Platfarm Capitalism: Feudalism and Post-Feudalism, An Enjoyment That Makes the Difference!
What follows is a passage from my new book Psychoanalytic Sociology: A New Theory of the Social Bond. Please follow the link to purchase the book to read more. If you decide to cite any passage from this book, please cite the original book (pagination is included below).
[p. 171–172]
I discovered […] shortly before the [Ukraine-Russian] war [of 2022], that the Marxian metanarrative doesn’t speak to the recent mode of strangeness. For example, the mode of production is no longer a sufficient or exclusive organizing principle for contemporary social order. Some recent thinkers have introduced a new organizing principle, the “platform” (see, for example, Srnicek, 2016). From the perspective of the platform, we shift from a social group based upon alienation within a system of production, whereby producers become alienated from their human essence, and so on, toward a condition of prosumption (Ritzer, 2015a; 2015b and Ritzer, 2010). I asked my students: what is a commodity for social media? Their answer, provisionally, was that it is the platform, a point made quite clearly by the former Greek minister of finance, Yanis Varoufakis (see Varoufakis, 2021a; 2021b). His claim was that Western capitalism is not defined anymore by the rules of capitalist production and exploitation within markets that were articulated by Karl Marx (ibid.). Instead, it is a mode of techno-feudalism, that is, platform capitalism. For his part, Nick Srnicek described platform capitalism in the following way:
What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and General Electric, Uber and AirBnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of platform capitalism. (Srnicek, 2016)
Varoufakis took this position even further: “[C]apitalism has already evolved outside of itself, into another system” (2021). In other words, platform capitalism, taken as a type of technological feudalism — which implies that it is a regression in capitalism rather than a progression — is, quite simply, capitalism without capitalism. Hence, platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tinder, Minecraft, Roblox, and so on, are like fiefdoms within a feudal economy. There are nonetheless some important differences between neo-feudalism and traditional feudalism. The former does not require that you toil the land, since something much more radical is at stake: singular enjoyment and identities are affirmed. It is not toiling, but the work of enjoyment that is at stake in plat-farm capitalism. Moreover, we have a high degree of choice: we can choose what we want to grow on our analogous farms: we are intimately tethered to the activities and products of [what the American sociologist George Ritzer calls] prosumption.
During modern industrial capitalism, workers were taken out of the home, which was often owned privately, and forced into circumstances of alienation alongside other workers. In this way, revolutionary consciousness was possible: they were [thought to be] able to gain an advance upon feudal fixations by relating to other workers, coming into “class consciousness” or a “class for itself.” However, in the era of singularities we return to our feudal fixations, demonstrating the impotency of any “vanishing mediator” (as [the late] Fredric Jameson has called it): how do two singularities communicate with one another? How can members of one farm speak with members who are separated from them working another farm? Take the following two plat-farms: Tik Tok and YouTube. On the former, there was once a popular attempt to “cancel” the hip hop artist Eminem, and yet, on YouTube, there was a popular attempt to defend and celebrate his music.
Plat-farm capitalism has been my answer to the following three theories: (1) the “end of history” theory, advanced by Francis Fukuyama, which imagines democratic capitalism to be the crowning achievement of history; (2) “technofeudalism,” advanced by Yanis Varoufakis, Jodi Dean, and, at times, Slavoj Zizek, and; (3) “platform capitalism,” from Nick Srnicek. My aim is to shift the focus away from the tired argument that capitalism is a “vanishing mediator” between feudalism and communism, as argued by the [late] American Marxist Fredric Jameson (from the classical sociological work of Max Weber). Rather, plat-farm capitalism isolates the stubbornness of feudal fixations, finding something of a repetition — outside of capitalist dialectics — which persists without mediation. Hence, my claim is not that capitalism has progressed or mutated but that, quite simply, the feudal drive persists alongside capitalist temptations.
[p. 173]
Mark Zuckerberg’s “Meta Platforms” is precisely this sort of fiefdom. Slavoj Zizek described it in the following way: “[It is] privately owned, with a private feudal lord overseeing and regulating our [social] interactions” (see Varoufakis, 2021; italics added into audio transcript). What is the regulatory apparatus? Platforms do not function according to prohibitions, that is, through repression. They emerge as a solution for social bonds saturated in jouissance, through “particular affirmations.” Meta affirms. Zuckerberg once said the following: “At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.” Facebook intended to offer itself as a new mode of social bond, one based upon choice raised to a dominant cultural logic: the social bond is a site of radical affirmation of the feudal drive. Thus, when you go onto Facebook and choose your gender, there is nothing stopping you, as far as I know, from inventing one for yourself.
This is a queer thing to do, which means, in other words, strange. Perhaps we might claim that there are two dominant ways strangeness can be understood with respect to gender: you can feel estranged from gender, or gender can itself become strange. Critics might claim that this reproposes a binary; yet, what of gender can be said to remain unrelated, in some fundamental way, to the overarching social bond? Gender cannot be understood without some articulation of discourse, that is, the social bond, and, on the one side of the binary, there is, quite precisely, what is not entirely submitted to discourse.
Hence, there is, without a doubt, those who are without gender, that is, not-all in relation to the social bond. Today, then, we have shifted into the dominance of the not-all, and this, quite strikingly, is what permits the proliferation of gender identities. Or, as Patricia Gherovici has put it in the title to one of her wonderful books: Please Select Your Gender!
[p. 88]
What is fascinating to me is that Lacan suggested during his twenty-fourth seminar that a Möbius strip — a surface of continuity — is [perhaps] homologous to a hole (Lacan, 2018). The subject emerges as a missing place within a world, thanks to the hole. It is possible in these circumstances to speak about the crisis of representation, as modern anarchists and revolutionaries often liked to do.
But the crisis of representation only makes sense in a symbolic world. Hence, without the continuity of subject and world, crisis shifts from representation toward presentation. It is clear that the logic of the “Not-All” has forced an erosion of any totalizing principle, thereby becoming the cultural dominant of today’s plat-farm capitalism — or what might be more accurately named capitalist feudalism. The crisis of presentation, of the not-all, constitutes our [p. 89] current challenge. Plat-farm capitalism thrives on the presentation of its blahbblahblah. Yet, Jacques-Alain Miller once reminded us that “the dream is its own interpretation.” This explains why ChatGPT is now being described by top scholars as more creative or innovative than any of us could ever be (Sunilkumar, 2023). It marks a clear disjunction of “subject” and “world.”
Any meaningful interpretation or intervention of ChatGPT only perpetuates the redundancy of interpretation, thereby making psychoanalysis meta. A proper intervention provokes an awakening, which, in turn, produces the possibility of a new covenant with the world.
