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<div><br></div><div>This has been - as usual here on iDC - a highly stimulating discussion. I hope my contribution contributes to its quality, though it does come at this question from quite a different perspective. </div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>I wish to return us to the outset of this thread, wherein Brian quoted Jonathan thusly:</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#0026dc" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #0026dc">"How do you get capitalism into the psyche, and how do you get the psyche into capital?" asks the philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux. Drawing on key insights from Gramsci, Simmel and Benjamin -- and radicalizing the work of film critic Christian Metz in the process -- Jonathan Beller gives this quite astonishing reply:</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; color: rgb(0, 38, 220); min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#0026dc" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #0026dc">"Materially speaking, industrialization enters the visual as follows: Early cinematic montage extended the logic of the assembly line (the sequencing of discreet, programmatic machine-orchestrated human operations) to the sensorium and brought the industrial revolution to the eye.... It is only by tracing the trajectory of the capitalized image and the introjection of its logic into the sensorium that we may observe the full consequences of the dominant mode of production (assembly-line capitalism) becoming 'the dominant mode of representation' (cinema). Cinema implies the tendency toward the automation of the subject by the laws of exchange.... Understood as a precursor to television, computing, email, and the World Wide Web, cinema can be seen as part of an emerging cybernetic complex, which, from the standpoint of an emergent global labor force, functions as a technology for the capture and redirection of global labor's revolutionary social agency and potentiality."</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0026DC"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">I will begin by saying that I do not believe that this historical trajectory gets to the heart of the matter. Valuable as it is in certain respects in shedding light on our evolving world, I nonetheless believe that it is a heuristic model that seems to fit the facts, yet elides them. I will do my best to explain why I think this. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I have not read your book, Jonathan, so if I am way off the mark in my interpretation of your words than that will be my fault. But it sounds to me like a causal relationship is being established in the above analysis, between cinema's evolution as a global cultural force and the parallel advance of certain socially prescriptive aspects of modern and post-modern industrial capitalism. The cybernetic loop you describe suggests that cinema and capitalism are engaged in a form of dance, impelled, once begun, by the alarmingly potent logic of "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 38, 220); ">assembly-line capitalism"</span>, that incriminates cinema as both agent and victim. Certainly cinema, (and cineastes) in your analysis appear as not just one of these two things, but as both.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">With regard to the question of causality, I am unconvinced that cinema's economic or epistemological architectures – as opposed to its narrative themes or stylistic vagaries – played such a fundamental causal role in the unfolding of the social dynamics of "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 38, 220); ">assembly-line capitalism". </span><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">The reason I think this is that I also reject, at a more basic level, the argument that 'industrialism enters the visual via cinema' at all. In fact I think this articulation entirely misses the essential relationship between industrialism and the visual.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The key to this relationship is the understanding that industrialism is the more-or-less direct result of increased literacy. It is of the eye, and it largely replaced the experiential techne of the ear that preceded it, just as literate capitalism replaced the economies of the ear that preceded it). As simplistic as this sounds, it is, in my opinion, accurate and fundamental. It is no accident that Scotland in the 18th century had the world's highest literacy rate and was also the world's industrial incubator. It is no accident that the popularization of literacy in Britain coincided with its imperial rise. Nor is it an accident that the peak in world literacy today coincides with the death of most of the world's oral languages. The industrial age is a visual age. It is the triumphant age of text, in which reading and writing come to rule the world through their manifold representations in maps, constitutions, lawbooks, forms, contracts, ledgers, deeds - and, of course - blueprints, patents, technical specifications, reports, schemata, manuals and the myriad textual tools that enabled industrialization (i.e. the raster grid that Sean rightly indicates is so historically definitive), as well as their resulting man-made mechanical universe. And here I seem to hear the familiar "pshaw, this is determinist claptrap" (though not perhaps from your lips, reader), to which I reply: just take writing out of the equation and see what degree of industrialism you are left with. Try it and see. There is nothing left. Without the widespread dissemination of literacy, industrialism crumbles utterly.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Cinema, seen in this light, is a mere actor in the larger drama that is literate culture's struggle to achieve global hegemony, and is not the primary cause of anything, except perhaps an infinity of shared dreams (no small thing, I admit). It is just one of many monological industrial media shaped by the technical and psychic architectures of print. Just as television would become as well. Neither is anything but a talking book from my perspective. And so to answer Goux's question: you get capitalism into the psyche via the printing press, you get it via the rigid, powerful, monological imperatives of print. As with industrialism, extract print from the evolution of capitalism and nothing at all remains, not even a trace. I don't even talk about capitalism myself, only of literate capitalism, for capitalism is epistemologically indistinguishable from literacy. (Though strangely, so in many respects is Soviet socialism).</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The second part of your paragraph, Jonathan, is important too. </div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 38, 220); ">Understood as a precursor to television, computing, email, and the World Wide Web, cinema can be seen as part of an emerging cybernetic complex, which, from the standpoint of an emergent global labor force, functions as a technology for the capture and redirection of global labor's revolutionary social agency and potentiality."</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0026DC"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">As I have mentioned, I do not think that cinema and television are more than accidental precursors to computing, email and the World Wide Web. (Kind of the way Gil Scott-Heron seems to be the godfather of rap, whereas his work is not directly related at all, only indirectly.) And as I see it there are two cybernetic complexes in effect here anyway; one hegemonic, one emergent; one literate and one digital. Each of these two looped universes is indigenously highly distinct from the other, yet bright minds with vast resources are desperately trying to colonize the emergent one on behalf of the ruling one, with some success. And of course defending the fort – and actively taking the battle to these hungry entrepreneurs – are revolutionaries of all shapes and sizes, your friends and mine, seeking to counteract this unfeeling assault with art, autonomy, activism and more. Much more.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">However, what matters is not necessarily how successful we and our idealistic friends turn out to be. What seems to matter most is the march of time, and technology. When Negativland pioneered its remix work it caused outrage and conflict. With the passage of time, however, the mashup has become a staple of everyday life. Not because Negativland (or John Oswald or Bryan Gysin for that matter) 'won' but rather because they turned out to be doing stuff ahead of the curve. It was not a case of the good guys winning due to hard work, the righteousness of their message and the political maturation of 'the people'. It just turned out that when the tools advanced enough to make it easy and fun for kids to do, kids did it. And that's basically all that revolution took to succeed. And soon the kids will grow up. Lots already have.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">In this sense I am an unrepentant technological determinist. Not that I think, for example, that the transition to post-literate capitalism is a given. On the contrary, I expect things to get more and more dangerous and bloody and I am not happy about that at all, as the evolutionary conflict between the efficient and the hyperefficient gains demographic momentum. So there is in fact an urgent need for leadership, and by this I mean intercultural leadership that constructively bridges the emergent and hegemonic cybernetic loops in the pursuit of sustainable and judicious compromises (to say nothing of also reaching out and inviting into the dialogue the colonized oral peoples of the world who have a crucial role to play here, particularly in helping to stave off literate capitalism's imminent ecocide.) Antagonizing the corporate world for the sake of personal catharsis is fun and all, and I have done it plenty in my art, aimed at 'bad guys' who couldn't have cared less, but more useful I now believe is an engagement that respects and enlightens, rather than unmasking villainous archetypes in (our) everyday life. There just too many of us. :)</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Literacy too has certainly functioned<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 38, 220); "> "as a technology for the capture and redirection of global labor's revolutionary social agency and potentiality." </span><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Except when it wasn't. Except when it was something else. For </font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">it has also made possible wondrous and wonderful achievements (for some – the many and/or the few). Drawing hard and fast boundaries between this or that idea, this or that system, this or that morality, is a favourite literate game. But I think it has served its purpose. Let's mix things up a little more, focusing on what we have in common rather than where we differ; trying to find a way forward that balances the benefits that each cybernetic vortex can offer while also seeking to offset its ill effects. And then look to the kids to make it happen.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">That sounds to me like a truly revolutionary program.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">(All of the above offered with the utmost respect for the pleasure and privilege of this conversation and hopefully not sounding as bitchy as I sometimes feel...)</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Thanks for listening,</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">John Sobol</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">www.johnsobol.com</div></div></body></html>