Introduction

In recent years, scholars across the humanities have been drawn to questions of thingness and material culture, especially in the idea that “things” in a “material” culture exist independently of us as perceivers and users. The most recent statement of this investment is object-oriented ontology, which is becoming important to film and media scholars for the ways in which it refuses the “for us” relation that pertains between subjects and objects by leveraging aspects of objects’ existence that are “withdrawn” from human observation and use expressly so that the object may begin to speak for itself. Significantly, this object-oriented turn has usefully complicated questions of the subject, especially as they’ve come to us in media studies either as psychoanalytic aberrations of the self or else as idealist versions of the transcendental subject. In some respect, this can be regarded in continuity with media scholars’ investment in issues of difference and autonomy as well as a tradition of film theory that features the moving image as that which has a (technological and nonhuman) capacity to produce a “world” that exists independently of the subject. Yet, the image cannot be equated to that world, nor is the image’s ability to show objects proof that it is itself an object. Moreover, if an object is defined as anything but a subject, in what way might the subject—if it can only exist on a firm ontological ground as something that merely rests alongside something else—be both attentive and effective? How would the subject both inhabit and behold such a “flat ontology”? What will become of the politically interventionist character of film and media studies if we adopt the stance that objects exist and move of their own volition? What would be the point of adopting a materialist approach to the moving image if the material world is seen as impervious to intervention? How might a nonmedium-specific approach to the image that attempts to get beyond the objecthood of its technical supports also attend to what is specific to it, which includes the moving image’s unique ability to appear in multiple places at the same time? In answering these questions, the following dossier is an attempt to understand, among other things, the political passivity that underwrites nearly every claim for the autonomy of objects, even when such claims are made in the name of a democratic culture of media.