Epilogue

Paying Attention

And ale does more than Milton can To justify God’s ways to man. —A. E. Houseman

Since the major part of each of the chapters that make up this book were first drafted in the early to mid-nineties, much has transpired to make the Cinematic Mode of Production along with the attention theory of value seem even more necessary to an understanding of the present moment. The question, “what is the relationship between media, social organization, and production?” is more urgent than ever—having become central not only in the unthought of the logistics of globalization, but central in current economic thinking as well. In the screen/society how can we think simultaneously the systemic imbrication of mass media (from cinema to cell phones), the politico-economic (including neo-imperialism and war), and consciousness (from the quotidian to the outer limits of philosophy and fantasy)?

The internet came into being, along with the explosion of the stock market and a new set of billionaires and business models. In one way or another, these transformations perceived, acted upon, and realized the transformed situation of media pathways and their attendant bodies. Michael Hardt (who read an earlier version of this book with his graduate students at Duke in 1995 when it was my dissertation) wrote Empire with Antonio Negri, and together they later developed the concept of affective labor from their prior concepts of social cooperation and what, in Labor of Dionysus, they called the factory-society. For them, and now for a reviving Marxism, media played a larger role in capitalist mediation. Jonathan Crary wrote Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, which understood the organization of attention as central to the development of visual forms and technologies. September 11, the spectacle, happened, resulting in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars, though now admitted even by government to be based upon “faulty intelligence” (a further breakdown of sign function?)—as if there were ever any doubt, have served not only as vehicles of imperialist control, but also to underscore the continuous calibration of social relations embarked upon by the state. But it is perhaps only now in 2005, with the full blown emergence of what is being called the attention economy, that the significance of the convergence of media and society are becoming fully apparent.

In my own view, the academic left still has some catching up to do to the shifts in mediatic function. On October 29, 2005, I attended a forum on the Geopolitics of Contemporary Capitalism at the University of California– Santa Cruz that was organized by New Left Review editor Gopal Balakrishnan and focused on the recent book by members of the Retort Collective, Iain Boal, T. J. Clarke, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts entitled Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. Balakrishnan, these authors, and economist/theorist Bob Brenner were on the panel. While raising important issues, this discussion helped me to pinpoint what aspects of media theory still need to be internalized by “the left” in the United States.

In an assertion that I largely would agree with, the authors of Afflicted Powers write:

The deeper and deeper involvement of the state in the day-to-day instrumentation of consumer obedience meant that increasingly it came to live or die by its investment in, and control of, the field of images—the alternative world conjured up by the new battery of “perpetual emotion machines,” of which TV was the dim pioneer and which now beckons the citizen every waking minute. This world of images had long been a structural necessity of a capitalism oriented toward the overproduction of commodities, and therefore the constant manufacture of desire for them; but by the late twentieth century it had given rise to a new polity.”¹

This assessment is correct in its broad outlines; however, the enormity of this transformation somehow escapes Retort when it comes both to the collectives own strategies of representation and analysis, and to its understanding of the relationship between media and what the collective calls “primitive accumulation.” In an effort to register the ever-more-dynamic field of signification/signalization, Retort has written that, “the modern state … has come to need weak citizenship.”² Weak citizenship “but for that very reason the object of the state’s constant, anxious attention, an unstoppable barrage of idiot fashions and panics and image-motifs, all aimed at sewing the citizen back (unobtrusively, “individually”) into a deadly simulation of society.”³ Readers of The Cinematic Mode of Production will recognize the necessary daily calibration of spectators here as well as the transformed proprioception of subjects. However, for Retort, 9/11 represents a huge blow to the state’s control and organization of the spectacle that left the state anxious and afraid and feeling vulnerable (don’t you feel sorry for it?). Retort’s account of the emotional and psychological condition of the state in the current political situation stems from their view that images of 9/11 represented a crisis for the state—a defeat. “The spectacular state … is obliged to devise an answer to the defeat of September 11^th.”⁴ Thus, for Retort, the war and all the hoopla in Iraq is a quasi-hysterical endeavor to overcome this defeat in the spectacle.

At the conference, Retort defended this “Miltonian” view of 9/11 and the paroxysms of the “afflicted powers,” and, in accord with their own political seriousness, took the spectacle seriously on its own terms, as it were, eschewing a kind of bread and circuses understanding of its fevered inanity. For Retort, the situation of afflicted powers results in a “military neoliberalism” that they defined there as “violent accumulation under conditions of the spectacle.” This idea leads them to theorize an emergent condition of permanent war, not too different from that argued for by Agamben in State of Exception, but surprising to hear without any mention of George Orwell’s ideas on the topic from the mid-1940s.⁵ What is noteworthy here is that Retort considers this state of permanent war to be a consequence of the defeat dealt to the U.S. superstate in the spectacle, and that furthermore, this defeat plunges the United States back into a kind of primitive accumulation through warfare. However, this idea that the Bush regime is purely reactionary misses the pro-active, indeed pre-emptive, character of contemporary state power. One does not even have to believe that “Bush did it,” as the theory ran, to see that the current U.S. regime and those who are close to it have been the real beneficiaries of 9/11.

Bob Brenner, for his part, did not see 9/11 as a defeat for the current U.S. regime, but rather as an opportunity, a step forward in some respects, a necessary condition for an ultra-right-wing power grab that set out not to make the world safe for capitalism, but to enrich a particular domestic coterie of neo-conservative capitalists. Indeed, according to Brenner, the pay-off of 9/11 for the neo-conservatives has been the unfettered implementation of their “ultra-capitalist domestic policy.” Interestingly, Brenner does not see the Bush regime as a sheer, or even a creeping coup, but notes almost in passing that the religious right had been building grassroots support for itself for many years.

Gopal Balakrishnan, who asked the provocative question “why put twenty-five years of good business at risk?” with reference to the invasion of Iraq and the global war on terror, spoke of the “erosion of the field of intelligibility of the intrastate system,” saying that the intentions of nations were no longer legible. Systems and sub-systems including militaries, corporations, juridical institutions, and national agencies were all behaving as if they were semi-autonomous. Thus, they spin out their own often contradictory logics, thereby creating a crisis in the categories of geopolitical rationality.

The erosion, or perhaps we should say implosion of the field of intelligibility, voiced by Balakrishnan, is also characteristic of Giorgio Agamben’s learned and meticulous long deconstruction of sovereignty in State of Exception. Agamben shows that the juridical inclusion of the extrajuridical suspension of juridical powers by the sovereign or sovereign state—its effort to include powers that by definition are excluded from the legal exercise of is sovereignty—is the very condition of sovereignty and has been since the Roman Empire.⁶ Likewise, Jacques Derrida in Rogues argues in the first long essay, “The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?)” that the state of permanent war has produced an erosion in the legibility of social, juridical, and national movements/modes of governance.⁷ His inquiry into questions of sovereignty, subjectivity, democracy, and freedom, cleanses the common and even the philosophical categories of the understanding of these phenomena of their use, and splits philosophical hairs in search of the event.

In spite of the fact that Derrida concludes that “there is something of the Rogue state in every state,” Rogues does not have much encouragement for the activist.⁸ Furthermore, in Rogues, one cannot easily identify, as it were, the agents of history. This leaves, for the second essay, the question of reason and the effort to “save the honor of reason” as a kind of necessity given the absence of other identifiable agents and the effective autonomization of rationalities. Without getting lost in the mire of Derrida’s two essays in Rogues, the first of which seems to say that “when it comes to politics, if you think you know than you’re a fascist,” and the second of which seems to say, “it may be impossible but let’s make reason reasonable,” the question of history and periodization seems paramount. At one point toward the end of the first essay, Derrida engages in plainspeak and seems to imply that his descriptions of the deconstruction of democracy on the one hand and of reason on the other are not a mere philosophical exercise carried out at the highest levels of abstraction, but are informed by a kind of historicomaterial exigency: “such a questioning of sovereignty is not simply some formal or academic necessity for a kind of speculation in political philosophy, or else a form of genealogical, or perhaps even deconstructive, vigilance. It is already under way. It is at work today; it is what’s coming, what’s happening.”⁹ Thus, what at first appears in his text as a kind of ontology of “democracy” and “reason” (that is, their necessary conditions of non-being) is cast into a historical periodicity, if not narrative—one that is not exactly told but nonetheless haunts the text as the only possible, or rather ultimate explanation for its occasion—the deconstruction of the categories of sovereignty is “what’s happening.” Thus the “real referent” of Rogues is History. With different emphasis, Agamben’s book State of Exception traces the fact, if you will, that extrajuridical powers, in/as the state of exception, are the very condition of sovereignty at least since the Roman Empire. Thus, even though Agamben points out that today many so-called democracies are regularly if not permanently calling upon their exceptional powers to maintain rule, he shows that this exceptionalism, recognized either partially or, in Schmitt, clearly, has been the historical condition of sovereignty since it has been theorized.

With respect to Derrida and Agamben, the question arises, why now? Why do these works about the crisis of reason, democracy, and law appear as we approach a condition where exceptionalism and roguery are exercised regularly rather than lurking at the deconstructible edges of the closure of the juridical (even though Agamben shows numerous historical examples of the exercise of the state of exception)? Rather, why do these quasi-ontological works, which strive to show that (now) it has never been the case that democracy, sovereignty, and reason have been fully present, appear at this historical juncture? If such has always been so, what is different about the present moment that calls forth the articulation of this now quasi-ontological situation?

The Retort Collective, too, writes at length about a condition they call permanent war, which results in a kind of collapse of the thinkability of war itself. Orwell, though none of the abovementioned seem to think he is worth invoking, theorized this as early as 1948 under the rubric of Newspeak and its annihilation of thought (War is Peace). Orwell did so not in the rarefied atmosphere of high philosophy but rather in the fairly realistdriven language of sociology and dystopian social realist fictional narrative. Significant here is that Orwell showed that the conditions of permanent war emerged as a strategy of accumulation and simultaneously as a strategy of thought control designed for the preservation of hierarchical society. War, while driving the engines of production more and more furiously, provides a psychologically satisfying rational for both the appropriation and destruction of the social surplus. Furthermore, and this seems key, this systematic is inseparable from the effective collapse of language by what he somewhat heavy handedly though no less deftly for all that saw as the necessary thought control exercised through the utilization of media (linguistic and visual) as an assault on the intelligence and thus upon the physical life of the population. The conscious dimension of this systematic that had to deny even to itself the function and implementation of its own agenda, Orwell famously called “doublethink.” Doublethink, or the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s head simultaneously and believe them both to be true, was, in 1984, characteristic of all aspects of social life (recall the party slogans: War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength) and as such represented the collapse of any dialectical thought by the real, practical imposition of what he already had glimpsed as the end of history—the eternal domination of humanity by an immortal, relatively static, and ultimately unconceptualizeable totalitarian society.

For me, after briefly surveying this field of inquiry into political sovereignty, characterized by this erosion of the field of intelligiblity, what all of the commentaries discussed above have in common is that they represent various takes on the crisis of representation, to borrow a phrase from poststructuralism. Retort sees a media environment in which 9/11 itself induces a crisis in the spectacle that threatens and panics state power. Brenner mentions in passing that 9/11 has something to do with the strange ability of the right to convince Americans that it represented their interests, and Balakrishnan sees the erosion of the field of intelligibility of the interstate system. Likewise, Agamben and Derrida, themselves explicitly plying the deconstructive möbius strip (Agamben works on one large one while Derrida moves into its fractal structure), are concerned with the impossibility of a correct notion of sovereignty and thus of freedom. Given this shared symptom of the crisis of representation, is it too much to ask the following: Might it be that the intensification of the penetration of visual technologies—of cinematic ale—into the discursive sphere of civil society and geopolitical rationality offers a point of connection for these partially divergent takes on contemporary globalization? Again, does political theory need to become film theory, or media theory?

In previous chapters, I already have mentioned how visual technologies scramble language-function and indeed I have suggested that linguistics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and post-structuralism might, like so many architectural styles, all be taken as periodizing markers for intensification of the operation of machines of the visual—spitting out their particular analytics and thus their particular objects at different moments of the reorganization of the graphosphere by the mediasphere. Skipping a few steps here and leaving out the “somes,” “mays,” and “mosts” that liberals like to see in claims so qualified that they offend no one but the “unreasonable,” let me say directly here that such a thesis places the intersection of political economy and culture at the center of all humanistic inquiry. The media are not merely engines of representation, they are economic engines, which as they represent also monetize. Therefore, what I find missing from all of the above accounts of the war in Iraq and the direction of the U.S. superstate is precisely this question of culture, more particularly even, the question of the culture industry.

It seems to me that the work of Adorno and Horkheimer (long dismissed as being too overdetermining and illiberal), who see the culture industry as an essential component in the processing of the masses to make them fit to return to work, as well as that of Althusser, who understands ideological state apparatuses such as “the school,” “the church,” and “the media” as implements for the production and reproduction of subjects “who work,” and also of Foucault, who understands the articulation of various subjectformations and those of power to be inseparable (as in one and the same), were missing from the discussion of Retort’s work on that day and that their lessons, along with the lessons of feminist work on domestic and informal labor, have been all too quickly forgotten. It is as if what were really most radical about the sixties and seventies had fallen away, and the New Left had all of a sudden become the Old Left. Let us hope that work such as Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, which shows that not only is the prison-industrial complex a state and corporate system directly tied to the legacy of slavery, but also an ideological institution that naturalizes many other normative social impositions regarding not just punishment and crime but also race, class, gender, justice, human possibility, and humanity itself, will not meet the same fate.¹⁰ I bring up Davis’s work here because not only is it an intervention in a field of relative invisibility (since prisons are for-profit institutions that claim to disappear problems of today’s for-profit society), but because it shows important aspects of the relationship between institutional and cultural hegemony and the prevention of revolutionary progressive social change. The crisis of representation (in every sense of the word) of the incarcerated is linked directly to the sociopolitical, the historic, and the economic, all of which are registered in the cultural. Davis’s work, however, shows where the profit-making and taking occur, and offers numerous sites of struggle. It points toward the politicoeconomic organization of race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality. She points out that before the abolition of slavery many people could not imagine its end, just as today many cannot imagine the abolition of the prison. Davis shows that the questions of punishment and social justice are also questions of culture, and more particularly of the economicization of culture.

The multiplicity of the cultural (not to say of the multitudes) leads Davis to the introduction of complexity without the aporia of abstract philosophy itself becoming a stultifying burden. In deconstructing the single liberatory solution, we move toward, the people. In some ways, Davis’ discussion of the prison-industrial complex and Derrida’s discussion of sovereignty are moving in the same direction. However, there are more and less effective ways to displace the unitary ideals of sovereignty and make such a move toward the masses. Derrida writes, “For wherever the name of God would allow us to think something else, for example a vulnerable nonsovereignty, one that suffers and is divisible, one that is mortal even, capable of contradicting itself or of repenting (a thought that is neither impossible nor without example), it would be a completely different story [different from that of the unitary soverign God], perhaps even the story of a god who deconstructs himself in his ipseity.”¹¹ But Davis writes, “It is true that if we focus myopically on the existing system [of crime and punishment] … it is very hard to imagine a structurally similar system capable of handling such a vast population of lawbreakers. If, however, we shift our attention from the prison, perceived as an isolated institution, to the set of relationships that comprise the prison industrial complex, it may be easier to think about alternatives. In other words, a more complicated framework may yield more options than if we simply attempt to discover a single substitute for the prison system. The first step, then, would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.”¹²

We are to understand from this juxtaposition that in a society still underpinned by the dialectic of the identity of identity and non-identity, in other words, in a society in which multiplicity is constantly being configured as a moment in the movement from M(1) to M(2) (from money as capital to money as a larger capital), that the unitary formations are the reactionary ones and that the scene of the multiple is where production and struggle occurs. The god who deconstructs himself in his ipseity and the letting go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment both express a will to unravel the unitary, the identitarian. This deconstruction indicates a movement by (the) people beyond the normative modes of capitals’ valorization, and while capital must hasten to capture the always-expanding envelope of revolutionary innovation, the increasing complexity of society is driven by the masses and this complexity is a result of struggle. However, it may be that in the current moment the less abstract and the more concrete the referent of theory, the closer it might get to various forms of struggle. Because The Cinematic Mode of Production is a work that traces the trajectories of abstraction and capitalization of concrete social practices of spectatorship and attention, it is important to say here that once the new architectonics of social domination are grasped, a turn to the particularities of struggles against the logic of the spectacle is essential. It is for that reason that the companion text for this volume is my book Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalism, and the World-Media System, which examines the struggle with the spectacle from the standpoint of activist-artists and revolutionaries in the postcolonial Philippines.¹³ It also explains why the imagination, which in Adorno and Herkheimer’s paradigm of the culture industry “withers away” and in The Cinematic Mode of Production is shown to undergo continuous assault, is the terrain on which many anti-racist feminist Marxists today place their hopes and stake their claims.

To continue to make the case for culture and for the specificity of culture in the context of this political economy of culture in stacatto form: What an analysis of the current situation requires is what Althusser called “the standpoint of the production and reproduction of the relations of production,” which took into consideration not only the replacement of usedup materials at the factory, but the replacement, whether daily or generationally, of laborers. For Althusser, the question of politics involved the question of the production and reproduction of subjects, not only through wage labor and the necessities that could be purchased with the wage, but psychologically, as it were, through a process he called interpellation—the calling of the worker-subject into being by ideological apparatuses. These were exemplified in his work by the “Hey you” of ideology, in the mouth of the police officer, or of God (to Moses), but generally also uttered by licensing boards, politicians, television—all of the techno-material structures that daily produced and reproduced the subject through various modes of instantiation. Not only is ideology “omnipresent” (Althusser) and practice always already “ideological” (as Zizek has shown) but any clear sustainable distinction between ideology and materiality in the society of the spectacle has collapsed.

Today, with the “death of the subject,” its shattering, the matter is more complex. Thus, in calling for the abolition of the prison, Davis takes into consideration not only media representations of criminality, but also the strong links of the institution of the prison to slavery, the privatization of prisons and the sale of prison labor, the exponential growth of prisons over the past three decades, the ideology of security, multinational capitalism, U.S. imperialism, and third-world labor, among other factors. She writes, “if we are willing to take seriously the consequences of a racist and classbiased justice system, we will reach the conclusion that enormous numbers of people are in prisons simply because they are, for example, black, Chicano, Vietnamese, Native American or poor, regardless of their ethnic background. They are sent to prison not so much because of crimes committed [Davis has pointed out that most of us have broken the law at one time or another], but largely because their communities have been criminalized. Thus programs for decriminalization will not only have to address specific activities that have been criminalized—such as drug use and sex work—but also criminalized populations and communities.”¹⁴ In short, the prison industrial complex depends upon the coordination of multiple vectors of social practice spanning the representational, the subjective, the psychological, and the economic. It is a particular formation, constructing its subjects and its objects, as well as its partial subjects, it’s intensities, and it’s systemics, that results from an amalgamation of a variety of racist, sexist, nationalist, capitalist practices—all of which are negotiated and renegotiated at the cultural level. For Davis, it would seem that the prison is everywhere, a fundamental presupposition of U.S. society—an institution, but also an ideology and a philosophy, a material structure and a structure of feeling, in short, a set of practices that underpins daily life in both conscious and unconscious ways. As I mentioned earlier, because the arguments against prison abolition are so entrenched that they are presuppositions, Davis must remind us that only a short time ago the abolition of slavery for many—including many slaves themselves—was unimaginable. In making an argument that suggests not only that prisons are the legacy of slavery (where Black Codes, chain gangs, and prison labor constitute slavery by other means) but also that the exponential growth of the prison industrial complex from the 1970s forward is effectively one Postmodern equivalent of enslavement, Davis demonstrates that the various avatars of incarceration (racism, misogyny, capitalist production of its human detritus, ideologies of crime and punishment, and “security”) require mobilization, maintenance, development, and constant redeployment in order to do the work of supporting and increasing the scope of the prison industrial complex. Concealed as the prison system, these avators function to disappear human and social problems, creating a zone of unrepresentability, a kind of anti-spectacle that is part of the other side, the unseen of the spectacle. Now, in the current moment of the “post-human,” these processes, along with other similarly mobilized avatars of domination, are chunked and microchunked—endlessly fragmenting and differentiable, but nonetheless functional and functionalized. What one needs is a dialectics of multiplicity, of visibility, of representation—a dialectics of the utterance.

Since we now have the production of subjectivity (or post-subjective affects and intensities) in the equation, we also have the situation of the spectator, or what, in a different and more utopian context, Alvin Toffler once called the prosumer. As I have been arguing throughout The Cinematic Mode of Production, this prosumer finds his/her first incarnation as a spectator, who produces and reproduces him/herself by exercising the “freedom reflex,” desire, intention, the unconscious, what-have-you, while valorizing the media pathways; s/he produces value for capital through attention— both as a commodity that is bought and sold in advertising, is speculated on via the promotional budgets of blockbusters, and as a medium that remakes, reconfigures various corporeal-mental-chemical structures that allow him or her to go back to work in a situation of hyperflexible accumulation. Deleuze called this arrangement “desiring-production,” but I have endeavored to give these assemblages a strict economic meaning that accompanies its other personal, cultural, collective significances. Clearly then, if the spectator works and cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye, not only has the situation of production been transformed because the form of labor has undergone a profound modification in its interface with technology, but in the dialectics of visibility and invisibility the commodity form itself has also been altered and with it, the form of value. I have tried to show how these transformations can be conceptualized in the cinematic century in and through that relation known as the image. It now seems more obvious than ever that the present moment is going to produce a new set of interfaces in which a shift in the quantity of attention being expropriated will result in yet another shift in the quality of social relations themselves.

What we are party to (and in this I am close to the Retort project and their embrace of the work of Karl Polanyi) is the continuing enclosure (or capture) and thus expropriation of the commons, not only of water, air, federal lands, DNA, and nature, but of all of the objective and subjective resources that have to date constituted the “human” in humanity. In the twenty-first century “the human” will return as a spectre, a haunting. Indeed, “our” vestigal humanism haunts a planet where billions of human beings do not have the luxury to indulge in the richness of such a conceit. Because the expropriated commons includes not just shared social spaces or “natural” resources but the historically produced and won realms of freedom and creativity that have been considered the inalienable characteristics of human beings—thought, imagination, proprioception, aesthetics, faith—in short, all those zones of creativity that traditionally functioned in a relation of relative autonomy to capitalism, we are in a position to discern that Retort’s idea that capital has moved to a strategy of primitive accumulation through warfare is incomplete in significant ways. Not only because war, and particularly imperialist warfare has been characteristic of the United States for more than one hundred years, but because all of the indicated human qualities, our common humanity, are now being brought online to feed the beast. We must understand that primitive accumulation, if it means the violent robbing of the wealth of people without payment, is not, as Retort acknowledges, only or even mostly about oil. And it is not even about permanent war, although, as noted, war is an important component inasmuch as it serves to concentrate production while giving the minimal return of socially produced general wealth to the general population—and as such is not just an economic but also a cultural endeavor. Primitive accumulation is now about mounting a belligerent campaign against the source of all value—human creativity itself, now located not just in the body of the worker, but in the mind of all: content producers, weak citizens, janitors and professors, natives, overseas contract workers, whores of all stripes—the general intellect. Wage labor, the exchange of money for subjective power, is not the only mode of exploitation—what falls outside of it and yet still enriches capital is primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation is not simply the annexing of lands and resources, nor the environmental devastation wrought by corporations, nor the usual privatizations of public trusts demanded by the World Bank, the IMF, and now the WTO. All of the unpaid work of social cooperation, of attention, is also the active expropriation of the commons—part of the real costs of production, paid for with the living labor/life of disenfranchised masses. The Cinematic Mode of Production lays out the nascent architecture of normalization for this form of primitive accumulation that is even now being legitimated and set in place in the official economic policies of capitalism. Along with life and labor, the very consciousness of our bodies has been and is being expropriated. For this we have become not just spectators, but specters. The only way out, short of a complete expropriation of the expropriators, a radical redistribution of wealth and a complete overhaul of the human network (whatever that would look like), is to drop out completely, that is, for all practical purposes, to cease to exist, to cease to speak, write or be written as the discourse of the spectacle. Otherwise, you (or at least chunks of you) are working for the man. Sorry, Jim, but that’s how it is.

Of course, this spectacular mode of accumulation, which announces a transformation if not a superceding of the money form, shows that there is nothing primitive about contemporary primitive accumulation. It is accumulative hoarding under capitalism by means other than the wage, but these means and the economies of spectacularity and spectrality that they imply are composed of the very latest methods for the reduction of massive populations to the most “primitve” forms of suffering and bare life.

In a remarkable book, which only recently came to my attention, Paolo Virno in A Grammar of the Multitude makes the case that it is precisely the general intellect that has be subsumed by postmodern capitalism—the cognitive-linguistic abilities of the species have been harnessed by capital as an engine of production. Arguing that “productive labor in its totality appropriates the special characteristics of the performing artist,” Virno understands virtuosity as the paradigmatic operation of production.¹⁵ “Each one of us is, and has always been, a virtuoso, a performing artist at times mediocre or awkward but, in any event, a virtuoso. In fact the fundamental model of virtuosity … is the activity of the speaker.”¹⁶

Virno asks the following question, “If the entirety of post-Fordist labor is productive (of surplus-value) labor precisely because it functions in a political-virtuosic manner, then the question to ask is this: what is the score which the virtuosos-workers perform?”¹⁷ He answers as follows: “I maintain without too many reservations that the score performed by the multitude in the post-Ford era is the Intellect, intellect as generic human faculty … . [T]he score of modern virtuosos is the general intellect, the general intellect of society, abstract thought which has become the pillar of social production.”¹⁸

As I have argued throughout The Cinematic Mode of Production, the cinematic organization of society has led to the restructuring of perception, consciousness, and therefore of production. Furthermore, this production vis-à-vis the cinematicization of society has become increasingly dematerialized, increasingly sensual and abstract, to the point that it occupies the activities of perception and thought itself. While not actually exploring the techno-visual history of capital that leads up to the colonization of the sensorium and the expropriation of the senses and the intellect, Virno’s work complements the work of The Cinematic Mode of Production by theorizing the performative dimensions of consciousness-production in relation to capital. He writes: “The general intellect manifests itself today, above all, as the communication, abstraction, self-reflection of living subjects. It seems legitimate to maintain that, according to the very logic of economic development, it is necessary that a part of the general intellect not congeal as fixed capital but unfold in communicative interaction under the guise of epistemic paradigms, dialogical performances, linguistic games. In other words, public intellect is one and the same as cooperation, the acting in concert of human labor, the communicative competence of individuals.”¹⁹ “The general intellect manifests itself, today, as a perpetuation of wage labor, as a hierarchical system, as a pillar of the production of surplus-value.”²⁰

Virno further elaborates:

The general intellect is social knowledge turned into the principal productive force; it is the complex of cognitive paradigms, artificial languages, and conceptual clusters which animate social communication and forms of life. The general intellect distinguishes itself form the “real abstractions” typical of modernity, which are all anchored to the principle of equivalence. Real abstraction is above all money, which represents the commensurability of labor, of products, of subjects. Thus, the general intellect has nothing to do with the principle of equivalence. The models of social knowledge are not units of measurement; instead, they constitute the premise for operative heterogeneous possibilities. Techno-scientific codes and paradigms present themselves as an “immediate productive force,” as constructive principles. They do not equalize anything, instead they act as a premise to every type of action.²¹

Which is like saying that the materials of thought have become the hammer, nails, and bulldozers of contemporary social production (but to my mind nonetheless implies that these tools operate within a larger field of equivalences and are organized accordingly). However, what is important here is that in a way that significantly modifies the supplementarity of ideology, Virno understands cognitive-linguistic function as having become directly productive of (surplus) value. As Virno sums it up, “the primary productive resource for contemporary capitalism lies in the linguistic-relational abilities of humankind, in the complex communicative and cognitive faculties (dynameis, powers) which distinguish humans.”²²

So if one thinks of the general intellect as a new order of fixed capital (infrastructure) and virtuosity (performance), as a new paradigm of labor, then what of cinema and attention? For me, a choice between the sets of terms is at present undecideable. Each term provides a figure for the transformed ground of production and productive activity. “The general intellect” has the virtue of invoking the sedimented thought of human history and its material overdetermination but leaves out the decisive character of the visual turn. “Cinema” underscores the historico-material shattering of the linguistic alongside the rise of the visual, the displacement of ontological categories, and the reconfiguration of the imaginary and the subject in the logistics of spectacle. “Virtuosity,” articulates the dynamic between performance and score, emphasizing the creative mediations of subjective activity (labor). Attention makes clear the baseline functioning of consciousness/bodies (labor) in relation to all forms of social machinery, and allows for a consideration of input, output, and throughput at intellectual and corporeal levels. The struggle over the future will undoubtedly refine these terms.

For the moment however, we might note once again that if, as Lacan says, the unconscious is structured like a language, and, as Virno’s work implies, language is structured like the factory, then the unconscious too is an engine of production. This takes on a kind of thickness, if we understand the operations of the unconscious, in addition to dream-work and to the effect it exercises on the organization of the signifier, in terms of the political unconscious. In a previous chapter I argued in a somewhat ontological vein that cinema is the unconscious of the unconscious, and while I would still hold out for the encroachment of capital on the visual as the fundamental historical shift that inaugurates the discourse of the unconscious, it is also important here to see that the prison industrial-complex, the third world, and the invisibility of production in general are also concrete formations, the excluded formations of the spectacle’s “epic poems of commodities”—each and all formations for which the set of operations identified with the unconscious are symptoms.

In the organization of the visible world, cinema, or what elsewhere I have called “the world media-system,” simultaneously creates huge swaths of functional invisibility. Such a conception, in which human activity (aesthetic form, political ideology, identity, desire, sexuality, reproduction, oldfashioned work, utterance, etc.) is spawned in some determinate relation to the world-system, is therefore mediated by and mediating the dialectics of visibility and invisibility. Indeed the apocalyptic themes of mid-century, themes that include the fundamental irrationality of the rational (Horkheimer’s “End of Reason” and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Enlightenment as Mass Deception”), the evacuation of being not only from the sign, but from writing understood as the situation of all representation (Derrida), and the foreclosure of representation itself (Debord) function as a kind of barometer, charting the tidal rise of an unconscious that swallows up what may now be glimpsed as the relatively small islands of intelligibility that formerly seemed to contain All. The irrationality of capital’s rational accumulation, its constant humanization of an anti-human agenda was, in the onslaught of its expansion, understood to require profound structural shifts in the operation of mediation in order to adequately distort the field of intelligibility and operationalize it in accord with its deeper though unrepresentable logic. In fact, Virno’s insight into the capture of speech itself by capital was already audible in the following passage from Derrida in 1967:

It is therefore as if what we call language could have been in its origin and in its end only a moment, an essential but determined mode, a phenomenon, an aspect, a species of writing. And as if it had succeeded in making us forget this, and in willfully misleading us, only in the course of an adventure: as that adventure itself. All in all a short enough adventure. It merges with the history that has associated technics and logocentric metaphysics for nearly three millennia. And it now seems to be approaching what is really its own exhaustion; under the circumstances—and this is no more than one example among others—of this death of the civilization of the book, of which so much is said and which manifests itself particularly through a convulsive proliferation of libraries. All appearances to the contrary, this death of the book undoubtedly announces (and in a certain sense has always announced) nothing but a death of speech (of a so-called full speech) and a new mutation in the history of writing, in history as writing. Announces it at a distance of a few centuries. It is on that scale that we must reckon it here, being careful not to neglect the quality of a very heterogeneous historical duration: the acceleration is such, and such its qualitative meaning, that one would be equally wrong in making a careful evaluation of past rhythms. “Death of speech” is of course a metaphor here: before we speak of disappearance, we must think of a new situation for speech, of its subordination within a structure of which it will no longer be the archon.²³

For Derrida, this structure is to be called “writing,” and he sums it up, in one of those formulations that shatters the glass through which, without realizing it, many of us formerly viewed the world: “The ‘rationality’—but perhaps that word should be abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence—of a writing thus enlarged and radicalized no longer issues from a logos.”²⁴ It would appear that for Derrida, this shift away from the linguistic ground of rationality is a response to a moment of “economy” just as was the epoch of phonologocentrism:

The privilege of the phonè does not depend upon a choice that could have been avoided. It responds to a moment of economy (let us say as the “life” of “history” or of “being as self-relationship”). The system of “hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak” through the phonic substance—which presents itself as the nonexterior nonmundane, therefore nonempirical or noncontingent signifier—has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, the idea of world-origin, that arises from the difference between the worldly and the non-worldly, the outside and the inside, ideality and nonideality, universal and nonuniversal, transcendental and empirical, etc.²⁵

Now it is the optico-visual dimensions of the emerging visual economy that displaces phonologocentrism and some of the mechanics by which its economics organize the imaginary and displace not just the signifier but signification.

In setting out such a genealogy of cinema, of capitalized visuality’s displacement of the sign, as a consequence of the continuation of the institution of private property (not the cause but the effect of alienated labor as Marx says), it is correct to recall that the transformed situation of speech and of the sign implied by the cinematic mode of production also received rigorous treatment by Jean Baudrillard in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign.

Noting that “the operation of the sign, the separation of signs, is something as fundamental, as profoundly political, as the division of labor,”²⁶ Baudrillard writes:

1. It is because the logic of the commodity and of political economy is at the very heart of the sign, in the abstract equation of signifier and signified, in the differential combinatory of signs, that signs can function as exchange value (the discourse of communication) and as use value (rational decoding and distinctive social use).

2. It is because the structure of the sign is at the very heart of the commodity form that the commodity can take on, immediately, the effect of signification—not epiphenomenally, in excess of itself, as “message” or connotation—but because its very form establishes it as a total medium, as a system of communication administering all social exchange. Like the sign form, the commodity is a code managing the exchange of values. It makes little difference whether the contents of material production or the immaterial contents of signification are involved; it is the code that is determinant: the rules of the interplay of signifiers and exchange value.²⁷

Baudrillard’s analysis of the homologous logics of signification and commodification is symptomatic of the subsumption of the code by the laws of exchange, its financialization. This financialization must now be understood as part of the effect of the cinematization of social relations. The fusion of industrialization and signification brought about by cinema gives rise to what today is becoming known as the attention economy. The early organization of sensual labor by the circulation of commodity-images from the factory, and then through relationships of what became known as spectatorship, brings about the fundamental cyberneticization of “the code”—the radical and irreversible denaturing of language as machinelanguage, its “inhuman” (that is machinic and economic) dimension, and its imbrication with the capitalist-imaginary. Thus we can see that it is not because of the ontology of the image that the metaphysical ground of signification is shattered, but rather, it is shattered (sublated) through the historico-material operations of the capitalized image, itself a social relation, a product of social praxis and a technology of production.

Throughout this book, I have made an argument for the increasing inadequacy of consciousness to cinematic society and now to media society—to a society that functions through visual and other media and the organization of affect. Jameson’s cognitive mapping provided one (heroic) strategy for producing propaedeutic crutches for a failing consciousness, but this strategy was also an aesthetic—in a worst case scenario a Brazil-like exercise in the imaginary triumph of conscious will over the sublime of a world-system with no outside (for us). In mapping the architecture of the dynamic cage, consciousness increasingly becomes understandable for what it is—a subroutine of global organizational vectors—while the unconscious is revealed to us as the dream-life of the world-system, a dreamlife that is first instantiated, formalized and then tapped to harness the living creative power of human tissue, a source of dream-work, of living labor slated to digitize, objectify, and capitalize its productions. The primitive accumulation at these final frontiers—which in my own worst case scenario makes me think thoughts such as, “as soon as you know it’s too late” (wherever you look, capital is there), and, “if there is hope, it’s in the body” (hence the resurgence of martial arts films)—has resulted in a new set of business models that amount to the foreclosure of humanity. These models, which I will discuss at the end of this chapter, ready a formalization and, therefore, a routinization and legalization, in short, a monetization of these being-expropriated bio-psychic processes that finally will be as inescapable as the air we (will soon pay to) breathe if left to continue on their current trajectory.

The media is the message, or rather, in a dramatic reversal, the message (all of them) is the media … of capitalization. Not surprisingly, then, we are living in a time of the hyper-valuation of media, of which the military is but one. The war in Iraq is symbolic violence—it being understood, of course, that symbolic violence (at the level of the bomb or the letter) implies real murder (words of Richard Dienst: not just Television is War by other means, but War is Television by other means). What we must do, what is being done, is to embark upon the general expansion of the whole concept of mediation, such that one can grasp the multiple and interlaced vectors of mediation (of the network of particulars) and simultaneously figure capital as the ur-medium: the genetic material of first proto- and now actually existing digital culture. Today, de-reification means grasping all objects, images and entities (all ontological catagories and their referents) as mediations. This would imply that most unitary formations confronting us today might best be viewed as a collection of software programs for the organization and representation of data: from the various Islams, to “America,” to Israel, to White. Each of these has an ability to image data and create screens of actuation that enable operators to operate and be operated. These various “world-views” now can be understood as the abstract machines that opened up the social space for the concrete machines that are the various screens and page-views now attended to with ever more fervor and regularity. And just as Marx’s phrase “the anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape” is a formulation that while correctly giving priority to the most advanced evolutionary iteration of a series, changes forever the situation of the ape, so too with the ideologies of yesteryear. They continue to function, but now they must make their way in a “man’s” world, it being understood of course that today’s “man,” whatever her race, gender, class, and nationality, and whether she has access to a computer or not, is also a computerized cyborg running the Pavlovian programs of capital. In Christian Metz’s words, “We watch and we help.”

To conclude then, I would like to take a final chunk of your attention to look at current industry discourse on the attention economy. With apologies for the metallic cheer in some of the language, below follows a post by one Mitch Wagner on Google:

Google’s latest surprise is that it’s now offering enterprise-class Web analytics for free. Why would they do such a thing? They’ve decided that licensing fees are worth less money than the opportunity to find out what pages people are visiting, how long they’re staying there, where they’re coming from, and where they’re going to next. Google Analytics is another microscope Google can use to peer into what people are paying attention to.

It’s just an extension of the real business that Google is in, which isn’t search, or e-mail, or maps, or even advertising. Rather, Google is in the attention business.

Most of us are in the attention business in one way or another. Most jobs consist of large amounts of getting other people to do what you want them to do. But before you can convince someone else to do things your way, you have to get their attention. You need to get some time on the boss’s calendar, or to lure the potential customer into the store. Sometimes you need to hire a lawyer or call the cops just to get the other guy’s attention.

The advertising business is the business of buying and selling attention in bulk quantities. Media outlets such as newspapers, TV, radio shows and online periodicals get you to pay attention by giving you information you want. Then the media outlets turn around to the advertisers and say, “We have all these people paying attention to us. Give us some money and we’ll slip your message in front of them.”

Whereas the rest of us are trying to get other people to pay attention to us, Google seeks to find out what people are already paying attention to and get in front of them for a moment. That’s how AdWords works; Google displays its advertising based on keywords in searches. Search Google for the word “golf,” and you’ll see ads for golf equipment, services, and resorts.

For Google, being in the attention business means it’s of utmost importance for Google to find out what people are paying attention to. To do that, Google has made a history of giving away services that other companies charge an arm and a leg for. Even more amazingly, the service that Google gives away is usually better than the services that other people are charging for. GMail is a great mail client with 2 gigabytes of free storage. Likewise, Google Maps, Google Desktop search, and the Picasa desktop photo-organizer are first rate implementations of what they do.

In exchange for that free service and software, Google wants to look over your shoulder and take notes on what you’re paying attention to and what you’re ignoring.

Right now, Google uses the attention information for one purpose: Ads. It seems to me that attention is a valuable commodity that can be sold in many other ways other than advertising—but I guess I’m too stuck in 20th Century thinking to come up with any ideas. How else might Google make money, other than by selling ads? What other ways are there for an Internet business to make money by selling its users’ attention? ²⁸

This inquiry into the profitable stripping of attention seems to be the key question for the current generation of venture capitalists. How can the whole attention economy take off? While the hyper-capitalization of Google has the company developing numerous practical means for the tracking, bundling, and selling of attention, the clearest financial analysis that I have found to date is that of Seth Goldstein, an entrepreneur. Interestingly, Goldstein approaches the dynamics between attention and capital from two diametrically opposed perspectives: that of the attention provider and that of the capitalist.

Palo Altoan Susan Mernitt, on her blog, writes and quotes the following from Goldstein:

Seth defines attention as a valuable commodity and posits that we can manage it like other assets (I think).

He writes: “Our challenge as consumers in the age of paid search and performance marketing, therefore, is whether/how to wrest control back from the machine that has begun to anticipate our intentions for its proprietary gain.”

And

“The choruses of attention, data, privacy and identity are all converging in one giant conceptual mashup, which stretches from Web 2.0 pundits to members of Congress grappling with identity theft regulation. Lost at times are the basic rights we are fighting for, which I understand to be:

•You have the right to yourself.

•You have the right to your gestures.

•You have the right to your words.

•You have the right to your interests.

•You have the right to your attention.

•You have the right to your intentions.”²⁹

Clearly here, these rights are imagined in terms of proprietary rights, but interestingly do not extend beyond the parameters defined up to but not including our outer skins. The vestigial space of interiority is to be preserved, for now, but our images, it seems, are up for grabs in the proprietary world. Witness the emerging legal contest between athletes and celebrities, who claim that they own all images of themselves, and sports photographers and paparazzi—but the smart money is with the photographers and the media who employ them. Or the satellites—everytime they take a picture of you, who owns that? I haven’t signed any release forms for outer-space photography lately.

So it seems that there is a distinction to be made between physical presence and practices on the one hand—ATM and parking lot security systems photograph us, John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness System, which was to be built for the Pentagon and for all we know still is being built, might in principle track our movements throughout the urban landscape, correlate it with the books we read and the spices we buy to decide if we are terrorists—and our intentions or attention, on the other hand, attention being the more readily quantifiable of the two (since intention is thus far only legible as it manifests itself). It is now being presupposed that attention, like labor, belongs to a juridical subject, that is, a proprietor who has the right to bring it to market. Goldstein has founded what he calls an Attention Trust, where web users can track their web usage—every click a user makes is recorded. While in certain respects this trust exists to document and therefore give a kind of heft (economic reality) to attentional practices by converting them systematically into data, it might also serve as the foundation of a new market, which is to say, it is one potential model for the increasingly organized tracking of attentional practices.

While ostensibly the attention trust exists in part to help consumers realize and protect the value of their attention (this cannot, ultimately, mean here anything but the financialization of their attention), it also serves as a strategy to bring attention online with a higher degree of informational quality and therefore of calculability. In his brilliant if chilling essay “Media Futures: From Theory to Practice” on his Transparent Bundles website, Goldstein writes about the securitization of attention—a process through which attentional practices are to be bundled and resold. This securitization is not a thought experiment, despite the fact that the essay appears with a sidebar of recommended readings that includes Georg Simmel, Norbert Weiner, and Walter Benjamin. Goldstein has hooked up with Lewis Ranieri, formerly of Solomon Brothers, to put the securitization of attention into practice. In Goldstein’s words, securitization works as follows:

If you consider the housing market in the 1970s and early 1980s, you will recall that the process of obtaining a mortgage was considerably more arduous than it is today and therefore far fewer people as a percentage of the population owned their own home. In each instance of a borrower asking the bank for a loan, the bank had to independently vet the risk that the borrower might default on the loan. The breakthrough idea was to consider a mortgage as simply a “promise to pay.” Such an individual promise held risks for default and pre-payment, but could be combined with other mortgages to create a pool of mortgage-backed securities that could be priced in the aggregate. The local bank, therefore, when presented with certain consumer borrowing variables, could check in with the “market” and provide the risk-adjusted rate almost immediately. In attention computing terms, the physical gesture (i.e., applying for a mortgage) became mapped to an electronic signal (i.e., a series of personal data fields), which could then be priced, traded, and optimized. Once freely tradeable by investors, consumers in turn benefited from faster response times, better rates, and clear access to home ownership.

This process has a name:

Securitization is a financial technique that pools assets and, in effect, turns them into a tradeable security. Financial institutions and businesses use securitization to immediately realize the value of a cashproducing asset. Securitization has evolved from its beginnings in the 1970s to a total aggregate outstanding (as of the second quarter of 2003) estimated to be $6.6 trillion. This technique comes under the umbrella of structured finance. (from Wikipedia)

The person most responsible for inventing securitization was a legendary Wall Street maverick named Lew Ranieri forever immortalized in Michael Lewis’s classic Liar’s Poker. In the 1970s, from his perch at the Salomon Brothers trading desk, Ranieri famously applied securitization to the mortgage market, creating what is now referred to as MBSs (mortgage backed securities) and CMOs (collateralized mortgage obligations). This application has enabled (1) millions of consumers to more easily become homeowners by (2) transferring credit risk away from banks and thrifts to independent financial investors in the bond markets.³⁰

Goldstein and Ranieri together run a company called /ROOT Markets, which is committed to creating a market for attention. Consumers (i.e., attention producers/providers) will be linked to marketers (advertisers) in such a way that the aggregated attention not only can be bought and sold but turned into a financial instrument subject to the laws of markets, that is, speculation. Clearly this project requires a new business model, as well as the development of new technologies. However, what is significant in the context of the discussion of The Cinematic Mode of Production is that what is being captured and formalized is the historical production and isolation of attention as the general form of socially productive labor. Before I discuss this paradigm shift further, a little more from Goldstein:

In the same way that the mortgage security market transferred credit risk away from the balance sheet of operators and into the portfolios of professional investors, a media futures market will enable non-advertisers (aka speculators) to take on the risk from the balance sheets of publishers. Publishers will be happy to hedge out their inventory, limit earnings volatility, and focus entirely on creating value-added programming; rather than spending their time speculating whether CPMs are going up or down.

Within these new markets enabled by Internet arbitrageurs, there are billions of micro markets where a query or a unique user path comes into contact with one or more targeted advertisements. A constructive tension emerges between the user who intends to find or do something and the sponsor of the link who is trying to lure her into the sponsor’s particular commercial environment. Each one of these tiny interactions feature a buyer (advertiser), seller (publisher) and asset (consumer attention) financed by an arbitrageur (investor).

Our goal at /ROOT Markets is to maintain liquidity across all of these tiny markets. This is no small task, especially against the backdrops of apathy. Consumers are generally apathetic about the value of their attention data. Advertisers and publishers are apathetic about the cost of taking consumer attention. Investors are apathetic about consumer attention as a tradeable commodity. By educating the market about the value of attention, and enabling it to be traded (in the form of leads), we can continually feed back better and better information in terms of price, quality and yield on attention. While this may not create new attention, it may indeed help reduce our significant attention deficit.³¹

/ROOT Markets, it should be noted, has one type of proposal for the creating of an attention market similar to a stock exchange. A pressing question, of course, is what motivation web users might have to make their attentional practices more legible (and therefore more amenable to the instrumental calculus of capital) than these practices already are. In a recent conversation with Goldstein (who, for the record is a genuinely brilliant individual), I suggested that the only real motivation for users to open their private computing practices more fully to capital would be something like a proprietary stake in the process. That is, if the trust were to be owned like a collective such that its profitability were shared with attention providers, there would be motiviation to “work” in such an operation. Goldstein told me that their board had been “talking about this this morning.” Because of the nature of the valuation of these economies, those who get in earlier do better than latecomers who, at the extreme, end up working in new economy companies for what is effectively only a wage. The general model will tend toward that relation, where users work in the attention factories for something like a wage, and over time we might expect this relationship to computers and information flow generally to be more and more unavoidable—as if an information proletariat is currently under construction, such that if you do not work for the information industry you will have no access to the general form of social wealth. Humans will have to make themselves increasingly porous to data chains, such that not only their (I mean “our”) interests in cars and digital cameras are legible, but eventually their medical requirements, food preferences, psychopathologies, and erections will be subject to the laws of informatics and monetization. We will not only create information, we will be /ROOT Market’s information.

It should be added here that, at least as it appears from the Attention Trust, an opt-in model is not the only model for the capture of attention and in the end may not be the successful one. Google is currently looking into acquiring a browser in order to do away with “www” headings altogether and track every user action; and Yahoo! and Google are currently figuring out ways to “meld” television and internet. No doubt by the time these sentences see the light of day more innovations will be afoot. We may be sure that these advances will ever more completely encroach upon the remaining uncaptured activities necessary to us in the pursuit of … what? Debord’s terms “enhanced survival” and “gilded poverty” come to mind.

However, there are a few basics inadequacies in the new business models that The Cinematic Mode of Production allows us to designate, and these are sites not only of speculation but perhaps also of hope, which, in some ideal version, I suppose, is a kind of non-capitalist speculation. First of all, it is to be hoped that even the most elaborate calculus cannot fully render the subtleties of image-function with respect to its incorporation both during the moments of its viewing/legibility and during the aftermath of the instance of incorporation as the image/text enters the living vocabulary/ programming of the subject as well as his/her unconscious/body. In the moment of creation there always exists a possibility to smash the code. The wide literature on divergent reading practices, subcultural endeavors, graph-art, dreamwork, imagination, and social movements is useful to remember here. We are developing new capacities, new possibilities that cause our houses and cars to sprout computers. Are all these refinements and sensual extensions only there to fuel forever an immortal and totalitarian capitalism? Is the spectacle of civilization destined forever to float on a sea of blood?

On the one hand, the fact that viewers channel surf looking for pixilated flesh is registered by advertisers and their networks, and it is true that even generic/iconic body types have been distilled more or less scientifically and represented as formula most likely to succeed. The recent film Ultraviolet may be the latest if not the highest testament to and crystallization of this logic of the survival of the fittest image. Yet who can really say how the curve of a particular breast, the plump appeal of a tightly swaddled botoxed labia, or the particular ribbing of depilitated washboard abs really works at the micro-levels of incorporation? Equally elusive here are reading practices, with all of their idiosyncratic interpretations and ideolectical resultants. What about all the intimations of misery—personal and collective—percolating through myriad pores and pixels of daily life. And these divergent vectors can be extruded not only along a particular square inch of flesh or in relation to a single phrase or still image, but also across a broader range of these types of texts, which despite their grammatological programs and intentions and their statistical calibrations, are everywhere open to variance, aberration, differance. And while we know that variation is everywhere open to further statistical analysis and data crunching of all types via flowcharts, algorithms, and electronic machines, we also believe (those of us who have ever been a statistic of any kind) that after all the expropriation, deconstruction, and slaughter there is a certain excess there, a voice, a thought, an experience, a will, or a spirit, that does not resolve itself in the mathematical of the now. Isn’t there a leftover presence, a haunting, that is mathematically, linguistically, visually, and politically irresolvable? And who is that? A mere ideological after-effect, a protesting ghost, a reason to write or speak?

Evidence of variation and anti-systemic excess, new types of attention-getting virtuosity, may be found many places, outside and in. Here’s one from “The Poverty of Philosophy” by spoken-word/hip-hop artist Immortal Technique:

I’m quite sure that people will look upon my attitude and sentiments and look for hypocrisy and hatred in my words. My revolution is born out of love for my people, not hatred for others.

You see, most of Latinos are here because of the great inflation that was caused by American companies in Latin America. Aside from that, many are seeking a life away from the puppet democracies that were funded by the United States; places like El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Columbia, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Republica Dominicana, and not just Spanish-speaking countries either, but Haiti and Jamaica as well.

As different as we have been taught to look at each other by colonial society, we are in the same struggle and until we realize that, we’ll be fighting for scraps from the table of a system that has kept us subservient instead of being self-determined. And that’s why we have no control over when the embargo will stop in Cuba, or when the bombs will stop dropping in Vieques.

But you see, here in America the attitude that is fed to us is that outside of America there live lesser people. “Fuck them, let them fend for themselves.” No, fuck you, they are you. No matter how much you want to dye your hair blonde and put fake eyes in, or follow an anorexic standard of beauty, or no matter how many diamonds you buy from people who exploit your own brutally to get them, no matter what kind of car you drive or what kind of fancy clothes you put on, you will never be them. They’re always gonna look at you as nothing but a little monkey. I’d rather be proud of what I am, rather than desperately try to be something I’m really not, just to fit in. And whether we want to accept it or not, that’s what this culture or lack of culture is feeding us.

I want a better life for my family and for my children, but it doesn’t have to be at the expense of millions of lives in my homeland. We’re given the idea that if we didn’t have these people to exploit then America wouldn’t be rich enough to let us have these little petty material things in our lives and basic standards of living. No, that’s wrong. It’s the business giants and the government officials who make all the real money. We have whatever they kick down to us. My enemy is not the average white man, it’s not the kid down the block or the kids I see on the street; my enemy is the white man I don’t see: the people in the white house, the corporate monopoly owners, fake liberal politicians—those are my enemies. The generals of the armies that are mostly conservatives— those are the real mother-fuckers that I need to bring it to, not the poor, broke country-ass soldier that’s too stupid to know shit about the way things are set up.

In fact, I have more in common with most working and middleclass white people than I do with most rich black and Latino people. As much as racism bleeds America, we need to understand that classism is the real issue. Many of us are in the same boat and it’s sinking, while these bourgeois mother-fuckers ride on a luxury liner, and as long as we keep fighting over kicking people out of the little boat we’re all in, we’re gonna miss an opportunity to gain a better standard of living as a whole.

In other words, I don’t want to escape the plantation—I want to come back, free all my people, hang the mother-fucker that kept me there and burn the house to the god damn ground. I want to take over the encomienda and give it back to the people who work the land.

You cannot change the past but you can make the future, and anyone who tells you different is a fucking lethargic devil. I don’t look at a few token Latinos and black people in the public eye as some type of achievement for my people as a whole. Most of those successful individuals are sell-outs and house Negroes.³²

Part history lesson, part class analysis, part critique of collaboration, individualism, consumer culture and white supremacy, these lines as a recording are an example of another kind of machine: cognitive-linguistic, musical, affective. They provide an occasion for us to shape our thought even in their contradictions. As a performance, these lines are a reclamation of the voice, varying the score of the general intellect in ways intended (in part at least) to be fatal to its current dispensation. It steals the voice to perform a call to community—a formation of community that makes for an uncomfortable fit with capitalist domination, white supremacy, and U.S. Empire. Those of us who attend to these lines may also begin or deepen our affiliation with the anti-capitalist, anti-white–supremacist collective they invoke through the organization of our sensual capacities, our structures of feeling, and our discursive production in relation to not just the message here encoded, but to the histories, the possibilities and the affects transmitted here. This transmission takes place via the words and rhythm, accents and inflections of the voice, but also in its activation of prior, similar transmissions that are part of collective/mass culture, memory, history.

As with many things, this relating to this mediation, does not propose a slavish accession to its imperatives, but rather an internalization and then a re-mediation of the life and the life-world it proposes and calls into being. Thus, Immortal Technique’s “The Poverty of Philosophy” is another technology for the bundling of attention, but its method of operation, it’s rational and its rationalizations are markedly different than the internet models. This bundling is not undertaken (exclusively, anyway) to be parsed and resold. It activates other systems of account. First, “The Poverty of Philosophy” calls upon the various modes of attending we have developed historically and assembles them to create its aesthetic/intellectual/communitarian experience (be it tinged with fervor, beauty, love, or panic), and it bundles the attention required both to produce the piece for the artist (the reservoir of past forms and learning, Marxism, decolonization, anti-racist struggle, rap) and for the audience (the collective modes of relating both to the piece and to one another). While not exactly cinema, it is cinema and things cinematic that has brought the contest between labor and capital to a new stage—a stage where the organization of attention, perception, and of voice may be decisive. In this process—the machinations of a movement that re-presents the poverty of philosophy and the philosophy (as praxis) of poverty—there may be less transparency (and thus a deeper poetics) than that required or even allowed by the emergent data-sphere in its capacity as a medium of capitalization. Binary code may transmit the mp3 files that disseminate “The Poverty of Philosophy” and thousands if not millions of similar encodings, but running the program requires wetware and organizes zones that are beyond the reach of the project and projection of capital. Or so we must assume. And, perhaps, it is there in the shadows, that the poverty of philosophy may be seen to expresses Our new power. This time, here, now, it is capital that will have to catch up or fizzle out. Either way, there will be blood.

NOTES

1. The Retort Collective, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 21. The phrase “Perpetual emotion machines” is taken from Perry Anderson, The Origius of Postmodernity (London, 1998), 89.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., 34.

5. See my short essay, “Military Industrial Complex,” in Shock and Awe (2004).

6. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

7. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

8. Ibid., 156.

9. Ibid., 157.

10. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).

11. Derrida, Rogues, 157.

12. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 106.

13. Jonathan L. Beller, Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalism, and the World- Media System (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006).

14. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 113.

15. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitudes, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (New York and Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agent Series, 2004), 54.

16. Ibid., 55.

17. Ibid., 63.

18. Ibid., 63.

19. Ibid., 65.

20. Ibid., 66.

21. Ibid., 87.

22. Ibid., 98.

23. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans., Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1976, 1982), 8. Originally published in France as De la Grammatologie, Les Editions de minuit, 1967.

24. Ibid., 10.

25. Ibid., 7–8.

26. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans., Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 189.

27. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans., Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 146–147.

28. Posted by Mitch Wagner on November 15, 2005, at 5:39 PM, http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2005/11/google_wants_yo.html.

29. Susan Mernitt, http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/search/index.html.

30. Seth Goldstein, “Transparent Bundles,” http://majestic.typepad.com/seth/. I thank Renu Bora for bringing Goldstein’s work to my attention.

31. Ibid.

32. Immortal Technique, “The Poverty of Philosophy,” from the album Revolutionary, Nature Sounds.