This post is about multitude. With the ongoing crisis in capitalist accumulation and the demise of the financialization solution to the problems of overproduction and maintenance of effective demand, neoliberist hegemony is showing its cracks and the post-post-Fordist move to a new relation between capital and labor is begin to assert itself more robustly. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the breakdown of the work-leisure dichotomy, with capital asserting itself in the subsumption of identity labor. The production of identity and its repercussions and material manifestations and byproducts have all become central to a new problematic of productive forces and new socialized forms of the relations of production, with immaterial, affective and cognitive forms of labor stepping to the fore in lieu of the mechanization of Fordist approaches to labor expropriation. The productivity gains harnessed to the digitization of culture are contingent upon a given socialization of the collaborative labor processes, a development that is sometimes called the "social factory."
Carles highlights one instantiation of the social factory in this recent missive, which details they way in which craft labor has been assimilated to mass leisure and urban youth movements toward a more integrated subjectivity interpellated by a dispersed and highly networked economy. The Craft Bar that Carles discusses here is merely one node in a larger, rhizomatic structure for the production of pliant and disciplined subjectivities that ironically seize upon their very determination within the economic structure as the liberated expanse of their autonomy.
In his analysis, Carles hinges the argument upon a single word: "creative." First he reveals how creativity in its reified, alienated form as developed and extenuated by the new reigning regimes in the realm of production serves as the new means of social exclusion: "Would I fit in even if I am not creative/good at arts and crafts?" he asks -- sotto voce, one imagines -- in the manner of anxious "hipster" concerned about his or her cultural capital. Ersatz craft (kraft?) skills are a new field in which distinction can be manufactured and traced -- supplanting/supplementing the list of earlier mass-market social activities that served as a gateway to alcohol-fueled escape, "gambling, cards, Monopoly, darts, shuffle board, video games, frisbee golf, and Farmville." Now the impulse to escape from the pigeonhole in which we are placed by capitalism (which inevitably leads to our fashioning ourselves and even-more-narrow pigeon hole or "niche" for ourselves) is not sought merely through oblivion but through mediated small-scale manufacturing, a displacement of identity onto useless, by and large infantile baubles such as the ones ("plushies") seen in the photographic documentation Carles has presented. "Are plushies for uncreative people?" Carles asks incisively. Do these characters unwitting manifest and embody a contradiction? Are they helping paper over the contradictions inherent in late capitalism? Are they the apparent solution to capital's recent problems?
Though presumably these youths imagine themselves as left-leaning progressives, their unwitting adherence to the new paradigms for capitalist exploitation makes them fit members of the "Creative Society" -- Ronald Reagan's name for his vision of a neoliberalist paradise that he deployed in his successful 1966 California gubernatorial campaign. "The Creative Society, in other words, is simply a return to the people of the privilege of self-government," Reagan thundered, and it is not difficult, Carles implies, to imagine the youths pictured thrilling to such rhetoric as they crank out their geegaws en route to manufacturing their distributable identit(ies). "What kind of people go to craft bar?" he asks rhetorically. Those who "Just wanna get buzzed and get my create on."
Which takes us to Carles's second thesis about "creativity," that it serves as the post-fordist analogue for consumption, that it is a new guise for substance abuse, only magically transformed into something putatively more active and engaging. But as Carles frames the question: "Are ‘plushies’ a legitimate art, or are they bullshit?" What profits the left to further advance the production of stuffed cutesy avatars for narcissists? The difficulty in separating use from exchange value is exacerbated, thwarting the elaboration of a more egalitarian distribution of socially meaningful labor to benefit everyone and not merely those patrons of an "authentic ‘hipster dive bar,’" as Carles derisively deems it. Art and bullshit have become one under the pressure of immaterial labor, co-creation, and broad-based preoccupation and distribution of the various efforts made at self-fashioning.
Carles's final thesis about creativity unveils his fundamentally Lacanian reading of creativity as an elaboration of the pursuit of the object petit-a. Again, as is his wont, he frames the his critical intervention in an interrogatory fashion: "Do u want to chill at a bar where ’something positive / creative’ is going on, or do you just like loud, smoky places where people are trying to ‘get their fuck on’?" The either-or construct here is meant to call our attention to the fact that these two types of motivation have collapsed, or are at the very least collapse-able. After all, sexual reproduction is the most basic of reproductive acts, but it bears with it the annihilation of identity, the obverse of the instrumental use of creativity in such social scenes as Carles dissects here. Carles means to dismantle the "positive" aspects of creativity and expose the inherent negative dialectic to all such endeavors that deserve the name "creative." But the manufacture of plushies by inebriated youth does not constitute a politico-critical act; instead it serves as competitive positioning in the sexual-mating lottery. From such a viewpoint, the only creativity, ultimately, is desire itself, unfulfillable in its constituitive libidinal force. The unconscious, as we know, is itself a "loud, smoky place" and now amount of creative immaterial labor will be able to blow away the clouds.
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