I am writing the next lecture for the unit Consumer Culture to be delivered on Thursday and I have been thinking about Lazzarato’s event-based conception of consumption and the relation between consumers and worlds. I found these great store displays while doing the weekly shop yesterday that’ll hopefully allow me to discuss the aesthetics of consumption, less in terms of branding (that comes later in the course), but more in terms of the production of ‘worlds’.
Lazzarato’s use of ‘world’ does not literally mean some sort of terraforming exercise, but more in the sense of territorialising exercise. The world is an event and it could be of a ‘large’ or ‘small’ extension. The above image captures mere fragments of sense (perspective on self-identity), that could be assembled into a lifestyle, an event of a larger extensive and intensive scale.
The constant process of the consumer market to inflect becoming through ‘choice’ relies on a singular habitus, which may involve multiple identities. In other words there is only a single order of difference, rather than a second order difference of difference; the virtual and the actual are in a near constant relation with differences manifest between virtual-actual relations over time (generational change) and location in the networks of capital distribution.
One of the implications of this world-building thesis is that the ‘grid’ of sense that frames the world in the processual character of perspective can change and mutate with the flux and fashions of consumer culture. Surely advertising, as a communicative apparatus of capture, best succeeds when it works to create new possibilities in the lives of consumers. Not material possibilities in some quasi-Marxist sense, such as entrepreneurial opportunity, but possibilities for what can happen in the world. (This is what Deleuze and Guattariu meant when they lamented in WiP? how advertising has taken over the production of concepts.)
What does all this mean? Think about how a new product comes on the scene. The product is advertised not simply according to capacities or qualities that the object has, but the advertisements serve as a discourse-based incorporeal infrastructure for a ‘world’ within which those qualities and capacities matter. The advertisements serve as quasi-cause for this ‘world’ as it reconfigures what matters, and consumers take note and begin working towards this mattering, then the world within which the consumer subject and commodity object exist does matter as such. The incorporeal (sense, event, world) has material effects, or rather the effect of the incorporeal is material in nature.
This is not simply about what matters in the world as some kind of social sensory filter; these material reconfigurations guide people in the world and show new potentialities for (consumer-based) action. Think of the new rage amongst tech-geek minded inviduals for sub-notebooks (ASUS Eeepc, etc.), they are not as capable as other computers according to the prior discourses and worlds within which computers mattered (not as fast, not as powerful, etc.); yet, they are bought because they can ‘do’ things that these other computers can’t do. So what? They are fulfilling a need in the market for ultra-portables and constant ‘switched-on’ net-based interface, surely? Yes, they are. But they are also educating and habitualising a new cohort of consumers of what is now possible in terms of the mobility and connectivity afforded by sub-notebooks. An actual world is produced that accelerates the tendency towards the ubiquity of mobility and connectivity…
I bring all this up because Negri and Hardt in Empire discuss how politics should be understood as the production of new possibilities. If this is so, then the advertising-based communicative apparatus of capture is currently the most efficient form of politics.
This is a fascinating post, glen.
If I can raise a few questions/observations?
1. “The product is advertised not simply according to capacities or qualities that the object has, but the advertisements serve as a discourse-based incorporeal infrastructure for a ‘world’ within which those qualities and capacities matter.”
I think this is a very attractive and very productive way of thinking about what used to be called the “ideological” function/effect of advertising.
2. “Negri and Hardt in Empire discuss how politics should be understood as the production of new possibilities. If this is so, then the advertising-based communicative apparatus of capture is currently the most efficient form of politics.”
A very significant observation. The same might be said about advertising’s philosophical effects, too, at least if we understand by “philosophy” the creations of concepts (a la D&G), or — in Caputo’s terms — the thinking of the impossible so as to generate new possibilities.
Though, what does that say about philosophy and politics? Or is it that the latter are about not just producing but also “charging” possibilities (in the sense of giving them a valency)? Or to put it another way, is either philosophy or politics concerned with the production of possibilities purely for the sake of producing possibilities?
3. “The constant process of the consumer market to inflect becoming through ‘choice’ relies on a singular habitus, which may involve multiple identities. In other words there is only a single order of difference, rather than a second order difference of difference;”
I’m in tune (or at least I imagine that I am) with everything you’ve said above about advertising, capture, the material effects of the incorporeal, and the becoming-actual of a potentiality produced by an incorporeal infrastructure, etc. but I can’t quite think my way through the above. Would you mind elaborating on that passage? What I’m getting is that the processes/techniques of the market produce a consumer subjectivity defined by its capacity to choose (i.e. from among what the market offers) but not to choose to exercise one’s (market-defined) capacity to choose, or indeed to choose not to exercise that capacity (or possibly to choose from an array of other possibilities not produced/legitimated by the market). Would that be oversimplifying the idea?
4. “So what? They are fulfilling a need in the market for ultra-portables and constant ’switched-on’ net-based interface, surely? ”
So that explains your “choice” to eschew the chance, made possible by the destruction of your mobile phone, to get a hold of an iPhone and to go all mo-lo-fi instead?
I meant also to say that if politics is to be understood as the production of possibilities purely for the sake of producing possibilities, that strikes me as bordering on a fairly benign pluralism (esp. insofar as that formulation entails no recognition of the fact that possibilities will inevitably come into conflict, that production may entail erasure, etc.). By the same token, any politics understood as regulated according to some determined (determinate) end falls prey to the usual criticisms.
The question of the habitus is the subject of the next journal article I am working on derived from my diss. I make one general point about the concept (the difference between Deleuze and Bourdieu’s respective conceptions, which I am still working on) and then a more specific point relation to the two poles of enthusiasm (post-Kantian challenge-sublime and the commodified post-Weberian impersonal charisma of ‘neo-tribes’).
Regarding the first point, in my dissertation I do not develop my critique of Bourdieu properly, mainly because I did not understand the most useful way to frame it. I realised there was a problem with the way he had been represented (and the way he sometimes discussed it) as trying to resolve the agency versus structure divide in sociology. The problem of agency versus structure invokes a false dichotomy of action that seeks to locate causality in or out of the human, and does not properly account for how a given state of affairs is already in motion before any ‘action’ is taken. How to define a given a state of affairs and delineate it is essentially a problem of sense and correlative perspective. The residual of events — singularities — do not reside in things as much as things are defined by singularities; and these are or are not shared by people according to affective thresholds. I did understand that this observation necessarily leads to a different, primarily Deleuzian conception of the habitus. What I did not understand was how to discuss this shift.
ANT is an admirable way of engaging with this problem, but I think there is a problem with ANT’s (or at least Latour’s) demand that a given network be flattened through analysis. This move elides the biopolitical question of aggregates of (non-)human action that are part of much larger events that exceed the perspective and capacity for action of individuals within events; all this is obvious as I have had to engage with the system of automobility. Technology can be blackboxed, and an equivalent happens in the social field through concepts used to make sense of aggregates. It does not matter if Latour thinks these aggregate-engaging, sense-making concepts (society, etc) are non-existant in reality, because as concept-events they serve as quasi-cause for human action.
It is not a question of some Hegelian critique of the power of stupid concepts, but an appreciation of the burden of an existential expectation that supposes the logical contiguity of cause and effect through collectively transversal human action. There is no logical contiguity; only assumptions that prove to be correct within affective thresholds of comprehension (as a relation between sense and perspective) that sutures together the problematic contiguity of the chaosmos. Humans perceive a logical contiguity as an effect of techno-discursive apparatuses of visibility. The nihilistic point is that we perceive things on scales that are cosmically irrelevant. The socially progressive point is that our perceptions are therefore subject to power relations.
‘Perception’ in the above is not in the sense of vision, but based on some ideas derived from Whitehead about prehensions prehending each other. We are assemblages of prehensions (what Whitehead would call a society), one version of this is what we call the ‘body’. The concept of the ‘body’ however, when thought about in terms of its infra-sensible virtually, suffers from the same baggage of any and all concepts that grasp at virtuality and which have been backformed (or forwardformed) from the actual (this is essentially the problem with Hallward’s book on Deleuze).
Two definitions of the ‘same’ that Whitehead briefly mentions are firstly about how societies can not change to stay the same or secondly how a society’s state of ‘sameness’ can be derived from how it can continually incorporate change in different ways. This is useful for thinking about difference, as Deleuze does. There is a zero order of difference (difference refused), first order (difference incorporated/subsumed, dialectical difference), and Deleuze’s differentiating difference or difference-in-itself as a second order difference. The habitus is therefore not a reflexive habituation of class inflected capacities for action (where action is delineated according to social tasks bound by cause and effect) as much as it is a contracted actual multiplicity of prehensions that have more or less infra-sensible capacities for actioning virtual multiplcities as they are processed and through which the discrete phenomeno-cultural events of social tasks, and both chains of cause and effect and relations of visibility, are actualised as sensible (in every sense of the word).
Any concept that seeks to account for this differentiating process, such as ‘risk’ or ‘opportunity’ as concepts that delineate possibilities, and which remain on the level of first order difference, I believe are already subject to another second order of difference that has not yet been engaged with. This is a problem of ‘critique’ as a process of transforming second order difference into first order difference and the philosophical production of possibilities.
Glen: I am really pleased to read this idea of how to make good use out of Lazzaratos theory on how corporations make “worlds”, also, it makes sense to write about it as quasi-cause, as it is what makes the effect known as such, only the temporality is inverted (the futurity of the quasi-cause, or the future is sensed via pastness in the present – or is that what you mean with “The product is advertised not simply according to capacities or qualities that the object has, but the advertisements serve as a discourse-based incorporeal infrastructure for a ‘world’ within which those qualities and capacities matter.”). But, what about such concepts as memory, perception and affect in the discussions about these kinds of processes? Is the cause immanent in the effect that it itself makes possible it needs a population to work on? Massumi has written some fascinating stuff, I think, on the concept of the quasi-cause and uses the example of fear as a quasi-cause, and he writs on this in a piece on the affective economy of fear and threat as it is projected in the alarm-system (color codes on various alert-rates) of the war against terrorism. A question, could you make page-notes for the things you use in Hardt/Negri (how politics is the production of possibilities and the “event milieu”)? I really liked those two citations you used.
hi nikk
‘event milieu’ is pp 25 of empire
‘possibilities’ line is derived from pp 357 of empire and fn 8 pp 468. It is not a direct paraphrase. N&H talk about the passage from the ‘virtual through the possible to the actual’ as the fundamental act of creation. This process decribes the production of ‘necessity from contingency’, which they locate in the ‘power of living labor’. So my line above is an interpretive summary where the politics (of labor) involves the production of possibilities.
I am very familiar with Massumi’s work and his essay “Fear, the spectrum said”, but I am more focused on trying to think about how capitalist enterprises extract value from positive affective economies. Hmm, I don’t really write about memory. Trying figure out what memory is in the spectrum of habit and reflection is a very difficult task! What would you suggest about memory?