Pasi Valiaho

Rhythm Returns: Movement and Cultural Theory

This introduction charts several of rhythms various returns as a way of laying out the theoretical and methodological field in which the articles of this special issue find their place. While Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis is perhaps familiar to many, rhythm has appeared in a wide repertoire of guises, in many disciplines over the decades and indeed the centuries. This introduction attends to the particular roles of rhythm in the formation of modernity ranging from the processes of industrialization and the proliferation of new media technologies to film and literary aesthetics as well as conceptualizations of human psychology, social behaviour and physiology. These are some of the historical antecedents to the contemporary understandings of rhythm within body studies to which most of the contributions to this issue are devoted. In this respect, the introduction outlines recent approaches to rhythm as vibration, a force of the virtual, and an intensive excess outside consciousness.

Affectivity, Biopolitics and the Virtual Reality of War

At the focal point of contemporary biopolitical knowledge and power is human life in its contingent, evolutionary and emergent properties: the living as adaptive and affective beings, characterized...At the focal point of contemporary biopolitical knowledge and power is human life in its contingent, evolutionary and emergent properties: the living as adaptive and affective beings, characterized in particular by their capacity to experience stress and fear that works together with vital survival mechanisms. This article addresses new techniques of psychiatric power and therapeutic epistemologies that have emerged in present-day military-scientific as well as media technological assemblages to define and capture the human in its psychobiological states of emergency. Specifically, the focus of this article is on one special kind of screen medium, called Virtual Iraq, a virtual reality device designed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder among war veterans. The article analyses Virtual Iraq as an example of new forms and strategies for the management of affectivity and memory that have been developed in conjunction with contemporary neuroscientific discourses on the evolutionary origins of emotional life and its neurobiological functionality among humans qua species. Furthermore, it discusses Virtual Iraq as an example of the biopolitical work of contemporary screen media in which the reality of images starts to concern the organism’s internal functioning instead of being anthropological or communicative, tapping into the brain’s capacity of self-organization as well as contributing to the production and maintenance of psychological immunity.

Video Games and the Cerebral Subject: On Playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

This article engages with the fabrication of experiences in first-person shooter video games. On one hand, it explores the forms of affective and cognitive engagement this novel type of immersive imagery demands of the player. On the other hand, the article speculates on how video games images resonate and coincide with other key practices and imaginations defining the political reality of life today. What (at least according to some accounts) matters most in the politics of life today is a particular locus of mediation – the brain. The ways we imagine ourselves are today characterized by a figure of the ‘cerebral subject’. The article presents an attempt to chart video games imagery in relation to this key contemporary image of who we are, and to consider how the rhythms of the console screen might be seen as emblematic of a more general anthropology of subjectivity today.This article engages with the fabrication of experiences in first-person shooter video games. On one hand, it explores the forms of affective and cognitive engagement this novel type of immersive imagery demands of the player. On the other hand, the article speculates on how video games images resonate and coincide with other key practices and imaginations defining the political reality of life today. What (at least according to some accounts) matters most in the politics of life today is a particular locus of mediation – the brain. The ways we imagine ourselves are today characterized by a figure of the ‘cerebral subject’. The article presents an attempt to chart video games imagery in relation to this key contemporary image of who we are, and to consider how the rhythms of the console screen might be seen as emblematic of a more general anthropology of subjectivity today.

The light of God: Notes on the visual economy of drones

The frontispiece to the Jesuit priest Guilielmus Gumppenberg’s book Atlas marianus, first published in 1657, illustrates a story of the miraculous transport of the Virgin Mary’s house in Nazareth to Loreto, Italy.[2] Originating from the latter half of the 15th century, the story tells how some 200 years earlier, after the retreat of Christian crusaders from the Holy Land, angels airlifted the building from Palestine and carried it over to the town in the Italian Marches. The engraving shows a team of angels transporting the Virgin Mary’s humble dwelling to its destination. Beams of light emanate from the bottom of the house, which is covered by images of the Madonna with the Christ Child. The Mother of God herself is seated on the roof, holding Baby Jesus in her lap and gesturing toward the pictures on the roof of the house as well as in the heavens. Mediator between the heavens and the earth (mediatrix caeli et terrae), she radiates divine light and casts her presence onto the terrain below through her images.

Spellbound: early cinema's transformational spaces

This article maps out and conceptualizes the way cinema emerged as a novel type of technology of the self and psychic individuation. It analyzes how cinema, in its inception, implemented a binding sensory dynamic that affected the convergence of spatiotemporal patterns into a constantly modifying hybrid self. Technologically animated images started to produce transformational spaces where the individual became problematized and regulated, not only in narratives and rhetorical figures, but more importantly, in the spatial patterning of perception, in affect transmission and collective organization. The article approaches cinema’s bodily and psychic dynamics in topological terms and employs three basic concepts—continuity, nearness, and neighborhood—so as to problematize what has become of the question of the individual in the age of moving images.This article maps out and conceptualizes the way cinema emerged as a novel type of technology of the self and psychic individuation. It analyzes how cinema, in its inception, implemented a binding sensory dynamic that affected the convergence of spatiotemporal patterns into a constantly modifying hybrid self. Technologically animated images started to produce transformational spaces where the individual became problematized and regulated, not only in narratives and rhetorical figures, but more importantly, in the spatial patterning of perception, in affect transmission and collective organization. The article approaches cinemas bodily and psychic dynamics in topological terms and employs three basic concepts – continuity, nearness and neighbourhood – so as to problematize what has become of the question of the individual in the age of moving images.

Animation and the Powers of Plasticity

This article studies the notion of plasticity that Sergei Eisenstein identified as key to the practice of animation. But rather than approaching plasticity only in aesthetic terms, the article exte...This article studies the notion of plasticity that Sergei Eisenstein identified as key to the practice of animation. But rather than approaching plasticity only in aesthetic terms, the article extends its meaning to consider animated figures’ power over their beholders. By looking at both historical and contemporary case studies, from Athanasius Kircher’s experiments in the 17th century to present-day virtual reality applications developed by the US military, the author seeks to understand the transformative potential of animation with regard to psychic life, and how this potential has been turned into a practice of power.

Bodies Outside In: On Cinematic Organ Projection

In his Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik from 1877, Ernst Kapp articulates one of the first modern philosophical approaches to technology and its role in human history. According to Kapp’s view, which can be characterized in materialist and even ‘territorial’ terms (referring to the ways in which technology participates in the creation of both biological and cultural space-times), fundamental to technology is its character as modulation of the human corporeal apparatus. For Kapp, technology reproduces, extends and augments bodily functions and organs. A key concept in this respect is ‘organ projection’ (Projection der Organe/Organprojection). The concept signals the way in which our corporeal apparatus, the inside, becomes exteriorized in technical objects ranging from most elementary hammers to modern steam engines. These, Kapp postulates, operate as unconscious projections of the body, and it is through various kinds of technological projections of its gestures and organs that the human kind constantly models, replicates and recreates itself in the course of its evolution.

the white screen circa 1900- On the moving image as potentiality of thought

Léonce Perret’s 1912 film Le mystère des Roches de Kador presents one of the most beautiful shots in the early history of cinema: the female protagonist, Suzanne, shrinks away from a white screen filled with light in front of her and eventually faints (see Figure 1). In the film’s story, Suzanne has fallen into an amnesic and catatonic state due to a traumatic experience of a shooting incident taken place at a rough seashore, where Suzanne’s cousin who is jealously in love with her has attempted to shoot her fiancé. She is treated by a Professor Williams with a “new cinematographic method in psychotherapy,” which consists of restaging and recording the traumatic event and then showing the film to the patient. The scene in question displays the screening of the film, after which Suzanne becomes cured and regains her capacity to speak, recollect, and act. Most importantly, Suzanne recovers her “faculty” of language, a faculty that in the history of Western thought has been approached as that of articulate and meaningful speech essentially characterizing the “living being that has logos” (to zôon logon ekhon) (e.g., Aristotle 2002, De Interpretatione 16a27-29). The shot itself, however, is interesting in its muteness or speechlessness; it lacks communication, and what actually occurs is action between agency and pure passiveness. On the other hand, what is essential is how Suzanne recoils after the film ends and the projector illuminates the screen, and consequently, there is nothing to be seen but bare “imagelessness.” Just as there are no words, in a sense images are also absent (or, rather, what the actual image attempts to bring forth is the absence of any image). What does Suzanne then “see”? Kador suggests that she faces her own forgetting.1 In the story, Suzanne has been passed out during the original traumatic event due to a sleeping