Janet Harbord

Public Space, Media Space

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction C.Berry, J.Harbord & R.O.Moore What Is a Screen Nowadays? F.Casetti Multi-Screen Architecture B.Colomina Mapping Orbit: Towards a Vertical Public Space L.Parks Cairo Diary: Space-Wars, Public Visibility and the Transformation of Public Space in Post-Revolutionary Egypt M.Abaza Shanghais Public Screen Culture: Local and Coeval C.Berry iPhone Girl: Assembly, Assemblages and Affect in the Life of an Image H.Grace In Transit: Between Labor and Leisure in Londons St. Pancras International R.Moore Encountering Screen Art on the London Underground J.Harbord & T.Dillon Direct Address: A Brechtian Proposal for an Alternative Working Method M.Lewandowska Domesticating the Screen-Scenography: Situational Uses of Screen Images and Technologies in the London Underground Z.Krajina Privatizing Urban Space in the Mediated World of iPod Users M.Bull Publics and Publicity: Outdoor Advertising and Urban Space A.M.Cronin Index

Agamben’s cinema: Psychology versus an ethical form of life

Agamben’s essay on gesture is perhaps his most influential piece of work for film studies, in which he argues that cinema at its inception captures the moment at which humans have lost control of their gestures, manifest in a crisis of communicability. Comparing the traces of the gesticulating bodies of Gilles de la Tourette’s patients with those in the proto-cinematic series of photographs taken by EadwardMuybridge, Agamben suggests that these are the twin processes of a biopolitical production of life; respectively, the body as the site of investigation and the exemplary body put to work. Yet the ethicopolitical implications of Agamben’s essay on gesture and the biopolitical production of life are relatively under-developed. This article pursues not only cinema’s relation to biopolitical capture but also theway inwhich cinema came to compensate for such a reductive version of corporeality by constructing the concept of an individual located as complex interiority. When gestural communication declines at the close of the 19 century meaning is relocated to the internal space within the human body; commensurate with this production of human interiority as a site of truth, cinema becomes a machine whose task is to decipher the turmoil of the inside, a process reproduced as narrative explication.