Flexible accumulation pt. 3 (the production of imagery)

Volatility is both a truism of capitalism and a threat against it (see “contradictions” above). Reaction to volatility in the marketplace has two main types: one must be “highly adaptable and fast-moving” or be skillful at “masterminding the volatility.” (287) The latter means manipulating taste and opinion. The image is paramount. Production of the image prevents overaccumulation.

For Harvey, “The future has come to be discounted into the present...the merging of the cinema of distraction with the cinema of futuristic universes.” (291, and his use of the term “futuristic universes” brings to mind the Natali article on science fiction films) He cites Baudrillard's simulacrum here and criticizes the self-perpetuating theory of deconstructionism: if nothing is solid and permanent, anything can be said about it. Harvey sees, again, a quest for tradition and origin in the production of images: “Photographs, particular objects and events, become the focus of contemplative memory, and hence a generator of a sense of self that lies outside the sensory overloading of consumerist culture and fashion.” (292) This postmodern practice of identity-formation somehow doesn’t undercut postmodern fragmentation of self, but reinforces it.

Harvey makes direct reference to films of the Around the World in 80 Days type: “Mass tourism, films made in spectacular locations, make a wide range of simulated or vicarious experiences of what the world contains available to many people. The image of places and spaces becomes as open to production and ephemeral use as any other.” (293) James relates this to the idea of a “throwaway society” that recycles, discards, and resurrects whatever images and ideas about itself that are most prized at any given (temporary) time.

As Harvey develops this line of argument, he flips around the notion of the landscape as purely an “outsider”-created image, as explored in Gunning’s essay. “As spatial barriers diminish we become much more sensitized to what the world's spaces contain.” (294) In turn, those in command of societies can alter spaces in such a way to be more attractive to highly mobile capital. “World images” can be state-controlled. “The less important the spatial barriers, the greater the sensitivity of capital to the variations of place within space, and the greater the incentive for places to be differentiated in ways attractive to capital.” (295-296) As Lefebvre notes in his definition of “filmmaker-driven” landscape, desirable images of particular sites can be just as much the distorted framework of the site’s inhabitants as the distortion of an “outsider” framing a site for consumption.

People can experience the world vicariously through simulacrum, but it is done in such a way as “to conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labour processes that produced them, or of the social relations implicated in their production.” (300) Again, though, there is a countereffect: a “search for personal or collective identity, the search for secure moorings in a shifting world...Because everyone occupies a space of individuation,...and how we individuate ourselves shapes identity.” (302) “The irony is that tradition is now often preserved by being commodified and marketed as such. The search for roots ends up at worst being produced and marketed as an image, as a simulacrum or pastiche.” (303)

What is the essence of this “search for roots,” I wonder? We all agree that identities of people, places, and things are shifting phenomena that can be mediated by ourselves and others given a particular pursuit or situation. Do the possibility and practice of shifting identities spark an equally or more powerful conservative yearning for a solidity of self? In our own scholarship, we constantly strive to locate the “origins” of things, which have been disguised by multiple “veils” (mostly created by the marketplace) that we are duty-bound to tear away. Does the tearing away of a simulacrum veil, in the scholarly quest to uncover some essential “core” of an image bring us all the way back to Hegel’s dialectical assertions of the Spirit in Time, and the Idea in Space? As scholars, once we pin down what we consider to be the root “cause” of the “effects” we are studying, perhaps we may always be in danger of committing ourselves to an extremity of causality that we may detect here or there in the writings of Harvey and Hegel.