Apparatus Theory, Post-Cinematic Dispositifs, and the Algorithmic Interpellation of the Subject

In the 1960s and 1970s, film studies scholarship linked to psychoanalysis and Marxism attempted, under the umbrella of apparatus theory, to examine the ways in which cinema reproduces capitalist power and ideologically affects the perceiving subject. Rather than analyzing the narrative configurations of films, its proponents focused on the hidden effects of the cinematic apparatus itself, and the ways in which it inscribes itself imperceptibly into the unconscious of viewers and interpellates them. Building on the insights of apparatus theory, this text asks how the analytical inputs of this thinking and its theory of the constitution of the subject can be applied today — after the transformation of the cinematic media regime into a post-cinematic one. By focusing on media dispositifs and the ways in which they manipulate the user, the text shows how the post-cinematic apparatus (defined primarily by the asignifying processes of algorithmic systems) affects the perceiving subject. In the same way that apparatus theory considered the interpellation of the fixed subject (which would later become part of capitalist labor relations to produce value) as the main mechanism of ideology, the subject of post-cinema is, through the modulation of desires, attached to dispersive media platforms where he or she actively generates value in the form of data. The text will therefore argue that, despite the significant structural transformations of media environments, the process of subjectivation described by the apparatus theory is still a relevant theoretical tool for exploring the dynamics of the manipulatory power of contemporary media dispositifs.