Technologies of Sin & Salvatation:
Capital & Technologies of Meaning in the Age of the Perpetual Innovation Economy
Chapter
One
THE
AFFECT ECONOMY
But
so long as the market retains its transcendent status
in liberal political theory, the telos of a more just
and equitable social order will remain virtual, and
the experience of a universal subjectivity will remain
the sole province of those who can afford it.
Grant
Kester, Learning from Aesthetics
As
long as automated capitalist production maintains
its viability through innovation, it creates new structures
which expand the boundaries of both human potential
and human misery.
Tessa
Morris-Suzuki, Robots & Capitalism
Amidst
the massive restructuring and move to virtual arrangements,
a void has emerged.
Crandall
& Wallace, The Virtual Corporation
IN
DESIGNING NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
we design ourselves anew — for to be human is
to be technological. When we create new information
and communications technologies, we create new technologies
of meaning. And, because these technologies of meaning
have become the increasingly dominant means of creating
value in today's perpetual innovation economy, they
are directly implicated in the ongoing transformation
of both capital value and notions of human worth.
This chapter addresses this tensive relationship between
imminent meaning and transcendent value, describing
ways in which a 200 year transformation of capital
which began with the Industrial Revolution may now
finally offer the opportunity to deconstruct this
dialectic into what Pierre Levy has described as a
genuine "economy of human qualities." That
is, in the vernacular of this study, an "eco-cognitive
political economy."
____Because
of the ever more penetrating and fluid relationship
being forged between imminent human creativity and
the transcendent authority of global capital, it is
all the more crucial that the work of designing and
assessing digital network technologies be public,
transparent and subject to informed deliberation.
It is equally important that those designing and implementing
such technologies be empowered with practical methods
for shaping these external neural networks in ways
which will ameliorate rather than magnify the epistemological
and cognitive errors to which human beings have proven
uniquely susceptible. For, though the most fundamental
dynamics of human virtuality and embodiment may have
changed little since the beginning of human cognitive
history, cast in the fresh light of contemporary technological
capabilities and environmental imperatives, the stakes
have come to be extraordinarily high-both in terms
of the potential impacts upon our most private immediate
and embodied experience, as well as upon the ultimate
compatibility of our technologies with our only habitat.
____When
the technologies of capital and thermodynamics converged
just two centuries ago in the Industrial Revolution,
they sparked a period of accelerating political economic
transformation which-despite recent works proclaiming
the end of history and political economy-shows no
signs of diminished vitality or force. Indeed, it
appears clear that the incipient synergies of capital
and machine began just a few decades ago to more rapidly
evolve into today's perpetual innovation economy.
This latest political economic transmogrification
has taken capital beyond the privatization of natural
spaces and resources, beyond the mechanical manufacture
of material goods, beyond even the digital encoding
of information, into the dimension of human subjectivity,
embodied affect, soul.
____This
transformation can be seen statistically in the phenomenal
growth in recent years of the entertainment and media
industry, the rapid shift to global markets, as well
as the accelerating "weightlessness" of
major national economies. Between 1997 and 2001, the
global entertainment and media industry expanded from
US$8.5 billion to US$1.1 trillion in total revenues.
To put this into some perspective, the global petroleum
market last year saw revenues of about US$1.2 trillion,
a figure largely unchanged from the previous year.
By 2006, the global entertainment and media market
is forecast to grow to US$1.4 (PriceWaterhouseCoopers
2001). Earlier comparative figures are difficult to
ascertain for the content industry, largely because
many sectors simply did not exist prior to the mid-1990s.
For example, gaming and interactive entertainment,
which expanded a remarkable 43 percent from US$6.6
to US$9.4 billion between 2000 and 2001, became a
major factor in the market only over the past several
years, and yet last year had already eclipsed the
film industry in total annual revenues. Secondly,
the content industry has rapidly transformed from
a disparate and diverse universe of regional and national
businesses to a global market now dominated by nine
transnational corporations; AOL Time Warner, Disney,
Bertelsmann, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation,
Sony, TCI, Universal and NBC. Further, until 1997,
the two largest, AOL Time Warner and Disney, derived
only 15 percent of total revenues from international
sales. Today, that figure is estimated to have grown
to between 35 and 40 percent. Meaning has quickly
become a global enterprise. Finally, a study in 2001
by the Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Center for Business
Innovation quantified the trend toward a "weightless"
economy which increasingly generates value through
virtual products such as media content and program
code. From 1977 (the first year for which reliable
data was available) and 2000, the total weight of
all American goods and services plateaued at roughly
1 trillion pounds, while its adjusted dollar value
doubled. Alan Greenspan has described this phenomenon
as the key indicator of an emerging economic paradigm
shift (2001).
____Central
to this continued capital transformation has been
the accelerating schematization and mapping of previously
immeasurable, uncharted regions of virtual and natural
dimensions. In the final years of the 20th century,
genes and memes, the building blocks of human embodiment,
cognition and culture, were rapidly encoded for absorption
into the newly digital circuits of the global marketplace
(Dawkins 1990). Despite popular allusions throughout
the 1990s to humankind's impending ascendance to the
"pearly gates of cyberspace," the lasting
impact of the developments of the past several decades
is more likely to be in the convergence of the new
capital, digital, social and biological technologies,
not only recasting each technology through a synergy
with the others, but also in shifting evolutionary
trajectories for both the human subject and its environment.
For, as Dewey argued, all technological change-indeed
all adaptive action-necessarily leads to corresponding
changes in both the organism and the environment.
In his 1938 treatise, Logic: the Theory of Inquiry,
Dewey identified "the continuum of inquiry,"
defining inquiry as "the controlled or directed
transformation of an indeterminate situation into
one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions
and relations as to convert the elements of the original
situation into a unified whole" (Dewey 1938,
104-105) He argued that an "indeterminate situation"
is one in which the balance between organism and environment
is disturbed, stimulating the organism to restore
the balance, and in the process reconstituting both
itself and its environment. This was, of course, an
early articulation of what has come to be known as
"social constructivism" in political economics,
and "enaction" in the field of cognitive
science. These crucial, complementary insights are
of particular importance in understanding the growing
complexity of interaction between the human organism
and its contemporary environment through emergent
technologies of value and meaning.
____In The Society of Mind, Minsky identified the
human cognitive operations now being externalized
in our global, digital networks of value meaning.
Today, Minsky's description serves particularly well
to illustrate our contemporary difficulty in understanding
the complex, self-modifying processes of a perpetual
innovation Affect Economy.
Why
are [these] processes so hard to classify? In earlier
times, we could usually judge machines and processes
by how they transformed raw materials into finished
products. But it makes no sense to speak of brains
as though they manufacture thoughts the way factories
make cars. The difference is that brains use processes
that change themselves-and this means we cannot separate
such processes from the products they produce. In
particular, brains make memories, which change the
ways we'll subsequently think. The principal activities
of brains are making changes in themselves. Because
the whole idea of self-modifying processes is new
to our experience, we cannot yet trust our commonsense
judgment about such matters (1984, 99).
____What
Minsky says of the internal neural network of the
brain applies as well to the networked economy. For
it is this self-modifying, self-transformative capacity
which has been established over the past three decades
as the principle driving force in this economic paradigm.
Innovation is far more than a mere trend, but represents
this increasingly dominant self-modifying process
of endless innovation for generating both value and
meaning in the global political economy today.
____The
explosion of broad-based technological schematization
in the late 20th century further enabled-and in many
instances necessitated-the rapid dissolution of barriers
between once disparate academic disciplines and political-economic
enterprise, as well as giving rise to altogether novel
forms of social and capital networks. One industry
in which this phenomenon was particularly evident,
for example, was in the swift consolidation of previously
distinct media into global purveyors and distributors
of digital "content," including, for example
the AOL Time Warner, Disney and Murdoch conglomerates.
Invoking two of the most potent themes of the day,
executives announcing the formation of the world's
largest new media corporation spoke of injecting "Internet
DNA" throughout the venerable Time Warner Corporation.
Though the language was certainly intended as loosely
and dramatically metaphorical, the conceptual blend
of digital and biological technologies it conjures
continues to be literalized in rapidly growing industries
such as bio-informatics. Much innovative work in academe,
too, occurred in compelling new interdisciplinary
syntheses of traditionally discrete fields of study,
often spurred by these merging networks of political
economic activity. As noted earlier, such research
particularly relevant to this study has been, for
example, Mathew Rabin's seminal work in bridging psychology
and economics, giving rise to the compelling new insights
of behavioral finance. Robert McNeil's groundbreaking
synthesis in environmental history details the effects
of successive technological and political economic
transitions on the natural environment. The argument
presented in this chapter also owes much to Antonio
Negri and Michael Hardt's penetrating analyses of
the potentialities for human experience engendered
in this convergence of capital, digital and biological
forces within what they term the new "Empire"
of the global political economy.
____Far
less publicly recognized and vetted, however, has
been the inception and maturation of what Tessa Morris-Suzuki
first termed the "perpetual innovation economy,"
the core dynamic now driving the accelerating global
schematization and convergence described above. In
this chapter, I argue that this emergent political
economic paradigm relies to an unprecedented degree
on a powerfully tensive and problematic relationship
between transcendent capital value and imminent human
value and meaning, yet which holds out the possibility
of purposefully evolving our notions of both capital
value and human worth. This chapter's major purpose
will be to survey and distill from a broad array of
interdisciplinary analyses of these present-day political
economic transformations in order to garner important
touchstones in defining a set of theoretical parameters
and principles for the design of successful eco-cognitive
technologies, and provide direction to the corresponding
method of researching and designing information and
communications technologies to be presented in Part
II.
. . .
One
need not travel too far back in time for
evidence of how rapidly capital's form and value have
been progressively transformed through successive
phases of Western political economy. It was as recently
as the mid-17th Century when Europe's first banks
were established in England to safeguard the nation's
gold from an avaricious King Charles I. It was then
in 1776, as the principles of the American experiment
were being formulated, when Adam Smith first observed
that the state's source of wealth and power had come
to reside in its ongoing production of goods rather
than its stockpiles of precious metals and gems. (Solomon,
1997, 20). And less than a century later, Marx presented
in Grundisse his initial proof of the need for "living
labor" in the suddenly and increasingly mechanized
workplace, presenting that surplus value could not
be sustained through the "dead labor" of
mechanistic production alone. Specifically, he argued
that the source of capital's value was necessarily
derived from individuals doing labor, who must then
reinvest their capital earnings into these and other
products in order to propel the money-commodity-money
(M-C-M) cycle through which the capitalist economy
sustained itself. In short, Marx showed that the machine
alone was incapable of creating and sustaining surplus
value. And, though his analysis was framed within
the then current physics of thermodynamics, his foundational
thesis has withstood scrutiny within changing techno-scientific
contexts up to and including the current quantum,
digital age (Caffentzis 1997, Carchedi 1997, Lerner
1990, Schiller 1994). Marx was also clearly aware,
even at that early juncture, of the false contradistinction
of man and machine in the marketplace. As he noted
in Capital:
It
took both time and experience before the workers learnt
to distinguish between machinery and its employment
by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks
from the material instruments of production to the
form of society which utilizes these instruments (1976,
554-555).
____In
fact, as much as it is still widely misunderstood
and misrepresented, Marx's deconstruction of the man|machine
dialectic was equally deft and devastating. For, beyond
his exhaustive statistical analyses, Marx's arguments
were generally deeply rooted in the core existential
fact of human alienation. This crucial dimension to
Marx's research and writings was initially inspired
by Hegel's description of entfremdung, alienation
or estrangement.
____In
his Philosophy of History, Hegel had earlier
noted that, "What the mind really strives for
is the realization of its notion; but in doing so
it hides that goal from its vision and is proud and
well satisfied in this alienation from its essence."
Hegel's entfremdung was, in its essence, an account
of the negative existential repercussions of virtualizing
technologies of meaning, which had been described
rather differently by Johanne Eckhart several centuries
earlier. "When the soul wishes to experience
something new," Eckhart observed, "she throws
a vision of the experience out before her and enters
into her own image." These statements by Hegel
and Eckhart may be two of the West's earliest clear
articulations of that human capacity for creative,
figurative transformation which has since come to
lie at the heart of today's political economy. Eckhart's
observation is hopeful, even naïve. Hegel's formulation,
framed several centuries later within the context
of the Industrial Revolution, is far less optimistic.
During the time when Hegel wrote his cautionary description
of alienation, it would have been nearly impossible
to be unaware of the tendency for "imagination"
to manifest in the form of industrial virtualities,
a systems world within which value and meaning were
increasingly alien to the human touch.
____Like
Hegel, Marx also viewed technologies-whether linguistic,
social or material-with a sense of caution. It was
in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts where
he most explicitly warned against either idolizing
or demonizing human constructs, of projecting them
into the transcendent realms of good or evil-whether
in the form of dualistic epistemologies or religious
dogma.
____Marx
and Hegel's Modernist analyses of alienation are the
West's earliest careful observations of the negative,
virtualizing dynamics within the cycle of figurative
transformation and technological schematization. In
the 20th Century, we find analogous postmodern interpretations
in the writings of scholars such as Jean Beaudrillard
and Michel Foucault. The essential difference, however,
lies in the Modern emphasis on the alienating impacts
of the virtualization of value in the industrial economy,
and the Postmodern fascination with the disorienting
and vertiginous effects of the virtualization of meaning
in the current political economy. There is also, of
course, a difference of prescription. Where Marx and
Engels urged the proletariat's re-appropriation of
the means of production as their antidote to the industrial
virtualization of value, the postmodernists appear
to offer the deconstruction of Western dialectic and
logic as their alternative to remaining entangled
in the untethered "hyperreality" of transcendent
networks of meaning-a method which, as I will show,
presents some uncanny parallels to the Zen Buddhist
use of their koans in breaking through constraining
cognitive biases. Though it is unclear whether this
is the intended effect of the postmodern theorists'
syntactic paroxysms or simply the inevitable consequence
of epistemological despair.
____But
what actually happens to the condition of alienation-that
is, the virtual void between imminent experience and
transcendent authority-as human and machine enter
an era of digital neural networks and bio-informatics?
The field of historical and contemporary analysis
offers the most promising insights into this question
remains that of human labor-which is implicit today
in the full cycle of production and consumption. This
is, after all, the active plane upon which the individual
has direct engagement with the natural and built environment,
inevitably culminating in the formation of identity
and humanity itself. Labor, in this broad sense, is
human life giving rise to and signifying itself.
____It
has become common to view the succession of political-economic
paradigms since the Middle Ages in several distinct
phases, each denoted by its primary mode of labor
and production: a first paradigm in which agriculture
and the mining of resources dominated the economy,
a second defined by the manufacture of durable goods,
and a third paradigm in which services and communications
represent the vanguard of economic production and
the creation of value. Attending each succeeding political-economic
paradigm have been distinctly new forms of human labor
and the expansion of capital privatization and commoditization
into new areas of human exchange and experience. The
gradual expansion of economies driven primarily by
agriculture and resource extraction required the progressive
private appropriation of once vast, shared geographical
spaces. During the 18th and 19th centuries, as the
locus of capital growth accelerated toward urban manufacturing
centers, the new forms of economic production necessitated
new forms of closely regulated labor and the progressive
appropriation of social time and space. Material and
social technologies representative of this paradigm
include machines and management methods built upon
what Pierre Levy has described as the "molar"
science of thermodynamics. These served as the dominant
engines of industrial age economic growth up through
the late 20th century, mining units of quantifiable
labor from the worker, who, through production and
consumption, became subject to these new sociotechnical
objects and dominant mechanistic metaphors in the
existential narrative of that day.
In
the early 20th century, Musil noted this passage of
humanity from the agricultural paradigm to life in
the social factory.
There was a time when people grew naturally into the
conditions they found waiting for them and that was
a very sound way of becoming oneself. But nowadays,
with all this shaking up of things, when everything
is detached from the soil it grew in, even where the
production of soul is concerned one really ought,
as it where, to replace the traditional handicrafts
by the sort of intelligence that goes with the machine
and the factory (in Hardt, 2001, 2).
The
cognitive and affective transformations which Musil
described in the lives and identities of those immersed
in this Industrial Revolution also demanded that Western
philosophers and other scholars turn their collective
efforts to articulating new epistemologies capable
of taking account of these new ontological realities.
The existential ruptures apparent throughout Europe
at that time demanded fresh conceptions of value and
meaning, which are explored in fuller detail in Chapter
Five.
____Finally,
in the closing decades of the 20th century, a new
economic paradigm emerged which is characterized by
perpetual figurative transformations, entailing the
intensified negotiation and creation of new human
subjectivities, identities and desires. In this nascent
paradigm, schematizing and commoditizing embodied
affect has come to represent the vanguard of economic
development and expansion, a phenomenon increasingly
manifest in what Hardt and Negri have referred to
as the Affect Economy (Hardt, 1999; Hardt & Negri,
2000), and which Rolf Jensen refers to as the Dream
Society (Jensen 1999), a political economic paradigm
dominated by value and meaning conveyed through mythical
narrative form rather than through information. As
Jensen puts it,
The
days of the Information Society are numbered….
The agricultural society originated 10,000 years ago,
the industrial society between 200 and 100 years ago,
the information-based society 20 years ago. Who knows
how many more years the logic and economics of the
Information Society will last? … The Information
Society will render itself obsolete through automation,
abolishing the very same jobs it created. The inherent
logic of the Information Society remains unchanged:
replacing humans with machines, letting the machines
do the work. This is reflected in the three waves
of the electronics industry. The first wave was hardware.
The second wave was software…. The third will
be content; that is, profit will be generated by the
product itself, not by the instrument conveying it
to the consumer (3).
____With
each paradigm shift, new capacities for technological
schematization have enabled capital valuation in the
progressive encoding and formatting of new areas of
cognition, culture and biology. Caffeintz has described,
for example, the process of genetic mapping as prerequisite
to capital's privatization and effective commoditization
of plant and animal life. Agribusiness would be incapable
of purchasing and patenting biological organisms without
the schematic encoding of these life forms by biologists
and geneticists. The pharmaceutical industry would
similarly be incapable of owning legal rights to molecular
compounds without the schematization and replication
enabled by their scientists in research and development.
There is a history of reciprocity between Western
instrumental science and the mechanisms of capital.
But, again, this relationship is dynamic. The ontogenesis
of value and meaning is created in a complete, unending
cycle of figurative transformation and technological
schematization and replication which then provides
new platforms and potentialities from which fresh
transformations may be projected. Capital's goal must
therefore be to encompass this entire, generative
cycle of human value and meaning.
____Since
the early 1980s, a broad array of economic analyses
identified pervasive and profound economic changes
driven first by the mechanistic automation familiar
to Musil and his contemporaries, and later by the
powerful synergy of these traditional forms of automation
and the newer forms of ICTs (Davis 1997). Anticipating
the effects of Herbert Weiner's early theoretical
work in cybernetics, Bagrit in 1964 coined the term
'cybernation' to describe his vision of industrial
automation combined with complex feedback control
systems-an early theoretical synthesis which would
eventually manifest in today's digital marketplace
(Huhtama 1997). Since that time, though the term has
fallen somewhat out of vogue, the accelerating trend
toward cybernation-that is, digital formatting, encoding,
automation and replication-has impacted the macro-economy,
as well as individual and institutional realities,
in a multitude of familiar and well-documented ways.
These include the previously mentioned trends toward
convergence, a global economy increasingly reliant
on accelerated, ongoing innovation, as well as the
opening of a "virtual void" in human, living
labor described below. Yet it was in Tessa Morris-Suzuki's
groundbreaking analyses of the Japanese economy of
the 1980s where the fundamental new dynamics of value
formation were initially elucidated. In essence, Morris-Suzuki
proposed that, in an environment of accelerating electronic
automation and ever-advancing technologies of reproduction,
capital's value must inevitably and increasingly flow
from the creative human production of new knowledge,
"content"-or, more properly, meaning (1984,
1986).
____Developments
over the past decade and a half, the birth of the
now ubiquitous "knowledge worker," and subsequent
research, have since more than borne out Morris-Suzuki's
early observations of these digital dynamics. For
example, one major study conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers
over a two-year period and covering 800 businesses
worldwide, quantified "the proven link between
innovation and growth." Among its other findings,
the study showed that companies which generate 80
percent of revenue from new products typically double
their market capitalization in a five-year period.
Innovation-from process reengineering to new product
design-was revealed to be directly proportional to
revenue growth. The technology sector, together with
entertainment and media businesses, ranked highest
in spawning growth through innovation, launching an
average of 30 new products and services each year
(PriceWaterhouseCoopers 2002). In popular business
and management literature, this phenomenon is most
generally understood and described simply as the quickening
pace of change. But it is a great deal more than this,
involving transformations in the essential formulation
of the human subject and its built and natural environments.
In responding to Kester's proposition in the epigram
at the top this chapter that capital be recognized
as an immediate and imminent human construct, Morris-Suzuki's
analysis suggests that, even as the market proceeds
down the path of global saturation, in an economy
propelled by innovation, capital is simultaneously
and irrevocably reliant upon the human individual's
embodied subjectivity and creative capacity for its
essential value. It is important this point be understood.
For, ultimately, this ongoing convergence of capital,
digital, social and biological elucidates and supports
Marx's very early contention that the commonly perceived
contradiction of man and machine in political economics
is premised on an altogether false separation of that
which is human and that which is technological.
____Perhaps
no other corporation has embodied this dynamic over
the past decade as effectively as Disney. The Disney
Corporation has built itself on innovation and built
its unique brand on the power of perpetually innovated
narrative content. As CEO Michael Eisner said in the
company's 1996 annual report, "It is about creating
change before it creates you," adding that roughly
half of Disney's growth during the past 10 years has
been generated by business that did not exist in 1985
(Jensen 1999, 9).
____A
second macro-phenomenon closely related to this shift
toward perpetual innovation in the Affect Economy
has been the steady hollowing out of national and
regional economies over the past several decades and
the gradual expansion of the structural unemployment
which has always been a characteristic of capitalist
societies. This hollowing phenomenon has been shown
to manifest itself in an accelerating trend in labor
migrating toward either end of the income spectrum.
As virtual arrangements have increasingly freed capital
from the need for mid-level information workers, labor
has become ever more concentrated in high-level management
positions on one hand and low-level service functions
on the other. This has in turn led to a rapidly growing
pool of superfluous yet educated human labor, representing
today's unemployed, underemployed and all those confronted
with increasingly fluid employment conditions. Within
today's organizations this has led to a fundamental
redefinition of the corporate structure and of employment
practices such that only those individuals offering
specific core and supportive competencies now secure
the long-term social contracts once a staple of pre-digital
economic practice. A growing "center" of
employment is increasingly rendered either superfluous
through technological innovation or fully contingent
upon immediate-term market dynamics. In her analyses
of historical and contemporary labor trends, Juliet
Schor has described this phenomenon as an extreme
"polarization" of the global workforce,
a trend highlighted by a growing disparity in salaries-and
valuations-of labor on either end of the employment
spectrum. For the year 2000, Businessweek calculated
that cash compensation alone for CEOs at 365 top U.S.
companies jumped 18 percent during a time when shareholder
values were plummeting. At that time, annual compensation
awarded to the country's leading business executives
already exceeded the salaries of their lowest-ranking
employees by a ratio of 400 to 1. Crandall and Wallace,
among other analysts, point to this phenomenon, this
"void" born of "the transition to virtual
arrangements," as "the single most important
factor that will challenge our economy in the next
decade" (1998, 9).
____Efforts
to enframe and interpret the transformations implied
by these paradoxical dynamics have been as myriad
and partially formed as one would expect in such a
moment of technological and political-economic flux.
Business analysts frequently address the quickening
pace of change while failing to speak to the tectonic
political economic shifts described by Morris-Suzuki
which have given rise to this quest for "the
next new thing." Economists frequently demarcate
and debate the pros and cons of a global economy enabled
by capital's increasingly virtual and volatile character
while seldom delving into what these transformations
may mean to the experience of being human and laboring
within this new paradigm. The most compelling research
into the social and psychological impacts of new digital
media have generally stopped short of incorporating
the evolving dynamics of capital into their analyses.
Yet there are those, such as Katherine Hayles, Mathew
Hardt and Antonio Negri, who challenge us to restructure
the parameters of theory and method around an integral,
unified space of embodiment, affect and cognition,
of information and materiality-even as the limitations
of our traditional social epistemologies are being
revealed by the dawning light of an emergent political
economic paradigm.
____ While
the market's transcendent status may well be necessary
to its continued viability in capital's present form,
it is equally clear that the dynamics of a perpetual
innovation economy demand new, extruded communications
technologies capable of invigorating the production
of figurative innovation. Such networks of collective
innovation must be capable of empowering and articulating
the full multi-dimensionality of the human individual's
affective, embodied experience and labor. And such
networks, in their integral aesthetic nature, must-by
definition-counter the causes and effects of that
condition of alienation currently required to maintain
capital's transcendent status. In other words, a transcendent
virtuality in which value and meaning are measured
and commodified in a global network of capital is
ultimately antithetical to an imminent reality in
which value and meaning are generated through embodied,
human figurative transformation. Such, I believe,
is the emerging tensive paradox at the core of the
perpetual innovation-or affect-economy. This is not
another version of "automated Marxism,"
but rather represents an ongoing, qualitative shift
in the relationship of human meaning to capital value.
For, as Gregory Bateson has argued, if meaning resides
in patterns of human cognition and experience, it
is clear that the source of capital's value increasingly
lies in the innovation of meaning-that is, in an ongoing
cycle of self-modifying patterns and processes, enabling
new technological schematizations, which enable new
figurative transformations, ad infinitum. The transformative
dynamic involved in this perpetual innovation of fresh
value and meaning lies beyond reason and replication,
beyond the immediate economics of corporate efficiencies
which have served capital so well for so long, and
beyond the epistemological confines of Platonic dualisms
and dialectics which have served the West for much
longer still. Capital value increasingly lies rather
in the vast, uncharted and untapped meanings which
coalesce only in the living presence of physical human
affect, identity and desire.
____ Convergent
evidence representing a growing diversity of voices
from a range of disciplines and political-economic
viewpoints support the view that contemporary ICT
networks represent an ongoing externalization of what
has until very recently been this internal feature
of human cognition. Until now, the human individual
has possessed the unique ability to use imbedded material,
linguistic and social technologies to imaginatively
project modifications as well as altogether novel
schemas of value and meaning. Today, the fundamental
work of ICT developers is thus to create external
digital networks with the collective transformative
capacity of the previously unique internal capacities
of the human subject. We thus enter a political economic
model characterized by what Minsky, as we have seen,
identified as complex "self-modifying processes."
____ For
all of these reasons, it has increasingly become the
view of observers from all points along the political
spectrum that the interplay of these technological
and political-economic dynamics is generating the
conditions for a necessary and accelerating transformation
of capital into as yet unimagined forms and into unexplored
terrain. In a process of perpetual innovation, capital
will seek to schematize, format and encode new and
ancient dimensions of experience, generating, as Morris-Suzuki
noted, novel "structures which expand the boundaries
of both human potential and human misery." As
capital continually seeks competitive advantage by
freeing itself from the costs and constraints of embodied
human labor and other physical constraints which keep
it tethered to physicality and unable to transcend
into pure virtuality, the question becomes: How is
capital value to be generated within regional and
global economies increasingly marked by a virtual
absence of that same living labor-as well as the ongoing
diminishment of the physical environment? The complex
of technologies which comprise capital must continue
to evolve-with or without human understanding and
direction-in order to resolve this core paradox and
problematic. As Levy has noted, this ambiguous relationship
of embodied production (and reproduction) with capital
and digital technologies is precipitously driving
the "Darwinian machines" which are today's
corporate entities (1998, 130-135) to extend themselves
beyond the traditional plane of analytic dialectical
method. The new emphasis is on "user experience"
and what Seeley-Brown has described as "the social
life of information." What many contemporary
observers have tended to overlook, however, is that
capital is increasingly beholden to human beings for
certain peculiar human capacities-for the social organization
of that vast dimension of human experience which lies
beyond measure and reason, for creative innovation,
and most importantly for the aesthetic integration
of the life world and the systems world (that is,
new meanings and technological replication) from which
capital derives its value. Marx's early vision becomes
realized in ways he could not have foreseen. The means
of production are, in this important sense, in the
workers' hands-or rather in their uniquely human capacity
for innovative production.
____ When
perpetual innovation shapes the competitive business
landscape, the development of more advanced innovation-enabling
technologies becomes the priority within every capital-driven
organization. As Hirschberg notes, "Business
begins with an idea. And as never before, its growth,
stability and ultimate success depend upon innovation
and a continuing flow of imaginative thought"
(2000, 157). In their important work, The Knowledge
Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide valuable
cross-cultural account of this now well-established
imperative toward the innovation of knowledge and
meaning as the key to value creation. Their work provides
a rare analysis of the creative process within the
Japanese organizational context set against a careful
analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of traditional
Western conceptions of knowledge and meaning. Beyond
their incisive survey of contemporary methods of generating
new knowledge and new value within companies both
in Japan and in the West, their work also suggests
a shift toward metaphor and conceptual blending which
coincides extremely well with the most recent advances
in the cognitive sciences-and is in line with the
suggested methodology presented here. I will turn
again to Nonaka and Takeuchi's important work in my
discussion of method in Chapter Five.
____ As
these and many other business texts on the subject
attest, on such a dynamic competitive terrain, the
imperative for every executive, brand manager or information
technology professional becomes the development of
more effective self-modifying systems and processes,
which today translates to more fully integrative information
and communication systems-both for corporate use and
for the market. The cumulative creativity of these
legions of virtual innovators, and the resources of
the largest and most advanced institutions in the
world, are today bent toward developing new eco-cognitive
technologies to more effectively mine that essential
human value of productive innovation. Such eco-cognitive
technologies range from mobile computing and connectivity
devices for the internal sales force, to corporate
communications portals, to new techniques and media
technologies for use in brand management. Market analysts
laud Dell for its innovative use of ICTs in supply
chain and inventory management, driving up stock valuations,
and allowing the company to further discount its retail
prices, driving a virtuous cycle of innovation, valuation
and market share. As Levy remarks, "The more
we are able to form intelligent communities as open-minded,
cognitive subjects capable of initiative, imagination,
and rapid response, the more we will be able to ensure
our success in a highly competitive environment (1998,
117). Success in today's information marketplace rests
upon the formation of these freely associating communities
of individuals of authentic "initiative"
and "imagination." When "Content is
king," survival in the free market depends upon
providing more powerful methods of dissolving barriers
to innovation and nurturing creative synergies. This
creative imperative, emerging as it is from within
capital itself, increasingly demands that the political
economy extrude its flattened methods and metrics
to respond effectively to this emergent economic environment.
And this is increasingly accomplished through communications
technologies which most effectively establish the
conditions required for the managed enhancement or
exploitation of human cognitive and creative capacities.
____ Hardt
and Negri have provided perhaps the most explicit
description of the dynamics of this confluence of
human productive capacities with capital valorization,
compassing the most sacred and mundane dimensions
of self- and social-formation. Specifically, Hardt
and Negri see the global formatting and privatization
of embodied affect, subjectivity and desire as a qualitatively
new form of capital valorization. Their remarks are
therefore worth quoting at length. They explain that,
in the Affect Economy,
Labor
becomes increasingly immaterial and realizes it value
through a singular and continuous process of innovation
in production; it is increasingly capable of consuming
or using the services of social reproduction in an
ever more refined and interactive way. Intelligence
and affect … just when they become the primary
productive powers, make production and life coincide
across the terrain on which they operate…. There
would be no surplus if production were not animated
throughout by social intelligence, by the general
intellect and at the same time by the affective expressions
that define social relations and rule over the articulations
of social being. The excess of value is determined
today in the affects, in the bodies crisscrossed by
knowledge, in the intelligence of the mind, and in
the sheer power to act. The production of commodities
tends to be accomplished entirely through language,
where by language we mean machines of intelligence
that are continuously renovated be the affects and
subjective passions.
____ Like
Hardt and Negri, other scholars of these complex virtual
and embodied dynamics today are also seeking the means
to dissolve contemporary cognitive barriers to a more
aesthetically integrative view of human experience.
From New French Theorists such as Derrida, Foucault,
Lyotard and Baudrillard, to American and other perspectives
cited above, the techno-cultural paradigm which has
been emerging over the past several decades has many
straining at the bit of the traditional dialectic
method. We want a new embodied metaphysics and appropriate
and corresponding methods of integrative design and
analysis.
____ As
early as 1976, in L'Echange Symbolique et La Mort,
Baudrillard, for example, announced the end of political
economy and the demise of the linear dialectic:
The
end of labor. The end of production. The end of political
economy. The end of the dialectic signifier/signified
which permitted an accumulation of knowledge and of
meaning, and of a linear syntagm of cumulative discourse.
The end simultaneously of the dialectic exchange value/use
value which alone previously made possible capital
accumulation and social production. The end of linear
discourse. The end of linear merchandising. The end
of the classic era of the sign. The end of the era
of production (1976, 20).
____ Though
hindsight reveals Baudrillard's pronouncements on
the demise of political economy as premature at best,
his thought and prose yet serve two powerfully illustrative
functions. First, they reveal the limitations to sense-making
when binary oppositions are taken to their (il)logical
extremes. Secondly, his syntactic philosophy and rhetorical
contortions are themselves arguments for the need
for theory to extend itself beyond dialectical ratiocination.
As previously mentioned, the unintended, or perhaps
merely unconscious, product of this and other postmodern
speculations often bears a striking resemblance to
the writings of Buddhist scholars dating back to the
time of Nagarjuna in the 2nd century A.D. To those
who contend that today's virtual technologies of affect
and intelligence serve to exacerbate a postmodern
condition of accelerating fragmentation, Johnson responds
that, "Conceptual turbulence - the sense of the
world accelerating around you, pulling you in a thousand
different directions - is a deeply Modern tradition
with roots that go back hundreds of years." Particularly
emphasizing the integrative aesthetic of the ICT interface,
Johnson argues that, "What differentiates our
own historical moment is that a symbolic form has
arisen designed precisely to counteract that tendency,
to battle fragmentation and overload with synthesis
and sense-making. The interface is a way of seeing
the whole" (1997, 238).
____ And,
though I believe Johnson to be correct in his assessment
of the aesthetic and ethical dimension of the virtual
interface, as well as its underlying codes and architectures,
in Chapter Four I will argue that the exploration
and use of such eco-cognitive technologies in fact
predates us by thousands of years.
____ To
take one other example from the other end of the political
economic spectrum, Fukuyama proclaimed the end of
history a decade ago, arguing that capitalism and
democracy had finally satisfied humankind's most essential
nature. Fukuyama offered a picture of bourgeois rationality
wherein capitalism enabled through democracy provides
the total means by which all individuals may fulfill
what he identifies as that which defines us as human.
That is, "thymos," or the irrepressible
need for public recognition of the atomistic and superior
self. For Fukuyama, the failure of the Soviet experiment
two decades ago was a clear signal of the end of conflicting
worldviews, of a teleological arrival, and the hypostasized,
materially sated culmination of reason in capitalist
democracy (Dowdy, 1998, p. 318). Market capitalism,
enabled by a supportive ideological infrastructure
of liberal democracy provides the final, perfected
means of channeling the individual's ego-drive toward
economically productive ends. Fukuyama's concern is
only that the status-leveling effects of democratic
institutions will inevitably drain this vital life-force
from the human soul and irretrievably diminish humankind's
drive for individual and species supremacy, or, as
he puts it, the impulse "to be recognized not
just as equal, but as superior to others" (1992,
p. xii). The tautological irony of this position may
be seen in that such recognition of individual superiority
has meaning only within given social networks where
such recognition is an established behavior in the
first place. As will be shown in our later discussion
of Eastern social epistemologies, such a vaunted view
of thymos has been antithetical to many cultures since
ancient times.
____ Yet
as we have seen, 21st Century political economy-and
capital most palpably-is more accurately morphing
beyond its linear, logical constraints and beyond
our capacity to comprehend its new forms and dynamics
with our traditional instrumental means of analysis.
Baudrillard and Fukuyama each represent the trap of
institutional involution. For Baudrillard, like many
others of the postmodernist critics, language itself
becomes a solipsistic trap. In his paraspatial hyperreality,
Logos has become transcendent, beyond which there
is no firm ground upon which to stand, no body within
which experience is rooted. For Fukuyama and the conservative
right, the obsession has become the perfect union
of democracy and capital, marking the end of political
economic evolution. The free market society becomes
static, transcendent. But we know that political economy
has not come a linear end. It evolves, extruding itself
beyond the reach of linear logic. Capital reaches
for new methods and new metaphors in network mathematics,
in behavioral finance, in cognitive science. In a
space of excess supply and diminishing surplus value,
capital is driven to new modes of producing and consuming
new forms of affect within new realms of subjective
experience. The dynamics of convergence, encoding,
formatting, privatization and globalization are already
manifesting themselves in capital's efforts to integrate
political economy with the environmental space on
the one hand and the affective, embodied dimension
on the other. It is, therefore, crucial that our conceptual
frameworks and methods are capable of grasping this
reality and anticipating its impacts.
____ Only
by constructing an integrative conceptual framework
and method which nurtures a unified space of technology
and art-schematic replication and figurative transformation-will
humanity be in a position to purposefully evolve itself,
its emergent technological capabilities and its political-economy.
This is thus a practical project, the goals of which
are to confirm the source of value and meaning in
human labor and articulate a clear set of principles
and methods addressing the disconnect between capital's
virtual value, our notions of human worth, and of
our natural environment. The alternative is to allow
these political-economic transformations to race on
before us, driven by emergent dynamics beyond our
grasp, fueled by outdated theories and methods of
analysis and design. Capital will inevitably seek
out the science to refine its methods of measuring
and manipulating these spaces. The question is whether
these methods will be transparent and democratic,
or veiled and coercive, owned by and available only
to a privileged few.
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