Jonathan Beller
Biographic Data
| ID | 3881052 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Beller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Beller |
| SIGNATURE | BELLER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pratt Institute |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Two photographs taken at Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme's exhibit the song is the call, and the land is calling , at Copenhagen Contemporary
The Question of Genocide
This written dialogue studies how the “question of genocide” has infiltrated media ecology and come to permeate every meaning, gesture, and relation. Confronting Israel's escalation, since October 2023, of its genocidal siege on Palestine, two writers (a Palestinian and a Jew) engage in an experiment of thinking together that is at once critical, theoretical, affective, and emergent, in an effort to configure and, indeed, live part of their solid…
Sociality at the End of the World
This collectively written essay meditates on sociality, mediation, death, and life during Pandemic 2020
Preface to the revolution
The fall of the Berlin wall was immediately succeeded by the rise of the internet. In the ‘West’ revolutionary discourse was used to sell computational advances that ultimately colonized and financialized everyday life and eviscerated communal linguistic power. In the ‘East’, cybernetics was first understood as an imperialist science while Stalinism coercively reorganized linguistic practice such that in the Soviet Union too, folks learned to den…
Message Is Murder
The Programmable Image of Capital
The selfie and fractal celebrity have become the obverse of what Sylvia Federici calls the system of global apartheid. These results of a financialized attention economy index a shift in the character of both labor and the commodity form towards screen mediated code-work and networked valorization. We can thus rewrite the labor theory of value in relation to image and code, and hypostasize the totalitarian aspirations of capitalism in the notion …
Fragment from The Message Is Murder
This fragment is drawn from The Message Is Murder, a work in progress that includes statistically discrepant readings of Jorge Luis Borges, Alan Turing, and Karl Marx, in addition to the engagements with Claude E. Shannon and Alfred Hitchcock present here. These readings are offered as a kind of riposte to Marshall McLuhan's formulation "The medium is the message" at a moment when it has become even more undeniable that the media (linguistic, vis…
Texas-(s)ized Postmodernism; Or, Capitalism without the Dialectic
The programmatic erasure of the concept of capitalism by the state (here paradigmatically represented by the state of Texas) is allied with the waning of Fredric Jameson's dialectical concept of postmodernism. "Postmodernism" as the critique of the cultural logic of late capitalism is no more, and capitalism, it would seem, is now to be thought without the dialectic. Indeed, the discourses of capitalism and postmodernism have mutated into discour…
Theory Hogs of the Political Unconscious
This essay is a meditation on the emergence of the concept of “queer futurity” based upon the author’s reflections on the life of José Esteban Muñoz and the author’s mourning upon the occasion of his death. The essay considers Muñoz’s everyday and embodied pedagogy recollected from early days at the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University and in the vibrant context provided by Fredric Jameson, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and many other facul…
The Martial Art of “Cinema”
The cinematic mode of production has orchestrated the real subsumption of society by capital unevenly in the Asia-Pacific, affecting film form, genre, gender, performativity, and exhibitionism in various ways, as well as structures of agency and regimes of truth. Variations in Chinese, Hong Kong, and Philippine cinema are explored here, each demonstrating differing inflections in relation to digitization, finance capital, gender performativity, a…
Grammar of the McMultitudes
Iterations of the impossible
Film is Dead. Please omit flowers. Khavn In a brilliant essay entitled ‘In the Womb of the Global Economy: Anak and the Construction of Transnational Imaginaries,’ University of the Philippines pr
Third Cinema in a Global Frame
Research Article| May 01 2001 Third Cinema in a Global Frame: Curacha, Yahoo!, and Manila by Night Jonathan L. Beller Jonathan L. Beller Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2001) 9 (2): 331–367. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9-2-331 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan L. Beller; Third Cinema in a Global Frame: Curacha, Yahoo!, and Manila by…
Writing Video Art
Book Review| August 01 1998 Writing Video Art Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art edited by Julia KnightBedfordshire: John Libbey Media at University of Luton Press, 1996 384 pp./€17.50 (sb) Jonathan L. Beller Jonathan L. Beller Jonathan L. Beller teaches Film and Video and American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1998)…
Directing the real
Global/Local
C]apitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations.Always by nature neocapitalism, it invents, for the worst, its eastern face and its western face, and reshapes both.-GillesDeleuze and Felix Guattari, On the Line There are tendencies [in global capitalism] going in opposite directions.On the one hand, there's a tendency toward this international centralization of power.There's also an opposite tendency.All around the world, there's much…
The Spectatorship of the Proletariat
Cinema, Capital of the Twentieth Century
Cinema, Capital of the Twentieth Century Jonathan L. Beller The exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, because it is the basic concept of modern political economy, just as capital itself, of which it is the abstract reflected image, is the basis of bourgeois society. —Karl Marx, Grundrisse Cinema 3: Towards a Dialectical Film of the Cinema (Books) What is cinema? By posing the infamous question yet again I mean to set forth t…
Third Cinema in a Global Frame
Research Article| May 01 2001 Third Cinema in a Global Frame: Curacha, Yahoo!, and Manila by Night Jonathan L. Beller Jonathan L. Beller Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2001) 9 (2): 331–367. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9-2-331 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan L. Beller; Third Cinema in a Global Frame: Curacha, Yahoo!, and Manila by…
Preface to the revolution
The fall of the Berlin wall was immediately succeeded by the rise of the internet. In the ‘West’ revolutionary discourse was used to sell computational advances that ultimately colonized and financialized everyday life and eviscerated communal linguistic power. In the ‘East’, cybernetics was first understood as an imperialist science while Stalinism coercively reorganized linguistic practice such that in the Soviet Union too, folks learned to den…
Fragment from The Message Is Murder
This fragment is drawn from The Message Is Murder, a work in progress that includes statistically discrepant readings of Jorge Luis Borges, Alan Turing, and Karl Marx, in addition to the engagements with Claude E. Shannon and Alfred Hitchcock present here. These readings are offered as a kind of riposte to Marshall McLuhan's formulation "The medium is the message" at a moment when it has become even more undeniable that the media (linguistic, vis…
Texas-(s)ized Postmodernism; Or, Capitalism without the Dialectic
The programmatic erasure of the concept of capitalism by the state (here paradigmatically represented by the state of Texas) is allied with the waning of Fredric Jameson's dialectical concept of postmodernism. "Postmodernism" as the critique of the cultural logic of late capitalism is no more, and capitalism, it would seem, is now to be thought without the dialectic. Indeed, the discourses of capitalism and postmodernism have mutated into discour…
Directing the real
Cinema, Capital of the Twentieth Century
Cinema, Capital of the Twentieth Century Jonathan L. Beller The exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, because it is the basic concept of modern political economy, just as capital itself, of which it is the abstract reflected image, is the basis of bourgeois society. —Karl Marx, Grundrisse Cinema 3: Towards a Dialectical Film of the Cinema (Books) What is cinema? By posing the infamous question yet again I mean to set forth t…
The Spectatorship of the Proletariat
Global/Local
C]apitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations.Always by nature neocapitalism, it invents, for the worst, its eastern face and its western face, and reshapes both.-GillesDeleuze and Felix Guattari, On the Line There are tendencies [in global capitalism] going in opposite directions.On the one hand, there's a tendency toward this international centralization of power.There's also an opposite tendency.All around the world, there's much…
Writing Video Art
Book Review| August 01 1998 Writing Video Art Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art edited by Julia KnightBedfordshire: John Libbey Media at University of Luton Press, 1996 384 pp./€17.50 (sb) Jonathan L. Beller Jonathan L. Beller Jonathan L. Beller teaches Film and Video and American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1998)…
Directing the real
Third Cinema in a Global Frame
Research Article| May 01 2001 Third Cinema in a Global Frame: Curacha, Yahoo!, and Manila by Night Jonathan L. Beller Jonathan L. Beller Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2001) 9 (2): 331–367. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9-2-331 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan L. Beller; Third Cinema in a Global Frame: Curacha, Yahoo!, and Manila by…
Iterations of the impossible
Film is Dead. Please omit flowers. Khavn In a brilliant essay entitled ‘In the Womb of the Global Economy: Anak and the Construction of Transnational Imaginaries,’ University of the Philippines pr
Grammar of the McMultitudes
The Martial Art of “Cinema”
The cinematic mode of production has orchestrated the real subsumption of society by capital unevenly in the Asia-Pacific, affecting film form, genre, gender, performativity, and exhibitionism in various ways, as well as structures of agency and regimes of truth. Variations in Chinese, Hong Kong, and Philippine cinema are explored here, each demonstrating differing inflections in relation to digitization, finance capital, gender performativity, a…
Theory Hogs of the Political Unconscious
This essay is a meditation on the emergence of the concept of “queer futurity” based upon the author’s reflections on the life of José Esteban Muñoz and the author’s mourning upon the occasion of his death. The essay considers Muñoz’s everyday and embodied pedagogy recollected from early days at the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University and in the vibrant context provided by Fredric Jameson, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and many other facul…
The Programmable Image of Capital
The selfie and fractal celebrity have become the obverse of what Sylvia Federici calls the system of global apartheid. These results of a financialized attention economy index a shift in the character of both labor and the commodity form towards screen mediated code-work and networked valorization. We can thus rewrite the labor theory of value in relation to image and code, and hypostasize the totalitarian aspirations of capitalism in the notion …
Fragment from The Message Is Murder
This fragment is drawn from The Message Is Murder, a work in progress that includes statistically discrepant readings of Jorge Luis Borges, Alan Turing, and Karl Marx, in addition to the engagements with Claude E. Shannon and Alfred Hitchcock present here. These readings are offered as a kind of riposte to Marshall McLuhan's formulation "The medium is the message" at a moment when it has become even more undeniable that the media (linguistic, vis…
Texas-(s)ized Postmodernism; Or, Capitalism without the Dialectic
The programmatic erasure of the concept of capitalism by the state (here paradigmatically represented by the state of Texas) is allied with the waning of Fredric Jameson's dialectical concept of postmodernism. "Postmodernism" as the critique of the cultural logic of late capitalism is no more, and capitalism, it would seem, is now to be thought without the dialectic. Indeed, the discourses of capitalism and postmodernism have mutated into discour…
Preface to the revolution
The fall of the Berlin wall was immediately succeeded by the rise of the internet. In the ‘West’ revolutionary discourse was used to sell computational advances that ultimately colonized and financialized everyday life and eviscerated communal linguistic power. In the ‘East’, cybernetics was first understood as an imperialist science while Stalinism coercively reorganized linguistic practice such that in the Soviet Union too, folks learned to den…
Message Is Murder
Sociality at the End of the World
This collectively written essay meditates on sociality, mediation, death, and life during Pandemic 2020
The Question of Genocide
This written dialogue studies how the “question of genocide” has infiltrated media ecology and come to permeate every meaning, gesture, and relation. Confronting Israel's escalation, since October 2023, of its genocidal siege on Palestine, two writers (a Palestinian and a Jew) engage in an experiment of thinking together that is at once critical, theoretical, affective, and emergent, in an effort to configure and, indeed, live part of their solid…
Two photographs taken at Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme's exhibit the song is the call, and the land is calling , at Copenhagen Contemporary
Political science (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Art history (7 works) · Visual arts (6 works) · Capital (architecture (5 works) · Capitalism (5 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (5 works) · Law (5 works)