This is a response to the Posner-Garner-Wark-Bloom view of hermeneutics. It is an elite Continental psycholinguistic analysis of the Norman invasion as a force of civilization and its discontents, and is only available with premium subscriptions to very expensive journals.
http://dismagazine.com/disillusioned/di ... ification/MJ You have written that “We need a new language to describe emergent forms of commodity economy. It’s not neo anything or post anything. It’s not late capitalism or cognitive capitalism. Modifiers won’t do. It’s based on an ontological mutation: the historical production of the category of information.” Given your analysis, does the concept of class struggle retain any relevance today? What form does it take in the context of an immaterial, digital landscape?
MK To talk about the biopower of postfordist neoliberal late capitalism seems to me a complete failure of language. Just sticking some modifiers on the old terms doesn’t really capture the strangeness of the times. It helps to imagine that there was one other past mutation in the commodity economy. It shifted from the enclosure of the commons as private property, to the industrial production of the thing as private property. There’s a leap in the form of abstraction there. Not just land and its produce but labor and its produce can be commodified, rationalized, quantified, and so on. Perhaps what we are living through is a second great mutation in the commodity form, from product to information. In Marx’s day, steam and iron were the technical means by which industrialization could proceed. In our time, the integrated circuit is driving a whole new means to capture value, and no longer just from actual work. The commodification of play is another side to this new form of the commodity economy, as I tried to argue in my book Gamer Theory. The question would be then whether new kinds of class relations emerge out of making information private property. Are there new haves and have-nots? Not that this class division over information replaces those over land and industry, but is rather layered on top of them, perhaps even controlling them.
http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/ ... l_articles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
