Virality, Informatics, and Critique; or, Can There Be Such a Thing as Radical Computation?

Informatics, Politics, and Theory

Over the past two decades a substantial body of critical writing has emerged to address the broad transformations that constitute the historical period named the “society of control” (by Gilles Deleuze) and the era of the “cybernetic hypothesis” (by Tiqqun). In strictly economic terms this same period could be defined as that of computer-enabled, post-Fordist, neoliberal capitalism—and it should be noted straight off the bat that “computer-enabled,” in the sense I intend it here, does not describe simply the rise-to-ubiquity of digital technologies in production but rather the broad array of social, economic, political, and cultural changes theorized through cybernetics research in the 1940s and both inspired and emblematized by the universal, binary, and discrete functionality of the computer. The major terms of this historical turn are by now well defined: information replaces material goods as the principle commodity; flexible, precarious forms of labor play a central role in the employment marketplace; the market, underpinned by informatic systems, regulates all social interactions; the notion of the worker as psychologically interior individual is replaced by that of the mathematically modelable automaton. While this present era is in many respects a clear extension of the disciplinary, industrial societies predicated on the familiar systems of exchange, circulation, value production, and exploitation examined by Marx in the mid-nineteenth century, the transformations and novel formations that define it as a distinct historical period require us to reevaluate and adapt our same principle modes of critical thought.¹

This essay, which is deeply indebted to the approach set out by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism and taken up by Nancy Fraser in her commanding “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” aims to interrogate certain notions of radical political practice and the theoretical models that might be derived from them in the context of post-Fordist, neoliberal economics and the ubiquitous informatic culture that is tightly bound up with it. In her 2009 article, published in the New Left Review, Fraser uses the term “the cunning of history” to describe processes whereby historical change recasts radical practices as central to new modes of production and governance (2009, 99). Focusing on the changing role of second-wave feminism from the postwar, state-organized form of capitalism to the “post-Fordist, transnational, neoliberal” form that emerged in the late twentieth century, Fraser compellingly analyses the “complex, disturbing possibility” that “cultural changes jump-started by the second wave, salutary in themselves, have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society” (99).

All this is neatly summed up in an excerpt from Fredric Jameson’s “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film,” in which he examines the dialectical situation whereby social movements that campaign for an equal and just society are both structurally integral to and structurally unrealizable by late capitalism. Jameson suggests that

the values of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement and the anti-authoritarian egalitarianism of the student’s movement are thus preeminently cooptable because they are already-as ideals-inscribed in the very ideology of capitalism itself; and we must take into account the possibility that these ideals are part of the internal logic of the system, which has a fundamental interest in social equality to the degree to which it needs to transform as many of its subjects or its citizens into identical consumers interchangeable with everybody else. The Marxian position—which includes the ideals of the Enlightenment but seeks to ground them in a materialist theory of social evolution—argues on the contrary that the system is structurally unable to realize such ideals even where it has an economic interest in doing so.

(1977, 884)

I am interested in mapping the conundrum set out above, about the simultaneous co-option of radical ideals and the fundamental impossibility of realizing the basic goal of these ideals—that is, a “just society”—by late...