- Freie Universität Berlin, Kolleg-Forschergruppe Cinepoetics, Department Memberadd
- D. N. Rodowick is the author of numerous essays as well as nine books: An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and t... moreD. N. Rodowick is the author of numerous essays as well as nine books: An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities (2021), What Philosophy Wants from Images (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (Harvard University Press, 2015); Elegy for Theory (Harvard University Press, 2014); The Virtual Life of Film (Harvard University Press, 2007); Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Duke University Press, 2001); Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (Duke University Press, 1997);The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory (Routledge, 1991; reprinted 2013); and The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (University of Illinois Press, 1989; 2nd edition, University of California Press, 1994). His edited collection, Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy, was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2009. Rodowick's essay, "An Elegy for Theory," received the Katherine Singer Kovacs Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2009, and his book, Elegy for Theory received the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2015.
Having taught at Yale University until 1991, Rodowick began the film studies program there. After studying cinema and comparative literature at the University of Texas, Austin, and Université de Paris III, he obtained a PhD. at the University of Iowa in 1983. Rodowick subsequently taught at the University of Rochester and at King's College, University of London, where he founded the Department of Film Studies and the Film Study Centre. Before coming to the University of Chicago, he was William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, where he also helped create a new PhD. program in Film and Visual Studies. Special research interests include aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the history of film theory, philosophical approaches to contemporary art and culture, and the impact of new technologies on contemporary society. Among other honors, he has been a Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Cornell University, a Senior Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, Germany, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Film Studies, Free University of Berlin. In 2002, he was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Rodowick is also a curator, and an award-winning experimental filmmaker and video artist. With Victor Burgin, he was awarded in 2016 a Mellon Collaborative Fellowship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, University of Chicago, to produce new video work. He is also a member of the International Association of Art Critics and the Arts Club of Chicago. His creative work can be viewed at: https://bauleute.org.edit
From the mid-1960s on, Farocki observed, reported, critiqued, analyzed, and deconstructed, sometimes in his own voice and other times strategically deploying the voices of others. It is tempting to say that Farocki worked in the genre of... more
From the mid-1960s on, Farocki observed, reported, critiqued, analyzed, and deconstructed, sometimes in his own voice and other times strategically deploying the voices of others. It is tempting to say that Farocki worked in the genre of the essay film, though that might be too small and vague a category to contain the inventive breadth of his moving-image works, nor can they be considered straightforwardly documentary in any restrictive sense. Each of his major works—and there are many—emerges as if in search of a new hybridity where fiction and nonfiction, the imaginary and the real, the invisible and the visible, and suppressed and conspicuous forces combine and recombine in always startling combinations. The simplest and truest thing one can say about Farocki’s work is that it is the product of a life engaged in the critique of images by images.
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Claude Lanzmann visited Yale University on 4-13 April 1990 at the invita-
tion of the Department of Comparative Literature. The text that follows is
an edited transcript of the second of two seminars on Shoah organized by
David Rodowick.
tion of the Department of Comparative Literature. The text that follows is
an edited transcript of the second of two seminars on Shoah organized by
David Rodowick.
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The concluding section of An Education in the Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. I have said that in the humanities both teacher and student learn together and share beyond the content... more
The concluding section of An Education in the Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. I have said that in the humanities both teacher and student learn together and share beyond the content of any given course examples of judgment and how judgment can be practiced concretely. The important question embedded here is, What does exercising judgment edu- cate us to? Every occasion to exercise humanistic reasoning, whether inside of outside of the classroom, is an opportunity to practice good judgment in a public context, and to practice judgment with others is to bestow the gift of freedom. In ideal situations, the public practice of judgment is an opportunity to learn how to accept and exercise one’s freedom to think and to speak and to feel that freedom in solidarity with others. In this case, the classroom can function as something like a temporary autonomous zone that hosts a critical community based on generosity, community, and common care. Education means not to inculcate knowledge or belief but to learn how to judge freely with a capacity for charity and a willingness to alter one’s beliefs and opinions. One should not ignore that there can be an intense pleasure felt in shar- ing judgments with others. This pleasure arises in feelings of sociabil- ity and solidarity, in the freedom to think and to think differently, to be in communication with others, and to persuade and be persuaded by them as a measure of belonging to the community. In such com- munities of judgment, one does not have to seek complete and total agreement but rather only feel attuned to the modes of reasoning and patterns of coming to agreement or in disagreeing, that one is speaking and listening on the same terms.
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This article argues in favor of misreading as a creative act. There is something involuntary in every creative act, and this involuntariness is itself a force of creation that arrives at the threshold of every act of repetition in and... more
This article argues in favor of misreading as a creative act. There is something involuntary in every creative act, and this involuntariness is itself a force of creation that arrives at the threshold of every act of repetition in and through time. Creativity is always shaped by unexpected encounters with ideas, arguments, and artworks. My defense of misreading as a creative act, however, asks for a broader description of contingency that includes accidents, misprisions, and fortuitous faults in memory generating flights of fancy and unbidden and unexpected imaginative analogies. These erosions of intention by internal or external events are one way of anticipating the freedom for new creation. Before it is expressed in actions, creativity arises in imagination, and to those open to it, imagination is fed by both the inner contingencies arising in memory and imagination and the outer contingencies of surprise encounters with ideas, texts, and other creative works.
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A Critical Symposium on the Changing Face of Motion Picture Exhibition featuring commentary by David Bordwell, Grover Crisp, The Ferroni Brigade, Scott Foundas, Bruce Goldstein, Haden Guest, Ned Hinkle, J. Hoberman, James Quandt, D. N.... more
A Critical Symposium on the Changing Face of Motion Picture Exhibition featuring commentary by David Bordwell, Grover Crisp, The Ferroni Brigade, Scott Foundas, Bruce Goldstein, Haden Guest, Ned Hinkle,
J. Hoberman, James Quandt, D. N. Rodowick, and Jonathan Rosenbaum
J. Hoberman, James Quandt, D. N. Rodowick, and Jonathan Rosenbaum
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An obituary for Peter Wollen published in Afterall 49 (2020): 126-129.
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Revised version included in D. N. Rodowick, "Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media." Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
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A revised and expanded version is included in Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
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The Introduction to a Special Issue of the PMLA. The title of this special-topic issue, also used for our panel at the 2000 MLA convention, is meant to raise more questions than it resolves. The nature of our mobility as citizens... more
The Introduction to a Special Issue of the PMLA. The title of this
special-topic issue, also used for our panel at the 2000 MLA
convention, is meant to raise more questions than it resolves.
The nature of our mobility as citizens (economic, geographic, cultural) is
no less complex and variegate than the media environments we now oc-
cupy, as Caren Kaplan explains in her contribution. Moreover, even if the
concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer transnational corpo-
rations is resulting in a multinational entertainment state, as the Nation
suggested some years back, this does not mean that media use and audi-
ence identity are becoming more homogeneous. Global media are less
unified, and unifying, than they appear at first glance; media consumers
are more heterogeneous and their responses more complex than e
special-topic issue, also used for our panel at the 2000 MLA
convention, is meant to raise more questions than it resolves.
The nature of our mobility as citizens (economic, geographic, cultural) is
no less complex and variegate than the media environments we now oc-
cupy, as Caren Kaplan explains in her contribution. Moreover, even if the
concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer transnational corpo-
rations is resulting in a multinational entertainment state, as the Nation
suggested some years back, this does not mean that media use and audi-
ence identity are becoming more homogeneous. Global media are less
unified, and unifying, than they appear at first glance; media consumers
are more heterogeneous and their responses more complex than e
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A revised and expanded version of this essay appears in Elegy for Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.
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In Expanding Cinema: Theorising Film Through Contemporary Art. Eds. Laura Rascaroli and Jill Murphy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 277-291. The defining question of modern art was how to release the image from... more
In Expanding Cinema: Theorising Film Through Contemporary Art. Eds. Laura Rascaroli and Jill Murphy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 277-291.
The defining question of modern art was how to release the image from representation. The problem for contemporary art is how to find new ap- proaches, materials, techniques, and technologies for remapping this question in ways responsive to our current history and media environ- ment. What has the image become under new conditions of technological production and reproduction, amplified flows of communication through social and mass media, and the global expansion of neoliberalism, both politically and economically? In this chapter, Rodowick appeals to Theodor Adorno’s late writings on aesthetics to evaluate contemporary art’s critical responses to its current technological and social condition in works by Phillipe Parreno, Sturtevant, Pierre Huyghe, Michel Majerus, Cory Arcangel, and other international artists.
The defining question of modern art was how to release the image from representation. The problem for contemporary art is how to find new ap- proaches, materials, techniques, and technologies for remapping this question in ways responsive to our current history and media environ- ment. What has the image become under new conditions of technological production and reproduction, amplified flows of communication through social and mass media, and the global expansion of neoliberalism, both politically and economically? In this chapter, Rodowick appeals to Theodor Adorno’s late writings on aesthetics to evaluate contemporary art’s critical responses to its current technological and social condition in works by Phillipe Parreno, Sturtevant, Pierre Huyghe, Michel Majerus, Cory Arcangel, and other international artists.
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Jeder Student im Grundstudium der Philosophie kennt die drei Fragen, die Immanuel Kant als grundlegend für das menschliche Denken und Leben ansah: Was kann ich wissen? Was soll ich tun? Was darf ich hoffen? Weniger beachtet ist die vierte... more
Jeder Student im Grundstudium der Philosophie kennt die drei Fragen, die Immanuel Kant als grundlegend für das menschliche Denken und Leben ansah: Was kann ich wissen? Was soll ich tun? Was darf ich hoffen? Weniger beachtet ist die vierte Frage, wie sie in seinen späteren Schrif ten und ganz besonders in den anthropologischen Vorlesungen formuliert ist: Was ist der Mensch? Etwas subtiler muss Kants Frage wohl folgendermaßen formuliert werden: Was heißt es, Mensch zu sein oder in einem umfassenderen Sinne Mensch zu werden bzw. zu wissen, dass man in einem umfassenderen Sinne Mensch werden kann? Kants überraschende und schwierige Annahme ist, dass der Mensch als Teil der Spezies ›Mensch‹ geboren wird, als dieses ungewöhnlich begabte Tier aber doch noch nicht im eigentlichen Sinne Mensch ist. Oder auch, dass für jedes Individuum, das geboren wird, das Potenzial und die Möglichkeit, Mensch zu werden, universal gegeben ist, aber dass diese zugleich einen Weg vorzeichnen, der nur selten wirklich beschritten oder zu Ende gegangen wird. Mit den folgenden Überlegungen versuche ich, einige am Schluss von Philosophy’s Artful Conversation1 unbeantwortete Fragen oder nicht zu Ende geführte Gedanken wieder aufzunehmen. Alle diese Fragen und Gedanken konvergieren in meiner Vorstellung einer möglichen Philosophie der Geisteswissenschaf ten (Humanities). Diese kann nicht von der Suche nach einer Methode oder einem Programm der Interpretation und Evaluation bestimmt werden. Ihre Ergebnisse – falls es solche Ergebnisse gibt – werden nichts hervorbringen, das sich konsistent als Methode oder Kriterium zur Interpretation von Texten, Objekten oder Erfahrungen einfach anwenden ließe. In diesem Sinne verstehe ich philosophische Bildung in den Geisteswissenschaf ten nicht im Sinne eines Kanons oder einer bestimmten Disziplin, die beherrscht werden müsste, noch überhaupt von
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The Introduction to Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
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I am thinking here of Miriam’s deeply original account of what might be 22 called the dynamic and disintegrated subject as a phenomenological character- 23 istic of the experience of modernity, a concern of Miriam’s from her earliest 24... more
I am thinking here of Miriam’s deeply original account of what might be 22 called the dynamic and disintegrated subject as a phenomenological character- 23 istic of the experience of modernity, a concern of Miriam’s from her earliest 24 American writings. This is a deeply immanent, materialistic, and dynamic 25 conception of subjectivity, inspired most prominently by Kracauer early and 26 late. The critical and utopian dimensions of this fractured or shrinking subject, 27 as it is often referred to in Cinema and Experience, are also explored in Benja- 28 min’s and Adorno’s writing, although in very different ways. For those of us 29 trying to imagine a different kind of film theory in the late 1970s and early 30 1980s, this dynamic conception of the subject was intensely appealing; it was 31 the theme of many intense conversations Miriam and I had about Kracauer 32 dating from the earliest days of our friendship.
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The rapid emergence of new media as an industry and perhaps art raises a perilous question for cinema studies. The twentie century was unquestionably the century of cinema, but is cinema's over? And if so, what is to become of its... more
The rapid emergence of new media as an industry and perhaps
art raises a perilous question for cinema studies. The twentie
century was unquestionably the century of cinema, but is cinema's
over? And if so, what is to become of its barely matured field of scholship, cinema studies?
art raises a perilous question for cinema studies. The twentie
century was unquestionably the century of cinema, but is cinema's
over? And if so, what is to become of its barely matured field of scholship, cinema studies?
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In this essay, I review a 2019 exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo entitled When Saying Is Doing, which featured work by Angelica Mesiti, a contemporary Australian artist who works on questions of performance, immigration, and non-verbal... more
In this essay, I review a 2019 exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo entitled When Saying Is Doing, which featured work by Angelica Mesiti, a contemporary Australian artist who works on questions of performance, immigration, and non-verbal communication in multi-screen moving image installations. On the contemporary global stage, if we do not share the same linguistic community or communities, how is human interrelatedness expressed through other forms of ordinary language, where “language” is now considered not as speech but rather as human expressiveness in its most diverse and complex manifestations? What happens when shared language is neither “speech” nor conversation in the linguistic sense? Needed here is a newly imagined vision of the communicability of human community that I refer to as “neighboring.” Putting Mesiti's work in productive dialogue with Stanley Cavell and other critics, I examine how skeptical problems of isolation, privacy, and unknownness are potentially add...
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A revised and expanded version of this essays appears "The Historical Image" in Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
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The analysis of The Pirate (an MGM musical directed by Vincente Minnelh, released in 1948)whch followsd not really take place as the interpretation of a text. Ideally, it d attempt to unfold as an inquiry into the nature of filmic... more
The analysis of The Pirate (an MGM musical directed by Vincente Minnelh, released in 1948)whch followsd not really take place as the interpretation of a text. Ideally, it d attempt to unfold as an inquiry into the nature of filmic textuality in its relationship to the representations of desire specified by a single text.
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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... more
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 a no clearer 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 equally as true for its defenders as its assailants.
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From the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the institutionalization of cinema studies in universities in North America and Europe became identified with a certain idea of theory. This was less a " theory " in the abstract or natural... more
From the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the institutionalization of cinema studies in universities in North America and Europe became identified with a certain idea of theory. This was less a " theory " in the abstract or natural scientific sense than an interdisciplinary commitment to concepts and methods derived from literary semiology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism, echoed in the broader influence of structuralism and post-structuralism on the humanities. However, 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 reconceptualiza-tions of spectatorship and the film audience, and the placement of film in the broader context of visual culture and electronic media.
When visible sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, sensation releases force as something that might destroy it, or become its ally or friend. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation With the cinema, it is the world... more
When visible sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, sensation releases force as something that might destroy it, or become its ally or friend. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation With the cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: the Movement-Image I begin with two quotes from Gilles Deleuze, including one from his book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Nothing is further from painting than camera-works. Yet one way of justifying images as painterly is to understand the spectrum of possibilities for altering space with the hand, especially if the results are textural and haptic. Call this turning figures into figuration, where producing effects of blotching, smearing, smudging, torqueing and blurring make zones of indiscernibility emerge through and across lines, movements, volumes and colours, which gain therein new intensive variations. My main inspiration here is that there is a powerful link between certain strategies of non-figurative painting and related processes in experimental film and video. In neither case am I referring to pure abstraction. Rather, I am interested in the spectrum of questions and problems raised by Deleuze's account of sensation. Speaking from a personal perspective, the logic of sensation defines the singular point where my philosophical commitments to a vitalist materialism influenced by Bergson and Deleuze intersect most intimately with my own creative moving image practice, and with the work of contemporary artists to whom I feel most closely allied. Many years of acculturation have led us to believe that the Ideal image in film or video is meant to be in clear focus from foreground to background, that the frame line is fixed along a stable horizontal line and at the average height of the human eye, that sound is inseparable from image, and that recorded motion and sound are continuous as if corresponding to an equally idealised arrow of homogeneous and linear time. The aim of these conventions is not to reproduce the world as humanly seen but rather as we believe
Every assiduous reader of Miriam Hansen's work knows that one of her major contributions to film and critical theory was to investigate cinema's possibilities for constituting an alternative public sphere with transformative effects on... more
Every assiduous reader of Miriam Hansen's work knows that one of her major contributions to film and critical theory was to investigate cinema's possibilities for constituting an alternative public sphere with transformative effects on the experience of modernity. But in reading Cinema and Experience, I found myself following another fascinating though related thread that winds through her readings of Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno in intriguing and provocative ways. I am thinking here of Miriam's deeply original account of what might be called the dynamic and disintegrated subject as a phenomenological characteristic of the experience of modernity, a concern of Miriam's from her earliest American writings. This is a deeply immanent, materialistic, and dynamic conception of subjectivity, inspired most prominently by Kracauer early and late. The critical and utopian dimensions of this fractured or shrinking subject, as it is often referred to in Cinema and Experience, are also explored in Benja-min's and Adorno's writing, although in very different ways. For those of us trying to imagine a different kind of film theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this dynamic conception of the subject was intensely appealing; it was the theme of many intense conversations Miriam and I had about Kracauer dating from the earliest days of our friendship. Miriam's characterizations of this fractured, shrinking subject are riven by multiple antinomic senses. The modernist subject shrinks first in relation to other subjects existing together in densely packed urban spaces
This essay is collected in Cine-Ethics. Eds. Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey. London: Routledge, 2014. It examines Stanley Cavell's account of cinema's responses to the paradoxes of skepticism.
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My second book is currently only available in an expensive library edition. I have uploaded a scan of the original publication for those whose might still be interested.
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These are corrected pages proofs of Chapter Five from my recent book, What Philosophy Wants from Images. The chapter is an expanded version of my essay, "The Force of Small Gestures," which includes an account of my experimental video,... more
These are corrected pages proofs of Chapter Five from my recent book, What Philosophy Wants from Images. The chapter is an expanded version of my essay, "The Force of Small Gestures," which includes an account of my experimental video, "Plato's Phaedrus."
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I am not sure that many people know that my books "Elegy for Theory" and "Philosophy's Artful Conversation" were originally one organic manuscript. The Harvard University Press Board of Syndics (apparently with wonderful support form... more
I am not sure that many people know that my books "Elegy for Theory" and "Philosophy's Artful Conversation" were originally one organic manuscript. The Harvard University Press Board of Syndics (apparently with wonderful support form Stanley Cavell) were ready to publish this massive tome until the marketing department intervened with complaints about pricing. Hence the originally three part manuscript was divided into two books. For those who might be curious about the form of the original project, I offer here my original final draft.
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This is a book proposal for my new project on Hannah Arendt, judgment, and the humanities. It is under review at University of Chicago Press.
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This book, Thinking Media Aesthetics, is available as Open Access. It has been selected to be part of the Knowledge Unlatched Crowdfunding initiative which enables libraries worldwide to invest funds for transforming academic books to... more
This book, Thinking Media Aesthetics, is available as Open Access. It has been selected to be part of the Knowledge Unlatched Crowdfunding initiative which enables libraries worldwide to invest funds for transforming academic books to Open Access.
Available here: https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/16251
Foreword by WJT Mitchell. Contributions by Samuel Weber, Ina Blom, Mary Ann Doane, Eivind Roossak, Susanne Ostby Saether, Liv Hausken, Arild Fetveit, D.N. Rodowick, Dieter Daniels and Sandra Naumann
Available here: https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/16251
Foreword by WJT Mitchell. Contributions by Samuel Weber, Ina Blom, Mary Ann Doane, Eivind Roossak, Susanne Ostby Saether, Liv Hausken, Arild Fetveit, D.N. Rodowick, Dieter Daniels and Sandra Naumann
Research Interests: Aesthetics, Methodology, Phenomenology, Video Art, Environmental Aesthetics, and 14 morePhotography Theory, Media Theory, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Materiality of Art, Media Archeology, D. N. Rodowick, Samuel Weber, Media Aesthetics, Mediality, Dieter Daniels, W.J.T. Mitchell, Mary Ann Doane, WJT Mitchell, and Sandra Naumann
I am applying to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for support to complete a series of experimental video works and installations whose proposed rubric is “Sites of Thinking.” As represented in recent books like Frédéric Gros’s A... more
I am applying to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for support to complete a series of experimental video works and installations whose proposed rubric is “Sites of Thinking.” As represented in recent books like Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking (2009) or John Kaag’s Hiking with Nietzsche (2019), the history of philosophy is populated with scenes of walking and thinking. Rousseau confessed to be helpless at his desk—thinking meant moving and to be moving through quite specific locations and environments.
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Two looped HD video projections, color, silent; nineteen digital prints In 1983, I completed a film entitled 1963 (a meditation on history and violence), which would prove to be my last circulating analog work. Made twenty years after the... more
Two looped HD video projections, color, silent; nineteen digital prints In 1983, I completed a film entitled 1963 (a meditation on history and violence), which would prove to be my last circulating analog work. Made twenty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 1963 was meant to be a contemplative investigation of the relation between image and memory, and indeed image as a medium that obscures memory as much as preserving or transmitting it. The paradox here is that the more traumatic the historical event, the more images and documents proliferate around it, clouding or fogging the experience to such an extent that one only sees the obscuring haze. Moreover, that haze fills the space around and between us to the extent that we no longer see one another and communicate historical experience directly. Support for the polis is no longer intersubjectivity and attention to others, but rather our blind attempts to navigate the information fog that surrounds and separates us. The source material for 1963 was a copy of Abraham Zapruder's 8mm footage of the Kennedy assassination, itself filmed in color Super-8 off of the screen of a small black and white video monitor as it was broadcast on national television. Already twice mediated, this 26.6 seconds of images was then blown up to 16mm and step-printed at one frame-per-second, slowing and obscuring the image while bringing forward the textures of its electronic and photochemical mediations. In 1963, the step-printed sequence is repeated once—history repeats itself, at least in images. Kennedy's 100 th birthday took place on 29 May 2017, and we are now more than fifty years past the traumatic year of 1963. In the intervals of time that have now past between and beyond 1963 and 1983, I have often thought about returning to these materials, but in expanded form and using digital means. Interval is thus a new iteration of my ongoing interest in the fading of memory and historical experience as a function of image and medium. My intuition here is that the mediated images that comprise our collective memory of historical events are subject in complex ways to temporal erosion, where duration becomes distended and elliptical, gapped and perforated, and space is clouded by a thickening or sedimentation of time perceived as indistinct layerings of the past and the present in uneven rhythms.
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#MyNeighborMonVoisinMeinNachbar is a long-term photographic documentation of a precise urban location, which Google Maps identifies as: 48°49'46.2"N 2°23'00.3"E. This space is located in a major European city next to a busy thoroughfare... more
#MyNeighborMonVoisinMeinNachbar is a long-term photographic documentation of a precise urban location, which Google Maps identifies as: 48°49'46.2"N 2°23'00.3"E. This space is located in a major European city next to a busy thoroughfare running parallel to the industrialized quay of a river. The location is often empty but sometimes occupied, not only by passers-by but by those without domicile or shelter.
This is an observational study, not a sociological one. It is without story, without interpretation, without judgment. Images are silent, reticent. What can one know of or from an image, or even from the data gleaned from a long series of images?
This is an observational study, not a sociological one. It is without story, without interpretation, without judgment. Images are silent, reticent. What can one know of or from an image, or even from the data gleaned from a long series of images?
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Plato's Phaedrus is the second iteration of a new series works that I call " philosopher walks, " or more formally, peripatetikos after the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece. Like my earlier " walking works, " the peripatetikos... more
Plato's Phaedrus is the second iteration of a new series works that I call " philosopher walks, " or more formally, peripatetikos after the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece. Like my earlier " walking works, " the peripatetikos explore formal processes of digital capture as performative gestures in response to specific environments, actions, situations, movements, trajectories, and durations—in this case, specific sites of walking and thinking evoked in the history of philosophy.
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In December 1950, Harper’s Magazine published an essay called “The Strangest Place in Chicago” by John Bartlow Martin with illustrations by Ben Shahn. Martin describes a once glorious 19th century apartment building called “The Mecca”... more
In December 1950, Harper’s Magazine published an essay called “The Strangest Place in Chicago” by John Bartlow Martin with illustrations by Ben Shahn. Martin describes a once glorious 19th century apartment building called “The Mecca” located in Chicago on 34th Street between State and Dearborn.
The Mecca was purchased quietly in 1938 for the planned expansion of what would become the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1940. Throughout this decade, the IIT sought to expel what had become nearly 2000 tenants by refusing to put money into maintenance and repairs, and then resorting to eviction proceedings. In 1950, the remaining tenants responded with mass protests. Nevertheless, The Mecca was demolished in 1952 to make way for Mies van der Rohe’s masterwork, S. R. Crown Hall, which now sits precisely on its footprint. This site and its Bronzeville environs thus evoke many fascinating themes of displaced architectures, competing visions of modernism and utopia, and conflicts in popular and cultural memory.
The core form of Returning is structured as a sequence of 26 “passages” organized as languid cross-fades from negative to positive images—at the midpoints of these transitions each passage appears as a strangely embossed bas-relief. Here Shahn’s photographs are literally reanimated. The implied movement is less a reversal than a passage through variable densities that vacillate between abstraction and figuration, which in turn suggest the ambiguity and intractability of historical documents with respect to the reanimation of the disappeared. There is no dialectic here but rather only a series of variable intensities and intervals.
The Mecca was purchased quietly in 1938 for the planned expansion of what would become the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1940. Throughout this decade, the IIT sought to expel what had become nearly 2000 tenants by refusing to put money into maintenance and repairs, and then resorting to eviction proceedings. In 1950, the remaining tenants responded with mass protests. Nevertheless, The Mecca was demolished in 1952 to make way for Mies van der Rohe’s masterwork, S. R. Crown Hall, which now sits precisely on its footprint. This site and its Bronzeville environs thus evoke many fascinating themes of displaced architectures, competing visions of modernism and utopia, and conflicts in popular and cultural memory.
The core form of Returning is structured as a sequence of 26 “passages” organized as languid cross-fades from negative to positive images—at the midpoints of these transitions each passage appears as a strangely embossed bas-relief. Here Shahn’s photographs are literally reanimated. The implied movement is less a reversal than a passage through variable densities that vacillate between abstraction and figuration, which in turn suggest the ambiguity and intractability of historical documents with respect to the reanimation of the disappeared. There is no dialectic here but rather only a series of variable intensities and intervals.
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1954 and 1958—Italy and Northern California—black & white and color. In one a woman wanders and observes; in the other, the woman wanders and is observed. In both situations the gaze is mobile, walking or driving, the world screened by... more
1954 and 1958—Italy and Northern California—black & white and color. In one a woman wanders and observes; in the other, the woman wanders and is observed. In both situations the gaze is mobile, walking or driving, the world screened by the floating frame of vision or car windows. Across the two spaces the women meander through museums, cemeteries, cities, landscapes of forest and ocean, sites of repetition, history, memory, and death. Images of faith and its distance from this world appear throughout. On the surface, no two works could be more dissimilar than Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The latter is organized spatially by an investigative and punishing male gaze leading to madness and death as it winds through San Francisco's serpentine streets. The former is dominated by the emotive face of Ingrid Bergman as she negotiates the labyrinthine streets of Naples, observing and reacting to the persistence of life in an environment overwhelmed by the force of passing and past time. Yet as described above, the two works, made only four years apart though in very difference circumstances, are surprisingly linked by many common themes, motifs, and scenographies, as if in a powerful though so far unheard conversation. The Wanderers is an original work comprised of five moving image projections and diverse sculptural objects.
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Seven Bridges (Kant) is part of a series of experimental videos and installation works devoted to sites of thinking and walking in the history of philosophy.
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This essay was originally commissioned as the entry on "Ethics" for the "The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film and Philosophy." However, it was refused by the editors. It is offered here for readers to judge for themselves.
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In fall 2007, I offered a graduate seminar at Harvard University on Stanley Cavell’s writings on film. The idea of the seminar was to examine closely Cavell’s thought on film. It was always my intention that the seminar would build toward... more
In fall 2007, I offered a graduate seminar at Harvard University on Stanley Cavell’s writings on film. The idea of the seminar was to examine closely Cavell’s thought on film. It was always my intention that the seminar would build toward two final sessions in which Cavell would be invited to conversation with us.
Cavell joined the seminar for two two-hour sessions on December 4 and 11. The first session was devoted to a general discussion Cavell’s writings; the second to in depth discussion of two then recent films, indeed two of the most popular films of summer 2007,
Ratatouille and Knocked Up. Many other films and texts were addressed along the way, and fuller information can be found in the bibliography and filmography that accompany this text.
Cavell joined the seminar for two two-hour sessions on December 4 and 11. The first session was devoted to a general discussion Cavell’s writings; the second to in depth discussion of two then recent films, indeed two of the most popular films of summer 2007,
Ratatouille and Knocked Up. Many other films and texts were addressed along the way, and fuller information can be found in the bibliography and filmography that accompany this text.
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My arguments here are inspired by Hannah Arendt’s influential essay, “What is Freedom?” first published in 1960. “What is Freedom?” is also one of the texts collected into her book entitled Between Past and Future, whose essays she called... more
My arguments here are inspired by Hannah Arendt’s influential essay, “What is Freedom?” first published in 1960. “What is Freedom?” is also one of the texts collected into her book entitled Between Past and Future, whose essays she called eight “exercises” in political thought. Why “exercises”? Exercises in the sense of rehearsals, I think, and most certainly in the spirit of thought experiments. I too consider this essay to be a thought experiment, a set of conjectures inspired by Arendt, rather than a systematically elaborated argument.
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Accounting for the powers of imagination is one of the most important problems for philosophical anthropology, and yet, despite an expansive literature, these powers remain incompletely understood. And, like judgment, imagination has its... more
Accounting for the powers of imagination is one of the most important problems for philosophical anthropology, and yet, despite an expansive literature, these powers remain incompletely understood. And, like judgment, imagination has its failures and limits as well as its flights of originality. My recent book, An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities, examined the role of judgment in the arts and humanities, but there is no
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judgment without imagination. In fact, aesthetic judgments would not arise if not inspired by imaginative responses to art works and novel situations. Nor, of course, is creation possible without imagination.
The originality of Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, which have occasioned as much criticism as admiration, resides in her conviction that the elements of an original political philosophy inhabit Kant’s third Critique, as if a restless sleeper anxious to be awakened. And just as judgment is reconsidered here in relation to politics, Arendt also suggests that in many senses, politics and aesthetics are inextricably linked. In my book on Arendt and the humanities, I read the Lectures to draw out and define what I call the operations of judgment as activities fundamental to teaching and research in the arts and humanities. In my contribution here, I want to reorient my reading toward the activities of imagination. Just as Arendt’s Lectures redirect our understanding of judgment in quite original directions, I believe that there are also important lessons about imagination waiting to be brought into clearer focus.
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judgment without imagination. In fact, aesthetic judgments would not arise if not inspired by imaginative responses to art works and novel situations. Nor, of course, is creation possible without imagination.
The originality of Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, which have occasioned as much criticism as admiration, resides in her conviction that the elements of an original political philosophy inhabit Kant’s third Critique, as if a restless sleeper anxious to be awakened. And just as judgment is reconsidered here in relation to politics, Arendt also suggests that in many senses, politics and aesthetics are inextricably linked. In my book on Arendt and the humanities, I read the Lectures to draw out and define what I call the operations of judgment as activities fundamental to teaching and research in the arts and humanities. In my contribution here, I want to reorient my reading toward the activities of imagination. Just as Arendt’s Lectures redirect our understanding of judgment in quite original directions, I believe that there are also important lessons about imagination waiting to be brought into clearer focus.
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An account of my video and installation work as an extension of my philosophical practice.
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With a running time of six hours projected as a loop, Stan Douglas's magnificent Luanda-Kinshasa is obviously concerned with the experience of time and history. Yet, this is a complex time that opens up multiple points of entry and... more
With a running time of six hours projected as a loop, Stan Douglas's magnificent Luanda-Kinshasa is obviously concerned with the experience of time and history. Yet, this is a complex time that opens up multiple points of entry and dimensions of experience for each spectator. Before entering The Studio, the projection space of the Bourse de Commerce, visitors hear pulsing jazz-funk rhythms that recall the pan-African syntheses of funk and Afrobeat epitomized on albums like Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, LIVE/EVIL, and On the Corner. What one sees projected in the installation space is a precise reconstruction of "The Church," a former Columbia Records studio on East Thirtieth Street in New York, decommissioned in the 1980s, where many of the greatest jazz musicians of the postwar period recorded their masterpieces.
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This is an unpublished review of Philippe Grandrieux's production of "Tristan und Isolde." Imagine an opera without the trappings of obviously operatic (and sometimes melodramatic) staging. Gone are the period costumes or glittering... more
This is an unpublished review of Philippe Grandrieux's production of "Tristan und Isolde."
Imagine an opera without the trappings of obviously operatic (and sometimes melodramatic) staging. Gone are the period costumes or glittering fashion statements, the impressive architectural settings, the elaborate lighting effects, sweeping gestures and movements. Staging and choreography are reduced to a minimum. In the French language, a live performance is a “representation.” But this work is not opera in the usual sense. In Grandrieux’s words, it is “opera undone” (“opéra défait”). The question posed by Grandrieux is “How to achieve the silent depth of the body? To tear opera from opera, dance from dance, live performance from live performance, so that one is faced with what one does not know, with what cannot be said, willed, but which imposes itself on one in the silence of the body, in its obscurity.”1 Not an opera and not a representation.
Imagine an opera without the trappings of obviously operatic (and sometimes melodramatic) staging. Gone are the period costumes or glittering fashion statements, the impressive architectural settings, the elaborate lighting effects, sweeping gestures and movements. Staging and choreography are reduced to a minimum. In the French language, a live performance is a “representation.” But this work is not opera in the usual sense. In Grandrieux’s words, it is “opera undone” (“opéra défait”). The question posed by Grandrieux is “How to achieve the silent depth of the body? To tear opera from opera, dance from dance, live performance from live performance, so that one is faced with what one does not know, with what cannot be said, willed, but which imposes itself on one in the silence of the body, in its obscurity.”1 Not an opera and not a representation.
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In today’s parlance, avant-garde is often used interchangeably, and perhaps just as carelessly, with experimental film or video. I much prefer the latter term. Today, I want to argue that there is a powerful case to be made for... more
In today’s parlance, avant-garde is often used interchangeably, and perhaps just as carelessly, with experimental film or video. I much prefer the latter term. Today, I want to argue that there is a powerful case to be made for considering art practice as experiment and experimentation. Art is not science, thank heavens, and the analogy between creative practice and laboratory experimentation only reaches so far. But there are, I believe, strong correspondences between studio and laboratory experiment, and making clear the similarities and differences between these two kinds of work might help us to understand the power and significance of creative failure in the arts, and especially, the digital arts, for failure is intrinsic to all experimentation.
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The visual arts are often considered to be distinct from the humanities, as image is to text and practice is to theory. I want to open for discussion another perspective where the arts and humanities are imagined as inseparable and... more
The visual arts are often considered to be distinct from the humanities, as image is to text and practice is to theory. I want to open for discussion another perspective where the arts and humanities are imagined as inseparable and integrated activities. In both areas we are introduced to special conceptual worlds, as Wittgenstein once put it, that both challenge and enlarge our basic human capacities for interpretation and evaluation.
This text was first presented as a Humanities Day lecture at the University of Chicago on 18 October 2014. Video documentation can be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlJhuRMxXJg
This text was first presented as a Humanities Day lecture at the University of Chicago on 18 October 2014. Video documentation can be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlJhuRMxXJg