Steve Jobs, Romantic Individualism, and the Desire for Good Capitalism

Abstract

The Hollywood biographical drama Steve Jobs retells a story that first emerged in the 1980s, a story that over the decades has repeatedly offered the public details about Jobs' oracular marketing style, rock-star arrogance, and business successes, debates about the exact nature of his "genius," and a fascination with his bad behaviors.This essay explains how that story and its repetition tell us more about the culture than the man.Building on previous work about the rise of "romantic individualism" as an organizing mechanism for high-tech capitalism, this essay focuses on the latest outpouring of discourse about Jobs since his death in 2011, analyzing both its continuities with past cultural forms and what it is about the present moment that has intensified the discourse-especially the post-2008 crisis of confidence in financial capitalism.Among other things, the tale offers the appealing, if ultimately unrealistic, hope of a capitalism with integrity, of a one-percenter who deserves it. International Journal of Communication 9(2015)Steve Jobs and the Desire for Good Capitalism 3107 What are we to make of this?One of the key points of cultural studies was that, while the popular matters, the goal of analysis is neither to celebrate nor sneer, but to try to carefully tease out the causes and consequences of cultural forms, in a particular historical context for particular individuals and for the society, while allowing for their multivalent possibilities.The popular is never monolithic or selfexplanatory.Neither dominance nor resistance is simple or singular.2 In The Net Effect (Streeter, 2011), I argued that the countercultural inflections of computing that played a role in the emergence of the microcomputer and the Internet had a specific form, a set of cultural tropes and habits that I call romantic individualism.That form, in turn, has become part of the legitimating apparatus of contemporary capitalism-while also in some contexts leaving space for alternative views and possibilities.3 I hope to show in this essay that much of what has been attributed to Steve Jobs, like the emphasis on technology as a medium for individual creativity, art, and expression, the oracular statements framed in plain or informal language, and the radical individualism displayed in both his public and personal life, neatly expresses the broader tendencies described in The Net Effect.The goal here is not to view the outpouring of storytelling and discussion around Jobs as false consciousness. 4 Rather, the point is to investigate the causes and consequences of the outpouring, of what Foucault might have called an "incitement to discourse" (Foucault, 2012, pp.15-35), 5 to explore the sociopolitical work that it is performing.The talk about Jobs is as much effect as cause, and it tells us more about our culture than about the person.2 Whether in its Gramscian tendencies, which emphasized the complex, processual nature of hegemony, or its Foucauldian tendencies, which emphasized the dispersed capillaries of power, cultural studies has always maintained that resistance does not emerge simply from oppression or a singular identity, and dominance does not happen because of a singular obvious mechanism of power such as class or ownership.As Stuart Hall (1998) put it, "Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle.It is the arena of consent and resistance" (p.453).3 For example, in the early 1990s, Internet-related romantic individualism played a role in reviving neoliberal economic policies worldwide (Streeter, 2011, pp.119-137), whereas in the late 1990s, it played a role in calling into question some of neoliberalism's core assumptions, particularly regarding intellectual property and proprietary corporate behavior (Streeter, 2011, pp.138-167).4 Repeated journalistic errors and misstatements (particularly overattribution to Jobs of inventions) are significant but should be understood as symptoms of underlying frames or patterns of interpretation, not merely as tools that pull the wool over the eyes of gullible audiences.5 Ever since Raymond Williams (1961) introduced the concept of "structures of feeling," diverse scholarly literatures have probed the relations of subjectivity, feelings, and affect to economic structure.Approaches range from Frankfurt school critical theory (Illouz, 2007) to affect theory (e.g., Chaput, 2010;Papacharissi, 2014; Ticineto Clough & Halley, 2007) to questions of authenticity and its ironies (Banet-Weiser, 2012) to Foucauldian biopolitics (Lemke, 2001).The discipline of sociology has long harbored a tradition of the sociology of emotions (e.g., Collins, 1990).My approach makes two contributions to the discussion: (1) an integration of traditional humanist approaches with a contemporary interest in the politics of passions and affect and (2) illustrations of the ways that passions have a history and a form, that contemporary formations of affect have connections to past cultural forms, that they have a traceable history with a causal relation to the present.Rather than exclusively trying to explain what is unique about the present, my work finds insight in connections with the past.

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