Ricardo Dominguez on Mon, 7 Aug 2006 20:41:10 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> The Spectre of Particle Capitalism |
The Spectre of Particle Capitalism by Keith Sandborn For *Particles of Interest: Tales from the Matter Markets* By Diane Ludin and Ricardo Dominguez http://www.pitmm.net A Transvergence Beta Project For: ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge & the Thirteenth International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA2006) AUGUST 7-13, 2006 <<The Spectre of Particle Capitalism>> Particle Capitalism is but the latest phase in the quantification of the world, the historical motor of capitalism. Capital relies on the notion of quantifiable exchange. Everything has its price: wood, timber, electricity, human labor. But the abstraction of raw materials, objects, elemental forces, and human activities onto the same plane-making them comparable objects of exchange, i.e. their commodification-assumes one thing, which Marx places in a footnote-always the locus for rupture-of the introduction to Capital: that Capitalism assumes the individual has an encyclopediac knowledge of commodities, a self-evidently impossible condition. This absurdity, this impossible contradiction in Marx?s time, the mastery of all knowledge, even anecdotally and functionally via the encyclopedia or the library, has reached new levels of alienation and dysfunction in the individual experience of the dataworld as it collapses onto itself. 125 channels of cable tv and nothing to watch was only the prelude to the enumerable yet phenomenological numberlessness of websites. To make possible current conditions of exchange, all is reduced to data and datafication becomes an end in itself. In the dataworld, people are not merely objectified, as in slavery, or prostitution, they are transduced and betrayed more directly into the common medium of exchange: people are electricity are timber are wood are data. And data in radically reductive binary machine only readable form. This condition of alienation can only be compared with what Jakobson identified as the pathological loss of language called the contiguity disorder, where all discourse becomes a mere word heap. The syntax, which keeps the circuits of exchange silently ?humming,? is-as it has always been-hierarchical and imposed from above. ?Particle capitalism? is yet another attempted coup on the common matrimony of the natural world: if the world has been more nearly entirely mapped than ever before in its extent-GPS tells us where we are wherever we are in the Cartesian grid of data capital-what remains is possession of the world in depth, the non-linear mathematical depth of physics (string theory), for example, and the subjective depth of personal experience. If this attempted deployment of science yet again in pursuit of power is to be consciously thwarted it will come about only by the radical subjectivity of those involved. If the basic building blocks of matter cannot be grasped-even by the common agreement of those who make it their constant occupation to attempt to actively position themselves with respect to such entities-then perhaps it already exceeds the grasp of particle capitalism. It has been argued that in the current state of physics, mathematical models are being created without the predictive, testable results traditionally associated with ?science.? What sort of mutation in capital could come about as the notion of quantifiability itself shifts? But given this lack of consensus about radically complex models, how is the agora of physics utterly different from the Wikipedia where each can write and re-write the entries? Who has the time to constantly re-write the fragmentary history of the world, or its map: the answer is still-as it seems always to have been: those with enough power, wealth, and leisure to have it done for them by their scribal-or screenal-submissives. The Wikipedia is a kind of hybrid of the 80s BBS and the Enlightenment Encyclopedia; it does not function at the level of the control circuits of power in any of the disciplines with which it intersects. It functions as a kind of unintentional parody of the epic of the democratization of knowledge and power at the heart of data capitalism: it is lively chatter even more than collective labor, which is slavery. Physics, of course, functions on a ?higher,? i.e. more rigorous level of discourse, whether as an animated and open exchange of theories, or as a dead ritual of exchange within a priestly hierarchy. In one sense, the special nature of quantifiability within current physical theory may not be important: the movement of the stock market cannot be predicted both macroscopically and microscopically over any useful length of time, yet this has not stopped the market from continuing to ?function.? Nor has the dataworld stopped non-virtual human immiseration from increasing worldwide: real prostitution has shown aggressive development strategies in the former land of Lenin and real slavery exists in various forms worldwide. Though a tax on breathing remains currently unenforceable-the control of ?natural? resources is still an epic of possession and power. Wars seem to be fought for them: men, women, and children die real deaths for them, though that is apparently only a physical drama representing the more nihilistic ideological sport of the masters. With particle capitalism-the attempt to commodify matter in its most complex dimensions-that familiar and oft-sutured-over contradiction between the politics of commodification and the limits of human knowledge once again erupts. The question is: can capital force matter-and its human interpreters-to conform to a logic of the commodity, or will matter itself-and its human interpreters-force a potentially fatal mutation in capital. Will the encounter between the logic of ?advanced? science and the logic of ?advanced? capital yield a result more familiar to art historians than historians of science or economics, as the struggle among ?advanced? factions plays itself out. For MORE: *Particles of Interest: Tales from the Matter Markets* http://www.pitmm.net # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net