Extracts from Feather, H. (2012) 'Cracking Capitalism...'
Cracking Capitalism…
The network of interdependencies amongst human beings is what binds
them together… a structure of mutually oriented and dependent people…it
expresses what we call ‘society’ …as neither an abstraction of attributes of
individuals…nor a ‘system’ or ‘totality’ beyond individuals, but rather a
network…(Elias, 2000, p. )
The recent focus on networking as a means to personal success may be no more than the
sensing of an epiphenomenon, an echoing of an everyday reality, the spectral
presence of capital in what we take to be spontaneous contacts on the Internet
etc. However, the trite business-speak de nos jours (cf. J. Hobsbawm on networking[2]) may also be an indicator of something
profoundly central to capitalist modernity: something lateral that escapes
hierarchy, subsumption, subjection to
formations of capital.[3] The modus
operandi of student protest, the Occupy movement, for example suggests a form of networking that evades
commodification –how is this possible, what are its grounds? We will examine the spontaneous connections
which underlie more formalised,
institutionalised social arrangements. These are not to be confused with
‘networking’ but are peer-oriented, often unnoticed ways of working upon which
more conscious organisational processes are based- be they ‘horizontal’ or
hierarchical formal arrangements.
The concern of
this discussion is with the way the
coordination and reciprocation constitutive of networks gets subsumed
within modern capitalist social formations as its everyday life and the
potential for circumventing this subsumption of the visible cracks, tensions which, for example, protest movements
represent. The paper is a survey of some ideas that might facilitate seeing
through or around modern capitalism.
The
way into this discussion is made via a
slight detour into the exchange
engendered over the existence of
hierarchy and networks by Giddens’ structuration theory.
[1]. This discussion was provoked or stimulated
by reading Holloway’s Crack Capitalism. The piece is not a
response to Holloway and interprets cracks not as alternative spaces but as
something more dynamic, conflictual representing not just escape routes, but
rather a systemic intertwining of different forces which open up lines of
visibility.
[2] The Guardian, 2012, ‘It’s not what you know,
but who- the return of an unfortunate reality’ June 30th, p.43
[3]. See David Harvey 2012, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution,
for a critique of ‘horizontalism’, the pitfalls of which, hopefully, this paper
avoids.
Mouzelis (1995, pp.123-4) points out that Giddens in his theory of
duality of structures does not deal with
hierarchy -although referring to power as a resource in relation to legitimacy.
The implication here then is that this is a ‘flat’ theory rather than a theory
of stratification, a theory of interconnection.
Clearly (with
Mouzelis) hierarchy is real but at the same time it is abstract; it posits
relationships which exist outside the way people relate spontaneously beyond
the bureaucratic definitions and
requirements of formal settings; in
that sense it is a reorganisation of concrete, informal relationships, ways of
doing. As such it is a mode of abstraction from interactions as
networks of associations and as such,
arguably secondary to these, that is,
the networks are its ontological ground because they already contain the
content which appears in hierarchisation .
‘Labour’
as Marx (1974, p.78) argues , has a ‘two-fold social character’: the shape the
value of commodities takes ultimately depends on ‘living labour’, the concrete
relationships between producers, producers and products and producers and
capitalists. Use value is open-ended and
depends on specific contexts and so commodities are shaped by creative forces
outside the generality of the value form and
carry this with them to be extracted in different ways by different
concrete users
Arguably,
every hierarchy is also a network in
which stratification is grounded: the members of hierarchies relate to each
other as interactants, as elements of
a network, as rhizomes, as well as rank statuses etc.
The
following is an illustration of how this conflict between subsuming
organisational power and the popular, everyday, informal network becomes visible. Linux Open Source computer programming (Kelion,
2012) offers a way of linking various trade products such as Microsoft’s
Windows packages to free software which in important ways parallel and provide
access to those packages, i.e. provide alternative access to computing and the
Internet. Microsoft (ibid.) described
Open Source programmes as ‘a cancer’ and ‘un-American’. It reveals both the possibility that using
the Internet can be improvised and controlled by users and renders visible the
subsumption of networking by powerful organisations; one can see how Microsoft
is ultimately dependent on coordination because Open Source does what they do
without formal hierarchy. The politics
of the Internet is revealed, shown to function through the occlusivity of
subsumption i.e. networking is made mysterious rather than everyday; it is
blackboxed.
Teams and
co-ordination: another way of thinking about
informal agency within hierarchised structures
Organisations
frequently use ‘team’ or network strategies as these are believed seen to
increase potential for innovation,
synergies, information flow, cross fertilisation and so on, via in effect
creating new discursive formations. It’s an attempt to objectify, render
visible, processes that go on anyway as the organisation’s taken for granted or
black-boxed modus operandi. Hence formal ‘teamwork’ etc. is the misrecognition
of the way the organisation actually
functions i.e. the coordination, networks, interrelations which have been
already subsumed as the ground of its bureaucratised structures. Company human
relations techniques therefore attempt to harness the drift of such informal logics for the
benefit of company telos. However, this
is a case of the uncanny, as organisational strategy takes management ideas as
its apparent ground by reproducing in objectified form something that already
goes on informally.
We can see then that subjects relate to an other in the mediated way that the other is given to
the subject, that is as the subject’s
otherness. In coordination of activities
with other subjects it is therefore its own
sense of relation that the
subject has to negotiate, rather than
its direct relation to an other as directly given to a subject’s consciousness.
Elsewhere Mead (1970, pp.152-64) expresses a cognate idea: relating via the ’generalised other’, and so
on. This is a ‘different’, non-identical subject which exists in relation to,
mediates self-identity. In other words, the other is given via its
relationality, as for example, Sartre’s regulatory third shows. Harvey
One recalls here Beauvoir’s (Beauvoir, 1972, p.17) argument that although in patriarchy men
dominate women, they still require recognition in eyes of women, experience dependency
on them and thus there is the basis for
mutual relation. The argument here is moreover posed in more general terms
…if following Hegel, we finding in consciousness
itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject
can be posed only in being opposed- he
sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the
object.
But the other consciousness, the other
ego, sets up a reciprocal claim…willy nilly, individuals and groups are forced
to recognise the reciprocity of their relations
And in Beauvoir (1944)
I must recognise my situation
as founded by the other, even while affirming my being beyond the situation…Only
the freedom (subjectivity) of the other is able to give necessity to my being
(pp. 83-4, 95-6).
We can see from this that Beauvoir posits a mode of
interrelating or intertwining of subjects which is a kind of conflictual
intersubjectivity, one which exists between peers as such and also one which
cuts across hierarchy to create a peer dimension there.
Such
reciprocity, coordination or network is a de-objectifying moment, one in which
hierarchies, black boxes, categories are opened up and contents presented as
interrelation, a kind of Deleuzian, rhizomatic moment.
posted by Howard Feather at 4:17 AM
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