Jodi Dean

Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics

What is the political impact of networked communications technologies? I argue that as communicative capitalism they are profoundly depoliticizing. The argument, first, conceptualizes the current political-economic formation as one of communicative capitalism. It then moves to emphasize specific features of communicative capitalism in light of the fantasies animating them. The fantasy of abundance leads to a shift in the basic unit of communication from the message to the contribution. The fantasy of activity or participation is materialized through technology fetishism. The fantasy of wholeness relies on and produces a global both imaginary and Real. This fantasy prevents the emergence of a clear division between friend and enemy, resulting instead in the more dangerous and profound figuring of the other as a threat to be destroyed. My goal in providing this account of communicative capitalism is to explain why in an age celebrated for its communications there is no response.

Why the Net is not a Public Sphere

What is the relation between the idea of the public sphere and computer-mediated interaction? I argue that the notion of the public sphere is not only inapplicable to the Net, but also and more importantly, that it is damaging to practices of democracy under conditions of contemporary technoculture, conditions Manuel Castells theorizes as capitalism in the information mode of development and which I refer to as communicative capitalism.1 As an alternative to the public sphere, I consider the potential of a political architecture rooted in a notion of networks. To the extent that such an architecture can center democratic practice in conflict and contestation, so can it open up the democratic imagination in the networked societies of communicative capitalism.

including women: the consequences and side effects of feminist critiques of civil society

When one begins to look at feminist critiques of civil society, one is struck by two, somewhat conflicting, impressions. On the one hand, feminists have remained oddly silent on the subject of civil society. Indeed, until quite recently most feminists have ignored the concept completely. On the other hand, a critical awareness of the dichotomy between the public and private spheres underpins most feminist theory. In fact, one is hard pressed to find

The Party and Communist Solidarity

This essay, based on a talk given at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference, defends the idea of the party by setting out the conditions that make it necessary. Rather than imagining a national, mass-electoral party, it envisions a solidary, militant, international organization. Against left realists who claim that the party is an outmoded or “fully saturated” political form and that we are relegated to momentary acts of resistance or small reforms that leave the capitalist system intact, our conditions push us to rethink and renew that form of political organization through which communists think collectively about political power, act together in order to generate it, and inspire one another to use it for the collective determination of the world we produce in common. Capitalism pushes us apart. Left politics, instead of emphasizing difference, should assert and build commonality. The party is a form for this assertion.

Secrecy since september 11

Taking up the notion of the secret invoked in the US discussion of September 11 and the norm of publicity conceptualized by Jurgen Habermas, this article considers the inextricable link of publicity and secrecy. It argues that under contemporary conditions of communicative capitalism, the notions of public and publicity undermine aspirations to democracy. It develops this point further via an engagement with the work of Ernesto Laclau, demonstrating the depoliticizing effects of the concept.

The Real Internet

At first glance, Slavoj Žižek’s writings on cyberspace from the late 1990s don’t hold up. The primary problem is the separation of cyberspace, or virtual reality, from the communicative exchanges that are part of everyday life in real capitalism. When Žižek wrote these pieces, computer-mediated interactions seemed to be on their way to constituting a new, separate reality that people might “jack into” (William Gibson had already supplied a compelling term for this cybernetic space in his 1984 novel, Neuromancer). Nineties theorists of technoculture, virtual reality, and cyberspace focused on the lawlessness of this new realm, particularly on the ways its anonymous, real-time, textual interface facilitated identity play and sexual experimentation.2 That cyberspace was considered a separate domain let Žižek treat it not only as a world with its own dynamics, but more fundamentally as a specific sociocultural symptom. Thus, much as the neuroses of Freud’s hysterics provided a point of access into the pathologies of bourgeois modernity, so did the psychotic character of virtual communities enable Žižek to begin theorizing the decline of symbolic efficiency constitutive of the “postmodern constellation.”3 My intent here is to reconsider Žižek’s early account of cyberspace in light of the intensifications of communicative capitalism. What appear as glitches, I argue, open up the possibility of theorizing the Internet as Real. Networked media’s capture of subjects follows the circular movement of the drives.

Feminism, Communicative Capitalism, and the Inadequacies of Radical Democracy

Under communicative capitalism, should feminists be radical democrats? If radical democracy entails an emphasis on the multiplicity of political identities engaging in agonistic struggle within a framework of liberal democratic norms and institutions, as it does for Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), then the answer is no. The changing conditions of signification accelerated by networked information and communication technologies decrease the viability of the production of symbolic identities as a means of left political struggle. At the same time, the tenacity of neoliberalism as an economic project renders allegedly democratic institutions barriers to significant political change. Together, these two aspects of communicative capitalism indicate the limits radical democracy places on left political thought and point to the importance of reinvigorating socialism as a left political project.

Materialities of Independent Publishing: A Conversation with Aaaaarg, Chto Delat?, I Cite, Mute, and Neural

This text is a conversation among practitioners of independent political media, focusing on the diverse materialities of independent publishing associated with the new media environment. The conversation concentrates on the publishing projects with which the participants are involved: the online archive and conversation platform AAAAARG, the print and digital publications of artist and activist group Chto Delat?, the blog I Cite, and the hybrid print/digital magazines Mute and Neural. Approaching independent media as sites of political and aesthetic intervention, association, and experimentation, the conversation ranges across a number of themes, including: the technical structures of new media publishing; financial constraints in independent publishing; independence and institutions; the sensory properties of paper and the book; the politics of writing; design and the aesthetics of publishing; the relation between social media and communicative capitalism; publishing as art; publishing as self-education; and post-digital print.

Zizek on Law

This essay outlines the theory of lawin the work of Slavoj Zizek. Zizek proceedsfrom the premise that law is internally,constitutively divided. Law is split betweenthe external social law and the obscenesuperego supplement. Superego is thenecessary, unavoidable underside of the sociallaws that hold together the community.Nevertheless, law can serve potentiallyliberatory ends. It can work as a repositoryfor aspirations for something better. Thus, thearticle argues that for Zizek what is beyondlaw inheres in law as a kind of faith. Theadvantage of Zizeks approach to law thus restsin the way it addresses the crime of law whileholding onto the hope animating law.

Enclosing the Subject

This paper draws from contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as nineteenth-century crowd theory to critique Louis Althusser’s account of the ideological interpellation of the subject. I argue that rather than ideology interpellating the individual as a subject, bourgeois ideology interpellates the subject as an individual. By “bourgeois ideology” I mean the loose set of ideas and apparatuses associated with European modernity, an instrumental concept of reason, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The advantage of reversing the Althusserian account is that the subject is not pre-constrained to the individual form, a form that is itself always already as failing and impossible as it is assumed and demanded. In Althusser’s version, the individuality that emerges in history is posited as universal, a given. In mine, the individual form is itself the problem; it’s a coercive and unstable product of the enclosure of the common in never-ceasing efforts to repress, deny, and foreclose collective political subjectivity. The individual is thus a form of capture. Rather than natural or given, the individual form encloses into a singular bounded body collective bodies, ideas, affects, desires, and drives. There is nothing necessary about the link between subjectivity and individuality; it is an effect contingent to the array of processes that converge into bourgeois modernity.