Book Review: Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. 7: 116-119. 2016. (original) (raw)

To what extent is cinema, or any technology, an aggrandizing, autonomous force that demands the reorganization of the environment around it according to its own technological needs? In the US, the railway system demanded the alienation of land and the coordination of time as a condition of its technical operation. Air travel commanded an instant redefinition of the concept of property—particularly air rights over individual plots—to facilitate flying from one part of a country to another without trespass. Technology, in this sense, is a standardizing, overcoding force that erodes local difference according to its own technological needs. The dispositif of cinema, in this light, can be seen as such an overcoding. The architectonics and screening practices of cinema are remarkably familiar, often instantly recognizable whether we are looking at 1920s Iowa City, Ibadan, Sunderland, Lucknow or Chiang Mai. Despite massive cultural, political, and religious differences, the cinematic apparatus takes on a familiar shape and any attempt to analyze the emergence and history of technological media has to take this capacity of overcoding into account. The turn toward materialism in the recent critical thought, represented in such diverse domains as the archaeology of media, new materialisms, and actor-network theory, asserts the agentive, deter-minative power of technologies and rejects the idea that technologies and objects " are just there to be used as a white screen on to which society projects its cinema " (Latour, 1993, p. 53). On the other hand, to what extent is this overcoding technology vulnerable and porous to the environments it finds itself growing within? The version of technology presented in the opening paragraph is based on an assumption that the ontology of a machine is formed at its moment of invention, and that once formed, it is simply transported from place to place. This is, particularly, the case with media archaeology whose critical effort is focused on revealing the conditions of possibility from which media emerge rather than the ways in which those media, once existing in the world, continue to mutate and grow. A more infrastructural view of media places emphasis on standardization and extension. The invention, in the work of someone like Gilbert Simondon (1992), is a single phase in an ongoing process of individuation that will have multiple phases. Cinema, in this sense, comes to be. It is a porous instrument whose internal structures are in constant mutual exchange with a host of external forces—other technologies, modes of economic organization, political formations, legal regimes, religious disciplines, and so on.