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title: "Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics"
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# Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics
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Thanks to Steven Johnston and Jane Bennett for introducing me to my editor at Duke, Courtney Berger, and thanks to Courtney for supporting this project. Thanks also to John Armitrage, Ryan Bishop, Hubertus Buchstein, Sam Chambers, Mladen Dolar, Andrew Norris, Lee Quinby; Mike Shapiro, and Adam Thurschwell for comments on specific chapters. Thanks to Jackie Stevens and Ken Wark; for their <;areful reading of the manuscript. And thanks to Cynthia Blacklaw for her work in preparing the manuscript.
Paul Passavant read and commented on the papers and essays that became this book. Surprisingly, he stil doesn't agree with quite a bit of it. I am as grateful for his disagreement as I am for his love.
Geneva, ·New York July 2008 l:NTBODUCTXON
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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Post-Politics and Left Victory
he end of the Bush administration and the crisis in capitalism confronting the world economy are opportunities not simply for reflecting on the bankruptcy of conservatism and neoliberalism but also for addressing the yet more significant failures of the left. They present opportunities, in other words, for confronting the ways that the true believers in the Republican message were actually leftists and Democrats. For many of us on the American left, the election of 2ooo indicated less a divided populace than it did the consolidation of conservative hegemony. We read George W Bush's assumption of the presidency as exposing the underlying truth of the country, despite the fact A1 Gore won the popular vote and the election's outcome rested with the Supreme Court. A Bush presidency seemed inevitable, almost foreordained. Trapped in what appeared as one enormous red state and overlooking the pervasive blue and purple, we walowed in our misery.1 That over half the voters did not want Bush somehow seemed unimportant. That the Republicans remained signifcantly behind the Democrats with respect to voters' party identification barely registered. 2 We were convinced that the country was Republican, conservative, capitalist, Christian fundamentalist, and evangelical (as if these were al the same) . It's almost as if we believed in their strength and unity, their power and influence, more than they did themselves. So we submitted to what we loudly lamented as our own worst nightmare. We turned a split election into the fact, the victory, of conservatism. And ever since, many of us on the
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academic and typing side of the u·.s. left have interpreted this conservatism as the essential core of America's present politics.
Why did we do this? Why, instead of taking to the streets after the decision to stop the count of Florida votes, did the majority of those who position themselves on the U.S. left accept defeat? Why did we see an overal and resounding right-wing victory and why did we submit? Why was this election, in the minds of so many on the left, the beginning of a new status quo rather than a minor setback we could use to strengthen our resolve and invigorate our fight?
One should interrupt this line of question.ig-what do you mean "we"? There wasn't a unified left in 2000 and there isn't a unified left now. Denying this unity is the article of faith unifying those who deny it as leftists. (Conservatives already know the left exists-that's how they know whom to oppose.) To presume some kind of left support for Gore in 2ooo is thus ill-informed and naive. Let's recall: a number of us voted for Ralph Nader (some blame us for the Bush presidency). Still others, whether they voted or not, emphasize the futilty of electoral politics under conditions of communicative capitalism, which I define as the materialization of ideals of inclusion and participation in information, entertainment, and com.riUJ.-rication technologies in ways that capture resistance and intensify global capitalism.3 Gore was hardly a left-wing candidate. He was backed by the business-friendly Democratic Leadership Council and major financial interests. The aCtivist street theater group protesting at the party conventions during the summer of 2ooo was known at the time as Bfl;. lionaires for Bush and Gore, not just Billionaires for Bush. So isn't the assertion of a "we" inaccurate as well as misleading?
No. However valid these objections to the idea of a unified left may be, they can't account for the emptiness in the streets in the wake of the decision in �ush v. Gore. They point in the opposite, more radical direction, one of a vehement opposition to Bush that should have found its expression in massive protests and dissent. Leftists opposed to Gore were even more opposed to Bush. Thus, it is possible to invoke a "we" in this regard-those of us opposed to Bush, those of us opposed to the Supreme Court's decision, those of us opposed to stopping the Florida recount, those of 1:s beginning to suspect that the tenacity ofthe right's opposition to President Bill Clinton and the relentlessness with which the Republicans were fighting their battles were slowly and not so subtly changing
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INTRODUCTION
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American politics, those of us coming to think of our political positionand future-as trapped within conservative hegemony.
Lack of faith in Gore did not lead the left to concede defeat. We lacked something in ourselves. Call it faith, conviction, resolve-even the very notion of an "ourselves" that could be or be called a "we:' Acquiescing to the fantasy of a conservative United States enabled us to deny this lack.
Consider the theme of "Clinton fatigue" so frequently invoked during the 2000 campaign. Conventional wisdom held that the United States was tired of Bil Clinton, tired of the endless qualifying, the slickness and scandal. Specifically left Clinton fatigue can be understood as the desire to get away from the Clinton years, from certain deeper feelings of guilt we didn't want to confront. This guilt lilcely resulted in part from our enjoyment of the Lewinsky afair (the president's sexual involvement with a White House intern that led the House to undertake impeachment proceedings). Talking about sex was great fun-and presidential sex was sordid and politically important, an ideal site for the typing left's political correctness and cultural superiority. Feeling guilty for enjoying Clinton's excesses could have made us feel like we deserved to be punished and that our punishment was losing the election, losing the power we never really had. Clinton proved to us-in a way we could not openly acknowledgethat we couldn't lead, that the left (even the middle!) is what the right says we are, liberal, both in terms oflicentiousness and economic liberalism or neoliberalism.
Although such an explanation for Clinton fatigue on the left may be appealing, my wager is that the left's retroactive determination of the 2000 election as the truth of conservatism was also an efort to avoid confronting a more fundamental failure: our failure to take responsibility for the overwhelming neoliberalization of the U.S. economy that culminated during the Clinton administration in the defeat of universal health care, rollback of welfare state provisions (which were already sporadic, poorly delivered, and minimal), "reinvention of government" as a private contractor and market actor, and expansion of the freedoms offinancial and banking concerns in the haze of a dot-com euphoria that trampled on the poor. The left had assumed and enjoyed the values of neoliberalism, firing its own salvos at the state and celebrating the imaginary freedoms of creativity and transformation ofered by communicative capitalism. The unique singularity of each would replace the constraints of thinking in terms of, much less trying to build, something collective, something like an all. No wonder, then, that we could neither take to the streets nor see ourselves as us.
INTRODUCTION
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Left Enjoyment or Victory in Defeat
The political, economic, and social changes associated with the decline of disciplinary society, obsolescence ofFordist production, and defeat of the Keynesian welfare state have been accompanied by increased emphases on the singular, individual, and personal. 4 Commodities are no longer marketed to broad types-housewives, teenagers-but are individualized such that consumers can specify the features they desire in a product: I'll take a grande half-caf skinny latte with extra foam: I'll design and order my own sports shoesj I'll save television shows, edit out the commercials, and watch them when it's convenient for me. Media, ever smaler and more integrated, are not just many-to-many, as early internet enthusiasts emphasized, but me-to some-to me. The rise of the consumer as producer hyped as Web 2.0 and signaled by Face book, MySpace, and You Tube designates a shift in media such that increasing numbers of people present their own artistic work (videos, photography, music, writing), express their own views, and star in·their own shows. They want-to make themselves known and visible -not just read or hear or see others (one example: 93 percent of U.S. teenagers use the Internet; 39 percent of them post their own art, stories, and video online).5 At the same time, the experience of consUming media has become progressively more isolated-from large movie thea�ers, to the family home, to the singular person strolling down the str�et wearing tiny headphones as she listens to the soundtrack of her life or talks in a seeming dementia into a barely visible mouthpiece. This isolation in tum repeats the growing isolation of many 1\.rneritan workers as companies streamline or "flexibiliz�e" their workforce, cuting or outsourcing jobs to freelance and temporary employees. Insofar as too many on the academic and typing left have celebrated isolation as freedom and consumption as creativity, we have failed to counter the neoliberalization of the economy. Even w9rse-we have failed to provide good reasons to support collective approaches to political, social, and economic problems.6 It's easier to let the market decide.
Rather than accepting responsibilty for this failure and for our o� enjoyment of the benefits and pleasures of networked, consumer-driven entertainment and communications media, though, we continue to blame the other guys-conservatives and neoconservatives, Republicans, mainstream Democrats, neoliberals, religious fundamentalists. After all, casting blame is infinitely easier than envisioning alternatives to global capitalism, combating climate change, or securing peace in the Middle East. As long as leftists see ourselves as defeated victims, we can refrain from having to admit that we are short on ideas-or that the ones we have seem unpopular, outmoded. Thus, we need a strong, united enemy. If the right is weaker than we are prepared to admit, then our retreat, our cowardice, is al the more shameful: We gave in, gave up, before ·we needed to. We actually didn't lose. It's worse than that. We quit.
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INTRODUCTION
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Turning the contingent outcome of the 2000 election into the truth of conservative hegemony had other benefits besides that of relieving us of a responsibility we want to deny. It enabled us to embrace our failure (and then compromise with Democrats via rhetorics of electability, conciliation, unity, cooperation, and change). As victims of a stolen election, we could deny and accept our weakness and incapacity at the same time (the same dynamic accompanies the 2004 election, also alleged to have been stolen) . Losing is not our fault. It's not our fault that we are losers. The other guys cheated! They stole from us!
The position of victim (rather than victor) grows out of a prominent strain of contemporary American politics, namely, the rights discourse associated with movements for civil rights, women's rights, and the rights of sexual minorities. 7 Although often linked to left political correctness, speaking as a victim is at odds with the long history of the labor movement . as well as with the politi�s of the new left. One need but recall a whole series of claims to power: "Black power," "Sisterhood is powerful;' 'We're here; we're queer; get used to it;' "Power to the people:' Reducing political speech to testimony to the sufering of victims inverts these claims to power and subverts the movements' activist spirit. 8
Shrinking the scope of political claims to those of victims needing recognition and redress also traps claimants in a double bind: to speak at all they have to demonstrate how they are harmed and vulnerable, how they are weak, inadequate, or sufering. They must speak as those who have lost, those who are losers.9 One who feels the political impulse to struggle, who is ready for a fight against injustice, is not injured enough to speak. For many leftists, the attraction of the position of the victim is thus double: one is always morally correct-for who can deny the sufering of the victim?\_.and never politically responsible-for victims are too weak and injured to govern.
INTRODUCTION
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The language of victimization thrives in a variety of discursive habitats, not just those on the left. To take one example, some Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists speak as victims. They take nails for Christ as they endure the temptations of secular society. Identifying as victims enables these Christians to present themselves as a persecuted religious minority (as if the majority of American citizens were not Christian; as if the U.S. Constitution did not protect religious freedom).
Accompanying the presumed weakness of the victim is a taste for cruelty. In the United States, claims for the rights of victims have stimulated increases in the brutality of the criminal justice system. Families of victims demand ever harsher penalties in the name of achieving "closure:' 10 The criminal as the singular locus and cause of the monstrous injustice sufered by the victim is a necessary component of this demand (which, in chapter 2, I consider in light of the fantasy of free trade). Neoliberalism's inevitable losses are displaced from systematic problems in need of collective solutions and concentrated onto the fantastic image of the individual criminal to be imprisoned, punished, tortured, and killed.
Communicative capitalism's consumerism, personalization, and therapeutization create ideal discursive habitats for the thriving of the victim identity. One might think here of gated communities (for huge houses with loads of closet space); surveillance cameras (I need to b� sure that ·I'm safe), global positioning systems (where am I, anyway?), and RFID tags (no child left behind) as well as mini-furors over tainted pet food and il-constructed toys. Moreover, particularly since leftists adopted the neoliberal language of hostility to regulation, constrainig and penalizing corporaJions has seemed limited to the possibility of locating innocent, aggrieved victims-as if obscene inequities in corporate salaries and benefits weren't themselves crimnal. Innumerable foundations organized around health and disease likewise struggle on behalf of victims, trying to secure ever-intangible "awareness." As Samantha King demonstrates with respect to breast cancer, such foundations form alances with corporations engaged in cause-related marketing to reconfigure political action as consumption, volunteerism, and fundraising. 11 Finally, since September n, 2001, the entirety of the population of the United States has seemingly acquired the right to speak as victims, as violated, as aggrieved, and therefore as fundamentally nonresponsible for violence enacted in our name.
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INTRODUCTION
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The Am.erican left has done little to challenge the hegemony of the victim. Instead, we have embraced and encouraged the current condition wherein those who don't speak as victims lack standing. The trap is deadly: those who don't speak as victims aren't supposed to complain (they are privilegedi what do they have to gripe about? what do they know of sufering?) and the political trajectory that follows from the complaints of victims enhances surveillance and control, policing and security. Precisely because the victim-security matrix is so tightly structured, the left is either left out of the current matrix or doomed to reinforce it.
The 2000 presidential election is not the only instance when the American left failed to acknowledge victory. The left also won the culture wars fought throughout the universities, arts, and media during the eighties and nineties. Slavoj Zizek helps explain how such a victory functions. He writes: "The true victory (the true 'negation of the negation') occurs when the enemy talks your language. In this sense, a true victory is a victory in defeat. It occurs when one's specifc message is accepted as a universal ground, even by th� enemy:'12 Zizek uses the example of British prime minister Tony Blair to -make his point. Blair secured the victory of the batle fought by his seeming opponent Margaret Thatcher in her attack on the British welfare state. Bill Clinton is the U.S. equivalent of Blair. Clinton achieved a dismantling of social services surpassing the right's wildest dreams. Speaking a neoliberal language that made the state just another market actor, Clinton realized the victory of Reaganism.
The victory of the academic left in the culture wars should be understood along similar lines: the prominence of politically active Christian fundamentalists, Fox News, and the orchestrations of Bush advisor Karl Rove all demonstrate the triumph of postmodernism. These guys take social construction-packaging, marketing, and representation-absolutely seriously. They put it to work. The tight's will to construct (and deconstruct) reality to fit their interests reached new extremes during the Bush administration: it paid the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to endorse the president's No Child Left Behind program, that is, to impersonate a journalist while promoting a specific political agenda. Similar fake news was distributed by the Transportation Security .Administration (a report praising airport security), the Department of Health and Human Services (television spots advertising the Medicare prescription drug benefit), and the State Department (segments of good news from U.S. miltary eforts in Afghanistan and Iraq) .13 As the New York Times columnist Frank Rich writes, "The same conservatives who once deplored postmodernism and moral relativism were now eagerly promoting a brave new world in which it was a given that there could be no empirical reality in news, only a reality you wanted to hear (or they wanted you to hear) :'14 Is it so surprising, then, that when empirical reality is up for grabs many may start to doubt any claim made by the administration, even one as seemingly basic as its account of the events of 9 I 11?
INTRODUCTION
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Corporate capitalism similarly embodies the triumph of postmodernism. Wink and guerrilla marketing, targeting specific groups, and identifying potential "tipping points;' not to mention more basic advertising strategies around branding, apply to consumers insights into the generation of afect and desire celebr�ted by scholars in critical theol)j philosoph)lj and cultural studies. Amplifying this point, Zizek calls Gilles Deleuze the "ideologist oflate capitalism:'15 Is not the intense circulation of afects in ways that bypass persons in a multiplication of intensities that Deleuze celebrates a key feature of communicative capitalism? What about toys like Transformers that can be reshaped as dinosaurs or machines and the prominence of morphed images throughout the media sphere? These morphings exemplify the continual transmutation of divides· between rna.; chine and organism, human and animal, animal and computer. They are virtual enactments of Deleuzian becoming. 16
In a simlar vein, Thomas Frank describes the underlying consensus between cultural studies and corporations that consolidated during the 1990s. He notes the challenges confronting marketers when consumers are fickle and styles change rapidly� Because consumers are already skeptical, he explains{
The intellectual task at hand is not just legitimation, it is infiltration, and suddenly questions like the oppositional or subversive potential of The Simpsons aren't quite as academic as they once seemed. Given the industry's new requirements, the active-audience faith of the cult stud becomes less an article of radical belief and more a practical foundation for the reprioritized audience research being done by the new breed of marketing experts, who can be found commenting lucidly on the postmodern condition in highbrow business publications like the Journal of Consumer Research, laying out plans to "reenchant" the brand with a "liberatory postmodernism;' and warning advertisers to create with the active, emancipation-hungry consumer in mind.17
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Enthusiasm for diversity, multiplicity, and the agency of consumers actively transforming their lifestyles unites left academics and corporate capital. For many on the academic and typing left assertions of diference, singularity, and the fluidity of modes of becoming are radical. Yet insofar as they ignore their comm.on cause with ne<:Jliberalism (a willful ignorance on the part of many left supporters ofBarack Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign), they miss the truth of this radicality-the radical redistribution of wealth to the very, very rich and the radical reconstruction of the state into the authoritarian tool for their protection. Capitalism is more revolutionary than the left has ever been.
Ideological victory can look just like ideological defeat. -when one's enemy accepts one's terms, one's point of critique and resistance is lost, subsumed. The dimension of ant\_agonism (fundamental opposition) vanishes. Other, smaller conflicts emerge. Conflicts that are less significant, less crucial, become sites of intensity, sucking up political energies. Confusions arise as the multiplicity of small antagonisms, each seemingly central, make finding the key division dificult.
Confronting the implications of ideological victory is what many of us who identify as leftists fail to do. Some academics repeat terms from old battles, as if the problem of the contemporary right is its investment in essentialisp:1 and origins, as if the right doesn't already accept (and benefit from) the impact of representations and mediations. Some feminists continue to think that exposing pornography as sexist male domination is radical and insightful. They fail to recognize that this is part of pornography's appeal-liVhy are you telling me this is domination when I know it's domination ? That's why I like it! That's what gets me of! Some new media activists celebrate, even fetishize, the latest communication gadgets, unaware that their message is indistinguishable from Apple's. Too often what passes for left politics is little more than the denunciation of all possibility of knowledge and truth, as if communicative capitalism was not already implicated in fundamental changes to the conditions of possibility for credibility, changes that activism for 9 In truth demands that we confront.
INTRODUC TION
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