Post Cinematic Affect by Shaviro Steven

Author:Shaviro, Steven
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978 1 84694 431 4
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

6 Coda

“Corporate Cannibal,” Boarding Gate, Southland Tales and Gamer have almost nothing in common – except for the fact that they all belong to, and they all express, a common world. This is the world we live in: a world of hypermediacy (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 33-34) and ubiquitous digital technologies, organized as a “timeless time” and a “space of flows” (Castells 2000, 407-499), through which “divergent series are endlessly tracing bifurcating paths” (Deleuze 1993, 81). Such a world cannot be represented, in any ordinary sense. There is no stable point of view from which we could apprehend it. Each perspective only leads us to another perspective, in an infinite regress of networked transformations – which is to say, in an infinite series of metamorphoses of capital. We find ourselves in a chronic condition of crisis; the “state of exception” (Agamben 2005) has itself become the norm. The repeated experience of disruption, or “creative destruction” (Schumpeter 1943, 81-86), is a necessary part of capital’s own perpetual self-valorization and rejuvenation: it will go on, whatever the human cost. “Corporate Cannibal,” Boarding Gate, Southland Tales and Gamer all bear witness to this state of affairs.

We live in a world of crises and convulsions; but this does not mean that our world is anarchic, or devoid of logic. If anything, the contemporary world is ruthlessly organized around an exceedingly rigid and monotonous logic. For everything in the postmodern world is subject to the tendential movement of “real subsumption.”87 All impulsions of desire, all structures of feeling, and all forms of life, are drawn into the gravitational field, or captured by the strange attractor, of commodification and capital accumulation. There is no difference, in this respect, between images and sounds on the one hand, and more palpable objects and markers of identity on the other. Everything moves along the same vectors of modulation, digitization, financialization, and media transduction. The movement is all in one direction; and yet it is also without finality. “The circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless” (Marx 1992, 253). The proliferation and dissemination of images and sounds, together with other material and immaterial goods, is an endless process of circulation, with no content other than the self-reflexive reiteration of the mark of capital itself, in the form of trademarks and brand names. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, it is “a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name” (McLuhan 1994, 8). In McLuhan’s time, “General Electric” was spelled out in light bulbs; by 1990, “IBM” was spelled out in atoms. Today, everything seems to come with a corporate logo and a brand name.

Another way to put this is to say that the very experience of real subsumption is what makes our world a common one. It doesn’t matter which particularities are being subsumed; but only that they are all subsumed in the same way.

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