Brainstorming Haunted Nerves

“I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there.”

In the last couple years, I’ve reverted to a basic brainstorming exercise (see above) as a way to help me focus and organize larger projects. In the past, they’ve come towards the end of writing—for example, this was one of the first tasks I accomplished when I began to rewrite the introduction from scratch to Disney’s Most Notorious Film in the Spring of 2011. I’ve done it now once or twice for the Anderson project and probably will do so again in the very near future as I sit down to redo the intro for that one too.

But now I’ve thought about doing it as a preliminary process for Haunted Nerves / Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema—hence, the mad, half-arbitrary scribbling above. The whole manuscript is probably already half-written, but in fragments here and there. It lacks the self-evident structure of, for example, a director’s body of work, or the reception and industrial history of a Disney film. 

As the manuscript evolves, I've become less obsessed with defining exactly what its ultimately going to be, preferring to embrace the process. At the same time, though, I do want to touch base every few months with what I think at that moment it will become. Having written a few books now, I have faith that it will come together in the end. Plus, there's really no urgency to rush it to completion.

I’m not going to try to write a whole book introduction this afternoon. As with all blog posts, its less about declaring anything with finality and more about me “talking” aloud as I work through ideas in progress. So, I’ll unpack the heart of that diagram above—find the main rivers and search for the tributaries later.

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I see Haunted Nerves as negotiating three deeply interlocked concepts: the historical emergence of digital cinema since the early 1980s; the ambivalence of postmodernism as the cultural dominant during that/this time; and, building from that, the centrality of nostalgia in informing both industrial practices and historical consciousness. It may help to take each separately:

Digital Cinema: If there’s a central selling point to Haunted Nerves, then it concerns another way to frame the widespread shift in film culture from analog to digital technologies. My initial research question: how do we “historicize” digital cinema, how do we historicize the present? I am concerned with several areas: cinematography, visual effects, archives, and exhibition. I’m also interested in media convergence more broadly defined, particularly as it relates to industrial practices and nostalgia, but am trying to limit my scope to cinema for practical reasons at the moment. As my thinking has evolved, I’m less interested with a sense of time within the ontology of the digital image—sort of my first “postmodern” approach to the topic (as in, a new articulation of the simulacrum, a copy without an original, etc.). I’m still concerned with that question of indexicality—the digital’s ontological difference from the direct light traces which marked film in the age of mechanical reproduction, and its attendant cultural and aesthetic automatisms (as someone like DN Rodowick has already articulated), and more interested in how that simulacric logic is symptomatic of deeper issues of im/materiality—industrially and culturally—regarding a decreasing sense of historical consciousness in cinema’s production, distribution and reception.

Postmodernism: The idea of “historical consciousness” links all three concepts, and my use of the term is rooted largely in Fredric Jameson’s reading of the cultural logic of postmodernism—how to historicize a culture obsessed with the perpetual present of the (now digital) simulacrum. David Harvey’s work, I keep reminding myself, is also worth revisiting. Jameson’s own account—twenty-plus years ago of the social and historical use-value of computers—is highly instructive despite its simplistic misunderstanding of the new medium’s potential in hindsight. The connection between postmodernism and digital cinema has already been repeatedly noted by scholars such as Philip Rosen, Steven Shaviro, Nicholas Rombes, and so forth. But it seems to me that the point is often under-developed, perhaps because the “popularity” of postmodernism itself faded right as discourses on digital cinema emerged. Often times, the parallel between the two is presented as either self-evident or as inadequate, but is otherwise neglected. Of course, the question remains: how do I define (use) “postmodernism”?

Nostalgia: Building on Jameson’s definition of nostalgia (and to a lesser degree affect) in the postmodern era—which has in many ways been my project since the first year in grad school—is really the anchoring to the entire project at the moment. For Jameson, personal and collective nostalgia was a substitute for a dialectical understanding of history. This links up to the oft-proclaimed “end of history” narratives that framed both progressive and reactionary accounts of postmodernism in the 1990s (I may finally get a chance to cite Derrida!). History matters here not just to “remember the past” in some generic way, but because it reflects profound changes in the cultural logic of “late” capitalism in general, and the histories of post-Fordist Hollywood in particular. Both become obscured by a cultural obsession with nostalgia. Yet, at the same time, I’m not sure we cannot get “outside” nostalgia either--this may ultimately be the heart of the project. I hope to draw more on the work of figures such as Richard Dyer and Svetlana Boym, which I regret not doing more with in Disney’s Most Notorious Film, to create a space for nostalgia’s quirks and contradictions—for what Boym's called “reflexive” as well as “restorative” forms of nostalgia. If we accept, as Jameson argued, that nostalgia has in a sense replaced history in the current moment, how might that fatalism be problematized to create a space for critical thought (or ambivalent resistance)?

So, there are some broad sketches of the project at the moment, which is very much by design. As I noted above, probably more than half the project is already written at the moment, but I’m not going to worry about nailing down the introduction until I’ve finished all the chapters and know for sure how every detail will fit. One of the things too that I learned from the last two books is not to worry too much about laying it all out in advance, especially since it will all get rewritten in the end anyway. Blogging about this gets me excited about Haunted Nerves again, and I just have to make sure nothing kills the momentum.