Abstract
Chapter 3 engages the character of contemporary control by articulating the concept of “constant capitalism,” the emergent mode of production in the early 21st century. In short, the increasing prevalence of immediacy, simultaneity and ubiquity force Marx’s dichotomy of constant capital and variable capital into a zone of indistinction, such that distinctions between worktime and freetime hold together no more well than that which once separated technology from humanity rhetorically. The chapter focuses on the process through which constant capitalism, tempo- and technocultural immediacy and neoliberal economics has given rise to a new form of financial dictatorship embodied most clearly in Michigan’s Emergency Financial Manager laws.
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Notes
P. Virilio, A Landscape of Events (Boston: MIT Press, 2000), 2.
J. Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Worker’s Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981).
This historicized definition of ideology derives from A. Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010). For a more productive example of the “vulgarization” of ideologies in the Tunisian case, see
M. Foucault, Remarks on Marx (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).
D. Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (New York: Holt, 2008).
For “cognitive capitalism,” see, for instance, A. Negri, Reflections on Empire (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 64; and for “communicative capitalism,” see
J. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
Another concept that might have been used is Sheldon Wolin’s “inverted totalitarianism.” But whereas Wolin’s concept describes “abstract totalizing powers, not by personal rule” (44), ours refers to a form of rule that is, in fact, the executive authority of a single individual. Further, in amending the concept of dictatorship with the term “financial,” we invoke the terms used by the State of Michigan, while conjoining them to Carl Schmitts assertion that dictatorship is not necessarily separate from liberalism but is, in fact, a constant potential of all modern constitutional republics. See S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) and
C. Schmitt, Dictatorship (London: Polity, 2012); Constitutional Theory (Duke University Press, 2008); The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (MIT Press, 1988);
C. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
For the latter’s version, see W. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Thesis XIII and XIV, in W. Benjamin, Ed. Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 395.
For an interesting argument about the statist and capitalist dimensions of this in the South, see K. Lawrence, Marx on American Slavery (Freedom Information Service, 1976) and
R. Blackburn, Ed., An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London: Verso, 2011).
This translation is from W. Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 241.
N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 1–35. For a post-digital media update, see S. Rampton, “Hast the Internet Changed the Propaganda Model?” PR Watch, May 22, 2007 and P. Jay and E. Herman, “ ‘Manufacturing Consent’ 25 Years Later” The Real News, April 21, 2013.
J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup and M. Allen, Eds. The International Handbook of Internet Research (London: Springer, 2010), 283.
G. Deleuze and F Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 462.
P. Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 98.
G. Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 13.
See, for instance, R. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2005).
K. Marx, Grundrisse: Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1993), 173.
Compare Virilio: “One usually says that power is tied in with wealth. In my opinion, it’s tied first and foremost with speed; wealth comes afterward,” to Marx: “economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.” Nevertheless, his approach of disclaiming Marxism while still keeping Marx and Marxian thought within his intertextual economy is perhaps the most thoughtful way to engage him. Not by being a Marxist, but by being a thinker who uses Marx’s ideas, just as one might Plato, Nietzsche, or Hegel. See P. Virilio, Pure War (Brooklyn: Semiotext(e), 1997), 49 and Marx, Grundrisse.
P. Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 2003), 133.
“The synthesis of horizons is essentially a temporal process, which means, not that it is subject to time, nor that it is passive in relation to time, nor that it has to prevail over time, the thing and the natural world but that it merges with the very movement whereby time passes. Through my perceptual field, with its spatial horizons, I am present to my surrounding, I co-exist with all the other landscapes which stretch out beyond it, and all these perspectives together form a single temporal wave, one of the world’s instants. Through my perceptual field with its temporal horizons I am present to my present, to all the preceding past and to a future.” M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962), 385–386.
P. Virilio, in J. Armitage, Ed. Virilio Now (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 29: “It is the ‘kairos’ of the real-time of immediacy and ubiquity which today governs the real space of geography, thereby putting duration, temporality and human history into a profound crisis derived from the sudden emergence of interactivity.”
B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006).
Italics in original. H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 59.
R. Paul, Liberty Defined: so Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (Boston: Hachette Book Group, 2011).
H. Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 17.
H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind (Orlando: Harcourt, 1978), 176. This argument is directly cited by Virilio and seems to have influenced Deleuze’s take on Nietzsche, as well.
Deleuze and Guattari also note the Virilio/Arendt nexus (linking chapter 1 of L ‘Insecurity du Territoire on the “suicidal state” and The Origins of Totalitarianism), “although Hannah Arendt identifies Nazism and totalitarianism, she expressed this principle of Nazi domination: “Their idea of domination was something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can ever achieve, but only a movement that is constantly kept in motion… even the war, and the danger of losing the war, acted as accelerators.” Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, 538. As we will see below, recent debates in cultural and political theory around the question of “accelerationism” point to this Virilio/Arendt/Deleuze nexus, arguing that the earlier Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus was more nihilistic in his embrace of deterritorialization, while, following his and Guattari’s reading of Virilio and Arendt, they began to encourage a cautious deterritorialization, so as to prevent the formation of “realized nihilism” (230). Virilio and Arendt alike argue that the Nazi state was predicated on individualizing and totalizing modes of power, which isolate individuals such that their only possible collectivity is that organized by the state. This is what keeps “the movement… in motion”: that each specific subject is a permanent subject in a movement that is also permanent, that seizes power only in order to more wholly “organize as many people as possible within its framework and to set and keep them in motion.” H. Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of the Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1976), 24. Arendt, in turn, derives this argument directly from Mein Kampf, as well as Dieter Schwarz: “National Socialism as an ideology will not abandon its struggle until… the way of life of each individual German is has been shaped by its fundamental values and these are realized every day anew” (24).
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Adams, J.M. (2014). Control-Time: Immediacy and Constant Capitalism. In: Occupy Time: Technoculture, Immediacy, and Resistance after Occupy Wall Street. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275592_3
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