Robert Hassan - The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life

The Condition
of Digitality:

A Post-Modern
Marxism for the
Practice of Digital Life

Robert Hassan

Critical, Digital and Social Media Studies

Series Editor: Christian Fuchs

The peer-reviewed book series edited by Christian Fuchs publishes books that critically study the role of the internet and digital and social media in society. Titles analyse how power structures, digital capitalism, ideology and social struggles shape and are shaped by digital and social media. They use and develop critical theory discussing the political relevance and implications of studied topics. The series is a theoretical forum for internet and social media research for books using methods and theories that challenge digital positivism; it also seeks to explore digital media ethics grounded in critical social theories and philosophy.

Editorial Board

Thomas Allmer, Mark Andrejevic, Miriyam Aouragh, Charles Brown, Eran Fisher, Peter Goodwin, Jonathan Hardy, Kylie Jarrett, Anastasia Kavada, Maria Michalis, Stefania Milan, Vincent Mosco, Jack Qiu, Jernej Amon Prodnik, Marisol Sandoval, Sebastian Sevignani, Pieter Verdegem

Published

Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukcs, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet

Christian Fuchs

https://doi.org/10.16997/book1

Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism: An Introduction to Cognitive Materialism

Mariano Zukerfeld

https://doi.org/10.16997/book3

Politicizing Digital Space: Theory, the Internet, and Renewing Democracy

Trevor Garrison Smith

https://doi.org/10.16997/book5

Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare

Scott Timcke

https://doi.org/10.16997/book6

The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism

Edited by Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano

https://doi.org/10.16997/book11

The Big Data Agenda: Data Ethics and Critical Data Studies

Annika Richterich

https://doi.org/10.16997/book14

Social Capital Online: Alienation and Accumulation

Kane X. Faucher

https://doi.org/10.16997/book16

The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness

Edited by Joan Pedro-Caraana, Daniel Broudy and Jeffery Klaehn

https://doi.org/10.16997/book27

Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism

Edited by Jeremiah Morelock

https://doi.org/10.16997/book30

Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto

Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, and Alex Pazaitis

https://doi.org/10.16997/book33

Bubbles and Machines: Gender, Information and Financial Crises

Micky Lee

https://doi.org/10.16997/book34

Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization

Edited by Vincent Rouz

https://doi.org/10.16997/book38

The Condition
of Digitality:

A Post-Modern Marxism for the
Practice of Digital Life

Robert Hassan

University of Westminster Press

www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk

Published by

University of Westminster Press

115 New Cavendish Street

London W1W 6UW

www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk

Text Robert Hassan 2020

First published 2020

Cover design: www.ketchup-productions.co.uk

Series cover concept: Mina Bach (minabach.co.uk)

Print and digital versions typeset by Siliconchips Services Ltd.

ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-912656-67-7

ISBN (PDF): 978-1-912656-68-4

ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-912656-69-1

ISBN (Kindle): 978-1-912656-70-7

DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book44

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This license allows for copying and distributing the work, providing author attribution is clearly stated, that you are not using the material for commercial purposes, and that modified versions are not distributed.

The full text of this book has been peer-reviewed to ensure high academic standards. For full review policies, see: http://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/publish. Competing interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Suggested citation:
Hassan, R. 2020. The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life . London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book44 License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit https://doi.org/10.16997/book44 or scan this QR code with your mobile device:

Acknowledgements

My gratitude, first of all, goes to Christian Fuchs for encouraging me to continue with the manuscript through its two or three iterations and which saw it transform quite considerably from the initial idea that I had pitched to him. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers who, mixing antagonism and sympathy between them, were actually helpful in improving the text. Special thanks to Andrew Lockett, whom I met in Melbourne over a beer to discuss the broad themes of a yet-to-be-written manuscript. His quiet encouragement and no-stress approach to deadlines nonetheless acted as a speed-up as actual deadlines loomed.

Family, as always, is central to my functioning in any realm, and so it was here. Without Kate, Theo and Camille Id likely be tramping the streets, muttering to myself and looking for a place to sleep.

In the text I use both postmodernity (postmodernism) and post-modernity to signify two different meanings. Postmodernism used to convey an ideological frame as it has been used in many left and Marxist critical writings since at least the late-1970s. Post-modernity I see as a much stronger and more epochal signifier, indicating a phase in historical, economic and philosophical time that has moved definitively beyond modernity ; a modernity which, following Jean-Franois Lyotard, was the imposed Enlightenment idea of a unitary history and subject. An idea and a time that has gone.

For Josie Daw and Mark Hassan

CHAPTER 1

A world that has changed, but has not changed.

If the title of this book vaguely recalls another, then to save you guessing Ill state at once that this is a book that is part homage and part critical re-consideration of David Harveys The Condition of Postmodernity : An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change suffused the consciousness of almost every person within it in terms of his or her engagement with each other through networks of communication, production and consumption: I call it digitality.

But first to Harvey.

Postmodernity is an academic text but, unusually for such a work, it has been through several reprints. Even more remarkable, it crossed over into the mainstream and was reviewed in supplements, magazines and newspapers in the early 1990s. And, perhaps unprecedentedlyconsidering it was an overtly Marxist workthe Financial Times reviewer hailed it as probably the best [book] yet written on the link between ... economic and cultural transformations. That was then. So what? Beyond the fact that I write these words in 2019, and a minor anniversarial moment attends to its first print-run, the more serious questions a reader would ask are: why Harvey, why this particular book, and why now? Before coming to these, I should preface my answers by saying that Harvey, his book, and the present conjunction are subsets of the overarching questions that scale to the wider context that this book is aboutthe relevance of Marxism and internationalism today in an era of insurgent right-wing populism and ethnic nationalism; the condition of capitalism today when it seems more chronically ailing than ever, yet we increasingly feel unable to see beyond it; and, as I just noted, our understanding of digital technology, which since the time of the publication of Postmodernity has become a condition all of its own, a process that has become so embedded and so normative (so quickly) that we have failed to see what it has done to the operation of capital and to the relevance of the basic materialist ideas of Marxism.