Political Economy and Culture Research Workshop: Jonathan Beller, “The Message is Murder: Informatic Labor in the Age of Computational Capital,”
October 23 @ 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm in 1032 Clemens​

Jonathan Beller (Pratt Institute) will join us to present on his most recent book The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (Pluto Press 2018) and to discuss an unpublished and co-authored “off-white” paper entitled “ArtWork for the End of Racial Capitalism”.

Preparatory readings are available for download from this folder: https://buffalo.box.com/v/politicaleconomyandculture

From Pluto Press:
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 capitalized 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 recognizing 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.

BRIEF BIO:
Jonathan Beller 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.