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The Joy of Looking: A Review of Diana George and Charles Tonderai Mudede, eds., Politics without the State: Joy, Terror and Depression in the Global Corporate Order. Seattle: Seattle Research Institute, 2002.

Reviewed by Andrew Klobucar
The Rain 2:1 (January-February 2004): 8


San Francisco, that most “European” of American cities, with its narrow, car-defying lanes, snaking up and down hill upon hill of multi-coloured 19th century character housing, shares also with the old world a curiously un-modern, fixed relationship with time—or, more accurately, a particular time-period. Just as Italy’s Florence remains forever emblematic of the Italian Renaissance, Ravenna, the final moments of the Roman Empire, St. Petersburg, a living monument to Russia’s formal entry into European culture in the 18th century, San Francisco still exemplifies the climax of American New Deal liberalism, circa 1968, that point in time when the United States completed its first full generation into the postwar consumer-boom period. To walk SF is to become indelibly stamped with the topography of cultural thrall culled from an unprecedented collaboration between private markets and public mandate. From the WPA funded mosaics of Diego Rivera lining Coit Tower to the quasi-leftist utopianism of Haight-Ashbury, such social spectres seem impressively resistant to fresh patterns of modernisation. Witness how nearly a century of Sovietisation, including a new name and set of ideological symbols, could not make a Leningrad out of St. Petersburg. Similarly, the recent powerful encroachment of Silicon Valley on and into the Bay cities of SF, Oakland and Berkeley could not permanently re-model these areas according to the venture capital-laden dictates of San Jose, Walnut Creek and the many other sister suburban points that make up the Valley network.

It may be too soon historically to pinpoint which urban centre, if any, among the West Coast’s decentralised web of post-industrial markets, will come to typify the burgeoning “new world order” of 21st century neo-liberalism. Ideologically driven, as it is, to procure secure borderless, unrestricted access to all world trade and resources, the “order” remains particularly non-committal to any distinct social or cultural architecture. Accelerating beyond capitalism’s previous internationalist phase to embrace a market un-tethered to any vestige of the nation-state, the dictates of neo-liberalism stand contrary to all forms of public space. To imagine a post-industrial economy is, at one level, to imagine a world without single cities, a world where urban centres give way to larger, more amorphous urban landscapes—economic grids composed of multiple, undifferentiated metropolitan spaces, interconnected via freeway and fibre optics. Currently, the concrete strewn gotham of Los Angeles looms large as the most popular visual representation of this not so brave new world. However, while many important critical analyses of ominous economic and social trends have been successfully filtered through contemporary narratives of LA (for example, the apocalyptic works of Mike Davis), the most accurate cultural expression of post-industrial ideology may, in fact, lie 1500 miles north within the equally nebulous boundaries of Washington state’s SeaTac conglomeration.

If the U.S.’s fin-de-siècle yields any cultural relics for future study, they will most likely be unearthed out of the post-industrial environs of Seattle with its re-defined 21st century consumer markets of coffee and software. Of course, Seattle’s cultural nascence originally sprung via the pop music industry, accommodating, as it did, at the beginning of the 1990s, America’s earliest commercial response to the growing European market for synthesizer-based dance music. While computers, turntables and drum machines hummed in the cities of Manchester, Ibiza and the new Berlin, Seattle countered with a derivative guitar-based neo-punk scene of its own: the short-lived “grunge” sound of sub-pop records. Grunge delivered an effective homage to rock and roll’s more conservative roots in middle-American pragmatism. Homespun, anti-production and deliberately unsophisticated, the overly male voice of grunge reaffirmed Middle-America’s contention with “disco” and anything remotely associated with either gay or black culture. After a generation of providing little more than middle-class suburbs for Boeing employees, Seattle finally found a foothold within pop culture’s music industry. Or, perhaps more accurately, the pop music industry finally found a foothold in Seattle—along with the rest of the American Northwest coast.  

Compared to California, with its longer, more historically refined relationship to liberal capitalism, the Northwest states of Oregon and Washington have experienced relatively few cultural imprints via modern consumer markets. Where cities like San Francisco and LA reveal a century of engagement with cultural modernism, the smaller communities of Portland and Seattle have only now, at the end of the century, begun their respective confrontations with the dialectics of modernisation and consumer culture. It is not surprising, for this reason, that intellectuals committed to analyzing the frameworks of cultural production surrounding these newer economies should find traditional paradigms of critique and theory increasingly extraneous. For writers and artists working literally from ground zero of the new aggressive lifestyle markets represented by companies like Starbucks and Microsoft, the very concept of a culture industry can seem far more complex and psychologically sophisticated compared to previous generations of capitalism. In this context, recent works published by the Seattle Research Institute, an association of Northwest writers and artists, seem best read as a gritty intellectual effort to establish a new critical vocabulary for the current cultural and economic situation. Rejecting what they term the “reified and deified” discourse of the established canons of postmodern thought, the reputable trinity of Baudrillard, Zizek and Lyotard that set much of the tone and direction of critical thought on academic campuses throughout the 1990s, SRI introduces itself as a sort of fifth column of cultural revisionists.

Politics without the State: Joy, Terror and Depression in the Global Corporate Order, a short collection of five essays on globalisation and the post-ironic empire, reads first and foremost like a manifesto. Its introductory points even appear as numbered statements. Hence, the book wastes no time in launching itself as a critical response, summoned accordingly by the unprecedented political state of affairs the West has found itself in post 9/11, post economic bust and, perhaps most of all, post-postmodernism. The manifesto, of course, is a useful genre for this type of positioning, and it is difficult not to appreciate the classic modernist voice such preambles inevitably intone. If indeed we are to move beyond the dialectical impasse postmodern media theory has prioritised this past decade, what better style for a much needed intellectual coup? What remains particularly frustrating in this specific revisionary tale, however, is the lack of “state” upon which the manifesto is paradoxically based. Manifestoes are socially motivated calls to arm. They are meant to inspire, not only thought and enquiry, but also social action. In this aim, SRI’s document appears at first no different from previous historical models. Yet, editors, Diana George and Charles Tonderai Mudede quickly make known that any substantial re-visioning of political state structure is not in the program; rather, the very idea of the state as a political structure will be the first target of their critique. As the title of the anthology suggests, SRI’s political theory begins literally with imagining a “politics without the state.”

Such a strategy is not without its own historical precedents. Like previous Leftist movements, SRI is committed to what it calls “socially engaged inquiry”, yet clearly the terms of what constitutes the “social” requires serious re-thinking. Accordingly, SRI has found it necessary to search beyond the established dialectical Marxist critique, re-examining the critical discourse of post-1968 radical leftisms like the autonomatistes as led by theorists like Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Francois Beradi, and Antonio Negri. In this aspect, SRI seems especially emblematic of the cultural politics of the newer northwest urban economies, as well as current directions in globalisation theory. Similar to 1968’s sea-change in Leftist thought, the first post-cold war decade in what was once “the West” has produced a resurgent interest in autonomatism and its prominent critique of dialectics. Politically, the reasons for the movement’s re-emergence are not too difficult to surmise. The 1968 crisis in leftism began with Paris riots and Russian tank treads on Prague streets, but ultimately led to the widespread intellectual abandonment of soviet-style communism as an ideological alternative to capitalism. The final disappearance of NATO’s dialectical “other” at the beginning of the 1990s appears to summon a similar querying of the classic Marxist relationship between production and labour. Autonomatism, thirty years ago, constituted one of the first radical leftist movements to re-imagine the role of the worker in a post-capitalist economy. Disenchanted with the promise of a worker’s state, the autonomatistes theorised a leftism less dependent upon the politics of production. Of course, this level of uncertainty concerning the role of labour in radical politics has never diminished within western theory, and the collapse of the Soviet Union cannot be pinpointed as the final statement on worker-run states.  Nevertheless, combined with the rise in the 1990s of global economic relations, the growth of American venture capital and the shift from print-based media to digital telecommunication networks, the very parameters of what actually constitutes labour and worker rights have become even less definable than they were at the height of the baby boom generation. SRI, in this context, appears again at the front of a much wider interest within leftist thought to re-define its objectives as commanded by capitalism within the “new world order”.

The clearest, most advanced articulation of this direction in theory remains Mike Hardt’s resourceful critique of globalisation and postmodern culture using several key autonomist observations on the organisation of capital in the late twentieth century. In fact, his 2001 book, Empire, co-written with Antonio Negri, establishes much of the terminology and conceptual framings found throughout SRI’s own work. For Hardt and Negri, leftist thought must continue to follow the autonomatistes’ original focus on media and information technologies as primary determinants of capitalism’s ongoing development. Similarly, SRI’s Bess Gabriel Lovejoy discusses the significant influence of new media on revolutionary tactics in her essay, “On the Universal Transmission of the Revolution”, and Diana George and Nick Veroli consider the work-as-play environment commissioned by high technology economies as a potentially liberating social space of refuge and autonomy.

Handled uncritically, however, such concepts run a substantial risk of belying any real potential for political analysis and thus social engagement. It is likely presumptuous, for example, to render the stereotypical design of high tech workplaces, with their penchant for stocking higher grade coffees in the office kitchens and providing foosball sets for the young and economically naive, as ideological progressiveness. Certainly the cubicles of Silicon Valley’s Apple Corporation in the 1990s were better decorated than those of IBM or Xerox in the 1970s, but as many of their occupants found after the high tech market downswing in 2000, the rules of production still guide the rights of workers in the 21st century, not the other way around as George and Veroli imply in “What if they gave a Depression and Nobody Came”. Despite the high tech worker’s freedom, real or imagined, to punctuate her work day with moments of speculative revelry and networked video game play, her social position remains as dependent upon her economic value as it was thirty years ago—perhaps more so. Just because the definition of work has become harder to distinguish as an exclusive social category doesn’t mean the discrepancy between the value of consumer production and that of the labour behind it has diminished; rather, comparable to the Bush regime’s treatment of returning bodies from the Iraq war, the ideology of capitalism may have simply improved its ability to hide this variance from public analysis. Similarly, when the editors compare their critical methodology to what they call “the logic of postmodern assembly: [where] ‘Make it so’ can make it so”, it is difficult not to think of Nike’s own obnoxious trumpeting of capitalist relations in its slogan, “just do it”.

Economic globalisation is certainly not a myth and the transformation of communication networks with digital technology cannot be overlooked when discussing new strategies for the analysis and critique of capitalist relations. Politics Without the State, however, seems to be more culturally and intellectually symptomatic of these changes, rather than critically responsive to them. Reading the essays that comprise the book, one feels to have embarked on a specially guided tour of the culture of “empire” as it stands at the threshold of the new American century. The Seattle Research Institute offers a window, so to speak, onto the culture of Windows, itself, where the points of labour and leisure newly meet and all discourses of social emancipation stand impatient for continuous upgrade.