[iDC] Periodizing cinematic production
Stmart96 at aol.com
Stmart96 at aol.com
Tue Sep 15 19:17:18 UTC 2009
Reading my last post I thought it did not make sense. I meant to say
that becoming autobiographical as John did when he sent us to his web pages
is something that is a potentiality behind or underneath our theorizing
and letting out the autobiographical in certain performed ways seems
really interesting and revealing and attuned with digital networking.
However in my former post I said the psyche is no longer personal and I
would say that of the autobiographical as well. So this swerve to the
autobiographical now is part of what needs to be thought about and 'acted out'
in a variety of ways. Finally I meant to say that sometimes our swerve
to theorizing (when theorizing everything neatly away) is a defense
against the autobiographical Sometimes that is necessary. thanks for you
patience Patricia
In a message dated 9/15/2009 8:52:28 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
Stmart96 at aol.com writes:
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
body-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
themes 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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