Jonathan Beller is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and co-founder of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Beller is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of English, Film, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

His work explores the rise and role of images, screens and screen cultures in political economy, with an emphasis on concerns relevant to struggles against racial capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and heteropatriarchy. Through studies of cinema, painting, photography and computing, Beller has introduced key concepts for the critique of political economy including “attention economy,” “the attention theory of value,” “computational capital,” “the computational mode of production,” “computational colonialism,” “informatic labor,” and “economic media.”

Beller is currently interested in further developing the concept of economic media, and particularly an understanding of the relation between expressivity and currency/issuance as a means of accounting in both the semantic and economic registers. Systems of account, ledgers and archives—-the networked differentials potentiated by systems of signs from words to images to money to digits——are historically overdetermining. In order to realize the liberation we seek, the historical claims of the oppressed require enhanced modes of account and accounting both for self-organization and for the holding of hegemony accountable.

Jonathan Beller’s books include The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Dartmouth UP, 2006); Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle, and the World-Media System (Ateneo de Manila UP, 2006); The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (Pluto Press, 2017) and The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Duke UP, 2021). He is a long-time member of the Social Text editorial collective, and currently serves as co-editor.