About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherPluto Press

ISBN-100745337309

ISBN-139780745337302

eBay Product ID (ePID)234835331

Product Key Features

Number of Pages224 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication NameMessage Is Murder : Substrates of Computational Capital

Publication Year2017

SubjectMedia Studies, Digital Media / General, Networking / Local Area Networks (Lans), Gender & the Law

TypeTextbook

AuthorJonathan Beller

Subject AreaLaw, Computers, Social Science

FormatUk-Trade Paper

Dimensions

Item Height0.7 in

Item Weight10.2 Oz

Item Length8.5 in

Item Width6.7 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN2022-439872

Dewey Edition23

TitleLeadingThe

ReviewsJonathan Beller powerfully addresses the most urgent issue of today's political economy: the gradual merging of capital and computation into new structures of power., 'Beller is one of the leading and pioneering theorists of the political economy of attention. This book is extremely pertinent for a readership seeking news ways of understanding contemporary capitalism. Beller has developed an original strategy by placing media archaeology and critical race theory in dialogue with the popularized work of Marshall McLuhan, and also by using Marx and Borges as interlocutors of well-known cyber-theorists such as Turing and Shannon', Beller's taking to task of media studies techno-fetishism is a strong reminder that scholars should consider not only the formations of violence that support our systems of media but also the historicity of dominant concepts like information, which have rendered such violence as value-neutral and the cost of doing business. . . . Scholars should take seriously Beller's insistence that media theory needs critical race theory to thoroughly understand the relationship among media, race, suffering, and violence., Beller is one of the leading and pioneering theorists of the political economy of attention... this book is extremely pertinent for a readership seeking new ways of understanding contemporary capitalism., So-called digital culture operates on and intensifies a substrate of racial-capitalist calculation that precedes the invention of the electronic digital computer. Jonathan Beller's remarkable book examines the implications of this foundational claim through 'poetico-theoretical' analyses of information theory, literature, and cinema. By tracking the co-constitutive operations of economics, informatics, visuality, and psychology, Beller reveals the violent formations that ground contemporary mediatic regimes., 'So-called digital culture operates on and intensifies a substrate of racial-capitalist calculation that precedes the invention of the electronic digital computer. Jonathan Beller's remarkable book examines the implications of this foundational claim through 'poetico-theoretical' analyses of information theory, literature, and cinema. By tracking the co-constitutive operations of economics, informatics, visuality, and psychology, Beller reveals the violent formations that ground contemporary mediatic regimes', 'So-called digital culture operates on and intensifies a substrate of racial-capitalist calculation that precedes the invention of the electronic digital computer. Jonathan Beller's remarkable book examines the implications of this foundational claim through "poetico-theoretical" analyses of information theory, literature, and cinema. By tracking the co-constitutive operations of economics, informatics, visuality, and psychology, Beller reveals the violent formations that ground contemporary mediatic regimes', 'Jonathan Beller powerfully addresses the most urgent issue of today's political economy: the gradual merging of capital and computation into new structures of power'

Number of Volumes1 vol.

Dewey Decimal302.2308

Table Of ContentIntroduction Part I: Informatics of Inscription/Inscription of Informatics 1. Gramsci's Press: Why We Game 2. A Message from Borges: The Informatic Labyrinth 3. Alan Turing's Self-Defense: On Not Castrating the Machines 4. Shannon/Hitchcock: Another Method for the Letters 5. The Internet of Value, by Karl Marx: Information as Cosmically Distributed Alienation Part II: Photo-graphology, Psychotic Calculus and Informatic Labor 6. Camera Obscura After All: The Racist Writing with Light 7. Pathologistics of Attention 8. Prosthetics of Whiteness: Drone Psychosis 9. The Capital of Information: Fractal Fascism, Informatic Labor and M-I-M' Appendix: From the Cinematic Mode of Production to Computational Capital - An Interview conducted by Ante Jeric and Diana Meheik for Kulturpunk Notes Index

SynopsisWritten 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., More than fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that "the medium is the message," profoundly influencing future generations of media theorists. A long-overdue wakeup call for the field of media studies, The Message is Murder analyzes the formations of violence still imbued in the everyday functions of the media. Jonathan Beller introduces the concept of computational capital to argue that contemporary media are not neutral, but rather they are technologies of political economy that became entangled with gendered and racialized capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Engaging with Borges, Turing, Hitchcock, and Marx, Beller offers an ambitious and provocative critique of contemporary media studies.

LC Classification NumberP94.6