17/06/2014

In defence of 'accelerationism'

I want to consider the term 'accelerationism', which in recent discussions has become a bone of contention among those exploring the ideas and questions posed by those operating - for now, at least - under or in association with this moniker. Most notably, authors of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics - Williams and Srnicek - have said in public conversations that they have become increasingly dubious of the term and its efficacy. In particular, this hesitancy appears to stem from the sudden proliferation of both 'accelerationist' thought and curious critics probing the idea of 'acceleration'.

I want to make two propositions. Firstly, that the question 'what is being accelerated?' is the wrong question with which to respond to the problems accelerationism is trying to explicate, explore and transcend. Secondly, that in order to avoid both the dead ends this line of questioning forces us down, as well as the (frankly lazy) tendency by many to lump in the 'neo-reactionary' ideas posed by Land, proponents of accelerationism need to be assertive in positing their perspective as a fundamentally philosophical approach towards a more concrete politics, i.e. contemporary Marxism.

Williams, Srnicek and Avanessian have argued that through neoliberalism the future has been 'forgotten'; it is inherently unable to generate the sort of future we desire. The normative project has a clear temporal dimension: we must stake our claim in the present in order that new futures can emerge, defeating the eternal present offered by neoliberalism and contemporary capitalism more broadly. This is not to construct or imagine an ideal future - indeed Srnicek and Williams have always rightly been cautious of over-prescribing post-capitalist society - but rather to acknowledge that through neoliberalism we may appear to be running forwards even though the wheel is fixed firmly to the side of the cage. This is the extent of the 'progress' available to us within the current paradigm. The project of accelerationism then, is not to speed up the wheel so quickly it brings the cage falling down - this is far closer to the Landian project, which the Manifesto identifies as confusing acceleration with 'speed'. Rather, the project is to force a paradigmatic shift from within the present circumstance in which we live, in order to create the possibility for new futures beyond the neoliberal paradigm and capitalist epoch. The question then, should not so much be 'what is being accelerated?' as 'in our present condition, what is keeping us static?'

Accelerationism is therefore less concerned with identifying a particular moment, agent, event or phenomenon and pushing it to its furthest bounds in order to create something new, but instead concerned with placing demands upon the present circumstances which force a destructive and catalytic moment in which the cracks of the present can reveal new possibilities which point beyond capitalism. The movement necessary to transcend capitalism is almost ineffable, and indeed requires multiple strategies across the assemblage of terrains upon which capitalism relies. Accelerationism is the philosophical approach which encourages to make tools and weapons of all the means at our disposal, to regain and weaponise the project of modernity against the status quo from all angles.

However, just as anarchism is properly a set of ethics which struggle to find either meaning or project without being attached to a politics such as communism, the anti-capitalist, pro-modernity philosophical project propounded by accelerationism flounders unless it is used to inform a concrete politics. Not only does this move give direction and purpose to the accelerationist project, but it creates palpable distance between the positions being advocated by - for example - Srnicek and Williams on the one hand, and Land on the other. While Land clearly shares certain tenets of accelerationism in some sense, particularly around the possibilities for the use of technology and abstraction in social organisation, the fact that his later 'neo-reactionary' far-right positions become unwittingly absorbed into the accelerationist school by many onlookers does a disservice to emerging thought in that school and is arguably a hindrance to the broad political project personally advocated by the bulk of its thinkers.

Within the political thought (and personal convictions) of those invested in the expanding accelerationist school is a clear indebtedness to late Marxist ideas, particularly in relation to the Grundrisse's 'Fragment on Machines', and the autonomist Marxist/post-operaismo tradition, particularly in terms of the necessity of a movement with demands. It therefore seems both appropriate and efficacious to move away from developing mere 'accelerationism' and towards an accelerationist Marxist politics.

11/02/2014

The diffusion of digital technology within work and everyday life: is the 'social factory' an adequate theorization of political possibility?



The contemporary state of what we might call Late Capitalism has, over time, dramatically shifted the balance between work and leisure, according to theorists such as Fisher (2013), who argue that with the insertion of digital technologies into work and everyday life, there is now little or no escape from work.  On this account, work spills beyond the boundaries of the workplace, encroaching into every corner of life, facilitated by digital communicative technologies which pay no regard to the ‘work-life balance’.  The idea of the expansion of the workplace across all social life is not new.  This notion is articulated most notably by theorists in the autonomous Marxist, or autonomist, tradition, who argue that the idea of the ‘social factory’ can be identified as a defining characteristic of post-Fordist capitalism. Here, post-Fordism is broadly taken to denote the mode of capitalist production and work relations which have developed since the 1970s.  The autonomists further argue that shifting away from the prior Fordist model of the assembly line, the factory and the regimented work relations therein, the paradigm of post-Fordism, spanning the “totality of contemporary social production” (Virno, 2004: 61) is characterized by its emphasis on communication, affective labour and ‘virtuosity’, which can be observed in modern cross-workplace emphases such as customer ‘service’, ‘likeability’ and the generation of purchasing desire (ibid.: 57), and the performativity involved in these affective tasks (Fisher, 2013).

Indeed, within the autonomist tradition, post-Fordism has been described as an articulation of working class demands and desires being met and articulated by capital in its own ‘deformed’ way (Virno, 2004).  However, at the heart of their discourse around the social factory is a normative position which argues that the expansion of the ‘workplace’ is a negative phenomenon, necessarily eroding our personal time and asserting ‘work’ as the dominant mode of subjectivity.  This suggestion has been carried into many contemporary debates in both activist and theoretical circles, concerning the growing prevalence of digital technology in our work lives, and indeed in providing a means of extension for work into everyday life. 



In this essay I want to explore the normativity implicit in this formulation, engaging with positions which have been articulated by what has been called an ‘accelerationist’ Marxist tradition (see Srnicek, 2013). This argues for a ‘properly’ Marxist attitude towards technology as a necessary condition of any development beyond capitalism (Srnicek, 2013).  This builds upon and develops the arguments made by Hardt and Negri in Empire around informatization and the commons. I want to explore the idea that the autonomist negative critique of the social factory is inconsistent with the fundamental autonomist analysis of labour as the motor of capitalist recomposition, and that following the logic implicit in the potential for communicative and educative engagement with digital technologies that rather than a “social factory” new possibilities are made latent for potential recomposition towards post-capitalist objectives.  If, as Gorz (2012: 8) argues, our socialism cannot and should not be “reduced to the restoration of the pre-modern, undifferentiated unity of the individual, community and functional spheres of paid work and self-determined activities”, then we should be taking up the challenges presented to us by digital communicative technologies in work, and articulating the possibilities for the reduction of work through technologies diffusion and repurposing.

           

I will first examine the idea of the social factory; locating it within the condition of ‘post-Fordism’ and explicating what these concepts are both absorbing and denoting.  I will then discuss the conflicting contemporary articulations of the role of digital technology within the ‘social factory’ which, I will argue, seem to centre around a tension over whether we are losing or gaining something through the process of informatization. I will argue that the reactionary normative assumptions of the social factory demonstrate an instrumental view of technology as an agent in the ‘hollowing out’ of the social, whereas the alternative, communicative view of technology asserts the role of technology in the creation of a new rhizomatic and cooperative multitude which instead ‘fills in’ the social.  In order to resolve this tension, I will argue that there is indeed a dual-effect arising from the intersection of digital communicative technologies and work, but that these must be schematized and separated out, seen not as directly opposed but as playing out on the different terrains which drive epochal shifts as the assemblage of motors Marx identifies as operative in the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism, and currently underlying the present transition through late capitalism.  I will go on to contribute to the current discussions on technology being generated by the nascent accelerationist Marxist project, arguing that the insertion of digital communicative technologies into work presents possibilities for future (post-) capitalist recomposition and social change through the repurposing of these technologies, the creation of new technologies and the generation of new social imaginaries.



As this essay is concerned with the intersection between digital technology and the changing nature of work, it seems pertinent to operationalize the term ‘work’ as it has no universally-accepted parameters as a concept.  For reasons of efficacy I will adopt the term as it is used by Andre Gorz.  It should be made clear, as Gorz (ibid.: 54) notes, that “’work’…represents a sociohistorical category”.  ‘Work’ should not be used to refer to poiesis in the sense of “the activities of subsistence, reproduction, maintenance and care performed within the household” (ibid.: 53) because “the notion of work assumed its present meaning only as commodity production and consumption came to gain precedence over production for self”; that is, with the rise of industrial capitalism (ibid.).  Gorz outlines two essential properties of ‘work’: “1. It must be performed in the public, not the private sphere. 2. It must be intended for others as social, not private individuals” (ibid.: 54).  Therefore the reason poiesis should not be considered work does not refer to whether it constitutes paid work, i.e. wage labour, but rather because ‘work’ “is done in the public domain and appears there as a measurable, exchangeable and interchangeable performance; as a performance which possesses a use-value for others, not simply for the members of the household community carrying it out: for others in general, without distinction or restriction, not for a particular, private person” (ibid.: 53).  This notion of work is not without caveats, however.  As Gorz rightly notes, this notion of work has its roots in the early industrial working class, and as this essay will cover, work in post-industrial society has a very different character.  Here Gorz raises an apposite point which will be of significance when this essay turns to the discussion the sociohistorical changes being played out on the terrains Marx identifies as driving epochal shifts:



“The question, however, is to what extent this conception of work, handed down to us essentially by the skilled industrial workers of the nineteenth century (workers who were still close to artisan production, and had a complete grasp of manufacturing procedures and the products to be made), can apply to the largely de-materialized, pre-determined, specialized work which is the predominant form in today’s macro-social space – a form of activity which has no purchase or influence either on the way it is performed or on the final purpose it is to serve, and is commonly referred to simply as ‘work’.”

(ibid.: 55-56)



The notion of work outlined here will demonstrate its efficacy when later discussing digital technological developments in the way we interact with work, particularly in the issues raised by Berry (2011) on data streams.  In order that there can be no risk of confusion or conflation over the perennial suggestion that work represents all activities of subsistence, i.e. poiesis, Gorz defends the everyday usage of the term by saying: “In continuing to apply the idea of work-as-poiesis...one runs the risk of demanding that today’s workers or employees regard as their ‘means of personal fulfilment’ precisely those tasks which prevent such fulfilment” (Gorz, 2012: 56).



In the contemporary experience of work, technology is ubiquitous.  From the dependence on computers both on the shop floor and throughout the logistics chain to the provision of company smartphones with their constant state of readiness both in terms of the device (sleep mode) and the user (push notifications), “digital technologies open a completely new perspective for labour” (Berardi, 2009: 75).  Indeed the centrality of technology within work has drawn observations about the changes these technological developments have brought to the experience of what it means to work.  Referring to the prevalence of smartphones, Mark Fisher (2013) notes, “email means that there is no such thing as a workplace or a working day.  You start working the minute you wake up.”  This current mode of work within post-industrial, ‘late’ capitalism can be referred to as post-Fordism.  ‘Post-Fordism’ is so-called because it denotes a development from ‘Fordism’ which was characterized in its epitome by the factory assembly line.  Where the Fordist production line was marked by its ‘rigidity’, the advent of post-Fordism was characterized by a new ‘flexibility’ (Fisher, 2009: 33).  This break away from rigidity can be observed both in the practices of the workplace, and in terms of the ‘boundaries’ of the workplace, or the divide between ‘work’ and ‘life’.  Let us take each in turn.



In terms of the ‘workplace’ itself, where Fordism denotes the industrial, blue-collar ontology of factory-based manufacturing work, post-Fordism instead denotes a more service-oriented mode of work, with a heavy focus on communicative and affective labour, or what Virno calls ‘virtuosity’; and a strong emphasis on digital, communicative technologies through the informatization of work (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 280).   This is not to deny that the manufacturing of products still accounts for a sizeable, if diminished, proportion of work carried out within late-capitalist society.  While the notion of post-Fordism does assert we are living in a post-industrial mode of capitalism, this is not to suggest industrial production is resigned to history, but rather that its dominant position as the primary mode of work has been supplanted by communicative capital, aided by the reduction in the number of industrial jobs with the rise of automation in factories, but more importantly a qualitative alteration in the work carried out by the worker in those workplaces.  Where the Fordist mode was driven by Taylorist principles of scientific management and the repetition of simple tasks, the crucial difference in post-Fordism is that “while the material production of objects is delegated to an automated system of machines, the services rendered by living labour, instead, resemble linguistic-virtuosic services more and more” (Virno, 2004: 58).  Where the services of living labour within Fordism could be typified by piece-work and a strict separation of tasks, “in post-Fordism, when the assembly line becomes a ‘flux of information’, people work by communicating” (Fisher, 2009: 34).



The emphasis on flexibility and communication is also central to the second way in which post-Fordism departs from Fordism.  A key observation of post-Fordism is the perceived expansion of work beyond the parameters of the physical workplace and into all corners of life.  The ‘social factory’, i.e. the expansion of the factory over the social, denotes the point at which “work and life become inseparable” (ibid.).  So characterized by affective linguistic-virtuosity is our working life that “there is no longer anything which distinguishes labour[-time] from the rest of human activities” (Virno, 2004: 102) in terms of our mental disposition.  In this sense we are ‘attending to work’ all the time.  This constant work-subjectivity is continually aided and maintained by digital communicative technologies which blur the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘life’, the publicly-performed and private.  Technologies which can be regarded as ‘intimate’ such as our smartphone (Berry, 2011: 149) are simultaneously used to organise, administrate and perform our multiple subject-identities of ‘employee’, ‘job candidate’ and ‘lover’, providing a constant in threading together what Fisher (2009: 34) calls the conditions of total instability, or ‘precarity’, that we must learn to live in.  As Marazzi identifies, these communicative technologies have been crucial to the establishment of post-Fordism, the present conditions both requiring and emerging from “an increased cybernetization of the working environment” (ibid.: 33). With the growth of the social factory, we can also then see the development and production of the ‘socialized’ worker-subjectivity: constantly connected to both public ‘work’ life and private life simultaneously, while “the factory is, with the indispensable aid of information technologies, disseminated into society” (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 80).



Mario Tronti
What is being absorbed by the emergence of post-Fordism and the development of the social factory?  Virno (2004: 98) argues that post-Fordism demonstrates a recomposition of capitalism which is, in its own deformed way, meeting and rearticulating the demands made by the labour force towards the end of Fordism during the 1970s.  Fisher (2009: 34) agrees, stating that post-Fordism is “Capital’s mobilization and metabolization of the desire for emancipation from Fordist routine.”  Both of these analyses reflect an acceptance of what has come to be known as the ‘Trontian inversion’ at the crux of autonomous Marxism.  In his 1965 essay The Strategy of Refusal, Tronti argues that where an orthodox or Leninist reading of Marx holds that the labour force is conditioned by the movement of Capital, it is rather the case that “capitalist power seeks to use the workers’ antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor for its own development” (Tronti, 1965). Labour is therefore the force which moves Capital through capitalist recomposition in response to the desires and actions of the labour force.  As we can see, and hence why Virno choses to use the term ‘deformed’, the capitalist recomposition into post-Fordism has both enabled and limited the labour force.  For desired flexibility and freedom of work we also see these coupled with precarity and nomadism (Fisher, 2009: 28).  Yet there is a question mark over how we should interpret the social factory in this case.  As much as it could be argued that the social factory and situating of digital communicative technologies at the centre of life are the articulation of working class desires through capital, there also appears to be a normative assumption within the notion of the ‘social factory’ that the expansion of work beyond the workplace is an ‘encroachment’ into social life which is emblematic of the insidious expansion of the logic of commodification into every realm of life (Crary, 2013: 3).  Two things are being played out here.  On one hand there seems a repositioning of work as the central and dominant mode of life, while on the other there seems to be a diffusion and flexibility which represents a release from the strict rigidity of the Fordist epoch.  While the social factory has its benefits as a concept in helping us visualise the spread of work from the factory outwards, it also carries with it the reactionary normative suggestion that work is better off being reduced through its containment rather than its diffusion.



The central point of contention between the conflicting positions we can see emerging relates to two differing conceptions of technology.  On one hand, the instrumental view of technology argues the role played by digital technologies in post-Fordism is driven by economic rationality and is ‘hollowing out’ society.  On the other hand, the communicative view of technology is arguing that digital technologies are changing the way we experience work such that our creative and cooperative possibilities are expanded, and therefore that technology is actually serving to ‘fill in’ or provide gains for society.



We can plainly observe ways in which digital communicative technologies have been purposed to benefit capital.  It has been noted that technology is optimized towards “the maximisation of output/profit” (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 147) and that digital technologies are also used and monitored within a ‘dispersed corporation’ for the purposes of control (Fisher, 2009: 22).  Crary (2013: 11) is also quick to denounce the ‘economic imperative’ that comes with the development and spread of new technologies.  However, it cannot be said on the basis of technology being used for capitalist ends that the expansion of digital technologies can only serve to benefit capital, for at the same time we can observe work becoming more diffuse and communicative in character, leading to new subjectivities filling the void left behind by the Fordist industrial worker.  While from an instrumentalist point of view we might see the notion of the “computationally supported subject” (Berry, 2011: 147) as somehow detracting from or compromising the subject, from a communicative standpoint we can instead view this notion positively as a ‘computationally enabled subject’.  Next to the bleak imperatives of the instrumental standpoint of technology, a communicative standpoint presents new possibilities. Rather than lamenting the decline of the industrial labour force and the subjectivity of the industrial worker, we can instead look to technology and communication as tools for developing an intellectual and inventive labour force (Negri, 1989: 116; Hardt & Negri, 2001: 292).



Wasp T12 Speechtool: it's well weapon
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2009:88) argues that while the “dissemination of the labour process” to dispersed individuals through digital technologies might seem ‘formally autonomous’, they are “actually coordinated and ultimately dependent.”  As an example of this dependency, he asks us to consider cellular phones: “The cellular phone is left on by the great majority of info-workers even when they are not working.  It has a major function in the organization of labour as self-enterprise that is formally autonomous but substantially dependent… [it is] constantly coordinating and localizing in real time the fragments of info production.  Cellular phones, the most important article of consumption of the last decade, provide this very function at a mass level” (ibid.: 89).  In this sense, it is argued that while work may be dispersed in terms of proximity, we are in fact attending to work just as much, if not more, than if we were engaged physically at a workplace.  While we are ‘formally autonomous’, the fact that ‘fragments’ of production – tasks, updates, communications – reach us in real time wherever we are, means we have not left the workplace but taken it with us.  Fisher (2013) describes this in comparison to the relative burden the Fordist worker was tasked with: “Most of us find ourselves compulsively gripped by the imperatives of communicative capitalism (to check email, to update our statuses). This mode of work makes Sisyphus’s interminable labours seem quaint; at least, Sisyphus was condemned to perform the same task over and over again. Semio-capitalism is more like confronting the mythical hydra: cut off one head and three more grow in its place, the more emails we answer, the more we receive in return.”  For Crary (2013: 3) the logical, and intended, progression of this is towards the 24/7 sleepless worker, constantly available to attend to the whims of economic opportunity.



Srnicek, of the emergent accelerationist school contends that it is simply naïve to posit that “technology has been reduced to a particular capacity” (Srnicek, 2013), however it is argued that this hollowing out of social life goes beyond our capacities and activities just as workers, “but as students, consumers, shoppers, and television viewers [we] are now directly integrated into the production process” (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 80).  If anything this presents us with a far bleaker picture in which we are constantly ready to perform for the benefit of economic ends, each “lived day…subject to a semiotic activation” (Berardi, 2009: 90) because “we are the commodities; so that any time not spent selling ourselves is wasted time” (Fisher, 2013).  Although the hollowing out of society being described can be expanded beyond the role of worker to the role of consumer, this account still maintains a basic normative assumption that the expansion of communicative technology necessarily results in the expansion of the profit motive.  Srnicek (2013) responds that it is reactionary to say that “every technology is bound to only serve the function of extracting surplus value.  The political conclusion that’s drawn from this is then what makes it a reactionary viewpoint: in order to get beyond capitalism, one has to destroy its infrastructure”.  Here Srnicek highlights an important point.  These concerns around the social factory, the expansion of work and the mediation brought by communicative technologies all come from a position of some notion of progressing to post-capitalism.  How then are we to imagine progress beyond our present condition?  We seem faced with a choice of either destroying the infrastructure of capitalism, which would surely denote a regression, or we are forced to engage with the present processes in order to see how the can be repurposed or ‘accelerated’ through.  Possibilities arise if we try to understand the effects of the expansion of digital technological processes as ‘filling in’ rather than ‘hollowing out’ social life.  If we instead look at what these processes and mediations do provide us, perhaps we can then generate a more positive account of what is at stake.



Speaking of the internet, Virno (2004: 43) refers to the world-wide web as a “common place”, whereas Hardt & Negri (2001: 291) note the “continual interactivity” it facilitates.  While none of these theorists would deny the existent capitalist purposing of these technologies, they are not willing to reduce technological advances merely to economic benefits.  Instead, as work becomes ever-more characterised by communication and informatization, this allows the worker to be part of an interconnected network which provides new opportunities for creativity and different forms of cooperative intelligence which are more virtuosic and “immanent to the labouring activity itself” (ibid.: 294).  Therefore while we can observe that the deterritorialization of production the labour force finds itself in a “weakened bargaining position” (ibid.: 295), this is only insofar as we can judge strength of the labour force qua industrial power.  As Gorz (2012: 8) is quick to note, “the social actors pressing for…development are no longer, first and foremost, the rapidly declining class of industrial workers.”  There both in order to maintain clarity in our discussions and in order to reflect the true present situation of things, we need to regard the working class as ‘multitude’ rather than ‘people’, or in other words as a theoretical concept rather than a ‘snap-shot picture’ to be equated “with certain habits, with certain usages and customs” (Virno, 2004: 45).  Constrained by a rigid notion of the social factory and the reactionary, instrumental stance towards technology, Berardi simply cannot accept that possibilities for post-capitalism, for the reduction of work, can arise from the technological diffusion of work though society, instead seeing is as a direct encroachment of the social by the factory which simply must be constrained.  He asks, “Why does this new kind of worker value labour as the most interesting part of his or her life and therefore no longer opposes the prolongation of the working day but is actually ready to lengthen it out of personal choice and will?” (Berardi, 2009: 79).  Here Berardi, while identifying a new kind of worker, fails to acknowledge the changing nature and experience of work, typified by linguistic-virtuosic activity through which “our economic and social reality is defined less by the material objects that are made and consumed than by co-produced services and relationships” (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 302).  While within this framework, the burden of success or failure of work is “judged in reference to current continual output” (Berry, 2011: 150), this form of production “can be distributed and…feed into other shared work” (ibid.: 151).  With this in mind we can appreciate a developing inversion of the original early-modernity notion of work, as in the workhouse, which “referred not to a creative or productive act but to the activity in so far as it entailed pain, annoyance and fatigue” (Gorz, 2012: 53), and seems to correspond more closely to the outmoded normative assumption of the experience of work as upheld by Berardi.



While we do not want to reduce the technological mediation of work to a solely unitary function of maximizing surplus value (Srnicek, 2013), we can clearly see there does exist a degree of instrumentality and optimization towards economic ends at some level.  Similarly, while we can agree with Negri that through communicative technologies, “capitalism has succeeded in liberating desires and subjects to some degree…capitalism restrains these liberating forces at the same time” (ibid.).  How then are we to resolve this friction?



In footnote 4 of chapter 15 in Capital, Marx (1976: 493) identifies six terrains upon which sociohistorical epochs shift and evolve[1]: technology, the relation of man to nature, the modes of production, the reproduction of daily life, social relations and mental conceptions of the world.  Rather than being seen as separate spheres, these terrains should be seen as forming an assemblage or ecology of moments which coevolve (Harvey, 2010: 196), linked through the modes of production which guide social evolution (ibid.: 192).  With post-Fordist capitalism as the mode of production, we can begin to schematize and map out the effects upon each of these terrains.  With digital communicative technologies plotted on the terrain of technology, we can separate out the instrumental as being operative on the terrain of the reproduction of daily life and the logistics contained therein, while as has been highlighted by Negri, social relations are characterized by their communicability.  Hence we can maintain a communicative notion of digital technologies, while also observing the tendencies towards both instrumental and economic reason between the terrains of the reproduction of daily life at the level of work and the mode of production which maintains a dual character, reducible neither to instrumentality, nor wholly to communicative procedures, even if they do constitute an increasingly conspicuous part of the means of production through the virtuosic competencies of living labour (Virno, 2004: 61), which maintain a balance between the creative and intelligent manipulation of communication and information on one hand, and the routine-symbolic work of data handling on the other[2] (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 293).  Vitally, “these elements are…not static but in motion” (Harvey, 2010: 192) which leaves room for new possibilities and recompositions through movement across and between these terrains.



Perhaps most interesting from the perspective of progression towards post-capitalism is possibilities opened up by different mental conceptions of the world in relation to the other terrains.  Certainly a new mental conception of the world is what Fisher (2009) is advocating in his provocation against ‘capitalist realism’, and the generation of new imaginaries in relation to technological development is at the centre of the accelerationist project (Williams & Srnicek, 2013).  Indeed we can see this kind of interplay between terrains in our mental experiences of technological developments such as the digital streams which have replaced the model of web ‘pages’, generating a new technological imaginary in the process (Berry, 2011: 143).  Where our prior usage of the internet was based on internet retrieval (ibid.), data streams operate in real time, are co-creative and “constitute a new kind of public” (ibid.: 144), and naturally as this imaginary takes root, new models and augmentations of existing streams are almost certain to emerge.  The assemblage of terrains comprising the sociohistorical motor does not only allow us to resolve the friction between instrumental and communicative interpretations of technology, but it also creates the conditions of possibility for the shared normative intention to progress to post-capitalism.  As Rainer Land (1990: 633-4) states, “For it to be possible for development to be shaped and directed, the most important point is that processes of innovation and selection should be tied in to the aspirations and life interest of individuals, i.e. that procedures of political participation should be established which allow individuals to bring the ‘autonomized social machine’ into line with – and place it in the service of – their life interests.”



The development towards post-capitalism is possible because of the degree of contingency across these terrains, particularly in the application and benefits of digital technologies.  Contrary to Crary, technology is not the life- (and sleep-) stripping tool of squeezing every last ounce of surplus value from society (Crary, 2013: 5).  As I have demonstrated, technology is neither essentialist in its application and outcomes, nor reducible to economic imperatives.  While it may be true that many industrially-applied digital technologies are “policed in such a way as to guarantee order and profits” (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 298), this demonstrates precisely that they are contingent on multiple factors or else they would not need to be policed into getting the ‘right’ outcomes.  Indeed this reflects our current reality in terms of radical social change as articulated by accelerationist theorists: at present, “our technological development is being supressed by capitalism, as much as it has been unleashed” (Williams & Srnicek, 2013).  However if it is the case that communicative technologies and ‘techno-habitats’ are expanding beyond the control of capitalist authority (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 84), this provides the opportunity for a repurposing of those technologies and habitats, in order “to limit the field in which economic rationality may find expression” (Gorz, 2012: 8).  Of the issues discussed in this essay there are two significant contributions which can be made.  Firstly, what has been termed the ‘proper Marxist idea of technology’ encourages a positive engagement with digital technologies both in terms of their repurposing and creation.  On this account, “the improvement of the built environment is a necessary [but not merely sufficient] condition for the emergence of a post-capitalist society” (Srnicek, 2013).  However, as no one terrain on the assemblage driving sociohistorical change “prevails over the others” (Harvey, 2010: 196), there also needs to be a positive engagement with the idea of communicative-virtuosic work as it is found within post-Fordism.  It is precisely because “work ceases to constitute a special and separate praxis…different from those criteria…which regulate non-labour time" (Virno, 2004: 102-3) that we can observe that post-Fordism is articulating the desire for the reduction of work through the capitalist mode of production.  In ceasing to be separate, in dissolving work qualitatively into the social, post-Fordist communicative capital is articulating that desire as far as it can within bounds of the wage-relation and economic logic of capitalism.  It is for this reason Virno so famously declares post-Fordism to be “the communism of capital” (ibid.: 110).



If “the transformation of work – of all work – into an autonomous activity was, according to Marx, the meaning of communism as a lived historical horizon” (Gorz, 2012: 56), then we should be repurposing digital technologies in our favour in order to drive further capitalist recomposition.  If within post-Fordism “productive cooperation is a ‘publicly-organized space’” (Virno, 2004: 63) this presents its own opportunities for cooperation and the percolation of desire, which can generate new mental conceptions of the world.  As has been noted, this was a key factor in the shift to post-Fordism: “The disintegration of stable working patterns was in part driven by the desires of workers – it was they who, quite rightly, did not wish to work in the same factory for forty years” (Fisher, 2009: 34).  As a result, “today we participate in a more radical and profound commonality than has ever been experienced in the history of capitalism” (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 302).  In any case it must surely be said that the changing nature of work and the role of digital technologies therein open up new possibilities for multitudinal organization and future recomposition, therefore it must be said that the autonomists’ notion of the ‘social factory’ is an inadequate theorization of the political possibilities in Late Capitalism.

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Bibliography

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[1] It is worth noting that David Harvey later identifies seven terrains, citing the seventh – legal and political superstructures – from an earlier footnote in Capital (Harvey, 2010: 194).


[2] It would be interesting to conduct further research on the division of labour across class lines within at the intersection of communicative work and digital technologies. It strikes me that the informatized work which provides most flexibility and creativity seems to be expected more at a higher class level, whereas the lower classes often see flexibility manifested as precarity and virtuosity as a means of survival rather than realm of creativity in a positive sense.