Abstract:

For one thing, the signs have changed. The signs were once language, they were semiotic, they were about letters, about language games. Today the signs will tend to be number. If once, discipline was through language and the confessional and the subject, then today’s control is about not letter but number, about algorithms, about not Saussure and Barthes/Derrida but about Gödel and Turing. About not even negentropy but about the possibility of openness through entropic systems. Today’s economies of signs and space are perhaps about neither substance or subject(ivity) but the about constellations of multiplicity: of opening the black boxes of machinic operationality. 1994 economies of signs and space were about flows of information, of commodities, of media, of people, of capital, of goods and bads. But today’s flows and mobilities have come under the sign of, not so much flows or mobilities, but the logistics of Amazon and Taobao. And are most of all a question of infrastructure, and especially of platforms in what has become surely an age of platform media and platform capitalism. Infrastructure as platforms. But what are Google and Facebook and Amazon? They are not so much commodities, and they surely with their quasi-monopoly status are not markets. They say quite aggressively – Mark Zuckerberg – that they are not media. They are instead platforms, they are infrastructures themselves, on whose surface markets are constituted and media come into play. But what about further East? What about the Belt and Road Initiative? Perhaps the newest and most fundamental iteration of sign and space economies. In China, we are looking at neither hard power nor soft power but instead at infrastructure power. What sort of economics is this? Is it a formalist economics that stretches from classical political economy to neoclassicism and neoliberalism? Or is it a substantivist economics of e.g., Karl Polanyi and the anthropologists in which the market is but one institution among many, in which prices are not necessarily set by markets? In which in today’s possible Pacific-Asian critical theory it is also culture that drives the economy.