Category: Theory

Dylan Trigg’s uncanny (film) phenomenology

Just a few days ago, I linked to Adrian Ivakhiv’s article “The Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine: Stalking the Zone of Cinema” in the most recent issue of Film-Philosophy. Another highlight in that issue comes from Dylan Trigg, a researcher at the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée in Paris, whose blog Side Effects I just recently discovered. Trigg’s paper, “The Return of the New Flesh: Body Memory in David Cronenberg and Merleau-Ponty,” can be found here; and here is the abstract:

From the “psychoplasmic” offspring in The Brood (1979) to the tattooed encodings in Eastern Promises (2007), David Cronenberg presents a compelling vision of embodiment, which challenges traditional accounts of personal identity and obliges us to ask how human beings persist through different times, places, and bodily states while retaining their sameness. Traditionally, the response to this question has emphasised the importance of cognitive memory in securing the continuity of consciousness. But what has been underplayed in this debate is the question of how the body can both reinforce and disrupt the grounds for our personal identity. Accordingly, by turning the notoriously “body conscious” work of Cronenberg, especially his seminal The Fly (1986), I intend to pursue the relation between identity and embodiment in the following way.

First, by augmenting John Locke’s account of personal identity with a specific appeal to the body, I will explore how Cronenberg’s treatment of embodiment as a site of independent experience challenges the idea we have that cognitive memory is the guarantor of personal identity. Cronenberg’s treatment of the “New Flesh” posits an account of the body that undermines the Cartesian and Lockean account of personal identity as being centred on the mind. In its place, I will argue that Cronenberg shows us how the body establishes a personality independently of the mind.

Second, through focusing explicitly on body memory, I will explore how we, as embodied subjects, relate to our bodies in a Cronenbergian world. Approaching this relation between memory and embodiment via the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that memory is at the heart of Cronenberg’s vision of body horror. I will conclude by suggesting that far from generating unity, Cronenberg’s vision of embodiment and identity is diseased (often literally) by a memory that cannot be assimilated by cognition. The result of this failure to assimilate body memory, is that memory itself occupies the role of the monster within.

As evidenced on his blog, Trigg is doing some really fascinating phenomenological work (for example, a great post here on “The Language of Hauntings”), and his book, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny, is due out in 2012 (available now for pre-order). Here’s the publisher’s blurb for the book:

From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world.

Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within “place studies,” an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; “transitional” contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies.

Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls The Memory of Place “genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”

I highly recommend checking out Dylan Trigg’s blog and his article in Film-Philosophy, and I look forward to reading his wonderful-sounding book!

Adrian Ivakhiv’s ecocritical film-philosophy

Adrian Ivakhiv, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, maintains the excellent blog immanence, where he posts regularly on “the Form, Flesh, and Flow of the World : Ecoculture, Geophilosophy, Mediapolitics” (as he puts it in the blog’s byline).

Recently, he linked to a new article of his in the open-access online journal Film-Philosophy (published by the great Open Humanities Press), in a special issue on “Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis.” Here is the abstract of Ivakhiv’s paper, which is certainly worth reading in full:

The Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine: Stalking the Zone of Cinema

This article proposes an ecophilosophy of the cinema. It builds on Martin Heidegger’s articulation of art as ‘world-disclosing,’ and on a Whiteheadian and Deleuzian understanding of the universe as a lively and eventful place in which subjects and objects are persistently coming into being, jointly constituted in the process of their becoming. Accordingly, it proposes that cinema be considered a machine that produces or discloses worlds. These worlds are, at once, anthropomorphic, geomorphic, and biomorphic, with each of these registers mapping onto the ‘three ecologies,’ in Felix Guattari’s terms, that make up the relational ontology of the world: the social, the material, and the mental or perceptual. Through an analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), I suggest that cinema ‘stalks’ the world, and that our appreciation of its potentials should similarly involve a kind of ‘stalking’ of its effects in the material, social, and perceptual dimensions of the world from which cinema emerges and to which it returns.

Keywords:

Film theory; film-worlds; ecocriticism; ecologies; Tarkovsky

Beyond this paper, Ivakhiv is working on a book called Ecologies of the Moving Image, which I very much anticipate reading. Indeed, in many respects, Ivakhiv seems a kindred spirit of sorts in his process-relational philosophical orientation and his endeavor to formulate a non-anthropocentric philosophy of film. With his notion that the cinema is one of the places “in which subjects and objects are persistently coming into being, jointly constituted in the process of their becoming,” Ivakhiv’s views seem largely apposite with my own film-theoretical project, which, as I summarized (in German) recently, seeks a “rapprochement between the conflicting human and nonhuman agencies inhabiting [Frankenstein] films” and the cinema in general. As I outline it in Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, this “rapprochement […] consists […] of a recognition of the mutual articulation of experience by human and nonhuman technical agencies, whereby the affective and embodied experience of anthropotechnical transitionality is not arrested and subjugated to human dominance, but approached experimentally as a joint production of our postnatural future” (24). Ivakhiv’s proposal “that cinema be considered a machine that produces or discloses worlds” seems, in my opinion, to point in the same – experimental and postphenomenological – direction.

Steven Shaviro on “the post-cinematic”

Steven Shaviro, probably best known for his now-classic book The Cinematic Body (an early but still one of the best explorations of the meaning of Deleuzo-Guattarian theory for embodied spectatorship; and one that Shaviro himself has critically reconsidered from a distance of 15 years in an essay called “The Cinematic Body Redux”), has recently published a book entitled Post-Cinematic Affect (Zero Books, 2010), which is summarized, on the publisher’s website, like this:

Post-Cinematic Affect is about what it feels like to live in the affluent West in the early 21st century. Specifically, it explores the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities. The 20th century was the age of film and television; these dominant media shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities. In the 21st century, new digital media help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility. Movies (moving image and sound works) continue to be made, but they have adopted new formal strategies, they are viewed under massively changed conditions, and they address their spectators in different ways than was the case in the 20th century. The book traces these changes, focusing on four recent moving-image works: Nick Hooker’s music video for Grace Jones’ song Corporate Cannibal; Olivier Assayas’ movie Boarding Gate, starring Asia Argento; Richard Kelly’s movie Southland Tales, featuring Justin Timberlake, Dwayne Johnson, and other pop culture celebrities; and Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s Gamer.

Now, over at his wonderfully named and always intriguing blog The Pinocchio Theory (which you can also always find in the handy “blogroll” on the right-hand side of this very blog), Shaviro has begun outlining the meaning of “the post-cinematic” as it appears in that book. This is what Shaviro says about the purpose of his theorization of “the post-cinematic”:

The particular question that I am trying to answer, within this much broader field, is the following: What happens to cinema when it is no longer a cultural dominant, when its core technologies of production and reception have become obsolete, or have been subsumed within radically different forces and powers? What is the role of cinema, if we have now gone beyond what Jonathan Beller calls “the cinematic mode of production”? What is the ontology of the digital, or post-cinematic, audiovisual image, and how does it relate to Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image? How do particular movies, or audiovisual works, reinvent themselves, or discover new powers of expression, precisely in a time that is no longer cinematic or cinemacentric? As Marshall McLuhan long ago pointed out, when the media environment changes, so that we experience a different “ratio of the senses” than we did before, older media forms don’t necessarily disappear; instead, they are repurposed. We still make and watch movies, just as we still broadcast on and listen to the radio, and still write and read novels; but we produce, broadcast, and write, just as we watch, listen, and read, in different ways than we did before.

The full thought-provoking post, which is highly recommended, can be found here. Enjoy!

Shane Denson: Interview zu Frankenstein & Film

Neulich wurde ich vom Fanzine Zauberspiegel zu meiner Dissertation Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface und verwandten Themen interviewt. Die Dissertation, deren Cover man hier sieht, wurde von Ruth Mayer (Leibniz Universität Hannover) und Mark Hansen (Duke University) betreut und 2010 bei der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Hannover eingereicht. (Während eine überarbeitete Fassung für die Publikation in einem geeigneten Verlag in Vorbereitung ist, ist die als Eigendruck produzierte Dissertation jetzt schon von der Universitätsbibliothek Hannover direkt oder durch den interuniversitären Dissertationentausch erhältlich. (Datensatz bei der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek hier, bei GetInfo hier und im Online-Katalog der Uni Hannover hier.))

Das Interview im Zauberspiegel, das einige allgemein verständliche Antworten auf die in der Dissertation eher technisch und philosophisch behandelte Fragen geben soll, findet man hier: “Shane Denson über Frankenstein, das Monster und ihre Beziehung in Film und Roman.”

Und hier, schliesslich, ist die deutsche Zusammenfassung der Dissertation, die ich der englischsprachigen Arbeit beigelegt habe:

In der vorliegenden Dissertation argumentiere ich, dass filmische Umsetzungen von Mary Shelleys gotischem Roman Frankenstein ein besonderes Licht auf die Historizität von Mensch/Technik-Schnittstellen werfen—zumindest dann, wenn man sich ihnen in einer konsequent historisierenden Weise annähert. Betrachtet man die verschiedenen Filme im Kontext der historischen Zusammenhänge, die zwischen ihren narrativen Inhalten, sozialen Umfeldern und begleitenden kulturellen Konflikten bestehen, setzt man sie in Relation zu medientechnischen Infrastrukturen, Innovationen und Transitionen und verortet man sie genau in den materiellen und lebensweltlichen Parametern des historisch situierten Zuschauererlebnisses—dann lassen die sogenannten Frankenstein-Filme spezifische Konfigurationen der Mensch/Technik-Interaktion erkennen: Muster, Tendenzen und Abweichungen, die die Momente einer von Umbrüchen geprägten Geschichte bilden, die zugleich eine Geschichte des Kinos, der Medien, der Technik und der affektiven Kanäle unserer eigenen Leiblichkeit ist.

Die Arbeit ist in drei Hauptteile gegliedert. Nachdem Kapitel 1 eine Einleitung in die Argumentation und die Begrifflichkeiten der Arbeit liefert, verortet der erste Hauptteil (bestehend aus Kapitel 2 und 3) eine Reihe experienziell-phänomenologischer Herausforderungen, die die Frankenstein-Filme darstellen. Dafür entwickelt Kapitel 2 eine „Technophänomenologie“ der dominanten Film/Zuschauer-Beziehungen unter den Paradigmen des frühen Kinos und des klassischen Hollywood Filmes; diese Perspektive findet dann in der Analyse zweier Frankenstein-Filme aus den jeweiligen filmgeschichtlichen Perioden Anwendung, wobei sich in beiden Fällen eine Destabilisierung zuschauerlicher Relationen zum Film zeigt, die auf einen unbeständigen Zwischenbereich hindeutet, der zwischen den phänomenologischen Regimes des frühen und des klassischen Kinos liegt. In Kapitel 3 verfolge ich diesen Hinweis in die Übergangsperiode des Kinos der 1910er hinein, insbesondere zu dem aus den Thomas-Edison-Studios stammenden Film Frankenstein aus dem Jahre 1910. Wie ich dort argumentiere, deuten die Dualitäten der Adressierung, die in diesem Film exemplifiziert werden, auf eine breiter gefasste Erfahrung der Transitionalität hin, die sich in Bewegung zwischen stabilen Situationen befindet und sich in negativer Weise zur phänomenologischen Subjektivität zeigt—in Form einer unbestimmten Kluft oder Lücke.

Die charakteristische Herausforderung der Frankenstein-Filme verorte ich in diesen Lücken der Transitionalität, und im zweiten Hauptteil der Arbeit versuche ich, ein theoretisches Rahmenwerk—nämlich den „Postnaturalismus“—zu formulieren, das den Provokationen der Filme eine Antwort liefern kann. Kapitel 4 kreist zunächst um die Lücken, die feministische Lesarten von Mary Shelleys Roman an den Tag gelegt haben, bevor ich in diese Lücken eintauche, um dort eine Theorie des prä-personellen und daher nicht diskursiven Kontaktes zwischen menschlichen Körpern und der technischen Materialität zu entdecken. Auf Basis dieses Kontaktes, so mein Argument, sind technische Revolutionen (wie die industrielle Revolution, in deren Gefolge Shelley ihren Roman schrieb) in der Lage, die menschliche Handlungsmacht radikal zu destabilisieren, so dass wir experienzielle Lücken erfahren und textuelle Lücken produzieren—die allerdings rasch aufgefüllt und vergessen werden, wenn wir uns an neue Techniken gewöhnen und sie so „naturalisieren.“ In Kapitel 5 widme ich mich diesen Prozessen im Kontext der Aneignung der Dampfmaschine durch die Thermodynamik, um damit die postnatürliche Historizität der naturwissenschaftlichen Natur selbst aufzudecken—also die Tatsache, die sich nicht auf ein epistemisches Phänomen der diskursiven Konstruktion oder Projektion reduzieren lässt, dass sich die materielle Natur in konstanter Bewegung befindet und dass—aufgrund der Rolle von Techniken in dieser Geschichte—die Natur noch nie „natürlich“ gewesen ist. Kapitel 6 übersetzt diese Ergebnisse in eine postnatürliche Medientheorie, die nicht bloß empirisch individuierte Apparate, sondern auch die Historizität des phänomenologischen Raums betrifft, wie er von menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Akteuren zusammen artikuliert wird; als filmtheoretisches Korrelat schlage ich eine „kinematische Doppelvision“ vor, die zwischen einer von Merleau-Ponty inspirierten phänomenologischen Sichtweise und einer Bergsonschen Metaphysik pendelt, um die filmische Erfahrung als Produkt eines Wechselspiels zwischen menschlichen Situationen und technischen Verschiebungen zu zeigen.

Der dritte Hauptteil kehrt dann zu den Frankenstein-Filmen zurück, um die besonderen Beziehungen aufzuzeigen, die zwischen ihnen und der postnatürlichen Historizität der anthropotechnischen Schnittstelle bestehen, und eine Art Rapprochement zwischen den konfligierenden menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Akteuren, die den Filmen innewohnen, zu bewirken. Kapitel 7 folgt diesem Ziel, indem es sich den paradigmatischen Frankenstein-Filmen—James Whales Frankenstein (1931) und Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—widmet und die menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Perspektiven alternierend aufzeigt, deren Zusammenkunft die zentrale Kreatur der Filme animiert. In dieser Konfrontation—die unentwirrbar im historischen Moment und besonders im Kontext des Übergangs zum Tonfilm eingebettet ist—suche ich eine nicht-reduktive Weise, um die andersartige Kraft zu begreifen, die die durch Frankenstein-Filme provozierten Erfahrungslücken besetzt. Schließlich bietet Kapitel 8 eine synoptische Sichtweise der weiteren Entwicklung der Frankenstein-Filme; hier versuche ich, die aktive Rolle der kinematischen Techniken in der Produktion kurzlebiger Erfahrungen der Transitionalität aufzuzeigen, die unter dem Gewicht unserer habituellen und „natürlichen“ Beziehungen zu jenen Techniken begraben liegen. Das von mir anvisierte Rapprochement besteht also darin, eine Anerkennung der gegenseitigen Artikulation der Erfahrung durch menschliche und nichtmenschliche (technische) Akteure zu fördern, wodurch die affektive und leibliche Erfahrung einer anthropotechnischen Transitionalität nicht arretiert und der menschlichen Dominanz unterjocht wird, sondern experimentell als gemeinsame Produktion unserer postnatürlichen Zukunft angenähert wird. Dies ist die eigentliche Herausforderung der Frankenstein-Filme.

“To be continued…”: Seriality and Serialization in Interdisciplinary Perspective

Now online:

Shane Denson, “‘To be continued…’: Seriality and Serialization in Interdisciplinary Perspective.” (Conference Proceedings of: “What Happens Next: The Mechanics of Serialization.” Graduate Conference at the University of Amsterdam, March 25–26, 2011.) In: JLTonline (17.06.2011).

URL: http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/conferences/article/view/346/1004

PDF: here.

“Frame, Sequence, Medium”: Vortrag in Regensburg

Auf der Jahrestagung der Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien in Regensburg wird Shane Denson einen Vortrag über Comics am 18.06.2011 halten. (UPDATE: Mittlerweile ist eine Video-Version des ganzen Vortrags auch online: hier.) Hier das Abstract:

Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective

Shane Denson

In this paper, I argue that careful attention to some of the basic formal properties of comics calls not only for comparisons with analogous properties of other media, but for appreciation of the fact that comics themselves exhibit a strong tendency towards imbrication in robustly “plurimedial” contexts, such that comics as a medium must be seen as a nodal unit in larger, non-reducible networks of mediation. Setting out from a rather formalistic consideration of comics’ techniques of visual and narrative framing and sequencing, and drawing on observations made by Derrida and others, I identify a set of crucial liminalities and reversible oppositions—e.g. between the inside and outside of framed panels, between the temporal and spatial orderings of sequences—that are centrally at work in, and perhaps even partially constitutive of, the medium of comics. At the limit, this formal-phenomenological investigation suggests that liminality or marginality pertains not only to the “internal” relations or constitution of the medium, but that it is also a basic fact of comics’ “external” relations to other media. Above all the serial forms typical of comics’ narration witness the medium positioned in an emphatically plurimedial field, where boundaries are continually negotiated, annexes claimed, and permeable borders policed. The figures that populate comics series, in particular, move between diegetically closed narrative worlds, the integrity and continuity of which is often highly strained, and open multiverses that encompass not only alternative realities within the medium of comics but also alternative existences in other media as well. Attention to the way that serially and plurimedially instantiated figures (such as Batman and Superman, but also Frankenstein or Tarzan) negotiate the relations between diegetically open and closed serialities promises, finally, to shed media-theoretical light on the social question of the dynamics of comics’ transnational reception—which involves superheroes and other comic figures in both global and local contexts, in internationally standardized forms and national or regional adaptations. In a different context, Benedict Anderson has identified a competition between “bound” and “unbound” serialities at work in the modern constitution of nations as “imagined communities”—a competition, that is, between the totalizing closure of a territory and numbering of its occupants as effected by a national census, as opposed to the categorically open and ongoing iterability and reproducibility of events as modeled in the media of newspapers and photography. Refocusing Anderson’s perspective onto comics’ serial and plurimedial negotiations of “bound” and “unbound” formations—understood in relation to the marginalities and reversible boundaries that mark the frames, sequences, and media of popular culture—I aim to link comics’ plurimedial relations and their transnational imaginings through seriality as a locus of ambiguous intersection and border-crossing.

Mediatization and Serialization

Am 18.05.2011, im Rahmen der Initiative für interdisziplinäre Medienforschung an der Leibniz Universität Hannover, hielt Shane Denson den Vortrag “Mediatization und Serialization.” Dies war seine zweite Auseinandersetzung mit dem Begriff der Mediatisierung, nach seinem Vortrag “Mediatization, Techno-Phenomenology, and Popular Serial Entertainment” auf der Tagung “Mediatized Worlds–Culture and Society in a Media Age,” die am 14.-15.04.2011 in Bremen stattfand. Hier ist ein Abstract für den Vortrag in Bremen:

Mediatization, Techno-Phenomenology, and Popular Serial Entertainment

Shane Denson

This paper looks at the preeminently mediatized worlds of modern popular entertainment and sets them in relation to debates over the apparent centrality of media in the articulation and execution of contemporary human agencies. Theorists of mediatization have argued that “the mediation of everything,” as it is implicitly or explicitly postulated in recent media studies research, both captures something essential about our changing lifeworlds but, because of a latent determinism, also stands in the way of countenancing these changes rigorously and responsibly (Livingstone, Hepp). Recent suggestions to the effect that analyses of mediatization processes require a non-media-centric media theory (Hepp, following Morley) seek to counteract deterministic tendencies by highlighting the extra-medial (e.g. social and cultural) forces that increasingly situate media at the center of mediatized lifeworlds while, at the same time, demonstrating that these media retain a high degree of flexibility with regard to the variety of contextual logics and implementations that they can accommodate. Drawing on the work of American philosopher of technology Don Ihde, I would like to propose “techno-phenomenology” as a tool for conceptualizing the mediatization of lifeworlds in this paradoxical or “de/centered” sense. This approach shows technologies as possessing “telic inclinations” or logics that can invisibly transform perceptual and actional agencies and the lifeworlds in which they are embedded, while comparative analyses demonstrate that these tendencies are far from absolute: technical logics are emphatically plural, for intentionality-modulating technologies can occupy a variety of positions within the basic intentional relation. For example, media can be either transparent or opaque and ostentatious, thus instituting a space for reflection on their role in the lifeworld that they in part structure. In the sphere of modern popular entertainment, a techno-phenomenological approach reveals that reversals and variations of a medium’s position and significance within the intentional relations between audiences and the entertainments they consume are an integral part of these entertainments themselves. In other words, the mediatized world of popular entertainment is characterized by repeated interrogations of its own mediatization processes and their larger place in the modern world. Mediatization itself is problematized and put on display in popular media, e.g. when new media emerge or existing media are transformed. This is nowhere more evident than in serialized forms of entertainment, which, due to their development over time, are capable of tracking mediatization processes in the very act of their unfolding. Self-reflexively de/centering the media involved, popular serial forms tell stories that are as much about media as about the contents they mediate; and in the feedback loops that emerge between producers and consumers of popular series, media centrally structure both the form and content of communicative interaction, establishing a dynamic of self-propulsion that is nevertheless not strictly deterministic. Serial forms of popular entertainment therefore both display and enact the de/centerings that constitute a central paradox of our mediatized worlds.

Hepp, Andreas. “Researching ‘mediatized worlds’: Non-mediacentric media and communication studies as a challenge.” Media and Communication Studies Intersections and Interventions. Eds. Nico Carpentier, Ilija Tomanic Trivundža, Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Ebba Sundin, Tobias Olsson, Richard Kilborn, Hannu Nieminen, and Bart Cammaerts. Tartu: Tartu UP, 2010. 37-48.

Ihde, Don. Technics and Praxis. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979.

_____. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Livingstone, Sonia. ‘On the Mediation of Everything’, Journal of Communication 59.1 (2009): 1-18.

Morley, David. ‘For a Materialist, Non Media-Centric Media Studies’, Television & New Media 10.1 (2009): 114-16.

_____. Media, Modernity and Technology. The Geography of the New. London: Routledge, 2007.