NECROPOLITICAL SCREENS: DIGITAL IMAGE, PROPRIETY, RACIALIZATION

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

it that this extreme entails. Technology provides a direct boost to capitalism.
NFT What if we start this analysis with something so banal and idiotic, but involving so much money, that it can stand as a symbol of the hyper-financialization we live in? The digital world produces millions of images, but now non-fungible tokens (NFT) stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, 3  it is my trophy. In some cases it comes to cost an insane amount of money to own the ID (and one form of the roulette is that often those spending most on buying NFTs are those who invested the most in the NFT infrastructure; it is thus a crypto pyramid schema); the hype is multiplied by the amount of money invested to buy it and causing the NFT's underlying digital image to spread around virally. Reproductions of these digital items (images, videos, and other types of digital files) are available for anyone to attain. Still, it has only one owner, though the more the NFT digital item is seen, the more the hype around it rises, and the next sale may result in a significant profit. What is bought or sold is a code, not the image in itself. The greater the demand, the greater the next profit.
Before the arrival of NFTs, blockchain technology's first application was a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. What is important in the debates surrounding the NFTs, is that their rising power in the digital/immaterial world is inevitably connected to a real energy-intensive usage and, therefore, environmental devastation. Johannes Sedlmeir opposes the thesis of devastation, nevertheless he and his colleagues affirm in their analysis that "the redundancy underlying all types of blockchain technology can make blockchain-based IT solutions considerably more energy-intensive than a non-blockchain, centralized alternative." 4 In summary, NFTs are not only devastating for the environment but make a mockery of the concept of free digital sharing. The concept of the NFT is centered on ownership and private property, tightly connected to the art market and the stock market. In short, it is all about money and profit. Money, on the other hand, represents a political neoliberal project of necro-sovereignty and pure domination. Today, money is printed in such a quantity that it really is paper, better to say just information, digital numbers, impregnated with power, violence, legislatures, and ultimately lives ousted; it is a balloon-however, when blown it is not empty but bloody.
The becoming NFT of a digital image means acquiring a digital trophy in very close proximity to all other necrocapitalist trophies.
Instead of discussing what Pasi Väliaho calls "biopolitical screens," 5 I suggest to talk about necropolitical screens.

FROM MARXISM TO INSURGENT BLACK MARXISM
We can tackle the topic of propriety from two sides; the research by Andreas Wittel 6 is a good start. Wittel is a Marxist. We are as well, though seeing that the most pertinent thought of thinking and doing is the Black thought (it is revolutionary and invincible in the demands to rethink all the notions through an optic of the Black body, history, and futurity)-we are gravitating toward an Insurgent Black Marxism. In general, the codified academic white world is stuck today. Black and POC people are here to be drained, to be sucked from everything they know. In the past, colonialism and racial slavery wanted their flesh and labor. Today, the white neoliberal regime of necro-power wants not only their flesh but also their soul.
In a long analysis, Wittel focuses not only on labor, value, and resistance, but also on property. He refers to Ronald V. Bettig's work from the 1990s, in which the latter identified changes regarding media technology. To put it short. Before the advance of digital technology, no idea of sharing and creative commons existed, and mass media were all in the service of capital. However, Wittel says that despite the idea of the common and sharing, and against our expectation, digital technology did not produce better conditions. The expectations were high but the end is not promising.
Wittel explains, relying on Bettig, that the reproducibility of the digital product is limitless at a very low cost. It is also widely distributed, and it is difficult to prevent its use.
In fact, most intellectual property is non-rival, meaning they can be used by one person without preventing other people from using the same goods. Digital objects, however, are not only non-rival; they are also abundant by nature. Therefore, all attempts to rescue the idea of copyright via digital rights are absurd in the sense that they create artificial scarcity. They turn objects that are abundant into legally scarce goods. To put it ironically: In the digital age only the creation of artificial scarcity can feed capitalist accumulation. 7 And here is what happened with NFTs: they produced a bypass or another type of scarcity by redefining the images only through their ownership "uniqueness." It is a sort of an upgrade of the Occidental modernist obsession with the signature of the artwork, that in the digital times is replaced by the ownership. This is what we see with the NFTs today; they are made into scarce objects by centering only on the ID that is proprietary, and not the artist's signature. The content does not have any meaning. It is the form that matters-not of the (art)work but the form of private property that has always been a fetish in capitalism: what has always been at stake is a signature, but this time the signature of ownership takes center stage.
Next come the three features of property that are useful for the present analysis. First, Wittel states that what "we can learn from Marx is that property is not a natural right. It is a historic product.
Property relations are subject to specific historic conditions." 8 This is the first point exposed by Wittel which should come as no surprise given that capital's tendency, in the end, is to relate to itself only; it is a psychotic machine that has no relation to anything other than itself. Such sunken space produces a sunken image; the NFT is a sunken image of contemporary art in the sunken space of the financial necrocapitalism, and they seem to work so well together.
All these energy nodes that connect images come short when we think of these relations.
Necropolitical Screens: Digital Image, Propriety, Racialization To sum up, all the images, from operative to moving and nonhuman generated images, are coming to a short end without the view of their other side, the racialized images and the trophy images. Let's look into details, and I repeat, the trophy-imagewithout time-erased space-racialized form. The absence of time depicts a condition of immobilization rather than an erasure of time. According to Perera, trophy bodies are characterized by their condition of being seized, caught, captured, affixed, and immobilized within the violent regimes of visibility and power.

THE EMBLEMATIC IMAGE OF THE DIGITAL NECROCAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION
As they are crafted within an order of bodies "as political flesh and affect," 25 trophy bodies are the product of complex economies (visual, discursive, aesthetic, and scientific) that situate them as a specific genre among an exemplary brand of the nonhuman. 26 Further, space is not a zero, as it was in the 1990s, nor is it subtracted, as Alain Badiou would say. On the contrary, it is quite literally an erased space that mirrors necrocapitalism's persistent erasure of history and people. Again, this is not the end of history but rather its performative, administrative procedure of erasure. The form is racialized, which means that it is no longer constituted as solely temporal or spatial, but that (art, life, the social, aesthetic, etc.) forms are re/produced through continuous regimes and conditions of racialization in relation to propriety, racial slavery, and colonialism. Thus, we may ask what about the processes of subjectivation that are an outcome of the (trophy/ racializing) image's order. 27 The answer is the wretched (of the world), with a direct reference to Fanon. 28 The scheme can therefore be supplemented as follows: the trophy-image-without time-erased space-racialized formthe wretched (the superfluous and the disposable). 29 Within violent processes of dehumanization, we see figures of "disidentification" rather than "relations of resemblance" to the human. In the last instance, the result of the processes of racialization is a flesh having the status of a political flesh-a flesh that does not establish a limit but rather is the limit of any capitalist neoliberal politics.