{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","uuid":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","normalized_title":"digitallabortheinternetasplaygroundandfactory","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","isbns":["9780415896948","9780415896955","9780203145791"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":267,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/DIGITAL%20LABOR%20THE%20INTERNET%20AS%20PLAYGROUND%20AND%20FACTORY","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/search"},"page":{"printed_page":139,"pdf_page":146,"physical_index":146,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"85935466e6fc7469d422de2ec11d00b13974aee6d2c8b2da3faedf314ce9eae5"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"8\n\nAgamben affiliates whatever being with the capitalist commodification of the human body and the technologization of its image in the spectacle.23 The photographic images proliferating out ofadvertising and pornography are \"neither generic nor individual, neither an image of the divinity nor an animal form.\"In them, the body \"now became something truly whatever.\"The \"whatever\"Agamben invokes here suggests a new approach to Guy Debord's society of the spectacle, one that takes back from the spectacle the positive properties of being in language and being in common that it expropriates. For Agamben, whatever being is the mode of being in the comingcommunity. Produced in capitalist spectacle, whatever being is harbinger of a better future, one wherein the division held together in the unity of the spectacle is ultimately overcome. Because he wants to wrest transformations of human nature from their entrapment in the spectacle, Agamben suggests the “geometrical splendor\" of the legs of a long line of dancing girls.\n\nAnother way to think about the idea of “neither generic nor individual” is to link it to the normalizing, aggregating aspect of disciplinary power. Modern disciplinaryinstitutions, be they home, school, factory, or state, produced individuals astypes, asoccupants of social roles or positions. Recall photographs of Levittown, of soldiers in training, of graduates in their caps and gowns. The self-governing, reflective subject idealized as the outcome of the disciplines may have understood himself to be an individual, but more than that, he was an instance ofa form. Autonomy appeared through individuality.\n\nAgamben associates the planetary petty bourgeoisie with a frustration with and impropriety toward identities rooted in physical particularities or differences in language, tradition, or culture. He concedes that fascism and Nazism had already recognized in the petty bourgeoisie the “decline of the old social subject.\"24 He jumps quickly over their nationalism as a false popular identity, though, as he asserts a new planetary refusal of identity.\n\nWith this jump, Agamben omits the mass as a modern collective force that is also neither generic nor individual. The mass is a displaced mediator between the planetary bourgeoisie and whatever being. In Jean Baudrillard's formulation,“The mass is without attribute, predicate, quality, or reference.\"25Agamben's whatever beings appear as singularizations of the mass. Bereft of qualities of their own, they are not the same as the mass resolved into its components: masses were masses of subjects, combinations and aggregations and accumulations of people across and against modernity's attempts to separate and order them. If the mass results from a combination of bodies that omits their specificities, whatever being skips the step of amassing to treat the indistinction, the without-qualities, not as a result of belonging to the mass but as the condition of belonging as such.\n\nWhatever Blogging\n\n139","previous_page":138,"next_page":140}