Jody Dean's Communicative Capitalism: The Evolution of a Social Theory

Abstract

This review is devoted to the recent concept of communicative capitalism introduced by American social theorist and left activist Jodi Dean in 2002. Communicative capitalism is a political-economic formation in which the convergence of democracy, capitalism, network technologies, and media occurs. Under these new conditions, the primary democratic values materialize in networked communication technologies, which leads to a reliance of communicative capitalism on the exploitation of communication. This causes a radical shift in network communication: now the fact of "contributions” to the "circulation of content” is more significant than the content of a message. The review traces the evolution of Dean's conceptual framework, outlines key aspects and ideas which were used for its elaboration (e.g. the Lacanian concepts of jouissance and drive, Slavoj Zizek's "interpassivity” and "post-politics”, "whatever being” by Giorgio Agamben, "zero-institution” by Claude Levi-Strauss). The author concludes that modern world events and trends in online communication (Twitter and Facebook Revolutions, frames for profile pictures on Facebook, online petitions, surveys and hashtags, very popular accounts with large numbers of followers) make it possible to discern the high potential of the framework as an eminently applicable interdisciplinary theoretical lens and methodological tool.