| The purpose of The Cinematic Mode of Production is at once to show that all of cinema, no matter what else it is, is an extension of capital logic's colonization of the body and to imagine new ways to oppose capital's violations. Cinema develops a completely new method of value production and extraction, first by projecting the dynamics of political economy into the visual arena and then by colonizing bodies by inducing them to labor in what amounts to a deterritorialized factory--mass media. Chapter 1 utilizes the filmography of Dziga Vertov to show that cinematic movement is an extension of capital circulation the cinematic image is shown to develop out of the commodity--form. Chapter 2 utilizes the film theory of Sergei Eisenstein to show how cinema becomes directly involved in the process of social production and reproduction by converting visual attention to labor power. Here I endeavor to show how the labor theory of value is a special case of what I call the theory of the productive value of human attention. Chapter 3 argues that Gilles Deleuze's cinema books (Cinema 1 and Cinema 2), which I retitle Cinema, should have been for the twentieth century what Karl Marx's Capital was for the nineteenth, but failed because of their refusal to theorize political economy, and chapter 4 shows how, during the sixties and early seventies Pier Paolo Pasolini reconceives the cinematic innovations of Eisenstein and Vertov in order to produce alternative structures for the circulation of value (affect) against a cinema and a society entirely overrun by bourgeois organization. Chapter 5 explains how CNN's coverage of the Gulf War and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers swallows geography into the visual medium, substituting the media for environment and, by simulating the urban and the globe, completes the enfolding of humanity by machines that began in the industrial revolution. The conclusion extends the analysis of cinema, as the value-productive consciousness of capital, to culture and consciousness in general by explicating the terms of the visual economy developed in the body of the text. |
