The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle“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. |
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The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the ... Jonathan Beller No preview available - 2006 |
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abstraction activity alienation Antonio Negri appears attention aura Beavis and Butt-head become Benjamin body called capital capital's capitalist cinema cinematic mode circulation commodity consciousness culture Debord Deleuze dematerialization deterritorialized dialectical discourse dominant dream duction dynamics Dziga Vertov effect Eisenstein emerges exchange exchange-value factory FFCP film Fordism function gaze global Google grasped Grundrisse Guy Debord historical human Ibid ideology imaginary industrial kino-eye labor Lacan language logic machine Marx Marx's Marxism material means medium Michael Hardt mode of production montage movement Movie Camera Natural Born Killers object organization Pavlov perception political economy postmodern practice precisely psyche psychoanalysis reality relation representation revolutionary sciousness screen sense sensorium sensual shift signifier social production society spectacle spectator Strike structure surplus value symbolic television theory tion trans transformation unconscious use-value valorization Vertov viewers vision visual economy Walter Benjamin workers Writings Wurzer