Kenneth Rogers

Bio

Kenneth Rogers is Assistant Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside. His work is broadly concerned with the way in which the nexus of power, affect, institutional practices, and the global political economy become articulated by and inextricably folded into rapidly mutating forms of media technology. Professor Rogers has been a fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at UC, Riverside; recipient of a Mellon grant on affect and interactive media; and has lectured at various venues, including the Getty Research Institute and The Kitchen. Some recent publications include: LA Freewaves, Too much Freedom?: Alternative Video and Internet Distribution (2007); From Media to Remediation: Transitions in Early Video Culture (2009), and Capital Implications: The Function of Labor in the Video Art of Juan Devis and Yoshua Okón (2009). His current book project is Economies of Attention: Media Technology and Biopolitics.

Abstract

Capital Implications

This presentation will build off some my earlier research in a paper titled Capital Implications that addressed how advanced forms of speculative value that are central to the globalized neoliberalist market systems are nonetheless inextricably bound to and dependent upon more informal and local market systems based on the spontaneous organization of exploitable, precarious, marginalized, and ultimately undervalued forms of labor. By addressing what has become known as the “attention economy,” this next phase of the research will continue to work through the deep inextricable link between speculative, immaterial, and digital forms of labor and more traditional, wage-based, manual forms of labor. It will suggest that it is in direct proportion to neoliberalist market logics that the issue of attention has gained currency within a wide array of institutional, cultural, and material practices. Dispersed, heterogeneous, de-regulated, de-governmentalized forms of capitalization--and the diversification of labor endemic to it--have demanded new diversified kinds of self-regulating attentive subjects, that exist within every sector of the precarious trans-national labor system of the global economy.