event mechanics

Nikki Usher‘s 2010 article in New Media & Society “Goodbye to the news: how out-of-work journalists assess enduring news values and the new media landscape” examines the goodbye letters, emails, speeches, columns and blog postings — “final musings” — of journalists who have been laid off, taken a ‘voluntary buyout’ or who have left the industry. Usher’s piece is somewhat polemical in tone at times, not that this is necessarily a problem, it just needs to be taken into account when digesting her arguments:

[A]ll these goodbyes reveal a silver lining – those that are being let go may be let go for business reasons, but they may also be the people failing to see the opportunities for new media and those who are unable to help newspapers be entrepreneurial in their attempts to come through the crisis they face. (924)

Usher analysed 31 ‘final musings’ as presented on the Poynter.org blog by Jim Romenesko. The terrific irony of this for anyone following the current state of journalism in the US is that Romenesko resigned from the Poynter Institute late last year after being accused of improper attribution by allegedly not using “quote marks” appropriately. The Romenesko blog was rebranded Romenesko+ and is now simply Media Wire. It is a brilliant example to use in my first lecture for my Online News unit this semester, in concert with Usher’s piece as a set reading, as we introduce and explore with students the role of ‘online news’ in the tensions of the current journalism industry.

Usher’s piece is a useful way to frame traditional understandings of journalism in the context of structural change. The analysis is useful for locating the prevailing culture of legacy print journalism in terms of the relation between individual experiences and the structural shifts that in part form their context. From a Foucaultian perspective Usher is isolating a ‘discourse event’ in the point of inflection between two discursive regimes and correlative compositions of power relations (dispositifs). Usher draws on Fredric Jameson’s conceptualisation of ‘nostalgia’ and Barbie Zelizer’s notion that rather than ‘profession’, US journalists should be understood as belonging to an ‘interpretive community’.

Usher’s use of Jameson’s ‘nostalgia’ begins with her arguing that journalists now work in a ‘post-modern news era’ (914). (What would be absolutely fascinating for me would be to revisit the so-called ‘Media Wars’ of the late-1990s in light of such a description. On the face of it, Keith Windschuttle and his ‘traditionalist’ supporters have lost.) She is mostly describing the shift Fordist modes of news production, which includes changes to reliable occupational routines of ‘newsroom’ work practices and changes to the status and function of the audience. The inherent double movement of Jameson’s nostalgia is that it is backwards oriented and forward directed. Nostalgia produces collective memories of the past while at the same produces a potential of a better future. The nostalgia of journalists, Usher suggests, also masks reality in that bias, corporate control and so on are not constitutive elements:

They are nostalgic for a time when journalism meant stability and economic security, and deeply believe that traditional print journalism contributed to democratic discourse and public service – masking the reality, perhaps, that their work may have helped sustain and perpetuate power structures. The old way of doing newspapers is threatened, and journalists are uncertain about the future. But significantly, they also fail to be forward-looking even as they are backward-looking: their nostalgia is self-limiting because it fails to produce a vision of the future that catapults traditional journalists into the new media world and new media economics. (923)

The current transformations to the legacy news industry serve as an example of what Zelizer calls the ‘interpretive community’. Usher writes:

Discourse about the changes in the news industry creates a discursive community of journalists. This, then, shapes shared meanings about the trials and tribulations journalists face and takes on the collective memory of ‘professional journalism’ in a pre-web, pre-blog, pre-newspaper slump era. (915)

Usher’s analysis is structured around four main areas of journalists’s discourse functioning as an ‘interpretive community’: 1) ‘Journalism as an ideal’ (916-9), 2) ‘New Media Economics’ (919-21), 3) confusion around what is being challenged or changed, mostly in terms of technology (921-2), and 4) a failure to be ‘forward thinking’ (923-5).

The basic tenets of journalism as an ideal are that journalism works in the public interest, it remains impartial, serves the voiceless and provides a crucial link in democracy (916). The ideal of journalism is to serve as ‘public service journalism’. Mark Deuze defines public service journalism as:

Journalists share a sense of ‘doing it for the public’, of working as some kind of representative watchdog of the status quo in the name of people, who ‘vote with their wallets’ for their services (by buying a newspaper, watching or listening to a newscast, visiting and returning to a news site). (447)

Deuze (2005: 448) notes that journalists can learn to have more responsive attitude to their ‘publics’ and therefore use this “age-old ideological value” as a wau to maintain the power relations of the status quo while learbing how to adapt to changing conditions. As Usher describes it, in the context of ‘prestige papers’ (such as the LA Times or New York Times), “these individuals want to reassert their claims to defining the public interest and determining what public service journalism is, rather than creating a more open conversation with a newly engaged audience of news producers and consumers” (917).

In the context of smaller, local newspapers this public service ideal is described in terms of a newspaper being a (more paternalistic than patronizing) ‘caretaker’ helping a public “interpret difficult ideas” and also sustaining local community by reproducing existing routines of newspaper communication and correlative power relations. Usher’s point is that this does not take into account those on- and off-line practices that reproduce ‘community’ that do not have the newspaper at the centre (918). Newspaper in general are seen to be arbiters of democracy in the idealized practice of highlighting the power relations that underpin existing governmental and market-based power relations. There was a general lament, Usher notes, that transformations to journalism are understood in terms of catering to the ‘market’ rather than ‘democracy’. ‘New media economics’ (and ‘new media technologies’) therefore become a threat to the democratic role of public service journalism. Political writer Michele Jacklin’s final column captures a sense of this when she writes, “As a substitute for hard news and insightful analysis, readers are served up a steady diet of splashy graphics, celebrity gossip and stories with the heft of cotton candy.”

In the Australian context, this tension between hard news and insightful analysis versus forms of content designed to increase website visitors and ‘hits’ is represented from the other side of the conflict by NineMSN.com’s online news editor Hal Crawford in his commentary about the Australian Federal Government’s Independent Media Inquiry posted to mUmbrella.com.

Real time data tell you exactly how popular a story is, and to maximise your audience size you need to weed out stories that no one wants to read. This kind of brutal treatment can be hard for an old school journalist to take.
Initially you may get upset that no one is reading the ‘important’ stories, but that arrogance fades quickly. Truly important stories rate. If some piece of news is going to change lives or become socially necessary or is just plain interesting, it gets traffic.

The NineMSN submission to the inquiry similarly seeks to problematise ‘quality journalism’:

The traditional view is that a key role for the news media is to be an independent monitor of government power and therefore quality journalism requires truth, accuracy and independence. We think it’s also important to acknowledge that that news media serves diverse roles. [...]
For ninemsn the most important indicator of quality content is that it is trusted. Trust is the key concern for our news team because trust equates to brand reputation which drives of audience. [...]
The traditional media are no longer small elite who serve as the gatekeepers of the news. Value in the digital news media is increasingly generated by interactions with users including the use of social media to provide commentary, share stories and drive traffic. News produced for digital platforms has to be a quality product if we want people to engage with our stories, to contribute their own insights and to participate in their dissemination.

The discourse surrounding ‘new media economics’ in Usher’s analysis is less important to my Online News unit this semester, but will be central to the second semester unit organised around ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurial journalism’. The second semester unit is designed to prepare students for a more market-oriented, audience-driven form of journalism at the level of producing individual stories through to the level of creating standalone ‘online media enterprises’. Usher’s analysis notes that individual journalists generally take structural shifts personally, and see their respective departures as a failure of ‘owners’ or ‘Wall St’ to recognise talent. This is important in an educational context because ‘talent’ is still recognised, of course; it is more a question of the character of the ‘talent’ and of the mechanisms of ‘recognition’.

Jacklin’s comments are also interesting in the context of the socio-technical practices and technologies that Usher suggests will assist journalism. She lists a number of “recommendations as the possible salvation for traditional journalism’s problems: increased social networking, conections with the audience, more multimedia platforms, crowd-sourcing, better forums, flash-graphics, newspaper-hosted community blogs and hyperlocal reporting, to name a few” (922).

Lastly, Usher notes that the article odes not mean to say that other journalists are not reconsidering with the public and “are deeply engaged in trying to understand what such things as user-generated content, blogging, comment boards, data-mining, crowd sourcing and the like might mean for their newsrooms” (924-5). She ends with a provocative question: “to what extent are non-traditional journalists concerned with the discourse about traditional news values and the idea of what it means to be a journalist?” My response, shared with other educators, is to work on developing units that hope to empower students when they hit the job market.

“From salesman to client, from client to salesman, from consumer to consumer and from producer to producer, whether competing or not, there is a continuous and invisible transmission of feelings — an exchange of persuasions and excitement, through conversations, through newspaper for example — which precedes commercial exchanges, often making them possible, and which always help to set their conditions.” (Gabriel Tarde in Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay “The Science of Passionate Interests”, 39)

My ‘festive season’ reading has largely consisted of Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay’s “The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology”. It makes for fascinating reading. The extent of my Tarde reading consists of his Laws of Imitation and the special 2007 issue of the journal Economics and Society on his work. (Oh, plus Tarde’s post-apocalyptic science-fiction novella!)

In The Science of Passionate Interests, Latour and Lepinay have produced a diagrammatic reading of Tarde’s masterwork Psychologie Economique (1902). They set up Tarde’s core problematic in terms of developing an adequate critical theory (or ‘science’) of economies that does not fall into the same mistakes as ‘economics’. Here are my notes to part one (1-32). The science part of it is a development of the notion that everything can be measured according to measures appropriate for their terms.

Latour and Lepinay begin with Tarde’s theory of value, and demonstrate its relation to subjectivity. For Tarde subjectivity refers to the “contagious nature of desires and beliefs, jumping from one individual to the next without ever [...] going through a social context or structure” (9). Value extends to all desires and beliefs; it is made up of all the continual assessments we make. Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital is also another way of critically engaging with non-economic economies of social and cultural value. The difference between the two is that Bourdieu’s focus is squarely the deployment of cultural competence and social esteem within structurated fields. Tarde and Bourdieu have different takes on the aquisition of value, for Bourdieu it is learnt as a product of imbrication in a field, for Tarde (immanent social) value is produced through the special interference effect of congruent practices of ‘imitation’, what he calls ‘invention’. Tarde’s value is a mmeasure of talent, Bourdieu’s is a measure of competence.

Tarde argues that economists did not make use of all the possible ways value can be quantified and they instead relied on, firstly, reducing all human behaviour to an ‘objective’ realm and, secondly, extending this reduction to all domains of human activity. Latour and Lepinay argue that economists format social relations. They do this by confusing two orders of measuring. The actual measured measurement that “captures the real state” (15) and the measuring measurement that formats the social world. Latour and Lepinay quote Tarde’s example of how the value of ‘belief’ is (re)produced by monks:

Priests and the religious have studied the factors involved in the production (meaning here reproduction) of beliefs, of ‘truths’, with no less care than the economists have studied the reproduction of wealth. They could give us lessons on the practices best suited to sowing the faith (retreats, forced meditation, preaching) and on the reading, the conversations and types of conduct that weaken it. (Tarde in L&L 15)

For Tarde it is a question of the laborious work of seeking out the specific values of any activity. Latour and Lepinay introduce the term valuemeter to refer to all devices whose specific function is to make visible and readable all the value judgements of what Tarde calls economics (16). The result is a metrology produced by chains of valuemeters. They provide the sociology of science as an example, where a metrology of learned literature “made visible and readable by the very extension of the quasi-currency we call credibility where, better than anywhere else, the very production of the finely differentiated degrees of belief plays out” (19).
The flaw in the approach of economists is to imagine they had to pursue a line of inquiry characterized by a “progress of detachment, objectivity and distance” (20). Latour and Lepinay provide money as an example of a ‘measuring measure’. What money measures, as a process of simplified registering for the purposes of capture (money as an ‘apparatus of capture’?), has kind of link to what is indicated by the numbers (21).

It would be a mistake to imagine, Latour and Lepinay warn, that as the number of metrological chains of valuemeters increases, there is a danger of shifting from passions to reasons, from the inter-subjective of Tarde’s social economy to the anemic economics of neoliberal markets, etc. Nor is it about finally recovering economic reason, but about how the economic rational is always thoroughly irrational. The solution to ward off the epistemological problem of false distance, built on a scaffold of irrationalities, is to properly appreciate value “from up close, in small numbers, and from the inside” (28). Latour and Lepinay are clear on this:

If there is, for Tarde, a mistake to be avoided, it is to take social facts “as things,” whereas, in other sciences, if we take things “as things,” it is for lack of a better alternative! How could sociologists abd, more surprisingly, economists, have had the crazy idea of wanting to imitate physicists and biologists through an entirely artificial effort at distancing, while the very thinkers they tried to imiate would give their right hands to find themselves at last close to particles, cells, frogs, bodies with whom they try top come into intimate association with the help of their instruments? (29)

The central problem has been to mistake the discipline of economics for the economy (31-32).

There has been a bit of a discussion on Twitter and around the internet regarding whether or not the Occupy Wall Street protests have received ‘sufficient’ news coverage. Here is a good piece by Joe Pompeo where he crunches some numbers. Erika Fry at the Columbia Journalism Review has published a piece of meta-journalism also questioning the sufficiency of the press coverage. She should be lauded for attempting to bring an analytical frame to the discussion. She draws on the work of celebrated sociologist Charles Tilly in an attempt to ascertain whether the Occupy Wall Street protest should be considered a social movement or not. Fry writes:

They [sic] press coverage indicates that most journalists have found Occupy Wall Street a movement not significant to give much coverage. If Tilly were around today, given his criteria, he’d likely agree.

Unfortunately, Tilly is certainly not the most useful academic source to draw on in this circumstance. For Tilly, social movements should be thought of as attempts by a politically engaged population to effect change to a nation’s political apparatus. Is that what is happening here? I don’t want to get into too much political or media theory, but ‘Wall Street’ is an event in part constituted by everything signified by ‘Wall Street’. Does Fry understand this? The Occupy Wall Street protests are not protesting a building or even an actual street. The protests on the actual street called Wall Street serve as a resource for counter images, the locus for the production of counter-narratives and so on. They are not protesting against a physical location; the physical location is simply a locus of action. Just as ‘Wall Street’ itself is distributed across the social body in repeated and yet different ways. Fry writes:

For a perhaps concurring perspective from the world of social science, consider the canonical work of American sociologist and political scientist Charles Tilly (he died in 2008) who developed widely-accepted criteria of what constitutes a ‘social movement.’ Yes, the media is not academia—there is of course a place for things that are timely, newsworthy, and important—the police’s questionable use of pepper spray on protesters for example—but in deciding the extent to cover a nascent protest movement, to which national media attention is oxygen, it is worth considering his criteria.

Its been pointed out that Fry’s logic is circular (nascent social movement needs national media coverage — its ‘oxygen’ — but won’t get it because it is not a social movement). But that is relatively unimportant compared to correcting the misunderstanding regarding Tilly’s work. Firstly, if Tilly was ‘canonical’ at one point, his work has shifted in status to ‘seminal’. The difference is that a ‘canon’ is a political artifact within knowledge economies, its importance is sustained by agents who are invested in its importance (imagine scholarly ‘Tilly experts’ who want Tilly to remain important). A work becomes ‘seminal’ when it has real influence in a field because it inspires other scholars to produce critical work that engages with its arguments or points in a thorough manner.

Tilly’s seminal work has inspired other scholars such as Jeroen Van Laer & Peter Van Aelst who have published a paper that is particularly relevant: “Internet and Social Movement Action Repertoires: Opportunities and Limitations” (2010). Laer and Aelst draw on Tilly’s framework without necessarily agreeing with his arguments and present their own more nuanced perspectives. This is the real scholarly influence of ‘seminal’ work. How many times Tilly’s work is set as required reading, for example, would indicate its canonical status. This indicates that it is important but not why.

Laer and Aelst offer a nuanced perspective of social movements that are entirely or partially organised around internet-based opportunities for political action. Fry seems to miss the obvious point (and, well, it is obvious, surely??) that the Occupy Wall Street protests have developed in such a way so the offline protest provides ‘oxygen’ for the online protest. Fry is not stupid, she seems to admit this point, but without sufficiently engaging with its importance:

The group has many grievances, but what they want to do about them or achieve by occupying Wall Street is much less clear—both in those “unfair” media reports and the content churned out by OWS’s own media machine.

So the Occupy Wallstreet Protest organisational group has its own ‘media machine’, ok… this is not newsworthy? Maybe not yet?

It’s just not the kind of coverage the protest group—which produces a lot of media in its own right—was hoping for.

Fry admits that the protest group is producing a large amount of its own media content through its ‘media machine’. Does Fry ask if this is different from other social movement protests? Or what the protest group hopes to achieve by producing a large amount of its own media content? No, she does not.

They have also built a sophisticated social media infrastructure and communicate on Twitter. Yet, just by looking at the pictures or a livestream of events, aside from the presence of technology (lots of Macs), it’s so far hard to distinguish OWS from any other liberal protest.

They’ve also ‘built a sophisticated social media infrastructure’! So aside from the presence of ‘technology’ — you know, technology that can be used to produce your own media coverage of an event, and indeed produce a planned ‘media event’ of the protest, for which the offline protest serves as a resource — Fry finds it hard to distinguish the Occupy Wall Street protests from any other ‘liberal’ protest. Ok, this isn’t news. It isn’t even meta-news produced by a meta-journalist (a ‘journalist’ covering other journalists) from the CJR. I am not sure why Fry believes that her own inability to distinguish between liberal protests is news or even media commentary. That is why journalists should go speak to experts, instead of relying on Wikipedia definitions of useful scholarly research such as Tilly’s definition of primarily 20th century social movements. Hence, we arrive at Fry’s money shot — the line in any work of online news-based media content (I won’t call it journalism) which is designed to function as ‘link bait’. Trollumnists (columnists who function as internet trolls) will organise their columns around such examples of ‘link bait’. Fry’s link bait trollumnist money shot is that the Occupy Wall Street protests are ‘all hype’:

Tilly explains this can come from participant demeanor and an air of seriousness. OWS seems to project by it’s worthiness by its own media machine, shrewdly developed in advance of the protests to steer the narrative and call attention to itself — the rather sophisticated websites, Twitter feeds, livestream technology, and thought that has gone into documentation and projecting an image online is impressive. OWS’s PR machine has not been matched by on-the-ground reality. OWS is all hype.

Occupy Wallstreet is all hype. Clearly. Fry says so based on evidence derived from Tilly’s Wikipedia page and her own inability to distinguish between protest movements as defined by her robust analytical journalistic mind. Why not ask a related question based on Tilly’s own understanding of internet-based social movements, one that is far more interesting and, dare I say it, newsworthy? Let’s frame it in a way that would be relevant for a meta-journalist such as Fry working at CJR:

Charles Tilly argued that internet-based social movements do not have strong enough social ties to constitute a viable social movement, does this observation apply to the Occupy Wall Street protests? If not, then how should journalists approach internet-based social movements? Are there any ethical or professional issues attempting to cover a social group that is producing their own media narratives that compete with the media narratives in the so-called ‘mainstream media’?

You see how that would produce actual news? It transcends the political divide not because it asks for representative opinions from various ‘sides’ of the protest (“he said, she said” journalism), but because it asks a question that anyone interested in the protests from any side of politics will actually want to know.

I hope there are not too many typos in the above, I’ve had to hammer it out before a three and ahalf hour drive to Sydney!!

On one of my recent trips up to Sydney from Canberra I listened to the debate hosted at the London School of Economics and produced as a program for the BBC with the theme of Keynes vs. Hayek. I listened to the ‘complete’ version availble on iTunesU, posted by the LSE. Keynes is traditionally understood to belong to ‘the left’ and Hayek to ‘the right’. I listened with an accute curiousity that developed into a sense of disbelief. The most sensible voice in the debate was Lord Robert Skidelsky who suggested that a targeted investment program would get most western economies out of the slump they find themselves in. On the other hand, from a systems theory perspective the Hayekian approach seems the most sensible — let the market-based systems sought themselves out, booms and busts equalise over the long term. But, for Hayekians, how does this happen? Representing the Hayekian side is Professor Georg Selgin. In the written version of his prepared speech (Skidelsky’s presentation is also there), Selgin says:

Liquidate, in short, the whole sub-prime bubble-blowing apparatus that was nurtured by easy monetary policy.

That would have meant letting insolvent banks that lent or invested unwisely go bust.

But instead our governments chose to keep bad banks going and that is why quantitative easing has proven a failure.

Quantitative easing failed because almost all the new money the government created has gone to shore up the balance sheets of irresponsible bankers.

‘Irresponsible bankers’? Ok. This sounds great! In fact, both sides of the debate seemed to agree that at a certain point economics becomes a discussion of morals. For the Keynesians it is a question of recognising the humanity of those suffering because of irresponsible decisions mostly by others (i.e. Selgin’s “irresponsible bankers”). On the other hand, the Hayekians argue that governments should not support ‘markets’ (or the legacy organisation of commercial entities that function “irresponsibly”) through spending because that will just encourage further irresponsibility, so the only appropriate response is to weather the downturn and work on making sure it doesn’t happen again when a ‘bust’ rips through a society.

What I do not understand from the Hayekian position, based on what Selgin was saying, is that the unfettered “market” is both the source of freedom and the ‘fairest’ way to distribute responsibilities while at the same time also the mechanism by which agents that constitute the market (i.e. “irresponsible bankers”) are morally censured/reprimanded (or something) so they will not participate in or contribute to unsustainable ‘booms’ again. I was actually shocked by this suggestion. Firstly, that most “irresponsible bankers” couldn’t care less what damage they do to ‘markets’ through their unfettered pursuit of profit, and, secondly, that the ‘market’ is the same mechanism that enables this unfettered pursuit of profit (discussed by Hayekians in terms of ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’) will also somehow distribute punitive measures to those deservingly responsible. Is there not an inherent contradiction here, where the ‘market’ is asked to do two things at once? I know there are some allegedly intellectual Hayekians so I’d welcome any response that attempted to resolve this contradiction.

Let me frame it another way. Below is a clip of one of the “irresponsible banker”-types that Selgin is discussing. Real capitalists (who are the real problem) do not care where their profit comes from; they game the markets to exploit any opportunity possible. This is a pathological position based on an active disavowal of humanity and the suffering that accompanies the collapse of a market (or for that matter the unethical production of surplus value). (Found via here and here.)

The ‘market’ as discussed by the trader above is not the Hayekian market of Selgin — one that is both the source of ‘freedom’ and moral disciplinarity — it is the market constituted by thousands of capitalists who attempt to embody the most pathological dimensions of capital itself. There is no discussion of the creation of real value and no discussion of how to correct the immorality of previous consitutent participants of an obviously failed composition of the ‘market’. How would a Hayekian respond to the above trader? How would a Hayekian concerned with booms as well as busts respond to the current mining boom in Australia? What mechanisms would be put into place to restrict the irresponsible boom that is currently being created through the commodities market?

Do Hayekians have a concept of a sustainable opportunity? This is my interest in all this. I am thinking about the current state of the journalism industry that can no longer rely on legacy business models from the print-era or broadcast-era media industry. Is there a Hayekian concept of opportunity that is not framed in terms of the entrepreneurial recognition of a capitalist profit that only has to be actualised through a commercial enterprise, but is rather turned towards a sustainable commercial model? I have been researching this and I have not come across anything like the concept of a “sustainable opportunity” in any of the economics/business literature.

This is why Skidelsky’s response seems to be the most appropriate to me. A targeted investment plan does not mean investing money into capitalist enterprises solely designed to realise profit and hence game an inherently pathological market (i.e. the stupidity of the bank bailout), it means investing in projects that will produce real value.

Danny has raised a point from Spivak’s argument regarding the character of ‘value’ in reply to my previous post and I agree that he makes a good point.

While I agree with the overall thrust of the post, I don’t think that positioning surplus-value as being overwhelmed by the value of financial capital is really tenable in transnational labour of the type that produces the ‘racial’ trope in the London riots. The consumer goods being ‘looted’ should not be dismissed here. As Marx gestures toward in his writings on primitive accumulation, in a certain way the subject is always super-adequate to itself, and this is the origin of surplus value, rather than it being simply the easiest path to any exchange value. The question is who has the monopoly on appropriation of this value. For me a useful investigation of this is Spivak’s “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” from Diacritics, still holding up pretty well a quarter of a century on:

“even as circulation time attains the apparent instantaneity of thought (and more), the continuity of production ensured by that attainment of apparent coincidence must be broken up by capital: its means of doing so is to keep the labor reserves in the comprador countries outside of this instantaneity, thus to make sure that multinational investment does not realize itself fully there through assimilation of the working class into consumerist-humanism. It is one of the truisms oí Capital I that technological inventions open the door to the production of relative rather than absolute surplus-value. [Capital I 643-54. "Absolute surplus-value" is a methodologically irreducible theoretical fiction.] Since the production and realization oí relative surplus-value, usually attendant upon technological progress and the socialized growth of consumerism, increase capital expenditure in an indefinite spiral, there is the contradictory drive within capitalism to produce more absolute and less relative surplus-value as part of its crisis management. In terms of this drive, it is in the “interest” of capital to preserve the comprador theater in a state of relatively primitive labor legislation and environmental regulation… To state the problem in the philosophical idiom of this essay: as the subject as super-adequation in labor-power seems to negate itself within telecommunication, a negation of the negation is continually produced by the shifting lines of the international division of labor. This is why any critique of the labor theory of value, pointing at the unfeasibility of the theory under post-industrialism, or as a calculus of economic indicators, ignores the dark presence of the Third World.” p84

I recall we’ve had previous discussions about related topics and I have been trying to figure out what ‘value’ is for a while now, see this post. This previous thinking about ‘value’ was in a general sense as it seemed that any essentialist definition, that located it ‘in’ something or ‘standing in’ for something else (worker’s labour, capitalist exchange), was deficient, and I was thinking about it more in terms of a kind of event of normative equivalence that produced the normative as much as the value. Very similar to what Spvak suggests, but in Deleuzian rather than Derridean terms.

To return to Danny’s comment, if I am reading Spivak adequately, the non-correspondence between the use value of the worker’s labour for the capitalist and its exchange value would normally be determined by a materialist excess of the worker (and not, as Spivak warns, an idealist ‘lack’ or individualist psychologisation, i.e. subject of consciousness). I agree with this point, and I also agree with most of what Spivak argues to the extent that I want to suggest that now it is only a partial account. She assumes an “increase [of] capital expenditure in an indefinite spiral”. This is no longer the case (if it ever was), due to the failure of the debt markets to provide the conditions of possibility for indefinite capital expenditure. I am drawing a bridge across the principle terms of her argument (from the agents of multinational capitalism and their puppets in the comprador theater (developing countries and their manufacturing capabilities)) in a different direction to the one she is. She is following a line of exploitation that she rightly argues was being ignored by most academics who were suggesting at the time that the labour theory of value was inadequate for post-industrial capitalism. I want to suggest that with the relative failure of the debt markets there is not a continuation of the relation she indicates in her essay. My understanding of all this is largely congruent with the argument of this essay in metamute. I want to suggest that the relation of exclusion that Spivak isolates is far more porous now than it was when she was writing. That is my first point.

Secondly, the deconstruction of the representation/transformation chain from labour-power to capital that she carries out in the first two fifths of her essay does not include the specific functioning of debit and consumer credit. The ‘mortgage’ as a way of colonising time means that the future state of a given population of workers is transformed. Brett Neilson has written about this. Although the people rioting could be reconfigured along ‘super-adequate worker’ lines, I simply don’t think this is _currently_ the case. The mechanisms of exploitation Spivak is concerned with don’t seem to exist for the rioters; there is not a separation of worker labour and the means of production because there is no means of production in London at the moment! I may be totally wrong about this, some kind of sociological research needs to be carried and probably already has. From everything I’ve read it seems the case. That was my original point above.

Perhaps a better way to think about it from my perspective, following the logic of Spivak’s essay, is that the developing world is being reproduced in small pockets in the over-developed world. (She indicates a relation between British racism and the international division of labour in a footnote, fn 10, p 83, in the context of British Marxist cultural studies, just before the section Danny quotes above.) I need to make several qualifications here.

I am making a temporal not a spatial argument. Debt produces worker-puppets to play out in a ‘comprador theater’ that exists in the future, not a geographical or spatial differentiation of the over-developed versus the developing worlds, but a historical or temporal differentiation of the present production of a surplus of workers (what I called a surplus of humanity) to be possibly ‘realised’ in the future (or not, and used as a political weapon to extract political capital, as I suggest in the revious post, and which I believe is far more likely). I can frame the rationale for this in the terms of Spivak’s argument.

Spivak assumes an ‘instantaneity of exchange’ in the over-developed countries, correlating with the relation of ‘transformation’ between money and capital, and this excludes the relation of ‘representation’ which defines the relation between labour use-value and money, which characterizes the division of labour in the developing world. For the rioting youth of London there is no instantaneity; they are excluded from these circuits of exchange and only have access to the representational logics of consumerism: the riots are a surplus of affective labour without the ‘labour’ (labour value as use-value for the capitalists).

Or to return to Spivak’s essay:

[As] the subject of super-adequation in labour-power seems to negate itself within telecommunication, a negation of the negation is continually produced by the shifting lines of the international division of labour. This is why any critique of labour theory of value, pointing at the unfeasibility of the theory under post-industrialism, or as a calculus of economic indicators, ignores the dark presence of the Third World. (84)

I am definitely including Third World. I am arguing that the international circuit of debt and consumer credit, the disappearance of access to any mode of production for the ‘super-adequate’ subject and the forthcoming draconian realization (by conservatives and capitalists) of labour-power from this surplus of humanity (the rioters) characterizes the horizon of intelligibility for the rioters and their material conditions of possibility. They are promised a consumerist world on the one hand and excluded by racialised and neo-liberal (Thatcherite dismantling of welfare state and annihilation of worker solidarity) divisions of labour from participating on the other. This is a partial reproduction of what Spivak calls the “pre-modern” (86). It is only partial to the extent that primitive accumulation does not happen, only the conditions that would enable it to occur are produced, with the possibility of it occurring in the future. At the current juncture there is a failure of what Spivak calls the ‘economic text’ to produce value.