Unwritten: On Richard Seymour's The Twittering Machine

Academia functions by specialization. We are all divided into our respective fields, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, etc., and then once more into the subfields, methodologies, etc. Keeping on top of the relevant material keeps us in our little cells. Publish or perish to the extent that it still remains the law of the land has as its corollary survive by specialization. Academics are like exotic tropical fauna that survive only within a particular niche.

Combined and Uneven Socialization: Remarks on The Social Network

Several years ago, I taught at a small liberal arts college. The college was over an hour away from where I lived. Not an especially long drive, but the drive through the frozen tundra of central Maine was boring as hell. So I tried books on tape to deal with the commute. I was teaching Philosophy of Film one semester, basically a Deleuze course, and I thought it would be interesting if I found some book on film to listen to while I drove. I basically wanted to offset my theory with something a little more concerned with the practical matter of making film. The best that the library could offer was something by Sidney Lumet. I am a fan of Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and The Verdict, so I decided to listen to it. I do not remember much of the book, mostly stories about the making of various films, but Lumet did talk about how much he hated what he called “Rubber Duckie Stories”; simple stories of single event offered as psychological motivation. Basically, someone steals a child’s rubber duckie and he becomes the rubber duckie killer, or something to that effect.

As I have written here and elsewhere (numerous elsewhere’s in fact), Marx’s critique of “so-called primitive accumulation” could be understood as a critique of psychological causality. The idea that moral qualities, such as thrift and greed, are themselves sufficient to drive history, to constitute the formation of capitalism. I will quote the entire passage here just because I love it so (Marx can write some dull passages, but when he hits it, he really hits it).

“This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite; the other lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins.”

What does this have to do with The Social Network? First, it is necessary to contextualize the film a little bit. One can reasonably imagine that behind the film there is a massive drive to turn every social phenomena, every fad, into a major picture: break dancing, skateboarding, and even the forbidden dance of the Lambada (did anyone actually do that?) have had their respective films. There have been rumors of a facebook film in development for years, most of which, like the rumored facebook stalker film, sounded ridiculous. Although it is worth noting that part of the reason that a facebook movie sounds ridiculous is that the internet is just a much more efficient machine at capturing attention, at turning activities into webpages and hits. Texts from Last Night, Cats that look like Hitler, Passive aggressive notes, ugly tattoos, there is a website for all of them. Movies might try to capture trends, putting parcour in a James Bond film, but they are generally too slow, lumbering dinosaurs compared to the fleet footed internet.

David Fincher’s film answers this corporate demand, but does so in the form of what is largely a biopic. However, as the film’s trailer suggests, this story of Mark Zuckerberg (facebook’s founder) is supposed to be a story of us, revealing something of how we have been changed by social networking. Zuckerberg’s obsession with status and almost pathological inability to connect are supposed to explain our tendency to confirm that friend request from someone we hardly know and the fact that all of these “friends” leave us feeling very alone. History is psychology.




This is especially true in the scenes that bookmark the film. In the first, which has been discussed countless times, Zuckerberg’s girlfriend breaks up with him, telling him that he is an asshole. Much of the rest of the film is dedicated to confirming this conclusion. This traumatic break-up drives Zuckerberg to create Facesmash, a website that allows men to rate women based on their looks. This basic thesis, that the internet is driven by misogyny (its original sin) is confirmed latter in the film when we meet Sean Parker (creator of Napster) who also has a break-up story. The internet is presented as compensation for lost love. Zuckerberg’s particular failed romance also concludes the film. The last scene shows him, successful but alienated from his friends, looking up the girlfriend from the first scene, and clicking “Add as Friend.” Friending an old girlfriend is the new Rosebud.

I actually like the last scene. It is one of the few points in the film that actually touches on something of the social experience of facebook. Its tendency to render every social relationship present: we don’t have memories anymore, even regretful ones, we have embarrassing search histories. There is something tragic to the image of the creator of facebook hitting refresh again and again, waiting to see his request for a friend confirmed. All of his wealth and power means nothing at this point. ("A friend request, a friend request, my kingdom for a friend request.") However, for the most part the actual “social network” remains off-screen. What motivates and drives it, and drives our participation in it, is only alluded to in the psychology of the characters. We cannot completely fault the film for this, a film of people checking their email status, looking at pictures of their secret crush, and “liking” LOL cats would be horribly boring.

This is not true of all of the scenes in the film. The scene in which Zuckerberg unleashes Fasesmash is interspersed with scenes from one of the legendary parties of the final clubs in which women are bused into campus to party with the future elite. The camera cuts from isolated men, or men in small groups, rating women on the internet to actual women, ready and available to the frat boys. This scene could be read as part of the film’s Revenge of the Nerd’s plot, a more high concept staging of the eternal struggle of nerds versus jocks, in which the latter always get the girls. However, it also could be read as a statement about the internet itself. Not just how much of it is driven by sex, or the spectacle of sex in a kind of pervasive voyeurism, as Matteo Pasquinelli has argued, but how social networks are driven by the fantasy of actual sociality. Everyone appears to be having more fun than us, and we forget that we are part of that appearance too. When Zuckerberg says he wants to put the college experience online he does not just mean the social relations in college, but the interplay between inclusion and exclusion, the constant feeling of missing out: the idea that the next click could get you to the real interesting party.

It is in scenes like this that the film departs from its “Rubber Duckie” narrative, situating the social network within the social relations that it exploits, and the social drives that it cultivates. These are always secondary, however, to the pathologized psychologies of its protoganist. Which raises the following question: given that the film has been universally praised, not just as well shot and acted, but as revealing something of the present, as our Citizen Kane (?), why are we so willing to recognize ourselves in this image? Why do we, or at least most of the critics, see ourselves in Mark Zuckerberg?

Sooner or Later Everyone Jumps the Shark: Parting Remarks on Dollhouse

The phrase “jump the shark” has come and gone as a snarky fundamental term of television criticism. Initially, it was used to refer to a show that had exhausted its premise and desperately devised some new element, an adorable cousin or a new career as a stuntman, in order to restore some life to the show. It is in that initial context that the term became the basis for a website, and later a book, before it became a term applied to everything and anything.

The program Dollhouse has most definitely jumped the shark, but oddly so in that it seems to have been conceived to do so from the beginning. As I wrote earlier, the show began as a creepy high tech version of Charlie’s Angels; became a political/corporate thriller, with shades of Manchurian Candidate; and ended with the end of the world as we knew it, borrowing heavily from Philip K. Dick and The Matrix along the way. (I say seems because the show was canceled halfway through its second season. It is possible that the apocalyptic ending was a last ditch way to conclude the show, and a great one at that, why not take the world with you.) What is frustrating about this, and may have led to the show’s demise, is that unlike most instances of “jumping the shark” the show it became was much more interesting than the show that began.

What interests me about the show is the link, the continuity, between these different genres. At the level of plot the transitions are made possible by the show’s technology, a device that makes it possible to upload or download any personality including, knowledge, skills, and memories, effectively rendering people into walking iphones with many “apps” to choose from. At the beginning of the show this technology is cumbersome, requiring people, “the dolls” or actives, to sit in a chair, but it eventually goes viral, making it possible to reprogram people at a distance. That is what connects the shows premise to its conclusion at the level of plot, but I am more interested in how the show functions at the level of the apocalyptic imaginary. What is it, besides the standard Frankenstein parable, which makes this a vision of the apocalypse?

As it has been noted elsewhere the show’s initial premise can easily be interpreted to be about exploitation. The dolls are ridiculously expensive prostitutes. They are not simply that, however, they are also the dream employees of capitalism. Skill, habits, and personalities can be uploaded and dumped. Moreover, these capacities can be developed without costly and difficult externalities, no need for schools, for research, or for urban spaces. (Although it is neverly entirely clear where they get the memories and skills of an anti-terrorism expert or dominatrix, if such knowledge is every paid for or if it is part of some high tech digital commons). When the “dolls” are not working they are the very picture of docility. They spend their days as relatively mindless drones practicing yoga, indulging in various creative pursuits, and eating healthy meals. Their dollhouse is modeled after a spa or the latest resort hotel: it is the dream of contemporary relaxation rendered as prison.

The dolls can be easily read as allegories of Paolo Virno’s interpretation of the general intellect. The term general intellect comes from the following passage in Marx:

“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are the products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge objectified [vergegenständlichte Wissenskraft]. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.”

Virno stresses that the centrality of the general intellect in the production process entails a fundamental shift in not just the structure of work but its emotional tonality as well. The general intellect has to be distinguished from the regime of abstract labor, in which the focus was on the commensurability between different types of labor, different laboring, subjects, which were rendered interchangeable. The exploitation of labor power presupposed equality as a real abstraction. This changes as knowledge, science and intellect comes to forefront of the production process. These different forms of knowledge are incommensurable. “They are not units of measure, but rather are the measureless presuppositions of heterogeneous operative possibilities.” With respect to the first “real abstraction,” abstract labor, there was always a contradiction between the ideal of equality and the reality of exploitation. The general intellect is defined not only by incommensurable forms of knowledge but also by the need for workers to constantly shift from one to another, as new jobs demand new skills and knowledges. There is no equivalence, no ground of comparison, between these different activities and skills.

Virno argues that this constant and groundless shifting produces a flexible kind of cynicism. “Cynics reach the point where they entrust their self-affirmation precisely to the multiplication (and fluidification) of hierarchies and inequalities which the unexpected centrality of production knowledge seems to entail.” The “dolls” are not even cynical because they never have to deal with incommensurability of the different types of knowledge. They never have to confront the contradiction between the affective demands of a care worker and a security worker because they are “wiped” clean each time. To quote Franco Berardi, “The worker does not exist any more as a person. He is just the interchangeable producer of microfragments of recombinant semiosis which enters into the continuous flux of the network.”

In the first season the show offers two personifications of this loss of self in the form of two anomalous characters, two dolls who cannot be wiped. They accumulate the knowledge and personalities of multiple lifetimes, becoming legion as the bible would say. The first, Alpha, loses any sense of empathy or morality, becoming a bad reading of Nietzsche's übermensch. While the second, Echo, the shows heroine, becomes the personification of the multitude, the general intellect as superhero. In the second season this loss of self is socialized, extended across all of society. The show offers an immediate image of this in terms of individuals who walk around with a necklace of “memory sticks” (the little flash drives that have become the talismans of the immaterial laborer). On these sticks are not just powerpoint presentations or term papers, but subjective capabilities, from weapons skills to mercy. All these images, and the fears and fantasies they embody, seem like various ways to cognitively map the otherwise disorienting present, which places the power of knowledge objectified not just at the center of the production process but in all of our laps.

Form matches content in this case. “Jumping the shark” is nothing other than a drastic shift in operative paradigms, a new operating system, new job, or job description. The modern cultural forms of reboots and mash-ups (zombies with Jane Austen, and so on) seems strikingly appropriate to an economy of precarity and shifts in careers. The cultural logic of late capitalism may have been pastiche and irony, but the logic of real subsumption is the mash-up.

The situation of the Dollhouse also intersects with the situation of the informatization of production in its very layout. On the bottom floor are the dolls, confined in cells and waiting to be reprogrammed with the next set of instructions. They are the ultimate machine, utterly reprogrammable; or rather, they are the brain as machine, its fundamental plasticity and neoteny put to work: they are permanent children. On the floors above are their programmers, who work in an environment reminiscent of stories of tech start-ups before the dot-com bust: informal dress and a ready supply of snack foods and games. While the dolls are completely confined, the programmers are not only free but they constantly draw from a reservoir of knowledge that is freely available: flows of knowledge that depend on confinement in order to function. (Bittorrent sites coexistence with prison like compounds producing ipods.) Above the programmers is the CEO’s office, modern wood interiors and a stocked bar. Security traverses the entire structure.

This is at least how things appear as the outset, but as the show progresses it becomes more and more clear that this vertical model, itself a kind of panopticon, is permeated by horizontal flows of power. The real power does not move from top to bottom, at least not exactly. As I wrote earlier, the dolls only appear to be at the bottom of the hierarchy, they are actually apparatuses for the capture of the dreams and fantasies of the people on the outside. This was at least the second phase of the show, Dollhouse 2.0, in which everyone and anyone could be a doll, a programmed individual, or working under the influence of a doll. It was an image of complete control; not the complete control of the dollhouse compound, which operated through the rather crude technologies of surveillance cameras but a more flexible form of control (in Deleuze’s sense) that operated on memories, desires, and fantasies. As the technology progresses, however, even this control falls apart and the final version of the show, Dollhouse 3.0, suggests a future in which the ability to reprogram anyone and everyone with ease leads to a breakdown of society.

There is thus a certain sense in which Dollhouse presents a new version of the apocalypse, one that is explicitly technological and political rather than ecological. Thus, breaking with the pattern of contemporary popular culture where the apocalypse is either ecological or sublime, unexplained. In Dollhouse the apocalypse is brought about by the excess of information over subjectivity. This is the apocalyptic vision shared by such thinkers as Bernard Stiegler who point to a breakdown of the basic conditions of subjectivation brought about by the speed of communication and new technologies. To quote Berardi again, “The great majority of humanity is subjected to the invasion of the video-electronic flux, and suffers the superimposition of digital code over the codes of recognition and of identification of reality that permeate organic cultures.” Or, to put all of this in a more mundane context, it is the nightmare scenario of various columnists and pundits who predict a fragmented blogosphere of various subcultures (tea baggers, 9/11 conspiracy believers, etc.) who are entirely programmed by their specific media. However, this vision of the apocalypse is also very old, with all of the trappings of the Mad Max films, shoulder pads and a massive armored truck. Thus, in the end, revealing how stilted our imagination of the new actually is. Or, perhaps we are more programmed than we would like to think.

Blogcapsule

[blägkapsel] noun. 1. A blog which was regularly updated for a period of time, but has since fallen into neglect. It remains on the web as a sort of time capsule of the period in which its author was active. 2. What "unemployed negativity" was in the danger of becoming.

It has obviously been a very long time since I have updated this blog. The reasons for this are quite mundane, the usual end of the semester crunch combined with a conference and a brief period of travel in which I was off the grid for a little bit. These mundane reasons have combined to break the habit of "blogging" so now, even when I have the time (arguably), I do not have the inclination. I have even gone back to writing random thoughts in my notebook instead of posting them here. I am now trying to get the habit back and am taking advantage of some jetlag which has me wide awake at 3:47 AM to get back into the habit. This blog was begun in jetlag and in jetlag it shall be reborn.

Of course starting the habit is not the same as having an idea. The only glimmer of an idea that I have right now has to do with title of this post. As a reader of blogs I have noticed that more often than not, when the author (or authors) of a blog stop posting, the blog continues to linger online for a long period of time, preserving the moment that it was active. This brings up an aspect of the relationship of the internet to temporality that one does not often think about.

It has become commonplace (even banal) to indentify the internet in general with immediacy, it is the place where one goes for up to the minute news, commentary, etc. Thus, the internet easily serves as a kind of technological stand in for the decline of historical comprehension in contemporary capitalism. The reduction of time and history to the instant and pure speed of communication. However, as I have already indicated this image does not fit the internet itself, which perserves the traces of not only various blogs but many things. One can still find archived discussions on listservs when performing searches on Google. On the internet the past and present coexist, appearing on the same list of search results. Like Freud's use of the ruins of Rome as a metaphor for the unconscious, past and present exist side by side without distinction or differentiation. I am not sure what this says about time, or historicity, other than that the temporality of the internet (and perhaps of society in general) is not just the pure present but an unthinking and unreflecting retention of the past. Nothing is forgotten. To quote Deleuze and Guattari, “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.”