Jonathan Beller
Literature Department
Duke University
The exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, because it is the basic concept of modern political economy, just as capital itself, of which it is the abstract reflected image, is the basis of bourgeois society.
–Karl Marx, Grundrisse
Cinema 3: Towards a Dialectical Film of the Cinema (Books)
What is cinema? By posing the infamous question yet again I mean to set forth the task of thinking the development of the concept of cinema and of cinema itself in terms of political economy and social organization.
Let me begin this kind of thinking about cinema with a quick discussion of the “Capital Cinema” shown and shown up by the Coen brothers in their 1992 film, Barton Fink. In the film, Capital Cinema is the name of the late 1930s pre-war Hollywood production studio which, according to the story, makes cinematic expression possible. This company, as a representative of the studio system, is used by the Coen brothers to demonstrate that cinema is at once a factory for the production of representation and an economic form, that is, a site of economic production. As factory and as economic system cinema is inscribed in and by the dominant mode of production: specifically, industrial capitalism and its war economy. As a factory of representation Capital Cinema dictates limits to the forms of consciousness that can be represented, but as an economic form inscribed by the larger cultural logic, Capital Cinema dictates limits to forms of consciousness per se.
The film Barton Fink, in which the Jewish writer Barton (John Turturro) falls from celebrated playwright to abject existentialist hack as he tries to make the shift from New York playwrighting to Los Angeles screen writing, is about the spaces and sensibilities which fall out of (are absent from) a cinema which is a fully functioning component of the capitalist economy. The movement from New York to Los Angeles marks the movement for Barton, but also for representation in general, into a new era. The climax of the film occurs when the film confronts the limits of its own conditions of representation.
Indeed, the thesis of Barton Fink is that there remains an unrepresentable for cinema: experience that refuses commodification. Although such unrepresentability of experience occurs in the film via specific instantiations of race (Jewishness), gender (the wife who has written all of her alcoholic husband’s books), sex (the homoerotic tensions in the hotel room scenes) and class (the inner life of the encyclopedia salesman), it is perhaps even more interesting to think about invisibility as a general case in capital cinema–a predicament of disenfranchised elements in others and in ourselves. The writer Barton is trying to create a script about the real man, about “everyman,” but when the film finally encounters everyman’s never told biography, the biography of the failed encyclopedia salesman (John Goodman) and the biography that Barton, being preoccupied with his script, has not had the time to listen to, the encounter is and can only be indirect, off-screen as it were, and that, as a crisis. At the moment of the encounter between cinema and the experience of “everyman,” a conflagration erupts. Inside the frame the film set is burnt, while outside the frame in the space beyond the film the very edges of the frame burst and flame–the medium literally self-destructs as the reality principle of the film is destroyed in the confrontation of its limits.1 As a film steeped in the protocols of profit, the particular experiences of Goodman’s mad encyclopedia salesman, that is, the myriad experiences of failure in capitalism, fall below the threshold of knowing possible in capital cinema and are precipitated only as effects. These effects, much like a labor strike, confront the mode of production as a crisis and halt its smooth functioning. The experience of Everyman, nearly uncommodifiable by definition, cannot be represented in Capital Cinema.2 Its emergence threatens to destroy the medium itself.
If consciousness in late capitalism, generally speaking, functions like (as) cinema–relatively unable to think beyond the exigencies of capital, then it is important to note at the outset that cinema as consciousness is overdetermined by capital regulation. Cinema, as money that thinks, fuses the protocols of representation and capitalist production. This claim remains relatively unproblematic until one takes cinema not only as a form of representation but as consciousness itself. The idea, simply put, is that something like the Coen brothers’ Capital Cinema manufactures not just films, but consciousness in general, complete with its possibilities and lacunae.3 This consciousness can be shown to be hegemonic if what I call the cinematic mode of production has fully infiltrated (some aspects of) our minds and converted them into money that thinks. Such thinking money is money of a special form, not money as a mere medium of exchange but, in short, money as capital. The screenwriter for the studio, like the professor for the university and the citizen for the state must be a source of profit. Capital consciousness has a variety of perceptual possibilities, thresholds and limits. In explaining this idea more fully it will be useful to turn to the cinema of Deleuze’s cinema books, that is, to a cinema conceived as consciousness par excellence. Although Deleuze does not dwell on the relationship between cinema and consciousness per se, cinema, at least in its incarnation in the masterpiece, is for him the ur-form of consciousness which challenges state-forms, the very process of mechinic assemblage. No longer a consciousness pared down and limited by the constraints of a body, of a subject, of a state, and no longer a consciousness taken as ideal, cinema in the cinema books is expanded consciousness, consciousness unbound–free-ranging, multi-perspectival and rigorously material– consciousness itself.
My present motivation for such an inquiry into the political economy of consciousness and hence of cinema, as well as for an inquiry into the Cinema of Deleuze, is suggested by the idea of “cultural imperialism.” In as much as the phrase suggests not just “culture,” but “imperialism” as well, and in as much as we keep in mind that imperialism is an economic undertaking as well as an ideological and libidinal one, this phrase today remains an incomplete thought. I mean to suggest here that whatever the project of imperialism was, it does not cease in the presence of the fantasy called Postcoloniality.4 Rather, as world poverty indexes readily show, the pauperization process is intensifying. The “expiration” of national boundaries and the so-called “obsolescence” of the nation state only imply that these national forms are being superseded (sublated) even as they continue to do their work.5 The thesis here is that cinema and cinematic technologies– television, telecommunications, computing, automation–provide some of the discipline and control once imposed by earlier forms of imperialism. Furthermore, the media work to organize previous forms of discipline and control, which remain extant. Transnationalism, which finds its very conditions of possibility in computing, telecommunications and mass media, implies that these media are playing a fundamental role in new modes of value production and value transfer. The cinema, I shall be arguing, is a first instance of these other “higher forms” of mediation. With the globalization of capital it may turn out that economic expansion is presently less a geographical project and more a matter of capturing the interstitial activities and times between the already commodified endeavors of bodies. Every movement and every gesture is potentially productive of value. I am speaking here of media as cybernetics, of capital expansion positing the body as the new frontier.
We are thus dealing with two distinct yet interactive sets of relations here. In the first set, capital cinema regulates perception and therefore certain pathways to the body. It is in this sense that it functions as a kind of discipline and control akin to previous methods of socialization by either civil society or the labor process (e.g., Taylorization). The second moment, related yet distinct from the first, is the positing by capital cinema of a value- productive relationship which can be exploited–i.e., a tapping of the productive energies of consciousness and the body in order to facilitate the production of surplus value.
Before turning to Deleuze I would like to sketch in brief some of the basic characteristics of the larger project upon which I am currently working, provisionally entitled The Cinematic Mode of Production, and then to show how such a project might occasion a rethinking of Deleuze’s cinema books. My argument with respect to Deleuze is that the cinematic mode of production as a world historical moment is already implicit in Deleuze’s work; it is immanent. However, in the name of and desire for a “non-fascist politics,” he represses the concept of the mode of production generally in and as the concept of “the machinic assemblage.” Though it is immanent, Deleuze refuses to think cinema in dialectical relation to capital.6
The Cinematic Mode of Production
The Cinematic Mode of Production proposes a situation and a name for the dominant mode of production during the historical period that begins at the turn of our century and is just now drawing to a close. During this period capitalism and its administrators organize the world more and more like a film: modern commodity production becomes a form of montage. Much as film stock travels along a particular pathway, eventually to produce a film-image, capital travels along its pathways to produce commodities. As in the assembly of films, capital is edited while moving through its various determinations in commodity production. Today, with the convergence of the once separate industries for image and other forms of commodity production (in advertising, for example, the image is revealed as the commodity par excellence), we are in a better position than ever before to see the global dynamics of the cinematic mode of production and to reckon some of its consequences.
The key hypotheses and claims of my work are:
1) Cinema simultaneously images and enacts the circulation of economic value. It images the patterns of circulation of economic value itself (capital).7
2) This circulation of value in the cinema-spectator nexus is itself productive of value because looking is a form of labor. I should emphasize here that all previous forms of capitalized labor remain intact; however, looking as labor represents a tendency towards increasingly abstract instances of the relationship between labor and capital, a new regime of the technological positioning of bodies for the purpose of value extraction. Though this tendency is becoming dominant, which is to say that the relationship between consciousness and the state is more important than ever before, all previous forms of exploitation continue. When a visual medium operates under the strictures of private property, the work done by its consumer can, like ground rent, be capitalized and made to accrue to the proprietor of the medium. In other words, some people make a profit from other people’s looking. The ways in which this profit is produced and channeled fundamentally defines the politics of cultural production and the state.
3) Such a revolutionary method for the extraction of value from the human body has as profound an effect on all aspects of social organization as did the assembly line–it changes the dynamic of sight forever, initiating what can be thought of as a visual economy. As I shall sketch briefly, this economy has been developing for some time.
4) Understood as a technology capable of submitting the eye to a new disciplinary regime, cinema may be taken as a model for the many technologies which in effect take the machine off the assembly line and bring it to the body in order to mine it for labor power (value).8
5) The advent of such a new method of value-transport and value-extraction demands a new contribution to the critique of political economy.9
The hypothesis that vision, and more generally human attention, are today productive of economic value can be supported by showing that the labor theory of value, especially as discussed by Marx, is a specific instance of a more general hypothesis which is possible concerning the production of value. This I call the hypothesis of the productive value of human attention, or the attention theory of value. It is derived from the way in which capital process occupies human time in the cinema and in other media. Assuming for the moment that human attention is a value-adding commodity sought by capitalized media, it can be shown that if to look is to labor, then at least a partial solution to the dilemma posed to the political economist by the very persistence of capitalism presents itself. We should recall that for the radical political economist today, capitalism thrives in apparent violation of the labor theory of value and the law of the falling rate of profit. These two limitations on the expansion of capital cause Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg and others to predict a critical mass for capital–a catastrophic point beyond which it cannot expand. Unable to expand and hence unable to turn a profit, fully globalized capital, remember, was expected to self-destruct. The law of value was to have been overcome and a world in which any of us, should we so desire, could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticize at night was to have come into being. Clearly, and despite the globalization of capital, this auto-annihilation has not happened. I am suggesting that, from the standpoint of capital, as geographical limitations are in the process of being fully overcome by capital, capital posits the human body as the next frontier.10
In order to follow the developmental trajectory of ever expanding capital (of which cinema is so crucial a part) one must give thorough consideration to the cyberneticization of the flesh–what Virilio calls “the habitation of metabolic vehicles.”11 Like the road itself (the productive value of which Marx intuited but never showed), such machine-body interfaces clearly shift the distribution of the body over its machinic linkages, opening up many more sites and times for the production of value, multiplying, as it were, the number of possible work sites. Capital expands not only outwards, geographically, but burrows into the flesh. This corkscrewing inward has profound consequences on life-forms. Seeing how modern visual technology tools the body for new labor processes during the twentieth century suggests parallel studies of other arts, technologies and periods, past, present and future. Art as cultural artifact is interesting, but art and culture as technology shot through with historical, libidinal and visual necessity promises a more compelling account of human (cybernetic) transformations. The technologically articulated body does not undergo transformation in order to merely reflect new social relations or express new desires; the retooling it undergoes is endemic to the economics of social production and reproduction–a necessary development of social relations.
Because cinema as a perceptual medium is nothing less than the development of a new medium for the production and circulation of value, a medium no less significant in the transformation of human relations than the railroad track or the highway, human endeavors generally grouped together under the category “humanities” and (perhaps) once experienced as realms of relative freedom can be, and are being figured as economically productive. The entire history of cinema remains as a testament to this practice; advertising, television and culture generally today testify to it.
Certain relationships between looking and value already are and will continue to become sites of extensive legislation and political struggle. The Mapplethorpe photos, the pink triangle, English words in French advertising, and images of sex in American films shown in the Philippines are examples of some of these relationships; others include corporate competition for industry standards in High Definition Television, satellite communications and computing. Here, at the most general level, I am speaking about the commodification of culture and mediation, about culture as an interface between bodies and the world system. Much work has already been done on this problem of the commodification of culture, but none is fully conscious of the problem of the quantitative as opposed to the merely qualitative or metaphorical capitalization of culture.12 A sense of the quantification of cultural value as capital proper begins to shed light on how radical indeed the qualitative shifts in culture have become. The corollary here is that academic, philosophical, historical and aesthetic concerns are essential aspects of socio-economic transformation– haptic processes that integrate the body with social production in general. The amalgamation of the labor involved in such process as the production of cultures, identities and desires, is already and will continue to be the way in which political blocs, however ephemeral, are formed and persist in postmodern society.
The Movement-Image13
As I mentioned, we might imagine for a moment that at a certain point in history (Taylorism and Fordism) the world began to be organized more and more like a film.14 As Geoffrey Nowell Smith points out, the form of assembly line production easily invokes montage–hence, the French phrase chaine de montage, but the circulation of capital itself may as well be thought of as a kind of cutting.15 Much as film stock is edited as it travels along a particular pathway to eventually produce a film-image, capital travels along its various pathways to produce commodities–it is edited as it moves through its various determinations in assembly line production. Like the screen on which one grasps the movement of cinematic production, capital is the standpoint or frame through which one can see the movement of value, the scene in which emerges a moment in the production process. Capital provides the frame through which one observes economic movement. The finished commodity or image (commodity- image) results from a “completed” set of movements. Cinema, then, is already implied by capital circulation; dialectical sublation is a slow form of film.16 Thus Marx’s Grundrisse, a Nike sneaker, and a Hollywood film all share certain systemic movements of capital to create their product/image.
We can trace proto-cinematic technologies even further back in historical time. The standardized production of terra-cotta pots, the Roman minting of coins, the Gutenberg press and the lithograph mentioned by Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” could all be taken as early forms of cinema.17 Like shutter, frame and filmstock, each technology mentioned above repeats a standardized and standardizing act while striking an image that subjugates the eye to a particular and consequential activity. From the recognition of money to the reading of print, these activities place the eye within the discipline of a visual economy which corresponds to the type and speed of the mode of production. For each mode of production there necessarily exists a particular scopic regime. With the advent of cinema and the speeding up of individual images to achieve what is called “the persistence of vision” (that is, the illusion of a smooth continuity of movement among individuated images) there was an equally dramatic and corresponding shift in the relation of the eye to economic production. From the historical moment of the viewer circulating before the paintings in a museum to the historical moment of images circulating before the viewer in the movie house, there is an utter transformation of the visual economy, marked not least by the movement from what Benjamin called “aura” to what today postmodern theory calls “simulacra.” This movement was accompanied by a changeover from yesterday’s ideology to today’s spectacle. With the increased speed of its visual circulation, the visible object undergoes a change of state. In apprehending it, the textures and indeed the very properties of consciousness are transformed.
The Greek casts for terra-cottas and coinage, the woodcut, the printing press, the lithograph, the museum, all of which Benjamin elaborates as pre- cinematic forms of mechanical reproduction, are also all technologies designed, from one point of view, to capture vision and to subjugate it to the mechanics of various and successive interrelated economies. These forms of mechanical reproduction, with their standardized mechanisms and methods of imprinting are, in effect, early movies. That upon its emergence the “aura,” which Benjamin theorizes, is found not on the visual object but in the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived (it accompanies the gaze, the gazing) is consistent with Benjamin’s dialectical thesis that the sensorium is modified by the experience of the modern city. The development of film, like the development of the metropolis, is part of an economy which has profound effects on perception.18 That modernization modifies perception is also consistent with the dialectical notion that in the production and reproduction of their own conditions human beings modify themselves. Perception’s aura, I suggest, is the subjective experience of the objective commodification of vision.
Because of the increased intensity of the image’s circulation, the simulacrum produced by mass media is, far more than the painted masterpiece, utterly emptied out and means only its own currency in circulation. The “original” and hence any possibility of the “copy” are liquidated in the frenzy of the circulation of the postmodern image.19 With the pure simulacrum, we are looking at the pure fact of other people’s looking at a particular nodal point in media flow. The simulacrum is primarily an economic image; a touchstone for the frenetic circulation of the gaze.20
Aura as “a unique distance” never was anything other than the slow boiling away of the visual object (the painting, for example) under the friction of its own visual circulation. The painting in the museum becomes overlaid with the accretions of the gazes of others on its surface. This statement is merely a reformulation in visual terms of Lukacs’ analysis of commodity reification: “underneath the cloak of a thing lay a relation between men [sic].”21 With the painted masterpiece, which, as a unique object, has been seen by so many others, the viewer’s image of it is necessarily measured against all other imagined viewers’ images. That is, his or her perception of it includes his or her perception of the perceptual status of the object–the sense of the number and of the kind of looks that it has commanded. This abstracted existence, which exists only in the socially mediated (museum reproductions, etc.) and imagined summation of the work of art’s meaning (value) for everyone else (society), accounts for the fetish character of the unique work of art. The relations of production in the production of the value of art are abstract and hence, because they have heretofore lacked a theory, hidden.22 Because the visual fetish emerges when one cannot see the visual object in its totality (the totality of looks in which it has circulated), we may grasp that part of the object’s value comes from its very circulation. The fetish character intimates a new value system; the aura intimates visual circulation in a visual economy. As I have proposed, this circulation is productive of value in the classical terms of the labor theory of value.23
What Benjamin understood as “information”–that is, events, “shot through with explanation”–the rise of which coincides with the fall of the story, the decline of experience and the dawning of modernity, is now recognizable as a predominant feature of new forms of mediation in the capitalist economy.24 In the intensification of the logic of capitalist information society, the pure and immediate visible object becomes ever more recondite, the oceanic bond with it ever more distant. As the distance between the eye and the originary visual object approaches infinity, aura passes into simulacrum.25
As with information, which must appear “understandable in itself,” and the coin, so with binary code and the media byte.26 The media byte is media understood in two determinations: 1) as its particular content, mediation in its synchronic form, and 2) as part of a system of circulation. As with all objective forms that must be reified (taken out of capital circulation, at least conceptually) in order to be constituted as objects, the media byte travelling at a certain speed (in the form of a nineteenth-century painting in the nineteenth century, for example) has a fetish character or aura. As the image accelerates, the aura undergoes a change of state and becomes simulacrum. Simulacra travel so fast, circulate among so many gazes, that the content (as context, as socio-historical embeddedness) is sheared from the form, making the history of their production ungraspable. Indeed, to a certain extent the category “history” no longer applies to them. The simulacrum has value and nobody knows why. This result should be taken as a gloss on the famous phrase “the medium is the message.” The aura, in its conversion to simulacra, means the regime of mediation. The specter of the visible (aura) has become the substance of the visual (simulation). In the visual arena as well, exchange- value overtakes use-value, forcing vision itself to partake directly in the dynamics of exchange. Hence today there is an almost palpable integument overlaying society. This integument can no longer properly be described as “ideology” (since ideology is a concept welded to a narrative and therefore quasi- historical core), but is more adequately denoted by the term “spectacle.”27
Aura, then, is to ideology as simulacrum is to spectacle. In the simulacrum, the particular content of a message, its use value, is converted into nothing but pure exchange value. The amplitude of the message itself is liquidated under the form that it takes. Media bytes realize their value as they pass through the fleshy medium (the body) via a mechanism less like consciousness and more like the organism undergoing a labor process–call it an haptic pathway. New synapses uniting brain and viscera are cut and bound. Internal organs quiver and stir. We arise from our seats in the cinema and before our television sets remade, fresh from a direct encounter with the dynamics of social production and reproduction.
Properly speaking, contemporary media bytes do not have an aura, but have become simulacra. The term aura is better reserved for the painting hanging on the gallery wall–its circulation among gazes transpires at a slower speed. As I noted, the painting’s aura derives from the gap between what one sees and its status as a work of art in circulation. One covets the authentic knowledge of an object that is slowly boiling away under the gazes of passers-by only to be reassembled as an abstraction of what the many eyes that have gazed upon it might have seen. The painting becomes a sign for its own significance, a significance that is an artifact of its circulation through myriad sensoriums. Simulation occurs when visual objects are liquidated of their traditional contents and mean precisely their circulation. Liquidated of its traditional consents and intimating the immensity of the world system, the affect of the visual object as simulacrum is sublime.
Put simply, the aura is Benjamin’s name for the fetish character of vision.28 It is the watermark of the commodification of sight. The frustratingly mystical properties of the aura are due to the fact that it is the index of the suppression of the perception of visual circulation. The aura is the perception of an affect and indicates the moment where the visual object is framed by the eye with the desire to take it out of circulation. Like the fetish, it marks the desire to convert exchange value into use value, to free the object from the tyranny of circulation, and to possess it. The fetish character of the commodity is the result of capital’s necessary suppression of the knowledge of the underbelly of production, i.e., exploitation; it is the mystification of one’s relationship to the products for consumption. Here, this mystified relation, expressed most generally, is our inability to think the production of value through visual means, that is, our inability to thoroughly perceive the properties and dynamics of the attention theory of value in the production of aesthetic, cultural and economic value. The fetish marks the independent will of objects, their monstrous indifference to our puny desire, their sentience, that is the registration of their animation in circulation. Commodity fetishism is the necessary ruse and consequence of free enterprise, and its sublimity is the antithesis of social transparency. This sublimity is further intensified (as is social opacity) with simulation in the postmodern.29 The aura, as the visual component of the fetish, specifies the character of representation, visual and otherwise, under capitalism during the modern period. Simulation, which occurs at a higher speed and greater intensity of visual circulation, specifies the character of representation in the postmodern period.
The Time-Image
It is important to think for a moment that for Deleuze cinema is to our period what capital was to Marx’s. Of course the parallel is not strict since, if you will allow me to misrepresent both thinkers slightly, Capital is for Marx a matter of development, while Cinema is for Deleuze an ontological condition. However, I put it this way not because I want, with Deleuze, to posit cinema as consciousness par excellence, but because I want, against Deleuze, to make an historical claim for cinema as the consciousness par excellence of twentieth century capitalism.
For Marx, Capital posited a universal history of which capital the idea was the culminating moment, in that it allowed us to grasp universal process. The name of the work, Capital, is the hypostatization of the machinic logic that had the world in its grip: a process as a thing (capital), which, when actualized as process (movement) unlocked the secret dynamics between the historical construction of the world and of consciousness. Capital the idea, with its ability to deploy the concepts developed in Capital, was precisely the consciousness of capitalism, at once the realization and representation of the material and conscious processes of capital itself: its specter, if you will. Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 can be taken also as names for modes of production, spectral projections of cinematic circulation in the discourse of philosophy.
If “cinema” as the process and the sign for the dominant mode of production does not immediately have the same resonance as “capital,” one need only begin to think of cinematic relations as an extension of capitalist relations–the development of culture as a sphere of the production line. Thus cinema is at once a sign for itself as a phenomenon and its process, as well as a sign for capital as a phenomenon and its processes. Cinema here marks a phase in the development of capitalism and capital’s utter modification (metamorphosis) of all things social, perceptual, material.
The cinema for Deleuze is nothing if it is not a force of deterritorialization. So too, we must remember, was capital for Marx: simultaneously the most productive and destructive force unleashed in human history. But the cinema, for Deleuze, is an industrial strength modifier of consciousness capable, in its strong form, of unweaving the most arborescent and solidified of thought formations, the most reified of perceptions–it annihilates traditional thought forms as well as tradition itself. Hence its attraction for philosophy. Cinema, like capital, is also a relentlessly material practice which can be recapitulated in the movement of concepts. Deleuze works “alongside” the cinema, producing cinema’s concepts in order to deploy cinema’s deterritorializing forces within the discourse of philosophy. This way of working is to be taken at once as a kind of representational verisimilitude, a performance of cinematic movement/time in the discourse of concepts, and also as a polemic against philosophy that takes on the statist forms purveyed by Freud, Lacan, Marx and other theorists whose work excises from the realm of possibility certain kinds of movements (desires) and blocks their becoming. Deleuze is interested here neither in ideology critique nor in psychoanalysis, the two dominant modes of film theory at the time of writing; he builds his assemblages around the work of auteurs, whom he takes as machines who produce certain distinct kinds of forms.
To write cinema as an agent of deterritorialization, Deleuze eliminates most of it. He makes a distinction at the beginning of Cinema 1 between the work of the great directors–who are to be compared “not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers,” and all the rest of cinema’s products, what he calls, “the vast proportion of rubbish in cinematic production.”30 We will have to consider all of cinema, but for Deleuze, “We are talking only of masterpieces to which no hierarchy of value applies.”31 This leaves him one or two hundred directors at most, and their commentators. We are left to assume that the rest, the producers of “rubbish,” recapitulate state forms.
The translators of Cinema 1 say that “[t]he book can . . . be seen as a kind of intercutting of cinema and philosophy,” but even given that cinema is a force for the unweaving of existing structures, conceptual and otherwise, Deleuze must keep philosophy itself from arborescence, that is, from becoming a reterritorializing practice that would undo the cinema and put the breaks on desire.32 However, this means that Deleuze must write, as it were, without history. As I have noted, to accomplish this unweaving he conceptualizes filmmakers as other great philosophers, painters, and writers have been conceptualized by the New Critics and their legacy, that is, as auteurs, geniuses. Desire, the animus of movement, is to Deleuze what Power, the animus of immobilization, is to Foucault: the name for praxis, the ether of relations, the field of the event. To release desire (that is, the becoming molecular of the molar, the destratification of the stratified) and to weave by unweaving is precisely the desire of Deleuze. How then but through the debunking of history to keep philosophy from producing a field of stratification, from undoing the work Deleuze sees performed by cinema and that he would himself perform in the force field of philosophy (and again in the world) by filming cinema with his numerous and extraordinary descriptions/abstractions of its relations? In short, how to keep philosophy from becoming a state form?
The difficulty of the cinema books is a partial answer to these questions. The fact that there is only one periodization in the books provides another answer. Their concepts are neither hierarchized nor even serialized. Although the concepts emerge from each other and draw on each other, they are not locked into any strict array. Yet, for all that, they have the aura of a profound interdependence. As do the films he writes about, the movement of Deleuze’s concepts sets up alternate economies of forces. These alternate economies are economies of movement, of time, of knowing, which are not/have not yet been produced on a massive scale. This refusal of stratification, the refusal of concepts to become knowledge in Foucault’s sense of the word, makes Deleuze’s concepts of the cinema as difficult to understand within their “system” as it is to understand the “system” itself. His “system,” if one had but world enough and time, would, I fear, end up like the proverbial Chinese emperor’s map of the kingdom that is as big as the kingdom itself–not much of a map for the Chinese emperor, not much of a system for the philosopher. The system is manifest rather as a mode of production–one learns one’s way around by following a path and by wandering about. Deleuze is not building a system, he is making pieces, pieces for us to use in our own constructions, pieces at once so delicately, precisely and precariously placed that as soon as we touch them, they become something else. Cinema is for Deleuze a machine that makes machines. Deleuze machines concepts from cinema’s flows. The consistency of the flow of Deleuze’s concepts one from the other, their complex yet ultimately undecidable relations to an unconceptualizable whole of Cinema (hence Cinema 1, Cinema 2), negates what for Deleuze is fascistic understanding, an understanding that takes the form of recognition, of history. This recognition which for Deleuze and Guattari confirms the cliches of pre-fabricated thought, prevents the encounter.33 The ostensible consistency of method in the cinema books, a consistency that withstands a thousand variations of angle, illumination and content, is here at once the sign of the game of philosophy and its undoing as a state form in Deleuze’s terms.
This fluidity then is very much like the Grundrisse, the first draft of Capital, with one important (historical) difference: it is “post- dialectical,” non-hierarchical and non-totalizing. Like the cinema books, the Grundrisse is also not a solid; it is as well precisely a representation of production process. In the Grundrisse one cannot understand the commodity form without understanding the entire process of exchange. One cannot understand exchange without understanding circulation and production. One cannot understand circulation and production without understanding money. One cannot understand money without understanding wage labor. One cannot understand wage labor without understanding necessary labor time and surplus labor time. One cannot understand these without understanding the falling rate of profit and so on until one can see the grand functioning of all aspects of the model, each mutually interactive and as a result mutually defined. The constituent concepts of capital flow into each other to create an image of social totality similar in form to the grand spiral that Deleuze sees in Eisenstein. Deleuze’s concepts, on the other hand, all precisely defined and interactive, create discrete images of a totality that are individuated and non- interdependent. As with Marx, the process of this totality occurs off-screen, as it were, but unlike with Marx its architecture cannot, even in theory, be grasped in its entirety. For Deleuze the process of consciousness is unremittingly material but can never be fully conceptualized. The concepts abstracted from the materials that make up a filmic thought arise from the way the elements combine with each other, but then fall away, necessarily positing a world outside. However, unlike a dialectical logic, the logic embedded in the concept tells us nothing final about what is beyond the frame: hence the plateau, the auteur, the assemblage. The method here is not differentiation and sublation, but differentiation and transgression. One moves across, not through and beyond. But the necessity of moving across the infinity of proliferations, the tireless press of movement, becomes a beyond–quantity becomes quality, even for Deleuze. This beyond is precisely the conditions of possibility for the time-image. Even though he does not write “in the name of an outside,” an outside appears. The precision of Deleuzian concepts, taken together with the impossibility of finding an underlying logic which explains them in their totality, makes them figurations of the fact of a beyond: they are sublime.
Recall the way each of the sections in the cinema books ends–with phrases like “the three time images all break with indirect representation, but also shatter the empirical continuation of time, the chronological succession, the separation of the before and after. They are thus connected with each other and interpenetrate . . . but allow the distinction of their signs to subsist in a particular work”34 or, “It is these three aspects, topological, of probabilistic [sic.], and irrational which constitute the new image of thought. Each is easily inferred from the others, and forms with the others a circulation: the noosphere.”35 What I am interested in here is the motion of the phrasing. In the cinema books a summary of what came before is already a going after. These are examples of the Deleuzian cut, which as it finishes something off, begins it anew in another key. Always leaving something behind, always moving on to something else, the Deleuzian cut is always, infinitely in between.
The mode of production in the cinema books is well described in A Thousand Plateaus. In the chapter entitled “How do you make yourself a Body without Organs?” Deleuze and Guattari say:
This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing the lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole 'diagram,' as opposed to still signifying and subjective formations. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the plane of consistency.36
Deleuze understands such occupation and tipping as characteristic of the cinema. Whether in the dialectical yearning of the image he notes in Eisenstein, the interval he expostulates in Vertov, the free and indirect discourse of Pasolini, the duration of the time-images from the films of Ozu, the effect present in the masterpiece is one of an actual retreading of perception and hence of thought. Cinema “connects, conjugates and continues,” making us pass over into something else. For as Deleuze says, “Cinema’s concepts are not given in cinema . . . . Cinema itself is a new practice of images and signs whose theory philosophy must produce as a conceptual practice.”37 For Deleuze, this practice checkmates pre-fabricated thought and releases desire, either pushing thought beyond itself into its own unthought, or, as Deleuze puts it by paraphrasing Artaud, making thought aware that it is “not yet thinking.”38As the body undergoes new forms of viscerality, new forms of thought are produced.
I am suggesting that the encounter with the paralysis of thought, the encounter with the immensity of the not yet thought that results for Deleuze in an encounter with the sublime, marks at once a moment in the retooling of our sensoriums and cinema’s encounter with the immensity of, for lack of a better term, the world system. The retooling of the sensorium that occurs in the encounters with the unrepresentable occasions in the work of Deleuze a retooling of philosophy. Though I can only suggest it here, it should turn out that the experienced events in the cinema are from the standpoint of capital experiments about what can be done with the body by machines and by the circulation of capital. Not all of these visceral events turn out to be equal. The structures and intensities of surrealism, for example, seem thus far to have had greater possibilities for capital expansion (e.g., MTV) than those of suprematism. Deleuze’s conceptualization of these events (the encounters between machines, value and minds) is, as he himself admits, a finding of concepts for forms. Cinemas 1 and 2, it seems to me, grapple in the language of concepts with the Darstellung of cinema in a manner similar to the way in which Marx’s Capital, or better, the Grundrisse (because there one sees the thought happening) grapples with the Darstellung of capital. Deleuze’s books are at once an attempt to translate the logic of cinema into an explicitly conceptual language, and an excrescence of cinema. With respect to the body, geography, labor, raw material and time, one might well imagine cinema to have become the most radically deterritorializing force since capital itself.
To show the relevance of Deleuze’s cinema to the visual economy and the cinematic mode of production, I have noted that there is really only one explicitly historical thesis in the cinema books, a thesis which at once unifies and divides the two volumes.
"Why," asks Deleuze, "is the Second World War taken as a break [between the movement image and the image, between Cinema 1 and Cinema 2]? The fact is that in Europe, the post war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe . . . . [These] situations could be extremes, or, on the contrary, those of everyday banality, or both at once [Deleuze's exhibit A is the neo-realism of Rossellini]: what tends to collapse is the sensory-motor schema which constituted the action image of the old cinema. And thanks to this loosening of the sensory-motor linkage, it is time, 'a little time in the pure state', which rises up to the surface of the screen. Time ceases to be derived from the movement, it appears in itself . . . .39
The emergence of what Deleuze calls the time- image is a result of the increase in the number of situations to which we do not know how to respond. For Deleuze it leads directly to the sublime, and he produces it as such. That the time-image is also a response to the informatics of culture and to informatics itself, to what Benjamin called in “The Storyteller” a decline of experience, should also be clear: “Was it not noticeable after the [first world] war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent–not richer, but poorer in communicable experience.”40 Shock, whether from war, from modern life in the metropolis, or from the profusion of information, severs organic (low speed, traditional, non-metropolitan) human relationships. Deleuze notes that, “The life or afterlife of cinema depends upon its internal struggle with informatics.”41 Here in Cinema 2 Deleuze, again very close to the Benjamin of “The Storyteller,” writes with the desire to ward off the categoricality of capital-thought, that is, the degradation (reification) of thought and experience which comes with the mass communicational regime–information’s procrustean bed. For Deleuze the category of the time-image, with its attendant sublimity, its ability to cancel or bully thought and identification, names a multiplex of forms that cinema (the ultimate Body without Organs) as contemporary consciousness actualizes as resistance to molarity, to the field of stratification, to the plane of organization of which a key player is capitalism and its perceptual order. This perceptual order is marked by the stratification (reification) essential to capital process. Its overcoming (as well as its recoding) must be taken as a form of labor. Indeed such overcomings and recodings take place all the time. In the social sciences they are referred to as informal economy or disguised wage-labor.42
Elsewhere in Cinema 2, cinema’s struggle with the informatics of capitalism is made more explicit:
The cinema as art lives in direct relation with a permanent plot, an international conspiracy that conditions it from within, as the most intimate and indispensable enemy. This conspiracy is that of money; what defines industrial art is not mechanical reproduction but the internalized relation with money. The only rejoinder to the harsh law of cinema--a minute of image which costs a day of collective work--is Fellini's: 'When there is no more money left, the film will be finished.' Money is the obverse of all images that the cinema shows and sets in place so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film . . . .43
Deleuze argues that the film within the film is in one way or another a film about the film’s economic conditions of possibility. One should take the citation from Fellini at once literally (when the filmmaker runs out of money his film is finished) and absolutely (when and if the money form becomes obsolete film will be outmoded, which in a way it is). Though Deleuze says disappointingly little about film’s direct relation with “a permanent plot, an international conspiracy that conditions it from within,” it is clear that for him cinema as forms of thought is locked into a dire struggle with capitalism. The cinema of masterpieces is at once enabled and threatened by the schizophrenia of capital. For Deleuze the criteria of the masterpiece is the schizophrenic relation to hegemony.
After writing that “the cinema confronts its most internal presupposition, money,” Deleuze goes on to claim that in cinema “we are giving image for money, giving time for image, converting time, the transparent side, and money, the opaque side, like a spinning top on its end.”44 Though one might be tempted to claim that this is not for Deleuze an implicit recognition of the dialectical relationship between cinema and money–on the contrary, the relationship between time and money, with respect to cinema, is one of reciprocal presupposition, a reciprocal relationship that is not dialectical but, as Deleuze emphasizes, “dissymetrical”–I should note here that Deleuze’s example to illustrate the dissymetricality of the relationship between cinema and money is Marx’s expression M-C-M, which he contrasts to C-M-C. The formulation C-M-C, Deleuze writes, “is that of equivalence, but M-C-M is that of impossible equivalence or tricked dissymetrical exchange.”45 Though for Marx it is the very mystery of the dissymetrical relationship money-commodity-money which produces for him a critique of political economy (that the second “money” is greater than the first “money” raises the whole question of the production of value), for Deleuze this dissymetricality produces the category of the unthought, “money as the totality of the film.”46 “This is the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money. If it is true that movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence, a symmetry as an invariant, time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal change or the impossibility of equivalence.”47
“It is this unthought element which haunts the cinema of the time-image (e.g., Citizen Kane and the unthought and unthinkable Rosebud which conditions the chrono-logical unfolding of the film).”48 Taking Citizen Kane as a point of analysis, there are three things that I would like to establish here. First, in refusing to think political economy, or rather, in flirting with the idea of political economy in order to do something else, Deleuze is playing a game–his internal struggle with informatics. He ends the section on M-C-M and dissymetrical exchange not by invoking the mysteries of the production of value, but by repeating the line from Fellini, “And the film will be finished when there is no more money left.” At once, in the next section, he begins his writing of cinema anew–the film is not yet finished. Second, Deleuze’s flirtation with political economy takes the form of his concept of cinema–his flight from political economy follows what he believes cinema itself to be accomplishing. The unthought or the unthinkable that drives the time-image is, for Deleuze, the non-differentiated condition of consciousness–it is that which cannot be made conscious. For example, the investigation into “what is the thing (the being) called Rosebud”49 drives Citizen Kane, and causes it to deploy for Deleuze what he calls “sheets of past.” “Here time became out of joint and reversed its dependent relation to movement; temporality showed itself as it really was for the first time, but in the form of a coexistence of large regions to be explored.”50 Deleuze continues:
In relation to the actual present where the quest begins (Kane dead) they [the sheets of past] are all coexistent, each contains the whole of Kane's life in one form or another. Each has what Bergson calls "shining points," singularities, but each collects around these points the totality of Kane or his life as a whole as a "vague nebulosity."51
As is nearly always the case with Deleuze’s Cinema, the metaphysics posited by the masterpiece in question are the metaphysics of cinema generally–the film functions as an allegory for cinema. In the passage above, Kane stands in for cinema: his being, “the totality of Kane or his life as a whole,” is given by the being of cinema which culminates this time in a “vague nebulosity.” In a new key the vague nebulosity which the sheets form marks again the totality that exceeds mapping of which I spoke earlier; it is in the glowing rhizome of cinema in general that Deleuze finds the “shining points,” the concepts. By using the films as figures of the concepts he is describing, Deleuze shows that the films are the concepts. “The hero acts, walks and moves; but it is the past that he plunges himself into and moves in: time is no longer subordinated to movement but movement to time. Hence the great scene where Kane catches up in depth with the friend he will break with, it is in the past that he himself moves; this movement was the break with the friend” (italics in original).52 The fact that this movement was the break with the friend is the demonstration that in the cinema of the time-image movement is subordinated to time since in effect the movement renders the time of the break. Hence my second point, that Deleuze’s flirtation with political economy takes the form of his concept of cinema, is confirmed because a more general rule applies: Deleuze’s flirtation with everything that the cinema touches takes the form of his concept of cinema. Cinema is composed of homologies of Cinema. It is in the search for Rosebud, and in cinema itself, and finally in reality itself as well (“temporality showed itself as it really was”), that the sheets of past are all coexistent. Thus for Deleuze the film figures an ontological (ahistorical) condition. Film itself achieves the ability to mime the being of time, and Deleuze mimes the film. It is because he puts film in the tradition of art and philosophy and because, in spite of himself, he finds truth there, in the forms set forth by Spinoza, Bergson and Peirce, that he does not see the temporal relations deployed by Citizen Kaneas an emergent historical condition.
Cinema is composed of homologies of Cinema, yet certain homologies are discarded. Here, in order to make my third point with respect to Citizen Kane and the cinema books, that the unthought of the cinema books is production itself, it will be useful to recall that Rosebud, the unthought in Citizen Kane, embodies the matrix of desires which inaugurated Kane’s empire building–Rosebud is the repository of desire for and by the forces of capitalist production, the originary formation in the biography of Kane’s libidinal economy. It is also a question: How does this Rosebud, which is at once forgotten, a child’s toy, an eternally blossoming flower, and an anus, relate to Kane’s libidinal economy? Are Kane’s libido and economy fused in the intensity with which the object must be held onto even in the face of the final and necessary letting go, or in the eternal return of a dissatisfaction caused by the cessation of movement which must necessarily occur at the bottom of a hill, or, again, in the hidden and ever renewing promise of a mobility dependent upon a generalized homogenization of the landscape and brought about by a snow that brings with it mobility across all obstacles as well as communion with a certain childhood bliss? Though one could extend this list of questions to include questions about technology and speed and the constitution of childhood, whatever constellation of anality and the holding on to things, and release, of the rhythm of circulation, of the homogenizing and mobilizing effects of money one decides upon, it is perhaps most important at this point to remember that the empire which Kane builds is a media empire. Rosebud, the unthought, is at the core of a capitalist media project.
The fact that all of Citizen Kane‘s great temporal gyrations through sheets of past are not about presenting the mystery of anyone but precisely of Citizen Kane, the capitalist media mogul, and his relation to Rosebud, that obscure object of his desire, is not in itself sufficient proof to show that the time-image has at its core an inadequately explored economic component. Nor can we take Deleuze’s using the formula M-C-M to explain cinema’s dissymetrical exchange with money as adequate evidence for the necessity of doing a political economy of cinema, and therefore as adequate evidence for the need to posit something like the attention theory of value. Even if such an account might help to explain what Deleuze cannot: namely, cinema’s sheer existence as an industry, but also its presence at the provenance of the transformation of the terms of production via new forms of mediation; and even if Deleuze’s many other flirtations with cinema as the formal equivalent of capital formations tempt us to think that cinema is capital of the twentieth century; we can conclude only that a line of thought is cut off in the cinema books. Deleuze writes, “What [Welles] is showing–already in Citizen Kane–is this: as soon as we reach sheets of past it is as if we were carried away by the undulations of a great wave, time gets out of joint, and we enter into temporality as a state of permanent crisis” (italics in original).53 However tempting it might be to suggest that the transformation of temporality in cinema is much more akin to Lukacs’ concept of the spatialization of temporality in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” or to Ernst Bloch’s synchronicity of the nonsynchronous in “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics”54 than is here admitted, or however much the undulations of great waves and the state of permanent crises sound like descriptions of capital’s cycles of boom and bust, we can only conclude that Deleuze ignores this line of inquiry because he operates with an idee fix that cinema, that is the masterpieces of cinema, operate in excess of capital, are indeed its unthought. This unthought is for him at once the dissymetrical exchange with money, and outside of political economy. My suggestion here is that it is precisely in the region of excess, in the overloading of forms, that we find the creation of new possibilities for production.55 The synchronicity of the nonsynchronous is only one of them.
If Deleuze’s cinema books are to be taken as an enactment of the organizational possibilities of cinema in the discourse of philosophy, then his Cinema is within Cinema; it is a film within a film and therefore, even by his own logic, a film about money. The philosophical praxis which goes under the name of Cinema is a sign of the world system–a projection in the arena of philosophy of the cinematic mode of production. What remains to be done here is to suggest the role of cinema in political economy.
Cinema 3: The money-image
New German Filmmaker Wim Wenders films the cinema as such in his explicitly multinational and hence self-consciously contemporary work, Until the End of the World. There, optical machines interfaced with computers and the human sensorium allow the blind to see through the eyes of another person. This other person, the filmmaker, so to speak, must go out to see things and then during the playback of the images remember them with the feelings he had for them in order that the images may pass through his consciousness and into the consciousness of the blind. The filmmaker’s role, in a manner a la Vertov and Kino-Eye, is to aid those who, in post-industrial society, cannot see because of their bio-historical restrictions. The filmmaker does not, however, as in Vertov, have to create an image of totality, simply an image rooted to the world by passing through a human and humanizing mind.
But in the late capitalism of Until the End of the World, visual representation and the unconscious are portrayed on a convergent course. Furthermore, they are impacted in a third term, the commodity. In a new innovation, the same technology which allows the blind to see is used to record and replay an individual’s dreams by cutting out the filmmaker- other. One of the characters involved in the research on this new technology develops an addiction to the ghostly colored electronic shadows of her own pixilated dreams that flicker then vanish only to coalesce once again as, for example, liquid blue and yellow silhouettes walking hand in hand on a blood red beach. Endlessly she watches the movement of the abstracted forms of her desire mediated and motivated only by technology and her own narcissism, rather than seeking an encounter with the outer world through another visual subject. Her addiction feeds on her dreams and her dreams feed on her addiction. This video within a film is capital’s shortest circuit–an environment where the individual immediately consumes her own objectification. Staring endlessly at video, only breaking off in order to sleep, she is immersed in the time of the unconscious and cannot be reached from outside. The time of the unconscious secreted on the screen is taken also as the Ur-time of late capitalism–a temporality resulting from the infinite fluidity and plasticity of a money that responds to desire before desire can even speak, and a desire which, no matter what else it is, is desire for money, the medium of the addiction. As emphasized by the setting, a James Bond style cave full of high tech imaging equipment staffed by aboriginal people in the middle of the Australian outback, the strange outcroppings of capital circulation are under scrutiny here. In late capitalism three strands, representation, the unconscious and the commodity, tend to converge in the image.56
A different filmmaker might have ended such a history of the world and its cinema here, with a time- image marking the end of the world, but Wenders, who has always painfully yet often beautifully believed in the world, ends the film with a knowing farce: Returning not exactly to Earth, but to the logical time of official world history, the video junky kicks the habit and gets a little perspective on the planet by working in an orbiting shuttle for Green Space. Despite Wender’s partial yet inadequate ironizing of such “political” alternatives which utilize the money- consciousness system with a little perspective, I think that we can take Until the End of the World as exemplary of Deleuze’s argument that “the cinema confronts its most internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation [italics his]. What the film within the film expresses is this infernal circuit between the image and money . . . . The film is movement, but the film within the film is money, is time.”57 In the strange temporality of Until the End of the World, the plot breaks down where the video starts. The video interludes drip with the temporality of pure mediation. Locked into the circuits of economic flow, the time-image is a money-image as well.
The time/money-image that reveals the end of thoughtful action and the impetus to the narcissism of philosophy (or even to the masochist’s elation in sublimity) is not, as Deleuze might have us think, the sole province of the latter half of the twentieth century. Nor, I should add here, is it the only form of the money-image–only the most philosophical of them. In The Time Machine of H.G. Wells, which is contemporary with the beginning of cinema, we have another harrowing time-image of the end of the world: The lonely time traveller sits in his now ancient time machine on the last beach at the end of the world, a cold thin wind arising as the giant red sun, gone nova, droops into the final sky. To avoid the giant crabs that slowly close in on him at the end of eternity, he first moves on a hundred years only to find them still on the beach, so he moves forward a few million more. The giant crabs are gone and the only living creature to be seen is a black sea- dwelling football-like animal that takes a single leap out of the dark ocean. The thin wind blows and in the twilight snow falls. This scene suggests that the forces of reason capable of producing the time traveller’s time machine are also capable of hailing the foreclosure of the human species. Wells’s time- image at the end of the nineteenth century as well as Wenders’s at the end of the twentieth put forth two images of time and its ruins, or better, its ruining, at the end of the world. This “a little time in its pure state” is at once a meditation on the consequences of rationality, and equipment for living. If we reconstitute ourselves in the presence of the sublime, perhaps we become inured to it as well. In our responses, conscious, unconscious, visceral, what have you, we incorporate the terms and protocols of the new world as it incorporates us.
What do the time machines of H.G. Wells and of the cinema have in common? Is not Wells’s late nineteenth-century time machine already a form (in Deleuze’s terms) of “post-war” cinema, a device for the utter severing of the sensory-motor link? I am suggesting that the cinema machines this severing, that it is not a mere response to an objective historical situation that can be reified under the sign of the war. Rather, such a severing ought be thought of as a tendency of convergent logics and practices. Antonio Gramsci, recall, in his essay “Americanism and Fordism,” predicted the necessary emergence of a psycho-physical nexus of a new type in which sensation and movement are severed from each other.58 One must consume such severing to produce it in oneself. After all, like the spectator, the time- craft just sits there utterly motionless as night and day alternate faster and faster, as the solid buildings rise and melt away, and then, still accelerating, as everything goes gray and the sun becomes a pale yellow and finally a red arc racing around the sky. The Time Machine‘s bleak registration of the infinite extensionality of a time which yields only emptiness and extinction emerges only out of the theory and practice of a scientific rationality which we know that Wells associated with specialization, capitalism and imperialism. The time machine is the consciousness of these formations. In many ways the story of The Time Machine works much like Max Horkheimer’s assertion in “The End of Reason” that the concentration camps are the logical result of instrumental rationality.59 Rationality to the point of irrationality; Temporality to the point of extinction–these are the trajectories emerging out of a cultural logic which the very form of Deleuze’s ultimately aestheticizing thought elides.
In processing the time-image we produce our own extinction, a necessary condition for many of today’s employees.60 In capitalism our labor confronts us as something alien, as Marx said. Today we work (consciously and unconsciously) to annihilate our own constitution as subjects and make ourselves over as information portals able to meet the schizophrenic protocols of late capitalism. Just as in one era at the behest of social organization we built ourselves as consolidated subjects, in another mode of production we dismantle and retool.61 Today we are schizophrenics.
If cinema is a time machine then perhaps its sublime is precisely the image of our own destruction (as subjects, and therefore, in the “free world,” as a democracy). The pleasure we get as we consume our own annihilation marks a contradiction as absolute as that which emerges, for example, from the awe inspired by the latest I-max film (an excellent name for a late- capitalist medium), Blue Planet. As our eyes, like those of Wenders’ video junkie, experience the exhilaration of digging deeper and deeper into the infinite resolution of six story tall images of entire continents shot from outer space, the film proposes with far less irony than Wenders’s Green Space that space observation might aid in saving the visibly eroded planet still-swirling majestically below us. This proposition conveniently elides the notion that the present condition of an earth that requires saving is a direct result of the very technology (optical, military, communicational–and the economics thereof) which offers us such breathtaking and “salvational” views. The message of the universal project of Science (which can here be understood to be one with the universal project of “good” Capitalism) is reinforced by the moving image of the awesome and eternal Earth. If in the time images of Deleuze’s “masterpieces” we confront the many forms of our own annihilation, “the impower of thought,” and elsewhere, “the destruction of the instinctive forces in order to replace them with the transmitted forces”62, and if in the time images of our popular culture we confront the apotheosis of production/destruction dynamic of capitalism, then we must confront the question of the significance of the aestheticization and philosophization of sublimity in lieu of a political economy of the time-image. We must question the aestheticizing reception of modernists. And if, as Fredric Jameson says, the spectacle which we consume in late capitalism is the spectacle of late capitalism itself,63 we must challenge the aestheticizing reception of the postmodernists as well. As today’s images hold us rapt, it is our own sensory-motor responsiveness which is being retooled and replaced with an aesthetic and aestheticizing function. What future society might emerge from an apt political economy of aesthetics?
Politics
Could we rethink the hold of the cinema on our eyes by producing another way of thinking about it which at once takes seriously the sublime, the internalized relation of the cinema with money, the function of cinema as time machine, and yet which does not reproduce either aesthetics or philosophy or repeat the work of ideology critique or of psychoanalysis?
I believe it is possible. One might begin to think, for a moment, of cinema not only as an aesthetic or philosophical occasion, but as a variation of other media like the road or the railroad track or money: a mental pavement for creating new pathways of commodity flow. Marx never resolved the question of the productive value of the road.64 Cinema presents an occasion where the question of the productivity of the road and the question of mediation in general take on new forms. As an instrument capable of burrowing into the body and connecting it to new circuits, cinema and mass media in general are deeply imbricated in economic production and circulation in the world system. Indeed, cinema performs a retooling of the sensorium by initiating a new disciplinary regime for the eye.
It should come as no surprise that the labor necessary to produce the manifold forms of our systemic compatibility is our own. On an immediate level this claim implies that we work for big corporations when we watch their advertising, but more generally, our myriad participations in the omni- present technology fest are, in addition to whatever else they’re doing, engaged in insuring the compatibility of our sensoriums with prevailing methods of interpellation. These interpellations reach us not only by calling us into identification in the Althusserian sense but by calling us to rhythms, to desires, to affects. Daily we interface with machines in order to speak the systems-language of our socio- economic system. The retooling of ocular and hence corporeal functions is not a one time event; retreading vision, sensoria, and psyches requires constant effort. It is important to note that we are thinking of organic transformation channeled not only through discourse, but through visual practice. (One must, of course, at this point acknowledge the ear as well.) Though certain hardware remains standard for a time, even the screen, for example, has undergone many modifications in its movement from movie to TV to Computer. Today the screen is again being superseded by virtual reality–in the so-called “fifth generation” of computer technology we will be inside information.65 However, micro-adjustments and calibrations of the practices of concrete bodies are being made all the time: as fashion, as sexuality, as temporality, as desire.
I would like to recapitulate briefly two propositions concerning the question of value: 1) The perception that images pass through the perception of others increases their currency and hence their value. Vision adds value to visual objects. Often this value is capitalized. Inevitably this value changes the form or the character of the image, not least because this value is the bio-technological placing of the image in circulation, its very mediation. If circulation through sensoria creates value (recall the painted masterpiece) then this value is the accruing of human attention on the image. Because the images circulate in regulated media pathways (channels), the media itself becomes more valuable as its images do.
2) In what the sociologists might call informal economy, value is produced by viewers as they work on their own sensoriums. In other words, some of the effort in the near daily remaking of the psyche is provided by the labor time of the viewer. This tooling of the body to make it amenable to commodity flow–to make it know how to shift times and to operate at the different speeds that the non-synchronicity of late capitalism demands, to make it address certain ideologies and desires, to elicit certain identifications–requires human labor time and is productive of value.66 Thus at a formal level the value of media and of images is increased, while at an informal level we work on ourselves so that we may work in the world. Though it is important never to forget that in the present regime of sensorial production, all earlier forms of exploitation (wage labor, slavery, feudalism) coexist with the visual and the sensual production of value that I have described, if to look is to labor, then one finds the possibility of such labor accruing to circulatory pathways of our own choosing or even making rather than pathways chosen for us. Where we put our eyes makes a difference. If we look at things normally obscured, or if we rechannel our perceptions and our perceiving via our own intellectual production, we might–through endeavors such as alternative video, writing, performance, etc.–build some of the circulating abstraction that make possible confrontational cultural practice. The labor of revolution is, after all, always an effort to reorganize the production and distribution of value. It is an attack on the presiding regimes of value in order that we might create something else.
One might think of the cinema as an instrument (along with radio, television, telecommunications) that has, without our really noticing, been the harbinger of a new regime for the production and circulation of economic value at a new level of economic practice as well as of economic conceptualization. Aesthetics and philosophy would then be secondary media (access roads) activated by the cinema. Other cinematic attractions, for example, narrative, circus acts, street shows, identity politics and terrorism, imply other cinematic methods for the harnessing of human attention potentially productive of value; we would do well to follow up the hypothesis of the productive value of human attention.67
If we can dare to think that human attention is productive of value, all of the non-masterpieces of cinema could then be brought back (as well as those of radio and TV) and scrutinized for the multifarious ways in which they have begun a global process of repaving the human sensorium, opening it up to the flow of ever newer and more abstract commodities. At the same time, because we have all been converted into performers and multitudes, they have rendered anything like what used to be meant by democracy utterly and literally unthinkable. The “masterpieces” could also be studied for their participation in certain visuo-economic practices and their resistance to others, though their interest (and status) might dwindle for many. And, I should add, new canons of masterpieces would be (are being) produced by people with different market shares, people who labor and are enfranchised by circuits for the circulation of capital partially antagonistic to the dominant.68 We witness (and participate in) these alternate circuits in the amalgamation of the attention of blocks of viewers in, for example, gay cinema, cinema of the African diaspora, or third world cinema.
What if one thought of cinema not so much as a factory for the production of concepts, but as a factory for the production of a consciousness more and more thoroughly commodified, more and more deeply integrated in a world system? In a world organized like cinema, consciousness becomes a screen on which the affects of production are manifest. What if one thought of cinematic technologies, with their ability to burrow into the flesh, as a partial solution to the problem of expansion faced by the full globalization of capital? In a fully globalized situation, capital expands not outward, spatially and geographically, but into the body, mining it of value (Videodrome). In this schema, television viewers work in a sort of cottage industry performing daily upkeep on their sensoriums as they help to open their bodies to the flow of new commodities. When we come home from work and flip on the tube, our “leisure time” is spent paving new roads. The value produced (yesterday and elsewhere by labor time, but in advanced societies by human attention) accrues to the shareholders of the various media. It is tabulated statistically in what is called ratings and sold to other employers (advertisers) at a market value. But if, for example, we put our eyes elsewhere, or rechannel our viewings into different media, we might build some of the circulating abstractions which make possible medium scale confrontational cultural practice.
Vision becomes a form of work. Bodies become deterritorialized, becoming literally machinic assemblages, cyborgs. The extension of the body through the media, which is to say the extension of the media into the body, raises myriad questions about agency, identity, subjectivity, and labor. Question for the next century: Who (what) will control the pathways in which our attention circulates? Technologies such as cinema and television are machines which take the assembly line out of the space of the factory and put it into the home and the theater and the brain itself, mining the body of the productive value of its time, occupying it on location. The cinema as deterritorialized factory, human attention as deterritorialized labor. Global organization as cinema–the potential cutting and splicing of all aspects of the world to meet the exigencies of flexible accumulation and to develop new affects. Consciousness itself as cinema screen as the necessary excrescence of social organization. Cinema as a paradigm of corporeal calibration. Each body- machine interface may well be potentially productive of value–how else could there have been a Deleuze?
Notes
The author wishes to thank Eleanor Kaufman, Paul Trembath, Jeff Bell, Jonathan Beasley, and Jim Morrison for their helpful comments on the manuscript while in progress.
1. By “reality principle” I mean the set of logics, conventions and strategies by which the film creates the reality effect of the narrative and the mise en scene. The term is particularly apt since it is the eruption of various repressions in the form of walls dripping ooze and sinister sounds which in the film threatens the integrity of the reality principle before its final catastrophe. Sigmund Freud’s elaboration in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the reality principle as that principle which replaces the pleasure principle and works “from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world” coincides precisely with my thesis here that consciousness in its dominant forms is the cinematic excrescence of social organization. To put it very crudely, capitalist production, organized more and more like movie production, produces certain difficulties and contradictions which must be resolved in cinema/consciousness. Sounding somewhat like Max Weber, Freud tells us that “Under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle [italics Freud’s]. This latter principle does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure.” In his development of this formulation Freud could well be describing the representational strategy of Capital Cinema: “In the course of things it happens again and again that individual instincts or parts of instincts turn out to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones, which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego [or in this case, the film]. The former are then split off from this unity by a process of repression, held back at lower levels of psychical development and cut off, to begin with, from the possibility of satisfaction.” That Freud uses the trope of cutting is perhaps no accident. If the “incompatible” instincts succeed “in struggling through, by roundabout paths, to a direct or to a substitutive satisfaction, that event, which would in other cases have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unpleasure . . . . Much of the unpleasure that we experience is perceptual unpleasure [italics Freud’s]. It may be perception of pressure by unsatisfied instincts; or it may be external perception which is distressing in itself or which excites unpleasurable expectations in the mental apparatus–that is, which is recognized by it as ‘danger’.” The ego here can be seen at once as the psychic consequence of a repressive social order pitted against a polymorphously perverse body and as a theater of perception. As a matrix of mediation it occupies the bio-social space which during this century has been overtaken by cinema in the special sense of the word which I attempt to develop here. All of the above citations of Freud come from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1961); pp. 4-5.
2. This point can be made more forcefully still if we see, with Walter Benjamin, the category of experience fundamentally at odds with the commodification of culture during a certain historical juncture. Experience and narrative are in decline because of the emergence of rationality as shock and information. See “The Storyteller,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 83-109.
3. As I have noted elsewhere, during the twentieth century the world is organized more and more like a film; commodity production becomes a form of montage. Commodities, the results of the cutting and editing of materials, transport systems, and labor time take on the status of filmic objects which are then activated in the gaze on the screen of consciousness. The transformation of consciousness, wrought by the cinematic organization of production and the transformed status of objects, is tantamount to consciousness’s full-blown commodification.
4. By the fantasy of postcoloniality I mean fantasy in the same spirit in which it appears as “the First World fantasy of the Free World” in Neferti Xina M. Tadiar’s essay “Sexual Economies in the Asia-Pacific Community,” in What Is In a Rim: Critical Perspectives of the Pacific Region Idea, ed. Arif Dirlik (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 183-210. Tadiar notes that the First world fantasy of the Free World is “the shared ground upon which the actions and identities of its participants are predicated–it is a field of orientation, an imaginary determining the categories and operations with which individuals as well as nation-states act out their histories” (183). My use of the term encompasses a somewhat smaller constituency, intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences. Nonetheless it derives, as does Tadiar’s from Slavoj Zizek, for whom a fantasy construction “serves as a support system for our ‘reality’ itself: an illusion which is structuring our effective, real social relations and which is masking thereby some insupportable, real, impossible kernel” (205, n. 1). In this case the kernel is the persistence of the processes of colonialism itself which are the very conditions of possibility for the institutional construction and deployment of the fantasy of postcoloniality.
5. One need only think of the crucial role borders and passports continue to play in regulating immigration. Precisely because people can’t move, capital, with its ability to cross borders, can pit one national population against another as they compete to sell themselves ever more cheaply than their neighbors. For an excellent discussion of the new form of the nation state see Arif Dirlik’s essay, “Post-Socialist Space Time: Some Critical Considerations,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Duke University Press, 1994 [forthcoming]).
6. In thinking the relationships between cinema and capital there is, to my mind, plenty of room to disagree with Deleuze about the fascistic, statist, stratifying, “outcome known in advance” character of Marxism. Despite the lessons of Deleuze and Guattari about the mode of analysis requisite for the combatting of fascism, Antonio Negri, with his emphasis on radical autonomy and revolutionary subjectivity, provides one alternate example, while Gramsci, whom Deleuze never ventures to touch, provides another.
7. For a more complete discussion of this sketch of an idea see my essay “The Circulating Eye,” Communication Research (Sage Publications, vol. 20, no. 2, April 1993), pp. 298-313.
8. See my essay on Robocop 2 entitled “Desiring the Involuntary,” which discusses the cyberneticization of the flesh as a further realization of what cinema has been doing to its audiences all along, in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (cited above).
9. Two related lines of thought: First, that the new technologies for mining economic value from human flesh produce a new type or class of worker equipped to meet the protocols of flexible accumulation (by this logic, all TV viewers are involved in “cottage industry”); and second, that an elaboration of the dynamics, properties and economic relations of “infomercial” labor will help to theorize other kinds of informal economies.
10. I develop this idea in an essay on S. Eisenstein, I.P. Pavlov and F.W. Taylor, “The Spectatorship of the Proletariat.”
11. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986).
12. I am thinking here of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-Francois Lyotard as well as that of Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School. More recently, the very interesting work of Jennifer Wicke, Mark Seltzer and Anne Friedberg has addressed the commodification of vision and visual culture. It is my contention that though all of these thinkers see the logic of commodification at work in the articulation of cultural forms, commodification remains for them largely metaphorical, a code.
13. I should note here that my use of the term “movement-image” differs somewhat from that of Deleuze’s use of the term. My critique of his work necessarily demands an adaptation of certain aspects of his language and a refusal of other aspects. Though I accept the category “movement-image” just as I accept the category “cinema,” I cannot argue with Deleuze at every point along the way, at every point along his way, if I am to say what I want to say even in this preliminary way. To show the dialectical aspects of the movement-image I need to tell another story–one that does not find the movement-image in the masterpieces, but the masterpieces in it.
14. In David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), Janet Staiger has noted that “Hollywood’s mode of production has been characterized as a factory system akin to that used by a Ford plant, and Hollywood often praised its own work structure for its efficient mass production of entertaining films.” Though I do not disagree with this I am arguing the opposite as well: rather than cinematic production copying Fordism, I would argue that it is an advance over Fordism. Cinematic production uses the practices of Fordism but begins the dematerialization of the commodity form, a tendency which, more than anything else, characterizes the course of economic production during this century. Rather than requiring a State to build the roads that enable the circulation of its commodities, as did Ford, the cinema builds its pathways of circulation directly into the eyes and sensoriums of its viewers. It is the viewers who perform the labor that opens the pathways for new commodities.
15. Geoffrey Nowell Smith points this out in his introduction to Eisenstein Volume 2: Towards a Theory of Montage, eds. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1991).
16. In the cinema, the technologies for the organization of production and of the sensorium converge. Film/Capital is cut to produce an image. Today, the convergence of the once separate industries for image production and for other forms of commodity production (in advertising, for example, the image is revealed as the commodity par excellence) realizes a new and hybridized form: the image-commodity.
17. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 217-251.
18. “The film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. Man’s need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him. The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus–changes that are experienced by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present day citizen” (Illuminations, p. 250, n. 19).
19. Deleuze, in a characteristic and brilliant reading of Plato, provides an analysis of simulation and suggests that it has always haunted the house of philosophy. What I find characteristic about this essay is that in locating the need for idealism to banish simulation in Greek philosophy, Deleuze elides the historical problem of simulation: Why is it possible to make this analysis now? See “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” in The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
20. Instead of withering away like the State, the fetish character of vision, the mystical warping of the visual field surrounding the visual object of perception called “aura,” has achieved, in the situation of televisual reproduction under capitalism, a change of state on par with the change in the status of the object itself: today’s equivalent of aura is the simulacrum. This change of state in the object’s specter raises questions about the changing characteristics of mediation and the historical causes thereof.
21. Georg Lukacs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).
22. Here it is is important to note that I am speaking about the production of value generally. Whether or not this value will be capitalized depends upon a variety of factors, including how pervasively capital has prevaded the arena of the work of art’s “consumption.”
23. That Benjamin at one point extracts the aura from the solitary seer’s gaze upon a tree branch serves only to prove that the supplemental excess of vision that is the aura is not particular to any one moment in an economy of vision, but is distributed along all nodal points in the economy of sight. That which Benjamin called “distance” is actually the irreducibility of the visual object into a static object free from the visual circulation which eventually annihilates the visual object as an object of sight. This finally is as simple as the fact that we cannot look at the same thing forever and that things impel us to look at other things. The way in which our gaze moves is directly related to the way in which our bodies and our eyes are plugged into the economy itself. “Distance,” then, is a form of vibration between the two determinations of mediation. Like the commodity, the object of vision occupies two states simultaneously, it is at once a thing, a use value, and a place holder in the syntax of an economy of vision, an exchange value. The experience of unbridgeable distance registers the impending disappearance or submergence of any visual object back into the regulated circulation of vision itself. Distance, that is, aura, is the poignant registration of the visual object’s oscillation between its two determinations: an object of vision, and a moment in the circulation of vision.
24. Illuminations, p. 89. Benjamin notes in “The Storyteller,” the essay from which this citation is taken, that “It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it,” (Illuminations, p. 89). Storytelling in the essay is pitted against the production of events designed for easy consumption, that is, what Benjamin presciently calls “information.” The clash of storytelling and information in this wonderful essay stages the confrontation of two modes of production which also clash in “The Work of Art,” the pre-industrial and the modern.
25. Information, as it turns out, has less use-value outside of the circuits of the market than did storytelling. It is not knowledge really; to function it must remain in channels. It is important here to distinguish between mediation per se, as in the mediation of events by a medieval manuscript or the transportation of sugar cane on a barge, and mediation in its self-conscious form; that is, media as media that, like the commodity in circulation, has both a particular component (use value) and an abstract component (exchange value) in every “byte.” To understand media thus is to argue that each infinitesimally small slice of media has value both in its content, its information, and in its form as media itself. Media as media always posits and refers back to the circulatory system in which it has and is currency.
26. Illuminations, p. 89.
27. What Benjamin only peripherally perceives about the phenomenon that he dubs aura is that it is an artifact of a visual economy. His perception of it marks a shift in the speed of the circulation of visual economy. The aura, as observed and constructed by Benjamin, is a primordial form of the exchange value of the visual object produced by the systematic circulation of looks, and hence of “images,” in an emerging economy of sight. The labor power accreting to the visual object gives it a certain palpable agency; that is why compelling objects look back. In the moment of their looking at us, we encounter the indifference of the value-system to our own being. In the postmodern, objects look back at us with such intensity that they see through us. In their indifference to our individuality is their sublimity. Benjamin records earlier experiences of this kind of event. Quoting Proust, he transcribes, “Some people who are fond of secrets flatter themselves that objects retain something of the gaze that has rested on them,” adding, “(The ability it would seem, of returning the gaze.)” As Benjamin notes, “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.” In his effort to define the auratic he quotes Valery as well: “To say, ‘Here I see such and such an object’ does not establish an equation between me and the object….In dreams, however, there is an equation. The things I see, see me just as much as I see them” (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, pp. 188 and 189). The concept of the aura is the semi-conscious acknowledgement of the work or image as simultaneously commodity and currency–as being at once itself (an object) and a moment in the circulation of vision. As with storytelling itself, which for Benjamin becomes a topic on the eve of its extinction, the aura becomes observable as soon as there is a transformation in the status of objects. Visual objects, like the events that are no longer held in an organic relation by storytelling but instead appear as information, appear via a new mode of production in the modern. This mode of production functions at a new speed.
28. Through the eye one may grasp the dynamics of circulation in general. Because such disappearance of authenticity is at once more clearly marked in the realm of the visual (Benjamin, Berger, Baudrillard) and, simultaneously, at present more characteristic of late capitalism, I will here restrict my comments to the visual component of aura.
29. If one takes the fetish as an intimation, to the abject individual, of the power of the world system, then it could be said that simulation as spectacle is a dim version of the sublime; it occurs when the shutter on the lamp of the unrepresentable is just barely open. If simulation is an excess of reference without a clear referent, then the sublime is an excess of referent without adequate reference. All the simulation in the world cannot represent the world system, even though the sublimity of such a spectacle evokes its ominous presence. This dual inadequation between a symbolic which cannot represent its object and an object which cannot find its symbolic representation defines the semantic field of the postmodern condition.
30. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xiv.
31. Cinema 1, x.
32. Cinema 1, xii.
33. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
34. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 155.
35. Cinema 2, 215. Deleuze defines the noosphere as follows: “The noosphere is the sphere of the noosign–an image which goes beyond itself towards something which can only be thought” (Cinema 2, 335).
36. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 161.
37. Cinema 2, 280.
38. Cinema 2, 167
39. Cinema 2, xi. For a thumbnail sketch with which to see the difference between the movement-image and the time-image, think of the difference between Griffith and Antonioni, or between Eisenstein and Tarkovsky.
40. Illuminations, 84.
41. Cinema 2, 270.
42. See The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries, eds. Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells and Lauren A. Benton (Baltimore: Thge Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). I am suggesting that in the humanities such informal practices occur in the sphere of literature, film, criticism, television, style, politics, etc., in short, culture. The negotiation of value at the level of consciousness is at once socially necessary labor and unregistered in the GNP.
43. Cinema 2, 77.
44. Cinema 2, 78.
45. Cinema 2, 78.
46. Cinema 2, 77.
47. Cinema 2, 78.
48. For this comment I am indebted here to the readers at Postmodern Culture whose valuable suggestions are to be found doing their work throughout this paragraph, the previous one, and the one that follows.
49. Cinema 2, 105.
50. Cinema 2, 105. In the context of another discussion, this sentence might well describe the relationship between history (historical sheets) in the spatialized present of the postmodern. I add this thought because my project in this section is to show the historical conditions of possibility for Deleuze’s thought and for the resonance of this thought in us. To argue that what Deleuze finds uniquely in the cinema is at present part of a generalized perceptual bathosphere seems to me to be a precondition for the suggestion I am making here concerning media’s pre- eminent place in political economy. Political economy is the unthought of media theory even as it is the empirical if mystified practice of media itself.
51. Cinema 2, 105-6.
52. Cinema 2, 106.
53. Cinema 2, 112.
54. Ernst Bloch, “Nosnsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique, no. 11, 1977 pp. 22-38.
55. Though Deleuze would most likely agree with this statement, he would not however be in accord with the idea that production as such can be productively thought about in terms of political economy. The machinic assemblage, for example, is for him precisely a mode of production that avoids what he takes to be the Oedipalizing tendencies of Marxism which returns all variations to the law of value. Whether or not Deleuze is correct on this matter I leave to readers to decide. Here I would only like to suggest that the philosophical sources upon which Deleuze draws so heavily in the cinema books, namely Henri Bergson and Charles S. Peirce, particularly with respect to their work on quality–which arises from a certain excess and manifests itself in time–might be analyzed using the strategy adopted by Georg Lukacs in his analysis of Kant. By posing the question, what has capital done to perception and consciousness, or alternately, how are models of perception and consciousness and the consciousness they depict utilized by capital, the work of these philosophers might take on a new significance. Peirce defines thirdness, the category that in part gives rise to Deleuze’s category of the time-image, as “that which is what it is by virtue of imparting a quality to reactions in the future” (Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler, New York: Dover Publications, 1955; p.91). This idea of a guiding persistence manifest in such formulations as “Not only will meaning always, more or less, in the long run, mould reactions to itself, but it is only in doing so that its own being consists” (91), might well be considered in the light of the emergence of organizational relations which inflect the construction and the circulation of objects, i.e, developments in capital circulation which orchestrate the temporality of objects and thus change the character of their significance. Such affects might be briefly classed as aura, fetish, or the ideology of private property, but their variety might be, finally, as diverse as affect itself. Bergson too, who claims that “our perception . . . is originally in things rather than in the mind, without us rather than within” (Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer [Garden City: Doubleday, 1959], p. 215), might be studied in light of the diminishing agency of subjects and the increasing agency of things.
56. The flattening out of the space between the unconscious and representation is precisely the argument implicit in a variety of socio-linguistic analyses from Orwell to Baudrillard: things are as they appear, all of the would-be contradictions, yesterday’s contradictions, are on the surface, and since they are on the surface they are no longer contradictions. The space of the fold that registers alienation has all but disappeared. When dystopia is no longer recognizable as such, we are in the postmodern; as in much of the work of Tarkovsky, we are the unconscious. To the Orwellian Trinity WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, we may add a maxim for the theorist: CONSCIOUSNESS IS UNCONSCIOUSNESS.
57. Cinema 2, 78.
58. For Gramsci, Americanism implied not only a routinization of work experience, but the concomitant necessity of “breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing of productive operations exclusively to the mechanical physical aspects” (302). “It is from this point of view,” Gramsci tells us,
that one should study the "puritanical" initiative of American industrialists like Ford. It is certain that they are not concerned with the "humanity" or the "spirituality" of the worker, which are immediately smashed . . . . "Puritanical" initiatives simply have the purpose of preserving, outside of work, a certain psycho-physical equilibrium which prevents the physiological collapse of the worker . . . . American industrialists are concerned to maintain the continuity of the physical and muscular-nervous efficiency of the worker. It is in their interests to have a stable skilled labor force, a permanently well-adjusted complex, because the human complex (the collective worker) of an enterprise is also a machine which cannot, without considerable loss, be taken to pieces too often and renewed with single new parts. (303)
Hence, for Gramsci, Americanism implied not only a reorganization of work, but a reorganization of cultural forms. Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Goeffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 277-318.
59. Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1987), pp. 26-48.
60. See Noam Chomsky, “Notes on Nafta: The Monsters of Mankind,” in The Nation, March 29, 1993, pp. 412- 416. Chomsky argues that the necessary condition of transnational corporations is the destruction of democratic consciousness. In any case they are acting as if it didn’t exist and putting policy into place to insure that it doesn’t exist at least at the level of representation. How much more effective when the mass media engages the microcosms of our own sensibilities to work in tandem with the macrocosmic interests of transnational capital.
61. This is the basic mise en scene of cyberpunk.
62. In the program of the masochist from A Thousand Plateaus, 155.
63. Spoken from the podium during the conference Visions From the Post-Future, Duke University, Spring, 1993. The idea here is, as I understand it, also one of the central theses of The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).
64. Marx thought that the road was built with surplus labor time (surplus value) that was somehow taken out of circulation in its use as road and hence ceased to be capital. Elsewhere, however, it is clear that the roads are necessary for capital circulation, i.e., that they are constituted with what should be necessary labor time. Clearly, surplus labor cannot be necessary labor without forcing the implosion of the labor theory of value since capital is built, that is, realizes a profit, precisely on this split. Marx couldn’t decide if roads were profitable or not. By taking cinema, and more generally mass media, as higher forms of the road, some of these problems begin to resolve themselves precisely because of the increase in intensity of circulation and in the increasing frequency of the production of “roads.”
65. As a citation in Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality says, “Computer programming is just another form of filmmaking.” Rheingold describes the generational development of computers as a slow meshing of human intelligence with artificial intelligence, a gradual decreasing of the distance between the mind and the machine. At first one handed punched cards to an operator. Then one could input information oneself. Then there was a switch from base two to primitive code words, and after that more common language and the screen. In the fifth generation (VR) we will be inside information, able to fly through information spaces, making simple physical gestures, such as pointing, which will then activate complex computerized functions.
66. I would venture as well that it is this unrecognized value producing activity along with other kinds of informal economy (attention) described as disguised wage labor, both in third world economies by political scientists and in patriarchal economies by feminist socio-linguists, that make up the bulk of the unacknowledged maintenance of the world.
67. To repeat, such a theory should in no way obscure the plight of workers whose exploitation continues to take on the forms already visible at the beginning of the industrial revolution. As Einstein’s equations reduce to Newton’s at low velocity, so too ought the attention theory of value reduce to the labor theory of value at low velocities of monetary circulation, that is, at velocities lower than the speed of cinema.
68. Canons are themselves excellent examples of the kind of institutional entrenchment possible by garnering the value produced by attention. The existence of a canon, already and obviously a politics, is one of the myriad forms in which attention is organized and which continues to organize attention.
