Jonathan Beller

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I am interested in the structural, psychological, libidinal, and corporeal adaptation of spectators to the protocols of global production. This conversion of spectating, generally conceived as a consumer activity, into a socially productive activity depends on the establishing of media as a worksite of global production. Today, mass media functions as a deterritorialized factory, where the maintenance and retooling of a transnational, transsubjective infrastructure composed of human beings, factories, cottage industries, service sectors, as well as programmed software and electronic hardware is essential to the valorization of capital. The cinematicity of objects is harnassed as an alternative force and used to intensify production. The cinema and its technological descendants extract the labor for the maintenance and calibration of the social totality. Without television, as well as fax-modems, telephones, computers and digitized, computerized money, production would grind to a halt. Each of these media burrows its way into the flesh of the globe. - Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production p. 112 [4]

While drawing on Italian post-workerist theorists associated with speculations about so-called "immaterial labour" Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno and their American associate Michael Hardt, Beller disagrees with their conclusion that developments such as "the social factory", [5] "Post-Fordism" and the increasing capture and commodification of human social interaction itself means that the labour content of value is no longer measureable and thus Marx' theory of value obsolete. Beller lays out the case that it is not obsolete but that both it and our historical moment have been misunderstood. For Beller, Marx' observation that value is dead labour - alienated life - more comprehensively grasps the nature of value globally now than ever before, although value-creating labour today, which includes, for the most privileged strata of workers, so much leisure activity, entertainment consumption and unremunerated (unwaged, unsalaried) attention labour (what is often called "playbor") - labour conditions very different from those the international division of labour and polarizing class divisions assign to the poorest strata of the global working class - has to be understood as taking quite diverse concrete forms. This is in keeping, Beller argues, with Marx' conception of abstract labour, not a phenomenon requiring the transcendence of that analysis.

In addition to Guy Debord and the situationists, Beller's analysis absorbs the work of diverse mediologists and sociologists, principally Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the early Jean Baudrillard of The Political Economy of the Sign, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Niklas Luhmann, and Régis Debray, and cultural critics like Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, to develop his case, in an original and yet fairly orthodox Marxist fashion, that capital has always been image and medium, the products of labour have always been abstract, and that the history of capital's development is one of the ongoing "recession of the real" from the language and sensual access of human subjects:

[T]he apolcalyptic themes of mid-century, themes that include the fundamental irrationality of the rational (Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason and Adorno and Horkheimer’s "Enlightenment as Mass Deception"), the evacuation of being not only from the sign, but from writing understood as the situation of all representation (Derrida), and the foreclosure of representation itself (Debord) function as a kind of barometer, charting the tidal rise of an unconscious that swallows up what may now be glimpsed as the relatively small islands of intelligibility that formerly seemed to contain All. The irrationality of capital’s rational accumultation, its constant humanization of an anti-human agenda was, in the onslaught of its expansion, understood to require profound structural shifts in the operation of mediation in order to adequately distort the field of intelligibility and oeprationalize it in accord with its deeper though unrepresentable logic. - Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production p. 298

Without seeking to minimize the dramatic historical transformations of modernity, Beller contends that the post-modern, post-Fordist, post-human, "digital" society that may seem so disconcertingly new and rapidly changing is a culmination of the progressive intensification and entrenchment of exploitative social relations with continuity going back at least to early modernity. "Digitalisation, and the ideology of the digital, is one of the great reifications of our time. It seems as if the word digital would sum up our entire life situation now because everything is digitized. Everything passes through the computer and the computer mediation, and we all know that. However, it is important to understand that the digital is in fact an abbreviation for a very complex set of social processes which means nothing less than a world system. It takes the entire organization of the world to produce the digital and the digital is now dialectically implicated in whatever else that world is. In fact if one thinks seriously about digitality, one can recognize that the contemporary sense of digital culture is really only the second version, the first being capital itself." [6]

Beller's interest in new technologies and new media is avowedly political. He argues that the fascination with technology can disguise continuity and that "one has to see the technology itself as coming out of the prior sedimentation of dead labour....The earlier forms of exploitation are intensified and continued by the current forms of the removal of value. Furthermore, we don't know how to think about this, in part by design and in part by our own exploitation or the fact that our current situation depends on the exploitation of others. Two billion people live on two dollars a day. That's well known. It's also well known that that's the population of Earth in 1929. The current levels of poverty are higher than ever before, and therefore we are dealing with a kind of immiseration which is distinctly modern, or post-modern. What is the role of digitality in that?" [7]

Cinema of the Philippines

Beller has also written extensively about the cinema of the Philippines where he formerly taught film studies. Acquiring Eyes, his second published book, is on this topic.

Related Research Articles

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to critical theory:

The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory of value that argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of "socially necessary labor" required to produce it.

In economics, the means of production is a term which describes land, labor, and capital that can be used to produce products ; however, the term can also refer to anything that is used to produce products. It can also be used as an abbreviation of the "means of production and distribution" which additionally includes the logistical distribution and delivery of products, generally through distributors; or as an abbreviation of the "means of production, distribution, and exchange" which further includes the exchange of distributed products, generally to consumers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marx's theory of alienation</span> Social theory claiming that capitalism alienates workers from their humanity

Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the experience of human life as meaningless or the human self as worthless in modern capitalist society. It is Marx’s earliest recognizable attempt at a systematic explanatory theory of capitalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commodity fetishism</span> Concept in Marxist analysis

In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things and not as relationships that exist among people. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce, from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services.

The term culture industry was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.—that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer perceived mass-produced culture as especially dangerous compared to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abstract labour and concrete labour</span> Distinction made by Karl Marx

Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It refers to the difference between human labour in general as economically valuable worktime versus human labour as a particular activity that has a specific useful effect within the (capitalist) mode of production.

<i>Das Kapital, Volume I</i> 1867 book by Karl Marx

Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital is the first of three treatises that make up Das Kapital, a critique of political economy by the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx. First published on 14 September 1867, Volume I was the product of a decade of research and redrafting and is the only part of Das Kapital to be completed during Marx's life. It focuses on the aspect of capitalism that Marx refers to as the capitalist mode of production or how capitalism organises society to produce goods and services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spectacle (critical theory)</span> View of media, markets and commodities as sovereign, central to Situationist thought

The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. In the general sense, the spectacle refers to "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign." It also exists in a more limited sense, where spectacle means the mass media, which are "its most glaring superficial manifestation."

Criticisms of the labor theory of value affect the historical concept of labor theory of value (LTV) which spans classical economics, liberal economics, Marxian economics, neo-Marxian economics, and anarchist economics. As an economic theory of value, LTV is widely attributed to Marx and Marxian economics despite Marx himself pointing out the contradictions of the theory, because Marx drew ideas from LTV and related them to the concepts of labour exploitation and surplus value; the theory itself was developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. LTV criticisms therefore often appear in the context of economic criticism, not only for the microeconomic theory of Marx but also for Marxism, according to which the working class is exploited under capitalism, while little to no focus is placed on those responsible for developing the theory.

In Marxist philosophy, reification is the "conversion of the subject to an object, as when the worker becomes a commodity", or the process by which human social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.

In the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production is a specific combination of the:

Exploitation is a concept defined as, in its broadest sense, one agent taking unfair advantage of another agent. When applying this to labour it denotes an unjust social relationship based on an asymmetry of power or unequal exchange of value between workers and their employers. When speaking about exploitation, there is a direct affiliation with consumption in social theory and traditionally this would label exploitation as unfairly taking advantage of another person because of their vulnerable position, giving the exploiter the power.

In Karl Marx's critique of political economy and subsequent Marxian analyses, the capitalist mode of production refers to the systems of organizing production and distribution within capitalist societies. Private money-making in various forms preceded the development of the capitalist mode of production as such. The capitalist mode of production proper, based on wage-labour and private ownership of the means of production and on industrial technology, began to grow rapidly in Western Europe from the Industrial Revolution, later extending to most of the world.

Socially necessary labour time in Marx's critique of political economy is what regulates the exchange value of commodities in trade and consequently constrains producers in their attempt to economise on labour. It does not 'guide' them, as it can only be determined after the event and is thus inaccessible to forward planning.

<i>Das Kapital</i> Foundational theoretical text of Karl Marx

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, also known as Capital, is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy and critique of political economy written by Karl Marx, published as three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. The culmination of his life's work, the text contains Marx's analysis of capitalism, to which he sought to apply his theory of historical materialism "to lay bare the economic laws of modern society", following from classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. The text's second and third volumes were completed from Marx's notes after his death and published by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.

Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike critics of political economy, Marxian economists tend to accept the concept of the economy prima facie. Marxian economics comprises several different theories and includes multiple schools of thought, which are sometimes opposed to each other; in many cases Marxian analysis is used to complement, or to supplement, other economic approaches. Because one does not necessarily have to be politically Marxist to be economically Marxian, the two adjectives coexist in usage, rather than being synonymous: They share a semantic field, while also allowing both connotative and denotative differences.

Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.

In the theoretical works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and subsequent Marxist writers, socialization is the process of transforming the act of producing and distributing goods and services from a solitary to a social relationship and collective endeavor. With the development of capitalism, production becomes centralized in firms and increasingly mechanized in contrast to the pre-capitalist modes of production where the act of production was a largely solitary act performed by individuals. Socialization occurs due to centralization of capital in industries where there are increasing returns to scale and a deepening of the division of labor and the specialization in skills necessary for increasingly complex forms of production and value creation. Progressive socialization of the forces of production under capitalism eventually comes into conflict with the persistence of relations of production based on private property; this contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation of the social product forms the impetus for the socialization of property relations (socialism).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of Marxism</span> Overview of and topical guide to Marxism

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Marxism:

References

  1. ↑ "Curriculum Vitae". 18 June 2009.
  2. ↑ "Jonathan Beller | Pratt Institute". www.pratt.edu. Retrieved 2022-06-12.
  3. ↑ "Columbia College Today". www.college.columbia.edu. Retrieved 2022-06-12.
  4. ↑ Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle UPNE, 2006
  5. ↑ Cf. http://libcom.org/library/deleuze-marx-politics/4-social-factory
  6. ↑ Jonathan Beller, video for conference The Internet as Playground and Factor, New School for Social Research http://vimeo.com/7449081
  7. ↑ Jonathan Beller, video for conference The Internet as Playground and Factor, New School for Social Research http://vimeo.com/7449081
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