Art, Old and New
In “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” Gregory Bateson opened a new window through which to imagine and conceptualize a behavior we are all familiar with but may not have thought deeply about . “The phrase ‘This is play,’” he argued, means in effect, “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote” (2000f, 180). The italicized phrase, he goes on to explain, introduces reference into mammalian communication, in that the mimicry in the invocation of play refers to “serious” actions. In other words, “This is play” means, “These actions we’re now engaged in do not mean what they would mean if they were serious.” Hence, as Bateson elaborates, “The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (180). It is important to step back to the origins of critical theory of the arts to understand the fundamentals from which its key ideas should be derived. As Aristotle argues , artistic representation is intrinsic to human life. For “imitation” or “representation ,” mimēsis in the Poetics , “is naturally occurring in human beings from childhood,” he writes. Furthermore, “humans differ from other animals in this respect: they are the most mimetic, they both learn their first lessons through mimesis, and they all enjoy representations” (1980, 1448b, 5–6).1 The pleasure evoked by engaging in and observing imitative behavior is fundamental both to art and to play. “The reason (aition) for their pleasure is this,” Aristotle continues, “that learning is most enjoyable not only to philosophers, but to others as well, though to a lesser degree” (1448b, 14–15). Because mimetic arts are “more philosophical” (philosophōteron 8, 1451b, 5–6) than history or, in other words, than a literal representation of “facts,” poetry, painting, and of course film, no matter how much they claim to be committed to documentary truth-telling, are nevertheless representations. Because mimetic arts, Aristotle thinks, are more like philosophy in their focus on the universal than on history, in the focus on the particular, films are philosophical artifacts. Aristotle and his teacher Plato (if we allow his famous Allegory of the Cave2 to stand as the first movie house) were therefore the first film philosophers. No matter how vividly focused on the details of life, film, like literature, is a generalization. Even when it is non-representational, cinema becomes, like geometry, even more abstract as in the films of Jordon Belson (2018).
In fictive films like the feature movies discussed in the present book, representations are clearly constructed; thus, they can readily be subjected to critical scrutiny of their themes and designs. In documentary films, however, cinematographers and their critics sometimes prefer to think that their representations are “windows on the world,” which are not or should not be subjects of artistic critique. In both cases, film criticism is derived from what I will describe, in Bateson’s terms , as a “circle of differences,” messages in a circuit, an informational exchange between “critic” and “text” shaped by both and reducible to neither. Premises assumed by filmmakers and their commentators influence the course of critical dialogue by applying “constraints” on what can be and cannot be meaningfully said. Thus, we will see a documentary filmmaker being charged, in what follows, with taking artistic liberties with his subjects rather than sticking with scientific canons of truth. The distinction between the arts and the sciences on which this kind of claim is based, including the claim that universalizing mimetic forms do not convey truth, is therefore critically examined to discover on what basis claims are made on both sides.
Aristotle also thinks that artistic representation uses techniques that are less than logical. Hence, he considers poetry’s use of “metaphor” or “bearing across” of names from one species or genus to another to be a legitimate artistic technique, but only presumably for poetry and implicitly for film, not (at least without logical explication) for philosophy. Here, that assumption must be subjected to critique as well.
Despite the elitism of the philosopher (Aristotle was a tutor to Alexander the Great), he notes what Bateson is pointing out: that the pleasure of learning is experienced by all human beings and by other animals as well. In a thesis converging with Bateson’s analysis of reference in play, moreover, Aristotle develops his idea of mimetic representation: “It is because we enjoy seeing likenesses that, as a result of seeing representations, we learn from them and infer [sullogizesthai] what each thing is, that a this is a that” (1448b, 17–19). In other words, mimetic processes are common to human beings and animals, and serve as “performative syllogisms.” Human beings and other creatures through mimēsis classify representations in terms of species and genus, or in Plato’s language, particular and form. “This particular character or plot sequence on screen is that kind of person or event,” literally speaking.
However, it is not simply classifying films (for example) according to genre that is my primary concern, but rather, considering the realm of differences that open up between the particular and universal in their interpretation. In Bateson’s terms, playful actions too refer to literal or “serious” ones that are reclassified as “play” rather than “art,” both being thus “reframed.” Reframing is what he will otherwise describe as a “transcontextual ” shift that requires a “double take” to comprehend (2000g, 272). This shift allows multiple perspectives to open up on particular film sequences and prevents film (or any other object of study) from being enclosed in a single disciplinary domain. It is this kind of shift, or versatility in making it, that I argue is needed to shape a transdisciplinary theory of film in the Anthropocene.
Building on the theory of logical types (Whitehead and Russell 2010, ch. 2, 37–65) and expanding on Aristotle’s necessarily limited view of natural history, Bateson argues that the emergence of reference through the syntax of play in mammalian communication is not only the road to human artistry but also the way both to learning and communicative freedom. In play and art, creatures are no longer bound by literal responses to stimuli as in Pavlovian and Skinnerian behavioral conditioning. Due to its logical typing, the likeness of literal action differs in kind from its referent, just as Chaplin’s imitation of Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940) stands at a distance from its subject, so that the playful imitation emergent in the arts allows a creative, critical, and comic or tragic perspective on the world it depicts. Hence, along with the critical shift to a transcontextual perspective in the arts comes a cosmopolitan one in ethics.
The expansion of visual artistic production in the nineteenth century from still photography into in film with Thomas Edison’s invention of the kinetoscope and kinetograph in 1889, and its subsequent commercial combination of film with music and voice in the twentieth century in The Jazz Singer (Crossland 1927) should not, in Bateson’s terms, be separated from the mammalian heritage of art and play. The rise of digital film with Once Upon a Time in Mexico (Rodriguez 2003) in the twenty-first century, along with the consequent development of digital convergence, pointed out by Friedrich Kittler in his analysis of the integration of arts in the idiom of computation (2010, 225–230), has brought to light a new phenomenon in human and mammalian evolution. The new phenomenon, digital Lamarckism is a paradoxical bootstrap in media, where digital representations are on the verge of transforming and even supplanting their originals, as in the generation of “virtual reality” and the shaping of new lifeforms through graphical interfacing and bioengineering. It is in the context of the recent emergence of play from its embodiments in organisms, traditional art works, and celluloid films, culminating in digital film in the mode of information (Poster 1990), that an unprecedented problematic has arisen : “Conscious man, as a changer of his environment, is now fully able to wreck himself and that environment—with the very best of conscious intentions,” as Bateson articulated the issue in 1972 (Bateson 2000b, 452). This was well before the now widening concert of commentators classified the phenomenon as a new geological era: the Anthropocene. It is the role and meaning of film and digital media in the emerging era that is my central topic, framed in terms of transcontextual criticism and cosmopolitan ethics.
In the present study, I sketch a critical model of the construction of knowledge and the world in the media ecology of the Anthropocene . Here, as Michel Fou...