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theses

My dissertation “Short Circuits of Reality: Reproducibility, Simulation and Technical Images in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Eve Future (1887), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht,(1973) and Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005)” examines the reciprocal relationship between the evolution of visual media technologies and sensory perception. Reading the 20th century as an era of simulation shows that there has been a historical connection between tendencies of simulation and the invention of audiovisual media technologies that enabled the increasingly “photo-realistic” reproduction of our material reality. This interplay and feedback loop between reality and literary imagination created the first female android in literature as a new media technological dawn was on the horizon in the outgoing 19th century. The rise of the mechanical machines and media technological apparatuses inaugurated the industrial age and the beginning of modernity.
Preceding the analyses of Villier’s de L’Isle Adam’s L’Eve Future (1887), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht (1973), and Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), I offer a theoretical and terminological foundation. It is based on three thinkers on the impact of media technologies on perception from the now considered “classic era of media theory.” Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on reproducibility and the replacement of original sources by ubiquitous copies are followed by Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra and simulation. Here, the distinction between original and copy gradually becomes obsolete in the state of simulation and hyperreality. Vilém Flusser’s theory of technical images and technical imagination stands in contrast to Baudrillard’s, as he counters the deceptive quality of the simulacra by approaching “technical images” (images created by apparatuses) as signifiers that project meaning outwards instead of inwards.
The following second chapter is concerned with the notion of unstable sources and the depiction of phonographic, photographic and cinematic media technologies as narrative devices in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s novel l’Eve Future from 1887. I argue that the simulation of these media technologies in the narrative enables the destabilization of original sources and replaces them with simulacra that ultimately cannot be sustained.
The third chapter analyzes the “aesthetics of simulation” implemented in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (1973). In a combination of philosophical and existential reflections on the nature of reality, the film calls the perception of reality radically into question while employing a simulative aesthetic that includes the spectator in its cinematic framework.
The fourth and final chapter reads the “image as projectile” in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005). It includes not just the spectator in its visual framework, but also what is purposely left outside of the film-frame. By combining Benjamin’s notion of shock and Flusser’s concept of projection in relation to technical images, I intend to show that Haneke’s moral impetus is related to the (mis)perception of technical—and in this case, digital—images, which have a simultaneous abstract and concrete violent quality. The question that Haneke transfers to the viewer is then, to what extent are we responsible for the violent images we are willingly exposed to on a daily basis?

ETD_9343

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Sascha Hosters

doi:10.7282/t3-q61w-ja96

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.