I just received an advance copy of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail in the mail as part of his campaign to build buzz for his book within the long tail itself. This has coincided with my effort to gradually, actually read everything on my del.icio.us links with a "READTHIS" tag. So while this entry will be loosely centered on Michael Hardt's essay "Affective Labor," I've noticed that a lot of what Hardt covers is directly applicable to Anderson's topic (at least as far as I can tell having read the book's blog). So hopefully next weekend, when I review The Long Tail, I'll be able to bring in some of what I'll be writing below.

The reasons I tagged this essay with the intention of reading it later is fairly clear. Hardt discusses the shift from modern to postmodern forms of production as being that of the shift from the "Fordist" model to the cleverly titled "Toyotist" model. In other words, the new dominance of immaterial labor within our economy:

"Toyotism is based on an inversion of the Fordist structure of communication between production and consumption. Ideally, according to this model, the production planning will communicate with markets constantly and immediately."

Immediately this struck me as a parallel to Deleuze's point in Postscript that modern societies of control are centered around, among other qualities, modulation. I've often discussed here how modulation is also central to these new media networks we find ourselves in: blogging is reliant on quick reaction to the actions and reactions of others within the network, social networks thrive on the idea that identity can be presented in a modular fashion, etc. This sort of modulation we see occurs not from a central point, or even decentralized points, but in a distributed, social manner. We modulate according to and under the pressure of the network(s).

Hardt also acknowledges this social/network aspect by highlighting the social in affective labor itself:

"[...] in this second moment, production has become communicative, affective, de-instrumentalized, and "elevated" to the level of human relations—but of course a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital. [...] In the production and reproduction of affects, in those networks of culture and communication, collective subjectivities are produced and sociality is produced—even if those subjectivities and that sociality are directly exploitable by capital."

Affective labor takes place within and produces these distributed networks and plays a significant role in creating subjectivity. Again, it is not hard to extend this to new media, this blog has slowly become fixated on networked subjectivity in a way.

Yet one place where I part from Hardt is the specificities of the significance of the physical medium of the computer, the web, and the internet as the locations for this affective labor. He includes a reference or two to "the computer" making his piece relevant to the context in which it was published, but seems to dodge meaty analysis. What he avoids is acknowleding the reifying effect these media have on these networks of affective labor. While it is the data, the information, the affect that is important - these necessarily immaterial units - our new/swarming media networks have the ability to reflect and map the immaterial. I think it's this key interplay between the immaterial and its effects that are intriguing here.

In some ways this ever-so quotable line from the piece demonstrates this gap:

"Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves."

We can't necessarily see these networks as merely prostheses, instead they have become something more similar to repositories and factories of subjectivity. Also, notice that he uses the term "lens." This implies an explicitly visual approach in the analysis to the concept of selfhood within the network. Yet the networked subjectivities, which are the most valuable product of modern affective labor in these media, is most important in its non-visual points of interaction and cross-over with other tendrils of identity. To couch a discussion of postmodern subjectivity in language ruled by the ocular is brushing over significance of topic itself. The visual aspects are merely side effects of immaterial production. But in using language invoking the visual - albeit creating an eminently quotable line in the process - Hardt side-steps the sharpness of the rest of the essay and his key observation: that there are reifying aspects to networks of immaterial labor, especially as this new phase of labor applies to swarming media networks.