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Permanent Crisis and Technosociality in Bruce Sterling's Distraction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2015
Abstract
Bruce Sterling's science fiction novel Distraction (1999) envisions a near-future (mid-twenty-first-century) US in which the economy has collapsed, entire categories of skilled and professional labor have ceased to exist, rampant and endemic joblessness leaves masses of the unemployed to survive on the margins as squatters and scavengers, the infrastructure of entire regions is in ruins (Louisiana is described as “underwater” and the West as “on fire”), and the ongoing crisis has enabled the proliferation of ad hoc governance structures (“State-of-Emergency cliques”), even as democratic institutions survive (just barely) in the eviscerated form of pure spectacle. In this world, where, as one character puts it, “money just doesn't need human beings anymore,” a significant portion of the population have opted out of the money economy altogether. Appropriating biotech that can fabricate nutrition from scrub grass and weeds, the novel's nomad proles live off roadside detritus, which they also use to fabricate the phones and laptops central to their wired, moneyless reputation economy. This paper addresses the relation in the novel between economic crisis, the demise of representational politics (what Slavoj Žižek calls the “divorce” of “capitalism and democracy”), and alternative forms of sociality, particularly in the figure of the nomad proles, and of the urban squatters described as practicing a kind of “digital socialism” in what were once the public spaces of government (Senate office buildings, for example). If the reversion to nomadism most emphatically signposts the dissolution of the social body in Distraction, Sterling's representation of the nomad communities also insists that disaggregation is not the same thing as disorganization. Quite the contrary, as one character notes of the nomads, “organization is the only thing they've got.” We are interested in the ways in which this networked form of belonging both does and does not decode as ethnicity, as well as the ways in which it orients the proles both to structures of authoritarian governance and to the (equally wired) edifice of corporate capital. Along related lines, we ask what kind of resistance to capitalism is imagined in a “digital socialism” where private property and the private sphere are “turned inside out” through rfid (radio frequency identification) tagging and ubiquitous mutual “sousveillance”? To what extent do the disruptive effects of new technologies, as embodied by both the nomad proles and the socialist squatters, represent a genuine political opportunity, and to what extent do they represent a technologically determinist fantasy of capitalist collapse without class struggle, in the spaces of newly mediated social possibility created by permanent crisis?
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- Information
- Journal of American Studies , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Fictions of Speculation , November 2015 , pp. 711 - 729
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015
References
1 The etiology of permanent crisis is, of course, a point of debate. Broadly sketched, analysts place different weight on the decline of the industrial base (the extent of this decline, and its bearing on measures of productivity, are themselves disputed), the shift from consumption based on income to consumption based on credit, and the enormous expansion of financial markets – the latter made possible, in turn, by massive concentrations of capital in hedge funds and other financial actors, and the proliferation of dozens upon dozens of new financial instruments, ranging from “puttable-adjustable tender bonds,” to “synthetic convertible debt,” to the now infamous “collateralized mortgage obligations,” suggesting, in Henwood's apt phrase, that “money capital longs for exotic forms.” See Doug Henwood, Wall Street (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 49. Undoubtedly, financial speculation is a central factor in the contraction of capital's cycles, and at least arguably, the driving force As we will suggest, Sterling's speculative fiction explains the permanent crisis of his near-future US in terms roughly cognate with this analysis.
2 On the connection between Internet cultures and social capital see Marleen Huysman and Volker Wulf, eds., Social Capital and Information Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), chapter 5; and Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 95–96; 361–62. See also Benkler's more general discussion of the sharing economy or what he calls “commons-based peer production” (ibid., chapter 3, esp. 60). The term “social capital” originates in sociology, as, for example, Coleman, James S., “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” American Journal of Sociology, 94 (1988), 75–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar; or Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in John Richardson, ed., Handbook for Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–58, for whom social capital is understood as continuous with capitalism as such, in such forms as the “old boys’ network.” It is in relation to computer-mediated communication that social capital begins to be theorized in more conflictual terms.
3 Sterling's novel elaborates the implications of his earlier story about network gift economies, “Maneki Neko,” in Sterling, A Good Old-Fashioned Future (New York: Bantam, 1999), 1–19. For later works of SF responding to Sterling see Benjamin Rosenbaum, “The Guy Who Worked for Money,” at www.shareable.net/blog/the-guy-who-worked-for-money, originally posted 10 July 2010, accessed 11 July 2014. Another example would be Jay Lake's story “In the Forests of the Night,” which imagines a future fragmented American society where “[f]or the first time since the invention of coinage, social capital was able to trump financial capital,” in John Scalzi, ed., Metatropolis (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2009), 13–77, 39.
4 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 294.
5 Bruce Sterling, Distraction (New York: Bantam, 1999), 159.
6 Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban–Regional Process (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1989), 352–53.
7 Sterling, Distraction, 121.
8 See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008).
9 Sterling, Distraction, 120.
10 Ibid., 256.
11 Ibid., 369.
12 Ibid., 61.
13 Ibid., 159, original emphasis. Contrast Holland's Deleuzian elaboration of the concept of “nomad citizenship.” Eugene Holland, Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 23, 65–67.
14 Sterling, Distraction, 160.
15 Ibid., 161.
16 Ibid., 165–66.
17 Ibid., 58.
18 Ibid., 229.
19 Ibid., 245.
20 Bambakias's medical fandom is “grass-roots,” we suggest, in precisely the same way as Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. The innovation and brilliance of the Obama campaign was to offer the liberal–left electorate a simulacral alternative, steeped in the affect and iconicity of progressive social movement, but absent the political referent.
21 Sterling, Distraction, 35.
22 Ibid., 258, original emphasis.
23 Ibid., 4.
24 Ibid., 3.
25 Ibid., 162.
26 Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), chapter 12.
27 Sterling, Distraction, 162.
28 William Gibson, Spook Country (New York: Putnam, 2007), 20.
29 The metaphor of cyberspace computer networks as consensual hallucinations originates with Gibson's first novel. See William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 51.
30 Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix (New York: Ace Books, 1986), 264. For a reading of this trope see Thomas Foster, The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xix–xxi.
31 Sterling, Distraction, 326.
32 Ibid., 327.
33 Ibid., 215.
34 Ibid., 491.
35 Kevin Kelly, “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online,” at www.wired.com/culture/culturerreviews/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all, originally published in Wired, 17, 6 (May 2009). Kelly acknowledges Benkler, Wealth of Networks, as a source for this “third way” trope. Compare Holland, Nomad Citizenship,100–4, on “free-market communism.”
36 Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 37.
37 Sterling, Distraction, 256.
38 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973; first published 1858), 690–712.
39 Paolo Virno, “General Intellect,” trans. Arianna Bove, at http://autonomousuniversity.org/content/general-intellect, accessed 7 Nov. 2013, originally published in Futur Anterieur, 10, 2 (1992), n.p., and rewritten for A. Zanini and U. Fadini, eds., Lessico Postfordista: dizinario di idee della mutazione (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2001), 146–52. We will be quoting throughout from the online version of this essay, which is unpaginated.
40 See, for example, Marx's formulation in the “Fragment on Machines” from the Grundrisse: “to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production.” Marx, Grundrisse, 700. Other commentaries on the “Fragment” include Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 35–40; Dyer-Witherford, Cyber-Marx, chapter 9, esp. 219–21; and Hardt and Negri, Empire, 29.
41 Dyer-Witherford, 4.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Sterling, Distraction, 4.
45 Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net (New York: Ace, 1988), 195, 210, 228.
46 Sterling, Shaping, 110–11.
47 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980), 274. For a more recent, Marxist argument for precisely such a rethinking of class and class conflict in information societies see Fuchs, Christian, “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet,” Information Society, 26 (2010), 179–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 See Terranova, Tiziana, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text, 18, 2 (Summer 2000), 33–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Electronic Book Review, 20 June 2003, at www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary, last accessed 2 Feb. 2015.