THE HANDSTAND

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2006


the eye

Jonathan Beller:

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.

[55] 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

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.


[56] 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.


[57] 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.

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.

[58] 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?

Photo Illustration: Copyright © 2004–2007 Timo Laine