A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television

S. Panse, D. Rothermel, S. Panse, D. Rothermel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137014177
• eBook ISBN: 9781137014184
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television is a response to a significant increase of judgment and judgmentalism in contemporary television, film, and social media by investigating the changing relations between the aesthetics and ethics of judgment.

1

Judgment between Ethics and Aesthetics: An Introduction

Silke Panse and Dennis Rothermel

This collection responds to a significant increase of judgment and judgmentalism in contemporary television, film, and social media. Especially on television, works whose sole purpose is to generate judgment have multiplied. Judgment pervades contemporary television. The comment sections on online press webpages and blogs, along with social media such as Facebook and Twitter, elicit and propagate our judgments incessantly. The judgment of everyone and everything leaves a permanent digital footprint of that judgment on the judged, but also on those who judge, so that everyone is continuously cast as someone under judgment for what they say or endorse and for how they judge. In viewing we are also watched. In judging we are often also judged. The buyer judges the seller, and vice versa. Our most private relations are rated as transactions. Subjective judgment has left the internal realm of our own super-egos and instead is handed out in a public manner, forever archived in verdicts on screens. The rise of subjective judgment directs all areas of public and private life, at work and at leisure, from popular culture to academia. Judgment and competition are made to look as though they are synonymous. In the capitalist society of control (Deleuze 1992) judgment becomes privatized and relegated to the consumer’s subjective preferences. Judgment has ceased to be objective determinations by experts or overseeing institutions, in contrast to the previous disciplinary society that Foucault analyzed (1995). That the proliferation of judgments takes the form of an increase in judges, rather than of the distanced objectivity of expert judgments, reflects the ascent of the subject in a prolonged history of modernity, from Descartes to Kant to Lyotard’s emphasis on subjectivity (rather than the subject) in post-modernism. The figure of the judge ultimately emerges on and in front of the television, signifying the ultimate prevalence of judgmental subjectivity.

At the same time as the frequency of voicing of personal judgments has increased, their effect has lessened. But maybe this should be the reverse: because our voices result in so little change, they have become louder and more opinionated. The saturation of media and society with judgment coincides with the increase of precarious labor with zero-hours or short-term contracts. Employees are in constant competition, they have to reapply even for the same casual labor, and they are constantly judged in competition with one other. Paradoxically, while individual workers have to be the factory as well as the company, and individuals are ever more subjected to judgments, corporations are not held accountable and judged in court, because they have acquired the rights of an individual (Grear 2010; Parramore 2012). Moreover, the fact that corporations are deemed too large to fail, and thus too large to be judged, stands in contradiction to their status as individuals. The increase of subjective judgments is at odds with how politicians, entrepreneurs, and corporations have attained the status of being beyond judgment.

Judges have become more anonymous and invisible online, and, inversely, more pronounced and visible on television. Reality television is founded on judgment, and that judgment is defined through competition, from MasterChef (1990–), Changing Rooms (1996–), to Survivor (1997–), Big Brother (1999–), Pop Idol (2001–), I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! (2002–), to X-Factor (2004–), etc. On The Voice (2010–), even the judges compete. The first part of this collection traces these mutual enforcements between competition and judgment in reality television. In their chapter about the Young Apprentice (2010–2012), a franchise of The Apprentice (2005–), Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn discuss how the program repeats and reinforces the judgment of personal performance management that now informs our work cultures. They also argue that Young Apprentice ties in perfectly with a British education system that is structured in terms of competitive entrepreneurialism and which grooms pupils for submission to employers’ judgment. Félix Guattari already bemoaned in 1989: “In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City” (2005 [1989], 43). Little could he have foreseen that the Trump species would one day also take over judgment television on The Apprentice.

Especially on factual television, dramatic characterizations elicit positive and negative judgments according to industry narrative formulae. News and reality television induce us to indulge a proclivity to judge – to endorse, to favor, to condemn, to denigrate, to remonstrate, to like, to love, and to hate. The rise of subjective, irrational judgment is accompanied by an absence of objective, rational judgment and analysis that would evaluate a process over time. This is evident in the history of documentary, from expository with an objective, expert voice-of-God narration to the dominance of vox populi in current news reporting (Graham 2013). Documentary media – from the broadcast news to the tabloid press – generate the most common denominator in emotional judgment: outrage. The satisfaction of judgment in the form of moral outrage is brief and needs to be fed constantly, be that from the right or from the left. Emotional judgment can also drive the rhetoric of anti-capitalist activism. Ethical judgment today arises predominantly through outrage. But is outrage always bad? Should we cast judgment on being emotional about injustice? Do we need to be emotionally judgmental to change things? Can irrational judgment effect rational action? Do we need to be outraged to act ethically? Or does our outrage, rather, arise from a sense of what is ethical? Does emotional judgment result in feel-good and lifestyle activism with no change in society, just in ourselves? Is outrage always politically inconsequential? Are we, then, suspended in a constant state of outrage, because we have so little influence?

In contrast to social media, emotions generated through television usually do not lead to political action. As if ethical judgment can only be emotional, even politicians have to legitimize their actions by declaring emotionality in their judgment: “the prime minister has been greatly affected by the video evidence of last week’s attacks” (Channel 4 News 2013). When the news announces that “David Cameron has made it a matter of judgment” (Newman, Channel 4 News 2013) – referring to his expressed intention to move ahead with military intervention in Syria – judgment is even used synonymously with emotion. When factual television and documentary film evoke emotional judgment: on television, the position of the judging employer is usually reinforced, whereas big screen documentary cinema often emphasizes moral judgment from the standpoint of the underdog.

The critique of judgment and Kantian philosophy

The title of our collection echoes Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Kant’s treatments of aesthetic judgment serves as both the point of departure and the backdrop for much of the discussion in the chapters in this book. Kant’s complex and interconnected systematic philosophy consists primarily in his three major texts, which are commonly referred to as the First, Second, and Third Critiques: Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1999a), Critique of Practical Reason (Kant 1997a), and Critique of Judgment (Kant 2000). There is, perhaps, no one term that pervades the entire Kantian corpus more thoroughly and more crucially than judgment. A judgment connects two concepts to say or think something about something, but does not need to be formulated overtly in our conscious thought. Even perceptions are judgments, including those we are barely aware of. Judgment is essential to human mentality: “the intellect, in all its guises (concept formation, subsumption of instances under concepts or rules, syllogistic inference ), [is] a capacity to judge” (Longuenesse 2005, 18–19). For Kant, there is an important variety in the distinct ways of how we have judgments in our thoughts and experience.

Our conscious experience is filled with a rich, steady stream of perceptions about the things available to us through our senses. Our life is continuously occupied with empirical judgments, and this is the first way in which Kant talks about judgment. How this tree in front of me is an oak, that it’s sunny today, that the cat purrs contentedly, etc. – these are all judgments of the sort that emanate spontaneously in perceptual experience. Kant attributes the intense activity of perceptual judgment to the faculty of imagination, which draws from the wealth of concepts stored up from life to gather up the raw information provided by the senses. The availability of that store of concepts from experience Kant calls the faculty of the understanding. The process is eminently reliable, but not infallible. The moment that I recognize a friend in a crowd but then see, no, it is not her, shows how the imagination creates and revises perceptual judgments continually. This is Kant’s first, foundational, spontaneous type of judgment (1999a, A115–130, B129–149).

Some of our empirical judgments employ logical concepts – such as unity, plurality, possibility, negation – that are logically prior to experience. Any instance of using one of these concepts would already presume the availability of the concept. Causality is one of the twelve categories that Kant identifies as having this logical role in how we make empirical judgments. I may have learned to associate the fall in temperature after sundown with a causal relation. But this would not show that causality is something learned inductively from experience. Rather, for Kant, causality is a concept that is logically prior to the possibility of experience. So, a second type of judgment derives from what Kant calls pure concepts of the understanding (A76–83/B102–116).

The third type of judgment registers how sensation pleases subjectively (Kant 2000, 91–92, 97–98). I enjoy the lovely taste of fresh berries with my yogurt in the morning. Many may like that taste, too, but there could be some who do not. But what I can perceive about them – their color, shape, and taste – is insufficient to guarantee that I should like them.

In an example of the fourth type of judgment, I am struck by the beauty of rich golden-hour sunlight upon the fluttering leaves in the trees. The special light saturates their colors and accentuates the rhythm of their harmonic movement in the breeze. But here it is not a matter of how I may like those colors, or those trees. The experience, rather, captivates my cognitive faculties. At this point, the imagination in its tremendous constant activity no longer works hard to bind sensations into known concepts in the understanding. Rather, it reverberates in the very process of cognition. Instead of this hard work of finding and fitting concepts, there is harmonic resonance in the free play of how the imagination and understanding work together. This aesthetic judgment of the beautiful frees the imagination, which now has the upper hand over the understanding rather than being beholden to the wealth of concepts the understanding has in store for the imagination to accommodate in generating judgments (25–27). The pleasure I take in the light upon the trees is as spontaneous as my empirical, factual judgments of where the tree is, what kind of tree this is, and so on (90–91). This pleasure has nothing to do with any self-serving interest I may take in the trees – such as whether they have commercial value for me growing on my land. Because any interest I may take in the actual existence of the object falls away in my aesthetic judgment about it, it follows, Kant says, that I project the pleasure I take in it to be universal, and thus it is different from what pleases merely subjectively. Thus, it is my expectation that this feeling of the beautiful would be just as pleasurable and with the same intensity for anyone who pauses to witness this beautiful sight (96–97). There is, however, no aspect of the aesthetic judgment of the beautiful that brings into play pure concepts, and so this expectation of universality that accompanies my pleasure in the beautiful has no necessary conceptual form (163).

The fifth type of judgment is that of the sublime. When I stand by a steep cliff edge, I indulge pleasurable feelings that come from understanding that the depth before me is unfathomable. This is another case of aesthetic pleasure arising from cognitive experience, but now differently. Rather than the imagination generating judgments in, around, and through what I experience as beautiful, now the imagination is at a loss to provide a comprehensible judgment, and the pleasure derives exactly from that lack. I delight in how I cannot fathom the depth, in how the imagination becomes pleasurable just in its striving without success to compose the concept that will provide a definitive judgment. It is no less pleasurable for my not being able to do so, but, rather, all the more pleasurable for that. The cognitive activity and the pleasure associated with it are, at this point, dominantly those of the imagination, now in free play, which is now even less dependent on the understanding. This fifth kind of judgment is specifically that of the mathematical sublime, because what cannot be grasped is a matter of indeterminate magnitude (131–132).

Kant calls the sixth type of judgment that of the dynamical sublime (143–144). When I contemplate the vast encompassing forces of the universe, and how quickly I can be reminded of how miniscule is the realm in which things are within my power compared with the inestimable forces of the universe, that allure of the incomprehensibility of the sublime arises again, but this time differently. It is not just magnitude. It is the vast, complex dynamics of the world that characterizes the fascination. I am struck with abject fear and awe at this power. Returning to what is familiar to me relieves that disquietude somewhat, and there is joy in that return. But this is a joyfulness that owes its emotive power to the moment of being caught up in the draw of the overwhelming fearsome power of the universe.

As I ponder the eternal stars in the sky and the complexity of the universe, so vast in its dimensions and dynamics beyond my comprehension, I undertake to grasp, albeit speculatively, what overarching purpose there may be in this universe where there are the stars above and my place and life here and now. This is a seventh type of judgment, which Kant calls teleological (249–252).

The beauty of the leaves fluttering in the golden-hour light might be captured powerfully as an artistic representation. Such art could be complexly creative or merely gratuitously appealing to quaintness. I may compare artistic emanations of the beautiful as measured by the degree of complexity in how the imagination is engaged in the experience of the beautiful in art. This eighth type of judgment is the contemplative, evaluative, and comparative estimation of the presence of aesthetic values in the experience of art. The judgment of art as an expression of cultivated taste in aesthetic judgments aims to make good on what occurs to me initially as an immediate implication of the spontaneous pleasure in the beautiful (49, 184–185). It is inherent to the pleasure I take in the beautiful that anyone would have the same appreciation. In evaluating art, the intention is to establish and cultivate taste that apprehends the universality of the beauty of the artwork. Even if not everyone actually does appreciate it that way, for Kant, in effect, they ought to (49, 184–185).

Finally, when I judge what people do as good or bad, I am inclined to think of what anyone would see that one ought to do. This ninth type of judgment is moral judgment. Conceptualizing what anyone ought to do has a more elaborate Kantian formulation: “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature” (Kant 1999b, 73). For Kant, moral feeling should not influence moral judgment. A positive feeling might accompany a moral judgment, or the ensuing act, or as a response to the moral actions of others, but this is not necessary (Kant 2000, 153; Guyer 1979, 170, 317, 356–357; Zammito 1992, 238, 292–295). Aesthetic feelings, for Kant, are essential to aesthetic judgment, which, strictly speaking, is not subject to intellectual interest beyond the aesthetic (2000...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Judgment between Ethics and Aesthetics: An Introduction
• Part I: Judgment in Factual Television
• Part II: Judging Documentary Images
• Part III: Judgment and Universality
• Part IV: Disappeared Subjects and Supernatural Judgment
• Index