The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network

by Rob Wilkie

The acceleration in science, technology, communication, and production that began in the second half of the twentieth century- developments which make up the concept of the digital-has brought us to what might be the most contradictory moment in human history. The digital revolution has madeit possible not only to imagine but to actually realize a world in which social inequality and poverty are vanquished. But instead these developments have led to an unprecedented level of accumulation of private profits. Rather than the end of social inequality we are witness to its globalexpansion.
Recent cultural theory tends to focus on the intricate surface effects of the emerging digital realities, proposing that technological advances effect greater cultural freedom for all, ignoring the underpinning social context. But beneath the surfaces of digital culture are complex social and historical relations that can be understood only from the perspective of a class analysis which explains why the new realities of the digital conditionare conditioned by the actualities of global class inequalities. It is no longer the case that technologycan take on the appearance of a simple or neutral aspect of human society. It is time for a critique of the digital times.
In The Digital Condition, Rob Wilkie advances a groundbreaking analysis of digital culture which argues that the digital geist-which has its genealogy in such concepts as the body without organs, spectrality, and differance-has obscured the implications of class difference with the phantom of adigital divide. Engaging the writings of Hardt and Negri, Poster, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Haraway, Latour, and Castells, the literature and cinema of cyberpunk, and digital commodities like the iPod, Wilkie initiates a new direction within the field of digital cultural studies by foregrounding the continuing importance of class in shaping the contemporary.

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Bryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Digital Condition addresses the (supposedly) global digital culture that has (supposedly) rendered class distinctions irrelevant. Wilkie’s central thesis is that the metanarrative of a global digital culture, in both business and the arts, is a conservative ideological screen successfully camouflaging the material conditions of history; namely, the distinction between those who own the means of production and those who own solely their labor power. Wilkie provides a swath of both academic and popular texts to backup his theory: Antonio Negri, Thomas Friedman, novelist William Gibson, Jacques Derrida, and The Matrix to name a few. These he elucidates only for purposes of critique via the works of Marx and Lenin.

What strikes the reader most about The Digital Condition is what is missing. There is a dearth of data about the actual material conditions at the root of global class disparity. Economic data is sparse and presented qualitatively. The author offers a metaphorical “global North” and “global South” without ever mentioning the very concrete examples of manufacturing exodus from the United States to northern Mexico, or the gargantuan human surge powering the consumer electronics factories of China. If there is a symbolic link joining the economic and cultural aspects of global digital culture it is the smartphone. These Wilkie does not mention, though he does come close with repeated mentions of a specific piece of consumer electronics, the Ipod. He never mentions the actual circumstances of the Ipod’s manufacture.

In act of obscurantism, Wilkie invokes the Derrida essay, “The Double Session”, claiming it “has become so influential because it responds to the contradictory needs of capital to provide working people with a skillful mode of reading that can deal with intricacies of a global, digital economy...” Surely, he jests. Derrida has never provided working people with anything other than headaches. Again, I’m somewhat at a loss why he would choose Derrida. The elephant in the room is Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, an unclassifiable work whose form and function cuts across both academia and popular culture. Noticeably absent is also Slavoj Zizek, the world’s most infamous Marxist cultural critic. These obvious gaps could perhaps be forgiven if Wilkie’s arguments were not undermined by his convoluted writing style. Page after page of quotes from his source material are cobbled together. Often this results in the original source’s point of view coming across better than Wilkie’s own reading thereof. How can one critique Derrida’s “positing the irreducibility of the binary” when pages earlier the same author textually deconstructs Antonio Negri to the point of suggesting his work actually masks a conservative agenda?

The Digital Condition amounts to a missed opportunity. Never are we left with sensation one is left with when reading Zizek, I’ve never thought about that movie that way before, or Derrida, I’ve never thought that way before, period. Indeed, any public library employee can attest that a global digital culture is in fact a myth perpetuated by capitalist ideology and the material conditions of production have let many, if not most, excluded from this “global” technologically enabled paradigm shift. Despite this truth, Wilkie’s painful mishandling of the material forces me to not recommend The Digital Condition.

[Ronit pussy- Hemilton]

Seems interesting .. especially the chapter on writing and reading