Connolly dubbed ‘the diagram, This is a kind of “noopolities” that “does not try xeuropolities,” often driven by the power of to synthesize relations into a final aesthetic, social, or political ‘outcome. Instead, i solicits and follows the diagrams virtuality, the diagrams force—the force of the edge” (194). So Munster's task of dissecting how the dynamism and temporality of networks is constituted —taking off from James's “withness between some parts of the sum of total experience and other parts” (qtd. 79) and Guattar’s “meta-modeling,” among other sources—has an ‘eminently pragmatic function. This kind of diagrammatism (or James's “mosaic”) becomes the key or “relaying the force ofthe edge” (195) between the imperceptible and perception. Munster’ precise nothing ess than negotiating the evanescent border CINEMA By Alain Badiou Polity Books, 2015 320 pp/$69.95 (hb); $24.95 (sb) “Cin presence of humanity and the meaning that hum: ascribe to the world” (28) ‘This is the driving theme ‘behind philosopher Alain Badiou's 2010 book Cinema, translated in 2013 fom the original French, ‘The camera is particularly adept at crmbodying the dialectic of the filled gaze, he notes, and for Badiow the results are matters of justice, liberation, fand the future of cinema, Fall the arts,” Badlion writes, “this s certainly the one that has the ability to think, to produce, the most absolutely undeniable truth” (18) But that truth is constantly under threat from those who ‘would deny cinema’s essential power, and Badiow argues that threat is as old as the art form. “Bom by accident from a ma isan art, that is, the mechanical invention (Laniére didn’t think his industry had any Facure),” Badion writes, “ie struggles each and every day against, the black and white world of producers, of the commercial industry that i is” (33) Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers ‘of our day, whose mission seems to be to save cinema from itself and his is an applied philosophy that unfolds through, five decades of film analysis and appredation. Along with a sich cultural and historical context, Badiow provides prac factions 0 enable audience and filmmaker to embolden al <éinema’s rich potential arguments do much to restore a suppleness and a complex, living, ‘connectivity to our understanding of nerworks, without resorting to bjectoriented philosophy! and vations other ultimately conservative reductionism that are currently in vogue AY MURPHY is rite and indent curator caren ing in Clase. He gence th exibition ad fm progr Tnelligence Report, hich wil pen et erin rae in Sealand in fall 2014 ih Aone Hag Cale ess iy of Mis ode Badiow warns of “a certain laziness associated with flm- ‘going that must be guarded against: the notion that it only exists to fil up the empty moments of a day, like a kindof gratification requiring vearcely any co-operation on our pan” (28). One way to batile that laziness sto break out of film’s “formal tendencies” of audio (“constant confusion of music,” “brutal sounds”), car ‘chases (the opening of two films out of every three being a car chase), sexual activity (“a major part of what is authorized by dominant contemporary imagery”), and special effects of any kind (“a sort of Late Roman Empire consummation of murder, ‘cruelty, and eatasteophe”) (140-1). Ginema is at its best when it “does justice to the buman figure,” Badiow contends. “In bad films, human presence is wasted”; in good films, “that presence is made visible” (6). DM. Griffc’s early invention of the close-up on actors’ faces was key to cinema’s inherent truth-telling, Badiou argues, especially a director Carl ‘Theodor Dreyer used the method to impatt spirituality in his 1928 The Pasion of Joan of Ar. ‘The author is not alone in his esteem for “the superlative art of the montage” (134) but he does elevate the technique higher than most. While Soviet fila theorist Sergei Eisenstein declared montage “the nerve of cinema,” Badiou believes the technique curns film into “the equivalent of a muhi-voice conversation crafied by God” (134). ‘One of Badiou's more striking claims is that it would be a mistake to consider films as stories frst and foremost. To him, inema’s inherent truth sapplants a brilliant scrip, which “brings to light the pretentiousness of the image” (29), After all, Orson. ‘Welles claimed he didn't understand the plot to his own 1947 masterpiece The Lady fiom Shanghai. “The mediocre dialogues of [Les] Maxosies Rencontres [1955] don’t spoil the purity of [Alexandre] Astruc’s style.” writes Badiou, “because they are redhced to their essential function: to be the outward signs of the relationships forming bewween the characters, relaionships whose hidden truth can be found only in our apprehension of a awa syntax” (29). Badiou turns to director Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 film Magnolia as an example of complex and transcendent cinema, precisely because it intentionally exposes cinema's inadequacies im ts cegaed of the human form, He writes, mainay Nooa Pir 39yWIILAy4)4 BOOK REVIEW 34 Tes a thesis about today’s world . a thesis that says that ‘rue life is absent wo the extent that love is withdrawn,” Its contemporaneity les showing that humanity eannot really exist in the figure of performance, and in showing such a thing cinematically, even within the actors’ performances, Which i quite remarkable, (191), Ginema is historical record of Alain Budiow's abiding love affair with film. He delves boldly into its faults, challenges its SOFTWARE TAKES COMMAND By Lev Manovich Bloomsbury Academic, 2013 357 pp/$29.95 (sb) When, nearly two decades ago, media archacologist Friedrich Kittler pronounced that “there is no software,” he urged new ‘media critics and users alike to attend more fully to the physical architecture and technical substrate of computational ‘medlia.! With dis now infamous aphorism, Kittlor sought to foreground the inextricability of programming languages, operating systems, device drivers, and media applications from the hardware fanctions on which they depend, For Kites, to think software itsel'—to chink the matter of software and how ‘comes to matter—was ineluctably to return to hardwate, for he polemicize, all code operations ultimately “come down to signifies of voltage differences." There was, to be sure, a political nimus that drove Kitler to this arguably crude physicalist ‘conception ofthe computers essential formal properties and to the ‘undeslying conflation between medium and material support that bolstered his claim. Concealed by “the triumph of voltware” i the ‘material infrastructure that makes madern computational media possible: software incarnates a cryptographic impulse, a dream of the transcendence of matter that obscures digital medias encoding ‘of power under the user-friendly guise of content. When software ‘akes command, Kite worried, we are deluded into believing that what you seis indeed what you get If Kittler’s hardware-centrie annihilation of safiware thus marked a ertical displacement of user-centered and visual cultare approaches o the study of new media, Lev Manovich’s important new monograph, Sofanae Takes claim: “There is no such thing as ‘digital media,’ There is only smmand, puts forward the inverse software” (152), Although Manovich doesnot directly address Ritter mistakes, nurses its wounds, and defends its humanity. He hhas watched the world, and hus cinema, grow and change dramatically, and now he holds filmmaker and audience accountable for the future of the seventh art PAULETTE MOORE ion indi flak and ait profes arts at Eastem Meare Unicity in Hrrsnbur, Vig afm ‘on this point, his book i structured around the assertion that the newness of new media i defined nether by the technical eapacities of digital data, nor the representational forms of digital content, but rather by the software—and especially the application software rough which media content is created, edited, distributed, and accessed, Ofcourse in an ge of pervasive computing, 1 say that we inhabit a “software culture” is notin itself provocative. But the innovation and achievement of Manovich’s text rests in its impressive historical and aesthetic excavations into how, formally and conceptually, software has instituted a break in the history of ‘media, representation, and even culture as such, Against Kites thrall to the media objects, ‘media we must look beyond the “essential” properties of digital fi locate “the new qualities of ‘digital media’... “inside Manovich insists that to understand (new s, computers, and networks to “the intellectual ideas conceived by the pionects wo in Larger labs [and] the actual products ‘created by software companies and open source communities” (149) Defily moving between an intellectual history of computing, ‘cross-media aesthetics, and close readings ofthe formal techniques ‘employed within a range of software Alter Effects and Photoshop, Softate Takes Command provides both a genealogical and an archaeological inquiry into how computers became cultural machines and, more precisely, how software ppplications such as Adabe has been central to the remaking of information technologies as interoperative tools for media creation and editing, Manovich's bookended, on one end, by the birth ofthe graphic-user interface in Ivan Sutherland's ‘Sketchpad (1963) and by the release of Apple's Final Ct Pro (1999) rs rise to prominence her—pivots on the radically contingeat encounter between computation and media that took shape in the labs of computer cngineers who moonlighted, Manovich compellingly demonstrates, 1s media theorists. One ofthe major claims Manovich furnishes is shat the computer's emergence asa medium for cultural expression and representation was in no way inevitable bus, rather, was et in ‘motion in the 19603 and "70s through the development of software that supported the generation, manipulation, and distribution of media content. Manovich’s account, im his ‘opposite of technological deserminism’” (96), Consistent with this approach, Manovieh introduces reacers to cohort of new medtia wn word, is “the iaists than the visionaries perhaps less well-known to nonspet likes of Vannevar Bu data forma h and Douglas Englebact, who developed ‘ing techniques and interface principles that would Fhnical users to engage in multimedia authoring and editing. Here, Manovich locates a democratizing posture across