Brian Holmes writes:

The central idea of this piece — about the cooptation of formerly
subversive ideas by the networked managerial class — is hardly new: after
all, "The Californian Ideology," by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, was
written in 1995. But the absorption of counter-cultural practices in a
working neoliberal hegemony turns out to be not just a California product.
Nor do I think we can blame it all on the popularity of Deleuze and
Guattari. What I try to analyze here is the way a new culture-ideology was
forged in response to the response to the last great cycle of dissent in
the 60s-70s, how it came to center on the personal computer, and how it
fits into an integrated economic system, that of "flexible accumulation."
The demonstration takes the form of a dialectical reevaluation and
actualization of some of the central theses of the Frankfurt School. —
Brian HolmesThe events of the century's turn, from Seattle to New York, have shown that
a sweeping critique of capitalist globalization is socially possible, and
urgently necessary - before the level of violence in the world dramatically
increases. The beginnings of such a critique exist, with the renewal of
"unorthodox" economics.1 But now one can look further, toward a critique of
contemporary capitalist culture.

To be effective, a cultural critique must show the links between
the major articulations of power and the more-or-less trivial aesthetics of
everyday life. It must reveal the systematicity of social relations and
their compelling character for everyone involved, even while it points to
the specific discourses, images, and emotional attitudes that hide
inequality and raw violence. It must shatter the balance of consent, by
flooding daylight on exactly what a society consents to, how it tolerates
the intolerable. Such a critique is difficult to put into practice because
it must work on two opposed levels, coming close enough to grips with the
complexity of social processes to convince the researchers whose
specialized knowledge it needs, while finding striking enough expressions
of its conclusions to sway the people whom it claims to describe — those
upon whose behavior the transformation of the status quo depends.

This kind of critique existed very recently in our societies, it
gave intellectual focus to an intense and widespread dissatisfaction in the
sixties and seventies, it helped change an entire system. Today it seems to
have vanished. No longer does the aesthetic dimension appear as a contested
bridge between the psyche and the objective structures of society. It is as
though we had lost the taste for the negative, the ambition of an
anti-systemic critique. In its place we find endless variants on
Anglo-American "cultural studies" — which is an affirmative strategy, a
device for adding value, not for taking it away. The history of cultural
studies argues today for a renewal of ideological critique.

When it emerged in the late fifties, British cultural studies tried
to reverse aesthetic hierarchies by turning the language of literary
criticism onto working-class practices and forms. Elevating popular
expressions by a process of contamination that also transformed the elite
culture, it sought to create positive alternatives to the new kinds of
domination projected by the mass media. The approach greatly diversified
the range of legitimate subjects and academic styles, and thereby making a
real contribution to the ideal of popular education.2 However, its key
theoretical tool was the notion of a differential reception, or "negotiated
reading" — a personal touch given to the message by the receiver. The
notion was originally used to reveal working-class interpretations of
dominant messages, in a model still based on class consciousness.3 But when
the emphasis on reception was detached from the dynamics of class, in the
course of the 1980s, cultural studies became one long celebration of the
particular twist that each individual or group could add to the globalized
media product. In this way, cultural studies gave legitimacy to a new,
transnational consumer ideology.4 This is the discourse of alienation
perfected, appropriated, individualized, ethnicized, made one's own.

How can cultural critique become effective again today? I am going
to argue for the construction of an "ideal type," revealing the
intersection of social power with intimate moral dispositions and erotic
drives.5 I call this ideal type the flexible personality. The word
"flexible" alludes directly to the current economic system, with its casual
labor contracts, its just-in-time production, its informational products,
and its absolute dependence on virtual currency circulating in the
financial sphere. But it also refers to an entire set of very positive
images, spontaneity, creativity, cooperativity, mobility, peer relations,
appreciation of difference, openness to present experience. If you feel
close to the counter-culture of the sixties-seventies, then you can say
that these are our creations, but caught in the distorting mirror of a
new hegemony. It has taken considerable historical effort from all of us to
make the insanity of contemporary society tolerable.

I am going to look back over recent history to show how a form of
cultural critique was effectively articulated in intellectual and then in
social terms, during the post-World War II period. But I will also show how
the current structures of domination result, in part, from the failures of
that earlier critique to evolve in the face of its own absorption by
contemporary capitalism.

Question Authority

The paradigmatic example of cultural critique in the postwar period is the
Institut für Sozialforshung — the autonomous scholarly organization known
as the Frankfurt School. Its work can be summed up with the theoretical
abbreviation of Freudo-Marxism. But what does that mean? Reviewing the
texts, you find that from as early as 1936, the Institut articulated its
analysis of domination around the psychosociological structures of
authority. The goal of the Studien über Autoritat und Familie was to
remedy "the failure of traditional Marxism to explain the reluctance of the
proletariat to fulfill its historical role."6 This "reluctance" — nothing
less than the working-class embrace of Nazism — could only be understood
through an exploration of the way that social forces unfold in the psyche.
The decline of the father's authority over the family, and the increasing
role of social institutions in forming the personality of the child, was
shown to run parallel to the liquidation of liberal, patrimonial
capitalism, under which the nineteenth-century bourgeois owner directly
controlled an inherited family capital. Twentieth-century monopoly
capitalism entailed a transfer of power from private individuals to
organized, impersonal corporations. The psychological state of masochistic
submission to authority, described by Erich Fromm, was inseparable from the
mechanized order of the new industrial cartels, their ability to integrate
individuals within the complex technological and organizational chains of
mass-production systems. The key notion of "instrumental reason" was
already in germ here. As Marcuse wrote in 1941: "The facts directing man's
thought and action are those of the machine process, which itself appears
as the embodiment of rationality and expediency. Mechanized mass
production is filling the empty spaces in which individuality could assert
itself."7

The Institut's early work combined a psychosociological analysis of
authoritarian discipline with the philosophical notion of instrumental
reason. But its powerful anti-systemic critique could not crystallize
without studies of the centrally planned economy, conceived as a social and
political response to the economic crisis of the 1930s. Institut members
Friedrich Pollock and Otto Kirchheimer were among the first to characterize
the new "state capitalism" of the 1930s.8 Overcoming the traditional
Marxist portrayal of monopoly capitalism, which had met its dialectical
contradiction in the crisis of 1929, they described a definitive shift away
from the liberal system where production and distribution were governed by
contractualized market relations between individual agents. The new system
was a managerial capitalism where production and distribution were
calculated by a central-planning state. The extent of this shift was
confirmed not only by the Nazi-dominated industrial cartels in Germany, but
also by the Soviet five-year plans, or even the American New Deal,
anticipating the rise of the Keynesian welfare state. Authority was again
at the center of the analysis. "Under state capitalism," wrote Pollock,
"men meet each other as commander or commanded."9 Or, in Kirchheimer's
words: "Fascism characterizes the stage at which the individual has
completely lost his independence and the ruling groups have become
recognized by the state as the sole legal parties to political
compromise."10

The resolution of economic crisis by centralized planning for total
war concretely revealed what Pollock called the "vital importance" of an
investigation "as to whether state capitalism can be brought under
democratic control." This investigation was effectively undertaken by the
Institut during its American exile, when it sought to translate its
analysis of Nazism into the American terms of the Cold War. What we now
remember most are the theory and critique of the culture industry, and the
essay of that name; but much more important at the time was a volume of
sociological research called The Authoritarian Personality, published in
1950.11 Written under Horkheimer's direction by a team of four authors
including Adorno, the book was an attempt to apply statistical methods of
sociology to the empirical identification of a fascistic character
structure. It used questionnaire methods to demonstrate the existence of a
"new anthropological type" whose traits were rigid conventionalism,
submission to authority, opposition to everything subjective, stereotypy,
an emphasis on power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism, the
projection outside the self of unconscious emotional impulses, and an
exaggerated concern with sexual scandal. In an echo to the earlier study of
authority, these traits were correlated with a family structure marked not
by patriarchal strength but rather weakness, resulting in attempts to sham
an ascendancy over the children which in reality had devolved to social
institutions.

The Authoritarian Personality represents the culmination of a
deliberately programmed, interdisciplinary construction of an ideal type: a
polemical image of the social self which could then guide and structure
various kinds of critique. The capacity to focus different strands of
critique is the key function of this ideal type, whose importance goes far
beyond that of the statistical methodologies used in the
questionnaire-study. Adorno's rhetorical and aesthetic strategies, for
example, only take on their full force in opposition to the densely
constructed picture of the authoritarian personality. Consider this quote
from the essay on "Commitment" in 1961:

"Newspapers and magazines of the radical Right constantly stir up
indignation against what is unnatural, over-intellectual, morbid and
decadent: they know their readers. The insights of social psychology into
the authoritarian personality confirm them. The basic features of this type
include conformism, respect for a petrified façade of opinion and society,
and resistance to impulses that disturb its order or evoke inner elements
of the unconscious that cannot be admitted. This hostility to anything
alien or alienating can accommodate itself much more easily to literary
realism of any provenance, even if it proclaims itself critical or
socialist, than to works which swear allegiance to no political slogans,
but whose mere guise is enough to disrupt the whole system of rigid
coordinates that governs authoritarian personalities..."12

Adorno seeks to show how Brechtean or Sartrean political engagement
could shade gradually over into the unquestioning embrace of order that
marks an authoritarian state. The fractured, enigmatic forms of Beckett or
Schoenberg could then be seen as more politically significant than any call
to rally collectively around a cause. Turned at once against the weak
internal harmonies of a satisfied individualism, and against the far more
powerful totalizations of an exploitative system, aesthetic form in
Adorno's vision becomes a dissenting force through its refusal to falsely
resolve the true contradictions. As he writes in one of his rhetorical
phrases: "It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to
resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a
pistol to men's heads."13

The point is not to engage in academic wrangling over exactly how
Adorno conceived this resistance of contradictory forms. More interesting
is to see how a concerted critique can help give rise to effective
resistance in society. The most visible figure here is Herbert Marcuse,
whose 1964 book One-Dimensional Man became an international best-seller,
particularly in France. Students in the demonstrations of May '68 carried
placards reading "Marx, Mao, Marcuse." But this only shows how Marcuse,
with his directly revolutionary stance, could become a kind of emblem for
converging critiques of the authoritarian state, industrial discipline, and
the mass media. In France, Sartre had written of "serialized man," while
Castoriadis developed a critique of bureaucratic productivism. In America,
the business writer William Whyte warned against the "organization man" as
early as 1956, while in 1961 an outgoing president, Dwight D. Eisenhower,
denounced the technological dangers of the "military-industrial complex."
Broadcast television was identified as the major propaganda tool of
capitalism, beginning with Vance Packard's book The Hidden Persuaders in
America in 1957, then continuing more radically with Barthes' Mythologies
in France and above all, Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Ivan Illich
and Paul Goodman attacked school systems as centers of social
indoctrination, R.D. Laing and Felix Guattari called for an
anti-psychiatry, and Henri Lefebvre for an anti-urbanism, which the
Situationists put into effect with the practice of the derive. In his
Essay on Liberation, written immediately after '68, Marcuse went so far
as to speak of an outbreak of mass surrealism — which, he thought, could
combine with a rising of the racialized lumpen proletariat in the US and a
wider revolt of the Third World.

I don't mean to connect all this subversive activity directly to
the Frankfurt School. But the "Great Refusal" of the late sixties and early
seventies was clearly aimed at the military-industrial complexes, at the
regimentation and work discipline they produced, at the blandishments of
the culture industry that concealed these realities, and perhaps above all,
at the existential and psychosocial condition of the "authoritarian
personality." The right-wing sociologist Samuel Huntington recognized as
much, when he described the revolts of the 1960s as "a general challenge to
the existing systems of authority, public and private."14 But that was just
stating the obvious. In seventies America, the omnipresent counter-culture
slogan was "Question Authority."

What I have tried to evoke here is the intellectual background of
an effective anti-systemic movement, turned against capitalist productivism
in its effects on both culture and subjectivity. All that is summed up in a
famous bit of French graffiti, On ne peut pas tomber amoureux d'une courbe
de croissance ("You can't fall in love with a growth curve"). In its very
erotics, that writing on the walls of May '68 suggests what I have not yet
mentioned, which is the positive content of the anti-systemic critique: a
desire for equality and social unity, for the suppression of the class
divide. Self-management and direct democracy were the fundamental demands
of the student radicals in 1968, and by far the most dangerous feature of
their leftist ideology.15 As Jürgen Habermas wrote in 1973: "Genuine
participation of citizens in the processes of political will-formation,
that is, substantive democracy, would bring to consciousness the
contradiction between administratively socialized production and the
continued private appropriation and use of surplus value."16 In other
words, increasing democratic involvement would rapidly show people where
their real interests lie. Again, Huntington seemed to agree, when he in
turn described the "crisis" of the advanced societies as "an excess of
democracy."17

One might recall that the infamous 1975 Trilateral Commission
report in which Huntington made that remark was specifically concerned with
the growing "ungovernability" of the developed societies, in the wake of
the social movements of the sixties. One might also recall that this
specter of ungovernability was precisely the foil against which Margaret
Thatcher, in England, was able to marshal up her "conservative
revolution."18 In other words, what Huntington called "the democratic
distemper" of the sixties was the background against which the present
neoliberal hegemony arose. And so the question I would now like to ask is
this: how did the postindustrial societies absorb the "excess of democracy"
that had been set loose by the anti-authoritarian revolts? Or to put it
another way: how did the 1960s finally serve to make the 1990s tolerable?

Divide and Recuperate

"We lack a serious history of co-optation, one that understands corporate
thought as something other than a cartoon," writes the American historian
and culture critic Thomas Frank.19 In a history of the advertising and
fashion industries called The Conquest of Cool, he attempts to retrieve
the specific strategies that made sixties "hip" into nineties "hegemon,"
transforming cultural industries based on stultifying conformism into even
more powerful industries based on a plethoric offer of "authenticity,
individuality, difference, and rebellion." With a host of examples, he
shows how the desires of middle-class dropouts in the sixties were rapidly
turned into commodified images and products. Avoiding a simple manipulation
theory, Frank concludes that the advertisers and fashion designers involved
had an existential interest in transforming the system. The result was a
change in "the ideology by which business explained its domination of the
national life" — a change he relates, but only in passing, to David
Harvey's concept of "flexible accumulation."20 Beyond the chronicle of
stylistic co-optation, what still must be explained are the interrelations
between individual motivations, ideological justifications, and the complex
social and technical functions of a new economic system.

A starting point can be taken from a few suggestive remarks by the
business analysts Piore and Sabel, in a book called The Second Industrial
Divide (1984). Here the authors speak of a regulation crisis, which "is
marked by the realization that existing institutions no longer secure a
workable match between the production and the consumption of goods."21 They
locate two such crises in the history of the industrial societies, both of
which we have already considered through the eyes of the Frankfurt School:
"the rise of the large corporations, in the late nineteenth century, and of
the Keynesian welfare state, in the 1930s."22 Our own era has seen a third
such crisis: the prolonged recession of the 1970s, culminating with the oil
shock of 1973 and accompanied by endemic labor unrest throughout the
decade. This crisis brought the institutional collapse of the Fordist
mass-production regime and the welfare state, and thereby set the stage for
an industrial divide, which the authors situate in the early 1980s:

"The brief moments when the path of industrial development itself is at
stake we call industrial divides. At such moments, social conflicts of the
most apparently unrelated kinds determine the direction of technological
development for the following decades. Although industrialists, workers,
politicians and intellectuals may only be dimly aware that they face
technological choices, the actions that they take shape economic
institutions for long into the future. Industrial divides are therefore the
backdrop or frame for subsequent regulation crises."23

Basing themselves on observations from Northern Italy, the authors
describe the emergence of a new production regime called "flexible
specialization," which they characterize as "a strategy of permanent
innovation: accommodation to ceaseless change, rather than an effort to
control it." Abandoning the centralized planning of the postwar years, this
new strategy works through the agency of small, independent production
units, employing skilled work teams with multi-use tool kits, and relying
on relatively spontaneous forms of cooperation with other such teams to
meet rapidly changing market demands at low cost and high speed. These
kinds of firms seemed to hark back to the craftsmen of the early nineteenth
century, before the first industrial divide that led to the introduction of
heavy machinery and the mass-production system. To be sure, in 1984 Piore
and Sabel could not yet have predicted the importance that would be
acquired by one single set of products, far from anything associated with
the nineteenth century: the personal computer and telecommunications
devices. Nonetheless, the relation they drew between a crisis in
institutional regulation and an industrial divide can help us understand
the key role that social conflict — and the cultural critique that helps
focus it — has played in shaping the organizational forms and the very
technology of the world we live in.

What then were the conflicts that made computing and
telecommunications into the central products of the new wave of economic
growth that began after the 1970s recession? How did these conflicts affect
the labor, management, and consumption regimes? Which social groups were
integrated to the new hegemony of flexible capitalism, and how? Which were
rejected or violently excluded, and how was that violence covered over?

So far, the most complete set of answers to these questions has
come from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in Le Nouvel Esprit du
Capitalism, published in 1999.24 Their thesis is that each age or "spirit"
of capitalism must justify its irrational compulsion for accumulation by at
least partially integrating or "recuperating" the critique of the previous
era, so that the system can become tolerable again — at least for its own
managers. They identify two main challenges to capitalism: the critique of
exploitation, or what they call "social critique," developed traditionally
by the worker's movement, and the critique of alienation, or what they call
"artistic critique." The latter, they say, was traditionally a minor,
literary affair; but it became vastly more important with the mass cultural
education carried out by the welfare-state universities. Boltanski and
Chiapello trace the destinies of the major social groups in France after
the turmoil of '68, when critique sociale joined hands with critique
artiste. They show how the most organized fraction of the labor force was
accorded unprecedented economic gains, even as future production was
gradually reorganized and delocalized to take place outside union control
and state regulation. But they also demonstrate how the young, aspiring
managerial class, whether still in the universities or at the lower
echelons of enterprise, became the major vector for the artistic critique
of authoritarianism and bureaucratic impersonality. The strong point of
Boltanski and Chiapello's book is to demonstrate how the organizational
figure of the network emerged to provide a magical answer to the
anti-systemic cultural critique of the 1950s and 60s -— a magical answer, at
least for the aspirant managerial class.

What are the social and aesthetic attractions of networked
organization and production? First, the pressure of a rigid, authoritarian
hierarchy is eased, by eliminating the complex middle-management ladder of
the Fordist enterprises, and opening up shifting, one-to-one connections
between network members. Second, spontaneous communication, creativity and
relational fluidity can be encouraged in a network as factors of
productivity and motivation, thus overcoming the alienation of impersonal,
rationalized
procedures. Third, extended mobility can be tolerated or even demanded, to
the extent that tool-kits become increasingly miniaturized or even purely
mental, allowing work to be relayed through telecommunications channels.
Fourth, the standardization of products that was the visible mark of the
individual's alienation under the mass-production regime can be attenuated,
by the configuration of small-scale or even micro-production networks to
produce limited series of custom objects or personalized services.25 Fifth,
desire can be stimulated and new, rapidly obsolescent products can be
created by working directly within the cultural realm as coded by
multimedia in particular, thus at once addressing the demand for meaning on
the part of employees and consumers, and resolving part of the problem of
falling demand for the kinds of long-lasting consumer durables produced by
Fordist factories.

As a way of summing up all these advantages, it can be said that
the networked organization gives back to the employee - or better, to the
"prosumer" - the property of him- or herself that the traditional firm
had sought to purchase as the commodity of labor power. The strict division
between production and consumption tends to disappear, and alienation
appears to be overcome, as individuals aspire to mix their labor with their
leisure.26 Even the firm begins to conceive of work qualitatively, as a
sphere of creative activity, of self-realization. "Connectionist man" — or
in my term, "the networker" — is delivered from direct surveillance and
paralyzing alienation to become the manager of his or her own
self-gratifying activity, as long as that activity translates at some point
into valuable economic exchange, the sine qua non for remaining within
the network.

Obviously, the young advertisers and fashion designers described by
Thomas Frank could see an interest in this loosening of hierarchies. But
the gratifying self-possession and self-management of the networker has an
ideological advantage as well: responding to the demands of May '68, it
becomes the perfect legitimating argument for the continuing destruction,
by the capitalist class, of the heavy, bureaucratic, alienating,
profit-draining structures of the welfare state that also represented most
all the historical gains that the workers had made through social critique.
By co-opting the aesthetic critique of alienation, the networked enterprise
is able to legitimate the gradual exclusion of the workers' movement and
the destruction of social programs. Thus, artistic critique becomes one of
the linchpins of the new hegemony invented in the early 1980s by Reagan and
Thatcher, and perfected in the 1990s by Clinton and the inimitable Tony
Blair.

To recuperate from the setbacks of the sixties and seventies,
capitalism had to be become doubly flexible, imposing casual labor
contracts and "delocalized" production sites to escape the regulation of
the welfare state, and using this fragmented production apparatus to create
the consumer seductions and stimulating careers that were needed to regain
the loyalty of potentially revolutionary managers and intellectual workers.
This double movement is what gives rise to the system conceived by David
Harvey as a regime of "flexible accumulation" — a notion that describes not
only the structure and discipline of the new work processes, but also the
forms and lifespans of the individually tailored and rapidly obsolescent
products that are created, and the new, more volatile modes of consumption
that the system promotes.27 For the needs of contemporary cultural critique
we should recognize, at the crux of this transformation, the role of the
personal computer, assembled along with its accompanying telecommunications
devices in high-tech sweatshops across the world. The mainstay of what has
also been called the "informational economy," the computer and its
attendant devices are at once industrial and cultural tools, embodying a
compromise that temporarily resolved the social struggles unleashed by
artistic critique. The laptop serves as a portable instrument of control
over the casualized laborer and the fragmented production process, while at
the same time freeing up the nomadic manager for forms of mobility both
physical and fantasmatic; it successfully miniaturizes one's access to the
remaining bureaucratic functions, while opening a private channel into the
realms of virtual or "fictitious" capital, the financial markets where
surplus value is produced as if by magic, despite the accumulating physical
signs of crisis and decay. Technically a calculator, the personal computer
has been turned by its social usage into an image- and language machine:
the productive instrument, communications vector, and indispensable
receiver of the immaterial goods and semiotic services that now form the
leading sector of the economy.28

Geographical dispersal and global coordination of manufacturing,
just-in-time production and containerized delivery systems, a generalized
acceleration of consumption cycles, and a flight of overaccumulated capital
into the lightning-fast financial sphere, whose movements are at once
reflected and stimulated by the equally swift evolution of global media:
these are among the major features of the flexible accumulation regime as
it has developed since the late 1970s. David Harvey, like most Marxist
theorists, sees this transnational redeployment of capital as a reaction to
social struggles, which increasingly tended to limit the levels of resource
and labor exploitation possible within nationally regulated space. A
similar kind of reasoning is used, on the other end of the political
spectrum, by the business analysts Piore and Sabel when they claim that
"social conflicts of the most apparently unrelated kinds determine the
course of technological development" at the moment of an industrial divide.
But it is, I think, only Boltanski and Chiapello's analytical division of
the resistance movements of the sixties into the two strands of artistic
and social critique that finally allows us to understand the precise
aesthetic and communicational forms generated by capitalism's recuperation
of — and from — the democratic turmoil of the 1960s.

Beneath A New Dominion

If I insist on the social form assumed by computers and
telecommunications during the redeployment of capital after the recession
of the 1970s, it is because of the central role that these technologies,
and their diverse uses, have played in the emergence of what Manuel
Castells conceives as the global informational economy. Describing the most
advanced state of this economy, Castells writes that "the products of the
new information technology industries are information processing devices or
information processing itself."29 Thus he indicates the way that cultural
expressions, recoded and processed as multimedia, can enter value-adding
loop of digitized communications. Indeed, he believes they must enter it:
"All other messages are reduced to individual imagination or to
increasingly marginalized face-to-face subcultures."30 But Castells tends
to see the conditions of entry as fundamentally technical, without
developing the notion that technology itself can be shaped by the patterns
of social, political and cultural relations. He conceives subjective and
collective agency in terms of a primary choice or rejection of the network,
followed by more or less viable paths within or outside the dominant
system. The network itself is not a form, but a destiny. Any systemic
change is out of the question.

A critical approach can instead view computers and
telecommunications as specific, pliable configurations within the larger
frame of what Michel Foucault calls "governmental technologies." Foucault
defines the governmental technologies (or more generally,
"governmentality") as "the entire set of practices used to constitute,
define, organize and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals, in
their freedom, can have towards each other."31 At stake here is the
definition of a level of constraint, extending beyond what Foucault
conceives as freedom — the open field of power relations between
individuals, where each one tries to "conduct the conduct of others,"
through strategies that are always reversible — but not yet reaching the
level of domination, where the relations of power are totally immobilized,
for example through physical constraint. The governmental technologies
exist just beneath this level of domination: they are subtler forms of
collective channeling, appropriate for the government of democratic
societies where individuals enjoy substantial freedoms and tend to reject
any obvious imposition of authority.

It is clear that the crisis of "ungovernability" decried by
Huntington, Thatcher and other neoconservatives in the mid-1970s could only
find its "resolution" with the introduction of new governmental
technologies, determining new patterns of social relations; and it has
become rather urgent to see exactly how these relational technologies
function. To begin quite literally with the hardware, we could consider the
extraordinary increase in surveillance practices since the introduction of
telematics. It has become commonplace at any threshold — border, cash
register, subway turnstile, hospital desk, credit application, commercial
website — to have one's personal identifiers (or even body parts: finger-
or handprints, retina patterns, DNA) checked against records in a distant
database, to determine if passage will be granted. This appears as direct,
sometimes even authoritarian control. But as David Lyon observes, "each
expansion of surveillance occurs with a rational that, like as not, will be
accepted by those whose data or personal information is handled by the
system."32 The most persuasive rationales are increased security (from
theft or attack) and risk management by various types of insurers, who
demand personal data to establish contracts. These and other arguments lead
to the internalization of surveillance imperatives, whereby people actively
supply their data to distant watchers. But this example of voluntary
compliance with surveillance procedures is only the tip of the control
iceberg. The more potent and politically immobilizing forms of self-control
emerge in the individual's relation to the labor market — particularly when
the labor in question involves the processing of cultural information.
Salaried labor, whether performed on site or at distant.

telematically connected locations, can obviously be monitored for
compliance to the rules (surveillance cameras, telephone checks, keystroke
counters, radio-emitting badges, etc.). The offer of freelance labor, on
the other hand, can simply be refused if any irregularity appears, either
in the product or the conditions of delivery. Internalized self-monitoring
becomes a vital necessity for the freelancer. Cultural producers are hardly
an exception, to the extent that they offering their inner selves for sale:
at all but the highest levels of artistic expression, subtle forms of
self-censorship become the rule, at least in relation to a primary
market.33 But deeper and perhaps more insidious effects arise from the
inscription of cultural, artistic and ethical ideals, once valued for their
permanence, into the swiftly changing cycles of capitalist valorization and
obsolescence. Among the data processors of the cultural economy — including
the myriad personnel categories of media production, design and live
performance, and extending through various forms of service provision,
counseling, therapy, education, and so on — a depoliticizing cynicism is
more widespread than self-censorship. It is described by Paolo Virno:

"At the base of contemporary cynicism is the fact that men and women learn
by experiencing rules rather than "facts"... Learning the rules, however,
also means recognizing their unfoundedness and conventionality. We are no
longer inserted into a single, predefined "game" in which we participate
with true conviction. We now face several different "games," each devoid of
all obviousness and seriousness, only the site of an immediate
self-affirmation - an affirmation that is much more brutal and arrogant,
much more cynical, the more we employ, with no illusions but with perfect
momentary adherence, those very rules whose conventionality and mutability
we have perceived."34

In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard identified language games as an
emerging arena of value-production in capitalist societies offering
computerized access to knowledge, where what mattered was not primary
research but transformatory "moves" within an arbitrary semantic field.35
Here, cynicism is both the cause and prerequisite of the player's unbounded
opportunism. As Virno notes: "The opportunist confronts a flux of
interchangeable possibilities, keeping open as many as possible, turning to
the closest and swerving unpredictably from one to the other." He
continues: "The computer, for example, rather than a means to a univocal
end, is a premise for successive 'opportunistic' elaborations of work.
Opportunism is valued as an indispensable resource whenever the concrete
labor process is pervaded by diffuse 'communicative action'...
computational chatter demands 'people of opportunity,' ready and waiting
for every chance."36 Of course, the true opportunist consents to a fresh
advantage within any new language game, even if it is political. Politics
collapses into the flexibility and rapid turnover times of market
relations. And this is the meaning of Virno's ironic reference to
Habermas's theory of communicative action. In his analysis of democracy's
legitimation crisis, Habermas observed that consent in democratic societies
ultimately rests on each citizen's belief that in cases of doubt he could
be convinced by a detailed argument: "Only if motivations for actions no
longer operated through norms requiring justification, and if personality
systems no longer had to find their unity in identity-securing interpretive
systems, could the acceptance of decisions without reasons become routine,
that is, could the readiness to conform absolutely be produced to any
desired degree."37 What was social science fiction for Habermas in 1973
became a reality for Virno in the early 1990s: personality systems without
any aspiration to subjective truth, without any need for secure processes
of collective interpretation. And worse, this reality was constructed on
distorted forms of the call by the radical Italian left for an autonomous
status of labor.

The point becomes clear: to describe the immaterial laborer,
"prosumer," or networker as a flexible personality is to describe a new
form of alienation, not alienation from the vital energy and roving desire
that were exalted in the 1960s, but instead, alienation from political
society, which in the democratic sense is not a profitable affair and
cannot be endlessly recycled into the production of images and emotions.
The configuration of the flexible personality is a new form of social
control, in which culture has an important role to play. It is distorted
form of the artistic revolt against authoritarianism and standardization, a
set of practices and techniques for "constituting, defining, organizing and
instrumentalizing" the revolutionary energies which emerged in the Western
societies in the 1960s, and which for a time seemed capable of transforming
social relations.

This notion of the flexible personality, that is, of subjectivity
as it is modeled and channeled by contemporary capitalism, can be sharpened
and deepened by looking outside of France and beyond the aspirant
managerial class, to the destiny of another group of proto-revolutionary
social actors, the racialized lumpen proletariat in America, from which
arose the Black, Chicano, and American Indian movements in the sixties,
followed by a host of identity-groups thereafter. Here the dialectic of
integration and exclusion becomes more apparent and more cruel. One the one
hand, identity formations are encouraged as stylistic resources for
commodified cultural production. Regional cultures and subcultures are
sampled, recoded into product form, and fed back to themselves through the
immeasurably wider and more profitable world market.38 Local differences of
reception are seized upon everywhere as proof of the open, universal nature
of global products. Corporate and governmental hierarchies are also made
open to significant numbers of non-white subjects, whenever they are
willing to play the management game. This is an essential requirement for
the legitimacy of transnational governance. But wherever an identity
formation becomes problematic and seems likely to threaten the urban,
regional, or geopolitical balance — I'm thinking particularly of the Arab
world, but also of the Balkans — then what Boris Buden calls the "cultural
touch" operates quite differently and turns ethnic identity not into
commercial gold, but into the signifier of a regressive, "tribal"
authoritarianism, which can legitimately be repressed. Here the book
Empire contains an essential lesson: that not the avoidance, but instead
the stimulation and management of local conflicts is the keystone of
transnational governance.39 In fact the United States themselves are
already governed that way, in a state of permanent low-intensity civil war.
Manageable, arms-consuming ethnic conflicts are perfect grist for the mill
of capitalist empire. And the reality of terrorism offers the perfect
opportunity to accentuate surveillance functions - with full consent from
the majority of the citizenry.

With these last considerations we have obviously changed scales,
shifting from the psycho-social to the geopolitical. But to make the ideal
type work correctly, one should never forget the hardened political and
economic frames within which the flexible personality evolves. Piore and
Sabel point out that what they call "flexible specialization" was only one
side of the response that emerged to the regulation crisis and recession of
the 1970s. The other strategy is global. It "aims at extending the
mass-production model. It does so by linking the production facilities and
markets of the advanced countries with the fastest-growing third-world
countries. This response amounts to the use of the corporation (now a
multinational entity) to stabilize markets in a world where the forms of
cooperation among states can no longer do the job."40 In effect, the
transnational corporation, piloted by the financial markets, and backed up
by the military power and legal architecture of the G-7 states, has taken
over the economic governance of the world from the former colonial
structure. The "military-industrial complex," decried as the fountainhead
of power in the days of the authoritarian personality, has been superseded
by what is now being called the "Wall Street-Treasury complex" — "a power
elite a la C. Wright Mills, a definite networking of like-minded luminaries
among the institutions — Wall Street, the Treasury Department, the State
Department, the IMF, and the World Bank most prominent among them."41

What kind of labor regime is produced by this networking among the
power elite? On June 13, 2001, one could read in the newspaper that a sharp
drop in computer sales had triggered layoffs of 10% of Compaq's world-wide
workforce, and 5% of Hewlet Packard's — 7,000 and 4,700 jobs respectively.
In this situation, the highly mobile Dell corporation was poised to draw a
competitive advantage from its versatile workforce: "Robots are just not
flexible enough, whereas each computer is unique," explained the president
of Dell Europe.42 With its just-in-time production process, Dell can
immediately pass on the drop in component prices to consumers, because it
has no old product lying around in warehouses; at the same time, it is
under no obligation to pay idle hands for regular 8-hour shifts when there
is no work. Thus it has already grabbed the number-1 position from Compaq
and it is hungry for more. "It's going to be like Bosnia," gloated an upper
manager. "Taking such market shares is the chance of a lifetime."

This kind of ruthless pleasure, against a background of
exploitation and exclusion, has become entirely typical — an example of the
opportunism and cynicism that the flexible personality tolerates.43 But was
this what we really expected from the critique of authority in the 1960s?

Conclusions

The flexible personality represents a contemporary form of governmentality,
an internalized and culturalized pattern of "soft" coercion which
nonetheless can be directly correlated with the hard data of labor
conditions, bureaucratic and police practices, border regimes and military
interventions. The study of such coercive patterns, contributing to the
deliberately exaggerated figure of an ideal type, is a way that academic
knowledge production can contribute to the rising wave of democratic
dissent; in particular, the treatment of "immaterial" or "aesthetic"
production stands to gain from this renewal of a radically negative
critique. Those who admire the Frankfurt School, or closer to us, the work
of Michel Foucault, can hardly refuse the challenge of bringing their
analyses up to date, now that a new system and style of domination has
taken on increasingly clear outlines.

Yet it is not certain that the mere description of a system of
domination, however precise and scientifically accurate, will suffice to
dispel it. And the model of "governmentality," with all its nuances, easily
lends itself to an infinite introspection, which would be better avoided.
The timeliness of critical theory, today, has to do with the possibility of
refusing a highly articulated and effective ideology, which has integrated
and neutralized a certain number of formerly alternative propositions. But
at the same time it is important to avoid the trap into which the Frankfurt
School, in particular, seems to have fallen: the impasse of a critique so
totalizing that it leaves no way out, except through an excessively
sophisticated, contemplative, and ultimately elitist aesthetics. Critique
today must remain a fully public practice, engaged in communicative action
and indeed, communicative activism: the recreation of an oppositional
culture, in forms specifically conceived to resist the inevitable attempts
at co-optation.44 The figure of the flexible personality can be publicly
ridiculed, satirized, its supporting institutions can be attacked on
political grounds, its traits can be exposed in cultural and artistic
productions, its description and the search for alternatives to its reign
can be conceived not as another academic industry — and another potential
locus of immaterial production — but instead as a chance to help create new
forms of intellectual solidarity, a new collective project for a better
society. When it is carried out in a perspective of social transformation,
the exercise of negative critique itself can have a powerful subjectivizing
force, it can become a way to shape oneself through the demands of a shared
endeavor.45

The flexible personality is not a destiny. And despite the
ideologies of resignation, despite the dense realities of governmental
structures in our "control societies," nothing prevents the sophisticated
forms of critical knowledge, elaborated in the peculiar temporality of the
university, from connecting directly with the new and also complex, highly
sophisticated forms of dissent appearing on the streets. This type of
crossover is exactly what we have seen in the wide range of movements
opposing the agenda of neoliberal globalization. The initial results are
before our eyes. The communicational infrastructure, largely externalized
into personal computers, and a considerable "knowledge capital," shifted
from the schools and universities of the welfare state to the bodies and
minds of the immaterial laborers, can be appropriated by all those willing
to simply use what is already ours, and to take the risks of political
autonomy and democratic dissent. The history of radically democratic
movements can be explored and deepened, while the goals and processes of
the present movement are made explicit and brought openly into debate.

The program is ambitious. But the alternative, if you prefer, is
just to go on playing someone else's game -— rolling the loaded dice, again
and again.

Notes

1. The World Social Forum, held for the first time in Porto Alegre in
January 2001, is symbolic of the turn away from neoclassical or
"supply-side" economics. Another potent symbol can be found in the charges
leveled by economist Joseph Stiglitz at his former employers, the World
Bank, and even more importantly, at the IMF — the major transnational organ
of the neoclassical doctrine.

2. For a short history of cultural studies as a popular-education movement,
then a more theoretical treatment of similar themes, see Raymond Williams,
"The Future of Cultural Studies" and "The Uses of Cultural Theory," both in
The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989).

3. See Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, et. al., Resistance through Rituals
(London: Routledge 1993, 1st edition 1975), esp. the "theoretical overview"
of the volume, pp. 9-74.

4. The reversal becomes obvious with L. Grossberg et. al., eds., Cultural
Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), an
anthology that marks the large-scale exportation of cultural studies to the
American academic market.

5. The methodological device of the ideal type was developed by Max Weber,
particularly in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; as we
shall see, it was taken up as a polemical figure by the Frankfurt School in
the 1950s.

6. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996/1st ed. 1973), p. 116.

7. Herbert Marcuse, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," in A.
Arato and E. Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New
York: Continuum, 1988), pp. 143, 158.

8. The term "state capitalism" is more familiar as an indictment of false
or failed communism of the Stalinist Soviet Union, for instance in Tony
Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia (London: Pluto Press, 1974); however, the
concept as developed by the Frankfurt School applied, with variations, to
all the centrally planned economies that emerged after the Great
Depression.

9. Friedrich Pollock, "State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations"
(1941), in ibid., p. 78.

10. Otto Kirchheimer, "Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise"
(1941), in ibid., p. 70.

11. T.W. Adorno et. al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper,
1950).

12. T.W. Adorno, "Commitment" (1962), in The Essential Frankfurt School
Reader, op. cit. p. 303.

13. Ibid., p. 304.

14. M. Crozier, S. Huntington, J. Watanabi, The Crisis of Democracy
(Trilateral Commission, 1975), p. 74.

15. In the words of the Paris enrages: "What are the essential features of
council power? Dissolution of all external power — Direct and total
democracy — Practical unification of decision and execution — Delegates who
can be revoked at any moment by those who have mandated them — Abolition of
hierarchy and independent specializations — Conscious management and
transformation of all the conditions of liberated life — Permanent creative
mass participation — Internationalist extension and coordination. The
present requirements are nothing less than this. Self-management is nothing
less." From a May 30, 1968 communique, signed ENRAGÉS-SITUATIONIST
INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE, COUNCIL FOR MAINTAINING THE OCCUPATIONS, made
available over the Internet by Ken Knabb at:
.

16. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975/1st
German edition 1973), p. 36.

17. The Crisis of Democracy, op. cit., p. 113.

18. The origins of the "conservative revolution" are described by Keith
Dixon in an excellent book, Les evangelistes du marche (Paris: Raisons
d'agir, 1998).

19. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1997), p. 8.

20. Thomas Frank, ibid., p. 229; the references to Harvey are on pages 25
and 233.

21. Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide
(New York: Basic Books, 1984); excerpts in R. Koolhaas, S. Boeri, S.
Kwinter, et. al., Mutations, exhibition catalogue, arc en rêve centre
d'architecture, Bordeaux, 2000, pp. 643-644.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme
(Paris: Gallimard, 1999). As the title suggests, the authors draw on
Weberian methodology to propose a new ideal type of capitalist
entrepreneur, the "connectionist man." Unlike the Frankfurt School, and
myself, they do not systematically relate this ideal type to a
sociopolitical order and a mode of production.

25. Andrea Branzi, one of the north Italian designers who led and theorized
this transition, distinguishes between the "Homogeneous Metropolis" of
mass-produced industrial design, and what he calls "the Hybrid Metropolis,
born of the crisis of classical modernity and of rationalism, which
discovers niche markets, the robotization of the production line, the
diversified series, and the ethnic and cultural minorities." "The Poetics
of Balance: Interview with Andrea Branzi," in F. Burkhardt and C. Morozzi,
Andrea Branzi (Paris: Editions Dis-Voir, undated), p. 45.

26. In L'individu incertain (Paris: Hachette, 1999, 1st ed. 1995),
sociologist Alain Ehrenberg describes the postwar regime of consumption as
being "characterized by a passive spectator fascinated by the [television]
screen, with a dominant critique marked by the model of alienation"; he
then links the positive connotations of the computer terminal in our own
period to "a model of communication promoting inter-individual exchanges
modeled on themes of activity and relationships, with self-realization as
the dominant stereotype of consumption" (p. 240). Note the disappearance of
critique in the second model.

27. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990),
pp. 141-148.

28. In the text "Immaterial Labor," Maurizio Lazarrato proposes the notion
of aesthetic production: "It is more useful, in attempting to grasp the
process of the formation of social communication and its subsumption within
the 'economic,' to use, rather than the 'material' model of production, the
'aesthetic' model that involves author, reproduction, and reception.... The
'author' must lose its individual dimension and be transformed into an
industrially organized production process (with a division of labor,
investments, orders, and so forth), 'reproduction' becomes a mass
reproduction organized according to the imperatives of profitability, and
the audience ('reception') tends to become the consumer/communicator."
Today, the computer is the key instrument allowing for the industrial
organization of aesthetic production. In: Radical Thought in Italy: A
Potential Politics, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 144.

29. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (London: Blackwell,
1996), p. 67.

30. Manuel Castells, ibid., p. 374.

31. Foucault, "L'ethique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberte,"
interview with H. Becker, R. Forner-Betancourt, A. Gomez-Mueller, in Dits
et ecrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. IV, p. 728; also see the excellent
article by Maurizio Lazarrato, "Du biopouvoir à la biopolitique," in
Multitudes 1, pp. 45-57.

32. David Lyon, Surveillance Society (Buckingham: Open University Press,
2001), p. 44.

33. For an analysis of the ways that (self-) censorship operates in
contemporary cultural production, see A. Corsani, M. Lazzarato, N. Negri,
Le Bassin du travail immateriel (BTI) dans le metropole parisien (Paris:
L'Harmattan, 1996), pp. 71-78.

34. Paolo Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment," in Radical Thought in
Italy, op. cit., pp. 17-18.

35. Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir, Paris,
Minuit, 1979, esp. pp. 13-14 et 31-33.

36. Paolo Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment," op. cit., p. 17.
Compare Sennet's discussion of a 1991 U.S. government report on the skills
people need in a flexible economy: "in flexible forms of work, the players
make up the rules as they go along... past performance is no guide to
present rewards; in each office 'game' you start over from the beginning."
Richard Sennet, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of
Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 110.

37. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, op. cit., p. 44.

38. Can research work in cultural studies, such as Dick Hebdige's classic
Subculture, the Meaning of Style, now be directly instrumentalized by
marketing specialists? As much is suggested in the book Commodify Your
Dissent, edited by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York: Norton, 1997),
pp. 73-77, where Frank and Dave Mulcahey present a fictional "buy
recommendation" for would-be investors: "Consolidated Deviance, Inc.
('ConDev') is unarguably the nation's leader, if not the sole force, in the
fabrication, consultancy, licensing and merchandising of deviant
subcultural practice. With its string of highly successful 'SubCultsTM',
mass-marketed youth culture campaigns highlighting rapid stylistic turnover
and heavy cross-media accessorization, ConDev has brought the allure of the
marginalized to the consuming public."

39. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2000), pp. 198-201: "The triple imperative of the Empire
is incorporate, differentiate, manage."

40. Piore and Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide, op. cit.

41. Jagdish Bhagwati, "The Capital Myth," Foreign Affairs May/June 1998;
electronic text available at
.

42. "Une crise sans precedent ebranle l'informatique mondiale," Le Monde,
June 13, 2001, p. 18.

43. The ultimate reason for this tolerance appears to be fear. In
Souffrance en France (Paris: Seuil, 1998), the labor psychologist
Christophe Dejours studies the "banalization of evil" in contemporary
management. Beyond the cases of perverse or paranoid sadism, concentrated
at the top, he identifies the imperative to display courage and virility as
the primary moral justification for doing the "dirty work" (selection for
lay-offs, enforcement of productivity demands, etc.). "The collective
strategy of defense entails a denial of the suffering occasioned by the
'nasty jobs'.... The ideology of economic rationalism consists...— beyond
the exhibition of virility - in making cynicism pass for force of
character, for determination and an elevated sense of collective
responsibilities... in any case, a sense of supra-individual interests"
(pp. 109-111). Underlying the defense mechanisms, Dejours finds both the
fear of personal responsibility and the fear of becoming a victim oneself;
cf. pp. 89-118.

44. Hence the paradoxical, yet essential refusal to conceive oppositional
political practice as the constitution of a party, and indeed of a unified
social class, for the seizure of state power. Among the better formulations
of this paradox is Miguel Benassayag and Diego Sztulwark, Du contre pouvoir
(Paris: La Decouverte, 2000).

45. The notion of a new emulation, on an ethical basis, between free and
independent subjects seems a far more promising future for the social tie
than any restoration of traditional authority. Richard Sennet doesn't hide
a certain nostalgia for the latter in The Corrosion of Character, op. cit.,
pp. 115-16; but he remarks, far more interestingly, that in "the process
view of community... reflected in current political studies of deliberative
democracy... the evolving expression of disagreement is taken to bind
people more than the sheer declaration of 'correct' principles" (pp.
143-44).