DOCSLIB.ORG

From Street to Screen

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
From Street to Screen Performance Research A Journal of the Performing Arts ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20 From Street to Screen David Archibald & Carl Lavery To cite this article: David Archibald & Carl Lavery (2018) From Street to Screen, Performance Research, 23:7, 109-119, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2018.1558427 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1558427 © 2019 The Author(s) Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 31 Jan 2019. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rprs20 From Street to Screen Debord’s drifting cinema DAVID ARCHIBALD & CARL LAVERY In addition to his roles as editor of the journal music. In addition to their overt didacticism, Internationale situationniste and principal theorist of Debord’s film essays constantly call the medium the Situationist International (SI), it is often of cinema into question in ways that resonate forgotten that Guy Debord was, above all else, with the Brechtian-inspired apparatus theory a filmmaker. Between 1952 and his death in 1994, of critics such as Jean-Louis Baudry (1978) and Debord wrote and directed six films, and abandoned Jean-Lous Comolli (1980), and of British Marxist numerous others, including a feature-length work, commentators associated with the leading De l’Espagne, that he was working on in the early academic journal Screen in the 1970s and 1980s. 1980s. To borrow from Jason Smith (2013), these However, in an age of what Gilles Deleuze terms works can be divided into three periods. The ‘control societies’ (1992) and what Debord anti-cinema of Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls himself, in his final period, called ‘integrated for Sade, 1952) in which Debord experiments with spectacle’ (1990 [1988]: 9), these now somewhat Lettriste techniques, such as an extra-diegetic orthodox (and perhaps discredited) forms of voiceover and silent, black and white screens; the thinking through the politics of cinema – centred, counter-cinemas of Sur le passage de quelques as they are, on ‘showing the apparatus’ – can personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps no longer account for the political relevance of (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Debord’s film. A different method of analysis Brief Unity of Time, 1959) and Critique de la is needed – one in which the focus of attention séperation (Critique of Separation, 1961), defined by is not based on contextualizing what the films Debord as ‘confused documentaries’ on the Lettrist say or in historicizing what they show, as most International (LI) and Situationist International commentators on his films have done to date (Debord 2003 [1959]: 18, 15); and three film essays, (Coppola 2003; Danesi 2011), but rather on La Société du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle, how their rhythmic structures seek to liberate 1 The twenty-two minutes 1973), Réfutation de tous les judgements, tant élogieux the audience from the dominant refrains of of Refutations, for instance, qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film ‘La neoliberal capitalism. are made up entirely of Société du spectacle’ (Refutation of All the Judgements, There is a temporal irony involved in Debord’s Debord’s responses, in text and image, to criticisms of Pros or Cons, Thus Far Rendered on the Film ‘The cinema, for while, as we outline below, it is the filmic version of The Society of the Spectacle’,1975)1 and In girum imus always melancholically focused on the past, its Society of the Spectacle. nocte et consumimur igni (1978), where Debord significance is projected into the future. In this 2 Debord also released a posthumous television detourns images, texts, films and even the hostile respect, Debord’s films are marked by what art film, screened on Canal+ in criticisms of film critics, to theorize about the ever critic Boris Groys calls ‘contemporaneity’ – an January 1994, Guy Debord, son art, son temps (Guy greater circulation of spectacular commodities uncanny mode of temporality in which to be Debord – His Art and His across the world.2 historically attuned is always to be out of date, Time). The film was a collaboration between In common with the cinematic experiments of never in step with one’s time: Debord and the journalist his contemporaries, such as Alain Resnais, Chris Brigitte Cornand. the contemporary is actually constituted by doubt, Marker, Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard, film, 3 It should be noted, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision – by the need however, that Debord was for Debord, transcends fictional narrative, the for prolonged reflection, for a delay. We want to highly critical of La 3 production of dramatic stories. On the contrary, postpone our decisions and actions in order to have Nouvelle Vague and was particularly hostile to cinema is a technology for politics, a device for more time for analysis, reflection, and consideration. Godard, calling him explicitly critiquing the society of the spectacle And that is precisely what the contemporary is – a ‘Maoist liar’ in the short text ‘Cinema and through the use of direct address, intertitles, a prolonged, even potentially infinite period of delay. Revolution’ (2003 [1969]: images and the insertion of often incongruous (Groys 2009) 219). PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 23·7 : pp.109-119 ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online © 2019 The Author(s) 109 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1558427 Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. PR 23.7 On Drifting.indd 109 23/01/2019 09:38 The fact that Debord is our contemporary is to capture attention through an expanded The imperative now, as Michael J. Shapiro neither surprising nor contradictory. As the Retort notion of the cinematic (Crary 2015) – highlights in Politics and Time (2016), is to be Collective have argued (2006; see also pp.4–5 in a redistributed technology of screens, networked specific about how one utilizes affect. Shapiro this issue), capitalism is both an ideology and communications, and informational labour. In exemplifies his point by focusing on how ‘the economic structure that simultaneously changes our present, the drift is both a temporal and choreography of the camera’ (2016: 90–166) can and stays the same. So while Debord’s six films ontological condition, something that contests perturb ‘the imposed rhythms of labour’ in the are explicit attempts to critique twentieth- what François Hartog critiques as ‘presentism’ ‘global factory’ (97, 103).5 5 Critics who tie affect to century forms of alienation, they retain their (2015: xiii–xv), the sense in which capital seeks Shapiro’s language highlights the need specifics include Massumi (2002) and Thrift (2007). acuity for us today for how they interrupt to erase alternative ways of living in time by to think of cinematic politics in terms of 6 Debord’s awareness that twenty-first-century capitalism’s temporal tethering us to a now that wants to last forever. a corporeal performance, a dance whereby the the ‘realism’ of the film regime. This is a regime in which capital has The necessity of making such a critical shift intensity of capitalism’s refrains, those things resides in its affective dimension is also apparent moved beyond Taylorist and Fordist models of in our understanding of drifting is evident if we that capture bodies and minds as rhythms and in the letter to Frankin, industrial production, founded on the rhythm consider the following words from philosopher not as discourse or form, are disrupted and when he mentions that the brevity of the film might of the conveyor belt, and instead takes place in Bernard Stiegler: jammed. As opposed to Walter Benjamin’s work against his purpose. and through the signs, speeds and intensities ideas on the dialogical potential inherent in an For him, a longer duration In today’s control societies (also modulation is more suitable for of ‘deterritorialized factories’. This move from societies), aesthetic weapons play an essential aesthetic of shocks and jolts, Shapiro, like Beller translating ‘the slow the ‘alienation of non-communication’ to what role (this is what Jeremy Rifkin has referred to as and Stiegler, recognizes that alienation effects movement of exposure and ‘cultural capitalism’); it has become a matter of negation … I was trying to the Marxist autonomist thinker Franco Berardi and affects are no longer tenable, in and by embody in Passage’ (2003 terms ‘the panic’ and ‘depression’ of an ‘excess controlling the technologies of aisthēsis (the audio- themselves, in a neoliberal world. Today, we are (1960]: 214). The key idea, of communication’ institutes a different order visual or the digital, for example) and, in this way, jolted and shocked on a daily basis, subjected to again, is rhythmic: the controlling the conscious and unconscious rhythms of references to movement, of rhythmic and, by extension, aesthetic politics information overload, tyrannized by deadlines pace and embodiment bodies and souls; modulating through the control (Berardi 2009: 100–2). For while the aim of and signs, compelled to engage in the ‘labour prove this. of flows these rhythms of consciousness
Load more

Recommended publications
  • From Opinions to Images: Essays Towards a Sociology of Affects Ulus S
    FROM OPINIONS TO IMAGES: ESSAYS TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF AFFECTS ULUS S. BAKER EDITED BY ARAS ÖZGÜN AND ANDREAS TRESKE A SERIES OF READERS PUBLISHED BY THE INSTITUTE OF NETWORK CULTURES ISSUE NO.: 37 FROM OPINIONS TO IMAGES: ESSAYS TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF AFFECTS ULUS S. BAKER EDITED BY ARAS ÖZGÜN AND ANDREAS TRESKE FROM OPINIONS TO IMAGES 2 Theory on Demand #37 From Opinions to Images: Essays Towards a Sociology of Affects Ulus S. Baker Edited by Aras Özgün and Andreas Treske Cover design: Katja van Stiphout Design and EPUB development: Eleni Maragkou Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2020 ISBN print-on-demand: 978-94-92302-66-3 ISBN EPUB: 978-94-92302-67-0 Contact Institute of Network Cultures Phone: +31 (0)20 595 1865 Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.networkcultures.org This publication is available through various print on demand services. EPUB and PDF edi- tions are freely downloadable from our website: http://www.networkcultures.org/publications. This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommer- cial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. FROM OPINIONS TO IMAGES 3 Cover illustration: Diagram of the signifier from Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1987. 4 THEORY ON DEMAND CONTENTS PASSING THROUGH THE WRITINGS OF ULUS BAKER 5 1. A SOCIOLOGY OF AFFECTS 9 2. WHAT IS OPINION? 13 3. WHAT IS AN AFFECT? 59 4. WHAT IS AN IMAGE? 86 5. TOWARDS A NEO-VERTOVIAN SENSIBILITY OF AFFECTS 160 6. ON CINEMA AND ULUS BAKER 165 BIBLIOGRAPHY 180 BIOGRAPHIES 187 FROM OPINIONS TO IMAGES 5 We have lived at least one century within the idea of opinion which determined some of the major themes in social sciences..
    [Show full text]
  • Spectacle, Labour and Utopia in Michael Bay's the Island Brian
    The Cinema Within: spectacle, labour and utopia in Michael Bay’s The Island Brian Baker In this article, I will analyse Michael Bay’s The Island (2005) as a cinematic spectacle which, through its imagination of a particular dystopian future, lays bare the machinery of spectacular visuality that is crucial to the mode of Hollywood spectacle cinema that Bay’s work is often held to exemplify. I will suggest that the formal apparatus of the utopia/dystopia, and of science fiction itself, allows for a reading of The Island as a kind of self-conscious critique of spectacle cinema within the formal apparatus of spectacle cinema, which works in part through thematising visuality and in part through making visible the very apparatus of cinematic production itself. In this, I will draw upon the work of Jonathan Beller, and in particular The Cinematic Mode of Production (2006), and a mode of film theory and criticism in which cinema is foundationally implicated in the production of ideology. In Beller’s work, which draws on Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, ‘cinema’ can be understood not only as an effect of the circuits of late capital, where spectacle is an extension of ideology, but as a means by which capital extends its operations into new productive domains, into attention and the ‘work’ of spectatorship. My reading of The Island suggests that it is a particularly important film in Bay’s oeuvre, in that it marks a point at which Bay’s visual strategies of cinematic spectacle turn back on themselves and the formal presentation of visuality within a utopian/dystopian paradigm affords the potential for critique, both within and without the film.
    [Show full text]
  • I V the Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media: Media Arts in the Middle East by Özgün Eylül İşcen Computational
    The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media: Media Arts in the Middle East by Özgün Eylül İşcen Computational Media, Arts and Cultures Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Mark B. N. Hansen, Advisor ___________________________ Mark Olson ___________________________ Negar Mottahedeh ___________________________ Pedro Lasch Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Media, Arts and Cultures in the Graduate School of Duke University 2020 i v ABSTRACT The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media: Media Arts in the Middle East by Özgün Eylül İşcen Computational Media, Arts and Cultures Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Mark B. N. Hansen, Advisor ___________________________ Mark Olson ___________________________ Negar Mottahedeh ___________________________ Pedro Lasch An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Media, Arts and Cultures in the Graduate School of Duke University 2020 i v Copyright by Özgün Eylül İşcen 2020 Abstract Today, humans must rely on technical operations that exceed their perceptual threshold and control. The increasingly complex and abstract, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping acts as a model for how we might begin to articulate the relationship between the psychic and social realms, as well as the local and global scales. Jameson’s attentiveness to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations is still helpful for us to map the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers – where its differential impacts are felt and negotiated strongly.
    [Show full text]
  • Fostering Strategies Revised Solange.Pages
    SOLANGE MANCHE // FOSTERING STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE, 53-65 FOSTERING STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE: THE ART SPACE AS AN ESCAPE FROM ALIENATION SOLANGE MANCHE UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT NETHERLANDS [email protected] SUBMISSION DATE: 29/12/2016// ACCEPTANCE DATE: 09/05/2017 // PUBLICATION DATE: 12/01/2018 (pp. 53-65) KEYWORDS: Art Spaces, Culture Industry, Frankfurt School, Alienation, the Museum as a Factory, Hegel, Karl Marx, Post-Fordism, Antonio Negri, Commodification of Art. ABSTRACT: This article reflects upon the Marxist tradition of considering industrially produced cultural products as being inherently deceitful and politically misleading, trying to go beyond the avant-gardist prejudice of the Frankfurt School that denies the spectator any agency. By giving an extensive rethinking of initially Marx’s concepts, such as commodification, it is argued that it cannot be an object — an art object in a specific space— in and by itself that offers a way to escape from the working day, but that it is the tension between the object and the space in which it is presented that accords agency to the observer; whereby, the relation between object and subject are inherently different from, and eludes, alienation. In order to reach this conclusion, the article uses examples from both late 20th century and contemporary art1. Throughout the 1930s and early and Max Horkheimer. Even if they 1940s a steady stream of German lived just outside Hollywood, Adorno exiles in flight from the Third and Horkheimer’s view of the culture Reich travelled from the East Coast that was being produced there was to settle in Los Angeles. As if by anything but positive.
    [Show full text]
  • University of California Santa Cruz from Mass Culture To
    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ FROM MASS CULTURE TO PERSONALIZATION A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS by Lindsay A. Weinberg June 2018 The Dissertation of Lindsay A. Weinberg is approved: ___________________________________ Professor Robert Meister, co-chair ___________________________________ Professor Carla Freccero, co-chair ___________________________________ Professor Warren Sack ___________________________________ Professor Mark Andrejevic _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction, p. 1 Chapter One, p. 36 Rethinking the Frankfurt School Chapter Two, p. 118 On the Question of Labor Chapter Three, p. 180 Attention and Design Chapter Four, p. 231 Surveillance and Privacy Conclusion, p. 274 References, p. 283 ! iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Kelvinator “Automatic Cook” advertisement................................................195 2. Hotpoint All-Electric Kitchen advertisement…............................................196 3. Original advertisement for the Honeywell Kitchen Computer......................199 4. Apple’s “1984” advertisement………………………………………….......202 ! iv Abstract From Mass Culture to Personalization Lindsay Weinberg This dissertation argues that personalization—the web of technologies and cultural practices that generate information about consumers to market goods and services to target audiences—is part of a larger cultural and economic
    [Show full text]
  • Ing-Yeo Subjectivity and Youth Culture In
    Being Surplus in the Age of New Media: Ing-yeo Subjectivity and Youth Culture in South Korea A Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at George Mason University by Sangmin Kim Master of Arts Seoul National University, 2002 Bachelor of Science Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 1993 Director: Hugh Gusterson Affiliate Faculty, Cultural Studies, George Mason University Professor, Anthropology and International Affairs, George Washington University Fall Semester 2015 George Mason University Fairfax, VA This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Boosoo Kim and Chaerip Song, and my parents-in-law, Chungsik Yu and Myungja Woo. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am honored to have worked with my dissertation committee. I would first like to express my sincere gratitude to my academic advisor and dissertation chair, Hugh Gusterson. His thorough scholarship and social engagement as a social scientist serve as a model for my academic life. I would like to thank Alison Landsberg and Tim Gibson for their generous and encouraging feedback as well as inspiring teaching in visual culture and media studies. In addition, I would like to thank Roger Lancaster, Denise Albanese, and Paul Smith for introducing me to the fascinating field of cultural studies. I am indebted to my many colleagues in the cultural studies program. I am especially grateful to my mentor Vicki Watts, who supported and encouraged me to overcome hardships during my early years. Rob Gehl, Jarrod Waetjen, Nayantara Sheoran, Fan Yang, Jessi Lang, Randa Kayyali, Cecilia Uy-Tioco, David Arditi, Dava Simpson, Ozden Ocak, and Adila Laïdi-Hanieh have all been wonderful colleagues.
    [Show full text]
  • The Disenfranchisement Complaint Colin Ross Kielty Yorba Linda, CA BA, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006 MA, Univers
    The Disenfranchisement Complaint Colin Ross Kielty Yorba Linda, CA BA, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006 MA, University of Chicago, 2009 A Dissertation (or Thesis) presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Politics University of Virginia September, 2018 Professor Stephen K. White Professor Lawrie Balfour Professor Jennifer Rubenstein Professor Rachel Wahl Introduction: Disenfranchisement in the Democratic Imagination On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri. His killing, the neglect of his bullet-ridden body, and the behavior of the Ferguson police department—at once evasive and repressive—all contributed to a subsequent protest movement that achieved mass scale and national attention. But as that movement gained momentum, the domain of grievances that it articulated widened. Not only did citizens of Ferguson and the surrounding areas voice complaints about Brown’s slaying itself. Nor did they focus exclusively on the police response to their protests, immortalized in images of camouflaged phalanxes of officers and snipers perched atop armored tactical vehicles.1 In addition to complaints about these things, protesters expanded the range of relevant issues to include the general experience of simply being a citizen in Ferguson. Specifically, they complained that part of their experience was the condition of being disenfranchised. As Ferguson Democratic committeewoman Patricia Bynes described the source of her community’s disaffection, “the African-American community [in Ferguson] has been disenfranchised for a very long time.”2 Russell Gunn, a former state representative whose district included part of Ferguson, described community sentiment thusly: “Some people feel so disenfranchised, they wonder what good [getting politically involved] is going to do.”3 And 1 A particularly iconic image containing all of these things lead the New York Times’ initial coverage of the protest, just days after Brown’s slaying.
    [Show full text]
  • A Lexicon of Non-Aligned Poetics
    Parallel Slalom A Lexicona lexiconof of non-aligned poetics editors Non-aligned Bojana Cvejić Poetics Goran Sergej Pristaš Parallel Slalom A Lexicon of Non-aligned Poetics published by Walking Theory ‒ TkH 4 Kraljevića Marka, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia www.tkh-generator.net and CDU – Centre for Drama Art 6 Gaje Alage, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia www.cdu.hr in collaboration with Academy of Dramatic Art University of Zagreb 5 Trg Maršala Tita, 10000 Zagreb www.adu.hr on behalf of the publisher for walking theory: Ana Vujanović for cdu: Marko Kostanić editors Bojana Cvejić Goran Sergej Pristaš Parallel researchers Jelena Knežević Jasna Žmak coordination Dragana Jovović Slalom translation Žarko Cvejić copyediting and proofreading Žarko Cvejić and William Wheeler A Lexicon of Non-aligned Poetics graphic design and layout Dejan Dragosavac Ruta prepress Katarina Popović printing Akademija, Belgrade print run 400 copies The book was realised as a part of the activities within the project TIMeSCAPES, an editors artistic research and production platform initiated by BADco. (HR), Maska (SI), Bojana Cvejić Walking Theory (RS), Science Communications Research (A), and Film-protufilm Goran Sergej Pristaš (HR), with the support of the Culture programme of the European Union. This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication (communication) reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. with the support of the Culture programme
    [Show full text]
  • SFU Thesis Template Files
    “Now Playing. You”: Big Data and the Production of Music Streaming Space. by Robert Prey M.A. (Communication), Simon Fraser University, 2005 B.A., University of Windsor, 2001 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Communication Faculty of Communication, Art, and Technology Robert Prey 2015 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Fall 2015 Approval Name: Robert Prey Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (Communication) Title: “Now Playing. You”: Big Data and the Production of Music Streaming Space. Examining Committee: Chair: Robert Hackett Professor Yuezhi Zhao Senior Supervisor Professor Rick Gruneau Supervisor Professor Enda Brophy Supervisor Assistant Professor Andrew Feenberg Internal Examiner Professor Mark Andrejevic External Examiner Associate Professor Media Studies Pomona College Date Defended/Approved: Nov 3, 2015 ii Ethics Statement iii Abstract This dissertation begins from the premise that Dallas Smythe’s attempt to develop a Marxist ‘materialist’ political economy of media remains a critically important - and unfinished - project. To-date, the debate has largely been concerned with locating the central commodity produced by ad-supported media. This commodity has been at various times identified as either ‘audiences’, ‘watching-time’, ‘ratings’, and more recently, ‘prosumers’ or ‘data’. Building from the late philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s insight that Marxists have too often focused on the production of commodities in capitalist space, leaving them blind to the production of capitalist space itself, this dissertation proposes a different approach. Ad-supported media, I argue, generate rents from the spaces that are produced by media audiences/users around media content. The question of how ‘media space’ is produced and shaped by the stipulations of rent extraction is examined through a case study of the ad-supported music streaming sector.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle Ann B
    The Cinematic Mode of Production interfaces: studies in visual culture Editors: Mark J. Williams & Adrian W. B. Randolph, Dartmouth College This series, sponsored by Dartmouth College Press, develops and promotes the study of visual culture from a variety of critical and methodological perspectives. Its impetus derives from the increasing importance of visual signs in everyday life, and from the rapid expansion of what are termed “new media.” The broad cultural and social dynamics attendant to these developments present new challenges and opportunities across and within the disciplines. These have resulted in a trans-disciplinary fascination with all things visual, from “high” to “low,” and from esoteric to popular. This series brings together approaches to visual culture—broadly conceived—that assess these dynamics critically and that break new ground in understanding their e¤ects and implications. Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman, eds., Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Body, Image, and Interface in Information Aesthetics Luc Pauwels, ed., Visual Cultures of Science: Rethinking Representational Practices in Knowledge Building and Science Communication Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg, eds., Trauma and Visuality in Modernity dartmouth college press hanover, new hampshire published by university press of new england hanover and london The Cinematic Mode of Production Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle Jonathan Beller dartmouth college press Published by University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766 www.upne.com © 2006 by Jonathan Beller Printed in the United States of America 54321 All rights reserved.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cinematic Mode of Production: Towards a Political Economy of the Postmodern
    Culture, Theory & Critique, 2003, 44(1), 91–106 The Cinematic Mode of Production: Towards a Political Economy of the Postmodern Jonathan Beller Abstract Cinema marks a profound shift in the relation between image and text – indeed it is the watershed of the subjugation of language by image. Cinema as an innovative shift in both industrial capitalism and cultural practice marks, therefore, the restructuring of language function in accord with the changing protocols of techno-capitalism. The ‘talking cure’, otherwise known as psycho- analysis, is itself a symptom of cinema. As a precursor for TV and computing and Internet, cinema transacts value transfer across the image utilising a production process that can be grasped as founded under the rubric of what I call ‘the attention theory of value’. The deterritorialised factory that is the contemporary image, is an essential component of globalisation, neo-imperialism, and militarisation, organising, as it were, the consent (ignorance of) and indeed desire for these latter processes. Thus ‘cinema’, as a paradigm for image-mediated social production, implies a cultural turn for political economics. It also implies that it is the interstitial, informal activities that transpire across the entire surface of the socius as well as in the vicissitudes of the psyche and experience that are the new (untheorised) production sites for global capital – and therefore among the significant sites for the waging of the next revolution. But all the story of the night told over, And their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancies images, And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable.
    [Show full text]
  • Towards an Immanent Critique of the Attention Economy
    TOWARDS AN IMMANENT CRITIQUE OF THE ATTENTION ECONOMY Labour, Time, and Power in Post-Fordist Capitalism Claudio Celis Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy School of English, Communication & Philosophy Cardiff University 2015 SUMMARY This thesis develops an immanent critique of the concept of attention economy from the perspectives of labour, time, and power. The attention economy is a notion forged by authors belonging to the field of political economy in order to explain the growing value of human attention in societies characterised by post-industrial modes of production. In a world in which information and knowledge become central to the valorisation process of capital, human attention becomes a scarce and hence increasingly valuable commodity. At the same time, the attention economy turns human attention into a form of labour and hence into a new mechanism of capitalist exploitation. Using a series of contemporary readings of Marx (Postone; Lazzarato; Negri and Hardt; Deleuze and Guattari), this thesis develops a critique which does not simply apply Marxist categories to the object of the attention economy, but which uses the attention economy as a concrete object of analysis for reflecting upon both the validity and the importance of Marx‟s critique of political economy for a critique of contemporary capitalism. In other words, this research suggests that, although the attention economy has indeed turned human attention into a new form of labour, it is only through a systematic reinterpretation of Marx‟s categories that this claim can be fully grasped. This reinterpretation comprises two general aspects. Firstly, this thesis argues that the way in which the attention economy produces and exploits value puts into crisis the traditional category of labour based on an industrial mode of production and which relies solely on abstract labour time as its general equivalent.
    [Show full text]