4 These terms are derived from Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990): 29. Ihde distinguishes two senses of perception: “What is usually taken as sensory perception (what is immediate and focused bodily in actual seeing, hearing, etc.), I shall call microperception. But there is also what might be called a cultural, or hermeneutic, perception, which I shall call macroperception. Both belong equally to the lifeworld. And both dimensions of perception are closely linked and intertwined.”
5 Two types of theory that are, to some degree, microperceptual analysis are, first, psychoanalytic accounts of the processes of cinematic identification in which cinematic technology is deconstructed to reveal its inherent “illusionism” and its retrogressive duplication of infantile and/or dream states and, second, neo-Marxist accounts of both photography’s and cinema’s optical dependence upon a system of “perspective” based on an ideology of the individual subject and its appropriation of the “natural” world. One could argue, however, as I do here, that these two types of theory are not microperceptual enough. Although they both focus on the “technological” construction of subjectivity, they do so abstractly. That is, neither deals with the technologically constructed temporality and spatiality that ground subjectivity in a sensible and sense-making body.
6 Ihde, p. 29. (Emphasis mine.)
7 Ihde, ibid.
8 Ihde, p. 21.
9 For the history, philosophy, and method of phenomenology, see Herbert Spiegelberg’s The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1965), David Carr, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Incarnate Consciousness,” in Existential Philosophers: Kierkegaard to Merleau-Ponty, ed. George Alfred Schrader, Jr. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), pp. 369-429, and Don Ihde, Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Paragon Books, 1979).
10 Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, p. 26.
11 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July-August, 1984), p. 77.
12 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983): 6-7.
13 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa deLauretis and Stephen Heath (New York, 1980): 122-123.
14 The very recent erosion of “faith” in the photographic as “evidence” of the real in the popular consciousness has been a result of the development of the seamless electronic manipulation of even the tiniest “bits” of the photographic image. While airbrushing and other forms of image manipulation have been around for a long while, they have left a discernable “trace” on the image; such is not the case with digital computer alterations of the photographic image. For an overview, see “Ask It No Questions: The Camera Can Lie,” The New York Times, August 12, 1990, sec. 2, pp. 1, 29
15 Comolli, p. 123.
16 Most media theorists point out that photographic (and later cinematic) optics are structured according to a norm of perception based upon Renaissance perspective, which represented the visible as originating in and organized by an individual, centered subject. This form of representation is naturalized by photography and the cinema. Comolli says: “The mechanical eye, the photographic lens…functions…as a guarantor of the identity of the visible with the normality of vision…with the norm of visual perception” (pp. 123-124.)
17 Comolli, p. 142.
18 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964): 166.
19 It must be noted that the term “memory bank” is analogically derived in this context from electronic (not photographic) culture. It nonetheless serves us as a way of reading backward that recognizes a literal as well as metaphorical economy of representation and suggests that attempts to understand the photographic in its “originality” are pervasively informed by our contemporary electronic consciousness.
20 For readers unfamiliar with the film, La jet?e is a narrative about time, memory, and desire articulated in a recursive structure. A survivor of World War III has a recurrent memory of a woman’s face and a scene at Orly airport where, as a child, he has seen a man killed. Because of his vivid memory, his post-apocalyptic culture–underground, with minimal power and without hope–attempts experiments to send him back into his vivid past so that he can, perhaps, eventually time-travel to the future. This achieved, aware he has no future in his own present, the protagonist, with the assistance of those in the future, ultimately returns to his past and the woman he loves. But his return to the scene of his original childhood memory at Orly reveals, first, that he (as an adult) has been pursued by people from his own present and, second, that his original memory was, in fact, the vision of his own adult death.
21 Andr? Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967): 9-16.
22 James Joyce, in 1909, was “instrumental in introducing the first motion picture theater in Dublin” (See Kern, pp. 76-77.)
23 Arthur M. Danto, “Moving Pictures,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4 (Winter 1979): 17.
24 In the traditional cinema, an image can be “frozen” only by replicating it many times so that it can continue moving through the projector to appear frozen on the screen.
25 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968): 143-44.
26 For a complete and lengthy argument supporting this assertion, see my The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.)
27 Jameson, p. 64.
28 Ibid., p. 78.
29 Brooks Landon, “Future So Bright They Gotta Wear Shades.” (Unpublished manuscript.)
30 It is important to point out that although all moving images follow each other serially, each cinematic image (or frame) is projected analogically rather than digitally. That is, the image is projected as a whole. Electronic images, however, are transmitted digitally, each bit of what appears as a single image sent and received as a discrete piece of information.
31 “Network” was a term that came into common parlance as it described the electronic transmission of television images. Now, we speak of our social relations as “networking.” In spatial terms, however, a “network” suggests the most flimsy, the least substantial, of grounds. A “network” is constituted more as a lattice between nodal points than as grounded and physical presence.
32 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Red and Black, 1983): n.p.
33 It is no accident that all of the films used illustratively here can be identified with the generic conventions and thematics of science fiction. Of all genres, science fiction has been most concerned with poetically mapping the new spatiality, temporality, and subjectivities informed and/or constituted by new technologies. As well, science fiction cinema, in its particular materiality, has made these new poetic maps concretely visible. For elaboration of this mapping, see chap. 4, “Postfuturism” of my Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (Ungar, 1987).
33 Jameson, p. 64.
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