<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Thank you again, Alan, for your questions -- questions that require more than one person for answers, I think.<div>The works on cognitive capitalism that I like the most include Paolo Virno's Grammar of the Multitude and Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. My own work, particularly The Cinematic Mode of Production, approaches questions of cognition and utterance from a slightly different perspective than those of economics and politics, at least in the strict sense, namely, media history and practice -- issues, which in my own view, are inseparable from the oftentimes presumably larger questions of political economy. In each of the texts, although with differing emphasis, it seems to me that the question of the utterance is paramount -- where the semiotic field and digitization lays heavily upon all human activity, creative potential/sensual labor has practically become synonymous with human expression, and the politics of the production and reproduction of capitalist domination are at once omnipresent and inexorable. Additionally there are the early writings of Antonio Negri and the slew of books by Hardt and Negri that have much to say on these issues of social cooperation and subsumption. Perhaps others on this list might suggest more recent works or other works of interest.</div><div><br></div><div>If by chance you could suggest something on physics/mathematics/computation relevant to the issues you raise I would be very grateful.</div><div><br></div><div>All best,</div><div>Jon</div><div><br></div><div> <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"><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 Jul 19, 2009, at 6:09 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div><br><br>Jonathan, your response is brilliant - I mean that in all honesty, some- <br>thing to be pondered and thought and rethought. It raised nothing more <br>than questions at my end, which I think to pose, not having answers, or <br>having ones that only 'work' for me.<br><br>Is there a media theory, or media theories? Must a media theory be <br>_responsive_ to anything in particular or at all? Does any theory _have_ <br>to be anything in particular? Must a theory be 'critical of its conditions <br>of emergence'? Certainly relativity theory is, to take another example but <br>I can also see a certain wisdom in ignoring what might amount to a <br>misreognition of historicity. I think a speaking subject carries a <br>problematic of essentialism and authenticity, in general; in the case of <br>theorizing, it seems somehow 'stronger.' Need avatar or picture carry <br>such? At times it seems to me an avatar is 'diacritical' or at best a <br>floating signifier; this is an issue in relation to Scott's and Patrick's <br>considerations of labor in Second Life. (Perhaps in other words, is the <br>virtual virtual?) I'm drawn personally to considerations of exploitation: <br>what is going on, world-wide, is horrifying, and with all the theory I've <br>read (perhaps not enough), I do not understand it; at this point <br>exploitation is so tied into networking on one hand and global ecological <br>issues on the other, that it's hard (for me) to get a handle on it. The <br>question here is - How do you teach these issues, in such a manner that <br>students or others in general are motivated? How do you avoid coccooning <br>on one hand and catatonia on the other? Re: The condition of philosophy: <br>How is this the condition of philosophy generally? There are also <br>philosophies of withdrawal, of course, opening space for thought in <br>environments that are inherently thoughtless. Is society hierarchical? <br>Perhaps collocations, holarchic might be a better description? One issue I <br>try to deal with, which is literally alien to this discussion but perhaps <br>relevant (from a viewpoint deliberately cutting itself off) is that of <br>contemporary physics/cosmology - I'm not referring to science as ideology <br>or the political economy of research (say the LHC), but the models <br>emerging/competing - multiverse, noncommutative geometries, the <br>holographic universe, string theory/branes, quantum and other logics, <br>spinors, etc. - and the matheses related to this: how to make sense of a <br>world which, no matter which model subsumes the others, is alien to such a <br>degree that models are abstracted _without_ representation or visualiza- <br>tion? I wonder if a theory need even be experimentally testable; certainly <br>there are reasons to think otherwise - so that a certain kind of founda- <br>tion assumed all along (just as Kuhn's paradigm was assumed for decades <br>and is now questionable) might be just another chimera.<br>In which case where does any theory of media reside? Certainly within and <br>without labor, but also within and without theories of perception that, it <br>seems to be, are themselves tottering - just as perception itself might be <br>considered tottering. (On another scale, what does it mean to 'perceive <br>Tweeter'? What is the 'labor of Tweeter'? Where is the 'intellectual prop- <br>erty of Tweeter'? I know these are the wrong questions - but then what <br>does happen to the categories we're familiar with?)<br>Can you say more about the 'theories of cognitive capitalism' and/or point <br>me to a source on this? It's of great interest. -<br>Again, I want to thank you because your response is thought out in a <br>manner that, for me, goes beyond this statement/text/whatever, and applies <br>to utterance in general.<br><br>yours, Alan<br><br>On Sun, 19 Jul 2009, Jonathan Beller wrote:<br><br><blockquote type="cite">I want to thank Alan for so directly and provocatively voicing his concerns <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">with respect to my statements about the imperatives of contemporary media <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">theory, concerns which clearly are his, but very likely not only his. In <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">response I would like to point out that although I suggested that what we are <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">here calling "theory" operates under imperatives to be of service to social <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">justice since its condition of possibility is social inequality -- and if <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">theory is to be thought, then it necessarily must be critical of the <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">conditions of its emergence -- neither statements of this type nor my <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">utilization of my "own" subject position as one framework among others for <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">staging the drama and imperatives of this kind of endeavor is in itself <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">particularly essentialist or, for that matter, authentic. Would it make any <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">sense to say that an avatar is authentic, or that a picture is essentialist?<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Alan, as you note, the issues here are not trivial and I completely agree. <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">What I see happening in the language of your response to me is the <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">functioning of a set of linguistic subroutines that process/interpret my <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">transmission along certain metaphysical lines. I did not say anything about <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">authenticity, you (as it were) however, recognized something in my message <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">that felt/meant like authenticity, and expressed ambivalence about this <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">perception: on the one hand you seem to have been drawn to some of the claims <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">regarding exploitation and theory's commitment to being relevant to that <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">problematic, on the other you were perhaps repulsed by what you may have felt <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">to be the repressive exclusion of the suggestion that theory had to be this <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">committed practice, whatever else it might be.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">In my conclusion to the letter you responded to, you can see that I placed <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">"rightfully," "belongs" and "global south" in quotation marks, as if to <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">acknowledge that these words invoked metaphysical concepts that only held if <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">one were aligned with the movement of my thought up to that point, and <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">furthermore that this movement was contingent. Putting these words in <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">quotation marks was itself a way of being open to other realities, as you <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">say, and an explicit recognition that what my transmission desired to cast as <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">a form of truth was (tragically?) not guaranteed -- indeed the proper role of <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">theory, who thought belongs to, and who are its constituents and <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">beneficiaries are among the questions being debated. The increasing <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">inadequacy of language itself to represent the world in which we live is, in <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">my view anyway, part of the problematic of media theory which must deal with <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">the onslaught of visuality -- a phenomenon which at once marginalizes the <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">traditional roles and capabilities of language and forces it to function <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">increasingly as images do. When, after invoking the contingencies above, I <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">asked "how to be adequate to such a reality?" -- a "reality" that includes <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">both the production and reproduction of hierarchical society and <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">capital-mediation in and through visuality -- and did not place "reality" in <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">quotation marks, that exclusion was a rhetorical (i might even say poetic) <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">choice on my part, an effort to produce the image of the ring of truth (a <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">sound, by the way), _as if_ the metaphysical questions about contingency <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">could be left behind. However the statement was less philosophical and more <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">performative at that point -- it being recognized of course that <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">performativity is (now) the condition of philosophy generally. The phrase was <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">meant to mark the ineffable yet necessary movement of the possibility of <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">justice. Thus I might call it a utopian gesture haunted by contingency, a <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">projection of a certain form of redemptive possibility that, to take things <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">too far, would be as beautiful as it is impossible -- the last flower in <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Pan's Labyrinth. I'm not saying that my letter achieved anything like this <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">kind of movement (it really was not so carefully considered), but I am <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">endeavoring here to say something about method: To make the words line up to <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">produce the image of an actionable object is to strive to create "a natural <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">perspective that is and is not," to coin a phrase. It is to produce, even <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">momentarily, a full, desirable and pragmatic version of the world in an ocean <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of competing images and contingent claims -- what Jameson called the <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">marketplace of ideas, but today is really just the marketplace in general. <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">There may be the illusion of authenticity and of metaphysical ground, but <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">there is nothing guaranteed about any of it.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Having said all this, I recognize that my particular exercise of such <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">tactics, is not to everyone's taste. Like others, I do the best that I can, <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">to operate in a matrix of mediations, and navigate towards becomings that may <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">well be ultimately unfounded and unobtainable. Plying the myriad codes and <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">mediations today (what used to be called writing) is perhaps an experience of <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">what has been called post-representational democracy -- a movement through <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">the infinite claims of history to date. However, we have not left <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">representation behind entirely, even though we have a new set of terms that <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">would include affect, intensity, viscerality, visuality and others, that are <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">available as tools to calculate, measure, think, feel and strategize with. <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">This is where we work -- all of us, at least to some degree -- isn't that <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">what the theories of cognitive capitalism point to? To write is to wager, it <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">is to make a prediction, which as Gramsci taught us, is in fact, a programme.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Again, Alan, thanks for the opportunity to reflect on these issues. There is <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">implicit in what I said, some thoughts on the production of consciousness, <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">but I'll leave more explicit remarks on that topic for another time.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Kind regards,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Jon<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">Jonathan Beller<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Professor<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Humanities and Media Studies<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">and Critical and Visual Studies<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Pratt Institute<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="mailto:jbeller@pratt.edu">jbeller@pratt.edu</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">718-636-3573 fax<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><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></div></body></html>