Towards a Post-Digital Imaginary: Technological Transition in American Cinema and Society

Habilitation Abstract

It has been argued that with the ‘cultural turn’ the very idea of culture referentially shifted away from particular types of objects and was redirected toward the meaning-making practices that dynamically structure social interaction. Accordingly, cultural circuit theory (Du Gay, Hall, Woodward) denotes the interdependent relation between culture and meaning making as recursive material and aesthetic processes of production, consumption, regulation, representation and identification. But what happens when the number of cultural producers exponentially increases over short time periods while impediments to cultural participation decrease at proportionate rates? Facebook currently has a user-base catalogue of digital images exceeding 50 billion photos, and with 3 billion queries per day, Google handles 1.1 trillion searches per year. If the advent of big data fundamentally impacts relations between the production, consumption and regulation of information, how does it affect the integrity of cultural circuits? Lev Manovich has claimed that “our world, media, economy and social relations all run on software” (Software Takes Command), arguing that while new information technologies are reshaping societies, individuals and perceptions of the world, the study of new technologies is most valuable when it promotes the understanding of social practices as culture per se. Within the tradition of examining technological change and its impact on society from a Cultural Studies perspective, and employing methods from cultural anthropology, gender studies, media studies and narrative studies, this work analyses representations of techno-social transition (TST) in contemporary cinema and society.

According to Miriam Hansen, cinema is a privileged site of cultural productions representing technological change due to the very technicity and narrative function of the cinematic apparatus. Analogous to the circuit of culture, cinematic modes of representation reflexively respond and contribute to the culturally situated symbolic processes in which they are engaged. Cinema’s aesthetic strategies for representing technological transition can contribute to a better understanding of how ICT-driven institutions like the Digital Military Complex or Social Media impact techniques of the self (Foucault) and the social imaginary (Taylor), as well as providing insights on how digital technologies in the entertainment industry, such as massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), are displacing conventional modes of representation and identification concomitant to their economic displacement of the film industry itself. Accounting for the historical contingencies that enable technological transition, this project first delineates a genealogy of cinematic technologies as imbedded in historic flows of scientific, material and cultural techno-social transitions in order to then examine the conceptual shift from analogical modes of sense making to digital ones, and the reflexive technology-based metaphors or modes of representation this shift generates, such as the screen and other media-centric thresholds. Departing from representational cycles of moral panic about embodied technologies and gender hierarchies, disruptive patterns of narrative and aesthetic organization emerge in the post-digital era. These patterns break with norms of Apollonian logocentrism, subject-oriented anthropocentrism and gender-specific conventions of the cinematic gaze hitherto prevalent in Hollywood narrative aesthetics and the social imaginary.