ABSTRACT
Though neither of the above passages could serve as an epigraph to the present work, their juxtaposition offers an emblematic expression for the
a. k
ia ri
na k
or de
la
shift occurring in fi lm production and theory, from the early formative years of industrial modernism to the postmodern era of global, informatized, and biopolitical production. The fi rst passage originates in Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), a pioneering attempt toward a systematic fi lm theory. In J. Dudley Andrew’s paraphrase of Münsterberg’s Neo-Kantian conceptualization of fi lm, “[j]ust as the space and time of the fi lm are imaginary and don’t affect the space and time of our everyday existence, so also the causality at work in the fi lm doesn’t fl ow directly into our lives,” so that the fi lmic “experience is entirely self-contained.”3 The second passage arrives exactly at the turn of the millennium in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, which addresses the specifi city of global capitalism. While Münsterberg’s modernist era of industrial capital “was indicated by a migration of labor from agriculture and mining (the primary sector [of production]) to industry (the secondary),” Hardt and Negri write within the “process of postmodernization or informatization” which is “demonstrated through the migration from industry to service jobs (the tertiary) . . . in the dominant capitalist countries . . . since the early 1970s.” These service jobs-ranging “from health care, education, and fi nance to transportation, entertainment, and advertising”—“are characterized . . . by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication,” because of which “many call the postindustrial economy an informational economy.” The labor specifi c to this economy is both “corporeal and affective” and “immaterial,” not in an idealist sense but in the sense that its products are “intangible,” such as “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction.”4
