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  • Intermedial Relations: A Critique of Reification Theory1
  • Davide Panagia (bio)

The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation.

—Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiment (I.i.1.3)

I begin with an epigraph from Adam Smith in order to make apparent the structuring conceit of this essay, which is the following: the matter of assemblages are here considered within the context of modern tradition(s) of moral sentimentalism and its considerations of the affective, associational dynamics that dispose of collectivities. At root in these reflections is my inclination to return to the original French term in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari that sources our English “assemblage”—namely, agencement. As John Phillips shows in an important essay on the topic, the French agencement used by Deleuze and Guattari (and translated as “assemblage”) is more expansive and, indeed, diurnal than our English assemblage: “one would speak of the arrangement of parts of a body or machine; one might talk of fixing (fitting or affixing) two or more parts together; and one might use the term for both the act of fixing and the arrangement itself, as in the fixtures and fittings of a building or shop, or the parts of a machine” (108). Agencement is, in this regard, a compelling word in ways that assemblage is not. Whereas assemblage carries resonances of assembly-formation, the French term agencement used by Deleuze and Guattari specifically references the ways in which things may be arranged and disposed. In short, agencement (as the Dictionnaire de la Langue Française notes) bespeaks a mode of disposing of things like draperies and other accessories, grouping these things, adjusting them. Agencement is the intermedial agency of dispositifs.

It is this sense of arranging, of disposing, that I explore in the pages that follow especially as this regards the techno-human dispositifs that enable diverse forms of collective action. For the purposes of this essay, then, I consider how the sentimental dynamics in and of assemblages speak to forms of collective action emergent from the interaction of perceptibilities, objects, and individual and collective bodies. More than this, however, I wish to provide in this essay some resources for pluralizing our sources [End Page 90] of reflection on assemblages. Hence my turn to the work of Miriam Hansen, who is not typically held in company with assemblage theorists, but whose reflections on cinema and whose readings of (especially) Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin contribute to an understanding of the techno-human agencement as an intermedial collection of centripetal and centrifugal forces for collective action.

Miriam Bratu Hansen arrived in the United States in the 1980s and quickly developed a rich program for the study of film.2 This might, at first glance, seem like a break or departure from her stature as a second-generation Frankfurt School critical theorist, a school of thought typically not optimistic about the vital role of cinema for life. Yet Hansen sought with perspicuity and rigor an inquiry into the history of modern spectatorship, as well as the experiences of psycho-perceptual transformation and the cultures of publicness complicit with modern practices of medial life. In short, Hansen saw technical media, peoples, and theory as crucially entangled one with the other in such a way as to generate sites and sources of experience for emerging publics, or what she calls “intermedial relations.”3

Her last major work, the posthumously published Cinema and Experience, will be the tangential focus of this essay. Specifically, I am interested in Hansen’s notion of activated spectatorship that forms the backdrop of her at times implicit and at other times explicit critique of the reification thesis as adequate to the study of media. More specifically, in Cinema and Experience, Hansen turns the reification thesis on its head by attending to how media technology works through publics rather than on or at them. In this regard, I argue, she holds a distributive and dispositional appreciation of media such that her thinking about what...

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