<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; 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: 0; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; 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; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; 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; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; 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; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; 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><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">Hi all, same drill, Trebor, etc.</div><div><br></div><div>Very happy to be a part of this discussion group / conference and my sincere thanks to Trebor for including me among the participants.</div><div>My current interests beyond <i>The Cinematic Mode of Production</i> and <i>Acquiring Eyes</i> have to do with thinking through media technologies themselves as imbricated in the histories of colonialism/imperialism/empire as well as gender and racial formations. Technologies, frozen under what Allen Feldman has termed "platform fetishism" often are not legible as products of the lived social mediations that are the conditions of possibility of our "media." The practices and histories, which themselves constitute the appearance, uses and significance of various technologies, are then seemingly frozen into the apparatus and for most practical purposes rendered invisible. Thus the utilization of media quite often seems like a far more autonomous (and thus ahistorical) exercise (a user plus a value-neutral technology) than it actually is. How to make the playground pulse with the struggles that underpin, situate and overdetermine our very presence (virtual or otherwise) in this, our space-time-now.</div><div><br></div><div>K. Am also interested in ye ole real subsumption of society by capital and the expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic capacities of the species (that would be us, I guess.) Two main aspects here: the role of visual and audiophonic media in the deliverance (in both senses) of this emergent discursive situation. Shouldn't we consider further that with the rise of photography and phonography language became one writable medium among others (and was thereby relativized and demoted). Shouldn't also, all of the discourse theory of the 20th century be rethought in this light? Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Post-structuralism -- all artifact of new modalities of mediation. Second, the situation of writing now: not from the point of view of those of us who fill out forms all day long but from those (parts) of us who are looking to crack the code(s). This is where I am very interested in the work of so many of you on this list. I am looking forward to learning more about the extraoridnary things people are thinking and doing. For my part, I will try to direct my comments in a way that explores the implications for the kinds of writing and speaking we do, which is to say the politics of our own practice. Don't all our locals, petty or otherwise, bear the signature of the globopolis? What then might a geopolitical pedagogy of the oppressed look like?</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Looking forward,</div><div><br></div><div>jon</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Jonathan Beller</div><div>Professor </div><div>Humanities and Media Studies</div><div>and 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 fax</div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; "><br></span></font></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br><div><div>On Jun 8, 2009, at 5:05 PM, Julian Kücklich wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>Hi all,<br><br>I have been encouraged by Trebor and Biella to chime in on what is<br>already quite an impressive discussion about play and labour on the<br>interwebz, and I also feel compelled to add my two cents to the stakes<br>because I've written a few bits and pieces on what I call playbour ---<br>mostly within the digital games production nexus, but also in other<br>pockets of post-productive living (I am painfully aware that the most<br>extensive piece of writing that I refer to above, my dissertation on<br>deludology, is still not available to public scrutiny, which I will<br>rectify at the earliest convenience --- meanwhile, if you like, take a<br>look at playability.de/pub for some of the published extracts from<br>that).<br><br>But let me unpack.<br><br>The transformation that Trebor refers to in his introductory piece may<br>have its roots online but it is quite evident to all of us that it has<br>now spilled over the confines of the virtual and seeped into the very<br>fabric of the actual, the material, the tangible. Everywhere we look<br>--- be it journalism, the wretched creative industries (which<br>encompass everything from designing bubble gum wrappers to making new<br>drugs), the financial markets, or the production of physical goods, it<br>seems increasingly ludicrous to pay people for their productive labour<br>when production has become almost entirely autonomous of the economic<br>and political contexts in which it appeared to be so firmly inscribed.<br>The latest crisis is just a symptom of a loss of orientation in a<br>world where the established models provided by Marx, Weber and Smith<br>do not provide guidance anymore.<br><br>So it's not just a question of value, but also a question of values, a<br>distinction that is increasingly difficult to uphold in a world where<br>the value of a product or a company is determined by how compatible it<br>is to the values of its users (think facebook, or twitter). It seems<br>to me that what was of value in the pre-digital age was the discrete,<br>packaged and self-contained product, often manufactured through a<br>process that could itself be broken down into discrete, packaged and<br>self-contained steps. In the post-productive age value has shifted to<br>the stream, the continuous, the Flood (a metaphor borrowed from the<br>video game Halo), and these streams are itself generated through<br>messy, continuous, excessive (call them biopolitical, if you will)<br>processes.<br><br>And I am not just talking about the<br>snorting-coke-off-a-naked-hookers-ass world of advertising and design<br>here, but also about software production, clothes manufacturing, and<br>food processing, all of which have become nomadic, following the lure<br>of free-trade agreements, cheap labour, and the availability of tax<br>breaks and materials. It's the Flood, all right, and what it leaves<br>behind is the flotsam and jetsam of globalization, along with homo<br>sacer in its most wretched, abject form, stripped of identity,<br>mobility, and spirit. So it's not all good. And crucially, of course,<br>the temporarily sustainable forms of post-productive life, the<br>twittering, flickring, friendfeeding multitude is entirely dependent<br>on the destruction of human life as we know it.<br><br>But let's take a step back from this dystopian vision for a moment and<br>talk about games. Importantly, I think, the internet and the video<br>game are both products of the Cold War military-industrial complex,<br>which has structured the way we live today to a large extent. They are<br>both posty-scarcity media, developed in university labs flush with<br>military money and that is the message that it took them 50 years to<br>impart. To be fair, packet switching and efficient subroutines (which<br>were necessary to fit game code on small chips) both follow the logic<br>of scarcity, but in their teleology, their technosocial impetus, both<br>of these media followed a logic of abundance. The game, which is both<br>larger and smaller, older and younger, than the internet, had the<br>advantage of drawing on a tradition of play, which has always adhered<br>to the logic of the potlatch, of "pure waste" (Caillois), and it<br>infused the internet, and then the world wide web with what I have<br>called an "ideology of play."<br><br>I have written about the ideology of play on this list before, so I<br>won't go into much detail now. The concept is neither novel nor<br>complex, it just provides a convenient handle on some stuff that I am<br>struggling with both in my life and my work (if this is a distinction<br>that still makes sense). What is important to bear in mind is that<br>play --- in its rarefied, unadulterated form, which probably never<br>existed, except in the minds of cultural theorists who never set foot<br>into a casino --- is autotelic and has no end than the one it finds in<br>itself. So it is by definition unproductive, and even gambling is<br>ultimately a zero-sum game. And since there is no reward in play it<br>demands that players devote themselves to the game fully and<br>unreservedly --- lest they be labelled spoilsports, cheaters or<br>triflers.<br><br>It seems to me that this is the logic (post-Aristotelian, for sure,<br>but still a logic) is what governs the processes of production and<br>distribution on the internet, and increasingly in all other domains of<br>life, as commerce, art, communication, transport, sex, food, etc.,<br>transform themselves into digital expressions. So we are no longer in<br>the realm or era of production but in that of pollination, to use a<br>Stieglerian phrase. This of course raises the question of<br>remuneration, but this might be too thorny an issue to tackle at the<br>end of this long and rambling missive. So I will leave that to less<br>frazzled minds than mine to sort out.<br><br>So what can I offer to this discussion apart from a rather<br>self-indulgent meditation on the nature of play? Maybe this: 1) The<br>playground has become a factory, but the factory has become a<br>playground, so the logic of production does no longer apply. 2)<br>Resistance is futile but cheating is possible. 3) If we want to<br>understand the rules of this new game, we will have to become players<br>ourselves. 4) Playing the game means wagering everything but because<br>of 2) we can bend the rules to our advantage and come out not<br>necessarily with more but with something else. 5) "After the game is<br>before the game" (Sepp Herberger).<br><br>Julian.<br><br><br>2009/6/8 <<a href="mailto:trebor@thing.net">trebor@thing.net</a>>:<br><blockquote type="cite">Good morning all,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Life is not all about labor in the traditional sense but what creates<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">economic value is continuously changing and expanding.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Jonathan Beller describes this as the financialization of everyday life<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">(our attention, imagination, creativity, and faith). This financialization<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">applies as much to the mortgage that Amanda mentioned as it does to the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">current economic shakedown, the dotcom crash, and to what happens when we<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">log on. The value of new social media, speculative and "real" (in terms of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">actual revenue) is created through advertising and the digital traces of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">our attention. Driven much more by the desire for praise than<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">remuneration, people participate and this social participation has become<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">the oil of the digital economy.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">In 1928, Bertolt Brecht wrote his poem Questions from A Worker Who Reads,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">where he points to the labor of the cooks, soldiers, and masons, which<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">cannot be found in history books. Today, Burak Arikan's Meta Markets draws<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">attention to user labor by creating a stock market for trading "socially<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">networked creative products" (<a href="http://meta-markets.com">http://meta-markets.com</a>).<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Tracks of our behavior, the public management of our relationships with<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">others are recorded, sorted, analyzed and sold while we are enjoying<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">ourselves and benefit in many ways. IPv6 comes into this discussion. It's<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">really all quite frictionless despite Digg's Boston Digital Party and the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">complaints of Facebook users starting in September 2006. For me, these<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">events are spectacles of Internet democracy; they are consumer feedback<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">loops. We are negotiating a product that we are co-producing.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">In the middle of the eighteenth century, Diderot and d'Alembert published<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Encyclopédie, which celebrated the virtues of labor. Throughout its<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">twenty-seven volumes, articles dealt with everything from baking bread to<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">making nails. What would Diderot include in his revised edition today? A<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">few places to start--<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">virtual volunteering (i.e., “… if handled adeptly, [unpaid Verizon<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">volunteers] hold considerable promise" <a href="http://is.gd/T6Q6)">http://is.gd/T6Q6)</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">creating meta data (i.e., Flickr Commons)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">uploading and/or watching/looking at photos and videos<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">socializing (playful acts of reciprocity)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">paying attention to advertising<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">micro-blogging (status updates, Twitter)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">co-innovating (i.e., bicycles, mountain bikes, skate boards, cars, etc)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">posting blog entries and comments (i.e., the bloggers who work for<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"> Huffington Post)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">performing emotional work (presenting a personality that “fits in”)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">posting news stories<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">referring (i.e., Digg.com)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">creating virtual objects (i.e., Second Life)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">beta testing (i.e, Netscape Navigator 1998)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">providing feedback<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">consuming media (i.e., watching videos)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">consuming advertisement<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">data work (i.e., filling in forms, profiles etc)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">viral marketing by super-users<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">artistic work (i.e., video mashups, DeviantArt, Learning to Love You More)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Most of this about pleasure, play, personal benefit, and profit-- all at<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">the same time. It's fun, sure, and the price we pay for the "free<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">services" is complex. Michael Warner is a good place to start thinking<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">about that:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">"Our lives are minutely administered and recorded to a degree<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">unprecedented in history;" as Warner put it, "We navigate a world of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">corporate agents that do not respond or act as people do. Our personal<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">capacities, such as credit, turn out on reflection to be expressions of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">corporate agency."<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">(Publics and Counterpublics, p52)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">For now,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Trebor<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">=<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">R. Trebor Scholz<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">The New School University<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Re: Remuneration<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">"A Fine Is a Price"<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://www.citeulike.org/user/yoav/article/1953151">http://www.citeulike.org/user/yoav/article/1953151</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">_______________________________________________<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net">iDC@mailman.thing.net</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc">https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">List Archive:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/">http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">iDC Photo Stream:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">RSS feed:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc">http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">iDC Chat on Facebook:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647">http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote>_______________________________________________<br>iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)<br><a href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net">iDC@mailman.thing.net</a><br>https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc<br><br>List Archive:<br>http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/<br><br>iDC Photo Stream:<br>http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/<br><br>RSS feed:<br>http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc<br><br>iDC Chat on Facebook:<br>http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647<br><br>Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref<br></div></blockquote></div><br></body></html>