Intensive Culture

Social Theory, Religion & Contemporary Capitalism

Scott Lash

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781412945172, 9781412945165
• eBook ISBN: 9781446243183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary culture, today?s capitalism - our global information society - is ever expanding, is ever more extensive. And yet we seem to be experiencing a parallel phenomenon which can only be characterised as intensive. This thought provoking, innovative book is dedicated to the study of such intensive culture. Whilst extensive culture is a culture of the same: a culture of fixed equivalence; intensive culture is a culture of difference, of in-equivalence - the singular. Intensities generate what we encounter. They are virtuals or possibilities, always in process and always in movement.

We thus live in a culture that is both extensive and intensive. Indeed the more globally stretched and extensive social relations become the more they simultaneously seem to take on this intensity. Ours is a relational world where each intensity ? whether human, technological or biological ? provides a distinct, specific window onto the whole.

Lash tracks the emergence and pervasion of this intensive culture in society, religion, philosophy, language, communications, politics and the neo-liberal economy itself.

In so doing he redefines the work of Leibniz, Benjamin, Simmel, and Durkheim and inititates the reader into the ontological structures of our contemporary social relations. In the pursuit of intensive culture the reader is taken on an excursion from Karl Marx?s Capital to the ?information theology? in the science fiction of Philip K. Dick.

Diverse, engaging and rich in detail the resulting book will be of interest to all those studying social and cultural theory, sociology, media and communication and cultural studies

1

Introduction

Culture: extensive and intensive

Contemporary culture, today’s capitalism – our global information society – is ever expanding, is ever more extensive. There are Starbuck’s and McDonald’s – indeed many Starbucks and many McDonalds – in not just London, Paris and Berlin, but in seemingly every district of Shanghai and Beijing, Delhi and Bombay, Johannesburg and Lagos, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Sao Paulo and Mexico City, and also increasingly in Chongqing and Wuhan, in Bangalore and Madras, in Nairobi and Cairo, Buenos Aires and Bogotá. Vodafone has subscribers in all continents, BP petrol stations are ubiquitous in the United States as much as England, Carrefour is everywhere in China and Latin America, Pepsi Cola and Nike are omnipresent in cityscapes around the world. Despite the meltdown of 2008–09, the general tendency is for finance to become ever more extensive. Capitalism, society, culture, politics are increasingly extensive. It is not only multinational corporations that are driving this increasing extensity of contemporary social relations. It is international intergovernmental organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the International Labour Organization, and international non-governmental organizations such as Médecins sans Frontières, Amnesty International, Oxfam, CARE International and the Save the Children Alliance. This growing extensity is also ‘regional’. Thus there are regional intergovernmental economic and political organizations such as the European Union, and extensive regional trade agreements such as NAFTA, ASEAN, Mercosul and SAFTA. Extensive also are intergovernmental military organizations like NATO, as is the worldwide distribution of US and NATO military bases. There are US Air Force bases in 15 countries, US Navy in 12, Marines in eight countries and army bases in four. All this documents the increasing extensivity, the extensive universalization of contemporary social relations, of contemporary culture. This growing extensity has meant, first, a gain in geographical spread. It has at the same time brought homogenization. Thus the urban homogenization based in Corbusier’s identical units of habitation and the city grid model has spread from New York and Chicago to Shanghai and Guangzhou, to India and Africa and Latin America. These homogeneous units of space have run parallel to an effective homogenization of (Newtonian) time and the spread of homogeneous units of value in the commodity. And commoditization has surely been the major driver of this growing extensity of social relations.

Given this growing extensification of contemporary culture, on another level and at the same time, we seem to be experiencing a parallel phenomenon whose colours are other; they come in a different register and can only be characterized as intensive. The drug experience, the sexual relations, the sheer pace of life in the streets of today’s mega-city would seem somehow to be intensive. The pace and volume of capital market transactions – despite the end-of-noughties credit crunch – is intensive. There is a longer-term process of intensification of culture and media – with laptops, iPhones, iPods, WiFi, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and platforms for downloading and streaming of just about everything. Work experience is becoming more intensive. We once had life-long employment in rule-bound and hierarchical bureaucratic organizations. Now we work increasingly in often precarious ‘project-networks’, in intensive close personal relations of work groups for shorter periods of time bound by the length of the project, which itself is often a one-off to be patented or copyrighted. Our closest friendships may now be at a great distance and abetted by air travel, thus intensive and compressed into the shortest time. Instead of watching television over the extensivity of a weekly TV series, we may download or buy the DVD of a series like The Wire and watch with one or two intensively significant others the 14 episodes of a season over just a few days. If a city like Paris is organized around an extensive and open framework of Baron Haussmann’s grand boulevards, there is at the same time another Paris around fractal and intensive nodes, such as the medieval Hôpital Salpetrière of Charcot’s infamous neurology experiments or, say, the interior of Oscar Niemeyer’s Parti Communiste Français headquarters. The City of London may have financial tentacles all around the world yet the Square Mile has a density and intensity of people and work that makes even pedestrian traffic difficult and lends its pace and rhythm to the whole of London. We may encounter a series of identical commodities rolled off Nike production lines, but the intensity of the brand Nike, compressed into the logo, is something we never see. If we encounter successions of extensive and metric figures on our laptop computer and mobile phone interfaces, there is another smaller group of intensive software codes or algorithms, which we may never see but yet generate these figures that we do encounter. This increasing global extensity has conquered not just space but also time – thus the spread of futures exchanges from the Chicago Board of Trade to China’s Dalian Commodity Exchange and the United Arab Emirates’ Dubai Mercantile Exchange. Indeed, the size of a global corporation is no longer measured in terms of its assets or its revenues but in terms of its market capitalization, its stock market value, which is its expected future profits. Despite the meltdown of neo-liberal banking, global capitalism over the long term will inexorably remain a still importantly financialized capitalism. And this financialization has brought an intensive economic temporality. In classical industrial capitalism you bought and sold commodities in a Newtonian temporality of the present, in which each moment is experienced as a succession of nows. But financial products and transactions have a longer-term temporality built in, in which past and especially the future are infolded into the present, in what amounts to an intensive time.

We live thus in a culture that is at the same time extensive and intensive. Indeed, the more globally stretched and extensive social relations become, the more they simultaneously seem to take on this intensity. This book is dedicated to the study of such intensive culture.

What is intensive culture?

1. Homogeneity versus difference

Extensive culture is a culture of the same: a culture of equivalence; while intensive culture is a culture of difference, of inequivalence. Things and beings in extensive culture are equivalent or consist of units of equivalence. The intensive, in contrast, consists of units of difference, of the one-off, of the singular. For example, the commodity – which is extensive – consists of equivalent, indeed identical units of value. The brand, in contradistinction, is intensive. Each brand constitutes itself as different from every other brand. The brand only has value, or adds value, in its difference from other brands. The commodity takes on value as it incorporates greater quantities of homogeneous labour power or homogeneous units of market exchange. The value of the brand is inherent instead in this difference, in its inequivalence. In extensive politics, we have notions of citizenship, or ‘the people’ (le peuple in Rousseau’s Social Contract, 1999) or the proletariat: each of these presumes equivalence. There is an equivalence of human beings as citizens, peuple or proletarians. This is an equivalence before the law, in which each person is the same as every other; an equivalence in collective struggle; or an equivalence of individuals constituting a body (le peuple) that is a party to the social contract with the state (or government). In contrast, the ‘multitudes’ (Hardt and Negri 2000) give us an intensive politics of difference. Each member of the self-organizing ‘multitudes’ is different from every other. Radical social movements over several decades have incorporated such a politics of singularity: one based on inequivalence and individuality, in which organization comes no longer from the outside – as in the classical Leninist party – but instead from the inside as self-organization. The bureaucratic and hierarchical corporation is engaged in extensive production in that it may produce a very large number of the same identical object. This stands in contrast to the intensive economy of today’s project-networks, which come together for short periods of time to make one-off goods or services, in each case a different product. So at the heart of extensity are homogeneity, equivalence and identity; at the heart of intensity is heterogeneity and inequivalence, difference.

2. Actual and virtual (potential)

We encounter commodities: they are thus actual. They are actualized. We do not encounter brands. We never see a brand itself. We see branded products. Brands (Lury 2004) actualize: they generate products or commodities that we do encounter. Brands in this sense are not actual but virtual. Brands are thus intensities that actualize into extensities. To be virtual is also to be in potentia, to be a potentiality. A potential has an inherent capacity for growth, development or coming into being. Potent means ‘to be able to’. Its roots are in the Latin potentia, meaning power or force or, in a sense, potential energy. The point here is that extensities are actual. They are the things you encounter. Intensities are virtuals or potentialities. They generate what you encounter. Further, extensities are fixed, while intensities are always in process. They are always in movement. This is movement not through space but the movement of change and instability in the intensity itself. Extensities have the stability of a system in equilibrium. Extensities thus are ‘beings’ while intensities are ‘becomings’. An algorithm, i.e. software coding, is an intensity. The algorithm then generates the extensive figures and data on your computer screen. The figures encountered are actual; the algorithm is virtual. This is also the difference between material and immaterial labour (Lazzarato 2004). Immaterial labour produces difference. It produces virtuals that can generate actuals. These can be intensive goods, singular prototypes from research and development. These intensive goods are often the product of a ‘design process’. These prototypes are then produced in thousands of extensive copies, in what Marx called the ‘labour process’. Often these intensive designed goods are things we never encounter that produce other things we do see and buy. Thus virtual things produce actual things. The virtual things have a value in potentia, and the actual things have what Marx called exchange-value. That is an actual value, a price we pay for these things in a market. Things that are actual possess a figure. They ex-tend towards the viewer as a figure, to the hearer as a sound. Intensities, for their part, do not ex-tend towards us. They in-tend into themselves. Because they in-tend, we encounter no figure. Extension and intension: in in-tension there is compression and in ex-tension decompression.

3. Thing-for-us, thing-in-itself: against instrumental reason

There are two ways in which we can approach beings, whether human or non-human beings. Either we can approach them as extensities – that is in terms of how they ex-tend to us or how they are for us. Or we can approach them more as intensities, that is intrinsically: not ex-trinsically but in-trinsically. We can approach them as they in-tend or in-tense into themselves. As they ex-tend to us and thus are for us, we approach these things through our categories. As they in-tend into themselves, we approach the thing in its own terms. Take you, the reader, as an individual human being. Either someone else approaches you through general categories, such as ethnicity, gender, age, degree of beauty. Or he/she approaches you in your own singularity, as you are in yourself. You will say that the more he/she can know you the more he/she can approach you in your own singularity and not through these general categories. To be treated in your singularity is to be treated as an intensity: to be treated as different from every other being. To be approached through these general categories is to be treated like an ‘atom’: like any other of the tens of thousands of atoms that fit into these categories. Immanuel Kant called the extensive thing, as you approach it through your or general categories, the ‘thing-for-us’ or the ‘thing-for-itself’. It is a thing for itself, if you can imagine the thing as external to itself and approaching itself through these general categories. The intensive thing that you approach as a singularity and through effectively its own categories is the thing-in-itself. It is how the thing in-tends. Kant (1929: 266ff.) called the for-itself or the extensive thing the ‘phenomenon’ and the thing intrinsically or intensively the ‘noumenon’. He held that we can only know phenomena. This book, contra Kant, is about knowledge of things in themselves. Knowledge of the thing-in-itself is intensive knowledge. To know the thing, not in terms of our own, extrinsic categories but in terms of its own intrinsic categories, is such intensive knowledge. To know the thing extensively in terms of our categories is also to know the thing, for example nature, instrumentally: as an instrument we can use for our own purposes. To know nature in terms of its own categories, to know it intensively, means a fundamental break with such instrumental knowledge. Intensive culture is intrinsically a critique of such instrumental reason.

4. Life versus mechanism

Extensities – like the bodies in Newtonian physics – do not have their own energy. They need to be acted upon from without. They are in need of external force. Intensities, for their part, possess their own sources of energy. Extensities are mechanical while intensities incorporate ‘life’ and are vital. Thus intensive culture is not mechanistic but vitalist. The material body in Descartes, Galileo or Newton is mechanistic. The body for Friedrich Nietzsche, in contrast, is vital. Nietzsche spoke of power not primarily acting on bodies from the outside, but of bodies having their own ‘will-to-power’. Against Newtonian mechanism, Nietzsche’s (1966b) will to power was life itself. All beings – human, organic and inorganic – have such a will to power. Nietzsche’s will to power, his vitalism, appear again as the notion of ‘desire’ in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. These authors (1984: 5–6) write about ‘desiring machines’ in which the intensive and the material come together, in which inorganic machines themselves become vital. For Michel Foucault (2008), power is not just something that is exercised externally from above. Power is not just repressive. For him, life and intensity become also a principle of domination, in what he calls ‘bio-power’. Bio-power is not a mechanistic but vitalist mode of domination, which seizes subjects through the capillaries of the living body itself. If energy is internally generated, then causation itself is no longer external but instead internal. Systems are no longer caused or organized from the outside, but instead become self-organizing. Mechanistic systems are organized from elsewhere as cause or force or energy starts as external to the system. Once the force ends, these linear systems move back to equilibrium. Vitalist, intensive systems are self-organizing, the internally generated energy tending to drive the system to far-from-equilibrium states, hence change is the byword. To self-organize – whether for systems or for individuals or indeed communities – is to be reflexive. At stake in intensive politics, for example, is not just mechanistic domination, domination through the mechanistic commodity and resistance through non-linear intensity. Domination itself takes on non-linear colours. Domination itself comes about through difference. If extensive culture is painted in Cartesian colours, vitalist intensive culture is very much Nietzschean.

Ontology and religion

There is in these times a lot of talk about ‘ontology’. People speak about an ‘ontological turn’ in, for example, sociology, anthropology, geography and politics. But there is an alarming looseness to the notion of ontology that is banded about. The concept is used to cover just about anything. If everything is ontological, then the concept has little analytic purchase: indeed, it has little value in any sense. This book takes ontology very seriously, and will take it seriously not just on the level of philosophy but on the level of social theory more generally, for all the social sciences. You hear a lot about an idea of ‘realist ontology’. Scholars who say they subscribe to a realist ontology insist that there is a reality outside the observer and that the observer can know this reality. This book indeed holds that there is a reality outside us. The problem is that ontology is not a doctrine of reality but a question of being. ‘Realism’ speaks of knowledge of reality as comprised of actual things or beings that we encounter. Ontology looks beyond the actual beings or things we encounter to the being of those things, to the being of those beings. Realist ‘ontology’ looks at those actual things or beings through the categories of the observer. Ontology will look at the singular and even processual nature of those beings, i.e. the being of those beings, through those beings’ own ontological structures. Realist ontology, in the above sense, is thus a question of what is described above in terms of the thing-for-us; it is a question of extensive knowledge. Ontology is at the heart of intensive knowledge and intensive culture. So we want to make a first analytic distinction in terms of what is not ontological. Here such a realist doctrine of knowledge, or any doctrine of knowledge in which an observer who is separated from the world of things that she studies and understands those things in terms of our world and our categories, is epistemological. Intensive knowledge, in which the observer is placed in the world with the things or beings that she studies, in terms of their own world, and through their own categories, is ontological.

Martin Heidegger is the lynchpin of modern ontology. He formulated this very much as a student against the dominant positivist and neo-Kantian (indeed ‘realist’) epistemology of his teachers. These neo-Kantians, like Kant, advocated notions of extensive and epistemological knowledge. Heidegger wanted to go beyond epistemology and the knowing of beings through the observer’s categories to the study of being itself. For this the very young Heidegger (Sheehan 1988: 70–1) went back to Aristotle. Aristotle did speak of categorical knowledge. But one of Aristotle’s categories, ‘substance’, was unlike all the others. The others could describe things in terms of their external characteristics, but substance went to the heart of the being, the intrinsic being of things. To look at substance is one very important way of understanding the being of things. Most modern philosophical ontologies break with the concept of substance. But all ontologies, ancient, modern and postmodern all inquire into the being of things (beings). Thus ontology normally harkens back to Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Loux 2003: 166–7). Aristotle’s ontology was based in a more or less linguistic ontology, formed in his re-reading of the grammar of classical rhetoricians. Here his idea of substance took the role of subject of an expression and the other categories were its predicates. Say the sentence ‘Susan is middle aged, female, an architect, of oriental extraction and Chinese speaking’. Here Susan is the subject and all of her characteristics are her predicates. Susan’s or the subject’s intrinsic being is her substance, quite apart from her extrinsic categories. But other ancient Greek thinkers, like Plato, rejected the rhetoric formulations of the Sophists altogether and did not have such a linguistic mediation between the beings that we encounter and the ideas that are their truth. This too i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Intensive Sociology: Georg Simmel’s Vitalism
• 3 Intensive Philosophy: Leibniz and the Ontology of Difference
• 4 Intensive Language: Benjamin, God and the Name
• 5 Intensive Capitalism: Marxist Ontology
• 6 Intensive Politics: Power after Hegemony
• 7 Intensive Religion: Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms
• 8 Information Theology: Philip K. Dick’s Will to Knowledge
• 9 Conclusions
• References
• Index