Innis

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 value-form 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.

This paper, part of a larger project that examines drones from a social-construction of technology perspective, considers drone warfare in light of Harold Innis’s seminal work on empire and communication. Leveraging leading-edge aeronautics with advanced optics, data processing, and networked communication, drones represent an archetypal “space-biased” technology. Indeed, by allowing remote operators and others to monitor, select, and strike targets from half a world away, and in real-time, these weapon systems epitomize the “pernicious neglect of time” Innis sought to identify and remedy in his later writing. With Innis’s time-space dialectic as a starting point, then, the paper considers drones in light of a longstanding paradox of American culture: the impulse to collapse the geographical distance between the United States and other parts of the globe, while simultaneously magnifying the cultural difference between Americans and other peoples and societies. In the midst of the wo...

“Whichever way you throw me, I will stand”: the official motto of the Isle of Man perfectly describes the Celtic languages, their histories, their present endangered and/or revived statuses, and captures the general attitude of Celtic speakers towards their languages. One such speaker and a ...

... Goff man's work on gender representations in advertising is based on a strategy of flipping "figures" (female representations) with the "grounds" (male representations and gazes), by implementing role and pose reversals.34 While Goffman does not use figure/ground ...