The Cinematic Mode of Production

Through an examination of cinema over the course of the twentieth century, the author establishes the process of the emergent capitalization of perception. By exploring a set of films made since the late 1920s, he argues that, through cinema, capital first posits and then presupposes looking as a value-productive activity. "Cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye," writes Jonathan Beller, "and engages spectators in increasingly dematerialized processes of social production." In his ground-breaking critical study, cinema is the paradigmatic example of how the act of looking has been construed by capital as "productive labor." Through an examination of cinema over the course of the twentieth century, Beller establishes on both theoretical and historical grounds the process of the emergent capitalization of perception. This process, he says, underpins the current global economy. By exploring a set of films made since the late 1920s, Beller argues that, through cinema, capital first posits and then presupposes looking as a value-productive activity. He argues that cinema, as the first crystallization of a new order of media, is itself an abstraction of assembly-line processes, and that the contemporary image is a politico-economic interface between the body and capitalized social machinery