Digital Theory, Inc.: Knowledge Work and Labor Economics

Carol Colatrella (bio)
Georgia Institute of Technology
carol.colatrella@lcc.gatech.edu

 
Over the past year, faculty members in my interdisciplinary department at Georgia Tech responded to the request by an external review for improved descriptions of our programs and department. The process of strategic planning is inherited from the corporate world and is the most obvious way that academic institutions are being pressed to function better (i.e., more like corporations). My colleagues and I struggled to agree on the best description of our research and teaching, because we knew that the reputation and future configuration of the department were at stake. Recessionary university budgets meant that we had to be both accurate and persuasive in descriptions that would be read by various interest groups: our university colleagues; administrators, including our dean, provost, and president; former, current, and prospective students and their parents; employers of our graduates; the citizens and legislators of our state who underwrite part of the budget for our institution; and the various other funding agencies and donors who contribute to our research and curricular programs.
 
After considering what each faculty member does and relating it to the university’s recently issued strategic plan, we reached a consensus that our scholarship and curricular programs focus on culture and technology, and particularly on building and critiquing technologies, including technologies of representation. While agreeing on our core activities, however, we also recognized diverse affiliations with other disciplinary and interdisciplinary humanistic fields: rhetoric, literary criticism, creative writing, cinema studies, performance studies, and cultural studies of science and technology. Because it is impossible to be both universally transparent and cutting-edge, there are irresolvable, permanent tensions between our department’s general project and individual faculty members’ specific research; these tensions are reflected, furthermore, in the differences between our department’s configuration and those of similar departments in the state system and beyond.
 
Our experience of strategic planning represents what Katie King calls “networked reenactment” in building community-identity and embodies what Rob Wilkie describes as the necessary, if unpaid, labor to create culture. King’s and Wilkie’s respective books, Networked Reenactments and The Digital Condition, both consider the economic forces affecting the creation, deployment, and consumption of technologies and related representations. Both books explain how macroeconomic processes affect scholarly work and undervalue it in the marketplace. Theoretically rigorous, these books are also highly pragmatic in recommending activism for social justice.
 
In this way, Networked Reenactments and The Digital Condition have more in common than one might expect from their titles. Both texts explore the ways that media technologies are uncomfortably intertwined with entrepreneurial capitalism and with the emerging global university. Developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary arguments about human engagement with technology, King and Wilkie consider the constraints and rewards of recently-developed media technologies that promise empowerment while limiting return on investment. The authors discount unabashed affirmations of individual and social empowerment that appear in other cultural theories of media, and assess expanded opportunities for social networking as a poor substitute for social justice.
 
Networked Reenactments and The Digital Condition present differently constructed, yet complementary arguments about the insufficiencies of contemporary accounts of technology and the context of global capitalism. Both books critique media’s facile representations of past and present and indict universities for going along with these dominant yet inadequate ideologies. More specifically, each points to engagements of media and “global academic restructuring,” to use King’s phrase. She understands that universities

are venues packing simultaneous realities in multitemporal histories that interlace, variate, and shift range. Distributive processes of making, sharing, using, and modeling knowledge reach out among networking knowledge economies such that creating a product, addressing readers and audiences, and finding communication styles are all more difficult.

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King and Wilkie explain that contemporary humanities scholarship struggles to represent accurate, accessible narratives about our engagement with science and technology. For Wilkie, such analysis must be grounded in historical materialism and should consider who contributes labor and who profits. He argues that literary criticism and theory are mere distractions so long as they do not consider such conditions. For King, representations of the past, particularly depictions of scientific exploration and discovery, are inadequate until they are unpacked by a historical materialist analysis. To teach and to do research in a university in the era of globalization presents an opportunity to consider the workings of capitalism, albeit while being subjected to and replicating its functions. Both texts have strengths and weaknesses, although the imperfections are slight and should not discourage readers. King’s Networked Reenactments interprets different texts and related social circumstances to discuss a diverse range of what she calls “reenactments”; she extends the definition of “reenactment” beyond participation in reenacted military battles and applies the term to media presentations such as museum exhibits, television shows, and Internet sites. King bases her argument on factually dense case studies organized in loose chronological order. Although the organization works well to support historical analysis of a specific period (the 1990s), it can be difficult to follow her argument because it tends to be interrupted by the factual density of the examples. As a result, summarizing the internal logic of King’s argument can result in a collage of related statements (see below), but it is rewarding because her analysis is so trenchant.

 
Taking a different approach, Wilkie’s The Digital Condition counters the celebratory pronouncements of cultural theorists who see individual and social empowerment as inevitable outcomes of digital technology. A particular strength of Wilkie’s book is that it is clear, succinct, and straightforwardly organized. His application of Marx’s ideas to our digital economy could provoke resistance in readers who are suspicious of what can in places seem to be doctrinaire Marxism. But ultimately both Wilkie and King acknowledge the benefits as well as the costs of the technologies they discuss, share a healthy skepticism about the effects of global capitalism on production and consumption of media technology, and recommend that knowledge workers think skeptically and act beyond self-interest.
 
Focusing on the 1990s enables King to present recent, still relevant cultural and political issues and to survey how different communities of practice explore similar ideological assumptions and material practices of networked reenactments. Her introduction reviews the general outlines of stories about past and present that are embedded in different types of reenactments, including science exhibits in museums, fictionalized historical television dramas, televised archaeological and historical documentaries, and fictional and reality TV shows that attempt to represent the past or what she calls “pastpresent,” a term referring to the inevitable inflection of present-day thoughts in any reading of the past. These topics are analyzed in greater detail in chapters 1 through 5, as King works her way through the decade with case studies of networked reenactment. The first chapter links the fantasy television shows Highlander and Xena to the political climate surrounding the formation of the European Union in 1992. King connects the reception of these shows to that of Ellen DeGeneres’s situation comedy Ellen and describes them as “examples, in telescoping layers of locals and globals, of . . . global gay formations and local homosexualities” (24). Her point that sexual communities serve as a synecdoche for national and transnational communities rings true, but instead of offering a summative evaluation of the shows’ sexual politics, she follows this point with a set of questions leading to subsequent chapters.
 
Taking a meandering approach by emulating a walk through a museum, Chapter 2 of King’s book considers issues of national history and disciplinary claims related to the Smithsonian’s 1994 exhibit Science in American Life, which was funded by the American Chemical Society and elicited criticism from some scientists. King acknowledges other controversies that dogged the museum, including the 1991 exhibit on the American West, which critiqued the concept of Manifest Destiny, and the 1995 Enola Gay exhibit, which “the Air Force Association, the American Legion, and veterans’ groups [protested] was not going to express the view that the bombing of Japan had saved American lives” (60). She guides readers through Science in American Life by using narrative description and photos, a method she describes as “modest witnessing” along the lines of Donna Haraway, who wrote the foreword to Networked Reenactments. This witnessing sets the stage for King’s analysis of the exhibit, which exposed the conflicting “self-interests” of scientists, historians of science, and social scientists who engaged in disputes about what counts as science (is social science science?) and about whether public presentation of science should include “anti-science sentiment” (66, 61). King notes the critique of University of Maryland physicist Robert Park, who “characterized the exhibit as ‘technically superb’ but unbalanced, painting science as ‘a servant of the power structure'” (61). Park would prefer a positivist approach, identified by King as “pro-science conservatism”: “What people need to know, and are not told, is that we live in a rational universe governed by physical laws. It is possible to discover those laws and use them for the benefit of humankind” (Park qtd. in King 61). Patient, persistent readers are rewarded if they follow King’s meanderings because she enables us to work through the evidence supporting her generalized claim that the conflicts surrounding Science in American Life were “only a piece of the Smithsonian controversies coming out of the nineties, controversies in which commerce, knowledge work, and national culture are inextricably intermixed” (102).
 
The next section of the book pursues the question of commerce in educational settings; it responds to academic capitalism, recapitulating arguments advanced by Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie about corporate incursions into the university and universities’ reconfiguration of their operations along corporate lines. King reports that her own use of the term “communities of practice” was protested by a student, who recognized its popularization “in the managerial domain” and thus refused to take King’s University of Maryland course that adopted the term to reference feminist practices (104). Another Smithsonian controversy discussed by King concerns Catherine and Wayne Reynolds’ withdrawal of funding for a proposed exhibit that would have contained, in historian Patricia Limerick’s words, American “portraits of individual achievement . . . [and] the obstacles against which those individuals struggled” (114-15). Media outlets reported that the prospective donors made demands incompatible with museum practice, yet the Smithsonian’s Blue Ribbon commission simply recognized inherent complications when private funds support public exhibits. King contextualizes this controversy by describing the changing purview of the museum: “its ‘national’ character and its ‘historical’ character are simultaneously long-term continuities but also relatively refocused priorities in politicized environments of the last half century” (119). This politicized refocusing is reflected in the ongoing transformation of the museum’s name: first known in the late fifties as “the Museum of History and Technology,” in the sixties it became “the National Museum of History and Technology,” in the early eighties it was “the National Museum of American History,” and the late nineties added the designation “the Behring Center” (119). The chapter concludes by recognizing that public history is inevitably “messy” in its attempt to explain competing interests while they unfold: “We cannot mine the terrors of globalization for possibilities unless we act as modest witnesses for what we are becoming” (127). Recognizing these shifts even at the level of museum naming enables King to assert a commitment to developing “relational feminist tools for progressive political work” and a willingness to look at “the limits of debunking” as part of “a critique of critique” (121). When she alludes to a feminism inherent in debunking others’ debunking, however, King does not explain what is particularly feminist about her critique other than careful observation of material practice and sensitive analysis of related ideological claims.
 
The value of King’s argument depends on how much one appreciates her careful collage of facts as support for her general claims. For example, Chapter 3, “TV and the Web Come Together,” surveys television shows that represent the past and that present investigations of the past, such as a number of History Channel, Discovery Channel, and Nova series and episodes about ancient, medieval, and Renaissance cultures and their technologies. King describes the shows’ development, their assemblages, and their incorporation and reconfiguration of academic scholarship to engage audiences, who are presumed to be interested in

communities of identity: what we are, what we name ourselves, shifts multiply as what we do variously with different each others connects us to multiple pastpresents. This kind of political possibility offers bits of utopianisms in a very different way than that of telling us who we should be and what we should do; instead it attempts to recognize who we are becoming.

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She thus points to our processes of identity formation as evolving through various narrative reconfigurations in diverse media. Referencing the term “repurposing” used by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin in their book Remediation, her chapter considers “internet repurposings” of television documentaries that are supplemented with Internet sites containing related materials for extended study. This argument can be extended beyond print, television, and Internet sites to include social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.

 
King realizes historians and other experts are sometimes drawn into projects “less to provide interpretation or insight than a fig leaf of authority for a fundamentally anti-historical enterprise” (246), as she puts it in her fourth chapter, “Scholars and Entrepreneurs.” She discusses the 2001 six-part series The Ship, a “BBC reenactment of Captain James Cook’s voyage in the South Seas . . . [that] recruited [academics], reality TV style, to be specialist volunteers and to live on his ship The Endeavour . . . in circumstances the director, Chris Terrill, was to call ‘extreme history'” (247). King reports on critical reactions to the documentary and on the testimony of participants at a 2004 Vanderbilt conference. Noting that “BBC and museum folks felt deeply misunderstood and misrepresented” while her own talk “foreground[ed] the materialities of academic capitalism” (254), King connects the example of the conference to other examples that highlight “knowledge transfer” and thereby identifies the “entrepreneurial ‘products'” shared at transdisciplinary academic conferences as themselves examples of reenactments (257, 266).
 
In her conclusion, King describes interpreting “science-styled television reenactment” as a way to “experience alternately embodied epistemologies” (274). Looking at the work of Henry Jenkins, King argues that “the materialities of transmedia storytelling are very much intertwined with academic technology infrastructures amid transdisciplinary scholarship amid academic entrepreneurships, some ‘mandated’ and some enthusiastic or ‘evangelizing’ in technology-specific ways” (280). This final move on her part appreciates that narrative, technology, and economy are tied together in a manner that requires continuing analysis of communities of practice and knowledge making.
 
Such an analysis is offered, happily, by The Digital Condition, which describes the shortcomings of other social theories about culture and digital technologies. Wilkie begins with the premise that “the acceleration in developments in science, technology, communication, and production” has “made it more possible than ever not only to imagine but to realize a world in which the tyranny of social inequality is brought to an end” (2). That goal has not yet been achieved, Wilkie explains, because the contradictions between labor and capital are exacerbated by technology rather than eliminated by it (72). For example, technology provides professors with “more freedom in the classroom” without changing “the relation of productive and unproductive labor,” for “regressive tax policies that favor the rich over the poor” make public universities turn “towards corporate logics as a way of coping with less and less financial resources” (99). Such choices depend on how surplus value is calculated in the capitalist economy, a point that becomes the heart of Wilkie’s argument:

Instead, these changes are a reflection of the fact that all aspects of life are being turned towards realizing as much of the surplus value expropriated during production into capitalists’ profits as possible. As such, it is not new technologies or control over how one works that will change this. The solution is transforming the economic relations which create these conditions. What is necessary for real transformation, in short, is freedom for all from a system driven by the private accumulation of surplus value.

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Thus, when others concentrate on the digital enhancement of individual lives and creation of social progress, Wilkie is more disillusioned about achieving these outcomes in a capitalist economy.

 
His first chapter explains how most cultural theorists have separated cultural from economic concerns: “It is not that cultural theory simply fails to describe the economic inequalities of digital society; it is that in the context of contemporary theories of digital culture—which focus on consumption over production, desire over need, and lifestyle differences rather than class—cultural studies turns class into a safe concept . . . [that] is hollowed out of any explanatory power” (5). Wilkie counters the work of contemporary thinkers such as Nicholas Negroponte, Jeremy Rifkin, and Zillah Eisenstein who see technology, and particularly access to digital technology, as eliminating class differences. Wilkie finds a similar omission of property in Mark Poster’s What’s the Matter with the Internet?, identifying Poster’s argument as “a clear example of the way in which the economic divisions of the digital condition are rewritten as conflicts other than those shaped by the relations of production” (22). The Digital Condition instead “reads” the digital according to “the historical materialist theory . . . that reconnects questions of culture to the objective relations of class, labor, and production” (7).
 
Stipulating that a worker’s labor is property and that property is a key, albeit underappreciated, factor in a digital economy, Wilkie asserts that “class, in short, is an objective relation,” one that

is determined not by the consumption of materials—whether, for example, both the lord and the serf eat from the same harvest and thus think of themselves as part of the same community or whether the owner and the workers spend their free time gaming online and consider themselves members of a gaming clan—but rather by the relationship to property that exists between these social groups.

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Wilkie succinctly summarizes counterarguments by others, including Daniel Bell, who recognizes “traditions” and not “economics” as determining “the development of society and the uses of technology” (30). Comparing Bell’s ideas about capital with Jean Baudrillard’s, Wilkie concludes that “what both theorists share is the underlying assumption of a soft technological determinism” privileging knowledge as capital (33).

 
Objecting to the idea that knowledge constitutes capital, Wilkie argues that it is labor that produces technology (36). He writes that Martin Heidegger locates “the alienation of the individual in contemporary society not in capitalism but in the instrumental logic of technology,” noting that what Heidegger “presents as a ‘spiritual’ renewal—creativity—is simply a recognition that it is the labor power of works that creates value” (41). Resisting Thomas Friedman’s characterization of the iPod as an example of technology empowering the consumer, Wilkie recognizes it as technology proceeding from human labor. Similarly, in his second chapter, he points out that

technological developments produce value only in the sense that they are products of labor and therefore contain an amount of extracted surplus value, and that they are used to increase the productivity of labor within the working day, thereby indirectly contributing to the production of future surplus value. Machines do not produce value in themselves but only as instruments of human labor.

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The second half of The Digital Condition links analyses of literary and digital theory and close readings of literary and cinematic texts that comment on human engagement with technology in order to advance Wilkie’s argument about labor and surplus value under global capitalism. He reads William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades in relation to theories of globalization. In chapter 4 (“Reading and Writing in the Digital Age”), Wilkie cites theories of digital text by N. Katherine Hayles and George Landow, among others, to explain “the open ideology of digital textualism” (126). The Digital Condition takes a dim view of “the Platonic theory of mimesis” and “the Derridean theory of nonmimesis,” preferring instead “the historical materialist theory of nonmimetic reflection” (146). In his concluding chapter 5 (“The Ideology of the Digital Me”), Wilkie acknowledges that Dark City and The Matrix take up “the discursively complex theories of writers such as [Antonio] Negri, [Bruno] Latour, and [Donna] Haraway” to popularize their “new ideologies” (180). Unfortunately, these films interpret contemporary conditions in ways “that extend, rather than challenge, capitalist relations” (186).

 
In contrast, for Wilkie, technological innovation is linked to “the increasing productivity of labor,” which has not enhanced the lives of workers; instead, “the gap between the richest and poorest Americans has continued to grow at an increasing rate” (188). Wilkie disagrees with digital theorists who argue that “the contradiction between capital and labor is one of a residue of living labor that will be eliminated by the automation of production” (189). At the end of the study, Wilkie reasserts his claim that technology, far from liberating workers, “becomes a hindrance to progress” (194). His final recommendation is that cultural theory must “return to the concepts of class, labor, and production so as to be able to understand how the forms of everyday life are shaped by the economic relations and thus how and why the development of technology means they can be transformed in the interests of all” (195).
 
How technologies, and particularly media technologies, serve the interests of an elite socioeconomic class is the common concern of both books under review. While King provides vivid collations of facts and assertions to demonstrate multiple interests unfolding in the production and reception of 1990s reenactments such as fictional and documentary television series and museum exhibits, Wilkie demystifies lofty speculations about technological empowerment by providing a rigorous account of how the few profit from the labor of the many in the current digital economy. These are complementary rather than contradictory arguments that press readers to think more deeply about the technologies we buy, use, and invent. Both texts enjoin us to develop social actions based on careful analysis rather than on commercial claims. The take-home lessons for me—to indulge in corporate-speak—include that technology constrains as it enables; that its efficiencies represent often unheralded, frequently under-rewarded labor; and that interactions of technology and culture can be tracked but not predicted.

Carol Colatrella is professor of Literature and Cultural Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Faculty Affairs in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts; and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Women, Science, and Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Colatrella’s books include Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative: Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner; Literature and Moral Reform: Melville and the Discipline of Reading, and Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology. She co-edited (with Joseph Alkana) and contributed to Cohesion and Dissent in America. Technology and Humanity, an anthology she edited and to which she contributed, has just been published. Since 1993, she has served as Executive Director of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts and editor of the SLSA newsletter Decodings.