Arbitrage on Life, Differánce of the Flesh
Racialization and Colonial Gender Formation as Algorithmic Innovation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.44.2.05Keywords:
life, derivatives, racialization, colonial gender formation, femicide, currency issuanceAbstract
Who/what can be had at an ontological discount? By grasping the “anitrelationality” and “dismediation” of social relations by capital’s system of accounts, we discern not only the epistemicide and the expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic by capital, we shed new light on racial abstraction and gender abstraction. We grasp in “the coloniality of race and gender” the logistics of abstraction that at once code the social factory and give rise to what I have called the derivative condition—a condition in which the multiple forms of being, when dissolved in and as executable information, are functionalized as contingent claims on the value-form by means of “the world computer.” When we say that semiotic processes are metapragmatically put under economic and informatic pressure, we are also saying that the datafication expresses more than a simple analogy to the commodity form by assigning numbers to qualities. Rather, datafication appears as the preeminent mechanism for the commodification of sociality, and thus also encodes access to social currency. Femicide and the ritual violence of parastate cartels of “gore capitalism” can be seen as alternative means of issuing derivative (soft) currencies by imposing extrajudicial if equally violent systems of account.
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