Jeff Bell

Dept. of History and Government
Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond
FHG$2395@ALTAIR.SELU.EDU

 

Jonathan Beller has set forth an interesting and provocative account of the relationship between cinema and what he takes to be the condition for the possibility of cinema–i.e., capital. Beller draws upon many resources to support this thesis, from the film Barton Fink to the work of Gilles Deleuze, and generally the arguments are well thought out and thought-provoking. In particular, Beller argues, and rightly I believe, that with cinema capital extends its domain onto and into the conscious attention of individuals, and with this a new form of exploitation is made possible. As Beller puts it, capital cinema can be used to tap “the productive energies of consciousness and the body in order to facilitate the production of surplus value” (par. 7). Or again, “some people make a profit from other people’s looking” (par. 10). The basic argument is Marxist, yet Beller supplements it by stressing the significance of human attention as a form of labor, a labor that is productive of value, and hence productive of surplus value when exploited under capitalism.

 

In support of this basic argument, Beller brings in an enlightening discussion of the transition from aura (following Walter Benjamin) to simulacra. In both cases human attention constitutes value. In looking at a work of art, for example, there is what one actually sees, and there is the fact that many others have seen this same thing. The gap between what one sees and the circulation of this artwork among many other gazes defines, for Beller, the “aura” of this work, an aura which gives value to the work. A simulacrum, on the other hand, results when “visual objects are liquidated of their traditional contents and mean precisely their circulation” (par. 23), and this liquidation is the result of a speeding up of the circulation of these visual objects. Value in this case is nothing more than the circulation of the object among many gazes, and thus value is cut free from anything having to do with the object itself. In the words of a recent television commercial, “image is everything!”

 

I do not have much to add to Beller’s fine discussion of these issues, and for the most part I agree with what he says. What I want to respond to is Beller’s use of Deleuze’s Cinema books to support his arguments and his effort, through a critique of this work, to distance himself from Deleuze. More precisely, I want to respond to Beller’s three chief criticisms of Deleuze’s theory of cinema. The first and most important criticism is that Deleuze, according to Beller, ignores and “refuses simply to think” the fact that cinema is a capitalist industry. A second and related criticism is that Deleuze only discusses the masterpieces of cinema while ignoring everything else. And finally, Beller claims that Deleuze’s “aestheticizing thought” overlooks the cultural logic wherein the time-image leads to extinction, schizophrenia, and the pathological severing of senory-motor links. By responding to these charges on behalf of Deleuze, I hope to clarify some of the central issues that are at stake in Beller’s work and contribute to the important discussion which this work has begun.

 

Although Deleuze, according to Beller, refuses “to think political economy,” he does flirt with it. Such flirtation becomes clear when Deleuze cites Fellini: “When there is no money left, the film will be finished.” Beller finds in Fellini’s remark, and in Deleuze’s treatment of it, evidence for the claim that cinema is always “in one way or another a film about the film’s economic conditions of possibility” (par. 38). This is only a flirtation, however, for Beller believes Deleuze says “disappointingly little” about cinema’s own conditions of possibility–i.e., capital. Deleuze may not say much about the economic conditions of possibility in his Cinema books, and perhaps he is to be faulted for this, but much is said on these matters in Deleuze and Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus. Central among their claims in this book is that capitalism is a functioning assemblage of processes, interactions, codings and overcodings; however, the raison d’etre of capitalism is the decoding of flows. In other words, the pursuit of surplus value hinges upon creating new markets, new values, needs, etc. (i.e., the “new and improved” syndrome of capitalism); and yet to do this requires decoding or deterritorializing existing markets, existing values, needs, etc. To return to Beller’s example discussed above, the transition from aura to simulacra entails the decoding of value, a value which is tied to the “traditional contents” of art (i.e., qualities of the visual art object itself), so that new values and needs can be created–i.e., value as tied only to the circulation of the object among many observers. This example betrays the very process of capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari, and for that reason they would agree with Beller’s analysis. But capitalism, and this is the crucial point, must continually avoid complete deterritorialization, complete decoding; in short, it must avoid schizophrenia. Consequently, every process of decoding and deterritorialization entails a simultaneous recoding and reterritorialization. Without this capitalism could not function. On this point, Deleuze and Guattari are quite explicit: “one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which it continually reproduces on a widened scale.”¹ Thus, although simulacra result from a decoding of aura, simulacra are nevertheless set forth as new values, as new standards and codes.

 

With this in mind we can see that yes, for Deleuze and Guattari that capitalism as decoding and deterritorializing process (or what Deleuze refers to in the Cinema books and elsewhere as the “genetic,” “differentiating” element) is the condition of possibility for cinema. However, this unthought and unthinkable differentiating condition is also the exterior limit of capitalism and cinema, the limit which must be pushed back. Consequently, capitalism and cinema find themselves recoded and reterritorialized upon existing values, existing standards, existing relative limits. On this basis we can understand Deleuze’s treatment of Fellini’s statement. Just as capitalism itself requires the reterritorialization of its deterritorializaing tendencies, so too does cinema’s deterritorializing process require reterritorialization, and it is precisely money which fulfills this role and which Fellini laments. The deterritorialization of a Fellini film does not go unchecked, but is reterritorialized by the financial backers of the film with their budgetary constraints. There is thus a double role of money which needs to be stressed here, for although Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the deterritorializing aspects of money and capital, they also point out the reterritorializing and stratifying processes associated with money, and it is the latter process which Deleuze is referring to when he claims that “cinema as art lives in a direct relation with a permanent plot, an international conspiracy which conditions it from within, as the most intimate and most indispensable enemy. This conspiracy is that of money . . . .”² Put more simply, cinema as art, as a process which creates new values, new ways of looking at the world, etc.; this cinema confronts the demands of financial backers who want to see a profit from a film, who don’t want something new so much as something that sells. And we need not look far in the history of film to find a successful film that is widely imitated with the hopes of “cashing in” on its success. This is the reterritorializing conspiracy of money, a conspiracy filmmakers who are not in the “mainstream” constantly confront (such as Fellini, Orson Welles, Antonioni, etc.)

 

This brings me to the second of Beller’s criticisms–i.e., Deleuze’s emphasis upon the masterpieces of cinema at the expense of everything else. For Beller, recognizing that human attention is productive of value leaves open the possibility that “all of the non-masterpieces of cinema could then be brought back” (par. 58). They could be brought back because human attention, even of the non-masterpiece variety, is assumed to be capable of creating new ways of seeing, valuing, etc. Deleuze’s point is not that new values are produced only within the work of a few “recognized” masters; rather, his point is very Nietzschean in that he claims that all new values have been produced and created away from the marketplace. From what we have said above, we can see that this does not mean that new values, in particular new values associated with cinema, must be produced in isolation from capital and capitalism, but only that these values always entail a process of deterritorialization, and this occurs apart from, and at odds with, the reterritorializing conspiracy of capital and capitalism. When something new is said, or when a film shows us a different way of looking and feeling, this happens, for Deleuze, because of a deterritorialization of existing values and codes; but these films are always exceptional for Deleuze, because for the most part films are made on the basis of the security of what is already known to sell (i.e., money as reterritorializing). That this tendency is especially so with respect to cinema as art, in contrast to the many other arts (e.g., painting, sculpture, poetry, etc.), should be obvious: i.e., it takes a large capital investment simply to make a film. Investors are subsequently more apt to back the film which has the greater chance of returning their initial investment with a profit. To capitalize on cinema, therefore, takes roughly one of two tracks: either the financial backers act on the basis of what is already known about public taste, etc., in order to decide which project will be profitable; or they risk losing their investment by supporting a project that is novel and yet risks not being accepted. It should be clear that the first track is the more common, and yet, and this is Deleuze’s point, masterpieces always result from the second approach. This is not to say that all films made from this second approach are masterpieces; to the contrary, and again Deleuze is explicit on this point, if a masterpiece truly says something new it will be at odds with the reterritorializing tendencies of capital, but it does not follow from this that every film that is at odds with these tendencies does say something new.

 

In reference to literature, though we could apply this to cinema just as easily, Deleuze makes some comments which get to the heart of Beller’s concerns as well as his difficulties with some of what Deleuze is arguing. In an article titled “Mediators” in his book Pourparlers, and in a section of this article titled “The Conspiracy of Imitators” (which should recall the conspiracy with which cinema as art is confronted, the conspiracy Beller claims is discussed “disappointingly little”), Deleuze claims that “Fast turnover [of books, but equally films] necessarily means selling people what they expect: even what’s “daring,” “scandalous,” strange and so on falls into the market’s predictable forms. The conditions for literary creation, which emerge only unpredictably, with a slow turnover and progressive recognition, are fragile.”³ What the market is interested in, or what capital as reterritorializing is interested in, is what is predictable; and it is precisely this conspiracy of imitators which authors and filmmakers, if they are interested in creating something new (i.e., in deterritorializing predictable forms and codes), run up against.

 

This brings us finally to Beller’s final criticism that Deleuze’s “aestheticizing thought” overlooks the cultural logic wherein the time-image leads to extinction, schizophrenia, and the pathological severing of senory-motor links. On the one hand, Beller is certainly correct to make this claim. The time-image does indeed entail the possibility of leading to extinction. Deleuze often recognized this possibility, however, and in Thousand Plateaus for example he pointed out the dangers of making one’s self a body without organs. The danger is that to make one’s self a body without organs one must deterritorialize themselves, but if this deterritorialization goes too far this could lead to our self-destruction and extinction. In a reference to Carlos Castaneda’s distinction between the nagual and tonal, which corresponds roughly with the distinction between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they claim that “the important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. . . . You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual.”⁴ In other words, to deterritorialize, and this is just what Deleuze believes the time-image does, is also to risk deterritorializing too much, with the result being the extinction and destruction of self with which Beller was concerned.

 

The time-image, or deterritorialization, if it can avoid the black hole of self-annhilation by holding on to some reterritorialization, can then create something new, can produce new values. To create a new way of seeing the world with cinema is therefore a very risky affair. One risks either succumbing to the conspiracy of imitators who will only financially back a film which imitates a given formula for success; or one risks deterritorializing given values and standards too much with the result that the film, and consciousness which was Beller’s concern, collapses into the black hole of self-destruction and extinction. Deleuze was quite aware of both dangers and yet argues that if we are going to change the way things are we must face these dangers nonetheless. Deleuze would agree wholeheartedly with Beller’s following claim: “The labor of revolution is, after all, always an effort to reorganize the production and distribution of value. It is an attack on the presiding regimes of value in order that we might create something else” (par. 56). Deleuze’s thought and work is motivated by just this type of revolutionary concern; however, Deleuze cites the dangers inherent in revolutionary activity. Every revolution, whether in politics, economics, or cinema, risks collapsing into the stratifying stranglehold of tyranny and fascism, the conspiracy of imitators; or it risks exploding into the chaos of anarchy and self-destruction. Deleuze would agree with Beller’s call for revolutionary change, but would caution us to beware of its dangers.

 

Notes

 

1. Anti-Oedipus. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 246.

 

2. Cinema 2. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 77.

 

3. Pourparlers (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1990), 175. Translation mine.

 

4. Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 162.