<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear All, <div><br></div><div>Forgive the intrusion, especially as I, very regrettably for me, will not be at the Uppsala conference. However I want to say -- as someone who has been working on Marxist political economy of visuo-digital technologies for two decades now, and as someone who has never been friended or had a friend on face-book -- that neither of these practices provide any guarantee of radicalism. Even though it is arguable that representation itself has been fully subsumed by capital-logic and therefore that entry into the domain of representation is now always already a re-entry into networked expropriation structurally managed to increase the accumulation of capital and hence, necessarily, the abundance of dispossession, it is still not a given that to exist at the margins of representation or even beyond the horizons of the representable constitutes a revolution, or even a revolutionary. From the standpoint of existence, to not exist is not necessarily radical. Of course this void, occupied perhaps by the majority of humans on the planet (and undoubtedly by the majority of life), can, these days at least, only be posited from within representation and thus, it seems, from within capital. Imagine what it woud be like to not be on Facebook, to not be an academic, to not be enfranchised at least to some degree as a global citizen, etc.</div><div><br></div><div>Which is to assert two things: 1) All of us who are included in this sentence (in any way) are complicit with the production and reproduction of capitalist society and 2) we must strain the limits of discourse far beyond the academico-scientific grammars; which is to say that to <i>seriously</i> embark on the project under discussion on this list serve, one must wage constant war on meaning itself. Meaning that what we need to seek is the non-sensical, impossible, foreclosed, beyonds and futures of actually existing semiosis. In answer to the question in the subject line of this email, it's an aesthetic project, amigos, and also a social one -- finding ways to graft our energies and attentions to the struggles of specters. It is not and never could be merely an economic and/or technical one and be anything other than a radically cynical endeavor.</div><div><br></div><div>Reading Marx is never a bad idea, I completely agree, and there are things to learn from our romance with the actually existing Italians. But an analysis that does not understand race, gender, language-group, sexuality, nation etc., as themselves <i>political-economic</i> categories (and not merely analytical categories beyond the domain of political economy) -- that is as real abstractions that themselves operate as engines of production and reproduction -- will find itself writing a technical manual for the overthrow of the state that will serve only aspirant bureaucrats. This is in no way to belittle the brilliant work and brilliance of those who will convene in Uppsala. Only to say that with this project there arises aesthetic, cultural, representational and affective demands that the language of political economy, even Marxist political economy, will be at great pains to execute. It is not time for the discipline of communications theory to absorb the world, rather it is time for the world to absorb the discipline. We must bring the world, the myriad and singular struggles of peoples, and those parts of our distributed selves which are perhaps of the world, into the space of our nascent discipline and run the risk of destroying it. Otherwise the lived time of the global south, all the unremunerated living labor of survival performed by the unrepresented and unrepresentable billions, serves, as it does for the global society, merely to produce a writing surface for us experts too, a virtual place for us to encode our contemplations about leaving facebook from the safety of our offices.</div><div><br></div><div>I think back to Negri's early work where he spent some time considering Marx's class hatred. A significant dose of animus to animate the theory. Hatred, rage, outrage, indignation, disgust -- we can use these things, indeed, I would say we must.</div><div><br></div><div>With these elements in mind, as well as their utopian corollaries,</div><div><br></div><div>Jon</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Jonathan Beller</div><div>Professor</div><div>Humanities and Media Studies</div><div>Critical and Visual Studies</div><div>Pratt Institute</div><div><a href="mailto:jbeller@pratt.edu">jbeller@pratt.edu</a></div><div>718-636-3573 (office fax)<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre; "> </span></div><span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre; "> </span></span></div></span></span></span></span></span><span></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><span></span></span></div></div></body></html>