... you have to get rid of the idea as power or constraint as power over. It’s always a power to. The true power of the law is the power to form us. Power doesn’t just force us down certain paths, it puts the paths in us, so by the time we learn to follow its constraints we’re following ourselves. The effects of power on us is our identity. That’s what Michel Foucault taught us. If power just came at us from outside, if it was just an extrinsic relation, it would be simple. You’d just run away. In the 1960s and 1970s that’s how a lot of people looked at it - including myself. Drop out, stop following the predictable, straight-and-narrow path, and things like sexism will just disappear. Well, they didn’t. It’s a lot more complicated than that. Power comes up with us from the field of potential. It ‘informs’ us, it’s intrinsic to our formation, it’s part of our emergence as individuals, and it emerges with us - we actualise it, as it in-forms us. So in a way it’s as potentialising as what we call freedom, only what it potentialises is limited to a number of predictable paths. It’s the calculable part of affect, the most probable next steps and eventual outcomes. As Foucault says, power is productive, and it produces not so much repressions as regularities. Which brings us to the ‘society of control’ and to capitalism
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.
When you buy a computerised product, you can do a lot of different things with it - you use it to extend your affective capacities. It becomes a motor force of your life - like a turbo charge to your vitality. It enables you to go farther and to do more, to fit more in. The way even older-style products are sold has something to do with this. You don’t just buy a car, the dealers tell us, you buy a lifestyle. When you consume, you’re not just getting something to use for a particular use, you’re getting yourself a life. All products become more intangible, sort of atmospheric, and marketing gets hinged more and more on style and branding ...
It’s this enabling of experience that is taking over. Now, that enablement of experience has to be tended. Companies work very hard to produce brand loyalty. ‘Fidelity programs’ involving things like rewards points are everywhere. The product becomes a long-term part of your life, you’re brought into a relationship with the company through fidelity programs, service networks, promises of upgrades, etc. The way you use the product is also more and more oriented towards relationship - the most seductive products produce possibilities of connection. ‘Connectibility’ is another buzzword. When we buy a product, we’re buying potential connections with other things and especially other people - for example, when a family buys a computer to keep in touch by email, or when you get a computer for work and end up joining on-line communities. What’s being sold more and more is experience, social experience. The corporation, the capitalist company, is having to create social networks and cultural nodes that come together around the product, and the product gets used more and more to create social networks that radiate out from it. ‘Networking’ was the buzzword in the 1980s, when this new kind of capitalist power was just coming into its own.
Marketing itself is starting to operate along those lines. There is a new kind of marketing called viral marketing where specialised companies will surf the web to find communities of interest that have spontaneously formed. It started in the music industry, around fan networks for bands. They find a group of people who have a very strong affective attachment to a band or a performer that is very central to how they see themselves and to what they perceive as the quality of their life. They will network with them, offer them tickets or inside information, or special access, and in return the members of the group will agree to take on certain marketing tasks. So the difference between marketing and consuming and between living and buying is becoming smaller and smaller, to the point that they are getting almost indistinguishable. On both the production side and the consumption side it is all about intangible, basically cultural products or products of experience that invariably have a collective dimension to them.
ndividual consumers are being inducted into these collective processes rather than being separated out and addressed as free agents who are supposed to make an informed consumer choice as rational individuals. This is a step beyond niche marketing, it’s relational marketing. It works by contagion rather than by convincing, on affect rather than rational choice. It works at least as much on the level of our ‘indeterminate sociality’ as on the level of our identities. More and more, what it does is hitch a ride on movements afoot in the social field, on social stirrings, which it channels in profit-making directions. People like Negri talk about the ‘social factory’, a kind of socialisation of capitalism, where capitalism is more about scouting and capturing or producing and multiplying potentials for doing and being than it is about selling things. The kind of work that goes into this he calls ‘immaterial labour’. The product, ultimately, is us. We are in-formed by capitalist powers of production. Our whole life becomes a ‘capitalist tool’ - our vitality, our affective capacities. It’s to the point that our life potentials are indistinguishable from capitalist forces of production. In some of my essays I’ve called this the ‘subsumption of life’ under capitalism.
Jeremy Rifkin is a social critic who now teaches at one of the most prestigious business schools in the US (talk about the capture of resistance!). Rifkin has a description of capitalism that is actually surprisingly similar to Negri’s. And he’s teaching it to the next generation of capitalists. It centres on what he calls ‘gatekeeping’ functions. Here the figure of power is no longer the billy club of the policeman, it’s the barcode or the PIN number. These are control mechanisms, but not in the old sense of ‘power over’. It’s control in Gilles Deleuze’s sense, which is closer to ‘check mechanism’. It’s all about checkpoints. At the grocery store counter, the barcode on what you’re buying checks the object out of the store. At the automatic bank teller, the PIN number on your card checks you into your account. The checks don’t control you, they don’t tell you where to go or what to be doing at any particular time. They don’t lord it over you. They just lurk. They lie in wait for you at key points. You come to them, and they’re activated by your arrival. You’re free to move, but every few steps there’s a checkpoint. They’re everywhere, woven into the social landscape. To continue on your way you have to pass the checkpoint. What’s being controlled is right of passage - access. It’s about your enablement to go places and do things. When you pass the checkpoint you have to present something for detection, and when you do that something registers. Your bank account is debited, and you and your groceries pass. Or something fails to register, and that’s what lets you pass, like at airport security or places where there’s video surveillance. In either case what’s being controlled is passage across thresholds.
Society becomes an open field composed of thresholds or gateways, it becomes a continuous space of passage. It’s no longer rigidly structured by walled-in enclosures, there’s all kinds of latitude. It’s just that at key points along the way, at key thresholds, power is tripped into action. The exercise of the power bears on your movement - not so much you as a person. In the old disciplinary power formations, it was always about judging what sort of person you were, and the way power functioned was to make you fit a model, or else. If you weren’t the model citizen, you were judged guilty and locked up as a candidate for ‘reform’. That kind of power deals with big unities - the person as moral subject, right and wrong, social order. And everything was internalised - if you didn’t think right you were in trouble. Now you’re checked in passing, and instead of being judged innocent or guilty you’re registered as liquid. The process is largely automatic, and it doesn’t really matter what you think or who you are deep down. Machines do the detecting and ‘judging’. The check just bears on a little detail - do you have enough in your bank account, do you not have a gun? It’s a highly localised, partial exercise of power - a micro-power. That micro-power, though, feeds up to higher levels, bottom up.
http://www.international-festival.org/node/111
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.
When you buy a computerised product, you can do a lot of different things with it - you use it to extend your affective capacities. It becomes a motor force of your life - like a turbo charge to your vitality. It enables you to go farther and to do more, to fit more in. The way even older-style products are sold has something to do with this. You don’t just buy a car, the dealers tell us, you buy a lifestyle. When you consume, you’re not just getting something to use for a particular use, you’re getting yourself a life. All products become more intangible, sort of atmospheric, and marketing gets hinged more and more on style and branding ...
It’s this enabling of experience that is taking over. Now, that enablement of experience has to be tended. Companies work very hard to produce brand loyalty. ‘Fidelity programs’ involving things like rewards points are everywhere. The product becomes a long-term part of your life, you’re brought into a relationship with the company through fidelity programs, service networks, promises of upgrades, etc. The way you use the product is also more and more oriented towards relationship - the most seductive products produce possibilities of connection. ‘Connectibility’ is another buzzword. When we buy a product, we’re buying potential connections with other things and especially other people - for example, when a family buys a computer to keep in touch by email, or when you get a computer for work and end up joining on-line communities. What’s being sold more and more is experience, social experience. The corporation, the capitalist company, is having to create social networks and cultural nodes that come together around the product, and the product gets used more and more to create social networks that radiate out from it. ‘Networking’ was the buzzword in the 1980s, when this new kind of capitalist power was just coming into its own.
Marketing itself is starting to operate along those lines. There is a new kind of marketing called viral marketing where specialised companies will surf the web to find communities of interest that have spontaneously formed. It started in the music industry, around fan networks for bands. They find a group of people who have a very strong affective attachment to a band or a performer that is very central to how they see themselves and to what they perceive as the quality of their life. They will network with them, offer them tickets or inside information, or special access, and in return the members of the group will agree to take on certain marketing tasks. So the difference between marketing and consuming and between living and buying is becoming smaller and smaller, to the point that they are getting almost indistinguishable. On both the production side and the consumption side it is all about intangible, basically cultural products or products of experience that invariably have a collective dimension to them.
ndividual consumers are being inducted into these collective processes rather than being separated out and addressed as free agents who are supposed to make an informed consumer choice as rational individuals. This is a step beyond niche marketing, it’s relational marketing. It works by contagion rather than by convincing, on affect rather than rational choice. It works at least as much on the level of our ‘indeterminate sociality’ as on the level of our identities. More and more, what it does is hitch a ride on movements afoot in the social field, on social stirrings, which it channels in profit-making directions. People like Negri talk about the ‘social factory’, a kind of socialisation of capitalism, where capitalism is more about scouting and capturing or producing and multiplying potentials for doing and being than it is about selling things. The kind of work that goes into this he calls ‘immaterial labour’. The product, ultimately, is us. We are in-formed by capitalist powers of production. Our whole life becomes a ‘capitalist tool’ - our vitality, our affective capacities. It’s to the point that our life potentials are indistinguishable from capitalist forces of production. In some of my essays I’ve called this the ‘subsumption of life’ under capitalism.
Jeremy Rifkin is a social critic who now teaches at one of the most prestigious business schools in the US (talk about the capture of resistance!). Rifkin has a description of capitalism that is actually surprisingly similar to Negri’s. And he’s teaching it to the next generation of capitalists. It centres on what he calls ‘gatekeeping’ functions. Here the figure of power is no longer the billy club of the policeman, it’s the barcode or the PIN number. These are control mechanisms, but not in the old sense of ‘power over’. It’s control in Gilles Deleuze’s sense, which is closer to ‘check mechanism’. It’s all about checkpoints. At the grocery store counter, the barcode on what you’re buying checks the object out of the store. At the automatic bank teller, the PIN number on your card checks you into your account. The checks don’t control you, they don’t tell you where to go or what to be doing at any particular time. They don’t lord it over you. They just lurk. They lie in wait for you at key points. You come to them, and they’re activated by your arrival. You’re free to move, but every few steps there’s a checkpoint. They’re everywhere, woven into the social landscape. To continue on your way you have to pass the checkpoint. What’s being controlled is right of passage - access. It’s about your enablement to go places and do things. When you pass the checkpoint you have to present something for detection, and when you do that something registers. Your bank account is debited, and you and your groceries pass. Or something fails to register, and that’s what lets you pass, like at airport security or places where there’s video surveillance. In either case what’s being controlled is passage across thresholds.
Society becomes an open field composed of thresholds or gateways, it becomes a continuous space of passage. It’s no longer rigidly structured by walled-in enclosures, there’s all kinds of latitude. It’s just that at key points along the way, at key thresholds, power is tripped into action. The exercise of the power bears on your movement - not so much you as a person. In the old disciplinary power formations, it was always about judging what sort of person you were, and the way power functioned was to make you fit a model, or else. If you weren’t the model citizen, you were judged guilty and locked up as a candidate for ‘reform’. That kind of power deals with big unities - the person as moral subject, right and wrong, social order. And everything was internalised - if you didn’t think right you were in trouble. Now you’re checked in passing, and instead of being judged innocent or guilty you’re registered as liquid. The process is largely automatic, and it doesn’t really matter what you think or who you are deep down. Machines do the detecting and ‘judging’. The check just bears on a little detail - do you have enough in your bank account, do you not have a gun? It’s a highly localised, partial exercise of power - a micro-power. That micro-power, though, feeds up to higher levels, bottom up.
http://www.international-festival.org/node/111
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