The Flexible Personality:
For a New Cultural Critique
by Brian Holmes
The events of the century's turn, from Seattle to New York, have
shown that
a sweeping critique of capitalist globalization is possible, and
urgently
necessary - before the level of violence in the world
dramatically
increases. The beginnings of such a critique exist, with the
renewal of
"unorthodox" economics.1 But now one can look further,
toward a critique of
contemporary capitalist culture.
To be effective, a cultural critique must
show the links between
the major articulations of power and the more-or-less trivial
aesthetics of
everyday life. It must reveal the systematicity of social
relations and
their compelling character for everyone involved, even while it
points to
the specific discourses, images and emotional attitudes that
hide
inequality and raw violence. It must shatter the balance of
consent, by
flooding daylight on exactly what a society consents to, how it
tolerates
the intolerable. Such a critique is difficult to put into
practice because
it must work on two opposed levels, coming close enough to grips
with the
complexity of social processes to convince the researchers whose
specialized knowledge it needs, while finding striking enough
expressions
of its conclusions to sway the people whom it claims to describe
- those
upon whose behavior the transformation of the status quo
depends.
This kind of critique existed very recently
in our societies, it
gave intellectual focus to an intense and widespread
dissatisfaction in the
sixties and seventies, it helped change an entire system. Today
it seems to
have vanished. No longer does the aesthetic dimension appear as
a contested
bridge between the psyche and the objective structures of
society. It is as
though we had lost the taste for the negative, the ambition of
an
anti-systemic critique. In its place we find endless variants on
Anglo-American "cultural studies" - which is an
affirmative strategy, a
device for adding value, not for taking it away. The history of
cultural
studies argues today for a renewal of the negative, of ideology
critique.
When it emerged in the late fifties,
British cultural studies tried
to reverse aesthetic hierarchies by turning the sophisticated
language of
literary criticism onto working-class practices and forms.
Elevating
popular expressions by a process of contamination that also
transformed the
elite culture, it sought to create positive alternatives to the
new kinds
of domination projected by the mass media. The approach greatly
diversified
the range of legitimate subjects and academic styles, thereby
making a real
contribution to the ideal of popular education.2 What is more,
cultural
studies constituted a veritable _school_ on the intellectual
left,
developing a strategic intention. However, its key theoretical
tool was the
notion of a differential reception, or "negotiated
reading" - a personal
touch given to the message by the receiver. The notion was
originally used
to reveal working-class interpretations of dominant messages, in
a model
still based on class consciousness.3 But when the emphasis on
reception was
detached from the dynamics of class, in the course of the 1980s,
cultural
studies became one long celebration of the particular twist that
each
individual or group could add to the globalized media product.
In this way,
it gave legitimacy to a new, transnational consumer ideology.4
This is the
discourse of alienation perfected, appropriated, individualized,
ethnicized, made one's own.
How can cultural critique become effective again today? I am
going
to argue for the construction of an "ideal type,"
revealing the
intersection of social power with intimate moral dispositions
and erotic
drives.5 I call this ideal type the _flexible personality_. The
word
"flexible" alludes directly to the current economic
system, with its casual
labor contracts, its just-in-time production, its informational
products
and its absolute dependence on virtual currency circulating in
the
financial sphere. But it also refers to an entire set of very
positive
images, spontaneity, creativity, cooperativity, mobility, peer
relations,
appreciation of difference, openness to present experience. If
you feel
close to the counter-culture of the sixties-seventies, then you
can say
that these are _our_ creations, but caught in the distorting
mirror of a
new hegemony. It has taken considerable historical effort from
all of us to
make the insanity of contemporary society tolerable.
I am going to look back over recent history
to show how a form of
cultural critique was effectively articulated in intellectual
and then in
social terms, during the post-World War II period. But I will
also show how
the current structures of domination result, in part, from the
failures of
that earlier critique to evolve in the face of its own
absorption by
contemporary capitalism.
Question Authority
The paradigmatic example of cultural critique in the postwar
period is the
Institut für Sozialforschung - the autonomous scholarly
organization known
as the Frankfurt School. Its work can be summed up with the
theoretical
abbreviation of Freudo-Marxism. But what does that mean?
Reviewing the
texts, you find that from as early as 1936, the Institut
articulated its
analysis of domination around the psychosociological structures
of
authority. The goal of the _Studien über Autorität und Familie_
was to
remedy "the failure of traditional Marxism to explain the
reluctance of the
proletariat to fulfill its historical role."6 This
"reluctance" - nothing
less than the working-class embrace of Nazism - could only be
understood
through an exploration of the way that social forces unfold in
the psyche.
The decline of the father's authority over the family, and the
increasing
role of social institutions in forming the personality of the
child, was
shown to run parallel to the liquidation of liberal, patrimonial
capitalism, under which the nineteenth-century bourgeois owner
directly
controlled an inherited family capital. Twentieth-century
monopoly
capitalism entailed a transfer of power from private individuals
to
organized, impersonal corporations. The psychological state of
masochistic
submission to authority, described by Erich Fromm, was
inseparable from the
mechanized order of the new industrial cartels, their ability to
integrate
individuals within the complex technological and organizational
chains of
mass-production systems. The key notion of "instrumental
reason" was
already in germ here. As Marcuse wrote in 1941: "The facts
directing man's
thought and action are
those of the machine process, which itself appears
as the embodiment of rationality and expediency. Mechanized mass
production is filling the empty spaces in which individuality
could assert
itself."7
The Institut's early work combined a
psychosociological analysis of
authoritarian discipline with the philosophical notion of
instrumental
reason. But its powerful anti-systemic critique could not
crystallize
without studies of the centrally planned economy, conceived as a
social and
political response to the economic crisis of the 1930s. Institut
members
Friedrich Pollock and Otto Kirchheimer were among the first to
characterize
the new "state capitalism" of the 1930s.8 Overcoming
the traditional
Marxist portrayal of monopoly capitalism, which had met its
dialectical
contradiction in the crisis of 1929, they described a definitive
shift away
from the liberal system where production and distribution were
governed by
contractualized market relations between individual agents. The
new system
was a managerial capitalism where production and distribution
were
calculated by a central-planning state. The extent of this shift
was
confirmed not only by the Nazi-dominated industrial cartels in
Germany, but
also by the Soviet five-year plans, or even the American New
Deal,
anticipating the rise of the Keynesian welfare state. Authority
was again
at the center of the analysis. "Under state
capitalism," wrote Pollock,
"men meet each other as commander or commanded."9 Or,
in Kirchheimer's
words: "Fascism characterizes the stage at which the
individual has
completely lost his independence and the ruling groups have
become
recognized by the state as the sole legal parties to political
compromise."10
The resolution of economic crisis by
centralized planning for total
war concretely revealed what Pollock called the "vital
importance" of an
investigation "as to whether state capitalism can be
brought under
democratic control." This investigation was effectively
undertaken by the
Institut during its American exile, when it
sought to translate its
analysis of Nazism into the American terms of the Cold War. What
we now
remember most are the theory and critique of the culture
industry, and the
essay of that name; but much more important at the time was a
volume of
sociological research called _The Authoritarian Personality_,
published in
1950.11 Written under Horkheimer's direction by a team of four
authors
including Adorno, the book was an attempt to apply statistical
methods of
sociology to the empirical identification of a fascistic
character
structure. It used questionnaire methods to demonstrate the
existence of a
"new anthropological type" whose traits were rigid
conventionalism,
submission to authority, opposition to everything subjective,
stereotypy,
an emphasis on power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism,
the
projection outside the self of unconscious emotional impulses,
and an
exaggerated concern with sexual scandal. In an echo to the
earlier study of
authority, these traits were correlated with a family structure
marked not
by patriarchal strength but rather weakness, resulting in
attempts to sham
an ascendancy over the children which in reality had devolved to
social
institutions.
_The Authoritarian Personality_ represents the culmination of a
deliberately programmed, interdisciplinary construction of an
ideal type: a
polemical image of the social self which could then guide and
structure
various kinds of critique. The capacity to focus different
strands of
critique is the key function of this ideal type, whose
importance goes far
beyond that of the statistical methodologies used in the
questionnaire-study. Adorno's rhetorical and aesthetic
strategies, for
example, only take on their full force in opposition to the
densely
constructed picture of the authoritarian personality. Consider
this quote
from the essay on "Commitment" in 1961:
Newspapers and magazines of the radical
Right constantly stir up
indignation against what is unnatural, over-intellectual, morbid
and
decadent: they know their readers. The insights of social
psychology into
the authoritarian personality confirm them. The basic features
of this type
include conformism, respect for a petrified façade of opinion
and society,
and resistance to impulses that disturb its order or evoke inner
elements
of the unconscious that cannot be admitted. This hostility to
anything
alien or alienating can accommodate itself much more easily to
literary
realism of any provenance, even if it proclaims itself critical
or
socialist, than to works which swear allegiance to no political
slogans,
but whose mere guise is enough to disrupt the whole system of
rigid
coordinates that governs authoritarian personalities...12
Adorno seeks to show how Brechtean or Sartrean political
engagement
could shade gradually over into the unquestioning embrace of
order that
marks an authoritarian state. The fractured, enigmatic forms of
Beckett or
Schoenberg could then be seen as more politically significant
than any call
to rally collectively around a cause. Turned at once against the
weak
internal harmonies of a satisfied individualism, and against the
far more
powerful totalizations of an exploitative system, aesthetic form
in
Adorno's vision becomes a dissenting force through its refusal
to falsely
resolve the true contradictions. As he writes in one of his
rhetorical
phrases: "It is not the office of art to spotlight
alternatives, but to
resist by its form alone the course of the world, which
permanently puts a
pistol to men's heads."13
The point is not to engage in academic
wrangling over exactly how
Adorno conceived this resistance of contradictory forms. More
interesting
is to see how a concerted critique can help give rise to
effective
resistance in society. The most visible figure here is Herbert Marcuse,
whose 1964 book _One-Dimensional Man_ became an international
best-seller,
particularly in France. Students in the demonstrations of May
'68 carried
placards reading "Marx, Mao, Marcuse." But this only
shows how Marcuse,
with his directly revolutionary stance, could become a kind of
emblem for
converging critiques of the authoritarian state, industrial
discipline and
the mass media. In France, Sartre had written of
"serialized man," while
Castoriadis developed a critique of bureaucratic productivism.
In America,
the business writer William Whyte warned against the
"organization man" as
early as 1956, while in 1961 an outgoing president, Dwight D.
Eisenhower,
denounced the technological dangers of the
"military-industrial complex."
Broadcast television was identified as the major propaganda tool
of
capitalism, beginning with Vance Packard's book _The Hidden
Persuaders_ in
America in 1957, then continuing more radically with Barthes'
_Mythologies_
in France and above all, Debord's _Society of the Spectacle_.
Ivan Illich
and Paul Goodman attacked school systems as centers of social
indoctrination, R.D. Laing and Félix Guattari called for an
anti-psychiatry, and Henri Lefebvre for an anti-urbanism, which
the
Situationists put into effect with the
practice of the _dérive_. In his
_Essay on Liberation_, written immediately after '68, Marcuse
went so far
as to speak of an outbreak of mass surrealism - which, he
thought, could
combine with a rising of the racialized lumpen proletariat in
the US and a
wider revolt of the Third World.
I don't mean to connect all this subversive
activity directly to
the Frankfurt School. But the "Great Refusal" of the
late sixties and early
seventies was clearly aimed at the military-industrial
complexes, at the
regimentation and work discipline they produced, at the
blandishments of
the culture industry that concealed these realities, and perhaps
above all,
at the existential and psychosocial condition of the
"authoritarian
personality." The right-wing sociologist Samuel Huntington
recognized as
much, when he described the revolts of the 1960s as "a
general challenge to
the existing systems of authority, public and private."14
But that was just
stating the obvious. In seventies America, the omnipresent
counter-culture
slogan was "Question Authority."
What I have tried to evoke here is the
intellectual background of
an effective anti-systemic movement, turned against capitalist
productivism
in its effects on both culture and subjectivity. All that is
summed up in a
famous bit of French graffiti, _On ne peut pas tomber amoureux
d'une courbe
de croissance_ ("You can't fall in love with a growth
curve"). In its very
erotics, that writing on the walls of May '68 suggests what I have
not yet
mentioned, which is the positive content of the anti-systemic
critique: a
desire for equality and social unity, for the suppression of the
class
divide. Self-management and direct democracy were the
fundamental demands
of the student radicals in 1968, and by far the most dangerous
feature of
their leftist ideology.15 As Jürgen Habermas wrote in 1973:
"Genuine
participation of citizens in the processes of political
will-formation,
that is, substantive democracy, would bring to consciousness the
contradiction between administratively socialized production and
the
continued private appropriation and use of surplus
value."16 In other
words, increasing democratic involvement would rapidly show
people where
their real interests lie. Again, Huntington seemed to agree,
when he in
turn described the "crisis" of the advanced societies
as "an excess of
democracy."17
One might recall that the infamous 1975
Trilateral Commission
report in which Huntington made that remark was specifically
concerned with
the growing "ungovernability" of the developed
societies, in the wake of
the social movements of the sixties. One might also recall that
this
specter of ungovernability was precisely the foil against which
Margaret
Thatcher, in England, was able to marshal
up her "conservative
revolution."18 In other words, what Huntington called
"the democratic
distemper" of the sixties was the background against which
the present
neoliberal hegemony arose. And so the question I would now like
to ask is
this: how did the postindustrial societies absorb the
"excess of democracy"
that had been set loose by the anti-authoritarian revolts? Or to
put it
another way: how did the 1960s finally serve to make the 1990s
tolerable?
Divide and Recuperate
"We lack a serious history of co-optation, one that
understands corporate
thought as something other than a cartoon," writes the
American historian
and culture critic Thomas Frank.19 In a history of the
advertising and
fashion industries called _The Conquest of Cool_, he attempts to
retrieve
the specific strategies that made sixties "hip" into
nineties "hegemon,"
transforming cultural industries based on stultifying conformism
into even
more powerful industries based on a plethoric offer of
"authenticity,
individuality, difference, and rebellion." With a host of
examples, he
shows how the desires of middle-class dropouts in the sixties
were rapidly
turned into commodified images and products. Avoiding a simple
manipulation
theory, Frank concludes that the advertisers and fashion
designers involved
had an existential interest in transforming the system. The
result was a
change in "the ideology by which business explained its
domination of the
national life" - a change he relates, but only in passing,
to David
Harvey's concept of "flexible accumulation."20 Beyond
the chronicle of
stylistic co-optation, what still must be explained are the
interrelations
between individual motivations, ideological justifications and
the complex
social and technical functions of a new economic system.
A starting point can be taken from a few
suggestive remarks by the
business analysts Piore and Sabel, in a book called _The Second
Industrial
Divide_ (1984). Here the authors speak of a _regulation crisis_,
which "is
marked by the realization that existing institutions no longer
secure a
workable match between the production and the consumption of
goods."21 They
locate two such crises in the history of the industrial
societies, both of
which we have already considered through the eyes of the
Frankfurt School:
"the rise of the large corporations, in the late nineteenth
century, and of
the Keynesian welfare state, in the 1930s."22 Our own era
has seen a third
such crisis: the prolonged recession of the 1970s, culminating with
the oil
shock of 1973 and accompanied by endemic labor unrest throughout
the
decade. This crisis brought the institutional collapse of the
Fordist
mass-production regime and the welfare state, and thereby set
the stage for
an _industrial divide_, which the authors situate in the early
1980s:
The brief moments when the path of industrial development itself
is at
stake we call industrial divides. At such moments, social
conflicts of the
most apparently unrelated kinds determine the direction of
technological
development for the following decades. Although industrialists,
workers,
politicians and intellectuals may only be dimly aware that they
face
technological choices, the actions that they take shape economic
institutions for long into the future. Industrial divides are
therefore the
backdrop or frame for subsequent regulation crises.23
Basing themselves on observations from Northern Italy, the
authors
describe the emergence of a new production regime called
"flexible
specialization," which they characterize as "a
strategy of permanent
innovation: accommodation to ceaseless change, rather than an
effort to
control it." Abandoning the centralized planning of the
postwar years, this
new strategy works through the agency of small, independent
production
units, employing skilled work teams with multi-use tool kits and
relying on
relatively spontaneous forms of cooperation with other such
teams to meet
rapidly changing market demands at low cost and high speed.
These kinds of
firms seemed to hark back to the craftsmen of the early
nineteenth century,
before the first industrial divide that led to the introduction
of heavy
machinery and the mass-production system. To be sure, in 1984
Piore and
Sabel could not yet have predicted the importance that would be
acquired by
one single set of products, far from anything associated with
the
nineteenth century: the personal computer and telecommunications
devices.
Nonetheless, the relation they drew between
a crisis in institutional
regulation and an industrial divide can help us understand the
key role
that social conflict - and the cultural critique that helps
focus it - has
played in shaping the organizational forms and the very
technology of the
world we live in.
What then were the conflicts that made
computing and
telecommunications into the central products of the new wave of
economic
growth that began after the 1970s recession? How did these
conflicts affect
the labor, management and consumption regimes? Which social
groups were
integrated to the new hegemony of flexible capitalism, and how?
Which were
rejected or violently excluded, and how was that violence
covered over?
So far, the most complete set of answers to
these questions has
come from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in _Le Nouvel Esprit
du
Capitalism_, published in 1999.24 Their thesis is that each age
or "spirit"
of capitalism must justify its irrational compulsion for
accumulation by at
least partially integrating or "recuperating" the
critique of the previous
era, so that the system can become tolerable again - at least
for its own
managers. They identify two main challenges to capitalism: the
critique of
exploitation, or what they call "social critique,"
developed traditionally
by the worker's movement, and the critique of alienation, or
what they call
"artistic critique." The latter,
they say, was traditionally a minor,
literary affair; but it became vastly more important with the
mass cultural
education carried out by the welfare-state universities.
Boltanski and
Chiapello trace the destinies of the major social groups in
France after
the turmoil of '68, when _critique sociale_ joined hands with
_critique
artiste_. They show how the most organized fraction of the labor
force was
accorded unprecedented economic gains, even as future production
was
gradually reorganized and delocalized to take place outside
union control
and state regulation. But they also demonstrate how the young,
aspiring
managerial class, whether still in the universities or at the
lower
echelons of enterprise, became the major vector for the artistic
critique
of authoritarianism and bureaucratic impersonality. The strong
point of
Boltanski and Chiapello's book is to demonstrate how the
organizational
figure of the _network_ emerged to provide a magical answer to
the
anti-systemic cultural critique of the 1950s and 60s - a magical
answer, at
least for the aspirant managerial class.
What are the social and aesthetic
attractions of networked
organization and production? First, the pressure of a rigid,
authoritarian
hierarchy is eased, by eliminating the complex middle-management
ladder of
the Fordist enterprises and opening up shifting, one-to-one
connections
between network members. Second, spontaneous communication,
creativity and
relational fluidity can be encouraged in a network as factors of
productivity and motivation, thus overcoming the alienation of
impersonal,
rationalized procedures. Third, extended mobility can be
tolerated or even
demanded, to the extent that tool-kits become increasingly
miniaturized or
even purely mental, allowing work to be relayed through
telecommunications
channels. Fourth, the standardization of products that was the
visible mark
of the individual's alienation under the mass-production regime
can be
attenuated, by the configuration of small-scale or even
micro-production
networks to produce limited series of custom objects or
personalized
services.25 Fifth, desire can be stimulated and new, rapidly
obsolescent
products can be created by working directly within the cultural
realm as
coded by multimedia in particular, thus at once addressing the
demand for
meaning on the part of employees and consumers, and resolving
part of the
problem of falling demand for the kinds of long-lasting consumer
durables
produced by Fordist factories.
As a way of summing up all these
advantages, it can be said that
the networked organization gives back to the employee - or
better, to the
"prosumer" - the _property_ of him- or herself that
the traditional firm
had sought to purchase as the commodity of labor power. Rather
than
coercive discipline, it is a new form of internalized vocation,
the
"calling" to creative self-fulfillment in and through
each work project,
that will now shape and direct the employee's behavior. The strict
division
between production and consumption tends to disappear, and
alienation
appears to be over
come, as individuals aspire to mix their labor with their
leisure.26 Even
the firm begins to conceive of work qualitatively, as a sphere
of creative
activity, of self-realization. "Connectionist man" -
or in my term, "the
networker" - is delivered from direct surveillance and
paralyzing
alienation to become the manager of his or her own
self-gratifying
activity, as long as that activity translates at some point into
valuable
economic exchange, the _sine qua non_ for remaining within the
network.
Obviously, the young advertisers and fashion designers described
by
Thomas Frank could see a personal interest
in this loosening of
hierarchies. But the gratifying self-possession and
self-management of the
networker has an ideological advantage as well: responding to
the demands
of May '68, it becomes the perfect legitimating argument for the
continuing
destruction, by the capitalist class, of the heavy, bureaucratic,
alienating, profit-draining structures of the welfare state that
also
represented most all the historical gains that the workers had
made through
social critique. By co-opting the aesthetic critique of
alienation, the
networked enterprise is able to legitimate the gradual exclusion
of the
workers' movement and the destruction of social programs. Thus,
artistic
critique becomes one of the linchpins of the new hegemony
invented in the
early 1980s by Reagan and Thatcher, and perfected in the 1990s
by Clinton
and the inimitable Tony Blair.
To recuperate from the setbacks of the sixties and seventies,
capitalism had to be become doubly flexible, imposing casual
labor
contracts and "delocalized" production sites to escape
the regulation of
the welfare state, and using this fragmented production
apparatus to create
the consumer seductions and stimulating careers that were needed
to regain
the loyalty of potentially revolutionary managers and
intellectual workers.
This double movement is what gives rise to the system conceived
by David
Harvey as a regime of "flexible accumulation" - a
notion that describes not
only the structure and discipline of the new work processes, but
also the
forms and lifespans of the individually tailored and rapidly
obsolescent
products that are created, and the new, more volatile modes of
consumption
that the system promotes.27 For the needs of contemporary
cultural critique
we should recognize, at the crux of this transformation, the
role of the
personal computer, assembled along with its accompanying
telecommunications
devices in high-tech sweatshops across the world. The mainstay
of what has
also been called the "informational economy," the
computer and its
attendant devices are at once industrial and cultural tools,
embodying a
compromise that temporarily resolved the social struggles
unleashed by
artistic critique. The laptop serves as a portable instrument of
control
over the casualized laborer and the fragmented production
process, while at
the same time freeing up the nomadic manager for forms of
mobility both
physical and fantasmatic; it successfully miniaturizes one's
access to the
remaining bureaucratic functions, while opening a private
channel into the
realms of virtual or "fictitious" capital, the
financial markets where
surplus value is produced as if by magic, despite the
accumulating physical
signs of crisis and decay. Technically a calculator, the
personal computer
has been turned by its social usage into an image- and language
machine:
the productive instrument, communications vector and
indispensable receiver
of the immaterial goods and semiotic or even emotional services
that now
form the leading sector of the economy.28
Geographical dispersal and global coordination of manufacturing,
just-in-time production and containerized delivery systems, a
generalized
acceleration of consumption cycles, and a flight of
overaccumulated capital
into the lightning-fast financial sphere, whose movements are at
once
reflected and stimulated by the equally swift evolution of
global media:
these are among the major features of the flexible accumulation
regime as
it has developed since the late 1970s. David Harvey, like most
Marxist
theorists, sees this transnational redeployment of capital as a
reaction to
social struggles, which increasingly tended to limit the levels
of resource
and labor exploitation possible within nationally regulated
space. A
similar kind of reasoning is used, on the other end of the
political
spectrum, by the business analysts Piore and Sabel when they
claim that
"social conflicts of the most apparently unrelated kinds
determine the
course of technological development" at the moment of an
industrial divide.
But it is, I think, only Boltanski and Chiapello's
analytical division of
the resistance movements of the sixties into the two strands of
artistic
and social critique that finally allows us to understand the
precise
aesthetic and communicational forms generated by capitalism's
recuperation
of - and from - the democratic turmoil of the 1960s.
Beneath A New Dominion
If I insist on the _social form_ assumed by
computers and
telecommunications during the redeployment of capital the
recession of the
1970s, it is because of the central role that these
technologies, and their
diverse _uses_, have played in the emergence of what Manuel
Castells
conceives as the global informational economy. Describing the
most advanced
state of this economy, Castells writes that "the products
of the new
information technology industries are information processing
devices or
information processing itself."29 Thus he indicates the way
that cultural
expressions, recoded and processed as multimedia, can enter
value-adding
loop of digitized communications. Indeed, he believes they
_must_ enter it:
"All other messages are reduced to
individual imagination or to
increasingly marginalized face-to-face subcultures."30 But
Castells tends
to see the conditions of entry as fundamentally technical,
without
developing the notion that technology itself can be shaped by
the patterns
of social, political and cultural relations. He conceives
subjective and
collective agency in terms of a primary choice or rejection of
the network,
followed by more or less viable paths within or outside the
dominant
system. The network itself is not a form, but a destiny. Any
systemic
change is out of the question.
A critical approach can instead view
computers and
telecommunications as specific, pliable configurations within
the larger
frame of what Michel Foucault calls "governmental
technologies." Foucault
defines the governmental technologies (or more generally,
"governmentality") as "the entire set of
practices used to constitute,
define, organize and instrumentalize the strategies that
individuals, in
their freedom, can have towards each other."31 At stake
here is the
definition of a level of constraint, extending beyond what
Foucault
conceives as freedom - the open field of power relations between
individuals, where each one tries to "conduct the conduct
of others,"
through strategies that are always reversible - but not yet
reaching the
level of domination, where the relations of power are totally
immobilized,
for example through physical constraint. The governmental
technologies
exist just beneath this level of domination: they are subtler
forms of
collective channeling, appropriate for the government of
democratic
societies where individuals enjoy substantial freedoms and tend
to reject
any obvious imposition of authority.
It is clear that the crisis of
"ungovernability" decried by
Huntington, Thatcher and other neoconservatives in the mid-1970s
could only
find its "resolution" with the introduction of new
governmental
technologies, determining new patterns of social relations; and
it has
become rather urgent to see exactly how these relational
technologies
function. To begin quite literally with the hardware, we could
consider the
extraordinary increase in surveillance practices since the
introduction of
telematics. It has become commonplace at any threshold - border,
cash
register, subway turnstile, hospital desk, credit application,
commercial
website - to have one's personal identifiers (or even body
parts: finger-
or handprints, retina patterns, DNA) checked against records in
a distant
database, to determine if passage will be granted. This appears
as direct,
sometimes even authoritarian control. But as David Lyon
observes, "each
expansion of surveillance occurs with a rationale that, like as
not, will
be accepted by those whose data or personal information is
handled by the
system."32 The most persuasive rationales are increased
security (from
theft or attack) and risk management by various types of
insurers, who
demand personal data to establish contracts. These and other
arguments lead
to the internalization of surveillance imperatives, whereby
people actively
supply their data to distant watchers. But this example of
voluntary
compliance with surveillance procedures is only the tip of the
control
iceberg. The more potent and politically immobilizing forms of
self-control
emerge in the individual's relation to the labor market -
particularly when
the labor in question involves the processing of cultural
information.
Salaried labor, whether performed on site or at distant,
telematically connected locations, can obviously be monitored
for
compliance to the rules (surveillance cameras, telephone checks,
keystroke
counters, radio-emitting badges, etc.). The offer of freelance
labor, on
the other hand, can simply be refused if any irregularity
appears, either
in the product or the conditions of delivery. Internalized
self-monitoring
becomes a vital necessity for the freelancer. Cultural producers
are hardly
an exception, to the extent that they offer their inner selves
for sale: at
all but the highest levels of artistic expression, subtle forms
of
self-censorship become the rule, at least in relation to a
primary
market.33 But deeper and perhaps more insidious effects arise from
the
inscription of cultural, artistic and ethical ideals, once
valued for their
permanence, into the swiftly changing cycles of capitalist
valorization and
obsolescence. Among the data processors of the cultural economy
- including
the myriad personnel categories of media production, design and
live
performance, and also extending through various forms of service
provision,
counseling, therapy, education and so on - a depoliticizing
cynicism is
more widespread than self-censorship. It is described by Paolo
Virno:
At the base of contemporary cynicism is the fact that men and
women learn
by experiencing rules rather than "facts"... Learning
the rules, however,
also means recognizing their unfoundedness and conventionality.
We are no
longer inserted into a single, predefined "game" in
which we participate
with true conviction. We now face several different
"games," each devoid of
all obviousness and seriousness, only the site of an immediate
self-affirmation - an affirmation that is much more brutal and
arrogant,
much more cynical, the more we employ, with no illusions but
with perfect
momentary adherence, those very rules whose conventionality and
mutability
we have perceived.34
In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard identified
language games as an
emerging arena of value-production in capitalist societies
offering
computerized access to knowledge, where what mattered was not
primary
research but transformatory "moves" within an
arbitrary semantic field.35
The unpredictable semiotic transformations of Mallarmé's
"roll of the dice"
became a competitive social gamble, as in stock markets beset by
insider
trading, where chance is another name for ignorance of precisely
who is
manipulating the rules. Here, cynicism is both the cause and
prerequisite
of the player's unbounded opportunism. As Virno notes: "The
opportunist
confronts a flux of interchangeable possibilities, keeping open
as many as
possible, turning to the closest and swerving unpredictably from
one to the
other." He continues: "The computer, for example,
rather than a means to a
univocal end, is a premise for successive 'opportunistic'
elaborations of
work. Opportunism is valued as an indispensable resource
whenever the
concrete labor process is pervaded by diffuse 'communicative
action'...
computational chatter demands 'people of opportunity,' ready and
waiting
for every chance."36 Of course, the true opportunist
consents to a fresh
advantage within any new language game, even if it is political.
Politics
collapses into the flexibility and rapid turnover times of
market
relations. And this is the meaning of Virno's ironic reference
to
Habermas's theory of communicative action. In his analysis of
democracy's
legitimation crisis, Habermas observed that consent in
democratic societies
ultimately rests on each citizen's belief that in cases of doubt
he could
be convinced by a detailed argument: "Only if motivations
for actions no
longer operated through norms requiring justification, and if
personality
systems no longer had to find their unity in identity-securing
interpretive
systems, could the acceptance of decisions without reasons
become routine,
that is, could the readiness to conform absolutely be produced
to any
desired degree."37 What was social science fiction for
Habermas in 1973
became a reality for Virno in the early 1990s: personality
systems without
any aspiration to subjective truth, without any need for secure
processes
of collective interpretation. And worse, this reality was
constructed on
distorted forms of the call by the radical Italian left for an
autonomous
status of labor.
The point becomes clear: to describe the immaterial laborer,
"prosumer," or networker as a _flexible personality_
is to describe a new
form of alienation, not alienation from the vital energy and roving
desire
that were exalted in the 1960s, but instead, alienation from
political
society, which in the democratic sense is not a profitable
affair and
cannot be endlessly recycled into the production of images and
emotions.
The configuration of the flexible
personality is a new form of social
control, in which culture has an important role to play. It is a
distorted
form of the artistic revolt against authoritarianism and
standardization, a
set of practices and techniques for "constituting,
defining, organizing and
instrumentalizing" the revolutionary energies which emerged
in the Western
societies in the 1960s, and which for a time seemed capable of
transforming
social relations.
This notion of the flexible personality,
that is, of subjectivity
as it is modeled and channeled by contemporary capitalism, can
be sharpened
and deepened by looking outside of France and beyond the
aspirant
managerial class, to the destiny of another group of
proto-revolutionary
social actors, the racialized lumpen proletariat in America,
from which
arose the powerful emancipatory forces of the Black, Chicano and
American
Indian movements in the sixties, followed by a host of
identity-groups
thereafter. Here, at one of the points where a real threat was
posed to the
capitalist system, the dialectic of integration and exclusion
becomes more
apparent and more cruel. One the one hand, identity formations
are
encouraged as stylistic resources for commodified cultural
production.
Regional cultures and subcultures are sampled, recoded into
product form,
and fed back to themselves via the immeasurably wider and more
profitable
world market.38 Local differences of reception are seized upon
everywhere
as proof of the open, universal nature of global products.
Corporate and
governmental hierarchies are also made open to significant
numbers of
non-white subjects, whenever they are willing to play the
management game.
This is an essential requirement for the
legitimacy of transnational
governance. But wherever an identity formation becomes
problematic and
seems likely to threaten the urban, regional, or geopolitical
balance - I'm
thinking particularly of the Arab world, but also of the Balkans
- then
what Boris Buden calls the "cultural touch" operates
quite differently and
turns ethnic identity not into commercial gold, but into the
signifier of a
regressive, "tribal" authoritarianism, which can
legitimately be repressed.
Here the book _Empire_ contains an
essential lesson: that not the
avoidance, but instead the stimulation and management of local
conflicts is
the keystone of transnational governance.39 In fact the United
States
themselves are already governed that way, in a state of
permanent
low-intensity civil war. Manageable, arms-consuming ethnic
conflicts are
perfect grist for the mill of capitalist empire. And the reality
of
terrorism offers the perfect opportunity to accentuate
surveillance
functions - with full consent from the majority of the
citizenry.
With these last considerations we have obviously changed scales,
shifting from the psychosocial to the geopolitical. But to make
the ideal
type work correctly, one should never forget the hardened
political and
economic frames within which the flexible personality evolves.
Piore and
Sabel point out that what they call "flexible
specialization" was only one
side of the response that emerged to the regulation crisis and
recession of
the 1970s. The other strategy is global. It "aims at
extending the
mass-production model. It does so by linking the production facilities
and
markets of the advanced countries with the fastest-growing
third-world
countries. This response amounts to the use of the corporation
(now a
multinational entity) to stabilize markets in a world where the
forms of
cooperation among states can no longer do the job."40 In
effect, the
transnational corporation, piloted by the financial markets, and
backed up
by the military power and legal architecture of the G-7 states,
has taken
over the economic governance of the world from the former
colonial
structure. The "military-industrial complex," decried
as the fountainhead
of power in the days of the authoritarian personality, has been
superseded
by what is now being called the "Wall Street-Treasury
complex" - "a power
elite a la C. Wright Mills, a definite networking of like-minded
luminaries
among the institutions - Wall Street, the Treasury Department,
the State
Department, the IMF, and the World Bank most prominent among
them."41
What kind of labor regime is produced by this networking among
the
power elite? On June 13, 2001, one could read in the newspaper
that a sharp
drop in computer sales had triggered layoffs of 10% of Compaq's
world-wide
workforce, and 5% of Hewlet Packard's - 7,000 and 4,700 jobs
respectively.
In this situation, the highly mobile Dell corporation was poised
to draw a
competitive advantage from its versatile workforce: "Robots
are just not
flexible enough, whereas each computer is unique,"
explained the president
of Dell Europe.42 With its just-in-time production process, Dell
can
immediately pass along the drop in component prices to
consumers, because
it has no old product lying around in warehouses; at the same
time, it is
under no obligation to pay idle hands for regular 8-hour shifts
when there
is no work. Thus it has already grabbed the number-1 position
from Compaq
and it is hungry for more. "It's going to be like
Bosnia," gloated an upper
manager. "Taking such market shares is the chance of a
lifetime."
This kind of ruthless pleasure, against a
background of
exploitation and exclusion, has become entirely typical - an
example of the
opportunism and cynicism that the flexible personality
tolerates.43 But was
this what we really expected from the critique of authority in
the 1960s?
Conclusions
Posing as a WTO representative, a provocateur from the group
known as the
Yes Men recently accepted an invitation to speak at the
"Textiles of the
Future" conference in Tampere, Finland. Taking both an
historical and a
futuristic view, Hank Hardy Unruh explained how the U.S. Civil
War need
never have happened: market laws ensure that cotton-picking
slaves in the
South would eventually have been freed. Feeding, clothing,
housing and
policing a slave in a country like Finland would be absurdly
expensive
today, he argued, compared to wages in a country like Gabon,
where the
costs of food, clothes and lodging are minimal, and even better,
the price
of policing is nil, since the workers are free. But he cautioned
that the
use of a remote workforce had already been tried in countries
like India:
and the screen of his PowerPoint presentation showed footage of
rioters
protesting British rule. To keep a Ghandi-like situation of
workers'
revolt, hand-spun cotton and local self-sufficiency from ever
developing
again in our time, he said, the WTO had a textile solution.
It was at this point that an assistant
appeared before the crowd
and ripped off Mr. Unruh's standard business attire to reveal a
glittering,
golden, skin-tight body suit, equipped with a yard-long inflatable
phallus
suddenly springing up from the groin area and seeming to dance
about with a
life of its own. Animated graphics on the PowerPoint screen
showed a
similarly outfitted man cavorting on a tropical beach: the
Management
Leisure Suit, Unruh explained, was
conceived to transmit pleasing
information through implanted body-chips when things were going
well in the
distant factory. But the end of the protuberance housed a
television
monitor, with a telematic control panel allowing the manager to
intervene
whenever unpleasant information signaled trouble in the making:
"This is
the Employee Visualization Appendage, an instantly deployable
hip-mounted
device with hands-free operation, which allows the manager to
see his
employees directly, as well as receive all relevant data about
them," Unruh
continued,44 while the audience clapped and whistled.
The Yes Men, archetypal figures of our
society's capacity for
consent, seem to have captured every detail of the modern
control and
consumption regime. Could one possibly imagine a better image of
the
style-conscious, tech-savvy, nomadic and hedonistic modern
manager,
connected directly into flows of information, able and compelled
to respond
to any fluctuation, but enjoying his life at the same time -
profiting
lavishly from his stock options, always up in the air between
vocation and
vacation, with unlimited pleasure and technological control
right at his
fingertips? True to its ethics of toleration, the corporate
audience loved
the textiles, the technologies, and the joke as well, at least
until the
entire conference was ridiculed in the press the next day. Did
they even
wince as images of the distant workers - fifteen-year-old Asian
women on a
factory floor, kids squatting at lathes - flashed up rapidly on
the
PowerPoint screen?
***
The flexible personality represents a contemporary form of
governmentality,
an internalized and culturalized pattern of "soft"
coercion, which
nonetheless can be directly correlated to the hard data of labor
conditions, bureaucratic and police practices, border regimes
and military
interventions. Now that the typical characteristics of this
mentality - and
indeed of this "culture-ideology"45 - have come fully
into view, it is high
time that _we_ intervene, as intellectuals and citizens. The
study of
coercive patterns, contributing to the deliberately exaggerated
figure of
an ideal type, is one way that academic knowledge production can
contribute
to the rising wave of democratic dissent. In particular, the
treatment of
"immaterial" or "aesthetic" production
stands to gain from this renewal of
a radically negative critique. Those who admire the Frankfurt
School, or,
closer to us, the work of Michel Foucault, can hardly refuse the
challenge
of bringing their analyses up to date, at a time when the new
system and
style of domination has taken on crystal clear outlines.
Yet it is obvious that the mere description
of a system of
domination, however precise and scientifically accurate, will
never suffice
to dispel it. And the model of governmentality, with all its
nuances,
easily lends itself to infinite introspection, which would be
better
avoided. The timeliness of critical theory has to do with the
possibility
of refusing a highly articulated and effective ideology, which
has
integrated and neutralized a certain number of formerly
alternative
proposals. But it is important to avoid the trap into which the
Frankfurt
School, in particular, seems to have fallen: the impasse of a
critique so
totalizing that it leaves no way out, except through an
excessively
sophisticated, contemplative, and ultimately elitist aesthetics.
Critique
today must remain a fully public practice, engaged in
communicative action
and even communicative activism: the recreation of an oppositional
culture,
in forms specifically conceived to resist the inevitable
attempts at
co-optation.46 The figure of the flexible personality can be
publicly
ridiculed, satirized, its supporting institutions can be
attacked on
political grounds, its traits can be exposed in cultural and
artistic
productions, its description and the search for alternatives to
its reign
can be conceived not as another academic industry - and another
potential
locus of immaterial productivism - but instead as a chance to
help create
new forms of intellectual solidarity, a new collective project
for a better
society. When it is carried out in a perspective of social
transformation,
the exercise of negative critique itself can have a powerful
subjectivizing
force, it can become a way to shape oneself through the demands
of a shared
endeavor.47
The flexible personality is not a destiny.
And despite the
ideologies of resignation, despite the dense realities of
governmental
structures in our "control societies," nothing
prevents the sophisticated
forms of critical knowledge, elaborated in the peculiar
temporality of the
university, from connecting directly with the new and also
complex, highly
sophisticated forms of dissent appearing on the streets. This
type of
crossover is exactly what we have seen in the wide range of
movements
opposing the agenda of neoliberal globalization.48 The
development of an
oppositional "school" can now extend to a vastly wider
field. The
communicational infrastructure has been partially externalized
into
personal computers, and a considerable "knowledge
capital" has shifted from
the schools and universities of the welfare state into the
bodies and minds
of immaterial laborers: these assets can be appropriated by all
those
willing to simply use what is already ours, and to take the
risks of
political autonomy and democratic dissent. The history of
radically
democratic movements can be explored and deepened, while the
goals and
processes of the present movement are made explicit and brought
openly into
debate.
The program is ambitious. But the
alternative, if you prefer, is
just to go on playing someone else's game - always in the air,
between
vocation and vacation, eyes on the latest information, fingers
on the
controls. Rolling the loaded dice, again and again.
Notes
1. The World Social Forum, held for the first time in Porto
Alegre in
January 2001, is symbolic of the turn away from neoclassical or
"supply-side" economics. Another potent symbol can be
found in the charges
leveled by economist Joseph Stiglitz at his former employers,
the World
Bank, and even more importantly, at the IMF - the major
transnational organ
of the neoclassical doctrine.
2. For a short history of cultural studies as a
popular-education movement,
then a more theoretical treatment of its origins and potentials,
see
Raymond Williams, "The Future of Cultural Studies" and
"The Uses of
Cultural Theory," both in _The Politics of Modernism_
(London: Verso,
1989).
3. See Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, et. al., _Resistance
through
Rituals_ (London: Routledge 1993, 1st edition 1975), esp. the
"theoretical
overview" of the volume, pp. 9-74.
4. The reversal becomes obvious with L. Grossberg et. al., eds.,
_Cultural
Studies_ (New York: Routledge, 1992), an anthology that marks
the
large-scale exportation of cultural studies to the American
academic
market.
5. The methodological device of the ideal type was developed by
Max Weber,
particularly in _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism_; as we
shall see, it was taken up as a polemical figure by the
Frankfurt School in
the 1950s.
6. Martin Jay, _The Dialectical Imagination_ (Berkeley:
University of
California Press, 1996/1st ed. 1973), p. 116.
7. Herbert Marcuse, "Some Social Implications of Modern
Technology," in A.
Arato and E. Gebhardt, eds., _The Essential Frankfurt School
Reader_ (New
York: Continuum, 1988), pp. 143, 158.
8. The term "state capitalism" is more familiar as an
indictment of false
or failed communism of the Stalinist Soviet Union, for instance
in Tony
Cliff, _State Capitalism in Russia_ (London: Pluto Press, 1974);
however,
the concept as developed by the Frankfurt School applied, with
variations,
to all the centrally planned economies that emerged after the
Great
Depression.
9. Friedrich Pollock, "State Capitalism: Its Possibilities
and Limitations"
(1941), in ibid., p. 78.
10. Otto Kirchheimer, "Changes in the Structure of
Political Compromise"
(1941), in _The Essential Frankfurt School Reader_, op. cit., p.
70.
11. T.W. Adorno et. al., _The Authoritarian Personality_ (New
York: Harper,
1950).
12. T.W. Adorno, "Commitment" (1962), in _The
Essential Frankfurt School
Reader_, op. cit. p. 303.
13. Ibid., p. 304.
14. M. Crozier, S. Huntington, J. Watanabi, _The Crisis of
Democracy_
(Trilateral Commission, 1975), p. 74.
15. In the words of the Parisian _enragés_: "What are the
essential
features of council power? Dissolution of all external power -
Direct and
total democracy - Practical unification of decision and
execution -
Delegates who can be revoked at any moment by those who have
mandated them
- Abolition of hierarchy and independent specializations -
Conscious
management and transformation of all the conditions of liberated
life -
Permanent creative mass participation - Internationalist
extension and
coordination. The present requirements are nothing less than
this.
Self-management is nothing less." From a May 30, 1968
communiqué, signed
ENRAGÉS-SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE, COUNCIL FOR
MAINTAINING THE
OCCUPATIONS, made available over the Internet by Ken Knabb at:
<www.slip.net/~knabb/SI/May68docs.htm>.
16. Jürgen Habermas, _Legitimation Crisis_ (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1975/1st
German edition 1973), p. 36.
17. _The Crisis of Democracy_, op. cit., p. 113.
18. The origins of the "conservative revolution" are
described by Keith
Dixon in an excellent book, _Les évangélistes du marché_ (Paris:
Raisons
d'agir, 1998).
19. Thomas Frank, _The Conquest of Cool_ (Chicago: The
University of
Chicago Press, 1997), p. 8.
20. Thomas Frank, ibid., p. 229; the references to Harvey are on
pp. 25 and
233.
21. Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, _The Second
Industrial Divide_
(New York: Basic Books, 1984); excerpts in R. Koolhaas, S.
Boeri, S.
Kwinter, et. al., _Mutations_, exhibition catalogue, arc en rêve
centre
d'architecture, Bordeaux, 2000, pp. 643-644.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, _Le Nouvel esprit du
capitalisme_
(Paris: Gallimard, 1999); in this and the following three
paragraphs, I
draw mainly on on pp. 208-85. As the title of the book suggests,
the
authors use Weberian methodology to propose a new ideal type of
capitalist
entrepreneur, "connectionist man." Unlike the
Frankfurt School, they do not
systematically relate this ideal type to a socioeconomic order
and a mode
of production/consumption, but remain primarily concerned with
questions of
legitimation.
25. Andrea Branzi, one of the north Italian designers who led
and theorized
this transition, distinguishes between the "Homogeneous
Metropolis" of
mass-produced industrial design, and what he calls "the
Hybrid Metropolis,
born of the crisis of classical modernity and of rationalism,
which
discovers niche markets, the robotization of the production
line, the
diversified series, and the ethnic and cultural
minorities." "The Poetics
of Balance: Interview with Andrea Branzi," in F. Burkhardt
and C. Morozzi,
_Andrea Branzi_ (Paris: Editions Dis-Voir, undated), p. 45.
26. In _L'individu incertain_ (Paris: Hachette, 1999, 1st ed.
1995),
sociologist Alain Ehrenberg describes the postwar regime of
consumption as
being "characterized by a passive spectator fascinated by
the [television]
screen, with a dominant critique marked by the model of alienation";
he
then links the positive connotations of the computer terminal in
our own
period to "a model of communication promoting
inter-individual exchanges
modeled on themes of activity and relationships, with
self-realization as
the dominant stereotype of consumption" (p. 240). Note the
disappearance of
critique in the second model.
27. David Harvey, _The Condition of Postmodernity_ (Oxford:
Blackwell,
1990), pp. 141-148.
28. In the text "Immaterial Labor," Maurizio Lazarrato
proposes the notion
of aesthetic production: "It is more useful, in attempting
to grasp the
process of the formation of social communication and its
subsumption within
the 'economic,' to use, rather than the 'material' model of
production, the
'aesthetic' model that involves author, reproduction, and
reception.... The
'author' must lose its individual dimension and be transformed
into an
industrially organized production process (with a division of
labor,
investments, orders, and so forth), 'reproduction' becomes a
mass
reproduction organized according to the imperatives of
profitability, and
the audience ('reception') tends to become the
consumer/communicator."
Today, the computer is the key instrument allowing for this
industrial
organization of aesthetic production. In: _Radical Thought in
Italy: A
Potential Politics_, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt
(Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 144.
29. Manuel Castells, _The Rise of the Network Society_ (London:
Blackwell,
1996), p. 67.
30. Manuel Castells, ibid., p. 374.
31. Michel Foucault, "L'éthique du souci de soi comme
pratique de la
liberté," interview with H. Becker, R. Forner-Betancourt,
A. Gomez-Mueller,
in _Dits et ecrits_ (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. IV, p. 728;
also see the
excellent article by Maurizio Lazarrato, "Du biopouvoir à
la biopolitique,"
in _Multitudes_ 1, pp. 45-57.
32. David Lyon, _Surveillance Society_ (Buckingham: Open
University Press,
2001), p. 44.
33. For an analysis of the ways that (self-) censorship operates
in
contemporary cultural production, see A. Corsani, M. Lazzarato,
N. Negri,
_Le Bassin du travail immateriel (BTI) dans le métropole
parisien_ (Paris:
L'Harmattan, 1996), pp. 71-78.
34. Paolo Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,"
in _Radical Thought
in Italy_, op. cit., pp. 17-18.
35. Lyotard, _La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir_
(Paris:
Minuit, 1979), esp. pp. 13-14 et 31-33.
36. Paolo Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,"
op. cit., p. 17.
Compare Sennet's discussion of a 1991 U.S. government report on
the skills
people need in a flexible economy: "in flexible forms of
work, the players
make up the rules as they go along... past performance is no
guide to
present rewards; in each office 'game' you start over from the
beginning."
Richard Sennet, _The Corrosion of Character: The Personal
Consequences of
Work in the New Capitalism_ (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 110.
37. Jürgen Habermas, _Legitimation Crisis_, op. cit., p. 44.
38. Can research work in cultural studies, such as Dick Hebdige's
classic
_Subculture, the Meaning of Style_, now be directly
instrumentalized by
marketing specialists? As much is suggested in the book
_Commodify Your
Dissent_, eds. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York: Norton,
1997), pp.
73-77, where Frank and Dave Mulcahey present a fictional
"buy
recommendation" for would-be stock-market investors:
"Consolidated
Deviance, Inc. ('ConDev') is unarguably the nation's leader, if
not the
sole force, in the fabrication, consultancy, licensing and
merchandising of
deviant subcultural practice. With its string of highly
successful
'SubCultsTM', mass-marketed youth culture campaigns highlighting
rapid
stylistic turnover and heavy cross-media accessorization, ConDev
has
brought the allure of the marginalized to the consuming
public." Whether
cultural studies has been instrumentalized or not, it has
clearly appeared
preferable, in American universities, to the "identity
politics" which grew
directly out of the sixties' emancipation movements and seemed
on the verge
of posing a real threat to cultural hierarchies in the early
19902
(particularly with the controversies over the literary canon and
the book
_I, Rigoberta Menchú_).
39. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, _Empire_ (Cambridge,
Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 198-201: "The triple
imperative of the
Empire is incorporate, differentiate, manage."
40. Piore and Sabel, _The Second Industrial Divide_, op. cit.
41. Jagdish Bhagwati, "The Capital Myth," _Foreign
Affairs_ May/June 1998;
electronic text available at
<www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/Deadline/bhagwati.htm>.
42. "Une crise sans precedent ebranle l'informatique
mondiale," _Le Monde_,
June 13, 2001, p. 18.
43. The ultimate reason for this tolerance appears to be fear.
In
_Souffrance en France_ (Paris: Seuil, 1998), the labor
psychologist
Christophe Dejours studies the "banalization of evil"
in contemporary
management. Beyond the cases of perverse or paranoid sadism,
concentrated
at the top, he identifies the imperative to display courage and
virility as
the primary moral justification for doing the "dirty
work" (selection for
lay-offs, enforcement of productivity demands, etc.). "The
collective
strategy of defense entails a denial of the suffering occasioned
by the
'nasty jobs'.... The ideology of economic rationalism
consists... - beyond
the exhibition of virility - in making cynicism pass for force
of
character, for determination and an elevated sense of collective
responsibilities... in any case, for a sense of
_supra-individual
interests_" (pp. 109-111). Underlying the defense
mechanisms, Dejours finds
both fear of personal responsibility and fear of becoming a
victim oneself;
cf. pp. 89-118.
44. The story of the Yes Men is told by RtMark, Corporate
Consulting for
the 21st Century, at <www.rtmark.com>; or go directly to
<www.theyesmen.org/finland>.
45. The notion that contemporary transnational capitalism
legitimates
itself and renders itself desirable through a
"culture-ideology" is
developed by Leslie Sklair, in _The Transnational Capitalist
Class_
(London: Blackwell, 2001).
46. Hence the paradoxical, yet essential refusal to conceive
oppositional
political practice as the constitution of a party, and indeed of
a unified
social class, for the seizure of state power. Among the better formulations
of this paradox is Miguel Benasayag and Diego Sztulwark, _Du
contre-pouvoir_ (Paris: La Decouverte, 2000). It is no
coincidence that the
book also deals with the possibility of transforming the modes
of knowledge
production: "The difference lies less in belonging or not
to a state
structure like the university, than in the articulation with
alternative
dynamics that coproduce, rework and distribute the forms of
knowledge. That
must be done in sites of 'minority' (i.e. 'non-hegemonic')
counter-power,
which can gradually participate in the creation of a powerful
and vibrant
bloc of counter-power" (p. 113).
47. The notion of a new emulation, on an ethical basis, between
free and
independent subjects seems a far more promising future for the
social tie
than any restoration of traditional authority. Richard Sennet
doesn't hide
a certain nostalgia for the latter in _The Corrosion of
Character_, op.
cit., pp. 115-16; but he remarks, far more interestingly, that
in "the
process view of community... reflected in current political
studies of
deliberative democracy... the evolving expression of
disagreement is taken
to bind people more than the sheer declaration of 'correct'
principles"
(pp. 143-44).
48. For a glimpse into the way intellectuals, activists, workers,
and
artists can cooperate in dissenting actions, see Susan George,
"Fixing or
nixing the WTO," in _Le Monde diplomatique_, January 2000,
available at <
www.en.monde-diplomatique.fr/2000/01/07george>.