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The disinvestment in higher education may be more explicable in terms of labor-market requirements. Today’s vectoral class has no need of the mass worker. Labor is bifurcated between a small core of a highly skilled hacker class using or designing information technology and a vast precarious population whose jobs have been deskilled by the same information technology.19
The bulk of the book is not about such things. It is rather about what one can think by extension from such experience. It is about mapping the commodity economy centered on the management of bodies, sexes, identities, or what Preciado calls the “somatico-political,” of how it finds itself both making and made over by “the sex-gender industrial complex” (28). It is an exercise in what Bogdanov calls substitution, building a metaphoric account of how the whole world is made out of one’s own experience of labor. The most interesting kind of labor is now that of the “production of the species as species.”
“I look for keys to survival in books,” Préciado writes (135). Scattered in Testo Junkie are useful lists of writers and artists for anyone who feels they need similar keys to survival: Jean Genet, Walter Benjamin, Monique Wittig, Susan Stryker, Edmund White, Faith Ringgold, Faith Wilding, Jill Johnson, Valerie Solanas, Silvia Federici, Ellen Willis, Kathy Acker, Sandy Stone, Shu Lea Chang, Diane Torr, Del LaGrace Volcano, Pedro Lemebel, Michelle Tea. As in any low-theory book, the reading list is determined by a need to live rather than disciplinary boundary keeping. What is of interest is how Préciado pulls it off.
My argument would be that while the timing is different, programming might not be all the different from other professions in its claims to exclusive mastery based on knowledge of protocols shorn of certain material and practical dimensions. In this regard, is it all that different from architecture? What might need explaining is rather how software intervened in, and transforms, all the professions. Most of them have been redefined as kinds of information-work. In many cases this can lead to deskilling and casualization, on the one hand; and to the circling of the wagons around certain higher-order, but information-based, functions on the other. It is not that programming is an example of “neoliberalism,” so much as that neoliberalism has become a catch-all term for a collection of symptoms of the role of computing in its current form in the production of information as a control layer.
Hence my problem with the ambiguity in formulations such as this: “Software becomes axiomatic. As a first principle, it fastens in place a certain neoliberal logic of cause and effect, based on the erasure of execution and the privileging of programming” (49). What if it is not that software enables neoliberalism, but rather that neoliberalism is just a rather inaccurate way of describing a software-centric mode of production? The invisible machine joins the list of other invisible operators: slaves, women, workers. They don’t need to be all that visible so long as they do what they’re told. They need only to be seen to do what they are supposed to do. Invisibility is the other side of power.13 To the extent that software has power or is power, it isn’t an imaginary fetish.
To what extent is information the missing “complement” to the commodity? There is only one kind of (proto-) information in Marx, and that is the general equivalent—money. The materiality of a thing—let’s say “coats”—its use value, is doubled by its informational quantity, its exchange value, and it is exchanged against the general equivalent, or information as quantity. But notice the missing step. Before one can exchange the thing “coats” for money, one needs the information “coats.” What the general equivalent meets in the market is not the thing but another kind of information—let’s call it the general nonequivalent—a general, shared, agreed-upon kind of information about the qualities of things.24
Putting these sketches together, one might then ask what role computing plays in the rise of a political economy (or a post-political one) in which not only is exchange value dominant over use value, but where use value further recedes behind the general nonequivalent, or information about use value. In such a world, fetishism would be mistaking the body for the information, not the other way around, for it is the information that controls the body.
Thus we want to think bodies matter, lives matter, things matter—when actually they are just props for the accumulation of information and information as accumulation. “Neo”liberal is perhaps too retro a term for a world which does not just set bodies “free” to accumulate property, but sets information “free” from bodies, and makes information property in itself. Perhaps bodies are shaped now by more than one kind of code. Perhaps it is no longer a time in which to use Foucault and Derrida to explain computing, but rather to see them as side effects of the era of computing itself.25
I have always dissented from part of this narrative. I think the category of the “immaterial” is meaningless, and modifiers such as “cognitive” and “semio-” don’t really capture what is distinctive about the forces of production and reproduction in our times. I also think it best not to assume in advance some sort of collective or class unity when really one is talking about quite different experiences and implications within the production process. Thus, in A Hacker Manifesto I was careful to see the hacker and worker as different figures that need to find ways of combining their interests through cultural, political and organizational means.
Nevertheless, I think Italian and French writers such as Virno, Boutang, Lazzarato and Berardi are at least asking the right questions and trying to capture in a conceptual net some of the features of this stage of commodification. It would appear that Stengers also accepts part of the shared terrain here. She draws attention to those working in computation who invented a form of resistance to the appropriation of what was common to them, of which Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement might be the most conscious element.14 “It was as ‘commoners’ that they defined what made them programmers, not as nomads of the immaterial” (85).
Is this still capitalism, or something worse? Haraway was already grappling with a new language for it in her “Cyborg” text. Whatever it is, it produces a new worldwide proletariat, new distributions of ethnicity and sexuality, and new forms of the family. Haraway was writing about an earlier moment in Silicon Valley, when it was still a major center for chip fabrication, using mostly women of color as an industrial workforce. Much of that production has moved on, leaving toxic Superfund sites behind, but the global, distributed labor of making these digital means of production still exists, on an expanded and globalized scale.18
The word precarity had not yet been coined, but Haraway was already describing it. Work has in a paradoxical way been feminized.19 On the one hand, women get to work; on the other, the work is precarious, powerless and toxic. The vector has the ability to route around any stoppage or strike that workers might deploy as leverage.20 “The success of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men’s unionized jobs is tied to the power of the new communication technologies to integrate and control labor despite extensive dispersion and decentralization” (39).
By our own standards, Catherine and Emma’s pain seems extreme, but it is still intelligible to us. Yet, as this book seeks to claim, the romantic agony that both of these women experience has changed its content, color, and texture. First of all, the opposition between society and love which each enacts in her suffering is hardly relevant to modern societies. Indeed, there would be few economic obstacles or normative prohibitions preventing either Catherine or Emma from making their love their first and only choice. If anything, our contemporary sense of appropriateness would command us to follow the dictates of our heart, not of our social milieu. Second, a battery of experts would now be likely to come to the rescue of a hesitant Catherine and of Emma’s passionless marriage: psychological counseling, couple therapy, divorce lawyers, mediation specialists, would massively appropriate and adjudicate over the private dilemmas of prospective or bored wives. In the absence of (or in conjunction with) experts’ help, their modern counterparts would have shared the secret of their love with others, most likely female friends, or, at the very least, occasional anonymous friends found on the Internet, thus considerably diminishing the solitude of their passion. Between their desire and their despair, there would have been a thick flow of words, self-analysis, and friendly or expert advice. A contemporary Catherine or Emma would have spent a great deal of time reflecting and talking about their pain and likely found its causes in their own (or their lovers’) deficient childhood. They would have derived a sense of glory not from the experience of grief, but precisely from having overcome it, through an arsenal of self-help therapeutic techniques. Modern romantic pain generates an almost endless gloss, the purpose of which is both to understand and extirpate its causes. Dying, committing suicide, and running away to a cloister no longer belong to our cultural repertoires. This is not to say, obviously, that we, “post-” or “late” moderns, do not know something about the agony of love. In fact we may possibly know more about it than our predecessors. But what it does suggest is that the social organization of romantic pain has changed profoundly. This book is about understanding the nature of that transformation through an examination of the changes undergone in three different and crucial aspects of the self: the will (how we want something), recognition (what matters for our sense of worth), and desire (what we long for and how we long for it).
Precisely because we live in a time where the idea of individual responsibility reigns supreme, the vocation of sociology remains vital. In the same way that at the end of the nineteenth century it was radical to claim that poverty was the result not of dubious morality or weak character, but of systematic economic exploitation, it is now urgent to claim not that the failures of our private lives are the result of weak psyches, but rather that the vagaries and miseries of our emotional life are shaped by institutional arrangements. The purpose of this book is thus to vastly shift the angle of analysis of what is wrong in contemporary relationships. What is wrong are not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but the set of social and cultural tensions and contradictions that have come to structure modern selves and identities.
For example, when (heterosexual) love became the constitutive theme of the novel, few noticed that it became tightly intertwined with another theme, no less central to the bourgeois novel and to modernity at large: that of social mobility. As suggested by the two examples of Catherine and Emma discussed earlier, romantic love was almost always inevitably interwoven with the question of social mobility. That is, one of the central questions asked by the novel (and later by Hollywood cinema) was and remains whether and under what conditions love can trump social mobility, and, vice versa, whether socio-economic compatibility should be a necessary condition for love. The shaping of the modern individual was at one and the same time emotional and economic, romantic and rational. This is because the centrality of love in marriage (and in the novel) coincided with the waning of marriage as a tool of family alliances and marked the new role of love for social mobility. But far from marking the demise of economic calculus, it in fact deepened it, as women and men would increasingly move up (and down) the social ladder through the social alchemy of love. Because love made the fit between marriage and strategies of economic and social reproduction less explicit and formal, the modern choice of a mate progressively included and mixed both emotional and economic aspirations. Love now incorporated and contained rational and strategic interests, merging the economic and emotional dispositions of actors into one single cultural matrix. One of the key cultural transformations accompanying modernity was thus the co-mingling of love with economic strategies of social mobility. This is also why this book contains a number of methodological biases: it addresses heterosexual love more markedly than homosexual love because the former contains a denial of the economic underpinnings of the choice of a love object, and fuses both economic and emotional logics. These two logics are sometimes harmoniously and seamlessly reconciled, but they equally often splinter the romantic sentiment from within. The co-mingling of love and economic calculus at once makes love central to modern lives and is at the heart of the conflicting pressures to which love has been submitted. This intertwining of the emotional and the economic is thus one of the threads through which I offer to reinterpret love in modernity, showing how choice, rationality, interest, competition, have transformed the modes of meeting, seeking, courting a partner, ways of consulting and making decisions about one’s sentiments. Another bias of this book is that it addresses the condition of love more markedly from the standpoint of women than of men, and more especially from the standpoint of those women who opt largely for marriage, reproduction, and middle-class lifestyles. As I hope to show here, it is the combination of these aspirations and their location in a free market of sexual encounters which creates new forms of emotional domination of women by men. [...]
[...] Psychic suffering contains an experience which threatens the integrity of the self. Suffering in contemporary intimate interpersonal relationships reflects the situation of the self in conditions of modernity. Romantic suffering is not parenthetical to presumably more serious forms of suffering because, as I hope to show, it displays and performs the dilemmas and forms of powerless-ness of the self in modernity. As I document by analyzing a variety of sources (in-depth interviews, Internet sites, the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, the Independent’s sex column, novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, self-help books to dating, love, and romance)32 experiences of abandonment and unreciprocated love are as crucial to one’s life narrative as other (political or economic) forms of social humiliation.