{"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":141,"pdf_page":148,"physical_index":148,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f50c699858be6c2e7a77cd83411fa8917792ee149faf319b13ede79b6bd1d9c5"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"What would happen if we just stopped? Agamben's evocation of singularity and belonging detached from a compulsion to cultivate an individual identity or to identify with a specific group opens up the potential for another form of belonging, one unlimited by the divisions and restrictions of being this or that. He suggests, moreover, that the beings whowould so belongare not subjects in the sense that European philosophy or psychoanalysis might theorize. If some sort of identity served as a locus of ethical personality, and the search for this identity has been configured as an important ethical task (perhaps, as some philosophers would have it, the task of each human life), then whatever beings would emerge as those who are not subject to such tasks. Unburdened by the obligations of being this or that, of being bound by choices or words or expectations of meaning, whatever beings could flow into and through community without presuppositions.\n\nAgamben asks what the politics of whatever singularity could be, what sort of politics could accompany “a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist)... but by belonging itself.\"28 Because the course of his exposition of whatever being takes him through Saint Thomas Aquinas and limbo as the habitat of the souls of unbaptized children, the political question seems particularly vexing. Those in limbo lack God, but they don't sufferfrom this lack; they know nothing of it: “Neither blessed like the elected, nor hopeless like the damned, they are infused with a joy with no outlet.\"29 With limbo long synonymous with a certain stuckness, with an in-between condition of persistence that is neither here nor there, withan inability to go forward or back, it is difficult to register a politics that we might admire or seek.\n\nMore specifically, I can locate here neither a politics I admire nor any sort of struggle at all. What could motivate whatever beings? What might move them? As Agamben conceives them, they seek nothing, they lack nothing. They co-belong without struggle or antagonism. It would seem, then, that they are not political beings at all; their being is apolitical, beyondpolitics. They neither attack nor resist; they are neither inside nor outside. Perhaps it makes better sense, then, to think of the politics of whatever beings in terms of their setting. They are moved and propelled; they circuit through contemporary networks.\n\nSouls in limbo belong in neither heaven nor hell. This condition of belonging to neither is limbo. It is also Agamben's model for a politics of absolute enmity toward the state. Agamben writes that “a being radically devoid of any representable identity would be absolutely irrelevant to the State.\"3º And so the state or, better, states, would continue, unbothered and unlimited by the demands of people. States could attack and imprison, exploit and ignore—the future unfolding in and through militarized predatory robot drones. Whatever beings lack nothing and therefore demand nothing (and, presumably, they all get along just fine). No wonder they are irrelevant to the state. The state can do what it wills. Whatever.\n\nFor Agamben, however, rather than easing the way for unchecked state power, whatever being is the “principal enemy of the State.\"The state, he tells us, \"cannot\n\nWhatever Blogging\n\n141","previous_page":140,"next_page":null}