Sociology 304

April 9, 1998

The Virtual Class

1. Introduction

Many of the issues related to virtuality and cyberspace that we have considered in this last section of the course have been concerned with the micro, interaction, small group, or community level. Stone examines how individuals relate to the computer, interact with others in cyberspace, and create new forms of community. She notes some of the problems associated with this such as the contradictions between the corporate and creative environment and the difficulties of creating community. At the same time, Stone generally considers the new technologies to be creating new forms of individuals and selves, along with changes in social organization. The exact direction of these changes cannot be predicted because, as the title of her book claims, there is a war between desire and technology, and the outcome is not clear.

2. Arthur Kroker's Analysis of New Technologies

A somewhat different perspective on the new technologies is presented by Arthur Kroker, the postmodern political theorist from Concordia University in Montreal. Kroker notes some of the larger societal or macro level changes associated with the new technologies and their promotion by what he calls the virtual class. The articles are chapters one and four of Data Trash, a 1994 book by Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein. While the book has two authors, I will primarily refer to this as Kroker's work, because Kroker is the one who is most closely associated with the theories and approaches outlined in Data Trash. Data Trash does not constitute theory in the usual sense of sociological theory, but is a statement by Kroker about some trends in contemporary society, with a focus on technology and the consequences for culture, social relationships, and political economy. The CBC interview with Kroker presents a summary version of Kroker's views in his own words and in a form that might be grasped more quickly than the articles or Data Trash.

Kroker's claim is that the digital, virtual, computer, and communications arena is no longer democratic (if it ever was) and that this realm has been taken over by a virtual class. The power and social basis for this class is in high-tech, the computer-mediated form of communication that has become widespread and, according to Kroker, dominant in many aspects of our lives. Kroker argues that this class has become extremely powerful in contemporary society. The representatives of this class claim that it is necessary for people to adopt the latest digital technologies and adapt to these or we will fall behind, become uncompetitive, and be bypassed by those who do adopt these technologies. adapting to these. "Adapt or You're Toast" is the title of a section on pp. 2-3 of The Theory of the Virtual Class.

Kroker argues that rather than technology being used to assist society and adapting to help human needs and social relationships, there is strong compulsion for humans to adapt to the digital technologies. Kroker points out how the virtual becomes identified with the good (Theory, p.1), but this is really a projection of the class interests of the virtual class into cyberspace (Theory, p. 2). He notes some of the negative consequences of this for human social relationships (loss of aesthetics and solidarity, Theory, p. 1), for society as a whole (loss of democracy and economic justice, Theory, p. 5), and for political economic realities (unemployment, dislocation) in the contemporary world and in the future.

At the same time as Kroker is a cultural critic, his approach is not that of a dispassionate, neutral observer, who stands back and makes judgments concerning the good or bad features of contemporary culture. He argues that the understanding of virtuality requires the critic to become immersed in the virtual world, to understand it from within. As a critic, he attempts to subvert it from within, not as a Luddite, to destroy it, but to alert people to what is happening to them and society. In many ways, Kroker favours the new technologies and argues that they could and should become more democratic, that they could become a way of helping to form communities and find meaning. But he considers the direction being pursued by those associated with the new technologies to generally be the reverse of this, with a tendency toward commercialization, domination by technology, and control by a technological elite or virtual class.

Kroker's message may appear very negative, with resistance to the virtual class being difficult. In Pan-Capitalism, he argues that there may be a new form of fascism developing - pan-capitalism and the recline of western civilization. In this way, his message may seem one sided, similar to that of some of the critical theorists such as Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man. However, in some of the interviews he has given, his message is less one sided and he discusses contradictions within the virtual class. There is also the possibility of subversion, of saying no, and of bringing morality back into politics.

Much of Kroker's writing is diatribe, manifesto, and personal statement that open a number of issues that are important for each of us today and in the future, for Canadian society and for people in all parts of the world. Much of Kroker's writing is difficult to read and he uses a postmodern approach, developing new "jargons and vocabularies" (Roseanau, p. 18). New forms of jargon are often used by new schools of academic thought and particular subcultures, in an attempt to distinguish themselves and form a boundary between those with and without knowledge of the jargon. Rosenau notes that postmodern writers go beyond this and

they see little reason to make especially strenuous efforts to communicate exactly what they mean in any case. They argue that jargon, defined as playing with words, is interesting in and of itself. The generally relaxed post-modern temper makes for flexibility, but at the same time it contributes substantially to confusion and ambiguity. (Rosenau, p. 18).

Kroker provides a good example of this and a quick glance at the articles yields terms such as virtual class, crash culture, recline of civilization, abuse value, soft ideology, possessed individual, technotopia, cyber-flesh, post-modem society etc. Each of these makes some sense, although Kroker does not usually give exact meaning to them. Instead, the general meaning can usually be discerned by looking at the context and considering what Kroker is trying to get across. This approach can be frustrating but is at the same time interesting and carries considerably meaning and insight.

The writings of Kroker also differ from much other sociological writing in that they do not have a unilinear approach, working from some assumptions and hypotheses and developing an argument. Marx's Capital or Durkheim's Suicide begin from a single argument or proposition and proceed to examine the consequences of this. Their approach is reasoned and logical, building a solid argument by using empirical data and theoretical reasoning, and continually going back and forth between them. Kroker is postmodern in that he skips from one topic to another, repeating the argument, and going at issues from other points of view. He also uses short sketches, photographs, and artistic works to illustrate his points. In that sense, his approach is that of the virtual world - television or the web with their juxtaposition of images, ideas, and issues - where there need be no unilinear form of development. For example, the web allows the individual to jump from site to site, and there need be no particular connection between these. This can be chaotic, but if there is some organizing principle the author has in mind, then the points get across.

3. Kroker's Background

Arthur Kroker (1945- , Canada), from Red Rock, near Thunder Bay in Northern Ontario, originally intended to be a priest. Kroker received a Ph.D. in Political Science from McMaster University in 1975 and was a professor at the University of Winnipeg from 1979 through 1981. While there, Kroker established the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory. Since 1991, this journal has discontinued publishing in hard copy and was transformed into the electronic journal Ctheory (http://www.ctheory.com/). From this address you can get to the Kroker's own home page. Since 1981, Kroker has been a professor of political science at Concordia University in Montreal. He is a postmodern theorist who examines culture and technology in the contemporary world. He has written several books, has produced a disc of sampled and electronic sounds, presents lectures and performance art and has toured with a band Sex without Secretions.

Marilouise Kroker is an artist who collaborates with Arthur Kroker on many of his works. She is editor of the Cultural Texts series for New World Perspectives, a founding editor of Ctheory, and co-author with Arthur Kroker of several books.

4. Kroker's Influences

In addition to the literature on cyberculture, and the familiarity of Kroker with the major political and sociological traditions, there appear to be four major influences in the work of Kroker.

• Grant, Innis, and McLuhan. Kroker's first book examined the writings of these three Canadian writers who dealt with technology, culture, and Canadian society. The influence of McLuhan is most evident, and Kroker writes as if he were a contemporary McLuhan - considering the various types of effects that contemporary communications and media have on society. However, the earlier work of Innis, with its emphasis on technological conditions and the nature of commodities having important economic and social effects also is discernible in Kroker's work. Grant's anti-American concerns are also evident, recalling an earlier era when it might have been possible to build a different, conservative Canada. Grant was also a humanist, arguing for preservation of "some vestige of the dignity of human purpose," something which is being threatened by the will to technology of the later twentieth century (Technology and the Canadian Mind, p. 25).

• Postmodern writers, especially some of the French postmodernists such as Baudrillard, Virilio, Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, and also the American, Rorty. These are not so evident in Data Trash but are discussed in some of Kroker's other works. Some of the approaches and terms used in Data Trash do come from these writers, e.g. Kroker argues that in contemporary society there is an "ideology of interminability" and it is "an enormous sign of denial, a reaction formation against acknowledgment of all the Baudrillardian 'deaths' (society, history, all the substitution-signs for God) (pp. 44-45). The recombinant sign and cynical seduction of Theses 1-2 on pp. 28-29 undoubtedly have their roots in Baudrillard, as do crash, panic, implosion, and hyperreality. This sometimes makes these references difficult to follow, since few of us know much about these postmodern writers.

• Nietzsche. One writer whose influence pervades Data Trash is Friedrich Nietzsche (German, 1844-1900). This is especially evident in Chapter 3, with talk of "will to power," the "post-Christian" era, and "post-God" (pp. 56-60). Kroker connects interminability with Nietzsche's process of repetition (p. 42). Kroker emphasizes the "will to virtuality" in the first part of Data Trash, and this may be a play on Nietzsche's "will to power" as the affirmation of life and the will to power is the "world" (Lechte, p. 219). Nietzsche's influence also exists in the style of writing and general approach - short discussions of major arguments, juxtaposed with other arguments, with no overall logical, linear development.

• Marxist political economy. Given these other influences, it may seem strange that Kroker adopts a Marxist approach to political economy. But much of his language is Marxian: virtual class, pan-capitalism, retro-fascism, abuse value, surplus bodies and flesh, recombinant commodity, etc. Each of these has a meaning different from traditional Marxism in the age of virtual reality, but the connection with the Marxian tradition is clear, and an understanding of the Marxian approach helps the reader understand Kroker's critique of cyberculture. Further, Kroker's approach is dialectical, and he is fond of showing how claims and developments are turned into their opposite. For example, he mentions dead information (like dead labour?), and notes how the illusion and promise of interactivity has instead turned into cooptation that swallows bodies and whole societies, so that "the digital superhighway is really about the immersion of the flesh into its virtual double" (Theory, p. 2). Further, the contradiction between the promise of cyberculture and virtuality is continually being undermined by commercial interests, with oppression, disappearance, and possession resulting. Finally, Kroker notes the importance of struggle against the de-humanizing aspects of contemporary technologies and reasserting human values. All of these arguments are part of the Marxian tradition.

From CBC Sunday Morning interview: Kroker notes that there is a grim consolidation currently underway, but also a rebellion against the techno-hype of Silicon Valley. Kroker argues that we should develop a critical perspective on these new technologies but embrace their creative possibilities. For Kroker, there are no inevitabilities in human history and there is a human will to resist. Kroker is trying to develop a language for the new digital world of the 21st century, a language that portrays the will to resist.

5. Kroker's Approach

• Postmodern. Kroker considers us to be in an era that could be called the postmodern condition and this requires an analytical approach different from that of the great theoretical traditions. For Kroker, there has been a decisive break with the earlier era, a discontinuity that distinguishes the modern era (from the 1700s and associated with industrialism and the Enlightenment). Kroker seems to argue that technology plays a major role in this. Like Baudrillard, he may be claiming that postmodern society has become "simulations, codes, models, and new technologies" (Best and Kellner, p. 275). Some of the technological trends and the way they have developed may be taken as dominant trends within all society. Unlike Baudrillard though, Kroker does use a political economic analysis.

Regardless of the exact nature of contemporary society and the trends in it, Kroker generally argues that the old ideologies, theories, forms of analysis, and political movements are no longer adequate or capable of dealing with contemporary or future realities. In this sense, Kroker is a radical postmodernist, who argues that the technological, social, economic, and political realities of the modern era are over, and we now have entered the postmodern ear. Individuals, groups, society, technology, and forms of analysis have all changed so new tools and new understandings are necessary for contemporary and future developments. Thus postmodernism is not just a new tool of sociological analysis but is also a new era.

• Cultural critic. Much of Data Trash is about culture, and how culture has changed, now becoming virtual culture. Chapter 2 discusses virtual ideology as "the cultural logic of the recombinant sign" (p. 27). Often this virtual culture is from the United States, and may be connected with the military, and he refers to the military-entertainment complex (p. 28). Kroker argues

Not only is the virtualization of military culture under wasy, but the colonization of the globe is achieved by downloading American culture into the expectant orifices of local territorial space. It is not only the technological class that is against the working class, but a universal media class that is arrayed against local populations. (p. 33).

Kroker also deals with other forms of culture such as visual art, music, and in Chapter discusses photographic culture. The glossary (pp. 158-163) also mentions crash culture (dead culture in the age of terminal shutdown and recline of the west), excremental culture (recycling), and virtual culture (a total environment for the virtualized body). In raising these points, Kroker is arguing that the old cultural referents and systems have disappeared and new cultures have emerged.

• Use of visual art, poetry, music. These are part of his analysis and way of working. The Krokers have toured as a band, and use multi-media formats to present their work. Their latest book, Hacking the Future: Stories for the Flesh-Eating 90s, comes with a CD containing poetry, stories, sampling, and various types of music. Many of Kroker's presentations are built around visual art (p. 58 and pp. 124-128), music, or performance art (Stelarc, pp. 27-8).

• Immersion in technology. Kroker's exact position on technology is not always clear. Is he a critic of technology, a technological determinist, one who considers technological change to have created the radical discontinuity leading to the postmodern condition, one who view technology as neutral, or one who favours and enjoys all the latest technological developments? There is no simple answer to this, and there is support for each of these points. The multiple approaches to technology is one aspect that you should try to sort out as you read Kroker.

Note that the Krokers publish an electronic journal, have web pages with lots of information about their work, and they issued a CD along with their last book. In the 1996 Wired interview, Marilouise Kroker argues

Yet as our world changes, if you want to critique it, you have to keep up with it. Antitech people will say, "I don't watch television because it's bad." Well, how can you analyze your culture if you don't watch TV? It's the same thing for what's going on digitally right now.

In the July, 1995 CBC interview, Arthur Kroker argues that you have to get inside the technology to be able to understand and critique it. Kroker operates within the electronic beast, becomes part of it, but uses this as a way of understanding the difference between technology and the experiences of his own flesh.

From the CBC Sunday Morning interview: Kroker says that we cannot escape technology and we must get involved in it. If we express fascination for the techno-utopian model, the mind shuts down. Rather than fascination, Kroker himself is hyper-fascinated. His method is to always try to move into things intensely, and this means intense involvement in the new technologies. At the same time he adopts a critical perspective on these technologies, retains a distance from them and not does become a promoter of the virtual class. Kroker is critical of the later McLuhan, arguing that McLuhan's critical edge disappeared as he became a spokesperson for the new forms of media. Further, Kroker does not consider himself to be an abstracted intellectual but argues that we must live within the culture.

• Vocabulary. Many new words and phrases and develops own vocabulary.

• Bodies and sex. Data Trash has lots of discussion of the body. On page 2, Kroker mentions "the vanishing of the body (into a relational data base), the nervous system into 'data processing,' and the skin into wetware." Further, the body is weakened, and becomes the body electronic. Kroker talks about data flesh (p. 155) and surplus flesh. Biological analogies and language (and sociobiology) have often been used in sociology and Kroker is not exception. He talks about biological engineering, cloning, and the "recombinant commodity." His earlier books, and many of the stories from the flesh-eating nineties involve various types of sex, break boundaries associated with traditional forms of sex and sex roles (recombinant or third sex), and examining issues of concern to feminism such as sexual abuse of females and disappearance (harrassment to invisibility, p. 12 of The Last Sex). Two books edited by the Krokers are The Hysterical Male (1991) and The Last Sex (1993).

6. Limitations to Kroker's Analysis

There are a number of shortcomings in Kroker's analysis, and that of other postmodernists. Some of the limitations would seem to be:

• How extensive are the issues and society of Kroker's analysis? Virtual reality and cyberspace are extensive, but less than half of Canadian households have computers, and in Saskatchewan, only 5 per cent of households had internet access to cyberspace in 1996. The more general problem is that of boundaries of Kroker's and postmodern analysis.

• Implications. What are the implications of Kroker's analysis for society? Kroker appears to do a better job of analyzing these than do some postmodern theorists, partly by maitaining a close connection with the Marxian method and being aware of political implications. But the trends Kroker points to are often trends in cyberspace, and may not represent other aspects of society.

• Production and consumption. Again Kroker sorts these out better than some postmodernists who argue that production has disappeared (Kellner and Best, p. 133), changed its nature, or become unimportant (post-industrial society). But Kroker's analysis, as much postmodernism, is more about consumption than about production. On the Hacking the Future CD, many of the stories are about shopping, about Las Vegas, about various types of sex, and about entertainment. As a critique of this, Kroker's insights are often very good. But as a general critique of problems of production, ecology, poverty, etc. the analysis is incomplete.

• Postmodern Condition. The claim that there has been a radical break with the previous era is questionable. This radical claim leads Kroker to argue that we need a new form of analyis. In fact, there are many continuities with earlier capitalist society, and the major features of capitalism -- commodities, surplus value, labour, exploitation -- still dominate much of the dynamics of the economic and social world. Kroker is aware of this, but at times writes as if the break was total.

• Subjects and familiar forms of reality disappear in some of Kroker's analysis and becomes virtual reality. The repackaging of bodies, disappearance of the body, recombinant commodities, and virtuality. This is reminiscint of Baudrillard who argues that representations, simulations, and objects are reality, with subjects having lost control and subjects becoming controlled by or constructed by these representations. Kroker does not go this far, but has strong tendencies in that direction. For example, he notes we live in an era of dead information, "That's our cooptation as servomechanisms of the cybernetic grid (the digital superhighway) that swallows bodies, and even whole societies, into the dynamic momentum of its telematic logic" (Data Trash, p. 7). In most of Data Trash, Kroker treats these as tendencies, rather than complete descriptions of postmodernity, but he does have a tendency to treat these as completed forms rather than as emergent tendencies. In his other works he examines resistance, but there is little resistance in Data Trash itself.

7. The Virtual Class

a. CBC Interview. The following notes, giving Kroker's description of the virtual class, come from a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Sunday Morning broadcast of July 23, 1995. For Kroker, the virtual class is the new technological class. It came or is coming to power on the back of cyberspace or the internet. This is the class that expresses the dominant interest of information technology. Representatives of this class may claim that it is time for a real austerity budget. But this means bludgeoning the working and the middle class and shifting the economic pie so that more money goes into high tech industries, and there is no discussion of the consequences of this. For example, what happens when there is no work for much of the population? Virtualization means moving to a society that requires less labour and more and more people become surplus. More people become a surplus class and today there are some countries which could be considered to be surplus countries.

Alvin Toffler is a representative of the virtual class. Toffler proclaims a third wave, after the first wave of the Industrial Revolution and the second wave of capitalist industrial expansion following the Second World War and continuing through the 1970s. Toffler argues that those in the third wave have common interests and should cooperate, promoting cyberspace. In contrast, Kroker argues that the virtual class may speak the language of democracy but their real purpose is to have an ideology of facilitation (come on board info highway with global access and global communication) and this feeds on the view that technology can create utopias and humanism. But by the mid1990s, the time for the age of net utopia is over and now corporations such as Disney and Time-Warner claim that we need to make money on the internet. This will stop our relation as users and turn us into passive consumers.

The virtual class:

• is obsessed with technology.
• prevents critiques of technology.
• views digital technology as a source of salvation.
• has an impuse to nihilism, assuming that will to virtuality is will to good, so that the good is "the disintegration of experience into cybernetic interactivity."
• predatory capitalism and technological rationalizations for cost and deficit cutting. New form of ethics, an ethics of the virtual class -- predatory capitalism, restructuring, deficit cutting.
• projects its class interests into cyberspace.
• exerts absolute control over intellectual property.
• views the body as a passive archive to be processed, entertained, and stockpiled.
• reduces human intelligence to a circulating medium of cybernetic exchange, i.e. a set of digital codes that can race around the internet. Destroys creativity and does not distinguish creativity from information.
• diminishes human experience. The virtualizers attempt to "disappear human subjectivity" by replacing the "data trash of experience" with "the war-machine of cyberspace." Note how the disappearance of the subject is a favorite post-modern theme,

Brook and Boal quote Howard Rheingold on the imagined community of cyberspace. See p. ix of Brook and Boal, where they note "the wish to leave body, time, and place behind in search of electronic emulation of community."

Kroker's critique is that under the guise of being progressive and promoting creativity, community, and a better life, the virtual class ignores and destroys positive human values. The political and economic consequences of this are are to hurt people and communities through the austerity and deficit cutting measures that have become so widespread.

b. Structure of the Virtual Class. These are the social strata which represent the new technologies, promote them as a solution to problems of society and to our mundane existence, and who wish to speed up and intensify the process of virtualization by applying it to as many parts of society as possible. This class can be considered to have two parts, the technicians and the capitalists. Often these two are the same people, but there are two distinct sets of tasks that are carried out by this class -- the development and application of the new technologies, and the commercialization of these technologies. See Map 4, p. 21 on the information elite. Also "There are pure capitalists in the cyber industry and there are capitalists who are also visionary computer specialists" (Data Trash, p. 15, top).

The language and discourse of this class, along with their power and control over the direction that technology takes, because of the importance of new technology, makes this class a powerful group in society. At the same time, this class is not all powerful, with many of the modernist forms of production and consumption still holding sway over much of society. But they are an emergent force, because this class represents the new technologies, and these technologies have a great influence on the direction of the economy and society, and could have an increasingly greater influence.

If the virtual class is to be considered a social class, what is the social basis on which this class is structured? The alliance of cyber-technologies with capitalism would appear to be the basis. This means the widespread application of these new technologies in a great variety of areas - manufacturing, communications, service industries, government, etc. Note that this is somewhat different than the classical Marxian analysis, in that this new class is attempting to control and profit from information, so that the material basis is somewhat different than earlier capitalist classes. It is not yet clear whether all of this information can be turned into the commodity form, although the virtual class is attempting to do this. But this is what various companies are attempting to do with commercialization of the internet.

Class struggle also takes a different form in that it is a struggle (i) between the virtual class and a variety of individuals and groups who attempt to prevent the virtual class from having such great control over the new technologies and the flow of information, and (ii) with large sections of society and the world rendered irrelevant or surplus. As Kroker noted in his CBC interview, many of the effects of the new technologies are to render people, groups, and whole nations surplus. Unlike imperialism, which was a grand system of theft for poorer countries, the virtual economy is one of neglect - one that does not require the resources of the poor countries. The expansion of the industrial technologies (1750 - 1980) and service industries (after World War II) created a need for more people. While the new technologies need some people, and there are expanding parts of the labour force as a result of these, these technologies overall seem to result in a lower level of employment. This was also true of the more productive manufacturing technologies in an earlier era, and that the growth of those resulted in dramatic changes in society. The question is how the cyber-technologies will lead to changes in society. Kroker seems to be arguing that these new technologies change the whole nature of political economy and possibly society.

References

Brook, James and Iain A. Boal, editors, Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information, San Fransisco, City Lights, 1995.

Kroker, Arthur and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: the theory of the Virtual Class, Montreal, New World Perspectives, 1994.

Rosenau, Pauline Marie, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992.

Cyber References

Two chapters from Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: the theory of the virtual class (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994) are available on the internet. These are:

Chapter One, " The Theory of the Virtual Class."

Most of Chapter Four, " The Political Economy Of Virtual Reality: Pan-Capitalism," pp. 66-93 of Data Trash.

CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape. Edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker.

Notes from April 9, 1998. Last revised on April 14, 1998.

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