The Flexible Personality:
For a New Cultural Critique
by Brian Holmes
The
events of the century's turn, from
a sweeping critique of
capitalist globalization is possible, and urgently
necessary – before
the level of violence in the world dramatically
increases. The
beginnings of such a critique exist, with the renewal of
"unorthodox" economics.1 But now one can look further,
toward a critique of
contemporary
capitalist culture.
To be effective, a cultural critique must show the links between
the major articulations of power
and the more-or-less trivial aesthetics of
everyday life. It must reveal the
systematicity of social relations and
their compelling character for
everyone involved, even while it points to
the specific discourses, images
and emotional attitudes that hide
inequality and
raw violence. It must shatter the balance of consent, by
flooding daylight on exactly what a
society consents to, how it tolerates
the intolerable. Such a critique
is difficult to put into practice because
it must work on two opposed
levels, coming close enough to grips with the
complexity of
social processes to convince the researchers whose
specialized
knowledge it needs, while finding striking enough expressions
of its conclusions to sway the
people whom it claims to describe – those
upon whose behavior the
transformation of the status quo depends.
This kind of critique existed very recently in our societies, it
gave intellectual focus to an
intense and widespread dissatisfaction in the
sixties and seventies, it helped
change an entire system. Today it seems to
have vanished. No longer does the
aesthetic dimension appear as a contested
bridge between the psyche and the
objective structures of society. It is as
though we had lost the taste for the
negative, the ambition of an
anti-systemic
critique. In its place we find endless variants on
Anglo-American
"cultural studies" – which is an affirmative strategy, a
device for adding value, not for
taking it away. The history of cultural
studies argues today for a renewal of
the negative, of ideology critique.
When it emerged in the late fifties, British cultural studies
tried
to reverse aesthetic hierarchies
by turning the sophisticated language of
literary criticism onto working-class
practices and forms. Elevating
popular expressions by a process of
contamination that also transformed the
elite culture, it sought to create
positive alternatives to the new kinds
of domination projected by the
mass media. The approach greatly diversified
the range of legitimate subjects
and academic styles, thereby making a real
contribution to the
ideal of popular education.2 What is more, cultural
studies constituted a veritable
_school_ on the intellectual left,
developing a
strategic intention. However, its key theoretical tool was the
notion of a differential reception,
or "negotiated reading" – a personal
touch given to the message by the receiver.
The notion was originally used
to reveal working-class
interpretations of dominant messages, in a model
still based on class consciousness.3
But when the emphasis on reception was
detached from the dynamics of class, in
the course of the 1980s, cultural
studies became one long celebration of
the particular twist that each
individual or
group could add to the globalized media product. In this way,
it gave legitimacy to a new,
transnational consumer ideology.4 This is the
discourse of
alienation perfected, appropriated, individualized,
ethnicized, made
one's own.
How can
cultural critique become effective again today? I am going
to argue for the construction of
an "ideal type," revealing the
intersection of
social power with intimate moral dispositions and erotic
drives.5 I call this ideal type the
_flexible personality_. The word
"flexible" alludes directly to the current economic
system, with its casual
labor contracts, its just-in-time
production, its informational products
and its absolute dependence on
virtual currency circulating in the
financial
sphere. But it also refers to an entire set of very positive
images, spontaneity, creativity,
cooperativity, mobility, peer relations,
appreciation of
difference, openness to present experience. If you feel
close to the counter-culture of the
sixties-seventies, then you can say
that these are _our_ creations, but
caught in the distorting mirror of a
new hegemony. It has taken
considerable historical effort from all of us to
make the insanity of contemporary
society tolerable.
I am going to look back over recent history to show how a form
of
cultural critique was effectively
articulated in intellectual and then in
social terms, during the post-World
War II period. But I will also show how
the current structures of
domination result, in part, from the failures of
that earlier critique to evolve in
the face of its own absorption by
contemporary
capitalism.
Question Authority
The
paradigmatic example of cultural critique in the postwar period is the
Institut
für Sozialforschung – the autonomous scholarly organization known
as the
abbreviation of
Freudo-Marxism. But what does that mean? Reviewing the
texts, you find that from as early
as 1936, the Institut articulated its
analysis of domination around the
psychosociological structures of
authority. The
goal of the _Studien über Autorität und Familie_ was to
remedy "the failure of
traditional Marxism to explain the reluctance of the
proletariat to
fulfill its historical role."6 This "reluctance" – nothing
less than the working-class embrace
of Nazism – could only be understood
through an exploration of the way that
social forces unfold in the psyche.
The
decline of the father's authority over the family, and the increasing
role of social institutions in
forming the personality of the child, was
shown to run parallel to the
liquidation of liberal, patrimonial
capitalism, under
which the nineteenth-century bourgeois owner directly
controlled an
inherited family capital. Twentieth-century monopoly
capitalism
entailed a transfer of power from private individuals to
organized,
impersonal corporations. The psychological state of masochistic
submission to
authority, described by Erich Fromm, was inseparable from the
mechanized order
of the new industrial cartels, their ability to integrate
individuals within
the complex technological and organizational chains of
mass-production
systems. The key notion of "instrumental reason" was
already in germ here. As Marcuse wrote
in 1941: "The facts directing man's
thought and action are those of the machine process, which itself
appears
as the embodiment of rationality
and expediency. Mechanized mass
production is
filling the empty spaces in which individuality could assert
itself."7
The Institut's early work combined a psychosociological analysis
of
authoritarian
discipline with the philosophical notion of instrumental
reason. But its powerful
anti-systemic critique could not crystallize
without studies of the centrally
planned economy, conceived as a social and
political
response to the economic crisis of the 1930s. Institut members
Friedrich
Pollock and Otto Kirchheimer were among the first to characterize
the new "state
capitalism" of the 1930s.8 Overcoming the traditional
Marxist
portrayal of monopoly capitalism, which had met its dialectical
contradiction in the
crisis of 1929, they described a definitive shift away
from the liberal system where
production and distribution were governed by
contractualized market
relations between individual agents. The new system
was a managerial capitalism where
production and distribution were
calculated by a
central-planning state. The extent of this shift was
confirmed not
only by the Nazi-dominated industrial cartels in
also by the Soviet five-year plans,
or even the American New Deal,
anticipating the
rise of the Keynesian welfare state. Authority was again
at the center of the analysis.
"Under state capitalism," wrote Pollock,
"men meet each other as commander or commanded."9 Or, in
Kirchheimer's
words: "Fascism characterizes
the stage at which the individual has
completely lost
his independence and the ruling groups have become
recognized by the
state as the sole legal parties to political
compromise."10
The resolution of economic crisis by centralized planning for
total
war concretely revealed what
Pollock called the "vital importance" of an
investigation
"as to whether state capitalism can be brought under
democratic
control." This investigation was effectively undertaken by the
Institut during its American exile, when it sought to translate
its
analysis of Nazism into the American
terms of the Cold War. What we now
remember most are the theory and
critique of the culture industry, and the
essay of that name; but much more
important at the time was a volume of
sociological
research called _The Authoritarian Personality_, published in
1950.11
Written under Horkheimer's direction by a team of four authors
including
Adorno, the book was an attempt to apply statistical methods of
sociology to the
empirical identification of a fascistic character
structure. It
used questionnaire methods to demonstrate the existence of a
"new anthropological type" whose traits were rigid
conventionalism,
submission to
authority, opposition to everything subjective, stereotypy,
an emphasis on power and
toughness, destructiveness and cynicism, the
projection
outside the self of unconscious emotional impulses, and an
exaggerated
concern with sexual scandal. In an echo to the earlier study of
authority, these
traits were correlated with a family structure marked not
by patriarchal strength but
rather weakness, resulting in attempts to sham
an ascendancy over the children
which in reality had devolved to social
institutions.
_The
Authoritarian Personality_ represents the culmination of a
deliberately
programmed, interdisciplinary construction of an ideal type: a
polemical image
of the social self which could then guide and structure
various kinds of critique. The
capacity to focus different strands of
critique is the key function of this
ideal type, whose importance goes far
beyond that of the statistical
methodologies used in the
questionnaire-study.
Adorno's rhetorical and aesthetic strategies, for
example, only take on their full force
in opposition to the densely
constructed
picture of the authoritarian personality. Consider this quote
from the essay on
"Commitment" in 1961:
Newspapers and magazines of the radical Right constantly stir up
indignation
against what is unnatural, over-intellectual, morbid and
decadent: they know their readers. The
insights of social psychology into
the authoritarian personality
confirm them. The basic features of this type
include conformism, respect for a
petrified façade of opinion and society,
and resistance to impulses that
disturb its order or evoke inner elements
of the unconscious that cannot be
admitted. This hostility to anything
alien or alienating can accommodate
itself much more easily to literary
realism of any provenance, even if it
proclaims itself critical or
socialist, than
to works which swear allegiance to no political slogans,
but whose mere guise is enough to
disrupt the whole system of rigid
coordinates that
governs authoritarian personalities...12
Adorno
seeks to show how Brechtean or Sartrean political engagement
could shade gradually over into the
unquestioning embrace of order that
marks an authoritarian state. The
fractured, enigmatic forms of Beckett or
Schoenberg
could then be seen as more politically significant than any call
to rally collectively around a
cause. Turned at once against the weak
internal harmonies of a satisfied
individualism, and against the far more
powerful totalizations of an
exploitative system, aesthetic form in
Adorno's
vision becomes a dissenting force through its refusal to falsely
resolve the true contradictions. As he
writes in one of his rhetorical
phrases: "It is not the office of
art to spotlight alternatives, but to
resist by its form alone the course
of the world, which permanently puts a
pistol to men's heads."13
The point is not to engage in academic wrangling over exactly
how
Adorno
conceived this resistance of contradictory forms. More interesting
is to see how a concerted
critique can help give rise to effective
resistance in
society. The most visible figure here is Herbert Marcuse,
whose 1964 book _One-Dimensional
Man_ became an international best-seller,
particularly in
placards reading "Marx, Mao,
Marcuse." But this only shows how Marcuse,
with his directly revolutionary
stance, could become a kind of emblem for
converging
critiques of the authoritarian state, industrial discipline and
the mass media. In
Castoriadis
developed a critique of bureaucratic productivism. In
the business writer William Whyte
warned against the "organization man" as
early as 1956, while in 1961 an
outgoing president, Dwight D. Eisenhower,
denounced the
technological dangers of the "military-industrial complex."
Broadcast
television was identified as the major propaganda tool of
capitalism,
beginning with Vance Packard's book _The Hidden Persuaders_ in
in
and Paul Goodman attacked school
systems as centers of social
indoctrination, R.D.
Laing and Félix Guattari called for an
anti-psychiatry, and
Henri Lefebvre for an anti-urbanism, which the
Situationists put into effect with the practice of the _dérive_.
In his
_Essay
on Liberation_, written immediately after '68, Marcuse went so far
as to speak of an outbreak of
mass surrealism – which, he thought, could
combine with a rising of the
racialized lumpen proletariat in the
wider revolt of the
I don't mean to connect all this subversive activity directly to
the
seventies was
clearly aimed at the military-industrial complexes, at the
regimentation and
work discipline they produced, at the blandishments of
the culture industry that concealed
these realities, and perhaps above all,
at the existential and
psychosocial condition of the "authoritarian
personality."
The right-wing sociologist Samuel Huntington recognized as
much, when he described the revolts
of the 1960s as "a general challenge to
the existing systems of authority,
public and private."14 But that was just
stating the obvious. In seventies
slogan was "Question
Authority."
What I have tried to evoke here is the intellectual background
of
an effective anti-systemic
movement, turned against capitalist productivism
in its effects on both culture
and subjectivity. All that is summed up in a
famous bit of French graffiti, _On ne
peut pas tomber amoureux d'une courbe
de croissance_ ("You can't
fall in love with a growth curve"). In its very
erotics, that writing on the walls of
May '68 suggests what I have not yet
mentioned, which
is the positive content of the anti-systemic critique: a
desire for equality and social unity,
for the suppression of the class
divide. Self-management and direct
democracy were the fundamental demands
of the student radicals in 1968,
and by far the most dangerous feature of
their leftist ideology.15 As Jürgen
Habermas wrote in 1973: "Genuine
participation of
citizens in the processes of political will-formation,
that is, substantive democracy,
would bring to consciousness the
contradiction
between administratively socialized production and the
continued
private appropriation and use of surplus value."16 In other
words, increasing democratic
involvement would rapidly show people where
their real interests lie. Again,
turn described the
"crisis" of the advanced societies as "an excess of
democracy."17
One might recall that the infamous 1975 Trilateral Commission
report in which
the growing
"ungovernability" of the developed societies, in the wake of
the social movements of the
sixties. One might also recall that this
specter of ungovernability was
precisely the foil against which Margaret
Thatcher, in
revolution."18
In other words, what
distemper"
of the sixties was the background against which the present
neoliberal
hegemony arose. And so the question I would now like to ask is
this: how did the postindustrial
societies absorb the "excess of democracy"
that had been set loose by the
anti-authoritarian revolts? Or to put it
another way: how did the 1960s finally
serve to make the 1990s tolerable?
Divide and Recuperate
"We
lack a serious history of co-optation, one that understands corporate
thought as something other than a
cartoon," writes the American historian
and culture critic Thomas Frank.19
In a history of the advertising and
fashion industries called _The
Conquest of Cool_, he attempts to retrieve
the specific strategies that made
sixties "hip" into nineties "hegemon,"
transforming
cultural industries based on stultifying conformism into even
more powerful industries based on a
plethoric offer of "authenticity,
individuality,
difference, and rebellion." With a host of examples, he
shows how the desires of
middle-class dropouts in the sixties were rapidly
turned into commodified images and
products. Avoiding a simple manipulation
theory, Frank concludes that the
advertisers and fashion designers involved
had an existential interest in
transforming the system. The result was a
change in "the ideology by which
business explained its domination of the
national life" – a change he
relates, but only in passing, to David
stylistic
co-optation, what still must be explained are the interrelations
between individual motivations,
ideological justifications and the complex
social and technical functions of a
new economic system.
A starting point can be taken from a few suggestive remarks by
the
business analysts Piore and Sabel, in a
book called _The Second Industrial
Divide_ (1984). Here
the authors speak of a _regulation crisis_, which "is
marked by the realization that
existing institutions no longer secure a
workable match between the production
and the consumption of goods."21 They
locate two such crises in the history
of the industrial societies, both of
which we have already considered
through the eyes of the
"the rise of the large corporations, in the late nineteenth
century, and of
the Keynesian welfare state, in
the 1930s."22 Our own era has seen a third
such crisis: the prolonged
recession of the 1970s, culminating with the oil
shock of 1973 and accompanied by
endemic labor unrest throughout the
decade. This crisis brought the
institutional collapse of the Fordist
mass-production regime
and the welfare state, and thereby set the stage for
an _industrial divide_, which the
authors situate in the early 1980s:
The
brief moments when the path of industrial development itself is at
stake we call industrial divides. At
such moments, social conflicts of the
most apparently unrelated kinds
determine the direction of technological
development for
the following decades. Although industrialists, workers,
politicians and
intellectuals may only be dimly aware that they face
technological
choices, the actions that they take shape economic
institutions for
long into the future. Industrial divides are therefore the
backdrop or frame for subsequent
regulation crises.23
Basing
themselves on observations from
describe the emergence of a new
production regime called "flexible
specialization,"
which they characterize as "a strategy of permanent
innovation:
accommodation to ceaseless change, rather than an effort to
control it." Abandoning the
centralized planning of the postwar years, this
new strategy works through the
agency of small, independent production
units, employing skilled work teams
with multi-use tool kits and relying on
relatively
spontaneous forms of cooperation with other such teams to meet
rapidly changing market demands at low
cost and high speed. These kinds of
firms seemed to hark back to the
craftsmen of the early nineteenth century,
before the first industrial divide that
led to the introduction of heavy
machinery and
the mass-production system. To be sure, in 1984 Piore and
Sabel
could not yet have predicted the importance that would be acquired by
one single set of products, far
from anything associated with the
nineteenth
century: the personal computer and telecommunications devices.
Nonetheless, the relation they drew between a crisis in
institutional
regulation and an
industrial divide can help us understand the key role
that social conflict – and the
cultural critique that helps focus it – has
played in shaping the organizational
forms and the very technology of the
world we live in.
What then were the conflicts that made computing and
telecommunications into
the central products of the new wave of economic
growth that began after the 1970s
recession? How did these conflicts affect
the labor, management and
consumption regimes? Which social groups were
integrated to the
new hegemony of flexible capitalism, and how? Which were
rejected or violently excluded, and how
was that violence covered over?
So far, the most complete set of answers to these questions has
come from Luc Boltanski and Eve
Chiapello, in _Le Nouvel Esprit du
Capitalism_,
published in 1999.24 Their thesis is that each age or
"spirit"
of capitalism must justify its
irrational compulsion for accumulation by at
least partially integrating or
"recuperating" the critique of the previous
era, so that the system can become
tolerable again – at least for its own
managers. They identify two main
challenges to capitalism: the critique of
exploitation, or
what they call "social critique," developed traditionally
by the worker's movement, and the
critique of alienation, or what they call
"artistic critique." The
latter, they say, was traditionally a minor,
literary affair; but it became vastly
more important with the mass cultural
education
carried out by the welfare-state universities. Boltanski and
Chiapello
trace the destinies of the major social groups in
the turmoil of '68, when _critique
sociale_ joined hands with _critique
artiste_. They
show how the most organized fraction of the labor force was
accorded unprecedented economic gains,
even as future production was
gradually
reorganized and delocalized to take place outside union control
and state regulation. But they
also demonstrate how the young, aspiring
managerial class,
whether still in the universities or at the lower
echelons of enterprise, became the
major vector for the artistic critique
of authoritarianism and
bureaucratic impersonality. The strong point of
Boltanski
and Chiapello's book is to demonstrate how the organizational
figure of the _network_ emerged to
provide a magical answer to the
anti-systemic
cultural critique of the 1950s and 60s – a magical answer, at
least for the aspirant managerial
class.
What are the social and aesthetic attractions
of networked
organization and
production? First, the pressure of a rigid, authoritarian
hierarchy is
eased, by eliminating the complex middle-management ladder of
the Fordist enterprises and
opening up shifting, one-to-one connections
between network members. Second,
spontaneous communication, creativity and
relational
fluidity can be encouraged in a network as factors of
productivity and motivation,
thus overcoming the alienation of impersonal,
rationalized
procedures. Third, extended mobility can be tolerated or even
demanded, to the extent that tool-kits
become increasingly miniaturized or
even purely mental, allowing work
to be relayed through telecommunications
channels. Fourth, the standardization
of products that was the visible mark
of the individual's alienation
under the mass-production regime can be
attenuated, by
the configuration of small-scale or even micro-production
networks to produce limited series of
custom objects or personalized
services.25 Fifth,
desire can be stimulated and new, rapidly obsolescent
products can be created by working
directly within the cultural realm as
coded by multimedia in particular,
thus at once addressing the demand for
meaning on the part of employees and
consumers, and resolving part of the
problem of falling demand for the
kinds of long-lasting consumer durables
produced by Fordist factories.
As a way of summing up all these advantages, it can be said that
the networked organization gives
back to the employee – or better, to the
"prosumer" – the _property_ of him- or herself that the
traditional firm
had sought to purchase as the
commodity of labor power. Rather than
coercive discipline, it is a new form
of internalized vocation, the
"calling" to creative self-fulfillment in and through
each work project,
that will now shape and direct the
employee's behavior. The strict division
between production and consumption
tends to disappear, and alienation
appears to be over
come, as individuals aspire to mix
their labor with their leisure.26 Even
the firm begins to conceive of
work qualitatively, as a sphere of creative
activity, of self-realization.
"Connectionist man" – or in my term, "the
networker"
– is delivered from direct surveillance and paralyzing
alienation to
become the manager of his or her own self-gratifying
activity, as long as that activity
translates at some point into valuable
economic exchange, the _sine qua non_
for remaining within the network.
Obviously,
the young advertisers and fashion designers described by
Thomas Frank could see a personal interest in this loosening of
hierarchies. But
the gratifying self-possession and self-management of the
networker has an
ideological advantage as well: responding to the demands
of May '68, it becomes the
perfect legitimating argument for the continuing
destruction, by
the capitalist class, of the heavy, bureaucratic,
alienating,
profit-draining structures of the welfare state that also
represented most
all the historical gains that the workers had made through
social critique. By co-opting the
aesthetic critique of alienation, the
networked
enterprise is able to legitimate the gradual exclusion of the
workers' movement and the destruction
of social programs. Thus, artistic
critique becomes one of the linchpins
of the new hegemony invented in the
early 1980s by Reagan and Thatcher,
and perfected in the 1990s by
and the inimitable Tony Blair.
To recuperate
from the setbacks of the sixties and seventies,
capitalism had to
be become doubly flexible, imposing casual labor
contracts and
"delocalized" production sites to escape the regulation of
the welfare state, and using this
fragmented production apparatus to create
the consumer seductions and
stimulating careers that were needed to regain
the loyalty of potentially
revolutionary managers and intellectual workers.
This
double movement is what gives rise to the system conceived by David
only the structure and discipline
of the new work processes, but also the
forms and lifespans of the
individually tailored and rapidly obsolescent
products that are created, and the new,
more volatile modes of consumption
that the system promotes.27 For the
needs of contemporary cultural critique
we should recognize, at the crux
of this transformation, the role of the
personal computer, assembled along with
its accompanying telecommunications
devices in high-tech sweatshops across
the world. The mainstay of what has
also been called the
"informational economy," the computer and its
attendant
devices are at once industrial and cultural tools, embodying a
compromise that
temporarily resolved the social struggles unleashed by
artistic critique. The laptop serves as
a portable instrument of control
over the casualized laborer and the
fragmented production process, while at
the same time freeing up the
nomadic manager for forms of mobility both
physical and fantasmatic; it
successfully miniaturizes one's access to the
remaining
bureaucratic functions, while opening a private channel into the
realms of virtual or
"fictitious" capital, the financial markets where
surplus value is produced as if by
magic, despite the accumulating physical
signs of crisis and decay.
Technically a calculator, the personal computer
has been turned by its social
usage into an image- and language machine:
the productive instrument, communications
vector and indispensable receiver
of the immaterial goods and
semiotic or even emotional services that now
form the leading sector of the
economy.28
Geographical
dispersal and global coordination of manufacturing,
just-in-time
production and containerized delivery systems, a generalized
acceleration of
consumption cycles, and a flight of overaccumulated capital
into the lightning-fast financial
sphere, whose movements are at once
reflected and
stimulated by the equally swift evolution of global media:
these are among the major features
of the flexible accumulation regime as
it has developed since the late
1970s. David Harvey, like most Marxist
theorists, sees
this transnational redeployment of capital as a reaction to
social struggles, which increasingly
tended to limit the levels of resource
and labor exploitation possible
within nationally regulated space. A
similar kind of reasoning is used, on
the other end of the political
spectrum, by the business analysts
Piore and Sabel when they claim that
"social conflicts of the most apparently unrelated kinds
determine the
course of technological
development" at the moment of an industrial divide.
But it is, I think, only Boltanski and Chiapello's analytical
division of
the resistance movements of the sixties
into the two strands of artistic
and social critique that finally
allows us to understand the precise
aesthetic and
communicational forms generated by capitalism's recuperation
of – and from – the democratic
turmoil of the 1960s.
Beneath A New Dominion
If I insist on the _social form_ assumed by computers and
telecommunications during
the redeployment of capital the recession of the
1970s,
it is because of the central role that these technologies, and their
diverse _uses_, have played in the
emergence of what Manuel Castells
conceives as the
global informational economy. Describing the most advanced
state of this economy, Castells
writes that "the products of the new
information
technology industries are information processing devices or
information
processing itself."29 Thus he indicates the way that cultural
expressions,
recoded and processed as multimedia, can enter value-adding
loop of digitized communications.
Indeed, he believes they _must_ enter it:
"All other messages are reduced to individual imagination
or to
increasingly
marginalized face-to-face subcultures."30 But Castells tends
to see the conditions of entry as
fundamentally technical, without
developing the
notion that technology itself can be shaped by the patterns
of social, political and cultural
relations. He conceives subjective and
collective agency
in terms of a primary choice or rejection of the network,
followed by more or less viable paths
within or outside the dominant
system. The network itself is not a
form, but a destiny. Any systemic
change is out of the question.
A critical approach can instead view computers and
telecommunications as
specific, pliable configurations within the larger
frame of what Michel Foucault calls
"governmental technologies." Foucault
defines the governmental technologies
(or more generally,
"governmentality") as "the entire set of practices
used to constitute,
define, organize and instrumentalize
the strategies that individuals, in
their freedom, can have towards each
other."31 At stake here is the
definition of a
level of constraint, extending beyond what Foucault
conceives as
freedom – the open field of power relations between
individuals, where
each one tries to "conduct the conduct of others,"
through strategies that are always
reversible – but not yet reaching the
level of domination, where the
relations of power are totally immobilized,
for example through physical
constraint. The governmental technologies
exist just beneath this level of
domination: they are subtler forms of
collective
channeling, appropriate for the government of democratic
societies where
individuals enjoy substantial freedoms and tend to reject
any obvious imposition of
authority.
It is clear that the crisis of "ungovernability"
decried by
Huntington,
Thatcher and other neoconservatives in the mid-1970s could only
find its "resolution"
with the introduction of new governmental
technologies,
determining new patterns of social relations; and it has
become rather urgent to see exactly
how these relational technologies
function. To begin quite literally with
the hardware, we could consider the
extraordinary
increase in surveillance practices since the introduction of
telematics. It
has become commonplace at any threshold – border, cash
register, subway turnstile, hospital
desk, credit application, commercial
website – to have one's personal
identifiers (or even body parts: finger-
or handprints, retina patterns,
DNA) checked against records in a distant
database, to determine if passage will
be granted. This appears as direct,
sometimes even
authoritarian control. But as David Lyon observes, "each
expansion of
surveillance occurs with a rationale that, like as not, will
be accepted by those whose data
or personal information is handled by the
system."32 The most persuasive
rationales are increased security (from
theft or attack) and risk management
by various types of insurers, who
demand personal data to establish
contracts. These and other arguments lead
to the internalization of
surveillance imperatives, whereby people actively
supply their data to distant
watchers. But this example of voluntary
compliance with
surveillance procedures is only the tip of the control
iceberg. The more potent and
politically immobilizing forms of self-control
emerge in the individual's relation
to the labor market – particularly when
the labor in question involves the
processing of cultural information.
Salaried
labor, whether performed on site or at distant,
telematically
connected locations, can obviously be monitored for
compliance to the
rules (surveillance cameras, telephone checks, keystroke
counters, radio-emitting badges, etc.).
The offer of freelance labor, on
the other hand, can simply be
refused if any irregularity appears, either
in the product or the conditions
of delivery. Internalized self-monitoring
becomes a vital necessity for the
freelancer. Cultural producers are hardly
an exception, to the extent that
they offer their inner selves for sale: at
all but the highest levels of
artistic expression, subtle forms of
self-censorship become
the rule, at least in relation to a primary
market.33 But
deeper and perhaps more insidious effects arise from the
inscription of
cultural, artistic and ethical ideals, once valued for their
permanence, into
the swiftly changing cycles of capitalist valorization and
obsolescence. Among
the data processors of the cultural economy – including
the myriad personnel categories of
media production, design and live
performance, and
also extending through various forms of service provision,
counseling,
therapy, education and so on – a depoliticizing cynicism is
more widespread than
self-censorship. It is described by Paolo Virno:
At the
base of contemporary cynicism is the fact that men and women learn
by experiencing rules rather than
"facts"... Learning the rules, however,
also means recognizing their
unfoundedness and conventionality. We are no
longer inserted into a single,
predefined "game" in which we participate
with true conviction. We now face
several different "games," each devoid of
all obviousness and seriousness,
only the site of an immediate
self-affirmation – an
affirmation that is much more brutal and arrogant,
much more cynical, the more we
employ, with no illusions but with perfect
momentary
adherence, those very rules whose conventionality and mutability
we have perceived.34
In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard identified language games as an
emerging arena of value-production in
capitalist societies offering
computerized access
to knowledge, where what mattered was not primary
research but transformatory
"moves" within an arbitrary semantic field.35
The
unpredictable semiotic transformations of Mallarmé's "roll of the
dice"
became a competitive social gamble,
as in stock markets beset by insider
trading, where chance is another name
for ignorance of precisely who is
manipulating the
rules. Here, cynicism is both the cause and prerequisite
of the player's unbounded
opportunism. As Virno notes: "The opportunist
confronts a flux
of interchangeable possibilities, keeping open as many as
possible, turning to the closest and
swerving unpredictably from one to the
other." He continues: "The
computer, for example, rather than a means to a
univocal end, is a premise for
successive 'opportunistic' elaborations of
work. Opportunism is valued as an
indispensable resource whenever the
concrete labor process is pervaded by
diffuse 'communicative action'...
computational
chatter demands 'people of opportunity,' ready and waiting
for every chance."36 Of
course, the true opportunist consents to a fresh
advantage within
any new language game, even if it is political. Politics
collapses into
the flexibility and rapid turnover times of market
relations. And
this is the meaning of Virno's ironic reference to
Habermas's theory of communicative action. In his analysis of democracy's
legitimation
crisis, Habermas observed that consent in democratic societies
ultimately rests
on each citizen's belief that in cases of doubt he could
be convinced by a detailed
argument: "Only if motivations for actions no
longer operated through norms
requiring justification, and if personality
systems no longer had to find their
unity in identity-securing interpretive
systems, could the acceptance of
decisions without reasons become routine,
that is, could the readiness to
conform absolutely be produced to any
desired degree."37 What was
social science fiction for Habermas in 1973
became a reality for Virno in the
early 1990s: personality systems without
any aspiration to subjective
truth, without any need for secure processes
of collective interpretation. And
worse, this reality was constructed on
distorted forms
of the call by the radical Italian left for an autonomous
status of labor.
The
point becomes clear: to describe the immaterial laborer,
"prosumer," or networker as a _flexible personality_ is
to describe a new
form of alienation, not alienation
from the vital energy and roving desire
that were exalted in the 1960s, but
instead, alienation from political
society, which in the democratic sense
is not a profitable affair and
cannot be endlessly recycled into the
production of images and emotions.
The configuration of the flexible personality is a new form of
social
control, in which culture has an
important role to play. It is a distorted
form of the artistic revolt against
authoritarianism and standardization, a
set of practices and techniques
for "constituting, defining, organizing and
instrumentalizing"
the revolutionary energies which emerged in the Western
societies in the
1960s, and which for a time seemed capable of transforming
social relations.
This notion of the flexible personality, that is, of
subjectivity
as it is modeled and channeled by
contemporary capitalism, can be sharpened
and deepened by looking outside of
managerial class,
to the destiny of another group of proto-revolutionary
social actors, the racialized lumpen
proletariat in
arose the powerful emancipatory
forces of the Black, Chicano and American
Indian
movements in the sixties, followed by a host of identity-groups
thereafter. Here,
at one of the points where a real threat was posed to the
capitalist
system, the dialectic of integration and exclusion becomes more
apparent and more cruel. One the one
hand, identity formations are
encouraged as
stylistic resources for commodified cultural production.
Regional
cultures and subcultures are sampled, recoded into product form,
and fed back to themselves via the
immeasurably wider and more profitable
world market.38 Local differences of
reception are seized upon everywhere
as proof of the open, universal
nature of global products. Corporate and
governmental
hierarchies are also made open to significant numbers of
non-white
subjects, whenever they are willing to play the management game.
This is an essential requirement for the legitimacy of
transnational
governance. But
wherever an identity formation becomes problematic and
seems likely to threaten the urban,
regional, or geopolitical balance – I'm
thinking particularly of the Arab
world, but also of the Balkans – then
what Boris Buden calls the
"cultural touch" operates quite differently and
turns ethnic identity not into
commercial gold, but into the signifier of a
regressive,
"tribal" authoritarianism, which can legitimately be repressed.
Here the book _Empire_ contains an essential lesson: that not
the
avoidance, but
instead the stimulation and management of local conflicts is
the keystone of transnational
governance.39 In fact the
themselves are
already governed that way, in a state of permanent
low-intensity civil
war. Manageable, arms-consuming ethnic conflicts are
perfect grist for the mill of
capitalist empire. And the reality of
terrorism offers
the perfect opportunity to accentuate surveillance
functions – with
full consent from the majority of the citizenry.
With
these last considerations we have obviously changed scales,
shifting from the psychosocial to the
geopolitical. But to make the ideal
type work correctly, one should
never forget the hardened political and
economic frames within which the
flexible personality evolves. Piore and
Sabel
point out that what they call "flexible specialization" was only one
side of the response that emerged
to the regulation crisis and recession of
the 1970s. The other strategy is
global. It "aims at extending the
mass-production model.
It does so by linking the production facilities and
markets of the advanced countries with
the fastest-growing third-world
countries. This
response amounts to the use of the corporation (now a
multinational
entity) to stabilize markets in a world where the forms of
cooperation among
states can no longer do the job."40 In effect, the
transnational
corporation, piloted by the financial markets, and backed up
by the military power and legal
architecture of the G-7 states, has taken
over the economic governance of the
world from the former colonial
structure. The
"military-industrial complex," decried as the fountainhead
of power in the days of the authoritarian
personality, has been superseded
by what is now being called the
"Wall Street-Treasury complex" – "a power
elite a la C. Wright Mills, a
definite networking of like-minded luminaries
among the institutions – Wall
Street, the Treasury Department, the State
Department,
the IMF, and the World Bank most prominent among them."41
What
kind of labor regime is produced by this networking among the
power elite? On
drop in computer sales had triggered
layoffs of 10% of Compaq's world-wide
workforce, and
5% of Hewlet Packard's – 7,000 and 4,700 jobs respectively.
In this
situation, the highly mobile Dell corporation was poised to draw a
competitive
advantage from its versatile workforce: "Robots are just not
flexible enough, whereas each computer
is unique," explained the president
of Dell Europe.42 With its
just-in-time production process, Dell can
immediately pass
along the drop in component prices to consumers, because
it has no old product lying
around in warehouses; at the same time, it is
under no obligation to pay idle
hands for regular 8-hour shifts when there
is no work. Thus it has already
grabbed the number-1 position from Compaq
and it is hungry for more.
"It's going to be like
manager. "Taking such market
shares is the chance of a lifetime."
This kind of ruthless pleasure, against a background of
exploitation and
exclusion, has become entirely typical – an example of the
opportunism and
cynicism that the flexible personality tolerates.43 But was
this what we really expected from
the critique of authority in the 1960s?
Conclusions
Posing
as a WTO representative, a provocateur from the group known as the
Yes Men
recently accepted an invitation to speak at the "Textiles of the
Future" conference in
futuristic view,
Hank Hardy Unruh explained how the U.S. Civil War need
never have happened: market laws
ensure that cotton-picking slaves in the
South
would eventually have been freed. Feeding, clothing, housing and
policing a slave in a country like
today, he argued, compared to wages
in a country like
costs of food, clothes and lodging
are minimal, and even better, the price
of policing is nil, since the
workers are free. But he cautioned that the
use of a remote workforce had
already been tried in countries like
and the screen of his PowerPoint
presentation showed footage of rioters
protesting
British rule. To keep a Ghandi-like situation of workers'
revolt, hand-spun cotton and local
self-sufficiency from ever developing
again in our time, he said, the WTO
had a textile solution.
It was at this point that an assistant appeared before the crowd
and ripped off Mr. Unruh's
standard business attire to reveal a glittering,
golden, skin-tight body suit,
equipped with a yard-long inflatable phallus
suddenly springing up from the groin
area and seeming to dance about with a
life of its own. Animated graphics
on the PowerPoint screen showed a
similarly
outfitted man cavorting on a tropical beach: the Management
Leisure Suit, Unruh explained, was conceived to transmit
pleasing
information
through implanted body-chips when things were going well in the
distant factory. But the end of the
protuberance housed a television
monitor, with a telematic control
panel allowing the manager to intervene
whenever unpleasant information
signaled trouble in the making: "This is
the Employee Visualization
Appendage, an instantly deployable hip-mounted
device with hands-free operation,
which allows the manager to see his
employees
directly, as well as receive all relevant data about them," Unruh
continued,44
while the audience clapped and whistled.
The Yes Men, archetypal figures of our society's capacity for
consent, seem to have captured every
detail of the modern control and
consumption
regime. Could one possibly imagine a better image of the
style-conscious,
tech-savvy, nomadic and hedonistic modern manager,
connected
directly into flows of information, able and compelled to respond
to any fluctuation, but enjoying
his life at the same time – profiting
lavishly from his stock options, always
up in the air between vocation and
vacation, with unlimited pleasure and
technological control right at his
fingertips? True
to its ethics of toleration, the corporate audience loved
the textiles, the technologies,
and the joke as well, at least until the
entire conference was ridiculed in
the press the next day. Did they even
wince as images of the distant
workers – fifteen-year-old Asian women on a
factory floor, kids squatting at
lathes – flashed up rapidly on the
PowerPoint screen?
***
The
flexible personality represents a contemporary form of governmentality,
an internalized and culturalized
pattern of "soft" coercion, which
nonetheless can be
directly correlated to the hard data of labor
conditions,
bureaucratic and police practices, border regimes and military
interventions. Now
that the typical characteristics of this mentality – and
indeed of this
"culture-ideology"45 – have come fully into view, it is high
time that _we_ intervene, as
intellectuals and citizens. The study of
coercive patterns, contributing to the
deliberately exaggerated figure of
an ideal type, is one way that
academic knowledge production can contribute
to the rising wave of democratic
dissent. In particular, the treatment of
"immaterial" or "aesthetic" production stands
to gain from this renewal of
a radically negative critique.
Those who admire the
closer to us, the work of Michel
Foucault, can hardly refuse the challenge
of bringing their analyses up to
date, at a time when the new system and
style of domination has taken on
crystal clear outlines.
Yet it is obvious that the mere description of a system of
domination,
however precise and scientifically accurate, will never suffice
to dispel it. And the model of
governmentality, with all its nuances,
easily lends itself to infinite
introspection, which would be better
avoided. The timeliness of critical
theory has to do with the possibility
of refusing a highly articulated
and effective ideology, which has
integrated and
neutralized a certain number of formerly alternative
proposals. But
it is important to avoid the trap into which the
School,
in particular, seems to have fallen: the impasse of a critique so
totalizing that
it leaves no way out, except through an excessively
sophisticated,
contemplative, and ultimately elitist aesthetics. Critique
today must remain a fully public
practice, engaged in communicative action
and even communicative activism:
the recreation of an oppositional culture,
in forms specifically conceived
to resist the inevitable attempts at
co-optation.46 The
figure of the flexible personality can be publicly
ridiculed,
satirized, its supporting institutions can be attacked on
political
grounds, its traits can be exposed in cultural and artistic
productions, its
description and the search for alternatives to its reign
can be conceived not as another
academic industry – and another potential
locus of immaterial productivism – but
instead as a chance to help create
new forms of intellectual
solidarity, a new collective project for a better
society. When it is carried out in a
perspective of social transformation,
the exercise of negative critique
itself can have a powerful subjectivizing
force, it can become a way to shape
oneself through the demands of a shared
endeavor.47
The flexible personality is not a destiny. And despite the
ideologies of
resignation, despite the dense realities of governmental
structures in our
"control societies," nothing prevents the sophisticated
forms of critical knowledge,
elaborated in the peculiar temporality of the
university, from
connecting directly with the new and also complex, highly
sophisticated forms
of dissent appearing on the streets. This type of
crossover is
exactly what we have seen in the wide range of movements
opposing the agenda of neoliberal
globalization.48 The development of an
oppositional
"school" can now extend to a vastly wider field. The
communicational
infrastructure has been partially externalized into
personal computers, and a considerable
"knowledge capital" has shifted from
the schools and universities of
the welfare state into the bodies and minds
of immaterial laborers: these
assets can be appropriated by all those
willing to simply use what is already
ours, and to take the risks of
political
autonomy and democratic dissent. The history of radically
democratic
movements can be explored and deepened, while the goals and
processes of the
present movement are made explicit and brought openly into
debate.
The program is ambitious. But the alternative, if you prefer, is
just to go on playing someone
else's game – always in the air, between
vocation and vacation, eyes on the
latest information, fingers on the
controls. Rolling the
loaded dice, again and again.
Notes
1. The
World Social Forum, held for the first time in
January
2001, is symbolic of the turn away from neoclassical or
"supply-side" economics. Another potent symbol can be
found in the charges
leveled by economist Joseph Stiglitz
at his former employers, the World
Bank,
and even more importantly, at the IMF – the major transnational organ
of the neoclassical doctrine.
2. For a short history of cultural studies as a
popular-education movement,
then a more theoretical treatment
of its origins and potentials, see
Raymond
Williams, "The Future of Cultural Studies" and "The Uses of
Cultural
Theory," both in _The Politics of Modernism_ (
1989).
3. See
Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, et. al., _Resistance
through
Rituals_
(London: Routledge 1993, 1st edition 1975), esp. the "theoretical
overview" of the volume, pp. 9-74.
4. The
reversal becomes obvious with L. Grossberg et. al.,
eds., _Cultural
Studies_
(New York: Routledge, 1992), an anthology that marks the
large-scale
exportation of cultural studies to the American academic
market.
5. The
methodological device of the ideal type was developed by Max Weber,
particularly in
_The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_; as we
shall see, it was taken up as a
polemical figure by the
the 1950s.
6.
Martin Jay, _The Dialectical Imagination_ (
7.
Herbert Marcuse, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," in
A.
Arato
and
8. The
term "state capitalism" is more familiar as an indictment of false
or failed communism of the
Stalinist Soviet Union, for instance in Tony
Cliff,
_State Capitalism in Russia_ (London: Pluto Press, 1974); however,
the concept as developed by the
to all the centrally planned
economies that emerged after the Great
Depression.
9.
Friedrich Pollock, "State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and
Limitations"
(1941),
in ibid., p. 78.
10.
Otto Kirchheimer, "Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise"
(1941), in _The Essential Frankfurt School Reader_, op. cit., p.
70.
11.
T.W. Adorno et. al., _The Authoritarian Personality_ (
1950).
12.
T.W. Adorno, "Commitment" (1962), in _The
Reader_,
op. cit. p. 303.
13.
Ibid., p. 304.
14. M.
Crozier,
(Trilateral
Commission, 1975), p. 74.
15. In the words of the Parisian _enragés_: "What are the
essential
features of council power? Dissolution
of all external power – Direct and
total democracy – Practical
unification of decision and execution -
Delegates
who can be revoked at any moment by those who have mandated them
-
Abolition of hierarchy and independent specializations – Conscious
management and
transformation of all the conditions of liberated life -
Permanent
creative mass participation – Internationalist extension and
coordination. The
present requirements are nothing less than this.
Self-management
is nothing less." From a
ENRAGÉS-SITUATIONIST
INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE, COUNCIL FOR MAINTAINING THE
OCCUPATIONS,
made available over the Internet by Ken Knabb at:
<www.slip.net/~knabb/SI/May68docs.htm>.
16.
Jürgen Habermas, _Legitimation Crisis_ (
German edition 1973), p. 36.
17.
_The Crisis of Democracy_, op. cit., p. 113.
18. The
origins of the "conservative revolution" are described by Keith
d'agir, 1998).
19.
Thomas Frank, _The Conquest of Cool_ (
20.
Thomas Frank, ibid., p. 229; the references to
233.
21.
Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, _The Second Industrial Divide_
(New York: Basic Books, 1984); excerpts in R. Koolhaas, S.
Boeri, S.
Kwinter,
et. al., _Mutations_, exhibition catalogue, arc en
rêve centre
d'architecture,
22.
Ibid.
23.
Ibid.
24. Luc
Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, _Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme_
(Paris:
Gallimard, 1999); in this and the following three paragraphs, I
draw mainly on on pp. 208-85. As
the title of the book suggests, the
authors use Weberian methodology to
propose a new ideal type of capitalist
entrepreneur,
"connectionist man." Unlike the
systematically relate
this ideal type to a socioeconomic order and a mode
of production/consumption, but
remain primarily concerned with questions of
legitimation.
25.
Andrea Branzi, one of the north Italian designers who led and theorized
this transition, distinguishes
between the "Homogeneous Metropolis" of
mass-produced
industrial design, and what he calls "the Hybrid Metropolis,
born of the crisis of classical
modernity and of rationalism, which
discovers niche
markets, the robotization of the production line, the
diversified
series, and the ethnic and cultural minorities." "The Poetics
of Balance: Interview with Andrea
Branzi," in F. Burkhardt and C. Morozzi,
_Andrea
Branzi_ (
26. In
_L'individu incertain_ (Paris: Hachette, 1999, 1st ed. 1995),
sociologist Alain
Ehrenberg describes the postwar regime of consumption as
being "characterized by a
passive spectator fascinated by the [television]
screen, with a dominant critique
marked by the model of alienation"; he
then links the positive
connotations of the computer terminal in our own
period to "a model of
communication promoting inter-individual exchanges
modeled on themes of activity and
relationships, with self-realization as
the dominant stereotype of
consumption" (p. 240). Note the disappearance of
critique in the second model.
27.
David Harvey, _The Condition of Postmodernity_ (
1990),
pp. 141-148.
28. In
the text "Immaterial Labor," Maurizio Lazarrato proposes the notion
of aesthetic production: "It
is more useful, in attempting to grasp the
process of the formation of social
communication and its subsumption within
the 'economic,' to use, rather
than the 'material' model of production, the
'aesthetic' model that involves author, reproduction, and
reception.... The
'author' must lose its individual dimension and be
transformed into an
industrially
organized production process (with a division of labor,
investments,
orders, and so forth), 'reproduction' becomes a mass
reproduction
organized according to the imperatives of profitability, and
the audience ('reception') tends
to become the consumer/communicator."
Today,
the computer is the key instrument allowing for this industrial
organization of
aesthetic production. In: _Radical Thought in
Potential
Politics_, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (
29.
Manuel Castells, _The Rise of the Network Society_ (
1996),
p. 67.
30.
Manuel Castells, ibid., p. 374.
31.
Michel Foucault, "L'éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la
liberté," interview with H.
Becker, R. Forner-Betancourt, A. Gomez-Mueller,
in _Dits et ecrits_ (Paris:
Gallimard, 1994), vol. IV, p. 728; also see the
excellent
article by Maurizio Lazarrato, "Du biopouvoir à la biopolitique,"
in _Multitudes_ 1, pp. 45-57.
32.
David Lyon, _Surveillance Society_ (Buckingham: Open University Press,
2001),
p. 44.
33. For
an analysis of the ways that (self-) censorship operates in
contemporary
cultural production, see A. Corsani, M. Lazzarato, N. Negri,
_Le
Bassin du travail immateriel (BTI) dans le métropole parisien_ (
L'Harmattan,
1996), pp. 71-78.
34.
Paolo Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment," in _Radical Thought
in Italy_, op. cit., pp. 17-18.
35.
Lyotard, _La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir_ (
Minuit,
1979), esp. pp. 13-14 et 31-33.
36.
Paolo Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment," op. cit., p. 17.
Compare
Sennet's discussion of a 1991
people need in a flexible economy:
"in flexible forms of work, the players
make up the rules as they go
along... past performance is no guide to
present rewards; in each office 'game'
you start over from the beginning."
Richard
Sennet, _The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of
Work in
the New Capitalism_ (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 110.
37.
Jürgen Habermas, _Legitimation Crisis_, op. cit., p. 44.
38. Can
research work in cultural studies, such as Dick Hebdige's classic
_Subculture,
the Meaning of Style_, now be directly instrumentalized by
marketing
specialists? As much is suggested in the book _Commodify Your
Dissent_, eds. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York: Norton,
1997), pp.
73-77,
where Frank and Dave Mulcahey present a fictional "buy
recommendation"
for would-be stock-market investors: "Consolidated
Deviance,
Inc. ('ConDev') is unarguably the nation's leader, if not the
sole force, in the fabrication,
consultancy, licensing and merchandising of
deviant subcultural practice. With its
string of highly successful
'SubCultsTM',
mass-marketed youth culture campaigns highlighting rapid
stylistic
turnover and heavy cross-media accessorization, ConDev has
brought the allure of the marginalized
to the consuming public." Whether
cultural studies has been
instrumentalized or not, it has clearly appeared
preferable, in
American universities, to the "identity politics" which grew
directly out of the sixties'
emancipation movements and seemed on the verge
of posing a real threat to
cultural hierarchies in the early 19902
(particularly with the controversies over the literary canon
and the book
_I, Rigoberta Menchú_).
39. See
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, _Empire_ (
Harvard
University Press, 2000), pp. 198-201: "The triple imperative of the
Empire
is incorporate, differentiate, manage."
40.
Piore and Sabel, _The Second Industrial Divide_, op. cit.
41.
Jagdish Bhagwati, "The Capital Myth," _Foreign Affairs_ May/June
1998;
electronic text
available at
<www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/Deadline/bhagwati.htm>.
42.
"Une crise sans precedent ebranle l'informatique mondiale," _Le
Monde_,
43. The
ultimate reason for this tolerance appears to be fear. In
_Souffrance
en France_ (Paris: Seuil, 1998), the labor psychologist
Christophe
Dejours studies the "banalization of evil" in contemporary
management.
Beyond the cases of perverse or paranoid sadism, concentrated
at the top, he identifies the
imperative to display courage and virility as
the primary moral justification
for doing the "dirty work" (selection for
lay-offs, enforcement of productivity
demands, etc.). "The collective
strategy of defense entails a denial of
the suffering occasioned by the
'nasty jobs'.... The ideology of economic rationalism
consists... – beyond
the exhibition of virility – in
making cynicism pass for force of
character, for
determination and an elevated sense of collective
responsibilities... in
any case, for a sense of _supra-individual
interests_" (pp. 109-111). Underlying the defense mechanisms, Dejours finds
both fear of personal
responsibility and fear of becoming a victim oneself;
cf. pp.
89-118.
44. The
story of the Yes Men is told by RtMark, Corporate Consulting for
the 21st Century, at
<www.rtmark.com>; or go directly to
<www.theyesmen.org/finland>.
45. The
notion that contemporary transnational capitalism legitimates
itself and renders itself desirable
through a "culture-ideology" is
developed by
Leslie Sklair, in _The Transnational Capitalist Class_
(
46.
Hence the paradoxical, yet essential refusal to conceive oppositional
political
practice as the constitution of a party, and indeed of a unified
social class, for the seizure of
state power. Among the better formulations
of this paradox is Miguel
Benasayag and Diego Sztulwark, _Du
contre-pouvoir_ (
book also deals with the
possibility of transforming the modes of knowledge
production:
"The difference lies less in belonging or not to a state
structure like
the university, than in the articulation with alternative
dynamics that coproduce, rework and
distribute the forms of knowledge. That
must be done in sites of 'minority'
(i.e. 'non-hegemonic') counter-power,
which can gradually participate in
the creation of a powerful and vibrant
bloc of counter-power" (p.
113).
47. The
notion of a new emulation, on an ethical basis, between free and
independent
subjects seems a far more promising future for the social tie
than any restoration of traditional
authority. Richard Sennet doesn't hide
a certain nostalgia for the
latter in _The Corrosion of Character_, op.
cit.,
pp. 115-16; but he remarks, far more interestingly, that in "the
process view of community... reflected
in current political studies of
deliberative
democracy... the evolving expression of disagreement is taken
to bind people more than the
sheer declaration of 'correct' principles"
(pp.
143-44).
48. For
a glimpse into the way intellectuals, activists, workers, and
artists can cooperate in dissenting
actions, see Susan George, "Fixing or
nixing the WTO," in _Le Monde
diplomatique_, January 2000, available at <
www.en.monde-diplomatique.fr/2000/01/07george>.
Ends