A lecture with Jonathan Beller, The Pratt Institute. His work focuses on the relationship between the rise of industrial and digital forms of imaging and the transformation of political economy, discourse function and the value-form. His talk will explore the ways in which the new economy boosters champion new media's potentials of empowerment all the way to the bank, while the 21st century is thus far also characterized by forms of radical dispossession. Whether one considers youth in Mexican gangs, children in Darfur, child laborers in the Philippines, ordinary Chinese living near the Three Gorges Damn, the struggle of Palestinians, the situation in Brazilian favelas, prison inmates in the United States, one encounters forms of dispossession that are at once equal in their violence to any prior historical era, absolutely contemporary, and taken together, unprecedented in scale.
This talk seeks to interrogate the ties that bind such forms of capture, enclosure, civil death and actual death to the digitally driven glitz that makes its triumphant presence felt in the techno-rush of smooth bodies, supercomputing, war machines, screen viscerality, and other forms of the postmodern sublime.
New York City, NY; NYC