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 © 20042007 Timo
Laine