TheFlexiblePersonality
The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique
Trechos de The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique:
The brief moments when the path of industrial development itself is at stake we call industrial divides. At such moments, social conflicts of the most apparently unrelated kinds determine the direction of technological development for the following decades. Although industrialists, workers, politicians and intellectuals may only be dimly aware that they face technological choices, the actions that they take shape economic institutions for long into the future. Industrial divides are therefore the backdrop or frame for subsequent regulation crises.23 [...] What then were the conflicts that made computing and telecommunications into the central products of the new wave of economic growth that began after the 1970s recession? How did these conflicts affect the labor, management and consumption regimes? Which social groups were integrated to the new hegemony of flexible capitalism, and how? Which were rejected or violently excluded, and how was that violence covered over? So far, the most complete set of answers to these questions has come from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in _Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalism_, published in 1999.24 Their thesis is that each age or "spirit" of capitalism must justify its irrational compulsion for accumulation by at least partially integrating or "recuperating" the critique of the previous era, so that the system can become tolerable again - at least for its own managers. They identify two main challenges to capitalism: the critique of exploitation, or what they call "social critique," developed traditionally by the worker's movement, and the critique of alienation, or what they call "artistic critique." The latter, they say, was traditionally a minor, literary affair; but it became vastly more important with the mass cultural education carried out by the welfare-state universities. Boltanski and Chiapello trace the destinies of the major social groups in France after the turmoil of '68, when _critique sociale_ joined hands with _critique artiste_. They show how the most organized fraction of the labor force was accorded unprecedented economic gains, even as future production was gradually reorganized and delocalized to take place outside union control and state regulation. But they also demonstrate how the young, aspiring managerial class, whether still in the universities or at the lower echelons of enterprise, became the major vector for the artistic critique of authoritarianism and bureaucratic impersonality. The strong point of Boltanski and Chiapello's book is to demonstrate how the organizational figure of the _network_ emerged to provide a magical answer to the anti-systemic cultural critique of the 1950s and 60s - a magical answer, at least for the aspirant managerial class. What are the social and aesthetic attractions of networked organization and production? First, the pressure of a rigid, authoritarian hierarchy is eased, by eliminating the complex middle-management ladder of the Fordist enterprises and opening up shifting, one-to-one connections between network members. Second, spontaneous communication, creativity and relational fluidity can be encouraged in a network as factors of productivity and motivation, thus overcoming the alienation of impersonal, rationalized procedures. Third, extended mobility can be tolerated or even demanded, to the extent that tool-kits become increasingly miniaturized or even purely mental, allowing work to be relayed through telecommunications channels. Fourth, the standardization of products that was the visible mark of the individual's alienation under the mass-production regime can be attenuated, by the configuration of small-scale or even micro-production networks to produce limited series of custom objects or personalized services.25 Fifth, desire can be stimulated and new, rapidly obsolescent products can be created by working directly within the cultural realm as coded by multimedia in particular, thus at once addressing the demand for meaning on the part of employees and consumers, and resolving part of the problem of falling demand for the kinds of long-lasting consumer durables produced by Fordist factories. As a way of summing up all these advantages, it can be said that the networked organization gives back to the employee - or better, to the "prosumer" - the _property_ of him- or herself that the traditional firm had sought to purchase as the commodity of labor power. Rather than coercive discipline, it is a new form of internalized vocation, the "calling" to creative self-fulfillment in and through each work project, that will now shape and direct the employee's behavior. The strict division between production and consumption tends to disappear, and alienation appears to be over come, as individuals aspire to mix their labor with their leisure.26 Even the firm begins to conceive of work qualitatively, as a sphere of creative activity, of self-realization. "Connectionist man" - or in my term, "the networker" - is delivered from direct surveillance and paralyzing alienation to become the manager of his or her own self-gratifying activity, as long as that activity translates at some point into valuable economic exchange, the _sine qua non_ for remaining within the network. Obviously, the young advertisers and fashion designers described by Thomas Frank could see a personal interest in this loosening of hierarchies. But the gratifying self-possession and self-management of the networker has an ideological advantage as well: responding to the demands of May '68, it becomes the perfect legitimating argument for the continuing destruction, by the capitalist class, of the heavy, bureaucratic, alienating, profit-draining structures of the welfare state that also represented most all the historical gains that the workers had made through social critique. By co-opting the aesthetic critique of alienation, the networked enterprise is able to legitimate the gradual exclusion of the workers' movement and the destruction of social programs. Thus, artistic critique becomes one of the linchpins of the new hegemony invented in the early 1980s by Reagan and Thatcher, and perfected in the 1990s by Clinton and the inimitable Tony Blair. To recuperate from the setbacks of the sixties and seventies, capitalism had to be become doubly flexible, imposing casual labor contracts and "delocalized" production sites to escape the regulation of the welfare state, and using this fragmented production apparatus to create the consumer seductions and stimulating careers that were needed to regain the loyalty of potentially revolutionary managers and intellectual workers. This double movement is what gives rise to the system conceived by David Harvey as a regime of "flexible accumulation" - a notion that describes not only the structure and discipline of the new work processes, but also the forms and lifespans of the individually tailored and rapidly obsolescent products that are created, and the new, more volatile modes of consumption that the system promotes.27 For the needs of contemporary cultural critique we should recognize, at the crux of this transformation, the role of the personal computer, assembled along with its accompanying telecommunications devices in high-tech sweatshops across the world. The mainstay of what has also been called the "informational economy," the computer and its attendant devices are at once industrial and cultural tools, embodying a compromise that temporarily resolved the social struggles unleashed by artistic critique. The laptop serves as a portable instrument of control over the casualized laborer and the fragmented production process, while at the same time freeing up the nomadic manager for forms of mobility both physical and fantasmatic; it successfully miniaturizes one's access to the remaining bureaucratic functions, while opening a private channel into the realms of virtual or "fictitious" capital, the financial markets where surplus value is produced as if by magic, despite the accumulating physical signs of crisis and decay. Technically a calculator, the personal computer has been turned by its social usage into an image- and language machine: the productive instrument, communications vector and indispensable receiver of the immaterial goods and semiotic or even emotional services that now form the leading sector of the economy.28 Geographical dispersal and global coordination of manufacturing, just-in-time production and containerized delivery systems, a generalized acceleration of consumption cycles, and a flight of overaccumulated capital into the lightning-fast financial sphere, whose movements are at once reflected and stimulated by the equally swift evolution of global media: these are among the major features of the flexible accumulation regime as it has developed since the late 1970s. David Harvey, like most Marxist theorists, sees this transnational redeployment of capital as a reaction to social struggles, which increasingly tended to limit the levels of resource and labor exploitation possible within nationally regulated space. A similar kind of reasoning is used, on the other end of the political spectrum, by the business analysts Piore and Sabel when they claim that "social conflicts of the most apparently unrelated kinds determine the course of technological development" at the moment of an industrial divide. But it is, I think, only Boltanski and Chiapello's analytical division of the resistance movements of the sixties into the two strands of artistic and social critique that finally allows us to understand the precise aesthetic and communicational forms generated by capitalism's recuperation of - and from - the democratic turmoil of the 1960s. [...] A critical approach can [...] view computers and telecommunications as specific, pliable configurations within the larger frame of what Michel Foucault calls "governmental technologies." Foucault defines the governmental technologies (or more generally, "governmentality") as "the entire set of practices used to constitute, define, organize and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals, in their freedom, can have towards each other."31 At stake here is the definition of a level of constraint, extending beyond what Foucault conceives as freedom - the open field of power relations between individuals, where each one tries to "conduct the conduct of others," through strategies that are always reversible - but not yet reaching the level of domination, where the relations of power are totally immobilized, for example through physical constraint. The governmental technologies exist just beneath this level of domination: they are subtler forms of collective channeling, appropriate for the government of democratic societies where individuals enjoy substantial freedoms and tend to reject any obvious imposition of authority. It is clear that the crisis of "ungovernability" decried by Huntington, Thatcher and other neoconservatives in the mid-1970s could only find its "resolution" with the introduction of new governmental technologies, determining new patterns of social relations; and it has become rather urgent to see exactly how these relational technologies function. To begin quite literally with the hardware, we could consider the extraordinary increase in surveillance practices since the introduction of telematics. It has become commonplace at any threshold - border, cash register, subway turnstile, hospital desk, credit application, commercial website - to have one's personal identifiers (or even body parts: finger- or handprints, retina patterns, DNA) checked against records in a distant database, to determine if passage will be granted. This appears as direct, sometimes even authoritarian control. But as David Lyon observes, "each expansion of surveillance occurs with a rationale that, like as not, will be accepted by those whose data or personal information is handled by the system."32 The most persuasive rationales are increased security (from theft or attack) and risk management by various types of insurers, who demand personal data to establish contracts. These and other arguments lead to the internalization of surveillance imperatives, whereby people actively supply their data to distant watchers. But this example of voluntary compliance with surveillance procedures is only the tip of the control iceberg. The more potent and politically immobilizing forms of self-control emerge in the individual's relation to the labor market - particularly when the labor in question involves the processing of cultural information. [...] What kind of labor regime is produced by this networking among the power elite? On June 13, 2001, one could read in the newspaper that a sharp drop in computer sales had triggered layoffs of 10% of Compaq's world-wide workforce, and 5% of Hewlet Packard's - 7,000 and 4,700 jobs respectively. In this situation, the highly mobile Dell corporation was poised to draw a competitive advantage from its versatile workforce: "Robots are just not flexible enough, whereas each computer is unique," explained the president of Dell Europe.42 With its just-in-time production process, Dell can immediately pass along the drop in component prices to consumers, because it has no old product lying around in warehouses; at the same time, it is under no obligation to pay idle hands for regular 8-hour shifts when there is no work. Thus it has already grabbed the number-1 position from Compaq and it is hungry for more. "It's going to be like Bosnia," gloated an upper manager. "Taking such market shares is the chance of a lifetime." This kind of ruthless pleasure, against a background of exploitation and exclusion, has become entirely typical - an example of the opportunism and cynicism that the flexible personality tolerates.43 But was this what we really expected from the critique of authority in the 1960s?
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