The challenge, then, is to confront network activity not with negation but intensification. What is essential is not the actual, certainly not the enforced identi– ties of consumer capital and the management of the self, but precisely nonidentity: the nonidentical nature of the world to which Western thought perpetually ascribes identity. Beyond the shattering of the individual self, what remains to be thought is the nonidenticality of the crowd, or the masses, or populations. The implication of the shattered self is that the crowd is no longer conceivable in terms of a relation between individual and collective. For Laclau, any social or political group emerges neither because the group exists “naturally" (as in some descriptions of nationalism), nor as an aggregation of individuals, but as the concatenation of a more primal human condition:
The unity of the group is, in my view, the result of an articulation of demands. This articulation, however, does not correspond to a stable and positive configuration which could be grasped as a unified whole: on the contrary, since it is in the nature of all demands to present claims to a certain established order, it is in a peculiar relation with that order, being both inside and outside it. As this order cannot fully absorb the demand, it cannot constitute itself as a coherent totality. (Laclau 2005: ix)
But in the database economy, demand is always the object of management. Demand management demeans demand as engine of socialization. Even where it is most lauded as the new mode of extraction of surplus value from populations, in crowdsourcing, the crowd is treated as an emergent property of probabilities whose behaviors, however, are held to be foreseeable. In this actuarial foreknowledge, it is crucial to discern the object of biopolitical management, an object that is singular. The population managed in biopolitics is a single entity. This is the sovereign people of constitutional representative democracy, the sovereign consumer of the market economy. There is only one market in the global economy. But that entity is incomplete and contradictory: neither whole nor universal, it fails in its quest for totality.
We live, politically, in a world governed by the distinction between the rights of the citizen and the rights of man. As Anthony Downey (2009: 109) expresses it, “What if the refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed are not only constitutive of modernity but its emblematic subjects?" Like Agamben (1995), who provides his premise, Downey misses a key issue—that the refugee, along with those other others, is not a subject, because she is not within the population. Assimilating the stateless and the excluded wil remove the last great barrier to cosmopolis, the last political refusal of a system which today encourages the free flow of money and goods and only restricts the free flow ofpeople.
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The ShiftingSites of Labor Markets