Necropolitical Screens: Digital Image, Propriety, Racialization

Abstract

How are racism, colonialism, classism, and exploitation re/ produced in images today? This will be my main question. What is the image’s “relation to the imperial, colonial, necropolitical and racial line that cuts global neoliberal capitalism from within and heavily conditions contemporary necropolitical capitalist production” and its financialized/digital images?1 My attempt here is to radicalize the status of images of the digital (financial) mode of production.2 Much like the novel in the 19th century—that as a cultural form allowed the spreading of colonialism despite the monstrous history of racial slavery’s violence, which gave rise to supremacist orders of modernity in the Americas and the imperial capitalist world—the digital image, albeit floats, sustains the race/class/ colonial /exploitative divide. This may sound as a pretty doubtful statement; given all is floating, digital, laisse-faire, borderless? One of the hypotheses I share is that every period of capitalism developed its proper form of extreme re/production. Capitalism is always extreme, and we have to redefine, reformulate what is it that this extreme entails. Technology provides a direct boost to capitalism.