20th century and into our own, I would argue that this demotion of discourse has intensified and that it includes the demotion of discoursers.
Let us explore this demotion of discourse as theintensification of capitalism by other, ostensibly extra-economic, means. Allow me to suggest that by examining mediatic shifts (the crisis of representation, the rise of visuality and informatics), by developing new concepts for labor and capital (that is, reconceptualizing the forms of labor, value, accumulation, attention, the wage) in ways that keep pace with changes already being instituted in practice, and by noting transformations in the character and role of language, affect, and utterance, we may pose a set of metrics and tactics attuned to yet opposed to those ventured and imposed by capital. I am suggesting, therefore, that it is possible at once to tell a more precise (if subaltern and subterranean) history of the conditions of possibility for what is known micropolitically as cognitive capitalism and macropolitically as Empire than what has been offered to date and that, in doing so, one is not obliged to give way to the theories of the immeasurability of surplus value as proposed by the autonomists. Which is to say that one may speak rigorously about the expropriation of language and of the linguistic commons by a capitalism that continues to depend upon quantitative metrics and the now computer-mediated calculus of profit
Disappointingly perhaps, what I have to offer here does not accomplish all of the tasks I just set out; rather, it concentrates on the epistemic shifts that have occurredin relation to the transformation of political economy and language function and leaves the math for another time. But by expanding on a section of “The Digital Ideology"—a talk that I gave at a November 2009conference on digital labor at The New School called The Internet as Playground and Factory,—I hope to at once extend the history of the digital and shift the locus of the general tenor of thought surrounding it. Figure 10.1 shows the intimate relation between the cognitive and mathematical functions of Empire. The image, one of digitality, is of a handout I passed around in an edition of 100 at that conference. This is all that remains—little, yes, but it is not nothing.
By all appearances, what you see before you is an ordinary one-dollar bill with a red ink stamp of the word Distributed on it along with a handwritten # indicating the number in the series. But one could legitimately ask: Was the handout a performance, an image, or software? Was it an iconof, or an occasion for, what Trebor Scholz and others call distributed creativity? No doubt, it was already an image of images, but one could not and cannot decide here whether the medium is paper or money or computers. Maybe it was once paper. . . once gold? But...Oh strange conversion! The handout, which audience members were invited to accept (as payment for their attention to my talk, as ironic critique of their scholarly intentions?) or reject (either as perverse outing of deeply embarrassing relations endemic to contemporary knowledge production that had best remain unconscious or as an act of disidentification with said relations?), gives new resonance to the still-significant formulation, the medium is the message. (For the record, some took a handout, some took several, some ironically asked for them to be signed, others left them in small piles like so much garbage—while taking the memory with them, perhaps.) But what exactly is the medium? The various inks on paper raise numerous questions along the lines of the following series: Value as Writing/Photography as Image as Money as Capital.. . as Value. It being understood that in itsreiteration through therepresentational-technical-financial network, value becomes not a mere economic determination but an inexorable dimension of representational praxis. It is at once an image among images and an archetópical image—one that all others well could bear a relation to. This distributed dollar then is at once an image of extreme superficiality and ofinfinite permutation, mediation, regress, and progress. Dialectics at a standstill.
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The Violence of Participation
FIGURE10.1