Spellbound

Abstract

This article maps out and conceptualizes the way cinema emerged as a novel type of technology of the self and psychic individuation. It analyzes how cinema, in its inception, implemented a binding sensory dynamic that affected the convergence of spatiotemporal patterns into a constantly modifying hybrid self. Technologically animated images started to produce transformational spaces where the individual became problematized and regulated, not only in narratives and rhetorical figures, but more importantly, in the spatial patterning of perception, in affect transmission and collective organization. The article approaches cinema’s bodily and psychic dynamics in topological terms and employs three basic concepts—continuity, nearness, and neighborhood—so as to problematize what has become of the question of the individual in the age of moving images.