National Resilience, Politics and Society Volume 2, No. 2, Fall 2020, pp. 103-113 DOI: https://doi.org/10.26351/NRPS/2-2/2 ISSN: 2706-7645 (print); 2706-7653 (online)

Communicative : Theoretical Approach, Orientation in Reality, and Contemporary Political Implications

Gong Weiliang and Ho, Ming Sun Richard

Abstract

American political theorist Jodi Dean's theory of Communication Capitalism, though based on the study of political science, straddles the field of cultural communication, and is a piece of critical thinking and expression of contemporary communication with cultural, political, and psychoanalytical tints. What it attempts to respond to theoretically are the changing realities of how "communication is the means of capitalist subsumption" and the political consequences of the domination of capital over mental intercourse. The impact of this change on and its consequences is subversive, suffocating the development of effective politics in a false prosperity of . At the same time, however, there is hope for political change in this bleak reality.

Keywords: communicative capitalism, critique of capitalism, cultural politics, mental intercourse, psychoanalysis

Dr. Gong Weiliang – Institute of Communication Studies, Communication University of China, Beijing; [email protected] Ho, Ming Sun Richard – Institute of Communication Studies, Communication University of China, Beijing; [email protected]

103 104 Gong Weiliang and Ho, Ming Sun Richard

Introduction1

Communicative Capitalism is a concept developed by Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in response to the question of "contemporary combination of multiple interlinked media, , and democracy" (Jodi Dean & Yueyang Li, 2015). Communicative Capitalism is also the name for a new capitalist political-economical-cultural structure. In the words of Jodi Dean: "Communicative capitalism is a form of political-economy" (Jodi Dean & Zhang Quanjing, 2015). The concept is a profound critique in the age of mass media and individualistic media, when democracy has become an empty illusion due to capitalism's control of mental intercourse. Jodi Dean's work is a "critique of contemporary Capitalism" by Marxists in the West (Wang Xingfu, 2014), initiated by a group of prestigious contemporary Western left-wing scholars, including Zizek, Badiou, Hart and Negri, as part of their theoretical and practical explorations of New . Jodi Dean's proposing of Communicative Capitalism as a concept is based on political theories, and is representative of a form of critical thinking from the field of cultural communication studies; compared to Information Capitalism, Digital Capitalism, or Cultural Capitalism, Communicative Capitalism is perhaps a "more universal and inclusive description" (Graham Murdoch & Yao Jianhua, 2019). Thus, it has increasingly received attention from critical theorists both inside and outside of China.2 This article is intended for the journalism and communication studies community, and seeks to critically sort out, evaluate and analyze the theory of Communicative Capitalism.

The Theoretical Approach and Orientation in Reality

The ideological construction of Communicative Capitalism responds to the reality that communication (or, to use a Marxian concept, "mental intercourse") has become a subsumptive means of capitalism. The research on the political economy of communication has long been critical of communication technologies and the services that the communication industry provides to the accumulation of capital in the financial sector, but unlike this line of research's Theoretical Approach, Orientation in Reality, and Contemporary Political Implications 105

focus on the analysis of media production, the theory of Communicative Capitalism is a critique of a more cultural, political, and psychoanalytical nature, with its own unique and profound path of research. Although the term "communicative" is routinely translated as "communication" in common context and in the context of communication studies, here the accurate translation may perhaps be "communication/intercourse"; this juxtaposition (of chuanbo/ jiaowang) not only takes care of the usual need for translation, reflecting its position in an emerging critical theory of media, but also overcomes the strong tendency of the term "communication" in today's Chinese academic environment towards informational- attributing and Scientism (Li, 2016). That is to say, Communicative Capitalism points towards and orients itself towards multiple levels, not only of media and information, but also of life and politics, in "mental intercourse"; its profound insight lies in the fact that the capital exploitation in the network media era can, to a certain extent, be separated from the material shell of commodities. In other words, it "directs exploitation and profit-making to the abstract social relations at its core" (Lan Jiang, 2013). To understand the background of the time when the theory of Communicative Capitalism was conceived, it is important to pay attention to the historical evolution of capitalism, that is, the historical chain linking industrial capitalism to finance capitalism and then to Communicative Capitalism. Financial capitalism, as a distinctive feature of contemporary capitalism, is still the dominant force. However, what we are facing today is not only financial capitalism in the usual sense, but also the development of a form of Communicative Capitalism that embraces human mental intercourse within the economic and political structure of capitalism. In contrast to the already rich discussion of the various aspects of financial capitalism, if we merely perceive more from the perspective of media itself and of popular culture, we may be distancing ourselves from the political and economic substance of communication of our time. Because media users are now included in global capitalism's tight chains of enjoyment, production, and surveillance, critical scholars' understanding of "network communication" and their perception of "communication/intercourse" now should also be capable of including global economic activities. This can be achieved by considering the dimensions of production, distribution, and consumption of communication, as well as the dimensions 106 Gong Weiliang and Ho, Ming Sun Richard

of cultural politics and the subjectivity of contemporary online communication as "mental intercourse." Finance and media are two of the most important tools that today's capitalism relies on to achieve global expansion. Using Mandel and James Minson's classification of the historical stages of capitalism, Communicative Capitalism can be seen as a new feature of Late Capitalism, with "the expansion of capital into those regions that have not yet been commodified" (Sun Xun & Yang Jianlong, 2006, p. 219). The following insight can be gained by taking what Hart and Negri call "immaterial labour" as a perspective: if the achievement of industrial society is to replace the domination of land and real estate with the formation of a pattern in which industry dominates agriculture and the city dominates the countryside, then the dominant economic and social life now is no longer (heavy or light) industry, but immaterial production and the production of life-politics, i.e., the production of ideas, information, images, knowledge, codes, language, social relations, emotions, and so on (Michael Hardt, 2010; cited in Lu Shaochen, 2016). This kind of production is directly aimed at the production of life-politics, that is, the production of social life; the joint motto of financial capitalism and Communication Capitalism is in fact "we'll have bothyour money and your life." One aspect of today's capitalist trends is the evolution from a productive kind of capitalism to that of a communicative kind. Its business logic is that the explosive growth of human-to-human information dissemination through the development of ever-changing media technologies has given capitalism an unprecedented opportunity to use human interaction as a means of capital appreciation. With media encompassing almost all users of the production system, Communicative Capitalism has even become a convergent and "omnipotent" form of capitalism: it is at once a capitalist pattern of production, a capitalist form of democracy, and a capitalist ideology. Following Baudrillard's theoretical construction by lateral conceptual shift from Marx's study of the political economy, new and important changes have surfaced in contemporary history from the perspective of Communicative Capitalism, including the emergence of new forms of exploitation, from the exploitation of labor in the industrial age to the exploitation of communication in Communicative Capitalism; the communicative force becomes a labor force, and the accumulation of surplus value becomes an accumulation Theoretical Approach, Orientation in Reality, and Contemporary Political Implications 107

of surplus attention; accordingly, perhaps communication theorists today should study "communication as labor" on another level.3

The Contemporary Political Implications of the New Configuration

As a political theorist, Jodi Dean keeps the focus of her intellectual and theoretical constructions on the question of democracy, and on the new ways in which capitalism and democracy have come together in the age of network communication. In her view, "In communicative capitalism, changes in information and communication networks have profoundly altered capitalism and democracy. They accelerate and amplify elements of capitalism and democracy, while fixing them both into an entirely new configuration" (Jody Dean & Yueyang Li, 2015). The underpinning of this New Configuration is the domination of capitalistic logic over mental intercourse, and the implications of this for capitalist democracy are subversive. Democracy depends on a consensus of values, which depends on communication, and when communication becomes an internal element of capital appreciation – that is, in terms of political theories, when "participation and contestation (for exchanging and sharing opinions, for political mobilization, and for expressing opposition and even rebellion) becomes the main component part of capital production and capital cycle," then democracy will also become "a synonym for capitalist expansion" (Jody Dean & Yueyang Li, 2015). When everyone can fully express themselves through participatory media, democracy seems to be everywhere, but it is fundamentally ineffective, and its value is exhausted in the clamor of online media. The theoretical foundation of the critique of contemporary democracy's failure is laid by Jodi Dean's analysis of "the three myths of networked media" and her consideration for the characteristics of Communicative Capitalism. Jodi Dean regards "variety," "participation," and "totality" as the three political myths of new media, and this kind of "mythological critique" of the Internet is in fact a kind of disenchantment for contemporary democratic politics that relies on the spread of new media. As she puts it: 108 Gong Weiliang and Ho, Ming Sun Richard

The Western world likes to use the variety of media environment as proof of the triumph of democracy. The Internet, in particular, is said to allow everyone to publish information and everyone to participate in discussions. I believe that this kind of democracy is in fact a tool to promote capitalism. I would like to describe this combination of democracy and capitalism using the concept of Communicative Capitalism. To understand the power of Communicative Capitalism, one has to think about its vibrant myths and the illusions that link the Internet to democracy, such as "variety," "participation," and "totality" (Jodi Dean & Quan Jing Zhang, 2015).

The myths/fantasies of "variety," "participation," and "totality" control our political imagination and, as ideology, make us fully trust a formalistic democracy which creates and conceals grave social differences, as it increasingly leads to a rupture in substantive democracy. As some commentators have noted, "The democratic form of capitalism seems to be becoming more widespread, but behind the form there may be a certain degree of obliteration and neglect of true democracy" (Tong Jin, 2016). When Jodi Dean summarizes the basic characteristics of Communicative Capitalism, she speaks of information becoming a contribution in the service of capital "rather than an act that provokes a response" (Jodi Dean and Yueyang Li, 2015). Amidst the massive stream of value-added data, "facts, theories, judgments, opinions, fantasies, jokes, and lies all circulate around indiscriminately. Here again, they are indistinguishable as contributions, each one merely 'adding something' to the gush" (Jody Dean and Yueyang Li, 2015). This is a severe test for today's democratic politics; a lack of authentic understanding of information and its resulting actions leads to the failure of political communication and the exhaustion of political energy. Political discussions and expressions of dissent, once considered to be meaningful public constructs, are no longer valid in the economic pattern, democratic form, and ideological context of Communicative Capitalism, where all criticisms, even if insightful, are systematically absorbed into the chain of value-adding communications controlled by capitalistic logic, and become the circulating content and data that build the edifice of communicative capital. Unlike Habermas's expectation of the media space becoming a vibrant public sphere, the personal interactive media under communicative capitalism become a platform for Theoretical Approach, Orientation in Reality, and Contemporary Political Implications 109

the exhibition of individualized cultural subjectivities. Borrowing from Zizek's notion of Symbolic Efficiency, Jodi Dean points out that one of the characteristics of Communicative Capitalism is the decline of symbolic efficiency (ability to circulate). That is, if symbols are detached from particular contexts, they will become obscure and meaningless. Identities previously built on symbolic cognition disintegrate. Communicative Capitalism creates for each subject an unstable identity, and a fragile and fluid imaginary identification replaces the symbolic identity that helps us understand ourselves and the world. Ultimately, this alienation of mediated social relations leads to total reflexivity. As Jodi Dean insightfully notes, "In the self-referential cycle of Communicative Capitalism, the democratic drive is the political engagement that captures us in the online media, so that even if our actions and interventions strengthen capitalism rather than dismantle it, we are still thrilled and happy to participate" (Jody Dean and Yueyang Li, 2015). With regard to the contemporary political implications of this New Configuration in general, Communicative Capitalism is a contemporary critique of capitalism by Western Marxists and a new theoretical understanding of the contemporary contradictions manifested by capitalism; it is unique in revealing the political phenomenon of the transformation of communication into an empty rhetoric of democracy that loses its specificity, and of its degradation into a capitalist spectacle that leads liberal democracy to reach its own limits. Communicative Capitalism contains a profound critique of life- politics that corresponds to capitalism's extreme excavation of internal commanding domains; it "addresses the problem of subjectivity that traditional has failed to deal with adequately, overcoming the extreme deconstructions by post-structuralists on issues about ideology and subjectivity" (Zhao Yuezhi),4 and is widely influential among Western critical communication studies scholars.

Conclusion

Jodi Dean's reflections reveal the fundamental dilemma facing democracy in the age of global online communication: the "political-economy configuration" of Communicative Capitalism created by the "contemporary combination of multiple interlinked media, neoliberalism, and 110 Gong Weiliang and Ho, Ming Sun Richard

democracy" (Jodi Dean & Yueyang Li, 2015) stifles effective political development in the false prosperity of capitalist democracy, and leads to liberal democracy's decline and the people's defeat. The current situation is bleak, and its dilemma perhaps unprecedented. Between the lines, Jodi Dean reveals a sense of powerlessness and pessimism as a left-wing scholar in the West. In her essays and speeches to the Chinese journalism and communication circles, she cites examples from Qidian.com, Zhou Liming, Liu Xiazi, and the Beijing Olympics, and calls the abandonment of the basic commitment to social solidarity "an abandonment characteristic shared by East and West." From the intent of her citations to her comment about social solidarity, it is clear that Jodi Dean's theoretical construction of Communicative Capitalism refers to and includes China. From the political participation of network-era China and in the actuality of social solidarity, clues of techno- fetishism replacing real politics can clearly be seen. However, based on the uniqueness of China's socialism in terms of history, polity, and education, we should not dismiss lightly the answers to both the question of whether China has lost its overall political imagination in the flood of online communication and the question of whether online media can be an effective way to create organic coalitions. Otherwise, we will fall back into the stereotypical judgment of the International Left against China, thus losing the sphere for discussing "whether there is any possibility of continuity or reconstruction of the organic link between the working class, the Communist Party and itself in the network era, so as to ensure the people's leadership of national culture and the socialist nature of the constitution" (Zhao Yuezhi & Wu Changshang, 2009). At the same time, Jodi Dean said at the end of her academic lecture to the Chinese journalism and communication circles on "Three Myths of Networked Media":

Online communication technologies materialize democracy into political form, and format political dynamics into participation in communication. As key to political inclusion and democratic participation, new media technologies reinforce the grip of neoliberal capitalism and the privilege of the top 1 percent of the global population. At the same time, global online communication remains a tool and site of struggle, making political change more difficult – and more necessary – than ever before (Jodi Dean and Quan Jing Zhang, 2015). Theoretical Approach, Orientation in Reality, and Contemporary Political Implications 111

Even in the midst of the dilemma of democracy, it is necessary to take a dynamic historical perspective to see a promising reality and future orientation. On the one hand, from the classical standpoint of Marxism, and with the help of the reflections of Negri and others, in the era of the rise of "immaterial labor," one needs to see that "linked to the spirit of communism, the interconnected, interoperating and mutually assisting are increasingly becoming the dominant mode of operation of contemporary socio-economy and production" (Lu Shaochen, 2016), and that "because alienation and the abandonment of alienation follow the same path," like Finance Capitalism, Communicative Capitalism itself "also creates the conditions for a rich, comprehensive and new social dependency of the future" (Wang Xingfu, 2014). On the other hand, in terms of the dynamic logic of subject generation, as Professor Lu Xinyu points out, "the complete datafication of human beings is precisely the most profound manifestation of Information Capitalism. In this sense, the 'proletarianization' of human beings has gained unprecedented advancement" (Xinyu, 2016).

References

Dean, J., & Z. Quanjing (2015). Three Myths of Networked Media. International Journalism, 2, 105–116.

Dean, J., & L. Yueyang (2015). Communicative Capitalism and the Limits of Western Democracy. Journal of Global Media, 2, 54–64.

Hardt, M. (2010). The Common in Communism. In C. Douzinas and S. Žižek (Eds.), The Idea of Communism (pp. 131–144). London, England: Verso.

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Li, X. (2016). Re-examining Mental Intercourse: The Marxist View of Communication and the Reconstruction of Communication. Modern Communication, 8, 19–23.

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Endnotes

1 This article is part of the results of the "Network-Communication and Democracy Myth: A Critical Interpretation of Communicative Capitalism" project by Marxist Communication Research Base (Project No. 2017009) of Compilation and Translation Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. 2 It is worth mentioning that, at the invitation of Professor Zhao Yuezhi, an internationally renowned Chinese communication scholar and director of the Institute of Communication Politics and Economics at Communication University of China, Jodi Dean visited China in July 2013 and gave two lectures at Fudan University and Communication University of China, namely "Communicative Capitalism and the Limits of Democracy in the West" and "Three myths of networked media." These two speeches have her thinking on Communicative Capitalism summarized especially for academia in China. The Institute of Communication Politics and Economics, Communication University of China (CUC), organized the translation of these two speeches, which were published in the Journal of Global Media (No. 2, 2015) and International Journalism (No. 2, 2015), respectively. Theoretical Approach, Orientation in Reality, and Contemporary Political Implications 113

3 "Communication as labor: A study of the working conditions of Chinese journalists" by Wang Weijia (China Media University Press, January 2011) is a representative work that takes the pivotal perspective of capital and labor into communication research; a summary is in: Yao, Jianhua and Xu, Wei (2019). Global Digital Labour Research and Chinese: Critical Review. The Journal of Social Sciences (Hunan Normal University), 48(5), 141–149. 4 According to Prof. Zhao, Yuezhi in a comment delivered after a lecture at the first "Communication Station" workshop held by Communication University of China in July 2013; see: Zhihua Zhang & Manman Wang, "Rethinking the return of Karl Marx: An overview of the first Communication Station Workshop" in Chinese edition of "Marx is Back" by Fuchs and Mosco (2012), translated by Communication Station Workshop and published in 2016 by East China Normal University Press.

About the Authors

Dr. Gong Weiliang is an associate researcher and Master's degree supervisor at the Institute of Communication Studies, Communication University of China, in Beijing. His research interests are rural studies and the political economy of communication.

Ho, Ming Sun Richard is a doctoral student of political communication at the Institute of Communication Studies, Communication University of China, in Beijing.