What would Nietzsche and Marx say about the 21st, and its changes in language and material relations?

Our reading Ross reminded me of a piece of content I came across on the Internet a bit ago: a long manifesto regarding our usage of social media, and the assertion that, by using social networking sites, we are engaging in a kind of literal labor that we are being drastically under-compensated for.

I’ll return to this idea later in this response, but I wish to lead with the mention of this manifesto as to stir the thought that the Internet has been a really remarkable and disruptive technology, penetrative of a lot of degrees of human life.. In Marx’s consideration, revolutionary shifts in society have always occurred after a modification of the base by technological change slowly ripples up through the superstructure. I would argue, as I’m sure many would agree, that the adoption of the World Wide Web has been the great technological change of Generation Y’s time, and a marker of transition between epochs.

To follow Nietzsche’s cue of uncovering the secret intentions of words, it seem inescapable to notice that a groundswell of language has followed with the usage of Internet and, even, new ways of mutating and creating meaningful language-image-signs. The meme, for instance, is an example of social construction assembled in a language community that exists together even if its individual members occupy very different places in space. Memes, often containing words and images but sometimes only one or the other, are immensely flexible and often one meme is recycled and incorporated into another, linking ideas in chains of signification. One attuned to the the etymology of memes would see that they can be carefully traced from one site (and accompanying language-community) to another, or sometimes developing on a single platform.

Just as Nietzsche fiercely distrusts the virtuous idea of “good”, so can we now look to a number of new “virtues” in this Internet age. The literature from a new telephone that has come into my possession implores me: “Stay connected with MOBILE LIVING“. Before the 21st century, would I possibly have been so concerned with the importance of “sharing”– “Sharing” was once taught to us by our parents; today, that authoritative role may be supplanted by Facebook, who teach us to “share” in our own way, upholding the modern construct of individuality. Conversely, the current connotation of “oversharing” is more complex now that it doesn’t necessarily refer to speech acts with limited temporal existences.

There are many, many examples of these kinds of newly minted words–they crop up each day– and the fact that I can’t recall them all easily only illustrates that, normalized through their everyday use, their new layers of meaning are subtly meshed within the way I view the world. And to pull back, as to gain appropriate distance for their comprehension, requires a little straining. Like Nietzsche, I want to assert that the positive connotation of many of these words reveals an insidious truth– in our preoccupation with “sharing” and “staying connected”, we are deceiving ourselves as to our quite opposite real social conditions

These conditions, as Marx might note, come now at the end of very long story about humans and labor: we have seen the shift from the serfdom through the Industrial Revolution (the technological change mentioned before) engendering the relationships between capitalists and proletariat, the emergence of the bourgeoisie; skipping forward a bit and and narrowing scope, we see the ascent, peak, and slow decline of labor following World War II, the simultaneous decline in manufacturing in the Global North as it shifts elsewhere in the world, capital flows opening up internationally as the development of shipping containers completely changes the way commerce is conceived and physically exchanged, the ascendancy of Global Cities and the shift of blue-collar, labor-union dominated work to white-collar service work, the shift away from Welfare State economics to a Neoliberal ideology, the extreme manifestation of the Free Market, the development of the Internet and rise to pre-eminence of Information as a new economic unit value.

Just as Capitalism had traditionally reduced workers to their ability to create commodities, so has this most recent iteration of capitalism focused on humans as creators of information (and to put it less humanistically: data). To refer back to the manifesto noted at the beginning of this response, the many users of Facebook, whether they know it or not, are harnessed to stimulate digital lines of economy: their personal data is mined and sold by large social media companies to advertising agencies who, using the information that we passively shed into the Infosphere, help online retailers market commodities back to us– at the end of the day, there is something like Marx’s surplus-value created and, as if by some unfunny joke, it obviously does not come back to us. If workers of the past could look forward to meager wage-compensation, we–the “social” laborers of the Internet– have nothing but the unremarkable carrot of “sociability” provided to us for our toil.

In reality: we are all sitting at our computers. We are no longer “out in the world” or the streets or what-have-you, seeing our fellow laborers eye-to-eye and engaging in socializing despite our labor-alienation. To play with Marx’s words a little bit, what were once social relationships between commodities are now social relationships between media. We are “connected” incorporeally, deprived of the world by our social conditions, which are masked from us just the same. We do not necessarily understand the neuroses that Internet-material-relations engender, but we know that our modes of socializing soothe that same nerve that they agitate. We are given the snake oil prescriptions of “mobile living” and “staying connected”, not realizing that they are infact the very illness we are sick from.

How does Foucault reconstitute Marxist thought so as to apply it to sex?

At first read, it is difficult to perceive Michel Foucault’s strain of Marxist influence. He does not address the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, or the means of production. In fact, in this excerpt, economics do not figure a predominant role. Indeed, his terminology foregoes the usual jargon and exchanges it for language such as power and discourse. These terms remain vague and have less political overtone then Gramsci’s use of hegemony or Althusser’s RSAs and ISAs. Yet, Gramsci and Althuser are crucial to a conceptual understanding of Foucault’s underlying assumptions. Although Foucault’s development and application of Marxist thought is highly original, he remains a Marxist in his theoretical approach.

Gramsci is a crucial, yet subdued, consideration within Foucault’s argument. The premise that everyone is an intellectual accedes to ideology a quotidian exercise that reinforces the ideology of the controlling class and their traditional intellectuals. As Gramsci elucidates, ideology is “’mediated’ by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the ‘functionaries’” (1142). Foucault structures his argument around the functionary role of private institutions in regulating sexual behaviors (e.g. doctors, psychologist, and families). Without the private efforts of intellectuals (i.e. everyone) at rooting out deviants and perverts, the extrapolation of sexual identities could not have been accomplished.

Still, Althusser’s theorization, based largely on Gramsci, formulates the structure of Foucault’s theory. Although Foucault does not borrow from Althusser’s vocabulary or wretched prose, the influence of hegemony and ideology is evident in Foucault’s formulation of power and discourse. The crux of Foucault’s argument is reliant on Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus that functions “massively and predominantly by ideology” as well as, in the second resort, to repression (1342). However, Foucault reconfigures ideology into an “analytical discourse” that objectified and rationalized sex, and which was then “meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself” (1506. 1512). Yes, the discourse repressed those non-normative sexualities, but in order to do so it had to essentially discover them.  In such a way, “sex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respite” (1504). Foucault follows Althusser’s argumentation that “the ideology of ideology…recognizes…that the ideas of a human subject exist in his actions…and if that is not the case, it lends him other ideas corresponding to the actions (however perverse) that he does perform” (1354). Actions then situate ideology in the material realm and are thus subject to the same ideological formulations as ideas. Therein, until the taxonomy of sexual tendencies was accomplished, discourse remained powerless where it was ignorant. Indeed, Althusser had already formulated that “ideology has the function…of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects” so that “there is no practice except by and in an ideology…[and] there is no ideology except by the subject and for the subject” (1355). Within this framework, discourse gained ever more power as it inculcated ever more subjects through its proliferation of sexual categories. A “centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy” flourished as discourse penetrated the peripheries of society’s sexuality, allowing the normative heterosexual monogamous married couple a silence in the discourse (1514). Such silence allows the normative couple the agency to operate undefined thus relatively untrammeled within the discourse.

As delineated, Foucault’s argument does rely on the material focus of Marxist philosophy. However, it broaches an area of reality that was once thought to be independent, purely biological, and impregnates it with ideological, or discursive, awareness. Hegemony, or power, as argued by Foucault, is reproduced in even the most intimate of actions or thoughts. Although Foucault does not address the traditional questions of Marxism, his theorization is deeply embedded in that strain of thought.