Working for Pleasure: Interactivity and Ideology; or what is the Glue Holding Neoliberalism Together? – Core Post 2, Josh Foley

                The readings for this week address the ways in which fandom operates as a type of free labor in a neoliberal economy. As interactive media trains us to produce capital on behalf of someone else, it also leads us to believe that we can know the secret of the system while participating within it. As Andrejevic writes, “Publicity as a counterhegemonic principle enacts not the drive toward self-exposure associated with the celebrity subject of cyberia but the exposure of the secret of power” (45). This “publicity without a public” operates within the sanctioned spaces of online forums that, even if users are aware, as Andrejevic points out, that their comments and concerns won’t necessarily be taken seriously, function as market research on behalf of producers and networks. This makes me think of an argument put forth by Deleuze and Guattari in 1972, the year we may think of as the start or solidification of neoliberal politics and ideology, at least in the U.S. In Anti-Oedipus, following the earlier work of Wilhelm Reich, they write, “It is not a question of ideology … That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests – when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat – it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure” (104).

Indeed, the forum users described by Andrejevic, the fans described by Jenkins, and the decoders described by Seiter following the model of Stuart Hall all point towards groups of television consumers who do not passively watch, but instead actively engage with T.V., bending it in certain ways so that it will correspond more closely with their desires. As Seiter writes, “Another way to think of this is in terms of ‘shifting’ the text slightly to fit individual interests” (465). Paired with this, Andrejevic suggests, is the pleasure of knowing how one is exploited by “the powers that be,” coupled with a feeling that there is, ultimately, nothing one can do.

It is worth thinking through how these are not the after-effects of a neoliberal way of life, but how they are engendered as the very substance or glue that enables a neo-liberal system. Indeed, these mechanisms are not ways of coping with neoliberalism, they are ways of maintaining it. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of desire, resistance to neoliberalism, or knowledge of its operations of power, is part of its infrastructure. Like a game in which pleasure is derived from figuring out the rules and constraints put in place by “someone else,” we become preoccupied doing this work of “figuring out,” not because we have been duped but because we like it. Neoliberalism seems to operate not according to older notions of ideology, discourse, or the state, but instead according to a strange performative logic: participate or perish. This is not about knowledge (including Foucault’s notion of discourse), because it ultimately, as these readings point out, doesn’t matter whether or not you know how the systems works; this is about participation within an architecture. I suspect that is why much of the conversation in interactive media studies circulates around activity/passivity or agency/non-agency rather than knowing/not-knowing. In conclusion to a rambling post, I suggest a switch from Foucault’s notion of knowledge/power to one of participation/power, in which participation within the right systems, or the correct technologies, grants one a piece of the dispersed powers of neoliberalism. 

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin, 2009.