Technologies of Seduction Essays -- Seduction Cinematic Body Film Essa

Technologies of SeductionThere can be no question of escaping the twisted logic of theoretical writing there are altogether different ways of coming to terms with it. (Shaviro 11)Blind Beast (Masumura Yasuzo 1969), Ghost in the Shell (Ohii Mamoru 1995), and Spirited Away (Miyazaki Hayao 2001) sustain the congress between the carcass and technology its terrific horror is its subjection. Captured bodies cut, cybernetic bodies hacked, and fattened bodies served. These three films all capture the viewer and take us to a nonher place, and even in the conquering of representation understood as events (the theory-fiction of film analyses), such films can be understood as narratives, images, and sounds of losing the self in the moment, an abandon to seduction that constitutes a relation between technologies and bodies. The terrific is the pleasure of the seduction, and the horrific the unavoidable and, indeed, necessary trepidation felt in falling into the utterly convincing and char ming seducers reality. Steven Shaviros theory of film fatale offers a thorough account of what sustains and characterizes the relationship Friedrich Kittler describes between body and technology Wherever media were unable to connect, human interfaces filled the niche.What is seduction? To answer this question would be to work productively, a principle of production that is very much oppositional to seduction. Seduction is something like persuasion or convincing, but does not work at a level of cognition. The cinematic image is at once intense and impalpable. On the one hand, film (even more than other optical forms, and in sharp contrast to the articulations of language) is inescapably literal. Images confront the viewer directly, with... ... the same level of suspicion as the productive and representational. The salvation, then, of this argument, a string of mediations that claim to throw an effect on discourse or understanding, is in its denied seductive ulterior. An all urement that occurs just where it is not spoken of, and for just the reasons that remain unsaid. Theory against itself is here a most cunning seduction.WORKS CITEDCarpenter, Novella. Avant-Prof. An Interview with Steven Shaviro. Alt-X Press. Dec. 11, 2002. http//www.altx.com/int2/steven.shaviro.htmlCreed, Barbara. Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine an Imaginary Abjection. in Jancovich, ed., Horror, The Film Reader. New York Routledge, 2002.Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. London Free Association, 1990.Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1993.