Neoliberalism, ‘Digitization’, and Creativity: the Issue of Applied Ontology

The paper extends Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics. More specifically, I construct and defend an anti-Husserlian approach to the labour process with the objective of investigating how collectively generated forms of intellectual labour have been appropriated under capitalist relations of production. I also interrogate the way that different notions of (computational) applied ontology influence both the nature of and our very conception of social creativity. What, quite wrongly, has been thought of in Spinoza as pantheism is simply the reduction of the field of God to the universality of the signifier, which produces a serene, exceptional detachment from human desire. In so far as Spinoza says—desire is the essence of man, and in the radical dependence of the universality of the divine attributes, which is possible only through the function of the signifier, in so far as he does this, he obtains that unique position by which the philosopher—and it is no accident that it is a Jew detached from his tradition who embodies it—may be confused with a transcendent love. This position is not tenable for us. Experience shows us that Kant is more true, and I have proved that his theory of consciousness, when he writes of practical reason, is sustained only by giving a specification of the moral law which, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state, that very desire that culminates in sacrifice, strictly speaking, of everything that is the object of love in one’s human tenderness—I would say, not only in the rejection of the pathological object, but also in its sacrifice and murder. That is why I wrote Kant avec Sade. (Lacan, 1979: 275-6) But it is like the story of the Resistance fighters who, wanting to destroy a pylon, balanced the plastic charges so well that the pylon blew up and fell back into its hole. From the Symbolic to the Imaginary, from castration to Oedipus, and from the despotic age to capitalism, inversely, there is the progress leading to the withdrawal of the overseeing and overcoding object from on high, which gives way to a social field of immanence where the decoded flows produce images and level them down. Whence the two aspects of the signifier: a barred transcendent signifier taken in a maximum that distributes lack, and an immanent system of relations between minimal elements that come to fill the uncovered field (somewhat similar in traditional terms to the way one goes from Parmenidean Being to the atoms of Democritus). (Deleuze and Guattari,1987: 290-1). Marx was vexed by the bourgeois character of the American working class. But it turned out that the prosperous Americans were merely showing the way for the British and the French and the Japanese. The universal class into which we are merging is not the revolutionary proletariat but the innovative bourgeoisie. (McClosky, D. 2009)