Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

References

Digitality and the Media of Dispossession

Jonathan Beller

Despite everything that’s happened—and I think I mean everything—some persist in the belief that they live in a world of immediacy: that there is nature and a level playing field, that they see things as they are, that words say what they mean, that you and I are just talking.

We don’t just talk anymore, we run programs. Whom do they serve?

Whether we are just talking about the figure in 20th-century Euro-American painting, the integrity of literary form in modernity, Vietnamese bodies trapped in the inexorable logic of the Phoenix project, Iraqi bodies caught in the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib and the sites of Black Hawks and drones, or the recent economic crisis that rendered the nominal values of institutions and commodities obsolete (until the banks were shored up by a desperate expropriation of collective wealth by a government beholden to already-existing entities), one might find a common logic at work—namely, the almost unbearable pressure of social forces on the material signifier. This pressure breaks up prior codifications like so many icebergs. Here, of course, I am speaking simultaneously about signs and their users. The pulverization of signs pulverizes some of these users, who, as we know (from Lacan), are also identified via signs. While Volosinov may have been correct when he wrote in the late 1920s in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language that language is the most sensitive index of social change, we have, in the last long century, witnessed not just changes within language but changes in the status of language itself. Today, a simultaneous injunction to communicate along with a rapidly shrinking horizon of the kinds of things words as we know them might accomplish seems to prevail. The very power of speech is in question—such is the situation of the writer. His master’s voice is just one download among many. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault identified an inflection point for language at the end of the Classical Age. During the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century, he argues there was a generalized “demotion of discourse.” In the 20th century and into our own, I would argue that this demotion of discourse has intensified and that it includes the demotion of discoursers.¹

Let us explore this demotion of discourse as the intensification of capitalism by other, ostensibly extra-economic, means. Allow me to suggest that by examining mediatic shifts (the crisis of representation, the rise of visuality and informatics), by developing new concepts for labor and capital (that is, reconceptualizing the forms of labor, value, accumulation, attention, the wage) in ways that keep pace with changes already being instituted in practice, and by noting transformations in the character and role of language, afect, and utterance, we may pose a set of metrics and tactics attuned to yet opposed to those ventured and imposed by capital. I am suggesting, therefore, that it is possible at once to tell a more precise (if subaltern and subterranean) history of the conditions of possibility for what is known micropolitically as cognitive capitalism and macropolitically as Empire than what has been ofered to date and that, in doing so, one is not obliged to give way to the theories of the immeasurability of surplus value as proposed by the autonomists. Which is to say that one may speak rigorously about the expropriation of language and of the linguistic commons by a capitalism that continues to depend upon quantitative metrics and the now computer-mediated calculus of profit.

10

Disappointingly perhaps, what I have to ofer here does not accomplish all of the tasks I just set out; rather, it concentrates on the epistemic shifts that have occurred in relation to the transformation of political economy and language function and leaves the math for another time. But by expanding on a section of “The Digital Ideology”—a talk that I gave at a November 2009 conference on digital labor at The New School called The Internet as Playground and Factory,—I hope to at once extend the history of the digital and shift the locus of the general tenor of thought surrounding it. Figure 10.1 shows the intimate relation between the cognitive and mathematical functions of Empire. The image, one of digitality, is of a handout I passed around in an edition of 100 at that conference. This is all that remains—little, yes, but it is not nothing.

By all appearances, what you see before you is an ordinary onedollar bill with a red ink stamp of the word Distributed on it along with a handwritten # indicating the number in the series. But one could legitimately ask: Was the

FIGURE 10.1

handout a performance, an image, or software? Was it an icon of, or an occasion for, what Trebor Scholz and others call distributed creativity? No doubt, it was already an image of images, but one could not and cannot decide here whether the medium is paper or money or computers. Maybe it was once paper … once gold? But … Oh strange conversion! The handout, which audience members were invited to accept (as payment for their attention to my talk, as ironic critique of their scholarly intentions?) or reject (either as perverse outing of deeply embarrassing relations endemic to contemporary knowledge production that had best remain unconscious or as an act of disidentification with said relations?), gives new resonance to the still-significant formulation, the medium is the message. (For the record, some took a handout, some took several, some ironically asked for them to be signed, others left them in small piles like so much garbage—while taking the memory with them, perhaps.) But what exactly is the medium? The various inks on paper raise numerous questions along the lines of the following series: Value as Writing/Photography as Image as Money as Capital … as Value. It being understood that in its reiteration through the representational-technical-financial network, value becomes not a mere economic determination but an inexorable dimension of representational praxis. It is at once an image among images and an archetypical image—one that all others well could bear a relation to. This distributed dollar then is at once an image of extreme superficiality and of infinite permutation, mediation, regress, and progress. Dialectics at a standstill.

The understanding that emerges from a consideration of the implied series that spans the history of money, writing, photography, printing, and computerization (and, not incidentally, that of colonialism, the rise of corporate power, and U.S. imperialism) would insist that capital informs not only writing and image but their reception. However, this insistence only becomes fully convincing (which is to say realized) in the contemporary, when digital technologies underpin the world media system and when so-called cognitive capitalism, or the expropriation of what Paolo Virno calls the “cognitive-linguistic capacities of the species,” reigns.² However, given this outcome in which cognition itself is today digitally mediated without question—not a trivial outcome and furthermore one that is often undertheorized where cognitive practices are considered today—we might consider that the substitution of Quantity for Quality (the reconfiguration of quality by quantity), which has been occurring at least since capital’s beginnings, informed the first as well as this, our computer-mediated penultimate digital culture. (Optimism of the will requires that we do not consider our current digital the ultimate culture but only a precursor: as Christian Fuchs would have it, the emergence of the digital computer is a necessary precondition to the long-sought arrival of communism.) Nonetheless, we should, and indeed must, wager that the current digitization of cultural form finds its conditions of possibility not in what we most easily recognize as the computer but in the dynamics of an older machine language: that of use value/ exchange value imposed by wage labor and the commodity form—which is to say, by capitalism itself. Price was already a snapshot, and a digital one at that.

The role of digitization and its relation to the money form is a central question in both the history of political economy and our own period. The rise not only of Newtonian calculus (a calculus of space and time) but of a calculus of cultural form—and emphatically of a calculus of the image—is paramount. Marx’s account of capital was a parsing of the process of integration—the taking of the integral of capitalist production cycles along various points in the trajectories of production. Too, the artist has long used her work as a wager or exploit to gain a foothold in the socius—an efort to convert attention into a means of subsistence that increasingly has meant the cash nexus. Cinema, advertising, and banner ads clearly function in a network of politic-economic relation that convert afect to monetary units and are machines for the mining of attention, but these later forms are the key to the anatomy of their precursors: painting and photography, which must also be grasped as techniques of capture and strategies of control. Taken as whole, we could say that what was once, for the artist at least, only a more or less embarrassing presupposition and but one dimension of visual-cultural production has become the overriding component. Crudely put, these media (what is meant by “the media”) convert attention into cash—quality into quantity. Yes, there are many mediations, but the accountants (i.e., bankers) always do their best to have the last say. Just read the papers for their latest take.

Vilém Flusser, in his brief but nonetheless monumental work entitled Towards a Philosophy of Photography, sees Descartes as the pivotal figure in which alphabetical writing begins to be displaced by numerical notation. This is a significant development in the already profound disruption occasioned by linear writing. Referring to the camera but also to apparatuses in general he says:

All apparatuses (not just computers) are calculating machines and in this sense “artificial intelligences,” the camera included, even if their inventors were not able to account for this. In all apparatuses (including the camera), thinking in numbers overrides linear, historical thinking. This tendency to subordinate thinking in letters to thinking in numbers has been the norm in scientific discourse since Descartes; it has been a question of bringing thought into line with “extended matter” constructed of punctuated elements. Only numbers are suited to a process of bringing thought into line with “extended matter.” Since Descartes at least (perhaps since Nocholas of Cusa) scientific discourse has tended towards the re-encoding of thought into numbers, but only since the camera has this tendency become materially possible. The camera (like all apparatuses that followed it) is computational thinking flowing into hardware (italics mine). Hence the quantum (computational) structure of all the movements and functions of the apparatus.³

One could obviously trace the overlap between Flusser’s idea of the apparatus and Norbert Wiener’s understanding of cybernetics in The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society—characterized by what I think of as the welding of a set of intentions to future attention through calculated metrics (a principal that, we might note, already inheres in writing). I want to dwell, however, on Flusser’s understanding of photography and its relation to writing. For here one can observe the consequences of the technical image for writing as well as the digitization of images (and thus discourse) already in the 19th century. Flusser asserts that the photograph, “the first post-industrial image,” is a “technical image”—and therefore an abstract image—whose internal mechanics derive from the operation of written concepts. Thus, the photograph is a form of programming. Indeed, for Flusser, despite the appearance of transparency, the technical image is triply abstract. Very briefly, its genealogy is as follows: In what he calls the “pre-historical” era, the pictographic image (think cave painting) is a first abstraction from the visible world, mapping it to a two-dimensional picture plane that can be visually scanned. In the “historical” era, linear writing “tears up the image,” organizes its pieces in a linear manner, and imposes a temporal sequence. Flusser has given the example of an image containing stick figurations of a sun, two people, and a dog, which can then be written grammatically in “Mesopotamian tiles” as a linear sequence of these four elements.⁴ Linear writing is thus an abstraction of the image, which for Flusser is its “metacode.” Where the image is once abstracted from reality (three dimensions into two), writing is doubly abstracted (two dimensions into one). Furthermore, its strict imposition of linearity and temporal process gives rise to a new experience of time, which Flusser calls “history.” Thus, historical consciousness and writing are inseparable. The technical image, which for Flusser inaugurates our current “post-historical” era, is made with an apparatus (literally a black box) that is designed vis-à-vis the application of written—that is, abstract— postulates. Linear writing, which for Flusser is now also mathematical notation and therefore science, and which was already an abstraction from images that reduced its two dimensions into a temporal line, writes the program that is then put into operation to build the camera. Thus, while the technical image seems to be a window on the world, it is in fact an image—one that is triply abstract. Each photographic or technical image has as its condition of possibility (and is therefore a result of) this increasingly complex process of abstraction that at this point extended thought into matter via digital notation. From this point of view, no transparency exists in the technical image, and its legibility is a question with radical implications. For his part, the photographer, sometimes referred to by Flusser as “the functionary,” is locked in a struggle with the overdeterminations imposed by the programming of the apparatus—an apparatus that clearly takes on cultural dimensions—given the dialectic of usage and innovation in which the apparatus is itself engaged. The camera is an interaction of programs, and the resultant image functions as a social program.⁵

Despite important overlaps between Flusser’s work and what, following Alfred Sohn-Rethel, is currently being referred to as “real abstraction,” Flusser’s philosophical approach to photography cannot, however, be conflated with the economic abstractions decoded by classical Marxism (though Flusser does claim that the innovations of the photographer against the overcoding of the apparatus is the only revolution left open to us).⁶ The technical image for Flusser interrupts and indeed breaks with linear history and historical time, putting society into what he identifies as a postindustrial, and therefore postwork and postproletarian, mode in which information dominates, and functionaries—that is, “human beings”—are neither “the fixed nor the variable,”⁷ as they were in prior modes of production, but “merge” with the apparatus “into a unity.”⁸ The increasingly complete incorporation of humans into the apparatus changes the relations of production. Flusser, without presuming to name or identify the meta-systemic principles in operation here, nonetheless acknowledges that the programs that constitute the photographic apparatus are programmed by higher-order programs:

Beyond these [programs that inhere in the camera] are further programs— that of the photographic industry that programmed the camera, that of the industrial complex that programmed the photographic industry, that of the socioeconomic system that programmed the industrial complex; and so on.⁹

Provocatively, Flusser adds, “Of course there can be no ‘final’ program of a ‘final’ apparatus since every program requires a meta-program by which it is programmed. The hierarchy of programs is open at the top.”¹⁰ For Flusser, there is no ultimately determining instance, and, for all we know, the algorithms that shape informatics may have their higher-order programs in quantum mechanics—an outcome that for—and indeed in—all its cosmic neutrality and sublimely naturalistic indiference would be disappointingly ideological.¹¹

Nonetheless, Flusser does register the overdetermination of the programming of the photographic apparatus by what he calls “the socio-economic system”—or what we would want to call political economy—as a crisis. This crisis involves an immersion in the universe of technical images, which no one knows how to properly interpret, not least of which because the old modalities of meaning that belong to writing (particularly those relying on sequential thinking and historical imagination) no longer function. While endeavoring to remain far aloof of what he calls the “textolatry” of Marxism (which, Flusser claims, it shares with Christianity), Flusser nonetheless also clearly acknowledges that the framework of signification seemingly guaranteed by what elsewhere has been called a logocentric culture (which, in its heyday [remember those days?], proposed human actors and meanings in the form of “man” along with the weighting factors of historical time) now disorganized by “the ritualized and endlessly repeatable movement”¹² of images, creates a tremendous crisis for human beings. While one apparatus among many, the camera, for Flusser, is the apparatus par excellence and, in a quasi-Darwinian mode, has created the conditions for not just its selfreproduction but the exponential multiplication of its functions and expansion of its presence, to the point that “Nothing can resist the force of this current of technical images—there is no artistic, scientific or political activity which is not aimed at it, there is no everyday activity which does not aspire to be photographed, filmed, video-taped.”¹³ As Flusser puts it elsewhere:

[W]e are manipulated by photographs and programmed to act in a ritual fashion in the service of a feedback mechanism for the benefit of cameras. Photographs suppress our critical awareness in order to make us forget the mindless absurdity of the process of functionality, and it is only thanks to this suppression that functionality is possible at all. Thus the photographs form a magic circle around us in the shape of the photographic universe.¹⁴

In a nutshell, the camera’s program creates an evolutionary vector that at once incorporates and exceeds human selfdefinition.

Flusser’s account of the quantum character of the apparatus above clearly owes a debt to Turing’s conception of the steadystate machine, and might even be said to endeavor to construct the historical conditions of possibility for Turing’s still-penetrating insights into the machinic aspects of all orders of information processing, from the simplest information transfer to the highest forms of behavior and cognition—forms that may well include cosmic processes such as galaxy formation. However, while Flusser would not agree, I would argue that when tracking the emergence of digitality, we ignore the rise of the money system and capitalism at our extreme peril. Privileging the emergence of “the apparatus” represses the socioeconomic determinations that provide the ground for its emergence. The rise to social preeminence of the general equivalent—that is, money—alongside the organization of production in accord with the split register of the commodity form (use value/exchange value) inaugurates a transformation whose ultimate consequences have not been drawn. At the origins of capitalism, commodification (use value over exchange value—that is, quality over quantity) already provided a general method for the extension of cognition into matter. Profit, alienated production, and the accumulation of private property was itself a program—one that extended digitality (in the form of exchange value) into the deepest recesses of matter and continues its ramifications to this day. As has been said (by Fredric Jameson, among others), the emergence of the commodity form, the ability to quantitatively and thus abstractly compare specific and otherwise incomparable qualities is similar in historical import to the neolithic revolution. Thus, the Cartesian subject should be understood as exercising the mode of cognition slated by money—the vanishing mediator. Likewise, the Cartesian coordinate system, with its transposable 0 point (0,0,0) and axonometric grid that can be thrown over any space whatever lays the groundwork for the numerical calculus of space and time. We may agree with Sohn-Rethel that the real abstraction that is the money form is the condition of possibility for abstraction in classical philosophy. For Marx, it was clear that the rise of individuality and the modern subject coincided with the emergence of markets in which structurally equivalent owners of commodities came to exchange the qualities of their commodities for quantities of the general equivalent.

Today the so-called vanishing mediator is the computational underpinning of images, thought, information, and form itself. The vanishing mediator is the medium of the media. Which is also to say that labor is the medium of capital. How it underpins and sustains the various layers of mediation is one of the fundamental questions of our times. Subfields and entire fields, as well as startup and full-blown business models, position themselves in relation to the de rigeur insight that coupling digitization to image/ cognition is an investment that generates capital. Somehow, despite the overwhelming evidence, we must continuously remind ourselves of this transformation as well as the dialectical corollary that the changes in capitalist informatics have also transformed political economy and thus politics at every level. Sean Cubitt’s brilliant discussion of environmental and nonsubjective agency, Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle’s challenging insights into the culture of code and of algorithmic futures, and Patricia Clough’s incisive consideration of afect and measure in essays included in this volume point to new arenas of political economy, politicaleconomical engagement, and forms of practice. Indeed, it is arguable that there is no easy distinction between financialization and digitization and that all such distinctions, save those that selfconsciously endeavor to be politicizing, make political claims in the guise of nominally cultural ones.

Let us pause for a moment to take stock. We began with the problem of discourse in the context of the digital and have arrived at a universal tendency toward digitization that precedes the so-called digital age by at least five centuries. Cartesian mathematics, Newtonian calculus, the rise of capitalism, and the infusion of digital programming into apparatuses of representation all testify to a environment of discursive practice that has been transformed over several centuries. We also see the relative inability of our language-based strategies of meaning making to account for this digital (which is to say, metaphysical) transformation. Let us dwell for a moment on the unperceived operations that have rendered our language far less transparent, far less adequate, than we may have heretofore expected. How are we to solve or even to conceive world-historical problems that have exceeded all categories of knowledge, including history? Humankind sets forth only such problems as it can solve—so said Marx. Given the degradation of language, have we arrived at a problem we cannot even set forth? The imbrication of digitality in all modern media, as well as the subsumption of labor by and in digital media, recasts the moment of conceptualization, of utterance, as a preeminently political one.