Mediated Associations: Cinematic Dimensions of Social Theory (review)

This is a fairly brilliant book - alas, written with the overly self-conscious degree of preciosity that screams 'cultural studies' these days - but brilliant nevertheless, for a number of reasons, probably the principal one being the sort of theoretical challenge it poses in thinking about everyday social life.

Daniel O'Connor's Mediated Associations is a work of sociology, not film theory or even communication (my own field), although to be sure it touches upon both. That is, sociology in the best sense of the term - or social theory, if one wants to be picky - as a sustained reflection upon the implications of what seems to be a mundane, everyday thing (the commodity for Marx, for example) and a bringing-out of its actual profound complexity in the understanding of social arrangements. For O'Connor, this represents an investigation of the 'everyday' conditions of seeing and saying, as in the mundane act of going to the movies. In itself, this line of inquiry has already been in one form or another well trodden by the likes of Althusser way back when, and since then Foucault of course, Jean Baudrillard, Hal Foster, Martin Jay and the other students of the 'scopic regimes' (Jay) of modernity. One way, perhaps unfairly, to characterize this lot is to say that their take on the conditions of seeing and saying is fundamentally a repressive one. The apparatuses that regulate our senses repress them more than anything else.

O'Connor takes a softer line; he wants to draw our attention to the everydayness of what he calls social apparatuses. Of these, there have been three broad categories: public executions, legislative signs ('the laws'), and the 'cinema,' to use the French term for movies. These social apparatuses work in a descending order of repression, the least repressive being the 'regimes of publicity' that by their planned (and unplanned) strategies and styles provide cues on how people act, read, see, live, gather and exchange information, and so define or mediate the conditions of social association. O'Connor's is still a theory of power - he is a sociologist after all - but it's a different form of power that neither is absolute nor represses opposition, in the historical moulding of the conditions of social association since the days of the public execution (see his chapter 2).

But let's fast-forward to the present-day society of the postmodern spectacle, simulacrum, end of the real, or whatever you wish to call it. O'Connor would call it the transition from the spatiality of social associations to that of their temporality, of which 'the cinema' is the most striking manifestation and has been pretty much since it was invented. 'The cinematic interface is a structure occupying time rather than inhabiting space.' This observation is one of great consequence in the sense that one could argue that ever since the cinema came along our grasp of time has undergone terrific confusion. To simplify O'Connor's argument a lot, this is because cinema deals in the montage of faciality. The face is perhaps the primary affective form of human association. The cinematic machine, as Lev Kuleshov's famous experiment showed, operates by montage or juxtapositions: a face can appear happy or sad depending on what image is literally associated to it. In other words, cinematic technologies create new possibilities of association, real, imaginary but always affective. This is not always a good thing - here O'Connor's 'repressive' side returns.

The key question here is one of evaluating the mediated associations that ever more have come to define social interactions - aside, to be sure, from the recognition that they have (a line of argument that alone makes O'Connor's stand out). In other words, of the difference between what Simmel termed 'socialities' and 'sociabilities.' For Simmel, socialities comprise the cultural manners of association in polite society. Sociabilities transcend sociality by rising above everyday interest. O'Connor takes this distinction but alters it so that sociability becomes an...