Toward a Philosophy of the Documentarian

A Prolegomenon

Dan Geva

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319755670
• eBook ISBN: 9783319755687
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The theme of this book is the documentarian— what the documentarian is and how we can understand it as a concept. Working from the premise that the documentarian is a special—extended—sign, the book develops a model of a quadruple sign structure for-and-of the documentarian, growing out of enduring traditions in philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and documentary theory. Dan Geva investigates the intellectual premise that allows the documentarian to show itself as an extremely sophisticated, creative, and purposeful being-in-the-world—one that is both embedded in its own history and able to manifest itself throughout its entire documentary life project, as a stand-alone conceptual phase in the history of ideas.

© The Author(s) 2018

Dan GevaToward a Philosophy of the Documentarianhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75568-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Dan Geva^{1, 2}

(1)

Haifa University, Haifa, Israel

(2)

Beit-Berl College, Beit-Berl, Israel

Dan Geva

Questio mihi factus sum.

[I have become a question to myself]

—St. Augustine (1960, 10.6)

The critical path alone is still open

—Immanuel Kant (1998, A855)

[…] A sign is only a sign in actu by virtue of its receiving an interpretation, that is, by virtue of its determining another sign of the same object. This is as true of mental judgments as it is of external signs.[…]

—Charles Sanders Peirce (l901- C.P. 5-569 -CP 5-569)

End Abstract

The documentarian is my theme—what the documentarian is and how we can possibly understand it as a concept. ¹ Anyone who contemplates the documentarian nowadays cannot fail to sense that it is, without doubt, both a familiar subject and an outlandish object of thought. When we see how the philosophical energy of the documentarian is diffused and muddled through anthropological analyses, readings based on individual films, mode/genre theories, and analyses based on biography or on monographs, it becomes clear that we are in danger of losing our ability to view this matter with a clear perspective. For while the conceptual qualia of the documentarian has not, so far, been treated philosophically, it is in other ways a very familiar part of our everyday language. ² Although the documentarian is not typical of the kind of problem that a philosopher would, at first glance, consider to be worthy of attention, I argue that it should be so treated. I say that for two reasons. First, the problem of the subject-artist has been essential to the evolution of the philosophy of art, even (and perhaps especially) in light of Nietzsche’s insightful observation that “in all philosophy to date the artist is missing.” ³ Second, and perhaps even more crucially, it is a philosophical problem by virtue of the mere fact that the documentarian is, very plainly, a human subject—an active moral agent prone to the classical “who/what” dichotomy with respect to the human subject and, consequently, a matter of lasting concern within philosophical traditions. ⁴ My addition of “moral” in the last sentence, in my initial definition of the figure, is very much at the heart of my project and my vision for what constitutes the documentarian in her work and in her responsibilities to and for it—that is, insofar as that work is understood, throughout the book, as a concept in urgent need of scrutiny. This book argues that the main avenues of documentary critical thinking threaten to put a halt to a primordial—and thus more profound—understanding of the documentarian, that is, inasmuch as it must be regarded as an essential “documentary value” (to paraphrase Grierson’s catchphrase, inspired by Flaherty’s work). ⁵

In pursuing this argument, I follow the ancient Greek philosophical tradition of asking the fundamental question “What is X?”—placing the documentarian in dialogue with the Greeks’ naturalistic-scientific curiosity, asking in an unbiased manner (so far as this is possible), as if for the first time: “What is a documentarian?” (Note that I do not ask “Who is the documentarian?” as I base my discussion on the search for the meaning of the concept itself rather than grounding it in the study of a contingent personal denotation of this or that individual documentarian.) In this process, the documentarian reveals itself as both a hypothetical problem and a concrete substance for thought, prone to a methodical inquiry into its elementary units as well as its governing laws. ⁶

My overall line of reasoning, as it unfolds in the course of this book, suggests that insofar as the documentarian is not, on the face of it, a self-understandable historical ego or a generic empirical ego, it is, first and foremost, an object of thought susceptible to—and therefore available for—a philosophical critique, in and of itself.

The preliminary metaphysical presupposition in the syllogistic framework of this book is that the documentarian , insofar as it is a constant for any algorithm for thinking about documentary (and in that sense a meta-concept), consists of four fundamental concepts, self-manifested along the lines of a concomitant logic that determines this distinct sign’s binding and dividing interrelationships, as well as its terms of self-proclamation.

The four fundamental concepts that make up the axiomatic nature of the documentarian as an object of philosophical thought are:

1. 1.
   Documentarian-Abstractness ( DA ),
2. 2.
   Documentarian-Sensoriality (DS),
3. 3.
   Documentarian-Práxis (DP), and
4. 4.
   Documentarian-Invisibility ( DI ).

In this study, each one of these four fundamental concepts—idea, sense, práxis, and invisibility—receives separate treatment in its own dedicated chapter. Specifically, Chapter 2 is devoted to DA, Chapter 3 to DS, Chapter 4 to DP, and Chapter 5 to DI. Each chapter delineates, analyzes, and relocates the relevant concept in its interdisciplinary context. Next, I position these four fundamental concepts, which make up the holistically interrogated concept of the documentarian, in a purposeful arrangement: a foursquare semiotic and philosophical matrix. In this framework, each of the concepts is located in the final discussion (Sect. 5.​2) as one of the four theoretical corners of an analytical construction that bears the formal arrangement of a “semiotic square,” to reference Algridas Greimas’s inventive formulation. ⁷ Thereafter, this new semio-philosophical entity, grounded in the foursquare structure that is based on the four fundamental concepts that constitute the documentarian, is termed the Documentarian-as-Extended-Sign (DES), a prolegomenon to a philosophy-of-the-documentarian.

Throughout the book, I will argue that the concept of the documentarian as an extended, quadruple sign structure allows its four fundamental concepts (DA, DS , DP , and DI) to occupy a steady yet energized and interactive position within the confines of a tangible logical structure. This dual state—stability and extension, consistency and change—subjects the extended sign structure of the documentarian to scrutiny, both in relation to its near-cloud of documentary concepts and others from philosophy, psychoanalytical theories, and semiotics—in reciprocal tension with its innate sensibilities to neighboring discourses, as I shall discuss at greater length below.

The holistic formulation of the DES serves as both a compass and a beacon in the methodological and philosophical quest for a paradigmatic shift in documentary studies—to pursue a path toward-a-philosophy-of-the-documentarian. This naturally leads us to ask: “What does it mean, and how does it come about?”

The very first hypothesis presented in this book is that although the traditional literature of documentary theory has stressed that the nouns documentary and documentarian share semantic fields and, of course, the same linguistic root (and therefore obviously refer to the same cultural and artistic sphere), this commonality in itself should not automatically suggest a relation of absolute epistemological reciprocity, much as garbage and the garbage collector, or the watch and the watchmaker are not of the same ontological order. To state the obvious: the “is” of garbage, of timepieces, and documentaries, qua nouns referring to concrete objects in the world, is fundamentally different from the “is” of the subject paired with each of them: the garbage collector, the watchmaker, and the documentarian. The very different “is”-ness of the produced object and the creative subject necessitates an alternat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Documentarian-Abstractness (DA)
• 3. Documentarian-Sensoriality (DS)
• 4. Documentarian Práxis (DP)
• 5. Documentarian-Invisibility (DI)
• Back Matter