{"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":176,"pdf_page":183,"physical_index":183,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"4de575e93524c39fac5343bc28dbea77b7c2a4673a046c8b070c4cbec35202ad"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"However, before proceeding to my central thesis here regarding the worldwide foreclosure of democracy through the demotion of discourse, let us return to Foucault regarding the compensatory cultural shifts resulting from the“demotion of language to the mere status of object\"during the 19th century.Speaking about the practice of exegesis, he writes:\n\n[NJow it is not a matter of rediscovering some primary word that has been buried in [language], but of disturbing the words we speak, of denouncing the grammatical habits of our thinking, of dissipating the myths that animate our words, of rendering once more noisy and audible the element of silence that all discussion carries with it as it is spoken. The first book of Das Kapital is an exegesis of “value\"; all Nietzsche is an exegesis of a few Greek words; Freud, the exegesis of all those unspoken phrases that support andat the same time undermine our apparent discourse, our fantasies, our dreams, our bodies. Philology, as the analysis of what is said in the depths of discourse, has become the modern form of criticism. Where, at the end of the eighteenth century, it was a matter of fixing the frontiers of knowledge, it will now be one ofseeking to destroy syntax, to shatter tyrannical modes of speech, to turn words around in order to perceive all that is being said through them and despite them. God is perhaps not so much a region beyond knowledge as something prior to the sentences we speak and if Western man is inseparable from him, it is not because of some invincible propensity to go beyond the frontiers of experience, but because his language ceaselessly foments him in the shadow of his laws [quoting Nietzsche]: \"I fear that we shall never rid ourselves of God, since we stil believe in grammar.²4\n\nThe analysis of the transformed status of language, so meticulously and brazenly undertaken by Foucault, stands as one of the important intellectual achievements of what, until recently, could be said to be“our times.\" The consequences of the demotionof language from its classical transparency to a medium still has to be reckoned with. Foucault elucidates three compensations: (1) language is understood as a necessary medium for knowledge, (2) there is a critical value bestowed upon the study of language, and (3) “the appearance of literature, of literature as such\"25 a practice in which language “has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being.\"26While this last isan arresting, even beautiful, statement, we could well ask for whom does it shine and for whom might it sparkle or flame? And furthermore, why the visual metaphor? Why write laudatory sentences about the literary when the literary as such would mark the diminution of linguistic power in the world? Without really embarking on an argument here, but only suggesting a line of inquiry, could one resituate the work of Foucault in relation to the history of media technology? Would a Kittlerization of Foucault rescue him (or at least us) from remaining as Edward Said said, “the scribe of power?\"One who abrogates his agency (andnot only in his rejection of Marxism)in the recording of Power's micropolitics? Might an apparatus centered historicization of Foucault'sclaims potentially transform the aspects of hiswork that are ideological in Regis Debray's sense of the term“ideology: the play of ideas in the silence of technology.\" What might become visible if the archeological approach gives way to the mediological approach would be not simply discursive practices—or even, as with biopower, the interface of the body with the technics of the social—but the historico-materiality of mediation: the machines, platforms, techniques, and concrete media of inscription, transmission, and dissemination, and perhaps (above all?), the investments in and complex financialization of these apparatuses. What might then appear is the multiple capitalist bases on which “man\"has been invested in and built, and is now meeting his end.\n\n176\n\nThe Violence ofParticipation","previous_page":175,"next_page":177}