Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900

Cinema has played a significant role in the coevolution of media technology and the human psyche, with the earliest cinema laying the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital world. Jeffrey West Kirkwood's book "Endless Intervals" explores the history of early cinematic machines and argues that cinema engineered an entirely new model of the psyche that was both mechanical and semiotic, discrete and continuous, physiological and psychological, analog and digital. He theorizes an epochal shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that demonstrates how cinema produced a rich continuous experience of inner life.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 08 November 2022
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Cinema did not die with the digital, it gave rise to it. According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest cinema laid the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital world. In Endless Intervals, he introduces a theory of semiotechnics that explains how discrete intervals of machines came to represent something like a mind and why they were feared for their challenge to the uniqueness of human intelligence. Examining histories of early cinematic machines, Kirkwood locates the foundations for a scientific vision of the psyche as well as the information age. He theorizes an epochal shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that demonstrates how cinema engineered an entirely new model of the psyche - a model that was at once mechanical and semiotic, discrete and continuous, physiological and psychological, analog and digital. Recovering largely forgotten and untranslated texts, Endless Intervals makes the case that cinema, rather than being a technology assaulting the psyche, is in fact the technology that produced the modern psyche. Kirkwood considers the ways machines can create meaning, offering a fascinating theory of how the discontinuous intervals of soulless mechanisms ultimately produced a rich continuous experience of inner life.

Weight: 227g
Dimension: 216 x 140 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517912536