{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","id":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","uuid":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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":325,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":10,"pdf_page":212,"physical_index":212,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3590c60260b36adcfe20e5c3aef2aa206c29ab9e84b20f7780d90dc9fabe143a"},"chapter":"Digital Labor","content":"Digitality and the Media of Dispossession\n\nJonathan Beller\n\nDespite everything that’s happened—and I think I mean everything—some persist in the belief that they live in a world of immediacy: that there is nature and a level playing field, that they see things as they are, that words say what they mean, that you and I are just talking.\n\nWe don’t just talk anymore, we run programs. Whom do they serve?\n\nWhether we are just talking about the figure in 20th-century Euro-American painting, the integrity of literary form in modernity, Vietnamese bodies trapped in the inexorable logic of the Phoenix project, Iraqi bodies caught in the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib and the sites of Black Hawks and drones, or the recent economic crisis that rendered the nominal values of institutions and commodities obsolete (until the banks were shored up by a desperate expropriation of collective wealth by a government beholden to already-existing entities), one might find a common logic at work—namely, the almost unbearable pressure of social forces on the material signifier. This pressure breaks up prior codifications like so many icebergs. Here, of course, I am speaking simultaneously about signs and their users. The pulverization of signs pulverizes some of these users, who, as we know (from Lacan), are also identified via signs. While Volosinov may have been correct when he wrote in the late 1920s in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language that language is the most sensitive index of social change, we have, in the last long century, witnessed not just changes within language but changes in the status of language itself. Today, a simultaneous injunction to communicate along with a rapidly shrinking horizon of the kinds of things words as we know them might accomplish seems to prevail. The very power of speech is in question—such is the situation of the writer. His master’s voice is just one download among many. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault identified an inflection point for language at the end of the Classical Age. During the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century, he argues there was a generalized “demotion of discourse.” In the 20th century and into our own, I would argue that this demotion of discourse has intensified and that it includes the demotion of discoursers.<sup>1</sup>\n\nLet us explore this demotion of discourse as the intensification 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, afect, 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 ofered 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.\n\n10","previous_page":9,"next_page":11}