... Teaching our Students, Serving Our Communities: |
... with further implications for change. PART FOUR:
Collaborating with E-Businesses, Some Paraconceptual Starting Places: |
Where "you" may be: No doubt, to many--too many--academic downcast eyes, "collaborating" with E-Businesses reads like "collaborating with the enemy"! And the enemy is an entity that "we" should not co-labor with, should not give support to, but should dis/engage in a battle with. It should be, therefore, "our" job to critique E-Business. What I have suggested, however, is that critique and resistance are the very forces that make Capitalism only stronger. Ads and Commercials themselves are informed by and with the topos of resistance, which works to hook, as Avital Ronell would say, beings-on-drugs. Beings who would be intoxicated! Ampomorphine, or counter-ads, will not work to drive out the evil, seductive-libidinalized images flowing in our veins and attached to our biosystems!
This is a gestural statement that is very difficult to go along with! Our trained incapacities will not allow us to go, but we ask, How in the world, whole-wide, could it be that critiquing a subject of the object only makes it ... both of them ... stronger!? Only more insidious and invidious!? There are, however, many good answers, besides the one that I suggested previously, to this paradoxical question concerning critique. The best answers can still be found in commercials themselves. Or in the work of Walter Benjamin or Thomas Frank or so many others.
Recall what Benjamin says to us:
Fools lament the decay of criticism. For its day is long past. Criticism is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on human society. The 'unclouded,' 'innocent' eye has become a lie, perhaps the whole naive mode of expression sheer incompetence. Today the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It abolishes the space where contemplation moved....
What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says--but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt. (Reflections 85-86) |
It is no longer a MATTER of recalling or rebuilding "the space where contemplation moved"! For space as space is today and tomorrow--conceptual starting places, topoi--are beyond any of our Greek-Victorian notions of space. Which gets me to the new conceptual starting places that "we" must come to work in. Understand: That the ways of critiquing, the ways of reestablishing What was ... is ... Victorian--Marx is Victorian--the economic system that "we" have been developing our critique out of, as Marx himself did through his Victorian lens, is that of the economic system of the Industrial Revolution. Don't even begin to think of some notion of a Post-Industrial or Post-Fordist Revolutionary space for critique. To dis/engage in by way of critique. Don't bother to take such conceptual starting places into the new space to critique it! Don't wear your Nikes on your feet or in your mind--but how could "you" k/not!--to the WTO (Seattle) or FTAA (Quebec) as well as future "sites" to practice "y/our" civil disobedience.
Instead what paradoxically is wanted IS
TOTAL COLLABORATION!
Speaking of space, "Let's" point.less to the new space:
to ... "10 Driving Principles of the New Economy" from Business2.0 (Dec 1998): 11, 13, magazine:
- MATTER. It matters less.
- SPACE. Distance has vanished. The World is your customer--and your competitor.
- TIME. It's collapsing. Instant interactivity is critical, and is breeding accelerated change.
- PEOPLE. They're the crown jewels...and they know it.
- GROWTH. It's accelerated by the network.
- VALUE. It rises exponentially with market share.
- EFFICIENCY. The middleman lives. "Infomediaries" replace intermediaries.
- MARKETS. Buyers are gaining dramatic new power--and sellers new opportunity.
- TRANSACTIONS. It's a one-on-one game.
- IMPULSE. Every product is available everywhere. The gap between desire and purchase has closed.
Check out the full details of each of these topoi. ... As "you" read these topoi, I bet "you" laugh and shake "y/our" head, right? I mean, I look at the list and the explanations and I myself can think, 'Wow, arguing against these points will be like shooting fish in a barrel, right?' NO! ... The economy! It's changing! ... While Living within its new space. CoHabiting with it. Study it. But not by ways of a Victorian lens.
"You" should also check out and compare Kevin Kelly's Ten Rules for Success in the New Economy. "You" will find them on the right side of the interview with amazon.com. The full discussion can be found in New Rules for the New Economy. There are numerous other writers (anthropologists, geographers, etc.) who are talkin' and walkin' around and through the new economic space such as J. Nicholas Entrikin (The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity) and Marc Auge (Non Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity).
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The greatest danger--"we" are control freaks, phreaks--that "we" can offer "ourselves" and "our" students in reponse to these topoi is that each is a contradiction! and just needs to be understood and dealt with as such. "Our" battle club is not logic! "Our" praxis cannot be lobbing spears of futile critiques at these topoi! What we are battling against--if battling at all--is not social contradictions remedied with large doses of logic. What "we" are struggling with is something by(e) far more insidious and invidious. ... These topoi, of course, are laughable, but that is so because we read them semiotically across "our" logic of late Victorian-Marxism. "We" find them incongruous with what "we" think social reality should be.come! That they are laughable is what makes them so insidious and invidious.
And Yet, perhaps Global Capitalism is protecting us against something far worse. ... I think Capital and Global States are liminal at best ... moving us to something by(e) far so fundamentally different ... that we cannot ... think it. Fearing that it, instead, will think us! ...
Pine and Gilmore have mapped out our transformations by way of homo-economics: We have moved from
- discovering and extracting Commodities,
- developing and making Goods,
- devising and delivering Services,
- depicting and staging Experiences,
- to determining and guiding Transformations!
(The Experience Economy 177).
The coming community--as it is becoming additionally sketched out by Kevin Kelly, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben--is less guided by the principle of control, human control, than "we"--rotten with perfection, hegemonic through and through--can allow. It speaks of Metamorphisis as well. A Loss of Control and a Throw of Change, Chance-Emergence.
Kelly writes:
We trade power for control. For control junkies like us, this is a devil's bargin. Give up control, and we'll artificially evolve new worlds and undreamed-of richness. let go, and it will blossom. Have we ever resisted temptation before? [...] The future of control: Partnership, Co-control, Cyborgian control. What it all means is that the creator must share control, and his destiny, with his creations. (Out of Control 311, 331)
It's the case, as Marx said, that human beings through their work, their labor, make value; and yet, it's becoming the case.less that human beings have learned to work, so to speak, with their potential to not-work, to not create value as usual. And therein lies a return to Potentiality (techne or dynamis) for a new beginning. For ... a radical hetero-economics ... and yet, in
TOTAL COLLABORATION!
... "The world of the made will soon be like the world of the born: autonomous, adaptable, and creative but, consequently, out of our control. I think that's a great bargain" (Kelly, Out of Control 4).
What I have said about serving our students, serving our community, applies to what I began with t.here: authoring and editing, editing and authoring. WE are all a vivisystem for production of novelty and variation. Invention of invention of invention.... Perpetually so.w. But in a finitude ... without infinity, immanence. Without individuality, without communion, with singularity in ecstasy.... in the basting together ... of ... Whatever... Beings!!!!
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