[iDC] Periodizing cinematic production

Stmart96 at aol.com Stmart96 at aol.com
Tue Sep 15 10:19:57 UTC 2009


 
Thanks  you Jonathan   I think the differing between   Jonathan and John  
is especially interesting for the  autobio swerve  offered by John.   It is 
the drive to do so  that I think informs  theory/writing/speaking. It is what 
they are all  about or at often times about.  Our  networked  digitizing  
is an intense expression of  this  even in its  failure  I meant to say in my 
post that sometimes  the   swerve to the criticism of capitalism  seems  
defensive    unable to speak autographically  even if it is necessary to  
theorize  capitalism. And I fell even more the necessity to  theorize  
capitalist governance simply because  it informs   more  in the way we swerve from 
the autographic to the theoretical to the  critical.   Patricia     
 
In a message dated 9/13/2009 9:53:36 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
jbeller at pratt.edu writes:

Hi all,  forgive me for clogging your in-boxes. Luckily, the teaching week 
begins soon  so we'll all get a break.   


For the record, what I wrote was the following:


"Goux's work delineates the homologous structures of psychoanalysis and  
political economy. However, for all of its undeniable brilliance, it lacks a  
materialist theory of mediation. Goux lacks an answer to the question 'how 
do  you get capitalism into the psyche, and how do you get the psyche into  
capital.?' They are isomorphic, but why"(CMP, 25)?


So my immediate question, was in fact, following Patricia, how does "he"  
do it, not how does this isomorphism come about.



 
 
 
 
"Goux argues that 'the affective mode of  exchange,' meaning the symbolic, 
is a function of 'the dominant mode of  exchange,' meaning capital. While 
Goux's statement is accurate, what is left  out is that it requires the 
history of twentieth-century visuality to make it  so. The twentieth century is 
the cinematic century, in which capital aspires  to the image and the image 
corrodes traditional language function and creates  the conceptual 
conformation, that is the very form, of the psyche as limned by  psychoanalysis" (25). 
The cinematic image as paradigmatic mediator between  these two orders of 
production (political economy and the psycho-symbolic)  better describes the 
historically necessary, mutual articulation of  consciousness and capital 
expansion than does Goux's provocative but  too-abstract idea of the 
'socio-genetic process' in which social forms  mysteriously influence one another or 
take on analogical similarities. Goux's  theory of mediations itself lacks a 
general theory of mediation. It is only by  tracing the trajectory of the 
capitalized image and the introjection of its  logic into the sensorium that 
we may observe the full consequences of the  dominant mode of production 
(assembly-line capitalism) becoming the dominant  mode of representation 
(cinema). Cinema implies the tendency toward the  automation of the 'subject' by 
the laws of exchange" (25-26).




And of course, the rest of the argument is that  this itself a new mode of 
production, with the consequent transformations of  language, affect, the 
subject, the human, hermeneutics, depth, time, etc. The  visual turn is a 
cypher for all this.


Ok, gtg. Thanks for your comment Patricia -- I  want to think more about it.


Best,
Jon









Jonathan Beller
Professor 
Humanities and Media Studies
and Critical and Visual Studies
Pratt Institute
_jbeller at pratt.edu_ (mailto:jbeller at pratt.edu) 
718-636-3573 fax
















On Sep 13, 2009, at 1:44 PM, _Stmart96 at aol.com_ (mailto:Stmart96 at aol.com)  
wrote:



 
I too have found the discussion  stimulating, although hard to  find the 
time-space in which to speak or speak-up.  Thanks to John  Sobol for  an 
invite to mix it up.  I too am more than a  technological determinist  or rather 
less one  than a lover.  No more or less than human beings, the technical 
object  as  Gilbert Simondon would call it, is an invention  an individuation 
that  has granted ongoing ontogenesis by also creating a milieu of self  
determination (or further indetermination) so let it continue to grant and  be 
loved .    While technology differs from the technical  object  along the 
lines John Sobel suggests  below,  that is,  the potential is perhaps captured 
in technology, but still  or even so, it is the domain of the technical 
object modulating what John  refers to as "the head of the curve" as well as  
the fun and love of  the kids.   So  I am presently teaching a graduate  
course on Freud and Deleuze and felt shocked at Jonathan (whose work is  much 
appreciated by me) when he asked  "How do  you get capitalism into the psyche, 
and how do you get the psyche into  capital?"   I assume what is meant here 
 is: How do "they" do that?   I was shocked because I thought that  
different technologies  are emanations of  a dynamic ground  where  the 
potentialities can inform or invent different  relations for psyche and technology, 
psyche and energy or  force  and thus force, energy and the market , capitalist 
  governance, work labor sex etc.  With this assumption I would  say,  
there is no 'in' of psyche   Perhaps there never was  (Derrida says so  but so 
does Deleuze  who does a really  interesting theft of Freud's work) but more 
important  there  is no 'in'  of the psyche (or not only an 'in' ) now  in  
relationship to the digital,  the emergent in relationship to the  digital.  
Psyche (its presently rethought energies and forces) has  escaped  the 
individual,  has dropped back down through the  pre-individual to ground or 
in-formation as a material  force  an ontogenetic force. This is an ontology for 
affect and  affect economies, among them capitalism. This  points I think  
away  from the cognitive-ism or consciousness (albeit unconsciousness)  of 
Jonathan's question and  sends  his own  focus on  "attention"  or the labor 
of attention toward the body and to  the transformation of the bod
y-as-organism  to a full body of  desiring.   One reason I love the digital is that is 
makes all of  this seemingly abstract stuff  so-not-abstract  but   
accessible when we allow it to shift  criticism away  from  the given-ness of a 
capitalist  logic  that always knows  what's coming  next and seeks to show how 
it will be our fault that it  did. Instead a way   is offered to respect  
the  temporalities  at play,  which are put in play often by capital  
(perhaps not often capitalism or capitalist governance).  The  life-itself that 
digital has enabled and which shows up in discourse about  biopolitics and 
necropolitics  is  not easy to capture without  producing  the fringe of 
indeterminacy that is life-y.  Even in  this awful times of war and terrorism 
torture poverty and death, the  life-y at least is good news  and asks us to pay 
more  attention to measuring  or capturing and its politics  which is  
non-organic and surely non-human as well as human.   Well this is  only a start 
for me     More to come     Patricia  Clough.   


In a message dated 9/12/2009 6:21:05 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, 
_john at johnsobol.com_ (mailto:john at johnsobol.com)  writes:



This has been - as usual here on iDC - a highly stimulating  discussion. I 
hope my contribution contributes to its quality, though it  does come at 
this question from quite a different perspective. 


I wish to return us to the outset of this thread, wherein Brian  quoted 
Jonathan thusly:



"How do you get capitalism into the psyche, and how do you get the  psyche 
into capital?" asks the philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux. Drawing on  key 
insights from Gramsci, Simmel and Benjamin -- and radicalizing the  work of film 
critic Christian Metz in the process -- Jonathan Beller gives  this quite 
astonishing reply:


"Materially speaking, industrialization enters the visual as  follows: 
Early cinematic montage extended the logic of the assembly line  (the sequencing 
of discreet, programmatic machine-orchestrated human  operations) to the 
sensorium and brought the industrial revolution to the  eye.... It is only by 
tracing the trajectory of the capitalized image and  the introjection of its 
logic into the sensorium that we may observe the  full consequences of the 
dominant mode of production (assembly-line  capitalism) becoming 'the 
dominant mode of representation' (cinema).  Cinema implies the tendency toward the 
automation of the subject by the  laws of exchange.... Understood as a 
precursor to television, computing,  email, and the World Wide Web, cinema can 
be seen as part of an emerging  cybernetic complex, which, from the 
standpoint of an emergent global labor  force, functions as a technology for the 
capture and redirection of global  labor's revolutionary social agency and 
potentiality."


I will  begin by saying that I do not believe that this historical 
trajectory gets  to the heart of the matter. Valuable as it is in certain respects 
in  shedding light on our evolving world, I nonetheless believe that it is a  
heuristic model that seems to fit the facts, yet elides them. I will do my  
best to explain why I think this. 


I have not read your book, Jonathan, so if I am  way off the mark in my 
interpretation of your words than that will be my  fault. But it sounds to me 
like a causal relationship is being established  in the above analysis, 
between cinema's evolution as a global cultural  force and the parallel advance 
of certain socially prescriptive aspects of  modern and post-modern 
industrial capitalism. The cybernetic loop you  describe suggests that cinema and 
capitalism are engaged in a form of  dance, impelled, once begun, by the 
alarmingly potent logic of "assembly-line  capitalism", that incriminates cinema 
as both agent and victim.  Certainly cinema, (and cineastes) in your analysis 
appear as not  just one of these two things, but as both.


With regard to the question of causality, I am  unconvinced that cinema's 
economic or epistemological architectures – as  opposed to its narrative t
hemes or stylistic vagaries – played such a  fundamental causal role in the 
unfolding of the social dynamics of "assembly-line  capitalism". The reason  I 
think this is that I also reject, at a more basic level, the argument  that 
'industrialism enters the visual via cinema' at all. In fact I think  this 
articulation entirely misses the essential relationship  between 
industrialism and the visual.


The key to this relationship is the understanding  that industrialism is 
the more-or-less direct result of increased  literacy. It is of the eye, and 
it largely replaced the experiential  techne of the ear that preceded it, 
just as literate capitalism replaced  the economies of the ear that preceded 
it). As simplistic as this sounds,  it is, in my opinion, accurate and 
fundamental. It is no accident that  Scotland in the 18th century had the world's 
highest literacy rate and was  also the world's industrial incubator. It is 
no accident that the  popularization of literacy in Britain coincided with 
its imperial rise.  Nor is it an accident that the peak in world literacy 
today coincides with  the death of most of the world's oral languages. The 
industrial age is a  visual age. It is the triumphant age of text, in which 
reading and writing  come to rule the world through their manifold 
representations in maps,  constitutions, lawbooks, forms, contracts, ledgers, deeds - and, 
of course  - blueprints, patents, technical specifications, reports, 
schemata,  manuals and the myriad textual tools that enabled  industrialization 
(i.e. the raster grid that Sean rightly indicates  is so historically 
definitive), as well as their resulting man-made  mechanical universe. And here I 
seem to hear the familiar "pshaw, this is  determinist claptrap" (though not 
perhaps from your lips, reader), to  which I reply: just take writing out of 
the equation and see what degree  of industrialism you are left with. Try it 
and see. There is nothing  left. Without the widespread dissemination of 
literacy, industrialism  crumbles utterly.


Cinema, seen in this light, is a mere actor in  the larger drama that is 
literate culture's struggle to achieve global  hegemony, and is not the 
primary cause of anything, except perhaps an  infinity of shared dreams (no small 
thing, I admit). It is just one of  many monological industrial media shaped 
by the technical and psychic  architectures of print. Just as television 
would become as well.  Neither is anything but a talking book from my 
perspective. And so to  answer Goux's question: you get capitalism into the psyche 
via the  printing press, you get it via the rigid, powerful, monological  
imperatives of print. As with industrialism, extract print from the  evolution 
of capitalism and nothing at all remains, not even a trace. I  don't even 
talk about capitalism myself, only of literate capitalism, for  capitalism is 
epistemologically indistinguishable from literacy. (Though  strangely, so in 
many respects is Soviet socialism).


The second part of your paragraph, Jonathan, is  important too.  


Understood as a precursor to television,  computing, email, and the World 
Wide Web, cinema can be seen as part of an  emerging cybernetic complex, 
which, from the standpoint of an emergent  global labor force, functions as a 
technology for the capture and  redirection of global labor's revolutionary 
social agency and  potentiality."


As I  have mentioned, I do not think that cinema and television are more 
than  accidental precursors to computing, email and the World Wide Web. (Kind 
of  the way Gil Scott-Heron seems to be the godfather of rap, whereas his 
work  is not directly related at all, only indirectly.) And as I see it there  
are two cybernetic complexes in effect here anyway; one hegemonic, one  
emergent; one literate and one digital. Each of these two looped universes  is 
indigenously highly distinct from the other, yet bright minds with vast  
resources are desperately trying to colonize the emergent one on behalf of  the 
ruling one, with some success. And of course defending the fort – and  
actively taking the battle to these hungry entrepreneurs – are  revolutionaries 
of all shapes and sizes, your friends and mine, seeking to  counteract this 
unfeeling assault with art, autonomy, activism and more.  Much more.


However, what matters is not necessarily how  successful we and our 
idealistic friends turn out to be. What seems to  matter most is the march of time, 
and technology. When Negativland  pioneered its remix work it caused 
outrage and conflict. With the passage  of time, however, the mashup has become a 
staple of everyday life. Not  because Negativland (or John Oswald or Bryan 
Gysin for that matter) 'won'  but rather because they turned out to be doing 
stuff ahead of the curve.  It was not a case of the good guys winning due to 
hard work, the  righteousness of their  message and the political 
maturation of 'the  people'. It just turned out that when the tools advanced enough 
to make it  easy and fun for kids to do, kids did it. And that's basically 
all that  revolution took to succeed. And soon the kids will grow up. Lots 
already  have.


In this sense I am an unrepentant technological  determinist. Not that I 
think, for example, that the transition to  post-literate capitalism is a 
given. On the contrary, I expect things to  get more and more dangerous and 
bloody and I am not happy about that at  all, as the evolutionary conflict 
between the efficient and the  hyperefficient gains demographic momentum. So 
there is in fact an urgent  need for leadership, and by this I mean 
intercultural leadership that  constructively bridges the emergent and hegemonic 
cybernetic  loops  in the pursuit of sustainable and judicious  compromises (to say 
nothing of also reaching out and inviting into  the dialogue the colonized 
oral peoples of the world who have a crucial  role to play here, 
particularly in helping to stave off literate  capitalism's imminent ecocide.) 
Antagonizing the corporate world for the  sake of personal catharsis is fun and all, 
and I have done it plenty in my  art, aimed at 'bad guys' who couldn't have 
cared less, but more useful I  now believe is an engagement that respects 
and enlightens, rather than  unmasking villainous archetypes in (our) 
everyday life. There just too  many of us. :)


Literacy too has certainly functioned "as a technology  for the capture and 
redirection of global labor's revolutionary social  agency and 
potentiality." Except when it wasn't. Except when it was something else.  For it has 
also  made possible wondrous and wonderful achievements (for some – the many  
and/or the few). Drawing hard and fast boundaries between this or that  idea, 
this or that system, this or that morality, is a favourite literate  game. 
But I think it has served its purpose. Let's mix things up a little  more, 
focusing on what we have in common rather than where we differ;  trying to 
find a way forward that balances the benefits that each  cybernetic vortex can 
offer while also seeking to offset its ill effects.  And then look to the 
kids to make it happen.


That  sounds to me like a truly revolutionary program.


(All of the above offered with the utmost respect  for the pleasure and 
privilege of this conversation and hopefully not  sounding as bitchy as I 
sometimes feel...)


Thanks for listening,
John Sobol


_www.johnsobol.com_ (http://www.johnsobol.com/) 

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