Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

Let us say that, for political reasons (reasons still possibly caught within the domain of an epoch that has not come to a complete close and therefore remains susceptible to its foibles, logics, and what may later admittedly appear as misconceptions; but also reasons that recognize capital as something like an event horizon: a present mathematically extended into matter and therefore currently untranscendable), one wanted a counter to all the celebratory hoopla and evangelical hand rubbing with respect to the digital and its correlative posthumanism by dwelling further on the negatives of digitality; one could also look again, in support of a quest for radical disenchantment, at some of the classic critiques of media clustered around the global 1960s (decolonization, revolution)—specifically, McLuhan, Enzensberger, and Baudrillard. These thinkers, beyond their specific claims, have the merit of showing how little prepared we are to think the problems of history and society. While it may appear tedious to rehearse some of these arguments, my hope is that readers will see this as a kind of afective practice, an attitude adjustment that might occur in relation to cultural analysis and what is known as thought.

The still-underappreciated McLuhan argued in 1964 that new media technologies alter the sense ratios and that the macroefects of such alteration cannot be easily or quickly apprehended. Indeed, only with the rise of electronic media do we grasp the historical significance of the Gutenberg press. McLuhan drops blazing one-liners such as, “Print created individualism and nationalism in the 16th century,” which, of course, implies that the fundamental categories for thinking about agency, history, and geopolitics in the standard historical accounts (i.e., the individual and the nation) miss the mark. Beginning with the famous, but perhaps not famous enough, example of the light bulb as a medium without content (without content, at least until neon lights—McLuhan’s example—and perhaps the cinema screen—my example), McLuhan argues that “The medium is the message.”¹⁵ In other words, the deep structural and epistemic changes of history and society are media based and take place irrespective of particular content.

In 1970, Hans Magnus Enzensberger could have been writing about this, our current moment:

Anyone who expects to be emancipated by technological hardware or by a system of hardware however structured, is the victim of an obscure belief in progress. Anyone who imagines that freedom for the media will be established if only everyone is busy transmitting and receiving is the dupe of a liberalism which, decked out in contemporary colors merely peddles the faded concepts of a preordained harmony of social interests.¹⁶

Cleaving to the belief that content, distribution, and access to the means of production matter, Enzensberger dismisses “the charlatan” McLuhan’s formulation that the medium is the message:

The sentence … tells us that the bourgeoisie does indeed have all possible means at its disposal to communicate something to us, but that it has nothing more to say. It is ideologically sterile. Its intention is to hold on to the control of the means of production at any price while being incapable of making the socially necessary use of them is here expressed with complete frankness in the superstructure. It wants the media as such and to no purpose.¹⁷

Enzensberger also dismisses (as bourgeois):

the symbolical expression by an artistic avant-garde whose program logically admits only the alternative of negative signals and amorphous noise. Example: the already outdated “literature of silence,” Warhol’s films in which everything can happen at once or nothing at all, and John Cage’s forty-five minute-long, Lecture on Nothing.¹⁸

Interestingly, for us theorists of cinema, cut ’n’ mix and the mash-up, he sees the potential of content and agenda-driven programming and identifies the partisan character of montage, “Cutting, editing, dubbing—these are techniques for conscious manipulation.” He describes these techniques as “work processes” and calls the results “proto-types,” presumably for the fabrication of reality. In contrast to traditional works of art, Enzensberger writes, “the media do not produce such objects, they create programs.” This statement is not too far from Solanas and Gettino’s position in their 1969 manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” which saw the cinematic work as a catalyst of revolution and for the creation of a “new man”; it is also not entirely diferent from Flusser’s ideas of the technical image and of the apparatus, at least in as much as it sees programming and labor as endemic to the logistics of the image.

In his 1972 “Requiem for the Media” (a title shot through with unrequited wish fulfillment), the much-maligned Jean Baudrillard explains that “the media are not co-eficients, but efectors of ideology.”¹⁹ Ideology is not “some Imaginary floating in the wake of exchange value: it is the very operation of exchange value.” This thesis is brilliantly elaborated in what, for me anyway, is his most significant work: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. In “Requiem,” using the mass-media response to and thus containment of Paris ’68, Baudrillard asserts that:

The mass media are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate noncommunication: they are what always prevent a response, making all processes of exchange impossible (except the various forms of response simulation …). The revolution tout court lies in restoring this possibility of response.²⁰

The media’s power of preventing a response, its irresponsibility, ultimately lies in what Baudrillard calls “the terrorism of the code.” The invariable organization of code by the algorithm Encoder-Message-Decoder, an algorithm which we must assume is the result of the history of the practical applications of code and therefore the historical achievement of “communication” as “the code” itself, means that one can only be transmitter or receiver, never both, and that both ambiguity and genuine reciprocity are excluded. Against Enzensberger, Baudrillard writes, “Reversibility has nothing to do with Reciprocity” and concludes that the code institutes “decentralized totalitarianism.”

A summary of these late-1960s media negatrons could read as follows: For McLuhan, the nonrecognition of the mediatic basis of society leads to a gross miscategorization of agency and to historical (and therefore political) error. Without a mediatic understanding of the transformation of consciousness by means of the shift in sense ratios, no proper understanding of human agency is possible. For Enzensberger, bourgeois-organized media is liquidated of socialist content/program and therefore divested of content meaningful for anything but the intensification of capitalism; thus, the mass media is counterrevolutionary in its current incarnation, though perhaps not in essence. For Baudrillard, the functioning of the code itself negates the production of noncapitalist values— one must “smash the code.” Thus, whether the failure of revolutionary socialism is in misperception of nearly invisible media efects, improper programming, or the historically imposed structure of communication itself, these three thinkers insist that a radical reconsideration of mediatic modes is the sine qua non of social justice.

These critiques of what we are now calling media platforms and their functions or exploits, along with Flusser’s understanding of the postindustrial character of photography, should be further linked to the more recent extrapolation and development of what Regis Debray christens mediology. In Media Manifestos, Debray, theorist of the foco movements, volunteers the mnemonic, “Submission rhymes with Transmission” “because to transmit is to organize, and to organize is to hierarchize. Hence also to exclude and subordinate.”²¹ Debray suggests, in efect, that the history of sign function is organized by what we might now think of as media platforms and the apparatuses, institutions, and practices that sustain them. “Let us agree on the propriety of calling ‘medium’ in the strong sense the system of apparatus-support-procedure, that which a mediological revolution would unsettle and disturb organically.”²² We see from this text that, in addition to whatever else it may be, sign function is clearly extrasemiotic—in other words, practical-material. Whether thinking about writing and the institutional system of books, libraries, and print media; television with its networks, power grids, and editing suites; or computers with their servers, protocols, and globally disaggregated factories for the assemblage of both the machines and the platforms, Debray allows us to consider more concretely the material operation of the apparatus proper in the organization of what Althusser called “ideological state apparatuses” but also in ostensibly nonstatist media forms.²³ Furthermore, the hypermediation of language (and hence its radical denaturing) is everywhere evident.

In light of these critical—and let’s admit it, radically pessimistic—takes on media history (and therefore History), I hope, for the sake of further disenchantment, that it will be worth revisiting and further elaborating my own brief history of visuality as laid out in The Cinematic Mode of Production, which understands the highlights of 20th-century intellectual history as inflection points describing the decreasing purchase of sign function (that is, “natural” language) on reality. It is only by examining the codevelopment of sign function and technocapitalism that one can really understand the situation of linguistic function described phenomenologically by the Italian post-Marxists. More importantly still, taking a mediological approach explains how the efective short-circuiting of language function has been a necessary achievement of capital’s worldwide suppression of democracy. It requires the world media system to convert nominal democracy into its antithesis. Mass cynicism, irony, farce, and indiference are mere symptoms of this historical transformation.

However, before proceeding to my central thesis here regarding the worldwide foreclosure of democracy through the demotion of discourse, let us return to Foucault regarding the compensatory cultural shifts resulting from the “demotion of language to the mere status of object” during the 19th century. Speaking about the practice of exegesis, he writes:

[N]ow it is not a matter of rediscovering some primary word that has been buried in [language], but of disturbing the words we speak, of denouncing the grammatical habits of our thinking, of dissipating the myths that animate our words, of rendering once more noisy and audible the element of silence that all discussion carries with it as it is spoken. The first book of Das Kapital is an exegesis of “value”; all Nietzsche is an exegesis of a few Greek words; Freud, the exegesis of all those unspoken phrases that support and at the same time undermine our apparent discourse, our fantasies, our dreams, our bodies. Philology, as the analysis of what is said in the depths of discourse, has become the modern form of criticism. Where, at the end of the eighteenth century, it was a matter of fixing the frontiers of knowledge, it will now be one of seeking to destroy syntax, to shatter tyrannical modes of speech, to turn words around in order to perceive all that is being said through them and despite them. God is perhaps not so much a region beyond knowledge as something prior to the sentences we speak; and if Western man is inseparable from him, it is not because of some invincible propensity to go beyond the frontiers of experience, but because his language ceaselessly foments him in the shadow of his laws [quoting Nietzsche]: “I fear that we shall never rid ourselves of God, since we still believe in grammar.²⁴

The analysis of the transformed status of language, so meticulously and brazenly undertaken by Foucault, stands as one of the important intellectual achievements of what, until recently, could be said to be “our times.” The consequences of the demotion of language from its classical transparency to a medium still has to be reckoned with. Foucault elucidates three compensations: (1) language is understood as a necessary medium for knowledge, (2) there is a critical value bestowed upon the study of language, and (3) “the appearance of literature, of literature as such”²⁵ a practice in which language “has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being.”²⁶ While this last is an arresting, even beautiful, statement, we could well ask for whom does it shine and for whom might it sparkle or flame? And furthermore, why the visual metaphor? Why write laudatory sentences about the literary when the literary as such would mark the diminution of linguistic power in the world? Without really embarking on an argument here, but only suggesting a line of inquiry, could one resituate the work of Foucault in relation to the history of media technology? Would a Kittlerization of Foucault rescue him (or at least us) from remaining as Edward Said said, “the scribe of power?” One who abrogates his agency (and not only in his rejection of Marxism) in the recording of Power’s micropolitics? Might an apparatus centered historicization of Foucault’s claims potentially transform the aspects of his work that are ideological in Regis Debray’s sense of the term “ideology: the play of ideas in the silence of technology.” What might become visible if the archeological approach gives way to the mediological approach would be not simply discursive practices—or even, as with biopower, the interface of the body with the technics of the social—but the historico-materiality of mediation: the machines, platforms, techniques, and concrete media of inscription, transmission, and dissemination, and perhaps (above all?), the investments in and complex financialization of these apparatuses. What might then appear is the multiple capitalist bases on which “man” has been invested in and built, and is now meeting his end.

Without skipping too many logical steps in an argument here, then one could go so far as to say that digitization is the necessary precondition of modern humanity. This digital core of humanity is today manifest by even a superficial examination of the contemporary world: as far as global citizenship is concerned, where there is no money, hegemony recognizes no humanity. Or as Solanas and Gettino put it in “Towards a Third Cinema:” “The more exploited a man is, the more he is placed on a plane of insignificance. The more he resists, the more he is viewed as a beast.”²⁷ One can show (and, indeed, it has been shown—many times, yet seemingly not often enough) that the very idea of the human, at least as put into practice by the West, depends upon violent racist and culturalist-nationalist exclusions of discursively and materially produced others: non-, in-, and sub-humans. These images of the racial other, grasped by Western(ized) eyes as images of animality, stupefaction, irrationality, and abjection, should be understood as nothing less (if perhaps something more, much more) than representational technologies of capitalist expansion. Discursively speaking, iterations of self and other amount to ideologies in an older idiom, software in a more contemporary one; narratives and images of self/other conform to Foucault’s idea of a “techne” for both the making of certain subjects and the disappearance of others. In the Foucaultian paradigm, this organization of knowing is part of an episteme, the archeology of which allows Foucault to ask in all resonant seriousness in The Order of Things, “Does man really exist?”

To imagine, for an instant, what the world and thought and truth might be if man did not exist, is considered to be merely indulging in paradox. This is because we are so blinded by the recent manifestation of man that we can no longer remember a time—and it is not so long ago—when the world, its order, and human beings existed, but man did not…. Ought we not remind ourselves—we who believe ourselves bound to a finitude which belongs only to us, and which opens up the truth of the world to us by means of our cognition—ought we not remind ourselves that we are bound to the back of a tiger?²⁸

The epistemic changes are bigger than man; we are finally starting to know that. I suppose the question here is whether or not one could say that Foucault’s tiger is digital. This would allow us to assert that “Man” was the brand name for a once-popular (if still unspeakably violent) operating system. If contra Foucault and with his ruptures and discrete epistemes, we allow ourselves to be guided by Marx’s dictum that “The anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape,” which argues that the later formations reveal the eschatological tendencies incipient in the former, we find ourselves not only collecting animal spirits but confronted by the following paradox: retroactively, the ur-medium of “man,” of “humanity” is capital. Thus, “man” was an early symptom of the digital.

At one level, this claim that “man” is capital with a human face seems simple enough, obvious even: the same ur-medium that has produced the human has also produced the radical dispossession of the human. The only other achievement that can be understood to be of the same order as the achievement of humanity is inhumanity. In a refrain of Cesaire’s surrealistic query into paradox from Discourse on Colonialism, we might also wonder, “Civilization and Colonization?” The charismatic dictator, the great family of man—all symptoms of the dialectic of capital-man. This is not necessarily to take this dialectic as the summation of modernity en toto. My project here is not to identify the ruling trope of an era and even less to ofer a totalizing view of world history (really), but rather to explore the bankruptcy of the ruling ideas that continue to structure the cultural inflection of emergent media. Thus, it is significant to critique “man” and “the human” not only because these are still operative but because the emergent considerations of a much-touted posthumanism negatively locate the human remainder as a central investment for Western (that is, Western self-identifying) culture. As critics such as Joel Dinerstein and Alexander Weheleya pointedly demonstrate, not just humanisms but also posthumanisms smuggle the white Western subject of liberalism back in as the metric for the measurement and the enjoyment of the drama of its—that is, his—own disappearance. Something similar might also be said of the literary function of the sublime in the work of Foucault: in the words of Walter Benjamin, “man experiences his annihilation as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” The payof is in watching the air go out of the bag. Thus, from the Nietzschean nihilism of “Man would rather will nothingness than will nothing at all” to the Benjaminian diagnosis of the aesthetics of fascism, one begins to understand the compensatory pleasures ofered an enfranchised if still exploited citizenry: Debord’s “gilded poverty” lived in exchange for new forms of marginalization and nonexistence. These relations are distributed through the encroachment of a new sociologistical media paradigm, reiterated at the level of philosophy and savored by theory. One could follow this thread through the contemporary rise of farce, blank irony, simulation, and reality TV, but that would lead us too far afield. The point here is that the demotion of language and the liquidation of the Real is orchestrated in direct relation to the intensive development of the first digital medium of representation.

However, it also needs to be mentioned here that the recession of the Real and the deconstruction of “man” that reached new levels of intensity during the 20th century was not merely the efect of domination; it was also the efect of struggle. In other words, as commodities, images, pirates, and police arrived to dominate, counterimages, counternarratives, countertheories, and counterhistories have been put forward staking claims that either challenged the Real or Deconstructed it. The imposition of various realities in the name of Man and his democracy were countered by their negation. The disintegration of the Real, of the referent, of “being” was, in fact, also a hallmark of struggle. Thus, one must understand the essential but all too often unremarked centrality not only of the self-contradiction of capitalism and fascism (a seemingly internal afair) but of antiracist, anticolonialist, anti-imperialist, postcolonial, feminist, women of color feminist, and queer struggles (the rebellions of the trod upon) and the resultant theories and practices in the making of the 20th-century epistemic shift that I am speaking about. Without exception, these struggles aspire beyond the framework insisted upon by capitalism, even if they are partially recuperated by said framework in a later iteration. Without a clear understanding of insurresctionary work such as that of Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Helene Cixous, Angela Davis, and Judith Butler (to put but one, perhaps for today still too provincial, name on each of the endeavors listed above), there is no real possibility of understanding the outrage nor the historical and geopolitical stakes that animate the changes we have been so mechanically (and in fact anachronistically) discussing in terms of “man.” The Arab Spring, Los Indignados in Spain, and the worldwide protests of 2011 all transmit a radical disafection with the capitalist organization of representation and assert the living history and potential of insurrection as a constituent element of a nominally capitalist planet.

To return to the troublesome history of the human sciences and perhaps place Foucault’s work in a mediological context, we might propose that the major moments of this history be read as an indexical phenomenologicon of sign function in relation to the capitalist development of technology. Together, these diferentiable endeavors, each with its own theory of sign function, ofer a periodization of verbal sign efects in relation to an overall trajectory: the technologically mediated recession of the Real. It should be taken as axiomatic that the development of technologies of mediation—particularly visual, audiophonic, and digital technologies—does not occur apart from either political economy or the geopolitical forces of colonialism, imperialism, racialization, and the regulation of sexuality and gender.

Beginning in the 19th century with the rise of the world market and the international interstate system (itself, as Benedict Anderson shows, a kind of media phenomenon organized by the newspaper), tendencies toward universal (which is to say, global market) protocols were increasingly pronounced. Linguistics and structuralism institute an inaugural and henceforth unrecoverable split between signifier and signified—the sign shadows the real and vice versa, while arguing that these basic dynamics adhere in all linguistic representation regardless of content. One might say that the shift from what Saussure viewed as classical philology to linguistics marks the final demotion of language to being one medium among many, one record of accounts to a world that may now ofer competing versions of itself in other languages and media. Only then can one derive the arbitrary nature of the sign (Foucault reads Schlegel, Cuvier, and Bopp for this, but for me the decisive figure is Saussure). Psychoanalysis and semiotics propose that the world beyond the purview of language churns in accord with logics beyond those of daytime rationality (grammatology) and definitively shifts the whole Marxian notion of the depthhermeneutic and the symptom from the appearance of things (the commodity) to language itself (the sign). Things and words have subterranean dynamics. The year 1895—roughly the advent of cinema, psychoanalysis, and structuralism—provides a convenient date to mark both this breakdown of language and its strategies to accommodate its newly precipitated dysfunction. Language ruptures to find images—images to which it can only afix more of itself. These ruptures in sign function, signs of the real, turn out to be signs themselves. Parapraxis, a pronounced breakdown in language, through which the unconscious emerges, requires the discourse that will be psychoanalysis to explain it. Signifier/ Signified is a generative image of the sign. The dream is a rebus. The objet petit a is a name for the gaze. Language notices and endeavors through the proliferation of the humanistic disciplines to accommodate its own displacement by the rising tide of the visual—by the omnipresence of images. Vast amounts of discourse are required to manage the ever-intensifying proliferation of these images.

As I tried to show in “The Unconscious of the Unconscious,” the onslaught of the visual and the penetration of the life world by visual technologies can be thought of as the unconscious of the unconscious itself—the repressed media history that provided the template for the new insights into human nature that emerged out of both psychoanalysis and studies of sign function. Likewise semiotics, with its attention to visual texts as well as its meditations on the meaning of meaning that in one branch of its endeavors culminated in the analysis of the structure of myth as a second-order signifying system (Barthes), showed the ways in which signs could be deployed (and therefore denatured) by what we might today recognize as a program. Poststructuralism and deconstruction, despite the latter’s intensive emphasis on textuality, amounted to an elaboration of Lacanian aphanasis (the fading of the subject) by placing presence and being itself under erasure. Both the subject and existence could no longer be guaranteed by writing or speech, which, in being understood as moments of a specific technological formation, had become one and the same. One could say that in a visual-becoming-infomatic digital culture, the traditional forms of writing and its subjects were driven to the brink of extinction. Linear time, grand narratives, history, presence, and being itself, all of the onceessential elements of not only human nature but purportedly of nature proper, were shown to be at once discursive formations and formations that were crumbling. One could find the visible, photographic, and electronic light of images pouring through the cracks of the old forms. The subjects who once presided over their objects melted into them, and, as I put it somewhere else, all that is solid melts into film. What’s more, this light, once seemingly external but now internal to language and subjectivity itself, was powered by the masses.

With full postmodernism (a new moment of capitalist digitality) and the full emergence of virtuality and simulation, along with the waning of historicity and what I would call not the waning but the repurposing of afect, we enter a world in which not only has language been functionalized by the great political-economic machines of the imagination known as but not limited to cinema, television, digital cameras, and computers, but the productive possibilities and social roles of language have been forever transformed. And, almost incidentally, so, too, has the role of philosophy and, for what (little) it’s worth, the definition of our species. A la Kubrick’s 2001, the human drama may have a cosmic scope, but if it does, it is most certainly not humanistic. As it turns out, infinite existentialism when combined with infinite irony produces simulation as the sine qua non of knowledge. From the perspective of the absolute fading of the Real, what could be more nihilistic than the current engagement with a recognized simulation as if it were real, it being understood, of course, that today the other name for nihilism is faith?

In this manner then, the discursive frames of the recent human sciences— psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction—could be borrowed from intellectual history for the staging of the exit of the Real from representation. Indeed, I would say that it is only with Saussure and the arbitrary nature of the sign that language really begins to be understood as a medium among others and embarks on the journey toward a full abrogation of its privileged access to the Real. This exit of the Real from the symbolic is to be correlated, then, with the intensifying penetration of the life-world by technologies of the visual, the audiophonic, and the digital as well as the struggles for decolonization and social justice that further relativize linguistic claims. Incidentally, the 20th-century human sciences should also be correlated with the parametric instrumentalization of the signifier in various capitalist endeavors spanning that not-so-wide gamut that runs from advertising to torture, both of which endeavor to theatrically create for its audience (victim) an existential crisis that shatters the traditional personality so it can be resignified by the domain of power in which it is newly bound. The contest over the Real—its increasing distance from the subjects of civilization— has been continuously reintegrated and transformed as the new ground of encounter. Consequently, the subject has been pulverized. I mention this violent reconfiguration and reprogramming of the concrete individual because it allows us to return to my thesis: that the capitalist development of digitality and informatics served the dual purpose of capture and marginalization, of mobilization and nonrepresentation, writ large, of worldwide massification without worldwide democracy. This program was absolutely essential for the continued concentration of the accumulation of surplus value and, what amounts to the same thing, the preservation and intensification of hierarchical society.

Marx himself showed that the modern subject—the individual—emerges as the subject of exchange within the framework imposed by market capitalism; Althusser showed how the subject becomes the other side of the capitalist state form—a functional position always already within ideology—efectively foreclosed from any breach with ideology. The lessons here are formal as well as political—certain modalities of subjectification and discursive practices are, if not out and out dead ends, then fraught with the paradox of capture—by what Brian Holmes calls “the over-code.”²⁹ The subsequent pulverizing of the subject, the transformed role of discourse under the paradigm of virtuosity, and the reconstruction of state governance as Empire must be closely linked to an understanding of the increasing intimacy—one might even risk saying the convergence—of media forms and the logistics of capitalism. Aphanasis and the recession of the real is not only a tragic revolutionizing of the forces of production, it is also necessarily an opportunity: aesthetic, political, social.