Sam Lewitt, Paper Citizen 4322 (detail), 2012.

Computational Racial Capitalism

Computation, suspected of having swallowed and reformatted the world, does not mark the end of capitalism, but a new phase of racial capitalism. The social differentiation endemic to the history of commodification and its corollary capitalist expansion requires through its very scale, complexity, and requisite integration, a difference engine in the form of the discreet state machine. This difference engine, the modern computer, is also a social difference engine.

The seminar meetings draw on readings from critical race theory, feminism, marxist critiques of colonialism, neo-liberal economics, and marxist cultural analysis to explore the modes of social differentiation imposed by capital expansion that give rise to the virtual machine that Beller calls “the world computer.” We read together what is at this point a group of classical theoretical texts to explore how racial capitalism inscribes and makes legible what comes to function as executable code on bodies. These codes include forms that we identify as race, gender, nation, class, and a million other differences that make a difference.  We will discuss these themes and others from Beller’s forthcoming book The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism. Additional concepts proposed and discussed will include “the programmable image,”  “informatic labor,” and “economic media.”