Post-Cinematic Effects

Abstract

Post-Cinematic Effects Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, London, Zero Books, 2010, 191pp; £10.99 paperbackSteven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect engages with the effects of post-cinematic technologies on our experiences, orientations, emotions, feelings and lives. 'Post-cinematic' technologies include all that is associated with the rise of interactivity, gaming, multimedia, and the proliferation of different internet platforms, as well as various new types of text, such as the music video, the new ways, modes and contexts of experiencing and consuming them and the effects they have on consciousness and perception. Shaviro considers the rise to dominance of these 'post-cinematic' technologies in terms of a transformation of 'affects': mutations of experiential landscapes, emotional geographies, and perceptual and sensorial ecosystems. Using Raymond Williams' term, yet following and developing a distincdy Deleuzean paradigm, Shaviro characterises this as an epochal transformation in dominant 'structures of feeling'.If such post-cinematic technologies have transformed structures of feeling, this is not the first time this has happened. Consider die emergence of cinema itself. Rey Chow opens her 1995 book Primitive Passions with a reconsideration of the famous story of the turn towards a writing career of the monumental figure of Chinese literature, Lu Xun. Whilst a medical student at the very beginning of the twentieth century, Lu Xun watched with horror newsreels depicting atrocities committed in the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria, including the executions of Chinese people. Chow emphasises the significance of the fact that this new technology (the cinematic apparatus) precipitated a peculiar response from Lu Xun: he turned away from medicine and towards literature, believing that he could do more to improve the health of China by cultural (or ideological) intervention than by medical intervention.Central to Chow's reading of this famous narrative is the following: Lu's response to the new cultural technology (cinema) sends him into a relationship with an older technology (literature). From this, Chow proposes that it is possible to perceive the effects of cinema in (and on) Lu's literature. From this point, one may broaden the perspective and begin to grasp the significance of the emergence of cinema in much, if not all, subsequent developments in literature. Indeed, we might begin to regard the majority of twentieth-century literature as 'post-cinematic', insofar as it is literature produced in a cultural world into which the cinematic apparatus has intervened. In other words, in the wake of cinema, literature could never be the same again. In this sense, Lu Xun's story is exemplary of the epochal mutation entailed in the shocks of modernity. Literature in modernity is itself post-cinematic, even if this reverses the chronological periodization and emphasis that organizes Shaviro's title. For, the 'post-cinematic' that Shaviro refers us to is of course all that new stuff that comes after cinema: computers, the internet and so on. But, as with Lyotard's 'post-modern', one of the key points about the postmodern is that the 'post' is there at the outset. Postmodern thinkers of the postmodern have long pointed out that the postmodern is implied in and active in the emergence of the modern, right from the start.Chow's reading of Lu Xun's affective response to these early experiences of (or encounters with) cinema demonstrate this explicitly. The new technology intervenes into, informs and thereby transforms the cultural landscape in ways which have knock on (albeit unpredictable) effects on other forms of cultural production and reception. To see this at a basic level, one need merely consider the extent to which so many literary best-sellers today have clearly been written with the production requirements of the standard Hollywood film form firmly in mind. This is but one register of the hegemony of the cinematic form and its 'hegemonization' of so-called literature. …