The Coming of Post-reflexive Society: Commodification and Language in Digital Capitalism

Language is a unique aspect of human communication because it can be used to discuss itself in its own terms. For this reason, human societies potentially have superior capacities of co-ordination, reflexive self-correction, and innovation than other animal, physical or cybernetic systems. However, this analysis also reveals that language is interconnected with the economically and technologically mediated social sphere and hence is vulnerable to abstraction, objectification, reification, and therefore ideology – all of which are antithetical to its reflexive function, whilst paradoxically being a fundamental part of it. In particular, in capitalism, language is increasingly commodified within the social domains created and affected by ubiquitous communication technologies. The advent of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ implicates exchangeable forms of thought (language) as the fundamental commodities of this emerging system. The historical point at which a ‘knowledge economy’ emerges, then, is the critical point at which thought itself becomes a commodified ‘thing’, and language becomes its “objective” means of exchange. However, the processes by which such commodification and objectification occurs obscures the unique social relations within which these language commodities are produced. The latest economic phase of capitalism – the knowledge economy – and the obfuscating trajectory which accompanies it, we argue, is destroying the reflexive capacity of language particularly through the process of commodification. This can be seen in that the language practices that have emerged in conjunction with digital technologies are increasingly non-reflexive and therefore less capable of self-critical, conscious change.

Pattern-based analysis of EAI languages : the case of the business modelling language

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a challenging area that is attracting growing attention from the software industry and the research community. A landscape of languages and techniques for EAI has emerged and is continuously being enriched with new proposals from different software vendors and coalitions. However, little or no effort has been dedicated to systematically evaluate and compare these languages and techniques. The work reported in this paper is a first step in this direction. It presents an in-depth analysis of a language, namely the Business Modeling Language, specifically developed for EAI. The framework used for this analysis is based on a number of workflow and communication patterns. This framework provides a basis for evaluating the advantages and drawbacks of EAI languages with respect to recurrent problems and situations.

Impediments to Cosmopolitan Engagement: Technology and Late-Modern Cosmopolitanism

What characterises late modern variety of cosmopolitanism from its classical predecessors is the inherent connection between cosmopolitanism and technology. Technology enables a vital dimension of the cosmopolitan experience – to move beyond the cosmopolitan imagination to enable active, direct engagement with other cultures. Different types of technologies contribute to cosmopolitan practice but in this paper we focus on a specific set of these enabling technologies: technologies which play a crucial role in regulating the free movement of people and populations. We briefly examine how three of the great surveillance states of the 20th century – Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic – used hightech solutions in pursuing an anti-cosmopolitanism. We suggest that in the period from 2001 to the present, important elements of the cosmopolitan ethos are being closed down, and once again high-tech is intimately connected to this moment. The increasing (and proposed) use of identity cards, biometric identification systems, ITS and GIS all work to make the globalised world much harder to traverse and inhibit the full expression and experience of cosmopolitanism. The result of these trends may be that the type of cosmopolitan sentiment exhibited in western countries is an ersatz, emptied out variety with little political-ethical robustness.