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Films and music videos, like other media works, are machines for generating affect, and for capitalizing upon, or extracting value from, this affect. As such, they are not ideological superstructures, as an older sort of Marxist criticism would have it. Rather, they lie at the very heart of social production, circulation, and distribution. They generate subjectivity, and they play a crucial role in the valorization of capital. Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the computing-and-information-technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal finance. There's a kind of fractal patterning in the way that social technologies, or processes of production and accumulation, repeat or 'iterate' themselves on different scales, and at different levels of abstraction

Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, pg. 2-3

#Shaviro #steven shaviro #post-cinematic affect #affect #media #film #video #music #marxism #labour #capital #ideology #ideological superstructure #valorization of capital #hollywood #neoliberalism #production of affect

“Modernist artists sought to shatter taboos, to scandalize audiences, and to pass beyond the limits of bourgeois “good taste.” From Stravinsky to the Dadaists, from Bataille to the makers of Deep Throat, and from Charlie Parker to Elvis to Guns N’ Roses, the aim was always to stun audiences, by pushing things further than they had ever been pushed before. Offensiveness was a measure of success. Transgression was simply and axiomatically taken to be subversive. But this is no longer the case today. Neoliberalism has no problem with excess. Far from being subversive, transgression today is entirely normative. Nobody is really offended by Marilyn Manson or Quentin Tarantino. Every supposedly “transgressive” act or representation expands the field of capital investment. It opens up new territories to appropriate, and jump-starts new processes from which to extract surplus value. What else could happen, at a time when leisure and enjoyment have themselves become forms of labor? Business and marketing practices today are increasingly focused upon novelty and innovation. More rapid turnover is one way to combat what Marx called the tendential fall of the rate of profit. Far from being subversive or oppositional, transgression is the actual motor of capitalist expansion today: the way that it renews itself in orgies of “creative destruction.”

Vivian Sobchack compellingly argues...that electronic media 'engage [their] spectators and 'users' in a phenomenological structure of sensual and psychological experience that, in comparison with the cinematic, seems so diffused as to belong to no-body...the electronic is phenomenologically experienced not as a discrete, intentional, body-centered mediation and projection in space but rather as a simultaneous, dispersed, and insubstantial transmission across a network or web that is constituted spatially more as a materially flimsy latticework of nodal points than as a stable ground of embodied experience'

Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, pg. 39

#shaviro #steven shaviro #post-cinematic affect #sobchack #electronic media #phenomenology #phenomenological #cinema #cinematic #nobody #bodyless #disembodied

Beauty is therefore an event, a process, rather than a condition or a state. The flower is not beautiful in itself; rather, beauty happens when I encounter the flower. Beauty is fleeting, and it is always imbued with otherness. For although the feeling of beauty is “subjective,” I cannot experience it at will. I can only find beauty when the object solicits me, or arouses my sense of beauty, in a certain way. Also, beauty does not survive the moment of the encounter in which it is created. It cannot be recovered once it is gone. It can only be born afresh in another event, another encounter. A subject does not cognize the beauty of an object. Rather, the object lures the subject while remaining indifferent to it; and the subject feels the object, without knowing it or possessing it or even caring about it. The object touches me, but for my part I cannot grasp it or lay hold of it, or make it last. I cannot dispel its otherness, its alien splendor. If I could, I would no longer find it beautiful; I would, alas, merely find it useful. This is why the apprehension of beauty is disinterested. The beautiful object is unconcerned with me; and in return, I have no actual interest in it. I don’t care what benefit it can offer me, or what empirical “gratification” (Kant 1987, 47) it can give me, or even if it exists or not. I am only concerned with how it makes me feel; that is to say, with how it affects me.

Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria : Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics

#shaviro #me watching a terrence malick film

Expression, then, precedes intention, precedes the existence of any content to be expressed. Thought and language emerge out of vociferation and physical contortions, and not from Symbolic articulation. Bataille’s theory of language is as far removed from structural linguistics, or from various theories of the autonomy of the signifier, as it is from idealist notions of the transparency of speech. It is closer, perhaps, to Jean-Pierre Brisset’s schizophrenic insistence on the multiplicity and materiality of discourse, as described by Foucault: “Phonetic repetition does not mark the total liberation of language with respect to things, thoughts, and bodies; it does not reveal in discourse a state of absolute weightlessness; to the contrary, it thrusts syllables into the body, it gives them back the functions of cries and gestures; it rediscovers the great plastic power which vociferates and gesticulates; it puts words back in the mouth and around the sexual organs; in a time faster than any thought it gives birth to and effaces a whirlwind of frantic, savage, or exultant scenes, from which words arise which words call forth.

Steven Shaviro, Passion&Excess: Blanchot Bataille and Literary Theory

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#Bifo citando a #Shaviro 🖤🖤🖤 (en Ampliación Popular Progreso, Morelia) https://www.instagram.com/p/CAjKkFGjo0VbkIuehMHj_9IUGje9FW9gNK9-A40/?igshid=1qz4nrjewqfz

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When I watch a film I suffer from a sort of "similarity disorder." I have great difficulty associating faces and names, remembering which actor or character is which. Thus, I am unable to "identify" properly. Instead, I am affected by continuities and cuts, movements and stillnesses, gradations of color or of brightness. This does not mean that my experience of film is nonmimetic or abstract: these variations have to do with the actions and events being enacted, and not just with the plastic or formal qualities of the image. I laugh and cry, I shudder and scream, I get tense or pissed off or bored, I restlessly glance at my watch and at the person next to me, or I sink into a state of near-catatonic absorption. But in any case, I do not actively interpret or seek to control; I just sit back and blissfully consume. I passively enjoy or endure certain rhythms of duration: the passage of time, with its play of retention and anticipation, and with its relentless accumulation, transformation, and destruction of sounds and images. There is no structuring lack, no primordial division, but a continuity between the physiological and affective responses of my own body and the appearances and disappearances, the mutations and perdurances, of the bodies and images on screen. The important distinction is not the hierarchical, binary one between bodies and images, or between the real and its representations. It is rather a question of discerning multiple and continually varying interactions among what can be defined indifferently as bodies and as images: degrees of stillness and motion, of action and passion, of clutter and light and dark. [...] The cinematic apparatus is a new mode of embodiment; it images. The cinematic body is then neither phenomenologically given nor fantasmatically constructed. It stands at the limits of both of these categories, and it undoes them. This body is a necessary condition and support of the cinematic process: it makes that process possible, but also continually interrupts it, unlacing its sutures and swallowing up its meanings. Film theory should be less a theory of fantasy (psychoanalytic or otherwise) than a theory of the affects and transformations of bodies.

Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body

#shaviro #is there anything more tacky than psychoanalytic film theory?