Berlin, 26 Jan. A Glossary of Subsumption at Archive Books

January 29th, 2013

A two-day seminar building a common vocabulary of the present organised by Sean Dockray and Post-Media Lab Leuphana University.

 


Friday, January 25, 2013 – 12:00-16h
Saturday, January 26, 2013 – 12:00-22h
Archive Books Berlin
www.archivebooks.org

 

Inherited from idealist philosophy (Kant, Schelling, Hegel) and used by Karl Marx to theorise the development of the capitalist mode of production, subsumption has emerged as an important term for contemporary theorists attempting to describe and periodise the development of technologies, knowledges and class relations under capital. These categories of human activity and society can be described as ‘under capital’ since ‘subsumption’, which can be translated as submission, domination or subordination, describes a process by which the particular (concrete labour) is subsumed by a universal (value or capital’s process of valorisation).

Marx theorises subsumption as a two-stage process by which capital takes hold of a existing process (formal subsumption) and begins to shape and transform it to its own ends (real subsumption). The shift from ‘formal subsumption’ to that of ‘real subsumption’ in our present moment is characterised by the profound separation of human needs from capitalist production, self-reproduction and expansion. Labour remains central to capital’s self-augmentation and socialisation, but under such naturalised domination it appears only increasingly marginal. Capital is no longer content to merely encompass existing forms of production in its pursuit of value, but must convert and transform all of life (production and reproduction) into capitalist forms. Through this ceaseless deterritorialisation, it finds ways to extract value across all forms of social, material and biological activity, radically altering them in its wake. Within this, our ways of relating, caring and of expression, of communicating and collaborating, are enclosed, templated and optimised. As ICT is folded into this process the creation of new forms of sociality, new edges, speeds and channels of communicating, and an endless wake of data are produced by and for subjects. ICT accelerates capitalist subsumption but also changes the nature of struggle against its domination, forcing it, and us, into more bound and arguably intimate confrontations.

→ Reading materials: http://aaaaarg.org/contents/post-media-lab

→ Glossary: http://piratepad.net/wZe29j5N7f

 

 

People presenting or participating

Anthony Iles on A brief history of Subsumption >> Autonomisation

Gordan Savicic (TBC) on Information and Computation >> discussion of the term “seamlessness” through various hands-on applications on smartphones and within standard web-browsers.

Inigo Wilkins on Information and Computation >> heterodox economics, HFT, the robot-phase transition in finance and social media, computational modeling and soft control and on Health >> transparency and surveillance

Sean Dockray on Information and Computation >> data centers, cloud

Oliver Lerone Schultz on dispossession, land grabbing and annexations in the context of international AgroIndustries, and on the re-structuring of social space grid/logics in aligning with digital network infrastructures (Zoning, logistical city, Network-Geographies)

Matteo Pasquinelli on “The number of the collective beast: The substance of value in the age of the institutions of ranking and rating”

 

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