---
schema_version: "library-reader-v1"
source_type: "original_book"
title: "Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics"
author: null
edition: null
publisher: null
year: null
isbn: null
library_document_id: "2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5"
source_sha256: "569b98cf47059b34d9ea0cd28116e2c02cc6e5dc1d526cdff92bd1ecb4c3c702"
pdf_physical_page_count: 229
pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0
range_start: 50
range_count: 10
html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5?start=50&limit=10"
markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5.md?start=50&limit=10"
previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5.md?start=40&limit=10"
next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5.md?start=60&limit=10"
---

# Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

> 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=50 | PRINTED_PAGE=40

Writing on Many-2-ManYi a group weblog on social software, Clay Shirley uses a similar argument to explain Ho'V"ard Dean's poor showing in the Iowa caucuses following what appeared to be his remarkable successes on the Internet during the 2ooo presidential campaign. Shirky writes:

We know well from past atempts to use social software to organize groups for political change that it is hard, very hard, because participation in online communities often provides a sense of satisfaction that actually dampens a wilgness to interact with the real world. When you're comuning with like-minded souls, you feel [emphasis in original] like you're accomplishing something by arguing out the smallest details of your perfect future world, · while the imperfect and actual world takes no notice, as is its custom.

There are many reasons for this, but the main one seems to be that the pleasures of life onlie are precisely the way they provide a respite from the vagaries of the real world. Both the way the on)ine environment flattens interaction and the way everything gets arranged for the convenience of the user makes the threshold between talking about changing the world and changing the world even steeper than usual. 39

Interacting with others online feels good. It feels like action, like one is doing something, like one is making a diference. One might argue on a blog for hours on end, failng to convince another person of a single point, and still feel eficacious and involved. But this feeling is unconnected from any larger collective practice that might actually afect change.

My point is not that Web-based activities are trivial or that social softw�e is useless. The Internet is an important medium for connecting and communicating, and the Dean campaign was itmovative in its use of social software to build a vital, supportive movement around Dean's candidacy. But media pleasures should not displace our attention from the ways political change demands much, much more than networked communication and the ways intense mediality provides barriers to action on the ground (it's hard to find time to go door-to-door when one blogs twenty hours a day) . As the Dean campaign also demonstrates, without organized and sustained action, without building relationships with caucus attendees in Iowa, say, Internet politics remains precisely that-a politics of and through new media, and that's all.

40

ONE

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=51 | PRINTED_PAGE=41

The last operation of the technological fetish follows from and is enabled by the previous two: denial. The political purchase of the technological fetish is presumed in advance; it is immediate, understood. File-sharing is political. A website is political. Blogging is political. This assertion of immediacy, however, is an energetic form of denial. The presumption that a left politics necessarily attaches to a technological fix denies what the media activist or technology enthusiast already knows to be the case-that democracy in practice is the rule of the wealthy, the protection of a governmental elite who serves their interests, and the constant chatter and opining of everyone else in the circuits of communicative capitalism.

In his account of fetishism, Freud describes how the young boy's belief in the fetish enables him to retain and give up this belief at the same time.40 He can know his belief that his mother has a penis is false but continue to believe it nevertheless-this is what the fetish allows him to do. Crucial to Freud's account is the reason for the boy's underlying attachment to his false belief-fear of castration. If he accepts what he knows, the boy must acknowledge castration, and this is what he cannot .l?ear. He would rather retain the fiction of a mother with a penis than acknowledge a world of lack or accept the possibility of his own dependence or diminishment.

The power of the technological fetish operates in a similar fashion. A condition of possibility for asserting the immediately progressive political character of something-web-radio or open-source software, say-is a prior exclusion of knowledge of their antagonistic conditions of emergence, their embeddedness within the brutalities of global capitalism, their dependence for existence on systemic violence and nationalized and racialized divisions. Advocating the extension of information and communication technologies accepts and denies these conditions at the same time. Even as the proliferation of communication technologies serves neoliberal firtancialization, accelerating the speed of monetary transactions and consolidating networks of privilege, the left advocate of participation, deliberation, and fundamental rights to communication canand must-energeticaly deny this context. Why would leftists promise that the technologies could fix democracy, if democracy was not broken, if it was not failing as a political form? And if democracy's underlying brokenness is the problem, the actual condition for the advocate's emphasis on communication and technology, why isn't this fundamental lack or failure the central matter at hand? Communicative capitalism thrives on the fetishistic denial of democracy's failure, its inability to secure justice, equity, or solidarity even as it enables millions to access information and make their opinions known.

TECHNOLOGY

41

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=52 | PRINTED_PAGE=42

The Fantasy ofWholeness: A Global Zero Institution

Communicative capitalism relies on the fantasy of abundance accompany;. ing the reformatting of messages as contributions and the fantasy of pa.�cipation accompanying technology fetishism. These fantasies give people the sense that our actions online are politicaly significant, that they make a diference. A fantasy of wholeness further animates networked communications. This fantasy furthers our sense that our contributions to circulating content matter by locating them in the most signif.: cant of possible spaces-the global. But the world does not serve as a space for communicative · capitalism analogous to the one th<sub>�</sub> nation pro.; vided for industrial capitalism. On the contrary, the space of communicative capitalism is the Internet. Networked communications materialize specifc fantasies of unity and wholeness as the global. These fantasies in turn secure networked transactions as the Real of global capitalism.

The cqncept of the "zero institution'' helps explain the way the internet functions as the key space for imagining the global.41 A zero institution is an empty signifer. It has no determinate meaning but instead signifies the presence of meaning. It is an institution with no positive function. Al it does is signify institutionality as such (as opposed to chaos, say). As originally developed by Claude Levi-Strauss, the concept of the zero institution accounts for the way people with radically diferent descriptions of their collectivity nevertheless understand themselves as members of the same tribe. Zizek adds to the Levi-Straussian idea insight into how both the nation and sexual diference function as zero institutions. The nation designates the unity of society in the face of radical antagonism, the irreconcilable division and struggle between classes. Sexual diference, in contrast, suggests diference as such, a zero-level of absolute diference that will always be filled in and overdetermined by contextually given diferences.

42

ONE

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=53 | PRINTED_PAGE=43

In light of the nation's failing capacity to stand symbolicaly for institutionality, the Internet has emerged as the zero institution of communicative capitalism. It enables myriad constituencies to understand themselves as part of the same global structure even as they radically disagree, fail to co-link, and inhabit fragmented and disconnected network spaces. The Internet is not a wide-open space with nodes and links to nodes distributed in random fashion such that any one site is equaly as likely to get hits as any other site. This open, smooth, virtual world of endless and equal opportunity is a fantasy (and not simply because some countries censor and block). Barabasi's research on directedness in scale-free networks demonstrates that the World Wide Web is broken into four major "continents" with their own navigational requirements (161-78 ). Folowing links on one continent may never bring a user to another continent; likewise, folowing links in one direction does not mean that a user can retrace these links back to her starting point. Despite the fact that its very architecture (like al directed networks) entails fragmentation into separate spaces, the Internet presents itself as the unity and fulness of the global. Here, through our communicative interactions, the global is imagined and realized. The Internet thus functions as a particularly powerful zero institution precisely because it is animated by the fantasy of global unity.

The Internet provides an imaginary site of action and belonging. Celebrated for its freedoms and lack of boundaries, this imagined totality serves as a kind of presencing of the global. On the one hand, the Internet imagines, stages, and enacts the "global" of global capitalism. But on the other, this global is nothing like the "world" -as if such an entity were possible, as if one could designate an objective reality undisturbed by the external perspective observing it or a fuly consistent essential totality unruptured by antagonism.42

The oscillations in the 1990s debate over the character of the Internet can clarify this point. In the debate, Internet users appeared either as engaged citizens eager to participate in electronic town hals and regularly communicate with their elected representatives, or they appeared as Websurfing waste-of-lives in dark, dirty rooms downloading porn, betting on obscure Internet stocks, or collecting evidence of the U.S. government's work with extraterrestrials at Area 51. In other versions of this same matrix, users were either innocent children or dreadful war-game-playing teenage boys. Good interactions were on Amazon. Bad interactions were underground and involved drugs, kiddie porn, LSD, and plutonium. These familiar oscillations remind us the Internet has always been particular and struggles over its regulation have been struggles·over what kind of particularity would and should be installed. Rather than far-reaching, engaging, and accessible, the Internet has been constituted in and through conflict over specific practices and subjectivities. Not everything goes.

TECHNOLO GY

43

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=54 | PRINTED_PAGE=44

We might even say that those who want to clean up the Internet, who want to get rid of or zone the porn and the gambling, who want to centralize, rationalize, and organize commercial transactions in ways more beneficial to established corporations than to mom and pop shops, express as a diference on the Internet what is actually the starker diference between societies traversed and mediated through electronic communications and .financial networks and those reliant ·more on social, interpersonal, and extralegal networks. As Emesto Laclau argues, the division between the social and the nonsocial, or between society and what is other to it, external and · threatening, can only be expressed as a diference internal to society.43 If capital today traverses the globe, how can the diference between us and them be expressed? The oscilations in the Internet debates depict a diference between those who are sexualized, undisciplined, violent, irrational, lazy, excessive, and extreme and those who are civilized, mainstream, hard.:working, balanced, and normal. Put in the terms f Lacanian psychoanalysis, the other on the Internet is the Real other-not the other I imagine as like me and not the symbolic other to be recognized and respected through abstract norms and rights. Eforts to clean up the Internet target more than gambling and porn; they involve the image of the global. "Whatever disrupts the fantasy of unity on the Internet cannot be part of the global.

The particularity of the fantasies of the global animating the Internet is striking. Richard Rogers's research on linking practices on the World Wide

44

ONE

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=55 | PRINTED_PAGE=45

Web brings out the pervasive localism and provincialism. In his account of the Dutch food safety debate, Rogers observes "little in the way of 'web dialogue' or linkage outside of small Dutch 'food movement: "4 Critics of partisan bloggers as well as of the sheltered world of AOL click on a similar problem--the way the world on the Internet shrinks into a very specific image of the global.45 How would English-speaking American high school students on Facebook or southern momies uploading photos of their scrapbook pages come into contact with sites providing Qur'anic instruction to modern Muslims-even if there were no language proble.ms? And why would they bother? \Nhy should they? AB a number of commentators have worried for a while now, opportunities to customize the news and announcements one reads-not to mention the already undigestible amount of information available on topics in which one is deeply interestedcontribute to the segmentation and isolation of users within bubbles of views and opinions with which they already agree.46 Segmentation and isolation are neither new nor unique to the Internet, but they run counter to the fantasy of the global on which communicative capitalism relies.

The particularity of these fantasies of the global is important because this is the global networked communications produce. Our networked interactions produce our specific worlds as the global of global capitalism. They create the expectations and efects of communicative capitalism, ex:­ pectations and efects that necessarily vary with the setting. Because the global is whatever specifc communities or exchanges imagine it to be, anything outside the experience or comprehension of these communities either does not exist or is an inhuman, otherworldly alien threat that must be anihlated. If everything is out there on the Internet, anything I fail to encounter-or can't imagine encountering-isn't simply excluded (everything is already there) 1 it is foreclosed. Admitting or accessing what is foreclosed destroys the very order constituted through foreclosure. Thus, the imagined unity of the global, a fantasy filled in by the particularities of specifi.c contexts, is one without fundamental conflict.47 Circulating content can't efect change in this sort of world-it is already complete. The only alternative is the Real that ruptures my world, that is to say, the evil other with whom I cannot imagine sharing a world, the one I must eradicate. The very fantasy of a global that makes my networked interactions vital and important results in a world closed to politics and threatened by evil.

TECHNOLOGY

45

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=56 | PRINTED_PAGE=46

No Reponse

A Lacanian comonplace is that a letter always arrives at its destination. What does this mean with respect to networked communications? It means that a letter, a message, in communicative capitalism is not really sent. There is no response because there is no arrival. There is just the contribution to circulating content.

Many readers wil likely disagree.48 Some might bring up the successes of Move On. From its early push to have Congress censure Bill Clinton and "move on;' to its eforts to organize its millions\ of members in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, MoveOn has become a presence in mainstream American politics. In addition to circulating petitions and arranging emails and faxes to members of Congress, one of Move On's best actions was a virtual sit-in: over 2oo,ooo of us called into Washington, D.C., at scheduled times on the same day, shutting down phone lines into the Capitol for hours. In early 2004, Move On sponsored an advertisement contest: the winning ad would be shown during the Super Bowl footbal game. The selected ad, titled "Child's Play," illustrated the Bush administration's trillion-dollar deficit with images of children hauling trash, working in assembly lines, and carying out other physically demanding tasks generaly associated with low-pay, low-skill labor. It was great-but C B S refused t o broadcast it.

Far from being evidence against my argumel}t, MoveOn exemplifies technology fetishism and confirms my account of the reduction and cap.; ture of political energies into contributions to communicative capitalism's circuits of information and entertainment. MoveOn's campaigns director, Eli Pariser, says that the organization is "opt-in, it's decentralized, you do it from your home:'49 No one has to remain committed or be bothered with boring meetings. Al one has to do is contribute-an opinion, a signature, or monei. Andrew Boyd, in a positive appraisal of the group, writes that "MoveOn's strength lies . . . in providing a home for busy people who may not want to be a part of a chapter-based organization with regular meetings . . . . By combining a nimble entrepreneurial style with a strong ethic of listening to its members-via online postings and straw polls-MoveOn has built a responsive, populist and relatively democratic virtual communitY:'50 Busy people can think they are active-the technology wil act for them, alleviating their guilt while assuring them that nothing wil change too much. The virtual community won't place too many (actually any) demands on them. Its democracy is the democracy of communicative capitalism-opinions will circulate, views will be expressed, information will be accessed. By sending an email, signing a petition, responding to an article on a blog, people can feel political. And that feeling feeds communicative capitalism insofar as it leaves behind the time-consuming, incremental, and risky eforts of politics. MoveOn likes to emphasize that it abstains from ideology, from. division. While this postideological gesture is disingenuous-MoveOn's politics are clearly progressive, antiwar, leftdemocratic-the emphasis on a nonposition is symptomatic of precisely that denial of the trauma of contemporary left politics that the technological fetish covers over: it is a refusal to ofer a vision of collectivit'yj to stand for a solidarity premised not on individual particularities and desires (which is no solidarity at all) but on the painstaking and organized struggle for reclaiming the state as a force to be used against neoliberalism and its corporate beneficiaries.

46

ONE

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=57 | PRINTED_PAGE=47

One might :find better reasons to disagree with .me when one focuses on the role of the Internet in mass mobilizations, in connecting activists from al over the world, and in providing an independent media source. The mobilzation on February 15, 2003, of ten million people worldwide to protest the Bush administration's push for war against Iraq is perhaps the most striking example, but one might also mention MoveOn's candlelight vigil on March $^ { 1 6 , }$ an action involving over a milion people in 130 countries. Such uses of the Internet are vitally important for po­\_litical activists-especially given the increasingly all-pervasive reach of corporate-controlled media. But these examples fail to address the question of whether such instances of intense social meaning drive larger organizational eforts and contribute to the formation of political solidarities with more duration. At the end of the first decade of the new millennium, there is little evidence that they do. $\mathrm { O n }$ the contrary, left activists seem ever more drawn to spectacular events that raise awareness, momentarily, but do little in the way of building the institutions necessary to sustain a new political order. Networked communication technologies materialize democracy as a political form that formats political energies as communicative engagements. Valued as the key to political inclusion and democratic participation, new media technologies strengthen the hold of neoliberalism and the privilege of the top 1 percent of people on the planet. At the same time, globally networked communications remain the very tools and terrains of struggle, making political change more dificult -and more necessary-than ever before.

TECHNOLOGY

47

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=58 | PRINTED_PAGE=48

48

ONE

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=59 | PRINTED_PAGE=2

alism. Our everyday practices of searching and linkg, our communicative acts of discussing and disagreeing, performing and posing, intensify our dependence on the information networks crucial to the financial and corporate dominance of neoliberalism. Communicative capitalism captures our political interventions, formatting them as contributions to its circuits of afect and entertainment-we feel political, involved, like cont ibutors who really matter.

The fact of such formatting does not mean networked computing necessarily or inevitably leads to neoliberalism-or vice versa (after al, the Soviets had computers and the protocols underlying the Internet were developed as state initiatives). Neoliberalism is a political and economic project-there is nothing inevitable about it.1 The sense that there is no alternative is a component of neoliberal. ideology,. one of the ways that the ideology instals in its subjects a belief in markets-anything else fails, is ineficient can't be funded, won't last, can't compete in a global arena . . .

To succeed, though, neoliberalism depends on the organized politiCal occupation and direction of governments, on the use of the bureaucratic, legal, and security apparatuses of the state in ways that benefit corporate and financial interests (the most obvious examples here include the Bush administration's support of and collusion with oil and energy interests as well as private military contractors and Clinton's revocation ofthe Glass-

Free Trade

2

THE N.E O LIBERAL FANTASY

下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5.md?start=60&limit=10)