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Boutang sees the development of work after Fordism as being about coopting the rebellion from work’s alienated form.17
Work comes to dress itself in the clothes of the artist or of the university. The values of creativity only become capable of being exploited by an intelligent capitalism to the extent that they were promoted as a value, first experimentally and then as a norm of living. (88)
Hence, at least in part, “the ‘hacker’ individual is closer to the creative artist and the ivory-tower professor than to the risk-taker or the possessive individualist” (90). This might not however take full account of the rise of the “Brogrammer,” product of elite American universities who studied programming rather than go to business school, and for whom tech is just a means to get into business. The ethnographic realities of class are always complicated.
Even so, while start-up culture is designed to shape a kind of petit-bourgeois personality, not every hacker is persuaded by this. Many will discover that there is now a kind of second-degree exploitation, not of labor per se but of one’s capacity to hack, to invent, to transform information. Who knows? Some might even question the split that this emerging mode of production forces between labor and creation, which was the basis of Asger Jorn’s very prescient situationist critique of political economy.18 For Boutang this new division is like that between the “free” worker and the slave in mercantilist capitalism—which I must point out is a division between two different classes.
Perhaps one could even open up the question of whether the tensions within the ruling class point toward the formation of a different kind of ruling class. One part of the ruling class really insists on the enclosure of information within strict private property forms, while another part does not. One part has lost the ability to produce information goods strapped to physical objects and charge as if they were just physical objects. This is the case not just with things like movies or music, but also with drugs and increasingly with sophisticated manufactured goods. You can now buy a pretty good knockoff iPad for a fraction of the price.
And yet there’s a tension here, as there is another kind of value production that is all about the leaky and indeterminate way in which social knowledge gets turned into products. One could frame this as an instability for a ruling class which does not know which of these is more important, or whether both tendencies can really occur at once. Or whether it is even a split between different kinds of ruling class: one still dependent on extracting surplus labor power and selling commodities; one dependent instead on asymmetries of information and commanding the processes of social creation themselves by controlling the infrastructure of the information vector.
Lazzarato mentions all too briefly the role that property rights plays in tying the desubjectivized world of machines to the subject-producing world of discourse. “By ensuring that creation and production are uniquely the feats of ‘man,’ it uses the ‘world,’ emptied of all ‘soul,’ as its own ‘object,’ as the instrument of its activities, as the means to its ends” (35). The property form makes the individualized subject the author and hence owner of something that is really much more likely the product of a machinic assemblage of different bits of various people’s subjectivity, various machines, assorted technical resources. Hence we end up with the myth that Steve Jobs created the iPhone—and reaped most of the rewards from it.
Lazzarato: “it is never an individual who thinks” (44). And it is never a corporation that produces. The corporation appropriates the unassigned values of a machinic “commons,” as it were, “free of charge,” and captures it in the form of profit or rent. Just as capital appropriates the natural commons, here it appropriates the social commons, or rather a social-machinic one.6 Meanwhile, the dividual agents have to be patched back together as more-or-less whole subjects meant to think of themselves existentially as free agents who are both investors and debtors, trading in the self as currency in a market for souls.
Still, the neo-capitalism concept does touch on certain key features, to do with how subjectivity is machined rather than merely hailed into existence via language, as in Žižek. Lazzarato draws attention to the vacant language of org charts, graphs, budgets—one might add PowerPoints. Hierarchy is really organized more through the asignifying aspects of such procedures. Or take the call center, where the latest systems do not even require that the worker actually speak. She or he can just click on prerecorded phrases to step the caller through the sales routine.21 The software of course includes rating, ranking, classifying and timing functions.
In a useful insight, Lazzarato claims that what is managed now is not really labor so much as processes, of which labor is just a component. Management is not really about “human resources,” just resources for machinic enslavement, cordoned off in subroutines that are controlled and which have no reciprocal capacity to effect control. Lazzarato:
Sociology and industrial psychology seem to be incapable of grasping conceptually the qualitative leap that has occurred in the move from “work” to “process,” from subjection to enslavement. Those high on the hierarchy no longer deal with work but with “process” which integrates labor as “one” of its parts. (119)
This all seems to confirm the work Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski did on how the ruling class responded to the challenge to its hegemony in the ’60s by resisting one line of attack yet incorporating the other. The line resisted was the labor critique, in the form of wildcat strikes and factory occupations. The line that was incorporated was the artistic critique, which spoke not of labor but of alienation. It turns out that extracting value out of labor could function just fine without rigid, externally imposed discipline and uniformity. McRobbie: “While the prevailing value system celebrates the growth of the creative economy and the rise of talent, the talented themselves are working long hours under the shadow of unemployment in a domain of intensive under-employment, and self-activated work” (153). McRobbie works this observation through a study of the work of Richard Florida, Richard Sennett and the Italian workerist school and its descendants, such as Virno, Berardi and Lazzarato.
The connection between race and production hardly appears in Gilroy. I’m skeptical about his claim that “cars fudge any residual distinctions between material and semiotic, base and superstructure” (30). It might make more sense to think of cars à la Lazzarato as connected to an infrastructure that is both material and semiotic, which is deeply embedded in a global geography of production and distribution, shaping cities to its affordances. As Pasolini had noted in the ’60s, the production lines of neo-capitalism stamp out subjects as well as objects. What I find most promising in this part of Gilroy’s work is the opportunity to think about how race and infrastructure interact, and always on a global scale.
is this teorema? im intrigued
What I find missing in Dean is the sense of a struggle over how tech and flesh were to coadapt to each other. Let’s not forget the damage done to the conversation about the politics of technology by the Cold War purge, in which not only artists and writers were blacklisted, but scientists and engineers as well. Iris Chang’s account of the fate of Tsien Hsue-Shen in Thread of the Silkworm is only the most absurdist of such stories.10 This pioneering rocket scientist lost his security clearances for having social ties to people who, unbeknownst to him, were communists. And so he was deported—to communist China! There he actually became what he never was in America—a highly skilled scientist working for the “communist cause.” This is just the craziest of thousands of such stories. Those who find the tech world “apolitical” might inquire as to how it was made so thoroughly so.
Hence the Californian Ideology is a product of particular histories, one piece of which is documented so well in Turner—but there are other histories. The belief that tech will save the world, that institutions are to be tolerated but not engaged, that rough consensus and running code are all that matter—this is not the only ideology of the tech world. That it became an unusually predominant one is not some naturally occurring phenomena—even though both Californian ideologists and Dean both tend to think it is. Rather, it is the product of particular struggles in which such an ideology got a powerful assist, firstly from state repression of certain alternatives, and then by corporate patronage of the more business-friendly versions of it.
The developed world became the overdeveloped world. Commodification ran up against the limits of what it could claim to organize efficiently or effectively. Whole chunks of social life had to be hacked off and fed into the flames to keep the steam up. Commodification moved on from land to things to information. A whole infrastructure grew, of information vectors, backed up by the growth of “intellectual property” into a comprehensive set of full private property rights. This for me would be a sketch that makes sense of neoliberalism as effect rather than cause.
Brown shows that there’s a slippage in neoliberal thought about the subject, between the individual and the family. Homo economicus is still imaged as a male head of a household, or at least one with the benefits of such a household. He may no longer have slaves, but someone tends the kids and does the dishes. The family remains a nonmarket sphere that cannot be economized. It’s a space of needs, interdependence, love, loyalty, community and care—where it is women who take care of all that “stuff.” I might venture that for all its patriarchal faults, the family is the minimal unit of communism, not as a utopia of course, but strictly understood as a domain of shared or pooled resources outside of both exchange and even gift, as Karatani might see it.