Erik Marshall

Once in awhile I rewrite an introduction to my dissertation to keep in practice explaining it, and to reveal to myself what changes have been taking place in my own thinking about the project, to suggest new directions and to refocus myself. Here’s what I came up with about a week ago.

What many of the early postmodernists noticed about art and culture, namely the prevalence of pastiche and borrowing of older styles and the increasing mobility of global capital, has metastasized (to use one of Baudrillard’s favorite words) into what Castells and others call “Network Society” and Kazys Varnelis calls “Network Culture”. The proliferation of media across platforms and spaces opens up some important questions about the ontology of the image and about changing viewing practices. The easy access to digital technologies creates a copy culture, where the legal status of intellectual property and the basic concept of originality increasingly come under question.¹ For the entertainment industry, this brings up the issue of “piracy,” or the illegal copying of movies and music, but also increased number of advertising spaces and revenue streams in the form of websites, internet-only shorts or episodes, online distribution of work and whatever else may create more profit. For film/cinema/moving image/media studies the challenge is to understand how the ways in which we use and view images has changed and is changing.

To theorize this shift effectively, it will prove useful to look at a few theorists who wrote during times of change in media and society, particularly Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, as well as Andre Bazin and others. I propose we look at cinema in terms of networked media, of which the feature length film exhibited in a large theater is still the center but in a more complicated way, both augmented and challenged by digital network technologies. I will argue that the prevalence of digital technologies and network practices creates what Nicholas Rombes has called a “cinema of distractions”.  I want to revisit Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s discussions of distraction in modernity, in the analyses of the mass ornament in Kracauer, and, later, in the figure of the flaneur, and the concept of cinematic shock for Benjamin, in order to propose a type of spectatorship that invites a hyper-distracted viewer who must (and can) take in large amounts of disparate information from many places, and make novel connections between bits of information.

It is important to note the difference in approach to distraction between these two theorists. For Kracauer, distraction manifests in the exhibition of the film and serves to reveal to the masses the chaotic nature of their lives. For Benjamin, distraction is a heightened state of awareness in the viewer, who must maintain a distracted attention to deal with cinematic shock and to perceive daily modern life. It would seem that between Kracauer and Benjamin, we have a move from display to spectator, where instead of revolting, the typical spectator adapts a new way of viewing.

Deconstructing Benjamin’s dichotomy between auratic and mechanically reproduced art, Mark Poster posits another function of networked media, what he calls its “underdetermination.” He sites several installations that include input from users as part of the artwork, and concludes that:

“…the art of networked computing brings forth a culture that highlights its future transformation rather than confirming the completeness of the real. This art insists upon the virtuality of the real, its openness to possibility. It solicits the participant not simply to admire the real, or even imagine a critique of the real in the sense of a future happiness (Marcuse). Instead the art of networked computing invites the participant to change the real. If Marx called for philosophy not simply to interpret the world but to change it, the new art, more forcefully than he, fulfills his own purpose.”

Poster recognizes the essentially interactive nature of networked technologies, and the agency of the user in creating meaning. I argue that a similar negotiation happens between traditionally made and distributed films through various networked technologies, but that, at the present, the feature-length film remains the center these negotiations, and remains essentially unchanged from Benjamin’s time. The networked media environment works on a peer-to-peer basis, enabling a different type of mobility and discourse, not just between users, or only mediated by a few critics, but also between users and producers. Benjamin’s specatator-critic  has arrived, as has, to some extent, a more crowdsourced production model.

Distraction manifests as well in a proliferation of identities. Anyone with internet access can have any number of email addresses and virtual identities on various sites. In the same way that, in a Kracaurian sense, collaged interfaces demand a distracted attention, users become fragmented and compartmentalized performing a virtual schizophrenia and enacting an extreme form of Benjamin’s heightened sense of perception. To follow Benjamin’s formulation, networked information demands the equivalent of split personalities.

1. Look at any publication or website about education and you will find an article about the problem of plagiarism. [↩]