Late Notes About Margaret Thatcher and Jean Baudrillard
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich writes that the troubling question is not why people go on strike and revolt, but the other way around: Why do people not go on strike all the time?1 Why do people not rebel against oppression? Today, after the rise and fall of the Communist hope in the last century, there are many answers to this question. People are unable and unwilling to revolt because they do not find the way to autonomy and solidarity, because of precariousness, anxiousness, and competition, which are the main features of the present organization of work. The effects of the deterritorialization of labor, and of the technological fragmentation of the social body, result in the inability to create networks of solidarity and in widespread loneliness broken by sudden random explosions of rage.
A second answer may be based on the dissolution of the physical identity of power. Power is nowhere and everywhere, internalized and inscribed in the techno-linguistic automatisms called governance. Recent waves of rebellion have proved unable to focus on a physical center of financial domination because a physical center does not exist. The precarisation of labor, which implies the end of a territorial proximity of labor, physical isolation, and the widespread sentiment of anxious competition among workers, has provoked the dissolution of social solidarity that was predicted in the works of Jean Baudrillard since the second part of the 1970s. In those years of transition from the industrial civilization to the digital civilization, changes occurred in the conceptual field and in the disciplinary organization of knowledge. This disciplinary reshuffling reflects the transformation that took place in the decades of the neoliberal reformation, which obviously intersects with digital technology.
The dissolving of the masses
In the book Dark Fiber, Geert Lovink observes that the academic study of mass psychology is abandoned in the 1980s, and replaced by a wide range of disciplines: sociology, psychology, cybernetic science, cultural studies, and media theory.2 I don’t want to investigate the academic motivations and implications of this disappearance and replacement. I want to focus on the real disappearance of the modern masses as a homogeneous body in society.
Masses are actually fading, almost vanishing, when the emergence of the post-mass media technology for network-communication dispels the crowd, turning it into a sprawl of connecting atoms, and the process of precarisation of labor disintegrates the physical proximity of workers. Social precarity indeed can be described as a condition in which workers are continuously moving positions, so that nobody will meet anybody twice in the same place. Cooperation without physical proximity is the condition of existential loneliness coupled with all-pervading productivity.
Workers do not perceive themselves anymore as the parts of a living community; they are rather compelled to compete in a condition of loneliness. Although they are exploited in the same way by the same capitalist entity, they are no longer a social class because in their material condition they can no longer produce collective self-consciousness and the spontaneous solidarity of a living community of people who live in the same place and share the same destiny. They are no longer “masses” because their random coming together in the subway, on the highway, and in similar places of transit is random and temporary.
Mass psychology dissolves because the masses themselves are dissolving, at least in the social mind’s self-perception. The concept of “masses” is ambiguous and hard to define, as Baudrillard wrote at the end of the 1970s.3 Furthermore, the concept of “masses” diverges from the Marxian concept of “social class,” the aggregation of people who share interests, behavior, and consciousness. The existence of a working class is not an ontological truth: it is the effect of a shared imagination and consciousness. It is a mythology, in the strong sense of the word: a narration about the present and about the possible future. That narration vanished altogether with the social conditions of industrial production, and with the end of the physical massification of workers in factories. In the last three decades, the cultural conditions for class self-perception have been destroyed by the post-industrial transformation of capitalism. The dissolution of this massive dimension of society can be linked to the utter individualization and competitive disposition of workers in the age of precarisation.
Energy, desire, and simulation
In the late ’70s, when I read Baudrillard’s texts in which he discusses the end of the social, I felt a mix of attraction and repulsion. I rejected the idea that social conflict may disappear, but his writings were illuminating something that I could perceive in the emerging subcultures of the time. The Italian political landscape in 1976 and 1977 was marked by the insurgence of the youth: students and unemployed young people occupied universities all over the country, and a wave of squat openings and protests took place. The rebels established a network of independent radio-stations: they were speaking a new language, which had little in common with the old Marxist-Leninist jargon. The new language was reminiscent of the Dadaist art avant-garde, and also of the contemporary punk culture.
This movement, which is generally referred to as “autonomia,” was rising in a new cultural context: in that period the Italian Communist Party was slowly absorbed in the power system, and staged an alliance with the ruling party called Democrazia Cristiana. The focus of the revolt was both against capitalist rule and communist authoritarianism, and the energy of that movement was an expression of the emerging creativity of the intellectual composition of labor. The concept of desire, which we extracted from books by Deleuze and Guattari, was a perfect translation of that energy. That movement, however, was double-sided: it was also influenced by the leftist imagination from the 20th Century, proclaiming the possibility of a communist transformation of daily life. Simultaneously, it was searching for new forms of singularity and creative expression, but at heart it was haunted by the premonition of a techno-totalitarian order to come.
At a certain point, after the riots of March 1977 (particularly intense in Rome and in Bologna), after the wave of repression that the Italian State launched at the movement, after the surfacing of armed groups like the Red Brigades, the libertarian soul of the movement, inherited from the ’60s American hippie culture, melted with a dark perception that there was no future.
In those years, I read the books of Guattari, Deleuze, and of Jean Baudrillard, whose visions were radically distinct. That ambivalence, however, was for me the intellectual source of two divergent imaginations, which were simultaneously helping me understand the unfolding process at that time. Guattari’s message was all about the inexhaustible energy of desire in the process of subjectivation. In the books that he wrote in the second part of the decade, Baudrillard replaced desire by the seductive force of simulation, and replaced the concept of subjectivation by the concept of implosion of the masses: “Everything changes with the device of simulation: collapse of poles, orbital circulation of models (this is also the matrix of every implosive process).”4 And he continues:
Bombarded with stimuli, messages and texts, the masses are simply an opaque, blind stratum, like those clusters of stellar gas known only through analysis of their light spectrum—radiation spectrum equivalent to statistics and surveys—but precisely: it can no longer be a question of expression or representation, but only of the simulation of an ever inexpressible and unexpressed social.5
Guattari was attracted by the technological rhizome of information, and foresaw the creation of a proliferating network as a tool for liberation. Baudrillard expressed awareness of the dark side of the network: the dissipation of social energy, the implosion of subjectivity, and the subjection of mental activity to the logic of simulation. Guattari was interested in the concept of network (reseau) because he saw in it a process of self-organization of social actors and the condition of a media-activist movement, but Baudrillard anticipated the effects of the new post-social power that was emerging under the umbrella of neoliberalism, and was taking the form of a network rather than the old form of the hierarchical pyramid.
Social autonomy and neoliberal deregulation both developed in the same period and to some extent imply each other. The concept of a rhizome is a conceptual map of the explosion of modern disciplinary society, but it is also the cartography of the process of capitalist deregulation, which paved the way to the precarisation of work and to the dissolution of social solidarity.
The neoliberal destruction of sociability
Baudrillard wrote the book In the Shadow of Silent Majorities at the end of the ’70s, when Margaret Thatcher seized power in the Tory Party and began the triumphal progress that prepared her victory in the national elections in 1979, and launched the project that we have come to know as neoliberalism. Baudrillard’s texts (In The Shadow of Silent Majorities and Fatal Strategies) can be compared with some interviews with Margaret Thatcher from the ’80s. Echoing Baudrillard’s concepts in an interview of 1987, she said:
What irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal security. And they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is, yes. And therefore, it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.6
The final goal of Thatcher’s revolution was not economic, but political, ethical, almost spiritual, we might say. The neoliberal reformation was finally intended to inscribe competition in the very soul of social life, up to the point of destroying society itself. This cultural intention of the neoliberal reformation was clearly described by Michel Foucault in his 1979–1980 seminar published as The Birth of Biopolitics: the subjection of individual activity to the spirit of the enterprise, the overall recoding of human activity in terms of economic rentability, the insertion of competition into the neural circuits of daily life. These are the trends that Foucault foresaw and described in that seminar.
Not only the economic profit, but also the cult of the individual as economic worrier, the harsh perception of a fundamental loneliness of humans, the cynical concession that war is the only possible relation among living organisms in the path of evolution: this is the final intention of the neoliberal reformation. Margaret Thatcher also says:
There is no such thing [as society]. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.7
Thatcher’s concept is interesting but not accurate. Society is not disappearing; sociability is dissolving, not society. During the last thirty years, society has been transformed into a sort of blind system of inescapable obligations and interdependences; a prison-like condition of togetherness in which empathy is cancelled and solidarity is forbidden. The social world has been transformed into a worldwide system of automatic connections in which individuals cannot experience conjunction but only functional connection with other individuals. The process of cooperation does not stop; it is transformed into a process of abstract recombination of info-fractals that only the Code can decipher and transform into economic value. The mutual interaction is not cancelled, but empathy is replaced by competition. Social life proceeds, more frantic than ever: the living conscious organism is penetrated by dead unconscious mathematical functions.
Endnotes
1 Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 3rd ed., Vincent R. Carfagno, trans. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1933, 1980).
2 Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
3 Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or, The End of the Social, John Johnston, Paul Patton, and Stuart Kendall, trans. (Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 1978, 2007).
4 Ibid., 48.
5 Ibid., 48.
6 Quoted in Ronald Butt, “Economics are the Method; The Object is to Change the Soul,” Sunday Times, May 3, 1981. Available online: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104475.
7 Quoted in Douglas Keay, “Interview,” Woman’s Own, September 23, 1987. Available online: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689.