event mechanics

Say you find yourself staring at an old pot. Your brain, being an incredibly sophisticated computer, immediately assesses that it’s an old pot, and that old pots are boring. It’s not going to dance, or sing heartbreaking songs of yesteryear. It won’t even rock gently in the breeze. It’s just going to sit there being a pot. Probably a broken one at that. If it was on television, they’d at least have the decency to back it with some upbeat techno while zooming in and out, and even then you’d immediately switch over. But instead, because you’ve got the misfortune of actually being there in front of it, surrounded by other people, you have to stand and look at the poxy thing for a minimum of 30 seconds before moving on to gawp at the next bit of old shit, or everyone’s going to think you’re a philistine. The same principle applies in art galleries and museums. They’re full of secretly bored people pulling falsely contemplative faces. It’s a weird mass public mime.

Even though it is depressing to watch, I like the TV show Nathan Barley, co-created as an adaptation from a a fake TV guide listing (TV Go Home) for a fake TV show called Cunt. (Here is a link to one of my more infamous blog posts, it is probably NWS if you live behind a coarse language firewall, but if you did, then why are you reading my blog?:)

The above block quote comes from the regular Guardian column of one of the co-creators of Nathan Barley and TV Go Home, Charlie Brooker. I was introduced to Charlie Brooker’s column by a friend with whom I share many similar tastes in popular culture consumption. Brooker is a funny bastard, I certainly grant him that. His column from the 22 June 2009 is about having an ‘interest’ (ie hobby) and the relation between this ‘interest’ and the practices of ‘interested’ people and the way Brooker has always turned his ‘interest’ into a job.

Brooker’s column makes fun of what he perceives to be the contemplative mode of engagement expressed through the practices of visitors to archaeological ruins as they pause and consider a broken pot. There is a rhythm to this practice, of walking, having one’s interest caught, gazing upon this object of interest and all the while contemplating something about it. The capacity to contemplate an object reminds me of the way Bourdieu wrote about the capacity of certain upper-class consumers of cultural artefacts. There is a pleasure in the nitty gritty of seeking these objects out, but the point is to index their particular significance. (See Hilary Geoghegan’s essay in the ‘Enthuse‘ special eissue of M/C Journal on Being Enthusiastic about Industrial Archaeology.) To realise their significance requires an informal (for amateurs) or formal (for scholars or professionals) inculcuration of these practices into the enthusiast habitus. At stake is a subcultural assessment of beauty. For Brooker there is no utility in a this kind of Kantian reflection on the ‘beauty’ of the broken pot. The Bourdieuian would simply retort Brooker is not properly equipped to contemplate the broken pot’s beauty nor have the cultural capital to realise its significance.

I am not a Bourdieuian, however. I appreciate Bourdieu’s work and what he has given to the social sciences. I prefer to take another position, one that incorporates what, following Deleuze, is the virtual dimension of the cracked pot. Think about an amatuer archeologist’s practice. They come across several if not dozens of such artefacts similar to the cracked pot in their leisure-time labour. The great joy of such amateurs, just as it is for any subcultural practice organised around the indexing and cataloguing of significant cultural artefacts, is when something that might be an artefact does not fit into the schema of the established typology.

Bourdieu went to great pains to point out the class bias in Kant’s philosophy of aesthetic judgement. But what if Bourdieu was wrong to focus on aesthetic judgement and instead should have engaged with Kant’s notion of enthusiasm to describe the cultural practices of his research subjects? Participating in a cultural formation does not only require a cultural competence, it also requires one to be mobilised. The mobilisation was assumed in Bourdieu’s account; it is a variable he took out of his analysis of formations of cultural consumption and their intersection with class-based social stratifcations. Surely everyone has met people who belong to a particular social milieu but who choose not to particpate in the practices of cultural consumption ‘expected’ of such a social positioning?

The amateur archeologists as well as many other enthusiasts are forced to use their respective powers of imagination. The broken pot has a biography, its surface and its cracks are traces of events that have been inscribed upon it. Part of the work of the enthusiast is to decipher these material signs of its biography. For example, enthusiasts in modified-car culure can ‘read’ the material signs of a car and reconstruct the ‘amount of work that has gone into it’, which would be similar to an archeologist exclaiming to how much ‘history’ is present. ‘Amount’ here is quantitative but it is also qualitative, the biography (work/history, i.e. active/passive inculcation of events) is an index of enthusiasm, deciphered from the material signs of the object’s biography and immanently valorised within the practice of contemplating the object.

Charlie Booker seems to be mobilised by the challenge of cultural critique of those practices that he deems boring (amateur archeologists). It is an unnerving practice to simply pour scorn on other peoples’ enthusiasms and I don’t care much for it. Maybe there is some inverse cultural cringe here, but I think people should be allowed the dignity of pursuing their collective enthusiasms. For some it is the only thing they have for warding off a brutal and nihilistic ennui. Booker, and many other people I have met of my generation who are as cool as fuck, is alienated from his own enthusiasm and seems to get enthusiastic about pointing out the ‘absurdities’ of another’s enthusiasm.

Earilier discussion here, here and here.
It is clear that in his book Prince of Networks on Bruno Latour and on his blog, Harman is trying to make room for a concept of time as a series of cinematic-instants. He argues against an allegedly Bergsonian conception of time in Deleuze’s work that is organised around duration. One of the things that struck me about Reassembling the Soical was its distinctive Deleuzian tone. From Latour’s Reassembling the Social:

A terminological precision about network
The word network is so ambiguous that we should have abandoned it long ago. And yet the tradition in which we use it remains distinct in spite of its possible confusion with two other lines. One is of course the technical networks—electricity, trains, sewages, internet, and so on. The second one is used, in sociology of organization, to introduce a difference between organizations, markets, and states (Boyer 2004). In this case, network represents one informal way of associating together human agents (Granovetter 1985).
When (Castells 2000) uses the term, the two meanings merge since network becomes a privileged mode of organization thanks to the very extension of information technology. It’s also in this sense that Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) take it to define a new trend in the capitalist mode of production.
But the other tradition, to which we have always referred, is that of Diderot especially in his Le rêve de d’Alembert (1769), which includes twenty-seven instances of the word reseaux. This is where you can find a very special brand of active and distributed materialism of which Deleuze, through Bergson, is the most recent representative. (129)

This is here as a note to which I shall return to try to answer the question, If Harman presents a Heideggerised Latour, what would be a Deleuzian Latour?

The consequence of throwing out the category of class together with the logic of economism has not been to institute a new and more adequate model of analysis, but to abandon the field to the wilderness of stratification theory, for which, in Don Aitkin’s terms, class ‘is a concept of merely nominal value: it is simply the term used to subsume the manifold differences in occupation, income, prestige, residence, lifestyle and education that characterize a complex urban industrial society’. The implication of such a model is that these dimensions are quite disconnected from each other: that they are aggregated rather than structured, or that they form a continuous, indeterminate, and potentially infinite scale without structural polarizations, and therefore without any way of explaining consolidations of discrepant interests.” The very act of listing the ‘factors’ that make up social positionalities (age + gender + race + sexual orientation + …) assumes, as Judith Butler puts it, ‘their discrete, sequential coexistence along a horizontal axis that does not describe their convergences within a social field’. (102) John Forw Cultural Studies and Cultural Value

EDIT 26/07/09: Graham Harman has responded to this post on his blog. Apologies for the tone of the opening paragraph. Graham seems pretty cool, how can he not be after being a sportswriter! The opening para is for my non-academic readers who neither have an interest or the professional investment in reading, discussing and debating philosophy. I have friends and associates who read this blog and really don’t (want to?) understand what all the fuss is about. Oh, and he said very similar things regarding paranoia of US grad students in this interview.

Philosophy blog wars are a little bit lol and a little bit sad. I have little professional investment in some arguments/critiques over others as I am not a philosopher by profession. The political economy of the academic blogosphere in relation to the academy needs to be accounted for in these stoushes. Some academic have ‘professional’ blogs, others couldn’t think of anything worse. My interest in all this is purely on the level of interest: I am an enthusiast. Even though I have a PhD, I have had no formal training in philosophy at all except for some introductory units 12 years ago. I did not pass through the US grad system, which seems to produce eaither a certain kind of intellectual paranoia or a counter-movement against this paranoia. I pick up and read ideas to figure out if they seem to work. If they work then I run with them. If not, then they are mere folly.

Some parts of the philosphical blogosphere have been discussing Graham Harman’s book on Bruno Latour Prince of Networks. I have a PDF copy but it is annoying that the bookshop I buy my books from (and where I also worked while finishing my PhD) has not yet got copies in even though they were expected by June. Levi Bryant over at Larval Subjects has been following Harman and the discussion of Prince of Networks. He did a recent post on the notion of a Flat Ontology. I found Latour’s conception of a flat ontology equally problematic, and I think for any Deleuzian the notion of a flat ontology needs to be carefully qualified. Levi wrote: “What the onticologist asserts is not that there are two worlds, the real natural world and the ideal mental world of meaning, but that there is only one level: reality. Onticology thus draws a transversal line across the distinction between mind and world, culture and nature.”

I have a feeling that the so-called realists are far too preoccupied with discounting Kant’s philosophy than anything else! It is a dialectic, where there is a kernal of Kantianism implicit in their anti-Kantianism. Part of my comment was critical of the seemingly simplistic Kantian binary between mind and world. “There should be an infinite number of ‘mind-body’ splits if the mind and body are not reduced to a simple binary but the complex continuum between mind-brain-nervous system-body is taken into account and understood as a series of transformative affordances. If so, then language, perceptions and affections of all actants would need to be incorporated into a truly ‘flat’ analysis. Discounting the variable capacities for affection and perception between actants is an imposition of a human frame of reference when trying to comprehend the relations between actants.”

Graham Harman replied (on his blog) and so did Levi. Harman:

“No one is saying that it’s the same process of concrescence. Humans have language, dreams, and cognitive processes that I would never wish to ascribe to cotton or fire. But this continues to ignore the major question: is the difference between human and non-human relations to the world worthy of giving rise to a basic ontological dualism.”

I reply emphatically, ‘Yes, if by dualism you mean different kinds of multiplicities, not a simple anti-Kantian binary.’ Harman continues:

“I say No. So does Whitehead, whose term “concrescence” glen uses without signing up for Whitehead’s explicitly anti-Kantian position. The whole point of the term “prehension” in Whitehead is to put the human and non-human back on the same ontological level. Of course there are differences between humans and stones. But that doesn’t mean it’s justified to view human experience as a special rip in the cosmic fabric, incomparable to anything else.”

Well, Whitehead does have the notion of a ‘conceptual prehension’. From Process and Reality:

“Appetition is at once the conceptual valuation of an immediate physical feeling combined with the urge towards realization of the datum conceptually prehended. For example, ‘thirst’ is an immediate physical feeling integrated with the conceptual prehension of its quenching.” (32)

Why did Whitehead need a more specific kind of prehension to describe the conceptual valuation, which I would talk about in terms of affects and percepts, if the reflexive/aware entity (in this case a human, but does not necessarily have to be a human) is not different to other non-reflexive/aware entities? This is not a minor problem in Harman’s thesis.

Levi agrees with Harman’s comments, but then expresses my point much more clearly than I did and ascribes it to Harman and his similar position:

“I think one of the key points here– and I’m in a rush so I can’t develop it as much as I would like –is that OOP is not a representational realism. That is, it is not the epistemological thesis that objects themselves are like we experience them. Rather, the human-world relation is one way in which two different objects grasp one another. The manner in which a dog encounters a tree or water encounters wood is entirely different and has its own structure of translation. In other words, it seems to me that both my position and Graham’s is already making the point you’re making.”

To clarify, I was remaking one of Deleuze’s points. It is cool that the philosophical position they are developing is not one of representational realism, the ‘correspondence’ view of reality was one that Deleuze argued against. However, there is a disjunction between Harman’s response and Levi’s additional comment. The problem is with what happens to a given object when it is grasped one way and then another. For Harman it would not be the same object, I may agree, but only to the point that an object is determined by the events of which it is part. A fire does not have a conceptual prehension of quenching when it is doused with water. Is it more useful to talk about different ‘water-objects’ or a differential repetiton of the event of water as multiplicity? A dog does have a dog version of a conceptual prehension of quenching. A fish is something else again. In everything relation water is actualised as part of a different event.

Then I go off on a bit of tangent trying to remember Whitehead’s work and the function of temporality, which is problematic. I also try to come to grips with Harman’s interpretation of Latour’s conception of temporality. Admittedly, this could have been expressed better, and I have further comments already written that I shall post as a separate blog post:

Harman presents Latour (so far along in the book as I am still reading) as offering a temporality of pure alterity. ‘Time’ comes from another actant through the character of the relation, actants in themselves do not ‘have’ a temporality, they exist ‘in’ a temporality: a spatialised time the character of which is produced through the relation between at least two actants. Is this an accurate reading?

If so, then it troubles the notion of an allegedly flat ontology. Actant1 must ‘force’ actant2 to inhabit actant1’s purely external temporality. This relation is never equal as one actant (1 or 2) will be forced to ’sync’ with the imposed temporality, which does not, in turn, belong to the other actant at all, but to yet another actant which has imposed its temporality in yet another. Hence the paradox of infinite regress where nothing seems to get done because no one has any time (boom tish), it is always imposed from outside. When does the ‘happening’ happen? How can we know this if we form yet another actual occasion and another spatialised time from within which we can relate with objects? From where does the ’spatialised time’ come from? Following the argument then, actants can’t create a temporality because it is an infinite regress of temporalities handed down. To me this reads like an ontological version of Zeno’s paradox.

Levi replies:

The difficulty I have with Bergson’s understanding of temporality is that I find it difficult to see how anything could ever emerge from it. I think this is a difficulty with Deleuze’s ontology as well. We have the one-all of the virtual populated by singularities and whatnot, but it’s not at all clear why something would ever be actualized from within this pre-individual field. Similarly, in Bergson’s pure duration, it’s not clear why anything would ever become spatialized at all or why we wouldn’t just have pure and endless flux. Here I think Bachelard provides a convincing critique of Bergson in The Dialectic of Duration, though I don’t agree with his solution. Your discussion of Latour, and Whitehead for that matter, is unrecognizable to me. For Latour it is not that objects don’t have time but rather that time arises from objects or actants.

And my reply which is yet to be allowed through the moderation queue is:

I get the notion of a flat ontology as forwarded by Latour and others. The problem with existence is that it ebbs and flows, so if something is existing in a different ebb and flow to something else it seems problematic to reduce the difference in respective ebb and flows to merely purport that they ebb and flow in the same way. There is no difference in terms of the character of being in the world between things, for sure, but how they come into and out of the world depends on the rhythms of ebbing and flowing. Hence, the ontology is only flat along one dimension. I am not sure how useful it is to proclaim that this one dimension of ‘flatness’ is flat, with which I am in total agreement, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. Looking at different rhythms of becoming and the differential repetition of events, ie the bits of ontology that certainly are not flat, seems far more useful for actually thinking about and engaging with the world.

Now my response regarding time is the next blog post.

“The question is only whether we grant sufficient reality to objects when we say that a thing is not just known by what it ‘modifies, transforms, perturbs, or creates’, but that it actually is nothing more than these effects. If the pragmatism of knowledge becomes a pragmatism of ontology, the very reality of things will be defined as their bundle of effects on other things.” (95)

It is unclear for me from Harman’s writing if this is meant to be a critique or a positive observation. I have a feeling that because Harman is attempting to develop an object-oriented philosophy and not an event-based philosophy he would say it is a critique. So far this is the best comment in his book, however, so I thought I better post about it.

If you are concerned with events as constituting reality, then you begin with a concern with onto-epistemological problems. I am still reading so I am not sure if Harman goes on to argue that we can somehow know reality and discuss it in any sensible fashion without relying on assumptions of what is happening beyond its effects (what with certain qualifications Deleuze would call an ‘event’). If reality is in part consituted by the relations formed with an observer, then we cannot even know the full extent of these relations let alone the ‘objects’ we form them with!

I already have about 12 pages of notes which shall form the basis of a critical review.

I have been idly contemplating the role, function and incorporation of creativity into capitalism. The contemplation has been instigated because I now work in a commercial enterprise. For the first time in my life I am being forced to think like a capitalist. There is something liberating and joyful about this. For so long I have basically been at war with a part of myself — my habitus — that was individuated/grown in the capitalist ecology of late-20th century neoliberalism. Many people opt out of this war much earlier in life and dismiss it as teenage fantasy, and some continue the war fueled by teenage fantasy, but I am doing neither. I am learning. This learning is progessing along two main axes. One of which I describe below in an anexact yet rigorous fashion

From my PhD research I already have an account of how human endeavour — no matter how seemingly trivial and banal — is commercialised. I have been haunted by Manuel DeLanda’s comments regarding the uselessness of the term ‘commodification’ in that it is far too simplisitic a term. Indeed, I agree it is far too simple. I have been thinking about the concept of the spectacle and how to invert it to stand it right side up on its material base. The spectacle has been described a number of ways since Debord. I think the closest to my way of thinking come from Jonathan Crary’s remarks on ‘relations of attention’:

Spectacle is not primarily concerned with looking at images, but rather with the construction of conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects, even within a world in which mobility and circulation are ubiquitous. In this way attention becomes key to the operation of noncoercive forms of power. This is why it is not inappropriate to conflate seemingly different optical or technological objects [in a discussion of Foucault’s and Debord’s respective works]: they are similarly about arrangements of bodies in space, techniques of isolation, cellularization, and above all separation. Spectacle is not an optics of power but an architecture. (Crary 1999: 74-75)

In my dissertation I describe this as an imperceptible ‘structurating expectation’ that is felt in the bodies of enthusiasts. Alongside what Deleuze isolates as two of Foucault’s conceptual innovations — ‘statements’ and ‘visibilities’ — is this third [something]. I am not sure what to call it. It has a far more dynamic relationality than both the ‘statement’ and ‘visible’. Sanford Kwinter isolates something similar in his book Achitectures of Time. I will try to outline precisely what I am trying to talk about.
The first part seems similar to what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘refrain’ in that it has a catalysing function. A ‘new’ iteration of organisation precipitates across the heterogeneous elements grouped by a given consistency. There is a seemingly silly dimension to this: the elements are grouped because they are grouped. But that ignores the dynamic dimension of how different basins of consistency (I prefer this to basins of attraction, as ‘attraction’ implies a relation between similar elements, when they are purely heterogeneous) are formed and unformed.

Note I have used the Derridean term ‘iteration’ to describe the relation between different consistencies of organisation. This is a problemtic term. The event, in Derrida’s philosophy, is that irreducible element that cannot be actualised and is continually deferred. What in Deleuzian philosophy would be called the ‘pure event’. Without a doubt there is a pure event, that of pure existence, of everything, the cosmos, for all eternity. This is perfectly useless for mundane human affairs. Introduce any degree of spatialisation and temporalisation — so that the pure happening of the cosmos becomes the happening of any discrete composition of elements — and there is a near infinite complexity of temporality, spatiality and causality. The best concept I have come across that attempts to tackle this complexity is that of ‘transversality’.
‘Transversality’ is a term that describes the non-spatial and non-temporal contiguity of elements in a complex system. The character of transversal relationality is what Deleuze and Guattari rather enigmatically, and with a hint of irony (at least for this reader), describe as ‘problematic’. The seriality of the differential repetition of events into iterative organisational consistencies is not linear; it has a ‘problematic’ character. The seriality is transversal. The second dimension of this [something] I am trying to describe is its transversality. The transversal (iterative) seriality is contained within the [something].

A problem that took me a long time to be able to even grasp was with seemed to be the conflict inherent between different interests within a given consistency of elements. In my dissertation this consistency of elements most often appeared as the ‘scene’ of an enthusiasm. How to reconcile the commercial intersts of capital and the subjective interests of enthusiasts born of a complex psychology of identity and so on. Perhaps the simplest way to imagine this is in terms of the conflict of ideology. There is a clash of beliefs at the level of what is perceptible and expressible as signifying elements in terms of what is visible and statements (what can be said at any given juncture). Yet, in a war for example, the conflict has a dimension of participation in that, as the cliche goes, it takes two to tango.

Whitehead’s concept of ‘congruence’ is a way to grasp the asignifying relationality between elements that are otherwise antagonistic. Perhaps this is an echo of human will or any will for that matter, one that does not yet take on the consistency of agency, yet overdetermines the trajectory of elements that have a consistency and the character of this consistency. At stake is the integration of the perceptible — the object world of a subject — and the vast imperceptible transversal relationality of the happening of iteration and the pure event of the cosmos. The transversal contiguity of iterative consistencies has a congruent relationality that is felt, ie as affect, but is otherwise imperceptible to participants. To frame it in the terms of another conceptual paradigm, it is the content of what Kant described as intuition. Congruence then is the third and, at this stage of conceptual development, final dimension of this [something] I am trying to describe.

There is a fourth dimension that with purposeful irony is related to time. I haven’t quite figured out how to formulate this as yet. The specific problem is super complex and relates to different orders of causality (feedback and feedforward loops, for example) within the transversal seriality of different iterations of consistency. At the moment I am leaning towards another concept from Whitehead to describe the processual dimension of this complex causality, what he called ‘appetition’. For Whitehead, this was the integration of prehensions prehending each other into an ‘actual occurence’, basically what Deleuze would call ‘actualisation’. The troubling part of this is the function of human imagination in the form of memory and probabilistic calculation, of how the ‘past’ or felt relationality of crystalised impercibility commonally referred to as ‘memory’, affects the relations of futurity by opening or closing perceptible relations and thus effecting the present directionality of action. It is a feedback loop with a feedforward loop ratified on the level of affect and directly consecrating action into the appropriate and inappropriate. This is what I would call the appetition of the spectacle and pushes Crary’s description of the spectacle as an ‘architecture’ into a fourth dimension.

To return to my opening remarks, what I am learning is how to map the effect of capital within this dynamic through the distribution of effort into the appropriateness or not of action. How to render this process of the distribution of appropriate action perceptible and guide it seems to me to be the location of agency and the purpose of what Deleuze described as counter-actualisation. One positive effect of all this thinking is that the distribution of effort within this transversal iterations of consistency as I understand clearly renders the utter conceptual poverty of the phrase ‘self interest’. ‘Self interest’ is a refrain that consecrates the distribution of effort into actions for the ‘self’ as appropriate and thus ratifying the affects of capitalist apprehension and, in a word, judgement.

Partially in response to Steve Shario’s post on biopolitics here is an old post that I was a long way off finishing and have decided to post in parts as I have time. I addded the last paragraph to inidicate where the other three parts are headed. They are some rough drafts of ideas I am working on for a book chapter.

One common knot I tried to untie all semester with my students in the Consumer Culture unit I tought was regarding loyalty cards and/or programs.

Maurizio Lazzarato points to the work of Zarifian to indicate one way to understand the function of ‘loyalty’. The long two paragraph extract below highlights, first, the biopolitical dimensions of consumerism (not in the bios=life=biology sense of some interpretations of biopolitics) and, second, the importance of the virtual feedforward loops that cultivate and then harness anticipation as an affective or ‘felt tendency’ for guiding consumer behaviour:

[C]ompetition between companies is aimed not at conquering a market but at ‘capturing a clientele’, at building a customer capital which is managed monopolistically. The market, as understood by political economy, does not exist or is identified with constitution/capute of customers. Two elements are essential tto this strategy: building customer loyalty and having the capacity to renew what is on offer through innovation. The space within which transforms the co-operation between minds into a public/clientele. The capture of a clientele and the building of its loyalty means first and foremost capturing attention and memory, capturing minds, creating and capturing desires, beliefs (the sensible) and networks.

All production is the production of services, that is a transformation of “the conditions of activity and the capacity for future actions of customers, users, and the public”, which in the end always aims at the ‘mode of life’. The service does not satisfy a pre-existing demand, but it must anticipate it, it must ‘make it happen’. This anticipation takes place entirely within the domain of the virtual by mobilising resources such as linguistic resources and language, communication, rhetoric, images, etc. The anticipation of services by the virtual and signs has the advantage, on the one hand, to be able to use all properties of language, thus opening up the exploration of several possibles, and, on the other hand, to enable work on sense through communication. (193)

In the micro-physics of consumer exchange and consumption the services may very well satisfy demands that do not pre-exist and which are co-individuated with the correlate consumer subjectivity through the capacity communicative apparatus to incite (not determine or dominate) consumption. What I find fascinating is the interplay of various temporalities in this process. Lefebvre may have called this rhythmanalysis, but perhaps something is lost in translation as each iterative individuation differentially repeats what apear to be circular power relations in different ways. So it is not circular or rhythmic, but an iterative spiral and heterogeneous.

The rates of change, or different capacities to absorb and nullify or magnify the effect of contingencies, exist at thresholds of different scales. The ‘new’ for a consumer (‘innovation’) is not the same ‘new’ for the business. For example, consumers may understand each version of an iPod to be ‘new’, but from the biopolitical perspective of individuating or capturing a clientele, Apple wants the iPod consumer base to at least remain the same or at most grow. Apple has to ensure the iPod is different enough so nothing changes.

These different rates of change then pose an interesting problem when trying to produce customer loyalty, particularly in those circumstances where there is no necessary reason why a consumer should use one service or commodity over another, such as grocery shopping where the ‘same’ commodity and service is provided by myriad businesses. One way I have been thinking about this over the course of the semester and discussing it with students in lectures and tutorials, is through the function of loyalty cards and programs.

The character of ‘loyalty’ has changed over the last 20-30 years. Customer ‘loyalty’ used to be connected to some quality of the service or commodity on offer. People shopped and consumer because they were serviced by their local shop, they travelled because of some special quality provided by another business, and sought to distinguish themselves from other consumers through these qualilty items. This qualitative dimension produced business-based ‘goodwill’. ‘Goodwill’ is a social relation associated with a business premised on trust, quality and other such positive social traits. ‘Goodwill’ is worth something and is often figured in calculations of business worth. The ‘loyalty’ of contemporary ‘loyalty cards’ is not premised on ‘goodwill’ but a quantitative metric driven by outcomes-based assessment of economic exchange.

What I am interested in is 1) the relations of temporality between the incorporeal infrastructures of ‘saving’ and consumers inculcated in the logic and practice of using the cards, and therefore the microphysics of power in these relations of ‘saving’ and a global market-based cultural economy, 2) the affective character of these relations and the habitualised practices and appreciation of tendential fields of possibility that emerged around contingency and the rhythmic harnessing of contingency into the iterative rhythms of the cultural economy calendar (e.g. xmas, etc), and 3) the way constellations of power relations enable or incicte consumers to consume in a properly biopolitical fashion (mobilising entire populations), so practices of consumption become defined by how contingencies are processed congruently with the fields of possibility overdetermined by a synergistic network of commecial interests.

Kant: “What is related to general human inclinations and needs has a market price; that which, even without presupposing a need, conforms with a certain taste, that is, with a delight in the mere purposeless play of our mental powers, has a fancy price; but that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has not merely a relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth, that is, dignity.”

I find the concept of dignity fascinating, not least of which because dignity in a general sense and in Kant’s moral sense above seems to be hard to find nowadays. The first time I recognised I needed to think about something along the lines of ‘dignity’ (but without knowing what to call it) was after hearing a Vietnam veteran speak at work about his new book. He had a certain gravitas that did not beg or challenge you or attempt to lose or win you over in any way.

Diginity is not decency, I don’t care about decency. Dignity for me is a kind of relationality.

I am going to the Gold Coast for two nights and I am leaving in about 5 or so hours. I had to finish off writing my class notes for an online class I am teaching over winter school. It is my first postgraduate class situation and it is very fun. The class size is small and the students are very switched on. It is shit we don’t have more contact hours, but the course is designed for those who basically work fulltime.

Speaking of work, I have lined up a pretty solid amount of casual work for next semester. I need to get my focus back on my work and stop buggering around in the weird limbo space I find myself. In the winter school class we draw on Kate Crawford’s Adult Themes for the section on the shifting character of work. She raises the example of the Austrian village, Marienthal:

A famous study of unemployment and its sociological effects was based on a small textile factory village in Austria called Marienthal. During the 1930s, the factory hit hard times, and three- quarters of families in the village became dependent on relief payments. The study observed how continued joblessness slowly deprived the people of Marienthal of the patterns and disciplines that give life structure and meaning:
The workers of Marienthal have lost the material and moral incentives to make use of their time. Now that they are no longer under any pressure, they undertake nothing new and drift gradually out of an ordered existence into one that is undisciplined and empty.’
It was a groundbreaking study that detailed how devastating unemployment can be for individuals and for a community at large. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote that the people in the Marienthal study were dispossessed of routine, of the vital illusion of having a function or a mission and, ultimately, experienced a kind of social death.

So for the new precarious or ‘flexible’ workers, even privileged workers like casual academics, have to either continually reorientate their ‘routine’ in the warding-off-of-social death way that Bourdieu describes or find some way to incorporate workplace churn into their subjectivities. I have been doing the former and, well, failing miserably. I am already something of a amateur nihilist so it doesn’t really help to have to jump one’s mind set from the relative ontological security of the PhD completion process to the bleak prospect of 2-3 months maximum guaranteed employment. It is less a gravy train and more like an aerobics machine in one of the lowest levels of Hell, Tartarus (see Tantalus). A job is always just in reach, but a career can never be grasped. (EDIT: Hmmm, makes me think of both Adorno’s description of ‘spectacle’ and Whitehead’s concept of ‘appetition’…)

The Hell metaphor was a deliberate segue for bringing up the tv show Reaper. I think it is pretty good at problematising the workplace for post-youth, young adults, albeit in a weird US, non-class-antagonism sort of way. The main character works two jobs. One as the ‘reaper’ for Satan, capturing souls that escape from Hell. The other really is hell, working in some shitty ‘home depot’ type of store with a complete asshole of a boss… Worth checking out when it gets to Australia I think. From what I can deduce the second fifth of the season is a bit slow (first fifth, cool shit as Sam figures out what he is doing), but then the season length plot arc starts to have greater weight than the episodic dramas and the meta-level narratives begin to fill in the gaps.

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address (via), “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure….

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

,…Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way….Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned….