Category: politics

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Questioning the ‘gamified’, ‘pop-up’ city

It seems to be de rigueur to offer ‘smart’, compelling projects or visions of a particular kind of participation in the fabric of the contemporary city through the buzz- concepts/ words of ‘gamification’ or ‘pop-up’. I just want to offer a quick observation of the political problems that might identified with these ideas.

First, gamification proposes that what are considered to be otherwise mundane tasks should be rendered entertaining by introducing the ‘mechanics’ of a game into their operation. This seems principally to be the use of simple, reproducible functions such as attributing ‘points’ for given actions and introducing competition by creating a leaderboard. This, perhaps, in part stems from the ease with which one can, using digital media – especially through apps on mobile phones,  reductively quantify a given action and then create a system for comparing those numbers. However, this is neither a meaningful representation of or intervention in those activities apparently being ‘gamified’.

At best ‘gamification’ is running a simplified (reductive) model of a system alongside given activities and pretending the two converge or at least are someway related or relevant. At worst it is the automisation of people in a servile relationship with a mechanism for data acquisition that has been integrated into a system or set of practices that they need or (used to) enjoy. For, more often than not, ‘gamification’ happens in order to facilitate the capture of information about a group of people using a system or service. In this way it can be argued that gamification is, following Ian Bogost, a form of deception. Indeed Bogost argues, following Harry Frankfurt, that if “bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce”, then “gamification is bullshit”. “Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit” (Bogost). Given this understanding of gamification, these ‘mechanics’ are not opening out participation but are rather attempting to subjugate people. The darker and more cynical end of that argument is that, in fact, gamification is a means by which you enrol people into a form of unpaid work as the producers of data desirable to the authors of the system, which is rather like what Maurizio Lazzarato has called ‘immaterial labour‘.

I am certainly not arguing against creating playful systems – I am all for systems that take play seriously, for example see Hello Lampost and other creative and playful interventions into urban experience. I delight in the unexpected and serendipitous and value things that may facilitate that, but reducing that to ‘flat pack’ suites of algorithms to be crowbarred into pre-existing systems is, for me, rather undesirable.

Second, the ‘pop-up‘ model of business is the short-term injection of a business in an otherwise unused or perhaps unusual space, for example: an empty shop or a tent on municipal green space. This is often couched as the use of otherwise ‘wasted’ spaces and perhaps an enabling of a fledgling or experimental business through low-cost accommodation. Or, as ‘Popup Britain’ has it, to: “offer a co-working, co-funded space for brands to experiment with physical retail, test the market and gain face-to-face customer feedback”. Now, shrugging off the marketing speak, these things may be true, but it seems common sense that when commercial occupancy rates climb again councils and landlords will be far less willing to provide such space, the experiments then end and the risky workers are ousted.

My main issue with this model is not the risk of post-austerity commercial revanchism (although that may well be a real risk) but the rehashing of precariousness as a good. The assumption appears to be that small or new business owners must wilfully make themselves precarious, or in the case of ‘cultural’ pop-ups that the staff should be happy to offer their services for a token cup of coffee etc., and remain precarious labour (which seems to have been the case in some of the pop-up things I’ve been in).

Now, there is a realpolitik to this – I understand that regardless of the precarity pop-ups still represent an opportunity for some artists and social enterprises that otherwise may not exist. Nevertheless, once the rents and occupancy return should these artists and social enterprises simply be expelled from the revived thoroughfares and forgotten?

So, it’s not the control and use of desirable-again spaces, that is merely symptomatic of the broader issue. ‘Pop-ups’ seem to me to be founded on the assumption that it is not only ok but desirable to create a whole class of precarious creative worker and that, rather than reward them, we should enforce that precariousness and package it as desirable.

To inject a smidgeon of theory, both ‘gamification’ and ‘pop-ups’ could be critically understood, at their worst, as strategies of ‘proletarianization‘ (following Bernard Stiegler) – a curtailment not only of skilled knowledge (savour faire), and the time to cultivate it, but also of the development of life skills (savour vivre) amongst the populace – creating unthinking consumers. A traditional Marxian critique would also possibly identify both ‘gamification’ and ‘pop-ups’ as the constitution of a form of ‘surplus labour‘ and maintaining a ‘reserve army of labour‘.  This is not the realisation of a grand evil plan by the big Other, ‘the bankers’ or ‘the bourgeoisie’, but rather a logic, which has developed with and through capitalism, that we have all internalised and recapitulated and in some way indentured ourselves with.

A couple of questions arise then: Surely gamification has a limited shelf-life before it becomes passé? How long will people subject themselves to quantification and competing against one another for less-than-meaningul ‘points’? Are pop-ups simply using precarious cultural labour as window dressing for vacant shops? Both of these questions point to a third: Who or what counts in these processes and how can they be taken seriously?

It is possible to imagine creative and interesting ways of living together but, I would argue, just because certain (short-term) strategies are popular it doesn’t necessarily mean we should all jump in.

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2014, a year of consolidation in HE?

Following on from the critical reflections concerning the perceived need for a ‘revolution’, or an impending ‘avalanche‘, in HE and the desire of various parties to put technology at the heart of its ongoing pedagogical development, its interesting to read Prof. Nigel Thrift’s (V-C at Warwick, a Russell Group member) speculations about 2014 being a ‘year of consolidation‘.

This speculation for 2014 is the latest in Thrift’s sporadic blogging for The Chronicle’s ‘Worldwise‘ series. Just as he structures journal article sections with enumerated lists of key issues, in his post Thrift anticipates four trends for the year to come:

1. Increased competition for the student experience, with an expectation (from Thrift) that students will ‘shop around’ for the best ‘value for money’ university experience.

2. Universities need to look at income and not just revenue, with, Thrift suggests, the majority of universities in the UK having to look very hard at additional income generation in order to fund continued expansion and those all important capital expenditures on shiny new buildings (hah!)

3. Size will be ever-more important. Universities need particular kinds of critical mass in order to generate both student and research income. Thrift suggests this will lead to mergers and take-overs. Something for academic staff to look forward to then…

4.The university sector will continue to fragment. In a similar categorisation to the ‘avalanche’ report, Thrift identifies a splitting of the sector between research-intensive (i.e. Russell Group) universities, the ‘mid-range’ universities attempting to decide their strategies, and the smaller, colleges that will have to increasingly compete with the private sector to provide (higher) vocational education.

Again, following from some of my previous posts here, the final paragraph also caught my eye:

Notice that I have not mentioned new technology, not once. No doubt, new technology will continue to have effects–and important effects, too. But the end of 2013 saw the MOOC bubble deflating, at least in part: MOOC hype is now being replaced by a more measured and a more careful response which is injecting the pedagogic expertise that has been lacking.

Anyway, given Thrift’s position, and his own politics, the post makes for an interesting read…

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The appeal of the frontier narrative and MOOCs

Following on from the translation I made of Bernard Stiegler’s reflections on how digital (media) technologies can perform a valuable pedagogical role, I wanted to highlight that Martin Weller has given a very cogent and pointed critique of the fairly common narrative of ‘disruptive technology’ in relation to MOOCs.

This brings together two aspects of my own research: the ways in which those involved in computing R&D look to the future and anticipate the kinds of technologies they may want to produce (and the kinds of politics that produces); and what can be seen as the progressive commoditisation of our capacities to think and feel by certain applications of digital media.

Firstly, as Martin identifies in his blogpost, there is a widespread discourse of the necessity of breakthrough, disruption and revolution  in the mythology of the aspirational technology sector located in Silicon Valley. This has some obvious foundations in the need to continually destroy and re-create new markets in a finite global system of capital (as David Harvey cogently diagnoses). It also has an interesting basis in alternative discourses of progress on the counterculture movements in that same region of the US, with Stewart Brand (founder of the Whole Earth Network) a significant exponent of libertarian thought in the growing ICT industry that translated into the creation of WIRED magazine as the purveyor of this techno-economic orthodoxy (for more on this see Fred Turner’s brilliant book).

Martin offers the insight that the rather clunky, and somewhat messianic, narrative of the need for an external agent to intervene in a slow, inefficient, outmoded (and so on) sector, central to the disruptive technology spiel, allows sharp and charismatic entrepreneurs to step in as the pseudo-saviour, i.e. Sebastian Thrun of Udacity and others of his ilk. Criticism of the West Coast (capitalist) mythology is not new, of course, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron offered a critique of the ‘Californian Ideology‘ in the 1990s, and Stiegler has criticised the ‘American model’ of  laissez faire ‘cultural capitalism’ led by the ‘programming industries’ of new media (“functionally dedicated to marketing and publicity” [p. 5]) in his The Decadence of Industrial Democracies. Indeed, we can look back to Adorno and Horkheimer’s stinging critique of the Culture Industry as a formidable progenitor. What we can perhaps take from that line of argument is that arguing for a supposed ‘greater’ choice is actually a deception, the ‘choice’ is merely to consume more.

Others, who set themselves up as more thoughtful commentators have also weighed in on the side of the need for a disruption/revolution. Martin highlights that Clay Shirky has also parroted the, now well-worn, technological deterministic ark of argument. As with others, Shirky suggests that ‘education is broken‘ and must therefore be fixed by shiny new technology, in the form of MOOCs . Some proponents of this line of argument suggest that this would bring wider access to university level learning. There are a few (also well-worn but compelling) critiques of this line.

An obvious initial critique, as Martin argues in his blogpost, is that the ‘education is broken and so it requires a technological fix’ argument has gained so much traction because it is neat and easy to digest by journalists. A simple story with a clear solution is always going to trump the slightly messy, perhaps convoluted, and multiple stories that approximate the truth, for which there are unclear and troubling political solutions that require quite a lot of explanation and working through.

Furthermore, the existing evidence of engagement with MOOCs also somewhat contradicts the rosy picture painted by their evangelists. Completion rates for MOOCs tell a mixed story (as Martin has pointed out in other blogposts) and this perhaps speaks to the negotiation (by both students and course designers/leaders) of legitimacy and value for these courses – this is a sector still very much in flux. Those who are passionate about providing equal and wider access to university level education are torn by the desire to offer courses that open up (frequently excellent) materials for anyone to access but this is, of course, only a fraction of what we as university lecturers and students do when running and participating in courses.

We’re all, of course, increasingly proficient at consuming content online and MOOCs leverage that behaviour. What such systems are not so good at is providing something analogous to tutorials. The stand in for this is peer discussion/ support, which, of course, come with their own social and cultural issues around facilitation and particular participants becoming overbearing etc. So, these (socio-)technological fixes are not necessarily a like-for-like stand-in for all of those significant but hard to define benefits of university study within the physical context of an institution. Which is not to say that whatever MOOCs turn into cannot be of value, its just that its neither a direct alternative nor a replacement but rather a new/emerging form of pedagogical practice.

We can also look to the somewhat obvious Marxian critique of the constant clarion for technological revolution that, far from bringing in egalitarian and widespread access to a better form of living, education and so on, it ushers in the creation of a new proletarianised class of knowledge worker, trained, in this case, by machines (the machine learning version of xMOOCs is the example here) and held even further away from access to critical debate and the means of production.

After all, in a ‘mature’ market for technology, devices (and sometimes services) become cheap through mass production and availability. This slashes profit margins and consumer-users become savvy at backwards engineering and ‘modding’. Customers taking power into their own hands is rather undesirable for the corporate technology producer, unless they can co-opt those developments into the next iteration of the product. Thus, constant ‘innovation’ brings with it the maintenance of a premium for the ‘latest’, ‘must-have’ etc. device/service and necessarily excludes those who cannot pay.

One can easily imagine, then, how a stratification of the market would rapidly take hold. Cheaper, gigantic and formulaic courses (with automated marking of assessments) would be seen as lesser ‘products’ than more exclusive courses (with human tutor support). Those with power and money, in this case, would most-likely still send their children to (very expensive) physical universities with small classes, lots of attention from staff and all of the accoutrements of elite institutions.

Leaving that rather depressing argument aside, the framing of this form of consumer market for higher education is very Anglo-American, where degrees have already become a form of currency – for which there isn’t really an alternative. I cannot help wondering what other forms of education are being ignored (and therefore probably saved). The system of apprenticeship in Germany, for example, where more than half of school-leavers enter apprenticeships, which are really valued in society – with a majority of apprentices staying on with their host companies, is very successful and neither needs or could support a Silicon Valley style ‘disruption’.

Where does this leave us with regard to Stiegler’s argument that it is precisely the forms of collaboration that are opened up by digital media that can and should be used to transform higher education? Well, the innovative media supports being created in the guise of MOOCs and so on are neither the envisioned radical break(through) claimed in the silicon valley rhetoric or a pedagogical nosedive. As with all forms of technicity, MOOCs are pharmacological – they have the capacity to be both ‘poison’ and ‘cure’. If we take seriously Stiegler’s challenge that we need ‘to drive a dynamic for the rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and its media [supports] (of which MOOCs are a possible dimension) with the universities and academic institutions’ then we also need to take (very) seriously Martin’s arguments that designing open education courses/experiences is hard. I’m certainly not going to attempt to offer ‘easy’ or glib answers to such a problem here…

If we want the kind of collaborative learners that Stiegler gestures towards do we simply hope that they are self-selecting? Almost like postgraduate education is, with motivated students seeking out the opportunities to learn and contribute to the production of knowledge. That, of course, is a relatively small minority of the student population. Equally,we might consider the example of the proactive producers of peer-to-peer knowledge using platforms like Wikipedia, who are self-selecting and a minority relative to the number of ‘passive’ users of the platform. If the degree remains the only currency for employability within certain sectors and for particular kinds of roles then we retain the significant tension between the ideals of the pursuit and production of knowledge, traditionally at the heart of higher education, and the purchasing of a passport for employment (often in an unrelated field, probably in the financial sector) which the university degree has become in the UK.

It seems to me that it is not the university side of higher education that is broken in the UK (although it is always worthwhile striving for the ideals that underpin it), instead it is the preparation of skilled employment that was once provided by a valued system of apprenticeships and polytechnic institutions that has been not only broken but decimated. The renewal of these complimentary forms of further and higher education, with the new media supports we are using throughout all areas of life, seems to be an immediate and pressing concern.

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Reblog > Place, Space and Politics book series, edited by Clive Barnett

My colleague Clive Barnett has announced a new research-focused book series with Routledge entitled ‘Place, Space and Politics’. I look forward to seeing what kinds of books are published.

Place, Space and Politics: New Book Series from Routledge

Posted on January 22, 2014 by 

Routledge have a new research-focussed book series, the Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics Series. I am the Series Editor. Full details of the Series can be found here: Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics Series. Do feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about the Series, and especially if you have any book ideas you might think will fit. Here is the overview of what the series aims to cover (the list of topics is indicative only):

“The Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics Series offers a forum for original and innovative research that explores the changing geographies of political life. It seeks to draw into focus emerging interdisciplinary conversations about the spaces through which power is exercised, legitimized and contested. Titles within the series range from empirical investigations to theoretical engagements, and authors include scholars working in overlapping fields including political geography, political theory, development studies, political sociology, international relations and urban politics. The series seeks to engage with a series of key debates about innovative political forms, including topics such as transnational mobilization, global justice movements, global governance, the right to the city, the commons, new public spaces, cosmopolitanism, the digitalization of governance and contention, material politics, new localisms, and policy mobilities; and to address key concepts of political analysis such as scale, territory and public space. This series provides a forum for cutting edge research and new theoretical perspectives that reflect the wealth of research currently being undertaken around new forms of spatial politics.”

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Marx Reloaded, in its entirety

Stuart Elden recently posted the YouTube video of the film Marx Reloaded, by Jason Barker, which concerns a reappraisal of the idea of communism in relation to the 2008 financial crisis. It includes interview snippets from, amongst others: Michael Hardt, Jacques Ranciere, Toni Negri, and Slavoj Zizek (with subtitles).  As a means of  engaging with contemporary debates around what left-oriented politics can and might do and how Marx’s work has been adopted and transformed it is worth watching…

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Pharmacology of the National Front

Bernard Stiegler has published another new book in French entitled ‘Pharmacologie du Front National‘, or the ‘Pharmacology of the National Front’, which came out on the 27th of March 2013. This follows on, of course, from some of the work in the Disbelief and Discredit book series but also, and perhaps more importantly, from his other, untranslated, political work, perhaps in particular the two-book series entitled Constituer l’Europe, in which Stiegler examines the effect of the destruction of psychic and collective individuation on Europe, as well as the forthcoming (in English) The Re-enchantment of the World. The National Front have arguably been a particular concern for Stiegler for some time. The essay/lecture To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us is dedicated to ‘the electors of the National Front’, of whom Steiglers says:

“…I feel close. I feel close to them because they are people who suffer and who cause me to suffer. They cause me to suffer because in the proximity of their suffering, I feel them infinitely distanced from me–and I feel infinitely far from them. I feel that this distance is our lost community. The distance is paradoxically the vanishing point for our common suffering and, as such, our proximity. What is common to us is the feeling of absolute separation. But this concerns not only our common suffering, but also the suffering that separates us. If I feel close to those people who suffer while they also make me suffer, if I suffer with them, I do not suffer only because they make me suffer. I suffer also with them from that which makes them suffer.” (taken from Acting Out, p. 38).

It is this common suffering of distance and separation that is our ‘loss of community’ that undermines the We of transindividuation, that is the communal becoming (betwixt and between the I and the We) of what it is to be ‘human’, and which is a destruction of the ways in which we come to know ourselves and our places in the world (psychic and collective individuation) through which forms of collective intelligence and society in general are performed and co-produced–such that it might become that ‘there is no such thing as society’. This stems from a dissolution of belief (in a/the future) into calculable forms of ‘trust’ (i.e. financial systems as the only arbiters of trust – such that it must always have a financial value), the narcissistic and conniving use of power by the elites, and the wilful stupidity to which we all submit as increasingly passive consumers.

Phillipe Petit,member of Ars Industrialis and co-author with Stiegler of the book of interviews ‘The Hypermaterial Economy and Pyschopower’, has recently offered an interesting introductory essay to ‘Pharmacologie du Front National‘ on the French current affairs website Mariane. Its in French unfortunately but contains some good points:

Petite suggests that Stiegler argues  that the ideology of the last few decades, of neoliberalism and neo-conservativism, has been the source of the increasing belief that there is nothing we can do against the rising stupour/stupidity, the kind of nihilism, of submitting to the base drives of selfishness and consumerism – in fact, we are led to believe that there is no alternative.

The National Front is for Stiegler, according to Petite, a prime symptom of this malady that afflicts society, for which he (Stiegler) wants to offer a form of medicine.

Stiegler argues that there is an alternative: an ‘economy of transition’, capable of surpassing consumer capitalism–which has become structurally speculative and toxic. The three points of focus for this transitional economy Stiegler identifies (according to Petite) are: the digital, the inauguration of  a new form of public authority/power, and the reconstruction of our capacities for attention.

The new book therefore is combative, it fights against the trend not to attempt to fully explain our problems or to care about them (and each other, for that matter), which has led to the creation of scapegoats, amongst the groups of those disenfranchised by the political economic mess, who become persecuted by others, who are also disenfranchised. For Stiegler, this is the polarising form of suffering to which the National Front both succumbs and meets out.

In the essay, Petite closes with the paragraph [very rough translation]:

Will his proposals allow our country to escape its demons? Stiegler has the pride or the weakness to believe so. He is consulted in the highest places, and is not reluctant to be. The sense of urgency that runs through his work is not for him an affectation, and with a genuine and youthful desire he thinks that utopia deserves the effort.

Indeed, Stiegler has argued elsewhere that if we do not combat (critique and offer alternatives to) the rampant stupidity, and toxicity, of the contemporary situation we further the loss of desire to construct an alternative, more just, more sustainable, and more caring system. As he argues, in his inimitable terminology, at the end of To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us:

If we do not enact an ecological critique of the technologies and the industries of the spirit as markets lead to a ruin comparable to that which the Soviet Union and the great capitalist countries have been able to create by exploiting territories or natural resources without any care to preserve their habitability to come–the future–then we move ineluctably toward a global social explosion, that is, toward absolute war. (in Acting Out, pp. 81-2).

The release of this new book seems to be garnering some press attention in France. I cannot imagine that it will be translated into English, given its particular focus on the French society, but it will be interesting to see how this line of argument feeds into Stiegler’s broader work.

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Belief in politics – Stiegler

On the 30th of April 2004, the French newspaper Le Monde published an essay by Bernard Stiegler entitled ‘De la croyance en politique‘ (Belief in politics), in which Stiegler puts forth a robust and shortened version of his political argument contained within his Disbelief and Discredit series of books.

To summarise in all-too-brief terms, industrialisation has led to a sceptical and conniving form of capitalism that has proletarianised all of us, not only the ‘workers’ (in Marx’s terms), but also the consumers.

In such a system, everything has become calculable – even belief – which becomes a form of (financially) secured trust. ‘Free time’, which was used to dedicate oneself to favourite activities and to rest (‘otium’), has become calculable in the form of the activities of consumption. This proletarianisation undermines the processes of sublimation by which base drives are translated into more positive libidinal energies, instead fixing those drives in forms of consumption and stupidity.

The base drives of consumption for its own sake and the associated credulity lead us to a disbelief that undermines our faith in one another and our belief in the potential of the future. It is the persistent calculated short-termism of immediate profit that undermines our ability to construct plans for the future.

Stiegler argues that the political economy can still be rehabilitated (see my previous translations and comments about the ‘economy of contribution‘). He calls for a re-examination of our belief in politics and a re-invigoration of our desire for knowledge and enlightenment: our desire to ‘elevate’ ourselves. It is through this re-invigoration of political, social and economic life, Stiegler argues, that a new, positive, ‘industrial spirit’ can be formed.

I found translating this text rather hard and I expect it may need further work – the original French can be found here. I would very much welcome any comments and corrections, please use the comments form at the bottom of the page or email me.

As usual, I have included the original French or possible alternative words in square brackets where I am unsure about phrases. I hope that others find this essay as provocative and interesting as I have – I feel it brings out, in a short text, something of Stiegler’s political argument.

Belief in politics

Bernard Stiegler – Le Monde, 30th April 2004

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the liquidation of singularities has instigated both a total loss of confidence amongst the proletariat and a calculating disbelief and has proven powerful, increasingly hegemonic and arrogant.

The scepticism that emerged during the European elections was only one of the many lamentable results of a disbelief in politics ravaging the contemporary world. This collapse of belief in politics has a history, which must now be analysed.

After the industrial revolution transformed into proletarians those that ushered in a new world [les ouvreurs de monde qu’étaient], in their own way, and aside from the clerks  – those who work as labourers, workers and producers in general – the globalisation of capitalism was accomplished in the twentieth century by imposing a proletarianisation of the consumer. The proletariat as a whole is robbed of all of their knowledge, whether it is their savoir-faire or their savoir-vivre, and is now condemned to a life-without-knowledge, that is to say, without flavour [saveurs]. It is thrown into an insipid, at times disgusting, world: a misery that is in turn economic, symbolic and libidinal.

As with the producers, the proletarianisation of consumers affects all social strata, well beyond the “working class”. It leads to a state of consumption resulting from the capture and deviation of the libidinal economy by marketing technologies: the rational exploitation of the libido by industrial means which exhaust the energy that constitutes it.

However, the political community is constituted by its “philia” (a goodness [amicalité] that binds those who compose it) which is entirely libidinal. In other words, consumption tends to liquidate the process of political individuation that has characterised the Occident since the poets, geometrists and legislators, founders of the cities of ancient Greece, the pre-Socratic thinkers, questioned this individuation as the mystery of the One and the Many, thereby politicising the world through thought, and thus trans-forming thought, which is to say through legislation, thereby affirming the power of ideas.

Is a politics still possible today that will not essentially be a struggle, a “polemos”, in the language of Heraclitus (c. 576-about 480 BC.) against the depletive trend of existential, temporal and sapiential resources without which it seems any psychic and collective individuation whatsoever is impossible – including, perhaps, the after life beyond all politics? [au-delà de ou par-delà toute politique?]

The control society, following the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), as the implementation of calculative technologies that allow the institution of a life lived by the imperatives of industrial production, continues and complicates the ‘rationalisation’ described by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920). To develop his analysis of “Beruf” as “vocation to make money” (“the capitalist system needs this dedication to the mission of making money”), Weber notes of the worker that, when his salary is increased, he works less: he chooses to take his time.

The worker that labours thus looks forward to free and social time formerly called “otium”. If he earns more money, it reduces his working time for the freedom of his own time, not only to survive and sub-sist, which contradicts the “spirit of capitalism”. Therefore it is necessary to lower his salary to make him work: such is the poverty that inevitably accompanies proletarianization.

At the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States, with Fordism as the new industrial model and politics, the producer must be a consumer. This new rationality becomes all the more necessary as the Great Depression of the 1930s expresses the famous “contradictions of capitalism”. This is how marketing becomes king, beginning the process of the proletarianisation of the consumer.

However, the generalized proletarianisation as a loss of existence [existences] as well as livelihoods, imposed on all individualities, mental or collective, is a question of subjection to a constant pressure in order to particularize and de-singularise, to eventually cause a collapse of reason, if by “reason” we mean the reason for living of what Aristotle calls the noetic soul and which he described as a “politics” insofar as they are motivated by and inclined towards “philia”. This reason, which Aristotle (circa 322 to 384-BC.) called “theos”: is the advent of the onto-theological-political par excellence.

The proletarianised rationalisation of the producer, which involves the transformation of “logos” into “ratio”, that is, concretising the “death of God”, replaces the question of belief with that of trust. This is why the dollar expresses the thought of the American politician Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), whose sermons guided the analysis of Weber, by the statement inscribed on the greenback: “In God we trust”. Belief has become, according to Franklin’s sermons, legitimately calculable, which is its transformation into what we thus call trust.

This is the fruit of the development of capitalism that consists as a new state of mind, which requires, as Weber shows, an “absolute confidence in innovations” and the reign of trust. Capitalism is the constant – and literally fascinating – invention of new modes of production and consumption that must be developed against tradition, and which require the development of a fully calculable trust that comes up against belief.

However, in the early twenty-first century, the liquidation of singularities and the destructive trend of the libidinal economy, squeezes everyone, if only by denial, inducing both the total loss of confidence in the proletarians and a calculating [conniving] and powerful disbelief amongst the powerful, who are increasingly hegemonic and arrogant.

Generalized discredit therefore responds to this total proletarianisation and threatens the capitalist system at its very heart: the rational development of trust leads to the rational destruction of all belief – that is to say, of any future. This is the nihilism against which Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), contrary to so many clichés, calls for another faith: “And you must sail the seas, you emigrants, you too are compelled to this by – a faith” he writes in The Gay Science.

Today, suffering is experienced dreadfully by everyone everywhere as disbelief and discredit, which could not happen (it took a century, as Nietzsche announced) until the moment when the libido, desire in the Freudian sense, not just interest in the Weberian sense, became an object of calculation with the view to its systematic exploitation.

Also necessary is the issue that may appear today in the return of the theological-political, the new issue of belief in politics is less a return to religion than a return of what has been repressed through the death of God: it is the issue of consistence [la consistance] as what does not exist and cannot be the subject of calculation, because it leaves distinct, but does not oppose, cause and “ratio”. The issue is how existence relates to consistence, which does not exist, to compose (with) the incalculable: “One must have had in the poem a number such that it prevents counting”[1] writes the poet and playwright Paul Claudel (1868-1955), and so it is not that there is no God for, although he does not exist, he consists. It is the same for art, justice, and ideas in general. Ideas do not exist: they only consist. Such is their strength, their power, as Freud says. Such is the power of knowledge, taste, wisdom.

With God dead, the devil yet remains, and as trust consumes and eliminates any belief, it risks forever ruining the industrial-becoming of the world. However, first and foremost this is a case of not diabolising the devil [diaboliser ce diable 2]. This is about fighting the hegemony of calculative trust, which eats itself [autophage] and can only engender discredit. For if God is dead, in other words the revelation of his absence, it does not necessarily nullify the issue of consistence, with the development of the spirit of capitalism, calculable becoming is what is planned, as existences (as singularities), consistencies (ideas, knowledge and powers) this becoming, without this future which is not automatically equivalent, is what tends to reduce these consistencies to ashes: the ashes of nonexistent and inconsistent subsistence. Insipid.

This is the consumption it is necessary to fight, as economic hegemony, questioning anew the belief in politics.

This is an issue of who can say yes to becoming, but with the condition here of distinguishing a future that does not obviously and entirely coincide with becoming. Confusion of the two is precisely how disbelief becomes the carrier of discredit. This is what has pushed the entire political class into a shameful cynicism that purely reduces modernity to the management of the need to adapt to power without knowledge of calculation. However, belief can never consist of the projection in and towards what takes place beyond any adaptable horizon because the reason for any real invention proceeds from the power of ideas, which is to say that any opening (through work, labour) of a future is as equally possible as it is indeterminate.

The question of belief in politics must revisit and distinguish, but not oppose, “otium” and “negotium”, placed at the heart of the political question of culture defined as a worship of this distinction, which does not oppose but compose without renunciation. Culture is by no means ghettoized by any “cultural policy”, whether it is national, European or even global (UN) or whether it is traditional or “hypermodernist”, in which “exception” or “diversity” may form a good or bad conscience: In the age of cultural capitalism, politics must principally become a politics of singularities, for the invention of a new industrial age and an ecology of spirit [écologie de l’esprit].

Notes
[1] The translation of this passage is taken from Daniel Ross’ translation of Stiegler B. 2011 The Decadence of Industrial Democracies: Disbelief and Discredit 1. Polity, Cambridge. See page 90.

[2] Elsewhere Stiegler plays on the image of the diabol/devil as a divisive force in the processes of transindividuation – the “great third that constitutes authority as such, beyond the I and the we”:
“If ‘God is dead’, the ‘devil’ is still alive and well. This is what remains for thought–as that which is contained in the remains, that is, in the traces of the he that has become, in its death, the primary material of consciousness commensurable on the market” (Acting Out, p. 71).

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Andrew Barry’s new book: Material Politics

Stuart Elden has highlighted on his blog that a new book by Andrew Barry entitled ‘Material politics: disputes along the pipeline‘ is forthcoming in the RGS-IBG book series, its currently set for release in September.

Andrew Barry is a thoughtful commentator on the politics intimately concerned with technology and, one might say, technics. His book ‘Political Machines’ was of significant help to me during my PhD work for thinking through how we can conceptualise the sorts of politics that emerge within institutions or networks focused on ‘innovation’ in technology.

Perhaps more importantly, Barry is also one of a still-limited number of social scientists engaging with the work of the philosopher Isabelle Stengers. In fact, his talk at the recent ‘Politics and Matter‘ event held by the University of Bristol’s geography department offered an excellent and rigorous exegesis of Stengers’ project of ‘cosmopolitics’, which, as he suggested, is not easy.

This new book clearly draws upon some of the thinking that Barry has been engaged in around these themes, as the blurb on the book’s web page demonstrates:

In Material Politics, author Andrew Barry reveals that as we are beginning to attend to the importance of materials in political life, materials has become increasingly bound up with the production of information about their performance, origins, and impact.
* Presents an original theoretical approach to political geography by revealing the paradoxical relationship between materials and politics
* Explores how political disputes have come to revolve not around objects in isolation, but objects that are entangled in ever growing quantities of information about their performance, origins, and impact
* Studies the example of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline – a fascinating experiment in transparency and corporate social responsibility – and its wide-spread negative political impact
* Capitalizes on the growing interdisciplinary interest, especially within geography and social theory, about the critical role of material artifacts in political life

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Clive Barnett on varieties of ‘the political’

In a recent post over on his blog, Pop Theory, Clive Barnett has written an excellent critical reflection upon the meanings and uses of ‘the political’ in social scientific discussion and political philosophy, as well as the various ways in which politics and the political are characterised, frequently dyadically. The post is set in the context of reflecting upon the growth in the supposition of the ‘post-political’ and Barnett’s healthy skepticism about it. I particularly like this passage:

Methodologically, the analysis of our post-political condition depends on a weird slippage – when one finds an example of partisan political action making use of consensual rhetoric, or of a political action culminating in a decision being made in the favour of some interests rather than others, or at the expense of others, then what you have found, it turns out, is not politics being done at all, but the end of politics, the closing down of the properly political. One would have thought that it’s not that difficult to recognise that politics is a game that turns on different ways of relating the partisan and the common, the partial and the universal, the specific and the general, at the level of rhetoric and action; dare one say it, even the consensual and the a(nta)gonistic (that’s what compromise, bargaining, deal-making are after all). One might also think that the literature on the politics/the political distinction has some interesting ways of understanding the dynamics of those relations. One would have thought, too, that the fact that some people end up being better at politics than others – that it’s a game of winners and losers – could be understood as an important part of the game, worthy of some analytical attention, and not just interpreted as being an effort to end of the game.

I found the three varieties of discussion of the political that Barnett characterises a useful analytic for reflecting upon my own work and how I’d situate it, not least in terms of Barnett’s critique of the trend towards studies of “the politics of–”, of which I am certainly guilty. Its also interesting to reflect on what it might mean to talk about politics on the context of research given the increasing pressure to make knowledge ‘exchangeable’ and ‘transferable’…