The regularities start to loosen. This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism’s dynamic. It’s not a simple liberation. It’s capitalism’s own form of power. It’s no longer disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it’s capitalism’s power to produce variety - because markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are OK - as long as they pay. Capitalism starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but only in order to extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to intensify profit potential. It literally valorises affect. The capitalist logic of surplus-value production starts to take over the relational field that is also the domain of political ecology, the ethical field of resistance to identity and predictable paths. It’s very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me that there’s been a certain kind of convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance.
n a way the real power starts after you’ve passed, in the feed, because you’ve left a trace. Something has registered. Those registrations can be gathered to piece together a profile of your movement, or they can be compared to other people’s inputs. They can be processed en masse and systematised, synthesised. Very convenient for surveillance or crime investigation, but even more valuable for marketing. In such a fluid economy, based so much on intangibles, the most valuable thing is information on people’s patterns and tastes. The checkpoint system allows information to be gathered at every step you take. You’re providing a continuous feed, which comes back to you in advertising pushing new products, new bundlings of potential. Think of how cookies work on the internet. Every time you click a link, you’re registering your tastes and patterns, which are then processed and thrown back at you in the form of flip-up ads that try to get you to go to particular links and hopefully buy something. It’s a feedback loop, and the object is to modulate your online movement. It’s no exaggeration to say that every time you click a link you’re doing somebody else’s market research for them. You’re contributing to their profit-making abilities. Your everyday movements and leisure activities have become a form of value-producing labour. You are generating surplus-value just by going about your daily life - your very ability to move is being capitalised on. Deleuze and Guattari call this kind of capitalising on movement ‘surplus-value of flow’, and what characterises the ‘society of control’ is that the economy and the way power functions come together around the generation of this surplus-value of flow. Life movements, capital and power become one continuous operation - check, register, feed-in, processing, feedback, purchase, profit, around and around.
It becomes one big, self-propelling feedback machine. It turns into a kind of automatism, and we register collectively as individuals through the way we feed that automatism, by our participation in it, just by virtue of being alive and moving. Socially, that’s what the individual is now: a checkpoint trigger and a co-producer of surplus-values of flow. Power is now distributed. It trickles down to the most local, most partial checkpoint. The profits that get generated from that don’t necessarily trickle down, but the power does. There is no distance anymore between us, our movements and the operations of power, or between the operations of power and the forces of capitalism. One big, continuous operation. Capital-power has become operationalised. Nothing so glorious as sovereign, just operational - a new modesty of power as it becomes ubiquitous.
At any rate, the hope that might come with the feeling of potentialisation and enablement we discussed is doubled by insecurity and fear. Increasingly power functions by manipulating that affective dimension rather than dictating proper or normal behaviour from on high. So power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms, it’s affective. The mass media have an extremely important role to play in that. The legitimisation of political power, of state power, no longer goes through the reason of state and the correct application of governmental judgment. It goes through affective channels. For example, an American president can deploy troops overseas because it makes a population feel good about their country or feel secure, not because the leader is able to present well-honed arguments that convince the population that it is a justified use of force. So there is no longer political justification within a moral framework provided by the sovereign state. And the mass media are not mediating anymore - they become direct mechanisms of control by their ability to modulate the affective dimension.
http://www.international-festival.org/node/111
n a way the real power starts after you’ve passed, in the feed, because you’ve left a trace. Something has registered. Those registrations can be gathered to piece together a profile of your movement, or they can be compared to other people’s inputs. They can be processed en masse and systematised, synthesised. Very convenient for surveillance or crime investigation, but even more valuable for marketing. In such a fluid economy, based so much on intangibles, the most valuable thing is information on people’s patterns and tastes. The checkpoint system allows information to be gathered at every step you take. You’re providing a continuous feed, which comes back to you in advertising pushing new products, new bundlings of potential. Think of how cookies work on the internet. Every time you click a link, you’re registering your tastes and patterns, which are then processed and thrown back at you in the form of flip-up ads that try to get you to go to particular links and hopefully buy something. It’s a feedback loop, and the object is to modulate your online movement. It’s no exaggeration to say that every time you click a link you’re doing somebody else’s market research for them. You’re contributing to their profit-making abilities. Your everyday movements and leisure activities have become a form of value-producing labour. You are generating surplus-value just by going about your daily life - your very ability to move is being capitalised on. Deleuze and Guattari call this kind of capitalising on movement ‘surplus-value of flow’, and what characterises the ‘society of control’ is that the economy and the way power functions come together around the generation of this surplus-value of flow. Life movements, capital and power become one continuous operation - check, register, feed-in, processing, feedback, purchase, profit, around and around.
It becomes one big, self-propelling feedback machine. It turns into a kind of automatism, and we register collectively as individuals through the way we feed that automatism, by our participation in it, just by virtue of being alive and moving. Socially, that’s what the individual is now: a checkpoint trigger and a co-producer of surplus-values of flow. Power is now distributed. It trickles down to the most local, most partial checkpoint. The profits that get generated from that don’t necessarily trickle down, but the power does. There is no distance anymore between us, our movements and the operations of power, or between the operations of power and the forces of capitalism. One big, continuous operation. Capital-power has become operationalised. Nothing so glorious as sovereign, just operational - a new modesty of power as it becomes ubiquitous.
At any rate, the hope that might come with the feeling of potentialisation and enablement we discussed is doubled by insecurity and fear. Increasingly power functions by manipulating that affective dimension rather than dictating proper or normal behaviour from on high. So power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms, it’s affective. The mass media have an extremely important role to play in that. The legitimisation of political power, of state power, no longer goes through the reason of state and the correct application of governmental judgment. It goes through affective channels. For example, an American president can deploy troops overseas because it makes a population feel good about their country or feel secure, not because the leader is able to present well-honed arguments that convince the population that it is a justified use of force. So there is no longer political justification within a moral framework provided by the sovereign state. And the mass media are not mediating anymore - they become direct mechanisms of control by their ability to modulate the affective dimension.
http://www.international-festival.org/node/111
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