Generation Bubble

The fact that consumerism assimilates resistance in order to move merchandise makes consumerism difficult to resist. Something similar is happening with social media: We are left twittering our paranoia about what Twitter is doing to us.

You can’t be what you were. The technological changes that allow you to read this (and us to publish it) have foisted upon us a new conception of identity, one more thoroughly suited to consumerism. In particular, what began as a new-found ability to broadcast what we consume culturally and to be recognized (if not paid) for consuming well are becoming compulsions. No one any longer presumes identity to be an essence we are born with and discover; such an idea is the preferred illusion of the modern era. Rather, the newfangled notion of identity is as capital stock that we are compelled to expand roughly along the same line as that of the logic which Marx argued drove capitalists to accumulate! accumulate!

Michel Foucault’s lectures “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self” (reprinted in Political Theory in 1993) has some bearing on this. In these lectures, he begins to explain his move away from his preoccupation with power toward what is usually referred to as governmentality.

It seems, according to some suggestions by Habermas, that one can distinguish three major types of techniques in human societies: the techniques which permit one to produce, to transform, to manipulate things; the techniques which permit one to use sign systems; and the techniques which permit one to determine the conduct of individuals, to impose certain wills on them, and to submit them to certain ends or objectives. That is to say, there are techniques of production, techniques of signification, and techniques of domination…. Since my project was concerned with the knowledge of the subject, I thought that the techniques of domination were the most important, without any exclusion of the rest. But, analyzing the experience of sexuality, I became more and more aware that there is in all societies another type of techniques: techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on. Let’s call this kind of techniques a techniques or technology of the self.

In order to understand subjectivity we must “take into account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely, the points where techniques of the self are integrated into structures of domination.” In other words, though we have some agency and autonomy, “subtle techniques of domination” co-create subjectivity. This effectively prevents us from recognizing how these techniques constrain us, how they constitute subjectivity in such a way as to guarantee obedience.

Foucault basically takes Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony and  applies them to a theory of the self. “We must not understand the exercise of power as pure violence or strict coercion,” Foucault says. The relation may instead betoken collaboration. When, for example, we produce all sorts of useful information for producers by sharing the details of our consumption online in social networks, no one has to coerce us. We do it because we think it makes our identity more concrete and in so doing extends it further, broadening our influence. It is what Lazzarato calls immaterial labor — voluntary production in the symbolic order that manifests itself for the laborer as consumption. More and more, that consumption is identity-driven. We must consume to produce the self, producing as a by-product data that is valuable to information-economy firms. It would be all well and good to be paid in identity for labor we volunteer to perform, if that set of relations did not at the same time corrupt us with the compulsions of capital. We end up compelled to continue to expand it as identity becomes increasingly a cause for competition within the “attention economy.”

In his lectures Foucault contrasts a classical-era “truth procedure” with a medieval monastic one to highlight what changed as Christianity came to order Western society. I’m not entirely sold on his methodology, but I found this interesting: He’s talking about theologian John Cassian and the monastic requirements to search into the motivations of your thoughts to decide whether they should be accepted or rejected.

How is it possible to perform continuously this necessary self-examination, this necessary self-control of the tiniest movements in the thoughts? How is it possible to perform this necessary hermeneutics of our own thoughts? The answer given by Cassian and his inspirators is both obvious and surprising. The answer given by Cassian is, well, you interpret your thoughts by telling them to the master or to your spiritual father. You interpret your thoughts by confessing not of course your acts, not confessing your faults, but in confessing continuously the movement you can notice in your thought.

"I contain multitudes": social media and the monetized self.

This has an obvious application to the impulse to confess the minutiae of our lives in status updates and on Twitter — with the ominous implication that those Web 2.0 services now function as our “spiritual fathers” in the current self-production regime. Sharing is what permits us to understand ourselves, in a tradition that, if Foucault is right, has deep roots. He asserts that the process of confessing itself reveals in that moment of expression the purity or authenticity of them. Only in that moment can the self be separated from sin. Interpreting Cassian, he writes, “If one seeks to hide his own thoughts, if even quite simply one hesitates to tell his thoughts, that is proof that those thoughts are not good as they may appear.” Foucault notes that the Greek church fathers had a word for “this permanent verbalization of the thoughts”: exagoreusis. I guess “tweeting” is a bit catchier.

Foucault regards exagoreusis as an ascetic process, a paradoxical sacrifice of the self at the moment of its concrete realization as something that must be renounced.

We have to understand this sacrifice not only as a radical change in the way of life but as the consequences of a formula like this: you will become the subject of the manifestation of truth when and only when you disappear or you destroy yourself as a real body or as a real existence.

This is arguably what happens when we realize our identity in social networking and consumerist modes of self-production. The moment at which we demonstrate our uniqueness we also reveal our dependence, our lack of autonomy, our constructedness in the code of consumerist symbols.

Foucault offers this speculation in conclusion: “Maybe the problem of the self is not to discover what it is in its positivity, maybe the problem is not to discover a positive self or the positive foundation of the self. Maybe our problem is now to discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history. Maybe the problem is to change those technologies.”

If that is the problem, do we begin by turning off our computers, throwing our smartphones in the river? Or would the resulting isolation serve to neutralize us as thoroughly as participation in the new technologically mediated social system promises to? The technology itself, its propensity to capitalize on network effects, inevitably becomes coercive, reshaping the sphere in which identity can appear, in which vital recognition can occur. Our situation with social technologies is akin to that which we face with consumerism. It’s difficult to resist consumerism because the resistance itself can so easily be transformed by the very system it wants to reject into a signifying product to be consumed for identity purposes. Something similar is happening with social media: we are left Twittering our paranoia about what twitter is doing to us.

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