desire, value, consumption– Curtis’s Century of the Self

Adam Curtis’s four part documentary Century of the Self manages to brilliantly capture some of the involutions between notions of creativity, emotional expresson, marketing, public realtions, and new modes of flexible capital. The third installment, like Kavita’s discussion in earlier post, makes the argument that counter-conduct in the 1960s and 70s  became constituent features of emerging capital formations. The turn to  value and express emotion, to reject conformist mass capital and instead to become “acutalized” individuals was then captured in new “lifestyles and values” marketing techniques that identified ‘value” and consumption patterns to lifestyles that could then constitute new markets. Instead of old mid-century worries that consumption would dry up when needs were fulfilled, individualized expressivities were continuously generative of modified desires for products to fulfill. Commodities not only produced economic value, but were the infrastructure of individualized “values.”

The “lifestyles and values” approach came in the late 1970s, using computer processed questionaires at SRI in Stanford– most famous for its military research. SRI in fact moved off campus in the 1960s as a reaction to anti-war protests.

By early 80s, Reagan and Thatcher manage to then capture this sense of individualized commodified expression as an anti-government, pro-capital valuation.

By the 1990s, “the left” — read Blair and Clintons — use the same marketing techniques to reformulate the terms of “left” party politics.

I can’t praise this documentary enough. It is utterly fascinating and manages to get at the involutions of desire, commodity, capital, individuation, science, politics, marketing, and affective labor we’re wrestling with on Red Technopolitics.

you can catch it streaming at Internet Archive

Diamond Mines and Appropriated Feminism

Here’s a new disturbing twist on reproduction/Production and the entanglements of feminisms in global capital. The International Women’s Health Coalition, the New York based transnational feminist NGO that was so influential in reappropriating international policy language towards feminist projects of “reproductive health and “reproductive rights” have themselves become entangled with diamond mining in South Africa, particularly De Beers Group and Anglo American.

How to make sense of this conjuncture of necropolitical accumulation of diamonds and feminist biopolitics?

Counterculture/Cyberculture

“From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism” is a nice book by Fred Turner (U of Chicago Press, 2006). It parallels the story of ’70s feminists and neoliberalism that Murphy tells. The 1960s hippie scene and its embrace of visions of wholeness, interconnection (-systems theory), social connections (-networks), and transcendence (-God’s-eye view) did not just accidentally grow into the Bay Area computation scene. Turner tracks key players like Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and others, and tells the story of how the network culture of the Whole Earth Catalogue morphed into the network culture of computer programmers and corporate futurism. For example, here’s Turner’s comment on Kelly in the late 1980s: “…. like LSD, computers seemed to make it possible to envirion life itself as a whole. If the New Communalists had sensed that they were “all one,” the computers of the Artificial Life Conference seemed to prove the point: The natural world and the social world really were all one system of information exchange. That vision of singularity in turn allowed Kelly to link his religious yearnings to the particular form of sociability common to both the cold war research world and the New Communalist wing of the counterculture: collaborative networks.”

This sounds a lot like the genealogies of the term “group” and other countercultural/neoliberal imbrications.

Also, the metaphysics of nature that pervaded eco-hippie talk is transformed into the metaphysics of the machine. It’s good to have a philosophical hunch confirmed by rigorous historical research! I’ve been performing analytical pretzel-moves to argue something like this to tie together my chapters on nature and technology. I’ve been teaching the feminist critique of “uploading consciousness to the net” and the historical connection between Mondo 2000 and Wired. But until now I didn’t have the specific historical steps that connected the 1960s eco-commune-CA-phenomenon to the 1990s network society, again CA-style. Here’s another quote from Turner:

[so, the HArvard Business Review picks up Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, seeing tihs as the ultimate goal of the new economy - competition plus democratic individual satisfaction.

” In the pages of Out of Control, the Long Hunter of the Whole Earth Catalog had become an entrepreneur … Almost 30 yrs earlier, thousands of young, highly educated Americans had tromped off into the wilderness seeking to build an egalitarian, fun-loving world. Today, suggested Kelly, they should look to technology and teh economy for satisfaction.

They should do so, he argued, because the world itself was an information system. In his view, to manipulate computers and to work with information was not simply to hold down a job; it was to gain access to a hidden world ,,, Kelly’s vision echoed the New Communalists’ celebration of consciousness. It also resuscitated the commune-dwellers’ disregard for the demands of the material world. … Throughout his book, Kelly underplayed the work of embodied labor, celebrated intellect and the collaborative styles associated with intellectual institutions, and so offered a model of a world inhabited exclusively by freelancing elites. In the early 1990s, as in teh late 1960s, that turn away from teh material world helped legitimate teh authority of those who controlled information and information systems by rendering invisible those who did not.” (p 204)