The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (27)

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Hanich: Some critics claimed it was an interesting metaphor, but shouldn’t be taken literally. You did not mean it metaphorically though. Although my most novel contributions here are, I hope, to our understanding of the technologies of cinematic and electronic representation (those two materialities that constitute our current moving-image culture), something must first be said of that culture’s grounding in the context and phenomenology of the photographic (which has provoked a good deal of phenomenological description). [3] The photographic mode of perception and representation is privileged in the period of market capitalism located by Jameson as beginning in the 1840s. This was a “moment” emergent from and driven by the technological innovations of steam-powered mechanization, which both enabled unprecedented industrial expansion and informed the new cultural logic of realism. Not only did industrial expansion give rise to other modes and forms of expansion, but this expansion was itself historically unique because of its unprecedented visibility. As Jean-Louis Comolli points out: “The second half of the nineteenth century lives in a sort of frenzy of the visible. . . . [This is] the effect of the social multiplication of images. . . . [It is] the effect also, however, of something of a geographical extension of the field of the visible and the representable: by journies, explorations, colonisations, the whole world becomes visible at the same time that it becomes appropriatable” (122-23). Thus, although the cultural logic of realism has been seen as represented primarily by literature (most specifically, the bourgeois novel), it is, perhaps, even more intimately bound to the mechanically achieved, empirical, and representational “evidence” of the world constituted—and expanded—by photography. Young, Iris Marion. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Hanich: Were there other phenomenologists on the syllabus or did you read up on phenomenology later? These preliminary remarks are grounded in the belief that historical changes in our sense of time, space, and existential, embodied presence cannot be considered less than a consequence of correspondent changes in our technologies. However, they also must be considered something more—for, as Martin Heidegger reminds us in the epigraph that begins this essay, “The essence of technology is nothing technological” (317). That is, technology never comes to its particular material specificity and function in a neutral context to neutral effect. Rather, it is historically informed not only by its materiality but also by its political, economic, and social context, and thus it both co-constitutes and expresses not merely technological value but always also cultural values. Correlatively, technology is never merely used, never simply instrumental. It is always also incorporated and lived by the human beings who create and engage it within a structure of meanings and metaphors in which subject-object relations are not only cooperative and co-constitutive but are also dynamic and reversible.

del Río, Elena. “The Body as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts.” Camera Obscura 37-38 (1996): 92-115. Print. Grundberg, Andy. “Ask It No Questions: The Camera Can Lie.” New York Times 12 Aug. 1990 2: 1, 29. Print.Not so the electronic, whose materiality and various forms engage its spectators and “users” in a phenomenological structure of sensual and psychological experience that, in comparison with the cinematic, seems so diffused as to belong to no-body. Emerging culturally in the 1940s in television (a technology that seemed a domestically benign conjunction and extension of radio and cinema) and in supercomputers (a more arcane technology driven by a less benign military-industrial complex), the electronic can be seen as the third “technological revolution within capital itself.” Both television and computers radically transformed not only capital but also the culture, insofar as both in-formed what was, according to Jameson, an unprecedented and “prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas,” including “a new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious” (78). Subsequently, the electronic has increasingly come to dominate not only the photographic and cinematic but also our lives; indeed, as Brooks Landon writes, it has “saturated all forms of experience and become an inescapable environment, a ‘technosphere’” (27). Beginning in the 1940s, this expansive and totalizing incorporation of what was perceived to be natural by what seemed a totally mediated culture, and the electronically specular production, proliferation, and commodification of the unconscious (globally transmitted as visible and marketable desire) restructures monopoly capitalism as multinational capitalism. Correlatively, Jameson (famously) identifies postmodernism as a new cultural logic that begins to dominate modernism and to alter our sense of existential (and, I would add, cinematic) presence. Heidegger, Martin. “Die Frage nach der Technik.” In his Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Neske, 1954, 13–44; “The Question Concerning Technology.” Trans. William Lovitt. In Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977, 287–317. 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. Dagrada, Elena, Raffalele de Berti, and Gabriele Scaramuzza, eds. Estetica e cinema a Milano. Milan: Cuem, 2006.

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. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 2: L’image-temps. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985; Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Hanich: Does this make phenomenology an endeavor that includes paying more attention to language than other film theoretical approaches do? Carroll, N., 1998. ‘The essence of cinema.’ Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 89 (2/3), pp. 323–330.I am speaking here of a dominant cultural and techno-logic. Obviously, electronic communication (including such things as petition circulation) can and does entail more significant degrees of moral gravity with correlatively significant material consequences. This, however, tends to be the case in circumstances and for people in cultures in which electronic and postmodern logic is not a dominant and in which embodied being is truly at referential stake and cannot be forgotten or so easily “liberated.” Howe, D., 1994. Review of Blue. Washington Post [online] 11 February. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/bluenrhowe_a0b031.htm [Accessed 11 November 2009]. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 2005, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm (last accessed May 1, 2020).

Flaxman Gregory, ed. The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. The Active Eye: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Vision," Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 12, no. 3 (1990): 21–36.Until very recently the photographic has been popularly and phenomenologically perceived as existing in a state of testimonial verisimilitude—the photograph’s film emulsions analogically marked with (and objectively “capturing”) material traces of the world’s concrete and “real” existence. [4] Unlike the technologies that preceded it, photography produced images of the world with an exactitude previously rivaled only by the human eye. Thus, as Comolli suggests, with the advent of photography the human eye loses its “immemorial privilege”; it is devalued in relation to “the mechanical eye of the photographic machine” that “now sees in its place” (123). This replacement of human with mechanical vision had its compensations, however—among them, the material control, containment, and objective possession of time and experience. [5] Abstracting visual experience from an ephemeral temporal flow, the photographic both chemically and metaphorically “fixes” its ostensible subject quite literally as an object for vision. It concretely reproduces the visible in a material process that—like the most convincing of scientific experiments—produces the seemingly same results with each iteration, empirically giving weight to and proving in its iterability the relationship between the visible and the real. Furthermore, this material process results in a material form that can be objectively possessed, circulated, and saved, that can accrue an increasing rate of interest over time and become more valuable in a variety of ways. Photography is thus not only a radically new form of representation that breaks significantly with earlier forms, but it also radically changes our epistemological, social, and economic relationships to both representation and each other. As Jonathan Crary tells us: “Photography is an element of a new and homogenous terrain of consumption and circulation in which an observer becomes lodged. To understand the ‘photographic effect’ in the nineteenth century, one must see it as a crucial component of the new cultural economy of value and exchange, not as part of a continuous history of visual representation” (13). Indeed, identifying the nineteenth-century photograph as a fetish object, Comolli links it with gold and aptly calls it “the money of the ‘real’”—the photograph’s materiality assuring the possibility of its “convenient circulation and appropriation” (142). Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print.