[iDC] response to M. Goldhaber's response to Julian Kücklich
Jonathan Beller
jbeller at pratt.edu
Mon Jun 15 13:32:03 UTC 2009
Niiice! Downright Socratic (if you'll pardon the spectacularity of the
reference). Who said that all twitterbots were twittiets anyway?
Wonderful to drop those celebrated names like so many empties crushed
underfoot despite yourour lightness. Overall I would agree that the
stars themselves -- always-already indices of collective programs
anyway -- ought to be dropped like Walter's shells as we strive to
eliminate that unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be.
Who said that? Why all of us -- but from over here, somewhere.
Ah poesy! delicate as a dehiscent dandelion, lethal as a gun.
Jonathan Beller
Professor
Humanities and Media Studies
and Critical and Visual Studies
Pratt Institute
jbeller at pratt.edu
718-636-3573 fax
On Jun 15, 2009, at 4:09 AM, Julian Kücklich wrote:
> 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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