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 ------------------
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005