High-performance connections: Digital holism and communicative capitalism at HappyAppy

The current study examines the ways in which new age organizations use digital culture to promote “holistic” visions of personal and social well-being. Concepts of holism are common in contemporary and new age management settings, but are largely undertheorized by organizational scholars; moreover, the relations between holism and techno-culture, increasingly recognized by digital sociologists, are largely missing from organizational scholarship. Using the lens of “communicative capitalism,” we carry out a case study of “HappyAppy,” a French techno-startup association concerned with well-being related applications, to understand how holistic ideas are deployed and shaped within this association. We find that that holism is marked, on the one hand, by “autarkic” fantasies, involving subjective integration and immersion, and on the other, by “relational” fantasies, involving interpersonal connection and participation. Moreover, each of these versions of holism is associated with distinct critical possibilities. We use these results to theorize the role of digital holism at the intersection of new age management and digital culture, outlining an agenda for future research.

Paradigmatic Politics

This final chapter examines films distributed by the conservative production company Citizens United, placing special emphasis on the films’ excessive use of stock footage as a substitute for archival images. The stock footage, I claim, functions as an aesthetic correlative for neoliberalism in the era of communicative capitalism and likewise provides the primary aesthetic means by which the hysterical films mimic the conventions of compilation documentaries. The generic, paradigmatic images are paired with the talking points offered by political speakers, thereby implying that the former validates the latter, despite the fact that both modes of presentation bear no direct relationship to the referents they invoke. The simulacrum of more conventional documentary forms and strategies provides the hysterical films with the flexible tools by which to dismiss or erase from view any and all political alternatives, avoiding a substantive debate through the very performance of debate.

ТЕОРИЯ П. ВИРНО: КОММУНИКАЦИЯ, НОВАЯ ПУБЛИЧНОСТЬ, ДЕМОКРАТИЯ

The article is about the key moments of the theory of post-operaist philosopher Paolo Virno in connection with the concepts of nonmaterial economy and general intellect. The theory of post-operaism is based on the judgment that, from the one hand, communication becomes the leading mean of production and increment of capital in the frame of Post-Fordist capitalism; from the other hand, communication as the mode of production of «common» can be the foundation for the labor autonomy from capital and emergence the new types of democracy. The borders between labor (poesis), political activity (praxis) and intellect (life of Mind) blur in the frame nonmaterial economy functioning. As a result, we have deal with the situation of politization of labor and highlighting the phenomenon of virtuosity as a key competence in the new type of capitalism. Connection between labor and politics moves the labor activity in to category of public action that build new understanding of publicity based on the mastery of language and communication. Marх’s sustained division of labor on productive and unproductive, where the last isn’t able to create surplus value, gets the new conceptualization in the frame of post-operaist theory. Contemporary communicative capitalism has shown that the intellectual worker-virtuoso can make surplus value in the frame of cultural industry development, the «life» labor serves the capital in such situation. But, at the same time, the virtuoso linguistic activity as the basis of nonmaterial economy can become the foundation for the new types of democracy, which differ from the project of neoliberal democracy, where labor gets the characteristics of political action and receives the autonomy from capital. The concept of labor as virtuoso political action based on the idea of interactive and communicative foundation of politics which can to create the new space of publicity using the communicative technologies. These technologies empower the realization of participatory democratic processes for the citizens in the frame of political life and provide type of political interaction which sets out the continuity of the process of production of common knowledge, ideas, communications, relationships and finance as the basis for the new type of democracy. All of that promote the manifestation of communist (production of «common») tendencies in cooperative functioning of knowledge, communication and capital.

Erich Fromm and the Critical Theory of Communication

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a Marxist psychoanalyst, philosopher, and socialist humanist. This article asks: How can Fromm’s critical theory of communication be used and updated to provide a critical perspective in the age of digital and communicative capitalism? In order to provide an answer, this article discusses elements from Fromm’s work that allow us to better understand the human communication process. The focus is on communication (the second section), ideology (the third section), and technology (the fourth section). Fromm’s approach can inform a critical theory of communication in multiple respects: His notion of the social character allows to underpin such a theory with foundations from critical psychology. Fromm’s distinction between the authoritarian and the humanistic character can be used for discerning among authoritarian and humanistic communication. Fromm’s work can also inform ideology critique: the ideology of having shapes life, thought, language, and social action in capitalism. In capitalism, technology (including computing) is fetishized and the logic of quantification shapes social relations. Fromm’s quest for humanist technology and participatory computing can inform contemporary debates about digital capitalism and its alternatives.

From Opinion to Method: Film Criticism beyond Communicative Capitalism

In the light of Barthes’s failed assassination of the author, this essay will tread on the plane of film criticism’s practices of resuscitation of the author. Looking at the current phenomenon of the explosion of quantification in social media space, this essay considers the way communicative capitalism and neoliberal psychopolitics regulate points of view, analyses, and criticism in the internet, and funnel them into a single unit, which is in the form of opinion. This essay will look into three reviews of Citizen Jake (2018) which, as will be argued, often function in double: not only as reviews, but also as consumer guides, which come from the individual opinion of a privileged member of the audience, the reviewer. As a recommendation to resist these reductions, it is suggested that the film critic must practice a self-conscious theorization by looking at the social practices governing the production of the film, the subject of criticism. Dialectically, this will also resolve the failed modernist projects of defacing the author, defacing capitalist subjectivities, toward a materialist conception of film.

Theorizing Struggle in the Social Factory

This essay explores possibilities for expanding how critical organization scholars theorize and examine processes of struggle in the capital–labor relationship. Arguing for a more expansive conception of the typical sphere of struggle, I explore the intersections of branding, communicative capitalism, and the entrepreneurial self as a way to theorize struggle in the “social factory.” I suggest that the focus of critical scholars on the “indeterminacy of labor” at the point of production as the key to struggle in the capital–labor relationship should be expanded to encompass an exploration of the “politics of indeterminacy” within the broader cycle of value in motion in the capital accumulation process. A politics of indeterminacy attempts to capture the struggles (around meaning, value, affect, identity, etc.) that unfold throughout the sites and stages of the capital accumulation process. Moreover, conceiving of the capital accumulation process as a dialectical movement of the “unity in contradiction” between value and anti-value provides critical scholars with additional conceptual resources to explore struggle in the organizing process.