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April 26, 2007
I want to return to Jonathan Beller's The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, a Marxist analysis of cinema as a mode of production in what many call “post-industrial” capitalism. I posted on this here, and I found myself intrigued by Beller's argument that cinematic images are not just representations of capital, but that they actually are capital.
In the Introduction to the Cinematic Mode of Production Beller says that:
it is today possible to mark clearly, at the outset (a luxury not available when I began this work), that the industrialization of vision has shifted gears. With the rise of internet grows the recognition of the value-productive dimensions of sensual labor in the visual register. Perception is increasingly bound to production ..... As in the history of factory production, in the movie theater we make and remake the world and ourselves along with it.
What we have is the organization of the visual by technology so that we suture on image to the next with the elevation of commodity production to the visual realm.
Beller says that he uses the term cinema:
not only to refer to the set of institutions traditionally configured as "the cinema," in popular usage, but to refer to the manner in which production generally becomes organized in such a way that one of its moments necessarily passes through the visual, that is, that it creates an image that (while the tip of the iceberg) is essential to the general management, organization, and movement of the economy.
Beller goes on to say that under the rubric of the cinematic mode of production, "cinema" refers not only to what one sees on the screen or even to the institutions and apparatuses that generate film but to that totality of relations that generates the myriad appearances of the world on the six billion screens of "consciousness."
"Cinema" means the production of instrumental images through the organization of animated materials. These materials include everything from actors to landscapes, to populations, to widgets, to fighter¬planes, to electrons. "Cinema" is a material practice of global scope, the movement of capital in, through, and as image. "Cinema" marks the changeover to a mode of production in which images, working in concert, form the organizational principles for the production of reality. The whole regime of classical value production extends itself into the visual.
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