Self-reflection is a doubly ambiguous term. This makes it both rich and at risk of becoming vague. As Mieke Bal has pointed out, both elements of the term are subject to further specification. The‘self’may be the work, or it can be the subject looking at it.‘Reflection’can refer to a visual mirroring, and it can be an intellec-tual activity of thought. (1991: 247-48) Moreover, each pole of these two ambigu-ities can be crossed with each of the other pair, so that four types of self-reflection
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may occur: the mirroring of the work, as inmise-en-abyme–about which more in the next chapter–or of the viewer, as in literal mirroring effects; reflection on the work, or reflection on the viewer, the act of viewing, and the effect of it – its performativity. This rich ambiguity can be mobilized as a whole, or in any of its specifications. The situation becomes even more complex, as is the case here, when‘work’is not the right term; when a situation, an installation, or a combina-tion of screens are the object of the self-refleccombina-tion. In what follows, it is useful to keep in mind this complexity of the term.
Fantasies about virtual mobility have fueled our imagination and colored our conceptions of how visual media work. Technologies of transportation have been used, literally, as models for the possibilities of technologies of vision. Yet, where the train stood as a model for cinema, and auto-mobility has been regarded as homologous to television, applications of digital technologies seem to lack such a literal model of vehicular transportation. Instead, in the cultural imaginary, more so than analogue media, the digital has been framed as immaterial and disembodied; in order to be imagined as a machine for virtual mobility, the digital has therefore taken this virtuality to a new level, so to speak.1
We see a paradoxical imagination at work, where digital virtual mobility is sym-bolized as mobility and the disembodiment of the digital involves the body itself as the locus of mobility. Sometimes digital technology is presented as offering a weightlessmobility, as we can see in some contemporary commercials that depict e.g. mobile phones floating through the air, or underwater. In other instances, however, digital mobility is conceptualized as a mobility that dispenses with such propelling machines, one where the body appears to suffice: a kind of pedestrian rather than vehicular mobility. With this term I do not seek to characterize the transformed experience of walking with mobile screens, as analyzed for example by Ingrid Richardson and Rowan Wilken (2009, esp. 27). Here, the qualifier pedestrian refers to the imaginary characterization of the media experience as walking. Unlike trains and cars that are spatially bound to tracks and roads, as well as temporally tied to timetables, stop signs and traffic jams, digital pedes-trians can make space their own, on their own, in their own time and place. They compose their own, individual trajectories, which demonstrate liberation from the spatial and temporal constraints of vehicular mobility. In line with this fantasy of freedom and autonomy, surfing, skating, snowboarding or skateboarding fig-ure as metaphors for the fluidity of individual digital mobility. More flexible, fas-ter, swiffas-ter, and more anarchistic than walkers, these boarders can truly construct new spaces. In short, in the absence of a key trope comparable to the train or the automobile, a great variety of figures of mobility rival for attention. It is precisely because of this variety that I seek to propose a more solidly anchored, single trope. As it happens, these visions of mobility have in common that they all point self-reflexively to navigation as characterizing new screen media.
The fantasies I am exploring concern less simultaneity or immediacy, based on the conflation of time and space – a trope in emerging media that has been pointed out by others–than navigation, as the activity that makes that conflation central. Navigation is so central because it constitutes a practice that unifies time, space and agency. The appeal of navigation is based on the desired power over one’s own mobility. As figures that metaphorically stand for the possibilities of digital media in commercials, the surfer, skateboarder or pedestrian do seem to have that power. Such metaphors, commercial as they are, signify a point of self-reflection in the culture in which they function.2
Self-reflection is meaningful for the understanding of a cultural moment due to the metaphors that specify what is at stake in that moment. This is how self-reflection can become a privileged tool for a methodology adequate for a cultural moment which is no longer captive of canonical works of art. What, then, are the self-reflexive metaphors for virtual travel through navigation that we can distill from presentations of digital screen technologies, and what do they specify regarding navigation? The answer to this question harbors a view of cultural his-tory and its methodology as I see it. This is the point of self-reflection. In this instance, its central metaphor is travel.
As I have argued in my book The West in Early Cinema (2006) on emerging cinema and the depiction of the American West, particularly as a frontier, the popularization of travel is not only contemporaneous with the advent of cinema;
it is also structurally congruent with cinema. In light of this temporal conjunc-tion, it is significant that, similarly, at the heart of both ‘new’, modern culture and the‘new’medium are the hot topics of movement, vicarious displacement as well as both spatial and perceptual expansion. Therefore, the recurrence of the theme of travel in the popular deployment of the moving image in both moments of my diachronic bipolar vision–around 1900 and around 2000–is no coinci-dence, and the self-reflexivity of the films in the first decade of the medium points out how this theme’s frequent occurrence is best understood. Within the frag-mentation and variability we can discern a logic of kaleidoscopic connections and attractions that celebrate the moment of radical change: a change evidenced by new mobilities and the new medium that provides ways to show them. I contend that the self-representation of media reflects the ways their screens give us access to space–indeed, determine our relationship to space. In this sense, the media always precede and thus, pre-write (if not to say pre-scribe) the way scholars and users later come to understand them. The object pre-formats how we can study it.
Of course, I am not the first to draw attention to media in transition as being acutely self-reflective. For example, as David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins have pointed out, “the introduction of a new technology always seems to provoke thoughtfulness, reflection, and self-examination in the culture seeking to absorb it.”(2003: 4) The terms of these self-reflections are grounded in a strong bond (either positive or negative) between the old and new media. A reassessment of
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old media is sometimes even more apparent than an examination of new media.
This is the reason that, as I explained in the introduction to this book, I took as the starting point for my cases the examination of media behavior at not one but two moments of transition, one hundred years apart: the first years of cinema, and the present-day use of digital screens. Both moments are marked by a self-reflexive foregrounding of the possibilities of the new screen to navigate virtual space. This systematic relationship between new cultural practices and the collec-tive imaginary it contributes to shaping enhances the relevance of a study such as this one within its own field of study, but also beyond, as it helps us understand how cultures self-express.
However, with the advent of postmodernism, perceiving self-reflexivity is becoming a bit of a platitude, and is only helpful for our understanding of media culture if we specify what it is that self-reflection puts on the table. When referen-cing each other, pointing out their own mediated status, media texts suggest very different agendas, different degrees and directions, even destinations, of self-reflexivity. Moreover, this discursive operation of reflection even suggests a criti-cal agency of media artifacts. To give some examples: they may seem self-satisfied or critical of themselves or of the media they have the ambition to replace, of social and cultural situations, related or not to the emerging media, of the conse-quences of their popularity. As a result, reflection on this reflexivity may yield insights of a methodological nature, concerning the ways we study and write cul-tural history, as well as of a philosophical nature, concerning the self-critical per-spective of a culture.
In line with this differentiation of self-reflexivity, I offer the following double contention–theoretical and historical. Media reflection means that an artifact in a particular medium probes that medium’s features and impact. Moreover, as Mary-Ann Doane suggests in her discussion of medium specificity at the moment of innovation and transition, this entails not only highlighting possibilities, but also its technological and material limitations:
Proper to the aesthetic, then, would be a continual reinvention of the medium through a resistance to resistance, a transgression of what are given as mate-rial limitations, which nevertheless requires those matemate-rial constraints as its field of operations. (2007: 131)
Such reflections (phrased here as “reinvention”) on the possibilities and limita-tions of the medium are not a mere issue of aesthetics, nor can they be reduced to commercial self-promotion. Theoretically speaking, I contend that reflexivity in a broad sense is an inevitable cultural mode pervasively present in all media arti-facts. This is so because cultural existence implies the desire to understand how things work. However, this need for exploring the possibilities, limitations, and medium-specificity is particularly pertinent to moments of innovation and
transi-tion. Specifically at those moments, the artifacts are reflexive in that they inform us about the historical position of their newness, including its future, as well as, consequently, our own. This can easily be assessed in an analysis of the meeting of two moments of increasing and accelerated development of new media, a cen-tury apart. Whether we consider these moments as ruptures or as modifications does not matter. This double contention has a systematic and a historical side to it. I will elaborate both through an analysis of different modes and levels of self-reflexivity in a range of disparate cases. Each of these cases address in their own way changing relationships between spectator/user and (urban) space. They do this through, on, and by means of the screen. This centrality of the screen brings up the question of the relationship between spectator, screen and image. A parti-cularly useful concept to investigate this relationship isdeixis. I propose to use the concept of deixis to probe the way mobility and space-making work through the address to and solicitation of the spectator.
The term deixis is borrowed from linguistics to explain how language is con-text-dependent. In fact, as Émile Benveniste (1971) has argued, deixis and not reference is the essence of language. Deictic words, or shifters, function as mobile focal points, often within an oppositional structure such as‘here’, impli-citly opposed to‘there’. Deixis indicates the relative meaning of the utterance, tied to situation of utterance, an‘I’in the‘here’and‘now’. They have no fixed, refer-ential meaning. Deixis establishes the point of origin, or deictic center, of the utterance: the‘I’who speaks, as well as its point of arrival, the‘you’who is spo-ken to. These terms are by definition mutually exchangeable. Moreover, or conse-quently, deixis frames the statement in temporal (‘now’) and spatial (‘here’) terms. Deixis helps set up the world to which the text relates. In contrast to e.g.
nouns or adjectives, deictic words or shifters have meaning only in relation to the situation of utterance. Their meaning is produced through indication rather than reference–think of pointing. Personal pronouns of the first and second person–
‘I’,‘we’, or‘you’ –are shifters. But‘he’,‘she’or‘it’are not. The latter, although also in need of identities to fill them in, do not change when the situation of utterance changes. But whenIspeak and youanswer,youbecomeI, andI,you.
She remains the same, since both I andyou know the person to whom we are referring. If we do not know who is speaking, the first-person and second-person pronouns have no meaning. Similarly, we cannotplacethe meaning of such words as‘over there’or‘right here’if we don’t know from where the speaker is speak-ing. Nor can wetimethe meaning of‘yesterday’without a determined time frame.
I allege these examples of shifters to suggest that time, place and person are their primary anchors. While the term was first introduced in linguistics, the per-spective on the construction of space, time and subjectivity is particularly useful for analyzing how the spectator is bound to the image. Hence, the‘represented’
images of, for example, the ride films that are central to my case below, are not simply presented as from an internal point of view –a diegetic spectator –but
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also produce the subjectivity of the implied looker, (the‘I’doing the looking) as well as of the looker’s ‘you’, the second person who mutually constitutes and affirms the‘I’. A filmic image is what tells us about, and thus constitutes, a (fic-tionalizing) gaze that emerges through the inflection of the vista that invests it with subjectivity. This inflection can also be called focalization, as a term from narrative theory that expresses this mediating and subjectivizing function, a visual equivalent of deixis. That is to say, these images in their self-reflexivity address the meaning of the screen.3