{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","uuid":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","normalized_title":"digitallabortheinternetasplaygroundandfactory","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","isbns":["9780415896948","9780415896955","9780203145791"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":267,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/DIGITAL%20LABOR%20THE%20INTERNET%20AS%20PLAYGROUND%20AND%20FACTORY","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/search"},"page":{"printed_page":179,"pdf_page":186,"physical_index":186,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1f98e29acce489a70d59760b0d8033f25e649083376f1b2315715abecc0fc973"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"However, it also needs to be mentioned here that the recession of the Real and the deconstruction of “man\"that reachednew levels of intensity during the 20th century was not merely the effect of domination; it was alsothe effect of struggle. In other words, as commodities, images, pirates, and police arrived to dominate, counterimages, counternarratives, countertheories, and counterhistories have been put forward staking claims that either challenged the Real or Deconstructed it. The imposition ofvarious realities in the name of Man and his democracy were countered by their negation. The disintegration of the Real, of the referent, of “being\" was, in fact, also a hallmark of struggle. Thus, one must understand the essential but all too often unremarked centrality not only of the self-contradiction of capitalism and fascism (a seemingly internal affair) but of antiracist, anticolonialist, anti-imperialist, postcolonial, feminist, women of color feminist, and queer struggles (the rebellions of the trod upon) and the resultant theories and practices in the making of the 20th-century epistemic shift that I am speaking about. Without exception, these struggles aspire beyond the framework insisted upon by capitalism, even if they are partially recuperated by said framework in a later iteration. Without a clear understanding of insurresctionary work such as that of Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon,Gayatri Spivak, Helene Cixous, Angela Davis, and Judith Butler (to put but one, perhapsfor today still too provincial, name on each of the endeavors listed above), there is no real possibility of understanding the outrage nor the historical and geopolitical stakes that animate the changes we have been so mechanically (and in fact anachronistically) discussing in terms of “man.\" The Arab Spring, Los Indignados in Spain, and the worldwide protests of 2011 all transmit a radical disaffection with the capitalist organization of representation and assert the living history and potential of insurrection as a constituent element of a nominally capitalist planet.\n\nTo return to the troublesome history of the human sciences and perhaps place Foucault's work in a mediological context, we might propose that the major moments of this history be read as an indexical phenomenologicon of sign function in relation to the capitalist development of technology. Together, these differentiable endeavors, each with its own theory of sign function, offer a periodization of verbal sign effects in relation to anoverall trajectory: the technologically mediated recession of the Real. It should be taken as axiomatic that the development of technologies of mediation—particularly visual, audiophonic, anddigital technologies—does not occur apart from either political economy or the geopolitical forces of colonialism, imperialism, racialization, and the regulation of sexuality and gender.\n\nBeginning in the 19th century with the rise of the world market and the international interstate system (itself, as Benedict Anderson shows, a kind of media phenomenon organized by the newspaper), tendencies toward universal (which is to say, global market) protocols were increasingly pronounced. Linguistics and structuralisminstitute an inaugural and henceforth unrecoverable split between signifierand signified—the sign shadows the real and vice versa, while arguing that these basic dynamics adhere in all linguistic representation regardless of content. One might say that the shift from what Saussure viewed as classical philology to linguistics marks the final demotion of language to being one medium among many, one record of accounts to a world that may now offer competing versions of itself in other languages and media. Only then can one derive the arbitrary nature of the sign (Foucault reads Schlegel, Cuvier, and Bopp for this, but for me the decisive figure is Saussure). Psychoanalysis and semiotics proposethat the world beyond the purview of language churns in accord with logics beyond those of daytime rationality (grammatology) and definitively shifts the whole Marxian notion of the depth-hermeneutic and the symptom from the appearance of things (the commodity) to language itself (the sign). Things and words have subterranean dynamics. The year 1895—roughly the advent of cinema, psychoanalysis, and structuralism—provides a convenient date to mark both this breakdown of language and its strategies to accommodate its newly precipitated dysfunction. Language ruptures to find images—images to which it can only affix more of itself. These ruptures in sign function, signs of the real, turn out to be signs themselves. Parapraxis, a pronounced breakdown in language, through which the unconscious emerges, requires the discourse that will be psychoanalysis to explain it. Signifier/ Signified is a generative image of the sign. The dream is a rebus. The objet petit a is a name for the gaze. Language notices and endeavors through the proliferation ofthe humanistic disciplines to accommodate its own displacement by the rising tide of the visual—by the omnipresence of images. Vast amounts of discourse are required to managethe ever-intensifying proliferation of these images.\n\nDigitality and the Mediaof Dispossession\n\n179","previous_page":178,"next_page":180}