[iDC] iDC Digest, Vol 55, Issue 31

Fri Jul 17 18:52:33 UTC 2009

Hi all,

Sorry for the abrupt entry into this discussion -- i'm finally getting  
set up again after two weeks gone -- but i've got to weigh in on  
Michael Bauwen's side here in this very brilliant exchange. As someone  
who wrote one book on the emergence of new media as a technology of  
value extraction and then a second book that was a direct response to  
the challenges I felt by years of living and working in the  
Philippines to make my what is now called media theory relevant in a  
third world/global south context, i have to agree that the (world-)  
systemic dimensions of exploitation are on par in terms of importance  
with the violent instances of the most recognizeable and brutal  
expressions of exploititive practices: defacto agrarian slavery, the  
radical dispossesion of casual workers in the slums, the captured  
bodies of prostitutes, etc. To hypostasize: each is a condition of the  
other.

For what its worth, I think that one of the great problems of our time  
is to make manifest the myriad links between the pleasures available  
in  global society -- pleasure which certainly include but are not  
limited to screen pleasures -- and systemic murder, i.e., the willed/ 
automatic/unconscious deprivation of life (it is all of these) that is  
the sine qua non of global capitalist perpetuity. What are the  
mediations?

In my own experience of exchanges with members of the radical left, if  
you will, in the Philippines (exchanges which I feel at once humbled  
by and honored to partake in), there is great interest in terms of  
strategy and tactics to understand the logistics of media-exploitation  
as well as possible. This interest is manifest by those who organize  
protests and public actions against, for example, disappearances  
sometimes called political killings launched illegally by the  
Macapagal-Arroyo regime in the Philippines in order to preserve the  
rule of law by assassinating those who threaten its legitimacy (more  
than 800 since GMA took office), as well as protests in solidarity  
with Jeepney drivers against escalating gasoline prices, and many many  
other forms of protest. This interest in a mediological analysis of  
sociality has deep roots in the university and in the long-term anti- 
fascist and anti-imperialist struggles and it informs scholarship,  
pedagogy, cultural theory, filmmaking, art practice, and political  
strategy.

I'll close this all too brief account with two points: first, the  
expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic as well as the sensual by  
media-capital means that the struggle for the production of  
consciousness as a moment in the overall struggle for the democratic  
control of the means of production that informs the very possibilty of  
social justice is at least as important as it has been in the past, if  
not more so. Second, the high theory of media studies, academic  
marxism (to use a pejorative term), feminist and queer theory, like  
the wealth and culture of the great Western metropoles, rightfully  
belongs to the third world/ global south. All these terms  
("rightfully," "belongs," "global south") are subject to modification,  
but you get my drift -- consciousness itself, and the world that  
sustains it, is produced on the backs of those who are most radically  
dispossessed. Personally, I am haunted by an enduring question: how to  
be adequate to such a reality?

Best,
Jon

Jonathan Beller
Professor
Humanities and Media Studies
and Critical and Visual Studies
Pratt Institute
jbeller at pratt.edu
718-636-3573 fax

On Jul 17, 2009, at 1:01 PM, Michael Bauwens wrote:

>
> Hi John,
>
> Look again to the exploited worker that you mention ... and amidst  
> whom I live in this working class neighborhood in bangkok ...
>
> He/she is often heavily in debt, this represents a double exploitation
>
> Then look at his employer ... they too are heavily in debt, and  
> their rate of profit is actually not that high ...
>
> Then look at the people lending to both the worker and his  
> employer ... their profit rates are higher ...
>
> Through debt and compound interest, there is a direct flow of money  
> from the poor to the rich, from the productive sectors to the  
> 'unproductive' financial sectors ...
>
> This is just as real a face of exploitation ...
>
> I'm not at all afraid to say this to the worker in the extractives  
> industry ... he/she is just as aware of the reality of this form of  
> exploitation ... look at the farmer's suicides in India .. they kill  
> themselves not because they are being exploited, they have always  
> been, but because very specifically of their debt situation ...
>
> I think this is where your yikes should be directed at, not at those  
> correctly pointing out the financial exploitation,
>
> Michel
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: John Hopkins <jhopkins at tech-no-mad.net>
>> To: idc at mailman.thing.net
>> Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 3:07:25 AM
>> Subject: Re: [iDC] iDC Digest, Vol 55, Issue 31
>>
>> Michael Bauwens wrote:
>>> Thanks Douglas for explaining this, we are on a pretty similar  
>>> wavelength,
>>
>> Hallo Michael:
>>
>> nothing like resonance; but I have to dissonate with the following
>> statement (whilst otherwise only able to occasionally scan the  
>> contents
>> of the iDC box -- Trebor, you need to write something more or less
>> precise/poetic about how you *do* your facilitation work here on  
>> iDC and
>> perhaps what your own personal desires are around it! :-)
>>
>>> We could argue that today, a very large part of surplus value  
>>> extraction is
>> not done directly at production, but indirectly through the  
>> financial system
>>
>> Yikes, really, say that to someone working in the extractives  
>> industry,
>> at the lower levels of the techno-social pyramid as it were...  That
>> argument comes from looking too long at view-point-limited/ing  
>> screens!
>>  You are luxuriating at a level of abstractions that are subsidized
>> ("brought-to-you") by a massive globe-spanning process of  
>> concentrating
>> and refining basic material energies -- a process which is run via  
>> human
>> bodies, at its most fundamental level.  And it is precisely there, at
>> the level of embodied life-energies and life-times, that surplus  
>> value
>> (energy) accumulates and becomes directly available to the service of
>> those up higher in that pyramid...  When one gives ones attention
>> (Michael Goldhaber...) in the form of life-time and life-energy to
>> anyone (regardless of mediatory path), that energy or surplus, as you
>> call it, is, in real-time, transferred...
>>
>>
>> cheers,
>> John
>>
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>
>
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