Affect in the Age of Neoliberalism

A woman flings herself heedlessly through a maze of corridors, stairwells, and parking garages—pursued from one anomic space to another by attackers whose motives she cannot fathom. A prisoner shoots his way across a fractured game-space while neurologically wired to a player commanding his body from elsewhere. These are just two of the many characters that populate the media terrain that Steven Shaviro defines as "post-cinematic." Figures such as these no longer occupy the space of the screen as it was constructed by the codes of classical cinema. In these situations, Shaviro argues, bodies function as conductors for intense affects, generating experiences that work "transpersonally and transversally," and are at once "singular and common" (4). Shaviro's primary aim in Post-Cinematic Affect is to put affect theory, which his polemical book The Cinematic Body (1993) helped bring to film studies, in conversation with Marxian analyses of political economy. In that earlier work, Shaviro drew on the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to offer an alternative to psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship structured around lack. He revisited the project in an essay entitled "The Cinematic Body REDUX," concluding that his "grudge match" against Lacanian film theory was the wrong fight to pick given the institutional strength of what he calls "the anti-theory backlash."¹

There he also notes that his 1993 book failed to consider filmmaking's involvement with capital, and the economics of production, circulation, and consumption. This essay (not included in Post-Cinematic Affect) is available at The Pinocchio Theory, Shaviro's well-established blog, where he also developed much of the material that makes up the new book. In Post-Cinematic Affect, Shaviro takes up the work of Brian Massumi, as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, to address the way digital technologies and neoliberal social relations intersect to yield what Shaviro calls "radically new ways of manufacturing and articulating lived experience" (2).

In addition to these other theoretical voices, Post-Cinematic Affect responds to Jonathan Beller's account of what he terms the "cinematic mode of production," or the transformation of society into a deterritorialized factory where looking becomes labor, and value can be expropriated in the form of attention. For Beller, cinema brings the "industrial revolution to the eye," extending this mode of production (and discipline) to the sensorium.² He describes the spectator's suturing of one image to the next as a form of what Marx called "sensual labor," comparable to what takes place on an assembly line. He also stresses that surplus value is now extracted in the processes of distribution and consumption, as well as in the process of primary production. Shaviro accepts Beller's claim but wants to mark the "emergence of a different media regime" keyed not to industrial production, but rather to the mechanisms of neoliberal finance, or what Foucault describes as "the generalization of the economic form of the market" to include "the whole of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary exchanges."³ For Beller, "cinema is the decisive achievement of industrialization" and also "the bridge to 'post-industrial' society."⁴ Shaviro, by distinction, wants to describe how the contemporary manipulation and modulation of affect differs from "the mass mobilization of cinematic affect" in the first half of the twentieth century (153). In addressing these shifts, he sidesteps issues of precise periodization to concentrate on the way contemporary fiction films (and music videos) express these processes; that is, how they are symptomatic and productive of the conditions that shape the contemporary moment (all four of his case studies are works produced within five years of the book's publication).

He argues, for example, that Olivier Assayas's film, Boarding Gate (2007), pictures the "bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital," both too abstract and too interconnected to conform to any totalizing or linear narrative structure. Moving through the spaces of globalized finance, the film's protagonist, Sandra (played by Asia Argento), does not act decisively so...