This post was written by Anthony Burton, PhD Candidate and researcher at the Digital Democracies Institute, on the Beyond Verification:
Authenticity and the Spread of Mis/Disinformation project.
Dr. Jonathan Beller, Professor in the Humanities & Media Studies department at the Pratt Institute, visited the Digital Democracies Institute on March 9th as part of our Spring Speaker Series. His presentation, “Poetry against calamity: decolonial ecology and postcapitalist economic media”, focused on reimagining the calls of monetary media to transcend racial capitalism and its colonial order. Part of racial capitalism’s claustrophobia comes from computational media technologies that mimic the capitalist abstraction of everyday life into commodity values. But Beller’s work shows that, because they are wrought in struggle, there’s liberatory potential within the very functions of these technologies. If we shift our focus from the transmission of racial capitalism’s valuations, we can view these technologies as a means to accelerate, intensify, and transmit a different set of social relations. Beller highlights that while computational media serves the economic circulation of capital and its mode of defining value, this servitude is not necessary to the character of its mediating form. Computational media’s horizon spans far beyond capital’s cycles of crisis and violent dispossession. It enables networks of accelerated and intensified sociality. These networks possess a form of sociality far richer than the one defined by capital’s formalizations of command and control.
Key to Dr. Beller’s insights is the move to view money as a form of writing itself. Like linguistic inscription, like coding, like narrativization, money performs particular compressions, semiotic significations, and expressions that shape what it transmits–and, particular to its design, this writing is the writing of capitalist commodity structures. Think, for example, of the techniques of tracking, indexing, and categorizing enabled by money. From the bank ledgers of accounting trades to blockchains of cryptocurrencies, the tracking of money always inscribes phenomena into an indexical, trackable, economic form.
Labor in turn, is collected and encrypted in commodities, decrypted in turn through the market as it affects exchange. The means by which money indexes value, then, allows Beller to likewise imagine money as writing–as a media itself. Money is techniques of encoding that collapse our expressivity, creativity, and struggles for survival into existing monetary denominations. The poesis of creation inherent in forms of expression are, in their translation to economic forms, stripped of their values by being collapsed or “crushed”, Beller describes, into numbers. The linguistic, material, and visual content of our utterances are reduced to whatever might make it work to produce the surplus value that fuels capitalism.
The encroachment onto the creation of meaning by monetary media has been fundamental in shaping the programs of racial capitalism over the past several hundred years. Economic media are already operative in a colonial mode in racial capitalism. Beller’s exploration of the mediated and mediating nature of money is in the service of a decolonial, radical project of critique that breaks open this present operation and shows its radical contingency. In its overcoding of the social and the geopolitical, monetary media and its integration with the world media system represents all things as elements in the network of computational racial capitalism. But the unidirectional nature of monetary media’s abstractions leaves behind the potential for refashioning its technologies into devices that support liberation. This opening comes from the two perspectives detailed above: economics as a matter compiler, in how it organizes labor and matter in accord with the requisites of monetary forms; and writing as a material practice, a collective form of authorship. Under capital, authorship is erased by ownership. However, revisiting the relationship between material composition and authorship could facilitates new forms of meaning making and value transmission. And in these forms composable through computation, a range of new methods for transforming ideation to materialization emerge. They unite the possibility of collectively “programming” the political and the cultural along with the programming of the socioeconomic and the computational.
In doing so, Beller explains, we are able to then draw out the relational epiphenomena of writing and economy into their main functionalities as means of relation, all the while leaving behind their compilation through capitalism into the commodity form. The transmission of values through computational networks, for example, need not be tied to capital–nothing in decentralized and distributed networking necessitates the compression of value. These networks can instead be the ground upon we write our own futures, the composite results of “historical struggles and disaffection with dominant media and social forms”.
Beller’s presentation focused on a praxis of opening up futures from the pessimism of understanding their present. The speed of capital exchange enabled by monetary media has developed into a means of transferring values and, in turn, defining it according to its own “necessary” abstractions. But paying particular critical, poetic, and radical attention to the ways that this digital and monetary mediation allows for value to translate lets us see digital mediation’s colonial and racist origins as nothing more than that – sufficient but not necessary conditions to its existence. In this critical opening, the question becomes: how do we project forward in a way that creates a sustainable “economy”? Here, economy describes not a social organization founded on finance capital but a means of creating and sharing values in the broadest, truest sense of the term.
The financial architectures that underpin daily life and our understandings of value seem almost impossible to resist. But within this “almost”, Dr. Beller notes, we can find the poetic and relational power to resist handing over these values to the processes of capitalization. Poesis is work that (should) belong to us.