Page 231 - Cyberculture and New Media

222 Technology on Screen
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“talking isn’t seeing… a difference that means that by
saying what one can’t see, one’s taking language to its
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ultimate limit, raising it to the power of the unspeakable.”

This according to Deleuze is not what Foucault is doing. There
comes to reside in language the power to significantly affect without
fundamentally determining. In accordance with this position and in a manner
that seems to support the inclusion of film within an expanded category of
discourse, Deleuze has described Foucault’s archaeological method as audio
visual:

Archaeology is to do with archives, and an archive has two
aspects, it’s audio-visual. A language lesson and an object
lesson. It’s not a matter of words and things. We have to
take things and find visibilities in them. And what is visible
in a given period corresponds to its system of lighting and
scintillations, shimmerings, flashes produced by the contact
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of light and things.

It is these ‘shimmerings’ in cinematic form that are the object of
analysis here. Such an approach seems to echo/draw on Heidegger’s position
regarding the centrality of discursive practice to essence as set out above. If
what is said and how it is said is recognised as important in locating the
essence of technology, then technological determinism and instrumental
reasoning can be challenged. Film, when seen as more than a technological
means to an end, can help us do this. Both economic and political, existing as
both cultural text and within a wider social context, it is a
medium/technology that is situated in relation to other media/technologies
both old and new. This situated relationship is sometimes explicit, as in the
films being analysed here. At times paranoia may be identified when film is
seen as being aware of itself as a technology, with a direct relationship to
other technologies, but it is unaware of itself as central to the essence of
technology in the form of causa finalis. As such it does more than simply
reflect the so-called real world.
Let’s examine how mainstream Hollywood as a ‘system of lighting
and scintillations’ ‘speaks’ from an industrially located ideology and what it
has to ‘say’ about technology. The big screen (cinematic apparatus) tries to
articulate its supremacy – as the ‘premiere’ or licit platform of film in a
media landscape where films become computer games, can be ‘ripped’ –
downloaded, sampled and collaged, shared through peer-to-peer file sharing
viewed in their entirety or as clips or stills on the small screen of television
and PCs as well as on the tiny screens of mobile phones and ipods. At the
same time cinema must engage and contain the fantasies engendered by new