The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital - Softcover

Beller, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745337309 ISBN 13: 9780745337302

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Beller is a revered film theorist, culture critic and mediologist. He is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the Pratt Institute and Director of the Graduate Program in Media Studies. He is the author of The Cinematic Mode of Production (UPNE, 2006), Acquiring Eyes (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006) and The Message is Murder (Pluto, 2017).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 awareness of mediation suggested that beyond any particular affordance of an instance of communication, a systemic shift in the sense ratios and in the organization of society was brought about by any new transmission process — and that such ecological changes were ultimately more significant than any message in particular. "The medium is the message," sounded mysterious because it flew in the face of hermeneutics, referentiality and common sense. It heralded a new ontology from a future profoundly organized by media. The phrase was not just a historical insight into print and the epistemic and sensual instantiations of print culture suddenly made analytically available by the waning of print with the rise of electronic culture. It was also a prediction and therefore a program. Media platform shifts and the proliferation of new media suddenly made it apparent that human societies were, in Regis Debray's significant term, "mediological," and that as had been noticed with increasing frequency by philosophers, psychoanalysts and language theorists, there was no im-mediate access to anything like reality or truth. McLuhan's brilliant intuition at the dawn of the electronic age was that the long dominant and now disappearing print-media and, more particularly, the segmentation of language by moveable type lay the groundwork for shifts in perception, literary form, industrialization, finance, subjectivity and the scientific revolution. This insight into the consequences of breaking continuous flow into differentiable segments insisted upon and convincingly demonstrated the widespread collateral effects of a medium precisely at a moment when print was becoming one medium among many. This constellation of socio-cultural shifts identified by McLuhan's sudden awareness of the specificity of print is undeniable, but was it really print, as McLuhan gloriously argues in his consideration of "the Gutenberg Galaxy" that got linear history steaming forward? Or was print already an emergent medium of capital?

We are sympathetic with McLuhan's effort to give a non-capitalist accounting, but we also recognize that one must account for capitalism to do this well. Thus attention must be directed to capitalist mediation. The summation of subjective activity (sensuous labor) that produced the commodity (any commodity) became a medium not only for capital, but also for the development of capital. Labor merged with communication and workers' energy was absorbed wholesale. But from the standpoint of capital expansion, the particulars could be damned. Like Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, capital's exchange-value was "content indifferent" so long as it increased. This relationship of indifference to content, shared between base 2 communication and capital as they shattered and fragmented traditional social media is no mere analogy. In considering the general formula for capital, M-C-M' (where M'>M), we will see that McLuhan's most famous phrase, "the medium is the message," was made precisely of and for that medium, namely capital, even if he did not recognize it.

In a society organized and indeed governed by profit algorithms, lived social formations and technologies also lose their hard distinction. If it be granted that boundaries between media and message along with those between technology and social form blur, then this dissolution of objects and agents also applies to genre problems of theory and narrative. For if, as argued here, the medium is at once capital and the message, then logically the message as capital poses a real dilemma for revolutionary consciousness and revolution. Theory must seek to outmaneuver the programmed logistics of the sign aware, as it must be, that its principle affordances have been subsumed by capitalist production. With this problem made explicit, the reader of Message should consider themself hereby warned that some odd passages await them — indiscrete passages at odds with the laws of chance.

The general shift in the modality of the dispensation of sensuous labor time — its emerging combinations with semiotics, informatics and computation that colonize language and thought — requires a poetico-theoretical exploration of social-media (written with a hyphen) and of the new world-historical situation of the global organization of production and value extraction. The anti-capitalist account considers distributed production, the re-organization of space, time, bodies, senses and consciousness, new modes of exploitation and new strategies of accumulation, layered, it must be said on top of the old modes and strategies, some of which have been conveniently brought up to date. Brought up to date, at least, from the perspective of "The Lords of Things as They Are" — as "the father of cybernetics," Norbert Wiener, designated the ruling class in 1948. The persistent forms of domination that underlie new media and its cybernetics include settler colonialism, plantations, factory work, military and prison industrial complexes, migrant labor, forced migration, detention centers, camps, contemporary forms of enslavement, genocides. What type of poetry can disrupt all that?

Among the foundational insights of early cybernetics and information theory was the understanding of historical social relations in terms of systems of communication. In his search for insights into feedback and recursivity, Wiener observed numerous natural and social phenomena including among his observations of nature the mongoose and its battle with the rattler. From his social observations he clearly grasped the necessity of the control of communication as a means of governance:

Thus small, closely knit communities have a very considerable measure of homeostasis; and this whether they are highly literate communities in a civilized country or villages of primitive savages. Strange and even repugnant as the customs of many barbarians may seem to us, they generally have a very definite homeostatic value, which is part of the function of anthropologists to interpret. It is only in the large community, where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, from private criticism by laws of libel and the possession of the means of communication, that ruthlessness can reach its most sublime levels. Of all of the anti-homeostatic factors in society, the control of communication is the most effective and important.

Ruthlessness, then, is a means to volatility, and volatility (anti-homeostatic opportunity) is to be correlated with the centralized control of communication. The Lords of Things as They Are do not leave chance to chance. We will see this ruthlessness again in Borges, and it goes a long way to explaining anti-poetic phenomena such as ISIS, POTUS and derivative finance. Necessarily, then, this text before you, entering, as it must into nothing less than a regime of communication, is also a negotiation of practices of inscription. Ye olde poético is upon us, like it or not, for the discursive field is increasingly organized by algorithms of chance management. Utterance, positioned as standing reserve by ambient computation (the electronic replacement of homogenous segmentation in print culture), scripted in advance, generative like much of metabolism itself of swathes of data and meta-data for capture, is largely programmed for capitalist harvest. The book worth reading, sentenced to serve as an advertisement for itself, must seek to do more than merely to accomplish its own turnover.

The processes of inscription, description, prescription, subscription, ascription, conscription, layered and intercalated with the older techniques of expropriation and control and common to all forms of textualization, were for much of the twentieth century, generally understood as more or less connected to institutionalized practices of writing (pedagogy, the canon, the press, ideology, the law), but are today to be seen as at once informatic and directly related to digital technologies. Digitization, and more explicitly capitalist digitization, already begun by means of the commodity form and double entry bookkeeping, explodes to subsume all prior analogue mediations. We are still living through this mathematical and indeed political process and any analytic endeavor to take the measure of this result must also take the measure of its own strategy of engagement with the informatic field. "In every from of society there is a particular [branch of] production which determines the position and importance of all the others, and the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine those in all other branches." Concisely and in accord with their own financial interests, the business pages of today's "newspapers" identify as ascendant that "particular [branch of] production," that is definitive in Marx's sense, as "Tech." Of "Tech" we may observe that "the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine those in all other branches." The tech industry is in fact the media industry and looking at the business pages with this in mind reveals that almost every story in the typical business section of the New York Times is in one way or another about media. Increasingly this is true of almost every story in the New York Times. As if in unconscious confirmation of McLuhan, media is constantly reporting on itself in order to say the message is the media. This fact underscores that computational media have become the command and control platform for all other industries and indeed for social life. We remind ourselves that this medium of information management inexorably functions through the writing and unwriting of 1s and 0s: through the production and reproduction of writing and of other writing machines — very possibly including ourselves. Weiner's prescient comparison between machinery that could learn and self-reproduce and "a virus [that] guides into its own form other molecules of the same virus out of the tissues and juices of the host" in 1961 meant that the writing of 1's and 0s, implied the production of machinery that could both learn and reproduce itself out of what chanced by. Because we know that computation has saturated life in all its pores, and because we know that computation is the sine qua non of contemporary financialization — a financialization that has also colonized life — we observe that such viral machinery, with a capacity to learn through accumulation, storage and retrieval of knowledge has expanded to absorb writing and all other social practice. Who or what wrote that program?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Message is Murder by Jonathan Beller. Copyright © 2018 Jonathan Beller. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745337309
• ISBN 13: 9780745337302
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224