The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle

by Jonathan Beller

“Cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye,” writes Jonathan Beller, “and engages spectators in increasingly dematerialized processes of social production.” In his groundbreaking critical study, cinema is the paradigmatic example of how the act of looking has been construed by capital as “productive labor.” Through an examination of cinema over the course of the twentieth century, Beller establishes on both theoretical and historical grounds the process of the emergent capitalization of perception. This process, he says, underpins the current global economy. By exploring a set of films made since the late 1920s, Beller argues that, through cinema, capital first posits and then presupposes looking as a value-productive activity. He argues that cinema, as the first crystallization of a new order of media, is itself an abstraction of assembly-line processes, and that the contemporary image is a politico-economic interface between the body and capitalized social machinery. Where factory workers first performed sequenced physical operations on moving objects in order to produce a commodity, in the cinema, spectators perform sequenced visual operations on moving montage fragments to produce an image. Beller develops his argument by highlighting various innovations and film texts of the past century. These innovations include concepts and practices from the revolutionary Soviet cinema, behaviorism, Taylorism, psychoanalysis, and contemporary Hollywood film. He thus develops an analysis of what amounts to the global industrialization of perception that today informs not only the specific social functions of new media, but also sustains a violent and hierarchical global society.

Genres: Film, Theory, Nonfiction, Art, Technology, Sociology, Philosophy

352 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2006

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

How odd: I mostly agree with the book's main argument, but couldn't stand the way the author approached or developed it, and found the impossibly pretentious and quite clunky writing just about impossible to follow. These two sentences, chosen more or less at random, offer a quite typical illustration of Beller's hyperbolic but empty-sounding prose:

"Given the image of the globe of globalization as the sublime figure of our universal disempowerment, it should come as no surprise that the labor necessary to produce the manifold forms of our systemic compatibility is our (humanity's) own. On an immediate level, this claim implies that we work for big corporations when we watch their advertising, or submit to their p(r)grams, but more generally, our myriad participations in the omni-present technology fest are engaged in ensuring the compatibility of our sensoriums with prevailing methods of interpellation, signalization, and inconsiousification, in addition to whatever else they're doing."

Seriously...

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

While being a bit distracted and self-impressed (his feeling the need to explain the joke in the title of the Beavis and Butthead movie for instance, or his use of that in-word parenthesis thing that was fashionable with academics of our fin du siècle), Beller makes some interesting arguments here. Foremost among them, and which he sadly does not take to its ultimate conclusion or have the courage to display with precise figures, is that television is a means of extending the working day. He cites that on average Americans consume about six hours of television per day, and while I have read recently that this has decreased to about four, if you compound that with the average smartphone “screen time” of about five hours, it’s a bit depressing.

However, doesn’t this interpretation ultimately mean that workers in the imperial core should fight to be compensated for their gratuitous television-viewing while the periphery works to produce their food and necessities? Beller recommends his concurrent book about the Philippines as a companion which I could imagine would clear some things up, but there’s really no reason to do as he has done and relegate discussion of imperialism to some offhand references to a non-representation. Sadly, Beller significantly limits himself in his discussion of commodity production as a whole to an analogy between F.W. Taylor, Pavlov and Eisenstein.

The attention towards psychology with which he replaces this, following Althusser, isn’t particularly informed by contemporary scientific or clinical literature either, instead preferring to cite canned Lacan and ruminate on how cinema has opened up new facets of the body to capital. What we are left with is some metaphysics on the pervasiveness of the visual, little history and little trajectory. I watched Barton Fink and it wasn’t that great. I haven’t watched the Wenders film he considers misogynist for seemingly engaging in the same critique he is, however.

[Chris Tempel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is a very good groundwork for a Marxist critique of cinema and the image/commodity. beller claims academic theory has lagged behind in this, and I think it's true that many regular folks have had scorn for film as a social production line ready to manufacture the dialogue of the working class but also profit past work hours.

After reading a very different book on cinema (bell hook's Reel to Real, which is about black representation and its possibility) I would like to see what Beller has to say about anti-colonial representations in radical African-American films. hooks too sees possibility in cinema for consciousness raising, but her writing focuses on the white supremacist gaze of the camera and how radical individuals can overcome this to produce "visionary Coltrane", a decolonized black experience.