As we have written elsewhere, capitalism is not only a mode of economic production based on dissymmetrical relations of production established to ensure the exploitation of the majority by a minority through the extraction of labour force from human bodies and minds alike (in addition to the exploitation of nature through the extraction of energy and resources from it).
As Félix Guattari suggested as early as the 1970s, capitalism is also a semiotic operator that encodes what we think, desire, feel, and perceive. It does not only encode, therefore, our ideas, but also our perceptions, feelings, and desires; that is to say, the four major components of our subjectivity.
Much has been written since then on the capitalist encoding of our desires (what moves us) and ideas (about everything, from the chance to achieve a rapid economic success to the enslavement of children in the extraction of the materials needed to make our smartphones, of which we are only interested in knowing how many pixels their cameras have). And something has been written too on how capitalism encodes our feelings (what pleases us and what does not).
Yet there is another major domain of our subjectivities, namely, the perceptual, on which not so much has been written instead; and it is a not-less crucial one – in fact, it all begins with it, as, of necessity, in order to feel, desire, and think we first must perceive.
Over the past 50 years, semiotic capitalism has managed, and rather effectively, to simplify our perceptions; and it has carried this all the way through to an unprecedented level.
First, semiotic capitalism has simplified our perception of, and our subsequent reaction to, all stimuli by inducing us to either approve them or reject them: 👍 / 👎. In this way, we have come to relate to everything as potential consumers.
Secondly, and paradoxically living as we do in an image-saturated society, semiotic capitalism has simplified our perception of images. Think not only in the manifold images we are constantly exposed to, such as selfies aiming at provoking immediate approval, desire, envy or laugh; think too on how most films produced today reproduce the same visual, narrative, and interpretative cliches.
Lastly, semiotic capitalism has simplified, again to an unprecedented extent, our sound perception with the invasion of pop music and its almost infinite variants, all of which have in common one thing: their simple melodies and rhythms.
Capitalism needs of these and many other simplifications, for otherwise it would not be able to pervade our lives as it does. For capitalist consumption requires immediacy, speed, and massive impact. Complexity, instead, would short-circuit its very functioning.
“Cinema is dead,” said Godard not so long ago. Very likely, we will see it literally disappear. And the same with music and with everything else that may not adapt to capitalism’s sole rule: the commodification of absolutely everything. But soon we will have forgotten that there were once things outside its nebula. Soon it will be too late.
(Image taken from Getty Images)