Failing Upwards: On Perfection in Global Film and Media Theory

What is the opposite of media failure? Over the past years, a growing body of literature has examined forms of failure (e.g., glitch, error, noise) as habitual phenomena in the operations of media. While such scholarship has often embraced failure or imperfection as a critical alternative to dominant media logics, it has left perfection itself undertheorized. Inverting the terms of contemporary debates, my talk demonstrates that the very ideal of perfection is an engine of semantic instability in the modern age. Through close engagement with the work of Walter Benjamin, Dziga Vertov, Julio García Espinosa, and Hito Steyerl, I argue that moving-image media played a crucial role in the redefinition of perfection in modernity, as classical conceptions of the term gave way to perfectionism, perfectibility, and an aesthetics of imperfection. Integrating the method of conceptual history into the study of moving images, my talk offers a new understanding of perfection as a key concept in global film and media theory.

Nicholas Baer is Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Critical Theory, Dutch Studies, Film & Media, Jewish Studies, New Media, and Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. He is the author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) and co-editor of The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907-1933 (University of California Press, 2016), Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and Technics: Media in the Digital Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).

This lecture has been organized with the support of the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch, Center for German and European Studies, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Department of History, Department of Philosophy, Center for Austrian Studies, and Graduate Minor in Moving Image, Media, and Sound.