The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic “Presence”

Vivian Sobchack

Abstract

Sobchack’s analyses three technologies, forms and institutions of visual representation: the photographic, the cinematic and the electronic. Each of them signified a perceptive revolu­tion in the field of culture and of the subject (realism, modernism and post-modernism). The electronic, unlike the photographic and the cinematic, semiotically constitutes a system of simulation which generates „copies” lacking an „original” source. It fosters certain types of narratives in which both causality and intentional action are redundant. Electronic space de-materializes; electronic presence has neither a point of view nor a visual situation, such as we experience with the photography and the cinema. Electronic representation trivializes and devaluates, denying its fleshy presence, and the world its dimensions.

• The text is a translation of the chapter The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic „Presence” by Vivian Sobchack from edited volume Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1994. © 1994 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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