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Communicative Capitalism and the Subject of Politics 2019 Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft Jodi Dean Critique or Collectivity? Communicative Capitalism and the Subject of Politics 2019 https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/11939 Veröffentlichungsversion / published version Sammelbandbeitrag / collection article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Dean, Jodi: Critique or Collectivity? Communicative Capitalism and the Subject of Politics. In: Dave Chandler, Christian Fuchs (Hg.): Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data. London: University of Westminster Press 2019, S. 171– 182. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/11939. Erstmalig hier erschienen / Initial publication here: https://doi.org/10.16997/book29.n Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer Creative Commons - This document is made available under a creative commons - Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 Attribution - Non Commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 License. For Lizenz zur Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu dieser Lizenz more information see: finden Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 CHAPTER 14 Critique or Collectivity? Communicative Capitalism and the Subject of Politics Jodi Dean 1. Introduction The questions posed for the symposium ‘Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Ac- tivism, Research & Critique in the Age of Big Data Capitalism’ take up pos- sibilities of digital activism and of critique in a digital age. What does digital mean as a qualifier of activism and condition of critique? On the one hand, this is obvious: we are talking about our current conditions of networked media, personalised mass communication and the production of the devices that sup- port it; we are talking about Big Data, about the general setting of communica- tive capitalism. On the other hand, there is something that is rather less clear in qualifying activism and critique with ‘digital’, namely the underlying theory of the subject. What notion of the political subject is posited or assumed in inquiries into digital activism and critique, and how is this subject impacted by a digital age? Is this impact, if there is one, best understood in terms of ‘digitality’, or might ‘digital’ in fact mark or periodise a certain understanding of capitalism and the ways it determines our setting? (I should add here that How to cite this book chapter: Dean, J. 2019. Critique or Collectivity? Communicative Capitalism and the Subject of Politics. In: Chandler, D. and Fuchs, C. (eds.) Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Inter­ disciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data. Pp. 171–182. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.16997/book29.n. License: CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0 172 Digital Objects, Digital Subjects in critical media studies it is of course Christian Fuchs who has insisted on the necessity of analysing digital media in terms of capitalism and its catego- ries of labour, production, and value rather than, say, bourgeois categories of information.) In my view, ‘digital’ directs us to our setting in communicative capitalism. It tells us less about the subject of politics than it does about the processes aligned to block this subject’s appearance, processes that nevertheless contribute to the concentrations and aggregations that are opportunities for the subject’s appearing. I take it as uncontroversial that a theory of the political subject is impor- tant for any approach to activism and critique (digital or otherwise). Do we think, for example, that the subject of politics is necessarily an activist subject? Or do we assume that it is acted upon, subjected, conditioned or determined? Likewise, do we imagine the political subject as engaging in or impacted by critique? Are online practices of sharing and opining, Twitter storms and Face- book updates, the practices of a political subject? What about hacking or blog- ging? Perhaps most important, do we proceed as if this subject were individual, or collective; is it present in the actions and events carried out in its name and, if so, how? In this essay, I first briefly sketch a theory of the political subject (anchored in Lacan), that brings together the Slovenian view of subject as gap in the struc- ture (Žižek and Dolar; see my discussion in Dean, 2016) with the early Badiou’s (2009) emphasis on subjectivation and the subjective process as responses to the intervention of the subject. Second, I illustrate the theory by turning to crowds. Crowds are not the political subject, but their ‘egalitarian discharge’ (a term I take from Canetti 1984) can exert effects that are retroactively attributed to the divided people (people as the rest of us [Dean, 2012], a revolutionary alliance of the oppressed) as their subject. The emphasis on crowds enables, third, a way to find ‘grave-diggers’ in communicative capitalism’s mobilisa- tion of and reliance on complex networks and their power law distributions of links. The politics ofdigital networks then takes shape as a dual problem of the one versus the many and maintaining the gap of the subject – a politics of collectivity rather than critique. Finally, I put my thesis up against Hardt and Negri’s approach to networked biopolitics to demonstrate the relevance of the party form for us today as that perspective, that instrument and organisational means, necessary for revolutionary politics. Rather than jumping right in to the theoretical discussion, I want to set out descriptively the general problem I aim to solve in terms of survivors and sys- tems. Two dominant themes in contemporary theory and activism constellate around either survivors or systems. So some activists and theorists, not to men- tion many students and others active on social media, are deeply invested in identity politics and intersectionality. They take identity to be a crucial site of politics, one that must be defended and asserted against multiple violations and harms. Lacking either solidary social and political associations or an economi- cally reliable future, they raise the multiple intersecting challenges obstructing Critique or Collectivity? Communicative Capitalism and the Subject of Politics 173 access to success and happiness. They imagine these challenges as, like them, specific rather than general. Betrayed by institutions, they have little faith in organised collectivity. So they repeat, spontaneously, the dominant injunction to rely on themselves and go it alone, despite the fact that they are already out- raged by the obstructions that block them from being able to ‘go it alone.’ In this vein, some advocates hold up livability, survivability, as a crucial achievement. ‘Survivor’ thus becomes, in this strand of theory and activism, a key figure for the contemporary subject of politics. Yet even as social media and left political culture more broadly valorise survi- vors, a concurrent strand of contemporary theory distances itself from people, from anything like a subject, indeed from the human. For these theorists, un- derstanding the present requires a posthumanist focus on systems – geologic, galactic, algorithmic, chaotic and so forth. We see this general move in empha- ses on extinction, exhaustion, objects and things. These two theoretical currents correspond toneoliberalism’s dismantling of social institutions and to communicative capitalism’s intensification of capi- talism via networked media/informatisation. University, schools, family and unions are less stable and more in flux. Social welfare protections have been dismantled in the name of people taking responsibility for themselves. The breakdown of social groups and institutions renders individuals ever more vulnerable to exploitation, violence and coercion; they are ever more likely to experience others as competitors or threats, and view them with suspicion. Taking care of oneself now appears as a politically significant act, rather than as a symptom of the dismantled social welfare net and obscenely competitive labour market wherein we have no choice but to care for ourselves if we are go- ing to keep up. The spontaneous response is individual: outrage, a demand that something be done, a call for change. Communicative capitalism supplies the infrastructure for this spontaneous politics of the individual: mobile phones and social media. These media reward immediate reactions such as the tweet, the status update, signing of a petition, emailing a representative – individual activities all ancillary to the singular act said really to matter: voting. What passes for politics enslaves individuals ideologically to bourgeois individualism and its individualised political practices. Jobs are less reliable, and people feel like everything is more competitive, more precarious. More and more choices in a more and more complex and uncertain informational field are downloaded onto the individual, even as these individuated choices have little to no impact on the real determinations of our lives in a setting where satellites, fibre-optic cables, server farms, Big Data, and complex algorithms power high-speed trad- ing, enable just-in-time production, intensify labour markets and concentrate wealth in ever fewer hands. The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt characterised liberalism as replacing politics with ethics and economics. I would say that when combined with communi- cative capitalism, neoliberalism is characterised by ideological investment in survivors
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