Page 228 - Cyberculture and New Media

Technology on Screen: Projections, Paranoia and Discursive
Practice

Alev Adil and Steve Kennedy

Abstract
This paper explores the manner in which visual representations might be
positioned in relation to more traditional political discourses around
contemporary media technologies. Visual representation is discourse – not
viewed as preceding as Baudrillard might have us believe, but as a link in a
discourse chain connecting intermediate events or intensities. The way
technology is seen and discussed, is integral to its essence (and therefore to
digital/technological/cyber cultures) from a Heideggerian perspective. The
discursive practices that shape technology will be explored using cinema as
an example. Conceptual boundaries between seeing and feeling, perception
and reality, past and present (memory and perception), the individual and
collective are problematised and breached in contemporary cinematic
representations of technology. Using Freud’s conceptualisation of paranoia,
arising from his analysis of Schreber’s memoirs, this paper will address
several questions about the paranoid film text and its relationship to new
technologies. Discursive practices both shape technology, and are
technologies in themselves. This essay will challenge hierarchies and position
cinema as a key element within a network of discourses, exploring the extent
of linkage and asking how situated practises shape these discourses.

Key Words: Technology, Cinema, Paranoia, Situated practice, Discourse,
Visual Representation, Psychoanalysis, Freud, Schreber, Heidegger, Deleuze
and Guattari
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Film and its visualisation of other technologies can and should be
seen as operational within discourse, existing not solely in the symbolic
realm but bound up in the world materially. But what is a discourse? What is
it that film is a part of? For Michel Foucault a discourse is an amalgamation
of statements that exist within a specifically prescriptive modality that allows
1
them to have a material impact. The films examined here are statements
within a discourse that form a relationship with the ‘real’. It is not an empty
reality composed of representations in the manner put forward by Slavoj
2
Žižek or Jean Baudrillard. Films do more than simply reflect or set up a
model for imposing vacuity wherein the real world is reduced to a screenplay