Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

Agamben afiliates 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 of advertising 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 coming community. 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 disciplinary institutions, be they home, school, factory, or state, produced individuals as types, as occupants 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 of a form. Autonomy appeared through individuality.

Agamben associates the planetary petty bourgeoisie with a frustration with and impropriety toward identities rooted in physical particularities or diferences 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.”²⁵ Agamben’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.

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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 of their 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 a 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 continuing to 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 being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a 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 of collectivity. Central to this production is the cultivation and feeding of a 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 a group). Personalized participatory media is a problem not only because of its personalization of participation. 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.

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 who would so belong are 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 un-baptized children, the political question seems particularly vexing. Those in limbo lack God, but they don’t sufer from 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, with an inability to go forward or back, it is dificult 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, beyond politics. 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.”³⁰ 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 tolerate in any way … that the singularities form a community without afirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging.”³¹ Leaving to the side the question of whether this intolerance is a property of the state or a more complex matter of a human subjectivity that is constitutively split, it seems clear enough that the state has, from time to time, tolerated and used the mass, a form of co-belonging without representable condition. The mass can threaten or support the state, can subvert or sustain it. In Baudrillard’s conception, for example, the mass is neither a group subject nor an object. On the one hand, the mass generally fails to become a conscious revolutionary force. On the other, it refuses attempts to make it speak. Surveys and statistics may simulate it, but the mass remains ungraspable, particularly as these very surveys are implicated in the reflexive constitution of the mass they survey. The absence of the mass, Baudrillard says, “is nevertheless intolerable.”³² It drives the repetitive processes of polling and testing. So not only can and has the state tolerated forms of co-belonging that do not afirm an identity, but the absence of an identity can itself generate processes of surveillance and incitement to speech useful for producing and maintaining power.

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

Spectacular consumption preserves the old culture in congealed form, going so far as to recuperate and redifuse even its negative manifestations; in this way, the spectacle’s cultural sector gives over expression to what the spectacle 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 doing find in the spectacle “a positive possibility that can be used against it.”³⁵ Communication of the incommunicable dissolves the gap between them. It tells us that even the incommunicable can be communicated, that it cannot be separated. Thus, the spectacle as the extreme expression of estrangement from linguistic being enables its own overcoming. The expropriation of language in the spectacle opens up a new experience of language and linguistic being: “not this or that content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition, but the very fact that one speaks.”³⁶ Failure to communicate provides its own satisfaction, the enjoyment of language itself.

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 terms 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 is 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.

Contemporary networked media perform and repeat communicativity as such, the taking place of language. As applications for the expression of any idea whatsoever, of an opinion, such that it is, blogs continue the severing of expressions from their content and their authors. Ideas and opinions link together and circulate, expressions of themselves neither completely generic nor completely individual. Posts may link and gesture, but they don’t represent themselves or anything else. They are expressions, such that they are. The measuring and counting, the hits and rankings remind bloggers that we are set in intensive, reflexive communication and entertainment networks. It’s as if the compulsion to make the mass speak, to poll and survey it, now takes whatever being as its target. Blog stats don’t track truth or meaning. They track blogging, the addition of posts, responses, and page views. Diferently put, they track the fact of the spoken as they direct us away from what is said.

A better instance of language without referent, of language that refers only to the “it was said,” is the word cloud, a graphic representation of the content of a text understood in terms of frequency of word use. For example, a word cloud made after the first debate between presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama during the 2008 election shows that McCain frequently used the words know, spending, and got. Obama used the words think, make, and going. He also used the word got with high frequency. We don’t know what this means. But we do know that words were used and speeches were made. The irony here is that language as language itself, language reflected to itself as language—Agamben’s ideal of the coming community—takes the spectacular form of the image.

In word clouds, frequency and proximity displace meaning. Which words appear with which other words? The combination of these elements determines intensity—words that appear only once either don’t count (they aren’t counted) or they appear very faint and tiny, type as atmosphere. Words matter, not stories and not narratives. Words index communication—they mark that they are being communicated. Word clouds shift away from a space of linguistically constituted meaning, away from a language constituted out of sentences that are uttered in contexts according to rules that can be discerned and contested.

What’s lost? The ability to distinguish between contestatory and hegemonic speech. Irony. Tonality. Normativity (how can there be an ethics of the address if the words are not part of an address, if they are extracted from their position within speech acts to become artifacts and toys?). Critique. The terms prominent in a discourse can be discerned, but not what they mean, not even in relation to each other. We don’t know the rules governing truth and falsity, which may suggest that there are no rules (other than those of frequency, proximity, and duration). Note that frequency can be citational or monological—that is, it can come from circulation or from self-repetition. Message force multipliers are more important than the message. Word clouds capture the shift from message to contribution characteristic of communicative capitalism.

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The word image of the word cloud is prefigured in avant-garde art from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cubists included words as images. Even more disruptive were the posters from Russian communist and Soviet revolutionary artists. On the one hand, their word art was efective because of its revolutionary impulse, its challenge to the status quo of late Russian painting. It performed the revolution, disrupting prior meanings. On the other hand, precisely because it depended on its context for its performative eficacy, it reinforced the fact of symbolic meaning. Its disruption was not only to index language but to create a new one, to bring about a new world, a new man, a new register of meaning. The point wasn’t to destroy meaning. It was to change it.

Word clouds aren’t revolutionary. They are elements of communicative capitalism, elements that reinforce the collapse of meaning and argument and thus hinder argument and opposition. Any words can be clouded. At Wordle you can make a new one out of speeches from Kennedy and Khrushchev, Ann Coulter or Sean “Pufy” Combs. Anyone you like.

The word-cloud image doesn’t stand in for or provide a prosthetic word. It marks a feeling, an intensity. It doesn’t ask that the viewer understand it. All the viewer is expected to do is register that the word has been, that it has appeared. The wordbecome-image is a feeling-impulse, like a badge. It’s identificatory, relying on an identity between word and object. The word image is this impulse identity.

One can’t argue with a word cloud. It doesn’t take a position. It marks a moment. It registers aspects of the intensity of that moment: repetition entails intensity in this equation. But one doesn’t know why or whether it’s called for or what it’s in relation to. It’s just intense. The word cloud might transmit the intensity, it might incite a feeling or a response, but it doesn’t invite the interrogation of that response or what induced it. It ofers representation without understanding: issues are out there. A word cloud is like a Möbius strip where meta-data becomes noise: “she said a lot about politics and technology.” Whatever.

Notes

1 The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported on July 19, 2006, that the majority of U.S. bloggers (54%) are under thirty; Amanda Lenhart and Susanna Fox, “Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers,” http://www.pewInternet.org/ pdfs/PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202006.pdf.

Pew reported on December 19, 2007, that “girls dominate the teen blogosphere; 35% of all online teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online teen boys”; Amanda Lenhart et al., “Teens and Social Media,” http://www.pewInternet.org/pdfs/ PIP\_Teens\_Social\_Media\_Final.pdf.

2 Lenhart and Fox, “Bloggers.”

3 See Chuck Salter, “Girl Power,” Fast Company, September 1, 2007, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/118/girlpower.html?page=0%2C0. See also www.whatever-life.com.

4 “State of the Blogosphere/2008,” http://technorati.com/ blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/.

5 See also James Grimmelmann, “Saving Facebook,” Iowa Law Review 94 (2009): 137–1206, http://works.bepress.com/ james\_grimmelmann/20/.

6 Dominic Pettman, Love and Other Technologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 9.

7 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, translated by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1.

8 Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” was first published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1853.

9 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 140.

10 Buck-Morss, 147.

11 One significant study of film as a vehicle for assimilation is Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

12 Buck-Morss, 161.

13 Buck-Morss, 159.

14 Buck-Morss, 201.

15 Ibid.

16 Buck-Morss, 147.