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  • Olivier Jutel – Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power

    Olivier Jutel – Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power

    by Olivier Jutel

    ~

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board. 

    Introduction

    The emergence of Donald Trump as president of the United States has defied all normative liberal notions of politics and meritocracy. The decorum of American politics has been shattered by a rhetorical recklessness that includes overt racism, misogyny, conspiracy and support for political violence. Where the Republican Party, Fox News, Beltway think-tanks and the Koch brothers have managed their populist base through dog-whistling and culture wars, Trump promises his supporters the chance to destroy the elite who prevent them from going to the end in their fantasies. He has catapulted into the national discourse a mixture of paleo-conservatism and white nationalism recently sequestered to the fringes of American politics or to regional populisms. Attempts by journalists and politicians during the campaign to fact-check, debunk and shame Trump proved utterly futile or counter-productive. He revels in transgressing the rules of the game and is immune to the discipline of his party, the establishment and journalistic notions of truth-telling. Trump destabilizes the values of journalism as it is torn between covering the ratings bonanza of his spectacle and re-articulating its role in defence of liberal democracy. I argue here that Trump epitomizes the populist politics of enjoyment. Additionally liberalism and its institutions, such as journalism, are libidinally entangled in this populist muck. Trump is not simply a media-savvy showman: he embodies the centrality of affect and enjoyment to contemporary political identity and media consumption. He wields affective media power, drawing on an audience movement of free labour and affective intensity to defy the strictures of professional fields.

    Populism is here understood in psychoanalytic terms as a politics of antagonism and enjoyment. The rhetorical division of society between an organic people and its enemy is a defining feature of theoretical accounts of populism (Canovan 1999). Trump invokes a universal American people besieged by a rapacious enemy. His appeals to “America” function as a fantasy of social wholeness in which the country exists free of the menace of globalists, terrorists and political correctness. This antagonism is not simply a matter of rhetorical style but a necessary precondition for the Lacanian political “subject of enjoyment” (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008: 257). Trump is an agent of obscene transgressive enjoyment, what Lacan calls jouissance, whether in vilifying immigrants, humiliating Jeb Bush, showing off his garish lifestyle or disparaging women. The ideological content of Trump’s program is secondary to its libidinal rewards or may function as one and the same. It is in this way that Trump can play the contradictory roles of blood-thirsty isolationist and tax-dodging populist billionaire.

    Psychoanalytic theory differs from pathology critiques of populism in treating it as a symptom of contemporary liberal democracy rather than simply a deviation from its normative principles. Drawing on the work of Laclau (2005), Mouffe (2005) and Žižek (2008), Trump’s populism is understood as the ontologically necessary return of antagonism, whether experienced in racial, nationalist or economic terms, in response to contemporary liberalism’s technocratic turn. The political and journalistic class’s exaltation of compromise, depoliticization and policy-wonks are met with Trump promises to ‘fire’ elites and his professed ‘love’ of the ‘poorly educated’. Trump’s attacks on the liberal class enmeshes them in a libidinal deadlock in that both require the other to enjoy. Trump animates the negative anti-fascism that the liberal professional classes enjoy as their identity while simultaneously creating the professional class solidarity which animates populist fantasies of the puppet-masters’ globalist conspiracy. In response to Trump’s improbable successes the Clinton campaign and liberal journalism appealed to rationalism, facts and process in order to reaffirm a sense of identity in this traumatic confrontation with populism.

    Trump’s ability to harness the political and libidinal energies of enjoyment and antagonism is not simply the result of some political acumen but of his embodiment of the values of affective media. The affective and emotional labour of audiences and users is central to all media in today’s “communicative capitalism” (Dean 2009). Media prosumption, or the sharing and production of content/data, is dependent upon new media discourses of empowerment, entrepreneurialism and critical political potential. Fox News and the Tea Party were early exemplars of the way in which corporate media can utilize affective and politicized social media spaces for branding (Jutel 2013). Trump is an affective media entrepreneur par excellence able to wrest these energies of enjoyment and antagonism from Fox and the Republican party. He operates across the field whether narcissistically tweeting, appearing on Meet the Press in his private jet or as a guest on Alex Jones’ Info Wars. Trump is a product of “mediatiaztion” (Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2011), that is the increasing importance of media across politics and all social fields but the diminution of liberal journalism’s cultural authority and values. As an engrossing spectacle Trump pulls the liberal field of journalism to its economic pole of valorization (Benson 1999) leaving its cultural values of a universal public or truth-telling isolated as elitist. In wielding this affective media power against the traditional disciplines of journalism and politics, he is analogous to the ego-ideal of communicative capitalism. He publicly performs a brand identity of enjoyment and opportunism for indeterminate economic and political ends.

    The success of Trump has not simply revealed the frailties of journalism and liberal political institutions, it undermines popular and academic discourses about the political potential of social/affective media. The optimism around new forms of social media range from the liberal fetishization of data and process, to left theories in which affect can reconstitute a democratic public (Papacharissi 2015). Where the political impact of social media was once synonymous with Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and direct democracy we must now add Donald Trump’s populism and the so-called ‘alt-right’. While Trump’s politics are thoroughly retrograde, his campaign embodies what is ‘new’ in the formulation of new media politics. Trump’s campaign was based on a thoroughly mediatized constituency with very little ground game or traditional political machinery, relying on free media coverage and the labour of social media users. Trump’s campaign is fuelled by ‘the lulz’ which translates as the jouissance of hacker nerd culture synonymous with the “weird Internet” of Twitter, 4-Chan and message boards. For Trump’s online alt-right army he is a paternal figure of enjoyment, “Daddy Trump” (Yiannopoulos 2016), elevating ritualized transgression to the highest reaches of politics. Trump’s populism is a pure politics of jouissance realized in and through the affective media.

    Populism and Enjoyment

    The value of an obscene figure like Donald Trump is that he demonstrates a libidinal truth about right wing populist identity. It has become a media cliché to describe Donald Trump as the id of the Republican party. And while Trump is a uniquely outrageous figure of sexual insecurity, vulgarity and perversion, the insights of psychoanalytic theory extend far beyond his personal pathologies.[1] It should be stated that this psychoanalytic reading is not a singular explanation for Trump’s electoral success over and above racism, Clinton’s shockingly poor performance (Dovere 2016), a depressed Democratic turnout, voter suppression and the electoral college. Rather this is an analysis which considers how Trump’s incoherence and vulgarity, which are anathema to normative liberal politics, ‘work’ at the level of symbolic efficiency.

    The election of Trump has seemingly universalized a liberal struggle against the backward forces of populism. What this ‘crisis of liberalism’ elides is the manner in which populism and liberalism are libidinally entangled. Psychoanalytic political theory holds that the populist logics of antagonism, enjoyment and jouissance are not the pathological outside of democracy but its repressed symptoms, what Arditi borrowing from Freud calls “internal foreign territory” (2005: 89). The explosion of emotion and anger which has accompanied Trump and other Republican populists is a return of antagonism suppressed in neoliberalism’s “post-political vision” (Mouffe 2005: 48). In response to the politics of consensus, rationalism and technocracy, embodied by Barack Obama and Clinton, populism expresses the ontological necessity of antagonism in political identity (Laclau 2005). Whether in left formulations of the people vs the 1% or the nationalism of right wing populism, the act of defining an exceptional people against an enemy represents “political logic tout court” (Laclau: 229). The opposition of a people against its enemy is not just a rhetorical strategy commonly defined as the populist style (Moffitt 2016), it is part of the libidinal reward structure of populism.

    The relationship between antagonism and enjoyment is central to the psychoanalytic political theory approach to populism employed by Laclau, Žižek, Stavrakakis and Mouffe. The populist subject is the psychoanalytic “subject of enjoyment” (Glynos & Stavrakakis:  257) shaped by trauma, irrational drives and desires. Populist ontology is analogous to Lacanian “symbolic castration” in which the child’s failure to fulfill a phallic role for the mother “allows the subject to enter the symbolic order” (Žižek 1997: 17). Populism embodies this fundamental antagonism and sense of lost enjoyment. Populist identity and discourse are the perpetually incomplete process of recapturing this primordial wholeness of mother’s breast and child. It is in this way that Trump’s ‘America’ and the quest to ‘Make America Great Again’ is not a political project built on policy, but an affective and libidinal appeal to the lost enjoyment of a wholly reconciled America. America stands in as an empty signifier able to embody a sub-urban community ideal, military strength or the melding of Christianity and capitalism, depending upon the affective investments of followers.

    In the populist politics of lost enjoyment there is a full libidinal identification with the lost object (America/breast) that produces jouissance. Jouissance can be thought of as a visceral enjoyment which that defies language as in Barthes’ (1973) notion of jouissance as bliss. It is distinct from a discrete pleasure as it represents an “ecstatic release” and transgressive “absolute pleasure undiluted” by the compromises with societal constraints (Johnston 2002). Jouissance is an unstable excess, it cannot exist without already being lost. ‘America’ as imagined by Trump has never existed and “can only incarnate enjoyment insofar as it is lacking; as soon we get hold of it all its mystique evaporates!” (Stavrakakis 2007: 78). However this very failure produces an incessant drive and “desire structured around the unending quest for the lost, impossible jouissance” (Glynos and Stavrakakis: 261). Donald Trump may have won the White House but it is unclear whether American greatness has been restored, delayed or thwarted, as is the nature jouissance. The Trump campaign and presidency embodies jouissance as “pleasure in displeasure, satisfaction in dissatisfaction” (Stavrakakis: 78). With a dismal approval rating and disinterest in governing Trump has taken to staging rallies in order to rekindle this politics of jouissance. However the pleasure generated during the campaign has been lost. Matt Taibbi described the diminishing returns of jouissance among even his most devoted followers who turn out “for the old standards” like “lock her [Clinton] up” (2017) and are instead subjected to a narcissistic litany of personal grievances.

    The coalescence of libidinal energy into a populist movement depends on what Laclau calls an affective investment (2005) in a ‘people’ whose enjoyment is threatened. The shared affective experience of enjoyment in being part of the people is more important than any essential ideological content. In populist ontology ‘the people’ is a potent signifier for an organic virtue and political subjectivity that is seemingly pure. From Thomas Jefferson’s ode to the yeoman farmer, the Tea Party’s invocation of the producerist tradition and the humanism of Bernie Sanders[2] there is a belief in the people as the redeemer of politics. However for Laclau this people is always negatively defined by an antagonistic enemy, whether “mobs in the city” (Jefferson 1975: 216), liberal government, Wall Street or ‘Globalists.’ Trump’s promise to make America great again is at once destiny by virtue of the people’s greatness, but is continually threatened by the hand of some corrupting and typically racialized agent (the liberal media, George Soros, China or Black Lives Matter). In this way Trump supporters ‘enjoy’ their failure in that it secures an embattled identity, allows them to transgress civic norms and preserve the illusory promise of America.

    Within the field of Lacanian political theory there is rift between a post-Marxist anti-essentialism (Lacalau, 2005, Mouffe, 2005) which simply sees populism as the face of the political, and a Lacanian Marxism which retains a left-political ethic as the horizon of emancipatory politics (Žižek, 2008, Dean, 2009). With the ascent of populism from the margins to the highest seat of power it is essential to recognize what Žižek describes as the ultimate proto-fascist logic of populism (Žižek, 2008). In order to enjoy being of the people, the enemy of populism is libidinally constructed and “reified into a positive ontological entity…whose annihilation would restore balance and justice” (Žižek 2008: 278). At its zenith populism’s enemy is analogous to the construct of the Jew in anti-semitism as a rapacious, contradictory, over-determined evil that is defined by excessive enjoyment. Following Lacan’s thesis that enjoyment always belongs to the other, populist identity requires a rapacious other “who is stealing social jouissance from us” (Žižek 1997: 43). This might be the excessive enjoyment of the Davos, Bohemian Grove and ‘limousine-liberal’ elite, or the welfare recipients, from bankers, immigrants and the poor, who ‘enjoy’ the people’s hard earned tax dollars. For the populists enjoyment is a sense of being besieged which licenses a brutal dehumanization of the enemy and throws the populist into an self-fecund conspiratorial drive to discover and enjoy the enemy’s depravity. Alex Jones and Glenn Beck have been key figures on the populist right (Jutel 2017) in channelling this drive and reproducing the tropes of anti-semitism in uncovering the ‘globalist’ plot. In classic paranoid style (Hofstader 1965), this elite is often depicted as occultist[3] and in league with the lumpen-proletariat to destroy the people’s order.

    Trump brings a people into being around his brand and successful presidential in personifying this populist jouissance. He is able to overcome his innumerable contradictions and pull together disparate strands of the populist right, from libertarians, evangelicals, and paleo-conservatives to white nationalists, through the logic of jouissance. The historically high levels at which evangelicals supported the libertine Trump (Bailey 2016) were ideologically incongruous. However the structure of belief and enjoyment; a virtuous people threatened by the excessive enjoyment of transgender rights, abortion and gay marriage, is analogous. The libidinal truth of their beliefs is the ability to enjoy losing the culture wars and lash out at the enemy. Trump is able to rail against the elite not in spite of his gaudy billionaire lifestyle but because of it. As Mudde explains, populism is not a left politics of reflexivity and transformation aimed at “chang[ing] the people themselves, but rather their status within the political system” (2004: 547). He speaks to the libidinal truth of oligarchy and allows his followers to imagine themselves wielding the power of the system against the elite (as also suggested by Grusin 2017, especially 91-92, on Trump’s “evil mediation”). When he appeared on stage with his Republican rivals and declared that he had given all of them campaign contributions as an investment, it was not an admission of culpability but a display of potency. There is a vicarious enjoyment when he boasts as the people’s plutocrat “when they [politicians] call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them…I call them, and they are there for me” (Fang 2016).

    Populist politics is not a means to a specific policy vision but enjoyment as its own end, even if Trump’s avarice runs counter to the people’s rational self-interest. The lashing out at women and immigrants, the humiliation of Jeb Bush, telling Chris Christie to ‘get on the plane’, the call to imprison Hillary Clinton, all offer a release of jouissance and the promise to claim state power in the name of jouissance. When he attacks Fox News, the Republican party and its donors he is betraying powerful ideological allies for the principle of jouissance and the people’s ability to go to the end in their enjoyment. The cascading scandals that marked his campaign (boasting of sexual assault, tax-dodging etc) and provoked endless outrage among political and media elites, function in a similar way. Whatever moral failings it marks him as unrestrained by the prohibitions that govern social and political behaviour.

    In this sense Trump’s supporters are invested in him as the ego-ideal of the people, who will ‘Make America Great Again’ by licensing jouissance and whose corruption is on behalf of the people. In his classic study of authoritarianism and crowds, Freud describes the people as having elevated “the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego” (1949: 80). Trump functions in this role not simply as a figure of obscene opulence and licentiousness but in a paternalistic role among his followers. His speeches are suffused with both intolerance and professions of love and solidarity with the populist trope of the forgotten man, however disingenuous (Parenti 2016). Freud’s theory of the leader has rightly been criticized as reducing the indeterminacy of crowds to simply a singular Oedipal relation (Dean 2016). However against Freud’s original formulation Trump is not the primordial father ruling a group “that wishes to be governed by unrestricted force” (Freud: 99) but rather he is the neoliberal super-ego of enjoyment “enjoining us to go right to the end” (Žižek 2006: 310) in our desires. This libidinal underside is the truth of what Lakoff (2016) identifies as the “strict father” archetype of conservatism. Rather than the rigid moral frame Lakoff suggests subjects, this obscene father allows unrestrained transgression allowing one to “say things prohibited by political correctness, even hate, fight, kill and rape” (Žižek 1999: 6). Milo Yiannopolous’ designation of Trump as the ‘Daddy’ of the alt-right perfectly captures his role as the permissive paternal agent of jouissance.

    In an individuated polity Trump’s movement sans party achieves what can be described as a coalescence of individual affective investments. Where Freud supposes a totalizing paternal figure, Trump does not require full identification and a subsumption of ego to function as a super-ego ideal. This is the way to understand Trump’s free-form braggadocio on the campaign trail. He offers followers a range of affective points of identification allowing them to cling to nuggets of xenophobia, isolationism, misogyny, militarism, racism and/or anti-elitism. One can disregard the contradictions and accept his hypocrisies, prejudices, poor impulse control and moral failings so long as one is faithful to enjoyment as a political principle.

    The Liberal/Populist Libidinal Entanglement

    In order to understand the libidinal entanglement of liberalism and populism, as embodied in the contest between Trump and Clinton, it is necessary to consider liberalism’s conception of the political. Historical contingency has made liberalism a confused term in American political discourse simultaneously representing the classical liberalism of America’s founding, progressive-era reformism, New Deal social-democracy, the New Left and Third Way neo-liberalism. The term embodies the contradiction of liberalism identified by CB MacPherson as between the progressive fight to expand civil rights and simply the limited democracy of a capitalist market society (1977). The conflation of liberalism and the left has occurred in the absence of a US labour party and it has allowed Third Way neo-liberals to efface the contribution of 19th century populists, social-democrats and communists to progressive victories. The fractious nature of the 2016 Democratic primary process where the Democratic Party machinery and liberal media organs overwhelming supported Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders and a youthful base openly identifying as “socialist”, has laid bare the conflation of liberalism and the left. In this way it makes sense to speak of liberalism and neoliberalism interchangeably in contemporary American politics.

    Liberal politics disavows the central premise of psychoanalytic theory, that political identity is based on antagonism and enjoyment. Mouffe (2005) describes its vision of politics as process-oriented with dialogue and rational deliberation between self-interested parties in search of true consensus. And while the process may not be seemly there are no ontological obstacles to consensus merely empirical blockages. One can see this in Hillary Clinton’s elevation of the ‘national conversation’ as an end in and of itself (McWhorter 2016). While this may contribute to a democratic culture which foregrounds journalism and ‘the discourse’, it presents politics, not as the antagonistic struggle to distribute power, access and resources, but simply as the process of gaining understanding through rational dialogue. This was demonstrable in the Clinton campaign’s strategy to rebuff Trump’s rhetorical recklessness with an appeal to facts, moderation[4] and compromise. With the neoliberal diminution of collective identities and mass vehicles for politics, the role of politics becomes technocratic administration to expand individual rights as broadly as possible. Antagonism is replaced with “a multiplicity of ‘sub-political’ struggles about a variety of ‘life issues’ which can dealt with through dialogue” (Mouffe: 50). It is in this way that we can understand Clinton’s performance of progressive identity politics, particularly on social media,[5] while being buttressed by finance capital and Silicon Valley.

    The Trump presidency does not simply obliterate post-politics, it demonstrates how populism, liberalism and the journalistic field are libidinally entangled. They require one another as the other in order to make enjoyment in political identity possible. The journalist Thomas Frank has identified in the Democrats a shift in the mid-1970s, from a party of labour to highly-educated professionals and with it a fetishization of complexity and process (2016a). The lauding of expertise as depoliticized rational progress produces a self-replicating drive and enjoyment as one can always have more facts, compromise and dialogue. In this reverence for process the neoliberal democrats can imagine and enjoy the transcendence of the political. Liberal journalism’s new turn to data and wonk-centric didacticism, embodied in the work of Nate Silver and in the online publication Vox, represents this notion of post-politics and process as enjoyment. Process then becomes the “attempt to cover over [a] constitutive lack…through continuous identificatory acts aiming to re-institute an identity” (Glynos and Stavrakakis: 261). For neo-liberal Democrats process is a fetish object through which they are fulfilled in their identity.

    However try as they might liberals cannot escape their opponent and the political as a result of the inter-subjective dimensions of enjoyment. Those outside the dialogic process are seen as “old-fashioned ‘traditionalists’ or, more worryingly, the ‘fundamentalists’ fighting a backward struggle against the forces of progress” (Mouffe: 50). Where liberalism sees Trump as a dangerous xenophobe/fundamentalist, Bernie Sanders functions as a traditionalist clinging to an antagonistic political discourse and a universalist project (social democracy). Sanders’ universalism was widely criticized as undermining particular identity struggles with Clinton chiding him that ‘Breaking up the banks won’t end racism’. Thomas Frank systematically tracked the response of the Washington Post editorial page to the Sanders campaign for Harper’s Magazine and detailed a near unanimous “chorus of denunciation” of Sanders’ social democracy as politically “inadmissible” (2016b).

    The extent of the liberal/populist co-dependency was revealed in a Clinton campaign memo outlining the “Pied-Piper” strategy to elevate Trump during the Republican primary as it was assumed that he would be easier to beat than moderates Rubio and Bush (Debenedetti 2016). For liberalism these retrograde forces of the political provide enjoyment, virtue and an identity of opposing radicals from all sides, even as populism continues to make dramatic advances. The contradiction of this libidinal entanglement is that the more populism surges the more democrats are able to enjoy this negative and reactive identity of both principled anti-fascism and a cultural sophistication in mocking the traditionalists. The genre of Daily Show late night comedy, which has been widely praised as a new journalistic ideal (Baym 2010), typifies this liberal enjoyment[6] with populists called out for hypocrisy or ‘eviscerated’ by this hybrid of comedy and rational exposition. Notably John Oliver’s show launched the ‘Drumpf’ meme which was meant to both mock Trump’s grandiosity and point out the hypocrisy of his xenophobia. What the nightly ‘skewering’ of Trump by SNL, The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s Tonight Show achieves is the incessant reproduction of identity, widely shared on social media and other liberals sites like Huffington Post, that allows liberals an enjoyment of cultural sophistication in defeat.

    Immediately after the election of Trump SNL made a bizarre admission of this liberal over-identification with its negative identity. Kate McKinnon, who impersonated Hillary Clinton on SNL, began the show in character as Clinton while performing the late Leonard Cohen’s sombre ballad ‘Hallelujah’. Here the satirical character meant to provide the enjoyment of an ironic distance from political reality speaks for an overwrought full identification with liberalism through the cultural politics of late night comedy providing liberals what Rolling Stone called ‘catharsis after an emotionally exhausting’ election (Kreps 2016). Writer and comedian Matt Christman has described this as an elevation of comedians analogous to the conservative fetish of ‘The Troops’ (Menaker 2016). There is a fantasy of political potency and virtue embodied in what Žižek might call these ‘subjects supposed to eviscerate’ who wield power in our place.

    In the 2016 US Presidential elections, liberalism failed spectacularly to understand the political and to confront its own libidinal investments. While the Clinton campaign did manage to bring certain national security Republicans and moderates to her side in the name of consensus, this reproduced the populist imaginary of a class solidarity of the learned undermining The People’s natural order. Hillary Clinton’s vision of meritocracy included a diverse Silicon Valley cabinet (Healy 2016) and the leadership of “real billionaires.”[7] Meanwhile Trump spoke of the economy in antagonistic terms, using China and the globalist conspiracy to channel a sense of lost community and invert the energies of class conflict. Trump, the vulgar tax-dodging billionaire, is preferable to a section of working class voters than a rational meritocracy where their class position is deserved and their fate to learn code or be swept away by the global economy. Friedrich von Hayek wrote that the virtue of the market as a form of justice is that it relies on “chance and good luck” (1941: 105) and not simply merit. However erroneous this formulation of class power, it allows people to accept inequality as based on chance rather than an objective measure of their value. In contrast to Clinton’s humiliating meritocracy, Trump’s charlatanism, multiple bankruptcies and steak infomercials reinscribe this principle of luck and its corollary enjoyment.

    The comprehensive failure of liberal post-politics did not simply extend from the disavowal of antagonism but the fetishization of process. The party’s lockstep support of the neoliberal Clinton in the primary against the left-wing or ‘traditionalist’ Sanders created an insular culture ranging from self-satisfied complacency to corruption. The revelations that the party tampered with the process and coordinated media attacks on Sanders’ religious identity (Biddle 2016) fundamentally threatened liberal political identity and enjoyment. This crisis of legitimacy necessitated another, more threatening dark political remnant of history in order to restore the fetish of process. Since this moment liberals, in politics and the media, have relied on Russia as an omnipotent security threat, coordinating the global resurgence of populism and xenophobia and utilizing Trump as a Manchurian candidate and Sanders as a useful idiot.[8] This precisely demonstrates the logic of fetishist disavowal, liberals know very well that process has been corrupted but nevertheless “they feel satisfied in their [fetish], they experience no need to be rid of [it]” (Žižek 2009: 68). For the liberal political and media class it is easier to believe in a Russian conspiracy of “post-truth politics” than it is to confront one’s own libidinal investments in rationalism and consensus in politics.

    Affective Media Power and Jouissance

    The success of Trump was at once a display of journalistic powerlessness, as he defied predictions and expectations of presidential political behaviour, and affective media power as he used access to the field to disrupt the disciplines of professional politics. The campaigns of Clinton and Trump brought into relief the battle over the political meaning of new and affective media. For Clinton’s well-funded team of media strategists and professional campaigners data would be the means by which they could perfect the politics of rationalism and consensus. Trump’s seemingly chaotic, personality driven campaign was staked on the politics of jouissance, or ‘the lulz’, and affective identification. Trump represented a fundamental attack on the professional media and political class’ notions of merit and the discourse. And while his politics of reaction and prejudice are thoroughly retrograde, he is completely modern in embodying the values of affective media in eliciting the libidinal energies of his audience.

    By affective media I am not simply referring to new and social media but the increasingly universal logic of affect at the heart of media. From the labour of promoting brands, celebrities and politicians on social media to the consumption of traditional content on personalized devices and feeds, consumption and production rely upon an emotional investment, sense of user agency, critical knowingness and social connectivity. In this sense we can talk about the convergence of affect as a political economic logic of free labour, self-surveillance and performativity, and the libidinal logic of affective investment, antagonism and enjoyment. Donald Trump is therefore a fitting president for what Jodi Dean calls communicative capitalism (2009) in which capital subsumes personalized affective drives in circuits of capital. He exemplifies the super-ego ideal of communicative capitalism and its individuating effects as a narcissist who publicly ‘enjoys’ life and leverages his fame and media stakes to whatever end whether real estate, media contract negotiations or the presidency.

    The success of Trump’s populism and the contradictory responses he drew from establishment media must be understood in terms of the shifts of media political economy and the concurrent transformation of journalistic values. Journalism has staked its autonomy and cultural capital as a profession on the principle that it is above the fray of politics, providing objective universal truths for a public “assumed to be engaged in a rational process of seeking information” (Baym 2010: 32). Journalism is key to the liberal belief in process, serving a technocratic gatekeeping role to the public sphere. These values are libidinal in the sense that they disavow the reality of the political, are perpetually frustrated by the economic logic of the field, but nevertheless serve as the desired ideal. Bourdieu describes the field of journalism as split between this enlightened liberalism and the economic logic of a “populist spontaneism and demagogic capitulation to popular tastes” (Bourdieu 1998: 48). This was neatly demonstrated in the 2016 election when CBS Chairman Les Moonves spoke of Trump’s campaign to investors; “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS” (Collins 2016). The Trump campaign and presidency conform to the commercial values of the field, providing the volatility and spectacle of reality television, and extraordinary ratings for cheap-to-produce content. Faced with these contradictions journalists have oscillated between Edward R. Murrow-esque posturing and a normalization of this spectacle.

    Further to this internal split in the field between liberal values and the economic logic of the Trump spectacle, the process of “mediatization” (Strömbäck and Dimitrova, 2011) explains the centrality of affective media to public political life. With neo-liberal post-politics and the diminution of traditional political vehicles and identities, media is the key public space for the autonomous neoliberal subject/media user. The media is ubiquitous in “producing a convergence among all the fields [business, politics, academia] and pulling them closer to the commercial pole in the larger field of power” (Benson 1999: 471). In this way media produces symbolic capital, or affective media power, with which media entrepreneurs can make an end-run around the strictures of professional fields. Trump is exemplary in this regard as all of his ventures, whether in real-estate, broadcasting, social media or in politics, rely upon this affective media power which contradicts the traditional values of the field. The inability of the journalistic and political fields to discipline him owes to both his transcendence of those fields and the indeterminacy of his actions. Trump’s run may well have been simply a matter of opportunism in an attempt to accrue media capital for his other ventures, whether in renegotiating his NBC contract or putting pressure on the Republican party as he has done previously.

    The logic of Trump is analogous to the individuated subject of communicative capitalism and the injunction to throw yourself into circulation through tweets and posts, craft your brand and identity, expand your reach, become and object of desire and enjoy. He exemplifies mediatized life as “a non-stop entrepreneurial adventure involving the pursuit of multiple revenue streams predicated on the savvy deployment of virtuosic communicative and image skills” (Hearn 2016: 657). Trump is able to bypass the meritocratic constraints of professional fields through the affective identification of a loyal audience in his enjoyment and brand. His long tenure on national television as host of The Apprentice created precisely the template by which Trump could emerge as a populist ego-ideal in communicative capitalism. He is a model of success and the all-powerful and volatile arbiter of success (luck) in a contest between ‘street-smart’ Horatio Algers and aspiring professionals with impeccable Ivy-League resumes. The conceit of the show, which enjoyed great success during some of America’s most troubled economic times, was the release of populist enjoyment though Trump’s wielding of class power. With the simple phrase ‘you’re fired’ he seemingly punishes the people’s enemy and stifles the meritocracy by humiliating upwardly mobile, well-educated social climbers.

    Trump’s ability to channel enjoyment and “the people” of populism relies upon capturing the political and economic logic of affect which runs through contemporary media prosumption (Bruns 2007). From the superfluousness of clickbait, news of celebrity deaths and the irreverent second-person headline writing of Huffington Post, affect is central to eliciting the sharing, posting and production of content and user data as “free labour” (Terranova 2004). Trump’s adherence to the logic of affective media, combined with a willing audience of affective labour, is what allowed him to defy the disciplines of the field and party, secure disproportionate air-time and overcome a 4-to-1 advertising deficit to the Clinton campaign (Murray 2016). The Trump campaign had a keen sense of the centrality of affect in producing the spectacle of a mass movement, often employing ‘rent-a-crowd’ tactics, to using his staff as a cheer squad during public events. In a manner similar to the relationship between the Tea Party and Fox News (Jutel 2013) the performance of large crowds produced the spectacle that secured his populist authenticity. While Fox effectively brought the Tea Party into the fold of traditional movement conservatism, through lobbying groups such as Freedom Works, Trump has connected his mainstream media brand with the online fringes of Brietbart, Info Wars and the so-called ‘alt-right’. It is from this space of politicized affective intensity that users perform free labour for Trump in sharing conspiracies, memes and personal testimony all to fill the empty signifier ‘Make America Great Again’ with meaning. Trump’s penchant for entertaining wild conspiracies has the effect of sending his online movement into a frenzied “epistemological drive” (Lacan 2007: 106) to uncover the depths of the enemy’s treachery.

    Where the Trump campaign understood the media field as a space to tap antagonism and enjoyment, for Hillary Clinton the promise of new media and its analogue ‘big data’ were a means to perfect communication and post-politics. Clinton was hailed by  journalists for assembling “Silicon Valley’s finest” into the “largest” and “smartest” tech team in campaign history (Lapowsky 2016). Where Clinton employed over 60 mathematicians using computer algorithms to direct all campaign spending, “Trump invested virtually nothing in data analytics” seemingly imperilling the future of the Republican party (Goldmacher 2016). The election of Trump did not simply embarrass the New York Times and others who made confident data-driven projections of a Clinton win (Katz 2016), it fundamentally undermined the liberal “technology fetish” (Dean 2009: 31) of new media in communicative capitalism. Where new media enthusiasts view our tweets and posts as communicative processes which empowers and expands democracy, the reality is a hyper-activity masks the trauma and “larger lack of left solidarity” (Dean 2009: 36). Trump is not simply the libidinal excess born of new forms of communication and participation, he realizes the economic logic and incentives of new media prosumption. The affective labour of Trump supporters share a connective tissue with the clickfarm workers purchased for page likes, the piece-meal digital workers designing promotional material or the Macedonian teenagers who circulate fake news on Facebook for fractions of a penny per click (Casilli 2016). Trump reveals both an libidinal and political economic truth nestled in the promise of new mediatized and affective forms of politics.

    The clearest demonstration of affective media as a space of enjoyment and antagonism, as opposed to liberal-democratic rationalism, is the rise of the so-called ‘alt-right’ under Trump. In journalistic and academic discourses, new media cultures defined by collaboration and playful transgression are seen as the inheritance of liberalism and the left. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, affect is deemed central to enabling new democratizing public formations (Grusin 2010, Papacharissi 2016). The hacker and nerd cultures which proliferate in the so-called ‘weird internet’ of Twitter, Reddit and 4chan have been characterized as “a force for good in the world” (Coleman 2014: 50). Deleuzian affect theory plays a key role here in rejecting the traumatic and inter-subjective dimensions of enjoyment for a notion of affect, whose transmission between mediatizaed bodies, is seen as creating ‘rational goals and political effects’ (Stoehrel and Lindgren 2014: 240). Affect is the subcultural currency of this realm with ‘lulz’ (jouissance) gained through memes, vulgarity and trolling.

    However as the alt-right claim the culture of the “youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet” (Bokhari and Yiannopoulos 2016) it is apparent that a politics of affective media is not easily sublimated for anything other than the circular logic of jouissance. It was in fact the troll ‘weev’, profiled in Coleman’s book on Anonymous as the archetypal troll, who claims to have launched ‘Operation Pepe’ to turn the Pepe the frog meme into a ubiquitous form of alt-right enjoyment as a prelude to race war (Sklar 2016). Trolling defines the alt-right and exemplifies the intractability of the other in enjoyment. Alt-righters might enjoy brutally dehumanizing their opponents in the purest terms of racism, anti-semitism and misogyny, but this is coupled with an obsessive focus on ‘political correctness’ on college campuses, through to pure fascist and racist nightmares of miscegenation and the other’s enjoyment. It should be clear that we are in the realm of pathological enjoyment and violent libidinal frustration particularly as the alt-right overlaps with the “manosphere” of unbridled misogyny and obsession with sexual hierarchies (Nagle 2017). The term “cuckseravtive” has become a prominent signifier of derision and enjoyment marking establishment conservatives as cuckolded or impotent, clearly placing libidinal power at the centre of identity. But it is also self-consciously referencing the genre of inter-racial ‘cuckold’ pornography in which the racial other’s virility is a direct threat to their own potency (Heer 2016). With the rise of the alt-right to prominence within internet subcultures and the public discourse it should be clear that affect offers no shortcuts to a latent humanism but populism and the logic of jouissance.

    Conclusion

    The election of Donald Trump, an ill-tempered narcissist uniquely unqualified for the role of US President, does not simply highlight a breakdown of the political centre, professional politics and the fourth estate. Trump’s populism speaks to the centrality of the libidinal, that is antagonism and enjoyment, to political identity. His vulgarity, scandals and outbursts were not a political liability for Trump but what marked him as an antagonistic agent of jouissance able to bring a people into being around his candidacy. In his paeans to lost American greatness he elicits fantasy, lost enjoyment and the antagonistic jouissance of vilifying those who have stolen “America” as an object of enjoyment. Trump’s own volatility and corruption are not political failings but what give the populist the fantasy of wielding unrestrained power. This overriding principle of jouissance is what allows disparate strains of conservatism, from evangelicals, paleo-conservatives and the alt-right, to coalesce around his candidacy.

    The centrality of Trump to the emergence of a people echoes Freud’s classic study of the leader and crowd psychology. He is a paternal super-ego, referred to as ‘Daddy’ by the alt-right, around which his followers can identify in themselves and each other. However rather than a figure of domination he embodies the neoliberal injunction to enjoy. In a political space of mediatized individuation Trump provides followers with different points of affective identification rather than subsumption to his paternal authority.  His own improbable run to the presidency personified the neo-liberal ethic to publicly enjoy, become an object of desire and ruthlessly maximise new opportunities.

    The response to Trump by the liberal political and media class demonstrates the libidinal entanglement between populism and neo-liberal post-politics. The more Trump defies political norms of decency the more he defined the negative liberal identity of urgent anti-fascism. The ascendance of reactionary populism from Fox News, the Tea Party and Trump has been meet in the media sphere with new liberal forms of enjoyment from Daily Show-style comedy to new authoritative data-driven forms of journalism. The affinity between Hillary Clinton and elite media circles owes to a solidarity of professionals. There is a belief in process, data and consensus which is only strengthened by the menace of Trump. The retreat to data functions as an endless circular process and fetish object which shields them from the trauma of the political and liberalism’s failure. It is from this space that the media could fail to consider both the prospects of a Trump presidency and their own libidinal investment in technocratic post-politics. When the unthinkable occurred it became necessary to attribute to Trump an over-determined evil encompassing the spectre of Russia and domestic fifth columnists responsible for a ‘post-facts’ political environment.

    Affective media power was central to Trump’s ascendance. Where journalists and the Clinton campaign imagined the new media field as a space for rationalism and process, Trump understood its economic and political logic. His connection to an audience movement, invested in him as an ego-ideal, allowed him to access the heights of the media and political fields without conforming to the disciplines of either. He at once defines the field through his celebrity and performances which generated outrageous, cheap-to-produce content with each news cycle, while opening this space to the pure affective intensity of the alt-right. It is the free labour of his followers which produced the spectacle of Trump and filled the empty signifier of American greatness with personal testimonies and affective investments.

    Trump’s pandering to conspiracy and his unyielding defiance of decorum allowed him to function as a paternal figure of enjoyment in affective media spaces. Where new media affect theory has posited a latent humanist potential, the emergence of Trump underlines the primacy of jouissance. In the alt-right the subcultural practices of trolling and ‘the lulz’ function as a circular jouissance comprised of the most base dehumanization and the concomitant racial and sexual terror. New media have been characterized as spaces of playful transgression however in the alt-right we find a jouissance for its own end that clearly cannot be sublimated into emancipatory politics as it remains stuck within the inter-subjective dimensions of enjoyment. Jodi Dean has described the effects of communicative capitalism as producing a ‘decline of symbolic efficiency’ (2010: 5), with new communicative technologies failing to overcome neoliberal individuation. Left attempts to organize around the principles of affective media, such as Occupy, remain stuck within discursive loops of misrecognition. Trump’s pure jouissance is precisely the return of symbolic efficiency that is most possible through a politics of affective media.

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    Olivier Jutel (@OJutel) is a lecturer in broadcast journalism at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. His research is concerned with populism, American politics, cyberlibertarianism, psychoanalysis and critical theory. He is a frequent contributor to Overland literary journal .

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] While one should avoid constructing Trump as an enemy of pure jouissance, analogous to the enemy of populism, the barefaced boasts of sexual predation are truly horrific (see Stuart 2016).

    [2] While Laclau holds that all political ruptures have the structure of populism I believe it is important to distinguish between a populism, which constructs an overdetermined enemy and a fetishized people, against a politics which delineates an enemy in ethico-political terms. Bernie Sanders clearly deploys populist discourse however the identification of finance capital and oligarchy as impersonal objective forces place him in solidly in social-democratic politics.

    [3] The most widely circulated conspiracy to emerge from the campaign was ‘Pizzagate’. Fed by Drudge Report, Info Wars and a flurry of online activity the conspiracy is based on the belief that the Wikileaks dump of emails from Clinton campaign chairman revealed his complicity in a satanic paedophilia ring run out of Comet Pizzeria in Washington D.C. A YouGov/Economist poll found that 53% of Trump voters believed in the conspiracy (Frankovic 2016).

    [4] Having secured a primary victory against the left-wing Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s general election tact consisted principally of appealing to moderate Republicans. Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer explained the strategy; “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin” (Geraghty 2016). While a ruinous strategy it appealed to notions of a virtuous, rational political centre.

    [5] In the build-up to the Michigan primary contest, and with the Flint water crisis foregrounded, Clinton’s twitter account posted a network diagram which typifies the tech-rationalist notion of progressive politics. The text written by staffers stated “We face a complex, intersectional set of challenges. We need solutions and real plans for all of them” (Clinton 2016). The diagram pictured interrelated concepts such as “Accountable Leadership”, “Environmental Protection”, “Investment in Communities of Color”. The conflation of intersectional discourse with network-speak is instructive. Politics is not question of ideology or power but managing social complexity through expert-driven policy solutions.

    [6] This form of satire is well within the confines of the contemporary liberal conception of the political. John Stewart’s pseudo political event “The Rally to Restore to Sanity” is instructive here as it sought primarily to mock right-wing populists but also those on the left who hold passionate political convictions (Ames, 2010). What is more important here than defeating the retrograde politics of the far-right is maintaining civility in the discourse.

    [7] At a campaign stop in Palm Beach, Florida Clinton stated that “I love having the support of real billionaires. Donald gives a bad name to billionaires” (Kleinberg 2016)

    [8] The Russia narrative was aggressively pushed by the Clinton campaign in the aftermath of the shock defeat. In Allen and Parnes’ behind the scenes book of the campaign they describe a failure to take responsibility with “Russian hacking…the centre piece of her argument” (2017: 238). While Russia is certainly an autocratic state with competing interests and a capable cyber-espionage apparatus, claims of Russia hacking the US election are both thin and ascribed far too much explanatory power. They rely upon the analysis of the DNC’s private cyber security firm Crowdstrike and a report from the Director of National Intelligence that was widely been panned by Russian Studies scholars (Gessen 2017; Mickiewicz 2017). Subsequent scandals concerning the Trump administration have far more to do with their sheer incompetence and recklessness than a conspiracy to subvert American democracy.

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    Works Cited

     

  • Anthony Galluzzo — Utopia as Method, Social Science Fiction, and the Flight From Reality (Review of Frase, Four Futures)

    Anthony Galluzzo — Utopia as Method, Social Science Fiction, and the Flight From Reality (Review of Frase, Four Futures)

    a review of Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (Verso Jacobin Series, 2016)

    by Anthony Galluzzo

    ~

    Charlie Brooker’s acclaimed British techno-dystopian television series, Black Mirror, returned last year in a more American-friendly form. The third season, now broadcast on Netflix, opened with “Nosedive,” a satirical depiction of a recognizable near future when user-generated social media scores—on the model of Yelp reviews, Facebook likes, and Twitter retweets—determine life chances, including access to basic services, such as housing, credit, and jobs. The show follows striver Lacie Pound—played by Bryce Howard—who, in seeking to boost her solid 4.2 life score, ends up inadvertently wiping out all of her points, in the nosedive named by the episode’s title. Brooker offers his viewers a nightmare variation on a now familiar online reality, as Lacie rates every human interaction and is rated in turn, to disastrous result. And this nightmare is not so far from the case, as online reputational hierarchies increasingly determine access to precarious employment opportunities. We can see this process in today’s so-called sharing economy, in which user approval determines how many rides will go to the Uber driver, or if the room you are renting on Airbnb, in order to pay your own exorbitant rent, gets rented.

    Brooker grappled with similar themes during the show’s first season; for example, “Fifteen Million Merits” shows us a future world of human beings forced to spend their time on exercise bikes, presumably in order to generate power plus the “merits” that function as currency, even as they are forced to watch non-stop television, advertisements included. It is television—specifically a talent show—that offers an apparent escape to the episode’s protagonists. Brooker revisits these concerns—which combine anxieties regarding new media and ecological collapse in the context of a viciously unequal society—in the final episode of the new season, entitled “Hated in the Nation,” which features robotic bees, built for pollination in a world after colony collapse, that are hacked and turned to murderous use. Here is an apt metaphor for the virtual swarming that characterizes so much online interaction.

    Black Mirror corresponds to what literary critic Tom Moylan calls a “critical dystopia.” [1] Rather than a simple exercise in pessimism or anti-utopianism, Moylan argues that critical dystopias, like their utopian counterparts, also offer emancipatory political possibilities in exposing the limits of our social and political status quo, such as the naïve techno-optimism that is certainly one object of Brooker’s satirical anatomies. Brooker in this way does what Jacobin Magazine editor and social critic Peter Frase claims to do in his Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, a speculative exercise in “social science fiction” that uses utopian and dystopian science fiction as means to explore what might come after global capitalism. Ironically, Frase includes both online reputational hierarchies and robotic bees in his two utopian scenarios: one of the more dramatic, if perhaps inadvertent, ways that Frase collapses dystopian into utopian futures

    Frase echoes the opening lines of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto as he describes the twin “specters of ecological catastrophe and automation” that haunt any possible post-capitalist future. While total automation threatens to make human workers obsolete, the global planetary crisis threatens life on earth, as we have known it for the past 12000 years or so. Frase contends that we are facing a “crisis of scarcity and a crisis of abundance at the same time,” making our moment one “full of promise and danger.” [2]

    The attentive reader can already see in this introductory framework the too-often unargued assumptions and easy dichotomies that characterize the book as a whole. For example, why is total automation plausible in the next 25 years, according to Frase, who largely supports this claim by drawing on the breathless pronouncements of a technophilic business press that has made similar promises for nearly a hundred years? And why does automation equal abundance—assuming the more egalitarian social order that Frase alternately calls “communism” or “socialism”—especially when we consider the  ecological crisis Frase invokes as one of his two specters? This crisis is very much bound to an energy-intensive technosphere that is already pushing against several of the planetary boundaries that make for a habitable planet; total automation would expand this same technosphere by several orders of magnitude, requiring that much more energy, materials, and  environmental sinks to absorb tomorrow’s life-sized iPhone or their corpses. Frase deliberately avoids these empirical questions—and the various debates among economists, environmental scientists and computer programmers about the feasibility of AI, the extent to which automation is actually displacing workers, and the ecological limits to technological growth, at least as technology is currently constituted—by offering his work as the “social science fiction” mentioned above, perhaps in the vein of Black Mirror. He distinguishes this method from futurism or prediction, as he writes, “science fiction is to futurism as social theory is to conspiracy theory.” [3]

    In one of his few direct citations, Frase invokes Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, who argues that conspiracy theory and its fictions are ideologically distorted attempts to map an elusive and opaque global capitalism: “Conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.” [4] For Jameson, a more comprehensive cognitive map of our planetary capitalist civilization necessitates new forms of representation to better capture and perhaps undo our seemingly eternal and immovable status quo. In the words of McKenzie Wark, Jameson proposes nothing less than a “theoretical-aesthetic practice of correlating the field of culture with the field of political economy.” [5] And it is possibly with this “theoretical-aesthetic practice” in mind that Frase turns to science fiction as his preferred tool of social analysis.

    The book accordingly proceeds in the way of a grid organized around the coordinates “abundance/scarcity” and “egalitarianism/hierarchy”—in another echo of Jameson, namely his structuralist penchant for Greimas squares. Hence we get abundance with egalitarianism, or “communism,” followed by its dystopian counterpart, rentism, or hierarchical plenty in the first two futures; similarly, the final futures move from an equitable scarcity, or “socialism” to a hierarchical and apocalyptic “exterminism.” Each of these chapters begins with a science fiction, ranging from an ostensibly communist Star Trek to the exterminationist visions presented in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, upon which Frase builds his various future scenarios. These scenarios are more often than not commentaries on present day phenomena, such as 3D printers or the sharing economy, or advocacy for various measures, like a Universal Basic Income, which Frase presents as the key to achieving his desired communist future.

    With each of his futures anchored in a literary (or cinematic, or televisual) science fiction narrative, Frase’s speculations rely on imaginative literature, even as he avoids any explicit engagement with literary criticism and theory, such as the aforementioned work of  Jameson.  Jameson famously argues (see Jameson 1982, and the more elaborated later versions in texts such as Jameson 2005) that the utopian text, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, simultaneously offers a mystified version of dominant social relations and an imaginative space for rehearsing radically different forms of sociality. But this dialectic of ideology and utopia is absent from Frase’s analysis, where his select space operas are all good or all bad: either the Jetsons or Elysium.

    And, in a marked contrast with Jameson’s symptomatic readings, some science fiction is for Frase more equal than others when it comes to radical sociological speculation, as evinced by his contrasting views of George Lucas’s Star Wars and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.  According to Frase, in “Star Wars, you don’t really care about the particularities of the galactic political economy,” while in Star Trek, “these details actually matter. Even though Star Trek and Star Wars might superficially look like similar tales of space travel and swashbuckling, they are fundamentally different types of fiction. The former exists only for its characters and its mythic narrative, while the latter wants to root its characters in a richly and logically structured social world.” [6]

    Frase here understates his investment in Star Trek, whose “structured social world” is later revealed as his ideal-type for a high tech fully automated luxury communism, while Star Wars is relegated to the role of the space fantasy foil. But surely the original Star Wars is at least an anticolonial allegory, in which a ragtag rebel alliance faces off against a technologically superior evil empire, that was intentionally inspired by the Vietnam War. Lucas turned to the space opera after he lost his bid to direct Apocalypse Now—which was originally based on Lucas’s own idea. According to one account of the franchise’s genesis, “the Vietnam War, which was an asymmetric conflict with a huge power unable to prevail against guerrilla fighters, instead became an influence on Star Wars. As Lucas later said, ‘A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now carried over into Star Wars.” [7]

    Texts—literary, cinematic, and otherwise—often combine progressive and reactionary, utopian and ideological elements. Yet it is precisely the mixed character of speculative narrative that Frase ignores throughout his analysis, reducing each of his literary examples to unequivocally good or bad, utopian or dystopian, blueprints for “life after capitalism.” Why anchor radical social analysis in various science fictions while refusing basic interpretive argument? As with so much else in Four Futures, Frase uses assumption—asserting that Star Trek has one specific political valence or that total automation guided by advanced AI is an inevitability within 25 years—in the service of his preferred policy outcomes (and the nightmare scenarios that function as the only alternatives to those outcomes), while avoiding engagement with debates related to technology, ecology, labor, and the utopian imagination.

    Frase in this way evacuates the politically progressive and critical utopian dimensions from George Lucas’s franchise, elevating the escapist and reactionary dimensions that represent the ideological, as opposed to the utopian, pole of this fantasy. Frase similarly ignores the ideological elements of Roddenberry’s Star Trek: “The communistic quality of the Star Trek universe is often obscured because the films and TV shows are centered on the military hierarchy of Starfleet, which explores the galaxy and comes into conflict with alien races. But even this seems largely a voluntarily chosen hierarchy.” [8]

    Frase’s focus, regarding Star Trek, is almost entirely on the replicators  that can make something,  anything, from nothing, so that Captain Picard, from the eighties era series reboot, orders a “cup of Earl Grey, hot,” from one of these magical machines, and immediately receives Earl Grey, hot. Frase equates our present-day 3D printers with these same replicators over the course of all his four futures, despite the fact that unlike replicators, 3D printers require inputs: they do not make matter, but shape it.

    3D printing encompasses a variety of processes in which would-be makers create an image with a computer and CAD (computer aided design) software, which in turn provides a blueprint for the three-dimensional object to be “printed.” This requires either the addition of material—usually plastic—and the injection of that material into a mould.  The most basic type of 3D printing involves heating  “(plastic, glue-based) material that is then extruded through a nozzle. The nozzle is attached to an apparatus similar to a normal 2D ink-jet printer, just that it moves up and down, as well. The material is put on layer over layer. The technology is not substantially different from ink-jet printing, it only requires slightly more powerful computing electronics and a material with the right melting and extrusion qualities.” [9] This is still the most affordable and pervasive way to make objects with 3D printers—most often used to make small models and components. It is also the version of 3D printing that lends itself to celebratory narratives of post-industrial techno-artisanal home manufacture pushed by industry cheerleaders and enthusiasts alike. Yet, the more elaborate versions of 3D printing—“printing’ everything from complex machinery to  food to human organs—rely on the more complex and  expensive industrial versions of the technology that require lasers (e.g., stereolithography and selective laser sintering).  Frase espouses a particular left techno-utopian line that sees the end of mass production in 3D printing—especially with the free circulation of the programs for various products outside of our intellectual property regime; this is how he distinguishes his communist utopia from the dystopian rentism that most resembles our current moment,  with material abundance taken for granted. And it is this fantasy of material abundance and post-work/post-worker production that presumably appeals to Frase, who describes himself as an advocate of “enlightened Luddism.”

    This is an inadvertently ironic characterization, considering the extent to which these emancipatory claims conceal and distort the labor discipline imperative that is central to the shape and development of this technology, as Johan Söderberg argues, “we need to put enthusiastic claims for 3D printers into perspective. One claim is that laid-off American workers can find a new source of income by selling printed goods over the Internet, which will be an improvement, as degraded factory jobs are replaced with more creative employment opportunities. But factory jobs were not always monotonous. They were deliberately made so, in no small part through the introduction of the same technology that is expected to restore craftsmanship. ‘Makers’ should be seen as the historical result of the negation of the workers’ movement.” [10]

    Söderberg draws on the work of David Noble, who outlines how the numerical control technology central to the growth of post-war factory automation was developed specifically to de-skill and dis-empower workers during the Cold War period. Unlike Frase, both of these authors foreground those social relations, which include capital’s need to more thoroughly exploit and dominate labor, embedded in the architecture of complex megatechnical systems, from  factory automation to 3D printers. In collapsing 3D printers into Star Trek-style replicators, Frase avoids these questions as well as the more immediately salient issue of resource constraints that should occupy any prognostication that takes the environmental crisis seriously.

    The replicator is the key to Frase’s dream of endless abundance on the model of post-war US style consumer affluence and the end of all human labor. But, rather than a simple blueprint for utopia, Star Trek’s juxtaposition of techno-abundance with military hierarchy and a tacitly expansionist galactic empire—despite the show’s depiction of a Starfleet “prime directive” that forbids direct intervention into the affairs of the extraterrestrial civilizations encountered by the federation’s starships, the Enterprise’s crew, like its ostensibly benevolent US original, almost always intervenes—is significant. The original Star Trek is arguably a liberal iteration of Kennedy-era US exceptionalism, and reflects a moment in which relatively wide-spread first world abundance was underwritten by the deliberate underdevelopment, appropriation, and exploitation of various “alien races’” resources, land, and labor abroad. Abundance in fact comes from somewhere and some one.

    As historian H. Bruce Franklin argues, the original series reflects US Cold War liberalism, which combined Roddenberry’s progressive stances regarding racial inclusion within the parameters of the United States and its Starfleet doppelganger, with a tacitly anti-communist expansionist viewpoint, so that the show’s Klingon villains often serve as proxies for the Soviet menace. Franklin accordingly charts the show’s depictions of the Vietnam War, moving from a pro-war and pro-American stance to a mildly anti-war position in the wake of the Tet Offensive over the course of several episodes: “The first of these two episodes, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever‘ and ‘A Private Little War,’ had suggested that the Vietnam War was merely an unpleasant necessity on the way to the future dramatized by Star Trek. But the last two, ‘The Omega Glory‘ and ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,’ broadcast in the period between March 1968 and January 1969, are so thoroughly infused with the desperation of the period that they openly call for a radical change of historic course, including an end to the Vietnam War and to the war at home.” [11]

    Perhaps Frase’s inattention to Jameson’s dialectic of ideology and utopia reflects a too-literal approach to these fantastical narratives, even as he proffers them as valid tools for radical political and social analysis. We could see in this inattention a bit too much of the fan-boy’s enthusiasm, which is also evinced by the rather narrow and backward-looking focus on post-war space operas to the exclusion of the self-consciously radical science fiction narratives of Ursula LeGuin, Samuel Delany, and Octavia Butler, among others. These writers use the tropes of speculative fiction to imagine profoundly different social relations that are the end-goal of all emancipatory movements. In place of emancipated social relations, Frase too often relies on technology and his readings must in turn be read with these limitations in mind.

    Unlike the best speculative fiction, utopian or dystopian, Frase’s “social science fiction” too often avoids the question of social relations—including the social relations embedded in the complex megatechnical systems Frase  takes for granted as neutral forces of production. He accordingly announces at the outset of his exercise: “I will make the strongest assumption possible: all need for human labor in the production process can be eliminated, and it is possible to live a life of pure leisure while machines do all the work.” [12] The science fiction trope effectively absolves Frase from engagement with the technological, ecological, or social feasibility of these predictions, even as he announces his ideological affinities with a certain version of post- and anti-work politics that breaks with orthodox Marxism and its socialist variants.

    Frase’s Jetsonian vision of the future resonates with various futurist currents that  can we now see across the political spectrum, from the Silicon Valley Singulitarianism of Ray Kurzweil or Elon Musk, on the right, to various neo-Promethean currents on the left, including so-called “left accelerationism.” Frase defends his assumption as a desire “to avoid long-standing debates about post-capitalist organization of the production process.” While such a strict delimitation is permissible for speculative fiction—an imaginative exercise regarding what is logically possible, including time travel or immortality—Frase specifically offers science fiction as a mode of social analysis, which presumably entails grappling with rather than avoiding current debates on labor, automation, and the production process.

    Ruth Levitas, in her 2013 book Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, offers a more rigorous definition of social science fiction via her eponymous “utopia as method.”  This method combines sociological analysis and imaginative speculation, which Levitas defends as “holistic. Unlike political philosophy and political theory, which have been more open than sociology to normative approaches, this holism is expressed at the level of concrete social institutions and processes.” [13] But that attentiveness to concrete social institutions and practices combined with counterfactual speculation regarding another kind of human social world are exactly what is missing in Four Futures. Frase uses grand speculative assumptions-such as the inevitable rise of human-like AI or the complete disappearance of human labor, all within 25 years or so—in order to avoid significant debates that are ironically much more present in purely fictional works, such as the aforementioned Black Mirror or the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson, than in his own overtly non-fictional speculations. From the standpoint of radical literary criticism and radical social theory, Four Futures is wanting. It fails as analysis. And, if one primary purpose of utopian speculation, in its positive and negative forms, is to open an imaginative space in which wholly other forms of human social relations can be entertained, Frase’s speculative exercise also exhibits a revealing paucity of imagination.

    This is most evident in Frase’s most  explicitly utopian future, which he calls “communism,” without any mention of class struggle, the collective ownership of the means of production, or any of the other elements we usually associate with “communism”; instead, 3D printers-cum-replicators will produce whatever you need whenever you need it at home, an individualizing techno-solution to the problem of labor, production, and its organization that resembles alchemy in its indifference to material reality and the scarce material inputs required by 3D printers. Frase proffers a magical vision of technology so as to avoid grappling with the question of social relations; even more than this, in the coda to this chapter, Frase reveals the extent to which current patterns of social organization and stratification remain under Frase’s “communism.” Frase begins this coda with a question: “in a communist society, what do we do all day?”  To which he responds: “The kind of communism   I’ve described is sometimes mistakenly construed, by both its critics and its adherents,  as a society in which hierarchy and conflict are wholly absent. But rather than see the abolition of the capital-wage relation as a single shot solution to all possible social problems, it is perhaps better to think of it in the terms used by political scientist, Corey Robin, as a way to ‘convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.’” [14]

    Frase goes on to argue—rightly—that the abolition of class society or wage labor will not put an end to a variety of other oppressions, such as those based in gender and racial stratification; he in this way departs from the class reductionist tendencies sometimes on view in the magazine he edits.  His invocation of Corey Robin is nonetheless odd considering the Promethean tenor of Frase’s preferred futures. Robin contends that while the end of exploitation, and capitalist social relations, would remove the major obstacle to  human flourishing, human beings will remain finite and fragile creatures in a finite and fragile world. Robin in this way overlaps with Fredric Jameson’s remarkable essay on Soviet writer Andre Platonov’s Chevengur, in which Jameson writes: “Utopia is merely the political and social solution of collective life: it does not do away with the tensions and inherent contradictions  inherent in both interpersonal relations and in bodily existence itself (among them, those of sexuality), but rather exacerbates those and allows them free rein, by removing the artificial miseries of money and self-preservation [since] it is not the function of Utopia to bring the dead back to life nor abolish death in the first place.” [15] Both Jameson and Robin recall Frankfurt School thinker Herbert Marcuse’s distinction between necessary and surplus repression: while the latter encompasses all of the unnecessary miseries attendant upon a class stratified form of social organization that runs on exploitation, the former represents the necessary adjustments we make to socio-material reality and its limits.

    It is telling that while Star Trek-style replicators fall within the purview of the possible for Frase, hierarchy, like death, will always be with us, since he at least initially argues that status hierarchies will persist after the “organizing force of the capital relation has been removed” (59). Frase oscillates between describing these status hierarchies as an unavoidable, if unpleasant, necessity and a desirable counter to the uniformity of an egalitarian society. Frase illustrates this point in recalling Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom, a dystopian novel that depicts a world where all people’s needs are met at the same time that everyone competes for reputational “points”—called Whuffie—on the model of Facebook “likes” and Twitter retweets. Frase’s communism here resembles the world of Black Mirror described above.  Although Frase shifts from the rhetoric of necessity to qualified praise in an extended discussion of Dogecoin, an alternative currency used to tip or “transfer a small number of to another Internet user in appreciation of their witty and helpful contributions” (60). Yet Dogecoin, among all cryptocurrencies, is mostly a joke, and like many cryptocurrencies is one whose “decentralized” nature scammers have used to their own advantage, most famously in 2015. In the words of one former enthusiast: “Unfortunately, the whole ordeal really deflated my enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies. I experimented, I got burned, and I’m moving on to less gimmicky enterprises.” [16]

    But how is this dystopian scenario either necessary or desirable?  Frase contends that “the communist society I’ve sketched here, though imperfect, is at least one in which conflict is no longer based in the opposition between wage workers and capitalists or on struggles…over scarce resources” (67). His account of how capitalism might be overthrown—through a guaranteed universal income—is insufficient, while resource scarcity and its relationship to techno-abundance remains unaddressed in a book that purports to take the environmental crisis seriously. What is of more immediate interest in the case of this coda to his most explicitly utopian future is Frase’s non-recognition of how internet status hierarchies and alternative currencies are modeled on and work in tandem with capitalist logics of entrepreneurial selfhood. We might consider Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social and cultural capital in this regard, or how these digital platforms and their ever-shifting reputational hierarchies are the foundation of what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism.” [17]

    Yet Frase concludes his chapter by telling his readers that it would be a “misnomer” to call his communist future an “egalitarian configuration.” Perhaps Frase offers his fully automated Facebook utopia as counterpoint to the Cold War era critique of utopianism in general and communism in particular: it leads to grey uniformity and universal mediocrity. This response—a variation on Frase’s earlier discussion of Star Trek’s “voluntary hierarchy”—accepts the premise of the Cold War anti-utopian criticisms, i.e., how the human differences that make life interesting, and generate new possibilities, require hierarchy of some kind. In other words, this exercise in utopian speculation cannot move outside the horizon of our own present day ideological common sense.

    We can again see this tendency at the very start of the book. Is total automation an unambiguous utopia or a reflection of Frase’s own unexamined ideological proclivities, on view throughout the various futures, for high tech solutions to complex socio-ecological problems? For various flavors of deus ex machina—from 3D printers to replicators to robotic bees—in place of social actors changing the material realities that constrain them through collective action? Conversely, are the “crisis of scarcity” and the visions of ecological apocalypse Frase evokes intermittently throughout his book purely dystopian or ideological? Surely, since Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on Population, apologists for various ruling orders have used the threat of scarcity and material limits to justify inequity, exploitation, and class division: poverty is “natural.” Yet, can’t we also discern in contemporary visions of apocalypse a radical desire to break with a stagnant capitalist status quo? And in the case of the environmental state of emergency, don’t we have a rallying point for constructing a very different eco-socialist order?

    Frase is a founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a long-time member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He nonetheless distinguishes himself from the reformist and electoral currents at those organizations, in addition to much of what passes for orthodox Marxism. Rather than full employment—for example—Frase calls for the abolition of work and the working class in a way that echoes more radical anti-work and post-workerist modes of communist theory. So, in a recent editorial published by Jacobin, entitled “What It Means to Be on the Left,” Frase differentiates himself from many of his DSA comrades in declaring that “The socialist project, for me, is about something more than just immediate demands for more jobs, or higher wages, or universal social programs, or shorter hours. It’s about those things. But it’s also about transcending, and abolishing, much of what we think defines our identities and our way of life.” Frase goes on to sketch an emphatically utopian communist horizon that includes the abolition of class, race, and gender as such. These are laudable positions, especially when we consider a new new left milieu some of whose most visible representatives dismiss race and gender concerns as “identity politics,” while redefining radical class politics as a better deal for some amorphous US working class within an apparently perennial capitalist status quo.

    Frase’s utopianism in this way represents an important counterpoint within this emergent left. Yet his book-length speculative exercise—policy proposals cloaked as possible scenarios—reveals his own enduring investments in the simple “forces vs. relations of production” dichotomy that underwrote so much of twentieth century state socialism with its disastrous ecological record and human cost.  And this simple faith in the emancipatory potential of capitalist technology—given the right political circumstances despite the complete absence of what creating those circumstances might entail— frequently resembles a social democratic version of the Californian ideology or the kind of Silicon Valley conventional wisdom pushed by Elon Musk. This is a more efficient, egalitarian, and techno-utopian version of US capitalism. Frase mines various left communist currents, from post-operaismo to communization, only to evacuate these currents of their radical charge in marrying them to technocratic and technophilic reformism, hence UBI plus “replicators” will spontaneously lead to full communism. Four Futures is in this way an important, because symptomatic, expression of what Jason Smith (2017) calls “social democratic accelerationism,” animated by a strange faith in magical machines in addition to a disturbing animus toward ecology, non-human life, and the natural world in general.

    _____

    Anthony Galluzzo earned his PhD in English Literature at UCLA. He specializes in radical transatlantic English language literary cultures of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries. He has taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Colby College, and NYU.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] See Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000).

    [2] Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. (London: Verso Books, 2016),
    3.

    [3] Ibid, 27.

    [4] Fredric Jameson,  “Cognitive Mapping.” In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 6.

    [5] McKenzie Wark, “Cognitive Mapping,” Public Seminar (May 2015).

    [6] Frase, 24.

    [7] This space fantasy also exhibits the escapist, mythopoetic, and even reactionary elements Frase notes—for example, its hereditary caste of Jedi fighters and their ancient religion—as Benjamin Hufbauer notes, “in many ways, the political meanings in Star Wars were and are progressive, but in other ways the film can be described as middle-of-the-road, or even conservative. Hufbauer, “The Politics Behind the Original Star Wars,” Los Angeles Review of Books (December 21, 2015).

    [8] Frase, 49.

    [9]  Angry Workers World, “Soldering On: Report on Working in a 3D-Printer Manufacturing Plant in London,” libcom. org (March 24, 2017).

    [10] Johan Söderberg, “A Critique of 3D Printing as a Critical Technology,” P2P Foundation (March 16, 2013).

    [11] Franklin, “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era,” Science Fiction Studies, #62 = Volume 21, Part 1 (March 1994).

    [12] Frase, 6.

    [13] Ruth Levitas, Utopia As Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), xiv-xv.

    [14] Frase, 58.

    [15]  Jameson, “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” in Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 110.

    [16]  Kaleigh Rogers, “The Guy Who Ruined Dogecoin,” VICE Motherboard (March 6, 2015).

    [17] See Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left  Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Frase, Peter. 2016. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. New York: Verso.
    • Jameson, Fredric. 1982. “Progress vs. Utopia; Or Can We Imagine The Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9:2 (July). 147-158
    • Jameson, Fredric. 1996. “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” in Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.
    • Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso.
    • Levitas, Ruth. 2013. Utopia As Method; The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview Press.
    • Smith, Jason E. 2017. “Nowhere To Go: Automation Then And Now.” The Brooklyn Rail (March 1).

     

  • Gavin Mueller – Civil Disobedience in the Age of Cyberwar

    Gavin Mueller – Civil Disobedience in the Age of Cyberwar

    a review of Molly Sauter, The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)

    by Gavin Mueller

    ~

    Molly Sauter’s The Coming Swarm begins in an odd way. Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, confesses in the book’s foreword that he disagrees with the book’s central argument: that distributed denial of service (DDoS) actions, where specific websites and/or internet servers are overwhelmed by traffic and knocked offline via the coordinated activity of many computers acting together, should be viewed as a legitimate means of protest.[1] “My research demonstrated that these attacks, once mounted by online extortionists as a form of digital protection racket, were increasingly being mounted by governments as a way of silencing critics,” Zuckerman writes (xii). Sauter’s argument, which takes the form of this slim and knotty book, ultimately does not convince Zuckerman, though he admits he is “a better scholar and a better person” for having engaged with the arguments contained within. “We value civic arguments, whether they unfold in the halls of government, a protest encampment, or the comments thread of an internet post because we believe in the power of deliberation” (xv). This promise of the liberal public sphere is what Sauter grapples with throughout the work, to varying levels of success.

    The Coming Swarm is not a book about DDoS activities in general. As Sauter notes, “DDoS is a popular tactic of extortion, harassment, and silencing” (6): its most common uses come from criminal organizations and government cyberwar operations. Sauter is not interested in these kinds of actions, which encompass the vast majority of DDoS uses. (DDoS itself is a subset of all denial of service or DoS attacks.) Instead they focus on self-consciously political DDoS attacks, first carried out by artist-hacker groups in the 1990s (the electrohippies and the Electronic Disturbance Theater) and more recent actions by the group Anonymous.[2] All told, these are a handful of actions, barely numbering in the double digits, and spread out over two decades. The focus on this small minority of cases can make the book’s argument seem question-begging, since Sauter does not make clear how and why it is legitimate to analyze exclusively those few instances of a widespread phenomenon that happen to conform to an author’s desired outlook. At one level, this is a general problem throughout the book, since Sauter’s analysis is confined to what they call “activist DDoS,” yet the actual meaning of this term is rarely interrogated: viewed from the perspective of the actors, many of the DDoS actions Sauter dismisses by stipulation could also be–and likely are–viewed as “activism.”

    From its earliest inception, political DDoS actions were likened to “virtual sit-ins”: activists use their computers’ ability to ping a server to clog up its functioning, potentially slowing or bringing its activity to a stand-still. This situated the technique within a history of nonviolent civil disobedience, particularly that of the Civil Rights Movement. This metaphor has tended to overdetermine the debate over the use of DDoS in activist contexts, and Sauter is keen to move on from the connection: “such comparisons on the part of the media and the public serve to only stifle innovation within social movements and political action, while at the same time cultivating a deep and unproductive nostalgia for a kind of ‘ideal activism’ that never existed” (22-3). Sauter argues that not only does this leave out contributions to the Civil Rights Movement that the mainstream finds less than respectable; it helps rule out the use of disruptive and destructive forms of activism in future movements.

    This argument has merit, and many activists who want to move beyond nonviolent civil disobedience into direct action forms of political action appear to agree with it. Yet Sauter still wants to claim the label of civil disobedience for DDoS actions that they at other moments discard: “activist DDoS actions are not meaningfully different from other actions within the history of civil disobedience… novelty cannot properly exempt activist DDoS from being classified as a tactic of civil disobedience” (27). However, the main criticisms of DDoS as civil disobedience have nothing to do with its novelty. As Evgeny Morozov points out in his defense of DDoS as a political tactic, “I’d argue, however, that the DDoS attacks launched by Anonymous were not acts of civil disobedience because they failed one crucial test implicit in Rawls’s account: Most attackers were not willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions.” Novelist and digital celebrity Cory Doctorow, who opposes DDoS-based activism, echoes this concern: “A sit-in derives its efficacy not from merely blocking the door to some objectionable place, but from the public willingness to stand before your neighbours and risk arrest and bodily harm in service of a moral cause, which is itself a force for moral suasion.” The complaint is not that DDoS fails to live up to the standards of the Civil Rights Movement, or that it is too novel. It is that it often fails the basic test of civil disobedience: potentially subjecting oneself to punishment as a form of protest that lays bare the workings of the state.

    Zuckerman’s principle critique of Sauter’s arguments is that DDoS, by shutting down sites, censors speech opposed by activists rather than promoting their dissenting messages. Sauter has a two-pronged response to this. First, they say that DDoS attacks make the important point that the internet is not really a public space. Instead, it is controlled by private interests, with large corporations managing the vast majority of online space. This means that no arguments may rest, implicitly or explicitly, on the assumption that the internet is a Habermasian public sphere. Second, Sauter argues, by their own admission counterintuitively, that DDoS, properly contextualized as part of “communicative capitalism,” is itself a form of speech.

    Communicative capitalism is a term developed by Jodi Dean as part of her critique of the Habermasian vision of the internet as a public sphere. With the commodification of online speech, “the exchange value of messages overtakes their use value” (58). The communication of messages is overwhelmed by the priority to circulate content of any kind: “communicative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to democratic politics, are the basic elements of capitalist production” (56). For Dean, this logic undermines political effects from internet communication: “The proliferation, distribution, acceleration and intensification of communicative access and opportunity, far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite – the post-political formation of communicative capitalism” (53). If, Sauter argues, circulation itself becomes the object of communication, the power of DDoS is to disrupt that circulation of context. “In that context the interruption of that signal becomes an equally powerful contribution…. Under communicative capitalism, it is possible that it is the intentional creation of disruptions and silence that is the most powerful contribution” (29).

    However, this move is contrary to the point of Dean’s concept; Dean specifically rejects the idea that any kind of communicative activity puts forth real political antagonism. Dean’s argument is, admittedly, an overreach. While capital cares little for the specificity of messages, human beings do: as Marx notes, exchange value cannot exist without a use value. Sauter’s own “counterintuitive” use of Dean points to a larger difficulty with Sauter’s argument: it remains wedded to a liberal understanding of political action grounded in the idea of a public sphere. Even when Sauter moves on to discussing DDoS as disruptive direct action, rather than civil disobedience, they return to the discursive tropes of the public sphere: DDoS is “an attempt to assert a fundamental view of the internet as a ‘public forum’ in the face of its attempted designation as ‘private property’” (45). Direct action is evaluated by its contribution to “public debate,” and Sauter even argues that DDoS actions during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests did not infringe on the “rights” of delegates to attend the event because they were totally ineffective. This overlooks the undemocratic and illiberal character of the WTO itself, whose meetings were held behind closed doors (one of the major rhetorical points of the protest), and it implies that the varieties of direct action that successfully blockaded meetings could be morally compromised. These kinds of actions, bereft of an easy classification as forms of speech or communication, are the forms of antagonistic political action Dean argues cannot be found in online space.

    In this light, it is worth returning to some of the earlier theorizations of DDoS actions. The earliest DDoS activists the electrohippies and Electronic Disturbance Theater documented the philosophies behind their work, and Rita Raley’s remarkable book Tactical Media presented a bracing theoretical synthesis of DDoS as an emergent critical art-activist practice. EDT’s most famous action deployed its FloodNet DDoS tool in pro-Zapatista protests. Its novel design incorporated something akin to speech acts: for example, it pinged servers belonging to the Mexican government with requests for “human rights,” leading to a return message “human rights not found on this server,” a kind of technopolitical pun. Yet Raley rejects a theorization of online political interventions strictly in terms of their communicative value. Rather they are a curious hybrid of artistic experiment and militant interrogation, a Deleuzian event where one endeavors “to act without knowing the situation into which one will be propelled, to change things as they exist” (26).

    The goal of EDT’s actions was not simply to have a message be heard, or even to garner media attention: as EDT’s umbrella organization the Critical Art Ensemble puts it in Electronic Civil Disobedience, “The indirect approach of media manipulation using a spectacle of disobedience designed to muster public sympathy and support is a losing proposition” (15). Instead, EDT took on the prerogatives of conceptual art — to use creative practice to pose questions and provoke response — in order to probe the contours of the emerging digital terrain and determine who would control it and how. That their experiments quickly raised the specter of terrorism, even in a pre-9/11 context, seemed to answer this. As Raley describes, drawing from RAND cyberwar researchers, DDoS and related tactics “shift the Internet ‘from the public sphere model and casts it more as conflicted territory bordering on a war zone.’” (44).

    While Sauter repeatedly criticizes treating DDoS actions as criminal, rather than political, acts, the EDT saw its work as both, and even analogous to terrorism. “Not that the activists are initiating terrorist practice, since no one dies in hyperreality, but the effect of this practice can have the  same consequence as terrorism, in that state and corporate power vectors will haphazardly return fire with weapons that have destructive material (and even mortal) consequences” (25). Indeed, civil disobedience is premised on exploiting the ambiguities of activities that can be considered both crime and politics. Rather than attempt to fix distinctions after the fact, EDT recognized the power of such actions precisely in collapsing these distinctions. EDT did criticize the overcriminalization of online activity, as does Sauter, whose analysis of the use of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to prosecute DDoS activities is some of the book’s strongest and most useful material.

    Sauter prefers the activities of Anonymous to the earlier actions by the electrohippies and EDT (although EDT co-founder Ricardo Dominguez has been up to his old tricks: he was investigated by the FBI and threatened with revocation of tenure for a “virtual sit-in” against the University of California system during the student occupations of 2010). This is because Anonymous’ actions, with their unpretentious lulzy ardor and open-source tools, “lower the barriers to entry” to activism (104): in other words, they leverage the internet’s capacity to increase participation. For Sauter, the value in Anonymous’ use of its DDoS tool, the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, against targets such as the MPAA and PayPal “lay in the media attention and new participants it attracted, who sympathized with Anonymous’ views and could participate in future actions” (115). The benefit of collaborative open-source development is similar, as is the tool’s feature that allows a user to contribute their computer to a “voluntary botnet” called the “FUCKING HIVE MIND” which “allows for the temporary sharing of an activist identity, which subsequently becomes more easily adopted by those participants who opt to remain involved” (130). This tip of the hat to theorists of participatory media once again reveals the notion of a democratic public sphere as a regulative ideal for the text.

    The price of all this participation is that a “lower level of commitment was required” (129) from activists, which is oddly put forth as a benefit. In fact, Sauter criticizes FloodNet’s instructions — “send your own message to the error log of the institution/symbol of Mexican Neo-Liberalism of your choice” — as relying upon “specialized language that creates a gulf between those who already understand it and those who do not” (112). Not only is it unclear to me what the specialized language in this case is (“neoliberalism” is a widely used, albeit not universally understood term), but it seems paramount that individuals opting to engage in risky political action should understand the causes for which they are putting themselves on the line. Expanding political participation is a laudable goal, but not at the expense of losing the content of politics. Furthermore, good activism requires training: several novice Anons were caught and prosecuted for participating in DDoS actions due to insufficient operational security measures.

    What would it mean to take seriously the idea that the internet is not, in fact, a public sphere, and that, furthermore, the liberal notion of discursive and communicative activities impacting the decisions of rational individuals does not, in fact, adequately describe contemporary politics? Sauter ends up in a compelling place, one akin to the earlier theorists of DDoS: war. After all, states are one of the major participants in DDoS, and Sauter documents how Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) used Denial of Service attacks, even though deemed illegal, against Anonymous itself. The involvement of state actors “could portend the establishment of a semipermanent state of cyberwar” with activists rebranded as criminals and even terrorists. This is consonant with Raley’s analysis of EDT’s own forays into online space. It also recalls the radical political work of ultraleft formations such as Tiqqun (I had anticipated that The Coming Swarm was a reference to The Coming Insurrection though this does not seem to be the case), for whom war, specifically civil war, becomes the governing metaphor for antagonistic political practice under Empire.

    This would mean that the future of DDoS actions and other disruptive online activism would not be in its mobilization of speech, but in its building of capacities and organization of larger politicized formations. This could potentially be an opportunity to consider the varieties of DDoS so often bracketed away, which often rely on botnets and operate in undeniably criminal ways. Current hacker formations use these practices in political ways (Ghost Squad has recently targeted the U.S. military, cable news stations, the KKK and Black Lives Matters among others with DDoS, accompanying each action with political manifestos). While Sauter claims, no doubt correctly, that these activities are “damaging to [DDoS’s] perceived legitimacy as an activist tactic (160), they also note that measures to circumvent DDoS “continue to outstrip the capabilities of nearly all activist campaigns” (159). If DDoS has a future as a political tactic, it may be in the zones beyond what liberal political theory can touch.

    Notes

    [1] Instances of DDoS are typically referred to in both the popular press and by hacktivsts as “attacks.” Sauter prefers the term “actions,” a usage I follow here.

    [2] I follow Sauter’s preferred usage of the pronouns “they” and “them.”

    Works Cited

    • Critical Art Ensemble. 1996. Electronic Civil Disobedience. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
    • Dean, Jodi. 2005. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics.” Cultural Politics 1.1. 51-74.
    • Raley, Rita. 2009. Tactical Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Sauter, Molly. 2014. The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

    _____

    Gavin Mueller (@gavinsaywhat) holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communication at the University of Texas-Dallas. He previously reviewed Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous for The b2 Review.

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