[iDC] response to M. Goldhaber's response to Julian Kücklich

Mon Jun 15 08:09:43 UTC 2009

Here's a sort of postscript on microfame.

[Mon, 15 June, 07:57 GMT]

cycus: Thou shalt follow @cucchiaio for being the personification of
ludology and coolnerdism, spitting out teenage angst poetry in a
reflected way.

cucchiaio: @cycus Aww, thx. That's an awfully nice follow recommendation.

cycus: @cucchiaio was a pleasure since I'm consistently laughing my
ass off with your dark sarcasm

cucchiaio: Thinking about microfame and microfascism. #idc #theory

cucchiaio: One of the (manymany) problems of academic discourse is
that it cannot overcome its oedipal fixation with scholarly
celebrities. #idc

markbuchholz: @cucchiaio I think microfame for many is when their
jokes got retweetet by a handful of twitter-bots

cucchiaio: I mean, how can you sustain a critique of celebrity culture
while referencing Marx, Weber, Benjamin, Debord, McLuhan, Deleuze,
etc.? #idc

cucchiaio: @markbuchholz Well, that's precisely what it is. Microfame
is mundane, self-referential, and unit-operational. Long live the
twitterbots!

[Mon, 15 June, 08:42 GMT]

2009/6/14 Jonathan Beller <jbeller at pratt.edu>:
> 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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