Speeding Up Fast Capitalism

Cultures, Jobs, Families, Schools, Bodies

Ben Agger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781594510328
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317251606
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In his 1989 book, Fast Capitalism, Ben Agger presented a framework for understanding late-20th century social problems. Speeding Up Fast Capitalism, a sequel to his earlier book, assesses social changes since the end of the 1980s brought about by information technologies like the Internet, which have quickened the pace of everyday life. In Speeding Up Fast Capitalism, Agger assesses the impact of the Internet on consciousness, communication, culture and community, and evaluates the prospects of democratic social change. Where the earlier book was largely theoretical, Speeding Up applies critical theory to specific topics such as Internet culture, work, families, childhood, schooling, food, the body and fitness. Although indebted to Fast Capitalism, the sequel appeals to an audience wider than theorists, including empirical sociologists, social scientists and scholars in cultural disciplines.

1

Faster Capitalism?

The doorbell just rang. It was the mailman bringing a package from Amazon.com. In our suburb between Fort Worth and Dallas, good bookstores are hard to find. There is the obligatory Barnes & Noble outlet, where you can order a book with your cappuccino or calendar. But there is nothing in the way of an independent, intellectual bookstore of the kind we used to enjoy in Buffalo and nearby Ithaca. So we order from Amazon. Today’s book is called Wired to the World, Chained to the Home by Canadian social scientist Penelope Gurstein (1991).

Canada figures in this story. One of my main themes is the way that distance (as opposed to immersion) affords clarity of vision. Here, distance is Canada. A host of Canadian scholars and writers, from Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and George Grant to John O’Neill, Douglas Coupland, and Arthur Kroker have addressed the impact of rapid information and communication on self, society, and culture. McLuhan coined the term global village and Coupland the term Generation X. Perhaps Canadian theorists are well positioned to understand the inextricable connection between culture and power; after all, Canada exists in the shadow of America and yet it shuns superpower politics and identity. Canadians are also keenly aware of the importance of boundaries.

The other thing that happened today is that I finished writing The Virtual Self (2004), a book about the impact of the Internet. Instead of sending a pulp copy of the manuscript to the publisher, I simply e-mailed files across the country. The publishing house is based in England, but it operates internationally. The book was signed and developed in the United States, typeset in India, and printed and bound in the United Kingdom. Virtuality is the question of the day, indeed of the year and perhaps of the decade. Critical social theorists are scrambling to make sense of new information technologies just as we use these technologies to order books and write them. Speeding Up Fast Capitalism, a sequel to Fast Capitalism (Agger 1989a) in light of the Internet, doesn’t simply reflect the world but is implicated in that world. As I explain in The Virtual Self, I am not antitechnology or anti–information technology; I use technology, but it also uses me in ways that give me pause to consider it theoretically. I sometimes use a cell phone, fax machines, pagers, the television, of course, and courier services (the Amazon book), all of the accouterments of an industrial civilization that some call post-Fordist—beyond the era of Henry Ford’s mass production. An excellent book on this post-Fordist world is Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Marx (1999).

CAPITALISM, TIME, AND BOUNDARIES

Fast capitalism is a term I coined in 1989 to describe a new stage of social development. The term has found its way into the theoretical discourse; recently, a scholar published a book with Princeton University Press using the term fast capitalism in the title (Holmes 2000). When I published Fast Capitalism with University of Illinois Press, I had just taken delivery of a computer in my faculty office at SUNY-Buffalo. I’ve been a typist since the eighth grade, and this IBM PC, as I recall, was a useful addition to my intellectual technology. But even in the late 1980s, as I thought through my argument about a new stage of capitalism called “fast,” I could only dimly imagine what was to come in the subsequent decade as the Internet and World Wide Web colonized the planet, changing the way we start our days (with e-mail), communicate (e-mail, again, and chat), learn about and teach the world (Web pages), entertain and stimulate ourselves, shop and travel, and make intellectual contacts. This book describes how a fast capitalism has gotten even faster, and it traces the implications of all this for culture, work, schooling, childhood, diet, and bodies. You don’t have to be a social theorist to read this book productively. I will summarize and update the argument of my earlier book in this first chapter and then apply these insights to a host of human and social issues.

The key word in all this is acceleration, a term used by Douglas Coupland in the subtitle of his book Generation X (1991). The rate of communicating, writing, connecting, shopping, browsing, surfing, and working has increased since the Internet came on the scene. I was correct, in 1989, to notice that capitalism had sped up since Marx’s time, and even since the post–World War II period in which the Frankfurt School theorists wrote about domination and the eclipse of reason (see Jay 1973; Wiggershaus 1994). But I didn’t foresee the extent of acceleration and instantaneity we have come to know today. Who could have? What has happened with the Internet proves my earlier point about the ways in which boundaries of all sorts have been broken down, largely owing to the Internet, television, and what Doug Kellner (1995) calls media culture. As I will explore, perhaps the most crucial boundary under assault by the information technologies that stream through us is the boundary between personal and public life (see Sennett 1977). Nothing today is off limits to the culture industries and other industries that colonize not only our waking hours but also our dreaming.

As I argued in my earlier book, published fifteen years ago but separated from our world today by a vast gulf, I intend the adjective fast to modify “capitalism” in two ways. The first involves time and the way it is compressed as the pace of everyday life quickens in order to meet certain economic imperatives and to achieve social control; idle hands are the devil’s workshop. The second involves erosion of boundaries, which are effaced by a social order bent on denying people private space and time. The two senses of the term are related. A key boundary separates personal and public life. Another key boundary is between the text, as I call all writing and figuring acts, and the world—society and culture. I was especially concerned to think about what I (Agger 1990) have called the decline of discourse (similar to Jacoby’s [1987] last intellectuals) as a result of a postmodern capitalism in which texts are dispersed into the environment. They ooze out of their covers and become lives, reproducing the world—quickly—through a casual reading. Reading becomes casual because people have neither the time to read carefully nor the critical intellectual skills, which they are not provided in this educational milieu of standardized learning and accountability testing (see chapter 4 on schooling and childhood). Also, as I pursue in the next chapter, casual reading is conditioned by casual writing, which both reflects and reproduces people’s lack of intellectual preparation to read the big books of yesteryear—Susan Sontag on photography or cancer, Lewis Mumford on the city, C. Wright Mills on the military-industrial complex, Sartre on existence and bad faith, Marcuse on one-dimensional consciousness.

In this sequel to my earlier book, I am interested in the activities of boundarying and the removing of boundaries, both of which are characteristic of a shift from early- and mid-twentieth-century capitalism to post–World War II and now early-twenty-first-century capitalism. What some people call postmodern capitalism involves removing boundaries between people and among social institutions heretofore viewed as separate, such as work and home. I argue for reboundarying where I contend that the self is at risk of losing her freedom and even her mind in a fast, and now faster, society of information, communication, surveillance, and stimulation. But, as I contend in my final chapter, which ends with practical recommendations for selves, we cannot simply turn back the clock to an earlier era, the premodern, in which these invasive and accelerating technologies did not exist. (In fact, enslavement to the clock is part of our problem.) Many of the technologies I discuss are useful because they will deliver us from scarcity and poverty; they are also useful because they empower people to know and master their worlds. Think of the Internet, which has made the task of writing this book, among other things, easier. As I point out repeatedly in Speeding Up Fast Capitalism, whether technologies are bad or good depends on their uses, their context. The main context in which these faster technologies are used is capitalism, which thwarts the humanism for which I am arguing. Better to change capitalism than unplug the Internet (although changing capitalism will transform the Internet, and a transforming/transformed Internet will help change capitalism).

What underlies these two senses of the word “fast” in our stage of capitalism—acceleration and the erosion of boundaries—is what one might call instantaneity. This captures nicely the postmodern experience of the world. We expect things quickly, instantly, including our fast food, fast cars, fast bodies, fast work, fast reading, and fast writing. What better vehicle of instantaneity than the Internet? Although I composed much of my 1989 book on my trusty PC, which was provided to SUNY faculty because secretaries had been laid off and faculty were now expected to do their own typing, there was no Web, no surfing, no chat rooms. E-mail was restricted to universities. The Internet was initiated by the Defense Department to be a fallback communications system in the event of nuclear war. It was implemented by computer nerds at four major American universities as they got their mainframes talking to each other. It was a technology restricted to the military, government, and university. Today, it is a mass technology, available to most who live above the poverty line. I even see people who live in a local homeless shelter come to the university bookstore in Arlington in order to use free computers. My kids, born in 1991 and 1994, began to learn how to use computers in the second grade; they not only have classes in how to use computers but also take reading tests on their classroom and library computers, for which they need to know basic computer operating skills.

Instantaneity refers to the sheer speed of computers with high-speed Internet connections. When the Internet isn’t overwhelmed by Saturday morning traffic, it hums, connecting one to Buffalo or Bulgaria in a few keystrokes. As I mentioned earlier, I e-mailed book chapters to an editor near Boston. We talked about the chapters a few minutes after I sent them. Instantaneity also refers to the human experience of accelerated information flows and the impact these have on the sensibilities of people. What I termed fast capitalism was fast by comparison to the slower world of my father, who grew up in Manhattan during the 1930s. He knew only radio, “regular” mail, newspapers, billboard advertising, train travel, the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers. The faster capitalism of the 1980s, half a century later, was so different: television, express mail, fast magazines, electronic advertising, and jet travel, including the Concorde. And my dad’s world was quicker by half than Marx’s world of a hundred years earlier, when people rarely traveled, seldom read, and knew little of the world beyond their local scenes.

Social history and cultural analysis by decade are rarely reliable. But in the past ten years the world has sped up, especially communication and information, so that we can talk about a distinctively new experience of the world I am calling instantaneity, which has brought about another distinctly new experience called globality. We can connect with people anywhere, communicating with them and reading email and their Web pages, without waiting long for a response. Time compresses and space shrinks when information and communication are accelerated.

The compression of time and space changes the experience of being human (see Harvey 1989). The self suddenly has no boundaries between itself and the world. One’s home, time, and even thoughts are invaded as the virtual world streams through them. Instantaneity breaks down boundaries and barriers, bringing about a kind of dedifferentiation, which some say is the hallmark of postmodernity. Although I don’t retract what I said in Fast Capitalism about how we still inhabit modernity (and capitalism), not postmodernity (and postcapitalism), the erasure of boundaries and barriers by media culture and information technologies is a distinctively new feature of human experience (see Huyssen 1986). As the world speeds up and compresses, producing the experiences of instantaneity and globality (see Hardt and Negri 2000), we lose the capacity for retreating into privacy in order to evaluate what is going on around us and to us. We lose the distance from the world required to assess it critically, marshaling the analysis and energy to change it. Instead, the self merges with the world, losing the boundaries surrounding what Freud originally called the ego.

This manipulation of experience takes us a stage beyond what the Frankfurt School called domination, which itself intensified what Marx termed exploitation or alienation (see Agger 1992b; Marcuse 1960). Now, the self experiences its own dissolution and dispersal as it is bombarded with culture, control, and commodities. Critical theorists talked about the eclipse of reason to capture this idea (Horkheimer 1974). But they assumed the possibility of critical distance from the world, and thus the integrity of the self, that makes critique and consciousness-raising possible. The Internet reduces this distance, drawing us so close to the world that we cannot find a standpoint from which to reflect or to engage in reasoning.

Exploitation/alienation was Marx’s (1967) term for the theft of workers’ surplus value, the basis of profit, in market capitalism. Alienation is a total human condition in which workers are separated from their work, its product, the working process, other people, and nature. It is in the “logic” of capitalism not to compensate workers for a part of their daily work time. Capitalism shrouds this theft of surplus value in the illusion of false necessity and permanence; the intellectual systems that create this veil are called ideologies. Marx published volume 1 of Capital in 1867 and he died in 1883. His first important work was composed in the same year that Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol.

The Frankfurt School theorists and Lukács, a Hungarian Marxist, began, during the 1920s, to revise Marxist theory in order to explain why the socialist revolution that Marx expected failed to occur. They theorized that false consciousness, produced by ideology, had become more prevalent than Marx anticipated. Marx felt that economic crises would push workers to the brink of revolutionary action. But by the end of the Great Depression, in the early 1930s, it was evident that capitalism was more resilient than Marx allowed for. The “state” or government intervened in the economy, violating Adam Smith’s strictures about the invisible hand, in order to forestall economic crises through Keynes’s strategies of deficit spending and investment implemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the first one hundred days of his presidency in 1932. And, as the Frankfurt School came to recognize, for example Horkheimer and Adorno in their (1972) book Dialectic of Enlightenment, the “culture industry” intervened to stave off people’s psychic crises. It did this through entertainment, leisure, and a subtle, enveloping social philosophy of conformity and control. This social philosophy, deeply implanted in everyday life, was termed domination—a condition of deepened alienation impervious to straightforward critique or social criticism of the kind Marx composed. In a condition of domination, people develop what Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man (1964) called “false needs” for products far beyond their basic needs. Domination is characteristic of the “late” stage of capitalism between the 1930s and the 1970s, corresponding with the Fordist stage of capitalist development. The Fordist stage of capitalism, modeled on Henry Ford’s social technologies of mass production, situates factories and warehouses full of inventory in big cities; production runs are long and relatively inflexible; labor unions are efficacious.

DISPERSED DISCOURSES/DECLINE OF DISCOURSE

After the 1970s, post-Fordist capitalism entered a new phase with the decline of unions and mass production, globalization, and the extensive use of automation and “flexible” information technologies such as the Internet. In this phase, which Jameson (1991) and Harvey (1989) have termed postmodern capitalism, all sorts of boundaries, especially between truth/ falsehood, text/world, and private/public, began to collapse. As a result, institutional dedifferentiation has occurred, with institutions such as work and family, education and entertainment, merging into each other. There is much debate within social and cultural theory about whether this new stage is a genuine postmodernity, beyond an earlier modernity addressed by Marx, Weber, Parsons, and the Frankfurt School, or whether this is only a variation on capitalism that uses postmodern technologies and a postmodern media culture to deepen people’s alienation. I take the latter point of view. In my work, I use postmodern insights to explore the discourses of fast capitalism, but I don’t forget that our economic system is still based, as it was for Marx, on the private ownership of means of production and the bureaucratic coordination of work. But things have changed significantly since the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in this dedifferentiation of social institutions. The most important aspect of dedifferentiation is the invasion of home and even head by cultural imperatives delivered via advertising and the Internet. The Frankfurt School termed this “total administration,” but they did not foresee the extent to which this would happen, with information technologies and media culture becoming more prevalent and more sophisticated than they were in the 1940s and 1950s, when the critical theorists focused their attention on radio and movies.

I have argued that it is useful to view “discourses” as having been dispersed into the everyday environment of work, home, school, even the body. A fast capitalism accelerates cultural messages and both work and family. Few writers write texts on important social topics that do not require doctoral training on the part of readers (think of the books of Sontag, Mumford, and Mills that I mentioned earlier). Writing is dispersed into the sentient world, taking the form of advertising, scripts, Internet chat, Web pages, romance novels, massmarket fiction, gossip magazines, and electronic ’zines. Even academic writing becomes formulaic, written to build careers and not to enlighten, engage, and enrage readers. In my late 1980s and early 1990s discussions of the decline of discourse, which I view as a central feature of fast capitalism, I focused on the eclipse of books, of writing and reading, that imperils the projects of critical theory and social analysis. Marx in the mid-nineteenth century took for granted that he and Engels, his friend and collaborator, could write straightforward works of social criticism, exhorting workers to commit the revolutionary deed, that would be read and understood by workers everywhere (see Marx and Engels 1967). “Workers of the world, unite!” Today, we can no longer presume that writers can write such books or that readers will read them. We cannot presume that publishers would publish them, given market pressures and intellectual stupefaction on the part of readers who prefer fast reads to slow and challenging ones.

That framework of analyzing alienation, domination, and the decline of discourse as a gradual deepening of false consciousness seemed compelling to me in the late 1980s. At the time I stressed, and I stress again, that my analysis recants neither Marx’s criticisms of capitalism nor his utopian solutions—a society beyond class and the alienation of labor. However, I did not foresee the rate at which the decline and dispersal of discourse would accelerate with the Internet, which is an important new factor in a Frankfurt School–oriented analysis of cultural domination today. The Internet both changes things and makes them more the same. It does not overthrow capitalism, pushing us into postmodernity. Nor should it simply be demonized. We must theorize and analyze the Internet as an important aspect of what Marx originally called the mode of production...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Faster Capitalism?
• Chapter 2 Domination at the Speed of Light
• Chapter 3 The Omnipresence of Work
• Chapter 4 Fast Families and Virtual Children
• Chapter 5 Fast Food, Fasting Bodies
• Chapter 6 Slowmodernity
• References
• Index