File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism.Jul12-Aug17.94, message 110


From: jordan.crandall-AT-thing.nyc.ny.us
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 94 11:00:20 
Subject: Informatics



Greetings. Here is my introduction with some initial comments. I am a theorist
and artist (of the
non-expressionistic minority; I work with signifying systems and social
formations), Chair of a
nonprofit organization and artmaking collective called The X-Art Foundation,
and editor of the art
journal BLAST. I am also a board member of  The Thing BBS, a network dedicated
to art and
cultural theory based in New York and Cologne. My interest is in the charged
area where
discursive construction irresolutely meets biologic and economic production.
While I see
economic production as an extension of biology in the cultural sphere, I see
biology, culture, and
economy as concurrently discursively formed. Economic production becomes the
mediating force
in the determination of social relations, but its "essentialism" is held at
bay. Materialism is
increasingly informational--I am most interested in how Marxism functions in
terms of the
information economy: how does information-currency operate, "materialize,"
determine sociality? I
see the hyperspaces of our moment as the result of, following Jameson, quantum
leaps in the
enlargement of capital, "in the latter's penetration of hitherto uncommodified
areas"--that is, its
formation and colonization of information space. As Jameson writes, "A certain
unifying and
totalizing force is presupposed here"--not the Absolute Spirit, not the State,
"but simply capital
itself." 

The new discourse of "informatics," defined by Katherine Hayles, following
Donna Haraway, as
"the technologies of information as well as the biological, social, linguistic,
and cultural changes that
initiate, accompany, and complicate their development" engages this new world
system, but it
lacks an awareness of the constitutive dynamics of the market. I am most
interested in
interweaving Marxist discourse here, anchoring it while avoiding an
essentializing move. 

In relation to the discussion of labor and cultural capital on this list, it
would be interesting to
discuss information capital and the materialism of information as the
constitutive force of social
relation, especially as we engage the radically new networking technologies and
modes of
interface. My emphasis is in this alignment of hybrid, informatic hyperspace
with the emergent de-/ 
re-constructed subjectivities and attendant modes of embodiment, developing new
interstitial sites
of agency, performative identity, and political consciousness. 

Jordan

jordan.crandall-AT-thing.nyc.ny.us



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