I.

Language seduces us into an imaginary domain, an order of images. But it is an image – as with the Apple logo betokening forbidden knowledge – that precipitates our fall. Once we can see, we can look. And once we can look, we can labour.

The garden of virtual delights we call the internet, according to Jonathan Beller, is a factory, extended in space and time. Looking is labouring, and the value of whatever is looked at is just the fetishised form of all the glances, or lingering inspections, that the image draws. Capital posits looking as labouring, and turns looking time into socially-necessary-cybertime. It binds perception to production, orchestrating the extraction of sensuous labour

Capital sets about re-making the image in its own image. The rules of verisimilarity and legibility are modelled on the social structure, so that an image which does not in some way code the norms and protocols of that structure strikes one askance. The cultural pathways of race, sex, nationality and so on are converted into images which can captivate the look, and capture the labour of looking.

The image also excludes, as fetishes do. Rather as the gaze of the shoe fetishist is always drawn short of the point where the legs meet, the image is defined by its scotomisation of reality. As long as our attention is riveted to the circulation of images-as-commodities, it is not on the social realities sustaining the spectacle.

This estrangement of the visual order, this conversion of attention into alienated labour, is what Beller calls the ‘cinematic mode of production’. True to the paranoid, psychotic structure of the theory, he can do no other than offer us a cinematic image by way of explanation. We are in The Matrix, the life-energy we put into the world converted into energy to run the image-world, “imprisoned in a malevolent bathosphere, intuiting our situation only through glitches in the programme.”

II.

Was it a mistake to be seduced into the garden? And how far have we fallen?

Beller’s intense, provocative, stylishly seductive work is justly celebrated. And its eerie plausibility is not just a product of the fact that it conforms to capitalist verisimilarity. Participating in social media as a user -- or "produser" as they insufferably say -- might be creative and fulfilling in some ways. But it is also tiring, draining work. It is emotionally, mentally and physically taxing. To keep the circulation of images going – to feed the feed – we have to sacrifice hours of time that we might otherwise invest in anything else. 

However, if looking is labouring, it is only in a metonymic sense. Beller – not capital – posits looking as labouring. But this only works because looking stands in for all the other activities that we do online which help generate profits for tech platform firms. Looking is a condition for labour, part of the labouring process; it is not the labour itself. Netflixdoesn’t care if you watch, it cares how much you talk about its shows, to maximise its subscriber base. Advertisers ultimately only care for your longing looks to the extent that you demonstrate a propensity to buy. This is why the extraction, analysis, packaging and sale of data is becoming such a profitable industry.

If looking were literally labour – not in the ontological sense that everything we do is labour, but in the specific economic sense of it being a source of value – we would be faced with an almighty puzzle. Here, supposedly, is a new frontier in capitalist exploitation, the harnessing of perception to production. But when, one might ask, was perception not harnessed to production? When was labour not sensual? And if perception is itself a new form of value-production, how does one measure socially-necessary perception-time? How would one calibrate the instruments? And where, as Nick Srnicek asks, is the global capitalist boom as this new seam of value is mined? Where is the dynamic expansion of brand new means of optical production? 

A Rembrandt, Beller says, only has the value it does as the fetishised expression of the looks it has drawn: “all that looking sticks to the canvas and increases its value”. What is the product of this labour of looking? How would one package and sell it? It is evidently not the painting itself, as that is a product of a previous labour-process. The implication here is that there is some intangible surplus-product which has invisibly stuck to the visual. How would one go about evaluating this claim? 

If looking increased the value of a visual object, we would face an interesting paradox. In perhaps the majority of cases, accumulating more looks does not improve the market value – the realisable value – of a visual object. One need only think of the immense proliferation of visual items on the internet whose marketable value does not increase as a result of exposure (memes, for example). And so, just as a visual object is accumulating more and more value (as socially-necessary looking-time), it is becoming less and less possible for this value to be realised. This would be grounds for the economy of visuality to grind to a halt, not for it to become the basis of a new, spectacular mode of production.

But that implies dysfunction, and breakdown which, lip service aside, has no place in the “totalitarian social space” described in Beller’s thesis, where the language of capital has been introjected into the “sensorium”. 

III.

In the Lacanian terms of which Beller avails himself, the subject wholly trapped in the order of images, is psychotic. 

Lacking a symbolic structure to give structure to the imaginary world, the psychotic depends on a knot of delusion to hold it all together. Should it unravel, the subject would be exposed to a terrifying chaos of experience. And a delusion is not in the order of belief, about which one can entertain doubts: it is experienced as certainty, as an objective, intrusive reality. For that reason, psychotic delusion is often discernible not by its incoherence, but by its spurious and often elaborate coherence. 

Yet in Beller’s bold attempt to re-work psychoanalysis in historical materialist terms, the unconscious itself is posited as a product of industrial capitalism and its order of visuality. The unconscious first appears through a gap, a place where the symbolic order breaks down, where speech slips, and in that gap – so Beller claims – around which all the signifiers float and circulate, is an image, the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. It is, in fact, passing strange to have the object-cause defined as an image when what defines it is precisely that it eludes capture by both the symbolic and imaginary registers. 

Nonetheless, the critical step here is to link Marxism and psychoanalysis through the fetish. The commodity-image, like all fetishes, acts as a screen which excludes: in this case, it is the totality of the social process which is screened out. Capital itself therefore acts as a screen in which the ‘socius’ is both processed and repressed, a tendency that is raised to a new level with the regime of visuality. A regime in which the technologies of optical production open up and fill our lines of sight with the fetishised, spectacular of social experience.

Fetishism, then, does all the heavy lifting in the 'cinematic mode of production', rescuing it from a structure of psychotic delusion. But this move depends on a common and questionable tendency in left cultural writing, wherein terms like ‘fetishism’ and ‘reification’ are extricated from the complex series of epistemological operations that they are embedded in, and generalised to their overall impoverishment. For example, with due care, the psychoanalytic concept of fetishism could be deployed in the critique of ideology, but to treat it as coextensive with fetishism in its political-economic sense strikes me as stretching both concepts beyond repair.

The grounds for their congruity is clear. In both cases, fetishism arises as a consequence of a form of alienation, which it covers up. In both cases, the fetish operates as a kind of imperialist, bringing all reality under its command, mobilising all investments around its own munification. If the sexual fetish is experienced as a kind of force-multiplier, promising more intense orgasms than could be achieved outside of its shadow, that is because of its tendency to monopolise all possible libido investments. If it represents a guarantee of satisfaction, the fetish is also a reduction of the repertoire, a narrowing of the field of attention. Likewise, the fetishised product of the capitalist labour process acquires a strange magic because it has come to embody the human labour-power expended in making it, while also scotomising the wider field of social relations.

These are, however, extremely sketchy correspondences. In the psychoanalytic sense, a fetish is constructed around a castration. In a classic case of fetishism, a man could only be aroused by a woman wearing rows of buttons. The signifier ‘button’ played an important, overdetermined role in this fetish, linked to many memories in which, for example, both his and his mother’s sex organs had been described as a button. His mother had essentially used him as a narcissistic prop, a little penis, until finally, and belatedly, a form of separation was achieved and he acquired his own subjective existence. But he continued to be plagued by the idea that his mother might not have a penis, might need him to be her penis, and thus might eat him, swallow his whole being like a whale (or like a malevolent bathosphere, as if Beller and the MRAs might converge on the idea that The Matrix is a ravenous, castrated mother). The fetish was a compromise solution which enabled him to disavow his mother’s castration, and his own.

An obvious question, then, is whether the ‘alienation’ achieved in the capitalist labour process can in any meaningful sense be described as a castration – even an imperfectly, partially-achieved one. It is a commonplace that in Marx’s terms, alienation refers to several discrete ideas. There is the alienation of one’s labouring capacities under the control of capital. There is the alienation of the products of labour, which one encounters as fetishised embodiments of labour power ‘on the market’. And there is, in the early Marx, the idea of an alienation from one’s ‘species-being’, one’s labouring essence. It is only in the latter sense, that one could speak of an alienation that produces a mourning for a fantasised ‘lost wholeness’, for which a fetish might cover and compensate. But in what sense would this produce an unconscious? Only in the sense, according to Beller, that the unconscious is a realm of production, and production is one with the repressed. The unconscious, then, is not a point of failure of capitalist subjectivisation, but a wholly integrated component of a totalitarian social space. Here we have a split subject working seamlessly and productively for capitalism. Beller disavows the Adornian conclusion that human interiority has been ‘liquidated’ and replaced by the culture industry, and in principle leaves space for ‘extra-economic creativity’ on the part of the masses – but this concession is in no way integrated into his theoretical apparatus. 

And this raises the question of whether Beller is using fetishism qua concept, or, in an ideological sense, practicing fetishism. Whether, in fact, the higher level of articulation and abstraction that he attributes to capitalism under the reign of visuality is in fact a theoretical reification, and thus a fetishised production of his own paranoid style.

IV.

But if this is paranoia, then it is far from unique. Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of ‘surveillance capitalism’ is, in the terms of its own theory and poetics, yet another magisterial account of the internet as a totalitarian space.

The central figure of Zuboff’s analysis is not the deterritorialised factory, but the corporation as a new sovereign – which she calls, without any explicit Lacanian reference, the Big Other. In this view, what big data firms like Google achieve is not the exploitation of a new and potentially limitless seam of value, but the redistribution of citizenship rights. They monopolise privacy, acting with state-like secrecy, while abrogating the privacy rights of their users. Through unilateral action, facts-on-the-ground, they extract a new commodity called data, with no necessity for a feedback loop with populations who aren’t even their real customers.

Zuboff’s case is that ‘surveillance capitalism’ is a distinctive ‘logic of accumulation’ following on from Fordism and financialisation. The ramifications of information technology can be so drastic because of what distinguishes it from ordinary machinery: it “reflects back on its activities and the system of activities to which it is related”, making a whole series of new objects visible for the first time. There has been “a comprehensive textualisation of the work environment”. “The world is reborn as data and electronic text is universal in scale and scope”.

Whereas neoliberalism posited a market that was intrinsically ineffable and unknowable, every actor engaging on the basis of optimal stupidity and blindness as to the total, majestic logic of the market, now the market is known, and shaped, through data extraction. The more economic transactions are mediated by computing, the more flows of objects, goods, bodies and services can be tracked by sensors and chips, the more surveillance cameras and government and corporate records produce digital knowledge, and the more of every day experience is recorded and accumulated as data (cf Google Street View), the more markets can be pro-actively anticipated, produced and shaped. Reality itself is monopolised and commodified: becoming, in Polanyi’s terms, a fictitious commodity.

Online platforms thus structure their protocols in such a way as to engage in users in producing harvestable data: likes, searches, texts, photos, emails, mis-spelled words, clicks, all of which can be analysed, aggregated and sold. Data is extracted indiscriminately, without informed consent: an offer is made, a hook is dangled, addictions are solicited, but on the basis that the user is never told how the service is paid for. It is not a contract but a seduction. 

The ever-spreading web of data collection enables firms not only to predict which customers will buy or invest based on the profiles constructed by Facebook or Google, but also to track which ones have bought, based on their clicks through to Amazon and other services. Firms can adjust, modify and change the contracts they offer in response to growing knowledge about customers. And of course, thanks to Snowden, we know a little of how big data relates to the security apparatuses of national states.

These processes, Zuboff argues, are not only objectionable because big data violates our privacy. These processes are reconfiguring power, producing “chilling effects of anticipatory conformity”, such that acquiescence is no longer extracted through threats of force or ideological compulsion, but “disappears into the mechanical order of things and bodies”. Authority is replaced by technique, and behaviourism becomes, not a social theory, but a potential social reality.

Like Beller, Zuboff tries to disavow the paranoid logic of the theory by declaring that there is a space for resistance, and that the major force conniving in securing consent for this new mode of sovereignty is ignorance. But, of course, ignorance can’t be regarded as innocent, any more than the ignorance which allows people to rely on tabloids for their information, or which allows people to entertain grotesquely racist beliefs. It is saturated with jouissance, a will-not-to-know.

And this raises the question of where the ‘user’ or ‘produser’ fits in. Somewhere between Zuboff’s ‘surveillance capitalism’ and Beller’s ‘deterritorialised factory’, there is a subject.

V.

The relationship between repulsion and attraction resembles that between the two edges of a Mobius strip. On the one side, there is a powerful repellent force which we call phobic; on the other, the intense libidinised attraction, which we call a fetish. As Fanon said of the racialized body, the same object, appearing in different guises and contexts, can be both phobic and fetishistic. The man with the buttons fetish had to see several of them in a row in order to be aroused; a single button was abhorrent to him. 

In this sense, technophobia and technophilia are different arrangements of the same fetishistic orientation. Blaming the internet, and boosting the internet are both potentially in the position of ascribing to it characteristics which properly belong to human communities. It is clear enough that online media constitute new types of social relationship, characterised by the ‘weak ties’ – someone can ‘like’ you, or a photograph of you, or your current mood or situation, without it meaning much. And it’s equally clear that part of the ‘magic’ of new technologies, from tablets to Twitter, is to keep us talking about the phenomenal things they enable, without thinking too much about the constraints they impose. After all, ‘likes’ and ‘reacts’ are just an objectified, reduction-to-quantifiable-metrics of otherwise qualitatively complex interactions. And, as we know from Zuboff and Srnicek, the reason we are offered the possibility of interactions of this kind is so that they can be tracked, analysed, packaged and sold.

So, there is an assemblage of technologies, institutions and users, but these are all formatted by the logic of competitive accumulation. Nothing takes place on Facebook or Twitter or Google unless it can potentially give rise to a saleable commodity. Far from it being the case that merely looking is labour, we find that we have to engage in a set of measurable, recordable activities which are of use to advertisers.

But, the relationship between capital and its markets, and between platforms and their user populations, is a social relationship. And like all social relationships they’re subject to antagonism, dysfunction, and sometimes resistance. Where online corporations introduce new copyright-protecting devices, others find ways of routing around it. Where Apple tries to limit your choices, there will always be ‘jailbreak’ software and other work-arounds. Where corporations collect, hoard and monetise your data, to the extent that they can come to know you better than you know yourself, users increasingly use proxies, ad-blockers and anti-tracking software. Increasingly, political movements and parties are paying attention to these issues. The idealisation of our new economy overlords has broken down, and silicon oligarchs are coming under increasing scrutiny both as cash-hoarders and data-hoarders.

The efficacy of any moves to put democratic manners on post-democratic platform capitalists depends in part on how well they, and their opponents, each understand the way users relate to the technologies. We must assume that Facebook and Twitter, having accumulated so much data, understand their users well. They understand, not just what their users actually want from the service, but what they think they want. Their marketing strategies, as well as the way in which they format their platforms, tell us what they see. 

Think about the way in which services like Periscope or Facebook Live let everyone know you’re watching, so that it is as though you are a participant in events. Think about the way Twitter has marketed itselfas a place to see “what’s happening”, where the world and all its drama and novelty will be fed to you in edible bites. Think about how Facebook advertises itself as the place where real social encounters happen, where remote or long lost loves can be virtually embraced across oceans. 

The ideology of social media is that it’s like having a servant or a butler, thus democratising luxury. The ideology of social media is that it enhances and extends our agency by offering us a magical, cyborg-like expansion of our earthly powers. The ideology is that somehow it both does things for us, enabling us to live and act vicariously, and enables us to do more in the world, to be more places, to act at a greater distance and on a greater number of people. The ideology is that there is limitless plenty online, away from the tragic world of offline scarcity: just log-in, it’s abundant and it’s free. The ideology is that the technology and its protocols can achieve our goals for us.

This is the seduction, what leads us into the garden into the first place. It is fetishism. Is there any doubt that the platform firms have understood us well? In an hour online, you might sign up to a job-search site and upload your CV, in the hope that the technology will achieve your objectives for you, by finding you a job. You might share content made by other people on your wall, and let the Facebook technology accumulate a react-count while you do other things, thus sustaining a set of weak relationships on your behalf. You might sign an online petition or download an app that explains where to flashmob, in the belief that the internet would do your political organising for you. You might vicariously participate in major news events, or festivals or concerts.

We all know perfectly well that it doesn’t really work this way. The technology chiefly enables us to engage in a strictly defined, delimited and formalised set of interactions. If we want anything beyond that, we have to do it ourselves, knowing full well that it will become part of someone’s data empire. We know that social media ‘abundance’ is just another form of scarcity, that the eye is never satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing, and that our engagement with online ‘abundance’ will tend to lead us into paying for some goods and services that have been carefully marketed for us, anticipating and precipitating our desires. We know that the social ties we form online are weak, and that a like might be worth less than a handshake, or more than a smack in the mouth. We know this, but the technology enables us, invites us, to behave as if that wasn’t the case. As though the technology was a guarantor of our satisfaction, when we know it is no such thing.

Fetishists, though, always find what they’re looking for. If your thing is a pair of leather boots, say, then you’ll notice occurrences of them everywhere, and keep a mental catalogue thereof. Likewise, if a theorist’s kink is fetishism, chances are they’ll find plenty of it. As a rule, left-Lacanians do find it. And the problem here is that the theoretical optic of fetishism can act to perform the same disavowal as fetishism itself. The fetishist’s position is: ‘I know these leather boots aren’t magic, but I’ll get a kick out of pretending they are’. That’s a form of ambivalence in which the truth is both affirmed and denied in the name of enjoyment. Critically, however, the fetishist doesn’t acknowledge the ambivalence. And when theorists take the category of fetishism for granted, as a stable structure of meaning, they too are occluding the ambivalence embedded in it – and thus, the possible sources of change. 

After all, we knew it was a seduction when we came into the garden. We knew there would be trouble, and there was. We were and are not completely ignorant, even if we have been ambushed by the knowledge of just how dark and brutal this place can be. Given this, if we have become part of this machinery and ceded parts of our reality to it, that is at least in part because the ideology, the seduction, plausibly operates on our valid desires. The ‘sell’ of the platforms could not have been based in a complete unreality. And it had to perform favourably, in at least some respects, with traditional media alternatives.

A fetish is a compromise solution. And when the compromise breaks down, and when we are confronted with its failure, with its diminishing returns, with the fact it no longer guarantees satisfaction and perhaps never did, compromise gives way to conflict. We are torn, necessarily. We could be enticed by an intervention seeking to get the fetish up and running again. A new Twitter policy to clamp down on bullies. A new voluntary charter for social media firms. A new anti-fake news initiative. Or we could be persuaded to give up the fetish, and try another way.