nology, and yet still others emerge from the new technological "metaphors and analogies" that indirectly alter the structures of perceptual life and thought.[12] Implicated in and informing each historically specific "technological revolution in capital" and transformation of "cultural logic," the technologically discrete nature and phenomenological impact of new "materialities" of representation co-constitute a complex cultural gestalt. In this regard, the technological "nature" of the photographic, the cinematic, and the electronic is graspable always and only in a qualified manner--that is, less as an "essence" than as a "theme." Although I wish to emphasize the technologies of cinematic and electronic representation, those two "materialities" that constitute our current moving-image culture, something must first be said of that culture's grounding in the context and phenomenology of the photographic. The photographic is privileged in the "moment" of market capitalism--located by Jameson in the 1840's, and cooperatively informed and driven by the technological innovations of steam-powered mechanization that allowed for industrial expansion and the cultural logic of "realism." Not only did industrial expansion give rise to other forms of expansion, but expansion itself was historically unique in its unprecedented visibility. As Jean-Louis Comolli points out: The second half of the nineteenth century lives in a sort of frenzy of the visible.... [This is] the effect of the social multiplication of images.... [It is] the effect also, however, of something of a geographical extension of the field of the visible and the representable: by journies, explorations, colonisations, the whole world becomes visible at the same time that it becomes appropriatable.[13]Thus, while the cultural logic of "realism" has been seen as primarily represented by literature (most specifically, the bourgeois novel), it is, perhaps, even more intimately bound to...
