Screen Genealogies

Abstract

introduCtion 13 22 As Deleuze and Guattari use the term in A Thousand Plateaus, 'assemblage' indicates heterogeneous elements that enter into a new relation, forming a coherent but mutable unity. For the utility of the concept in film studies in an age of excessive screens, see Casetti, 2015, pp. 67-98. 23 The centrality of 'descent' and 'emergence' to Foucaudian genealogy descend (as it were) from his reading of Nietzsche, for whom Entstehung ('emergence') and Herkunft ('descent') 'are more exact than Ursprung ('origin') in recording the true objective of genealogy '. Foucault, 145. 24 This argument was central to Manovich, 2001. 25 Foucault, p. 148. introduCtion 15 because adversaries 'do not belong to a common space'. 26 Put another way, the conflict that impels something to emerge is itself a conflict between incommensurate organizations of space. Unfolding from interstices and sites of instability, an emergence redefines the relation of places to non-places. The spatial vocabulary latent within genealogy is worth emphasizing in considering the long historical descent of the screen. Continually defined and redefined by virtue of its between-ness, the screen might be recognized as a crucial element for thinking about such interstices and 'non-places'-a category that has become central to a contemporary ethnography of the sites of transit, consumption, and leisure within contemporary globalization. 27 For this very reason, a genealogical account of the screen's various emergences cannot remain at the level of narrating the history of the changing technologies that host visual representations. The struggle over such interstices has always concerned not just representations but also interventions, efforts to control and experiment with the environments and sites where screens and screening operate. Yet the concept of intervention does not displace or replace the importance of representation. Rather, interventions are precisely what link representations to other actions: the means by which images can filter external elements, shelter components, divide spaces, and camouflage appearances. The plan of this bookThe contributions to this book bring together a broad range of screen events that highlight the accidents, deferrals, reversals, appropriations, and deviations that characterize screen emergence. In addition to the familiar screens that one would expect to find in such a book-cinematic, televisual, and digital screens-the contributions reflect on a range of entities that radically stretch the boundaries of what has been considered a screen. Along with the phantasmagoria, the movie screen, smart phones, and virtual reality headsets, the reader will encounter shields, mirrors, hunting blinds, canvases, mechanical scenery, technical standards, hypnotic gestures, curtains, legal 26 Foucault, p. 150. 27 Foundational in this respect is the work of the ethnographer Marc Augé, who developed the concept of 'non-lieux' (non-places) to analyze airports, shopping malls, toll-booths and other spaces characterist...