The Condition of Digitality

Front matter

ROBERT HASSAN

A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life

The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life

Index

Acknowledgements

My gratitude, first of all, goes to Christian Fuchs for encouraging me to continue with the manuscript through its two or three iterations and which saw it transform quite considerably from the initial idea that I had pitched to him. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers who, mixing antagonism and sympathy between them, were actually helpful in improving the text. Special thanks to Andrew Lockett, whom I met in Melbourne over a beer to discuss the broad. themes of a yet-to-be-written manuscript. His quiet encouragement and nostress approach to deadlines nonetheless acted as a speed-up as actual deadlines loomed.

Family, as always, is central to my functioning in any realm, and so it was here. Without Kate, Theo and Camille Td likely be tramping the streets, muttering to myself and looking for a place to sleep.

A Note on Nomenclature

In the text I use both postmodernity (postmodernism) and post-modernity to signify two different meanings. Postmodernism used to convey an ideological frame as it has been used in many left and Marxist critical writings since at least the late-1970s. Post-modernity I see as a much stronger and more epochal signifier, indicating a phase in historical, economic and philosophical time that has moved definitively beyond modernity; a modernity which, following Jean- Francois Lyotard, was the imposed Enlightenment idea of a ‘unitary history and subject.’ An idea and a time that has gone.

For Josie Daw and Mark Hassan

CHAPTER |

A world that has changed, but has not changed.!

If the title of this book vaguely recalls another, then to save you guessing Ill state at once that this is a book that is part homage and part critical reconsideration of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change’, first published in 1989. The book was and still is important, for reasons I will come to. Mainly though, Postmodernity stands as an example of the value of Marxist criticism and analysis in what many within its various strands of thought still call late-modernity—but also as a reminder of the dangers of not upgrading, constantly, these frames of analysis, and adapting them to those new and important developments that can change the whole scene: such as the economic, cultural and ontological meanings and effects inherent in the processes of digital technology. My reconsideration of Harvey speaks to what is a lacuna in his work—the lack of a thoroughgoing analysis of digital technology in relation to that which it has so rapidly displaced: analogue technique and the human relationship with it, which together enabled, created and shaped capitalist modernity. Recall that the ‘information technology revolution as it was called, was fully underway as the eighties turned into the nineties. Moreover, this lack extends beyond Postmodernity and goes to the left more broadly, as we will see. And so the present book seeks to begin a conversation oriented toward the need to identify a new priority in the struggles to understand and transcend a destructive and unsustainable capitalism. My proposal is that the political priority vis-a-vis the current capitalism must not be the environmental crisis, or the need to revive tactics, theories and strategies of collective resistance to capitalism’s worst depredations—though these are important and must continue—but to prioritise instead a humanist understanding of the processes of a machine, a logic, that has not only rapidly colonised every part of the inhabited planet, but has also

Hassan, R. 2020. The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life. Pp. 1-11. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.16997/book44.a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 suffused the consciousness of almost every person within it in terms of his or her engagement with each other through networks of communication, production and consumption: I call it digitality.

But first to Harvey.

Postmodernity is an academic text but, unusually for such a work, it has been through several reprints. Even more remarkable, it crossed over into the mainstream and was reviewed in supplements, magazines and newspapers in the early 1990s. And, perhaps unprecedentedly—considering it was an overtly Marxist work—the Financial Times reviewer hailed it as ‘probably the best [book] yet written on the link between ... economic and cultural transformations.* That was then. So what? Beyond the fact that I write these words in 2019, and a minor anniversarial moment attends to its first print-run, the more serious questions a reader would ask are: why Harvey, why this particular book, and why now? Before coming to these, I should preface my answers by saying that Harvey, his book, and the present conjunction are subsets of the overarching questions that scale to the wider context that this book is about—the relevance of Marxism and internationalism today in an era of insurgent right-wing populism and ethnic nationalism; the condition of capitalism today when it seems more chronically ailing than ever, yet we increasingly feel unable to see beyond it; and, as I just noted, our understanding of digital technology, which since the time of the publication of Postmodernity has become a ‘condition’ all of its own, a process that has become so embedded and so normative (so quickly) that we have failed to see what it has done to the operation of capital and to the relevance of the basic materialist ideas of Marxism.

Why David Harvey? Well today, and notwithstanding the blips of interest in 2008 that compelled many to order a copy of The Communist Manifesto from Amazon to find answers to the near-collapse of the global banking system, Marxism, as a way to orient oneself in the world, and as a method through which to seek to change it, has been in the doldrums. The activist left more broadly has, since the 1970s, transmuted into an ever-growing spectrum of identitarianism. Much left theory, moreover, as Fredric Jameson wrote some time ago, had already retreated into the universities, there to be preoccupied within what he termed their ‘fields of specialization} Harvey, by contrast, since the late-1980s has stood against these tendencies and continued to hew the same historical-materialist line regarding the state of the world,‘ the diagnoses of capitalism,’ the nature of neoliberalism,* what he sees as the continuation of essentially Victorian-age imperialism’—and the necessity for a particular kind of Marxism (which Pll come to) with which to make sense of all of latemodernity’s travails. Moreover, Harvey has always been an activist, one who not only writes about struggles, but involves himself personally in them: be they those of car workers in Cowley in Oxford in the 1970s" or landless rural workers in Brazil in the 2010s, when he was in his eighties. Accordingly, he has immense respect and credibility within Marxist and left-activist coalitions and across the world and has helped inform, sustain and inspire millions by means of the dissemination of his works through distribution platforms such as YouTube and his own website, davidharvey.org. As a result, he is probably the most influential Marxist today, and has been so since at least the 1990s.

Why this particular book? Harvey is nothing if not prolific and has written most of his oeuvre of around 27 books since the publication of Postmodernity. However, Postmodernity is centrally important in several respects. Chance, or perhaps it was canny timing on the part of Harvey and his publisher, saw its release in 1989 coincide with a year of world-changing events in politics. The book emerged just as the political, economic and cultural tensions and contradictions that had been rumbling for some years previous, eventually broke out into the open with the symbolism of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The ending of the Soviet Union, the beginnings of the opening up of China and India, the proclaiming of American triumphalism and the ‘End of History’ all followed quickly.

Postmodernity seemed to explain or rationalise the transformation of capitalism in the context of these events. It did so, because in it Harvey drew upon and developed a major idea from a previous book, The Limits to Capital, which was published in 1982." The idea was the ‘space economy of capital’, a theory which stated that the shape and character and longevity of capital accumulation is influenced by geography to a profound degree, more so than anyone had previously realised. However, relative obscurity has long been the fate for most Marxist works of political economy. And such was the case here. Limits was well received in the journals, with one stating that, ‘It will almost certainly come to be considered as one of the most significant radical works of social and political theory published during the 1980s anywhere in the world:'* Such hyperbolic praise is unusual in journal reviews, but it did not translate into sales. Limits wasn't to be reprinted until 2007 when Verso published it.

Harvey's Postmodernity was fortunate in that the author’s restatement of the central ideas of the geo-spatial limits to capital accumulation (plus the additional exhilarating idea of ‘time-space compression in the organisation of capitalism’), gave theoretical expression to a material and cultural reality that was just then getting properly started—globalisation and postmodernity. These were controversial and hotly debated ideas in the early 1990s. Harvey had correctly identified that a ‘sea-change’ in the organisation of capitalism was in progress, and it was entering a new and intense phase with the ending of the Cold War. Postmodernity seemed to give rigour and analytical power to a Marxist understanding of these political, cultural and technological transformations as they were occurring. Moreover, the book’s analysis of the transition from ‘Fordism to flexible accumulation’’’ explained the realities of the class offensive that was then in its early phases and gave a radically different account to that of the hegemonic Hayekian ideology of market freedom that the emergent neoliberalism used to justify the economic ‘restructuring’ of the time.”

The fact that globalisation and postmodernity are hardly debated today does not indicate that they vanished as issues sometime during the years intervening since 1989. Far from disappearing, these concepts and the realities they expressed have taken root. The ideas of a global market-place and a world of inter-connectivity have embedded themselves deep inside Western sensibilities to become mainstream and common-sense, almost the natural order of things. Nonetheless, Postmodernity continues to be an important book, because it represents a central articulation of a hinge-point in the history of Western modernity as it expanded globally. In the book, Harvey wrote that the ‘condition’ of postmodernity was primarily ideological cover for the continued expansion of Western capital across the globe, and that it had to be seen as such; as empty and illusory. Furthermore, Harvey’s brilliant insight in both The Limits and Postmodernity was to recognise that there are geo-spatial limits to accumulation. The planet has only so much territory where over-accumulation in one region can be invested into another. There will come a time, he suggested, when there will be no more profitable areas of production and consumption, and capital will over-accumulate to global-crisis proportions. Capitalism will reach its end, with the mathematical certainties of physical space guaranteeing this. In his writing and activism, Harvey’s whole modality is oriented toward the idea that that socialists must prepare and organise for the coming crisis.

Postmodernity gained popular traction and remains the keywork of Harvey’s writings. However, in the many books written post-Postmodernity, the author never reconsidered or revised (in any major way) his earlier views in the light of the tremendous changes that have occurred from then until now. And through his lectures, debates and other, web-based activities, he has taken millions with him in the belief that capitalism today is as capitalism in the 1980s, in terms of the operation of accumulation, the organisation of capitalism, and the prospects for a socialist renewal that turn upon that operation and organisation. Why now? Ideally, ‘now’ should have been thirty years ago, or earlier, when globalisation and the neoliberal project were gaining what would become unstoppable momentum. But there is no going back, nor is any uninventing possible. In what was the blinking of an eyelid in historical time, a mere generation, a new category of technology has risen to domination. The term ‘new category’ is something to pause on and reflect about. Digital machines and their logic are (in the operation of their logic) like nothing we have ever seen before. Everything previously, going back to the dawn of our species and our drift toward technology invention and use, was some kind of analogue technology. From the wheel to the radio signal, and from writing to television, analogue technology fashioned our world and fashioned us, making possible such human-scaled processes as knowledge and communication, cities and institutions, Enlightenment and modernity, conceptions of time and space. Digitality changes all these and more, starting with the total transcending of the human scale. Time and space are now different categories of perception, condensed into immediacy and acceleration at the general level through, for example, the now-ubiquitous smartphone. Such drastic changes in scale and perception rebound back upon the analogue legacies in the realms of knowledge, reason, modernity and so on—and we struggle with the contradictions inherent within their unavoidable interactions across economy, society, culture and politics.

Seen in this way, digital technology and digitality compel us to think hard not just about the digital, but also about that which it supplants—the analogue logic and the relationship with analogue technology that made possible our pre-digital world. We are driven also to think about where the human stands in relation to analogue and digital. Some scattered work was done in this regard in the 1980s and 1990s, but all of it tentative, and none of it from a Marxist perspective that, like Harvey, makes salient social change and the socialist project. The hypothesis I construct here concludes that we are, ontologically speaking, analogue beings from an analogue universe that evolved from out of our species’ drift toward tool-use to become homo sapiens.'* Some scattered work was done here too, but only suggestive, not systematic, and not with a view to conclusions that had ramifications for the present conjuncture in terms of political economy or techno-capitalism.’? Meanwhile, digitality spread from a nascent but obvious technological ‘revolution around the time of Harvey's research for Postmodernity, to become a whole way of life—infiltrating the practice of daily life and colonising the consciousness that governs the meanings that constitute practice. It became a central element of culture, in other words; culture that is now networked and global. What this means is that the elements of Postmodernity that Harvey takes as empty ideologies—a globalising neoliberalism and the cultural postmodernity that expresses its superficiality—have become embedded, through digitality, into the practice that constitutes how everyday life is now increasingly lived and understood (or not understood).

Marxism Has to Become Post-Modern

Postmodernity begins, helpfully, but somewhat portentously, with a clean page before the Preface on which a heading titled “The argument’ appears, with the argument printed in the centre of the page underneath. It reads:

There has been a sea-change in cultural as well as in political-economic practices since around 1972.

This sea-change is bound up with the emergence of new dominant ways in which we experience space and time.

While simultaneity in the shifting dimensions of time and space is no proof of necessary or causal connection, strong a priori grounds can be adduced for the proposition that there is some kind of necessary relation between the rise of postmodern cultural forms, the emergence of more flexible modes of capital accumulation, and a new round of ‘time-space compression in the organization of capitalism.

But these changes, when set against the basic rule of capitalistic accumulation, appear more as shifts in the surface appearance rather than as signs of the emergence of some entirely new postcapitalist or even postindustrial society.

One could have no quarrel with the premise of the first three paragraphs. The world was changing as the 1990s got underway, and many felt precisely this kind of ‘sea-change. Many looked to Harvey and others like him” to see what it indicated for politics, culture and the socialist project. And Harvey’s seminal idea of crisis in the space economy of capitalism as precipitant for the sea-change may have seemed convincing for many as well. And so, shaped by the ‘basic rule’ of accumulation, Harvey's Postmodernity and the great volume of work that would follow, attracted a large and still-growing interest in the idea that a classic materialist logic would anticipate, at some future point, a kind of final crisis for accumulation in a planet that had nothing left to offer the insatiable appetite for space that is vital to keep capitalism alive and accumulating.

The word ‘sea-change’ is important here. And Harvey uses it more than once in his argument. It denotes something profound and deep-set within a process or dynamic. Yet, how can there be sea-change within capitalist economy and society if the ‘basic rule of accumulation’ is unchanged? This is where Harvey's self-confessedly”? doctrinaire Marxism comes into to view, something I will discuss at some length in Chapter One. The ‘basic rule’ is an item of faith in much Marxism beyond Harvey, too. For its adherents, it mandates that almost all change within capitalism must be ‘surface appearance’. To argue otherwise would be to call into question the materialist foundations of Marxism, whereby, as Marx himself had imbibed from his favourite Diderot, nature—with humans included—is all just matter in motion. And without this idea, without such materialism, there can be no Marxism as we have known it. It means also that to question materialism in this strict sense would be to question modernity too as a strategic Marxist principle. Harvey thus stays faithful to the ‘basic rule’ and to modernity in Postmodernity, therefore inescapably labelling ‘postmodernity’ a surface manifestation; an ideology that can be understood, critiqued and resisted as such. Undeniably there has been a sea-change, and moreover it involved the cultural and political-economic manifestations regarding the experience of time and space that Harvey describes in such perceptive detail throughout his book. However, the sea-change stems from a ‘mutation in the processes of accumulation, a mutation caused by digitality and its capacity to create a new kind of accumulation because of the existence of a new form of space—a virtual and networked digitality that has rendered accumulation as a process no longer limited by physical geography. This is a logic of accumulation, by virtue of its virtuality, that is able to colonise social and cultural life much more deeply than before, exposing almost every register of existence as vulnerable to commodification. This is what makes post-modernity real, something much more than what Harvey depicts as ideological froth that circulates mainly in literature, architecture and art—and amongst the bourgeois habitués of such realms. However, to countenance the notion that a ‘mutation of accumulation is possible, and that digitality has changed the ‘basic rule, would be to make Marxism post-modern—and therefore I argue to make the Marxist perspective free to see more clearly what globalisation, neoliberalism, postmodernism and digitality are.

This does not suggest that an acceptance of post-modernity as more than just surface appearance means that we are also in some kind of postcapitalist or postindustrial era. Today the planet is more capitalist and industrial than ever before. But capitalism and industrialism are now driven and shaped by digital technology that has both physical and virtual dimensions of accumulation. This means that that ‘organisation’ of capitalism and industry has changed. Harvey sees it as having become much more ‘flexible’ than it was in the Fordist era, right up until the 1970s. This is undeniable. But precisely what aided this flexibility is not really explained in Postmodernity. Partly Harvey attributes the enabling to the ideology of the market and the ideology of postmodernism—to ‘surface appearances’ in other words. This seems to place a heavy weight of effect upon empty and illusory ideologies. Little is said about the technology that made ‘flexibility’ actually possible, and so able to change ‘political-economic practices’ and the perception of time and space: the digital networks that were existing and growing when he wrote. Harvey’s stated argument, in effect, is to say that everything has changed but nothing (really) has changed. The essential components of Marxism, he says, do not need to be questioned. But this is to limit theory and therefore limit the potential of political action.

In the mid-1980s Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe published a book called Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,” wherein they were first to use the term ‘post-Marxism’ to signal the need to do away with what they saw as many of the essentialising and totalising aspects of post-war Marxism. In its own way, it was an early political post-modern work in that the authors argue amongst many other things that—using a Foucauldian and Gramscian framework—the economy (capitalism) should not be seen as the only foundation of class power, and neither should ‘the productive forces, conceived as technology’ be viewed as always determining.” Harvey does not mention what was then an important book in his Postmodernity. But neither does he mention Gramsci, an omission I will deal with in Chapter One, and Foucault receives some hostile attention, primarily because of his purported ‘deliberate rejection of any holistic theory of capitalism.” Laclau and Mouffe’s work is important because it is representative of a change within recent socialist political theory. It is a political post-modernity derived from the deconstructivist turn that formed part of a generation of mainly French-inspired philosophy and social theory that sought to move away from a Marxism that had ‘basic rules—and increasingly away from Marxism altogether. This new discourse also helped to open the way for the identitarian politics and activism of the 1990s, and on until today, where Marxism and socialism have dwindled even further and lost much of the theoretical edge that was sharpened by activism. Harvey continued with his activism, but he ironically lost his theoretical edge because of a refusal to consider postmodernity or a post-modern Marxism as anything but the empty ideological antitheses to a ‘holistic theory of capitalism.

The embrace of a post-modern Marxism is what this book makes the case for. This does not necessarily involve the rejection of the analytical value of concepts of class, of the leading role of the economy, or of the central importance of the function of capitalism in space and time. It is, rather, to prioritise things. The suddenness by which digitality came upon us needs to be recognised as something more than just a characteristic of the purported ‘efficiency’ and speed of computing in its many applications. Its suddenness was partly due to the weakness of social organisations to resist its implementation by business. But its suddenness meant also that we missed the importance, ontologically as well as economically and culturally, of what was really happening as a global networked society took shape.

Chapter Two sets the scene by contextualising Postmodernity in the year 1989. The year was turbulent and dramatic, and its shockwaves reverberate still. For some, such as Nikolai and Elena Ceausescu, dictators of Romania, it was the end of the line. For millions of ordinary people in China and India and elsewhere it was the beginnings of economic opportunity. For Harvey it was fortuitous. Globalisation and the transformed experience of time and space were what awaited much of humanity in the post-Cold War/neoliberal era. Postmodernity seemed to explain much of it and give hope for the future and a ‘renewal of historical-geographical materialism [to] promote adherence to a new version of the Enlightenment project.” Beginning in Chapter Three, and drawing from philosophical anthropology, media studies and technology studies, the book will develop the idea that humans are essentially analogue beings who have unconsciously constructed an antithetical and increasingly automated sphere wherein much of social-cultural, economic-political life now takes place. A feature of this section will be the ideology and practice of automation—not simply in the form of the growing ubiquity of robotics in life, but as an achieved aim of capitalist modernity. This is expressed through the instrumental goal, an historical goal now realisable through digitality, of efficiency in production by the pervasive minimisation of human labour through automation. The resulting new context of human alienation from both technology and the natural environment—with the concept of ‘alienation’ revived and rearticulated through the pathbreaking new work of Rahel Jaeggi**—will be discussed and analysed as the major effect of the condition of digitality.

Chapter Four argues that the condition of digitality is not an ideology of time and space but a reality. Three elements are salient here concerning the shaping context of digitality and some of its major determinants. First is the categoryshift in the technological basis of modernity. The analogue-to-digital turn is the ‘mutation’ aspect I will develop, together with its reificatory effects upon the human relationship with technology, production and nature. Second is the effects of digitality upon the global social relation that is capitalism: what exactly is capitalism in the age of digitality, when information is a major creator of value? It is a question that has exercised the minds of many, such as Wolfgang Streeck,”” who imagines that capitalism (as neoliberalism) is devouring itself, but there exists no viable ideological alternative, nor adequately developed political constituency to replace it. Third, and following from the second, is the effects of digitality upon the political organising principle of liberal democracy, a social relation that emerged and developed in the context of modernity and modernity’s institutions, and which has been based upon print culture and nation-states. These institutions still exist and still seek to influence and exert power, but can the time-space contexts of analogue institutions properly function and express themselves in the dominating context of digitality? If so, how might this happen? If not, then what can replace them?

In Chapter Five I turn to the economy of digitality. Here, Harvey's idea of ‘time-space compression becomes significant, but these dimensions take on dramatically new features through digitality. Here I develop the concept of ‘outward’ and ‘inward’ globalisation to articulate the process. ‘Outward’ globalisation is the processes of colonisation of the physical space of the planet by markets, production, the sourcing of raw materials and so on. This ‘outward’ aspect approached its spatial limits by the 1990s with the incorporation of the BRIC economies into global capitalism. What Harvey termed ‘flexible accumulation is rendered increasingly digital and is shown here to have become an immensely more powerful element of the capital relation than he recognised. This is expressed as the pervasive commodification that is able to penetrate and colonise (not least through the creation of a new and limitless virtual space), almost every register of life in an ‘inward’ globalisation process that inserts commodification into increasing spheres of existence, and simultaneously introduces a collective dependence upon digital technologies that facilitate, connect and super-charge the global economy of digitality. It is the process of ‘inward’ globalisation that makes possible the hitherto impossible feats of collective social communication such as Facebook, Uber, Google, Weibo, and so on. This form of digitality has become everyday practice that grows rapidly to drive digital capitalism and shape digital culture toward unknowable and uncontrollable directions. This process of ‘inward’ globalisation was enabled, and its path smoothed, by the ideological triumph of the ‘Californian Ideology’ — mid-1960s, part-hippy, part-business ‘alternative thinking’ that promulgated the idea that human freedom can best be attained not through the institutions of modern politics, but through networked computers.

Chapter Six, titled ‘the culture of digitality, will consider the cultural manifestations of digitality stemming from its roots in the convergence of the Californian Ideology with neoliberal political economy. It does this through a reflection on the works of two theorists, Lev Manovich and Bernard Stiegler, who have sought to express the specific effects of the digital upon cultural production and consumption. I underpin my critique of these approaches with an analysis of the major theorisations of culture within the context of late-capitalism, from Adorno and Horkheimer, Guy Debord, Raymond Williams,

Zygmunt Bauman and Jean Baudrillard. Their works were (and continue to be) important, but their perspectives no longer suffice as critique of the production of culture today, because although there was significant analytical purchase when they were written, they were conceived in a pre-digital time, and with analogue-dependent theories guiding their logic.

In Chapter Seven I apply my understandings of Jaeggi’s theory of alienation to a specifically digital context. This particular conjunction is new and exploratory and is aided and strengthened by the theoretical framework that builds throughout the book. It argues that alienation, a concept that Jaeggi concedes appears as ‘problematic and in some respects outmoded’, is in fact brilliantly rescued by her from oblivion. The aim here is to connect pre-digital Critical Theory with a theory of digitality which makes salient the depth and extent of digitally-driven alienation and shows it to be the most significant issue of our age.

! Jean-François Lyotard (1979) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p.73.

? David Harvey (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.

> Microsoft, for example, was already a billion-dollar corporation, and was supplying the software for the industry and consumer sides of the hardware (desktop) boom.

t From Amazon webpage for Postmodernity: https://www.amazon.de/ Condition-Postmodernity-Enquiry-Origins-Cultural/dp/0631162941

° Fredric Jameson (1979) ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’ Social Text 1, 130-148, p.139.

é David Harvey (2013) The Ways of the World. London: Profile Books.

7” David Harvey (2010) The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. New York: Profile Books.

* David Harvey (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

°’ David Harvey (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1 David Harvey (2014) Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. New York: Profile Books.

1 Teresa Hayter, David Harvey (eds.) (1994) The Factory and the City: The Story of the Cowley Automobile Workers in Oxford. Thomson Learning