The shelf of transdisciplinary critical theory on the networked condition in an era of planet-scale, planet-wrecking digitally enhanced capitalism is, just like its object, in an expansive phase, albeit one seemingly less prone to crisis. Marxist or Marx-adjacent publications by theorists such as Jonathan Beller, Christian Fuchs, or Jathan Sadowski hint at the scope of academic well as journalistic inquiry, as well as the blurring of those spheres enabled by social media.1 On a wider terrain, incisive work is being done by technology critics, historians and theorists drawing on phenomenology, ontology, ecology, media theory, process philosophy, cultural studies, black studies and feminism, including Ramon Amaro, Ruha Benjamin, Simone Browne, Orit Halpern, Yuk Hui, Lisa Nakamura, Safiya Noble, and the all-present Shoshana Zuboff.2 Many of these are interlocutors for Seb Franklin’s project. Yet extensive as this rollcall may be, it remains a snapshot of a field whose heterogeneity indexes the success of an intellectual current that seems to not only be expanding but actively redefining more established disciplines as it goes — the march of the digital humanities since at least the mid-2000s.

With this plurality of coordinates in mind, it is clear that Franklin’s work has some distinctive stakes. Besides the polemical likes of Tiqqun, it is the only one in the landscape charted above that excavates the actuality of cybernetics and information science in the constitution of digitally mediated social relations and productive forces both over time and as we know it today. This is a focus that is evident throughout his work, as in the previous book Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic(MIT, 2015). Further, it adapts that media-theoretical frame by not only grounding it in a historicised critique of political economy, but by mapping it onto works of fiction, visual art and cinema. This involves making use of contemporary approaches in Marxist analysis such as value critique/value-form theory and racial capitalism, and throughout it generates sharp and striking – if variably persuasive - readings in light of the limited congruence of these paradigms with one another. If value-form theory is consistently defined by its prioritisation of the “logical” over the “historical” dimension of the capitalist mode of production, the critical category of racial capitalism situates itself in the capitalist social formation, challenging the analytic and political utility of both those priorities and that distinction. A number of recent Marxist interventions, however, have sought to redefine that opposition, collapsible as it is into the zombiefied terms of “class” versus “identity,” and such efforts include Amy De’Ath, Alberto Toscano, as well as the late Kevin Floyd and the edited volume he initiated, Totality Inside Out, where notably Chris Chen and Sarika Chandra develop an “ascriptive” theory of the role of racism in the reproduction of capital drawing on the most generative aspects of both approaches.

Franklin’s project is at an oblique angle to these, though a dialogue can definitely be traced in the text and the endnotes. However, the driving principle of the project is not a synthetic one, such as some kind of fusion of media theory and historical materialism, but rather a reticularone. Digitally Disposed is animated by tracing connections and dependencies (“require and obscure” or “support and disavow” are the types of framing that recur) between the “congealed” and the “coded,” in the wording from Spivak cited early on, as modalities of more and less valued, more and less coerced, labor power in capital. “Computation” is placed closer to elite labor, and “congelation” to lower levels of autonomy in the work and lower levels of humanity imputed to the worker, drawing on Marx’s graphic simile of labor as bone jelly. This use of a passing if provocative reference in Spivak’s work on the subaltern is intriguing, though questions can be asked about how sturdy a distinction it provides, especially if we think about the material infrastructure of digital commodities and networked logistics that now organize so much manual labor even when it is not directly involved in generating the machines and the transport enabling it, not to mention the app-based gig economy or online piecework. In that sense much labor is computational nowadays, however differently the value produced (or not) is recognized by the wage or the credit system. Likewise, it can also be put as an open question whether it is waged workers or the enslaved, in Franklin’s account, who are closer to the computed side, if the enslaved are both commodities and producers of commodities and can be securitized like fixed capital.

With the emphasis on connection – key as well in Franklin’s positing of reliable or intermittent connections to value as the ground of the racialized division of labor — there is correspondingly little mediation, in the dialectical sense of reading the concrete through the abstract. The methodological implications of this are that the argument repeats in different formulations or ‘cells’ of its reticular construction (the chapters are often short, feeding this snapshot impression) and builds its conceptual momentum partly by echoing the algorithmic structure of the value abstraction it takes as its core object.

This mimesis of information theory paradigms is fascinating, if occasionally dense, but is always motivated in the analysis, as in Chapter 7, where a sentence like “the process through which the human subject is produced as autonomous by an informatic mechanism that conditionsand sets limits on its autonomy”(106 italics in original) captures both the critical stakes and the recursive structure of the argument. The impersonality of capitalist coercion is the grounding premise, yet for Franklin, the value-form of labor highlights how the experience of that abstraction is anything but homogeneous. Here there is a decisive step taken beyond the coordinates of an argument that could be read as a media-theoretical update of Sohn-Rethel’s foregrounding of the “exchange abstraction.”<3 The social synthesis, as presented by Franklin, doesn’t just implicitly pass through or over labor but is laser-focused on it. Its gradation and degradation is not just the political or ethical but theoretical core of the book. More precisely, the concept of “disposal” allows us to see both how the organization and the compromised reproduction or abjection of labor operates to shore up this social synthesis, with racialization and gender inequity as its chief modalities.

Here the most successful chapters stay close to mid-twentieth century cybernetic social theory and sociometry, which are re-narrated with their assumptions on display. Crucially, these are not just ideological, normative or formal assumptions, but represent an “unthought” in the value-form subtending Western capitalist social life and the premises of information-as-value they contain. Here, Franklin’s main argument that value is informatic all the way down is most substantive, although class seems to be substituted by race – a methodological presupposition whose premises in the work of the proponents of the “racial capitalism” paradigm remain indirect in the text. The exclusion of class is deliberate, but it does make it harder to grasp why and how “value-mediated social forms” work, or why the choice was made to superimpose race and class rather than articulate them as lived social, or, in Sianne Ngai’s terms, “visceral,” abstractions. Concurrently, a discussion of “form-determination” which unfolds into the suggestion of form and formlessness as a complementary prism to the reliability/unreliablity dyad of life and labor as viewed from the perspective of value extraction lends heft to chapters on speculative fictions such as Samuel Delany’s Return to Neveryon. Form and formlessness are correlated with “information” here in complex and suggestive ways. Franklin’s template yields fewer results in the somewhat more literal takes on Elena Ferrante or on Sondra Perry’s Typhoon coming on, where digitality is flatly equated with abstraction in a way that undercuts a promising angle on Romantic painting as a recursive subject-object relationship. The limits of analogy show themselves here. If the digital sea is in the same relation to any actual sea as value is to concrete social relations, where does this leave the artwork? Or analog photography? Or any process of mediation, for that matter? Such passages do not amount to blockages in Franklin’s narrative, though they may signal that its “propositional” (rather than critical) dimension could be further developed, perhaps by engaging in a more material thinking with the artworks that can pre-empt such illustrative uses.

Overall, however, Franklin’s achievement with this book is undeniable. He establishes a singular project even while raising the threshold for like-minded initiatives in reading race through and against value-theory in Marxist cultural critique and media theory alike. The centrality of dispossession over production or waged labor recasts the ironic double freedom of the waged worker as secondary to the primary blow of “wageless life.” The emphasis on structural violence over accumulation, or, perhaps, the centrality of the former to the latter finds its emphasis in current lines of inquiry into appropriation over commodification in capitalist accumulation, or surplus population, externalization, devalorization as the modes of capitalism in crisis but also in standard operation. These approaches join the recent focus on social reproduction and ecology in both Marxist research and political strategy. Here it is outlined in the terms of a digitalized biopolitics (a politics of life encoded via race rather than class) which gives us an ‘automatic subject’ of value as a form of quantification that the capital-labor relation always imposed, often destructively, on labor power. Capital’s homeostatic reproduction (vis-a-vis Marx: “value-sustaining appearance of labour appears as the self-supporting power of capital”) requires notionally free persons/workers/subjects/users as its vehicles insofar as they have a regular connection to the network.4 This “automatic subjectivity” of value transfers to them, but they remain needy partial-subjects whose ontological cohesion and material survival is secured by connectivity to capital. This continues to be enforced by the modern and colonial norm of self-ownership as underpinned by whiteness and maleness (or the asymmetries between those identified or ascribed as such and those who aren’t or can’t be). Concomitantly the structural centrality of labor and life turned into externality or waste by the reproduction of capital is that it can always be valorized later as new, “free,” or “cheap” inputs, in Jason Moore’s terms.5 Yet this is only one possible iteration of a central argument which the book’s reticular structure at times makes it a challenge to infer, evoking the relations of style and substance, essence and appearance, which its hex on mediation both exposes and keeps at bay.

1. See Jonathan Beller, The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021); Christian Fuchs, Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory (London: University of Westminster Press, 2020); Jathan Sadowski,Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (MIT Press, 2020).
2. A sample of references here could include Ramon Amaro, The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (London: Sternberg Press, 2022); Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity, 2019); Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Druham and London: Duke University Press, 2015); Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015); Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); Race After the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White (Milton Park: Routledge, 2011); Safiya Umoja Noble,Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York City, New York University Press, 2018); Shoshanna Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York City: PublicAffairs, 2019).
3. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (London: Macmillan, 1978).
4. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976) 1020-1021.
5. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).