SITUATION #153

“Spectatorship, as the fusion and development of the cultural, industrial, economic and psychological, quickly gained a handhold on human fate and then became decisive.…To ‘see’ is already to ‘buy,’ (I’ll buy that), to look is to labor. The separation between buying and selling (one ‘buys’ a commodity and ‘sells’ one’s labor in the same act of spectatorship, thereby bypassing the mediation of money) would be reconciled in the cinematic image.…What I call ‘the attention theory of value’ finds in the notion of ‘labor’, elaborated in Marx’s labor theory of value, the prototype of the source of all value production under capitalism today: value-producing human attention.…Capitalized machinic interfaces prey on visuality.”

Quotes from Jonathan Beller, “Kino-I, Kino World: Notes on the Cinematic Mode of Production”, in The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002), 61, and The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Lebanon: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 2006), 78.