#postmodernization

THE POOR In each and every historical period a social subject that is ever-present and everywhere the same is identified, often negatively but nonetheless urgently, around a common living form. This form is not that of the powerful and the rich: they are merely partial and localized figures, quantitate signatae. The only non-localizable ‘‘common name’’ of pure difference in all eras is that of the poor. The poor is destitute, excluded, repressed, exploited—and yet living! It is the common denominator of life, the foundation of the multitude. It is strange, but also illuminating, that postmodernist authors seldom adopt this figure in their theorizing. It is strange because the poor is in a certain respect an eternal postmodern figure: the figure of a transversal, omnipresent, different, mobile subject; the testament to the irrepressible aleatory character of existence. This common name, the poor, is also the foundation of every possibility of humanity. As Niccolo` Machiavelli pointed out, in the ‘‘return to beginnings’’ that characterizes the revolutionary phase of the religions and ideologies of modernity, the poor is almost always seen to have a prophetic capacity: not only is the poor in the world, but the poor itself is the very possibility of the world. Only the poor lives radically the actual and present being, in destitution and suffering, and thus only the poor has the ability to renew being. The divinity of the multitude of the poor does not point to any transcendence. On the contrary, here and only here in this world, in the existence of the poor, is the field of immanence presented, confirmed, consoli- dated, and opened. The poor is god on earth. Today there is not even the illusion of a transcendent God. The poor has dissolved that image and recuperated its power. Long ago modernity was inaugurated with Rabelais’s laugh, with the realistic supremacy of the belly of the poor, with a poetics that expresses all that there is in destitute humanity ‘‘from the belt on down.’’ Later, through the processes of primitive accumulation, the proletariat emerged as a collective subject that could express itself in materiality and immanence, a multitude of poor that not only prophesied but produced, and that thus opened possibilities that were not virtual but concrete. Finally today, in the biopolitical regimes of production and in the processes of postmodernization, the poor is a subjugated, exploited figure, but nonetheless a figure of production. This is where the novelty lies. Everywhere today, at the basis of the concept and the common name of the poor, there is a relationship of production. Why are the postmodernists unable to read this passage? They tell us that a regime of transversal linguistic relations of production has entered into the unified and abstract universe of value. But who is the subject that produces ‘‘transversally,’’ who gives a creative meaning to language—who if not the poor, who are subjugated and desiring, impoverished and powerful, always more powerful? Here, within this reign of global production, the poor is distinguished no longer only by its prophetic capacity but also by its indispensable presence in the production of a common wealth, always more exploited and always more closely indexed to the wages of rule. The poor itself is power. There is World Poverty, but there is above all World Possibility, and only the poor is capable of this. Vogelfrei, ‘‘bird free,’’ is the term Marx used to describe the proletariat, which at the beginning of modernity in the processes of primitive accumulation was freed twice over: in the first place, it was freed from being the property of the master (that is, freed from servitude); and in the second place, it was ‘‘freed’’ from the means of production, separated from the soil, with nothing to sell but its own labor power. In this sense, the proletariat was forced to become the pure possibility of wealth. The dominant stream of the Marxist tradition, however, has always hated the poor, precisely for their being ‘‘free as birds,’’ for being immune to the discipline of the factory and the discipline necessary for the construction of socialism. Consider how, when in the early 1950s Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini set the poor to fly away on broomsticks at the end of their beautiful film Miracle in Milan, they were so violently denounced for utopianism by the spokesmen of socialist realism. The Vogelfrei is an angel or an intractable demon. And here, after so many attempts to transform the poor into proletarians and proletarians into a liberation army (the idea of army weighed heavily on that of liberation), once again in postmodernity emerges in the blinding light of clear day the multitude, the common name of the poor. It comes out fully in the open because in postmodernity the subjugated has absorbed the exploited. In other words, the poor, every poor person, the multitude of poor people, have eaten up and digested the multitude of proletarians. By that fact itself the poor have become productive. Even the prostituted body, the destitute person, the hunger of the multitude—all forms of the poor have become productive. And the poor have therefore become ever more important: the life of the poor invests the planet and envelops it with its desire for creativity and freedom. The poor is the condition of every production. The story goes that at the root of the postmodernist sensibility and the construction of the concept of postmodernism are those French socialist philosophers who in their youth celebrated factory discipline and the shining horizons of real socialism, but who became repentant after the crisis of 1968 and gave up, proclaiming the futility of the pretense of communism to reappropriate social wealth. Today these same philosophers cynically deconstruct, banalize, and laugh at every social struggle that contests the universal triumph of exchange value. The media and the culture of the media tell us that those philosophers are the ones who recognized this new era of the world, but that is not true. The discovery of postmodernity consisted in the reproposition of the poor at the center of the political and productive terrain. What was really prophetic was the poor, bird-free laugh of Charlie Chaplin when, free from any utopian illusions and above all from any discipline of liberation, he interpreted the ‘‘modern times’’ of poverty, but at the same time linked the name of the poor to that of life, a liberated life and a liberated productivity.

Compare this quote to the first quotation on the blog, by McLuhan. Both writers share the same views. 

Computers (and technology) are changing everything. 

YOU are changing. Personally, I am depenedent on technology. I need my phone to be in my hand at all time. I need my computer to take notes in class. I need a camera when I’m going out to take pictures of my friends.

YOUR FAMILY is changing. You interact with your family differently now. For those of us that moved away from home, technology offers great ways to stay in touch with family members that in the past did not exist. My family members also use technology in their own way. For example, my brother is industrial design and he uses technology to draw the things he designs before actually creating them in real life.

YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD is changing. Your neighborhood is expanding. Think of McLuhan’s “global village” concept. You can literally access and send information to and from any place on the globe. 

YOUR EDUCATION is changing. Who goes to the library to look up a book anymore? That is what the databases online are for, right? Is it not crazy to think about how people used to use textbooks for research? Technology has made access to information faster, more efficient and much more vast. And it is only getting more advanced. Consider how much information will be accessible when every book in the world is digitized.

YOUR JOB is changing. Machines have taken over much of the job market. They are simply smarter, better, faster, and more efficient than humans are.

YOUR GOVERNMENT is changing. 

The emergence of mechanic technology drastically changed how people do their jobs. 

As McLuhan mentioned the media “leaves no part of us untouched” this includes how people work. He poses the question; what happens when machines learn to do peoples jobs? 

The Postmodernization reading states, “It has now become common to view the succession of economic paradigms since the Middle Ages in three distinct moments, each defined by the dominant sector of the economy: a first paradigm in which agriculture and the extraction of raw materials dominated the economy, a second in which industry and the manufacture of durable goods occupied the privileged position, and a third and current paradigm in which providing services and manipulating information are at the heart of economic production.”

As McLuhan stated that technology is reshaping our jobs, this is what he meant. Machines have taken over the previous economic paradigms. We are currently in the paradigm that provides services and manipulates information. The dominant sector of the economy has completely shifted due to the fact that machines began to be created that did human jobs more efficiently than humans could do themselves. Machines are better, faster, stronger. Machines do not expect paychecks. Machines will not die, or miss work, or come in late. For many reasons, the technology has continually been produced to do human work better than a human could- and therefore humans have lost these jobs, and moved into different sectors.  

Machines have taken over the need for human labour.