7

The Prehistoric Turn?

Networked New Media, Mobility, and the Body

Mark Coté

Introduction

What if, upon reading these words, you wanted to multitask and engage in related critical research? Given that this chapter examines the relationship between the human and technology via social networking, we could begin exploring some of the future dimensions of ubiquitous computing and mobility. There is a good chance you have a GPS-enabled smartphone – indeed, their global sales surpassed that of PCs in the last quarter of 2010, a trend most analysts see as permanent (Arthur, 2011). If so, you could use it to perform a new kind of cultural work: “checking in” to Facebook Places to let your friends know precisely where you are while reading this. Now that may not be your first choice for innumerable reasons, but were you to do so, you would be helping to forge an important new path in networked connectivity: positioning yourself into the digital information flow with precise markers not only of time but also of place. Such new mediated cultural practices are making location awareness a basic part of mobile connectivity. This trend is also reconfiguring the very structure of the Internet with HTML5, the new standard markup language, which integrates location awareness into the fabric and content of the web.

“Checking in” adds the dimension of mobility to social networking; conceptually, we can locate this “geosocial networking” in a more basic site of tension in mediated cultural practices – the conflation of play and labor. There we could sound the depths with an echo of Marx (1977b, p. 164): there is indeed a “mystical character” afoot because when one “checks in,” a commodity is born from this new socially networked form of labor. This is a particular kind of commodity, an information commodity – data comprising a body's precise location in time and space. In the realm of cultural performativity and communication, this demarcation of time and space is a form of play. Regardless, it also produces a commodity, data that become the permanent property of Mark Zuckerberg and his cabal of lucky investors and erstwhile partners. Facebook, as a capitalist enterprise, loves this information because in creating new forms of location-based user-generated data, it opens up entirely new opportunities for businesses to market and promote their brands and goods. And while at the time of writing “checking in” is the most prominent form of geosocial networking, such location-based practices will certainly become much more sophisticated and diversified, both culturally and in terms of their marketization, in ways currently unforeseen.

Making location profitable has already been fully anticipated by Facebook via its incredibly robust Terms of Use. This widely ignored but legally binding document further echoes Marx, but less in a mystical character and more through the heavy contractual chains of socially networked labor:

Or, as Mashable.com puts it even more succinctly, “All your stuff is ours, even if you quit [Facebook]” (Schroeder, 2009).

Perhaps many readers, like the author, still generate Facebook content on a regular basis. What bears consideration is precisely this persistence of use by an ever-growing number of people – steadily approaching one billion worldwide and still growing – regardless of the widespread knowledge of these heavy contractual chains. What may be most mystical about the nature of such new mediated cultural practices is how little this play is understood as labor, or at least how little that understanding seems to matter to most users. This chapter will try to anticipate the future importance of geosocial networking in two quite distinct but related ways. First, it will explore the immaterial aspects of that work–play, that is, its symbolic and affective production. The concept of immaterial labor, in both its original and 2.0 variants, offers a robust frame for understanding the myriad new mediated cultural practices that animate the Internet, social networks, and, increasingly, mobile platforms. Further, these changing cultural practices will be contextualized across the shift from mass media to networked new media. The accompanying process of convergence will be explicated by tracing the changing nature of cultural work, from the audience – via the political economic model of the audience commodity – to immaterial labor. Second, it examines the dimensions of mobility that underpin geosocial networking, especially their ramifications for the precarity of labor, and relatedly the broader temporal and spatial dimensions of globalization. To do so a kind of habeas corpus will be applied to that immaterial dimension – the digitally networked realm in which we work and play. In other words, the body will be returned to where, in fact, it always was – at the core of that immateriality. It is always difficult to gain a critical perspective on contemporary practices in which we are immersed, like geosocial networking. To help, we will make what might be a surprising move by rethinking the body not just in its contemporary condition of networked mobility but via a “prehistoric turn” to the most basic form of technology: the elementary stone tool.

Understanding Convergence: From the Audience Commodity to Immaterial Labor

Before directly examining the cultural work of social networks, it is worth setting the stage for the conflation of cultural work and play by appraising some of the key elements in the broader process of convergence. Perhaps the clearest sign that a definitive shift was underway in the media landscape came in 2004 when Rupert Murdoch, a press baron from the time of paper and ink, made the digital leap when his News Corporation spent more than half a billion dollars to buy the social network site MySpace. This move was seen as bringing his traditional mass media empire of movies, newspapers, and television into a networked future, and as signaling for capital the still-underway paradigm shift in the relationship between audiences and popular culture.

Elsewhere convergence has been widely examined. For example, Henry Jenkins (2006) has intensely studied the cultural dimensions of convergence, highlighting new forms of agency and new practices among new media audiences. Relatedly, Mark Deuze (2006) has looked at how media, in newly convergent forms, have radically reconfigured the contours of traditional cultural work, particularly among media professionals. Part of the import of convergence, though, is that it has not only changed professional cultural work, it has transformed what was once simply called the audience into cultural workers as well. Thus there is the need to rethink the role of the audience in the general circulation of culture. Audience studies was an important part of cultural studies, which looked for aspects of cultural agency at the point of consumption, in the circuit of cultural production–distribution–consumption (Fiske, 1987; Hall, 1980; Morley, 1992; Radway, 1984). Drawing a line from earlier audience studies under the mass media paradigm, Jack Bratich (2005) made important linkages to ways of understanding audience power beyond degrees of symbolic agency. (See also his contribution to this volume.) Of particular interest are the links he makes in the changing understanding of audience power, from the disintegration of the “mass” into individual consumer power to, most relevantly, the more distributed, networked model of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri called the “multitude.” The key aspect of this theoretical gesture is the aporia it reveals in traditional audience studies: that the composition itself holds an inherent agency and constituent power which exceeded the symbolic and precedes consumption. This is a critical thread for stitching together pertinent elements of convergence: that is, how social networks like Facebook are not just new forms of communication but (a) an increasingly important part of media in general and capital in particular, and (b) a new manifestation of the possibilities of autonomous cooperation and organization.

Foregrounding the changing role of our collective participation in the circulation of culture, we begin to get a sense of just how broad and multilayered is the process of convergence. This process entails not just the increasing importance of networked information technology, like the Internet itself, but the ever more deeply networked relations between the economy, media, culture, language, information, knowledge, and subjectivity. This transformation is not only critical to media industries, it is increasingly inseparable in the reproduction of our contemporary social order. Shortly I will consider how the “audience” has changed via the concept of immaterial labor. In short, what was once thought of as the mere consumption of culture has been transformed, along with concomitant communicative and subjective capacities, into a core and active articulation of capitalist production. Here let us recall what has been stated about the change in cultural work; that is, the conflation of work and play. We can draw out this conflation by following what News Corp. has done instrumentally in its pursuit of surplus value. In other words, we can conceptually trace the shift from the audience as discrete, measurable quanta in the chain of production, circulation, and consumption to a dynamic, productive composition of bodies as aggregates networked in information and communication technologies (ICTs). Perhaps one of the most robust links we can make is via what the trailblazing political economist of communication Dallas Smythe called “the audience commodity.”²

In 1980, at the apotheosis of the mass media model, Smythe wrote in Dependency Road (1981), “presently we know very little about this strange commodity, the audience” (p. 263). His basic thesis for the audience commodity was straightforward: “readers and audience members of advertising-supported mass media are a commodity produced and sold to advertisers because they perform a valuable service for the advertisers” (p. 8). In contradistinction to dominant audience research in cultural studies, Smythe framed the audience via its market aggregation, as opposed to social categories like class, gender, or race. Ever the political economist, Smythe saw first and foremost an intrinsically functional position for the audience within the circuit of production and consumption. What today we can see as more forward looking was the importance he placed on the “cultural work” of the audience in capitalist reproduction. Smythe's notion was equally contrarian to the Frankfurt School in that he eschewed examining the role of the audience via ideology. This is because his focus was not on how media and culture serviced the reproduction of the dominant class but on the productive role it played, not just in the reproduction of capital but in the extension of market relations into everyday life – one of the hallmarks of social networks as business enterprises.

Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999) was among the first to make the link between Smythe and the tradition of Italian autonomist thought,³ a theoretical crucible perhaps most famously expressed in the works of Hardt and Negri, and the intellectual milieu in which the concept of “immaterial labor” emerged. Indeed, while the concept of immaterial labor appeared prominently in Empire (2000), it was earlier developed by Maurizio Lazzarato (1996). In an eponymous article, Lazzarato identifies immaterial labor as manifesting across activities that produce the cultural content of the commodity – that is, “activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.”⁴

Immaterial labor brings a depth to our understanding of convergence by mapping shifts in broader work practices amidst post-Fordist globalization. As Lazzarato notes, immaterial labor helps us frame the increasing fusion of “leisure time” and “working time,” making life inseparable from work. This is a key aspect of what Marx (1977a) called “real subsumption” – the diffusion of capitalist logic and the dictates of surplus value through more and more of everyday life. The notion of the audience, then, no longer adequately captures our collective role in the circulation of media and culture. Things have changed considerably since Smythe caused such controversy by merely framing the audience in relation to labor. Even his model of the audience is now inadequate: a market aggregation passively bought and sold with no participation other than the movement of their eyeballs. This was an innovation for understanding mass media but it fails to capture the dynamic new elements of the cultural work performed today by what were once called audiences.

In the convergent environment of social networks, user practices are much more active than the passive role of broadcast audiences. This is not to suggest a resolution to Smythe's political economic critique; indeed, the basic point is to show how mediated play is also work in the service of capitalist reproduction. The task is to more clearly see the qualitative shift in which culture, subjectivity, and capital come together in new networks of ICT. Facebook perhaps best exemplifies this qualitative shift and is not only the most prominent social network, it is also the success story in new media with over 800 million users worldwide by 2012. The activities comprising new media platforms like Facebook, be they through their location-based services or simply updating one's profile, are something much different from the work of the audience commodity. Indeed, they are not only exemplary of what is now broadly known as the Web 2.0,⁵ but also paradigmatic of an emergent form of immaterial labor. What is new in social networks and across Web 2.0 is the centrality of user-generated content; thus elsewhere I have proposed immaterial labor 2.0⁶ – a more accelerated and intensified form of what was initially proposed by Lazzarato (1996, 2000, 2001) or within the pages of Empire. This concept brings us back to the conflation of play and labor, to how we “work” amidst our myriad interfaces with ICT, and draws out some of the unique qualities therein.

In particular, the concept of immaterial labor 2.0 helps us unpack some of the key dimensions of convergence beyond the technical: (a) a blending of production and consumption; (b) an elision of author and audience, especially in the new virtual ICT networks that increasingly mediate our everyday lives; (c) a merging of once discrete media sectors; and (d) the reworking of our communication and our cultural practices as new forms of labor increasingly integral to capital relations. As such, the 2.0 can be a valuable conceptual addendum for the future of media studies. The originary form of immaterial labor can be further unpacked with reference to its three dimensions identified by Hardt and Negri. First, immaterial labor denotes conceptual work, from problem solving to symbolic or analytic tasks. Such jobs are broadly dispersed across the culture industry and beyond. This form of labor is indicative of “the symbolic turn,” the shift in production from the material realm of the factory to the symbolic production of ideas. The second entails the production of affect, forms of labor that manipulate “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 108). Such labor has largely been unpaid and often regarded as “women's work,” like that which produces services or care through the body. Finally, there is the incorporation of communication technology by industrial production (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 293), transforming the very form of labor into increasingly mechanized and computerized modalities.

Immaterial labor 2.0 builds on these dimensions. The first important addition is the notion of “free labor” – in the matrix of work and play – initially popularized by Tiziana Terranova (2004) when she identified it as a central feature of both the Internet and the informationalized economy. Her work, especially the book Network Culture, is of prescient value, given that her innovative application of autonomist thought to information theory offered great promise for future research into the new digitally networked reality of our contemporary condition. The development of Web 2.0 has only elevated the level of participation/work. So on sites such as Facebook, in addition to the corporate mining and selling of user-generated content, users also produce the tastes, preferences, and general cultural content constructed therein. While this strongly resonates with the “labour that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 108), it is important to further delineate the subjective composition of this labor. The “subjective” is used here to indicate the degree to which the ongoing construction or performance of our identities is produced online, specifically within social networks. Immaterial labor 2.0 indicates how this subjective turn entails cultural work; the active and ongoing production of virtual subjectivities in and across our profiles on social networks. Then there are elements of the originary concept that are extended and intensified: affect, for example, is of critical importance to Facebook, acting as the binding, dynamic force that both animates those subjectivities and provides coherence to the networked relations. Finally, there is also a Foucault 2.0: social networks can be seen as biopolitical networks insofar as they articulate new flows through differential compositions of bodies – populations whose capacities to live are extended through the particularities of their subjective networked relations.

One of the underlying reasons Lazzarato conceptualized immaterial labor was to more clearly frame the aforementioned process of “real subsumption” – that is, how capital is seeking an unmediated form of command, not just over labor in the factory but in everyday life. That is why Lazzarato coins the slogan “become subjects” (Lazzarato, 1996), echoing the “subjective” reading of capital common among autonomists.⁷ To clarify, this denotes the autonomist understanding of the shift in the organizational form of capital, away from the mass production of Fordism toward the more flexible, diffused production of post-Fordism, which relies even more heavily on technology. What is “subjective” is not how the necessary skills, technics, and practices are simply absorbed in machinery – as a trend of deskilling might suggest. Rather, the subjective dimension is evident in the increasing importance of the linguistic, cognitive, and even cultural aspects of work, and their ever-more integral part in the formation of laboring subjectivities. In other words, the subjective reading situates the productive and creative capacity of labor first, thus expressing the possibility of a positive and constructive vision that flows out of labor power – as opposed to it being exclusively a site of exploitation and alienation. This “subjective turn” also highlights a basic orientation of autonomist thought: to look to labor first, before the relations in which it is captured and made productive for capital.

So it is this subjective element which facilitates an expanded capacity for social cooperation that is absolutely essential for more flexible production. These are also defining elements of the mediated and networked cultural work that I have been discussing. But here we cannot directly proceed to the immaterial labor 2.0 animating social networks. That is, as Smythe noted for the audience commodity, and the autonomists do for capital, the relation between play and work, or labor and capital, is best viewed by first considering the actions of people which are, in turn, captured by capital (more on this in the section discussing “syntax”).

In the context of social networks, then, we should remember their origins not only in the febrile imagination and desires of a Harvard undergraduate, but also in even earlier cultural practices like the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing of Napster. Such technics of immaterial labor enabled the proliferation of decentralized practices of virtual social cooperation, in the process radically altering potential kinds of interface with popular culture. This is not to argue for a new form of consumer sovereignty. Indeed, one thing the immaterial labor thesis stresses is the higher level and intensity of antagonism that is created along the way – something borne out in practice with the forced closure of Napster and the subsequent proliferation of new and seemingly uncontainable forms of P2P practices like BitTorrent. Lazzarato notes this fundamental contradiction in the workplace. Capital “is obliged ([in] a life-and-death necessity for the capitalist) not to ‘redistribute’ the power that the new quality of labor and organization imply” (Lazzarato, 1996).

We can see this playing out in the dynamic decentralized architecture of the Internet – the distributed network in which computers with a shared protocol can communicate directly without a hierarchical mediary. This is not only a radically different media terrain than television, it is one animated primarily by immaterial labor. In short, we have shifted from the static world of the couch potato to the dynamic one of the blogger or the social network, busily updating, Tweeting, or checking in. Capital has paid attention to this and there is a shift in what is being valorized. With television, the audience commodity was an isolated and sedentary beast, an aggregation of individuals linked only through the show they watched each week. Its organizational form was also more static: a centralized network with the audience in a cluster of dead-end lines. With the Internet – and specifically, online social networks – it is about the dynamic immaterial labor that traverses and constructs the decentralized networks. In short, it is the links, the networks that people construct and participate in that comprise not a new audience commodity but immaterial labor 2.0.

The “Sensuous” Body of Immaterial Labor 2.0

With a clearer understanding of immaterial labor 2.0 in place, we can ask anew about the conflation of work and play by returning to the body. But to what body are we returning? For some, immateriality is resonant with our contemporary condition of ubiquitous mediation precisely because its prefix “im” means “not” as in “not material.” When in its 2.0 variant – that is, when imbricated in digital networks – the “not material” is taken by many as “the virtual.” The overt predominance of mediation in social networks is sometimes interpreted as a kind of sociality that is more technological than human. In due course I will closely consider the relationship between the human and technology. There are two important paths that I will not follow but are worthy of mention: Haraway's (1991) posthuman cyborg, a deft feminist-philosophical critique which implodes the binary of nature and technology by weaving a hybrid of the former's supposed femininity and the latter's masculinity; and Latour's actor-network theory (1987, 2005), which models assemblages and is concerned not so much about which element is human or technological as about the kinds of agencies each offers in relation to the other. Instead, I will issue a very particular writ of habeas corpus, as it were, by returning to a question posed in this chapter's opening. That is, I will first return to the body through the example of “checking in”: what mystical characteristic is afoot when the location of one's body is marked in a collective information flow and is turned into a commodity possessed by the owners of Facebook? We should remember that for Marx, commodities are always born of social relations, and this is transparently so in social networks. What is more, what is “social” is also a “sensuous activity” – insofar as the social, by definition, implies relations between bodies – and that is what gets abstracted into commodity form. The crux of a political economic critique is precisely around the under-valorization of sensuous activity, that is, of labor; hence the never-ending struggle of labor around the value of work. Given the astronomical market value of Facebook, it seems reasonable to ask similar such questions about the value of immaterial labor 2.0 which animates not only that social network, but also an increasingly broad swathe of our information economy. The iron-clad nature of Facebook's Terms of Use makes clear that there is a considerable degree of under-valorization of this new mediated form of cultural work. But I will not proceed here by following the established terrain of the political economy of communication. Instead, I want to ask more basic questions about the status of the body (and thus the human) in order to provide insight into (a) the persistence of play in light of its revelation as work; and (b) the very coherence and perseverance of those networks.

Now it is paradigmatic that immaterial labor 2.0 transpires in network relations; it involves the body in relation to a machine, albeit an advanced one. What can we glean by returning to “Fragments on Machines,” a section of the Grundrisse that has already been noted as a text integral to the very concept of immaterial labor? Of course, Marx wrote during the Industrial Revolution, and his points of reference were machines which the nineteenth-century poet William Blake had earlier called the “dark Satanic Mills.” Therein, Marx saw the commodification of worker labor as follows: “What was the living worker's activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form” (Marx, 1973, p. 704). Again we find the body – in a machinic assemblage – and again a reference to the sensuous as it relates to labor and capital, and which here we might read in light of work and play. What I am presenting as most important, however, is the passage that follows:

This is a passage that bears closer reading. I have already brought sustained focus to “labor absorbed,” in its immaterial and 2.0 forms, and through changes in the commodification of these different kinds of cultural work, be it in traditional mass media or amidst the convergence of networked new media. I have also signaled the current and future importance of the absorption of that labor in its mobility, as capital in its continued globalization seeks to frame new parameters of space and time. But how might we speak of what is experienced – of “love possessed”? To interrogate the body in terms of its sensuousness is to consider its movement, and its affective and communicative capacity; that is, asking what that body can do in relation to the machine that purportedly possesses it.

We can begin by examining the sensuousness of the body within the new spatial and temporal parameters of online social networks. Within social networks, as with all mediated aspects of our everyday lives, our corporeal form, that is, our fleshy bodies, remain as steadfastly bound to precise points on the earth's mantle as ever. However, in and across those global, distributed networks, we are dispersed, here, there, almost anywhere, virtually instantaneously. So on the one hand, our material bodies remain stubbornly subjected to the Newtonian physics governing large objects; on the other hand, our immaterial qualities (our communicative, affective, and, indeed, cognitive capacities) seemingly possess the “strange action” of quantum particles, with near-instantaneous mobility. Might the related sensuous experience be more clearly modeled in the (non)local body?

To clarify, (non)locality is a term taken from quantum physics describing how two related particles, although separated by vast distances, seemingly act upon each other instantaneously. Related quantum entities, then, seemingly act as if they are local even when they are not. I am suggesting this as a useful model for understanding the condition of digitally networked bodies. Our material body retains its Newtonian physicality at the local level; yet our immaterial dimension (i.e., our communicative, affective, and cognitive capacities) function near-instantaneously at a global scale. (Non)locality, then, is a trope for grasping the constitutive relations of our im/material condition. To add one last “spin,” this conceptual turn of (non)locality foregrounds not the spatial and temporal dimensions of labor but, rather, of its very precondition.

This more measured approach to the body leads us to more insights about its animating tensions of play and work. If we begin with the conditions of the laboring body, we miss the nature of its possession. An autonomist reading, just as with the subjective turn, means the body comes first. Then capital, and the machines it mobilizes, absorbs but only through its own particular grammar; that is, a practical and instrumentalized rhythm imposed on the laboring body. The body, however, is already possessed – literally as sensuous embodied technology. In short, under proposal is a different model of the body: one wherein the sensuousness of its relation to technology possesses a syntax, a syntax that is then proscribed and prescribed by the grammar of capital.⁹

A note of clarification is necessary here. The use of the terms syntax and grammar was inspired from two traditions central to this chapter. First, my use of the term grammar comes from Paolo Virno's Grammar of the Multitude. In it, this central autonomist thinker revives the Spinozist notion of the multitude over the Hobbesian people as a political category for rethinking globalization. Virno situates the conflation of work and play in a larger one of labor, politics, and intellect. In this new space, wherein all is political yet seemingly depoliticized and all is performative, he lays out a strategy of “social cooperation” (of which I would suggest social networks are a prominent part). His “grammar” is what allows shared communication among the multitude, which is not a mass body but one of distributed singularities. Indeed, it is in the grammar of cooperation, in “the linguistic-relational aspect” of labor, that Virno situates an already-existing foundation of what he sees as the “communism of capitalism” (2004, pp. 107, 110). Syntax is taken from the late French paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan. He uses it to better understand the relationship between the human and technology. Thus he writes of an operational syntax, the sequential organization of the interaction between the human and tools. In short, it denotes our constitutive interactions with technology, including that which eventually takes form as immaterial labor 2.0. The analytic value in syntax over grammar is that the sequential organization of the former predates the latter. Again, in autonomist terms, syntax comes first.

So I deploy the terms grammar and syntax to deepen our understanding of what is meant by embodied technology. A sensuous syntax describes the sequence of bodily interaction between the human and technology which is both individual and collective – for example, all the innovative usages of ICTs that allow for our unprecedented capacity for communication. Contrary to Virno, however, this would be a syntax of the multitude and a grammar of capital. One of myriad possible examples would be the development of file sharing, which began with a high school student. This new syntax contravened the grammar of capital, which has ever since sought to proscribe its usage vis-à-vis cultural commodities over which it has intellectual property (IP) rights. To conclude, the syntax of the (non)local body, then, is one of the distributed digital network, both corporeal and communicative, with an ability to act which is both proximate and at a distance. The grammar of the (non)local body proscribes and prescribes forms of immaterial labor 2.0 which, driven by a logic of maximizing efficiencies and profitability, create general conditions of precarity for labor.

The Prehistoric Turn

Earlier I noted that this chapter would make a counterintuitive proposal: that by taking “the prehistoric turn” we can gain important insights about our current technological condition of digital, networked, mobile connectivity.¹⁰ In that spirit, let's again engage in critical research by multitasking. Imagine if you reached into your pocket, but this time, instead of pulling out your smartphone, in your hand was the most rudimentary stone tool. Would it be possible to “check in,” obviously not to Facebook Places, but to the actual environment in which you are situated? What, if anything, could you learn about our contemporary condition from this simplest form of technology: a rock which has been struck two or three times by another rock, chipping away flakes to give it a cutting edge?

The “prehistoric turn” is meant, in part, as a corrective to a regrettable aspect of the “postmodern turn” so celebrated in the 1990s. Namely, I refer to the prominence then given to the “virtual” and related notions that emerging in these new assemblages of human and technology was a fundamentally new “posthuman” or cyborg (pace Haraway). It is regrettable because the undue focus on digital technology obscured a more basic point: that we have always had a constitutive relationship with technology; indeed, that we have never been human outside this constitutive relation with technology. It is important to ward off notions of technological determinism when discussing the human in these various machinic assemblages. There is neither primacy nor determining causality ascribed to technology. To the contrary, the human is understood as being in constitutive relations with technology. French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1992) offers a valuable concept for understanding this mutually constitutive process: transduction. It offers a more holistic frame for understanding heterogeneous formations, wherein primacy is placed on the relations themselves over the things related. Those things related include the human and technology, the material and immaterial, and indeed, time and space. I find it most useful because it can differentially model the body in various assemblages and thus focus attention on what are complex and recursive relations. So while the human and technology are indeed and obviously different things, I am thinking of them not as discrete entities but as being transductively related.

Perhaps the most apposite guide on this prehistoric turn is the aforementioned Leroi-Gourhan. While little known across media and communication studies, Leroi-Gourhan had a defining impact on the contemporary media theorist Bernard Stiegler (1998, 2009). It is hard to factor the vicissitudes that have left Leroi-Gourhan such a relatively obscure scholar. In the 1930s, he studied ethnology under Marcel Mauss, undertook widespread structuralist analysis of Paleolithic art, subsequently embarking on his decades-long study of prehistorical technics, and eventually rising to hold the Chair in Prehistory at the Collège de France from 1968 to 1982, almost exactly coterminous with Foucault's Chair in the History of Systems of Thought. Leroi-Gourhan had an avowedly catholic approach to scholarship, with his multidisciplinarity ranging across paleontology, physiology, ethnology, the history of art, technology, and biology. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote about him, upon his death in 1986:

His earlier works were profoundly influential in French anthropology on the study of prehistoric technics;¹¹ his innovation was to focus on the technical modes of action on matter. Whereas technology entails artifacts, technics goes further to include related practices, be they arts or crafts and the assemblages in which they unfold. For the ancient Greeks, techne was the knowledge of how to generate something, or, in Jean Luc Nancy's felicitous phrase: “techne is the know-how to obtain from nature what it does not offer of itself” (Barison & Ross, 2004). And to bring it to an even finer point vis-à-vis immaterial labor 2.0 or, indeed, any mode of work, consider this from Stiegler:

One of Leroi-Gourhan's many innovations was how he framed the technical modes of action on matter in three dimensions: the interior milieu of the intellectual capital of the tool-making hominids (one might be tempted to refer here to the autonomist concept “general intellect”¹²); the technical milieu (socioeconomic and cultural factors inscribed into the tool); and finally, the external milieu (the environment actualized by the tool). What is most pertinent is the notion of technical exteriorization, and it is here that at least metaphorical links can be made to the contemporary practice of “checking in.” To begin to make this connection, think of how in this process the assemblage of the human and technology reconfigures the environment in which the human lives, hence demarcating a particular experiential point in space and time.

To make this conceptual leap, the model of the “natural” human must be abandoned. As such, we must proceed via an even more basic transductive relation. The human, for Leroi-Gourhan, only emerges amidst complex and recursive relations with technics, beginning with the most rudimentary form of lithic industry (literally, stone tools composed by a handful of blows). There are two key points to draw from the ascent of the techno-human. The first is that technology acts as a vector of exteriorization of the human qua the human, that is, technics always entails externalizing traces of memory. So, in the most basic terms, even a stone tool bears the trace of its construction, which can subsequently be “read” by an unrelated hominid. In the words of Leroi-Gourhan (1994), this exteriorization denotes “our unique ability to transfer our memory to a social organism outside ourselves” (p. 236). Please keep in mind this transfer of memory – which, after all, means traces of our actions – when thinking about distributed networks and the new forms of “social organization” they enable. Thus the importance of Leroi-Gourhan's second paradigmatic feature: the relationship between movement, technics, and rhythms. One of Leroi-Gourhan's most enduring maxims is that “it all began with the feet” (p. 65). What he meant was that when early hominids began walking on two feet, that physical gesture set off a complex cascade of unintended effects. Indeed, his most famous work, Gesture and Speech, traces a direct line from this radical innovation in movement to the later transductive development of technology and the human. Amidst this trajectory, the tool and brain are situated in a complex and recursive relation, what François Audouze (2002) identifies as milieus of “mobility, liberation, and exteriorization” (p. 289).

Leroi-Gourhan's research led him to posit an extra-biological role for technics in the process of the evolution of the human, but a deeply recursive and not determining one. To clarify, early hominids descended from trees, likely because of radical climactic changes, and developed bipedal capacity; this, in turn, impacts upon the position the skull is placed on the spine (because eyes need to look ahead and not at the ground); this is followed by a morphological shift in the cranium for balance (the base of the skull shortens but increases upwards our brain pan and its capacity); and finally, hands are freed from the task of locomotion, and jaws from carrying things; the whole while newly freed hands become more dexterous, enabling them to eventually manipulate and shape the most rudimentary stone tools.

But it is technics, as provocatively suggested by Leroi-Gourhan, which recursively facilitates the actual enlargement of the brain. In other words, Leroi-Gourhan situates tools and the brain in a deeply complex and recursive relation, wherein both impact the other but only ever in the milieus of mobility, liberation, and exteriorization.

This has been necessarily a concise overview of the more comprehensive account offered by Leroi-Gourhan and discussed and debated elsewhere (Audouze, 2002; Gamble, 2010; Ingold, 1999; Lemonnier, 1993).¹³ But there are two further details most relevant to media and communication studies. They consist of (a) the relation between tools, cerebral development, and thought; and (b) the syntax governing the rhythms and movement of the human in machinic assemblages.

For the first point, consider that the most rudimentary stone tools (Oldowan industry, which began about 2.6 million years ago) consisted of little more than a few blows to create a cutting edge, and they remained virtually unchanged in the archaeological record for a million years. This caused Leroi-Gourhan (1994) to remark, “among our hominid ancestors, early tool use was an extension of the hand – like an animal's claw [. . .] as if their brains and bodies had gradually exuded them” (p. 106).

So it is not so straightforward that our hominid ancestors woke up one day just so much smarter and began making tools. Instead, it was an extended and deeply recursive relationship between tool use and the brain that subsequently facilitated cerebral development. But even when more sophisticated tools appeared about 1.6 million years ago, cerebral capacity had barely increased. Stiegler (1998) wonderfully evokes this process:

This process is called corticalization, wherein conscious interiority develops in relation to nonhuman exteriority. To put it another way, think back to the “natural” human privileged by the ancient Greeks and the deprecation of material technology. This was predicated on the notion that “true knowledge” emanates only from the interior, from the transcendent soul, while technology was a source of contamination. Indeed, consider what Plato (1952) wrote in Phaedrus at a time when the then new information technology of writing was developing:

Yet what Leroi-Gourhan's work suggests, and what is most germane to media and communication studies, is that technology, and indeed all forms of mediation, were always a part of thought. As our ancestors used stone tools, not only did they transform their environment in terms of how they could utilize it in a quotidian manner, they literally exteriorized and archived knowledge. For the first time, and unique among all species, there were external traces of memory, and the information archived in tools outlived their makers. And over time this information accumulated, grew more complex because of the increased storage across different tools, and diffused over time and space. It is tools, then, as external repositories of memory and as extensions of the human body that play out in this deeply recursive fashion and influence the development of advanced brain functions like memory, perception, thought, language, and consciousness. Here, a critical insight of the prehistoric turn comes into focus. On the surface, we live in a time when technological mediation is more obvious than ever. While there is much that is wholly unique and new to our condition, it does not include a relation to technology that is for the first time ubiquitous. Indeed, we only became human qua the human with technical exteriorization. So, unlike the work of some futurists like Kurzweil (2005), I am not setting the stage for flights of fantasy of our being on the evolutionary cusp of becoming new species, technological hybrids in a new point of singularization. Instead, from the perspective provided above, if we look back millions of years we see nothing but prehistoric cyborgs, insofar as we could never have developed biologically or culturally outside that transductive relation with tools.

It is here we can turn to the second germane point, what Leroi-Gourhan called the chaîne opératoire (or operating sequence). The chaîne opératoire recognizes that the human interacts with the material world via a sequence of technical events. It is not only what makes the transductive human functional, but it sets the preconditions for exteriorization. It is instructive to recall Marx here, and momentarily bracket off that “capital absorbs labour into itself [via machinery]” and think again how it is “as though its body were by love possessed.” As such, let us think about the sensuousness of syntax.

Just as all native speakers know syntax without formal study or even comprehensive understanding, so it is the case with our syntactic relationship to technics. As Leroi-Gourhan (1994) notes, “operational syntax is generated by memory and is born from [an extra-discursive] dialogue between the brain and the material realm” (p. 114). Syntax is in the order of movement, and all interaction with technology comprises a veritable syntax of gestures. Imagine for a moment the hand and a simple stone tool; the external traces, the archival information contained in that tool, provide a functional architecture for technics, enabling a practice that heretofore could not be done (at least in that particular manner). But there is something just as important that is too often overlooked. Beyond its functionality, it is also a vector of exteriorization for calibrating the human sensorium.¹⁴ What a syntax of technics sets are conditions of possibility for a body's rhythm and movement, at least in that assemblage. So let us return to the example of the simple stone. This entails affective capacities; that is, both contained within the form of the tool and, in conjunction with the hand moving outward from the body, there is a logic of the sequencing of acts that extends and differentiates its ability to act, and thus to feel/experience the environment. So beyond functionalism, syntax offers a provisional answer to the Spinozist question of what a body can do; it creates preconditions for a body to act and to be newly structurally coupled with its environment.

The sensuousness of technology, then, is primarily of an affective order, and something already in place when capital attempts to take possession. This sensuousness is also a dimension critical to a body's mobility and ability to communicate through space and time. Syntax, thus, acts like a time signature and sets the key. Again from Leroi-Gourhan: “Rhythms are the creators of space and time, at least for the individual. Space and time do not enter lived experience until they are materialized within a rhythmic frame” (p. 309). The body is constantly exteriorized via rhythmic frames; hence the importance of syntax. And capital seeks to impose a grammar on those rhythms. The syntax of the (non)local body entails a sequence of communicative and cognitive technics and actions which offer unprecedented flexibility and scope. But the sensuous syntax of the (non)local body that affords flexibility is being subjected to a grammar of capital, making it precarious. Global labor is being subjected to new proscriptions and prescriptions, disrupting the more stable rhythms of Fordism, rendering those out of time. There are many names for this new time signature: post-Fordism, globalization, neoliberal capitalism, the information society, postcolonial capitalism. This rupture takes us from our prehistoric turn back to the future of mobility and precarity.

New Rhythms of (Non)Locality

The operational sequence guiding the movement of labor has changed significantly, in part due to the development of the global positioning system (GPS) that is integral to “checking in” and all forms of geosocial networking. Surprisingly, GPS was not widely deployed until Desert Storm in 1991. Subsequently, it was aggressively adopted by capital in order to more finely calibrate the “just-in-time” capacities of flexible accumulation. It had an immediate impact on mobility and labor, as this one exemplar illustrates. In 1994, Cemex was a modest, regional Mexican cement company when it synchronized its operations using GPS (Katel, 1997). Before the turn of the millennium, it was buying out leading cement and construction companies the world over, no doubt partially due to its deft deployment of GPS. By outfitting all cement trucks with transmitters, its head office could use real-time data about the location, direction, and speed of every vehicle, and make on-the-fly decisions to radically augment the efficiency of its delivery process. Within a few years of adopting GPS it had become the largest cement company in North America and subsequently the world. However, no sooner had it reached the top than it plunged into near insolvency and remains mired in bad debt. What is instructive here are the changing ways in which location awareness is being used. For Cemex, it was utilized to trace the mobility of raw materials with labor being a mere but necessary minder (i.e., driving the truck). GPS, then, in its “just-in-time” guise, monitors the movement of labor only insofar as it is materially tied to the movement of resources, and it has become standard in virtually all resource-delivery systems. Surplus value comes only through the more efficient movement of resources through space and time vis-à-vis a fixed site of production, be it cement delivery to a building site or parts for a factory.

The great leap forward for capital comes when it contrives to harness the (non)local flow of labor emanating from the newly augmented affective and communicative capacity of immaterial labor in its original and 2.0 variants. GPS is being redeployed by location-based applications to make this (non)local flow itself a site of production, altering the operational sequence of networked assemblages, adding a finer bearing of location to its syntax. At the time of writing, location-aware applications and geosocial networks were proliferating across the mediated landscape. As mentioned, HTML5 will enable location-aware browsing, Google has rolled out its “Near Me Now” search option, and its Chromebook (a laptop that comes without desktop applications or programs) is wholly Internet-based via cloud computing, designed for permanent WiFi connectivity. Chromebook is meant to be the exemplary artifact of Web 3.0 – location awareness plus cloud computing, making platforms and the associated information flow even more (non)local. As well, UrbanSpoon, Yelp, and other related applications are like location-aware Yellow Pages featuring user-generated reviews of stores, restaurants, and bars. There are also location-aware social networks, which allow users to interact relative to where they are. Facebook Places, Google Buzz, Foursquare, and PocketLife are among the more prominent apps. With Foursquare, users “check in” to venues to earn points, and even become “Mayor” of the site. Restaurants and bars are increasingly tying into Foursquare to offer time-specific discounts, and Zagat is overlaying its review database for even more widespread marketing and commercial tie-ins. Again, it is the early days for location awareness, and more sophisticated applications and, more importantly, unexpected new cultural practices are surely in the offing.

So we have immaterial labor 2.0, inflected with location, and manifesting in new cultural practices as well as in the more formal parameters of work. In critically engaging the increasingly precarious parameters of work, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter (2005) ask, “what are the circumstances in which capital meets life?” Always via technics is the response suggested here. But equally, life meets life via technics; that is, the human is exteriorized into material life via technics, a process that sets the rhythm for the spatial and temporal frame we experience. This process of exteriorization fully exceeds labor's absorption by capital; it is, resounding Marx in the First Thesis of Feuerbach, “human sensuous activity, practice” (1977b, p. 156). Technics, then, are the proper domain of the human, not an alien, alienating force, although such effects are manifest when directed by capital. Increasingly, our practices are (non)local, simultaneously local and at a distance. One benefit of thinking in terms of the (non)local body is that it foregrounds the embodiment of technology – and thus the transductive materiality of immaterial labor 2.0 – and refuses the problematic typology of the real and the virtual. There is no “natural” presence to the body; no objective parameters of space and time. As such, to think in terms of the “virtualization” of space and time is to miss the whole point of the transductive human. The affective and communicative capacities of the (non)local body may be unprecedented in their scope and speed but no less real – especially no less a real “human sensuous activity.” To be sure, (non)locality is altering our perception of and movement through space and time, via new visceral rhythms, affective behaviors, and integration in space.

Geosocial networking is an emergent techno-social space set by a new syntax of (non)locality. In the simplest terms, it is reconfiguring our movement through time and space because we can negotiate it through new, potentially deep and rich information flows. The information produced in geosocial networks helps us find things nearby and tell others where we are – just for starters – and we do that through collective practices – crowdsourcing to some, the general intellect to others, play and work regardless. As one digital media observer puts it, “it will become natural and expected to be informed, personally, about proximate things of interest” (Abell, 2010). From this prosaic insight, we can draw a key dynamic of (non)locality: proximate affinities. But what is new, syntactically, is that proximate affinities, just like those subatomic particles, break the principle of locality. We act corporeally on proximate affinities on the level of increasing microlocality (i.e., “checking in” to a geographic place), but via a communicative and affective capacity for which all and everything is proximate (information flowing near-instantaneously through the network around the world). Socially, informationally, it is not so much another round of time-space compression but implosion, given the radically different registers under which our material and immaterial dimensions operate. For some this marks a too-disorienting dislocation between the body and what they might see as the virtual. But for others, and especially for youth, they are first becoming (non)local and from there learning to immaterial labor. In other words: flexibility followed by precarity; that is, they are sharing a new syntax of time and space which is eminently flexible for myriad forms of new mediated cultural play and just as many kinds of precarious work.

(Non)locality, then, is a preeminent contemporary condition, emergent and unevenly distributed to be sure, but fervently growing. Flexibility is the valorized counterpart to precarity. Indeed, the former becomes the latter when seized by capital. But the absorption of (non)locality by capital comes only by drawing on a sensuous exteriorization that is already in formation. Here I would like to make one final autonomist inflection.

I have been using the term syntax to highlight the temporal and spatial order of the operational sequence informing the transductive and constitutive relations of the human and technology. I also thought it dubious to use the term syntax for capital as a synonym for logic. In part, this is because syntax establishes the preconditions for what a body can do in a technical assemblage and thus is inherently ambivalent. Capital, on the other hand, is wholly prescriptive. It is imposed on a syntax insofar as it determines the propriety or impropriety of syntax. As for (non)locality, that is a truly ambivalent syntax as it is manifested in both flexibility and precarity. So in flexible new mediated cultural practices, proximate affinities and their globally networked diffusions are being acted upon “from below,” as it were, by and amongst everyday people. Yet this expanded communicative and affective capacity is equally being seized by capital in the hopes that it is the pilot wave for the next big thing.

I do not wish to suggest that “grammar” is either inherently negative or the sole possession of capital. It is, rather, a constituting force that formalizes usage or a sequence of actions. As such, we can propose that there are competing grammars with very different proscriptions and prescriptions. One would be via contemporary capitalism. For one possible other, might (non)locality be the syntax governing the temporal and spatial rhythms of what Paolo Virno calls the grammar of the multitude? It delineates the rhythm of the collective body of the multitude. Virno situates the multitude in “a continuum of affect, of communication and sociality” functioning as the “common from which the refrain of precarity is individuated as a series of iterations on labour and life” (quoted in Neilson & Rossiter, 2005). I read this as the syntax which entails flexibility, innovation, and a constitutive freedom. The rhythm of what Virno calls “the common” is a syntax of (non)locality. Capital, however, is relentlessly redoubling its efforts to direct the tempo toward maximum efficiency and profitability. Thus we come back to that tension between play and work. Play entails a flexibility from which emerge innovations that are social, economic, and political. Work, at least under the grammar of capital, renders flexibility precarious and innovation an instrument for profitability. It is within these tensions we might differently profit by considering remarks made not long ago that resonate with the syntax of the (non)local body: “the demand to combine the freedom of movement with the freedom of communication is social dynamite” (Bove, Empson, Lovink, Schneider, & Zehle, 2003). The collective body that can create that “social dynamite” is multiply possessed, but to which grammar will it acquiesce, or indeed refuse?

NOTES

1 When this quoted version of Facebook's Terms of Use circulated, there was an outcry, a public relations fiasco, and subsequently they were revised. As of June 2011, the pertinent section reads as follows:

While this policy wording seems much more restrictive and benign, it is scarcely different in legal terms. In particular, the Terms begin with the following statement: “You own all of the content and information you post in Facebook, and you can control how it is shared.” But such anodyne words have little legal status. As succinctly noted by legal scholars Jennifer Hendry and Kay E. Goodall (2010):

For Facebook's Terms of Service, see https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy#!/terms.php

2 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide adequate detail of Smythe's introduction of the audience commodity, thus readers may benefit from elsewhere examining what were called the famous “blindspot debates” of the late 1970s. Cf. Jhally (1982); Livant (1979, 1982); Murdock (1978); Smythe (1977, 1978).

3 Not only is Wright a thoughtful critic of the immaterial labor thesis but his book Storming Heaven (2002) offers perhaps the best English-language overview of Italian autonomist Marxism, the theoretico-practical crucible from which the very concept emerged.

4 While the original source for Lazzarato's article is Virno and Hardt's Radical Thought in Italy (1996), it has since been diffused throughout the Internet. Perhaps the richest such source is the Generation Online site (http://www.generation-online.org/), a veritable treasure trove that has a vast array of articles from a very broadly defined autonomist tradition and incisive materials on concepts ranging from “immaterial labor” to “biopower” to “general intellect.”

5 O'Reilly (2005) uses this term to describe what many see the Internet has become: second-generation networked services. For example, Google would be a leading Web 2.0 entity as the efficacy of its search engine largely depends upon the collective activity of its users. Web 2.0 is what happens when the accretion of cultural knowledge, or the “general intellect” – in networked relations – becomes the primary dynamic of the Internet. Other Web 2.0 exemplars would be Twitter, Tumblr, wikis (open user-generated content sites like Wikipedia), and geosocial networks like Foursquare. Finally, all variants of user-generated content, from content rating (Digg, Reddit) to user reviews (UrbanSpoon, Yelp) to “tagging” (Flickr, de.licio.us), are integral to this active turn in Internet usage.

6 See Coté and Pybus (2007, 2011).

7 The subjective reading takes its cues from Marx's Grundrisse, specifically the section “Fragments on Machines.” In the autonomist reading, value is situated in the variable capital (the technical, cultural, and linguistic knowledge) of these new laboring subjectivities. It is this “subjective turn” that marks off much of what is unique about immaterial labor. This reading marks a key differentiation of autonomist thought from more orthodox Marxists who see this added value as accumulating in the fixed value of machinery.

8 Marx takes this quote from Goethe's Faust, specifically Part 1, Act 5, where it comprises the chorus from a drinking song performed by the patrons in Auerbach's Cellar. It is about the dangers of love and the dubious judgments its possession can sometimes render. Marx himself was quite possessed by this quote as he cited it three times, twice in Capital 1 and once in Capital 3: “[Capital is] an animate monster which begins to ‘work’ as if its body were by love possessed” (Marx, 1977b, p. 302); “The money's body is now by love possessed” (Marx, 1981, p. 517).

9 Proscribe means to prohibit and prescribe to endorse. These are terms commonly applied to grammar, describing its primary function. In other words, what grammar does is to prohibit or endorse combinatory word usage. As such, a particular syntax can be either grammatically prescribed or proscribed. Here I am transposing these terms from language usage to the body and technology, especially as related to capital. So when thinking in terms of a sensuous syntax, I refer to the sequence of bodily actions and techniques, particularly the communicative and affective actions of the social body. Bodily syntax is constantly being recalibrated in relation to different forms of technology; capital, in turn, proscribes and prescribes sensuous syntaxes guided by its governing logic of maximizing productivity and profitability.

10 “The prehistoric turn” is an attempt to enable us to better see, feel, and understand what might be called “McLuhan's water” – the Canadian media theorist once famously quipped that while he did not know who discovered water, it certainly wasn't the fish. My own “prehistoric turn” has been illuminated by the work of two innovative media theorists. First, Mark B. N. Hansen (2006a, 2006b), whose studies of new media are predicated on the recognition that media always already conditions our situation; that is, that human techno-genesis continuously calibrates and recalibrates the “natural” human. Second is Jussi Parikka, whose Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010) boldly steps out of the human realm in order to radically reassess media theory. His “posthuman turn” looks at everything from the organizational structure of the swarm to the affective sensorium of the tick to better understand contemporary digital culture.

11 Technics has a very specific philosophical lineage. It is derived from the Greek tekhne, which can be translated as craft or art. It also served in ancient Greece as a key marker of that which was not of the natural world (phusis). As such, it helped construct a model of the “natural” human. This denigration of tekhne and its related artifice even applied to the realm of knowledge. True knowledge, or episteme, emanates from the interior of natural human, from the soul, whereas that from Sophistic tekhne is, by definition, not only goal-oriented or practical in the service of craft but inherently of lesser value.

12 The “general intellect” again comes from “Fragments on Machines” where Marx uses it to denote how collective general intelligence makes the productive force of abstract knowledge greater than that of physical exertion. An innovative interpretation was developed by autonomists, and one critical to this chapter. Instead of building up in machinery autonomists see general intellect manifesting in worker subjectivity – thus a key element of the aforementioned “subjective turn.” Virno writes: “Science, information, linguistic communication, and knowledge in general – rather than labour time – are now the central pillars on which production and wealth rest” (1996, p. 267). So you can think of the general intellect as the resource upon which immaterial labor draws for its productive force. Indeed, it is the new distributed forms of user-generated knowledge that make the 2.0 variant so potent.

13 I discuss this process and some of the related debates in much greater detail in Coté (2011).

14 See Coté (2011) for further detail on the constitutive relations between the human-technology and the constant recalibration of the human sensorium.

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