ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the two categories most relevant to our theme of global media—the indebted subject citizen as a kind of sub-citizen, and the mediated citizen. The represented subject/citizen of classical democratic theory morphs into the consumer/spectator. The idea of the contemporary subject/citizen as “mediatized,” meanwhile, is also relevant to global and transnational media. While provoking new forms of transnational racism, globalization can also create new conditions for the emergence of transnational resistance. Cairo, Bahrain, Barcelona, Madison, New York and beyond, the authors note, form a transnational assemblage of insurgencies which shared, in however an inchoate manner, an animus against privatization and the hegemony of financial capitalism, and even, at their most radical, a rejection of private property. The dominant model of financial capitalism, for Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, molds subjectivity to produce a certain kind of subordinated subject, which they classify as the indebted subject; the mediatized subject; the securitized subject, and the represented subject.
