Marina Gržinić : Racialized bodies, the non-human and the 21st century digital mode of production
Channel: pmilat
Date: 2015-01-21

The Unconscious of the Unconscious :: MaMa, Zagreb :: 04.12.2014

If the cinematic mode of production conceived so ingeniously by Jonathan Beller is the mode of production for 20th century capitalism, then I propose, in analogy to Beller, another mode of production for the 21st century: the digital mode for the production of financial global capitalism (Gržinić 2004, 2008). Furthermore, I posit a thesis: that it is necessary to insist on a division from the inside of financial global neoliberal capitalism and the digital mode of production and its images. This division has to be conceptualized around the imperial, colonial, necropolitical and racial lines that cut global neoliberal capitalism from within. The imperial, colonial, racial division, though expelled ferociously from global financial capitalism, is returning with vengeance, dividing film productions and reframing their images through racialized labor, racialized images and the racialized Other.
Or differently, this division should be reworked constantly, not simply as the symptom of, but the condition of global neoliberal capitalism; only then can we think of a decolonial, political mode with which to reformulate what the pertinent political productions of today are, some of which I proposed in a very condensed video-film program (8 positions only) for Film Mutations 2014. If we make this division, then we can understand the politically pertinent new semio-technological im/possibilities for life, labor, the human and humanity, freedom and knowledge in and outside films. In addition, we can start a process of re-reading psychoanalysis, and also of re-articulating Hollywood mainstream kitsch, such as in Lucy or performative documentaries like The Act of Killing. Which images are we talking about when referring to the digital (financial) mode of production?
Jonathan Beller, with his cinematic mode of production, invites the possibility of rereading the proposed line of concatenation of selected auteur film productions of the 20th century, which Gilles Deleuze conceived in the 1980s. Deleuze recuperates a selected history of the 20th century Western auteur film productions through two images, two notions of body-mental relations to/within film: the image-movement and the image-time. Beller’s cinematic mode of production gave these images the missing frames of labor, of capitalist production relations and the capitalist means of production.
On the other hand, with the digital (financial) mode of production, we can go further and ask what the film images of the 21st century are. The list is long, though some images can possibly be enlisted as brands: the image-event, the militant image, the commodity-image. At this point, we have to radicalize the status of these images of the digital (financial) mode of production even more, and ask: with and beyond Lacan, what is the unconscious of these images? More precisely, what is the racialized unconscious of these images, and therefore, what is the status of psychoanalysis in relation to the imperial, colonial, necropolitical and racial line that cuts global neoliberal capitalism from within and heavily conditions contemporary film production and its financial-images?

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