[ICTs-and-Society] Vincent Mosco - Marx is Back, but Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite? On the Critical Study of Labour, Media, and Communication Today

[Jonathan Beller]

In my view, the "right direction" entails observing the shifts in the logistics of visuality and perception during capitalist expansion and intensification over the long 20th century. Such a consideration of the changing role of the visual (which extends to proprioception, language function, and the question of "the human" and "the real"), provides an index of the new demands placed on the visual and thus the new forms of processing required to cope with capitlaist complexity/exploitation. To understand these forms of processing as coming to occupy the place formerly held by labor (which turns out to be a subset of attention, at least in accord with what I call the attention theory of value) in the valorization of capital.

Thus a brief list of essential texts (I hope they do not seem too obvious, but they might to some readers):
Marx, Grundrisse
Eisenstein, Writings vol 1
Benjamin, "work of art"
Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Lacan, Four fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Adorno and Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry"
Dallas Smythe, "blindspot"
Regis Debray, Media Manifestoes
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto
Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitudes

writings by Christian Fuchs  -- perhaps he could suggest particular titles/links (and additional authors/texts)

and I would add my own The Cinematic Mode of Production.

Of course there are ways, perhaps better ways, to do this from the standpoint of feminist inquiry or anti-imperialist inquiry, but that's a start. What one wants to discern, I would say, are the mechanisms of "real subsumption." How are extra-economic practices brought within the domain of capital-logic, what are the dominant trends, and why? One way to do this, is to look at the struggles waged against capitalist encroachment.

Jon







Jonathan Beller
Professor
Humanities and Media Studies
Critical and Visual Studies
Pratt Institute
jbeller at pratt.edu
718-636-3573 (office fax)		
				

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On Feb 16, 2012, at 8:08 PM, Jernej Prodnik wrote:

> That's an interesting point to make regarding Lukacs, several other authors have similarly pointed at irrationality of the whole. For example Immanuel Wallerstein, in his attempt to answer why capitalism emerged as social system, writes: "This is not as easy as is often thought. On the face of it, far from being a 'natural' system, as some apologists have tried to argue, historical capitalism is a patently absurd one. One accumulates capital in order to accumulate more capital. Capitalists are like white mice on a treadmill, running ever faster in order to run still faster.
> 
> Similarly, Deleuze, in his debate with Guattary, which was suitably entitled "Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium", says (right at the beginning of their debate): "Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious; it's mad. In this sense we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational."
> 
> I concur, there is much much more to Marxism than just labour and exploitation. The only reason I'm focusing on these issues is because I'm working on them at the moment (and they remain very fruitful, while at the same time they're also difficult to overlook if you're working on the level of political economy, which is not the only level Marxism is applicable of course).
> In fact, I'm occupied with questions of audience-labour, that you're pointing out Andrew, and I'm still struggling with them. It's definitely a hard one to answer (and I would be glad if someone pointed me in the 'right' direction).
> From a very rational point of view it is very difficult to accept this could be deemed as labour, but on the other hand, labour in Marxian view can very much be seen as a historical phenomenon - so it depends on whether we're trying to give a transhistorical or even anthropological answer to what can be considered as labour (or, in this case better, work) OR what is a "correct" political-economic answer of what is labour in the existing historical context. In the latter case, labour can very much be seen as what capitalism itself defines (or accepts) as labour (which can then be exploited via extraction of surplus-value).
> 
> I'd welcome any input in these issues
> 
> Best,
> Jernej 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net [mailto:discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net] On Behalf Of Andrew Feenberg
> Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2012 6:15 PM
> To: ????? ????????
> Cc: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
> Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] Vincent Mosco - Marx is Back, but Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite? On the Critical Study of Labour, Media, and Communication Today
> 
> I too am following this discussion with interest. The question for me is what characterizes a Marxist approach today. I am a bit doubtful about reducing Marxism to political economoy. I am not convinced that everything significant for Marxism can be understood as labor and exploitiation. I can see the usefulness of the analogy between the exploitation of labor and the exploitation of TV audiences or facebook users, but it seems to me just an analogy. I can't really accept the idea that contributing to facebook is "labor" just because it is exploited. 
> 
> I focus on a different aspect of Marxism, the dialectics of rationalization. Lukacs described capitalism as rationalized in the parts, irrational in the whole. This seems right in the face of both technocratic and neo- liberalism. His theory of reification explains how rational institutional forms of life constrain their contents, the actual human lives they contain, and from this he derived a politics. The mediation of rational forms by human content sounds very abstract but it describes well a lot of contemporary political struggles around technology, especially in the environmental movement and on the Internet. I take this type of struggle to have first emerged in the labor movement. It has now spread wherever technology and bureaucracy structure people's lives, which is just about everywhere. Marxist critique should articulate such struggles theoretically. The risk in the exclusive focus on the model of labor is the loss of focus on other types of struggles that seem too different to count. On the other hand, labor struggle too can be conceived on Lukacs' terms as struggle over rationalization.
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "????? ????????" <maria1307 at mail.ru>
> To: "christian fuchs" <christian.fuchs at uti.at>
> Cc: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
> Sent: Thursday, 16 February, 2012 4:02:44 AM
> Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] Vincent Mosco - Marx is Back, but Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite? On the Critical Study of Labour, Media, and Communication Today
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> Thank you for an interesting discussion.
> I would like to add something.
> Please feel free to criticize my ideas.
> 
> I think that we already have an answer on a question about new media?s influence on politics, economics etc. Russia is an example how Facebook and other social networks can be a tool for social movements. More than 100,000 demonstrators indicated via Facebook that they joined the protests against the results of the December 4 parliamentary elections. It was the largest political event of its kind since the fall of the USSR. It?s not a secret that as the communication landscape gets denser, more complex and more participatory, the networked population is gaining greater access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action. In the political arena, as the protests in Russia demonstrated, these increased freedom can help closely coordinated public?s demand change.
> Regarding Marks?s theory as a way for understanding contemporary society I would like to add that we should always remember that we attribute other people?s behavior to psychology and our own behavior to context  and, what?s more, often don?t take into account other important circumstances like historical period. Of course, Marks and his contemporaries weren?t different kinds of people than we are in their age. Human nature hasn?t changed. But behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So we should search Mark?s studies always looking at the context of today?s life and in many cases using content of the new media. 
> 
> For example, we can use social media like a psychiatric patient. This allows us to measure the mood of the public over different mood states and predict social movements. 
> Recently The New York Times ran an interesting article, Happy and You Know It? So Are Millions on Twitter, today. The study was conducted by Scott A. Golder and Michael W. Macy of Cornell University and published in the September 30, 2011 edition of Science. The article and study highlight the increasing interest and usefulness of using text analytics to study social media as well as the cyclical nature of mood on a societal level. The conclusions and underlying concepts of this study indirectly support using similar tools to determine longer term societal mood trends for investment purposes. According to the article: ?Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people?s messages follows a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons.?
> 
> Another social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington  has found that  the emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7%.
> So in my opinion, it would be reasonable if we could compare Marks?s studies with the newest ones and discuss the value of all of them for our society.
> 
> 
> Best regards,
> Maria Razumova
> postgraduate student 
> the Faculty of Journalism
> 
> 
> 
> 12 ??????? 2012, 03:00 ?? Christian Fuchs <christian.fuchs at uti.at>:
>> I will in the coming weeks/months here once in a while post one of the
>> abstracts of the plenary talks of the Uppsala conference and try to
>> bring up, based on the abstracts, some questions for discussion.
>> 
>> Feel free to discuss, comment, voice critique, etc. The list is intended
>> for pre-conference discussion and controversy (please send no general
>> announcements for publications and events over it, there are other lists
>> suited available for that)... The keynote speakers are also part of this
>> list, and if they find time, they may even join the discussion if good
>> conversations and controversies develop.
>> 
>> Best, Christian
>> --
>> 
>> Vincent Mosco - Marx is Back, but Will Knowledge Workers of the World
>> Unite? On the Critical Study of Labour, Media, and Communication Today
>> 
>> In one the two opening lectures, Vincent Mosco will ask a question that
>> is fundamental for the Uppsala conference: What is the role of Marxist
>> theory for understanding contemporary society and the role of the media
>> in contemporary society? For Critical Media/Communication scholars, Marx
>> was never away, but he certainly tended to disappear in public discourse
>> and institutions during the past decades. How useful (or not) are some
>> of Marx's concepts today for understanding and changing the world?  Why
>> is it that he was "away" and has now "come back"? What are the
>> perspectives for Marxian-inspired studies of media and communication?
>> Vinny will furthermore, based on Marx, discuss what he sees as the
>> blindspot of media and communication sociology - knowledge labour. What
>> are fundamental qualities of knowledge labour? What experiences of its
>> exploitation can be found? How does knowledge labour resist
>> exploitation? What is the role of class struggles in contemporary
>> capitalism and contemporary movements? What is typical for the class
>> struggles of knowledge workers? In the contemporary situation of global
>> capitalist crisis, will knowledge workers of the world unite, struggle
>> and establish alternatives?
>> 
>> Abstract
>> 
>> This paper begins by addressing the revival of popular and academic
>> interest in Karl Marx and explains why, for some of us, he never went
>> away. Certainly, the global economic crisis has fuelled headlines
>> announcing that it is ?Springtime for Marx?. But so too has the failure
>> of governments to deal with the crisis. Indeed Marx is back partly
>> because of the profound political and moral crisis of capitalism as much
>> as for its economic failings. All of these attest to Marx?s return in
>> popular discourse whether in the mainstream press or on the signs
>> carried by activists at Occupy sites around the world. For some of us,
>> Marx never left because, from his early work on conscious-ness, ideology
>> and culture, which has informed critical cultural studies, through to
>> his later writing on the structure and dynamics of capitalism that
>> provides bedrock for critical political economy, he offers invaluable
>> guidance on how to understand the world and how to change it.
>> In addition to addressing these fundamental themes in Marx?s work, I
>> have been re-cently interested in exploring the need for all of us, but
>> especially for communication scholars, to pay more attention to work
>> that does not fit so neatly into either of these foci, namely Marx of
>> the Grundrisse and Marx, the professional journalist. This is neces-sary
>> because we have paid insufficient attention to labour in the
>> communication, cul-ture and knowledge industries. The Marx of these two
>> streams of work directs our at-tention to what I have called the
>> labouring of communication. It prompts one to ask a Marxian question
>> with a contemporary accent: Will knowledge workers of the world unite?
>> The remainder of the paper takes up this question by reporting on an
>> eight-year pro-ject that examines how knowledge workers have responded
>> to globalization, corporate concentration, technological change and the
>> ensuing economic crisis. It begins by tak-ing up the meaning of
>> knowledge work focusing on subterranean streams of thought that draw
>> from Marx. Next, it addresses an all too persistent blind spot in
>> communica-tion research by assessing tendencies to labour and trade
>> union convergence in the media, information and cultural industries
>> primarily through merger, internationalism and the formation of new
>> worker associations. The paper covers research sites in the United
>> States, Canada, Europe, India, and China where interviews with workers
>> and their leaders shed light on whether knowledge workers will indeed
>> unite. The conclusion considers the implications of current labour
>> strategies and the need for alternatives, including lessons from the
>> Occupy movement.
>> 
>> SPEAKER INFO: Vincent Mosco is Professor Emeritus at Queen's
>> University's Department of Sociology. He is a leading expert in the
>> political economy of communication and was Canada Research Chair in
>> Communication and Society and Professor of Sociology.
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Discussion mailing list
>> Discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
>> http://lists.icts-and-society.net/listinfo.cgi/discussion-icts-and-society.net
>> 
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