Cinema, Capital of the Twentieth Century

Jonathan L. Beller

© 1994
PMC 4.3

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)

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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
15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. 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

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.
29. 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.

30. 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?

31. 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.

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. 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." 38 As the
body undergoes new forms of viscerality, new forms of thought are
produced.

35. 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.

36. 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

37. 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

38. 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.

39. 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

40. "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 Kane as an emergent historical condition.

41. 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.

42. 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.

43. 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

44. 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.

45. 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

46. 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.

47. 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.

48. 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.

49. 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.

50. 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

51. 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?

52. 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.

53. 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.

54. 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.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.

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. 67

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.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.

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? 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.

59. 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?

Literature Department
Duke University

Copyright © 1994 Jonathan L. Beller NOTE: Readers

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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.
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