Jonathan Beller

A revolutionary reconceptualization of capital and perception during the twentieth century.

Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle

The Cinematic Mode of Production

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.

Substrates of Computational Capital

The Message is Murder

Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism

World Computer

Acquiring Eyes directs incisive but at the same time admiring attention to H. R. Ocampo, Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, and Emmanuel Garibay--four masters, the original and complex visuality of whose genre-specific efforts to parlay Philippine social dynamics into visual practices of engagement, struggle, and transcendence have produced for each of them a much-deserved and committed local following.

Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle, and the World-media System

Acquiring Eyes

In The World Computer Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression—language, image, music, communication—into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle.

The World Computer

Robert Stam

Karen Kelsky

Ella Shohat

Rob Wilson

Hamid Naficy

Wimal Dissanayake

Adjunct Fellow East-West Center Hawaii Scholar in Residence Wimal Dissanayake

Christopher Connery

This groundbreaking collection focuses on what may be, for cultural studies, the most intriguing aspect of contemporary globalization—the ways in which the postnational restructuring of the world in an era of transnational capitalism has altered how we must think about cultural production. Mapping a "new world space" that is simultaneously more globalized and localized than before, these essays examine the dynamic between the movement of capital, images, and technologies without regard to national borders and the tendency toward fragmentation of the world into increasingly contentious enclaves of difference, ethnicity, and resistance. Ranging across issues involving film, literature, and theory, as well as history, politics, economics, sociology, and anthropology, these deeply interdisciplinary essays explore the interwoven forces of globalism and localism in a variety of cultural settings, with a particular emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region. Powerful readings of the new image culture, transnational film genre, and the politics of spectacle are offered as is a critique of globalization as the latest guise of colonization. Articles that unravel the complex links between the global and local in terms of the unfolding narrative of capital are joined by work that illuminates phenomena as diverse as "yellow cab" interracial sex in Japan, machinic desire in Robocop movies, and the Pacific Rim city. An interview with Fredric Jameson by Paik Nak-Chung on globalization and Pacific Rim responses is also featured, as is a critical afterword by Paul Bové. Positioned at the crossroads of an altered global terrain, this volume, the first of its kind, analyzes the evolving transnational imaginary—the full scope of contemporary cultural production by which national identities of political allegiance and economic regulation are being undone, and in which imagined communities are being reshaped at both the global and local levels of everyday existence.

Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary

Global/Local

Jonathan Beller

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