Adsensory Financialisation [1 ed.] 9781443818506, 9781443895316

Citation preview

Adsensory Financialisation

Adsensory Financialisation By

Pamela Odih

Adsensory Financialisation By Pamela Odih This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Pamela Odih All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9531-8 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9531-6

Dedicated to Professor Barbara Adam. Barbara’s extraordinary intellectual excellence inspires my feminism of time.

A share of royalties will be donated to the charity United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Established in 1946, UNICEF is dedicated to furthering the rights, wellbeing, prosperity and creative potential of children.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xvi Prologue.................................................................................................... xix Adsensory Capitalism; “The Soul and Sensation” (Epicurus) Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Adsensory Capital Accumulation Part One: Introjecting the Principle of Performance, Adsensory Technology Chapter One ............................................................................................... 18 Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 43 Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle” (Herbert Marcuse) Part Two: Adsensory Capitalist Accumulation Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 66 Adsensory Accumulation as “[re]capitalized … landed property” (Karl Marx) Part Three: Dissimulating the Body and Simulating the Soul of Biocapitalism Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 106 Dissimulating Advertising

viii

Contents

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 134 Haptic-Sensory Cognition as the Simulatory Soul of Biocapitalism Part Four: Adsensory Technologies in Synoptic Times Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 166 International Biopolitics and the Political Economy of Wearable Technology Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 187 Adsensory Insurantial Technology in Synoptic Times Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 228 #Health as the Financialisation of Social Capital Translations Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 253 Digital Advertising as Asynchronic Cultural Economies of Financialised Times Conclusion ............................................................................................... 294 Adsensory Financialisation as “The Mental Diaspora of the Networks” (Jean Baudrillard) References ............................................................................................... 312 Index ........................................................................................................ 329

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Book Front Cover: Market Just or Just Market? Figure Pro.1. “And would the future tempt the ardent … Did not completion live within the past?” (Ann Yearsley, Familiar Epistle to a Friend, 1787). Figure I.1. “Lend me thy dark veil. Science darts her strong ray; In the orb of bright learning she sits. Haste! Haste! Cloth’d by thee, I can yet keep my way, Still secure from her critics, or Wits” (Ann Yearsley, Addressed to Ignorance, 1787). Figure P.1. “Indifference come! Thy torpid juices shed On my keen sense: plunge deep my wounded heart” (Ann Yearsley, To indifference, 1787). Figure 1.1 “Tis come! See how it reve’ls in the flood” (Ann Yearsley, On Jephthah’s Vow. Taken in a Literal Sense, 1787). Figure 2.1. “Then come, gentle Goddess, sit full in my looks; Let my accents be founded by thee: While Crito in pomp, bears his burden of books, On the plains of wild Nature I’m free” (Ann Yearsley, Addressed to Ignorance, 1787). Figure P.2. “Protected thus from ev’ry barbed dart, Which oft from soulcorroding passion flies, I own the transport of a blameless heart, While on the air the pow’rless fury dies” (Ann Yearsley, Written On A Visit, 1787). Figure 3.1. “Florus, canst thou define that innate spark Which blazes but for glory? Canst thou paint The trembling rapture in its infant dawn, Ere young Ideas spring; to local Thought, Arrange the busy phantoms of the mind, And drag the distant timid shadows forth” (Ann Yearsley, … on Genius Unimproved, 1787). Figure P.3. “As well command the hoary Alps to bear The Amaranth, or Phoebus-loving flow’r! Bid the Behemoth cut the yielding air, Or rob the Godhead of creative pow’r!” (Ann Yearsley, Written on a Visit, 1787).

x

List of Illustrations

Figure 4.1. “Hail! Steady Friendship, stubborn in thy plea! Most justly so, when Virtue is thy guide: Beneath your mingled ray my soul is free, And native Genius soars with conscious pride” (Ann Yearsley, Written on a Visit, 1787). Figure 5.1. “Shou’dst thou view a weaker spirit, Moving in her sphere confin’d, Be it still thy greatest merit. To forgive, and be resign’d” (Ann Yearsley, To a Sensible but Passionate Friend, 1787). Figure P.4. “Yet, Precept! Shall thy richest store be mine, When soft’ning pleasure would invade my breast; To thee my struggling spirit shall resign; On thy cold bosom will I sink to rest” (Ann Yearsley, Written on a Visit, 1787). Figure 6.1. “The subject was peculiar, and my friend sullenly trembled for his well-earn’d fame; Yet why? – no vict’ry was by me pursued, Nor would I, for her trophies, bid thee yield” (Ann Yearsley, Epistle to a Friend, 1787). Figure 7.1. “Farewel, ye groves! and when the friendly moon Tempts each fair sister o’er the vernal green, Oh, may each lovely maid reflect how soon Lactilla saw, and sighing left the scene” (Ann Yearsley, Written on a Visit, 1787). Figure 8.1. “Exquisite thy mental pleasure, Common transports are not thine; Far surpassing vulgar measure, All thy joys are near divine” (Ann Yearsley, To a Sensible but Passionate Friend, 1787). Figure 8.2. @FitbitUK, SmartPoints (Name Network Analysis). Figure 8.3. @FitbitUK, SmartPoints (Chain Network Analysis). Figure 8.4. Fitbit UK & Ireland Facebook (Chain Network Analysis). Figure 9.1. “Vile ravager of Order! who shall hold Thy line of false morality?” (Ann Yearsley, The Materialist, 1787). Figure C.1. “Ah! With too vain – yet ever new, For where resides the equal mind? Ye sons of woe, I ask of you, Where shall the wretch this comfort find?” (Ann Yearsley, Stanzas on Affliction, 1787).

PREFACE DIALOGIC ENGAGEMENT WITH THE OBJECTIVIST VERSUS SUBJECTIVIST MODELLING OF BIOSENSOR Interviewer: So why did you do the marathon? Interviewee: I do a lot of running, and the marathon is like the ultimate thing to train for really. Train for the marathon and it makes all your other races improves as well. Once a year it is the thing to train for really. Interviewer: What does it mean to you? What does it mean to you to do the marathon? Interviewee: What does it mean to me? Erhm. More dedication, things required. I think London’s probably special. The London marathon [compared with] others around the country is special. People are proud to do it. But it is congested. Not a very good marathon to do fast times on. It is so congested, zig, zagging around. Interviewer: And what about the training; how did the training go? Interviewee: It started at Christmas. And a long slog. Haven't been injured. Had niggles but nothing to stop me. So it’s been quite good really. Interviewer: And how did you train? Interviewee: There is this book called the Hansons Plan. The Hansons training plan. Which is an American company, which has this pretty; well a lot of people resort to training plan. So I followed the plan of the book for eighteen weeks. Interviewer: Hansons? ["Yea Hansons Plan"]. Tell me about that, sounds nice. Interviewee: It's these two guys in America who invented this training plan. They run a running club team over in America. They have written this book and it. And you run six days a week, do three hard sessions a week and then six days. Pretty intensive. Strange thing about it is, you never run more than sixteen miles in the training. Whereas some training plans you run like a twenty two mile run you know as a training. Hansons

xii

Preface

it is designed to be, because you are running every day. You are always running on tired legs. It’s designed like that. Interviewer: How does it work the plan? How is it a plan? Interviewee: It tells you, what, how many miles to run. What pace to run each day. Interviewer: Oh and does it tell you how to run? Interviewee: No it doesn't tell you how to run. It is the speed and the distance really. Interviewer: Does it tell you to actually log the running in any way? Interviewee: No. I do log the running though, for err GPS watches. Interviewer: Oh you got a GPS watch? Interviewee: [Lifting sleeve and revealing GPS watch]. Yea which everybody needs really to say what you are doing. Interviewer: How does that work? Interviewee: Well, it tells you, your pace, per mile that you are running at. So if you are doing seven minute miles, and that's your target, for your final time. So you are doing seven minute miles. So you don’t need to, [manually], make sure you’re not running too fast or too slowly really. Interviewer: And how do you log that? Interviewee: Well you can upload it to your computer, to Garmin or Strava. Just upload it and it just keeps a record of all your runs. It gives you all your splits [split time] and everything like that. Interviewer: What is a split? Interviewee: Each mile; the speed of each mile. Interviewer: Wow Interviewee: Because in the marathon is always slower as you get to the end really. Interviewer: So how does it help, actually being able to log your times in terms of the marathon? Interviewee: It is useful to see. When you are running it is useful to see, that you're not running too slow to keep your pace. Afterwards it’s good to

Adsensory Financialisation

xiii

look and see: that's where I went wrong. I went too fast there or I went too slow at that mile. It's good to, logs all the miles you do in a year. Interviewer: And do you share that? Interviewee: In the *** [name of running club] It's a group and everybody can share each other's training. Interviewer: And how does that group atmosphere work? How does it work in terms of helping you? Actually the group on line Interviewee: In your running club, you sort of know people who are a similar speeds as you. So you sort of can gauge, the training that they do. And [it] also maps out the routes that they do, so if you want to find another six mile route you can follow their route. It’s got useful things like that really. Interviewer: So you are like a community online. Do you talk to each other and help each other? Interviewee: Yea. And you can also, there is a kudos. Interviewer: Kudos, points? Interviewee: Well you know, thumbs up with a like, with Facebook sort of thing. When someone has done a run you can sort of like it. Interviewer: And does that means something to actually have that? Interviewee: I think so. Yea I think it does. Yea. It is a bit like with Facebook, if someone "likes" your comment it gives you a bit of a warm feeling. Interviewer: I have been doing some running, but to actually be able to have the stamina to stick it out. Does it take a lot of sort of focus and concentration? Interviewee: The training as well is hard. At parts of the training and you're thinking: you don't wanna go out, you don't wanna do this. And then you get to the race. You get to the start line and that's the hard part some times. Getting to the marathon because you get injured through the training. Because it is so intensive training. Then you always usually manage to get to mile twenty and after mile twenty is when the legs really start to hurt. It's a matter of getting through the last six miles.

xiv

Preface

Interviewer: Do you feel that you are competing with anyone or are you competing with yourself? Interviewee: I am competing with myself. Just trying to do the best, than what I did last time. We also have, at the club we have these standards depending on what age you are. If you are at a certain time you get gold, silver, bronze standard. Targets to work for. Interviewer: So the Standards are? Interviewee: Based on time yeah, motivation. Interviewer: And you are presented with these medals? Interviewee: That's quite good Interviewer: So what are your ambitions then in terms of ["running"] Yeah Interviewee: I would like to get under three minutes, three hours ten minutes. I think, I didn't stop my watch at the end. I think I was about ten seconds over.

Interviewer: Why didn't you stop your watch? Interviewee: Because I am going over the line and sort of; you can’t hardly stand-up let alone stop the watch. Thirty second latter, I did eventually.

Interviewer: And during the run, do you look actually look at your watch at all? Interviewee: Yeah Interviewer: Really, how? Interviewee: Yeah every five minutes, I reckon, to check you are running at the right speed. Make sure you are not going too fast or too slow. Interviewer: Is the design really good for marathons then? Interviewee: Yeah all running really. A lot of people use GPS watches, serious runners yeah. They are essential really. Interviewer: Why are they essential? Interviewee: If you’re training, if you’re, say you are doing speed training, you want to do a mile at a certain pace. If you are running too

Adsensory Financialisation

xv

fast, you’ll only be able to do two of them, whereas if you go to do like six mile repeats, you got to make sure you doing the right time. Interviewer: And what about the Fitbit? What do you know about; the Fitbit? Interviewee: Yeah, I haven't got a Fitbit. I don't think they do pacing things, they do more for: how many steps you do in a day? Interviewer: Pedometer Interviewee: Yeah. General activity. Garmin do, they are running watches, you see they are designed for running Interviewer: Does it link to anything else? Does it link to music? Interviewee: Some of them do. Strava does. I think you can link Strava to your phone. When you have your phone you can link it with your music. You never know, the new one might do. They are bringing one out every year

Interviewer: What do you think would help to link it to; to the watch to help you run? Interviewee: Music is good. If I am training I use music. You can't do it when you are racing. You need it when you are running on your own. It is really hard to run fast on your own. It is easier in a race, because you’re carried along.

Interviewer: Does the watch help you run fast by yourself? Interviewee: No I think if you keep looking at your watch, you think: I'm behind, I'm behind, I'm behind Interviewer: When you are running by yourself does it help you run faster? Interviewee: The watch. It makes you run to your pace. It doesn't make you run faster. It makes you do what you're supposed to do really. Interviewer: How does it make you? Interviewee: I am forcing myself. I am behind and I force myself to speed up. If I didn't have a watch I wouldn’t know to speed up. (London Marathon Runner, April 24th 2016)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express a heartfelt thank you to Professor David Knights who continues to inspire my academic development. Professor Barbara Adam’s prolific contribution to the study of time and society has been inspirational, and I would like to pay tribute to her work. Genuine appreciation to Camilla Harding (Commissioning Editor), Amanda Millar and Victoria Carruthers (Editorial) at Cambridge Scholars Publishing. My colleagues at Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths University of London have been supportive: Dr. Brian Alleyne, Prof. Vikki Bell, Prof. Vic Seidler and Prof. Bev Skeggs. Big thank you to my friends Andrea Reay and Ivalee Harris. Special heartfelt thank you to my friend Andy and the enchanting cultural delights of the Edinburgh Festival 2016. Love and best wishes to my family.

Illustrations All photographic images by Pamela Odih © Book Front Cover: Market Just or Just Market? Pamela Odih(c) 2015 Figure Pro.1. “And would the future tempt the ardent … Did not completion live within the past?” (Ann Yearsley, Familiar Epistle to a Friend, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2015. Figure I.1. “Lend me thy dark veil. Science darts her strong ray; In the orb of bright learning she sits. Haste! Haste! Cloth’d by thee, I can yet keep my way, Still secure from her critics, or Wits” (Ann Yearsley, Addressed to Ignorance, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2015. Figure P.1. “Indifference come! Thy torpid juices shed On my keen sense: plunge deep my wounded heart” (Ann Yearsley, To indifference, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2015.

Adsensory Financialisation

xvii

Figure 1.1 “Tis come! See how it reve’ls in the flood” (Ann Yearsley, On Jephthah’s Vow. Taken in a Literal Sense, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2015. Figure 2.1. “Then come, gentle Goddess, sit full in my looks; Let my accents be founded by thee: While Crito in pomp, bears his burden of books, On the plains of wild Nature I’m free” (Ann Yearsley, Addressed to Ignorance, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016. Figure P.2. “Protected thus from ev’ry barbed dart, Which oft from soulcorroding passion flies, I own the transport of a blameless heart, While on the air the pow’rless fury dies” (Ann Yearsley, Written On A Visit, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016. Figure 3.1. “Florus, canst thou define that innate spark Which blazes but for glory? Canst thou paint The trembling rapture in its infant dawn, Ere young Ideas spring; to local Thought, Arrange the busy phantoms of the mind, And drag the distant timid shadows forth” (Ann Yearsley, … on Genius Unimproved, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016. Figure P.3. “As well command the hoary Alps to bear The Amaranth, or Phoebus-loving flow’r! Bid the Behemoth cut the yielding air, Or rob the Godhead of creative pow’r!” (Ann Yearsley, Written on a Visit, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016. Figure 4.1. “Hail! Steady Friendship, stubborn in thy plea! Most justly so, when Virtue is thy guide: Beneath your mingled ray my soul is free, And native Genius soars with conscious pride” (Ann Yearsley, Written on a Visit, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016. Figure 5.1. “Shou’dst thou view a weaker spirit, Moving in her sphere confin’d, Be it still thy greatest merit. To forgive, and be resign’d” (Ann Yearsley, To a Sensible but Passionate Friend, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016. Figure P.4. “Yet, Precept! Shall thy richest store be mine, When soft’ning pleasure would invade my breast; To thee my struggling spirit shall resign; On thy cold bosom will I sink to rest” (Ann Yearsley, Written on a Visit, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016.

xviii

Acknowledgements

Figure 6.1. “The subject was peculiar, and my friend sullenly trembled for his well-earn’d fame; Yet why? – no vict’ry was by me pursued, Nor would I, for her trophies, bid thee yield” (Ann Yearsley, Epistle to a Friend, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016. Figure 7.1. “Farewel, ye groves! and when the friendly moon Tempts each fair sister o’er the vernal green, Oh, may each lovely maid reflect how soon Lactilla saw, and sighing left the scene” (Ann Yearsley, Written on a Visit, 1787). Photographic Image, London May 2016. Figure 8.1. “Exquisite thy mental pleasure, Common transports are not thine; Far surpassing vulgar measure, All thy joys are near divine” (Ann Yearsley, To a Sensible but Passionate Friend, 1787). Netlytic Social Data Analysis Image, Fitbit < 14th January 2016. Figure 8.2. @FitbitUK, SmartPoints (Name Network Analysis), January 2016. Netlytic Analytic Output. Figure 8.3. @FitbitUK, SmartPoints (Chain Network Analysis), January 2016. Netlytic Analytic Output. Figure 8.4. Fitbit UK & Ireland Facebook (Chain Network Analysis), February 2016, Netlytic Analytic Output. Figure 9.1. “Vile ravager of Order! who shall hold Thy line of false morality?” (Ann Yearsley, The Materialist, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2015. Figure C.1. “Ah! With too vain – yet ever new, For where resides the equal mind? Ye sons of woe, I ask of you, Where shall the wretch this comfort find?” (Ann Yearsley, Stanzas on Affliction, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2015.

PROLOGUE ADSENSORY CAPITALISM “THE SOUL AND SENSATION” (EPICURUS)

Figure Pro.1. “And would the future tempt the ardent … Did not completion live within the past?” (Ann Yearsley, Familiar Epistle to a Friend, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2015.

xx

Prologue Perfection, be it trifling as the mote Which reve’ls in the Sun-beam, cannot own Its essence self-originating. Vain Are all thy pleas to social rules of Man! Vain are thy toils in Science! Vain the web Hoary Philosophy shall ever spin, If, in thy future views, thou ne’er canst form Some good to hope for! (Ann Yearsley The Materialist, 1787)

Allegorical metaphors of, “the mote” trifling with perfection as it reve’ls in a stream of sunlight, might initially appear as an intemperate sojourn into the esoteric recondite aura of atomist physics. Indeed, eliding economics and atomist physics, in the analysis of biotechnology, might appear, as itself, an indeterminate aleatory encounter. Nevertheless, to elide and encounter physics in the economics of biotechnology has some precedence in the newly emerging field of econophysics (Savoiu 2013, Richmond et. al. 2013, Abergel et al. 2015). Furthermore, Karl Marx’s (1841), Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, provides the archetype exploration of abstract self-sufficiency as contiguous with the biotechnological encounter that is, clinamen. As Marx expresses it: We now consider the consequence that follows directly from the declination of the atom. In it is expressed the atom’s negation of all motion and relation by which it is determined as a particular mode of being by another being. This is represented in such a way that the atom abstracts from the opposing being and withdraws itself from it. But what is contained herein, namely, its negation of all relation to something else, must be realised, positively established. This can only be done if the being to which it relates itself is none other than itself, hence equally an atom, and, since it itself is directly determined, many atoms. The repulsion of the many atoms is therefore the necessary realisation of the lex atomi, [law of the atom] as Lucretius calls the declination. … But when I relate to myself as to something which is directly another, then my relationship is a material one … In the repulsion of the atoms, therefore, their materiality, which was posited in the fall in a straight line, and the form-determination, which was established in the declination, are united synthetically. (Marx 1841/2006:116-117)

The picture that emerges from Ann Yearsley’s, The Materialist, Titus Lucretius Carus’ (Lucretius) De Rerum Natura, and Karl Marx’s Epicurean inspired, clinamen, is that, “Repulsion is the first form of selfconsciousness, it corresponds therefore to that self-consciousness, which

Adsensory Financialisation

xxi

conceives itself as immediate-being, as abstractly individual” (Marx 1841/2006:117). Inferred in this observation is Marx’s concern to differentiate Democritean and Epicurean ancient Greek philosophical conceptions of chance. Democritus (ca.460-370 BC) and Epicurus (ca. 341-271/0 BC) espoused an atomist philosophy predicated on the belief that the universe’s constituent elements are atoms and void. While equally committed to atomist physics, the philosophers posited diametrically opposed conceptions of certainty and chance. According to Democritus, continuity and alteration, in the progression of atoms, manifests in accordance with a predetermined order. As Marx expresses it, Democritus was dedicated to discerning, “the way in which the relationship between the atom and the world, which is apparent to the senses is determined” (1841/2006:97). Democritus asserted that sensuous impression was not an integral feature of the atom: “It is not objective appearance, but subjective semblance [Schein]” (ibid.). The unswerving principles of the universe are atoms and void, all else is merely subjective opinion pertaining to the nature of semblance (ibid.). The sensation of cold, and that of heat, according to Democritus, exist in the realm of opinion; in empirical reality, exclusively atoms and void exist (ibid.). “Democritus makes sensuous reality into subjective semblance” (ibid. 98). Excluded from, “the world of objects”, sensuous reality resides precariously in selfconsciousness; individual self-consciousness is, “where the concept of the atom and sensuous perception face each other as enemies” (ibid.). Marx compares Democritus’ abjuration of sensuous reality with Epicurus’ exhortation of sense perception. For, Epicurus (1993:25) consistently asserted, “whatever image we receive by direct apprehension of our mind or our sense organs, whether of shape or of essential properties, that is the true shape of the solid object, since it is created by the constant repetition of the image or the impression it has left behind”. Suffice to say, while Democritus’ atomist physics configures sensuous reality as, “subjective semblance”, conversely, “Epicurus turns it into objective appearance” (Marx 1841/2006:98-99). The former is thus propelled, “into the arms of positive knowledge”, in the quest for objective determinants of reality, while the latter vehemently challenges the pursuit of necessary cause (ibid. 99). Indeed, Epicurus (1993:67), in a, Letter to Menoeceus, ascribes to chance equal relevance, as pertains to necessity, as a determinant of cause: “Some things happen by necessity, others as the result of chance; other things are subject to our control”. Referring to the denotation of necessity in Democritean physics, Epicurus remarks, “Because necessity is not accountable to anyone, he sees that chance is unstable, but what lies in our control is subject to no master; it naturally follows, then, that blame or

xxii

Prologue

praise attend our decisions” (ibid.). Epicurus’ reference here to a ubiquitous masterly force purposely evokes a religiosity that is too easily ascribed to necessity; conversely, Epicurus is keen to prompt, “Understanding that chance is neither a god … nor an unstable cause of all things” (ibid. 67-68). For, “the wise man does not think that either good or evil is furnished by chance to humankind for the purpose of living a happy life, but that the opportunities for great good or evil are bestowed by it” (ibid. 68). Epicurus appears, here, to infer that Democritean physics needs necessity to be real; this overrides the reality of necessity. As Epicurus indicates, in the following slight remark, “Indeed, it would be better to accept the myths about the gods than to be a slave to the ‘destiny’ of the physical philosophers. The myths present the hope of appeasing the gods through worship, while the other is full of unappeasable necessity” (ibid. 67). Here, and elsewhere, chance is entangled with human agency, “of living a happy life”; chance is an emergent feature of reflexive prudence; chance has a discernable ethics (ibid. 68). With regard to the latter, it is evident that Epicurus’ ethics of chance is integrally bound up with the, clinamen. Epicurus (ca. 341-271/0 BC) formulated a system of philosophy based on the atomist doctrine that, “the universe consists of bodies and void” (Epicurus 1993:21). It is evident that the former exists, as, “perception itself in all men bears witness” (ibid.). No matter how infinitesimal and, “imperceptible”, the existence of bodies, we can, “by necessity form a judgement”, epistemologically, “through the senses” (ibid.). Logical deduction affirms the existence of, “void and place”; if it, “did not exist, bodies would have no place to be nor anything through which to move, as they are clearly seen to be moving” (ibid. 22). There are distinctions in the ontological existence of bodies: “Some are compounds and others are those from which the compounds have been formed: These latter are indivisible and unchangeable if everything is not about to be reduced to nonexistence” (ibid.). Thus, Epicurus professed that something enduring remains, even when compounds are broken up: “One that is solid by nature and incapable of being dissolved” (ibid.). Consequently, “the first beginnings must be indivisible bodily substances” (ibid.). As Epicurus surmises: THE ATOMS … we must consider that atoms exhibit none of the qualities belonging to visible things except shape, mass, and size, and whatever is necessarily related to shape. For every quality changes; but the atoms do not change, since, in the dissolution of compound substances, there must remain something solid and indestructible, which causes changes not into

Adsensory Financialisation

xxiii

the nonexistent, nor from the nonexistent, but as a result of the transpositions of some particles and the approach or departure of others. Therefore, it is necessary that these shifting particles be everlasting and not share in the nature of what is changeable, but rather possess their own mass and configurations. For they must needs remain permanent. Even among things perceptible to us that change their configurations by loss of matter, there is still perceived an inherent shape; the other qualities do not remain in the object as it changes, just as shape survives, but they are removed from the entire body. These properties that are left behind are enough to cause the differences in compound substances, since it is necessary that some at least remain and are not destroyed into the nonexistent. (ibid. 2728).

Having elucidated the unchanging, solidity and indestructability of the atom, Epicurus sets about describing the constituent parts of the atom. Central to Epicurus’ principle of the atom, is that bodies must not be assumed to be constituted by an infinite number of atom particles. For, if we were to presume that infinite particles constitute a limited body, our calculations and analyses would be driven into the realm of nonexistence. As Epicurus expresses it, “Therefore, we must not only reject a cutting into ever smaller parts to infinity, lest we deprive all things of strength and in the composition of aggregate bodies be compelled to consume existing things by reducing them to nonexistence; but we must also not think that in finite bodies a reduction to ever smaller parts to infinity can occur” (ibid. 28). Epicurus’ supposition, here, has relevance to analyses of technology; the suggestion that bodies of technology are constituted by atoms is an attractive proposition when situated alongside an analysis of the internal workings of inter-dependent systems, markets etc. An additional feature of, “The Parts of the Atom”, of significance, to the analysis of market dynamics, is Epicurus’ observation concerning the velocity of the atom. For, it is asserted that, “atoms must possess equal velocity, whenever they move through the void, with nothing coming into collision with them” (ibid. 30). Epicurus defined a progression through the void, which entailed that, “neither will heavy bodies move more swiftly than the small and light, when nothing encounters them; nor do the small bodies move more quickly than the large; since they maintain a uniform course, provided nothing collides with them” (ibid.). The key conceptual issue here is the idea of constancy in the velocity of a phenomenon, which is only disrupted when it encounters and collides with an external force of equal motion. As Epicurus puts it, “For to the extent that either motion is maintained, so long will it keep on a course as swift as thought, until something collides with it, either from outside or from its own weight, which counteracts the force of what struck it” (ibid. 30-31). In this

xxiv

Prologue

statement, Epicurus provides intriguing insights into how atomist physics might be applied to the analysis of time and indeterminate markets. Time, arising from the collision of atoms, is discerned by Epicurus as so instantaneous that it exceeds conceivability. As Epicurus expresses it, “Moreover, the atoms’ passage through the void, when it meets no object that collides with them, completes any conceivable distance in an inconceivably brief time. For collision, or the absence of it, assumes the likeness of slowness or speed” (ibid. 31). The passage of time, although imperceptible when conceiving the collision of atoms, is also a context for the alignment of meaning as received through the senses. As Epicurus expresses it, “However, in a passage of time perceptible only to the mind, they move not in one direction, but are constantly colliding with one another until the constancy of their motion comes under scrutiny of the senses” (ibid.). The visual metaphor of motes streaming through a sunbeam of light is an evocative imagery of value here, and one described above as utilised in Ann Yearsley’s, The Materialist, and Lucretius’, De Rerum Natura. When viewing motes in a sunbeam, it may appear that these particles are chaotically bouncing around the light; in actuality the motes reve’l; they “draw back”, “retract” (Johnson 1837) from collisions with the particles of light. This has particular value for an analysis of technology, in that it suggests a theoretical frame for conceptualising selfdetermination as an outcome of chance encounter, at the same time as enabling a framing of chance that does not descend into solipsistic chaos theory. Indeed, Epicurus infers processes of self-determination in the following further account of the mental apprehension of the collision between atoms: Nor must we suppose that in moments perceptible only to thought the entire moving compound also moves in several directions, for this is inconceivable. If this were so, when it arrived all together in a perceptible period of time from any quarter of the infinite, it would not have set out from the place from which we perceived its motion. This visible motion will be the result of internal collision even if up to the visible level we admit that the speed of its motion meets no resistance from collision. It is useful also to grasp this fundamental principle. (Epicurus 1993:31)

The universe, within which bodies reside, is of infinite scale; possessing, no “outermost edge”, it “has no limit” (ibid. 22). Boundless in its calibration, “in the numbers of the bodies”, as well as, “the magnitude of the void”, the universe is limitless (ibid.). The motion of atoms in space is, “continuously forever”, with some extended long distances apart from each other and, “others in turn maintaining their rapid vibration, whenever

Adsensory Financialisation

xxv

they happen to be checked by their interlacing with others or covered by the interlaced atoms” (ibid. 23). Atoms descend downwards through the void, unless they are deflected by a collision with other atoms. The occurrence of atoms colliding, according to Epicurus, is an outcome of, “the nature of the void separating each atom by itself … since it is unable to furnish any resistance”, and also, “the hardness belonging to the atoms” (ibid.). The combined effect of these features, “makes them rebound after colliding, to the extent that their interlacing grants them a return to their former position following collision” (ibid.). Axiomatic with the deflection of the atom from the downward descent is timelessness: “Of their motions there is no beginning; the atoms and the void are the cause”, and this provides a basis, “for the understanding of existing things” (ibid.). Epicurus’, Letter to Herodotus, asserts consistently an atomist physicist treatise on the nature of existence, and this philosophy encompasses the essential composition of the soul. In reference to perceptions and emotional feelings, Epicurus (ibid. 32) introduces the idea that one should, “consider that the soul is a body of fine particles dispersed throughout the entire organism and most resembling a wind that contains a certain mixture of heat, in some ways resembling this (the wind) and in others this (the heat)”. Additionally, some properties of the soul are interactive with, “the rest of the organism” (ibid.). Epicurus professed that all of these properties of the soul are, “made evident by the powers of the mind, its feelings, its mobility, and those faculties of which we are deprived when we die” (ibid.). The latter assertion infers reciprocity eliding the existence of the soul and the body. Indeed, while it is Epicurus’ assertion that the soul is the principal impulse of sensation, “it would not have acquired this faculty, if it were not somehow enclosed by the rest of the body” (ibid.). The body informs the soul about that which precipitates a sensation, but the soul’s knowledge of sensation is not entirely drawn from the body. Epicurus deduces that it is, “for this reason, the body has no sensation once the soul departs” (ibid.). By inference, for as long as the soul remains within the body it, “will never cease to feel sensation even when some other part of the body is lost” (ibid. 33). Returning again to the relation of the body to the soul, Epicurus suggests that even where part of the soul is destroyed, as part of the destruction of the encasing body, “if the soul remains at all, it will have sensation” (ibid.). Conversely, the body, even if it endures in entirety or in parts, “will not have sensation when that aggregate of atoms, of whatever size, that goes to produce the nature of soul, is missing” (ibid.). Thus, if the whole body is obliterated, “the soul disperses and no longer possesses the same faculties” (ibid.). Suffice to say, “It is not possible to imagine the soul existing and having sensation

xxvi

Prologue

without the body, and experiencing these movements when there no longer exists that which encloses and surrounds the soul, in which it now exists and has these movements”. (ibid. 33). This observation leads Epicurus to explore whether the soul is incorporeal. Defining this latter term as applied to that which is perceived “as existing by itself” (ibid.). Such attributes appear directly relevant to the nature of void; “The void can neither act nor be acted upon, but only furnishes to bodies motion through it” (ibid). Conversely, the soul, unlike the incorporeal void, receives from the body elements of sensation and, thus, “the soul would not be able to act or be acted upon”, in this manner if it were incorporeal (ibid.). Axiomatic to Epicurus’, “the soul and sensation” (ibid. 32), is a conception of time as experientially conceived. As Epicurus describes, “We must not search for time as we do for the other things that we look for in an object, referring to the images we have in our minds, but must draw from direct experience, according to which we speak of, ‘a long time’, or, ‘a short time’, applying our intuition to this as we do to other things”. (ibid. 36). Epicurus countenances against the adoption of novel expressions of time, prioritising instead experientially unstructured epistemologies of time, “already in existence” (ibid.). In order to retreat from a solipsistic relativism, Epicurus asserts against predicating, “of time anything else as having the same existence as this unique property … but take into consideration only that with which we associate time and by which we measure it” (ibid.). Time, therefore, comes to be perceived through our experience; Epicurus associates this form of impermanency with the concept of, “accidents”. Whereby, the latter, “are to be regarded as they appear to be: Neither attending permanently nor possessing the status of material substance; rather, they are seen in the manner in which the actual act of perception reveals their proper characteristics” (ibid. 35). Time and temporal consciousness, as features of experience, need not be demonstrated factually, but, rather, experientially as reflections on our association of, “time with days and nights and portions of them, just as we do with feelings and lack of feeling, motion and rest, recognizing time as a certain particular sort of accident of these things, by virtue of which we call it time” (ibid. 36). Suffice to say, time is secular in its ontology, and is epistemologically conceived through experience. Epicurus is, here, also intent to assuage existential anxieties concerning, for example, fearing, “the loss of sensation itself that comes with death as if it were something that affected them directly” (ibid. 41). Such existential anxieties are not based on logical judgement; they are driven by “irrational impulse” (ibid.). Conversely, Epicurus espoused a philosophy of being in time, in which

Adsensory Financialisation

xxvii

rational judgement is axiomatic with being, “attentive to the feelings that we have and to sensations both common and particular in accordance with a common or particular concern, as well as to every available perception, according to each of the standards of judgement” (ibid.). To assume that life is to be judged in terms of subjective feelings and sensations is not necessarily to advocate an ethics of hedonistic reverie; indeed, Epicurus adhered to prudence as, “The beginning and the greatest good of all … from it derive all the other virtues” (ibid. 67). In Epicurus’ advocacy for the virtue of prudence, can be discerned a pedagogy for us on, “how impossible it is to live pleasantly without living wisely, virtuously, and justly, just as we cannot live wisely, virtuously, and justly without living pleasantly” (ibid.). Thus, it can be discerned that the virtues exist in reciprocal relation with the living of the, “pleasant life” (ibid.). Because Epicurus denies necessity’s accountability, “to anyone”, time and chance reside, “in our control”, and are, “subject to no master”; praise or admonishment, “attend our decisions” (ibid.). Comprehending, “that chance is neither a god … nor an unstable cause of all things”, furnishes the progression in time with an ethics of the aleatory, based on the materiality, “of living a happy life” (ibid. 68). Karl Marx’s (1841), Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, was more favourably inspired by Epicurus’ atomist physics on time and chance. Indeed, the comparative methodological technique that Marx utilises, intentionally positions Epicurus against Democritus so they perform one of two distinctly oppositional traditions in ancient Greek’s scientific investigation. It is evident that Marx intends that the victor of the dyadic encounter will represent a resolution to, “the function of contradiction and the nature of science” (Fenves 1986:434). Thus, Marx sought to intervene in a tension arising between two contrasting philosophical traditions; in so doing, “Democritus is presented as a physicist who is concerned only with the empirical laws that govern matter. Epicurus, on the other hand, denies necessity, accepts chance when he introduces the atoms’ swerve (clinamen)” (ibid.). Moreover, the latter’s repudiation of scientific truth, as premised on “noncontradiction”, provided for Marx further affirmation of Epicurus’ rightful casting as an advocate of a science based on indeterminancy (ibid.). In accordance with Epicurus, Marx countenanced that the atoms’ kinetics is threefold: “One motion is the fall in a straight line, the second originates in the deviation of the atom from the straight line, and the third is established through the repulsion of the many atoms” (1841/2006:108).

xxviii

Prologue

Marx was keen to distinguish Democritus from Epicurus in respect to the second feature of the motion of atoms: “The declination of the atom from the straight line differentiates the one from the other” (ibid.). In the writings of Democritus, can be discerned a conception of declination predicated on, “the opposite of freedom”, depicted, “with the deterministic and forced meeting of atoms” (ibid. 111). Conversely, Epicurean physics provides for complexity in its conception of time, chance, and identity. As stated previously, Epicurus conceived of a universe constituted by atoms and the void; atoms are in constant motion, “move continuously forever”; atoms inhabit vast distances from each other as they descend vertically through the void; “others in turn maintaining their rapid vibration, whenever they happen to be checked by their interlacing with others or covered by the interlaced atoms”; the void furnishes no resistance to the colliding atoms and thus they rebound; “Of their motions there is no beginning; the atoms and the void are the cause” (Epicurus 1993:23). Epicurus’ determined negation of a start point in the atoms’ motion is developed further in Marx’s account of declination: Just as the point is negated [aufgehoben] in the line, so is every falling body negated in the straight line it describes. Its specific quality does not matter here at all. A falling apple describes a perpendicular line just as a piece of iron does. Every body, insofar as we are concerned with the motion of falling, is therefore nothing but a moving point, and indeed a point without independence, which in a certain mode of being – the straight line which it describes – surrenders its individuality [Einzelheit]. (Marx 1841/2006:111)

Marx’s depiction of atoms - standing distances afar from each other, descending through spatial void - constitutes the atom’s descent as, “the immediate negation of abstract space” (ibid.). The atom negates dissolving into the space of the void, hence, it forms itself as, “a spatial point”. As Marx expresses it, “The solidity, the intensity, which maintains itself in itself against the incohesion of space, can only be added by virtue of a principle which negates space in its entire domain, a principle such as time is in real nature” (ibid. 111-112). The principle of identity through negation becomes ever more evident in Marx’s account of the, “relative existence, which confronts the atom”; “the mode of being, which it has to negate, is the straight line” (ibid. 112). Vertical descent through the spatial void is the self-evident motion of the atom. According to Marx (ibid.), negating the vertical descent - the immediate motion of the atom - can be spatially apprehended as, “the declination from the straight line”. In accordance with Epicurean atomist physics, Marx recognised that a

Adsensory Financialisation

xxix

property of the atom, “is that of being pure form, negation of all relativity, of all relation to another mode of being” (ibid.). As wholly self-sufficient bodies, the self-determination of the atom presumes that their progression through the void is, “not in straight, but in oblique lines” (ibid.). Consequences, as Marx observes, “The motion of falling is the motion of non-self-sufficiency” (ibid.). Epicurus depicts the materiality of the atom in terms of its vertical descent through the spatial void, and as Marx (ibid.) observes, Epicurus depicts the, “form-determination” of the atom in terms of its, “declination from the straight line”; it is evident that, “these opposed determinations are represented as directly opposed motions” (ibid.). Marx, in homage to Lucretius’, De Rerum Natura, concedes “Lucretius therefore is correct when he maintains that the declination breaks the fati foedera [bonds of fate] and, since he applies this immediately to consciousness, it can be said of the atom that the declination is that something in its breast that can fight back and resist” (Marx 1841/2006:113). Cognizant of the problematics of attributing essentialist properties to the, “formdetermination”, of the atom, Marx (ibid.) emphasises that Epicurus ventures, “to represent the declination as being as imperceptible as possible to the senses”. Indeed, Epicurus (1993:23) evokes the occurrence of the atom’s declination, as happening in an infinitesimal small space and, “Of their motions there is no beginning; the atoms and the void are the cause”. To assume a point in time, and discernable cause for the atom’s swerve away from the straight line, Marx’s argument would be to, “throw the declination of the atom back into the domain of determinism, out of which it was precisely to be lifted” (Marx 1841/2006:114). Indeed, to inquire into determined causation is a somewhat paradoxical venture for an Epicurean physicist; this would require inquiring, “after the cause that makes the atom a principle – a clearly meaningless inquiry to anyone for whom the atom is the cause of everything, hence without cause itself”. Marx (ibid.) also engages critically with the attempt by previous writers to ascribe to Democritus’ deterministic account of declination a, “spiritual principal”, as basis for discerning causation. In riposte to a treatise on the, “soul of the atom”, Marx reverts back to Epicurus’ account of the materiality of the soul and, thus, “the declination”, is presented as representing, “the real soul of the atom, the concept of abstract individuality” (ibid.). The latter concept refers to the, “formdetermination”, of the atom, “the pure being-for-itself” (ibid.). Abstract individuality conceives of the atom as defining itself through gaining, “independence from immediate being”, and this requires, “the negation of all relativity”, manifested, “only by abstracting from the being that confronts it” (ibid. 114-115). Marx makes evident, here, a paradoxical

xxx

Prologue

feature of the abstract individuality achieved from the declination away from the straight line, “for in order truly to overcome it, abstract individuality had to idealise it, a thing only generality can accomplish” (ibid. 115). By extension, the individuality of Epicurean atomist philosophy is achieved and made manifest when, “the entire Epicurean philosophy swerves away from the restrictive mode of being wherever the concept of abstract individuality, self-sufficiency and negation of all relation to other things must be represented in its existence” (ibid.). According to Marx (ibid.), meaning and the purposiveness of action can be discerned in the process of the swerve (clinamen), the abstraction away from non-self-sufficiency; “swerving away from pain and confusion, in ataraxy”. By way of illustration, Marx describes how swerving toward, “good is the flight from evil”, and, “pleasure the swerving away from suffering” (ibid.). More significantly, in its declination and abstraction, the atom expresses its, “negation of all motion and relation by which it is determined as a particular mode of being by another being” (ibid. 116). Marx ascribes a virtuosity to the atom’s abstract individuality, expressed in the swerve away from the straight line. Axiomatic to this position, is the idea that an integral feature of the swerve is recognition; abstract individuality can only be achieved, “if the being to which it relates itself is none other than itself, hence equally an atom, and since it itself is directly determined, many atoms” (ibid.). By this is meant, that, “atoms are their own sole object and can only be related to themselves” (ibid.). Hence, they are only enabled to interlace, “by virtue of their declination from the straight line” (ibid. 116-117). However, this interlacing with each other is predicted on a recognition and identification, “inasmuch as it relates to something else, which actually is itself – even when the other thing confronts it in the form of immediate existence” (ibid. 117). Referring back to the original objective of a, Philosophy of Nature, Marx (ibid.) argues that the human comes to know itself as human only when the other being, to which it relates, is also human. However, this abstract individuality necessitates that the human, “must have crushed within himself his relative being, the power of desire and of mere nature” (ibid.). Consequently, and as Marx (ibid.) expresses it, “Repulsion is the first form of self-consciousness, it corresponds therefore to that self-consciousness which conceives itself as immediate-being, as abstractly individual”. Furthermore: The concept of the atom is therefore realised in repulsion, inasmuch as it is abstract form, but no less also the opposite, inasmuch as it is abstract matter; for that to which it relates itself consists, to be true, of atoms, but

Adsensory Financialisation

xxxi

other atoms. But when I relate myself to myself as to something which is directly another, then my relationship is a material one. This is the most extreme degree of externality that can be conceived. In the repulsion of the atoms, therefore, their materiality, which was posited in the fall in a straight line, and the form-determination, which was established in the declination, are united synthetically. (Marx 1841/2006:117)

Democritean atomist physics preconfigures, in terms of determinism, an atom’s abstraction from the vertical descent through the spatial void; conversely, Epicurean atomist physics comprehends, clinamen, as, “the realisation of the concept of the atom” (ibid.). Indeterminism, thus, preconfigures Epicurean scientific inquiry and its assertion that selfdetermination arises through the atom’s motion of repulsion, collision, interlacing (collusion), and chance encounters. As Marx (ibid. 118) observes through Epicurus’ account of clinamen, “the form-determination is validated and the contradiction inherent in the concept of the atom is realised”. Marx concedes that, “Epicurus was the therefore the first to grasp the essence of the repulsion –even if only in sensuous form, whereas Democritus only knew of its material existence” (ibid.). The central conceptual issue proposed here by Marx is that, Democritean philosophy’s basis as science, prioritises determinacy to the expense of indeterminacy. As Marx expresses it, “For Democritus the atom means only stoicheion, a material substrate” (ibid. 130), whereas Epicurus engages with the atom, “as principle and foundation” (ibid.). The confutation, “between existence and essence”, “between matter and form”, integral to ancient Greek theories of the atom, becomes manifest as a feature of the atom as soon as it is ascribed with attributes (ibid.). “It is from repulsion and the ensuing conglomerations of the qualified atoms that the world of appearance now emerges” (ibid.). It is Marx’s observation that the transition of the atom, from an absolute foundation into a world of meaning ascribed appearances, brings to the fore contradictions inherent in the atomist theory of the atom. As Marx (ibid.) expresses it: “For the atom is conceptually the absolute, essential form of nature. This absolute form has now been degraded to absolute matter, to the formless substrate of the world of appearance”. The tension, here, arises as the atom progresses from absolute foundation into an appearance of reality; “Insofar as it proceeds to reality, it sinks down to the material basis which, as the bearer of a world of manifold relations, never exists but in forms which are indifferent and external to it” (ibid.). Marx (ibid.) introduces, here, an important conceptual distinction: “Abstract individuality is freedom from being, not freedom in being” (ibid. 130-131). The atom’s abstraction and swerve from the vertical descent through the void demonstrates, “freedom

xxxii

Prologue

from being”; but given that clinamen is precipitated from an encounter of shared identity affirms that the atom’s, “abstract individuality”, is, “not freedom in being” (ibid. 131). It is Marx’s contention that Epicurus, as opposed to Democritus, appreciates both the indeterminate properties of the atom and the consistent features of the atom. As Marx (ibid.) argues, “But the fact that Epicurus grasps the contradiction at this its highest peak and objectifies it, and therefore distinguishes the atom where it becomes the basis of appearance as stoicheion from the atom as it exists in the void as arche – this constitutes his philosophical difference from Democritus, who only objectifies the one moment” (ibid.). This observation brings Marx to compare the conceptualisation of temporality in the atomist physics of Democritus and Epicurus. Marx observes that both philosophers agree, given that the atom is absolute, “exempted from all relativity and changeability”, it is logical to assume, “that time has to be excluded from the concept of the atom, the world of essence” (ibid.). In this sense, matter is irreducible to any moment in time because it is, “eternal and independent” (ibid.). Democritus and Epicurus, Marx observes, share agreement in this regard, but they differ in terms of how time is determined. According to Marx (ibid.), Democritus engages with time so as to negate it; “time has neither significance nor necessity for the system” (ibid. 132). Furthermore, Marx appreciates that in Democritus’ atomist physics: “Time excluded from the world of essence is transferred into the self-consciousness of the philosophising subject but does not make any contact with the world itself” (ibid.). Conversely, as described previously, and is also evident in Marx’s (ibid.) analyses for Epicurus, “Time, excluded from the world of essence, becomes for him the absolute form of appearance”. Time is change as reflected in perception; time, “is the change as reflecting in itself, the change as change. This pure form of the world of appearance is time”. Indeed, Marx goes on to argue that time is as substantial to the world of appearance, as the atom is predicated as an absolute in the world of essence (ibid. 133). As Marx expresses it, “Time … is the fire of essence, eternally consuming appearance, and stamping it with dependence and non-essence” (ibid.). Time, as conceived in Epicurean physics, is inextricably tied to sensation; similarly Marx conceives that time is, “the abstract form of sensation”; consequently, it should be treated theoretically as a nature, this is because it has, “a separate existence within nature” (ibid. 134). The capricious, vicissitudinous nature of the, “sensuous world”, is mirrored through the existence of, “conscious sensuousness” (ibid.). This observation leads Marx to argue that, “Human sensuousness is therefore embodied time; the existing reflection of the sensuous world itself” (ibid.). So, as to illustrate

Adsensory Financialisation

xxxiii

the sensuous basis of time, Marx refers to Epicurus’, Letter to Herodotus, and its claim that time is instantiated into consciousness when the change of things is recognised as changing; as Marx expresses it, “time is so defined that it emerges when the accidentals of bodies, perceived by the senses, are thought of as accidentals” (ibid.). More specifically: Sensuous perception reflected in itself is thus here the source of time and time itself. Hence time cannot be defined by analogy nor can anything else be said about it, but it is necessary to keep firmly to the Enargie itself; for sensuous perception reflected in itself is time itself, and there is no going beyond it. (Marx 1841/2006:134) Therefore: just as the atom is nothing but the natural form of abstract, individual self-consciousness, so sensuous nature is only the objectified, empirical, individual self-consciousness, and this is the sensuous. Hence the senses are the only criteria in concrete nature, just as abstract reason is the only criterion in the world of the atoms. (ibid. 135)

Remaining within the atomist physics of sensuous time, Marx explores a relation between time and image. Utilising the concept of eidola (images), Marx (ibid. 134-135) shows how, in atomist physics, the, “forms of natural bodies”, are conceived as mere surfaces, which disentangle, “themselves like skins and transfer these bodies into appearance”. Similarly, Epicurus (1993:24) describes how, “there are images having the same shape as the solid objects, but far removed from objects apparent to the sense owing to their subtlety … We call these images films that are given off by the object and that convey an impression to the eyes”. Epicurus proposes that films are incomparably diaphanous with exquisite finesse. Sense perception of these emanations (films) involves, “unsurpassable speed since their passage is completely uniform” (ibid.). Uniformity, in the passage of films through time, is because of, “the fact that little or nothing of them collides with the infinite atoms, while bodies composed of many or infinite atoms immediately collide with something” (ibid.). Instantiated with the velocity of thought, emanations (films) are sense perceived as constantly flowing, “from the surface of bodies” (ibid.). Indeed, “Since they move quickly, they give the illusion of a single continuous motion, and they preserve as well the relationship with the existing object, as a result of the measured contact with that body owing to the rapid movement of atoms deep inside the solid object” (ibid.). The image impression that is apprehended by our mind, or the organs of our senses, is the genuine shape of the concrete object because, “it is created by the constant repetition of the image or the impression it has left behind” (ibid. 25). Epicurus prioritises the judgment and evaluation derived from sense impression: “For there would be no

xxxiv

Prologue

correspondence between the images that are received as in a picture, or those arising in dreams or as a result of application by the mind or the other faculties, and things that exist and are called real, unless there were such effluences actually brought into contact with our senses. There would be no error, unless there occurred within us some other movement connected with the perception of images but distinguished from it” (ibid. 25-26). Suffice to say that, Epicurus applies an atomist physics framework to the analysis of sense perception and this is, ever so eloquently, illustrated in the following account of hearing: Moreover, hearing results from a certain current or flow being carried from the one speaking or what is sounding or making noise, or giving rise in such manner to a sensation of hearing. This current is divided into particles, each like the other, which preserve at the same time a certain affinity with each other and a distinctive unity which extends as far back as what produced the sound. This unity commonly produces perception in the recipient, or at least furnishes clear evidence of an external object. Without this affinity or correspondence arising from the object, there would be no such perception … whenever we emit the sound of speech, the impact that occurs within us produces a squeezing out of certain particles that emit a stream, or current, of sound, and this furnishes us with the sensation of hearing. (ibid. 26-27)

One might begin to consider, here, an Epicurean atomist physics of wearable technology, in which technologies are, “bodies, some are compounds and others are those from which the compounds have been formed: These latter are indivisible and unchangeable if everything is not about to be reduced to nonexistence; but some strong element remains in the breakup of the compounds, one that is solid by nature and incapable of being dissolved” (ibid. 22). The composition of technology into aggregate bodies, from a perspective of Epicurean physics, resists the compulsion to apprehend technology by reducing it to infinite parts: “We must also not think that in finite bodies a reduction to ever smaller parts to infinity can occur. For, if once someone asserts that in anything there are infinite parts or parts of any degree of smallness, it is impossible to conceive how this object could still be limited in size” (ibid. 28). Portrayed from a physics embedded in atomism, it is possible to conceive that the universe of this technology consists of elements that are indivisible, moving, “continuously forever” (ibid. 230). “[I]nterlacing with others or covered by the interlaced atoms”, rapidly vibrating, descending at imperceptible velocity vertically through void, precipitating aleatory encounters by veering into collisions and entangling into collusions of indeterminate combinations; from an Epicurean frame of reference of these technological

Adsensory Financialisation

xxxv

dynamics, “there is no beginning; the atoms and the void are the cause” (ibid. 23). Epicurean atomist physics displaces teleological presuppositions; it emphasizes the emergent and contingent, chance occurrence of phenomenon (Clark et. al. 2007:522). Indeed, in Epicurus’, clinamen can be discerned, “a conception of social evolution and human freedom that rejected foundationalist ethics” (ibid.). Contingency and contradiction are the analytical tools of Epicurean scientific investigation. Appropriately so, given the capricious atoms’ motion, in which: “However, in a passage of time perceptible only to the mind, they move not in one direction, but are constantly colliding with one another until the constancy of their motion comes under scrutiny of the senses” (Epicurus 1993:31). Adsensory technology might be defined in these terms, as, “from the realm of being … they do not possess the nature of the whole (called ‘body’) to which they are attached, nor that of the properties that are in permanent attendance” (ibid. 35). Moreover, the surfaces (emanations) of adsensory technologies, to employ Marx’s prose: “as it were detach themselves like skins and transfer these bodies into appearance” (Marx 1841/2004:135). Such imagery begins to engage, conceptually with tensions that are evident between the wearable technology’s essence and its existence. Moreover, when time is conceived, “as accidens of the accidens … the change as change” (ibid. 132), a conception of technology, in terms of determinism, is antithetical. Conversely, this book presents a sociology of advertising and wearable technology based on empirical analyses of aleatory materialistic encounters. This book’s theoretical framework is geared towards a sociology of the science of wearable technology predicated on understanding indeterminate contingency and complex contradictions. Epicurean physics is an apposite starting point, especially when one considers the colluding and colliding of atom particles, as a metaphor for the body’s interaction with exquisitely sensory wearable advertising technologies. For example, Marx describes how, “The eidola are the forms of natural bodies”, and, “These forms of the things stream constantly forth from them and penetrate into the senses and in precisely this way allow the objects to appear” (ibid. 134-135). It is equally possible to conceive of data, derived from wearable technologies, as atoms streaming through a void, aligning and colliding across finance capital markets and structured fields of financial practice. Just as forms streaming forth enable, “in hearing nature hears itself”, (ibid.) and, “in seeing it sees itself” (ibid.), so it is that in the atoms’ motion of wearable technology data, financialisation sees itself. It is the central objective of this book to explore wearable technologies in terms of human sensuousness; as Marx (ibid.) describes: “Human sensuousness is … the medium in which natural

xxxvi

Prologue

processes are reflected as in a focus and ignited into the light of appearance”. Sensuousness is an apposite concept for describing adsensory technologies. In accordance with Marx’s (ibid.) conception, “sensuousness is the reflection of the world of appearance in itself, its embodied time”. In adsensory wearable technologies, can be discerned Marx’s (ibid.) observation: “that the temporal character of things and their appearance to the senses are posited as intrinsically One”.

INTRODUCTION ADSENSORY CAPITAL ACCUMULATION

Figure I.1. “Lend me thy dark veil. Science darts her strong ray; In the orb of bright learning she sits. Haste! Haste! Cloth’d by thee, I can yet keep my way, Still secure from her critics, or Wits” (Ann Yearsley, Addressed to Ignorance, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2015.

2

Introduction Advertising the Soul of Biocapitalism

Launched in 2015, and powered by the android operating system, Android Wear is, “A watch for every style” (Android 2015). “Round or square, traditional or modern”, its advertising communication insists that consumers can, “Wear the watch that represents you best … Wear it for fashion, fitness or fun” (ibid.). Resplendent in its, “Rainbow of bands”, Android Wear is promoted as enabling the user to, “Get more out of every moment”; it provides situational predictive, “useful information”, applications, which, “show you suggestions and useful information before you even ask –messages from friends, meeting details, info from your favourite apps and more … are always a glance away” (ibid.). “Left your phone behind”, the promotional product description attentively enquires as it eagerly offers a solution in the guise of Android Wear’s connectivity, “to your phone via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi” (ibid.). Its inter-operability displaces significant features of mobile phone technology as we can, “Get notifications, listen to music … Even when your phone isn’t with you”. Untethered from their mooring in rapidly archaic mobile phone devices, apps can now be customised to map the cartographic contours of Android Wear’s digitalised mobile human body. Users are encouraged to customise their Android watches, to, “Wear your favourite apps … with thousands of apps for Android Wear. Take photos, play games, listen to music, call for a lift, track your sleep”, within an endless digital application stream as, “more apps are being added every day” (ibid.). Android Wear’s ability to connect across digital media platforms is paralleled by its digitalised sensory connectivity to the kinetics of the human body. Users can, “Stay connected when your hands are full”, for they need only to, “say ‘Ok Google’”, to their Android Wear, “to send messages, ask questions, track your commute and get things done” (ibid.). Its body sensory technology enables information communication to be initiated through the flick of a wrist, “flick your wrist to scroll through hand information” (ibid.). Indeed, the range of fitness applications constitute an innovative bio-electronic connectivity, linking the human body to previously remote industries and markets. Android Wear’s global positioning system (GPS) provides users with, “GPS support”, enabling the monitoring of physical activity over time and space: “If your watch has a GPS sensor, fitness apps can now track your distance and speed without your phone. Go for a run or bike ride and leave your phone at home” (ibid.). The precision and detail of monitoring and tracking enables consumers to, “Track fitness”, by keeping, “track of your activity with daily summaries showing your step count and heart rate” (ibid.). Here, and elsewhere, the body features centrally in the promotional language of wearable technologies. Subject to

Adsensory Capital Accumulation

3

the digital technologies of wearable health monitoring, informational media, and GPS tracking, the body is rediscovered via, “a split (but profoundly interdependent) representation of his/her own body: The representation of the body as capital and as fetish (or consumer object)”, (Baudrillard 2003:129). Consistent in its seductive embrace, consumer capital’s engagement with the human body is entering a new era of intensity and omnipresence. In wearable technologies, this heightened, “rediscovery”, of the body manifests in terms of encouraging a deliberate investment in the cultivation of the inner body. Indeed, we are witnessing a heightened version of commercialised narcissistic body regimes, in which digitalised monitoring systems are, in new innovative ways, suggesting, “that one should revert back into one’s body and invest it narcissistically ‘from the inside’” (ibid. 131). Mediated through informationalised knowledge, the consumer’s reverting back into the inner recesses of the body is, “not in any sense to get to know it in depth”, but rather in, “a wholly fetishistic and spectacular logic, to form it into a smoother, more perfect, more functional object for the outside world” (ibid.). In their endeavour to provide detailed digital analysis of the mobile body, its heart rate, distance walked, time spent in accelerated physical activity, wearable technologies constitute, “a managed narcissism, operating on the body” (ibid.). The body of mobile advertising has long since been realised as a lucrative terrain for capitalist consumer markets. With the advent of wearable technologies, capitalism’s desire to colonise non-capitalised terrains reaches epidemic levels, “exploring the body like a deposit to be mined in order to extract from it the visible signs of happiness, health …” (ibid.). Such seemingly altruistic prospects, along with their, “mystique of liberation and accomplishment”, nevertheless remain firmly embedded within capitalist regimes of accumulation (ibid.). Indeed, as with their preceding narcissistic cults of the outer body, they remain, “in fact always simultaneously an investment of an efficient, competitive, economic type” (ibid.). For example, Android Wear, in its endeavour to map the mobile body through, e.g., its GPS, “check commutes”, product feature, even reminds users of social events through, “Get Reminders”, whilst providing digital support to their health and fitness regimes through, “track fitness” (Android 2015). In this seamless mapping onto the phenomenology of our social schedules, wearable technologies engage in a regime of capitalist accumulation in which the body, “is reappropriated … to meet ‘capitalist’ objectives: In other words, where it is invested, it is invested in order to produce a yield” (Baudrillard 2003:131). The notion of a body producing a capital yield,

4

Introduction

presumes intriguing complex dimensions of wearable technologies and more closely approaches Baudrillard’s (ibid.) conception of the body as, “The Finest Consumer Object”. This is because the body, as constituted through wearable technology, yields capital through its production of information. Consequently, it can be argued that: The body is not reappropriated for the autonomous ends of the subject, but in terms of a normative principle of enjoyment and hedonistic profitability, in terms of an enforced instrumentality that is indexed to the code and the norms of a society of production and managed consumption. (Baudrillard 2003:131)

The body, as constituted through digitalised wearable technology yields valuable informationalised capital, which flow from a phenomenology of everyday physical activities. Wearable technology is productive and the user is an integral feature of the production of a finely customised and increasingly valuable informationalised capital. For, the user is integral to a regime of capital accumulation through which the body is, “Recuperated as an instrument of enjoyment and an indicator of prestige”, but, at one and the same time, is, “subjected to a labour of investment” (ibid. 132). In the, “managed narcissism”, of health and fitness wearable technologies the user manipulates their body, “as one of the many signifiers of social status” (ibid. 131). In other words this, “managed narcissism”, provides for a form of assurance that, “bodily devotions” (ibid. 130), will indemnify the user against all that might, “ail”, them should they be, “culpably irresponsible towards … [their] own salvation” (ibid.). Suffice to say, in the act of managing, “one’s body … as one might handle an inheritance” (ibid. 131), the wearable technology user is engaged in the cultivation of informational capital that seeks to indemnify against punishment unleashed by their own body. As Baudrillard puts it, in the, “managed narcissism”, of the modern cult of the body: [I]f you don’t make your bodily devotions, if you sin by omission, you will be punished … which equates with puritan terrorism, except that in this case it is no longer God punishing you, but your own body – a suddenly maleficent, repressive agency which takes its revenge if you are not gentle with it. (Baudrillard 2003:130-131)

It is evident that in the managed narcissistic cult of the body, wearable fitness technology operates, as Baudrillard (ibid. 131) observes more generically, “under the guise of reconciling everyone with their own body”, but, “in fact reintroduce[s] … the subject and the objectivized body

Adsensory Capital Accumulation

5

as threatening double”. Having begun to peel away the promotional language of wearable technology, it becomes increasingly apparent that the information producing body of wearable technology, is in actuality, “subjected to a labour of investment (solicitude, obsession)”, that without question represents a more insidious, “alienated labour than the exploitation of the body as labour power” (ibid. 132). Moreover, this, “modern strategy of the body” (ibid. 135), reveals ever more brilliantly the basis of advertising as an inscriptive technology (Odih 2010). For, it is clearly apparent that the promotional communication broadcasts of wearable technology products are not the only channel through which advertising is circulating. Mediated through digitalised monitoring data, the body is transformed into a communicator of informationalised capital. This highlights an important additional transformation in the function of the wearable technology; it is the central contention of this book that wearable technologies partake of a third order simulacra of advertising. According to Baudrillard (1983: 2), simulation is the generation of, “models of a real without origin or reality”. Furthermore, because these, “models of a real”, do not exist, “To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t” (ibid. 5). It is Baudrillard’s (ibid. 12) contention that advance capitalism is progressing towards a heightened level of hyperreal sign production, in which signs, “feign”, nothingness. As Baudrillard expresses it: The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognise his own, nor any last judgement to separate true from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance. (Baudrillard 1983:12)

It is the central contention of this book that wearable technologies operate as advertisements. However, these advertisements are not solely channels for products, rather wearable technologies operate through, and on, the body as advertising sensors (adsensory) intent on actualising the body’s potential. However, this process of actualisation is based on third order simulacra; this is because wearable technologies feign to have what they haven’t; they feign to have insurance that can indemnify the user against an infinite horizon of signs that are increasingly signifying nothing; or, as Baudrillard (1983:12) expresses, “signs which dissimulate that there is nothing”. It is a central contention of this book that wearable technologies are adsensory inscriptive technologies that dissimulate the

6

Introduction

body and simulate that they will provide insurance to indemnify the user against the infinite signs of risks that saturate a world in which signs are increasingly dissimulating into a perilous void of immateriality. In a world that is no longer what it might have been, there is an escalation, “of myths of origin and signs of reality” (ibid.). In the milieu in which signs are dissimulating, “that there is nothing”, all existing forms of commodify-sign are by comparison aspirant secondorder sign productions having to invest ever more labour to retain value and assail the new heights of capitalist consumer culture (ibid.). As Baudrillard (ibid. 13) expresses it, “this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us ࡳ a strategy of the real, neo-real, and hyperreal whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence”. Adsensory technologies are evidence of capitalism’s response to a heightened era of dissimulation. Thus, their propensity to put forward a guise of a, “strategy of deterrence”, and in so doing feign their capacity to insure against the, “dissimulation that there is nothing” (ibid. 12), all suggests that adsensory technology is securely indexed to capitalist accumulation. Moreover, it is because adsensory wearable technologies feign to exist as insurance that they provide capitalism, with the lucrative possibility of generating profit from zero capital investment. Adsensory wearable technologies, thus, constitute a regime of advertising in which zero capital investment is capable of yielding tremendous capital gains. It is the central aim of this book to examine the modes of capital accumulation productive of adsensory wearable technology. The principal research question of this book is: In what ways are the modes of capital accumulation emerging from adsensory wearable technologies, different from previous generations of mobile advertising?

Organisation of the book This book is divided into four parts: Part I, Introjecting the Principle of Performance, Adsensory Technology; Part II, Adsensory Capitalist Accumulation; Part III, Dissimulating the Body and Simulating the Soul of Biocapitalism; Part IV, Adsensory Technologies in Synoptic Times. Part I, Introjecting the Principle of Performance, Adsensory Technology. Adsensory wearable technologies manifest an unparalleled precision in the generation of simulacra. Programmatic digital readings of the body’s physical movement, and internal vitality, provide levels of customised data that propels previous generations of mobile digital

Adsensory Capital Accumulation

7

advertising into, “a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential” (Baudrillard 1983:13). The resulting, escalating labour of these previous generations of mobile digital advertising, embeds them further into the capitalist system of production; they relentlessly assail its new heights of immateriality. Thus parallel to their, “panic-stricken production” (ibid.), mobile advertising that previously reigned supreme in their GPS driven definitive cartography of the world, are spirally into, “the panic of material production” (ibid.). Entitled, Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism, chapter one of this book deciphers the interactional codes that form the basis of the mode of introjection that defines adsensory technology. Herbert Marcuse (1964:10) defined introjection as implying, “the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies – an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behaviour”. For Marcuse (ibid.), this inner space presents the possibility of thinking beyond the everyday and, in so doing, challenges the preponderance of an immediacy with the world and a one dimensional existence, in which occurs, “an immediate identification of the individual with his society and through it with the society as a whole” (ibid.). Technological rationality, in its quest to reduce the complexities of our everyday lives into the binary form of digitalised programmes, provides for conditions, which erode the generative inception of critical, independent thought. As Marcuse (ibid.) expresses it, “the term ‘introjection’ perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society”. It was Marcuse’s observation that introjection is being whittled away by advancements in advertising psychology and the management sciences that have, as their focus, the psychology of consciousness. As Marcuse (ibid.) expresses it, “Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality”. This is not to assume that, “Mass production and mass distribution [attempts to] claim the entire individual”, are efficacious in their endeavour, but rather it is necessary to realise that these absolute signs are part of the sign technologies through which, “the power of negative thinking – the critical power of reason”, are increasingly negated (ibid. 10-11). Chapter one explores empirically Marcuse’s concept of introjection through a focus on the concepts of, “surplus-repression”, and the, “performance principle” (1956/1998). In, Eros and Civilization, Marcuse (ibid. 35) develops supplements to the excessively a-social and ahistorical features of Freud’s construction of the human psyche. “Surplusrepression”, refers to, “the restrictions necessitated by social domination”, and the, “performance principle”, refers to, “the prevailing historical form

8

Introduction

of the reality principle” (ibid.). Entitled, Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle” (Herbert Marcuse), chapter two of this book case studies the, “performance principle”, in terms of advertising analogues generated through the dashboards and metric outlays of wearable fitness technologies. In so doing, the chapter explores the concepts of, “surplus-repression”, and, “performance principle”, through empirical examples of the presupposed existence of a haptic-sensory fitness monitoring advertising industry. Collectively these analyses provide an insight into the phenomenological techniques, through which adsensory technologies seek to provide an individuated consumer capitalist society as a basis for introjection. Part II, Adsensory Capitalist Accumulation. Entitled, “Adsensory Accumulation as ‘[re]capitalized … landed property’ (Karl Marx)”, chapter three is a theoretically informed chapter and focuses on Karl Marx’s analysis in Capital Volume 3, of how advancing forms of capitalism achieve profitability through licensing and rental agreements. In chapter three, Marx’s concept of, “ground-rent”, is applied to an analysis of wearable fitness monitoring technology. In Marx’s (1991) analysis of ground-rent, can be discerned a framework relevant to the operation of advertising space in social media. Marx (1991:779) observed that, in ground-rent systems, “a portion of profit can be transformed into groundrent, so that a part of the commodity price thus accrues to the landowner”. In wearable technology social media advertising spaces, the proprietor of advertising space is a rentier. In accordance with Marx’s analysis, the wearable technology social media site constitutes, “the landed property”, and, “has in, and of itself, nothing to do with the creation of the portion of surplus-value (profit) and hence of the price of the commodity that is produced with the aid of” the information mining algorithmic behavioural indices applied to the, “landed property” (ibid. 786). Thus, surplus value can be produced from a wearable technology social media site regardless of the behavioural advertising data mining technique. Moreover, the wearable technology social media site as, “landed property”, “does not create the portion of value that is transformed into surplus profit; rather it simply enables the landowner, the proprietor … to entice this surplus profit out of the manufacturer’s pocket and into his own” (ibid.). Groundrent, as a concept, provides for an insightful means of observing the processes, through which wearable technology advertising spaces accumulate profit with very little capital investment. Writers, such as Christian Fuchs (2015), challenge the application of a rent model to the critical analysis of capitalist accumulation through social media digital

Adsensory Capital Accumulation

9

advertising. As Fuchs (ibid. 180) describes, “If an entity is rented by a business for economic purposes, it enters the capital accumulation process as fixed constant capital … Information on social networking sites does not have the same status as a piece of land: Human labour creates and updates it constantly, which enables its sale to targeted advertising clients”. Here, and elsewhere, Fuchs (ibid.) contrasts the digital advertising model of social media against the original meaning of rent, as articulated by Marx in Capital Volume 3. While in some agreement with Fuchs’ (ibid.) position, it is evident that adsensory wearable technologies provide valuable evidence of new transformations in existing modes of the, “becoming-rent-of-profit” (Vercellone 2010). Central to this proposition is an application of Marx’s (1991) account of “absolute ground-rent” to the analysis of the financialisation of Facebook social media engagement. This book’s case study analysis of Facebook advertising, exceeds beyond the misguided linear transmission modelling that depicts advertisers as being sold digitalised consumer data already captured by Facebook. Even the most cursory perusal into the technological structure and dynamic of Facebook advertising should precipitate an appreciation of the multi-directional complexity of Facebook as a sign-technology. For it is proposed, here, that Facebook’s advertising sign technologies dissimilate possession of digitalised biographical data that is in actuality auto-generated through the ongoing inscriptive activities of their advertising programmers. Part III, Dissimulating the Body and Simulating the Soul of Biocapitalism. Established since 2007, Fitbit® wearable technology tracking devices have gained widespread appeal and provide a uniquely innovative product suite. Indeed, the Fitbit Inc. range constitutes an exhilarating and fascinating new feature of body maintenance, health, and fitness products. The central aim of chapter four is to explore critically how the consumer applications of wearable technologies are constitutive of advertising technologies that are inscriptive of the human body in their operation as adsensory technologies. For, it is evident that the programmatic digital computations of wearable technologies are generating promotional models of the actualities of the body without equivalence to a reality. In so doing, the digital computations of ‘adsensory’ wearable technologies are forefront in a new sign-economy of advertising through the dissimulation of, “nothing”. Entitled, “Dissimulating Advertising”, chapter four is divided into two main parts: Part one, establishes the theoretical framework, which engages with Jean Baudrillard’s System of Objects, and specifically the account of, “A

10

Introduction

Universal Code: Status” (1968/2005:212); Part two provides an account of Baudrillard’s idea that we are witnessing, currently - in consumer culture an ascription of the body as the mode of salvation – the body is the new soul. Chapter five case studies Fitbit® PurePulseTM wearable technologies, as illustrative of the transformation of the body into adsensory technology. Writers have previously pronounced wearable technologies, as providing new channels to advertise to consumers; however, this positivistic managerial approach (e.g., Brauer 2013) appears oblivious to the social history and political economy present of how advertising operates as an inscriptive technology. Conversely it is formulated here that adsensory technology shares with biosensors the capacity to pick-up biosensory data, but they differ from the latter in that adsensory technologies are insatiably inscriptive advertisers. It is the central aim of chapter five to introduce into debates about the consumer applications of wearable technologies; some new thinking about advertising inscriptive technology; and, to explore critically the new circuits of capitalist accumulation that are arising from adsensory wearable technologies. Part IV, Adsensory Technologies in Synoptic Times. Entitled, “International Biopolitics and the Political Economy of Wearable Technology”, chapter six identifies a neoliberal entrepreneurial self as an integral feature of the biopolitical healthcare regime that governs wearable fitness technologies. According to Foucault (1979/2010), neoliberalism is indebted to the endeavour of its human subjects, to invest human capital in a self-regulated entrepreneurial pursuit of responsible health and wellbeing. Primarily informed by interviews and ethnographic observations, chapter six identifies the biopolitical basis of adsensory wearable technologies. It will be argued that a paradoxical feature of adsensory wearable technologies dissimulating, “that there is nothing” (Baudrillard 1983:12), is the proliferation of risk. This is because the dissimulation of nothing opens up the possibility that, “everything can be a risk, in so far as the type of event it falls under can be treated according to the principles of insurance technology” (Ewald 1991:200). Chapter six argues that adsensory wearable technologies are called upon, [is] “as a strategy of deterrence” (Baudrillard 1983:13), to indemnify against capitalism’s production of, “signs which dissimulate that there is nothing” (ibid. 12). In a context, in which much that was certain now feigns its own existence, the insurance professed by adsensory technologies provides for unrealisable guarantee against indefinable unknowable risks. Based also on analyses of European Court of Justice case histories, this chapter elucidates critically gendered dimensions of the entrepreneurial insurantial

Adsensory Capital Accumulation

11

subject and maps their body maintenance practices onto neoliberal regimes of healthcare provision. A central feature of my previous research (Odih 2010) has been to identify positivistic marketing and advertising practices as inscriptive sign technologies; the representational epistemology of these sign technologies acts upon the social world inscribing into being phenomena, rather than merely communicating a given objective reality. Michel Foucault’s (1988:18), Technologies of the Self, defines, “technologies of sign systems”, as one of four, “specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves”. It has been my consistent contention that technologies of the sign have gained ascendency as they extend further, and further, into the financialised governing of everyday life. Conversely, Michel Foucault asserts an emphasis on the operation of, “technologies of power”, and, “technologies of the self” (ibid.). Foucault (ibid. 19) accentuates this latter trajectory as thus: “I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others and in the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of self”. The apparent marginalisation of technologies of the sign, in this latter trajectory of Foucault’s oeuvre, raises epochal issues; surely the complex networked assemblages of technologies, of the sign that are pervading everyday life, have equal significance to the technologies of power and self? However, neither Foucault (1988), nor prominent Foucauldian translations and analyses of Foucault’s lectures and speeches on the archaeologies of knowledge (e.g., Gordon 1980, Sheridan 1994), prioritise technologies of the sign. Conversely, it is my contention that, “technologies of sign systems”, as defined by Foucault (1988:18) provide radically revelatory knowledges into biopolitical processes of marketization, financialisation, and informationalisation of everyday life. Integral to my assertion, here, is an appreciation of the contrasting orders of the sign and the complex formulations by which the interplay of, “sign systems”, operates to communicate and inscribe. Thus, central to the notion of adsensory technologies, expressed here, is a conception of advertising as inscriptive; this is premised on a definition of Foucault’s (ibid.) sign technologies, which utilises an asyndeton to emphasise a complex interplay between differing orders of the sign: “Technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, signification” (ibid. 18). Premised on a notion of advertising technologies as inscriptive, it has been my observation that the positivistic epistemologies that informed the marketing and advertising technologies of a Women’s Market for insurance, from its inception, have been integral to the creation of this

12

Introduction

market. Reductive advertising technologies and spurious actuarial pseudoscience coalesce in the marketing of incongruously designed (given the phenomenology of gendered time to reproductive domestic labour) Women’s Market for insurantial products. Following through this argument, the chapter situates wearable technologies within the marketising healthcare management programmes that are currently aligning National Health Service neoliberal reengineering, with consumer citizenship and the healthcare of populations. Furthermore, in their endeavour to network virtual communities, adsensory wearable technologies escalate conditions of neoliberal healthcare entrepreneurialism and self-regulation. Thus, arises levels of surveillance that exceed disciplinary panoptics (Foucault 1991) and embrace situations in which the many-are-watching the few i.e., synoptics (Mathiesen 1997) and the many-are- watching the many in the ethico-synoptics of adsensory technological times. Entitled, Adsensory Insurantial Technology in Synoptic Times, chapter seven identifies the complex synoptics of adsensory technologies so as to engage critically with their biopolitical regime of governance. Chapter seven engages empirically with these issues of biopolitical governance; it does so through a case study analysis of a new and innovative form of adsensory technology. In 2015, Weight Watchers® launched a multimedia advertising campaign promoting its alliance with the fitness monitoring wearable technology provider Fitbit Inc. The principal vehicle for the alliance is the Weight Watchers(R) new weight management programme, entitled, SmartPointsTM. Nutritional intake, and its management, continues to be a central feature of the Weight Watchers® weight management scheme, as evident in the following promotional communication text: “SmartPointsTM help you to eat well. It’s just one part of our new holistic programme that helps you achieve a healthier, happier way of living” (Weightwatchers 2016). Distinct to SmartPointsTM is an increased personalised level of digital mediation, as is illustrated in the following communication text: “Expert in your pocket. Our new holistic programme provides personalised help and guidance whenever you need it” (ibid.). The heightened level of digitally mediated personalised weight management is further advanced through the integration of Fitbit Inc. fitness monitoring technology, as illustrated in the following communication text: “Sweat your goals. Earn FitPointsTM throughout the day. It’s just one part of our new holistic programme that helps you achieve a healthier, happier way of living” (ibid.).

Adsensory Capital Accumulation

13

Entitled, #Health as the Financialisation of Social Capital Translations, it is the central proposition of chapter eight’s case study that the Fitbit® Weight Watchers® SmartPoint™ scheme operates as an insurantial technology. It is proposed that the Fitbit® Weight Watchers® SmartPoint™ scheme, first and foremost, is insurance in the sense that its networked health promotion media cultivates the accumulation and circulation of health capital necessary for the articulation of responsible healthcare citizenship. Secondly, it is proposed that the Fitbit® Weight Watchers® SmartPoint™ scheme is insurance in that its individuated monitoring enables an unparalleled level of tracking of the phenomenological time of our everyday lives; this digital data recording of the minutiae of lived experience provides insurance intelligence with knowledge of the everyday times of common sense that can be converted into future risks amenable to be ameliorated by the purchase of insurantial products. In the milieu, from which sex-based insurantial actuarial calculations have been rendered as discriminatory, it is necessary to critically engage with the increasing occurrence of insurance companies offering reduction on premium payments based on a life-style underwriting of wearable fitness technologies. Continuing with the SmartPoints™ premise that adsensory technologies are inscriptive in that they are a mode of advertising technology which renders the bio-social world amenable to calculation and knowledgeable regulatory intervention. Furthermore, as an inscriptive advertising technology (Odih 2010), the biosensory capacities of wearable fitness technologies are integral to the constitution of the message for which they are the medium. Inscriptive advertising technologies are constitutive of social reality rather than mere conduit, channels of existing commercial articulation. Given that these adsensory technologies are intrinsically haptic, bio-sensory health monitors their inculcation into the life-style underwriting of an insurance provider the potential conditions for a re-introduction of essentialist frameworks for premium payments and insurance benefits – the latter have since 2011 been rendered illegal by the European Court of Justice. My previous research (Knights and Odih 1993, 1995, 1999) problematized the embedded temporality of insurance and pensions products; for their representational linear temporality has trajectories in the positivist epistemologies through which discriminatory sex-based actuarial insurance underwriting perpetuates. Based on decades of expertise, and critical engagement with the illegitimate and profligate Women’s Market, this chapter cautions against introducing infra-structural conditions that would precipitate the return of

14

Introduction

sex-based discriminatory actuarial calculations of insurance premiums and benefits. Cognizant of the alignment of haptic-sensory wearable technologies with actuarial data, this chapter begins to enquire: Is your fitness biosensor insurantial technology sexist? Such questions serve as a catalyst to chapter nine’s enquiry into the financialisation of social capital translation in new media social networking platforms. Chapter nine is entitled, Digital Advertising as Asynchronic Cultural Economies of Financialised Times. Of central concern, in this chapter, is the social media advertising medium integral to the problematization of health capital as an integral feature eliding wearable fitness monitoring technology providers, health and wellbeing management programme providers, and lifestyle insurance underwriting. For, the brand-advertising strategies - mediating these moments of translation - necessitates the enrolment of agents into the transfiguration of their social networking into health capital. In this respect, Facebook provides a near perfect illustration. This is because, the auction bidding modality of Facebook’s advertising strategy enrols and entangles all of its users into the financialisation of the life-time, health and vitality of their social networks. Of concern is Facebook’s deployment and mobilisation of its sprawling algorithm matrix in the profligate production of synchronic cultural economies of financialised time, which are increasingly commercially relevant to the burgeoning market of lifestyle health insurance underwriting. Capital circulation in hyper-networked finance markets manifests an intensified compression (Harvey 2005) of time, identified by Manuel Castells (2010:467) as an integral feature of the, “informational economy”. It is Castells’ (ibid. 468) observation that, “The flexible management system of networked production relies on flexible temporality, on the ability to accelerate or slow down product and profit cycles, on the timesharing of equipment and personnel, and on the control of time lags of available technology vis-à-vis the competition”. Entitled, Adsensory Financialisation as “The Mental Diaspora of the Networks” (Jean Baudrillard), this book concludes with a focus on the financialised, “Mental Diaspora” (Baudrillard 2013:57), of algorithmic finance capital. BPay, ApplePay, and Google Wallet, are examples of wearable applications that disintermediate analogue payment processing administration and, in so doing, advance the, “timeless”, “space of flows” (Castells 2010), through which finance capital circulates. Enabling of a closer proximity of user and service provider, wearable payment devices constitute part of the, “increasingly powerful and mobile informationprocessing machines” (ibid. 468), integral to the, “timeless”, “space of

Adsensory Capital Accumulation

15

flows”, of finance capital. It is the central objective of this book to demonstrate that, with the advent of adsensory financialisation, the time of finance capital circulation, “is not only compressed: It is processed” (ibid.) into the “mental diaspora” (Baudrillard 2013:57) of haptic-sensory capital.

Figure I.1a. “Lend me thy dark veil. Science darts her strong ray; In the orb of bright learning she sits. Haste! Haste! Cloth’d by thee, I can yet keep my way, Still secure from her critics, or Wits” (Ann Yearsley, Addressed to Ignorance, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016.

16

Introduction

Figure I.1b. “Lend me thy dark veil. Science darts her strong ray; In the orb of bright learning she sits. Haste! Haste! Cloth’d by thee, I can yet keep my way, Still secure from her critics, or Wits” (Ann Yearsley, Addressed to Ignorance, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016.

PART ONE INTROJECTING THE PRINCIPLE OF PERFORMANCE, ADSENSORY TECHNOLOGY

Figure P.1. “Indifference come! Thy torpid juices shed On my keen sense: plunge deep my wounded heart” (Ann Yearsley, To indifference, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2015.

CHAPTER ONE INTROJECTING HAPTIC-SENSORY CAPITALISM

Figure 1.1 “Tis come! See how it reve’ls in the flood” (Ann Yearsley, On Jephthah’s Vow. Taken in a Literal Sense, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2015.

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

19

Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe. (Marcuse 1964/1986:18)

Adsensory wearable technologies manifest an unparalleled precision in the generation of simulacra. Programmatic digital readings of the body’s physical movement and internal vitality provide levels of customised data that propel, previous generations of mobile digital advertising into “a panic-stricken production of the real and referential” (Baudrillard 1983: 13). The resulting escalating labour of these previous generations of mobile digital advertising, embeds them further into the capitalist system of production as they relentlessly assail its new heights of immateriality. Thus, parallel to their, “panic-stricken production” (ibid.), mobile advertising that previously reigned supreme in their GPS driven definitive cartography of the world, are spirally into, “the panic of material production” (ibid.). In its emphasis on introjecting adsensory technologies, this chapter attempts to decipher the interactional codes that form the basis of the mode of introjection that defines adsensory technology. Herbert Marcuse (1964:10) defined introjection as implying, “the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies – an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behaviour”. For Marcuse (ibid.), this inner space presents the possibility of thinking beyond the everyday and, in so doing, challenging the preponderance of an immediacy with the world and a one dimensional existence, in which occurs, “an immediate identification of the individual with his society and through it with the society as a whole” (ibid.). Technological rationality, in its quest to reduce the complexities of our everyday lives into the binary form of digitalised programmes, provides for conditions that erode the generative inception of critical, independent thought. As Marcuse (ibid.) expresses it, “the term ‘introjection’ perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society”. It was Marcuse’s observation, that introjection is being whittled away by advancements in advertising psychology and the management sciences that have as their focus the psychology of consciousness. As Marcuse (ibid.) expresses it, “Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality”. This is not to assume that, “Mass production and mass distribution [attempts to] claim the entire individual”, are efficacious in their endeavour, but rather it is necessary to realise that

20

Chapter One

these absolute signs are part of the sign technologies - through which, “the power of negative thinking – the critical power of reason” - are increasingly negated (ibid. 10-11). Chapter One, explores empirically Marcuse’s concept of introjection through a focus on the concepts of “surplus-repression” and the “performance principle” (1956/1998). In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse (ibid. 35) develops supplements to the excessively a-social and a-historical features of Freud’s construction of the human psyche. “Surplus-repression” refers to, “the restrictions necessitated by social domination”, and, the, “performance principle”, refers to, “the prevailing historical form of the reality principle” (ibid.).

Eros as Adsensory Technology Setting up your Fitbit Flex. You can set up your Flex using a computer or the Fitbit apps for iOS, Android, or Windows … If you don’t have a mobile device, you can set up and sync your tracker on your Windows 10 PC using the same Fitbit app available for Windows mobile devices. To get the app, click the Start button and open the Windows Store (called store). Search for ‘Fitbit app’ … Open the app and follow the instructions to create a Fitbit account and set up your Flex. You can set up and sync wirelessly if your computer has Bluetooth®, otherwise you’ll need to use the wireless sync dongle that came in the box with your Fitbit Flex. (Fitbit Inc. 2016d:5)

Flex Wireless Activity + Sleep Wristband is a physical, recreational, and wearable, tracking device designed to make, “fitness a lifestyle” (Fitbit Inc. 2015p). The issue of lifestyle mapping features prominently in this contribution to the Fitbit® product suite. Flex is designed to monitor assiduously, “All-Day Activity, track steps, distance, calories burned, & active minutes” (ibid.). Its Progress Display is constituted by light emitting diodes (LEDs), which enable the user to, “See LEDs light up as you progress toward your daily goal” (ibid.). While, Sleep + Alarms “Monitor how long and how well you sleep & wake with a silent alarm” and Wireless Syncing “Sync stats wirelessly & automatically to leading smartphones and computers” (ibid.). The latter features provide for intriguing analogies of Herbert Marcuse’s (1956/1998) concept of the, “performance principle”, described as, “the prevailing historical form of the reality principle” (ibid. 35). Writing during the 1950s, amidst an enthralling resurgence of Freudian psychoanalysis, Marcuse explored “the history of man” as a “history of his repression”, in which, “Culture constrains not only his societal but also his biological existence, not only parts of the human being but his instinctual structure itself” (ibid. 11).

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

21

Civilisation is initiated through the repression of the pleasure principle’s incessant pursuit of, “momentary, uncertain, and destructive pleasure” (ibid. 13). In the accomplishment of civilisation, the individual concedes to the impossibility of, “the unrestrained pleasure principle”, and through this renunciation of the pleasure principle is instantiated the, “reality principle” (ibid.). The latter principle constitutes, “the adjustment of pleasure”, and this implies, “the transubstantiation of pleasure itself” (ibid.). In this respect, consider the following promotional material for Fitbit® Flex Wireless Activity + Sleep Wristband: All-Day Activity. Set a goal and go. Stay focused on your goals and get motivated to be more active with Flex – a slim, stylish device that tracks all-day activity like steps taken, distance travelled, calories burned and active minutes. (Fitbit Inc. 2015p)

It is obviously too simplistic to assert that the precisely calibrated monitoring of progression, enabled by the Fitbit® Flex Wireless Activity + Sleep Wristband, is a perfect analogy for the transubstantiation of ahistorical instinctual pleasure. The manifold references made in the promotional text to quantitative metrics of performance monitoring, reflect distinctly specific features of advanced capitalism. Indeed, the establishing of “goals”, and their quantitative performance review, is a mode of enumeration that gains prominence in a myriad of modes of capitalist production. Nevertheless, one gains a formidable sense that the Fitbit® Flex Wireless Activity + Sleep Wristband interpolates with distinctly cognitive features of capitalist accumulation in hyper-modern times. Marcuse (1956/1998:21) inquired similarly about technological rationality and its apparent contiguity with “repression in the instinctual structure of the individual”. Advanced western capitalist society is a world where, “The automatization of necessity and waste, of labor and entertainment, precludes the realization of individual potentialities” (ibid. 105). Integral to the automatizing of necessity is repression - popularly manifest as the repulsion of “libidinal cathexis” - propagated by the evolution of technical progress into the shaping of the psyche (ibid.). Multiplying in perpetuum, technical progress seemingly proffers, “The elimination of human potentialities from the world of (alienated) labour”, thereby creating, “the preconditions for the elimination of labor from the world of human potentialities” (ibid.). Central to this proposition is a sociology of the abstruse instinctual features of the human psyche. In Eros and Civilization, “The Origin of the Repressed Individual (Ontogenesis)” explores the extent to which a, “biological and at the same

22

Chapter One

time sociological dynamic is the center of Freud’s metapsychology” (ibid.). Marcuse recapitulates the tripartite features of the human subject’s “mental structure”, originally designated by Sigmund Freud, as the “id, ego, and superego” (ibid. 29). The id is the recesses of excitations and primal instincts. Immediate gratification displaces deference as the id’s cauldron of impetuous desire requisites satiation. Unencumbered by the circumspection and, “free from the forms and principles which constitute the conscious, social individual”, the id is the domain of unmediated instinctual gratification (ibid.). Marcuse (ibid.) ascribes to the id a being that is unaffected by the disciplining of time consciousness and the contradictions ensuing the monetising of time. The id’s primary instinct strives merely for the, “satisfaction of its instinctual needs, in accordance with the pleasure principle” (ibid. 30). However, in the hostile environment of the external world, the id’s hedonistic pursuit of pleasure, if untethered, threatens the health and vitality of human society. Recognising the id’s irresolvable contradictions, Freud developed the concept of the ego as a mediator between the id’s instinctual pursuit of pleasure and the pragmatic needs for constraints in the external world. The ego perceives - and is conscious of - immediate threats to the id, and does so by observing, analysing, and, “adjusting itself to the reality” (ibid.). In so doing, the ego manages and subdues the impulsive predilections of the id, tailoring the latter’s disjuncture with reality. Marcuse (ibid.) ascribes to the ego, the capacity, “to repress impulses that are incompatible with the reality, to ‘reconcile’ others with the reality by changing their object, delaying, or diverting their gratification, transforming their mode of gratification, amalgamating them with other impulses, and so on”. In its role as a mediator of the id’s imprudent and impractical maniacal pleasure-principle, the ego exerts pressure on the id, substituting for its pleasure-seeking desires a reality-principle, which assures more amicable conditions for security. Thus, the ego off-sets the anarchic insecurities that inevitably would accompany the id’s pursuit of an impetuous pleasure-principle, and, in so doing, “the ego retains its birthmark as an ‘outgrowth’ of the id” (ibid. 31). Consequently, the ego is a secondary process geared towards enacting the hegemony of the reality principle (ibid.). However, the recollection of gratification is, according to Marcuse (ibid.), the substratum of cognition, “the impulse to recapture past gratification is the hidden driving power behind the process of thought”. It is indeed because the reality-principle enforces responsible constraints on the desires of the pleasure-principle that the role of the ego conserves, subdues, modifies, and ultimately represses pleasure (ibid.).

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

23

Suffice to say, the id refers to, “the domain of the unconscious of the primary instincts”, and the ego is a realm of, “perception and consciousness”, moderation, and social observance (ibid. 29-30). Marcuse in agreement with Freud’s inclusion into the structural map of the human mind, a third entity the superego. This latter feature operates as a reflex against gratifications that challenge the external, established constraints imposed by immediate social networks and wider social agencies (ibid. 32). It is thought that these external moral influences are introjected into the ego and form the basis of its conscience (ibid.). Given that the superego responds to distant, as well as immediate, social influences, it is described as enforcing, “not only the demands of reality but also of a past reality”. (ibid. 33). In this sense, there occurs an enfolding of time translated between the id, ego, and superego, as Marcuse expresses it: The past reveals its twofold function in the shaping of the individual – and of his society. Recalling the dominion of the primal pleasure principle, where freedom from want was a necessity, the id carries the memory traces of this state forward into every present future: it projects the past into the future. However, the superego, also unconscious, rejects this instinctual claim on the future, in the name of a past no longer one of integral satisfaction but one of bitter adjustment to a punitive present. Phylogenetically and ontogenetically, with the progress of civilization and with the growth of the individual, the memory traces of the unity between freedom and necessity become submerged in the acceptance of the necessity of unfreedom; rational and rationalized, memory itself bows to the reality principle. (ibid. 33-34)

Repression is axiomatic with the civilization of the instinctual structure; for the latter involves a constant struggle, “with the demands of reality” (ibid. 32). Thus, arises the “reality principle”, which, “asserts itself through a shrinking of the conscious ego … The individual becomes instinctually re-actionary – in the literal as well as the figurative sense” (ibid. 32-33). According to Marcuse (ibid. 34), “The reality principle sustains the organism in the external world”. Marcuse (ibid.) argues, that, “In the case of the human organism, this is an historical world”. Marcuse’s emphasis on the reality principle as integral to “an historical world”, entices analysis of repression in terms of its socio-historical context. Indeed, this marks a principal point of departure in which Marcuse challenges directly Freud’s a-social and a-historical conceptualisation of the reality principle. It is Marcuse’s (ibid. 34) belief, that, “The external world faced by the growing ego is at any stage a specific socio-historical organization of reality, affecting the mental structure through specific societal agencies and agents”. Conversely, and according to Marcuse

24

Chapter One

(ibid.), Freud’s account of the reality principle describes an essentialist dynamic of repression premised on “biological necessities”, and irrespective of, “a specific historical form of reality”; Freud’s reality principle negates that which is integral to reality and, thus, merely refers, “to reality pure and simple” (ibid.). According to Marcuse (ibid.), Freud’s reality principle is based on the simplistic premise, that, “Precisely because all civilization has been organized domination, the historical development assumes the dignity and necessity of a universal biological development”. Moreover, Freud’s negation of the socio-historical basis, of “the external world”, and its impact on, “the mental structure through specific societal agencies or agents”, presumes implausibly the existence of an unchanging, “repressive organization of the instincts”, that substrates, “all historical forms of the reality principle in civilization” (ibid.). If we were to apply Freud’s supposition to an analysis of the aforementioned advertising text of the Flex Wireless Activity + Sleep Wristband, the situation of the advertising language, within a frame replete with programmatic indices, immediately suggests the inadequacy of relying upon a-historical evaluation. However, the alternative is not merely to add sociological concepts, but rather, as Marcuse (ibid. 35) suggests, it is necessary for the, “historical substance”, of instinctual structures to, “be recaptured … by unfolding their own content”. Marcuse (ibid.) develops this conceptual strategy so as to provide a critical supplement to the otherwise inadequate “unhistorical” aspects of Freud’s account of the instinctual structure of repression. “Terminologically”, this undertaking involves Marcuse (ibid.) configuring what is described as, “a duplication of concepts”. Whereby, “the Freudian terms, which do not adequately differentiate between the biological and the socio-historical vicissitudes of the instincts, must be paired with corresponding terms denoting the specific socio-historical component” (ibid.). Of particular relevance to this chapter’s analysis of introjection and advertising technology are conceptualisations of additional reality principles, developed by Marcuse so as to supplement Freud’s insistence on the existence of a reality principle that defines the order of civilisation in all human societies. For, it is evident that Marcuse, “posited a plurality of reality principles both historically and with respect to future possibility” (Geoghegan 1981:45). Marcuse’s (1956/1998:35) supplement concepts of “surplusrepression” and the “performance-principle” are additional forms of the reality-principle and defined as thus: (a) Surplus- repression: the restrictions necessitated by social domination. This is distinguished from (basic) repression: the “modifications” of

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

25

the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization. (b) Performance-principle: the prevailing historical form of the realityprinciple.

Surplus-Repression in Digital Advertising Technological Times Instinctual repression is the “dialectic of civilisation”, but behind Freud’s reality principle resides, “the fundamental fact of Ananke or scarcity (Lebensnot)” (Marcuse 1956/1998:35). It is evident that the struggle for survival, as conceived in Freud’s reality principle, manifests a world too impoverished to secure the satisfaction of all human needs, “without constant restraint, renunciation, delay” (ibid.). In the sphere of economically productive labour, throughout the duration of work time, “pleasure is ‘suspended’ and pain prevails” (ibid.). Given that the basic instincts ceaselessly endeavour for the satiation of pleasure and the privation of distress, Freudian analysis, Marcuse observes, positions the pleasure principle as discordant and antithetical with the necessary pragmatics of reality, thus, “the instincts have to undergo a repressive regimentation” (ibid. 36). In so far as Freud fails to recognise that the conditions of scarcity, which necessitate the imposition of the reality principle, are the outcome of a specific socio-historical era, “Freud’s metapsychology is [rendered] fallacious” (ibid.). Scarcity, in terms of the distribution of necessities, throughout history, has not been organised in accordance with collective needs or ensuring the equitable development of all populations. Rather, as Marcuse (ibid.) observes, “Instead, the distribution of scarcity as well as the effort of overcoming it, the mode of work, have been imposed upon individuals – first by mere violence, subsequently by a more rational utilization of power”. Regardless of the progressive effectiveness of rationality in terms of civilisation “it remained the rationality of domination, and the gradual conquest of scarcity was inextricably bound up with and shaped by the interest of domination” (ibid.). Marcuse observed that a plurality of reality-principles exist in reciprocal relation to their corresponding mode of domination and that reality-principles are to be apprehended in terms of the degree of intensity of the instinctual repression that they impose (ibid. 37). As Marcuse describes, “repression will be different in scope and degree according to whether social production is oriented on individual consumption or on profit; whether a market economy prevails or a planned economy, whether

26

Chapter One

private or collective property” (ibid.). Differences in the mode of production affect the form and operation of the reality principle, as it needs to be embedded in institutions, structured legal practices, and attitudes, “which transmit and enforce the required ‘modification’ of the instincts” (ibid.). Furthermore, the visceral body, upon which the reality principle is directed, is different within and through stages of civilization. Marcuse (ibid.) proceeds, therein, to identify modes of instinctual repression that exceed that which is necessary for the basic reproduction and preservation of the human species. As Marcuse expresses it: Moreover, while any form of the reality principle demands a considerable degree and scope of repressive control over the instincts, the specific historical institutions of the reality principle and the specific interests of domination introduce additional controls over and above those indispensable for civilized human association. These additional controls arising from the specific institutions of domination are what we denote as surplus-repression. (ibid. 37)

Surplus-repression can be observed as operating, Marcuse argues, in the modification and sublimation of instinctual energy imperative for the perpetuation of capitalist, “labor, or by public control over the individual’s private existence”; all are examples of the operation of, “surplusrepression pertaining to the institutions of a particular reality principle” (ibid. 38). Marcuse provides further illustration of surplus-repression with regards the visceral body and the containment to specific areas of the body, the instinctual sexual impulses. According to Marcuse, the containment of instinctual sexual desire involves the progression to bodily control, contiguous with basic repression and maturing into the making possible - through repression - the intensification of pleasure. However, intense instinctual repression of sexual drives, “may also be used against gratification” (ibid.). Marcuse identifies how, in the historical experience of the human species, the superintendence of instinctual sexual drives has involved an intertwining of the primal layer of repression and surplusrepression. Co-ordination of these layers of repression has meant that the normative progression to body control, “has been organized in such a way that the partial impulses and their ‘zones’ were all but desexualized in order to conform to the requirements of a specific social organization of the human existence” (ibid.). The pleasures of the body, through the course of civilization, have become contained into erogenous zones so as to curtail a spontaneous immediacy of bodily excitation. Surplusrepression is in evidence here, whereby the immediate and unpredictable excitation into pleasure of any region of the body, becomes specialised into specific sexual organs. Sexually instinctual desires are therefore

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

27

separated off into containable areas of the body, thus freeing the remainder of the body to engage in the time disciplined orchestration of capitalist labour. As Marcuse (ibid. 39) details, with regard to, “the pleasure of the proximity senses”, and, thus, similarly the excitations of the body, if “unrepressed development would eroticize the organism to such an extent that it would counteract the desexualisation of the organism required by its social utilization as an instrument of labor” (ibid.). Suffice to say, that surplus-repression is apparent in the division of the body into a series of socially acceptable “erotogenic zones”, and, thereby, sufficiently contains the disruptively unproductive potential of sexual drives (ibid.). Here and elsewhere, it is evident that: Throughout the recorded history of civilization, the instinctual constraint enforced by scarcity has been intensified by constraints enforced by the hierarchical distribution of scarcity and labor; the interest of domination added surplus-repression to the organization of the instincts under the reality principle. The pleasure principle was dethroned not only because it militated against progress in civilization but also because it militated against a civilization whose progress perpetuates domination and toil. (ibid. 40)

In interpolating Marcuse’s (1956/1998) account of surplus-repression, my discussion, thus far, has prepared a conceptual framework within which to position adsensory wearable technologies. It is my contention that the institutional relations and practices that cultivate advertising channels through wearable technologies, represent part of the surplusrepressive conditions through which the reality-principle comes to be introjected.

Haptic Perceptual Systems of Wearable Technologies Best Practices for PurePulseTM Accuracy Fitbit PurePulseTM trackers help you get the heart rate stats you want, right on your wrist – automatically, all-day, during workouts and beyond – with no need for an uncomfortable chest strap. Like all heart-rate monitoring technologies, accuracy is affected by physiology, location of device, and different movements. To get the most accurate heart rate reading during workouts, follow these three steps: 1. Move it up. Since blood increases further up your arm, wear your tracker higher on your wrist to improve the heart rate signal during

Chapter One

28

workouts. Start by moving the device up to three finger widths above your wrist bone, then experiment with slightly lower placement. 2. Keep it secure. The less your tracker moves during exercise, the more chance you have of maintaining a heart rate signal throughout the activity. Do not wear the band too tightly, as this can restrict blood flow and goes against our wear and care guidelines. 3. Hold steady for ten seconds. High intensity exercises or activities that cause you to keep your wrist bent (like push-ups) or move your arms vigorously (like dance) may interfere with heart rate signals. If you stop seeing a signal during these types of activities, hold your wrist steady for ten seconds during breaks to get your reading. However you choose to get in a good sweat, checking your heart rate during exercise helps you gauge your effort and adjust workouts on the spot to ensure you’re pushing yourself hard enough without overtraining. (Fitbit Inc. 2015s)

Advances in the technological rationality of fitness monitoring applications are revolutionising levels of proximity and accessibility through which advertising communications can intervene into social conditions of introjection. Of particular significance, have been formidable technological mediations into haptic perception. James Gibson’s (1966) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, defines the “haptic system” as thus, “The sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to his body by the use of his body” (ibid. 97). Originally deriving from the Greek terms “haptikos, meaning ‘able to touch’”, and “haptesthai, meaning ‘able to lay hold of’” (Katz 1989, quoted in Minogue and Jones 2006:318), haptic perception, in humans, operates when the body apprehends its environment. One might conceive that the haptic system of perception refers merely to sensation received at the interface between the body and its external environment. While pressure on skin has relevance, in addition to “the sense of kinesthesis”, the haptic system is more extensive than these individual features (Gibson 1966:97). For these, “elementary impressions” only partially begin to explain sense perception of the body (ibid.). Rather, what is required is a thorough reconsideration of the senses and a re-framing of predominant conceptual ideas, and this requires challenging the conventional notion that describes “the senses” as “channels of sensation” (ibid. 1). Gibson’s paramount objective is to explicate an understanding of the senses, “as systems for perception” (ibid.). Gibson appreciates that this may appear an unusual proposition; in order to ameliorate the peculiarity of theorising perception without emphasising sensation, Gibson encourages the reader to confront a duality

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

29

evident in the meaning of the verb senses. For, “the fact is that there are two different meanings of the verb to sense, first, to detect something, and second, to have a sensation” (ibid.). In the former, ‘sense’ refers to the active detecting and seeking out of information from the external environment, whilst the latter emphasises a process of receiving exterior stimuli. Emphasised here is a notion of the senses as actively detecting, seeking, and endeavouring to obtain information about external stimuli. Central to this conceptual approach is Gibson’s ground-breaking theory that sense perception is more than cerebral cognitive processing. For, “the senses can obtain information about objects in the world without the intervention of an intellectual process – or at least that they can do so when they operate as perceptual systems” (ibid. 2). Such is Gibson’s commitment to the prominence of perceptual systems that the conventional focus on senses, in terms of signals to the nervous system, is intentionally omitted from the frame of analysis - “I will distinguish the input to the nervous system that evokes conscious sensation from the input that evokes perception. I will not even speak of the ingoing impulses in nerves as ‘sensory’, so as not to imply that all inputs arouse sense impressions” (ibid. 2). Inferred in this position is Gibson’s belief that things can be perceived without the presence, and/or existence, of direct impression on the senses. As Gibson expresses it: For it is surely a fact that detecting something can sometimes occur without the accompaniment of sense impressions. (ibid. 2)

Central to the conceptual architecture of Gibson’s perceptual systems is, “the principle that stimulus information can determine perception without having to enter consciousness in the form of sensation” (ibid.). Here, it is necessary to return to the double interpretations of the verb ‘to sense’ for the detection of external stimulus information, without clear awareness of exactly which of the sense organs have received the signal and without an evaluation of the quality of the stimulation suggests “sensationless perception” (ibid.). This is not to suggest, “that perception can occur without stimulation of receptors”, rather, it is proposed, “that organs of perception are sometimes stimulated in such a way that they are not specified in consciousness” (ibid.). One might venture from this the possibility of perception precipitated by zero input – a fascinating conceptual puzzle (see chapter four of this book). Conversely, Gibson’s asserts that, “Perception cannot be ‘extra-sensory’, if that means - without any input; it can only be so if that means without awareness of the visual, auditory, or other quality of the input” (ibid.). By way of illustration:

30

Chapter One An example of this is the ‘obstacle sense’ of the blind, which is felt as ‘facial vision’ but is actually auditory echo detection. The blind man ‘senses’ the wall in front of him without realizing what sense has been stimulated. In short, there can be sensationless perception, but not informationless perception. (ibid. 2)

Gibson’s perceptual system exists in this context of “sensationless perception”, i.e., perception in the absence of a discernable organ’s reception of the external stimuli (ibid.). From this assertion derives the proposition, “that perception is not based on sensation”, perception is about seeking information “it is not based on having sensations” (ibid.). Information detection provides for the mechanics of Gibson’s perceptual system, whereby sense organs are described as either one of two forms “passive receptors that respond each to its appropriate form of energy, and the active perceptual organs, better called systems that can search out the information in stimulus energy” (ibid.). According to Gibson, the receptors have a quantifiable minimum threshold of activation; conversely, the perceptual systems and organs of the body are not subject to a minimum threshold other than in their relation to receptors. Similar threshold gradients are evident with regards to the echelons of stimulation: The stimulus energy of optics, mechanics, and chemistry is coordinate with receptors, but the stimulus information … is coordinate with perceptual systems. Stimulus energy varies along simple dimensions like intensity and frequency, but stimulus information varies along innumerable complex dimensions, not all amenable to physical measurement. (ibid. 2-3)

In the social and behavioural sciences, where senses are defined in terms of conduits of sensation, one is referring to docile receptors triggered by sensitive components in the organs of the body. While constituting an established and enduring disciplinary approach, the focus on sense perception - in terms of docile receptors - falls short of explaining, “how an observer, animal or human, can obtain constant perceptions in everyday life on the basis of these continually changing sensations” (ibid. 3). This is because a focus on perception that is conceptually premised on sense receptors that passively engage with the external environment is insufficiently equipped to accommodate invariance. As Gibson expresses it: It can be shown that the easily measured variables of stimulus energy, the intensity of light, sound, odor, and touch, for example, vary from place to place and from time to time as the individual goes about his business in the environment. The stimulation of receptors and the presumed sensations,

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

31

therefore, are variable and changing in the extreme, unless they are experimentally controlled in a laboratory. The unanswered question of sense perception is how an observer, animal or human, can obtain constant perceptions in everyday life on the basis of these continually changing sensations. For the fact is that animals and men do perceive and respond to the permanent properties of the environment as well as to the changes in it. (ibid. 3)

This is to appreciate that human beings sense variant and consistent features of their external environment - “The active observer gets invariant perceptions despite varying sensations” (ibid.). The active observer can perceive consistently an object even though their sense receptors will be activated by, and engaged in, the communication of changing contextual flows of stimulus energy; “he perceives a constant object by feel, despite changing sensations of pressure; he perceives the same source of sound, despite changing sensations of loudness in his ears” (ibid.). The mechanism here, which enables the perception of continuity within fast flowing streams of sensory reception, is because, “constant perception depends on the ability of the individual to detect the invariants”, and this necessitates filtering through the rapid streams of sensory reception and, in so doing, often paying “no attention whatever to the flux of changing sensations” (ibid.). This conceptual framework is in stark contrast with conventional analyses of perception, reliant upon modelling sensory nerve inputs. Conventional wisdom asserts that the inputs from sensory nerve bundles are the main determinants of perception, “There is said to be a receptor mosaic for each sense connecting with the central nervous system and projecting the pattern of excited receptors to the brain” (ibid. 4). In The Myth of Passive Perception, Gibson (1976) provocatively distains as misguided, theories that prioritise the mental faculties of the brain as the entire basis for conscious perception. Commencing with an acerbically crafted riposte attenuated from John Langshaw Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia, Gibson outlines here his formulation concerning, “the direct perceiving of the environment without the necessity of sensations to mediate the process. Perceiving is information-based, not sensation-based” (Gibson 1976:234). Admirably consistent and forthright, Gibson (ibid.) proceeds to challenge more directly the misapprehensions of theories that premise mental processes: The one kind of perceptual activity that my critics are willing to admit is mental activity, that is, the operations of the mind upon the deliverances of the senses. (You can substitute the operations of the brain upon the inputs

32

Chapter One of the sensory nerves if you like, but that will come to the same thing.) … The kind of activity, however, that seems to me important is the looking, listening, touching, tasting, and sniffing that goes on when the perceptual systems are at work. These acts involve adjustments of organs, not mere stimulation of receptors. They are not mental. Neither are they physical, for that matter, but functional. My notion of the pickup of information by the extracting of invariants over time involves the optimizing activity of a system and I believe it escapes the fallacies of mentalism on the one hand and those of stimulus-response behaviorism on the other. (Gibson 1976:234)

In so far as mental processes are prioritised in classical perspectives of sense-based perception, these approaches are limited by their reliance on reductive models of excited cerebral receptors. As Gibson (1966:4) puts it, “How could invariants get into the nervous system? The same incoming nerve fiber makes a different contribution to the pickup of information from one moment to the next”. Consequently, we are implored to think beyond a focus on the brain primarily for our analytical explanations of perception. As Gibson expresses, “Instead of looking to the brain alone for an explanation of constant perception, it should be sought in the neural loops of an active perceptual system that includes the adjustments of the perceptual organ” (ibid. 5). In contrast to the modelling of perception in terms of passive sense receptors automated in their passive transmission of messages to the brain, Gibson presents a conception of an active information seeking system in which: “The active senses cannot be simply the initiators of signals in nerve fibers or messages to the brain; instead they are analogous to tentacles and feelers” (ibid.). Viewed from this perspective sense perception comes to be appreciated as actively seeking information as part of a process of interacting with the external environment. Gibson’s formulation of an information-based perception, enables, and indeed encourages, an appreciation of perception, “before sensations have been aroused by stimuli, an activity that orients the organs or perception, explores the ambient array, and seeks an equilibrium” (Gibson 1976: 235). In accepting this evocation of perception, one is required to negate the idea, “of conduits, the assumption of incoming messages, and … go so far as to question whether there are nerves that should properly be called ‘sensory’” (ibid.). Perception, from this perspective, operates through links and “circular loops” that actively seek information; for, “that information is never conveyed but extracted by the picking up of invariants over time” (ibid.). Perception is an informationbased system, and, “Information about the world is available in the light, sound, chemicals and mechanical contacts that constitute the ‘flowing sea of stimulus energy’” (ibid.). Furthermore:

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

33

The world does not telegraph the brain and the brain does not telegraph the muscles; only a whole man sends telegrams. The brain is not a receiver nor a sender; not a homunculus but only an organ … A perceptual system does not respond to stimuli (although a receptor does) but extracts invariants. This notion is radical and unfamiliar but why should it be so difficult to comprehend? Gradients, transients, derivatives, ratios, and rates in a flowing array of energy are actually much more plausible than patterns of stimuli that go on and off at a mosaic of receptors. (ibid. 236-237)

Gibson describes sight, audio, olfactory, taste, and touch, as five perceptual sense systems that interrelate as part of an active process of perceiving the world. The brain’s role in relation to these perceptual systems is described as thus: And the function of the brain when looped with its perceptual organs is not to decode signals, nor to interpret messages nor to accept images. These old analogies no longer apply. The function of the brain is not even to organize the sensory input or to process the data, in modern terminology. The perceptual systems, including the nerve centers at various levels up to the brain, are ways of seeking and extracting information about the environment from the flowing array of ambient energy. (Gibson 1966:5)

Gibson’s perceptual systems are information detecting systems, which seek knowledge about their external environment. Modelling the perceptual systems in this manner has particular pertinence to my analysis of wearable technologies. Indeed, Gibson’s account of the perceptual system of touch, or the haptic system, provides for a conceptually enriching basis from which to explore the mediation of interaction in wearable fitness monitoring technologies. Similarly, it is recognised here that an analysis of the interactive features of fitness monitoring devices needs to appreciate the complex interactional properties of touch; this requires a focus beyond the traditional emphasis on the brain’s sensory nerves. It also requires exceeding beyond a conceptually limited focus on this biotechnology in terms of sensation on the skin – even where this mode of analysis is conjoined with the analysis of, “the sense of kinesthesis” (ibid. 97). Traditions of psychological research too often have these two features as their focus, resulting in crude assumptions, “that the set of these elementary impressions is all that the individual, animal or human, has available for perception” (ibid.). According to Gibson (1966), a principal reason as to why “elementary impressions” provide an incomprehensive definition of the haptic system is because, “the inputs available for perception may not be the same as the inputs available for sensation” (ibid. 97). This is particularly evident in my

34

Chapter One

post-structural analysis of the semiotics of adsensory advertising, featured in chapter four. Whereby, the advertising communication, for fitness monitoring wearable technologies, are identified as evocative in their allusion to perceptions only arbitrarily associated with a discernable reference. Consequently, haptic systems exceed a conceptual focus on skin pressure and kinesthesis; for in a haptic system, “There are inputs for perception, and also for the control of performance that have no discoverable sensations to correspond” (ibid.). Cognizance of these additional dimensions of a human being’s “inputs for perception” provides for a more expansive definition of the haptic system, as evident in the following formulation: The haptic system, then, is an apparatus by which the individual gets information about both the environment and his body. He feels an object relative to the body and the body relative to an object. It is the perceptual system by which animals and men are literally in touch with the environment. When we say figuratively that a man is in touch with the environment by looking or listening, the metaphor is something to think about. (Gibson 1966:97)

Gibson’s conception of “inputs of perception”, without discernable corresponding sensation, is indeed complex and provides potential basis for an account of the advertising architecture that is evolving in the field of wearable fitness monitoring technologies. If one is to cultivate resonantly applications of Gibson’s formulation of haptic systems it is necessary to explore further the original ancient Greek meaning of the term haptic. Aristotle’s De Anima Books II, III, provides discussion on forms of senseperception that exist in, and through, the body. Commencing with the observation that humans have the “nutritive faculty”, in addition to “the faculty of sense-perception”, Aristotle introduces into the matrix of senseperception, the concept of desire (Aristotle 1977:15). As is evident in the following extract, from De Anima: [F]or desire comprises wanting, passion, and wishing: all animals have at least one of the senses, touch, and for that which has sense-perception, there is both pleasure and pain and both the pleasant and the painful: and where there are these, there is also wanting: for this is a desire for that which is pleasant. (ibid. 15)

Aristotle (ibid.) asserts further the relevance of desire to sense-perception, “… let us say this much that those living things which have touch also have desire”. Touch is an omnipotent feature of sense-perception; for, “without the faculty of touch none of the other senses exists, but touch

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

35

exists without the others” (ibid. 16). Aristotle proceeds, in the analysis of touch, to examine “the tangible and touch” and the intangible (ibid. 38). With regards to the former, Aristotle (ibid.) raises pertinent questions concerning the primary sense-organ of touch. Part of the conundrum is that touch appears not to have an opposite, conversely other senses can be delineated in terms of opposites, as Aristotle illustrates “sight with white and black, hearing with high and low pitch, and taste with bitter and sweet; but in the object of touch there are many pairs of opposites, hot and cold, dry and wet, rough and smooth, and so on for the rest” (ibid. 39). Indeed, the inability to determine an opposite thing that is particular for touch, presents Aristotle with an anomaly and this is confounded by the simultaneity of perception and sensation that occurs with touch - “Whether the sense-organ {for touch} is internal or whether it is not this but the flesh directly does not seem to receive an indication in the fact that perception, occurs simultaneously with contact” (ibid.). Dispersed throughout the body, “the tangible and touch” can be likened to an integument, “a sort of membrane”, that is stretched over the flesh, “it would communicate the sensation in the same way immediately when touched” (ibid.). The paradox here, being that the primary senseorgan of touch would not reside within this membrane; “and if this were to become naturally attached, the sensation, would pass through it still more quickly” (ibid.). Thus, Aristotle (ibid. 40) proposes, that with respect to the tangible dimensions of touch, “the body must be the naturally adhering medium for that which can perceive by touch”. This partially explains why, “we perceive objects of touch not through the agency of the medium but simultaneously with the medium” (ibid. 41). Having introduced a conceptual mechanism for exploring the tangible aspects of touch, Aristotle proceeds to formulate, theoretically, that which is intangible and particular to touch. For, the notion of immediacy of perception input and touch sensation is less applicable to situations in which, “we perceive objects of touch not through the agency of the medium but simultaneously with the medium” (ibid.). Aristotle illustrates this feature of intangible perception and touch as thus - “like a man who is struck through his shield; for it is not that the shield is first struck and then strikes the man, but what happens is that both are struck simultaneously” (ibid.). In the act of perceiving an imminent impact on the body, one’s sensibilities are also touched. Thus, “it is clear that that which can perceive the object of touch is internal … [conversely] the flesh is the medium for that which can perceive by touch” (ibid.).

36

Chapter One

Aristotle’s observations about the sense-perception of intangible things are of particular pertinence to the bio-cognitive applications of wearable fitness monitoring technologies and, thus, require further elaboration. Using particularly poetic prose, Aristotle discusses how sense-perception can conceive the existence of materially intangible things; in, “senseperception we must take it that the sense is that which can receive perceptible forms without their matter, as wax receives the imprint of the ring without the iron or gold, and it takes the imprint which is of gold or bronze, but not qua gold or bronze” (ibid. 42-43). The concept of “imprint” is an astute rhetorical device; it inculcates into the notion of sense-perception the possibility of perceiving impressionistically. Just, “as wax receives the imprint of the ring” (ibid. 42); just as the mud drenched river foreshore receives the footprint of the traveller; just as the colours in a surprint retain traces of their original colour, so it is that senseperception can momentarily cultivate an impression of the dimension of an episode in time. Inferred in this proposition, is the capacity for senseperception to conceive of the potentiality of what an object, situation, or experience might become. Thus, “The primary sense-organ is that in which such a potentiality resides” (ibid. 43). From this can be deduced, that any modelling of the haptic system needs to account for the tangible, intangible, and potential dimensions of touch. As Aristotle expresses it: The primary sense-organ is that in which such a potentiality resides. These are then the same, although what it is for them to be such is not the same. For that which perceives must be a particular extended magnitude, while what it is to be able to perceive and the sense are surely not magnitudes, but rather a certain principle and potentiality of that thing. (ibid. 43)

Building further the concept of sense-perception potentialities, Aristotle conjectures as to whether that which is intangible can be affected by its perception; “Someone might raise the question whether that which cannot smell might be affected by smell, or, that which cannot see by colour” (ibid.). Can an intangible impression be affected by our senseperception of it? According to Aristotle, “nothing which is unable to smell can be affected by smell … nor can any of those things which can perceive be so affected except in so far as each is capable of perceiving” (ibid. 4344). Gibson’s (1966) account of the haptic system of perception advances further these issues and provides indication about their relevance to the analysis of wearable fitness monitoring technology. Of particular significance is the observation that, “… the inputs available for perception may not be the same as the inputs available for sensation. There are inputs

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

37

for perception, and also for the control of performance that have no discoverable sensations to correspond” (ibid. 97). It is my contention that the bio-sensory monitoring feature of wearable fitness technology operates as a haptic system in its mode of informationbased perception and in its capacity to detect performance where there are no discernable corresponding sensations. Consider, for example, the following promotional material derived from a November 2015 Fitbit Inc. online advertising campaign: On the walk to work, at the weight room or in the last mile. Somewhere between first tries and finish lines. Pillow fights and pushing limits. That’s where you find fitness. Every moment matters and every bit makes a big impact. Because fitness is the sum of your life. That’s the idea Fitbit was built on-that fitness is not just about gym time. It’s all the time. How you spend your day determines when you reach your goals. And seeing your progress helps you see what’s possible. Seek it, crave it, live it. (Fitbit Inc. 2015r)

One can discern from the statement, “Because fitness is the sum of your life” (ibid.), some indication of the operational components of a haptic perceptual system. According to Gibson (1966:99) - “The haptic system, unlike the other perceptual systems, includes the whole body, most of its parts and all of its surface”. Just as with Gibson’s conception of a haptic system, the biotechnology of a fitness wearable health monitoring device has no single sensory modality; it receives information from channels that circulate throughout the inner and outer body. According to Gibson (ibid.) in haptic systems, “The extremities are exploratory sense organs, but they are also performatory motor organs - that is to say, the equipment for feeling is anatomically the same as the equipment for doing”. It is my contention that digital monitoring denotative sensors operate similarly to the “extremities” of Gibson’s haptic system; they actively seek to discover figurations in the sensory milieu, inductively ascertaining knowledge and deductively using knowledge in channels of communication to the user. This combination of inductive and deductive knowledge is particularly unique to wearable fitness technologies that are predicated on touch; they actively intervene in the ambient milieu of the body’s sensory environment. Conversely, wearable technology that is orientated to vision, e.g., Google Glass investigates the visual scene encountered by the viewer without intervening to change the environment. A theme Gibson (ibid.) describes more generally as thus, “We can explore things with the eyes but

38

Chapter One

not alter the environment; however we can both explore and alter the environment with the hands”. By way of accounting for this haptic feature, Gibson (ibid.) describes the existence, “of overlap between the organs for perception and performance”. In human beings, the two central components, “of the haptic apparatus are the skin and the mobile body”; the latter is complicated by, “a hierarchy of members based on a skeleton”, and the former, “the skin has various appendages” (ibid. 100). Consequently, the haptic system’s information seeking receptors cover the surface of the body and do so in covariance with the framework of the body. In Gibson’s model of perception, this covariance between the skin and mobile skeleton introduces into the study of haptic systems complexity when discerning, “a boundary between the organism and its environment” (ibid. 101). Some indication of this complexity is provided as thus: The remarkable fact is that when a man touches something with a stick he feels it at the end of the stick, not in the hand. This is a difficulty for the theory of sensation-based perception; it requires some such postulate as the projecting of sensations outward from the body. But we entertain the hypothesis that information for the mechanical disturbance at the end of the stick is obtained by the hand as a perceptual organ, including information about the length and direction of the stick. The sensations in the hand itself are irrelevant. The surface of an organism, it should be remembered, is actually a boundary between the organism and its environment, and the boundary is not always or everywhere as clean-cut as the hairless human philosopher tends to think. (ibid. 100–101)

Given that, “the angular position of every bone of the body out to the extremities is literally articulated with the body frame”, and hence, “anchored to the direction of gravity and the plane of the substratum”, it is evident that, “an extremity can be oriented to both the frame of the body and the framework of space” (ibid. 102). Consequently, the haptic perceptual system involves the overlapping modalities of the body frame and the spatial frame of the external environment. Indeed, “the disposition of all the bones”, at any given period of time, can be conceived, “as a sort of branching vector space in the larger space of the environment, specified by the set of the angles at all joints relative to the main axes of the body” (ibid.). Gibson re-introduces cutaneous touch into the haptic system with regard to the body’s physical contact with the surfaces of its environment, perceptually mediated through the disposition of the body conceived as a radiating vector space divaricating into the wider expansive space of the environment. It is in this way that the wearer of a fitness monitoring

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

39

bracelet might feel the contours of the bracelet around their wrist as well as the shape of their wrist in the contours of the bracelet. Similarly, “a child who grasps a ball might feel the shape of the object as well as the shape of his grasping fingers” (ibid.). The general consensus emerging from these examples encourages a focus on the haptic system as yielding, “information about solid objects in three dimensions” (ibid.). Conversely, a focus on touch in terms of the proximity of sensations received by corresponding sense receptors, too narrowly concentrates on, “cutaneous impressions”, and its capability, “of yielding information only about patterns on the skin in two dimensions” (ibid.). Thoroughly reconsidering touch requires an advancement beyond proximity and cutaneous receptors embedded within the skin. Moreover, this is confirmed further when we realise complexity at the level of the receptors of the skin. For, it is misguided to conceive the modality of skin sensitivity in terms, “of a mosaic of receptors each with its own absolute local quality”; rather it is more conceivable that, “A locus on the skin consists of the set of differences between it and other possible loci” (ibid. 114). From this perspective emerges the assumption that skin sensitivity perception arises, not from the process of learning the different sensations emitted by each region of skin, but rather, “that parts of the skin have to be separated from one another by a joint process of maturation and learning” (ibid.). It is in this sense that the skin can be described as “differentiated” and this differentiation operates not as a mosaic of cutaneous receptors receiving distinct sensations; evidence of the existence of “these sensory spots” have long since been proven as, “mere artifacts of the method of stimulation” (ibid. 114-115). As Gibson describes: An indentation of the skin is not a point. Some indentations yield reportable sensations and some do not, but as Boring (1942) points out, this procedure ‘neglects all the vague sensory ghosts that can be aroused in the less effective regions between the spots’. (ibid. 115)

Following Gibson, it is my belief that any detailed consideration of touch needs to apprehend haptic processing in terms of information seeking receptors, which are, “primarily affected by mechanical energy” (ibid. 105). This implies a particular definition of the concept of “kinesthesis”, taken here to denote, “the pickup of movement”, and referring more narrowly, “to body movement, not movement of anything in the world” (ibid. 111). Kinesthesis traverses the operational perceptual systems of sight, sound, smells, taste, and touch. The imperative for the body to be able to discriminate between mobility and non-movements requires the inculcation of multiple perceptual systems; thus exceeding the

40

Chapter One

capacities of an exclusive cluster of receptors. Furthermore, there exists multifold varieties of movement that require registration by sensory receptors, as Gibson (ibid.) suggests, “There is articular kinesthesis for the body framework, vestibular kinesthesis for the movements of the skull, cutaneous kinesthesis for movement of the skin relative to what it touches, and visual kinesthesis for perspective transformations of the field of view”. In the aforementioned examples of kinesthesis, the sensory modality is with difficulty delineated; this is because “the sensory quality arising from the preceptor type is difficult to detect”, and yet the information received is coherently apprehended (ibid.). Thus confirming that, “Kinesthesis is a registering of such information without being sensory; it is one of the best examples of detection without a special modality of sensation” (ibid.). As may have been discerned, conceptually framing body movement in terms of, “the pickup of movement” (ibid. 111), has manifold implications for the analytically framing wearable technologies, especially with regards to their monitoring features, which can now alternatively be discerned in terms of a kinesthesis registering of information, “without being sensory” (ibid.).

Timely Reflections In summary, much can be gained from the application of Gibson’s (1966) haptic perceptual systems, regarding the analytical framing of wearable fitness monitoring technologies. Thus, following Gibson (ibid.), principal aspects of my haptic perceptual system formulation fitness wearable technologies are thus: Firstly, in contrast to the general assumption that binary digital fitness wearable devices, operate as conduits of sensory channels for the monitoring of specific sensations, a haptic approach defines the verb sense as, “to detect something” (ibid. 1). Consequently, wearable technology fitness devices, such as Fitbit Inc. PurePulse TM (2015), are considered here as sensory in that they actively seek information about the human subject’s body, rather than merely responding to sensed sensations. It is suggested further, that wearable fitness monitoring has as its principal endeavour the obtaining of information about the body, which although cognitively interpreted as data streams, does not have the cerebral processes of the human brain as the main source of perception. Consequently, the focus of my analysis is not reduced to an emphasis on, “the ingoing impulses in nerves as ‘sensory’” (Gibson 1966:2); in so doing the analysis is not suggesting that, “all inputs arouse sense impressions” (ibid.). For, it is evidently conceivable that a wearable technology can capture denotations of the body in the absence of

Introjecting Haptic-Sensory Capitalism

41

a discernable imprint. As Gibson (ibid.) states, “For, it is surely a fact that detecting something can sometimes occur without the accompaniment of sense impression”. Rather, it is my assertion that wearable fitness monitoring devices are evocative of haptic perceptual systems that actively detect sensory communiqué, “without any awareness of what sense organ has been excited or of the quality of the receptor” (ibid.); thus the sensory dimension of wearable technologies manifests what Gibson describes as “sensationless perception” (ibid.). However, in contrast to Gibson’s reservation that, “this does not mean that perception can occur without stimulation of receptors”, and that, “it only means that organs of perception are sometimes stimulated in such a way that they are not specified in consciousness”, this book explores immateriality as a feature of fitness monitoring and in this sense embraces the possibilities of what Gibson derisibly calls an “extra-sensory” perception, which he derides as meaning “without any input” and asserts as only being “so if that means without awareness of the visual, auditory, or other quality of the input” (ibid.). Thus, in contrast to Gibson’s (ibid.) assertion that, “there can be sensationless perception, but not informationless perception” (ibid.), the sensory dimensions of wearable technologies explored here, focuses additionally on “sensationless perception”: firstly in terms of the simulation of organs of perception in such a way as to obscure their definitive tracking in consciousness and secondly the focus of analysis explores the possibilities of what Gibson dismissively calls “extrasensory” perception (ibid.). A third principal feature of the haptic perceptual system approach to the analytical framing of wearable technology, is a focus on the advancement of perception through learning. Within the field of developmental psychology, it is often asserted that learning to perceive is a culmination of memory and “bare impressions” (ibid. 5). As Gibson (ibid. 6) expresses it, “On the assumption that the senses are channels of sensation, the process of learning has been thought of by stimulusresponse psychologists as an attaching of new responses to a fixed set of possible inputs”. With regards to an analysis of wearable technologies, a stimulus-response approach would focus on the fitness monitoring device as a conduit for the cumulative, serialisation of memories relayed in binary digital formats. Conversely, wearable technologies are discerned here as active information seeking, haptic perceptual systems that actively pickup “sensationless” and “extra-sensory” perception. As Gibson (ibid. 6) describes, “On the assumption that the senses are perceptual systems, however, the emphasis is shifted to the discovery of new stimulus

42

Chapter One

invariants, new properties of the world” to which the subject’s “repertory of responses can be applied”. The latter definition of learning has implications for the analytical framing of wearable technologies; it suggests that learning to perceive through the cumulative serialisation of information is merely “performatory learning” and needs to be contrasted with the active “perceptual learning” (ibid.) of the object’s environment.

CHAPTER TWO INTROJECTING THE (ELE)MENTS OF THE “PERFORMANCE PRINCIPLE” (HERBERT MARCUSE)

Figure 2.1. “Then come, gentle Goddess, sit full in my looks; Let my accents be founded by thee: While Crito in pomp, bears his burden of books, On the plains of wild Nature I’m free” (Ann Yearsley, Addressed to Ignorance, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016.

44

Chapter Two Extension or the Rationalising Logic of Homogeneous Elements?

“Congratulations, you have registered for the Big Billion Step-a-thon”, announces the precipitously flurried dép۶che cheerfully issuing from my computer screen. “Get stepping and check back soon for regular updates”, the message tantalisingly beckons as the Big Billion step monitor indefatigably displays a fascinating ascending live stream of, “total steps to date” (Big Billion 2016). Inquisitively enthralled by the incredible magnitude of the steps accumulated - 1,822,089,589 - I gaze fascinated at the step count’s unevenly paced leaps forward - within minutes it rises to 1,826,441,785 - thirty minutes later it jubilantly vociferates the figure 1,856,466,775, and, within an hour of quizzical screen gazing, the step counter is displaying an intriguing rapid ascent to 1,902,036,818 steps. My initial wonderment is now rapidly giving way to acedia as my gaze reaches beyond the isolated disembodied jittering, ascending numerical sign of the step counter. “Your steps have donated over £80,000 so far” (ibid.). Have they? Intrigue returns as my gaze forages the screen display, zetetically exploring for the demiurgus of the curiously erratic ascending numerical step counter sign. “There are 2 ways you can get involved”, extols the Big Billion promotional communiqué, “1. Join the Big Billion Step-a-thon. Already have a Fitbit? Register it now and for every 20,000 steps you take we’ll donate £1, up to £250,000. It’s simple. You step. We give. Register Now”; “2. Buy a Fitbit tracker and donate to Sport Relief. For a limited time only … Buy yours now and take #StepsForGood. Buy Now” (ibid.). Afterwards is displayed a Feel Good emblem aligned with the more familiar brand emblem of Sport Relief alongside the statement “Do Good”, followed by visual prompts to, “Get friends involved”, through Facebook and Twitter. The accolade, “Share #BigBillion”, precedes videos containing, “Greg Whyte’s Top Tips”. Lest we require further celebrity inspiration, there is offered, “Greg’s Tips for Success! Staying Motivated” (ibid.). Celebrity motivational edicts are accompanied by Twitter and Facebook screenshots featuring @FitbitUK, @sportsrelief, and the #bigbillion (ibid.). As I scroll onto the tab signed “Register”, I momentarily introspect: what would Herbert Marcuse say?

The (Ele)ments of Technological Rationality “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress” Herbert Marcuse’s (1964:1) eldritch, foreboding prose inaugurates One Dimensional Man as an exposition of technology, rationality, and

Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle”

45

subjectivity. In a characteristically laconic, afflicting rhetorical exegesis, Marcuse avails the demise of a rationality that had once arisen in contestation to erudite, divinatory knowledges, arbitrary rule, and ascribed status. Situated historically with the tumultuous provocations of rights and liberties integral to the initial stages of the industrial revolution, were, “critical ideas, designed to replace an obsolescent material and intellectual culture by a more productive and rational one” (ibid.). In the milieu of prosperity of advanced capitalist society, independence of ideas, “thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function” (ibid.). Axiomatic to this situation is the restive pervasiveness of technological rationality. Marcuse (1941/2002) defined technology in quite sophisticated terms; for the devices and mechanism of industry, encompassed were only a “partial factor” (ibid. 138). Cognizant of the erroneous populist postulations of technological modalities as brutishly determining consciousness, Marcuse (ibid.) argued that, “We do not ask for the influence or effect of technology on the human individuals”. For the human and nonhuman world are integrally interwoven, “not only as the men who invent or attend to machinery but also as the social groups which direct its application and utilization” (ibid.). Such sentiments pre-empted science and technology study’s coetaneous insurgence and prophetically anticipated the human/nonhuman dyadic relations of actor network theory. Technology does indeed relate to the non-human devices of a mode of capitalist production; technology is also a mediator of social relations, while at the same time being, “a manifestation of prevalent thought”, and a modality of the mobilization of regulative conditions limiting patterns of behaviour (ibid. 139). Technological rationality relates to the cultivation of a form of rationality emblematic of the logic and mode of production of capitalism. The antecedents of Marcuse’s formulation of the concept of technological rationality can be traced to conceptual interventions into the “The principle of individualism” (ibid. 140). Considering the English Revolution and its aftermath, the “the pursuit of self-interest, was conditioned upon the proposition that self-interest was rational, that is to say, that it resulted from and was consistently guided and controlled by autonomous thinking” (ibid.). Self-interest and “the individual’s immediate self-interest” were conceived as distinct; for the latter emerged in accordance with established authorities and the social propensities of a given society (ibid.). Conversely, self-interest as conceived in radical Puritanism positioned “the individual against his society” (ibid.). Knowing one’s interests in the context of society involved autonomous thinking and

46

Chapter Two

critical distance from inanely legitimating institutions and social practices of the established order. As Marcuse puts it: Men had to break through the whole system of ideas and values imposed upon them, and to find and seize the ideas and values that conformed to their rational interest. They had to live in a state of constant vigilance, apprehension, and criticism, to reject everything that was not true, not justified by free reason. This, in a society which was not yet rational, constituted a principle of permanent unrest and opposition. (ibid. 140)

Liberalist society was ordinarily presumed to provide an apposite social and economic context for the cultivation of an “individualistic rationality” directed towards critical autonomous thinking (ibid.). Marcuse observes that “In the course of time, however, the process of commodity production undermined the economic basis on which individualistic rationality was built” (ibid. 141). The emergence of mechanised and scientifically rationalised production techniques consolidated enterprises, alongside “establishing society’s domination over nature, abolished the free economic subject” (ibid.). Advances in technological power capacitated an ascendency of “the principle of competitive efficiency”, whereby the financially profitable deployment of technology came to determine the form, value and need for commodities, in so doing “the technological power of the apparatus affects the entire rationality of those whom it serves” (ibid.). It is Marcuse’s observation: The idea of compliant efficiency perfectly illustrates the structure of technological rationality. Rationality is being transformed from a critical force into one of adjustment and compliance. Autonomy of reason loses its meaning in the same measure as the thoughts, feelings and actions of men are shaped by the technical requirements of the apparatus which they have themselves created. Reason has found its resting place in the system of standardized control, production and consumption. There it reigns through the laws and mechanisms which insure the efficiency, expediency and coherence of this system. (ibid. 146).

Referring back to the Big Billion Step-a-thon Sport Relief campaign (Big Billion 2016a), by 15 February 2016, it had posted the following exuberant announcement (ibid.): The Big Billion Step-a-thon Thanks to the Fitbit community of steppers and the BIG BILLION Step-athon we’ve taken over 5 billion steps and raised £250,000 for Sport Relief.

Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle”

47

Your steps have truly made a difference to people living incredibly tough lives at home and abroad. WOW, WE’VE DONE IT!

The Big Billion step counter’s seemingly colossal numbers of the previous week appears pitiful when compared against the amazing desinential figure of 5,000,012,728. One might assume that this signifies the cessation of the Big Billion project, but scrolling through the promotion web-page reveals further indications of an impetus and impulse far in excess of the Big Billion project’s final performance. “Spending the morning talking physical activity & @FitbitUK #stepsforgood” reads the @gpwhyte, 15, February 2016, Twitter feed entry garland on the Big Billion promotional web-page (ibid.). “Just for fun 17 people reveal how they really feel about their Fitbit” (ibid.), interjects the Fitbit UK & Ireland Facebook feed. If the rationale of the Big Billion initiative was to achieve 5 billion steps, why is the aftermath of this successful performance permeated with such restless irresolution? Marcuse’s (1941/2002:146) critical engagement with the principle of performance axiomatic of “technological rationality” provides some relevant insights into the need for complexity when formulating relations of power and technological control; as is evident further in the following statement from One Dimensional Man: In the social reality, despite all change, the domination of man by man is still the historical continuum that links pre-technological and technological Reason. However, the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the ‘objective order of things’ (on economic laws, the market etc.). To be sure, the ‘objective order of things’ is itself the result of domination, but it is nevertheless true that domination now generates a higher rationality – that of a society which sustains its hierarchic structure while exploiting ever more efficiently the natural and mental resources, and distributing the benefits of this exploitation on an ever-larger scale. (Marcuse 1964:144)

Marcuse continuously valorises a form of rationality, which is perceived to have been an adumbrate of the revolutionary challenges to the entrenched dynasties of power and knowledge, that reigned in preindustrial capitalism. Rationality resisted the autocratic imperious imposition of erudite power/knowledges. This form of critical rational

48

Chapter Two

thought is steadily being displaced and circumvented - “Rationality is being transformed from a critical force into one of adjustment and compliance” (Marcuse 1941/2002:146). Alongside these changes is the undermining of autonomous independence in critical thought; “Autonomy of reason loses its meaning in the same measure as the thoughts, feelings and actions of men are shaped by the technical requirements of the apparatus which they have themselves created” (ibid.). Taken together, Marcuse defined technological rationality as a form of logic validating thought that is shaped and cultivated in terms of the prerequisites of the apparatus of an advanced capitalist mode of production. Once the acclaimed progenitor of radical contestation and resistance to the established order’s inequities, “Reason has found its resting place in the system of standardized control, production and consumption” (ibid.). Refulgent in its new abstraction, reason now, “reigns through the laws and mechanisms, which insure the efficiency, expediency, and coherence of this system” (ibid.). From this definition, we gain further insights concerning the seemingly restless impetus of the Big Billion Step-a-thon. Technological rationality swarms throughout society, incessantly transfiguring truths and values into a logic that mirrors the requirements of the capitalist system of production. Marcuse (ibid. 146-147) observed how, “Propositions concerning competitive or collusive behaviour, business methods, principles of effective organization and control, fair play, and the use of science and technics are true or false in terms of this value system, that is to say, in terms of instrumentalities that dictate their own ends”. Technological rationality premises “truth values” that attribute prestige and accomplishment to compliant coordination (ibid. 147). These are in stark relief to the pursuit of rational self-interest emerging with the rise of the industrial revolution; the mode in which, “individualistic society had established its supreme values” (ibid.). For, the externally directed heteronomy of technological rationality contrasts with a mode of critical rationality that opposes social inequities arbitrarily determining actions, and thoughts, in pursuit of vested interests. As Marcuse (ibid.) puts it, “The pursuit of self-interest now appears to be conditioned upon heteronomy, and autonomy as an obstacle rather than stimulus for rational action”. One gains here the suggestion of a dialectical relation between technological and critical rationality. Indeed, Marcuse is misread as prophetically professing the monolithic domination of technological rationality. Conversely, in-depth readings of Marcuse reveal complex dialectical relations entangling technological and critical rationality.

Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle”

49

Marcuse identifies these concatenate rationalities as rhizomatic protrusions of an initial rationality conceived as having a logical structure of identicalness similitude. This, “identical and ‘homogenous’ truth” (ibid.), bifurcates into two oppositional truth values. At times Marcuse describes the resulting bifurcation into critical and technological rationalities as manifesting heterogeneous traits and elements that resist being reduced or merged into simpler substances, despite their often times entanglement into structures of oppositional truth values. Heterogeneous traits include, for example, the shaping of technological rationality in terms of the quantitative elements of the apparatus of capitalist society. Whereby, an element is analogous to the mechanical dynamics of electrical resistance to a smooth infinite absolute conductivity. Suffice to say Marcuse identifies the existence of a bifurcation of an original rationality into two opposing truth values with heterogeneous elements that, while often times entangled, resist and disrupt their merging into smooth conductive structures. It is Marcuse’s observation that an original rationality, axiomatic with the revolutionary conditions that later precipitated the individualistic society of the industrial revolution, has bifurcated into two coetaneous emulative parts: The originally identical and ‘homogenous’ truth seems to be split into two different sets of truth values and two different patterns of behavior: the one assimilated to the apparatus, the other antagonistic to it; the one making up the prevailing technological rationality and governing the behavior required by it, the other pertaining to a critical rationality whose values can be fulfilled only if it has itself shaped all personal and social relationships. The critical rationality derives from the principles of autonomy which individualistic society itself had declared to be its selfevident truths. Measuring these principles against the form in which individualistic society has actualized them, critical rationality accuses social injustice in the name of individualistic society’s own ideology. (Marcuse 1941/2002:147)

Marcuse’s (ibid.) exposition concerning the divarication - into a binary - of an original rationality co-existent with the rise of individualistic society and its antithesis, resonates with a later form of post-structuralism evident in Jean Baudrillard’s provocation concerning duality. Whereby Baudrillard (2003a) identifies an ordered duality in postmodern signs. Elsewhere I have illustrated this dynamic in postmodern advertising signs, conceived as a “dimension” (Ermarth 1995) of a self-referential moment; interpolating their feigning of meaning through their collusion and

50

Chapter Two

collision (Odih 2010, 2013); postmodern signs interpolate, they are complex, intriguing and not inanely chaotic. Marcuse (1941/2002:147) preceded the path-breaking iconic post-structuralist writers of recent times; Marcuse achieves this in conceptualising an inter-relatedness connecting the binary divarication of rationality. Recognising the complexity of, “The relationship between technological and critical truth”, Marcuse (ibid.) argues that, “The two sets of truth values are neither wholly contradictory nor complementary to each other; many truths of technological rationality are preserved or transformed in critical rationality”. Moreover, there is pliability and flexibility in the binary division between critical and technological rationality. As Marcuse (ibid.) puts it, “The distinction between the two sets is not rigid; the content of each set changes in the social process so that what were once critical truth values become technological values”. Marcuse (ibid.) here cites, as an example, the appropriation of human rights by discourses of efficiency and expediency. Standardization of thinking endemic to technological rationality also impacts on critical, autonomous truth values. Referring to the Big Billion campaign, one can discern an illustration of Marcuse’s (ibid. 148) observation that, “political economy functions in the struggle among conflicting business groups and as a governmental weapon for unmasking monopolistic practices”; the latter might easily refer to the extension of markets and marketization into the UK charity sector so as to precipitate competition. Inculcating critical values into such pursuits has a corrosive effect on critical thought: For the categories of critical thought preserve their truth value only if they direct the full realization of the social potentialities which they envision, and they lose their vigor if they determine an attitude of fatalistic compliance or competitive assimilation. (Marcuse 1941/2002:148)

According to Marcuse (ibid. 149), social movements debilitate their revolutionary spirit, “when this movement incorporates itself into the apparatus”. Returning to the Big Billion Step-a-thon, one might argue that the translation, mediated by Fitbit Inc. of 5 billion steps into a £250,000 donation to Sport Relief, is analogous to a financialisation of an aggregated consumerism into interest bearing capital; thus, an illustration of the whole-sale incorporation of philanthropic charity giving into finance capital. From this perspective, it might be argued that the Big Billion Stepa-thon is an illustration of how in the financialisation of philanthropic giving, “Ideas such as liberty, productive industry, planned economy, satisfaction of needs are then fused with the interests of control and competition” (ibid.). When tracing the historical trajectory of opposition

Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle”

51

movements in Europe, Marcuse (ibid.) observed that a process of incorporation was occurring - in which the adoption of technological rationality in their organisation had resulted in the subordination of critical rationality to the latter - leaving social opposition in Europe, “thereby ‘purged’ of the elements, which transcended the established pattern of thought and action”. Processes reminiscent of the scaling-up of charity organisations in the UK corresponded, Marcuse (ibid. 149-150) observes, to an accrescence of large-scale industry and a concomitant need for social opposition movements to be more, “effectively coordinated in large-scale organizations”. However, their adoption of technological rationalistic coordinating structures meant that the transfiguration of social movements into mass political organisations, “far from dissolving the structure of individualistic society into a new system, sustained and strengthened its basic tendencies” (ibid. 150). Parallels can be made here with the adoption by Sport Relief of a multi-mediated Big Billion Step-a-thon campaign, mediated by a colossal scale-up of technological rationality so as to coordinate the monitoring of physical activity in its transformation into interest bearing finance capital. While it is possible to operationalize and reliably validate that this conversion of physical activity into finance capital has in some respects occurred, the notion of a mass mobilisation of individuals via a wearable fitness monitoring technology requires a more sophisticated formulation. Moreover, as previously asserted, technological rationality is a form of rationality that is shaped by the technical requirements of the apparatus of the capitalist system of production. While emerging from an original rationality - considered homogenous in its internal logic - technological rationality is homogeneous and its component features of quantification, for example, are elements that are entangled with the structures of capitalist production, resisting fusion into a smooth channel of conductivity. We need therefore to conceive more complexly the apparent massification of a financialised philanthropic giving made evident by the enrolment of Fitbit Inc. into the Sport Relief 2016 charity fundraising.

Technological Rationality and the Individuation of Financialised Charity Campaigning February 16, 2016, the Big Billion web-page is trailing the following Fitbit UK & Ireland, tweet: “@FitbitUK – Feb 16 Watch Ben’s amazing journey with #Fitbit. He did so much more than lose weight & get fit #stepsforgood #fitspirationhttp://youtube” (Big Billion 2016). Positioned immediately above joggers, luminously sporting their Fitbit® wrist

52

Chapter Two

devices, briskly ascending an open-air staircase bordered by pristinely trimmed uniform hedgerow. Replete with visual metaphors of a collective, coming together of shared interest and group camaraderie invested in Sport Relief, there exists in the visual imagery a subtle tension in the connotation of signifiers; they are, at one and the same time, depicting a group/mass and individual event. Similar tensions make complex the process of financialised philanthropy exemplified by the enrolment of Fitbit Inc. into the Sport Relief 2016 fundraising campaign. One might initially argue that the £250,000 raised from the 5 billion steps that were monitored, is illustration of a mass mobilized alliance between finance capital, charity sports campaigning, and the wearable technology company Fitbit Inc. Such an assertion would be an over simplification and an under estimation of the heterogeneous composition of the quantitative elements of technological rationality. In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse’s (1964:912) discourse on subjectivity and the undermining of a critical rationality in advanced capitalism is predicated on the concept of “introjection”; Marcuse’s conceptualisation of “introjection” has relevance to a formulation of the individuation of the extension of financialisation into sports charity events. According to Marcuse (ibid. 9), one-dimensional society refers to a specific phenomenon in advanced capitalist society where technological rationality marginalises alternative means of organising social relations, and undermines the intellectual conditions necessary for the conception of other ways of existing. In the milieu of its bifurcation from critical reason, technological rationality is achieving an, albeit fraught and complex, ascendency. As Marcuse (ibid.) observes, “But in the contemporary period, the technological controls appear to be the very embodiment of Reason and the benefit of all social groups and interests – to such an extent that all contradiction seems irrational and all counteraction impossible”. This prevalence of technological rationality had led to Marcuse’s (ibid.) proclamation that, “No wonder then that, in the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots”. Challenges to the system of technological rationality, “The intellectual and emotional refusal ‘to go along’”, is, according to Marcuse, castigated as, “neurotic and impotent”; thus arises a one-dimensional society in which the intellectual and affective conditions that, “seemed to represent the possibility of new forms of existence”, lack the conditions necessary for their fruition (ibid. 9-10). Marcuse interjects sophistication into this asservation through the utilisation of the concept of “introjection”. In socio-psychology,

Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle”

53

“introjection” refers to an internal dialogue between our uniquely experienced relation to the world and that which we perceive to be more widely considered as appropriate, normative, and conducive to one’s integrated participation in civilised society. This inner dialogue is dialectical as no other person lives anyone else’s life and, thus, our unique engagement with the world offers the possibility for a critical distance from an immediacy of existence in the world. Marcuse observes that the expansion of technological rationality, coupled with advancements in scientific management and advertising psychology intrusions into knowing the inner-self, have undermined the efficaciousness of this inner region as a source of two-dimensional thought. As Marcuse (ibid. 10) expresses it, “But the term ‘introjection’ perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society”. The unique and potentially critical internal dialogue between the I and the Me, is an opulent resource for twodimensional thinking. As Marcuse (ibid.) appreciates, “Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the ‘outer’ into the ‘inner’”. Axiomatic to introjection is the possibility of a dialogical engagement with an I, which is uniquely distinct from the exigencies of the “outer” social world. According to Marcuse (ibid.), “introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies –an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior”. Marcuse, clearly treasures this inner realm of “freedom”, as is evident in the statement, “The idea of ‘inner freedom’ here has its reality: It designates the private space in which man may become and remain ‘himself’” (ibid.). Advances in the pervasiveness of technological rationality are coupling with the intrusion of advertising psychology and scientific management into rendering knowable the inner realm of “freedom” precipitated by the I and its unique relation to the world. One Dimensional Man clearly does not refer to the predisposition of a man, but, rather, one-dimensional thought, which is the condition and outcome of a one-dimensional society. It is interesting that the original 1964 Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., publication does not include on the title page a hyphen linking the words One Dimensional. To have done so might have distractingly responded to the concerns levied in the 1960s about Motivational Research, subliminal persuasion and advances in advertising psychology. In the context of the 1960s heightened concerns regarding the possibilities of subliminal advertising and motivational conditioning,

54

Chapter Two

sociologists responded favourably to a body of work that transposed these commercial conditions into the social constructs of one-dimensional thought; but the inclusion of a hyphen in the title of Marcuse’s text encourages the erroneous and misconceived assumption that Marcuse is referring to the existence of a type of man. This also might explain why the German title of Marcuse’s (1964) book is not hyphenated, as it reads, Der eindimensionale Mensch. Marcuse was astutely cognizant of the inroads that advertising psychology and Motivational Research had made into rendering the inner aspects of the self, knowable. Thus, Marcuse writes that, “Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality” (Marcuse 1964:10). One needs to appreciate that Marcuse is not referring here to an apparent success in the ability to psychologically manipulate the consumer. Rather, as I have detailed elsewhere (Odih 2007b, 2010, 2013), from the 1930s, advertising psychology and Motivational Research were increasingly focusing on rendering the inner realm as an entity that can be known through scientific investigation. Accordingly, advertisements were increasingly directed at a dialogue with the inner-self and providing this realm with self, truth, and knowledge, albeit in a commercially crafted personalised and customised commodityform. Thus, Marcuse (1964:10) describes how, “Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory”. An outcome of this industrial level of intrusion into the inner sanctum of the self is that, “The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions” (ibid.). A consequence is that critical distance from the immediacy of our being in the world is whittled down. As Marcuse (ibid.) puts it, “The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole”. Marcuse’s observations here have parallels with the highly personalised advertising technologies through which the Big Billion Fitbit® mediated Step-a-thon charity fund raising campaign was expedited. There is indeed, as Marcuse (ibid.) might have observed: an “immediate, automatic identification” evident in the activity pursuits of the campaign and its “new ‘immediacy’” seem to be the outcome of a highly advanced technologically rationalistic scientific management. One needs to caution, however, and preclude from making crude empirical comparisons regarding the existent that the Big Billion campaign is direct evidence of Marcuse’s account of the corrosion of the inner dimension by the technological rationality of advertising psychology i.e., “In this

Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle”

55

process, the ‘inner’ dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down” (ibid.). One might agree that, “The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking –the critical power of Reason – is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition” (ibid. 10-11). While one might empathize with this assertion, it is necessary to caution against an overly deterministic reading of how this process of whittling down the inner realm of critical distance is presently coming about. Marcuse (ibid. 11) suggests that advances in the spread of technological rationality, “turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life”. The latter statement appears to be referring to a homogenous production of the facts of life (i.e., similar because they descend from the same original source), but closer reading reveals that the manufacturing of the quantitative facts of life is a homogeneous process i.e., “of the same sort of life”, the production of similarity in the quantitative form of elements. Thus, the pervasiveness of technological rationality advances through differences, challenges, and discontinuities in its pursuit of modes of quantification that efficaciously address the technical requirements of the apparatus of the capitalist system of production. It is partly through this sophisticated interplay of quantifying technological rationalities that capitalist society is able to ameliorate resistance to standardisation. Such that, “It is a good way of life –much better than before – and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change” (ibid. 12). This is evocative of the emergence of, “a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe” (ibid.). Marcuse goes on to pronounce that, as critical ideas, “They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension” (ibid.). However, surely this English translation of One Dimensional Man should read “quantitative elements”? In the German text, the same statement reads, “Sie werden neubestimmt von der Rationalität des gegebenen Systems und seiner quantitativen Ausweitung” (Marcuse 1970:37). The German word “Ausweitung” can according to the Clark et al. (1999:131) German- English Dictionary, English translate into the word “expansion”. The conception of a quantitative expansion, seems

56

Chapter Two

more apposite given Marcuse’s (1941/2002:147) presumption of technological rationality as coming into being through a bifurcation of an, “originally identical and ‘homogenous’ truth”, which, “seems to be split into two different sets of truth, values, and two different patterns of behavior”. It is important to recognise that Marcuse (ibid.) conceptualised that the bifurcated rationality into technological and critical rationality did not produce entirely diametric opposites. Rather, “The two sets of truth values are neither wholly contradictory nor complementary to each other; many truths of technological rationality are preserved or transformed in critical rationality” (ibid.). Translating the word “Ausweitung” into the English word ‘expansion’ comes closer to the dialectical relation that Marcuse envisaged to exist between technological rationality and critical rationality. This is because expansion suggests homogeneous processes of quantification, and the resulting morphology is of homogeneous elements that share similar form, but are not the same form as their descendent. Accepting this, then one is inclined towards the notion of quantified elements because the prefix “ele” refers to, “an extension at the end and at right angles to the main building” (Lieberman 2013-2014: 81). If we consider these quantitative expansions as elements that bend/swerve, it is possible to conceive - from an Epicurean notion of clinamen - that these elements exhibit a dynamic interchange in which they collude, collide, attract, and repel each other. This collision and collusion of quantitative elements provides for complexity in Marcuse’s (1964:12) conception of the extent to which ideas, “are redefined by the rationality of the given system”; the conception of elements introduces aleatory materialism into Marcuse conception of redefinition. I thus propose that Marcuse’s (1970:37), “Sie werden neubestimmt von der Rationalität des gegebenen Systems und seiner quantitativen Ausweitung”, should be translated in terms of defining “quantitativen Ausweitung” as at the least quantitative expansion, but more plausibly as quantitative elements. In so doing, one is given the conceptual scope to decipher empirically the complex ways technological rationality homogeneously sets about quantifying ideas, aspirations, and social relations. For it is evident that these quantitative elements of technological rationality collide and collude as part of their entanglement with the technical requirements of capitalist production. This is evident when we explore the Big Billion Step-a-thon, as an exercise in the individuation of financialised charity sports campaigning. Marcuse (1941/2002:150) argues that, “It seems to be self-evident that mass and individual are contradictory concepts and incompatible facts”. Perusing the 5 billion steps

Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle”

57

accomplished announcements on the Big Billion website, provides for a mesmerising array of trace elements variously indicating a colossal level of aggregation. Sifting amongst these heterogeneous trace elements - be they Twitter and Facebook threads, videos, step monitoring ticker tape one gains a sense of competing quantifying dynamics, each variously and differentially communicating with the audience member at the level of their own individuality. Marcuse (ibid.) describes how analyses of crowds too often misconceive the function of the individual; they presume that, with the crowd, the individual is no longer isolated and, in so doing, subjugates their individuality to that of the crowd. Reflecting again on the bricolage of social media threads, videos, and step-monitoring assemblage posted onto the Big Billion Step-a-thon web-site, one observes trace elements of an individuated mass as opposed to a collectively cultivated community. “Under authoritarianism”, Marcuse purports, “the function of the masses rather consists in consummating the isolation of the individual and in realizing his ‘former state of mind’” (ibid.). According to Marcuse (ibid.), the phenomenon of the crowd is, “an association of individuals who have been stripped of all ‘natural’ and personal distinctions and reduced to the standardized expression of their abstract individuality”. Thus, is revealed, a paradox at the heart of the technologically rationalised crowd aggregate that is the Big Billion Step-a-thon; its bricolage of social media virtual community trace elements bypasses the vicissitudes of organic, personal interaction preferring rather to channel para-social fragments of talk into standardized and formulaic expressions of “abstract individuality”, countenanced by individuating exercises complicit in the engendering of “the pursuit of self-interest” (ibid.). “Watch Ben’s amazing journey with Fitbit. He did so much more than lose weight and get fit #stepsforgood #fitspiration http://youtu.be”, states the Facebook Fitbit UK & Ireland February 16 2016 thread feeding through the Big Billion Step-athon webpage (Big Billion 2016). Given that the Big Billion Step-a-thon had successfully achieved its 5 billion monitored steps target, the “Watch Ben’s amazing journey” Twitter and Facebook synchronised message thread seems to be promoting some other cause. Marcuse (1941/2002:150) observes how, “As member of a crowd, man has become the standardized subject of brute self-preservation”. Having actively taken part in the Big Billion Step-a-thon, and donned my Fitbit Flex® during my daily run, it very easily became apparent that this collective feature was engendering of a highly individuated personal gain.

58

Chapter Two

According to Marcuse, “In the crowd, the restraint placed by society upon the competitive pursuit of self-interest tends to become ineffective and the aggressive impulses are easily released” (ibid.). The Big Billion Step-athon web-page, prior to achieving the 5 billion steps, sported a step counter accumulation live feed. A curious feature of this digital metric live step counter was the startling absence of rhythm in the numerical increase of steps; indeed, as described in the introduction: I gaze fascinated at the step count’s unevenly paced leaps forward - within minutes it rises to 1,826,441,785 - thirty minutes later it jubilantly vociferates the figure 1,856,466,775, and, within an hour of quizzical screen gazing, the step counter is displaying an intriguing rapid ascent to 1,902,036,818 steps. In the absence of knowledge at the level of the individual, of their individualised impact on the numerically scaled Step-a-thon, I and my fellow Big Billion step monitors were largely in pursuit of our own selfinterested target. Amidst the colossal mass of digitally generated numbers, self-interest is freed from the curtailment of the crowd. Marcuse (1941/2002:150) describes how, “These impulses have been developed under the exigencies of scarcity and frustration, and their release rather accentuates the ‘former state of mind’”. This is not to deny that Big Billion was successful in generating a simulacra of a crowd effect, but, the extent to which this aggregate of individuals ever progressed beyond the moment and became a collectively inspired virtual community of charity sports activists is questionable. Such sentiment is even more poignantly expressed as thus, “True, the crowd ‘unites’, but it unites the atomic subjects of self-preservation who are detached from everything that transcends their selfish interests and impulses. The crowd is thus the antithesis of the ‘community’ and the perverted realization of individuality” (ibid.).

Timely Reflections I have stressed that this does not mean the revival of ‘values’, spiritual or other, which are to supplement the scientific and technological transformation of man and nature. On the contrary, the historical achievement of science and technology has rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks – the materialization of values. Consequently, what is at stake is the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements in the technological process. The new ends, as technical ends, would then operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and not only in its utilization. Moreover, the new ends might assert themselves even in the construction of scientific hypotheses – in pure scientific theory. From the quantification of secondary qualities,

Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle”

59

science would proceed to the quantification of values. (Marcuse 1964:231232)

Marcuse (1956/2005:37) postulates that, “every form of the reality principle must be embodied in a system of societal institutions and relations, laws and values which transmit and enforce the required ‘modification’ of the instincts”. This institutionalised “body”, axiomatic with the reality principle, is distinct according to the epoch of civilisation. Moreover, given that any manifestation of the reality principle necessitates, “a considerable degree and scope of repressive control over the instincts”, the delimitative, “historical institutions of the reality principle and the specific interests of domination introduce additional controls over and above those indispensable for civilized human association” (ibid.). Additional modes of regulation emanating from the reality principle’s distinct institutions and relations of control are denoted as, “surplus-repression” (ibid.). By way of example, Marcuse (ibid. 37-38) describes how, “the modifications and deflections of instinctual energy necessitated by the perpetuation of the … hierarchical division of labor, or by public control over the individual’s private existence are instances of surplus-repression pertaining to the institutions of a particular reality principle”. These alterations and sublimations are an adjunct to, “the basic (phylogenetic) restrictions”, necessary for human civilisation (ibid. 38). Marcuse (ibid. 40) asserts that throughout the documented history of civilisation, control of instincts, necessitated by scarcity, have, “been intensified by constraints enforced by the hierarchical distribution of scarcity and labor; the interest of domination added surplus-repression to the organization of the instincts under the reality principle”. Contiguous with this architecture of instinctual regulation has been the displacement and circumvention of the “pleasure principle”, which expedited its demise, “not only because it militated against progress in civilization, but also because it militated against a civilization whose progress perpetuates domination and toil” (ibid. 40). At this stage of interpretation, it is necessary to recall that Marcuse (ibid. 34) critiqued the a-socio-historical emphasis of Freud’s psychoanalytic construct of the reality principle. Although, as with Freud, Marcuse (ibid.) argues that, “The reality principle sustains the organism in the external world”. In contrast with Freud, Marcuse argues that this external world is inherently sociohistorical in terms of the composition of reality encountered by the subject. As Marcuse (ibid.) puts it, “The external world faced by the growing ego is at any stage a specific socio-historical organization of reality, affecting the mental structure through specific societal agencies and agents”.

60

Chapter Two

Conversely, as Marcuse observes, Freud’s account of instinctual drives is predicated on physiology and a-historical biological predisposition. As Marcuse (ibid.) expresses it, “It has been argued that Freud’s concept reality principle obliterates this fact by making historical contingencies into biological necessities: his analysis of the repressive transformation of the instincts under the impact of the reality principle generalizes from a specific historical form of reality to reality pure and simple”. Freud’s ahistorical formulation of the history of civilization as an “organized domination” - perpetuated by an irreconcilability between the pleasureprinciple and the reality-principle - is largely abandoned by Marcuse (ibid.) along with its, “necessity of a universal biological development”. Keen to recapture the socio-historical implications of Freud’s promulgations concerning the historical development of instinctual drives, Marcuse (ibid. 35) sets about a formulation of extrapolation, through which, “their historical substance must be recaptured, not by adding some sociological factors (as do the ‘cultural’ Neo-Freudian schools), but by unfolding their own content”. An outcome of this process of extrapolation is Marcuse’s (ibid.) formulation of duplicated concepts operating as supplements to, “the Freudian terms, which do not adequately differentiate between the biological and the sociological vicissitudes of the instincts”. Surplus-repression and the performance-principle are the out-growth of this process of formulation through the extrapolation of the sociohistorical potential relevance of Freud’s existing concepts. Consequently, Marcuse’s conception of surplus-repression originates from the realisation that an impecuniousness of Freud’s reality-principle is the neglect to have conceived institutions to have been significant to its normalisation and propagation. Extrapolating from this, Marcuse (ibid. 37) conceives that, “The various modes of domination (of man and nature) result in various historical forms of the reality principle”; the institutional structures axiomatic to the differentiated embedding of the reality principle, “introduce additional controls over and above those indispensable for civilised human association”; and these adscititious regulations, “arising from the specific institutions of domination are what we denote as surplusrepression”. This chapter has sought to identify an institutionalisation of financialisation in terms of the enrolment of wearable fitness monitoring technologies into the marketization of the promotion of healthcare and well-being. It has been argued that the modification and sublimation of instinctual drives - advent of the regulation/monitoring of private lives by public audiences - adumbrates the institutionalisation of financialisation in

Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle”

61

health and social care provision within the voluntary sector. Considered as adsensory technologies, wearable fitness monitoring devices exemplify, “The power to restrain and guide instinctual drives, to make biological necessities into individual needs and desires” (ibid. 38). Interpolating the term surplus-repression has enabled a focus on financialisation in terms of the institutionalisation of computer mediated haptic-sensory regulation, and its rapid ascendancy, as an integral feature of what Marcuse (ibid. 44) describes as, “the social ‘body’ of the reality principle”. The empirical focus on Big Billion is illustrative of complexity in the processes by which adsensory technologies perpetuate and modify the reality principle. According to Marcuse (ibid.), “the institutions and relations that constitute the social ‘body’ of the reality principle … do not just represent the changing external manifestations of one and the same reality principle but actually change the reality principle itself”. Thus, it is necessary to enquire into the specific form the reality-principle is assuming in our contemporary epoch. Writing in the 1950s, Marcuse (ibid.) observed an increasingly competitive and individualising advancing capitalist society. Marcuse (ibid.) coined the concept of the, “performance principle”, to describe a pervasion of emulative, adversarial economic performance. As Marcuse (ibid.) expresses, “We designate it as performance principle in order to emphasize that under its rule society is stratified according to the competitive economic performances of its members”. Marcuse recognises that the performance principle is not the only historical reality-principle in common prevalence. Nevertheless, there is evidence to suggest that the mode of production in capitalist society is predicated on individualising competition. As Marcuse describes: The performance principle, which is that of an acquisitive and antagonistic society in the process of constant expansion, presupposes a long development during which domination has been increasingly rationalized: control over social labor now reproduces society on an enlarged scale and under improving conditions. (ibid. 45)

According to Marcuse (ibid. 46), “Under the rule of the performance principle, body and mind are made into instruments of alienated labor”. Society emanates as a proliferating system, “of useful performances; the hierarchy of functions and relations assumes the form of objective reason: Law and order are identical with the life of society itself” (ibid.89). Marcuse argues that mainstream Western philosophy has inculcated into its haecceity the performance-principle. Paradoxically, the same philosophy professes the progression towards a higher form of reason evocative of the negation of the individuating properties of the

62

Chapter Two

performance principle. As Marcuse (ibid. 130) describes in Western philosophy, “Behind the definition of the subject in terms of the ever transcending and productive activity of the ego lies the image of the redemption of the ego: the coming to rest of all transcendence in a mode of being that has absorbed all becoming, that is for and with itself in all otherness”. Duality and interpolation feature here, and consistently in Marcuse’s discussions, of the performance-principle and surplusrepression; and integral to both of these, is the ascendency of technological rationality. Thus, I return to the conceptual theme of this chapter, i.e., a conception of technological rationality in terms of homogeneous processes of quantifying the social. “It seems to be self-evident that mass and individual are contradictory concepts and incompatible facts”, Marcuse (1941/2002:150) observes in Some Social Implications of Modern Technology. Such sentiment appears apposite when conceptualising the idiosyncrasies of the crowd effect produced by computer mediated marketised health and well-being online networks. The Big Billion Step-a-thon charity fundraising event successfully enrolled the wearable fitness monitoring company Fitbit Inc., and the charity Sport Relief, into a mutually lucrative financialised translation of respectively distinct agenda. The conversion of physical activity into finance capital was mediated by the quantitative elements of technological rationality and, thus, a homogeneous process of conversion. Conceptual basis for the latter observation is evident in Marcuse’s (ibid.) challenge to the proposition that, “in the crowd the individuals ‘cease to be isolated’, are changed, and ‘feel no connection with their former state of mind’”. It is Marcuse’s (ibid.) observation that, “The crowd is an association of individuals who have been stripped of all ‘natural’ and personal distinctions and reduced to the standardized expression of their abstract individuality, namely, the pursuit of self-interest”. One may argue that technological rationality emanates here in terms of a quantitative extension that has produced a homogenous mass of its own descendants. However, such an assumption would have to negate the other competing, and even contradictory, forms of quantification that co-exist in the Big Billion Step-a-thon; subscribers were encouraged to regularly and competitively input their daily steps as recorded by their Fitbit Inc., fitness monitoring device. Considered as an element, the latter process counterpoised an intent to produce a homogenous mass of electronically mediated syncopated Fitbit® wearers.

Introjecting the (Ele)ments of the “Performance Principle”

63

Collusion and collision characterises the outcome of the quantification elements of technological rationality. Marcuse (ibid.) observes that, “As member of a crowd, man has become the standardized subject of brute self-preservation”. Modification and sublimation epitomise aspects of the subject’s response; “In the crowd, the restraint placed by society upon the competitive pursuit of self-interest tends to become ineffective and the aggressive impulses are easily released” (ibid.). When one recognises the processes of quantification at play here, in terms of quantitative elements, it becomes apparent that, “True, the crowd ‘unites’, but it unites the atomic subjects of self-preservation who are detached from everything that transcends their selfish interests and impulses” (ibid). Suffice to say, technological rationality shapes subjectivity through complex, colluding, and colliding quantitative elements; thus, “what is at stake is the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements in the technological process” (Marcuse 1964:232).

64

Chapter Two

Figure 2.1a. “Then come, gentle Goddess, sit full in my looks; Let my accents be founded by thee: While Crito in pomp, bears his burden of books, On the plains of wild Nature I’m free” (Ann Yearsley, Addressed to Ignorance, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016.

PART TWO ADSENSORY CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION

Figure P.2. “Protected thus from ev’ry barbed dart, Which oft from soul-corroding passion flies, I own the transport of a blameless heart, While on the air the pow’rless fury dies” (Ann Yearsley, Written On A Visit, 1787). Photographic image, London 2016.

CHAPTER THREE ADSENSORY ACCUMULATION AS “[RE]CAPITALIZED … LANDED PROPERTY” (KARL MARX)

Figure 3.1. “Florus, canst thou define that innate spark Which blazes but for glory? Canst thou paint The trembling rapture in its infant dawn, Ere young Ideas spring; to local Thought, Arrange the busy phantoms of the mind, And drag the distant timid shadows forth” (Ann Yearsley, On Genius Unimproved, 1787). Photographic Image, London 2016.

Adsensory Accumulation as “[re]capitalized … landed property”

67

If we consider the cases where capital investment on the land can take place without payment of rent, in a country of capitalist production, we shall find that they all involve a factual – if not a legal – abolition of landed property, an abolition that can occur only under very special conditions. (Marx Capital Vol. III 1981:885)

Launched in 2016 Fitbit BlazeTM is a trailblazing accompaniment in exordium to the Fitbit® repertoire. “See your stats in a whole new way on the Fitbit app and dashboard” (Fitbit 2016a). Announcing rapturously its extensive interoperability: “Fitbit Blaze synchs wirelessly to 200+ devices, so you can dive into workout summaries, analyse your trends, tracks your nutrition and more” (ibid.). Amidst a transonic boom of self-proclaimed “breakthrough features”, Fitbit BlazeTM is in many ways “A revolutionary watch designed with fitness in mind” (ibid.). Indeed actively seeking, calibrating and advertising the body’s health fitness, scales astounding levels of precision in Fitbit BlazeTM. Its PurePulseTM heart rate monitoring capacities, and on-screen workouts, coupled with “Connected GPS” constitute an unparalleled spectacle tableau vivant. Kinaesthetically sensing knowledge from the active body, Fitbit BlazeTM is equally ravenous in its monitoring of “All-Day Activity & Sleep” alongside biorhythmic pick-up of its “Music Control” (ibid.). Users are invited to “Start a Fitstar workout”, mediated by Fitbit BlazeTM GPS enabled tracker, so as to be tutored individually into body fitness regimes (ibid.). Receiving “step-by-step instructions and coaching right on your wrist” is an enhanced feature of Fitbit® SmartTrackTM alongside its capability to “automatically recognize and record exercises for you, so you’ll get credit for a workout even if you forget to log it” (ibid.). Additional features of the Fitbit BlazeTM tableau vivant include its “All-Day Activity” measuring of “all-day steps, distance, calories burned and active minutes” (ibid.). It is a fascinating feature of this tableau vivant that the restful body is a simulacra of the active body; for the former is a source of digital informational data even when seemingly asleep. Hence Fitbit BlazeTM valorises sleep as an active pasture for the harvesting of knowledge to be ploughed into optimising the performance of health and well-being. The valorisation of sleep is evident with the Fitbit BlazeTM “Auto Sleep Tracking” in which “Fitbit BlazeTM automatically tracks your time asleep & time restless, to help you tailor your habits for a better night’s sleep”; and its “Silent Alarms” provides the user with a means “To start your day in a less alarming way”, whereby the user sets “an alarm in the Fitbit app to get a silent vibration on your wrist in the morning” (ibid.). The Fitbit

Chapter Three

68

BlazeTM (2016c:30) manual details this product as having the following “sensors”: x x x x x

A MEMS 3-axis accelerometer, which tracks your motion patterns. An altimeter, which tracks altitude changes. An optical heart rate tracker. Ambient light sensor. A 3-axis magnetometer.

Indeed, the promotional and instructional material that accompanies the Fitbit BlazeTM appears intent on emphasizing the sensory and haptic features of this product. Thus, and by way of further example, the Fitbit BlazeTM manual (ibid.) details a “Haptic Feedback” product feature as thus: “Blaze contains a vibration motor, which allows the tracker to vibrate with alarms, goals, and notifications”. Replete in the promotional language of Fitbit BlazeTM is a notion of cultivation and vitality that is conducive with a field of technological rationality propagated by neoliberal biopolitical health regimes. Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 on biopolitics identify a classical tradition in economic theory in which the homo economicus of, e.g. the Fitbit BlazeTM can be conceived as “the man of exchange, the partner, one of the two partners in the process of exchange” (Foucault 1979/2010:225). Even the most cursory perusal of the Fitbit BlazeTM, digital operating system and seamless interfacing with social media disinclines a notion of an enterprising satisfaction of needs through utility maximising partnerships. Indeed, Foucault directs critical discourse on contemporary neoliberalism towards an additional construct of homo economicus as an entrepreneur. As Foucault expresses it: [I]n practice, the stake in all neoliberal analyses is the replacement every time of homo economicus as partner of exchange with a homo economicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings. (ibid. 226)

Utilising Foucault’s conception of biopolitics as a means of theoretically framing adsensory wearable technologies encounters limitations with regards to advanced capitalism’s construction of marginal digital fields that are dissimulating their value to the financialisation of our vitality.

Adsensory Accumulation as “[re]capitalized … landed property”

69

In Marx’s analysis of ground-rent, can be discerned a framework relevant to the interpolation of adsensory technologies into the financialising actor-networked market relations of social media and the lifestyle underwriting of insurance. Marx (1991:779) observed that in ground-rent systems “a portion of profit can be transformed into groundrent, so that a part of the commodity price thus accrues to the landowner”. In wearable technology social media advertising spaces the proprietor of advertising space is a rentier. In accordance with Marx’s analysis, the wearable technology social media site constitutes “the landed property” and “has in and of itself nothing to do with the creation of the portion of surplus-value (profit) and hence of the price of the commodity that is produced with the aid of” the information mining algorithmic behavioural indices applied to the “landed property” (ibid. 786). Thus surplus value can be produced from a wearable technology social media site regardless of the behavioural advertising data mining technique. Moreover, the wearable technology social media site as “landed property”, “does not create the portion of value that is transformed into surplus profit; rather it simply enables the landowner, the proprietor … to entice this surplus profit out of the manufacturer’s pocket and into his own” (ibid.). Groundrent as a concept provides for an insightful means of observing the processes through which wearable technology advertising spaces accumulate tremendous profit with very little capital investment. Writers such as Christian Fuchs (2015) challenge the application of a rent model to the critical analysis of capitalist accumulation through social media digital advertising. As Fuchs (ibid. 180) describes: “If an entity is rented by a business for economic purposes, it enters the capital accumulation process as fixed constant capital … Information on social networking sites does not have the same status as a piece of land: human labour creates and updates it constantly which enables its sale to targeted advertising clients”. Here and elsewhere, Fuchs (ibid.) contrasts the digital advertising model of social media against the original meaning of rent as articulated by Marx in Capital Volume III. It is significant to ascertain why Fuchs believes one should consider: “Facebook as a capitalist company and not a rentier” (Fuchs 2015:181). Amongst justifications presented the following assertions are particularly apposite: Facebook does not rent out virtual space, but sells a commodity, in which users’ attention and personal data is objectified. Users produce this commodity; Facebook exploits them and thereby accumulates capital. Facebook is not a rentier, but a capitalist company that exploits users …

70

Chapter Three Facebook is first and foremost an advertising company: it lets its users produce ever more data and ever more commodities in order to accumulate ever more capital. Such a dynamic process of accumulation of use-values, surplus-labour, surplus-products, commodities, and money capital cannot be found in the case of a rentier. Facebook therefore is a capitalist company, not a rentier. (Fuchs 2015: 181-182)

While in some agreement with Fuchs’ (ibid.) position, it is evident that adsensory wearable technologies provide valuable evidence of new transformations in existing modes of the “becoming-rent-of-profit” (Vercellone 2010). Central to this proposition is an application of Marx’s account of “absolute ground-rent” to the analysis of the financialisation of Facebook social media engagement. This book’s case study analysis of Facebook advertising, exceeds beyond the misguided linear transmission modelling that depicts advertisers as being sold digitalised consumer data already captured by Facebook. Even the most cursory perusal into the technological structure and dynamic of Facebook advertising should precipitate an appreciation of the multi-directional complexity of Facebook as a sign-technology. For it is proposed, here, that Facebook’s advertising sign technologies dissimilate possession of digitalised biographical data that is in actuality auto-generated through the ongoing inscriptive activities of their advertising programmers.

Marxian Analysis of Ground-rent and Digital Social Media Advertising An analogy is to an athlete running in a race: sprint too early and risk fading away before the finish line, but sprint too late and never make up the distance. Pacing ensures uniform competition throughout the day across all advertisers and automatically allocates budgets to different ads. (Facebook 2016a)

Marx (1991) commences composition of a thesis on ground-rent by distancing its intention from a historical analysis of various forms of landed property. Rather Marx is concerned with landed property “only in so far as a portion of the surplus-value that capital produces falls to the share of the landowner” (ibid. 751). In this sense, agriculture operates similarly to manufacturing; for both are subject to the expropriating logic of capitalist production. The proposition that capitalism has taken hold of agriculture, requires accepting the corollary that capitalistic agriculture extends beyond the physicality of the land. As Marx (ibid.) observes: “preconditions, such as the free competition of capitals, their transferability

Adsensory Accumulation as “[re]capitalized … landed property”

71

from one sphere of production to another, an equal level of average profit, etc. are also present in their full development”. Axiomatic with capitalism’s “possession of the land and soil” is a particular form of displacement of the rural worker and expropriation of the farming labourer as both are alienated “from the soil” and subjugated “to a capitalist who pursues agriculture for the sake of profit” (ibid.). Marx’s undifferentiated account of displacement requires critical engagement, and in so doing prepares conceptual ground for my creatively engineered notion of the cultivation of digital fields. Inspirational and exquisite in formulation, Ariel Salleh’s (2009:6) concept of “meta-industrial labour” provides a means of rethinking and imaginatively exploring further, Marx’s construction of capitalist agriculture. According to Salleh (ibid.) industrial capitalism “and the rise of cities created a ‘metabolic rift’ in this thermodynamic reciprocity” between humanity and the natural world, “with environmental degradation the result”. Axiomatic with capitalist accumulation is the ceaseless “meta-industrial labour” and “regenerative activities” of a “hitherto nameless class” (ibid.). Salleh identifies as amongst the “meta-industrials”, labourers within the domestic sphere “peasants, indigenes” (ibid.). For Salleh (ibid.) a key feature connecting these “meta-industrials” is “the unique rationality of their labour”, for it has “a capacity for provisioning ‘eco-sufficiency’ – without leaving behind ecological or embodied debt”. Thus in Salleh’s concept of “metaindustrial labour” is engendered creative conceptual scope to think beyond Marx’s clustering together of undifferentiated dispossessed and displaced agricultural labourers; and to introduce into Marx’s thesis on rent, a Marxist feminist counter-position on embodiment. An archetype example of Marx’s neglect of embodiment and its expropriation is evident in the following introductory account to a chapter of Capital volume III entitled: “Differential Rent in General”: Thus it is not peculiar to ground-rent that agricultural products develop into values and as values, i.e. that they confront other commodities as commodities themselves and that the non-agricultural products confront them as commodities, nor that they develop as particular expressions of social labour. What is peculiar is that with the conditions in which the agricultural products develop as values (commodities), and with the conditions of realization of their values, landed property also develops the power to appropriate a growing part of these values created with-out its assistance, and a growing part of the surplus-value is transformed into ground-rent. (Marx Capital, Vol. III 1991:777-778)

Chapter Three

72

Accepting, the imaginative conceptual curvet required, it is my contention that in Marx’s theory of ground-rent can be revealed disconcerting similarities with the algorithmic cultivation of advertising space in social media digital advertising labour. With regards to the latter, the Facebook (2016a) Ad Delivery and Pacing Algorithms, provide extraordinary illustration. Pacing, is an algorithmic “control logic” calculation which “determine how an advertiser’s budget should be spent relative to time”. Pacing endeavours to override an erratic distribution of viewer engagement with advertisements broadcast into social media platforms. As Facebook (ibid.) puts it: “Pacing ensures uniform competition throughout the day across all advertisers and automatically allocated budgets to different ads”. Insofar as Pacing establishes conditions for the cultivation of, albeit man-made fields, the process of competition will dictate the distribution of higher rent for Facebook. Such dynamics are indicative of Facebook’s rhetorical positioning of Pacing as a resource for optimising the advertiser’s capital investment: “Pacing is a core part of the optimization which ensures that return on investment (ROI) is maximised for the advertisers” (ibid.). The parallels between Pacing and capitalist agricultural farming become apparent when we drill down into the detailed technology of how the Pacing algorithm works:

How Facebook’s pacing algorithm works We will explain how pacing works by going through an example. Note that the example talks about click, but the same idea applies for view, conversion, action, reach etc. Setting 1. An advertiser wants to promote a sports product. They set a daily budget of $10. The bid type is CPC [cost per click] and the advertiser knows that each click produces a value of $5. 2. Then he or she creates an ad, optimized for LINK_CLICKS with the bid_amount as $5 and billing_event as LINK_CLICKS, based on their true value. The target audiences are male 25-35. 3. Profit to the advertiser is the value generated from these clicks minus the budget spent. To explain pacing with simpler terms, we assume that the price of all opportunities (clicks, impressions, etc.) during the day are known beforehand. With this we can order the clicks based on their price. (Facebook 2016a)

Adsensory Accumulation as “[re]capitalized … landed property”

73

One will have discerned that Pacing is a product supplied within Facebook’s digital advertising space tendering. Facebook’s (ibid.) introduction to Pacing Algorithms, proceeds to outline the optimised benefits that an advertiser bidding for space, might extricate subscribing to a control logic that evenly distributes bids over a given expanse of time. As Facebook (ibid.) puts it: “The simple formula … when we use a constant bid over the entire period, the value for the advertiser is maximized as compared to no pacing or bidding too low or too high”. Facebook’s Pacing control logic is designed to predict the independent movement of competing advertisers so as to ascertain the opportune level of a bid for advertising space. In order to achieve this Facebook’s Pacing algorithm utilises data it has learned diachronically about the previous bidding patterns of its advertisers. As Facebook puts it: “To achieve this goal pacing tries to come up with an optimal bid by learning from other ads competing for the same target audience”. Facebook provides the following formula by way of explanation of this process: Final bid (per impression) = optimal bid (per impression) * CTR where optimal bid