Jajuna

Anxieties related to the potential ill effects of Web 2.0 are often framed by concerns over how the internet is affecting our relationship to knowledge. For instance, commentaries found in articles like Is Google making Us Stupid? raise questions about how 24/7 access to instant information may be eroding our analytical capacities as well our cognitive ability to remember important pieces of information. Why bother with memory work if we know what we need is just sitting there in Wikipedia? This is something like what Fredric Jameson describes in his analysis of postmodern culture where the constant circulation and reproduction of ungrounded images, factoids, styles, and news cycles produces what he describes as a state of historical amnesia. The ultimate consequence being that our detachment from the grounding of the past hinders our ability to imagine and work collaboratively to build new images of alternative futures. This article, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting”, from the New York Times adds a bit of a twist to this argument. What happens to subjectivity when every whim, thought, impulse, or embarrassing photo becomes permanently cataloged on Twitter, Facebook, or the Blog? How will this immutable digital trail impact our relationship to ourselves, to knowledge, to our understandings of past and the future?  One of the effects, as the article intimates may be a radicalization of image maintenance and protection that accelerates an already creeping cultural narcissism associated with immanent collective surveillance and identity/reputation construction.

From the article:

In the nearer future, Internet searches for images are likely to be combined with social-network aggregator search engines, like today’s Spokeo and Pipl, which combine data from online sources — including political contributions, blog posts, YouTube videos, Web comments, real estate listings and photo albums. Increasingly these aggregator sites will rank people’s public and private reputations, like the new Web site Unvarnished, a reputation marketplace where people can write anonymous reviews about anyone. In the Web 3.0 world, Fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored based not on their creditworthiness but on their trustworthiness as good parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance risks.

Anticipating these challenges, some legal scholars have begun imagining new laws that could allow people to correct, or escape from, the reputation scores that may govern our personal and professional interactions in the future. Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches cyberlaw at Harvard Law School, supports an idea he calls “reputation bankruptcy,” which would give people a chance to wipe their reputation slates clean and start over. To illustrate the problem, Zittrain showed me an iPhone app called Date Check, by Intelius, that offers a “sleaze detector” to let you investigate people you’re thinking about dating — it reports their criminal histories, address histories and summaries of their social-networking profiles. Services like Date Check, Zittrain said, could soon become even more sophisticated, rating a person’s social desirability based on minute social measurements — like how often he or she was approached or avoided by others at parties (a ranking that would be easy to calibrate under existing technology using cellphones and Bluetooth). Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation brokers — like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax, for example — which will provide ratings for people based on their sociability, trustworthiness and employability.

Here is a quick cut from the thesis on neoliberal governmentality:

One of the most acute analysis of neoliberalism to emerge in recent years is based upon the genealogical accounts developed by Michel Foucault in his lectures at the College de France in the late 1970s. Writing on the cusp of the neoliberal revolution, Foucault identified the emergent free market ideology as a distinct form governmentality, by which he meant a system of institutional, legal, and social organizational logics based on distinct forms of knowledge, norms, processes, strategies, and corresponding modalities and technologies of subjectivity. In these lectures, Foucault traced the development of neoliberal logic from classical liberal theory, post-War German Ordo liberalism, to thinkers associated with the so-called “Chicago School” of economics such as Milton Freidman and Fredrich von Hayek, among others. In short, neoliberal governmentality as articulated by its “Chicago School” proponents is based on the belief that economic rationalities should operate as the foundation for all forms of political and social activity. Neoliberalism thus rejects the Keynesian diagram of a social state operating to regulate capitalism and to provide a level of social protection against its worst excesses. Instead, neoliberlism takes as given the natural efficiency and ethical neutrality of the market and the supposed inefficiency and corruption of the public sector, advocating that all social relations from environmental protection, education, health and child care, to conceptions of the state and civic engagement can and should be brought under the auspices of the market. Synthesizing Foucault’s approach, Wendy Brown has argued that as a form of governmentality neoliberalism represents a “normative” and a “constructivist” project. The result of human decision making as oppose an inevitable natural law, “it does not presume the ontological giveness of a thoroughgoing economic rationality for all domains of society but rather takes as its task the development, dissemination, and institutionalization of such a rationality” (Edgework, 40-41). This has had a profoundly depoliticizing effect as the market conjoined with the entrepreneurial decision making power of the consumer is fallaciously conflated with civic and democratic processes in virtually all domains of human interaction. This represents “a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state, and one that produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of the social” (37).

Since my first post on Commonwealth, my friend Paul and I have decided to launch a small intra-blog project. We will first continue to write up a set of notes for the book and to cross-post them on our blogs as well as to another public theory blog belonging to a friend of ours. This is in the interest and spirit of generating critical conversation. Next, we are going to co-write a book review. Unlike, these basic notes we hope to accomplish two things in the review (1) excavate some productive criticisms/limitations of Hardt and Negri’s project (2) create something new by thinking with and against Hardt and Negri in the context of our respective intellectual interests. For me, this means thinking about what productive insights Commonwealth might contribute to discussions of educational policy, security, and insecurity, and for Paul, it means thinking about online communities, internet surveillance, and theories of gifting and exchange. Of course, we hope to also think critically about how these fields speak to one another, the common, and possibilities for social transformation. This underscores a larger project we are working on that seeks to problematize issues of internet surveillance within the neoliberal University by looking at issues of campus-based corporate anti-piracy campaigns and questions of security and governmentality.

Preface

In the opening pages of Commonwealth Hardt and Negri claim that the book represents an attempt to “articulate an ethical project, an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire” (vii). Reiterating their position in Empire and Multitude, they argue that despite the insecurities, conflicts, and contradictions wrought by globalization there is no longer any space “outside” the new global capitalist order. For better or worse, globalization has created a common world. Because there is no longer an outside, creating more sustainable and democratic futures requires acting in this world through new collective projects of self-rule and political invention. CW thus represents Hardt and Negri’s attempt to fully articulate the conditions of possibility for a global democracy of the multitude. Central to CW is the conceptual deployment of the common. By the common Hardt and Nergi refer to the material world as well as to the results of social production—ideas, knowledge, images, and affects. While neoliberal forms of rule have led to the further enclosure of the commons through new strategies of capital accumulation and privatization, Hardt and Negri assert that globalization has also created common spaces and modes of knowledge particularly in the realm of digital communication and cultural production. According to Hardt and Negri, these articulations of the common—while still captured within empire’s distinct alignments of biopolitical production—represent an immanent potentiality for realizing an alternative democratic project: the “becoming-Prince of the multitude”.

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It has been a long time since I have posted. This is because I have been crazy-busy writing and delivering conference papers (three in the last two weeks) and trying as I can to organize and write my PhD exam and dissertation proposal (a terrifically masochistic endeavor indeed!). Below is something I came across in my files today as I was writing a section for my comps exam which critiques Foucault’s use of biopower, particularly its Eurocentric orientation. I wrote this awhile ago in response to Ann Stoler’s critique of Foucauldian biopower, which she expands to include the reciprocal relations between European identity and colonialism.

In Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995) Ann Stoler takes up Michel Foucault’s theoretical propositions in his A History of Sexuality Vol 1 and “refigures” them in a wider imperial field in order to link discourses of sexuality and the production of bourgeoisie subjectivity to race, and specifically to “racial thinking”. Thinking is a crucial word for it means that race must not only be confronted within an epistemological framework (how we know) but also within the ontological (what we know). Race is confounding in the sense that it blurs the material and symbolic lines of the visible and the invisible as well as the known and the unknown. I would like to briefly situate Stoler’s notion of “racial thinking” within this field of the thought and the un-thought and the visible and the invisible. By insisting that “racial thinking” was, and is, intrinsic to the production and circulation of discourses surrounding sexuality, Stoler is able to situate race as a fundamental category in the construction of not only what and how we know, but also who we are.

Stoler argues that the colonial “order of things” hinged upon the development of biopolitical technologies that enabled, albeit in an obvious asymmetry of violence, the efficient management of the colonizer and colonized alike, and bound them through mutually constitutive networks of material and affective relations. Intimately linked with the biopolitics of colonialism were discourses of sexuality which were interwoven with the subjectivization of colonial bodies: their study, classification, and manipulation in the interest of maximizing the rationality of the colonial endeavor. Discourses surrounding the racialized and sexualized bodies of the colonized were intrinsically tied to the production of bourgeoisie subjects. She claims that widely circulating notions of the racialized colonial “Other” served as “racially erotic counterpoints” which contrapuntally coded the terrain of European morality, health, and desire. Stoler argues that by failing to incorporate this expanded field of knowledge/power Foucault’s History of Sexuality misses a crucial axis in the production of European sexuality as well as the fundamental role of racial imaginaries in the historical modifications and developments of regulatory and normalizing techniques of rule. She asks, “was the obsessive search for “truth about sex” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries directly culled from earlier confessional models, as Foucault claims, or was this “truth about sex” recast around the invention of other truth claims, specifically those working through the language of race?”

According to Stoler, although Foucault understood that race underwrote the operation of power in the modern liberal (biopolitical) state, he failed to address how the material and symbolic exchange between metropole and colony produced mutually constitutive regimes of truth. Foucault restricted his analysis of race to a category of biopolitical regulation. In other words, he describes race as a “mechanism which allows biopower to work”, or, a category from which the vital capacity and health of bodies is regulated and managed in space and time. Stoler doesn’t feel like such a description goes nearly far enough in grappling with the way race is active within the constitution of modernity as it developed in out of the discourses and practices of imperialism. In this sense Stoler is making the claim that race is not only a “technique of power” but is a fundamental category underwriting the development the liberal state, its subjects, and the logics and rules governing and binding them together. By situating Foucault’s frame within this expanded field of power, Stoler argues that race functions as a grammar underlying the interstices of thought and experience within the construction of European and non European identities. This insistence deepens Foucault’s descriptions of biopower and complicates the field of thought and visibility. It claims that biopower is not only underwritten by the application of racial violence in the interest of maximizing the productive capacities of populations, but also predicated on racial thinking within the inter-subjective mediation of self and other. It involves the way ideas concerning difference are folded into thought and action as well as the processes of self governing and collective regulation. In this formulation, thinking is regulated by racial grammars which mediate the “relationship between visible characteristics and invisible properties, outer form and inner essence”…and the “untraceable identity markers” that negotiate what is possible to know and not to know, between what we see and do not see, and what we think and do not think.