> Johan: If you like just post it here (also because it is easier to
>read then ;-) .).
/Stefan
*Reluctant revolutionaries - the false modesty of reformist critics of
copyright *by Johan Söderberg
/Journal of Hyper(+)drome.Manifestation/, Issue 1 - September 2004
Collaborative Filtering
URI: http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html
Any estimation of the long-term viability of the intellectual property
regime rests on one fundamental assumption. Whether or not immaterial
use values (non-rival goods) are believed to be qualitatively
different from material use values (tangible, rival goods). [1]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn1>
Which position is taken at this point is decisive. Hackers, activists,
and scholars campaigning against copyright stress the discrepancy
between endless informational resources and limited material
resources. Those neo-classical economists that have paid attention to
knowledge as a factor in economic growth generally agrees:
“If a public or social good is defined as one that can be used by
additional persons without causing any additional cost, then knowledge
is such a good of the purest type.” [2]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn2>
Some Marxists, especially those engaged in case studies of the media
sector, acknowledge the peculiarity of information resources as
opposed to other ‘traditional’ resources. The two pioneer critics of
the ‘culture industry’, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, made some
comments pointing in this direction:
“Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to
the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly
consumed in use that it can no longer be used” [3]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn3>
Hackers charge that intellectual property creates artificial scarcity
were it does not naturally belong. This characteristic of artificial
scarcity is seen as unique to intellectual property. ‘Traditional’
property is assumed to be grounded in objectively limited resources.
Hence, property relations in material, rivalrous resources are
implicitly taken to be ‘operational’ or even ‘optimal’. It can be no
surprise that such a claim causes suspicion among radical scholars. In
the Marxist discipline, property is a social relation of power.
Scarcity is the construct of the property relation, which ensures
domination and dependency. In his examination of so called ‘poor’,
primitive societies, Marshall Sahlin offers a comment on scarcity in
modern society which is illustrative for this point of view:
”The market-industrial system institute scarcity, in a manner
completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated.
Where production and distribution are arranged through the behaviour
of prices, and all livelihood depend on getting and spending,
insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable
starting point of all economic activity.” [4]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn4>
Land was not scarce before the enclosure movement in the sixteenth and
seventeenth century England. Law and brute force (primitive
accumulation) fenced in resources (land) that had thereto been shared
by villagers in a commons. [5]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn5> Now
it was transformed into scarce property with exclusive rights assigned
to individual owners. Thus, Marxists prefer to look upon intellectual
property as an extension of traditional property, and highlight the
continuity rather than a discontinuity between the two. Furthermore,
Marxists would question the analytical procedure, of taking the
(informational) use value and its ‘inherent’ characteristics as the
referential point for an analysis. Installing qualities to particular
goods or type of goods is a close call to fetishism. The product is,
after al l, not an entity in its own right. The product is a stage in
the process of labour. If there is a discontinuity (as I believe there
is), it should not be sought in the discrepancies between
informational goods versus material goods. It must be located in
differences in the operation of immaterial labour versus the operation
of direct, living labour. In the words of Maurizio Lazzarato:
”The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labor
(its essential use value being given by its value as informational and
cultural content) consists in the fact that it /is not destroyed in
the act of consumption/, but rather it enlarges, transforms, and
creates the ”ideological” and cultural environment of the consumer.”
[6] <http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn6>
The concept of immaterial labour has a particular strong stand within
Italian, autonomous Marxist thought. I will, however, suggest another
departure point to examine the transition from living labour to
immaterial labour in production. In the 1970s more traditionally
thought Marxists began to elaborate with classic Marxist texts and
accustom the old theories to the changes which they observed. One of
the first Marxists to respond to the surge of ‘post-industrial’ myth
(represented par excellence by Daniel Bell and Alvin Toffler), by
re-examining dogmas in the Marxist doctrine, was the Trotskyite Ernest
Mandel. [7]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn7>
First, he acknowledged that a threshold had been passed in capitalist
accumulation.
“/The automatic production of automatic machines would hence be a new
qualitative turning point/, equal in significance to the appearance of
the machine-production of machines in the mid-19^th century” [8]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn8>
The course towards automatic production of automation is driven by
class struggle. Worker's resistance raise impediments to capitalist
accumulation. Capitalism overcomes these obstacles in part by
revolutionising the means of production. [9]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn9>
Ernest Mandel combined automation in ‘late capitalism’ with an
century-old Marxist debate on the ‘organic composition of capital’ and
‘falling rate of profit’.
”[…] /mass of surplus-value itself necessary diminishes as a result of
the elimination of living labour from the production process in the
course of the final stage of mechanization-automation/.” [10]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn10>
Marxist doctrine says that only human labour can add value to a
product. Living labour is unique in that it enlarges the value of a
product above the sum of its own input (In this narrow, economic
sense, the value of the input of living labour, equals the means
necessary for the worker to reproduce herself as labour power. In
other words, it is the amount of food, shelter, education, and
recreation she must consume to be able to work). The amount of
additional value she adds to the product above the her own input
(above her wage) is exploitation of surplus labour. The massing of
surplus labour/value is the stuff which accumulated capital is made
of. Dead labour (tools, machinery, resources) does not enrich capital
with any more surplus labour. To add more inputs of dead labour will
not add any more value to the end product above the value of the
inputs themselves. Dead labour is dead weight from the perspective o f
exploitation of surplus value. Still, capital is compelled to replace
living labour with machinery – dead labour. Ever larger concentrations
of fixed capital is demanded to increase productivity and stay
competitive, and as a strategy against labour militancy. The law of
the 'falling rate of profit' states that as more dead labour is
involved in production, capital gets less and less surplus
labour/value out of the process. It portrays a gradual movement
towards a logical endpoint where reduced profitability causes
aggravated crises and, eventually, death to capital. Ernest Mandel
provides a modified version of this narrative: we approach total
automation which simultaneously is inconceivable with capitalism. His
conclusion does not add up with the late capitalism we live in and
observe everyday. Advancement of automation and a deepening of the
capitalist relation seems to go hand in glove. Tessa Morris-Suzuki has
made a critical contribution to the discussion by working out a model
whereby late capitalism can ‘square the circle’. She wrote that
capitalism can sustain surplus value together with a partial,
asymmetrical automation, but with a twist.
“This fission of labor inherent in the nature of robots, in other
words, creates a situation where it is only in the design of new
productive information and the initial bringing together of
information and machinery that surplus value can be extracted. Unless
this process is continually repeated, surplus value cannot be
continuously created, and the total mass of profit must ultimately
fall.” [11]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn11>
We arrive at what Tessa Morris-Suzuki calls a /perpetual innovation
economy/ characterised by accelerating product cycles/./ [12]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn12> In
my mind, her approach is very promising for understanding late,
post-modern and post-Fordist capitalism. By explaining the collapse of
surplus value as asymmetrical and partial, and parried with
compensatory strategies, the model offered by Tessa Morris-Suzuki also
gives some directions after the ‘the law of value’ and ‘measure’ have
fallen apart. [13]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn13>
And her model incorporates the dominant position of immaterial labour
within its explanatory framework.
The state of total automation hinted at by Ernest Mandel would be
reached when fixed capital, without any injection of living labour,
spit out an infinite volume of goods at instant speed. It is hard to
imagine a machine with such dimensions, less than visualising futurist
gadgets or (just slightly more down-to-earth) nanotechnology fancies.
And yet, it is reality in most forms of cultural and immaterial
production. That is what is meant by saying, that information can be
copied infinitely without injecting additional living labour.
/Digitalisation of immaterial labour has leapfrogged capitalism to the
endpoint of total automation/. There is hardly any value-adding labour
taking place in this form of production. One click is all labour it
takes to duplicate immaterial goods. The main input of living labour
is instead at the start-up of the production process. In other words,
in the innovation of it. This is where we find immaterial labour. All
forms of labour that can be objectified in digits are subject to
infinite reproducibility. It is the Pyrrhic victory of capital. The
end destination of capital's long quest to disband living labour by
perfecting the techniques of separating and storing human creativity
in systematised, codified knowledge. However, like Phoenix, living
labour returns with a vengeance.
“The constant reproducibility is only limited by the contradictory
need within cultural consumption for novelty and difference.” [14]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn14>
More than innovation proper, post-modern capitalism is obsessed with
the appearance of innovation. It produces an aura of newness in what
Fredric Jameson called 'aesthetic innovation'. [15]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn15>
Only a fraction of the aesthetic innovations made in society occurs
within the wage labour relation. That is, in the space conceptualised
by Tessa Morris-Suzuki as ‘before’ production, in laboratories and in
ad agencies. Most aesthetic innovation takes place ‘after’ production.
It happens 'after' the wage labour relation, in consumption, in
communities, on the street, and on the school yard. It is here the
/social factory/ casts its long shadow. The social factory is a place
with no walls, no gates, no boss, – and yet rift with antagonism. [16]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn16>
Living labour raise from the aches. Labour is needed to
re-contextualise mass-produced cultural commodities in specific
consumer settings. Ironically, context and meaning was robbed from
culture in the first place by capital's deployment of Social
Taylorism. [17]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn17> It
is thus I understand Paulo Virno when he says that post-Fordist labour
is distinctively ‘political’. It is political because it is performed
and it structures a ‘public organised space’. Similarly, Maurizio
Lazzarato assert that immaterial labour “ enlarges, transforms, and
creates the ‘ideological’ and cultural environment of the consumer”.
Such a perspective force us to question the notion of consumers as
just passive. When factory goods first began to replace household
production, it did no t eradicate housework outright. Rather, it
phased out stages of household work, thereby allowing home production
at new stages of aggregation. [18]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn18>
Thus, commodified and consumed wares and services often implies an
aggregated level of home production. Commodified use values are
combined in novel and productive ways. This proposition is especially
relevant when the use values of a product in part derive from
advertising and branding, when, in other words, it is a ‘sign value’.
[19]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn19> A
social scenery and semiotic is then crucial for consumption to take
place. Consumers must be educated either in how to use a product or to
recognise what a product signifies.
“The consumption of commodified representational forms is productive
activity in which people engage in meaning-making to adapt signs,
texts, and images to their own agendas” [20]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn20>
Even something as passive as watching television requires a learning
process from the viewer. The viewer makes a message out of the signals
broadcasted to her and she places the message in continuation with her
own narrative. This perspective was advanced by a group of scholars
known under the name of British Cultural Studies. They rejected the
‘manipulation theses’ and the pessimism of the early Frankfurt School,
where mass audiences were seen as pacified and duped by the culture
industry. [21]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn21>
Without doubt, audiences have a marginal influence over the message
compared to corporate broadcasters. I doubt that fantasy-contests is
important enough to pose any serious threat to capital, even if it was
‘won’ by audiences (whatever that would be?). Appropriation of signals
might just make alienated life endurable to those subjugated by
commercial mass culture (thus ventilating dangerous pressure and
prolonging capitalism). Even so, there is merit in not diagnosing
audiences as pacified masses vis-à-vis the active
broadcaster/performer. If we do, we unwillingly reinforce the
bourgeoisie myth of labourers, of voters, of computer users, and of
audiences; as immobile and merely responding to the active and
individual agent (be it an entrepreneur, a politician, an in-house
programmer or star hacker, or a Spectacle-author). A more balanced
viewpoint is to recognise audiences as involved in a labour activity
of sorts. Dallas Smyth daringly made such a proposal. He started with
an insight known from the advent of radio and television (the so
called /Sarnoff Law/), that the value of broadcast networks is
proportionate to the number of viewers. Smythe recognised that the
commodity sold by media networks derives from the audience. Hence the
consumer is not the audi ence but the advertisers, a point which
hardly is controversial any more. However, from this reversal of roles
must follow, that the producer in question is the audience. He
nick-named this input of watching by audiences as ‘audience power’
(mirroring the term ‘labour power’) and made some probes for further
inquiries. [22]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn22> I
believe the concept of/ audience power /provides us with the missing
link in the discussion. It helps us to discern how audiences are put
to work in the social factory and are crafting sign values. Work
doesn’t stop after the worker has left the factory gate, certainly a
fact known to female workers. In their ‘spare time’ workers must
prepare themselves for the next day in the factory; by cooking,
cleaning, and sleeping; and for the next generation of workers, by
sexual intercourse. Before the advance of monopoly capitalism,
reproduction of labour power was accomplished inside the household.
Bread was baked, clothes sewn, tools tinkered with, and mating of
adolescents seen to, inside the family or the extended family and
community. Today the purchase of consumer goods fills the same purpose
of facilitating reproduction, Dallas Smythe insists. Audiences work in
the spare time to stay informed on what goods are available, which is
necessary for them to enable the reproduction of their labour power.
His suggestive ideas were picked up and pushed to its logical endpoint
by Sut Jhally. He rallies against radical critics who he says have
accepted the self-image of the media industry. It believes itself to
be the producer of audiences. This is the old myth of ‘the
productivity of capital’, he charges. Networks merely sell a
commodity, audience time, which has been produced for them by others.
Obviously, the television staff has done a part. But the other,
crucially part, can only be the contribution of the audience. In his
view, valorisation of audiences is analogous to the valorisation of
labour. The outlines drawn in the ‘law of value’ can be applied to both.
“Just as workers sell labour power to capitalists, so audiences sell
/watching power/ to media owners; and just as the use-value of labour
power is labour, so the use-value of watching-power is watching, the
capacity to watch. In addition, as the value of labour power is fixed
at the socially determined level of the means of subsistence (thus
assuring that labour power will be reproduced) so the value of
watching power is the cost of reproduction – the cost of programming,
which ensures the viewers will watch and be in a position to watch
extra (the time of advertising).” [23]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn23>
‘Necessary watching time’ is the amount of advertisements that must be
watched by an audience in order to pay for the programs they like to
watch. ‘Surplus watching time’ is advertisements on top of this level
which the audience is also made to watch. [24]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn24>
Bizarre as it sounds, I honour Sut Jhally for daring to push these
heretic concepts to their absolute limits. Still, something is
seriously missing. The thought that surplus labour would consist in
simply watching excessive advertising (and thus implying the existence
of such a thing as ‘necessary time of watching advertising’!) feels
totally inadequate. His reinterpretation of the law of value is too
literate in its inversion. It fails to capture the multiplicities of
ways in which valorisation takes place in the social factory . To work
myself towards a conclusion from this whirl of thoughts, I will start
all over again with a small objection to Dallas Smythe. His idea is
that watching advertisements has become a necessary expense to
reproduce labour power in consumer society. Against his proposal, we
could object that it does not take the average six hours a day of
televised indulgence to learn about life-supportive consumer goods
available in the local corner shop. But if the implication of the
‘reproduction of labour power’ is stretched a bit further, the idea
gets really intriguing. Our concern is not with the needs of the
individual to reproduce her labour power. Our concern is with the
needs of the system for the individual to reproduce herself in a
particular way (which, one way or the other, is often experienced by
the individual as her own needs [25]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn25> ).
Reproduc tion of labour power goes beyond the satisfaction of natural
needs (eating, sleeping) required for bare, human survival. It
includes the education of the worker with skills required to be
employable. What it means to be a productive worker differs with the
evolving set-up of the ‘mode of production’. So, for example, was a
new standard for public education set by Fordism. Advanced industry
demanded a large workforce with basic skills in writing, reading and
calculating. Saying this must not obstruct the fact, that initially it
was working class struggle that had won rudimentary schooling for
working class children. Capitalism mourned, then it adapted and took
advantage of the situation. Public education gradually became part of
the social cost for reproducing labour power and an instance for
disciplinary control. Today, the ‘refusal of work’ of the proletariat
is pushing back the omnipresence of factory time in ordinary peoples
life. It is a desire set in motion not entirely differe nt from the
desire of the working class a hundred years ago to be educated. One
response of capital to this challenge is Social Taylorism. Speaking
the language of brands and signs could here arguably be called a
productive, overhead cost. It is an educational requirement for the
system to operate smoothly. Watching commercials is one form of
immaterial labour taking place in the social factory, but just one.
Surplus labour is not located in the moment of watching. To the
contrary, it is valorised in the chain effects radiating from
commercials. [26]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn26>
Audience power hints at a valorisation process that has overrun the
dichotomy between producer and consumer, the ‘division of leisure’
that stabilises the commodity form. Peer to peer (P2P) is not an
isolated feature of the computer underground but is a universal
condition of cultural production. The emp hasised role of
users/consumers for valorisation in the computer industry, is,
however, more forthcoming than elsewhere in the economy.
“But the software requires its users to learn how to use it. This
means that the ability of software companies to capture value is
related to our willingness to learn how to use their programs. […]
From this perspective, in the aggregate the users have invested far
more time in learning how to use a software program than did the
developers.” [27]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn27>
This means that the key strategic asset of companies is located in the
user base (and thus is outside of the direct control of firms).
Know-how of a product among a large audience ensures a high
switching-cost for any customer to move to a competing product. The
user base provides the chief source of stability for a firm in a
highly volatile market. The centrality of commanding the user base for
acquiring market power and for taking strategic decisions over the
future of the computer architecture, is truly paramount. The mass of
people familiar with /Windows/ is Microsoft's only true asset. Take
for instance Microsoft's strategy of building technological platforms
and license schemes that are not interoperable with competitors
(especially targeting the free operating system /GNU/Linux/). Crucial
to the success of this scheme is that the next version of /Windows/
will capture a critical mass of user s, in the West and in Third World
countries. Otherwise it is Microsoft that will find itself out in the
cold.
The important observation made by Martin Kenney is echoed once again
by Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter in their
study of the computer gaming industry. [28]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn28>
Computer gamers are regularly invoked to test game playability, to
edit and advance features in the game, and to promote it, on behalf of
a company. It is only lately that companies have identified the
opportunities of involving fans and have begun to orchestrate the
participation of volunteers. More often corporations are unaware or
ignorant towards this activity by fans, or they brand volunteer
workers as pirates. This labour – diffused to the whole of society and
concentrated in communities - is reinforced in magnitude of importance
to capitalist exploitation, as living labour in production is scaled
back by automation and infinite reproducibility. Where living labour
is eradicated in the production process, primarily in the area of
software and the cultural economy, user collectives become vital
producers for companies. That is, the activity of users/consumers is
emphasised as a source of surplus value for capital. [29]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn29> In
the foreword to Paulo Virno’s /A Grammar of the Multitude/, Sylvère
Lotringer writes:
“In the post-Fordist economy, surplus value is no longer extracted
from labor materialized in a product, it resides in the discrepancy
between paid and unpaid work – the idle time of the mind that keeps
enriching, unacknowledged, the fruits of immaterial labor.” [30]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn30>
Crucial to the operation of enclosure is that the labour appropriated
goes unacknowledged. An important mechanism in intellectual property
rights is, according to Christopher May, the authority it bestows one
part to decide over what is recognisable property and what is not. A
clear case of how law works by categorising and appropriating is
suggested by the legal rights denied collectives while rights are
entitled to juridical persons. Knowledge about medical herbs among
natives and the breeding of species by generations of farmers, for
example, is not-property and freely shared with Western,
pharmaceutical corporations. The medicines and cash crops that are
produced from this knowledge, on the other hand, are recognised in
international treaties and national law as property of corporations.
Christopher May, James Boyle, and many other scholars writing on the
expansion of intellectual property rights, have labell ed it the
second/new enclosure movement. But an inquiry into the process of the
‘appropriation of the unnamed’ must not stop at the visible and
concrete mechanisms that are codified in juridical texts. More
colossal is the labour processes that not merely foregoes legislators,
but is invisible to the eye of everyone, especially to those who are
dispossessed of it.
My proposition can be clarified by referring to another field where
exploitation operates by means of invisibility. In the past three
decades, Marxism has been criticised by feminists for its blind spot
towards forms of oppression not directly involving class. Feminist
Marxists have tried to bridge the two standpoints by showing that
(male) waged labor depends on the reproductive work of women in the
household. Harriet Fraad, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff extends
on this important work in /Bringing it All Back Home: Class, Gender
and Power in the Household Today. /They/ /say that women produces
surplus labour at home which is appropriated by their husbands and in
a feudal-like relation. The appropriated surplus labour of the wife is
bundled together with the surplus labour of the husband-worker.
Eventually most of it ends up in the pockets of the capitalist. Now,
my proposition is that the exploita tive situation in which the wife
finds herself is analogous to the appropriation of gratis labour from
audiences and communities. The Star (the Author, the Artist, etc.) has
a role similar to the husband in selling the surplus labour of his
audience. The awesome revenues which a handful of superstars can
negotiate away from the profit margins of media capital does not
derive from their own toil. They are simply relays in the distribution
of vast amounts of surplus value appropriated from audiences. It is
true that professionals of the Spectacle are labourers too and
situated in a subjugated position towards capital. Indeed, to the vast
majority of the immaterial workforce, the promise of celebrity is a
mere hallucination which keeps them from revolting against the extreme
insecurities of their working conditions. The insecurity of their
occupations owes to the fact, that the qualities for which they are
hired (appearance, chatting, playing) is entirely generic, in the
sense that anyone can do it from just being born a human. The sole
negotiation power of a Star springs from her name-recognition among
the unnamed masses. The artistic labourer is recognised and ‘named’ as
such in her exchange with capital (including, of course, state
capital). Concurrently with the naming of the individual Author, the
authorship of the masses is denied, which is also the precondition for
the appropriation of their audience power. [31]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn31>
The Author has therefore stakes in social mechanisms which projects
passivity onto the unnamed masses (in particular intellectual property
and the romanticist ideology of the ‘artistic genius’). These
mechanisms of appropriation are reproduced with every moment of
positive labour performed by a 'named' individual. The naming of an
individual, her becoming-a-Star, is nothing other than the sign value
of her commodified labour. To ask her to resign it would be to ask her
to decommission the only quality which separates her from everyone
else who could equally well do the same work as she does. Labour
theory too partake in reproducing the conditions necessary for the
exploitation of the unnamed masses. Its complicity in this regard is
no different from its long-standing ignorance towards the reproductive
labour of women. Like then, labour theory one-sidedly focus its
analysis on the employment contract of the professionals of the
Spectacle. It is against this backdrop of exploitation that Roland
Barthes essay announcing the ‘Death of the Author’ takes on its
fullest relevance. He attest that the meaning of a text does not
‘flow’ from the writer’s pen, but is created every time it is read in
the mind of the reader. [32]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn32>
The main insight of his is t hat language can only be a collective
experience. Valentin Volosinov was an exception among early Marxists
in devoting himself to the study of language in relation to class
struggle. [33]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn33> In
/Marxism and the Philosophy of Language/, he underlined the same
observation:
“Signs can arise only on /interindividual territory/. (p.12, 1973,
emphasis in original)
I have now come a bit closer to presenting an alternative
interpretation to the question raised at the very outset of the
article. The Achilles heel of intellectual property rights is better
/not/ thought of as ‘infinite reproducible information treated as a
scarce resource’. It is more rewarding to formulate the paradoxical
existence of the political economy of information like this. /The
necessity of bourgeoisie relations of property is to individualise a
fundamentally collective and shared experience/. To appreciate the
immense revolutionary potential of the statement just made, we need to
reflect upon the fact that the core of the capitalist economy is
rapidly melting into language. [34]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn34>
And, concerning language, Lewis Mumford once wrote with incomparable
perceptiven ess:
“[...] the production of words introduced the first real economy of
abundance […]” [35]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn35>
At this point the reader may send a thought to any of the dozen of
manifests she has read on the 'gift economy of the net', or rallies
under the banner of 'information wants to be free'. Paradoxically,
herein is also the condition which will make the intellectual property
regime so extremely repressive. Giorgio Agamben identifies the stake
we are tampering with in his /Means Without End/:
“For this reason (precisely because what is being expropriated is the
possibility of a common good), the spectacle's violence is so
destructive; but, for the same reason, the spectacle still contains
something like a positive possibility – and it is our task to use this
possibility against it” (p.83, 2000)
The Spectacle is in pain to project a ‘John Lockean'-imagery of
private ownership turfs on top of the commons that is our shared
language. One illustration of how science and its cultural
conceptualisation is warped by these needs of the system is given in a
thought-provoking essay by Katherine Hayles. [36]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn36>
The notion that information patterns can be abstracted from its
material body is taken for granted by now. She argues that it was an
/invention /made in the sciences in 1940 and 1950. It responded
directly to the demands of the techno-scientific industry for a
definition on information that allowed for reliable quantifications.
For example, Claude Shannon’s theory on information presented in 1948
defines information as a signal indifferent to the meaning it conveys
to the receiver. Competing definitions surfaced at the time where
information and the message it conveyed to the receptor was
inseparable from each other. To assess ‘information as meaning’,
however, would imply the measuring of the changes taking place in the
mind of the receiver from receiving the information. Though it would
make a lot more sense to include both the sender and the receiver in a
definition of what information is, it would also make the term
immeasurable. It was such practical considerations, Hayles propose,
that made the scientific community to side with a narrowly
mathematician, de-contextualised, and counter-intuitive definition of
information. Their definition has been reinforced and has established
the cultural perception of information as an entity possible to
separate from the material body and distinct from its context. Which
is the same as to say, a quality that can be separated from living
labour and possessed as dead labour, as private property, by capi tal.
It is for this reason we live in an ‘Information Age’, and not in a
‘Communication Age’.
The interactivity of digital media, exemplified with the computer, is
a standard point of reference among mainstream scholars who celebrate
an end to consumer passivity. Passivity has ended thanks to new
commercial technologies, they say. [37]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn37>
Somehow, the persistence of the commodity form, under which both the
television and new digital media technologies have matured, is
unmistakably left to the side. There are some sobering examples of
technologies that enhance 'consumer interactivity'. The shifting of
time-consuming tasks from paid employees to unpaid customers when
accessing banking services, is one example of enhanced interactivity.
Another example would be the 15.000 volunteer maintainers of AOL’s
chat-rooms. Or the attempt by the Open Source initiative to co-opt the
labou r power of free software engineers. [38]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn38>
These are highpoints in a broader pattern, according to Tiziana
Terranova (2000). Free labour has become structural to late capitalist
cultural economy. It is therefore totally inadequate to apply the
leftist favourite narrative of authentic subcultures that are hijacked
by commercialism. Authentic subcultures at this point of time is a
delusion, she charges. ‘Independent’ cultural production takes place
within a broader capitalist framework which has already anticipated
and therefore modified the ‘active consumer’. /Interactivity/ counts
to nothing else than intensified exploitation of the audience power of
the user/consumer. It is not different to the intensification of
exploitation of wage labourers. If we opt for a pessimistic
interpretation, the load of tasks which the user/consumer undertakes
is exploitation for which not even a penny is paid in compensation.
Sometimes, the user/consumer is even under threat of being send to
prison or fined for her volunteer work (branded as a pirate). Still, I
would opt for interpreting the situation in a different light. The
perspective referred to above is coupled with an adherence to wage
labour as the sole bastion for class struggle. Against this belief, I
concede with autonomous Marxists and anarchists, that the captivity of
living labour under the wage labour relation must be seen as a
historical condition. Struggle against capitalist domination can be
fought by refusing to enter that relation as well as from inside the
wage relation. [39]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn39>
Thus I advocate a more benign outlook. I wish to stress the difficulty
presented to capital to discipline unpaid activity of volunteers
compared to commandi ng in-house, employed labour (hence the reliance
on courts and prison cells under the ‘intellectual property’-label for
meddling in these kinds of labour conflicts). One reason for the
volatility and overall difficulty faced by media industry to predict
and steer flows of revenue, might be explained with that media
companies have no direct authority over the labour of audiences. In
cultural production, financial returns do not seem to follow in a
one-to-one proportional relation to the size of capital invested in
the project.
“This radical indeterminacy can be explained in terms of the plurality
and instability of cultural processes as value-creating activities,
and the difficulty encountered by producers in controlling
valorisation, a problem exacerbated by the possibilities of
reactivation opened up by the new technologies of replication. At the
most basic level, audience membership itself is not a matter of
compulsion or necessity, but is principally voluntary and optional.”
[40] <http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn40>
Since reproducing (copying) immaterial use-values, and often sampling
and producing them anew, can be achieved with as little labour and
fixed capital as is provided in a standardised consumer product
(computers in particular), users/consumers do not depend on the
capitalist production apparatus. It has, /partially/, departed from
the wage labour relation and the direct command of capital. [41]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn41>
Their activity is, at least to a greater extent than before, guided
towards self-valorisation (i.e. labour for its own sake, or, for
short, play). This is true, to some extent, even in those cases when
corporations initiate and shepherds the process, as when video gamer
fans are mobilised to aid commercial game development, or when people
willingly expose themselves to commercials. The real promise for
social change, however, lies in communities that seize the initiative
and forces corporations to follow. Free Software development shows the
way. But an outstanding example like hacking must not be taken as
exemptions. It is a highpoint in a general pattern unfolding in front
of our dazzled eyes.
Certainly, the renewed struggle for liberation is fraught with
dangers. The radiation of productive capabilities to a wider sector of
the multitude, in one end of the balance sheet effectuating a
significant loss of control for social capital over labour, is
immediately taken advantage of by individual capitals. The benefits
from engaging labour as franchised and freelance ‘petty commodity
traders’ instead of employees are vast. [42]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn42> In
this way corporate giants can parry the a volatile cultural market by
pushing risks down onto lesser entities. But, while taking advantage
of the situation, capital also risks new threats to the reproduction
of capitalist relations. Under these circumstances, political
constitution has to impose the laws of exchange and measure on the
whole social terrain. Thus we end up with capitalism spanning
everywhere and infiltrating every relationship.
“In the social factory, all the conditions of society confront us as
capital. The orchestration and management of social capital (in both
its qualitative and quantitative dimensions) become the responsibility
of the state”. [43]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn43>
Empire differs from imperialism in that capital accumulation takes
place in ‘intensive' rather than 'extensive' exploitation. Extensive
exploitation is (was) the search for new external territory to
internalise into the world market. Intensive exploitation is the
penetration of cultural and emotional spheres. This marks the stage of
‘real subsumption’ where every relation, meaning, and representation,
is moulded in the image of capital. We must not fall to the
temptation, of announcing an one-sided advance of capitalist
relations. Actually, capitalism is badly forced into invading the
public sphere. Capital has no alternative; it cannot choose /not/ to
commodify information and yet ‘stay on top’. The overarching
intellectual property regime will make capital ever more omnipresent
and tyrannical, yes, but that is /not/ to say that it has become more
powerful. Rather, its general loss of control is testif ied in this
need for capital to be on guard constantly and everywhere. Is a despot
who is calling out his armed forces onto the streets more powerful
because of it? No, to the contrary, it shows us that he is closer to
being toppled. From this approach it also becomes more plausible to
say; that the new accumulation regime is not initiated or desired by
capitalists, it is at best a strategy of coping. The declaration of a
state of emergency is never the /alpha/ of an event. It is always the
response to some other build-up of tension. I believe the summoning of
the global intellectual property regime is a wounded capitalism
falling back on a state of emergency. Intellectual property is capital
copping with a fluid, immaterial labour process. Admittedly,
individual capitals feed from crisis and incorporates struggles for
liberation. In the same breath as accounting for the plausibility of
recuperation [44]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn44> ,
Antonio Negri stresses that the capitalist system is also strained by
struggle and compelled to modify the terms of domination and
exploitation. Struggle for liberation, even when corrupted, pushes the
system further into decline. Hence, I exclaim that capital’s bid to
enclose information is an issue of life-and-death for capitalism.
Reformist critics of copyright inevitably miss out on identifying the
stakes which they are tampering with. Indeed, they choose to ignore
it, hoping that policy makers will be more disposed to listen to them
if they circumscribe their analysis. [45]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn45>
Their case for an extended ‘fair use’ doctrine and weaker copyright
protection has to be presented as if compatible or even beneficial to
capitalism. It might make for a good rhetoric but it is not an
adequate assessment of the situation. The principal flaw of theirs
owes to their static understanding of the economy. Static
understanding of economy starts with framing the important questions
in the terminology of non-rival/rival goods. The fallacy of this
intellectual position is made evident in a few quotes by Lawrence
Lessig in his book /Future of Ideas – The Fate of Commons in a
Connected World. /I have to say, I'm not picking on Lessig. I could
easily have chosen almost any campaigner on these issues. Richard
Stallman’s famous description of free software as to be about ‘free
speech, not free beer’, rests on the same assumptions. With his phrase
he insists that hackers are defending civil liberties without
challenging private property. In Lawrence Lessig's book, he strongly
advocates that information should be organised in a commons. He then
quickly reassures the reader that markets and commons can coexist
peacefully:
“Not all resources can or should be organized in a commons”., and:
“While some resources must be controlled, others can be provided much
more freely. The difference is in the nature of the resource, and
therefore in the nature of how the resource is supplied” [46]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn46>
It is simply by nature that some resources are non-rivalrous. Such
(immaterial) resources are suitable to be organised within a commons.
[47]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn47> It
follows from this position, that it is in the nature of other
(material) resources to be organised as private property. If indeed
some resources where, and other where not, by nature, optimised for
commons respectively optimised for markets, and the proportions
between them were constant and stable (inscribed in their nature as it
were), then policy makers would face a straightforward technical
matter of drawing the 'right' boundaries. With the right boundaries,
capitalism could peacefully carry on its exploitation of workers
within the designated area of material production. Putting it in this
way, the absurdity of the non-explicit assum ptions made by reformist
critics should be evident to everyone. The idea that capitalist
accumulation would stay content within any set boundary is laughable
for anyone who accepts there is such a thing as capitalism.
I agree in principle that some resources are more or less apt to be
organised in a commons, and also that it largely boils down to if the
resource is rivalrous or non-rivalrous. My objection is to the
abstraction of resources from the process in which they are made, i.e.
the labour process. The resource then appears as fixed and existing
outside the universe of political choices. A more dynamic viewpoint
would recognise as a departing point a metamorphosing labour process,
animated by labour struggle and heated by a falling rate of profit,
which pushes the production process in the direction of immaterial
labour. And therefore, the 'law of value' /continues to push in the
same direction/. It is the rationale for capital to expropriate
cultural commons. And, indeed, was it not this threat which compelled
reformist critics to mobilise in defence of the public sphere in the
first place? To restrict capitalist exploitation to sites of direct,
living labour, at precisely the time when capitalist accumulation is
migrating to the immaterial labour process, is nothing less than to
starve capital. Starve it, ultimately, to death. What reformist
campaigners try to hide from is the fact that their moderate vision of
an expanded fair use doctrine and loose intellectual property rights
in immaterial goods - freely provided in a common, and, side by side,
status quo property markets in material goods; is nonetheless /a
revolutionary demand for a classless society/. The abolition of
capitalist relations looms at the end of the vector in which labour is
racing, which, borrowing the words of Paulo Virno, is:
“[…] /the era in which language itself has been put to work, in which
language itself has become wage labour/ (so much so that ‘freedom of
speech’ nowadays means no more and no less than the ‘abolition of wage
labour’)” [48]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn48>
Hence, Richard Stallman’s famous statement, that free software is
about 'free speech, not free beer', must be reconsidered. It can now
confidently be said, that /if we save free speech, we will have won
free beer/! Ayn Rand, the foremost among capital’s apologetics, was
absolutely correct when she emphasised the centrality of maintaining
intellectual property for sustaining the health of private property.
Lets end this essay with a heartening strophe of hers, in which she
warns her master capitalists of the dangers towering up on the horizon
of their bellowed system:
“Patents are the heart and core of property rights, and once they are
destroyed, the destruction of all other rights will follow
automatically, as a brief postscript” (p.128, Rand, 1966)
*Notes*
[1]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref1>
"The contradiction that lies at the heart of the political economy of
intellectual property is between the low to non-existent marginal cost
of reproduction of knowledge and its treatment as scarce property"
(p.43, Christopher May, /Global Political Economy of Intellectual
Property Rights – The New Enclosure?/, 2000).
Lawrence Lessig stressed the discontinuity between rivalrous and
non-rivalrous goods at the /Wizard of OS 3/ conference in Berlin in
2004. He urged everyone else to adopt the same rhetoric. It is
necessary, he said, in order to mobilise rightwing public support
against extended intellectual property rights. The case I wish to
advance is that though Lessig’s pledge makes tactical sense to
campaigners, it is an inadequate departure point for anaysis. An
alliance with the political right would be a brief and fragile one and
not worth the loss in insight and perceptiveness among radical forces.
[2]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref2>
(p.159, Fritz Machlup, /Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution and
Economic Significance/, 1984)
The concept of ‘public good’ has played a minor role in the thinking
of conventional economists. Nevertheless, a discussion on public goods
was introduced by Adam Smith. He offered one scenario where the deemed
that collective administration of a public good was preferable to
private property, namely in the maintenance of lighthouses.
[3]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref3>
(p.161, Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, /Dialectic of Enlightenment/
(1997)
[4]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref4>
(p.4, Marshall Sahlins, /Stone Age Economics/, 1972)
[5]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref5>
See Michael Perelman, /The Innovation of Capitalism – Classical
Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation/ (2000)
[6]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref6>
(p.137, Lazzarato in /ed./ Paolo Virno & Michael Hardt, 1996, /Radical
Thought in Italy/, 1996, my emphasis).
[7]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref7>
Later, Fredric Jameson would build upon Ernest Mandel’s work and
explore a Marxist response to the surge of postmodernism in academia
and aesthetics. Jameson called postmodernism ‘the cultural logic of
late capitalism’. A parallel investigation was pursued by David Harvey
starting with the concept of ‘flexible accumulation’ and the first
traces of neo-Fordism that had previously been raised by the French
Regulation School in the late 1970s.
[8]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref8>
(p.206-207, Ernest Mandel, /Late Capitalism/ 1978)
[9]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref9>
Ernest Mandel is often associated with his research in periodical
‘long waves’ or Kondratiev waves in market economy, for which he has
been criticised of attributing to capitalism a set of ‘motion laws’
that are mechanical and unhistorical. To denounce such a reading of
his work, Ernest Mandel underscores that it is class struggle that
raises obstacles that forces capitalism into new waves of innovation,
exploitation, and economic upturn.
“In our opinion, [waves] originate from attempts by capital to break
down growing obstacles to a further increase in the rate of surplus
value during the preceding period” (p.33, Ernest Mandel, /Long Waves
of Capitalist Development – A Marxist Interpretation/, (1995)
In this sense his work resembles the ‘reversal’ of perspective which
is forthcoming in autonomous Marxist thinking, where class struggle is
set prior to capitalist innovation:
“In effect, capitalist innovation is always a product, a compromise or
a response, in short a constraint which derives from workers’
antagonism.” (p.158, Negri in /ed./ Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino &
Rebecca Karl E, /Marxism Beyond Marxism/, 1996)
[10]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref10>
(p.207, Ernest Mandel, /Late Capitalism/, 1978, emphasis in original).
[11]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref11>
(p.18, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, in /ed./ Jim Davis, Thomas A. Hirschl &
Michael Stack, /Cutting edge: technology, information capitalism and
social revolution/, 1997)
[12]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref12>
Alvin Toffler has, without the theoretical underpinning of course,
noticed that ‘economy of speed’ would replace ‘economy of scale’
(/Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave/, 1994).
Economy of scale, i.e. concentration of fixed capital, has played a
crucial role in wresting away the capabilities of workers to
self-organise their collective labour. I believe that in a race for
‘economy of speed’, living labour has advantage over dead labour, in
precisely being living, mutable, in motion.
[13]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref13>
Antonio Negri has theorised on the breakdown of the ‘Law of Value’ and
its consequences for exploitation (/Marx Beyond Marx – Lessons in the
Grundrisse/,1991)
[14]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref14>
(Nicholas Garnham, 1990, /Capitalism and Communication/, 1990)
[15]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref15>
”[…] The frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever
more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to air planes), at ever
greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential
structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and
experimentation.” (p.4-5, Frederic Jameson, /Postmodernism, or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism/, 1991)
[16]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref16>
This important term was introduced by Mario Tronti in /La fabbrica e
la società/ back in 1962:
“At the highest level of capitalist development social relations
become moments of the relations of production, and the whole society
becomes an articulation of production. In short, all of society lives
as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive
domination over all of society.” (translated and quoted by Harry
Cleaver, p. 137, in /ed./ Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn & Kosmas
Psychopedis, /Open Marxism, /1992:2).
[17]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref17>
"Our argument is that this gathering of skill/knowledge/information,
hitherto most apparent in the capitalist labour process, is now
entering a new and more pervasive stage ... We are talking about a
process of social deskilling, the depredation of knowledge and skills,
which are then sold back in the form of commodities [...]" (p.65-66,
Robins and Webster in /ed/. Mosco and Wasko, 1988)
[18]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref18>
“Making and maintaining things at home increasingly meant using things
made in factories; producing was consuming […]. But of course
nineteenth-century factories also made thousands of commodities for
use /in/ home production.” (p.165, Ohmann, 1996)
[19]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref19>
‘Sign value’ was formulated by Jean Baudrillard and is central in his
criticism of Marxism (/For a Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign/, 1981) He charged that use value in Marxist doctrine is merely
an alibi for exchange value. Jean Baudrillard has rightly been
criticised for theorising use value solely from the standpoint of how
it is imagined by capital, and thus for denying the role of class
struggle in defining needs and uses of commodities (Douglas Kellner,
/Jean Baudrillard – From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond/, 1989).
Still, in agreement with Douglas Kellner and Martyn Lee (p.23,
/Consumer Culture Reborn – The Cultural Politics of Consumption/,
1993), I believe the concepts raised by Baudrillard are valid and
deserve to be considered in a Marxist analysis.< /P>
[20]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref20>
(p.57, Rosemarry J. Coombe, /The Cultural Life of Intellectual
Properties – Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law/, 1998)
[21]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref21>
In the eighties and early nineties this perspective swung into another
extreme, so that John Fiske celebrated the resistance of television
viewers in their appropriation of meaning from the signals broadcasted
to them. (/Television Culture/¸1987)
[22]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref22>
To equate ‘audience power’ with ’labour power’ of employed workers is
controversial to say the least. In his review of Marxist perspectives
on the political economy of communication, Vincent Mosco dodges the
question if audiences could be spoken of in the same sense as living
labour, a source of surplus value. Mosco grants that the relationship
between audience and broadcaster, a relationship of mutual dependency
and yet ripe with antagonism, can metaphorically be likened with the
uneasy coexistence between workers and management. (p.149, Vincent
Mosco, /The Political Economy of Communication/, 1996).
[23]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref23>
(p.84-85, Sut Jhally, /The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the
Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society/, 1987)
[24]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref24>
To illustrate the mechanism, Sut Jhally proposes a situation where an
audience is lured to watch twelve advertising spots as part of
watching a popular television program.
“For four of the twelve advertising spots the audience is watching to
cover the cost of the programming (which the audience presumably wants
to watch). It is /necessary/ for the audience to watch four spots to
produce value equal to the cost of programming. For four spots the
audiences watches for itself. For the remaining eight spots the
audience is watching /surplus-time/ (over and above the cost of
programming). Here the audience watches to produce surplus-value for
the owners of the means of communication, the networks or the local
broadcasters. (p.76, /ibid./, 1987)
[25]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref25>
“Rather, [needs] are better defined as /function/ induced (in the
individual) by the internal logic of the system: more precisely, /not
as consummative force liberated /by the affluent society, but /as a
productive force /required by the functioning of the system itself.”
(p.82, Jean Baudrillard, /For a Critique of the Political Economy of
the Sign/, 1981, emphasis in original)
[26]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref26>
Investigations into advertising must go beyond the undue emphasis on
exposed audiences and their spending habits. In those studies the
question is limited to asking, if enough people have decided to buy a
product from watching a commercial. As Sut Jhally recognises in his
book, the impact of advertising is a much broader one. It establishes
a semiotics of hierarchy and positioning vested in consumer goods, not
just influencing the group watching the commercial, but through
word-of-mouth, unconscious quirks, attitudes and so on, spreads to the
whole community. It is in this sense the crucial insight by Judith
Williamson (p.41-42, /Decoding Advertising /1978), should be
understood, that advertising works /through/ audiences, not /at/
audiences.
[27]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref27>
(p.94, Martin Kenney, in /ed./ Jim Davis, Thomas A. Hirschl & Michael
Stack, /Cutting edge: technology, information capitalism and social
revolution/, 1997)
[28]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref28>
(Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Greig De Peuter, /Digital Play –
The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing/, 2003)
[29]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref29>
A question which Sut Jhally struggles with is the objection, if it is
meaningful to talk about an activity as ‘unwaged labour’ when the task
has voluntarily been entered by the user/consumer? It is true to some
extent, that if an individual’s decision on consumption can be
conceived as voluntary (even if manipulated), then to engage the kind
of labour power represented by the consumer, companies must subject
labour tasks to the same grade of voluntarity. Labour becomes play –
and vice versa. But this response only recognises the tip of the
iceberg of the surplus value extracted from audiences. It is the
exposure to capitalist relations and the retransmission of these
relations, imbedded in the micro-politics of human interaction (to
refer to a key concept by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari el
aborated on in their two-volume work /Capitalism and Schizophrenia/),
that is crucial. This labour is involuntary since it is performed in a
conceptual space over which the individual cannot decide if she is to
refuse or to accept.
[30]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref30>
(p.12, 2004)
[31]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref31>
See Ivan Illich in /The Right to Useful Unemployment and its
Professional Enemies/:
“The power of professions to measure what shall be good, right, and
done warps the desire, willingness, and ability of the ‘common’ man to
live within his measure.” (p.81, 1978)
[32]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref32>
This insight underpins the whole body of post-structuralist and
deconstructivist thought that dominates in French philosophy. In
addition to Roland Barthes essay, to be found in /Image, Music, Text/,
(1988), Foucault roused similar questions in an essay published in
/ed./ Paul Rabinow, /The Foucault Reader/ (1991)
[33]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref33>
The emphasis on language, common to poststructuralist, French
philosophers like Derrida and Foucault, is lacking in traditional
Marxist sources, which, up till recently, has been consumed with the
pre-eminence of social relations in manual labour. Mark Poster sees a
great potential for analysis if the linguistic forms for domination,
power, and liberation, exposed in Foucault’s studies, were situated
within the developments of post-Fordist capitalist accumulation. (Mark
Poster, /The Information Subject/, 2001).
[34]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref34>
“Today productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses take
the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic,
communicational, and affective networks.” (p.294, Hardt & Negri, 2000)
Ernest Mandel phrased this stage of late capitalism as ‘the
mechanisation of the superstructure’.
[35]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref35>
(p.96, Lewis Mumford, /Technics and Human Development/ 1967)
[36]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref36>
(in /ed./ Peter Lunenfeld, /The Digital Dialectic – New Essays on New
Media/, 1998)
[37]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref37>
Alvin Toffler was early out in celebrating the interactivity of video
games. He contrasted the involvement in playing video games with the
passivity of watching television. Interestingly, Toffler was the first
to acclaimed the coming of the 'prosumer'. (Alvin Toffler, /The Third
Wave/, 1981)
[38]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref38>
Intellectual property law is standing in for employment contract law.
The furthest case in formalising the labour relations of the Open
Source model has been achieved by the U.S. patent /6,658,642/, which
IBM was granted in 2003. It describes an Open Source model for
requiting and rewarding free/open programmers. The appeal of this
model, IBM attests in their patent application, is that it allows them
to draw from a world-wide pool of programmers while lowering the cost
for software development. Those who doubt that FOSS development could
potentially undermine the position of in-housed, waged labour, is of a
different mind than are the managers at IBM.
[39]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref39>
”In fact, exodus – exodus from wage labor and toward activity, for
example – is not a negative gesture, exempt from action and
responsibility. On the contrary, because defection modifies the
contradictions within which conflict takes place, rather than submit
to them, it demands a particular high level of initiative – it demands
an affirmative ’doing’” (p.32, Paolo Virno in /ed./ Paolo Virno &
Michael Hardt, /Radical Thought in Italy/, 1996)
[40]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref40>
(p.47, Celia Lury, /Cultural Rights – Technology, Legality and
Personality/, 1993)
[41]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref41>
This leads Lester Thurow to ask his readers:
“What does capitalism become when it cannot own the strategic sources
of its own competitive advantage?” (p.279, /The Future of
Capitalism/,1996)
David Lyon, known for his research on digital surveillance, could have
ended up with an unsettling answer:
"The question is, what will happen when workers, with all their new
responsibilities for quality, ask why management is needed at all?
Holding on to the means of surveillance is the only remaining basis of
power that managers have over their workers" (p. 133, David Lyon, /The
Electronic Eye – the Rise of the Surveillance Society/, 1994)
[42]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref42>
Franchisees are in many respects worse off towards the franchiser,
than is the employee towards the employer. Ownership over physical
installments (the restaurant, the shop, etc), which in most cases are
bought with loans and is actually in the possession of the bank,
translates into greater insecurity (Alan Felstead, /The Corporate
Paradox – Power and Control in the Business Franchise/, 1993)
[43]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref43>
(p.112, Robins & Webster, in /ed./ Slack & Fejes, /The Ideology of the
Information Age/, 1987)
[44]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref44>
Recuperation describes how capital can take advantage of and subvert
attempts by the working class to break free from exploitative relations.
[45]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref45>
Jim Allchin (Microsoft's OS chief) accusation that GNU/Linux is
un-American (in this case to be understood as un-capitalist) (reported
in Bloomsberg News, 2001/14/02), was vigorously refuted by Open Source
activists and many Free Software developers. In unison they denied
that GNU/Linux was threatening property relations, and insisted that
it merely threatens one particular monopoly (Microsoft’s). In my view,
this proves that Microsoft’s strategists have assessed the magnitude
of GNU/Linux better than many of GNU/Linux own defenders and
developers have.
[46]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref46>
(p.93, 2001) and (p.94, /ibid/.).
[47]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref47>
In other chapters Lawrence Lessig takes a different view, giving
examples of how resources have been made scarce or non-scarce by
politically motivated choices on architecture (broadband and radio
frequency for example). But when reassuring the reader that commons in
information will not infringe on market economy, he describes the
demarcation between scarce and non-scarce resources as if to be
stable. Most other writers sympathetic of this view take the dividing
line as ahistoric and immutable, and their position can indeed be
criticized for being essentialist.
[48]
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftnref48>
(p.271, Virno, in /ed./ Paolo Virno & Michael Hardt, /Radical Thought
in Italy/, 1996)
/Johan
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