11/27: The Self-Enunciating Eye
November 19, 2007
- Bellar: The Cinematic Mode of Production
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1.
Kim Lacey | November 28, 2007 at 2:43 pm
After reading Beller’s The Cinematic Mode of Production, I was specifically interested in the Lacanian notion of “active annihilation” (266). Based upon the idea that subjectivity is a “bipolar reflexive action,” Beller illustrates this concept through the use of Stone’s Natural Born Killers. While I am not entirely interested in using the film as my main point in this response, I am intrigued with the idea of active v. passive annihilation and Beller’s approach to the formation of self-as-subject. In her essay “Asymmetrical Reciprocity,” Iris Marion Young makes this point clear when she states, “each person’s identity is a product of her interactive relations with others. […] By this knowledge that they have a perspective on me that is different from my immediate experience of myself, I experience them as subjects, as ‘I’s” (46). I view this situation as passive annihilation: I am interacting with somebody else’s perspective that is forming his/her perspective of his/herself all the while forming myself through them. Thus, I am passively annihilated because I am reformed through the other person ‘finding’ his/herself through me.
Returning to Lacan’s example, conversely if ‘I see myself seeing myself,’ then I am both forming and destroying my own subjectivity—I cannot experience both subjects as they are both versions of myself. Here’s where I believe the bipolarity fits in: if we can identify ourselves ‘by seeing ourselves,’ then one of those ‘selves’ must be annihilated. One ‘I’ can no longer be ‘me,’ as it must be the other from whom I construct myself. In turn, we end up gazing at ourselves in order to form our own subjectivity, which Beller later notes is an act that occurs when we try to be like those we see on the screen—the self/other divide is dissolved, and we can only formulate our subjectivity through ourselves (or, what we have made ourselves into).
In The Crossing of the Visible, Jean-Luc Marion notes a contradiction between the visible and the invisible: “the gaze strives to see what it is not able to see, but differently: the paradox offers a counter-appearance, while perspective suggests a breakthrough of the gaze. The paradox poses a visible that belies the visible, perspective a gaze that pierces through the visible” (2). Especially if the self-reflective gaze is indeed an active annihilation, I am not certain if it offers a counter-appearance as difference. Rather, I believe the counter-appearance is sameness, and that is the difficulty with, or perhaps the point of, active annihilation. There is no counter-appearance, as both “I”s are diminished through the self-reflective gaze.
The notion of bipolarity, then, is reminiscent of our readings early on this semester, specifically seen in “The Flatterer” and The Sophist. In The Sophist, we learned the difference between distinction and opposition: things are distinct from, rather than opposite of, something else. Whereas The Sophist argues against opposition, Lacan and the notion of bipolarity seems to embrace it. Further, “The Flatterer” simultaneously represents what Is and what Is-not, exactly what happens to oneself in a moment of self-reflexive subject formation.
Question for class: Since they both provide a certain type of identity construction, what’s more conducive to subject formation: active or passive annihilation?
2.
Jared Grogan | November 28, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Fair warning: this suffers from an end of term burn out and any wit is dry and worn-out– But an attempt at a good-humoured tour of my most basic response to the cinematic mode of production was all I was up for…
Now this…
On Fox News Sunday this weekend, Chris Wallace and company openly discussed the notion that Mike Huckabee’s surge in the polls was due to the fact that people in Iowa know their politics pretty well and they’re starting to prove it. Huckabee boasted that as advertising and marketing strategies continue to play more important roles for candidates, the people in Iowa are “getting smarter” and they know the difference between what’s real and the “manure in the catalogues;” and that they are looking more carefully for something that’s real…the truth. As Huckabee was talking the camera panned left and Huckabee was seen to be standing beside WWF legend Rick “nature boy” Flair… Meanwhile, Huckabee continued his spiel, adding that Rick Flair brings (along with his Huckabee’s other famed supporter– Chuck Norris) the real Republican tough guy support. Huckabee ended by promising that Rick Flair would then wrestle anyone who might not vote for him.
Now this.
Some other crappy News show is claiming that the next Republican President may be determined by how many trips to the dentist a candidate has made.
Now
Reading Beller confirms my underlying paranoia that theories of media/mediation had not gone far enough. The medium is the message…the medium is the metaphor… the medium is premeditating… the medium “surreptitiously became the formal paradigm and structural template for social organization generally. By some technological slight of hand, machine mediated perception now is inextricable from your psychological, economic, visceral, and ideological dispensations” (2). I was a firm believer by page 2. Even as an occasional spectator of Fox News for comedic relief, I could certainly anticipate that something hilariously unexpected but somehow predictable would happen, sure, like Rick the nature boy Flair or Chuck Norris defending freedom by street wrestling for votes. I am, apparently, a connoisseur, attentive, with eyes glued to the assured absurdities of media and the odd ways the men of the WWF have slowly been taking power, alongside other notable action heroes, and Fred Thompson, who I assume is their leader and manager. Of course the WWE was quicker than the bulk of academics to capitalize and be subsumed under the idea that entertainment itself was becoming the natural format for the representation of experience. Even though we’ve clearly all read the big thinkers that have long been tuned into the recession of physical reality in proportion to our symbolic advances– and we’ve especially heard the assorted rants about how technology and changes in our modes of communication are more than apt to change our cognitive habits, social relationships and subjectivity… But as Beller points out, all in all we’ve been slow to react to the mediation and co-option of attention and consciousness into the global attention economy. It’s like we’ve been sitting there watching Rick Flair on Fox news while his tag-team partner, Bobby the Brain Heenan, was butterfly-choking language–our signature move. To avoid the rhetorical tap-out Beller creates a need for intellectuals to know what’s happening to language in the new economy and for us to help re-write the terms without falling back on textual vocabularies and strategies that don’t cope with the new intersections of culture and the political economy. Beller’s call for interventions into the capitalist recuperation and exploitation of the human quest for “extra-economic” creativity and freedom asks us not to abandon dialectics of negation, but to acknowledge that the cinematic mode of production has us in a chicken-wing camel clutch inverted facelock sleeper hold of some sort (26). This spectacularly sweet move (which I suppose we could say “changes the relationship between the body and the commodity”) has counter moves, and Beller points out some of the leverage and pressure points. Beller rightly denotes that we need to find the potentia in the cinematic secularization of the revolution and the de-sacralization of human communion. But, perhaps because all I’ve been reading lately is about economics, it seems to me that to we also need to strategically intervene in the culture industry’s co-option of a cycle of self-perpetuating crises. Beller doesn’t simply overlook this idea, but I think that an emphasis on the rhythm that this fight has taken on in recent years is worth noting in this context. Beller could add to his notion of building solidarity among people and parts of ourselves that part of the disadvantage of those fighting for the justice of things to come lays in our slow response to kairotic moments in the “News.” Fox News’ and other media outlets have had stranger premediations in recent years than the possibility of Huckabee and Rick Flair wrestling democrats in the streets. The creative stockpile of rightwing ideas for the future are at once invisible ideas that lie around and ideas that are quickly put into play in response to crises seen as opportune moments. Do we have enough workable ideas lying in wait that are ready for action? Are we ready to respond to the “new architectonics of social domination” (291) and also ready to be economized as premises for new types of action? Snap on your colorful tights and get ready to rumble.
3.
Jared Grogan | November 28, 2007 at 3:29 pm
p.s. obviously that is supposed to say premediating above… but my bossy computer insists that I write premeditating.
4.
jack mcintyre | November 29, 2007 at 7:26 pm
What interests me most about “The Cinematic Modes of Production”, especially in relation to my paper, is the description of psychoanalysis and the unconscious as a “symptom” of cinema. Rotman is interested in thinking of the subject as developing into a multiplicity rather than a singular entity, an emergent entity beside the self, but in many ways this has already happened. Perhaps this is the case in psychoanalysis, though Rotman explicitly denies the psychoanalytic model of desire as lack in favor of a “never dischargeable excess”. A certain multiple self is also implied by Chartrand and Bargh; there is a conscious self and a “butler”, an autonomic self. And of course there is the ubiquitous “shattered subject of the postmodern”, as Beller calls it in his introduction; this also is a self-as-multiplicity, though not apparently the self Rotman envisions, since Rotman celebrates multiplicity and Beller seems to lament it.
I am interested in the multiple self as it relates to religion, as described by Derrida in The Gift of Death (and to a lesser extent in other works). Derrida refers to Patocka’s “Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy”, in which Patocka argues that responsibility in Europe started with Platonism and the impersonal Good and eventually developed into Christianity, which substituted a personal God and made responsibility internal rather than external. He distinguishes between ethics and responsibility; the former ideally requires complete transparency and publicity; one submits oneself and one’s actions before the law, the community, and so proves that they are ethical. Responsibility, on the other hand, must be secret, and therefore contradicts ethics; Derrida explicates this by examining Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, about Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac. For Abe’s sacrifice to be legitimate, he must truly love his son, and he certainly appears to meet this requirement; yet he must also hatefully murder his son; he must take responsibility for the act of murder, and therefore cannot excuse himself and his actions with the Nuremburg defense: I’m just following orders. God’s orders or not, Abe took his beloved boy up to that mountaintop to murder him. This is responsibility, and Patocka and Derrida both imply that Christianity, being so infused with Platonism, has not yet come to terms with this requirement, the requirement of secrecy.
In terms of the subject, responsibility serves to define the individual. To keep the secret and violate ethics requires setting the self apart from others (people), instead devoting oneself to the absolute Other, God. This is obviously a disturbing and dangerous notion; imagine if somebody you know murdered a child/spouse/etc. and said “God told me to”. According to responsibility as presented here, such a murder could be justified. And we, outsiders, others, could never know if indeed it was justified. On the other hand this neatly defined self, distinct from community in obedience to God, is also a multiplicity; the secret is even a secret from the self: “let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth” as Jesus says in Matthew. The self is then well defined and split simultaneously, as God is well-defined and split according to the doctrine of the Trinity.
Despite the terrifying implications of such loyalty to God, this understanding of responsibility could also be useful in the context of Beller’s (and Nealon’s, I think) concerns about the influence of Capitalism. Capitalism is extraordinarily good at colonizing whatever it touches, including the mind, body, and subjectivity of people. Yet how would capitalism deal with a secret? Any practitioner of a faith like Abraham’s, in his/her madness, is immune to the colonizing influence of Capitalism. Of course religion as commonly practiced becomes “the opiate of the masses”, but in Patocka’s view this is because Platonism has corrupted Christianity. It’s interesting to think about this in terms of the Middle East, and Islamic terrorists, who have in some ways very effectively resisted colonization by capitalism, and they’ve done it through a devotion much like Abraham’s. Certainly Muslim terrorists are in many ways not at all consistent with Derrida, at least as far as I can tell (secrets are by definition unfathomable), but there are certainly similarities. What if God actually told those guys to crash planes into the twin towers? If he had it wouldn’t be far from his order to Abe. The results are obviously horrifying, but reading Beller, the results of capitalism are perhaps equally terrible.
My question: can religion as Derrida conceives it be an effective means of resisting capitalism?
P.S.
Both the idea of self-as-multiplicity and the secret are essential to my argument. Obviously Beller is right to say that one can’t avoid contributing to the system and supporting the Man without suicide or worldwide revolution (of course you’d have to commit suicide with a homemade implement – no guns or pills here, cuz then you’re still consuming). But even Beller acknowledges that “chunks” of you can avoid working for the man (295). These are the chunks I’m interested in, the secret chunks secretly resisting, chunks that sneak out at night and fight the system only safely retreat and hide behind “normal” tax-paying law-abiding chunks. Of course the Man will never be completely defeated without radical restructuring of society, but this is nearly tautological: for society to change society has to change. The fact that there are secret chunks of resistance is cause for hope, and religion of a particular type fosters the growth of these chunks. Of course the new chunks bring new problems…
5.
Crystal Starkey | November 29, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Jared….I quite fancy interventionist technology. What’s your snag, man?
Anyway…..
Over the summer, I visited Capri, off the coast of Naples, Italy on my way to visit family in Sicily. I snapped a picture of a little sign posted on the lift designed to take tourists to the top of the island, where vacationers can enjoy a light lunch and crisp cool glass of white wine—if budgets allow, of course. Mine did not, so the strike-sign didn’t affect my daily itinerary in that I had planned to hike to the top of the island anyway. But, most people visiting the blue attraction hadn’t planned on a sweaty trek and were discontented at the lift-employees’ strike. My picture from Capri represents much of what Beller communicates in chapter two, where he discusses the symbolism of the prisoner’s belt (which the prisoner used to hang himself) and the factory belt on which it was produced. While the belt is produced merely to hold up pants, the factory workers are deprived of their life little by little in the form of their labor on the job (91). The factory worker thus is controlled by the upper class that runs the factory. Similarly, the strike on the lift at Capri is a symbolism for power over the middle class employers/owners of the lift as well as power of the upper class users/tourists—suffering to pay the same amount of money for a longer line and a longer, less exciting more stressful ‘ride’ to the top. Just as the factory worker is unable to find justice in proper use of the belt (92), the tourists on Capri are unable to find justice in their forced-to-walks or overly-expensive-with-too-much-waiting-and-crowding shuttles to the top. The lower class workers have prevailed. While the 1920’s film Beller cites revolves around a man’s suicide which catalysts his fellow into a strike, a similar thing occurs here when the unfair wages of these Italian lift workers provoked them into a strike. According to Beller, “…the power of the capitalists, the scales on which their power operates and the immanence of the workers’ discontent” (92) dictates the tourists’ walking or waiting. Beller uses a computer disk and a computer to exemplify his theory of dependence on significance on social organization (95). This example clearly shows the lower class they are merely depended on for the significance the upper class wants to experience and the middle class provides through social organization. Thus, the lower class’ lift operators’ strike reverses that power and forces the upper class to a mediocre experience through shuttle, while simultaneously making the middle class owners recognize the power with which their employers operate.
If, as Beller repeatedly suggests, movement is signification and thus “The Strike’s” factory workers realizes their personal meaning is their significance only in and as bodily activity, then do the factory workers’ movements on the line reflect their meaning in life—as might the Italian lift workers’ movements reflect their significance and meaning? If so, this meaning is menial, tedious, replaceable and repetitive, yes? And, thus, their movement to strike must reflect their meaning as such—or at least their need for recognition of their real meaning (a truer meaning), as a factory worker and/or lift worker. The strike then becomes their meaning. And, if this is so, then is Beller correct in his assessment that the “…form has turned out to be more revolutionary than the content” (97), as the elevator strike itself caused minor uproar among its own tourist-dependent people and employers, it simultaneously created a stir among the inconvenienced tourists? The form of the strike—inhibiting the transportation of affluent and highly expectant folks from all over the world—had a much larger impact (in what/who it affected) than the content of the strike or to whom the strike was directed towards. Therefore, because the elevator strike was based on insufficient pay and reimbursement, the elevator strike then must affect the shallow employers’ pockets as well.
According to Beller, film begs to “manufacture a new social order. This theory of production is not empty rhetoric, because, as Einstein aptly puts it, this production produces ‘a new class of ideology’ a suture within the social world that is of a new type” (99). Organized material, including written and visual, however, manipulated, is what enables the masses to join together in forces and fight their oppressor. The working class operates the elevator; the middle class owns the elevator; the upper class utilizes the elevator. Striking by the lower class, then, ultimately causes the elevator to close—making the middle class owners lose respect, dependability and money in their lost revenue from the lack of tourists’ use of the lift, as well as the owners having to invest in slow, crowded shuttle recruits. Additionally, it forces the upper class and tourists to not only pay full price for their less than pleasant transportation experience but to also lose time waiting in line for the newly implemented shuttle only to be poorly rewarded for the heated overcrowding and less scenic ride to the top of Capri.
6.
Katrina Newsom | November 29, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Although I find this reading extremely difficult to understand, one argument that Beller purposes, which is his theme throughout the book is the concept of capitalization of looking. I understand the Michael Hardt touches on this a bit in his essay “Affective Labor”, but he extends his argument to include the relational ties that are produced by affect within labor. However, it appears as if Beller is taking a Marxian approach to the production of wealth by the shifting of reality that cinema produces. When thinking of this, I begin to compare the change in contemporary black cinema from its predecessors. As Beller states in his book, “The cinema is in dialectical relation to the social: in learning the codes of commercial cinema, spectators also learn the rules of the dominant social structure-indeed, they become experts” (2). The dialectic that has existed within the black films has shifted in today’s understanding of capital and wealth. In the 1970s, a rash of black exploitation films came to the screen that placed the image of the gangster trapped by poverty and the ghetto genre of the economically oppressed characters straddled between poverty and barely making it before the eyes of black spectators. Now, in the more contemporary works of black cinema there is an upsurge of films that posit an image of middle to upper class blacks that own three-story homes and the latest model of SUVs. The significance of this lies not in the fact that wealth is being displayed, but in the reality of the economic position of the spectators of these films. Therefore, when Beller states, “Capital must be grasped not only as an engine of exploitation, but an image-engine of exploitation-a cinematic apparatus (2), he is speaking to the phenomena of the black film industry as well. The image that is produced within these films has shifted from “Good Times, standing in a chow line” to “We finally got our piece of the pie.” Clearly for many black Americans this is far from the truth. But the image of a black person living wealthily shapes the reality of the looker to induce the belief that s/he too has arrived. Therefore, not only does these images in these cinematic moments, which are clearly fragmented as I believe that Beller is asserting as he talks about the postmodernism of cinema, produce a false image by which many lookers now view themselves, but also, it creates the desire to see that image over and over. In most of these films, we rarely if ever see the individual working. We are told that s/he has a professional job, such as a lawyer or doctor sometimes even an entrepreneur (usually in the beauty salon) but that is the extent to which we see wealth being produced. At the same time, many of the lookers are working in some form of serve work that does not afford them the opportunity to buy said cars or homes. Clearly, I could conclude that what is experienced here is the fetishism that Beller writes about in relation to the Freud. Yet, I do not feel comfortable enough with this concept to write more about it. I guess the point I am getting at is that this new genre of black intellectuals with wealth that is so highly praised produced by cinema continues to produce lookers who are willing to spend and spend to see an image that is not their reality. They will go home and sleep in their scarcely furnished homes, to wake and go to a job that barely pays minimum wage dreaming of driving a SUV as they are waiting for mass transit. In no way I am speaking to the black population as a whole, but by and large, I believe this to be true. My question then is when Beller quotes Lacan as stating, “I am not fucking, I am talking to you” (152) as a way to show the satisfaction of talking in the sameness of the satisfaction of fucking which are both acts of doing. Can we place this concept within the framework in the act of looking for the black spectator?
P.S:
In response to Beller’s assertion that we cannot get from under the system of capitalism, Dr. Pruchnic asked the class if we believed Beller’s claims were valid. I responded by asking Dr. Pruchnic while on break if becoming non-productive was a form of resistance (I had Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in mind when I posed this question)? He informed me that even a non-productive lifestyle produced consumers. So on the way home after class and after the intake of those toxic fumes, a possible form of resistance came to mind. While talking to Dr. Pruchnic, he mentioned that people who grew and consumed their own food could be considered resisters of capitalism, but he also stated that there were many things that had to be considered before that person could be deemed an outsider to the capitalist system. Yet, as I continued to think about that form of resistance, I began to recall a character from J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Michael K.” Set in South Africa, this novel tells about a man who after a riot began a journey that took him on a path to find a hospital for his mother. After she died, he appeared to roam aimlessly and eventually he came upon a serene countryside where he grew and gathered his own food. Later, he was sent to some form of a concentration camp that imprisoned the poor and exploited their labors. At this place he became gravely ill. He was later released and began his aimless journey, again. With this in mind, I considered the argument of growing one’s own food and ownership that I mentioned earlier. I began to wonder if a person who used that form of resistance took ownership of the land that produced their food could be considered a participator of the system of capitalism? I believe that to a degree they are participants. However, in this novel, Michael K, the character whose racial identity is withheld from the reader, grows food in the ground for his nourishment, but he never possesses the land. He moves from one place to another, never making purchases as he gathers things that he deems useful along the way. I think this example of a vagabond lifestyle does resist capitalism.
7.
Jen | November 29, 2007 at 11:24 pm
The sheer variety of relations to this text from Nature Boy on the campaign trial to The Jeffersons speaks well of the density of this text. I, like the rest of the class, read this through the lens of my own personal interests, and like Jared, was instantly grabbed by Beller’s words.
This text gives a new chilling explanation of what it means when theorists say that in the new wave of capitalism everyone is a producer. What I usually thought of in relation to that idea was niche marketing and the circulation of information. I did not think of production as the act of digesting an image and then acting on it, fulfilling the capitalist purpose of that image. Jonathan Beller’s book, The Cinematic Mode of Production, truly merged affect theory, control societies, and Empire for me. Beller writes, “As the predominant assemblage (machine-body interface) responsible for the general phenomenon of what might be called image-capitalism, cinema marks a movement from the rational to the sensual, from the calculative to the affective” (244).
What Beller’s book elucidated for me was really why I should care about biometrics, why I should care that someone could be tracking my every move. My moves, my attention, is effectively labor, helping corporations create an effective marketing plan and tying my moves into information that can be sold. Their discoveries help corporations target me through what they know about me. This didn’t mean much to me before reading about cybernetics and affect, about how my “self” is really a functioning system. Through the self-help texts I’ve been studying, I’ve learned why positive thinking does not work. It doesn’t work because if an idea is foreign to the idea system that is our personality, it will be rejected. After reading Beller, I realize that by tracking my attention, they can gear images that complement my internal system, leading to instant ingestion and later enactment. Of course, part of me still rejects this idea under the logic “not me,” “maybe someone else, but not me, I can’t be programmed that easily.”
The cold calculation of attention tracking is reminiscent of Deleuze’s essay on societies of control. Deleuze writes, “The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it…Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’ Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies.” As Beller explains throughout his text, attention is a new set of currency. Whether we are discussing art or search engines, the value of an item increases based on how many people see it. Beller only sees the attention economy as expanding: “Humans will have to make themselves increasingly porous to data chains, such that not only their (I mean “ours”) interests in cars and digital cameras are legible, but eventually their medical requirements, food preferences, psychopathologies, and erections will be subject to the laws of informatics and monetization” (308).
After reading Beller’s main arguments, it made me reconsider projects such as One Laptop Per Child, which look to distribute laptops to children in developing countries. What makes me re-examine this project more closely is the fact that Nicholas Negroponte’s project was given seed money by Google and other big companies. Though the laptop is run with linux open source software, Negroponte told 60 minutes that “The first English word of every child in that village was ‘Google’.”. I would not want to argue that giving underprivileged children laptops is bad, but I do think more consideration needs to be given to arguments like the one Beller is making. Do we want to others to profit from the attention of these children? Do we want these children to be targeted by corporations?
What I felt reading Beller was similar to how I felt reading Empire by Negri and Hardt, that I wish the ideas of resistance/revolution could be developed further. Like Alexander Galloway in Protocol, Beller does elude to code as a means of resistance. While Galloway uses the term “hypertrophy” to describe what can be done through code, Beller uses the terms “smash.” From what little is given, I take Beller to be in line with Galloway that you can reroute and expand protocol, you can reinscribe space. However, capitalism will be there waiting to feed off these expansions.
Postscript:
In class discussion, I struggled to understand what was meant by a contrarian idea to capitalism. I tend to think of capitalism as a networked narrative, perhaps like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book, where no matter what you are in the system, but the outcome of that system doesn’t have to lead to a single conclusion. In Foucault Beyond Foucault, Nealon describes resistance as an attempt “to harness power otherwise, in the production of different effects” (24-25). To me, this seems much more useful than resisting by attempting to disappear from the system through drastic means. Of course, I’m reading this at the same time with Foucault, who if I understand him correctly would not say that capitalism is bad, merely dangerous.
8.
Andrea J. Vought | November 30, 2007 at 2:40 am
I decided to rewrite my response after class. but I’m not sure this one has any more insight than my first!
As much as I tried to construct my original response around the relationship (or lack thereof) of Beller’s argument with some of the major points I hope to cover in my conference paper, my attempts were futile. So, instead of straining to make something out of nothing, I’m going with my first instinct to elaborate (and complicate?) Beller’s argument against the filter of Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body and the “controversial” discussed therein.
As we discussed briefly in class, a potentially troubling aspect of Beller’s notion of “cinema” is that his definition and subsequent discussion involves only mainstream film. Indeed, even though he does touch upon films with more controversial matter, they nonetheless still follow culturally-accepted chronology and formatting. It is this cinema, according to Beller, that creates attention economy and facilitates our involvement therein: “The commodified object tends toward the image, money tends toward film, and capital tends toward cinema. People are slotted in accordingly as value-producing media for the new visual economy—as if living in accord with preordained scripts or programs” (28). The implications of this passage in conjunction with that of Richard Grusin’s “Premediation” are clear, as Clay pointed out in his response, so I will refrain from further discussion of that. Beyond that, however, I am still troubled with Beller’s point here and throughout. If capital begets cinema, it begets not only Jerry Bruckheimer summer blockbusters and flashy Disney CGI, but also art house gems and student-produced film projects, though with admittedly less capital gain from the latter. What Beller argues is that as spectators we are entrenched in the economy of the spectacle: we laugh when the director planned, cringe on cue, etc. Also, although I realize that the simile in the quotation above is just that, I can’t help but read consumers as an inextricable part of this prefigured machine. The very people who make the attention economy what it is are merely going through the motions, acting in accordance to the motives of the filmmakers and the political and cultural economy of which they are part.
The real beef I have with Beller’s argument comes in the epilogue: “Along with life and labor, the very consciousness of our bodies has been and is being expropriated. For this we have become not just spectators, but specters. The only way out, short of a complete expropriation of the expropriators, a radical redistribution of wealth and a complete overhaul of the human network (whatever that would look like), is to drop out completely, that is, for all practical purposes, to cease to exist, to cease to speak, write or be written as the discourse of the spectacle. Otherwise, you . . . are working for the man” (295). A grim prognosis if ever I heard one. Frankly, I’m puzzled that Beller comes to such a conclusion. It’s as if he says to readers, “well, that’s the way it is so you might as well lay down and take it.” What happened to the liberal spirit? I think this is precisely where Steve Shaviro can be of great assistance. Instead of becoming (because aren’t we always “becoming”?) specters entrenched in this economy of empty images, Shaviro showcases in The Cinematic Body that cinema is not only inherently corporeal—which Beller denies here—but also capable and made for the purpose of critiquing societal, political, economical (etc. ad infinitum) norms. And too—crucially—since the affective response elicited by the truly unexpected graphic violence of Cronenberg’s exploding heads or the disturbing implications of George Romero’s zombies is so strong in audiences, CHANGE (in perspective at the very least) IS POSSIBLE. Where Beller says, “too bad, so sad” and throws up the white flag, Cronenberg and others (via Shaviro) say, “fuck The Man” and DO. Sure, most of the films discussed by Shaviro are what mainstream critics and analysts would consider B-movies, and they may never have the widespread appeal or financial gain of a Spielberg picture, but that is precisely the point. These films are the ones that Beller conveniently erases, the ones that make us uncomfortably aware of the bodies on screen (and thus, too, our own bodies too) and protect us from becoming mere specters. And these filmmakers do so without expropriating the expropriators or redistributing wealth or overhauling the human network—though, commonly, their films’ “themes” (whatever that may mean nowadays) might advocate doing so.
In the end, I suppose the entire impetus for this response topic choice still remains open: what happens when rogue films, like Andy Warhol’s and—perhaps to a lesser extent since his is more critically-accepted—David Cronenberg’s work, become financially successful? Does a gain in capital signal submission to the economic powers-that-be? Or would such a financial success be a by-product of the radical shift that Beller posits is necessary not to be slave to the Man? I have my suspicions, but I’m really not so sure.
9.
Clay Walker | November 30, 2007 at 4:23 pm
From Richard Grusin’s “Premediation”
The logic of premediation … insists that the future itself is also already mediated, and that with the right technologies …the future can be remediated before it happens (19).
[P]remediation operates according to the assumption that knowledge, through, or facts are never independent of mediation but are constructed and stabilized through the mediation of political, cultural, and technological networks (30)
Premediation works to predetermine the form of the real only insofar as it tries to premediate as many of the possible worlds, or possible paths, as … [the present] might take (31)
From Jonathan Beller’s The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle
[C]inema and cinematic technologies (television, telecommunications, computing, automation) provide some of the discipline and control once imposed by earlier forms of imperialism (torture, violent intimidation, humiliation, covert war, though there is still plenty of that), but the media work to organize these previous forms of discipline and control that remain extant plus innovate entirely new forms (198).
Along with life and labor, the very consciousness of our bodies has been and is being expropriated. For this we have become bot just spectators, but specters. The only way out, short of a complete expropriation of the expropriators, a radical redistribution of wealth and a complete overhaul of the human network (whatever that would look like), is to drop out completely, that is, for all practical purposes, to cease to exist, to cease to speak, write or be written as the discourse of the spectacle. Otherwise, you (or at least chunks of you) are working for the man (295).
While not explicitly stated so, and without any references to any affect theory, Richard Grusin’s notion of premediation strikes me as being in great debt to affect theory. In particular, Massumi’s notion of the virtual echos in Grusin’s argument that we premediate the future, or work to give shape to virtual potentialities that have not yet been actualized – which is the affective moment of expression. But of particular interest to me, is the similarity with Silvan Tomkins’ weak affect theory that posits humans negotiate existence through an ideo-affective organization that compares past experience with the contingencies presented to the individual by reality. Tomkins illustrates this through the example of the man crossing the street. Like Tomkins’ weak affect theory, Grusin’s notion of premediation describes a process that works to control the effects of reality by premediating its possible outcomes.
Reading Grusin’s “Premediation” in conjunction with Beller’s Cinematic Mode of Production sheds light on how we can see something like Grusin’s premediation as the mode of enforcing hegemony in a society of control that is marked by the prevalence of digital technologies of communication (film, television, internet); it is a process that was ascribed to the physical institutions like school, factory, prison in the disciplinary society. As Beller argues, our attention or interest has been expropriated from our bodies and distributed through our consumption of visual technologies like cinema, film, and internet and in return we are compensated not with money or goods, but affective experience. In the middle of this process, it seems Grusin would argue that (at least at times) our expropriated attention is expropriated for the purposes of premediation and the affective experience we get back amounts to a rehearsal of the potentialities that may or may not be actualized. The subtext of this is some sort of affective stake be it fear in the case of 9/11 or plain old interest/joy as in the case of fantasy sports. Here Grusin and Beller agree – the effect of our visual economies of interest is the hegemony realized through multiple and simultaneous affective experiences. I am not sure what my question is here, except maybe, am I wrong? The Beller text was difficult for me to synthesize – maybe I am still groggy from all that turkey last week …
Addendum:
What I take from Beller is an agreement that an economy of interest draws strongly from cinema, but it is a qualified cinema, a cinema remediating the same digital technologies that remediate cinema itself. However, while there may be a certain genealogy linking current digital media with cinema, I am not sure if I entirely agree that film theory is the place for a solution. A media theory is more appropriate since ultimately, the value of commodities is becoming more and more linked with their ability to be expressed, traded, and consumed digitally or if they are consumed physically, acquired through digital channels. So a media theory will clearly play a key role, but equally important, if not more important, might be in understanding why these things hold our interest. Here is where affect theory comes in. Beller leaves little wiggle room for resistance, and although he may be right, simply dropping out of the system does not seem like a tenable solution. We must study and understand how persuasion operates through our affective relationships with other humans and nonhumans, only then can we begin to formulate modes of resistance.
10.
Kim Lacey | December 15, 2007 at 2:23 am
When Jeff mentioned that we had until this evening to post missing responses, I realized that I had forgotten this response-response. So, here it is (mind you, I’m writing this in a knee-deep, paper writing haze…) The thing that is so wonderful about cinema and TV is the voyeurism without feeling weird (not that I know what the weird kind feels like, but I am assuming it’s, well, weird). We can watch without being watched back by those on the screen. That is, unless you’re watching _The Office_. Michael Scott’s glances at the camera remind you that you are being watched–in fact, I am watching myself. If “I can see myself,” Michael literally reminds us of this fact. By staring directly at the audience/viewers, “the world’s best boss” reminds us that we’re looking to these spaces to find ourselves, and are shaped by them. And if Michael Scott is on the other side of the mirror, then, hell, we’re all doomed…