Beller, J. (2013). Kino-I, Kino-World: Notes on the Cinematic Mode of Production. In N. Mirzoeff (Ed. ), The Visual Culture Reader, 3rd Edition. (pp. 249-270). London: Routledge

Grounded in Marxist theories of commodification and the Lacanian understanding of the “the cut” within both words and especially in film as the gap for the unconscious, Beller (2013) details the inner and outer workings of “the cinematic mode of production” (CMP), a description of cinema as both value-production and a form of synecdochic transformation of sensual labor. As Beller (2013) notes, that while “Looking has long been posited as labor by capital” (251) simultaneously “capital [also] co-opts the ever-increasing abilities [of groups] to organize themselves” through the very cybernesis that is presented as freeing (254).

Exploding the definition, Beller (2013) explains cinema as the “means of production of instrumental images through the organization of animated materials. These materials include everything from actors, to landscapes, to populations, to widgets, to fighter-planes, to electrons. Cinema is the material practice of global scope, the movement of capital in, through, and as image” (255). For Beller (2013), cinema is the all-consuming suture point into which both the self is lost and is reconstructed again through visual collision with the capital apparatus in which contact both provides scopophilic pleasure and an effect of being rewritten.

The image itself is a “condensation,” notes Beller (2013). It is a “matrix of partially unconscious forces that means something else” (255). For, as language tries for a complete categorization of the visual, it also fails and with that failing comes a “cinematicity of domination for consciousness” (256). States Beller (2013) simply, “Though not everything is an image, nearly everything is con(s)t®ained by them [sic]” (256).  And it is through this fetishization of the image that leads to the “severance of community appearing as an object” as well (262). We seek in the spectacle a false connection to a greater community through its very commodification; “an image of a commodity, [which is] itself a higher order of commodity” (263).

From within this fascinating look into the suturing of subjective-objectification of the gaze through cinema by Beller, I was most drawn to the leveraging of the visual as labor. What does it mean, I was thinking while reading this, if the interfaces of systems become increasing cinematic (if they are not already such)? How are users seduced into the belief of a connection to a larger community through the display of other player’s scores and standing? Is the pursuit of the score or the prestige of placement something directed through the spectacle? In constraining the possibility space of player identification within the system, is the shaping of the interface directing them toward greater commodification through visual avatar “customization,” for example, or does this seeming expressing of individuality push them ever deeper into a submission to the system and its inculcating, capitalist ways?