Another Flexible Personality

Today is maybe a little bit scary I that it is the beginning...

Geographical dispersal and global coordination, just-in-time production and containerized creativity kits, a generalized acceleration of adaptation, and a flight of barely accumulated capital into the lightning-fast international financial black hole: International Artists Beware. and take a break from your laptop before it takes away your imaginary 401k.

The Flexible Personality by Brian Holmes was what I read when I woke up.

'... it can be said that the networked organization gives back to the employee—or better, to the "prosumer"—the property of him- or herself that the traditional firm had sought to purchase as the commodity of labor power. Rather than coercive discipline, it is a new form of internalized vocation, a "calling" to creative self-fulfillment in and through each work project, that will now shape and direct the employee's behavior. The strict division between production and consumption tends to disappear, and alienation appears to be overcome, as individuals aspire to mix their labor with their leisure.[26] Even the firm begins to conceive of work qualitatively, as a sphere of creative activity, of self-realization. "Connectionist man"—or in my term, the "networker"—is delivered from direct surveillance and paralyzing alienation to become the manager of his or her own self-gratifying activity, as long as that activity translates at some point into valuable economic exchange, the sine qua non for remaining within the network.

Ahemm. Fear wells up in my throat when I read this. You and me and everyone we know are getting closer to perfection. My perfection exists in a seamless relationship between my ideals and my life, my career and my imagination, my magazine subscriptions and my groceries. I desire intimacy with my boss that is the same as with my best friend, and my paid activities are blurred by my equal devotion for my job as for my personal practices. And no one can tell me that my time spent learning how to bake naan or tracing pictures of Jay-Z doesn't add to my professional practice? I don't even see the bounds between my shower and my job, and I can't see why I am not paid for all of it since one probably wouldn't exist without the other.

I taught an 'action' art course recently where the idea of the performance of every day and the horizontal sacredness of all rituals was a prominent thread. I was teaching what is closest to my heart and to my daily life. I would never deem my habits or practices as a 'calling' but it is possible that I talk about it like it is. My skin crawls to feel that I am part of a movement of 'networkers' working in a 'sphere' that ultimately creates its own models of surveillance, mistrust, and dirtiness that have been designed and serenely embedded by the perfect corporate model. Perhaps we are no longer mocking the corporate systems but sincerely recreating them for ourselves. Maybe I should get a well paying job designing at a company desk so I can afford the subscription to Adbusters and Harpers so I can be inspired to continue on with my seamless payed art dreams.

Fear two: being the 'networker'. By the way, you should really come over for dinner, I have this friend you should really meet. I think you two would have a lot to talk about and the potential to work together or make out or something.

'The computer and its attendant devices are at once industrial and cultural tools, embodying a compromise between control and creativity that has temporarily resolved the cultural crisis unleashed by artistic critique. Freedom of movement, which can be idealized in the figures of nomadism and roving desire, is one of the central features of this compromise. The laptop computer frees the skilled intellectual worker or the nomadic manager for forms of mobility both physical and fantasmatic, while at the same time serving as a portable instrument of control over the casualized laborer and the fragmented production process; it successfully miniaturizes one's access to the remaining bureaucratic functions, while also opening a private channel into the realms of virtual or "fictitious" capital, the financial markets where surplus value is produced as if by magic, despite the accumulating signs of environmental decay. In this way, the organizational paradigm of the network grants an autonomy which can be channeled into a new productive discipline, wherein the management of social relations over distance is a key factor, constantly open to a double interpretation. To recognize this profound ambivalence of the networked computer—that is, the way its communicative and creative potentials have been turned into the basis of an ideology masking its remote control functions—is to recognize the substance and the fragility of the hegemonic compromise on which the flexible accumulation regime of globalizing capital has been built.