Philosophy’s Artful Conversation

D. N. Rodowick

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674416673
• eBook ISBN: 9780674967380
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding.

Philosophy's Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory's role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a "philosophy of the humanities." In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like.

Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy's Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.

 

1. A Permanent State of Suspension or Deferment

Theory is essentially a scientific discourse, which is not only an abstract, generalizing, or foundational discourse, but also—and this is its distinctive trait—one that turns back on itself. A language that turns back on itself.

—Roland Barthes, “On Theory”

In 1970, Roland Barthes gave an interview, “On Theory,” to the French magazine, VH. What is most extraordinary about his remarks is his clarity about the stakes of theory in 1970 and the structure of theory as it would unfold so complexly over the next two decades. Barthes begins by signaling a contemporary disruption in the senses of theory that separate it from the discursive context of the nineteenth century, whose residues, one might add, were still to be found in the multiple origins of the discourse of structure. Barthes insists that theory not be opposed to the concrete nor confused with abstraction; this is his way of distinguishing two discursive formations of theory. Dominated by the kind of rationalism and empiricism associated with positivism and the rise of experimental science, the nineteenth century hesitates before theory, or searches for definitions of science distinguishable from theory. By the same token, positivism begins to turn from philosophy, or to seek a new place for philosophy as a helpmeet to science. This was one of the principal lessons of my Elegy for Theory.

In this turning point of 1970, Barthes also asserts that theory has taken on a new sense, which also withdraws from the practice of philosophy and the abstractions of metaphysics and now finds a new mode of concrete expression in the immanent analysis of texts. Theory passes through the text in an activity of fragmentation and discontinuity whose exemplary practice is Barthes’s reading of Balzac’s “Sarrasine” in S/Z. And here there is another disruption with an even older sense of theory. Etymologically, theory indicates a practice of observation, contemplation, meditation, or speculation, leading to a disinterested knowing independent of application. Through his interest in semiology and textual analysis, and through the influence of Levi-Strauss and Lacan, Barthes opposes these characterizations of theory and projects instead a third sense, one that is clearly indebted to Julia Kristeva’s account of theory as I described it in Elegy for Theory. “Theory is essentially a scientific discourse,” Barthes offers, “which is not only an abstract, generalizing, or foundational discourse, but also—and this is its distinctive trait—one which turns back on itself. A language which turns back on itself.”¹

Theory in this sense does not seek to complete itself in a system of thought, but rather engages in an ongoing practice of reflexive critique—Barthes says that it inhabits a permanent state of suspension or deferment. This reflexivity is neither circular nor closed; it does not seek to enclose truth within theory. Rather, Barthes seeks a concept of theory through a discourse that thinks itself in terms of its material organization of meaning while engaging in a continuous autocritique that evades the lures of abstraction, continuity, and closure. Barthes wonders, then, whether the new sense of theory is not simply writing, or écriture in the then current vocabulary. “Writing,” says Barthes, “in the contemporary sense of this word, is a theory. It has a theoretical dimension, and theory must not refuse writing or mobilize itself within a pure écrivance, which is to say, a purely instrumental view of the language that it uses” (“On Theory” 690–691).

One might smile at this kind of language today, recognizing its proximity to Tel Quel’s nearly forgotten language of literary modernism and the discourses of Theory of the 1980s and 1990s. Note, however, that Barthes is not promoting a political modernism (nor did he ever, I believe), but rather a close critical and analytical attention to the relation between discourse and theory, as well as to the discourse of theory; or better, that theory is produced through discourse and is never separate from it, materially or historically. On the one hand, Barthes’s statements bring into sharp focus one of the persistent and unifying characteristics of the multiple, dissenting, and contradictory discourses of contemporary theory—its resolute reflexivity and self-criticism, which is always probing the axiological and epistemological borders of discourse, refusing to let it stand still or close within itself. On the other, Barthes is careful to avoid any claims of identity, for either the text or the subject, and this pushes him back from the center to the edges of contemporary theory. Theory seeks knowledge. It might even seek “scientific” knowledge. But to do so is never to find the truth of a text, a subject, or a body, but rather to continually test how we approach or assert the question of knowledge in discourse, and what we value or not in that knowledge and the discursive forms it takes.

In Elegy for Theory, I suggested that we think of the problem of the history of film theory not as fixed and successive periods, or conceptual schemes overturning and replacing one another, but rather as overlapping and intersecting genres of discourse full of retentions, returns, and unexpected extensions, as well as ellipses and omissions. Nevertheless, the emergence or unfolding of discursive genres, one out of the other, occurs neither progressively nor continuously, but rather in series of disruptions and discontinuities that mark real differences between what I have called the aesthetic discourse, the discourse of signification, and that of ideology or culture, each of which involve turnings and remappings of concepts of theory. Moreover, I hinted at the end of Elegy for Theory that in film study, and perhaps the arts and humanities in general, a moment has arrived where contemporary theory reaches its end, which leads to some deep and disturbing questions: What comes after the contemporary? And what comes after Theory? In this context, certain key works anticipate a rupture that occurs between 1985 and 1995. I am thinking here of the unlikely pairing of David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film and Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image, both of which were published in 1985. Neither book is a work of Theory or even “theory,” and indeed both lead toward the controversial moment of “post-Theory” in the late 1990s, which in turn opens onto new competing yet tangentially related approaches to film philosophy. Stanley Cavell’s work on film, beginning with The World Viewed in 1971 and continuing with major statements like Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears, and Cities of Words, forges another path, which like Deleuze touches film theory along many of its edges without really interacting with it. In the same way that Jean-François Lyotard claimed that the postmodern is always what comes before the modern, it might be said that in their projections of film philosophy, Cavell and Deleuze stand outside or to one side of theory, marking out philosophy as an alternative path or a possible path to come. And if there is something that still challenges us in the critiques of post-Theory, it may not be exactly that theory has come to an end, though certainly the discursive period often called “contemporary” theory is drawing to a close, and it may even be said that contemporary film theory is in a moment of upheaval and transition. The stakes of our contemporaneity have changed, such that the response to what comes after theory is, often, philosophy. But what is philosophy? The paradox of this turning is its initial detour through history.

 

1. “Sur la théorie,” VH 101 (Summer 1970); reprinted in Roland Barthes, Oeuvres completes, ed. Éric Marty, vol. 2, 1968–1971 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 690, my translations.

2. How Theory Became History

Even though we may show our theory to be true, in some sense, we may be challenged to show that it is significant.

—Charles Taylor, “Understanding and Ethnocentricity”

In The Virtual Life of Film, I argue that the evolution of cinema studies since the early 1980s has been marked both by a decentering of film with respect to media and visual studies and by a retreat from theory. No doubt this retreat had a number of salutary effects: a reinvigoration of historical research, more sociologically rigorous reconceptualizations of spectatorship and the film audience, and the placement of film in the broader context of visual culture and electronic media. But not all of these innovations were equally welcome. In 1996, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll argued in their edited collection Post-Theory (University of Wisconsin Press) for the rejection of 1970s “Grand Theory” as incoherent. Equally suspicious of cultural and media studies, Bordwell and Carroll insisted on anchoring the discipline in film as an empirical object subject to investigations methodologically allied to the natural sciences. Almost simultaneously, other philosophical challenges to Theory came from film scholars influenced by analytic philosophy and the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. These debates emerged against the vexed backgrounds both of the culture wars of the 1990s and the rise of identity politics and cultural studies. Confusing “theory” with Theory, often lost in these debates is the acknowledgment that no judgments can be advanced—in history, criticism, or philosophy—in the absence of an axiological examination of our epistemological commitments. Put simply, theory has a critical dimension that promotes, evaluates, and adjudicates these commitments in an open-ended dialogue. To want to relinquish theory or to overcome it is more than a debate over epistemological standards; it is a retreat from reflection on the ethical commitments behind our styles of knowing. With this claim in mind, this book argues not for a return to the 1970s concept of theory, but rather for a vigorous debate on what should constitute a philosophy of the humanities critically and reflexively attentive to its epistemological and ethical commitments. I will return to this argument in later sections.

In Elegy for Theory I characterized the history of contemporary theory as being marked by distinctive conceptual divisions and conflicts. The Marxist and psychoanalytic theory of the subject inaugurated by Tel Quel in literature and by Screen in film studies was quickly challenged by new approaches and rhetorical stances including cultural studies, reception theory, feminist, postcolonial, and queer theory, and finally, new historicism and cognitivism. At the same time, within these divisions there are certain key conceptual commitments that wind through all the discourses like Ariadne’s thread, linking various concepts of subjectivity and identity to often-unacknowledged problems of epistemology. In his introduction to Post-Theory Bordwell observes, in some cases convincingly, that there are deep continuities of doctrine and practice between the discourses of ideology and culturalism despite the debates that arise between them. If one is attentive to history as a pattern of discontinuities, both minor and major, contemporary theory is defined less by a break or division between, say, psychoanalysis and cognitivism than by a set of family resemblances linking the quarrelsome family of contemporary thought axially around questions of spectatorship, meaning, and cultural value, as well as the stakes of “theory.” The problem of how to examine the activities of spectatorship, defining and assessing their range of subjective effects, is as important to cognitivism as it is to psychoanalytical or culturalist models. While the conceptual domain of contemporary film theory lacks unity, it is still defined by a powerful horizon of regularities where certain deep patterns of logic and discourse thread through the period. One of these involves how the problem of identity is fueled by the dialectic of negativity and the reflexive critical force of theory. The other has to do with the epistemological standpoints of claims to theory, which sustain all its processes of critique, debate, evaluation, and judgment, and which has only been rarely examined as such. Post-Theory and the cognitivist critique can be understood as one more branching of the second problem, extending the metatheoretical attitude in new directions.

By the mid-1990s film theory and indeed the concept of “theory” itself were challenged from a number of perspectives. This contestation occurred in three overlapping phases. The first phase is marked by David Bordwell’s call throughout the 1980s for a “historical poetics” of film, and culminates in the debates engendered by his Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Harvard University Press) and by the special issue of iris titled “Cinema and Cognitive Psychology,” both published in 1989. The keystone of the second phase is the 1996 publication of Post-Theory. Subtitled Reconstructing Film Studies, the book represents an attempt to establish film studies as a discipline modeled on cognitivist science and historical poetics, and to re-anchor practices of theory in the epistemological ideals of rational and empirical inquiry proximate to the natural sciences. While the second phase attempts to return theory to a model of “scientific” investigation and explanation, the third phase subjects the association of theory with science to philosophical critique. Deeply influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s purported critique of theory in the Philosophical Investigations, this perspective calls for a new orientation in the examination of culture and the arts through a philosophy of the humanities.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, then, theory is subjected to a triple displacement—by history, science, and finally by philosophy. At the same time, another salutary effect of post-Theory was its call for greater conceptual clarity in the stakes and structure of theory itself. In a contribution to the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Bordwell offers one of the clearest and most focused definitions: “Film theories offer systematic, general explanations of aspects of the nature, functions, and effects of cinema.”² This well-considered and generous formulation would seem to cover a great variety of different types and styles of aesthetic writing on cinema. However, not all kinds of explanations are equal. Just as Althusser asked that we distinguish between true and false ideas, Bordwell will ask that clear lines be drawn between what I will characterize as bad and good theory.

As suggested at the end of Elegy for Theory, developments in cinema studies in the 1980s were marked by a historical and a cultural turn echoing the influence of the new historicism in literary studies. The renewed interest in history was no doubt responsible for some of the most influential publications of the decade, including The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (Columbia University Press, 1985), coauthored by Bordwell with Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger, and Bordwell’s own Narration in the Fiction Film (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Both books were received as major contributions and interventions in contemporary film study, which at the height of its age of Theory was already confronting a number of impasses. It cannot and should not be said that either project was against theory. Both books argued implicitly for a reconceptualization and reorientation of theory, focusing and reducing its epistemological ambitions. This line of thought becomes clearer in Bordwell’s subsequent work on cognitivism and film theory. From the mid-1980s, Bordwell has been making a much-needed case for revising the methods and concepts of historical research, and for rebalancing the relationship between history and theory in film study. In retrospect, I believe Bordwell was neither rejecting, revising, nor extending “theory” in the 1980s, but rather trying to invent a new path between history and theory, which he called “neoformalism” or “historical poetics,” a path which he hoped would reform and remodel the discipline of film studies itself.

Bordwell’s work is equally exemplary of a recasting of theory for the field of cinema studies. It is important to appreciate Bordwell’s contribution to what I have characterized as the metatheoretical attitude. Among his generation, Bordwell was one of the first to exhibit a fascination with the history of film study itself, and to focus attention on problems of methodology with respect to questions of historical research and the critical analysis of form and style. Throughout the 1980s, Bordwell produced a number of influential methodological essays promoting a historical poetics of cinema. From Narration in the Fiction Film to Making Meaning, the broad outlines of his approach are made apparent. One cannot accuse Bordwell of a retreat from theory—no one’s commitment to good theory building is greater or more admirable. Rather, he wants to recast theory as history, or rather, to ground theory in the context of empirical historical research. In this way, Bordwell responds to what are perceived to be the twin threats of cultural and media studies. On the one hand, there is a risk of methodological incoherence for a field whose interdisciplinary commitments have become too broad; on the other, the risk of diffusing, in the context of media studies, cinema studies’ fundamental ground—film as a formal object delimiting specifiable effects. One aim of historical poetics, then, is to project a vision of methodological coherence onto a field of study perceived to be losing its center, and to restore an idea of film as a specifiable form to that center; in other words, poetics is searching for grounds to anchor and stabilize conceptually film’s virtual life, both formally and historically. Poetics concerns questions of form and style. It deals with concrete problems of aesthetic practice and describes the specificity of film’s aesthetic function while recognizing the importance of social convention in what a culture may define as a work of art. In Narration in the Fiction Film, the historical side of poetics addresses the proliferation of distinct modes of narration (classical Hollywood, S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• In Place of Beginning Again …
• 1. A Permanent State of Suspension or Deferment
• 2. How Theory Became History
• 3. “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences”
• 4. “I will teach you differences”
• 5. An Assembling of Reminders
• 6. “… a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing”
• 7. Gedankenwegen: On Import and Interpretation
• 8. “Of which we cannot speak …”: Philosophy and the Humanities
• 9. What is (Film) Philosophy?
• 10. Order Out of Chaos
• 11. Idea, Image, and Intuition
• 12. The World, Time
• 13. The Ordinary Necessity of Philosophy
• 14. “Art now exists in the condition of philosophy”
• 15. Falling in Love with the World
• 16. Ontology and Desire, or a Moving Response to Skepticism
• 17. Automatism and the Declaration of Existence in Time
• 18. Ethical Practices of the Ordinary
• 19. Perfectionism as Self-Disobedience
• 20. Comedy and Community
• 21. A Digression on Difference and Interpretation
• 22. Perfectionism’s Ironic Transport
• 23. An Elegy for Theory
• Acknowledgments
• Index