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Stephanie Baumann, Im Vorraum der Geschichte: Siegfried Kracauers History: The Last Things Before the Last, Konstanz 2014.
Now, historically, it is the techno-logic of the electronic—and not the residual logic of the cinematic—that dominates the form and in-forms the content of our cultural representations. And, unlike cinematic representation, electronic representation by its very structure phenomenologically diffuses the fleshly presence of the human body and the dimensions of that body’s material world. However significant and positive its values in some regards, however much its very inventions and use emerge from lived-body subjects, the electronic tends to marginalize or trivialize the human body. Indeed, at this historical moment in our particular society and culture, we can see all around us that the lived body is in crisis. Its struggle to assert its gravity, its differential existence, status, and situation, its vulnerability and mortality, its vital and social investment in a concrete lifeworld inhabited by others, is now marked in hysterical and hyperbolic responses to the disembodying effects of electronic representation. On the one hand, contemporary moving images show us the human body (its mortal “meat”) relentlessly and fatally interrogated, “riddled with holes” and “blown away,” unable to maintain material integrity or moral gravity. If the Terminator doesn’t finish it off, then electronic smart bombs will. On the other hand, the current popular obsession with physical fitness and cosmetic surgery manifests the wish to reconfigure the human body into something more invulnerable—a “hard body”; a lean, mean, and immortal “machine”; a cyborg that can physically interface with the electronic network and maintain a significant—if altered—material presence in the current digitized lifeworld of the subject. Thus, it is no historical accident that, earlier in our electronic existence, bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger played the invulnerable, hard-body cyborg Terminator, whereas, much more recently and more in tune with the lived body’s dematerialization, the slightly built Keanu Reeves flexibly dispersed and diffused what little meat he had across The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), The Matrix Reloaded (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 2003). T]he liberation . . . from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings—which it might be better and more accurate to call “intensities”—are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria. (64) Suspension of belief in “realism” is not the same as disbelief in the real. It is, however, a rejection of the transparency of such belief in “realism” and a recognition that our access to the real is always mediated and epistemologically partial. Mitchell, William J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. Print. In its pre-electronic state and original materiality, however, the cinema mechanically projected and made visible for the very first time not just the objective world but the very structure and process of subjective, embodied vision—hitherto only directly available to human beings as an invisible and private structure that each of us experiences as “our own.” That is, the novel materiality and techno-logic of the cinema gives us concrete and empirical insight and makes objectively visible the reversible, dialectical, and social nature of our own subjective vision. Writing of human vision and our understanding that others also see as we do, Merleau-Ponty tells us: “As soon as we see other seers . . . henceforth, through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible. . . . For the first time, the seeing that I am is for me really visible; for the first time I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes” (143-44). Prior to the cinema this visual reflexivity in which we see ourselves seeing through other eyes was accomplished only indirectly: that is, we understood the vision of others as structured similarly to our own only through looking at—not through—the intentional light in their eyes and the investments of their objective behavior. The cinema, however, uniquely materialized this visual reflexivity and philosophical turning directly—that is, in an objectively visible but subjectively structured vision we not only looked at but also looked through. In sum, the cinema provided—quite literally— objective insight into the subjective structure of vision and thus into oneself and others as always both viewing subjects and visible objects.Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Print. Carroll, N., 1998. ‘The essence of cinema.’ Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 89 (2/3), pp. 323–330. del Río, Elena. “Rethinking Feminist Film Theory: Counter-narcissistic Performance in Sally Potter’s Thriller” In Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21, 2004, 11–24.
Most powerful of all, in this regard, are those perceptual technologies that serve also as technologies of representation—namely, photography, cinema, television, and, most recently, computers. These technologies extend not only our senses but also our capacity to see and make sense of ourselves. Certainly, a technological artifact that extends our physical capacities like the automobile (whose technological function is neither perception nor representation but transportation) has profoundly changed the temporal and spatial shape and meaning of our lifeworld and our own bodily and symbolic sense of ourselves. [1] However, such perceptual and representational technologies as photography, motion pictures, television, video, and computers in-form us twice over: first through the specific material conditions by which they latently engage and extend our senses at the transparent and lived bodily level of what philosopher of technology Don Ihde calls our “microperception,” and then again through their manifest representational function by which they engage our senses consciously and textually at the hermeneutic level of what he calls our “macroperception” (29). [2] Most theorists and critics of cinematic and electronic media have been drawn to the latter—that is, to macroperceptual descriptions and interpretations of the hermeneutic-cultural contexts that inform and shape both the materiality and social contexts of these technologies and their textual representations. Nonetheless, we would not be able to reflect on and analyze either technologies or texts without, at some point, having engaged them immediately—that is, through our perceptive sensorium, through the immanent mediation and materiality of our own bodies. Thus, as Ihde reminds us, although “there is no microperception (sensory-bodily) without its location within a field of macroperception,” it is equally true that there is “no macroperception without its microperceptual foci.” Indeed, all macroperceptual descriptions and interpretations “find their fulfillment only within the range of microperceptual possibility” (Ihde 29; emphasis added). It is important to emphasize, however, that because perception is constituted and organized as a bodily and sensory gestalt that is always already meaningful, a microperceptual focus is not reducible to a focus on physiology. That is, insofar as our senses are not only sensible but also “make sense,” the perceiving and sensible body is always also a lived body—immersed in, making, and responding to social as well as somatic meaning. Young, A., 2003. ‘Into the blue: the image written on law.’ In: A. Sarat and J. Simon, eds. 2003. Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law: Moving Beyond Legal Realism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 327–51. Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What Is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Vol. 1. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967. 9-16. Print. In what follows, then, I want to emphasize certain microperceptual aspects of our engagement with the perceptual technologies of photographic, cinematic, and electronic representation that have been often overlooked. I also want to suggest some of the ways the respective material conditions of these media and their reception and use inform and transform our microperceptual experience—particularly our temporal and spatial sense of ourselves and our cultural contexts of meaning. We look at and carry around photographs or sit in a movie theater, before a television set, or in front of a computer not only as conscious beings engaged in the activity of perception and expression but also as carnal beings. Our vision is neither abstracted from our bodies nor from our other modes of perceptual access to the world. Nor does what we see merely touch the surface of our eyes. Seeing images mediated and made visible by technological vision thus enables us not only to see technological images but also to see technologically. As Ihde emphasizes, “the concreteness of [technological] ‘hardware’ in the broadest sense connects with the equal concreteness of our bodily existence”; thus “the term ‘existential’ in context refers to perceptual and bodily experience, to a kind of ‘phenomenological materiality’” (21). Insofar as the photographic, the cinematic, and the electronic have each been objectively constituted as a new and discrete techno-logic, each also has been subjectively incorporated, enabling a new and discrete perceptual mode of existential and embodied presence. In sum, as they have mediated and represented our engagement with the world, with others, and with ourselves, photographic, cinematic, and electronic technologies have transformed us so that we presently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other than we were before each of them existed.Of all narrative film genres, science fiction has been most concerned with poetically mapping those transformations of spatiality, temporality, and subjectivity informed and/or constituted by new technologies. As well, SF cinema, in its particular materiality, has made these new poetic maps concretely visible. For elaboration see my Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (223-305). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie.” In his Sens et non-sens. Paris: Nagel, 1948, 85–106; “The film and the new psychology.” In his Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, 48–59.
This different sense of subjectively perceived and embodied presence, both signified and supported by first photographic and then cinematic and electronic media, emerges within and co-constitutes objective and material practices of representation and social existence. Thus, while certainly cooperative in creating the moving-image culture or lifeworld we now inhabit, cinematic and electronic technologies are quite different not only from photographic technologies but also from each other in their concrete materiality and particular existential significance. Each technology not only differently mediates our figurations of bodily existence but also constitutes them. That is, each offers our lived bodies radically different ways of “being-in-the-world.” Each implicates us in different structures of material investment, and—because each has a particular affinity with different cultural functions, forms, and contents—each stimulates us through differing modes of presentation and representation to different aesthetic responses and ethical responsibilities. As our aesthetic forms and representations of “reality” become externally realized and then unsettled first by photography, then cinema, and now electronic media, our values and evaluative criteria of what counts in our lives are also unsettled and transformed. In sum, just as the photograph did in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so in the late twentieth and early twenty-first, cinematic and electronic screens differently solicit and shape our presence to the world, our representation in it, and our sensibilities and responsibilities about it. Each differently and objectively alters our subjectivity while each invites our complicity in formulating space, time, and bodily investment as significant personal and social experience. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” 1984, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf (last accessed May 1, 2020). Morris has noted that at an initial screening of the film several audience members started to consider Leuchter’s argument as truth. Wanting to avoid being tarred as a Holocaust denier, Morris subsequently re-edited his film adding a voiceover of a Holocaust historian. This addition makes me overtly aware of the documentary’s construction therefore I begin to question the film’s objectivity. It is a voice which does not belong to the story of Fred A. Leuchter. Its appearance seems contrived (suddenly being introduced halfway through the narrative). As my awareness to the film’s construction is heightened, I begin to pay more attention to the images as symbolic; as images I need to interrupt and analyse critically rather than images which teach me something about the world I live in. When the film has finished, I feel as if I am conflicted and confused about the “character” Fred A. Leuchter rather than feeling I have learnt something about Holocaust denial. Perhaps this is because my knowledge of the topic is relatively extensive? I am not dissatisfied with the experience though. It has been an intriguing character study, much as I expect Morris intended it to be. Blue, 1993. [Film] Written and directed by D. Jarman. UK: Channel 4 in association with The Arts Council of Great Britain, Opal, BBC Radio 3, and Zeitgeist. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” Trans. Carleton Dallery. The Primacy of Perception. Ed. James Edie. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964. 159-90. Print.Merleau-Ponty, M., 1946. ‘The primacy of perception.’ In: The Primacy of Perception. Translated from French and edited by J. M. Edie 1964. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 12–42. Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel, De vreugden van Houssaye: Apologie van de historische interesse, Amsterdam 1992, p. 18; Johan Huizinga, Verzamelde werken 2: Nederland, Haarlem 1950. Home-movies recall our memories of the existential subjects on screen and our experience of them in the lived world. The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, Editor (New York: AFI Film Reader Series, Routledge, 1996).
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