Agamben's version of co-belonging inverts the political imaginary of radicals from the 1960s and 1970s: many feared erasure, being commodified, being indistinguishable, being one of a mass. They rejected the terms of mass society and mass media, the forced collectivizing oftheir self-perception into the envelope of “us." Agamben accepts the mass without its collective form, thereby reformatting the momentary joy of dissolution into a whole as the singularity of belonging. Whatever beings do not shed or overcome their identities in an experience of massness. They already lack them. They can simply be as they are. The mass is the missing link—displaced mediator—the function of which is à chiasmatic inversion of properties. Baudrillard writes, "Banality, inertia, apoliticism used to be fascist; they are in the process of becoming revolutionary—without changing meaning, without ceasing to have meaning."26 Baudrillard's warning to leftists in the 1970s hits its target today: how is it that the evacuation of politics comes to embody the political as such?
Nevertheless, for Agamben, the petty bourgeoisie displace or stand in for the mass, presenting thereby a new opportunity, an opportunity for a form of belonging unhindered by the division and specificity of“belonging to."Agamben writes:
Because if instead of continuingto search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper beingthus not an identity and anindividual property buta singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity—if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication with the incommunicable.27
We have been produced as subjects unlikely to coalesce, subjects resistant to solidarity and suspicious ofcollectivity. Central to this production is the cultivation and feeding ofa sense of unique and special individuality. Every sperm is sacred: so began the story of our unique cellular lives. Or every potential genetic combination carries with it the remarkable potentiality we locate in our individuated selves. Each voice must be heard (but they don't combine into a chorus). Each vote must be counted (but they add up to less than a movement). Each person must be visible (but then we don't see à group). Personalized participatory media is a problem not only because of its personalization ofparticipation. More than that is its injunction that we participate ever more in personalization: make your own avatar, video, profile, blog, mobster, video, app. Participation becomes indistinguishable from personalization, the continued cultivation of one's person. Leave your mark.
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Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor