The Figural as Interface in Film and the New Media:

From:
Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 56, December 2003
Warwick Mules
The Figural as Interface in Film and the New Media:
D. N. Rodowick's _Reading the Figural_

Advertising captures what might otherwise have been a radical aesthesis of the body within emerging virtual communities outside the range of capital, and refashions it in answer to the desire of the individual consuming self in terms of a total experience, where distances in time and space are collapsed, and everything magically appears at the command of the consumer. [5] New media advertising does not sell products, it sells itself in terms of a liberating technology built especially for the consumer, and designed to virtualise her body, to free her from the constraints of time and space, and to place her in control of the resources of capital (easy credit, fluid social arrangements, unlimited opportunities for expansion, compliant technology, in short a world without struggle or travail, a world especially designed just for her). To counteract the power of capital to capture the figural, Rodowick calls for 'a critical philosophy of technology to unlock its historical image and to make legible the strategies of resistance and lines of flight that are created within it' (223).