ABOUT THIS BOOK

More than fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that “the medium is the message,” profoundly influencing future generations of media theorists. A long-overdue wakeup call for the field of media studies, The Message is Murder analyzes the formations of violence still imbued in the everyday functions of the media. Jonathan Beller introduces the concept of computational capital to argue that contemporary media are not neutral, but rather they are technologies of political economy that became entangled with gendered and racialized capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Engaging with Borges, Turing, Hitchcock, and Marx, Beller offers an ambitious and provocative critique of contemporary media studies.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jonathan Beller is professor of humanities and media studies and director of the graduate program of media studies at Pratt Institute, in New York.

REVIEWS

"Jonathan Beller powerfully addresses the most urgent issue of today's political economy: the gradual merging of capital and computation into new structures of power."

— Matteo Pasquinelli, University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe

"Beller is one of the leading and pioneering theorists of the political economy of attention... this book is extremely pertinent for a readership seeking new ways of understanding contemporary capitalism."

— Allen Feldman, New York University

“So-called digital culture operates on and intensifies a substrate of racial-capitalist calculation that precedes the invention of the electronic digital computer. Jonathan Beller’s remarkable book examines the implications of this foundational claim through ‘poetico-theoretical’ analyses of information theory, literature, and cinema. By tracking the co-constitutive operations of economics, informatics, visuality, and psychology, Beller reveals the violent formations that ground contemporary mediatic regimes.”

— Seb Franklin, author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic

“Beller’s taking to task of media studies techno-fetishism is a strong reminder that scholars should consider not only the formations of violence that support our systems of media but also the historicity of dominant concepts like information, which have rendered such violence as value-neutral and the cost of doing business. . . . Scholars should take seriously Beller’s insistence that media theory needs critical race theory to thoroughly understand the relationship among media, race, suffering, and violence.”

— International Journal of Communication

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Part I: Informatics of Inscription/Inscription of Informatics
1. Gramsci’s Press: Why We Game
2. A Message from Borges: The Informatic Labyrinth
3. Alan Turing’s Self-Defense: On Not Castrating the Machines
4. Shannon/Hitchcock: Another Method for the Letters
5. The Internet of Value, by Karl Marx: Information as Cosmically Distributed Alienation
Part II: Photo-Graphology, Psychotic Calculus, Informatic Labor
6. Camera Obscura After All: The Racist Writing with Light
7. Pathologistics of Attention
8. Prosthetics of Whiteness: Drone Psychosis
9. The Capital of Information: Fractal Fascism, Informatic Labor and M-I-M’
Appendix
From the Cinematic Mode of Productiion to Computational
Capital: An Interview conducted by Ante Jeric and Diana Meheik for Kulturpunk
Notes
Index