Blogging – the Cultural Logic of Communicative Capitalism: Dean’s Blog Theory

Abstract

Blogging – the Cultural Logic of Communicative Capitalism: Dean’s Blog Theory Mark Andrejevic (bio) Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive Polity Press: 2010. $19.95 (paper) $54.95 (cloth). 140 pages. ISBN-10: 074564970X To appreciate Jodi Dean’s diagnosis of communicative capitalism, we might revisit the Bush administration’s handling of a potentially damaging revelation about its failure to secure a large weapons cache during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency had repeatedly warned the administration about the weapons at Al Qa’Qaa, calling it, “the greatest explosives bonanza in history” (Glanz, Broad, & Sanger, 2004), no US troops had been tasked with protecting it during the tumult of the initial invasion. When inspectors reached the site, its seal was broken and the explosives looted, perhaps helping to explain where the opposition was getting its seemingly bottomless supply of high-grade explosives for improvised explosive devices and other weapons. Rather than providing a clear and potentially damaging explanation of their failure – and risk embarrassment during the 2004 Presidential campaign – Bush officials created a smokescreen of often contradictory claims. Perhaps the most honest response came early on, when one official confessed to the New York Times, “It's not an excuse … but a lot of things went by the boards” (Glanz, Broad, & Sanger, 2004). Over time, as the damaging import of the revelation became clear, the administration back-tracked, suggesting at various times that the site had been looted before US troops arrived; that Iraqis had smuggled the weapons into Syria before the invasion; and alternatively that the explosives hadn’t disappeared at all, but had been accounted for and disposed of by US troops. Under pressure from reporters, administration officials alternatively claimed that the president had not known about the missing cache until a few days before the story broke and that the White House had initiated an in-depth investigation once the explosives had been reported missing several months earlier. As the days passed, the smoke screen just got thicker – with the administration capitalizing on the impossibility of getting the full story (thanks in part to its own reluctance to release definitive details) as a means of discrediting critics. Demonstrating the success of the administration’s strategy, a reporter for the US News and World Report concluded somewhat forlornly, “there are many more questions than answers regarding this story” (Lou Dobbs Tonight, 2004). Mission accomplished. The administration’s strategy deftly dismantled the promise of the information age that enhanced access to information might help hold authorities accountable and provide citizens with a clearer, shared understanding of their world. It also exemplified an increasingly familiar strategy for information control in the digital era: rather than trying to enforce a dominant narrative, this strategy relies upon multiplying competing narratives that highlight the indeterminacy of any and all accounts as well as the associated inability to adjudicate between them. The intended result is the neutralization of critique via the dilution of compelling counter-narratives and the promulgation of uncertainty. As a Bush administration spokesperson put it, in response to the Kerry campaign’s charge of negligence in the Al Qa’Qaa case: “John Kerry presumes to know something that he could not know: when the material disappeared…Since he does not know whether it was gone before the war began, he can't prove it was there to be secured” (Sanger, 2004). In a breathtaking bit of rhetorical Jiu-Jitsu, this defense turned the administration’s own incompetence (in the form of its admission that it had lost track of the weapons) into a preemptive counter-attack. In the case of Al Qa’Qaa, critique dissipated in the shifting currents of multiple competing narratives. This strategy is in keeping with an internet era of information glut, in which, “Abundant, dispersed, mashed-up messages…displace previous communication strategies focused on direct image control. Even when facts are corrected, fictions remain, repeated and circulated in affective networks” (Dean, p. 100). Faced with the welter of information, citizens are left to pick the narrative that fits best with their own preconceptions and affective investments. Dean describes the resulting impasse of representation...