{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","id":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","uuid":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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":325,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":7,"pdf_page":177,"physical_index":177,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1f011faef232882de54c3e1831a16ae6601af2166c0e24b14b3cc4cf394edf60"},"chapter":"Digital Labor","content":"The change marked by the end of the Cold War has been tagged the end of ideology, the end of the Keynesian welfare state, the decline of the Fordist model of production, and the beginning of globalization, the information age, the network society, communicative capitalism. In their account of the new formation, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri accentuate the passage from disciplinary society to the society of control. Focusing on the capitalist societies of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, they point out how disciplinary logics worked primarily within the institutions of civil society to produce subjects. By the end of the twentieth century, these mediating institutions—the nuclear family, the prison, the school, the union, and the local church—were in crisis. The spaces, logics, practices, and norms previously coalescing into social and economic institutions have broken down and apart. Their eficacy is now indeterminate. In other words, in some instances, the release of an institutional logic from its spatial constraints has given it all the more force; in other instances, the opposite has occurred.\n\nCorresponding to this pervasive dissolution and indeterminacy (which itself necessarily correlates with the economic changes of informatization and the ubiquitous spread of networked communications) is an “indeterminacy of the form of the subjectivities produced.”<sup>18</sup> Hardt and Negri argue that the old political subject—the citizen-subject of an autonomous political sphere, the disciplined subject of civil society, the liberal subject willing to vote in public and then return home to his private domesticity—can no longer serve as a presupposition of theory or action. Racial, ethnic, and sexual identifications are similarly less fixed, less stable, less available as determinate subject positions. In their place, we find fluid, hybrid, and mobile subjectivities who are undisciplined, who have not internalized specific norms and constraints, and who can now only be controlled.\n\nPut in psychoanalytic terms, symbolic identity is increasingly meaningless in the society of control. What we have instead are imaginary identities sustained by excessjouissance—that is, by an injunction to enjoy. More specifically, symbolic identity involves the subject’s identification with an ego ideal—that is, with a perspective before whom the subject sees himself and his actions. Imaginary identification refers to the image that the subject adopts of himself. Symbolic identification, we might say, establishes the setting that determines which images appear and how it is that some are more compelling or attractive to us than others. Imaginary identification refers only to my self-image.\n\nIn disciplinary society, normative expectations coalesced around determinate social roles. Presuming the gaze of the school, church, family, or state, one could imagine oneself in diferent positions, positions that would either comply with or transgress institutional norms. I can be a conscientious student, faithful believer, dutiful daughter, good citizen. I can also be a delinquent, backsliding, worthless traitor. Even as the images difer, the symbolic identity of the gaze remains the same. In the wake of the decline of symbolic eficiency, the dissolution of disciplinary society, this gaze loses its prior force. We aren’t sure if it’s operative, if others believe it: is the good student a cog, uncreative, thinking inside the box, a goody-two-shoes? Does the Other actually admire and applaud transgression, and, if so, is it then more transgressive not to be transgressive since that’s what the Other wants? Encountering the endless possibilities of contemporary reflexivity, postdisciplinary subjects are propelled to move through a variety of imaginary identities. We imagine ourselves one way, then another, never sure of how we appear because we don’t know before whom we appear.\n\n7","previous_page":6,"next_page":8}