A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect

This essay offers a critical rejoinder to affect theories prevalent in the humanities since the 1990s. In film and media studies, affect theories display an opposition to ‘screen’ and apparatus theory of the 1970s and 1980s alleged to have marginalised the spectator's body and affects and privileged cognition over affection. Yet film and media studies’ turn to affect came with its own set of problems: in emphasising the affective over the cognitive aspects of cinematic experience, theories of the affective turn invert and reproduce the dichotomies (e.g. body/mind, affect/thought) they seek to contest. Critically reconsidering the turn to affect and its place within film and media studies, this article challenges the relation of affect theories to Gilles Deleuze's concept of affect, highlighting these theories’ failure to account for Deleuze's indebtedness to Immanuel Kant's aesthetics and his theory of the faculties. Suggesting a conception of cinematic affect beyond dichotomies of body and mind, affect and thought, this essay instead shows how cinematic experience instigates transformations in spectators that are simultaneously affective and cognitive.

A Humanistic Consequentialism for Film and Media Studies

This chapter outlines the framework for ethical analysis that will be carried through readings in the latter half of the book. It interrogates the reasons behind a dominant virtue ethics approach in film and media studies, and describes an alternative humanistic consequentialist approach. Consequentialism displaces the evaluation of others and their moral being, including the heroic or villainous qualities of fictive characters, in favor of a future-thinking concern that is more self-implicating, while humanist ethics integrates care and understanding of moral failures and the vagaries of moral luck. Humanistic consequentialism emerges as a pressure we can put on one another to be aware of the results of our behavior rather than a strict requirement to maximize the hedonic results of our actions; implications for the “thought experiments” of media are discussed.

2. Simondon as a Neo-Scholastic?

Johan Fredrikzon spent one and a half years as a visiting research assistant at the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale University 2018/2019. Some months before he arrived, a two-day workshop on Simondon was held by the Yale-Düsseldorf Working Group on Philosophy and Media, titled Modes of Technical Objects, with scholars from the US and Germany. Fredrikzon decided to engage a few of the workshop participants for this special issue of Sensorium, with the purpose to discuss perspectives on Simondon as a theoretical instrument for thinking technology, how the French philosopher matters in their work, and why there seems to be a revival in the interest in the writing of Simondon these days. On behalf of the Sensorium journal, the interviewer would like to thank the three interviewees for their generous participation. About John Durham Peters: John Durham Peters is María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University. Peters has been a creative force in media studies for many years and his thinking continues to influence academic environments throughout the world. His book The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, 2015) was an attempt to rethink the concept of media by including weather, dolphins and fire to the infrastructural landscape of digital communications and climate change. His new book, in cooperation with Kenneth Cmiel, is called Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (Chicago, 2020).

1. Abstract Machines

Johan Fredrikzon spent one and a half years as a visiting research assistant at the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale University 2018/2019. Some months before he arrived, a two-day workshop on Simondon was held by the Yale-Düsseldorf Working Group on Philosophy and Media, titled Modes of Technical Objects, with scholars from the US and Germany. Fredrikzon decided to engage a few of the workshop participants for this special issue of Sensorium, with the purpose to discuss perspectives on Simondon as a theoretical instrument for thinking technology, how the French philosopher matters in their work, and why there seems to be a revival in the interest in the writing of Simondon these days. About Gary Tomlinson: Gary Tomlinson is John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and the Humanities and director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. Tomlinson has taught and written about the history of opera and early-modern musical thought and practice, but also on the philosophy of history and anthropological theory. In his current research, he combines humanistic theory with evolutionary science and archaeology to search for the role of culture in the evolution of man. Following A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (MIT Press, 2015), his new book Culture and the Course of Human Evolution (Chicago, 2018) deepens the theoretical framework on how culture has shaped biology.

3. Constrained Freedom

Johan Fredrikzon spent one and a half years as a visiting research assistant at the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale University 2018/2019. Some months before he arrived, a two-day workshop on Simondon was held by the Yale-Düsseldorf Working Group on Philosophy and Media, titled Modes of Technical Objects, with scholars from the US and Germany. Fredrikzon decided to engage a few of the workshop participants for this special issue of Sensorium, with the purpose to discuss perspectives on Simondon as a theoretical instrument for thinking technology, how the French philosopher matters in their work, and why there seems to be a revival in the interest in the writing of Simondon these days. On behalf of the Sensorium journal, the interviewer would like to thank the three interviewees for their generous participation. About Paul North: Paul North is Professor at the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at Yale University. He teaches on media and literature from Ancient Greece through the romantic and enlightenment traditions into 20th century literary and critical theory. In The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford, 2015) North presented a largely unknown Kafka based on readings of the famous writer’s theoretical works at the end of World War I. Paul North’s new book, Bizarre Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness (Zone Books, 2021) diverges from centuries of thought focused on the idea of difference to engage deeply with the concept of likeness: in evolution, in natural and social worlds, in language and in art. More on: paulnorth.org.

Always already post: subaltern epistemologies in cinema curation

The notion of “post-cinema” derives from a modern understanding of media that frames cinema as a homogenous, exclusive totality. This paper proposes an epistemic approach more sensible to cinema’s performative condition based on curatorial practices. It argues for curation as a form of enacted research distributed across the matrix of reproductive practices responsible for keeping the objective coherence of the medium. As such, curation would be able to access subaltern modes of knowledge and challenge the abyssal thinking prevailing within film and media studies.

Acupuncture of Time (Fragments for a Memoir of the Present)

This personal essay reflects on how the pandemic has profoundly affected daily life, personal health, and the social body. A renewed awareness of embodied time evokes memories and images of intersecting life worlds, and of the people, especially women, who nourished the author and inspired a new conception of vernacular modernism for film and media studies.