Jul
08

The Ralph Kramden Thesis (or,The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Digital))

Anya Kamenetz, author of DYI U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, recently sat down with Cathy Davidson, a well-known digital humanist, “over a salad and iced coffee at Payard French Bakery in New York’s Greenwich Village” to talk about things digital.  (Evidently the interview will also appear in Fast Company, “the world’s leading progressive business media brand  . . . Written for, by, and about the most progressive business leaders”!) The interview, despite headline slugs about a “bold plan for change,” is pretty uninteresting, probably a lot less interesting than the book it’s plugging.

In the course of the conversation, Davidson talks about how she learned about the importance of attitude in “her extensive arm rehab” for an injury she received on vacation.  Davidson sets the scene: ““Here we were on Capri, one of the most beautiful places in the world, with my friend Diego, an art collector who discovered Basquiat. He and [Davidson’s partner] Ken are bobbing in the water below me, they’re waving, and I decide to go down the ladder and the next thing I know, my whole life has changed.”  Bad things can happen on vacation.  But, what struck me about Davidson’s description is how it outlines a particular kind of vacation: Capri, boats, art collectors, Basquiat, etc.  This isn’t your week-in-a-Motel-8-next-to-the-Santa-Cruz-boardwalk type of vacation.  The “Capri incident”  – – with its name and place dropping – – belongs to a refined genre of vacations, a definitely class-anchored status-dream of exotic places and people.

I don’t really care where people vacation, but the association in the interview between “Capri” and technologically inspired “plans for bold change” reminded me of a thread that runs straight through today’s “digital sublime.”  A quick flip through one of the founding texts of the digital age, Nicholas Negroponte’s 1995 bestseller, Being Digital, reveals a similar intimacy among things digital, powerful people, and important places.  Negroponte travels a lot in the book: Vancouver, British Columbia; Mount Fuji, Japan; memories of his boarding school in Switzerland; MIT; headquarters of this corporation and that.  He also brushes elbows with lots of movers and shakers: “sixty-five-year-old tycoons”; a “socialite” described as “a wealthy and charming woman”; an admiral; Nobutaka Shikani, owner of a Japanese “newspaper and TV media empire,” brilliant scientists, etc.

These sketches from the lifestyles of the rich and connected offer more than just status frisson, as they collect over the course of Being Digital, they also begin to point to a specific class consciousness.  Negroponte, for instance, bemoans the regulations that force NYNEX to “put telephone booths in the darkest corners of Brooklyn (where they last all of forty-eight hours).”   In so many ways, the “darkest corners of Brooklyn” represent the antithesis of “being digital”: outer-boro (vs. Fifth Avenue or Greenwich Village), State-regulated (vs. market liberated), dark (vs. enlightened), dangerous (vs. safe), backward (vs. modern), hardware (vs. bytes).  In sum, the master binary here seems to be: Brooklyn-bound working-class vs. footloose, continent-hopping digerati. You don’t have to be Tony Manero to understand that the digital future will never belong to darkest Brooklyn.

Maybe this kind of imagination also explains why Negroponte  keeps thinking about technology in equally class-sodden terms: VCR’s”schlep atoms” (as opposed to “no-return, no-deposit bits”); bandwidth is more like a “ski lift” than “plumbing”; the best metaphor Negroponte can imagine for “human-computer-interface is that of a well-trained English butler.”  And, Negroponte implores us to the necessity of machine-to-machine communication by asking: “If you were to hire household staff to cook, clean, drive, stoke the fire, and answer the door, can you imagine suggesting that they not talk to each other?”  Imagine!  The proper machine, like the proper household staff, listens to his master’s voice.

In a more recent paen to the idol of the digital,  Me++ (2003), William J. Mitchell follows Negroponte’s bass line but adds new riffs, especially on mobility and lightness.  Mitchell’s digital protagonist is the gadget-hungry nomad, or as he calls it – –  “the spatially extended cyborg.”  In more concrete terms, his main character is somebody like the “jet-lagged business traveler” who, thanks to gadgets and networks, can now “travel very lightly – -with credit card and passport, some portable electronic equipment, and a carry-on bag.”   The difference between the past and the digital now can be summed up in a series of recurring contrasts: heaviness vs. lightness; big vs. small; sedentary vs. mobile; simple vs. complex; fixed vs. portable; things vs. access.  In Mitchell’s “chronicle of progressive dematerialization,” even homelessness has been re-dematerialized from life on the streets to lacking “access privileges.”

The working-class is the gestalt background against which Mitchell paints his picture of life A.D. (“After Dematerialization”); it signifies by its absence.  Here is Mitchell on affordances and tools: in B.D. (“Before Dematerialization”), the “possibility of gripping large objects of arbitrary shape in the hand” created a niche variously occupied by luggage, large weapons, and the ultimate “winner” in this competition – – the “gentleman’s cane”; today, that winner is the laptop computer.    Missing from his B.D. tools and affordances are things like hammers, wrenches, and cranks – – surely, demographically speaking, much more the conqueror of hand niches than the “gentleman’s cane.”  Dematerializing the body entails, in Mitchell’s argument, dematerializing labor.

Here is Mitchell’s description of contemporary production processes: “We produce the artifacts we want by bringing together designs, energy, and materials . . . The nodes of these networks [of production] are sites at which materials are organized, according to some design, through the controlled application of energy.”  This is a scenario straight out of Harry Potter and the world of magic wands.  Things aren’t made; they’re organized.  Labor – – along with its very corporeal realities of muscle, sweat, and strain – – is “dematerialized” magically into “the controlled application of energy”!  In Me++, the “spatially extended cyborg” is in such a rush to board his flight to Singapore or some sunny Italian isle, iPhone and fanny pack in place, that he can’t even see the descendants of those “villagers [who] rose with the roosters to work until sunset in nearby fields” but now rise with alarm clocks to clean the airport, manage reservations, usher passengers onto skyways, and serve drinks.

The digerati may not need plumbing, phone booths, incompetent employees, or even bodies, but they do need an ideology to demarcate their identity and to guide their imagination of technology.  We can understand this ideology a little better by introducing the “Ralph Kramden Thesis.”

In a 1955 episode of The Honeymooners, titled “TV or Not TV,” after hearing that neighbors, Trixie and Norton, are buying a new television set, Alice demands that Ralph also buy a television.   Ralph refuses because he claims he’s “waiting for 3-D television.”   Alice accuses him of “being cheap” and notes that the Nortons have a washing machine, vacuum cleaner, television, and “even an electric stove.”  Ralph rebuts her with the value of money over things:

Alice draws attention to Ralph’s body and so, in her own way, to the connections among class, technology, and modernity.  Jackie Gleason’s success as Ralph Kramden flowed from his portrayal as one of the last, unabashed avatars of the working-class on prime time American t.v.  He is loud, vulgar, emotional, parochial, and rash.  His gross physicality – –  flailing gestures, rubbery face, and huge belly  – – roots his blue collar personna in the body, a grotesque body of excess and appetite.  Alice and Ralph’s run-down apartment – – with it’s stand-alone sink and gas cooker – – is an invocation of Gleason’s own Brooklyn working-class roots and a self-conscious class marker for audiences soon to be treated to the clean, shiny suburban living rooms of Father Knows Best or the cool modernity of Peter Gunn and 77 Sunset Strip.  Ralph is primordial and the signs of his class identity gravitate around a resplendent materiality – – the body, the voice, gestures, and shabby environment.  Ralph can never fly to Capri armed only with credit card and smart phone.

In the end, Ralph ends up “sharing” a television with the Nortons, but the television set becomes a source of comedic conflict and disruption.  “I gotta admit, Ralph,” Alice says at the show’s conclusion.  “Once in your life, you’re right.  We never shoulda got a television set.”  A television show that rejects television.  But, the blue collar humor of The Honeymooners demands this contradiction. Ralph’s battle against television represents a battle against modernity, and more specifically a battle between working-class and middle-class.  Technology marks the boundary between classes and between past and present.  You can’t make fun out of working-class resistance to bourgeois modernity if you let Ralph and Alice enjoy that modernity.

There’s nothing new about the bourgeois ideology of technology and modernity.  In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu exhaustively chronicles the processes of differentiation that create and renovate class identities.  Much of this differentiation gets worked out around the opposition between body and mind, matter and spirit, nature and culture.  Working-class meals in France, for instance, feature heavier, thicker foods and are governed by an ethics of plenty (“Eat ’til you’re full.”);  middle-class meals in France are dominated by lighter, refined foods and are governed by an ethics of form (“Use the salad fork, not the dessert fork.”).  “The disappearance of economic constraints,” Bourdieu writes, “is accompanied by a strengthening of the social censorships which forbid coarseness and fatness, in favour of slimness and distinction.”  Lightness, form/design, refinement, discipline, slimness: these are markers that inscribe and re-inscribe bourgeois distinction.  Digerati like Negroponte and Mitchell and others are repeating the same processes of class distinction with new objects.  They are integrating technology into the conventional bourgeois habitus: social difference and value are measured by distance from coarseness and fatness, by the distance from Ralph Kramden’s Brooklyn walkup and bloated body to Mitchell’s “networked city” and “cyborg selves.”

In a nutshell, then, the Ralph Kramden Thesis: All things being unequal,  the (unbearable) lightness of being digital both demands and disowns the fat men from Brooklyn.

 

Jun
29

The Book of Rutger (17:3): Abstract, Living, and Immaterial Labor

“Charlton Heston is an axiom of cinema.” So declared the great French film critic, Andre Bazin.  Yet, once Heston gave up the cinematic ghost – – some time between Soylent Green (1973) and his appearance in Dynasty (1985) and then The Dame Edna Experience (1987), who could replace Hollywood’s Last Hard M[a]n (1976)?

Enter Rutger Hauer, the blue-eyed Dutch import who crashed onto American screens in 1982’s still-canonical dystopic epic, Blade Runner.  In one single scene (see below), Hauer wrote the first chapter of the Book of Rutger.

From this brilliant apogee, Hauer’s career began its stolid decline into the depths of post-Korman B movies – – B-movies, that magic zone where the quest for quick profits pulls cinema closer and closer to the sensationalism of current reality, throwing up – – in the process – –  a dark, glittering forest of social allegory.

Born in 1944, Hauer was no nubile tulip when he appeared in Blade Runner at age 38. Yet, one could almost say that Hauer’s true “Earthquake” phase began with 1989’s The Blood of Heroes, where he co-starred with Joan Chen, soon to breakout in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. And so, Hauer wended his way through a series of similar ersatz Blade Runner ripoffs, swords and unicorns fantasies, and post-Hitcher, scary-strung-out-dude-with-a-slightly-off-accent epics until I recently caught up with him in 1999’s cyber-crime thriller, New World Disorder, where he teams up with another in-decline but non-axiomatic Hollywood b-teamer, Andrew McCarthy.

Hauer’s turn as David Marx, a washed-up, rotund detective assigned to the cold case file of a “Silicon Valley” police department, appears at first as a study in ironies.  Roy Batty, whose buff, Aryan presence betrays genetic engineering’s paucity of imagination, has gotten more life, and it’s not a pretty thing.  The contrast between Blade Runner and New World Disorder (a too literal gloss perhaps on Ridley Scott’s opus) bears cruel witness to the intrusion of cellulite into celluloid, of real time – – wrinkles, expanding waists, diminishing energies – – into film’s timelessness.  Classic movies persist impervious to fading on tape and disc, but actors have to keep working.

By 1999, Roy Battie has become Rick Dekkard (Blade Runner‘s Harrison Ford), the grizzled, burned-out veteran of life on the streets.  Still, in recycling one of the oldest topes of the cop procedural (rookie meets vet, vet hates rookie, vet comes to love and cherish rookie), New World Disorder manages to entangle itself in a fundamental question of “post-Fordist” society: what does labor mean when bytes have replaced atoms?  Both movies orbit around questions of labor, New World Disorder more directly and Blade Runner more indirectly.  (Recall that the problem in Blade Runner begins with an android revolt in an off-world mine.  And, Ray and his fellow ‘droids repeatedly confront Dekkard with the accusation of their slavery.) But, in 1999, here’s how veteran, David Marx (Hauer) and hot shot, FBI, cyber-crime rookie, Kris Paddock (Tara Fitzgerald) first butt heads over this thorny issue:

Technology upends seniority.  Time (of police procedure) and place (scene of the crime) have been dissolved into the “virtual world.”  The old way of work – – “sifting through old bones, revisiting crime scenes over and over again, waiting weeks for lab results” – – just doesn’t cut it any more.  Effective cops work with networks, gigabytes, connectivity, and ip packets. “It’s not the computer firing the bullets,” but when you’re hunting down thieves who steal software (in this case, a super-security program reminiscent of the Carnivore project), tote laptops, plug into ethernet connections, download onto zip drives, and drive cool, black motorcycles (all circa 1999), a good cop has to give up shoe leather for immaterial labor.

And, with the hint of David’s last name in mind, that’s the conflict that connects the disorder and not-so-early sorrow of 1999’s Hauer to questions of immaterial labor.  “Immaterial labor” is the term used by Maurizio Lazzarato in a highly influential essay to describe the shift from the manufacture of things to the  manufacture of “the ‘informational content’ of the commodity.”  Lazzarato argues that immaterial labor fundamentally reorganizes contemporary work; in focusing on the informational content of the commodity, the capitalist regime seeks to extract surplus value based on the “ability to activate and manage productive cooperation.  The workers must become ‘active subjects’ in the coordination of the different functions of production, instead of being subjected to it as a simple command.”  Capitalist work harvests “rich subjectivities” through new structures of cooperation and communication and “so to speak, exists only in the form of network and flow.”  And, as Lazzaroti notes, contemporary capitalism exploits the blurry line between consumption and production, employment and non-employment.  Pre-carity – – the insecurity of employment amongst young people, professionals, and workers in general – – represents a “virtual” form of immaterial labor.  All those hours on Facebook are training missions in immaterial labor.

If Hauer needed Blade Runner to break out of the minuscule Dutch media world, Lazzarato’s concept would have to wait for Negri and Hardt’s Empire to break out into the wider world of post-Marxist theory.  There, besides announcing that immaterial labor had now become the dominant form of labor, Negri and Hardt refined Lazzarato’s concept into a triptych: immaterial labor consists of three types of labor – – industrial production that has been informationalized (think Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine), analytical and symbolic tasks (think Robert Reich’s “symbolic analysts“), and the production and manipulation of affect (think the “softer” version of the service sector).  Like Lazarrato, Negri and Hardt play up the ambivalences inherent in this new category of labor: capitalism increasingly depends on self-managed, networked, and collectively intelligent laborers, even as the necessary autonomy of this labor strains against traditional forms of capitalist control and regulation.

You can see why immaterial labor seems so exciting to pundits of the new informational or digital economy.  The “californian ideology” of Wired magazine and its ilk, for instance, puts web designers, coders, innovators, and app-producers at the center of the digital economy because, in large part, they are the avant garde of immaterial labor – – networked, self-managed, entrepreneurial, and engrossed – – on the clock and off the clock – – in the byte-world of informational flow.  Richard Barbrook has mercilessly skewered this ideology and its consequences, and Tiziana Terranova has offered a powerful, if fragmentary anatomy of the “outernet”  – –  “the network of social, cultural and economic relationships which criss-crosses and exceeds the Internet – – surrounds and connects the latter to larger flows of labour, culture and power.”  Nick Dyer-Witheford and Steve Wright, the brilliant chronicler of Italian “autonomous” marxism, have offered similarly smart, provocative criticisms of immaterial labor.

Yet, missing from these critiques is perhaps a more fundamental flaw in the idea of immaterial labor.  Whether immaterial labor is the dominant form of labor today, or whether it can be discerned into diptychs or triptychs, for immaterial labor to produce value for capitalism, it must become abstract labor.  That is, capitalism’s ability to exploit the “free labor” of wiki-writers, Facebook users, and blog-posters depends on the alienation of worker from labor, the transformation of concrete labor into abstract labor.  Or, as Marx wrote: “The capitalist epoch is, therefore, characterized by this, that labor-power takes in the eyes of the laborer himself the form of a commodity which is his property; his labor consequently becomes wage-labor.”  As Raya Dunayevskaya (C.L.R. James’s compadre in the Johnson-Forest Tendency) noted long ago, the “cooperative” aspects of capitalist work are nothing new: “The ‘pecular form’ [of cooperative labor under capitalism] is also due to the fact that the laborers have sold their individual, isolated labor power. But since there are many such laborers, the capitalists must make cooperators out of them, but cooperators who must fructify with their living labor the value of the past labor incorporated in the machine but which is in actuality labor of the laborers themselves in alienated form.”  Immaterial labor turns out, then, to be a sociological description – – a pretty interesting and fruitful description of new, different kinds of work which now seem to flourish within the capitalist regime of alienated labor.  In other words, the content of labor may have changed (Fordist workers made cars and blenders on the assembly line, many of today’s workers make smiles and french fries) but the form (abstract labor) remains the same.

By its conclusion,  New World Disorder submits to the control of Hollywood convention: grizzled veteran learns to appreciate computers and brash rookie learns to appreciate bullets and procedure.  The “date” between Marx and Paddock cements this happy algorithm with a kiss.  Yet, despite it’s predictable generational reconciliation, New World Disorder may inadvertently also offer a final comment on immaterial labor.  Perhaps the real problem with immaterial labor is that it depends on a too strict dichotomy between Fordist and post-Fordist labor.  As John Holloway reminds us, “the only way in which we can understand the capitalist forms of social relations (and, at their center, abstract labor) is as forms swollen with their own negation, forms that do not contain their content, but from which their content constantly overflows.”  Abstract and living (or concrete) labor are two antagonistic aspects of labor under capitalism.  “There is a non-identity between them: doing [concrete labor] does not fit in to abstract labor without a remainder.  There is always a surplus, an overflowing.  There is always a pushing in different directions.”  Indeed, there would be no need for capitalism’s dense, fierce, and costly practices of control, on and off the job, if this antagonism didn’t threaten the ultimate goal: surplus value.

Immaterial laborists too easily cast the antagonism between living and abstract labor into strict historical sequence: before, in the factory, abstract labor ruled; today, in the software design firm, living labor dominates. The Book of Rutger tells us otherwise: Roy Batty’s “I want more life” testifies that even the most extreme imagination of abstract labor (programmed from his DNA upward to be a model worker) cannot stifle the ecstasies of living labor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5tlWeIh4WU

 

Jun
14

Digital Syndicalism

I just got back from Mexico City and the III Encuentro Internacionale, “La Economia de los Trabajadores,” hosted by Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco (and others).  In addition to bumping into old comrades like Peter Ranis, Manny Ness (whose new book is out now!), and Cliff DuRand, I got to know a whole new crew of  companeros – –  from Mexico, Argentina, Australia, and the States (including some fellow Oakland residents – – saludos a Dave y “el enemigo de Beowulf”!).

the companeros get down!

The Encuentro was a fantastic three days of talk, questions, and discussions focused on “autogestion” or workers’ self-management.  I learned a lot.  Special thanks to the folks from UAM-Xochimilco who were extraordinary hosts and incredibly industrious and gracious.

Mexico City is an incredible place, and I urge you to ignore warnings about crime, smog, etc. and visit the Distrito Federal soon!

In my own contribution to the Encuentro, I tried to outline, briefly, the connections between “sociomedia” and some themes of anarcho-syndicalism (decentralization, anti-expertise, creativity, and counter-culture).  This was really a snapshot and rough draft of my thinking about the politics of digital humanities – – or, given the current paucity of talk around the “politics” of digital humanities, a start to thinking about how digital humanities might challenge institutions and the university’s business-as-usual.  (I try to work out another piece of this puzzle in my recent Radical Teacher piece.)

I’ve published the google doc version of my talk to the web.  And, you can find a Commentpress version here.

Finally, although the discourse at the Encuentro was firmly anchored in politics, economics, and sociology, I’m convinced that autogestion is also fundamentally a cultural question.  My comrade, Salvatore Salerno’s work on the Wobblies is especially important here.  And, some serious thinking about the cultural dimensions of autogestion – – as well as thinking culture through autogestion – – is definitely on my agenda . . .