It is strik­ing to see how almost all of the key cul­tur­al prac­tices that have formed around the Web, and par­tic­u­lar­ly Web 2.0 — pro­sumerism, the long tail, the Open Source devel­op­ment mod­el, mashups, remix­ing, etc. — can be ana­lyzed and under­stood in terms of a polit­i­cal eco­nom­ic framework.

The basis of this frame­work was spelled out by Marx in the Grun­drisse, which he wrote between 1857 and ’61 but which was only pub­lished in 1941 (check it out here). In that work, Marx out­lined in broad strokes the basic struc­ture of the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion, which he described as belong­ing to phas­es of a sin­gle process: (1) pro­duc­tion, (2) dis­tri­b­u­tion, (2) exchange, and (4) con­sump­tion. Although these con­cepts were not invent­ed by Marx, he was appar­ent­ly the first to regard them as a sin­gle sys­tem that had the capac­i­ty to repro­duce itself, and there­fore per­sist for long peri­ods of time as a kind of vast machine or organ­ism of peo­ple and things, tend­ing toward change only through a grad­ual process punc­tu­at­ed by rev­o­lu­tions at crit­i­cal points.

Writ­ing before the inven­tion of cyber­net­ics and gen­er­al sys­tems the­o­ry, Marx had to rely on a more poet­ic frame­work to describe this process of change — the dialec­ti­cal the­o­ry of his­to­ry, famous­ly adapt­ed and invert­ed from Hegel — which has led many to dis­miss (or embrace) his soci­ol­o­gy as a prod­uct of Nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry roman­ti­cism. Indeed, the lack of a bet­ter frame­work with­in which to devel­op this idea may be respon­si­ble for the ill-fat­ed rev­o­lu­tion­ism that become of Marx in the hands of his Twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry admir­ers, the emer­gence of which Mark him­self helped to cre­ate with his rhetoric. But his basic idea remains entire­ly con­sis­tent with the more advanced con­cepts of bound­ary con­di­tions, pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive feed­back, and the like.

The inno­va­tion that allowed Marx to con­ceive of the four-part cycle as a repro­duc­tive sys­tem was to join the ends of the sys­tem togeth­er. Rather than view­ing them as a stack, with pro­duc­tion at the bot­tom and con­sump­tion at the top, each oper­at­ing inde­pen­dent­ly of the oth­er, and con­sump­tion act­ing as a kind of ter­mi­nal “sink” in a cir­cuit, Marx invent­ed, or at least strong­ly appro­pri­at­ed, the ideas of “pro­duc­tive con­sump­tion” and “con­sump­tive pro­duc­tion.” Pro­duc­tive con­sump­tion is con­sump­tion that takes place at the point of pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tive pro­duc­tion is pro­duc­tion that takes place at the point of consumption.

Now, the first con­cept seems easy enough to grasp — basi­cal­ly, to run, say, a fac­to­ry, you have to pro­vide that fac­to­ry with goods — food, fuel, equip­ment, sup­plies — to keep it run­ning. Goods are not pro­duced ex nihi­lo, or from mate­ri­als that arise sole­ly from nature and then get chan­neled into the econ­o­my. So pro­duc­tion requires consumption.

The sec­ond con­cept is more com­pli­cat­ed, and it is also the one that sheds light on Web 2.0. At this junc­ture of the process, the act of con­sump­tion pro­duces … what? Well, for one thing it pro­duces is peo­ple, the source of labor and what Marx called “vari­able cap­i­tal.” Eat­ing, the quin­tes­sen­tial act of con­sump­tion, lit­er­al­ly repro­duces our bod­ies. If you con­sid­er the social dimen­sion of eat­ing — whom you eat with, when and why  –you can see that eat­ing also repro­duces social forms, such as the fam­i­ly and social net­works based on friend­ship, etc. Beyond that, the con­sump­tion of peo­ple (through sex and mar­riage) repro­duces social rela­tions, by virtue of class pat­terns of mate selec­tion, a fact that has obvi­ous sig­nif­i­cance in kin­ship based soci­eties. But even more — and this is what has been picked up by folks like C.A. Gre­go­ry, Mary Dou­glas, and Pierre Bour­dieu — pro­duc­tive con­sump­tion repro­duces cul­tur­al forms and habits of thought through a com­plex artic­u­la­tion of taste for­ma­tion and expres­sion as we pur­chase and use a vari­ety of com­modi­ties that par­tic­i­pate in a sym­bol­ic dimen­sion as dense and social­ly effec­tive as it is usu­al­ly invis­i­ble to the con­sumer.  As con­sumer ethno­g­ra­phers have been telling us for some time, shop­ping is an act of iden­ti­ty for­ma­tion, and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

So, what does this have to do with the Web? It illu­mi­nates the sig­nif­i­cance of the con­cepts of pro­sumer and remix cul­ture. A pro­sumer is of course a con­sumer and a pro­duc­er of some­thing — pod­casts, YouTube videos, blog entries. Remix­ing is the act of a con­sumer who pro­duces new prod­ucts out of the frag­ments of prod­ucts he or she has consumed.

[MORE TO COME]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Anthropology, Media Theory, Political Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.