The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital - Softcover

Beller, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745337309 ISBN 13: 9780745337302

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Written as a wake-up call to the field of media studies, The Message is Murder analyses the violence bound up in the everyday functions of digital media. At its core is the concept of 'computational capital' - the idea that capitalism itself is a computer, turning qualities into quantities, and that the rise of digital culture and technologies under capitalism should be seen as an extension of capitalism's bloody logic. Engaging with Borges, Turing, Claude Shannon, Hitchcock and Marx, this book tracks computational capital to reveal the lineages of capitalised power as it has restructured representation, consciousness and survival in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, It argues that the global intensification of inequality relies on the discursive, informatic and screen-mediated production of social difference Ultimately The Message is Murder makes the case for recognising media communications across all platforms - books, films, videos, photographs and even language itself - as technologies of political economy, entangled with the social contexts of a capitalism that is inherently racial, gendered and genocidal.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Beller is professor of humanities and media studies and director of the graduate program of media studies at Pratt Institute, in New York.
 

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The Message is Murder

Substrates of Computational Capital

By Jonathan Beller

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2018 Jonathan Beller
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-3730-2

Contents

Introduction, 1, 
PART I: INFORMATICS OF INSCRIPTION/INSCRIPTION OF INFORMATICS, 
1. Gramsci's Press: Why We Game, 19, 
2. A Message from Borges: The Informatic Labyrinth, 32, 
3. Alan Turing's Self-Defense: On Not Castrating the Machines, 44, 
4. Shannon/Hitchcock: Another Method for the Letters, 57, 
5. The Internet of Value, by Karl Marx: Information as Cosmically Distributed Alienation, 76, 
PART II: PHOTO-GRAPHOLOGY, PSYCHOTIC CALCULUS, INFORMATIC LABOR, 
6. Camera Obscura After All: The Racist Writing with Light, 99, 
7. Pathologistics of Attention, 115, 
8. Prosthetics of Whiteness: Drone Psychosis, 137, 
9. The Capital of Information: Fractal Fascism, Informatic Labor and M-I-M', 158, 
Appendix From the Cinematic Mode of Production to Computational Capital: An Interview conducted by Ante Jeric and Diana Meheik for Kulturpunk, 175, 
Notes, 190, 
Index, 203, 

CHAPTER 1

Gramsci's Press: Why We Game

Anyone who makes a prediction has in fact a "programme" for whose victory he is working, and his prediction is precisely an element contributing to that victory ... because reality is the product of the operation of human will to the society of things (the machine operator's to his machine).

— Antonio Gramsci

An injunction to game

Communicative acts are directly or indirectly inscribed on desubjectified bodies. The extent of this desubjectification varies, but it follows racial, gendered, financial and national logics, among others; and in many cases approaches or achieves radical exclusion, extreme dis-mediation and social death. Surprisingly perhaps, computation, understood now in accord with the logic of media convergence to be the ultimate medium of communication, is not simply ancillary to this process of inscribing the messages of others on living bodies, but the very means by which this process has achieved a new level of efficiency, inexorability and hegemony.

Simply put, global communication and information processing utilizes planetary dispossession as its substrate. All of our high-tech communiqués are written on the backs of modern slaves. This book included.

How did this situation, in which it is statistically likely that your very utterance (whatever you might say) not only depends upon radical dispossession but also reinforces impoverishment and environmental degradation, come to pass? The Message is Murder endeavors to sketch an answer.

The strategy of The Message is Murder is a selective decoding of various moments of encoding: a consideration of the tips of various icebergs in what is very loosely a field called media studies that when considered together begin to tell a different history of four seemingly separate domains: capitalism, racialization, gender formation and information.

Western Marxism's poor record in relation to decolonization, blackness, critical race studies and queer activism, and the seemingly autonomous emergence of cybernetics and computation make these ostensibly separate sectors of social transformation known as capital, race, gender and informatics unlikely bedfellows at first glance. Capital, race, gender and information have been most often considered separately and in relative if not complete isolation from one another. But a second look informed by anti-racist, feminist, queer, postcolonial and indigenous struggles to understand that what is called "convergence" indicates not just media convergence (the fact that audio, video and text can all be digitized), but rather a total informatic convergence in which financial, biometric, and computational operations are increasingly unified. This convergence has a brutal history as well as dire implications.

A near total and becoming totalitarian convergence comes about because what we currently call digital culture is actually the second digital culture built atop a first order digitization by a racial capitalism that included colonialism, slavery, hetero-patriachy and industrialization. The commodity form, which imposed an exchange value on every use-value, was already the incipient digitization of the bios. In dictating the exact dimensions of the slave ship cargo hold during the Middle Passage and in pricing the slave on the Mississippi auction block, this digitization of living persons and their qualities lay its representational code upon bodies. Price, it turns out, was a digital message, though not the only one. The horrifying example of the slave ship's hold, designed for maximum profits reveals the imposition of digital metrics on bodies, and here specifically on African bodies, on black bodies, with flagrant disregard for their person. It shows the convergence of a digital calculus on space, on movement, and on bodies and the ability of this calculus to marginalize or eliminate any sympathetic relation. This convergence results in an impossible-to-apprehend unmaking of black bodies, their reduction, as Hortense Spillers writes to "flesh," and their reconstitution by an unimaginable history of violence that gets reified as "race." The media of commodification was also a message. Yes, money clearly, but so much else too that we are still at pains to decode.

What happens in the digital ether is not, as we have been sold, immaterial, fully abstract, or free, but rather ineluctably linked to the material conditions of the info-sphere's emergence and sustenance, and that in a way that includes all those externalities known (and indeed, unknown) as "the environment." This "environment," an externality from the standpoint of capitalism (Sean Cubitt, as we shall see shortly, has taught us to understand "the environment" as itself the symptom of a colonial logic), may and does take the form of forests, rivers, animals and people. Logically then, the included excluded of computational capital process may include not only forests and peoples but sectors of your mind that very possibly you thought were somehow exempt from financialized digitization. The breaking news is that they're not. Vast swathes of our outsides and of our insides are within the enclosure of computational capital's number crunch. That capture too is part of the message of The Message is Murder. In the domains traversed by messages, we play the odds or we get played.

The discrete laws of chance

Metrics are developed in relation to concrete practices with concrete goals in mind. The continuous amortization of consciousness through its sedimented encryption in the very techniques and instruments of rationality, not only as commodities for direct sale but as factories, machines, archives, the digital computer, data profiles, likes is the condition by which subjective practices are converted into fixed capital and their measure taken. If the factory floor, the slave ship's manifest, the spread sheet, the stock exchange and also the book, the cinema, television and electronic computation testify that the last seven centuries have approached a state in which, the medium is (the media are), in the most general sense capital, then so too is the message. Generally speaking then, messages are determinations of capital.

McLuhan's pithy phraseological condensation gave us a premonition that from a systems point of view, the hard distinction between medium and message was fast evaporating. A growing...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745337309
• ISBN 13: 9780745337302
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar