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.

Open Questions

• Does the "circulation forecloses politics" thesis extend from social/political communication to the circulation of architectural images (Instagram architecture)?