A matter of affect: Digital images and the cybernetic re-wiring of vision

Parallax

Volumn 7, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 122-127

  Parisi, Luciana ^a   Terranova, Tiziana ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EAST LONDON   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750720731     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13534640110089294     Document Type: Review

References (34)

1. The term 'control societies' was introduced by Gilles Deleuze to describe a shift away from the disciplinary societies described by Michel Foucault. 'We're definitely moving toward 'control' societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. Foucault's often taken as the theorist of disciplinary societies and of their principal technology, confinement (not just in hospital and prisons, but in schools, factories, and barracks). But he was actually one of the first to say that we're moving away from disciplinary societies, we've already left them behind. We're moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication', Gilles Deleuze 'Control and Becoming', trans. M. Joughin, in Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p.174.
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri also refer to the society of control in their political analysis of contemporary modes of power, Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000).
3. On the subject see also Michael Hardt, 'The Withering of Civil Society', in Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller (eds)
4. Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp.23-39.
5. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp.138-139.
6. Brian Massumi 'The Autonomy of Affect', in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp.217-239.
7. For example, see Homi Bhabha 'The Other Question' in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp.66-84;
8. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996);
9. and Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar and John Greyson (eds) Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film on Video (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
10. See Laura Mulvey's classic essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', in Anthony Easthope (ed.) Contemporary Film Theory (London: Longman, 1993);
11. E. Ann Kaplan (ed.) Psychoanalysis and Cinema (London: Routledge, 1990);
12. and Jackie Stacey, 'Desperate Seeking Difference', in Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (eds), The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture (London: The Women's Press, 1988), pp.112-129.
13. Barbara Creed 'The Cyberstar: Digital Pleasures and the End of the Unconscious', Screen, 41(1), Spring 2000, p.85.
14. See, for example, Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros (London: Athlone, 1996);
15. Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996);
16. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).
17. See Jean Baudrillard, 'Simulacra and Simulations', in Mark Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), pp.166-184.
18. See also Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988).
19. David N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (London, Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p.xv.
20. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism, p. xvii. He also adds: 'The ghost of an idealist Hegelian identity theory - that is, the founding of epistemological judgments on the basis of the unity of subject and object - seems to permeate even the most emphatic attempts to promote a materialist film theory. And this is no less true for the appeals that the discourse of political modernism makes to psychoanalytic theory, especially Lacan' (p.208). Rodowick questions the notion that the subject is exclusively produced by the text, which unilaterally defines its formal unity.
21. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communiction, p.24.
22. Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p.20.
23. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1993).
24. Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p.7.
25. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin Books, 1994).
26. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. E. Curley in The Collected Works of Spinoza (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985).
27. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p.19.
28. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' in Illuminations, trans. H. Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp.211-244.
29. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
30. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema, p.3.
31. Massumi, 'The Autonomy of Affect', p.218.
32. See Deleuze's understanding of the image in Bergson, where image equals movement, that is a relation between bodies in movement: 'Every image is "merely a road by which pass, in every direction, the modifications propagated throughout the immensity of the universe". Every image acts on others and reacts to others, on "all their facets at once" and "by all their elements'" [Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986), p.58].
33. Negri and Hardt suggest that the shift from what they call a modern sovereignty to the current imperial sovereignty implies a marginalization of the binary opposition between self and other in favour of an active interest in the management of difference. 'When we begin to consider the ideologies of corporate capital and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmodernist and postcolonialist theoriests who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity, and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignity have been outflanked by the strategies of power. Power has evacuated the bastion they are attacking and has circled around to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference. These theorists thus find themselves pushing against an open door' [Hardt and Negri, Empire, p.138]. The subtle and complex relation between cultural differences has become 'the very terrain upon which the global capitalist market operates' [Ashwani Sharma, 'Sounds Oriental: The (Im)possibility of Theorizing Asian Musical Cultures', in Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk, and Ashwani Sharma (eds) Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1996), p.22].
34. On the production and management of difference within a 'turbulent' order also see Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova, 'Heat Death: emergence and control in genetic engineering and artificial life' in Ctheory, vol. 23, No. 1-2 (http://www.tao.ca/fire/ctheory/0119.html).