After the Mass Society

In The Mass Society (from The Power Elite, 1956) C Wright Mills looks at ‘public opinion’  as the mythic seat of democratic power. This is what New Labour’s Gordon Brown deceitfully invokes whenever he bleats about ‘the British people’, whose needs he always knows. Essentially it is ‘an 18th Century idea’ which ‘parallels the economic idea of the market of the free economy’: a world of freely competing actors where price (not value) is formed by ‘anonymous, equally weighted, bargaining individuals’ and opinion arises out of ‘little circles of people talking with one another’. So that autonomy is assumed in both cases and autonomy of discussion in particular is important for the idea of how it legitimates, of how ‘no one group monopolises the discussion or by itself determines the conditions that prevail.’ So that ‘the discussion of opinion is the important phase in a total act by which public affairs are conducted.’

According to the reusable metaphor which Wright Mills then goes on to create out of the birth of British industrialisation, the opinionated public thus conceived ‘is the loom of classic 18th Century democracy’ in which ‘discussion is at once [both] the threads and the shuttle’, tying things together as it were.

And yet, then as well as now, this description is implausible: merely ‘a set of images out of a fairy tale: they are not adequate even as an approximation of how [...] power works [...] The idea of the community of publics is not a description of fact, but an assertion of an ideal’ which ‘is recognized by all those who have considered it carefully as something less than it once was.’

Writing out of his own particular time and place, Wright Mills develops out of what he finds a notion of a ‘society of masses’ in a way that parallels the identification of the ‘mass worker’ by Italian operaisti. In the latter, not wholly brave new world of post miracular Italy the opinion-forming Estates had either broken down or become irremediably repressive, rather as the unions and the trade and craft distinctions had either come to break down or had become oppressive in the Republic founded on Work:

‘Boss, you haven’t fooled us

with your creations, with the unions

your plans have gone up in smoke,

it’s us you’re up against.

.

And the qualifications, the trade distinctions,

we want them all abolished.

The divisions are at an end.’

(Alfredo Bandelli: La ballata della FIAT)

Or as an Autonomist slogan put it not long after dear, democratic Doctor Kissinger’s splendid 11 September coup against Allende: ‘In Chile they’ve got the tanks, but we’ve got the unions.’

And so, speculating now, out of this particular time and place, long after we got what we asked for, which wasn’t at all what we wanted (who was it, by the way, who described Berlusconi, friend of Tony Blair and client of David Mills / Mr Tessa Jowell, as the bastard child of Radio Alice?), we can recycle. Indeed Wright Mills’ metaphorical observations seem to need updating only slightly. In the era of cognitive capitalism, of immaterial labour, of precarity, the loom has been dismantled, or possibly repossessed. Instead there are simply small transmitter/receivers bobbing on the surface of the boundless ocean, linked only by the thread of their capacity endlessly, repetitively, to transmit and to receive. This is Negri’s multitude, but before it achieves self consciousness as a social subject. The movement of the ocean is titanic. Events go on ‘elsewhere’. Until the crash. But until then, in the thin and airless little world of the post Fordist polity as a viable public space, presence is everything, so that whilst these devices may disperse and recombine, whilst they float upon it they do not partake of the ocean in any active way, so that the overall effect is (at best) one of empty, mutual advertisement, of our affectless reincarnation as mindless, self documenting emoticons. Cf, for example, the examples of the bishop who would put confirmations on Twitter, as though the act of being formally received into the Church were a sort of spiritual happy slapping, or of Gordon Brown, looking and behaving like a gloomily aspirant Celtic Tony Hancock, over on You Tube. But there are plenty of non Establishment examples of the same sort of thing.

And meanwhile actual or social disappearance, not now the effect either of a real historical iceberg or of a metaphorical one but just a process of slow or rapid withdrawal, of absence, is merely radio silence, over and out, of death amidst white noise.

And we are, most of us, for the most part, still living out that death.

A Good Childhood

Having previously rescued children from the chimneys of industrial capitalism we have put them to work on the sofas of cognitive capitalism.

A Good Childhood is a so called ‘landmark report’ from the UK Children’s Society. According to a selective article in the Telegraph, it argues, inter alia, that television makes children mentally ill partly through advertisers’ messages that ‘you are what you own’ and partly through that medium’s practice of celebrity:

‘Children today know in intimate detail the lives of celebrities who are richer than they will ever be, and mostly better-looking. This exposure inevitably raises aspirations and reduces self-esteem.’

The reference to ‘aspirations’ here is peculiar. For a start, aspiration is more usually seen as one of capitalist society’s major drivers: you look across at the field belonging to that other chap, you see that it is greener, you apply some fertiliser to your own field and very soon everyone gains. It is this that underpins the hugely patronising (and often White) belief that inhabitants of US projects and slums are going to look up at Obama over the coming years and see not only a brave fulfilment of the dream of Dr King but also an inducement to themselves to give things one further heave.

And that, essentially, is its function in this view of how things work, an inducement to further effort, to fit in. But it’s a position from which, even though Tim Gill, for example, notes that children need to be autonomous, self directing and so forth, the Report as a whole will probably not dissent, its own sort of aspiration, other than at the margin. Aspiration, in other words, doesn’t seesaw with self esteem. Rather it works as social control in a way that desire, for instance, never can; which is what makes desire so subversive.

So here we have it: the dynamic model of capitalist aspiration. A carrot moves forward endlessly and therefore you do too, failing again and failing better, goaded onwards by a stick. Don’t do drugs and/or go to prison. Join the Democrats instead.

In a more topological model, one reaches towards the object of aspiration which always lies on the boundary of the very system within which one starts aspiring in the first place. In L’Europa e l’Impero, for example, Toni Negri notes how the US ‘empire’ is the skin or outer surface of a container for which we provide the contents, within which we live. And this, no doubt, is why (in a British context) the same mindless New Labour clique has looked successively to the vibrancy, if that’s the word, of WJ Clinton, GW Bush and now of BH Obama. Policy here is secondary if it’s relevant at all, because the issue is one of marques.

Nor are things much different in some Christian contexts. Christ is the object of imitation, the source of ‘living waters‘. However, that imitation is always radically incomplete. Either one never reaches that boundary (becoming fully alive is therefore always postponed) or else imitation fails in some other way: ‘[they have] hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water’ (Jeremiah).

As to the message that ‘you are what you own’ here are the children of Don Lorenzo Milani’s school in 1960s Barbiana (from Lettera ad una professoressa):

‘The poor create different tongues and then they struggle to renew them for ever. The rich crystallise these so that they can keep down those who do not speak as they do.’

Now what these children were complaining of was this: firstly that they were excluded from or dispossessed by others of a language which was theirs and secondly that a false and ‘crystallised’ form of that language (and this is similar to the commodification of ‘dead labour’) was then turned back on them prescriptively and proscriptively as a source for their (new) identity.

And this is actually quite serious. On the one hand there is an asymptotic relationship pre-existing between two aspects of language, a sort of ecology of the potential, which must not be destroyed:

‘The true culture, that which no one has so far possessed, is made up of two things: belonging to the group and possessing the power of individual speech.’  (Lettera…)

And on the other hand there is the sort of observation about that destruction which is made by Roland Barthes:

‘To rob a man of his language in the very name of language; this is the first step in all legal murders.’ (Mythologies)

But of course children living today are by no means dumber (or less dumb) than were their counterparts in Barbiana. Certainly they are experiencing a similar negative loop whereby they too become forced consumers of their own production, now fed back at them in crude and distorted ways: for example as reflections of their desire to be like their peers or like their older siblings, or as their desire to create new friendships, now reflected back as the bogus friendship of celebrity. And, almost certainly, like the children of Barbiana, they know this at some level. Yet they are hardly unique in this. Rather they are victims of the process common in cognitive capitalism and which applies both to children and to adults whereby (as Alquati and others have noted: tourism is an example) production and consumption coalesce:

‘They have sold us one by one. They have sold our poor lives and our history to make a history combined with others, a fake history, that doesn’t even have a happy ending, one that finishes in indifference for everything and for everyone.’ (Stefano Benni: Saltatempo).