Scorched Earth by Jonathan Crary

Author:Jonathan Crary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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In our disintegrating society, the public sphere and the sphere of intimacy atrophy at the same time.

Alexander Kluge

As the internet complex expands and aggregates, more facets of our lives are funneled into the protocols of digital networks. The disaster is the irredeemable incompatibility of online operations with friendship, love, community, compassion, the free play of desire, or the sharing of doubt and pain. Many of these disappear, or they become recomposed into depleted simulations, drained of their singularity and ineffability, permeated with absence and shallowness. There is no joy or sorrow, no beauty or exuberance on the internet. One can find poems, but no poetry. How can we gauge the full consequences of so drastically confining the richness and limitlessness of human potentiality within the desolation and monotony of digital systems? The madness and violence of this dissonance is evident everywhere, but at the same time obscured by the delusional belief in the inevitability that our lives must be lived online, where our hopes and creative energies are inexorably dissipated.

In this sense, the internet complex is continuous with how capitalism has long demanded a channeling of human energies and emotions into patterns that are molded by economic and disciplinary requirements. Herbert Marcuse gave an influential account of this process: “Underlying the societal organization of human existence are basic libidinal wants and needs; highly plastic and pliable, they are shaped and coordinated with the interests of domination and thereby become a stabilizing force which binds the majority to the ruling minority.”1 Repression, he wrote, could become so effective that it took on the illusory form of freedom or independence, and one of his examples is the willing mass submission to the “entertainments” of the culture industry. Marcuse explained how the “performance principle” induced people to willingly perform pre-established kinds of labor or economically necessary functions instead of following their own desires or instincts. Central to his work was the contention that capitalism administers society through a fusion of technology and subjugation, of rationality and coercion. “Technology provides the great rationalization for the unfreedom of human beings and demonstrates the ‘technical’ impossibility of being autonomous, of determining one’s own life.”2 At the same time, he argued that capitalism’s exploitation of nature was damaging to human capacities for the sensuousness essential to the imagination and creation of non-oppressive social environments.

In the 1980s, postmodernists of various sorts dismissed Marcuse’s work as old-fashioned: his understanding of power as repressive seemed heretical to all the newly minted Foucauldian academics. For others, he failed to recognize the “playful” and creative possibilities of technology. Then, after 1991, what did it all matter anyway, since capitalism was here to stay? Notwithstanding these critiques, Marcuse allows us to see some of the continuities of the internet complex with entrenched features of capitalism that have only intensified since the 1960s. More invasive forms of technical rationality have produced what Bernard Stiegler sees as an extreme phenomenon of proletarianization.3 By this he means the ongoing colonization of consciousness, the homogenization of experience, and the anesthetization of the senses.

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