Last excerpt this week of Adam Arvidsson’s landmark analysis of the new dynamics of capitalism, in his new book on The Ethical Economy.

The Ethical Turn:

The source of value in this ethical economy lies in the free, mediated cooperation between minds (Lazzarato, ….and, one should ad, bodies). It is important to stress that this cooperation is free and that it is mediated. The fact that it is free means that it cannot be directly commanded. (One cannot order someone to be cool or creative). Therefore other forms of governance are necessary. The fact that this ethical productivity is mediated means that it is public. Gabriel Tarde anticipated this over a hundred years ago. The public, ‘ the social form of the future’ mediates cooperation in new ways that transcend local and traditional boundaries and renders what was once private, localized and isolated to closed social networks, public, able to circulate and hence potentially valuable. Mediation thus already solves the problem of translating particular use values into general value, which is the first precondition for valorization to take place. Contrary to Fordist valorization processes however, this is achieved by the immanent properties of media of communication (that they make things public) rather than by the imposition of any disciplinary law of value, form above. This immanent fusion of the private-public boundary (your MySpace profile is public, and it is also private) means that the context of action itself becomes plastic and open to intervention. These two factors: freedom as a precondition for productive cooperation and the plasticity of the context of action are the main factors behind the development of ethics as a managerial technique.

This discovery first developed as the use of ‘values’ as a managerial tool. Within management the concepts of ‘corporate values’ or ‘corporate culture’ ermerged in the early 1980s with Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (and a number of similar seminal publications). The argument there was that excellence was premised on the existence of a well designed and correctly motivating corporate culture. Corporate culture was conceived as centred on a set of values, usually decided by senior management and written down, which were then inscribed in the social environment of the corporation through a variety of techniques [of affect modulation] that went from team meetings, weekend courses, investment in communication and information campaigns and design of logos and the physical environment. The purpose was to promote an environment of action where the autonomous formation of sociality and subjectivity was likely to envolve in highly particular directions. A second, but equally significant example of the discovery of ‘values’ as a point of managerial intervention was the brand. Like corporate culture, the concept of the brand evolved as a response to a new-found autonomy in the group subject to governance, in this case consumers. Also, the development of the brand as a way of managing consumption was premised on the discovery of ‘values’ as a methodological construct. Here a ‘value’ was understood as a consistent principle that gave coherence to a particular style of consumption, or ‘lifestyle’ (as in the commercially successful method for market segmentation VALS – Values, Attitudes Lifestyles). A brand was conceived as an artificial ‘value’ in this sense- as an abstract principle able to give coherence to and centre a particular process of consumption. Like corporate culture, brand management emerged as an attempt to promote an artificial context of action able to promote the production of a highly particular ethical surplus, a sense of community with other Macintosh users or ‘the particular way we have in this company of [working together] solving problems’. By working with values, management seeks to promote a particular ethical style, which makes probable a particular ethical outcome. This way management recognizes the open-ended future of productive cooperation. Rem Koolhaas puts this well in his ….

Value based techniques for managing productive interaction are premised on increasing centralization and surveillance. The brand as a consumerist institution was made possible by the host of new market data that became available as computers grew powerful and cheap enough to be put to commercial uses in the early 1970s: psychographics and life-style segementation, and latter data mining form bar code and credit card scans. Similarly, the arrival of value-based management was paralleled with a host of strategies- from Statistical Process Control (SPC) to Total Quality Management, that relied on a multiplicity of measure points planted in the environment of productive action. With the diffusion of networked ICTs within organizations as well as socially, the extent to which these measure points overlap with the life processes subject to control has increased significantly. This way it now becomes possible to survey the unfolding of productive processes of interaction and adjust the programmed environment of action accordingly, almost in real time. Very probably such possibilities will grow in scope with the arrival of new and more seamless forms of augmented space (Manovich..). The multiplication of control points also makes it easier to identify and clamp down on undesired practices: smoke detectors for renegade smokers, email scans to identify undesirable language, and surveyed online habits to identify undesirable patterns of interest. The result is more freedom at the immediate micro level (with respect to disciplinary surveillance techniques of the last century) combined with a greatly increased centralization of overall power and control [Sennett]. As Chris Rees concludes his survey of studies of people ‘experienceing Human Resource Management’ ‘Employees are likely to experience sokme genuine extension of discretion and autonomy albeit retaining to the detail of their immediate work situation, whilst at the same time management will be able to consolidate more general control’. (Rees, 50). The same thing goes for consumers. There is an increase in freedom and autonomy as regards to market choice, but choice unfolds in a media-augmented environment in which centralized power and control is much more intense than before (The shopping mall with all its surveillance cameras). Ethical management thus intervenes directly at life itself: it is a matter of biopolitical intervention, in the Foucualtian sense of that term. The object of intervention is a life process which is presumed to be autonomous and which transpires across institutional borders. While disciplinary power regarded the individual behaviour within the institution, biopolitical, ethical management techniques touches the life of its subjects in a wide variety of points at home, as well as at work. Life as an object of ethical management is thus always ‘naked’ in Agamben’s term, deprived of its particular institutional clothing and the rights and social status that pertains to it. (Indeed, the object of management is not so much the particular individual with his or her particular social determination, as much as the pattern of actions or affective investments, of which he or she might be part- see my instalment on Affective Apparatuses).

The resulting subjectivity is a state of permanently managed affect. Motivated by the omnipresent possibility of surveillance and intervention, the subject develops an apparent emotional detachment form life itself, a coolness which is however easily interrupted by the unexpected (brilliantly illustrated by the British comedian ..who in the Character of Borat tries to kiss everybody on a New York subway car.).