The history which is present in all the depths of society tends to be lost at the surface. The triumph of irreversible time is also its metamorphosis into the time of things, because the weapon of its victory was precisely the mass production of objects according to the laws of the commodity. The main product which economic development has transferred from luxurious scarcity to daily consumption is therefore history, but only in the form of the history of the abstract movement of things which dominates all qualitative use of life. While the earlier cyclical time had supported a growing part of historical time lived by individuals and groups, the domination of the irreversible time of 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 time” (Poverty of Philosophy). This is time devalued, the complete inversion of time as “the field of human development.” —Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Capital Cinema
So what is cinema? Let me here begin again this kind of thinking about cinema with a brief discussion of the “Capital Cinema” shown and shown up by the Coen brothers in their 1992 film, Barton Fink. In their film, Capital Cinema is the name of the late 1930s pre-war Hollywood production-studio that, according to the story, provides the conditions of possibility for cinematic expression. This company, as a representative of the studio system, is used by the Coen brothers to demonstrate that cinema is at once a factory for the production of representation and an economic form, that is, a site of economic production. As factory and as economic system, cinema is inscribed in and by the dominant mode of production: specifically, industrial capitalism and, here, its war economy. As a factory of representation, Capital Cinema dictates limits to the forms of consciousness that can be represented, but as an economic form inscribed by the larger cultural logic, Capital Cinema dictates limits to forms of consciousness per se.
The film Barton Fink, in which the Jewish writer Barton (played by John Turturo) falls from celebrated playwright to abject existentialist hack as he tries to make the shift from New York playwrighting to Los Angeles screenwriting, is about the spaces and sensibilities that fall out of (are absent from) a cinema that is a fully functioning component of the capitalist economy. The movement from New York to Los Angeles marks the movement for Barton, but also for representation in general, into a new era.1 The climax of the film occurs when the film confronts the limits of its own conditions of representation.
Indeed, the thesis of Barton Fink is that there remains an unrepresentable for cinema: experience that refuses commodification. Numerous incidents marking the unrepresentability of experience occur in the film via specific instantiations of race (Jewishness), gender (the oppressed wife who has written all of her alcoholic husband’s books), sex (the homoerotic tensions in the hotel room scenes), and class (the inner life of the encyclopedia salesman)—all of which to varying degrees are rendered invisible by the screened world and therefore are legible only elliptically, as effects. More interesting still, is the film’s construction of invisibility as such as a general case in capital cinema, a predicament of disenfranchised (non-capitalized and non-capitalizable) elements in others and in ourselves. The writer Barton is trying to create a script about the real man, about “everyman,” but when the film finally encounters the existence of everyman’s never-told biography in the form of the biography of the failed encyclopedia salesman (played by John Goodman), that is, precisely the biography that Barton, being preoccupied with his capitalized script, has not had the time to listen to, the encounter is and can be only indirect—off-screen as it were, and that, as a crisis. At the moment of the encounter between cinema and the experience of “everyman,” that is, at the moment when the essence of the encyclopedia salesman’s character would emerge, a conflagration erupts. Inside the frame, the film set is burnt, while outside the frame in the space beyond the film, the very edges of the frame curl and burst into flame. The medium literally self-destructs as the reality principle of the film is destroyed in the confrontation of its limits.
By “reality principle,” I mean the set of logics, conventions, and strategies by which the film creates the reality effect of the narrative and the mise-en-scène. The term is particularly apt since it is the immanent eruption of various repressions—intimated in an otherwise realist narrative by sinister sounds and the walls dripping ooze—which in the film threatens the integrity of the reality principle before its final catastrophe. Sigmund Freud’s elaboration in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the reality principle as that principle which replaces the pleasure principle and works “from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world” coincides precisely with my thesis here that consciousness in its dominant forms is the cinematic excrescence of social organization. 2 To put it very crudely, organized more and more like movie production, capitalist production creates difficulties and contradictions that must be resolved in the space-time of cinematic representation/consciousness. The excess is driven off the screen into the unrepresentable/social unconscious. For the sake of the economies of the gaze, spectacularity, narrative, and profit, cinema represses other forms of interference. In other words, for the sake of the perpetuation of capital cinema, certain contradictions and possibilities do not cross the threshold of cinematic consciousness.3 In Debord’s terms, “[I]ndividual experience of separate daily life remains without language, without concept, without critical access to its own past which has been recorded nowhere. It is not communicated. It is not understood and is forgotten to the profit of the false spectacular memory of the unmemorable.”4
Freud tells us that “under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle. This latter principle does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure.”5 In his development of this formulation Freud could well be describing the representational strategy of Capital Cinema: “In the course of things it happens again and again that individual instincts or parts of instincts turn out to be incompatible in their aims or de mands with the remaining ones, which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego [or in this case, the film]. The incompatible “instincts” [here embodied as the encyclopedia salesman’s entire life—his class, his failures, his repressed homosexuality, and his vengeance] are then split off from this unity by a process of repression, held back at lower levels of psychical development and cut off, to begin with, from the possibility of satisfaction.”6 That Freud uses the trope of cutting is perhaps no accident. If the “incompatible” instincts succeed “in struggling through, by roundabout paths, to a direct or to a substitutive satisfaction, that event, which would in other cases have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unpleasure… . Much of the unpleasure that we experience is perceptual unpleasure. It may be perception of pressure by unsatisfied instincts; or it may be external perception which is distressing in itself or which excites unpleasurable expectations in the mental apparatus—that is, which is recognized by it as ‘danger.’”7 The ego here can be seen at once as the psychic consequence of a repressive social order pitted against a polymorphously perverse, or at least untameable body, and as a theater of perception. As a matrix of mediation, it occupies the bio-social space that during this century has been overtaken by cinema in the special sense of the word that I attempt to develop here. The language/function of the ego has been interface and it becomes a subroutine of the spectacle. In a film steeped in the protocols of profit, the particular experiences of Goodman’s mad encyclopedia salesman, that is, the myriad experiences of failure in capitalism (and experiences of the failure of capitalism), fall below the threshold of knowing possible—or at least legitimated—in capital cinema and are precipitated only as effects. These effects, much like a labor strike or terrorism seen from the standpoint of bourgeois reason, confront the mode of production as a sort of inexplicable and phenomenal irrationality, and hence as a crisis that halts its smooth functioning. The real experience of Everyman—vanishing since World War I according to Walter Benjamin—is in this representation by the Coen brothers nearly uncommodifiable by definition and therefore cannot be represented in Capital Cinema.8 Its emergence or, better still, its eruption, threatens to destroy the medium itself.
If we consider the hypothesis that consciousness in late capitalism, generally speaking, functions like film-language—relatively unable to think beyond the exigencies of capital—then it is important to note at the outset that film-language as consciousness is overdetermined by capital regulation. Cinema, as money that thinks, fuses the protocols of representation and capitalist production. This claim remains relatively unproblematic until one takes cinema not only as a form of representation but as endemic to the workings of consciousness itself. Simply put, something like the Coen brother’s Capital Cinema manufactures not just films, but consciousness in general, complete with its possibilities and lacunae.9 This process is dramatized by Barton Fink having to adopt himself and his perceptions to the exigencies of the film industry as he struggles to write a viable script. Cinematic consciousness is shown as the hegemonic form of consciousness in late capitalism. If what I call the cinematic mode of production can be shown to have infiltrated human minds and converted their function into a kind of money that thinks, then this script writer’s dilemma can be shown to pertain generally. Such thinking money, what Marx called the “truly creative power,” is money of a special form, not money as a mere medium of exchange but, simultaneously, money functioning as capital. It is money that has transcended the money form, becoming part of what Marx called the General Intellect.10 The screenwriter for the studio, like the professor for the university and the citizen for the state, must from some position of accountabiltiy be a source of profit. Capital consciousness has a variety of perceptual possibilities, thresholds, and limits that at once provide standards of productivity and spur certain kinds of innovation. Here, as well as elsewhere, it is essential to see these innovations as being labordriven, that is, forced upon capital by the efforts of workers to free themselves. Capital’s innovations are thus strategies of containment and strategies to combat the falling rate of profit, no matter what else they might be.
In explaining this idea more fully, I first will show the manner in which the mediated colonization of the sensorium combats the falling rate of profit. In previous chapters, we have seen the cinematic circulation of capital followed by the cinematic production of capital, followed by cinema’s spectral presence in the discourse of the unconscious. Here we will begin to explore the necessity of capital’s transgression of limits—its deterritorialization of the material, the visual, and the body. The perceptual and biophysical transformations wrought by cinema impact upon the object world. Put another way, the character of objects, already a relation among people, that is, a mediation and hence a medium, shifts as the technical structure of perception and the internal composition of the psyche shift. In reality, these shifts are subtle and are orchestrated simultaneously, but in the temporality of critique they must be observed as moments. Thus, in an analysis of the auratic phenomenon noted by Benjamin, I will show the palpability of the form of value innovated in and as a visual economy.
An important dimension of an undertaking that aspires to a political economy of consciousness via a political economy of cinema involves an analysis of cultural imperialism. Imperialism is an economic undertaking as well as an ideological and libidinal one. The phrase “cultural imperialism” indicates a mode of production for which certain dimensions remain more or less unconscious. I mean to suggest here that whatever the project of imperialism was, it does not cease in the presence of the fantasy called the postcolonial. Rather, as world poverty indexes readily show (infant mortality, life expectancy, access to health care, literacy), the pauperization process is intensifying. The “expiration” of national boundaries and the purported “obsolescence” of the nation-state only imply that these national forms are being superseded (sublated) even as they continue to do their work.11 The thesis here is that cinema 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. The two wars in Iraq, and the coordination of the exigencies of the military industrial complex with the programming of corporate media and the function of the consciousness of Americans provide ample testament to the continuation of the old imperialism via the new technological means. Our objects and images are all embroiled in this bloody melange.
Transnational capitalism, which today finds its very conditions of possibility in computing, telecommunications, and mass media, shows that these media are playing a fundamental role in new modes of value production and value transfer. The cinema is a first instance of these other “higher forms” of mediation. By unlocking the dynamics of cinema, a new critique of its later iterations becomes possible. With the globalization of capital, economic expansion is presently less explicitly a geographical project and more a matter of capturing the interstitial activities and times between the already being-commodified endeavors of bodies. Contemporary cultural theory works in the interstitial spaces of the West and of Western domination, in the uncharted subjective and historical vicissitudes of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and epistemology. That theory, as well as the practical relations that it aims to describe, finds its locus there in the gaps, because it is there precisely that the newest struggles over the production of value(s) have shifted. This emergence of such interstitial sites is apparent not only for theory and for politics, but for the psyche and for intellectual-corporeal activity. Every movement and every gesture is potentially productive of value. I am speaking here of media as cybernetics, of capital expansion positing the yet-unalienated zones of the body as the new frontier, a new frontier for production.
We are thus dealing with two distinct yet interactive sets of relations here. In the first set, capital cinema regulates perception and therefore certain socio-libidinal pathways to the body. It is in this sense that it functions as a kind of discipline and control akin to previous methods of socialization by either civil society or the labor process (e.g., Taylorization). The second moment, related yet distinct from the first, is the positing by capital cinema of a value-productive relationship that can be exploited—that is, a tapping of the productive energies of consciousness and the body in order to facilitate the production of surplus value. The worker, once enveloped in the machine a la Charlie Chaplan’s Modern Times or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, is now the “social-worker” in Antonio Negri’s special sense of the term—an actor whose body and consciousness are enveloped entirely by the deterritorialized factory of capitalist social organization, exactly as in the Wachowski brothers’ contemporary social realist film, The Matrix.
Reconfiguration of Existence Itself
by the Falling Rate of Profit
Before I move on, let me recall and briefly summarize the first two dialectical hypotheses of The Cinematic Mode of Production, that of the image-commodity and the spectator-worker:
1.As I showed in chapter 1, cinema simultaneously images and enacts the circulation of economic value. It images the patterns of circulation (the tracing of space, time, movement, production) and intensifies the imagistic aspect of the commodity. What was implicit in the fetish character of the commodity as the phantom limb of its severed relations of production (at once the cipher of alienated labor and of its repression), increases quantitatively to the point where the commodity becomes an image, an image-commodity. The alienated living labor become-dead labor that constitutes the commodity finds new expressiveness in and as the cinematic image. In Man with a Movie Camera, we saw that cinema enacts the circulation of economic value itself (capital), and I suggested that though the fact of this process, visible in Vertov, is suppressed from cinematic diegesis after Vertov, it nonetheless continues to pertain. The moving image is the circulation of capital, indeed the circulation of images is a higher form of the circulation of capital. Cinema is the very form of capital circulation, its materialized abstraction, that is its functional ability to abstract an object via its practical dematerialization. Through a visuosensual cybernetic interface, it changes the relationship between the body and the commodity, which immediately implies a shift in the mode of production.
2.As I showed in chapter 2, the image-commodity finds its dialectical antithesis in the spectator-worker. The circulation of value (in the cinema-spectator link, that is) through the spectator-worker, is itself productive of value because looking is posited as a form of labor. I should emphasize here that all previous forms of capitalized labor remain intact. However, looking as labor represents a tendency toward increasingly abstract instances of the relationship between labor and capital, a new regime of the technological positioning of bodies for the purpose of value extraction. Though this tendency is becoming dominant, which is to say that the relationship between consciousness and mechanization is more important than ever before, all previous forms of exploitation continue—they are managed, justified, intoned, and made invisible through the cinematic production of consciousness. When a visual medium operates under the strictures of private property, the work done by its “consumer” can be capitalized and made to accrue to the proprietor of the medium. The celebrity, to give just one example here, is the epitome of the contradiction of individual identity posited by private property (s/he owns his or her image) and massive communal dissemination. In other words, some people make a profit from other people’s looking. The ways in which this profit is produced and channeled fundamentally defines the politics of cultural production and of the state. This dynamic abets not only the perpetuation of a hierarchical economic pyramid in what is nominally “democracy” via, for example, the mass-sanctioned, frenzied, and continual building of bombs, it ensures that their “collectively” chosen targets are chosen by a self-interested super-elite. Furthermore, it continues to disguise class, race, and imperialist wars as struggles for freedom, peace, security, and justice. As an industry on a continuum with other industries, the spectacle is productive of value for itself (for its proprietors) and also in what might be considered a short circuit of the money relation because viewers are paid in social “know how” and “enjoyment,” for capital in general. In a longer circuit of production, the spectacle also demands that spectator-workers labor to produce their own modifications of themselves and therefore their ability to cope (or cooperate) in the social matrix. I will have more to say on the consequences of the instantiation of both the image-commodity and the spectator-worker in what follows.
3.Such revolutionary methods for the extraction, appropriation, and channeling of value from the human body have as profound an effect on all aspects of social organization as did the assembly line—they change the dynamic of sight forever, initiating a visual economy, and finally an economy of the senses and cognition. These methods deterritorialize the body and multiply the sites of socio-technological interface. As I shall chart briefly in a discussion of Benjamin, this economy has been developing for some time.
4.Understood as a technology capable of submitting the eye to a new disciplinary regime, cinema may be taken as a model for the many technologies that in effect take the machine off of the assembly line and bring it to the body in order to mine it of labor-power (value).12 Cinema, and the media that extend its practices, constitute deterritorialized factories, paradigms of flexible accumulation. The implication is that value is extracted across the image and the spectator-worker is “paid” through enjoyment or other forms of social utility (“knowledge,” affects, other types of social software that can be “downloaded” through viewing). This represents a the shift in the wage that corresponds to the shifts in circulation and capital described above.
The hypothesis that vision and more generally human attention is today productive of economic value can be supported by showing that the labor theory of value is a specific instance of a more general hypothesis that is possible concerning the production of value. This I call the hypothesis of the productive value of human attention, or the attention theory of value. It is derived from the way in which capital process occupies human time in the cinema and in other media. Assuming for the moment that human attention is a value-adding commodity sought by capitalized media, it can be shown that if to look is to labor, then at least a partial solution to the dilemma posed to the political economist by the very persistence of capitalism presents itself. Capitalism thrives in apparent violation of the labor theory of value and the law of the falling rate of profit. These two limitations on the expansion of capital cause Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, and others to predict a critical mass for capital—a catastrophic point beyond which it cannot expand. Unable to expand and hence unable to turn a profit, fully globalized capital was expected to self-destruct. With the end of an outside for capital, the law of value was to have been necessarily overcome and a world in which any of us, should we so desire, could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and criticize at night, as Marx expressed it in a euphoric moment, was to have come into being. Clearly, and despite the globalization of capital, this auto-annihilation of capital has not happened. I am suggesting that, from the standpoint of capital, as geographical limitations are in the process of being fully overcome by capital, capital posits the human body as the next frontier. By colonizing the interstitial activities of bodies, each muscular contraction or each firing neuron is converted into a site of potential productivity.
Instead of occasioning an attack on the fundamental premise of Marxism, that value production under capital requires the extraction of surplus value (i.e., that value production is fundamentally exploitative—implicit in the abandonment of the labor theory of value and expressed in false hypotheses regarding conditions of choice and equality that underlie economic conditions of production/consumption, for example, the marginal utility theory), we can show the manner in which media and allied technologies have developed to combat the falling rate of profit via what is in effect, informal labor (disguised wage labor), and further how this penetration of the fabric of existence by capital forever transforms the objective qualities of things. Let me develop this argument by elaborating from a few tenets of Marx.13
1.“Capital is not merely, as A[dam] Smith thinks, command over alien labor, in the sense in which every exchange value is that, because it provides its owner with buying power, but that it is the power of appropriating alien labor without exchange, without equivalent, but under the guise of exchange” (Grundrisse, 474; emphasis Marx). Marx refers here to the extraction of surplus value in wage labor. Since, according to Marx, value is and can only be added to capital through labor, for workers to make money for their capitalist, they must be paid for less than what they actually produce.
Marx shows that once society has passed subsistence production, workers, because of increased productivity, have to labor less than an entire working day in order to subsist—socially necessary labor time decreases. Capital, however, pays subsistence wages, that is, it pays for socially necessary labor (the labor necessary to reproduce the worker), and appropriates the unpaid, that is, surplus labor from the remainder of the working day for itself. One can see in a more detailed examination of Marx’s work than I can engage in here that in early capitalism this surplus labor was a small percentage of the day up to, say, one-half of a day, while with the increasing efficiency of workers (the sheer amount one worker can produce via machinery, etc.) the surplus labor amounts to proportions along the line of 99 percent of the day and greater for itself. The point is that although the worker is forced to work an entire day, he or she is paid only for an increasingly small fraction of the value that his or her labor produces. The remainder is taken “under the guise of exchange,” in a relationship that through force of convention, law, violence, and necessity is made to appear inevitable, natural, and right. The question here is, under what other guises ratified by “custom” has capital evolved strategies for the extraction of surplus value?
2.“Circulation can create value only in so far as it requires additional employment—of alien labor—additional to that directly consumed in the production process. This is then the same as if more necessary labor were directly required in the production process. Only the real costs of circulation increase the value of the product, but they reduce surplus value” (Grundrisse, 471; emphasis Marx). Though Marx clearly grasps circulation as a moment of production, circulation as such is for him never production. A transport company, for example, can make a profit by employing alienated labor, but the cost of transport is added directly to the product. If it costs 8 hours worth of labor (abstract universal labor time) to move product X from point A to point B, then the value of X at point B is X + 8 hours, that is, the transportation was necessary labor, the necessary labor of circulation, and its value is added to the value of the product. However, this does not keep the transport company from paying for only 2 hours of the necessary labor provided and realizing a profit, that is, in effect appropriating 6 hours of labor-time under the guise of exchange. (The worker who has worked 8 hours and received 2 hours wages takes his “day’s” wages and can exchange it for only 2 hours of objectified labor time in the open market.) Thus circulation as necessary labor in the exchange of commodities does not add value to capital (it is like the cost of raw materials and therefore does not create value), but circulation as a capitalized business can produce value for capital in general in the alienated production process of its product, that is, transport, mediation, circulation.
3.“The production of capitalists and wage workers is … a major product of the valorisation process of capital. Ordinary political economy, which considers only the objects produced, entirely forgets this. Inasmuch as this process posits objectified labor as simultaneously the non-objectification of the worker, as the objectification of a subjectivity confronting the worker, as the property of someone else’s will, capital is also necessarily a capitalist” (Grundrisse, 436; emphasis Marx). The articulation of social form in and through the medium of history is a necessary product of capital. Capital produces the conditions in which labor must confront capital and the forms in and through which capital confronts labor. Though Marx personifies capital in the Grundrisse (since capital personifies itself in and as the activity of the capitalist), to an unprecedented degree capital today is also necessarily the momentum of capitalist society in all of its aggressively proclitic infiltrations confronting workers as the property (properties) of someone (thing) else’s will. I am speaking here of society as a force of alien will bearing down upon isolated individual bodies. Many times this no longer will take form as belonging to a subject, but as part of “nature,” “culture,” “the facts of life.”
4.“Capital’s creation of absolute surplus value—more objectified labor—is conditional upon the expansion, indeed the constant expansion, of the periphery of circulation. The surplus value produced at one point requires the production of surplus value at another point, for which it may be exchanged… . A condition of production based on capital is therefore the production of a constantly expanding periphery of circulation, whether the sphere is directly expanded, or whether more points within it become points of production (Grundrisse, 334 –35; emphasis Marx). Though Marx here is thinking of geographical extension and urban intensification (what will be called imperialism and urban industrialization), I am suggesting here that capital presently throws its network of control over bodies and masses of bodies in similar though technologically and dialectically advanced ways. Many of the forces for the regulation of material production have been dematerialized. Urban architecture poses certain constraints on the worker, but today, so also does computer architecture. The expansion of the periphery of circulation expands not only geographically but extends rhizomatically into and around bodies as zones of flow.
It should by now be clear that the four conditions of capital expansion specified above, that is, (1) the appropriation of labor without exchange, (2) the value added to commodities by the necessary labor of circulation, (3) the developing subjectification of capital as alien will and the corallary (en)forced structuring of social practice, and (4) the expansion of the periphery of circulation, are all met in my account of mass mediation. Capital strives to infiltrate the entire terrain of sociality, structuring the dynamics of all appearing, and binding existence to appearance. What needs to be shown, and what can be quickly demonstrated, is the structural manner and the degree of efficiency with which mass media counters the falling rate of profit.
The countering of the falling rate of profit, which historically was accomplished in a variety of ways, including longer work hours and increasing efficiency through the utilization of Taylorization and machinery, is today still accomplished, in effect, by extending the working day. But the means are different. After what is officially known as work, spectator-workers “lounge” about in front of TV or at the cinema, producing more of the world, for capital. Circulating capital’s products, ratifying the shifts and nuances in its subjectivity, opening unknown regions of our bodies for its penetration, developing whole new sets of capacities and affects, spectator-workers release living-labor to capital without equal exchange. Though I will have more to say about the forms that such near-mandatory activity takes, what I want to do here is to show the surprising significance such an extension of labor time has for capital.14
Marx shows that “surplus value always depends on the ratio between the whole working day and that part of it which is necessary for the worker to keep himself alive” (Grundrisse, 261–62). Therefore, “the increase in the productivity of living labor increases the value of capital (or diminishes the value of the worker) … because it reduces necessary labor and thus in the same proportion creates surplus labor, or, what amounts to the same thing, surplus value” (Grundrisse, 264). If, therefore, necessary labor is one-half of a day and capital (through technological innovation or scientific management) doubles productivity so that necessary labor becomes one-quarter of a day, capital increases its rate of profit from one-half of a day to three-quarters of a day, that is, the ratio of surplus labor (profit) to necessary labor increases by 50 percent. But a little simple math shows the following: “The surplus value of capital rises but in ever diminishing ratio to the development of productivity. Thus the more developed capital already is, the more surplus labor it has already created, the more tremendously must it develop productivity if it is to valorize itself, i.e., to add surplus value even in a small proportion—because its barrier always remains the ratio between that fractional part of the working day which expressed necessary labor and the whole working day” (Grundrisse, 265).
Without here going into all of the reasons for capital expansion, massification, competition among the many capitals, I can represent numerically the basis of this relation. Recall that in the above example, doubling productivity gave capital a 50 percent increase on the rate of profit. If, however, productivity already has increased to such an extent that necessary labor is 1/1,000th of the working day, than a renewed doubling of productivity (necessary labor = 1/2,000th of a day), means only an increase for capital from 1,998/2,000th of a day to 1,999/2,000th of a day, that is, 1/2,000th of a day or 0.05 percent. A doubling of productivity that earlier on yielded a 50 percent increase in the rate of profit now only increases this rate by a slight fraction (0.05 percent). As productivity grows, the increase in the rate of profit falls off asymptotically, that is, as long as the length of the work day remains the same.
However, if an absolute increase in the working day can be engineered, the growth rate can increase profits at the higher rates occurring during the historically earlier doublings of general productivity. For example, if one were to consider the whole of the average per capita television time as labor, that is, 6 hours per person per day in the United States, which capital could then add to the better part of the 8 hours that it already has appropriated, capital increases its rate of profit from nearly 8 hours per day [(999/1,000)*(8)] to nearly 14 hours per day [(999/1,000) *(8) + 6], or approximately 75 percent. One can easily see that not all of the productive value of television time (labor time or what I am calling attention time) need accrue to capital for the proportional increases here to exceed increases in productivity engineered by capital during the working day. Television, as sort of a second job, creates surplus value for capital that allows it to combat the falling rate of profit. No wonder people sleep less today than at any other time in history. No wonder children watch so much TV. No wonder we spend so much time in front of the development of that interface doing things like email, web-research, and the like. The increasing efficiency and development of new attention-siphoning technologies becomes the central province of endeavor for later twentieth-century capital. Cinema and television quite literally represent an evolution in the form of capital.
In order to follow this developmental trajectory of ever-expanding capital (of which cinema, as the first fully realized form of media-capital is so crucial a part), one must consider the cyberneticization of the flesh—what Virilio calls “the habitation of metabolic vehicles.”15 For it is the extension of machines into the body, the incorporation or enframing of body components by capitalized forces of mediation, that best characterizes the development of late capital. Like the road itself (the productive value of which Marx intuited but never showed), such machine/body interfaces clearly shift the distribution of the body over its techno-mechanical linkages, opening up many more sites and times for the production of value, multiplying, as it were, the number of possible work sites. Capital expands not only outwards, geographically, but burrows into the flesh. This corkscrewing inward has profound consequences on life-forms. The argument I am making about the historical modification of the body in and by social (cinematic) process should have important consequences for studies of sexuality, identity, the history of art forms, and communication research, not to mention political economy. Seeing how modern visual technology tools the body for new labor processes during the twentieth century suggests parallel studies of other arts, technologies, and periods, past, present, and future. Art as cultural artifact has been a diverting pursuit, but art and culture as a social interface, as a panoply of technologies shot through with historical, libidinal, and visual necessity promises a more compelling account of human (cybernetic) transformations. Cultural forms must be grasped as technologies—machines for the engagement of human flesh. And equally, machines, objects, and images must be grasped as cultural forms, that is, social relations. The technologically articulated body does not undergo transformation merely in order to reflect new social relations or express new desires; the retooling it undergoes is central to the transformed economics of social production and reproduction—a necessary development of social relations.
Cinema is the development of a new medium for the production and circulation of value, as important in the reorganization of production and consciousness as the railroad track and the highway. Human endeavors generally grouped together under the category “humanities,” and (perhaps) once experienced as realms of relative freedom, can be and are being figured as economically productive. The entire history of cinema remains as a testament to this practice; advertising, television, and culture generally today testify to it.
Certain relationships between looking and value, that is, images, already are and will continue to become sites of extensive legislation and political struggle. The photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, the pink triangle, English words in French advertising, images of genitals in American films shown in the Philippines, are examples of the politically charged link between looking and value. The legitimacy or lack thereof of these images is not “merely” about ethics, identities, or politics; they activate the battles over the terms of the capitalist enfranchisement for the embattled groups advocating or suppressing them. Other forms of contention over the image include corporate competition for industry standards in High Definition Television, satellite communications, and computing. It is a mistake to think that the first group and the second are different realms—culture in the case of the former and industrial technology in the case of the latter. All are struggles over interfaces that will empower certain communities and disempower others in a society in which empowerment has come to mean capitalization more than anything else. Here, at the most general level, I am speaking about the commodification of culture and mediation, about culture as an interface between bodies and the world system. Much work already has been done on this problem of the commodification of culture, but little has been done that is fully conscious of the problem of the quantitative as opposed to merely the qualitative or metaphorical capitalization of culture. A sense of the quantification of cultural value as capital proper begins to shed light on how radical indeed the qualitative shifts in culture have become. Furthermore, this sense of transformation of the value form poses a strategy of inquiry that adds another dimension to the significance of cultural shifts. The corollary here is that academic, philosophical, historical, and aesthetic concerns are essential aspects of socio-economic transformation, designs for haptic processes that integrate the body with social production in general. The amalgamation of the labor involved in such processes as the production of cultures, identities, and desires, is already and will continue to be the way in which political blocs, however ephemeral, are formed and persist in postmodern society. The cinematic organization of fragments is at once the mode of tyranny and tyranny’s possible overcoming.
The Thinking Person’s Fetish
As one of my leitmotifs might suggest, we might imagine for a moment that at a certain point in history (Taylorism and Fordism) the world began to be organized more and more like a film. Geoffrey Nowell Smith points out that the form of assembly-line production easily invokes montage—hence, the French phrase chaîne de montage—thus the movement of capital itself may as well be thought of as a kind of cutting. As film stock is edited as it travels along a particular pathway to produce a film-image, capital is edited as it moves through its various determinations in assembly-line production. Like the screen on which one grasps the movement of cinematic production, capital is the standpoint or frame through which to see the movement of value, the scene in which emerges a moment in the production process. Capital provides the frame through which one observes economic movement. The finished commodity or image (commodity-image) results from a “completed” set of movements. When the circulation of capital is grasped as a kind of cutting, one grasps the generalized cinematicity of social organization, the spectacular arrangement of production, in short that the world is organized like a film. Cinema then, already is implied by capital circulation; dialectical sublation, as the metamorphosis of capital, is a slow form of film. Janet Staiger has noted that “Hollywood’s mode of production has been characterized as a factory system akin to that used by a Ford plant, and Hollywood often praised its own work structure for its efficient mass production of entertaining films.”16 Although I do not disagree with this I am arguing the opposite as well: Rather than cinematic production copying Fordism, I would argue that it is an advance over Fordism. Cinematic production uses the practices of Fordism but begins the dematerialization of the commodity form, a tendency which, more than anything else, characterizes the course of economic production during this century. Rather than requiring a state to build the roads that enable the circulation of its commodities as did Ford, the cinema builds its pathways of circulation directly into the eyes and sensoriums of its viewers. It is the viewers who perform the labor that opens the pathways for the flow of new commodities.17
We can trace proto-cinematic technologies even further back in historical time than Fordism or, for that matter, Marxist dialectics. The standardized production of terra-cotta pots, the Roman minting of coins, the Gutenberg press, and the lithograph mentioned by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” are early forms of cinema.18 Like shutter, frame, and filmstock, each reproductive technology mentioned above repeats a standardized and standardizing act while striking an image that subjugates the eye to a particular and consequential activity. From the recognition of money to the reading of print, these activities place the eye within the discipline of a visual economy that corresponds to the type and speed of the mode of production. For each mode of production there necessarily exists a particular scopic regime. With the advent of cinema and the speeding up of individual images to achieve what is called “the persistence of vision” (that is, the purported “illusion” of a smooth continuity of movement among individuated images), an equally dramatic and corresponding shift occurred in the relation of the eye to economic production. From the historical moment of the viewer circulating before the paintings in a museum to the historical moment of images circulating before the viewer in the movie house, there is an utter transformation of the visual economy, marked by the movement from what Benjamin called “aura” to what today postmodern theory calls “simulacra.” This movement was accompanied by a changeover from yesterday’s ideology to today’s spectacle. With the increased speed of its visual circulation, the visible object undergoes a change of state. In apprehending it, the textures of the object, its tactility, and indeed, the very properties of consciousness are transformed.
The Greek casts for terra-cottas and coinage, the woodcut, the printing press, the lithograph, the museum, all of which Benjamin elaborates as precinematic forms of mechanical reproduction, are also all technologies designed, from the point of view of the historical development of the senses, to capture vision and to subjugate it to the mechanics of various and successive interrelated economies. These forms of mechanical reproduction, with their standardized mechanisms and methods of imprinting are, in effect, early movies. That upon its emergence the “aura,” which Benjamin theorizes, is found not on the visual object but in the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived (it accompanies the gaze, the gazing) is consistent with Benjamin’s dialectical thesis that the sensorium is modified by the experience of the modern city. The development of film, like the development of the metropolis, is part of an economy that has profound effects on perception. As Benjamin writes, “The film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. Man’s need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him. The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus—changes that are experienced by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present day citizen.” 19 That modernization modifies perception coincides with the dialectical notion that in the production and reproduction of their own conditions human beings modify themselves. Perception’s aura, I suggest, is the subjective experience of the encroaching commodification of vision, the becoming-media, that is becoming-capitalized media, of the object. The becoming conscious of aura in the historical moment that is Benjamin’s writing is the last cry, the quantum emission of the existential object, as it is subsumed through a change of state induced by capitalized perception.
Today, because of the exponentially increased intensity of the image’s circulation, the simulacrum produced by mass media is utterly emptied out and “means” only its own currency in circulation, far more than John Berger’s painted masterpiece.21 Indeed, meaning is but a subroutine, a fine-tuning of the ballistic trajectories of social force delivered via the impact of the image. What is important is flow and effect. Meaning is but one modality of grasping the image and one of decreasing importance as far as the project of the capitalist organization of society is concerned. This emptying out of images and objects, what is called simulation, is the latest consequence of the long-term strategies of appropriation of alienated sensuous labor (that is, alienated attention) by the object in circulation. Previously, this transformation was registered in the changed character of the particular work of art and of art in general. First, in modernization, mechanical reproduction liquidated the “original,” and now, as Baudrillard informs us, any possibility of the “copy” is liquidated in the frenzy of the circulation of the postmodern image.21 We should pause here to remark that with the pure simulacrum, we are looking at the pure fact of other people’s looking at a particular nodal point in media flow—a fact of a new seriality that wreaks havoc on the organization of space and time. The simulacrum is primarily an economic image, the first object-image that is in terms of its qualities, principally an economic function. Seen as the production of the gazes of others, the simulacrum is a touchstone for the frenetic circulation of the gaze.
The spectacle, as Guy Debord puts it, “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images.”22 Aura as “a unique distance” never was anything other than the slow boiling away of the visual object (the painting, for example) under the friction of its own visual circulation. The painting in the museum becomes overlaid with the accretions of the gazes of others on its surface. This statement, like Debord’s, is merely a reformulation in visual terms of Lukács’ analysis of commodity reification, “underneath the cloak of a thing lay a relation between men [sic].”23 With the painted masterpiece, which, as a unique object, has been seen in serial fashion by so many others, the viewer’s image of it is necessarily measured against all other imagined viewers’ images. The media-system that has the painting in its grip has a perceptual effect. The edifice built by the gazes of others on the work of art has a perceptible effect on the imagination, which is to say that when we view a cult image in the form of a painting, we view a generalized and imaginary image imposed upon the material surface of the canvas.
Though Benjamin’s use of the term “aura” is varied, it subtends an object’s relation to its past and to its production—the trace of the potter’s hand in the pot, as Benjamin put it in the Baudelaire essay. The trace of production past, to which Benjamin ascribes the aura, at a later moment becomes the fetish character of the commodity. The aura as the phantom limb linking an object to production and history is transformed into the spectral quality of the fetish character for the unique work of art as the circulation of such a visual object in the visual field begins to affect the quality of its prior visual harmonics. Put another way, the aura is the thinking person’s fetish. The thing that Benjamin calls “aura” is worked on by visual circulation; it is altered by all that looking. By the time the museum patron confronts the masterpiece on the wall, s/he must compare her/his experiences of the object with her/his perception of all the perception that has accreted to it—in short, everything that accounts for its canonical status as art, that valorizes the object socially, and that valorizes the viewer who establishes a relation to the art object. It is in such a moment that we might grasp the tremendous scale in terms of space, time, visual objects, numbers of persons, and social institutions mediating our relations to one another. These relations necessarily become imaginary and it is here that the image begins its decisive ascension over the signifier. The viewer’s perception of the painted image includes his or her perception of the perceptual status of the object—the sense of the number and of the kind of looks that it has commanded. This abstracted existence, which exists only in the socially mediated (via lithographs, museum’s reproductions, etc.) and imagined summation of the work of art’s meaning (value) for everyone else (society), becomes the fetish character of the unique work. Its uniqueness stands in contradiction to its mode of appropriation. The stature of the unique work of art is the other, supplemental, fate available to objects in a situation of mass-production. Thus relations of production in the production of the value of art are abstract—they depend upon the mode of appropriation generalizeable to the entire society in which the unique work is seen and understood. Because they are abstract, that is, not visible in the object itself, and because they heretofore have lacked a theory, these relations of production that inhere in “high” art have been hidden, despite their practical realization as the price of art masterpieces.24
The visual fetish emerges when one cannot see the visual object in its totality (the totality of looks in which it has circulated)—part of the art object’s value comes from its very circulation. The fetish character intimates a new value system; the aura intimates visual circulation in a visual economy. As the $60 million price tag of a Van Gogh investment practically demonstrates, this circulation is productive of value in the classical terms of the labor theory of value.25 All that alienated attention, in the form of those dutiful, or worshipful, or revelational, even disdainful fetishizing gazes, in the form of Christy’s promotions, monographs, postcards, what have you, accretes to the image and its proprietor. Both particular works of art and the entire art-system are infused with value of this sort. Art-objects and the institutions that sustain them become capitalist machines extracting and expropriating value through alienated attention.
Use-Value and Exchange-Value in Every Byte!
“It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it.”26 What Benjamin understood as “information”—that is, events, “shot through with explanation”—the rise of which coincides with the fall of the story, the decline of experience, and the dawning of full modernity, is now recognizable as a predominant feature of new forms of mediation in the capitalist economy.27 In the intensification of the logic of capitalist information society, the pure and immediate visible object becomes ever more recondite, the oceanic bond with it ever more distant. As the distance from the eye to some originary visual object approaches infinity, as the visual becomes the ob-scene, the “essentially pornographic,” “visuality” or the medium in which every iteration is inscribed in its seam with “use only as directed,” aura either “withers away” or passes into simulacrum. 28 In either case, what this means, effectively, is that “the thinking person” is gone.
As with information, which must appear “understandable in itself,” and the coin, so with binary code and the media byte.29 The media byte is media functioning in two determinations: 1) as its particular content, mediation in its synchronic form; and 2) as part of a system of circulation. As with all objective forms that must be reified (taken out of capital circulation, at least conceptually) in order to be constituted as an object, the media byte traveling at a certain speed (in the form of a nineteenth-century painting in the nineteenth century, for example) has a fetish character or aura. Language can try to catch up with it. As the image accelerates, the aura undergoes its quantum shift (quantity [of gazes], to quality [of image]) and becomes simulacrum. Simulacra travel so fast, circulate among so many gazes, that the content (as context, as socio-historical embeddedness) is sheared from the form, making the history of their production ungraspable. Simulacrum is the sublime in the ridiculous, truth as the removal of the ground for truth. Indeed, to a certain extent, that is, within simulacra’s own realm, the category “history” no longer applies to them (except, of course as simulation, as “history”). The simulacrum has value and nobody knows why. That is because its metaphysics of value are in another dimension, on a different string, if you will. What replaces historic imbeddedness of the image-object is mediatic regulation. This result should be taken as a gloss on Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message.” The aura, in its conversion to simulacra, signifies the regime of mediation, not necessarily denotatively but practically. Experientially we encounter simulation, practically, they realize profit. The specter of the visible (aura) has become the substance of the visual (simulation). In the visual arena, as in the object universe before it, exchange-value overtakes use-value, forcing vision itself to partake directly in the dynamics of exchange. The local confounding of metaphysics releases a whole new battery of affects that become the software algorithms for postmodernity. Hence today there is an almost palpable integument overlaying society. This integument can no longer properly be described as “ideology” (since ideology is a concept welded to a narrative and therefore a quasi-historical core) but is more adequately denoted by the term “spectacle.”30
Aura, then, is to ideology as simulacrum is to spectacle. Aura is of the subject. In the simulacrum, the particular content of a message, its use-value, is converted into nothing but pure exchange-value. The amplitude of the message itself is liquidated under the form that it takes. Media bytes realize their value as they pass through the fleshy medium (the body) via a mechanism less like consciousness and more like the organism undergoing a labor process—call it an haptic pathway. Media bytes are thinking money, or better, affective money (that becomes thoughts in the subroutines of language). In the course of their flow, new synapses uniting brain and viscera are cut and bound. Internal organs quiver and stir. We arise from our seats in the cinema and before our television sets remade, freshly ennervated from a direct encounter with the dynamics of social production and reproduction. “We see that the methods of processing the audience are no different in the mechanics of their realization from other forms of work movement, and they produce the same real, primarily physical work on their material—the audience” (Writings, 1:66).
Properly speaking, contemporary media bytes do not have an aura, but have become simulacrum. The term “aura” is better reserved for the painting hanging on the gallery wall—its circulation among gazes transpires at a slower speed. As I noted, the painting’s aura derives from the gap between what one sees and its status as a work of art in circulation. It also derives from the fact that one constructs oneself as a “one.” One covets the authentic knowledge of an object which is slowly boiling away under the gazes of passersby only to be reassembled as an abstraction of what the many eyes that have gazed upon it might have seen. The painting becomes a sign for its own significance, a significance that is an artifact of its invisble mediations, its circulation through myriad sensoriums. Simulation occurs when visual objects are liquidated of their traditional contents and mean precisely their circulation: It is at this object-image that myriad people have looked. Liquidated of its traditional contents and intimating the immensity of the world system, the affect of the visual object as simulacrum is sublime.
The aura of authenticity experienced by Benjamin in the presence of the museum painting marks historically the emergence and intensification of the fetish character of vision.31 It is the watermark of the commodification of sight. Aura indexes the falling of vision under the sway of the capitalization of vision which itself is falling under the sway of the cinematic mode of production. The frustratingly mystical properties of the aura are due to the fact that it is the index of the suppression of the perception of visual circulation. The aura is the perception of an affect and indicates the moment where the visual object is framed by the eye with the desire to take it out of circulation. Like the fetish character of the commodity, it marks the desire to convert exchange-value into use-value, to free the object from the tyranny of circulation, and to possess it, to have a unique knowledge of it. It marks the desire to overcome that unique distance, or what could be understood as the disappearance of humanity from the world of things. The fetish character of the commodity is the result of capital’s necessary suppression of the knowledge of the underbelly of production, that is, exploitation at once desired and disavowed; it is the mystification of one’s relationship to the products for consumption—the consequences of the very alienation of the produce of production from producers. Here, this mystified relation, expressed most generally, is our inability to think the production of value through visual means, that is, our inability to thoroughly and immediately perceive the properties and dynamics of the attention theory of value in the production of aesthetic, cultural, and economic value. All those looks at a painting, though invisible, leave a residue that makes the painting what it is. The aura is the living tissue of now absent attention and social practices that congeal around the work and continue to exercise a palpable effect despite the fact that they are invisible. The fetish also marks the independent will of objects, their monstrous indifference to 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 objects, is a consequence of the amplification of such characteristics (personality and individual will over and against the sentience and indifference of objects). Thus personality and genius are not only hermeneutic mechanisms for the interpretation of modern artworks, but compensatory mechanisms imputing human characteristics to a world where these characteristics are disappearing among the general population in the face of the market. Like the experience of Everyman in the Coen Brothers’ Capital Cinema, the personal touch, unaccommodated by massive, visual mediation (massively intending, widely circulating, institutionally enabled, capitalized objects) is doomed by capital to extinction.
Though no longer personal, because so highly mediated, such modernist masterworks confront us with a socially magnified image of our own lack. The utopia they represent, in which their creator’s personality is valued for what it is, passes through the market of alienated labor and attention. The value produced by our personal relationship to them, accrues to them, their media, and their masters. Such is the logic of celebrity. Commodity fetishism, which is a variation on precisely the same structure of alienation, is the necessary ruse and consequence of free enterprise—its sublimity is the antithesis of social transparency. We want what has been taken away from us. This sublimity is further intensified (as is social opacity) with simulation in the postmodern—simulation is the intensification of social opacity.32 The viscerality of simulation attests to the depth of the penetration of alienation into the core of the collective (Western? Global?) soul.
The aura, as either a visual component or analogue of the fetish, specifies the character of representation, visual and otherwise, under capitalism during the modern period. Simulation, which occurs at a higher speed and greater intensity of visual circulation, specifies the character of representation in the postmodern period. In Debord’s words, “The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production. What grows with the economy in motion for itself can only be the very alienation which was at its origin.”33 Thus the visual fetish implies that the production of alienation has entered the visual field. In the case of the painted masterpiece, it is the mark of so many eyeprints, each having left its unaccounted-for trace in the production of value.
The Money-Image
In his explicitly multinational and self-consciously contemporary work Until the End of the World, new German filmmaker Wim Wenders films the cinema as an explicitly politico-economic complex. There, optical machines interfaced with computers and the human sensorium allow the blind to see through the eyes of another person. This other person, the filmmaker, so to speak, must be in a state of empathy with the blind. He or she must go out to see things and then during the playback of the images remember them with the feelings that accompanied them in order that the recorded images may pass first through his or her consciousness and into the consciousness of the blind. According to the logic of Until the End of the World then, the filmmaker’s role, in a manner a la Vertov and Kino-Eye, is to aid those who, in post-industrial society, cannot see because of their bio-historical restrictions; cinema is a prosthetic device for the enabling of those who, because of where they are and who they are in a world such as ours, live with limitations. The filmmaker does not have to create an image of totality in order to achieve some form of social remediation, as in Man with a Movie Camera,—what is required is simply an image rooted to the world by passing through a human and humanizing mind. The film lasts until the end of the world, that is, until the cinema is overtaken by video.
In the late capitalism of Until the End of the World, a converging course for visual representation and the unconscious is portrayed. This convergence, thematized as video, threatens Wenders’ cinema-on-a-human-scale. The human-friendly technology that is described above as drawing upon memory and the unconscious in positive ways is shown to contain within itself dire possibilities. These adverse tendencies, which for Wenders threaten the very being of analytic thought, are activated when vision and the unconscious are impacted in a third term, the commodity. In a new innovation, the same technology that during the early part of Until the End of the World is being developed to allow the blind to see, is utilized to record and replay an isolated individual’s dreams by cutting out the filmmaker-other, in effect, undermining the structuring-field of the signifier as the constitutive condition for self/other or subject/object. As signaled by the quasi-anachronistic presence of a Sony camcorder in this futuristic film, this technology turns out to be an elaborate form of video. The film’s female love interest, who is involved in the research on this new technology, develops an addiction to the ghostly, colored electronic shadows of her own pixilated dreams that flicker on her eye-screen and then vanish only to coalesce once again as, for example, liquid blue and yellow silhouettes walking hand in hand on a blood red beach. Rather than surrealism without the unconscious, what appears on the video (and by implication what video is) is the spectacle of her own unconscious, exempt from the triangulation performed by the self-other-signifier relation. Endlessly she watches the movement of the abstracted forms of her desire mediated and motivated only by technology and her own narcissism, rather than seeking an encounter with the outer world through another visual subject. Her addiction feeds off of her dreams and her dreams feed off of her addiction. That this “indulgence” makes her inaccessible to the men who desire her, and that this self-separation from heterosexist patriarchy might be a good thing or have some elements of a good thing, is not explored adequately by the film. Indeed, here, it only stimulates the men’s fascination and their need to save her from her own (attractive) narcissism. Within Wenders’ logic, she is caught in a dead-end loop. This video within a film is portrayed as capital’s shortest circuit—an environment where the individual immediately and addictively consumes her own objectification.
Staring endlessly at video, only breaking off in order to sleep, the female antagonist is immersed in the time of the unconscious—in time that is unconscious—and therefore cannot be reached from outside. The time of the unconscious articulated in the videographic hallucinations secreted on the screen is taken also as a sort of ur-time of late capitalism—a temporality resulting from the infinite fluidity and plasticity of a money that responds to desire before desire can even speak. This desire, which is pre-symbolic and in certain respects a result of capital’s penetration of the infantile, is a desire that, no matter what else it is, is necessarily (if unconsciously) a desire for money, the very medium of the addiction. Hence her desire, in passing through the technological, is mediated by capital in the sense developed in chapter 2, that is, capital structures the conditions of the emergence of her desire, even if that desire is not structured by the symbolic of language. As emphasized by the setting, a James–Bond style cave full of high-tech imaging equipment staffed by aboriginal people in the middle of the Australian outback, the strangest outcroppings of capital circulation are under scrutiny here. Because, as the multiplying characters and the multinational plot would imply, capital is shown to traverse all circuits as global flow, technological society and the money economy appear as the real in cinematic representation, even if not accessible as such in the videographic hallucinations. What the film Until the End of the World shows that the video cannot is that when the batteries run out, another world appears. It is therefore a critique of virtual reality, an attempt to map the reality behind virtuality. The film stages the new terms of a crisis in which a kind of involution occurs—most of what was formerly reality becomes unrepresentable within the videographic/unconscious, and that which was unconscious stands in the place of the reality principle, that is, in place of wakefulness. Unconsciousness tends to subsume consciousness. In late capitalism, three strands—representation, the unconscious, and the commodity—tend to converge in the image.
This flattening out of the space between the unconscious and representation (i.e., the end of representation as such) is precisely the argument, albeit with shifting emphasis, implicit in a variety of socio-linguistic analysis from George Orwell to Jean Baudrillard: With a certain amount of pressure on the signifier (pain), depth (as history, as the unconscious) vanishes and things are as they appear. Freudian representation becomes Pavlovian signalization. All of the would-be contradictions, yesterday’s contradictions, are on the surface, and since there is nothing but surface they are no longer contradictions. This surfacing of signification appears in two dimensions: the elimination of depth, and the annihilation of laws and boundaries that have, in the past, delimited the movement of the signifier. In Orwell’s famous example, with enough electricity, 2 + 2 can equal 5. Though I will not elaborate the idea here, these two altered dimensions in the transformation of the signifying stratum are just two effects of the same process of the technologically mediated overloading of signification. Absolute depthlessness and incessant ecstatic exchange come into being simultaneously as new fields of power and organization (capitalized mediation) overtake the field of signification.34 As signification is overwhelmed and overdetermined by capitalized visual technologies, as it is subsumed by the economics of the imaginary, it is converted in its interface with bodies into a productive activity compatible with industrial labor and then visual attention. All of signification’s spatial and metaphysical properties undergo a shift—its internal, organic logic is sublated by capital logic. This transformation of the laws presumed to striate signification conventionally, such as referentiality, logic, or narrativity, has been called poststructuralism and postmodernism, but very few of the discourses emitted in and as these formations have been able to figure adequately the economic as an overdetermination effect on the new (im)possibilities of signification. Because of the dissolution of the referent, language’s inability to posit its own beyond, the economic, along with the unconscious and the Other, has an annoying quality of evaporating just where one might hope to find it. However, this shift in the character of language away from being a representation of reality to being under erasure, that is, at its extreme, unconsciousness itself, can be historicized.35
We already have seen that for an image of the inadequation of language and contemporary visuality, one need look no farther than that fabulously undynamic duo of Beavis and Butt-head. Situated within MTV, endlessly watching music videos, they only interrupt their viewing to describe the intensities of their visceral urges (with an economy of language that would make Hemingway envious). Then they immediately fall back into their visual stupefaction (which is sutured to the home-viewer’s) in front of undulating, eroticized musickified bodies. In their movie premier, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, much as in Until the End of the World, it is noteworthy that the plot cannot get going until Beavis and Butt-head’s television is stolen, that is, only in the absence of this prosthesis can narrative begin. Overall, language offers only the most rudimentary punctuation of corporeal intensities. Meanwhile, virtually disempowered, Beavis and Butt-head serve the purposes of others.
Let me suggest here that because the sign is swamped by images, it takes on the commodity form. Its structure is less signifier/signified (signifier over signified) and more exchange-value/use-value (exchange-value over use-value). To an ever-greater degree (and with apologies to poets, struggling or otherwise), the social signification of the sign can only (also) be capital. Like other bits of exchange-value moving in a global commodity chain, the exchange-value that is the signifier must follow its capitalized vector, while its use-value becomes, as is the case with money, primarily its capacity to valorize capital. In other words, the sign is integrated vertically with the spectacle, but in such a way that the spectacle is above it (rather than the unconscious being below it). Thus the sign is the unconscious of the spectacle—“the non-represented.” The traditional properties of language do less to inflect the trajectory of the signifier than do the laws of capitalized informatics.36 The space of the fold between signifier and signified that registers alienation, what Lacan conceptualized first as the cut and later as the rim, has all but disappeared—because we have fallen into it. We become the unrepresentable because representation itself becomes a marginal riptide in the intensive flux of capitalized signifying matter. God is a shout in the street. As far as capital is concerned, at least, the meaning of everything is capital. The laws by which subjects are constituted are superseded by the laws of capitalized signification (the discourse of cinema’s third machine). When the subject no longer can constitute itself as the subject of oppression because of the inadequation of language to visuality, when dystopia is no longer recognizable as such, there is the postmodern. As in some of the work of Tarkovsky or David Lynch, or, for that matter, in the novellas of Can Xue, we are the unconscious. To the Orwellian Trinity “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength,” one can add a maxim for the theorist: Consciousness is Unconsciousness—indeed, such is approximately the dictum (“Orthodoxy is unconconsiousness”) employed by the high priests of Newspeak. The corollary: If the subaltern cannot speak, neither can you, or what’s left of you. And the rest, well what’s that?
Lacan, in fact, says pretty much the same thing in the discussion of aphanisis, the disappearance or fading of the subject, in the lecture on alienation in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. However, the differentiating element between a Lacanian modernism and the postmodern, one might suppose, is the temporality of the subject’s fading. The constitution of the subject constantly functioning as the process of its disappearance in the signifier can be glimpsed from the following account of the drive: “in the profound relation of the drive, what is essential is the movement by which the arrow that sets out towards the target fulfills its function only by really re-emerging from it, and returning on to the subject” (FFCP, 206). The Lacanian diagnosis of the acceleration of this process of the drive immediately follows: “In this sense, the pervert is he who, in short circuit, more directly than any other, succeeds in his aim, by integrating in the most profound way his function as subject with his existence as desire” (FFCP, 206). By Lacan’s definition, Beavis and Butt-head as well as the video-addict in Until the End of the World are perverse. So too would be the speaking subaltern, who, excluded from speech, “exists” as desire.
The perverse in Lacan’s universe is something like “bad oedipalization,” if I may be so bold. Though in many respects Wenders’ locating such a “flaw” in a woman shows the conventionally sexist character of his notions of gender (woman as perverse, narcissistic, addicted to money), nonetheless, his equation of video with the feminine is not entirely off base—at least inasmuch as it endeavors to modulate the view that in the culture of capitalist patriarchy the phallic subject is the oedipalized subject and the pre-(non?)-oedipal subject is the unknowable/as-yet-unknown zone of the non-subjective feminine. In other words, the film embraces a kind of sexist naturalism in which that which is to be brought under the dominion of the phallic subject is feminized. It recapitulates the absence of Woman in the phallogocentrism of the symbolic. Though phallic and patriarchal, this naturalizing of the zone of the non-subject is not superficial, indeed it reveals the ground on which much first- and second-wave feminism stages its struggle. The feminine as glyph of another universe and as object of male desire corresponds to the postmodern mode of écriture that Alice Jardine calls Gynesis: “a new kind of writing on the woman’s body, a map of new spaces to be explored, with “woman” supplying the only directions, the only images, upon which postmodern man feels he can rely.”37 Wenders’ registration of a feminizing techno-narcissism as a threat both to the subject and to the subject of history, and his effort to recontextualize it in the oedipal domain, present a lucid crystal of the simultaneously profound and hegemonic perceptions of gender, technology, and power. I should say up front that I am deeply ambivalent about this presentation. What are the possibilites in the intersections of the technological violation of the subject and feminism and/or antiracist feminism? In Wenders’ presentation, much like the lose-lose situation of the O.J. Simpson trial, in which spectators are invited to be either racists or misogynists, we are given the choice of techno-feminist narcissism blind to issues of political economy, or sexist Marxism constitutionally opposed to experience beyond the purview of the phallic subject. Because Wenders seems to be saying that one might escape from patriarchy and yet not escape from capital, the “solution” that he offers in the final scenes of the film is that of a partially emasculated subject (the woman in command but in outerspace), ironically engaged in some form of environmental politics.
Before trying to untangle this ball of string, let me return to certain elements from chapter 3. Lacan, for whom the subject emerges in the field of the Other, tells us two things: “Everything emerges from the structure of the signifier” (FFCP, 206), and “the facts of human psychology cannot be conceived in the absence of the function of the subject defined as an effect of the signifier” (FFCP, 207). The subject is a signification effect. In Lacan’s model of signification, “the processes are to be articulated … as circular between the subject and the Other—from the subject called to the Other, to the subject of that which he has himself seen appear in the field of the Other, from the Other coming back. This process is circular, but of its nature, without reciprocity. Because it is circular, it is dysymmetrical” (FFCP, 207). Such then is the subject in the field of cinema in Until the End of the World. As the love story shows, before video, the male subject emerges in the field of the other in a circular process without reciprocity—the generative situation of unrequited love—the dysemmetrical aspects of the relation implying or giving rise to time—narrative time. Man pursues woman in time. But the temporal twist in Until the End of the World that results in the videographic subversion of time itself, also shows that the film’s theme-song refrain, “I’ll love you ‘till the end of the world,” means nothing more than until video sucks in “subject, Other, and time.”
The End of the World and the Beginning of Globalization
The significance of the paragraph below will not be lost on anyone who has endeavored to teach media studies to students with no formal training in critical theory, because televised images often as not are not perceived as “something for someone,” but rather as something more like “nothing for no one.”
The whole ambiguity of the sign derives from the fact that it represents something for someone. This someone may be many things, it may be the entire universe, inasmuch as we have known for some time that information circulates in it, as a negative entropy. Any node in which signs are concentrated, in so far as they represent something, may be taken for a someone. What must be stressed at the outset is that a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier. (FFCP, 207)
Not only does this non-recognition of media feed as a signifier suggest that critical theory is itself an institutional response to the crises of the subject (a huge machine staving off its impending disappearance), it also suggests that only when images are taken as signifiers, and brought into the analytical and metaphysical mode of analysis, that their political dimension as ideological state apparatus emerges. The fundamental act of most media theory is to take mediated emissions as signifiers. In so doing, media theory posits its own subjectivity, that is, its position as analyst.
The subject-form is linked inexorably to politics and political thought; Wenders fears the end of conscious politics. Such a fear is the old fear of rampant visuality, overwhelming, indeed emasculating, analytic thought. The spectacle is practical feminization, understanding that reasserts male power. Wenders, and he is not alone, believes that cinema can ponder the visual world in a philisophico-political mode. Such is the contest between cinema and video/television. However, the form of the subjective constitution—here the taking of non-subjectifying video feed as signifier—shows precisely through its fear of the visual that other mechanics accompany so-called signifying practice that precede and exceed those that can be apprehended in the realm of signification qua signification. Whether an audience is conscious or not, media make demands on it. The political exceeds the subjective. This is something that feminism has argued convincingly for some time. In many ways, Pavlov’s term “signalization” is again more apt than “signification” to describe the consequences of media feed. Televisual images that do not emerge as signification (but are experienced rather, as “nature” or as “intensities”) will not be taken as a someone and no subjects will be constituted. An observer, constituted as are all scientists, in the realm of signification, finds, in such a signalized miasma, nodes of intensities in a media-scape. Such an observer is probably in cinema as Wenders understands it, caught in the oedipal triangle, while the observed are videographic.
Lacan provides another name for such a non-intersubjective relationship to signification in his correction of what he calls the “Piagetic error,” that is, Piaget’s notion of “what is called the egocentric discourse of the child” (FFCP, 208).
The notion of egocentric discourse is a misunderstanding. The child, in this discourse, which may be tape-recorded, does not speak for himself, as one says. No doubt, he does not address the other, if one uses here the theoretical distinction derived from the function of the I and the you. But there must be others there—it is while all these little fellows are there, indulging all together, for example, in little games of operations, as they are provided with in certain methods of so-called active education, it is there that they speak—they don’t speak to a particular person, they just speak, if you’ll pardon the expression, à la cantonade.” (FFCP, 208)
Alan Sheridan, the translator of The Four Fundamental Concepts, quickly adds a note explaining that “à la cantonade” is at once a pun on Lacan’s name and “to speak to nobody in particular.” It is as an analyst of the signifier (that is, as one who takes their words as signifiers) that Piaget constructs these children as subjects. So one sees here the connection between the non-subjectivizing character of discourse in the mass media, feminization, and infantalization as well as the desire for the Other (subject) on the part of the analyst.38
We now have here three models of signification within mass media: 1) the self-other of linguistics and psychoanalysis that corresponds to the older cinema; 2) the active education or signalization model in which media speaks à la cantonade and, we must assume, provokes audiences to a great extent to respond in kind, adopting a similar utilization of the signifier, a kind of parallel play—this corresponds to television; and 3) the perverse, which would correspond to the purely videographic/virtual reality. Valorizing any one of these alone as harboring some inherent revolutionary character is over-hasty—the prospects for consciousness, dominant media, or even the promising category of perversity as a guiding light for the amelioration of historical problems seem irredeemably limited. However, taken all together these three forms yield the schematics of the psycho-perceptual regime of cinematic production in late capitalism. It is possible and indeed probable for any consciousness encountering this assertion to pass through all of these states. Thus Wenders’ film, for all of its flaws, is a map of the dominant relations of production at the level of media, a realist representation of the postmodern: a quasi-Balzacian ideologeme.
The necessary refusal of a univalent plan for a solution to the global unfreedom of the majority of Earth’s inhabitants gives rise to the relativistic strategies adopted by social theorists; however, it is precisely in the alternation among these modes that social cooperation is produced and maintained—to the detriment of so many. But neither, among the most radical strains of political engagement, has a unified model for social struggle come into being. If we choose consciousness and subjectivity as our mode of accounting and our paradigm for action, we risk enacting for the nth time all the violence of Western metaphysics and its discontents (logocentrism, patriarchy, imperialism). “Choosing” televisual “consciousness” corresponds, in the Deleuzian vocabulary, to a becoming woman, becoming child, that is to an effort to enter a pre- or anti-oedipal state. But to choose this may really be a choice for door number three, since one cannot in fact choose the pre-oedipal and therefore one only embraces the anti-oedipal. This shows that the child and the woman of Deleuze are virtual enterprises, garments to wear, mantles to be picked up. Alice Jardine, in her chapter “Becoming a Body without Organs,” encourages such doubts about “D+G’s” (Deleuze and Guattari’s) project. Her citation of Irigaray illuminates a troubling question about the discourse of D+G vis-à-vis the subject and feminism: “In order to make the ‘body without organs’ a ‘cause’ of jouissance, isn’t it necessary to have had, with respect to language and sex—to organs?—a relationship which women have never had?”39 Jardine also points toward the contradiction in Deleuze and Guattari’s work that I have been plying here. She finds “D+G’s ‘woman’ … endemic to an era of postsignification—an era, it would seem, that human subjects, their texts, and the world itself are rapidly approaching,” while at the same time noting that “while taking the United States as their ideal, D+G’s work remains overwhelmingly Francocentric in its philosophical teleology. The voyages to the outer continents of reason are firmly directed from their homefront.”40 Thus critical reactions to the encroaching era of post-signification threaten to repeat the logics of patriarchy and imperialism. “We” do not yet know how to make time flow backwards to bring us to a point before oedipalized subjectivity, before gender (unless television and virtual reality are precisely technologies for such an undertaking), so the phallic subject is to work his way into the beyond of childhood or femininity, using these figures as modalities or methods for negotiating the assemblage and finding the line of flight. But like Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the Oriental or of Faulkner’s becoming negro, one can’t help feeling that this form of gynesis or, now, “other-esis,” these minoritarian simulations, are at once suspect and highly circumscribed, especially given that some empowerment of “minorities” has taken place precisely in marginalized groups’ institutional self-constitution as subjects. Perhaps the historical conditions have not emerged for Deleuze and Guattari’s thought manuals to realize themselves beyond a virtuality all too comfortable with forgetting, I honestly don’t know, but even if these lessons for dismantling the phallic subject from within are valid (as Jardine seems to suggest), I can’t help, with respect to such poststructuralist escape hatches, but lean toward the spirit of Langston Hughes’s remark that the average black person in America “hasn’t even heard of the Harlem Renaissance, and if he has, it hasn’t raised his wages any.”
A different filmmaker might have ended his history of the world and of the disappearance of what Lacan calls “the lethal factor” from perception with a time-image marking the end of the world, that is, with the overtaking of Until the End of the World’s narrative with the videographic display, but Wenders, who has always painfully yet sometimes beautifully believed in the world, ends the film with a knowing farce: Returning not exactly to Earth, but to the logical time of official world history, the video junky kicks the habit and gets a little perspective on the planet by working in an orbiting shuttle for Green Space. Despite Wender’s partial yet inadequate ironizing of such “political” alternatives that utilize the money-consciousness system with a little perspective, I think that we can take Until the End of the World and its closing aporia as exemplary of Deleuze’s argument that “the cinema confronts its most internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation. What the film within the film expresses is this infernal circuit between the image and money… . The film is movement, but the film within the film is money, is time.”41 In the strange temporality of Until the End of the World, the plot breaks down where the video starts.42 The mechanism of what Deleuze finds beyond the movement-image and calls “a little time in the pure state” is revealed in the video-junky’s techno-capitalist narrative dysfunction: Time cut out from movement and narrative is the expression of the transcendence of signification brought about by capital intensification. Until the End of the World is a film that wants two things: to be the world, and to restore a redeeming subject to the world. Whatever one wants to make of that as a political project, we can learn something from the film’s portrayal of the video interludes dripping with the temporality of pure mediation. Locked into the circuits of economic flow, the time-image is a money-image as well. As Debord would have it, “The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory … is the false consciousness of time.”43
The time/money-image that reveals the end of thoughtful action, or inagurates the paralytic contemplation of the unconscious/sublime, or even impels us toward what might be termed the narcissism of philosophy, is not the sole province of the latter half of the twentieth century. In The Time Machine of H. G. Wells, which is contemporary with the beginning of cinema, we have another harrowing time-image of the end of the world: The lonely time traveler sits in his now-ancient time machine on the last beach at the end of the world, a cold, thin wind arising as the giant red sun, gone nova, droops into the final sky. To avoid the tremendous crabs that slowly close in on him near the end of eternity, the time traveler first moves on a hundred years only to find the crabs still on the beach, so he moves forward a few million years more. The giant crabs are gone and the only living creature to be seen is a black sea-dwelling football-like animal that takes a single leap out of the dark ocean. The thin wind blows colder and in the twilight snow falls. This scene suggests that the forces of reason capable of producing the time traveler’s time machine are also capable of hailing the foreclosure of the human species. Wells’s time-image at the end of the nineteenth century as well as Wenders’ at the end of the twentieth put forth two images of time and its ruins, or better, its ruining, at the end of the world. This “a little time in its pure state” is at once a meditation on the consequences of rationality, and equipment for living. If we reconstitute ourselves in the presence of the sublimity of an indifferent time that eats away at our very constitution, a temporality that is a result of the cultural logic of our era, perhaps we become inured to it as well. For time really has become this way and yet we must go on. In our responses, conscious, unconscious, visceral, what have you, we incorporate the terms and protocols of the new world—in this case perhaps, the impossibility of a future—and its new temporalities as it incorporates us.
What do the time machines of H. G. Wells and of the cinema have in common, then? Is not Wells’s late-nineteenth-century time machine already a form (in Deleuze’s terms) of “post-war” cinema, a device for the utter severing of the sensory-motor link? I am suggesting that the cinema machines this severing, that it is not a mere response to an objective historical moment that can be reified under the sign of the war. Rather, such a severing ought be thought of as a tendency of convergent logics and practices. True, the scale of military operations and those of corporations renders individual agency ever-more marginal, but are these thinkable without the war of images?
Antonio Gramsci, in his essay “Americanism and Fordism,” predicted the necessary emergence of a psycho-physical nexus of a new type in which sensation and movement are severed from each other.44 One must consume such severing to produce it in oneself. After all, like the spectator, the time-craft just sits there utterly motionless as night and day alternate faster and faster, as the solid buildings rise and melt away, and then, still accelerating, as everything goes gray and the sun becomes a pale yellow and finally a red arc racing around the sky. The Time Machine’s bleak registration of the infinite extensionality of a time that yields only emptiness and extinction emerges directly out of the theory and practice of a scientific rationality that we know that Wells associated with specialization, capitalism, and imperialism. The time machine is the consciousness of these formations. It is also a figure for the cinema. In many ways, the story of The Time Machine prefigures Max Horkheimer’s assertion in “The End of Reason” that the concentration camps are the logical result of instrumental rationality.45 Rationality to the point of irrationality; temporality to the point of extinction—these are the trajectories emerging out of a cultural logic based upon the acceleration of production and the consumption of the future.
In processing the time-image, we produce our own extinction, a necessary condition for many of today’s employees.46 In capitalism, our labor confronts us as something alien, as Marx said. Today we work (consciously and unconsciously, if such a distinction can still be applied) to annihilate our own constitution as subjects and make ourselves over as different types of information portals able to meet the schizophrenic protocols of late capitalism. Just as in one era at the behest of social organization we built ourselves as consolidated subjects, in another mode of production we dismantle and retool.47 Today we are schizophrenics—juridical subjects one moment, polymorphous pseudopodia of affect the next (for example, Terminator 2).48
If cinema is a time machine, then perhaps its sublime is precisely the image of our own destruction (as subjects, and therefore, in the “free world” as the components of “democracy”). The pleasure we get as we consume our own annihilation marks a contradiction as absolute as that which emerges, for example, from the awe inspired by the early 1990’s I-Max film (an excellent name for a late-capitalist medium), Blue Planet. As our eyes, like those of Wenders’ video junkie, experience the exhilaration of digging deeper and deeper into the infinite resolution, in this case, of six-story-tall images of entire continents shot with hundred-thousand-dollar optics on large-format movie film in outer space, the film proposes, with far less irony than Wenders’ Green Space, that space observation might aid in saving the visibly eroded planet still swirling majestically below us. This proposition conveniently elides the notion that the present condition of an earth that requires saving is a direct result of the very technology (optical, military, communicational—and the economics thereof) that offers us such breathtaking and “salvational” views. The message of the universal project of Science (which here can be understood to be one with the universal project of “good” [American] Capitalism) is reinforced by the moving image of the awesome and eternal Earth. If, in the time images of Deleuze’s “masterpieces,” we confront the many forms of our own annihilation, “the impower of thought,” and elsewhere, “the destruction of the instinctive forces in order to replace them with the transmitted forces”, and if, in the time-images of our popular culture we confront the apotheosis of production/destruction dynamic of capitalism, then we must confront the question of the significance of the aestheticization and philosophization of sublimity in lieu of a political economy of the time-image.49 In Blue Planet, as in the logo of Universal Studios, the earth itself, in its now precarious (now that it can in fact be seen) but once-immutable majesty, becomes an image of the awesome destining of capital cinema.
Given the image of the globe of globalization as the sublime figure for our universal disempowerment, it should come as no surprise that the labor necessary to produce the manifold forms of our systemic compatibility is our (humanity’s) own. On an immediate level, this claim implies that we work for big corporations when we watch their advertising, or submit to their p(r)ograms, but more generally, our myriad participations in the omni-present technology fest are engaged in ensuring the compatibility of our sensoriums with prevailing methods of interpellation, signalization, and unconsciousification, in addition to whatever else they’re doing. These communiques reach us not only by calling us into identification in the Althusserian sense but by calling us to rhythms, to desires, to affects. Daily we interface with machines in order to “speak” the systems-language of the dominant and dominating socio-economic system. The retooling of ocular and hence corporeal functions is not a one-time event; retreading vision, sensoria, and psyches requires constant effort. It is important to note that we are thinking of organic transformation channeled not only through discourse, but through visual practice. (One must, of course, at this point acknowledge the ear and the nose as well—as music and now the perfume industry attest, other senses are being opened for capitalization.) Though certain hardware remains standard for a time, even the screen, for example, has undergone many modifications in its movement from movie to TV to computer. Today the screen again is being superseded by virtual reality—in the so-called “fifth generation” of computer technology we will be inside of information. As a citation in Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality puts it, “Computer programming is just another form of filmmaking.” Rheingold describes the generational development of computers as a slow meshing of human intelligence with artificial intelligence, a gradual decreasing of the distance between the mind and the machine. At first one delivered punched cards to an operator. Then one could input information oneself. Then there was a switch from base two to primitive code words, and after that more common language and the screen. In the fifth generation (VR), we will be inside information, able to fly through information spaces making simple physical gestures such as pointing, which will then perform complex computerized functions.50 But this transformation will only put us literally where we already have been for some-time. Micro-adjustments and calibrations of the practices of concrete bodies have been and are being made all the time: as fashion, as sexuality, as temporality, as desire.
I have enumerated above several of the shifts in consciousness and perception characteristic of the cinematic mode of production without passing final judgment on these. To conclude this section, I would like to recapitulate two propositions concerning the question of value.
1.As the visual fetish testifies, the perception that images pass through the perception of others increases their currency and hence their value. Vision adds value to visual objects, value that is often capitalized. Inevitably, this value changes the form or the character of the image because this value is the bio-technological placing of the image in circulation, its very mediation. If circulation through sensoria creates value (recall the painted masterpiece), then this value is the accruing of human attention on the image. Because the images circulate in regulated media pathways (channels), the media itself becomes more valuable as its images do. As significance is displaced and messages are depleted, we move from “the medium is the message” to “the medium is the medium.”
2.The accretion of “fixed” visual capital, the visual technologies that arise for its management (mediation), and the intensification of its productive strategies along with the increased rate of profit made possible through the colonization and domestication of life bring about a change in the very quality of human productive activity. In what sociologists would call an informal economy, value is produced by viewers as they work on their own sensoriums.51 In other words, some of the effort in the near-daily remaking of the psyche, as well as the production of rhythms, desires, intensities, proprioception, zones of visibility, and zones of invisibility is provided by the labor time of the viewer. This tooling of the body to make it amenable to commodity flow—to make it know how to shift times and to operate at the different speeds that the non-synchronicity of late capitalism demands, to make it address certain ideologies and desires, to elicit certain identifications, to engender and transgender, to seek freedom in the well-lubricated groves of capitalist ambition, requires human labor time and is productive of value for capital.52
Thus, at a formal level, the value of media and of images is increased, while at an informal level we work on ourselves so that we may work in the world. This said, it is important never to forget that in the present regime of sensorial production, all earlier forms of exploitation (wage labor, slavery, feudalism, imperialism) coexist with the visual and the sensual production of value that I have described.
Twenty-First Century Addendum:
Media-Capital of the Twenty-First Century
As the price of assets such as housing rise and as the medium wage in the United States decreases (adjusted for inflation), one might expect to find a growing discontent among a fragmented working class that could be countered only by the erosion of civil rights and imperialist war. While the global war on terror, with its patriot(ic) acts, clearly fills this gap, destroying social wealth in what appears to be for many a more or less psychologically satisfying way while preserving hierarchical society intact, it is important to see that this war, which has as its basic goal the destruction and/or expropriation of the individual’s wealth in exchange for a fantasy of empowerment and/or security, is also characteristic of the new fundamentalisms and of consumerism. How does this phenomenon work? Is this the psychology of most, approaching all socio-economic exchange, including showing up for work, film-going, sporting events, attending meetings, and perhaps even your reading here? What actually happens as you give your life to this book? Are you giving away your labor time only because you believe (perhaps not incorrectly) that it will help you do battle in the capitalist competition of each against all? Is reading a way of capitalizing your investment of attention? And is it possible or does it matter that in doing so you are increasing the author’s capital (little as it is …)? Assuming we are not direct antagonists, are we in solidarity or is this a business relationship?
This line of questioning is less about thinking the bling (only one) of academic glamour and more about pointing out the isomorphism of various forms of socially programmed investment—whether of one’s social due(s) (the commons, including public education, welfare, the highways), one’s labor or attention (work), or one’s accumulated wealth (consumption) in a larger dynamic of symbolic empowerment. This would show that the other side of consumerism is to turn all social activity into investment—an investment in an/one’s image. The pleasure derived from such investments is one of the payoffs (you feel important, secure, American)—a kind of surplus value. Being “American,” in the religious sense of the word, is one place, a kind of conspicuous consumption/production, in which, for example, poor working-class people wager their fair share of the social wealth (past, present, and future) on an outcome that returns a profit in a way not too dissimilar to working to buy Prada, or doing what it takes (saying what needs to be said) to show everyone you’re a good Christian.
In the end, it is the conspicuousness that is most significant here because it brings us back to the dynamics of the image and of film-language. In the investment in and production of a capitalized symbolic on the subjective side, in the calculus of the image on the objective side, a shattering or rather a sublation of all the categories of value is achieved—the categories are at once annihilated and preserved. Just as from a certain distance, Gauss’s law allows physicists to treat an uneven distribution of charge as a point charge, the distinctions between use-value and exchange-value, production and consumption also may be ignored and utilized for certain calculations, such as the current price of Google’s stock. However, what is going on at the surface, as it were, of that point of charge, is a whole new set of dynamics far different than the contradiction between labor and capital as played out on the shop floor in the industrial context.
This transformation of the form of value, finally, is the reason that cinema is the privileged figure of analysis in this text. As one can observe about my insistence on the relationship between the aesthetic and production—of the image as a productive interface between social capital and the body—the dynamics of capital accumulation will have to have been transformed for the productive aspect of the aesthetic dimension to be valid. A film, like a car, is neither a single commodity nor is it used up at one go. At certain junctures, each is treated as a discreet commodity, as when, for example, a car or a ticket is bought. However, each is not only an assemblage of commodities and processes that range across the entire planet, each is also “consumed” partially, in different instances of space and time. I put “consumed” in quotation marks because neither can be consumed fully or rather exclusively in as much as consumption also involves movement and hence circulation. Furthermore, this circulation, which is also a kind of consumption, requires the “throwing into the fire” of continual infusions of value (productive labor) in order to complete itself—either in the form of gassing up, (and working to do so) or sales of media and the utilization of media to/by different concrete individuals separated in space and time. While it would seem that neither GM nor Pixar makes any money from the gassing up or the actual watching (even driving), it is also obvious that cars and films stimulate other vast networks of production and consumption and that furthermore, these vehicles get people to work.
What this description says about the value form is that the complex amortization, production and re-production of media, introduces complexities that make commodities neither particle nor wave; they can and must be treated differently from different standpoints of analysis and of practice. For the capitalist, production implies consumption: This is an old thesis of Marx, but these two follow upon and overlay one another in new ways. Furthermore, the unit of analysis is not confined to the day, the hour, the Thaler, or the widget, rather, it has been shattered to the point where it is infinitely differentiable. The Armani suit, the tax write-off, the tear, and the genital tremor might all be moments of consumption that are now or years later turned to the purposes of production. It is as if, if one wanted to think in terms of abstract universal labor time, huge swaths of it were no longer available and capital had to depend continuously upon machines for fishing around for momentary fragments of such time. In “post-industrial: society, capital no longer can get the hose-line of abstract universal labor time as it could on the assembly line, or more accurately, even though it can and does get these hose-feeds, in many contexts it also must seek little pieces of abstract time.”53
Indeed, Google’s advertising strategy in 2005 (yes, it’s 2005 already, which just goes to show that production also is parceled out over space and time), which has helped push its stock price above $400 per share, is to create a massive algorithm that takes into consideration all known variables about a particular user—address, online purchasing history, web pages viewed, gender, age, and very likely class and frequency of orgasm—to link auctioned advertising to searches run by Google users. This method of gathering, weighting, and bundling little pieces of attention more and more thoroughly distills units of abstract time to a universe of time/attention buyers. This computerized advance over the niche marketing practiced by television buyers and the product placement practiced by film and TV is linked to the practice of what Google calls the monetization of content—where every instance of content on the web can, in principle, be treated simultaneously as a commodity and a medium.
This means that every page view, every image if you will, is slated to be sold as a medium of labor power. Google has found its true function in the sifting and parsing of not just data but of human subjective activity. Under the guise of making information available to users, Google has made these users available to capital and thus have made them productive of capital.
Significant here is the Google Print program, which has secured the rights to major library holdings in order to source materials that have fallen out of copyright protection and to make them available online. Also, and like Amazon, Google is taking advantage of fair use laws to show a page at a time of other print works. Deals with libraries and publishers currently are being inked to allow these individual page views to be sold a page at a time. This cannibalization of prior media should be understood in conjunction with online music, image and digital video sales/distribution, as well as blogging. Time-Warner’s acquistion of Myspace.com reveals that content producers, mostly kids, bands, and burgeoning (auto)pornographers are not just working for themselves as they craft their identities. In short, these devices are the means by which the real subsumption of society by capital is continued and intensified. They also mark a further moment of primitive accumulation—an expropriation of the commons (be it the old books or people’s private lives collectively conceived) in order to privatize and capitalize it. And then there is the modestly christened Google Earth, which turns the entire planet into an image with the intention of eventually monetizing it. As one commentator aptly put it, “Soon you’ll be driving your Google to the Google to get some Google for your Google.”
NOTES
1.Not coincidentally, this shift from one representational paradigm to another coincides, historically speaking, with the break marked by Gilles Deleuze between the movement-image and the time-image. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 209 and 215. See chapter 3 of the present volume.
2.Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1961), 4 –5.
3.Very generally here, I mean a lack of solidarity with others, a dearth of historical self-understanding, and an absence of strategies for imagining the terms of the world as other than they appear.
4.Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Red and Black, 1983), #157.
5.Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 4–5.
6.Ibid.
7.Ibid.
8.This point can be made more forcefully still if we see with Walter Benjamin the category of experience fundamentally at odds with the commodification of culture during a certain historical juncture. Experience and narrative are in decline because of the emergence of rationality as shock and information. See Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 83–109.
9.As I have noted previously, during the twentieth century the world is organized more and more like a film; commodity production becomes a form of montage. Commodities, the results of the cutting and editing of materials, transport systems, and labor time, take on the status of filmic objects that are then activated in the gaze on the screen of consciousness. The transformation of consciousness, wrought by the cinematic organization of production and the transformed status of objects, is tantamount to consciousness’s full-blown commodification.
10.See Paolo Virno, “Notes on the General Intellect,” trans. Cesare Casarino, Polygraph 6/7: Marxism Beyond Marxism? (1993): 32–38.
11.One need only think of the crucial role that borders and passports continue to play in regulating immigration. Precisely because people can’t move, capital, with its ability to cross borders, can pit one national population against another as they compete to sell themselves ever more cheaply than their neighbors. For an excellent discussion of the new form of the nation state, see Arif Dirlik’s essay, “Post-Socialist Space Time: Some Critical Considerations,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).
12. See my essay on Robocop 2 entitled “Desiring the Involuntary,” which discusses the cyberneticization of the flesh as a further realization of what cinema has been doing to its audiences all along, in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, cited above.
13.In order to avoid bogging the discussion down with sets of qualifications that ultimately would make it necessary to lay out in schematic form the whole of Marx’s analysis of capital, I restrict myself to the skeletal components of a discussion and leave it to readers to raise questions and fill in gaps.
14.My example here is with absolute values for labor time utilizing what Marx calls “abstract universal labor time” as my measure. But it also should be possible to develop a kind of saturation coefficient to describe the number of sites and the intensities of capital’s occupation of the human faculties.
15.See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986).
16.Janet Staiger, “The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930” in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 90.
17.In the cinema, the technologies for the organization of production and of the sensorium converge. Film/capital is cut to produce an image. Today, the convergence of the once-separate industries for image production and for other forms of commodity production (in advertising, for example, the image is revealed as the commodity par excellence) realizes the new and hybridized form of the image-commodity.
18.Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, 217–51.
19.Ibid., 250, n.19.
20.John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972).
21.Deleuze, in a characteristic and brilliant reading of Plato, provides an analysis of simulation and suggests that it always has haunted the house of philosophy. What I find characteristic about this essay is that in locating the need for idealism to banish simulation in Greek philosophy, Deleuze elides the historical problem of simulation: Why is it possible to his analysis now? See “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy” in The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
22.Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Red and Black, 1977).
23.Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971).
24.Here it is important to note that I am speaking about the production of value generally. Whether or not this value will be capitalized depends upon a variety of factors including how pervasively capital has pervaded the arena of the work of art’s “consumption.”
25.That Benjamin at one point extracts the aura from the solitary seer’s gaze upon a tree branch serves only to prove that the supplemental excess of vision that is the aura is not particular to any one moment in an economy of vision, but is distributed along all nodal points in the economy of sight. That which Benjamin called “distance” is actually the irreducibility of the visual object into a static object free from the visual circulation that eventually annihilates the visual object as an object of sight. This finally is as simple as the fact that we cannot look at the same thing forever and that things impel us to look at other things. The way in which our gaze moves is directly related to the way in which our bodies and our eyes are plugged into the economy itself. “Distance,” then, is a form of vibration between the two determinations of mediation. Like the commodity, the object of vision occupies two states simultaneously, it is at once a thing, a use-value; and a place holder in the syntax of an economy of vision, an exchange-value. The experience of unbridgeable distance registers the impending disappearance or submergence of any visual object back into the regulated circulation of vision itself. Distance, that is, aura, is the poignant registration of the visual object’s oscillation between its two determinations: an object of vision, and a moment in the circulation of vision.
26.Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, 89.
27.Ibid. Storytelling in the essay is pitted against the production of events designed for easy consumption, that is, what Benjamin presciently calls “information.” The clash of storytelling and information in this wonderful essay stages the confrontation of two modes of production that also clash in “The Work of Art,” the pre-industrial and the modern.
28.. Information, as it turns out, has less use-value outside of the circuits of the market than did storytelling. It is not knowledge really; to function it must remain in channels.
It is important here to distinguish between mediation per se, as in the mediation of events by a medieval manuscript or the transportation of sugar cane on a barge, and mediation in its self-conscious form; that is, media as media that, like the commodity in circulation, has both a particular component (use-value) and an abstract component (exchange-value) in every “byte.” To understand media thus is to argue that each infinitesimally small slice of media has value in its content, its information, and in its form as media itself. Media as media always posits and refers back to the circulatory system in which it has and is currency.
29.Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, 89.
30.What Benjamin only peripherally perceives about the phenomenon that he dubs aura is that it is an artifact of a visual economy. His perception of it marks a shift in the speed of the circulation of visual economy. The aura, as observed and constructed by Benjamin, is a primordial form of the exchange-value of the visual object produced by the systematic circulation of looks, and hence of “images,” in an emerging economy of sight. The labor power accreting on the visual object gives it a certain palpable agency; that is why compelling objects look back. In the moment of their looking at us, we encounter the indifference of the value-system to our own being. In the postmodern, objects look back at us with such intensity that they see through us. In their indifference to our individuality is their sublimity. Benjamin records earlier experiences of this kind of event. Quoting Proust he transcribes, “Some people who are fond of secrets flatter themselves that objects retain something of the gaze that has rested on them,” adding, “The ability it would seem, of returning the gaze.” As Benjamin notes, “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.” In his effort to define the auratic, he quotes Valery as well, writing, “To say, ‘Here I see such and such an object’ does not establish an equation between me and the object… . In dreams, however, there is an equation. The things I see, see me just as much as I see them” (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, 188 and 189). The concept of the aura is the semi-conscious acknowledgment of the work or image as simultaneously commodity and currency—as being at once itself (an object) and a moment in the circulation of vision. As with storytelling itself, which for Benjamin becomes a topic on the eve of its extinction, the aura becomes observable as soon as there is a transformation in the status of objects. Visual objects, like the events that are no longer held in an organic relation by storytelling but instead appear as information, appear via a new mode of production in the modern. This mode of production functions at a new speed.
31.Though the aura does not apply to vision alone but rather denotes the specter of tradition in the context of fragmentation (the specter of humanity in the context of objectivity), I emphasize the visual here because through the eye one may grasp most easily the dynamics of circulation in general.
Because such disappearance of authenticity is at once more clearly marked in the realm of the visual (Benjamin, Berger, Baudrillard) and, simultaneously, at present more characteristic of late capitalism, I will restrict my comments here to the visual component of aura.
32.If one takes the fetish as an intimation to the abject individual of the power of the world system, then it could be said that simulation as spectacle is a dim version of the sublime; it occurs when the shutter on the lamp of the unrepresentable is just barely open. If simulation is an excess of reference without a clear referent, then the sublime is an excess of referent without adequate reference. All the simulation in the world cannot represent the world system, even though the sublimity of such a spectacle evokes its ominous presence. This dual inadequation between a symbolic that cannot represent its object and an object that cannot find its symbolic representation defines the semantic field of the postmodern condition.
33.Debord, Society of the Spectacle, #32.
34.Adorno and Horkheimer show the practical causes and effects of the transformation of the signifier in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “The more completely language is lost in the announcement, the more words are debased as substantial vehicles of meaning and become signs devoid of quality; the more purely and transparently words communicate what is intended, the more impenetrable they become. The demythologization of language, taken as an element of the whole process of enlightenment, is a relapse into magic” (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Joda Cumming [New York: Continuum, 1976], 164). “Terms themselves become impenetrable; they obtain a striking force, a power of adhesion and repulsion which makes them like their extreme opposite, incantations. They come to be a kind of trick, because the name of the prima donna is cooked up in the studio on a statistical basis, or because a welfare state is anathematized by using taboo terms such as ‘bureaucrats’ or ‘intellectuals,’ or because base practice uses the name of the country as a charm. In general, the name—to which magic most easily attaches—is undergoing a chemical change: a metamorphosis into capricious, manipulable designations, whose effect is admittedly now calculable, but which for that very reason is just as despotic as that of the archaic name. First names, those archaic remnants, have been brought up to date either by stylization as advertising trademarks (film stars’ surnames have become first names), or by collective standardization. In comparison, the bourgeois family name which, instead of being a trade-mark, once individualized its bearer by relating him to his own past history, seems antiquated. It arouses a strange embarrassment in Americans. In order to hide the awkward distance between individuals, they call one another ‘Bob’ and ‘Harry,’ as interchangeable team members. This practice reduces relations between human beings to the good fellowship of the sporting community and is a defense against the true kind of relationship” (164 –65).
35.Using symbolic logic, Lacan shows the fallacy of the static principle of identity (X = X), saying “the signifier with which one designated the same signifier is evidently not the same signifier as the one with which one designates the other—this is obvious enough. The word obsolete, in so far as it may signify that the word obsolete is itself an obsolete word, is not the same word obsolete in each case” (FFCP, 210). This logical operation of the signifier indexes and indeed constitutes the subject alienated from himself. Alienation in the signifier, which Lacan calls the vel of alienation, “condemns the subject to appearing only in that division [in which] if it appears on one side as meaning, produced by the signifier, it appears on the other as aphanisis” (FFCP, 210). In the choice between being and meaning, “If we choose being, the subject disappears, it eludes us, it falls into non-meaning. If we choose meaning, the meaning survives only deprived of that part of non-meaning that is, strictly speaking, that which constitutes in the realization of the subject, the unconscious. In other words, it is in the nature of this meaning, as it emerges in the field of the Other, to be in a large part of its field, eclipsed by the disappearance of being, induced by the very function of the signifier” (FFCP, 211). The meaning is no longer meaning for the subject posited by the signifier whose being now fades. This phenomenon, what Derrida identifies as “the trace,” can be expressed by the phrase, “I am no longer in my words.”
The vel of alienation “whose properties depend on this, that there is, in the joining [the intersection of the sets “meaning” and “being”], one element that whatever the choice operating may be, has as its consequence a neither one, nor the other” (FFCP, 211), is further elaborated by Lacan in an example that proves particularly relevant here: “Your money or your life! If I choose the money, I lose both. If I choose life, I have life without money, namely, a life deprived of something” (FFCP, 212). It is, of course, not an accident that Lacan places the imperative imposed by capital as the cynosure for the function of the sign, however, Lacan does not dwell upon this relation. Instead he finds the source of the alienating vel, in Hegel’s master slave dialectic: “Your freedom or your life!” (FFCP, 212) and characterizes the unique element of this vel as the “lethal factor” (FFCP, 213). One chooses alienation in the signifier or death. For Lacan, the entry into the symbolic is not a matter of disposition, as he says, “this alienating or is not an arbitrary invention, nor is it a matter of how one sees things. It is a part of language itself. This or exists” (FFCP, 212). The persistence of this “or,” coupled precisely to the historical transformation of how one sees things, accounts for the radical dislocation of political consciousness from political event.
36.Except perhaps at the level of individual experience. I mean “individual experience” in an almost technical sense, that is, as marking off a zone of conscious life at the threshold of capitalization in which one establishes a unique relationship to a particular event, signifier, or constellation of materials. Though one side of the product may emerge as capital (a life spent in the factory, a work of art), the other side is a residue of the greatest importance. See, for example, Georges Bataille’s ideas for a “science of the heterogeneous” in Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
37.Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 52. I want to emphaszie that Wenders does not bring us any closer to answering Jardine’s question, “if … gynesis at work in the male text is rooted in male paranoia, what happens when women take over this discourse in the name of women?” (263).
38.Infantilization, in a way different from but not entirely unlike feminization as a model for televisual unconsciousness, raises certain questions about the celebratory character many postmodern writers have taken with respect to film and television’s deterritorialization/re-organization/superseding/etc. of the subject. The question of the subject in the postmodern is an iteration of the effect of the image on language, and therefore equally on meaning and existence.
39.Jardine, Gynesis, 213 (fr., Irigary, Ce sexe, pp. 138–139).
40.Jardine, Gynesis, 210 and 209.
41.Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 78.
42.One might recall here that this is precisely the function of images of women according to Laura Mulvey. See “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Evans (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
43.Debord, Society of the Spectacle, #158.
44.For Gramsci, Americanism implied not only a routinization of work experience, but the concomitant necessity of “breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing of productive operations exclusively to the mechanical physical aspects.” Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Goeffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 277–318 at 302. I discuss Gramsci’s idea of Americanism in chapter 6.
45.Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1987), 26– 48.
46.See Noam Chomsky, “Notes on Nafta: The Monsters of Mankind,” in The Nation, March 29, 1993, 412–16. He argues that the necessary condition of transnational corporations is the destruction of democratic consciousness. In any case, they are acting as if it didn’t exist and putting policy into place to ensure that it doesn’t exist at least at the level of representation. How much more effective when the mass media engages the microcosms of our own sensibilities to work in tandem with the macrocosmic interests of transnational capital.
47.This is the basic mise-en-scène of cyberpunk.
48.Terminator 2 provides a perfect example of such malleability in the advanced terminator, the T1000. Without going into the Lacanian dynamics here, let me simply say that this humanoid machine provides a figure for and of the members of the audience. The T1000 can consolidate itself in order to produce a striking force, but it also can morph in order to become inconspicuous (famously, it became the very floor walked upon), trick others, and conceal its purposes. It can take on any face, any texture, any identity without giving up its final ends: to kill strategically with the purposes of infinitely perpetuating humanity’s subjugation to its own machines, that is, the mechanics of capital. Once again, the stakes are nothing short of the foreclosure of the future.
49.In the program of the masochist from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 155.
50.Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).
51.The analogy here between self-employed trash-pickers and small-time vendors who find their niches within the interstices of the socius is not accidental here.
52.I would venture as well that it is this unrecognized value-producing activity, along with other kinds of informal economy (attention) described as disguised wage labor both in third-world economies by political scientists and in patriarchal economies by feminist socio-linguists, that make up the bulk of the unacknowledged maintenance of the world.
53.I want to thank Gopal Balikrishnan for this formulation and for a conversation on the form of value that inspired some of my remarks here.