<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">Thanks Sylvain for that paragraph from Fraser, there are definite similarities, however my dystopian vision is not quite as bucolic as her already dreary picture. While I do see that representation and semiotics have been increasingly flattened, a la Orwell and Marcuse, by a vast internalization of the apparatuses of oppression (in which "thought" is the (productive) thought of the (capitalist) Party), I do not think that hierarchy/class has gone away. Indeed, today thought is all about maintaining hierarchical society (capital is nature, capital is eternal, capital is information is nature, or, in a more pedestrian mode: human beings are naturally acquisitive and competitive, etc.) <i>and</i> advancing one's place in it by any means necessary. There is programming (the big Other, as distinct from the racial other, become self) but it is violent, competitive, hateful and alienating at the same time as it is cooperative, simpering and abject. Of course this is a huge generalization, but it sums up your average TV show or comments section on youtube. It is Bateson and Deleuze's schizophrenic become the capitalist norm -- one who struggles to negotiate hierarchical society while reproducing it.</span></font><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">Since no one else has yet taken up my question about internet understood in a post-fordist framework </span></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px; ">(What if it is all advertising?)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px; ">, I thought I would develop the point myself. The argument, which I sketched more thoroughly in my previous post is that in the context of virtuosity and the expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic by capital, sociality itself has become what I called advertisarial, a ceaseless waging of capitalized exploits designed to garner attention/value for oneself and one's capitalists. The micro-management of desire, the production of new needs, the capturing of the imagination all in order to induce behavioral shifts in others is no longer merely the provence of advertising but of human interactivity. From Smyth's claim in the Blindspot essay that all leisure time has become labor time to Virno's virtuosity we have seen aspects of this model for the capitalist overdetermination of apparently unremunerated time before, but we need to investigate its implications in the context of a discussion of radical media practice.</span></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">I'll make two points here:</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">1) If, as I have argued in the CMP, the means of representation have become the means of production, the questions of and models for political agency are radically transformed. Language and images are neither inside nor outside, they are part of the general intellect. We have seen that the general intellect was once largely held in common, increasingly it is being privatized, which is precisely the pre-condition of the real-subsumption of society by capital. The media themselves have become forms of capital. The means by which we most intimately know ourselves and our desires (our images and words) are themselves vectors of capitalization, intent upon converting our very life-process into surplus value (which is to say value for capital). Again, this, I think, is what Stiegler means by the proletarianization of the nervous system -- which would include pathways of feeling and thought. Our affective capacities are put to work in the social factory, and their product is alienated, which is to say it produces ever intensifying and ever accumulating dispossession as the dialectical antithesis of its production of unprecedented wealth.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">From a historical perspective, this encroachment on the means of representation indicates that the individual, itself a platform for sociality that developed with the rise of capitalism (as the subject for the market, the thought of the commodity), is defunct. It's an outmoded technology which still appears as a skeuomorph in updated techno-social apparatuses -- like films, games, romance and national politics -- for the purposes of providing a sense of familiarity and orientation, but it is no longer a viable, which is to say sustainable fantasy. This expiration is not necessarily a cause for lament. However, from a political perspective it means that within each concrete individual body there exists, in differing quantities and qualities, capitalist and non-capitalist striations or sectors. There are, to be a bit simplistic, aspects of desire that are programmed to produce practices that function in perfect accord with capitalist accumulation strategies and aspects of desire that are atavistic, or collectivist, utopian, communist or just plain lonely. In reality, of course, desire is more singular, but we are speaking of politics here and therefore necessarily of the abstract forms available for the conceptualization and deployment of concrete emergences. For the moment, allow me to put it thus: In <i>Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism</i> Lenin showed how imperialist dividends complicated class issues in England since so many people, otherwise part of the working class, got a share of the dividends of imperialism by clipping the coupons of their investments in racist, exploitative British enterprises. Today, this fractionalization is fully internalized, on our ipads built by Chinese slaves we feel like nobles, on the job market we are abjects: even the concrete individual is composed of class fractions.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">Of course this is still somewhat simplistic and also class specific as many never get to participate as an enfranchised global citizen in any aspect or moment of life. A more complex view is that we are the product of the world system and thus, everything we are has been made vis-a-vis globalization and thus bears the trace of the system in its entirety -- again in varying proportions. This is not to erase class, not in the least, however it suggests that just as A. Cesaire saw the European metropoles as the product of third world labor, we are all products of the global south. It is internal to our being. How does one inventory those relations and produce them as formations of solidarity rather than as disavowed residuum? <br></span></font><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">To add to my point about the shifting character of political actors that goes so far as to suggest that we can no longer think of actors but rather must think of vectors, I'll make a second observation:</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">2)A political intervention in the advertisarial relations that have this planet headed towards environmental armageddon requires not only revolutionary policy but revolutionary culture. This culture must take into account that for many on this planet armageddon is not the future but the now. My call here, which in ways is similar to Dean's and Deuze's concerns as expressed on this forum, is to politicize affective structures and practices, including and perhaps especially those we can control -- namely our own utterances. Of course to call them "our own" seems to contradict what I said earlier about the expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic, but it is here, precisely, that we confront one of the significant material contradictions of our time: who or what speaks in us? This question, which I shorthand using the phrase "the politics of the utterance," and which you can experience palpably right now, seems to me to insist that our idea making actively produce its solidarity with the dispossessed -- who and whatever they (we) might be. Furthermore, to insist upon the relevance of culture and cross-cultural transnational solidarity helps to avoid platform fetishism because it sees the internet not as set or collection of autonomous technologies, but as a historically emerged system of expropriative communication-organization built directly on older but nonetheless contemporaneous forms of inequality and embedded in the flesh of the world. </span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">All of which implies, that the internet is not all advertising, but neither is advertising all advertising. Marx himself saw capitalism as vampiric, and today's processes of capitalization are even more totalitarian, more widely distributed and more blood-sucking than in prior eras. Thus we recognize that capital still needs labor, and furthermore, that it wages war on many fronts to secure labor power, it's product. The refusal of capital's encroachment is itself a creative act. Perhaps we have only begun to glimpse what a total refusal might achieve.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">Un saludo,</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">Jon</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br></span></font></div><div><br><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></div></div></body></html>