Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature

Preface

PREFACE The world around us contains a wild phantasmagoria of images. Put more provocatively: the world around us is a wild phantasmagoria of images. We live and move in a world that swirls with tempestuous currents made of a kind of audiovisual image-substance. Photographs, films and television programs, videos and computer games—these and other moving images blend and mix with images of the external and internal worlds produced by a global array of instruments, from satellites that face down at us, to telescopes that face away from us, to MRIs, EEGs, and ultrasound sonographs that face into us, to the personal computers, cellphones, and iPads that have become our bodily and mental extensions. Together these make up imagescapes full of motion. These images move us, and we move with them. And as we do, we may realize that we too are moving images, seen and heard and perceived by others who are seen and heard and perceived by us. A world increasingly filled with moving images has remade itself into a world of moving images. This book examines how images move us. It is not a treatise on the physics of this movement, nor is it an ethnography of ourselves in the midst of these currents. It is not particularly concerned with distinguishing between images and the supposedly “real things” represented, signified, or perhaps masked by those images. Rather, this book steps back from the immersive imageworlds in which we live in order to get a sense of what the moving image is and of what one particular history of it—the cinematic—can tell us today, at this juncture between a photographic and celluloid past and a digital future. “Cinema” refers to one form of moving image, a form that consists of structured sequences viewed by audiences and that emerged in a particular time and place (industrial-era Europe and North America) and has captivated the world over the course of the past twelve decades. This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema. My goal is to think through the ecological implications of the moving images—films, videos, animations, and motion pictures of various kinds—that have proliferated in our world since the late nineteenth century. The “eco” in its philosophy does not restrict itself to the material impacts of the production of those images. viii PREFACE It also delves into their social and perceptual effects. This book is about how moving images have changed the ways we grasp and attend to the world in general—a world of social and ecological relations—and about how we might learn to make them do that better. This project is an ecophilosophy in the sense that it develops a philosophical framework for reconceiving our relations with moving images. This framework is intended to be pragmatic and empirical, rooted in actual experience, but it is also metaphysically speculative and radical in its implications. The works of the two philosophers on whom I draw most deeply, Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, have never to my knowledge been brought together for the task of a detailed analysis of cinematic images. To this combination, I bring insights from a broad array of other sources. These include the ideas of other philosophers, such as Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, and a range of post-Deleuzian thinkers; as well as cultural historians’ and geographers’ studies of visuality and landscape, ecocritics’ analyses of representations of nature and the “ecological sublime,” feminist and post-colonial critiques of the “imperial gaze,” cognitive and neuropsychological studies of affect and perception, neo-Marxist theorizations of film’s political economies, and the work of scholars in animal studies, trauma studies, psychoanalysis, and depth psychology, among other fields. In its essence, this book proposes and applies a model of cinema that I refer to as “process-relational.” Such a model sees the world as consisting of relational processes—socio-semiotic-material events, encounters, and interactions that produce and reproduce the world anew in every moment. Of the modern art forms, I suggest that it is cinema—the art of the moving image—that comes closest to depicting reality itself, because reality is always in motion, always in a process of becoming. Cinema not only mirrors and represents reality but also shadows, extends, reshapes, and transforms it. Describing how cinema does this, and how different kinds of cinematic works do it in different ways, is the task of this book. This book’s argument takes...