Session #2: Christian Quendler on Descartes and Vertov (Oct 14)
This Thursday, October 14 , the Chicago Film Seminar begins its regular season meetings with Christian Quendler of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and currently a visitor to the Radio/TV/Film Department of Northwestern University. He will present his talk "Camera-Eye and Dispositif: René Descartes vs. Dziga Vertov." The response will be provided by Yuri Tsivian of the University of Chicago. What follows is a brief abstract Quendler has submitted for this talk: Metaphors of the camera eye are among the oldest and most powerful tropes to depict human vision and subjectivity. As a proto-cybernetic metaphor that lends itself both to anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic readings, the camera eye has become a double agent of subjectivity. It has served as midwife for a modern philosophy of the subject in René Descartes's discourse on Optics and as a gravedigger for classical notions of subjectivity in Dziga Vertov's radically constructivist aesthetics ...