Digital Media, Cultural Production and Speculative Capitalism

Freya Schiwy, Alessandro Fornazzari, Susan Antebi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415614498
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317982302
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of essays explores the interfaces between new information technologies and their impact on contemporary culture, and recent transformations in capitalist production. From a transnational frame, the essays investigate some of the key facets of contemporary global capitalism: the ascendance of finance capital, and the increasing importance of immaterial labor (understood here as a post-Fordist notion of work that privileges the art of communication, affect, and virtuosity). The contributors address these transformation by exploring their relation to new digital media (YouTube, MySpace, digital image and video technology, information networks, etc.) and various cultural forms including the Hispanic television talk show, indigenous video production, documentary film in Southern California, the Latin American stock market, German security surveillance, transnational videoconferencing, and Japanese tourists' use of visual images on cell phones. The authors argue that the seemingly radical newness and alleged immateriality of contemporary speculative capitalism, turns out to be less dramatically new and more grounded in colonial/racial histories of both material and immaterial exploitation than one might at first imagine. Similarly, human interaction with digital media and virtuality, ostensibly a double marker for the contemporary and economically privileged subject, in fact reveals itself in many cases as transgressive of racial, economic and historical categories.

Introduction

Digital media, cultural production and speculative capitalism

This collection of essays explores the interfaces between new information technologies, their impact on contemporary culture, and recent transformations in capitalist production. From a transnational frame, the essays investigate some of the key facets of contemporary global capitalism: the relativization of a production based model of capital, the ascendance of finance capital, and the increasing importance of immaterial labor (understood here as a post-Fordist notion of work that privileges the art of communication, affect, and virtuosity). The contributors address these transformations by exploring their relation to new digital media (YouTube, MySpace, digital image and video technology, information networks, etc.) and various cultural forms including the Hispanic television talk show, indigenous video production, documentary film in Southern California, the Latin American stock market, German security surveillance, transnational videoconferencing, and Japanese tourists’ use of visual images on cell phones. These diverse analyses of cultural production and digital media – itself a paradigmatic technology of global capitalism – reveal persistent lines of continuity between the virtual and the material, as well as between contemporary and earlier cultures and economies (racial, colonial and imperial legacies). Engaging with recent critical debates on the intrinsic entanglement of the digital and the corporeal and its relation to the logic of global capitalism, the essays collected here offer profoundly transnational perspectives on how we can think about the possibilities for socio-cultural transformation in light of speculative capitalism and the new information and communication technologies.

The essays are the outcome of two years of intense collective debate. Our conversations began in the fall of 2005 in an interdisciplinary and post-area studies faculty research group sponsored by the University of California Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society. At the Center, six of the contributors came together to exchange perspectives on the impact and articulation of digital technologies and speculative capitalism in different contexts: Latin America, Japan, and the USA. Theoretically this conversation brought together the Autonomia perspective on the changing face of capitalism (Mario Tronti, Mauricio Lazzarrato, and Antonio Negri among others) with recent scholarship on digital media (Mark Poster, Katherine Hayles, and Mark Hansen).

Autonomia thinkers have emphasized a historically specific rise of immaterial labor with respect to other forms of labor that corresponds to the current global capitalist economy. This shift, which in the broadest terms corresponds to the passage from secondary (industrialization) to tertiary (informatization) capitalist accumulation, puts the focus on the productive potential of immaterial labor qualities such as flexibility, creativity, innovation, knowledge, communication, and affect. A question that arises from immaterial labor’s coming into dominance is whether it undermines anti-capitalist projects that have focused on the production of affect as the ground for the constitution of alternative collective subjectivities. The risk of this structure is complete servitude to a capitalism in which work and intellect, material and immaterial labor, production and consumption have become indistinguishable from one another. Its potential for a politics of liberation seems to lie in a social creativity that transcends class hierarchies, as Mauricio Lazzarrato has written; or, following Paulo Virno’s argument, in the radical separation or ‘exodus’ of intellect from work; or, more recently, in Hardt and Negri’s revolutionary subject known as the multitude. These proposals share the view that an outside is no longer possible and that social transformation must be generated and become operative from within.

Digital media scholars, in contrast, have tended to focus their attentions on the specificity of new media forms, such as digital images and electronic hypertexts, and perhaps most importantly, on the interactions of human users and cybernetic machines. If, as Donna Haraway already argued in her now classic cyborg manifesto, the merging of the biological and the mechanical offers radical new possibilities for the disruption of traditional subject categories, this uncertain fusion also points towards the fantasy that material bodies are becoming obsolete – replaced by abstract information that circulates rapidly as code, through interchangeable, and ultimately disposable hardware platforms. Countering this fantasy, scholarship by Hayles and Hansen, among others, has emphasized the persistence of materiality in contemporary media, arguing in some cases that the digital is in fact intimately dependent upon embodied experience, and in this sense, intensely corporeal.

Despite obvious disparities between these two traditions, we were intrigued by their points of contact, and the problems these sometimes posed. The notion of immaterial labor as a labor that produces no durable or material good (such as a service, knowledge, or communication) also appears to be reflected in the fear – or fantasy – that the rise of digital technology means the disappearance of substance behind the code, or of a grounded referent behind the image. Media scholars’ insistence on the materiality of the digital complicates this parallel, although in many cases an emphasis on material specificity does not necessarily translate into leverage through which to postulate socio-political or cultural transformation, but remains instead at the level of a global capitalist self-reproducing and digitally networked system.

In conjunction with these debates, consideration of the ongoing colonial legacy of global capitalism allowed us to further complicate our understanding of the roles of new technologies in contemporary economies. Specifically, the immaterial qualities of colonialist discourse and their racial and gender imaginaries have long been fundamental to global capitalist expansion, and indeed have constituted the basis of its operations. In this sense, the seemingly radical newness – and alleged immateriality – of contemporary speculative capitalism, turns out to be less dramatically new and more grounded in histories of both material and immaterial exploitation than one might at first imagine. Similarly, human interaction with digital media and virtuality, ostensibly a double marker for the contemporary and economically privileged subject, in fact reveals itself in many cases as transcendent and transgressive of racial, economic and historical categories. This is the case, for example, when Andean indigenous communities create and distribute their own digital videos, or when nineteenth century colonialist entertainment forms such as ethnographic spectacles turn out to run on circuits powered by a blend of laboring bodies and collectively accepted codes of authenticity and ethnic difference.

Working from the interstices of these traditions a project emerged that situates new digital technologies in a broader global economic order and stresses the relevance of keeping colonial and modern lines of continuity in sight as we grapple with the speed and depth of socio-cultural transformations occasioned by new technologies.

This collective project was further developed and refined in the intense workshop atmosphere of a three-day panel at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in the Spring of 2007 in Puebla, Mexico. The contributors’ research papers were placed in dialogue with other transnational perspectives on digital media and global capitalism, and our thinking gained further depth. The collection presented here for publication includes some of these additional papers and maintains our radically post-area studies perspective, taking advantage of our different local positions in order to work towards a globally informed theorization of new information technology and speculative capitalism.

Antebi and Schiwy open up the collection of essays with two contributions that highlight continuities between the virtual and material. In ‘The Talk Show Uploaded: YouTube and the Technicity of the Body,’ Antebi explores the corporeal continuities manifest in what is often thought as a disembodied form of representation, namely, the television talk show and its contemporary recirculation on YouTube. Her essay traces historical links between the freak show and the television talk show, specifically emphasizing the nationalistic anxiety present in both virtual and material encounters between Latin American and Latino/a talk show viewers and participants. YouTube allows users to highlight specific program episodes, and to integrate them with personal commentary. Antebi argues that this instant and virtual reappropriation of ‘trash TV’ goes beyond the dilemma of authenticity and fraudulence that so consistently haunts both the freak show and its talk show successors, instead refocusing viewer attention towards the ‘empty husk’ (Hansen) of the corporeal, national image. Yet rather than suggesting the abandonment of corporeal presence in television and internet entertainment, this ‘husk’ itself becomes the object of enjoyment, and allows the viewer to reconsider the geopolitics of circulating body images, from transnational talk shows to their freak show legacy.

Schiwy’s ‘Digital Ghosts, Global Capitalism, and Social Change’ traces the importance of colonial legacies for theorizing speculative capitalism by thinking from the use of digital media by indigenous social movements in the Andes. She argues that the racialized body remains tangible as digital media are read and used akin to older, analogue technology and its ‘writing of light.’ The desires for truth and corporeality in indigenous media point to the existence of borders from which alternatives to the current capitalist order are imagined and enacted. Similarly then, in indigenous films speculative capitalism betrays its colonial constitution that ties it back to modern/colonial economic forms, rather than creating an entirely novel break with the past.

Rogers and Fornazzari focus on the implications of contemporary critical art for understanding the nature of speculative capitalism. In ‘The Aesthetics of Implication: Toward the Functional Axis of Labor Politics in Contemporary Art and Media,’ Rogers analyzes an experimental documentary collaboration between Juan Devis and Yoshua Okón. This film works through the politics of immigrant day-laboring in southern California, in order to examine how a new global and economic order comprised of supranational trade agreements (particularly NAFTA), new forms of communication and information technologies, modes of immaterial and ‘affective’ labor (Michael Hardt), and transnational economic flows have elicited an alternative form of anti-capitalist critique in art and culture. Rogers argues that this critique no longer represents the inequities of labor but rather deliberately implicates itself in the social and economic systems it seeks to undermine. The documentary approaches what Rogers calls ‘the functional axis of labor’ – the infolding of systems and procedures in and around the work that reveals the deep structural inequities of global labor practice by reflexively co-implicating themselves, their film, and ultimately the viewer into the labor of the film’s production – demonstrating how the work’s exchange value is dependent upon the surplus labor of others.

Fornazzari’s ‘A Stock Market Theory of Value’ engages the problem of neoliberal dedifferentiation by focusing on Latin American representations of what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon called ‘the monument par excellence of modern society’: the stock market. In the context of the Southern Cone neoliberal transitions, the stock market’s logic of second order abstraction is shown to reveal some of the profound transformations put into effect by finance capitalism’s focus on the money form (the anachronistic state of productivist centered political economy, high risk speculation, and the electronic free flow of finance and information). Focusing on the 1980s Chilean stock market boom and the fin de siècle Argentinean economic crisis, this paper explores the stock market theory of value that emerges out of the so-called new economic paradigm based on information technology.

Mejía, Kim and Foster explore different uses of new media and what these uses imply for the notion of referentiality so dear to modernity, industrial capitalism, and analogue technology now called into question with the proliferation of representation based on digital codes. Mejía’s article explores the use of new technologies by Ecuadorian migrants to the US and Europe who find themselves negotiating the reality they physically inhabit and the responsibilities and commitments that bind them to Ecuador. She maintains that, transformed by the irruption of new technologies intent upon shrinking space and time, nostalgia is becoming ‘digital.’ Digital nostalgia, then, is about the quest for continuity of space and time through the simultaneity offered by digital media.

Kim’s ‘Südlandia: Referentiality in Foucault, Security Cameras in Germany’ reexamines the question of referentiality in Michel Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge through the German cultural signifier ‘südländisch.’ He argues that the relation between referent and discourse in Foucault should be understood in terms of how ‘südländisch’ circulates as a free floating signifier: it generates the appearance of reference yet without a referent. ‘Südländisch’ is an untranslatable adjective in German, ‘literally’ meaning ‘southern’ but indexing its enunciator’s desires and fears. Its associations include warmth, sex, the color brown, as well as crime, filth and ‘foreigners’ who are imagined to stem from the Mediterranean. Focusing on an attempted ‘terrorist’ bombing plot in Summer 2006 in Germany, Kim discusses a fuzzy security camera image of a terrorist suspect described by police and the news media as appearing ‘südländisch.’ He maintains that the referential is that which has all of the appearance of a ‘referent’ but is rather a topos upon which discourse gathers and on which vision is trained. Hence, the question of referentiality in Foucault hitherto posed by critics and cynics has been wrongly configured. The true question should be, ‘How does discourse create the appearance of reference?’

Foster’s contribution, ‘Tourism and the Digital Gaze: What Time is this Picture?,’ concludes this collection. It considers how cell phone cameras are altering Japanese domestic tourism. At crowded festivals, tourists hold phones above the heads of other spectators to capture an otherwise unseeable sight. They transmit images to friends as immediate personalized postcards. Moments after an event, they scroll through their pictures, nostalgic for moments just past. The cell phone as a medium for visual production and consumption radically changes the way memories are encoded and communicated, instantaneously transforming the boundless tourist experience into a bounded visual text that can be manipulated, sent, and, ultimately, deleted. While Japanese-made camera phones are a vital part of the global electronics market, their ubiquity within Japan has reshaped the tourist landscape, making traditional distinctions between authentic/inauthentic, real/representation, here/there increasingly irrelevant.

The essays collected unravel the question of what changes and what remains in the transition to a global speculative economy relying on digital media and technology from different disciplinary perspectives in the humanities. Rather than focusing exclusively on the purported novelty of contemporary global capitalism and the digital technologies that frequently accompany it, we have sought to unpack both economic and technological histories as well as their points of intersection, in order to reconsider our understanding of the contemporary fascination with the immaterial, the digital, and the virtual. By looking more closely at the circulation of these concepts, as well as the specific technologies behind them, we have been able to sharpen our definitions of how and when new technologies have emerged in interaction with a global economy, and in what sense the cultural meanings of these technologies demands a rereading of the histories from which they have become inseparable. In addition, specific attention in several of these essays to paradigmatic transitional moments in economic history allows the collection as a whole to reflect upon the nature of contemporary global capitalism, as refracted through artistic and political expression, and to open a space for thinking through possibilities – and limitations – of radical transformation and critique.

One of the more significant theoretical challenges for this group of essays as a whole has been our collective negotiation of the problem of assumed disembodiment – in digital media images, for example – in opposition to the notion of a lingering or constitutive materiality. If referentiality is seen in some cases as a modern desire, now left behind by increasingly disembodied media forms, new media continues to call forth desires for and interrogations of materiality, perhaps as a lingering specter of earlier economies and cultural production, or in fact as the irrevocable underpinning of digitality, whose projected disembodiment belies an ongoing corporeal anchor. Does the desire for and reflection upon materiality in the midst of twenty-first century constellations of digital technology and speculative capitalism function as a backwards glance towards globalization’s colonial legacy? Or does the apparent contemporary virtuality of economics, cultural production and life forms rather point towards earlier versions of immaterial circulation that we now begin to recognize as such? Taken together, our essays suggest that both operations may be at work, and that the transhistorical, transmaterial exchange of glances will become crucial to understanding, negotiating and reshaping the historical legacies of global capitalism.

Freya Schiwy

Media and Cultural Studies Department, University of California, Riverside

Susan Antebi

Department of Hispanic Studies, University of California, Riverside

Alessandro Fornazzari

Department of Hispanic Studies, University of California Riverside

The talk show uploaded: YouTube and the technicity of the body

Susan Antebi

Department of Hispanic Studies, University of California, Riverside, USA

The dramatic success of YouTube and related internet sites in recent years has led to a shift in public interaction with many television programs, including popular and controversial television talk shows, such as Peruvian Laura Bozzo’s Laura en América. While television talk shows and other media have long participated in the production and circulation of racial, national, and class-based stereotyped images, the interplay between television, YouTube and independent internet use allows for new modes of engagement between embodied subjects and digital images. Through analysis of uploaded clips of Laura Bozzo’s show, homemade videos and user commentary, this article addresses changes and continuities in the structure of interpellation, through which identities circulate via popular Spanish language internet media. Building upon recent work by Mark Hansen regarding corporeal technicity, the article suggests that contemporary internet use blurs the contours of the stereotyped media image, and harnesses the user into a complex dynamic of both virtual and embodied identity delineation.

In June 2007, an incendiary rumor, fueled by a set of video postings, began to circulate on the international Peruvian community blogosphere. The rumor focussed on talk show celebrity Laura Bozzo, and on the ethics and legality of both her show and her publicity activities. The fact that Bozzo continues to inspire angry critique and gossip is hardly surprising, given the success of her shows, and the history of scandal surrounding her, from public disgust with her portrayal of poor Peruvians, to charges of her involvement in political corruption.¹

In this 2007 case, critique of Bozzo stemmed specifically from the work of bloggers, who juxtaposed two videos, one from Bozzo’s talk show, featuring a young girl from Lima, allegedly the victim of sexual abuse, and the second from a video of Bozzo’s visit to Pisco, following the earthquake that left many surviving residents homeless. In the Pisco video, a young girl cries as she tells Laura of her predicament following the earthquake, just as the girl on Bozzo’s show had cried as she told how she was afraid of her step-father. Could the two girls actually be one and the same? Some bloggers insisted that the girl who appeared in both videos was a paid actress. The news program Prensa Libre used infor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The talk show uploaded: YouTube and the technicity of the body
• 3. Digital ghosts, global capitalism and social change
• 4. Capital implications: the function of labor in the video art of Juan Devis and Yoshua Okón
• 5. What time is this picture? Cameraphones, tourism, and the digital gaze in Japan
• 6. A stock market theory of culture: a view from the Latin American neoliberal transition
• 7. Südländisch: the borders of fear with reference to Foucault
• 8. Is nostalgia becoming digital? Ecuadorian diaspora in the age of global capitalism
• Index