[iDC] Political questions on play/labor
Brian Holmes
brian.holmes at aliceadsl.fr
Fri Jun 12 16:04:36 UTC 2009
Hello all,
Greetings, brilliant that we will have a chance to meet in this
hi-end conf organized by tireless Trebor, who already has some
very successful symposia to his name. I am a cultural critic and
activist, working among others on the theme of networked leisure
and labor since my text on The Flexible Personality in 2002. Now
I'm coming back from two decades in France to spend more time in
the US, so it will be a great chance to meet many of you. The
promise of the conference, seems to me, is to tie up in one
living, breathing package the latest on computer-mediated and
"choreographed" social interaction, considered as an ethos, a
more or less legitimate way of living. But the eternal question
of such studies is: what for? Among other perspectives, this from
Jonathan Beller speaks to me:
> How to make the playground pulse with
> the struggles that underpin, situate and overdetermine our
very presence
> (virtual or otherwise) in this, our space-time-now.
Given the record of egalitarian and emancipatory struggles in the
hyper-mediated USA over this last decade, paralleled by the real
decay of the society (militarism, immiseration of the middle
classes, increasing exclusion and imprisonment, extraordinary
financial crimes and a whole range of ecological dead-ends) the
idea that an expanding space of play represents a realm of
freedom looks like a dubious interpretation of the cultural
consequences of networked media. If the parameters of play
(devices, themes, rules of engagement, participatory rituals,
affective tones etc) are an important part of what gives cultural
form to a society of abundance, then I'd like to see what happens
when a prominent group of academics, artists and technologists
admit that the results today are not very good. Why is it so
difficult now to talk about free play as a technique for the
political neutralization of the (forever) young - when it's not a
matter of indoctrinating future soldiers or corporate raiders?
Similarly I'd debate the emancipatory value of a simple focus on
digital labor and its relative autonomy, because the grand
egalitarian traditions of labor struggles are not particularly
evident in networked environments. Instead, the speed-up in pace
(see the issue of Processed World sent by Jesse Drew) and the
increased career opportunities in the financialized economy
mostly led to new forms of grinding exploitation at the bottom of
the payscale and extreme self-interest on the higher prosumer
ends. Under the influence of Clintonism and New Labor,
center-left professionals across the world accepted the premises
of neoliberal government-by-selfish-economics, with outcomes that
are now obvious thanks to the financial collapse. The question,
then, is what is the value of focusing on labor if you cannot
contribute to some new replacement for what the workerist
traditions used to call commitment, solidarity and class
consciousness? Can we really say, that's someone else's
department, I study the nitty-gitty of digital work?
I agree with Jonathan Beller that our unconscious thoughts and
unquestioned social routines are overdetermined by the really
existing struggles against bombs, pollution, exploitation and
expropriation. But let's face it: the struggles in the Middle
East, Latin America, Africa, and also in Europe and the USA
themselves don't get much conscious help from the play-labor
complex; and while it's quite valuable to hear any news to the
contrary, there would be a certain dishonesty in exaggerating the
importance of that news after what we have been though in this
decade. To echo some earlier discussions about what has changed
and what hasn't since digitization, it may well be true that the
increase in the availability and communicability of knowledge
about society has merely lent piercing clarity to the limited
scope of personal agency in the capitalist democracies. Yet still
it's a problem, no?
Many of you on the list have done excellent work defining the
operational underpinnings and interactive patterns of what can
shortly be called "the control society," and I think this work is
important. However, in my own case no less than any of yours, the
limit of that kind of critical work is post-leftist melancholia
and the exegesis of domination as some kind of theological
destiny. If, as I would argue, the hope that a change in
analytical focus could uncover previously unnoticed margins of
agency in entertainment and in the relative autonomy of everyday
labor has been largely a failure, then the question of how to
make critical intellectualism into a force in the world again,
and not just a declining career-path, raises its prickly head. In
addition to the specialist knowledge that this conference will
generate and freely share - and thanks in advance for that - the
problem on my mind will be, how to make research, publication and
teaching into a force for emancipation and social change, at a
moment when the self-destructive trends of world society are so
blatant?
Gabriella Coleman and others have written about the impressive
phenomenon of free-software development. Michael Bauwens talks
about the need for institutional support of cooperative cultures
of the kind that have emerged on line over the last twenty years.
These approaches point in positive directions. Yet it does not
appear that such forms of cooperation can be generated by better
algorithms and interaction designs, because their ethical basis
has to be cultivated by groups that at present are minorities,
and therefore must develop their own infrastructure,
value-orientations, operative modes and forms of validation, not
to mention wellsprings of desire. At a time when war, mental as
well as physical pollution and outright expropriation of the
social wealth are so threatening, why not use this conference to
think about the structures of discursive cooperation and social
practice that could give some relevance back to research and
teaching? Could the seeds of a more critical Internet culture be
planted at a conference like this? Otherwise it's Howard
Rheingold and the San Francisco venture capitalists forever!
The discussion on this list about how to define exploitation is
totally positive from my point of view. But you know, the US has
used its scientific and cultural hegemony to extract so much
wealth from the rest of the world over the past few decades that
it's really no wonder people have basically been paid to play,
whether through access to credit or as the part of the societal
experiment in one-to-one marketing that we have all been part of
since the Internet went commercial. The question of how to
recover egalitarian values and how to invent ecological ones
within the extended frameworks of world society is also
fundamental to any constructive critique of the play-labor ethos,
both politically and on strictly epistemological and ontological
grounds (since neoliberalism has wiped out old definitions of
exploitation, alienation and domination). If the conference could
set some shared research agendas on these kinds of topics, that
would be a real accomplishment.
all the best, Brian
text archive at brianholmes.wordpress.com.
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