Jonathan Beller
Encyclopedia
Jonathan Beller is a film theorist, culture critic and medialogist
. He currently holds the position of Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including Mellon, J.P. Getty and Fulbright Foundation grants and honours.
" within a Marxist approach to production that forefronts looking as labor. "To look is to labor"
: not only does the television (or radio) audience produce itself as a commodity to be vended by broadcasters to advertisers, but watching image-commodities is value-creating labour on those commodities, the looked-at commodity being the mechanism by which surplus value (the value created by the spectators above that which is returned to them - as services, pleasures - in a kind of barter) is extracted by the capitalist. Thus Beller proposes an understanding of exploitation and value creation today, with the important innovation of digitial visual entertainment commodities of all sorts - furthering the proliferation of what Debord called "The Spectacle
" ("capital at a degree of abstraction it has become image") - that completes Marx' analysis rather than refutes or "rethinks" it:
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", "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:
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."
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 know 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?"
where he formerly taught film studies. Acquiring Eyes, his second published book, is on this topic.
Mediology
Mediology , broadly indicates a wide-ranging method for the analysis of cultural transmission in society and across societies, a method which challenges the conventional idea that 'technology is not culture'...
. He currently holds the position of Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including Mellon, J.P. Getty and Fulbright Foundation grants and honours.
The Cinematic Mode of Production
Beller's major work, The Cinematic Mode of Production, proposes that cinema and its successor media (television, new digital audiovisual media) "brought the industrial revolution to the eye" and located the production of capital in the cerebral cortex. He has developed an analysis of what new media futurists call the "attention economyAttention economy
Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems....
" within a Marxist approach to production that forefronts looking as labor. "To look is to labor"
Dallas Walker Smythe
Dallas Walker Smythe was a political activist and researcher who contributed to a political economy of communications...
: not only does the television (or radio) audience produce itself as a commodity to be vended by broadcasters to advertisers, but watching image-commodities is value-creating labour on those commodities, the looked-at commodity being the mechanism by which surplus value (the value created by the spectators above that which is returned to them - as services, pleasures - in a kind of barter) is extracted by the capitalist. Thus Beller proposes an understanding of exploitation and value creation today, with the important innovation of digitial visual entertainment commodities of all sorts - furthering the proliferation of what Debord called "The Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle is a work of philosophy and critical theory by Guy Debord. It was first published in 1967 in France.-Book structure:...
" ("capital at a degree of abstraction it has become image") - that completes Marx' analysis rather than refutes or "rethinks" it:
While drawing on Italian post-workerist theorists
Workerism
Workerism is a name given to different trends in left-wing political discourse, especially anarchism and Marxism. In one sense, it describes a political position concerning the political importance and centrality of the working class. Because this was of particular significance in the Italian...
associated with speculations about so-called "immaterial labour" Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher.Negri is best-known for his co-authorship of Empire, and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university...
and Paolo Virno
Paolo Virno
-In Castilian:* * * * * * * * * * * -Other languages:* * * * *...
and their American associate Michael Hardt
Michael Hardt
Michael Hardt is an American literary theorist and political philosopher perhaps best known for Empire, written with Antonio Negri and published in 2000...
, Beller disagrees with their conclusion that developments such as "the social factory", "Post-Fordism
Post-Fordism
Post-Fordism is the name given to the dominant system of economic production, consumption and associated socio-economic phenomena, in most industrialized countries since the late 20th century...
" 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
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
and the situationists, Beller's analysis absorbs the work of diverse mediologists and sociologists, principally Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Hans Magnus Enzensberger , is a German author, poet, translator, and editor. He has also written under the pseudonym Andreas Thalmayr. He lives in Munich.- Life :...
, the early Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...
of The Political Economy of the Sign, Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist...
, Friedrich Kittler
Friedrich Kittler
Friedrich A. Kittler was a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military.-Biography:Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in 1943 in Rochlitz in Saxony...
, Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory.-Biography:...
, and Régis Debray
Régis Debray
Jules Régis Debray is a French intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society; and for having fought in 1967 with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in...
, and cultural critics like Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
, Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer was a German-Jewish philosopher-sociologist, famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the 'Frankfurt School' of social research. His most important works include The Eclipse of Reason and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment...
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:
Without seeking to minimize the dramatic historical transformations of modernity, Beller contends that the post-modern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
, post-Fordist
Post-Fordism
Post-Fordism is the name given to the dominant system of economic production, consumption and associated socio-economic phenomena, in most industrialized countries since the late 20th century...
, post-human
Posthumanism
Posthumanism or post-humanism is a term with five definitions:#Antihumanism: a term applied to a number of thinkers opposed to the project of philosophical anthropology....
, "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."
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 know 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?"
Cinema of the Philippines
Beller has also written extensively about the cinema of the PhilippinesCinema of the Philippines
Cinema of the Philippines started with the introduction of the first moving pictures to the country on January 1, 1897 at the Salón de Pertierra in Manila. The following year, local scenes were shot on film for the first time by a Spaniard, Antonio Ramos, using the Lumiere Cinematograph...
where he formerly taught film studies. Acquiring Eyes, his second published book, is on this topic.