The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture)
Jonathan Beller
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1584655836
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye,” writes Jonathan Beller, “and engages spectators in increasingly dematerialized processes of social production.” In his groundbreaking critical study, cinema is the paradigmatic example of how the act of looking has been construed by capital as “productive labor.” Through an examination of cinema over the course of the twentieth century, Beller establishes on both theoretical and historical grounds the process of the emergent capitalization of perception. This process, he says, underpins the current global economy.
By exploring a set of films made since the late 1920s, Beller argues that, through cinema, capital first posits and then presupposes looking as a value-productive activity. He argues that cinema, as the first crystallization of a new order of media, is itself an abstraction of assembly-line processes, and that the contemporary image is a politico-economic interface between the body and capitalized social machinery. Where factory workers first performed sequenced physical operations on moving objects in order to produce a commodity, in the cinema, spectators perform sequenced visual operations on moving montage fragments to produce an image.
Beller develops his argument by highlighting various innovations and film texts of the past century. These innovations include concepts and practices from the revolutionary Soviet cinema, behaviorism, Taylorism, psychoanalysis, and contemporary Hollywood film. He thus develops an analysis of what amounts to the global industrialization of perception that today informs not only the specific social functions of new media, but also sustains a violent and hierarchical global society.
Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Asia-Pacific : culture, politics, and society)
Xiao Wu/Platform/Unknown Pleasures: The Hometown Trilogy (BFI Film Classics)
Odd Man Out (BFI Film Classics)
production tends, socially, to eliminate this lived time. —Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle The time of production, commodity-time, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is the abstraction of irreversible time, all of whose segments must prove on the chronometer their merely quantitative equality. This time is in reality what it is in its exchangeable character. In this social domination by commodity time,“time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of
our puny desire, their sentience, that is the registration of their animation in circulation—their cult value. But the fetish marks the invisible relations capital that haunt the object while the aura marks the now absent uses and properties that make the object what it is. The personal quality of certain strains of modernism and the very cult of genius or personality as a signifying structure in modern art supporting individual works that otherwise would be lost in the world of intending
Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 7. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 8. Ibid., 156. 9. Ibid., 157. 10. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003). 11. Derrida, Rogues, 157. 12. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 106. 13. Jonathan L. Beller, Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalism, and the World- Media System (Manila:
France, though probably less common in the Murora atoll) is here followed by a disposition toward forgetting what insists on not being forgotten. Here, class hatred (for the bourgeoisie that informs everything of Marx’s) is suppressed; even the discourse that speaks this essential kernel of hatred to the realm of thought is nearly forgotten, reduced, rather, to a repressive apparition. Capital is not something to be understood from some nowhere in which one might decide that it is not essentially
audience’s psyche” (Writings, 46). Because “the montage approach [i]s the essential, meaningful and sole possible language of cinema, completely analogous to the role of the word in spoken material” (Writings, 46). The juxtaposition of moving fragments became for Eisenstein a tool for the reorganization of the audience’s psyche. The idea of montage, then, is the abstraction process itself, and cinema is its conscious utilization. In Eisenstein’s famous phrase, direction is “the organization of