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 THE CONDITION OF DIGITALITY CDSMS

THE CONDITION OF DIGITALITY

D
avid Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity rationalised capitalism’s
transformation during an extraordinary year: 1989. It gave theoretical
expression to a material and cultural reality that was just then getting
properly started – globalisation and postmodernity – whilst highlighting the
geo-spatial limits to accumulation imposed by our planet.
ROBERT HASSAN
However this landmark publication, author Robert Hassan argues, did

THE CONDITION
not address the arrival of digital technology, the quantum leap represented
by the move from an analogue world to a digital economy and the rapid
creation of a global networked society. Considering first the contexts of 1989
and Harvey’s work, then the idea of humans as analogue beings he argues
this arising new human condition of digitality leads to alienation not only
from technology but also the environment. This condition he suggests, is not
OF DIGITALITY
an ideology of time and space but a reality stressing that Harvey’s time-space
compression takes on new features including those of ‘outward’ and ‘inward’
A Post-Modern Marxism for the
globalisation and the commodification of all spheres of existence.
Lastly the author considers culture’s role drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s
Practice of Digital Life
theories to make the case for a post-modern Marxism attuned to the most
significant issue of our age. Stimulating and theoretically wide-ranging The
Condition of Digitality recognises post-modernity’s radical new form as a
reality and the urgent need to assert more democratic control over digitality.

ROBERT HASSAN
MEDIA THEORY | DIGITAL MEDIA | COMMUNICATION STUDIES

CDSMS C R I T I C A L D I G I TA L A N D
SOCIAL MEDIA STUDIES

THE AUTHOR
Robert Hassan researches and teaches at the University of Melbourne and
is the author, co-author or editor of numerous monographs and books on
topics such as time, new media theory, politics and the philosophy of media.
His recent works include Uncontained: Digital Connection and the Experience
of Time (2019) and The Information Society: Cyber Dreams and Digital
Nightmares (2017). Since 2009 he has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal
Time & Society.

uwestminsterpress.co.uk
 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 criti-
cally study the role of the internet and digital and social media in society. Titles ana-
lyse 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
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Published
Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse,
Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet
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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

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Social Capital Online: Alienation and Accumulation
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The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness

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Edited by Vincent Rouzé
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 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
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Text © Robert Hassan 2020

First published 2020

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Suggested citation:
Hassan, R. 2020. The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism
for the Practice of Digital Life. London: University of Westminster Press.
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 Contents

1. Introduction: A World That Has Changed, But Has

Not Changed 1

2. 1989: David Harvey’s Postmodernity: The Space

Economy of Late Capitalism 13

3. From Analogue to Digital: Theorising the Transition 35

4. The Condition of Digitality: A New Perspective on

Time and Space 73

5. The Economy of Digitality: Limitless Virtual Space

and Network Time 97

6. The Culture of Digitality 129

7. Digital Alienation 159

Index 191
 Acknowledgements

My gratitude, first of all, goes to Christian Fuchs for encouraging me to con-

tinue 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 sympa-
thy 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 dead-
lines loomed.
Family, as always, is central to my functioning in any realm, and so it was
here. Without Kate, Theo and Camille I’d likely be tramping the streets, mutter-
ing to myself and looking for a place to sleep.
 A Note on Nomenclature

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-
François Lyotard, was the imposed Enlightenment idea of a ‘unitary history
and subject’.1 An idea and a time that has gone.
For Josie Daw and Mark Hassan
 CH A PT ER 1

Introduction: A World That Has Changed,

But Has Not Changed

A world that has changed, but has not changed.1

If the title of this book vaguely recalls another, then to save you guessing
I’ll state at once that this is a book that is part homage and part critical re-­
consideration of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry
into the Origins of Cultural Change2, first published in 1989. The book was and
still is important, for reasons I will come to. Mainly though, Postmodernity
stands as an example of the value of Marxist criticism and analysis in what
many within its various strands of thought still call late-modernity—but also
as a reminder of the dangers of not upgrading, constantly, these frames of
analysis, and adapting them to those new and important developments that
can change the whole scene: such as the economic, cultural and ontological
meanings and effects inherent in the processes of digital technology. My re-
consideration of Harvey speaks to what is a lacuna in his work—the lack of
a thoroughgoing analysis of digital technology in relation to that which it has
so rapidly displaced: analogue technique and the human relationship with it,
which together enabled, created and shaped capitalist modernity. Recall that
the ‘information technology revolution’ as it was called, was fully underway
as the eighties turned into the nineties.3 Moreover, this lack extends beyond
Postmodernity and goes to the left more broadly, as we will see. And so the pre-
sent book seeks to begin a conversation oriented toward the need to identify
a new priority in the struggles to understand and transcend a destructive and
unsustainable capitalism. My proposal is that the political priority vis-a-vis the
current capitalism must not be the environmental crisis, or the need to revive
tactics, theories and strategies of collective resistance to capitalism’s worst dep-
redations—though these are important and must continue—but to prioritise
instead a humanist understanding of the processes of a machine, a logic, that
has not only rapidly colonised every part of the inhabited planet, but has also

How to cite this book chapter:

Hassan, R. 2020. The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of
Digital Life. Pp. 1–11. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.
org/10.16997/book44.a. License: CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0
2 The Condition of Digitality

suffused the consciousness of almost every person within it in terms of his or

her engagement with each other through networks of communication, produc-
tion 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 unprecedentedly—considering it was an overtly
Marxist work—the Financial Times reviewer hailed it as ‘probably the best
[book] yet written on the link between ... economic and cultural transforma-
tions’.4 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 seri-
ous 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 over-
arching questions that scale to the wider context that this book is about—the
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.
Why David Harvey? Well today, and notwithstanding the blips of interest in
2008 that compelled many to order a copy of The Communist Manifesto from
Amazon to find answers to the near-collapse of the global banking system,
Marxism, as a way to orient oneself in the world, and as a method through
which to seek to change it, has been in the doldrums. The activist left more
broadly has, since the 1970s, transmuted into an ever-growing spectrum of
identitarianism. Much left theory, moreover, as Fredric Jameson wrote some
time ago, had already retreated into the universities, there to be preoccupied
within what he termed their ‘fields of specialization’.5 Harvey, by contrast, since
the late-1980s has stood against these tendencies and continued to hew the
same historical–materialist line regarding the state of the world,6 the diagnoses
of capitalism,7 the nature of neoliberalism,8 what he sees as the continuation
of essentially Victorian-age imperialism9—and the necessity for a particular
kind of Marxism (which I’ll come to) with which to make sense of all of late-
modernity’s travails.10 Moreover, Harvey has always been an activist, one who
not only writes about struggles, but involves himself personally in them: be
they those of car workers in Cowley in Oxford in the 1970s11 or landless rural
workers in Brazil in the 2010s, when he was in his eighties.12 Accordingly, he
has immense respect and credibility within Marxist and left-activist coalitions
and across the world and has helped inform, sustain and inspire millions by
 Introduction: A World That Has Changed, But Has Not Changed 3

means of the dissemination of his works through distribution platforms such as

YouTube and his own website, davidharvey.org. As a result, he is probably the
most influential Marxist today, and has been so since at least the 1990s.
Why this particular book? Harvey is nothing if not prolific and has written
most of his oeuvre of around 27 books since the publication of Postmodernity.
However, Postmodernity is centrally important in several respects. Chance, or
perhaps it was canny timing on the part of Harvey and his publisher, saw its
release in 1989 coincide with a year of world-changing events in politics. The
book emerged just as the political, economic and cultural tensions and contra-
dictions that had been rumbling for some years previous, eventually broke out
into the open with the symbolism of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November
1989. The ending of the Soviet Union, the beginnings of the opening up of
China and India, the proclaiming of American triumphalism and the ‘End of
History’ all followed quickly.
Postmodernity seemed to explain or rationalise the transformation of capital-
ism in the context of these events. It did so, because in it Harvey drew upon
and developed a major idea from a previous book, The Limits to Capital, which
was published in 1982.13 The idea was the ‘space economy of capital’, a theory
which stated that the shape and character and longevity of capital accumula-
tion is influenced by geography to a profound degree, more so than anyone
had previously realised. However, relative obscurity has long been the fate for
most Marxist works of political economy. And such was the case here. Limits
was well received in the journals, with one stating that, ‘It will almost certainly
come to be considered as one of the most significant radical works of social and
political theory published during the 1980s anywhere in the world’.14 Such hy-
perbolic praise is unusual in journal reviews, but it did not translate into sales.
Limits wasn’t to be reprinted until 2007 when Verso published it.
Harvey’s Postmodernity was fortunate in that the author’s restatement of the
central ideas of the geo-spatial limits to capital accumulation (plus the addi-
tional exhilarating idea of ‘time-space compression in the organisation of capi-
talism’15), gave theoretical expression to a material and cultural reality that was
just then getting properly started—globalisation and postmodernity. These
were controversial and hotly debated ideas in the early 1990s. Harvey had cor-
rectly identified that a ‘sea-change’ in the organisation of capitalism was in pro-
gress, and it was entering a new and intense phase with the ending of the Cold
War. Postmodernity seemed to give rigour and analytical power to a Marxist
understanding of these political, cultural and technological transformations as
they were occurring. Moreover, the book’s analysis of the transition from ‘Ford-
ism to flexible accumulation’16 explained the realities of the class offensive that
was then in its early phases and gave a radically different account to that of the
hegemonic Hayekian ideology of market freedom that the emergent neoliber-
alism used to justify the economic ‘restructuring’ of the time.17
The fact that globalisation and postmodernity are hardly debated today does
not indicate that they vanished as issues sometime during the years intervening
4 The Condition of Digitality

since 1989. Far from disappearing, these concepts and the realities they ex-
pressed have taken root. The ideas of a global market-place and a world of
inter-connectivity have embedded themselves deep inside Western sensibili-
ties to become mainstream and common-sense, almost the natural order of
things. Nonetheless, Postmodernity continues to be an important book, because
it represents a central articulation of a hinge-point in the history of Western
modernity as it expanded globally. In the book, Harvey wrote that the ‘condi-
tion’ of postmodernity was primarily ideological cover for the continued ex-
pansion of Western capital across the globe, and that it had to be seen as such;
as empty and illusory. Furthermore, Harvey’s brilliant insight in both The Lim-
its and Postmodernity was to recognise that there are geo-spatial limits to ac-
cumulation. The planet has only so much territory where over-accumulation in
one region can be invested into another. There will come a time, he suggested,
when there will be no more profitable areas of production and consumption,
and capital will over-accumulate to global-crisis proportions. Capitalism will
reach its end, with the mathematical certainties of physical space guaranteeing
this. In his writing and activism, Harvey’s whole modality is oriented toward
the idea that that socialists must prepare and organise for the coming crisis.
Postmodernity gained popular traction and remains the keywork of Harvey’s
writings. However, in the many books written post-Postmodernity, the author
never reconsidered or revised (in any major way) his earlier views in the light of
the tremendous changes that have occurred from then until now. And through
his lectures, debates and other, web-based activities, he has taken millions with
him in the belief that capitalism today is as capitalism in the 1980s, in terms of
the operation of accumulation, the organisation of capitalism, and the pros-
pects for a socialist renewal that turn upon that operation and organisation.
Why now? Ideally, ‘now’ should have been thirty years ago, or earlier, when
globalisation and the neoliberal project were gaining what would become un-
stoppable momentum. But there is no going back, nor is any uninventing pos-
sible. In what was the blinking of an eyelid in historical time, a mere generation,
a new category of technology has risen to domination. The term ‘new category’
is something to pause on and reflect about. Digital machines and their logic are
(in the operation of their logic) like nothing we have ever seen before. Every­
thing previously, going back to the dawn of our species and our drift toward
technology invention and use, was some kind of analogue technology. From
the wheel to the radio signal, and from writing to television, analogue technol-
ogy fashioned our world and fashioned us, making possible such human-scaled
processes as knowledge and communication, cities and institutions, Enlighten-
ment and modernity, conceptions of time and space. Digitality changes all these
and more, starting with the total transcending of the human scale. Time and
space are now different categories of perception, condensed into immediacy
and acceleration at the general level through, for example, the now-ubiquitous
smartphone. Such drastic changes in scale and perception rebound back upon
the analogue legacies in the realms of knowledge, reason, modernity and so
 Introduction: A World That Has Changed, But Has Not Changed 5

on—and we struggle with the contradictions inherent within their unavoidable

interactions across economy, society, culture and politics.
Seen in this way, digital technology and digitality compel us to think hard
not just about the digital, but also about that which it supplants—the analogue
logic and the relationship with analogue technology that made possible our
pre-digital world. We are driven also to think about where the human stands in
relation to analogue and digital. Some scattered work was done in this regard
in the 1980s and 1990s, but all of it tentative, and none of it from a Marxist per-
spective that, like Harvey, makes salient social change and the socialist project.
The hypothesis I construct here concludes that we are, ontologically speaking,
analogue beings from an analogue universe that evolved from out of our spe-
cies’ drift toward tool-use to become homo sapiens.18 Some scattered work was
done here too, but only suggestive, not systematic, and not with a view to con-
clusions that had ramifications for the present conjuncture in terms of political
economy or techno-capitalism.19 Meanwhile, digitality spread from a nascent
but obvious technological ‘revolution’ around the time of Harvey’s research for
Postmodernity, to become a whole way of life—infiltrating the practice of daily
life and colonising the consciousness that governs the meanings that constitute
practice. It became a central element of culture, in other words; culture that is
now networked and global. What this means is that the elements of Postmoder-
nity that Harvey takes as empty ideologies—a globalising neoliberalism and the
cultural postmodernity that expresses its superficiality—have become embed-
ded, through digitality, into the practice that constitutes how everyday life is
now increasingly lived and understood (or not understood).

Marxism Has to Become Post-Modern

Postmodernity begins, helpfully, but somewhat portentously, with a clean page

before the Preface on which a heading titled ‘The argument’ appears, with the
argument printed in the centre of the page underneath. It reads:

There has been a sea-change in cultural as well as in political–economic

practices since around 1972.
This sea-change is bound up with the emergence of new dominant
ways in which we experience space and time.
While simultaneity in the shifting dimensions of time and space is no
proof of necessary or causal connection, strong a priori grounds can be
adduced for the proposition that there is some kind of necessary rela-
tion between the rise of postmodern cultural forms, the emergence of
more flexible modes of capital accumulation, and a new round of ‘time-
space compression’ in the organization of capitalism.
But these changes, when set against the basic rule of capitalistic accu-
mulation, appear more as shifts in the surface appearance rather than
6 The Condition of Digitality

as signs of the emergence of some entirely new postcapitalist or even

postindustrial society.

One could have no quarrel with the premise of the first three paragraphs. The
world was changing as the 1990s got underway, and many felt precisely this
kind of ‘sea-change’. Many looked to Harvey and others like him20 to see what
it indicated for politics, culture and the socialist project. And Harvey’s semi-
nal idea of crisis in the space economy of capitalism as precipitant for the sea-
change may have seemed convincing for many as well. And so, shaped by the
‘basic rule’ of accumulation, Harvey’s Postmodernity and the great volume of
work that would follow, attracted a large and still-growing interest in the idea
that a classic materialist logic would anticipate, at some future point, a kind of
final crisis for accumulation in a planet that had nothing left to offer the insa-
tiable appetite for space that is vital to keep capitalism alive and accumulating.
The word ‘sea-change’ is important here. And Harvey uses it more than once
in his argument. It denotes something profound and deep-set within a process
or dynamic. Yet, how can there be sea-change within capitalist economy and
society if the ‘basic rule of accumulation’ is unchanged? This is where Harvey’s
self-confessedly21 doctrinaire Marxism comes into to view, something I will
discuss at some length in Chapter One. The ‘basic rule’ is an item of faith in
much Marxism beyond Harvey, too. For its adherents, it mandates that almost
all change within capitalism must be ‘surface appearance’. To argue otherwise
would be to call into question the materialist foundations of Marxism, whereby,
as Marx himself had imbibed from his favourite Diderot, nature—with humans
included—is all just matter in motion. And without this idea, without such
materialism, there can be no Marxism as we have known it. It means also that
to question materialism in this strict sense would be to question modernity
too as a strategic Marxist principle. Harvey thus stays faithful to the ‘basic rule’
and to modernity in Postmodernity, therefore inescapably labelling ‘postmo-
dernity’ a surface manifestation; an ideology that can be understood, critiqued
and resisted as such. Undeniably there has been a sea-change, and moreover
it involved the cultural and political–economic manifestations regarding the
experience of time and space that Harvey describes in such perceptive detail
throughout his book. However, the sea-change stems from a ‘mutation’ in the
processes of accumulation, a mutation caused by digitality and its capacity to
create a new kind of accumulation because of the existence of a new form of
space—a virtual and networked digitality that has rendered accumulation as a
process no longer limited by physical geography. This is a logic of accumula-
tion, by virtue of its virtuality, that is able to colonise social and cultural life
much more deeply than before, exposing almost every register of existence as
vulnerable to commodification. This is what makes post-modernity real, some-
thing much more than what Harvey depicts as ideological froth that circulates
mainly in literature, architecture and art—and amongst the bourgeois habit-
ués of such realms. However, to countenance the notion that a ‘mutation’ of
 Introduction: A World That Has Changed, But Has Not Changed 7

accumulation is possible, and that digitality has changed the ‘basic rule’, would
be to make Marxism post-modern—and therefore I argue to make the Marx-
ist perspective free to see more clearly what globalisation, neoliberalism, post-
modernism and digitality are.
This does not suggest that an acceptance of post-modernity as more than
just surface appearance means that we are also in some kind of postcapitalist or
postindustrial era. Today the planet is more capitalist and industrial than ever
before. But capitalism and industrialism are now driven and shaped by digi-
tal technology that has both physical and virtual dimensions of accumulation.
This means that that ‘organisation’ of capitalism and industry has changed.
Harvey sees it as having become much more ‘flexible’ than it was in the Fordist
era, right up until the 1970s. This is undeniable. But precisely what aided this
flexibility is not really explained in Postmodernity. Partly Harvey attributes the
enabling to the ideology of the market and the ideology of postmodernism—to
‘surface appearances’ in other words. This seems to place a heavy weight of ef-
fect upon empty and illusory ideologies. Little is said about the technology that
made ‘flexibility’ actually possible, and so able to change ‘political-economic
practices’ and the perception of time and space: the digital networks that were
existing and growing when he wrote. Harvey’s stated argument, in effect, is to
say that everything has changed but nothing (really) has changed. The essential
components of Marxism, he says, do not need to be questioned. But this is to
limit theory and therefore limit the potential of political action.
In the mid-1980s Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe published a book
called Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,22 wherein they were first to use the term
‘post-Marxism’ to signal the need to do away with what they saw as many of
the essentialising and totalising aspects of post-war Marxism. In its own way,
it was an early political post-modern work in that the authors argue amongst
many other things that—using a Foucauldian and Gramscian framework—the
economy (capitalism) should not be seen as the only foundation of class power,
and neither should ‘the productive forces, conceived as technology’ be viewed
as always determining.23 Harvey does not mention what was then an important
book in his Postmodernity. But neither does he mention Gramsci, an omission
I will deal with in Chapter One, and Foucault receives some hostile attention,
primarily because of his purported ‘deliberate rejection of any holistic theory of
capitalism’.24 Laclau and Mouffe’s work is important because it is representative
of a change within recent socialist political theory. It is a political post-moder-
nity derived from the deconstructivist turn that formed part of a generation of
mainly French-inspired philosophy and social theory that sought to move away
from a Marxism that had ‘basic rules’—and increasingly away from Marxism
altogether. This new discourse also helped to open the way for the identitarian
politics and activism of the 1990s, and on until today, where Marxism and so-
cialism have dwindled even further and lost much of the theoretical edge that
was sharpened by activism. Harvey continued with his activism, but he ironi-
cally lost his theoretical edge because of a refusal to consider postmodernity or
8 The Condition of Digitality

a post-modern Marxism as anything but the empty ideological antitheses to a

‘holistic theory of capitalism’.
The embrace of a post-modern Marxism is what this book makes the case
for. This does not necessarily involve the rejection of the analytical value of
concepts of class, of the leading role of the economy, or of the central impor-
tance of the function of capitalism in space and time. It is, rather, to prioritise
things. The suddenness by which digitality came upon us needs to be recog-
nised as something more than just a characteristic of the purported ‘efficiency’
and speed of computing in its many applications. Its suddenness was partly due
to the weakness of social organisations to resist its implementation by business.
But its suddenness meant also that we missed the importance, ontologically as
well as economically and culturally, of what was really happening as a global
networked society took shape.
Chapter Two sets the scene by contextualising Postmodernity in the year
1989. The year was turbulent and dramatic, and its shockwaves reverberate
still. For some, such as Nikolai and Elena Ceausescu, dictators of Romania,
it was the end of the line. For millions of ordinary people in China and In-
dia and elsewhere it was the beginnings of economic opportunity. For Harvey
it was fortuitous. Globalisation and the transformed experience of time and
space were what awaited much of humanity in the post-Cold War/neoliberal
era. Postmodernity seemed to explain much of it and give hope for the future
and a ‘renewal of historical-geographical materialism [to] promote adherence
to a new version of the Enlightenment project’.25 Beginning in Chapter Three,
and drawing from philosophical anthropology, media studies and technology
studies, the book will develop the idea that humans are essentially analogue
beings who have unconsciously constructed an antithetical and increasingly
automated sphere wherein much of social-cultural, economic-political life
now takes place. A feature of this section will be the ideology and practice of
­automation—not simply in the form of the growing ubiquity of robotics in life,
but as an achieved aim of capitalist modernity. This is expressed through the
instrumental goal, an historical goal now realisable through digitality, of effi-
ciency in production by the pervasive minimisation of human labour through
automation. The resulting new context of human alienation from both technol-
ogy and the natural environment—with the concept of ‘alienation’ revived and
rearticulated through the pathbreaking new work of Rahel Jaeggi26—will be
discussed and analysed as the major effect of the condition of digitality.
Chapter Four argues that the condition of digitality is not an ideology of time
and space but a reality. Three elements are salient here concerning the shaping
context of digitality and some of its major determinants. First is the category-
shift in the technological basis of modernity. The analogue-to-digital turn is
the ‘mutation’ aspect I will develop, together with its reificatory effects upon
the human relationship with technology, production and nature. Second is the
effects of digitality upon the global social relation that is capitalism: what ex-
actly is capitalism in the age of digitality, when information is a major creator of
 Introduction: A World That Has Changed, But Has Not Changed 9

value? It is a question that has exercised the minds of many, such as Wolfgang
Streeck,27 who imagines that capitalism (as neoliberalism) is devouring itself,
but there exists no viable ideological alternative, nor adequately developed po-
litical constituency to replace it. Third, and following from the second, is the
effects of digitality upon the political organising principle of liberal democ-
racy, a social relation that emerged and developed in the context of modernity
and modernity’s institutions, and which has been based upon print culture and
nation-states. These institutions still exist and still seek to influence and exert
power, but can the time-space contexts of analogue institutions properly func-
tion and express themselves in the dominating context of digitality? If so, how
might this happen? If not, then what can replace them?
In Chapter Five I turn to the economy of digitality. Here, Harvey’s idea of
‘time-space compression’ becomes significant, but these dimensions take on
dramatically new features through digitality. Here I develop the concept of
‘outward’ and ‘inward’ globalisation to articulate the process. ‘Outward’ glo-
balisation is the processes of colonisation of the physical space of the planet by
markets, production, the sourcing of raw materials and so on. This ‘outward’
aspect approached its spatial limits by the 1990s with the incorporation of the
BRIC economies into global capitalism. What Harvey termed ‘flexible accu-
mulation’ is rendered increasingly digital and is shown here to have become an
immensely more powerful element of the capital relation than he recognised.
This is expressed as the pervasive commodification that is able to penetrate and
colonise (not least through the creation of a new and limitless virtual space),
almost every register of life in an ‘inward’ globalisation process that inserts
commodification into increasing spheres of existence, and simultaneously
introduces a collective dependence upon digital technologies that facilitate,
connect and super-charge the global economy of digitality. It is the process of
‘inward’ globalisation that makes possible the hitherto impossible feats of col-
lective social communication such as Facebook, Uber, Google, Weibo, and so
on. This form of digitality has become everyday practice that grows rapidly to
drive digital capitalism and shape digital culture toward unknowable and un-
controllable directions. This process of ‘inward’ globalisation was enabled, and
its path smoothed, by the ideological triumph of the ‘Californian Ideology’—
mid-1960s, part-hippy, part-business ‘alternative thinking’ that promulgated
the idea that human freedom can best be attained not through the institutions
of modern politics, but through networked computers.
Chapter Six, titled ‘the culture of digitality’, will consider the cultural mani-
festations of digitality stemming from its roots in the convergence of the Cali-
fornian Ideology with neoliberal political economy. It does this through a
reflection on the works of two theorists, Lev Manovich and Bernard Stiegler,
who have sought to express the specific effects of the digital upon cultural pro-
duction and consumption. I underpin my critique of these approaches with
an analysis of the major theorisations of culture within the context of late-
capitalism, from Adorno and Horkheimer, Guy Debord, Raymond Williams,
10 The Condition of Digitality

Zygmunt Bauman and Jean Baudrillard. Their works were (and continue to be)
important, but their perspectives no longer suffice as critique of the production
of culture today, because although there was significant analytical purchase
when they were written, they were conceived in a pre-digital time, and with
analogue-dependent theories guiding their logic.
In Chapter Seven I apply my understandings of Jaeggi’s theory of aliena-
tion to a specifically digital context. This particular conjunction is new and
exploratory and is aided and strengthened by the theoretical framework that
builds throughout the book. It argues that alienation, a concept that Jaeggi
concedes appears as ‘problematic and in some respects outmoded’28, is in fact
brilliantly rescued by her from oblivion. The aim here is to connect pre-digital
Critical Theory with a theory of digitality which makes salient the depth and
extent of digitally-driven alienation and shows it to be the most significant
issue of our age.

Notes
1
Jean-François Lyotard (1979) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p.73.
2
David Harvey (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
3
Microsoft, for example, was already a billion-dollar corporation, and was
supplying the software for the industry and consumer sides of the hardware
(desktop) boom.
4
From Amazon webpage for Postmodernity: https://www.amazon.de/­
Condition-Postmodernity-Enquiry-Origins-Cultural/dp/0631162941
5
Fredric Jameson (1979) ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’ Social Text
1, 130–148, p.139.
6
David Harvey (2013) The Ways of the World. London: Profile Books.
7
David Harvey (2010) The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism.
New York: Profile Books.
8
David Harvey (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford
­University Press.
9
David Harvey (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
10
David Harvey (2014) Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism.
New York: Profile Books.
11
Teresa Hayter, David Harvey (eds.) (1994) The Factory and the City: The
Story of the Cowley Automobile Workers in Oxford. Thomson Learning
12
See interview in the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation website: https://­
rosaluxspba.org/en/david-harvey-we-have-to-call-off-this-capitalist-­
urbanization-dynamic/
13
David Harvey (1982) The Limits to Capital Oxford: Blackwell.
 Introduction: A World That Has Changed, But Has Not Changed 11

14
Chris Paris (1985). ‘Book Reviews: The Limits to Capital, by David Harvey.’
The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 21(2), 279–283, p.279.
15
Harvey, Postmodernity, p.vii.
16
Ibid., pp.201–308.
17
Joyce Kolko (1988) Restructuring the World Economy. New York: Pantheon
Books.
18
Here I draw from a number of philosophical-anthropology sources, primarily
Arnold Gehlen and Jacques Ellul.
19
A good example of such ‘fields of specialisation’ theorising we see in Gal-
loway, Thacker and Wark’s Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and
Mediation (2013) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. All three, Wark
especially, would see themselves as being influenced by Marxism’s many
strands. However, the book and its ‘three inquiries’ is no inquiry at all. It
begins the Introduction by claiming that ‘Today such a theophany [God-
like presence] of media finds its expression in the culture industry and its
awestruck reverence toward new media, digital networks, and all things
computational’ (pp.13–14). This much is true, but the authors then proceed
in their own chapters to say virtually nothing about how these phenomena
might be understood at their roots or resisted in their manifestations. We
have instead three chapters that seek above all to show the erudition of their
authors and their mastery of their field of specialisation. This is Jameson’s
‘ghettoization’ of theory in the field of media, and a real-world articula-
tion of the ‘postmodernity’ that Harvey dreads as an expression of political
thought and seeks to call out in his books.
20
Notable here is Bob Jessop, who for years has both developed and cri-
tiqued Harvey’s ‘space economy’ thesis in interesting and useful ways. See
for ­example, his ‘Spatial Fixes, Temporal Fixes, and Spatio-Temporal Fixes’
at https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/­
papers/jessop-spatio-temporal-fixes.pdf
21
See Noel Castree (2007) ‘David Harvey: Marxism, Capitalism and the Geo-
graphical Imagination’, New Political Economy, 12:1, 97–115, p.103.
22
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
London: Verso.
23
Laclau and Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p.24.
24
Harvey, Postmodernity, p.46.
25
Ibid., p.359.
26
Rahel Jaeggi (2014) Alienation. New York: Columbia University Press.
27
Wolfgang Streeck (2016) How Will Capitalism End? London: Verso.
28
Jaeggi, Alienation, p.xix.
 CH A PT ER 2

1989: David Harvey’s Postmodernity: The

Space Economy of Late Capitalism

I think we have stopped a lot of what needed stopping. And I hope we have
once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is lim-
ited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a
law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.
Ronald Reagan, Farewell Speech, 11 January 1989.

In July of 1989, in what would be the first of its three printings in a year, ­Blackwell
published David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the
Origins of Cultural Change.1 We can see now that it was an unusual book from
an unusual academic—and that it appeared at an unusual time. When his book
was published, Harvey was, or seemed to be, unexceptional. He had ­graduated
with a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1961 and so was an experi-
enced academic with five books and numerous other writings already behind
him. He was also a highly respected scholar within his field, writing and teach-
ing in the rarefied air of Oxford University. Harvey was also a Marxist. And
­Marxists in 1980s Britain were ‘the enemy within’, as Prime Minister ­Margaret
Thatcher had famously alleged, in reference to the also-allegedly Marxist-
dominated National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and other unions.2 For
the ­neoliberals in politics, in the academy and in the mainstream right-wing
press, who had established themselves in the political saddle over the course of
the 1980s, Marxists were tolerated as long as they remained obscure, confined
themselves to the universities, to speaking at symposia that few went to, or
writing books that not many bothered to read. But, in a general bucking of the
trend of books on Marxist economics and cultural theory, Postmodernity sold.
It was a best-seller. It became influential, and not only in the academy and left-
wing circles of the Anglosphere, but way beyond, with translations published of

How to cite this book chapter:

Hassan, R. 2020. The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of
Digital Life. Pp. 13–34. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.
org/10.16997/book44.b. License: CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0
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