Table Of ContentPostcinematic Vision
CARY WOLFE, SERIES EDITOR
54 Postcinematic Vision: The Coevolution of
Moving- Image Media and the Spectator
Roger F. Cook
53 Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility
Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova
52 Variations on Media Thinking
Siegfried Zielinski
51 Aesthesis and Perceptronium: On the Entanglement
of Sensation, Cognition, and Matter
Alexander Wilson
50 Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones,
and Extinction
David Farrier
49 Metaphysical Experiments: Physics and the Invention
of the Universe
Bjørn Ekeberg
48 Dialogues on the Human Ape
Laurent Dubreuil and Sue Savage- Rumbaugh
47 Elements of a Philosophy of Technology:
On the Evolutionary History of Culture
Ernst Kapp
46 Biology in the Grid: Graphic Design and the
Envisioning of Life
Phillip Thurtle
45 Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude
Michael Haworth
44 Life: A Modern Invention
Davide Tarizzo
43 Bioaesthetics: Making Sense of Life in Science and
the Arts
Carsten Strathausen
42 Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and
Less Than Human
Dominic Pettman
41 Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than
Human Worlds
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa
40 Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies
Impression
Julian Yates
(continued on page 239)
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The Coevolution of Moving- Image
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Media and the Spectator
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Roger F. Cook
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University of Minnesota Press
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London
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Copyright 2020 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cook, Roger F., author.
Title: Postcinematic vision : the coevolution of moving-image media and the
spectator / Roger F. Cook.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2020. |
Series: Posthumanities | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019019310 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0766-2 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0767-9 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Mass media—Philosophy. | Mass media—Audiences. |
Visual perception. | Digital media. | Cinematography.
Classification: LCC P90 .C6815 2020 (print) | DDC 302.23—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019310
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Contents
Introduction 1
Moving- Image Media and Embodied Spectatorship 7
Media Convergence and Remediation 14
1 Film and the Embodied Mind 27
Technogenesis: The Coevolution of the Biological
and Technological 27
The Phatic Image of Cinema— Reassessed 45
“Consciousness Is an Epiphenomenon” 54
Dual Temporalities of Media and the Mind 62
Postcinematic Reflections on Spectatorship 77
2 1900: Film Transforms the Media Landscape 91
Film as Prosthetic Visual Consciousness 91
Mechanized Culture and the Moving Image 102
Remediation: The Convergence of Film and Writing 113
Film and the Tyranny of Writing: Franz Kafka 128
3 2000: Cinema and the Digital Image 155
Intermedial Constructions of Cinema’s Virtual Reality 155
Digital Mediations of Movement, Space, and Time 167
Cinema and Singular Consciousness 182
Conclusion 197
Notes 209
Bibliography 215
Index 231
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Introduction
As digital technology has radically altered the media landscape and
liberated the screen from the confines of an auditorium equipped
with a projector and fixed seats, some media theorists have de-
clared that the “cinematic century” has ended and that we have
entered a “postcinematic” and even “post- televisual” age (Friedberg
2006, 242).1 In the last few years a number of film scholars have
mounted a concerted effort to delineate the salient characteristics
of this transition to a radically new constellation of visual media.
This endeavor gained focus and steam when in his 2010 book Post-
Cinematic Affect Steven Shaviro explored how the emergent forms
of digital media were generating a substantially different “struc-
ture of feeling” (1). More recently, an extensive online collection of
both new and previously published work, Post- Cinema: Theorizing
21st- Century Film, has provided a comprehensive overview of what
is at stake in this theoretical pursuit and pointed toward new ave-
nues of investigation (Denson and Leyda 2016).
In her groundbreaking work toward a phenomenology of cinema,
Vivian Sobchack had already laid out in 1992 the basic contours of
what distinguishes cinematic spectatorship in the electronic age:
Postcinematic, incorporating cinema into its own techno-
logic, our electronic culture has disenfranchised the human
body and constructed a new sense of existential “presence.”
Television, video tape recorders/players, videogames, and
personal computers all form an encompassing electronic
system whose various forms “interface” to constitute an
alternative and virtual world that uniquely incorporates
the spectator/user in a spatially decentered, weakly tem-
poralized, and quasi- disembodied state. (300)
99 11 00
2 Introduction
This passage from the conclusion of Address of the Eye was written
just as digital imaging was beginning to alter cinema profoundly.
Anticipating some of the key changes in the media environment
over the next two decades, Sobchack cites those aspects of film
viewing that would be affected most strongly: the involvement of
all the senses in conjunction with the primary role of vision and
hearing; spatial and temporal orientation; and the new sense of
presence that the postcinematic image would generate. While
I agree with her characterization of the new spectating position
as “spatially decentered, weakly temporalized,” her suggestion
that it is “quasi- disembodied” or that “our electronic culture has
disenfranchised the human body” broaches questions about the
way moving- image media have affected human perception since
cinema became a global cultural dominant. In this study, I address
the convergence of cinema and digital media with respect to the
role film has played in the coevolution of the human and technol-
ogy over the last hundred years. Challenging the notion that our
engagement with visual media is ever actually disembodied, my
account of this process contributes to our understanding of how
our increasingly mediated relation to today’s digitized cultural en-
vironment is altering lived experience.
For some, the term postcinema seems to suggest that the film
image will not survive the development and success of diverse
forms of new media. Once restricted to the movie or television
screen, moving images are now viewed on all manner of mobile
devices and in almost every possible location. As these changes
continue to take effect and new forms of media are invented at
a rapid pace, there is little consensus about how this will affect
cinema or whether it will succumb to the onslaught of new visual
media. This popular cultural medium has, however, overcome
comparable challenges in the past. Media technologies that enable
new forms of entertainment either in the home (as had occurred
with TV) or in public venues (such as IMAX theaters or video and
VR installations) have always posed a threat to the movie indus-
try (Young, xii). But cinema has proven resilient, both when TV
became the dominant visual medium in the second half of the
twentieth century and now as mobile moving- image devices have
become commonplace. A quick assessment of the current state of
Introduction 3
cinema finds a robust medium that exhibits at least on the surface
more continuity than mutation. Moviegoers still flock to theaters
to be entertained by films of roughly the same length and narra-
tive composition as the conventional feature film that took shape
in the first two decades of the previous century. Faced with the
strong disruptive potential of digital technology, the Hollywood
film industry has responded in the same manner it has to all de-
velopments in film technology since the 1910s, assimilating digital
imaging to its standard practices much as it had previously adopted
innovations like sound, color, and the mobile camera. Economic,
cultural, and social forces have ensured that advances in moving-
image technology are deployed to bolster feature- film exhibition
and reinforce the existing mode of spectatorship.
While those who fear that cinema’s days are numbered seek re-
assurance from its continuing popularity, theorists of postcinema
contend that the ubiquity of digital devices has already ushered in
a new media regime with fundamentally different conditions for
spectatorship. Still, the prefix “post” does not indicate a clean break
from the inherited cultural forms of moving- image viewing to one
shaped entirely by either new embodied sensibilities or epistemolo-
gies of perception (Denson and Leyda, 6– 7). Rather, it designates a
period of transition in which both traditional film aesthetics and
inherited ontologies of the image continue to play a role. As David
Bordwell has argued with his assertion of an “intensified conti-
nuity” (2006, 24, 50), digital imaging has the power to create even
more compelling simulations that reinforce narrative continuity
and representational realism. However, the ability to harness the
power of digital technology in this way can also undermine the be-
lief in an indexical connection between the chemical reaction that
takes place on a strip of celluloid film and a profilmic reality. The
digitally altered cinematic image threatens the traditional realist
ontology of film. For some, this loss of indexicality has unleashed
a fundamental “crisis in perception” (Brown, 70– 71) or “crisis of re-
alism” (Lowenstein, 2) and stoked the fear that digital technologies
“are inherently deceptive and, therefore, dangerous” (Tyron, 47).
For the theorists of postcinema, this development has not
spurred nostalgia for a grounding of film in material reality, but
rather reveals the mediated nature of the indexical trace:
