DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

Thus, real objects, inaccessible, cut off by a “firewall," can enter relations only through sensual objects. In contrast, sensual objects can only touch through real objects. Harman refers to a “vicarious causality" to explain how the relationship between real objects is caused vicariously or where the sensual object is vicar of the real object. Further, the relationship thus formed forms a new object. The sensual object allows two real objects to relate, which forms the new object in which the sensual object and real object contact. For Harman, causation is alluring or affective at the point where real objects touch through sensual ones, and, as such, all objects may be alluring to all other objects, albeit some objects have a stronger allure than others.

I have emphasized Harman's posture toward objects because it turns attention toward the primary and secondary qualities of objects, given that the latter—color taste, or heat—are understood to be qualities of a subject's perception. In contrast, primary qualities belong to the object itself, such as length, width, and depth. But in questioning correlationism and relationism, the distinctions betweenprimary and secondary qualities are troubled. It is suggested that all qualities might be thought of as secondary, while being transformable in the relations objects have with each other, removed from the privilege of human consciousness. And yet in the withdrawal of the real object, as the sensual object allures other objects, there is a philosophical protection of the real object while its primary and secondary qualities are opened to profound transformation—let us say by a technoscience such as nanotechnology. After all, Parisiproposes that nanotechnology is turning attention to mathematical technologies that seem to be rendering curvilinearity, making extension in matter, or the prehension of eternal objects, operative and experienceable; nanotechnology means to neutralize the distinction between the physical composition of materials—atoms, photons, protons, electrons—and their properties, such as color, shape, smoothness, brightness, and so on, such that material can change their substance instantaneously.8

In such a situation, the tension between process philosophies and object-oriented ones might reveal a particular political, economic, and governmental configuration of labor, technology, bodies, and affect. While the process philosophies have enabled critics such as Parisi to keep an eye on technological transformation and the resulting capacity for the capture and manipulation of potential, thereby affecting life, labor, and matter, the object-oriented ontologies might be put to critical use as the investments of technoscience and capital keep seeking to capture every excess of measure; the object-oriented philosophies might give us philosophical ground when potential and virtualitó no longer have a positive valence or only a positive

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one. When labor is considered the work of affect, the stakes of philosophical debates may well be high; the abstractness of these debates is perhaps just what can give us purchase on critiques of politics, economy, andgoverning in relationship to the digital.

Notes

1 In presenting what he calls “nanofacture," Peter Galison suggests that nanotechnology is changing measure from representation to an ungoing doing in which measure is a making and manipulation all at once. Through the use of devices thatallow touching and manipulationof nanotubes or even viruses, the technoscientistis allowed “virtual interaction," or he or she obtains“virtual presence on the surface scaled by a factor of about one million to one. . .. Imagining in the nano-domain has shifted from a formof passive receptivity to an integral part of manipulation, an everyday increasingly haptic tool to be exploited in the fabricationof a world of the very small"(Galison 2007: 173). Gallison concludes: "Our philosophical ideal, formed in an early time may need to catch up to a very different form of science" (2007: 173). My efforts here are to present works that are critically responding to this reconfiguring of the ontological basis of knowing

2 Caffentzis also has suggested that physics was critical for the labor theory ofvalue: "physics..provides definite analyses of work and new plans for its organization. Its models may appear abstract, but they are directly related to the labor process" (Caffentzis 1992: 220). And more, Caffentzis has argued that just as thermodynamics provided a uniform approach to energy in industrial labor, with the invention of the Turing machine, computers provide a uniformapproach tothe computational procedures of all labor usually identified as skilled labor, but which are “implicit in all parts of the division of social labor"(Caffentzis 1997: 52).

3 In considering the labor theory of value, the importance of including labor other than the labor of humans also is taken up in Sean Cubitt's essay in this collection. There also is a connection to be made between affective labor and Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle's critical engagement with the culture of the code and algorithmic technologies. Yet in neither of these essays is there a rethinking of the body figured as organism and the effect of that figuring on thinkinglabor, affect, andits measure.

4 Information now is thought of in terms of a new law, which is: “information can neither be created nor destroyed,"which speaks to the physicality of information. (See C. Seife2006.)

5 For Massumi, quasi-causality “is sensitive-affective, or creative (adding a surplus-value to response). It expresses a global ability to sense and be affected, qualitatively, for change. It injects a measure of objective uncontrol, a margin of eventfulness, a liveliness" (Massumi 2002:225).

6 There is much to say about calculation and what is incalculable. I would point to David Berry's The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (2011) for its thinking of these questions in philosophical terms befitting the object-oriented philosophies and the process philosophies being discussed here.

7 In response to a draft ofthis essay, Sean Cubitt asked me an important question and made a request for clarification. I will answer here with regard to the political implications of his question about singular measure and a changing metric with each measure. Cubitt points to repetition of units of measure in his comments to me, but what I am after here (and I think, as I said above, it resonates with his essay in this collection)is that what we have thought of as immeasurable and therefore vibrant and supportive of a resistance to the foreclosure of chance may become measureable, asking us to think differently or think again about chance or indeterminacy or an open future. I am suggesting that nanotechnology and its mathematics is already asking us to think differently about virtuality, potentiality, and indeterminacy with regard to dynamic matter, because it is bringing a new way of measure that makes the ongoing manipulation, if not capture of indeterminacies possible and not merely as a repetition of the same. The question of politics is a large one, and I am suggesting that measure must be central to the answer to that question. Cubitt grounds his politicsin those whoare excluded from the probabilities of crowds or populations. I have argued elsewhere that the politically excluded often are economically included as populations (targeted for social services and/or policing) (Clough and Willse 2011). This is another way that the affective capacities or incapacities of these populations are open to measure and the productivity of the profitable labor of the measuring of affect. This understanding of the economic inclusion of the politically excluded populations is the contribution Foucault makes in his discussion of neoliberalism and biopolitics to which Cubitt also is responding.

8 It is far from clear whether object-oriented ontologies of speculative realism constitute an unhealthy symptom of the current capitalist mode of production or they are offering à ground for a criticism and politics. I only want to emphasize that these philosophical trends ought to be linked to transformations of technoscientifc development invested by capital.

References

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WHATEVER BLOGGING

Jodi Dean

In 2007, e-commerce types were agog at the success of American teenager Ashley Qualls. By the time she was seventeen, Qualls was making over \$1 million per year from Whateverlife.com, the busy pink website she designed to market MySpace page layouts. Market is not quite the right word, though. Her layouts and addon weren't for sale. They were free. Her income came from advertising. Because Whateverlife.com gets more than 60 million hits per month, exceeding the circulation of several of the most popular English-language teen magazines combined, it supplies advertisers with a valuable commodity: the eyeballs of teenage girls. Qualls, or AshBo as she calls herself, started Whateverlife.com in 2004. By 2007, she had expanded her site into a sort of community for girls, a go-to site where girls could find tutorials for making their own layouts as well as a variety of images, banners, captions, buttons, and boxes for decorating their MySpace pages. In addition to the revenue-generating ads, Whateverlife.com (with its growing staff of writers and designers) features a magazine and a link to AshBo's blog on her MySpace page.

Although Qualls's popularity is exceptional, her profile fits the dominant one for U.S. bloggers: she is under thirty and female.' The Pew Internet and American Life Project report on Teens and Social Media provides some context: only 8% of adult Internet users in the United States have created a blog, but 28% of online teens blog, and these are most likely to be girls. Describing her site as “a place to express yourself," Qualls repeats the reason most U.S. bloggers give for blogging: a wish to express herself creatively.2 By 2007, she was earning enough from Whateverlife.com to drop out of high school and purchase a house.³

Ashley Qualls provides an image of blogging as a popular technological practice of content production, media use, and multiple platform integration inscribed into everyday life such that there is little difference between being on- or offline. Together with the statistical snapshots provided by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, this image might create the sense that we are accessing a truth about blogs and social networks: they are by and for teenage girls. Both

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blogs and social networks produce affective spaces where girls express themselves, share their feelings, and reach out with a little hope that someone wil be touched and reach back. Accessed through the intense emotional world of networked adolescence, blogs aren't confined to a sphere separate from other media. They are situated in a rich communicative habitat consisting of multiple platforms and applications (mobile phones, social network sites, video, music, and photo-sharing sites). Blogs seem then to be ways that any of us could report on share, experience, and even market our social lives. With a little luck, we could even earn revenue on ads accompanying each and every heartfelt expression Feelings can be profitable.

2

The image constituted through the combination of statistics and the experience of a single blogger is too easy, even as it highlights the juxtaposition between the singular and the many characteristic of contemporary networked media. Rathei than relying on one to stand in for an impossible whole, we do better to consider the rise of personalized media as a mass phenomenon and practice.By 2008, there were from 80 million to 120 million blogs.4 The overwhelming majority of these blogs appears and dies in a matter of months, having been seen by few, if any, readers. Blogs are many and innumerable, an open, changing set of unique expressions At the same time, the standardization supplied by blog services—the basic page layouts, archival features, titles, banners, ads, and widgets—format blogs as ultimately interchangeable, the same, one virtually indistinguishable one from another.

The common format that makes blogs blogs is a condition for the unique productions of singular bloggers. And vice versa: without the unique offerings indeed, the promise that each voice can be heard, each experience documented each opinion expressed, blogging has no point.

We can approach this same entanglement from a different direction: blogs offe exposure and anonómity at the same time. As bloggers we expose ourselves, ou feelings and experiences, loves and hates, desires and aversions. Yet we often write as if we’ve opened ourselves to nearly no one, to just a select few, to a small com munity of those we trust, perhaps because we cannot see them. Knowing full wel that we are one among millions, we may find ourselves relieved not to have so many hits, so many comments. Strangers and opponents remind us of our expo sure, our visibility, vulnerability, and ultimate lack of control.

Blogs can be useful political tools: they let activists report on their activities plans, and aspirations. They help them meet up and coordinate. At the same time they deliver a lot of knowledge to activists’opponents—the university official wanting to know which students are responsible for the sit-in, the law enforce ment officials trying to diminish the impact of planned demonstrations to dis courage activists from going too far. Privacy and consumer protection advocate remind us of the accumulation of data on consumers, data easily mined for th sake of the increasingly specific and personalized targeting of ads. Yet this information in need of protection is the open content of millions of blogs and social network profiles. Blogs make monitoring easy. There's no need to spy! I'll tell you everything—andmore! In short, blogging relies on a fantasy of exposure without exposure correlative to the indistinguishable mass of the singularly unique. It's like the thrill of telling a secret without being burdened by anxiety over its being told—exposure without exposure.

Social networks such asMySpace and Facebook deploy a similar fantasy—one can share one's life with one's friends without repercussion. On the one hand, because one has specifically friended those in one's network, one can rest assured that one's secrets are safe. If you can't trust your friends, whom can you trust?On the other hand, the drive to grow one's network (Look! I'm somebody! I've got thousands of friends—they like me; they really like me!), to friend people with whom one works, people from different parts of one's life, belies the illusion of control over one's personal information. Not only is one's data shared with third parties, but the surveys and games that flourish in social network environments expand third-party access: access to my friend is a way of getting access to me. A typical Facebook profile reveals a person's name, age, birthday, location, occupation, high school and/or university, relationship status, sexual orientation, political affiliation, religion, and personal appearance. Add to this the fact that most users mention events they attend, groups to which they belong, and causes they support, and the result is a high degree of exposure.⁵

Typically, we respond to these seemingly paranoid lines ofthought with deflection—it isn't me about whom data is collected; it's us—an aggregate. It's our patterns, not mine. It's how many of us refer to a new movie or click on an ad, not whether I do. As with blogging, our participation in social networks relies on the supposition that we expose but are not exposed, that we are unique but ultimately indistinguishable.

3

Developing a notion offered by Giorgio Agamben, Dominic Pettman considers the problem of the interchangeable yet irreplaceable in terms of “whatever being.' For Pettman, as for Agamben, whatever being points to new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity through citizenship, ethnicity, and other modern markers of belonging Describing the character actor as exemplary of whatever being, Pettman glosses the concept as “an enactment of existence without qualities, or at least qualities so interchangeable and obvious that they erase all identity." In positive terms, whatever being is a tag for the “sheer generic potentiality of being."6

Agamben emphasizes that the “whatever" in whatever being relates not to singularity as indifference to a common property, “but only in its being such that it is."He writes:

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In this conception, such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, whichidentifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims)—and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself. Thus being-such, which remains constantly hidden in the condition of belonging (“there is an x such that it belongs to y") and which is in no way a real predicate, comes to light itself: The singularity exposed as suchis whatever you want, that is lovable.7

There is belonging, but not to anything in particular. Something in particular is, insofar as it belongs. Asking “to what?" Pettman and Agamben suggest, mistakenly prioritizes the set over the very condition of belonging. What matters is belonging, not that to which one belongs.

At the same time, mattering triggers an intervention into what could seem little more than another way of designating indifference. Mattering matters. It's the interjection or scissionof love and desire, ofwanting. What matters stands out from the mass or multiple because it matters. As Pettman suggests, that I love it desire it, separates it from the endless, open, uncountable set of indistinguishable members.

There are over 100 million blogs. At least one of them is mine.

4

In U.S.-American popular vernacular, “whatever" is an affective, verbal response that deflects another's comment. It is not generally uttered in response to a question, but to a statement or observation through which another might be attempting to harness the recipient or hearer.

“You haven't cleaned your room."

"Whatever."

One of multiple video mash-ups of Liam Lynch's punk-pop “Whatever" combines images of George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, Lynch’s guitar tracks, and a Bush-impersonation voice-over. Bush yells:

I'm George W. Bush, leader of the free world. I want to bomb Iraq. And when the world says, "no!"I say,"whatever!"

Saddam has started to meet our demands. Yeah, whatever.

He sings the refrain, “'cause this is my United States of whatever."

The response “whatever" registers the fact of another utterance, of a communicative effort or engagement. It acknowledges communicativity through the deflection of the communicative effort. The sender's message (whether understood in terms of its content or its intent, whether conscious or unconscious) is neither accepted nor rejected. Rather, the “whatever” response distills the message into the simple fact of utterance.

“Whatever" resembles the response of Herman Melville's Bartleby, the scrivener who replies, “I would prefer not to," when given a task or instruction.8 For some contemporary philosophers (for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), Bartleby provides a figure of refusal, opposition, or resistance; a model of escape or disentanglement from the relations of power constitutive of contemporary capitalist control societies. The argument is premised on power's dependence on resistance: the transgression of the law calls law into being. Or protestors need police brutality in order to demonstrate the validity of their protests. Bartleby, then, suggests a way out of the dialectic of law and its transgression. Sidestepping resistance, he deprives power of its hold.

Yet even as Bartleby evades the circuit of power andresistance by refusing to refuse, he continues to rely on his position as a singular subject: he says “I,’ referring to himselfas a subject—and not just any subject, but a subject with a view, a preference. As such, he remains exposed to power. He still cares. In response to a request, Bartleby does more than acknowledge communication, the fact that a message has been delivered and received. His answer affirms the intelligibility of the request even as it challenges the normative expectations informing it. And rather than challenging the sender of the message's authority to make the request, Bartleby asserts himselfas what matters—he would prefer not to. He is a subject with preferences, and these preferences must be attended to.

In contrast, the only affirmation in “whatever" is of communication as such. Another has communicated. This communication in no way obligates me as the recipient of the message. By responding, “whatever,"I have signaled the minimum degree of awareness of communicative being: a message is sent in expectation of a response (after all, I didn't completely ignore you).“Whatever" asserts no preferences. It neither affirms nor rejects. And it doesn't expose the subject as a desiring subject to whom something matters.

There is also an affective dimension to “whatever," an insolence or attitude or provocation that arises out of its function as a nonresponsive response. By acknowledging communication without attending to the content of the message, “whatever"denies the sender the sense that her message has been received because its content remainsunaddressed. The sender is challenged, her position as sender undermined.“Whatever" forestalls a communicative exchange even as it adopts communicative form. It refrains from establishing the subject position of the one who responds with “whatever,"and it unsettles the position of the one who initiates the exchange. It's à glitch in orality.

If communicativity such that it is whatever communicativity tags forms of subjectivity and belonging discernible in contemporary media practices, who and what is likely to benefit? What kinds of political and economic relations are likely to flourish in these new communicative habitats?

Whatever it takes.

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5

An extensive literature exists documenting the production of national identities through media and communication technologies.Susan Buck-Morss's Dreamworld and Catastrophe is one of the best contributions to this research. Buck-Morss explores the mass identities of utopian and project-basedstatessuch as the United States and the Soviet Union during the twentieth century. She highlights the dreams and fantasies enabled by the movies, the imaginings of collectivity that film incited. For communists and capitalists alike, twentieth-century technological projects were also identity projects. Four components of Buck-Morss's account are particularly compelling: mass media's direct addressing of society, the way mass media change the nature of crowds, the spectacular function of mass media, and the compensatory logic of mass media's organization of space.

First, many have noted the ways mass media address, well, masses. Radio brought leaders' voices directly into people's homes, integrating leaders into their intimate spaces. Broadcast television likewise occupied a domestic space as it addressed its audience as personal members of a nation, perhaps imagined like a family (respected newscaster Walter Cronkite was affectionately referred to as “Uncle Walt"). But film in particular, with its large screen and grand scale, organized and spoke to the masses as a collective. The nation as national society is produced through the media address (whether newspaper, radio, television, or film), with no existence as such prior to this address.

Second, in a nuanced reading of the role of film production in the United States and in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, Buck-Morss observes,

Whereas the radio voice allowed mass identification with political leaders, cinema, traveling to towns and villages to meet audiences halfway, represented a moving image of the masses that allowed audiences to recognize themselves. Such mirroring can be important in transforming the accidental crowd (mass-in-itself) into the self-conscious, purposeful crowd (the massfor-itself), with at least the potential of acting out its own destiny.9

Unlike the moving carnival whose spectators aggregate and disperse, cinema organizes, locates, and seats its spectators. Their attention is directed to a single place, to the screen. The unity of the screen produces out of the disunity of persons a singular audience that can see and recognize itself as a collective: “we" are watching this movie. For the Soviets, the films of Sergei Eisenstein played a particularly powerful role. Eisenstein captured and glorified intense scenes of revolutionary masses, images thatbecame the memories of the October Revolution. Buck-Morss writes:

The particular characteristics of the screen as a cognitive organ enabled audiences to see the materiality not only of the new collective protagonist, but also of other ideal entities: the unity of the revolutionary people, the idea of international solidarity, the idea of the Soviet Union itself.10

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