Playing Against the Program: Interval and De-programming as Editing Practice
This article proposes a Flusserian reading of film editing as a privileged retrospective site at which the programmatic logic of the apparatus becomes legible and can be worked against. While Vilém Flusser’s canonical account of the apparatus is grounded above all in the camera and in the production of technical images, the essay argues that the editing table constitutes a derivative or second-order apparatus-condition in which already programmed material becomes available for interruption, recombination, and reflective refusal. On this basis, the article develops the interval between shots as a minimal operator of de-programming: a threshold at which continuity ceases to function as a neutral solution and begins instead to reveal the pressure of the program itself. De-programming is therefore understood not as a total escape from the apparatus, nor as a merely aesthetic gesture of rupture, but as a practical skill of sustaining legibility where automatic resolution would otherwise prevail. To clarify this claim, the article identifies three micro-operations of the editing table: refusing automatic suture, delaying attribution, and redistributing agency. In its final movement, the essay follows this argument beyond cinematic procedure toward the question of subjectivity, asking whether the deepest program at stake is not only the one that organises images, but the one that organises the subject who experiences itself as freely organising them.
Das handlungsfähige Projekt? oder: Die Frage nach der Subjekthaftigkeit des Projekts in der Menschwerdung. Zwischen Geste, Projektion und Verantwortung
In the thinking of Vilém Flusser, the question of subjectivity is linked to the question of being human (Mensch-Sein) or becoming human (Mensch-Werden). The human subject should be considered as dependent on media’s cultural and anthropological conditions. In this context, changes in media conditions lead to changes of the human subject. Flusser calls this process a media-cultureanthropological evolution. According to this thesis, the human being is no longer defined as a subject in relation to an object but rather as a “project in a (second) incarnation” (Menschwerdung). The human subject is progressively freed from its dependency on an objective world. Therefore, the dichotomy of subject and object disappears and our existential condition of being in the world (In-der-Welt-Sein) change. We give up the idea of a given and still standing world in favor of an inter-subjective construction, in which the “I”, “You,” and “It” turn out to be projections. The question is: are we still able to talk about the ability to act (Handlungsfähigkeit) in the context of a post-historical project? Isn’t acting a genuine gesture/expression of the understanding of the “subject of objects,” and of agency in the “objective world”?