Hyperrhiz 28

Toward a Decolonial Digitality: On Seb Franklin’s The Digitally Disposed

Travis Alexander
Old Dominion University

Citation: Alexander, Travis. “Toward a Decolonial Digitality: On Seb Franklin’s The Digitally Disposed.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 28, 2025. doi:10.20415/hyp/028.r01

Keywords: digitality, Blackness, fugitivity, analogicity, control.

Franklin, Seb. The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 280pp.

If the long hot summer of 2020 marked a season of racial reckoning, it was also—now visible in retrospect—a moment for processing with the relation between digital technologies and power. 8:46 after all names not only an event, a murder, but the title of a short digital film. A film, moreover, that has found decisively counterposed audiences in its ongoing afterlives. A forensics of police violence, on the one hand, 8:46 also avails, in the shadier corners of the dark web, the pleasures of a snuff film. In this way, 8:46 is emblematic of a broader, and, perhaps, terminal indecision over the racial politics of digitality. To be sure, the proliferation of smartphone cameras and social media ecosystems has enabled, respectively, evidence of antiblack police violence and an amplifier for mass mobilization. At the same time, however, those same digital technologies have instantiated a massive militarization of urban and online topoi in the form of facial recognition and other surveillance technologies—disciplinary armatures whose imprecision at individuating black faces is only one of their features. And meanwhile, if social media has facilitated the growth and strategizing of groups like BLM, it has incubated with equal fervor an ascendant white nationalist movement. So, in a time of ongoing antiracist reckoning: whither the digital?

An attempt to answer that question would begin with a deeper analysis of not just how the digital has been weaponized, but with its very ontology. Is the digital itself and as such inimical to the flourishing of racialized bodies? This is the question central to an emergent tradition of media theory rooted in decoloniality and black studies as much as in its more familiar moorings of continental philosophy and cultural materialism. Perhaps given the salience of these questions today, it is no surprise to see a recent monograph tackle them so comprehensively and creatively. I’m thinking here of Seb Franklin’s The Digitally Disposed, which address its considerable critical faculties to the violence, disposal, and erasure of our present digital immersion, as well as to its latent potentials for resistance and fugitivity. In what follows I want to gloss Franklin’s book with an eye toward its advances over a previous generation of politically engaged media-theoretical scholarship, and, concomitantly, its capacity to theorize a decolonial digitality. The three years since its release in 2021 have only bolstered its relevance to imbrications of race, power, and media. Given the increasing reliance of antiblack violence on systems of computerized tracking and probabilistic intervention, 2024 marks the ideal time to take up the implications of Franklin’s text.

Most basically, The Digitally Disposed explores the shifting relations between slavery, freedom, digitality, and abstraction. More precisely, Franklin argues that in the era of digital computation, the concepts of freedom and self-possession are figured as “transmission capacity,” the ability to send and receive messages in an idealistically undegraded form: to send and receive with “frictionless connection” (3). Needless to say, this metaphysics, which Franklin terms the “social synthesis,” is not self-actualizing or self-effecting, is not autopoietic, despite its mythologies to the contrary. Across a refreshingly short book, Franklin exhumes the “invisibilize[d….but] myriad forms of disposable labor” required to sustain this fantasy—and in some cases, this reality, however incomplete—of connectivity, immediacy, and undegraded communication, as well as that sublated labor’s staggering human costs. In particular, The Digitally Disposed reveals how certain lives, certain bodies, must be configured, deployed, and degraded in order to furnish the appearance of seamless connectivity. These persons, individual lives whom, following Sylvia Wynter, Franklin terms “dysselected” by the apparatus of digital valorization, must be made interchangeable (18). They must, in other words, be made compatible with the calculation of value itself: the system of universalizing equivalence and fungibility. In this way, the slave is not just the consummate figure for the non- or pre-digital insofar as her fixity and boundedness disables her from partaking of seamless freedom and flexibility. The slave is, moreover, the material condition for the digital, the latter’s mystified base, insofar as the fungibilization of her dysselected para-life is what allows the relentless and invisibilized reproduction of the infrastructure of value. Franklin’s target, in other words, is “the processes of dispossession, abjection, and differential valuation through which capital and digitality [alike] effect social organization” (5). His is an inquiry into the “position[ing of] certain bodies and things within, outside, or across the threshold of form”—indeed, the threshold of life itself—“in order to maximize the functionality and reach of the system it constitutes” (5).

Franklin is keen to clarify that the production of value as equivalence long predates the rise of digitality. It is, after all, the source code of capital itself (11). Franklin’s point, rather, is twofold. It is, first, to show that capital’s regime of value, and the binarism of human lives—selected and dysselected—which that regime requires, lays the groundwork for the episteme of digitality that will eventually consummate it. It is, second and relatedly, to show that the rise of digitality was made inevitable by the disciplinary mechanism of the value form itself (16). That capital, in other words, would inevitably birth the digital. Franklin’s prosecution of capital’s digital unconscious rests primarily on a keen reading of Gayatri Spivak’s reference to bearers of value as “computed” quantities of homogenous labor, rather than, in most familiar English translations of Marx, “congealed” quantities (6). The former term’s connotation of abstract and dematerialized equivalency subtending capital. Computation, therefore,

describes a mode of processing bodies that in the same stroke abstracts their social product and facilitates their reproduction […]. Congealed describes extraction that […] instead lead[s] to the degradation and eventual destruction of the living bearer of labor power. […] the conditions that make value relations intelligible as computed, and which make possible the commingling of capital and digitality, both require and obscure these conditions of material degradation. (6 – 7)

Unsurprisingly, it is raced bodies that are abstracted, degraded, and disposed of in this long march toward pure computation. It is the degradation of their bodies that the seamless, spectral, and apparently spontaneous “matrix of value relations”—Franklin’s computational “social synthesis”—needs but “cannot admit” (15).

This disposal springs in part from the insatiable urge to “shrink the unbridgeable gap between the mirror world of logistics”—that is, the world of computation—“and the material world of people and things” (34). “[D]irect violence, intensified forms of work discipline, and new modes of dispossession,” in other words, mean to manifest the frictionlessness of the digital imaginary, the total use of information without residue, the noiseless message transmission. This ambition requires digitality and capital alike to hold “persons and things” in a constant flux around the inflection point of their potential usability, to expose each body within its imperium to the oscillation between “addressable and superfluous personhood.” Only thus can digitality and capital “maintain the circulation and expansion of value around the frayed edges of [their] circulation matrices” (36). Franklin hastens throughout to note that it is race and gender, in particular, which “are instantiated and allocated capacity at th[is] shifting threshold between abstraction and form-determined abjection” (58), between computable value and a “zone of nonbeing” (103). Embodiment is therefore the “necessary form of appearance” of a recombinant availability to value’s abstracting drive (70). Race and gender are thus constructed by the needs of a system to produce differentiation as a means of intelligibility and reproduction of a mystified synthesis.

Franklin shows how digital imaginaries, in turn, “valorize formlessness in [its] deracinated” mode “as the signature of optimally ‘free’ personhood. How else could images of natives, nomads, and the conquest of frontiers proliferate so widely in accounts of digital freedom and its concomitant forms of optimally human use?” (110). The abjected form-determination of racial(ized) populations is imagined as natural rather than effected.  Another way of describing both capital and digitality, then, is the pursuit of the “synthesis of reliable circuits using less reliable components” (168). It is a matter of “extracting surplus value from redundant components”—of congealing where computation cannot occur—“without the concomitant need to ensure those components’ reproduction” (184). This binarization traces out a history of “sorting through which those who do not connect get marked as lacking connective capacity and are thus made available for cheap, irregular connection” as, meanwhile, “putatively unupgradable lives consigned to the global service stratum” (184).

It is perhaps surprising, then, to see Franklin insist that the modes of resistance he envisions still take place within the digital, where he endeavors to find “expressions of desire and expectation that exceed or remain indifferent to value’s world-making protocols. […those] which cannot always be countenanced as bearing value or information (or value as information)” (28). In his abandonment of the analog, specifically, as figure for this impassive fugitivity, Franklin departs from a dominant tradition in media theory—one that he courted in his earlier work, Control. This earlier analog tradition, skeptical of the digital’s capacity for anything but pyrrhic participations in social resistance, is most influentially associated with Alexander Galloway and to appreciate the advance made by The Digitally Disposed for the project of racial justice, it is important to briefly survey that valorization of analogicity.

 For Galloway, the most influential of such writers, the digital means, at bottom, “the one dividing in two,” the continuous signal of the analog being bifurcated into discrete entities (52). The “profoundly rare” analog, by contrast, “creates relation without distinction” (56). Analogicity can therefore be articulated as the “One-as-Multiple” because it paradoxically both breaks through the “rivenness” of Being and proliferates that continuous rivenness—that internal difference—into such totality that it is no longer available to territorialization or actualizable Difference but only as ongoing differentiation suspended in terminal virtuality. “The continuous being of the One-as-Multiple is strictly affirmative in its movement,” he argues. “And the affirmative nature of continuous being indicates an additive principle: Come one, come all” (56 – 57). Analogicity “thrusts the actuality of specific situations into a newfound flux of indistinction. The specific becomes the generic. The two becomes one. The individual becomes impersonal” (58). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Galloway leverages this ontology of the analog into an ethics. Indeed, he will claim that ethics as such is an analog phenomenon, requiring, unlike the (re)solved (digital) dialectic of politics, a suspended indecision (186).

As even this summary makes clear, then, Galloway’s binarism envisions the analog as a utopian potential in exile, awaiting its return to a world dominated by digital power, or as Franklin earlier called this episteme of digital order, “control.” The analog manifests a stance of exemplary openness to a plenum of difference-within-identity tending toward an anti-hierarchicalized commonwealth. Galloway’s ennobling conception of the analog at the expense of the digital is indicative of broad trends in media and technology studies today. His somewhat recusantly philosophical bifurcation has been transposed into more material vocabularies which apprehend the digital as an instrument of neoliberal power. In place of Galloway’s interpretation of the digital as a differentiation of/within the same, an alienation of originary essence, Franklin, in his earlier volume Control, sees the digital’s abstracting dematerializations—its imperious fungibilization of any and all putatively-singular materialities into 1s and 0s—as an instantiation of neoliberalism’s own universalizing hostility toward any embodied particularisms it cannot assimilate as aesthetic or affective surplus. Digitality “requires procedures of idealization and exclusion and thus rests on conceptual formulations that erase the materiality of neurons, computers, bodies, and material resources alike,” he observes (86). Nor is this erasure merely a benign classificatory incision. But rather, “any element that falls outside of this regime of positively measurable action, anything that does not constitute either symbolically representable data or an act of connection-communication, is denied existence” (81). This critique is conjoined with one that elaborates on Galloway’s skepticism in seeing digitality’s totalizing conversion or convertability as a reification of colonial drives anchored in extraction, expropriation, and accumulation. In its redescription of the total social field as a recordable stream of data, “nominally immaterial phenomena (such as cognition) and nominally material practices (such as bodily activity itself)” are annexed alike “as digital communication” (27). “[S]ocial relations formerly outside of the accumulative regime of capital are [thus] brought into this regime” in an instance of what Marx called “real subsumption” (7). As critics such as Simone Browne have recently shown, these anxieties take unique shape in the context of white supremacy, apprehending digital photography specifically as a powerful instrument for the surveillance and regulation of black bodies.

Franklin’s new title suggest that it’s time for (re)thinking of such critiques’ own universality as heuristics of power. Not only, as he, does there exist a mode of digitality that is commensurate with the project of resistance for the dysselected—be it a praxis of black data or a related mode of insurgent passivity, absence, and sabotage. But what these contemporary scholars’ openness to the digital announces, or screens, is an awareness—even while not always articulated—of an antiracist energy already inherent in the digital’s own tendency to differ, to iterate a break from reality even as it mirrors that real with so much verisimilitude. I mean here to suggest that if the digital’s abstracting drives can come at a racial cost, they also entail the lineaments of what Hortense Spillers might call an “insurgent ground.” In other words, that there is in digitality’s abstracting drive already a passive impediment to the reproduction, perhaps not of value, but of race itself. I am thinking here of the reliance of race on the grounding of embodiment, of embodied reality. Race’s reliance, in other words, on the prosthesis of material inscription: the notion that race does exist somewhere and can be seen, known, evaluated, and of course, ultimately, managed. Might this axiom of black studies not impel a future tradition of media theory to (re)think the digital’s abstraction as an insurgent catachresis that destabilizes and ultimately immobilizes this foundational racial prosthetic? Might the digital not offer a fugitivity in and of itself, on this account?

Read thus, do writers invested in analogicity not recapitulate the very flattening inattention to embodied specificity which they impute to the digital itself? To read these arguments against their grain would be to suggest, perhaps, that they rest on an unwitting universalism and, relatedly, an implicitly deracinated utopianism. Their digital wariness, on this account, ignores that paradigm’s specific—if potential—applicability to black bodies. This heuristic must be supplemented with more deliberately provincialized and racially-specific models imagined at the intersection of black studies, visual culture, and media theory. After all, does the abolitionist fugitivity adumbrated by afropessimist and afrofuturist theorizations alike not require a “making discrete of the hitherto fluid”—a break, in particular, from the empire of white necropolitics? Is discretization, to put it differently, necessarily wedded to power, or does that insistence not, in its performative universalization, enact “control” itself? Can discretization, that is, not serve an agenda of resistance? Might the pulsion of internal differing, the “one-as-multiple” which analog theorists cathect to the exiled probate of the analog not already characterize a separatist blackness that need not see this characteristic democratized into a field of power from which it desires escape?

Perhaps it is past time to announce and forcefully instigates this new line of questioning and make a case for nothing short of media archaeology’s overdue decolonization by black studies.

References

Franklin, Seb. Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.

--. The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Galloway, Alexander R. Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.