Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation evaluates how the advent of digital technologies have implicated film and media studies in recent debates over the legacy of critical theory and the value of critique. Starting in the 1990s, I trace the emergence of “post-cinematic” theory alongside the rise of a “postcritical” ethos in such disciplines as philosophy, science and technology studies, cultural studies, and literary studies. United in their rejection of a “textual” model of critical theory associated with structuralism and poststructuralism, post-cinema and postcritique exemplify a broad range of methodological and disciplinary discontents. I examine the logic of these dissatisfactions, starting with an account of how the postcritical complaint misreads or refuses to read the theoretical corpus that it aims to displace and overcome. Against the widespread claim that critique has devolved into a routinized repetition of the same answers to every problem, I argue for an ethos of critique founded on the development and examination of questions that remain questions. I then turn to the manner in which post-cinematic theory promulgates its methods as the necessary correlate of digital technologies and thereby constitutes an avatar of postcritique fortified by technological determinism. My critique of post-cinematic theory focuses on the priority given to affect as both a primary material of its object and a theoretical injunction that calls for speculative modes of inquiry. I maintain that this logic of a new media “speculative demand” is founded on two premises: retrospectively assigning a fixed identity to the history of cinema which precedes it; and rejecting an obsolete theoretical project characterized as stifling cultural texts with a set of undifferentiated and totalizing claims. The dissertation concludes by intervening in these presuppositions by analyzing how the idea of “reading a film” has been displaced as film and media theory shifts its attention away from the concept of “the cinematic apparatus” to the logics of simulation and animation.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020
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Citation
Lee, Nathan,
"Post-Cinema and the Question of Critique"
(2020).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:1129387/
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Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Modern Culture and Media department....