Elegy for Theory

D. N. Rodowick

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674727014
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ästhetik in der Philosophie

Rhetorically charged debates over theory have divided scholars of the humanities for decades. In Elegy for Theory, D. N. Rodowick steps back from well-rehearsed arguments pro and con to assess why theory has become such a deeply contested concept. Far from lobbying for a return to the "high theory" of the 1970s and 1980s, he calls for a vigorous dialogue on what should constitute a new, ethically inflected philosophy of the humanities.Rodowick develops an ambitiously cross-disciplinary critique of theory as an academic discourse, tracing its historical displacements from ancient concepts of theoria through late modern concepts of the aesthetic and into the twentieth century. The genealogy of theory, he argues, is constituted by two main lines of descent—one that goes back to philosophy and the other rooted instead in the history of positivism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Giving literature, philosophy, and aesthetics their due, Rodowick asserts that the mid-twentieth-century rise of theory within the academy cannot be understood apart from the emergence of cinema and visual studies. To ask the question, "What is cinema?" is to also open up in new ways the broader question of what is art.At a moment when university curriculums are everywhere being driven by scientism and market forces, Elegy for Theory advances a rigorous argument for the importance of the arts and humanities as transformative, self-renewing cultural legacies.

 

1. A Compass in a Moving World

All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations and dance before our eyes.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”

In the final pages of The Virtual Life of Film, I recounted my puzzlement at being asked if the study of film would remain relevant in an era dominated by electronic and digital images. No doubt cinephiles of a certain generation regard the disappearance of the photographic image with intense nostalgia, perhaps even mourning. Indeed, the millennial form of cinephilia has become historical in a way that swings between mourning and melancholia. A desire in pursuit of a lost object: Has not the experience of film always been such—that is, the longing to recover the past in the present and to overcome lost time? The difference now is that the phenomenological force of photography, fueled by what I called automatic analogical causation, has been almost completely replaced by new series of computational automatisms and experiences. From the perspective of melancholia, film is historical in an archaeological sense: an object lost to history that cannot be recovered; an experience that can be imagined or reconstructed, perhaps, but never felt anew. Consequently, one seeks in digital images an experience that cannot be fully replaced, like widowers who have not yet learned to admire a worthy and seductive lover.

The melancholic cinephile will never let go of his desire for a lost object. (And he may even have forgotten or lost any sense of this experience as perceived or lived.) But mourning can be overcome and new loves reborn. That moving images have a virtual life means that new ways to love them can always be found—they will continue to be meaningful and to give meaning to our present experience. Explaining and evaluating this virtual life require concepts, or rather an ongoing process of conceptualization, of refashioning or inventing ways of understanding commensurate with the image’s virtual life. The desire to explain this experience by inventing or developing concepts adequate to thinking with or through it—call this, for the moment, theory—is inescapably caught up in, indeed engendered by, our confrontations with the ontological perplexities that screened images raise regarding our locatedness in time and in space, in relation both to the world and to each other through the medium of moving images.

But am I not caught in paradox here? In a project devoted to exploring the prospects for studying moving image culture in the twenty-first century, why extol a love that can always be rekindled in the moving image while writing an elegy for theory?

In some respects, theory is present more than ever in our thoughts about moving images. One consequence of the rapid displacement of photography by digital processes has been to fuel a new and welcome fascination with the history of film theory, as if desiring to recover or to reexperience the intense aesthetic pleasure and ontological curiosity of the artists and writers who lived and witnessed the first thirty years of film’s virtual life. These philosophical pioneers puzzled over the new qualities of space and time enfolding spectators and defining their modernity, while challenging tenaciously held concepts of aesthetic experience inherited from the nineteenth century. (Writing in 1939, Walter Benjamin expressed this attitude in observing that the question was not whether photography and film could be art, but whether instead they had transformed the entire character of art.¹) In short, faced with a new medium, they felt compelled to define and explain it, even as its forms shifted before their eyes. Classical film theory has renewed significance for film studies today because the computational arts and communication, which often take on a photographic or cinematographic appearance, confront us with an analogous shock, and compel us to reassess our experience of modernity through moving images. Like Vachel Lindsay, Hugo Münsterberg, or Ricciotto Canudo, not to mention Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Siegfried Kracauer, or Walter Benjamin, we strive mentally for concepts to give logical form to the unruly thoughts inspired by images that disorient us in time and that are no longer content to occupy space in ways familiar to us.

An elegy for film fuels the virtual life of theory; the former leads inexorably, and perhaps surprisingly, into the latter, in what turns out to be the single face of a twisting Möbius strip. The displacement of the photographic by the digital inspires new forms and conditions of ontological puzzlement concerning our experience of modernity through moving images. And these images now move, and occupy space and time, in ways that are as novel to us as to spectators in the first nickelodeons. Twenty years hence, will readers completely attuned to a computational ontology puzzle over how we could have felt such wonder and anxiety? Classical film theory was a lively period of conceptual innovation and experimentation. Contemporary cinema studies seeks inspiration there perhaps because the shock of modernity is as intense for us now as it was for those thinkers who first confronted the powers of photography and cinema. The desire to explain this experience, indeed the unending task of mastering it through concepts that could settle this moving world and help us find peace within it, was given a name very early in the twentieth century: “theory.” Already in 1924, in his wonderful and prescient book Der sichtbare Mensch, Béla Balázs called for theory as a conceptual compass in the stormy seas of aesthetic creativity and experience. What film studies has forgotten in the intervening decades is the strangeness of this word, as well as the variable range and complexity of the questions and conceptual activities that have surrounded it over time like clouds reflecting light and shadow in ever-changing shapes. The word “theory” has weight, gravity, and solidity in the humanities today. But, as Wittgenstein might have put it, like every overly familiar word, on closer examination it begins to dissolve into “a ‘corona’ of lightly indicated uses. Just as if each figure in a painting were surrounded by delicate shadowy drawings of scenes, as it were in another dimension, and in them we saw the figures in different contexts.”²

The idea of theory in art or film has a long and complex history, and this history invariably and recurrently coincides with and departs from the history of philosophy. Indeed, the range of activities covered by concepts of theory comprises a genealogy much longer and more complex than the virtual life of film. As a form of explanation, theory is ever more important to our comprehension of contemporary moving image culture, which is ever more powerfully a digital culture. Yet in film studies, as in the humanities in general, attitudes toward theory remain vexed. The decades since the 1970s have witnessed many critiques of theory, mostly unkind. These attempts to dislodge, displace, overturn, or otherwise ignore it have taken many forms—against theory, post-theory, after theory—as if to contain or reduce the wild fecundity of its conceptual activity or to condemn it to exile. In most cases, these critics have no clearer a view of what theory is than the thinkers who are supposed to practice it. The lack of clarity in our picture of theory haunts the humanities, and this is as true for its defenders as for its assailants. However, my goal here is not to give an account of these attacks, or even to respond to or refute them. If you should accompany me to the conclusion of my thoughts in this book, and in its companion, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation, you will see that I have more modest claims for the practice of theory, and indeed may give a great deal of ground to its rivals. Moreover, to reclaim some territory for theory and to reassert its powers of explanation and conceptual innovation, we may have to call upon a practice with a yet longer and more venerable history—philosophy. To write an elegy for theory may mean rediscovering a life in philosophy.

The impulse that drives this book goes deeper than debates for and against theory, for there is a hole at the center of this discussion (what once might have been called a structuring absence) that is not so easily filled in or accounted for. My first thoughts on this problem date back to my inaugural lecture at King’s College London in 2002, when it occurred to me that the two fundamental problems confronting the revitalization of film studies in the twenty-first century were first, how to assess the displacement of the photographic by the electronic and digital, and second, how to renew the place of theory in this debate.³ In the days following my lecture, a colleague and good friend, Simon Gaunt, an accomplished scholar of medieval French and no stranger to contemporary theory, asked a question that, despite its simple and straightforward form, continues to haunt and derail me: “What is film theory?” (He might well have asked, what is literary theory or art theory?) But being a good philosophical friend, Gaunt was provoking me, I continue to think, to confront a deeper and more fundamental problem. Despite thirty years of teaching and writing about the history of theory, I could not give a simple answer to his inquiry, for the question “What is theory?” is as variable and complex as the desire to explain “What is cinema.”

Gaunt’s question, and my incapacity to respond to it, utterly defamiliarized a mode of existence I had happily occupied for several decades—that of a self-described film theorist. My confidence was shaken, and the word “theory” became unfamiliar to me, melting into its corona of lightly indicated uses. Indeed, to paraphrase Christian Metz at the conclusion of his magisterial essay “The Imaginary Signifier,” I discovered that I have loved theory, I no longer love it, I love it still.

What is theory that it should arouse such emotion and debate both within the humanities and between the humanities and the sciences? For those of us in the arts and humanities who characterize our work as theoretical, by what conceptual means do we recognize and identify the how, the why, and the what of our doing? What does it mean to belong to a community of thinkers in the arts and humanities who characterize their work as theoretical, and how does this make us different from or similar to a historian, a critic, or a philosopher? Do we have now (have we ever had?) a clear and perspicuous view of theoretical activities, practices, and concepts? Would anyone who knows what “theory” is please raise your hand?

1. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 258.

2. Philosophical Investigations II, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), sec. 6, 155.

3. Published as “Dr. Strange Media, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Film Theory,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 374–397. An expanded version of this essay comprises part 1 of D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1–24.

2. Many Lines of Descent

When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present will you understand it.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”

In the contemporary context, the concept of theory is like a coin too long in circulation. As the coin has been passed from hand to hand, its surface has become flat and unburnished, its value illegible. If our conceptual picture of theory is clouded, perhaps this is because we have forgotten that it is a moving picture. Theory, as we live and challenge it today and as it challenges us, has a history. It is not a language-game but many, comprising various overlapping yet often contradictory and contested forms of life. Little wonder that now as in the 1920s it has seemed more a battleground—a test of competing conceptual wills with feints, sallies, and parries—than the rational unfolding of a communal research program. From a scientific point of view, it may seem odd to suggest that theory has a history, or further, to say that our picture of theory is cloudy or unfocused because we have forgotten its history or become blinded to it. However, a genealogical reflection on theory in general, and on the philosophy of art and of film studies in particular, may help restore some conceptual precision to its range of connotations and semantic values. Theory may again become a satisfying word if, as Emerson would recommend, it can be reclaimed from its counterfeit currency.

Genealogy is not history. One must take seriously that Nietzsche’s critique of history, of its uses and disadvantages, was one of his untimely meditations. A genealogical approach offers a special kind of historical perspective that breaks open the linear conception of time as progress or progression, revealing many variable and discontinuous lines of descent. We may set out on straight and well-paved highways, but there will also be culs-de-sac, detours long and short, secret passages, steep turns, and sudden and surprising vistas. Theory has no stable or invariable sense in the present, nor can its meanings for us now be anchored in a unique origin in the near or distant past. If the currency of theory is to be revalued conceptually for the present, we need a history that attends critically to the competing sites and contexts of its provenance in the past and that can evaluate the forces that shape its diverse and often contradictory conditions of emergence and its distributions as genres of discourse. To sketch out a genealogy of theory is to return to it a historical sense of its discontinuities as a concept and as an activity—not retracing a line, completing a circle, or constructing a frame, but rather to follow theory’s complex web of derivations and to evaluate the concept in the space of its discursive distributions. Or, as Michel Foucault advises, “to identify the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us.… The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.”⁴

Perhaps our picture of theory is not so much a cloud or corona as it is a palimpsest, whose many historical layers compete for our attention in such a way that we are unable to focus on any one of them. The genealogy of theory, its many lines of descent, confronts us as discontinuous series within the history of philosophy that are repeatedly linking to and breaking away from conceptions of ethics on the one hand and aesthetics on the other. In the historical frame of the twentieth century, this pairing of ethics and aesthetics through the conceptual bridge of theory might seem strange, since after Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, philosophy was reconceived not as a system or theory, but rather as a method of logical or conceptual analysis. In this context, questions of ethics and aesthetics were displaced in philosophy by a renewed emphasis on logic and epistemology. Moreover, the aim of this method, implicitly or explicitly depending on the case, was to make philosophy disappear into science.

Already in 1914, Russell directly expressed this attitude in writing that “every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.”⁵ In an essay of the 1920s, Russell states unambiguously that philosophy is “essentially one with science, differing from the special sciences merely by the generality of its problems, and by the fact ...