| Capital Networks: Culture and Class in the Digital Age is a materialist analysis of the "digital condition," which is said to be the cultural and social environment of our "new times." It engages the digital through various cultural products---from the iPod to The Matrix and from classic literary modes such as Mallarme's Mimique to William Gibson's post-cyberpunk novel Pattern Recognition---as well as the theoretical and philosophical writings of Derrida, Negri, Latour, Haraway, Heidegger, Castells, and Deleuze and Guattari. These theorists, and their followers such as Mark Poster, Stuart Hall, and N. Katherine Halyes, have argued that the "network" economy represents a historical break between an "analogue" past and a "digital" present and a broader shift towards a post-society (post-capitalist, post-national, post-labor, post-hierarchy, and post-work) in which consumption rather than production determines the conditions of life.;What has turned the ideology of the digital into a new technological fundamentalism is a new cyber-spiritualism that has its genealogy in such concepts as the "body without organs," "spectrality," and "differance." The digital geist has obscured the objectivity of class difference with the phantom of the digital divide. Capital Networks, through a series of critical readings, demonstrates that the digital divide is itself an effect of a division which precedes it, namely the social division of labor.;Capital Networks takes a different path in understanding the digital. It foregrounds "the property question" and, by proposing a new theory of mimesis ("non-mimetic reflection"), critiques the representation of the digital and demonstrates that the "new times" continue to be structured by relations of production (class), and that the widely shared views that culture has become autonomous from its material base is more an ideological representation than historical objectivity. The "digital condition" is itself conditioned, in other words, by its underlying relations of labor and capital. |
