<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">To continue the conversation:<div><br></div><div><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>First of all, writ large, the structure of the celebrity is a fascistic one -- the accrual of social power by individuals via the captured attention of the masses, exactly parallels the accrual of social power by the capitalist via the captured labor of the masses. This is not an accidental correspondence but rather an intensification of the very processes that created new forms of recognition and personality nascent in bourgeois capitalism. And, by personality, I do not only mean the exterior trappings that allow a face to be recognized, I mean also the intense elaboration of subjectivity and interiority associated with the richly textured experiences of high bourgeois culture. In the case of the capitalist, the celebrity and the fascist dictator, the individual in question is a creation of the masses even though s/he is not representative of the masses. The charismatic leader, as Gramsci taught us, was a Ceasarist, a kind of master power-broker, who was capable of doing the work of the hierarchical capitalist state precisely by utilizing populist discourse (and today we could say the technologies of populism -- what was Hitler without the loudspeaker? etc.). The Fascist dictators from Mussolini to Macapagal-Arroyo to Bush were also, in the most literal sense -- cyborgs, "individuals" created in symbiotic relation to the technical and economic apparatuses of his/her time. These mechanisms were/are driven by the sensual labor of the masses. The celebrated individual(s) constitute, in Debord's famous words regarding the spectacle, the diplomatic presentation of hierarchical society to itself.</div><div><br></div><div>Benjamin recognized the co-optation inherent in the celebrity-from already when he spoke of the fascist corruption of the film medium by capitalist industries/nations giving workers the chance not the right to represent themselves. One person is elevated, literally made from the subjective labor of the mass audience, and stands in as a point of identification for all those who will remain forever unrepresented. The celebrity becomes a kind of compensation for the disempowerment and castration of the masses. We regular folk will never accomplish anything, never achieve universal recognition by all humanity, but, not to worry, the celebrity does this in our stead. Of course, as with the dictator or with the capitalist monopolist our disempowerment is the condition of possibility for his/her elevation. Just as the wealth of the capitalist is the obverse of the poverty of the worker, the hyper-representation of the celebrity is the obverse of the non-representation of the rest of us.</div><div><br></div><div>In order to show the historical relationship between the social order denoted by celebrities and fans on the one hand and owners and workers on the other, I will not recapitulate the entire argument of <i>The Cinematic Mode of Production</i> here (my apologies :)) : suffice it to say that cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye and introjects the social relations of industrial society into the sensorium. In other words, the rise of visuality and subsequently of digitality does not happen in parallel to capitalism but is in fact an extension of capitalist relations deeper into the body -- into the viscera and, as is better understood, into cognitive-linguistic function. The logic of cinema, the chaine de montage, etc., extends the logic of the assembly line from the traditional labor processes of the factory to the senses and to perception. This movement of production into the visual/cognitive vis-a-vis the cinema is the material history of the emergence of the attention economy; cinema is the open book of the contemporary econometrics of attention.</div><div><br></div><div>All of which is to say that with due deference to various forms of subversive fandom, we may want to think twice before we celebrate celebrity and pitch our brilliant insights to investors. Must we still ask why?</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>When referring to the possibility of "social media" to bring about social change Michel Goldhaber writes below:</div><div><br></div><div>While I would not rule out the possibility that some such media could tremendously aid a move toward fuller equality, that cannot be taken for granted, nor would the resulting equality necessarily be so complete as some might hope. </div><div><br></div><div>it seems to me that there are at least two dangerous omissions: One is that media do not stand apart from us -- they are made out of us and they are us, no less than say, as Fanon reminded his readers, it was the labor of the Third World that built the European metropoles. The logic of celebrity, which is the logic of reification, has taught us to conceptually resolve media technologies as if they were free standing entities and not products of centuries of expropriation put to use by and large to continue and intensify those processes. We would do well to remember that today's planet of slums, with its 2 billion people (population Earth, 1929) in an abject, completely modern and utterly contemporary poverty, is also the product of whatever socio-technologic matrix of relations we find ourselves in. It is important also to recognize that the media, in and of themselves, are not going to progressively alter these relations. They are these relations! Here I recall Chomsky's response when asked if he thought internet would bring about greater democratization: "That question is not a matter for speculation, it is a matter for activism." In other words, the fight is also here and now. We are being called by the o/re-pressed that lies both within and without "us," to activate the vectors of struggle against domination/post-modern fascism/platform fetishism/capitalist technocracy/neo-imperialism/globalization/certain brands of "fun," etc. that already inhere in every atom of the status-quo.</div><div><br></div><div>The second omission in Goldhaber's statement may well be more self-conscious than the first appears to be -- in saying "nor would the resulting equality necessarily be so compelete as some might hope" he appears to omit himself from those who still have hope or want to hope. When referring to those who hope for equality and presumably social justice, some of us would have said "we."</div><div><br></div><div>Jonathan Beller</div><div>Professor </div><div>Humanities and Media Studies</div><div>and Critical and Visual Studies</div><div>Pratt Institute</div><div><a href="mailto:jbeller@pratt.edu">jbeller@pratt.edu</a></div><div>718-636-3573 fax</div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; "><br></span></font></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br><div><div>On Jun 13, 2009, at 4:13 PM, Michael H Goldhaber wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Hi Julian and everyone, </div><div><br></div>I disagree that the notion of dyadic classes never made much sense. On the contrary it was an is analytically of great value, even if it ignores some intermediate positions. The dynamics of societies are considerably clarified by the concept. '<div><br></div><div>As for whether Facebook, twitter and other means of social networking aid the attention economy as I use the term, we need not only think in terms of huge attention absorbers like Oprah. There are after all small capitalists as well as big ones, and there are small stars as well as big ones. to be a star, at the limit you only need to take in more attention than you pay out.<div><br></div><div>If you choose to define a star as someone who takes in several times as much attention as paid out, I still suspect that many of the participants in this very discussion would qualify, and more might well want to. It is critical that we remember this as we discuss issues such as exploitation. It is also important to consider this possibility when we discuss the apparent equalizing trends of social media. While I would not rule out the possibility that some such media could tremendously aid a move toward fuller equality, that cannot be taken for granted, nor would the resulting equality necessarily be so complete as some might hope. <br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Hoefler Text'; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Hoefler Text" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Hoefler Text">Best,</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Hoefler Text" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Hoefler Text">Michael</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; ">Juliann wrote: </span></font></div> </div> </div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; "><pre>Hi Michael & all,
.....
You write:
><i> I argue we are
</i>><i> passing from one dyadic class system (capitalists and worker) [...] to a new dyadic class
</i>><i> system of stars and fans
</i>
I think we all agree that the old dyad of capitalists and workers
never made much sense to begin with (and this is one of the reasons we
have so many communist -isms), while the new dyad is neither new, nor
does it make much sense in the context of the oh so tautologically
named "social media." I think what we see evolving there (and by
extension everywhere) is a system of microstardom and tactical fandom
that calls into question the classical power relationship between fans
and stars.
This is obviously preceded by alt.fan communities such as the ones
Jenkins writes about, but I am not interested so much in slash fiction
etc., but rather in the microfame that exists on myspace, facebook,
twitter, flickr, etc. The recent influx of "real celebrities", such as
Oprah Winfrey, into the twitterverse provides a good example because
it draws attention to the difference between a mass media attention
economy (in this case, TV) and a multitudinous media attention
economy. Oprah barged into twitter, expecting that people were
actually willing to pay attention to the mundane details of her life,
but as it turned out the mundane details of non-celebrities' lives are
actually more interesting (Oprah of all people should know).
In numerical terms, Oprah and Ashton Kutcher may be the "stars" of the
twitterverse, but they are stars only in the sense that they provide a
kind of background radiation for the real action. While indigenous
microfame is rare, twitter often amplifies attention capital acquired
elsewhere, and consolidates distributed and fragmented microaudiences.
At the same time, however, the agency of microaudiences is heightened
in multitudinous media such as twitter, and they can use this agency
tactically as well as strategically, and often do. In this context, it
is significant that while "friending" is the basic unit operation (to
use Ian Bogost's term) of facebook, the basic unit operation of
twitter is not "following" but "blocking". So if someone is perceived
as abusing their microfame this is sanctioned not just by a denial of
attention but by a reduction of that person(a)'s sphere of influence.
So I think we are not dealing with a dyadic system at all, but with
something much less structured and, for lack of a better word, more
fun (fun also being the mechanism underwriting new forms of
(self-)exploitation). Let's not forget, however, that achieving and
maintaining microfame is a form of labour, and one not so dissimilar
to the kind of work described in the MechTurk presentation sent around
by Matthew yesterday: it's affective and relational labour, much of
which consists in maintaining a good relationship with the
"requesters" (or "followers"). It seems to me that the decisive
difference between mass media fame and microfame resides in the fact
that the former is systemic, while the latter is endemic. In other
words: in mass media stars are made, while in multitudinous media
stars make themselves by performing their virtuosity across different
registers.
This does not mean that MechTurk workers are in the same boat as
"social media entrepreneurs" but it seems evident that menial labour
is increasingly informed by entrepreneurial ideology while
entrepreneurship now requires a much more labour-intensive
micromanagement of audiences across a range of different terrains than
the relationship management (schmoozing, corruption, collusion, etc.)
engaged in by "capitalists."
So, yes, the terrain we are dealing with is "complex and changing,
with alliances and antagonisms springing up in every possible
permutation," but I would contend that the binary oppositions of
stars/fans and capitalists/workers have been replaced by contextual
unit operations that follow a multivalent rather than a dyadic logic.
Julian.
</pre><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="monospace"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><br></span></font></div></span></div></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)<br><a href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net">iDC@mailman.thing.net</a><br>https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc<br><br>List Archive:<br>http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/<br><br>iDC Photo Stream:<br>http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/<br><br>RSS feed:<br>http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc<br><br>iDC Chat on Facebook:<br>http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647<br><br>Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref</blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>