Persuasion's Flows: Contagion, Affect, and the Power of Critical Judgment Or: 'The Slippery Realm of Experience': Miriam Hansen’s Critique of the Reification Thesis

29 Pages Posted: 16 Aug 2013

Date Written: August 15, 2013

Abstract

In this essay, I chart some of Miriam Hansen’s dislocations of the reification thesis in her readings of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer in Cinema and Experience. In the first part of the essay, I provide a snapshot of the cultural milieu of the reification thesis, at the time immediately preceding Georg Lukács’s penning of History and Class Consciousness. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century theories of spectatorship drew from "a larger realm of cultural expression known between 1870 and 1910 as hysteria, epilepsy, double consciousness, and, especially in the last decade of the period, neurasthenia. All of these nervous disorders fell under the rubric of psychological automatisms, and all evoked the fear of unconscious imitation." My concern is to view reification as a sentimental attitude that emerges out of early twentieth century psychologies of medial spectatorship. In the second part of the essay, I engage Hansen’s Cinema and Experience directly and show how her emphasis on cinematic play and innervation allows her to think mediatic objects as a sympathy of parts that constitute an intermdial res publica; that is, her development of the idea of intermedial relations involves thinking interrelationality as a techno/human assembly of actions. In short, Hansen offers a way to think of the complicity of mediatic objects with the moral sentiments as crucial to the transformational experiences of modernity.

Suggested Citation

Panagia, Davide, Persuasion's Flows: Contagion, Affect, and the Power of Critical Judgment Or: 'The Slippery Realm of Experience': Miriam Hansen’s Critique of the Reification Thesis (August 15, 2013). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2310544 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2310544

Davide Panagia (Contact Author)

Trent University ( email )

1600 West Bank Drive
Peterborough, Ontario K9J 7B8
Canada

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