Saturday, August 26, 2017 On Fetish posted by Richard Seymour God creates Adam and immediately—sooner than we thought—He speaks to him. This first address, according to the midrash, is a seduction: “And the Lord God took the human and placed him in the Garden of Eden” (Gen. 2: 15): He took him with beautiful words and seduced him to enter the Garden. It is seduction that is constitutive of the human entry into language. Moved, captivated by divine messages that escape his full understanding, Adam lives henceforth with these unconscious transmissions implanted within him. The first act of communication, then, brings the human being to a place beyond conscious choice. 10 The French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche describes in similar terms the first relationship of child and parent. The mother unconsciously transmits to her child seductive messages, which intimate aspects of her life that he is incapable of grasping. The child receives the impact of the other in all her beauty; he is dazzled by a light beyond his comprehension. The alienness of the other is registered; its unassimilable, stimulating message is locked within. From now, the child will be haunted, decentered by his unconscious life. In Freud’s words, “The ego is not master in his own house.” -- Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep I. Language seduces us into an imaginary domain, an order of images. But it is an image – as with the Apple logo betokening forbidden knowledge – that precipitates our fall. Once we can see, we can look. And once we can look, we can labour. The garden of virtual delights we call the internet, according to Jonathan Beller, is a factory, extended in space and time. Looking is labouring, and the value of whatever is looked at is just the fetishised form of all the glances, or lingering inspections, that the image draws. Capital posits looking as labouring, and turns looking time into socially-necessary-cybertime. It binds perception to production, orchestrating the extraction of sensuous labour Capital sets about re-making the image in its own image. The rules of verisimilarity and legibility are modelled on the social structure, so that an image which does not in some way code the norms and protocols of that structure strikes one askance. The cultural pathways of race, sex, nationality and so on are converted into images which can captivate the look, and capture the labour of looking. The image also excludes, as fetishes do. Rather as the gaze of the shoe fetishist is always drawn short of the point where the legs meet, the image is defined by its scotomisation of reality. As long as our attention is riveted to the circulation of images-as-commodities, it is not on the social realities sustaining the spectacle. This estrangement of the visual order, this conversion of attention into alienated labour, is what Beller calls the ‘cinematic mode of production’. True to the paranoid, psychotic structure of the theory, he can do no other than offer us a cinematic image by way of explanation. We are in The Matrix, the life-energy we put into the world converted into energy to run the image-world, “imprisoned in a malevolent bathosphere, intuiting our situation only through glitches in the programme.” II. Was it a mistake to be seduced into the garden? And how far have we fallen? Beller’s intense, provocative, stylishly seductive work is justly celebrated. And its eerie plausibility is not just a product of the fact that it conforms to capitalist verisimilarity. Participating in social media as a user -- or "produser" as they insufferably say -- might be creative and fulfilling in some ways. But it is also tiring, draining work. It is emotionally, mentally and physically taxing. To keep the circulation of images going – to feed the feed – we have to sacrifice hours of time that we might otherwise invest in anything else. However, if looking is labouring, it is only in a metonymic sense. Beller – not capital – posits looking as labouring. But this only works because looking stands in for all the other activities that we do online which help generate profits for tech platform firms. Looking is a condition for labour, part of the labouring process; it is not the labour itself. Netflixdoesn’t care if you watch, it cares how much you talk about its shows, to maximise its subscriber base. Advertisers ultimately only care for your longing looks to the extent that you demonstrate a propensity to buy. This is why the extraction, analysis, packaging and sale of data is becoming such a profitable industry. If looking were literally labour – not in the ontological sense that everything we do is labour, but in the specific economic sense of it being a source of value – we would be faced with an almighty puzzle. Here, supposedly, is a new frontier in capitalist exploitation, the harnessing of perception to production. But when, one might ask, was perception not harnessed to production? When was labour not sensual? And if perception is its...