Nick Mercer | Singapore University of Social Sciences (original) (raw)

Papers by Nick Mercer

The contemporary educational landscape in Singapore is being shaped by the informational needs of... more The contemporary educational landscape in Singapore is being shaped by the informational needs of capitalism and its drive to abstraction, and more specifically by the need to capture and calculate affective flows so as to extract economic value. Singapore’s holistic education initiative is being developed in these contexts, as well against the background of an education system that is increasingly witnessing its panoptical, disciplinary institutions take on the features of Gilles Deleuze’s “control society”. Holistic education is part of an evolving diagram of power that finds expression in mechanisms of modulatory control that monitor and measure the affective energies of students. The focus of this paper will be on holistic education assessments as a political technology of affective measurement that modulates the emotional, social and playful performativity of students. Two key Deleuzian insights inform my analysis. The first is the distinction that Deleuze, following Baruch Spinoza, makes between “affects” and “emotions”. Emotions denote subjective feelings about something or someone whereas affects for Deleuze are pre-personal, nonconscious and nonsignifiying bodily powers or potentials. Holistic education assessments attempt to register and represent the affections of the student body as subjective emotions and psychological categories (“social and emotional learning competencies”). However, for Deleuze affect experienced as a nonconscious and transsubjective “intensity” can never be grasped or measured as a subjective emotion or psychological condition. Rather, the way we should understand the modulatory power of holistic educational assessments is not as a technology that gives measure to something that is intrinsically immeasurable, but as an instrumental force of limitation. Deleuze in his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche describes “reactive forces” as those that “separate an active force from what it can do”, and this is how holistic education is interpreted: as a reactive force that functions to limit and contain active forces of playful affirmation by profiling and modelling student subjectivities and measuring their affective labour.

Linguistics, Literature and Culture: Millennium Realities and Innovative Practices in Asia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), Aug 24, 2012

Winning the Palm d'Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival has served to reinforce Apichatpong... more Winning the Palm d'Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival has served to reinforce Apichatpong Weerasethakul's reputation as one of global art cinema's leading luminaries. It has also put into sharp focus a central question concerning Apichatpong's status as a cosmopolitan auteur: How does he negotiate the countervailing forces of the local and the global in his work and in relation to his own creative identity as an artist and filmmaker? This essay attempts to partly answer this question by exploring the cultural geopolitics of the "glocal" through a close analysis of Apichatpong's film aesthetics. By examining how Apichatpong blends the formal styles of modernist and avant-garde filmmaking with the stories of indigenous Thai culture and the poetic sensibility of Buddhist philosophy, this essay argues that Apichatpong's films offer a way to understand the complex dialectic between the local and the global. The essay tracks the interface between the local and the global by focusing on three of Apichatpong's feature films: Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century.

Thinking the Commodity Throught the Moving Image (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller), Jan 16, 2009

In a series of essays in the 1990s Jonathan Beller makes the bold proposition that at the turn of... more In a series of essays in the 1990s Jonathan Beller makes the bold proposition that at the turn of the twentieth century cinema inaugurated a historical shift in the capitalist mode of production. 1 More than just a technical invention or a new aesthetic medium, cinema, Beller argues, gives birth to the 'cinematic mode of production', which describes a new historical modality of capitalist production that extends the power and logic of capital to the internal domain of the human senses and towards establishing a visual economy of attention. Beller's thesis makes the claim that the cinematic apparatus provides a 'prototechnology for the capitalisation of human attention' and that 'looking as labor (sic) represents a tendency towards increasingly abstract instances of the new relationship between labor and capital, a new regime of the technological positioning of bodies for the purpose of value extraction'. 2 Beller is not the first to assert that in this period in late modernity capital began to impose a 'disciplinary regime of attentiveness' in order to manage and control the distracted gazes of the masses. 3 Jonathan Crary's study into the way capital attempts to resolve the problem of inattention created at the end of the nineteenth century by its own destabilising forces of acceleration and dislocation identifies cinema as the pre-eminent disciplinary technology of the time. Crary contends that in cinema capital found an apparatus that could manage attention and synthesise perceptual consciousness, something that had become critical in modern urban societies where the 'fragmentation and atomisation of [the] cognitive field' had begun to threaten the social and productive capacity of labour upon which capital relied. 4 1 Apart from Beller's essay on Vertov that I referred to in chapter 1, the other essays where he explores the connection between cinema and capital include: Jonathan Beller, 'Cinema, Beller's theoretical assumptions draw upon much of Crary's historical observations regarding the perceptual limitations of modern human subjectivity with respect to the space-time configurations of modern eonomic production and the circulatory networks of global commodity exchange. As such, both theorists tend to view cinema as an apparatus of capitalist production that is concerned with the creation of a human-machine relationship that can deploy the subjective processes of human perception in the complex networks and abstract relations of commodity exchange.

Thinking the Commodity Through the Moving Image: Cinema, Time and Capitalism (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller), Jan 16, 2009

Thinking the Commodity Through the Moving Image: Cinema, Time and Capitalism (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller), Jan 16, 2009

If the cinema of the Italian neorealism was an attempt to re-open cinema to the possibilities of ... more If the cinema of the Italian neorealism was an attempt to re-open cinema to the possibilities of mediating the social time of the everyday, and Antonioni's time-images sought to refold the existential back into the non-alienated Utopian space of collective desire, then cinema has in the information age closed off these possibilities and beckons the spectator-subject to find ontological assurance in the monadic inner space of its digital universes. The anxieties that the time-image induced in the films of the neorealists and Antonioni are alleviated by the data-images of the special effects blockbuster, which transcend the phenomenal world and immerse the spectator in the sublime time of the 'artificial infinite'. 1 Like the cinema of the time-image, the cinema of special effects privileges a phenomenological mode of address that eschews the classical narrative dimensions of film, so as to, in Scott Bukatman's view, 'redirect the spectator to the visual (and auditory and even kinesthetic) conditions of cinema and thus bring the principles of perception to the foreground of consciousness'. 2 It is this commonality that allows us to thread together two seemingly incommensurable cinematic forms: the post-war cinema of Italian neorealism/Antonioni and the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. By contrasting the divergent nonnarrative temporal and spatial image formations through which the cinema of the time-image and the special effects blockbuster address the spectator, we can locate historically and aesthetically a transformation in the way the spectator-subject 'thinks through' the cinematic form as it becomes integrated with the distributed media of electronic and digital technologies. Jameson famously theorised the 'waning of affect' that accompanied the cultural turn from modernism to postmodernism. In Jameson's assessment the modern affects of anxiety and alienation have become displaced by the 'euphoria [of] free-floating and 1 Scott Bukatman, 'The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime' in Annette Kuhn (ed.) Alien

Thinking the Commodity Through the Moving Image: Cinema, Time and Capitalism (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller), Jan 16, 2009

Books by Nick Mercer

What is it to say that we think the commodity through the moving image? This book tries to answer... more What is it to say that we think the commodity through the moving image? This book tries to answer this central question by investigating the notion that cinema is a form of consciousness, and that cinema's machine intelligence develops an entirely fresh ontological terrain for the parthenogenesis of the commodity. Arguing that the commodity is the abstract heart of film's form, the author examines how cinema gives rise to a modern cinematic consciousness that automates perception and manufactures affects. Through an exploration of twentieth century cinema the author traces the way cinema informs our concept and experience of time and enables the assimilation and internalisation of capital's timescales from the industrial to the digital era. Drawing on key cultural thinkers and philosophers, including Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, as well as contemporary media theorists such as Jonathan Beller, Sean Cubitt, D.N. Rodowick and Mark B. Hansen, this book articulates a branch of media philosophy that reads the political economy of the moving image through an amalgam of continental philosophy, Marxist theory and film studies.

The contemporary educational landscape in Singapore is being shaped by the informational needs of... more The contemporary educational landscape in Singapore is being shaped by the informational needs of capitalism and its drive to abstraction, and more specifically by the need to capture and calculate affective flows so as to extract economic value. Singapore’s holistic education initiative is being developed in these contexts, as well against the background of an education system that is increasingly witnessing its panoptical, disciplinary institutions take on the features of Gilles Deleuze’s “control society”. Holistic education is part of an evolving diagram of power that finds expression in mechanisms of modulatory control that monitor and measure the affective energies of students. The focus of this paper will be on holistic education assessments as a political technology of affective measurement that modulates the emotional, social and playful performativity of students. Two key Deleuzian insights inform my analysis. The first is the distinction that Deleuze, following Baruch Spinoza, makes between “affects” and “emotions”. Emotions denote subjective feelings about something or someone whereas affects for Deleuze are pre-personal, nonconscious and nonsignifiying bodily powers or potentials. Holistic education assessments attempt to register and represent the affections of the student body as subjective emotions and psychological categories (“social and emotional learning competencies”). However, for Deleuze affect experienced as a nonconscious and transsubjective “intensity” can never be grasped or measured as a subjective emotion or psychological condition. Rather, the way we should understand the modulatory power of holistic educational assessments is not as a technology that gives measure to something that is intrinsically immeasurable, but as an instrumental force of limitation. Deleuze in his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche describes “reactive forces” as those that “separate an active force from what it can do”, and this is how holistic education is interpreted: as a reactive force that functions to limit and contain active forces of playful affirmation by profiling and modelling student subjectivities and measuring their affective labour.

Linguistics, Literature and Culture: Millennium Realities and Innovative Practices in Asia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), Aug 24, 2012

Winning the Palm d'Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival has served to reinforce Apichatpong... more Winning the Palm d'Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival has served to reinforce Apichatpong Weerasethakul's reputation as one of global art cinema's leading luminaries. It has also put into sharp focus a central question concerning Apichatpong's status as a cosmopolitan auteur: How does he negotiate the countervailing forces of the local and the global in his work and in relation to his own creative identity as an artist and filmmaker? This essay attempts to partly answer this question by exploring the cultural geopolitics of the "glocal" through a close analysis of Apichatpong's film aesthetics. By examining how Apichatpong blends the formal styles of modernist and avant-garde filmmaking with the stories of indigenous Thai culture and the poetic sensibility of Buddhist philosophy, this essay argues that Apichatpong's films offer a way to understand the complex dialectic between the local and the global. The essay tracks the interface between the local and the global by focusing on three of Apichatpong's feature films: Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century.

Thinking the Commodity Throught the Moving Image (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller), Jan 16, 2009

In a series of essays in the 1990s Jonathan Beller makes the bold proposition that at the turn of... more In a series of essays in the 1990s Jonathan Beller makes the bold proposition that at the turn of the twentieth century cinema inaugurated a historical shift in the capitalist mode of production. 1 More than just a technical invention or a new aesthetic medium, cinema, Beller argues, gives birth to the 'cinematic mode of production', which describes a new historical modality of capitalist production that extends the power and logic of capital to the internal domain of the human senses and towards establishing a visual economy of attention. Beller's thesis makes the claim that the cinematic apparatus provides a 'prototechnology for the capitalisation of human attention' and that 'looking as labor (sic) represents a tendency towards increasingly abstract instances of the new relationship between labor and capital, a new regime of the technological positioning of bodies for the purpose of value extraction'. 2 Beller is not the first to assert that in this period in late modernity capital began to impose a 'disciplinary regime of attentiveness' in order to manage and control the distracted gazes of the masses. 3 Jonathan Crary's study into the way capital attempts to resolve the problem of inattention created at the end of the nineteenth century by its own destabilising forces of acceleration and dislocation identifies cinema as the pre-eminent disciplinary technology of the time. Crary contends that in cinema capital found an apparatus that could manage attention and synthesise perceptual consciousness, something that had become critical in modern urban societies where the 'fragmentation and atomisation of [the] cognitive field' had begun to threaten the social and productive capacity of labour upon which capital relied. 4 1 Apart from Beller's essay on Vertov that I referred to in chapter 1, the other essays where he explores the connection between cinema and capital include: Jonathan Beller, 'Cinema, Beller's theoretical assumptions draw upon much of Crary's historical observations regarding the perceptual limitations of modern human subjectivity with respect to the space-time configurations of modern eonomic production and the circulatory networks of global commodity exchange. As such, both theorists tend to view cinema as an apparatus of capitalist production that is concerned with the creation of a human-machine relationship that can deploy the subjective processes of human perception in the complex networks and abstract relations of commodity exchange.

Thinking the Commodity Through the Moving Image: Cinema, Time and Capitalism (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller), Jan 16, 2009

Thinking the Commodity Through the Moving Image: Cinema, Time and Capitalism (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller), Jan 16, 2009

If the cinema of the Italian neorealism was an attempt to re-open cinema to the possibilities of ... more If the cinema of the Italian neorealism was an attempt to re-open cinema to the possibilities of mediating the social time of the everyday, and Antonioni's time-images sought to refold the existential back into the non-alienated Utopian space of collective desire, then cinema has in the information age closed off these possibilities and beckons the spectator-subject to find ontological assurance in the monadic inner space of its digital universes. The anxieties that the time-image induced in the films of the neorealists and Antonioni are alleviated by the data-images of the special effects blockbuster, which transcend the phenomenal world and immerse the spectator in the sublime time of the 'artificial infinite'. 1 Like the cinema of the time-image, the cinema of special effects privileges a phenomenological mode of address that eschews the classical narrative dimensions of film, so as to, in Scott Bukatman's view, 'redirect the spectator to the visual (and auditory and even kinesthetic) conditions of cinema and thus bring the principles of perception to the foreground of consciousness'. 2 It is this commonality that allows us to thread together two seemingly incommensurable cinematic forms: the post-war cinema of Italian neorealism/Antonioni and the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. By contrasting the divergent nonnarrative temporal and spatial image formations through which the cinema of the time-image and the special effects blockbuster address the spectator, we can locate historically and aesthetically a transformation in the way the spectator-subject 'thinks through' the cinematic form as it becomes integrated with the distributed media of electronic and digital technologies. Jameson famously theorised the 'waning of affect' that accompanied the cultural turn from modernism to postmodernism. In Jameson's assessment the modern affects of anxiety and alienation have become displaced by the 'euphoria [of] free-floating and 1 Scott Bukatman, 'The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime' in Annette Kuhn (ed.) Alien

Thinking the Commodity Through the Moving Image: Cinema, Time and Capitalism (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller), Jan 16, 2009

What is it to say that we think the commodity through the moving image? This book tries to answer... more What is it to say that we think the commodity through the moving image? This book tries to answer this central question by investigating the notion that cinema is a form of consciousness, and that cinema's machine intelligence develops an entirely fresh ontological terrain for the parthenogenesis of the commodity. Arguing that the commodity is the abstract heart of film's form, the author examines how cinema gives rise to a modern cinematic consciousness that automates perception and manufactures affects. Through an exploration of twentieth century cinema the author traces the way cinema informs our concept and experience of time and enables the assimilation and internalisation of capital's timescales from the industrial to the digital era. Drawing on key cultural thinkers and philosophers, including Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, as well as contemporary media theorists such as Jonathan Beller, Sean Cubitt, D.N. Rodowick and Mark B. Hansen, this book articulates a branch of media philosophy that reads the political economy of the moving image through an amalgam of continental philosophy, Marxist theory and film studies.