In other words, the spirit of capitalism can also serve as a springboard for both the critique of capitalism and for its transformation. In the hands of Boltanski and Chiapello, the spirit of capitalism becomes a mediating concept between the legitimation of the prevailing constellation of power and its curbing. It lies midway between performing a discursive servitude to capitalism and offering a springboard for its critique; between acting as an ideology that disguises particularistic interests and a justification that can potentially constrain their materialization. According to Boltanski and Chiapello, the new capitalism and its spirit were constructed within the coordinates and terms set by the artistic critique of capitalism. More specifically, they claim that the new spirit of capitalism has been constructed as a response to the artistic critique of capitalism (that which laments the alienating consequences of capitalism). The upshot of this has been a suppression of the social critique of capitalism (that which laments exploitation).
Why Study the Ideology of Techno-capitalism?
Notwithstanding their majestic analysis of its new spirit, however, Boltanski and Chiapello completely ignore the role that technology discourse plays in the legitimation of the new capitalism. Put differently, while Boltanski and Chiapello promise to examine the “ideological changes that have accompanied recent transformations in capitalism” (2005, 3), they neglect to account for the changes in the ideology of technology that have accompanied these very transformations. This book wishes to bring technology—as a central material and ideological component—into the analysis of contemporary capitalism. It takes their framework as its entry point and registers the new spirit of capitalism as it is filtered out through the discourse on network technology, or what Castells calls “the spirit of informationalism” (Castells 1996, 195–200) and what I term the “spirit of networks.”
Previous analyses have already pointed to the ideological underpinnings of contemporary technology discourse (Frank 2000; Barbrook and Cameron 1996; Best and Kellner 2000; Gere 2002; Borsook 2000; Turner 2006; Aune 2001; Mosco 2004; Wajcman 2004; Dean 2002). Such analyses tend to present contemporary technology discourse as false, utopian, or mythical. Thus, for example, Frank (2000) argues that information technology came to be “the most powerful symbolic weapon in the arsenal of market populism” (Frank 2000, 57), with the Internet specifically providing “a sort of cosmic affirmation of the principles of market populism” (Frank 2000, 79). Aune concludes that the digital discourse played a decisive role in the ideological struggle of Selling the Free Market (Aune
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age