I am a scholar, critic, and curator of contemporary culture with a core commitment to the history of ideas. In my writing and cultural production I seek to identify the newness of contemporaneity by tracing its emergence from concrete and contingent historical situations.

This interrogation has a double reference: to questions of aesthetics, and to the operation of technical mediation. I approach mediation as a complex material braid—at once a mode of aesthetic experience, a phenomenological determinant, and an epistemic construct.

Mediation thus conceived generates both experience and subjectivity.

If media determines our situation, in the words of Friedrich Kittler, my scholarship engages technological determination as a structural limit that also establishes a field of imagination and recalcitrance.

The encompassing technological scenario tints our ways of knowing, feeling, voicing, and conceptualizing on the level of the sensorium.

As such, it constitutes an environmental setting through which subjectivity both emerges and is expressed.

This figure/ground approach to conceptualizing the formation of aesthetic subjectivity mobilizes latent movements in the late thought of Michel Foucault.

I am fascinated by the world-building, entirely historical dimension of mediation—the extraordinarily subtle perceptual operation by which the outside comes in and the external is made intimate. The mechanics of physiological introjection, dubbed ‘innervation’ by Walter Benjamin, are a vector by which the impositions of an inescapable technical infrastructure become truly inhabited and collective—and sufficiently “material and conceivable” to be “experienced by us as art.” (Jacques Rancière)

Quite simply, the atmospheric diffusion of concrete technological effects into a lifeworld shapes “the organization of perception at the time” into an experiential period style.

At base, all my work strives to track the resulting interface between experience and subjectivity. It is at this hinge that, like language itself, mediation speaks the speaker in the conjoined domains of affect and aesthetics.

My archive unrolls backwards from the present to the mid 19th-century appearance of a photographic image. It tracks an evanescent object by cutting between disciplines and methods pertinent to literature, particularly poetry and poetics; early and avant-garde photography, film, and post-celluloid media; Modern and contemporary visual art; and three intellectual traditions: Western philosophical aesthetics, Continental philosophy, and Post-Structuralist literary and critical theory.

My doctoral work at The University of Chicago was conducted under the aegis of Mark B.N. Hansen, Lauren Berlant, Tom Gunning, Miriam Bratu Hansen.

I am presently writing a monograph, provisionally titled Bergson and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Movement.

I am also engaged in curatorial dialogue with four significant American artists: Diana Thater, Anthony McCall, Ken & Flo Jacobs.

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Michelle Menzies

Honorary (Fellow)

School of Culture and Communication

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Michelle Menzies

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Faculty of Arts

Primary Interest

Cinema and Media Studies

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Michelle Menzies

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