Mediatized Sapiens: Communicational knowledge

Circulation and capitalizing mediatization in hypermediatized societies 145 value. The creation of surplus value continues to depend on the exploitation of labor, as Fontenelle says, but “this axis is only sus- tained, like a Borromean knot, in connection with the levels of circulation and distribution of value, through consumption and finance” (ibid.). In this sense, the role of mediatization is funda- mental and closely linked to the consumer culture of communi- cational capitalism. During the last century, the development of capitalism required the increasing liberation of drives (PRADO, 2019)3, and, for this, there was a process of consumer formation, around increasingly complex consumer culture, so that: “the result is the internalization of the market law in order to seek the satisfaction of the drives, turning off the subject function when possible” (PRADO, 2019, p. 49). With this, production capitalism was configured as communicational capitalism, producing sev- eral shifts: production became just one of the moments of con- sumer culture; communication came to depend more and more on technical objects (not only external but also internal to the body) for the circulation of meanings; and capitalism became more emphatically a way of life, with strength in sign or communicational value (in terms of production of meanings, cognitive and sensitive)4. In another work, Fontenelle approached the concepts of psychoanalysis drive and the Deleuzian desire: “to the extent that such research is based on Deleuzian theory of desire and its conception of agencement – understood as the network itself, the articulation between bodies, machines, algorithms, state- ments, affections, among others -, the essay ends by propos- ing a necessary ‘encounter’ between the psychoanalytic notion of drive and that of desire in Deleuze” (FONTENELLE, 2020, p. 301). The author proposes to treat, starting from psychoanaly- sis, consumption as a search for drive satisfaction: This essay begins, therefore, by discussing what instinctual satisfaction is, a Freudian concept later expanded by Lacan from the category of enjoy3 See, also, FONTENELLE, 2017 and DUFOUR, 2013. 4 Such transformations did not modify the main point of the system: the creation of surplus value, the infinite accumulation as a vector. They only have this vector as an agent.

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