An exercise in genealogy (Birth of electronic space #2)

If paying particular attention to the singular expressive power of some cinematic works’, one might encounter unusual approaches, for instance, to the emergence of new technologies, and be tempted to establish the strangest of genealogies. The exercise in genealogy this paper amounts to — to discover the “birth of electronic space” inside the technology of film — must, nonetheless, first be comprehended within the larger context of the overwhelming emergence of the audiovisual archive. The relevance cinema might attain to our contemporary experience of the world is indeed directly connected with the struggle against the general archival of all experience. The belief in some level of irreducibility of ‘visibilities’ to discourse is perhaps the major theoretical hint we have for an understanding of cinema’s “relevance” that would be consentaneous with its most accomplished artistic exploits, exactly what one can never neglect while trying to grasp another level of intelligibility.

Film constitutes a privileged archaeological practice for understanding the orders of experience in a given historical moment, but we are nevertheless still lacking a philosophical ‘foundation’ of the audiovisual archive’s emergence that would bring film into this different level of intelligibility. In the end, we’re facing a function of film that cannot be neglected: the presentation of visibilities lacking so many technological, juridical and political statements that rule us, i.e., an intrinsic reach immanent to its material expression. But within the instance of discourse are indeed included film and art theories, with their corresponding “distributions of the sensible”, so amounting themselves to discourses that can block the ‘visibilities’ of film. That’s why a privilege of the object is always needed. [to be continued]