dada » 25 Mar 2017 02:33 wrote:Enjoyed this, thanks.
I wonder if there are any answers hiding in there (in relation to the Russian Conspiracy as RI subject). I guess it depends on how 'meta' we want to get.
I'll leave behind the old Russia, the old US, the old transnational industrial capitalism and jump ahead, to a quote in the above piece, "the simple fact that in a semiocapitalist world, the main commodity becomes attention."
Let's take that as a simple fact of today's world. It's a competition for attention. Your attention, my attention. A conspiracy to monopolize attention would be the only conspiracy game left to play, Russian or otherwise.
Why conspire to monopolize your attention? Because it's the main commodity, the hot new trend. Just because.
Anyway, jumping ahead again. From the above piece
In the very first chapter of Capital, Marx explains that value is time, the accumulation of time—time objectified, time that has become things, goods. It is not the time of work, of working in time, that produces value, for it matters little whether one is lazy or efficient. The important determination of value concerns the average time needed to produce a certain good.
All of this is clear: value is time, capital is value, or accumulated time.
Stefano posted an image yesterday in the image thread:
acceleration.JPG
I appreciated that the time in the image was a few minutes later than the time stamp on the post (for me, at least).
I would like to suggest that it isn't
accumulated capital, but
accelerated capital that produces the image. Part of the conspiracy for your attention is to get you to believe that accumulation is necessary for image production.
When Marx speaks of relative surplus value, he’s speaking about acceleration: if you want a growth in productivity—which is also a growth in surplus value—you need to accelerate work time.
Sure.
But when the main tool for production ceases to be material labor and becomes cognitive labor, acceleration enters another phase, another dimension, because an increase in semiocapitalist productivity comes essentially from the acceleration of the info-sphere—the environment from which information arrives in your brain.
Not so sure about that. But I'll allow it, for the sake of argument.
Do not forget that your brain functions in time, and needs time in order to give attention and understanding. But attention cannot be infinitely accelerated.
Definitely not sure about that. Even if attention cannot be infinitely accelerated - which the jury is still out on - understanding can be.
I think the trap fallen into here is one of binary, and/or linear thinking. Classical "if this, and not that, then the other thing." We're not getting anywhere with that anymore. May have served us well, but we have moved into the semiocapitalist world, the attention economy. Charlie Chaplin died forty years ago now, you know.
It's the trap a lot of big thinkers, many quoted in the above article, perhaps even the author himself, have fallen into. "Time or Space," "language or the body," "the sign or the signified," "meaning or non-meaning," "violence or non-violence." It's alright to criticize big thinkers. Authorities can be wrong. "The future is over," "Truth is dead," these are mystic pronouncements, posing as logical conclusions. Might as well say "god is dead." The thinker has painted themselves into a corner.
The argument is that accumulation of capital(time, attention) becomes the image. It's like purchasing something. But what if acceleration of capital becomes image? It's an exchange between states. The image
is capital, just faster.
The fear is that meaning is becoming lost in all this speed. Not so sure about that, either. Meaning is another state. Image exchanges with meaning, meaning with capital, capital with image. Who sets the exchange rate of meaning? Some know the secret of this triangular arbitrage. Keeping that knowledge from you is part of the conspiracy. I'm probably saying too much. The adept doesn't show his face. That's alright, the one who shows his face isn't an adept. So who cares what I say.
Acceleration doesn't have to be violent. That's just a romantic notion. I say more acceleration is the answer. Not amphetamine acceleration, like the author of the above piece warns against. Not futurist acceleration. Faster than all that. It's resistance that wears a system down, not acceleration. And the system is only a vehicle for getting us around, until we find a better vehicle. We don't want to break it, we want it to run smoothly. Then we sell it for more than we bought it for.