1. Week 10 Phenomenology

2. Lecture outline 1 Phenomenology (technology affects how we experience our bodies, space and time). 2 Jameson’s 3 types of cultural technologies synchronized with 3 stages of capitalism: A) Photography / realism / market capitalism B) Cinema / modernism / monopoly capitalism C) Electronic media / postmodernism / multinational capitalism 3 Cinematic presence and medium specificity: La jetée

4. A phenomenological approach: three key thinkers: Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938) Asked the question of whether an object described by one person is the same as the object described by another.

5. Is meaning constituted in the object, the subject, or between them? Importantly, phenomenology challenged the idea of an objectively constituted reality. Consciousness is a matter of perception for Husserl.

6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) Situated the body (and the subject) as the primary site of knowledge, rather than consciousness.

7. Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976) Related being to time as differentially marked and experienced by each of us. For Heidegger, we have forgotten what ‘being’ in the world is and need to return to this question.

8. ‘The essence of technology is nothing technological’. (Martin Heidegger) What he means by this is that the significance of technologies cannot be described by their component parts.

9. Technologies are ‘co-constituted’ with us, with our needs, and vice versa. Language and thinking reflects this: Human memory as ‘data bank’ Computers suffer from ‘viruses’

10. Film phenomenology Vivian Sobchack (1940 -) Sobchack draws on phenomenological philosophy to give an account of film as a perceptual and bodily experience. For Sobchack technology is a ‘theme’ rather than an ‘essence’: The Address of the Eye: A phenomenology of Film Experience (1992) Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004)

11. Key terms for a film phenomenological approach 1 Materiality – bodies and technologies 2 Embodiment – experience shaped by sensory capacities 3 Space and time – qualitative matter rather than objective measures 4 Presence – awareness of self in the moment

12. Sobchack closes the second paragraph of her article like this: ‘In sum, just as the photograph did in the last century, so in this one cinematic and electronic screens differently demand and shape our “presence” to the world and our representation in it….’

13. Continued… ‘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’.

14. Example: the selfie

15. How does the selfie video invite ‘our complicity in formulating space, time, and bodily investment as significant personal and social experience’. Experience – subjective marks what is significant (me in the frame) Time – moment of recording over-rides present Space – camera is directed towards subject rather than the world

16. 2 Jameson’s 3 types of cultural technologies synchronized with 3 stages of capitalism. Fredric Jameson (US cultural theorist)

17. Jameson argues that each mode of capitalism has a conceptual logic. Sobchack adds to this a correlating cultural technology: Form of capital Concept Cultural form market capitalism realismphotography

18. A)Photography Linked to technological revolution within capital and a perceptual revolution.

19. How so? Steam-powered engines enabled transport – capitalist expansion (colonies) – distant world is empirically verifiable through photography.

20. Photography – the mechanical eye supersedes the human eye. -Extracts a moment from a temporal flow - Transforms a moment into an object -- an object may be possessed, exchanged, traded -Photographs become ‘the money of the real’ (Comolli)

21. Objectification and material possession of life in photography constitute a trace of a personal experience and an ‘extroversion’ of experience (putting experience outside of the self – available for others to view). Example: carousel scene from Mad Men (marketing a ‘new technology’)

22. Photography’s limit for Sobchack – we remain outside of the photograph. It is an object that represents a sealed moment of time that has taken place – out relation is one of nostalgia as well as possession.

23. B) Cinema Monopoly capitalism modernism cinema

24. Time and space: The transcendental moment of the photograph versus the existential moment of cinema. Reorders and synthesizes time and space. Reality no longer objective but subjective.

25. ‘During this moment [1890s], the internal combustion engine and electric power literally reenergized market capitalism into the highly controlled yet expansive monopoly capitalism.’ ‘…the new cultural logic of “modernism” emerged, restructuring…realism to represent more adequately the new perceptual experience of an age marked by the strange autonomy and energetic fluidity of… the motion picture’.

26. The cinema enacts the coming into being of vision and representation – presents representation. Example: La jetée

27. Subjective time, space and embodiment: Cinema moves between an objectively constituted world and a subjective experience bound by the body. Example: Ratcatcher

28. The subjective being in the world of the character is enacted by the camera. The subject’s experience is open-ended and bound by fictional limits and historical coherence. Presence is multiply located: the ‘there’ of past and future viewed from ‘here’, a present presence.

29. C) Electronic media (1940s onwards) Electronic media - postmodernism - multinational capitalism

30. Electronic culture, space and time: - characterised by dispersed networks - located in the instant - disembodied spectator / user

31. Electronic media ‘constitute an alternative and absolute world that uniquely incorporates the spectator / user in a spatially decentred, weakly temporalized, and quasi- disembodied state’.

32. Digital culture can be transmitted in bits, may be separated and will stand alone. It lacks intentionality and engagement with the world. - it is a world in which copies occupy the same terrain as the original (there is no original).

33. Ethics Cinema presents an ethical subject acting consciously in a world (the film text as a world engaged with, exceeding the subject and viewed through the subject). Electronic media lacks a point of view and an ethical relation to the world. The ‘real’ world is suspended in a ‘schematized and intertextual metaworld’.

34. 3 Cinematic presence and medium specificity: La jetée Medium specificity: cinema (like all other cultural forms) has certain features that produce an effect unlike any other cultural form. For Sobchack cinema has: presence, embodiment, ethics.

35. ‘…as a whole, the film organizes, synthesizes, and enunciates the discrete photographic images into animated and intentional coherence, and indeed… makes this its explicit narrative theme’.

36. Week 10 A story of war is also a love story, the search for a woman. The story is also a desire to come into being in another moment of time. The protagonist is a time traveler (like cinema spectators?).

37. The film in terms of Sobchack’s phenomenology: - builds a collective past and future from a personal past - moves between an objective narrator (voice- over) and a subjective viewpoint - through bodily suffering and through passion the ethical choices of the man are evident - the specific features of film are show-cased

38. Phenomenology and its limits: - privileges human aspects of cinema above all others (compare to Epstein’s celebration of cinema as a mechanical revelation of the world). - are claims for the medium specificity of cinema too generalized? Is the computer gamer any less embodied than the cinema spectator? - privileges intentionality above chance and convergence. Does this bring rationalism back to the centre of creative production and cinematic reception?