95
Keywords
life, derivatives, racialization, colonial gender formation, femicide, currency issuance
Abstract
Who/what can be had at an ontological discount? By grasping the “anitrelationality” 
and “dismediation” of social relations by capital’s system of accounts, we discern not 
only the epistemicide and the expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic by capital, we 
shed new light on racial abstraction and gender abstraction. We grasp in “the colonial-
ity of race and gender” the logistics of abstraction that at once code the social factory 
and give rise to what I have called the derivative condition—a condition in which the 
multiple forms of being, when dissolved in and as executable information, are function-
alized as contingent claims on the value-form by means of “the world computer.” When 
we say that semiotic processes are metapragmatically put under economic and infor-
matic pressure, we are also saying that the datafication expresses more than a simple 
analogy to the commodity form by assigning numbers to qualities. Rather, datafication 
appears as the preeminent mechanism for the commodification of sociality, and thus 
also encodes access to social currency. Femicide and the ritual violence of parastate 
cartels of “gore capitalism” can be seen as alternative means of issuing derivative (soft) 
currencies by imposing extrajudicial if equally violent systems of account.
Arbitraža o življenju, differánce mesa: rasizacija in 
kolonialno oblikovanje spola kot algoritmična inovacija
Ključne besede
življenje, derivati, rasizacija, kolonialno oblikovanje spola, femicid, izdajanje valut
*  Department of Humanities and Media Studies, Pratt Institute, New York, US 
 jbeller@pratt.edu
Jonathan Beller*
Arbitrage on Life, Differánce of the Flesh: 
Racialization and Colonial Gender Formation 
as Algorithmic Innovation
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 44 | Number 2 | 2023 | 95–129
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.44.2.05

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jonathan beller
Povzetek 
Koga/kaj je mogoče dobiti z ontološkim popustom? Z razumevanjem »anitrelacional-
nosti« in »dismediacije« družbenih odnosov, ki jo izpeljuje sistem bilanc, ki ga določa 
kapital, ne razberemo le epistemicida in razlastitve kognitivno-jezikovnega, ki prihaja 
od kapitala, temveč tudi na novo osvetlimo rasno abstrakcijo in abstrakcijo spola. S 
»kolonialnostjo rase in spola« lahko pojasnimo logistiko abstrakcije, ki hkrati kodira 
družbeno tovarno in povzroča to, kar sem imenoval derivativno stanje – stanje, v kater-
em raznovrstne oblike bivanja, kadar so kakor izvršljive informacije in raztopljive vanje, 
s pomočjo »svetovnega računalnika« postanejo funkcionalne kot kontingentne zahteve 
do vrednostne oblike. Ko pravimo, da so semiotični procesi metapragmatično postavl-
jeni pod ekonomski in informacijski pritisk, pravimo tudi, da datafikacija izraža več kot 
zgolj analogijo z blagovno formo s tem, da kvalitetam pripisuje številke. Nasprotno, da-
tafikacija se kaže kot poglavitni mehanizem za komodifikacijo družbenosti in tako ko-
dira tudi dostop do družbene valute. Femicid in ritualno nasilje paradržavnih kartelov 
»gore kapitalizma« lahko torej razumemo kot zgolj drugačno obliko izdajanja izpeljanih 
finančnih instrumentov v (mehkih) valutah, a z uvedbo nelegalnih, čeprav enako nasil-
nih sistemov računanja.
∞
In a brilliant essay entitled “Racial Capitalism,” Jodi Melamed argues that
we need a more apposite language and a better way to think about capital as a 
system of expropriating violence on collective life itself. To this end, one way to 
strengthen racial capitalism as an activist hermeneutic is to use it to name and 
analyze the production of social separateness—the disjoining or deactivating of 
relations between human beings (and humans and nature)—needed for capitalist 
expropriation to work. Ruth Wilson Gilmore suggests a similar understanding of 
racial capitalism as a technology of antirelationality (a technology for reducing 
collective life to the relations that sustain neoliberal democratic capitalism) in 
her seminal definition of racism.
1
1 
Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 78, https://
doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.1.0076. See also Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: 
Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkley: University of 
California Press, 2007).

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arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
The generalized production of antirelationality, or what Allen Feldman calls 
“dismediation” in Archives of the Insensible
2
 entails, in political terms, the sev-
ering of horizontal connections among various social agents. This severance ef-
fects what I have elsewhere called read-write ontologies.
3
 Marxism has under-
stood this severance of individuals from their historical milieus as the dissolu-
tion of traditional societies and the subsequent separation; these ideas are de-
tailed, for example, in the work of Georg Lukács as reification
4
 or Guy Debord as 
spectacle.
5
 Decolonial scholarship sees antirelationality as epistemicide.
6
 The 
dissolution of prior ontologies, their cultures and material cultures, was not just 
a stage of primitive accumulation, but in many cases, genocide.
In semiotic terms, as Paul Kockelman details in “A Semiotic Ontology of the 
Commodity,” the dismediation organized by racial capital can be expressed as 
the delimiting of a “conditional relationality” generally operative in an open 
semiotic field of signifying practices by a “collateral relationality”
7
 in which the 
value-form overdetermines the semiotic process and thus the semiotic process-
ing of sociality. Melamed writes:
Although at first glance, dense interconnections seem antithetical to amputat-
ed social relations, it is capitalism’s particular feat to accomplish differentiation 
as dense networks and nodes of social separateness. Processes of differentiation 
and dominant comparative logics create “certainties” of discreteness, distinct-
ness, and discontinuity—of discrete identities, distinct territorializations and sov-
ereignties, and discontinuities between the political and the economic, the inter-
2 
Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
3 
Jonathan Beller, The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Durham: 
Duke University Press, 2021).
4 
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney 
Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972).
5 
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Black and Red (Maitland: Bread and Circuses, 
2012).
6 
See Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” 
International Sociology 15, no. 2 (June 2000): 215–32, https://doi.org/10.1177/02685809
00015002005; Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of 
Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 449–
514, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647 .
7 
Paul Kockelman, “A Semiotic Ontology of the Commodity,” Journal of Linguistic Anthro-
pology 16, no. 1 (June 2006): 89, https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2006.16.1.076.

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jonathan beller
nal and the external, and the valued and the devalued. In the drawing of the line 
that constitutes discrete entities and distinguishes between the valued and the 
devalued, people and situations are made incommensurable to one another as a 
disavowed condition of possibility for world-systems of profit and governance.
8
Melamed’s point about people being made incommensurable to one another 
identifies a peer to peer dismediation. People in our midst, across the tracks, 
across the border or at the podium, become incomprehensible in certain dimen-
sions—and therefore narratively (and perhaps horizontally) incommensurable—
incommensurable to one another in their/our social differences and in the vio-
lence of rupture that is at once entailed and disavowed in the creation of these 
differentiations. This epistemic incommensurability inherent in racism, sexism 
and the repression endemic to oppression, is effected not only through the vio-
lent reorganization of perception, apperception, institution, ideology, and infra-
structure on the horizontal plane we might refer to as “the ground,” but through 
the concerted and disciplining curation of emergent forms of embodiment and, 
of course, labor. Nonetheless, and despite their re-encoding as anti-relational 
(or indeed by virtue of it), bodies retain their commensurability and are rendered 
commensurable in another system of account, that of capital and its capacities 
for horizontal organization through vertical integration. These myriad bodies, 
however, are assigned values and thus accounted for in the ratios determined by 
racial capitalist semiotics—its denomination of life, significance, meaning and 
worth in money as wages, value, price, but also as opportunity, power, claim on 
reality, risk, precarity, etc., all of which have their economic metrics.
By transforming relationality, racial capital “impose[s] a forgetting of intercon-
nections, of viable relations, and of performances of collectivity that might nur-
ture greater social wholeness, but are deactivated for capital accumulation and 
state management.”
9
 Socially, conditional relationality becomes collateral rela-
tionality; the broadband pluripotentiality of meaningful interchange faces the 
metapragmatic dissolution of various forms of sociality to become the condition 
of relations of liquidity preserving collateralization. Who/what can be composed 
as an asset and by what means? Who/what can be had at a discount? By grasp-
ing the contrast between alternate ontological accounts of social relations and 
8 
Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” 78–79.
9 
Melamed, 79.

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arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
the proletarianization of narrative and relational capacity by capital’s system 
of accounts, we begin to discern not only the expropriation of the cognitive-lin-
guistic by capital and the productive role of creatively navigating its forms of 
false consciousness. We also grasp the logistics of abstraction that at once code 
the social factory and give rise to what I have called the derivative condition—a 
condition in which the multiple forms of being, when dissolved in and as exe-
cutable information, are functionalized as contingent claims on the value-form. 
To take just one example: your social graph indexes your credit-worthiness and 
thus what you will pay for money.
Skipping ahead analytically, the commodity-formation of living, where the 
logistics of price recursively reinscribes the emergent conditions of living across 
a multitude of social differences, leads to a double articulation of everyday life. 
This emergence is recursive and dialectical. At one and the same time we dream 
in the semantic life world and simultaneously in the capitalist one. We dream 
in “natural language” and the imaginaries of our communities, but also in and 
through a system of accounts that we will here identify as capitalist datafication 
and its calculus of costs, benefits and risk. For the moment, we will leave images 
out of the discussion and analytically collapse the essential functions of visual 
culture into the categories of perception and apperception. When we say that 
semiotic processes are metapragmatically put under economic and informatic 
pressure, we are also saying that datafication, as we increasingly know it under 
the regime of ubiquitous computing, which presumably indexes life informati-
cally, expresses more than a simple analogy to the commodity form by assigning 
numbers to qualities. Rather, datafication is a mechanism that has become the 
preeminent mechanism of commodification.
Famously, the commodity has a use value comprised of its physical qualities and 
an exchange value in which there is “not an atom of matter.”
10
 The exchange val-
ue is manifest in the “hieroglyph” that is the commodity, and, in Marxist thought 
is indexed in the field of exchange to “abstract universal labor time”—the quanti-
ty of “socially necessary labor time” inherent in each commodity. The price thus 
indicates the exchange rate of one commodity for another, by a comparison of the 
quantity of necessary labor inherent, on average in each commodity type. How-
10 
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes 
(London: Penguin, 1976), 138.

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jonathan beller
ever, 1) this comparison, if not made directly with the money commodity, is me-
diated by money, and 2) the “socially necessary labor time,” indexed by a quan-
tity of money, is an abstraction that generalizes labor time (“abstract universal 
labor time”) from all the particulars of labor. This analysis of “socially necessary 
labor time” inherent in the commodity is the result of a background calculus that 
comes about in practice by averaging the costs of fungible options through the 
socio-metabolic exchange of commodities—and as Frederick A. Hayek brought 
out in his analysis of the “telecommunications”
11
 of money (albeit without any 
reference to the specific importance of labor) creates a form of distributed but 
actionable knowledge regarding price and value derived from what people do in 
market transactions. More directly, the market produces knowledge from what 
happens when people spend their money, and it does so by collapsing a tremen-
dous amount of information into the informatics of price.
A key socio-technical result of all these market exchanges is abbreviated and 
functionalized as a “real abstraction” by the specific commodity that becomes 
the general medium of exchange, namely, the money commodity.
12
 Money is ab-
straction in practice. Once a particular commodity achieves this status, be it 
shells, gold, or fiat money, it is capable of notional and real pricing in its func-
tion as “the money-commodity” in “the motley mosaic” of the relative values 
available for exchange. The value of all commodities can now be organized by 
means of comparison with the single standard, money. Money then indicates 
the ratios of abstract universal labor time between one commodity and others 
as price ratios denominated in the commodity serving as money. The money 
commodity, or simply money, we must remember, is that particular commodity 
(also procured through labor) which rises to the status of general equivalent. In 
simple circulation we exchange one concretized form of socially necessary labor 
time for another, money for commodity, commodity for money.
Anticipating further discussion of what becomes for us the key term “informatic 
labor,” we add here that what is being quantified in the exchange valuation of 
the commodity is the value of abstract labor time necessary to change the state 
11 
Frederick A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in Knowledge Management and 
Organizational Design, ed. Paul S. Myers (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996), 7–15.
12 
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. 
Martin Sohn-Rethel (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2020).

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arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
of the matter in question from that of its inputs plus the value of these inputs. 
State changes, whether in everyday matter, cognitive conditions, or data sets 
platformed on discrete state machines, become cyphers of value. The values of 
commodities are discerned, abstracted, and thus measured in terms of material 
state changes indexed to labor time.
13
 How much labor is required to produce a 
particular change of state in a particular form of matter? Though as Marx wrote, 
“there is not an ounce of matter in exchange value,” exchange value is a social 
assessment of the abstract universal labor time necessary to create the material 
state changes that are legible. The price, then, is a partial decryption of the hi-
eroglyphics of the commodity, a processing of the manner in which matter has 
been informed, a calculation about the general cost of accessing such a mate-
rialized state from a particular place and time, it is a read of a commodity’s in-
form-ation.
14
We thus also observe from this exploration of the ontological transformation of 
the status of objects by money, that a Commodity C is composed of Raw Materi-
als R plus Labor time L. C = R + L. However, the raw materials in a current phase 
of production were very likely themselves purchased as commodities composed 
of labor and raw materials—as with lumber purchased to build a table, or a 
motherboard to build a computer. Thus, “raw materials” can be seen as imply-
ing regressions (R’ = R + L) to some prior state, which in the last analysis would 
be a pre-infrastructural and precapitalist state whose historical origin has all 
but disappeared and whose costs have been layered into current commodity 
production and amortized as a series of cycles of capital and, at the extreme, ep-
ochs of capitalism. “Nature” is thus the limit case to capital’s representational 
horizon, and as such beyond its purview.
13 
We note for future consideration that just as Moishe Postone has shown that the expan-
sion of capitalism and the generalization of the commodity form (and its prices) results 
in the abstraction and we should say occupation and indeed colonization of time, so too 
will the regime of informatic labor and computation, generate its temporal effects—new 
forms of non-synchronicity, local run times, repetition, non-linear times, and even silos 
of time. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of 
Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
14 
We further note here that this read is always from sometime, somewhere, and is therefore 
in flux, which is to say volatile, which is to say derivative. A strike price on a volatility 
spread of prices moving around a value, is not the value itself, it is a contingent claim on 
that underlier.

102
jonathan beller
Nonetheless, capital builds itself upon precapitalist and precolonial material-
ities that not only persist but inform its substrate. Atoms and electron bonds 
pre-exist the modern period, of course, but their changes of state as value can 
be indexed to the history of racial capitalist colonization. The history of capital-
ism is thus presupposed and collapsed in the sale of each and every commod-
ity when paid for “in full,” wherein all prior costs have been amortized, that 
is to say accounted for so far as capital’s ledgers are concerned, going all the 
way back to deep time. The costs borne during a history of production but not 
paid for (in wages or reparations) have been externalized as suffering and the 
proceeds from this violent externalization reaped as profit. Capital, as Robert 
Meister puts it, compounds injustice.
15
What those costs were, how they were configured, and who paid (bodily, social-
ly, ecologically, epistemologically) is a topic we cannot avoid and must continu-
ously bear in mind. This disavowed history is all the more important because the 
value of the past injustices of racial capitalism is compounded by the fact that 
capital uses the proceeds to finance further cycles of injustice down to the pres-
ent and into the future.
16
 Indeed, the legibility of commodities in the calculus of 
value is inseparable from the (il)legibility of people and peoples in the same cal-
culus. In the wake of colonialism and of chattel slavery—social and institutional 
techniques of value extraction whose value to capital has been compounded in 
the present arrangements—it becomes imperative to view the history of capital 
as a ceaseless arbitrage on the cost of labor at the expense of life. The cheap-
ening of labor is a cheapening of life for the benefit of capital and that of the 
owners of capital. From the standpoint of capital, the cheapening of life is also 
a peculiar type of innovation.
Capitalism is an exercise in efficient management (“optimization”) that includes 
not simply technical development but the driving down of the cost of labor per 
unit commodity: one definition of efficiency means less labor to create or ac -
complish the same thing. Driving down the cost of labor to combat the falling 
rate of profit is thus also a ceaseless driving down of the existential status of 
people, below a particular socially negotiated average in a society—negotiated, 
15 
Robert Meister, “Justice as an Option,” in Justice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of 
Finance for the Twenty-First Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 109–36.
16 
Meister.

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arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
it should be said through custom yes, but also resistance, refusal and doing oth-
erwise. Decreasing the cost of labor per unit commodity is accomplished in part 
by placing differentiable others partially or completely outside “society”—on 
the margins, on the periphery, across the border, in the ghetto, the shtetl, the 
reservation, the camp, the colony, the domestic space, the whorehouse, or the 
prison; in “female” bodies, “brown” bodies, “native” bodies, “disabled” bodies, 
“alien” bodies. The socially negotiated price of labor depends on the socially 
negotiated price of laborers subject to social differentiation. The equation of de-
creasing labor costs per unit commodity that comes with increases in the tech-
nological efficiency of capital is balanced not by every member of society having 
access to proportionally more wealth in the form of more commodities as their 
just share of the social product. Rather, the falling rate of profit that drives effi-
ciency actually decreases the share of social wealth accessible to wage workers 
relative to that accessible to capital. Those whose wages are discounted access 
an even smaller proportion of the social product as they are induced to give a 
larger proportion of their working day to capital for the same subsistence wage, 
thereby producing wealth for capital and poverty for themselves. This arbitrage 
on the cost of labor is an arbitrage on life.
Capital offsets the falling rate of profit by taking an increasingly large portion 
of the working day as surplus labor (and thus paying for a smaller portion of 
the working day). This is standard issue Marxism. The falling rate of profit as an 
unavoidable, i.e., mathematical, consequence of the fundamental law of capi-
tal expansion demands constant innovation. Innovation can take many forms, 
but as noted above, all are aimed at lowering the cost of labor per unit commod-
ity and thus engage in market arbitrage: building the same thing for less while 
being able to sell it at the same price, or in abstract terms, harvesting value at 
a lower cost to capital due to lag times in the generalization of (the technical 
knowledge of) innovations. This driving down of the cost of labor, necessitated 
by the falling rate of profit, along with the struggle among the many capitalists 
for higher rates of surplus value relative to the general rate of return on capital, 
required and requires a method of discounting the cost of labor which, without 
the romantic trappings, simply means increases in “efficiency.” Efficiency here 
consists not only in making things “smarter” (cheaper) with “labor-saving” de-
vices, but also in forcibly discounting people, their communities, their materi-
al worlds, their lands, biospheres and histories, their ontologies and lives. For 
capital, smarter here means discounted costs, by any means. While some of this 

104
jonathan beller
passing on the costs of production to workers and ecosystems has been referred 
to as the creation of “externalities,” we want to note here the monetary, informat-
ic and narrative-semantic implications of “discounting.” We further note that 
the expansion of capital, whether as technical innovation or as the discounting 
of people’s claims on the social product and thus on reality, means precisely 
colonization and imperialism (this observation is, or should be, uncontrover-
sial given the history of capital expansion), and thus, as we will explore further, 
means also racism, sexism, and war. Racial capitalism is a planetary endeavor, 
and racism, sexism, and warfare are fundamental tools of innovation, of revolu-
tionizing the productive forces. Racial capitalism, or what I sometimes call com-
putational racial capitalism, endeavors to organize all aspects of the known and 
knowable world in accord with the requisites of the value-form.
In what follows, we focus on the central roles of social differentiation and/as 
computing, a computing without which racial capitalism can no longer exist. But 
what is to be eliminated? Where to begin?
An Expanded Consideration of “Algorithms of Oppression” (Nobel)
We can glimpse the scale, focus, and scope of the world-historical endeavor that 
culminates in converting the digits of the invisible hand to those of the AI of a 
virtual machine that I have hypostasized as “the world computer,”
17
 by turning 
to the work of Aníbal Quijano. Quijano’s work stands alongside Cedric Robin-
son’s Black Marxism,
18
 and in this context can be seen to supplement Robinson’s 
deduction of the concept “racial capitalism” that inspires the work of Melamed 
and so many others. It helps here to take up the challenge posed by Melamed 
to sharpen our understanding of the forms of violence against collective and ra-
cialized life that are constitutive of racial capitalism. For Quijano, “the idea of 
race” that lays the groundwork for both the colonial and post-colonial eras, is an 
“idea” emerging from historical and material innovation. Reflecting on the his-
torical moment of its writing, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social 
Classification” opens as follows:
17 
Beller, World Computer.
18 
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

105
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the 
constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as new 
global powers. One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social 
classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental con-
struction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and per-
vades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific ra-
tionality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it 
has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix 
it was established.
19
For Quijano, “Eurocentrism,” “the idea of race,” and elaborate, discriminato-
ry social classification are part of colonialism, and more than that, these inno-
vations outlast the historical phase generally understood as colonialism. This 
“new model of power,” which would indeed outlast the planetary cancer of the 
so-called colonial world, embarked on “the codification of the differences be-
tween conquerors and conquered in the idea of ‘race,’ a supposedly different 
biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to the 
others.”
20
 Quijano says, “On this basis, the population of America, and later the 
world, was classified within the new model of power.”
21
 The accompanying pro-
cess “involved the constitution of a new structure of control of labor and its re-
sources and products.”
22
In laying out the form and terms of this new structure for the control of labor and 
its resources and products, Quijano writes:
Social relations founded on the category of race produced new historical social 
identities in the Americas—Indians, blacks, and mestizos—and redefined others. 
Terms such as Spanish and Portuguese and, much later, European, which had un-
til then indicated only geographic origin or country of origin, acquired from then 
on a racial connotation in reference to the new identities. Insofar as the social re-
19 
Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” trans. 
Michael Ennis, in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. 
Marel Moraña, Enrique D. Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Durham: Duke University Press, 
2008), 181.
20 
Quijano, 182.
21 
Quijano, 182.
22 
Quijano, 182.

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jonathan beller
lations that were being configured were relations of domination, such identities 
were considered constitutive of the hierarchies, place and corresponding social 
roles, and consequently of the model of colonial domination that was being im-
posed. In other words, race and racial identity were established as instruments of 
basic social classification.
23
It should be remembered that the role of these classifications was the control 
of labor, and thus also, the organization of capital. It was, in short, an innova-
tion, a revolutionizing of the productive forces, a violence that had ideological 
and practical dimensions for the colonizers. Quijano tells us that “as time went 
by, the colonizers codified the phenotypic trait of the colonized as color, and 
they assumed it as the emblematic characteristic of racial category.”
24
 “In this 
way, race became the fundamental criterion for the distribution of world pop-
ulation into ranks, places and roles in the new society’s structure of power.”
25
 
Thus there emerges “a systemic racial division of labor.”
26
This “racial division of labor” is intensified by the organizational power of mon-
ey and its withholding. Or rather we could say that monetary organization and 
racial differentiation co-evolved. With the emergence of a racial (racializing and 
racialized) division of labor we also find “a quasi-exclusive association of white-
ness with wages, and of course, with the high-order positions in the colonial ad-
ministration. Thus each form of labor control was associated with a particular 
race.”
27
 Furthermore, “Europeans associated nonpaid or nonwaged labor with 
the dominated races because they were ‘inferior’ races. The vast genocide of 
the Indians in the first decades of colonization was not caused principally by 
the violence of the conquest or by the plagues the conquistadors brought, but 
because so many American Indians were used as disposable manual labor and 
forced to work until death.”
28
Money, it seems, confers not only agency but also recognition for certain forms 
of embodiment at the expense of others. American Indians were imagined by 
23 
Quijano, 182.
24 
Quijano, 182.
25 
Quijano, 183.
26 
Quijano, 184.
27 
Quijano, 185.
28 
Quijano, 186.

107
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
their colonizers as only the means to value and never as recipients of value, 
and as Tzvetan Todorov
29
 argues, the genocide in the Americas was not an at-
avistic holdover from the Dark Ages, but the first thoroughly modern historical 
occurrence: a genocide in which the abstraction power of the value form thor-
oughly and instrumentally organized apperception by removing the “Indian” 
from the colonizer’s capacity for mutual recognition. It is as if money not only 
secures Whiteness but confers it. With this “whiteness as value,”
30
 we might 
confirm Frantz Fanon’s observation that at first the colonized man only wants to 
kill his colonizer, live in his house and sleep with his wife.
31
 There is a burgeon-
ing model of agency that is simultaneously linked to wealth and race; the se-
mantic fields and imaginaries that these weave through practice are themselves 
colonial. We cannot emphasize enough that money and its calculus created a 
kind of presence in the social accounting that is to be associated with not only 
rights and existence, but also with “the human community” and “humanity.” 
The power of money to confer humanity (and Whiteness, by the very denial of 
it to others) became more generalized by means of racial abstraction, and the 
violence inherent in making these abstractions “real.” From this we can (also) 
infer that in this worldview, which, Quijano persuasively argues, was becoming 
generalized, and thus “universal,” humanity” has been de facto, i.e., by histor-
ical material definition, “White.” And Whiteness, no less cooked up than this 
so-called humanity, perceived itself to be, as it were, at once a sign of it and one 
with it. Those from whom humanity (and wages) were withheld were made un-
worthy—violently so—while this self-same violence was used to produce White-
ness in its beneficent humanity, megalomania and narcissism in a Eurocentered 
world-view. Money, then, conferred belonging and was, in fact, a form of social 
know-how and socio-semiotics—a medium of practical knowledge that, on the 
one hand, conferred social currency that included access to social product, rec-
ognition, and belonging, and, on the other made its holder a contractual party 
to unspeakable violence—the unspeakable, irredeemable, and disavowed vio-
29 
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard 
Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).
30 
Neferti X. M. Tadiar, “In the Face of Whiteness as Value: Fall-Outs of Metropolitan 
Humanness,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 143–82, https://doi.org/10.1215/
quiparle.13.2.143.
31 
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 
2008).

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jonathan beller
lence constituent of “the human community,” about which we could correctly 
remark that there is, in fact, no such thing and that there never has been.
Today, hopefully, we already know versions of this demoralizing story from 
Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Enrique Dussel, and many others.
32
 
I have little to add, except perhaps a perspective on what has become of all this. 
Racialization in all its brutality, is also a form of calculus and now computing, 
a means to the assignation of number and value to life. This quantification is of 
course, affective, experiential, contestable, contested. Lived abstraction.
Quijano remarks that along with such material violence dedicated to the ad-
vance of what would become the economics and culture of Humanism, the col-
onizers also waged epistemic war as they
repressed as much as possible the colonized forms of knowledge production, 
models of the production of meaning, symbolic universe, and models of expres-
sion and of objectification and subjectivity. As is well known, repression in this 
field was most violent, profound, and long-lasting among the Indians of Ibe-
ro-America, who were condemned to be an illiterate peasant subculture stripped 
of their objectified intellectual legacy. Something equivalent happened in Africa. 
Doubtless, the repression was much less intense in Asia, where an important part 
of the history of the intellectual written legacy has been preserved. And it was 
precisely such epistemic suppression that gave origin to the category “Orient.”  
[. . .] In different ways in each case, the Europeans forced the colonized to learn 
the dominant culture in any way that would be useful to the reproduction of dom-
ination, whether in the field of technology and material activity or of subjectivity, 
especially Judeo-Christian religiosity. All of those turbulent processes involved a 
long period of the colonization of cognitive perspectives, modes of producing and 
32 
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: New York 
University Press, 2001); Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling 
the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its 
Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 
257–337 , https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015 ; Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Moder-
nity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures),” Boundary 2 20, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 65–76, 
https://doi.org/10.2307/303341.

109
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
giving meaning, the results of material existence, the imaginary, the universe of 
intersubjective relations with the world: in short, colonization of the culture.
33
We should note at this point that the coloniality of power means epistemicide. 
The simultaneous emergence of Eurocentered capitalism with racial classifica-
tion entails not only acts of violence that were unprecedented in their intensi-
ty and scale, but also acts of violence aimed at controlling labor. They there-
fore sought their institutionalization through the colonization of culture and, 
as mentioned at the outset, the conscription of the socio-semiotic as well as 
practical capacities of Indigenous and then enslaved populations. Thus, we see 
a radical divergence between the system of accounts that organizes racial cap-
italism, and the many systems accountable in and to the various ontologies, 
cosmologies, structures of feeling and ways of life antecedent to and yet per-
sistent in forms of temporality and fugitive survival contemporary with racial 
capitalism. With Orientalism, Edward Said reveals the violence of this wealth 
appropriation/making as one with the violence of culture appropriation/mak-
ing in Europe, both in the form of the “West” and of its constitutive fetish, the 
“Orient,” and so much of what emerges between.
34
 Accordingly, Mark Driscoll 
identifies “white superpredation” as a modality designed by Whites to put the 
Chinese “entirely at their disposal” in both a financial and ecological “CO2loni-
ality.”
35
 It would certainly be a major analytical and political error to understand 
these racial orders, which are also forms of geopolitical, cultural and ecological 
coordination, simply as the sovereign imposition of an imperial monologue or 
monoculture that held sway as if without struggle. Nonetheless, we may observe 
that the struggle to impose classification on the planet is a thoroughgoing affair 
occupying a superabundance of energy. The social practices entailed in the in-
stallation of an episteme, are also forms of economic practice and ecology that 
will come to be called biopolitics and later necropolitics.
Quijano notes the systemic coordination endemic to this model of power re-
quired its institutionalization as well as “the control of intersubjectivity.”
36
 We 
begin to see that Kockelman’s account of the displacement of “conditional rela-
33 
Quijano, “Coloniality of Power,” 189.
34 
Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
35 
Mark W. Driscoll, The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian 
Ecological Protection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).
36 
Quijano, “Coloniality of Power,” 193.

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jonathan beller
tionality” by “collateral relationality” in semiosis, mentioned above as an over-
determination of semiotic function by the exigencies of capital-logic (derived 
by Kockelman from neo-liberal NGO-colonialism in an ecological tourism site 
in Guatemala), is a world historical project of unprecedented violence. At min-
imum, it registers the existential threat of insolvency under a capitalist money 
economy on meaning and world-making. But we also should register that col-
lateral relationality, understood as a feature of racial capitalism gives rise to 
what Hortense Spillers has called and called out as “an American grammar.”
37
 
This grammar depends on and is founded in the reduction of enslaved Africans 
to “flesh” during the middle passage, and on the violent epistemic destruction 
that accompanied the physical and psychic terror of plantation slavery along 
with the national and racist disavowal of this history. Referring to the coloniali-
ty of race, Quijano shows, that “this model of global power [which includes the 
epistemic and semiotic functions under discussion here] is the first that covers 
the entire population of the planet” and that “humanity in its totality consti-
tutes today the first historically known global world-system, not only a world.”
38
The Program
Regarding this “first historically known global world-system,” which we endeav-
or to show here has morphed into the operating system of a virtual machine, we 
must also say, if race, then gender and sexuality. In “Heterosexualism and the 
Colonial/Modern Gender System,” María Lugones, in critical dialogue with and 
against Quijano among others, offers “a framework to begin thinking about het-
erosexism as a key part of how gender fuses with race in the operations of colo-
nial power.”
39
 Lugones further specifies, “Colonialism did not impose precolo-
nial, European gender arrangements on the colonized. It imposed a new gender 
system that created very different arrangements for colonized males and females 
than for white bourgeois colonizers.”
40
 Taking Quijano’s understanding of gen-
37 
Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby , Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 
17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 65–81, https://doi.org/10.2307/464747 .
38 
Quijano, “Coloniality of Power,” 193.
39 
María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” in “Writing 
Against Heterosexism,” ed. Joan Callahan, Bonnie Mann, and Sara Ruddick, special issue, 
Hypatia 22, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 186, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01156.x.
40 
Lugones, 186; italics added.

111
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
der as “too narrow and overly biologized,”
41
 Lugones argues that, “the hetero-
sexualist patriarchy has been an ahistorical framework of analysis” and seeks 
“an understanding of gender that sees it as a colonial concept.”
42
 She asks:
How do we understand heterosexuality not merely as normative but as consist-
ently perverse when violently exercised across the colonial modern gender system 
so as to construct a worldwide system of power? How do we come to understand 
the very meaning of heterosexualism as tied to a persistently violent domination 
that marks the flesh multiply by accessing the bodies of the unfree in differential 
patterns devised to constitute them as the tortured materiality of power?
43
The question concerning “the tortured materiality of power” is made more com-
plex along axes of imposed differentiation because Lugones also pursues
the indifference that men, but more important to our struggles, men who have 
been racialized as inferior, exhibit to the systematic violences inflicted upon 
women of color. [. . .] Feminists of color have made clear what is revealed in terms 
of violent domination and exploitation once the epistemological perspective fo-
cuses on the intersection of these categories. But that has not seemed sufficient 
to arouse in those men who have themselves been targets of violent domination 
and exploitation any recognition of their complicity or collaboration with the vi-
olent domination of women of color. In particular, theorizing global domination 
continues to proceed as if no betrayals or collaboration of this sort need to be ac-
knowledged and resisted.
44
Lugones puts this forcefully, not just as in intervention in the critical moment in 
which she writes (namely 2007), but as a provocation to rethink the historiogra-
phy and theory of postcolonial accounts of colonization, where complicity and 
betrayal of “women of color” have offered payoffs to those who would be men. 
Lugones wants to make visible “the instrumentality of the colonial/modern gen-
der system” and “to reject this gender system as we perform a transformation 
of communal relations.”
45
 For it is precisely the dismediation and indeed shat-
41 
Lugones, 193.
42 
Lugones, 187.
43 
Lugones, 187–88.
44 
Lugones, 188.
45 
Lugones, 189.

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jonathan beller
tering of community that colonization accomplishes by imposing its particular 
framework of race and gender.
Lugones’ argument, like Quijano’s, is too complex and nuanced to do it full jus-
tice here. For the purposes of this essay however, it is important to note that she 
cites the argument in The Invention of Women by Oyéronké Oyewùmí that “gen-
der was not an organizing principle in Yoruba society prior to colonization by 
the West.”
46
 Quoting further we find:
For females, colonization was a twofold process of racial inferiorization and gen-
der subordination. The creation of “women” as a category was one of the very first 
accomplishments of the colonial state. It is not surprising, therefore, that it was 
unthinkable for the colonial government to recognize female leaders among the 
peoples they colonized.
47
Lugones adds that Oyewùmí “notes that the introduction of Western 
gender system was accepted by Yoruba males, who thus colluded with 
the inferiorization of ana[tomical]females.”
48
In detailing what in effect were and are the wages of masculinity, Lugones also 
considers the work of Paula Gunn Allen, who “characterizes many Native Amer-
ican tribes as gynecratic” and “emphasizes the centrality of the spiritual in all 
aspects of Indian life and thus a very different intersubjectivity from within 
which knowledge is produced than that of the coloniality of knowledge in mo-
dernity.”
49
 According to Lugones, Allen sees the destruction of gynocracies as
crucial to the “decimation of populations through starvation, disease, and dis-
ruption of all social, spiritual, and economic structures.” The program of degyno-
cratization requires impressive “image and information control.” Thus “recasting 
archaic tribal versions of tribal history, customs, institutions and the oral tradi-
tion increases the likelihood that the patriarchal revisionist versions of tribal life, 
46 
Oyéronké Oyewùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender 
Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 31, quoted in Lugones, 
“Heterosexualism,” 196.
47 
Oyewùmí, Invention of Women, 124, quoted in Lugones, “Heterosexualism,” 197.
48 
Lugones, “Heterosexualism,” 197.
49 
Lugones, 198.

113
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
skewed or simply made up by patriarchal non-Indians and patriachalized Indi-
ans, will be incorporated into the spiritual and popular traditions of the tribes.
50
Thus we see that “information control” is a kind of encoding that is also a form of 
programming, and that codification not only containerizes its referent as some-
thing like an underlier, but by indexing it constitutes, addresses and indeed in-
structs agents who will interpret the codes that signify on her/it. I dwell here on 
Quijano and Lugones at such length because together their work provides an 
opportunity to observe the coloniality of power working through and as the im-
position of a framework of race and gender. This framework invests power and 
divests particular people(s) of power in accord with the requisites of codes of 
capital expansion. This claim is not offered to exhaust the affective dimensions 
of either the hatred and fear with which colonialism proceeds, or to foreclose 
knowledge of the suffering and resistance that colonization and its aftermath 
produces. John Keene’s Counternarratives and Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two 
Acts” come to mind as exemplary openings onto the presence and abiding strug-
gle of those subject to the of the epistemic colonizing and racializing foreclosure 
endemic to racial capitalism.
51
Even if we are inclined to doubt the totalizing accounts rendered here in the 
powerful work of Quijano and Lugones, which I must confess, I am, my drift 
here is that we attend to the organizing principles and recognize that they pro-
ject an idealization of global capitalist power: an idealization that I want to 
bring out as the ideal program of racial capitalism and its calculus.
Lugones’ follow-up to “Heterosexism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” 
the essay “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” states:
I understand the dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the non-hu-
man as the central dichotomy of colonial modernity. Beginning with the coloni-
zation of the Americas and the Caribbean, a hierarchical dichotomous distinc-
tion between human and nonhuman was imposed on the colonized in the ser-
50 
Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions 
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 42, quoted in Lugones, “Heterosexualism,” 199.
51 
See John Keene, Counternarratives (New York: New Directions, 2016); Saidiya Hartman, 
“Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 
1–14, https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.

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jonathan beller
vice of Western man. It was accompanied by other dichotomous hierarchical dis-
tinctions, among them that between men and women. This distinction became a 
mark of the human and a mark of civilization. Only the civilized are men or wom-
en. Indigenous peoples of the Americas and enslaved Africans were classified as 
not human in species—as animals, uncontrollably sexual and wild. [. . .] The be-
haviors of the colonized and their personalities/souls were judged as bestial and 
thus non-gendered, promiscuous, grotesquely sexual and sinful. [. . .] The civi-
lizing transformation justified the colonization of memory and thus of people’s 
senses of self, of intersubjective relation, of their relation to the spirit world, to 
land, to the very fabric of their conception of reality, identity and social, ecolog-
ical and cosmological organization. [. . .] In using the term coloniality I mean to 
name not just a classification of people in terms of the coloniality of power and 
gender, but also the process of active reduction of people, the dehumanization 
that fits them for the classification, the process of subjectification, the attempt to 
turn the colonized into less than human beings.
52
This universal reduction, here violently and as it were universally imposed by 
the coloniality of race and gender, is the central feature of the program of racial 
capitalism and of its dialectical leap into computational racial capitalism. This 
reduction, we could say with Spillers analysis of the middle passage in mind, 
to flesh, is ideational and socio-semiotic in as much as it produces social death. 
But we cannot emphasize enough that such sensibility-defying reduction is 
executed and imposed through cascading acts of ongoing violence—violence 
whose avalanche brings (some of) us into the present. As Quijano noted, this is 
the precondition for “globalization” and—in my own critical-theoretical terms—
for the emergence of the machine language and the operating system for the vir-
tual machine that is the world computer.
Agency/Subjectivization/Currency
The principle of incentivizing the reduction of others, narratively, ideologically, 
materially and corporally to be sure, but eventually to the statistical and proba-
bilistic forms with which we are increasingly familiar and disconcertingly com-
52 
María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” in “Feminist Legacies/Feminist Futures: 
The 25th Anniversary Issue,” ed. Lori Gruen and Alison Wylie, special issue, Hypatia 25, 
no. 4 (Fall 2010): 743–45, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x.

115
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
fortable becomes a general paradigm in the operating system of computation-
al racial capitalism. Increasingly, the categories pertinent to financial manage-
ment are all categories. This relentless application of racial capitalist classifica-
tion, heuristics and statistics presupposes and further enables the reduction of 
being and of beings to number, to information. The world-system that emerges 
as the coloniality of power percolates into and granularly re-codes the various 
worlds, their ontologies, cosmologies, social relations, practices, and more, and 
in doing so, in rendering everything and everyone computable, it saturates se-
miotic processes with blood. The blood of racial capital, that accompanies its 
classifications along with their explicit and implicit systems of accounts and 
discounts, is to say the blood of those who are in one way and another denied 
humanity in the production of so-called humanity. The blood of the enslaved, 
the colonized, the raped, the desecrated, the encamped, ravaged and annihilat-
ed is exacted at the bottom of the stack. This encoding is (or would be) imposed 
universally, pushing the claims of “prior” and/or pluriversal ontological beliefs 
and practices, as far as possible to the margins and/or into the enclosures. It is 
as if computational racial capital’s anthem, hummed in the background, were 
“Social Death for Y'all!” The entire epistemic framework of racial capital, which 
excludes or encapsulates its contradictions and sustains the expansion of the 
dominance of the value form is at once materialized in “civilization’s” institu-
tions, technologies and infrastructures, and built on bloodshed—built, to be 
clear, with the express intention of shedding more blood. Nearly everyone yet 
living is existentially forced to find their place within this practical, socio-se-
mantic, material webwork of operations, whether through subjective adapta-
tion, reservation, incarceration, abjection, willing participation, or other psy-
cho-somatic aspects of rationalizing a generalized demonization through and 
as the myriad means to further colonization.
These everyday striations of race and gender, and the statistical matrix that they 
give rise to in which “the laws of chance” are free to operate, constitutes, I am 
afraid, “our” framework of emergence, that is, the framework at least in part, of 
anyone who would claim rights, citizenship, or access to the social product (and 
thus—temporary— exemption from social death) in the terms currently offered 
by capitalism—by anyone, who for example, uses money. Like the plastic filled 
oceans, this deadly field of emergence overcoding social relations and striated 
by the vectoral and indeed matrixial logic of racial capital as a calculus of so-
cial difference is the water in which we swim in and the air we can breathe. Cue 

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jonathan beller
those Hollywood images of the hordes dressed in rags clambering up mountains 
of people to get over the wall.
But the war of each against all is not only brutish. Often, it is far more sophis-
ticated and refined. Almost civilized. Recognizing the near total saturation of 
the global socius by the practical and semiotic requirements of racial capital-
ism and its relentless value computing in through and by means of social rela-
tions helps us perhaps to better understand Sayak Valencia’s powerful analysis 
of “gore capitalism” as a systemic emergence.
53
 Gore capitalism, for Valencia, 
becomes a culmination of sorts of (a qualitative shift in) the colonial logic of 
racial capitalism, a condition of what we are here endeavoring to understand 
as world-computing. It is as if verisimilitude were not to be found on Fox News, 
but with Westworld.
54
 Focusing on “the big postmodern city of Tijuana” in which 
“the urban landscape has been altered by houses papered with ‘For Sale’ signs 
and by people carrying guns,” Valencia records what is clearly a well know local 
fact: that “becoming a murderer allows an individual to have access to and to le-
gitimate oneself within a consumption-based existence.”
55
 What is well known 
in Tijuana may be no less true on the US side of the border, but the mediations, 
entanglements, and forms of disavowal are different. For Valencia, the “endria-
go subject” is the emerging subject-form responding with violence to the new 
and ever more brutal terms for survival in a landscape extending across Mexico, 
much of Latin America and the world, a landscape and a socius that has been 
destroyed by colonialism, depleted by imperialism, and decimated by neo-im-
perialism. For the endriago subject “violence is converted into a resource for the 
gangster to manage, produce, and sell; it has become the tool sine qua non to 
carve out a space on the capitalist ladder.”
56
 “Using extreme violence endriago 
subjects create a lifestyle, work, socialization, and culture.”
57
 “The subjectivi-
ties operating within and characteristic of gore capitalism are endriago subjects, 
53 
Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, trans. John Pluecker (South Pasadena, California: 
Semiotext(e), 2018).
54 
Westworld is an American science fiction thriller franchise that began with the 1973 film 
Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton, and whose latest sequel is a televi-
sion series by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy that first aired on HBO on October 2, 2016.
55 
Valencia, Gore Capitalism, 195.
56 
Valencia, 197.
57 
Valencia, 138.

117
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
who have created a kind of new international class that we have called the crim-
inal class.”
58
Valencia writes:
In gore capitalism, traditional weapons have been converted into ancillary tools 
compared to new methods, which assume an increased level of cruelty. These 
methods—founded in extreme ferocity and efficacy—become means to deploy, re-
inforce, and preserve their powers of intimidation; thus, they create a reticular 
and managed terror, transferred from the bodies of the injured and murdered into 
the bodies of those who have not yet suffered such violence. Research into the 
most effective and cruel methods of torture and killing leads to the introduction 
and implementation of a series of techniques including decapitation, dismember-
ing, immersion into pools filled with piranhas or crocodiles, or into acid (which 
dissolves living victims into practically nothing). What has been fashioned is a 
semiotics of violence and a signature specific to each mafia organization.
59
Valencia’s work is a smart and harrowing analysis of experiences and practices 
that though geographically situated beyond the borders of the global North are 
at once responses to the violent colonial and imperial accumulation that under-
writes its constitution and, also, characteristic of the forms of hyper-masculinity 
reigning in the state-fascism of the superpowers themselves.
60
 The collapse of 
others, their work, their lifetimes into raw material for endriago self-fashioning, 
produces vectors of subjective agency. This is a fractal logic as well as a fascis-
tic one. The global expansion and intensification of capital logic imposes shifts 
in forms of subjective agency and expression, as well as the intensification and 
partial recasting of gender as social differential. These mutations index a further 
collapse of the guarantees promised by development capitalism, albeit selective 
58 
Valencia, 283.
59 
Valencia, 154.
60 
We note in the above a dynamic similar to what Sara Ahmed calls “affective economies,” 
in which the stickiness of sings is then inscribed on bodies through the particulars of their 
precarity and circulate in the production of affect. The fractal model of capitalist agency 
demands a revolutionization of productive force, which in this case entails becoming your 
own law, your own regime of truth, that secures your currency. The law itself becomes sub-
servient to branding, and the cartel emerges to impose its economy and style, in short, to 
impose its claims on reality. 

118
jonathan beller
and minimal, which, systematically, it can no longer afford to deliver on or even 
promise.
This mutation is a kind of intensification that is also an internal collapse, that 
at once gives the lie to the rule of law and to the sovereignty of the state form, 
and deals out dire consequences for those least able or willing to become brutal. 
What the notable work on the US Mexico border has documented and theorized 
(Rosalinda Fregoso,
61
 Melissa Wright, Lourdes Portillo and others), including 
practices of feminicide, disposable life, “denationalization” and the institution 
of a necropolitical order in which gendered violence, at times in the form of rit-
ualized rape, torture and murder, becomes a new vernacular of masculine and 
governmental sovereignty, has in Valencia’s view become part of the structural 
mutation that Valencia christens “gore capitalism.” Alongside a system of maq-
uiladoras in which the disposability of young women is in fact the very thing 
that represents their value,
62
 “Mexican drug traffickers enact a particular style of 
violence that they link to a signature or a brand in underworld tradition.”
63
 The 
narcos (and the police) are writing code. Valencia describes in gruesome detail, 
“some codes linked to the semiotics of overspecialized violence,”
64
 and argues 
that “the lacerated and violated body is itself the message.”
65
From the theft of life in the maquiladoras at five dollars a day, to the theft of life 
in toto by means of rapacious feminicide of the police and drug cartels alike, 
we see the further development and refinement of capital’s “factory code,” as 
a social factory code, the elaboration of the tool kit endemic to computational 
capital’s operating system. Lourdes Portillo’s film Señorita Extraviada (2001), 
an important if controversial work, also details the ritual cutting of the backs of 
young women as a kind of signifying process practiced by, in Valencia’s terms, 
endriago subjects. This transformed existential and semiotic field, in which “the 
61 
Rosa Linda Fregoso, “ ‘We Want Them Alive!’: The Politics and Culture of Human Rights,” 
Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 12, no. 2 (March 2006): 
109–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630600583296.
62 
Melissa W. Wright, “The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women, and Maquiladoras,” 
Public Culture 11, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 468, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11-3-453.
63 
Valencia, Gore Capitalism, 155.
64 
Valencia, 162.
65 
Valencia, 163.

119
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
illicit appropriation of the body of the Other has become a kind of currency”
66
 is 
built by hypermasculinist self-assertions of a right to violence and the “com-
plicit masculinities”
67
 that directly or tacitly endorse these “rights,” and benefit 
from them. Such masculinities emerge out of the coloniality of race and gender 
described above by Quijano and Lugones, and appear as a kind of next stage, 
a mutation of the requisite codifications of gender, race and class for the devel-
opment of racial capitalism. They assert the right to issue, that is, to mint local 
currency and to sign transactions on the flesh of their victims, an assertion, by 
means of the absolute reduction of, in this case, young women to victim, trophy, 
and sign that becomes part of the financial messaging percolating through the 
global compute. The issuance of currencies and signing of transactions is not a 
metaphor here, it is a feature of emergent economy. It creates binding contracts 
and gives endriagos and their cartels purchase on the world and on the world 
of commodities.
Lest anyone think these mutations are merely local phenomena, similar forms 
of gore capitalism and hypermasculinity are visible from Bolsonaro’s Brazil to 
Duterte’s Philippines and far beyond. Everyone, everywhere seems to be issu-
ing derivative currencies, and we suddenly grasp that the Facebook “like” and 
cryptocurrencies themselves are endemic to a new social (dis)order in which 
everything has become (is revealed as) a derivative (a contingent claim on the 
underlier “Value”), while the right to issue has become a new form of social 
struggle. From prison in Sao Paolo, gang leader of the Primer Comando de la 
Capital (PCC, Capital’s First Commando), Marcos Comacho, also known as Mar-
cola, notes the mutation, and tells his cowed interviewer that emerging beyond 
the now staid conceptions of class struggle “there is a third thing”:
O Globo: Aren’t you afraid of dying?
Marcola: You are the ones afraid of dying, not me. Better said: here in jail, you 
can’t come over and kill me, but I can easily have you killed outside. We are hu-
man bombs. In the slums, there are a hundred thousand human bombs. We are 
right in the middle of the unsolvable. You are between evil and good, and in the 
middle, there’s the frontier of death, the only frontier. We are already a new spe-
cies, different bugs, different from you. For you, death is this Christian drama ly-
66 
Valencia, 159; italics added.
67 
Valencia, 270.

120
jonathan beller
ing in a bed, with a heart attack. Death for us is daily bread, thrown over a mass 
grave. Weren’t you intellectuals talking about class struggle? About being a mar-
tyr? A hero? And then, we arrived! Ha, ha . . . I read a lot; I’ve read 3,000 books, 
and I read Dante, but my soldiers are strange anomalies of the twisted develop-
ment of this country. No more proletariat, or unhappy people, or oppressed. There 
is a third thing growing out there, raised in the mud, educated through sheer il-
literacy, getting their own diplomas on the street, like a monstrous Alien hidden 
under the crevasses of the city. A new language has already sprung. That’s it. A 
different language. You’re standing right before post-poverty. Post-poverty gener-
ates a new murderous culture, helped by technology, satellites, cellular phones, 
internet, modern weaponry. It’s all that shit with chips, megabytes.
68
The violence of the codes of value, the “new language,” bound up in and bound 
to value capture, iterating recursively through the cycles of world history, have 
done their work in the imposition and mutation of the lived abstractions of ra-
cial capitalism. The struggle for liquidity again revolutionizes the rules of the 
infernal game. The metapragmatic imperative to stave off insolvency, leave your 
old ontology, and enter “the false community of the commodity” has organ-
ized planetary space-time under the reign of an epistemology and a cosmology 
built on violence. One result is the hyper-masculinity of an emerging, indeed 
insurgent criminal class that rises to fill but also reformat “that desire called fas-
cism.” In the Philippines, the extrajudicial killings of supposed drug addicts be-
comes a kind of necropolitical signifying by the Duterte regime—bound corps-
es with heads wrapped in tape with clown faces drawn on them in Sharpie by 
the very cops who killed them have become a kind of vernacular—a vernacular, 
which is again to say a kind of currency—one that backed by violence, com-
pounds violence, pays dividends, creates new businesses and income streams. 
The negotiation of racial capital’s encodings of the semio-social milieu, where 
differentiable others become means to income streams, has created situations 
akin to Batesonian schizophrenia.
69
 If the terms of the imperatives (their metap-
ragmatics) cannot themselves be overturned, capital’s schizoid overcode pro-
duces innovation for capitalism overturning its existing rules by means of the 
very activities (and desperation) generated by its contradictory scripts. That too 
68 
Marcos Camacho, “There is a Third Thing,” interview by O Globo, trans. Pepe Rojo, Hostis 
1, July 22, 2017, https://incivility.org/2017/07/22/there-is-a-third-thing/.
69 
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, 
Evolution, and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

121
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
is innovation. These vernacular of violence in necropolitical orders are merely 
intensifications of the everyday language of empire—a virtuosic reappropriation 
of its expressivity by those whom the current law does not quite serve. These 
new vernaculars of power, written on the flesh to create both victims and kin, 
are currencies of the flesh, economic media that propose innovations in the pro-
curing of deliverables by reducing their cost of production.
O Globo: But, couldn’t there be a solution?
Marcola: You will only get somewhere if you stop defending “normalcy.” There 
won’t be any more normalcy. You need to auto criticize your own incompetence. 
But, to be quite frank, your morality. We are at the center of the unsolvable. The 
difference is we live here, and you have no way out. Just shit. And we already work 
in it. Understand me, brother, there’s no solution. And you know why? Because 
you can’t even understand how widespread the problem is. As the divine Dante 
wrote: “Abandon all hope. We are all in hell.”
70
“We are all in hell.” The competing and contradictory parameters of capital’s im-
peratives to freedom and to subjugation, that is its dialectic of freedom by means 
of subjugation, create schizoid ruptures in the framework of morality and indeed 
of reality. In the current global conjuncture, the rule of law is obsolete and the 
reigning order is hell itself. The double standard, freedom for self, subjugation 
for the other, solvency for self by means of insolvency for the other, is the stand-
ard. Again, the mutation takes place not because of a shift in the character of the 
primitives of the code of racial capitalism (accountability through solvency), but 
an intensification. A change in the quantity of events organized by this dialectic 
leads to a change in the qualities of its expression. The codes themselves, as dif-
ferentiated strategies for the pursuit for autonomy by means of the subjugation of 
others, as means to assemble contingent claims on the social product, come into 
contradiction as competing forms of social currency (social programs), different 
in allegiance, group or cartel, but with the same basic extractive logic. The war of 
each against all has become a war among the various currencies of violence. The 
offloading of capital’s contradictions onto the people of the world driven by the 
imperatives to balance accounts among the hard currencies of banks and states, 
in short, driven to stay liquid in geopolitical terms in order to survive, means 
that people survive through social computing, a continuous calculus among the 
70 
Camacho, “There is a Third Thing.”

122
jonathan beller
competing soft currencies, and therefore among the competing regimes of truth 
and reality propositions. Social computing of this type emerges as a structur-
al response to the globality of racial capital’s computations of value. The over-
riding imperative in this game, the rule that trumps them all, is that this game 
will be fully lived: each player must fight to survive (to secure guns, protection, 
food, shelter). In a world in which non- and ante-capitalist forms of social be-
longing have been cannibalized and social guarantees have been all but elimi-
nated, survival is purchased by maximizing one’s returns in a specific currency. 
In gore capitalism endriago subjects have found ways to collateralize violence 
and their capacity for violence, and from this securitization of the flesh of others, 
this banking on death, they can derive recognition, agency, employment, curren-
cy and income. Social accountability to cartelized regimes of violence provides 
their liquidity. Arbitraging the rule of law, endriago subjects find a cheaper path-
way to value. Arbitraging the state, they find a way to impose a new law, for less. 
They do so through an arbitrage on life, by cheapening it through its generalized 
devaluation. Such is innovation.
In the chapter of Gore Capitalism called “Transfeminism and New Masculini-
ties,” Valencia writes that because endriago subjects “are simultaneously sub-
jects of rebellion and servitude,”
71
 it becomes crucial in resistance movements 
that “the deconstruction of masculinity and the creation of a plurality of mas-
culinities go hand in hand with gender-based perspectives and transfeminism. 
By transfeminism, we mean not only a social movement made up of women, 
but also as an epistemological category for the conception and creation of new, 
non-dystopian—feminine and masculine—identities.”
72
 Such a “deconstruc-
tion” along with the creation of new identities points the way to alternative cur-
rencies, the currencies of alternative modes of life and living.
(Alternative) Futures
Invoking Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga keen awareness of the difficult 
road for the overturning of heteropatriachy,
73
 Valencia pursues a notion of mi-
71 
Valencia, Gore Capitalism, 272.
72 
Valencia, 273.
73 
Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical 
Women of Color (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2022). See also Cherríe 

123
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
cropolitics whereby in “making the violence visible, we might create a critical 
consciousness and resistance that could lead to active engagement and the joint 
creation of responsible intersubjective agreements, endowed with agency.”
74
 This 
notion of “responsible intersubjective agreements endowed with agency” is of 
great importance and I will return to it. Valencia says, “The force of corporeal 
politics is founded on the fact that our bodies are repositories of all actions; they 
are relational and can be understood as integral and active parts of events, as 
vehicles and linkages of socialization.”
75
 “If we build politically by virtue of the 
vulnerability of our bodies, then we have to recognize the vulnerability of the 
body as something indisputable.”
76
Such an account resonates with the domain of relations surfaced by Neferti Ta-
diar’s dialectical notion of “vital platforms,” in which embodied social relations 
such as kinship form economic networks that at once sustain their participants, 
distribute care and responsibility, and are mobilized by capitalism.
77
 It also reso-
nates with Paul Preciado’s “somatopolitics” and the politics and logistics of “the 
pharmacopornographic era,” in which a cyborgian matrix of body, technology 
and spectacle navigate the desiring landscape of racial capitalism.
78
 Recogniz-
ing the myriad strategies of corporeal capture by vectors of gore capitalization, 
Valencia says:
We urgently need to extricate the body from media discourses that spectralize it, 
so that we might depict it in all of its potency and importance. If we are able to 
re-ontologize the body, we will be able to re-semanticize the power of death in the 
gore capitalist and patriarchal framework. This re-semanticization of the body 
and its pain will emerge from language, critique, and performative practices that 
are developed in public space and through queer multitudes.
79
Moraga, Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (Boston: South End 
Press, 1983).
74 
Valencia, Gore Capitalism, 288; italics added.
75 
Valencia, 288.
76 
Valencia, 289.
77 
Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Remaindered Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022).
78 
Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic 
Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: Feminist Press, 2013).
79 
Valencia, Gore Capitalism, 292.

124
jonathan beller
It is possible and perhaps advisable to embrace this call for a re-semanticization 
of the bodies without resorting to an ontological projection. Such a project for 
the creation of new language that might recast and re-express forms of embodi-
ment is taken up, for example, in Tatiana Huezo’s film Noche del Fuego (Prayers 
for the Stolen, 2021). This harrowing and beautiful film depicts the daily lives of 
three small town girls in Mexico whose mothers must hide their burgeoning ad-
olescence from view in order to protect them from the boys and men who are ei-
ther being recruited to the police and the cartels or are already members of these 
organizations. Much of the film takes place in the absence of fathers who have 
left for el Norte to find work and send remittances but are not heard from again. 
In seeing both the consequences on family life of the state and para-state sys-
tems, and also the powerful and imaginative connections forged by the young 
girls in a climate of ambient fear, we may understand at a profound level some-
thing more about the ways in which capital genders the body and puts some 
bodies under siege. We witness: Men must decide how they will betray their 
families, through desertion, low wage ecologically destructive jobs in mining, 
or criminality. Mothers must not only supplement their income by working in 
the poppy fields, but must cut their 10-year-old daughter’s hair against their 
will, and punish them for the use of makeup. They must dig holes in the ground 
where their children must hide when cartel vehicles drive by. School teachers 
leave out of fear or for refusing to pay off the cartels so that they can work, gun-
men and militia roam the streets. Dead girls are found dumped in the brush.
Huezo’s film also shows the intimacy and strategy that evolves among the girls 
as they cope. The children practice a telepathic sensitivity to one another’s men-
tal states, they sing and swim together, and the camera shows us clearly that un-
der the threat of the foreclosure of their futurity (the constant fear of abduction, 
rape, torture and death) they are making themselves a new kind of body. Similar 
to but different from say the implants among the 2030’s cadre in The Peripheral, 
they create a delicate psycho-somatic tissue among themselves, that binds their 
subjectivities and fates while also creating a form of comfort, mutual awareness 
and protection. Without resorting to a new ontology or ontological projection of 
corporeal essence, this remaking of body and sense resonates with Valencia’s 
call for a “re-semanticization of the body [that] cannot be conceived of without 
deconstruction and criticism of hegemonic masculinity—articulated in the first 

125
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
person.”
80
 For, “when there are no other options to choose from, we must be ca-
pable of transforming the sole option not into a withdrawal or death, but rather 
into a condition of resignification.”
81
* * *
To conclude then, at a time when gore capitalism presents itself globally as the 
sole option available, we must work so that instead of killing us, it might resig-
nify us and lead us to re-think our very selves.”
82
 So says Valencia, and I agree. 
If we have taken time here in the detailing of the coloniality of race and gen-
der, the transformation of social relations, perceptions, subjectivities, corpore-
alities and cosmologies, it is to argue that these abstractions are operational-
ized as real abstractions. Race and gender as real abstractions are endemic to 
the operationalization of the bios by the world computer. This virtual machine 
platforming computational racial capital is itself platformed on the bios. It op-
erates through the incorporation of bodily existence captured and controlled 
through the variegated imposition of a matrix of operationalized abstract cate-
gories. Subaltern agency may be found in the temporalities of this matrix and in 
what Tadiar calls “remaindered life.”
83
 Thus, we must understand “the stack” as 
the various social institutionalizations and machine formalizations of a compu-
tational racial capitalism that has emerged over the course of centuries. What 
we call computation is not only ambient, but is itself the result of the historical 
sedimentation and institutionalization of inequality.
The double articulation of expression as semiotic and as information in the re-
lentless compute of value must be challenged by altering the structure of agency 
in both domains, that is, in the domains of meaning and of computability. At a 
schematic level, this challenge entails altering modes of inscription, legibility, 
datafication, and relation. At a socio-political level, it entails finding ways to 
make the pluriversal values of liberation from the multiple oppressions capa-
ble of becoming persistent in organizational, which is to say economic, modes. 
80 
Valencia, 293.
81 
Valencia, 295.
82 
Valencia, 295.
83 
Tadiar, Remaindered Life.

126
jonathan beller
Queer, anti-racist, decolonial sociality, and ecology, for example, must find 
their economy.
Though we will pause here, we do so having understood that the issuance of al-
ternative currencies and new transaction types is becoming a central question 
of our time. Racial capitalism is already presiding over new forms of issuance. 
New currencies, likes, brands, memes, cryptos, signature forms of violence and 
many more address the simmering afterlives of colonial racism, sexism, nation-
alism, subjectivity, speciation, and sovereignty. They are socio-semiotic, psy-
cho-libidinal, and profoundly embodied. Economic media is of the flesh.
We may sum these insights up by recognizing that the rules for financial ex-
pression are changing and indeed have changed, and to avoid the default de-
rivative protocols of endriago subjectivity and fractal fascism (or for that matter 
the default violences of national monies, national banks and their state, mil-
itaries and policies), a re-imaging of value- and values-creation is at the fore-
front: for along with a new politics of production and distribution, in short, of 
world-making, comes an ecopolitics and a politics of care. The social deriva-
tives we have considered above, those risk management strategies for a volatile 
world that are contingent claims on the underlier value, are perhaps not the 
only derivative contracts that subaltern forces can write. Can we create social 
currencies informed by Valencia’s notion of “responsible intersubjective agree-
ments endowed with agency?”
84
 Can such agreements be platformed? How? The 
Narco-traffickers use technological prosthetics for their embodied organizing, 
what new types of technicity and computing might emerge from subaltern strat-
egies? How might the oppressed denominate value(s) with expressive, qualita-
tive, future-writing forms, creating not just new types of writing but new forms 
of non-hierarchical social media that is also economic media? The hand up, the 
caress, the shared meal, the loving glance, the whisper of the ancestor, the mo-
ment of trans-subjective becoming, also leave their marks on the body. How to 
transmit these markings and preserve their qualities in a non-extractive medi-
um? The body’s “re-semanticization” is a cultural question and a political ques-
tion, yes, and it is an economic question as well. It’s easy to say we want differ-
ent values so that the oppressed may live and thrive, and we do. More difficult to 
say is that we want alternative social currencies of our own design—unless we 
84 
Valencia, Gore Capitalism, 288.

127
arbitrage on life, differánce of the flesh
perceive that these differences and forms of differánce are already being prac-
ticed. Might currency be backed with conviviality and radical care instead of dif-
ferentials founded in violence?
Just as revolution can no longer be adequately specified without an understand-
ing of race, gender and sexuality, so too, we wager, can it no longer be undertak-
en without computing, calculation and economic media, for these latter are the 
compilers and thus the new ground of the former, as well as the means by which 
alternatives may be held open. How will alternative futures immanent in our 
survival be made current, how will these “not yets”
85
 find their currencies? How 
will “we,” the revolutionary remainders of racial capitalism, yet living every-
where, including in “our very selves,” issue our emancipated futures?
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