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Notes on #ordure

“In fact, of course, this ‘productive’ worker cares as much about this crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk.” (Marx, The Grundrisse)[1]

It is clear that the valorisation process necessarily leaves waste behind, as Marx identified in 1858. In the social factories that produce the shit of telecommunications these days, not much has changed, and the workers who build the devices are treated like shit: “treated inhumanely, like machines.”[2] While ‘smart phones’ litter the streets, the human costs correspondingly multiply. In addition, the environmental consequences of over-production are there for all to see, as more and more environmental pollutants are dumped around the world as a consequence of the demands of an ever-expanding demand for telecommunications gadgetry.[3] Like the tradition of examining faeces to determine the organism’s health, the economy’s health can be judged by its management of waste. As Roberto Saviano confirms: “Waste grounds are the most concrete emblems of every economic cycle.”[4]

The pervasiveness of mobile technologies is symptomatic of the waste production of mass communications, and the overproduction of information that we are hardly able to process or make much sense of.[5] Contemporary alienation includes a kind of dyslexia, leaving little hope for effective action when people have become incapable of maintaining concentrated attention on the same object for a significant period of time.[6] In The Soul at Work, Franco Berardi uses the example of mobile phones to demonstrate the “network dependency” that underpins the social factory, such that info-workers continue to work even when not working.[7] The digital network more generally facilitates the spatial and temporal globalization of labour but the cellular qualities of this recombine semiotic fragments endlessly to produce what he calls ‘semiocapitalism’.[8] The most important commodity of late capitalism, the mobile phone, is the instrument of this, melting our brains both literally and metaphorically.

In The Human Condition (written in 1958), Hannah Arendt states that the political realm arises out of acting together, in the sharing of speech and action.[9] But despite the wild claims for social media revolutions, the restrictive register of Twitter’s 140 characters seems indicative of the economisation of speech and affect – as empty speech acts. The coalition between consumer capitalism and forms of democracy is evident in relation to the exaggerated claim to allow active participation in the political process. Freedom to voice opinions is offered but is rendered illusionary by the forces of the free market. Technologies, like the mobile phone, play a significant role here in distancing speech from affect in a situation where action and words have lost their power (to echo Arendt).

The intervention of Dominique Laporte, in the History of Shit (first published in French in 1978), is to verify that modern power is founded on the aesthetics of the public sphere and in the agency of its citizen-subjects but that these are conditions of the management of human waste.[10] He insists that in parallel to the cleansing of the streets of Paris from shit, the French language was similarly cleansed of Latin words to establish official French without “foreign leanings” (according to an edict of 1539). Thus he contends that language was purged of its “lingering stink” to become purer and invested with authority, “elevating it to the divine place of power freed from odor.”[11] The desire for clean language, as well as clean streets, sublimates shit and demonstrates an expression of new biopolitical forms of control over subjectivity (indicated by the bodily functions of speaking and shitting) and one where the market becomes sovereign (rather than the State). The same can be said of the technologies that are now found on the streets (installed in mobile devices and such-like) that are purged of their stink.

The move towards service-based platforms (so-called ‘cloud computing’) provides a further example of purified forms and the privatisation of collective speech-acts. This is the Apple paradigm of software development with specially conceived proprietary “apps” (for iPhones and iPads) that close off users from the underlying impurities (‘stink’) of code (think of the cleanliness of the App Store for instance [12]). These developments are crucial for a fuller understanding of the suppression of political expression in the public realm and the ways in which the voice is becoming promoted but through ever more privatized forms, underpinned by the coalition of pervasive technologies and free market logic. In other words, the social potential is stolen from the public realm and commodified. Only the separation of the public body from the free market can save us. The health of the body can be detected in its shit and current mismanagement is clear for all to see in its vile products.

Geoff Cox

Notes:

1. Marx, The Grundrisse (1858), 273.
2. See Gethin Chamberlain, “Apple’s Chinese workers treated inhumanely, like machines”, in The Guardian (5 May 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/30/apple-chinese-workers-treated-inhumanely).
The article claims that more than half a million Chinese workers are paid around 65p an hour, working over 60 hours a week to cope with the massive demand.
3. For instance, enormous amounts of exported e-waste ends up in Guiyu, China, a recycling hub with the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world (for full story, see http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870485,00.html#ixzz1HMrhkfVP).
4. Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah (2006), cited in Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation, 2009, 53.
5. For instance, 4chan is the largest English imageboard on the web where users generally post anonymously (including by the activist group Anonymous) (http://www.4chan.org).
6. See Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008).
7. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009).
8. Ibid., 89.
9. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
10. Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
11. Ibid., 18.
12. iCapitalism is the name of a game, created by Forumwarz in 2011. It was rejected from Apple’s App Store for no reason despite fulfilling their published criteria of acceptance, and despite the seemingly indiscriminate and endlessly trivial apps that are widely available for the iPhone. The game is simple: the person who pays the most wins.
Available at http://blog.forumwarz.com/2011/02/01/irejected-how-apple-took-nine-weeks-to-arbitrarily-reject-our-app/