The realization of an authentic self is the principle
challenge for the subject within contemporary (post)modernity. According to
Habermas, the project which developed and realised the Western human subject,
as inaugurated by the Enlightenment, was a process in which an entity’s status
as an individual was defined and increasingly fore-grounded. Over the course of
the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, both the symbolic and the
practical conceptions of the individual as a self-sufficiency, as an agency,
and as a unique will inhabiting a unique body propelled by its own will-to-power
was gradually extended to all citizens from its origins as a uniquely
aristocratic privilege. Simultaneous with the development of the individual defined
against the fabric of the public sphere was the individuation of nation-states against
the fabric of geography and the geo-political, and which has ultimately
resulted in the liberation of multinational financial and industrial entities
from the legal and geographical limitations posed on citizen-humans.
As Paul Virilio notes, digital technologies articulate a
means of controlling and defining subjects by imposing a globalized sense of
time and environment informed by a simultaneity which makes obsolete any local
analogues. Unlike the monolithic rigidity of prior systems of control, the
proliferation of information production technologies allows subjects to be
interpellated as individuals, their differences rationalized as ‘personal
profiles’ intended to catalyze modes of consumption. The Western philosophical
tradition has prided itself on liberating the individual from hierarchical
circumscriptions dictated by social protocol and into a space where the modern
subject is expected to realize and satisfy their own needs in society. Such is
certainly the myth of foundation by which the ‘American Dream’ can be seen to
operate, and to which the Occupy Wall Street protesters gestured in their
criticism. And while the spirit of protest and rebellion is currently
manifesting with a popular interest and sympathy not evident since the 1960s,
this paper will argue that such enthusiasm for revolutionary change has (so
far) been entirely co-opted by mechanisms which interpellate subjects as
consumers in a manner which limits their potential as citizens who can express
political agency.
In this capacity, mobile telephony is situated at the
intersection of personal agency and systemic control. While cell phones can be
seen to have recently enabled protests for democratic reform in several Arab
countries to flourish, simultaneously, however, mobile telephony as used by
police and government agencies allows a degree of surveillance and behaviour
modification seemingly at odds with the democratic and philosophical traditions
associated with a liberated human subject. Following Frederic Jameson’s
reclamation of Adorno’s critique of the capacity for self-agency within mass
culture, this paper will conclude that in the 21st century, individualism is
the precise means by which rigid social conformity will be achieved.
In postmodern consumer culture, the freedom to realise a
process of wilful self-individuation derives in large part from the social and
political transformations which occurred in the 1960s, or more importantly
which have been periodised and branded as the 1960s. The 60s counterculture begat
the self-awareness of the consumer initially as a process rejecting the
vulgarities and corruptions of consumer culture, best manifest in the ubiquitous
use of plastics in manufacturing and incessant miniaturization in electronics which
brought to market an increasing number of consumer distractions. In fact, the
alleged austerity of the hippie who rejected mass culture in favour of the
primacy of the natural world does not align with the actual expansion of
consumer capitalism in the years leading to the 1970s oil crisis in the West, when
consumption was momentarily depressed, and the fallacy of this particular
narrative is further evidenced by the subsumption of nature-centric, ostensibly
anti-modernist hippie idealism into the full flourishing of contemporary
consumer capitalism and the reactionary but consumer-centric environmental
movements which emerged over the 80s and 90s and continues to flourish into
this century.
The political agency which enabled the expression of dissent
in the 1960s evolved into the free market individualism in which the very same
expression of dissent is refocused upon uncovering the market value of the self;
in this context both dissent and conformity are acts of self-realisation within
the material terms of the economic. We can speak of this process as a
Heideggerian uncovering and disclosure of being as resource and potential, and the
desire which grounds such potential in materiality in this sense quantifies the
self within an order of value. The process of uncovering thus reveals and
quantifies subjects as individuals while at the same time aggregating them
under the aegis of a collective desire itself rationalised and historicised as
abstract transcendent ideas such as patriotism (understood as brand loyalty),
“freedom”, and “terror”. In other words, the historic-technological
configuration which can be conceived as the “project of Western civilisation” simultaneously
liberates the human-subject into individuality at the same time as that
individuality is used to further conform individuals to the will, if you like,
of the system as a whole. Due to the conflation within the market of high and
low culture understood by Fredric Jameson as a condition of what he defines as
postmodernity, as variety and difference serve not only to reflect a democratic
equality of taste and judgement, but also to energise the market with an
ever-increasing pool of consumer satisfactions.
Of course, one cannot invoke quantisation without its
material analogue, as it were, the computer. As depicted in many science
fiction and espionage films of the 60s and 70s – here I am thinking of Colossus: The Forbin Project, Westworld,
and THX 1138, among others – the
computer entered into the public consciousness in the 1960s as a monolithic and
autocratic entity which troubled distinctions between inanimate objects and
wilful organic sentience, ultimately threatening human independence. The
malevolence threatened by the computer is perhaps best realised by the murderous
rebelliousness of HAL in the film 2001: A
Space Odyssey, whose monstrousness stems from the logical sacrifice of
human life in pursuit of what has been reasoned to be a more significant
collective purpose and whose all-seeing eye signals the omnipresent
surveillance with which this presentation will conclude. An even more prominent
aspect of the counter-cultural movement, and one which overtly connects the 60s
with the Occupy movement of today, involved democratic political agency as
realised by mass protest – civil rights, feminism, the anti-war movement, and
gay rights, wherein the agency of the individual is realised and enabled by the
strength of the group.
In his 1984 essay Periodizing the 60s, Frederic
Jameson describes rebellion and popular activism as fundamentally tied to the
colonial history of the countries in which such forms of protest materialised. He
argues that the emergence as subjects of women, homosexuals, minorities, and the
disabled – along with other minorities – granted the full extent of political
and social standing is fundamentally a process of de-colonisation(498). As I
will further discuss momentarily, it is the proposition of this paper that such
neo-colonialism does not simply implicate those subjects who have been
historically marginalised. Rather, I wish to extend Jameson’s interpretation of
neo-colonialism as precisely the project of late capitalism. Instead of ships
full of Europeans who encounter a “New World” full of economic potential
manifesting as resources and slave labour, colonialism under late capitalism
requires a new geography and conception of the socio-economic world, one in
which the desires and needs of the body of the individual subject are elevated
to the superposition of the desires and needs of the incorporated state, a
virtual realm of borderless finance and the self-realised sovereignty of the
multinational companies. It is for this reason that we are confronted with the
logic of massive corporate subsidies and austerity budgets, in which the
middle- and working classes are sacrificed for the abstract and, in
world-history terms, unsustainable benefit of economic growth, itself
inordinately tailored to continue economic growth for the investment class
(see, for example Thomas Piketty’s recent book). In this capacity, the modern
subject is granted individuality within the circumscriptions of citizenship,
which grounds the subject within the praxis of the legal and economic systems
in which political agency most concretely manifests, namely the aristocratic
privilege of property.
Viewed in concert, the major and minor socio-cultural
transgressions which occurred in the 1960s in fact really were threatening to
the authority and dominion of the established hegemonies in Western
civilisation. However, the cultural and political legacy of the 60s does not
live up to the popular conception of resistance and rebellion. While the drive
to satisfy the will and desires of the individual by extending to rights of the
citizen to all individuals regardless of gender, class, or ethnicity is indeed
an important and ongoing procedure – most importantly in the sense of the
Hegelian recognition of the Other – we should not allow such progressivism to
blind us to the consequences of a continued and enthusiastic individualism. The
counter-culture idealism of the 60s, made iconic by the young hippie protester,
enabled the popularisation and broad (or mainstream) acceptance of free love
(sexuality outside of marriage and/or child production, ultimately elevating
the commodification of sexuality into daily and habitual practices of
consumption – images, bodies, people), “new age” lifestyles of self-exploration
and a spirituality governed by the self (constituted not only by the crystals,
vibrations, auras, “Eastern” polytheism, and psychic readings popularly
referred to as “new age”, but also in the mainstream acceptance of psychiatry and
pharmacology as therapeutic practices, the latter deriving from recreational drug
use intending to “expand consciousness”), and the foregrounding of personal
feelings as foundational to the establishment of new and alternative
lifestyles.
As should be evident by the list I just provided, such
gestures to counter-cultural resistance have been entirely co-opted by forms of
consumerism. Over the decades that followed, the image of the hippie and of 60s
protest has been sanitised as itself a commodity, to the point where the
rebellious and revolutionary potential inherent to 60s counterculture now
signals the precise manner in which market forces interpellate individual
subjects as individual consumers.
The popular conception of the 60s radical ignores the realities
of life for many of those who truly did “drop out” – perhaps best exemplified
by the model and junkie Joe Dallesandro, the star of Paul Morrissey’s trilogy
of films Flesh, Trash, and Heat, whose bohemian and transient life critiques both bourgeois complacency and working
class (masculine) hedonism. Of course, under Warhol’s tutelage, Dallesandro was
himself commodified, although not at all to the degree of his heirs.
The contemporary rebel, commodified in the wake of James
Dean, is safe enough for mall fashion and daytime television.
In this sense, we can
understand the revolutionary discourse of cultural history as a means by which
the past is rationalised, enclosed, and invoked as a series of walled gardens
of commercial potentiality. The hippie commune is now the corporate retreat, while the
expansion of consciousness in realisation of a “true” self has become personal
fitness training and the self-help industry. The deviant, do-it-yourself
fashions of hippie youth became not only the heavily-accessorised fashion
trends of latter decades, as well as the continued proliferation of youthful
rebellion as “sexiness” for the beauty industry presently, but also served to ensconce
the perpetual novelty of youth culture as the principle driver of consumer
capitalism.
In this sense, we should perhaps be a little weary of the
symbolism behind the appropriation of the Guy Fawkes mask from the film version
of
V For Vendetta, as the history of political
rebellion invoked by the mask is inaccurately glossed by the film in that the
Gunpowder Plot was not a rebellion against aristocratic or authoritarian
control of the body politic, but rather it was a conservative and Catholic
reaction to Protestantism.
This historic-political gloss is mirrored in
the use of the mask by the middle-class left, for such consumer-enabled
activist symbolism was acquired at dollar stores and manufactured in China. As
Zizek has recently warned, protesters must beware of taking pleasure in
themselves and the good time they are having.
And so with the middle-class privilege of citizenship, finally
we come to the mobile phone itself. The common narrative describes the manner
in which, like a techno-centric inversion of the Horatio Alger myth, what was a luxury item in the 1980s and early 90s
has by 2012 become available to nearly everyone in the “developed” world and a
substantial portion of people in countries collectively known as the
“developing” world. In ways that are both obvious and subtle, the mobile phone
brings together the worlds of the private and the public, which includes the
intimacies not only of social and interpersonal relationships, perhaps best
(and incidentally most humorously) realised in the “sexting” phenomenon which
troubles teenager and politician alike, but also the intimacies of the virtual and
quantified self, and such intimacies are both financial and geographical in
nature. That mobile phones are viewed by financial analysts as having the
potential to replace both physical currency and bank access cards further
enshrines the mobile phone as the principal new mark of citizenship.
The authoritarian potential of an individual’s
subject-identity to be quantified in such an individuating and technocratic
manner for commercial purposes is evidenced by the famously apocalyptic rants
of the character Johnny in the 1993 British film Naked, wherein the barcode prefigures the cell phone in dividing
the self into material agent and virtual consumer.
On the other hand, the democratic potential of mobile
telephony extends from phone acquisition to its actual use, or so we are told. The freedom to communicate at our will and at
our leisure is perhaps a necessary by-product of a democratic capitalism which
allows and often demands freedom of travel.
And so we read in the popular press (Guardian, Globe and
Mail) that the glut of inexpensive cell phones enabled the flourishing of
popular protests in the Middle Eastern countries, an event collectively
narrated under the sign of the Arab Spring. Spontaneous crowd organisation and
mobilisation (flash mobs), as well as a high degree of tactical co-ordination are
enabled by mobile telephony, and the resultant activities are themselves rendered
into a self-reflexive catalyst for protest as the still and moving image making
capabilities of mobile phones are exploited and photographs and video circulate
through social media.
The 2008 film
The Dark
Knight depicts one possible implementation of the surveillance
possibilities of the mobile network which, while rendered in the thoroughly
sensationalist and fantastic manner typical of Hollywood “realism”, is grounded
in contemporary research into information analytics. Batman himself can be seen
to represent the conservative fantasy of individual agency enabled by the
corporate nation state. Batman is himself an individual whose privilege is under
threat from a morally corrupt and politically rebellious underclass of criminal
elements. In one sequence, he uses the powerful computer systems in his Batcave
to access an elaborate spy network which uses the cell phones of every citizen
in the city. Not only does Batman have access to the location information of
every citizen in real time, thus allowing him to locate and monitor their
behaviour and communicate with them. More fantastically, the Batcave computer
can access the microphone and camera of each individual cell phone, and that
data, when interpreted and analysed, allows the Batputer to render a real-time
audio-visual map, thus reifying what Paul Virilio describes in
The Information Bomb as the “audiovisual
continuity of nations”, in which “political frontiers ... shift from the real
space of geopolitics to the ‘real time’ of the chronopolitics of the transmission
of images and sounds” (13).
Virilio further describes the results of such, as he calls
it, “amplification of the optical density of the appearances of the real world”
(39). As an aside, it should be noted that the computational power necessary to
interpret the data sets produced millions of simultaneous mobile phone users is
already available in the supercomputer-class of machines already in use by
large corporations and national governments. As is often noted, US Intelligence
agencies currently use a system called Echelon, which in the wake of the attack
on the World Trade center in 2001 has expanded its Cold War era role of media and
electro-magnetic signal transmission analysis to include the acquisition and
analysis of every email message and most if not all cell phone traffic (voice,
sms) and internet searches, as well as possibly Amazon purchase histories as
well. The National Security Agency is currently building a very large data
centre in Utah, which will be used, according to former NSA official William Binney, as a permanent archive for
this ever-growing intelligence database, which Binney describes as currently
containing roughly 20 trillion sources of data. Furthermore, computer
science predicts that by 2030 the same computational power will have “trickled
down” to the individual consumer by means of the same mechanism of capital and
industrial investment by which the computational capabilities of a computer
which cost $10,000 in 1995 has been matched or exceeded by an inexpensive
mobile phone in 2012.
More practically in the short term, however, and more
specifically relative to the protest activity occurring with the Occupy and
Arab Spring movements, among others, is the ability for cell phone users to be
located geographically in real time. Governmental and military authorities are
presently using this capability to locate and monitor individuals of interest, and
indeed by analysing the mobile traffic which occurs at locations of protest or
conflict, criminal guilt may be assigned with the assumption that proximity
equates with participation.
The internet-enabled cell phone permits a further capacity
for control, and here we can turn to the commercial model championed by Apple
and its iPod and iPhone technologies. First of all, we need to remind ourselves
that there is relatively little that is unique about Apple’s products other
than a unified design aesthetic. The iPod, which like every other digital media
player and flash drive in existence is in fact a software media player laid on
top of generic flash memory, exists solely within the postmodern virtual
geography inhabited by marketing and branding. Similarly, the iPhone is neither
the first portable digital device with a touch screen nor the first
internet-enabled phone. The revolutionary and individuating potential of their
devices is quite simply a fabrication of Apple’s marketing strategy. Much more important
than the individual devices, however, is the infrastructure on which such
devices operate. Apple’s mobile infrastructure involves a closed-hardware/software
platform in which all user interaction with the device is controlled,
regulated, and profited upon by a home electronics company now worth as much as
an oil company. In a market strategy which involves rendering traditional
optical media obsolete and all content delivered to the end user will be
downloaded to the iTunes store, the capacity for the Apple customer for
cultural awareness will be limited to what has been approved by Apple. Indeed,
that the socio-technological configuration known as (iDevice) + iTunes is
presently the most optimal means by which corporate capitalism and the individual
subject can be seen to cohabitate within the virtual geography of the self (which,
as this paper has elaborated, is the corporate body of the citizen) is
reflected in the fact that the financial markets have christened Apple as the
most valuable corporate entity on the planet. The desire for communication is
the fuel for this dependency. In this capacity, mobile telephony will be seen
as the dominant means to control and conform the individual subject, much like
oil was the means by which individuality came to flourish over the course of
the 20th century.
