Reviews for Communication 2000: Comprehensive

The average rating for Communication 2000: Comprehensive based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-09-22 00:00:00 Sebastian Zapata I want to start by saying this is the second time I've read this book - the first time I read it rather quickly, and that time, about two years ago, really only involved me in rushing off to read Derrida's Specters of Marx - which I reviewed at the time, but haven't really read over again the review again before writing this one up. I think at the time I read the Derrida I was worried that a metaphor of 'hauntology' that seemed quite clever when applied to Marx might end up being over-used in ways that undermined Derrida's point. I'm less concerned with that now. A motif that also holds this book together is a series of quotes from the ghosts of 'A Christmas Carol'. This book is doing many interesting things at the same time - it provides a history of the idea of the knowledge economy, a series of critiques of this idea from what some people might think are 'outside' of what should properly be called the 'knowledge economy' and it does so using literary tropes that allow us to see knowledge again as something best understood as standing outside of our current standard paradigm. And that standard paradigm is one in which we effortlessly speak of the 'knowledge economy' and yet never really ask why we might not speak of 'a knowledge society'. What would a 'knowledge society' look like and how might this be different from economically defined 'knowledge'? It seems to us while we are living in this paradigm, at least in part, that a knowledge economy is a new thing - one that might even make Marx's criticisms of capitalism redundant. The production of 'knowledge' seems different from the production of commodities. If I expend labour making a bottle of beer it is clear that only the purchaser of that bottle can enjoy the benefits of my labour - but if I write a sonnet, say, or discover a new way of understanding something, my 'product' can't really be used up in the same way as the standard capitalist commodity can be. Marx made a useful distinction between use and exchange values in his Capital when discussing commodities - he said that capitalism is only really interested in exchange values - that as long as the commodity has some sort of use value to someone (even if they were merely convinced it did), that is effectively where economic theory stops being interested in use values. Rather, economics is much more interested in exchange values, and this is because these drive the rest of his theory - exchange values determine how commodities gain their price from the amount of socially necessary labour they embody, they also present labour as a special commodity because the product of a certain quantity of labour-time can be sold at a higher price than the cost of purchasing that labour-time itself and that increasing this differential between the cost of labour and the product produced in that given time is the chief motivating force of capitalist technological advancement. But if we now live in a knowledge economy, rather than a production economy, then that would seem to make a difference to this relationship - not least because, as was said before, knowledge doesn't get used up in the same way as other products do. The problem is that there aren't just differences between these 'old' and 'new' economies - it also depends on how you go about defining knowledge. For knowledge to become part of the economy - particularly the defining part of what is still a capitalist economy - then we need to restrict access to knowledge in ways that allow for scarcity to be imposed on it. Economics being the science of responding to scarcity, becomes the art of creating scarcity. I've spent years learning stuff - so, I know knowledge isn't 'free' in any real sense - that knowledge has costs - but this is quite a different idea to what is being imposed by the knowledge economy. Here people are concerned with 'intellectual property rights' - and this is another way of saying that people are seeking ways to limit access to knowledge so that for others to gain access to their knowledge they have to 'pay a price', a kind of rent. This idea, in turn, implies that it is a reasonably trivial matter to work out where innovations come from and therefore who should be rewarded for them. The chapter on survival economies in this book complicates this notion - it discusses how western corporations go into 'under-developed' nations to take their knowledge of local plants and animals concerning the medicinal, nutritional and whatever other benefits these provide - then patent this knowledge, virtually always without any form of compensation to these local communities for the endless generations of 'research' such knowledges contain, but then patent and sell this knowledge back to these same communities in ways that destroy their ability to continue using their own knowledge as they did before it was appropriated. Look up 'seed rights' or Basmati Rice sometime - although, check your blood pressure beforehand. The problem is compounded by the fact that the capitalist relationship to knowledge here is not really at all relevant to the communities they have just ripped off - and so it isn't in the least bit clear how such communities could be compensated for their knowledge - given they are based on being a community rather than a corporation. And if effectively stealing from such communities and then changing them for the use of their own knowledge isn't felt to be a problem, then it isn't clear why the reverse - when under-developed nations make use of western technologies without paying for them - is a problem either. The chapter on survival economies isn't purely focused on how the powerful exploit the powerless - although, that is an obvious enough theme - but rather, also how these knowledges can't be translated from one paradigm into the other. In the west we believe we have the single and best way of knowing the value of any piece of knowledge - and that is knowledge's ability to provide innovations to improve technology. Here knowledge and technique are virtually synonymous. But even this idea rests on tenuous ground. We have known for a long time that capitalism works by creating desires that didn't exist before. That is, that the production of desire is one of the ways capitalism addresses its need for ever increasing markets. The chapter here on the libidinal economy addresses these themes. Creativity comes in many forms - some of those forms more easily fit within the capitalist economy - design, fashion, advertising (what is often referred to as the high art of capitalism). But some forms of creativity don't fit nearly so well, such as art per se - and some artists are much more interested in creating 'art events' rather than 'art pieces' because art pieces are far too easy to turn into commodities and the artists would prefer to remain artists, rather than the producers of objects to delight hoarding urges of fetishists. The 'desire to possess' is the central desire under capitalism - virtually be definition. Which is complicated when we think about knowledge. If the central aspect of knowledge under the knowledge economy is in finding ways to alienate knowledge - so as to restrict access to it and thereby charge others for rights to that access - how well does that fit with the work of, say, universities - which have long been in the business of dealing with knowledge? The problem here is one that reminded me of an old television program called Connections. The presenter would look at some major invention - say, the steam engine - and then rather than just talk about James Watt, would look at (deconstruct?) the actual history of that invention. The repeated message of the show was that there was never just 'one guy' that invented any of these things - but rather, as with Newton, they only got to see so far by standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before. And they only got to stand on those shoulders because the giants knew it was their responsibility to pass on what had been given to them (as the authors here say) with interest. So we are seeing two contradictory themes in modern academic life - a move by academics themselves to encourage open access to their research and another by universities and those who often fund them, to restrict access to this knowledge. I've only ever had one article published in my academic career - but if you don't have a university library prepared to meet the cost of allowing you to read those 5000 words it will cost you something like $50. Personally, I'm not sure the article itself is worth that much, there are few articles I think would be - but the way the game is structured also determines how it is played. Only a select group of people get access to ideas - and that group is defined more by money than by interest. It is not defined by the contribution they may be able to make following having been granted such access - but, purely and simply, by money. The authors note that what academics often think of as knowledge has a better fit with notions of the gift economy than it does with an exchange economy - more Mauss than Marx. There is a tangible sense of passing on knowledge so as to repay the debts owed after being allowed on someone else's shoulders. An idea that runs, in its extreme version, back to Socrates and his refusal to be paid for teaching. A lot of this also reminded me of the kinds of notions we have in the west of ancestor worship in 'less civilised' cultures. That is, that there are endless debts owed to those who came before and that the best ways of repaying those debts is by recognising we 'pay back' by 'paying forward'. But in a society such as ours so obsessed with the next thing, paying respect to ancestors becomes incoherent as we see ourselves too much as self-made. We see only our difference from our ancestors, rarely the continuities. There is also a chapter on the risk economy. Again this looks at the work of Giddens and Beck around risk and how risk is becoming central to our understanding of modern capitalism. Beck says in his Risk Society that one of the interesting things about risk is that you can never eliminate it, and so it is quite unlike food, where eventually you will become sated, but that with risk this is never the case. You could conceivably spend an infinite amount trying to reduce potential risks but even so risks will still remain despite your efforts. And this is in large part due to the probabilistic nature of many risks - but, again, also due to the limits of our knowledge. As the authors make clear, a society that is about constant change is also one creates risks it can neither control and often can't even anticipate. Here we find that knowledge doesn't provide certainty or increase our safety, but rather leaves us with a kind of terrifying foreboding that everything could (and probably will) eventually go off the rails - something Giddens discusses by referring to a Juggernaut - a huge machine always on the verge of running off out of control and crushing those powerless to do anything other than watch their impending doom. Think global warming, or the risks associated with eating stuff that isn't food, or our use of medicines that have side-effects worse than the diseases they are meant to cure. The knowledge that I'm most concerned about, though, is the knowledge that Gramsci called hegemony or that Bourdieu calls symbolic violence. That is, the knowledge we have that reassures us over and over again, 'all is fine, there is no better way, it might not be perfect, but any change would only make things worse'. In part the authors address this - particularly in the survival economy chapter - by discussing the use of humour to undermine the accepted and given truths by making them seem ridiculous. They point out this isn't the only way to address the problem, but I do think it is a particularly good way. You see, the problem is that symbolically those who have most to gain from how things currently work have it all over those of us who want things to change. It isn't just that their mates own the newspapers - although, let's face it, that doesn't hurt - but they also often have the degrees, the corporate offices, the prestige suits and so on - that is, all of the stuff that screams at us 'this person knows what they are talking about and you are a nobody'. And, as Bourdieu says, that really does matter - even as we try to convince ourselves that it doesn't. We like to think that all it takes to change the world is to raise people's consciousness - let people see know how stuffed things are and they will change it - unfortunately, that is never enough. What we really need, beyond knowing the truth, and being outraged at the lie, is a way 'to be' that is different from how we are currently encouraged to be in this society. What we need is to be shown new ways of living - of doing - that allow for change. To the extent that our current ways of being were forged in this society, they also reinforce the relationships that sustain this society. This is why Derrida's verbal pun of hauntology and ontology is so endlessly interesting - and why the authors' use of 'A Christmas Carol' is so apt - we need to pay attention to the ghosts that haunt us, that demand we take a broader perspective than that offered by a 'knowledge economy'. We need to seek after ways that can fundamentally change how we relate to one another and to knowledges more generally. This is worth reading. Even worth reading twice.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-01 00:00:00 Mark Phillips Highly obsessed with definitions! First chapter on knowledge economy is devoted to how different authors have used the combination of terms knowledge, information, society and economy. I think if Hegel and Wittgenstein together wrote something about economics, it would be this book! I couldn't stand it more than a few pages.