkout through MQUP.

qork / o d d i ty | Vancouver 1998 |<ST> | photo: Tanya Goehring

Cities of Rhythm & Revolution

// tobias c. van Veen

The urban problematic, urbanism as ideology and institution, urbanization as a worldwide trend, are global facts. The urban revolution is a planetary phenomenon. – Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (2003, 113)

Like Seeds in a Sack: the State and Urban Revolution

A revolution happens somewhere: in a city, a springtime revolt, the unexpected uprising, the insurgency of the city against its occupiers, whether military or monetary – these are all the classic forms. In the violence, boredom and exhaustion of the 21C,[1] there are revolutions in product design, software, advertising and taste while the upheavals that remake the world are rarely granted the dubious privilege of ‘revolution’. Despite its broad application, or rather, the attempt to render its force banal by subsuming it to the language of consumption, ‘the revolution’ nonetheless maintains an exclusive meaning when it comes to the remaking of the world as such. And this remaking has had particular import by way of the City: it is the City that is the locus of the State.[2]

What is the City that it overwhelms the world with a concentrated force, that it, once expressed as ‘the urban’, a tendency of the city to globalize, becomes the engine of history? Such would be Lefebvre’s ‘urban revolution’, the city as the dominant global manifestation in which a new form of the social emerges: the “urban society” (Lefebvre 2003: 5). The urban supercedes the agrarian and overtakes not only the country but even the city itself – for once all is woven within the urban fabric, the city loses its particularity, its oppositional architecture to the country’s expanse: “The urban fabric grows, extends its borders, corrodes the residue of agrarian life. This expression, ‘urban fabric’, does not narrowly define the built world of cities but all manifestations of the dominance of the city over the country” (3-4). But what is the city? Society? The country? A dialectical comment by Deleuze and Guattari on the matter, writ around the same time as The Urban Revolution (1970, trans. 2003), teases out the ambiguity of Lefebvre’s hypothesis remarkably well:

It is not the country that progressively creates the town but the town that creates the country. It is not the State that presupposes a mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the State that makes production a ‘mode’. The last reasons for presuming a progressive development are invalidated. Like seeds in a sack: It all begins with a chance intermixing. The ’state and urban revolution’ may be Paleolithic, not Neolithic…. (Deleuze and Guattari 429)

Deleuze and Guattari challenge the – traditional, Marxist, liberal, linear, etc. – narrative of humanity’s ‘progressive development’ (from nomads to cities, agrarian to urban) by arguing that the progressive timeline that would posit the emergence of the City-State at a specific moment in the ‘linear development of civilization’ falls prey to tautology in its quest for the origin and evolutionism of historical succession (427-428). Theses “on the origin of the State are always tautological” not only because they fall into tautology, but because the State is tautological. In fact, according to Lefebvre, it is because all “logics,” including that of the state and the law, commodities, the organization of space, the object, daily life, language, information and communication want “to be restrictive and complete, eliminating anything that is felt to be unsuitable, claiming to govern the remainder of the world,” that they become “an empty tautology” (2003: 35). This tautology, however, is not meaningless: its emptiness shares a common point in the accumulation of surplus value in the city. Thus Deleuze and Guattari “are always brought back to the idea of a State” – as an “apparatus of capture” – “that comes into the world fully formed and rises up in a single stroke, the unconditioned Urstaat,” to which we might add its dimensional aspects: centripetal, circular, enclosing, inscribed in the corridors and walls of the polis (427). The City-State emerges with the origin of History itself:

Economic evolutionism is an impossibility… An evolutionary ethnology is no better… Nor an ecological evolutionism… All we need to do is combine these abstract evolutions to make all of evolutionism crumble; for example, it is the city that creates agriculture, without going through small towns. To take another example, the nomads do not precede the sedentaries; rather, nomadism is a movement, a becoming that affects sedentaries, just as sedentarization is a stoppage that settles the nomads. (Deleuze and Guattari 430)

Let us make quick work of this moment – for the radically anti-evolutionary, nondevelopmental thesis of a “coexistence of becomings” (against which “history translates into a succession”) (ibid.), is also to be found in Lefebvre. It is found in the complex interplay of the ‘urban’, wherein the urban anticipates its own realization as the ‘virtual’ horizon of its own becoming.[3] Lefebvre is quite aware of Simondon’s theory of transduction (2003: 5) which will later be incorporated by Deleuze and Guattari when encountering this exact problem: the virtual.

The urban, like Deleuze and Guattari’s Urstaat, always seems to have coexisted in the tension between city and country, as the fabric of their antinomy, though one might argue – as Lefebvre will – that the urban has now become the Ur-apparatus of capture, the overwhelming of all other becomings wherein both city and country dissolve within the urban fabric. And it is certainly the case that Lefebvre’s insistence on the urban as the global revolution – if not as the production of globalization per se – derails the dialectical succession of history and empties it of its content, for the urban revolution swaps out history’s engine, the relations of production, for an ambiguous and virtual fabric, Ur-becoming, that is the urban itself. This is one tendency of Lefebvre, and one which I shall insist on, to draw out its heterodoxy, to amplify all that it has to say, and to emphasize its precedent to Lefebvre’s later technique of rhythmanalysis. Not surprisingly, then, the samizdat concept that is the urban upsets the orthodoxy of teleological history: the virtual-urban, the becoming-urban, in-forms the present material reality.

Can the transductive logic of the urban, even if thought as synchrony, function within a linear development of history? Lefebvre insists upon the diachrony of urban history – a dialectical progression of the urban – all the while arguing that the ‘impossible’ barriers to the urban realization, erected on the horizon of the virtual object, must be torn down (2003: 7; 17). The impossible is reduced to a possibility to be overcome. The tension between becoming and historical succession, diachrony and synchrony, transduction and economic evolutionism develop a kind of rhythm – unresolved, impossible, aporetic, even – that is taken up at length in the complex thought of The Urban Revolution – and later in the problematic of rhythm itself, in Rhythmanalysis.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2000. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Trans. Robert Boronno. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P.

–. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. Trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum.

Endnotes

  1. “21C” is here abbreviated to designate the binarization – or digital codification – of the historical timeline as the archives of humanity become accessibly only through complex technological systems. The soundbyte style of “21C” can be attributed to DJ Spooky’s defunct magazine of the same name (RIP). []
  2. “City,” as well as “State,” are here capitalized in accordance with the work of Lefebvre, where the signifiers attain a quasi-atemporal status, as if referring to a near a priori manifestation of human activity. Thus, at times, I refer to “cities” or a particular city in contrast to the City (a city’s ur-principle of centripetal control). Likewise for “the revolution,” which is marked by the near teleological destination of its pronoun, and later, Negri and Hardt’s deployment of “Empire” to demarcate an organisational command that exceeds the nation-state. []
  3. Lefebvre will write of the urban how “its complexity surpasses the tools of our understanding and the instruments of practical activity,” serving as a “constant reminder of the theory of complexification” (2003, 45). If our missive bows to such a theory, it is in part because any would-be Occam’s Razor would only prove that simplism empties itself out in reductionism. The law of parsimony (Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate) should read: Reductio non est ponenda sine necessitate. []
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patriotism & the consumption of carnival

March 2nd, 2010 | 17 comments

“From Abbotsford to Afghanistan, Canadians are celebrating” – this is how the CTV News opened on the evening of Sunday, February 28th, 2010. Abbotsford is a small town just east of Vancouver in the Fraser Valley – once known for agriculture, it is better now known for its organised crime as home of the Bacon brothers. As for Afghanistan, this wartorn country is still a theater of operations for Canada’s NATO military mission.

Gorilla celebrations in Whistler while Canadian forces battle guerillas in Kandahar. photo: tobias c. van Veen

In an interview with CTV’s Brian Williams the day before, Prime Minister Stephen Harper emphasized the patriotism that Canadians are (apparently) expressing, returning to this theme repeatedly. Indeed, according to Harper, Canadians have always been patriotic; they just haven’t usually expressed it like this. Canada’s CTV media has perpetuated the patriotism soundbyte; it has now become a meme echoed from broadcasters to small children. As the nation watches crazed fans painted red-and-white screaming themselves blue, we are told we are witnessing a historical act of mass patriotism. Or put it this way, as Lloyd Robertson did on CTV on Sunday evening: “The real star of the show – the people.” [[And wherever be the people, as the unification of the many under the rule of the sovereign one, be Hobbes, and the denigration of the chaotic multitude of the carnival.]] And where are these people celebrating their newly found patriotism, finally released from the repressed vault of Canadian modesty? Why — “From Calgary to Kandahar,” of course. And this is true: Canadian troops stationed at the massive Kandahar base got into the action with a ball-hockey game against the Americans (which they won 16-2).

The Canucks in Kandahar, July 1st, 2009. photo: National Post.

When one sacrifices self for country, this distracted life for the nation-state, all that returns – draped in the flag – is called a patriot. Soldiers are, of course, patriots by trade. The perpetuation of the signifier of patriotism in association with what are mass acts of carnivale – dressed up in a wildly successful clothing campaign from HBC – comes about at a time when Canada as a nation-state has come to aggressively assert itself on the world stage. Canada’s current government has turned its back on tackling climate change at Copenhagen, continued the relentless development of the Alberta tar sands, renewed its commitment to military action in Afghanistan, and claimed territorial control over the northern Arctic (including its oil reserves and the NorthWest passage) against the likes of Russia. Canada’s go at the “great game” of imperialism has intersected with Canada’s “greatest games ever.” And so while at the Olympic opening ceremonies VANOC head John Furlong called for the cessation of all warfare, emphasizing the traditional Olympic truce, on that very same day in Afghanistan Canadian forces launched a combined NATO offensive. War games are interconnected with athletic games through the signifier of patriotism. Indeed:

At the exact moment their countrymen were watching the opening ceremonies at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Canadian aviators were among the nearly 20,000 NATO and Afghan troops launching NATO’s biggest offensive yet against the Taliban and al-Qaida. [...] Saturday’s operation and the deployment to Afghanistan of Canadian helicopters early last year have formed a badly needed tonic for the air force, which was starved of new equipment for decades by a succession of governments. (Mathew Fisher, “Canadians part of major NATO Afghan offensive,” 13th February 2010, Canada.com)

The new Conservative government of Canada has, of course, supplied the necessary weapons of war to the hungry forces.

Did the Conservatives steal a page from Sheila Copps by including flag sales in their economic stimulus plan? photo: tobias c. van Veen

Whether the Greek Olympicon was a defuser of war or not, Greece itself was a heavily militarized city-state where each (mostly male) citizen and slave was called upon to fight. The heritage of the Olympic Games itself lies in the nostalgic resurrection of 19th century German philology and sport, which praised all things Greek. Athleticism and patriotism go hand-in-hand in the classical works of philosophy. Socrates fights on the battlefield for Athens. Despite his service, he is charged with “corrupting the youth,” and ordered to nix himself by drinking the poisoned hemlock. Famously, Socrates does so without protest – for the prospect of death does not absolve one from following the path of goodness and truth; the life which is unexamined is not worth living.

A sea of red & white engulfs Whistler shortly after Crosby's game-ending vindication of national pride, with Blue Rodeo on the stage, of course. photo: tobias c. van Veen

With the overcoming of the sanitized streets by the screaming red and white denizenry – that is, the dominant symbol of the Olympics –  a persuasive discourse has arisen that seeks to reintroduce, by way of the mediasphere, the signifier of patriotism into the banality of the everyday. Just as Canadians responded in overwhelming droves to the opportunity to brand themselves with symbols of the nation-state – holding up red mitts, palms adorned with the maple leaf, draped in the flag, painted and tattooed red and white, nearly naked save for a CANADA or BELIEVE scarf, pierced with Olympic 2010 pins, and capped with a lumberjack cap or checkered CANADA toque – and thereby asserting Canadian identity through mass acts of consumerism, the mediasphere has performed its own rebranding of “patriotism” by embracing it en masse as the correct descriptor of what is otherwise going on in Vancouver, Whistler, and apparently coast-to-coast.

We just won. Let's buy something. photo: tobias c. van Veen

But is this 24/7 euphoria patriotism? Even as the critical alternative media kept emphasizing the many problems of homelessness, poverty and debt associated with the Olympics, the general will (and the mainstream media) became swept up in the epic festival, turning to participate in, wonder at and report on the seemingly spontaneous rebirth of Canadian crowds singing the national anthem. As the protesters drifted away, and the street marches concluded, flash mobs and other acts of collective jouissance broke out as the general mass took over, expressing a mad desire to quit work and party without reserve. Greater than any organised leftist attempt to reclaim the streets, the city was overtaken by its citizens who came to realise that they could go out and claim it. All one had to do was dress up in the red & white  — and the keys to the city would be all but yours. On any other night, you’d be arrested, called out, impounded. But right now, in this special exception to English-Canadian cultural moralism, you could go apeshit on the streets and not only will they let you do so, they’ll brand you a patriot.

What precisely is going on here, then? Is it not carnival, in the Bakhtinian sense of a return of the repressed, where the social hierarchy is reversed, the fool made the king, and the king the fool? From Vancouver to Whistler, despite the massive security presence, surveillance cameras on every corner, blimps with thermal imaging cameras, military in the Callaghan and security checks to get within a few kilometres of Olympic venues, despite all of this, the mad party was in full effect. Cops were on the sidelines, the streets shut down, the city stalled, cars nowhere to be seen, but crazed fans everywhere, draped in an overwhelming sea of read and white. It appears that the constricted and uptight social fabric of Vancouver had given way under its own sheer weight. The stupid boredom of Vancouver had imploded.

Apparently the British wore red uniforms to disguise the blood of the battlefield. photo: tobias c. van Veen

I would like to suggest that the 2010 Olympiad had become the only avenue available for crazed acts of carnival in Canada. The Vancouver Police Department, of course, sought to intervene themselves in the power dynamic (and justify their presence) by moving to close liquor stores in downtown Vancouver at 7pm, thus ensuring that the ancient upset of the social order that is carnival, and its necessary function as a release valve amongst the citizenry (and slavery), would only be all the more devastating in its catharsis. Catharsis does not merely return the social order to its balance once the hangover is over, and order restored; its energy is always one of excess, and excess exceeds the composition of the social order. Depending to the degree which the carnival manages to upend and invert the structures of the social whole, this excess either arrives as an increase in the ability of the multitude to upend the order of things again, or as a deficit to the multitude, and an strengthening of the power of the nation-state to further control the degree to which carnival reroutes and reverses the mechanics of power.

Even with the degree of carnival witnessed here, its effect is uncertain. That the mediasphere and Prime Minister are attempting to contain the excesses of carnival within the signifier of patriotism reveals a struggle over the branding of what has taken place. For the flag can be divested of its meaning as a patriotic symbol of the nation state, and become but a cloak. Why wrap yourself in anarchist black when the flag is a much better disguise? And why should the flag only be the providence of the military and its militias? Much like 1960s America, the symbols of the nation state can be repurposed to different meanings. The Canadian flag can no longer mean somber (and sober) patriotism. No, it also means wild, uncontrolled, red and white madness, carnivale of the Canadian culture, celebration without purpose as an expression of patriotism. The flag is a contradictory symbol, split through and through. And how does this contradiction, this split of differentiation, take place? Well, by exiting the work machine to reclaim the streets, thereby demonstrating that “patriotism” undermines the state’s ability to control its populace.

Draped under the flag, the seditious act of carnival. photo: tobias c. van Veen

In this respect, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics have more in common with Montréal’s EXPO ‘67 than Vancouver’s EXPO ‘86. The baby boomers had their big coming out party at EXPO ‘67, as did the Quiet Revolution in Québec, which gave birth to a new Montréal, one in which the city would become a cultural hub, and where festivals would come to define the city’s landscape and economy. The carnivale that was EXPO ‘67 – the mass excess of social energies and newly created (inter)national networks amongst artists and freaks – irrevocably changed the social and economic fabric of Montréal. The public came to accept the madness of carnival as part of its composition. Montréal is one of few affordable urban enclaves of creativity and relative individual and collective autonomy left in North America.

The signifier of patriotism, then, is a sign of the ongoing contestation as to who will represent, archive and ultimately delimit the excess of carnival that ripped the constraints off the Canadian public. It may indeed have the effect of transforming Vancouver as such carnival has transformed Montréal: toward a city with bike lanes, arts recognition and funding, affordable housing, tolerant laws, and a penchance for letting it loose while incessant work is regularly relegated to the backburner. A city where living the good life is more important than labouring to brand it.

The flag is subjected to dissemination by repetition, with each symbol fracturing according to a renewed distribution of power. photo: tobias c. van Veen

Or, conversely, and in the worst case, Vancouver, Canada, and the contested symbol that is now the Canadian flag may be returned, once again, to state control, where the Federal government shuts down safe injection sites, where the arts are cut 90% (and virtually eliminated altogether), where public celebrations are curtailed, where the Vancouver Police Department calls the shots in determining the collective responsibility of its citizens, where, in short, “No Fun City” expresses the true heart of patriotism.

Indeed: don't come back down (otherwise known as raver utopia).

But this is not only the case for Vancouver. Vancouver the territory becomes the symbolic map for the nation. How will this map be drawn? And who will wield it? What narratives will come to enclose the excess of carnival? And now that the party’s over, what will happen to this euphoria? For from the Olympic high the nation comes crashing down off this two week binge into the dirty squalor of the everyday. From the Olympic euphoric now, the nation slides into its budget speech of devastating cutbacks & reactionary tough talk, from the podium to the throne speech, from the Callaghan to the ongoing carnage in that other “Canadian” city, Kandahar….

=/ transmission out.

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social media & its discontents

February 24th, 2010 | 42 comments

Compared to Turin, and even Beijing, the Vancouver 2010 Olympicon is perhaps the first major sporting spectacle to bear witness to the rise in social media. Compared to the ’90s advent of Indymedia, social media is a very different beast. Indymedia came about as the convergence of traditional alternative media (such as college & campus radio, ‘zines, underground newspapers and pamphlets) with emerging internet technologies of self-publishing. When Indymedia saw its first introduction at APEC in 1997, going on to become a full-fledged, independently developed technical web platform for contributors with a centralized media hub at the Seattle ‘99 WTO convergence, it provided effective coverage not only because it aired the footage of, and granted time to, perspectives that mainstream network-based television was either unable or unwilling to provide, but because it did so from a concentration of independent, alternative journalists who, though they may have differed as to the precise orientation of their political convictions, all agreed upon the common need for an alternative media network to represent the unheard side of the story.

cameras out as the spectacle slides by. photo: tobias c. van Veen

In so far as social media has engaged the earlier, more politicized forms of alternative media, it has done so almost by default of its omnipresence, as it provides street-level coverage from the now ubiquitious photo (and video) capable mobile handheld, with content directly uploaded to Flickr, Twitter or Facebook. While media hubs such as W2 in Vancouver have provided physical space to nonaccredited journalists of various stripes, such centres proclaim neutrality, and do not aim to provide the same collective media convergence of the Indymedia centres (the centre that did aim to do so, VIVO, had its low power FM radio station shut down). Indeed, closest to Indymedia’s heritage at the Olympicon is the Vancouver Media Coop for its critical reportage. But the social media hub of the Vancouver 2010 Olympicon has been True North Media House, which offers a self-accreditation process, print-out media badge, and a few online hubs for agglomerated content (Flickr photo pool; RSS firehouse of agglomerated content, and #tnmh hashtag search on Twitter). Unlike Indymedia, there is no agenda to “take on” the mainstream media as an alternative perspective. In this sense, TNMH is form without content, and purposely so. It seeks to provide only aggregation, and not a platform for publication. In this sense, it is your Twitter account, blog or Flickr page that becomes the venue; unlike Indymedia, it is a decentralized rather than centralized attempt at news gathering.

But is it even news gathering? Is it documentation or journalism? What is social media, precisely? This question came up at the Freshmedia conference on social media hosted at W2 during the Olympicon. The conference sought to explore the question “How has social media transformed the Olympic story?” From my own observations, I am not sure social media has transformed the Olympic story in any significant way. The Twitter channel #tnmh primarily reflects a mix of cheerleading approaches, with most tweets echoing what the mainstream media is already reporting in realtime – who scored a goal, who won a race, pictures of crowds on Robson, protests in the Downtown Eastside. Besides coverage of primarily W2 events and a few smaller happenings, TNMH has not broken a story nor exposed a perspective not already covered in the larger mediasphere.

sponsored media has the only elevated perspective? photo: tobias c. van veen

As a TNMH self-accredited “social reporter” myself, I have used the TNMH channel to try and disseminate articles from the alternative press about the Olympics, or even to juxtapose conflicting articles from different sources. For the most part, these tweets have not been retweeted, which means few Twitter users see them as worthy of disseminating to their followers. The tweets that are retweeted the most usually focus upon content from social media journalist and photographer Kris Krug as well as convivial though contentless (for a journalist) social observations on Olympic events. In short, the channel reflects a hierarchy of content and not a horizontal distribution of alternative viewpoints. Its contributors also do not appear to work toward a collective process; they retweet popular content, thus clogging the channel with more of the same, but do not interrogate each other’s content in an attempt to produce more work, verify it or question it. To address the questions raised at the Freshmedia conference, social media on this level is not journalism, insofar as it does not perform the most basic task of asking questions and verifying reports. That said, the #tnmh channel also features links to blog posts from about a dozen contributors, each of whom provide different viewpoints on the Olympic spectacle. In this sense, the TNMH RSS firehose feed, rebroadcasted at @tnmh, provides a better insight into the diverse content being produced. That said again, is it documentation or journalism? And once a blog article (as this one), is it “social media” or does it not revert to a fragmented form of indie journalism?

These questions are complex, though they reflect, to a degree, the technical structure of the software itself — social media is not a filter nor a concentrated platform; it is an agglomerate of channels, and with Twitter especially, content is limited to 140 characters. Beyond Twitter, digital photographs are the preferred medium (written blogs are a now distant third; and long analysis, such as this, dead last – thus guaranteeing this post’s stillborn obsolescence). While I am not out to critique any kind of apparent “lack” of politics given the open door format of TNMH, and the constraints of the underlying technology (though it leads to all kinds of questions concerning the sociopolitical limitations of these embedded technological constraints)  it does appear that in this particular scenario, right here & right now at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, social media does not seem to possess the same degree of self-consciousness as to its potential power as previous alternative media networks. Instead, it appears more concerned with reporting what we already know by way of a kind of convivial online chit-chat, and is perhaps more interested in reporting about itself, as Kris Krug’s article for PBS Mediashift demonstrates. There is a narcissism to social media reflected in the drive toward quantity over quality: more tweets, more followers, more people retweeting you, all adds up to more social prestige, more online cultural capital. Is that all there is to social media?

we watch the media watching us. live. and then tweeted. photo: tobias c. van Veen

While social media already exists, we don’t know why it exists for us — or for what it could be used for beyond its drive toward the virtualization (and quantification) of social relations (“facebook friends” / “followers”) and perhaps in the final assessment, corporate datamining. This is the reverse of Indymedia, which knew why it wanted to exist, and sought out the web tools to see it realised, and then went on an unpredictable journey to see how these tools could be put to use. But unlike 1997-2004 or so, Indymedia is no longer the mainstream media’s “media story.” And how convenient this is: that apparently democratizing social media has now taken up the mantle as the “voice of the people” only to reveal it has little, if anything, to say. Was Indymedia overcome by social media only to see its alternative collectivization of journalistic activity fragmented into conveniently apolitical soundbytes? Has alternative media culminated, then, in a lack of critical and self-reflective thought as it becomes social media?

It’s worth picking out a few examples of what I mean. The first is an obvious tag spam from @texturasalon. By including #tnmh in this message, it shows up in the #tnmh feed. When a corporate interest does this to a reportage hashtag, it is known as tag spam.

For the record, Textura Salon apologized for doing so when called out on their advertising tactics. But in some ways, this kind of tag spamming is so overt that it is like traditional advertising: it is very easy to identify, and any kind of complaint over the tag spam produces undesirable backlash.

Perhaps more complex, and thus all the more telling, is the following exchange surrounding @adhack, which began when a number of #tnmh Twitter accounts retweeted the following: “Still time to enter your Olympic ad photos to win a cool prize from Adhack: http://olympicadawards.com #tnmh.” A glance at Adhack’s website revealed a contest, taglined “People Powered Advertising,” where contestants could win “a cool prize” of “original artwork from a Vancouver artist” for “Best Ad Photographer” and “Best Brand at the Olympics.” The accompanying video was entitled “Celebrating the Best Ads at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.” Evidently the Adhack website and campaign uses the (free) resources of photographers and social media to, at the surface, gather documentation of various ad campaigns ongoing during the Olympics. In this sense, it perpetuates relations of precarious labour by dressing-up unpaid labour with a lure of glamour (the contest). [see k-punk's further meditations on precarious labour here]. Below the surface, the campaign collects data on who is participating, with the bonus of aggregated metrics on social media participation in ad campaigns (who is willing to volunteer unpaid labour for a prize). So as well as gauging the success or failure of diverse campaigns in various kinds of ways (which campaigns received the most exposure, from whom, at what time, for what reasons, etc), Adhack’s use of TNMH to advertise its campaign also blurs the line between “social reporting” and public relations.

Given the embedded technological constraints within Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and so on, it is perhaps worth asking if there was any such line between PR and social media to begin with. Unlike Indymedia, which sought to construct its own web software for collective and unmediated journalism, social media uses widely-available (and of course popular) corporate social networks whose entire existence is designed to gather and aggregate mass amounts of data, from metrics to network relations, which is then sold to all manner of entities, both private and public. So to assume that PR and social media isn’t already downstream from a privately-controlled datamining operation is to, perhaps, maintain something of a false hope, if not an incorrect assumption. Indeed, a resulting discussion with @jordanbehan, who tweeted me to let me know it was him who put the #tnmh hashtag into the Adhack tweets, revealed something of the perspective in which social media users view social media as a platform. [UPDATE: see our thoughtful discussion below in the Comments – and for the record Behan has no owned interests in Adhack]. Behan responded to my tweeted question “so in socialmedia, x-over with PR interests OK? because in journalism, it’s not” with the (public) tweet:

As Behan writes below in the comments, these 140 characters are not enough space to get into his comment on journalism, which is well taken (and this alone – the technological constraints on expression – could nearly summarize a large aspect of this post – which does not imply a technological determinism, but a determination of limited technologies). Besides that it is difficult to ascertain what “disclosure” means in this context, it begs the question. If newspapers and other media have vested interests, this does not mean that journalism itself has lost the ethical high ground (and if it has, should not alternative media struggle to regain it?). Moreover, should the compromised sponsorship of corporate media mean that social media must cross the same line? If social media follows from the acceptance of sponsored media interests, then it becomes a pale imitation of corporate media conglomerates; certainly it cannot live up to its hype as the “democratization” of media.

Fundamental differences arise between a privately owned newspaper, with its command & control hierarchy, and a social media hashtag associated with a self-accredited media disorganisation and its website (which ultimately has no control whatsoever). Which is why the concept of “community” – or rather the question of who owns this concept, who brands it & wield its signifier – is central to defining, and thus exerting control over, social media (and this control, at this level, takes place through symbolic networks and peer influences in channels like Twitter). Thus the larger question to address is one of “community,” as Behan notes. Is there such a thing as a “community” around an ad campaign? To claim that there is community when there are only contest participants seems to devalue the concept of community; the same goes for consumers and business associates. [See below comments: as Adhack is a "marketplace made up of independent ad creatives" – and not a traditional company – does this make it a community? The medieaval world for a delimited marketplace of producers was a guild, which is perhaps more accurate here than community. Or have the conditions of contemporary capital completely collapsed these distinctions?]

A community tears down the walls at APEC '97, broadcast in real time over cellphones on CiTR 101.9FM & streamed worldwide to the Net. Before the Prime Minister's handlers knew what had happened, Nardwuar was asking Chrétien about the incident. Result? "Pepper, I put it on my plate." photo: the Ubyssey (I was standing to the left – cell phone in hand.)

Is TNMH a community? To a degree, yes, insofar as the communal, or what is held in the commons, without ownership, is the shared output of (mostly unpaid) social reportage, and to the degree that many of its participants know each other and are engaged in collective labour toward perspectives and even ends that although different, are the product of social reportage and not advertising. What is common, and thus communal to TNMH is that it is reportage, and not advertising. What all of these questions reflect is the battle over – and ultimately the appropriation of – the meaning of the signifier “community,” and consequently, what is appropriate to and for that community, as well as what can appropriately represent that community. Following this line of thought, I tweeted surprise at the retweeting of the Adhack campaign, questioning the relation between social media and PR. Let me lead you on this tale, for it revealed a set of distinctions between different kinds of corporate involvement that became murky indeed.

Indeed, my tweet invoked a critical response of its own. Apparently the use of the word “spam” provoked some wrath as Adhack is a “community member” in the local Vancouver tech/arts scene. Kris Krug, author of the PBS Mediashift report on social media at the 2010 Olympicon, responded with:

Not to pick on Kris Krug (whom I respect immensely), but his (public) response led me to further questions: why is asking a question concerning the popular retweet of corporate public relations campaigns a “fail”? Who is this “we” who support Adhack? Should I be supporting Adhack if I support TNMH? And why is a tweet considered an “analysis” (aka a judgement) when it asked a question (as journalists are wont to do)? As a journalist, it was time to begin asking questions. If Adhack isn’t spam, given its placement of tag spam in a Twitter channel for social reportage – and doing so by enlisting, conscious or not, members of the TNMH “community” to retweet their tag spam – then I’m not sure what is — or isn’t. In any case, I thought if social reportage was to be self-reflective, perhaps this was the time for it to be so. (Note: I do hope to continue the conversation with Kris Krug at a later date — this by no means is meant to reflect the totality of his thought on the matter.)

At this point, the discussion went private with Kris Krug, and so I won’t reveal the tweets here, as “direct messages” are not readable by public members and so retain at least something of the apparent ethics of a private letter. That said, I can probably summarize the content (which was thoughtful & amicable). Unlike the dynamics of many an email list, the exchange did not lead to a flame war. Indeed we both commented on how inadequate 140 characters is to have a meaningful discussion (or even a dispute). But what Kris told me was that Adhack is a “community partner” – they support grassroots geek events like Barcamps, TNMH, Northern Voice and W2 by contributing skills and knowledge. In short, they aren’t “spammers” (which I was taken to task for in my use of “Adhack spam”). But what I wanted to know was: is Adhack use of TNMH feeds an acceptable use of social reportage? Indeed, Coke sponsors community events too – such as the Olympics. So where is the line drawn? As Krug responded, if Coke tagged #tnmh they’d be “tag spamming” as they have never contributed anything to the channel or local tech/arts community; but also explicit was a fundamental rejection of a corporation such as Coke (“fuck Coke”), which leads us to fine distinctions between corporate entities. So while large-scale corporations such as Coke are unacceptable if they use a Twitter channel such as #tnmh to promote a campaign (tag spamming), local use by a local advertising firm is acceptable, provided they have contributed in other ways to the tech/arts community.

And this, it appears, is the heart of it. What are the aspirations of social media? As Jordan Behan noted, is social media already compromised by the reportage of mainstream media (given corporate ownership and biased support of various agendas), thus offering no alternative? Or, perhaps more disturbingly, is the grassroots deployment of social media by advertising firms the only available model for building “community”?

Jaggi Singh taken down at APEC 97, as captured by the Ubyssey, some 9 years before Twitter, 7 years before Flickr, but on CiTR radio within minutes and online that night.

What alternative Indymedia sought to do was build community by building technologies and platforms, by giving voice to a multitude because issues and questions were not being represented in corporate media. Social media, by contrast, has not emerged from a social necessity to break down the wall of corporate and mainstream media. By contrast, social media has emerged from the corporate necessity to turn a profit from the increasingly fragmented mediasphere. Though “social reporting” has taken up residence in the house of social media, it does not own the building. It’s a tenant without a lease.

That said, it was Indymedia that sunk the foundations.

Indymedia at a Climate Change Camp in the UK. source: interwebz.

Marx once wrote that history repeats itself twice: first as tragedy, second as farce. I’m not sure which is which here, but what Indymedia started has been largely forgotten in contemporary social media. Distribution of ubiquitous mobile technology and easy-to-use corporate platforms of distribution has not produced the same level of citizen journalism and self-consciousness of reportage evident over a decade ago. Indeed, the second time around appears to have limited the impact of alternative media, not enhanced it. Quite simply, we have not witnessed the serious undermining of corporately-held media, whether traditional or in the social/new media spheres.

There are speculations to be had — that the corporate interests behind social media capitalize upon spectacles such as the Olympicon to generate the image of community involvement while delimiting its actuality. While I expected this everywhere at the Olympicon, I did not expect this kind of corporate entanglement to underlie the apparently independent conglomerate of interests that is TNMH, nor did I expect a general acceptance of vested corporate interests. Is the “new normal” of reportage reflective of entangled corporate interests? Are corporate interests OK if the corporation does enough to integrate itself within apparently independent “community” activities? What does this say about social media? Only that it is no better than or worse than mainstream corporate media — sans the fact-checking processes of journalism.

However, it reveals quite clearly that alternative media platforms, such as the Vancouver Media Coop, and larger media outlets such as the Huffington Post or in BC, the Tyee, though less hyped and less glamourous, are nonetheless better signs of media “democratization.” Social media hasn’t sold out; it never had anything to sell, as it was produced, packaged & sold by corporate interests to begin with. Does this leave vantages from which to undermine its embedded interests and turn its channels to other purposes? Yes indeed – but only as long as they allow you to keep contributing. Otherwise, and ultimately, it’s account deleted.

==./ transmission out

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après moi, le deluge — & the Olympicon

February 15th, 2010 | 2 comments

eye-in-the-sky security blimp over the Callaghan as the crowds press on toward a logistics nightmare

I am currently living in the midst of the Olympic maelstrom. For some reason I thought I might find myself frantically blogging the madness, but for the most part I find myself uninterested in doing so. Organised indie media such as the Vancouver Media Coop have kept it under control, and the damage is flying so fast & furious — see Democracy Now’s coverage of Olympic resistance to CBC on VANOC’s bad logistics & lack of venue foresight — that keeping up on Twitter seems to be the way to roll. So instead of daily blogging, I’ve been tweeting impressions & links [ @fugitivephilo ]. Anyway, first came the torch, and for that I have a video, ambivalence & beer included:

Perhaps coverage these days is better writ by Tweets, twitpics & links — watching Tweetdeck assemble feeds from athletes, broadcasters, artists, fans & resistance organisers is a fascinating visual depiction of a concentrated geography in which a heterogeneous blend of peoples come to mix under one given purpose. What that purpose is, I’m not sure. While the athletes are right in claiming this purpose for sport, VANOC and the IOC seem more interested in claiming the purpose for sponsorship and the strictest branding / copyright since anyone can remember — even kicking out the sports charity Right to Play from the Athlete’s Village./

a small slice of the twits flitting through the Olympic infomatrix

Living in Whistler during the Olympicon is a strange experience. On the one channel, it’s party time, with thousands upon thousands of people crowding the Village Stroll, taking it all in, dressed to the nines, cheering it on, and getting it on. I love it. It’s carnival & celebration and the thousands of cops and military really don’t know what to do — except smile every once in awhile. For the security (at least so far) is all but unnecessary as the throngs self-organise in the joy of mutual aid. That is what shared purpose can do for crowdsourcing — enact a kind of joyous, spontaneous flocking, with acceptance brewing even amongst all the dated 19th century symbols of nationalism… or, perhaps even because of them. By displaying the nation-state as a badge of difference, it becomes acceptable to cheer it on & bring it on when the consequence is symbol and not substance (or so goes the classic theory of sport crossing nationalist boundaries).

On the other channel, Whistler is in lockdown. While I enjoy the lack of traffic and increased transit, the massive police and military presence is unnerving, expensive, and intrusive. Backcountry skiiers who accidentally (though stupidly) travelled into the security zone several kilometres from the Whistler Athlete’s Village were detained & questioned for hours — even though they passed no signs or fences letting them know they were in a closed area. And two massive surveillance blimps hang over our heads. There are also Pigloos on every corner (black security cubes with coppers inside).

The over-the-top corporate presence (and price-tag) is somewhat subdued in Whistler, where local Council forbade intrusive public advertising with its strict Bylaws concerning preservation of the Village atmosphere. That said, the Corporate Invasion is insidious — to pick a petty example, I can’t get my favourite local beers at most pubs, as Kokanee or Canadian have bought out the barrels. No thanks, I don’t drink mass-produced piss.

Overall, I like the fact that I can catch Canadian electronic music innovators Mathew Jonson, Colin the Mole & Deadbeat on a thundering soundsystem, for free, in the snow, with only a few dozen punters kicking it down. That the trio were originally billed from Ireland (WTF?), mischaracterized as DJs (they are producers, and only Colin played records — Scott & Matt played their own material from laptop), mis-advertised (Mathew Jonson was billed as “MJ”) — well, anyway, it boggles the mind that these fine musicians play for thousands upon thousands in Europe, but in Canada, still can’t get no decent respect (or press) from the rawkstablishment. So it goes; those in the know got down to the sound. It’s just too bad we can’t celebrate fringe CDN artists like we celebrate fringe CDN athletes. That’s why CDN electronic artists have left for the technohub of Berlin in the first place — we’re not civilized enough here to give the arts what they deserve.

somehow I doubt that Colin, Matt & Scott have ever played for skier & snowboarders jumping through rings of fire../

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mauvais foi (Psychodrama Demons)

January 24th, 2010 | 4 comments

Yet another bloodsucker dressing-up to play the Glamour game.

I think the motto of recent living for me could be DOWN WITH THE TROLLS & GREY VAMPIRES, BUT ABOVE ALL, DOWN WITH THE PSYCHODRAMA DEMONS. What’s these here Grey Vampires and Trolls? K-punk outlines the concepts:

Grey Vampires are creatures who disguise their moth-greyness in iridescent brightness, all the colours of attractive sociability. Like moths, they are drawn by the light of energetic commitment, but unable to themselves commit. Unlike the Toll, the Grey Vampire’s mode is not aggressive, at least not actively so; the Grey Vampire is a moth-like only on the inside. On the outside, they are bright, humorous, positive – everyone likes them. But they are possessed by a a deep, implacable sadness. They feed on the energy of those who are devoted, but they cannot devote themselves to anything. (K-Punk)

Psychodrama Demons are somewhere in-between a Grey Vampire and a Troll. A Grey Vampire appears somewhat romantic at times, caught in a melancholia, only able to live vicariously through others, even as their mode-of-being sucks away at the marrow of life, draining those around them. A Troll is more outright aggressive. As K-Punk writes, a Troll “above all wants to waste time, its libido involves a banal sadism, the dull malice of snatching people’s toys away from them” (K-Punk).

Grey Vampires don’t feed on energy directly, they feed on obstructing projects. The problem is that, often, they don’t know that they are doing this. (That’s one difference between them and a troll – trolls usually aren’t under any illusions about themselves, they just find spurious justifications for their activities.) [...] the Grey Vampire is also a subject position that (any)one can be lured into if you enter certain structures. (K-Punk)

Certain structures include academia for k-punk, and many postgraduate students are Trolls, refusing to take positions, offering instead a constant barrage of critique without ground (oh, I know). But one could begin a list almost neverending of such “certain structures”: non-profits, start-ups, volunteer organisations, and of course, most corporate environments. After some consideration of management languages and hierarchies, it would appear that there be a third subject position between hideous Trolls and Grey Vampires worth investigating: the Psychodrama Demon. While the Grey Vampire might not know of their energy-sucking existenz, and while the Troll knowingly ignites a disastrous civil war amongst inhabitants (usually behind the cover of anonymity, sneaking away under cover of darkness as the flames fan higher & higher), the Psychodrama Demon turns every point of difference into a contest of wills, a battle of personalities. Everything is at stake with a Psychodrama Demon. It’s not only that they cannot appreciate another’s opinion; the real issue is that Psychodrama Demons don’t even notice that there are others around them. A demon doesn’t recognise others. Those other meaningless bodies are tools for use, not fellow travelers in Hell but a slave force of the Damned just waiting to be set to work under their auspices. Which is why any point of difference immediately becomes Psychodrama; for a minion to respond to a Demon calls into question the self-evident (for them) Master/Slave relationship that is the basis of their self-worth and existence. This is also why we have Psychodrama: because any point of resistance calls into question their self-confidence as beings, given that all other beings around them are reduced, in a demonstratively Kantian way, to means for their own nefarious ends. In short, Psychodrama Demons act with more potent violence than Trolls, for they stake their very being in being able to manipulate and control others through such brute means that one would usually think that no one would fall for it. Unfortunately, usually there is no choice in the matter. Psychodrama Demons are often so-called captains of knowledge, academia and industry. If in a leadership position, they are bottlenecks. Everything must go through them. They act as if they took Edward Gordon Craig’s theories of acting as a philosophy-of-life: those around them must be pulled with strings, mere instruments, as if “Uber-marionettes.”

Whenever I have someone write to me with the conversation-killer “I have real concerns with XYZ you’ve writ/said…”, I know two things: (1) this person believes that their real concern is at all a concern of mine; (2) this person believes that they exert power over me, and now we have to deal with an exercise in their attempt to exert it, i.e. I have to sit down and deal with it as if it mattered to me as much as it does to them; and that thus (ergo sum) this person be a Psychodrama Demon.

Of course such assessment calls to mind the classic work of Adorno & Horkheimer in The Authoritarian Personality, to which Brian Holmes has gone one step further, and combined  the sociological analysis of power with the economics of precarity, naming something he calls (in Unleashing the Collective Phantoms) the “Flexitarian Personality.”  As Holmes writes:

To grasp the way this hegemony [flexible accumulation - the subordination of social life to economic globalization - tV] is experienced by individuals, I have proposed the notion of the flexible personality. It is an ambiguous notion, because it designates both the managerial culture that legitimates the globalized economy, and renders it tolerable or even attractive for those who are its privileged subjects, as well as the “flexible” nature of a workforce that is subject to increasingly individualized forms of exploitation. In other words, the flexible personality designates the lived experience of a relation of domination. (Brian Holmes, Unleashing 59)

What is devilish (indeed) about the Flexible Personality is its Manichean structure, by which I mean devilishly dualist: both Master and Slave are caught up in this flexitarian regime. The Flexible Personality is precisely the managerial culture in which Grey Vampires, Trolls and Psychodrama Demons thrive. They thrive because – and I think this remains important for a basic faith in human kind (and not mauvais foi, in Sartre’s sense) – such devilish personalities are seduced, as if by the power of the Glamour which vampiric TV shows such as True Blood exploit (and to such lovely results). We can even call such glamour the Glamour of Globalization; all those expansive, vast networks, available for the biting & sucking (if one be a Grey Vampire), for the destroying (a Troll) or the controlling (mais oui, the Psychodrama Demon).

So the flexitarian system appears attractive, and to those that jump hell’s bells for it (the Sociopaths, to use the previous post’s language from Venkat), they are rewarded in kind, but only at the expense – and here our devilish theme continues – of their soul. The Glamour works upon those in the Slave position of this power relation, of course; in believing they might achieve such status, or in being the kind that likes being bitten & sucked off of their energies, those that do battle with Trolls, or attempt to stand-up to Psychodrama Demons… such positions engage in the game, this Hell which all are playing out, this fantasy land of mytho-economics that is the mechanic of servitude, ultimately, for all. Holmes’ great insight here is that the flexible aspect of the workforce is “subject to increasingly individualized forms of exploitation.” In short, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. You too can have your individualized relationship to the abstraction of capital; you too can find your own personal Hell.

The question is how to get out of it, which brings us to two points, both of them courtesy of Paolo Virno. The first is that our concepts deployed here are empty. Like multitude, they have no (ontological) content. By this I mean there is no essence to these devilish subjects. The multitude is not inherently revolutionary just as authoritarian leaders are not inherently Psychodrama Demons. That said, it be the intersection of the complex of desires that make up my being, the economic position I find myself perched within (precariously, it would appear), and the exit strategies I can see that make up what I become in this anthronomics of the subject/precariat. And exit strategies become increasingly important, which brings us to point two: exodus. How does one flee from this scenario? As Venkat writes, we are nearly in a no-option, No Exit scenario (Sartre would be happy):

While the thought of exodus as a strategy is appealing, we have to keep in mind one harsh fact. The real economy requires people to earn paychecks to pay the rent. A job isn’t a “nice to have” part of life like Facebook, but a “must have,” at least for now. And while I am among the most ardent champions of cloudworking and free-agenting, I am also pragmatic enough to recognize that the economy doesn’t really provide support for exodus as a strategy on any significant scale.

At least not yet. (Venkat)

As I writ in a comment to Venkat, which I will repost here as a comment to this post for posterity, exodus is already under way. There might not be an easy exit, and there is never a way to merely pick-up and exist “outside” of any system. But by outlining the contours in which we find our servitude, at least we can face up to the age-old problem Spinoza so aptly laid out for us, by marking out not only the “one man” we might be serving, but the “one man” – the Last Man – that hides within all of us, that Grey Vampire/Troll/Psychodrama Demon waiting to take hold, seductive and desperate, which is not an exit strategy, but a Personal Hell waiting for you, individualized, this salvation by servitude:

Granted, then, that the supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation, and count it no shame, but the highest honour, to spend their blood and their lives for the glorification of one man. (Spinoza, Preface to Theological-Political Treatise: 3)

over & out ./.

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managing language (with extreme prejudice)

January 11th, 2010 | 14 comments

the pyramid of corporate cognitive labour

I recently came across a rather awesome analysis on Ribbonfarm that adds some much-needed complexity to the basic dichotomy between vertical and horizontal models of corporate control. These fantastic and well-writ posts (The Gervais Principle I and II) have been hit up on Slashdot and have circulated far & wide for good reason. Like Christian Marazzi’s work that deftly summarizes the significance of language to capital – the way language informs the fluctuations of the stock market and global economy (see Capital and Language) – Venkat analyses the way in which language is ab/used by particular players in corporate organisations. He deploys his deft analysis to unravel bureaucratic power principles as well as propose a theory of microclass. And he accomplishes this all by taking as his primary example the hit TV series The Office — Ricky Gervais’ brilliant satire of water cooler politics and management mediocrity. Venkat’s analysis, informed by his research into theories of corporate management, complements Marazzi’s observation that

In the post-Fordist context, in which language has become in every respect an instrument of the production of commodities and, therefore, the material condition of our very lives, the loss of the ability to speak, of the “language capacity,” means the loss of belonging in the world as such, the loss of what “communifies” the many who constitute the community. (Marazzi, Capital and Language: 131).

In his first post, Venkat complexifies the horizontal/vertical models with a theory of microclass. The Sociopaths (senior mgmt), Clueless (middle mgmt) & Losers (bottomfeeders) are constituted by their ability (or lack thereof) to learn, engage with, and ultimately ab/use corporate language for their own ends. In short, Venkat’s analysis jives with Marazzi, Virno and Berardi’s claims concerning not only the significance of language to contemporary labour conditions – insofar as linguistic affect structures fluctations of the stock market – but its operational effacity, insofar as linguistic competence structures the very field of labour. In short, one’s subjectivity under cognitive labour is structured by one’s ability to process the linguistic matrix of capital (which of course says much about education and class composition, among other things, but also about the linguistic seduction of capital – the great mass of all those who, to rephrase Spinoza, fight to remain slaves).

In Autonomist theory, this centrality of linguistic operations, interlaced and communicated by way of mobile and networked technologies, has been called the general intellect, insofar as the intellectualization of labour via technics constitutes the overall condition of cognitive labour. In this increasing technicization of labour, linguistic competence becomes the measure of labour itself: it is the brain that becomes the machine or engine of (cognitive) labour. As I think I’ll comment on in an upcoming post, mind you, I think the significance of a functioning brain is overrated in cognitive labour and it is a living-dead brain or zombie labour that still constitutes the scenario for the majority of the workforce (one is required to think, but not think too much). I think Venkat captures something of the zombie labour hyperthesis in his breakdown of the Loser class into two subclasses (becoming-Sociopath and Clueless Losers) and by analysing the seemingly lost Clueless as the middle manageriat, i.e., as those who believe the most in the conditions of their own enslavement.

In his second post, Venkat breaks down language into Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk & Gametalk, and details how it is ab/used by each class. Powertalk is the language of control and conquer used by Sociopaths; it works on multiple levels at once, communicating several meanings in discrete semantic utterances. Such communication is a poker game of words, where what is left unsaid determines the value of what is said, where parameters of the language game itself are relayed in the delivery of each utterance, and where ambiguity destabilizes erstwhile assurances. While the Clueless attempt to imitate Powertalk, they only fail to grasp the most superficial level of its meaning, and though they might deploy all the buzzwords, the Clueless can only speak Posturetalk – all copy and no depth, all bark and no bite. For Powertalk is only Powertalk if the speaker has table stakes — some actual informational capital to wager. In a similar way, Gametalk is what Losers like to talk to each other, which is basically showroom-style hot air; but as this is a language for Losers only, it holds no value, unlike the way in which Posturetalk signals that one is dealing with a Clueless class member. And in a truly brilliant move, Venkat outlines how Babytalk is not only what Sociopaths use to communicate with the Clueless – for the Clueless can’t grasp Powertalk – but Babytalk is also the language that Losers use to address their middle management superiors, which is why Losers are the breeding ground of Sociopaths as well as containing an exodus-class of what I will call “Carefrees” who know perfectly well the game but have no real interest in playing it. And in those rare instances where upper management Sociopaths talk directly to Loser minions, a variant form of Powertalk is used called Straight Talk — a direct and one-way command utterance with threatening overtones. Mind you it is also in such instances that a becoming-Sociopath Loser can demonstrate their knowledge of Powertalk and forge a path to senior management.

Venkat's Gervais Principle Language Model

Like all great fiction, The Office models only what is more real than reality, the world in its representation, in its vicious deployments of language and power. One moment I particular dig in this worthy read (which I cannot do justice to here – do go and devour it) is when Venkat contrasts The Gervais Principle with the Dilbert Principle:

Scott Adams, seeing a different flaw in the Peter Principle, proposed the Dilbert Principle: that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to middle management to limit the damage they can do. This again is untrue. The Gervais principle predicts the exact opposite: that the most competent ones will be promoted to middle management. Michael Scott was a star salesman before he become a clueless middle manager. The least competent employees (but not all of them — only certain enlightened incompetents) will be promoted not to middle management, but fast-tracked through to senior management. To the sociopath level. (Venkat, Gervais Principle)

Venkat adds a subtle flavour here, though he isn’t quite acknowledging that both principles appear to be operational and correct. The Dilbert Principle applies in general: middle management is composed of the Clueless. That said, the truly incompetent remain as Losers – those forever loyal to the company but who will never achieve middle management as quite simply they do their menial jobs too well (though it’s hard to say who is more incompetent: the Losers who never get anywhere or the Clueless who believe they have gotten somewhere by becoming middle management but are just being played by the Sociopaths as a buffer between the upper management and the lumpenLosers). Indeed, it is the deployment of the Clueless as the buffer between the harsh and vicious world of the Sociopaths and the lumpenLosers that marks Venkat’s insight – for it also opens the door to possible action. Remove middle management, and a classic class antagonism reveals itself in all its possible violence. As Venkat puts it, the Clueless mediate between an otherwise untenable master/slave dialectic.

What I also dig about Venkat is that the Losers aren’t just “losers” in the usual, derogatory sense but are often composed of the completely Careless who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about this powergame – those coasting by who watch it unfold all around them and say to hell with it. The Careless Losers – the carefree, perhaps – have something else going on in their lives and see work for what it is: a distraction from what counts. In this sense, the Losers, as the biggest group that constitutes most of us, are composed of that “silent majority” that upholds a good deal of old fashioned anarchist sensibility: act as if the State/Corp doesn’t exist. In the indication of a blindspot within an organisation’s powergame environment, Venkat’s analysis suggests that other systems of power might lie elsewhere. This elsewhere keeps those with an ear to the outside constantly seeking an alternative means to living without working, and as Virno suggests, means that exodus (or the politics of disappearance) constitutes the general strategy of the (Loser) workforce.

The other strategy is, of course, to try and manipulate the system from the inside. And those with some sense of how to manipulate language (the Sociopaths) forge a path directly from Loserdom to senior management. Becoming-Sociopath Losers aren’t headhunted because they do their menial job well, but because they demonstrate (by subtle language signs) that they know that their job is worthless by the standards of other Sociopaths. By slacking in their work (getting others to do it for them or just plain deferring it) and putting the extra energy into getting ahead (manoeuvring and conniving), and taking advantage of risk-taking scenarios (playing the game), Sociopaths advance directly from Loser status to senior management — which does not necessarily imply that a Sociopath is bad. For if one is playing the powergame for different ends, such strategies are also the purview of the good. For this general assessment of power applies as much to NPOs and artist-run centres as it does to oil corporations and PR firms.

Check out how the way language plays into this sacking story recently sent to me (the author requested anonymity):

The most telling thing, in my 15-year design career, is I’ve never worked anywhere longer than two years. I’ve been made redundant once and been sacked one and a half times.

The first sacking came on a Friday evening completely out of the blue. It was at the end of the month, so it was nice and tidy for them. The boss had been out of the office all afternoon, walked in the office and asked to have a word with me outside the door. He simply said: “we’re going to let you go”— that was it. I walked away there and then. He did my colleague, the same way, 3 minutes later. Needless to say, it was ruthless and illegal. There was no dismissal process followed.

However, at the time, the job market was buoyant and I got a way better job (oxymoron) shortly afterwards. Needless to say, that company has been erased from my CV. It’s a futile act but it feels the most dignified response to how I was treated— walk away, shake the dust from your shoes and take back control.

The ‘point 5’ sacking was more gentle and evolved over the course of a month. It came to a head and can be summarised in one sentence. They said: “I think you need to move on”. I agreed and left at the end of the week.

*.*.*

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data on dismissal: getting canned

January 6th, 2010 | 3 comments

- the way in which anthronomics circulates -

As part of my recent research into the mechanics of dismissal – the ways in which dismissals operate as the modus operandi of precarious labour – I asked around the Facebook network for stories of gettin’ fired. And I was surprised by the response; a good number of friends & colleagues had at one time been ‘dismissed’ from their jobs. Their stories are self-explanatory. It would appear that in most cases, the managerial class deploys dismissal as a means to cover-up structural incompetence. In quite a few cases, employees were misled into short-term hirings; dismissal is an easy way to ignore labour law that protects employee rights.

coffee shop (in 2003?), got hired pre-xmas, promised full-time work by the end of the first week… only got 20-28 hours for the first three weeks… and then as soon as the xmas rush was over, i got told it ‘wasn’t working out’ – but the boss wouldn’t be more specific than that.

slightly different – when working in the convenience store in the UBC SUB, i had an awful, nasty boss, who’d angrily blame her stupid mistakes on the employees, multiple times a day. in the end, i turned up to work ten minutes late, and walked to the front of the line (i think it was new bus pass time, crazy busy) with my letter of resignation, and handed it to her (she was clearly pissed that i was late, and was about to say something rude to me). it read “i can’t stand working for you any longer, you are incompetent and your personality makes working hell. i quit as of now” (words to that effect). i cc’d it to the AMS office, and she was fired a few hours after i resigned – apparently, there’d been complaints about her before. so there’s someone else’s getting fired story, heh…

_Anomie Nous

==

Not an aggressive enough salesperson (basically not being the type of salesperson I hate). This happened at a lingerie/sex shop & at a hippy clothes and knickknack store.
_ Alexis O’Hara

I call the incompetence of supposed managerial superiors ’structural’ because any corporate structure which does not listen to its employees, and refuses to participate in a two-way dialogue between employees and managers, has already resigned itself to a vertical business model. Management models can be contrasted into two types, both of which are to be found under precarious labour.

The first, the vertical model, communicates from the top-down only. This model can be summarized as command & control. The vertical model uses the psychodynamics of paternalistic authority, manifesting itself in the language of guilt and loyalty, disappointment and approval, and works by way of coercive and usually hypocritical strategies (insofar as the employer, as the ‘good but stern father’, wishes you well – but only insofar as you are ’seen and not heard’). Usually the failure of the vertical model is self-evident. Without any kind of dialogue, managerial power is absolute. Employee scheduling is usually a mess; staff are kept 24/7 on call for shift changes. Fear operates as a motivator due to constant demands on regular scheduling. In this respect, the vertical model has changed since the 20th century; one’s ‘hours’ are not set in stone and can change at any time. Examples are made, of course, out of those who raise questions or attempt to engage in dialogue. For the most part, the vertical model is still the most prominent, and to be found in retail, etc.

i got “let go” from a residency recently for playing house..
_ Deejay Tripwire

==

new tattoo
_ Maria Herrero

The second, the deceptive horizontal model, is a supposedly more open, and relatively newer model of employee–managerial relations, and follows a consult & direct procedure. Open discussions are held with staff; employee ideas are explored. In a company like Google, (paid) time is even set aside to follow employee initiatives. In this model, there is a semblance, if not an actual amount of respect, inclusivity, negotiation, and ultimately, some degree of understanding between managerial and employee subject-positions. However, the advantage and the disadvantage of this model are the same, which is why it is deceptive: ideas percolate up. Whatever the employee initiative, it is property of the company, and not the employee, and the employee can easily be dismissed/shuffled out once their initiative has been overtaken by the corporation’s interests. This model is often found in ‘progressive’ hi-tech industries, the film industry, arts, music, academia and other creative industries, and in many respects is the model of precarious labour itself in its alliance with cognitive labour. In this sense, the deceptive-horizontal model is precisely what workers of the ’60s onward fought for: the mobilization and relaxation of labour time, more collective involvement in decision-making, and increased involvement in and responsibility for corporate operations. But this has had the downside of mobilizing all time into company time. All employee ideas are pre-owned by the company, and at its worst, this horizontal model is that of a cognitive sweatshop, as seen predominantly in the gaming and programming industries. Expect long hours without credit for brilliance; the managers steal the latter from their team, using what percolates up from below to advance their own careers/interests.

accusations of abusive language
_ Michelle Fearless

==

In clubland, I once had my wages raised (without asking for it – I was told I was worth it) and was told a month or so later that it was too expensive to keep me, so they “let” me “go”.
_ Hillegonda Rietveld

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business ontology (or why Xmas gets you fired)

December 29th, 2009 | 7 comments

Google gives me this image when searching for 'wage slavery' //

A few days ago I was throwing down some conversation in a noisy bar with a colleague (and friend) whom I hadn’t seen in awhile. Besides being able to only interpret every fourth word or so due to a completely distracting mashup mix blaring on the system whilst downing a good number of beers, the question came up as to what I was reading, and I showed TH a copy of Precarious Rhapsody by Franco “Bifo” Berardi — a work of autonomist theory from the Italian camp. The reason I was reading this, I explained, was because it engaged me, enraptured me, and for good reason — every line appeared as a reflection of my own fractured experience, not only in the past year working the shop floor, but in my life of working within realms aptly described under the banner of cognitive labour. I had gone from being a wordsmith and arts worker to a member of the shop floor precariat, in short from one precarious realm to another, from a realm where 110% of the brain is owned (insofar as one’s future cognitive production is pre-owned) to a position in which the brain is not only disowned, but actively discouraged in its use, with the menial task of one’s labour, however useless or counterproductive, the only toil to be done. While working the shop floor, I also observed the incredible ineptitude of business management, as it sweated the small stuff, missed the bigger picture, accepted mediocrity from itself while demanding 24/7 availability from the minimum wagers. In short, working the floor demonstrated quite precisely the management-induced toxic atmosphere of insecurity, resulting in seasonal turnover, inexperienced decision-making, and overall bad biz.

So there’s two angles here, as to why autonomist work grabs me by the nards. The first is its accuracy, insofar as it grasps the complex of conditions within precarious and cognitive labour. It is not imperative to discuss the theorizations and data of political economy, however. One does not need to directly tackle political theory to authenticate one’s work, or justify it, in view of some perceived greater political good or political cabal that would only see work of political theory as worthy of contemplation. But the second point I had to make digs much deeper than that, as it concerns the overall technicization of work, in short, the production of one’s labour and technico-ontology — one could say the labour required within the day-to-day technical way of being. This deep media infestation of being with technical production, of the cognitive sphere within the realm of cognitive labour, and of the apparatus of labour itself within precarity, situates the production of oneself as a labourer – which today is to say, as the possible totality of one’s being – within the multitude in relation to the vectors of cognitariat / precariat.

These coordinates of technical subjectivity in relation to labour affects the production of knowledge itself. In short, one cannot pretend to produce knowledge independently of these control mechanisms, of this technico-ontology, of the technicization of labour, and of the 24/7 mobilization of the brain that is cognitive labour. Nor can one claim to exist and work independently of the distraction mechanisms of mobile technologies and the tethering acts they perform to the superego of capital (you are always ‘on call’).

In short, there is an ironic yet devastating demand being placed on the labourer: while work never ends (as one is never out of touch, and always expected to be available, with no claims to a private life or other demands), you as a worker are nonetheless completely expendable (and thus a member of the precariat: and so one must sacrifice all autonomy from work so as to keep one’s job). And for what it’s worth, I know; I was finally “permanently removed from the schedule” (and thus ending my self-induced experiment in anthronomics) for (a) asking for a raise and (b) taking time off work (duly notified, in writing) over Xmas to visit my (ailing) family. The scenario is near Dickensian.

This contemporary condition of on-call ontology or on-demand da-sein produces an emotional economy of stress. To live under such instant-demand duress is stress-inducing indeed. Life becomes a series of panic attacks in the face of never being able to live up to such workplace demands without completely dismantling ‘life’ itself as distinct from ‘work’. The managerial class uses techniques of guilt/loyalty to enforce workers to labour at a moment’s notice, scheduling with less than a few hours or days time, without hope of a raise, without benefits or reward, and all for a minimum wage. And so when I read work that theorizes this condition and links it to the technical production of knowledge, the precarity of the labour class, the non-stop nature of labour, and so on, I feel that not only is it correct in many respects, but that such insightful and damning analysis, in its accurate summary and resistant energy, gives hope to the many.

has much if anything changed? indeed: the nature of the chains.

As Mark Fisher elaborates, we live in a “business ontology,” where “everything is folded inside a business reality system, that the only goals and purposes which count are those that are translatable into business terms” (Questioning Capitalist Realism @ MUTE). And Fisher makes a good point that it is not academia today (if it ever was) that acts as if it lived in an ivory tower, a supposed utopia where professors slack off and don’t have to ‘deal with the real world’ as has oft been portrayed (this assessment is so far off base — all academes I know work ridiculous hours, shoulder pounds of paperwork, wallow in committees, and pay their dues many times over; more than that the entire academic endeavour is  heading down the dark path of sessionalization, underemployment and underpay, sinking without delay to that junk-strewn bottom of degree zero precarity). So the myth that academia is apparently bereft of ‘competence appraisals’ is just that — a diversionary tactic from that other dark tower on the horizon. For that other (which is to say only) ivory tower is not ivory but built with the sweat of labour, and it houses business executives, not academics. It is the business world today that is the ‘ivory tower’. As the 08/10 financial crisis demonstrated, it is the business world that is lost in the clouds. How else can we describe or account for such a lofty place so seemingly out of touch with the conditions of existence of most of the labouring world, a place where overpaid executives get paid bonuses for not only sinking the company, but pillaging the entire system? It is business, the corporate environment, and the manageriat that are ensconced within a tower of their own, believing that their (generally poisonous, for the rest of us) actions are untouchable, unaccountable, and unchangeable. (And what will it take to pull this tower down?) As Mark Fisher puts it:

Neoliberal ideology likes us to believe that bureaucracy has decreased under it, but the reality is that it has simply changed form, and the average teacher or lecturer is doing much more bureaucracy than ever before – and this is not ‘necessary’ bureaucracy, or bureaucracy that ‘improves performance’; on the contrary, as we all know, it is a purely empty activity, a dead ritual that is at best useless, at worst actually counter-productive. What I mean by ‘capitalist realism’ is partly the imposition of these mechanisms – whose real significance might be to ensure ideological compliance at this ritualized level – and also the acceptance of those mechanisms by workers (and managers), who go along with them because ‘that’s just how things are now.’ (Mark Fisher / Questioning Capitalist Realism @ MUTE)

If one takes Fisher’s claims seriously – as I do – then the production of knowledge, which is to say, self-knowledge, and thus the production of subjectivity itself, is deeply affected by rituals of technical control. I wouldn’t say that, as an academic worker, that one needs to belabour the point well wrought by 1980s postmodern-style subject positioning (what are the coordinate of the authorial body?). [1] However, any kind of quasi-analytic intellectual labour today needs to address the ways in which work as-such is being conducted. For this is a question of general ontology, of the production of knowledge itself, in relation to the technics of labour. In this sense I think it is astute to observe the intersection between computing ontology and classical ontology. While interviewing Mark Fisher, Mathew Fuller interprets business ontology as “something that combines both the classical understanding of an ontology and the more technical description of the ordering of relations in a computing ontology, [wherein] one is flattened into the other” (Mathew Fuller / Questioning).

From what I can extrapolate of Fuller’s brief interpretation of business ontology (of which I would like to hear more), the hierarchy of computing ontology (the hierarchy of languages and feedback controls demonstrated by second level cybernetics) has been flattened into being, or the ontology of the world as-such. The hierarchical language ladders of computerization, wherein various master languages control others, and at base, all elements are programmed in a binary, numerical code, has since become the frame through which the flow of the world is perceived. This has worked very well for business up until recently (and even then, is still working) insofar as the technico-computerization of ontology affects the conditions of perception. Like science, such a framing demonstrates its efficacy; it is not as if it is autonomous from all that comes to pass (though I would place science on a less mutable level than this particular business ontology; but then we need to ask what is science, today, apart from business ontology and technico-production?). It is because of this relative efficacy — as Marx among others demonstrated, an effectiveness that is only at the expense of others — that the business class has thus perceived itself as meshing with the world as-such, when, in starkest reality of the night, the business class has done nothing but glimpse its image in a mirror, preening and congratulating itself for seeing itself reflected in all it sees, finding itself in all it touches, and finally coming to believe that its own bloated image is the totality of the world, and that the world works in the way it does.

This is classic hubris indeed, and the business ontology, successfully disseminated by an oversaturation of media networks, has become such a dominant framing of the world that its crash was unforeseen by almost all within its grasp (save for a few).

What to do about it then? Is this question even possible? What coffee needs to be drunk? What kool-aid? Well, why not read work that grabs the bull by the horns, and gets you wired on its energy, its no-holds-barred take on this world we live in:

The concept of competition has replaced that of competence. [...] Any intellectual competence that is not related to speculation is made precarious, devalued and low waged. [...] Ignorance rises up to power and economic decisions are made purely on the basis of the gain of the maximum and most immediate profit. All that matters is the reduction of labour costs, because this is what competition is about, nothing to do with the production of quality. As a result, the last word on decisions about production does not come from chemists, urbanists or doctors, but from people with managerial competence, that is, with the ability to reduce labour costs and accelerate realization of profit. (Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody 51-52).

At some point you have to ask yourself: do I want my life to be controlled by a manager? How long can I take this? This question certainly occurred to me; I was surprised to learn I could take it longer than my manager could. And everyone must do what they have to do to make do under the circumstances. But burying one’s head in the sand is the saddest of all responses. Life – or what is left of it – appears less solitary when seeking out work that dissects the situation — and challenges it. And to take up that challenge in one’s own way, in whatever way one sees fit, in one’s work, conversation, writing, this will be the only way to disseminate cognitive alternatives to the diminishing returns of precarious labour.

And for the record, I question the authority of not only managers, but chemists, doctors and certainly urbanists, point being that it will only be through a persistent culture of inquisitive souls that any kind of shift toward an engaged democracy can take place, a place with a market less defined by its methamphetamine binges, cocaine culture and capitalism-on-steroids, growth-at-all-costs ideology, and infused instead with the sustainable relation of all beings and things on this small and rather minor planet of ours.

[1] Edit — to add –  Perhaps the more apt questions still remain: what is doing the coordinating? What systems are in play? Who programs in the coordinates? Where do these coordinates come from? Whom do they serve? What is a coordinate? What map is being used? What does it attempt to map? In short, not ‘what or where is my body and how does that authenticate (or not) what I have to say’, but, what is controlling my body and how is that affecting what I CAN say? In short: whatever is muzzling you, you know it, it is right in front of you, every single time you bite your tongue. There, right there, is the blockage that must be removed, avoided, deconstructed, destroyed.

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sleeping with the enemy (embedded trauma)

December 15th, 2009 | 2 comments
truth in irony – whether beat down or beaten entirely / g20 protests, london

truth in irony – whether beat down or beaten entirely / g20 protests, london

Since there are no remaining visible alternatives to universal pan-capitalism there seems to be no need for payoffs for the disenchanted, no necessity to bribe dissenting segments of the population and no incentives to grant extensions of freedoms. Instead of peddling hope and the vision of a mutually shared commonwealth, authority is maintained by synthetic fear and the need to secure property against some other. (“Synthetic Fear,” Konrad Becker, in Strategic Reality Dictionary: 144).

What is an anthronomics? Anthronomics would come to consist of embedded analysis. But literally: sleep with the enemy. Living the precarious wage as anthropology of the precariat. And plumbing the depths of the employer (or lack thereof). As a -nomics, a study of laws, it is yet a side-step from an economics which sees laws as relations of production, trade, and money, or in general of eco- principalities that become increasingly removed from affective conditions of collective bodies. An anthronomics puts the body back into the equation of economics, as well as the embedded status of its investigator, and like cultural ethnography, seeks to think through by thinking among.

What is the precariat from the perspective of an anthronomics? Beyond what has already been said, the precariat is that class that lives within the repression/expression of trauma brought on by perpetual motion. While mobility is touted as the vector of freedom, mobility belies not a life of change, but a stasis in which security is suddenly fraught and yet central to existence. Any anthronomics of the precariat must learn to decipher the signs of collective trauma, to unwrap the politics of fear (as Brian Massumi collected long ago), and to pinpoint – and disintegrate – the control strategies in which the semantics of security reside.

Claiming precarity presupposes a state in which life was good, stable, grounded. Stability and the heartland – the volk – is a myth, which is to say, an effective distribution which found its place for a time. Longing for one is the prison of the other. The stable job that is now a dream was once the cage (and the time clock) to the worker of the 20th century. What does this mean? That though the poles of de/stabilization are contained within a politics of fear, the semantics of security are a new development within the perpetuation of fear under mobility.

Fear has been around as long as anything, and operates in different forms (…and is this not Foucault’s study, Discipline & Punish). Over the past centuries in which capital has intensified, fear has been operative at multiple levels, from the revolutionary fear of the proletariat and their organisation into unions that wield fear as power, to the perpetuation of fear under militarism during apparently stable economic formations, and always in complex ways (fears of union-busting; fear of violence, organised strikes, communism; fear of the corrupt union itself, etc: in this case, fear is fear of becoming-mobile, of losing one’s collective support, fraternity, job, home, family). Likewise, security was a concern under conditions of apparent stability when the world was organised in a bipolar fashion (the twin militarizations of capitalism/communism). In the 21C, attempts at bipolarization have not been entirely successful (“with us or with the terrorists”). In any case, it is more effective to retain fear of the other within — within borders, within homes, within ourselves, and precisely at the ontological level.

(For who in your office might go postal? Fear them. Carry a gun. You will never really know (them). But you will be ready when the time comes. — As will they. Amen.)

expression of localized fear as sadism: state sanctioned / g20 protests, London

state sanctioned expression of localized fear as sadism (aka "going postal") / g20 protests, london

Losing one’s job, family and home is still a fear, but now, a fear executed upon the solitary. To lose a job now is to be disconnected from a network; to lose the potential of one avenue of mobility. Fear in this case is fear of losing a series of connections, on the one channel, and fear of losing oneself among the overwhelming sea of connectivity, on the other.

When Becker writes of the utter lack of need to address the demands of the precariat, he is defining necessity from the side of what is also a precarious system of control. Precarity is not merely the precarious class, as the class of the cognitive labour, the mobility waged, and so on. Precarity is also the state of stability in its most general form, which can take system-wide effect, as the 2008 credit crunch demonstrated. Precarity is the state of the ecological worldsystems in which humans survive. Precarity is thus a general fear of total collapse, and it is the defining ontological condition of humanity as it emerges out of the first 10 years of the 21C.

As a totality-fear, it is a collective trauma meted out by a thousand cuts. For the very few, one fear eclipses all – and this is a phobia – but for most (in the overdeveloped West), fear expresses itself in a general panic about nothing at all, as nothing so large, and totalizing, has yet to be localized. The fear has not (yet) manifested — and this is precisely the fear. The West has not yet seen: mass terrorist attacks; collapse of food stocks, contaminated water; mass impoverishment; civil collapse. The precariat at all levels thus lives in a state of fear over what yet may be. A general trauma sets in, a fear of the future, and its futurity (will there be a future?). This is a nuclear fear without the content that the nuclear threat posed. For fear is now everywhere. This is fear at all levels.

One consequence of this generalized fear is asserting that the precariat is not the newly renamed proletariat. The precariat is a cross-section of the multitude, and the multitude, under Paolo Virno’s formulation, is a form, not a content. (If this form/content grouping is too simplistic, then think it like this: the multitude is evacuated of content; it is a framing, a process, without a point of reference in a revolutionary class. The multitude is a condition and it changes. What groups the multitude is the connectivity of the globe, as a network, and the development of communicative technics, as redefining the conditions of labour and production. The multitude is nonetheless locatable by grouping the collective bodies wrought within cognitive labour, communicative technologies, and generalized fear. This does not mean that the multitude, however, by virtue of its content, being or technico-economic status follows any particular entelechy or unfolding of history, dialectical or otherwise.)

In this sense, the great fear of all the trad-leftist theorists is thus realised, insofar as the multitude is not necessarily leftist, proletarian, etc — it is only expressed, perhaps, by this shared condition of collective trauma, which is a fear of the futurity of the future, a fear of what is yet to come but also that there might not be a to-come to come, and that what might come along might just put off what comes again once and for all. The conditions of this fear demand their embedded analysis, for they are constructed and wrought by the politics of fear, the semantics of security, and the economics of precarity / mobility.

In this shared moment, the precariat redefines necessity. It is not necessary to improve the living conditions of others not only because there is no alternative, but because there is no future. (Or there is no futurity-belief: even as the future arrives, without question. Not even Star Wars mythology — there is no only Hope, not even another Hope, just a lack of futurity in which Hope can be situated as a concrete imaginary, Force or No Force.)

Is there not something nihilist, then, in this formulation (and in the way Kroker thought technological nihilism)? The world’s underemployed and impoverished receive nothing because the perception of necessity is such – amongst those who distribute and steal from the collective wealth of the world – that there is no need to address necessity itself. A necessity only takes hold when it is imperative to address something in order to rectify (perhaps we understand this as the application of justice), or in which a scenario offers no alternative but to, under fear of a penalty (such as death). For example, the latter fear of the overthrowing of power, the revolution, personified in the fear that you might be the first up against the wall, generates the necessity to address the demands of the underemployed. Here, in this case where necessity has seemingly failed, the true necessity is one in which there is no alternative but not to, as there is no alternative (in general), because there is simply no need to.

In short: there is no fear of revolution, no fear of the uprising of the multitude, as those benefiting from current conditions are as part of this politics of fear as anyone else, and as part of the flux of the multitude as anyone else. What they fear is what we fear, and this fear is within us all, as the fear of what is hidden within, the incorporated, and that which is so totalizing – the Earth’s rejection of its human inhabitants – that it levels this fear against us all, amongst us all. There is no outside to this problematic, so to speak. And without fear of uprising, there is no necessity at the level of the locale, the level in which fear affects the body. At this level, there is fear not of a collective uprising of the underemployed and impoverished, but a fear of everyone and everything. For we know not who is agent and who is patriot. And this situation, of course, justifies everything.

a body registers fear in a localized impact of "necessary force" / g20 protests, london

a body registers fear in a localized impact of "necessary force" / g20 protests, london

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anthronomics of the precariat

December 14th, 2009 | 9 comments
"Precarious" issue of MUTE (Vol.2 #0)

"Precarious" issue of MUTE (Vol.2 #0)

What are the characteristics of the precariat? When one outlines the precarious class it is often by way of emphasizing the importance of cognitive labour. But sometimes discussions of cognitive labour (or what is known, somewhat incorrectly, as “immaterial labour”) glance over what Brian Holmes calls “the flexible personality.” As Holmes writes of his essay (originally published in 2001), the world has now commenced the

full implementation of the flexible employment system, that is, of a labor regime in which worker mobility and variable hours are accompanied by continuous electronic surveillance and the managerial analysis of performance. (Holmes, Flexible Personality)

Holmes’ observation on the flexitarian personality reveal the double-edge of precarity. Precarity results from, in part, the demands of the ’60s to a less-rigid workplace. Precarity in this sense is the outgrowth of Fordism; it is post-Fordist, post-assembly-line, post-one-job-for-life labour. However, the exploitation of precisely this development announces the precarious class. As employers no longer have to commit to their employees, no longer have to think of employees as long-term partners in the functioning of a business, employees are like stock: they become replaceable on a seasonal basis. The affective state of precarity underlies the instability of mobility. As the Frassanito Network writes, precarity means “unsure, uncertain, difficult, delicate.” The problem of labour under precarity is outlined by Neilson and Rossiter in Fibreculture (5):

The mobile capacity of information corresponds, in many instances, with the flexible nature of work across many sectors of the media and cultural industries. And it is precisely the informatisation of social relations that makes political organisation such a difficult – even undesireable – undertaking for many. Without recourse to traditional institutions such as the union, new technics of organisation are required if the common conditions of exploitation are to be addressed and transformed. (Neilson and Rossiter, “Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour“)

Information, in this sense, does not necessarily have to tie into the precariat of the new media and culture industries. Information is also a strain of hierarchical knowledge used to discipline, surveil and control employees. By granting employees access to information on production stock, delivery times and production dates, employees are handed the additional responsibility of communicating to customers the availability (present and future) of products. Thus the employee also becomes the face of a third-party company and answers to critiques of that company’s production schedule from irate customers. This kind of information is downloaded into employees, however without the power to do much about it. There is no upload of information (“feedback”) to the company or the employer concerning the consequences of the downloaded information. In short, information is one-way, from top to bottom. Changes that might arise from bottom-to-top remain inacceptable, which points to the general structure of hierarchy which still prevails among precariat business. (There are exceptions to this rule in the hi-tech industries, notably Google, which grants a percentage of labour as creative time to pursue whatever project(s) one wishes – given that it too becomes corporate property and a measure of one’s job performance; thus the second level of precarious knowledge is to grant employees the power of “feedback,” but only insofar as it improves the power of the managing hierarchy.)

In my unscientific but deeply subjective experience of returning to the retail sales floor over the past year – what Adorno would call, with some damn fine sense, an objective point of view in this scenario – I can attest to the now deeply ingrained fears and managerial strategies of the flexible workforce.

The first rule, which has been in place since mean wages peaked in 1973, is to pay as little as possible for the work performed. As all businesses in a given locale follow this rule, a blanket excuse that ‘one pays as much as the others’ stifles demands for a living wage. By keeping wages low, it ensures that workers have no real alternative to (yet another) business-as-usual. Yet, everyone well realises that they are quickly replaceable; in short, the job is flexitarian, as there is no upward mobility, no increase in benefits, to be had in staying at any one job. This very system of low wages means that the majority of the population is unable to purchase their own products (thus risking the stability of the entire economy, as without consumers/buyers, there is no production). Without credit cards, we’d all be doomed. The rise of credit in the face of low wages plays an essential part of the current economy of consumer markets as well as the “credit crunch” and collapse of 2008. With the lowering of the living wage from the ’70s on, a solution had to be found to the reduced spending power of consumers. By opening the credit market to workers of all stripes, genders and colours in the ’80s, consumers could once again purchase without consequence (or rather: a delayed consequence that hit the world in 2008). This new lending market  led to “financialization” as speculation upon debt – and  to the subsequent collapse of the credit market. The delayed circularity of this collapse is nonetheless lost on the localized decision of the flexitarian system to keep wages low (see Midnight Notes Collective – Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons).

The second rule is not to offer raises to returning staff. This reinforces the flexibility of one’s position, or, in other words, that the business has little stake in your labour, and that you a replaceable entity. The fear of losing one’s job for the most part ensures that few if any demands are raised by workers. That few workers stay on for longer than a year means that they never achieve an organisational capacity to pursue demands. The strategy of not increasing pay for increased responsibility, tasks or labour is even to the detriment of the business, insofar as training a new staff member (in the face of a staff member who quits) demands more of managerial labour, time and expense than offering a raise. However, the reinforcement of a below-living-wage, even at the expense of the business – so as to maintain the flexibility of the system itself – is perhaps the strongest index of the flexitarian system. Labour is cheap and plentiful in this system, easily replaceable. Rather than meet (and negotiate) demands, employees are rejected in their demands and/or reprimanded for requesting them (and pursuing their negotiation).

Third is to increase the demands upon a worker without offering corresponding benefits (in pay or otherwise). The longer one stays at a position, the more responsibility must be assumed, tasks and labour, yet there is no benefit to the employee. By increasing the demands of a job without an increase in pay, the implicit message is to move on to an easier job at the same pay. Thus the flexitarian system maintains mobility in the workforce. At the same time, this means that no employee ever forms a caring attachment to the labour they are performing. If they do, it is out of a misplaced sense of servitude that is often set at odds to the demands of the employer (the employee often cares more about customer relations or product quality than the owner, in this sense). In this convoluted sense of loyalty, the delay of decisive action to leave a job sustains all kinds of conflicting emotions. Fear of losing one’s job, guilt over not meeting the increasing demands of an employer, frustration at not being able to address the situation, nor at being able to assume the true responsibility it would require to actually address the inequalities and evident problems of the business — this is the politics of affect that takes its toil on the shop floor, in the kitchen and grey-paneled office.

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