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Theoretical Approach, Orientation in Reality, and Contemporary Political Implications

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Theoretical Approach, Orientation in Reality, and Contemporary Political Implications 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 Capitalism: 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 democracy and its consequences is subversive, suffocating the development of effective politics in a false prosperity of liberal democracy. 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, neoliberalism, 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 Communism. 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 both your 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
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