Re-run and Re-read

Hailed by critics as breaking paths for the direction of British fiction, Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder (2005) has been described as a way of re-thinking literature in terms of intermedial spaces, be they installations, performance artworks or a ‘remix’ of writing and film. The newness of Remainder seems to hinge on its imitation of a contemporary mediascape saturated with technical images and simulacra, in which reality is totally metamorphosed into a filmic phantasmagoria that novel writing is striving to mimic. Following McCarthy’s eschewing of the rhetoric of the ‘new’, this essay discusses the practice of re-enactment described in Remainder as a way digging up images from the past to read the myth of postmodern hyperreality against its grain. McCarthy’s ‘archeology of the present’ takes the concern with mediation and visual culture back to the unfinished business of modernism and its encounter with cinematic technology, reproposing the materialist aesthetics of embodiment that emerged from the conversation among literature, film and medicine in writers such as Joyce or T.S. Eliot, down to Samuel Beckett.

Viddy and Slooshy

This chapter looks at how the assemblages that characterise a society of control intervene at the level of speech and thought. It takes up Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962), a meditation on control over language, expression, and thought, but also technoscientific control, namely, through the ‘Ludovico technique’ — an assemblage of cinematic technology and pharmaceutical innovation the State uses to resubjectivise the criminal class. The novel is as famous for its ultra-violent aesthete, Alex, as for its fabrication of Nadsat, a fictional argot spoken by delinquent youths. Though Deleuze never cited Burgess, he wrote at length about Stanley Kubrick, who adapted Burgess's novel in 1971. Hence, this chapter shows how Burgess and Kubrick illuminate Deleuze's thoughts on literature and language, cinema and control, and allows us to trace their affinities with SF criticism and the genre's linguistic creations.

Frontiers of Visibility

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.