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"Kirkwood, Jeffrey West"
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Endless Intervals
Revealing cinema's place in the coevolution of media
technology and the human
Cinema did not die with the digital, it gave rise to it.
According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital
technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest cinema laid
the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital
world. In Endless Intervals, he introduces a theory of
semiotechnics that explains how discrete intervals of machines came
to represent something like a mind-and why they were feared for
their challenge to the uniqueness of human intelligence.
Examining histories of early cinematic machines, Kirkwood
locates the foundations for a scientific vision of the psyche as
well as the information age. He theorizes an epochal shift in the
understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that
demonstrates how cinema engineered an entirely new model of the
psyche-a model that was at once mechanical and semiotic, discrete
and continuous, physiological and psychological, analog and
digital.
Recovering largely forgotten and untranslated texts, Endless
Intervals makes the case that cinema, rather than being a
technology assaulting the psyche, is in fact the technology that
produced the modern psyche. Kirkwood considers the ways machines
can create meaning, offering a fascinating theory of how the
discontinuous intervals of soulless mechanisms ultimately produced
a rich continuous experience of inner life.
eBook
The Cinema of Afflictions
Histories of madness in modernity have had their own fixations. Fascination with the nightless din of city life and the asynchronous pounding of machine rhythms lent itself to an all-too-literal metaphor of psychological illness as mechanical “breakdown.” The machine age was marked by powerful regularities whose failures produced equally powerful accidents of unprecedented violence from which the psychophysiological machine was not exempt. In the famous opening passages to The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil captured the electrified milieu that gave rise to such comparisons between technological and psychological breakdown. He described the mechanical hum of an August 1913 day in
Book Chapter
Engineering the Interval
Gilbert Simondon argued in 1958 that we had entered “a new phase of the philosophy of technics” that followed a long period concerned with “thermodynamics and energetics.”¹ The new phase was one of information, which, as he claimed, still failed to make “a clear distinction between form and information.”² Broad application of the nineteenth-century scientific materialism born of research on the laws of thermodynamics to matters of industrial, philosophical, and social significance found a vanishing boundary between the human and the machine. After Hermann von Helmholtz, “energy was a transcendental principle” that allowed little regard for the metaphysical constructs that
Book Chapter
The Technics of Bildung
Education has traditionally been a practice of seeking closure. It codifies a set of techniques that train, discipline, and form students into autonomous subjects that can be plausibly treated as having a sense of agency, interiority, and a connection to a social universe. But how does one achieve closure? As every contemporary advice columnist probably knows, a definitive point of total absolution is impossible. Closure is merely an assumed point of externality—whether real or imagined—from which something or someone comes to function (or signify as functioning) as distinct from its surroundings. It is a practice, technique, or operation
Book Chapter
Coda
Cinema has always been both a digital and an analog technology. This is what made it such a powerful and at times contentious tool for understanding the function of the psyche as an apparatus. For all the fleeting enchantments the screen offered, early cinema also created an enduring nexus between technical discretization and the continuities of what it meant to have a mind. It was both discrete and continuous, technical and semiotic. If the psyche had been rendered a machine, cinema rendered machines psychological. What a terrifying proposition.
Cinema would only seem to rejoin inquiry into questions of digital discretization
Book Chapter
The Semiotechnical Subject
Between 1907 and 1917, film was transformed from an itinerant attraction in varieté theaters and traveling cinemas into an increasingly permanent fixture of urban entertainment in storefront cinemas and cinema palaces.¹ As the cinematic dispositif underwent accelerating standardization—regulating projection speeds, shutter mechanisms, film formats, and theater architecture—editing techniques governing the organization of multiscene narrative films followed suit.² During this time, cinema’s institutionalization was met with institutional criticism. This took the form of state censorship and a proliferation of conservative religious, medical, juridical, and bildungsbürgerliche associations, initiatives, and publications aimed at controlling for the potentially deleterious effects of films.
Book Chapter
Introduction
This book is about nothing. It is about the many nothings that form the stops, breaks, pauses, gaps, and fleeting moments of quietude underlying the work of machines that have governed human life since the nineteenth century. The machines propelling the “werewolf-like hunger for surplus-labour” amid the hellish drone of factories in Manchester, England, detailed by Friedrich Engels in the 1840s, and the digital machines of computational capitalism used to datafy and monetize work, sleep, and meditation alike share a feature often denied to their human counterparts: they rest.¹ For all the justified concern with the ceaseless nature of the
Book Chapter
Operations of Culture: Ernst Kapp's Philosophy of Technology
Tracing the origins of what has come to be called \"new German media theory\" leads to an unlikely location far from Germany--Texas--and by way of an even less evident path: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A German emigre, Ernst Kapp, reading Hegel in the rural expanses of central Texas in the middle of the nineteenth century, penned what is arguably the first philosophy of technology. Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture (1877) has shaped and predicted the course of much of contemporary media theory. The deeper one goes into the sedimented record of Kapp's role in the history of media theory, the broader and more decisive his impact appears to be. Elements, published a decade later, reads as a synthesis of political, practical, and intellectual experience at the edge of world history. Kapp's philosophy revolves around the key concept of \"organ projection,\" which has remained the primary fixture in the media-theoretical reception and misinterpretation of his work.
Journal Article