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.   )

 

 

 

       Where are the cracks[1]?

 

 

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.

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[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 30^th, 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’s concept  of relational space is also productive here in that it enables us to view the subject as a coordinated existent constituted across different spaces.

 

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.