The Cinematic Body
Here's a quote from Steven Shaviro's brilliant book "The Cinematic Body", a Deleuzian repudiation of iconophobic film criticism. I think much of it hold true of all forms of art, not the least poetry:
“Beneath its claims to methodological rigor and political correctness, it manifests a barely contained panic at the prospect (or is it the memory?) of being affected and moved by visual forms. It is as if there were something degrading and dangerous about giving way to images, and so easily falling under their power. Theory thus seeks to ward off the cinema’s dangerous allure, to refuse the suspect pleasures that it offers, to dissipate its effects by articulating its hidden but intelligible structure. Behind all these supposedly materialist attacks on the ideological illusions built into the cinematic apparatus, should be not rather see the opposite, an idealist’s fear of the ontological instability of the image, and of the materiality of affect and sensation?”
I'm not talking about the old bash theory kind of thinking, but I am thinking about that strain of thinking about poetry that must necessarily eliminate pleasure, affect, the image.
“Beneath its claims to methodological rigor and political correctness, it manifests a barely contained panic at the prospect (or is it the memory?) of being affected and moved by visual forms. It is as if there were something degrading and dangerous about giving way to images, and so easily falling under their power. Theory thus seeks to ward off the cinema’s dangerous allure, to refuse the suspect pleasures that it offers, to dissipate its effects by articulating its hidden but intelligible structure. Behind all these supposedly materialist attacks on the ideological illusions built into the cinematic apparatus, should be not rather see the opposite, an idealist’s fear of the ontological instability of the image, and of the materiality of affect and sensation?”
I'm not talking about the old bash theory kind of thinking, but I am thinking about that strain of thinking about poetry that must necessarily eliminate pleasure, affect, the image.
posted by Johannes at 12:45 PM
3 Comments:
Do you ever read Steven Shaviro's Pinnochio blog? If you don't know it, check it out. It's quite good.
I'll look it up.
I should say that Shaviro speaks specifically about film in his book (if that's not obvious from the title). But it seems like film and photography is present as a kind of fear in the criticism of all the arts.
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