2,076 research outputs found
Capital\u27s Media: The Physical Conditions of Circulation
The question of what constitutes media has received little attention in Marxism and where it does, the concept is an empty abstraction. While Marxists have extensively theorized the concentration of mass media ownership, and analyzed mass media content as ideology or propaganda, critical discussions of what a medium is in the capitalist mode of production have been mostly lacking. That is to say, Marxism does not have a media ontology. Media is therefore a critical gap in Marx’s political economy. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap by asking what is a medium in the capitalist mode of production?, answering it with a valueform theory of media and a concept of “capital’s media” that takes the circulation of capital as its starting point. The dissertation goes beyond Marxism’s mass media myopia and moves the concept of media towards logistics and infrastructure. The contributions this dissertation makes are to (1) develop a theory and category of capital’s media as a phenomenon of the circulation process of capital; (2) stake out an approach to investigate media phenomenon outside of pure political economy and cultural studies approaches; and in the process (3) contribute towards a rehabilitation of Marx’s analysis of circulation. To make these contributions this dissertation relies on a theoretical framework that is primarily based on Marx’s value theory, but enriched with concepts from Canadian- German media theory (Harold A. Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Wolfgang Ernst, and Hartmut Winkler) and Paul Virilio’s dromology. This dissertation has two components to its methodology: an original “circulationist” reading of Marx’s political economy that is developed from the heterodox Neue Marx-Lektüre (New Marx Reading), and a set of empirical case studies that includes the shipping container and intermodal transportation, distribution centers, and point-of-sale and payment systems Positing a category of capital’s media, this dissertation concludes that nothing by its very nature is a medium but instead that things function as media when they appear in that category. More specifically, a thing, such as a container ship or distribution center, appears in the category of capital’s media when they function within and for the circulation process
Exploring the landscapes of "computing": digital, neuromorphic, unconventional -- and beyond
The acceleration race of digital computing technologies seems to be steering
toward impasses -- technological, economical and environmental -- a condition
that has spurred research efforts in alternative, "neuromorphic" (brain-like)
computing technologies. Furthermore, since decades the idea of exploiting
nonlinear physical phenomena "directly" for non-digital computing has been
explored under names like "unconventional computing", "natural computing",
"physical computing", or "in-materio computing". This has been taking place in
niches which are small compared to other sectors of computer science. In this
paper I stake out the grounds of how a general concept of "computing" can be
developed which comprises digital, neuromorphic, unconventional and possible
future "computing" paradigms. The main contribution of this paper is a
wide-scope survey of existing formal conceptualizations of "computing". The
survey inspects approaches rooted in three different kinds of background
mathematics: discrete-symbolic formalisms, probabilistic modeling, and
dynamical-systems oriented views. It turns out that different choices of
background mathematics lead to decisively different understandings of what
"computing" is. Across all of this diversity, a unifying coordinate system for
theorizing about "computing" can be distilled. Within these coordinates I
locate anchor points for a foundational formal theory of a future
computing-engineering discipline that includes, but will reach beyond, digital
and neuromorphic computing.Comment: An extended and carefully revised version of this manuscript has now
(March 2021) been published as "Toward a generalized theory comprising
digital, neuromorphic, and unconventional computing" in the new open-access
journal Neuromorphic Computing and Engineerin
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