communication +1 Volume 2 Article 3 Issue 1 Communication and New Materialism September 2013 Human Material in the Communication of Capital Atle Mikkola Kjøsen University of Western Ontario, Faculty of Information and Media Studies,
[email protected] Abstract The purpose of this article is to interrogate Marx’s analysis of the circulation of capital through the ‘new materialist’ communications and media theory of Friedrich Kittler. It explores the connections between Marx’s commodity fetish and how Kittler posits human beings as components of an information system alongside technologies and institutions. The article ask whether a ‘non-human’ Marxist theory is possible, i.e. if it is possible to remove the human being from its privileged position in Marx’s political economy. Specifically the paper argues that human beings are programmable human matter that serves to aid the communication of value through capital’s circuit. This stance necessitates adopting the point of view of capital and the fetish, bracketing the social and moving away from categories such as labour, production and class consciousness in favour of the value form, circulation and programmability. Keywords Karl Marx, Friedrich Kittler, Marxism, Value form, New materialism, Media theory, Communication, Programmability, Lacan, Subjectivity Human Material in the Communication of Capital Cover Page Footnote Acknowledgement: Thanks to Vincent Manzerolle, Bernd Frohmann, Julia Campbell and Nick Dyer-Witheford for reading and commenting on drafts of the paper, to Jordan Coop for helping designing the figures, and especially to Siobhan Watters for reading, editing and commenting on several versions of this paper. This article is available in communication +1: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol2/iss1/ 3 Kjøsen / Human Material, Communication and Capital We cannot know whether Pavlov's dogs can escape from their conditioned existence.