Videogame researcher and developer Ian Bogost posted this video he made on the photography of Garry Winogrand, looked at through the lens of object-oriented ontology–a philosophical approach he shares with Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, and Timothy Morton. While my own metaphysical orientation is closer to the process-relational metaphysics put forward by people like Steven Shaviro and Adrian Ivakhiv (and following people like Whitehead and Deleuze), I agree with Adrian Ivakhiv that a significant middle ground can be found between the two positions. This is something that has been debated time and again in the speculative realism blogosphere, and I don’t want to get into that debate here; above all, I don’t want to suggest that there is no difference between these “schools” of thought, only that for some purposes these differences may be less important than the commonalities–above all, the common opposition to what Quentin Meillassoux has identified as “correlationism,” or the view that subjects and objects, humans and things, phenomenal appearances and substratal reality are always and inextricably tied to one another, that there can be no access to a realm outside human thought, and that there is no interaction that would breach this correlation. One can certainly question the claim that all of post-Kantian Western philosophy up until the advent of speculative realism (itself a contentious term that collects positions so various as to be outright opposed to one another) was beholden to the spell of correlationism, but whatever one decides about that, Meillassoux’s identification of this tendency is surely not without heuristic value. And thus speculative realisms, object-oriented ontologies, and process-relational philosophies can be seen to make common cause with posthumanistic positions that aim to decenter human perspectives and anthropocentrisms of all sorts. In my own work, I have tried to triangulate such philosophical efforts with a theory of media as (in Mark Hansen’s words) “the environment for life” or, as I prefer, media as the environment for agency (both living and nonliving). Anyway, this is all just a long way of saying that I recommend watching Ian Bogost’s nicely made video, which offers a thought-provoking contribution to this effort to think media beyond the frame of human intentionality, instrumentality, and sentimentality.
Tag: media theory
Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface
[UPDATE: I have posted the complete first chapter at my academia.edu page: here.]
A while back, I posted a summary, in German, of my dissertation Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, which I submitted last year and am currently revising for publication. The dissertation was advised by Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Leibniz University Hannover) and Mark B. N. Hansen (Program in Literature, Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, Program in Information Science+Information Studies, and Visual Studies Initiative, Duke University). Anyway, the dissertation itself is in English, and since I’ve had a few requests from non-German-speakers, I thought I would repost the summary, but this time in English:
Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface
Shane Denson
In this dissertation, I argue that the filmic progenies of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein cast a special light on the historicity of human-technological interfaces—supposing, at least, that we approach the films in a vigorously historicizing manner. Seen in the context of the historical connections that obtain amongst their narrative contents, their social settings, and contemporaneous cultural conflicts; set in relation to media-technical infrastructures, innovations, and transitions; and located squarely in the material and experiential parameters of historically situated spectatorship, Frankenstein films reveal specific, changing configurations of human-technological interaction: patterns, tendencies, and deviations that mark moments in a richly variable history that is at once a history of cinema, of media, of technology, and of the affective channels of our own embodiment.
The body of this work is divided into three main parts, the task of Part One being to locate the experiential challenges posed by Frankenstein films. Towards this end, Chapter 2 develops a historically indexed “techno-phenomenology” of the dominant film-viewer relations under the paradigms of early and classical film; I then apply this perspective to the analysis of two Frankenstein films from the respective film-historical periods, each of which is shown to instantiate a vacillating destabilization of spectatorial relations, pointing to a volatile intermediate realm between the phenomenological regimes of early and classical cinema. In Chapter 3, I follow this cue to the transitional era of the 1910s, and specifically to the first known Frankenstein film proper: the Edison Studios’ 1910 production Frankenstein. As I argue in that chapter, the dualities of address exemplified in this film point to a broader experience of transitionality which, on the move between more determinately stabilized situations, presents itself negatively to phenomenological subjectivity—as an indeterminate gap.
It is in these gaps of transitionality that I locate Frankenstein films’ characteristic challenge, and in Part Two I take up that challenge by formulating a theoretical framework, that of postnaturalism, that would be able to answer the films’ provocations. Chapter 4 first circles around the gaps that feminist readers have located in the text of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel before diving into them to discover a theory of a pre-personal and therefore non-discursive contact between human embodiment and technological materiality. On the basis of this contact, as I argue, technological revolutions (such as the industrial revolution in the wake of which Shelley composed her novel) are capable of radically destabilizing human agency, causing us to draw experiential blanks and to produce textual gaps—which, however, are quickly filled in and forgotten in the process of novel technologies’ habituation and naturalization. In the techno-scientific interlude of Chapter 5, I trace these processes in the context of the industrial steam engine’s recuperation by thermodynamic science in order to uncover the postnatural historicity of natural science’s nature itself—i.e. the fact, not reducible to an epistemic phenomenon of discursive construction and projection on the part of human subjects, that material nature itself is constantly in motion, in transition, and that—due to the role of technologies in this history—nature has thus never been “natural.” Chapter 6 translates these findings into a specifically postnatural media theory, which pertains not only to empirically determinate apparatuses but to the very historicity of the phenomenological realm as it is co-articulated between human and nonhuman agencies; as a film-theoretical correlate of this theory, I put forward what I call a “cinematic double vision,” which alternates between a Merleau-Ponty inspired phenomenological perspective and a Bergsonian metaphysics to reveal film experience as animated by the interchange between human situations and technological displacements.
Part Three then returns to Frankenstein films to demonstrate the films’ special relations to the postnatural historicity of the anthropotechnical interface and, in effect, to execute a rapprochement between the conflicting human and nonhuman agencies inhabiting these films. In order to do so, Chapter 7 turns to the paradigmatic filmic progenies, James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, and, on the theoretical basis of postnaturalism, alternately illuminates the human and nonhuman perspectives that come together to animate the films’ central creature. In this confrontation—the staging of which is inextricable from the films’ historical moment and specifically from their relations to the then-recent transition to sound cinema—I seek a non-reductive means of apprehending the alterior agency that occupies the gaps in subjective experience provoked by Frankenstein films. Chapter 8, by way of conclusion, briefly pursues this line beyond the paradigm case, taking a more synoptic view of the continuing proliferation of the Frankenstein film; here I seek to illuminate the active role played by cinematic technologies in eliciting a fleeting experience of transitionality, which lies submerged beneath the weight of our habituated or “natural” relations to those technologies. The rapprochement of which I spoke consists, then, 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. This is the ultimate challenge posed for us by Frankenstein films.
cultural distinctions remediated: beyond the high, the low, and the middle
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vrvd5ya7-4&w=560&h=345]
Shane Denson, “Media Crisis, Serial Chains, and the Mediation of Change”
Back in June, I posted a screencast video of “Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective,” a presentation I gave at the German Association for American Studies 2011 annual conference in Regensburg. This got me thinking about making screencast versions of other talks I’ve given. Here is one for a talk entitled “Media Crisis, Serial Chains, and the Mediation of Change: Frankenstein on Film,” which I gave at the American Studies Association annual conference in San Antonio, Texas on November 19, 2010.
Shaviro’s Response
Following the great round of presentations and lively discussions, Steven Shaviro has now offered his concluding response, wrapping up the theme week on his book Post-Cinematic Affect at In Media Res. In related news, over at his blog The Pinocchio Theory, he’s also posted a text on “post-continuity,” framed by a response to Mattias Stork’s video essay “Chaos Cinema.” There’s still lots to think about here, and I’m sure the discussion is not over yet…
More Post-Cinematic Moments
Following Elena del Rio’s post on “Cinema’s Exhaustion and the Vitality of Affect” (to which I responded here), the theme week at in media res on Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect has continued with two great presentations: Paul Bowman’s “Post-Cinematic Effects” and now Adrian Ivakhiv’s “A Hair of the Dog that Bit Us.” Bowman’s presentation is framed by a clip from Old Boy, while Ivakhiv uses Grace Jones’s video “Corporate Cannibal.” Both of these, like del Rio’s presentation on Monday, raise some crucial questions for understanding our contemporary media moment. If you haven’t been following the presentations and discussions, check it out now. Following Patricia MacCormack’s presentation tomorrow, Steven Shaviro is scheduled to respond to all of these takes (and tangents) on his work on Friday.
Metabolic Images and Post-Cinematic Affect
Over at in media res, the theme week on Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect has gotten underway with an intriguing post by Elena del Rio from the University of Alberta entitled “Cinema’s Exhaustion and the Vitality of Affect,” which I highly recommend reading/viewing. I wanted to post a short response there, but for some reason I am unable to log in to do so. So I’m posting my response here for the time being, but will post again at in media res when possible.
(Note that the following draws on ideas that I develop at much greater length in Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, which I am currently revising for publication, and attempts to set them in relation to del Rio’s response to Shaviro’s notion of post-cinematic affect.)
What Deleuze calls the “vital power that cannot be confined within species [or] environment” (quoted by Elena del Rio in her post at in media res) might profitably be thought in terms of “metabolism”—a process that is neither in my subjective control nor even confined to my body (as object) but which articulates organism and environment together from the perspective of a pre-individuated agency. Metabolism is affect without feeling or emotion—affect as the transformative power of “passion” that, as Brian Massumi reminds us, Spinoza identifies as that unknown power of embodiment that is neither wholly active nor wholly passive. Metabolic processes are the zero degree of transformative agency, at once intimately familiar and terrifyingly alien, conjoining inside/outside, me/not-me, life/death, old/novel, as the power of transitionality—marking not only biological processes but also global changes that encompass life and its environment. Mark Hansen usefully defines “medium” as “environment for life”; accordingly, metabolism is as much a process of media transformation as it is a process of bodily change. The shift from a cinematic to a post-cinematic environment is, as del Rio describes it, a metabolic process through and through: “Like an expired body that blends with the dirt to form new molecules and living organisms, the body of cinema continues to blend with other image/sound technologies in processes of composition/decomposition that breed images with new speeds and new distributions of intensities.” To the extent that metabolism is, as I claimed, inherently affective (“passionate,” in a Spinozan vein), del Rio is right that post-cinematic affect has to be thought apart from feeling, certainly apart from subjective emotion. Del Rio’s alternative approach, which (in accordance with Deleuze’s mode of questioning while thinking beyond the time-image) asks about the image, taking it as the starting point of inquiry, is helpful. The challenge, though, becomes one of grasping the image itself not as an objective entity or process but as a metabolic agency, one which is caught up in and defines the larger process of transformation that (dis)articulates subjects and objects, spectators and images, life and its environment in the transition to the post-cinematic. This metabolic image, I suggest, is the very image of change, and it speaks to a perspective that is the perspective of metabolism itself—an affect that is distributed across bodies and environments as the medium of transitionality. As del Rio rightly suggests, exhaustion—mental, physical, systemic—is not at odds with affect; rethinking affect as metabolism (or vice versa) might help explain why: exhaustion, from an ecological perspective, is itself an important, enabling moment in the processes of metabolic becoming.
Post-Cinematic Affect: Theme Week at In Media Res
This notice serves to advertise both a “medium” and its “message” (which, according to McLuhan is always another medium–and this is certainly true in this case). If you don’t already know the website In Media Res (the “medium” in question), you should definitely take a look. It’s an innovative and exciting project that works like this: each week, a group of people deal with a given media-related topic or theme (the “message,” so to speak) through the mixed media of a short video clip (30 sec. to 3 minutes in most cases) and a short textual accompaniment (between 300 and 350 words)–the medium’s message, itself media-oriented, is very literally composed of other media.
Now, the message has arrived that next week, the topic of discussion will be Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect, about which I recently posted. I quote here from Adrian Ivakhiv’s blog immanence:
Next week, the Media Commons project In Media Res will be hosting a theme week on Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect (which I wrote about here).
I’ll be guest curating the discussion on Wednesday, and Steven will be responding on Friday.
Here’s the full line up:
- Monday August 29: Elena Del Rio (University of Alberta, Canada)
- Tuesday August 30: Paul Bowman (Cardiff University, UK)
- Wednesday August 31: Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont, USA)
- Thursday September 1: Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
- Friday September 2: Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University, USA)
To participate you will need to take a moment to register here.
This promises to be an exciting event, and it should be especially interesting to members of the Film & TV Reading Group. Mark your calendars!
Multistable Frames
Stephanie Hoppeler, Lukas Etter, and Gabriele Rippl (whose research project “Seriality and Intermediality in Graphic Novels” is associated with the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality–Aesthetics and Praxis”) have put together a workshop titled “Interdisciplinary Methodology: The Case of Comics Studies,” which will take place on October 14-15, 2011 in Bern. In the organizers’ own words:
“Our motivation for this event is to reduce what we see as a stark discrepancy between the popularity of Comics Studies on the one hand and the virtual lack of encompassing methodological reflection on the other.
We have planned one keynote speech for each of the two days: Dr. Thierry Groensteeen (freelance lecturer and curator; founder of www.citebd.org) will hold an introductory speech on Friday 14 October, and Dr. Roger Sabin (lecturer at Central St. Martins University of the Arts, London) will give a paper on Saturday 15 October. Each speech shall be followed by several thematic panels, in which researchers will present their papers and thereby introduce a broader discussion.
[Papers have been chosen that] include or stimulate reflection on the methodological issues Comics Studies and Intermediality Studies raise, as well as on possibilities to tackle these issues.”
One of those papers will be presented by yours truly. The paper develops the phenomenological approach to comics that was implicit in my paper at the DGfA conference this year in Regensburg, “Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective” (screencast video here, in case you missed it). In particular, my talk in Bern will expand on the notion of the “multistable frame,” which I introduced as a way of talking about comics and their emergent serialities in the earlier paper. Here is the abstract for my presentation in Bern:
Multistable Frames: Notes Towards a (Post-)Phenomenological Approach to Comics
Shane Denson
“In the available accounts of the theories and methods of popular culture studies, phenomenology is conspicuously absent” (Carroll, Tafoya, and Nagel 1)—thus observe the editors of a volume meant to rectify that situation, published in the year 2000. But over a decade later their statement remains largely true. In the meantime, popular culture itself has changed, as have the studies devoted to it: new theories and methods have emerged, and different phenomena have come into view. Developments in and around comics and graphic novels are exemplary: comics themselves have been transformed through contact with digital media, their social status revised largely through the graphic novel, and they have come to exert an unprecedented influence on mainstream cinema and television. Today, comics cannot be ignored, neither in the broad field of popular culture nor in the more specialized realms of academic study: increasingly, comics are being researched with a great variety of methods by literary scholars, historians of art and culture, media theorists, and even philosophers. Looking back from this vantage point, we may find the absence of phenomenology among fin-de-millennium approaches to popular culture less surprising than the conspicuous absence of comics in a volume dedicated to Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture. Phenomenology and comics, or so it would seem, pass like ships in the night—and this despite the fact that the insights of some of the seminal works on comics, such as Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, were arrived at through methods and means of looking at comics that were implicitly phenomenological in nature. It remains, then, to make these methods explicit, and to transform phenomenological insights into a genuine methodology available for the study of comics. As a first step towards this goal, I propose rethinking Eisner’s and McCloud’s classic contributions through the lens of categories and concepts developed by American philosopher Don Ihde for the phenomenological study of “mediating technologies.” Adapted to the medium of comics, and applied specifically to the central figure of the frame that, in various forms (e.g. panels, speech balloons, pages as meta-panels), dominates Eisner’s and McCloud’s analyses of comics as a sequential art, Ihde’s phenomenological categories lend greater depth to our understanding of comics as an experiential domain, throwing phenomena like the achievement of “closure” (as McCloud puts it) between panels into sharper relief, but at the same time revealing the requisite negotiations between and amongst frames and the internal and external spaces they define as a highly complex process. The apparently simple act of reading comics, that is, is revealed as a highly complex process, one involving a non-linear dynamics that can be traced back to the recursive nestings and reversibilities of frames as phenomenal objects. Ultimately, the multistability of comics’ framings, as revealed in a phenomenological analysis, points towards the logic of flickering oscillations that Derrida has exposed under the rubric of the parergon, and hence to a postphenomenological approach that destabilizes any categorical difference between subjects (or readers) and objects (or comics). Nevertheless, a phenomenological methodology may prove to be the only route to understanding the irreducible experiential entanglements involved in our transactions with comics as a medium of the multistable frame.
Carroll, Michael T., Eddie Tafoya, and Chris Nagel. “Introduction: Being and Being Entertained: Phenomenology and the Study of Popular Culture.” Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture. Eds. Michael T. Carroll and Eddie Tafoya. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. 1-18.
Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 2008.
Ihde, Don. Technics and Praxis. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979.
_____. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.
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.