Communicative Capitalism

Definition

Communicative capitalism (Jodi Dean) names that stage of late capitalism in which democratic ideals — access, inclusion, discussion, participation — take material form in networked communication technologies, yet in which the intensified circulation of content forecloses politics rather than enabling it. Messages become mere "contributions" to a circulating stream (exchange value overtakes use value); the sender/author becomes immaterial; and the "deluge of screens and spectacles" produces a post-political condition in which "there is no response." It is animated by three fantasies: abundance (message → contribution), participation (technology fetishism / interpassivity), and wholeness (the Internet as "zero institution").

Key Thinkers

• Jodi Dean — originator of communicative capitalism.
• (Related, not yet paged: Slavoj Žižek (post-politics, interpassivity), Giorgio Agamben, Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Spectacle — the mediated image-circulation that communicative capitalism extends.
• Semiocapitalism — the attention/immaterial-labour economy that circulation monetizes.
• Noopolitics — the governance of attention/affect implied by circulation.
• Ideology — the materialized, subject-forming dimension of the circulation.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics
• Viral Architecture, or the Unintentional Architecture Criticism of Social Media
• Spectacle, Simulation, and the Selfie: Revisiting Baudrillard's Simulation and Hyperreality
• Everyday (Virtual) Life
• Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life
• Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (Virilio 1977) — dromocracy as the political control of circulation that communicative capitalism's "deluge of screens" extends into the social realm.
• War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Virilio 1989) — the "logistics of perception" prefigures the platform/algorithmic gaze that Dean's circulation forecloses politics.
• From ambient environments to sentient spaces (Gattegno & Johnson 2018) — the built-infrastructural instance: installations harvesting "trending conversations in online social media forums" and "trending search terms on multiple search engines" and retransmitting them as urban light and text; the chapter's own questions — "the complex and contradictory politics of the grid we plug into today, raising issues of ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism. Who owns the data? Who disperses it? What data is represented and how is it selected?" — and the counter-move of Murmur Wall's whispers, "analogous to graffiti on an urban surface," sent "to circumvent, interrupt, and question the information represented." The harvesting wall makes Dean's circulation physical: the platform's trending feed given a facade.
• source-notes/proto-2023-spectacle-and-the-screen

Open Questions

• Does the "circulation forecloses politics" thesis extend from social/political communication to the circulation of architectural images (Instagram architecture)?
• Gattegno & Johnson's Murmur Wall gives circulation a building: harvested trending feeds retransmitted as urban ambience, with public "whispers" as the override. Does the graffiti-override make the wall an active public sphere (participation regained) or Dean's interpassivity cast in LED — contributions to a stream that only re-circulates? And does the harvested city (trending feeds as ambience) extend "circulation forecloses politics" into the built environment itself — space that circulates content instead of housing exchange?