Nick Dyer-Witheford is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario.
Gilles
Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari
Maurizio Lazzarato
Franco Berardi (Bifo)
Mario Tronti
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
Antonio Negri
Autonomist Marxism
Postructuralism
CLAC
Disobbedienti
Social Centres
Pirate radio and Television
alternate domains
Independent media center
Nick Dyer-Witheford’s work has operated as an important bridge between Italian autonomist Marxism and Anglophone radical political economy of communication. His work has entailed disinterring strands of the radical political economy of communication tradition, represented by people such as Dallas Smythe, and combining them with the parallel and in many cases complementary analyses of figures such as Antonio Negri, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Mario Tronti, and Franco Berardi (Bifo). The first result of such a combination was Cyber-Marx, in which Dyer-Witheford explores contemporary informatized capital and argues that far from being triumphant, all it has provoked is a wave of new movements bent on its dissolution. Employing key classical and autonomist marxist concepts such as circuits of capital and cycles of struggle, Cyber-Marx extensively documents these radical movements, paying particular use to their fluency in information technology and their ability to sustain and extend each other’s struggles. Dyer-Witheford’s subsequent work has tended to focus on another key autonomist concept, immaterial labour, particularly as it is articulated within the video game industry. His forthcoming book with Greig De Peuter, tentatively entitled Games of Empire, takes this autonomist conceptual contribution and explores it empirically.
(1999) Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. University of Illinois Press.
(2002) “Global Body, Global Brain/ Global Factory, Global War: Revolt
of the Value-Subjects” in The Commoner, No. 3.
(2003) Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing.
(with Greig de Peuter and Stephen Kline). Montreal: McGill-Queen's University
Press
Online version of Cyber-Marx:
http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/dyerwitheford/index.htm
Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society:
http://www.endpage.com/Archives/Subversive_Texts/Dyer_Witheford/Autonomist_Marxism_and_Information_Soc.htm
Global Body, Global Brain/ Global Factory, Global War: Revolt of the Value-Subjects
(pdf version)
http://www.commoner.org.uk/03dyer-witheford.pdf
Cognitive Capital Contested: The Class Composition of the Video and Computer
Game Industry
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/05/25/171256&mode=nested&tid=4