Szymon Wróbel, Adam Cichoń

Introduction: Rethinking Seriality and Streaming

The New Beginning

The statement that we no longer live “in time” or even “with time” but “in series” is trivial today. We no longer live in the seasons and by the seasons – spring, summer, autumn and winter, but in subsequent seasons of our favorite series – Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, House of Cards, True Detective and The Killing. Unfortunately, platforms like HBO or Netflix have drawn our activity more during the pandemic than we would have expected. This gives the impression that we no longer have our own lives but the lives of the “heroes” of the series, without which we cannot imagine our existence. Does this reveal the emptiness of our existence or the power of capitalism that governs our lives, our free time, and our desires and identifications “through” and “by” the platforms? Our liberal freedoms are within the framework of the necessity of technical mediation and ideological conditions. Surely, succumbing to our whims and the market are two poles of the same thing. Seriality only empowers us in this.

The question of seriality and life in the series provokes the most fundamental problems, including the problem of freedom. The modern pursuit of freedom has always been complemented by questioning it. Labor law is a condition for the exercise of all other rights. The new society of workers has created a new society of dependency. At the same time, it created areas of freedom in terms of consumption. Freedom has become the recommended way to use the images we have of our ability to rule and achieve satisfaction. Mainstream cinema is on this topic. In place of genuine self-determination, it is “imagined autonomy.” Cinema and television, and streaming platforms today, are not the contingent entertainment accompanying capitalism; they are the very conditions of its reproduction. These are leading technologies that generate new forms of subjectivity.

Modernity, understood as humanity’s great liberation, is only a grand illusion. We are still fascinated by the vision of self-determination, even though this is where the main problem lies. In late capitalism, products are no longer simply devices or physical apparatus – they are various services and networks of dependencies that quickly become the dominant or exclusive model of human ontological and social reality. One of the many similarities between psychoactive substances and communication devices is that they produce various forms of social submission.

In the last few years, watching TV series has become a distinct socio—cultural phenomenon. The increasing rise of streaming media services has profoundly changed the accessibility standards of TV series, but also the way of watching them. However, the domestication of our life during the pandemic, made us realize that streaming series and films should become more important objects of our interest than ever before. In some sense, we live in-series and on-stream platforms. New technological situations, such as the presence of videoconferences in our life, present us with new problems and a new “reconfiguration of sensible [reconfigurer le sensible],” as Jacques Rancière might say (Rancière 2013). Video technology enters our private sphere, and in some sense, it calls us to be constantly available – to be on-stream but also to live in a series of accessibilities. The re-configuration of our life is obvious, but the role of images in this “re-” or “de-” configuration still requires some reflection. We are in constant tension between being-in-series and being-on-stream. We perceive ourselves as moving images on the screen. It affects our relationships and our perception.

In the book, we ask questions on two different planes, philosophical and cinematic. Thus, we ask what happens with the pieces of film art when they become just “tiles” on a streaming platform – a series of “bricks in the wall”? But also – what happens to us when we become just tiles in video conference meetings? We want to rethink seriality and streaming not only as a particular phenomenon but also as a concept. We should look at them from a slightly wider perspective. All doubts lead us to the question, “what do series do with us”? Philosophers and culture researchers have paid particular attention to this problem and seriality itself. Umberto Eco classified the series as a kind of repetition, which responds to our infantile need always to hear the same story and be consoled by the “return of the Identical” (Eco 1985). Gilles Deleuze offered other approaches (quite opposite to Eco), and even Jean-Paul Sartre tried to rethink series as a mode of our everyday life and experience (Sartre 1991). This encourages us to discuss the issue of seriality also from a more philosophical perspective.

But what about streaming? How is it connected with seriality? How does it affect our perception? What changes in our lives and work? The question that will haunt us in this book is the difference between the series and the stream. Consequently, what do series and stream mean? How do they work? How do they shape our life, habitual processes, and behavior? How do they change our thinking and orient us toward objects such as works of art? Last but not least – what does it mean to be inside the series, or what does it mean to be outside of the series? What does it mean to be between series and streaming?

Finally, the problem of economics returns. Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang, in the book Streaming, Sharing, Stealing, Big Data and the Future of Entertainment, claim that for the creative industries – music, film, and publishing – these are the best of times and the worst of times (Smith, Telang 2017). New technologies have provided self-published authors, independent musicians, and other creators with powerful new ways of doing their work and reaching their audiences. But the same technologies have also changed the competitive landscape, weakening established players’ control over content and consumers. We ask: can we, in our times of streaming and continuous flow of information, still talk about a “stolen object of desire,” a stolen letter in the Jacques Lacan sense (Lacan 1972), and the multiplicity of series caused by it? In what relations could we form the three concepts of streaming, sharing, and stealing? In his famous paper, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin could only sense the atmosphere of our time. But even he probably didn’t foresee the scale of the problem.

The Empty Square

Our theoretical starting point is Gilles Deleuze’s concept of seriality. We are aware, however, that this concept is still imbued with the spirit of structuralism. As we know, Jacques-Alain Miller developed the idea of a “metonymic causality,” and Louis Althusser developed the concept of a “structural causality” to account for the very particular presence of a structure in its effects and for how it differentiates all impact, at the same time as these latter assimilate and integrate it. By continuing this way of thinking, Deleuze, in the paper How Do We Recognize Structuralism?, claims that “A structure only starts to move, and become animated, if we restore its other half” (Deleuze 2004, 182). But what does that mean? In what sense is serialization one of the crucial key features of a moving structure?

In one of Jacques Lacan’s famous texts, he comments on “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allen Poe, showing how the “structure” puts into play two series, the places of which are occupied by variable subjects (Lacan 1972). The first series consists of the king, who does not see the letter; the queen, who is thrilled at having so cleverly hidden it by leaving it out in the open; and the minister, who sees everything and takes possession of the letter (Deleuze 2004). The second series consists of the police who find nothing at the minister’s hotel, the minister who is thrilled at having so cleverly hidden the letter by leaving it out in the open, and C. Auguste Dupin – perhaps the first detective in the history of literature – who sees everything and takes back possession of the letter. Not aspiring to the role of detective Dupin, we would say that today, in the streaming era, the status of a stolen letter and the subject who possesses it, intellectual property, and works of art, in general, are uncertain. What is the future of the Purloined Letter in the age of big data? Is the stealing of the “letter” still stealing in times when the transmission message never ceases, never dies? Is streaming stealing?

Finally, one should ask what is unconscious in the world of seriality. Does seriality today not amount to “dividing the collective” into a set of separate individuals who only relate to each other through their empty or narcissistic identities, such as passengers at a stop, consumers in shopping malls, students signing up for seminars on educational platforms, sick people registering in clinics, finally citizens, taxpayers who choose their leaders every few years. The time of seriality is a time of widespread autism, disturbing the ability to contact people and replacing this ability with a social hallucination – a false awareness of meeting, an illusion of contact.

The unconscious, according to Lacan, is neither individual nor collective but intersubjective, which is to say that it implies development in terms of series. Series are inseparable from the slippages or displacements they undergo in relation to the terms of the other. They are thus inseparable from the variation of differential relations. For this reason, Deleuze concludes that the structure–unconscious envelops a “wholly paradoxical object” or element. Such an object is always present in the corresponding series; it traverses and moves with them; it never ceases to circulate in them and from one to the other with extraordinary agility. What else would we call it, if not “Object = x,” the “riddle Object,” or the “great Mobile Element”? Deleuze adds: that one would say that the object “is missing from its place” (and, in this, is not something real); furthermore, that it does not coincide with its resemblance (and, in this, is not an image); and that it does not coincide with its own identity (and, in this, is not a concept). This is a very embarrassing statement because it suggests that the idea of serialization depends on something absurd (impossible), which is neither in the imaginary, conceptual, or, finally, real order.

Series need the empty square, without which nothing would move forward or function. The object = x is not distinguishable from its place. Still, it is characteristic of this place that it constantly displaces itself, just as it is typical of the empty square to jump ceaselessly. Gilles Deleuze, referring to the findings of Phillipe Sollers, likes to invoke the blind spot, so designating this always mobile point which entails certain blindness, but about which “writing” and “seeing” become possible, because series organize themselves therein as genuine “liter-emes,” a concept of structural or metonymic causality, the position of a zero, defined as lacking its own identity, and which conditions the serial constitution of numbers (Sollers 1988).

Series, Line, Stream

The key question of this book is the difference between series, line, and stream. The series always tends to combine elements into some more or less arbitrary whole. The series gathers elements looking for the principle of uniting these elements. In a sense, the series conserves the elements, placing them only in a more abstract order. The line, especially the line of number, on the other hand, establishes a sequence that does not aspire to any rule or generalization. The line is concrete and tangible, devoid of abstractness. The power to discern elementary identities is contained in the stream. Stream aims to destroy elements and blur them for the sake of flow. This gives the impression that a necessary feature of the data stream and streaming is the blurring of their source, initial, and elementary identities.

The streamed image is no longer an image, but a pure data flow, the identity of which is only given at the end by the reading, decoding, and capturing process. The flux is always molecular and never molar. The generalized streaming society is an entirely fluidized, processual society, never definitively established. The transition from a society of seriality to a streaming society is the transition from local and arbitrary series and ubiquitous individuals to a society of ubiquitous streams and flows that only establish local identities by correlating or linking conflicting flows – capital, information, energy, affects, and rhythms.

The streaming society is not fluid and is not a society without social or class stratification. Instead, it is a society that binds us to final identification and allows us to wander between classes imaginatively. How we imaginatively experience and recreate our class is revealed in our dreams, dreams in the cinema. The streaming society is not a society without domination, without hard determinants; it is a society that rules and divides through the distribution of desires and flows of images. But, on the other side, as Ernst Bloch pointed out in The Principle of Hope, “regret is a feeling that persists in the bourgeois world, but now almost exclusively in business life, so regretful dreams mostly revolve around money that has been lost” (Bloch 1995, 45). Amidst these dreams, there is still room among the petit bourgeois for the heroic pose, the one they did not strike at the right time, and the thundering phrase that did not flash out at the time. The dream plays out what is wished for as it could have been, what is right as it should have been. All boasting is part of this, all stupid pride follows this course, and the memory that the reality was different gives way to suit the vanity of our wishes.

So what is the subject in serialization understood in this way? And whether the essence of serialization is “the suspension of the causal order” in the sense that the elements of the series follow each other but do not evoke each other and are not their causes. The subject is precisely the agency that follows the empty place: it is less subject than subjected to the empty square. Its agility is peerless. Thus, the subject is essentially intersubjective. It seems that seriality, to a large extent, corrects our vision of subjectivity.

Michel Foucault presented disciplinary institutions in terms of a “criminal continuum” embracing the whole of society; however, a significant feature of the discussed historical period was the fact that, at the same time, there were unregulated, unorganized, and unsupervised times and places. Today it seems that these places have already been colonized. The notion of “everyday life” and “lived life” has become problematic. It used to be synonymous with the strata of an unmanaged life, at least partially excluded from the imperatives of discipline. Today this part has been colonized as well. We are part of a global stack, and our identities have long since become user functions.

As Benjamin H. Bratton perversely puts it – “The User’s enumeration is first a grotesquely individuated self-image, a profile, but as the same process is oversubscribed by data that trace all the things that affect the User, now included in the profile, the persona that first promises coherency and closure brings an explosion and liquefaction of self” (Bratton 2015). The position of the user is the most problematic. This is only the cybernetic mirror stage, Quantified Self and its Mirror. The User layer is not the universal persona nor a fixed term toward which design must orient its interfaces and artifacts. It is a model that is not given in advance and must be construed by interfaces and constructed for platforms. This new digital “care of the self” is a fabricated self-interpolation. For the User, the reflection provides recognition and misrecognition, not so unlike Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage parable, whereby the visual coherency of the body reflected is believed to confirm the psychological coherency of who stares at it (Lacan 2005).

Just Image in the Age of Technological Reproducibility

The same Deleuze who, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, proclaimed the unity of the machine and life, in one of his remarks in the volume Negotiations, concludes (in a paraphrase) that “technology is nothing” if it does not serve previously adopted objectives which cannot be explained based on technology itself. Turning to Jean-Luc Godard, Deleuze adds that “today the screen is no longer akin to a window or a gateway, but an information board” (Deleuze 1995). Deleuze resigns himself to the suggestion that the war on “digital images” is not about “a just image” (image juste) but “just an image” (juste une image); since “just images” always adapt to prevailing meanings. Deleuze is close to formulating a thesis on the domination of “cerebral images.”

We believe, however, that we should not stop at this diagnosis and ask the question: what does it mean “to live on the screen,” which has become an “information board”? Does this not mean that today tele-technology enters the theological phase, i.e., the phase of disturbing self-agitation and even self-temporalization, as a self-moving screen? Tele-technology today asks: how to set oneself in motion. Tele-technology pretends to be perpetuum mobile or Spinosian causa sui. Moreover, having raised such a concern, is the problem of reproducibility not the key objective of our analysis?

In the famous text entitled, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit) from 1935, Walter Benjamin claims that it is the technical reproduction which, for the first time in the history of the world, emancipates the “work of art” from its relationship with ritual (Benjamin 2008, 19–56). Due to technology, a reproduced work of art is increasingly becoming a “reproduction,” which strives only to become more reproducible. In place of grounding of work in ritual there appears to be grounding of work in politics and technology. The “display value” (Ausstellungswert) of the work replaces its “cult value” (Kultwert). The “cult value” gives away the theological foundation of the work as well as its affiliation to the ritual and place. “Display value” marks the work, its publication and lack of a permanent setting. For Benjamin, the turning point in reproducibility is the emergence of the reproduction of cinematographic works directly grounded in the production technique. Before, in both photography and then film, “display value” defied the “cult value” explicitly and directly. While a society overwhelmed and dominated by “display value” offers the individual a new right to constant reproducibility in the sphere of visibility, it refuses the right to sleep and invisibility.

“Society of display value” is, therefore – to refer here to the category proposed by Stiegler – “a society of the endless carnival of reproduction” which nowadays takes place within the screen network (Stiegler 2009, 40–59). The new subject of mass reproduction finds itself “in front of the optical apparatus” to perform a “test,” i.e., numerously exposing its image and thus verifying the value of its “own reproduction” for the audience. The new subject acts and displays itself only “in front of the apparatus” and “for the apparatus,” providing living proof that every human has an inalienable right to be filmed.

According to Benjamin, the importance of the cinema, with its exaltation of display value, results from the fact that it is only film – second to architecture – that can produce the subject of a simultaneous collective reception. The political power of cinema is the power to create a collective subject and manage its affects, hence, to let humanity “come out of suppressions,” exploding the unconscious, replacing class consciousness with the fascist subject, or yet merging mass reproduction with the reproduction of masses; cinema alone can finally redefine the image and the very optical unconscious and form anew the framework of what is visible. The latter is of utmost interest. I argue that there are solid reasons for re—reading The Work of Art of Benjamin, and that there are strong reasons we should try to rethink the very concept of reproducibility. What differs the contemporary digital reproducibility from the one known to Benjamin? In what sense is man exposed to a “machine test” today?

Perhaps we should argue that the 19th-century digital networks disrupt the organization brought upon by the audiovisual apparatus, which appeared already in the nineteenth century and spread on a massive scale in the twentieth century through television to impose on the whole world a type of relationship comparable to hegemonic relations. In this context, it is impossible to separate the fate of “digital writing” from a “digital image.” Therefore, this project is to create a “co-creative society” equipped with analytical thinking skills and which aims to move beyond the framework of a “society of display value.” Therefore, it is about creating a situation that reproduces the objects of a simultaneous collective reception, i.e., a symbolic environment in the state of association, where socialization is performed by association and individuation. Perhaps, only with the coming of the web network, particularly its auto-production, auto-broadcasting and bottom-up indexing, that a new process was released blocking the “fascist subject” from taking the place of “class consciousness.”

We therefore ask, are we part of the “society of display value” or a “co—creative society”? What does it mean to be part of such a society? We ask if the “society of display value” is identical to what we call a “networked society”? And finally, we ask what is the self and “digital identity” in the era of “networked society”? If – following Bernard Stiegler again – by a “society that is cross-linked” [réticulaire], we understand a society in which most individuals are inter-connected with all “in possibilities” and with some “in act” by means of a network that allows each person to take both the position of the sender and the recipient, is this situation a constellation of “universal control” in which the audiovisual industry has become only a “shortcut and bypass” of both educational, political and commercial institutions; or are we witnessing here a constellation giving the opportunity to establish a “co-creative society,” cultivating the analytical skills of co-creating and co-sharing, of both being together and being apart?

Seriality and the Aesthetics of Disappearance

Paul Virilio created a very intriguing category – the aesthetics of disappearance (Virilio 1991). Virilio’s central idea is the social and political role of detention. In fact, Virilio is interested in all the interruptions and pauses, from epilepsy and momentary loss of consciousness to death. What is alive is conscious only through an infinity of small deaths, accidents, interruptions, and cuts. Our perception is assembly, a series of temporality, which are the product of existing forces and technologies that organize time. For Virilio, cinema shows us what our consciousness is, and our consciousness is the result of editing, and seriality. The ego is not continuous; it consists of a series of small deaths and partial identities. If we want to give a break all its value, i.e., put a break in the series, we have to include death in it. In The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Virilio discovered the importance of interruptions, things that are productively retained. This is quite a different matter from what Deleuze does in Mille Plateaux. Deleuze deals with technology as deterritorialization and reterritorialization; he is constantly exploring territory and space. Technology, Gilles Deleuze adds that technology is absolute deterritorialization. Virilio takes care of breaks and absences, i.e., time.

According to Virilio, it was no coincidence that the film camera was preceded by Marey’s shotgun and Gatling’s pistol, which was inspired by the Colt revolver. These things are the beginning of new media, speed time, and choppy images. Our world is no longer about the source of light but about the relationship to “light as world.” Our world is a world made of speed. In this way, we return to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, to the world as a representation without will, to a representation of speed. The world created by speed is cinema. What happens in the window of a moving train, on the car’s windshield, on the TV screen is the same kind of “cinematography.” We have moved from the aesthetics of appearance, stable forms, to the aesthetics of fading away, unstable shapes. The painter painted a sketch and created a picture as long as it was not fixed. On the other hand, cinematographic images are “present through absence”; they exist as long as they flicker at twenty-four images per second. The images are present in the cinema and therefore on monitors because they disappear. The images give the impression of movement because they disappear. We are dealing with the transition from the visual aesthetics of appearing to the aesthetics of disappearing.

It is no coincidence that Virilio’s first book was called Uncertainty of Territory [L’insécurité du territoire] (Virilio 1993). Deterritorialization of vision, the eye itself, is a fundamental issue. This deterritorialization is not the end of art, but the end of technology that has become the “last art,” the “last perception”; a machine that sees itself. Since then, art has always been the art of the machine. It is impossible to understand what happened to the cinema without understanding what happened to the machine of vision. The decay of aesthetics is accelerating. The robotization of art is not just a metaphor, and it is not machines-allegories that squeak and move like Tinguely’s machines, the same premise of art in techno-science, but also the final form of art.

The first “speed machines” were “vision machines.” Virilio believed that the vision machine was more important to modernity than transport machines or machines of production. When we are told that the locomotive, the steam engine, created the industrial revolution, Virilio denies and points out that modernity is based on new machines of vision. First of all, the telescope, because modernity was not an industrial revolution but a revolution of vision. This is the revolution of Copernicus and Galileo. Modern vision began with machines that are vision machines. The telescope is “perception drives”; it certainly modified our relationship to the world with the speed of light before the speed of light of the TV’s electromagnetic waves came into existence.

So where have we gone? How did speed and light become the new curses? Well, we’ve lost our way through tele-objectivity and tele-realism. There was a modification in the field of perception, and we lost laterality. We are currently limited to frontal vision. It can be thought of as a type of glaucoma, a disease of optics. We cannot understand the present day without considering the influence the arrangement of perception has had on us. In a way, the screen is where the ‘frontality of vision’ and the irretrievable loss of visual laterality are produced. Frontal confrontation, aiming, even with a finger, is a threat. Deregulation of perception was accomplished through the primacy of the moving image, which contaminated the still image. Deregulation began with the invention of cinematography and then television – with the aesthetics of disappearing. Absolute deregulation tends to absolute inertia.

A new faith, a new religion, is also produced on the screen, because the machines of perception are linked to belief in perception. Belief in perception is a key concept. Believing in the world is believing what you see. Frederico Fellini said: “Art is, in fact, a call to mystery. Even beyond the religious expressions it can adopt, genuine art has a deep affinity with the world of faith.” We are not going back to religious wars, but to philosophy, to the dispute over the existence of the world.

Are we, then, heading for an absolute disappearance? Should Paul Virilio be accused of being a nihilist because he did not believe in tele—reality? The world’s great challenge is to escape nihilism. Nihilism is praise of death; it is only signing the slogan – Viva La Muerte [long live death]. You can no longer believe in reality. Reality becomes cardboard, a decoration that can vanish in the blink of an eye. Cities disappear in the blink of an eye. Perhaps what we need to regain faith in the world. Besides the speed of light which is the prerequisite for telecommunications, feedback, and the information bomb, there is also the speed of release that allows man to free himself from his world and escape from Earth. It is an incredible speed that frees us from our world. Perhaps this speed of release creates a new series.

The question arises, in what sense is the aesthetics of disappearance related to serialization and streaming? We have already noted that streaming destroys your objects and melts them into digital form. Streaming does not so much bring out the deep structure of the object, as it multiplies its various surfaces, shades, aspects, and assemblies of the object. In this sense, the aesthetics of streaming is pushing the aesthetics of decay to the limit. Or vice versa: the aesthetics of decay is its absolute manifestation and embodiment of streaming. In light of the flow ontology, the point is not that every object, although having multiple properties, is a homogeneous, uniform thing; The ontology of the flows denies that objects are unities with overt and hidden features. So we are talking about “reality” (Real) as a flow. The problem that remains is the question, is the world composed of one or many streams?

Repetition Beyond Law

The problem of serialization and streaming inevitably provokes the problem of repetition. For Friedrich Nietzsche, eternal return meant inequality and change (Nietzsche 1968). Eternal return is neither qualitative nor extensive but purely intense. Quantity is another name for intensity. But does the eternal return of what-always-distorted, i.e., the will to constantly melt and select, understood in this way, become a new law in a world that is only apparently liberated from law? Is it possible to make the repetition a “law of the new” under the pretext of relating it to experiment and trial, selection and excitement with what is to come? Certainly: habit always extracts something unexpected from repetition: difference. But what’s the difference? What does it mean that everything is equal, although in this equal being, things are irreducibly unequal? What is an ontology of uniqueness and univocality? If drive is no longer a simple aberration, but a constant derivation, then are we not dealing here with the establishment of a new law of constant sickness?

In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze repeats stubbornly against Hegel: repetition is not abstract and general (Deleuze 1994). Repetition that is not generality is not caught up in a concept and, therefore cannot be a simple application of the law. So does it become lawless? Or maybe it becomes a new hidden perverse law that says – “do what you want, but never give up on the stable thought picture!” Do we not feel the compulsion of innovation, so characteristic of our times? What to do so that repetition as an action and a contemplation of micro-perceptions always concern individuality and singularity, not subject to exchange or replacement, i.e., the logic of equivalence. What to do so that the reflections, echoes, and doubles, do not belong to the sphere of similarity or correspondence, but to the sphere of indivisibility? Who is the nymph Echo today? Is she still in love with Narcissus’s reflections?

To repeat it to relate to something unique or individual. To repeat this, it triggers an echo of a more hidden vibration, an echo of a deeper manner. We repeat the manner as something that has no idea, and that should not be memorized, and the rule does not exist at all. Again: it is a generality that belongs to the order of laws, but the law only defines the likeness of subjects subordinate to it. The law connects variability with duration. Is there a law of variation? And is this law dialectic? The repetition, however, does not repeat the dialectical figures. Repetition is not about counter-diction and cancellation, but perplication – multiplication of problems and perplexion – multiplication of troubles. Moreover, it is not about pattern-based pedagogy (do what I am your image) or rule (look for the rule, be generative), but about interaction, resonating (do with others and never try to follow an imago-pattern).

So is it possible that repetition is only the result of a deviation, derivative, mistake, error, and not the force of law? Perhaps that is what Søren Kierkegaard said in Repetition. Repetition is against the law: against like form and equivalent content. If repetition can be found in nature, it is because of a force that affirms beyond the law. Repetition is lawlessness in the name of more profound justice and wider reality. Kierkegaard constantly feels the overload of the soul. He complains incessantly of a soul that is so heavy that no thought can bear it. The disembodied spirit, for Kierkegaard, becomes a burden that drives him into despair. Kierkegaard, in repetition, induces corporeality as if inducing a continual imaginary pregnancy. The author of The Concept of Fear found the formula of repetition as a formula for restoring the lost directness and fullness of life (Kierkegaard 1983). As Faust says, if he could want something, he would not want wealth and power, but a return of potentiality, i.e., the moment when the eye perceives only what is possible. Such potentiality is not a mirage of what is lost, unfulfilled or prophetic but a kaleidoscope, because it is not a diagram! Of what is supposed to be. Kierkegaard is “only a spirit” with its instruments – its charms. She is a ghost, that is, a grotesque. It is the spirit or repetition of the body. Kierkegaard finally sabotages potentiality by not bringing it down to dissolve in a simple act.

Certainly, one should think of repetition as a form of feedback, find yourself (Soi) in repetition, and discover a peculiar subjectivity in what is repeated. For there is no repetition without a repeating, nothing repeated without a repeating soul or phantom. The repetition is ghostly, which is imaginative, because only from the point of view of the ghost does the imagination establish a moment vis repitativa, ordering what comes to exist. The imaginary repetition, however, is not a false repetition that occurs in the absence of a real one. Instead, it is a true repetition of the imagination. The subject is always a haunted subject, i.e., inhabited by a haunting repetition of physical acts.

The question remains: is the subject also haunted by language? Are we talking about simultaneously repeating “in language” and “in law”? And isn’t repetition in language just repetition without the subject seeing the bane? A great example of this repetition is Raymond Roussel’s linguistic machines, which create a kind of post-language where everything is repeated and re-started once everything has been said. The tool of repetition is not a synonym but a homonymy. This is the modern nymph Echo trapped in the tongue. The repetition of language repeats itself because words are not real because there is no definition other than the nominal definition. Understood as nature, it repeats itself because matter has no interior or memory. Matter is an eternal debutante. The unconscious is repeated because the Ego displaces and the Id does not remember or recognize it. In other words: it repeats itself because you are not something, you do not have something or you do not understand it. It is repeating the deaf and dumb. It is deafness and stupidity of words, nature and ignorance.

Perhaps the second season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, where Dale Cooper plays the role of a human automaton without memory, reveals an even newer form of aleatoric repetition of the intelligent idiot, the soulful automaton. Here, man becomes not so much a “wiping head,” but a “tossing head.” The roll of the dice affirms chance. It is not only about rolling the dice but rolling as the only rule; the questions are the dice themselves, and the imperative is throwing. It is no coincidence that Dale Cooper only understands games of chance; it is no coincidence that he is the producer of the case. Cooper’s amnesia is not the oblivion of Bill Murray on Groundhog Day, nor the retrograde amnesia of Leonard, who “without memory” compulsively searches for his wife’s murderer in Memento. Murray is still in the cycle, Leonard still takes notes and has semantic memory, and only Cooper creates a reality without memory.

The End

Questions that we raised in this book had their own very specific time. The basis for the texts in this volume was a conference organized during the pandemic. However, the idea of a conference, in which the presented texts are the result, appeared to us earlier in its naive form as a need to rethink the seriality phenomenon from a more philosophical perspective. The coronavirus outbreak confirmed the need for our plan. We had not only to postpone the event itself, but we also realized that we needed to expand our reflection by at least one more element – streaming. It could not be otherwise since streaming became our new reality. We could not ignore that the conference had to take place on the videoconference platform and that we experienced the poetics of disappearance in such a direct way.

In other words, simple reflection about seriality was not possible anymore. We needed to pose more serious questions and challenge new realities. Our time became a time of the series and a time of streaming. These circumstances showed the role of seriality in our life, raised even more. We lived through a series of repetitions and one of our everyday rituals was watching the lives of TV series’ protagonists. Furthermore, our human relations were mediated by screens. We became images on the screen and, to some extent, our life became a mode of perception, not something we live. This could be a crucial change for our existence and our relation with world, which perhaps we instead call worldlessness. These doubts are pivotal, especially in late capitalism, where the question of the production of subjectivity is a burning issue. This book is the result of the collective reflection of guests at our conference who decided to answer our call to rethink the role of seriality and streaming in our lives. In this volume, you can find texts of seven authors with different theoretical backgrounds. We believe that our work is worthy of continuation.

Finally, a few words about the content of the book. The book is opened by Szymon Wróbel’s paper Everything for the Family or Insane Seriality in which he analyzes two cult TV series – The Sopranos and Breaking Bad in the context of the mechanism of defending the family, which in both cases becomes kind of a Deleuzian empty square which motivated their actions. The author also explores the notion of insane seriality as a possible response to our fate or ability to take control over our own life.

In the second chapter, Adam Lipszyc looks very closely at David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and how it explores the limits of traditional TV shows. The author refers to Freudian notions of trauma and afterwardness and uses the philosophy of Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Derrida to investigate the temporal trajectories of Twin Peaks. In the third chapter, Jakub Momro tries to answer very widely posed questions about the current state of our culture and seriality, allowing us to perceive the dialectics of narration and discontinuity. The author explores what seriality can tell us about our subjectivity. A crucial notion for Jakub Momro is the singularity, which he analyzes in the context of the disaster TV series – Chernobyl.

In the fourth chapter, John Hillman asks about new situational awareness provided by the rising usage of video conference platforms in our everyday life. The author uses Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation to show in which situation we are as subjects. John Hillman also gives us insight into videoconference fatigue by examining all kinds of new behaviors we experience during videoconference meetings. In the fifth chapter, Iwona Grodź analyzes biographical series, how they shape an artist’s image and how they can be a tool to shape the historical and political consciousness of viewers. In the sixth chapter, Kristina Šekrst explores the differences between TV series and films and tries to answer the question why it is easier for us to binge-watch TV series for a few hours than it is to watch a traditional film, of which the duration is more than a few hours. The main example for Šekrst is the Twin Peaks series, treated as an eighteen-hour film. In her investigations, she widely recalls research on contemporary psychology. In the final chapter, Adam Cichoń briefly looks at Sigmund Freud’s struggles with serial narrative form and analyzes how it affected his way of thinking and psychoanalysis method. The author explores time-limited shows to describe how the mechanism of binge-watching can quickly become a form of counting down the time and accompany our everyday series of repetitions.

Finally, we would like to express first and foremost our sincere gratitude to the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” and its dean, prof. Robert Sucharski, Collegium Artes Liberales and its founder and directory prof. Jerzy Axer. Without their support and generous help, organizing the conference and publishing this book would not have been possible. We would also like to thank the “Artes Liberales Institute” Foundation and its president, prof. Jan Kieniewicz for the financial support given to this publication.

Similarly, we wish to thank the contributors, whose stimulating work, enthusiasm, and patience brought this volume into being. Most of the chapters in this book are based on papers presented at our conference, “Images Between Series and Stream Rethinking Seriality and Streaming,” which place on the 18th and 19th of November 2021. We want to thank all of our conference guests, especially the keynote speakers: Adam Nocek, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Adam Lipszyc, and Jakub Momro.

Finally, we would like to thank our colleagues from the Techno—Humanities Lab who invested their precious time into this project: Katarzyna Szafranowska for making the graphic design for the conference, typesetting and editing conference programs, posters and other printed materials and Krzysztof Skonieczny for taking care of practical matters during the conference and his invaluable help in organizing the event. We would also like to thank Joanna Romanowicz, whose administrative support was indispensable to us. Last but not least, we would like to offer special thanks to the Film Lab of the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” and its director Michał Oleszczyk who was the co-organiser of our conference, for his initial enthusiasm for the project and his inspiration throughout.

We hope this book touches crucial problems with seriality and streaming and will be an important element of reflection on these two phenomena. We also hope that the act of reflection itself is something we should never give up, as well as the work on the rethinking of seriality and streaming is something that will be continued.

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Table of Contents

Szymon Wróbel, Adam Cichoń

Introduction: Rethinking Seriality and Streaming