We continue our publication of Adam Arvidsson’s book on the role of brands in informational capitalism, which we’ve introduced here.

Excerpt 2:Adam Arvidsson on the General Intellect and Media Culture

General Intellect and Media Culture

During the 1950s through the 1970s the new electronic media landscape, together with the rise of the new middle class led to a reorientation of mainstream consumer practice. The kinds of active, participatory consumer practices that previously had been the business of the elites or the avant garde, now became part of the expected mainstream attitude. Consumer agency became a programmed feature of mainstream consumer culture.

This anticipation of consumer agency on a mass scale was a direct outcome of the new forms of mediatization of consumption made possible by electronic media. Pre-war, print based advertising had positioned goods as part of a spectacular culture of modernity that invited imitation or wholesale embracement. But the electronic media environment that developed in the post-war years worked differently. In part it was a matter of new media technologies entering deeper into everyday life and inviting themselves to be deployed productively in new social circumstances, like in the case of record players, Polaroid cameras and later tape and video recorders and home studio equipment. All of these functioned as tools that could be deployed productively in a wide variety of social situations. This tendency would be even clearer with the networked information technologies that emerged in the 1990s. In part it was a matter of new production and consumption technologies that permitted a greater range of diversity and, consequently, new kinds of experimentation, as in the case of the introduction of deep-freeze technology, which in combination with electronic ovens (and latter microwave ovens) significantly expanded the range of options that met the individual shopper. (Frozen microwavable meals were the main channel for introducing ‘ethnic’ cuisine- like Italian, Mexican and Indian dishes- into British households in the 1990s). But more than anything else, the new, more diversified media environment made a wider range of information and knowledge available and actively catered to an experimenting, interactive attitude. Cooking programs (made more attractive by colour television) introduced a wider variety of cooking styles and recipes and encouraged imitation and experimentation. Food and wine journalism grew out of cooking programs and fostered an attitude of active information seeking and deployment on the part of middle class consumers. Beginning in the 1980s, food and wine journalists, celebrity chefs and television personalities together with the supermarkets, did an impressive job in educating the British middle classes into wine consumers that were capable of distinguishing between and experiencing wine in a much more sophisticated manner than before. Similar things happened to fashion clothing, home technology, music, and most recently antiques. The mediatization of consumption created a commonly available informational environment that made resources that primarily had been private, the outcome of good breeding, or what Pierre Bourdieu called ‘class habitus’, public: generally available in the public domain. To be able to distinguish between wines it was no longer necessary to have been born into the haute bourgeoisie, it was enough to subscribe to Wine Spectator. This making private competences public and generally accessible greatly enhanced the scope and productivity of consumer agency. Concomitantly, ‘cultural mobility’ the ability to move between and show mastery of a wide range of different consumer domains, and to successfully manipulate goods and symbols began to replace proficiency in one dominant aesthetic as the main strategy of distinction. A good middle class consumer was no longer simply someone who knew how to act (or cook, or dress) the right way, but someone who was able to put the generally available resources of a highly mediatized consumer culture to use in producing something creative, original, or at least personal.

This way, the actual production process could be extended to include investments of consumers agency: consumers were invited to complete the product themselves, either materially (as in the case of interactive ready made foods) or symbolically (as in the case of mass fashions).

What then does this have to do with Marx? One a first level, the extension of Media Culture and its close integration into everyday life can be understood as the completion of what Marx called the ‘real subsumtion’ of society under capital. Capital (in the form of propertied symbols, and signifying complexes: advertising, brands, television series, music and other forms of content) is socialized to the extent of it becoming part of the very environment, the bio-political context in which life is lived. The other side to this equation is that life comes to evolve entirely within capital, that there is no longer any outside. The contemporary individual is born and bred within capital, ‘his’ subjectivity socialized to the point of him becoming a mere medium for the circulation of value. Docile and malleable she functions as an element of the society-wide exchange of meanings and symbols where ‘everything that is used as a unity by the system, is produced as a unity by the system’, to use Niklas Luhmann’s device.

Now this position is fairly well known and established. Some version or another of the real subsumtion thesis has been central to dystopian critiques of consumer capitalism from Horkheimer & Adorno to Baudrillard . Usually, the consequences have been quite dire, alienation, the end of the subject or even the end of the real. But is it possible to think another outcome of the process of real subsumtion, and consequently of the complete integration of Media Culture into everyday life?

With General Intellect Marx denoted a productive power that develops within capital. When labour is subsumed under capital, it is subjected to its discipline. Here, as in the case of the disciplinary power described more generally by Foucault, discipline works through individualization and spatial recomposition. This is most obvious, perhaps in the case of Taylorism, probably the most advanced expression of the ‘real subsumtion’ of labour in industrial capitalism. There, the inherent, personal knowledge of workers is replaced by a detailed scheme elaborated by the discipline of time-motion studies. Through a set of extremely detailed regulations, workers are made to move their bodies according to that scheme, to behave (rather than act) as ‘moments’ of a production process that is not of their own making. Under taylorism, labour is also silenced. As in Foucault’s famous image of a public lecture in a French nineteenth century prison (where each prisoner listens to the lecturer in his own wooden box, unable to communicate with, even see his neighbour), serious effort is made to limit worker interaction on the factory floor. But, at the same time, Marx, like Foucault, recognizes that capitalist discipline is not only repressive, but also productive. One form of subjectivity, based in pre-capitalist social relations is repressed: another form emerges: one form of communication, mediated by the linguistic codes of the worker’s own popular culture is silenced another form of communication, mediated by machinery and the over-all organization of the factory comes forth. Through the new forms of mediation that it realizes, capitalist discipline produces a new productive power, what Marx calls ‘social, socialized (i.e. collective) labour’ (Marx, 1990[1867]: 1024). Social labour emerges already with the organized cooperation and division of labour in early manufacture. It becomes central with ‘the specifically capitalist mode of production’; industrial production deploying advanced machinery and working on a scale large enough to systematically employ scientific knowledge.

Marx develops this line of thinking to its logical conclusion in a passage often used by the Italian autonomists and retrospectively titled ‘The Fragment on Machinery’ where he introduces a concept of General Intellect. With this term Marx seems, at a first glance to refer to the enormous productive powers that now appear as a property of large-scale industrial capital, principally embodied in machinery. Indeed, with the development of large scale industry, the productive powers of the machinery itself effectively dwarf those of the human capacities of the worker. But, it is not so much a matter of the individual knowledge of the craft worker, a knowledge that was his personal property, as much as it is a matter of ‘general social knowledge’. Indeed the foundation of wealth is no longer so much the direct theft of labour time, as much as the ‘ appropriation of [the worker’s] general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body’. It is his participation in the social productive power -the General Intellect-realized within capital (‘created by large scale industry itself’), ‘in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and or wealth’. Machinery is but one of the embodiments of a set of general competences- a general intellect- which arises from and is inscribed in the social reality of the factory system. Where then do these competences come from? One answer would be to point to the individual geniuses of science or great inventors of managerial discipline (like Taylor). But Marx’s answer is different, he argues that the general intellect should be regarded as a reality that emerges from the social organization of the productive system itself. The competences that it embodies arise from social interaction and communication within the productive process. At the same time as the ‘surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth’ so also ‘non-labour of the few’ has ceased to be the foundation for the ‘development of the general powers of the human head’. The General Intellect, the most important force of production of late capitalist is then an emergent effect of social interaction, beyond the direct control or command of any single individual. It evolves from the basic human capacity (and need) to from social intercourse, as this capacity is mediated by machinery, advanced production systems, and the socialization of capital in general.

The General Intellect thus refers to a productive resource that is generally available in so far as it is inscribed within the very environment of the productive process. It follows that the completion of the process of the real subsumtion of social life, in so far as this means a socialization of capital to the point that it becomes a context for life, entails extension of the General Intellect to encompass not only the productive environment of the factory system, but the general environment of life itself, or language. The other side to Baudrillard’s bleak vision of the masses themselves becoming a medium for the reproduction of capital is this: a general availability of a new productive resource, a General Intellect that, precisely because it is beyond the property of control of any single agent, or group of agents, lends itself to be employed within autonomous productive practices.

What then is the make up of this entirely socialized General Intellect? To [the Italian autonomist marsitst who have developed this argument] it is language, and more precisely, the new and less hierarchical forms of interaction that have developed out of the counter cultures of the 1960s and 1970s. These permit new more flexible and nomadic forms of sociality that easily lend themselves to be deployed within post-Fordist production processes. Another, and to my mind more obvious candidate is Media Culture. Even if the culture industries are privately owned, and even if access fees are charged for some content, like new feature films or video games and (decreasingly) music, most of Media Culture is generally and freely available. It has to be, since its value is based on the amount of attention that it can accumulate. This attention is in turn nothing but another term for its usefulness as a general resource in the marketing of consumer goods (either with a view to sales or to the creation of further attention to be realized as brand values). Contemporary marketing in its media-savvy directly deploys the General Intellect of media culture as a productive power. (And given the common nature of this resource it is beyond value. The valorization of particular media products thus takes place through more or less artificial measurements of the attention (eyeballs or clicks) that it can generate. But consumers also use Media Culture as a productive resource. They deploy the competences, the symbolic complexes, the signifying networks that have been established within Media Culture as a resource, a sort of language if you will, that can be used to perform the common that they produce in their agency. But Media Culture not only serves as a common resource. It’s entering into the framework of social action also means that, like the machine in the factory, it mediates social interaction differently and makes new forms of productive co-operation possible. (Ghetto fashions enable disadvantaged youth from Norway to Brazil to produce music, style, community and eventually a political perspective together.) This way it is true, as both Adorno and McLuhan would agree, that the re-mediation of social life produced by its subsumtion under capital in the form of media culture has put an end to the humanity of bourgeois, literary ‘Man’. But at the same time a new kind of humanity – or productive communality- has emerged.

The common availability of Media Culture as a General intellect, and the new forms of productive co-operation that it makes possible, mean that the productivity of consumers tends to exceed the programming efforts of marketing. As the following chapters will show, it is this excess productivity that brand management seeks to appropriate.