[iDC] response to M. Goldhaber's response to Julian Kücklich
Jonathan Beller
jbeller at pratt.edu
Sun Jun 14 02:43:31 UTC 2009
To continue the conversation:
First of all, writ large, the structure of the celebrity is a
fascistic one -- the accrual of social power by individuals via the
captured attention of the masses, exactly parallels the accrual of
social power by the capitalist via the captured labor of the masses.
This is not an accidental correspondence but rather an intensification
of the very processes that created new forms of recognition and
personality nascent in bourgeois capitalism. And, by personality, I do
not only mean the exterior trappings that allow a face to be
recognized, I mean also the intense elaboration of subjectivity and
interiority associated with the richly textured experiences of high
bourgeois culture. In the case of the capitalist, the celebrity and
the fascist dictator, the individual in question is a creation of the
masses even though s/he is not representative of the masses. The
charismatic leader, as Gramsci taught us, was a Ceasarist, a kind of
master power-broker, who was capable of doing the work of the
hierarchical capitalist state precisely by utilizing populist
discourse (and today we could say the technologies of populism -- what
was Hitler without the loudspeaker? etc.). The Fascist dictators from
Mussolini to Macapagal-Arroyo to Bush were also, in the most literal
sense -- cyborgs, "individuals" created in symbiotic relation to the
technical and economic apparatuses of his/her time. These mechanisms
were/are driven by the sensual labor of the masses. The celebrated
individual(s) constitute, in Debord's famous words regarding the
spectacle, the diplomatic presentation of hierarchical society to
itself.
Benjamin recognized the co-optation inherent in the celebrity-from
already when he spoke of the fascist corruption of the film medium by
capitalist industries/nations giving workers the chance not the right
to represent themselves. One person is elevated, literally made from
the subjective labor of the mass audience, and stands in as a point of
identification for all those who will remain forever unrepresented.
The celebrity becomes a kind of compensation for the disempowerment
and castration of the masses. We regular folk will never accomplish
anything, never achieve universal recognition by all humanity, but,
not to worry, the celebrity does this in our stead. Of course, as
with the dictator or with the capitalist monopolist our disempowerment
is the condition of possibility for his/her elevation. Just as the
wealth of the capitalist is the obverse of the poverty of the worker,
the hyper-representation of the celebrity is the obverse of the non-
representation of the rest of us.
In order to show the historical relationship between the social order
denoted by celebrities and fans on the one hand and owners and workers
on the other, I will not recapitulate the entire argument of The
Cinematic Mode of Production here (my apologies :)) : suffice it to
say that cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye and
introjects the social relations of industrial society into the
sensorium. In other words, the rise of visuality and subsequently of
digitality does not happen in parallel to capitalism but is in fact an
extension of capitalist relations deeper into the body -- into the
viscera and, as is better understood, into cognitive-linguistic
function. The logic of cinema, the chaine de montage, etc., extends
the logic of the assembly line from the traditional labor processes of
the factory to the senses and to perception. This movement of
production into the visual/cognitive vis-a-vis the cinema is the
material history of the emergence of the attention economy; cinema is
the open book of the contemporary econometrics of attention.
All of which is to say that with due deference to various forms of
subversive fandom, we may want to think twice before we celebrate
celebrity and pitch our brilliant insights to investors. Must we still
ask why?
When referring to the possibility of "social media" to bring about
social change Michel Goldhaber writes below:
While I would not rule out the possibility that some such media could
tremendously aid a move toward fuller equality, that cannot be taken
for granted, nor would the resulting equality necessarily be so
complete as some might hope.
it seems to me that there are at least two dangerous omissions: One is
that media do not stand apart from us -- they are made out of us and
they are us, no less than say, as Fanon reminded his readers, it was
the labor of the Third World that built the European metropoles. The
logic of celebrity, which is the logic of reification, has taught us
to conceptually resolve media technologies as if they were free
standing entities and not products of centuries of expropriation put
to use by and large to continue and intensify those processes. We
would do well to remember that today's planet of slums, with its 2
billion people (population Earth, 1929) in an abject, completely
modern and utterly contemporary poverty, is also the product of
whatever socio-technologic matrix of relations we find ourselves in.
It is important also to recognize that the media, in and of
themselves, are not going to progressively alter these relations. They
are these relations! Here I recall Chomsky's response when asked if he
thought internet would bring about greater democratization: "That
question is not a matter for speculation, it is a matter for
activism." In other words, the fight is also here and now. We are
being called by the o/re-pressed that lies both within and without
"us," to activate the vectors of struggle against domination/post-
modern fascism/platform fetishism/capitalist technocracy/neo-
imperialism/globalization/certain brands of "fun," etc. that already
inhere in every atom of the status-quo.
The second omission in Goldhaber's statement may well be more self-
conscious than the first appears to be -- in saying "nor would the
resulting equality necessarily be so compelete as some might hope" he
appears to omit himself from those who still have hope or want to
hope. When referring to those who hope for equality and presumably
social justice, some of us would have said "we."
Jonathan Beller
Professor
Humanities and Media Studies
and Critical and Visual Studies
Pratt Institute
jbeller at pratt.edu
718-636-3573 fax
On Jun 13, 2009, at 4:13 PM, Michael H Goldhaber wrote:
> Hi Julian and everyone,
>
> I disagree that the notion of dyadic classes never made much sense.
> On the contrary it was an is analytically of great value, even if it
> ignores some intermediate positions. The dynamics of societies are
> considerably clarified by the concept. '
>
> As for whether Facebook, twitter and other means of social
> networking aid the attention economy as I use the term, we need not
> only think in terms of huge attention absorbers like Oprah. There
> are after all small capitalists as well as big ones, and there are
> small stars as well as big ones. to be a star, at the limit you only
> need to take in more attention than you pay out.
>
> If you choose to define a star as someone who takes in several times
> as much attention as paid out, I still suspect that many of the
> participants in this very discussion would qualify, and more might
> well want to. It is critical that we remember this as we discuss
> issues such as exploitation. It is also important to consider this
> possibility when we discuss the apparent equalizing trends of social
> media. While I would not rule out the possibility that some such
> media could tremendously aid a move toward fuller equality, that
> cannot be taken for granted, nor would the resulting equality
> necessarily be so complete as some might hope.
>
> Best,
> Michael
> Juliann wrote:
> Hi Michael & all,
>
> .....
>
> You write:
> > I argue we are
> > passing from one dyadic class system (capitalists and worker)
> [...] to a new dyadic class
> > system of stars and fans
>
> I think we all agree that the old dyad of capitalists and workers
> never made much sense to begin with (and this is one of the reasons we
> have so many communist -isms), while the new dyad is neither new, nor
> does it make much sense in the context of the oh so tautologically
> named "social media." I think what we see evolving there (and by
> extension everywhere) is a system of microstardom and tactical fandom
> that calls into question the classical power relationship between fans
> and stars.
>
> This is obviously preceded by alt.fan communities such as the ones
> Jenkins writes about, but I am not interested so much in slash fiction
> etc., but rather in the microfame that exists on myspace, facebook,
> twitter, flickr, etc. The recent influx of "real celebrities", such as
> Oprah Winfrey, into the twitterverse provides a good example because
> it draws attention to the difference between a mass media attention
> economy (in this case, TV) and a multitudinous media attention
> economy. Oprah barged into twitter, expecting that people were
> actually willing to pay attention to the mundane details of her life,
> but as it turned out the mundane details of non-celebrities' lives are
> actually more interesting (Oprah of all people should know).
>
> In numerical terms, Oprah and Ashton Kutcher may be the "stars" of the
> twitterverse, but they are stars only in the sense that they provide a
> kind of background radiation for the real action. While indigenous
> microfame is rare, twitter often amplifies attention capital acquired
> elsewhere, and consolidates distributed and fragmented microaudiences.
> At the same time, however, the agency of microaudiences is heightened
> in multitudinous media such as twitter, and they can use this agency
> tactically as well as strategically, and often do. In this context, it
> is significant that while "friending" is the basic unit operation (to
> use Ian Bogost's term) of facebook, the basic unit operation of
> twitter is not "following" but "blocking". So if someone is perceived
> as abusing their microfame this is sanctioned not just by a denial of
> attention but by a reduction of that person(a)'s sphere of influence.
>
> So I think we are not dealing with a dyadic system at all, but with
> something much less structured and, for lack of a better word, more
> fun (fun also being the mechanism underwriting new forms of
> (self-)exploitation). Let's not forget, however, that achieving and
> maintaining microfame is a form of labour, and one not so dissimilar
> to the kind of work described in the MechTurk presentation sent around
> by Matthew yesterday: it's affective and relational labour, much of
> which consists in maintaining a good relationship with the
> "requesters" (or "followers"). It seems to me that the decisive
> difference between mass media fame and microfame resides in the fact
> that the former is systemic, while the latter is endemic. In other
> words: in mass media stars are made, while in multitudinous media
> stars make themselves by performing their virtuosity across different
> registers.
>
> This does not mean that MechTurk workers are in the same boat as
> "social media entrepreneurs" but it seems evident that menial labour
> is increasingly informed by entrepreneurial ideology while
> entrepreneurship now requires a much more labour-intensive
> micromanagement of audiences across a range of different terrains than
> the relationship management (schmoozing, corruption, collusion, etc.)
> engaged in by "capitalists."
>
> So, yes, the terrain we are dealing with is "complex and changing,
> with alliances and antagonisms springing up in every possible
> permutation," but I would contend that the binary oppositions of
> stars/fans and capitalists/workers have been replaced by contextual
> unit operations that follow a multivalent rather than a dyadic logic.
>
> Julian.
>
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