Becoming-Squid, Becoming-Insect and the Refrain of/from Becoming-Imperceptible in contemporary science fiction: Or ScarJo the sexed 'post human' starlet, and her all too human male counterparts

Abstract

First paragraph: Across his two Cinema books Deleuze contends that because cinema puts movement into the image films can be understood as autonomous thinking machines that provide viewers with the material conditions for thought. This is to say, thinking occurs courtesy of the more-than-human assemblage of the biological brain and an agential non-human thinking machine. In Cinema 2, Deleuze further maintains that the cinema’s essence “has thought as its higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning.” As arguably the most “philosophical” of all the cinematic genres, science fiction has long harnessed cutting edge industrial techniques and adopted a futural (or parallel) narrative tense to provoke viewers to think through the technological and socio-political issues relevant to the present. By so doing, the genre is oft acknowledged as a valuable “barometer of our times,” granting audiences an opportunity to see the operations of contemporary sociotechnical practices and technocratic politics in a novel light. Beyond telling speculative stories, the science fiction genre in general, and the Hollywood Blockbuster iterations in particular, are also renowned for their technophilic embrace—and pushing the capabilities—of the latest industrial effects and imaging techniques; which often result in crowd pulling spectacles that likewise surface as barometrical signifiers indicative of the broader technological assemblages the wider culture has entered into; or else have caught up the cinema, and can be understood re-creating and refashioning it. As such, the double articulation of science fiction fantasies with the industrial realms of science and technology help to highlight the genre’s privileged position for philosophically exploring the nature, politics, and potential of present technologies and sociotechnical practices.