DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

Similarly, in the United States, cinema changed the nature of the crowd by providing an imaginary mass body. In the early-twentieth-century United States, ethnic groups, religions, political organizations, and racist law worked against the image and goal of a unified political identity. Film countered these forces, offering massive cinematic bodies as points of singular identification. It was a crucial vehicle for mass assimilation via the production of a common culture and collective experience.1 And, as Buck-Morss emphasizes, the potential power of this new collectivity was enormous, whether as a force of production, consumption, or politics.

Third, Buck-Morss points out the potential for manipulation in cinema. In an argument reminiscent of Guy Debord's critique of the society of the spectacle, she notes how both Hollywood and Soviet cinema“affirmed official culture and denied certain bleak realities of social development."12 The former presented dream versions of commodity consumption. Monumental stars, awesome production numbers (Busby Berkeley) and special effects (King Kong), and luxurious lifestyles captivated Depression-era audiences and attempted to channel their desire toward fantasies of consumption. The latter idealized production. Although Soviet film in the 1920s continued the avant-garde experimentation of the revolutionary period (which was itself heavily influential in the United States) even as it imported Hollywood movies, by the1930s, socialist realism and the glorification of collective projects was culturally dominant. The chief of Soiuzkino (Soviet Cinema), Boris Shumiatskii rejected Soviet art cinema as overvaluingformalism andaesthetics. A better model for socialist realism could be found in Hollywood, whichemployed a factorylike model of artistic production and a realistic style of “joyful spectacles"accessible to the masses.13 One of the most successful Soviet films of this period was Chapaey, an action movie about the defeat of the White Russians in the Civil War that out-cowboy-and-Indian-ed the Hollywood movies it was modeled on.

Finally, the fourth aspect of Buck-Morss's discussion ofthe role of film in the production and imagining of mass national identities important for myargument is the division between public and private spheres. Here the Soviet and U.S.-American cultural imaginaries are inversions of each other: the space that for one was a fantasized site of fulfillment was for the other a site of drudgery. “The forced intimacy of the communal apartment was a particular kind of terror affecting the most banal practices of every day," Buck-Morss explains. Insofar as public life under Stalinism was itself presented as the location of purpose and fulfillment, “there was no need for retreat into a private domain."14 Conversely, in the United States, factory work generally appeared as a particularly brutal, humiliating kind of labor. Workers were subjected to control, subjection, the daily constraints and degradations of the assembly line. Rather than a source of fulfillment, industrial work was necessary drudgery. In return, workers received compensation in the form of consumption, enjoying consumer goods in the context of the love and

Whatever Blogging

133

134Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor

warmth of the nuclear family. Buck-Morss writes, “the ideology of the privat home came to bear a tremendous burden, that of legitimating the entire system c industrial capitalism, and nowhere more so than in the United States."15

6

Whatfantasies, what possibilities, what kinds of subjects, do multiply intersectin and increasingly personalized media and communication technologies stimulate Differently put, how might changes from the media constitutive of projects c national utopian imagination lead in the direction of whatever beings? The pleas ures of parallels with Buck-Morss's discussion of film and national mass identitie suggest that answers might be found in at least four domains.

First, if mass media addressed society directly, organizing and speaking t masses as collectives, contemporary networked communications have multipl addressees—addressees known and unknown, friends andstrangers. Bloggers ma write for others who theyimagine share their interests, a group of the uninforme they might enlighten, or future versions of themselves. The set of friends wh receive my updates on Facebook, my network, are uniquely mine. Each user's net work is different, even as they overlapandintersect. Blogs and social networks de not provide broadly shared symbolic identities from which we see ourselves. Blog don't address society writ large. They invite singular readers to consider what the have on offer. Or they just make themselves available to be found by search en gines' crawlers. Unlike mass media's calling of collectives, publics, and nations inte being, blogs don't unite bloggers and readers. To this extent, they are more lik pencils than cinema. They remain specific in their multiplicity

Second, whereas mass media made crowds visible to themselves as a unity, pro viding the crowd with an imaginary collective body, networked communicatior and entertainment makes particularities visible to themselves as particularities. can tweet my current location, update my friends on my current mood, checl what's trending. With multiply convergent and turbulent media, I don't have t settle on any one direction or theme. I can live in the momentary. Not only do these multiple, circulating impulses incite in me a kind of permanent indecisior or postponement, a lack of commitment—what else is out there?—but the frag menting, networking thrust of drive turns my particular body, my very face into ; montage: a wrinkle here, a bump there, a nose too large, lips too small. Fortunately I can update my photo at any time—and I can animateit, too! There is no us There is no me (although I can google myself to see if I turn up). Buck-Mors argues that “Cinema creates an imagined space where a mass body exists tha can exist nowhere else."16 My point is that blogs—standing in for the networke information and entertainment media of communicative capitalism—not only do not create such a space for a mass body but dissolve any sense of it. They dis-place it, producing instead ever-accelerating circuits of images, impulses, fragments, anc feelings. Blogs cannot be counted; they resist inclusion into sets or categories.Yes cinema still exists, and sometimes it lets us feel ourselves as something like an us— and then I can tweet about it. Blog-mapping projects attempt to make multiple disparate blogs appear as a sphere, a collective, as points in a shared space. But the space they map is in the imaginary of the researcher, not in bloggers’ presence to themselves as a collective.

Third, the cinematic spectacles produced by Hollywood and the Soviet Union in the 1930s generally sought to affirm official culture and deny the grimmer aspects of economic and social life. In contrast, blogs persist in a setting of total mediality: anything can be found, said, seen on the Internet. With publicity as the ideology of communicative capitalism, everything can be said; nothing need be denied. Every aspect of contemporary life is reflected upon, criticized, mocked and then the reflections, criticisms, andmockeries are themselves reflected upon criticized, mocked... did we go too far? In this setting, nothing is unworthy of comment or commentary. Every aspect of theordinary and everyday matters to someone—forlike a second. Blogs say that whatever happens to me matters—in and of itself. Andin this reflexive environment, even the fact that my posts are boring, that the arguments in my little segment of the blogipelago have an intensity far beyond merit, that the escapades of celebrities captured by TMZare trivial, even all these facts are known and discussed. Most of the time, the repetitiveintensities of blog drama are inversions of politics, rapidly circulating differences and modulations that ensure that nothing changes. Sometimes the intensities accumulate, “punctuated by catastrophic events, which are both creative and destructive."17 Markets boom and bust; terrorists attack; a children's book becomes a global sensation. The circuits adjust and recalibrate, capturing the new again in the snares of communicative capitalism.

Fourth, just as the official myth of fulfillment through factory labor collapsed with the end of Stalinism (people didn't have to pretend anymore that it was true; they still had to go to work), the myth of idealized domesticity crumpled in the United States, in part because of the achievements of feminism, in part because the realities of divorce, infidelity, addiction, and abuse made its fantasy impossible to sustain. Television and feminism both made the personalpolitical, erasing the fragile and imaginary boundaries between public and private, a line that made little sense after the rise of the social. In the remnants ofthe myth of idealized domesticity, ideals of individual freedom and creativity are promoted. Personal satisfaction takes the place of familial duty. Differently put, family life is supposed to be personally rewarding (rather than a duty or expectation). When family life fails to satisfy, it is examined and diagnosed, offered remedies and supplements—the family better succeed, because the brutal competition of neoliberalism offers neither shelter nor respite. Communicative capitalism provides the form and vehicle for the individualized consumption, participation, and creative needs expressionof subjects compelled to be personally satisfied.

Correlative to the erasure of the always-tenuous distinction betweenthe public and private spheres is the dissolution of the boundary between work and play

Whatever Blogging

135

136 Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor

From the initial electronics boom in the 1970s through the larger shifts associated with personal computers and the Internet, informatization has promised those who work with symbols and ideas increased ease and comfort. Early versions celebrated telecommuting and the paperless office. Later versions preyed on fears of being left behind, out of the loop, not as quick as the competition. Consultants urged corporations to restructure work, to encourage creativity and team building, to make work more like play. At the same time, with ever more games and interactions movingonline, onto screens, play seemed a little more like work. In the circuits of communicative capitalism, the repetitions of drive suggest work without work (in the forms of work without pay or work that is fun) and play without play (in the forms of play for which one is paid and play for which one pays with enjoyment). This, then, is the setting wherein blogs are not escapes from the drudgery of part of one's life. They are not fantastic experiments in virtual reality. Rather, blogs instead extend out from, amplify, and reflect on whatever aspect of whatever life.

7

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 previousló coalescing into social and economic institutions have broken down and apart. Their efficacy 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.

Corresponding 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."18 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 domesticitó—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.

Put in psychoanalytic terms, symbolic identity is increasingly meaningless in the society of control. What we have instead are imaginary identities sustained by excess jouissance—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.

In disciplinary society, normative expectations coalesced around determinate social roles. Presuming the gaze of the school, church, family, or state, one could imagine oneself in different positions, positions that would either comply with or transgress institutional norms. I can be à conscientious student, faithful believer, dutiful daughter, good citizen. I can also be a delinquent, backsliding, worthless traitor. Even as the images differ, the symbolic identity ofthe gaze remains the same. In the wake of the decline of symbolic efficiency, the dissolution of disciplinary society, this gaze loses its prior force. We aren't sure ifit's operative, if others believe it: is the good student a cog, uncreative, thinking inside the box, a goody-twoshoes? 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.

Lacking the ability to imagine how we appear to another, how another sees us, we lose the capacity to take the position of another, to see or think from another's perspective. We can choose any identity, but we lack the grounds for choosing or the sense that an identity, once chosen, entails bonds of obligation.19 Rather than following norms—which ones? How do they know? Who made them the expert?—we cycle through trends, whether these come from fashion, diet advice, or the hope for an anchor in a particular subculture. The society of control places limits on the mobility and fluidity of contemporary hybrid identities, but these limits are not those installed by a master signifier or symbolic law. Subjects experience these limits as either groundless intrusions, irrational barriers to enjoyment, or as hypothetical or instrumental injunctions as means for achieving enjoyment later. Caught in reflexive networks—always another move, another level—we lose the capacity for reflection. Our networks are reflexive so that we don't have to be.

We are not bloggers. We are not Facebook. The networked interactions of communicative capitalism do not provide symbolic identities, sites from which we see ourselves as loci of collective action. Rather, they provide opportunities for new ways for me to imagine myself, a variety of lifestyles that I can try and try on. This variety and mutability makes my imaginary identity extremely vulnerable— the frames of reference that give it meaning and value are forever shifting; the others who can rupture it might appear at any moment, and their successes, thei achievements, their capacities to enjoy call mine into question: I could have ha more; I could have really enjoyed. This insecurity is not only psychic; it's a reason able response to struggles to persist in global, reflexive financial and informatior networks. Most ofthe economic benefits of neoliberal capitalism—of the nev economy celebrated by digital media gurus—follow a power-law distribution A lucky few will get nearly everything. Most willgetvery little, almost nothing.

Whatever Blogging

137

Hardt and Negri describe the ungovernable, mobile, and fluid singularitie arising in the aftermath of disciplinary subjectivity in terms of an anthropologica exodus. Hence, they emphasize that “those whoare against"Empire's exploita tion and domination "must also continually attempt to construct a new bod and a new life."20Communicative capitalism facilitates and incites these attempt employing ever-innovative upgrades to ensure not just that the attempts continu but that they accelerate. Hardt and Negri acknowledge that the methods of an thropological exodus are the methods of Empire. But they don't accept that thei response is also Empire's: do more, go further, radicalize, create something nev make tools into prostheses, migrate and mutate into information technologies They write, “The will to be against really needs a body that is completely incapa ble of submitting to command."21 An undisciplined body incapable of submissior is a body of immediacy and enjoyment, driven to move from image to image intensity to intensity. Lacking discipline, how can it resist, how can it form a wi atall? Far from constructing something new, such a body forecloses the possibilit and hope of self-governance.

Networked media in the society of control amplify the challenge that post Fordism poses to collective identity. Yes, they enable people to sign petitions. Ye they enable people to give money. Yes, they enable people to express their opin ions. Yes, Obama had like a million Facebook friends. But these particular motions c clicking and linking do not produce symbolic identities; they are ways that Iex press myself—just like shopping, checking my friends' updates, or following tab loid news at TMZ.com. I may imagine others like me, a virtual local, but this loca remains one of those like me, my link list or followers, those who fit my demo graphic profile, my user habits. I don't have to posit a collective of others, other with whom I might need to cooperate or struggle, to whom I might be obliged others who might place demandson me. The instant connection of networke association allows me to move on as soon as I am a little uncomfortable, a little pu out. Petitions, social networkgroups (the one on Facebook that aims to get a mil lion people to say they oppose capitalism has 24,672 members), blogs—they ar the political equivalent of just-in-time production, quick responses circulating a contributions to the flows of communicative capitalism. In her compelling analy sis of flash mobs, Cayley Sorochan takes the argument even further. Counterin enthusiastic appropriations of flash mobs as new instances of democratic engage ment, Sorochan presents them as instances of the“fetishizing of pure participatio removed from any meaningful political project."She concludes, “Hopes that flas mobs might represent a future form of political organization reflect a desire for a politics of convenience where getting together with others is easy and does not involve conflict, commitment and struggle."22 In the circuits of communicative capitalism, convenience trumps commitment.

138

Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor

8

Agamben affiliates whatever being with the capitalist commodification of the human body and the technologization of its image in the spectacle.23 The photographic images proliferating out ofadvertising and pornography are "neither generic nor individual, neither an image of the divinity nor an animal form."In them, the body "now became something truly whatever."The "whatever"Agamben invokes here suggests a new approach to Guy Debord's society of the spectacle, one that takes back from the spectacle the positive properties of being in language and being in common that it expropriates. For Agamben, whatever being is the mode of being in the comingcommunity. Produced in capitalist spectacle, whatever being is harbinger of a better future, one wherein the division held together in the unity of the spectacle is ultimately overcome. Because he wants to wrest transformations of human nature from their entrapment in the spectacle, Agamben suggests the “geometrical splendor" of the legs of a long line of dancing girls.

Another way to think about the idea of “neither generic nor individual” is to link it to the normalizing, aggregating aspect of disciplinary power. Modern disciplinaryinstitutions, be they home, school, factory, or state, produced individuals astypes, asoccupants of social roles or positions. Recall photographs of Levittown, of soldiers in training, of graduates in their caps and gowns. The self-governing, reflective subject idealized as the outcome of the disciplines may have understood himself to be an individual, but more than that, he was an instance ofa form. Autonomy appeared through individuality.

Agamben associates the planetary petty bourgeoisie with a frustration with and impropriety toward identities rooted in physical particularities or differences in language, tradition, or culture. He concedes that fascism and Nazism had already recognized in the petty bourgeoisie the “decline of the old social subject."24 He jumps quickly over their nationalism as a false popular identity, though, as he asserts a new planetary refusal of identity.

With this jump, Agamben omits the mass as a modern collective force that is also neither generic nor individual. The mass is a displaced mediator between the planetary bourgeoisie and whatever being. In Jean Baudrillard's formulation,“The mass is without attribute, predicate, quality, or reference."25Agamben's whatever beings appear as singularizations of the mass. Bereft of qualities of their own, they are not the same as the mass resolved into its components: masses were masses of subjects, combinations and aggregations and accumulations of people across and against modernity's attempts to separate and order them. If the mass results from a combination of bodies that omits their specificities, whatever being skips the step of amassing to treat the indistinction, the without-qualities, not as a result of belonging to the mass but as the condition of belonging as such.

Whatever Blogging

139

Agamben's version of co-belonging inverts the political imaginary of radicals from the 1960s and 1970s: many feared erasure, being commodified, being indistinguishable, being one of a mass. They rejected the terms of mass society and mass media, the forced collectivizing oftheir self-perception into the envelope of “us." Agamben accepts the mass without its collective form, thereby reformatting the momentary joy of dissolution into a whole as the singularity of belonging. Whatever beings do not shed or overcome their identities in an experience of massness. They already lack them. They can simply be as they are. The mass is the missing link—displaced mediator—the function of which is à chiasmatic inversion of properties. Baudrillard writes, "Banality, inertia, apoliticism used to be fascist; they are in the process of becoming revolutionary—without changing meaning, without ceasing to have meaning."26 Baudrillard's warning to leftists in the 1970s hits its target today: how is it that the evacuation of politics comes to embody the political as such?

Nevertheless, for Agamben, the petty bourgeoisie displace or stand in for the mass, presenting thereby a new opportunity, an opportunity for a form of belonging unhindered by the division and specificity of“belonging to."Agamben writes:

Because if instead of continuingto search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper beingthus not an identity and anindividual property buta singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity—if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication with the incommunicable.27

We have been produced as subjects unlikely to coalesce, subjects resistant to solidarity and suspicious ofcollectivity. Central to this production is the cultivation and feeding ofa sense of unique and special individuality. Every sperm is sacred: so began the story of our unique cellular lives. Or every potential genetic combination carries with it the remarkable potentiality we locate in our individuated selves. Each voice must be heard (but they don't combine into a chorus). Each vote must be counted (but they add up to less than a movement). Each person must be visible (but then we don't see à group). Personalized participatory media is a problem not only because of its personalization ofparticipation. More than that is its injunction that we participate ever more in personalization: make your own avatar, video, profile, blog, mobster, video, app. Participation becomes indistinguishable from personalization, the continued cultivation of one's person. Leave your mark.

140

Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor

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.

Agamben 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.

More 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.

Souls 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.

For 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

Whatever Blogging

141

142InterrogatingModes of Digital Labor

tolerate in any way... that the singularities form a community without affirm ing an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition c belonging."31 Leaving to the side the question of whether this intolerance is property of the state or a more complex matter of a human subjectivity that: constitutively split, it seems clear enough that the state has, from time to tim tolerated and used the mass, a form of co-belonging without representable con dition. The mass can threaten or support the state, can subvert or sustain it. I Baudrillard's conception, for example, the mass is neither a group subject nor a object. On the one hand, the mass generally fails to become a conscious revolu tionary force. On the other, it refuses attempts to make it speak. Surveys and sta tistics may simulate it, but the mass remains ungraspable, particularly as these ver surveys are implicated in the reflexive constitution of the mass they survey. Th absence of the mass, Baudrillard says, “is nevertheless intolerable."32It drives th repetitive processes of polling and testing. So not only can and has the state toler ated forms of co-belonging that do not affirm an identity, but the absence of a identity can itself generate processes of surveillance and incitement to speech use ful for producing and maintaining power.

Agamben conceives the spectacle as language or communicativity. It is a forn for the expropriation of linguistic being, a form that alienates people from lan guage. He works here from the dilemma expressed by Debord: in the society e the spectacle, “the language of real communication has been lost,"and a “nev common language has yet to be found."33 Debord writes:

Spectacular consumption preserves the old culture in congealed form, goin so far as to recuperate and rediffuse even its negative manifestations; in thi way, the spectacle's cultural sector gives over expression to what the specta cle is implicitly in its totality—the communication of the incommunicable.34

Agamben's response is to turn the problem into the solution and in so doin find in the spectacle “a positive possibility that can be used against it."35 Com munication of the incommunicable dissolves the gap between them. It tells u that even the incommunicable can be communicated, that it cannot be separated Thus, the spectacle as the extreme expression of estrangement from linguisti being enables its own overcoming. The expropriation of language in the spectacl opens up a new experience of language and linguistic being: “not this or tha content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition, but th very fact that one speaks."36 Failure to communicate provides its own satisfaction the enjoyment oflanguageitself.

Sigmund Freud describes the circular movement of the drives as a turning back round about the self and a change from activity to passivity.37 Expressed in term of language, the active aim, to say something, is replaced by the passive aim, to have said. Agamben's reflexive treatment of communication, his turn from what i said to that something is said, employs this dynamic of drive. Not only is a negative condition (estrangement from linguistic being) treated as a positive opening (new experience of belonging), but its positivity is a result of reflexivity. Language turns on itself. Whatever beings turn their attention from the content of language, from trying to communicate something, back to themselves as speaking beings. They shift from focusing on something outside or beyond themselves to turning back round upon themselves. Subjects of drive, whatever beings are passive. The very excesses of their communicative activity are the form of passivity.