Original manuscript for "Elegy for Theory" (book version)

For Dudley Andrew, who guided my thought at the beginning, and Stanley Cavell, whose example steered me through the middle, in hope that I find my own way in the end. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 2 An Elegy for Theory D. N. Rodowick Harvard University Press Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory Ein philosophisches Problem hat die Form: “Ich kenne mich nicht aus.” --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Mark Tansey, West Face, 2004, Gagosian Gallery [permissions] 3 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 4 Table of Contents In place of beginning . . . . Part I. The Senses of Theory 1. A compass in a moving world 2. Many lines of descent 3. Theoria as practical philosophy 4. The sage is only wise in theory 5. Variations and discontinuities: aesthetic 6. How art found theory 7. Philosophy before the arts 8. The rarity of theory Part II. A Cartography of Theory 9. On the history of film theory 10. Genres of theory 11. Excursus: Ricciotto Canudo and the aesthetic discourse 12. On the way to language 13. The travels of Formalism 14. An uncertain and irrational art: filmology as a positive science 15. A small history of structuralism 16. After the long eclipse 17. An object, a method, a domain 18. A care for the claims of theory 19. The sense of an ending 20. “Suddenly, an Age of Theory” 21. The Fifth Element 22. “A struggle without end, exterior and interior” 23. Becoming a subject in theory Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory Part III. Philosophy’s Artful Conversation 24. A permanent state of suspension or deferment 25. How theory became history 26. “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” 27. “I will teach you differences” 28. An assembling of reminders 29. ". . . a complicated network of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing" 30. Gedankenwegen: on import and interpretation 31. “Of which we cannot speak . . .”: philosophy and the humanities 32. What is (film) philosophy? 33. Order out of chaos 34. Idea, Image, and intuition 35. The world, time 36. The ordinary necessity of philosophy (philosophy, modernity, and skepticism) 37. “Art now exists in the condition of philosophy” 38. Falling in love with the world 39. Ontology and desire, or a moving response to skepticism 40. Automatism and the declaration of existence in time 41. Ethical practices of the ordinary 42. Perfectionism as self-disobedience 43. Comedy and community 44. A digression on difference 45. Perfectionism’s ironic transport 46. An elegy for theory 5 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 6 In place of beginning. . . . He sent thither his Theôry, or solemn legation for sacrifice, decked in the richest garments. --George Grote, A History of Greece (1862) A new audiovisual culture, whose broad and indiscernible outlines we are only just beginning to distinguish, calls us to new modes of existence and forms of experience. Like any soul derailed by the vertiginous shock of modernity, we seek a conceptual compass to guide us home. One name for this navigational instrument is theory; another may be philosophy. An Elegy for Theory is the second of two books where I discuss the fate of cinema studies as a field of humanistic inquiry in the twenty-first century. The first book, The Virtual Life of Film, explored the philosophical consequences of the disappearance of a photographic ontology for the art of film and the future of cinema studies as the creative process of filmmaking becomes overtaken by digital technologies. An Elegy for Theory surveys critically the place and function of the idea of theory in the humanities as we have lived and still live it today. The Virtual Life of Film concludes by reaffirming the importance of theory in that every discipline sustains itself “in theory”--a discipline’s coherence derives not from the objects it examines, but rather from the concepts and methods it mobilizes to generate critical thought. An Elegy for Theory continues this argument through a critical and historical examination of what theory means for the arts and humanities, and why and how it has become a contested concept over the past thirty years. The book also takes the fate of theory in cinema studies as exemplary of the more general contestation of theory in the humanities. Indeed my discovery in writing this book is that theory has always been a difficult, unstable, and undisciplined concept, and this history of unruliness reaches back 2500 years. Like every author, I hope this book will be read and thought about as a whole composed of many interconnected parts and voicings, where a sympathetic ear attends to the unfolding of themes and variations, harmony and counterpoint, refrains, returns, and improvisations, as different lines of thought depart from and return to one another in new Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 7 contexts. Yet having reached the point where I am ready to release my elegy for theory into readers’ hands, I discover with some embarrassment that I have and have not written the book I intended to write. The book should be read as a whole, but many readers will justifiably approach it in sections or parts. Similar to The Virtual Life of Film, which this book is meant to complement, An Elegy for Theory is divided into three parts, “The Senses of Theory,” “A Cartography of Theory,” and “Philosophy’s Artful Conversation.” Another natural division falls between Part II and Part III, as the third part is equal in length to the first two. More significantly, this division marks a turn in my argument where the problematic existence of theory becomes the possibility of philosophy, especially what I call a philosophy of the humanities. I have just said that theory is problematic, meaning in a first sense that when we feel puzzled or perplexed, we turn to theory to navigate into and out of the problems blocking our paths to thought. (Theories do not resolve problems. Rather, think of theories and problems as mutually sustaining opposed forces.) Parts I and II of this book also view “theory” itself as problematic in the extent that, as a word and concept, it is considered to have a sense or to indicate a given practice of thought, or that it even has a single continuous history. In analogy with film’s virtual life, theory is a way of thinking that when considered critically and genealogically retreats from us as rapidly as we approach it, like a fata morgana. We moderns in the humanities have lived with theory for what seems like a long time. It has a certain presence to us or for us, which some embrace and others resist. But if theory is considered as something more like a language game, in how many ways could it be played? How variable or consistent would the rules remain across these games, and how many varieties of similarity and difference might become apparent? Considered in this way, my Elegy for Theory now divides into a series of plateaus with different areas and elevations, sometimes separated by impassable crevices and sometimes connected by hidden passages or overlooked bridges. This terrain is rugged and uneven. Some plateaus obscure others from clear sighting until we change our distance or angle, and many are populated with their own distinct ecosystems, some of which are seeded by neighboring land, some not. All of which is to say that I think of this book as something like a topographic map whose aim is to make clear and perspicuous Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 8 the branching lines of descent, but also the breaks, divisions, or fractures, where theory’s meaning takes the form of irregular series. The first two parts of an Elegy for Theory are organized around important historical disruptions in our senses of theory. Throughout this book, I argue that the concept of theory has a long pedigree in the history of philosophy, where theory is often in contest or competition with philosophy. At the same time, it is not possible, in either the history of philosophy or in the philosophy of science, to attribute a stable sense to theory that leads inexorably toward a perfectible concept around which a final consensus can be achieved. This is one way that theory too has a virtual life with many breaks and variations. It may be that our relation to theory always has been, and perhaps always will be, contingent and historical. For example, in the classical era, a vernacular sense of theoria as civic witnessing, watching, observing, or giving official and reliable testimony is displaced around the 4th century BC by a newer sense of attentive reflection or meditation, something closer to what later became contemplatio in Latin translation. Concomitant with this transformation is the invention of a new practice of thought as well as a new mode of life, called philosophein or philosophizing, whose reach towards understanding the world also aims at transforming the self. The desire for a philosophical life is driven not only by a thirst for knowledge, but also and principally by ethical dissatisfaction and existential dilemmas that encourage the quest for a new way of life or mode of existence. A second rupture occurs in the later 18th century, where variations in concepts of theory make of it a term of mediation between the senses and reason. At this moment theory is linked to another too familiar term undergoing new pressures of transformation-aesthetic. Moreover, debates on the senses of theory in relation to art and science, and whether there can be a science of art, are part and parcel with the emergence of philosophy as a university faculty and an academic discipline. While the two moments of rupture are very different and singular in many respects, each discontinuity is also accompanied by a process of retrojection; in other words, the messy and conflictual history of the concept is suppressed in each new instance by projecting past historical continuities backwards to construct a teleology that leads inevitably to its present now favored definition. Every violent conceptual struggle is thus followed by efforts to provide Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 9 a venerable ancestry for newly won definitions of the concept. New concepts of theory are thus often guided by present interest through forces of retrojection that make the unfamiliar familiar again. As exemplified in the Introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetic, periods of discontinuity and debate also inspire a drive to legislate boundaries between the activities of theory, philosophy, and science, which in turn seek to establish epistemological hierarchies among these practices. But these boundaries, too, are unstable, fluid, and often blurred and indiscernible or exchangeable. The legislative drive often takes the form of debates concerning what a science is, or what philosophy is or may be, with theory as an intermediate term floating uncertainly between the two. To achieve some clarity in evaluating these historical disruptions and debates, I suggest that there are three basic semantic domains where theory is deployed as a language game--what I call the vernacular, the methodical, and the scientific--though in individual uses they can overlap, become interchangeable, or even confused. By the mid-nineteenth century the problem with theory, what makes theory problematic in its variable senses, is that it is divided from within by forking genealogical roots--one sunk deeply in the ancient ground of philosophy, the other maturing and flourishing out of the history of positivism and the empirical sciences--that will be unequally nourished in the twentieth century. Even so, the evocation of theory as a practice or special concept of knowledge remains rare up to the mid-twentieth century, especially in the arts and humanities. There are interesting and significant exceptions, however, where the appeal to theory or “theories of,” no matter how rare, yield powerful instances, some of which associate an idea of theory with crises of modernity. From this perspective, a work like György Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel may be read, as Lukács himself suggests in a retrospective preface, in a way where theory signifies the response to this crisis, at once ethical and social, wherein one no longer feels at home in the world and where the movements of history are experienced not as progress but rather as the headlong rush into catastrophe. Discontinuity, retrojection, and rarity are important watchwords in my elegy for theory. The second part of the book narrows the historical focus to the twentieth century, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 10 where the history of cinema as an art form, and the history of thought about cinema, emerge alongside a new discourse of the human sciences. I characterize this thought as three historically distinct yet often overlapping discursive modalities: the aesthetic discourse, the discourse of structure or signification, and the discourse of ideology or culture. (Part III of my elegy for theory will begin by examining the paradoxical question of what comes “after” theory, whether in the form of the post-Theory debates of the 1990s, or in the suggestion that theory is displaced by philosophy and history.) Part II of this book is not so much a history of theory in film or the human sciences as a critical examination of significant moments of rupture, reconsideration, and retrojection where theory takes itself as its own object, examines and reconfigures its genealogy, conceptual structure, and terminology, and posits for itself a new identity and cultural standing. It may seem odd to take the history of thought about cinema as representative of a much larger and complex debate in the humanities, but there are several advantages of narrowing my analysis in this way. Focusing on the history of a single field of discourse makes my account more manageable. In addition, while film studies is relatively young as a university discipline, thought about cinema as been conceptually and discursively bound up with the main twentieth century critical debates about both literature and art. In many cases, what comes to be known as literary or art theory is forged in the same historical contexts as writing on film, and all three can be seen as belonging to and interacting in common discursive and conceptual frameworks. Theory is a tangled skein composed from many threads--this is already the lesson of Part I-whose filaments must be followed both individually and in the weave of their shifting patterns. Accordingly, my arguments will focus on significant points of passage and displacement in the genealogy of theory: Riccioto Canudo as exemplar of the aesthetic discourse, Boris Eikhenbaum and Russian Formalism, the filmology movement in France, the rise of structuralism and the early work of Christian Metz, and finally, the acknowledged and unacknowledged influence of Louis Althusser on the discourses of political modernism, culturalism, and the politics of identity. These points of passage should be imagined less as fixed and successive periods, or conceptual schemes overturning and replacing one another, than as overlapping and intersecting genres of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 11 discourse full of retentions, returns, and unexpected extensions, as well as ellipses and omissions. What I offer here is not a history of contemporary theory, then, but rather something like the elements of a historiography of concepts, enunciative modalities, and discursive formations in which developments in the academic study of film might stand, pars pro toto, for the vicissitudes of theory in the humanities more generally. Our contemporary tendency to characterize “theory” as a genre of discourse in the humanities is a fairly recent phenomena, appearing gradually only after WW II. To the extent that a concept of “film theory” emerges in a common framework with ideas of literary or art theory, and that all three have comparable conceptual commitments forged in the shifting discursive contexts of aesthetics, Russian formalism, structuralism, and poststructuralism, the study of film study provides an admirably clear case for describing transformations and debates on theory in general. By the same token, the post-Theory debate launched by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll in film studies in the 1990s--with which I begin Part III of this book--offers a fascinating and clarifying context for investigating the conceptual claims of the various efforts to critique, overturn, or forget “theory” more generally in the humanities. The plateaus of Part III mark off several interconnected territories where philosophy tests it difference from and frontiers with theory. My guiding idea is that while philosophy is linked to theory in many inescapable ways, it still remains distinct from theory as a practice. These plateaus are in turn divided by a valley that passes from further examinations of theory’s contested life to a more constructive vision of or for philosophy, or what I will call a philosophy of the humanities. In our contemporary moment, philosophy has many rivals, many from within philosophy itself, who seek to transform it or even to do away with it by projecting a single standard of rationality for all forms of thought. This attitude is exemplified in contemporary attacks on theory in the humanities and in the prestige currently enjoyed by cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. David Bordwell’s critique of interpretation and his promotion of historical poetics are formidable examples of this trend. In these sections my intention is not to question Bordwell’s influential and admirable work on problems of history, style, and poetics, but rather to respond to his rather acid critique of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 12 and disdain for the humanities. Bordwell’s work on historical poetics is guided by a concept that I call, somewhat ironically, “’good’ theory.” As a rival to what both Bordwell and Noël Carroll call grand Theory, good theory aims to anchor analysis and history in the epistemological ideals of rational and empirical inquiry proximate to the natural sciences. I use the example of good theory to question whether this standard of rationality is any more stable than the positions it opposes, and to introduce my critique of what P. M. S. Hacker calls the tendency to “scientism,” or the illicit extension of the methods and concepts of experimental science into areas of human expression and culture where they do not apply. Bordwell’s critique of interpretation and his promotion of historical poetics marks one phase in contemporary contestations of theory in film, where the turn to cognitivism and evolutionary psychology have provided new opportunities to replace theory with methods and approaches inspired by analytical philosophies of science. Another phase subjects the association of theory with science to philosophical critique. Deeply influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s purported critique of theory in the Philosophical Investigations, this perspective calls for a new orientation in the examination of culture and the arts through a philosophy of the humanities. No doubt the appeal of good theory is very great, especially for those who seek certainty and stable grounds for knowledge. The open questions remain, however, what counts as knowing, and whether or not there is a single standard of knowledge applicable in all cases, or whether there are justifiable forms of knowledge that are both contingent and context dependent, and which are to be valued for their contingency and context dependency. In my view, the logical frameworks of cognitivism and historical poetics, on the one hand, and the strain of analytic philosophy of science proximate to and critical of the humanities, on the other, overreach in projecting their particular view of rationality as a single standard of explanation. The interest of the later Wittgenstein for my book, and for the humanities in general, begins with his attack on the identification of philosophy with science. This leads to another critical challenge to theory as laid out in the Introduction to Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey’s important collection, Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. In reading Allen and Turvey, I examine and reassess Wittgenstein’s Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 13 purported rejection of theory as a method inappropriate for philosophical investigation of thought and culture. My aim here is to ask whether the conceptual investigation and evaluation of theory in all its historical varieties and differences can be preserved within the framework of philosophy as Wittgenstein conceived it, which also means asking whether strict borders between philosophy and theory must really be strictly marked. The turn to the later Wittgenstein introduces one of the major arguments of Part III, which is to sketch out an idea of a philosophy of the humanities inspired by G. H. von Wright’s assertion that the humanities study phenomena of culture or expression--call these forms of human life--that may and should be distinguished logically from methods and objects of study in the natural sciences. A primary task of a philosophy of the humanities is to assess the limits of scientific explanation, and in turn to describe and defend the sui generis character of humanistic understanding. Questions of interpretation, aesthetic judgment, and ethical evaluation are of central concern to the humanities, and here I set out the layered and multifaceted connections between these activities and Wittgenstein’s more prominent philosophical attention to problems of language and psychology. One of the principle trends of twentieth century philosophy, which G. H. von Wright justly criticized, is an excessive concern with epistemology that leads to a kind of conceptual poverty and value nihilism. The goal of a philosophy of the humanities is to redress this imbalance between epistemology and ethics, and to understand how the particular form of the will to truth expressed by scientism not only excludes a priori ways of knowing and interpreting that may be of great value, but also willfully tries to make the humanities disappear behind the mask of science. The line of thought that weaves from the later Wittgenstein through the work of von Wright, Hacker, Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, among others, can then be understood as motivated by the desire to assert and defend the autonomy of humanistic investigation and understanding. The idea that a philosophy of the humanities derives from the sui generis character of humanistic understanding takes inspiration from Charles Taylor’s account of humans as self-interpreting animals. Taylor’s fascinating claim is that our knowledge of reality, and the reality of our selves, are inseparable from our experience of reality in terms of both Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 14 knowledge and value, and of what we value in our ways of knowing ourselves and in the modes of existence we construct and inhabit. To interpret and to understand necessarily require a reflexive turn in acts of self-interpretation where problems of knowing are inextricably intertwined with questions of import and value. Therefore, ethics and reason, evaluation and interpretation, are intertwined activities because to claim to know is always to value certain ways of knowing, and to value is to project a world commensurate with the forms of reason one aspires to define and develop in conceptual expression. To project a world also means that philosophy is concerned with the expansion and conceptual renovation of our expressive resources as avenues toward possible transformations of our terms of existence. Philosophy must be imagined as a practice of change and invention, of augmenting, enlarging, and enhancing our conceptual schemes, of creating new styles of thought, and of projecting future states of self and society to which we aspire. Along these lines of thought, the reminder of Part III is devoted to discussing two philosophers as exemplars of the twinned projects of ethical and epistemological evaluation: Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell. Deleuze and Cavell are two contemporary philosophers with distinctly original conceptions of the specificity of philosophy and of philosophical expression in relation to film and the arts. In reading these two thinkers together, I want to deepen and clarify their original contributions to our understanding of film and of contemporary philosophical problems of ontology and ethics, and interpretation and evaluation. The remaining plateaus of Part III are then guided by three primary questions: What are Deleuze and Cavell’s particular conceptions of philosophy, and why is art or film so central to that conception? How do Deleuze and Cavell conceive philosophical practice as being immanent to artistic or cinematographic expression? And finally, what conception of ethics informs these two prior questions? Despite their apparent differences of approach and style, the philosophical work of Deleuze and Cavell are linked by many common themes: the relation of philosophy to art or science; the necessary role of the friend in philosophy; the critique of the cogito as an image of thought and existence; and dedication to an image of time or change as force, becoming, and recurrence deeply influenced by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Another Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 15 obvious way of linking Deleuze and Cavell is that in their own unique ways both share a picture of philosophy as inherently problematic; that is, as posing its own existence as a problem that must continually be revisited, rethought, and reassessed. The problematic nature of philosophy often takes the form of ethical questioning--what is the good of philosophy?--and in both philosophers the ethical relation is inseparable from our relationship to thought. For how we think, and whether we sustain a relation to thought or not, is bound up with our choices of a mode of existence and our relations with others and to the world. Odd as it may seem, there is a profound connecting thread that runs through Wittgenstein, Deleuze, and Cavell in the idea of restlessness and homelessness as the condition of thought, and that what matters most to philosophy can only be shown, not possessed or expressed. And if it could be expressed, it is likely to be misunderstood. In this perspective, philosophy is not a state to be attained, but a condition always to be discovered. My account of Deleuze’s possible contributions to (film) philosophy follow upon my sketch of the elements or grammar of a possible philosophy of the humanities, with its concern for interpretation and ethical evaluation. A key criterion for linking and contrasting Deleuze and Cavell is their common articulation of dilemmas of skepticism and the problem of belief. Here the path from Deleuze to Cavell takes an interesting turn. While Deleuze’s Spinozan ontology presents a universe or plane of immanence where skepticism should be made irrelevant, in The Time-Image his ethical picture of humanity’s broken link with the world demonstrates Deleuze’s difficulty in accounting for the human dimensions of this dilemma and the possible range of responses to it. A deep though not immediately apparent connection between Cavell and Deleuze might be located precisely at this point. There is a sinuous line where Cavell and Deleuze’s accounts of ontology complement one another, as if two pieces of a puzzle, whose pictures portray different worlds that nonetheless fit precisely at their joins. Along this line, Deleuze’s ethical demand to restore belief in this world finds itself paired with Cavell’s career-long examination of the grammar of acknowledgement and the logic of moral perfectionism. In turn, Cavell’s work is exemplary of a philosophy of and for the humanities, particularly in his original attempt to rebalance the concerns of epistemology and ethics. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 16 The common denominator between Deleuze and Cavell occurs in a grammar of worlding or worldliness: to acknowledge our connection to the world, as a moral connection to the world and to others; to believe again not in a transcendent world, but in this world with its reticence or recalcitrance, but also with its powers of change. Deleuze and Cavell are therefore both concerned with a similar problem: how does the subject undergo or experience change? However, unlike Deleuze, in Cavell time does not operate as a metaphysical constant, but rather as an ethical will that must be continually re-enacted because it is continually forgotten. One might say, then, that moral perfectionism is to Cavell’s philosophy what becoming is to Deleuze. Both concepts require new attention to the force of time in relation to qualities of change and transformation rooted in new and original approaches to Nietzsche’s thought. I call this discovering a passion for time. For both philosophers, the moving image is a privileged medium for exploring this passion for time, but in a special way. Filmic expression does not exemplify concepts or provide examples for philosophy; as artful expression it is philosophy, or rather, a becoming-philosophy tending toward conceptual formation. As expression, one of art’s many happy occupations is to be a friend to philosophy, and to aid in philosophical becoming. Acknowledgments The gift of friendship, philosophical and otherwise, is everywhere present in this book. I am above all grateful for the colleagues and companions who endured with patience and good cheer my obsessive probing of the vicissitudes of theory, and who shared their time, thoughts, knowledge, and skills of critical reading to help me bring into focus my sometimes meandering arguments. Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities at Harvard University Press, was unwavering in his support for this book, which grew in scale and ambition beyond either of our expectations. I am very grateful for his encouragement, advice, and above all, patience. A few courageous friends undertook the task of reading large sections of the manuscript, providing invaluable advice. Foremost among these are my most loyal and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 17 penetrating critic, Michael Westlake, and my equally critical and supportive partner, Dominique Bluher. John Hamilton also carefully reviewed the first part of the book, making many helpful suggestions, and saving me from embarrassing infelicities of German, Latin, and Greek. Among the other dear friends and colleagues who shared their work, ideas, and criticisms were Richard Abel, Dudley Andrew, Homi Bhabha, Karl-Alfred and Eliane Bluher, Brian Price, Alex Galloway, Michael Holquist, Martin Jay, András Bálint Kovács, Martin Levebvre, John MacKay, Toril Moi, Richard Moran, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Robert Ray, Eric Rentschler, Judith Ryan, Masha Salazkina, Diana Sorensen, Megan Sutherland, Galin Tihanov, Maureen Turim, and Justin Weir. The ever extraordinary Renée Pastel provided invaluable editorial help, verifying citations, reviewing translations, and copy editing with her usual precision and thoughtfulness. The genesis of many of the ideas and arguments for this book occurred at one of the most exciting and challenging events of my academic career: the Radcliffe Institute Exploratory Seminar on “Contesting Theory,” co-organized by myself, Stanley Cavell, and Tom Conley, which took place in May 2007. An early version of my essay, “An Elegy for Theory,” was circulated as a discussion paper at this workshop, whose participants included Richard Allen, Sally Banes, Edward Branigan, Noël Carroll, Francesco Casetti, Joan Copjec, Philip Rosen, Vivian Sobchack, Malcolm Turvey, and Thomas Wartenberg, as well as Allyson Field, Dominique Bluher, and Meraj Dhir. After this workshop, I needed no further convincing of the power of conversation to generate new thought and critical commentary, and I thank all who participated for the lasting influence of their ideas and criticisms. Many of my arguments were also honed by responding to challenging audiences at invited lectures and conferences at Oklahoma State University, the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, Concordia University, The Columbia University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation, the University of California, Los Angeles, the “Waking Life” conference in Berlin, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Shue Yan University, the New School for Social Research, the University of Edinburgh, the Laboratory for Advanced Research on Film and Philosophy, Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem, New University of Lisbon, the Udine International Conference on the History Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 18 of Film Theory/Permanent Seminar on the Histories of Film Theories, the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota, Leopold-Franzens-Universität, Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar, Wayne State University, the University of Florida, Gainesville, the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. I am especially beholden to the staff, colleagues, and fellows who shared with me one of the most extraordinary and fertile semesters of my career at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie in Weimar, including the generous and brilliant co-directors of the Institute, Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert. Portions of the manuscript have appeared as articles including “An Elegy for Theory,” October 121 (Summer 2007); “Ricciotto Canudo and the Birth of Film Aesthetics,” Cinematic 8 (Spring 2008); “The World, Time,” in Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, ed. D. N. Rodowick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); “A Care for the Claims of Theory,” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 1 (Fall 2010); “Of which we cannot speak . . . : philosophy and the humanities,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung Heft 2 (Autumn 2011); “’Art now exists in the condition of philosophy’,” Sites: the journal of 20th-century/contemporary French studies 16.2 (March 2012); “The Value of Being Disagreeable,” Critical Inquiry (forthcoming); “The Aesthetic Discourse in Classical Film Theory,” Dossier on Classical Film Theory, Screen (xxx); and “A Compass in a Moving World” in Thinking Media Aesthetics, eds. Liv Hausken, et al. (Peter Lang, in press). I wish to thank the editors of these publications for their attentive comments and suggestions, and for their kind permission to reprint this material here. A final thank you, and perhaps the most important one, goes out to my undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard University. I wonder if you know how deep your influence can be on the professors who pretend to teach you? My Elegy for Theory was shaped in deeply influential ways by students in several iterations of my seminar on Philosophy and Film, including the fall 2004 seminar on “Post-Theory,” the fall 2007 seminar on “The Film Philosophy of Stanley Cavell,” wherein Stanley generously Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory played a crucial and personal role, and finally and perhaps most importantly, my spring 2012 seminar on “Deleuze and Cavell.” 19 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory Part I. The senses of theory 20 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 21 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 requires 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 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 22 screened images raise regarding our locatedness in time and in space, both in relation 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 more present than ever to 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 re-experience 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 or 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 which 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 Moebius strip. The displacement of the photographic by the digital inspires new forms 1 “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) 258. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 23 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 2 Philosophical Investigations II, § vi, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) 155. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 24 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, I will soon argue, these critics have a no more clear 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 true for its defenders as 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, 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 which, 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 3 Published as “Dr. Strange Media, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Film Theory” in Inventing Film Studies, Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) 374-397. An expanded version of this essay comprises Part I of The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 1-24. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 25 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 enquiry, 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 even 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 hands? 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. Passed from hand to hand its surface is 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 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 26 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 unfocussed 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 to 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 cul-de-sacs, 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 which 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 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 27 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 Or further, in an essay of 1920s, that philosophy is “essentially one with science, differing from the special sciences merely by the generality of its problems, and by the fact that it is concerned with the formation of hypotheses where empirical evidence is lacking. It conceives that all knowledge is scientific knowledge, to be ascertained and proved by the methods of science.”6 But this is yet another story, to which I will return in Parts 2 and 3 of this book. Still, an oft-repeated desire expressed in the many diverse branches of analytical philosophy in the twentieth century was that philosophy is something modernity needs to be cured of through a 4 “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) 146-147; translation modified. 5 Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy [1914] (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961) 42 and 71. 6 “Philosophy in the Twentieth Century” in Sceptical Essays [1928] (New York: Routledge, 2004) 54. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 28 renewed grounding in scientific rationality and the elimination of all problems that cannot be subjected to logical analysis. This claim is a far cry from Nietzsche or Emerson, who found in philosophy a means of diagnosis and perhaps homeopathic relief from the disorienting forces of modernity. What line of descent would connect theory to their vision of philosophy? 3. Theoria as practical philosophy The best in us has perhaps been inherited from the feelings of former times, feelings which today can hardly be approached on direct paths; the sun has already set, but our life’s sky glows and shines with it still, although we no longer see it. --Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human Theory has, in the course of centuries, been a highly variable concept. One finds the noble origins of theory in the Greek sense of theoria as viewing, speculation, or the contemplative life. For Plato it is the highest form of human activity; in Aristotle, the chief activity of the First Unmoved Mover and the only practice loved for its own sake. As importantly, for Hellenic culture theory was also an ethos that associated love of wisdom with a style of life or mode of existence based on practices of self-examination and selftransformation. A profound incommensurability thus separates our contemporary senses of theory from the Hellenic conception of philosophein as simultaneously a “theoretic” activity and an ethos, desirable above all others. Indeed, the association and disassociation of theory from ethics and from philosophy will be a recurrent theme in this book. Bringing together thea (sight) and theoros (spectator), theory has often been linked to vision and spectacle. Theorein meant to observe attentively, to survey or witness. With its etymological link to witnessing, theater, and spectatorship, no doubt it was inevitable that the young medium of film should call for theory. Nevertheless, the idea of theory as Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 29 beholding has deep and varied roots.7 In pre-Socratic thought the philosopher is the spectator par excellence. When Leon the tyrant of Phlius asked Pythagoras who he was he responded with a word nearly unknown at the time, “A philosopher.” In Diogenes Laertius’ account Pythagoras continues by comparing life to the Great Games where some are present to compete in athletic or musical contests and others come to buy and sell at market. The best of all, however, are theoroi or spectators--those who neither serve nor seek fame and wealth but rather observe and pursue wisdom. The ethical dimension of this parable is important. The Pythagorean concept of theoria as contemplative spectatorship promoted the active intellectual study of number theory, geometry, music, and astronomy as bringing understanding of the ordered movements of the kosmos and the structure of everything it contains, including human thought. But at the same time, these contemplative activities were meant to promote a change in the philosopher’s 7 In his 1954 lecture on “Science and Reflection,” Martin Heidegger offers a fascinating etymology of theory: “The word ‘theory’ stems from the Greek verb theōrein . The noun belonging to it is theōría. Peculiar to these words is a lofty and mysterious meaning. The verb theōrein grew out of the coalescing of two root words, thea and horaō. Thea (cf. theater) is the outward look, the aspect, in which something shows itself, the outward appearance in which it offers itself. Plato names this aspect in which what presences shows what it is, eídos. To have seen this aspect, eidenai, is to know [wissen]. The second root word in theōrein, horaō, means: to look at something attentively, to look it over, to view it closely. Thus it follows that theōrein is thean horan, to look attentively on the outward appearance wherein what presences becomes visible and, through such sightseeing-to linger with it. That particular way of life (bios) that receives its determination from theōrein and devotes itself to it the Greeks call bios theōrētikos, the way of life of the beholder, the one who looks upon the pure shining-forth of that which presences. In contrast to this, bios praktikos is the way of life that is dedicated to action and productivity. In adhering to this distinction, however, we must constantly keep one thing in mind: for the Greeks, bios theōrētikos, the life of beholding, is, especially in its purest form as thinking, the highest doing. Theoria in itself, and not only through the utility attaching to it, is the consummate form of human existence.” In The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (1977) 163. Of great interest in this lecture is not only Heidegger’s fascinating genealogy of the early senses of theōrein, but also his investigation of how the classical Greek sense of theory is slowly transformed into our more modern scientific sense, where the holistic concept of theory as a bios mutates into a concept that compartmentalizes the real in the formation of objects of observation. Heidegger’s main point, however, is that these earlier philosophical meanings linger in the concept, as if an ancient spring that still nourishes a mighty ocean, waiting patiently to be rediscovered. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 30 existence, for through theoria one attained active assimilation to the divine Intellect or nous present in all of us.8 This little parable already embodies some fascinating historical paradoxes. The source of this story comes from Cicero’s summary of a fragment from Heraclides of Pontus (a member of Plato’s Academy). Andrea Wilson Nightingale argues that this is already a fourth century retrojection of philosophy and theoretic wisdom onto pre-Socratic thought in order to produce a venerable genealogy for a later invention.9 The emergence of classical philosophy thus already evinces a contestation of theoria that dissembles its discontinuities and incommensurabilities with earlier conceptions. Later I will argue that retrojection seems to be a persistent feature of theory formation as all the various and discontinuous senses of theory displace one another in ways that impose forms of continuity that make present history the inevitable culmination of a past trajectory. One important task of a genealogy of theory, then, is to identify, in all their dissension and contradiction, the many lines of descent covered over by the historical force of retrojection. 8 See Diogoenes Laertius’ Lives of the Greek Philosophers, VIII (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 200) as well as W. K. C. Guthries’ A History of Greek Philosophy. Volume I: The earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962) 211-212. Also see Pierre Hadot’s What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), especially 15-21. 9 See her Introduction to Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially 17-18. This genealogy is yet more complex. My Harvard colleague John Hamilton notes that the historical aspect of Greek lexicography is important here. Originally, a theoros was the envoy selected to consult an oracle. Only later is the word used to designate anyone who is officially sent to be present at city festivals; hence, the noun theorion, which denotes a box at the amphitheater. The use of theoriaas contemplation or consideration in the Pythagorean sense is attested in Plato dialogues, especially Philebus 38b and also Phaedrus 84b, where the verb theaomai is used with the object alethes (“to contemplate the truth”). Even later, with the development of oratorical training, the word theoria comes to name the explanatory preface to a speech relating specific concerns (meletē). See also Hans Blumenberg’s Das Lachen der Thrakerin: Eine Urgeschichte der Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987) and Hannelore Rausch’s Theoria: Von ihrer sakralen zur philosophischen Bedeutung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1982) Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 31 Diogenes Laertius credits Pythagoras, no doubt apocryphally, to coining the term “philosopher” to characterize his thought and way of life. Before the fourth century, theoria most often referred to the civic practice of sending delegates to witness oracles and religious festivals. Moreover, philosophein was used only rarely and in a vernacular sense as intellectual cultivation. Thus Plato’s setting out of philosophy as a specific kind of practice in The Republic shows that by the fourth century BCE theoria, in its various conceptual connotations, had become central to a Hellenic characterization of philosophein as a specific kind of activity--the ethical choice for a mode of existence devoted to a contemplation of world that required, in equal measure, an active transformation of the self. This conception is most fully realized in Book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics where theoria is singled out as the highest good of humanity and the summit of happiness. Contemplation is perhaps not the best modern equivalent of the word, which in ancient Greek involved not only observation and activities of sight, but also the sense of pursuing a theoretic life devoted to pure thought with no ulterior practical motive. For Aristotle, this is the ultimate virtue. Aristotle encourages a theoretic life as more desirable and more enjoyable than either an apolaustic or a political existence. The life of the intellect, as it contemplates knowledge and seeks out more knowledge, fulfills all the criteria Aristotle thought necessary for happiness: it is the most independent activity, though not an a-social one; compared to practical action it may be practiced for longer continuous periods; and containing its end within itself enjoys a greater schole or leisure. The activity of philosophic thought is thus commensurate with humanity’s best part--the intellect or nous, that is “the naturally ruling element which understands things good and divine and is ‘either itself divine or the most divine thing in us’, and its activity according to its own particular virtue is perfect happiness.”10 In this respect, “the human nous is a faculty or capacity (dynamis) activated, like everything else in the world, by the attraction of the First Unmoved Mover who, unlike mankind, is intellect pure, simple and tireless” (Aristotle 10 W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy. Volume VI: Aristotle: an encounter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 391. Interior citation from The Nicomachean Ethics (1177a12-17). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 32 395). In this way, Greek reason was of a natural order wherein mind and nature were proportionate. To seek wisdom was to understand the eunomia of the world, its lawful and just order, by searching for landmarks or guidelines to ways of life in harmony with the divine ordering of nature. In contrast to the “practical sciences” (episteme praktike), then, through theoria the human mind was capable of deciphering the logos of things on its own; call this, philosophy as non-instrumental reason. In this manner, ethics and epistemology were inseparably linked in classical philosophy with its axiological or valueoriented approach to the investigation of nature. Greek thought was governed by a holistic perception of world and mind emblematized by the interlocking meanings of physis as nature (both the physical world and the nature of the world as rationally ordered) and of physis as logos, an intelligible message written in nature. Reason and value defined a virtuous circle for Hellenic culture where one of the fundamental goals of the theoretic life was to discern a norm for the reasonable order of society in the rational order of nature. And as humanity is one with nature in this holistic perception, rational order could be sought for within oneself, non-instrumentally. Another incommensurabilty confronts us here. The Hellenic sense of ethics does not completely correspond to our modern conception of a life guided by implicitly or explicitly stated deontological principles that model moral behavior as duty. Rather, as Pierre Hadot argues, the desire for a philosophical life is driven first by ethical dissatisfaction and existential dilemmas that encourage the quest for a new way of life or mode of existence. Only afterwards does philosophy try to justify that choice and that existence through discursive argument. Since at least the time of Socrates, then, the choice of a theoretic mode of existence was not the final outcome or telos of philosophical activity. Indeed the choice of or for philosophy begins in confrontation with other existential attitudes as a critical reaction seeking another vision of the world and another way of life. But this reaction, and this choice, are not guided by philosophical discourse; philosophical discourse finds its origins in a life choice and an existential option, and not the other way round. Philosophical expression is not only discursive; it also finds itself crafted as a life, and this process is open-ended and unfinished. Philosophein asks of the novitiate a Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 33 conversion of being driven by the desire to be and to live in a new way, in tune with a changed conception of the world. This decision--the choice of a new mode of existence-also implies the presence or formation of a community as the expression of an ethos. Only afterward, in Hadot’s account, will the task of philosophical discourse be “to reveal and rationally justify this existential option as well as this representation of the world. . . . [P]hilosophical discourse must be understood from the perspective of a way of life of which it is both the expression and the means. Consequently, philosophy is above all a way of life, but one which is intimately linked to philosophical discourse.”11 Philosophy is lived or presents itself in a life before it is spoken or written. Or rather, it cannot be spoken or written in the absence of a desire for change and the on-going execution of an existential choice. There is always a separation between philosophy and wisdom, then, for philosophein is only a preparatory exercise towards wisdom. At the same time, philosophical expression can and must take place, simultaneously, on two reciprocal planes: that of discourse and that of a mode of existence that must continuously be examined and challenged or reaffirmed. Call this the perfectionist strain of philosophy, so important to Stanley Cavell’s later writings, which--as discourse and existential choice, both in a state of change fueled by dissatisfaction with one’s self and the world--reaches for a state of knowledge that can never be fully attained. Philosophein is a dynamic state to which one may aspire, and philosophia may fuel the desire to attain this state, but one never becomes, ultimately, a philosopher.12 11 What is Ancient Philosophy? 3-4. See also Michel Foucault’s Care of the Self (New York: Pantheon, 1986) for related arguments. 12 The philosophical character is thus extremely rare and a stranger to society. In his Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France, Pierre Hadot notes that “By the time of the Platonic dialogues Socrates was called atopos, that is, ‘unclassifiable.’ What makes him atopos is precisely the fact that he is a ‘philo-sopher"’ in the etymological sense of the word; that is, he is in love with wisdom. For wisdom, says Diotima in Plato's Symposium, is not a human state, it is a state of perfection of being and knowledge that can only be divine. It is the love of this wisdom, which is foreign to the world, that makes the philosopher a stranger in it.” “Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy,” trans. Arnold I. Davidson and Paula Wissing, Critical Inquiry 16.3 (Spring, 1990) 492. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 34 For these reasons, the two expressive planes of philosophy--as discourse and existential choice--do not correspond to a distinction between theory and practice. As Hadot insists, philosophic discourse already has a practical dimension--it is meant to transform or to produce a change in the practitioner, but in a non-instrumental way and with no other end than the unending pursuit of wisdom. At the same time, a philosophical life is not theoretical, but rather, theoretic; contemplative, certainly, but a form of contemplation whose reach towards understanding the world is also aimed at selftransformation. Theoria as practical philosophy. 4. The sage is only wise in theory If philosophical theories seduce you, sit still and turn them over in your mind. But never say that you are a philosopher nor allow another to say it. --Epictetus, Discourses, III The modern senses of theory gradually emerge through a series of disconnections, reversals, and remappings of theoria, which extend through scholastic philosophy to the early modern period, where the intimate connection between reason and value in Hellenic culture became increasingly strained and eventually broken. Here philosophy becomes, in various and sometimes incommensurable ways, progressively associated with an idea of science, whether conceived as empirical observation and the inductive work of scientific experimentation or with the more deductive mathematical modeling of nature promoted by Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. From one perspective, this is the story of how science gradually disengages and takes for itself from philosophy our modern sense of theory. (Later, we will examine a parallel dislocation: how philosophy comes into conflict with theory through a transformed sense of aesthetic.) The sense of philosophy as an ethical and existential choice was not completely forgotten, however. As both Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault have shown, early Christian practices retained and modified the earlier sense of philosophy as preparatory to an ongoing transformation of the selfinitiated by an existential choice. Moreover, medieval universities kept alive the concepts and traditions of neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism though in service to theological Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 35 debate and scholarship. In each case, though, the existential and discursive dimensions of philosophein become disconnected from one another, and philosophy was either subsumed under theology or relegated to a hierarchically inferior university faculty, a situation that persists through the early modern period. In this manner, the story of modern philosophy is often recounted as a gradual process of secularization throughout the Renaissance and into the Age of Reason where philosophy recovers itself from theology to become, after Descartes, a science or in service to science. Here one understands the discursive activity of philosophy as guided by epistemological refinements, rather than existential choices and evaluations, that were characterized more and more as scientific or theoretical in both idealist and positivistic contexts. This tendency was associated with the emergence of professional philosophy in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Especially in a European context, from the time of Hegel through the appearance of French existentialism and even structuralism, the activity of philosophy becomes associated with speculative theoretical systems or “pure theory,” a process Hadot characterizes as a “theoreticizing of philosophy” (What is Ancient Philosophy? 263). Nevertheless, the ancient conception of philosophy persevered, often in surprising places. A striking instance appears at the beginning of Descartes’ Third Meditation, not only in the sense of philosophy as an activity of meditation but also as an extended process of self-examination and transformation where “I will now shut my eyes, stop up my ears, and withdraw all my senses. I will also blot out from my thoughts all images of corporeal things, or rather, since the latter is hardly possible, I will regard these images as empty, false, and worthless. And as I converse with myself alone and look more deeply into myself, I will attempt to render myself gradually better known and more familiar to myself.”13 Hadot also uncovers other key reference points in Montaigne’s essays, and much later, in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein both early and late. 13 “Meditation Three: Concerning God, That He Exists” in Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, ed. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000) 113. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 36 Immanuel Kant is often considered to be the central figure in the emergence of professional academic philosophy and the exemplar of an idea of philosophy built from speculative theoretical systems, or, more precisely, philosophy as a theoretische Wissenschaft based on synthetic a priori judgments. Yet ethics and moral reasoning are also the linchpins of that system, linking reason and judgment. In examining Kant’s 1784 essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” Michel Foucault notes that the task or activity of philosophy turns critically from the investigation of metaphysical systems or the foundations of scientific knowledge to an examination of the present historical moment. The main question of philosophy then becomes: how we live or can live our modernity or contemporaneity? If Descartes asks, “Who am I that thinks,” a unique and individual but also a universal and a-historical subject, Kant’s questions of “What are we now, or what are we now becoming?” locates the thinking subject in a precise and unstable historical movement of powerful cultural as well as philosophical change. Universal philosophy does not disappear at this time; Hegel will be its next great (and perhaps last) exponent. But Kant’s philosophy marks a critical turning point where Foucault argues that, “the task of philosophy as a critical analysis of our world is something which is more and more important. Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time, and of what we are, in this very moment.”14 What often goes unremarked in Kant is his vision of the impossibility of philosophy, or of becoming a philosopher, that hearkens back to the perfectionist strains in Hellenic thought. This impossibility is also the motive force in the desire and search for a theoretic life. In the Opus postumum, Kant portrays philosophy as “the doctrine and exercise of wisdom (not simple science). Theoretically and practically, however, it does not personify itself as the sage (Scientia ideo non est praedicamentale aliquid; attamen praedicabile). 14 “The Subject and Power” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983) 216. Foucault’s statement echoes in interesting ways Max Horkheimer’s idea that “the critical theory of society is, in its totality, the unfolding of a single existential judgment.” See “Traditional and Critical Theory” [1937] in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Seabury Press, 1972) 227. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 37 The sage, according to theory, is a worldly sage and a philosopher, that is, a simple lover of wisdom in theory (non σόφος, sed philosophus).”15 The sage is only wise in theory. But humanity cannot possess wisdom but only love it and strive towards it, which for Kant it already one of the most praiseworthy occupations: “Philosophy is for man the struggle for wisdom, which is always unfinished. Even the doctrine of wisdom is too high for man” (Opus postumum 262). Here the perfectionist element of Kant’s perspective is unmistakable, for one does not attain wisdom or knowledge in loving it. Rather, we are drawn towards an Idea of philosophy as to an impossible yet imaginable, graspable ideal, where “The ‘philosopher’ is only an Idea. Perhaps we can throw a glance toward him, or emulate him in some respects, but we will never totally attain this state.”16 In this attitude, Hadot finds in Kant’s Idea of philosophy powerful echoes of the more ancient conception of a theoretic life where “the point was always and above all not to communicate . . . some ready-made knowledge but to form. . . . In other words, the goal was to learn a type of know-how; to develop a habitus, or new capacity to judge and to criticize; and to transform--that is, to change people’s way of living and of seeing the world” (What is Ancient Philosophy? 274). This Idea of philosophy is, as Foucault might have put it, actual, which is to say, ever present as a virtuality or potentiality that one must make actual or present, re-actualizing it in contemporary life. Throughout the twentieth century, the impossibility of philosophy took another form whose most radical expression was the will to supplant philosophy with reason; or indeed, what one might call in the scientific sense, theory. Late in life, the great Finnish logician Georg Henrik von Wright became increasingly concerned with how modern life and culture were increasingly and tragically marked by a breach between reason and value. This division has a long history, as I have already suggested, but in the twentieth century it was deepened and accelerated by two 15 Opus postumum, trans. François Marty (Paris: PUF, 1986) 245; my English translation. Philosophische Enzyklopädie in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften XXIX (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co., 1980) 8; my translation. The original text reads: “Der Philosoph ist nur eine Idee. Vielleicht werden wir einen Blick auf ihn werfen und ihm in einigen Stücken nachfolgen können, aber nie werden wir ihn ganz erreichen.” 16 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 38 factors. One was the increasing prestige of a scientific and technological rationality that encouraged an instrumentalization or even technologization of reason; the other was philosophy’s paradoxical wish to disappear or to wither away under the assumption that instrumental reason makes irrelevant any other approach to problems of mind, language, or logic. I will return to and deepen these observations in Part Three of this book. But in von Wright’s view, the irony of this story is that the major accomplishments of modern analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science overvalued problems of logic and epistemology in ways that displaced or even exiled moral reasoning and ethical evaluation from the domain of philosophy. Under the towering influence of the twin pillars of Russell and Moore’s Cambridge school of analysis and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, in its enthusiasm to become a branch of science, philosophy disappeared into theory fulfilling Brentano’s 1866 dictum that “vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est”.17 In this state of affairs, von Wright observes, “Value seemed exorcized from the sphere of reason, and rational thought from the sphere of valuations. Excessive scepticism about values has resulted in value-nihilism, and exaggerated faith in the power of reason has encouraged scientific fundamentalism” (Tree of Knowledge 246-247). Here the deep irony for von Wright, a student of Wittgenstein and deeply influenced by the analytic school, is that science has become a secular fundamentalism that sets aside questions of the value of knowledge, while leaving religion to occupy itself with moral and ethical life but outside of the context of reason. Thus, in von Wright’s assessment, “The erosion of the traditional basis of values in religion and the futility of the efforts to establish a new one in reason, in combination with the overpowering enhancement of the instrumental value of science, has tended to remove altogether from the sphere of rational thought questions relating to moral and other forms of what philosophers call intrinsic value. A state of value-vacuum or even value-nihilism has come to prevail” (Tree of Knowledge 242). This is a rather bleak way of saying that 17 Cited in von Wright’s The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993) 85. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 39 contemporary philosophy has deserted Kant’s great critical project to build in philosophy a bridge between epistemology and ethics, or pure and practical reason. Such an attitude should not surprise us. Already in the first Critique Kant distinguishes between worldly philosophy and academic or scholarly philosophy. The latter involves “a concept of a system of knowledge which is sought solely in its character as a science, and which has therefore in view only the systematic unity appropriate to science, and consequently no more than the logical perfection of knowledge.”18 The only aim of scholastic philosophy is to construct a perfectible system of knowledge. Yet this life is divided from within, and can never reconcile or find itself in the system of thought it seeks. In Kant’s sense, it is blind to what interests us all in our worldly and human questioning as a force or dynamis that animates all philosophical effort. This approach to thought is not theoretic, but only theoretical. Alternatively, late in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant recalls that ancient philosophy was firstly a moral philosophy. Organized by a conceptus cosmicus, what one might call Kant’s cosmopolitan philosophy is worldly in a specific sense. This conception is not exactly a return to the more ancient Hellenic conception where the search for reason in the natural order was the compass of ethical evaluation. Rather, for Kant humanity must find within itself the possibility of bestowing to itself the laws of human reason according to a Weltbegriff, a worldly concept “which relates to that in which everyone necessarily has an interest” (Critique of Pure Reason 658). Cosmopolitan or worldly philosophy does not seek wisdom in the ground of nature but rather in principles of reason found only within humanity and in what counts for all humanity. One wants to say that this is a concept that restores philosophy to the humanities, or perhaps makes of the desire to philosophize a human desire. In this respect, the philosopher is an ideal image of or for thought--that Emersonian attainable yet unattained self--for we can never become the sage but only learn to emulate her by exercising the talent for reason according to “universal” principles. Call this the capacity for judgment, where Kant will 18 Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965) 657. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 40 find in the aesthetic the bridge between the understanding and reason, pure and practical philosophy. 5. Variations and discontinuities: aesthetic A theorist of the fine arts--what a grand name! --Johann Gottfried Herder, Critical Forests, “Fourth Grove” In Keywords Raymond Williams identifies four primary senses of the word “theory” emerging by the 17th century: spectacle; a contemplated sight; a scheme of ideas; and an explanatory scheme. Although the persistence of associating thought about art or film with theory might be attributed to the derivations of the term from spectating and spectacle, a contemporary commonsensical notion follows from the last two meanings. Theories seek to explain, usually by proposing concepts, but in this they are often distinguished from doing or practice. In this manner, Williams synthesizes “a scheme of ideas which explains practice,” and this is certainly close to the way in which someone like Béla Balázs and other writers on art or film invoked the notion of theory in the 1920s.19 Call this the standard or vernacular meaning. But theory is also a particular form of provisional explanation or account. In an example from 1850, Williams cites, “were a theory open to no objection it would cease to be a theory and would become a law” (Keywords 267). Here theory remains close to an idea of speculation. And should this explanation become irrefutable or subject to a broad consensus, its explanatory scheme would pass from the speculative to the factual. (This leaves ambiguous, however, the logical form of explanation and conditions for agreement.) As for practice, Williams identifies two senses of its relation to theory. There is first practice in the sense of a thing done or effected and observed, which must be related back to an explanatory scheme. Secondly, there is practice in the sense of a repeated or customary action, perhaps a habitus in Pierre Bordieu’s sense of the term. In this way, common sense distinguishes scientific theories, which relate empirically and experimentally to the observation of 19 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) 267. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 41 phenomena occurring in nature from investigations appropriate to cultural and artistic activity with their historically variable norms and customary practices. Taking Williams as a starting point, it is possible to dig deeper into theory, uncovering the overlapping and sometimes contradictory layers of meaning it accrued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century the concept of theory moved freely across three semantic domains, which in many usages could be mixed or blended. Most familiar would be ordinary or vernacular deployments of theory, which long remained close to the more ancient, Hellenic senses of viewing, observing, and witnessing. In this semantic domain, to suggest a theory is to offer a speculative framework or viewpoint that is more or less large, and more or less systematic, though incompletely worked through. Here theory presents an ideal yet rational presentation of a state of affairs to which facts or practice may not exactly correspond--it is, in short, a conjectural account often offered as a personal though generalizable view. Theory was often used to project an air of learning or scientific rigor around an argument, especially when deployed in vernacular contexts. Alternatively, a pejorative sense of the vernacular also emerged to imply a too simple or restricted perspective representing facts in so schematic a way that conclusions applicable to reality cannot be obtained. A second domain was forged out of the varieties of positivism emerging by the middle of the nineteenth century whose best representatives were the works of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill. Here the senses of theory push closer to notions of systematic scientific explanation, strictly conceived. What counts as theory in this domain can be characterized by three principal tenets: that all theories are methodologically monistic; that scientific explanations are primarily causal and subsumable to general or covering laws; and finally, that mathematics provides an ideal form for all varieties of logical expression. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 42 Methodological monism insists on the unity of scientific method as a theory-type, regardless of the research domain to which it is applied.20 In the Preface to his Course on Positive Philosophy (1830), for example, Comte insists that the various sciences must conform to a unique method and be considered as forming the different parts of a general plan of research. Different classes of positive theories in the various natural and social sciences, then, are gathered monistically under the dual perspective of the unity of method and the homogeneity of doctrines. The second tenet seeks to subsume all individual cases to general laws of nature, including, one assumes hypothetically, presumed laws of human nature. Theories in this sense take the form of causal explanations, where as Mill put the case in his System of Logic, “An individual fact is said to be explained, by pointing out its cause, that is, by stating the law or laws of causation, of which its production is an instance.”21 The third tenet insists that the exact natural sciences, and in particular mathematical physics, present a methodological ideal or standard for all theoretical research. A theory, then, is considered as an encompassing synthesis that proposes to explain a great number of facts considered to be hypothetically true. Ideally, such a theory would take the form of a rigorously and systematically organized hypotheticaldeductive set of theorems forming a connected system. This idea appears later in a yet stronger form in the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and the mathematical analyses 20 For a fuller account, see Georg Henrik von Wright’s Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971) 4. Horkheimer’s 1937 account is also illuminating in this context: “In the most advanced logic of the present time, as represented by Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen, theory is defined ‘as an enclosed system of propositions for a science as a whole.’ Theory in the fullest sense is ‘a systematically linked set of propositions, taking the form of a systematically unified deduction.’ Science is ‘a certain totality of propositions . . . , emerging in one or other manner from theoretical work, in the systematic order of which propositions a certain totality of objects acquires definition.’ The basic requirement which any theoretical system must satisfy is that all the parts should intermesh thoroughly and without friction. Harmony, which includes lack of contradictions, and the absence of superfluous, purely dogmatic elements which have no influence on the observable phenomena, are necessary conditions, according to Weyl” (“Traditional and Critical Theory” 190. The interior citations are from Husserl’s Formale und transzendentale Logik and Hermann Weyl’s “Philosophie der Naturwissenschaft.” 21 1843, Book III, Chapter xii, Section 1 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 43 of the Cambridge School with their common interests in the foundations of mathematics and the philosophy of science. In this respect, von Wright argues that the neopositivism of the Vienna Circle shared “with nineteenth-century positivism an implicit trust in progress through the advancement of science and the cultivation of a rationalist ‘social engineering’ attitude to human affairs” (Explanation and Understanding 10). But as I will explain more fully later on, a fascinating discontinuity also begins to appear here between theory and philosophy, perhaps best expressed by Friedrich Waismann’s claim that “Philosophy and Science are two fundamentally different attitudes of the human mind. -The scientific mind seeks knowledge, i.e. propositions which are true, agree with reality. On a higher level it ascends to the formation of theories. -- Through philosophy one can gain increased inner clarity. The result of philosophic reasoning is not propositions, but the clarification of propositions.”22 Through commitments to progressive refinements of logic, often mathematically expressed, the various strains of modern analytic philosophy were most concerned with structural aspects of ratiocinative processes of argument, inference, or proof as rules for judging the correctness of the transition from premises to conclusions, not rules for judging the truth of premises and conclusions. This concern for increased clarity was considered not as a purification of philosophy but rather as the disappearance of philosophy into logic as the expressive foundation for scientific theories. Here philosophy was not considered as a system or a theory, bur rather as a method, that of the logical analysis of concepts. The third domain falls between the vernacular senses of theory and more formal subsumptive-theoretic definitions. Applied equally to both the human and natural sciences, here theory refers to that which is the object of a methodical conceptualization, systematically organized, and consequently dependent in its form on certain disciplinary practices or decisions that are distinct from common sense. By the nineteenth century this sense of theory was often associated with “science,” though through the broader and more open range of connotations accruing to the German concept of Wissenschaft. In his 22 “What is logical analysis” (1939), cited in von Wright’s translation in The Tree of Knowledge 26. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 44 Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), Wilhelm Dilthey offers an admirably clear definition of the purview of Wissenschaft in the late nineteenth century: By a “science” [Wissenschaft] we commonly mean a complex of propositions (1) whose elements are concepts that are completely defined, i.e., permanently and universally valid within the overall logical system, (2) whose connections are well grounded, and (3) in which finally the parts are connected into a whole for the purpose of communication. The latter makes it possible either to conceive a segment of reality in its entirety through this connection of propositions or to regulate a province of human activity by means of it. The term “science” is here used to designate any complex of mental facts which bears the above characteristics and which therefore would normally be accorded the name “science.”23 In direct confrontation with the positivism of Comte and Mill, Dilthey’s objective was to show that the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) of history, poetics, anthropology, and sociology stand on an equally strong logical and methodological footing as the natural sciences, even though a key epistemological criterion separates them. In a wellknown formulation, Dilthey asks us to distinguish between explanation (Erklären) and understanding (Verstehen). Open to history and the complexity and variability of human and social interactions, the human sciences seek to understand social phenomena rather than explaining their causes or resolving them to natural laws. (This was the key point on which Dilthey strenuously opposed positivism.) Simply speaking, all that is asked of a scientific theory here is that we acquire a systematic and methodologically unified knowledge of some thing through a coherent program of research. But often this knowledge remains conceptual and independent of practice. It seeks to explain, and perhaps to guide, but knowledge is nonetheless open, incomplete, and continuously revisable. Dilthey’s difficult relation with metaphysics and his desire to ground in theory the scientific basis of the full spectrum of human experience in history was marked by his 23 Eds., Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 56-57. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 45 admiration of the rigor of empirical and experimental investigation but also by his deep skepticism of positivism and its claims to eliminate investigations of society and history that were not grounded in natural scientific methods. In this Dilthey’s concept of Wissenschaft formalizes the more historically open and fluid evolution of the senses of theory that followed closely the institutional struggle through which, from the beginning of the 18th century, philosophy sought to assert its independence and autonomy as a university discipline with respect to the “higher” faculties of theology, law, and medicine. Defenses of philosophy as Wissenschaft (science) or Lehre (doctrine) were equally defenses or modifications in the domain of metaphysics, taken in its largest sense as that which falls outside of knowledge of the physical world through causal reasoning. Following Aristotle’s definition of metaphysics as a first philosophy, Alexander Baumgarten provided the eighteenth century’s most concise characterization as the science of the first principles of knowledge. In a sense, Dilthey’s later extended attempts to define, preserve, and police the frontiers between the human and natural sciences were also an attempt to defend and clarify the theoretical status of metaphysics in philosophy, even though he himself believed, with and against Kant, that metaphysics was a historically delimited and surpassable epistemological phase. “Kant properly called attention to the fact,” Dilthey explains, “that all metaphysics goes beyond experience. It supplements what is given in experience by an objective and universal inner system which arises only when experience is elaborated in light of the conditions of consciousness” (Introduction to the Human Sciences 180).24 Nonetheless, Dilthey’s view of philosophy might be thought of as a transformed metaphysics, though one grounded in history as well as self-reflection. In this respect, Dilthey distinguished the properties of human facts from facts of nature by stating that “In nature we observe only signs for unknown properties of a reality independent of us. Human life, by contrast, is given in inner experience as it is in itself. Therefore, only in anthropological reflection is the real there-for-us in its full reality” (Introduction 435). Later, of course, Windelband formalized this distinction in the contrast between nomothetic and idiographic thought. 24 See also Dilthey’s discussion of “The Concept of Metaphysics” in Introduction 176-184. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 46 In Kant’s time this sense of science was defended as theoretical philosophy, in contrast to the practical philosophies of ethics and politics. While no doubt metaphysical and speculative, a theory in this sense was still subject to rigorous and systematic exposition. Theory is contrasted with practice here as an activity of hypothetical or speculative construction, independent of application, that serves to bridge the formulation of a hypothesis or initiating idea and the working out of its implications in a more formal and systematic argument within a specialized conceptual vocabulary. Note that this is not necessarily restricted to natural scientific arguments. Soon we will see that most philosophies of art from Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetic forward into the late nineteenth century aspired to this degree of formal coherence, so much so that I will call them system aesthetics. In all three domains, Williams’ implied distinction between two kinds of practice-one which attributes causal reasoning to an observed state of affairs, the other accounted for in reference to custom or cultural norms--still applies. However, the overlapping or even confusion of the senses of theory and practice across this distinction are compounded by two sets of historical discontinuities. One derives from a division within 19th century concepts of theory between a philosophical idealism characteristic of German Romanticism’s response to Kant, and the other from emergence of positivism under the influence of August Comte. The invention of aesthetic in the 18th century, and the struggle to define that concept in relation to concepts of theory and science or Wissenschaft form the historical background of this division and contestation. The second discontinuity fuels what I call our contemporary retrojection of “theory” as an umbrella concept covering (and confusing) a wide variety of terms and practices emerging especially in the criticism and philosophy of art in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The aestheticians of the 18th and 19th centuries believed themselves to be extending and deepening a philosophical path reaching back to Plato and Aristotle, when in fact they were creating a conceptual domain unrecognizable by the ancients, just as our contemporary ideas of film or art theory project an image of continuity onto a history that has more detours, cul-de-sacs, and deteriorating bridges than straight and well-marked trails. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 47 These pressures on theory emerged from a number of currents, all of which descend from the profound transformation that another charged concept, aesthetic, was undergoing throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Like theory, “aesthetic” is another term too often taken for granted in our time. From the middle of the 18th century and throughout most of the 19th the concept was unstable, contested, and historically fluid. The semantic range of the more ancient term, aisthesis, was being completely remapped, though often in ways that went unacknowledged. Most ancient sources from before and after the 4th century BC used the word to refer to acts of perception but as strictly separate from terms for the making of objects, such as poietike, techne, and mimesis. And although perception was considered to be a material event, as distinct from noesis as an immaterial and interior product of thought, the problem for ancient Greek philosophy was how to consider the relation between aisthesis and noesis as one where subject and object were not distinct but rather part of the same holistic conception of the physical universe. In this way, most ancient accounts of aisthesis characterized perception as contact, a physical transmission between bodies and parts, or a continuous flow or flux of materials between outside and inside, and had little to do with the definition or apprehension of the beautiful. This sense of art as a specialized activity, distinct from both daily life and quotidian perception, would seem alien to classical culture. Here the older concept of aisthesis was undergoing a set of mutations that, from our contemporary point of view, was irrevocable. The invention of the aesthetic as a unique domain within philosophy organized around a distinct class of objects was also coincident with the invention of modern philosophy itself, as I will explain further below. The project of unifying philosophy as a complete system of thought meant, first, to demonstrate how the perception of beauty was connected to or continuous with a rational faculty. In this way, the senses or the imagination were created, practically for the first time, as objects worthy of philosophical definition and critique, especially those special acts of perception that would soon be qualified as aesthetic. A second more difficult problem was to respond philosophically to the new accounts of perception, dating from the time of Descartes’ optics, in which object and subject were considered as separate and distinct. The invention of the aesthetic Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 48 occurred not only as a problem for completing a system of philosophy that would incorporate all the human faculties with their different modes of judgment (epistemological, moral, and aesthetic), it also represented the effort to respond to the skeptical break with the world imposed by the new empiricisms, that is, to restore the broken link between the subject’s interior relation to knowledge and its exterior relations with nature, the world, and other minds. The idea of the aesthetic as a project of theoretical philosophy emerged only through a long process of conceptual transformation and remained contested for more than a century. Alexander Baumgarten’s influential yet incomplete Aesthetica (17501758) was the first modern attempt to lay down principles for the criticism of taste considered as a science or systematic philosophy. Baumgarten was widely acknowledged by Kant, Herder, and others as laying the groundwork for a positioning of aesthetic in the system of philosophy though without completing this system. To do so meant detaching and describing a special class of objects--in Baumgarten’s terminology, “perfect sensate representations” (perfectio cognitionis sensitivae) achieved through artistic means--as well as designating for psychological analysis a particular domain of experience.25 In his presentation of transcendental aesthetic at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant praises Baumgarten in 1781 yet objects to this sense of the aesthetic as an aberration of language. In his efforts to construct rational principles for the critique of taste and judgments of the beautiful, Baumgarten wanted to “raise the rules for such judging to the level of a science” (die Regeln derselben zur Wissenschaft zu erheben).26 But Kant calls this endeavor futile; it gives false hope for establishing a priori laws to which judgments of taste must conform. (He later famously modifies this argument in the Third Critique.) A more appropriate stance, Kant suggests, is to let this new name become extinct and to retain the more ancient distinction between the sensible and the intelligible (aistheta kai 25 See, in this respect, David E. Wellbery’s Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), especially chapter two. 26 Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Immanuel Kant theoretische Philosophie, Vol. 1 (Suhrkamp, 2004) 103. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar as Critique of Pure Reason (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1996) 74. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 49 noeta) as the basis for “the doctrine that is true science” (und sie derjenigen Lehre aufzubehalten, die wahre Wissenschaft ist). Kant is positioning himself, of course, to reserve for theoretical philosophy only his transcendental aesthetic as the framework for analyzing space and time as the two pure forms of sensible intuition that are the principles for a priori cognition. Alternatively, Baumgarten’s modification of the concept of the aesthetic might stand, Kant offers, if resituated clearly as speculative (rather than “theoretical”) philosophy, in which case the term would be taken partly in its transcendental sense and partly in Baumgarten’s psychological sense. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Kant’s characterization of aesthetic was prevalent in English around 1800, but Baumgarten’s conceptualization was finding increasing acceptance by 1830. The 1832 Penny Cylopedia explains “aesthetic” as “the designation given by German writers to a branch of philosophical inquiry, the object of which is a philosophical theory of the beautiful.” Theory would apply here as a set of rational principles and a systematic method through which judgments of the beautiful are raised to the level of a science. In the same year, however, the Philology Museum challenges this use, arguing that it has not been established beyond contest, while defending the Kantian sense as “that branch of metaphysics which contains the laws of perception.” And, in his Lectures on metaphysics Sir William Hamilton offers in 1859 that “It is nearly a century since Baumgarten . . . first applied the term Æsthetic to the doctrine which we vaguely and periphrastically denominate the Philosophy of Taste, the theory of the Fine Arts, the Science of the Beautiful, etc.,--and this term is now in general acceptation, not only in Germany, but throughout the other countries of Europe. The term Apolaustic would have been a more appropriate designation.” And here it is interesting to observe how philosophy, theory, and science float in “a corona of lightly indicated uses” around and through the concept of the aesthetic, as Hamilton is ironically aware. The question remains, however, of how and why “theory” emerged to characterize a certain way of conceptualizing aesthetics or the philosophy of art in particular and the humanities in general? For art to find theory meant that aesthetics was undergoing a transformation related to the transmigration of theoria into theory in a sense more familiar to us. Art was becoming an object of knowledge and aesthetics a separate and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 50 autonomous domain of philosophical inquiry. This transition was slow in coming, however. For example, in his 1846 study of Modern Painters, John Ruskin could still deploy a concept of theory that retained its ancient associations with sight and apperception while modernizing it in a post-Kantian frame. “The impressions of beauty,” he writes, “. . . are neither sensual nor intellectual, but moral: and for the faculty receiving them, whose difference from mere perception I shall immediately endeavour to explain, no term can be more accurate or convenient than that employed by the Greeks, ‘Theoretic,’ which I pray permission, therefore, always to use, and to call the operation of the faculty itself, Theoria. . . . Now the mere animal consciousness of the pleasantness I call Æsthesis; but the exulting, reverent, and grateful perception of it I call Theoria.”27 Theoria is not yet ready to explain, or to yield itself here to a systematic or scientific study of art. Still primarily a contemplative experience, it is neither active nor conceptual. Rather, Ruskin remains committed to a feeling for art as a subjective vision where the apprehension of beauty is regarded as a moral faculty. Ruskin retains the classical sense of aisthesis as ordinary or quotidian perception, the reception of a sensible eidos without its matter. But this perception is inchoate and without moral consequence if it does not move the soul by stimulating thought (noesis) and claiming its assent through judgment. Theoria, alternatively, indicates a perception heightened by a feeling for art, or an intuition of the force of artistic expression, to which we become receptive owing to a heightened moral sense. What modernity would eventually call the aesthetic is here termed by Ruskin the theoretic. 6. How art found theory There is nothing more abundant in our age than aestheticians. --Jean Paul Richter, Vorschule zur Ästhetik (1804) By 1892, the modern sense of aesthetic solidified enough in English to become the subject of Bernard Bosanquet’s A History of Aesthetic. Bosanquet characterizes his study as a 27 Modern Painters, Vol. II (London: George Allen, 1906) 13 and 17. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 51 “history of aesthetic consciousness” in which, from antiquity to the present day, the evolution of philosophical expression exists as “the clear and crystallized form of the aesthetic consciousness or sense of beauty.”28 To be able to write a history of aesthetic in the late 19th century already implies, first, an assumption of the stability and universality of the experience and value of beauty. At the same time, it is also a forgetting of the instability of the concept in a way that makes possible a retroactive and retrojecting construction wherein the aesthetic appears as the product of a continuous and uniform history of philosophical argument from antiquity through to the present. From the very first pages of Bosanquet’s history, this project is characterized as “aesthetic theory.” And for the history of philosophy, it exemplifies a discursive template set in place by Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetic that reappeared with little variation in a long succession of influential accounts. Bosanquet’s work is exemplary as one representation of the completion of the invention of the aesthetic in its modern sense--an invention that is at once a forgetting of the emergence of the concept in a 150-year history of contestation and debate and a retrojecting universalization of art and aesthetic experience. Lost to this discursive template, as Kant already warned, is a sense of the profound discontinuity between the multiple and complex senses of aisthesis in classical philosophy and its later reinvention and redeployment in modern philosophies of art. Here the aesthetic gradually emerges as a new domain of inquiry in modern philosophy through the proposal of conceptual systems to account for a particular class of objects as well as a qualitatively unique experience. Moreover, presented as a history of aesthetic and not as a philosophy of art, Bosanquet’s argument exhibits a discursive structure in which the nineteenth century commitment to historicism is also deeply felt. History in this period is universal history, whose tendency is to suppress differences and to align ideas, concepts, and discourses retroactively in a continuous and progressive evolution whose teleological orientation aspires towards ever-greater levels of complexity and synthesis. Bosanquet’s aesthetic theory is also a history but a history of a particular kind, which values the present as the culmination of all past thought. In this respect, history is conceived as a directed 28 A History of Aesthetic (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1949) xii. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 52 and ordered succession of genetically related stages where in thinkers as varied as Hegel, Comte, and Spencer the law of organic development is the law of all progress. Progress is not accidental, but determined by supra-individual and objective processes. Bosanquet’s influential book is thus emblematic of a process whereby, from the turn of the century through the 1920s, aesthetics is set in place in academic philosophy as a scientific discipline. Over a period of nearly two hundred years, a series of complex substitutions occurs in which the so-called scientific study of aesthetic experience was mapped in often fluid ways, especially in a German context, yielding several variations on the idea of establishing an aesthetic science, including Kunstlehren, Philosophien der schönen Künste, and Kunstwissenschaften. These are different but overlapping discursive domains whose translations into English as “theory” suppress significant conceptual and methodological differences in the history of aesthetic. And by the time we arrive at the emergence of Kunstwissenschaft as art theory or aesthetic science, concepts of theory will have been remapped from the semantic domain of systematic speculative construction to an empirical and sociological research program conceived in analogy with the explanatory models of the natural sciences. The invention of the aesthetic was inseparable from the emergence of professional philosophy as an autonomous discipline within the 18th century university. If one worries today that art is not often taken seriously by philosophy, in the 1730s philosophy as Weltweisheit or “worldly wisdom” was not taken seriously by the higher university faculties of theology, law, and medicine. Ironically, the position of philosophy in this era was not unlike the place of the humanities in universities today--a domain of selfcultivation preparatory to more serious study. (Here, the practice of the history of philosophy also tends to suppress the profound discontinuity of theoretic practices.) To be recognized as a higher faculty, philosophy had to become “theoretical”--not just speculative knowing in the classical sense but rather a rational and systematic account of the foundations of thought, both abstract and sensual. In a history extending from the expulsion of Christian Wolff from the University of Halle in 1723 to Kant’s completion of his three Critiques seventy years later, the practice of philosophy sought to overcome its marginal status as Weltweisheit by presenting itself Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 53 as a unique discipline with its own distinctive method devoted to the systematic investigation of the foundations of knowledge. As Howard Caygill observes, “This lay behind the near obsession of eighteenth-century German philosophers, from Wolff to Kant, with the methodology of philosophy and the necessity of its systematic presentation.”29 Philosophy was becoming more theoretic in its struggle to supplant theology and to clarify the rational foundations of knowledge, and more theoretical in its desire to found philosophy on universal and systematic principles. This universalism translated into curricula that offered encyclopedic surveys of human wisdom: not only logic, metaphysics and ethics, but also lectures in history, psychology, politics, physics, natural history, pure and applied mathematics, geography, and ancient and modern languages. In short, philosophy was responsible for the entirety of the humanities and social sciences as we conceive them today. Wolff and then Baumgarten’s vision of philosophy was also guided by the Enlightenment idea that the progress of knowledge toward ever great distinctness of thought and more refined analysis of our representations was to be understood as a progress into language--from perception and imagination to the manipulation of arbitrary signs in logical expression. This idea of progress meant that language should become more “philosophical”--securing definitions, becoming more “grammatical” or logical, and therefore more subject to law. The scientific or wissenschaftliche character of what would be called theoretical philosophy was thus founded in an indissociable link between the improvement of knowledge and semantic and syntactic refinements of philosophical language. For a good part of the modern philosophical era, theory would be a code word for epistemology in general--the problem of mind and how the world is apprehended and made knowable by the mind. And since perception (or sometimes, intuition) is the vehicle of this apprehending, aesthetics found itself inseparably yoked to theory. Commensurate with the 18th century tendency to promote a universal philosophy legislating all fields of knowledge, Baumgarten divided the philosophical organon into the areas of theoretical and practical philosophy. Theoretical philosophy included the four 29 Art of Judgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) 150. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 54 branches of metaphysics (ontology, cosmology, psychology, and theology) plus physics. The field of practical philosophy, following Aristotle’s scheme, encompassed ethics and politics. Conceivably, for Baumgarten aesthetic would fall under theoretical philosophy, though its application to particular works as a poetics would be included within practical philosophy. This was commensurate with his characterization of aesthetic as a kind of frontier or contested border between perception and reason. The story of how art found theory, then, is equally a story of how aesthetics became a “science,” or rather, in the more fluid German vocabulary, a Wissenschaft. The nearly one hundred years that stretched from Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry to the publication of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetic witnessed the persistent desire to work out a complete system of philosophy, to make of philosophy a universal philosophy, where the concept of the aesthetic was confronted as an essential yet intractable problem. However, the very idea of a systematic aesthetic was paradoxical for a number of reasons. One often leaves the hardest problems for last so that confrontation with the aesthetic often waited until the end of a philosophical career. Many of the most influential works of the 18th and 19th centuries exist only in the form of incomplete manuscripts, lecture notes, and drafts, which, like Schelling’s Philosophy of Art or Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetic, were reconstituted posthumously by students and disciples. In an era where philosophy longed for a complete system or doctrine of thought, incompleteness was the rule. Many of the important writers of German Romanticism embraced the fragment, of course, or like Herder believed that the desire to erect systems was a weakness of human nature. But in the period where modern philosophy was inventing itself, rebuilding its prestige in the university, and asserting its claim to legislate every activity that fell within or close to the domain of reason, the problem of the aesthetic--as sensation, perception, intuition, and free imaginative creation--was the rough sea that wrecked every ship. The lure of the aesthetic was a kind of sirens’ song where the formal unity and completeness of works of art offered philosophy an image of perfectability: an ideal of beauty in an expressive structure where everything is related and everything is connected to everything else, and where the sirens’ neighboring reef shimmered close to the shores of reason. This was the place where every universal philosophy came aground and split into fragments. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 55 Within this context, the idea of theory represents the will to find reason in art and to make art reasonable. It is important to understand fully, however, that ideas of theory in this period are as unstable as concepts of the aesthetic. And if the two notions were yoked together in such interesting ways, it was because theory was so semantically malleable with a genealogy rich enough to accommodate the activities of both the senses and reason. Howard Caygill observes that in the eighteenth century the construction of the new conceptual domain of aesthetics became simultaneously both the basis of and marginal to the establishment of theoretical philosophy. The term aesthetic first appears in its modern sense at the conclusion of Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry (1735), which in its argument and conceptual architecture completely prefigures his later, unfinished Aesthetica. Baumgarten conceived aesthetics as the foundation of a new science of perception. Responding critically to Christian Wolff, Baumgarten argued that rational and aesthetic knowledge differ only in degree not kind. Poetry is a form of sensual thought but it is thought nonetheless. From the Reflections on Poetry through the Aesthetica, Baumgarten attempted to bring philosophy and poetics together wherein logic as an art of judgment was complemented by aesthetic as an art of invention and imagination. The goal of this project was to reunite thought and sensibility in an expanded system of philosophy that reconciled aestheta and noeta. Thus, in the first paragraph of the Aesthetica Baumgarten offers the following definition: “Aesthetics (as the theory of the liberal arts, as inferior cognition, as the art of thinking beautifully and as the art of thought as analogous to reason) is the sensuous cognition.”30 A faculty or form of cognition and an art as well, aesthetics was also a theory; that is, a rule-governed form of explanation. Baumgarten’s argument presents rational and poetic discourse as distinct yet continuous forms of thought, in effect building the foundations for a discursive formation that finds theory in art. The project turns on a system of analogies where poetic images are presented as analogous to logical concepts and the logical structure of the syllogism 30 “AESTHETICA (theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientia cognitionis sensitivae.” Ästhetik, Vol. 1 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007) 10. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 56 finds its pendant in the aesthetic discourse of the poem. Baumgarten’s concept of aesthetic thus unfolds as a general theory of interpretation where the logical rules of syllogistic reasoning are complemented by an art of judgment that guides the interpretation of all forms of signification. The theoretic dimension of Baumgarten’s aesthetic already appears in paragraph 115 of the Reflections on Poetry where a philosophical poetics is promoted as “the science guiding sensate discourses to perfection . . . . It would now be the task of logic in its broader sense to guide this faculty in the sensate cognition of things. . . . .”31 In a complete system of philosophy, then, poetics guides art toward perfection just as imagination inspires reason to conceptual innovation. While things known form the province of logic, and things perceived the province of aesthetic, logic must extend down to imagination for the source of its inventiveness; yet it must also guide and regulate that indistinct and pleasurable perception of perfection that is aesthetic experience. Though Baumgarten never completed his Aesthetica, it inspired an explosion of writing in the latter half of the 18th century producing the background, no doubt, for Kant’s complaint that aesthetic was a conceptually unsound, even impure term. In many respects, he was right. Rather than continuing the project of producing a universal theoretical philosophy that would include perception and imagination in dialogue with reason, the near mania for the aesthetic yielded numerous theories of art and manuals for the cultivation of taste. In this manner, a certain idea of theory as Wissenschaft became disconnected from philosophy, or even worse--as Herder makes clear in his sharp attack on Friedrich Just Riedel and other “theorists” of fine arts and letters in the “Fourth Grove” of his Critical Forests--it risked diluting and undermining the epistemological and critical powers of philosophy as advanced by Baumgarten. After Baumgarten, then, two overlapping yet divergent variants of theory struggled to claim descent from this influential thinker and to assert their claim on the “scientific” study of art. The first phase, heavily influenced by Baumgarten, conceived the systematic study of perfect sensate representations as the attempt to establish a continuum between the higher spiritual and rational faculties and the more fluid material and perceptual or 31 Reflections on Poetry, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954) 77. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 57 intuitive ones. What one might call theory in this era is close to the rational method of aesthetic investigations so clearly foregrounded in one of Baumgarten’s most interesting exponents, Moses Mendelssohn. Written in Latin in the form of terse yet crystalline syllogisms, it may seem strange that Baumgarten’s Aesthetica unleashed such a vogue for beautiful thinking. Yet Baumgarten’s approach to philosophy came to represent a kind of model for philosophical language in the form of a logical system ideally able to generate all possible noncontradictory concepts and judgments, and which, through an algebraic form of calculation, could decide the truth of any statement. This was a first concept of a scientific aesthetic where the beauty of philosophical language resided in its clarity and distinctness as a transparent instrument of thought identical with reason itself. (Later, a fault-line will appear within the idea of Wissenschaft where theory could mean either the beauty of clear and distinct thinking or simply belles lettres, that is, tasteful thought and writing. This will be the second variant of theory.) The work of Mendelssohn, who Herder admired, set the logical parameters for what would become modern aesthetics more so than the master himself. Mendelssohn’s writings exemplify the structure of most theories of art as they persisted well into the twentieth century, specifically in their claim to establish a science of aesthetics whose systematic and logical character would rise to the level of a Wissenschaft. Mendelssohn’s major statement on aesthetic is “Über die Hauptgrundsätze der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften” (1771) (“On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences”). Here Mendelssohn’s thought demonstrates how aesthetic was thought to comprise three interrelated logical tasks: define the autonomy of the domain, draw up a taxonomy of expressive types, and describe the quality of subjective experience within this domain as embodied in those types. The idea of aesthetic was thus erected on the premise that all art forms be considered members of a single class of representation--in Baumgarten’s terminology, perfect sensate presentations. For aesthetics to constitute a science, art in general must be considered to have an essence and this essence must branch logically through, and be reflected in, each genre or media of art. The classification and ranking of the individual arts, then, a key feature of all general Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 58 aesthetics, had to demonstrate the aesthetic quality of the individual arts (that they belonged to the entire class) as well as the exclusivity of their expressive means. Call this a transmission of essence, where the autonomy and identity of art had to be reflected in the expressive purity and mutual exclusiveness of each medium of art. In any case, comparative descriptions became a universal feature of aesthetic theories as a way of discerning the presumed inner affinities and mutual exclusions that obtained among the arts and to delimit their proper domains. Just as art in general had to be considered as a specific and exclusive class of representations, the autonomy and self-sameness of individual forms of art were defended, first, by establishing qualifying predicates indicative of medium specificity. For example, in Mendelssohn’s scheme painting evokes perfect sensate presentations through the use of two-dimensional natural signs. Then the classification was developed by establishing a set of rules intrinsic to each art form to legislate the range of contents they can or should transmit. These aesthetic rules were often prescriptive, taking the form of restrictions on content selection derived from the presumed overriding aesthetic purpose of the representation as well as from the nature of the sign vehicle it deployed. The goal of these rules was to establish the conditions for the maximum efficacy of individual art forms, both in the selection of appropriate content and in their promotion of the aesthetic effect, through examining and establishing the distinctive semiotic features of each medium, especially in the quality and degree in which they affect the process of aesthetic reception. These classificatory schemes were the bridge between ontological definitions on the one hand and characterizations of subjective effects on the other. To classify and compare the arts was a means for identifying how this special class of representations could evoke aesthetic intuition in the receiver. The subjective experience induced by art in aesthetic sensation was considered, first, to take the form of a kind of internal perception--the activation of an intense emotional response deriving from the mental reactualization of the aesthetic presentation as an experience of illusionary internal presence. Analogously, the experience of aesthetic pleasure was conceived as both an external perception of the intrinsic formal qualities of the presented object and as the stimulation of the subject’s internal representational and emotional capacities, though in Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 59 the form of intuitions, not concepts. It was the function of theory to hone these intuitions into concepts through a philosophy of the aesthetic. The theoretical structure of aesthetics was a game of mirrors, however. Just as the essence, self-identity, and autonomy of art were reflected in each expressive medium of art, so too was aesthetic intuition reflected and reproduced within the subject as a kind of auto-affection--a self-given or selfproduced activity. Aesthetics thus defended the experience of art as a profound practical and acculturating activity. While falling short of a rational activity, aesthetic intuition was thought to have significant powers of socialization and acculturation, developing and exercising faculties that bound the human community together sympathetically, while forging the basis of its universal identity through the harmonious play of the representational faculties. Through beauty in art one found beauty in one’s self and humanity in an axiological system that was at once tautological and universalizing. In this manner, Mendelssohn’s arguments were emblematic of the theoretical structure of the main strand of Enlightenment aesthetics. The chief aim of theory so conceived was to develop a set of rules proper to each art and to develop a grammar governing combinations of different art forms. These were both rules of art in general (pertaining to aesthetic presentations) and rules following the essence or purpose of each individual art (maximizing medium efficacy). The form of argumentation was deductive and the style of writing philosophically neutral, reflecting the impersonality and objectivity of a rule-governed system. As David Wellberry observes, in contrast to the cult of genius that would soon overtake aesthetics in the period of German Romanticism, the idea of a science of aesthetics expressed the attitude that “. . . the arts do not at all reflect the creative force of an individual or cultural identity, but rather the entirely impersonal rules that govern the deployment of aesthetic representations. What the theory aims for is a calculus of aesthetic efficacy” (Lessing’s Laocoon 93). Nonetheless, as suggested above, the structure had an axiological component that promoted and legitimated specific aesthetic and cultural norms. Most classifications and taxonomies also led to aesthetic hierarchies, ranking the arts according to their semiotic potential for provoking beautiful thought, valuing some and devaluing others. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 60 Mendelssohn’s works do not characterize themselves so much as “theoretical” but rather as “scientific,” as reflected in the title of his essay, Über die Hauptgrundsätze der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften. In the latter half of the 18th century, however, “Theorie” comes to the foreground and takes on a different sense. This is the second variant after Baumgarten, one that echoes a conception of the education of taste, already prominent in the 1730s. In this context, theory meant something closer to our sense of poetics, and this usage probably informs later associations of Theorie with Lehre in the sense of a doctrine or method. This approach often took the form of encyclopedic collections and synopses meant to guide the cultivation of taste. A typical work was Riedel’s 1767 Theorie der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften, a work blasted by Herder in the aforementioned “Fourth Grove”; this title was reprised by J. A. Eberhard in 1786. But the key formulation no doubt, appears in J. G. Sulzer’s influential Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Kunste (General Theory of Fine Arts [1771-1774]) that claimed to elevate aesthetic to a science by proposing a general theory and deducing the rules of fine art from the nature of taste.32 From the 1760s, then, aesthetic theory took up again the program of promoting “worldly wisdom,” and became increasingly concerned with the education of taste defined as the cultivation of a graceful and exemplary life. As Kant, Herder, and Hegel were painfully aware in their very different ways, though these works took the form of academic treatises, they fell far short of Baumgarten or Mendelssohn’s intellectual precision. Taste was a fuzzy concept describing an instinctive or intuitive judgment operating independently of reason, yet strangely in harmony with it. It was also a guiding or directive concept that was supposed to teach individuals to “esteem that which . . . reason would infallibly have approved if it had had the time to examine it sufficiently" and by virtue of which it is thus the "leader and steward of the other noble powers of the 32 Sulzer’s entry on “aesthetic” begins with the assertion that “Die Philosophie der schönen Künste, oder die Wissenschaft, welche sowohl die allgemeine Theorie, als die Regeln der schönen Künste aus der Natur des Geschmacks herleitet” (Leipzig: Weindermannschen Buchhandlung, 1792) 47. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 61 human soul.”33 Though taste no doubt had local variants, it was nonetheless considered to be a universal faculty and therefore a standard, no matter how inchoate, for assessing the value of works of art and for producing rules both for the making of art and for expressing aesthetic judgments. As Gregory Moore explains, “Good taste in art was, naturally enough, reasonable, balanced, measured; and bad or corrupt taste pedantic, emotional, immoderate. These virtues were best embodied by the art of the ancients and the polite literature of the day” (“Introduction” 20). In any case, this is what passed for “theory” in the time bracketed between Baumgarten’s Aesthetica and Kant’s Critique of Judgment. And just as Kant respectfully considered the Aesthetica to be an abortive attempt to produce a science of taste, Herder disparaged the reduction of Baumgarten’s revolution in philosophy to a psychology of taste. This was the basis of his critique of Riedel, Georg Friedrich Meier, and other “theorists” of taste. Despite its title, in Meier’s Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften the object of aesthetic is not the scientific understanding of sensibility, Herder complains in the “Fourth Grove,” but rather the promotion of beautiful thinking and the cultivation of taste. Each from their own perspective, Kant and Herder wanted to restore theoretic powers to the aesthetic by promoting theoretical philosophy against the “science” of taste, though unlike Kant Herder believed that the development of such a science was possible and desirable. Despite some reservations, Herder admired Baumgarten’s aesthetics as a metapoetics or a synthesis of poetry and philosophy that pointed the way towards a genuinely scientific approach, meaning properly philosophical in its promotion of reflexive knowledge--a true theory. 7. Philosophy before the arts Thought and reflection have spread their wings above fine art. --G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetic 33 Ulrich König, Untersuchung von dem guten Geschmack in der Dicht- und Rede-Kunst. Anhang zu: Des Freyherrn v. Canitz' Gedichte (Leipzig, 1727) 261. Cited in translation in Gregory Moore’s “Introduction” to Johann Gottfried Herder’s Selected Writings on Aesthetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 20. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 62 By the 1820s, aesthetics had discovered metaphysical ambitions that went beyond questions of perception or the beautiful in general. In the same era, however, theory fell out of fashion, or rather was folded into a larger conception of the philosophy of art, sometimes referred to as a Kunstlehre, the title given to A. W. Schlegel’s Jena and Berlin lectures of 1797-98 and 1801-04. In his 1829 Lectures on Aesthetic, K. W. F. Solger characterizes his position as “a philosophical doctrine of the beautiful, or better, a philosophical doctrine of art” (eine philosophische Lehre vom Schönen, oder besser eine philosophische Kunstlehre”).34 What unites the most influential figures of the period, such as the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, Solger, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, is the project to define the essence or identity of art in general as a metaphysical and ontological concept. This sense of the philosophy of fine art was erected on an interest in the beauty of “free art” as a metaphysical question, where philosophy finds in art its true expressive capacity as a transcendental practice. In many of the figures of German Romanticism, reason was considered a limit that must be transcended and renewed through art’s creation of new forms of reflection. Indeed, the notion that philosophy could provide technical rules for the practice, use, or moral aims of art--and this was consistent with an earlier sense of “theory”--was anathema to the Romantic emphasis on the freely creative imagination, leading Hegel to rail against “art doctors” whose prescriptions for curing art were even less reliable than those of ordinary doctors for restoring health.35 Likewise, the philosophy of art became increasingly less committed to Kant’s view, which characterized the aesthetic as a capacity or potentiality of cognition (a position criticized by A. W. Schlegel in his Kunstlehre). Rather it envisioned in art the manifestation of the absolute and the representation of truth. Art or the beautiful in art was thus for Schelling the “ideal of science [Vorbild der Wissenschaft], and where art is, science has yet to attain to”; it was 34 Vorlesungen über Aesthetik (Leipzig: Brockhaus,1829) 1; my translation. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) 15. Additional citations in the original German will be indicated in italics, referring to the Suhrkamp edition of Hegel’s collected works, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970). 35 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 63 also “the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy” [das einzige wahre und ewige Organon zugleich und Dokument der Philosophie].36 At the beginning of the 19th century, then, a variation appears in debates on aesthetic signaling the promotion of a relatively new domain: the philosophy of art. The other key conceptual component to this debate involved defending the superiority of philosophy to theory with respect to claims for its scientific or wissenschaftlich character. Another decisive shift was taking place in this respect. Where Kant could complain in the Critique of Pure Reason that “aesthetic” was a misuse of language and a conceptual aberration, forty years later few would question the place of aesthetic in a system of philosophy. Rather, in the context of German Idealism, the place of theory was now contested in the creation of new philosophies of art. In this context, Hegel’s “Introduction” to his Lectures on Aesthetic still stands as one of the most influential statements of the 19th century. Delivered in Berlin in the years 1823, 1826, and 1828-29, Hegel’s lectures had an impact on the philosophy of art that would last for the next hundred years. In Germany, no less than France, England, and the United States, philosophical considerations of the aesthetic could not avoid confronting these arguments, first published posthumously in 1835 as three volumes in his collected works. Bosanquet’s commitment to the work, for example, is evidenced by his translation and publication in English of the Introduction in 1886; the closing section was also reprinted as an appendix to his History of Aesthetic in 1892. Despite its uncertain provenance--the manuscript was never completed in Hegel’s hand--Hegel’s philosophy of art exerted a profound if controversial influence throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. This influence was not without its historical paradoxes, however. Of central interest in the Introduction is how Hegel maps conceptually the contested terrain that lies between aesthetics, on the one hand, and theory on the other. Indeed, Hegel opposes his speculative philosophy to theory with two interesting consequences. First, one sees the malleability of the concept of Wissenschaft in its full 36 System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978) 227 and 231. The corresponding German is found in Schelling’s, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3 (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1858) 623 and 627. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 64 and contradictory semantic range. Second, despite his far-ranging influence, Hegel’s elevation of the philosophy of art over all other approaches to aesthetics would be, historically, largely a failed project. (The domain of Kunstwissenschaft would ultimately take another form.) Yet one finds here the various and contested discursive paths and thickets through which the history and theory of art would gradually emerge by the end of the nineteenth century. In Part II, this desire to adjudicate the claims of philosophy with respect to science and theory will be reprised in Louis Althusser’s epistemology, so important to the structure of contemporary film theory. And in a similar way Hegel’s dialectic of self-consciousness, in art or philosophy, will be found to haunt the deep structure of contemporary theory. Hegel prefaces the lectures by expressing dissatisfaction with the prominence of aesthetics in the vocabulary of his age. Taking Wolff and Baumgarten at their word, aesthetics should have been the name of a new science of sensation and feeling, but for Hegel the philosophical sense of the concept has become too disordered, though too widespread to be ignored or displaced. (And here is a refrain, already present in Kant, that would repeat and develop across the next century: no one is happy with the term “aesthetic,” yet everyone insists on deploying it after their fashion. In our time, the same will be said of “theory.”) Let the term stand, then, Hegel relents, “but the proper expression for our science is ‘Philosophy of Art’ and, more definitely, ‘Philosophy of Fine Art’ (Der eigentliche Ausdruck jedoch für unsere Wissenschaft ist “Philosophie der Kunst” und bestimmter “Philosophie der schönen Kunst”) (1, 13). Hegel is well aware that what he calls the reawakening of philosophy as universal thought and thought’s highest vocation is intimately linked to an analogous rediscovery of the science of art. The rediscovery of philosophy in the early 18th century was signposted by problems of aesthetic. The association of philosophy with Wissenschaft in the opening statement of the lectures, then, signals Hegel’s desire to complete through aesthetics Baumgarten’s project of elevating philosophy as the undisputed domain of universal reason. One of the first objections that Hegel confronts is not simply whether art is a suitable subject for philosophical treatment, but indeed whether the philosophy of art can treat these questions in a “scientific” manner. Hegel cleverly remaps the concept of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 65 science by revisiting a series of arguments already debated by Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant, where the aesthetic turn is imagined as a way of completing the system of philosophy by reconciling thought and perception, or reason and the senses. Science is pursued through the domain of pure thought while art offers itself to sense, feeling, intuition, and imagination. Science deals in rules, regularities, and conformity to law while art is produced and enjoyed in the realms of freedom and play that elude the “dark inwardness of thought” (Aesthetic 5). And where science is concerned with nature and its regularities, art is more free than nature, for “Art has at its command not only the whole wealth of natural formations in their manifold and variegated appearance; but in addition the creative imagination has power to launch out beyond them inexhaustibly in productions of its own” (5). For these and other reasons detailed in the Introduction, fine art would seem to elude scientific discussion by resisting thought’s regulative activity. Yet within fine art reason might also renew itself in significant ways through the powers of a free and unlimited creative will. Here Hegel revisits, though in a completely original way, the problem that so concerned Baumgarten and his successors: how to heal the breach between thought and feeling or sensation, and in so doing create a new ground for the practice of philosophy. To demonstrate that fine art may be treated scientifically means showing where reason lies within it--that it is a medium of thought and of the expression of ideas. Art, in this respect, is of the same order as religion or philosophy, sharing their vocation in a special way. In art, spirit expresses itself externally and seeks the infinite in a finite form, that is, as created from material nature and set before the subject in perception. Ordinary or quotidian reality is thus transformed; it is made both sign and Idea [Vorstellung], namely by displaying even the highest [reality] sensuously, bringing it thereby nearer to the senses, to feeling, and to nature’s mode of appearance. What is thus displayed is the depth of a supra-sensuous world which thought pierces and sets up at first as a beyond in contrast with immediate consciousness and present feeling; it is the freedom of intellectual reflection which rescues itself from the here and now, called sensuous reality and finitude. But this breach, to which the spirit proceeds, it is also able to heal. It generates out of itself works of fine art as the first Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 66 reconciling middle term between pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous, and transient, between nature and finite reality and the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking. . . . (Aesthetic 7-8) Art liberates the true content of phenomena from the pure appearance and deception of this bad, transitory world, and gives them a higher actuality, born of the spirit. Thus, far from being mere pure appearance, a higher reality and truer existence is to be ascribed to the phenomena of art in comparison with [those of] ordinary reality. (9) Here is the domain where art and Idea come together. (We do not yet know whether or not theory has a place in this domain.) The sphere of thinking (or better pure spirit) is the highest reality for Hegel, above all because it is conceptual, infinite, and immaterial. Hegel calls this the “Idea as such” or the Absolute--truth in itself in its not yet objectified reality. Art, however, expresses or gives form to its own Ideas. Our perception of beauty is essentially an individuated configuration of reality that embodies and presents the Idea, and therefore, for Hegel, the beauty of art is something more than reality and mere sensuous appearance--it signposts a path wherein the subject will, in the course of time, re-find itself thoughtfully reflected in the actual forms of art. “Accordingly,” Hegel continues, “there is here expressed the demand that the Idea and its configuration as a concrete reality shall be made completely adequate to one another. Taken thus, the Idea as reality, shaped in accordance with the Concept of the Idea, is the Ideal” (Aesthetic 7374). Eventually, each historical stage in humanity’s progress toward reason and selfreflection will pass through its own Ideal of art.37 37 Bosanquet provides a beautifully concise account of Hegel’s thinking here: “[In] the first place the whole world of imagined beauty or concrete fancy, which is called the ‘ideal,’ is conceived as passing through phases determined by the progression of intelligence and also by the cumulative result of the sequence itself. And in the second place, the human mind being at all times a many-sided whole, the same needs of expression which thus separate themselves each into its own successive phase in time, also appear, as a coexisting group of modes of fancy, relative to different media of expression, within each of the great historical forms or stages of the ‘ideal’ or art-consciousness. The former set of successive phases are what Hegel calls the three forms of art, symbolic, classical, and romantic, and taken together make up the main outline of the historical evolution of the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 67 The brute materiality of nature and the contingency of quotidian existence immersed in the complexities of present historical life resist the sprit and its access to the Idea, whereas fine art makes nature and history yield to the expression of the Idea. For these reasons, as Hegel puts it, fine art cannot be less true or more deceptive than either “historiography” (Geschichtsschreibung) or immediate perception and, in fact, it is closer to the higher truths of religion and philosophy. Art is also something less than philosophy, however. Whatever truths might be unveiled there, and whatever space art might give to thinking, is both enabled and constrained by the material immediacy of the senses and their relations to the external world and the contingencies of history. The mention of historiography here should not go unexamined. Within the domain of the scientific study of art, the history of art is granted a special though subordinate status within Hegel’s philosophy of fine art. (In Hegel’s own philosophical history of the deduction of the true Concept of art, Johann Joachim Winckelmann occupies pride of place in a pantheon that includes Kant, Schelling, Schiller, and Goethe.) In this respect, Hegel anticipates the reuniting of philosophy and history into something like a systematic Kunstwissenschaft. In any case, Hegel’s interest in history is strongly present in the lectures in that the evolution of artistic forms expresses the essence of the human as the search for the self-given Idea, and thus the history of humanity’s expressiveness is also the story of continuous dialectical progress toward that Idea. The structure of Hegel’s philosophy of art is already completely given in the Introduction as a kind of grand operatic overture in three movements. The first stage in a systematic consideration of the fine arts, as we have just seen, must include a universal part developing the Concept, as “both the universal Idea of artistic beauty as the Ideal, and ideal. The latter group of co-existing modes of expression, a group which repeats itself within each of the historical art-forms, is the system of the several arts, primarily differentiated from each other by the sensuous vehicles which they respectively employ. . . . And the same needs of expression being at the root of both differentiations of the ideal, the successive and the simultaneous, it follows that though all the arts recur in each epoch, yet in each recurrence one or more of them have a prerogative rank, depending on the coincidence of their special tendency with the spirit of the age within which they then are.” (History of Aesthetic 345-346) Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 68 also the nearer relation of the Ideal to nature on the one had and to subjective artistic production on the other” (Aesthetic 73). Secondly, a complete philosophy of fine art must account for the historical development of the media of art in their essential differences. And finally, this examination of the essential difference of the individual arts must yield a concept of the essence of art itself as it unveils itself in a synthetic account of the total system of the arts, “since art advances to the sensuous realization of its creations and rounds itself off in a system of single arts and their genera and species” (73). This idea marks Hegel’s account of the successive historical forms of art (symbolic, classical, and romantic) as well as his evaluative system for asserting and ranking the different means of artistic expression, including architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. The historical development of the essence of art through the evolution of its means of expression is thus presented as a progressive though asymptotic harmonization in which the spiritual idea seeks out forms closest to its (immaterial) essence, and where matter is overcome and shaped by the spirit that seeks to transform it meaningfully. Implicitly or explicitly, this structure will replicate itself as a kind of master template for all future attempts to erect a total system of the fine arts. (In Part II, we will also find this template reprised in what I call the aesthetic discourse of classical film theory.) The philosophy of fine art is first and foremost philosophy, and whatever science one might find in art, must first be realized in philosophy--the history of art is only in service to that larger scientific project. In this respect, there are two sides or dimensions to the dialectical movements of history in the Introduction. First, there is the force of universal history driving the spiritual development of humanity. Hegel characterizes this force as a “sequence of definite conceptions of the world [bestimmter Weltanschauungen], as the definite but comprehensive consciousness of nature, man, and God, gives itself artistic shape” (Aesthetic 72, 103). These world-concepts provide the spiritual content of art as the development of successive stages of a world-spirit in its symbolic, classical, and romantic forms. Universal history is then complemented by a history of the forms of art in their immediate existence and sensuous being. Here another dialectic is at work. Art proceeds from the Absolute Idea and its end is the sensuous presentation of the Absolute itself. Art Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 69 strives for a particular reality, that is, a reality adequate to its historical Concept, yet the Idea must also struggle with the external shapes of nature in order to represent itself there in the external world. Therefore, in Hegel’s reasoning what is best in artistic presentations, what will characterize the essence and historical perfectability of the medium of art “will depend on the degree of inwardness and unity in which Idea and shape appear fused into one” (Aesthetic 72). Hegel is not simply looking for the fusion of content and form here, for the successive history of artistic forms is also the history of the philosophical subject passing through the dialectical stages of its progress toward selfdiscovery and self-unveiling. This consideration of art as a medium for thought--what stands between pure thought and brute substance--is the core of Hegel’s conception of art. In it is found the essence of art and the source of all of Hegel’s axiological distinctions and hierarchies defining the nature of different forms of art. The one and universal essence of art is to mediate between thought given perceptible form and nature transformed as idea, and in this manner the identification of forms of art emerges in an asymptotic progression towards pure thought and away from brute substance and immediate perception. For Hegel, these arguments also characterize the modernity or contemporaneity of his age as the culmination of a line of development in the dialectical relation between art and philosophy evolving since the dawn of history and humanity, one of whose outcomes is the progressive refinement of the Ideal in the particular forms of the beauty of art. Hegel refers to this as his doctrine of the forms of art [Lehre von den Kunstformen] (Aesthetic 75, 107). The dialectical progress and development of the different forms of art each express ways of grasping the Idea as content and giving shape to it in the sphere of art. At the dawn of humanity primitive art first gives rise to symbolic forms. The earliest symbolic forms occur in unworked or lightly worked natural materials that stand only as mere tokens or totems for the Idea. Later, however, a religious spirit is embodied and shaped in the development of the art of architecture. Here the forms of inorganic nature are fashioned in relation to what Hegel calls an abstract Understanding--leveling a place for the god, forming his external environment, and building for him a temple “for the inner composure of the spirit and its direction on its absolute objects” (84). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 70 In symbolic forms the Idea is presented to consciousness only in an abstract and indeterminate way. The relation of the Idea to the objective world is largely a negative one and the correspondence between meaning and shape is inadequate, leading to the next stage in this evolution--the classical forms of Greek and Roman art. Here a new ontology emerges where beauty is made sensuously present in the human form through sculpture. The form of spirit concentrates and gives shape to something corporeal--god or the Idea permeating inert mass and giving it human form--as the free and adequate embodiment of the Idea in a shape appropriate to its essential nature. “Therefore,” Hegel explains, “here the spirit is at once determined as particular and human, not as purely absolute and eternal, since in this latter sense it can proclaim and express itself only as spirituality” (Aesthetic 79). What classical art accomplishes is a unification of spiritual and sensuous existence as a form of correspondence between the two. “But in this blending of the two,” Hegel continues, “spirit is not in fact represented in its true nature. For spirit is the infinite subjectivity of the Idea, which as absolute inwardness cannot freely and truly shape itself outwardly on condition of remaining moulded into a bodily existence as the one appropriate to it. . . . In other words, thought is ‘inwardness’ in the sense that thoughts are not outside one another in the way that the parts of a body are. This is why the spirit cannot find an adequate embodiment in things but only in thoughts, or at least only in the inner life” (79). Through symbolic and classical forms, reason finds its way through art as a vehicle for knowledge of the Absolute, and the forms of art establish points of equilibrium or correspondence between sense and thought. However, in the romantic age, Hegel’s age, works of art no longer serve the same kind of spiritual need: “The impression they make is of a more reflective kind, and what they arouse in us needs a higher touchstone and a different test. Thought and reflection have spread their wings above fine art” (Aesthetic 10). Thus the romantic ontology expresses an immaterial idea to which no physical form is adequate; the romantic arts have become less spatial and more temporal, signaling a withdrawal from space into the time of self-reflection and judgment. Both architecture and sculpture transcend their symbolic and classical dimensions in romantic art, but they are not as fully adequate to the expression of inwardness as are painting, music, and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 71 poetry, each of which Hegel considers as successive stages toward self-reflection and spiritual expression. Painting, for example, frees art from the sensuous spatiality of material things in reducing space to a plane surface--perception retreats from a volumetric space and produces visibility in pure acts of contemplative seeing. In turn, music cancels the indifferent self-externality of space such that “sound releases the Ideal . . . from its entanglement in matter” (88). In this way Hegel characterizes sight and hearing as “theoretical senses” not only because, in his view, they exclude enjoyment as the satisfaction of desire, but also because, at a distance from touch and from nature, through them the sensuous appearance of art is spiritualized in a negation or overcoming of matter and space as a withdrawal into an immaterial perception set at a non-tactile distance. The temporal ideality of sound thus negates space, marking a transition from the abstract and external spatial sensuousness of painting to the abstract inner spirituality of poetry. Understood in its specific difference as a medium of art, romantic poetry thus completes the system of the arts and unveils the one essence that flows through them all as the power “to call forth from all the depths of consciousness a sound and an echo in the spirit” (39). This emphasis on sonority shows the phonocentric bias that drives Hegel’s account of what is highest and most spiritual in art. In poetry sound is no longer the feeling of sonority but rather an internal sign of the idea, which has become concrete in itself: “Sound in this way becomes a word as a voice inherently articulated, the meaning of which is to indicate ideas and thoughts” (88). In this way, romantic subjectivity is created out of the articulate sounds of poetry as “. . . the self-conscious individual who out of his own resources unites the infinite space of his ideas with the time of sound” (89). “Therefore,” Hegel continues, the proper element of poetical representation is the poetical imagination and the illustration of spirit itself, and since this element is common to all the art-forms, poetry runs through them all and develops itself independently in each of them. Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings. Yet, precisely, at this highest stage, art now transcends itself, in that it forsakes the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 72 element of a reconciled embodiment of the spirit in sensuous form and passes over from the poetry of the imagination to the prose of thought” (89). Let us not mistake Hegel’s meaning here. Through poetry, art transcends itself and approaches philosophy, the prose of thought. Through romantic or Christian art, the unity of divine and human nature is elevated from an immediate unity to a known one, from an actual and material presentation (aesthetic, sensuous) to a theoretic or noetic one: “the true element for the realization of this content is no longer the sensuous immediate existence of the spiritual in the bodily form of man, but instead the inwardness of selfconsciousness. . . . Thus the unity of divine and human nature is a known unity, one to be realized only by spiritual knowing and in spirit . . . . In this way romantic art is the selftranscendence of art but within its own sphere and in the form of art itself” (80). The content of romantic art is free concrete spirituality manifested as spirituality to the spiritually inward. This is a negation and overcoming of immediate, sensuous presentations wherein perception and consciousness withdraw from externality and turn inward to (self) reflection. There is no content to romantic art other than subjectivity itself. One might say that in Hegel’s view it is the “theoretic” form par excellence. Here the English translation finesses one of the boldest moves of Hegel’s Introduction: that philosophy is more than science, or rather embraces an enlarged conception of science as universal reason. And in a clever rhetorical maneuver, Hegel sets out to deflect suspicions about philosophy by dispelling doubts concerning the scientific treatment of art, thereby demonstrating, through the possibility of a philosophy of art, the superiority of philosophy itself. Considered in itself fine art might indeed elude full scientific treatment for it cannot and never be identical with reason. Indeed Hegel admits, in a nod to Baumgarten and his followers, that as a free and contingent creation of the imagination, art appears in forms that resist thought, and consequently, thought is compelled to dissolve these forms in order to pursue its characteristic activity. Even the philosophical consideration of art may be confined to “the essential inner progress of its content and means of expression” (Aesthetic 12); in other words, aesthetic expression is limited of necessity to concrete sensuous forms and their histories. Either art resists the Idea or must completely yield to it, in which case it is no longer art but philosophy. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 73 For Hegel, then, fine art in the romantic age is already philosophy, or rather a form of proto-conceptual thought that calls for philosophy. Art is more than nature because it seeks its Idea through forms wrested from nature and so imbues them with thought. Art makes of these forms sensuous objects for self-reflection. Thinking cannot find its purest activity here; this practice is reserved for philosophy. But the practice of fine art does have a special function for thought. It shifts the inwardness of the Concept from its own ground toward the concrete externality of sense. And in this respect, thought is not only able to grasp itself in its proper form as thinking, but also is able to know itself again, or in a new and unfamiliar way, by passing through its opposite: externality, sense perception, and objects and forms distinct in space. “Thus the work of art too,” Hegel concludes, “in which thought expresses itself, belongs to the sphere of conceptual thinking, and the spirit, by subjecting it to philosophic treatment [wissenschaftlichen Betrachtung], is thereby merely satisfying the need of the spirit’s inmost nature. . . . [Art], far removed . . . from being the highest form of spirit, acquires its real ratification only in philosophy” [erhält in der Wissenschaft erst ihre echte Bewährung] (Aesthetic 13, 28]. Hegel continues this line of argument by demonstrating the superiority of the philosophy of fine art to other ways of treating beauty and art scientifically. At stake here are the variable meanings of Wissenschaft--a tug of war occurring since the time of Christian Wolff--whose aim is to demonstrate the primacy of philosophy to history, on the one hand, and to theory on the other, each of which have a claim to science. Philosophy, too, must overcome its prior history, which unfolded out of the concept of aesthetic and so-called philosophies of taste. With undisguised sarcasm, Hegel calls the philosophy of taste (read “theory” in Riedel’s sense) an abstract philosophy of the beautiful where science abandons itself to a thought that is unable to address works of art in their particularity. The history of art fares somewhat better. Hegel refers to history as the indispensable starting point for a consideration of fine art since every work of art belongs to its own time, environment, and people. The scholar must be acquainted with the vast corpus of artworks, both ancient and modern, amassing detailed material facts to account for the spiritual and formal conditioning of their existence. This knowledge is empirical, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 74 Hegel emphasizes, since the work of art is something individual and particular, not abstract. For Hegel, however, works of art also express something both immaterial and absolute, which is their Idea. But we cannot fully achieve this idea through theories of art (die Theorien der Künste) (Aesthetic 15, 31), which only offer abstract general characteristics to formulate prescriptions and rules for the making of art. Hegel’s disdain for theory is reacting, no doubt, to how late 18th century philosophies of taste not only failed Baumgarten’s project, but in so doing failed the project of philosophy. These works mostly addressed the external appearance of works of art, and as such are as one-sided as other non-philosophical sciences. They may justly recognize the beautiful in the aptness or perfection of sensuous form, but they cannot comprehend the Ideal in the concept of beauty as such. Theory must be overcome by philosophy in order for the Concept to find itself in self-reflection. Moreover, for Hegel theory has already been cast aside in Germany owing to the emergence of Romantic art and “genuinely living poetry,” which not only creates freely without formulae or prescriptions, but also recognizes in philosophical Idealism its thoughtful counterpart: “. . . the Concept, aware of itself as the thinking spirit, has now recognized itself on its side, more deeply, in philosophy, and this has thereby immediately provided an inducement for taking up the essence of art too in a profounder way” (20-21). For Hegel, the empirical history of art retains its scientific value as the background to philosophical reflection. But philosophy--or “purely theoretical reflection” (die ganz theoretische Reflexion) must account for that process of self-reflection that gives rise to the Concept of the beautiful (21, 39). Here Hegel turns from degraded forms of theory to a properly scientific consideration of fine art whose true name is the philosophy of fine art. The value of theory derives from the degree of its scientific character, and in this respect Hegel uses both Theorie and Wissenschaft almost interchangeably in a variety of contexts. But Hegel reserves for philosophy itself the activity of pure theoretical reflection and complete scientific knowledge, so much so that throughout the Introduction Philosophie and Wissenschaft also become interchangeable. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 75 But almost with the same breath, Hegel must confront an intractable problem. Only through philosophy can we arrive at the Concept of the beautiful and examine it scientifically. But being of a spiritual nature, art is shot through with subjective, imaginative, and unreasonable elements. In order to know the Concept of the beautiful in itself, one needs a reasoned context for sorting out the relation of the subjective to the objective, to understand how the external necessity of an object is in conformity or not with our inner impressions and responses. This would require, Hegel admits, a universal philosophy of which the philosophy of art is only a part; it presupposes the “encyclopedic development of the whole of philosophy. . . . For us the Concept of the beautiful and art is a presupposition given by the system of philosophy. But since we cannot here expound this system and the connection of art with it, we have not yet got the Concept of the beautiful before us scientifically. What is before us is only elements and aspects of it as they occur already in the different ideas of the beautiful and art held by ordinary people, or have formerly been accepted by them” (Aesthetic 25). In other words, even in the Introduction all we may have before us are theories of art that suggest or indicate the coming philosophy. In this context, the Concept of art can only be considered lemmatically as a self-given concept, universally held. Only when philosophy finds itself through the completed dialectic of Idealism can the essence of art be completely understood. And here the system of philosophy may not yet be complete (or perhaps, cannot yet come to completion) because humanity still has need of art to guide its way out of the dark inwardness of thought toward self-reflection. Philosophy turns to the beauty of art, then, as “one of the means which dissolve and reduce to unity the above-mentioned opposition and contradiction between the abstractly self-concentrated spirit and nature-both the nature of external phenomena and that of inner subjective feeling and emotion” (56). But the system still being incomplete, reason seeks another mediating term or activity, one that falls between art and philosophy yet may have the power to bridge them conceptually. Without a complete system of philosophy, strangely enough, theory must be our guide. How, then, can theory guide us toward the concept of the beautiful? Or conversely, how do we acquire this concept from or through our intuitions of beauty? Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 76 What Hegel derides as “rule-providing theories” or “prescriptions calculated for practical application” (Aesthetic 26) will be of little use here. A philosophy of fine art understands, first, that if there were rules for the creation of art, then anyone could be an artist. But for Hegel fine art is not the production of general human activity, but rather the creation of a special and unique kind of subjectivity. This is the Romantic conception of genius, which knows only free creation as “an entirely specially gifted spirit which now, however, is supposed to give free play simply and only to its own particular gift, as if to a specific natural force; it is to cut itself altogether loose from attention to universally valid laws and from a conscious reflection interfering with its own instinctive-like productive activity” (26). Hegel’s logic is striking here. This subject is not philosophical since it functions instinctively like a natural force, yet it is subject to scientific examination since it operates only according to its own inner necessity. A second consequence follows from this argument leading to Hegel’s controversial account of the end (and ends) of art. The sensuous value of fine art is tied ineluctably to the measure of the spiritual within it and to the degree of free play allowed to spiritual expression. Both matter and technique resist this expression, leading to the distinction, common in this period, between the free and mechanical arts. The more fine art is dependent on external workmanship and the struggle with matter, the less free rein can be given to the inventive spirit, wherein the Idea seeks to find itself in something close to its proper temporal and immaterial domain. The less art relies on handwork, the closer it stands to the Idea, thus leading toward Hegel’s axiological system in the lecture, where the fine arts progress in history through the forms of architecture and sculpture, evolving toward the higher forms of painting and music before achieving their telos in lyric poetry. The history of art, then, is marked by a continuous transformation of matter and nature directed by humanity’s spiritual search for the Idea, which circles back finally to find itself within itself. External existence is not what makes a work a product of fine art, Hegel insists, but rather, a work of art is such only because, originating from the spirit, it now belongs to the territory of the spirit; it has received the baptism of the spiritual and sets forth only what has been formed in harmony with the spirit. Human interest, the spiritual Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 77 value possessed by an event . . ., is grasped in the work of art and blazoned more purely and more transparently than is possible on the ground of other non-artistic things. Therefore the work of art stands higher than any natural product which has not made this journey through the spirit. . . . For everything spiritual is better than any product of nature. Besides, no natural being is able, as art is, to present the divine Ideal. (Aesthetic 29)38 Things of nature are variable, transient, impermanent, and resolutely non-subjective. But art as free subjective creation makes spiritual inspiration conspicuous--it is embodied and given external existence by humanly working the materials of nature, which then may embody the Ideal because they must first pass through and be transformed by what is human and subjective. From the other side, this freely creative subjectivity is also informed by a universal, absolute, and non-contingent need to produce art. Things in nature are singular and intractable, but the thinking subject, as the spiritual motor of the dialectic in philosophy or art, is double or doubling. As a thinking consciousness, the human subject reflects on itself by actively projecting outward representations of itself; the subject only recognizes what it is--what it has or can become--by duplicating itself in representation, both theoretically and practically. This consciousness of self is achieved theoretically, in Hegel’s terms, as a kind of inward sight or inner self-representation--an image of self achieved through a thought that can be externalized and recognized by others. In practical activity, this image of self-consciousness in thought is then produced by “altering external things whereon [the subject] impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics. Man does this in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself. . . . The universal need for art . . . is man’s rational 38 John Hamilton reminds me of the pervasive influence, here and elsewhere, of Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters on Hegel’s arguments. Time and space are lacking here to account for this influence, above all as it relates to an idea of art as belonging to a domain of freedom from nature, and to the decisive role that Schiller plays as the historical bridge between Kant and Hegel. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 78 need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self” (31). In the Lectures on Aesthetic, Hegel represents man as an amphibious animal caught between two worlds that contradict one another. Consciousness wanders between the two sides of this contradiction, finding neither satisfaction nor a home in one side or the other: on one side, there is an enslavement to need, passion, and matter, “the common world of reality and earthly temporality” (Aesthetic 54); on the other, the ideal and spiritual territory of eternal ideas, of thought and freedom, which the subject gives to itself through the free exercise of will--a transcendence of nature and passion through the self-providing of universal laws and prescriptions. Philosophy is the highest calling of this self-given gift in showing the way to truth as the dissolving of contradiction and the reconciling of humanity’s divided consciousness. And art too, paves the way toward philosophy, or perhaps philosophy completes the path set out by art, since “art’s vocation is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration, to set forth the reconciled opposition just mentioned, and so to have its end and aim in itself, in this very setting forth and unveiling” (55). Here, then, are the two sides of art’s special dialectic: the theoretical activity of making what is within the subject explicit to itself in thought, and the practical activity of fashioning this image of self as an outward reality (an exteriorized duplication of self by bringing it into sight/hearing and knowledge for itself and others). Later, the axiological dimension of this argument becomes more apparent and linked intimately to Hegel’s thoroughly conservative view of the aims of art. Like the Concept of the State, the Concept of art needs both a common end for all art making as well as what Hegel calls a higher substantial end, which is as much moral as philosophical or scientific. And just as the State assures societal order, the aim of art derives from “the capacity and vocation to mitigate the ferocity of desires” (Aesthetic 48). “The mitigation of the power of passions,” Hegel continues, “therefore has its universal ground in the fact that man is released from his immediate imprisonment in a feeling and becomes conscious of it as something external to him, to which he must now relate himself in an ideal way. Art by means of its representations, while remaining within the sensuous sphere, liberates man at the same Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 79 time from the power of sensuousness. . . . [Art] lifts him with gentle hands out of and above imprisonment in nature” (49). In this way, Hegel characterizes our preoccupation with artistic objects as “purely contemplative,” or rather “rein theoretisch” (49, 75). Just as natural forms cannot give us a concept of beauty, the poorest mode of apprehension is simple sensuous apprehension, hence the need for a purely contemplative relation to art. Alternatively, the artwork inspires another kind of relation through sensuous appearance, which leaves the object free to exist on its own account, and to which the subject relates without desire, “as to an object which is for the theoretical side of the spirit alone” [nur für die theoretische Seite des Geistes] (Aesthetic 36-37, 58). And here we come ever closer to the subject of theory as called forth by the apprehension of fine art. If there is a philosophy of art, it must be something higher, better, and closer to the spirit than either immediate sense perception or the practical desire to possess, transform, or consume external things. Hegel calls this “the theoretical study of things” or “the purely theoretical relation to intelligence,” which finds satisfaction in the work of science (37). The theoretical relation wants to know things “in their universality, finding their inner essence and law, and conceiving them in accordance with their Concept” (37). Theory retreats from things as sensuous external forms: “. . . intelligence goes straight for the universal, the law, the thought and concept of the object; on this account not only does it turn its back on the object in its immediate individuality, but transforms it within; out of something sensuously concrete it makes an abstraction, something thought, and so something essentially other that what the same object was in its sensuous appearance” (37). Theoretical activity transforms the (art) object in thought, releasing its concept, just as the freely creative genius releases the Idea in matter, and so produces the beauty of art. What is the relation of theory to art, then? Art cannot produce scientific satisfaction, nor should it, yet it also inspires something that transcends the purely practical desire to hold, transform, or possess. Art inspires in us, Hegel reasons, something less than philosophy but something more than immediate perception. This is a perceptive and thoughtful relation, though one which is not entirely scientific and reasonable. Throughout the Introduction, the word Hegel uses is Betrachtung, which can mean consideration but also view, contemplation, inspection, study, all of which relate Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 80 back to ideas of theory as regarding or spectating. This philosophical view differs from the purely theoretical activity of scientific intelligence, “since it cherishes an interest in the object in its individual existence and does not struggle to change it into its universal thought and concept” (Aesthetic 38). It lets art be, then, and open to theoretical consideration. What philosophy seeks in art is a special kind of theoretical relation, one where thought finds or refinds itself but in a particular form. Here thought or spirit gravitates to a sensuous presence that must remain sensuous, available to perception, but which at the same time is liberated from the shackles of purely material nature. As opposed to things of nature, the work of art is pure appearance and, as such, takes its distance both from nature (material transformed by the externalization of thought) and from thought itself (pure spirit as inward reflection). As an object of theoretical consideration, “. . . the work of art stands in the middle between immediate sensuousness and ideal thought. It is not yet pure thought, but, despite its sensuousness, is no longer a purely material existent either . . . .; on the contrary, the sensuous in the work of art is itself something ideal, but which, not being ideal as thought is ideal, is still at the same time externally there as a thing” (Aesthetic 38). Romantic art calls for theory or philosophy as the end(s) of art, and this perspective sheds new light on Hegel’s notorious claim that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Aesthetic 11). In an era where reason predominates, the universal and the rational are no longer contained by the imagination and brought into harmony with material, sensuous appearance. And in this respect, philosophy is something more than religion, or perhaps has become the new religion of the Enlightenment. Art no longer brings the Absolute concretely before us as the embodiment of the gods or beauty and an opening onto an intuition of the supra-sensible, nor does it inspire immediate enjoyment. Rather romantic art drives us inward and calls us to judgment and (self) reflection, modes of engagement and inquiry that lead us towards questions that only philosophy can answer. And here philosophy aspires to a special and universal practice identical with knowledge itself: “The philosophy of art [Wissenschaft der Kunst] is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in days when art by itself Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 81 yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is” [was die Kunst sei, wissenschaftlich zu erkennen] (11, 25-26). The end of art is the crowning of philosophy, through theory. 8. The rarity of theory Philosophy is really homesickness,” says Novalis: “it is the urge to be at home everywhere.” That is why philosophy, as a form of life . . ., is always a symptom of the rift between “inside” and “outside,” a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world, the incongruence of soul and deed. --György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel In Hegel, philosophy is not the mirror of nature but rather the mirror of consciousness endlessly reflected in art. Now we can only look back ironically at Hegel’s claim that art has come to an end. Even Hegel realized that the system of philosophy may not yet be complete, for humanity still has need of art even if only to inspire the prose of thought. Moreover, the admission that art can only inspire a theoretical relation, not a philosophical one, is a tacit confession that the Romantic era had not fulfilled its historical promise in either poetry or philosophy. Unable to lay claim fully to the accomplishment of a universal reason, philosophy turns to theory as something like an intermediate or transitional activity. At the same time, and even in their unfinished form, Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetic complete a logical and discursive template for aesthetic theory whose core problems and concepts were already set in place by Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Lessing, and others. Well into the 1940s (recall Clement Greenberg’s call for a newer Laocoön) the basic elements of aesthetic inquiry and valuation reprised, refined, or offered variations on the same tripartite schema. First, the concept of art was presented as a special form of apprehending by defining deductively its specific expressive modes or media. To define a medium of art meant in turn to establish criteria for asserting its relative autonomy and substantial self-similarity as a species of art, where all the major modes are distinct from one another yet all related through the same aesthetic principle. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 82 And finally, media specification included axiological criteria for ranking expressive modes according to their closeness to, or distance from, the guiding aesthetic principle. One of Hegel’s major contributions to this schema was his strong sense of the teleological force of history as humanity’s progressive discovery of a free and reasonable subject within itself, a discovery that could only take place through its successive externalizations in sensuous form. The long march toward the Absolute--a historical movement into philosophy and its forms of self-reflection--also followed the paths of progress of art in general as well as the evolution of the expressive means of art. Through all the elegant and sinuous twisting and turning of its dialectical reasoning, and in the very form of its incompleteness, Hegel’s arguments show how the variability and instability of concepts of theory in the context of the aesthetic are intimately linked to often repeated, and just as often failed, attempts to create a system of the arts as the anticipatory reflection of a complete system of philosophy. Many of the great figures of late 18th and 19th century philosophy found something troubling about the aesthetic; hence the appeal to theory or science as a way of containing that trouble or curing philosophy of it. In a sense, the aim of a book like Bernard Bosanquet’s 1892 History of Aesthetic, at its heart a profoundly Hegelian work, was to make aesthetics a respectable subject for academic philosophy by showing that it had a history concomitant with the entire span of Western thought from the pre-Socratics to the present day. After Hegel, Bosanquet also develops a more or less specific definition of theory in relation to philosophy. For Bosanquet, aesthetic theory is a branch of philosophy whose interest is understanding the place and value of beauty in the system of human life. As such the project of theory is both speculative and conceptual as “the succession of systematic theories by which philosophers have attempted to explain or connect together the facts that relate to beauty” (History of Aesthetic 1). The perception or intuition of beauty is something like a constant of human history for Bosanquet, though obviously it is valued differently by different cultures in different times. In this respect, what Bosanquet calls aesthetic consciousness comprises the “content” of aesthetic, its “data” being archaeological and other historical facts relating to art making as well as the observations of art criticism. Aesthetic consciousness finds expression in works of art but also in the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 83 perception of art, whether intuitive or active; it is therefore available to conceptual analysis. In defining these concepts, we make theories. And here, what is most striking in Bosanquet’s rather long and pedantic book is his degree of self-consciousness that ideas or concepts of the aesthetic have a history as variable and inconsistent yet systematic responses to the philosophical conundrum brought into focus by Alexander Baumgarten: “`How can the sensuous and the ideal world be reconciled?’,” or “`how can a pleasurable feeling partake of the character of reason?’” (History of Aesthetic 173). No doubt this is a retrojection of the modern idea of aesthetic onto earlier concepts. At the same time, Bosanquet’s notion of theory is an interesting transitional concept. On one hand, it is quite close to what Ruskin meant by “Theoria.” On the other, it strongly implies that theory is historical, and that the historical variability of theory is an important component of a broader philosophical account. In Bosanquet’s own summary: “The History of Fine Art is the history of the actual aesthetic consciousness, as a concrete phenomenon; aesthetic theory is the philosophic analysis of this consciousness, for which the knowledge of its history is an essential condition. The history of aesthetic theory, again, is a narrative which traces the aesthetic consciousness in its intellectual form of aesthetic theory, but never forgets that the central matter to be elucidated is the value of beauty for human life, no less as implied in practice than as explicitly recognized in reflection” (History of Aesthetic 2). Conceptual analysis, art criticism and the history of art, and finally the history of aesthetic theory, are the three components of what Bosanquet calls “aesthetic science,” an explicit rendering in English of the German term fashionable at the time, Kunstwissenschaft. Almost all of the synthetic accounts of aesthetic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are also histories of the idea and, concomitantly, of theories of the aesthetic but in a way that imposes a logic of continuity, origins, and ends. This historicizing gesture is already strongly present in Hegel’s concept of Weltanschauungen and subsequently its influence on Bosanquet, Benedetto Croce, the young György Lukács, and others. Nonetheless, it largely remains a retrojection whose continuities are more apparent than real, as Kant was well aware in his own time. When one considers deeply the genealogy of theory with its many lines of descent, the one strong commonality that Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 84 emerges, ironically, is the retrojecting force of contemporary accounts, which always forge present continuities from past discontinuous series. This remaking of history aprèscoup in a retrojecting gesture guided by present interest structures the vicissitudes of theory in the 19th century, and will reappear again in the middle of the twentieth. There is one last point to make here, relating to the grammatical difference between “theory” and “theory of.” In the almost two hundred year history of aesthetic that stretches from Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry into the early twentieth century, one did not offer theories, rather one constructed philosophical systems or doctrines; hence the reversibility of Philosophie and Wissenschaft in Hegel’s Introduction. In the standard sense, and sometimes more, theory was not an uncommon word. Still, it is important to hold onto a genealogical perspective attentive to its discontinuous and often contradictory meanings. The senses to which we (post)moderns have become accustomed are incommensurate with these earlier days, and in this respect, “theory” as the predicate for a specific kind of activity, whether philosophical or scientific, was rare--it was almost entirely absent from the titles of major works in the arts and humanities. Any account of the invention of the aesthetic, then, should retain the senses of conflict and disorder, often projected into the evolving concept of the aesthetic itself, wherein the theoretical philosophy of Kant’s time tried to hold on to a more classical and Hellenic concept of theory (what I have termed the theoretic), or where Hegel tries to create a new concept of theory as a special intermediate form of apprehension that is something more than art but less than philosophy, philosophy becoming in turn “pure theory” or science. The brief decade of the latter eighteenth century that witnessed the publication of Riedel’s or Eberhard’s “theories of” the fine arts are exceptional instances, even aberrations, where a special and limited sense of theory as artful or beautiful thought considered as a kind of Wissenschaft, so scandalized Herder or Hegel. And this is why it seemed important at the end of the nineteenth century to defend, as Bosanquet does, a concept of aesthetic science as the philosophy of fine art. One must wonder then (and I will return to this point) whether the title of György Lukács’ 1920 The Theory of the Novel was not received as something rather experimental and shocking? Or what epistemological sense was Boris Eikhenbaum trying to convey in his retrospective account in 1926 of “The Theory of the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 85 ‘Formal’ Method”? Commonplace now, these were daring titles eighty years ago, signaling a new sense and a new status for theory, making it visible and active in potentially new ways. In any case, this use of theory to designate a singular explanatory or evaluative account would remain rare and in the arts and humanities until the 1940s and 1950s. A consequence of the rarity of theory was that the major conflicts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not take place around ideas of theory so much as the senses of science or Wissenschaft in relation to philosophy and to art. In the Introduction, Hegel readily turns the philosophy of art into a science, or rather believes that there is no science of art that will not also automatically be philosophy. This was, it must be said, the philosophical bestimmte Weltanschauung in which he thought and wrote. In so far as German Idealist philosophy understood itself as an established and veritable philosophical science, Idealist philosophies of art regularly characterized themselves as scientific. In his influential Philosophy of Art (1802-3), Schelling considered philosophy as offering “a strong scientific perspective on art” (eine streng wissenschaftliche Ansicht der Kunst) because only philosophy goes beyond the contingent nature of empiricism to construct a scientific whole from “absolute principles.”39 In this way, Schelling anticipates Hegel’s contention that there is no science of art that is not, at one and the same time, a philosophy of art in which empirical and historical research must serve the broader and deeper metaphysical investigation of the Concept in art and in reason. The theoretical relation that art offers by inspiring self-reflection is on the way to a science or to a philosophy that remains as yet (and perhaps forever) unfinished. In this respect, yet another set of transformations of the aesthetic took place after Hegel wherein die Wissenschaft der Kunst became a Kunstwissenschaft--from the philosophy of art to “aesthetic science.” In the second half of the nineteenth century, and in the immediate wake of Hegel’s lectures, one did not offer theories or even philosophies of art, but rather Wissenschaften des Schönen. An entirely representative title is F. Th. Vischer’s three volume, Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen, published between 1846 and 1857. 39 Philosophie der Kunst in Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5 (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1859) 359; my translation. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 86 Still the debate over the senses and methods of science in relation to theoretical knowing were not over. Until the early 20th century, aesthetics remained a somewhat problematic enterprise within the university and academic philosophy. Moreover, the establishment of Kunstwissenschaft, and eventually art history as university disciplines would ultimately find their way through other compass points. The first congress of Kunstwissenschaft took place in Vienna in 1873, but it was not a meeting of philosophers, or at least, philosophy was not its main concern. The first academic journal of aesthetics was only created in 1904--the seminal Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, edited by Max Dessoir, and in France, the first Chair of Aesthetics at the Sorbonne was not created until 1921, when it was offered to Victor Basch. Nearly 200 years after Baumgarten’s initial defense of Wolff and his effort to promote the aesthetic as a reasonable discipline, art finally began to find a home in the university. This achievement came at a price, however. From the second half of the nineteenth century, documentary approaches to visual art--informed by classical philology, archaeology, connoisseurship, and documentary history--came more and more to present themselves as “art sciences,” reflecting the emergence of the history of art as an empirical and positivistic discipline. The attachment of Wissenschaft to what we now call art history arises no doubt from the same set of discursive formations that produced the idea of the aesthetic and the philosophy of art. Nonetheless, tectonic shifts were reshuffling the discursive landscape on which the senses of the term were nourished. At the end of the nineteenth century the history of art was informed more and more by a larger discussion in the disciplines of history as to whether historical laws operate in analogy to natural laws. Here a fault-line develops between the history of philosophical idealism and a more positivist and empirically informed art history that strove not only to enumerate facts and events but also to seek explanations and interpretations for the development of style. This change of emphasis reflected a general reorientation of the emerging discipline around the problem of form as the expression of an artistic will. The earlier archaeological and philological approaches to art history then became subdomains, though important ones, of a larger research program that referred to itself more and more frequently as allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, or “general art science,” a term that Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 87 after the turn of the century became strongly associated with the work of Max Dessoir.40 The enterprise of allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft was conceived methodologically as a comparative study of the arts, including literature and music, though nonetheless from a philosophical point of view. Dessoir believed that neither speculative and conceptual analysis nor empirical and psychological research were sufficient unto themselves; both must be accommodated in a general science of aesthetic. However, Dessoir opposed idealist philosophy with its exclusive concern for the beautiful, and instead emphasized understanding the general function of art in mental and social life. In this conception, a general science of art was comparative and critical, testing the conditions, methods, and aims of different theoretical approaches (poetics, music theory, psychology) in order to bring them together into a systematic perspective on art able to adjudicate among a number of competing approaches, both speculative and empirical. The study of art as Kunstwissenschaft became respectable, then, by casting doubt on the philosophy of art. Hegel had won the battle but was losing the war. In the late nineteenth century, under pressure from the broad and deep influence of positivism in a variety of domains, the senses of theory in relation to Wissenschaft began to turn away from philosophy and toward the social sciences, and here the semantic range of the concept began to shift. Where before Wissenschaft could sustain a philosophical or even metaphysical sense, it now felt more strongly the pressures of a positivistic and empirical approach. Even Bosanquet is trying to adapt to this climate while preserving pride of place for speculative philosophy with respect to what he calls the “exact aesthetic” of figures like Herbart, Fechner, Zimmerman, and Stumpf. This reversal is exemplified by the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, an important pioneer of experimental psychology. As reported by Benedetto Croce, in his Introduction to Aesthetic (1876) Fechner “claims to ‘abandon the attempt at conceptual determination of the objective essence of beauty,’ since he desires to compose not a metaphysical Aesthetic from above (von oben), but an 40 Dessoir’s major statement is Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1906; rev. 1923). Trans. Stephen A. Emery as Aesthetics and Theory of Art (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970). Dessoir edited the first academic revue devoted to aesthetics, the aforementioned Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, from 1906 until 1937. The journal continued publication until 1943. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 88 inductive Aesthetic from below (von unten) and to achieve clearness, not sublimity; metaphysical Aesthetic should bear the same relation to inductive, as the Philosophy of Nature to Physics.”41 Yet more vivid is Croce’s account of Ernst Grosse’s The Origins of Art [Die Anfänge der Kunst (Leipzig, 1894)]. “Contemner of all philosophical research into art,” Croce explains, “which he dismisses under the title of ‘Speculative Aesthetic,’ Grosse invokes a Science of art (Kunstwissenschaft) whose mission is to dig out all the laws lying hidden in the mass of historical facts collected to date” (Croce 397). Croce refers rather testily to the work of Spencer, Helmholtz, Taine, Fechner, Grosse, and others as “the superstitious cult of natural sciences” (391). Nevertheless, this body of work formed the discursive environment of what theory was becoming within the historical context of a “general art science.” Through the establishment of an allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, the philosophical idealism of Hegel and his time was being eroded and displaced by another version of theory, influenced by positivism, which took inspiration from the epistemological models of the natural sciences. As we come closer to the twentieth century and the invention and commercial development of the projected motion picture, as well as the initial debates on the significance, if any, of film as a new medium of art, it is interesting to reemphasize the rarity of works self-described as theory. Certainly, there are as many theories as before, but “theory” does not exist as a genre of discourse, nor does one find many “theories of” the arts. Philosophies of art continue to be written; in 1926 Rudolf Harms even publishes a Philosophie des Films in Germany. However, within the domain of the aesthetic, the most significant debates occur within conceptual definitions of Kunstwissenschaft and between Kunstwissenschaft and the philosophy of art. Within this context there is one strong exception worth noting, György Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel. Here we confront one last twist in the story (or at least one of the stories) of how art found theory, one that brings us closer to theory in a sense or senses more familiar to us. György Lukács’ second major work, The Theory of the Novel, was composed in 1914-15 41 Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic: As the science of expression and general linguistic [1909], trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York: the Noonday Press, 1953) 394. The interior citation is from Fechner’s Vorschule der Ästhetik (Leipzig, 1897-98) n. p. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 89 in the time of the European march towards total war. It was first published in Dessoir’s Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in 1915 and printed in book form in 1920, just after the conclusion of the war. Folded into the work, then, is a sense of a break in history and the suffering of a discontinuity where reason is disjoined from the world and society. And there is another turn, presented in Lukács’ retrospective account of his youthful work in the 1962 Preface to the re-publication of The Theory of the Novel. There is very little retrojection here as the elder Lukács takes pains to criticize his younger incarnation (always referred to in the third person as a kind of pre-historical self), for offering “a fusion of ‘left’ ethics and ‘right’ epistemology” in the years before discovering his own scientific perspective in Marxist philosophy, whose outcome was the controversial and still compelling History and Class Consciousness (1923).42 The Preface is thus a history of erring paths and epistemological breaks. My interest here is not to review Lukács’ arguments concerning the history of the novel as a social and philosophical form but rather to make present and perspicuous what language game he was playing in offering a “theory of” the novel in 1914-15, especially in his pre-Marxist period. This task is made more difficult in that neither in the book nor in the retrospective preface does Lukács offer an explicit account of the logic and value of theory as distinct from aesthetics, the philosophy of art, or of Kunstwissenschaft, all of which would be more common characterizations for the period. In an era when theory is still rare, how to account for its presence here as if it were a pelorus sighting a distant land where few had so far traveled? Considering its time and place of composition and publication, one of the most striking aspects of Lukács’ book is its Hegelianism. Lukács’ reference to his fusion of left ethics with right epistemology provides an important signpost for the stakes of theory at this historical moment. Lukács relates that the book was written under the influence of the “geisteswissenschaftlichen Methoden” of Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, and that the influence of Dilthey’s 1905 study of Poetry and Experience was in particular deeply felt. Lukács describes Dilthey’s influence as the appeal of an intellectual 42 Preface, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971) 21. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 90 world of large-scale syntheses in both theory and history. In turning to Hegel, Lukács was rejecting the neo-Kantian formalist and positivist aesthetics then dominant at the time, which for the younger Lukács contaminated even Dilthey and the “human sciences” school. And in turn, aesthetics seemed implicitly not the right way to characterize this approach, but rather, theory. In the 1962 Preface, Lukács gives an admirably concise definition of the apparent aims of theory as a “method of abstract synthesis” where it “became the fashion to form general synthetic concepts on the basis of only a few characteristics--in most cases only intuitively grasped--of a school, a period, etc., then to proceed by deduction from these generalisations to the analysis of individual phenomena, and in that way to arrive at what we claimed to be a comprehensive overall view” (Theory of the Novel 13). In his approach to the novel, Lukács Hegelianized Dilthey as a way of presenting “a general dialectic of literary genres that was based upon the essential nature of aesthetic categories and literary forms, and aspiring to a more intimate connection between category and history than he [the younger Lukács] found in Hegel himself; he strove towards an intellectual comprehension of permanence within change and of inner change within the enduring validity of the essence” (16). These were the conceptual components of theory as Lukács understood them at the time. Lukács notes that there was renewed interest in Hegel’s writings on logic and epistemology in the years before the outset of the Great War but that The Theory of the Novel was the first work to apply Hegel’s philosophy concretely to problems of aesthetics as conceived by the “human sciences” school. The elder Lukács does not shy away from the originality of his youthful turn to Hegel. Yet one must read between the lines of the Preface to grasp that Lukács’ sense of history and its relation to theory, in 1915 and in 1962, departs strikingly from Hegel’s teleological point of view. Lukács is responding sympathetically, no doubt, to the critical reaction of Dilthey and other philosophers to positivism and historicism, a reaction that was strongly present in other ways in the turn of the century reception of Nietzsche. At the same time, he implies that his youthful fascination with Hegel is analogous to that of the young Marx as a pre-scientific though necessary preliminary step towards a correct (theoretical) understanding of history and its relationship to art or literature. Theory has another special role to play here as the critical Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 91 response to a felt crisis in history, a crisis where other practical and conceptual possibilities seemed blocked or as yet unthought or unthinkable. Lukács relates that The Theory of the Novel was conceived in a period of deep existential as well as historical crisis, “written in a mood of permanent despair over the state of the world,” and where “nothing, even at the level of the most abstract intellection, helped to mediate between my subjective attitude and objective reality” (12). What I want to suggest here is that theory signifies the response to this crisis, at once ethical and social, wherein one no longer feels at home in the world and where the movements of history are experienced not as progress but rather as the headlong rush into catastrophe or cataclysm. This is where the turn to Hegel’s aesthetic seems strange, and where philosophy seems no longer to console or to provide a searchlight guiding humanity toward reason. In assessing the influence of Hegel’s aesthetic on his book, Lukács notes that a guiding concept is that art both follows and foreshadows the historical and philosophical abolition or overcoming of previously dominant forms and Ideals. In other words, art is always responding positively and conceptually to the evolution of the historical Idea by giving it sensuous form, a form that both anticipates and brings to completion the Idea, offering it to thought. In romanticism, sculpture and architecture thus recede to the background as poetry ascends to give voice to thought that is as rational in art as it is in politics. In Lukács’ account, “the ‘world of prose’, as [Hegel] aesthetically defines this condition, is one in which the spirit has attained itself both in thought and in social and state praxis” (Theory of the Novel 17). Alternatively, for Lukács the art of his modernity is the novel. And this is also where he marks his difference from Hegel, not only because the modern form of the novel was practically unknown to him but also because it suggests another relation to history. As Lukács relates, for Hegel history is continuous--a steady progressive march towards reason--and in moments of historical change or transformation only art becomes problematic as the signifier for one form and Idea replacing another. Art becomes problematic, or rather, confronts philosophy with problems calling for conceptual clarification, because reality itself has become non-problematic. Philosophy is the solution to art’s ontological puzzles as humanity continually re-finds and refines itself in Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 92 reason. For Lukács, however, the novel is expressive of a lived crisis in history, one where the world and history have gone out of joint and where art is unsure of its place. This is why the prose of life--poetry or philosophy--are “here only a symptom, among many others, of the fact that reality no longer constitutes a favourable soil for art; that is why the central problem of the novel is the fact that art has to write off the closed and total forms which stem from a rounded totality of being--that art has nothing more to do with any world of forms that is immanently complete in itself” (Theory of the Novel 17). The novel, it would seem, is less Stendhal’s mirror held to life than an irregular or broken crystal that presents the world in fragments. The historical realism of the novel is the historical crisis of modernity. Here the desire for totality, as represented in the perfectability of aesthetic form, or as a relation of identity between the subject and world or the subject and reason, all come to grief, and not for artistic but rather for historical and philosophical reasons: “‘there is no longer any spontaneous totality of being’, the author of The Theory of the Novel says of present-day reality. A few years later Gottfried Benn put the same thought in another way: ‘. . . there was no reality, only, at most, its distorted image” (18). In this respect, in concluding the 1962 Preface, Lukács makes explicit that the desire to create a theory of the novel was not intellectual, but rather ethical: “that the author was not looking for a new literary form but, quite explicitly, for a ‘new world’” (20). In or through theory, Lukács understands that the progress of art is unfinished and falls into fragments in humanity’s confrontation with the emergence of modernity and the global scale of violence of the first World War. Lukács’ appeal to theory is a reversal of Hegel in this respect. Where philosophy or metaphysics have failed in history, there is little left but to turn to theory. Like Marx and Kierkegaard writing after Hegel, the aim of theory was not to affirm existing reality as the culmination of history but to criticize existing reality as spiritually and historically incomplete and insufficient. Finding no solace in art as either the image of a perfectable world or a world guided by reason, one turns to theory. Expressing in its forms a crisis both ontological and historical, the novel presents history in a state of traumatic change; for the young Lukács this transformation was potentially destructive and chaotic. History would present him with new compass points, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 93 however--the Russian revolution of 1917 and the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. As a mode of art the novel is not the completion of a stage in history, but rather the anticipation of a new historical shift forged in violence. The young Lukács experienced this historical violence as a barrier--he had to find his way in theory. Retrospectively, the elder Lukács sees the problem posed by the novel as one of an anticipated revolution, which called for a response not from philosophy or metaphysics, but from theory as the complement to revolutionary practice. In turn, the history of the novel is something like the prelude to this theory; or, as Fredric Jameson notes, Lukács’ later adoption of the concept of reflection (Wiederspiegelung) from Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism was “not so much a theory in its own right as the sign of a theory to be elaborated. . . .”43 Theory turns to, or turns into, praxis in the extent to which it is capable of thinking change. In this respect, knowledge will no longer be theoretic--the static and contemplative standpoint of abstract thought and pure reason--but rather turns through theory to what is concrete, actual, and capable of transformation. Just as art was for Hegel the not-yet anticipating the completion of the system of philosophy, theory after Lukács was the always-to-come of world revolution as anticipated in the “problematical” structure of the novel itself. At the same moment, another group of writers were working through the problematic experience of modernity in relation to another form, one whose relation to art was not only uncertain, but which also threw up a challenge to the reigning concepts of aesthetics--cinema. Hegel announced the end of art (and perhaps the beginning of modern philosophy), but the concept of free art also signaled the completion of a vast social 43 Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) 188. Edward Said is an equally attentive and original reader of Lukács, especially with respect to how Lukács’ earlier concerns with subject-object relations in aesthetic experience prefigure his later commitments to revolutionary Marxism. “Theory for him,” Said observes, “was what consciousness produced, not as an avoidance of reality but as a revolutionary will completely committed to worldliness and change.” See Said’s “Traveling Theory” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) 234. Said takes up this argument again in an illuminating way in “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” in Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue, ed. Nigel C. Gibson (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), especially 197-202. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 94 change indicative of a new, modern relation to art. A more sociological and historical view would explore how Romantic ideas concerning free art were informed by the erosion of religious and aristocratic contexts of reception and patronage, the rise of state-funded museums, and the emergence of the autonomous art object as a commodity form circulating in art markets. By the early nineteenth century, artworks were definitely becoming objects with a special kind of value. And from Winckelmann through Hegel, the scientific study of art recognized ever more strongly and complexly the historical nature of this value. But it would take another hundred years before the twentieth century avant-gardes would undermine and disturb, before philosophy or aesthetic science themselves, the concept of beauty as the axiological foundation for concepts of art. Indeed the emergence of art theory, as distinct from the philosophy of art or Kunstwissenschaft, is inseparable from a certain politicization of art in critical theory-whose great critical exponents included Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, Brecht, and Adorno-that still recognized aesthetic experience as a unique perceptual domain or activity, but which placed questions of significance and value in relation to and recognition of art’s penetration by the commodity form. Film and aesthetic writing on film has a special place in this account not only as the emergence of a new and perplexing expressive mode--for many writers the very expression of modernity--but also one that was in historical tension with the transformation of aesthetic by the commodity form and capitalistic exploitation of culture and aesthetic experience. What Lukács suggests, and what we will see in the first aesthetic accounts of cinema in Part II, is that the call for theory is the appeal to the new, the actual, or the contemporary--what breaks from the past to anticipate the future. At the same time, embedded within the concept of theory is a discontinuous history of conceptual usage whose genealogy is as long as it is incomplete. Each time we evoke or invoke theory in the humanities, we lift the weight of this history on our backs, or more likely, we tread lightly upon it, as if to leave undisturbed the bones of our ancestors, unaware of how many geological layers lie beneath our feet. No doubt, when we search for a theory or theories, we seek to comprehend, understand, or explain objects, ideas, or states of affairs that attract our thoughts as well as Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 95 block them. But the problem with theory, as we shall soon see, is that it is torn from within by two diverging genealogical roots--one sunk very deeply in the ancient ground of philosophy, the other recently matured and flourishing out of the history of positivism and the empirical sciences--that have been unequally nourished in the twentieth century. Or to compound the metaphor, one could think of these as two different dimensions of our conceptual life, each involving different conceptions of time and history. The time of science, or rather, the image of truth that drives the scientific attitude (though not the history of science itself) is linear, defining a sense of progress through the accumulation of new data and the refinement of hypotheses through falsification. The more recent associations of theory with scientific method produce a tendency to view our conceptual life, sometimes even in the humanities, in terms of a rationality that is linear and conflictual, dominated by a teleological search of truth, if not as a progressively refinable image then as a repressed or hidden being, value, or identity to be uncovered or revealed. At the same time, in the humanities the scientific image of theory is too close to us, and the philosophical conception too distant. And ironically, in the twentieth century philosophy itself was responsible for producing this distance within its own history, conforming its image of thought to that of science. No doubt we reflexively link our image of theory to science, and modern philosophy, more than any other domain, has encouraged us to do so. But while a genealogy of theory seeks conceptual clarity, it cannot confuse this desideratum historically with the search for origins in either science or philosophy. Not one identity, many lines of descent. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory Part II. A Cartography of Theory 96 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 97 9. On the history of film theory What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity. --Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” Theory is not only a vista composed of many layers; our view of it is also oriented by many competing frames. Obtaining a clearer picture of theory means neither choosing a different frame nor drawing a more refined sketch or taking a different perspective, but rather remaining open to the complexity of its past and present movements. In The Virtual Life of Film, I argued that one powerful consequence of the rapid emergence of electronic and digital media is that we can no longer take for granted what “film” is—its ontological anchors have come ungrounded—and thus we are compelled to revisit continually the question, What is cinema? This ungroundedness is echoed in the conceptual history of contemporary film studies by what I call the metatheoretical attitude recapitulated in cinema studies’ current interest both in excavating its own history and in reflexively examining what film theory is or has been. The reflexive attitude towards theory began, perhaps, with my own Crisis of Political Modernism (1988; rpt. 1994) and throughout the 1980s and 1990s manifested itself in a variety of conflicting approaches: Noël Carroll’s Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory and Mystifying Movies (both 1988), David Bordwell’s Making Meaning (1989), Judith Mayne’s Cinema and Spectatorship (1993), Richard Allen’s Projecting Illusions (1995), Bordwell and Carroll’s Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996), Richard Allen and Murray Smith’s Film Theory and Philosophy (1997), Francesco Casetti’s Theories of Cinema, 1945-1995 (1993; trans.1999), Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey’s Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts (2001) and so on. One thing characteristic of all these works is the isolation and detachment of “theory” as an object available for historical and theoretical examination, but in doing so, these books take three different approaches. Natural scientific models inspire one approach, both philosophical and analytic, which posit that the epistemological value of a well-constructed theory derives from a precise and generalizable conceptual framework Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 98 defined in a limited range of postulates. This approach assumes there is an ideal model from which all theories derive their epistemological value. In turn, the value of film theory is measured by its historical progress toward commensurability with this ideal model. Alternatively, Francesco Casetti’s approach is both historical and sociological. Agnostic with respect to debates on epistemological value, it groups together statements made by self-described practitioners of theory, describing both the internal features of those statements and their external contexts as a form of social knowledge. In The Crisis of Political Modernism, my own approach, inspired by Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, assumes that the conditioning of knowledge itself is historically variable. Discourse produces knowledge. Every theory is subtended by enunciative modalities that regulate the order and dispersion of statements by engendering or making visible groups of objects, inventing concepts, defining positions of address, and organizing rhetorical strategies. This approach analyses how knowledge is produced in delimited and variable discursive contexts that are investigated as discontinuous, if sometimes overlapping, genres, practices, or modes of discourse. In a first move, it might seem strange to associate theory with history. Introducing a series of lectures at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of Vienna in 1998, I astonished a group of students by asserting that film theory has a history, indeed multiple histories with various yet intertwining genealogical lines of descent. Here the analytic approach to theory, on one hand, and sociological and archaeological approaches on the other, part ways. The fact of having a history already distinguishes film theory, and indeed all aesthetic theories, from natural scientific enquiry, for natural and cultural phenomena do not have the same temporality. Examination of the natural world may presume a progression where new data are accumulated and new hypotheses refined in modeling processes for which, unlike human culture, we have no prior knowledge. Aesthetic inquiry, however, must be sensitive to the variability and volatility of human culture and innovation; their epistemologies derive from (uneven) consensus and selfexamination of what we already know and do in the execution of daily life, or in adhering to and departing from the cultural protocols of our institutional contexts. And there is yet a third perspective offered by Hegel or the young Lukács, where theory stands somewhere Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 99 between art and philosophy as the expression and refinement of concepts offered to us in aesthetic experience, but in a pre-conceptual or proto-conceptual modality. For Hegel, art is the perfection of a place where philosophy will arrive and find itself in reason through theory; for Lukács, theory is a lifeline thrown to us in the storms of modernity, where art expresses the disjunction of reason from reality as well as the utopian possibility of their reconciliation. Here our picture of theory becomes unfocused again. This image now lacks clarity for other reasons, however. Many different conceptual images are superimposed one on top of the other, and each image resembles the others in ways significant enough that they appear to share the same design. But this image is chimerical and leads us astray if we are unable to recognize that even the short history of writing on film reveals distinct and disjunctive strata. Here the discontinuities between different approaches to investigating and evaluating the arts are as important as continuities. A historical perspective on film theory is wanted here, but what kind of history? One irony in asking this question suggests that our contemporary picture of film theory in ineluctably tied to a certain image of history. To my knowledge, the first synoptic account of aesthetic writing on film, gathering together and organizing conceptually what became the canonic version of classical film theory, was Guido Aristarco’s Storia delle teoriche del film, published in 1951.44 Owing to the overlapping senses of the word “storia” in Italian, the title of Aristarco’s pioneering book could be translated as either the “story” or “history” of film theory. But the appearance of “theory” in the title is equally significant. Our contemporary sense of what theory means may not derive precisely from Aristarco’s work, but his particular usage was certainly representative of a broad shift taking place in the immediate post-war period that involved a new set of criteria for identifying theory as a concept allied to a distinct set of institutional practices. The notion that there is a “story of film theory,” a coherent and perhaps teleological historical narrative that could be retroactively superimposed on the unruly critical writing 44 (Turin: Einaudi, 1951; rev. 1960). I thank Francesco Casetti for leading me back to this important book. See also Aristarco’s L’arte del Film: antologia storico-critica (Milan: Bompiani, 1950). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 100 on film emerging in cinema’s first fifty years, is coincident with similar shifts in the study of art and literature, especially the emergence in comparative literature of a new domain of inquiry--the survey of critical theory in a synoptic perspective whose inaugural gesture is René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949) and whose exemplar is René Wellek’s magisterial eight volume History of Modern Criticism (1955-1992). To this general historical perspective we owe the practice of conceptualizing courses in film, art, or literary theory as occupying a single term of study, or perhaps two successive semesters. In a course on aesthetics, which might begin with Plato and conclude with Derrida, this kind of decontextualized and often chronological approach implicitly assumes that there is a continuous, linear, and more or less unified narrative that can be told about aesthetic expression and judgments of value. Or, similarly, that the concept of the aesthetic itself has a philosophical continuity reaching back to Periclean Athens or before. Hegel’s philosophy of history is not too far in the background, even if its outlines are fading, and Bosanquet’s notion of aesthetic theory as a continuingly evolving consciousness of the aesthetic lingers nearby. That Aristarco was deeply influenced by Lukács and encouraged him to return to writing about film, and that Lukács and Balázs were close friends throughout the teens establishes an oblique yet distinct network of filiations and family resemblances. Retrospectively, it is equally curious that early in the 20th century film would become associated with theory. This association is not simple, natural, or self-evident. One of the earliest occurrences of the term appears in the aforementioned Der sichtbare Mensch (1924), where Béla Balázs argues that “Theory is, if not the helm, then at least the compass of artistic development. And only when a concept sends you in the right direction can you speak of erring. This concept--film theory--you must make for yourself.“45 The idea of theory presented here is both wonderfully contemporary yet also expressive of a very specific moment in the philosophy of art. On one hand, Balázs is 45 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001) 12; my translation. See also the new and welcome translations of Visible Man and The Spirit of the Film in Erica Carter, ed., Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghan Books, 2010). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 101 suggesting that in order to develop or unfold its expressive possibilities, the new art of film needs critical reflection. Criticism guides film (away from literature or theater perhaps) towards something like a heightened self-understanding, not only of its internal formal possibilities, but also its external cultural presentation of “visible humanity.” In many ways, Balázs’ book can be read as a founding text of visual cultural studies, one that gives pride of place to film not simply as the art most characteristic of modernity, but also as a new scriptural form through which humanity comprehends itself in a post-alphabetic culture, and where literacy now means close attention to the physiognomy of things as well as people, social as well as natural space. At the same time, “die Theorie des Films” is not something discovered “from” or “in” cinema as if there were facts there to be uncovered or brought to light. Rather it is a practice of the construction of concepts that is already curiously close to Gilles Deleuze’s observation sixty years later in the conclusion to Cinema 2: The Time-Image that theory is made or crafted no less than artistic expression itself. On the other hand, Balázs’ text may appear contemporary to us only as the retrojection of a picture that is far too familiar and this image may not align precisely with the one Balázs intends. Theory seems always to have accompanied film study on its long march toward academic acceptance, which still seems hardly or only newly achieved in the twenty-first century. It is a word, concept, and practice that we have taken for granted since at least the 1950s. Just as the notion of the auteur appeared as one strategy for legitimating the study of film by trying, and only with some difficulty, to locate filmic expression in a singular creative voice or signature thus defining it as art, perhaps theory also emerged as a way of applying a scientific patina to the discussion of an art form that was barely considered as such in 1924. But step back further from this picture or try to see it in a different light. What is called theory now might not be legible as such to someone of Balázs’ historical place and culture. In 1924, a writer with Balázs’ education and experience might well have defended film in the context and vocabulary of the philosophy of art or aesthetics. Here a frame or context is needed where theory seems alien or strange as a usage that is not obvious or self-evident. Indeed Balázs’ particular appeal to theory in 1924 was probably Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 102 exceptional and the word itself surprising in this context. This was certainly not the way writing on film or art was usually characterized in the teens (Lukács’ Theory of the Novel being an exception, as I have mentioned in Part 1). For example, in 1912 Lukács published a short text entitled, “Gedanken zu einer Äisthetik des ‘Kino’,” that is, thoughts toward a cinema aesthetics. Reviewing Balázs’ book in 1926, Andor Kraszna-Krausz describes it as a contribution to “aesthetic philosophy,” and the title of his review characterizes the book as “eine Filmdramaturgie.”46 This terminology resonates in compelling ways with other fundamental texts of the period such as Sergei Eisenstein’s 1929 statement, “A Dramaturgy of Film Form.” In his first preface to Der sichtbare Mensch, Balázs portrays his arguments as a “philosophy of the art of film” that explores questions of meaning by way of a critical account of the medium’s distinctive aesthetic features. And finally, Balázs’ most well known book in English, The Theory of Film, a collection and synthesis of texts spanning his entire career as a writer, seems never to have born that title except in English translation. Published first in Russian in 1945 as Iskusstvo Kino (The Art of Film), in 1948 the book appeared in German as Der Film. Werden und Wesen einer neuen Kunst (Film: Growth and Character of a New Art). Yet more significantly, the Hungarian title given this work was Filmkultúra: A film müvészetfilozófiájá (Film Culture: A Film Philosophy of Art). To complicate this picture, or alternatively, to show that a new usage of a concept of theory was setting in by 1950, it is interesting to note that the first chapter of the German version of Balázs’ book argues in its title for “Eine Filmästhetik (“a film aesthetic”), while the Hungarian version begins “Az elmélet dicsérete” or “In Praise of Theory.” My point here is that what we call theory today was characterized much differently throughout the long and complex history of writing on film before the end of WW II--as 46 “Béla Balázs: Der sichtbare Mensch. Eine Filmdramaturgie, Film Technik 21 (16 October 1926); reprinted in Der sichtbare Mensch 168. This rapprochement of theory to dramaturgy also suggests a slippage with one of the German senses of Lehre. Often translated as “theory” (Goëthe’s Farbelehre as color theory or Schlegel’s Kunstlehre as theory of art), in an aesthetic context the term is closer to doctrine, or better, a systematic poetic guiding or clarifying expression. This particular conception of dramaturgy and poetics will also inform Russian Formalist approaches to “theory.” Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 103 dramaturgy, aesthetic philosophy, and the philosophy of art, if the writers bothered to characterize their work at all. Indeed the adoption of the English title Theory of Film in 1952 is already indicative of a reflex to superimpose retroactively a picture of theory on a complex range of conceptual activities that may not have characterized themselves as such. This picture clouds our image of what those activities meant and were supposed to accomplish both conceptually and historically. No doubt, many of the best-known writers on film in the teens and twenties did not think of themselves as theorists at all. Like Balázs or Lukács, students of the great nineteenth century German tradition of aesthetics, they placed themselves, and were trying to place film, in a conceptual domain occupied by the philosophy of art. The appearance of the word theory in 1924, then, must evoke a special case, and one that is already in tension with philosophy or the philosophy of art, as we have already seen in the early Lukács. At the same time, we still don’t know what “theory” means in 1924 or why it should be evoked as a special case. In calling for theory as the compass guiding the aesthetic direction of a new art form, what language-game was Balázs playing? To grapple with the genealogy of this concept does not mean erasing differences and restoring continuities, but rather making the word “theory” alien again, to make it unfamiliar by peeling back the palimpsestic layers of meaning covering it over. 10. Genres of theory The modern is never simple; it is always, so to speak, on the top of something else; always charged with a contradiction, with reminiscence, in one word, with a history. --Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic To make these layers distinct again, it may be useful to picture the emergence of film aesthetics in the twentieth century from the perspective of three more or less discontinuous and open genres. It is tempting to think of the history of film aesthetics as a sequence of thirty-year periods--1915 to 1947 for classical, 1947 to 1968 for modern, and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 104 1968 to 1996 for contemporary film theory. But this approach disregards the important overlaps, retentions and returns, irregular continuities, all the dotted lines, straight and curving that thread through these three discursive series. For reasons that should soon be apparent, I will recast this formulation as the emergence and persistence of aesthetic, structural, and ideological or cultural modes of aesthetic writing on film. These are less chronological periods than distinct though sometimes interpenetrating enunciative modalities whose internal regularities are defined by commonalities of concept formation, institutional contexts, and rhetorical strategies. Blossoming from the soil of Baumgarten’s and Hegel’s organic and typological categories, the aesthetic discourse is concerned with questions of artistic value and the delimitation of aesthetic a prioris through which film’s singularity as an art form could be identified and assessed as well as compared with the other arts of space and of time. The structural or semiological discourse is dominated by problems of meaning or signification in relation to the image. Beginning with the filmology movement in postwar France, it is marked by the introduction of film studies to the university in the contexts of the human sciences and is dominated by the influence of formalism and structuralism in the 1960s. Finally, the cultural discourse is defined by the psychoanalytic challenge to structuralism, the predominance of theories of the subject, and the problem of ideology. Periodizing the aesthetic investigation of film as classical, modern, and contemporary is doubtless familiar to most students of cinema and, at first glance, may seem commonsensical. However, it is precisely the sources of this commonsense that interest me here, for there are good reasons to challenge them or least to hold them in suspension if not outright under suspicion. To maintain productively our disorientation with respect to theory, the discontinuities of these genres of discourse must be understood from the standpoint of their institutional contexts and rhetorical strategies but also, and more specifically, as distinct conceptual shifts in which the practice and activities of explanation and evaluation--ways of asking questions and anticipating answers, adapting and transforming terminology, rewriting precedent debates or repressing them--subtly but decisively shift meaning. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 105 Among the earliest emblematic works of the aesthetic discourse are Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture (1915) and Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916). Undoubtedly the richest and most complex period of writing on film, this discursive territory ranges from North America across France, Germany, and the former Soviet Union, before returning to the United States in the last works, written in English, of Siegfried Kracauer. It includes all the dominant figures of the first fifty years of thought about film: not only Lindsay and Münsterberg, but also Ricciotto Canudo, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, the French Impressionist and Surrealist writings on film, the Soviet montage schools with Lev Kuleshov, V. I. Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, the Poetika Kino and all of Sergei Eisenstein’s writings through his magnificent Non-Indifferent Nature, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, Erwin Panofsky, Hans Richter, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin, among other important figures. Chronologically, the genre is brought to a close by the post-war writings of André Bazin (still, probably, the most influential texts in the history of film aesthetics) and Kracauer’s Theory of Film. It is tempting to date the end of the aesthetic discourse with Bazin’s death in 1958 and the publication of Kracauer’s Theory of Film in 1960. (Curiously, Kracauer mentions Bazin nowhere in this book despite its enormous bibliography, which nonetheless includes other important sources in French from the era of filmology.) However, this argument ignores the place of the 1971 publication of Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed, still one of the most misunderstood books, both conceptually and historically, in writing on the cinema. But, as I already suggested in The Virtual Life of Film, Kracauer’s Theory of Film and Cavell’s The World Viewed stand together in their very different ways as the grand closing gestures of a certain way of thinking about film. And part of their richness, and why they remain compelling works today, is that they represent both the closure of a certain kind of thought and the opening up of new philosophical vistas to which we still have not properly adjusted our vision. They remain, in many ways, untimely works. A period spanning nearly fifty years and two continents: What criteria would justify bringing so many diverse figures, and so many conceptually rich texts, together on a single territory of such geographical, linguistic, and historical diversity? Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 106 First, this territory, and the set of criteria populating it, must be considered as open and variable. In this respect, the different discursive modalities of aesthetic writing on film, individually and together, are best considered as open sets, indeed something like a genre in Stanley Cavell’s logical characterization of that concept.47 A genre, of course, must contain a definable and delimitable set of criteria according to which membership in the set can be discussed, accounted for, and debated. Membership in the set does not require that each text exhibit or conform to all the criteria, however. Rather, it suffices that all members share at least some significant number of elements in common. The salient features of a genre, and candidacy for membership of individual texts, are therefore open-ended: new conceptual features, definitions, and questions are not limitable in advance of critical evaluation. Characterizing a genre, then, does not mean identifying a set that has been closed off in the past, or establishing a rigid typology. It requires attentiveness to repetition and change as well as contradiction, for genres are futureoriented, seeking change and mutation. The trick, then, is to assess and evaluate commonalities and family resemblances that persist across that repetition, which produces new members of the set until the salient elements change and recombine in such a way that a new genre emerges. The recognition of a new genre--in my example, a new discursive modality of film theorizing-equally requires contests or tests of negation. These contests are not historically linear; the time of repetition and contestation can be lateral, moving backwards or forwards across related groups of texts or arguments. A new genre thus emerges through a process of derivation where there is no a priori standing or necessary set of features that an instance must exhibit to qualify as a member of the set. Indeed, members will emphasize or exhibit different or further features of the discursive set, and some feature or features will inevitably sit uncomfortably within the set formed by the other members. 47 See in particular Cavell’s discussion of genre in Pursuits of Happiness: the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) 26-34, Contesting Tears: the Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 3-14, and “The Fact of Television” in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005) 59-85. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 107 One last component, especially characteristic of discourses of theory and the generic transformations of aesthetic writing on film, bears mentioning here. The emergence of a new discursive modality often suppresses its discontinuities with earlier genres by retrojecting its logic, vocabulary, and conceptual structure onto earlier genres and discourses. This would be another way of characterizing generic contestation or tests of negation. For example, in his essay on “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” Bazin resituates the history of film style not as a break between the silent and sound periods but rather as a contest between “faith in the image” or “faith in reality.” Rather than defining the technological history of cinema as divided between the silent and sound periods, one finds the ebb and flow of a constant evolution towards deep focus cinematography. Expressionism or montage are in contest here with composition in depth as a persistent stylistic option. In a founding work of the structural discourse, “Cinema: Language or Language System,” Christian Metz remaps the conceptual history of the aesthetic mode with respect to the problem of language, thus transforming the unruly precedent debates on film art as a continuous debate on the question of signification or meaning. When the cultural discourse emerges after 1968, Eisenstein or Benjamin are reread in the context of a materialist and ideological discourse that wants to recover or reconstruct a continuous history of left aesthetics in film, thus rendering the history of film theory as a Marxist theory and history. Very often, these retrojections involve conceptual remappings and replacements of the idea of theory itself. For these reasons, every historical moment of theoretical awakening is, as it were, to some degree metacritical or metatheoretical. In key moments of discursive ramification or reformulation, an idea of theory suddenly becomes conscience of itself and its apparent history. Part II of this book, then, will not be a history of film theory so much as a critical examination of moments of rupture, reconsideration, and retrojection where theory takes itself as its own object, examines and reconfigures its genealogy, conceptual structure and terminology, and posits for itself a new identity and cultural standing. Theory is a tangled skein composed from many threads, as we have already seen in Part I. We will need to follow them both individually and in the weave of their ever-shifting patterns. My arguments will thus focus on significant points of passage and displacement in the genealogy of theory: Riccioto Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 108 Canudo as exemplar of the aesthetic discourse, Boris Eikhenbaum and Russian Formalism, the filmology movement in France, the rise of structuralism and the early work of Christian Metz, and finally, the influence of Louis Althusser on the discourses of political modernism and culturalism, before revisiting the claims of historical poetics and postTheory at the beginning of Part III. In this context, attention to discursive discontinuities is as important as to continuities. This point is crucial for understanding so-called classical film theory. Before 1950, with some few very notable exceptions it is rare to find writing on cinema that characterizes itself as theory or theoretical, as I have already pointed out. In the great variety of texts produced in this period, what might be recognized today as film history, criticism, or dramaturgy blends with the conceptual innovation or invention that is more characteristic of the activities and rhetorical strategies of film theory or aesthetics. This observation still leaves unresolved, of course, the question of how to characterize logically a theory of art or of an art form like film? Indeed, the idea of theory, and what constitutes a theory in the aesthetic, structural, or cultural modes is something of a moving target. (Nor have we yet arrived at the point where a film philosophy might be distinguished from film theorizing. This will be the aim of Part III.) Nevertheless, as I suggested earlier, the aesthetic discourse confronts film as a problem, above all because the new medium is perceived to sit only uncomfortably within the then current philosophical discourse of Art or the aesthetic. Indeed, in the first forty years of its existence, film is testing, even negating, the “genre” of Art; its very existence and evolution undermines and throws open the questions of how to settle the identity of a medium or art form, and how to value or not the subjective aesthetic experiences it inspires. The insistence of the questions--What is film? Or what is cinema?--thus demonstrate the difficulty of making film visible and intelligible as an object of explanation and evaluation, and therefore, the object of a theory. And at the same time, the persistence of these ontological questions undermines confidence, as did modernism in general, in the concepts that previously assured the identity of art forms and categories of aesthetic judgment. In this manner, theory, in film or in art, first emerges as a form of explanation in confrontation with a problem, and this problem arises because of the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 109 variability or ephemerality of the objects writers are trying to frame or picture. What can be learned from the variety and contentiousness of writing on film, especially in the silent and early sound periods, is that here theory is less a form of unifying and systematizing a body of knowledge about an object than a mode of activity or of conceptual engagement, a manner of interrogating one’s self and debating with others about the nature of what counts as a (new) medium and how to describe its subjective effects and cultural significance. There is also the question of responding to larger historical pressures being brought to bear on the concept of art in general, as Walter Benjamin was so well aware. Consequently, it is especially characteristic of the aesthetic discourse that attempts to construct general and systematic accounts of film are rare.48 The activity of theorizing, if we can call it that, is rather highly speculative, open-ended, and written with poetic and confrontational enthusiasms. Much of this is explainable historically by the open and free-form contexts for debate, writing, and publication. With the exceptions of Münsterberg, Arnheim, and Panofsky, writing before the end of WW II usually occurred outside of the university as an institutional context. While many of the participants come from highly cultured backgrounds, they also have eclectic professional commitments: many are filmmakers like Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Hans Richter, working equally within, outside of, or on the margins of their national systems of production; others are critics and journalists like Vachel Lindsay, Ricciotto Canudo, Louis Delluc, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, or André Bazin. Film aesthetics is very much an amateur affair here, with all the positive connotations of the term. The professional activities of many of the writers are highly varied, as in the example of Balázs who was a writer, dramatist, critic, aesthetician, scenario writer, and film producer, as well as an educator and lecturer. The dominant literary form of the 48 Interesting counter-examples to this observation would include works like Georg Otto Stindt’s Das Lichtspiel als Kunstform (1924) and Rudolf Harms’s Philosophie des Films (1926). Academic treatises written in the context of German “art science” and normative aesthetics, these works are rather exceptions that prove the rule. Moreover, their variance with respect to the aesthetic discourse is documented in unfavourable reviews by both Kracauer and Arnheim. See Sabine Hake’s The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907-1933. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993, 130-157. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 110 period is the belle-lettristic essay, blossoming in the flourishing culture of ciné-clubs, galleries, feuilletons, manifestos, and small literary reviews. While collections of essays were fairly common (Jean Epstein’s Bonjour Cinéma [1921] is a pertinent example), apart from Münsterberg, before Kracauer’s Theory of Film Eisenstein might be the only significant figure who tries, for the most part unsuccessfully, to complete a systematic and synthetic approach to film in the form of a book or books.49 None of these contextual remarks, however, provide criteria for characterizing the aesthetic mode as a discursive genre. More important here are the conceptual commonalities that underlie the kinds of questions raised in the period, and the forms of their rhetorical strategies and positions of address as well as alternative responses to these questions. Despite the apparent variety and inconsistency of positions, which often lack an explicit methodological framework, what both enables and constrains the aesthetic mode is a series of complex and contradictory debates that were also characteristic of artistic modernism in general. These debates arose from a confrontation where film, and arguments about film, played a key role, and where concepts of the aesthetic and aesthetic judgment, and the constitutive self-identity of works of art, where consistently challenged, remaining contradictory and fluid. In this way, the perplexing virtual life of film runs parallel to, and is inseparable from, the history of modernism in art. However, as Noël Carroll has usefully explained in Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory, the unruly diversity of the genre is nonetheless framed by a three fundamental questions.50 The first question asks: what is the determinant or crucial feature of film that establishes its identity and specificity as an art form? In most accounts, this question structures attempts to ground the medium of film according to criteria of autonomy and self-identity. Second, what is the value or role of cinema, both artistically and socially? Does cinema have a place among the seven major arts, or, as Benjamin insisted, does it challenge our very concept of art? Here Carroll notes that the determining 49 Eisenstein’s life and work are strewn with projected and incomplete efforts to systematize his thought. See in particular Jacques Aumont’s still indispensable Montage Eisenstein, trans. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley, and Andrew Ross (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), especially 1-25. 50 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), especially 4-15. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 111 features identified by a given writer will generally be considered as “instrumental in realizing or actualizing the value or role the theorist names for cinema” (Classical Film Theory 13). Good examples include Balázs’ promotion of the close-up as restoring visual acuity and sensitivity to the physiognomies of people and things, an idea echoed in Jean Epstein’s linking of the close-up to the concept of photogénie--a poetic animation of nature through photography’s possibilities of framing and magnification that intensifies visual expression and transforms photography through cinema’s qualities of time and movement. Finally, in working through the first two questions most writers ask: what processes of articulation are specific to film? Carroll notes, rightly, that before Bazin the fundamental ground for these three questions was the assumption “that the most aesthetically significant feature of the film medium is its capacity to manipulate reality, that is, to rearrange and thereby reconstitute the profilmic event (the event that transpires in front of the camera)” (Classical Film Theory 7). The key example here is Rudolf Arnheim’s defense of the medium in Film as Art (1932) against the charge that it only mechanically records physical reality. Arnheim counters with the idea that the expressive possibilities of film all derive from its potential for creative artistic manipulation according to its specific means for projecting solids onto plane surfaces, signifying space pictured in depth, and for fragmenting and reordering space and time. Indeed, logically the aesthetic mode continually links the three questions by specifying articulatory features of the medium and then characterizing them according to a concept or idea that serves simultaneously to define and ground their aesthetic value. Eliciting criteria of expression, then, functions as both the telos and archē of the aesthetic discourse, connecting and reconnecting concepts of identity, value, and articulation in often circular ways. In my account, this observation neither turns the aesthetic discourse towards theory or away from it. These writings are neither pre-theoretical nor another kind of theory or an alternative to theory. Could the early experience of film have been accounted for otherwise? In treating these writers as “theorists,” criticizable according to analytic philosophy’s standards of argument, Carroll is indifferent to the complicated and variegate phenomenological dimension of early writing on film; that is, the fact that almost all Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 112 writings of the period are struggling to assess the specificity of the spectatorial experience of projected film as well as its place as the expression of a culture or an age. My concern, rather, is to indicate at least in outline how the ontological force of the new medium confronts writers struggling to comprehend the experience of modernity through their experience of film. The wild inventiveness of the aesthetic discourse was a continuing and contradictory response to the perceptual and conceptual vertigo elicited not only by the novelty of the medium, but also by the velocity with which it was continually reinventing itself and responding to larger historical and cultural forces. Like most strictly analytical accounts, Carroll also ignores the deeper and more complex genealogical network of concepts that thread through these writings philosophically, linking them in sometimes direct and indirect lines, if not errant displacements, to wider debates in the philosophy of art. It is important, first, to recognize in the aesthetic mode the conceptual and rhetorical form of the systematic aesthetics of the 19th century, especially in German philosophy, that would have formed the philosophical background of most of the writers. Here definitions of the medium or genre of art are motivated by criteria that delimit and typify major artistic forms such as poetry, music, dance, painting, sculpture, and architecture, often in ways that reproduce, explicitly or implicitly, the idealist system of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetic and its promulgation in the late nineteenth century in the works of Bosanquet and others. In most characteristic accounts, the aesthetic, or what counts as an instance or medium of Art, is thus framed by enunciative a prioris that define the horizon of all that can be said or thought within this discursive register. These are the conceptual grounds of the discourse, which include: the criterion of self-identity (that the existence of a medium of art must be typified as a pure genre); the criterion of substantial self-similarity (that each genre of art is produced from a medium, here defined as a single substance or a closed set of qualities); and finally, the definition of unique aesthetic a prioris for each medium, that is, sets of formal or stylistic options that are uniquely characteristic of the genre and its medium.51 51 See for example my Reading the Figural (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) 30-44 and The Virtual Life of Film 31-41. Carroll also adds what I have characterized as an “injunctive argument,” where the definition of media require an exclusiveness--deriving Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 113 11. Excursus: Ricciotto Canudo and the aesthetic discourse We are living between two twilights; the eve of one world, and the dawn of another. Twilight is vague, all outlines are confused; only eyes sharpened by a will to discover the primal and invisible signs of things and beings can find a bearing through the misty vision of the anima mundi. However, the sixth art imposes itself on the unquiet and scrutinous spirit. --Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of the Sixth Art” Ricciotto Canudo’s writings on film exemplify the aesthetic discourse in many ways as well as the philosophical background of idealist aesthetics before Walter Benjamin’s work of the 1930s. At the same time, his voluminous critical writings on cinema are exemplary of the openness of the discursive genre of classical film theory. Canudo was an Italian expatriate who settled in Paris in 1901 at the age of twenty-five. A scholar, writer, and literary entrepreneur, friend of Apollinaire and D’Annunzio, Canudo founded a movement called “Cérébrisme” and from 1913 to 1914 edited an important art journal called Montjoie! that advocated “French imperialism” in the domain of the arts. Like Balázs, throughout his lifetime Canudo composed novels, poems, tragedies, and ballets while churning out articles, lectures, and criticism for a great variety of newspapers and little magazines. Although a posthumous edition of his writings on cinema was published shortly after his death in 1926 as L’Usine aux images (The Image Factory), Canudo never published a book or a systematic account of cinema. Nonetheless, he considered himself an “aesthetician.” From 1908 to 1914 he lectured on aesthetics and the philosophy of art at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and published two significant works: Psychologie musicale des Civilisations. Le livre de l’evolution. L’homme (Paris: Edward Sansot et Cie., 1908) from their substantial self-similarity and aesthetic a prioris--that discourages or prohibits uses contrary to those criteria. In my account, the injunctive criterion was not as widespread or consistent as Carroll seems to believe, and it is contrary to my characterization of both discursive and artistic genres as open and variable. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 114 and Hélène, Faust et nous. Précis d’esthétique cérébriste (Paris: E. Sansot/R. Chiberre, 1920).52 During this period and up until the time of his death in 1923, Canudo was a tireless advocate for the cinema. Giovanni Dotoli and Jean-Paul Morel’s edition of L’Usine collects together 102 articles on cinema published between 1908 and 1923, which appeared in a variety of newspapers and little magazines. Characteristic of the institutional context of the aesthetic discourse, many of these began as lectures at cinéclubs and salons. Canudo himself hosted a cinema salon at the Café Napolitain in Paris, and in April 1921 founded the Club des Amis du Septième Art (often referred to as “C. A. S. A.”), which, eighteen months later, began publishing a review, La Gazette du cinéma. Although established after Louis Delluc’s own pioneering ciné-club, “C. A. S. A.” was arguably more influential in terms of the personalities enlisted to support it and the variety of activities it promoted. In the same year, Canudo began organizing film events at the still prestigious Salon d’Automne, established in 1903 by Frantz Jourdain as an alternative to the Salon des Beaux Arts. A critic of the commercialism of the major producers and distributors and a champion of the cinema as Art, Canudo understood that the ciné-clubs and salons were crucial for establishing an institutional context where an aesthetic discourse on and of film could be expressed and defended. Canudo’s writings on the cinema do not constitute a film theory nor were they meant to. Like his exact contemporary, Vachel Lindsay, the word theory appears infrequently and mostly in what I have called its vernacular use. Nonetheless, Canudo consistently deploys a discourse where art, philosophy, and science occupy important roles representative of the logic and rhetoric of the aesthetic debates of the time. The key term for Canudo was “aesthetic,” and his idea of the aesthetic was closely tied to a vision of modernity as the wholly new. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Canudo envisioned the potential for a modernist liberation of art as the possibility for achieving a grand idealist synthesis of all the arts. “Cerebrism” thus names the project for producing a 52 For a more complete overview of Canudo’s life and work, see Giovanni Dotoli and Jean-Paul Morel’s introduction to L’Usine aux images (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Séguier et Arte Éditions, 1995) 7-19 as well as Dotoli’s Ricciotto Canudo: ou le cinéma comme art (Paris : Didier Érudition, 1999) and Giovanni Dotoli, ed., Bibliografia critica di Ricciotto Canudo (Fasano: Schena, 1983). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 115 synthetic view uniting all the various avant-gardes (cubist, synchronist, simultaneist, futurist, dadist, surrealist) while providing a philosophical argument crowning artistic modernism as the Hegelian expression of the new historical spirit of modernity. The rise of an industrial and urban culture dominated by science and technology and the decline of religious sentiment meant for Canudo that humanity must search for emotional and ethical content in new means of expression--in short, the aesthetic would be the new secular religion of modernity. “Only the aesthetic can achieve this indefinite enlargement of the ideal,” Canudo wrote in 1911, “where all sensation becomes feeling and thought-religious idea. It alone appears to us as capable of channeling all the errant ‘religiosity’ of our age toward a true ‘religious faith’ that is acceptable to our modern spirit. It alone can give us this ‘faith,’ which is none other than the imposition of an a priori organizing principle [ordonnateur], an original, multiple, and unanimously accepted direction of mental life and collective feeling--the only one finally that could bring a style to the total life of an age.”53 In his 1906 book Psychologie musicale des Civilisations, Canudo finds this principle in the expressive possibilities of the Cinematograph, which he hails as ““the advent of the supreme synthesis of all the Arts and of all Philosophy in the Metaphysical Theater” that represents for the “Homo Novus, who we will not see . . . the perfect union of Science and Dream” (L’Usine 11; my trans.). Canudo’s aesthetic displays a pastiche of conceptual resources that were not uncommon for his time and place. Reflecting the impact of the French publication of Thus Spake Zarathustra in turn-of-the-century Paris, his writing is heavily influenced by the aphoristic style of Nietzsche and the rhetorical gestures of Emerson. (Oddly in this context, his basic philosophical position is Hegelian.) A persistent theme of his writings throughout the oughts and teens is that the Homo Novus or modern man is, like Nietzsche’s Overman, yet to come--this form of subjectivity is still being forged in a nascent modernist culture. Even at the time of his last writings in 1923, for Canudo the cinema was not yet a mature modern art, even though it still expressed completely the Hegelian spirit of the age. Here aesthetics had a specific role to play in identifying, 53 Cited in the introduction to L’Usine aux images 10; my translation. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 116 clarifying, and defending art’s anticipatory forms and affects. In a 1921 essay, “L’Esthétique du septième art (1),” Canudo clearly lays out the tasks of aesthetics as attending to historical facts as they occur, close examination and discussion of individual works, and the precise description of stylistic trends. This was all the more important in the case of the cinematograph as it was at once both the highest summit of aesthetic expression and still an immature art. Canudo continues: And since we are considering an Art that is new in all its aspects, we wish already to draw out the general laws, spiritual orientations, and the common rhythm of similar expressions [manifestations]. In a word: Aesthetic. Every Aesthetic, applied to whatever art, is its explication and its philosophy. It is more than “criticism” and has nothing in common with “reporting.” It seeks out the rules that dominate this human representation of interior life which is the whole of artistic vision. And since I must define it in an introductory way, I will say that the Aesthetic is to the work of art what Philosophy is to the work of reason. In sum, a “system,” a unitary conception of the aspirations and achievements that make every artistic work appear as a phenomenon which is never isolated, but is always part of a larger whole linked to the global spirit of an age. (L’Usine 59; my trans.) All the generic characteristics of the aesthetic discourse are already apparent in one of Canudo’s earliest essays on film, “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” published in October 1911 in Paul Vuilliaud’s esoteric literary review, Les Entretiens idéalistes.54 Canudo opens his argument by asserting that the five extant arts--music, poetry, architecture, sculpture, and painting--have all evolved from a universal aesthetic response to the natural environment. Eleven years later, Canudo presents this argument as his “theory of the seven arts” (dance has now been added) in his “Manifeste des sept arts.”55 This is not a film theory, but rather a general aesthetic accounting for the system of the arts and their evolution, 54 Trans. Ben Gibson et al. in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism (19071929), Vol. I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) 58-66. 55 From a lecture presented at the first Congrès de la Fédération internationale des Arts, des Lettres et des Sciences (Brussels, 18-20 April 1922) and first published in the Belgian review 7 arts 4 (23 November 1922) 1-2. Reprinted in L’Usine 161-164. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 117 following, in schematized form, the logic of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetic. It is also representative of a displacement throughout the teens and twenties whereby system aesthetics becomes gradually identified as a “theory.” Still, one might imagine that for Canudo, who understands cinema to be in its infancy and not yet having even achieved its adolescence, film would not yet merit a theory, since it had not yet discovered or developed within itself a system of aesthetic a prioris or unique articulatory mechanisms. What are the components of this “theory”? Already in Psychologie musicale des Civilisations, as well as “Birth of a Sixth Art,” Canudo asserts that aesthetic expression is a fundamental and universal human response to the ravages of time and to survival in the natural environment. The two principle or founding arts, existing since the “dawn of humanity,” are architecture (responding to the need for shelter) with its complimentary spatial expressions of sculpture and painting, and dance, with it complementary art, poetry, arising from a basic human emotional drive toward temporal and rhythmic expression. The fundamental aesthetic motive for all aesthetic expression is to struggle against death by fixing all that is transient in life: “elevating above ephemeral realities and affirming the eternity of things that stir the emotions of man” (“Manifeste” 162). In Canudo’s view, the function of architecture and music for primitive humanity was to arrest, fix, and give form to the plastic and rhythmic powers of its emotional existence. Subsequently, as humanity evolves culturally the arts branch out and evolve toward increasing spiritual complexity: from music comes the temporal arts, rhythmic movement (dance) combined with speech (lyric poetry); from architecture, the material and spatial arts of painting and sculpture. Both produce dreams of “perpetuity in space and in time” (162). In “Birth of a Sixth Art,” Canudo argues that after thousands of years, the Cinematograph now presents in outline the emergence of a fundamentally new art that combines the rhythms of space (the plastic arts) and the rhythms of time (music and poetry). The novelty of cinema for Canudo takes the form of its absolute modernity--not only the apogee of a continuous artistic and spiritual evolution, but also a definitive break with thousands of years of human history (“the eve of one world and the dawn of another”). In contrast to the more ancient form of theater, then, cinema presents a new Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 118 synthesis of forms previously held separate: “Plastic Art in Motion” or “a Painting and a Sculpture developing in Time, as in music and poetry” (“Birth” 59). Moreover, combining the spatial and temporal branches of artistic evolution, this grand synthesis of the arts reaches toward the expression of a universal aesthetic will, creating “the total art towards which all the others have striven” (“Manifeste” 161). In this respect, from a very early period, Canudo considered the Cinematograph as representative of all that was new and modern in art and culture. Throughout his essays on film Canudo considers himself as something like an aesthetic midwife for the new art, capturing and articulating its fundamental elements of expression as they appear. In 1911, Canudo defines the fundamental elements of the Cinematograph as the symbolic and the real. The symbolic refers to the new formal capacity of film to create forms through velocity or excess of movement--speed given expression or made expressive in being heightened to a poetic level as “a series of visions and aspects woven in a pulsating beam of light, seen as a living organism” (59, 33; my trans.). Here Canudo echoes futurism and anticipates the machine aesthetic of the European avant-gardes of the 1920s. As projected by the Cinematograph, characters move with speeds impossible in real life and all movements are produced and regulated with a mathematical and mechanical precision. This symbolic velocity, a poetics of speed, is also considered as something like a perceptual rapid transit system, analogous to the railroad or the automobile. Undoubtedly referring to the emergence of the capacities of editing, Canudo calls this “the symbolic destruction of distance,” (“Birth,” 60) or the ability both to combine images in space and to erase boundaries between nations, classes, and cultures. (Might he have seen Tour du monde d’un policier [Pathé, 1906]?) What Canudo calls the “real” refers to the cinema’s powers of affect and for expressing and remaking subjectivity. This is not so much the reproduction of the world as the making of a new world, in fact, a new ontology, where humanity actively seeks a meaningful presentation of the transformations it undergoes with respect to the cultural and technological forces of modernity. Previous forms of art stylized and typified life by immoblilizing it, rendering it as still life. But the cinema does not capture life from one side or in one aspect, “it represents all of life in action, and in an action which, even when Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 119 slowly unfolding the chain of its typical aspects, is there developed as rapidly as possible” (61, 35). In his own somewhat orientalist analogy, just as Eastern life manifests itself in contemplation, Canudo presents the Cinematograph as intensifying the basic psychic condition of Western life expressed in action, movement, speed, and the elimination of distance. The real connects to the symbolic here in that the expression of velocity and the collapse of space together characterize the spectacular forces of industrialization and urbanization; what audiences seek out in the rapid proliferation of cinemas is the desire to re-experience in a poetic or aesthetic form the transformations of body, time, and space undergone in the modern metropolis as “a lucid and vast expression of . . . internal life.”56 For Canudo the proliferation of cinemas is representative of the new promise of an ancient desire--what Canudo calls “Festival” or la Fête, which in French can also mean holiday, fair, or carnival--where especially film comedy overturns hierarchies and unleashes liberatory energies. Canudo envisions this cinematic Festival as a utopian collectivity. What is both moving and comic here is how the cinema eliminates all human obstacles created by the slowness or awkwardness of the body’s movements in space, thus creating a new comedic type expressive of the utopian aspirations of cinema audiences. The carnival-like atmosphere of the cinemas is fueled as well by the moving image’s elimination of a distance that is as much social as geographical: The comic can suppress hierarchies, it can join together the most different beings, give an extraordinary impression of the mixture of the most separate universes, which in real life are inflexibly separated. Since the comic is essentially irreverent, it gives a deep sense of relief to individuals oppressed in every moment of their real lives by social discriminations, so emphatically present. . . . (“Birth” 63-64, 38) But more than spectacle, what is striking, characteristic, and meaningful, is the will of the spectators, who come from every social class, from the most plebian to the most intellectual. This is the will for a new Festival, for a new joyful unanimity, realized in a spectacle and in a place where together, all people can 56 “Reflections on the Seventh Art” trans. by Claudia Gorbman in Abel, 293. This section of the essay was originally published as “Les domains propres au cinema” in L’Amour de l’art III.5 (May 1922) 158-159; reprinted in L’Usine 122-123. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 120 forget, in greater or lesser measure, their isolated individuality. This forgetting--the soul of every religion and source of all aesthetic feeling--will one day be absolutely triumphant. And the [cinema] Theater holds this undoubtedly still vague promise never before dreamed of in any age: the creation of a sixth art, of a plastic art in movement, already created in a rudimentary way in modern Pantomime. Modern life participates in this triumph. (65, 39) In portraying the Cinematograph’s significant elements as the symbolic and the real, however, Canudo is not searching to define the uniqueness of the medium, for in 1911 it has not yet become an art (nor will it have become one by 1923). What is representative is rather a set of possibilities or potentialities expressive of a new ontology: “Unexpectedly, summing up immediately all the values of a still eminently scientific age, abandoned to Mathematics rather than Dreaming, the Cinematograph asserts itself through a remarkable expansion, like a new theater, a kind of scientific theater made of precise calculations and mechanical expression. Our unquiet humanity welcomes it with joy” (“Birth” 60, 34). Yet the birth of the new art is incomplete. The technological precision of the cinematograph is born of a mechanical and rationalized society but the dreams it inspires are still scientific not poetic ones. The cinema awaits the heightening of its symbolic capacity, pregnant with possibility but not yet attaining the birth of a new aesthetic responsive to the most ancient, as well as most modern, concerns of humanity. In the conclusion to the essay, unpublished in translation, Canudo expresses directly the Hegelian inspiration for his ideas. The sixth art is uniquely capable of manifesting the historical spirit of modernity, and in a way unimaginable by Hegel who famously announced the end of Art. But for Canudo, the cinema has not yet become art, for it has not found a directive idea: Presenting a succession of gestures, attitudes, and figures, just like life, spreading out the picture of space, immobile and enduring, in a time where it shows and transforms itself, the Cinematograph forces us to dream of what it could become if an authentically higher directive idea held it to an ideal and profoundly meaningful line--the essential aesthetic idea of pictures that move [des tableau qu’il déroule]. We can dream of the creation of a sixth plastic Art in movement. Who could have Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 121 dreamed this before our time? No one, for man’s spiritual evolution had not yet attained the flowering of a violent desire to reconcile Science and Art in the complex representation of life in its totality. Every day the Cinematograph renews, and every day a bit more powerfully, the promise of this great reconciliation, not only of Science and Art, but also of Rhythms of Time and Rhythms of Space” (40; my trans.) In sum, for Canudo the cinema is the apogee of aesthetic evolution, and the art most expressive of the universal sprit of modernity, but it is not yet an Art, for it has not completely discovered or developed fully its expressive potentials: “[C]inematographic language . . . is feverishly seeking its speech, articulating its syllables, striving toward an optical pronunciation. So far it generally lacks elegance, or pleasing spontaneity.”57 Citing the philologist Max Muller, Canudo equates the acquisition of speech to the expansion of thought: “the more words one knows in a language, the more thoughts one can produce with grace and flexibility” (295). At the same time, Canudo is presenting an argument similar to Lindsay, and which will be taken up by Balázs and later Eisenstein-that the silent cinema “is a universal language and not just by virtue of its visual and immediate expression of all human emotion” (295, 125). (The idea here is not to establish firsts in film theory but to portray a discursive atmosphere as concepts and arguments emerging from shared series of aesthetic arguments and ideas in the philosophy of art so characteristic of the aesthetic discourse.) In this, cinema is becoming a kind of modern writing, but one which, paradoxically, draws its emotional energy and universal expressiveness from the most primitive origins of human communication. Reprising themes from his earlier writings, Canudo attributes the invention of graphic scripts to a human desire to transcend finitude and the ephemeral by fixing life and making it communicable. Unconsciously evoking the arguments of Vachel Lindsay, and anticipating Eisenstein, Canudo appeals to the examples of ideographic and hieroglyphic scripts to assert the origins of language in images. “In its groping infancy, the cinema 57 “Reflections on the Seventh Art,” 295. Originally published as “Du langage cinématographique” in L’Amour de l’art III.7 (July 1922) 221-222; reprinted in L’Usine 124-126. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 122 seeks its voices and words. It is bringing us with all our acquired psychological complexity back to the great, true, primordial, synthetic language, visual language. . . . The Screen, this single-paged book as unique and infinite as life itself, permits a model of the world--both internal and external--to be printed on its surface” (296, 126). In drawing out and upon the multiple possibilities of expression in images, in cinema there emerges the possibility of a universal language that brings the representation of life “back to the sources of all emotion, seeking life in itself via movement” (296). As the only form of plastic expression organized by time, in fact, by the mechanical manipulation of time, cinema captures and arrests the ephemeral, not in stillness, but in its integral movements which, further, may be speeded up, slowed down, in short, visually decomposed and analyzed. And these forms of analysis will enrich the poetic and painterly imagination in becoming the new elements of aesthetic expression in film. 12. On the way to language If there is an art that does not admit--or not yet--theory, it is certainly the art of Cinema. --Ricciotto Canudo, “The Seventh Art and its aesthetic” (1921) Arguing in 1922 that the cinema is an art that must not resemble any other, for it is unlike any other, Canudo fully deploys conceptual criteria that define the horizon wherein the aesthetic discourse curves back upon itself. Contrariwise, the openness of the genre is assured because the historical persistence of this discourse is challenged and undermined by the very objects it is trying to define, limit, or construct. From Canudo through Benjamin, the more one tries to defend film as Art through the conceptual vocabulary of system aesthetics, the more film, as Benjamin so eloquently put the case, redefines the question of “What is Art?” What continues to fascinate about pre-war writing on film is that it poses problems without “solutions”--a discourse that raises more questions than answers. The wild proliferation of “aesthetic a prioris” throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s--photogénie, cinégraphie, rhythm, close-up, montage, pure or absolute film, etc.--is best characterized as something like the generation of concepts in open-ended series of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 123 explanations or accounts that vary positively in their failure to come to terms with defining art, or film, in the implied framework of a systematic aesthetics. In fact, the success or failure of a “theory” is irrelevant here; what is at stake, and what the authors strive for, is conceptual invention and innovation commensurate with the newness, the modernity, or contemporaneity of film as a means of expression and a form of experience. A new genre of discourse thus emerges through the gradual erosion and contestation of historically precedent concepts. Indeed one might say that what characterizes the historic period of modernism is that “theory” emerges in the confrontation with and transformation of “aesthetics.” It becomes the sign, as it were, of an opening on the discursive horizon towards a new territory. This new territory is the discursive genre of modern film theory, or what I call the discourse of structure or signification. In contrast to earlier writings, the structural or semiological discourse emerges from a more or less tightly focused set of institutional and historical contexts. This is also the moment when theory in the sense most familiar to us emerges as a covering concept for the conceptual analysis of literary and artistic works. As a discursive genre, film theory, and indeed theory in general, is produced in a broad epistemic shift that takes place in the years following the end of the Second World War. The distinctiveness of this transformation should not be underplayed. In aesthetic writings on film in the first half of the century the term theory is deployed primarily in a vernacular sense; at times it is synonymous or exchangeable with aesthetics or linked in the formation “aesthetic theory.” In terms of rhetorical strategies, positions of address, and conceptual invention and deployment, however, the discourse is aesthetic and fully congruous with the forms and debates of late nineteenth century discourses on the philosophy of art. Moreover, across the three genres (aesthetic, structural, cultural), the rupture between the aesthetic discourse and the discourse of signification is the most significant, forceful, and apparent, though this break was subsequently erased through habits of use. It is a real epistemic change that shifts across multiple registers, and one in which we still live and think. Here theory first emerges as a genre, a discursive practice, and as an institutional position of address. With the important exceptions of Münsterberg, Arnheim, and Panofsky, or more marginal works like Rudolf Harm’s Philosophie des Films, the aesthetic Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 124 discourse was out of sync with the larger debates in the first half of the twentieth century concerning the methods and concepts of Kunstwissenschaft--the regulative term for “aesthetic theory.” Indeed that Arnheim’s 1932 book should be called Film as Art was indicative of the difficulty of accepting film within the purview of the scientific study of art. (The tension between theory--formal, sociological, positivistic--and philosophy would persist in the modern university well into the period of structuralism. Indeed the rise of structuralism in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s can be understood as the will to challenge philosophy with a certain view of theory, where the “human sciences” of linguistics, anthropology, history, and political economy erect the epistemological pillars for the study of art, literature, and culture. In the 1960s, theory is structuralist in tone and logic. The phenomenon of “post-structuralism” might be understood then as philosophy’s struggle to refind its place. Our contemporary sense of “theory” still feels this cleavage, and this confusion.) All of which is to insist once again that theory, in the senses most familiar to us now, is a post-war phenomenon. While I am focusing here on the invention of film theory, it is important to keep in mind that this could only take place within a much larger discursive formation marked by the appearance of structuralism and the rise of a new conception of the human sciences that was affecting the academic study of anthropology, sociology, psychology, literature, and the history of art no less than film. Here “theory” as a special genre of discourse is invented in relation to contemporary formations in the humanities in ways that would be unfamiliar to, and in tension with, earlier critical discourses. In the context of postwar film studies, the “when” of this turn is more ambiguous than the “how” of the discursive formation that rapidly settled in. Two fundamental historical markers bracket this shift, opening a rift of thirteen years’ distance where the discourse of signification gradually settles and gels. I have already mentioned how in 1951 Aristarco’s History of Film Theory traces a conceptual map that, through an inaugural retrojecting gesture, links and unifies the first forty years of writing about film. In 1964, Christian Metz’s first major methodological essay, “Le cinéma: langue ou langage,” (awkwardly translated as “Cinema: language or language-system”) opens with a Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 125 long account of the problem of language in film theory, no doubt desiring to place the construction of a semiology of film as the latest stage in that genealogy. The idea that theory is a discursive register or genre, and that it has been present for the entire history of writing about film, will soon become fully accepted and common as air. Nonetheless, this historical bracket is full of paradoxes, ellipses, and equivocations. One of the most striking is the absence of theory as a regulative concept in the 1950s even as the discursive and institutional context that frame its conditions of possibility rapidly emerges and settles into place. (One will have to wait until the 1960s, when the full historical influence of Russian Formalism and Prague School structuralism is felt within the larger discursive regime of French structuralism.) Within the thirteen-year period opened by this parenthesis, the deployment of “theory” to characterize a discursive genre is still relatively uncommon with a few interesting exceptions, for example, Kracauer’s Theory of Film, which is productively read as a curious transitional text between classical and modern film theory. Nonetheless, the rapid launch and flame-out of filmology in France in the years 1946 to 1960, with its sort of protostructuralism, sets fully in place a discourse of structure that is discontinuous with the earlier aesthetic discourse, and this discourse is produced within a fundamentally new conceptual, rhetorical, and institutional context. However, as the era of filmology contracts and the age of structuralism and semiology expands, “film theory” is suddenly fully present as a discursive genre in the 1960s as if a familiar friend always present with us. Nonetheless, both Aristarco and Metz, each in their different ways, produce their discourses through a logic of retrojection--in Aristarco’s case, a discourse of aesthetics and realism with a political twist, fueled by Lukács and Gramsci, threads together and gives form to the historical outline of film theory; in Metz, the discourse of language and signification that will soon concerns us. In retrospect, the discursive shift that occurs in Europe in the immediate post-war period is quite extraordinary and exceptional, although it did not happen all at once. The filmology movement, for example, which sets the institutional conditions for the attachment of theory to film, neither wished to propose a synthetic theory nor did it characterize its diverse multi-disciplinary work as “film theory” as did Aristarco. In contrast, a seminal figure like Jean Mitry carried forward a number of important questions, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 126 concepts, and approaches from the aesthetic discourse, maintaining its enunciative a prioris in the new context while debating the image’s capacity for conveying meaning as sign, language, symbol, or analogon. In his two great works of the post-war period--the Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema (1963 and 1965) and the History of Cinema (1967)-Mitry projected and retrojected forms of continuity that believed in the possibility of a total and synthetic knowledge of all cinema. Mitry’s was perhaps the first and the last great effort to produce a system of comprehensive thought about film. Yet he did not call this system a theory, but rather an aesthetics, perhaps to preserve the contrast with Metz and structuralism. Curiously, though, to the extent that his aesthetic presents an account of meaning and symbol in relation to the film image, and despite his hesitancies and antagonism toward semiology, his work remains conceptually congruent with the discourse of signification. (I will address these arguments later in greater depth.) Before expanding and deepening the senses of theory as a concept and a genre of discourse--with its peregrinations, pilgrimages, periods of exile and return, triumph and decline--a better understanding of the changed institutional context that made possible the idea and concept of film theory is wanted. One fundamental strand of this narrative involves the local interest of Russian Formalism in film, along with Sergei Eisenstein’s fascination with the philosophy of art, dialectical materialism, and Soviet anthropology and psychology, all of which anticipate a discourse that would be formalized in the postwar period within the rise of structuralism. The Russian Formalist use of “theory” in the 1920s and after is especially important in the way that it prepares the ground for the flowering of formalism and structuralism after the war. Nonetheless, the structural period opens suddenly in 1946 and 1947 in France and in Italy through a closely packed sequence of events, associated primarily with the rapid promotion of filmology and its concomitant research program in France. Despite its seeming abruptness, this shift was prepared by another specific institutional context--the formation of national film schools in which the teaching of film aesthetics and history held important and formative roles for international film culture. The model for these institutions was the VGIK, or All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, founded in Moscow in 1919, where Sergei Eisenstein led the direction faculty from 1935. As David Bordwell relates, from the early thirties Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 127 Eisenstein mounted an ambitious curriculum “that situated cinema within an enormously broad cultural framework. The program included physical training . . . ; the study of biographies of ‘outstanding creative personalities’ (Lenin, Gogol, Henry Ford); the examination of the laws of expression revealed in the writings of some twenty thinkers, from Plato to Pavlov; and the study of images in language, theatre, and the visual arts.”58 The structure and curriculum of Italy’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematographia, created in 1935, closely followed the Soviet model. Many institutional exchanges took place in the years preceding its founding and immediately after. Umberto Barbaro in particular was keenly interested in Eisenstein, Timoshenko, and especially, Pudovkin, translating and disseminating their work, and including it in the nascent curriculum of the Centro Sperimentale. In addition to his translations of Pudovkin, Barbaro assembled with Luigi Chiarini collections of film texts to be used for cinematic education at the Centro, including “I problemi del film,” “L’attore” and “L’arte dell’attore,” which consisted in large part of selections from Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Timoshenko, Balázs, Arnheim, Spottiswoode, and Rotha.59 Equally important was the founding of the L'Institut des hautes études 58 The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) 140; interior citation is from Vladimir Nizhny’s Lessons with Eisenstein, trans. and ed. Ivor Montagu (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958) 143-164. It is interesting to note that in the period between The General Line and Alexander Nevsky, when Eisenstein is primary engaged in teaching and research after his return from North America and Mexico, he begins explicitly to refer to this work as “theoretical.” For example, in his speeches to the AllUnion Creative Conference of Soviet Filmworkers held in Moscow in 1935, Eisenstein states: “I think that I must make a picture, and I will make pictures, but I feel that this must be worked on in parallel with equally intensive theoretical work and theoretical research.” As these speeches are as much political as intellectual, Eisenstein is trying to situate this work no doubt in the framework of theory and practice as expressed in political and philosophical Marxism. At the same time, until the 1939 Non-Indifferent Nature, these speeches are among the most systematic exposition of his research and thinking in aesthetics, and therefore, Eisenstein may self-consciously be placing himself in a genealogy of theory wending its way from Potebnya through the Formalists and current ideas of Kunstwissenschaft. See S. M. Eisenstein: Selected Works. Volume III. Writings, 1934-1947, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: BFI, 1996) 16-46. The quote above is on page 44. I will examine the Formalist conception of theory in the next section. 59 For a more replete account of this story, see Maria Salazkina’s “Soviet film theory in 1930s Italy: towards a new genealogy of Neorealism” in Global Neorealism: The Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 128 cinématographiques (IDHEC) in 1944 in Paris under the leadership of Marcel l’Herbier. Jean Mitry was appointed a professor of cinema in 1946, where apparently he taught the first course on film aesthetics in France. In all three situations, a special kind of institutional context was created where ideally the systematic study of film aesthetics and history was integrated with practice. The creation of film schools was also a sign of the increasing acceptance of the cultural presence and importance of cinematographic art, especially as recognized by state governments, whose policies and support were encouraged by notable intellectuals. André Malraux’s Equisse d’une psychologie du cinéma, published in the periodical Verve in 1939 and reprinted in a limited hardback edition in 1946, gave one important imprimatur to film art in France; Benedetto Croce’s 1948 letter to Bianco e nero, in which he fully accepted cinema as belonging to the system of the arts, was another, equally important intervention in Italy. European film schools were also important sites for the formation of a serious film culture, and were often linked through close networks of institutional filiation to the creation and publication of film journals, Bianco e nero’s attachment to the Centro Sperimentale being the most significant example. In this respect, the institutional conditions for thinking and writing about film changed significantly. As noted above, before the war writing about cinema was an amateur affair, open to anyone and without claim to any specific methodology or system of thought. By the1950s, writing about film was becoming a more specialized, pedagogical, and scholarly pursuit. Previously a phenomenon of ciné-clubs, galleries, and little magazines, film writing was starting to become a specialized activity, conditioned by research groups in film schools and universities and published in academic journals. Moreover, it now had more settled Transnational History of a Film Style, eds. Robert Sklar and Saverio Giovacchini (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011). In an essay forthcoming in October, "Tracing the Footsteps of a Materialist Film Theory: Moscow, Rome, Havana," Salazkina also maps out the dissemination of this institution discourse in the Hispanic Americas in the formation of the Fernando Birri’s Sante Fe School in Argentina, and the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry. Another welcome contribution to the institutional formation of discourses on cinema is Malte Hagener’s Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-Garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 129 institutional and academic contexts, one of the most important models being the establishment of the Institut de Filmology at the Sorbonne in 1947 and its support of one of the first academic journals of film research, La Revue de filmologie. Rhetorical strategies also changed significantly. No longer written in the belle lettristic and literary style of the aesthetic discourse, the discourse of signification emerged as a professional and academic jargon of specialists; in short, it became “theoretical,” with a special conceptual vocabulary forged from the human and social sciences with which it was institutionally associated, especially linguistics and anthropology. This trend would deepen and complexify with the debates on film semiology that proliferated throughout the 1960s in the works of Christian Metz, Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and others, which generated a whole new conceptual vocabulary of signifiers, signifieds, codes, semes, syntagms, paradigms, denotation, connotation, representamen, indexes, symbols, and im-signs. As a genre of discourse, theory became distinct from criticism. In the aesthetic discourse, the boundaries between film reviewing and interpretation, and more abstract and general accounts of the nature of film, were often fluid and indistinct. In the post-war period, serious film criticism still appears in little magazines and journals of opinion, and specialized magazines devoted to film criticism also begin to appear, such as La Revue du cinéma, Positif, and Cahiers du cinéma. But this is also the moment of the appearance of specialized journals of film research, such as the Bianco e nero, Cinema Nuovo, and the Revue de filmologie. At first progress is slow. For example, Metz’s key texts would mostly appear in academic venues of general research in the human sciences and semiology like Communications, the journal of the Ecole Pratique en Hautes Etudes where Metz worked from 1963 until his retirement in 1991, though he also published in magazines like Cahiers du cinéma. Specialized journals of film theory would really only start to appear in the post-1968 period when Cahiers du cinéma takes a “theoretical turn.” This is also the era of the founding of Cinéthique, Screen, Camera Obscura, Ça Cinéma, Framework, iris, Hors Cadre, Jump Cut, Cine-Tracts, and other important journals of film theory. With the interesting and difficult exceptions of Jean Mitry and Noël Burch, the figure of the filmmaker-theorist would also become more and more rare, as positions of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 130 address re-organize around accredited academic researchers working in universities and professional schools. All of these conditions foreground key differences between the two discursive genres. The aesthetic discourse is characterized by its heterogeneity and by the syncretism of its concepts, positions of address, and rhetorical stances. The discourse of structure or signification, however, is marked by a new tendency: the desire for formalization, methodological unity, and conceptual coherence. The tendency towards formalization and methodological unification in post-war film theory was initially and primarily fueled by the rapid emergence of filmology in France, with its network of affiliations and links, both direct and oblique, radiating from the Sorbonne to IDHEC and throughout French film culture, and with its creation of an international research network, binding in particular academic communities in France and Italy. These are the first shoots and branches of the discourse of structure in film study. The roots of this discourse, however, are nourished in foreign soils. 13. The travels of Formalism The point of theory is . . . to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile. --Edward Said, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” Rereading the first Preface to Warren and Wellek’s 1949 Theory of Literature, one cannot ignore their doubts and hesitations, and at the same time, their elation over the possible senses of theory. The book begins with a naming crisis. The authors are unsure of how to characterize the object of their enterprise, no less than the range of activities and concepts that might be covered by a “theory of.” The senses of theory seem open and difficult to denominate. “Even a proper ‘short title’, ‘Theory of Literature and Methodology of Literary Study’, would be too cumbersome,” they admit. “Before the nineteenth century Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 131 one might have managed, for then a full, analytic title could have covered the title-page while the spine bore the inscription ‘Literature’.”60 At the same time, Warren and Wellek recognize the novelty of their enterprise, that they have written a book without “any close parallel” (Theory of Literature 7), and this surprising assertion is coming from figures who were well aware of Lukács’ Theory of the Novel no less than Eikhenbaum’s “Theory of the ‘Formal Method’.” Theory therefore carries a sense of the new. It seems to be a critical and historical activity that borders on many others; it springs from deep genealogical roots yet it flowers in ways yet unseen. Theory borders on poetics and rhetoric, yet is unlike them in many ways--it is neither literary appreciation, criticism, nor history, though it may be helpful to all those enterprises. The authors are also deeply aware of their proximity to both a German tradition of Julius Petersen’s Die Wissenschaft von der Dichtung and to a Russian Formalism so far unknown in Western academic culture. Theory, however, presents not the concepts of literature or literariness as such, but rather, what Boris Eikhenbaum might call method. Warren and Wellek characterize this approach as the attempt “to formulate the assumptions on which literary study is conducted” (7); or later, “to provide an organon of method” (8). The senses of theory only become present, then, once one is attentive to the conceptual infrastructure, or the criteria, categories, and schemes that support, make possible, and limit our analytical and interpretive responses to aesthetic works. Perhaps a theory of art or literature begins with a critical attentiveness to the possibilities and limits of thought about art or literature? Still, the question remains (and perhaps must remain) incompletely answered: how and by what discursive channels and forces was the word theory transformed into a concept as the semantic descriptor for a given practice? What genealogical roots was Aristarco drawing on, no less than Warren and Wellek, in evoking with such confidence and facility the term “theory” to characterize ways of approaching literature, art, or film? Commenting on the new maturity and variety of modern cinematographic practices in 1946, the venerable Russian Formalist, Boris Eikhenbaum wrote, “We must organize 60 René Wellek and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. [1949] Third Edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1970) 7. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 132 the creative study of artistic problems in modern cinema. The study of cinema must become an object of systematic research, as the principal domain of artistic criticism. It is necessary that the greatest number of critics apply themselves to this task, for the study of modern cinema cannot do without theoretical experience.”61 Eikhenbaum’s short essay was entitled, “We need a theory of cinematographic art,” a call to theory in film that would be answered in the post-war period in different though related ways by Italian film criticism, on one hand, and by the filmology movement in France, on the other. Eikhenbaum, of course, was no stranger to theory, having in the year 1927 published a programmatic defense of Russian Formalism, “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’,” and edited one of the most important collections of Soviet aesthetic writing on film, the Poetika Kino. This crossroad between literature and film places Eikhenbaum at the intersection of two related but nonetheless incongruent discursive series. The Poetika Kino offers contributions to a poetics of cinema but nowhere do its various essays and authors make claims for an overarching theory or method in the study of film, concepts largely absent from the essays including Eikhenbaum’s own fundamental contribution on “Problems of Cine-Stylistics.” As befits the aesthetic discourse, the approach here is largely syncretic, a reflection from a variety of perspectives, as Kirill Shutko asserts in the Preface, “on the essence of cinema, its laws, its style, etc.”62 At the same time, Eikhenbaum’s authoritative account of the “formal method” is one of the most important instances of “theories of” in the 1920s; indeed it is as or more influential than Lukács’ Theory of the Novel for a possible conceptual cartography of the senses and stakes of 61 “Il faut une théorie de l’art cinématographique,” trans. in Les Formalistes russes et le cinéma: Poétique du film, ed. François Albèra (Paris: Nathan, 1996): 227; my English translation from the French. Originally published in Kadr 7 (1946). 62 The Poetics of Cinema, ed. Richard Taylor, Russian Poetics in Translation 9 (1982) 1. Even the very act of formulating film’s concepts is considered syncretically as represented in Shutko’s question, “Do we in Soviet Russia, where film production is only just taking its first steps, need to waste our efforts now on theorising, on philosophising about films?” (1). Theory and philosophy are interchangeable here and deployed only in vernacular senses. Moreover, the border between poetics and theory seems indistinct, though influenced no doubt by Formalism’s own ambivalences with respect to theory. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory theory, especially as they take form in the 1950s and 60s in the discourse of structure and signification. A more detailed historical account than I can offer here might show that the most direct genealogical line of descent for theory--with all its various and contradictory senses and values, with its forces of attraction and repulsion, its doubts and certainties--passes through the Russians, coming sharply into focus as a site of contestation just before and during the early years of the Soviet revolution, and then dispersing throughout the thirties and forties in a diaspora that passes through the former Czechoslovakia, Italy, and North America, before finally regrouping in France in the decade of structuralism’s greatest influence. (Another version of this story might follow Roman Jakobson’s peregrinations from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Prague, New York, and other cities, mapping his participation in the Moscow Linguistic Circle and OPOYAZ, meeting Shklovsky, Troubetzkoy, Levi-Strauss, gathering up and synthesizing all the conceptual components defining the structuralist sense of theory and its reconfiguration of the human sciences through the twinned enterprises of linguistics and anthropology.) In other words, it is almost certainly the case that the Russians invented “theory” in the modern sense for the humanities. Russian Formalism cleared the path for the discursive crossroads leading towards, on one hand, structuralism, semiology, and the emergence of theory as a genre of critical discourse, and on the other, to film theory considered not only as a subset of semiology, but also, in a retrojecting gesture, as a genre of writing about film stretching back continuously to Riccioto Canudo. In any case, the discursive seeds were planted in Russian soil, even if historical currents quickly transported them to other climes: from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Prague, New York, Rome, Paris, and even Iowa City as an essential conceptual influence on Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature. In its polemical refusal of aesthetics and metaphysics, completely in tune with Russian Futurism’s modernist rejection of all the dusty ideas of the past, Formalism turned to theory as a way of clearing a new epistemological space for literature and, eventually, film. Throughout the 1920s, theory became something of a catchword, drawing its semantic force not only from the influence of positivism on the study of art and literature, but also from the conflation of the physical and historical sciences often wrought in 133 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 134 claiming a scientific status for the different variants of dialectical and historical materialism. And here is the key interest of Eikhenbaum’s “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’.”63 This essay demonstrates the basic features of a discursive regime organizing around theory that would travel to Prague and then to Rome, where, in the context of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, film theory in the modern sense would began to take root as a historical concept and as a covering term for a certain genre of discourse. Theory was not created ex nihilo by the young turks of Moscow and St. Petersburg, however. Despite Victor Shklovsky’s particular anathema to academic forerunners such as Aleksandr Potebnja (1835-1891), both the basic approaches of the Formalists and their way of characterizing theory had a Russian pedigree stretching back to the late nineteenth century. Victor Erlich demonstrates how Potebnja, deeply influenced by the works of Wilhelm von Humboldt, not only prefigures the Formalist insistence on studying poetry and prose as linguistic phenomena, but also how this approach was deployed in and as theory. For example, one of Potebnja’s major collections from 1894 was titled Iz lekcij po teorii slovesnosti (Lectures on Literary Theory); after his death his students popularized his ideas in a collective volume entitled Problems of the Theory and Psychology of Art (8 vols., Petrograd-Xar’kov, 1907-1923). Similar attitudes can be found in the inductive poetics and anti-psychological orientation of Aleksandr Veselovskij (1838-1906).64 Eikhenbaum was a key member of the OPAYAZ group, an acronym for the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded in St. Petersburg in 1914. His analysis of Gogol’s The Overcoat was an important contribution to the first Formalist collection, Poetics: Studies in the Theory of Poetic Language, published in Saint Petersburg in 1919. As one of the principle polemicists of Formalism, Eikhenbaum’s essay is important not only for how it maps the relation of theory to the Formal method, but also how an idea of theory became associated with poetics in contrast to aesthetics or philosophy. In addition, 63 “Teoriya ‘formalnovo metoda’.” First published in Ukranian in 1926, and then in Russian in the important Formalist collection, Literature: Theory, Criticism, Polemics, published in Leningrad in 1927. English trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965): 99-139. 64 See Erlich’s Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), especially chapter one, 19-32. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 135 Eikhenbaum’s text is important not only for its defense of “theory” and description of its conceptual and methodological framework, but also for his account of Formalism’s scientific claims to theory in response to Marxism. In 1926, Eikhenbaum is responding implicitly to criticisms launched first by Leon Trotsky in Literature and the Revolution in 1923, and then in a symposium published in 1924 in The Press and the Revolution, an influential literary magazine. Eikhenbaum’s essay thus follows on from other attempts to reconcile the Formalist conception of theory with Soviet concepts of historical materialism, or at least to demonstrate their “scientific” compatibility.65 In contrast to Lukács’ Theory of the Novel, here the claims to theory--to have or possess a “theory of”--are a central component of Eikhenbaum’s argument, although as Lemon and Reis note in making the claim for a Formalist method compatible with scientific method Eikhenbaum tends to exaggerate both the conceptual coherence and the unity of Formalist analyses of literature, as well as the orderly and systematic progress of their research. Nonetheless, the text is a key conceptual reflection on what theory is or might mean as a genre of discourse and a working method--its force continued to be felt many years later. The essay is therefore a lens that both magnifies and focuses the senses of theory that would later be deployed in both film studies and the human sciences, especially in structuralism and semiology. Still, Eikhenbaum is curiously ambivalent about theory throughout the text, and this is strongly felt in his opening gambit. The Formal method, Eikhenbaum suggests, is neither a theory nor a method as much as an approach guided by two principles: first, to define what the object of literary study actually is, and second, to work inductively and empirically through “the examination of specific material in its specific context” (“Theory” 102). The criterion of immanence is crucial here. Seeing 65 See Lemon and Reis, 99-101. On the the complex relation of Formalism to Marxism, also see Ehrlich’s account, 99-117, and Jean Narboni’s “Introduction à ‘Poetika Kino’, Cahiers du Cinéma 220-221 (May-June 1970) 52-57. In Ehrlich’s gloss, Eikhenbaum’s response to Trotsky’s criticisms was that “Formalism and Marxism are not so much polar as incommensurate concepts: the former is a school within an individual humanistic discipline, namely literary scholarship; the latter, a philosophy of history. To put it in operational terms, [in] Marxism sociology inquires into the mechanism of social change, while [the] Formalist study of literature deals specifically with the evolution of literary forms and traditions” (Russian Formalism 108). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 136 themselves as the founders of a new positive science--the science of literature--the Formalists felt it necessary to be guided solely by the concrete data under study. Or, as Eikhenbaum himself put it: “Neither ‘Formalism’ as an aesthetic theory nor ‘methodology’ as a finished scientific system characterizes us; we are characterized only by the attempt to create an independent science of literature which studies specifically literary material” (“Theory” 103). Further, in a key passage of the essay, Eikhenbaum insists on what might be called the intermediate or transitory qualities of theory. In Eikhenbaum’s first summary: In our studies we value a theory only as a working hypothesis to help us discover and interpret facts; that is, we determine the validity of the facts and use them as the material of our research. We are not concerned with definitions, for which the late-comers thirst; nor do we build general theories, which so delight eclectics. We posit specific principles and adhere to them insofar as the material justifies them. If the material demands their refinement or change, we change or refine them. In this sense, we are quite free from our own theories--as science must be free to the extent that theory and conviction are distinct. There is no ready-made science; science lives not by settling on truth, but by overcoming error. (102-103)66 A theory, then, should be open, revisable, and falsifiable, and in this respect, a science is built by progressively freeing itself from theory. In other words, theory is only a stepping stone toward science, such that Eikhenbaum characterizes his project as showing “how the formal method, by gradually evolving and broadening its field of research, spread beyond the usual ‘methodological’ limits and became a special science of literature, a specific ordering of facts” (“Theory” 103). But Eikhenbaum is careful to note that this amounts neither to an “aesthetic theory” nor to a “finished scientific system,” but 66 This attitude is already apparent in a text of 1922, where Eikhenbaum states that “. . . in scientific work, I consider the ability to see facts far more important than the construction of a system. Theories are necessary to clarify facts; in reality, theories are made of facts. Theories perish and change, but the facts they help discover and support remain.” In Melodika russkovo liricheskovo stikha (Petrograd, 1922); cited in Russian Formalist Criticism, 125. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 137 only asks “for recognition of the theoretical and historical facts of literary art as such” (103). Why a special science and not a science as such, or a theory but not an aesthetic theory? Committed to inductive and nomothetic reasoning, Eikhenbaum is taking his distance from what he calls “’aesthetics from above’” and “self-styled general theories” (“Theory” 103-104), which are not so thinly veiled references to what I have called the system aesthetics of the 19th century. A progenitor of post-Theory, Eikhenbaum is retreating here from philosophy’s claims to a universal knowledge of aesthetics or any other domain. Rather than focusing on general and conceptual problems, such as the nature of beauty or the essence of art, Formalism sought a middle level framing and analysis of specific questions of artistic form and evolution. Following a now familiar debate, Eikhenbaum places formalism specifically in an alternative genealogy that passes through both a scientific Kunstwissenschaft and Heinrich Wölfflin’s “art history without names.” In fact, Eikhenbaum notes admiringly how the development of an “art science” in Germany displaced and reformed, as it were, the philosophical study of the visual arts; in Soviet Russia, he hopes, Formalism will do the same for the study of literature.67 In this context, Formalism and Futurism were bound together by history as both symptoms and causes of a crisis in philosophical aesthetics: a symptom in that Futurism heralded a poetic modernism, grounded in the material of language and of art, which confronted the conceptual coherence of the reigning norms of aesthetics; a cause in that this modern art called for a new critical approach, for which Formalism was the response, where aesthetics is displaced by poetics and the formal method. Both were intent on 67 In a diary entry from January 1919, concerning Heinrich Rickert’s Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, Eikhenbaum asserts in undisguised form that “Proceeding from Rickert, one realizes that the methods of the natural sciences must be applied to the history of the arts (1) when we speak of the social aspect of art (the poet’s social situation), the orientation of his art toward a particular existing [social] stratum, etc.; or (2) when we deal with the ‘nature’ of the material from which the work is made. In both cases it is conceivable to construct laws and definitions.” Cited in Peter Steiner’s “The Roots of Structuralist Esthetics,” in The Prague School, Selected Writings, 1929-1946, ed. Peter Steiner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982): 207. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 138 derailing the conceptual claims of philosophical aesthetics. Eikhenbaum portrays this conflict as a historical battle between generations. And in point of fact, this is a struggle in and over the senses of theory where the theoretical heritage of Potebnya and Veselovsky, so valued by the Symbolists, is depicted as “dead capital” that must be transformed into new currency. In Eikhenbaum’s polemical account, Formalism’s academic forbearers offered little more than a mélange of faded aesthetic, psychological, and historical concepts. Thus, the Formalist’s waged war against the Symbolists and their philosophical exegetes, in order to wrest poetics from their hands--to free it from its ties with their subjective philosophical and aesthetic theories and to direct it toward the scientific investigation of facts . . . . Hence our Formalist movement was characterized by a new passion for scientific positivism--a rejection of philosophical assumptions, of psychological and aesthetic interpretations, etc. Art, considered apart from philosophical aesthetics and ideological theories, dictated its own position on things. We had to turn to facts and, abandoning general systems and problems, to begin “in the middle,” with the facts which art forced upon us. Art demanded that we approach it closely; science, that we deal with the specific. (“Theory” 106) This passage discloses an interesting slippage between poetics and theory in the Formalist method. One way of looking at this ambiguity is to suggest that the theory of the formal method is not a theory of art or literature--what might usually be called literary theory is referred to by the Formalists as poetics. What theory refers to, then, is the method--the epistemological parameters of investigation, the conceptual bases of research, and the guiding assumptions of historical and analytical work--or what Wellek and Warren call “an organon of method.” The middle way of Formalism was therefore something less than philosophy and something more than an aesthetic theory based on subjective judgment. After Kant and Hegel, and following the framework of positivism, Formalism sought to lower the sights of science or Wissenschaft, and to make theory a meaningful term as an alternative to philosophy. What was objectionable in the Symbolist generation was not their methods per se, Eikhenbaum offers, but rather the irresponsible mixing of disciplines, methods, and problems. To create a science of literature required Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 139 applying instead a principle of specificity while avoiding speculative aesthetics, finding a conceptual foundation to anchor this science and to give it unity and consistency. To create a specific and factual aesthetic science meant constructing an object of scientific investigation--something that would ground the investigation epistemologically, define strict parameters for its methodological activities, and preserve its conceptual homogeneity. Increased conceptual clarification is needed here, for in Eikhenbaum’s account, the object of a science of literature is not individual works of poetry or fiction, but rather “literariness”--that quality or function wherein expression divagates from instrumental or prosaic uses and thus becomes aesthetic or literary, achieving in this respect an independent value. Here Eikhenbaum cites with admiration Jakobson’s 1921 study of Modern Russian Poetry. And in making the claim for grounding the discipline of literary research in literariness rather than given works of literature or literature as a genre of art, Jakobson is not only stressing the importance of function, he is also attempting to purify and specify the theoretical or conceptual foundation of a “literary science.”68 In order to avoid speculative aesthetics and inconsistent hybrid methods, Formalism sought a principle of specificity to serve as the foundation from which the quality of “literariness” or aesthetic function could be derived and characterized. The principle of specificity grounding the Formal method derived from one of their most important and original conceptual formations--the distinction between poetic and practical language, which was developed in a series of key texts by Leo Jakubinsky, Victor Shklovsky, and Roman Jakobson, among others. The emphasis on language is crucial here, for in order to avoid a methodological hodge-podge drawn from history, culture, sociology, and aesthetics, the Formalists sought to ground their method in a single 68 In the passage quoted by Eikhenbaum, the aesthetic school of Potebnya and his followers are likened by Jakobson to policemen who indiscriminately seize any and all who cross their paths. “The literary historians used everything--anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of literature, they created a conglomeration of homespun disciplines. They seemed to have forgotten that their essays strayed into related disciplines--the history of philosophy, the history of culture, of psychology, etc.--and that these could rightly use literary masterpieces only as defective, secondary documents” (107). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 140 material--language--and associate it with a single discipline, linguistics. In this way, linguistics offered not only a specific material and a method, Eikhenbaum notes, but also a science bordering on poetics and sharing material with it, but approaching it from a different perspective and with different problems. Linguistics, for its part, was also interested in the formal method in that what was discovered by comparing poetic and practical language could be studied as a purely linguistic problem, as part of the general phenomena of language. The relationship between linguistics and the formal method was somewhat analogous to that relation of mutual use and delimitation that exists, for example, between physics and chemistry. Against this background, the problems posed earlier by Potebnya and taken for granted by his followers were reviewed and reinterpreted. (“Theory” 108) Linguistics is appealed to here as a site alternative to philosophy and aesthetics, and one proximate to science, or at least close enough to enjoy its light and warmth. The methodological principles and concepts guiding poetics are something akin to theory, then, as that which falls between philosophy and science. Anchoring the method in a specific discipline, linguistics, and a concrete material, language, the distinction between practical and poetic language also served as an additional filter. Through the poetic function, linguistic patterns acquired independent value; in other words, they become more purely and structurally language, and attuned to the rhythm and materiality of language. In short, they achieved form. Form was thus considered a structure--or rather, as arising from a structuring principle--open to observation and whose laws could be defined and discovered in theory. In a variety of texts, Shklovsky in particular emphasized a principle of the active perception of form, that form becomes discernible, perceptible, or brought forward in independent outline when amplified by the poetic function through techniques such as defamiliarization and “roughened form.” “Perception here is clearly not to be understood as a simple psychological concept (the perception peculiar to this or that person),” Eikhenbaum insisted, “but, since art does not exist outside of perception, as an element in art itself. The notion of ‘form’ here acquires new meaning; it is no longer an envelope, but a complete thing, something concrete, dynamic, self-contained, and without a correlative of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 141 any kind” (“Theory” 112). In addition, in Eikhenbaum’s conception, the active perception of form does not convey the meaning of either an object or some content that lies within the object, for the independent function of art is to disrupt communication and meaning so as to increase the difficulty and span of perception. Aesthetic perception is an end in itself; it is attentive only to form and the dynamic unfolding of form. In Shklovsky’s own summary, offered as an explicit critique of Potebnya, the active perception of form thus becomes a gateway to building theory: “Poetic language is distinguished from practical language by the perception of its structure. The acoustical, articulatory, or semantic aspects of poetic language may be felt. Sometimes one feels the verbal structure, the arrangement of the words, rather than their texture. . . . The creation of a scientific poetics must begin inductively with a hypothesis built on an accumulation of evidence. That hypothesis is that poetic and prosaic languages exist, that the laws which distinguish them exist, and, finally, that these differences are to be analyzed.”69 Here Eikhenbaum clearly states the stakes of theory for Formalism: that one must begin with the establishment of a series of theoretical principles leading to clearly defined concepts, which in turn provide working hypotheses for the further investigation of data; that this data is defined and derived inductively; and finally, that theory grows out of contest and negation, here a defeat of theories of image and symbol derived from Potebnya’s followers in favor of an account of form. For Eikhenbaum, in a first phase this is largely a question of conceptual clarification, of sorting out the “differing uses of poetic and practical language,” and that, as Shklovsky suggests, showing that these differences are defined and sustained by laws (115). Theory is thus more concrete and factual than philosophy; like science, the method aspired to derive and test hypotheses for laws of empirical uniformity. In this respect, for Peter Steiner the Formalist method hovers between the nomological and historicalhermeneutic sciences. And even if Formalism stopped short of declaring the method a true science, in choosing the natural sciences as a model for all scholarship, Steiner suggests that it “betrayed an essentially positivist bent” (“The Roots of Structuralist Esthetics” 207). This was equally the case not only for later variants of Formalism, such as 69 Shklovsky, “Potebnya,” Poetika (1919); cited in Eikhenbaum, “Theory,” 114. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 142 Prague School structuralism, but also for structuralism in general. (Later, this tendency will again be displayed in the claims of historical poetics and post-Theory in contemporary film study. I will examine this connection more deeply in Part III.) Yet, despite the attraction to positivism, Formalism retained an important historical dimension, and its specific sense of the force and logic of history informs the method’s claims to theory in important ways. Eikhenbaum’s text offers an interesting concept of history and how it relates to theory in ways often commensurate with what will later be called historical poetics in film study. Eikhenbaum notes how questions of literary evolution are raised naturally alongside theoretical problems. As precursors to historical poetics, Eikhenbaum divides the theory of the Formal method onto two interrelated lines: studies of literary evolution as such and theoretical study of problems of form. The two are interrelated through the concept of form. If form is at once dynamic and historical, if it changes continuously against the background of other devices and styles, then it needs to be approached “without abstract, ready-made, unalterable, classical schemes; and we had to consider specifically its historical sense and significance. . . . The theory itself demanded that we turn to history” (“Theory” 132). The way form drives the history of style and how stylistic change modifies history are key elements in Eikhenbaum’s conception of method. Formalism is not looking for the causal factors of formal or stylistic change, but rather seeks to define something like a moving picture of structure, and how one device or set of devices yields to others over time; hence, the importance of knowing how to identify and evaluate functional significance in different historical contexts. While causal relations seem to be of little significance to the Formalist conception of history, their image of change is a key component to their characterization of history. Above all in their theoretical struggle with the literary heritage of Symbolism, Eikhenbaum portrays change, whether literary or critical, as a violent contest and upheaval. One wonders to what degree this view is a real conceptual element of the theory, or whether Eikhenbaum speaks in a coded language of revolutionary struggle, setting up a tone of sympathy or fellow traveling with dialectical materialism. In any case, the tenor of Eikhenbaum’s argument is unmistakable. The deposing of one theoretical paradigm by another takes place “without the idea of progress and peaceful succession” (“Theory” Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 143 133). Later, Eikhenbaum continues with yet greater emphasis: “Thus the basic passion for our historical-literary work had to be a passion for destruction and negation, and such was the original tone of our theoretical attacks; our work later assumed a calmer note when we went on to solutions of particular problems” (134). After the revolution, the slow work of building a science begins.70 Literary evolution was thus characterized by the notion of struggle or of “periodic uprisings” analogous to or in sympathy with the forces of revolution themselves. These uprisings, however, are not led or promoted by heroic figures or visionary leaders, but rather by collective and impersonal forces, which led Osip Brik to quip that if Pushkin had never existed, Eugene Onegin would have written itself. What frees history and theory from the subjectivist errors of the Symbolists, and what gives them their epistemological standing is the lack or erasure of the subject. In analogy with Wöfflin’s art history without names, the Formalists conceived of aesthetic history without a subject, or at least, without authorial personality as a cause; Eikhenbaum calls this “the study of literature as a selfformed social phenomenon” (“Theory” 136). Literature is seen here as a collective process, at least to the extent that it forms an interconnected discursive environment in which popular genres have a place no less significant than more elevated forms, and in which the two are continually interacting. In any case, the dynamism of change is not fueled by individual creative agents, but rather by more impersonal and collective forces of shifting functions and techniques vying for novelty. 70 In the “So-called ‘Formal Method’,” Osip Brik suggests that in its focus on studying the laws of poetic production, OPOYAZ does contribute directly to the revolutionary problems of culture. In answering the question, “What does ‘Opoyaz’ contribute to the proletarian construction of culture?,” Brik offers the following responses. The Formalist method contributes: “1. A scientific system instead of a chaotic accumulation of facts and personal opinions; 2. A social evaluation of creative people instead of an idolatrous interpretation of ‘the language of the gods’; 3. A knowledge of the laws of production instead of a ‘mystical’ penetration into the ‘secrets’ of creation” (324). In sum, OPOYAZ is the best education of proletarian writers because, Brik implicitly suggests, it is the closest relative in art theory to a scientific materialism. “The So-called ‘Formal Method,’” LEF 1 (1923): 213-225. Trans. Art in Theory (1900-1990), eds., Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992): 323-324. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 144 This perspective on history is also reflected in Eikhenbaum’s theoretical portrait of the formal method to the extent that the collective force and epistemological claims of the method rely less on the aggregated contributions of individual authors than on a dynamic process of collective and impersonal collaboration. The subject of theory, always greater than the sum of its parts, is neither Eikhenbaum, Shklovsky, Brik, nor Jakobson, but rather Formalism itself as a theoretical stance, binding them all in a common method and conceptual framework. That the historical nature of theory is not a “personal affair,” is how Eikhenbaum characterizes Formalism’s “chief connection with the times. Science itself is still evolving, and we are evolving with it” (“Theory” 138). In this sense, as a dynamic and impersonal force, history, or rather attention to the forces of history, is what saves the method either from falling into an abstract (or worse, subjectivist) philosophical system, or from congealing into a too rigid and inflexible theory. “We have no theory,” Eikhenbaum insists, “that can be laid out as a fixed, ready-made system. For us theory and history merge not only in words, but in fact. We are too well trained by history itself to think that it can be avoided. When we feel that we have a theory that explains everything, a ready-made theory explaining all past and future events and therefore needing neither evolution nor anything like it--then we must recognize that the formal method has come to an end, that the spirit of scientific investigation has departed from it. As yet, that has not happened.” (139) But perhaps theories do have ends, or rather, follow historical arcs that wax and wane, where periods of great conceptual novelty and innovation alternate with staleness or obsolescence. Galin Tihanov puts the matter forcefully in asking “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?).”71 In ways coincident with my own, Tihanov has argued that the idea or concept of a theory of literature is historically delimited, emerging and declining in the context of specific cultural and discursive situations. In his account, the era of theory stretches from the initial work of the Russian Formalists in the teens, declines with Wolfgang Iser’s turn from reception studies and a phenomenology of reading to “literary anthropology” in the 71 Common Knowledge 10:1 (2004): 61-81. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 145 1980s, and comes to a close with the death of Yuri Lotman in 1993. In their inaugural moment, the claims to theory in Russian Formalism were motivated by two factors. First was the desire to construct literature as a specific object and as an autonomous domain for analysis, separate from the other arts as well as other historical, social, and psychological factors. Focusing on the quality of literariness and the formal logic of the literary device, Formalism sought support in the still young and rather marginal domain of linguistics to study the immanent form and logic of poetic and narrative texts. This is the wellspring that would finally nourish the discourse of signification in the 1960s. The flowering and fading of theory is equally marked by a turn from and return to philosophy. The linguistic turn in the teens was the sign of a desire to retreat from philosophy and system aesthetics, seeking an alternative in “theories of.” In this respect, the appeal of linguistics was not only its novelty or contemporaneity (Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics was first edited and published by his students in 1916), but also its proposal of an immanent form of analysis with a rigorous, even scientific, methodology. For the Formalists and fellow travelers, linguistics was a young, marginal, and forwardlooking method alternative to the dusty debates of philosophy and philology. From the 1970s, however, the discourse of signification and of a textual semiotic still guided by linguistics began itself to age and fray into what Francesco Casetti characterizes as “field theories,” multiplying both the objects and subjects of investigation while turning from textual specificity to cultural analysis--theory was becoming Theory, and the discourse of form and signification was remapping itself through concepts of ideology and culture. In particular, deconstruction began to cast epistemological doubt on the stability of the concepts of sign, structure, and subject that grounded the discourse of signification as a “scientific” enterprise. Derrida’s tour de force critiques of Saussure, Rousseau, and LeviStrauss in Of Grammatology thus inaugurate the discourse of post-structuralism, and the coming senses of Theory. In addition, for Derrida’s readers in literature his work signposted a departure from the grand structuralist project back into a philosophy of literature, even if in a North American context this return retained the form of textual criticism. “Thinking and writing about literature,” Tihanov comments, “thus lost the edge of specificity and uniqueness, and the boundary between literary and nonliterary texts, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 146 solemnly guarded since the Formalists’ time, was rendered porous and eventually insignificant. Similarly, feminism, postcolonialism, and New Historicism were all ways of reading more than just literary texts; they were strategies of cultural theory . . . .” (“Modern Literary Theory” 62). The appeal of theory in the 1920s, then, as both a concept and as a sort of rallying point, was the definition of a methodological and an epistemological space alternative to and in contestation with the Hegelian, and to a certain extent, neo-Kantian, approaches to aesthetics dominant at the turn of the century. This tendency is already clear in Lukács’ own complex and difficult struggle with Hegel in The Theory of the Novel. Tihanov states the case clearly: “. . . the emergence of literary theory was conditional upon the process of disintegration and modification of monolithic philosophical approaches that occurred around the time of World War I” (“Modern Literary Theory” 65). In a very concrete sense, all of the conceptual resources for theory that flowed together into the discourse of structuralism are located in a retreat from aesthetics toward immanent analysis in a nomothetic framework: the modern linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure; Russian Formalism; the innovations of the Prague Linguistic Circle, especially the advances in phonology carried out by Nikolai Trubetskoy and Roman Jakobson in the 1930s; the debt of narratology to Vladimir Propp’s studies of the folktale, and so on. In fact, the two principle conceptual springs of theory may well be, first, the slow transformation of philology into linguistics, already signaled by the interest of Formalism in the work of Aleksandr Potebnja and their critical reaction to it, and second, Lukács’ application of Marxism to the study of literature in the 1930s. The idea that there might be currents of exchange flowing between Formalism and Lukacian realism in the 1930s is not as strange as might seem at first glance. As Tihanov explains, “Lukács’s writing on realism and the novel, done mostly during his time in Moscow, placed him in an internationally constituted field of literary theory to which he had not before fully belonged. This field was shaped by the Prague Circle’s deliberations on realism, most notably Jakobson’s article of 1921, ‘On Realism in Art.’ But the field was also shaped by the lingering presence in the 1930s of a fatigued Russian Formalism (above all, by Shklovsky, who polemicized openly and covertly against Lukács) and by Mikhail Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 147 Bakhtin’s powerful responses to Lukács’s theory, which were unpublished (if not unheard) at the time” (“Modern Literary Theory” 73). Following his unorthodox engagement with Marxism as a philosophical metadiscourse in the 1923 History and Class Consciousness, and responding to a desire to concretize the concepts of Marxist analysis through an account of literature and culture, Lukács’ studies of realism and the novel gave a new imprimatur, and a methodological context, to the study of culture along the main lines of Marxist “theory.” In this respect, the appeal to immanent analysis and concreteness in both streams can be understood as an ongoing project in response to Hegel and Hegelian theories of totality, to neo-Kantian accounts of essence and appearance, and to Lebenphilosophie’s attempts to reconcile form and life. Philosophy made concrete in cultural expression equaled “theory.” Significantly, these two streams--of linguistics and Marxism--would flow together into the soft Marxism of the Formalists and their interests in the literary and aesthetic avant-gardes, though it would sink underground or be diverted to other countries with the rise of Stalinism. Paradoxically, Formalism and Lukacian realism, strange bedfellows in any context, would then arrive together in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s, finding a home in film study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Here indeed is where an idea of film theory is first given conceptual clarity, especially as a materialist alternative to the idealism of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. For Umberto Barbaro and Guido Aristarco, it may well be that Formalism and Marxism come together in an Italian context to define “theory” as a particular kind of materialist account of art, forged in both a social dialectic and in deep attention to the facticity of physical and social reality--this would be a founding idea of neorealism as the model of modern cinema, indeed the very modern cinema Eikhenbaum might be referring to in 1946. Ironically, the deep divide between formalism and realism, so present in post-68 film theory, was unknown in this context. Nonetheless, before the discourse of structure and signification fully congeals and sets in place in the early 1960s in France, one more branch on the genealogical tree of theory must be accounted for. 14. An uncertain and irrational art Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 148 All this is undoubtedly not a science . . . .; but without it there is no science. --Théodule Ribot, cited in Gilbert Cohen-Séat’s Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma Two fundamental lines converge in the 1960s to produce theory as a discursive formation or genre: first, the directive idea of filmology that positivism guides every discipline applied to the “scientific” study of art, and second, a transformation of the conceptual framework of the human sciences effected by the increasing dominance of structuralism. The latter especially would be deeply influenced by a concept of theory forged by the travels of Formalism in the 1930s and 1940s. In both cases, the disciplines of linguistics, anthropology, and sociology took precedence in the study of art and literature with the problem of language or signification as their underlying foundation, though, ultimately, with very different conceptions of discourse and the logic of signs. Nonetheless, both lines developed a concept of structure as the “scientific” foundation for the study of culture and the life of signs in society though here, ultimately, semiology displaced the positivism of filmology in a manner analogous to Dilthey’s vision of Wissenschaft taking ground from positivism in the late 19th century. The influence of filmology on the invention of film theory has been undervalued and under-examined in this story. With the exception of Edward Lowry’s superb and still unsurpassed study, filmology remains for the most part unknown in North America today and is practically forgotten in France. 72 Yet, for ten years in the late forties through the late fifties, it flourished as an international network of university scholars, though, ironically, in a way that runs parallel to the extraordinarily vibrant film cultures of the 1950s without really interacting with them. Filmology sought a science of film, but fimologists were for the most part not lovers of cinema.73 Nonetheless, filmological 72 The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985). This state of affairs has changed with the publication of a superb double issue on the movement, “La filmologie de nouveau,” CiNéMAS 19:2/3 (2009), edited by Martin Lefebvre and François Albera. 73 See, for example, in 1955 Amédée Ayfre’s withering criticism of filmology, “Cinéphile et filmologue,” Cahiers du cinéma 48 (June 1955). Writing in Cahiers du cinéma 5 (1951) Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 149 research turned up in translation and citation in important journals like Bianco e nero, was an important framework for Christian Metz’s semiological essays throughout the sixties and early seventies, and was even significantly represented in the bibliography of Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film. Guido Aristarco’s 1951 Storia marks the first appearance of a historical conception of theory in the modern sense for film study, but the opening volley of the structural discourse in France was the publication of Gilbert Cohen-Séat’s Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma in 1946. Although no doubt a man of letters, Cohen-Séat was not an academic but rather a journalist, film producer, and sometimes director with close ties to the French government, the film industry, and to the Parisian intellectual community. Divided into two parts, “The Cinema in Contemporary Civilization” and “Fundamental Themes and Vocabulary of Filmology,” Cohen-Séat’s Essai was projected as the first of four volumes that would also include studies of “Aesthetics and Individual Psychology,” “Cinematographic Values and Collective Mentality,” and finally, “Methodology.” These last three studies never appeared in print, though many of the problems they proposed in outline were taken up and developed by other researchers in the filmological circle. It is more interesting to note here that, yet again, in 1946 CohenSéat is not presenting or arguing for a theory of film, but rather trying to lay the foundations for a philosophy of cinema. However, philosophy has a specific sense in this context that will set the conditions for what theory meant and could mean in the post-war period. Indeed, for a brief period of time, “filmology” largely meant what would later be called “film theory” in the 1960s. Although several concepts from the Essai would have a lasting impact on film study in France, especially the methodological distinction between filmic and cinematic facts, Cohen-Séat’s larger talents were in networking, lobbying, and institution building. As Edward Lowry observes, Cohen-Séat’s book set off a widespread “organized attempt by the French intellectual community to arrive at a comprehensive, methodical approach to under the pseudonym, Florent Kirch, André Bazin produced an equally sceptical view in his “Introduction à une filmologie de la filmologie.” See Dudley Andrew’s account in “The Core and Flow of Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009): 891-894. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 150 film within the context of the university and its established fields of study” (The Filmology Movement 4). Not so much a theory as a manifesto or white paper, the Essai proposed a twofold project. First, sounding an alarm on the power and crisis of cinema in post-war society throughout the world, Cohen-Séat sought to promote the scientific study of cinema within the established academic disciplines of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and comparative aesthetics. Second, the Essai had ambitions to lay the methodological and conceptual foundations for a comprehensive and unified research program in film that could take place across a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Here, fundamental philosophical principles appropriate to the study of cinema were to supply the method for a possible filmology whose sub-disciplines would suggest a variety of theories. In fact, Cohen-Séat offered the distinction between filmic and cinematic facts as a way of dividing up territories of research between aesthetics or the human sciences, on one hand, and the social sciences on the other, while setting up the methodological terms of exchange and communication between them. In this sense, Cohen-Séat’s characterization of method was entirely commensurate with positivism’s commitment to the idea that there is or should be a single scientific framework valid for all research. In Cohen-Séat’s conception, filmic facts were to account for film as an aesthetic or signifying object, and as a social force. In his often-debated definition, “the filmic fact consists in expressing life, the life of the world or of the mind, of the imagination or of beings and things, by a determined system of image combinations. (Visual images: natural or conventional, and auditory: acoustic or verbal.)”74 Or further: “. . . all the elements of film susceptible to being taken for its signification as a sort of absolute, from the point of view of intelligibility or from the point of view of aesthetics” (Essai 108). In contrast, cinematic facts were established through the study of the context of larger social, cultural, and economic institutions. Commenting on this distinction in 1971, Christian Metz noted that “film is only a small part of the cinema,” and that the cinematic fact comprises a vast range of phenomena, some of which occur before the film (economic and technical 74 Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, second edition, revised and expanded 1958): 54; my translation unless otherwise indicated. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 151 infrastructure, censorship), others after the film (audience response and political or cultural impact), and others during the film but aside from and outside of it (theater architecture, rituals of film-going, etc.).75 Though much discussed, criticized, debated, and refashioned, the distinction between filmic and cinematic facts--or aesthetic and institutional analysis-remains powerfully present in contemporary film study in a variety of forms. Moreover, in spite of all the frictions that divided aesthetics from the social sciences in the era of filmology, the camps ultimately converged on the same problem, which would become the central concern of contemporary film theory: spectatorship. Or, as Cohen-Séat put it, “Otherwise said, our perspective does not begin with the making of films, but rather with the consumption of the spectacle. It is in effect within and during the ‘performance’ [représentation] that the object and the new activity instituted by the cinema are found” (Essai 54). The crisis of cinema was thus conceived as a historical and cultural crisis, but also a psychological one compounded by a lack of data, or knowledge of any kind, of film’s physiological, cognitive, and emotional effects in spectators. This would account later for the predominance of psychological and anthropological studies in filmology at the expense of more aesthetic and qualitative analyses. In this manner, throughout the 1950s, the varieties, conditions, effects, and activities of film spectatorship became the founding objects of filmology as a positive science. Spectatorship would retreat somewhat as the discourse of signification comes to the foreground in the 1960s only to reemerge, however, with the second semiology and the concept of “signifying practice” in the 1970s. The impact of Cohen-Séat’s book and the effects of his lobbying were rapid and significant. An Association pour la Recherche Filmologique was created in January 1947 with Cohen-Séat as its secretary-general, and by July of the same year it began editing and publishing an academic journal, La Revue internationale de filmologie. The Association brought together some of the most important scholars and intellectuals of the post-war period: Etienne Souriau, appointed to a chair in Aesthetics and the Science of Art at the Sorbonne in 1945; Henri Wallon, Professor of the Collège de France and a leading child 75 Language and Cinema, trans. Donna Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1974) 12. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 152 psychologist; Raymond Bayer, also a Professor at the Sorbonne and co-founder with Souriau and Charles Lalo of the Revue d’esthétique in 1948; Edgar Morin, who was rapidly becoming one of the most important sociologists and public intellectuals in France; Léon Moussinac, devotee of Soviet film and a leading figure of French film culture since the 1920s, director of the Ecole Nationale des Art Décoratifs and soon to be the director of IDHEC; and other professors of the Université de Paris and schools throughout Europe. The first International Congress of Filmology was held at the Sorbonne in September 1947, and one year later an Institut de Filmologie began research activities at the Sorbonne, though it was only officially created in October 1950. Among other activities, the Institut offered a two-year course of study leading to a university degree, and while the Institut was attached in principle to the faculté des lettres at the Sorbonne, in fact it operated as an autonomous institution, which would cause problems later on.76 The appeal of filmology to French academics was less aesthetic than it was sociological. It was, further, a discourse framed in terms of urgency and crisis. Where the aesthetic discourse forged its variants in confrontation with film as the emblem of modernity, an emblem that swept away previous concepts of art, and which embraced the medium’s perceived transformation of nature and its vertiginous unlocatabiity in time and space, the new institutional discourse both admired and feared film, not as an artistic medium but as a mass medium of unprecedented power and influence. And where the aesthetic discourse often romantically embraced a certain irrationality in the experience of film, Surrealism being the best example, the structural discourse created itself out of the anxiety that the power and reach of cinema exceeds the capacity of any rational discourse to frame it or to guide its evolution. “What will astonish the historian,” Cohen-Séat wrote in his Essai, “in an age where methodical disciplines are so accomplished, is to see that such an enormous discovery has developed by chance, at the whim and under the pressure of commerce, in back rooms; in sum, less seriously than the sale and use of a 76 For a deeper and more complex version of this story, see Lefebvre and Albera’s “Présentation: Filmologie, le retour” and especially Lefebvre’s “L’aventure filmologique: documents et jalons d’une histoire institutionelle” in CiNéMAS 19:2/3 (2009), 13-56 and 59-100, respectively. In particular, Lefebvre provides a rather astounding account of the rise and fall of the Institut de Filmologie at the Sorbonne. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 153 common ointment” (46). In the late 1920s and into the 1930s, photography and film could serve for Kracauer and Benjamin as emblems for a crisis of experience in modernity, of history “going-for-broke” (to cite Kracauer’s famous phrase from the 1927 essay on photography) towards society’s complete collapse under capitalism or its rebirth as a socialist utopia. But in the wake of European fascism and its modernization of propaganda, the mass destruction of the Second World War, and the trauma of the German occupation, Cohen-Séat’s liberal humanism proposes a very different project--a reconstruction, as it were, that reasserted the project of scientific rationalism in the study of cinema, which in turn stood for a potentially global, humanist culture. Cohen-Séat’s rhetoric of crisis was fueled by his vision of cinema as an intrusive and omnipresent force whose effects are uncertain and badly understood in both their negative and positive dimensions. Reaching an audience of unprecedented size and scope, Cohen-Séat portrays the history of film as the rapid development and dissemination of an aesthetic super-reality--an autonomous world whose logic is largely unconscious and pre-conceptual, and whose psychological effects are unknown or badly understood. In this lies both the powers and the dangers of the medium, which Cohen-Séat judges according to the “quantity of humanity” it affects and the “quality of humanity” it may inhibit or promote. The first concept refers to the cinema’s international and transcultural scale as a mass medium and its potential for becoming the first global art form, for the cinema reaches an audience of unprecedented size and responds on a world scale to “the demand for a homogenous unity and a direct universal efficiency” (Essai 18). To the extent that it is an art, and potentially a language, the cinema has thus created something like a new universe of signs or a new “collective consciousness,” in Émile Durkheim’s sense of the concept, as the collective and institutional expression of ideas, symbols, and values that define a society and legitimate its institutions. In spite of its collective nature and global influence, for Cohen-Séat film may have become a popular art but it had not yet become a humanist art, or rather, realized its potential to affect the quality of humanity as “an instrument of reconciliation for humanist and collective values” (Essai 30). The difficulty of assessing film’s powers in this respect, opens up a problem that will define the structural discourse for another thirty years: to Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 154 what extent is film a language? Or to the extent that it conveys meaning or value, what kind of language is it? Cohen-Séat is an important transitional figure in this respect. Taking up one of the key themes of the aesthetic discourse, Cohen-Séat portrays cinema as the first universal art form: “For the first time such a sign, so intimately linked to the secrets of history and the will of humanity, affects all at once the surface of the earth . . . . For the first time in the history of mankind, the masses play the same game at the same time across the surface of the earth. The same game: not with different traditions, as in music and dance, nor with different approaches, as with dolls or hoops, nor with a greater or lesser degree of perfection, nor with different ways of adapting more or less to reality, but the very same to the last degree” (19-20). World cinema has thus created a kind of ideational “super-reality” [surréalité], “anterior to concept and indifferent to language” (24). The cinema has become a new global mentality or form of collective thought, but a fraught one composed from “unconscious judgments, novel inductions, eccentric and secret syllogisms, commentaries, and interpolations; or, alternatively, critical suppressions of sensations interpolated into the real by who-knows-what kind of imperfection or prejudice of our faculties, a whole world of generic perceptions or basic impressions that unleash a mysterious assault on our usages, our ‘normality,’ our experience, and even our feelings” (25). Herein lies the curious polarity that drives Cohen-Séat’s manifesto. Created, exploited, and disseminated in a context of unbridled capitalism and governmental neglect, and expressing a technological reason unguided by any ethical motive, cinema has evolved in a lawless and uncontrolled manner; hence its susceptibility to irrationality, emotion, and propaganda. In a 1948 essay published in the Revue, Cohen-Séat put the matter more directly: It is understood that the cinematographic spectacle plays a role in the concrete conditions of existence that determine our states of activity and behavior. The direct or indirect action of these “representations” transform the conditions of psychological life more than any other previous human invention. One realizes that this action can effect the intimate dispositions that condition attitudes as well as the active intentions [intentions réalisatrices] on which daily activity depends. It is not impossible that this action comes to transform man himself, by a violent Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 155 perceptual information and representation of life through which his relations with nature, with his peers, and with himself, must be corrected. Considering this global force, generative of interminable human consequences, and the infirmity of means, of knowledge and interpretation, one has with respect to its effects . . ., one agrees to see in the cinema one of the most worrisome developments of scientific progress and technology, and to say that this phenomenon must be studied.”77 The ultimate conclusion of this perspective, as Lefebvre accurately remarks, was that “If the cinema is really a conditioning agent, then it is not a simple and inconsequential entertainment, and it represents even a potential menace for the security of the State and for public order” (“L’aventure filmologique” 75; my trans.). Alternatively, in the ideal world of Cohen-Séat’s liberal humanism, the popularity and global reach of cinema gives evidence of a nascent and underdeveloped impulse towards a collective thought, and a collective language or game, that transcends barriers between individuals and nations, potentially creating a form of universal creative communication. This argument echoes one of the main themes of the aesthetic discourse-the rebirth or re-invocation of the utopia of film as an international language of reconciliation. But here another difficulty, and another potentiality, arises. Cinema is something like a cultural lingua franca, but an underdeveloped or undernourished one. In terms of social function, cinema is comparable to language, yet it is not, strictly speaking, a langue, or rationally ordered speech, in Cohen-Séat’s view. Significantly, there is no capacity for intercommunication--the spectator receives or views; she or he does not create or interact. Still, aesthetically the cinema aspires to something like a system of universal signs. And here, finally, is the task of a philosophy of cinema wherein theory will play its part. This philosophy is not so much aesthetic as ethical; its objective is not to guide film form and to elevate it artistically, but rather, to the extent that film is a language, to make that language more rational, humane, and cosmopolitan.78 “The question, “Cohen-Séat 77 “Filmologie et cinéma,” Reuvue internationale de filmologie 3-4 (1948) 237; my trans. In his 1947 essay on “Le cinéma et les études humaines,” Raymond Bayer expands on Cohen-Séat’s vision of film’s ethical vocation: “A successful film is a collective thought 78 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 156 concludes, “is thus to know whether the cinematic message can develop or create in its current condition the elements of spiritual life--principles of fellow-feeling, of universal values, where spiritual life is threaded--that can release from each ‘spectator’ a person [qui puissent échapper dans chaque ‘spectateur’ au personnage], who before being of man, of his feelings and gesticulations, also belongs to the substance of the human being, so to speak, to the very essence of humanity that each person carries within himself” (Essai 37). Briefly put, the goal of a philosophy of art or cinema is to create a rational context wherein the individual becomes more human, more universally human, as if one needs to discover, through a universal art, an unrecognized capacity for becoming human. In Part III I will discuss more thoroughly the ethical dimension of philosophy’s encounter with film. Nonetheless, in hindsight it is clear that Cohen-Séat’s discourse is marked by a rather unreflective and under-conceptualized humanism as well as a cultural ethnocentrism. Writing just after the end of the second World War, the Essai is permeated by a fear of irrationality, conflict, and cultural disorder. Being a product of unchecked capitalism with unpredictable psychological effects, cinema was an emblem of this disorder, and filmology was conceived as a way of bringing cinema under control through a systematic and rational discourse, guiding this new art toward democratic ends under principles of humanism and through a methodologically coherent sociology. In its attempt to lay the conceptual foundations for a filmology, the Essai is searching, then, for a scientific framework--in short, a theory or group of theories--that could serve as compass points for the rational evolution of cinema as an art form and as a social institution, one that is driven by positivism’s faith in the rational and progressive development of a culture enlarged and conveyed by time . . . . The question is neither to know in fact what films are, nor the manner in which they deceive us, but rather to carry out instruction and inquiry into their possibly unknown powers. The cinema must also be a reformer, a creator of values, a founder of schools of art; a discriminator in any case, confessor, or dispenser of justice. From one point of view, it is an instrument of confession and of psychoanalysis: for the modern spectator it replaces both one and the other. . . . Film’s vocation is deontological . . . . Just as art is an affair of conscience, taking into account a spirit that is both consciousness and science, the film also has an educational and collective role to play. I gladly imagine the moralist attitude of a Schiller, adding a Letter on the Cinema to his Letters on Aesthetic Education” Revue internationale de filmologie 1 (July-August 1947): 33; my translation. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 157 where “man is capable of creating the conditions of a superior life” (Essai 30). Filmology was thus conceived as an elite and scientific enterprise with a specific political and ethical objective--the creation of an institution where the mass of democratic individuals could be guided aesthetically toward human improvement.79 With these aims in mind, the goal of Cohen-Séat’s Essai was nothing less than to locate film as the object of a positive science in the tradition of Auguste Comte and the scientific sociology of Émile Durkheim, who are both significant influences on the book. (Durkheim and Marcel Mauss will play similar roles for structuralism.) Every line of Cohen-Séat’s discourse is underscored by positivism’s confidence in the ability of scientific inquiry to organize research in every social discipline, and to manage society rationally so as to direct the course of human history. Taking as his watchword “To understand is first to systematize; one understands as soon as one systematizes” (Essai 43), Cohen-Séat turns to positivism not to produce a general and synthetic theory of film, but rather as a structure of theoretical and methodological belief that could guide research in a variety of social sciences and enable communication between them in the systematic formulation of concepts and methodologies. In developing its own discursive logic, the goal of filmological research was to guide the evolution of a pre-rational discourse and psychological experience within a coherent scientific framework. In this one can already foresee the friction that would arise between academic filmology and the more cinephilic culture of serious film criticism in France. As a positive science, filmology imposes order and rationality from the outside on 79 One of Lefebvre’s more astonishing discoveries in his archival research on filmology was that through Cohen-Séat’s connections the Institut’s activities were secretly supported and funded by the French government on the assumption that the cinema was not only psychologically dangerous, but also a potential weapon of mass destruction, as it were. After the election of de Gaulle in 1959 with Michel Debré as prime minister, the new government asked Cohen-Séat to relinquish control of the Institut and to move his operations under the umbrella of the Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques, which he refused to do. In summer of 1959, the government withdrew funding for Cohen-Séat’s projects, including the Institut. The apparently sudden disappearance of filmology at the end of the 1950s was thus as much political as it was intellectual. See Lefebvre’s “L’aventure filmologique,” especially 76-90. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory a phenomenon considered to be infantile, anarchic, and unreasonable. Guided by a love of reason rather than of art, filmology examined empirically almost every aspect of cinematic experience while ignoring both the formal power of individual films and their value as art forms. Criticism and aesthetic valuation have no place in the filmological project. Only the scientific method promoted by positivism, Cohen-Séat all but insisted, can impose order on the diverse range of disciplines and research projects that can be brought to bear on the full spectrum of filmic and cinematic facts. Along these lines, Cohen-Séat concludes the Essai not with a call to theory, but rather a call for order in filmological research, carried out from the tripled perspectives of philosophy, practice, and science, each of which has a specific role to play. Through cinema, philosophy may acquire new means through which we discover, or challenge, “the knowledge we believe to have of ourselves” (Essai 188); this framework is implicitly ethical. Practice is more problematic, however, since for its first fifty years cinema has been abandoned by any systematic approach, even if technicians and artisans bring important knowledge of the forms and techniques of cinema to the table. The final arbiter in this sequence is not philosophy, then, but rather science, which must be brought to the study of cinema to raise knowledge to a new objective and trans-individual level. Asking, finally, “What is science?,” Cohen-Séat responds with what was perhaps the most oft-cited definition in twentieth century France, but one which certainly responds to his demand for system and method: “A ‘body of knowledge and research having a sufficient degree of unity and generality, and liable to lead individuals subscribing to these conditions to agreed conclusions, which result neither from arbitrary conventions, nor from the taste and individual interests common to them, but rather from objective relations that one discovers gradually, and which one confirms by defined methods of verification.”80 This definition echoes in most respects Dilthey’s definition of Wissenschaft, and through it filmology sees the path to theory. The Essai thus promotes the study of cinema through what Cohen-Séat calls the “methodical disciplines,” the disciplines ruled by method--primarily psychology, 80 Lalande, André, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1926) 954; cited in the Essai, 189 in my translation. 158 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 159 sociology, anthropology, and a comparative aesthetics close to and influenced by Max Dessoir’s earlier conception of aesthetic science or Kunstwissenschaft--that together define a common ground or meeting place for a research program owing to their presumed unity of method and aims. This approach was reflected in the First International Congress of Filmology, which took place at the Sorbonne on 15-21 September 1947, and which established five basic research groups: psychological and experimental research, devoted mostly to cinematic perception and the study of the cinema audience; psychological and sociological studies of “non-normative” subjects, such as children, the mentally disabled, and other “pathological” variants; the aesthetic, sociological, and philosophical analysis of the filmic universe and filmic reality; the comparative and philosophical examination of film as a language, in itself and in relation to other art forms; and finally, a working group on the development of “cinematic empiricism,” set up to provide methods and mechanisms for the international exchange of filmological research (The Filmology Movement 50-52). The immediate effects of this Congress were wide-ranging. It attracted academic researchers from throughout Europe, including Italy, England, Belgium, and Switzerland, and cooperative arrangements were quickly established between the Institute for Filmology at the Sorbonne and analogous institutions in other cities, including Oxford, Madrid, and eventually Milan. The two-year curriculum of the Institute of Filmology at the Sorbonne followed similar lines. A section on Psychological Studies, directed by Henri Wallon, offered lectures on film and child psychology, youth and education, and empirical studies of filmic perception. The section on Technical Studies, headed by Cohen-Séat, was devoted mainly to the history of cinema. A third section on General Filmology and Philosophy, directed by Raymond Bayer, included sub-sections studying “General Morphology,” or aesthetic/linguistic approaches to film, as well as the “General Aesthetics of Effects”; a fourth section of Comparative Studies was concerned with film in relation to the other arts. In addition, Lowry identifies sections devoted to “Filmic Anthropology” and “Ethics and Ideology,” which included Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s noted lecture on “The Signification of the Cinema” (The Filmology Movement 54). Despite the obvious intention here to balance the social and human sciences, by the end of the 1950s the Institute became Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 160 more and more focused on experimental research and sociological studies of mass communication; by 1954, the Revue was publishing only empirical and experimental research. In this context, the constructed research object of filmology was less film per se, than those aspects of cinema that could be defined and studied as “social facts” in Durkheim’s sense. Despite the diverse disciplines sheltered under the tent of filmology, and the real difficulty of precisely formulating a common methodological framework, filmological research approached cinema only from angles coincident with its positivistic perspective. Favoring cinematic over filmic facts, as a positive science filmological research was guided by the fundamental principles of Durkhiem’s sociology: that social facts have definable empirical properties and form real transindividual systems; that they are subject to principles of determinism in a manner consistent with those of the physical world; and that social facts are structured by invariant relations or laws that express the network of relations that bind social phenomena into larger systems through discernible relations of causation and interdependence. For all these reasons, the scientific method is the most appropriate framework for investigating the patterns of development and causal laws of social phenomena.81 Filmology was mostly concerned with generalizable and transindividual forces that act as constraints on individual choices and actions, and which operate as a kind of second nature according to recognizable laws--hence, Cohen-Séat’s vision of cinema as an ideational super-reality permeating contemporary society. Filmology privileged the social and psychological study of the cinematic fact since it believed that only within the realm of the social fact can laws of cause and effect be isolated, determined, and studied. Similarly, filmology quickly found itself studying spectators rather than films. In a 1949 questionnaire published in English and French in issue five of the Revue, the object of filmology was defined as “the reactions of the audience during the film and also, naturally, the conditions which produce those reactions. By ‘audience’ we do not mean only a collection of individuals sitting in front of a screen, but also the groups on which the film can have an effect, either directly or 81 See Durkheim’s Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973), especially Chapter One, “Qu’est-ce qu’un fait social?,” 3-14. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 161 indirectly, through the ‘atmosphere’ it creates. Those effects or those conditions can be physiological, perceptual, intellectual, aesthetic, ethical or social” (13). In fact, filmology’s resolute focus on the psychological and physiological effects of film watching was motivated by the assumption that not only was film a powerful medium for influencing the thought, conduct, and emotions of spectators, it also acted powerfully and directly on the body itself. One of the goals of filmology was to master these dangers, to control them, and to shield spectators from them, especially children and adolescents. As Lowry observes, the empirical audience research carried out by filmology was divided thus into two broad categories: first, testing “the viewer’s psycho-physiological responses to filmic stimuli, with an emphasis on the monitoring of brain waves by means of the electroencephalograph (EEG)”, while the second employed “methods of psychological testing to provide descriptive data for the evaluation of the film/viewer relationship in terms of the viewer’s response, comprehension and memory” (The Filmology Movement 137). Filmology thus followed a line already traced out in Raymond Bayer’s 1947 essay on “Cinema and the Human Sciences,” where the question of the value of cinema was tied explicitly to its sociological force. Here, “sociology becomes axiology,” Bayer wrote, and to such a degree that contemporary aesthetics should be a “socio-aesthetics” that gives priority to the social sciences (34). This displacement or resituating of aesthetics was so rapid and complete, that, as Lowry notes, when Etienne Souriau’s important collection, L’Univers filmique appeared in 1953, it brought together a group of scholars concerned with aesthetic and stylistical approaches to cinema, including Henri Agel and JeanJacques Riniéri, who would never again be published in the Revue (The Filmology Movement 64). Still, the filmic fact did not entirely disappear from the discourse of filmology. Owing to the stature and influence of Etienne Souriau, the aesthetic study of film within filmology pushed forward and formalized the structural discourse while setting the conditions for a new strain of film theory to emerge: the discourse of signification. In many respects, Souriau can be understood as a protostructualist and precursor to film semiology in his lifelong effort to formulate a scientific approach to aesthetics. In a 1980 necrology of Souriau, Christian Metz outlines with great generosity how Souriau opened Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 162 the French university to the serious study of film and laid the foundations for what would become a structural and semiological approach to film.82 Yet Souriau’s conception of “science” within the human sciences would not be quite the same as structuralism’s, though implicitly the two discourses were connected by the undercurrent of positivism already flowing through Formalism. Moreover, despite the increasing marginalization of aesthetic, morphological, and comparative studies in institutional filmology, Souriau was an important figure whose methodological commitments were commensurate with the positivistic bent of the movement, while keeping the study of aesthetics and the filmic fact alive within it. Souriau’s structural and comparative approach was strongly influenced by the predominance of Kunstwissenschaft’s definition of aesthetics as a positive academic discipline, though he ultimately pushed the “science of aesthetics” in another quite original philosophical direction. In contrast to the semiology that would come to the foreground in the 1960s, Souriau’s interest was not in meaning or signification, but rather in the existential analysis of art, or how art comes into being or creates an autonomous universe through a series of processes that Souriau called “instauration.” The comparative method formed the basis of Souriau’s approach to a scientific aesthetics, above all in the effort to define and characterize the core features of the “universe” of art and of individual media of art through ascertaining their structural correspondences. Therefore, “If one wishes to penetrate to the heart of each art,” Souriau claims in La Correspondance des arts, “to seize the primary correspondences, the considerations whose principles are the same regardless of the most varied techniques, to discover laws of proportion or structural schemas as valid for poetry as for architecture, or for painting or dance, a whole new discipline must be founded, new concepts forged, a common vocabulary organized, perhaps inventing truly paradoxical means of investigation . . . . One therefore evokes here a whole and truly scientific discipline.”83 Seeking the structure of art underlying all 82 "Sur un profil d'Étienne Souriau," "L'Art instaurateur" (Special issue on Etienne Souriau), Revue d'esthétique 3/4 (1980): 143-160. An English translation was published as " A Profile of Etienne Souriau" in On Film 12 (Spring 1984): 5-8, however, all translations here are my own. Also see The Filmology Movement, 73-97. 83 (Paris: Flammarion, 1947) 10-11; my trans. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 163 of the arts through a positive and comparative methodology, Souriau was completely in sync with the logical framework of filmology. Souriau’s philosophy of art was guided then, no less than Cohen-Séat’s, by the directive idea of positivism, and so much so that in an essay on “Filmology and Comparative Aesthetics,” Souriau states unambiguously that “The Science of Art is a positive discipline,” whose principle task is “to discern clearly the different and essential forms of each art according to their specific materials and constitutive forms.”84 In a 1950 lecture delivered at the Institute and subsequently published in the Revue, Souriau also explains that “. . . filmology is, must be, wants to be a science. And if a science is not uniquely, according to the celebrated formula of Condillac, 'a well-made language,' it at least requires and supposes such a language. To refuse the effort necessary to establish this language, to adopt it, to take it and to use it in a correct and normal manner, is to be condemned in advance to a scheme of badly posed questions, vague researches without solid and positive results, poorly drafted observations, and provisional and confusingly heuristic studies.”85 Here, the commitment to “method” is as strong or stronger than in Cohen-Séat. From his earliest works, such as L’Avenir de l’esthétique published in 1929, Souriau sought to establish a systematic, rational, and scientific research program for the study of the aesthetic fact, especially through a comparative approach, a project carried forward in La Correspondence des arts. This approach was the foundation for filmology’s comparative method, wherein the various arts may be categorized and their common components defined, analyzed, and studied, with a view toward identifying and analyzing a process of coming into being unique to art, and present in every instance or genre of art. This approach is presented with great clarity in a methodological statement entitled, “Nature and limit of the positive contributions of Aesthetics to Filmology,” published in 84 “Filmologie et esthétique comparée,” Revue internationale de filmologie 10 (April-June 1952): 113; my trans. 85 "La structure de l'univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie," Revue internationale de filmologie, 2.7/8 (1951): 231; my translation. Also see Souriau’s contribution to L’Univers filmique, ed. Étienne Souriau (Paris: Flammarion, 1953: 5-31. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 164 the first issue of the Revue internationale de filmologie.86 To begin, Souriau asks, what role does aesthetics play in the creation of cinema and, more importantly, what is its “proper and indispensable contribution to a complete and scientific filmology?” (47). Aesthetics groups together several disciplines--psychology, sociology, technological studies--and sets them to work towards a common objective, each one bringing its observations, its laws, and its knowledge of causes producing certain effects. Starting from the point of view of the work of art, the place of aesthetics, then, is to reunite the variety of disconnected facts about art scattered in these domains in order to assemble them systematically so as to reconstitute the unity and specificity of the “fact of art” in itself and in each of its genres. Aesthetics is therefore a normative activity to the extent that it draws from this activity “a theory susceptible to practical applications” (48). “The fact of art is the positive domain of aesthetics,” Souriau concludes, “that which is absolutely proper to it, whose only quality is to say what can give the characteristic of art to an activity as much as a work . . . .” (48). Although very different from the Formalists, Souriau shared with them a certain functionalism, though pushed in a yet more radical direction. Aesthetics, in Souriau’s view, was concerned neither with the artist’s intentions nor with judgments of artistic quality. “The problem,” Souriau writes, “is not to know up until what point an artistic intention, more or less superficial or real, and an apparent artistic quality, more or less vaguely evaluated or judged by those more or less competent and according to their personal preferences, succeeds in producing commercially interesting results. Rather, it is knowing at what point these results derive from the quantity of real art effectively put to work; from this art, I would say, quantitatively evaluated (even measured) according to methods that are rigorous, objective, and controlled . . . .” (49). This certainty about how to identify the presence of art, and even to measure the quantity of art present in a given work, clearly demonstrates the degree and extent of Souriau’s commitment to a science of aesthetics, even if he himself only rarely used empirical methods. Throughout his essay on the “Nature and limit of the positive contributions of Aesthetic to Filmology,” and indeed in his entire philosophical oeuvre, 86 Souriau, “Nature et limite des contributions positives de l’Esthétique à la Filmologie,” Revue internationale de filmologie 1 (July-August 1947): 47-64; my trans. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 165 Souriau’s discursive position is that of an aesthetician “or if you wish,” he mentions parenthetically, “a theoretician” (“Nature et limite” 49). At the risk of reading too much or too deeply, Souriau’s wry acknowledgement of another term, and perhaps another position of address, signals a profound discursive rupture that will soon take place in the study of film and in the discourse of the human sciences. Souriau uses the term “theory” fairly infrequently. What we might call theory in hindsight is fully accounted for semantically by what Souriau would call, as would most philosophers before the 1960s, aesthetics or aesthetic science. In any case, when he evokes the term, for Souriau aesthetics and theory are interchangeable, with the proviso that aesthetics becomes theory when it aspires to the logical conditions and methods of a positive science. And it is here that the rupture of the discourse of signification will become most apparent, and also where aesthetics will be become diminished and displaced by theory in the rhetorical strategies and concept formations of the human sciences in the great decade of structuralism. Aesthetics is concerned with the existence and value of art, both of which are measurable qualities for Souriau. Therefore, in his view the positive contributions of aesthetics to filmology are threefold: “on one hand, the choice and indication . . . of facts that concern and directly condition the artistic value of film; on the other, study of the systematic assembly of these facts, as they come together in a truly artistic film; finally, indication of the conditions that model and specify aesthetic knowledge in general, in its particular applications to the art of film” (“Nature et limite” 50). This last activity is what Souriau would call theory perhaps. Nonetheless, filmology’s dreams of a unified and unifying method creating a positive science of film ultimately proved elusive. The Second International Congress of Filmology took place at the Sorbonne in 1955, almost eight years after the first. Despite the fact that it brought together 350 delegates from 29 countries, in retrospect it was the swan song of the shortlived movement. Rather than moving forward toward a global and synthetic account of cinematic experience, Lowry notes that the movement fractured along disciplinary lines, fraying into “a hierarchy of hermetic discourses attached to various university disciplines which acknowledged one another largely on the level of rhetoric” (The Filmology Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 166 Movement 157). As positive science of filmology gravitated more and more to strictly empirical methods, the study of film through aesthetics, phenomenology, history, or psychoanalysis, all previously included under the tent of filmology, became more and more marginal. Moreover, in the decade to come, the problem of aesthetic value would disappear almost entirely from the structural discourse to be displaced by the discourse of signification, on the one hand, and the critique of ideology on the other. In this respect, filmology would be rapidly replaced by another claimant to method in the human sciences, often contested and marginal, but rapidly graining ground throughout the 1950s-structuralism and the discourse of semiology. Filmology thus occupies a curious place in the temporal parentheses opened between Aristarco and Metz. The presence of “theory” as a concept, or as a characterization of a certain genre of discourse, is almost entirely absent from filmology, despite the imprimatur given it by Aristarco’s 1951 collection. To the extent that theory has a place or function in the proto-structuralism of filmology, it veered in two directions. On one hand, the conclusion of Cohen-Seat’s Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma suggests that theory may be only an intermediate stage of formulating concepts and methods that will yield a complete positive science of film--not a film theory but a filmology. Filmology did not produce an overarching theory of film or cinema. Yet, it offered many intermediate theories of aspects of cinema, such as the perception of motion, depth, and rhythm, and made real conceptual contributions to the psychological study of moving images. In each of these cases, following the directive idea of positivism, the social sciences modeled their research on the natural sciences, formulating hypotheses, collecting data, and progressing piecemeal toward a larger picture of the phenomena under investigation. Alternatively, Souriau suggests that the comparative method already involves a positive science--aesthetics--and so much so that a properly conceived positive aesthetics is already synonymous with theory. The positive contribution of aesthetics to filmology is, for all intents and purposes, only to show how film may be included in a general science of comparative aesthetics, which for Souriau was already fairly well elaborated. However, here one last absence is worth commentary. Filmology was remarkably, if not willfully, ignorant of the more general discourse of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 167 serious film criticism, research, and analysis. Further, it demonstrated almost no knowledge or awareness of the fifty-year history of writing on film that was being excavated and canonized by Aristarco and others in the post-war period. What I have called the aesthetic discourse was largely invisible to filmology. Filmology was thus entirely concerned with defining and investigating filmic and cinematic phenomena inductively and within the methodological framework of a positive science. Theories could only be produced within that conceptual framework and, therefore, implicitly other kinds of discourse were scientifically invalid and institutionally unrecognized. There was no history of film theory for filmology because, in its own perspective, the possibility of a theory in which filmic and cinematic facts would be established and play a part only begins with filmology. For someone like Aristarco to collect, value, and identify these writings as a canon of “film theory,” might very well have represented the attempt to give this work an institutional standing it had as yet in no way achieved. The evocation of Aristarco is important here because of the influence of filmology in Italy and its afterlife there. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, Bianco e nero had an active interest in French filmological research and translated several essays. As Lowry observes, in the years following the second Congress, filmological research regrouped in Italy under the aegis of Luigi Chiarini and Umberto Barbaro. The Revue internationale de filmologie, renamed Ikon and still published today, moved to Milan in 1962. Still, it remains the case that Aristarco’s usage remained unusual for an indefinite period. Reviewing the journal up to and just after the first publication of Aristarco’s collection turns up only infrequent evocations of theory, with the exception of Aristarco’s contributions, which include studies of “the theory of Canudo,” or of Rotha or Eisenstein, for example. (An interesting exception is a multi-part essay by Giuseppe Massi, “"Per una teoria dinamica dell'espressione cinematografica.") Yearly indexes through 1951 categorize articles under the headings: General and Various; Aesthetics; Criticism and History; Filmology; Cinema and Music; Documentary; Didactic Cinema; Intellectuals and Cinema; Economy and Production; Technology; Small Formats; book and film reviews. The presence of “filmology” and the absence of “theory” are significant. While "theory" is emerging in the titles of some articles, in indices they are usually characterized generically Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 168 under the headings of "Aesthetics" and "Filmology." More often than not, "Filmology" referred to empirical studies by specialized academics in psychology and other empirical disciplines. Aristarco is writing a number of essays, however, like "The Theory of Eisenstein" that indicate discursively the appearance of a gradual substitution, and a new use, in which theory comes to substitute for aesthetics. For a short time at least, the term “filmology” covered sociological or psychological theories within the study of cinema while “aesthetics” indicated general and philosophical approaches to film. By 1951, filmology is dropped as a heading, while an interest in aesthetics remains widespread, though with its own ebbs and flows. Souriau was a curious transitional figure in this context, a crossroad or cloverleaf where various possible paths of theory intersected, bridged, and bypassed one another. Though respected and appreciated by Roland Barthes, Raymond Bellour, and Christian Metz, he was in no way part of the semiological generation or its institutional context. Still, the undercurrent of positivism in Formalism and linguistics, as they traveled from St. Petersburg and Moscow to Prague, New York, and Paris, enabled cine-structuralism to recognize in Souriau a fatherly precursor. This “scientific” orientation of filmology was not completely antithetical to new attitudes toward the human sciences, nor was it alien to the emergent, parallel discourse of structuralism. Still following Cohen-Séat’s maxim that “to understand is first to systematize” or that film is a “logic awaiting its laws,” and exhibiting above all in Souriau’s comparative aesthetics a concern with defining structures that underlay the logic of human expression, structuralism and filmology had many points of contact. At the same time, neither linguistics nor semiology, were recognized as accepted “methods” of filmology whether in comparative aesthetics or anthropology, nor did they have any institutional currency in French universities of the 1950s. While at least in film study Souriau’s influence and generosity set an enabling context for the discourse of signification, and filmology itself made the study of cinema possible in an academic context, the discourse of semiology was still suspiciously foreign to French academics in both the figurative and literal sense. Its flowering in the sixties would mark a real scientific revolution. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 169 15. A small history of structuralism And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call all this--if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them--structuralism. --Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language” In his necrology for Etienne Souriau written in 1980, Christian Metz asserts that the 1951 publication of l’Univers filmique remains one of the most indispensable works on cinema ever written. Although filmology was at that time almost forgotten in France and hardly known in Anglophone countries, with characteristic generosity Metz foregrounds links between filmology, structuralism, and film semiology that are often forgotten in accounts of the post-war film period. Among the most important connections was Souriau’s role with Cohen-Séat in opening the French academy to the study of cinema. (Metz’s own role in the sixties and seventies will be no less important.) And despite the fact that he published comparatively little on film, Metz outlines convincingly Souriau’s contributions to the (unfinished and incomplete) progress toward theory, including a version of theory that will later include both semiology and psychoanalysis. Metz’s inclusive gesture, however, is less straightforward than appears at first glance, and offers insight into a new conception of theory that begins to form in the 1960s through the full emergence of the discourse of signification against the background of structuralism’s conceptual transformations of linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, and where Metz himself will play a fundamental institutional and conceptual role. In his retrospective, and perhaps retrojecting, survey of Souriau’s contributions to film study, Metz describes an erratic and incomplete trajectory that models in miniature the invention and transformation of a discursive landscape where theory and film are mapped and located as neighboring domains. In a way that echoes Souriau’s remark on “theory” in “Nature et limite des contributions positives de l’Esthétique à la Filmologie,” Metz notes that in Souriau’s writings, “One does not find a (complete) theory of cinema. He cared little for it” [on ne trouvera pas chez lui une théorie (complète) du cinéma. Il n’en avait cure] (“Sur un profil” 148), and also that one Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 170 finds in Souriau “a constant rigor without ever any ‘scientific’ claims” (148). Certainly, it is true to say that Souriau did not attempt, nor wish to present, a complete theory of cinema. In any case, as will be seen in the coming sections, according to Metz’s conception of theory this would not have been conceptually possible. But to say that Souriau cared little for theory or was cured of it opens an interesting breach in this retrospective account, one that can only be accounted for in a broader discursive context. Already, Souriau’s (and indeed all of filmology’s) view of theory as marked by the protocols and methods of a positive science are not Metz’s conceptions and characterizations of theory. For Souriau, aesthetics was everything, and the aesthetician, working in the context of positivism and Kunstwissenschaft, was already a theoretician working “scientifically,” and with such confidence that it could go unmentioned. For Souriau, filmology was probably a long though important footnote to aesthetics as a total conceptual system accounting for all the arts and for the fact of art itself. For Metz, this perspective is in some respects reversed. Souriau here makes interventions, stages or stepping-stones toward a film theory yet to be accomplished. Moreover, later in the same paragraph, Metz mentions, in homage to Souriau’s epistemological modesty, that the human sciences are not sciences in the strict sense, even if they differ from literature or philosophy, and in this case, they are also not theory or theoretical in Souriau’s sense. These comments from 1980 show a modesty that are at odds with structuralism’s claims in the 1960s to have founded a new conception of the human sciences, indeed to have placed the critical study of culture on a scientific footing. In his first major academic essay, "Le cinéma: langue ou langage?," Metz already challenges, often in surprising ways, the scientific claims of hard structuralism. This essay was published in 1964 in the special and somewhat legendary issue number 4 of Communications devoted to “Semiological Research” under the direction of Roland Barthes. The number also contained Barthes’s seminal work, “Elements of Semiology,” and was widely considered to be the opening volley in structuralism’s attempt to promote a Saussurian-inflected semiology as the method for the critical study of culture, a project whose first important programmatic statement was Barthes’s essay “Myth Today,” which appeared as the second Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 171 half of Mythologies.87 The issue included not only Metz’s "Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" but also an important text by Claude Brémond on Vladimir Propp, “Le message narratif,” and Tzvetan Todorov’s first published essay in French, “La description de la signification en littérature.” Metz’s essay, to which I will return, has not only a central role in the establishment of a general semiology as a model for the human sciences, it can also be read retrospectively as a foundational text on the possibilities and prospects of and for theory in the senses most familiar to us in any domain of the arts and humanities. The sudden disappearance of filmology around 1960 as a discourse, as an institutional setting for research on cinema, and an approach to what Cohen-Séat would later call “visual information,” is less striking when one considers the web of institutional filiations linking it no longer to the Sorbonne, of course, but to a rival institution: the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). Indeed, on a closer look one sees less a definitive break between filmology and structuralism than a series of displacements and generational shifts. Roland Barthes taught with Souriau at the Institut de Filmologie, published two essays in its Revue, and accompanied Cohen-Séat to an important conference in Milan in 1960.88 Claude Brémond, another founding figure for the 87 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957); trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). The book collected together a series of essays on contemporary France that Barthes published in Les letters nouvelles, Ésprit, and France-Observateur between 1954 and 1956. His 1970 preface brings into sharp focus the critical nature of the semiological project of the time: “on the one hand, an ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture; on the other, a first attempt to analyse semiologically the mechanics of this language. I had just read Saussure and as a result acquired the conviction that by treating 'collective representations' as sign-systems, one might hope to go further than the pious show of unmasking them and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.” (9). 88 See Barthes’ review of the “Première Conférence internationale sur l’Information visuelle,” Communications 1 (1961), 223-225; my trans. In this short but provocative report, Barthes also draws clear lines of demarcation between the filmological and semiological projects. Among his main objections are to how “visual information” is constructed as an object of knowledge and how as a model for mass media cinema is only considered as information analyzable in its effects. “To a sociology or a physiology of visual information,” Barthes writes, “one needs to add a semantic of images” (224). Moreover, in response to filmology’s conception of the dangerous and irrational nature of images, Barthes adds that “one knows that mass communication considered in its Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 172 structural analysis of narrative, worked with Cohen-Séat as a research assistant. Indeed, all of the members of the editorial committee of Communications--Georges Friedman, Barthes, Bremond, Edgar and Violette Morin--worked with the Institut in capacities great and small throughout the 1950s. In this manner, the Centre d’études des communications de masse (CECMAS), created in 1960 and directed by Georges Friedmann at the EPHE, as well as the editorial home of Communications, can be understood as an institutional successor to the recently closed Institut, though emphasizing sociology and anthropology over experimental psychology. In stronger terms, the research produced and published through CECMAS gives evidence of a rapid transformation around 1960--an institutional, conceptual, and rhetorical reorganization where the emergent discourse of signification changes almost entirely the stakes of “theory,” not only in relation to film, but also for the critical study of culture in general. As the institutional home for structuralism’s epistemological and critical revolution, the EPHE was also the primary site promoting and putting into practice Saussure’s vision for expanding linguistics into a general semiology accounting for all aspects and objects of culture in their capacity for signification. In order to account fully for what film theory becomes within the horizons of the discourse of signification means tracing out how that discourse is framed historically by structuralism, and what theory means to structuralism, or not. On one hand, there are clear continuities between filmology and structuralism, most of which also pass through and nourish the main conceptual components of the discourse of signification through its genealogical roots in Russian Formalism, Prague School structuralism, and even some variants of Marxist critical theory. The influence of Durkheim and a common commitment to sociology are always historically present here in a broad network of capillaries leading actuality, according to the most recent research, rarely modifies information: above all it confirms beliefs, dispositions, sentiments, and ideologies that are already given in the social, economic, or cultural state of the public analyzed” (224). That mass communications only transmit or sustain given attitudes both deprives censorship of its rationale and filmology of one of its fundamental assumptions--that the cinema is a dangerous and active psychological force capable of modelling the behaviour of a receptive public. Here a discursive transformation is already taking place along institutional, conceptual, and rhetorical lines. Also see François Albera and Martin Lefebvre’s “Présentation: Filmologie, le retour?,” CiNéMAS 19:2-3 (Spring 2009) 29-33. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 173 back to the beating heart of positivism, and to the idea that the human sciences are nonetheless, sciences in a fairly well defined sense. On the other hand, once we turn to look more closely at the founding debates for a film semiology in the 1960s, the ruptures or discontinuities through which the aesthetic discourse passes into the discourse on signification will be more clearly seen. Barthes’s deeply influential account of the “Elements of Semiology” was the capstone of Communications 4, which both retrospectively and at the time of its publication was understood as a collective manifesto presenting structural linguistics as a model for literary and cultural analysis. Drawn from his seminar taught in the sixth section of the EPHE, the work is a product of a moment when Barthes was overtaken with a “methodological intoxication” or passion whose dream was twofold: first, to make of semiology a truly scientific enterprise based on the methods and conceptual vocabulary of Louis Hjelmslev’s structural linguistics, and second, to fulfill Saussure’s vision of a general semiology accounting for the life of signs in society.89 In the conclusion to this long essay, Barthes foregrounds how the objectives of semiological research are marked by a certain functionalism, strongly reminiscent of Formalism and Prague School structuralism, that aspires “to reconstitute the functioning of systems of signification other than speech [langue] in accordance with the project of all structuralist activity, which is to build a simulacrum of the observed objects.”90 The epistemological status and clarity of this enterprise relies on borrowing from linguistics the idea that analysis is guided by clear principles of pertinence. The concept is already familiar to us from the section on Eikhenbaum. Through a process of framing or 89 This self-characterization is from a 1970 television interview with Barthes. See François Dosse’s Histoire du structuralisme I. Le champ du signe (1945-1966) (Paris: Éditions de la Découverte, 1992) 243. I am indebted throughout this section to Dosse’s detailed conceptual and institutional account of the history of structuralism in France. Trans. Deborah Glassman as History of Structuralism, Vol. 1, The Rising Sign (1945-1966) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 205; trans. mod. Italicized page numbers refer to the original publication. 90 The Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Noonday Press, 1988) 95, 132; translation modified. Italicized page numbers refer to the original publication in Communications 4. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 174 limitation, “. . . one decides to describe the assembled facts only from a single point of view, and consequently, only to retain from the heterogeneous mass of these facts the traits that interest this point of view to the exclusion of all others” (95, 132). Thus, phonology, in Barthes’s example, concerns itself only with the sound of language as a physical and articulatory system. In a similar way, semiology is concerned primarily with how objects attain meaning within implicit or explicit systems of signification considered apart from other determinations, whether psychological, sociological, economic, or physical. In this manner, Barthes continues, “The principle of pertinence surely constrains the analyst to a situation of immanence--one observes a given system from the interior. However, as the examined system is not understood in advance of its limits (since this involves precisely reconstituting the system), at the beginning immanence can only apply to a heteroclite set of facts, which it must ‘treat’ in order to know the structure” (96, 133). Thus a material is assembled or framed in advance of analysis according to choices that my be unavoidably and inevitably arbitrary--Barthes calls this “the corpus.” On one hand, the corpus must be large enough that one can have a reasonable expectation of defining a fairly complete system of resemblances and differences. On the other, the corpus must be as homogenous as possible, meaning in the first case, having substantial consistency. In Barthes’s examples, the phonologist works only on the substance of spoken language; or in film, one must examine the multiple expressive substances of image, speech, and music in their formal interrelationships and exchanges. One may allow a heterogeneous corpus, then, on two conditions: the systematic articulations of included substances must be carefully studied, and the same “structural interpretation” must be applied to their heterogeneity (Elements 98). The structural interpretation thus follows conditions outlined in Saussure’s Cours, especially with respect to the necessity of synchronic analysis. A temporal homogeneity must overlay the substantive heterogeneity, and the corpus must maximally eliminate diachronic elements: “it must coincide with a state of the system, a ‘slice’ of history” (98, 134). Along these lines, Barthes insists that one should not prejudge the rhythm of systemic change because “the perhaps essential objective of semiological research (. . .) is precisely to discover the proper time of systems, the history of forms” (98, 134). Or as Barthes will put it in an equally famous essay, the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 175 structuralist activity takes from Saussure the necessity of a certain “immobilization of time . . . in so far as diachrony tends to represent the historical process as a pure succession of forms.”91 These among others are determined elements that unite semiology and an earlier Formalism into a common discourse of signification. Barthes’s methodological essay also implicitly exhibits another link between formalism, filmology, and semiology, that is, their common attitude that research progresses by gradually assembling or incorporating elements (facts, concepts, methods, even disciplines) into ever larger and more unified systems. All three discourses are equally marked by an implicit teleological attitude where the idea of eventually constructing a complete explanatory account of the objects considered by the discourse drives each domain. There are also significant differences, however. In striving to be scientific, formalism aspired to be value neutral; in the passage from filmology to semiology, the axiological component of filmology (film is not “rational” discourse) disappears or is displaced by the critical commentary of structuralism. As conceived in Barthes’ earlier work, Mythologies, semiology was here understood as a contestatory and counter-cultural enterprise--a method for both the social analysis of mass cultural signification and the critical deconstruction of myth and ideology as structures of naturalized meaning. Barthes’s structuralist activity is thus guided by a certain directed functionalism, which studies not the meaning or signified of objects but rather their conditions of intelligibility, or what makes meaning or signification possible. Barthes felt strongly that while meaning is a fact of culture, culture tends to naturalize the process of signification by making the signifier slip behind the signified. Semiological analysis, then, was meant to reverse this process in an interested model or simulacrum, and thus to contribute to a decryption of the cultural code, a denaturalization of the process of signification, and a critique of ideology. Clearly, the structuralist activity is marked by a certain ethos, a stance or 91 Originally published in Lettres nouvelles as “L’activité structuraliste” in February 1963, the essay was soon reprinted in Barthes’s Essais Critiques (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964) 213. Translated by Richard Howard as “The Structuralist Activity” in Critical Essays, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972) 214. French page numbers are given italics when the translation is modified. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 176 perspective on culture that is both epistemological and evaluative--it is nothing less than the imagination of a new conceptual and enunciative position in theory. Thus one striking aspect of the essay, as Metz recognizes later, is Barthes’s definition of structuralism not as a school or movement, but rather as a conceptual approach to the world defining a practice, an activity, even a way of life, where is it necessary to place both analysts and creators “under the common sign of what we might call structural man, defined not by his ideas or his languages, but by his imagination, or better yet, his imaginary, that is to say, the way in which he mentally lives structure. . . . [Structuralism] is essentially an activity, which is to say, the controlled succession of a number of mental operations” (“The Structuralist Activity” 214, 214). These operations are guided by a very particular will to knowledge. If the heart of the structuralist activity is to decompose the real in order to reproduce its systematic functioning in a simulacrum, between these two gestures or processes one also produces the new; one does not simply reproduce the object in another form as much as give it intelligibility or a newly apparent conceptual clarity: “the simulacrum,” writes Barthes, “is intellect added to the object, and this addition has anthropological value in that it is man himself, his history, his situation, his freedom, and even the resistance that nature opposes to his mind” (215, 215). Later, Barthes names this new ethical perspective: “Homo significans: such would be the new man of structural research” (217, 218). The promise of structuralism in Barthes’s first conception was that of a method tending toward a science, indeed providing a new context and definition for the human sciences, but also a new critical consciousness. This approach was coincident with Claude Levi-Strauss’ conviction that semiology should be conceived as a critical sociology, not only a scientific practice, but also a demystifying one that investigated the unconscious and unapparent logics of signification through which culture is produced. This attitude was representative of Levi-Strauss’s commitments to the importance of both Freud and Marx for structuralism, and reinforced by his habit of rereading Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon each time he undertook a new project. At the same time, semiology and structural linguistics were still considered marginal disciplines by the Sorbonne, the citadel of academic prestige in France. During the 1950s, they were Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 177 nonetheless growing in stature owing to the steadily increasingly influence of Levi-Strauss, especially after the critical and commercial success of Triste Tropiques in 1955; in turn, Structural Anthropology, Levi-Strauss’s collection of essays from 1958, was considered for many years to be the founding methodological text of structuralism. Further, because of Levi-Strauss’ association with the EPHE, structuralism and semiology found a winter garden where they could flourish and blossom throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. The main concepts of structural anthropology were forged at the New School for Social Research in New York, where Levi-Strauss sat out the war and completed his 1948 thesis, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, a work that would soon be viewed as igniting an epistemological revolution in the human sciences. Here Formalism and the Prague School rejoin the story of theory. In 1942, Levi-Strauss encountered Roman Jakobson at the New School, where he followed Jakobson’s course on phonology and where Jakobson attended Levi-Strauss’s course on kinship relations; the two thinkers would have a profound effect on one another, their lines of thought meeting on the common ground of “structure” and their common interest in Ferdinand de Saussure. Jakobson had discovered Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics in Prague in the 1920s, through his work on phonology with Nikolai Trubetzkoy and his involvement with the Prague Linguistic Circle. A concept descending more from Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method than from Saussure, structuralism built upon a number of formalism’s fundamental principles, including an emphasis on the immanence of poetic language defined by principles of pertinence distinct from those of practical language, the formulation of a concept of poetic structure as a dynamic whole having an internal coherence greater than the sum of its parts, and finally, the desire to use linguistics to make of poetics a nomothetic science. Levi-Strauss’ often stated ambition was to make structural anthropology the foundation of a new, unified conception of the human sciences. Indeed, the concept of structure in Levi-Strauss should be understood as a remapping of the concept of “science” in the human sciences, and in turn, as nourishing a certain conception of “theory.” LeviStrauss brought an idea of science to the study of societies that joined structuralism to the main lines of Comtean positivism, though Levi-Strauss certainly did not share positivism’s optimism for the progress of human evolution. Still, its influence is felt in his conviction Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 178 that knowledge should be organized in every domain on the model of the scientific method and aspire to the same rigors as the natural sciences. This attraction to an idea of science can also be understood historically as a withdrawal from and a challenge to philosophy, as we have already seen in Tihanov’s account of the invention and decline of literary theory. Structuralism thus emerged in the context of a post-war disappointment with philosophy, whether phenomenological or Marxist, in its failures to formulate a secure epistemology and to assert itself as a substantial critical force. In Dosse’s view, the scientific claims of linguistics as a sort of hard theory, rigorous in its concepts and open to mathematical modeling, was an instrument of “de-ideologization” for a number of militant intellectuals influenced by LeviStrauss and disappointed by the political disillusions of the post-war period. Seeking an escape from existential disarray, in hard structuralism there was “a tendency to ontologize structure that, in the name of Science and Theory, became an alternative to traditional Western metaphysics” (Dosse, Structuralism xx). Levi-Strauss claimed a pivotal role for anthropology in this program because, in his view, it lay at the intersection of the natural and human sciences and thus anthropology “does not despair of waking among the natural sciences at the hour of last judgment”.92 The influence of Jakobson’s conception of linguistics and poetics is keenly felt here. Both formalism and the Prague Circle tended towards the idea that a science is founded on clearly defined principles of pertinence; that is, a poetic science can only develop independently of metaphysics or philosophy if it concentrates on restricted and therefore definable aspects of reality. Semiology’s methodological focus on locating the elementary and distinctive unities of language as fundamental and coded articulations defined through the binary distinctions of signifier/signified, denotation/connotation, expression/content, paradigm/syntagm, and synchrony/diachrony, brought new concepts and principles of pertinence to this enterprise. Moreover, through the model and methods of linguistics, especially phonology, structuralism sought to bring the human sciences closer to the model of the exact sciences, or at least to efface or reduce the frontier 92 “Le Champ de l’anthropologie” (Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France, 5 January 1960) Anthropolgie structurale deux (Paris: Plon, 1973) 29; my trans. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 179 between them. The principles of phonology, especially Jakobson’s Saussurian-influenced version, inspired a number of structuralism’s fundamental ideas, and kindled Levi-Strauss’ conviction that structural analysis would find “its model is already in the body,” because phonology lay at the intersection of the corporal, the psychological, and the cultural.93 Phonology was also understood as addressing phenomena that do not operate on a conscious level; language was thus conceived as a trans-individual or a-subjective structure operating outside of the purview of consciousness or individual agents’ subjective judgments. Levi-Strauss also asserted that, “Like phonemes, the terms of kinship are elements of signification; like them, they acquire signification only on the condition of integrating themselves into systems.”94 Here one sees not only the influence of Saussure, but also of Durkheim or Marcel Mauss. Meaning or signification only arises as a system of differential relations, and the goal of the human sciences will be to construct general and non-subjective laws from the study of systems of signification. In its search for systematic invariants in the multitude of iterative instances, and its emphasis on the unconscious components of structure by withdrawing from any recourse to a selfconscious subject of speech, structuralism also sought an epistemological security alternative to the models of postwar French philosophy, especially the existential phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre. The very definition of structure in Levi-Strauss or Jakobson was that of a signification without a subject, and this perhaps also promoted a certain scientific conception of knowledge as free of subjective conditioning. In way that would deeply influence Jacques Lacan, Levi-Strauss remodeled Saussure’s concept of the sign by giving a dominant role to the signifier: “Like language, the social is an autonomous reality (the same one, by the way); symbols are more real than what they symbolize; the signifier precedes and determines the signified.”95 The code is independent of the message and the subject is always submitted to the law of the signifier. 93 See L’homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1971) 619; my trans. On the importance of phonology for the conceptual foundation of structuralism, also see Dosse, 38-41. 94 “L’Analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie” in Anthropologie structurale deux (Paris: Plon, 1958) 40-41; my trans. 95 “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss” in M. Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie [1950] (Paris: PUF, 1968), xxxii; my trans. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 180 In all of these ways, structural linguistics was considered as modeling and guiding the methodological and epistemological claims of the social sciences in general. And as structuralism’s influence began to spread in France throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, the domains of linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis all tended to conceive of structure as an immanent or virtual force, something outside the reach of consciousness and manifest meaning, that underlay all the systems of culture. One can see a direct link between filmology and structuralism, then, through the influence of Durkheim and positivism, especially in their similar commitments to the concept of the social fact, and in their concept of culture as an autonomous and independent structure. At the same time, these two discursive formations are divided by structuralism’s deep commitment to linguistics and the problem of signification. A sidebar for filmology, the problem of discourse becomes the central feature of structuralism. Indeed, despite the presence and increasing influence of André Martinet, who came to the Sorbonne in 1955, linguistics was seen as a minor and technical discipline by the French academy, still dominated by commitments to philology and historical grammar. Alternatively, to a whole generation of French thinkers coming of age in the immediate post-war period, structuralism and semiology were embraced as particularly modern or cutting-edge methods, attractive in their disciplinary confrontations with the university establishment. In this context one better understands the institutional friction between the Sorbonne and the EPHE, and later, with the Althusser faction at the École Normale Supérieure, exemplified in an anecdote reported by Dosse. When Tzvetan Todorov came to Paris from Bulgaria in 1963 to study what he called, the “theory of literature” at the Sorbonne, he was astounded at his total rejection by the Dean: “He looked at me as if I came from another planet, and very coldly told me that literary theory was not practiced at this university, and it is out of the question that it will be” (Dosse 194, 230). For the structuralist generation, the Sorbonne was an emblem of an enclosed and static institution, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 181 resistant to change and new thought. Adventurous young thinkers like Todorov or Metz would find a more welcoming home at the EPHE.96 Though odd to think of now, virtually all of the leading figures of structuralism were either based in institutions that, while often prestigious, were still subordinate to the main institutions of academic power like the Sorbonne, or else like Jacques Lacan they followed career arcs at the margins or completely outside of the traditional university system. This observation provides insight into the unique institutional position of the sixth section of the EPHE for the history of structuralism and the emergence of the discourse of signification. Created in 1868, the EPHE had an interesting status with respect to other French institutions of higher learning in that instructors, called “directeurs d’études,” could be recruited from outside the university system and were not required to have higher degrees. Students could also follow courses without having passed the French baccalauréat. Roland Barthes, for example, had no degree higher than a licence in classical literature, and his project for a doctorat d’État, eventually published in 1967 as The Fashion System, was refused by both André Martinet and Claude Levi-Strauss. (Remember that Canudo also lectured on aesthetics at the EPHE in the teens in his capacity as a practicing critic.) In 1947, the sixth section of the EPHE, previously devoted only to economics, was restructured under the leadership of Marc Bloch and Lucien Lebvre into a section called “Social and economic sciences,” eventually evolving to become an independent institution in 1975, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Levi-Strauss returned to France under the sponsorship of George Dumézil, where in 1949 he became a directeur d’études on “Peoples without writing” in the fifth section of 96 The academically marginal status of the key authors of structuralsim and poststructuralism is also represented in Pierre Bourdieu’s recounting of “the astonishment of a certain young American visitor, at the beginning of the seventies, to whom I had to explain that all his intellectual heroes, like Althusser, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault, not to mention the minor prophets of the moment, held marginal positions in the university system which often disqualified them from officially directing research (in several cases, they had not themselves written a thesis, at least not in canonical form, and were therefore not allowed to direct one). See his “Preface to the English Edition” of Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) xviii. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 182 the EPHE (Sciences of Religion). Elected to the Collège de France ten years later, he continued to exert profound influence on the EPHE. The two other key figures in this context were Roland Barthes and Algirdas-Julien Greimas, who were close friends since the time they both taught at the University of Alexandria in the early 1950s. In fact, Barthes discovered Saussure and Hjelmslev through Greimas, and Greimas’ commitment to a version of structural linguistics, proximate to the hard sciences and committed to the rigors of mathematical modeling, fueled Barthes’s methodological passion for semiology. Roland Barthes joined the EPHE in 1962 and two years later was appointed a directeur d’études in the sociology and semiology of signs and symbols where his seminars exerted considerable influence, especially the famous course on the elements of semiology. Greimas, however, was considered by many to be the intellectual leader of the semiological program. Influenced deeply by Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology and by Merleau-Ponty’s program for remapping philosophy in the context of a new vision for the human sciences dominated by Saussure and Levi-Strauss, in 1956 Greimas published one of the fundamental manifestos of structuralism, “The Actuality of Saussurianism,” where semiology was promoted as the foundation for a unifying method for the social sciences in its vision of culture as a structured and signifying system.97 With the support of LeviStrauss, Barthes helped to elect Greimas to the sixth section of the EPHE in 1965, where he organized a research group devoted to linguistics and semiology within the laboratory of social anthropology of the EPHE and the Collège de France under Levi-Strauss, whose activities would support the early careers of Oswald Ducrot, Gérard Gennette, Tzvetan Todorov, Christian Metz, and later, Julia Kristeva. (Metz served as secretary general for the laboratory from 1966-1969.) It is also worth noting that through the interventions of Fernand Braudel and Louis Althusser, in 1964, after the creation of the Ecole française de psychanalyse, Jacques Lacan’s seminars were given a home at the École normale supérieure through the sixth section of the EPHE, a relationship that would continue for 97 "L'Actualité du saussurisme," Le Français moderne 24 (1956) 191-203. This essay was written to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Greimas’ later work, Semantique structuale (Paris: Larousse, 1966) became a key text of a structural linguistics gravitating toward mathematical modeling and the hard sciences. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 183 five years. The EPHE was thus the intellectual heart as well as the institutional base for the structuralist program, and throughout the 1960s, Levi-Strauss, Greimas, and Lacan were considered something like a troika of a “hard” structuralism that promoted a conception of the human sciences aspiring to the methodological unity and rigor of the natural sciences. The place of “science” in this new conception of the human sciences functioned in curious ways that illuminate both structuralism’s frictions with post-war French philosophy and the place of theory in the discursive formation of structuralism. If structuralism is now associated with Theory in a contemporary context, this is owing to a retroactive, and retrojecting, construction through the emergence of the discourse of ideology after the late 1960s. Just as the discourse of filmology needed no special concept of theory (“filmology” already signified a scientific theory for its adherents), analogously, “semiology” also already signified a critical and scientific approach. By the same token, if one could found a semiology of film, there would be no need for a theory of film, which in any case would only be a sub-set of a general semiology.98 No special concept of theory was needed beyond that which was already signified by semiology as a covering term. (Indeed, a fundamental characteristic of the discourse of ideology and political modernism was to make of theory a discursive genre or practice in which semiology was less a pilot science than a method in service to the broader goal of the critique of ideology.) In a similar way, to speak or write from within the discourse of the human sciences was to claim an epistemological perspective that divagated from the position of philosophy and claimed precedence over it. In the English language preface to Homo Academicus, Pierre Bourdieu observes that one important consequence of structuralism’s intellectual 98 What will make Metz’s texts yet more striking in this context, then, is the absence of a special concept of theory in other key works of the 1960s, including Mitry’s Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema and Noël Burch’s Praxis du cinéma. This absence is coincident with the perspective of structuralism wherein “semiology” was largely substituted for “theory.” Even Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, arguably the first English language book of modern film theory, initially cast itself in the context of aesthetics and the history of aesthetic thought. The 1972 conclusion to the revised edition, with its early account of post-structuralism, thus marked out a key turning point in the discourse of signification towards that of political modernism. See my Crisis of Political Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 42-66. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 184 domination of the human sciences was that in France in the 1950s and 1960s there was something like a wholesale abandonment of philosophy for the social sciences.99 Similarly, François Dosse notes that even though most of the most influential figures of structuralism had backgrounds in philosophy--including Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault--the attraction to the human sciences as a new discipline fueled a retreat from and even a challenge to post-war French philosophy, often in the form of a kind of academic revolt where young thinkers sought a different vision of intellectual life in anthropology, linguistics or semiology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and even history (History of Structuralism 382-385). In short, philosophy suffered a diminishment of prestige in epistemology and ethics. Homo significans had replaced homo philosophicus. If structuralism conceived itself as a scientific alternative to philosophy, what did philosophy mean in this context? The two main projects of postwar French philosophy, Sartrian existentialism and phenomenology, were both philosophies of consciousness and of the subject. In fact, the relation of structuralism to phenomenology in its broadest conception was complex. Sometimes the two approaches clashed in public conflict, the most notorious being Levi-Strauss’ attack on Sartre in the Introduction to The Savage Mind (1962). More often, however, the two discourses, structural and phenomenological, were held in an unsteady, complex, and often paradoxical system of attraction and repulsion. This is due to the fact that phenomenology itself encompassed a variety of distinct yet overlapping philosophical approaches. On one hand, there was the undeniable influence of Husserl’s phenomenology and its concern with how the world is given through experience and investigated through eidetic reduction, the intentionality of consciousness in regard of things, and the desire to make of philosophy a kind of science, a perspective rich enough to have been a major influence on the very different figures of Sartre and Jakobson. Another major influence of the 1950s was Jean Hyppolite’s resurrection and remapping of Hegel’s phenomenology and his influential approach to the history of 99 Homo Academicus, xxvi. In this retrospective text, Bourdieu presents a slightly cynical yet concise and informative account of conflicts and tensions arising in the conflicts between the Sorbonne and the EPHE, on the one hand, and philosophy and social or human sciences on the other. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 185 philosophy, to which both Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze were indebted. And finally, there was the almost inescapable undertow of Heidegger, whose influence was felt implicitly everywhere, especially in Derrida and Foucault, although rarely acknowledged outright. In fact, the twinned influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger will eventually return to define the fault-lines where post-structuralism emerges through a deconstruction of structuralism’s central concepts of sign, system, and language. No doubt, the dominant figure in the post-war context is Sartre; if there was a resistance to philosophy in post-war France fueling the influence of structuralism, it was in most respects defined through a reaction formation to Sartre’s enormous political and philosophical prestige. Indeed, one way of looking at the discursive formation of structuralism is through its recurrent confrontations with Sartre’s concept of agency as a kind a humanism where man is freely active as the self-conscious motor of his own history, and where the ego was considered as a limpid and transparent consciousness, present to itself as substance and as the site of truth. Foucault referred to this as a theology of man as the Cartesian cogito, and in turn characterized the whole pre-structural epoch of humanism as the middle or dark ages of modernity. If philosophy was to remain a critical force within the human sciences, its major task, according to Foucault, was to join structuralism in uncovering fractures in a certain historical conception of the cogito as substance and as a self-identical consciousness, and therefore to undermine its epistemological confidence and prestige. In a 1966 interview in La Quinzaine Littéraire after the publication of The Order of Things, Foucault puts the matter bluntly: “The point of rupture occurred the day when Levi-Strauss showed us, with respect to societies, and Lacan to the unconscious, that meaning is probably only a sort of surface effect, a shimmering, a froth, and that what passed through us so deeply, what was before us and sustained us in time and space, was the system.”100 Structuralism’s anti-humanism and its attack on the cogito were motivated by its scientific aspirations, the idea that structuralism is or could be a science (or perhaps a set of theories tending toward a science), unifying all the human sciences in the common 100 Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal, La Quinzaine Littéraire 5 (15 May 1966) n.p.; my trans. Also see Dosse 330-342. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 186 project of a critical examination of culture through it logic or systems of signification. Moreover, the founding gesture of structuralism was to overturn the centrality of the subject in philosophy with the concept of structure as a trans-subjective and a-subjective force. Herein lies the strange yet powerful and pivotal role of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who in giving primacy to the logic of sense as viewed from a phenomenological perspective sought to find a communicating passage between philosophy and the human sciences. (Althusser will later play a similar conceptual and institutional role for the discourse of ideology or power.) Throughout the 1950s, in fact, Merleau-Ponty assembles into something like a whole the major conceptual components of structuralism--through linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis--which come together in his 1960 work, Signs. (He is also an important link between the Institut de Filmologie and the broader emerging discourse of structure.) For example, in a lecture presented in 1951 on the phenomenology of language reprinted in Signs, Merleau-Ponty is among the first in France to stress the importance of Saussure’s work for a theory of meaning. “What we have learned from Saussure,” wrote Merleau-Ponty, “is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs.”101 A sign is only capable of transmitting sense through its variable placements in a differential system of relations. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical and political falling out with Sartre and his rapprochement with Levi-Strauss added the anthropological component to this domain. In the fourth chapter of Signs, “From Marcel Mauss to Claude Levi-Strauss,” Merleau-Ponty ardently defended the anthropological turn: “Social facts are neither things nor ideas; they are structures. . . . Structure does not deprive society of any of its weight or thickness. Society itself is a structure of structures: how could there be absolutely no relationship between the linguistic system, the economic system, and the kinship system it employs?” (Signs 116-117 and 118). As one of the principle institutional figures of post-war French 101 “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) 39. For a broader account of MerleauPonty’s relationship with structuralism, see Dosse 37-42. It is thought anecdotally that Lacan discovered or was encouraged to read Saussure through the influence of MerleauPonty. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 187 philosophy Merleau-Ponty thus designed a curious place for the role of philosophy with respect to the human sciences. No longer the great arbiter and final ground of reason (how could it be, if meaning was transmitted no longer by the subject, but rather through a locale or position in a virtual system of differences?), Merleau-Ponty sought to make of philosophy the methodological consigliere to structuralism. Somewhat ironically in this respect, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology imagined itself as having a place and function in modern Continental philosophy analogous to that of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in an Anglophone context. Philosophy would provide a sort of metalanguage for structuralism, bringing out the sets of conceptual intersections wherein it could become a unified epistemological model for the human sciences. And herein lies the uncertain place of philosophy with respect to structuralism. Throughout the 1950s Merleau-Ponty is searching for a way of ascertaining the claims of reason in a discursive field where the subject is displaced and de-centered with respect to the new concepts of sign and system; for philosophy, then, the “task is to broaden our reasoning to make it capable of grasping what, in ourselves and in others, precedes and exceeds reason” (“From Mauss to Claude Levi-Strauss,” Signs 122). In this respect, his project is imminently philosophical. At the same time, through Merleau-Ponty philosophy annexes itself to the larger territory of structuralism and assumes a more modest position with respect to linguistics, anthropology, or psychoanalysis. No longer the guardian of logic and epistemology, philosophy functions rather like a crossing-guard or traffic cop, signaling the paths that cross and connect the various analytical approaches to structure and signification on the larger map of the human sciences. François Dosse explains well the profound yet deeply ironic effect that Merleau-Ponty exerted on the post-war generation of philosophy students. They learned their lesson too well: awakened to the new concepts and methods of structuralism they deserted the field to become linguists, anthropologists, or psychoanalysts, at least in theory (History of Structuralism 40). Dosse also foregrounds the multiple and interesting ways in which the year 1966 marked the conceptual and cultural triumph of structuralism as a critical and intellectual force, and at one and the same time, the beginning of its decline. In their period of ascendance through the 1950s and into the 1960s, structural anthropology and linguistics Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 188 drew from Formalism a strong undercurrent of positivism and a belief in the possibility of making the human sciences something close to science. The break with structuralism and the emergence of post-structuralism, then, passes through a historical and conceptual critique of this epistemological confidence and methodological passion that occurs on multiple fronts in ways that were often not entirely clear at the time. Here, and in almost every case, a new conception of philosophy returns to challenge and displace structuralism’s epistemological and cultural prestige. If 1966 is the banner year of ascendant structuralism, it is also the tipping point where devastating philosophical critiques of the concepts of sign, system, and speech were deployed in a number of fundamental works that, coincidently, seemed to arrive together like independent springs joining a mighty stream. The most important of these works included the publication of Lacan’s Écrits, and a year later, Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology with its critical deconstructions of the foundational concepts of structuralism--the role of speech and sign in Saussure’s Cours and the place of structure and system in Levi-Strauss’ anthropology, as well as its interrogation of the Rousseauian subject’s desire for complete transparency to itself. (Later, we will also have to examine the more complicated case of Althusser’s For Marx and Reading Capital, both published in 1965.) Undoubtedly, however, the most surprising and paradoxical event of the year was the wholly unexpected critical and popular success of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. Foucault’s path-breaking book offered a philosophical and historical account of the human sciences, which while bringing a new and spectacular image of structuralism to popular attention (adding Foucault to the structuralist tribe of Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and Barthes), also demarcated the limits of structuralist thought. Originally subtitled an “archaeology of structuralism,” the book was considered (somewhat mistakenly, and even by Foucault himself) as providing a philosophical synthesis of structuralist thought in the previous 15 years. Retrospectively, the book was forcefully understood as one of the first fundamental works of poststructuralism, where in viewing the history of the human sciences as series of discontinuities, Foucault both excavated and drew in sharp outline the horizons or limits of structuralist thought. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 189 One of the central ideas of The Order of Things was to map out how the creation and elevation of the human sciences--in general grammar, natural history, and political economy--could also result paradoxically in the “death of man” and a profound antihumanism. The multiple and powerful ironies of Foucault’s perspective at the time are on full display in an interview broadcast in 1966 on the popular French television program, “Lectures pour tous.”102 Here Foucault presents himself as the enunciator of a new position of thought, taking sides with Levi-Strauss and Dumézil, Lacan, and Althusser against Sartre, whom he characterizes as “a man of the 19th century, for his entire enterprise aims at making man adequate to his own signification” (History of Structuralism 330, 384). In a similar way, Foucault also strongly implies that in the current era, philosophy has lost its power and function, or perhaps, has simply disappeared into other conceptual activities. “Philosophy” here means “Sartre,” of course, as the sign of a superceded Marxist and phenomenological humanism. “We have arrived at an age,” Foucault continues, “which is perhaps that of a pure thought, thought in action, and disciplines as abstract and general as linguistics, equally fundamental as logic, or even literature since Joyce, are activities of thought. They hold the place of philosophy: not that they take the place of philosophy, but that they are the very deployment of what was, in another time, philosophy” (History of Structuralism 330-331, 384-385). Undoubtedly, there is a valuation of structuralism here for displacing “man” as the focus and object of the human sciences, while also producing a perspective that carves out a place and creates a distance dislodged within culture so that it may be grasped critically. In this lies Foucault’s implicitly Kantian project of making his archaeology of knowledge not an account of the past so much as an interrogation of the present, where structural anthropology becomes less about the study of other or “primitive” cultures than the 102 Later, Foucault defines more clearly the epistemological break or line of flight dividing French philosophy of the 1960s: “What separates a philosophy of experience, meaning, and the subject, from a philosophy of science [savoir] and of the rationality of the concept? On one side, filiation linked to Sartre and to Merleau-Ponty; and then another, which is that of Cavaillès, Bachelard, Koyré, and Canguilhem.” “La vie: l'expérience et la science” [1977], Revue de métaphysique et de morale 1 (January-March 1985): 4; my trans. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 190 expression of a will to make our own culture appears as strange to us as Levi-Strauss’ description of the Nambikwara. Foucault’s archaeology was not about restoring to unity lines of thought progressing ineluctably to our present civilization, but rather locating the discontinuities that separate thought in present and past epistemes, or discursive regimes of knowledge, by demarcating their borders, horizons, and startling shifts in perspective. In bringing his particular historical perspective, fueled by Bachelard and Canguilhem, to bear on the foundations of the human sciences, Foucault achieves something like an ethnology of the past, where we take ourselves, the provenance of our selves, as alien others. Humanism (and positivism), as a thought becoming fully present and transparent to itself and evolving without interruption in a linear time, is here seriously undermined. At the same time, Foucault’s particular and deeply original Nietzschean view of history also marked the beginnings of an erosion of confidence in structuralism’s scientism and its positioning of something like a structuralist subject of knowledge, who in marking out the logic of systems, somehow stood outside of or to one side of them. At this particular moment, Foucault fully embraces structuralism’s successive displacements of the subject in structural linguistics, structural anthropology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, while adding to them his Nietzchean remapping of the history of knowledge. However, if structuralism is less a method than the “awakened and unquiet conscience of modern thought,” in reviewing the discontinuities and tectonic shifts of past knowledge, archaeology also seeks out fractures and points of instability in the present that render not only the limits of our knowledge in its state of actuality, but also the possibility for new thought to come.103 In an era marked by the death of god, the death of the author, and the death of man, Foucault sought not to deepen and extend structuralism’s anti-humanism and cultural pessimism, but rather, to ask us to understand the subject, not in its forms of identity, but rather in its differences, and so to take as our perspective in the present our discontinuities with the past as the acknowledgment of fractures of thought that still reside within us. No doubt such a perspective draws clearly the limits of thought and erodes claims to progress in thought, but it is also aims to clear the grounds for new forms of 103 Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1970) 208; trans. modified. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 191 thought or subjectivity. Structuralism might indeed be the realization of a particularly modern consciousness, but Foucault’s archaeology also raises the critical question of how to go beyond this consciousness, since it is unquiet and discontent? In its historical conception of the human sciences that returned them to a context defined by the history of science and philosophy, The Order of Things in fact submitted structuralism to a profound epistemological critique, and this critique--both Kantian and Nietzchean, and in certain respects, Heideggerian--was imminently philosophical, though certainly in a way other to Sartre, though perhaps similar to Merleau-Ponty. In some respects analogous to Derrida’s work of the period, there is a strong element of creative destruction here, which wants to take full account of the conceptual horizons of structuralism in order to make a new way of thinking possible, and in Foucault’s case, perhaps a new politics, thus opening a path for philosophy after structuralism. From a contemporary and North American viewpoint, we tend to map this path as the road to Theory as a discursive practice or genre in the humanities, whose founding moment might well have been the International Colloquium on Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man convened at Johns Hopkins University in October 18-21,1966, organized in cooperation with the 6th section of the EPHE. This somewhat legendary colloquium included a great variety of participants representing, roughly speaking, both structuralist and phenomenological perspectives, including Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Tzvetan Todorov, as well as René Girard, George Poulet, Lucien Goldmann, Jean Hyppolite, and many others.104 In retrospect, the most explosive and influential text presented was Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences.” Indeed there is also something significant here in the gesture of importing French thought to North America that fuels our present conception of Theory. However, while the American organizers of the conference no doubt considered these papers as contributing to the project of a new literary theory, whose genealogical roots descended from Wellek and 104 For a fuller account of the conference and its aftermath, see the various prefatory remarks by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man [1970], eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) ix-xxv. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 192 Warren through Formalism and structuralism, in the French context of 1966 theory was perhaps a less powerful concept than science or method. The Americans, in this respect, play an important role in the invention of contemporary discursive genre of Theory. A second irony would be how the stage is set here for the creation of Theory through the return of philosophy to the study of literature--Derrida’s work in particular would exert a steadily rising influence across the next two decades. Paradoxically, the emergence of a specific concept of theory, or the sense of Theory as a specific kind of practice, occurs through the return of philosophy within the fault-lines that gradually separate poststructuralism from structuralism as represented conceptually in Derrida’s important essay. Yet, Derrida’s writing is philosophy and not “theory,” post-structuralism and not structuralism, and from the other side, the path from Formalism to structuralism in linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis is forged less under the emblem of theory than that of “science” or “method.” The human sciences founded in France and exported to North America are not synonymous with what Dilthey would have called Kulturwissenschaft, though undoubtedly they fall close to the semantic domain defined in his concept of a general Wissenschaft. In the context of French structuralism, science may have followed this genealogy, but it also inserted itself into a whole new and specific constellation of meanings. The commitment to sign, structure, and system was first seen as a path alternative to philosophy and displacing it, whether in the form of existentialism, phenomenology, or metaphysics. It was also a way of challenging academic institutions like the Sorbonne and attempting to create new ones. And finally, the discourse of structure or signification sought to establish a new epistemological and critical perspective, and to open a new territory for the human sciences between philosophy and literary history. Especially in the example of Levi-Strauss, structuralism claimed a social and critical genealogy descending from Marx, Saussure, and Freud, and also asserted for itself an epistemological and critical power superior to its rivals in its scientificity. Here again, as in so many other historical contexts, theory hovers in an unstable space, as if held unsteadily between the opposed magnetic poles of science and philosophy. Nevertheless, from within the École Pratique des Hautes Études a new discursive path to theory was being forged in the effort to create an epistemological and ethical space that Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 193 challenged structuralism while trying to find new concepts for situating image and aesthetics within the project of a general semiology, and all this within the domain of film. 16. After the long eclipse One sees reborn everywhere, after a long eclipse, the interest for theoretical discussion. --Christian Metz, “On classical theories of cinema” In his fascinating reassessment of filmology in France, “L’aventure filmologique,” Martin Lefebvre unearths an intriguing document--a proposal for a thèse d’État submitted by a young researcher at the Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifiques who proposes to extend the filmological project into a new domain more or less ignored by the movement itself, what he calls “filmolinguistics.” Admitted to the French linguistics section of the CNRS in 1962, this young scholar was Christian Metz. This project, which would result in the publication in 1971 of one of Metz’s most compelling and difficult works, Language and Cinema, demonstrates that while forgotten by many others, Metz maintained a continuing interest in filmology throughout the 1960s. References to articles in the Revue de filmologie pepper the footnotes to his numerous essays in this decade; in addition, Metz repeatedly reaffirms the methodological centrality of Cohen-Séat’s distinction between filmic and cinematic facts. Yet more importantly, Metz’s frequent references to the movement, which often reveal both admiration and an internal struggle with its scientific aspirations, project a certain shared vision with filmology--that the “filmolinguistic” or cine-semiological enterprise is in many respects indebted to both criticism and history, yet remains epistemologically distinct from them. In this case, filmology and semiology intersect in another domain. Metz is searching for a new direction for the academic study of film, one that will bring it within the larger context of the human sciences as conceived by structuralism. Often considered to be the discursive founder of the structuralist enterprise in film, revisiting Metz’s earliest publications reveals a more complex and often surprising picture, and yet another kind of project. In a group of texts published between 1964 and 1972, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 194 Metz marks out a conflicted conceptual space within structuralism--between the aesthetic discourse and the emergent discourse of signification, between phenomenology and semiology, between semiology and film, and between sign and image--whose stakes are played out in the imagination and construction of theory. Indeed the early Metz takes on two projects in the early sixties whose scales are enormously ambitious. Having become associated with the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1963 under Barthes’ tutelage (and in 1966 elected a directeur d’études), Metz takes on one of the central obstacles to expanding linguistics into a general semiology of culture, that is, to show that the methods and concepts of structural linguistics and the study of speech or langue are applicable to non-spoken phenomena; in short photography and film. As is clear even in Barthes’s early essays on photography, the image is viewed here as both an object of fascination and an obstacle to a general science of signs, which can only demonstrate its universality if it can master the image in signification. The enunciative a priori or implied defining question of the aesthetic discourse was “In what ways can film be considered an art?” And in repeatedly returning to this question, debating it, worrying it, probing it from different angles and from a variety of conceptual frames, the discourse fractured and eroded the concept of the aesthetic itself in a way commensurate with the larger project of modernism in the arts. The enunciative a priori of the discourse of signification, raised by Barthes in “Rhetoric of the Image,” is “How does meaning get into the image?,” as if the image itself, in its analogical plenitude, is opaque to meaning.105 Semiology can only lay claim to founding a general science of signs if it can demonstrate that the image is surrounded by meaning, crossed with or shot through with signification, bathed in sense. However, and in a way analogous to the aesthetic discourse, semiology founders somewhat in its confrontations with the image; or, as Barthes’s encounters with the image makes clear from the beginning, from a semiological perspective there is something traumatic, anxious, or imponderable in the image that semiology felt compelled to master, and in many respects, fails to master. Barthes will finally embrace the idea of an 105 “Rhetoric of the Image” in Image/Music/Text (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1993) 32. Also see, in the same volume, “The Photographic Message” and “The Third Sense.” Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 195 unmasterable core of non-meaning in the image in his return to “phenomenology” in Camera Lucida. Therefore, one central concern of Metz’s earliest essays is to contribute to a general semiology of culture by working within the context of the EPHE in a specialized domain, that of cinema. Alternatively, out of this project unfolds another one, less remarked upon yet equally ambitious. More than Barthes, I think, Metz quickly became keenly aware of the difficulties, not of the image, but of renovating the concepts of structural linguistics to extend them to non-linguistic expressions. At the same time, if the semiological program was to include film, one also needed to take into account a historical discourse on cinema reaching as far back as the twenties to show how these writings were already approaching, if often in conceptually imprecise and non-systematic ways, the problem of film as discourse. After Guido Aristarco, Metz is one of the first important figures to place the aesthetic discourse in an historical frame, to consider it in all its syncretism and dispersion across continents, languages, and decades as a special genre of discourse, distinguishable from both history and criticism, and one that has a history seeking conceptual unity. Like Aristarco, Metz is constructing an archive (which will be recognized retrospectively as the first canon of classical film theory) but a directed one-selecting texts, identifying predecessors, locating where conceptual foundations have been laid. This project is not without its ironies and paradoxes. On one hand, Metz is entirely a product of his discursive context. In excavating and refashioning the aesthetic discourse in the early 1960s, he is guided ineluctably by a retrojecting framework that revisits and unavoidably rediscovers in the first fifty years of writing on film a preoccupation with language and signification commensurate with, if only incompletely and in a fragmentary way, the larger discourse of structuralism. On the other hand, through his cinephilism, his commitment to phenomenology, and his attachment to postwar French film culture, Metz is at odds with structuralism. The twinned project of contributing to a new cinesemiology, and to recovering and paying homage to a special literature on film, does not necessarily lead to building a general science of culture through linguistics. Metz desires to be rigorous, conceptually precise, and methodologically systematic, but he refrains Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 196 from making this into a desire for science or for philosophy--it is, rather, a desire for theory. Emerging out of a series of overlapping yet conflicting discursive formations-phenomenology, filmology, structuralism, classical film aesthetics, and cinephilism--in a series of important texts of the 1960s, Metz finds his way in theory, and in so doing, begins to construct an enunciative position or perspective that can finally be recognized as “theoretical.” Metz builds a map and a picture of the history of film theory (here it can finally be called as such) through the discursive formations of structuralism and semiology, and in so doing brings into sharp outline a series of discursive shifts moving along multiple trajectories: of institutional contexts (from the Sorbonne/Institut de Filmology to the EPHE and CECMAS); groups of objects (language, sign, system, text); the designation and deployment of concepts (langue/parole, signifier/signified, syntagm/paradigm, denotation/connotation), and positions of address, “structural man” or film “theorist.” Contrary to the usual conception of the early Metz as the founder of a certain discourse and of a method--cine-semiology and the structural analysis of film--Metz here becomes a fairly unique figure within the larger discourse of signification in its era of methodological passion. Metz’s particular conception of theory is directed by a kind of ethical searching at odds with the discursive context that produced him, one that questions a whole mode of existence (in structuralism, in film study, in theory) through the conceptual will to forge a new form of life in thought around the cinema. A closer look into his essays of the 1960s gradually uncovers the will to locate a position or perspective expressed in the form of a certain moral reasoning. An inheritor of the institutional and academic discourse of filmology, as well as the phenomenology of Bazin, and inhabiting discourses that are simultaneously cinephilic, philosophical, and ethical, in these essays Metz positions himself as the conciliator between several postwar discourses traversing film and the human sciences, as if to find a new place for film in the human sciences through theory. Metz’s construction of a place for theory--its positions of address, its points of intersection and conflict with other forms of discourse, its epistemological extensions and limits--unfolds on a sinuous path that moves forward by looping back on itself at frequent intervals in a recurrent process of revision and refashioning, moving in uneven lines across Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 197 several essays. Undoubtedly, the most fascinating and most complex account occurs in the first half of Metz’s first professional article, ““Le cinéma: langue ou langage?” published in 1964 in the issue of Communications devoted to “Semiological Research.”106 In short order, Metz takes up the problem of history and theory again in his review of the first volume of Jean Mitry’s Aesthetic and Psychology of Film, “Une étape dans la réflexion sur le cinéma” (“A Stage in Reflection on the Cinema”).107 The line continues in a 1967 review of Mitry’s second volume, “Problèmes actuels de théorie du cinéma” (“Current Problems in Cinema Theory”) before another phase of methodological reflection and revision occurs in parallel: first in the opening chapter of Language and Cinema, and then in the republication of the two essays on Mitry in Essais sur la signification au cinéma, II (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1972), which are grouped together with a new prologue in a section entitled, “On classical theories of cinema.” Among his many significant contributions, then, Metz was one of the first key figures to adopt a metatheoretical perspective in film study--a reflection on the components and conceptual standards of theory construction, as well as a historical view of the development of film theory. Metz is one of the first main figures after Aristarco to make present and perspicuous a new concept of theory by constructing theory as an object, examining its history, and testing its present and potential claims to generate knowledge. 106 The article was reprinted in Metz’s first collection of essays, Essais sur la signification du cinéma (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1968) 39-93. It appeared in translation as “Cinema: Language or Language System” in Film Language: a semiotics of the cinema [1974], trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 31-91. As I will discuss further on, the English title of the essay is misleading and the translation itself marred by many errors and infelicities. For this reason, I will refer to the essay with its French title. All citations from this essay are my own translations, with French page numbers from the Essais provided in italics. For a detailed overview of Metz publications and curriculum vita see, Christian Metz et la théorie du cinéma, special issue of iris (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1990) 299-318. 107 The first Mitry review essay was published in Critique 214 (March 1965) 227-245, and the second in Revue d’esthétique 20 (April-September 1967) 180-221. Dudley Andrew has recently stated that he has “always dated the advent of academic film studies at the moment when Metz leapfrogged over Mitry as he reviewed the latter’s Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma. . . .” See his “The Core and Flow of Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009) 896. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 198 That Metz moves, as if searching out stepping stones to cross an unruly stream, from a stage in reflection, to current problems of theory, and then to the assertion of an antecedent and historically locatable period of film theorizing is significant, as we shall soon see, and all the more so in that the canon of film theory so familiar to us today was still fragmentary, incomplete, imperfectly translated, and hardly known. Still, one finds throughout the sixties the emergence of a certain historical consciousness in the form of a desire to revisit, recollect, reorganize and systematize thought about the cinema, especially as represented in Kracauer and Mitry’s great books, preceded by Jay Leyda’s pioneering translations of Eisenstein’s Film Sense (1942) and Film Form (1949). Nonetheless, up until the 1970s a great number of key theoretical texts were unavailable in French, and indeed, in many other languages: Eisenstein and Pudovkin’s work appeared only in scattered fragments and excerpts, Vertov was hardly known, and key texts by Balázs were available only in German. The French genealogy scattered across the diverse texts of Canudo, Delluc, Dulac, Moussinac, Faure, Epstein, Gance, Clair, Cocteau, Feuillade, L’Herbier, or the Surrealists, was dispersed in often hard to find publications. The fiftieth anniversary of the invention of cinema inspired the publication of two important collections in 1946, Marcel Lapierre’s Anthologie du cinéma: retrospective par les textes de l’art muet qui devint parlant (Paris: La Nouvelle Édition) and Marcel L’Herbier’s Intelligence du Cinématographe (Paris: Éditions Corrêa), but valuable as they were these volumes were hardly more than a mélange of testimony by directors, actors, and inventors interspersed with selections from aesthetic writings, assembled under rubrics that revealed no special concept of “theory.” Still, in France as in Italy, postwar film culture did have a sense of a canon for the aesthetic discourse, as represented by Henri Agel’s little pedagogical volume for the Que sais-je? series, Esthétique du cinéma (Presses Universitaires de France, 1957), which refers to and closely follows Aristarco’s canonization of Balázs, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Arnheim, and Spottiswoode, though without reproducing any of their texts. The first collection of Eisenstein’s texts in French, Réflexions d’un cinéaste, appeared only in 1958. Throughout this period of recovery, collection, and anthologization an historical perception emerges of there being a body or corpus of film theory that is relatively Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 199 delimited and self-contained if only one could assemble all the texts in an orderly way. This desire to discover or construct a canon is fueled both by the rarity of sustained studies of film aesthetics in the classical period and by the cultural and academic marginality of film and film studies. Even in Metz’s case, this perception of rarity and marginality leads to a tendency to think of the history of film theory as a series of monuments: Balázs, Arnheim, Eisenstein, Kracauer, Bazin, Mitry, all major figures who could anchor a field or mark out its borders. (And one believed this territory could in principle be taken in from a single field of vision--even in the early seventies, the devoted student of cinema could still dream of reading every published work in film theory, in English or in French, as the books would hardly fill one shelf.) Metz’s expert command of German and English, and his institutional placement as an academic researcher in a field which as such did not yet exist, no doubt abets and fuels a drive to assemble, organize, and arrange, methodically and systematically, the available “research” on cinema, as if to reassure himself of a certain place in the history of thought about cinema, or even to show that this thought exists and has a history. No doubt he is also inspired by Mitry’s own drive to organize systematically a certain thought about cinema, to ratify it and to show that it has methodological unity and value. At the same time, it is not only the discourse of structure and signification that drives Metz’s interest in resolving what might be viewed as the conceptual oxymoron of linking film and language, for “Le cinéma: langue ou langage?” also appeared against the background of a wave of writing on the problem of “filmic grammar” and of a general interest in film as a rhetoric or a discourse. Metz’s retrojection, which finds from Balázs to filmology the unifying thread of language or signification in discourse on film, is therefore not unreasonable. As Metz noted on several occasions, both Cohen-Séat and Souriau were important precursors to the semiological project. In fact, a number of authors working in the context of filmology sought to treat the question of discourse in film with greater precision and rigor, though without recourse to or even awareness of the conceptual frameworks of linguistics or formalism. Cohen-Séat himself published an important study on “filmic discourse” that was expanded and republished as a new chapter in the second edition of the Essai, and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 200 whose conclusions anticipate Metz’s in interesting ways.108 With the exception of Roland Barthes, whose studies of "Le problème de la signification du cinéma" and “Les unités traumatiques au cinéma” appeared in the Revue internationale de filmologie 32-33 and 34 respectively (1960), semiological concepts were notably absent in the journal. The pursuit of a strictly linguistic analysis appeared unsound to many of the principle voices of the filmology movement, and indeed the semiological discourse was still suspiciously foreign, in both the figurative and literal sense, to many French academics. There was a definitive fracture between filmology and semiology, then, but this was a fault-line shifting in the common soil of method. And in spite of filmology’s privileging of the cinematic over the filmic fact, Christian Metz noted retrospectively that the distinction was instrumental for setting the conditions that made a semiology of film possible. Francesco Casetti has also explained in detail the breadth of interest in this 108 “Le discours filmique,” Revue internationale de filmologie 5 (1949): 37-48. Cohen-Séat recognized early on the difficulty of placing the problem of discourse in the established sections of the Institute for Filmology. Is it a purely formal problem to be examined under Group II, Technical Studies, he wonders, or a psychological problem for Group I, or a comparative problem for Group IV, wherein speech or verbal discourse would be compared and contrasted to filmic discourse? Almost as if he were anticipating Metz’s early work fifteen years in advance, Cohen-Séat suggests that if such a comparative project were to take place, in order to avoid “a game of unconscious analogies,” one would need to consider it “with all the due seriousness, in order to adapt to its method, the enormous labor, the prodigious richness of detail and subtlety accumulated by linguistics” (38; my trans.). Equally striking, Cohen-Séat complains of the imprecision with which such questions are usually addressed. Thus, Cohen-Séat’s conclusions broadly anticipate Metz’s initial work toward a semiology of film. Though film cannot be considered a language in the strict sense, he argues, this does not mean it cannot be treated as a discourse. Once this is understood, research can address seriously the problem of defining filmic signs, as well as questions of order and transition (syntagms and marks of punctuation). And finally, in a phrase that could have been lifted from Metz, Cohen-Séat concludes that “The cinema is an art precisely because it is not a language, and there even where it resists language. In effect, nothing prevents us from asserting that neither film nor art abide being treated to the blows of syntax or grammatical tools [que ni le film, ni l’art, ne supportent d’être traités à coups de syntaxe et d’outils grammaticaux]” (45). Edward Lowry also notes how a number of essays collected in Souriau’s anthology, L’Univers filmique, anticipated a range of questions and concepts that would soon arise in film semiology. See his The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985) 92-97. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 201 period in questions of “film language” or “grammars of film” in a wide range of studies in English and Italian, as well as French. 109 Structuralism and semiology were not the only contexts for the discourse of signification, but belonged to or emerged in parallel with a broader enunciative modality that was prepared for by a more general, and often inexact, interest in film grammar or rhetoric. Here again, Russian Formalism was in the avant-garde of the discourse of signification. As Metz would correctly point out, both Eikhenbaum and Eisenstein offered imaginative and innovative accounts of the filmic sign. Indeed, in his 1964 essay, Metz is responding to this discourse, both exploring and defending semiology as a “scientific” framework for the study of filmic signification. But again, in the immediate post-war period the idea that the image could function as a sign or symbol was discursively widespread. 17. An object, a method, a domain [The] cinema is not a unified object; it is also by this measure that the semiological enterprise today, somewhat outrageously, targets as its objective the global study of cinematographic facts. --Christian Metz, Language and Cinema Discourse, then, is in the air at the same time as the first canons of aesthetic writing on film are being collected and organized. At the same time, it is not clear that Metz viewed the initial phase of his work as contributing to a (semiological) theory of film, so much as appealing to film as a problem in the transition from linguistics to a general science of signs. Metz will thus regroup and reconfigure the canon of film theory as constituted by Aristarco and others to include film semiology as a necessary stage toward developing a “scientific” problem and attendant vocabulary, in which film is only a part. To better understand Metz’s construction of theory, along with the epistemological stakes and perspectives invested in that term, it may be best to begin at the point where Metz concludes the first phase of his thinking: the Introduction to his magisterial thèse 109 See especially Chapter Four, “Cinema and Language” in Casetti’s Theories of Cinema, 1945-1995 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999) 54-73. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 202 d’État, Language and Cinema. Nearly ten years after filing his proposal to study “filmolinguistics,” the connection to filmology had not been forgotten. In hindsight it is clear that Metz conceived both "Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" and Language and Cinema as functioning in ways analogous to Cohen-Séat’s Essai, that is, as setting out a methodological foundation as a kind of conceptual grid: imposing conceptual order, reducing the problem to a manageable scale, defining and aiming at certain problems while excluding others. Language and Cinema is a sort of reconception and rewriting of the Essai but from the standpoint of the discourse of signification, which in 1971 has fully bloomed, meaning also, that is has begun to fade. Four years later, with the publication of yet another deeply influential methodological statement in Communications, “The Imaginary Signifier,” Metz would help found a new discourse, that of the subject and ideology. In a strong sense, the central question of the Introduction to Language and Cinema is how to bring theory to cinema? Or in other words, and in a way very similar to Eikhenbaum’s concern with method, how to filter, reduce, or circumscribe the object of investigation to make it the proper object of a theory? The cinema in its largest possible conception, Metz argues, is a “total social fact” in Marcel Mauss’ sense. As a multidimensional whole it does not lend itself to a unified and rigorous examination, but rather, only to “a heteroclite mass of remarks implicating multiple and various points of view.”110 As a possible object of theory, this is another way in which “cinema” is analogous to “language,” for language in its largest sense also confronted Saussure as a global, variegate, and multidimensional social whole whose scale and complexity escaped any theoretical purchase. A theory, then, requires a principle of pertinence, a sort of filter or grid that sets the conceptual perimeters of a theoretical object and establishes the lines of latitude and longitude guiding its systematic study. The cinema as such, like language as such, is too vast to be a possible object of knowledge. Saussure 110 Language and Cinema, trans. Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1974) 9, 5; translation modified. Originally published as Langage et cinéma (Paris: Larousse, 1971). Page numbers in the French original will be given in italics wherever I have modified the translation. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 203 laid the foundations for a theory of signs--semiology--in defining langue as a system of signification underlying language more generally, and therein lays a possible opening into film theory. In examining the system of signification, semiology refinds language in another sense, and finds other senses in language. A theory of film, rather than a theory of cinema, will have to perform a similar reduction, isolating only those components of the filmic fact that are discursive or textual. Metz continues by observing that although narrative film began to emerge about the same time as Saussure was giving his course on general linguistics, theory was a long time coming to film, or at least the components of a theory wherein one could clearly establish criteria for defining filmic and cinematographic facts. (And these are social facts; just as filmology draws support from Durkheim, Metz leans on the terminology of Mauss.) That the history of film theory has unfolded, higgledy-piggledy, in the accumulation of heteroclite and syncretic observations and texts is a result of its relative youth as an art form and lack of institutional setting. The history of cinema has not wanted for “theorists,” Metz observes, though it has, until recently, lacked the constituents of a theory. To make film a possible object of knowledge means reducing the scale of investigation, plotting out recognizable property lines, flattening and shaping the landscape, and giving it an architectural design. In an astonishing (if unconscious) paraphrasing of Souriau, Metz rewrites the profile of the (classical) “film theorist.”111 In the early decades of writing on the cinema, Metz observes, “What one most often called a ‘cinema theorist’ was a sort of one-man-band [l’homme orchestre] who ideally held an encyclopedic knowledge and a quasi-universal methodological formation” (Langage and Cinema 10, 5). One needed to be a historian, Metz continues, with complete knowledge of world film production, as well as an economist who could understand the industrial circumstances of production. To define film as art one also needed to be an aesthetician, and if one wished to comprehend film as a meaningful discourse, one was also a semiologist. Finally, to the extent that one wanted to excavate in the content of particular films’ various 111 See, for example, the opening paragraphs of Souriau’s “Nature et limite des contributions positives de l’Esthétique à la Filmologie,” Revue internationale de filmologie 1 (July-August 1947): 47. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 204 psychological, psychoanalytic, social, political, or ideological facts, “nothing less than a total anthropological knowledge was virtually required” (10, 6). In short, the classical era risked producing little more than “a heteroclite mass of remarks implicating multiple and various points of view.” What is surprising, nonetheless, is the conceptual richness and precision of early contributions to understanding film (here Metz draws clearly his canon) in the texts of Balázs, Arnheim, or Laffay, in the writings of Eisenstein and the Russian Formalists, or later, Edgar Morin and Cohen-Séat where, as Metz notes, the choice of principles of pertinence is already more self-consciously made. For Metz, these names represent phases, stations, or stages on the way to theory, or a theory yet to come. The classical period is thus not a total but only a partial eclipse--light peers through, and it is waxing. If the space opened between Aristarco in 1951 to Metz in 1964 defines a period in which film theory will gradually achieve (historical) consciousness of itself, in the period between 1964 and 1971 film theory not only acquires a name, it also takes on a form and acquires a method and epistemology--it becomes a genre of discourse. (And this is also true in the broader domain of the human sciences.) 1964 is not only the date of publication of Metz’s seminal and foundational essay, “Le cinéma: langue ou langage?” It also falls between the publication of Jean Mitry’s two volumes of Aesthetic and Psychology of Cinema (1963 and 1965). No doubt, a figure like Mitry embodies more than any other the image of a homme orchestre that Metz sketches on the first page of Language and Cinema. Metz’s deep appreciation of Mitry’s arguments and his accomplishments--fully set out in his two critical reviews on Mitry in 1965 and 1967 respectively, and his frequent citations of Mitry’s magisterial if flawed work--are sincere and his praise fulsome. Nonetheless this praise is attenuated by the curious place reserved for Mitry in Metz’s genealogy of theory. Metz praises Mitry’s books as the synthesis and the outcome of an entire era of “reflection on film”; reflection, however, and not theory. For as Metz will soon make clear, from the standpoint of a possible film semiology Mitry’s work is the apogee, but also the denouement and conclusion, of a certain way of thinking about film. The question before Metz here is “theory”: what counts as a theory of film, what are its conceptual components and its characteristic Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 205 activities, and who can lay claim to being a subject of theory, its author or enunciator? In posing these questions in a series of works between 1964 and 1971, and sketching out historical markers and directions, in fact, in raising theory’s history as a theoretical question, Metz not only invents film theory but also becomes the first exponent of what I have called the metatheoretical attitude. In these seven short years, for film studies at least, Metz becomes “discursive” in Foucault’s sense. Not just the author of film theories but the focal point of a new system of address, which emits from a new institutional context with its own rhetorical style and sense of place in history, setting out a new conceptual framework defined by precise principles of pertinence and implicit criteria of inclusion and exclusion for the practice of theory. In looking back retrospectively at the first phase of general reflection on film, Metz observes that, in fact, there are two kinds of “theories” proposed. (The quotation marks are Metz’s.) On one hand, in everyday language, the word “theoretician” still “frequently designates an author whose writings are above all normative, and whose principle aim is to exert influence on films to come, indeed, to prescribe a preferential choice of subject for these films” (Language and Cinema 11, 6). This idea of a normative or prescriptive perspective chimes well with Noël Carroll’s argument that classical theories are often marked by an injunctive component. But another path has been forged through the aesthetic discourse, above all by the authors that occupy Metz’s preferred canon. These are writers who “have devoted all or an important part of their cinematographic efforts to analyzing films such as they exist, and who appear as so many precursors of a description of film, in the sense given this work in the human sciences and notably in linguistics” (Language and Cinema 11, 6). These authors are precursors, then, of a descriptive rather than prescriptive form of analysis that attends to films as they are rather than some possible future ideal film, yet to be created. There are two sides or dimensions of this pre-theoretical reflection then: “one on the side of the work to come, thought in terms of influence, which does not hesitate to advise or prescribe, which wants to respond directly to the working problems of an ‘artist creator’, and which only has sense in this perspective, and one on the side of filmic discourses already given, and which seeks to analyze them as facts” (11, 7). An analogous Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 206 situation exists in aesthetics, Metz suggests. But the significant point here is Metz’s preference for a descriptive theory of cinema, whose main outlines are prefigured, though in a scattered and disunified way, in the most important authors of the discourse of aesthetics. These writers, however, lacked principles of pertinence that could ground and unify their observations about the state of film language. As such, they could follow only furrows they had already plowed, circling endlessly back to the aesthetic a prioris guiding their thought. The main outlines of Metz’s approach should already be clear, for what he seeks in theory is something close to Eikhenbaum’s “method.” A film theory is descriptive, it functions through the immanent analysis of existing works, and it requires principles of pertinence (what Eikhenbaum called principles of specificity) to establish clearly the facts to be investigated and to include some types of observation while excluding others. What counts, then, as a principle of pertinence? For Metz, the founding principle of a possible film theory was established by Cohen-Séat in his 1946 Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma--that of the distinction of filmic from cinematographic facts--which conceptually characterizes “film,” in Metz’s terms, as a “localizable signifying discourse, in contrast to the cinema which, thus defined, constitutes a more vast ‘complex’ at the heart of which, nevertheless, three aspects predominate forcefully: the technological, the economic, and the sociological” (Language and Cinema 12, 7). To localize signifying discourses already places film theory on the side of the filmic fact, and a descriptive analysis of the filmic fact is best served by the concepts and methods of semiology: “Semiology,” Metz observes, “whether of film or of something else, is the study of discourses and texts” (13, 7-8). Or further: “It will suffice to acknowledge that we will call ‘film,’ apart from further specification, [is] the film as a signifying discourse (text), of further, as a language-object: Cohen-Séat’s filmic fact” (13, 8). Semiology will have little to offer to technological or economic research on cinematographic facts, though accounts of film language are somewhat closer to sociology. And perhaps, as filmology wanted, the study of cinematographic facts will be unified on a larger scale by their own principles of methodological pertinence, and so produce their own theories. In any case, Metz is laying the groundwork here, after Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 207 Cohen-Séat, for producing a theory of film in contrast to a theory of cinema, and this theory will be formal and semiological. Metz clearly signals his debts to filmology in these passages. In particular, Étienne Souriau is singled out as a theoretical predecessor in laying the groundwork for another principle of pertinence for the discourse of signification: the designation and circumscription of “filmophanic” experience as the focus of analysis, or the film as perceived by its spectators in the time of actual projection.112 “Let us say, then,” writes Metz, “that it is the ‘filmophanic’ film, and it alone, that we will call ‘film’” (Language and Cinema 13, 8). However, film in this sense is also a multidimensional phenomena comprised of a variety of social, psychological, psychoanalytic, and aesthetic facts, including the physiology and psychology of motion perception, filmic memory and comprehension, the production of an impression of reality, social analysis of content, or the study of iconography, the history of style, and the morphology of filmic forms. To the extent that the object of semiology is to study film considered as or in relation to language, one might think that the study of the filmic fact should be further subdivided along the broad lines of psychology, sociology, aesthetics, and linguistics. Semiology would only need to concern itself, then, with a theory of filmic discourse. However, Metz is careful to note that to understand film as a meaningful discourse means considering the entire film, or the multidimensional aspects of language in relation to film whether aesthetic, psychological, or sociological. Just as linguistics maps only with some difficulty the interface between phonology and phonetics--the sonic material of language and the organization of acoustical sense--one cannot locate film as a discourse without taking into account the complex organization of, in Louis Hjelmslev’s terminology, its matters of expression: not only moving photographic images, but also sounds, music, speech, and graphic inscriptions. By the same token, psychological and cognitive mechanisms of perception and cognition cannot be strictly separated from the study of discourse and signification. And finally, again adapting Hjelmslev’s concepts, Metz relates that 112 See "La structure de l'univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie," Revue internationale de filmologie, 2.7/8 (1951) 236; revised and reprinted in L’univers filmique, ed. Étienne Souriau (Paris: Flammarion, 1953) 8. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 208 structural analysis cannot neglect the form of content of different films--their internal organization of sense along semantic or even thematic lines. As an object of theory filmic discourse is not so clearly definable--the formal object stands out in a design whose main lines are distinct yet also permeable and slightly unstable, and this no less true in the context of linguistics. Here Metz summarizes in one paragraph the main argument of the second half of “Cinéma: langue our language?” While film is no doubt of a different order than speech [langue], as an aesthetic means of expression, and a meaningful one, it has “quasi-consubstantial relations” with the system of language (16, 11). “Cinematographic codes exist,” Metz concludes, “but without the consistency and stability of natural languages; the filmmaker and the speaker are confronted with already constituted forms, anterior to their proper activities, but not to the same degree or in the same way. Here, therefore, semiological analysis is tightly associated with the ‘aesthetic’ of film. These were only three examples, the principle but certainly not the only ones. All three suggest the same conclusion: because the film (contrary to the cinema) constitutes a delimitable space, an object devoted in its various scales to signification, a closed discourse can only be considered ‘as a language’ in its entirety, or not at all” (17, 11). The problem that repeatedly arises in the opening pages of Language and Cinema describes a particular kind of friction between object and method. The domain of filmic facts also describes a vast and multidimensional space that is not so easily contained or reduced, and if semiology is to stake an epistemological claim here, it must be through method, which can lay out what is specific to the practice of semiology and what it shares with other, related disciplines. “From object to method, the relation is always bilateral,” writes Metz. “What one calls a domain of research is a zone whose principle of determination, in the last analysis, always appears as an indiscernible mixture of ‘object’ and ‘method’” (Language and Cinema 17, 11). Thus the problem of method must continually confront the fact “that the cinema is not a unified object; it is also by this measure that the semiological enterprise today, somewhat outrageously, targets as its objective the global study of cinematographic facts” [ne saurait sans quelque démesure se fixer comme but l’étude totale du fait cinématographique]” (18, 12). At the same time, method must know how to build good fences to make good neighbors. Whether Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 209 interested in the filmic fact or not, the various research domains of psychology, sociology, aesthetic, and even semiology are imperfectly distinct and perpetually embarrassed at their frontiers. Alternatively, the study of closed texts, such as a narrative film, “represents par excellence the place where the reciprocal implication of disciplines are maximally inextricable. A closed text--story, myth, play, novel, etc.--is always, and always at the same time, a total cultural object and a kind of restricted object with respect to the general production of a society. For one reason or another, it lays out a kind of space where, more than any other, the different ‘human sciences’ run alongside one another, and do so closely because on a restricted surface” (18, 12). Within this space, film can become a variety of objects, depending upon the disciplinary perspective that predominates; it is according to method, then, that it possibly becomes one of a variety of objects, say, a discursive one. On one hand, it is normal that semiology would draw support from the data (but not the methods) produced by neighboring disciplines in the human sciences; on the other, the structural analysis of film must stake a claim to its proper domain--the film as a “total signifying-object” (Language and Cinema 19). Generally speaking, the domain of semiology is the critical study of the forms and logics of cultural signification, often by extending the concepts and methods of linguistics through the annexation of a variety of cultural objects, such as film. And within the domain of semiology, one then construes the filmic fact in terms of the discursive structure of film. To this extent one can--and ought to--assign to the semiology of film the goal of the global study of filmic discourse considered as an integrally signifying locale (= form and substance of content, form and substance of expression). On the level of longterm objectives (which one must have) this is the only definition that appears to us to be possible for this emerging discipline. As such it will no longer be a question of “semiology” in the somewhat provisional and restricted sense this term has today (= outskirts of linguistics), but rather of the structural analysis of film or films (with linguistic inspiration maintaining an important role in this enlarged perspective) . . . . Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 210 This book would never have been undertaken without the idea that only a so-called semiological inspiration is capable of eventually providing the framework for a coherent and unified knowledge of the filmic object. On the day when this goal is in view of being achieved, the semiology of film will only need to preserve its name: it will then really be (or more really be) what it is today programmatically: a theory of the filmic fact, and not a particularly linguisticallyinspired approach, even if we must pass through one to attain the other. (19-20, 13). A theory of the filmic fact. The whole first chapter has led to this point where a theory can follow from a method, and at the same time, “Methods are things that cannot be interchanged (and which can not be ‘blended’ without great danger of giving birth to monsters), but facts and knowledges [les données et les connaissances], bits of acquired experience, can and must circulate freely. Those who do not know the cinema will never make from it a semiology” (20, 13). The first epoch of general reflection on film has now come to an end. One can no longer be satisfied with a variety of heteroclite observations but must clearly choose a principle of pertinence; in other words, theory must rally around a method, which can unify synthetically from a singular perspective the data and knowledge gathered within its domain. What was previously called “film theory” included observations concerning filmic and cinematographic facts, but often without differentiating them. Though often illuminating, these approaches were eclectic and syncretic, drawing on a variety of methods without applying any one in a consistent or even self-conscious way. The discourse of aesthetics was not yet a theory of film. The discourse of structure and signification signals another mutation in this history, then, as the opening of a new phase that Francesco Casetti has quite rightly characterized as “methodological.” In this transitional moment, Metz argues that methodological pluralism is a necessary though nonetheless provisional exigency. One sees here both a defense of filmology, its persistence as a fellow traveler supporting the discourse of signification in film, as well as the flowering of a “theory of the filmic fact,” derived from the methods of a linguistically informed semiology. Most striking throughout this chapter is Metz’s implication that Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 211 semiology (linguistics?) is somehow provisional or less stable than sister disciplines in the human sciences, and that theory has not yet arrived here in the form of a singular and unifying method. A striking commonality, then, between the discourses of aesthetics and signification, despite all the characteristics and criteria that divide them, is the sense that theory is yet to come, always ahead of us as a third possibility, envisageable but so far unattained. 18. A care for the claims of theory Those who know Metz from the three perspectives of writer, teacher, and friend are always struck by this paradox, which is only apparent: of a radical demand for precision and clarity, yet born from a free tone, like a dreamer, and I would almost say, as if intoxicated. (Didn’t Baudelaire turn H. into the source of an unheard of precision?) There reigns a furious exactitude. --Roland Barthes, “To Learn and to Teach” Metz’s concern with method in the Introduction to Language and Cinema is already on full display in "Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" Throughout the sixties, it is fascinating how Metz seems so concerned with mapping out and clarifying the variety of epistemological frameworks within which film study takes place, as if in his first published essay he needs to create a new mode of existence in film and in theory. The essay is both manifesto and methodological statement, dividing and ascribing tasks, probing and defining concepts, and laying out positions of address. More importantly, it wants to explore the conditions of possibility wherein a synthetic and unified theory of film might be constructed, and as such it is a both a prelude and pendant to the Introduction to Language and Cinema. That such a global and unified approach to film might be possible is the lesson Metz learns from Mitry’s Aesthetic, and that a global and unified approach to the problem of signification as such is possible is the very air Metz breathes throughout the sixties. This idea directs, after all, the project for semiological research outlined in Communications 4 with all its methodological passion. What remains to be understood is the place of a possible film theory in this discursive universe--now already somewhat Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 212 ahead of what Metz will characterize as Mitry’s summing up and closing off of classical film theory, but also somewhat behind in making its own positive contributions to a general semiology. Theory as such is yet to arrive in academic film study. The title of the essay is significant: can the sense of film be studied from within the concepts and methods of linguistics, whose object is langue, or the virtual system of natural languages? Or if film is a language (how could it not be since it conveys meaning?) what kind of language is it, or but what rights do we refer to it as a language? The essay aims not only at rendering more precisely an object of study, but also at creating and evaluating a perspective from which that object can be known, and in many respects, valued. Already, this is a somewhat strange position to occupy within the context of a “scientific” structuralism. Be that as it may, if theory is a problem searching for an explanation, Metz here redraws a fairly cloudy picture in sharp outline. In so doing, he shifts the discursive landscape and remaps the entire territory of the aesthetic discourse onto the discourse of signification. Where before the persistent problem was “Is film an art, or has it transformed the concept of art?,” now the problem is: “How do images convey meaning, or in what ways can images be considered as signs?” This question lies at the heart of the semiological enterprise and is the key to its aspirations to become a general science. If linguistics is only a subdomain of a more general semiology, then the conceptual domain of speech, and scientific foundation of linguistics, must be extendible to images, and especially, moving images. This turning of the question shifts all the centers of gravity of the earlier discourse; it displaces elements in their orbits and creates new sources of illumination, lighting up new features of the landscape and throwing shadows over previously prominent landmarks. With what would soon be recognized as Metz’s characteristic precision and attention to detail, the very long prologue to the essay works back through the history of film theory as it was known at the time, but with a specific agenda in mind. The prologue focalizes a persistent question of earlier writings on film, but one running in the background, as it were, and brings it forward. Again, one outcome of this move is to recast retroactively this discourse as “film theory,” indeed to see in a variety of otherwise eclectic accounts the problem of language and signification in film, and to see them as false starts or incomplete movements waiting Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 213 for the proper general concepts and methods to place them in a framework where they can be articulated and resolved, moving forward in a genuinely dialectical fashion. Here key differences become apparent. More often than not, the aesthetic discourse proceeds through an immanent analysis. It begins with the idea that filmic expression has a specific identity anchored in materials, processes, or automatisms that belong only to film. Semiology extends these medium specificity arguments for a certain time, only finally to renounce them in the second semiology, whose turning point is Metz’s Language and Cinema. However, Metz’s earlier essay produces another, more violent mutation of perspective, and one that accounted for the resistance to semiology by more aesthetically inclined thinkers. In a very real sense, film as such was no longer the object of theory (and in Language and Cinema that object will entirely disappear into a conceptual, virtual space). Rather, the discourse of signification begins from a general yet precise methodological perspective--that of the “science of signs”--of which film or photography will only be a part of the universe of cultural signification. In the context of the EPHE, this science was forged in the commitment to linguistics and marked by Saussure’s unaccomplished dream of creating a general theory of signs. In this respect, (semiological) film theory was initially considered as only one component or sub-domain of a general account of signs. However, if photography or film were of special interest to both Barthes and Metz in the early sixties, this is because they posed a special, and in many respects intractable problem for a general and inclusive theory of signs, at least from a Saussurean perspective. As I have remarked in several contexts, the aesthetic discourse inherited from the philosophy of art a system of categories that divided and ranked art forms according to criteria of spatial or temporal expression. Among the many disorienting features of film was to present itself as an uncanny hybrid of space and time, thus producing the need for new concepts and categories, and in some cases, unsettling and remapping the idea of the aesthetic itself. Being forged in the history of linguistics (running parallel in a curious coincidence with the history of film), semiology confronted in film another intractable division, that of speech and image. Through its commutation tests and concepts of double articulation, syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, denotation and connotation, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 214 messages and codes, semiology was born in a scientific context confident that its analysis of speech or natural languages was extendible into anthropological and literary structures of expression. The open question in the heroic era of structuralism was whether these concepts and categories would prove pertinent or even applicable to more general forms of expression, especially analogical and pictorial images. Or even, and this is the question that Metz’s essay both wants to answer and finds nearly impossible to answer, is the very notion of “film language,” so prominent among the Soviet theorists and in the fad for grammars of film in the 1950s, a legitimate formulation, or is it in fact an oxymoron? If the image cannot be considered a sign, and if narrative film cannot be analyzed as a language or aesthetic discourse, then the scientific project of a general semiology, a complete theoretical account of signifying phenomena, was an impossible fantasy. This project preoccupies Metz throughout the sixties, bringing him into conflict and debate with Umberto Eco and Pier Paolo Pasolini. It also inaugurates the discursive genre of film theory within the context of the larger episteme laid in place by the more general history of structuralism. Metz’s essay is thus the launching pad for a new sense of theory, marked by the adoption of a vast new range of concepts, a shift in rhetoric and positions of address, and new institutional contexts. Film becomes an academic enterprise, subject to scholarly debate in university seminars and colloquia by trained researchers, in ways that presuppose a common methodological background or framework, even if that framework is open to revision. But here there is another important point to emphasize. Before the discourse of signification there is no “film theory”; there are only aesthetic writings on film. Aristarco’s rhetorical move is ratified thirteen years later by the discourse of signification; or rather, by the early sixties, the invention of theory as a discourse in the context of structuralism has fully and invisibly accomplished a retrojection, both carving out and bridging over an epistemic breach, wherein theory enters the ordinary language of academic discourse as if it had been always there, as if, from the time of Canudo’s earliest essays, we were and had always been “theorists.” Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 215 We find ourselves again beginning with an ending. The conclusion to "Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" comes round again to the opening to underscore the stakes of Metz’s arguments. (It also anticipates in interesting ways the Introduction to Language and Cinema.) It is certainly the case that the essay remains a foundational text, laying out the elements for a semiology of cinema, performing for film studies the work that Barthes’s “Elements of Semiology” performed for the study of literature and of culture in general. Metz is concerned not only with working through and critiquing metaphorical uses of the concept of language in relation to film form and narration, but also with making more conceptually precise how one may speak of filmic meaning within the conceptual vocabulary of linguistics and semiology, and finally, with how film both challenges and enlarges the prospects for achieving a general semiology of culture. These accomplishments would have been enough to assure Metz a place in the history of modern film theory, and this with his first professional academic essay at the age of 33. But fully half of the text is devoted to another question, and one not often discussed: the specificity of theory as a concept. Just as Metz is clearing the ground and making more precise how and under what conditions the concept of language can be applied to the study of meaning in film, he is also concerned with mapping precisely appropriate uses of the term “theory.” Here Metz is equally convinced that there is a literature or language of theory, and that not all writings on film are theoretical; thus, his implicit desire to establish the parameters of theory as a discursive genre. Recall that, with the exception of Aristarco, the term as such has up till now, 1964, been deployed only infrequently, irregularly, and inconsistently; no one embraces it, or if they do, they equivocate even in the larger context of structuralism. Through the discourse of signification, Metz draws the contours of the concept, gives it form, shape, and appearance through a nominative process. Hereafter, vernacular uses of the term will become less habitual as theory comes to denominate a specific kind of practice and a more or less well defined genre of academic discourse. Metz concludes his essay then in asserting that up until 1964 there have been four ways of approaching film study: film criticism, cinema history, filmology, and “theories of cinema.” (The scare quotes are again Metz’s.) While the history and criticism of film must Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 216 certainly contribute to a complete understanding of the cinematographic institution, they are not the central focus of Metz’s interest. Nevertheless, what Metz calls the “theory of cinema” is less a present discourse than a historical one (if one is past, another new one must be emerging), whose great exponents were Eisenstein, Balázs, and Bazin. Metz characterizes this approach as “a fundamental reflection (on the cinema or on film, depending on the case) whose originality, interest, significance and, in sum, whose very definition is tied to the fact that it was also made from within the world of cinema: ‘theorists’ were either cineasts, enthusiastic amateurs, or critics . . . .” 113 In contrast, filmology approached the cinema from the outside, carrying out research on cinematographic facts through the domains of psychology, psychiatry, aesthetics, sociology, and biology, whose fundamental figures are Gilbert Cohen-Séat and Edgar Morin. No doubt, many of the concerns of film theory and filmology are complementary as represented by what Metz calls the border cases of Rudolf Arnheim, Jean Epstein, and Albert Laffay. Both approaches are indispensable to the territory of activities that Metz wishes to mark out, a synthesis no doubt possible since it is nearly accomplished in the first volume of Jean Mitry’s Aesthetic and Psychology of Cinema. But there is something missing in this story. Despite the variety and repetitiveness of the appeals to the idea of language in theoretical writing on film, and given the fact that no less a figure that CohenSéat underlined the importance of the study of the filmic fact as discourse, there are have been few points of contact between linguistics or semiology and the study of film. That linguistics has ignored film is not unreasonable. But here Metz has a more daring move in mind. The time has come to bring together in a synthetic way the work of the principle theoreticians of film, filmological research, and the vocabulary and methods of linguistics as a way of finally realizing “in the domain of cinema the great Saussurian project of a study of the mechanisms through which individuals transmit human significations in human societies. The master of Geneva did not live long enough to witness the 113 "Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" in Essais sur la signification au cinéma (Paris, Klincksieck, 1968) 90, 92. Trans. Michael Taylor as Film Language: a semiotics of the cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). I remind the reader that all English translations are my own, and that corresponding page numbers from the original French version are given in italics. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 217 importance that cinema would have for our world. No one contests this importance. We have to make a semiology of cinema [Il faut faire la sémiologie du cinéma]” (91, 93). Curiously, the specificity of the study of film would seem to disappear in the accomplishment of a general semiology; at the same time, the project of semiology cannot move forward without a passage through the problem of how meaning is transmitted through images. This is a thorny problem that will require some tricky conceptual gymnastics in the essay. We will eventually find our way back to them. But for now let’s return to the idea that Metz is trying to survey a vast landscape, in both film study and linguistics, to lay out the perimeters of a new and more contained conceptual space. For the moment, he is less certain of what it is than what it is not. It borders on history and criticism and draws support from them, but at the same time it is spatially distinct from them. It appears to be temporally distinct from “film theory” as a historical discourse; at the same time, coming from outside the cinematographic world, filmology is also not “film theory.” What is, in fact, the discursive position that Metz is trying to construct for himself and for the academic study of film? This question functions as a sort of enunciative a priori structuring the conceptual and rhetorical space that links "Le cinéma: langue ou langage?," “On the classical theory of film,” and the Introduction to Language and Cinema into a common discursive network. In each iteration of the question, in pursuing a drive towards theory Metz recurrently finds himself equally confronting the idea that film theory does not yet exist; rather, we find ourselves in a middle period where at best we are only on the way to theory, and that in most respects what will be finally accomplished is not a “film theory” but rather an incorporation or subsumption of the filmic fact into the general domain of a semiology of culture. This untimeliness of theory as a conceptual and rhetorical position--always to come and always past, never fully present as an epistemological perspective--is on full display in Metz’s writings on Mitry. The interest of these essays lies primarily neither in Metz’s clear and useful account of Mitry’s books, nor in his criticisms of certain of Mitry’s concepts, but rather in Metz’s attentiveness, striking in its perspicuity, to a certain concept of theory. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 218 Through Metz, film theory achieves a certain presence, stature, or standing. There is confidence here that film theory has a structure and a history, that it develops and evolves according to a definable arc, and that it seeks a form, which it has not yet attained. For Metz, Mitry’s books are thus a stage or stepping stone in this progressive arc of film theory. They have an intermediate status--summing up and concluding one phase and opening out to another--and an uncertain temporality. They have deep roots in the past, and thus belong conceptually in most respects to classical film theory, yet in their drive towards building a global and synthetic account of meaning and the moving image, Mitry’s work anticipates a theory yet to come. (It is significant that Mitry produces an “aesthetic”; Metz calls this work a “theory.”) Thirteen years after Aristarco’s pioneering book, film theory gels, thickens, and begins to appear in clear outline as the possibility of a systematic and unifying conceptual framework for the study of cinema. In “On the classical theory of cinema,” Metz also outlines a historiography of theory: that theory is a way of thinking about film that has a history, that it has had a “classic” phase, which is coming to a close in Mitry’s work, a future that can contribute to a global account of the social life of signs, and a present though intermediate phase, which is laying the conceptual foundation for a possible general semiology of the cinema, though in a fragmentary and piecemeal fashion. (Though Metz himself does not say so, this vision of theory does not arise actually from the history and discursive structure of aesthetic writing on film, but rather from a larger discursive territory--that of the history of structuralism, already anticipated in my account of Eikhenbaum and Russian Formalism.) Metz’s 1971 presentation of the two texts on Mitry, contemporaneous with the writing and publication of Language and Cinema, is striking in this respect. In a few short paragraphs, Metz takes pains to lay down definitive historical markers, so many stages in the theory of film marked by discursive fissures and breaks that overlap in uneven strata. The first section of Metz’s 1972 collection--on the classical theory of cinema, and in particular, the works of Jean Mitry--is meant to give an account of how problems of theory were posed in the years of publication of Mitry’s two volumes, 1963 and 1966. Metz wants to put into perspective the “classical” period of film theory (the parentheses are his own, a doubt or hesitation concerning the temporality and conceptual cohesion of such a concept), of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 219 which Mitry’s books are at once the apogee and closing gesture, and from which they draw their conceptual and historical significance. The books thus define a precise historical segment in the stations of theory: “It was before the theoretical renewal of 1968-69; just before and in another sense, well before. It was well after the great theoretical era of silent film. It was just after the Bazinian wave. As for filmology, one no longer spoke of it. A hollow period [période creuse]. . . .: there was not enough interest in theory to know who was already part of it, and who was then passing into a vast forgetting.”114 The lack of interest in Mitry’s important books, Metz argues, is caused by their uncertain historical position--they bear witness to the importance of a past tradition that had reached its point of culmination, and having thus exhausted itself, had also outlived its audience. Metz puts the “classical” period within quotation marks not only to signal its temporal uncertainty (How far into the present has it dilated? How deep into the past has it contracted?) but also to clear a space for a new discursive terrain. Through Mitry, the classical discourse has reached its point of culmination in the present, but it is not part of the present; it cannot find a resting place within the modern or actual discourse, the discourse of signification, but must remain disjunct from it on several levels. The deep irony of this disjunctiveness is Metz’s recognition of the many points of contact between Mitry’s work and the emerging discourse of signification. This hole or hollow in the progress of film theory (“période creuse”) would not long remain empty. Metz quickly notes that his own first steps in conceiving the project of a film semiology, “Le cinéma: langue ou langage,” was published in 1964 in between Mitry’s two volumes. (“Une étape” is contemporaneous with that essay, as I have already noted.) But despite the novelty of semiology, and the possibility it presents for real theoretical advancement, Metz reiterates his sentiment that it cannot be considered as an absolute beginning for film theory. In its inaugural moment, semiology must take into account, reconsider, and reevaluate what preceded it and made it possible. This task is 114 “Sur la théorie classique du cinéma: a propos des travaux de Jean Mitry” in Essais sur la signification du cinéma, II (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1972) 11; my trans. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 220 neither an afterthought nor supplement, Metz emphasizes, but rather engages directly the value of theory itself. A single page, then, and apart from a foreword the first page of Metz’s book, but one can already begin to see clearly his conception of the place of semiology in the broader historical perspective of film theory. What is not so clear is how the gesture of placement itself constructs a history of theory with divisions, continuities and discontinuities, way stations and mile markers, retrospective glances and retrojecting movements. Classical writers were on the way to theory, as it were, but could take it only so far. Writing in 1971, Metz believes he sees a future for theory, a renewal and setting of new directions. In between falls a period of transition, a time of taking stock, clearing terrain, and of clearly establishing principles of pertinence that can make real theoretical work possible. Among the other hopes placed in it, film semiology was thus charged with the task of finally building the foundations of a film theory that would contribute to the larger project of constructing a general science of signs. But what in fact are the criteria defining theory in this sense? How is it different from previous writing on film, and how does it anticipate its place in the general, critical semiology to come? Mitry’s conceptual concerns here overlap with those of the younger Metz and of semiology in other interesting ways, above all with respect to questions of analogy, representation, the “coefficient of reality” attributed to film, and film’s phenomenological character. In fact, these are all qualities of photography and film that would rub up against and resist the incorporation of mechanically produced images within a linguistically inspired account of signs in both Barthes’s and Metz’s texts of the early sixties. Metz remarks upon this as a problem for the “first semiology,” which constructed an intractable opposition between the analogical and the coded.115 As Metz relates, “The 115 The question of whether the analogical image could be subdivided into smaller distinctive units, and thus to what degree one could identify codes interior to the image as it were, is one of the key points of contention between Metz, Umberto Eco, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Referring to this as a debate on the relative value of graded and coded signs, Peter Wollen provides an astute commentary in his Signs and Meaning in the Cinema Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 221 first semiology could not conceive that analogy itself might result from certain codes, whose proper action is to produce the impression of their absence. And further, today still, if one wishes to critique the illusion of reality, is it not necessary to take the fullest account of the reality of that illusion? Thus a gap still resides between arbitrary codes and analogical codes, even if the latter, precisely, are at present conceived of as codes” (“Sur la théorie classique” 12). In retrospect, one of the most striking aspects of Metz’s first text on Mitry, “Une étape dans la réflexion sur le cinéma,” is not only his suggestion of a clear historical transition between two ways of thinking about the cinema but also his sense that this thought distributes itself historically in distinct if sometimes overlapping and interpenetrating genres. Metz writes of Mitry’s book that “This work, taken on its own terms, represents the most serious effort of general synthesis to date of which cinema has been the object.”116 In its breadth, ambition, and logical structure, one imagines it suggests for the first time the real possibility of a general and synthetic theory of film. If Mitry’s book embodies both a point of culmination and a distinct division, how is it alike or different from other texts that historically considered themselves, or were considered, “theories of cinema”? Metz sets aside journalistic or anecdotal accounts as well as film history to first describe as theory general accounts of film itself divided onto two lines: “The first emerges from what one calls the ‘theory of cinema’: written by cineasts or critics, or by enthusiastic amateurs, they place themselves in any case within the cinematographic institution and consider the cinema first as an art. The others, of more recent appearance, adopt the ‘filmological’ perspective: approached from the outside, the cinema is grasped as a fact with psychological, sociological, and physiological dimensions, and--more rarely--aesthetic dimensions” (“Une étape” 13). Whereas they might have complemented one another, theory and filmology have, more [1969] (London: British Film Institute, 1998). See especially the chapter on “The Semiology of the Cinema,” 79-118. 116 “Une étape dans la réflexion sur le cinéma” in Essais sur la signification du cinéma, II (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1972) 13; my trans. Metz also refers to the book as the “first general treatment of cinema available in the world” (13), strangely ignoring the 1960 publication of Kracauer’s Theory of Film. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 222 often than not, experienced tense relations. Perhaps they are two sides or dimensions of a single theoretical approach? They are alike in their generality, Metz offers, as well as in their distinctiveness from what Metz calls “differential studies” of individual filmmakers, genres, or national cinemas. “How can one understand the cinema without being a bit of a ‘filmologist’,” Metz asks, “since film puts to work phenomena that go well beyond it? And how to understand it without being a bit of a ‘theoretician’ because the cinema is nothing without the cineasts who make it?” (14). Among Mitry’s great achievements is that he brings these two dimensions together in a single work, by a thinker who is also a maker. Moreover, in its great synthetic arc, Mitry’s book establishes a line of thought and a network of filiation and common concerns that reasserts, once again, the emerging canon of classical film theory: Balázs, Arnheim, Jean Epstein, Eisenstein, Bazin, Albert Laffay, Gilbert Cohen-Séat, and Edgar Morin. One finds conjoined within Mitry, then, the aesthetic or “theoretical” line of classical film theory and the scientific or “filmological” line that is a sort of precursor to modern film theory. Later in the review, Metz characterizes the classical period as a time of violent polemics and blind combat, of too general analysis and contradictory claims for the metaphysical essence of cinema. Although Metz would later revise this opinion, Eisenstein and the Soviets come in for particular criticism for their lack of rigorous terminology, approximate and inexact analysis, and avant-garde enthusiasms rendered in an “artistic” style. In contrast, Metz offers that Mitry’s book marks the passing of this era and the emergence of a new phase of reflection on film, opening “an epoch of precise research, which even if its objectives are general, will no longer be vague or uncertain in its methodological reasoning. . . . This book has brilliantly concluded an epoch that was sometimes brilliant but which risked aging badly if prolonged immoderately. Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema opens a reflection on film to the perspectives of a new epoch, which will have the face of those who make it” (“Une étape” 34.). This new era, of course, is the era of signs and meaning, and if Mitry marks the point of termination of one line of thought, moving towards theory, perhaps Metz marks the beginning of another. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 223 We finally approaching the beginning of "Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" The essay is divided into two almost equal halves: the implicit concern of the first half is to review the history of film theory and to construct an idea of what it means to have a theory; the second half works through methodological problems of applying linguistic concepts to film. It is revealing that most glosses on this foundational essay ignore the first twenty-five pages, as if there were something there that was inassimilable or perturbing to the project of the second half, which lays down the ground work for a semiology of film. There are perhaps two reasons why the first half of the essay seems so out of place, or perhaps out of time, a long delay or digression before Metz gets on to the presumed semiological heart of his argument. To understand the first reason means comprehending that Metz himself does not know or has not yet found the place or position from which a theory can be articulated. It is as if one were trying to speak without yet knowing the grammatical rules of a language, or even its pronominal functions. Metz is searching, trying to find his place in theory without yet being certain of what defines the epistemological stakes and value of theory construction. The ground continually shifts beneath his feet as he seeks out a stable foundation on which to build a new epistemological perspective (the semiological) alongside an ethical analysis. In fact, it is this ethical dimension of Metz’s questing for theory that seems indigestible, though in hindsight it may be the most original and fascinating line of thought in his argument. The reflexivity of these pages is dizzying as Metz tries to put in place a vision or concept of theory that does not yet exist as such, and at the same time also reflects continually on the value of theory as an enterprise. Though Metz is no Nietzschean, one sees him here in almost a Zarathustrian mode, asking, “What does the ‘theorist’ want, and what does he will in wanting it?” The second reason derives from the place the essay itself occupies in the history of film theory: not only does theory as such not yet exist as a concept (we almost literally see it here in a process of discursive emergence), one also cannot yet place it in a history. It is as if the concept cannot emerge without having a certain historical consciousness of itself, heretofore lacking. Theory’s archive does not yet exist. It must be reassembled and evaluated from scattered texts in multiple languages; one must make of it a corpus, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 224 defining within it salient questions, problems, and debates with their own internal regularities and zones of classification. This historical self-consciousness of theory, and the desire to assemble critically an archive from which the potential for theory construction can be adjudicated, is a fairly unique accomplishment for the period. By the same token, this sense of a history of (film) theory could only occur under two conditions. It requires, first, that there is a sense of a canon of aesthetic writing on film as a sort of prelude to theory. Filmology by no means provided this canon, nor is there yet textual evidence that Metz was aware of Aristarco’s Storia. However, both polyglot and polymath, and an intensely curious and exacting researcher, Metz constructs his own canon as it were, from German and English, as well as French sources. Metz’s canon conforms in interesting though coincidental ways, with first canons of Daniel Talbot and Richard Dyer MacCann, though with an exception: Metz is refining the definition of theory and who is capable of constructing theories; his principle of selection is guided by a concept of theory where earlier collections are not.117 Second, this canon must define a certain kind of historical space, where there is not only “theory” but competing theories and ideas, grouped together historically. Francesco Casetti has commented astutely that theories in the classical period were local formations contained in distinct social and national communities that were rarely in direct contact with one another. In the post-war period, a new discursive environment occurs, where not only is a new idea of theory coming into existence, but where there is also the awareness of an international history of film theory comprised from an archive whose fundamental texts are now co-present, spatially and historically, and in dialogue with another. Moreover, here the syncretism and eclecticism of the classical era is defined retrospectively from the point of view of an epistemological space where structuralism follows on the heels of filmology, and where a unified and globally applicable theory in the human sciences seems possible. In constructing a space for theory, Metz is clearing the grounds, shifting back through the history of writing about film to sculpt a concept 117 Compare, for example, Daniel Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959); reprinted (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), and Richard Dyer MacCann, ed., Film: a montage of theories (E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1966). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 225 with precision, to review its possible senses, and to reorganize it in a unified field held together with well formed and consensually accepted principles of pertinence. We have finally arrived, through a series of loops and digressions, though important ones, at the first pages of "Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" Most astonishing in retrospect is how Metz begins emphatically with an implied ethical question: from what place does theory speak? In an essay that wants to explore what a theory of language can offer film, the stakes first unfold in a critical evaluation of the language of theory and what theory values in taking film as an object of knowledge. It is odd that so much of 1970’s theory opposed Metz to André Bazin (an indicator of the retrospective and retrojecting force of political modernism and the discourse of ideology), for in the opening paragraph of the essay the cards of the argument are fully stacked in Bazin’s favor. Citing a 1959 interview with Roberto Rossellini in Cahiers du cinéma, Metz observes that at the very turning point of modern cinema in Europe, Rossellini speaks of the great silent age of Soviet montage and the idea of editing as an all powerful manipulation of meaning as things of the past. The era of montage was an indispensable phase of cinematic creation but now it is giving way to other strategies, and other aesthetic approaches to reality. Here, Rossellini (and Metz) might as well be quoting chapter and verse from Bazin’s “Evolution of the Language of Cinema.” Montage was also thought a theory, Metz suggests, not only because it was one of the first sustained concepts of cinema, but also because of its scientific pretensions. Trained as an engineer, the young Eisenstein came to believe in the possibility of engineering reality and subjectivity through the reconstruction of film language. And in this respect, a certain concept of montage became co-extensive with the cinema itself in a long line of influential writers: not only Eisenstein, but also Pudovkin, Alexandrov, Dziga Vertov, Kuleshov, Balázs, Renato May, Rudolf Arnheim, Raymond J. Spottiswoode, André Levinson, Abel Gance, and Jean Epstein. Pudovkin introduces yet another variant in the discussion--of the relation between shot and montage, where the shot is only an element of montage whose sense is found in the whole of the construction, not in the content of an individual part. Metz calls this a fanaticism for montage, whose adherents refuse doggedly and categorically any form of descriptive realism to the cinema. Two problems thus arise about the status and location of language Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 226 in cinema, especially in relation to the shot and to the referential status of profilmic space. Eisenstein’s process is one of fragmentation and reconstitution. That an uninterrupted segment would have its own sense and beauty is unthinkable. In the early Eisenstein, the profilmic space is a raw material to be dissected and reconfigured into a new series whose meaning is unambiguous. Thus for Metz, “Eisenstein does not miss any opportunity to devalue, to the profit of concern for sequential arrangement, any art that would invest itself in the modeling of the segments themselves” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?"33, 41).118 Metz thus characterizes the era of montage as being dominated by a spirit of manipulation and of engineering the spirit. The theme of the ethical dimension of theory starts to emerge along these lines, and very soon it will be clear that Metz is contrasting two forms of life or modes of existence characteristic of his modernity--the structural and the phenomenological--in order to explore how an aesthetic semiology comes to designate a third path inspired by the phenomenological aesthetics of Mikel Dufrenne, and to a certain extent, the early Barthes. In the opening pages of this essay, an unquestioned foundational text in the history of film theory, what we find is rather a strong ethical statement, which continues into the second section. The question of film language has hardly yet been asked. The central problem here seems to be the value of the shot of whatever duration in relation to the sequence, and then the question of where meaning is expressed in the composed film? And what is most striking in the second section is how the ethical question, rather than the theoretical one, advances; or yet more complexly, how the ethical and the theoretical advance in turns like two strands that weave one around the other. The engineering spirit of sovereign montage has not fallen into the past except in the cinema, Metz asserts; instead, it finds itself reborn in the new cultural attitudes of the human sciences. Where one would think that Metz’s ambit is to present the value of structural linguistics for the study of film, one finds instead a heartfelt plea to 118 In later essays and retrospective footnotes, Metz significantly softens and complicates his original assessment of Eisenstein. In this early work, Metz is offering a selective ethical reading of Eisenstein, incomplete though not unjust, to make him an exemplar of “structuralist man.” Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 227 soften the structuralist activity by bringing it into contact with modern film, that is, with art. What links the Soviet obsession with decoupage and montage to a certain modern attitude in the human sciences is a passion for manipulating elements through dismantling and reconstructing them--Metz calls this a “jeu de mecano,” playing with Erector Sets, a childhood preoccupation that carries forward into the more adult activities of “engineers, cyberneticians, indeed ethnographers or linguists . . . .” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 34, 42). So here, slowly and subtly, before it is even apparent that Metz is addressing the question of langue or langage, the problem of linguistics, and of the multiple and confusing overlapping senses of “language,” weave themselves into his text. Film should be confronted as a language, but what kind of language, with what sort of linguistics, and from what perspective? Indeed what languages of theory must be spoken or rewritten to examine the possible senses of language in relation to cinematographic art? With undisguised irony, Metz associates information theory and distributional analysis with playing with model trains: disassembling, classifying, and reassembling always interchangeable parts--rails, straight, curving, and forked--into ever renewable configurations. Though himself trained in structural linguistics, what Metz is straining towards slowly is a deep criticism of modern linguistics for denaturing and deaestheticizing language. No doubt, like boxes of rails and connectors in a model train set, ordinary language may be characterized by fairly strict kinds of paradigmatic choices that yield richly varied syntagmatic chains, all of which are open to modelization. (This, in point of fact, is close to what Saussure referred to as langue, an implicit and restricted set of invariant operations underlying mechanisms of sense in ordinary speech.) But there is still something in language that resists modelization and the engineering of meaning, something that remains open and ambiguous, only ever partially and incompletely coded, and something also that sticks to the world of experience and is not so easily reduced to a virtual system. Information theory wants to reduce the thickness of language to a message, because it pulls along too much “substance” within itself, it is not totally organizable. Its double substantiality, phonic and semantic (that is to say, two times human, by the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 228 body and the mind) resists complete pigeon-holing [résiste à l’exhaustivité de la mise en grilles]. Furthermore, has the language that we speak become--quite paradoxically when one thinks of it--what these American logicians call “natural” or “ordinary” language, whereas in their eyes no adjective is required when they speak of their machine languages, more perfectly binary than R. Jakobson’s best analyses. The machine has stripped human language of its bones, sliced it up into neat sections where no flesh adheres. These “binary digits,” perfect segments, now only need to be assembled [montés] (programmed) in the required order. The perfection of the code is triumphantly achieved in the transmission of the message. This is the great celebration of the syntagmatic mind. ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 35, 43) In case one misses his meaning, Metz continues by focalizing in the “linguistic machine” a variety of modern preoccupations with automatization, commodification, and the overprocessing of raw nature into denatured products where finally, “The prosthesis is to the leg what the cybernetic message is to the human sentence” (35, 43). In the opening sections of his essay, then, Metz is objecting to two kinds of theory, in film and linguistics, which are connected by a preoccupation with “engineering” and a way of construing language. What Metz is searching for now is a theoretical alternative both to montage “theory” and to hard structuralist analysis. (Perhaps the former is too far to the left--a failed utopia leading to Stalinism, the other too close to the right, and a mechanized and commodified society.) In hard structuralism language is treated as a product, Metz asserts, or more clearly, a raw material that must be refined in a welldefined process: one analyses by isolating constitutive elements of paradigms, then these elements are redistributed into isofunctional categories (“straight rails to one side, curved rails to the other”). However, the moment that one anticipates in theory, the one thought of from the beginning, is the syntagmatic moment. One reconstitutes a double of the first object, a double totally thinkable since it is a pure product of thought: the intelligibility of the object has become itself an object. And one has not in the least considered that the natural object has served as model. Quite to the contrary, the constructed object is the object-model; the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 229 natural object has only to hold up to it. Thus the linguist tries to apply the givens of information theory to human language, and what the ethnographer will call “model” is not in the least the reality examined but rather the formalization established from it. ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 36, 44) Reality has disappeared into its simulacrum. Published in 1964 in the rapidly ascendant arc of structuralism, and in the flagship journal of the semiological enterprise in France, this paragraph must have been stunning, even bewildering to some readers, for Metz continues by linking information theory to French structuralism itself. No less a figure than Levi-Strauss is chided for “pacifying the real as ‘non-pertinent” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 36, 44). This theory of abstracting and modeling the real is then linked to the structuralist activity as defined by Roland Barthes, Metz’s mentor at the École Pratique, who is himself criticized because his aim is not to represent the real, but to simulate it. The structuralist activity “does not try to imitate the concrete face of the initial object, it is not ‘poesis’ or ‘pseudo-physis’; it is a product of simulation, a product of ‘techne’. In sum, the result of a manipulation. Structural skeleton of the object erected into a second object, always a sort of prosthesis.”119 Metz, soon to be considered the godfather of cine-structuralism, has here retreated from the core concepts of structuralism. Or perhaps he is trying to imagine another kind of structuralism, and another path to theory, one where the hard structuralism of Levi-Strauss can be softened in the passage through aesthetics in general and film in particular? After Levi-Strauss and Barthes, the next link in Metz’s chain of argumentation is Eisenstein, considered as a hard structuralist avant la lettre. And in a similar fashion, film theory must seek still another path, not in a return to the filmic past, to the engineering or manipulative attitude that now, ironically, replicates itself in hard structuralism, but rather one in relation to modern cinema, which presents an ethos alternative to the machinic mind. Rossellini is again the avatar of a new way of thinking. “To Rossellini who 119 (36, 44) The interior citations are from Barthes’ essay, “The Structuralist Activity,” originally published in Lettres nouvelles (February 1963) 71-81, and reprinted in Barthes’s Essais Critiques (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 230 exclaimed: ‘Things are there. Why manipulate them?,’ Metz writes, “the Soviet might have responded, ‘Things are there. They must be manipulated.’ Eisenstein never shows the course of the world, but always, as he himself said, the course of the world refracted through an ‘ideological point of view,’ entirely thought and signifying in each of its parts. Meaning does not suffice; one had to add signification to it [Le sens ne suffit pas, il faut que s’y ajoute la signification]” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 36-37, 44). This is not a political contrast, as Metz makes very clear, but it is an ethical one, and one with theoretical consequences. If Eisenstein veers too far towards the materialist side of modernity, the scientific and engineering mentality, on the phenomenological side, Bazin’s desire for a direct contact with things through film is too idealist. At stake in this contrast is how one approaches the concept of sense or meaning in relation to signification. At this very moment in the text, semiology makes a surprise appearance as an intermediary possibility, perhaps bridging the materialist and the phenomenological attitudes, or in fact, softening structuralism with phenomenology. Rather than a direct contact of consciousness with things, or a deconstruction and remaking of meaning in a simulacrum, semiology, Metz argues, is concerned with something else: “what I call the ‘sense’ of the event narrated by the cineast would be, in any case, a meaning for someone (no others exist). But from the point of view of expressive mechanisms, one can distinguish deliberate signification from the ‘natural’ meaning of things and beings (continuous, global, without a distinct signifier, thus the joy read on a child’s face). The latter would be inconceivable if we did not already live in a world of meaning, but it is also only conceivable as a distinctive organizing act through which meaning is redistributed: signification loves to cut up precisely discontinuous signifieds that correspond to as many discrete signifiers” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 37, 45). In this Eisenstein goes too far, not aesthetically but theoretically. Referring to the magnificent segment of the stone lions rising up in protest in Battleship Potemkin, Metz argues that “It wasn’t enough for Eisenstein to have composed a splendid sequence, he intended in addition that this be a fact of language [langue]” (37, 45). How far can the passion for construction go, Metz protests? One variation on the imagination of the sign would be a cybernetic art finally reconciled with science, a vision of poetry programmable by Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 231 machines. This is an extreme example of a certain orientation of modernity, one of its possible paths, where whether carried forward into aesthetic creation or into cybernetics or structural science, leads to dubious results. There is a genealogical line, then, that Metz draws from the modernity of sovereign montage to that of Barthes’s vision of “structural man.” Along this line, it must be said, there are many points of attraction for Metz. Both cinéphile chevronné and structural linguist, admirer of Eisenstein (in theory and practice) no less than Rossellini, adept at phenomenology no less than semiology, how to counter-balance all these opposing forces? And how to do so in theory and through language? Indeed, how to seek out in language--both a theoretical conception of language and in a certain conception of theoretical language--a place that reconciles these interests? How to find one’s distinct place in theory? In implicitly asking these questions, Metz is forging for himself here a new form of life in theory. But to return to my reading, here Metz notes two reservations with respect to his criticisms of structural man or the “syntagmatic mind.” The historical existence of Constructivism in film and film theory waxes and declines well before the emergence of structural man, who appears after the Liberation in France. In fact, the historical situation is yet more complex, as I have already shown. The emergence of a Formalist or structuralist attitude is contemporaneous with the triumphant period of Soviet cinema and aesthetics. The two evolve in tandem and in close contact with one another, especially in the pages of Lef and through the work of Eikhenbaum, Brik, Shklovsky, and Jakobson in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Moreover, even if the period of sovereign montage is thought to be concluded, structuralism in the thirties was just entering a period of gestation before arriving with Levi-Strauss, Jakobson, and Martinet in France, all fresh from their encounters in New York. This does not detract from Metz’s main point, however. In the historical moment when a certain mentality (call this from our perspective, a certain form of life in language and in theory, but what Metz calls an “intellect-agent”) becomes conscious of itself and gains confidence in itself, it deserts the cinema, where a new form of modernism is asserting itself in neorealism and the French New Wave. Moreover, the cinematic domain is too small; structuralism needed to deploy its forces on larger Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 232 territories. It is thus understandable that at the beginning structuralism would have to feel its way slowly toward a field so rich and complex as film. But here Metz’s second reservation arises. Metz finds it paradoxical that the cinema would be considered such a rich domain for the early syntagmatic mind of the 1920s, for it seems to be in conflict with the analogical power of the film image as well as its phenomenological sensitivity to the real--what Metz calls a continuous and global image without a distinct signifier, which is resistant, in fact, to strict codification. Even from a semiological perspective, Metz’s bets for a new film theory, indeed, for modern theory as such, are placed on the real, or at least, a certain image of the real: “Is it not the peculiarity of the camera to restore to us the object in its perceptual quasi-literality, even if what one gives it to film is only a fragment pre-selected from a global situation? The close-up itself, the absolute weapon of the montage theorists in their struggle against visual naturalism, is it not at the smallest scale just as much respectful of the face of the object as a wide shot? Is not the cinema the triumph of this ‘pseudo-physis’ that the manipulative mind precisely refuses? Is it not based completely on the famous ‘impression of reality’ that no one contests, which many have studied, and to which it owes simultaneously its ‘realist’ tendencies and its aptitude for staging the fabulous?” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 38, 46). And here is the dilemma in which Metz finds himself, the double bind that requires a solution in theory. What is most modern in theory, structuralism, finds itself in conflict with what is most modern in cinema, Rossellini or Bazin’s phenomenology of the real. And indeed film (or more precisely, the analogical image)--which might be thought as marginal to the larger enterprise of structuralism whose concern is with all of culture and all of language--will soon become the focal point through which semiology must distinguish itself from linguistics. The image is in conflict with language, and what is most advanced in theory is at odds with the most powerful aesthetic concepts of modern cinema. In league in many respects with Barthes’s writing on photography in the same period, Metz must now remodel a concept of language to find a new way of approaching semiology--not a science (filmology), but something methodologically rigorous and conceptually precise; not a hard structuralism, but a soft one. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 233 From a semiological perspective, film theory could only have a paradoxical status in its current state. Given Metz’s view that the cinema does not lend itself well to manipulation or to the engineering mind, why did it generate so much enthusiasm for certain “theorist’s of construction” [“théoriciens de l’agencement”] like Eisenstein and the Russian Formalists? The great attraction of film for Constructivism, was based on a fundamental conceptual error in Metz’s opinion. Like a language, film seemed to have fundamental and distinct levels of articulation--from the photograms on the film strip, to shots, to sequences, and to larger structural parts--that could be broken down, reconfigured, and rearticulated. Why should one not see a meaningful system of articulations there? Metz continues in observing that “the error was tempting: seen from a certain angle, the cinema has all the appearances of what it is not. It seems to be a kind of language; one saw there a langue. It authorized and even required decoupage and montage: one believed that its organization, so manifestly syntagmatic, could only proceed from a prerequisite code, even if presented as not yet fully conscious of itself. The film is too clearly a message for one to suppose it without code” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 40, 47-48). This is perhaps the moment to follow Metz in a short digression. The problem of the essay--cinema, langue ou langage?--so limpidly posed in French has always presented obstacles to English readers, above all in translating the term langue. Langue is not exactly speech nor is it language. In a footnote to these paragraphs, Metz explains the basic conceptual distinction where for Saussurianism langue is a highly organized code, while language covers a zone of interest more amorphous and more vast: Saussure said that language is the sum of langue and speech. Charles Bally or Émile Benveniste’s notion of the “language fact” goes in the same direction. If one wants to define things and not words, one would say that language, in its most extensive reality, appears every time that something is said with the intention of saying . . . . No doubt, the distinction between verbal language (language properly speaking) and other “semes” (sometimes referred to as “language in the figurative sense”) imposes itself on the mind and must not be mixed. But it is [also] normal that semiology would take an interest in all “languages” without prejudging from Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 234 the beginning the extension and limits of the semic domain. Semiology can and must draw important support from linguistics, but the two cannot be confused. ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 40, 47-48, n 5,) Two problems arise from this terminological digression. On the side of code, langue is neither speech nor language, nor is anything gained from opposing natural and aesthetic languages. Metz needs something more here than Formalism’s main principle of pertinence, the distinction between practical and poetic language. Secondly, semiology must deal with a vast range of meaningful phenomena (semes), many of which are not linguistic in nature. Yet, as a science of meaning linguistics has not been surpassed, and must still nourish the concepts and methods of semiology. The contrast between langue and parole, or code and message, is not only a key principle of pertinence for Saussure’s linguistics, it also essential to his imagination of a more general semiology. Message, speech, language, and seme are all actualized instances of meaning, but the langue underlying them is virtual. Where langue is so close in French to “tongue,” or “national language,” here it is more like a virtual force, nowhere present in any instance of signification, yet at the same time underlying all meaning as the structured system of differences from which an expression gains and transmits sense. Herein lies a conceptual confusion where all the various “grammars” of film and treatises on “film language” have come to grief. Because films are understood, and are repeatedly understood, one searches in them for a conventional syntax. Yet, at best one will find only fragile and partially coded elements torn from reality, like “a great river whose always moving branches deposit here and there its bed, in the form of an archipelago, shaped from the disjointed elements of at least a partial code. Perhaps these small islands, hardly distinct from the watery mass, are too fragile and scattered to resist the external forces of the currents that gave birth to them, and to which in return they remain always vulnerable” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 40-41, 48). Metz later continues this line of thought in a significant passage: “In the cinema, everything happens as if the signifying richness of the code and that of the message were connected together [unies entre elles]--or rather, disconnected--by the obscurely rigorous relation of a kind of inverse proportionality: the code, when it exists, is coarse. Those who believed in it, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 235 when they were great cineasts, did so in spite of themselves. When the message becomes more refined, it undermines the code--at any moment, the code can change or disappear; at any moment, the message can find a way to signify differently” (48-49, 56). The impermanent, unstable, and even historical nature of code in aesthetic expressions already throws up a challenge to Saussure, who insisted that only a synchronic analysis could reconstruct the underlying system of a langue. All the (phenomenological) qualities of analogical artifacts, and indeed the historical variability and innovativeness of art, erect conceptual barriers to a theory of the code, at least in a strict sense. The open question for theory, then, is how to remain sensitive to the open and complex processes through which films have, gain, or give the appearance of intelligibility? On one hand, Constructivist or Formalist writing on film goes too far in taking shots for words and sequences for phrases, thereby finding the structure of langue, speech, and other forms of “pseudo-syntax” within the filmic message. Sovereign montage dismantles the sense interior to the image to slice it up into simple signs exploitable at will. On the other, without montage, or rather, the extreme forms of montage, modern cinema unveils another kind of expressivity, and therefore a kind of “language” immanent to the analogical image itself in its phenomenological density and richness. Metz calls this another or alternative kind of organization [agencement], where “the signifier is coextensive with the whole of the signified, a spectacle that signifies itself, short-circuiting the sign properly speaking” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 43, 50). Following Merleau-Ponty’s lecture on “Cinema and the New Psychology,” and indeed a whole line of post-war reflection on the phenomenology of the image, Metz finds film to be the phenomenological art par excellence, where the moving image, “like a spectacle of life, carries its meaning within itself, the signifier only uneasily distinct from the signified. ‘It is the felicity of art to show how a thing begins to signify, not by reference to ideas that are already formed or acquired, but by the temporal and spatial arrangement of elements’” (43,50).120 The film image short circuits the linguistic sign, but at the same time it is not 120 The interior citation is from Merleau-Ponty’s “The Film and the New Psychology,” a lecture originally given at IDHEC in 1945 and reprinted in his Sense and Non-sense, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 236 life itself but rather a composed, complex, heteroclite image; not a langue, but nonetheless a language, and again following Rossellini, a “poetic language” (44, 51). Thus the title of the essay already gestures towards Metz’s key dilemma in theory. The problem of meaning in film must navigate carefully between, on one hand, the domain of langue and the conceptual precisions of structural linguistics, and on the other, language, or the phenomenological richness of the analogical and aesthetic image. This dilemma organizes all the great rhetorical poles of the essay, including the recurrent contrast between Rossellini and Eisenstein in the realm of poetics, and the historical distinction between the “classical theorists” of film and the broader, more synthetic semiology to come. At the same time, these are also ethical choices, laying out approaches to life and to thought as the odd introduction to the essay makes clear. As an alternative to structural linguistics, Metz searches out an aesthetic or poetic semiology to forge a compromise where the search for a place in theory might define a domain that is both conceptually precise and aesthetically rich. Even more striking is the way that for Metz the new, modern cinema already anticipates, reconciles, and transcends these oppositions in its very forms; it is ahead of or anticipates theory in this respect.121 The modern cinema includes both montage and sequence-shot in its creative repertoire, and here Metz agrees completely with Mitry that there is no film without montage, or rather, Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) 57-58; trans. mod. 121 This observation draws out an interesting contrast between the early work of Metz and Raymond Bellour, who otherwise were so closely allied. Bellour understood early on that the primary testing ground for the structural analysis of film should target a certain classicism; in short, Hollywood film, especially Hitchcock. In contrast, to put his “large syntagmatic categories” to the test, Metz turned to a minor though important New Wave film, Adieu Philippine and investigates narration in Fellini’s 8 ½, both of which have essays devoted to them in Film Language. His frequent references to Left Bank filmmakers are not simply a matter of taste, I think, but rather are more generally representative of a feeling for the conceptual power and inventiveness of the new cinemas, and one that would be echoed later in Gilles Deleuze’s work on the time-image. The tight link between “modern theory” and “modern cinema” is also in full view in the panels on semiology and film incorporated into the Mostri del Nuovo Cinema in Pesaro in 1966 and 1967, which generated important critical discussions in which Barthes, Metz, Eco, and Pasolini all had roles to play. See for example Casetti’s Theories of Cinema 135. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 237 editing. The analogical power of the image, the near fusion of signifier and signified, cannot define the whole of the film image, but only one of its most important components--the photographic image. The image is not reducible to the photographic alone. The shot enters into many kinds of combinations and on various scales or degrees: “A film is made of many images, which take their sense, one in relation to the others, in a play of reciprocal implications . . . .” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 43, 51). The signifier and the signified are thus separated in a way that indeed makes “language” possible. Therefore, through their interest in aesthetic or poetic language, even the Bazinians and Left Bank filmmakers have the merit of having conceived a sort of spontaneous and intuitive semiology that refuses any consideration of cinema as a langue. Finally, there is yet another polarity that must be reconciled in Metz’s essay, and this polarity poses two obstacles to the kind of aesthetic semiology Metz is searching for. Within the historical space of “classical theories,” which Metz no doubt considers the precursors to a more modern approach signaled by semiology, there are two possibilities or pathways on the way to theory: one which veers too closely to language, the other of which strays too far from it. On one hand there is formalism or constructivism, what Metz calls the adherents of “cine-langue”; on the other, there are the “aestheticians,” such as Balázs and Arnheim.122 In each instance, it seems always to be the case that theory has not yet arrived: one constructs the components of a theory, but then there occur the false starts, detours and digressions, cul de sacs, where in the aesthetic discourse, either one veers towards Constructivism and cine-langue or towards art and expression--theory must reconcile the two. The second obstacle is that the conceptual genealogy of cine122 This contrast was implicitly understood in the classical period. In a 1931 review of Granowky’s Lied vom Leben, Arnheim complained about “the strange way in which Russian film artists ruin the chance of visualizing things through their penchant for theoretical constructions. The Russians are real fanatics of film theory. They have thought up almost cabbalistic systems; yet the application to the actual work of art is for the most part not very satisfactory.” The implication is that there should be some conceptual alternative to the Russian approach, and perhaps one that is more aesthetic and less theoretical. See “Granowsky probiert” in Rudolf Arnheim: Kritiken und Aufsätze zum Film, ed. Helmut H. Diederichs (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979) 233. I was led to this fascinating quote by Sabine Hake’s The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907-1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993) 278. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 238 semiology descends directly from the Formalists (in the broadest sense), who, Metz implies, may have posed the problem for film in a limited or inadequate manner. And this observation turns round to complicate the first problem. In 1964 a linguistically inspired semiology passing through structural anthropology aims high, hoping to construct a general and critical account of culture as language. But if a general semiology is to transcend linguistics to become a comprehensive account of the life of signs in society, of signifying culture, it must widen conceptually the province of language to include nonlinguistic expressions. And here all the most intractable problems will pass through the analogical arts, primarily photography and cinema, “messages without codes” as Barthes put it at the time. The artistic domain that at first glance seems tangential now becomes the central obstacle to constructing a general theory. Suddenly, the minor art of film is a major concern for semiology. Moreover, to construct a theory by bringing the two domains in contact with one another, to produce a defendable epistemological perspective on the filmic fact that is equally attentive to the phenomenological experience of film, Metz needs a new concept of language, one which, like filmology, comes from outside the cinematographic institution but which also remains attentive to the expressive power and complexity of the works themselves. To be on the way to theory, then, means returning to but also remapping the problem of speech or cine-langue in pre-war writing on film, and also, from the perspective of modern aesthetics and structural linguistics, to pass judgment on the first stage or phase of theory, which now implicitly, though in a scattered and disunified way, follows the Ariadne’s thread of the concept of cine-langue, and this, paradoxically, in the era of silent film. Metz is well aware of the irony: “No era was more verbose than that of silent film. So many manifestos, vociferations, invectives, proclamations, prophetic statements, and all against the same fantasmatic adversary: speech” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 49, 56). And all seeking purity of expression, as it were, in a moving visual image of universal power. At the same time, the concept of cine-langue sought out something like a universal syntax in the silent image, something that made of images a “language,” but a non-verbal one. In returning to and remapping the canon of aesthetic writing on film, Metz defines a Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 239 twofold project. On one hand, he identifies and defines a certain genre of writing on film-film theory--and gives it a conceptual valence distinguishable from history and criticism. Historically, this is both a backward looking and forward projecting gesture, which in each case launches itself from a space located within the discourse of signification. The objective of constructing a new idea of film theory is to make it part of a larger project-the general semiology to come as the foundation for the human sciences. At the same time, this rewriting or remapping is a retrojection, reformatting the aesthetic discourse in the structure of the discourse of signification, making of it the first or preliminary archaeological phase to which film semiology will be a second and intermediary step contributing to a general science of signs. After stating his criticisms and hesitations concerning the status of the concept of cine-langue, Metz returns to them to examine what elements or characteristics bring them close to theory, or render them as stages or stepping stones, partial and fragmentary attempts, to find a path towards theory. The seduction and the sin of early writings was to have been on the right road but going too fast in the wrong direction. Many found a path toward theory through the problems of meaning and language; nonetheless, they operated with an inexact, even mistaken, concept of signification and of language, “. . . for at the moment when they defined the cinema as a non-verbal language, they still imagined confusedly that a pseudo-verbal mechanism was at work in the film. . . . A thorough review of theoretical writings of the period makes easily apparent a surprising convergence of conceptions: the image is like a word, the sequence is like a sentence, a sequence is constructed from images like a sentence from words, etc. In placing itself on this terrain, the cinema, proclaiming its superiority, condemned itself to an eternal inferiority. In comparison to a refined language (verbal language), it defined itself without knowing as a courser double” ("Cinéma: langue ou langage?" 50-51, 57-58). This is what Metz calls the paradox of “talking cinema,” in expression and in theory. The key aestheticians of the silent period and the transition to sound had an unclear and even somewhat perverse understanding of the complex relationship of speech to image. They viewed this relationship as antagonism and rivalry, which blinded them in theory to the wealth of possible combinations and interactions between image and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 240 speech, each equally impure, each equally enriched, by their mutual interaction. Looking back at this period historically, like Bazin but for different reasons, Metz observes that for a certain cinema, nothing changes in fact during the transition to sound. Declaring film to be a “language,” indeed a universal aesthetic language of images, the “theorists of cinema” confused it with a langue--a relatively restricted system logically anterior to the message: an image opposed to speech in principle yet speaking to all as clearly as words. At the same time, actual speech seemed to bring to film only “an unhappy surplus and an ill-timed rivalry” (55, 61). In fact, not until a new modern cinema was born, perhaps with Citizen Kane in the early forties, did the image transform itself to welcome a new relationship with speech, and not any kind of speech, but rather a modern aesthetic discourse. The modern cinema appears again in Metz as a sort of herald for theory--the proto-conceptual theoros who announces a new relationship of image to language that can only be finally understood in a new construction of theory, where Metz’s aesthetic version of structuralism hopes to make a contribution. Here the modern cinema finally becomes a “talking” cinema that conceives itself as a supple aesthetic language, never fixed in advance, always open to transformation. Referring explicitly to Étienne Souriau (and implicitly to André Bazin), Metz writes that the long take has done more for talking cinema than the advent of sound, and that a technological innovation can never resolve an aesthetic problem--it can only present the problem before a second and properly artistic creation comes to suggest possible solutions, which can consequently be expressed in theory. In this manner, the modern cinema of Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Agnès Varda constructs a new conceptual relation of language to image, a complex yet “authentically ‘filmic’” discourse ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 56, 62). In many respects, they present to semiology what is a stake in a film discourse. We are now close to the end of the first half of the essay. After all of his criticisms of Constructivism, of cine-langue and erector set cinema, Metz then concludes the first half of “Le cinéma: langue ou langage?” with an appreciation of cine-langue as theory, or perhaps pointing the way towards theory. Metz offers that these writings formed a whole body of theory (“La ciné-langue formait tout un corps théorique” [62]), which must be Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 241 evaluated as such. The open question here is what are the components and conceptual stakes of theory that appear in outline or in their initial steps in the 1920s and 30s, and which are more or less clearly distinguishable from criticism on one hand, and history on the other? And there is another term in this equation--art. Metz observes that there may have been an erector set cinema but not erector set films. “Cinema” here means an idea or a concept imagining, desiring, or proselytizing for a certain kind of film. But, pace Arnheim, the great films of Eisenstein or Pudovkin transcended their theories: “The common tendency of many films of this period were only hypostasized in the writings and manifestos. The tendency never realized itself completely in any particular film . . .” ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 56, 62). Aesthetic thinking through a filmic discourse, in this respect, always remained ahead of theoretical expression itself. This observation is related to Metz’s subsequent comment that from a historical perspective, the cinema could only become conscious of itself, as film and as art, through excess or exaggeration; hence, the ecstatic tone of the period’s manifestos and various cris de coeurs. The period of cinelangue is thus important for two reasons. After 1920 or thereabouts, it coincides with the birth of an idea of cinema as art, and thus represents the emergence of a kind of historical consciousness as well as an anticipation of theory through aesthetic practice. Secondly, Metz notes that his central question--cinema langue or language--could only begin to be presented at the moment when the first film theories were being conceived. The whole conception of cine-langue--though preliminary, incomplete, and excessive--nonetheless raises questions of both art and language. Though Metz does not say so directly (he says it everywhere indirectly), the path to theory is sign-posted here as passing through, and perhaps beyond, the domains of the aesthetic and the linguistic. The possibility of theory, however, had to wait for more modern approaches to both art and linguistics, and in this respect, film, like every art, exhibited its proto-conceptual and anticipatory force. At the apogee of sovereign montage, Metz concludes, and without attendant theories or manifestos, directors like Stroheim and Murnau prefigured the modern cinema. This idea of cinematic modernity is, of course, Bazin’s. And at the same time, il faut faire la sémiologie du cinéma. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 242 The theory to come--film theory as a stage or step towards a global and unified semiology--must pass through the linguistic and the concept of langue, and at the same time it must become “translinguistic” passing through the problems posed by non-verbal languages. Here the question of cinema has pride of place. And at this point, interestingly enough, Rossellini is evoked once again to establish that film is an art rather than a specific sign-vehicle, and must be treat us such semiologically. The simple conclusion and the profound irony for the discourse of signification is that while films are powerfully meaningful and expressive, nothing can be gained for semiology by considering them as analogous to a langue. But just as a general semiology will only come into being by transcending and subsuming the domain of linguistics, film theory will become a sub-domain of semiology in recognizing concretely the ways in which cinema is a language without a langue. Testing the conceptual limits of langue in order to map out the possible and legitimate ways of treating filmic expression as language is the great technical task of the second half of Metz’s essay. That useful pedagogical task must be left aside here.123 The important point to conclude with is to account fully for the role played by the aesthetic, or a transformed idea of the aesthetic, in forging the discourse of signification. In one of the most remarkable sentences of the essay, Metz writes that “The ‘specificity’ of cinema is the presence of a language that wants to be made art, in the heart of an art that wants to become language” [La ‘spécificité’ du cinéma, c’est la présence d’un langage qui veut se faire art au cœur d’un art qui veut se faire langage] ("Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" 59, 65). There are two directions of “language,” then, neither of which is predisposed to being understood as a langue. On the one hand, there is what Metz calls an “imaged discourse” [discours imagé], that is, the moving photographic 123 Briefly, Metz’s main objective is to trace out all the ways signification in film is unlike a langue but like a language according to the following criteria: within the image discourse there is no double articulation; filmic syntax is forged at the level of sequence composition, making film more like “speech” than langue; narrative film is characterized by strong syntagmatic organization with weak paradigms, or rather, commutations are only possible at the level of large units of organization; and that film, like other art forms, is less communication than an open system of expression. Linguistics, in other words, points the way to showing what film is not (langue) and what it is, a language or discourse of art. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 243 image as “an open system, difficultly codifiable, with its non-discrete fundamental unities (= images), its too natural intelligibility, and its lack of distance between the signifier and signified” (59, 65). But there is also a “filmic discourse” that draws upon a variety of other elements to compose a film expressively, not only with moving images and montage, but also with dialogue, music, sound effects, written elements, structures of narration and patterns of spatial and temporal articulation both invented and borrowed from the other arts, which are only partially codifiable. “Art or language,” concludes Metz, “the composed film is a yet more open system . . . . The cinema that we know . . . (there will perhaps be others . . .) is a ‘menu’ with many pleasures: it enduringly weds consenting arts and languages in a union where the powers of each tend to become interchangeable. It is a community of wealth, and in addition, love” (59, 65). To construct a film theory while maintaining a love of cinema, to make this theory conceptually possible and terminologically current, will now mean knowing to what extent the vocabulary of linguistics advances or blocks the passage through film to a general semiology. For the possibility of semiology here is also the path to having or possessing a theory, or to know that one thinks theoretically. To become or be on the way to theory, the discourse of signification has to find itself pre-figured in the aesthetic discourse. This was equally the case for Cohen-Séat’s vision of filmology and Souriau’s concept of aesthetics. Or to put it in a different way, theory is only the partial and intermediate transition point toward a more general science. If filmology as a general science exists, there is no need for film theory, which could also only be a sub-domain of a general science of aesthetics. For all the pages so for written in this essay, and for all the twists and turns taken in Metz’s brilliant argument, the question still before him, then, is that if the cinema can in no way be considered a langue, then how to defend his conviction that a “filmolinguistics” is both possible and desirable, and that it must be solidly grounded in the vocabulary and method of linguistics? One of the founders of the discourse of signification, for Metz the path to a global semiology and a science of signs must pass through a linguistically inspired film theory. This conviction produced two consequences for his writings of the period. First, his retroactive historical reconstruction of a certain Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 244 history of writing on film from the 1920s produces a canon where in fact to claim their status as theory means to have considered the problem of language in whatever form. A process of retrojection is at work here, where the highly variegate and contradictory aesthetic discourse is being (has been) transformed by the discourse of signification. The past canon of film theory is thus selectively formed to contribute to a debate in which filmolinguistics or cine-structuralism will be both the culmination and the passage to new, broader, and more synthetic forms of knowledge. Theory here becomes a theory of language and structure, inspired by Saussure, a process begun already by the Formalists in the twenties and thirties. Tracking back for the moment from our restricted view on Metz’s first essays to include the prolific work of other writers of the period, including Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Raymond Bellour, Noël Burch, Emilo Garroni, Yuri Lotman, Peter Wollen, Sol Worth, and many others, even including Jean Mitry, we can see that despite the will to forge a common method and conceptual vocabulary for (cine)semiology, the discourse of signification was itself a highly variegate and in some senses syncretic discourse. Nonetheless--and here filmology indicated a real and fundamental change--there was a sense common to almost everyone of a shared, international dialogue or debate within a more or less common set of problems and concepts, of moving forward through conceptual conflict to a more precise and unified approach defined by the problem of signs and meaning in images. Marc Vernet has observed that Metz’s writings can be organized into three distinct phases, each with their particular style of writing, each of which defines its own particular conceptual and epistemological space distinct from the others: the collected essays of the 1960s, Language and Cinema, and finally, “The Imaginary Signifier.”124 These phases are all points of passage or transition in theory, moving from the problem of signification to that of the text, and finally, to psychoanalytic accounts of the signifier. In taking account of the variety of Metz’s contributions, and his extraordinary drive and commitment continually to revisit critically and to remap the stakes of theory, both epistemologically and evaluatively, we can better understand his unique contributions, not only to building 124 See Michel Marie and Marc Vernet, “Entretien avec Christian Metz,” iris 10 (April 1990) 276. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 245 film studies as a modern university discipline, but also to forging a discourse now often taken for granted: the theory of film. What drives Metz’s epistemological and ethical searching from the very beginning is his dual sense of both the fundamental necessity of theory as conceptual critique and innovation, and an idea that theory is always open and incomplete, not yet arrived and always to come. In the decades of semiology’s methodological passion, Metz was one of structuralism’s most powerful critics, and also one of its true believers, but by the early seventies the dream of a global and unified science of signs was rapidly fading--the discourse of signification was fraying and splitting into new formations; structuralism was turning into poststructuralism, and theory was becoming Theory. In this respect, it is interesting to return to the Introduction to Language and Cinema and its retroactive account of what Metz calls the three phases of “film theory.” In the first phase, what was referred to as the theory of film was eclectic and syncretic, and “called upon several methods without applying any of them in a consistent manner, and sometimes without being aware of doing so” (Language and Cinema 20, 13). The semiology of the cinema, which preoccupied Metz throughout the sixties, and whose crowning achievement was Metz’s magisterial doctorat d’État, Language and Cinema, is obviously here only an intermediate stepping stone--not yet a theory but building the foundations of a methodology on the shoulders of filmology through a process of conceptual clarification and reorganization in the context of a general science of signs. Metz continues by anticipating a third phase to come, “where various methods would be reconciled in depth (which could imply the common disappearance of their present forms), and film theory would then be a real synthesis, non-syncretic, capable of precisely determining the field of validity of different approaches, the articulation of various levels. Today, it may be that we have reached the beginning of the second phase, where one may define a provisional but necessary methodological pluralism, an indispensable course of treatment through division [une cure de morcellement]. The psychology of film, the semiology of film, etc., did not exist yesterday and may no longer exist tomorrow, but must be allowed to live today, true unifications never being brought about by dictate but only at the end of numerous studies” (21, 14). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 246 It is a tribute to Metz’s influence on the field, and his own capacity for self-criticism and innovation, that Noël Carroll will echo this sentiment twenty-four years later in his own introduction to a collection co-edited with David Bordwell, Post-Theory. Moreover, Metz’s major turn to psychoanalysis only four years after Language and Cinema would force a wild shift in the discourse of signification and, at the same time, set in place a new discursive situation of increasing conceptual pluralism, opening the era of contemporary theory in film, media, and art. There is a certain irony here in noting Metz’s close agreement with Bordwell and Carroll about the prospects for theory and its incompleteness, that we have not yet entered a conceptual space where a theory of film is possible. At the same time, in what may have been his last interview, Metz characterizes this openness or incompleteness as a kind of ethics or modesty in theory. The interview with Marie and Vernet ends with Metz offering a tribute to Roland Barthes as his only real master. Metz describes this debt to Barthes as a care for the claims of theory, of thinking theoretically, while maintaining a certain flexibility or openness: to not be attached to a theory but rather to change positions according to need. In this one better understands Metz’s rejection of the idea that the study of film could be the object of a science or Wissenschaft, and that in fact the serious or theoretical study of film would always take place through a methodological pluralism that was open-ended and irresolvable. But there is something else. “This practical philosophy, which [Barthes] transmitted to me rather than taught me,” Metz offers, “is a sort of ethic--the will to furnish, in the very movement of research, an amiable and open space [un espace amical et respirable]” (“Entretien avec Christian Metz,” 296). Call this, theory as generosity. 19. The sense of an ending Even if passed and mourned, wouldn't theory return like a ghost in unexpected forms? --Vincent B. Leitch, “Theory Ends” In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault wisely notes that the closer in time one stands to a discursive formation the more difficult it is to evaluate it conceptually. The Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 247 threshold of existence of a new discourse, he writes, “is established by the discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say, and from that which falls outside our discursive practice; it begins with the outside of our own language; its locus is the gap between our own discursive practices.”125 Perhaps the contours, scale, dimension, and volume of a discourse only become apparent once one no longer occupies it. One must live an external discontinuity before past internal continuities become visible, and this is no easy task. The possibility of tracing out the architecture of a thought only occurs by standing on the far side of a fracture or division in which we believe, rightly or wrongly, that our own thought has become different. But if you stand close to the frontier, how can you know if you are approaching the border, standing at its limits, or perhaps have never even left the territory you thought you were mapping from a distance? Here we have reached our most difficult point of passage, not because our maps are too vague, but rather because they are too precise, crowded with detail, and correspond too closely to our places of intimate habitation. Moving now to the final sections of Part II of my Elegy for Theory, I realize ever more strongly how my attempts to understand the conceptual vicissitudes of theory have veered wildly in perspective, sometimes plunging into one or two texts in florid detail, making them carry the weight of an entire discursive formation on the space of a few pages, then retreating to the horizon to frame the most panoramic view possible. I have noted already that the discontinuities between the aesthetic discourse and the discourse of signification are more violent than the ones dividing the discourse of signification from that of ideology or culture, which are more subtle and joined by intertwining common roots. Another difficulty in accounting for this point of passage is not only its proximity to us, so close that we still live on the breath it exhales, but also the curious conceptual frame in which Theory is now pictured as something singular and precise, a veritable genre of discourse, but also as varied and complex, continually over-flowing its perimeters and throwing shoots in all directions. No single text or restricted corpus can represent the highly elaborated cross-disciplinary space that defines Theory in the humanities today--a larger and less detailed view is required. 125 Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) 130. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 248 Yet, as we shall soon see, there may be one exemplary yet now ghostly figure who can still bring the epistemological and ethical stakes of Theory into sharp focus. Odd, then, that Theory should be treated as a singular genre of discourse in the humanities, for as Vincent B. Leitch has noted, since the end of the second World War it has unceasingly branched into a succession of schools, movements, and trends: formalism, myth criticism, Marxist criticism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, structuralism and semiotics, reader-response criticism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, new historicism, cultural studies, media studies and so on.126 In the period from 1968 to about 1980, especially in the newly emerging field of academic film studies, one still believed in the possibility of Theory as a more or less coherent discursive field that drew on disparate conceptual elements and discourses but was nonetheless unifiable across the broad problematic of ideology and the subject. Any number of books like Rosalind Coward and John Ellis’ Language and Materialism: developments in semiology and the theory of the subject (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977) or Kaja Silverman’s The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford University Press, 1983) argued for the possibility of constructing a unified account of the subject in relation to ideology and culture from the building blocks of textual semiology, psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism, whose foundational model was, implicitly or explicitly, Julia Kristeva’s formidable and fascinating book, La révolution du langage poétique : l’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle, Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Éditions du Seuil, 1974). All of these works, and many others, formed the conceptual background of what I have called the discourse of political modernism, whose discursive and conceptual template was forged in Tel Quel’s “théorie d’ensemble”--a loose amalgam of semiology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism as represented in the work of the very different thinkers united in the pages of the journal such as Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Marcelin Pleynet, Jean-Louis Baudry, and others. By the early seventies, Tel Quel’s théorie d’ensemble, as filtered through the pages of French film journals such 126 Vincent B. Leitch, “Theory Ends,” Profession (2005) 122-128. Recall that Galin Tihanov remarks on a similar multiplicity in “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?”). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 249 as Cahiers du cinéma and Cinéthique, and then transplanted across the English Channel to the newly reorganized journal Screen, was becoming what was simply referred to as film theory. This was the dynamic era of the materialist theory of the subject and its relations to ideology as forged in language or signification.127 From the mid eighties up until the present time, however, Theory is better characterized as a disaggregated and rhizomatic proliferation of fields and problems. In the first part of my genealogy of theory, discursive transformations and displacements occurred across centuries and decades; since the 1980s, it is as if discourse-time has accelerated and space splintered. Conceptual movements coalesce, crest, and spread out in the space of a single decade, or in even more compressed time frames. But within these waves, larger patterns still form. For example, Leitch notes how the poststructuralism of the eighties gives way in the nineties and after to a new wave of cultural studies, which in turn multiplies into a variety of disaggregated yet conceptually individuated sub-fields: body studies, disability studies, whiteness studies, media studies, indigenous studies, narrative studies, porn studies, performance studies, working-class studies, popular culture studies, trauma studies, science studies, and so forth. In a sense, the variability and discontinuity of theory here, as well as the unceasing internal movements of its disjunctive archaeological layers shifting at uneven rates of change, is little different from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except perhaps that the rates of change are exponentially accelerated, and forking paths more numerous. Theory, such a small and simple word, continues to unravel then into a variety of semantic domains and frames of reference that rapidly branch and multiply though not without a certain logic. In addition, each new ramification of theory also seems to inspire renewed criticisms and proclamations of its exhaustion, ending, or passage into history. In “Theory Ends,” Leitch provides a succinct and perspicuous summary, not only of the semantic range of theory in its current uses, but also how it is framed by its detractors. 127 For a deeper and more complex account, see my The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). I will give a fuller account of the discourse of political modernism further on. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 250 In a first sense, theory refers loosely to a range of contemporary schools or movements such as structuralism, semiology, psychoanalysis, and their branching out into the varieties of cultural studies. Here theory is largely synonymous with social criticism, broadly conceived. In its perceived domination of the humanities, it is targeted for critique by conservative scholars devoted to mid-twentieth century models of formal and moral criticism and to preserving a traditional canon of works. In this context, theory is synonymous with “a historically new, postmodern mode of discourse that broaches longstanding borders, fusing literary criticism, philosophy, history, sociology, psychoanalysis, and politics” (Leitch 123). Other versions coalesce around more grounded methodological perspectives that conceive the work of theory as examining the conceptual foundations or contexts of criticism. Here, according to Leitch “theory designates general principles and procedures-methods--as well as the self-reflection employed in all areas of literary and cultural studies. A small but vigorous skirmish against such theory has been enjoined by neopragmatists who oppose foundational principles, with the result that few nowadays defend theory in its most ambitious methodological or scientific pretensions” (Leitch 123). In this context, ambitious metatheoretical work has now yielded to more pragmatic and small scale accounts of theory as a toolbox of ready-to-hand conceptual devices that are deployed contingently, and whose usefulness is judged according to their potential for producing new and innovative critical perspectives. This approach is in turn targeted for criticism by defenders of objective interpretation in the context of New Criticism and hermeneutics. And then there is even a looser conception where “theory denotes professional common sense--what goes without saying and what every specialist knows-so that everyone in the field has a theory, although some people don’t realize it. In this view theory is a sociohistorical construction complete with contradictions and blind spots yet shored up by the current status quo. But the equating of theory with professionally configured common sense paradoxically ends up diluting its specificity, its conflicts, and its counterhegemonic agendas” (123). In contrast to a more rigorous methodological account, this conception of theory as a sort of professional sensus communis is unmarked by the need for epistemological critique or ethical clarification. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 251 The so-called postmodern varieties of theory have a distinctly foreign and specifically French cast. Often referred to as high or grand Theory, this sense still reaches high philosophically and moves along the lines of structuralism and post-structuralism as laid out in the works of Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva, Lyotard, and others. Here opposition has arisen not only from conservative scholars but also from liberal and left theorists who indict Theory for a range of sins: “philosophical idealism, obscurantism, nominalism, and quietism, charges early made famous by certain Marxists, feminists, critical race theorists, and cultural studies scholars” (Leitch 123). Leitch further explains that “Insofar as contemporary theory and postmodernism are often linked with social constructivism, standpoint epistemology, cultural relativism, and popular culture (versus the literary canon), they constitute threats and often targets for conservative thinkers, left- and right-wing” (127 n2). In Part III, we will find similar criticisms arising in the post-Theory debates in contemporary film studies of the nineties, but from the more targeted perspective of promoting a version of theory construction influenced by post-positivist philosophies of science. In every case, however, criticism is generated around similar concerns of epistemology and axiology. The turning point here, as Leitch points out, was the revelation in 1987 of Paul de Man’s early anti-Semitic writings, a moment of great symbolic import that marked both the waning of the dominance of a certain poststructuralism and the increasing influence of new historicism and cultural studies, as well as renewed calls for an end to theory. In an analogous way, Martin Jay has argued that theory seems always to be situated in a semantic network of meanings and values that oppose and deride it, or find it to be irrelevant. In their resistance to theory, these values appeal to a variety of alternative experiences or practices. There is first what Jay beautifully calls “the pathos of ineffability,” which asserts that theoretical concepts are a fortiori violations of the objects they undertake to comprehend.128 In turn, these objects are valued for their resistance to conceptualization as a power of the real that offers categories of experience that are implicitly inconceivable or untheorizable. Here the subsumptive force of theory is viewed 128 “For Theory” in Cultural Semantics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998) 22. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 252 as undermining or being inadequate to the expression of difference, or the particularity of experience as lived. Then there are prereflexive practices that value a deep hermeneutics of reading, looking, or listening as phenomenological attentiveness to objects in their singularity and concreteness in contrast to the abstractions and generalities of theory. Closely related to this idea is belief in the natural intelligibility of narrative as particularized stories through which meaning and valued can be recovered by attentive and sympathetic reading. Jay observes that “The project of recovering the ‘voices,’ of those silenced by dominant accounts of the past derives in large measure from a belief in the irreducibility of unique stories to larger patterns, such as those imposed by theoretical generalization” (“For Theory” 25-26). Finally, there is the position of institutional critique, closely associated with the work of Stanley Fish or Pierre Bordieu, which focuses on institutions and communities of theory from a sociological perspective in order to debunk them as “little more than a tool in the struggle for distinction in cultural fields or power in interpretive communities” (26). In Jay’s view, examining theory in relation to its others demonstrates both its responsiveness and its deep connection to the problems, questions, or experiences that invoke and challenge it: the intractability of objects, the indecisiveness or ambiguity of practical criticism, prereflexive experiences that falter before understanding, the singularity of modes or practices of criticism or interpretation that may be directionless without concepts, and the institutional frameworks that enable acts of theorizing themselves. “[W]hat makes theory necessary, if by itself insufficient,” Jay offers, is precisely the no less blatant incompleteness of its others. That is, in the imperfect world we inhabit, indeed in virtually any world constructed by fallible humans, no possibility of self-sufficient immanence exists on the level of practice, experience, hermeneutic interpretation, narrative intelligibility, or empirical facticity. Nor, to look in the other direction, can we reduce theoretical communities to mere stratagems of power, functional only in the acquisition of cultural capital, social distinction, or institutional control. For in so doing, we ignore precisely the reflexivity, the capacity to reflect on their own institutional Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 253 embeddedness, that necessarily sets such communities apart from others in the world. (“For Theory” 27). At a fundamental level theory in its many variants refers to moments of self-reflexive understanding responsive to the lack of self-sufficient immanence or openness that characterizes both theory and its others, with the proviso that the conceptual powers of theory thus derives from acknowledgment of its epistemological incompleteness. When concepts of theory are correlated to schools and movements, when it is conceived as the subject of intellectual history, or when we target it as an object of thought or critique, no doubt we feel that all things, good or bad, both flower and decline; or depending on our concept of history, occur in waves, cycles, or time-delimited trends. Leitch notes that there have been many ends to theory, which are in fact so many displacements and remapping of concepts of theory: formalism and New Criticism being displaced by structuralism and poststructuralism, then poststructuralism succeeded by British cultural studies, which is in turn spreads out in a disaggregated North American version into the varieties of field studies. Yet across these changes there seem to be certain persistent commitments, arising generally out of the projects of poststructuralism: the deconstruction of binary concepts and the leveling of hierarchies, a commitment to interdisciplinarity, and the desire to preserve theory as a form of social criticism and as a way of identifying sites of cultural resistance, especially through the analysis and redress of discriminatory attitudes and practices. Soon we will also see that the persistence of theory is tied ineluctably to the concept of ideology and its critique, or that the continual analysis and evasion of the snares of power requires a specific relation to theory, with its promise of possibilities for the liberation of thought and the projection of other modes of existence. Theory passes and returns, is challenged, debated, and critiqued, yet endures with a kind of utopian promise. The still unexamined question, however, is why theory should persevere as a site of persistent anxiety and aggression, as well as other complex emotions? What Paul de Man famously characterized as “resistance to theory” has now been replaced by a more general malaise or uneasiness, whose ironies and paradoxes are expressed by the fact that theory’s endings are recurrent, multiple, and interminable, and that each Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 254 proclamation of its passing, every mournful eulogy or triumphant grave-dance, yields renewed and often powerful examinations of its powers, goals, histories, meanings, and values. To feel one’s self at the end of something inspires reflection on its ends, which may imply a defensiveness toward past incarnations, nostalgia and longing for better days, or anxiety before an uncertain future. However, times of uncertain ends and historical self-examination suggest another possible direction. “The past of theory demonstrates that theory has a future,” Leitch concludes. “[N]either the inheritance of theoretical concepts, problems, and debates nor the search for effective methods and pragmatic protocols nor the influence of perennial theory texts nor the borrowing from neighboring fields nor the critique of the status quo seems likely to disappear. Like a riverbed, theory changes yet abides. . . . Even if passed and mourned, wouldn't theory return like a ghost in unexpected forms?” (124-125). 20. “Suddenly, an Age of Theory”129 I have strayed somewhat from the task of accounting for the continuities and discontinuities of the passage from the discourse of signification to that of ideology and culturalism. And other puzzlements await further on, such as how to imagine what comes after “contemporary” film theory, and how to evaluate a post-Theoretical moment in film and media studies, or the arts and humanities? I have no intention here of writing even a short history of contemporary film theory. (How to define the “contemporary,” such a paradoxical concept! Is it not the present we eternally occupy and the near future that hovers just in front of it? How far into the past does it extend?) Instead, these contextual comments are meant to give purchase on the curious logic and temporality of the meanings of theory after 1970, and to show the possibilities both for theory’s persistence and its potential transformation into something else, what we may want to call philosophy. 129 From Elizabeth Bruss’s Beautiful Theories: the spectacle of discourse in contemporary criticism (Balitmore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 255 Not a history of contemporary theory, then, but something like the elements of a historiography of concepts, enunciative modalities, and discursive formations in which developments in the academic study of film might stand, pars pro toto, for the vicissitudes of theory in the humanities more generally. That Theory should come to describe or identify a genre of discourse, or a practice of thought and writing is, I believe, a product of the 1970s. Before 1950, for example, one hardly thought about the notion that there might be a canon of aesthetic writing about film; before 1960, it was uncommon to refer to this canon as “film theory.” (In a similar vein, the annual bibliography of the Modern Language Association established a rubric for “Literary Criticism and Literary Theory” only in 1967; before the rubrics where “Aesthetics” and “Literary Criticism.”) My principle argument in the preceding sections was that in many respects Christian Metz invented and imagined the place from which film theory could be enunciated; or more accurately, his early writings were the focal point of a number of intersecting discourses wherein the practice of theory takes shape conceptually and discursively, not only within the framework of filmology and postwar film criticism, but also with respect to the larger movements of formalism, semiology, and structuralism. At the same time, like filmology, semiology had no need of a special concept of theory. With its proximity to anthropology and to linguistics, it basked in the reflected light of the natural sciences and of imagined progress towards a unified conception of the human sciences. Justifiably or not, it could take for granted the presence of a common vocabulary and research program framed by a method, and the potential for refining and enlarging its domain through internal critical debate. Before the mid-sixties, as a word and a concept theory had no special value except in local instances. And when it was invoked, it was usually a gesture of pointing towards the “science” in the human sciences. From the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, however, the institutionalization of cinema studies in universities in North America and the United Kingdom became identified with a certain idea of theory that indicated the eruption of a new discontinuity. This was less a theory in the vernacular, abstract, or natural scientific senses than an interdisciplinary commitment to concepts and methods derived from literary semiology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism, echoed in the broader influence of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 256 structuralism and post-structuralism on the humanities.130 In the newly emerging discipline of film studies, this presumed synthesis coalesced around what I have called the discourse of political modernism. According to what logic, and within which presumed genealogy, did this discourse lay claim to being called “theory”? From the perspective of the creation of academic film studies, especially in North America and the United Kingdom, the contemporary concept of film theory is woven from two intersecting genetic ribbons, one internal to the formation of the discipline and one external to it, though both profoundly marked by the histories of French structuralism and poststructuralism. The internal line winds through the interlocking trajectories of Aristarco, Mitry, and Metz, and leads toward the pioneering work of Dudley Andrew. Call this the archaeological line where in very different ways these authors contribute to the academic study of film by constructing a canon of film theory and framing its history--laying out monuments and main authors, identifying major concepts, and drawing forth continuities and points of possible synthesis. The first collections of the 1960s such as Daniel Talbot’s Film: An Anthology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960) and Richard Dyer MacCann’s Film: a montage of theories (E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1966) were early attempts at historical recovery, though without any special concept of the function and status of theory as a discourse. Following on from Peter Wollen’s seminal Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1969), in the 1970s the idea of film theory achieves a new presence and stature in the first edition of Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen’s Film theory and criticism: introductory readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), the publication of the first volume of Bill Nichols’ Movies and Methods (Berkeley: University 130 It is interesting to note the place “theory” served in the battles to create new disciplines in the 1970s such as womens’ studies, film studies, or postcolonial studies. In each of these cases theory appeared as something central to the formation of new areas of study, yet often sitting uneasily within them. The place of the new French feminisms within the history of women’s studies in the 70s and 80s would itself make for an interesting history. One attempt to explore this problem (and all the more interesting since it comes from the other side of the Atlantic) is François Cusset’s French theory : how Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort with Josephine Berganza and Marlon Jones (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 257 of California Press, 1976), and also and above all in Dudley Andrew’s deeply influential critical assessment of The Major Film Theories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). In the French context, one might also add Dominique Noguez’s collection Cinéma: théorie, lectures (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973) and then, Jacques Aumont, et al. Esthétique du film (Paris: Nathan, 1983). Although each of these books has distinct and often contesting perspectives and critical commitments, the anthologies in particular are marked not only by a desire for historical preservation and presentation, but also by the idea that there are conceptual interests and continuities that thread through and unify film theory as a kind or genre of discourse where Münsterberg, Arnheim, Kracauer, and Balázs dialogue with Pudovkin and Eisenstein or Bazin, who then discourse with Metz, Eco, or Wollen. What is most fascinating and original in Andrew’s 1976 book in particular is not only the idea that film theory has a history, but also that there is something like an independent structural core to the concept of theory itself that gives it identity and consistency, and serves as a basis for contrasting, comparing, and evaluating approaches in their similarities and differences. Thus film theories--despite their debates, conflicts, differences of approach and method--are conceived as belonging to an identifiable set, perhaps describable as Theory as such. In addition, both Signs and Meaning and The Major Film Theories make present and perspicuous a line of thought that remains mostly implicit in the other works. Like the early Metz before them, these books evince a certain historical self-consciousness where theory comes more and more to identify and differentiate itself, to stake its claim as a particular way of discoursing about film or art, with its own special conceptual concerns, rhetorical strategies, and enunciative positions; in other words, these works exhibit a metatheoretical perspective as a critical reflection on the logical status of theory as a practice distinct from criticism or history. Andrew sees this most clearly when in writes in the introductory pages of Concepts in Film Theory that Christian Metz’s landmark review of Jean Mitry in 1964 “is not so much a break as a turning of theory around upon itself,” of theory inventing itself, as it were, by taking itself as an object of critical reflection.131 In a strong sense, this critical reflection only became possible when 131 Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (New York: Oxford, 1984) 17. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 258 film study had become an institutional and academic discourse, a process coalescing in the seven-year period separating Wollen and Andrew’s books. The reflexivity of the metatheoretical attitude is as much historical as conceptual. The process of inventing or remapping a certain concept of theory as a genre of discourse, and as a special kind of critical or epistemological perspective, occurs through a backwards glance that seeks out ancestors and traces continuities, retrospectively and retroactively, in precedent discourses. This genealogical research produced valuable historical documentation, analysis, and context. But also, like an orphaned child searching for lost relatives, it was often guided by the need to find its proper family name, to construct and reaffirm an imaginary identity of which it felt bereft--hence the often retrojecting character of early periods of theory formation, which reclaim “traditions” while thoroughly transforming them in their own image, or rather, the image to which they aspired. The emergence of contemporary film theory was no different in this respect. This effect is particularly striking in the editorial transformation of Cahiers du cinéma in the years immediately following the student and worker uprisings in France in May and June of 1968. Well into the 1960s, the editorial policy of Cahiers was marked by a continued commitment to auteur criticism and to the promotion of a serious cinephilic culture. Despite having been founded by André Bazin (would Bazin have considered himself a “film theorist”?), one would hardly call the magazine a journal of film theory, even though it published several important early texts by Christian Metz, as well as occasional works of historiographical interest such as George and Ruth Sadoul’s filmographic and bibliographic accounts of Pudovkin and Vertov. However, through the spring and summer of 1968 the magazine underwent an editorial shift in response to the political and social crisis in France, first by turning away from Hollywood to historical and contemporary filmmaking understood as challenging mainstream filmmaking, both formally and politically, and then in January 1969 by taking an explicitly “theoretical” as well as distinctly political turn that would, by the end of 1969, result in a crisis of ownership at the magazine. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 259 The transformation of Cahiers du cinéma by theory was all the more striking considering its independence; that is, the absence of an institutional context, whether academic or party political. (The same might be said for the British journal Screen after its break with the British Film Institute in 1971). Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the institutional context briefly shifted from an academic framework to one defined by the flourishing of independent reviews and little magazines. This theoretical turn took place on two interrelated fronts. First, beginning with issue 209 in February 1969, Cahiers began a major project of translating the principal published works of Sergei Eisenstein, which continued month by month throughout the early seventies. Many of these texts were hardly known outside of the Soviet Union. At the same time, this work of resurrection and review was guided by the desire to recover a history of international Marxist thought in both filmmaking and theory, and to situate the magazine in relation to that history. As the editors wrote in concluding their famous editorial, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” in the fall of 1969, “in our view, the only possible direction for criticism is to build on the theoretical research of Russian filmmakers of the 1920s (above all, Eisenstein), in the attempt to elaborate and apply a critical theory of cinema, a specific mode of apprehending rigorously determined objects, with direct reference to the method of dialectical materialism.”132 Cahiers was not alone in this respect. A newer journal, Cinéthique was engaged in similar work, and in London Screen produced important translations and contextual work on Vertov, Eisenstein, Kuleshov, Russian Formalism, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin, as well as on Soviet Constructivism and 132 Jean Narboni and Jean-Louis Comolli, “Cinéma/Idéologie/Critique,” Cahiers du cinéma 216 (October-November 1969) 15; my translation. The most well-known English translation, by Susan Bennett, appeared in Screen 12.1 (Spring 1971) 27-36. In retrospect, this translation seems tendentious in a way that smooths out the style of the text to make it seem more formal and “scientific,” indeed structuralist. In my translation, I have tried to preserve the more writerly style of the text, so influenced by writing in Tel Quel, and have retained the implied references to deconstruction and other aspects of poststructuralism. French readers of the time also would not have missed that the way “dialectical materialism” is referred to here references the attempts of Althusser and his followers to build a Marxist philosophy out of a critique of “empiricist” epistemologies. The language of the Cahiers’ editorial clearly implies a desire to develop a Marxist and scientific film criticism in the context of Althusser’s epistemological writings. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 260 production art in Lef and Novy Lef.133 It might also be said that like Tel Quel, Change, Cahiers pour l’analyse, and many other journals of the time, the commitment to left politics through theory was made possible because of the independent standing of these reviews with respect to the university or other mainstream institutional settings. In the May-June number of 1970, Cahiers also produced a special double issue devoted to “Russia in the 1920s” that included an interview with Lev Kuleshov and translations of texts by Vertov, Eisenstein, Tynanov, Eikhenbaum, and Kozintsev, as well as Lenin, Khlebnikov and Meyerhold. Also published were important contextual and historical essays, including an extensive introduction by Jean Narboni to two texts by Eikhenbaum and Tynanov from the Poetika Kino. It would appear that Eikhenbaum’s 1946 call to theory in film was finally being answered, and in fact, with the exception of the now all but forgotten filmology, virtually all of the errant discursive streams I have described in the preceding pages flow here towards a single watershed. First, there is the historical or archaeological perspective opened up by Aristarco and Metz that situates classical theory in relation to contemporary developments, though now seen from a committed Marxist perspective. (Indeed, as we shall see momentarily, the peculiar contemporaneity of 1970 is to situate both Theory and Marxism in a new and precisely defined framework; this will be the external genetic line.) In fact, Narboni credits the Soviet montage school with being the first movement “to think of the cinema in theory,” or indeed to create a “school” of theory guided by an ideology, that of the Bolshevik revolution.134 Only by creating itself through theory or by inventing a concept of theory, 133 For a deeper review of the theoretical commitments and historical context of this period in both France and the United Kingdom, see my Crisis of Political Modernism, especially Chapters One and Three. Another still essential point of reference is Sylvia Harvey’s May ’68 and Film Culture (London: British Film Institute, 1978). For a brief history of Screen, see Philip Rosen’s “Screen and 1970s Film Theory” in Inventing Film Studies, eds. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) 264-297. Rosen situates the project of Screen and contemporary film study with respect to the history of Western Marxist critical theory in his invaluable doctoral thesis, The Concept of Ideology and Contemporary Film Criticism: A Study of the Position of the Journal Screen in the Context of the Marxist Theoretical Tradition, dissertation, University of Iowa, 1978. 134 “Introduction à ‘Poetika Kino’,” Cahiers du cinéma 220-221 (May-June 1970) 57 n3; my translation. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 261 Narboni argues, could the Soviet cinema break with an earlier ideology of realism and an idea of film as serving only to reproduce literary or theatrical works, and thus to think of itself as a specific artistic practice. No doubt, Narboni understands this theoretical rupture as being fueled by its revolutionary context, just as Cahiers’ own “epistemological break” was inspired by May ’68 and its aftermath. If there is a special concept of theory at work in post-revolutionary Russia, it is no doubt influenced by the Marxist and Leninist characterization of the relation of theory to practice. But more specifically, as theory Narboni insists on the special contexts of OPOYAZ and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, as well as the general interest of Russian Formalism in the cinema. Here the archaeological trend meets contemporary theory in a specific conjuncture. Noting that the work of the Formalists was hardly known in France before 1958, the date of the French translation of Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, and is only really rediscovered as read through the history of structuralism in Todorov’s 1965 collection, Théorie de la littérature, Narboni reasserts here the central interest of Eikhenbaum’s “Theory of the ‘formal’ method,” not only for the historical texts he is placing in context, but also to the more general projects of structuralism and semiology, which must now guide critical work in and on film. Indeed Narboni places Eikhenbaum and Tynanov’s early treatments of language and film explicitly in relation to the work of Christian Metz. In all of this, however, there is also a disruption with respect to the discourse of signification, still so present and close both geographically and temporally. In both his general introduction to the issue, and in his text on the Poetika Kino, Narboni orients the history of Russian Formalism and film theory not only in relation to the critical project of structuralism, but also with respect to a break or mutation in the development of a critical semiology: “It is not our place to account for the considerable significance of these works for the fields of literature and linguistics, of structural research and to the ‘human sciences,’ nor to explain the movement through which a modern semiotic, which incorporates their theoretical accomplishments, also tends to overtake them and to deconstruct their philosophical presuppositions through the elaboration of a theory of textual production as signifying practice. We will make do here as well with referring only to the work in progress around Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva” (52; my Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 262 emphasis). Here Narboni’s text opens out centrifugally to the external genetic ribbon where contemporary film theory rapidly takes shape in the context of a more general discursive transformation, where the poststructuralism of Derrida and Kristeva, both authors closely associated with Tel Quel, displaces and refashions structuralism. Contemporary film theory thus unfolds out of a larger conjuncture where a certain idea of Theory is taking shape, not only under the influence of Derrida and Kristeva’s texts of the late sixties and early seventies, but also, and especially, under the influence of Louis Althusser. 21. The Fifth Element The semiology of signifying practices . . . is ready to give a hearing to any or all of those efforts which, ever since the elaboration of a new position for the speaking subject, have been renewing and reshaping the status of meaning within social exchanges to a point where the very order of language is being renewed: Joyce, Burroughs, Sollers. This is a moral gesture, inspired by a concern to make intelligible, and therefore socializable, what rocks the foundations of sociality. --Julia Kristeva, “The System and the Speaking Subject” In The Crisis of Political Modernism, I suggest that the contemporary moment of film theory coincides with the emergence of a set of questions and problems that at the time where felt to be both urgent and new. In turning to the concept of ideology, and the possibility of opposing ideology with a scientific or “theoretical practice,” film studies began to discover itself in theory, and to reorient and define itself in relation to a left tradition of art and cultural criticism. The emergence of semiology as the study of the social life of signs was linked early on to “deconstruction”--in the sense of uncovering and displaying analytically the unconscious structures underlying all symbolic expressions--as well as a desire to promote social change through a transformation of language. This critical tendency is also evident in Formalism’s interest in avant-garde poetry, such as Russian Futurism, and its implicit if uncomfortable relation to the Soviet Revolution, and to the interest of many of the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 263 discursive founders of structuralism in Marx and Freud. However, before 1968 the connection between semiological analysis and ideological criticism is not self-evident. The most significant exception is Roland Barthes’s 1956 essay, “Myth Today” where a critique of ideology is repetitively linked to the demystificatory potential of semiology as an analytical science. The renewed assertion of this linkage in the turn to the seventies will signal a new mutation of theory where the discourse of signification becomes one of ideology. Like theory, ideology is largely absent as a special concept in structuralism. Through retroactively reinvoked in film studies and cultural studies of the 1970s and 1980s, Barthes’s political gestures in 1956 are rather the exception that proves the rule. The concept is almost completely absent in the work of Christian Metz until his pathbraking turn to a Marxist-inflected psychoanalysis in 1975 with the publication of “The Imaginary Signifier” in Communications 23. One might say, then, that contemporary film theory emerges with Cahiers du cinéma’s “theoretical break,” which was first affirmed as such in Jean Narboni and Jean-Louis Comolli’s editorial of October/November 1969, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” In this deeply influential text, Comolli and Narboni proposed to reorient the magazine towards a scientific critical approach, a ”theoretical practice” of criticism, where Althusser’s critique of idealist or empiricist ideologies would be welded to formal and semiotic analysis as a way of understanding cinema’s potential for either perpetuating or disrupting its relationship to the dominant ideology of capitalism. In “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” the problem of signification is decisively reoriented around that of ideology, which now becomes a kind of tutor-concept. For example, when Comolli and Narboni assert in an oft-quoted statement that every film is a political film, they suggest at the same time (and not without some consequent friction with the writings of Althusser and his followers) that film is an ideological practice, and moreover, that a scientific film criticism can identify a scale of varying relations between ideology and form. This idea is aptly represented in Cahiers’ well known typology of seven categories ranging from films “which are bathed in ideology in every part, expressing and transmitting it without discrepancy or perversion; they are blindly loyal, and above all, are blind to this loyalty itself” (13) to films Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 264 that perform a double action on their ideological assimilation. First, by direct political action: at the level of “signifieds,” through the explicit treatment of various political subjects (treatment--not in the sense of discussing, repeating, or paraphrasing, but rather in the transitive sense: action on--of an explicitly political subject that initiates a turn of criticism on ideology, which supposes a theoretical work absolutely contrary to the ideological); a political act tied necessarily . . . to a critical de-construction of the system of representation. At the level of their process of formal invention [au niveau du processus de constitution des formes], films like Not Reconciled, The Edge, or Terra em Transe carry out an interrogation of cinematographic representation (and mark a break with the constitutive tradition of this representation). We repeat that only this double action (at the level of “signifiers” as well as “signifieds”) has a chance of being effective against (in) the dominant ideology: double action, indissoluble, economical-political/formal. (13) In between these two poles there is another, more ambiguous category, wherein a symptomatic reading can locate in an otherwise apparently non-progressive film the possibility of an internal critique, and a variable or discrepant relation to ideology: Here the ideology has not been transposed as such by the [conservative or reactionary] intentions of the author of the film . . . but rather it encounters obstacles before which it deviates or swerves, and sees itself exhibited, shown, denounced by the filmic framework in which it is held, and which plays against it, its limits are seen and at the same time transgressed, forced by the critical work, a work which can be detected by an oblique or symptomatic reading, which beyond the apparent formal coherence of the film grasps its discrepancies, its fault-lines, cracks which an ordinary film is incapable of provoking. The ideology becomes a textual effect, which does not persist as such--only the work of the film allows its presentation, its exposition. (14) Several features are worth noting in this linking of signifying practice to ideological practice. First is the persistence of a semiological vocabulary (“signifier/signified”) in a context where the fundamental concepts of structuralism are being displaced and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 265 reworked in other domains. This retention of a certain structuralism within an otherwise poststructuralist context will be a persistent feature of contemporary film theory within the larger domain of Theory in general. Second, as I have discussed at length in The Crisis of Political Modernism, the evaluative dimension of this scale, and others like it produced at the time, is based on the assumption that signifying practices produce “knowledge effects,” and may do so to varying degrees. Theory frames, reveals, makes visible, or gives access to the possibility of an otherwise occluded epistemological value or relation, in the text or in relation to the text. Tutored overall by a broad binary system that opposes realism to modernism, or the classical text to modernist écriture, mainstream filmmaking is considered as producing an illusory “reality-effect” that transparently communicates the dominant ideology in contradistinction to an avant-garde practice, which working at the level of form or of the “signifier” will reflexively interrupt this transmission. For Comolli and Narboni, “The cinema’s most important task, therefore, when cognizant of the nature of the system that makes it an ideological instrument, is to problematize [mettre en question] the system of representation itself: to put it into question as cinema and to provoke a slippage or a rupture with its ideological function” (“Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” 13). Third, the possibility of this disruption in the field of representation, of recognizing the potential breaks with or within a signifying practice, all turn on criteria of representation and visibility. This criterion of visibility is ineluctably linked to the preceding notions of epistemological value and formal innovation, such that formal work on the signifier is thought to produce knowledge--or the possibility of a knowledge to be completed by criticism--of how film functions as an ideological practice. Political modernism is thus a kind of epistemological modernism where the presumed knowledge effect is a making visible of the ideology-effect. Fourth is the persistence across a range of critical writing of the rhetoric of the break or rupture, within or from ideology, which produces knowledge as an interval--the opening of a reflexive space within the text, or again, in relation to the text. In this manner, theory is linked to epistemology as, paradoxically, the axiological dimension of the discourse; it functions as a sort of value produced, reflexively and parthenogenetically, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 266 in practices where the break with realism is made self-apparent. It is not just the concept of ideology that forms the core of contemporary film theory, the axis on which all other questions turn, but more importantly, the possibility that a theoretical practice will emerge in a break from ideological practices, and one with real cognitive and demystificatory effects. Throughout the discourse of political modernism, whether in the film journals or in the larger context of French poststructuralism, this transformation of cognitive value is presented as a turn from idealism to materialism, which is in turned mapped as a passage from illusion to knowledge. What is unclear, however, though fiercely debated within the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, Cinéthique, and then Screen, is the location of this materialist, theoretical practice, which seems to float uncertainly in the overlapping spaces of aesthetic practice, on the one hand, and critical method on the other. In this context, the unanswered and in fact undecidable question of the discourse of political modernism is: where is this knowledge effect produced? In the film through formal work on representation, or in a specific kind of critical or even philosophical work? And in either case, what is the mechanism for producing these knowledge effects? Eventually, we will have to turn to a deeper examination of Althusser’s critique of idealist or empiricist epistemologies to unpack these questions, and to know better what the value of theory is in this context. However, there is a fifth element missing from these characterizations of theoretical practice, though nonetheless implied everywhere in them. The possibility of producing knowledge effects or not requires the presence of a subject or spectator as the target for these effects of recognition and misrecognition. If semiology appears to one side of dialectical materialism, psychoanalysis must now appear on the other. Structuralism’s discourse without a subject, which preserves it scientificity in theory through the relation of sign and system to meaning, is now transformed as what Julia Kristeva calls alternately semiotic, signifiance, or the subject in process. Indeed, the problem of how to characterize this subject--What is its place within or with respect to the signifying processes of cinema or other aesthetic practices? How and where it is produced? What are its activities or not, and how is it differentiated?--will all be guiding questions for contemporary theory, and the principle compass points on its map. The problem of the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 267 subject will also supply criteria for understanding, first, the synthetic moment of Theory across semiology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, and then its disaggregation into accounts of the feminine, queer, black, postcolonial or subaltern subject. For the moment, however, it is interesting to note the relative absence of the subject as such in French film theory between 1968 and 1975, despite the fact that it is the fundamental question implied everywhere in writings of the period. To achieve real force and presence within Theory and the discourse of political modernism, the concept must wait first, externally, for Julia Kristeva to integrate fully the work of Jacques Lacan into her accounts of signifiance and signifying practice, and then, internally, for psychoanalysis to erupt fully in film theory through the work of Jean-Pierre Oudart, Jean-Louis Baudry, and finally Christian Metz. The launching of contemporary film theory’s psychoanalytic moment happens dramatically with the publication in 1975 of a special issue of Communications on psychoanalysis and cinema, edited by Metz, Thierry Kuntzel, and Raymond Bellour, and continues in earnest in Screen in essays by Stephen Heath, Laura Mulvey, Jacqueline Rose, Colin MacCabe, and others. (Metz’s long and erudite methodological account of the transformation of the study of signification by psychoanalysis, “The Imaginary Signifier,” which opens Communications 23, was translated almost immediately in Screen.) In all of this work, ideology is conceptualized not just as a discourse, but as a specular relation produced both within film as a discourse through point of view and deictic relations, and in the situation of recording and projection, as a series of mutually supportive dialectical relations. Ideology is considered as a special kind of practice here, one that produces, through film form and projection, an almost inescapable regime of sight and power. In Jean-Louis Baudry’s influential essay, “Cinema: ideological effects produced by the basic apparatus,” cinema becomes a kind of philosophy machine for producing and perpetuating an idealist perception and conception of the world. Cahiers du cinéma’s version of political modernism, and its commitment to a critical practice conceived in the context of a dialectical materialism, orients itself explicitly and directly within a discursive framework constructed and refined in Tel Quel in a ten year period running from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. Published between Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 268 1960 and 1982, the history of Tel Quel as an independent review of literature, criticism, and philosophy runs parallel to all the major conceptual developments of structuralism and poststructuralism in France. In The Future of Theory, Jean-Michel Rabaté also notes how Tel Quel takes up a line of thought forming as early as 1953 in Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, where the political responsibility and possibility of literature is addressed in terms of a “morality of form.”135 Though Tel Quel would suffer a variety of editorial and political upheavals and transformations, its unifying aim throughout the sixties was to link a cultural politics of the avant-garde to contemporary experimental literature while promoting a new “science” of writing and textuality. Key components of Tel Quel’s program from the beginning were to publish together formal experiments in literature (for example, Ponge, Michaux, Bataille, Artaud, Pound, and many writers of the nouveau roman) with critical accounts of problems of language and literature, all within the common framework of a transformative cultural politics that imagined radical literary experimentation as a site for cultural resistance and a renewal of language. Under the dynamic but often contentious leadership of Philippe Sollers, the nature of the journal’s politics would change--from a disquieting silence on the conflict in Algeria, to a rapprochement and then break with the French Communist Party leading to a phase of militant Maoism, and finally ending in a reactionary flirtation with the nouveaux philosophes--but the linking of modernism, writing, and politics remained constant. The force of this constancy came from the commitment to place poetic practice in a dialogue or dialectic with a theory of literature, a force given impetus not only by structuralism and the presence of structuralist writers like Barthes, Gennette, Eco, and others in the pages of the journal, but also by the “rediscovery” of Russian Formalism through the work of Todorov and then Kristeva. Indeed the sense of theory as a specific alignment between literary experimentation, critical self-reflection on the immanence of poetic language, and the promise of cultural change is no doubt inspired by the insertion of the Formalist conception of theory into this network of conceptual commitments. 135 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). See especially, 71-76. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 269 Nevertheless, the shift from theory to Theory is leveraged by another conceptual turn in which the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism was marked by a rapid transformation of the conceptual field that took place largely within the pages of Tel Quel. This shift begins with the first contributions of Derrida and Kristeva.136 While Derrida deconstructed an entire structuralist architecture that associated speech with the site of truth and the presence of thought to itself, and which tried to master difference through systems of binary terms, Kristeva was busy remapping the foundational structuralist concepts of sign and system while extending them in new directions. Arriving in Paris from Bulgaria on Christmas eve, 1965, Kristeva’s presence at the École Pratique des Hautes Études was quickly and strongly felt through Barthes’s mentorship and her participation in his seminar; her association with Tel Quel was sealed through marriage to Philippe Sollers in 1967. In particular, Kristeva’s work of the late sixties was deeply influential in transforming the discursive terrain of semiology, helping to reorient it in a synthetic way towards psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism while introducing a new series of influential concepts, for example, intertexuality, genotext and phenotext, signifying practice, signifiance, the subject in process, and a new concept of Text as an infinite productivity of meaning. In Rabaté’s account, Tel Quel thus drafted the project for a poststructuralist Theory where a “combination of Saussure, read by Derrida, of Marx, read by Althusser, and of Freud, read by Lacan, provided a fundamental trilogy mapping a new scientific and critical knowledge” (Future of Theory 87). In brief, these are the elements of the “theory of textual production as signifying practice” referenced by Jean Narboni. And if a contemporary film theory is emerging in the pages of magazines like Cahiers du cinéma and Screen in the early 1970s, not to mention a new notion of Theory as such across the arts and human sciences, it owes much to a network of concepts presented and refined in the pages of Tel Quel. At the same time, this special concept of Theory, or the acknowledgment and promotion of 136 Derrida’s first publication in the review, an essay on Artaud entitled “La parole soufflée,” appeared in 1965; Kristeva’s first contribution, “Towards a semiology of paragrams,” was published in 1967. Both writers would continue to publish important essays in the journal, as well as books in the series “Collection Tel Quel” at La Seuil, at least until Derrida was publicly criticised as an idealist philosopher in 1974. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 270 Theory as a practice, came only gradually into focus even within the pages of Tel Quel. Nonetheless, the standard was clearly raised with the publication of a collection in 1968 entitled, Théorie d’ensemble (Éditions La Seuil). It is interesting to note the invocation of “theory” here, and the suggestion of the existence of a general Theory in a little magazine that intermittently, then permanently after 1967, appended “Science/Literature” to its title. (After 1970, it would also add “Philosophy/Politics.”) For the most part, Tel Quel had no special concept of theory before this point in time. Or perhaps it is better to say that the appearance of the collection in 1968 marked an evolution in the concept, now come to the fore, resulting from twinned influences dating from 1965: first, a new appreciation of the Russian Formalist idea of a theory of literature, and then a particularly French Marxist concept of theory associated with the sudden prominence of Althusser after the publication of For Marx and Reading Capital. As will be seen in a moment, the idea of theory, of there being a practice of theory, is explicitly Althusserian and is not so far distant from the meaning of “science” as evoked by Tel Quel. In the same year a Group for Theoretical Studies was created with contributions from Sollers, Kristeva, Derrida, Jean-Joseph Goux and others, and a conference organized with La Nouvelle critique linked the review’s theory and practice of the text to Marx’s critique of political economy and the concept of ideology, with explicit reference to the work of Althusser. Without making any judgments of value (and I will still defend any number of Althusser’s concepts, psychoanalysis, and certain approaches from semiology), what is most striking in the effort to project a unified picture of theory in the late sixties and early seventies was the confidence that a common framework could be drawn from such conceptually and historically diverse sources. To make this claim is not to delegitimate individual works or conceptual innovations in either Althusser, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, or Kristeva. Rather what interests me is the desire or drive in this moment that wants, as the writers of Tel Quel expressed it, “une théorie d’ensemble”: the idea that an otherwise diverse group of writers, perhaps joined by certain conceptual family resemblances but otherwise very diverse and even contestatory in their different approaches to problems of philosophy, history, meaning, and politics, would project themselves as contributing to a collective theory. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 271 What does it mean, then, for Tel Quel to evoke a “théorie d’ensemble”? “Ensemble” is conjoined significantly to théorie here as a way of invoking a whole constellation of references: a collection of texts, a theoretical corpus, a collective or group theory, and indeed a theory, like structuralism, tending towards a formalizing science. The reference to the mathematical set theory of the Bourbaki Group (“théorie des ensembles”) would not have been missed by cultured French readers. Nonetheless, if science referred first to linguistics and structuralism in the journal, it was now more clearly allied to Althusser’s epistemological defense of dialectical materialism. Citing the important work of Patrick Ffrench on the history Tel Quel, Rabaté also notes how the introduction to the collection pushes the sense of a corpus in another direction where “Theory hesitates between a radical philosophical questioning of literary concepts and the more etymological sense of a ‘list’ of authorities, or the ritual ‘procession’ of tutelary figures invoked and yoked together” (Future of Theory 85).137 The brief introduction to the volume, “Division de l’ensemble”--which begins significantly with citations from Mallarmé and Marx (“Ideas do not exist separately from language”)-sets out in an admirably concise way both the historical precursors and the new directions of Tel Quel’s theoretical practice. The very first paragraph signals the importance of a “’formalism’, linked to the birth of ‘structuralism’” that retroactively made apparent a critical rupture in ways of approaching the “so-called literary” text.138 The scare quotes are significant in that the introduction marks a series of historical displacements that will finally yield in Tel Quel’s version of poststructuralism the conceptual framework wherein the senses of contemporary theory are honed in their break with an “ideology of linguistics” (“Division” 22). The editorial notes a specific kind of historical process, “also 137 See Ffrench’s The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (1950-1983) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), as well as “Introduction” and “Chronology” in The Tel Quel Reader, eds. Patrick Ffrench and Roland-François Lack (London: Routledge, 1998) 1-18. 138 “Division de l’ensemble” in Théorie d’ensemble (Paris: La Seuil, 1968) 7-10; trans. Patrick Ffrench as “Division of the Assembly” in The Tel Quel Reader, 21. Original page numbers are given in italics wherever the translation has been modified. In Tel Quel 31 (Fall 1967), Sollers published a short essay entitled “Programme” that anticipated “Division de l’ensemble” in interesting ways. It represents, perhaps, the first eruption of a special concept of Theory in the journal. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 272 verifiable in the history of science,” where “a reworking of foundations always occurs, not in the move that immediately precedes the revision, but rather in the movement that precedes this move” [un remaniement de base se fait toujours, non sur le coup qui précède immédiatement celui de la refonte, mais sur le coup qui précède ce coup] (21, 8). The references to Althusserian epistemology, where sciences are formed in a process of rupture with their ideological precursors, would also not have passed unnoticed. But the immediate sense of this passage is to mark out a new space for Theory not only in a displacement that links structuralism to surrealism, formalism, and the birth of structural linguistics in the 1920s, but also in a precedent genealogy that threads through Lautréamont and Mallarmé, Marx and Freud--Marxism and psychoanalysis yoked to avant-garde French poetry. Here are two epistemological breaks, as it were, combined with a retrojection that is meant to validate Tel Quel’s own vision of a literary political modernism linked to psychoanalysis and Marxism. Although the volume includes a great number of writers associated with the journal, the introduction foregrounds, as discursive founders of contemporary theory, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida in whose work is manifested a series of transformative concepts: writing, text, unconscious, history, work, trace, production, scene. The introduction also stresses the importance of Lacan and Althusser as theoretical “levers” throughout the volume. These three discursive authors are then attributed with laying out the three main axes of an open space where theory and writing interact on multiple planes. For example, Foucault’s essay on Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Distance, aspect, origine,” is credited with identifying a specific milieu where “signifying practice” is exercised, not as poetry or fiction, but rather in an écriture that produces an open, productive, and nonrepresentational space. Barthes’s essay on Sollers, “Drame, poème, roman,” sets out the potential for a new analysis of Text as a practice founded necessarily in theory, where new forms of writing decenter both the subject and history. What is at stake here the anonymous editor (probably Sollers) writes, “is to enlarge the tear in the symbolic system in which Western modernity was born and continues to live . . . in order to decenter it, to withdraw its thousand-year old privileges, such that a new writing (and not a new style) can appear . . . .” (“Division” 22-23, 9). In turn, Derrida’s text is assayed as inscribing a Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 273 theoretical leap where the concept of différance dislodges writing as the sign of truth, and opens a space critical of “all the metaphysical sediments deposited in the ‘human sciences’” (23, 9). These three dimensions of writing, finally, suggest a fourfold project, which would be the collective project of Theory as such: to unleash a movement capable of mapping out a discontinuous history of text in their points of difference and conjuncture; to elaborate concepts adequate to rethinking this history of texts and of signifiance; to unfold a plural history or histories as a way of “communicating theory and practice through a series of radical breaks precisely identifiable in their time” (23); and finally, “to articulate a politics logically linked to a non-representational dynamic of writing” (23; all emphases in the original text). The editorial introduction to Théorie d’ensemble can thus be read as a road map to political modernism, especially in the desire to link “a politics logically linked to a nonrepresentational dynamic of writing” and “the construction of the relations of this writing to historical materialism and to dialectical materialism” (“Division” 23). In this respect, the emergence of Theory is best understood as a series of overlapping influences, weaving and turning around one another in a complex series of folds and intercalations. (Significantly, however, the tides of influence flow only in one direction--while “French Theory” is reread, translated, filtered, and transformed in a variety of international Anglophone contexts, with a few significant exceptions, the Parisian intellectual village remained opaque to any reciprocal influence.) Contemporary film theory, inaugurated in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma in the period between 1969 and 1975, largely incorporated the discourse and rhetoric of Tel Quel though no doubt transforming it in interesting and original ways. In relay, from 1971 Screen is largely following the lines set out by Cahiers du cinéma, though often amplifying and refocusing them in a rather provocative manner; the same may be said for the influence, direct and indirect, of Tel Quel. On one hand, before 1975 Screen evidences the desire for a kind of formalizing scientificity, linking questions of method in textual semiotics to appropriations of Althusser that, through Ben Brewster’s influential translations, magnified the claims for theory as a secure cognitive context for critically examining and breaking with ideology. It is significant that Derrida does not pass through this filter, such that throughout the 1970s Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 274 the most influential work in Screen reads as a peculiar and highly selective mix of structuralism and post-structuralism. Even psychoanalysis is not strongly present before 1975, and then again, only intermittently until Stephen Heath’s dossier on suture and his important work on sexual difference is published from 1977. On the other, from about 1975 the work of Julia Kristeva comes to be keenly felt by a variety of writers, including Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, and Stephen Heath. Indeed, it less Cahiers that is responsible for the fifth element than Screen itself, which places Kristeva’s emphasis on the “subject in process” at the forefront of contemporary theoretical discourse. Where deconstructive philosophy tended to destabilize the conceptual foundations of structuralism and semiology (as well as, implicitly, the claims to scientificity for dialectical materialism), Kristeva’s semiotic or semanalysis was read as extending and renovating the project of a “science of the text.” Kristeva’s work builds an important conceptual bridge linking Greimas’ laboratory at the EPHE, to Lacan and Derrida’s seminars at the École Normale Supérieure, and finally to the critical enterprise of Tel Quel. As importantly, Kristeva was instrumental in the formation of a feminist theory allied to materialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis that reverberated especially in the British context of the 1970s, entering into a dialogue with the pioneering work of Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, and Toril Moi as well as writers associated with the important review, m/f.139 Kristeva’s contributions to poststructuralist theory are multiple and complex. In a variety of influential texts published in the late sixties and early seventies, leading from her first important collection of essays, Sēmeiōtikē: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (1969), towards her magisterial La Révolution du langage poétique (1974), Kristeva displaced and rewrote structuralism’s foundational concepts into a complex and ramified account of discourse as a heterogeneous space marked by process or production. Kristeva forcefully criticized semiology on two accounts. First, through its foundational concepts of sign and 139 For a more replete account of this connection, see again my Crisis of Political Modernism, especially Chapter Eight on “Sexual Difference.” Kristeva’s influence on concepts of identification, the subject, and ideology, particularly in Screen are also discussed critically in Chapters Six and Seven, and especially pages 186-192. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 275 system, semiology conceives language as a homogenous and atemporal space, unaffected by change, history, or a differentiated subject. This leads to the second dimension of her critique, which views structuralism as either absenting the subject, as it were, or producing it through “the rehabilitation of the Cartesian conception of language as an act carried out by a subject. On close inspection, as certain linguists (from Jakobson to Kuroda) have shown in recent years, this 'speaking subject' turns out in fact to be the transcendental ego which, in Husserl's view, underlies any and every predicative synthesis, if we 'put in brackets' logical or linguistic externality.”140 A critique of a semiology of systems and of its phenomenological foundations must start, then, from a “theory of the speaking subject” where language is conceived as a heterogeneous space of enunciation--a site where the subject is both located, produced, and reproduced in discourse--and as a process driven by the relation of unconscious to conscious thought, as well as the body’s relation to language, desire, and the drives. If signifying practices produce or sustain a subject in relation to signification, that subject must also be divided within itself. The linguistic system, which Kristeva associates with the Lacanian concept of the symbolic, is thus only one dimension of a dialectic motored by the force of negativity, a concept Kristeva adopts from Hegel’s logic. Kristeva characterizes negativity in relation to desire and to the Lacanian Imaginary as the disarticulatory force of the drives in relation to language, which she calls the “semiotic disposition.” Fueled by desire, fantasy, and the primary processes, in poetic practice the semiotic disposition is defined by grammatical deviation, intense phonemic materiality, the overdetermination of sense, discursive lapsus and ellipses, various syntactical and modal irregularities; in short, the eruption of drive-governed and unconscious processes into the materiality of language itself. Negativity is in fact the foundation of her “revolution” in poetic language. It defines the specificity of signifying practices not as the transmission or communication of meaning, but rather in the formal transgression of meaning, and the subject not as the master or origin of sense, but rather as riven by the 140 “The System and the Speaking Subject” in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (1986) 27. Originally published in the Times Literary Supplement (12 October 1973) 12491252. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 276 libidinal and somatic forces within it as well as by its external relation to history and social institutions. In her own account, Kristeva writes that The moment of transgression is the key moment in practice: we can speak of practice wherever there is a transgression of systematicity, i.e., a transgression of the unity proper to the transcendental ego. The subject of the practice cannot be the transcendental subject, who lacks the shift, the split in logical unity brought about by language which separates out, within the signifying body, the symbolic order from the workings of the libido (this last revealing itself by the semiotic disposition). Identifying the semiotic disposition means in fact identifying the shift in the speaking subject, his capacity for renewing the order in which he is inescapably caught up; and that capacity is, for the subject, the capacity for enjoyment. (“The System and the Speaking Subject” 29) Transgression marked by negativity is thus a key concept both for Kristeva’s semanalysis and for her version of political modernism. It marks, in fact, the work of a Hegelian dialectic across two dimensions whose point of intersection is her concept of the speaking subject. The first--call it the external or historical dimension--retains the structuralist thesis that “What semiotics has discovered in studying 'ideologies' (myths, rituals, moral codes, arts, etc.) as sign-systems is that the law governing, or, if one prefers, the major constraint affecting any social practice lies in the fact that it signifies; i.e., that it is articulated like a language . . . . One may say, then, that what semiotics had discovered is the fact that there is a general social law, that this law is the symbolic dimension which is given in language and that every social practice offers a specific expression of that law” (25). The symbolic dimension of language wants to conserve the system, instrumentalize signification, and preserve and stabilize the subject with respect to its structural place with respect to the Family and the State. But this desire for system and stabilization is repeatedly undermined by an internal relation--Lacan’s equally Hegelian dialectic of identification where the imaginary turns on the symbolic, and the semiotic disposition disrupts the subject’s relation to language and social order. The speaking subject is a “subject in process” because it is ineluctably caught up in a dialectic than can never be finished, stabilized, or trapped by meaning--the system is always doomed to fail. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 277 Kristeva’s semanalysis thus sets the fundamental framework for the discourse of political modernism and for the idea of Theory that would accompany it. In an admirably rigorous way, it sought not to overturn structuralism and semiology, but rather to expand and ramify them in a conceptually unified space where linguistics was remodeled in relation to psychoanalysis and Marxism. Likewise, it turned semiology from its concern with ordinary language and communication to the study of poetics and aesthetics, forging a sustained commitment where Theory was built out critically from the analysis of art and literature. In writing of signifying practice and of a subject in process, Kristeva located the subject as the site of both production and reproduction in which a dramatic conflict was played out--between the symbolic and the imaginary, the system and desire, the conscious and the unconscious subject--whose stakes where either the preservation or destabilization of social order. And by treating discourse as the site of transgression and the capacity for enjoyment, semanalysis foregrounded an account of the subject as an unstable, processual space, divided within itself by desire, the unconscious, and the force of the drives, but also open to change and transformation. Through concepts like negativity, the semiotic disposition, and the subject in process, literature and art were made the central and dynamic sites of a revolutionary politics and a critique of ideology. In transposing many of these themes to contemporary film theory, most of the key figures writing in Screen were deeply committed to the centrality of the subject in process for both a critical account of ideology and for posing modernist alternatives to what was called, the “classical realist text” of Hollywood cinema. Whether she was referenced directly or not--and Kristeva was both translated in Screen and cited frequently--her concepts of negativity and the subject were key components of the work of Peter Wollen, Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath and Laura Mulvey. Mulvey, of course, but also Stephen Heath and others, would bring out in film theory another important aspect of Kristeva’s work; that is, her attentiveness to feminism and to psychoanalytic accounts of sexual difference and identification, where poetics became identified with the possibility of an écriture féminine. However, before pursuing this line of thought further, one last aspect of semanalysis as the framework for Theory or theoretical practice must be addressed. In Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 278 stressing the concept of negativity and the disarticulatory force of the semiotic disposition within language, what is missing is an account of the epistemological frameworks and stakes of Kristeva’s sense of theory. Very clearly, as a theoretical practice semanalysis considered itself a scientific practice in ways similar to structuralism. But here the stakes of “science” have changed considerably. They were no longer defined necessarily by Levi-Strauss’s dream that structuralism would find itself awakening next to the natural sciences on judgment day, but rather within the framework of historical and dialectical materialism. This commitment was shared with contemporary film theory, though as I have already pointed out, on either side of the Channel the stakes of theoretical practice turned less on discourse or poetics than on criteria of visibility wherein the critical response to ideology, and Kristeva’s concept of negativity, were mapped onto a dialectics of miscognition and recognition as a passage from the imaginary to the symbolic or from illusion to knowledge. Kristeva, however, offered no such confidence or security. If the great innovation of Kristeva’s semiotic was to reconsider discourse as both system and transgression, how could Theory preserve or conserve its own epistemological coherence, and desire for systematic exposition and critique? This question is most striking for Kristeva, whose commitments to lucidity in logical exposition and coherence in argumentation are extraordinary, whose discourse is marked everywhere as “scientific,” and whose work from the late sixties progressed steadily toward the grand synthesis represented by the Revolution in Poetic Language. Kristeva thus stands admirably for the great unifying tendency of theory, or the desire to weave a general Theory of the subject in discourse from the strands of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. Alternatively, as Toril Moi points out in her vivid and concise introduction to “The System and the Speaking Subject” in The Kristeva Reader, the practice of theory in semanalysis also had to confront an internal contradiction. “Insisting as it does on the heterogeneity of language,” Moi comments, “semiotics is caught in a paradox: being itself a metalanguage (language which speaks about language) it cannot but homogenize its object in its own discourse. In this sense, then, semiotics is structurally unable to practise what it preaches” (24). However, rather than undermining the possibility of scientific or theoretical knowledge, Kristeva mobilizes the concept of negativity to preserve the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 279 openness of theory. The ineluctable dialectic of system and negation or transgression means that the semiotician, in Moi’s words, “is forced always to analyse her own discursive position, and thus to renew her connection with the heterogeneous forces of language which, according to Kristeva, is what makes language a productive structure in the first place” (24). Theory itself, then, is marked by the open circularity of semiosis and signifiance. For Kristeva semiology is somewhat paradoxically an exemplary theory as the site not only where ideology may be examined as produced through signifying processes, but also where knowledge is produced of and in language. In her own contribution to Théorie d’ensemble, “La Sémiologie: science critique et/ou critique de la science,” Kristeva notes that as theory semiology itself is characterized by a division or heterogeneity characteristic of all language, and thus becomes a special kind of critical signifying practice. As a critical science, semiology formalizes language using methods borrowed from mathematics and other formal sciences in order to comprehend its functioning in terms of “the axiomatization . . . of signifying systems” (77, 82).141 At the same time, the critical analysis of language is only possible through the medium of language, and in this respect semiology is distinguished from its sister sciences through its powers of taking itself as its own object. In Kristeva’s conception, it is the site of a special reflexivity that in taking language as its object in a system of formal modeling is also capable at the same time of modeling the model, and thus takes its own underlying theory as an object of analysis and critique. “Semiotics,” Kristeva writes, is thus a type of thought where science sees (is conscious of) the fact that it is a theory. In every instant of its production, semiotics thinks of its object, its instruments and the relation between them, and therefore thinks itself, and in thus turning on itself becomes the theory of the science it constitutes. This means that semiotics is always both a reevaluation of its object and/or its models, a critique of these models (and therefore of the sciences from which they were borrowed), and 141 “Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or Critique of Science,” trans. Seán Hand in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 74-88. Originally published in Théorie d’ensemble (Paris: Seuil, 1968) 80-93. Page numbers from the French edition are given in italics when the translation is modified. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 280 of itself (as a system of stable truths). As the meeting point of the sciences and an endless theoretical process, semiotics cannot be constituted as a science let alone the science: semiotics is an open form of research, a constant critique that turns back on itself, offering its own auto-critique. As it is its own theory, semiotics is the kind of thought which, without raising itself to the level of a system, is still capable of modeling (thinking) itself. (77, 82-83) In that a critical semiology is always refinding its theory within itself, it is always beginning again but in a non-circular way: “Semiotic research remains a form of inquiry that ultimately uncovers its own ideological gesture, only in order to record and deny it before starting all over again. 'No key to no mystery', as Levi-Strauss said. It begins with a certain knowledge as its goal, and ends up discovering a theory which, since it is itself a signifying system, returns semiotic research to its point of departure, to the model of semiotics itself, which it criticizes or overthrows” (77-78). Thus a critical semiology is at the same time a critique of semiology that opens on to something else, ideology, in the sense of continually reliving or reinvoking the process through which in Althusser’s epistemology, scientific knowledge is produced. Like Althusser, Kristeva credits Marx with being the founder of a scientific practice that in challenging Hegel’s logic and the idea of teleological and absolute reason, nonetheless preserves an idea of scientific practice where the process of formulating models is “doubled by the theory underlying the very same models. Created as it is by the constant movement between model and theory while at the same time being situated at a distance from them (thus taking up a position in relation to current social practice), this form of thought demonstrates the 'epistemological break' introduced by Marx” (79). Semiology unveils how science is born within ideology and at the same time extends a theoretical gesture where it reflexively separates itself from ideology; in producing knowledge about language, it simultaneously examines the process of knowledge as production in language. The construction of a systematic metalanguage requires a reflexive attentiveness to contradiction, which means that the desire to build Theory and to acquire theoretical knowledge is not teleological, but productive. Kristeva’s semanalysis, like Theory itself, is motored no doubt by a Hegelian rationality, indeed perhaps a Hegelian conception of science. As theory, it resembles nothing so much as the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 281 self-actualizing and self-revealing subject of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Sprit. However, Kristeva takes pains (though I think with uneven success) to project an image of theory where the dialectic, both unending and aspiring to ever-greater levels of subsumption and unity, can never achieve universality. Semanalysis is without question a “theory,” but to my knowledge, apart from this essay Kristeva never produced a methodological account in which the epistemological stakes of theoretical practice could be examined, interrogated, and defended, and in which philosophy might adjudicate the possible relationship between science and ideology. To better understand these problems, we must turn finally and directly to the key figure for the emergence of Theory: Louis Althusser. 22. “A struggle without end, exterior and interior” . . . in order to know itself in its theory, philosophy has to recognize that it is no more than a certain investment of politics, a certain continuation of politics, a certain rumination of politics. --Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy” Kristeva’s concept of negativity, and her implied concept of theory, are not only key components of contemporary film theory; in many respects the dialectic of negativity and the reflexive critical force of theory can be understood as fueling the historical structure of Theory itself in its movements from unification to disaggregation. One of the great paradoxes of Theory--the source of both its powers and miseries--is that it is driven from within by internal contradiction. As in the Hegelian dialectic, negativity drives the discourse forward, causing it to ramify and expand by producing new concepts and seeking out new powers of criticism. The specific site of contradiction, however, is how the concept of the subject is deployed in relation to this dialectic, first as a space of epistemological contest, and then in relation to concepts of difference and identity. The key question of contemporary theory--especially to the extent that psychoanalysis persists within it--is how can the subject secure an epistemological standpoint separate from ideology, and with respect to which ideology can be criticized? Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 282 From what subjective space is critique possible, and what founds or secures the subject’s potential to recognize, comprehend, and contest the snares of power? These two questions are profoundly interrelated, and yet are in many ways irreconcilable. From his 1964 essay on “Freud and Lacan” to his later influential study of “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” [1970], Althusser argued that psychoanalysis contributes conceptually to an account of theory and ideology in two ways. First, it aids in understanding the psychological processes through which subjectivity is produced in representation, and in turn helps to explain the functioning of irrational belief and contradictory behavior; for example, why subjects act repeatedly against their own economic or political interests. Second, like Marxism psychoanalysis becomes a privileged terrain for Althusser’s larger epistemological project, which wants to know how knowledge is produced and by what means, both conceptually and historically, and how a science can separate itself from ideology. Here the problem of theory is a site both for defending the scientific standing of psychoanalysis and for presenting the possibility of a scientific disengagement from ideology, or at least, the possibility of a materialist and scientific understanding of the functioning of ideology. Kristeva’s turn to psychoanalysis, however, frames the idea of the production of the subject in language in another way. As the site of transgression, Kristeva’s subject in process projects a space and a process where the force of ideology is continually eroded, and the potential for new sites and possibilities of subjectivity created. Left unclear in either case is the question of how this subject could be found in possession of--or to discover or rediscover, either internally or externally--the critical and epistemological potential for standing outside the institutions or apparatuses of power to which it is subjected. In other words, how is the subject produced (or renewed) in theory? I have already remarked how in the late sixties Tel Quel’s “théorie d’ensemble” achieves a new discursive presence and force where the more positivistic or scientific senses of theory in filmology or structuralism are displaced and reorganized semantically around or within dialectical materialism. In this context, the institutional context of theory gravitates from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études to the Ecole Normale Supérieure where from 1948 Althusser served as “caïman,” or director of studies for students preparing their “agrégation” to teach philosophy at the secondary level; in 1954 he was Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 283 promoted to the post of secrétaire de l’école littéraire. At the beginning of the 1960s, despite his modest institutional position and cyclical struggle with clinical depression, Althusser exerted an enormous influence through his seminars, his publications, and his sponsorship of the relocation of Lacan’s seminar to the ENS in 1964, thus making of it another powerful epicenter of structuralist activity. I have also already remarked on the somewhat ironic role philosophy plays in this context. A perhaps unintended effect of the era of high structuralism was the departure of many students from philosophy into other areas such as psychoanalysis, anthropology, and linguistics. At the same time, Althusser insisted that philosophy must not renounce its traditional place as a sovereign discipline, especially in the domain of epistemology. Indeed while Althusser is often recognized today for his contributions to the study of ideology, his work is better understood in the frameworks of epistemology and the philosophy of science. Althusser’s major project was twofold: first to defend the idea that Marx founded a science, historical materialism, and a specific philosophy, dialectical materialism. Second, through his “structural” Marxism, and in some ways analogous to Merleau-Ponty, Althusser sought to preserve for philosophy a key role within the epistemology of the human sciences. Althusser devoted his seminar of 1962-63 to the conceptual origins of the human sciences, and sought to locate Marxism within the other dominant strains of structuralism in linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. (The following year would produce his famous seminar on “reading Capital.”) Here philosophy has a special though somewhat ambivalent function with respect to the other domains of structuralism. In his “Remarks on the Terminology Adopted,” added to his essay “On the Materialist Dialectic” as published in For Marx, Althusser locates the Marxist concept of theory in a remark by Engels in the Anti-During: “'If theoreticians are semi-initiates in the sphere of natural science, then natural scientists today are actually just as much so in the sphere of theory, in the sphere of what hitherto was called philosophy’.”142 Although 142 Trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon 1969) 162. Originally published in La Pensée 110 (August 1963) and reprinted in Pour Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1965) 5-46. Original page numbers are given in italics when the translation has been modified. Althusser’s most synthetic and compelling account of these problems appears in his Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 284 Althusser would soon finesse the distinction, here philosophy is strongly associated with ideology, and Althusser argues that Engels invokes theory as a way of demonstrating Marxism’s capacity to critique and supersede its philosophical predecessors. In turn, Althusser forges a special concept of Theory to distinguish dialectical materialism as a practice distinct from philosophy and in fact displacing it. In a manuscript from 1965, Althusser puts the matter directly, asserting that dialectical materialism holds a privileged place in the history of philosophy because it “transformed philosophy from the condition of an ideology into a scientific discipline. In fact, Marx was in some sense compelled, by an implacable logic, to found a radically new philosophy, because he was the first to have thought scientifically the reality of history, which all other philosophies were incapable of doing. Thinking the reality of history scientifically, Marx was obliged, and able, to situate and treat philosophies--for the first time--as realities which, while aiming for ‘truth’, while speaking of the conditions of knowledge, belong none the less to history, not only because they are conditioned by it but also because they play a social role in it.”143 For Althusser, the function of philosophy with respect to the human sciences was to produce a general Theory of theoretical practices capable of weighing and testing the value of their scientific claims, and distinguishing to what degree they had separated themselves from ideological forms of knowing. Within this framework a new concept of theory was taking shape and achieving new standing and prestige--explicitly or implicitly, Althusser’s senses of theory, largely transmitted through Tel Quel and joining film studies through Cahiers du cinéma and Screen, came to define the project of theory for the contemporary discourse. One of Althusser’s key texts on theory is “On the Materialist Dialectic (on the unevenness of origins).” Here Althusser argues not only for the importance of theory to Marxism, but also that theory has specificity as a practice commensurate with other types of practice, for example, ideological, economic, or political. Althusser calls practice “any process of transformation of a determinate given preface to Reading Capital, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970) 13-69. 143 “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and Ideological Struggle,” trans. by James H. Kavanagh in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays (London: Verso, 1990) 10. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 285 raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of 'production'). In any practice thus conceived, the determinant moment (or element) is neither the raw material nor the product, but the practice in the narrow sense: the moment of the labour of transformation itself, which sets to work, in a specific structure, men, means and a technical method of utilizing the means” (“Dialectic” 166-167). This definition sets up Althusser’s key concept of knowledge-as-production, or as a specific form of intermediate conceptual labor. Among Althusser’s other contributions is to redistribute or redefine the conventional Marxist distinction between theory and practice. The distinctiveness of theory as a practice is in no way to be considered in its more ancient philosophical senses as disengaged speculation or meditation. Rather, it is fully considered by Althusser to be part of the structured whole of society and in continual interaction with other forms of practice. Moreover, theory has a special relationship with politics. On one hand, as in a Leninist conception, as theory dialectical materialism orients and guides political activity by giving it a scientific foundation. But on the other, in a theme to which Althusser will continually return, theory is considered something like an implicit knowledge that is never absent from Marxist politics, which is always active within it historically though often in an inchoate or non-philosophical form.144 This is an important idea to which we will return. What defines the practice of theory, then? On what material does it work, how does it produce, and what product does it produce? The raw material of theory is given in representation, concepts, or facts provided to it historically by other practices whether empirical, technical, or ideological. In this way, theoretical practice works on or transforms ideological practice in a specific sense. No science is founded all at once but rather undergoes a more or less long pre-scientific or ideological phase of historical formation. The concept of ideology is not treated here as either illusion or a necessarily false knowledge. Rather, it is both a stage in the history of sciences and a characteristic of certain idealist forms or structures of knowledge, which Althusser characterizes as 144 A key text examining this issue is Althusser’s essay, “Sur le travail théorique: difficultés et ressources,” La Pensée 132 (April 1967): 3-22. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 286 “empiricist.” In contrast to Althusser’s concept of knowledge-as-production, the explicit danger of an empiricist conception of science is that its conceptual work becomes displaced or invisible; that is, it ceases to acknowledge that it has a theory or is indebted to a theoretical practice. As a form of idealism, empiricism denies or ignores the historical structure of knowledge and suppresses the active and historical role of theoretical practice in producing knowledge. This is why Althusser maintains a sense of theory as a historically founded form of epistemological critique, which as such is also the dialectical motor for further refinement, clarification, and progress in philosophy. The danger of empiricism is to believe that direct knowledge of the real is accessible without the mediation of concepts or theoretical practice, or that knowledge resides in objects and needs only to be extracted by direct and unmediated observation.145 In other words, empiricism refuses to recognize that knowledge is conditioned historically in a material practice of on-going conceptual production and transformation sensitive to external social conditions. A key component of Althusser’s epistemology is to contrast scientific and empiricist forms of knowing as competing modes for the mental appropriation of reality. From the standpoint of the history of science, Althusser adopts from Bachelard the idea that the production of knowledge also appears out of a qualitative discontinuity, both theoretical and historical, in the form of an “epistemological break.” This discontinuity involves a specific form of dialectical labor and conceptual transformation “which establishes a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and by revealing this past as ideological” (“Dialectic”168; my emphases). In this manner, the process of Theory or the 145 On the question of empiricism as a form or structure or knowledge, see the extraordinary section 10 of Althusser’s Preface to Reading Capital, 34-40. In Ben Brewster’s account, “Althusser uses the concept of empiricism in a very wide sense to include all ‘epistemologies’ that oppose a given subject to a given object and call knowledge the abstraction by the subject of the essence of the object. Hence the knowledge of the object is part of the object itself. This remains true whatever the nature of the subject (psychological, historical, etc.) or of the object (continuous, discontinuous, mobile, immobile, etc.) in question. So as well as covering those epistemologies traditionally called ‘empiricist’, this definition includes classical idealism, and the epistemology of Feuerbach and the Young Marx” (Reading Capital 313). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 287 production of knowledge involves two conjoined operations: the critique of an older, ideological form of knowledge and, in a dialectically critical or self-critical gesture, the production of a new scientific one. Perhaps an essential component of theoretical reflection is to be in contradiction, or rather, to be able to reflect in and on contradiction, in which case the contradiction is in Althusser’s terms “overdetermined.” A detachment and a revealing: when contradiction is overdetermined there is both a discontinuity and a turning. Theory turns back on itself to reflect, from within and without, on the conditions of existence of the contradiction itself within the complex structure of a greater whole as it unfolds in time, producing a situation where from within a given theoretical practice a distance or perspective is produced from which one can discern a new epistemological quality. There is not one form of theory, in this respect, but several, which must be qualitatively distinguished: theory, “theory,” and Theory. Althusser calls theory any theoretical practice of a more or less scientific character; perhaps this is something close to what I have called the vernacular sense of theory. In contrast, “theory” is reserved to describe “the determined theoretical system of an actual science (its fundamental concepts in the more or less contradictory unity given at a moment in time) . . . . In its 'theory', any determined science reflects on its results, which become the conditions and means of its own theoretical practice, within the complex unity of its concepts (a unity, by the way, which is always more or less problematic)” (“Dialectic” 168, 9). But in this context, there is another qualitative transformation that yields Theory in the form of a materialist dialectic at the heart of dialectical materialism. This is the general Theory of theoretical practice whose epistemological standards are adjudicated by a process “which transforms into 'knowledges' [connaissances] (scientific truths) the ideological product of existing 'empirical' practices (the concrete activity of men)” (168). Althusser’s account of the production of knowledge as organized by conceptual practices that are both transformative and self-transformative, and which secure new epistemological standpoints through discontinuities or an internal distancing that enables both critique and separation from ideologically conditioned knowledge, is historical in multiple senses. Theories and the process of theory are formed within determinate social Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 288 conditions. They are conditioned by the structured social whole in which they occur and by situations of social conflict to which they are aligned, but they are also historical in that there is no end to the process, not even in a teleology that would lead to a classless society. Althusser stresses that there is no pure theory or scientific state that can finally be achieved in a materialism that would be finally free of idealism or the taints and threats of ideology: “we know that a 'pure' science only exists on condition that it continually purifies itself, of a science free from the necessity of its history, on the condition that it frees itself unceasingly from the ideology which occupies it, haunts it, or lies in wait for it. The inevitable price of this purification and liberation is a continuous struggle against ideology itself, that is, against idealism, a struggle whose reasons and aims can be clarified by Theory (dialectical materialism) and guided by it as by no other method in the world” (“Dialectic” 170-171, 10). The historical structure of theory as the critique and production of knowledge has other consequences. A science may happily function for a long time without any further reflection on its “theory”--it method and corpus of concepts. Indeed, one can say the same about political practice, which often functions effectively without recourse to any explicit theorization or theoretical knowledge. The will to construct a Theory would then seem to be fairly rare and always difficult, and this is so for two reasons. First, the need to produce a Theory of theoretical practice, to turn back on the epistemological framework of the science itself to critique or modify it and to test its limits, always happens after the fact in moments of blockage or crisis. And second, philosophy always seems to follow behind science in this respect. The process of Theory can never appear ex nihilo, but only after a long period of conceptual invention and methodological exploration. Philosophy must always return to science, to systematically work in or through its concepts, evaluating, refining them, testing their weaknesses and blind spots--in short, producing the Theory of a theoretical practice through critique and symptomatic reading. In contrast to historical materialism, whose object is the historical constitution and transformation of modes of production, according to Althusser The object of dialectical materialism is constituted by what Engels calls “the history of thought,” or what Lenin calls the history of the “passage from ignorance to Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 289 knowledge,” or what we can call the history of the production of knowledges-- or yet again, the historical difference between ideology and science, or the specific difference of scientificity--all problems that broadly cover the domain called by classical philosophy the “theory of knowledge.” Of course, this theory can no longer be, as it was in classical philosophy, a theory of the formal, atemporal conditions of knowledge, a theory of the cogito (Descartes, Husserl), a theory of the a priori forms of the human mind (Kant), or a theory of absolute knowledge (Hegel). From the perspective of Marxist theory, it can only be a theory of the history of knowledge--that is, of the real conditions (material and social on the one hand, internal to scientific practice on the other) of the process of production of knowledge. (“Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation” 8) Theory is thus always a materialism in a strict sense--it works on the concepts and methods of an already established discourse, and never stands completely outside of them abstractly or ideally. The idea that history, and the history of theory, is a process without a subject, that there is potentially no end in which theory or science are finally and completely triumphant over ideology, and that the struggle to attain Theoretical knowledge is constant, led Althusser to several phases of self-criticism and revision, and produced tensions in his relations with the French Communist Party. For the moment, though, it is important to hold onto the idea that a key capacity of theoretical practice is the potential to achieve a state of transformation where through epistemological critique a discourse separates itself from a pre-scientific or ideologically conditioned thought by grasping the historical conditioning of that thought in class conflict. At its heart, for Althusser philosophy is the site of an epistemological struggle between idealism and materialism as forms of thought allied to the larger conflicts between capital and labor. In its capitalized form, then, Theory defines a process where the philosophy of dialectical materialism, a philosophy unwritten by Marx himself but whose unfinished concepts are strewn more or less systematically through his later works of political economy, is gradually forged by excavating and refining logically those concepts through the systematic study and reevaluation of Marx’s texts. One of Althusser’s most Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 290 controversial and influential arguments at the time was that there is no single underlying system to Marx’s thought, but rather that the process of discovering or founding dialectical materialism is marked internally by a fundamental discontinuity where the mature Marx separates himself from his earlier attachments to Hegel, Feuerbach, and other strains of humanism. The historical evolution of Marx’s thought internalizes and exhibits the structure of the theoretical process itself, and this process is latter carried through in certain works of Engels and Lenin; it is also, of course, the method and project of Althusser’s seminars on reading Capital. The process of theory is one of continuous dialectical critique, auto-critique, and transformation through a series of conflicts and discontinuities, and the function of Theory is to adjudicate the degree of scientificity of a science in terms of its commitments to a dialectical and materialist epistemology. This is the key to understanding Althusser’s recurring argument that while Marx completely founded a new science--historical materialism--the philosophy of that science, dialectical materialism, as the complete and interrelated system of concepts that underlay its practice, remains incompletely worked out. Here there is a fundamental tension between philosophy and Theory, one that occurs not only at the level of names or concepts but also in terms of critique and epistemological value. On one hand, by 1965 Theory had become synonymous with or a substitute for philosophy itself in a certain French context. Indeed, when Althusser inaugurated his edited collection at Éditions François Maspero, it was called simply “Theory,” and very often in Althusser’s own texts Theory was a shorthand for the philosophy of dialectical materialism. When Althusser’s students at the ENS founded their journal, the Cahiers marxistes-leninistes, it was emblazoned with the exergue, “Marx’s theory is all-powerful, because it is true”; that is, Theory was the site of scientific truth, one that perhaps transcended and replaced philosophy. On the other, if one followed Althusser’s writings closely, theory should be considered as a process of constant critique and struggle in which the path to philosophy was only gradually disengaged through the process of turning Theory on theory in an ever vigilant critique of concepts and methods. Thus in Cahiers pour l’analyse, another important journal linked to the ENS and deeply influenced by both Althusser and Lacan, theory was envisioned as a kind of an Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 291 epistemological research whose role was to interrogate critically the scientificity of psychoanalysis, linguistics, and logic with a view toward constructing a unified science, conceived as a psychoanalytic and materialist theory of discourse. Theory here becomes the site of a kind of scientific Leninism in the avant-garde of critical thought, which returns us to the perspective of Tel Quel. The concept of Theory in the two journals is the same, giving testimony to a common discourse network and set of institutional affiliations. Althusser soon revisited and criticized this concept of Theory as a unilateral, abstract, and therefore misdirected characterization of dialectical materialism. This selfcriticism amounted to a revision of the relation of theory to practice in a way that sought a concept of theory that was more tightly integrated with political practice. In so doing, the senses of Theory were transformed in ways that would resonate powerfully, though often in subterranean and unacknowledged ways, across the contemporary discourse. Althusser’s revision of the relation between theory and philosophy was presented publicly in a lecture given on “Lenin and Philosophy” at the Société Française de Philosophie in February 1968, and published in 1969 in the book of the same name. However, the broad outlines of his new position were still more clearly stated in a 1968 interview published in Italy in l’Unitá and then reproduced in La Pensée as "La Philosophie comme arme de la révolution (Réponse à huit questions)."146 This turn in theory follows Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci in asserting that philosophy is fundamentally political, that it is a direct intervention in the political, especially in the domains of epistemology and the relation of theory to practice. The role of philosophy, according to Althusser, is to represent the class struggle in the domain of theory, and in this respect philosophy is neither science nor pure theory, but rather a practical political intervention in the domain of theory. However, philosophy is not a politics, but rather serves political practice through theoretical interventions, assuring that strategies are informed and directed scientifically through historical and materialist analysis. As Theory, then, dialectical materialism does not stand above or outside other instances like the political. Rather it 146 La Pensée 138 (1968): 26-34. Trans. Ben Brewster in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays as “Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon” (London: New Left Books, 1971) 1122. Original page numbers appear in italics when I have modified the translation. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 292 preserves a place and function for philosophy as something like a point of intersection or interface between the political and the theoretical: it refines and critiques the place of materialism in theory; inspired by practice, it also returns (scientific) theory to practice as a guide for politics. However, there is another kind of internal relation where theory bridges or links philosophy and politics, one with further consequences not only for understanding the place of the Subject, but also classes or categories of subjects in contemporary theory. To engage in theory is to embark on a process of self-transformation. For Althusser, an intellectual is by definition allied to the class perspective of the petit bourgeoisie, and to engage with theory is to embark on a long and arduous process of reeducation: “A struggle without end, exterior and interior” (“Philosophy as a Weapon” 12, 27). The careful study of Marxist-Leninist theory can help certain intellectuals pass into the perspective of the working class. In this respect, the process of theory--of the acquisition of theory and its points of passage or transformation--is nourished by two streams: the science of historical materialism and the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Althusser relates that philosophy is one of the two theoretical “weapons” of class struggle. But Althusser’s main point is, again, that while Marx fully constituted an historical science with the publication of Capital, the presence of an independent Marxist philosophy is underdeveloped and inchoate. The great project that results in the essays collected in For Marx, and in the collaborations resulting in Reading Capital, both published in 1965, is to show that there is a philosophy of Marx that unfolds not in continuity through Marx’s life, but rather appears in an intellectual crisis or break wherein Marx turns from the Hegelian and humanist writings of his youth to create a genuinely original perspective that is at once philosophical and political. And since Marx himself never wrote a method, or argued himself for the philosophical consistency of his work, this philosophy must be rendered perspicuous in a transversal reading of later works beginning with the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology, and continuing through the Communist Manifesto, The Poverty of Philosophy, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Wages, Price and Profits, and the volumes of Capital, both published and unpublished. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 293 The process of critique, self-critique, and symptomatic reading must be carried out in other areas as well. Often in science or philosophy, materialism is blocked or one is blinded to it by bourgeois ideology. (Only proletarian militants, Althusser believes, are capable of spontaneously recognizing the value of materialism in theory or in practice.) Thus one of the primary tasks of theory, whether in scientific or political practice, is to recognize and understand the significance of a Marxist-Leninist science and philosophy, and to struggle against bourgeois ideology on both the political and scientific fronts, internally and externally, including critiquing the primary forms of bourgeois philosophy-neo-positivism, phenomenological or existential subjectivism (humanism), and structuralist ideology, and therefore to make of dialectical materialism the scientific foundation of the human sciences. Now, Althusser suggests that everyone has a spontaneous conception of the world directed in fact by ideological practices, whether religious, moral, juridical, political, and/or aesthetic. These world-conceptions are represented in theory by philosophy, which becomes the site of struggle between antagonistic frameworks, idealist or materialist, for understanding society. The problem is how to define and sustain the epistemological position of a materialist philosophy for politics and against ideology, and here Althusser’s historical philosophy of science, and his concept of theoretical practice, returns as a kind of philosophical politics. As soon as a theoretical domain is established by a science, philosophy comes into existence. It makes possible conceptual understanding, without which there are only ideological world-conceptions. The constant struggle in philosophy, then, is to distinguish between forms of ideological and scientific knowing; in short, idealism and materialism. A detachment and a revealing: theory means making present and perspicuous the underlying concepts of a practice, whether scientific, political, or ideological, and thus opening them up to a process of materialist and dialectical refinement and critique that leads to an epistemological break where those concepts are framed at a distance and from a new perspective. To engage in this process is to become a philosopher. And while no man is spontaneously a philosopher, says Althusser, he is capable of becoming one [“Tout homme n’est pas spontanément philosophe: il peut le Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 294 devenir” (“Philosophy as a Weapon” 18, 31)]. To become a philosopher is to become subject to theory, or to be capable of producing theory or engaging in theoretical practice. Three observations might clarify some of the more obscure or difficult ramifications of Althusser’s arguments. For Althusser, theory is a site of transition or transformation. A science can come into being and establish itself as a practice without having fully developed itself conceptually--its concepts can be thinly drawn or inchoate, and yet it can still function productively. When a science turns to theory or seeks out its theory, it is usually blocked, at an impasse, or in a state of epistemological uncertainly. This is why philosophy follows science in Althusser’s conception. A science extends, renews, or even discovers itself by passing through philosophy. It becomes a real science through Theory in a process of self-reflection and self-criticism wherein its conceptual architecture and epistemological framework are finally made fully perspicuous and thus available for evaluation. Second, theory is not only the site for constructing and refining concepts; it is also the site of revolution, or less dramatically, a point of rupture and transformation in knowledge--the point of passage where ideology is overcome by scientific thought. In one of Althusser’s more famous assertions, history is a process without a subject, such that materialism is considered an anti-humanist philosophy. Analogously, the passage toward scientific knowing is also a process without a subject in the sense that science is not subjective--it does not derive its value from a spontaneous and free or self-identical consciousness. In both cases, the process is trans-subjective and collective. But there is a deep paradox in this argument. Idealism and ideology serve to perpetuate the class dominance of the bourgeoisie. But Althusser equally asserts that through their experience of militancy and class exploitation, the proletariat has a conception of the world that is spontaneously materialist, if not exactly philosophical. In virtue of its exploitation as a class of subjects--historically and epistemologically--the proletariat exist as a historically formed epistemological stance, inchoate perhaps, but “scientifically” in advance of the petit bourgeoisie. “It is because the working-class movement knew itself in Marxist theory that it recognized itself in it,” Althusser wrote earlier (“Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation” 33). Here already in Althusser, appears the idea of the necessary Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 295 and spontaneous capacity of the exploited to understand the nature of their exploitation and their capacity for resistance, an idea that will later be central to identity politics. At the same time, materialist intellectuals serve as a sort of Leninist conceptual avant-garde. Through their expertise in theoretical practice, intellectuals draw out, support, and refine theory’s concepts. In so doing, philosophical work is meant to effect a dual transformation--theory clarifies and brings into focus what the exploited class already spontaneously knows in virtue of their exploitation; it also transforms conceptually the petit bourgeois intellectual, bringing him into congruence with the epistemological perspective of the proletariat. The proletarian is spontaneously materialistic and scientific; the petit bourgeois intellectual is spontaneously idealist. Through theory, both must become philosophers from their two starting points, though in fact, the intellectual must lead the workers, while taking inspiration from their exploitation. Therefore, understanding Althusser’s concept of theory means understanding fully how it inhabits the intersection of two points of reference. “In order really to understand what one ‘reads’ and studies in these theoretical, political and historical works,” Althusser asserts, “one must directly experience oneself the two realities which determine them through and through: the reality of theoretical practice (science, philosophy) in its concrete life; the reality of the practice of revolutionary class struggle in its concrete life, in close contact with the masses. For if theory enables us to understand the laws of history, it is not intellectuals, nor even theoreticians, it is the masses who make history. It is essential to learn with theory--but at the same time and crucially, it is essential to learn alongside the masses” [il faut apprendre auprès des masses]” (“Philosophy as a Weapon” 20, 32). Again, we find here a spontaneous and unreflected relation to materialist theory in militant proletarian struggle. Intellectuals have access to the tools and practice of theory, but may not be guided by the right theory, and in fact, both the proletariat and intellectuals are continually subject to the lures of ideology and idealism. Philosophy, or rather dialectical materialist Theory, must thus become the compass or navigational tool in political struggle. Citing Lenin, and this is one of the key arguments of “Lenin and Philosophy,” Althusser claims that the master function of philosophical practice is “to draw a dividing line between true ideas and false ideas” (21, 33), which is at the same Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 296 time to make a line of demarcation between class friends and class enemies. Therefore, “Philosophy represents the people’s class struggle in theory. In return it helps the people to distinguish in theory and in all ideas (political, ethical, aesthetic, etc.) between true ideas and false ideas. In principle, true ideas always serve the people; false ideas always serve the enemies of the people” (21, 33). Theory is a political compass, then, whose points of navigation are both epistemological and an ethical, leading to a life guided by materialism, and only difficultly achieved. And here is my third and final point. There is a vacillation or even an undecidability within Althusserian epistemology--between truth and falsity, ideology and science, theory and philosophy--that renders it paradoxical. Whether ostensibly Marxist or not, this paradox inhabits all the contradictory sites and stages of Theory within the discourse of ideology, whether from a psychoanalytic or cultural studies perspective. The class of subject might be defined by gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, a history of colonial exploitation, or any other identity defined in an asymmetrical relationship to power, but identity politics is always anchored in what one might call an identitarian epistemology: a class of subject is defined collectively and homogeneously through the (visible) signs of its discrimination or exploitation, and in virtue of its otherness spontaneously achieves a (nonrecognized) knowledge or capacity for criticism. In turn, theory serves to recognize and value that (self) knowledge, to make it present and active. There is a tension here, however, with later versions of identity politics in the eighties and nineties. Every politics of identity relies on defining a class of discrimination and/or exploitation. However, in contrast to Althusser’s emphasis on the collective nature of knowledge or self-knowledge within a class of subject, later theory will become the expression of a monistically defined individual oppressed consciousness, living its oppression as an individual member of the class. Nonetheless, Althusser’s concept of Theory remains strongly present, if often unrecognized as such, in almost every instance of contemporary theory. 23. Becoming a subject in theory Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 297 One knows very well that the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself . . . . --Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” Understanding fully Althusser’s influence on contemporary theory and the discourse of ideology requires a shift in historical perspective with respect to standard accounts. Contemporary film theory turned to Althusser primarily for a theory of ideology and its critique. But in a way not dissimilar from my discussion of the Introduction to Hegel’s Aesthetic in Part I, Althusser’s broader project throughout the 1960s was to reassert the importance of philosophy for Marxism, and to separate and clarify conceptually the relationship between theory, philosophy, and science. This is the reason why I have stressed Althusser’s place in the field of epistemology. One way of looking at contemporary theory is less as a discourse of ideology than as a series of ramified and conflicting projections of an epistemological space that stands to one side or outside of ideology, or is resistant to ideology, and thus preserves a perspective or a framework with respect to which ideology is spontaneously counter-acted with “knowledge.” This critical space is more often than not anchored monistically. From the standpoint of Kristeva’s semiotic psychoanalysis, this monistic space is the Subject whose body is organized expressively by the drives in their relation to sexual difference; for cultural studies, it is located in a category or class of subjects. In either case, these two presumptions often intersect in a similar characterization: the subject recognizes or identifies itself; it is selfidentifying and self-knowing, able to recognize others and to recognize itself in others through its self-sameness, which is also a difference marked by a negative and asymmetrical relation to power. Moreover, there is epistemological value in this relation, not only in its powers of recognition (of its self and its like community), but also in its difference and its subjugation to hierarchies of power. While power pressures this subject from all sides and continually exerts its forces upon it, achieving few or no benefits from power, the subject preserves an ideological and ethical distance from it--its mode of existence is to be other to power, and to be in a position to know this critically. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 298 There is no discourse of ideology, then, without a corresponding appeal to an epistemological space free from or resistant to ideology. In the period ranging from 1969 to 1975, figures like Comolli and Narboni, on one hand, and Metz, on the other, maintained a clear commitment to the idea that only a continuously elaborated and selfcritical theoretical practice was capable of producing a perspective or framework in which the ideological effects of the film text and the cinematic apparatus of recording and projection could be parried, analyzed and critiqued. Theory, then, becomes the site of a continuous and perhaps interminable struggle to locate a space wherein the subject (or the text) could elude epistemologically the snares of ideology. Along these lines, the discourse of ideology in contemporary film theory can be laid out as branching series--sometimes overlapping, sometimes running parallel or interfering with on another--in terms of their different characterizations of the subject in relation to ideology, and in how different concepts of theory were deployed to understand the nature of this subjectivity in relation to problems of culture and power. Thus, the period from 1969 to 1975 might be characterized as the phase of the “apparatus” and the “transcendental subject.” The concept of apparatus should be understood here in multiple interwoven senses. First is the sense of a conceptual apparatus adopted from Tel Quel, but yet more deeply influenced by Louis Althusser’s efforts throughout the 1960s to construct a materialist epistemology and philosophy of science. The editors of Cahiers du cinéma were relatively clear in this respect that their theoretical practice sustained a critical apparatus--that is, a theory of reading--that took both the aesthetic and economic practice, of film or cinema, as objects of criticism. In this sense, no additional theory of the subject was necessary since, as Althusser frequently asserted, the condition of science was to be process without a subject. To be a subject was to be subject to or a subject of ideology. What did it mean, then, to consider aesthetic and economic practices as “apparatuses,” or an interlocking set of apparatuses? This was the main question of JeanLouis Baudry’s influential essay, “Cinéma: effets idéologiques produit par l’appareil de base,” published in Cinéthique 7/8 in 1970. Baudry was among the first writers to apply Lacan’s essay on the mirror-stage to questions of identification and cinematic Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 299 spectatorship. But as I discuss more fully in The Crisis of Political Modernism, Baudry is better understood as applying Althusser’s account of knowledge-as-production to cinematographic technologies of recording and projection, and following Tel Quel’s “théorie d’ensemble,” to place this technology on the terrain of the battle of materialism against idealism. Baudry’s essay exemplifies how Althusser’s epistemology was translated into the discourse of political modernism, and how a version of Althusser persisted, sometimes covertly or even inadvertently, and with all its attendant contradictions, as a set of underlying assumptions for the discourse of ideology in general. Baudry adopts an Althusserian vocabulary (with a smattering of deconstruction) to argue that below or beyond the effects of any given film, the system of cinematographic recording and projection functions like a conceptual machine. It is a productive apparatus, and what it produces is an omniscient and idealist vision of the world. Baudry’s argument tries to accomplish two principal tasks in this respect. The first is to compare the camera’s mental appropriation of reality with Althusser’s account of the empiricist structure of knowledge. Here Baudry plays on the dual sense of “apparatus” [appareil] as both technological machine and conceptual structure. If both empiricist epistemologies and cinematographic recording present themselves optically--the construction, attenuation, and management of a gaze--then Baudry asks, “Does the technical nature of optical instruments, directly attached to scientific practice, serve to conceal not only their use in ideological products but also the ideological effects which they may themselves provoke?”147 This leads to the second task, where Baudry tries to find within this apparatus the possibility of a reversal, where an idealist and ideological structure of vision can turn on itself reflexively, revealing itself and making itself present to another kind of sight, a materialist and “theoretical” one. To respond to his question, Baudry describes the specificity of cinematic recording as the “specularization” of the subject in three stages: the delimitation of the frame, the production of the illusion of continuous movement through the suppression of difference 147 Trans. Alan Williams as “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 286-287. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 300 of the series of frames in projection, and in a process of double identification, both with the characters in the film and with the camera’s staging of a vision of the world. Following the arguments of another Tel Quel writer, Marcelin Pleynet, on the ideological effect of perspectiva artificialis in Quattrocento painting, Baudry argues that the construction of space in the cinema similarly “elaborates a total vision which corresponds to the idealist conception of the fullness and homogeneity of ‘being,’ and is, so to speak, representative of this conception. In this sense it contributes in a singularly emphatic way to the ideological function of art, which is to provide the tangible representation of metaphysics” (Baudry 289). In its standard uses, the cinema is a mechanism for producing ideology, whose effects reside in the form of a substitution that mimics the psychical constitution of the subject while remodeling it more perfectly. Moreover, the essay follows closely the main lines of Althusser’s account of ideology as laid out in his article on “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” published in the same year: that ideology functions in form of a “representation” (the scare quotes are Althusser’s) of the imaginary relation of individuals to the real conditions of their existence; that as representation ideology has a material existence embodied in a practice or apparatus; and that the function of ideology is to interpellate or produce individuals as subjects. The function of ideological apparatuses is therefore to produce a structure of recognition in which one is attracted to a vision of one’s self as a particular kind of subject, and at the same time, one is also subjected to a particular kind of vision. “[This] is the transcendental subject whose place is taken by the camera,” writes Baudry, which constitutes and rules the objects in this “world.” Thus the spectator identifies less with what is represented, the spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle . . . . It constitutes the “subject” by the illusory delimitation of a central location--whether this be that of a god or of any other substitute. It is an apparatus destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology: creating a phantasmatization of the subject, it collaborates with marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism. . . . Everything happens as if, the subject himself being unable--and for a reason--to account for his own situation, it was necessary to substitute secondary organs, grafted on to replace his own defective Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 301 ones, instruments or ideological formations capable of filling his function as subject. In fact, this substitution is only possible on the condition that the instrumentation itself be hidden or repressed. (Baudry 295). This idea of ideology as productive of a transcendental subject closely follows Kristeva’s account outlined above. Moreover, Baudry’s argument echoes Althusser’s own example at the end of his essay on ideological state apparatuses of how religious ideology projects a structure where an Absolute Subject functions as a specular center of attraction that interpellates individuals into subjects, which subjects them to the Subject as it were, in a process of recognition and misrecognition that operates through a play of mirrors and misleading identifications. More precisely, Baudry implicitly characterizes cinematic representation as producing or reproducing the three constitutive errors of empiricist thought as outlined by Althusser in his preface to Reading Capital. The cinematographic apparatus is a site of knowledge, but its uses produce an idealist or even falsifying knowledge where cognition is reduced to the form of an optics. Since all knowledge resides in the domain of the visible world, conceptual knowledge about the world is confused with the world itself, which in turn means that the theoretical or conceptual instrumentality formulating and conditioning this knowledge is suppressed. As a structure of vision and misrecogntion, the transcendental subject is produced through the suppression of any recognition or comprehension of a given labor, or process of transformation, where the cinematographic apparatus intervenes between a determinate raw material in the form of “objective reality” and a determinate product in the form of ideological interpellation. Where Baudry differs from Althusser (and Kristeva), reading him selectively along lines laid out generally in Cinéthique in the early seventies, is in the suggestion of the possibility of reversing this situation from within the apparatus itself, and thus to transform ideological aesthetic practices into theoretical practices, thus aligning them with the materialist production of knowledge. According to Baudry, in order to accomplish a deconstruction of the ideology produced by the camera, the question then becomes “is the work made evident [Il s’agira de savoir si le travail est montré], does consumption of the product bring about a ‘knowledge effect’ [Althusser], or is the work concealed?” Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 302 (Baudry 287). Unambiguously, Baudry asserts that cinema’s potential for achieving a break with its ideological function corresponds to the degree in which the work of its instrumental base--photographic registration, serial regulation of movement, the process of identification in projection--can be made legible [lisible] within the text: “. . . concealment of the technical base will . . . bring about an inevitable specific ideological effect. Its inscription, its manifestation as such, on the other hand, would produce a knowledge effect, as actualization of the work process, as denunciation of ideology, and as critique of idealism” (288). In Chapter Three of The Crisis of Political Modernism, I provide a fuller critique of this rather extraordinary assertion of cinema’s possibilities for becoming a deconstructive theoretical practice. The main point, however, is that Baudry’s argument, which is entirely characteristic of the discourse of political modernism, is ordered by a dialectic of visibility and suppression aligned with the opposition of illusion to knowledge, idealism to materialism, and ideological to theoretical practice, in which one criterion of visibility is substituted for another in a logic of binary reversibility. Extraordinarily, to know means only to see, that is, the process of production within the text, and seeing correctly gives access to knowledge. In this manner, the idea of an aesthetic “theoretical practice” offered within the discourse of political modernism produces as if in mirror construction the very structure of the empiricist epistemology it is supposed to counteract. In the early to mid-seventies, Screen largely adopts and seeks to expand a version of film theory that incorporates and refines Althusser’s critique of empiricist epistemologies, while also making of it a theory of representation and anti-representation where the problem of knowledge also turns on the question of visibility. To the extent that there is a concept of the subject here, it is the subject of ideology, held in a relation of misrecognition. But similar to Baudry and other writers in Cinéthique, this position is thought to be formally reversible, and reversible within the text. This leads to the curious position, noted in the conclusion to The Crisis of Political Modernism, that there is no text in theory; or rather that the conceptual and epistemological powers of theory are given over to or disappear into the modernist text, which seems, in its presumed disruption and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 303 critique of realism and transparency, to be autoproductive of a certain knowledge. The task of criticism is only to complete that process. This discourse begins to shift in 1975, opening a new phase that extends up until around 1990. On one hand, this year marks the apogee of the dream of producing a unified theory and method in which the concept of film theory matures. But on the other, no sooner is a certain idea of theory fully formed than it begins to splinter along two lines, one defined by the influence of feminist theory and debates on sexual identification and spectatorship, the other by the steadily rising influence of cultural studies. Along these same lines, the discourse of political modernism reaches its point of maximum influence through the concepts of suture and subject-positioning. At the same time, it begins to unravel rapidly in the new framework of postmodernism, which puts pressure on all of the grand binaries that sustained political modernism--realism/modernism, ideology/theory, transparency/deconstruction, idealism/materialism--no less than undermining the coherence of binary logic itself. The first landmark event here is the publication in Screen of Ben Brewster’s translation of “The Imaginary Signifier” in summer 1975, just a few months after its publication in France. The impact of Metz’s essay in English (no doubt far greater than its effect in France) occurred on multiple levels. Where before Screen was concerned with promoting rigorous work in textual analysis and problems of method in film semiology, linking them both to historical predecessors in left criticism, suddenly psychoanalysis comes to the foreground and with it the centrality of the cinematographic apparatus. Or, as Metz might have preferred, theory turned from problems of filmic signification to an idea of cinema as a complex institution, which preserves and reproduces itself by producing forms of desire in relation to vision: scopophilia, fetishism, and voyeurism. In other words, implicitly following Althusser’s critique of empiricism and his preliminary work on ideological state apparatuses, Metz characterizes the cinematic institution as geared toward the production and reproduction of subjectivity. (As we shall see, Metz’s curious silence with respect to Althusser and Kristeva indicates a certain respectful skepticism toward the political possibilities of theory, either as a scientific theoretical practice or as transgression.) Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 304 At the same time, Metz’s essay is also a methodological statement, which not only broadly maps out the principle questions, concepts, problems, necessity, and stakes of transforming semiology by psychoanalysis (here entering into an implicit dialogue with Kristeva), but also insists throughout on the necessity of theoretical self-reflection. Indeed theory achieves a new stature here in relation to the subject. To the extent that Metz presents the cinematic institution as an almost perfectly functioning machine, there would seem to be little hope of avoiding the attraction and lure of its socially sanctioned forms of scopophilia. But here Metz differs significantly from Baudry. Where Baudry pins vague hopes on a deconstructive power that lies within the apparatus itself, which can dialectically turn on itself and make visible otherwise suppressed mechanisms of signification, thereby undermining the transcendental subject and encouraging a new knowledge and perception, Metz holds no such hope. Instead he makes the case for the critical powers of theory itself in a necessarily external relation that requires not only a multidisciplinary work of conceptual invention and innovation, but also an unceasing internal process of critical self-reflection or self-analysis. If one’s (ideological) relation to the apparatus is passive, then theory itself requires a counter-acting activity where another subject must produce itself in theory by introducing a fold or internal distancing within itself that disrupts its relation to desire and the imaginary, exercises a strategic sadism both on itself and on its object of desire (the cinema), and thus replaces scopophilia with epistemophilia transforming one’s relation to the image through concepts. This is not so much a denigration of vision as Martin Jay proposes, but rather a suspicion of desire where an ever-vigilant theory is the conceptual counterweight to desire.148 In 1975 the concept of the apparatus reaches it apogee of influence but also encounters its point of most profound crisis. Closer to Cinéthique than Cahiers, until this point Screen considered the apparatus and the classic realist text as efficient dialectical machines for producing an idealist and transcendental subject. (Is there no escape from the apparatus?) These arguments echoed Tel Quel in proposing a certain kind of 148 See Jay’s compelling and original account it Downcast Eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth century French thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and in particular, Chapter Eight. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 305 modernist aesthetic practice in the form of a theoretical counter-cinema whose primary models were Bertolt Brecht, Straub and Huillet, and Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Dziga Vertov Group. It is also significant that the issue of Screen devoted to “The Imaginary Signifier” included a Marxist-feminist critique of psychoanalysis by the American critic, Julia Lesage, “The Human Subject – You, He, or Me? (Or, the Case of the Missing Penis).” References to feminist theory and to the womens’ movement were almost completely absent from Screen before this point, even as they were becoming increasingly important and influential in both British and North American political and film culture. This state of affairs shifts dramatically when Screen published in its next issue what is perhaps the most influential and intensely debated essay in contemporary film theory-Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey’s essay on visual pleasure--the product of several years work in both theory and filmmaking, as well as collective work in the British women’s movement--opens a new and important direction in contemporary Anglophone theory; or better, presents a fork in the road with express routes to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and questions of sexual difference on the other. The impact of Mulvey’s essay should be understood in the context of the pioneering work of many other writers, including Pam Cook and Claire Johnston, as well as widespread interest in recovering and promoting the contribution of women filmmakers to the history of cinema. Mulvey’s essay, however, was the ignition point for what would become among the primary interests of film theory deep into the 1980s: feminism, feminism and political modernism, and debates on the specificity of the female spectator. But before Mulvey’s contribution can be assayed, another fork on the highway to theory must be briefly sketched out, indeed, a parallel route under construction that was bound to overtake and transform the psychoanalytic one--cultural studies. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart at the University of Birmingham. Influenced by the native British Marxism of Hoggart and Raymond Williams, in 1970 the Centre began producing a journal, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, which was an exact contemporary to Screen and in many respects a rival to it, at least with respect to developing a Marxist politics and a theory of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 306 ideology in relation to representation. Similar to Screen, the Centre and WPCS were sites for lively debates on cultural politics and criticism with similar commitments to the work of Althusser and Barthes for developing a contestatory cultural criticism, but outside of the framework of Tel Quel and without a deep commitment to psychoanalysis. Among the most influential works for what would become a discourse of culture were Stuart Hall’s essay “Encoding/decoding,” first circulated as a stenciled paper in 1973 and continually reprinted in the next two decades, the special issue of WPCS 7/8 “Resistance through Rituals,” (Summer 1975), Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, 1979), and David Morley’s, The 'Nationwide' audience: structure and decoding (British Film Institute, 1980). Significantly, none of these works centered on film, but all would have a significant impact in pushing the emerging field of film studies in the directions of media studies and cultural studies. From 1975 up until the early nineties, then, Theory branched into two streams--one defined by psychoanalysis and feminism, the other by cultural studies of media. The two streams continually interacted at their edges, of course, and feminist film theory itself would undergo an internal debate on female subjects or spectators where tension accrued between psychoanalytic and culturalist accounts. Both streams were in turn complicated by another external genetic line. As the influence of Tel Quel faded, the 1980s were strongly marked by another conceptual framework that rapidly unfolded across discourses in and of arts, though largely exhausting itself in the 1990s--that of postmodernism. In all of these respects, the discourse of ideology began to turn on that of culturalism in evermore-complicated combinations. Throughout the 1980s the terms of Theory are shifting, though around or in relation to a common center of gravity--the question of the subject and ideology--which remains the background of every cultural debate and conceptual importation. However, on this ground there is already tension between the concept of signifying practice, especially as defended in Screen, and the commitment in cultural studies to think of cultural consumers not as “spectators” but rather as active and differentiated readers or producers of meaning. This tension was in turn complicated by the increasing tendency to treat the problem of meaning not in relation to the Subject of psychoanalysis, but rather as classes or categories Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 307 of social subjects. This shift was not necessarily a rejection of “French theory” as much as a remapping and rebalancing of concepts drawn from Althusser, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, and later Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bordieu. In contrast to film theory, even Derrida would have a role to play through his influence on Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha’s contributions to subaltern and postcolonial theory. The steadily rising influence of cultural studies also contributed in other significant ways to the vicissitudes of theory in the 1980s. Like film theory per se, cultural studies had an abiding interest in questions of Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, postmodernism, media studies, postcoloniality, and critical race theory, all of which would provide points of commonality and collaboration with the expanding field of film studies. However, organized around the concept of culture, film was only one of a constellation of elements under examination, which also included television, music and fashion subcultures, and indeed broadly, all forms of popular culture and mass media. Here the concept of culture rivals film as an object of theory and contributes to one of the major trends of the 1980s: the disappearance of film into the general study of culture, or the incorporation of film into the broader matrix of media studies. I have already commented on the irony of this historical situation in The Virtual Life of Film. Just as the study of film starts to achieve real presence in university curriculums, and begins to contribute in significant ways to critical and historical studies in the arts and humanities, the moving image, so long associated with theatrical cinema, begins to unravel into a variety of electronic and digital media, appearing on new kinds of screens through a variety of platforms and distribution channels. At the same time, the explosive influence of postmodernism in the arts and critical theory--despite the internal conceptual dissensions arising between its various conceptions in architecture, philosophy, social theory, and critical theory--quickly undermined and overturned the discourse of political modernism. In philosophy and critical theory, there was a new skepticism towards the possibility of conceiving theory as a generalizable or unifiable doctrine with secure epistemological standpoints and claims to universality. Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979], published in translation by University of Minnesota Press in 1984, set the framework for this new epistemological perspective of reduced Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 308 expectations. If modernism’s critical potential was founded by the clash of great regimes of representation and knowledge, postmodernism emerged from an increasing incredulity toward master narratives and the grand dialectical movements of philosophy or history-the dialectic of Spirit, the emancipation of the oppressed, the accumulation of wealth, or the founding of a classless society. The postmodern condition emerges, then, in an environment of increased skepticism marked by the proliferation of micro-narratives and “phrase regimes” alert to difference, diversity, and the incompossibility of cultural contexts and situations, where the great hierarchies of knowledge and value are fragmented and leveled out. In the domain of art and art theory, beginning with Hal Foster’s influential 1983 collection The Anti-Aesthetic, and Fredric Jameson’s work leading up to the publication of Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991, the discursive framework of postmodernism largely dissolved political modernism as discourse, and in turn, both the object and subject of Theory were transformed. With respect to the influence of Tel Quel, the combination of cultural studies and postmodernism led to a rapid dissolution of the fundamental binary of modernism and realism, a declining commitment to the transgressive claims of modernism, and a steadily rising interest in the popular, thus blurring the axiological line between high art and the popular arts or mass media. The discourse of political modernism eventually disappeared as the stakes and framework of experimentation in the arts underwent profound shifts, substituting transgression, negativity, and critique for strategies of appropriation, recontextualization, parody, and irony, as exemplified in the work of Sherry Levine, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Dara Birnbaum, and Martha Rosler, among many others. In a process happening across all media--architecture, photography, film, video, painting, sculpture, and performance art-modernist commitments to formal abstraction and medium specificity were in rapid decline. Indeed, the late seventies and early eighties witness the emergence of conceptualist and “post-medium” strategies leading to a destabilization of the concept of medium as such. Film theory and film studies responded to this period of transition in a complex and contradictory way, first because the main unifying framework of theory was in a state of tension with cultural studies, but also because cultural studies was more Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 309 conceptually prepared to deal with the unraveling of film into television, video, and eventually interactive media across the eighties and nineties. Indeed, by 1991 what might be called postmodern cultural studies, whose turning point in the United States is the conference in Champagne-Urbana that produced the massive and influential collection Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1992) edited by Lawrence Grossberg, had completely displaced the influence of Tel Quel, and by the same token had undermined the synthetic gesture of Theory, thus promoting its disaggregation and multiplication into ever increasing streams of fields. Throughout the eighties and into the nineties, the rise of media studies and new critical interest in popular television, video art, and electronic media produced a situation where as the object of theory film gave way to a new concern with visual studies and the multiplication of screen cultures driven by the demands of multinational capitalism and proliferating simultaneously on global and capillary scales. At the same time, cultural studies had created a new conception of a class or collective subject of mass culture, attentive to the differential contexts of reading and readership, that overturned or reversed the logics of apparatus theory and the subject in process. The apparatus was no longer all-powerful, and the subject in process was no longer specifically aligned to a negativity associated with the avant-garde. Cultural studies produced readers rather than spectators, placing new emphases on an active consumption of culture where, depending on context, meaning could be pulled in a variety of directions. The Leninist notion of intellectuals as the avant-garde of theory was thus undermined by the spontaneous agency of resistant readers. Psychoanalysis would not completely disappear. The concept of negativity and the drive-governed bases of signification were now marshaled, rather, to explain the subject’s always open, incomplete, and contradictory relation to meaning. To the extent that transgression was diminished as a concept, perhaps the death-drive was overtaken by the pleasure principle? In any case, just when psychoanalysis seemed to be conceptually exhausted, Slavoj Žižek appeared on the scene to encourage us to enjoy our symptoms. Taking a satellite view, perhaps it is now possible to picture the topography of contemporary film theory as it stretches from the politically charged date of 1968 toward the mid-nineties, and turns from a discourse of ideology to one of “culturalism.” In Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 310 contrast to either the aesthetic discourse or the discourse of signification, contemporary theory fully embraces its name, and accepts the concept of Theory as such as a practice or even a discipline within the arts and humanities. An idea of Theory is deployed widely, not only in academic and critical discourses, but also within the arts themselves--this is truly an “age of Theory.” However, this great umbrella term, so easily evoked or gestured to, also obscures or camouflages a number of distinct divisions, conflicts, and debates. Our satellite map must be complemented with another kind of topography, which can account for major and minor geological shifts, fractures and fault-lines, and complex patterns of parallel and intersecting lines. Out of Tel Quel’s “théorie d’ensemble” and Kristeva’s concept of signifying practice stretches the discourse of political modernism, which reaches its point of maximum influence in the late seventies with Screen’s interest in psychoanalytic concepts of suture and subject-positioning. As theories of discourse, these lines can be understood as extensions and modifications of the precedent discourse of signification. Parallel to socalled Screen theory is the discourse of identity and culture, which not only overtakes political modernism but also largely remains dominant today to the extent that “theory” still exists. Both are variants on the discourse of ideology, of course, but the steadily rising arc of cultural studies in film and media studies could also be mapped against a decline or displacement of psychoanalysis. This fault line is especially apparent in the history of feminist film theory. The concept of the transcendental subject produced a significant impasse or blockage in theory in the form of an identity without difference. To the extent that the apparatus was considered an efficient dialectical machine, both psychological and ideological, for reproducing the transcendental subject of idealism, all paths toward a materialist epistemology appeared to have been barred. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey turned negativity and the reflexive force of theory back on apparatus theory itself, and thus introduces the idea that the transcendental subject of cinema is in fact gendered, that it produces and universalizes forms of perception and desire that sustain not only idealism but also patriarchy. The line of questioning that Mulvey’s essay inaugurates is how does the apparatus sustain sexual difference while privileging only one Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 311 of its terms, and where can other potentialities of difference be located within it? Her argument is fully framed within the discourse of political modernism, however, and her proposed solution is to produce another kind of (materialist) cinema, both avant-garde and materialist, in order “to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment.”149 Stephen Heath’s essay on “Narrative Space,” published in Screen in autumn 1976, introduces another turn, incorporating Kristevan concepts of negativity and the subject in process to a theory of the subject. The process of reproduction of the subject is always at risk, Heath argues, and inclined to fail, and thus must be continually sustained in a spatial and temporal dynamic that bolsters the idealist system of representation. But the potential is always there to release another kind of cinema (materialist) and another kind of subject (open to ideological transformation). Here the problem of difference is still organized around the concept of signifying practice, whose ideas of signifiance and suture sustain an immanent relation of the subject to discourse. The subject is produced through discourse, as it were, and if the text and apparatus are productive of a certain form of subjectivity, then the response is to produce another kind of text. While Mulvey’s essay aspired to locate the possibility of a new form of materialist text and spectatorship, one could not necessarily say that the text would be feminist or forms of identification “feminine.” Indeed, while Mulvey and others brought the critical concepts of a psychoanalytic feminism to bear powerfully on the patriarchal logic of classical film form, many unanswered questions remained. Was there no place for the female spectator in the classical Hollywood cinema? And what were the possibilities for locating and defining the possibilities of female authorship and the poetics of a feminine style or écriture? At this point the reflexive critical force of theory begins to open new fault-lines within feminist theory itself. Throughout the late seventies, essays in Screen were increasingly concerned with questions of subjectivity and subject-positioning, leading up to Stephen Heath’s exhaustive overview of psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference 149 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975) 18. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 312 and identification, “Difference,” in the autumn 1978 issue. As importantly, in 1981 Mulvey published her "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure'," which attempted to account for the activity and pleasure of the female spectator with respect to classical Hollywood films. From 1978, then, through the early eighties and up to Camera Obscura’s special issue on the topic in 1990, defining the psychological specificity of the female spectator, and the potential for a feminist avant-garde practice, together defines a dominant series within contemporary film theory as articulated in important essays and books by Linda Williams, Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, and many others.150 From the late 70s through the 1980s, theory is not only turning to new problems-such as feminine identification, the female spectator, and feminine écriture--but is also turning on itself in the form of negation and critique. Psychoanalysis is not only the framework for posing and exploring these questions, but also for testing and interrogating patriarchal biases within film theory and psychoanalytic theory themselves. Moreover, both within and outside of feminism, psychoanalysis itself was being challenged both from within by feminist theory, and from without by cultural studies, which by the early eighties were producing important accounts of female readership in the context of ethnographic and reception studies. The important idea here, however, is to emphasize that theory itself is being transformed in a relatively new way, where one might say that one of the primary activities of theory is to be engaged in theoretical critique, to be continually turning back onto itself, probing itself for limits, biases, ideological flaws, ellipses, and blind spots. This critical dimension of theory is not new, of course. But what is novel in contemporary theory is how this reflexivity continually turns around and transforms dialectically the problem of the subject--it forms of identity or difference, and the limits and possibilities of knowledge of itself and in its relation to power. In a conceptual framework so committed to psychoanalysis, the unconscious, subjective difference, and the transgressive force of desire and the drives, in retrospect one of the most curious features of contemporary theory is how the concept of negation or 150 For a fuller account, see Chapter Eight of The Crisis of Political Modernism, as well as my subsequent book, The Difficulty of Difference : psychoanalysis, sexual difference and film theory (New York: Routledge, 1991). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 313 critique returns continually to the problem of identity. Where earlier psychoanalytic accounts focused on the drive-governed processes of transgression as an erosion of identity that had to be shored up in ideological representations, beginning with the question of the specificity of the female spectator theory as theoretical critique turned increasingly to a politics of identity that amplified rather than eroded the assurance of selfknowledge. This odd tension was already present in Althusserian epistemology, as I have already shown. Here the crisis of representation in political modernism and the idea of a subject positioned in or by discourse is turned inside out, and through theory the site of the political turns from the text to the subject and the subject’s capacity to produce both texts and readings. Moreover, in a context so committed to anti-foundationalism and antiessentialism, this capacity returned continually to the criteria of bodies marked by their external and asymmetrical relation to power through differences of gender, ethnicity, race, class, sexual preference, and all actual and historical forms of exploitation. Among the very great achievements of this age of theory were its deep ethical commitments to political activism and its desire to critique and seek redress for inequality, discrimination, oppression, and injustice. No apologies are necessary for these very real achievements. Among the absolutely key and resolutely unexamined structural components of the logic of contemporary theory, however, and this despite its intense and recurring patterns of reflexivity and critique, was the tendency to construct a concept of identity as the site of a special epistemological space in relation to ideology or power. In virtue of its asymmetrical relationship to power, what we might call the excluded or differential subject was granted special powers of agency, (self) knowledge, and critique that freed it to interrogate all strategies of domination as well as the imbrication of others in the snares of power. The power of negation here produced another kind of continuing crisis of representation, but this time not relating to the immanent structure of signifying practice, but rather to external relations of exclusion that returned in the capacity of identity to critique how the other, or I as other, is represented by others. Asymmetry in the experience of power was thus assumed to produce a special kind of epistemological privilege in the double form of a critique of representation and its biases, and the possibility of knowing bias and eluding it through self-representation as other. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 314 Disenfranchisement in relation to power was thought to produce a countervailing power in the form of the possibility of critique. Though strange to think of it now, the structure of this form of knowledge is oddly Hegelian in its logic. Negativity drives a form of critique whose product is a new form of self-consciousness, and through the negation of the negation a new identity is synthetically achieved that not only overturns the asymmetry of master and servant, but also produces new and higher possibilities of freedom and knowledge. (That Alexander Kojève’s original if eccentric reading of Hegel was deeply influential for Lacan, not to mention Kristeva, and that Hegel’s Phenomenology played analogously important roles in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, gives additional credence to the idea that Hegel’s dialectic of self-consciousness lurks in the deep structure of theory.) In any case, the ramifying drive of contemporary film theory is marked first by critique--that is, the stepping outside of a current theoretical position in order to expose its limits and contradictions. Here theory takes itself as its own object on a new “metatheoretical” level, not to create a new concept of “theory,” but rather to expand its range of subjects in a dual sense, producing not only new, themes, concepts, and arguments, but also new sites of epistemological interrogation and evaluation. And then appears the second dimension of theory, which seeks beyond or to one side of ideology to project a space of the other who claims to speak from a horizon beyond ideology. In this manner, from about 1985 the disaggregation but also expansion of Theory throughout the humanities is fueled by reflexivity and critique. Questions of difference and spectatorship were complicated by the increasing importance of critical race theory, postcolonial theory, a renewed interest in Third Cinema, and in the wake of increasing gay activism, especially in response to the AIDS pandemic, the emergence of queer theory. Each of these internal movements within theory is marked by conferences or publications that serve as “instaurateurs du discours” in Foucault’s sense, both instituting and institutionalizing new series within the discourse. At the same time, new series are also generated by a critical folding or turning of the discourse upon itself to probe its ethical limits or horizons, and to project new epistemological spaces marked by Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 315 difference. Thus buoyed by the context of Juliet Mitchell’s feminist psychoanalysis and the new French feminisms of Kristeva, Irigaray, and Montrelay, in 1975 Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” opens contemporary film theory and the discourse of the transcendental subject to a critique of its androcentric and patriarchal biases, and generates new questions around the possibility of female spectatorship and women’s aesthetic practice. Important debates on black aesthetics and racial difference in authorship and spectatorship were opened by James Snead’s pioneering program, "Recoding Blackness: The Visual Rhetoric of Black Independent Film," (Whitney Museum of American Art New American Filmmakers Series, 18 June-3 July 1985), and in 1988 with the publication of Blackframes: critical perspectives on Black independent cinema, edited by Mbye B. Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins (MIT Press, 1988), and Screen’s “Last Special Issue on ‘Race’,” edited by Issac Julien and Kobena Mercer. With the publication of Judith Butler’s deeply influential Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1990) and the important anthology How Do I Look? (Bay Press, 1991), the emergence of queer theory introduces a highly productive new series of concepts and questions, where from both within and without, feminist theory and theory as such are criticized for reducing the problem of gender to the binary frame of the heterosexual matrix. Non-normative sexual practices thus become sites marking the instability of gender identities, and in turn new strategies of agency and resistance are proposed as “a set of parodic practices based in a performative theory of gender acts that disrupt the categories of the body, sex, gender, and sexuality and occasion their subversive resignification and proliferation beyond the binary frame.”151 From 1990, then, contemporary theory finds itself fully enmeshed in the decade of identity politics. Where the period from 1968 to 1975 is marked by the desire to forge a more or less unified theory of ideology and the subject out of the context of French structuralism and poststructuralism, the period from 1975 to 1990 produces separate yet interacting series of critiques where the transcendental subject of apparatus theory is criticized as supporting a masculine visual privilege, patriarchal ideology is challenged by 151 Judith Butler, “Preface (1990)” in Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity (New York: Routledge, 1999) xxxi. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 316 posing the specificity of feminine identification and practice, queer theory interrogates the heterosexual presumption, and finally critical race theory promotes interest not only in the specificity of the African-American spectatorship, but also all the possible subjective categories marked by ethnicity, hybridity, and diasporic cultures. Under the influence of cultural studies, each of these series generates new approaches to questions of agency and resistance wherein psychoanalysis and cultural studies enter into an uneasy alliance, and where Laura Mulvey’s essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” serves not only as a target of respectful critique, but also as a continuing point of anchor for the discourse in general. If Althusserian epistemology and Tel Quel’s théorie d’ensemble forged discursively the conceptual framework in which we think Theory, we have now reached a point where cultural studies has fully come into its own, psychoanalysis is on the wane, and Tel Quel is all but forgotten. And this is also where one might mark the end of contemporary film theory around 1995. We would seem to be at a historical juncture where Theory is triumphantly dominant in film studies as well as the arts and humanities. But such a picture leaves aside the fundamental importance of the “new historicism” in the 1980s in both film studies and the study of literature, as well as the more sociological orientation of most of cultural studies. Also in film studies, from the late 1980s there is a new interest in narratology, historical poetics, and cognitivism, as well as a desire to critique and temper poststructuralism through an appeal to post-positivist philosophies of science. As importantly, perhaps we have too quickly forgotten the discovery of Paul de Man’s wartime writings in 1987, the “culture wars,” and the conservative critique of leftist domination of humanities that had erupted at about the same time, which dominated public debate deep into the nineties. All of which is to stay that the two decades stretching from 1975 to 1995, the era of contemporary theory, are also full of tension, conflict, and debate where Theory, or various approaches to theory, are challenged at every turn from both within and without. We have returned again to Vincent Leitch’s characterization of the paradox of theory, where each disruption, each new moment of negation and critique interrogates the ends of theory and projects the end of Theory. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 317 The problem of endings returns us to the question of the contemporaneity of Theory. Here is a deeper problem for the contemporary is also what is actual, what is present to us as a lived situation. A contemporary sense of the state and history of a discourse or a discipline is always bound to a certain present interest that frames the evershifting ways in which we seek out conceptual ancestors, ignoring some and elevating others, forging commonalities and establishing differences, setting out boundaries, and seeking to define our present position on a time-line where progress may be asserted and defended. Contemporaneity is also often assessed contingently by grand historical disruptions. Thus the end of the second World War became the common frontier of our post-modernity with any number of other intermediary eruptions punctuating it--the war in Viet Nam and other post-colonial movements of the 1960s; the civil rights movement in the United States followed by the international student rebellions of 1968 as well as the feminist movement; the conservative backlash of the Reagan years, and then the first and second Gulf Wars. These historical and social eruptions all inspired new centers of interest around questions of spectatorship and subjectivity--from the perspectives of feminism, race and ethnicity, the post-colonial and subaltern. In writing “The Imaginary Signifier,” did Christian Metz realize he was ceasing to be modern and clearing the terrain for contemporary film study, in challenging his earlier work on signification and laying out the methodological grid for investigating psychoanalytic accounts of spectatorship and identification? And if from the perspective of the contemporary, film theory is closing off and opening on to something new, what comes after the contemporary? We are close, then, to having to examine the paradox of a new disruption where a post-contemporary moment is projected into the conceptual space defined by postTheory. And if we are now in the position of asking what comes after the “contemporary,” we must also ask, what comes after Theory? Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory Part III. Philosophy’s Artful Conversation 318 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 319 24. A permanent state of suspension or deferment [Theory] is essentially a scientific discourse, which is not only an abstract, generalizing, or foundational discourse, but also--and this is its distinctive trait--one that turns back on itself. A language that turns back on itself. --Roland Barthes, “On theory” In 1970, Roland Barthes gave an interview “On theory” to the French magazine, VH. After Kristeva and Althusser, what is most extraordinary about his remarks is Barthes’s clarity about the stakes of theory in 1970 and the structure of theory as it would unfold so complexly over the next two decades. Barthes begins by signaling a contemporary disruption in the senses of theory that separate it from the discursive context of the nineteenth-century whose residues, one might add, were still to be found in the multiple origins of the discourse of structure. Barthes insists that theory not be opposed to the concrete nor confused with abstraction; this is his way of distinguishing two discursive formations of theory. Dominated by the kind of rationalism and empiricism associated with positivism and the rise of experimental science, the nineteenth century hesitates before theory, or searches for definitions of science distinguishable from theory. By the same token, positivism begins to turn from philosophy, or to seek a new place for philosophy as a helpmeet to science. In the turning point of 1970, Barthes also asserts that theory has taken on a new sense, which also withdraws from the practice of philosophy and the abstractions of metaphysics and now finds a new mode of concrete expression in the immanent analysis of texts. Theory passes through the text in an activity of fragmentation and discontinuity whose exemplary practice is Barthes’s reading of Balzac’s “Sarrazine” in S/Z. And here there is another disruption with an even older sense of theory. Etymologically, theory indicates a practice of observation, contemplation, meditation, or speculation, leading to a disinterested knowing independent of application. Through his interest in semiology and textual analysis, and through the influence of Levi-Strauss and Lacan, Barthes opposes these characterizations of theory and projects instead a third sense, one that is clearly indebted to Kristeva. “[Theory] is essentially a scientific discourse,” Barthes offers, “which Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 320 is not only an abstract, generalizing, or foundational discourse, but also--and this is its distinctive trait--one which turns back on itself. A language which turns back on itself.”152 Theory in this sense does not seek to complete itself in a system of thought, but rather engages in an ongoing practice of reflexive critique--Barthes says that it inhabits a permanent state of suspension or deferment. This reflexivity is neither circular nor closed; it does not seek to enclose truth within theory. Rather, Barthes seeks a concept of theory through a discourse that thinks itself in terms of its material organization of meaning while engaging in a continuous autocritique that evades the lures of abstraction, continuity, and closure. Barthes wonders, then, whether the new sense of theory is not simply writing, or écriture in the then current vocabulary. “Writing,” says Barthes, “in the contemporary sense of this word, is a theory. It has a theoretical dimension, and theory must not refuse writing or mobilize itself within a pure écrivance, which is to say, a purely instrumental view of the language that it uses” (“On theory” 690-691). One might smile at this kind of language today, recognizing its proximity to Tel Quel’s nearly forgotten language of literary modernism. But note that Barthes is not promoting a political modernism (nor did he ever, I believe), but rather a close critical and analytical attention to the relation between discourse and theory, as well as the discourse of theory; or better, that theory is produced through discourse and is never separate from it, materially or historically. On one hand, Barthes’s statements bring into sharp focus one of the persistent and unifying characteristics of the multiple, dissenting, and contradictory discourses of contemporary theory--its resolute reflexivity and self-criticism, which is always probing the axiological and epistemological borders of discourse, refusing to let it stand still or close within itself. On the other, Barthes is careful to avoid any claims of identity, for either the text or the subject, and this pushes him back from the center to the edges of contemporary theory. Theory seeks knowledge. It might even seek “scientific” knowledge. But to do so is never to find the truth of a text, a subject, or a body, but rather 152 “Sur la théorie,” VH 101 (Summer 1970); reprinted in Roland Barthes, Oeuvres completes, tome III (1968-1971), ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002) 690; my translations. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 321 to continually test how we approach or assert the question of knowledge in discourse, and what we value or not in that knowledge and the discursive forms it takes. In Part II, I suggested that we think of the problem of the history of film theory not as fixed and successive periods, or conceptual schemes overturning and replacing one another, but rather as overlapping and intersecting genres of discourse full of retentions, returns, and unexpected extensions, as well as ellipses and omissions. Nevertheless, the emergence or unfolding of discursive genres, one out of the other, occurs neither progressively nor continuously, but rather in series of disruptions and discontinuities that mark real differences between the aesthetic discourse, the discourse of signification, and that of ideology or culture, each of which involve turnings and remappings of concepts of theory. Moreover, I hinted at the end of Part II that in film study, and perhaps the arts and humanities in general, a moment has arrived where contemporary theory reaches its end, which leads to some deep and disturbing questions: What comes after the contemporary? And what comes after Theory? In this context, certain key works anticipate a rupture that occurs between 1985 and 1995. I am thinking here of the unlikely pairing of David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film and Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: the Time-Image, both of which were published in 1985. Neither books are works of Theory or even “theory,” and indeed both lead toward the controversial moment of “post-Theory” in the late 1990s, which in turn opens onto new competing yet tangentially related approaches to film philosophy. Stanley Cavell’s work on film beginning with The World Viewed in 1971, and continuing with major statements like Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears, and Cities of Words, forges another path, which like Deleuze touches film theory along many of its edges without really interacting with it. In the same way that Jean-François Lyotard claimed that the post-modern is always what comes before the modern, it might be said that in their projections of film philosophy, Cavell and Deleuze stand outside of or to one side of theory, marking out philosophy as an alternative path or a possible path to come. And if there is something that still challenges us in the critiques of post-Theory, it may not be exactly that theory has come to an end, though certainly the discursive period often called “contemporary” theory is drawing to a close, and it may even be said that contemporary film theory is in a moment of upheaval and transition. The stakes of our Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 322 contemporaneity have changed, such that the response to what comes after theory is often, philosophy. But what is philosophy? 25. How theory became history Even though we may show our theory to be true, in some sense, we may be challenged to show that it is significant. --Charles Taylor, “Understanding and Ethnocentricity” In The Virtual Life of Film, I argue that 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 reconceptualizations of spectatorship and the film audience, and the placement of film in the broader context of visual culture and electronic media. But not all of these innovations were equally welcome. In 1996, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll argued in their edited collection Post-Theory (University of Wisconsin Press) for the rejection of 1970s “Grand Theory” as incoherent. Equally suspicious of cultural and media studies, Bordwell and Carroll insisted on anchoring the discipline in film as an empirical object subject to investigations methodologically allied to the natural sciences. Almost simultaneously, other philosophical challenges to Theory came from film scholars influenced by analytic philosophy and the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. These debates emerged against the vexed backgrounds both of the culture wars of the 1990s and the rise of identity politics and cultural studies. Confusing “theory” with Theory, often lost in these debates is the acknowledgment that no judgments can be advanced—in history, criticism, or philosophy—in the absence of an axiological examination of our epistemological commitments. Put simply, theory has a critical dimension that promotes, evaluates, and adjudicates these commitments in an open-ended dialogue. To want to relinquish theory or to overcome it is more than a debate over epistemological standards, it is a retreat from reflection on the ethical commitments behind our styles of knowing. With this claim in mind, I want to argue not for a return to the 1970s concept of theory, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 323 but rather for a vigorous debate on what should constitute a philosophy of the humanities critically and reflexively attentive to its epistemological and ethical commitments. I will return to this argument in later sections. I have characterized the history of contemporary theory as being marked by distinctive conceptual divisions and conflicts. The Marxist and psychoanalytic theory of the subject by Tel Quel in literature and by Screen in film studies was quickly challenged by new approaches and rhetorical stances including cultural studies, reception theory, feminist, postcolonial, and queer theory, and finally, new historicism and cognitivism. At the same time, within these divisions there are certain key conceptual commitments that wind through all the discourses like Ariadne’s thread, linking various concepts of subjectivity and identity to often unacknowledged problems of epistemology. In his Introduction to Post-Theory David Bordwell observes, in some cases convincingly, that there are deep continuities of doctrine and practice between the discourses of ideology and culturalism despite the debates that arise between them. If one is attentive to history as a pattern of discontinuities, both minor and major, contemporary theory is defined less by a break or division between, say, psychoanalysis and cognitivism, than by a set of family resemblances linking the quarrelsome family of contemporary thought axially around the questions of spectatorship, meaning, and cultural value, as well as the stakes of “theory.” The problem of how to examine the activities of spectatorship, defining and assessing their range of subjective effects, is as important to cognitivism as it is to psychoanalytical or culturalist models. While the conceptual domain of contemporary film theory lacks unity, it is still defined by a powerful horizon of regularities where certain deep patterns of logic and discourse thread through the period. One of these involves how the problem of identity is fueled by the dialectic of negativity and the reflexive critical force of theory. The other has to do with the epistemological standpoints of claims to theory, which sustain all its processes of critique, debate, evaluation, and judgment, and which has only been rarely examined as such. Post-Theory and the cognitivist critique can be understood as one more branching of the second problem, extending the metatheoretical attitude in new directions. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 324 By the mid-nineties film theory and indeed the concept of “theory” itself were challenged from a number of perspectives. This contestation occurs in three overlapping phases. The first phase is marked by David Bordwell’s call throughout the 1980s for a “historical poetics” of film, and culminates in the debates engendered by the publication of Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Harvard University Press) and by the special issue of iris on Cinema and Cognitive Psychology, both published in 1989. The keystone of the second phase is the 1996 publication of Post-Theory. Subtitled Reconstructing Film Studies, the book represents an attempt to establish film studies as a discipline modeled on cognitivist science and historical poetics, and to re-anchor practices of theory in the epistemological ideals of rational and empirical inquiry proximate to the natural sciences. If the second phase may be characterized by the attempt to return theory to a model of “scientific” investigation and explanation, the third phase subjects the association of theory with science to philosophical critique. Deeply influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s purported critique of theory in the Philosophical Investigations, this perspective calls for a new orientation in the examination of culture and the arts through a philosophy of the humanities. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, then, theory is subjected to a triple displacement--by history, science, and finally by philosophy. At the same time, another salutary effect of post-Theory was its call for greater conceptual clarity in the stakes and structure of theory itself. In a contribution to the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, David Bordwell offers one of the clearest and most focused definitions: “Film theories offer systematic, general explanations of aspects of the nature, functions, and effects of cinema.”153 This well considered and generous formulation would seem to cover a great variety of different types and styles of aesthetic writing on cinema. However, all kinds of explanations are not equal. Just as Althusser asked that we distinguish between true and false ideas, Bordwell will ask that clear lines be drawn between what I will characterize as bad and good theory. 153 “Film Theory,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol. 2, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 197. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 325 As suggested at the end of Part II, developments in cinema studies in the 1980s were marked by a historical and a cultural turn echoing the influence of the new historicism in literary studies. The renewed interest in history was no doubt responsible for some the most influential publications of the decade, including The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (Columbia University Press, 1985), co-authored by Bordwell with Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger, and Bordwell’s own Narration in the Fiction Film (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Both books were received as major contributions and interventions in contemporary film study, which at the height of its age of Theory was already confronting a number of impasses. It cannot and should not be said that either project was against theory. Both books argued implicitly for a reconceptualization and reorientation of theory, focusing and reducing its epistemological ambitions. This line of thought becomes clearer in Bordwell’s subsequent work on cognitivism and film theory. From the mid-eighties, Bordwell is making a muchneeded case for revising the methods and concepts of historical research, and for rebalancing the relationship between history and theory in film study. In retrospect, I believe Bordwell was neither rejecting, revising, nor extending “theory” in the 1980s, but rather trying to invent a new path between history and theory, which he called “neoformalism” or “historical poetics,” a path which he hoped would reform and remodel the discipline of film studies itself. Bordwell’s work is equally exemplary of a recasting of theory for the field of cinema studies. It is important to appreciate Bordwell’s contribution to what I have characterized as the metatheoretical attitude. Among his generation, Bordwell was among the first to exhibit fascination with the history of film study itself, and to focus attention on problems of methodology with respect to questions of historical research and the critical analysis of form and style. Throughout the 1980s, Bordwell produced a number of influential methodological essays promoting a historical poetics of cinema. From Narration in the Fiction Film to Making Meaning, the broad outlines of his approach are made apparent. One cannot accuse Bordwell of a retreat from theory—no one’s commitment to good theory building is greater or more admirable. Rather, he wants to recast theory as history, or rather, to ground theory in the context of empirical historical Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 326 research. In this way, Bordwell responds to what are perceived to be the twin threats of cultural and media studies. On one hand, there is a risk of methodological incoherence for a field whose interdisciplinary commitments had become too broad; on the other, the risk of diffusing, in the context of media studies, cinema studies’ fundamental ground--film as a formal object delimiting specifiable effects. One aim of historical poetics, then, is to project a vision of methodological coherence onto a field of study perceived to be losing its center, and to restore an idea of film as a specifiable form to that center; in other words, poetics is searching for grounds to anchor and stabilize conceptually film’s virtual life, both formally and historically. Poetics concerns questions of form and style. It deals with concrete problems of aesthetic practice and describes the specificity of film’s aesthetic function while recognizing the importance of social convention in what a culture may define as a work of art. In Narration in the Fiction Film, the historical side of poetics addresses the proliferation of distinct modes of narration (classical Hollywood, Soviet or dialectical materialist, postwar European art cinema, parametric narration) as delimitable in time and sensitive to national and/or cultural contexts. Here Bordwell makes his best case for basing the analysis of individual works upon sound historical investigation and explicit theoretical principles in a way that avoids arbitrary boundaries between history, analysis, and theory. By 1989 Bordwell’s attack on interpretation and his promotion of cognitivism as a model of “middle-level research” recast theory with respect to three proposals. First, his appeal to middle-level research calls for pulling back from broader concerns of ideology and culture to refocus attention on film’s intrinsic structure and functions. Second, he promotes a comparable turn from psychoanalytic theories of the subject to the study of filmic comprehension as grounded in, ideally, empirically constrained mental and perceptual structures. Finally, his renewed emphasis on history also signals a withdrawal from high-level conceptual concerns to refocus research on the fundamental data of films themselves and the primary documentation generated from their production contexts. Bordwell accuses interpretation of reaching too high in grasping for abstract concepts to map semantically onto its object. Here the film-object itself disappears in its particularity, becoming little more than the illustration of concepts. Moreover, the interpreter is Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 327 reflexively insensitive to the cognitive operations they execute. They produce no new knowledge, but rather only repetitively invoke the same heuristics to model different films; in other words, interpretation is understood as a process of repeating the same heuristic models, not for accumulating new data and explanatory frameworks. The sometimes-unruly responses to Making Meaning and Cinema and Cognitive Psychology demonstrate that Bordwell’s criticisms touched a nerve, and there is little doubt that his work in this period is a genuine and important response to the impasse in theory that cinema studies began to confront by the end of the 1980s.154 In the critique of so-called Grand Theory, what is most interesting here is the implicit alliance of historical poetics and cognitivism with analytically inclined philosophies of science, above all as exemplars of what Bordwell calls rational and empirical inquiry. In the two Introductions to Post-Theory, both Bordwell and Carroll promote strong views of what comprises good theory building in stark contrast to the then current state of contemporary film and cultural theory. Ironically, one consequence of this appeal, strongly implicit in Carroll’s contribution, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” is that film theory does not yet exist, an implication that strongly recalls Christian Metz’s position in the 1960s and early 1970s. Carroll criticizes both classical and contemporary film theory according to three basic arguments: they are essentialist or foundationalist, taking films as examples of a priori conditions; they are doctrine driven rather than data driven, meaning not susceptible to empirical examination and verification; and finally, they deviate too widely from film-based problems, that is, the concrete particularity of filmic problems disappears when they are taken up to illustrate broader concepts of ideology, subjectivity, or culture. Alternatively, characterized by “ordinary standards of truth” as a regulative ideal, good theory seeks causal reasoning, deduces generalities by tracking regularities and the norm, is dialectical and requires maximally free and open debate, and finally, it is characterized by fallibilism. In this sense, good theory is historical in the sense of being open to revision through the successive elimination of error. Middle-level research presents the provisional 154 See in particular the special issue of Film Criticism 17: 2-3 (1993) devoted to critical discussion of Making Meaning, as well as Bordwell’s debate with Dudley Andrew on cognitivism in iris 11 (Summer 1990). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 328 ground for a theory or theories of film projected forward in a process of debate, falsification, and revision.155 The “post” in post-Theory is a curious misnomer, then, for what has been characterized as Theory is epistemologically invalid, and, ironically, what comes after may only appear after a period of long debate and revisionism. A legitimate film theory remains to be constructed, the product of an indefinite future. Hesitancy before “theory” is a familiar theme of this book, which has taken several different though related forms. Sometimes theory hovers in an indefinite future as a desired though as yet unattained or unattainable state of knowledge; alternatively, Eikhenbaum exemplifies the tendency to temper theory with method in order to avoid the abstractions of philosophy and to bring poetics closer to nomothetic reasoning. In insisting that poetics is neither a doctrine nor a method, Bordwell projects a view not dissimilar from Eikhenbaum’s, which is unsurprising considering the influence of Russian Formalism on historical poetics. However, in the dozen or so years since Post-Theory was published it is surprising how little the stakes of the debate have changed; in many senses, Theory has not been transcended or overcome, though it has continued unraveling and branching into diversely intertwining series of “field studies,” to invoke Francesco Casetti’s terminology. By the same token, historical poetics and cognitivism have taken firm root in cinema studies, producing many interesting offshoots and spreading for more widely and diversely than Bordwell or Carroll have often been ready to admit. Why, then, has the post-Theory moment not fully arrived? In the Introduction and first chapter of Poetics of Cinema (Routledge, 2008), Bordwell suggests that the reasons are largely institutional, which motivates him not only to deepen and clarify methodologically his commitments to poetics, but also to extend his criticisms of Theory, his notions of theorizing, and his conception of the relation of poetics and theory to 155 Succinct accounts of Carroll’s commitment to theorizing as a provisional process motored by failibilism and marked by a competitive multiplicity of theories of different levels of generality, are also found in his “Introduction” to Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xiii- xix, and his essay, “Cognitivism, Contemporary Film Theory and Method: A Response to Warren Buckland,” in the same volume, 321-335. Also see David Bordwell’s “Foreword” to Theorizing the Moving Image ix-xii. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 329 empirical research. One ongoing and curious feature of Bordwell’s defense of film poetics is not only his hesitancy before theory, but also his association of Theory with literary study, academic research, and the Modern Language Association as a hegemonic institution promoting Theory. So admirably committed to concreteness, detail, and clarity in other domains, the way Bordwell constructs Theory, whether in his 1996 Introduction to Post-Theory or his 2008 Introduction to Poetics of Cinema, only thinly disguises an ethical critique in the form of epistemological objections. This pitting of poetics against Theory requires a rhetoric forged in agon, conflict, and opposition in order to identify and identify with a domain of reason from which others seem to have withdrawn or have never aspired to. From “A Case for Cognitivism” to Poetics of Cinema, what I have always found most striking about Bordwell’s critiques of Theory, the humanities, and indeed most of academic film study, is that little is added and nothing subtracted from his own worthy and productive vision of historical poetics, in either its results or its methodological clarity and conviction, by these criticisms. The open questions, then, are why do they return and what do they hope to achieve?156 Though the idea may seem paradoxical to most, in a 156 In an early review of Carroll’s Mystifying Movies, Warren Buckland notes that an effect of this polarizing rhetoric is to limit meaningful debate in advance through a binary logic that “reformulates, transforms, misrepresents, and systematically distorts the values and norms of the scheme or the theory that has been translated or interpreted, for such an interpretation is carried out on the outside, not the inside, of the theory under interpretation.” See Buckland’s “Critique of Poor Reason,” Screen 30.4 (1989) 84. I could also add that in the two introductory essays to Post-Theory, few ideas apart from the “grand Theorists” are engaged directly through their authors. Carroll’s introduction is without footnotes, and in Bordwell’s essay the footnotes maintain a sort of running dialogue with the main text to two purposes: one is to show that the database is large and that this is indeed a complete and not one-sided account of “film theory”; second, Bordwell lays out a bibliography of alternative texts for the opposing philosophical and cognitivist account as a site of potential truth. One feels strongly that this rhetoric is less about providing a full and adequate picture of theory as it is to draw tendentiously its limits, the better to foreground why the competing cognitivist account is better. The two introductions also ignore the presence of substantial criticism and debate within the framework of so-called Grand Theory. Or worse, the presence of such debate is read as only inconsistency and contradiction, and thus assumes that the imagined grand Theory is homogenous and unified. Both subject-position and culturalist theory are presented as a sort of anonymous collective (the realm of “theoretical” common sense or consensus), which is then represented as misleading, false, or subject to poor reasoning. On the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 330 strong sense Bordwell’s rhetorical strategies express a deep commitment to the fundamental questions of philosophy as I have defined them: to evaluate (in this case critically and skeptically) the limits of reason or knowledge in a domain in order to project another mode of existence or form of life with its own community sustained by other discursive commitments and reasoning protocols. Critical evaluation of the logical and discursive limits of knowledge, and attentiveness to the historical forms of discontinuity of our relationship to knowledge, are key components of the philosophical practice as I have so far considered it in this book. But most striking in the discourse of post-Theory is that criticism does not seek to change the world of “academic humanities,” as it were, but rather to leave it behind for a better and more reasonable community. In fact, one of the goals of criticism is to define or project that future community, or to rediscover it as a path not taken. Equally striking in the identification of Theory with the humanities is the implicit placement of the method and practice of poetics as another domain to one side or outside of the humanities. It is as if Bordwell believes that the humanities have relinquished all interest or commitment to artworks in their immanence, as well as the analysis of form and style in well-defined historical frameworks. However, even if I find this near blanket condemnation of the humanities to be logically and historically flawed, my goal here is not to challenge it further, nor am I concerned to criticize Bordwell’s unique and considerable accomplishments in constructing a poetics of cinema. (Indeed, in most contexts I spend my time defending them.) My interest is rather to uncover and make conceptually precise the concept of “good theory” in relation to my larger account of the vicissitudes of theory in relation to philosophy, on the one hand, and science on the other. In his 2008 Introduction to Poetics of Cinema, Bordwell largely restates without modification his objections to Grand Theory: it is doctrine-driven and aims to high, often alliance of cognitivism with social science and its opposition to the “humanities,” also see Bryan Vescio’s “Reading in the Dark: Cognitivism, Film Theory, and Radical Interpretation,” Style 35.4 (Winter 2001) 572-591. On conflict and disunity in postTheory and film theory in general, see Casey Haskins, “The Disunity of Film Theory and the Disunity of Aesthetics” in European Film Theory, ed. Temenuga Trifonova (New York: Routledge, 2009) 32-46. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 331 presuming “that all human activity can be subsumed within some master conceptual scheme.”157 Moreover, its reasoning protocols are marred by argument from authority, unjustified associative leaps, vagueness and obfuscation, and avoidance of empirical evidence. Bordwell does not ignore or deny that Theory is itself a contentious domain with many competing perspectives. But he also asserts that what unites these positions under the grand umbrella of Theory is “the idea that any program propelled by doctrines can be applied, via imaginative extrapolation, to one phenomenon or another. The cluster of doctrines isn't questioned skeptically; the effort goes into diligent application” (“Introduction” 2). “We have lived with this writing for 30 years,” Bordwell continues. “lts limping cadences, convulsive syntax, and strategic confusions have dulled our senses. Very likely, no one in the history of English ever published prose as incomprehensible as that signed by Theorists” (2). Has there ever been a clearer expression of the longing for a different world? In the bipolar world that Bordwell constructs, the commitment to historical poetics and good theory aims at nothing less than a transformation of the field of film studies, and one that will distance it from the humanities. In contradistinction, good theory has a goal as simple as it is direct: “producing knowledge that is reliable and approximately true” (“Introduction” 3). Moreover, this knowledge is historical in quite specific ways. Its concepts are corrigible--it is continually revisable in the light of new evidence, whether derived from documentary and archival research or innovative analysis of the form and style of specific artworks. In addition, I also believe that Bordwell accepts that concepts themselves are open to invention and innovation, as long as they stay close to evidence and are ideally empirically constrained. All of this is non-controversial. However, if good theory distances itself from the humanities, to what alternative domain does it gravitate? One likely candidate is “science.” But the problem here is that both Bordwell and Carroll’s appeals to science, when they occur, are as vague and overly general as their critical view of the “humanities.”158 Nonetheless, Bordwell is very clear, 157 (New York: Routledge, 2008) 2. In footnotes, Bordwell often reproduces enormous bibliographies of research in cognitivism and in evolutionary criticism. However, despite his attention to and criticism 158 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 332 especially in later work, that in his view poetics is not a science nor does it want to become one. For example, there is no commitment to covering laws as a necessary condition for producing knowledge. However, to the extent that theory is a component of poetics, it serves a now familiar transitional or intermediate function: methodologically, it makes poetics proximate to reasoning protocols that are closely associated with science. For the moment, though, good theory is not quite equivalent to science but rather involves a broader tradition of rational and empirical inquiry, as Bordwell puts it, committed to historical research and a mix of inductive and deductive reasoning. “By rational inquiry,” Bordwell clarifies, I mean probing concepts for their adequacy as descriptions and as explanations of problems. Problems are stated as questions to be answered; the more concrete, the better. Empirical inquiry--not "empiricism," as humanists have to be told over and over--involves checking our ideas against evidence that exists independent of our beliefs and wishes--not evidence delivered in pristine innocence, without conceptual commitments on the part of the seeker, and not facts that “speak for of reasoning protocols, he gives little sense of what positions he adheres to in either logic or the philosophy of science. In most cases his position seems largely and simply Aristotelian. (By the same token, Carroll’s conception of “dialectics” is Platonic rather than Hegelian.) The situation is even more obscure in Carroll’s critical essays and responses to criticism. While often evoking “post-positivist” philosophies of science, gesturing toward patterns of agreement and disagreement with Thomas Kuhn, or appealing to “ordinary standards of truth and error,” the varieties of history or philosophy of science that Carroll adheres to are almost invisible in his writings and must be extrapolated conceptually from his arguments. Still certain general commitments appear. In Making Meaning, Bordwell critiques interpretation because it “does not on the whole produce scientific knowledge" (257), and further, that it should be pressed "to produce knowledge in [something] like the sense applicable to the natural and the social sciences" (263). In his introduction to Post-Theory, Carroll complains that “one reason we have reached this impasse is that film scholars generally have little, if any, background in the actual practices of theory building, since most of them have exclusively hermeneutical training, as opposed to education in theoretical disciplines such as the natural or social sciences, or philosophy" (42). Or further: "What I am saying is: let us take advantage of the insights derived from reflection on the scientific enterprise in order to think about what the structure of our own practice might be" (59). In a so far unpublished essay, “Film Theory and the Philosophy of Science,” Meraj Dhir has presented an excellent defense of Carroll’s position with contemporary debates on the history and philosophy of science. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 333 themselves.” What is evidence? It's what is corrigible in the light of further information. And to those who believe that facts are inevitably relative to your standpoint, I'd reply that both concepts and evidence can cut across different research frameworks. . . . Rational-empirical research programs have been undertaken by many other film scholars, perhaps more by historians than by critics and theorists, but I try to answer questions from a distinctive angle. That angle I call the poetics of cinema. . . . (“Introduction” 3-4) Key criteria of rational and empirical inquiry include being categorically explicit and open to criticism on conceptual grounds. Concrete evidence must be invoked in a way that is equally open to critical appraisal and correction. Another aspect of poetics that associates it with good theory is that it “appeals to intersubjectively available data that are in principle amenable to alternative explanation.”159 Intersubjectivity here indicates that described events and explanations are in principle universally observable and communicable. Finally, as theory poetics is proximate to science in another way--it is willing to make appropriate best use of biological and neurological, psychological, social scientific, and evolutionary accounts as components of causal explanations. In this it is also distinct from the humanities, which Bordwell feels distrusts science. Poetics is presented, then, as both an alternative path to theory and as a rival to the dominant hermeneutic strategies of the humanities. In the humanities, method is synonymous with adherence to an interpretive school, which means for Bordwell that the writer must “master a semantic field informed by particular theoretical concepts and then to note certain features of films that fit that field” (“Poetics” 12). Here Bordwell recapitulates arguments from his concluding chapter to Making Meaning, “Why Not to Read a Film,” which is fundamentally a defense of two positions: that interpretation is not 159 “Poetics of Cinema” in Poetics of Cinema 15. In his new introduction to Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, Bordwell also explains, in a statement that uncannily echoes Eikhenbaum, that, “I try to provide only as much ‘theory’ as is necessary to solve the midrange problems I’ve tackled. The fewer theoretical presuppositions you hold, and the more you appeal to intersubjectively accessible evidence, the stronger your argument gets” (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies Publications, University of Michigan Electronic Reprint, n.d.,11). Available online at https://www.cjspubs.lsa.umich.edu/electronic/michclassics/online/books/ozu.php. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 334 equal to theory, and that historical poetics is not so much a theory as a theoretical activity, as Bordwell will later put it, driven by a certain functionalism. The question here is not so much who makes meaning (the culturalist view point), but rather where and how meaning is made. This shift defines all the epistemological stakes of the argument. In Making Meaning, Bordwell offers a rich and complex account of interpretation as an institutionally structured craft activity, governed by conventional knowledgestructures (schemata), inductive inferential procedures (heuristics), and standard rhetorical forms. The interpretive act ascribes implicit or symptomatic meanings to a text through the application of one or more semantic fields, or conceptual structures that organize potential meanings relationally. To refer to a locus classicus of contemporary theory, semantic fields can be exemplified as ordered sets of distinctions such as active/passive, masculine/feminine, and voyeurism/fetishism. Operating from broad assumptions and hypotheses, the interpretive critic maps pertinent semantic fields onto appropriate cues identified in the text, and through inferential procedures translates different kinds of schemata into an action that allows “the critic to show the film enacting the pertinent semantic values.”160 My paraphrasing here is rather abstract, though Bordwell himself offers many astute and clarifying examples.161 From the point of view of the functionalism of historical poetics, one problem with interpretation is that while it may be based on fairly close readings from textual evidence, it draws meaning from the “outside,” as it were, and too abstractly. There is no such thing as a strictly intrinsic interpretation, then, and the act of interpretation itself violates what Russian Formalism already identified as a principle of immanence. However, the issue before us is the picture of “good theory” expressed through Bordwell’s critique of interpretation. In “Why Not to Read a Film,” Bordwell is careful to distinguish interpretive from theoretical writing, especially since the former often masquerades as the latter. This is one of the cardinal sins of interpretation. In Bordwell’s 160 Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Harvard University Press, 1991) 249. 161 A good example is Bordwell’s account of Robin Wood’s analysis of Salo in “Film Interpretation Revisited,” Film Criticism 17:2-3 (1993) 100-105. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 335 conception, a theory consists of a systematic propositional explanation of the nature and function of phenomena, say the cinema, and theoretical writing differs from interpretive writing in that it proposes, analyzes, and criticizes theoretical claims. One might say that theories are explanatory, critical, and conceptually based; they explain through constructing and invoking apposite concepts, which are open to revision or falsification through critique. A critic does not need theory to produce interpretations. “If theory as a body of doctrine consists of propositional knowledge,” Bordwell writes, “critical interpretation is principally a matter of procedural knowledge, or know-how. Producing an interpretation is a skill, like throwing a pot. The potter need not be a chemist, a minerologist, or a professor of pottery. In some cases, learning ‘theory’ may help people acquire certain interpretive skills, but it cannot replace those skills” (Making Meaning 250). Interestingly, one might say the same thing about the procedural skills for producing artworks, as indeed Bordwell does in later articles and books. The production of theories may also be considered a practice, of course, with their own institutional contexts, reasoning protocols, and rhetorical strategies. (Here, somewhat surprisingly, Bordwell is not so far from Althusserian epistemology, nor are Bordwell or Carroll necessarily open to the Althusserian critiques of “empiricism.”) However, for Bordwell interpretation is not often conducted in a “theoretically perspicuous” (251) way, meaning it is not usually open to conceptual self-interrogation, pace Barthes. When theory is “applied” through interpretation, it is usually done so in “a piecemeal, ad hoc, and expansionist manner. . . . While the constraints on ‘pure’ theorizing are logical and broadly empirical, the constraints on using theory in interpretation arise from the needs of the immediate task. . . . ‘Theory’ will be selectively assimilated by the normalized routines of interpretation” (250-251). For Bordwell, this is an unjustified restriction and reduction of theoretical activity, and in many cases I grant he is correct. The objectives and stakes of interpretation and theory should be epistemologically distinguishable, then, first because interpretive heuristics are not open to counter-example. Once a semantic field, heuristic, or schema is put into play, apposite examples are assumed to be equally interpretable. In contrast to theory construction, interpretation refuses “to stipulate when something will not count as a valid interpretive move or as an Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 336 instance of meaning. Let me be clear: within the interpretive institution,” Bordwell insists, “such conceptual moves do not count as errors. They help produce interpretations that are judged to be novel and persuasive. But this shows that the criteria governing this practice ill-accord with the conventions of another one, that called theorizing” (Making Meaning 252). Good theory must have the potential to be in error, that is, it should be falsifiable and open to counter-example. But appeals to theory in interpretation are pragmatic and rhetorical rather than demonstrative. Thus, interpretive arguments are not fallible in the strict sense, nor can theory assure an interpretation, whether inductively or deductively. Interpretation, then, usually evokes theory to frame and define evidence in a text, or as a warrant or authority to support a reading. Critics are rational agents to the extent that they seek to apply the tools and procedures of their craft to produce novel interpretations. But in Bordwell’s view, interpretive procedures stand and fall on novelty and persuasiveness, not standards of truth and error. What are the general criteria, then, according to which good theory is produced? In a now thoroughly familiar argument, Bordwell suggests that theoretical arguments must be governed by clear principles of pertinence, setting out what the theory will and will not explain. By the same token, these explanatory accounts must possess degrees of generality distinguishing broad concepts from middle range and fine-grained ones, and should be reasonably counter-intuitive in terms of producing surprising perspectives or results. Quotidian assumptions should be specifiable and open to interrogation. Most importantly, a theory must be corrigible, empirically falsifiable, and conceptually coherent. “All these criteria--broad but not unlimited scope, internal coherence, empirical adequacy, the ability to be disconfirmed--are ones by which a theoretical argument ought to be judged . . . .” (Making Meaning 253). Are there any virtues to interpretation? In fairness Bordwell believes there are. Many exemplars of interpretation, Bordwell writes, “deserve praise because they have introduced conceptual schemes that reorient our understanding. They have activated neglected cues, offered new categories, suggested fresh semantic fields, and widened our rhetorical resources. Innovative frames of reference have heightened our awareness of what can be noticed and appreciated in artworks” (Making Meaning 256). Interpretation Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 337 might also serve what is conventionally understood as one of the main concerns of the humanities in that it “answers to a widely felt interest in motives, intentions, and ethical responsibility by showing that artworks which do not offer explicit guides for behavior can raise significant issues of thought, feeling, and action” (258). Yielding to Dilthey’s concept of Verstehen or understanding, Bordwell also suggests that interpretation may offer reasoned speculation on the possibilities of meaning, and become an occasion “to explore a theory’s semantic implications and affinities” (258). At the same time, interpretation is for the most part incapable of producing scientific knowledge in the sense of explaining processes that underlie external phenomena, and in this it falls short of theory. “Neither causal nor functional explanation is the aim of film interpretation,” Bordwell explains. “Indeed, in a certain sense, knowledge of the text is not the most salient effect of the interpretive enterprise. It may be that interpretation's greatest achievement is its ability to encourage, albeit somewhat indirectly, reflections upon our conceptual schemes. By taming the new and sharpening the known, the interpretive institution reactivates and revises common frameworks of understanding. Interpretation takes as its basic subject our perceptual, cognitive, and affective processes, but it does so in a roundabout way--by attributing their ‘output’ to the text ‘out there.’ To understand a film interpretively is to subsume it to our conceptual schemes, and thus to master them more fully, if only tacitly” (Making Meaning 257). To the committed humanist, these activities may not seem so unreasonable or undesirable, but for Bordwell interpretation’s sins outweigh its virtues. In contrast to some of the great exemplars of pre-1968 film theory, such as Arnheim, Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Bazin, and Burch, what Bordwell calls the contemporary interpretive project has not produced or extended the conceptual resources for understanding film style, form, or structure. Poetics follows these exemplars of classical film theory in avoiding interpretation by constraining analysis to questions of composition, effects, and functions. Historical poetics also draws inspiration from another genealogical line stretching from Aristotle to the Russian formalist Poetika Kino and Todorov’s Poetics of Prose. In another surprising connection, historical poetics connects back here to a modified structuralism on my cartography of theory, but without the commitment to language as an object. The Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 338 concept of signification is thus displaced by comprehension, but with respect to latter’s concern with meaning and spectatorship, the cognitivist turn may be more a variation on the discourse of signification than a complete break from it. In addition, many of these predecessors were also concerned to make method proximate to reasoning protocols in the natural sciences.162 Nevertheless, despite finding some value in the early Metz and the semiological analysis of film, on the whole the project of historical poetics seeks to define a break or point of epistemological rupture and discontinuity with contemporary Theory, and in a now familiar move frames itself in a retrojecting alternative lineage. Thus in the history of film theory, it becomes possible to imagine a post-contemporary moment once “contemporary” film theory is circumscribed as a particular discourse, which has completed itself and condemned itself to repetition. This is one of the generative contexts of post-Theory and the “end” of the contemporary. The retrojecting movements of postTheory thus seek to circumvent those phases in the history of theory forged in the problematics of signification, psychoanalysis, and ideology, and to characterize them as deviations in the main line of theory. At the same time, while historical poetics opposes itself to the discourses of signification and ideology, it has many points of contact not only with structuralism but also with filmology, especially in the version offered by Souriau. If Bordwell has some sympathy for the early Metz, perhaps this derives partially from Metz’s own hesitations before the overly scientific ambitions of hard structuralism? The strongest continuity, however, is perhaps the most delicate yet complex one, which is a certain 162 Poetics also takes inspiration from earlier models of film criticism (Manny Farber is a particular favorite) in attending complexly to the surface of a work according to principles of immanence. Bordwell also find exemplary criticism in the pages of Movie and Monogram, and even gives some credit to semiotically oriented textual analysis. Here a “sensuous criticism” attends to phenomenal qualities of texts in the extent to which they begin to organize meaning, or are directed towards meaning, but from within the text. Precise description may then be complemented by historical study of particular films to account for what processes brought them into being and what forces--aesthetic, institutional, economic, or political--have mobilized them for specific purposes. Drawing on all these examples, Bordwell then argues that “A theoretically rigorous historical scholarship is at present a strong candidate for reinvigorating film study” (Making Meaning 266). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 339 hesitation before “theory,” and the ways in which the meanings and values of theory in relation to poetics hover uncertainly between science and philosophy in ways analogous to Souriau’s conception of aesthetics. Bordwell and Carroll’s demand for good theory, and for a stable framework for pursuing research and dialectical criticism, also share with filmology the desire to find a common theoretical framework and vocabulary in which data and results can be shared across a variety of analytic and experimental approaches. Here Carroll’s professed adherence to “post-positivist” philosophies of science may diverge from logical, but there are still many ways in which both Bordwell and Carroll hover close to a version of positivism that passes through formalism, filmology, and structuralism. While Bordwell and Carroll demonstrate no obvious commitments to positivism, and justifiably decline to characterize their enterprise as “scientific,” the ideal of good theory is clearly open to charges of “scientism,” a tendency that P. M. S. Hacker has described as “the illicit extension of the methods and forms of explanation of the natural sciences.”163 (Hacker’s defense of the humanities and his reasons for calling such extensions illicit will be taken up in the next section.) Not all such extensions are misconceived, but many are, and the goal is to avoid applying the positivistic doctrine of methodological monism across scientific and humanistic epistemology, especially since contemporary scientific methods are themselves badly characterized as striving for methodological monism and indeed may be open to a variety of heterogeneous explanation schemes. In particular, Bordwell and Carroll’s position is aptly described by what Hacker calls “non-reductive methodological scientism.” In this view, even if one accepts that social and psychological phenomena are not logically or ontologically reducible to physical processes or functions, “the logical structure of explanation in humanistic studies, in particular the explanation of human thought and action, is the same as that of typical explanations in the natural sciences” (“Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding” 43). A fully scientific explanation of human behavior requires knowledge of causes and of underlying causal laws that may determine it. Often these 163 “Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding” in Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2001) 42. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 340 causal laws are taken to describe regularities of neural or abstract functional computational mechanisms. The assumption here is that all rational explanation must have the same general form, exemplified by forms of explanation in the natural sciences. Beyond the commitments to empiricism and a principle of immanence, one could also point to other affinities with positivism, including a fairly unified conception of scientific method, the ideal of promoting general understanding through discovery of necessary and sufficient conditions for phenomena, the idea that investigation should be supported by corrigible and confirmable empirical research whose results have the potential to be surprising, and that the ultimate goal of research is to produce knowledge in a way that aspires to be value-free and productive of universal applicability. In addition, Bordwell and Carroll share a view, commonplace since Comte, “acknowledging that the tradition of rational and empirical inquiry, however subject to error, is our most reliable path to knowledge, which can be used for progressive ends” (“Introduction” 5). In other words, adherence to a subsumption-theoretic model is the best available framework for guiding and assuring social as well as scientific progress. Poetics, then, has a long and distinguished genealogy, and Bordwell suggests that poetics has maintained a persistent aim across the span of centuries: “The poetics of any artistic medium studies the finished work as the result of a process of construction--a process that includes a craft component (such as rules of thumb), the more general principles according to which the work is composed, and its functions, effects, and uses” (“Poetics of Cinema” 12). In addition, poetics has further critical dimensions, which may be analytical (the study of a device or devices in a single work or group of works), theoretical (setting out conditions for a class or genre of work), and/or historical (understanding how artworks assume given forms within and across time periods). Historical, analytical, and theoretical activities are combined in historical poetics to explain the principles through which artworks are constructed, how they produce well defined effects, and how they emerge historically and evolve in particular empirical circumstances. Each of these questions indicates how good theory is deeply concerned with problems of causality and intentionality. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 341 Take the question of “effects.” In “Film Interpretation Revisited,” Bordwell explains that “I take ‘effects’ to include all possible responses we can ascribe to the film viewer, and propose to treat meanings as one (large) class of effects. There are non-meaningful effects: the perception of color or pattern, ‘hard-wired’ responses to certain cues (e. g., the phi phenomenon, or the startle response evoked by sudden blasts of music or noise in a thriller). There are also effects which involve the ascription of non-interpretive meanings (referential and explicit, on the typology under discussion).”164 What is most interesting here is how the problem of meaning is produced through a conceptual continuum grounded ultimately in the body, or rather, physiological and neurological processes; in this, Bordwell is not so far from Levi-Strauss or Jakobson. I will return to this idea in discussing Bordwell’s commitment to good naturalization and rational agent theory. Poetics is also open to a variety of models of causation and change, including teleological, intentionalist, and functional. In this same paragraph is found once again the disclaimer that poetics need not claim to offer scientific explanations, yet it remains proximate to scientific reasoning protocols. It has “the explanatory value of any empirical undertaking, which always involves a degree of tentativeness about conclusions” (“Poetics of Cinema” 16). Moreover, poetics is perhaps similar to other scientific disciplines, such as geography and archaeology, “which fall short of predictive accuracy but have good records of ex post facto explanatory power. It's probably best to say that poetics joins the overarching tradition of rational and empirical inquiry to which science and kindred disciplines belong” (16). In a section entitled, “One Poetics of Film,” Bordwell offers, again with admirable clarity, an account of the role theory plays in poetics and the nature of the reasoning he adheres to. Bordwell situates himself in a tradition of dealing with the singularity or particularity of artworks. One line is art historical in the sense of systematically tracking forms and styles in the visual arts and explaining change causally. The key figures here are Heinrich Wöfflin, Alois Riegl, Erwin Panofsky, and E. H. Gombrich. In literary theory, the genealogy passes through Russian Formalism and Prague School structuralism, which 164 Film Criticism XVII: 2-3 (Winter/Spring 1993) 117, footnote 16. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 342 are valued for their concrete analysis of works and how they function in historical contexts. Bordwell locates an equally rich tradition in music theory. However, here again, just as poetics hovers close to science without being scientific, it aims at theory without being theoretical, at least in a specific sense: “lf we take a film theory to consist of a set of propositions explaining the fundamental nature and function of all cinematic phenomena, the poetics I'm setting out doesn't amount to a theory in that sense. It's best described as a set of assumptions, a heuristic perspective, and a way of asking questions. It's frankly empirical and tries to discover facts and truths about films” (“Poetics of Cinema” 20). Bordwell says much the same things about his commitments to cognitivism. The idea that cognitivism is less a theory than a perspective, frame of reference, heuristic, or problem-solving program goes back to Bordwell’s first major methodological statement, “A Case for Cognitivism.” As in the later “Poetics of Cinema,” Bordwell takes great care to set out cognitivism’s core assumptions. In contrast to psychoanalysis, for example, cognitive explanations are concerned with normal and successful actions, such as perception, recognition, and ordinary comprehension (though in each case this will come down mostly to non-intentional and thus sub-normative processes). One then moves forward to propose theories about how such processes of habitual mentation work, and to analyze and test these theories “according to canons of scientific and philosophical inquiry.”165 A key constraint is put into practice in both instances: mental representations and actions, cognitively defined, are posited as irreducible frameworks for explaining human social action. While cognitivism may be concerned with meaning, it is not based in questions of signification or language; rather, its key concepts involve rational and intentional acts of mentation. In contrast to behaviorism, cognitivism acknowledges that within any acceptable theory of mind a gap must exist between intelligible and intentional actions, on one hand, and the physiological mechanisms that underlie or execute them on the other. This gap is filled by mentation: active or intentional mental processes or functions, 165 “A Case for Cognitivism,” iris 9 (Spring 1989) 13. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 343 which include activities such as perception, thought, belief, desire, intention, planning, and feeling. These processes may be considered mental representations, though to what degree they must be grounded in fundamental neurological structures is left ambiguous. In focusing on intentional acts, cognitive research frames meaning as a mental activity that is purposive, rule-guided, and deliberately performed. These criteria are key components of Bordwell’s appeal to the concept of the rational agent. In sum, a key question of cognitivism is how can mental activity be considered representational, that is, to be meaningful or to possess semantic content open to theorization? Cognitivism is also subject to another methodological constraint, which Bordwell characterizes as “good naturalization.” In its concern with mental representations and functions that occupy the gap between meaningful intentional acts and physiological processes, one might say of the cognitive frame of reference that it hovers between philosophy and science. In Bordwell’s account, it is thus situated in a conception of the history of science as a process of “turning philosophical doctrines into matters for empirical investigation” (“A Case for Cognitivism” 14). Cognitivism is committed to a “naturalizing” epistemology that wishes to build upon the best empirical investigations of mind, brain, and associated sensory systems. One of the most fascinating aspects of cognitivism is how it is situated conceptually and methodologically at the frontier between body and mind, thus fueling the possibility that clinical and experimental studies will contribute to the solution of some long-standing philosophical problems. This idea further frames and focuses the concept of mentation on which cognitivism’s appeals to good theory are built. The criterion of good naturalization means that the mental phenomena or actions that are most open to empirical investigation and causal or functional explanation are ones wherein mind and brain will find their closest connections. Bordwell draws from recent cognitive research the idea that if lower level sensory mechanisms are “’informationally encapsulated’,” as Jerry Fodor puts it, and thus “impervious to conscious awareness” the mind can be studied as sets of specialized and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 344 autonomous functions or modules.166 One might think of these modules as something like internal information processors, functioning algorithmically, or at least in rule-guided ways that favor “rapid, probabilistic extrapolation from limited samplings of data” (15). In this respect, artificial intelligence research is another major influence on cognitivism where “mental representation is a matter of structurally comparable computational activities, not of embodiment in any one sort of material. That is, it just so happens that our brains are the hardware for the programs that they run” (15). Bordwell appeals to cognitivism, then, as an approach alternative to film theory. Anticipating the post-Theory debate to come, he is searching for a conceptual framework to remap the concept of theory itself in relation to film study, and in so doing, to transform cinema studies as a discipline. Equally anticipating the arguments of Making Meaning, in press at the time of this essay’s publication, Bordwell argues that contemporary film theory has been too dominated by hermeneutic and interpretive approaches to films and theories. Here theories tend to be mined for their semantic cores and potential for narrativization, as it were. And if the principal appeal to theory is as an allegorical key to texts, or to texts as illustrations of theoretical concepts, then Bordwell feels that scientific aspirations can and will be ignored. But if a theory is to have epistemological value, it must explain rather than explicate or allegorize. Thus Bordwell argues that “the cognitive framework has a signal advantage. It does not tell stories. It is not a hermeneutic grid; it cannot be allegorized. Like all theorizing, it asks the Kantian question: Given certain properties of a phenomenon, what must be the conditions producing them? It then searches for causal, functional, or teleological explanations of those conditions” (“A Case for Cognitivism” 17). In its commitment to good naturalization, cognitivism diverges perhaps from many of the culturalist assumptions of contemporary theory; but it also shares with recent film theory a commitment to constructivist explanations. Here Bordwell is searching for common ground, both to place cognitivism firmly within the project of contemporary film study, but also to offer it as an alternative or even a corrective concept of theory. 166 “A Case for Cognitivism” 15. Bordwell is referring here to Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983) and J. L Garfield’s Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Processing Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 345 The concept of constructivism is meant to further characterize the active nature of cognitive functions that transform perceptual inputs through rule-guided inference building structures. However, constructivism must be constrained by good naturalization. Under the concept of good naturalization, research questions are best answered through empirical work guided by problems and hypotheses. It also posits that actions performed by intentional agents are minimally rational. In turn, minimal rationality implies that intentional mental actions are based on the inferential model of practical syllogisms, according to the regulative assumption that perceived means are adjusted to intended ends. On these bases, rational agent theory is promoted as an alternative to theories of spectatorship that rely on appeals to unconscious or non-intentional processes. The concept of rationality provides a key criterion for pursuing causal accounts according to the epistemological constraints of good naturalization, and thus the connection between the two must be pursued more deeply. In both its formal, historical, and psychological dimensions, poetics needs certain kinds of forms, objects, or structures to ground it epistemologically, and it further needs to acquire empirical data leading to new information. These are key conditions for the causal reasoning underlying Bordwell’s version of rational and empirical inquiry. Film form, style, and convention as immanent processes anchor the first need; new historical, documentary, institutional, and contextual information fulfill the second. To pursue the psychological question of comprehension, rationally and empirically, similar kinds of constraints on structure and process are necessary. Combining bottom-up and data driven perceptual and neurological structures with more top-down conceptual ones, Bordwell’s account of mentation involves a dynamic set of relationships between body, brain, and mind. On one hand, pictorial and narrative comprehension build up from perception to recognition by invoking human physiological and cognitive capacities that have evolved over time to deal with patterns of information in the world. On the other, comprehension draws experientially on extensive domains of knowledge and skills in narrative structure and comprehension. Comprehension is then defined as grasping “the concrete significance of the perceptual material as patterns of social action. In this case, the patterns are presented in the form of a story” (“Poetics of Cinema” 43). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 346 Understanding how filmic effects are registered in or by spectators is then a matter of modeling “the processing of films by viewers,” and these models must build upon the best scientific findings in cognitive and evolutionary psychology to construct a plausible framework for theorizing (“Poetics of Cinema” 44). For these reasons, poetics is both mentalistic and naturalistic--mentalistic in its commitment to describing those mental representations wherein the embodied mind engages with artworks, and naturalistic in adherence to the idea that the scientific investigation of mental life provides the most reliable knowledge of cognitive processes. This approach admittedly involves a degree of idealization of spectatorship, but so do, Bordwell is correct to say, most other accounts whether psychoanalytic, narratological, or culturalist. Mental naturalization may not contribute much to understanding differences among spectators, but it does aspire to account for intersubjective and cross-cultural regularities, which are potentially universal in the sense that they derive from the fundamental mental structures on top of which higher-level conceptual activities are built. The cognitivist model of dynamic interaction between bottom-up and top-down processing is exemplary of Bordwell’s commitments to a naturalizing epistemology; in fact, this model goes a long way in demonstrating the necessity of making poetics proximate to science. Dealing with high-level and potentially culturally acquired concepts, top-down processes are potentially open to self-examination. However, the closer one descends to bottom-up processes, the more they are “impervious to introspection”; in other words, to the extent that we have no prior knowledge of these mandatory and automatic physiological and neurological processes, the more open they are to scientific and causal accounts. In a complete model of comprehension bottom-up and top-down processing are inseparable, and in this way good naturalization flows freely, as it were, back and forth across the dimensions of mental life. The commitments to mentalism and naturalization mean that to be subject to good theory, even higher level conceptual processes, in principal open to introspective examination, take on increased epistemological value owing to their proximity to more naturalized processes and their inseparability from them--they are grounded in naturalization, as it were. Thus Bordwell emphasizes that “neurological research will eventually show that any experiential process Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 347 involves complicated feedback and input-output among many mental systems,” and later claims that contemporary research will ask us “to consider that many of what we take to be learned or culturally guided mental activities will turn out to be packed into our biological equipment” (“Poetics of Cinema” 45). Good theory will always and invariably be grounded in the brain. Considering his critique of interpretation, it is interesting to note how Bordwell wants to incorporate acts of “appropriation,” or the context dependency of meaning making, into his model of viewer activities. This idea follows from his earlier statement in “Why Not to Read a Film” that historical poetics will deal not only with creation and comprehension, but also protocols of reception. On one hand, this is a strategy for enhancing the interpretative freedom and activity of spectators and demonstrating their commitment to rational, mean-ends endeavors. In addition, it extends poetics in the direction of cultural studies, or at least shows that there is a potential bridge between poetics and cultural studies. On the other, Bordwell wants to include appropriation not only to extend his schema to the full spectrum of mental life--from perception to comprehension to appropriation--but also to frame culture in the conceptual context of mental naturalization, and to make culture, or some dimensions of cultural comprehension, subject to good theory. Appropriation shows the way acts of comprehension may diverge according to different cultural contexts. However, good theory seeks to balance appropriation against other comprehension activities, and again, the theory becomes more epistemologically sound the more it focuses on convergences and cross-cultural regularities that are grounded in the body, and on automatic processes that are impervious to introspection and belief. Therefore, Bordwell notes that adequate explanations of comprehension must draw upon several diverse explanatory frameworks including, “biological capacities of the human organism (for example, the mandatory perception of apparent movement), acquired but very basic perceptual processes (for example, ballistic eye movements, object recognition), acquired but culturally widespread cognitive skills (for example, means/end analysis, personification), and acquired and culturally variable processes (for example, particular notions of personal identity, historical conventions of narrative construction). It seems likely that a tenable theory of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 348 this sort will have recourse to perceptual and cognitive research in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and aesthetics” (Making Meaning 272). Poetics is thus open to a variety of different research programs or theories that can constructively incorporate and debate alternative positions. And in this way, Bordwell acknowledges that he shares with both Russian Formalism and cognitivism, broadly defined, “their broad theoretical ambitions and their methodological commitment to conducting rational and empirical inquiry into principles of art making within and across cultures” (“Poetics of Cinema” 54). In the ideal research community that Bordwell seeks, the conversation advances through dialectical argumentation, empirical research, and theoretical explicitness characteristic of all these approaches, and becomes the ground for their on-going dialogue. A naturalizing epistemology demands that the more a process is involuntary and closed to introspection, the more it gains epistemological value in good theory. However, this constraint contradicts Bordwell’s commitment to rational agent theory, or at least demands further investigation of the concept. The concept of rational agents has played a key role in economics, game theory, decision theory, and especially research on artificial intelligence. In most cases, the “rationality” of the agent is defined in a specific framework: the agent is assumed to have clear preferences, to model uncertainty according to predictable values, and in confronting choice will always execute actions that optimize outcomes. Moreover, rational agents are not necessarily defined through criteria of personhood--a rational agent need only be capable of selecting from inputs and executing decisions, and this can be a person, a corporation, a machine, or software. Artificial intelligence borrowed the concept from economic theory, in fact, to describe autonomous programs capable of goal-directed activity. In contradistinction to the discourse of ideology, above all in its conceptual commitments to psychoanalysis, Bordwell further characterizes the rational agent as engaged in active, intentional, rule-guided, and ends-directed activities, defined by means-end reasoning and practical responsiveness to institutional constraints and opportunities. Bordwell’s 2008 overview of poetics puts new emphasis on the concept of rational agency, which functions not only on the side of comprehension but also creation. The concept is of central concern to Bordwell’s characterization of good theory, first Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 349 because it organizes all the criteria by which cognitivism opposes itself to psychoanalysis, and one would think, any psychological account committed to the potential intelligibility of unconscious actions. This argument is continuous from Narration in the Fiction Film to the more recent Poetics of Cinema. Second, the continuity of the concept demonstrates that it functions as the ground (in a logical sense) for Bordwell’s commitments to mentalism and naturalism. However, if I am right that the epistemological stakes of this theoretical framework rely on criteria of good naturalization, as well processes and functions that are non-intentional and impervious to inspection, then one wonders why any concept of agency is necessary to the account or whether it even applies? This observation is especially apposite if the criteria of good naturalization become more grounded epistemologically the closer they veer towards mandatory and automatic mental processes. Bordwell provides fairly convincing accounts of these cognitive functions and operations in relation to narration and comprehension. I am struck, though, by Bordwell’s attraction to the literature on cognitivism coming out of artificial intelligence. Moreover, despite his insistence on the value of describing these functions and operations as activities, they are neither necessarily conscious nor intentional. Automatic and bottomup processes are certainly not intentional in any philosophical sense. Higher-level and concept driven processes would logically be considered intentional, and the more so the higher one moves up the mental hierarchy. The concept of appropriation certainly implies both the intention to remap meaning in new ways and an agency performing the semantic remapping. But it remains the case that Bordwell tends to describe all of these processes as anonymous, automatic, and rule-guided in ways that undermine appeals to intentionality. Even the reasoning protocols of interpretation are characterized as routine or habitual. As processes they do not require agency as a necessary condition (though perhaps it is a sufficient one). What is necessary to the theoretical framework is that these operations be characterizable as “rational,” which means open to a good theorization whose epistemological values depend on good naturalization. In an astute critical essay on “Cognitive Film Theory,” Richard Allen also interrogates how cognitivism attributes the quality of rationality to cognitive functions and operations, and further argues that cognitivist film theory, of which Bordwell and Greg Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 350 Currie are the exemplars, projects a mistaken picture of the mind. Citing Reid Hastie, one of Bordwell’s authorities, Allen puts into focus how constructivist theories of perception tend both to personify presumed mental operations such as schemata, and to characterize them in specific ways. For example, in Hastie’s article on “Schematic Principles in Human Memory,” a schema is treated as a “naive theory of some stimulus domain and the individual using it a ‘naive scientist.’”167 Here one assumes, first, that human beings actively apply schemata, and second, in doing so this psychological action functions analogously to a “scientific theory”: it discriminates between salient and unimportant inputs and then posits networks of associations believed to be characteristic of the inputted data as a way of providing rules for thinking about the them. In Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell draws a fairly similar picture of mental function in the act of narrative comprehension. The spectator approaches a film tuned and prepared “to focus energies toward story construction and to apply sets of schemata derived from context and prior experience” (34). This activity is then characterized by a given set of actions whose rationality is defined by seeking unity, testing information for consistency, and establishing patterns of coherence. In addition acts of comprehension involve strong degrees of hypothesis testing: “The viewer also finds unity by looking for relevance, testing each event for its pertinence to the action . . . . Such general criteria direct perceptual activity through anticipations and hypotheses, and they are in turn modified by the data supplied by the film” (34). One might say that for Bordwell, comprehending in general means theory-making, as well as revising and correcting theories in light of new information. The rational agent is first and foremost an internal theory builder, just as for Hastie comprehending means behaving like a “naïve scientist.” 167 Cited in “Cognitive Film Theory,” in Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, eds. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (New York: Routledge, 2001) 178. A related but shorter and more straightforward critique of Bordwell’s model of comprehension is offered by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith in his essay, “How films mean, or, from aesthetics to semiotics and half-way back again,” in Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000) 8-17. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 351 Two questions are immediately raised by this account. First, by what right may normal and quotidian comprehension, aesthetic or otherwise, be considered an activity, and who or what is carrying out this activity? For Bordwell, active construction is a characteristic of the entire system of the mental representations comprising cognitive activities. Yet it is unclear how or why one would contrast data-driven, automatic, and involuntary processes as “active” in contrast to the putatively passive accounts of other psychological theories. Moreover, to the degree that such processes are not conscious and unreflective, one must also question why and in what ways they are considered to be “rational,” much less intentional? As Allen argues, “A constructivist psychology of perception does not necessarily entail an active percipient, one who is consciously seeking out cues, for it is possible for a spectator who engages in all the requisite inference-making procedures to remain entirely unaware of them. Bordwell does claim that top-down processes are more overtly based upon expectations, and speaks . . . of an 'effort toward meaning'. This may support the idea of an active spectator. But to justify the concept of the active spectator this way requires drawing a sharp distinction between bottom-up and top-down processes, a sharp distinction that Bordwell rejects” (“Cognitive Film Theory” 179). A subtle rhetorical move takes place here where rather than defining the activity of spectatorship, non-conscious inference making procedures are offered as grounds for their rationality. How does this take place? Allen makes a convincing case for how cognitivist accounts of perception as inference make unjustified leaps in presenting causal accounts of physiological processes as the logical grounds for cognitive, inferential activities. Following Anthony Kenny, Allen faults this kind of reasoning for an unacknowledged “homunculus fallacy.” In Kenny’s account, the homunculus fallacy is a pervasive error in psychological theories defined by “the reckless application of human-being predicates to insufficiently human-like objects. . . .”168 More than a harmless heuristic device, such misapplication of psychological verbs to physiological and causal functions leads to conceptual and methodological confusion. This is another way of seeing what is at stake 168 “The Homunculus Fallacy” in Investigating Psychology: Sciences of the Mind After Wittgenstein, ed. J. Hyman (New York: Routledge, 1991) 155. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 352 when the mandatory and automatic processes proposed as the good objects of naturalizing epistemology are attributed with forms of reasoned and conscious agency that one usually grants only to the normative behaviors of complete individuals. Cognitive functions are often characterized as rule-guided, inferential procedures in this manner. But as Allen points out, “For a rule to act as a rule, for it to function normatively, it must be capable of being followed and being broken and be invoked by the agency that is following the rule to justify the inference or interpretation being made. Causal processes are mechanisms and mechanisms are not normative in character. Brains cannot infer, they cannot justify their inferences by invoking rules, and nor can they make mistakes” (“Cognitive Film Theory” 184). Allen concludes, quite reasonably, that an inference is a form of thought, but a perception is not; therefore, the argument that perceptions are inferences is unsustainable. I will hold to one side here the full complexity of Allen’s critique of how constructivist theories of comprehension teeter uncertainly and in a circular way around questions of agency in relation to conscious or non-conscious mental functions. This circularity has to do with unwarranted assumptions that lead to applying the homunculus metaphor to automatic processes and causal mechanisms. This rhetorical move is a fallacy in the degree to which true premises (causal mechanisms of perception) lead to false conclusions (the psychological explanation that perception may be an active and conscious inference guided activity). Kenny sees such moves as unjustified extensions of human-being predicates (for example, activity, consciousness, rationality) to functions or parts of the brain. In reference to Bordwell’s account of narrative comprehension, though, the critique applies to many other varieties and domains of cognitivism. Allen further adds that “If these processes are not predicated of the conscious agent in the sense that it is not the agent who actually infers, tests and forms hypotheses, then it must be the activities of something or someone else who is the object of knowledge, of an homunculus whose psychological processes mimic our own but are explicable in terms of material processes. But, as we have seen, the homuncular conception of the mind is incoherent, it involves predicating psychological capacities to a brain that can only rightfully be predicated of the whole person” (“Cognitive Film Theory” 188). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 353 Allen further explains how Greg Currie’s version of cognitive film theory refers outright to the homunculus metaphor. In his Fodor-influenced account of the dynamic modularity of the brain, Currie makes explicit how the homunculus fallacy operates in Bordwell’s own model of rational agency in the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes. In Currie’s own words, We can think of [a] person as constituted by a hierarchy (or complex of hierarchies) of intelligent creatures or homunculi. The farther down the hierarchy you go, the less intelligent is the homunculus carrying out the operations at that level, until we reach the ground floor, where intelligence bottoms out into straightforward causal interactions where notions of information, reason, evidence and inference play no role, and where everything that happens is driven by brute causal powers in accordance with natural law. The person or agent himself occupies the top level of the hierarchy and is more intelligent than any of the homunculi that operate at subpersonal levels . . . . The primary insight of the homuncular or hierarchical view is that, when an operation is conducted below the personal level, we are not driven to describe that operation in purely causal, nomological terms. We can describe it as a task carried out for a certain purpose, employing information of certain kinds, and conducted within certain constraints of efficiency, reliability and so forth. That way, we describe it as a task performed by a subpersonal homunculus.169 Here again we return to the way that rational agent theory is agnostic about personhood, although now armed with arguments about why the functional elements of this theory can be neither intentional agents nor rational. The concepts of artificial intelligence, with their analogies between programmable rule-guided activities and the inferential activities of thought, must carry a lot of the blame here. As Allen points out, in adhering wholesale to the homunculus fallacy, Currie implicitly denies that there is a conceptual distinction between normative, rule-governed actions and causal mechanisms, and between persons and brains (or 169 Image and Mind: Film Philosophy and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 84. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 354 computers), there is just a hierarchy of more complex and less complex systems. Yet his theory depends upon the assumption that there is a conceptual distinction to draw between operations at the higher personal level and brute causal processes at the lower level. The distinction is blurred through Currie's use of the vocabulary of “purpose.” It is of course possible to ascribe a purpose in the sense of a function, a telos, or a rationale to a causal system, and it may well be fruitful to conceive the interaction of parts of the brain in these terms. But the vocabulary of “purpose” does not apply to an agent in the same way as it applies to a mechanism, and its application to a mechanism does not make that mechanism person-like or intelligent creature-like: we do not explain human agency in functional terms. . . . By blurring the distinction between the functional purposiveness of an organ and the purposiveness of an agent, Currie mistakenly invites us to believe that human beings are simply highly complicated purposive (in the biological sense) organisms and that understanding the complexity of purposive human behaviour is an empirical matter awaiting the discoveries of cognitive science. (“Cognitive Film Theory” 200) In attributing normative behavior to mechanisms, and psychological predicates to physiological and cognitivist functions, constructivist psychology is grounded in forms of tautology characteristic of the homunculus fallacy. In turn, a form of explanation that aspires to be causal and as value-neutral as possible is thus found to be ruled by metaphor and an unquestioned doctrinal assumption. However, the fault of good theory and naturalizing epistemology is not to be found in their alliance with scientific reasoning and empirical forms of inquiry, but rather in the insistence that causal accounts are the whole of reason or rationality. In taking parts for the whole, the functions of the brain are confused with reasoned behavior, and the mind becomes populated with an internal society of more or less intelligent little persons or agents. Here all the semantic values of rationality are organized around theoretical principles that Bordwell associates with “rational and empirical inquiry”--they are indeed sound theoretical principles exhibiting great coherence and internal consistency, as well as openness to empirical confirmation and disconfirmation. But if good naturalization Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 355 favors operations that are anonymous, universal, and non-intentional, then there is no agent to perform or carry them out--they are automatic processes--and once intentionality is subtracted from the framework, there are no clear justifications for characterizing these operations as either rational or irrational, conscious or non-conscious. The concept of rational agency is less an agent that an internal information processor using cues to execute determinable operations, and instead of the unconscious we are faced with nonconscious and automatic functions to which certain activities or features of consciousness are attributed. Thus, the desire to ascribe rationality to these operations must come from other motivations. The cognitivist emphasis on automatic and mandatory mental functions also leads to another important question: how do we assess and renovate our conceptual schemes, or as importantly, how do we produce new ones? To do so requires an agency that is intentional and capable of self-examination in ways that are both epistemological and ethical. In other words, it seeks not only to investigate how thought is possible and by what means, but also asks why do I seek to think in this way, what do I value in this framework of thought, and what communities of thought do I join and leave behind in so doing? Bordwell and Carroll wish to constrain value talk with truth talk by reducing epistemology to causes and functions. But indeed, among the most forceful aspects of the post-Theory critique are the ethical criticisms and desires it projects. Looking at the reverse side of Bordwell and Carroll’s criticisms, I think it is also important to examine their ideal projection of good theory as the ethical appeal for a new mode of existence where, in their view, politics or ideology has not supplanted reason. Here “dialectics,” as Carroll presents it, become the basis of an ideal research community of rational agents working on common problems and data sets with results that are falsifiable according to ”ordinary standards” of truth and error. But these ideals rest on no firmer philosophical grounds than the ideological theories they critique. For example, while Grand Theory is criticized for its obsession with an irrational and unconscious subject that cannot account for its actions, Bordwell’s promotion of “rational agents” as the logical ground of mental functioning is equally unstable and open to question. Indeed in supplying criteria of rationality to both the method and object of investigation, the concept is circular and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 356 seems to have no clear motivation apart from posing the subject of good theory as recognizing itself in the object it wants to examine. (Doesn’t the rational agent function allegorically here?) The concept of the rational agent functions tautologically as a projection where the ideal scientific subject seeks the contours of its own image in the model of mind it wishes to construct or to discover--good theory applies admirably to theory building homunculi and naïve scientists. In a perspective that aspires to be free of ideological positioning and to assert an epistemology that is value-neutral, the two Introductions to Post-Theory nonetheless express the longing for a different world modeled on an idealized vision of scientific research: a community of researchers united by common epistemological standards who are striving for a universalizable and truthful picture of their object. We are closer now to understanding my assertion that debates over epistemological standards are often and equally the expression of ethical commitments that sustain or defend different styles of knowing, or even, one might say, modes of existence or forms of life in theory. From this point of view, listing, defining, and refining the epistemic criteria of good theory (or in fact, any theory) thus amounts to mapping out and evaluating what Charles Taylor has called, after Elizabeth Anscombe, the “desirability characterizations” interwoven into its concepts, discourse, and practices.170 This observation returns us to an important dimension of the post-Theory critique. For reasons similar to the ones above, the strategy of distinguishing cognitive from psychoanalytic accounts on the basis of rational versus irrational motivation is specious and unwarranted.171 On one hand, to the extent that it is defined by automatic and nonintentional operations, there is no agent in rational agency much less one characterized by rationality or irrationality. On the other, for whatever faults of argumentation may be legitimately ascribed to psychoanalytic film theory (in past work I have designated quite a few myself), psychoanalysis does offer complex accounts of agency and of intentional processes. Especially in Freud’s later mental topography, there are not one but several 170 “Understanding and Ethnocentricity” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 119. 171 For a more detailed and nuanced account of this issue, see Louis A. Sass’s essay, “Wittgenstein, Freud and the Nature of Psychoanalytic Explanation” in Allen and Turvey, 253-295. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 357 locales of agency, as the ego, superego, and id are posited as sites of interacting and often conflicted intentions. In addition, from the very beginning a primary motivation in building the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis was to demonstrate analytically that these conflicted intentionalities are not irrational, but rather have their own reason whose logic could be ascertained and motivations clarified. The conceptual objects of classical psychoanalysis--the dream-work, parapraxis, fantasy, and the etiology of neurosis--are all described and defined by their internal and self-consistent logics. Indeed Freud’s great accomplishment was to demonstrate the degree to which many otherwise mysterious psychological phenomena could be characterized as rational processes in the strong sense that their reasons could be coherently explained and their intentions clarified in ways that were open to scientific description and analysis; in other words, explanations that were both corrigible and intersubjectively verifiable. In these respects, Carroll’s frequent characterizations of psychoanalysis as “a theory whose object is the irrational” is demonstratively false and misleading (“Prospects for Film Theory” 64). In building the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis on the analysis of dreams, parapraxis, the formation of sexuality, and fantasy, to a large extent Freud was attempting both to show that these processes are part of normal mental functioning and that psychological processes were open to scientific research and theoretical examination even if they could not yet be causally located in physiological and neurological mechanisms. One place where Carroll’s (and to a certain extent Bordwell’s) critique of psychoanalysis is entirely specious is in the claim that even if it is granted that professional psychoanalysts can make descriptive empirical claims on “data” generated in their practices, because psychoanalytic film theorists have no therapeutic practices, they produce “confecting theories, but with no empirical constraints” and no proper access to data (“Prospects” 66). The criticism is incoherent, or if it has any grounds, those grounds are extendible as well to cognitive film theory and its relationship to all associated external fields of experimental psychological research. Both cognitivism and psychoanalysis have produced concepts that inspired fruitful exploration (and sometimes dead ends) in both non-clinical, and perhaps non-empirical contexts such as philosophy, religion, and art. No, the bright line Carroll wants to draw lies elsewhere, and I hope to Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 358 show further on that it is dim and blurry. Good theory attains value the closer it stands to good naturalization, that is, processes open to causal explanation and functions impervious to introspection. (Carroll, and again to a certain extent Bordwell, have already yielded to the idea that humanistic disciplines can produce empirically confirmable or disconfirmable evidence.) And so I return to the implicit claim that the critique of Theory, though in many ways valuable, is an unjustified critique of the humanities in general as without method, reason, theory, or the capacity for self-criticism. Alternatively, what needs to be clarified and defended are forms of reason whose practices are founded on the very quality of being open to introspection. Even a rationalist as committed as Jürgen Habermas understood and defended psychoanalysis on these terms. As a theory, psychoanalysis does not stand or fall on whether it produces causally complete cures, or can be ultimately grounded in biological and neurological mechanisms, but only in the degree that its explanations are convincing in terms of reasons examined through analytical introspection that are intersubjectively debatable and verifiable.172 Indeed, the fundamental measure of therapeutic progress (there is no “cure” if the examined mechanisms are part of normal mental functioning, even if they often cause suffering) is that the process of analysis that takes place between therapist and patient must be transferred to the analysand as a capacity for critical self-examination. Here I will take a great leap that I hope soon to defend. Freud considered psychoanalysis to be a developing science and not philosophy. But like philosophy, the value of psychoanalysis is that it is in principle open to all as a practice of reasoned and critical analytic introspection. Indeed its reasons can only be developed and scrutinized through introspection and dialogue in a process motivated by doubt, uncertainty, or even crisis. (Remember Wittgenstein’s proposal that the form of a philosophical question is, “I cannot find my way.”) Good theory wants to bring the humanities and philosophy closer to the reasoning routines of the natural sciences. Much good can come of this critical project, which should be defended for many kinds of questions. Our greater task now, however, is 172 See, for example, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), especially 9-10. This idea is worked through more completely in Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 359 to understand the potential critical and conceptual power of the humanities, whose reasons are indeed logical and philosophical, and to turn philosophy not completely away from theory, but towards the humanities. 26. “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book and Brown Books The logical frameworks of cognitivism and historical poetics, on the one hand, and the strain of analytic philosophy of science proximate to and critical of the humanities, on the other, overreach in projecting their particular view of rationality as a single standard of explanation, and theory as necessarily methodologically monistic. In fact, we are not dealing here with a conflict between rational and irrational explanation, or even domains of truthful explanation that could be placed on a scale of rationality that are testable through fallibility and dialectical correction. Perhaps judgments of truth value in explanations are less applicable here than reasonableness, or rather, how we assess the value and quality of reasons given and received, and how those reasons can be built into local and contingent consensus. Perhaps one could call this the search for agreement rather than the quest for certainty, which so obsessed Russell or Moore. (To reach tacit agreement, one can certainly pass through series of disagreements, and agreement does not have to be complete.) This may not be a case of combating Theory with its other, or even of placing a number of theories into competition with one another to decide which one or ones “best accounts for data.” To do so would be to give the game up entirely to a position that recognizes only the power of scientific rationality, and wishes to extend its domain over all forms of action, whether natural or social. Here we must turn briefly, and perhaps only in schematic form, to a very old debate in order to describe both the limits of “scientific” Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 360 explanation, and the sui generis character of humanistic understanding. Bordwell or Carroll’s idea that a healthy debate is characterized by multiple theories competing for dominance according to criteria of falsification and the progressive elimination of error assumes that there is agreement on the proper model of theorization subject to a single standard of judgment, and that this model may turn out to be universally applicable with fairly stable reasoning protocols. But the main idea of this book is that “theory” is an unstable concept, and that in both the history of philosophy and the philosophy of science, there has been continual and conflictual debate on the conceptual parameters of theory itself. It may be that our relation to theory always has been, and perhaps always will be contingent and historical. The idea that there is a contrast to be struck between scientific explanation and historical understanding has a long pedigree. Readers will already recognize here Droysen and Dilthey’s critiques of positivism in trying to carve out a more or less autonomous logical space for the Geisteswissenschaften, the “moral” or human sciences. In his classic work on Explanation and Understanding, Georg Henrik von Wright has shown that this debate has an even more ancient ancestry, which he draws in the contrast between Aristotelian and Galilean explanation types, the former favoring teleological or finalistic explanation, and the latter promoting causal or mechanistic accounts. In other words, the Galilean explanation type seeks to explain and predict phenomena, while the Aristotelian wants to make facts finalistically understandable. Lest one should think that I am defending a mode of diplomacy that Carroll and other post-Theory adherents feel is an accommodating pluralism, I will say from the outset that I agree with most of von Wright’s more subtle and nuanced conclusions. One can find much to value in both forms of reasoning. But it would be foolish to believe that truth is irrevocably allied to either explanation or understanding, and equally so to assert that truth lies somewhere in the middle in the form of compromise on some types of questions. And so Wright concludes that we should recognize and accept that despite all the potential points of intersection between the two domains of reason, “there is also a basic opposition, removed from the possibility both of reconciliation and of refutation--even, in a sense, removed from the truth. It is built into the choice of primitives, of basic concepts for the whole Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 361 argumentation. This choice, one could say, is ‘existential.’ It is a choice of a point of view, of framework of belief, which cannot be further grounded.”173 Although this comment does not receive further clarification, I am struck by von Wright’s suggestion that adherence to a domain of reason is marked by an “existential” choice, indeed what I have called the choice of a mode of existence as both a discursive community and a form of discourse in which this choice is examined and justified. Moreover, conflict between positions seems built into the commitment to primitive concepts, which can only be asserted since they are foundational yet only elusively and allusively justified. With respect to the idea of a naturalizing epistemology characteristic of one form of theory, I have shown how its grounding in rational agents is both circular and not further justifiable within the theory itself--the concept as such can never be proven or demonstrated according to the terms of fallibility set by this form of theory. Nevertheless, there is and often has been a historical and sometimes productive dialogue between the two positions amounting to a kind of progress. Von Wright observes that the temporary dominance of one of the two positions often follows from innovations deriving from criticism of the contrasting trend. In the case under consideration, both historical poetics and the arguments against Theory, from either a historical or culturalist perspective, or that of the analytical philosophy of science, gave rise to productive arguments and criticisms in the face of the impasses of the discourses of ideology and political modernism. At the same time, von Wright adds, “What emerges after the breakthrough is never merely a restoration of something which was there before, but also bears the impress of the ideas through whose criticism it has emerged. The process illustrates what Hegel described with the words aufgehoben and aufbewart, perhaps best rendered in English as ‘superceded’ and ‘retained.’ The position which is in process of becoming superseded usually wastes its polemical energies on fighting already outmoded features in the opposed view, and tends to see what is retained in the emerging position as only a deformed shadow of its own self” (32-33). Words of caution, then. For just as the critique of Theory often rails against arguments that have already faded in the Other it 173 Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971) 32. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 362 projects, we must be attentive here to what is constructive and new in searching for the possibilities of a film philosophy as both a cure for theory and a productive partner with theory. I generally agree with Richard Allen’s two main conclusions in his critical essay on “Cognitive Film Theory”: that Bordwell’s historical poetics has produced one of the finest and most productive accounts of film style and narration in contemporary film study, but that alternatively his theory of narrative comprehension is for the most part unsustainable. Now, according to the explicit standards of good theorization to which both Bordwell and Carroll are committed, their theories remain impervious to criticism unless I can falsify or correct some aspect of their data or offer a more complete alternative explanation. I have no intention of doing this. But in this intention I hope to start down the path to showing some of the ways in which philosophy touches upon many problems of theory yet remains distinct from theory as a practice. The central problem with Bordwell and Carroll’s projection of good theory as I see it is an overvaluation of naturalizing epistemology and of causal reasoning, especially in the framework of humanistic inquiry. (A subsidiary problem is an underdetermined and largely unexamined commitment to “rationality” as a value underwriting naturalizing epistemology.) In both cases, good theory finds itself allied with one of the principle trends of twentieth century philosophy, which G. H. von Wright justly criticized as an excessive concern with epistemology leading to a kind of conceptual poverty and value nihilism. Instead, the two critical tasks of philosophy, in my view, are to interrogate the bases, grounds, and frameworks wherein reasons are given and defended, both to constrain them when they are unreasonable, but also to expand and ramify them in the production of new frameworks, contexts, and concepts, while evaluating the axiological commitments that frame or structure our forms of reason-giving. To claim to know is always to value certain ways of knowing, and to value is to project a world commensurate with the forms of reason one aspires to define and develop in conceptual expression. Here the role of philosophy is to examine and critique the conceptual structures that frame and inform human expressiveness and action. And these concepts inform everyday discourse and thinking no less than more exotic activities of analysis and interpretation. Later, I will expand this definition to include activities of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 363 conceptual innovation as well as addressing problems of agreement and of establishing common frameworks for conversations (even conflictual conversations or debates) within which reason giving, interpretation, and evaluation all take place. Apart from Carroll’s vague references to post-positivist philosophies of science, Bordwell and Carroll make no explicit appeal to philosophy or a kind of philosophy in their introductions to Post-Theory and associated essays, and this is commensurate with their desire to temper theory with the reasoning protocols of the natural sciences. (In many ways, philosophy falls “behind” both good theory and experimental science here.) Richard Allen and Murray Smith’s critique of contemporary film theory in Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) echoes Bordwell and Carroll’s perspective with the explicit aim of reorienting theory along the mainlines of twentieth century analytic philosophy. Accusing Theory of an “epistemological atheism” powered by an exaggerated ethical concern with the critique of a capitalist modernity, Allen and Smith’s criticisms make clear a number of philosophical assumptions absent from the post-Theory critique. From the analytic point of view, arguments for and against “theory” take place against the background of a philosophy of science. One engages in theory building or not according to an epistemological ideal based on natural scientific models. In employing the methods and forms of scientific explanation, however, philosophy becomes indistinguishable from science, at least with respect to theory construction. Philosophy disappears into science as “theory” becomes indistinguishable from scientific methodology. As I argue in the first part of my elegy for theory, from the beginning of the 20th century analytic philosophy was responsible for projecting an epistemological ideal of theory derived from natural scientific methods. Bertrand Russell’s 1914 essay “On Scientific Method in Philosophy” presents a concise definition of this ideal: “A scientific philosophy such as I wish to recommend will be piecemeal and tentative like other sciences; above all, it will be able to invent hypotheses which, even if they are not wholly true, will yet remain fruitful after the necessary corrections have been made. This possibility of successive approximations to the truth is, more than anything else, the source of the triumphs of science, and to transfer this possibility to philosophy is to ensure Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 364 a progress in method whose importance it would be almost impossible to exaggerate.”174 This is an admirably succinct summary of the epistemology to which Carroll and Bordwell, and Allen and Smith, subscribe. Theories are built piecemeal out of preliminary and falsifiable hypotheses, and one must establish the factual character of the parts before the whole can be understood. The theory then advances as successively closer approximations to the truth as hypotheses are further tested, refined, or rejected in light of new evidence. Russell’s ideal produced a disjunction between philosophy’s ancient concern for balancing epistemological inquiry with ethical evaluation. Here, “theory” disappears in two ways, at least as it is generally conceived in the humanities. Not only is the activity of theory given over to science, but also philosophy itself begins to lose its autonomy and self-identity--it would seem to have no epistemological function save in the light reflected from scientific ideals. Analytic philosophy attacks theory on more than one front. First, there is the implicit tendency to de-legitimate extant film theory to the extent that it draws on concepts and methodologies influential in the humanities that fall outside of the reigning norm of what Quine would call a “naturalized philosophy.” Consequently, because so little aesthetic thought on film conforms to scientific models, Noël Carroll concludes that, for the most part, a “theory” of film does not yet exist, though it might at some future date. The conflict over theory in film studies thus reproduces in microcosm a more consequential debate, one that concerns both the role of epistemology and epistemological critique in the humanities and the place of philosophy with respect to science. Analytic philosophy wants to redeem “theory” for film by placing it in the context of a philosophy of science. At the same time, this implies that the epistemologies characteristic of the humanities for a number of decades are neither philosophically nor scientifically legitimate. And so the contestation of theory becomes a de facto epistemological dismissal of the humanities. The rise of cognitivism, evolutionary psychology, and historical poetics, and the debates on post-Theory in both film studies and the humanities, represent a trend where 174 In Mysticism and Logic: and Other Essays (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918) 113; my emphases. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 365 throughout the nineties philosophy allies itself with science as a challenge to theory. In this phase of the debate, “theory” is the contested term. Very quickly, however, “science” becomes the contested term as a philosophy of the humanities gives over theory to science and opposes itself to both. Important keys to this transition are the late works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially his Philosophical Investigations, as well as G. H. von Wright’s calls for a philosophy of the humanities in works like The Tree of Knowledge, and Other Essays (E. J. Brill, 1993).175 The interest of the later Wittgenstein for my arguments, and for the humanities in general, begins with his attack on the identification of philosophy with science. In asserting that “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” (Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus 4.111), Wittgenstein presents a formidable challenge to Bertrand Russell’s conception of philosophy as allied to epistemological models drawn from the natural sciences. In contrast to Russell, Wittgenstein argues that science should not be the only model of explanation and knowledge, and so he insists on the specificity of philosophy as a practice. Von Wright echoes this assertion in writing that A philosophy which does not look for answers to questions, does not explain or theorize about the things which attract the philosopher’s curiosity, and does not try to provide the foundations for our beliefs, is not a philosophy for which scientific thinking sets the pattern. It, on the contrary, fights the infiltration of this thinking into philosophy and makes it responsible for the confusions from which the philosopher tries to rid himself. It is not, need not be, hostile to science as such. But it may be said to take a critical or even hostile attitude to the influence of 175 Following von Wright, including his logical investigation of these questions in Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), other important contributions to the critique of scientism and the affirmation of the distinctiveness of humanistic inquiry, though often in very different ways, come from the work of P. M. S. Hacker, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, and of course, Stanley Cavell. Another locus classicus, though from a different philosophical tradition, is Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. I will comment further on most of these thinkers in the sections to follow. Late in the writing of this draft, Richard Moran also directed me to Bernard Williams’ fascinating lecture, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,” Threepenny Review 85 (Spring 2001) 8-13. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 366 science outside its proper domain--and in particular on philosophic thought. In this it runs counter to an intellectual mainstream of the century.176 The question lies open before us then of what concept of philosophy responds to these criticisms, and how can philosophy contribute to critical thought in the humanities? Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey’s introduction to their compelling and provocative collection devoted to Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, along with P. M. S. Hacker’s contribution to the volume, offers an admirably clear and useful overview of the later Wittgenstein, especially with respect to arguments critiquing the misapplication of causal explanations and supporting the autonomy of philosophy for the humanities. As such the book is a timely intervention against the versions of scientism in film studies promoted by historical poetics and cognitivism, but also a productive defense of the humanities in a time where its values and forms of reasoning remain under siege. One of the most curious aspects of Allen and Turvey’s introduction, however, and in the editorial line of the volume overall, is the place of “theory” as a focusing concept, not only as an object of philosophical analysis and criticism, but also as a way of addressing the central argument of the book: Wittgenstein’s purported rejection of theory as a method inappropriate for philosophical investigation and enquiry. One of Allen and Turvey’s principal objectives is to contest, in ways not dissimilar from Bordwell, the prestige “theory” currently enjoys in the humanities as a form of explanation. “For if the later Wittgenstein is right,” they explain, “regardless of the specific conceptual confusions embedded in specific theories, theory itself is in most cases a logically inappropriate form of explanation for humanistic subject matter. In other words, humanistic subject matter is not, for the most part, amenable to theorization . . .”177 Theory is displaced then in order to follow through on G. H. von Wright’s suggestion that a philosophy of the humanities should be distinguished from the philosophy of science, and that this is the most appropriate model for humanistic inquiry. To accept or reject this argument (or to know 176 “Wittgenstein and the Twentieth Century” in The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays 97. 177 Allen, Richard and Malcolm Turvey, “Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: a prophylaxis against theory” in Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, eds., Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (London: Routledge, 2001) 2. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 367 which elements of the criticism should be retained or excluded) entails knowing precisely what theory is and how it is supposed to characterize forms of explanation that are routinely deployed in the humanities. Like Bordwell and Carroll, Allen and Turvey are critical of theory as a practice within humanistic investigation, but unlike Bordwell and Carroll they wish to defend the humanities, and not by recourse to scientism but rather to philosophy, or again, a certain conception of philosophy. Whether or not this view is too restrictive is the matter under examination, which leads again, and hopefully for the last time, to one final conceptual description of theory. Allen and Turvey provide an admirably direct and clear account of the logical criteria characterizing “theory,” or at least the version of theory they target for criticism. In spite of the various forms theories take in the humanities, in their view all theories tend to possess two fundamental features: “First, they unify a range of apparently disparate, unconnected phenomena by postulating an underlying principle that these phenomena putatively have in common and that can explain their nature or behaviour. Second, the common, underlying principle postulated by the theory--whether it takes the form of an entity, process, force, concept, or something else--is at least initially hidden from view. It is these two features--the unification of apparently diverse phenomena, and the postulation of an underlying principle that cannot be immediately discerned--that theories typically share, despite their other differences” (“Wittgenstein’s later philosophy” 2). Allen and Turvey focus strategically on three primary pillars of the enterprise of contemporary Theory to exemplify these criteria and to demonstrate their operations as theory: the structuralist account of narrative in Barthes’s period of methodological passion, Lacanian psychoanalysis as represented in the work of Slavoj Žižek, and finally David Bordwell and Greg Currie’s cognitive accounts of filmic comprehension. Ironically, though significantly, all three examples have aspired to or allied themselves with a concept of science though with often radically contradictory versions of what “science” might mean. (All three examples also exist in some tension with different and proximate notions of “philosophy.”) The choice of examples is significant since structuralism and psychoanalysis have so dominated one powerful genetic line in contemporary discourses of Theory. Moreover, adding the competing example of cognitivism, putatively opposed Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory to structuralism and psychoanalysis, is meant to demonstrate how the logical characteristics of theory are present even in starkly opposed views through criteria that unite them all in a common discourse. Allen and Turvey’s critique is fairly convincing on the surface. Structuralism, for example, must indeed postulate that in all cases meaning is produced by patterned systems of differences, and to the extent that structures are universal, collective, and asubjective they are, as it were, hidden from view. Nor can structuralism’s appeal to hypothetical-deductive procedures stand as a science, “because nothing can disconfirm the structuralist axiom that there must be an underlying structure that supports and makes possible the diverse forms taken by narrative in human cultures” (“Wittgenstein’s later philosophy” 28-29). Žižek’s Hegelian and Lacanian perspective is vulnerable to similar criticisms. Similarly, cognitivism builds its epistemological framework on demonstrating the unifying functions of cognition through cross-cultural regularities and the actions of operations that are impervious to introspection. Allen and Turvey seem to have found something like the deep structure of theory, or at least its fundamental logical characteristics. Moreover, this argument is commensurate with Bordwell’s assertions of the underlying unity of so-called Grand Theory though, paradoxically, cognitivism falls within the same conceptual framework. Our task is now twofold. Before moving further along in my elegy for theory, one needs to know whether the conceptual investigation and evaluation of theory in all its historical varieties and differences can be preserved within the framework of philosophy as Wittgenstein conceived it, which means as well, asking whether strict borders between philosophy and theory must really be strictly marked. (Are there a variety of language games in which “theory” is deployed, or is there only one as Allen and Turvey assert?) Second, the case for the autonomy of humanistic understanding proffered by Wittgenstein’s interpreters needs to be set out and evaluated in order to understand more clearly their arguments concerning the meaning and value of cultural practices and how they should be interpreted and evaluated, both critically and historically. 27. “I will teach you differences” 368 Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 369 The ‘space of reasons’, therefore, is also a cultural space. --P. M. S. Hacker, “Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding” In a well known story that recurs across the essays published in Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts and in many other accounts, Wittgenstein characterized the project of his later philosophy by paraphrasing Kent’s admonishment to King Lear: “I will teach you differences.” This phrase exemplifies two of the fundamental guidelines for the thought of the later Wittgenstein: the appeal to particular cases and the avoidance of generalities, especially synthetic or subsumptive generalities. Only in this way, I believe Wittgenstein thought, could philosophy accompany us in a search for conceptual clarity by avoiding misleading philosophical friends. In adopting a genealogical perspective on theory and its variety of discordant senses, I have tried to follow this advice as a constant reminder of distinctions produced and effaced in the history of the conceptual transformations of theory, especially in relation to similar mutations in conceptions of philosophy. This reminder is important. For appealing as it might be to think that the fundamental structure of theory has been identified in two key features, and that once so identified philosophy can purge itself of theory, in point of fact there is very little warrant for this idea in the later Wittgenstein. Nor do I think that these principles offer clear guidelines for distinguishing an autonomous space for humanistic investigations by differentiating them from scientific explanations while purging theory from philosophy. To better understand these problems, the questions of what Wittgenstein meant by “theory,” and whether even the so-called attack on or rejection of theory is a central component of his later philosophy, must be more closely examined. My first point is a simple one though it may yield complex consequences. In the nearly 200 pages of the Philosophical Investigations, the word “theory” appears exactly once. To be sure, it appears in a crucial and often cited passage worth revisiting in its entirety: It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones. It was not of any possible interest to us to find out empirically ‘that, contrary to our preconceived ideas, it is possible to think such-and-such’--whatever that may Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 370 mean. (The conception of thought as a gaseous medium [Die pneumatische Auffassung des Denkens].) And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings; in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by reporting new experience, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language. (§109)178 Now as always the open question is what does “theory” mean in this passage? What problem does theory present for Wittgenstein, and by what criteria is it defined and then proscribed from philosophical investigations? A good deal but not all of Wittgenstein’s meaning is plainly presented in the text itself: a theoretical problem is empirical in nature, addressed through the construction of hypotheses, and takes the form 178 All citations are from the revised fourth edition of the Philosophical Investigations (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). For Wittgenstein to call this “Die pneumatische Auffassung des Denkens” raises interesting questions of interpretation. In an alternative translation, I might offer something like “a meaningless mechanical conception of mind,” though “gaseous” certainly conveys Wittgenstein’s implication that the “theory” is vague, inflated, or full of hot air. In New Testament theology, the pneuma also means spiritual, belonging or relating to spirit and spiritual existence, in which case Wittgenstein could be referring to those areas of experience like religion, ethics, or aesthetics where we run up against the frontiers of our language. (I will comment further on this question later on.) Here there is a fascinating though perhaps unlikely connection to the Pneumatomachi, a fourth century Macedonian sect who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit and believed in the consubstantiality of Jesus Christ and God the Father, and also that the Holy Spirit was a creation of the Son. The odd logical connection to Wittgenstein is reported in a 1930 conversation on Schlick’s ethics with Friedrich Waismann, where Waismann relates that in a reply to his question, “Is the existence of the world connected to the ethical,” Wittgenstein replied, “Men have felt a connection here and have expressed it in this way: God the Father created the world, while God the Son (or the Word proceeding from God) is the ethical. That men have first divided the Godhead and then united it, points to there being a connection here.” See Waismann’s “Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein,” The Philosophical Review 74.1 (January 1965) 16. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 371 of explanations seeking new and previously unknown information. In addition, as in many passages of this deeply introspective work, the subject of Wittgenstein’s critical attitude is Wittgenstein himself. One signpost to the meaning of theory in this passage, then, are Wittgenstein’s reminders of how to avoid the logical snares retroactively apparent in the Tractatus, with its belief in the possibility of reducing language to primitive signs corresponding to simple elements of reality capable of picturing the world as a bounded whole commensurate with the possible forms of all truth statements. In this the Tractatus presented a theory in all the senses that Wittgenstein came later to doubt: seeking underlying principles when none are needed, explaining through reference to a principle that is posited rather than observed, and building an argument out of systematically connected exceptionless theses. While this passage is the only reference to theory in the Philosophical Investigations, similar arguments can nonetheless be found in the Zettel and in the Blue and Brown Books. Yet it remains the case that such passages are infrequent and that theory as such may not have been a special conceptual preoccupation through which Wittgenstein’s efforts to define the specificity of philosophy were defined, or if they are, their historical and conceptual targets are quite specific. In fact, I have already laid them out in the first part of this book; namely, those dimensions of positivism and logical positivism that subscribe to the doctrine of methodological monism and subsumptiontheoretic models of explanation. Whatever their variety or spaces of deployment, theories in this sense seek methodological unity and homogeneity, the subsumption of individual cases to generalizable laws, and favor causal explanations. In this semantic domain a theory is considered to be a synthetic explanation of a range of facts considered to be hypothetically true. It is one influential and widespread concept or model of theory but indeed not the only one. These models come from the domain of science and of the philosophy of science and are the principle sources of the scientism in philosophy and the humanities justly criticized by von Wright and Hacker after the example of Wittgenstein. No doubt, to the extent that conceptual residues and ideologies of positivism still inhabit formalism, structuralism, cognitivism, and perhaps even psychoanalysis, they all remain vulnerable to Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 372 the definition and critique of theory offered by Allen and Turvey. However, I still feel that a number of consequences of their argument are worrisome and perhaps unearned. Foremost among them is the idea that the critique and rejection of theory, which is the unifying idea of the entire book, very likely has little warrant in Wittgenstein himself as I have just demonstrated. Alternatively, what is fundamentally warranted, and crucially so, are the efforts of von Wright and Hacker, or Charles Taylor and Stanley Cavell, to define after Wittgenstein the relative autonomy of humanistic understanding with respect to science and the philosophy of science. The issue here would then be whether theory should be absolutely identified with scientism and methodological monism, and subsequently whether the latter Wittgenstein proscribes its. At the same time, if the critique of theory is so closely associated with scientism and the subsumption-theoretic model, does it really blanket the whole of the humanities? Or is it just a way for philosophy to adjudicate a border dispute between the natural and human sciences, where frequent friendly visits may even be welcome as long as the neighbors have a clear view of the logical constraints on their activities? Theory in the strictest sense, or even what von Wright refers to in Explanation and Understanding as the “quasi-causal” logic of much historical research (which admits some causal explanations though without reference to covering laws), can serve humanistic investigations in many productive ways, above all in identifying and clarifying natural constraints on cultural practice and meaning in terms of perception and comprehension. Here another important question presents itself. If a philosophy of or for the humanities is possible, and does involve other methods or modes of knowing, why does the alternative not amount to a theory in the strict sense? As Allen and Turvey argue in their introduction to Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, philosophy differs from science in that its subject matter is not empirical in nature--only nature is subject to investigation by empirical methods. Empirical has a precise definition here as that of which we can have no prior knowledge. Alternatively, philosophy is concerned with problems of sense and meaning, and these problems are not empirical in the sense that language use and creative expression are already part of a commonly accessible stock of human knowledge. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 373 This involves a second criterion: statements about empirical phenomenon are, and must be, necessarily falsifiable. Philosophical investigation, however, concerns testing the limits of sense and meaning of given propositions. In this way, Wittgenstein’s case for a philosophical anthropology as the best framework for investigating human behavior and creativity is based on what P. M. S. Hacker calls the autonomy of human understanding.179 This concept is exemplified in the conventional distinction between reasons and causes. Simply speaking, in a causal explanation each effect is presumed to have a cause identified by a hypothesis, which may and must be rejected or revised in light of further evidence. The idea of theory presented here is no doubt associated with the semantic domain of subsumption-theoretic accounts. Causal explanations are legitimate in scientific contexts because actions have origins that derive from states of affairs of which we have no prior knowledge. Most human action and behavior, however, is ill served by causal explanation, for agents have the capacity to justify their behaviors with reasons. As Allen and Turvey explain: A reason for an action is identified by the fact that it can potentially be cited by the agent to justify what he did. An agent’s reason is typically authoritative and complete. That is, it is not a conjecture or hypothesis on the part of an agent or others observing the agent that further evidence might prove, disprove or qualify. Since the reason for an action is not a hypothesis, it is not something that is typically unknown or hidden. An agent does not usually discover his reason for doing something by deducing a hypothesis and testing it against the available evidence . . . . Furthermore, it is also usually self-sufficient in the sense that the agent does not have to find out any more information in order to better justify his action. (“Wittgenstein’s later philosophy” 15-16) 179 Hacker defines the task of defining the relative autonomy of human understanding as the search for “forms of understanding and explanation appropriate to and dependent upon the understanding of language and its uses in the stream of human life.” See his essay, “Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding” in Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, 59. It might be added that the issue of defining the relative autonomy of humanistic understanding remains a complex and unsettled question. See for example the contributions and debates between Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty published in The Review of Metaphysics 34.1 (September 1980). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 374 In other words, reasons are not hidden from view and are thus open to inspection and introspection. I will comment critically on these criteria later on, but before moving forward it is necessary to clarify and qualify some unexamined assumptions here. First, in this account agents are considered as being completely transparent to themselves in terms of reasons. However, frameworks of knowing can also be intuitive, unacknowledged, and incompletely accounted for. Reasoning may falter and agents may not be in full selfpossession of their claims to reason. Indeed, an agent may need to find out more information to justify his reasons though this information may not be empirical in nature. There is nothing in Wittgenstein to suggest that an agent be fully in possession of selfknowledge or capable of achieving such a state, as we shall see. The important criteria here involve first acknowledging that acts of reason giving and justification are human capabilities or potentials, and then to insist on the criterion of openness to introspection as defining the space of human understanding and self-understanding. To say that reason giving is agential is also to say that it is intentional in ways foreign to the search for previously unknown data and causes. This is why Hacker says that the space of reasons is also a cultural space. Where causes operate in the domain of automatic, physical, natural, or sub-normative processes, intentional acts operate in the realm of reasons and choices. Intentional acts thus lead to questions of purpose, and appropriate responses will take the form of giving reasons for what one intended as a form of explaining ones’ self (and for understanding ones’ self). The grammar of reason giving-for example, justification, forward looking reasons, desirability characterizations in terms of the schemes and values of the culture of the agent, backward looking reasons, description or redescription of the intended act--is thus clearly distinguishable from causal explanations, as Hacker well points out. Knowledge of causes is generally though not exclusively inductive, but accounts of reasons are not. Knowledge of causes is discovered because previously unknown data or information are brought to light but one does not normally find out or uncover one’s reasons for executing an intention unless they are assumed to be unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense, and even then the criteria of prior availability and of being open to introspection still apply. Causes make events occur but Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 375 reasons guide and justify intentional acts, and consequently, unlike causes reasons provide the grounds for evaluating and understanding human actions. Therefore, one cannot say of reasons that they are true or false, right or wrong, but only that that are good or poor, defensible or indefensible, justifiable or unjustifiable, persuasive or doubtful. Similarly, characterization of a reason does not specify a sufficient condition for the performance of the intended act, nor can accounts of reasons in reference to intentional acts be subsumed to time independent and generalizable laws. To explain an action as done for a reason, for the sake of an intended goal, or in order to bring about a certain state of affairs, is thus not tantamount to giving a causal explanation. Reason giving is an expression of self-understanding and thus representative of how an agent himself understands (whether well or poorly) his intentions and actions-human behavior and cultural activity stand in need of understanding and interpretation rather than explanation. Nevertheless, while expression involves performing meaningful and intentional acts, these acts are also variegate, multi-layered, and perhaps intentionally or unintentionally ambiguous or even contradictory, and thus human expressive activities refer to social conventions and institutions that vary culturally and historically, and which are irreducible to causal or sub-normative functions. Therefore, the cultural practices and behaviors of human communities are time-dependent in the sense that understanding the mutually imbricated horizons of intents and reasons, expressions and interpretations, require acknowledgement of appropriate contexts and attention to the surrounding and antecedent histories of these activities. For all these reasons, the description and interpretation of expressive acts and cultural practices require concepts different in kind from those that best serve the natural sciences; hence the Wittgensteinian insistence on a commitment to the autonomy of intents and cultural practices. (Later, I will follow Deleuze in asking whether and to what extent “concepts” are appropriate at all for scientific practice.) Autonomy now indicates that agents have the capacity for authoritative self-examination and self-justification. Therefore, a key difference between scientific and philosophical enquiry is that science tests its hypotheses against external phenomena, that is, the natural world. But philosophy admits only to internal or self-investigation. This is less a question of truth and error than Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 376 judgments concerning the approximate rightness of a proposition tested against prior experience and knowledge in contexts both historical and contingent. “The phenomena of nature do not, in the requisite sense, have a meaning,” Hacker explains, “are not rulegoverned or intentional, are not thus embedded in customs and institutions and in specific situations, and are not actions done for reasons” (“Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding” 70). Humanistic accounts are also evaluative in ways that causal explanations cannot be. Understanding the thoughts, expressions, and actions of others requires imagination and empathy, both an intuitive grasp of others’ reasons and the possibility of projecting oneself into their perspectives and contexts. Interpreting and evaluating an intentional act therefore requires an account not only of the knowledge and beliefs guiding an action but also of the agent’s goals, values, and reasons, as well as his understanding of himself and his role in the situation and his conception of others’ beliefs and understanding of that role. In other words, interpretation and evaluation have strong ethical components. “Often understanding his action requires not only an explanation of the agent’s reasons, but also an explanation of why those reasons weighed with him,” Hacker insists, which can sometimes be given by references to his self-understanding, or his conception of the expectations of others, or the values which he has imbibed in the context of the society of which he is a member. Such explanations are alien to the natural sciences. They are not reducible to causal, sub-normative explanations, and are not formally homogeneous with the nomological forms of explanation characteristic of the sciences. . . . For what underlies the generalizations of the study of culture and society is not the blind movements of matter in space, but the actions and activities of man, sometimes intentional, often done for reasons, typically moved by motives and directed to ulterior goals, and only intelligible as such. (70 and 71) Reviewing the distinction between reasons and causes thus helps to begin to unravel the conceptual confusions surrounding the idea of theory in cinema studies or the humanities; for example, why Bordwell and Carroll have been so wedded to a certain idea or ideal of science and the theoretic-subsumption model, but also why theory in its Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 377 current sense, even from a culturalist or psychoanalytic perspective, remains so compelling for a great many fairly intelligent people. As Malcolm Turvey puts the question, “Why is there a lack of basic empirical research in film theory if the nature and functions of cinema are like the laws governing natural phenomena? Why does such research, somehow, seem unnecessary to film theorists? And how is it that film theories ever convince anyone that they are plausible in the absence of such sustained research?”180 Because these criteria are irrelevant for cultural investigation. Film theories, like all humanistic investigation, concern human activities and thus presume a high degree of prior knowledge, self-knowledge, and self-examination. Like any cultural activity, cinema is a human creation and thus is embedded in practices and institutions that form the basis of our quotidian existence. We may not have fully conscious knowledge of these practices and institutions, nor any desire to construct theories about them in the form of propositions or concepts, yet we act on and through them in coherent and consistent ways. This is why cultural theories are able to solicit agreement in the absence of empirical research and experimentation. Their power and plausibility is based on the extent to which they seem to clarify for us what we already know and do on a daily basis, what we intend to do in the future, or what we have done in the past. Here we need no external examination beyond the critical investigation of our own practices as they evolve historically. However, what film studies has called theory in its multiple and variegate guises might more appropriately be called aesthetics or philosophy. And indeed, perhaps we could achieve much methodological and conceptual clarification by setting aside “theory” provisionally in order to examine what a philosophy of the humanities, and indeed, what a film philosophy might look like. 180 “Can Science Help Film Theory,” The Journal of Moving Image Studies 1.1 (2001) <www.uca.edu/org/ccsmi/journal/issue1_table_contents.htm>. The passage reads differently in the latest published version of the essay. See The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Texts and Readings, eds. Thomas E. Wartenberg and Angela Curran (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 25. For related arguments, see Karen Hanson’s “Provocations and Justifications of Film” in Philosophy and Film, eds. Cynthia A. Freeland and Thomas E. Wartenberg (New York: Routledge, 1995) 33-48. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 378 28. An assembling of reminders . . . since there can be no way of circumscribing the conceptual confusions which may distort human thinking or of predicting in advance fresh sources of conceptual entanglement which may emerge from a culture, there will be no end to the need for philosophical criticism. --P. M. S. Hacker, “Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding” . . . both statements of fact and statements of value rest upon the same capacities of human nature; that, so to speak, only a creature that can judge of value can state a fact --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason The logical frameworks of cognitivism and historical poetics, on the one hand, and the strain of analytic philosophy of science proximate to and critical of the humanities, on the other, overreaches in projecting their particular view of rationality as a single standard of explanation, and theory as necessarily methodologically monistic. In fact, we are not dealing here with a conflict between rational and irrational explanation, or even domains of truthful explanation that could be placed on a scale of rationality that are testable through fallibility and dialectical correction. Perhaps judgments of truth value in explanations are less applicable here than reasonableness, or rather, how we assess the value and quality of reasons given and received, and how those reasons can be built into local and contingent consensus. Von Wright characterizes this attitude in a distinction between the rational and the reasonable. For example, an argument can be rational but its premises and conclusions may be unreasonable. Rationality is goal-oriented and has to do primarily with formal correctness of reasoning, efficiency of means to an end, and the confirmation and testing of beliefs. Judgments of reasonableness, however, are valueoriented and aimed at qualitative assessments of our forms of life or modes of existence. “The reasonable is, of course, also rational--,” von Wright explains, “but the ‘merely Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 379 rational’ is not always reasonable.”181 This is von Wright’s way of rebalancing the split between epistemology and ethics, or logical and moral reasoning, in twentieth century philosophy. As I have already stated, perhaps one could call this the search for agreement rather than the quest for certainty, which so obsessed Russell or Moore. To reach tacit agreement, one can certainly pass through series of disagreements, and agreement does not have to be complete. However, reason giving is messy, conflictual, contentious, contingent, and often disagreeable. According to concept and context, individuals (or theories) may have conflicting accounts or justifications for the same actions, behaviors, or interpretations. And these conflicts may be in part or in whole reasonable within their own contexts and frameworks for justification. Moreover, because all human activity is historically open, and conflicts of interpretation are always generated by discrepant or discordant contexts, no final consensus can be hoped for. No doubt the appeal of good theory is very great, especially for those who seek certainty or stable grounds for knowledge, and clear lines of demarcation between what is true or capable of being true, and what is not. But the key problem here is what counts as knowing and whether or not there is a single standard of knowledge, applicable in all cases, or whether there are justifiable forms of knowledge that are both contingent and context dependent, and which are to be valued for their contingency and context dependency. Such an appeal is not a defense of either perspectivalism or relativism. It is, however, meant as a strong critique of scientism in the humanities, or the improper extension of the theoretic-subsumption model to domains of cultural activity to which they do not and cannot apply. Or worse, to understand how the particular form of the will to truth expressed by methodological monism not only excludes a priori ways of knowing and interpreting that may be of great value, but also willfully tries to make the humanities disappear behind the mask of science. The line of thought that weaves from the later Wittgenstein through the work of von Wright, Hacker, and Charles Taylor can be understood as motivated by the desire to protect and preserve a domain of knowledge and form of understanding from erosion and distortion by an instrumental and technological 181 “Images of Science and Forms of Rationality” in The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays (New York: E. J. Brill, 1993) 173. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 380 reason. To assert and defend the autonomy of humanistic investigation and understanding is also to protest the illegitimate encroachment of the natural sciences into domains where they do not apply. Accordingly, what the humanities might need instead of a defense of Theory are more powerful conceptual resources for evaluating the value and limits of causal and quasi-causal reasoning with respect to problems of cultural creation, interpretation, and evaluation. At the same time, the criterion of the autonomy of understanding, interpretation, and reason-giving as practical activities is an important component in a defense of the humanities, and in constructing a possible philosophy or philosophies of the humanities. However, one must also be attentive to this criterion’s limits as well as its powers. I am thus led to ask whether the Wittgensteinian hesitancy before theory and its desire “to leave language untouched” limit important possibilities and potentialities of philosophy of the humanities? The fact of the matter is that Wittgenstein’s struggle to define the conceptual activities of philosophical investigation is neither systematic, synthetic, nor proscriptive. (One might also ask if such a form of investigation is amenable to judgments of right or wrong, correct or incorrect, true or false. In a similar manner, the suggestion that our cultural activities are governed by “rules,” rather than say norms or conventions, must also be considered.) A critical and humanistic philosophy should be attentive to the open, experimental, and exploratory nature of Wittgenstein’s writings, in order to preserve their sense of struggle and internal conflict, of not getting one’s conceptual bearings or direction quite right, and of remaining open to new paths that the investigation may eventually clear. Indeed, in spite of the value and clarity of their arguments, most worrisome in Allen and Turvey’s account is their tendency to draw limits, to exclude and forbid, and in turn to give in to what Wittgenstein characterized in The Blue and Brown Books as the “craving for generality,” or the desire to treat variegate phenomena as if they were essentially of the same type rather than doing justice to their variety and differences.182 In avoiding generalities and seeking to account for particular cases, 182 See The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row, 1965) 18. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 381 philosophical investigation wants to account for difference, singularity, or what makes something unique, or a new accomplishment or intuition. This teaching of differences has been, I hope, a watchword in writing my elegy for theory. What elements of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy point then towards the possibility of a conception of philosophy built on the autonomy of humanistic understanding? P. M. S. Hacker observes that Wittgenstein was a critical philosopher in at least two senses related to Kant’s conception of Kritik. Both philosophers were concerned with exploring and testing the limits of reason and reasonableness, Kant through his doctrine of the faculties and Wittgenstein through philosophical investigations of the limits of expression. “Where Kant delimited knowledge in order to make room for faith,” Hacker notes, “Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, delimited language in order to make room for ineffable metaphysics, ethics, and religion.”183 In the years following Wittgenstein’s disappointment with the Tractatus and his slow construction of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein’s investigations into the limits of language no longer shied away from value talk as untouchable, but rather insisted that understanding the grammar of ethical or aesthetic expressions requires attention to their distinctive contexts and the roles they play in given forms of life. Like Kant, Wittgenstein was also a trenchant critic of philosophical illusions produced when the bounds of sense are transgressed. In particular, he rejected metaphysical claims for giving access to the language-independent essence of things, no less than questioning the appeal of logic for settling claims of certainty and abstract reasoning. In addition, Wittgenstein began remapping philosophy’s concepts of the agent or subject in important ways, both denying that the subject has privileged access to his own consciousness and that subjective and mental activities are essentially better known than actions in the external world. Similar to Kant’s dialectical critique, Wittgenstein finds we lose our way or are misdirected in our reasons through inexact concordances with the conditions of sense and the unfounded migration of concepts and expressions beyond their legitimate contexts. Wittgenstein’s most mordant critiques are aimed at the 183 “Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding” in Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, 39. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 382 inappropriate use of psychological concepts for logical explanations of human actions. Foremost among these concepts is the ascription of the first person pronoun to a selfidentical and self-present Cartesian ego that seems both to inhabit the body and to remain distinct from it, as well as the belief that such ascriptions are immune to misidentification and reference failure. Here the ego is always identical to itself as the site of a certain rationality. Consequently, Wittgenstein was equally critical of the inclination to think of the mind as an inalienably possessed private domain of subjective experience to which the subject has privileged access and self-knowledge, as well as the tendency to confuse, through criteria of numerical and qualitative identity, knowledge of objects with knowledge of persons and experience. Through such criticisms, in Hacker’s view, Wittgenstein hoped to lay down guidelines for a philosophical anthropology and for building the foundation of a philosophy of the humanities that could withstand the constant and often illegitimate encroachments of scientism. Wittgenstein’s critique of the misapplication of psychological concepts hopefully derails a misunderstanding that certainly arises here--what does it mean to speak of the “human” in the humanities? To the extent that the enterprise of Theory has been identified with a philosophical anti-humanism for the last fifty years it should be said that the idea of defending the autonomy of humanistic understanding does not necessarily include returning to older concepts of “humanism,” as is clear in the very different Wittgenstein-influenced work of Richard Rorty, Donald Davidson, or Charles Taylor. To defend the humanities as the critical investigation and evaluation of what is distinctively human about cultural creation and interpretation implies no conceptual commitments either to an ideal of “man” as a freely acting and fully self-conscious agent, or to the cogito as the source and origin of meaning. No one was more aware than Wittgenstein of the limits of human understanding and potential failures of meaning, interpretation, and sense, or how our own quotidian practices of expression and interpretation often remain opaque to us. However, Wittgenstein’s implied concept of human agency in relation to potentials for expression in relation to forms of life are complex and not easily grasped. To connect intentional expression to forms of life means that our cultural activities and expressiveness Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 383 are always practiced in two dimensions as it were--both collective and individual, global and local, impersonal and personal, and public and anonymous--such that accounts of a particular expression must refer equally to the cultural context or form of life in which it is embedded. This is what is often referred to as Wittgenstein’s holistic conception of meaning. Therefore, the potential for deployments of practice, both successful and unsuccessful, and opportunities for understanding and misinterpretation, as well as invention or innovation within practice, are framed by culture and the history of collective or social use. To express is to perform a singular and intentional act but also to evoke an entire social and collective framework of experience--all expression is public and social in some sense, and thus meaning and interpretation can never be constrained by or reduced to individual intents. In a similar way, misunderstanding and disagreement occur not only because of friction between cultural or idiosyncratic contexts, but also because of the impossibility of fully accounting for the “rules” connecting statements to “states” of meaning. Expression as an intentional cultural activity is therefore both an action and a state, a singular active performance whose meaning and interpretability are also embedded in a cultural and impersonal grammatical context, open to innovation and historical change. Expression, then, must be thought of simultaneously as an action verb as in “to state or express” but also as an historical condition or fact of existence, that is, as a framework circumscribing potentialities of sense or meaning. Therefore, whatever sense or meanings we attribute to expression are no longer “subjective” meanings or the properties of individual enunciators, but rather are constitutive of a complex intersubjective social matrix that frames or conditions the potential for public communication no less powerfully than it does for violent misunderstanding and disagreements. In this context, to be understood or to fail to understand, and to reach agreement or not, occurs through “grammatical” missteps of various kinds: not only a lack of clarity in concept or expression, but also the mapping or projection of concepts into domains where they do not apply, or disconnecting them intentionally or unintentionally from contexts in which they could be better understood. Here is what Wittgenstein might mean, then, in refusing hypothetical explanations and insisting only on description. To return to clarity, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 384 to interpret efficiently, or to reach agreement thus entails grammatical descriptions or characterizations that draw out the multiple and varied relationships that connect and reconnect a singular expression or instance to its ever evolving collective and cultural environment or context. Here philosophical investigation, as Wittgenstein conceived it, involves two principle and interconnected activities, perspicuous description and connective analysis. As described by Hacker, perspicuous description--übersichtlichen Darstellungen is Wittgenstein’s phrase--examines “the uses of expressions, the various forms of their context dependence, the manner in which they are integrated in behaviour, the point and presupposition of their use, and their relations of implication, compatibility or incompatibility with other expressions” (“Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding” 41). Dartstellung can also mean portrayal, depiction, presentation, schema, account, or statement. It thus indicates a kind of showing or demonstration. Sometimes Wittgenstein also uses the verb beschreiben, which implies description but also depiction, characterization, picturing, drawing, and delineating. Übersichtlich indicates that the account should be open, clear, and capable of being obviously and plainly understood. Alternatively, “connective analysis” evaluates philosophically problematic concepts. Here the grammars of problematical concepts are examined by rigorously tracing out conceptual connections, which having been overlooked or forgotten, or alternatively, overstretched or misapplied, lead to conceptual confusion and philosophical perplexity. “A main source of our failure to understand,” Wittgenstein wrote, “is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words [daß wir den Gebrauch unserer Wörter nicht übersehen]--Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity” (Philosophical Investigations §122), and this is a persistent problem for philosophers no less than ordinary language users. Wittgenstein’s insistence on developing a clear view or overview of our expressive and conceptual practices and capacities is clearly indicated in his frequent use of verbs and qualifiers such as übersehen and übersichtlichkeit, which encourage us to have a view of or on, to look over, assess, or see more clearly because we have failed to see, overlooked, or missed something. Philosophy neither explains nor deduces, formulates Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 385 hypotheses, nor discovers what was unknown, for to survey the expressive practice of human culture is to explore a territory where in principle nothing is hidden and everything is public and open to view. Perhaps philosophy in this sense is something like the making of grammatical maps by producing clearer descriptions of the features of our expressive activities and reminding us of expected and unexpected pathways of meaning, keeping us going in the right direction and avoiding navigational mishaps, and reminding us not to stray too far from an intended route. Philosophical investigation thus involves not only conceptual characterization and clarification but also a restoration or reminding of absent or missed connections between things. Wittgenstein called this further activity an assembling of reminders [ein Zusammentragen von Erinnerungen] by making manifest and accounting for the implicit or explicit criteria underwriting reasons and interpretations. Assembling reminders is both an attractive and strange concept in that it encourages us to recall that we often forget not only what we mean but also how we intend to mean. Call this a certain philosophical absent mindedness that in every one of us provokes misfires of reason: to have overlooked, to be unaware, to be subject to misdirected “perceptions” or perspectives, looking in the wrong place, to be distracted, to have insufficiently accounted for conceptual connections, to have insufficiently valued or valued for the wrong reasons, to have insufficiently accounted for what one values, to have insufficiently thought through consequences, to misunderstand or be misunderstood, to be confused or distracted, to have misapplied context or not found the right context for interpretation; in short, to have failed to explain oneself completely. And to rectify such misfires, “We remind ourselves,” Wittgenstein offers in the Philosophical Investigations, “that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena. . . . Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one” (§90). This phrase sheds new light on what it means to offer a perspicuous description of our quotidian expressive acts. The grammatical investigation of our claims to sense, meaning, agreement, or conviction is not simply an assertion of the meaningfulness of ordinary language, but rather of how language “grammatically” sets the conditions or potentialities for making sense, achieving meaningfulness, reaching agreement or sustaining conviction: “. . . our investigation . . . is directed not towards Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 386 phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena,” Wittgenstein insists (§90). And these possibilities are in plain view, or may be brought into plain view, because of our common capacity for expression. At the same time, to possess the capacity for expression does not assure that we reliably mean what we say, or even know completely how to mean what we say, or to say what we mean. 29. ". . . a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing" We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. --Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” We have come some way in understanding what is at stake in Wittgenstein’s philosophical anthropology as the effort to delimit the autonomy of human cultural activity--its language games and forms of life--with respect to the activities of philosophical investigation and theoretical explanation. However, two obstacles lie in the path of connecting these arguments to what I want to call a film philosophy, or even more broadly, a philosophy of art and human expressiveness. Where von Wright or Hacker refer to the autonomy of human or humanistic understanding, Allen and Turvey insist upon the autonomy of linguistic understanding, as if the only form of human expression was speech. The second and more important obstacle has to do with evaluating the senses of ordinary or everyday expressiveness with respect to philosophical expression. Attentive readers have already noticed or wondered about my use of expression, expressiveness, or expressivity in passages where one might ordinarily find “language.” Despite all of the justifiable critiques that could be made of contemporary Theory from semiology to postmodernism, one of its fundamental accomplishments has been to open and completely transform the question: what is called discourse? From film semiology’s attempts to overcome a purely linguistic account of language in its confrontations with the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 387 image, to Derrida’s grammatological critique of the identification of speech with thought as the origin and anchor of meaning, to Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical transformations of discourse, and Lyotard’s accounts of the figural, one signal accomplishment of the age of Theory was to critique thoroughly and completely transform the privilege of meaning and expression as being constrained exclusively by linguistic structures. Allen and Turvey are virtually unique in their own book in insisting that the autonomy of human expression and understanding be constrained to the linguistic in a strict sense--this constraint is not self-evident or widespread in other Wittgensteininfluenced accounts. Still I am led to ask a simple question: How much would be changed in philosophy if the widely held default assumption that meaning or sense is linguistically constrained were renounced and the more expansive term “expression” was substituted for “language”? As even Wittgenstein well understood, human powers of expression are variegate and manifold, and every act of linguistic expression is not only embedded holistically in a variety of signifying actions (gestural, physiognomic, indicative, etc.), but also shot through with non-linguistic elements that equally have the capacity to intend meaning and to demand interpretation. If this were not so, how would a philosophy of art be possible? Indeed, after Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard, my more than twenty years of philosophical work on the figural has tried to show that our conception of discourse should be transformed in just these ways.184 But let it just be said for the moment that nothing is changed or altered in either Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical investigation, or von Wright and Hacker’s approach to defending the autonomy of cultural practices and interpretive activities, if the broader term expression is evoked to characterize every form of human activity that is intentional in meaning or has the capacity for meaningfulness, which lends itself to interpretation (but also misinterpretation and ambiguity), and finally, entertains or promotes possibilities for conceptual transformation and renewal through recontextualization. (And here the fact that many ordinary expressions are often quite extraordinary must also be accounted for.) 184 See, for example, the essays collected in Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 388 This observation leads to the second obstacle. One of key difficulties in the standard view of Wittgenstein is knowing how to follow his suggestion that philosophy concern itself primarily with ordinary or normative uses of language. In order to free language from its metaphysical uses and bring it back down to earth means in principle that understanding whatever procedures, conventions, or rules govern meaning are open and available to everyone, and in turn can be explained by anyone. For example, Allen and Turvey feel that a primary feature of theory is the appeal to occult, hidden, or otherwise invisible structures of meaning or culture. This appeal was an acknowledged flaw even of the Tractatus as Allen and Turvey clearly explain: “An invisible system of representation of the sort postulated by the Tractatus, Wittgenstein came to realize, cannot account for how users of a language actually use language themselves. Rather, the meaning of an expression must be visible to its user if he is to be able to use it correctly. And the norms, standards or rules that define its correct use in a specific context must in principle be ones that its user can appeal to in justifying his usage, or in explaining how the expression is to be used correctly to others. If they were not, how could he himself ever use language correctly, or challenge the incorrect use of language on the part of another?” (“Wittgenstein’s later philosophy” 8). Now the first worry in such characterizations is the criterion of visibility (and by implication, invisibility), which is often unreasonably extended to the idea that quotidian practices of language use, and justifying one’s use, are self-evident and universally available. In many cases they are, but the correct sense of the argument is difficult to characterize. Justifications of this argument often appeal to another justly famous passage from the Investigations: “Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything--Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us” (Philosophical Investigations §126). Allen and Turvey closely follow Wittgenstein’s sense here in arguing that language use describes a public and autonomous domain that is open to view, meaning that practice is not determined by anything external to actual usage, such as deep structures of grammar, mental operations, or correspondence to a meaning-endowed world. Moreover, if these rules were unavailable they could not play a normative role. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 389 Therefore, Allen and Turvey conclude, “. . . if meaning is visible, and if the assumption that meaning needs to be unified by being reduced to a single essential function such as describing has been rejected as mere prejudice, then theory of any kind (not just a theory that is explicitly scientific) must be an inappropriate methodology for philosophical investigations into sense and meaning. For there are no concealed, underlying principles of meaning to postulate, and no 'essence' to reduce meaning to, to unify it” (10). Allen and Turvey appeal to the criterion of visibility because it is tied so strongly to their definition and critique of “theory”--if an explanation appeals to latent, hidden, indiscernible, invisible, or otherwise non-conscious structures or forces, it is both characterizable as theory and inappropriate for accounts of humanistic investigation and understanding. However, the consequences of this “non-theoretical conception of meaning” which do indeed appear to be faithful to Wittgenstein’s intended sense are too restrictive, such that philosophical investigation is now restrained only to indicating and describing: “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is” (Philosophical Investigations §124). Now, §109 of the Investigations may recommend against the proposal of “theories,” that is, the construction of hypotheses and the search for new and previously unknown information, but it says nothing about visibility or invisibility, nor does §126 necessarily lend itself to a similar interpretation. The criterion of visibility is superimposed from without by the as yet unjustified mandate that the Philosophical Investigations authorizes a blanket critique and rejection of theory in its broadest sense. (Given that we know precisely what “theory” is and in what sorts of language games it is embedded.) The key question here, however, is to understand what it means to say that meaning is “open to view.” Again, one might assume that Wittgenstein’s meaning in such passages is fairly plain, if only one knows how to see it. At the end of the passage Wittgenstein writes, “Denn, was etwa verborgen ist, interessiert uns nicht“; what is hidden [Verborgen] does not interest us. Verborgen, or course, does mean hidden, out of view, or concealed, but also latent or dormant; alternatively, what is concealed may not be invisible, but like Poe’s purloined letter is rather missed in plain sight like all of the potential misfires of reason I Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 390 described earlier. The more slippery passage includes the phrase, “Da alles offen daliegt . . .“--there everything lays open, not open to view but simply there, available. Here the German adjective offen lends itself to a range of interesting senses: open, overt, unconcealed, unsealed, clear, outright, direct, candid, active, but also, loose, raw, undetermined, undecided, and unsettled. The criterion of visibility is deeply misleading, I believe, and too forcefully reduces the sense of Wittgenstein’s recommendations or reminders. Seen plainly in such pages are Wittgenstein’s objections to the kinds of theory that insist that only those functions or operations that are impervious to introspection are epistemologically valid. (Scientistic “good” theory, then, is an obvious candidate for criticism whose influence must be overcome if we are to see our way clear to valuing the kinds of philosophy that frames and supports the arts and humanities.) Rather than speaking of visibility or invisibility when trying to open and map the terrain on which humanistic investigations can and should take place, perhaps it would be better to say that we are interested in those expressive and cultural activities and practices that are open to observation and open to introspection as capacities of human intentional creation, expression, and interpretation. Two crucial points must be made here. As I see it, the standard view of Wittgenstein imagines the autonomy of linguistic meaning and the condition of being open to view as something like the world’s largest public library. However, the latent assumption in the standard view is not only that all the books are available to every human, but also that every human has read every book in the library, and perhaps having temporarily forgotten the content of this or that volume needs a gentle reminder now and then of where the books are placed and what resides within them. But it is also unavoidably the case that the total content of this great depository can never be known, that much of what we know we forget, and that we often lose sight of the networks of association that connect, enlarge, and deepen our ideas and arguments, or in turn link them in unexpected contexts or innovative colligations. In this case a community and a form of life are required in which peers, colleagues, students, librarians, and even interfaces and databases collectively collaborate in both challenging and enlarging the web of contexts through which meaning and interpretation are pursued. It is also Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 391 importantly the case that each one of us continually adds to this library by creating new contents and new contexts for it. In addition, in spite of their considerable differences, there is a strong similarity between the standard view of the autonomy of linguistic meaning as a normative practice and the scientistic model of mind as subnormative behavior: both propose a terrain for investigation that is not open to change and in which characteristic activities must remain untouched. If taken at his word, and I am not sure we should absolutely do so, Wittgenstein’s admonitions to leave language untouched, to only describe, and to restrain our activities to perspicuous characterization hover close to similar proscriptions imposed by scientism and causal explanation. The admonition that language remain untouched presupposes a conception of our individual and collective expressive capacities as if they were geological features of unchanging landscape, when in fact they comprise a city, which we are constantly building, extending, clearing, redesigning, and reconstructing. No single citizen can have or retain a complete mental overview of this ever evolving space--philosophical maps are necessary, and they are open to diverse interpretations while enabling a variety of trajectories through and across the conceptual polis--yet every citizen can contribute in ways both minor and major to the expressive and cultural resources of this collective project. In the standard view of Wittgenstein there is a third and final problem correlative to both the constraint of language to linguistic usage and to the admonition to leave language untouched--this problem concerns the status of “rules” of usage. The application of rules is one of Hacker’s key criteria for asserting why the subject matter of the humanities is not generally amenable to the forms of explanation given in the natural sciences, and why humanistic reason is different in kind and irreducible to natural scientific reasoning. Some of these criteria are now familiar to us. One involves the holistic conception of expression where language is a public, norm-governed practice partly constitutive of the form of life and culture of its speakers; another involves Wittgenstein’s argument against private languages. Intentional expression is social and collective. Learning a language is part of acculturation, of belonging to a community, and one acquires behaviors alongside of language acquisition. In these respects, precise Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 392 distinctions and adjudications of reasoning, interpreting, and evaluating cannot take place generally and abstractly, but only through practice: “an explanation of the meaning of an expression,” Hacker explains, “is internally related to instances of its correct application. The internal relation between a rule for the use of an expression and its extension is fixed by the practice of applying the rule, of correcting misapplications of it, of explaining the meaning of the expression by reference to the rule, by the responses (of understanding, misunderstanding and not understanding) to the expression in use, which exhibit what counts in practice as correct and incorrect applications” (“Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding” 60). This brings us back round to the question of how the knowledge of rules of usage is open to view. All such rules must be implicitly known and understood within human communities. One might also say that these rules are fully deployed and embedded in our social and cultural forms of life, a quality that opposes them to the process of discovering and describing previously unknown causal relations in the natural world that are in turn subsumable to covering laws of which we can have no prior knowledge. Such rules are present, implicit, or open to view in every instance of expressive or cultural practice, but they are also flexible, plastic, and open to improvisation in ways that nomic relations are not. I wonder then why convention is not thought the appropriate term? “Rules” seems too strict and inflexible. Are not conventions something like rules of thumb, applied in flexible, contingent, and context dependent situations open to improvisation and invention? In addition, “rules” imply that there is some implicit list of obligatory requirements whose violation immediately and inevitably leads to non-sense. To assume the prior existence of a relatively fixed set of rules that must be evoked to anchor our reasons may also lend support to the appeal of scientism and good theory, as if giving reasons always means returning to a bounded site of knowledge, which we mine for our reasons and which is capable of being exhausted or described completely and with certainty. Therefore, it is important to insist with Wittgenstein that expressive and cultural activities are “not everywhere circumscribed by rules” (Philosophical Investigations §68), but a grammatical analysis or comparison may show us what is entailed in “being Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 393 governed by rules.” As Stanley Cavell usefully explains, “The concept of a rule does not exhaust the concepts of correctness or justification (‘right’ and ‘wrong’) and indeed the former concept would have no meaning unless these latter concepts already had. Like any of the activities to which it is related, a rule can always be misinterpreted in the course, or in the name, of ‘following’ it.”185 Thus rules do not determine the nature of a game or how it is practiced, “And we can learn a new game without ever learning or formulating its rules (§31); not however, without having mastered, we might say, the concept of a game” (“The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” 49). The concept of rules in Wittgenstein refers not so much to strict constraints or limitations as much as potentialities and frameworks of practice where neither language, expression, nor games have an essence or an irreducible set of core characteristics. (And here we are reminded again of §124--philosophy offers no essence or foundation for language, and in attending only to “the actual use of language,” refers to the kinds of practices or games that we expressively deploy.) Hence the importance of Wittgenstein’s appeal to “intermediate” or impure cases, where rather than searching for identity or essence one seeks to discern patterns of family resemblance wherein language games are considered to be open sets. In such intermediate cases no individual member of the set may serve as a token for the whole, for there is no whole apart from the shifting pattern of relationships defining the “game,” or patterns of similarity and difference between two or more games-there are only practices or uses that exhibit "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing" (Philosophical Investigations §66). An example of an intermediate case would be Ruskin’s deployment of the term “theoria” wherein the language games of theory in its classical senses and in the domain of aesthetics or 19th century philosophies of art both overlap and contest one another as genres of discourse. In identifying and attending to intermediate cases, philosophical investigation finds itself in situations of uncertainty where it is difficult to decide how to define and apply the conventions of proximate and contrasting games and practices. Sets overlap in intermediate cases and thus provoke the desire to understand where differences can and 185 “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 49. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 394 should apply. An intermediate case is always clarifying, then, because it might belong to more than one set or game, and thus aids us in establishing relations of contrast and similarity, overlap and friction, between practices--in short, they help us ascertain differences, while also indicating mutations or changes in or of practice. Intentional acts are expressed and characterized through practices that are, moreover, embedded in forms of life wherein the following of a rule has a degree of plasticity requiring improvisation, and whether a game has been played correctly is open to questions of agreement and disagreement, which in fact may not be answered with finality or certainty. For these reasons, the concept of rules should not be understood as restrictive, nor can rules be characterized as a sort of calculus of meaning: “Our ordinary use of language conforms to this standard of exactness only in rare cases,” Wittgenstein observed. “Why then do we in philosophizing constantly compare our use of words with one following exact rules? The answer is that the puzzles which we try to remove always spring from just this attitude towards language” (The Blue and Brown Books 25-26). Philosophy must be something more than description, then. One needs to restore the openness and contingent quality of these constraints, as well as a sense of play in language, such that philosophy may be also considered a practice of change and invention, of augmenting, enlarging, and enhancing our conceptual schemes, of creating new styles of thought, and of projecting future states of self and society to which we aspire. Call this philosophy as experimentation. 30. Gedankenwegen: on import and interpretation Working in philosophy--like work in architecture in many respects--is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.) --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value Wittgenstein’s commitments to human activities as being generally open to anyone’s inspection, and to our common abilities to give accounts and reasons for our actions, means that in principle philosophy is open to everyone as a quotidian event. In addition, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 395 in contrast to the practices of experimental science philosophy is a form of noninstrumental reason, meaning that it requires no special technologies or resources apart from human capacities of thought, expression, imagination, and empathy. Alternatively, these capacities do not mean that the desire to be meaningful or to be understood commonly result in successfully executed events. To advance towards intelligibility, meaning, and agreement might also require the elaboration of new frameworks or concepts for understanding that progress and retrogress through exchanges both orderly and disorderly. And in investigating, reasoning, and reaching agreement, language does not remain untouched but rather is being continually renovated, innovated, and transformed. Even if all our cultural and expressive activities are potentially open to view, this does not mean that they are immediately or completely intelligible or interpretable. (What is “theorizing” if not speculating, imagining, or wondering if our attempts at expression, interpretation, or reason-giving are successfully executed or not? What draws us to theory other than failures of understanding or explanation?) To accept this principle does not require (or exclude) a concept of the unconscious in the psychoanalytic definition nor does it locate sense giving and making activity in the automatic and sub-normative mental processes of cognitivism. We are speaking here of human capacities of expression and interpretation and our potentials for executing them, which are not only not completely available to us because they are cultural and collective, but also because they are historical in the sense of being contingent and open to innovation, creation, and experimentation. It will (or should) seem paradoxical to characterize philosophy as a quotidian event, or as something that is not a special practice or a practice of specialists, in the same way that theory often can be. As Kant already recognized, philosophy passes through or attends to “ordinary” expression because it is concerned with our common capacities for presentation, self-presentation, reasoning, interpreting, and understanding. The interests of philosophy are thus what are of interest to us all in virtue of being social and expressive beings. However, if this is so, then why is it that philosophical expression since the time of Socrates has been characterized as disorienting and difficult, provoking alarm, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 396 confusion, exasperation, and dismay? Here again Wittgenstein’s deep commitment to the ordinary is illustrative, especially since his own language poses fascinating obstacles to interpretation. Wittgenstein philosophizes, and we in turn produce theories of what he might have meant, until such time as we begin philosophizing ourselves, and we all have the capacity to do so. Our satisfaction with the ordinary leads to doxa, but philosophical investigation and expression at their most powerful are paradoxical and critical, leading us to conceptual innovation, as well as ethical evaluation and transvaluation. This is what I think Stanley Cavell means in “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” when he offers that Wittgenstein’s appeal to ordinary language as the subject of philosophical investigation suggests new categories of criticism. Here our task is finally to understand what these kinds of critical activities might entail as practices toward a philosophy of the humanities. In investigating the friction between philosophy and the expression of ordinary beliefs Wittgenstein does not suggest that philosophy is a superior way or knowing, which must reform or “correct” language conceptually, nor is he defending ordinary beliefs against philosophical abstraction. Rather, in its excessive concern with epistemology, and in its quest to achieve certainty or shore itself up against skeptical doubt, philosophy has aimed at the wrong targets. The question of belief is only raised in fact by the problem of non-belief; that is, when dilemmas of skepticism or certainty are raised in philosophy and put under scrutiny and critical pressure. In this way, philosophy has built Luftgebäude, as Wittgenstein puts it, or castles in the air, which raise questions for philosophy that interest only philosophy. Thus Cavell observes that perhaps Wittgenstein, wishes to show that, in its conflict with ‘what we all believe,’ the philosopher has no position at all, his conclusions are not false (and not meaningless), but, one could say, not believable--that is, they do not create the stability of conviction expressed in propositions which are subject (grammatically) to belief. . . . For Wittgenstein, philosophy comes to grief not in denying what we all know to be true, but in its effort to escape those human forms of life which alone provide the coherence of our expression. He wishes an acknowledgment of human limitation which does not leave us chafed by our own skin, by a sense of powerlessness to Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 397 penetrate beyond the human conditions of knowledge. The limitations of knowledge are no longer barriers to a more perfect apprehension, but conditions of knowledge überhaupt, of anything we should call ‘knowledge.’ (“The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” 61-62) How to reengage philosophy, then, with our ordinary dilemmas of doubt, wonder, curiosity, discord and agreement, conflict and contradiction, understanding and misunderstanding, justice and injustice, or adjudicating promises kept and broken, of sense made or unmade? (And here “to make sense” may mean not just being sensible and rational but also creating meaning and new contexts for meaning.) All of which is to say that philosophy’s new critical categories are now reoriented grammatically towards the concrete practices where these activities actually take place: in our human capacities for expression and creation, knowledge and self-knowledge, which we are capable of, and required to, exercise on a daily basis. In the rational and epistemological tradition that descends down through the Enlightenment from Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, philosophy’s original sin, Cavell argues, is its lack of concern “with the knowledge of persons and in particular with self-knowledge; viz., its neglect of history as a form of human knowledge” (“The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” 68, fn 11). Here we return to the value vacuum produced by modern philosophy’s excessive concern with epistemology and knowledge of objects and matters rather than persons. Our intellectual problems, Cavell suggests, are set by the very success of instrumental knowledge, that is, “by the plain fact that the measures which soak up knowledge of the world leave us dryly ignorant of ourselves” (68). Along these lines, Cavell approaches Wittgenstein in a deeply original way, and one that demonstrates how Wittgenstein’s new categories of criticism are generated through the grammatical style of the Investigations itself, which endeavors not to teach or to convince, but to show practices of grammatical investigation and critique. (This is perhaps all that a philosopher, or a theorist, can really do.) In a move that brings us full circle back to Hadot’s account of ancient philosophy as driven by an ethical disquiet that demands a changed conception of both self and world where knowledge and selfknowledge advance through one another, Cavell concludes his essay with a convincing Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 398 account of how the style of the Investigations displays all the hallmarks of a grammar of confession. The question here is not understanding what Wittgenstein writes, but rather to immerse oneself critically and imaginatively in the how of his practice, gradually approaching its method or methods through its own suggested techniques of perspicuous description, connective analysis, and the examination of intermediate cases. In a deeply original move, Wittgenstein recasts confession as dialogue, especially a dialogue with one’s self. Thus the grammatical form of the Investigations exhibit, what serious confessions must: the full acknowledgment of temptation (‘I want to say . . .’; ‘I feel like saying . . .’; ‘Here the urge is strong . . .’) and a willingness to correct them and give them up (‘In the everyday use. . .’; ‘I impose a requirement which does not meet my real need’). (The voice of temptation and the voice of correctness are the antagonists in Wittgenstein’s dialogues.) In confessing you do not explain or justify, but describe how it is with you. And confession, unlike dogma, is not to be believed but tested, and accepted or rejected. Nor is it the occasion for accusation, except of yourself, and by implication those who find themselves in you. There is exhortation (“Do not say: ‘There must be something common . . . but look and see . . .’” (§66)) not to belief, but to self-scrutiny. And that is why there is virtually nothing in the Investigations which we should ordinarily call reasoning; Wittgenstein asserts nothing which could be proved, for what he asserts is either obvious (§126)--whether true or false--or else concerned with what conviction, whether by proof or evidence or authority, would consist in. . . . Belief is not enough. Either the suggestion penetrates past assessment and becomes part of the sensibility from which assessment proceeds, or it is philosophically useless. (“The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” 71) Here Cavell finds that Wittgenstein’s writing is both deeply practical and critical in ways similar to Freud. Taking seriously Wittgenstein’s assertion in the Investigations that “There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies” (§133), Cavell shows that both philosophy and psychoanalysis compel forms of understanding that must be accompanied by self-transformation, and part of this selftransformation involves describing and restoring the broken links that divide us from the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 399 sense of ourselves and our relation to others. “Both of them,” Cavell continues, “are intent on unmasking the defeat of our real need in the face of self-impositions which we have not assessed (§108), or fantasies (‘pictures’) which we cannot escape (§115). In both, such misfortune is betrayed in the incongruence between what is said and what is meant or expressed; for both, the self is concealed in assertion and action and revealed in temptation and wish” (“The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” 72). This is why the form of dialogue in the Investigations is so interesting and compelling, especially in how the competing voices of temptation and correctness cycle through stages of assertion, doubt, speculation, and self-correction. The place, voice, and thought of Wittgenstein seems so quixotic, mobile, mercurial, and unfixable in the grammar of the Investigations because Wittgenstein himself is projected less as a unique author or enunciator than as an “intermediate case”--a self-projected philosophical friend or conceptual persona--whose positions shift, sometimes dramatically, from section to section, and whose portrait takes form not in words but in the conceptual pattern of family resemblances that emerges from and between, not the sections or phrases themselves, but in the gaps, ellipses, and blank spaces that both separate and assemble them into the larger grammatical architecture of the work itself. In this, the Investigations are both an exercise in self-examination and in self-portraiture, but one which can never be finished because on close examination the subject they project dissolves into a corona of lightly indicated images, “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” (Philosophical Investigations II.vi). The “subject” of grammatical investigation thus concerns us all as human subjects in our quotidian dilemmas of interpretation, understanding, evaluation, discrimination, and consensus building. And we only advance through these dilemmas, as Cavell puts it, in confronting and assessing the self-imposed restrictions and “pictures” that block our real needs. In this, philosophy becomes an exemplary practice or repository of methods. What is thus requested through philosophy is a reflexive turn back on the conditions or possibilities of expression, or “a request for the person to say something about himself, describe what he does. So the different methods are methods for acquiring self- Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 400 knowledge. . . . Perhaps more shocking, and certainly more important, than any of Freud’s or Wittgenstein’s particular conclusions is their discovery that knowing oneself is something for which there are methods--something, therefore, that can be taught (though not in obvious ways) and practiced” (“The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” 66-67). In a fascinating footnote, Cavell also observes that in many important ways Wittgenstein thought of his methods as liberating, as when writing in §133 that “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. --The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.” At the same time, Cavell observes, this request for selfexamination and self-overcoming can seem intolerable: “The reason why methods that make us look at what we say, and bring the forms of language (hence our forms of life) to consciousness, can present themselves to one person as confining and to another as liberating is, I think, understandable in this way: recognizing what we say, in the way that is relevant in philosophizing, is like recognizing our present commitments and their implications; to one person a sense of freedom will demand an escape from them, to another it will require their more total acceptance. Is it obvious that one of those positions must, in a given case, be right?” (57, fn 7). Finally, in Wittgenstein the question of how to know what we intended or wished to say is linked with the general question of selfknowledge, but also with the problem of not sharing a concept or a context with proximate communities, leading to a sense of disorientation when we cannot find ourselves in others. “’One human being can be a complete enigma to another,” Cavell cites from Wittgenstein. ‘“We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country’s language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We can not find our feet with them” (Philosophical Investigations II, 190). In all of these cases, we may arrive at agreement, or a consensus for a theory or theories, but even so, as Hacker asserts, there will still be no end to the need for philosophical criticism. The difficulties of philosophy are no more and no less than our daily dilemmas and hesitations before questions of doubt and certainly, deciding and procrastinating, hesitating and committing, agreeing and disagreeing. And in this Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 401 hesitation or blocking, this bumping of our heads against the quotidian problems that expression and interpretation present to us, perhaps philosophy finds its own theoretical dimension? Philosophical investigation differs from the logical quest for certainty, and in turn, as von Wright insisted, “The phenomena which the humanities study have features of their own which distinguish them logically from the typical objects of study in the natural sciences. A primary task of a philosophy of the humanities is to try to capture and do justice to those features.”186 To those who want truth from philosophy, or at least the proper conditions for truth telling, this turn in philosophy is scandalous for at least two reasons. Here the quest to enlarge our powers of reasoning takes place less through adding progressively to our knowledge of the external world than in examining the capacities and limits of human reason itself as expressed in its forms of communication and cultural practices. And further, strategies for enlarging our capacity to interpret and to understand necessarily require a reflexive turn as acts of self-interpretation where problems of knowing are inextricably intertwined with questions of import and value. Analogous arguments are closely associated with Charles Taylor’s innovative work on interpretation and his definition of humans as self-interpreting animals. Cavell notwithstanding, more than any other philosopher since Wittgenstein, Taylor has consistently worked through the implications of defining the sui generis character of humanistic understanding. Humans are characteristically self-interpreting because, from a scientific or theoretical perspective, they are not just objects among other objects immersed in webs of causal relations nor can one separate the knowledge of the subject from the object she or he investigates. In other words, there is no such thing as a structure of meaning for subjects that is independent of their interpretive and self-interpretive activities. One is woven into the other, Taylor argues, such that “the text of our interpretation is not that heterogeneous from what is interpreted; for what is interpreted is itself an interpretation; a self-interpretation which is embedded in a stream of action. It is an interpretation of experiential meaning which contributes to the constitution of this 186 “Humanism and the Humanities” in The Tree of Knowledge, and Other Essays (New York: E. J. Brill, 1993) 163-164. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 402 meaning. Or to put it in another way: that of which we are trying to find the coherence is itself partly constituted by self-interpretation.”187 At the same time, the will to interpret and acts of interpretation always occur within frameworks of import-ascription, which also ask for accounts of value. “This is an animal,” Taylor writes, “whose emotional life incorporates a sense of what is really important to him, of the shape of his aspirations, which asks to be understood, and which is never adequately understood. His understanding is explicated at any time in the language he uses to speak about himself, his goals, what he feels, and so on; and in shaping his sense of what is important it also shapes what he feels.”188 It is impossible to do justice to the full range and complexity of Taylor’s arguments here, especially with respect to the important role that the articulation and interpretation of emotions plays in his definition of human beings as self-interpreting animals. What I would like to do is to open out and clarify some potential meanings for interpretation in the humanities in relation to the ascription of value, and thus to better comprehend the distinction of understanding from explanation. In ways similar to Cavell, Taylor adopts from Heidegger the idea that Verstehen is a Seinsmodus; or in other words, understanding and self-understanding are inseparable as ways of fashioning a form of life or mode of existence--here the quest for meaning is intertwined inextricably with assessments of value. This argument has been a recurring theme of this book. But this assertion also raises the question: what forms of knowledge or reason are appropriate when human beings take themselves and their cultural practices as “objects” of investigation? The thesis that humans are self-interpreting animals--especially as a way of distinguishing the epistemological space of the humanities from that of the natural sciences--runs counter not only to our conventional sense of object-subject distinctions, 187 “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” in Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 26. This essay offers one of Taylor’s strongest critiques of scientism and one of his most interesting responses to the hostility of the verificationist perspective to the dilemmas of the hermeneutic circle. 188 “Self-Interpreting Animals” in Human Agency and Language, Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 74. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 403 but also to our most tenaciously held criteria for wanting and claiming certainty in knowledge. Conventionally, to think about a thing clearly with the purpose of obtaining certain knowledge of it requires that it be thought of primarily objectively and as an object among other objects distinct from our subjective experiences and standpoints, which are considered to be secondary. From a scientistic point of view, these secondary and experiential qualities should be excluded as much as possible because they relate to our experience of objects, or what we take to be objects, and are thus considered subjective, variable, and not amenable to intersubjective validation. As Taylor nicely puts it, “they cannot make good a claim to be independently part of the furniture of things” (“SelfInterpreting Animals” 46). Here two difficulties are confronted. One is a version of epistemology which in aspiring to clarity, objectivity, and certainty must effectively exclude the human and the subjective from its realm of investigation, or conversely, reduce the human to properties or qualities of objects and sub-normative functions or operations. I have called this, somewhat ironically, “good theory.” The second difficulty, though Taylor does not pose it as such, is to know how and under what conditions the subject may investigate itself subjectively qua subject within this framework as a function of understanding. No doubt, this is the key question that any possible philosophy of the humanities must address. The conventional epistemological between distinction between primary and secondary qualities, or the objective and subjective, must be overturned or undermined in order to comprehend that our knowledge of reality, and the reality of our selves, are inseparable from our experience of reality in terms of both knowledge and value, and of what we value in our ways of knowing ourselves and the modes of existence we construct and inhabit. (This argument provides on of the closest points of contact between Taylor and Cavell, as we shall see farther down the road.) The open question here, to which Taylor and Richard Rorty have differing but also similar responses, is whether a strict distinction between objective and subjective knowledge can really be made? Or to put it another way, since all knowledge arises from human practices and social contexts, the desire to produce a kind of trans-subjective or asubjective knowledge (to which structuralism, for example, aspired) is illusory, such that Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 404 the pursuit of knowledge, in whatever context or through whichever method, unavoidably involves interpretive activities. To pursue this line of thought is not only to demonstrate the overlapping and interpenetrating borders between the human and natural sciences but also to restore the maligned concept of interpretation as a central aspect of human and intentional activity in whatever domain. Central to the activity of interpretation is the assignation of what Taylor calls import ascriptions. Explaining oneself, giving a reason, constructing and defending a concept, describing a desire or emotion, or expressing what Richard Rorty calls a sentential attitude, are all activities of justification that involve or make explicit a qualitative judgment concerning the objects under investigation of whatever sort. Such justifications equally involve the ascriptions of “imports”; or as Taylor puts it, providing a perspicuous description of the “way in which something can be relevant or of importance to the desires or purposes or aspirations or feelings of a subject; or otherwise put, a property of something whereby it is a matter of non-indifference to a subject” (“Self-Interpreting Animals” 48). Describing, justifying, or given reasons involves making sense of the state of affairs so described or the actions so justified as well as accounting for the import of the act or situation as we experience it. Philosophically, such activities involve making explicit their import-ascriptions, which is less the affirmation of a judgment than grasping the sense of the situation that incorporates or leads to the judgment. Such accounts are necessarily subjective in that they are experience dependent, but this experience is also cultural, or rather, depends on accounting for my experience of a culture or my social existence as a subject in solidarity or in conflict with other subjects; we return here to Wittgenstein’s insistence on the holistic nature of all claims to knowledge or sense. Import-ascriptions are thus also accounts of the values accepted or given within a form or life, for the expressive or semantic dimension of the ascription can only be explained in reference to a subject for whom these meanings have import, and without such subjects, there would be neither import nor sense. Since the early modern period, one of the great recurring illusions of Western science has been that culture and history may be bypassed in explanations of human actions, and that all such explanations avoid confronting the fact that they are both Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 405 cultural and historical. But Taylor’s rather radical claim, at least from a positivistic or scientistic point of view, is that there is no epistemology, no theory or method, from which an intending subject and its forms of life can be subtracted. All forms of describing, explaining, reasoning, or conceptualizing are unavoidably subject-referring, and therefore to examine the epistemological and conceptual frameworks of a theory or a method necessarily involves a holistic investigation of their import ascriptions. To look at theorizing as a practice also means acknowledging that our ways of conceptualizing and shaping theories unavoidably incorporate elements of self-characterization or selfdefinition that shape knowledge practices, and thus any theory purporting to understand the intentional acts of self-referring agents cannot be considered as either purely instrumental or objective. Subject-referring does not necessarily mean self-referring, however, and the class of subject-referring imports is much broader than that of self-referring or self-regarding imports. This is so for two reasons. First, explications of import-ascriptions are usually not qualifiable by a single term, but evoke rather a whole network of meanings for the subject. Secondly, even though subject-referring properties do not lend themselves to the logic of scientistic or objectivist accounts because they can only be explicated in experience dependent terms, this does not mean that they are purely subjective. To make an importascription is to produce a judgment about a situation--its value and meaning--which cannot be simply reduced to how we feel about it because producing and communicating an interpretation is a public and social event open to conversation and debate, agreements and disagreements, which in turn may potentially transform the terms of debate, the language in which it is expressed, and the nature of the epistemological and axiological commitments that have been entered in to. Another way of putting this is so say that we experience the world collectively before we experience it individually. In this context, restoring the value of interpretation is more interesting than continuing to map the borders, no matter how porous, between the human and natural sciences. Moreover, seeking out knowledge of human beings, their cultures, and creative practices, may not mean overcoming and transcending the dilemma of the hermeneutic circle, but rather embracing it--not as a circle but rather as an ever expanding skein of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 406 new conceptual vocabularies and connective relations. In one of the fragments collected in the Zettel, Wittgenstein remarks that there is no need for interpretation when one “feel[s] at home in the present picture” (§234)”189 The need or will to interpret, then, arrives when I am subject to disagreeable situations, when I am homeless or adrift, bereft of needed conceptual resources, or when I am faced with an obstacle to thought, or I lack signposts to move further in thought or understanding. To interpret, or perhaps to theorize, means acquiring or moving towards a new conceptual framework, or as Wittgenstein puts it, stepping from one level of thought to another: “Wenn ich deute, so schreite ich auf dem Gedankenweg von Stufe zu Stufe (§234). Charles Taylor’s several essays examining how humans are characteristically selfinterpreting animals offer some landmarks for this Gedankenweg--steps, levels, or passages wherein the acquiring of knowledge is both a self-examining and selftransforming process. These activities are all built upon Taylor’s intuition that all knowledge is in some respects subject-referring. One initial step involves a process that Taylor calls growing insight. Establishing the meaning, value, or sense of people, objects, events, or states of affairs are all activities shaped by complexes of subject-referring imports of which we may only be partially aware. To develop the capacity for identifying, presenting, and describing perspicuously deeply felt but inarticulate imports is to bring potential insight into our lives as subjects, giving sense and making sense of what is important to us qua subjects. Thus Taylor writes that, “If we think of this reflexive sense of what matters to us as subjects as being distinctively human--and it is clearly central to our notion of ourselves that we are such reflexive beings; this is what underlies the traditional definition of man as a rational animal--we could say that our subject-referring feelings incorporate a sense of what it is to be human, that is, of what matters to us as human subjects” (“Self-Interpreting Animals” 60). Because these feelings are articulable and articulated, they are in a strong sense interpretations. To examine an object, event, or situation is to express both its sense and one’s feeling about it, and these expressions lead to or generate series of more expansive and finely tuned characterizations. Interpretive 189 Eds., G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 407 responses generate expression, and expression leads in turn to qualifications, extensions, and refinements in meaning and understanding. Insight is then amplified by further assessments that evaluate, weigh, and rank our import ascriptions through a process of qualitative discriminations in the context of the forms of life we inhabit, thus affirming or challenging them. Taylor calls this strong evaluation, which examines not just objects in the light of our desires but also the desires themselves in a second-order evaluation that is inherently reflexive. Strong evaluations involve subject-referring imports, and reciprocally, subject-referring feelings are or involve strong evaluations in a process of moral reasoning that is close to what Stanley Cavell calls moral perfectionism. “Implicit in this strong evaluation,” Taylor writes, “is thus a placing of our different motivations relative to each other, the drawing, as it were, of a moral map of ourselves; we contrast a higher, more clairvoyant, more serene motivation, with a baser, more self-enclosed and troubled one, which we can see ourselves as potentially growing beyond, if and when we can come to experience things from the higher standpoint” (67). The process of giving expression to our sense of things makes present to us the imports guiding our responses, defining and characterizing them, leading to further assessments and evaluations that are as much social and contextual as personal. These assessments ascribe a form to what matters to us, a logic of sense, and at the same time open us to the domain of what it is to be human. However, like all forms of reason, this activity is not completely free of disagreeable qualities of ambiguity, mischaracterization, uncertainty, or self-doubt, nor does strong evaluation necessarily lead to progressive improvement in morals or moral reasoning. For these feelings also open the question whether this characterization is adequate, whether it is not incomplete or distortive. And so from the very fact of their being articulated, the question cannot but arise whether we have properly articulated our feelings, that is, whether we have properly explicated what the feeling gives us a sense of. In an important sense, this question once opened can never be closed. . . . The attempt to articulate further is potentially a life-time process. At each stage, what we feel is a function of what we have already articulated and evokes the puzzlement and perplexities which further understanding may unravel. But whether we want to Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 408 take the challenge or not, whether we seek the truth or take refuge in illusion, our self-(mis)understandings shape what we feel. This is the sense in which man is a self-interpreting animal. (“Self-Interpreting Animals” 64-65) Interpretation and self-interpretation are, in other words, interminable because our reasons and justifications are incomplete and persistently open to question. They prevent the interpretive circle from ever completing itself and thus fuel instead a hermeneutic spiral, whether virtuous or vicious. Language shapes the reflexive experience of reasoning, assessment, and evaluation not only by giving expressive form to import-ascriptions and reasons, but also by providing new conceptual vocabularies for them. When different experiences, senses, or emotions are assessed or evaluated under different concepts they are experienced differently and potentially undergo a transvaluation. This is a process that entails recognizing that vocabularies for describing and assessing imports themselves shape and extend or expand our assessments. One might add, they also change the sense of the experience itself. Taylor attributes two kinds of conceptual revolution to this process of transvaluation, one in relation to a personal stance in need of transformation, the second of which recognizes the necessity of transformation under a new concept. Perhaps one could say that the first kind of transformation involves a critical dialogue with one’s self and involves acquiring deeper insight into one’s import ascriptions. But the second kind of transformation and transvaluation involves another kind of confrontation wherein one’s self-understanding, and conceptual frameworks for self-understanding, are challenged in the encounter with other cultures, perspectives, and points of view. It is as if we come to understand the limits and confinements of our own conceptual vocabularies for selfassessment and self-understanding in comprehending that a number of different subjectreferring accounts are equally possible and desirable. In addition, we are susceptible to the necessity of (self) transformation under a new concept because the open, incomplete, and fragmentary nature of our interpretations of self and of others means that our conceptual vocabularies can never be decisively fixed because they can never be fully described in objective terms. For these reasons, the reflexive process of interpretation, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 409 assessment, and evaluation, of making and remaking qualitative distinctions, can never be definitively closed. There is another important dimension to the process of transformation under a new concept, one that deepens our sense of understanding of how the subject may investigate itself subjectively qua subject. In his essay “Theories of Meaning,” Taylor unfolds the consequences of what he terms the expressive or triple-H (Herder-Humboldt-Heidegger) account of meaning in contrast with designative and truth-conditional accounts of language, wherein language is considered a phenomenon of nature like all others making of it a pliant and transparent instrument of thought.190 Meaning cannot be simply treated as representation nor can we come to understand how meaning or interpretation work from the standpoint of monological and neutral observers. Taylor’s account characterizes expression not only as attempts at communication or the transmission of sense, but also as acts of disclosure. Language in its broadest sense is thus defined as the site of three human activities: making articulations, and thus putting before us and making us more aware of our import ascriptions, assessments, and conceptual commitments; putting this discourse in a public space, and thereby constituting a public space for further evaluation and assessment; and finally, in this process discriminating, reworking, and refining values and concepts that are fundamental to human concerns, and thus opening us reflexively to those concerns. If this is really to be an expansive, critical, and transformative process, then interpretations must not only be partial and open to critical investigation and debate, they must be crucially out of phase with their explananda. Interpretations thus involve confrontations--with recalcitrant objects and texts as well as competing conceptual frameworks for interpretation--that not only produce new conditions of sense, but also new conditions for reassessing the sense of one’s self. This argument follows from Taylor’s claim that there is no such thing as a structures of meaning independent of our interpretations of them, and thus that all meaning is experiential in the sense that every interpretation involves a degree of self-interpretation embedded in a stream of action. 190 “Theories of Meaning” in Human Agency and Language 248-292. In fact, there are more broadly four H’s in Taylor’s account of what he called the Romantic or expressive family of theories, which includes Johann Georg Hamann. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 410 This domain of experiential meaning shifts interpretive activities in a new and interesting direction, for an interpretation must not only transform its object or give it a new sense. Interpretation does not simply restore sense or coherence to an expression; it also produces new forms or situations of coherence. Moreover, to the extent that this is new sense for the subject, and that the subject is embedded in the larger context of experiential meaning, the subject too is potentially transformed in interesting ways. In my view, Taylor’s essay “Understanding and Ethnocentricity” offers his most replete account of what it might mean to undergo transformation under a new concept. Taylor’s principal thesis is that interpretive theories, or ways of understanding the practices of humans as self-referring animals, must be distinguished from descriptions of theories in the natural sciences, and thus that “Understanding is inseparable from criticism, but this in turn is inseparable from self-criticism.”191 Ethnography offers an interesting case for exploring the ways in which efforts to understand another society--or more broadly, intentional acts and practices that stand in need of interpretation because of a felt discontinuity with our sense of our selves and our own forms of life--challenge us to criticize and remap our self-definitions. The problem confronted here is that one cannot achieve an adequate explanatory account of alien languages, cultures, or experiences until our own self-definitions are understood, defined, and accepted, and further, in their difference from our own forms of life or conceptual contexts, these encounters may encourage us to expand our own language of human possibilities. The key question here is how to make sense of others, and what happens to us when we feel compelled to make sense of others? Taylor frames his argument ethnographically or anthropologically, that is, how do we understand and make sense of alien cultures and practices? But we might also feel compelled to interpret any action or activity, including artful expression, which seems to resist our capacity to understand or interpret it. (A similar extension can and should be made, in my opinion, to Donald Davidson’s fascinating account of problems of linguistic translation in “Radical Interpretation” and other essays.) 191 “Understanding and Ethnocentricity” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 131. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 411 Following out the consequences of our sympathetic responses to such alien encounters helps clarify the steps or stages guiding our will to interpret. First, to want or to be willing to interpret means accepting that an intentional act--even more so one we feel to be alien--must in principle be understandable in that it arises from common human capacities for expression and self-reference. The first move in such acts of interpretation is to try to arrive at how the agent, text, or expression may have wished to understand itself. This idea is commensurate with Davidson’s account of rational accommodation, or what is sometimes called his Principle of Charity. Further, interpretive understanding does not simply arrive at meaning or come to a conclusion in finding or adopting the point of view of the subject or text which stands in need of interpretation, for simply recovering this selfdescription may shed no light whatsoever on the acts or make them more comprehensible. In other words, an interpretation does not complete itself simply in comprehending the agent’s self-descriptions. There are several reasons for this. The given explananda may not fully understand itself, or be subject to omission or contradiction, misinformation or illusion, or cannot or has not yet found the right language of selfcharacterization. Thus there is no need to frame our explanantia in the same language as the subject, nor should we do so. Those who gravitate towards the natural sciences as a model for the social sciences or humanities will want to by-pass these self-descriptions altogether as “subjective,” for they cannot be intersubjectively validated in unproblematic ways--there is no hope of replicable findings. But this is to give up the game too quickly. One cannot avoid the subject-referring qualities of intentional acts or else we have renounced the human in the human sciences. At the same time, we have not successfully interpreted in simply understanding the other’s point of view or putting ourselves in their place. What Taylor calls the “interpretive view” is distinguishable from both the natural science model and the false ally that misconceives interpretation as successfully concluded in adopting the explanandum’s viewpoint. Taylor terms this the “incorrigibility thesis,” meaning that interpretation must take the agent’s self-account as absolutely authoritative. This view must be tempered, as I have already pointed out, by acknowledging that the agent might be mistaken or subject to the variety of misfires of reason. We all are. This Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 412 acknowledgment produces a new framework for what theory should do in relation to selfdescription and understanding. If there are a multitude of reasons why our authoritative self-referring accounts might be incomplete or unreliable, that what passes for common sense or common knowledge may in fact be inadequate, then theory is very much in the business of correcting common-sense understanding. It is of very little use unless it goes beyond, unless it frequently challenges and negates what we think we are doing, saying, feeling, aiming at. But its criterion of success is that it makes us as agents more comprehensible, that it makes sense of what we feel, do, aim at. . . . And so there is no way of showing that some theory has actually explained us and our action until it can be shown to make sense of what we did under our description (where this emphatically does not mean . . . showing how what we did made sense). For otherwise, we may have an interesting, speculative rational reconstruction . . ., but no way of showing that it actually explains anything. (“Understanding and Ethnocentricity” 124). The incorrigibility thesis is attractive because it seems to safeguard against ethnocentrism and other forms of cultural prejudice or bias. But the interpretive view wishes both to avoid the false neutrality, objectivity, and universalism of scientism and to engage critically others’ forms of self-understanding with a view of potentially transforming them, if necessary. If this were not done, there would be no possibility of producing new interpretations or of undergoing a change in understanding and value. For in challenging the language of self-understanding in others, we may also be challenging our own language of self-understanding. This process is generated by misunderstanding and disagreement, and thus there is value in being disagreeable because there are many instances where such acts of interpretation are transformative on both sides. “In fact,” Taylor explains, it will almost always be the case that the adequate language in which we can understand another society is not our language of understanding, or theirs, but rather what one could call a language of perspicuous contrast. This would be a language in which we could formulate both their way of life and ours as alternative possibilities in relation to some human constants at work in both. It would be a Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 413 language in which the possible human variations would be so formulated that both our form of life and theirs could be perspicuously described as alternative such variations. Such a language of contrast might show their language of understanding to be distorted or inadequate in some respects, or it might show ours to be so (in which case, we might find that understanding them leads to an alteration of our self-understanding, and hence our form of life--a far from unknown process in history); or it might show both to be so. (125-126) Taylor’s description of coming to terms in languages of perspicuous contrast is close in spirit and logic to Davidson’s concept of “passing theories” and to Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons.” There is neither time nor space to follow out the implications of these comparisons here. What is important is to hold on to the idea that interpretation refers equally to questions of meaning and matter, that is, import. Conflicts in interpretation often arise because different cultures, in the broadest and most varied sense of the term, are defined by different import vocabularies, and even within a given culture, people with different import vocabularies have very different experiences. Moreover, as Taylor points out, “conceptual mutations in human history can and frequently do produce conceptual webs which are incommensurable, that is, where the terms cannot be defined in relation to a common stratum of expressions” (“Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” 55). When this happens, there is no way forward in understanding or in thought without the creation of new concepts and new strata of expressions through the acknowledgment that our powers and means of expression are replete with possible extensions. However, Taylor’s main point, and the connective thread between all his various accounts of interpretation, is that understanding is inseparable from ethical evaluation, and that both understanding and evaluation are potentially open to extensions, creative transformation, and transvaluation. In other words, “in the sciences of man in so far as they are hermeneutical there can be a valid response to 'I don't understand’, which takes the form, not only 'develop your intuitions', but more radically, ‘change yourself'. . . . A study of the science of man is inseparable from an examination of the options between which men must choose” (54). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 414 In conclusion, Taylor’s characterization of the need for transformation under a new concept might be further deepened and extended in comparison with Richard Rorty’s pragmatist account of inquiry as recontextualization. Rorty departs from Taylor in arguing that boundaries between the natural and human sciences need not and cannot be observed. Nonetheless, there are points of contact between the two thinkers in that both more or less agree that the activities of pursuing knowledge and defining meaning are invariably subject-inflected in both the natural and human sciences (though perhaps in different ways) and that both domains seek consensus or some form of intersubjective verifiability. In his essay, “Inquiry as recontextualization: An anti-dualist account of interpretation,” Rorty begins by asking that we “Think of human minds as webs of beliefs and desires, of sentential attitudes--webs which continually reweave themselves so as to accommodate new sentential attitudes.”192 We need not ask for the moment where new beliefs, attitudes, or concepts come from, nor about how one might parse the flow of information between an external and internal world. Just assume, Rorty asks, that new beliefs and desires keep appearing that challenge, contradict, or place under tension our current webs and imagine how we respond: “For example, we may simply drop an old belief or desire. Or we may create a whole host of new beliefs and desires in order to encapsulate the disturbing intruder, reducing the strain which the old beliefs and desires put on it and which it puts on them. Or we may just unstitch, and thus erase, a whole range of beliefs and desires . . . .” (“Inquiry as recontextualization” 93). Part of the problem here is how to think about and account for the flow of change wherein human knowledge and attitudes toward the world and society are modified and transformed, expand and deepen, or even stagnate. Rorty characterizes inquiry as a reweaving of beliefs or a process of continuing recontextualization where the “more widespread the changes, the more use we have for the notion of ‘a new context.’ This 192 In Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 93. This paper was first written for a NEH Summer Institute on “Interpretation” organized by Hubert Dreyfuss and David Hoy, held in 1988 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 415 new context can be a new explanatory theory, a new comparison class, a new descriptive vocabulary, a new private or political purpose, the latest book one has read, the last person one has talked to; the possibilities are endless” (“Inquiry as recontextualization” 94). Traditionally, philosophy has sorted out this kind of contextual remapping into two kinds of classes, which might be distinguished as inferential and imaginative--Rorty compares their respective attitudes towards discourse as translation and learning a new language. Inferential processes involve the acquisition of new truth-value candidates without a corresponding transformation of discourse: “We speak of inference when logical space remains fixed, when no new candidates for belief are introduced. Paradigms of inference are adding up a column of figures, or running through a sorites, or down a flow-chart” (94). One might be reminded here of the inferential and inductive processes of good theory that map data into new domains without corresponding transformations of methods, concepts, or modes of expression. Transformation through imagination, however, involves a new set of attitudes or even mutation of one’s discourse repertoire through the innovative use of metaphors fallen out of use, the invention of neologisms, or the colligation of heretofore unrelated texts and concepts. In a footnote Rorty adds, “Successful colligation of this sort is an example of rapid and unconscious reweaving: one lays one set of beliefs on top of another and finds that, magically, they have interpenetrated and become warp and woof of a new, vividly polychrome, fabric” (“Inquiry as recontextualization” 95). Rorty notes that there is a tendency to associate the concept of rationality exclusively with inference, as does good theory in fact, and before the post-positivist philosophies of science of Kuhn, Toulmin, Feyerabend, or Hanson the physical sciences were indeed thought to be definitive and exclusive models of rationality. The scandal now is that shifting scientific paradigms may indeed require learning a new discourse and adopting unfamiliar concepts in ways that are closer to “theory” in a broader and perhaps more humanistic sense. Rorty’s account of inquiry as recontextualization is self-characterized as an antidualist account. One dualism he hopes to undermine strictly separates the human and natural sciences into two incommensurable domains, one dealing exclusively with texts Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 416 and the other exclusively with objects or matter.193 Another has to do with a version of realism characteristic of both domains where inquiry involves and is valued for finding out the nature of something that lies beyond and outside the web of our beliefs and desires, and which only seeks a discourse commensurate with that “outside.” This outside is considered to be in possession of its own intrinsically privileged context; it would also be primarily objective in the sense that Taylor challenges. However, from the perspective of Rorty’s pragmatism, or even of a Wittgensteinian holism, no such dualism or distinction of the subject and object of knowledge--as if two exteriors in confrontation with one another-is in fact possible or desirable. This is first because, in an attitude that recalls Canguilhem, Bachelard, or Althusser, the intelligibility of an object of inquiry, whether text or lump, is always framed by context in the form of the questions asked of it, the concepts evoked for it, and the desirability characterizations that inform them both. In turn, this means that there is no simple representation of an object by a discourse external to it, for objects are always already contextualized or woven into a web of beliefs and pragmatic attitudes about the object. “Once one drops the traditional opposition between context and thing contexualized,” Rorty argues, there is no way to divide things up into those which are what they are independent of context and those which are context-dependent--no way to divide the world up into hard lumps and squishy texts, for example. Or, to put it another way, there is no way to divide the world up into internal and external relations, nor into intrinsic vs. extrinsic properties--nor indeed, into things that are intrinsically relations and things that are intrinsically terms of relations. For once one sees inquiry as reweaving beliefs rather than discovering the nature of objects, there are no candidates for self-subsistent, independent entities save individual beliefs-individual sentential attitudes. But these are very bad candidates indeed. For a belief is what it is only by virtue of its position in a web. (“Inquiry as recontextualization” 98) 193 This is the subject of another influential Rorty essay, “Texts and Lumps,” in Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 78-92. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 417 Rorty notes that his attitude is characteristic of anti-essentialism in both the analytic and continental traditions--there are neither essences to objects or even essences themselves wherein questions of certainty can ground themselves. However, his larger concern, in ways similar to Taylor, is with the value of interpretation or hermeneutics, but not necessarily as a way of defining and preserving the domain of human understanding in the usual ways. And in fact, Rorty is not willing to subscribe to a strict distinction between the natural and human sciences, especially one which excludes rationality from the later and interpretation from the former--these are two sides or dimensions of any knowledge practice, which can neither be strictly separated nor serve as a ground for separating the sciences from the humanities, or vice versa. Rorty’s objective, rather, is to undermine the view that the aim of inquiry is to represent objects or to translate them into an adequate representational language, and in turn to substitute the view that the goal of inquiry is to make our beliefs and desires coherent with a view towards deepening and clarifying them, or when they fail us, challenging and renovating them. The only concept of object that one needs in this perspective is what Rorty calls an intentional object: “An intentional object is what a word or description refers to. You find out what it refers to by attaching a meaning to the linguistic expressions to that word or description. That, in turn, you do by either translating or, if necessary, becoming bilingual in, the language in which the word or description occurs. Whether that is a useful language for your purpose is as irrelevant to objecthood as the question of whether the object has any causal powers” (“Inquiry as recontextualization” 106-107). Concepts of both essence and empiricism have disappeared here as objects cannot stand outside of descriptions, which are themselves context dependent and subject-referring. Rorty’s pragmatist account thus transforms the pursuit of knowledge and recasts it not as establishing the coherence or correspondence of a relation between minds and objects, but rather as the ability to arrive at consensus through persuasion. Rather than opposing texts and lumps, subjects and objects, or trying to identify one with the other, both are dissolved into transitory and contingent webs of meaning, intelligibility, and significance. In similar ways, Rorty refers to the work of Donald Davidson to break down not only the dualism between object and subject, but also the frontiers between intercultural Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 418 and intracultural understanding. “The difference between banally intercultural and controversial objects,” he insists, “will be the difference between the objects you have to talk about to deal with the routine stimulations provided by your familiars, and the objects required to deal with the novel stimulations provided by new acquaintances (e.g. Aristotelians, Polynesians, avant-garde poets and painters, imaginative colligators of texts, etc.)” (“Inquiry as recontextualization” 107). When confronting radical novelty in practice or expression, in whatever cultural context or domain, interpretation begins by appealing to Davidson’s Principle of Charity. Here one assumes, first, that there is coherence or sense to a novel expression if the correct context and translation protocol can be found for it, and second, that in view of the common human capacity for expression and interpretation, there are already in principle overlaps and important points of contact in the forms of life confronting one another; in other words, miscomprehension only exists in situations where some degree of understanding is nonetheless possible. As Rorty puts it, according to Davidson’s Principle of Charity, in accommodating ourselves to the discourse and customs of strange beings such as the Nambikwara, poets, artists, string theorists, or humanists “we are already, automatically, for free, participant-observers, not mere observers” (107). Such a principle applies to all difficulties of interpretation and understanding in whatever epistemological or cultural domain we find ourselves, and thus dissolves yet another philosophical dualism: the one that separates (causal) explanation from (interpretive) understanding. There is no longer a polarity between the two epistemological perspectives, but only a scale running in degrees from one to the other. And there is no singular or particular method appropriate to one and alien to the other, but only shifting series of pragmatic stances or contexts in which each adapt their vocabularies and methods to the problems and questions that confront them. To the extent that it allows a distinction between the natural and human sciences, then, Rorty’s version of pragmatism does not promote the idea of two methodological domains or cultures separate from and opposed to one another, but sees them rather as interpenetrating genres of discourse about the world. Each of these genres has an improvisational or experimental quality, which are less about dividing the world and culture up into subject matters or disciplines than attempts to recast pragmatically the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 419 intelligibility of objects, events, texts, or states of affairs through whatever conceptual frameworks we can mobilize, co-opt, renovate, extend, or invent in a given historical moment and context. This recasting is tantamount to creating new languages or logics of sense and significance, not ex nihilo, of course, but rather as modifications and extensions, whether slight or radical, of previous genres of discourse, which in turn will be themselves refashioned in new, future contexts. Different genres or strands of discourse may interact and intertwine, Rorty explains, as do art and the criticism of art or science and the history of science, or philosophy and criticism. However, “there are no rules for whether they should or shouldn’t intertwine--no necessities lying in the nature of a subject or a method. There is nothing general and epistemological to be said about how the contributors to the various genres should conduct themselves. Nor is there any ranking of these disciplines according to degrees or kinds of truth. There is, in short, nothing to be said about the relation of these genres to the world, only things to be said about their relations to each other. Further, there are no ahistorical things to be said about the latter sort of relations” (“Texts and Lumps” 91-92). While Rorty is less committed than von Wright or Taylor to mapping differences between the human and natural sciences, nonetheless he shares their criticisms of instrumental and technological reason and their resistance to a scientism that reduces what is rational and true only to those functions or processes that can be characterized as sub-normative, automatic, and blindly causal. But what Rorty hopes to gain by such a critique is perhaps both a humanization of science and a theoretization of interpretation. “Viewing inquiry as recontextualization,” Rorty concludes, makes it impossible to take seriously the notion of some contexts being intrinsically privileged, as opposed to being useful for some particular purpose. By getting rid of the idea of ‘different methods appropriate to the natures of different objects’ (e.g., one for language-constituted and another for non-language-constituted objects), one switches attention from ‘the demands of the object’ to the demands of the purpose which a particular inquiry is supposed to serve. The effect is to modulate philosophical debate from a methodologico-ontological key into an ethico-political key. For now one is debating what purposes are worth bothering to Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 420 fulfill, which are more worthwhile than others, rather than which purposes the nature of humanity or of reality obliges us to have. For antiessentialists, all possible purposes compete with one another on equal terms, since none are more ‘essentially human’ than any others. (“Inquiry as recontextualization” 110) This modulation of perspective is very close to what Taylor calls assessment or secondorder evaluation. However, Rorty turns his arguments in another direction. The desire to know or to seek understanding, and the tendency to enlarge one’s interpretive context through recontextualizing may be thought of as characteristically human, but perhaps no more so (and no less) Rorty insists, than the capacity to use opposable thumbs: “We have little choice but to use that thumb, and little choice but to employ our ability to recontextualize. We are going to find ourselves doing both, whatever happens. From an ethico-political angle, however, one can say that what is characteristic, not of the human species but merely of its most advanced, sophisticated subspecies--the well-read, tolerant, conversable inhabitant of a free society--is the desire to dream up as many new contexts as possible. This is the desire to be as polymorphous in our adjustments as possible, to recontextualize for the hell of it” (110). Perhaps this is a new motto for the humanities. 31. “Of which we cannot speak . . .”: philosophy and the humanities . . . in certain cases, as the saying suggests, one remains a philosopher only by-being silent. --Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human In the preceding pages, I have often examined the debate on theory from the point of view of competing epistemological stakes. Accused of “epistemological atheism,” the very concept of theory is wrested from the Continent to be returned semantically to the shores of science and the terrain of British and American analytical philosophy. Initially, this debate was posed as a conflict between Theory and philosophy. But the late Wittgenstein has taken this argument in another direction, one that also questions “theory” but as a way of turning philosophy from science to restore it to the humanities. In so doing, Wittgenstein was less concerned with the epistemological perfectibility of philosophical Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 421 language than with reclaiming philosophy’s ancient task of theoria. Where Rorty concludes his discussion of inquiry as recontextualization in a somewhat elitist key with an appeal to the most advanced and sophisticated subspecies of humanity, Wittgenstein placed his hopes in the acknowledgement that we are all subject to “grammatical” confusion, and that the only way to free ourselves for other steps toward thinking is through an instinctive revolt against the conceptual restraints that bind us, which in turns leads to something like a wholesale rearrangement of our language--that is, of the conceptual and expressive repertoires available for our interpretations and our selfdescriptions and self-assessments.194 Rorty calls this recontextualization or learning a new language, and Taylor, transformation under a new concept. In either case, the path towards knowledge requires a reflexive turn through assessments of the terms for selfknowledge in which critical evaluations of ways of knowing are linked to the preservation or transformation of a mode of existence or form of life. If the politics and epistemology of Theory have been subject to much soul searching and epistemological critique, it is important nonetheless to find and retain in theory the distant echo of its connection to philosophy, or to theoria, as restoring an ethical dimension to epistemological selfexamination; or as Rorty put it, to modulate philosophical debate from a methodologicoontological key into an ethico-political key. As Wittgenstein tried to teach us, what we need after theory is not science, but a renewed dialogue between philosophy and the humanities wherein both refashion themselves in original ways. Georg Henrik von Wright remains a fascinating figure for me, not only as one of Wittgenstein’s most devoted students, but also as a key figure in the history of logic and 194 In the “Big Typescript,” Wittgenstein writes: “Human beings are deeply embedded in philosophical, i.e. grammatical confusions. Freeing them from these presupposes tearing them away from the enormous number of connecting links that hold them fast. A sort of rearrangement of the whole of their language is needed. (‘Man muss sozusagen ihre ganze Sprache umgruppieren.’)--But of course that language has developed the way it has because some human beings felt--and still feel--inclined to think that way. So the tearing away will succeed only with those in whose life there already is an instinctive revolt against the language in question and not with those whose instinct is for the very herd which created that language as its proper expression.” Cited in von Wright’s own translation in The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays, 97. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 422 twentieth century analytic philosophy who, like Wittgenstein, in the course of his long career suffered an ethical crisis that led him to reassess and transform his conception of philosophy. In his late collection of texts, The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays, von Wright writes movingly of his disappointment with the overreaching ambitions of behaviorism, positivism, and logical positivism that ultimately failed, on one hand, to make of philosophy an epistemological handmaiden to science, and on the other, to provide a secure or even satisfactory philosophical foundation for the humanities. No one, I think, would consider von Wright an epistemological atheist, yet he remains a powerful opponent of the instrumental rationality through which philosophy kept its distance from the humanities in the twentieth century. Von Wright insists that two general problems frame the failures of twentieth century philosophy, especially with respect to the humanities. One has to do with the conceptual poverty of naturalizing epistemologies; the other with the value vacuum produced by this attitude. The conceptual poverty produced by an excessive concern with epistemology is fueled by an unwavering commitment to the legacies of positivism that inform all the varieties of scientism in theory, whether in formalism, structuralism, cognitivism, or logic, but also with their common desire to make of language or expression an instrument of thought and analysis. This attitude, so characteristic of logical positivism, expresses the impulse of logic progressively to refine language in hopes of making it the grounds for certainty and a perfect instrument of thought. Throughout the essays collected in The Tree of Knowledge, whose original dates of publication range from 1957 to 1991, von Wright links the history of twentieth century analytic philosophy to an ever-widening and deepening instrumentalization of language and thought fueled by the steadily increasing prestige of science and technology in the twentieth century. “The form of rational thought which I used to regard as the highest in our culture,” von Wright explains, “was becoming increasingly problematic because of the repercussions it had on life as a whole” (The Tree of Knowledge 3). Indeed, as I have already suggested, throughout his book von Wright is calling for a complete reassessment of the terms or grammar of a certain concept of rationality, which has led not only to the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 423 domination of a culture by technology and scientism, but also a miscomprehension and devaluation of culture in its human dimensions of invention and expressivity. This is why von Wright seeks a new valuation of the humanities, and a new emphasis on philosophy’s diagnostic and critical role for contemporary culture. Taking inspiration from Wittgenstein’s philosophical anthropology, a philosophy of the humanities would be concerned with the analysis of conceptual structures in everyday discourse and thinking that relate to human actions, norms, and valuations. In its many variants, the ideology of positivism was driven by a utopian vision of liberal democratic consensus wherein perfect understanding and communication could be progressively achieved through logical refinements of language. But Wittgenstein’s philosophical anthropology presents a very different vision of the embeddedness of human life in language and culture, one which enables possibilities for community and creation, but which also divides and separates us into discordant webs of beliefs and destructive attitudes leading to doubt, confusion, and uncertainty. The conceptual poverty of this version of rationality relates not only to the scarcity of concepts, as malformed or inapplicable to our current needs, but also to their ethical poverty, or their incapacity or disinterest in presenting useful frameworks for defining, interpreting, understanding, and passing through or beyond the dilemmas that block us from a better life. Like Nietzsche, and sometimes Wittgenstein, von Wright appeals to philosophy as a diagnosis of values, which is another way of understanding Rorty’s appeal to rebalancing the ontologicalmethodical mode of philosophy with an ethico-political one. The instrumental rationality of scientism and logic considers itself exempt from moral reasoning and evaluation. To question instrumental rationality does not mean ignoring or rejecting the enormous achievements of modern science, but rather to counterbalance them with a critical rationality that acknowledges and investigates the value of the human “striving for knowledge as a form or way of life, i.e., as a striving to know and understand for the sake of knowing and understanding in themselves and for no other purpose” (“The Tree of Knowledge” 151). This is a different vision for the evaluation of progress in philosophy, which is less concerned with adding to our stock of knowledge, as if layering bricks to complete an evermore complex and unassailable structure, than with continually turning Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 424 the earth and surveying the terrain that nourishes thinking and makes it possible. Or, as Wittgenstein put it in 1930, “I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as having a perspicuous view of the foundation of possible buildings. So I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists and my way of thinking is different from theirs.”195 What can be said, then, about the province of a philosophy of or for the humanities? At the conclusion to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein famously asserted that “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Often bypassed in this context is the preceding statement: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless [unsinnig], when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.”196 Often taken as an admonition to remain silent in the face of what propositional logic cannot express or contain, Wittgenstein’s later philosophical investigations give evidence of the importance to philosophy of those domains of experience that are unsinnlich--non-sensical, or perhaps, contrary to ordinary or common sense--where no final consensus can be achieved nor one single standard of rationality apply; they are “super-natural” (though not irrational) in the sense that naturalizing epistemologies can neither account for their conditions of sense nor their value to us. Most prominently, these are domains of aesthetic or ethical experience where understanding is grasped, intuited, or brought close to intelligibility through insight or intuition before it can be clearly expressed, much less linguistically encapsulated. Philosophy’s inheritance from logical positivism in the twentieth century was twofold. One was the desire to exclude from philosophy “unanswerable” questions of ethics and aesthetics, or at least to reframe them in potentially more limited ways. The 195 Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 7e. 196 Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) §6.54. The German text reads, “Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie - auf ihnen - über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.) Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig.“ Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 425 other was the desire to make philosophy disappear into science. These two tendencies are related in that what excludes questions of art or ethics, and what makes philosophy disappear into science, is the commitment to subsumption-theoretic models of explanation and the assumption that these models are universally applicable. The last line of the Tractatus meant to indicate that these unanswerable questions may well instead be the most central concerns of philosophical investigation, and the remainder of Wittgenstein’s philosophical life was devoted to finding and giving reasons for why this may be so. In the “Lecture on Ethics,” prepared for delivery in Cambridge sometime between September 1929 and December 1930 though unpublished in his lifetime, Wittgenstein suggests that final and conclusive agreements on such questions cannot be hoped for. But this does not mean that ethical or aesthetic experiences are incommunicable or incomprehensible; hence Wittgenstein’s long fascination with intermediate and impure cases as occasions for investigating these experiences philosophically, though often indirectly. Ethical and aesthetic judgments present cases where humanity expresses its urge to run up against the limits of language. The failure to find an adequate concept or expression may indeed lead us to silence, but it is just as likely to produce in series a variety of different statements or forms of expression, all of which fail to convey these experiences adequately to ourselves or to others, but which nonetheless bring forth the blurred outlines of the experience in our repeated attempts to convey it, like lines in a sketch that create the impression of a picture or idea as compelling as it is incomplete. (“A thinker is very much like a draughtsman whose aim it is to represent all the interrelations between things,” writes Wittgenstein in 1931 [Culture and Value 12e].) Through the assembly of related intermediate cases and perspicuous grammatical investigation, a latent image develops that nowhere lies fully in the expressions themselves, but rather emerges in patterns of similarity and difference perceived among or between the expressions so produced. This is perhaps a case of finding or seeing through connective analysis, rather than direct descriptions, patterns in the differences between things that are brought to light in different ways through different framings or contextualizations. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 426 Consider these images or features expressions, then. But what we want to communicate, convey, apprehend, or understand lies nowhere in the image, but rather is only graspable in a pattern of relationships that is itself neither pictured nor expressed, yet becomes “visible,” as it were, if only in an intuited way. Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics” offers by example procedures for developing or drawing out these pictures through language in a process of comparing a number of more or less synonymous expressions of the defining characteristics of ethics. Though each expression differs slightly from the others, it is nonetheless possible to assemble patterns of difference and commonality in ways similar to the construction of a composite photograph. The effect thus produced is neither a consensual definition of ethics nor a complete understanding of the concept. Rather, as Wittgenstein might put it later on, definitions and concepts of ethics are deployed in a variety of language games in order to produce a pattern of family resemblances where different but overlapping conceptual senses can be “seen”: “so if you look through the row of synonyms which I will put before you, you will, I hope, be able to see the characteristic features they all have in common and these are the characteristic features of Ethics.”197 This is what Wittgenstein might have meant earlier in asserting that the world is “seen” correctly, not through propositions but only when propositional thought has been transcended, overcome, quelled, or outgrown, all of which are senses appropriate to the German word, überwinden. Moreover, the two fundamental domains where expression and thought enter into such difficult but potentially expansive relationships are also the two areas of primary concern to a philosophy of the humanities, aesthetics and ethics. In sorting through our expressive and conceptual difficulties in these domains, Wittgenstein also advises that we distinguish the trivial or relative from the absolute senses of concepts. If as G. E. Moore put it, “Ethics is the general inquiry into what is good,” “good” might be characterized in a relative sense as progressively approaching a certain predetermined standard. Judgments of relative value stand close in form to scientific propositions in that they can be posed as statements of fact adjudicated according to fairly 197 “A Lecture on Ethics,” The Philosophical Review 74.1 (January 1965) 5. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 427 quantitative measures. Potentially, they possess a certain logical necessity and are open to procedures for reaching agreement through the falsification and elimination of competing accounts. One could forge a science of relative good perhaps, but it would say nothing about what concerns us in judgments of absolute value, or what Taylor calls importascriptions and assessments, for “No state of affairs,” Wittgenstein offers, “has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge” (“Lecture on Ethics” 7). In such situations, Wittgenstein continues, “I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts . . . .” (7). Make no mistake, Wittgenstein’s distinction between factual discourse and “supernatural” concepts is neither a lapse into mysticism nor metaphysics. Or rather, perhaps it is a recasting of metaphysics in a way that brings it down to earth, that is, to the level of our quotidian experiences and statements. In any case, such concepts can provoke no compelling agreement through logical necessity, meaning they cannot be factually explained but only conveyed and understood in special ways wherein language may be both transcended and transformed, if it does not instead lead us astray. Wittgenstein states that he can only offer a metaphor, or perhaps an analogy, simile, or even allegory--all of which are forms wherein the experience can only be indirectly related or which require the invention of new forms of expression. In Wittgenstein’s account, then, the apprehension of absolute value, whether ethical or aesthetic, is less a matter of objective statements of fact than subject-referring descriptions of experiences and beliefs, which are necessarily open and contingent. (As will be seen in pages to come, one of these will later provide an unexpected and striking connection to Deleuze.) Wittgenstein says that his own best way of describing the experience of absolute value “is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist’” (“Lecture on Ethics” 8). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 428 The paradox of expressions of absolute value is not only that they are descriptions of super-natural experience, but also that they are non-sensical. But if Wittgenstein here calls them “nonsense,” it is also important to account for how the character and meaning of the word are transformed. These semantic transformations tend in several directions. From one point of view it is nonsense to wonder at the existence of the world because we cannot imagine the world as not existing; there is a certain ineluctable self-evidence to existence. But this is not to say that we have lapsed into tautology or have thus disarmed and dispelled the experience, for to follow Rorty’s previous analogy, to question these experiences skeptically is no more or less sensible than questioning why we have opposable thumbs. We will inevitably undergo these experiences and entertain these questions--they are characteristics or potentials of experience that are best investigated by other means. Another point of view notes that such experiences never take the form of factual or propositional statements, but rather are most often expressed in the form of similes or allegories. The paradox has now been compounded. Its domain of reference is both selfevident (I cannot imagine the world as not existing) and super-natural (I wonder at the existence of the world), and additionally it eludes ostensive definition--all descriptions of the experience must approach it indirectly or at a tangent. From a logical point of view such experiences are disturbing because as experiences they should have factual dimensions, and to leave them unaccounted for in scientific explanation only means that they have yet to be defined as scientific problems, or that the correct means of logical analysis of what we mean by ethical or aesthetic expressions has not yet been found. But this is not what Wittgenstein means by “nonsense.” And here we circle back to the final statements of the Tractatus where Wittgenstein implicitly distinguishes the power of language to describe from its powers of showing or demonstration. For when confronted with the argument that what should be searched for are correct logical analyses of absolute value, Wittgenstein responds that I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 429 on the ground of its significance. That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” (“Lecture on Ethics” 11-12) In a conversation held in the same time period of the preparation of the “Lecture on Ethics,” Friedrich Waisman reports similar thoughts, where Wittgenstein describes this human drive to run up or against the confining borders of language as characteristically ethical: “This thrust against the limits of language is ethics. . . . In ethics, one constantly tries to say something that does not concern and can never concern the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain that, whatever definition one may give of the Good, it is always a misunderstanding to suppose that the formulation corresponds to what one really means. (Moore). But the tendency, the thrust, points to something.”198 Humanity feels compelled to run along or against the frontiers of language. In other words, we struggle constantly against the confinement of thought in or by language. And if this struggle is ethical, it is less about achieving a consistent or universal definition of the Good or the beautiful, than expressing a desire to transform the terms of our existence. Moreover, if this drive “points to something,” the experience is assumed to be real or significant, and not something illusory or irrational. Ethics is a matter of deep concern for philosophy, then, even if it cannot be expressed in the form of a question and there is no answer to it. At the same time, for Wittgenstein philosophy has no resources for 198 “Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein,” The Philosophical Review 74.1 (January 1965) 13. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 430 investigating these experiences apart from those that can be applied to and through language. What Cavell, Taylor, or Rorty add to Wittgenstein, then, are strong arguments for reconsidering this drive. Rather than understanding it as examining our confinements in language and attempting to describe and correct lapses in sense, philosophical investigation becomes equally or more concerned with the expansion and conceptual renovation of our expressive resources as avenues toward possible transformations of our terms of existence. Questions of interpretation, aesthetic judgment, and ethical evaluation are of central concern to the humanities, and what I have hoped to show in the preceding pages are the layered and multifaceted connections between these concerns and Wittgenstein’s more prominent philosophical attention to problems of language and psychology. For example, in comments reported in the Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief Wittgenstein observes that the field of aesthetics is both very large but also full of grammatical confusion. The scale or pervasiveness of aesthetic questions is such that they touch upon many different domains of philosophical investigation and at the same time refuse to be reduced to a single or unified theory or method. In addition, the reach and significance of the aesthetic in human experience and culture is far greater than that of artistic expression; in other words, our forms of life are deeply engaged at multiple and daily levels with aesthetic sensations and interests, indeed much more so than our routine encounters with intended works of art. That much grammatical confusion occurs in our interpretations and evaluations of aesthetic experience arises from two common tendencies. The first tendency, common in the language games of good theory, blind us to the fact that aesthetic judgments involve or evoke types of concepts that are ill-served by empirical investigation, and similarly, that the kinds of conceptual satisfaction we seek in aesthetic questions will not be found through empirical evidence or experimentation. In particular, Wittgenstein’s hostility to the empirical psychological commitments of Kunstwissenschaft is undisguised. “The sort of explanation one is looking for when one is puzzled by an aesthetic impression,” Wittgenstein writes, “is not a causal explanation, not one corroborated by experience or by statistics as to how people react…. This is not what one means or what one is driving at Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 431 by an investigation into aesthetics.”199 Under the influence of explanatory models misappropriated from science, it is all too easy to discount or disparage the many and varied kinds of things that happen when we undergo aesthetic experience and make aesthetic judgments. In like manner, the long historical tendency of aesthetics to seek to classify ontologically genres or media of art, as well as art itself, conceals more than it reveals about the varieties of aesthetic experience and their importance to us. Wittgenstein’s recommendations for sorting out our grammatical and conceptual confusions here are now familiar. Generalities should be avoided and deep attention applied to the concrete case, accompanied by perspicuous description of the particular artworks and experiences themselves, as well as the judgments we offer about them. One should also strive to see connections through the assembly, examination, and comparison of intermediate cases within their cultural context, in order to understand what role they play in the communally unfolding language-games of their time and place. These activities, among others, broaden and deepen our knowledge of aesthetic matters and enhance our capacities not only for perception and description, but also for formulating and sharing our judgments with others. This is a mutually amplifying process of learning to see and learning to value where achieving versatility in aesthetic judgment is guided by entry into what Wittgenstein called a “special conceptual world” (Zettel §165). One might say that this special conceptual world is guided by rules, but only if one accepts that these rules are historically contingent and highly sensitive to context. Moreover, in practical experience they are deployed irregularly along a continuum of expression from the cognitively explicit and linguistically encapsulated to the implicit, intuitive, and only behaviorally manifested rules of thumb. Generally speaking, then, learning to see and learning to value is a question of adding to one’s cognitive stock, amplifying one’s perceptual sensitivity and openness to new experience, acquiring new frameworks or contexts for judgment, and developing the potential for imaginatively applying or creating concepts. 199 Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) 21. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 432 Within the framework of a philosophy of the humanities, then, activities of interpreting, locating meaning, and engaging in ethical evaluation deploy a variety of overlapping tasks including conceptual clarification and enlargement, creating more detailed interpretations and new frameworks for interpretive understanding, imaginative colligation and the creation of new connections between elements, restoring or making newly apparent overlooked connections, and finally, contextualizing and recontextualizing “for the hell of it.” Paradoxically, David Bordwell’s sympathetic account of interpretation’s (limited) activities and virtues are now reframed in a new context. In ways similar to aesthetic expression itself, the many language games deployed through interpretive activity may introduce new conceptual schemes that reorient understanding by making apparent neglected or overlooked traits, offering new categories of intelligibility and comprehension, creating fresh semantic fields and innovative frames of reference, and broadening our rhetorical resources. Interpretation might also respond to our ethical need to explore through art and aesthetic judgment important concerns of thought, feeling, and action. Our varied activities of interpretation, judgment, and evaluation thus offer occasions for criticizing but perhaps also renewing and transforming possibilities of meaning and value. Call these activities, if you like, theory. I have argued that Wittgenstein’s purported attack on theory is both too broad and too restrictive, and that it is more important to foreground what the later Wittgenstein brings to a philosophy of the humanities. The humanities are centrally concerned with the interpretation and evaluation of cultural expressions, and of placing these expressions in historical and social contexts. There are, of course, many competing and often conflicting methods and theories for defining what interpretation and evaluation may mean as activities, and how they are carried out in a variety of language games. This is because philosophy and the humanities, a philosophy of the humanities, are concerned with special kinds of often unanswerable or undecidable questions such as: what is art?, what is the value of art? or what does this work mean? Perhaps theoretical answers (at least of the subsumptive sort) are indeed inappropriate for these kinds of questions. We are limited rather to giving reasons while evaluating both the form and axiology informing those reasons. No theory will every completely answer these questions for us, although there Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 433 have certainly been psychological, and more recently, evolutionary psychological, attempts to frame and answer these questions. Thus, the simple reason for the openness and undecidability of the language games of theory is that no causal explanation is adequate to these questions--they are not subject to the test of fallibility nor is it possible to reach final agreement for the reasons we may give. In liberating humanistic enquiry from the bonds of empirical and causal explanation, however, a philosophy of humanities may make propositional claims, but these claims need not be fallible—they only require suasion and clear, authoritative selfjustification. This is because humanistic theories are subject-referring and framed by culture. Unlike the investigation of natural and automatic or subnormative phenomena, philosophical investigations examine what human beings already know and do, and this knowledge is in principle public and accessible to all. In Bordwell’s sense of the term, “naturalization,” whether good or bad, has little relevance here as humanistic (self) enquiry does not necessarily require finding new information, but rather only clarifying and evaluating what we already know and do, or know how to do, and understanding why it is of value to us. Indeed, in contrast to scientism what interests the humanities are precisely those cultural activities, both creative and interpretive, that are open to introspection. In its descriptive emphasis, Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations do support strongly one important aspect of historical poetics—the analysis of the internal norms of cultural objects and of our everyday sense making activities in relation to those objects. Nonetheless, a ”non-empirical” notion of history is wanted here, and for specific philosophical reasons. Natural laws are time-independent, at least in a human context, and thus are appropriately explored through falsifiable causal explanations. Alternatively, cultural knowledge is historical in a particular sense. It emerges and evolves in the context of multiple, diverse, and conflictual webs of social interactions that require constant re-evaluation on a human time scale. Von Wright himself puts the case directly: “The use of theory in the human as well as in the natural sciences is for explaining and making us better understand the world in which we live. But since the world men build for themselves, i.e. social reality, changes as they go on building it, its explanatory principles--and not only or knowledge of them--will change too in the course of this Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 434 process” (“Humanism and the Humanities” 170). Therefore, the senses of history deployed in the humanities and in the course of philosophical investigations should be guided by knowledge “. . . that man’s place in the world-order is not fixed, if by ‘fixed’ we mean determined by factors which are extraneous to human action” (170), and therefore, I might add, covered by nomothetic principles. Human history and natural history may not be investigated by the same means, even if their domains my overlap with respect to certain problems. Unlike the scientist, the humanist must examine phenomena that may be shifting before her very eyes. She must account for change in the course of its becoming, while she herself might be in a process of self-transformation. Clearly, one of the obvious limits of both the cognitive critique of “interpretation” and ordinary language accounts of art or cultural creativity is their incapacity to account for the new. One of the most beautiful accomplishments of the later Wittgenstein was to restore to all of humanity the capacity for philosophizing, to make of us all philosophers of ordinary language in our quotidian practices of expressing ourselves, interpreting the intentions and meanings of others, for giving reasons, and for negotiating matters of accord and disagreement. But Wittgenstein’s sense that philosophy should leave language “untouched,” which would be one way of restraining ourselves pragmatically from relying too heavily on generalities and metaphysical justifications, may also block investigation of one of its most powerful ordinary uses--creation. Means of expression and interpretation are being continually renewed and innovated, and thus must also be continually reinterpreted and reevaluated. And once a new usage or a new work of art are created, they are not frozen into objects to be mined for meaning; they are always open to new contexts for interpretation and sense-making, of gaining and losing value for us, and regaining value in new historical situations. To what extent, then, is the enterprise of theory still possible? And how might we return to philosophy the specificity of its activity? The two questions are different yet related, and both are linked to the fate of humanities in the 21st century and the place of art and moving images in the future of the humanities. Possible answers begin in recognizing that epistemological atheism does not follow from an ethical critique of modernity. And indeed what links philosophy today to its most ancient origins are the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 435 intertwining projects of evaluating our styles of knowing with the examination of our modes of existence and their possibilities of transformation. Within this very large and general domain, many forms of thought and life are possible. Perhaps they form “theories” in the sense of local, contingent, and malleable accounts of human cultural activity, and perhaps they even compete (and should compete) in some senses with respect to strategies for accounting for, epistemologically and evaluatively, our various and ever changing strategies for interacting with the world and with others. Moreover, there are many ways that these theories may be considered rational and even empirical, without assuming a form of eliminative competition that requires unification in subsumptive-theoretic accounts or insists on standards of methodological monism. I want to continue, then, and eventually conclude my elegy for theory by exploring these questions in discussion of two contemporary philosophers as exemplars of the twinned projects of ethical and epistemological evaluation: Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell. Neither Deleuze nor Cavell offer answers to these questions or solutions to these problems. Rather they offer different and original frameworks for how theses questions may be posed and investigated in relation to film and forms of artistic or cultural expression. Deleuze and Cavell are the two contemporary philosophers with the strongest commitment to cinema, yet with distinctly original conceptions of the specificity of philosophy and of philosophical expression in relation to film, literature, and the other arts. Though an unlikely pairing, reading these two philosophers together can deepen and clarify their original contributions to our understanding of film and of contemporary philosophy. Here I want to make the case that a (film) philosophy may and should be distinguished from theory. At the same time, I want to distinguish for the humanities a fluid metacritical space of epistemological and ethical self-examination that we may continue to call theory should we wish to do so. 32. What is (film) philosophy? Compare a concept with a style of painting . . . . --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 436 1970 is one fascinating turning point for the genealogy of Theory in the senses closest to us; 1985 is another. In this year Gilles Deleuze published in France the second volume of his cinema books, Cinema 2: the Time-Image. Whether Deleuze’s cinema books are works of film theory, film philosophy, or even just philosophy are questions that must remain open and suspended for the moment. However, it can be said that quickly in France, and slowly but surely in other countries, the two books were received as major yet somewhat controversial interventions in the field of film studies. Deleuze’s cinema books confronted head-on an impasse in film theory by infusing it with a new and disorienting vocabulary, re-characterizing cinema history, and restoring pride of place to the power of the concept in relation to the image. One of the great paradoxes of these books, equally apparent in both the French and Anglophone contexts, is how they seemed to emerge out of time. In nearly 700 pages of philosophical and conceptual analysis, Cinema 1: the Movement-Image and Cinema 2: the Time-Image are works that appear as if from another dimension. (Frankly, both Kracauer’s Theory of Film and Cavell’s The World Viewed probably had the same effect in their own time. Is untimeliness a characteristic of works of film philosophy?) There are very few points of contact in Deleuze’s cinema books with the discourse of ideology and the subject, psychoanalysis, or even the narratology dominant in academic French film study in the 1970s and 1980s. It as if the era of Tel Quel, of Baudry and Metz’s turn to psychoanalysis, or even of the predominance of “Screen theory” had never existed. At the same time, the books have many points of contact with modern film theory and the discourse of signification, even if they pull from it conceptual series alternative to Metz’s first film semiology, especially in Deleuze’s return to and recontextualization of figures like André Bazin, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Noël Burch, and Pascal Bonitzer, and his provocative remapping of Charles Saunders Peirce in relation to Henri Bergson to produce a new classification of images and signs, but one more indebted to logic than linguistics. No doubt, there is also a certain French cinephilism in the books that roots them in other attitudes of the 1960s wherein thought about the cinema was in close contact with the new modern cinemas of Italy, France, Japan, Germany, and other countries. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 437 However, the cinema books return to the sixties and seventies in another important way. They are Deleuze’s first major project after his important collaborations with Félix Guattari including Anti-Oedipus, Kafka: For a Minor Literature, and A Thousand Plateaus. Nonetheless, the concepts and arguments of schizoanalysis make only infrequent and minor appearances in Deleuze’s film studies.200 Rather, as I argue in Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, the film books are best understood as a complex series of folds where Deleuze returns to the major concepts and concerns that inform his greatest philosophical works, in particular, Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, both published in 1969. Indeed, I have often quipped that one should read The Movement-Image and The Time-Image as a 700 page-long footnote to Difference and Repetition, or more seriously, as a rethinking of Deleuze’s principal works of the 1960s through a new account of images and signs in the cinema. At the same time, the two cinema books anticipate concepts and arguments taken up later in Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?, which marks the return of the concept after its artful expression in the Image. In this framework, Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books and occasional essays and interviews present two pairs of elements that show what a film philosophy might look like. These elements recur throughout Deleuze’s philosophical work. On one hand, there is the relation of Concept to Image. Here the creation of concepts defines the autonomy of philosophical activity while the Image becomes the key to understanding the profoundly immanent relation of subjectivity to the world. (Later, I will discuss this principle of immanence as a commitment to Spinoza’s doctrine of the univocity of Being.) The second set involves Deleuze’s original reconsideration of Nietzsche’s presentation of ethical activity as philosophical interpretation and evaluation. Ethics, interpretation, and evaluation are in fact key points of contact between a philosophy of the humanities and that domain of the philosophy of art that might be called film philosophy. 200 For a fascinating discussion of how concepts from schizoanalysis nonetheless thread through the cinema books, see Ian Buchanan’s essay “Is a schizoanalysis of cinema possible?” in D. N.Rodowick, ed., Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) 135-156. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 438 Deleuze ends Cinema 2: The Time-Image with a curious plaint for theory. Already in 1985, he argues, theory had lost its pride of place in thought about cinema, seeming abstract and unrelated to practical creation. But theory is not separate from the practice of cinema, for it is itself a practice or a constructivism of concepts. “For theory too is something which is made, no less than its object . . . .,” Deleuze writes. A theory of cinema is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices. . . . The theory of cinema does not bear on the cinema, but on the concepts of the cinema, which are no less practical, effective or existant than cinema itself. . . . Cinema’s concepts are not given in cinema. And yet they are cinema’s concepts, not theories about cinema. So that there is always a time, midday-midnight, when we must no longer ask ourselves, ‘What is cinema?’ but ‘What is philosophy?’ Cinema itself is a new practice of images and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as conceptual practice.201 A slippage is obvious here, with theory standing in for philosophy. But that being said, what does Deleuze wish to imply in complaining that the contemporary moment is weak with respect to creation and concepts, and that concepts themselves are not found “in” artistic expression, but rather that expression gives rise to concepts, which must be further refined or crafted in philosophy itself? The most replete response comes from the most obvious successor to the problems raised in the cinema books—Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? What is Philosophy? is a strange book, bathed in fatigue and pathos in ways commensurate with its existence as a last book--a final act of combat in a long battle where philosophy struggles to hold onto and to reassert its place and function with respect to a series of rivals, and to defend itself against charges of obsolescence, which have often come from within philosophy itself. (Recall again the insistence of logical positivism and its successors that philosophy should disappear into science or theory.) The human sciences, sociology, epistemology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and symbolic logic, indeed 201 Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 280. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 439 theory in all its variegate forms, have presented themselves as rivals to philosophy in the twentieth century. And in the contemporary moment, the situation worsens with challenges from information science, marketing, advertising, and all the mass arts of communication that fancy themselves as creators and “conceptualists.” “It is certainly painful to learn that ‘Concept’ designates a culture of service and information engineering,” write Deleuze and Guattari. “But the more philosophy clashes with its impudent and inane rivals, the more it meets them on its own terrain, the more it feels its enthusiasm for the task--to create concepts that are aerolites rather than commodities. Philosophy has a mad laugh that brings it to tears. Therefore, the question of philosophy is the singular point where concept and creation rely most upon one another.”202 In an environment where thought is pervaded by capital at even the most capillary levels, and where creation is continually degraded by the commodity form, philosophy must more than ever rediscover and refine its creative and critical capacities. If the question of philosophy is the singular point where concept and creation are brought together in an act of immanence, then perhaps philosophy owes more to art than it does to science? In turn, the question of film philosophy is related to how the philosophic act is related to creative acts and expressiveness, with their own special spaces, times, scenographies, and dramaturgies. The desire to ask the question, what is philosophy?, emits from a special place with its own characteristic temporality, one commensurate with last stands, or better, bifurcation points in history where the descent into chaos may yet produce unanticipated utopian forces. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that such questions come late in life, or perhaps late to thought, in moments of “quiet restlessness, at midnight, when there is no longer anything left to ask” (What is Philosophy? 1). In order to think, or to move thought forward, one suggests theories all of one’s life and in the linear course of life’s happening. But in order to ask what is philosophy, or in what consists the activity or powers of philosophy, one does not present 202 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 11, 16; trans. mod. Originally published as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991). Original French page numbers appears in italics wherever I have modified the English translation. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 440 one idea or argument after another, but reaches towards that place, that time, which make thinking in all its rarity possible. One seeks to answer this question not in a statement, description, or argument, but rather in a doing within the time of the act itself. What is Philosophy?’s account of this activity amounts to a kind of dramaturgy, or perhaps a scenography or cartography of thought. If Wittgenstein’s style of philosophy is confession, Deleuze’s style is rather a theater or cinema of thought, but also a geography of thought, where in seeking out the place and time from which thought becomes possible, one frames a landscape or a geography as the mise-en-scène of philosophy. (The philosophical act is a moving cartography of images, as my colleague Tom Conley might put it, and this is a clear link between the geographic and cinematographic dimensions of what Deleuze and Guattari geo-philosophy.) In spite of the wildness and unrestrained character of its vocabulary, style, and concepts, one of the most extraordinary aspects of What is Philosophy? is that it is almost entirely descriptive. It offers no method and presents no theories; it neither proscribes nor explains. Moreover, this descriptive approach to the philosophical act endows it with space, time, style, and indeed a sort of figurability, as if sketching out a portrait of thought’s genesis and movements. These are the two sides, then, to the book’s characterization of philosophy--a creative act very close to artistic creation, and a mapping or geography framing and composing the territories and geological features of thought. One can begin to see here how, for Deleuze, of all the arts the cinema is closest to philosophy as a space and time where thought is immanent to the movements and substance of life. Deleuze and Guattari call this “geophilosophy” but the philosophical act is equally well characterized as a scenography or dramaturgy; or more simply, the construction of an Image. The key questions, then, are how to characterize philosophical expression or enunciation, and what are the characteristic components and activities that make philosophy distinct from neighboring modalities of expression, investigation, creation, and knowing in science or in art? At the same time, how can philosophic constructions enter into complex “arrangements,” combinations, or compounds with art and science in ways that blur their frontiers and multiply their points of contact, influence, and exchange? One feels the need to ask the question in French--what is agencement philosophique?--to Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 441 evoke the multiple senses of agencer: to make happen, to combine or construct, to organize or arrange. Still, many ambiguities arise in Deleuze and Guattari’s various deployments of this agencement, which seems to operate simultaneously as an intransitive and transitive verb, a strange combination of activity and passivity, where creative acts or expressions both presume a singular subject, but also connect this subject to a collective space or framework that conditions these acts and expressions. In the introduction to What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari write that their response to this question has never varied. Regardless of whether one speaks of Aristotle’s substance, Descartes’ cogito, Leibniz’s monad, or Bergson’s duration, philosophy acts through the creation of concepts: “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, or fabricating concepts. But it was not only necessary that the response took account of the question, but also that it determined a time, an occasion, the circumstances, landscapes and characters, the conditions and unknowns of the question” (What is Philosophy? 2, 8). Later, Deleuze and Guattari will characterize this terrain as philosophy’s particular plane of immanence. But for the moment, note here only that the landscape of philosophical potentiality is populated and swarming with figural and dramatic activity. And on this terrain there is also agon and agape--challenges from adversaries and encounters with friends--whose sites and moments of conflict block or slow thought, but also enable it as a power or potentiality. Through agon thought turns back on itself in a reflexive gesture whose uncertainty or hesitancy interrupts its movements. As I relate in Part I of my elegy for theory, one classic adversary to philosophy is the sage. But the sage is only wise in theory, and philosophy requires something else, a friend or an intercessor. To love wisdom (philo-sophia) is not to possess it but to pursue it without finality, and the only finality known to humankind is death--the rest is creation. This is why, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the Greeks invented philosophy by affirming the death of the sage. Philosophy does not need disciples, and indeed to be disciple to a sage is to eliminate the possibility of thought and to enter the dead time of repetition. But what is the function of the philosophical friend, or why does philosophy need friends? The act of philosophy, the desire that makes of philosophy a potentiality of or for thought, emerges in moments of existential crisis expressed as the ethical longing for a different way of thinking and a Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 442 different community of thought. No doubt philosophy has sought a home in schools and academies. But these communities are as much virtual as actual--in fact, they must be virtual before becoming actual. The philosophical friend is not an actual or historical person or character, then, but rather “a presence intrinsic to thought, a condition even of the possibility of thought, a living category, a lived transcendental” (What is Philosophy? 3 9); or in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, a conceptual character or persona [personnage conceptuel]. The friend is a conceptual persona deployed in the theater of philosophy--the emerging image of a thought and a community to come that draws thought forward towards the concept and that community as an image of philosophy’s characteristic activity. The conceptual persona is therefore both a condition for the exercise of thought and a stage in the creation of concepts. An intermediary in every sense of the term, the friend introduces into thought a particular kind of material intimacy as “a vital relation with the Other that one had thought excluded from pure thought. . . . The friend, the lover, the suitor, the rival are transcendental determinations, who as such never lose their intense and animated existence in one or several characters” (4, 9-10). Nor is the friend a unified or self-sufficient function--there are as many conceptual personae in the history of philosophy as there are creators of concepts. Paradoxically, it is not the philosopher who enunciates his or her concepts, but rather the conceptual persona who embodies as a virtual force the becoming of a new form and style of thought to which the philosopher aspires. Deleuze and Guattari themselves refer to conceptual personae as “embrayeurs,” Émile Benveniste’s term for “shifters” or deictic indicators of location in time and space, as well as designations of grammatical person. Conceptual personae thus affect particular kinds of movements or transitional states. Deleuze and Guattari describe them as having a mysterious, intermediate, and fluctuating existence, hovering between the formed concept and the pre-formal or pre-conceptual plane of immanence, going from one to the other, and in turns figuring the subjective presuppositions that characterize the plane and marking out a place for concepts to be constructed. The conceptual persona gives life and character to philosophy, and there is no becoming of a concept without the mediation of a conceptual shifter. The conceptual persona is neither myth, allegory, nor symbol, however. Its Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 443 function is neither imaginary nor abstract but rather immanent to acts of philosophical creation. Nor does the conceptual persona represent the philosopher. Rather, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “the philosopher is only the envelope of his principle conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors, the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosopher’s ‘heteronyms,’ and the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae. I am no longer myself but thought’s aptitude for manifesting and deploying itself across a plane that passes through me at several places. . . . The conceptual persona is the becoming or the subject of a philosophy, on a par with the philosopher . . . .” (What is Philosophy? 64, 62-63). Later, I will connect the role of conceptual personae to that of psychological and spiritual automata in the cinema books. There are also many instances where Deleuze figures cinematic auteurs as if they were philosophical companions. In philosophical discourse, the conceptual persona may appear outright as dramatic characters--Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, or Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Kierkegaard’s Don Juan--or as something like a philosophical friend who seems to be a constant companion of philosophical invention, say the examples of Emerson and Wittgenstein in Cavell. Nevertheless, it is rarely the case that the conceptual persona is explicitly figured. More often than not, it appears only indirectly or hovers phantom-like behind the philosophical act. Unnamed and subterranean, it is usually only invoked or reconstructed by an attentive reader. Thus the division between the philosopher and her or his conceptual personae can also be thought in another way--there is the public persona of the philosopher (Deleuze or Cavell), and there is the more intimate and private thinker within the philosophical act, a kind of implied thought or spiritual automaton at the heart of every philosophical phrase, which is in principle distinguishable from the author. In any case, there is a sort of conceptual perfectionism here analogous to Cavell’s moral perfectionism as an ideal or imagined trajectory towards which thought aims, and which it likely misses or falls short of, yet which holds it in a play of forces and a continuous recurrent becoming. In this way, conceptual personae set loose the movements that define the philosopher’s plane of immanence and intervene directly in the creation of his concepts. The philosopher is less a biographical life than another function in the philosophical act--a medium for Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 444 philosophical creation; or better, a subjective component in the abstract machine of conceptual creation and enunciation. The conceptual persona is the subjective condition of the philosophical act, displacing the philosopher herself toward other states of being both grammatically and in thought, for example, Nietzsche becoming “the Antichrist” or “Dionysus crucified.” “In philosophical enunciation, one does not do something by saying it;” according to Deleuze and Guattari, “rather one makes movement by thinking it through the intermediary of a conceptual persona. Are not conceptual personae thus the true agents of enunciation? Who is I? It is always a third person” (What is Philosophy? 6465, 63). The conceptual persona is the becoming-philosopher of those who will to think by creating concepts.203 Again, there is a whole dramaturgy of the philosophical act. And yet conceptual personae should not be confused with what Deleuze and Guattari call aesthetic figures or psychosocial types, and thus remain relatively distinct from both artistic creation and sociological analysis. Within their own domains aesthetic figures and psychosocial types serve analogous functions: through art, for example, the aesthetic figure expresses a power of affects and percepts rather than concepts, a becoming-image or sensation rather than becoming-thought. These figures present different powers of creation in different abstract machines. However, this does mean that there are no points of intersection or exchange between art and philosophy, or that they cannot enter into complex intensive constructions or assemblages capable of transforming them together: the musical and theatrical figure of Don Juan becomes a conceptual persona for Kierkegaard, just as 203 I should note here that the role of Guattari in the composition of What is Philosophy? is controversial. In informal conversation, Eric Alliez has expressed to me the opinion that Guattari played almost no role in writing the book, and that Deleuze retained his name as a sign of friendship or homage. But one wonders if there is something more to this double enunciation than a simple act of solidarity? If Deleuze is the philosophical author of the book, and if the book’s concepts are his creations, there is still no doubt that Guattari’s influence is strong, and in more ways than one. Perhaps Guattari is the co-author of What is Philosophy?, not literally but structurally as intercessor, conceptual persona or shifter, or spiritual automaton, slipping within the discourse, populating the plane, and affecting the medium for the creation of concepts. Even if Guattari did not co-author the book, there is a becoming-Guattari (his concepts, discourse, planes of immanence) that slides into the deployment of Deleuze’s thought. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 445 Deleuze’s cinema books are populated with a multitude of conceptual intercessors from Sergei Eisenstein to Alain Resnais, no less than Orson Welles himself, both director and aesthetic figure, as the exemplar of a kind of cinematographic Nietzscheanism. In these situations, aesthetic figures do not present a synthesis of art and philosophy, but rather hybrid acts where two kinds of creation encounter and affect one another without losing their distinctiveness, sliding across or into one another in new stratigraphic combinations, where the compositional figures of art and the conceptual territory of philosophy encounter one another, mix, and then branch out again onto their own planes. To assert that the aim of philosophy is the creation of concepts does not mean that concepts are forms or products, whether found or forged. This is another way in which the temporality of philosophy, like that of the humanities, differs from that of scientific advancement. The pursuit of the unknown in philosophy does not amount to discovering or retrieving information that lies dormant in nature or in thought, as if digging out and refining the riches of the past, nor does it mean realizing the unrealized. The unknown in philosophy emerges out of a different kind of potentiality, a turmoil or chaos, wherein the unseen is not hidden in the earth or unnoticed in the heavens, and which no technical instrument will unearth or bring to light. The unknown in philosophy is the blindness of Tiresias, aimed toward the future and not the past--it is the struggle to bring the new and the unforeseen into existence. Wittgenstein’s idea that philosophical investigation must leave language untouched is at best the half the story. Philosophy is also experimentation. And the struggle with language, so present in both Wittgenstein and Deleuze in their very different ways, is also for Deleuze the struggle to create or to give birth to sense in ways not yet anticipated on the terrain of thought. Another link to Wittgenstein (and later to Cavell) is the relation of philosophy to non-philosophy. Thought is not only the province of the philosopher; the activities of philosophy--call them for the moment interpretation and evaluation--are in principle open to everyone in all of the domains of daily life. But thinking is rare, even for the philosopher, and is often mistaken for other kinds of activities, such as contemplation, reflection, or dialectical communication, all of which may be considered “theoretical” in some sense. For example, even if the object of philosophy is to create concepts, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 446 philosophy itself has no object, and thus nothing to observe or to contemplate. (This is one certain way of distinguishing it from theory. In what sense could one call a concept an object?) Moreover, if philosophy’s activity consists in creating concepts, how could one contemplate or consider an entity that has not yet been brought into existence? To reflect, to consider calmly or meditatively in dialogue with oneself, or to mentally reproduce and examine phenomena, is equally foreign to philosophy’s activities and for similar reasons, nor does thought emerge and perfect itself in a reasoned dialogue or dialectic of rivals. In contrast to contemplation, reflection, and communication, which run after universals in the forms of objective, subjective, or intersubjective idealism, concepts are singular acts of creation. Philosophy’s rivals appeal to a universally apprehensible and transmittable reason. But in a phrase that strangely echoes Wittgenstein, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the appeal to universals explains nothing; they themselves must be explained. “All creation is singular, and the concept as purely philosophical creation is always a singularity” (What is Philosophy? 7 12). Another way to characterize philosophical activity is as a constructivism whose activity consists in “knowledge [connaissance] through pure concepts” (What is Philosophy? 7, 12). Here Deleuze and Guattari follow Nietzsche in asserting that you will never know anything through concepts if you have not first constructed them, that is “constructed them from within an intuition that belongs to them: a field, a plane, and a ground that must not be confused with them, but rather shelters their seeds and the people [personnages] who cultivate them. Constructivism requires that all creation shall be construction on a plane that gives it an autonomous existence” (7, 12). This is Deleuze and Guattari’s most direct expression of the idea that concepts must be constructed from their own plane of immanence, where the French word, plan, variously indicates a plane, map, ground, area, staging area, or blueprint. At the same time, this “knowledge” is a connaissance and not a savoir--it is neither certain nor a point of arrival. One is always rather “on the way,” even if the path is blocked or unclear. The construction of concepts is often a strange process inspired by alienation and disorientation (“I cannot find my way”) such that encountering a concept, even one’s own concepts, is like becoming acquainted with or getting to know a stranger, or a new friend. There is always something Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 447 unsettling about the emergence of a concept, even if it robes itself in familiar terminology. The construction and baptism of a concept often follows from a peculiar necessity where concepts assume names in a variety of forms: . . . some require an extraordinary word, sometimes barbarous or shocking, which must designate them, whereas others are content with a familiar and quite ordinary word that swells with such remote harmonics that they risk being inaudible to a non-philosophical ear. Some solicit archaisms, others neologisms crossed with nearly mad etymological exercises: etymology as a peculiarly philosophical sport. . . . The baptism of the concept solicits a specific philosophical taste that proceeds through violence or insinuation, and which constitutes within language a language of philosophy, not only a vocabulary, but also a syntax reaching for the sublime or great beauty” (7-8, 13). Philosophy also has a peculiar kind of history where strong concepts almost never disappear, but rather recur and mutate through new phases of replacement, renewal, and recontextualization “that give philosophy a history as well as a turbulent geography, each moment and place of which is preserved (but in time) and that passes (but outside time)” (8). One way of characterizing a film philosophy then may be to consider Deleuze’s concept of the direct image of time as a moving portrait of philosophy, and eternal recurrence as the measure of philosophical history and the time of creation. But first, we must inquire more deeply into the concept’s relation to both science and art. 33. Order out of chaos When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value Following Deleuze and Guattari, I have taken as given that philosophical activity is defined by the creation of concepts. Yet several questions remained unanswered. How are concepts related philosophically to Ideas? And what is the relation of philosophy to science or to art, each of which possess their own creative acts and Ideas, their own Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 448 histories and styles of becoming, and their own networks of influence and exchange, both between themselves and with philosophy? For Deleuze and Guattari, the three great territories of human creation are art, philosophy, and science. These are relatively autonomous domains each of which involves acts of creation based on different modes of expression—perceptual, conceptual, or functional. Deleuze and Guattari insist at many points that while the creation of concepts defines the specificity of philosophical constructivism, this does not give it a special or preeminent status with respect to other means of ideation, expression, thinking, or creating. The problem confronted in What is Philosophy? is knowing how philosophical expression differs from artistic or scientific expression, yet remains in dialogue with them. Percepts, concepts, and functions are different expressive modalities, yet each may influence the other but not in a way that affects the autonomy of their productive activity. An artist or scientist no doubt profoundly engages in conceptual activity, and so are influenced by philosophy. Yet the outputs of that activity—percepts, functions—retain their autonomy and specificity. The question here is not whether art or films think, but rather how, where, or even whether thinking takes place and by what means? Nor is philosophy in the business of contemplating or explaining art or film as if from an external or transcendent perspective. Philosophy neither supplies concepts to art nor does it extract concepts from art. To comprehend the originality of Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, the principle of immanence whereby thought is no longer the property of a subject, but rather a relation of intimate contact and exchange with the world where Being and world are singular expressions of a unique substance, must be fully grasped. In the conclusion to What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari write that all we ask from art, science, or philosophy is a bit of order to protect us from chaos. Chaos is one of the central concepts of the book, or perhaps it is better to say that chaos is the world or environment wherein questions of art, philosophy, and science must be staged. The role chaos plays in these arguments must be approached with delicacy and complexity. Chaos is neither disorganization nor anarchy. On one hand, it is a global concept referring to what Deleuze in The Movement-Image calls a regime of universal Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 449 variation or constant self-differing movement--a cosmos of fluid matter and radiating energy mutually interacting at all scales and on all points of contact in a creatively evolving open Whole. Deleuze and Guattari call this the plane of immanence, where there is neither transcendence nor externality, and no substantial division between mind and body, but only a qualitative and self-organizing process of self-differentiation in a ceaseless state of becoming. The plane of immanence is thus the expression of a radical empiricism where “Subject and object give a poor approximation of thought. Thinking is neither a line extended between subject and object nor one orbiting around the other. Thinking takes place, rather, in the relationship between territory and the earth” (What is Philosophy? 85, 82). The distinction between territory and earth is meant, perhaps, to bring the plane of immanence down to a human scale. Conceived in this way, the earth is not a foundation or stable surface, but rather continuous stratigraphic movement at uneven rhythms. In its movements, the earth never stops provoking deterritorializations; Deleuze and Guattari say it is deterritorializing and deterritorialized. Like the plane of immanence, or itself an instance of the plane, it is not one element among others, but that which gathers all elements onto a common plane while at the same time making use of them to displace territories into series and overlapping movements of deterritorialization. Should one take Deleuze and Guattari at their word here, or is the relationship of earth to territory only an allegorical or poetic one? Indeed the relationship is intrinsic to all existence and thought, but relative to two perspectives that shift planes like two variations of “aspect-seeing.” One may speak of physical geographies as much as social or psychological ones, and thus mark historical relations with the environment and the earth, whether cultural, geological, or cosmological, in the waxing and waning of cities, states, and peoples interacting with the evolving global organic whole of which they are always a part. Deleuze and Guattari call this relative deterritorialization. But there is also an absolute deterritorialization that relates to Spinoza’s monistic ontology of mind, body, and nature as aspects or modes of a single expressive Substance. To be fully conscious of such an absolute deterritorialization would be to achieve an absolute Being-Thought moving at infinite speeds, something impossible or humanly unbearable. Yet such thought moves into or out of us, unless we accept the tragedy of skepticism where we are forever Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 450 walled off from the external world by barriers of perception and consciousness. The movements of territorialization and deterritorialization, absolute and relative, are meant to bypass or “forget” the dialectic and all negativity, as well as to do away with all subjectobject distinctions. Instead we confront two variations, dimensions, or perspectives on a single unique substance, or thought-movement, in which our present potentials for thinking are framed or conditioned by relative historical circumstances--whether cultural, geographical, or cosmological--as territories anchoring or nourishing thought, and from which new thought must deterritorialize itself. (Later, I will explain that in its own way, and through artistic means, for Deleuze cinema expresses these two variations in the elaboration of two cinematographic planes of immanence--the movement-image and the time-image--each of which describes a different set of relationships of space to movement and time, as well as differing relations to a Whole which changes, and each of which expresses a different relationship to thought.) Put in its purest or most absolute form, one can say of pure immanence that is a Life and nothing more. In his last published text, ““Immanence: a Life,” Deleuze writes that “A life is everywhere, in every moment which a living subject traverses and which is measured by the objects that have been experienced, an immanent life carrying along the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subject and objects. This indefinite life does not itself have moments, however close they may be, but only between-times [entre-temps], between-moments. It does not arrive, it does not come after, but presents the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event to come and already past, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness.”204 This, in fact, is what Deleuze in the cinema books calls the pure time-image. The plane of immanence is a radically inhuman or nonhuman environment in the sense that human perceptual capacities fall far short of forming an adequate image of or from it. Its scale and complexity overwhelms human comprehension. At the same time, bodies, minds, selves, perceptions are no more nor less of this material plane and this life than the organic and non-organic forces and matters of the universe at whatever scale; hence the need of science to isolate and compartmentalize it into manageable fragments 204 “Immanence: a Life” in Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Cambridge: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2006) 387. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 451 and to express it in terms of functions, or of art to render it apprehendable in sensations and livable in affects. Human perception and comprehension are not separate from this cosmological complexity, but rather one with it as part of a single expressive substance. There is not only photography in things, as Bergson might say, but also thought. And like all things, thought is subject to entropy: “Nothing is more painful or distressing,” Deleuze and Guattari observe, “than a thought escaping itself, ideas that flee, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master . . . . We lose our ideas incessantly” (What is Philosophy? 201, 189). Because thought is movement, or is never without movement, it risks fleeing from itself in all directions; at each moment thought confronts bifurcation points where it might reorganize itself at higher levels of complexity, or fall into dissipative energy. To form a relationship to thought or to hold onto it means reordering its movements--slowing it or changing its rhythms, framing or composing it, mapping it and giving it a finite coordinate space as sections or variations on infinite universal movement. There are many different kinds of images of thought, then, and in each one there is a danger of arresting thought in fixed positions or opinions. We feel the need to furnish ourselves with a minimum of consistent and protective rules so as to order the succession of ideas in space and in time with principles of identity, resemblance, contiguity, or causality. Doxa shields us from chaotic thought, but it also might impede us in creative thought. In Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, art, science, and philosophy are all strategies for descending into and returning from chaos to preserve the creative movements and openness of thought. Each confronts chaos by sectioning and framing it, congealing it into an Image, no matter how fragile or ephemeral--each composes chaos in a way that makes thought happen, as event or concept in philosophy, as functions in science, or as sensation or affect in art. “The three disciplines advance by crises or shocks in different ways,” Deleuze and Guattari conclude, “and in each case it is their succession that makes it possible to speak of ‘progress.’ It is as if the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy, because another struggle takes on more importance--the struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself” Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 452 (What is Philosophy? 203). We need an image or images of thought. Yet the question remains, how is thought kept in creative movement? As expressive modalities relating to a single plane of immanence, perhaps one might say that science, philosophy, and art form qualitatively distinct images, or emit distinctive types of signs. The aim of science is to create functions describing states of affairs, of art to create percepts through sensuous aggregates, and of philosophy to create concepts in relation to events, but the devil is in the details. In art, percepts refer to the creation of affective experience through constructions of sensuous materials. In painting, these expressive materials may be composed of blocks of lines and colors, whether figurative or abstract; in cinema, combinations of movements, durations, rhythms, and sounds. Alternatively, the role of functions helps clarify the relation of philosophy to theory in the scientific sense. There is a function, Deleuze explains, as soon as two wholes are put into a fixed correspondence.205 Newton’s inverse square law provides an apposite example. A function is a mathematical expression orienting thought (first whole) to a natural phenomenon (the propagation of energy). As expression, the function is not the specific phenomenon, of course, nor is it analogous to thinking. The function is a descriptor or algorithm, close in spirit to what information science calls an abstract machine. Its descriptiveness of behaviors in the natural world is important, but this is not the key to its specificity. It is abstract and general, and its generality derives from its timeindependence. It produces descriptions, and these descriptions are valid for all times and all places--thus, the proposal of a second whole. In its predictiveness of future behaviors, then, the function is exemplary of what science calls “theory,” and when this predictiveness becomes regular, functions become “laws.” In a similar way, in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the three modalities of thought according to the distinctiveness of their planes, their expressive modes, and their subjective presuppositions: artistic creation takes place on a 205 See “Having an Idea in Cinema,” trans. Eleanor Kaufman in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, eds. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 14-20. For an alternate version, see “What is the Creative Act? in Two Regimes of Madness 317-329. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 453 plane of composition that gives expression to the force of sensation mediated through percepts or aesthetic figures; philosophy forms concepts on a plane of immanence as expressed through or in relation to conceptual personae; and science creates functions with respect to a plane of reference in relation to partial observers. There are interesting sets of commonalities and differences in all three definitions. Functions take the form of propositions in a discursive system that serves as the medium or grammar of scientific thought. Alternatively, art and philosophy neither refer nor represent. The powers of philosophy and art are both non-representational and nonreferential even when they are profoundly figural or formal, whereas scientific prospects are propositional and referential or ostensive, expressing functions as operations of actualized states of affairs observed in given experimental frameworks. Like a good algorithm, a function will produce the same state of affairs ad infinitum without variation; its prime component is the independent variable. Functions are also expressed as logical propositions that relate to individuated forms, bodies, or things. But there are also lived functions whose arguments are produced as perceptions and affections expressed as doxa or opinion; call this, what is publicly known or accepted as known. An opinion is not a subjective expression, however. Humans have opinions on everything that we perceive and which affects us, but things themselves, no matter how vast or molecular, are also “opinionated” to the extent that they receive and give information in specific contexts, act and react in networks of movement, relation, and causality that pass between the virtual and the actual. In creating and describing functions, science ascends from a chaotic virtuality to actualized states of things and bodies--a function describes processes or powers through which the virtual is actualized or comes to actualization. Concepts and percepts do not travel on these lines of interaction, however. And if one descends from actualized states of affairs back towards the virtual, one discovers another kind of virtuality or power of the virtual: The virtual is no longer the chaotic virtual, but rather virtuality that has become consistent, an entity forming on a plane of immanence that sections the chaos. Call this the Event, or the part that escapes its own actualization in everything that happens. The event is not at all a state of things; it is actualized in a state of things, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 454 in a body, in a lived, but it has a shadowy and secret part that is continually added or subtracted to its actualization. In contrast to a state of affairs, it neither begins nor ends, but has gained or kept the infinite movement to which it gives consistency. It is the virtual distinguished from the actual, but a virtual that is no longer chaotic, having become consistent or real on the plane immanence that wrests it from chaos. Real without being actual; ideal without being abstract” (What is Philosophy? 156, 147-148). This virtual has the power to restore infinite movement to thought, but not as a transcendental perspective. Its consistency thus relates to its capacity to survey itself in itself as “pure immanence of what does not actualize or which remains indifferent to actualization because its reality does not depend on actualization. The event is immaterial, incorporeal, unlivable--pure reserve” (156, 148). In stark contrast to the infinite difference in repetition expressed as function, as pure immanence the event is repetition of infinite differentiation: “that which starts again without having begun or ended--the immanent aternal [l’internel immanent]” (157)--in other words, eternal recurrence. Philosophy and art are thus distinguished from science by their differing attitudes to chaos and through the qualities of time they express. Each express two different relationships to the virtual, or two ways of drawing upon and giving expression to the virtual as a temporal force. Philosophy seeks to give consistency to the virtual while preserving its powers of infinite speed. Philosophy frames or constructs a plane of immanence through a sectioning of chaotic forces, selecting the infinite movements of thought and furnishing the plane with concepts moving at thought’s own velocity. Science seeks points of reference that actualize the virtual and realize it in functional states of affairs. Rather than increasing the amplitude of movement toward the infinite, science seeks to localize movement in a frame of reference by slowing down or congealing time, and expressing it in terms of functions. Functions manage chaos in forming an object of reference whose mode of existence is defined by submission to finite conditions--variables of position, movement, force, or energy--that are quantitatively determined and spatially located, whether in an actual or calculated space. These Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 455 functions are not identical to the “objects” themselves. Their mode of existence is a coordinate system comprised from at least two independent variables in relation to formed matter--reference as propositional form and the relation between systems and states of affairs.206 Philosophy, science, and art interrelate from or across a given plane of immanence in their unique ways of giving expression to it--organizing chaos, managing relations between the virtual and actual, and drawing out points of subjectivation or enunciation (conceptual personae, aesthetic figures, partial observers). Science manages chaos in expressing a function as an independent variable framed by a partial observer; philosophy gives consistency to chaos through the concept, enunciated by a conceptual persona who preserves its virtual and infinite powers of thought. What art produces is a figure or Image through organizing sensations, lifting them out of the flow and flux of the durée; hence art’s special relationship to time. The aim of art is to create a new “existent” separate from the stream of lived time, such that Deleuze and Guattari write that “Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved. It preserves and is preserved in itself . . . .” (What is Philosophy? 163). No art is eternal, of course, and all of art’s materials are 206 In his lecture on “Science and Reflection,” Heidegger offers a remarkably similar perspective, and one that characterizes the modern conception of theory as distinct from philosophy: “Theory makes secure at any given time a region of the real as its object-area. The area-character of objectness is shown in the fact that it specifically maps out in advance the possibilities for the posing of questions. Every new phenomenon emerging within an area of science is refined to such a point that it fits into the normative objective coherence of the theory. That normative coherence itself is thereby changed from time to time. But objectness as such remains unchanged in its fundamental characteristics. That which is represented in advance as the determining basis for a strategy and procedure is, in the strict sense of the word, the essence of what is called ‘end’ or ‘purpose.’ When something is in itself determined by an end, then it is pure theory. It is determined by the objectness of what presences. Were objectness to be surrendered, the essence of science would be denied. This is the meaning, for example, of the assertion that modern atomic physics by no means invalidates the classical physics of Galileo and Newton but only narrows its realm of validity. But this narrowing is simultaneously a confirmation of the objectness normative for the theory of nature, in accordance with which nature presents itself for representation as a spatiotemporal coherence of motion calculable in some way or other in advance.” Heidegger calls this a “trapping-securing procedure.” See “Science and Reflection” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row,1977) 169. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 456 subject to the laws of entropy--it is only a matter of time before they return to chaos and disorganization. Nonetheless, as an autonomous act of creation, art extracts an Image from chaos and forms it as a percept, but not as a way of conserving the material or medium of the figure, but rather as the action of perpetuating or maintaining its immanent and creative relations with virtual forces. This is another way of asking what is an Image in relation to the image of thought in art or philosophy? In Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, artistic expression is less a matter of forming than enduring, of giving time a thickness or consistency, making it present as a durative force. Here a figure or image is formed from an expressive material or medium, yet there is always something else created within the medium that eludes it as an incorporeal sensation or percept. Percepts differ fundamentally from functions in that they are based on no system of reference apart from what is immanent to sensation and one’s encounter with the percepts and affects produced in such “sensational” encounters. A percept is not a perception, then, but rather a relation of immanence flooding both subject and object, if this distinction is still relevant. In the acts of becoming that produce aesthetic experience, in the creation of aesthetic things or existents, percepts become something more than the perceptions of those who experience an artwork, and affects something more than the responses of emotion, boredom, or incredulity incited by aesthetic experience, or not. An affect is not an effect, and the viewer has no more and no less being than the work itself. To experience a work of art means entering into a complex series of relations with it, to become another complexly composed component in a network of sensations, perceptions, and affections. In this perspective, the viewer is less a self-identical subject than a molecular component in a new virtual community where “sensations, percepts, and affects are beings, valid in themselves and exceeding experience as lived. . . . The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else--it exists in itself” (What is Philosophy? 164, 154-155). In the complex of immanent relations comprising aesthetic sensations, “We are not in the world,” Deleuze and Guattari conclude, “we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming” (169). Deleuze and Guattari thus reverse the usual causality through which we believe sensations are produced--it is not colors, sounds, or movements that produce effects, but Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 457 rather aesthetic material or art invades or is absorbed into sensations and becomes indiscernible from them. The materials become indiscernible from the sensation, yet sensations are conserved or preserved as independent entities or existents, percepts and affects. “Even if the material lasts for only a few seconds,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “it will give to sensation the power to exist and to be preserved itself, in the eternity that coexists with this short durée. So long as the material lasts, the sensation enjoys an eternity in those very moments. Sensation is not realized in the material without the material passing completely in to the sensation, into the percept or affect. All the material becomes expressive” (What is Philosophy? 166-167, 157). Art is neither a “representation” of reality nor of inner states; it is not a representation at all. Art expresses its own reality. The goal of art is not to represent, but rather to give existence or independent life to sensations in the form of percepts and affects, to release percepts from the perception of objects and affects from emotions as the passage from one qualitative state to another in ways that draws their powers from the creative self-differentiation of the plane of immanence, though in a human framework. Percepts and affects are experienced as autonomous and self-sufficient existents, continuously present to themselves without fixed reference to a historical past or future, which are, in principle, completely independent of and co-equal to the beings that experience them. The expressive forms of art, or what the creative act produces, are “monuments,” though characteristically Deleuze and Guattari construct a special sense for the term. Monuments are not memorials (perhaps they are im-memorials?) and their relation to temporality is not that of producing a memory-image or re-invoking the past. To be released from lived perception in a percept is to occupy an event where the Image is without anchor or reference to past memory, nor is it evoked in a stream of involuntary memory flooding from the archives of past experience. Art does not commemorate the past but rather endows the event with composed sensations that celebrate it with their own expressive force. Art thus endures not as memory, but as fabulation. This term will be familiar to every reader of Deleuze’s cinema books. Creative fabulation as an expressive act is about art’s creation of its own immanent and sensory reality by releasing sensations from quotidian events, but first one must be able to envision or apprehend Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 458 them.207 This act is neither the deployment of memory nor the expression of fantasy, but rather giving existence to something virtually present and immanent in given life itself. What Deleuze and Guattari require here is something close to the aesthetic figure of the voyant of modern cinema--a seer giving birth to pure optical and acoustical situations, percepts and affects that overflow everyday life--where artistic perception is framed by a certain philosophical attitude. To understand the relation between philosophy and art, then, is to comprehend how the figural consistency of the concept relates to the durative capacity of the percept. One of the most striking features of What is Philosophy? is how it presents an art or aesthetics of the concept. There is an extreme sensitivity to the concept, not as something to be analyzed or accounted for, but only described in its complexity as a figure, which may effect itself through space, time, and action, but which is only experienced as thought and the movements of thought. (This in fact is the claim that Deleuze makes for the direct image of time as something like the purest form of a thought without image, or what I refer to in Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine as a non-spatial perception. We will soon return this description of the direct image of time as Deleuze’s most replete account of the concept’s relation to images.) Concepts relate to percepts through their creative force as well as their lack of referentiality. Concepts must be constructed and their form is never simple, nor can they be reduced to a singular form, sign, or proposition. Every concept is a multiplicity comprising a figure with variable components whose nature is to multiply--the concept is additive and constructive, entering into ever-growing agencements or assemblages, actively combining, constructing, assembling, linking to or connecting with to form evermore elaborate networks. This poses an interesting question of beginnings because concepts are never created ex nihilo. There are no absolute beginnings free of context and prior discursive frameworks, such that one always starts up from the middle, as it were; one is already in the movement of becoming, and working within or trying to force a deviation in the history of philosophy and its concepts. At the same time, concepts form 207 See, for example, my chapter on “Series and Fabulation” in Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) 139-169. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 459 a fragmentary or open whole that is simultaneously forming and de-forming. Concepts seek to unify their components, or at least to bring them into a Figure or Image, but in the same movement the nature of conceptual creation is to articulate, to express, to cut-up, and to rearrange, giving the concept an irregular contour defined by the number of its components, with branches seeking connections to other units. The concept is a mobile figure and a moving Image, and indeed what Deleuze hoped to accomplish in the cinema books, among other things, was to do justice to the plastic complexity and creativity of the concept as a philosophical figure. The will to create concepts often responds to a problem that has been misunderstood or badly presented, and without which it would have no sense, or the potential for sense. Moreover, these problems are difficult to isolate or to characterize until such time as conceptual series emerge that trace out possible solutions. Concepts do not so much respond to problems, then, as picture them or make them present. Here an interesting distinction might be made. With its emphases on witnessing, observation, and spectating, theory relates to problems through concept formation as a kind of picturing. But in its virtual force the concept itself has a non-spatial dimension. What Deleuze calls the image of thought is a theoretic image, but philosophy is concerned with something else--the genesis of thought without image. This idea provides an immediate bridge to the cinema books as two interrelated responses to the question: What is the relationship of movement, time, and image to thought? How can thought be put into movement, or to persist and insist as movement? And in each book, both movement and time become “problematic” in relation to thought in different ways, or rather, the concept of movement itself becomes problematized. For example, in the four commentaries on Bergson extending across the two books, our common sense notions of movement as physical change in space, elapsed trajectory, chronology, or the quantitative addition of spatial sections is soon complicated and deepened through Deleuze’s original readings of Bergson’s Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution. Through the signs and sensations of cinema, our quotidian sense of movement unravels onto other dimensions: the plane of immanence as universal variation, or the essential equivalence of matter and light; movement as creative evolution and change through time, the unpredictable appearance Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 460 of the new and unforeseen; and finally, what Deleuze calls thought from the outside, pitched into movement by the virtual force of the Event. But there will also be a second problem, itself threading through the cinema books in a closely woven skein, where the shift from the movement-image to the time-image presents a shift in the nature of belief, and raises the ethical question of how to restore belief in this life and this world, and their possibilities for change? But these are matters for later sections. Concepts are marked by temporal as well as spatial complexity. In fact, there are something like four temporal dimensions or rhythms to every concept. One of these is historical--how the creation of a concept draws on prior histories, foraging, gleaning, displacing, and adapting material from different contexts and planes of immanence. Another relates to the emergence or becoming of a new concept from within its own plane of immanence and its present combination and connection of elements from that plane. The third dimension establishes not the unity, but rather the consistency of a concept, both within itself and in its relation to neighboring concepts. Deleuze and Guattari add that every concept has an endo-consistency and an exo-consistency. The components of the concept, no matter how distinct and heterogeneous, must form an open whole (this is the fourth dimension), wherein the elements are both woven together yet open on to new forms and relations of connectivity. However, the passage from a concept to or through its neighbor can often be indistinct or indiscernible because they may share components, or comparable components may occupy a zone of proximity wherein concepts overlap on their frontiers. Most of these dimensions encourage us to imagine concepts as open and mobile entities with a strong degree of plasticity, susceptible to entering onto new lines of development and into larger sets or ensembles. But the consistency of a concept, what gives it its particular physiognomy, is how it becomes the site of intersection of its components--a point of condensation around a strange attractor. The concept waxes and wanes, expands or contracts, in state of continual flux that passes between and among its components, which serve in this sense as intensive traits--lines or figures that give the concept its singularity. Components occupy or territorialize the concept in series of condensation and displacement as a force of differentiation. But the concept also emerges Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 461 distinctly from its components through forces of integration as a kind of transcendental synthesis or overview. However, these movements of integration and differentiation, of forming intensive traits and unfolding into expansive series, are never realized into a completed picture of a self-contained whole. One might say, then, that concepts are fuzzy or indistinct, in the same way that Wittgenstein gravitates toward blurred or indistinct concepts that evade our attempts to pin them to language, but which become visible, apprehendable, or intelligible, by assembling and comparing the language games in which they are deployed. In such cases, one might ask of the concept: What is its location? Where is its place in language or thought, for it does not occupy or fill up a stable moment in time, space, or a particular state of affairs. A concept is an Image, but a deterritorializing one, where the components of concepts territorialize or populate the field or ground against which the concept might show itself. This is why Deleuze and Guattari say that the concept is an “incorporeal” or pure Event, a hecceity “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract” (What is Philosophy? 22). The concept shares with the absolute plane of immanence mobility across two dimensions or perspectives: “The concept is therefore both absolute and relative: it is relative to its own components, to other concepts, to the plane on which it is defined, and to the problems it is supposed to resolve; but it is absolute through the condensation it carries out, the site it occupies on the plane, and the conditions it assigns to the problem. As whole it is absolute, but insofar as it is fragmentary it is relative” (What is Philosophy? 21). The mobility or movements of the concept traverse two planes, then. There are finite or singular movements that trace the contour of its components, giving them a physiognomy or drawing through them an Image. But the concept itself is comprised of infinite movements, a tour d’horizon or conspectus, a mental survey or overview that, one wants to say, is theoric. Thinking through concepts is therefore a continuous process of construction and reconstruction. “A philosopher never stops reworking or even changing his concepts,” Deleuze and Guattari write, a phrase more true of Deleuze than any other twentieth century philosopher (What is Philosophy? 21, 26-27). The philosophical act is intrinsically syntagmatic, pragmatic, and constructive--the making, unmaking, and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 462 remaking of constructions through relative and absolute series. Concepts evolve in series according to proximate connections or combinations, whether internal or external. The internal consistency of the concept is measured by the connections of its components in zones of proximity and indiscernible transitions, like variations of intensity and frequency in an analog image. Its exo-consistency, its displacement or deterritorialization into new series, occurs through bridging two or more neighboring concepts, whose components may be exhausted or incapable of further transformation. And so, Deleuze and Guattari write, this is what it means to create concepts: “to connect internal, inseparable components to the point of closure or saturation so that we can no longer add or withdraw a component without changing the nature of the concept; to connect the concept with another in such a way that other connections change their nature” (What is Philosophy? 90, 87). There is a virtual power in each concept, then, a polyvalency or plurivocity, dependent only on its zones of proximity, internal or external, that makes of it a fragmentary whole open to continuous modulation and change. When it is well made the morphology of the concept is viral. But rather than attacking a host to assure its mutations, it moves through chains of neighboring concepts through processes of attachment, penetration, disintegration and reintegration, self-replication and selfmediated assembly, releasing its components into neighboring assemblages: “The concept is not paradigmatic but syntagmatic; not projective but connective; not hierarchical but arterial [vicinal]; not referential but consistent. That being so, it is inevitable that philosophy, science, and art are no longer organized as levels of a single projection and are not even differentiated according to a common matrix but are immediately posited and reconstituted in a respective independence, in a division of labor that sustains connective relations between them” (91, 87). Philosophical constructivism thus entails subtracting, adding, expanding, or recombining conceptual components to construct new series and points of condensation in acts of imagination, intuition, or even forgetfulness. Philosophy initiates its movements of thought through concepts, with their finite and infinite speeds, but is also often carried away by them. In a phrase Deleuze frequently cites from Leibniz, “I thought I had come home to harbor, but was thrown out again to open sea.” In its combination of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 463 movements, the concept integrates its components and forms its endo-consistency, but also gives rise to new series out of its exo-consistency, yet it has no reference apart from the movements of thought itself: “it is self-referential; it posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created” (What is Philosophy? 22). And so much so that Deleuze and Guattari characterize the philosophical act as a kind of perpetual digression or digressiveness. This is why, finally, Deleuze and Guattari assert that concepts are neither discursive nor propositional, thus providing another unexpected link to the late Wittgenstein. Where is the truth of the concept, or how is its truth to be judged? What is the nature of criticism in philosophy, and is there such a thing as progress in the history of philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari’s response is to assert that a concept has no other truth than that which is shaped by its own conditions of creation. Our concepts must surely respond to problems of our own time and our own situation of thought; they arise in relation to “our history, and, above all, to our becomings” (What is Philosophy? 27). Concepts are judged not in relation to some abstract value or criterion of knowledge, but rather only with respect to how they make present or intelligible new directions or contexts for thought emerging out of a present problematical situation; they are immanent to the problems that presently concern and derail us. “If a concept is ‘better’ than its predecessor,” Deleuze and Guattari offer, “it is because it makes us hear new variations and unknown resonances; it executes unfamiliar constructions/assemblages [découpages] and brings forth an Event that overtakes and passes through us [qui nous survole]” (28, 32). And if we still refer to, adapt, or recontextualize concepts from earlier philosophies, this is because concepts can always be reactivated or remade in relation to new problems. Components may be extracted from them to create new series or combinations, giving rise to new concepts or novel meanings for old concepts. Philosophy advances neither through succession, subsumption, dialectical critique, nor by evoking the powers of its ancestors, but rather by performing a particular kind of work: always creating new concepts for the ever-changing problematics in which we find ourselves. Philosophical critique does not advance through negation or refutation, then, but only in remarking that a concept has become exhausted or fatigued, that it has lost Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 464 components, or has been transformed in a new situation where it acquires new components or responds to new problems. The scourge of philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari observe, are philosophers who criticize without creating, or defend tired or exhausted concepts without knowing how to return them to life. Nor does philosophy desire to discuss concepts, for while every new concept finds expression on a plane of immanence that gives it an Image, there is also something intransmissable in the concept that holds it open, which remains unthought, or confronts thought as the unthought that still resides within it. Here Socrates remains the first philosopher, or the conceptual persona that haunts all of philosophy, not because he represents philosophy as a free discussion among friends, but rather because he is a figure of disturbance and disconcertment that impedes discussion as a figure for the restlessness of conceptual creation and a thought without rest. 34. Idea, Image, and intuition To think is to create--there is no other creation--but to create is first of all to engender “thinking” in thought. --Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition One might say that the percept is formal or formative in singular acts of creation, whereas the concept is singular yet abstract in that it relates to thought in its own temporal immanence. The expressiveness of art finds its instantiation in the sensuous products of art and its human affects, and the expressiveness of science finds its confirmation in the predicted behaviors of natural phenomena. But concepts express only thought and acts of thinking. Does this mean that thinking is purely an interior activity cut off from the sensuous and material world? Art provides important answers to this question in relating concepts to Ideas, signs, and images. Cinema 1: the Movement-Image and Cinema 2: the Time-Image are rife with concepts: the plane of immanence; the movement or time image; rational and irrational connections or divisions; integration, specification, and differentiation; relative and absolute relations of sets to wholes or the Whole; the powers of the false; psychological Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 465 and spiritual automata; thought of the Outside; and indeed many, many more. In a strong sense, these are concepts restored to cinema by philosophy. Yet they remain fully immanent to the cinematic image as expressive forces within cinema itself as moving images. At the same time, the immanence of movement--as becoming, change, openness of the whole, or force of the Outside--is a characteristic shared by both Image and concept, and so much so that there is a kind of logical reversibility or complex system of exchange between the cinema books and What is Philosophy? The philosophical act is constructive, but a construction that occurs on two complimentary yet distinct dimensions: to create concepts, but also to lay out or figure a scenography, mise-en-scène, cartography, territory, or plateau that delimits the consistency of concepts in their emergence and in the network of relations they establish across planes of immanence. Concepts are fragmentary wholes distributed across the plane like a casting of seeds, or the spread of planets, moons, and asteroids in a solar system, but the plane is the earth or the environment that receives the seeds and conditions their growth, or the forces of gravity and distributions of energy that holds elements in their orbits--an unlimited open Whole. As in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image there is something here like an absolute and relative relation to the plane of immanence. The plane of immanence is absolute when related to the Whole--the regime of universal variation on a cosmological scale and the intuition of the univocity of Being as a single expressive substance. In its relative dimension, the plane of immanence is more like an expansive frame or frontier that expresses a horizon that delimits complex sets while also setting their internal consistency. Both the movement and time-image comprise or contain a multiplicity of signs and images; they are two fragmentary wholes as it were, yet each one has a consistency internal to itself comprising something like a world, which is nonetheless open to multiple hybrid configurations. This is another way of looking not only at the history of philosophy but also the history of art. How does ideational creation take place, or how does movement occur from one image of thought to another as in, for example, the complex transition between the movement and time-image? Across the history of philosophy, and the history of art, there are a multiplicity of planes of immanence, each with their own internal conceptual Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 466 consistency, their own lines and degrees of force, strata, and rhythms. However, change does not take place as a simple succession of planes, but rather as a folding and interleaving, deposits of sediment and strata in an ever-flowing stream, where planes are in flux, one with respect to another, and also pass into and out of one another in impure and unexpected mixtures. Unlike the partiality of scientific theories or the fragmentariness of concepts, each plane is a singular immanent whole, carrying out selections of components and elements that vary from one plane to another. Another question arises here: is there a point of transition, bridge, or meeting point that connects movements between plane and concept? Similar to Bergson’s notion of the intermediate image as a “perception” (percept is perhaps the better term) falling between the material and the mental, the tangible and the intangible, this would be a thought consistent enough to be “sensible” but unformed enough to not yet be conceptual. The plane of immanence is distinct from concepts and their creation as force is distinguishable from matter, or the virtual from the actual. Concepts are conditioned by the plane, emerging from it and passing back into it indiscernibly, and varying constantly with respect to it. Similarly, if conceptual creation is the characteristic act of philosophy, the movements and rhythms of the plane must be considered as pre-philosophical or nonconceptual in ways similar to how philosophy itself refers to intuitive or non-conceptual understanding. The force and nature of intuition thus defined, however, varies with the cartography of the plane and its characteristic features, geography, and landmarks. On one hand, the presuppositions and intuitions forming on the plane are not extrinsic to concepts, but rather the framework or horizon setting their particular internal conditions. Immanent to philosophy, yet not wholly commensurate with it, they are the engine or energetic heart of philosophy, but also its principle links to non-philosophy, that is, to other forms of (non-conceptual) understanding in everyday life, science, or art. The plane of immanence is therefore a kind of membrane through which resonates philosophy’s productive relations with other modalities of creating and understanding: Ideas, percepts, affects, functions. We are close here to what Hegel called “theory.” In Creative Mind, Bergson calls this philosophical intuition; Deleuze calls it having an Idea. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 467 In 1991, Deleuze gave an important lecture at the FEMIS, the French national film and television school, an excerpt of which was published as “Having an Idea in Cinema.” What does it mean to have an Idea in art and how do Ideas differ from concepts? Ideas are specific to a domain, a milieu, or a material, and so Deleuze writes that “Ideas must be treated as potentials that are already engaged in this or that mode of expression and inseparable from it, so much so that I cannot say I have an idea in general. According to the techniques that I know, I can have an idea in a given domain, an idea in cinema or rather an idea in philosophy” (“Having an Idea” 14). This argument relates to Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that concepts must be created from an intuition that belongs to them, where intuition means giving expression to the virtual forces and potentials of a given plane of immanence. Composed from variations and zones of indiscernibility in the passage between plane and concept, the concept is itinerant, wandering, vague, and without clear outlines, including those that would render it as figures of discourse--it is intensive and modular, in constant displacement on a plane of immanence. As form or force, the concept is an event whose logic of sense expresses neither whole nor fractional numbers for counting things or quantitatively presenting their qualities. There is no measure, data, or fixed outline to a concept, meaning it is completely other to scientific functions. Nonetheless, ideas in philosophy are oriented by a certain kind of figure or image, what Deleuze calls the “image of thought,” and so a connection or relation must link them. In What is Philosophy? the image of thought is defined as the specific terrain or plane of immanence from which Ideas emerge as pre-conceptual expression as “the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to use thought, to orient one’s self in thought” (What is Philosophy? 37). Just as the plane is not a concept, nor the concept of concepts, it is also neither thought nor the thinkable. This observation suggests that that there is special connection between image and thought, which is not a representation of thought, but rather what Kant characterized as a heautonomous relation of two wholes external to one another, an interstice or disjunctive synthesis where thought is the outside of the image, and the image the outside of thought, just as in the direct image of time, space and time are incommensurable and thought is given as a non-spatial perception. We return here to the non-visibility or non-givenness of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 468 the concept as an absolute value, of which Wittgenstein himself was equally aware. The image of thought comprises, then, neither sets of rules or methods than can be followed, nor an algorithm that can be executed. Neither is it a brain state imageable on screens nor a cultural expression of thought’s means, ends, and forms. There is no sign or representation commensurable with thought’s movements to which it can be fixed or reduced. For these reasons, Deleuze and Guattari say that what thought claims by right is infinite movement, and the only image appropriate to thought is that of infinite movement. Yet, what art might accomplish for philosophy is to provide figures of thought--formative and signifying components--setting finite conditions for thought’s movements. Deleuze’s term for this in the cinema books is noosigns, and we will return to them in a moment. Where does philosophy locate itself, or from which dimension does it act: the concept or the plane? (One could ask as well: where does sensation occur? In the Idea or the Image?) In fact the possibilities of philosophy, or philosophizing, emerge in the movements from one to the other in the folds or meshes that intercalate or weave together the two sides without ever confusing them. Philosophy cannot create concepts without mapping the plane, thus setting out its different components and activities. The cartographic elements of the plane are diagrammatic lines whereas concepts populate the plane as intensive features. On one side there is infinite movement, no matter how slow or sudden--the immeasurable rhythms of geological change or unexpected quakes and eruptions. On the other, there are intensive and ordered series of movements producing fragmentary and open segments of space, or variable framings or perspectives, that vary the rhythm of the infinite movements of the plane, “each of which constitutes a surface or a volume, an irregular contour marking a halt in the degree of proliferation” (What is Philosophy? 40). This is not to say that concepts as intensive figurations are derived from diagrammatic lines, the lines sketching the contours of the figure, for example, nor are intensive series deduced from the movements of the plane. Rather, crossings between plane and concept are transitions between intuitions and intensions, a passage from the pre-philosophical or extra-philosophical to philosophy. Perhaps one of the values of art (but also all kinds of creative media or expressive materials) is to embody or make sensate the intuitive force of the concept in its moving Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 469 figural intensity? Perhaps artistic construction is one kind of cartography of the concept, sketching out its intensive features, in ways similar to philosophical constructivism? The Movement-Image and The Time-Image are Deleuze’s concrete responses to these questions before What is Philosophy? comes about to ask them more abstractly. One of the most striking features of What is Philosophy? in this respect is how the figural force of the concept and its intensive features reprise the semiotic vocabulary of the cinema books. There is no reference, of course, to Deleuze’s vertiginous elaboration of perception, affection, action, or relation-images, nor to opsigns, sonsigns, or crystal-images. Rather, the genesis of cinematographic signs and the figural force of concepts are related through common principles of construction: absolute and relative dimensions of a plane of immanence, formation and expansion through specification, integration, and differentiation, the open relation of intervals or interstices to a Whole that changes, as well as determined relations between intervals and wholes. To have an Idea, then, is to express thought through particular constructions, combinations, or linkages—what Deleuze calls signs. As Spinoza insisted, signs are neither representational nor an expression of thought; rather they are expressions of our powers of thinking. Ideas are not separable from an autonomous sequence or sequencing of ideas in thought, what Spinoza calls concatenatio. This concatenation of signs unites form and material, constituting thought as a spiritual automaton whose potentia expresses our powers of thinking, action, or creation. And indeed the movement and time-images lay out their own points of thought and subjectivation in psychological and spiritual automata. We will return to all these terms and arguments momentarily. The importance of Deleuze’s cinema books is that they present his most complete account of a philosophical semiotic modeled on movement and time, and of how images and signs in movement or time are conceptually innovative; that is, how they renew our powers of thinking. The cinema books do not exemplify the abstract arguments in What is Philosophy? Rather, in their own way and through their own means they are making the same case for the immanence of thought to image as a virtual and temporal force. Art relates to philosophy in that images and signs involve pre-conceptual expression in the same way that the image of thought involves a proto-conceptual expression--they prepare Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 470 the terrain for new concepts to emerge. The cinema may be best able to picture thought and to call for thinking because like thought its Ideas are comprised of movements, both spatial and temporal, characterized by connections and conjunctions of particular kinds. Every instance of art is expressive of an Idea which implies a concept, and what philosophy does with respect to art is to produce new constructions or assemblages that express or give form to the concepts implicated in art’s Ideas. Philosophy renders perspicuous and in conceptual form the automatisms that make a necessity of art’s generative ideas. The key to grasping this relation in Deleuze is to understand the originality of his characterization of the Image as both an ontological and ethical concept. Especially in the cinema books, the Image is not the product of cinematic creation, but rather its raw material, the worldly substance that it forms and to which it gives expression. Hence the key place of Henri Bergson’s assertion from Matter and Memory that there is already photography in things. Like energy, images can neither be created nor destroyed--they are a state of the universe, an a-subjective universal perception or luminosity that evolves and varies continuously. Human perception is therefore largely a process of subtraction. Because we must orient ourselves in this vast regime of universal change according to our limited perceptual context, we extract and form special Images or perceptions according to our physiological limits and human needs. This image is the very form of our subjectivity, and persists in the crossroads between our internal states and our external relations with the world.208 The image is thus in relation with ourselves (interiority) and in relation with the world (exteriority) in an intimately interactive way. It is absurd to refer to subjectivity as pure interiority as it is ceaselessly engaged with matter and with the world. By the same token, thought is not interiority but our way of engaging with the world, orienting ourselves there and creating from the materials it offers us. Thus, another way of considering the autonomy of art, philosophy, and science is to evaluate the different though related images of thought they offer us. The percept is visually and acoustically 208 I review these arguments more completely in Chapter Two, “Movement and Image,” in Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 471 sensuous, provoking affects or emotions in us. Concepts and functions are more indirect. What the function is to scientific expression, the sign is to aesthetic expression. Art’s relation to thought, then, lies not in the substance of images, but in the logic of their combination and connectivity (or division and disconnectivity). No doubt every artistic image is an image of thought, a physical tracing and expression of thought given sensual form, no matter how incoherent or inelegant. However, while the aesthetic sign may imply a precise concept, it is nonetheless entirely affective and pre-conceptual. Yet there is a philosophical power in images. The artist’s Idea is not necessarily the philosopher’s. But images not only trace thoughts and produce affects; they may also provoke thinking or create new powers of thinking. In so doing, we are thrown from sensuous to abstract thought, from an image of thought to a thought without image--this is the domain of philosophy. And in moving from one to other, art may inspire philosophy to give form to a concept. What does philosophy value in art? To ask this question is to demand what forces expressed in art, in images and signs, call for thinking? Philosophy parts ways with science to the extent that time is taken as an independent variable--in fact, the simplest way of describing Deleuze’s (or Bergson’s) philosophical project is as the will to reintroduce time and change to philosophy’s image of thought. Philosophy finds inspiration in art because there the will to create is brought to its highest powers. Here, as in many other ways, Deleuze goes against the grain of contemporary philosophy. While happily science has never renounced its powers of creation, it has become less and less conceptual. And of course, it does not need concepts as philosophy does. Contrariwise, philosophy has moved closer and closer to art, and vice versa. This is the great untold story of 20th century philosophy that the 21st century must recount: that philosophy’s greatest innovations were not made with respect to science, but in dialogue with art. And further, that the modern arts came closer and closer to philosophical expression while nonetheless amplifying their aesthetic powers. Cinema 1: the Movement-Image and Cinema 2: the Time-Image are books of philosophy. Yet they are also philosophy’s way of acknowledging the noetic force of nonphilosophy, especially art, and of art’s powers of restoring or reinvigorating conceptual Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 472 creation. There is a becoming-concept in cinematographic expression that belongs only to cinema and thought’s relation to cinema, which exists and persists whether philosophy recognizes its powers or not--these powers are fully immanent to cinema and its semiotic history. Indeed, for Deleuze that semiotic history is distributed across two distinct aesthetic or cinematographic planes of immanence as two great regimes of signs, the movement-image and time-image, which in turn are variations on the plane of immanence as the cosmological regime of universal variation as self-differentiating movement. Of all the arts, cinema seems to draw the maximum of its formative and energetic resources from the universal plane. Both aesthetic regimes are variations on this universal movement-image, or perhaps two perspectives on how thought emerges in relation to it, one that privileges the commensurability of space and time, the other of which expresses their incommensurability. In their generality and in their conditioning of signs and images, the cinematographic movement-image and time-image express two fundamental Ideas responding to a critical question or problem: how does cinema transmit the modern image of thought? While cinema’s own varied answers to this question are intuitive and pre-conceptual, they are nonetheless singular, material, and concrete. What Deleuze calls the great cinematic auteurs are thus certainly thinkers. But in undertaking his cartography of the two regimes of signs, these auteurs become for Deleuze something else, intercessors or conceptual personae. As such, they have laid out the subjective presuppositions of the respective planes through the expressive force of their distinct and proto-conceptual Ideas, which philosophy in turn makes perspicuous by describing the planes of immanence from which those Ideas emerge, the abstract machines or diagrams that condition them, the logic of intervals or relations between intervals and wholes through which they are figured along well-defined planes of consistency, the noosigns and spiritual automata that render them thoughtful, and finally their ethical modalities and regimes of belief. Cinema presents a special case for considering the relation of philosophy to art, or concept to Image, first because it is in movement and can only be considered as movement or continual becoming. But that being said, the relations between movement, image, and thought also shift or change definition depending on their logic and relations Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 473 of spatial and temporal consistency. Time can be expressed as a formed or formal relation commensurate with space (the indirect time image), or time may recur as a force incommensurable with space (the direct image of time). Each case figures differently our modern image of thought, and activates differently the figurability of the concept. A concept is not a percept or an image, nor is it a function or a proposition. Indeed concepts are difficult to grasp or to fix in thought for two reasons. First, they are in movement or a continual state of becoming. A concept achieves consistency or a kind of presence to thought only by relating to a plane of immanence wherein it is sustained. When concepts are forceful and well constructed, they generate thought or organize movements of thought, but they are never completely present to thought. They may be named and mapped, or even related to points of enunciation through conceptual personae, but at no point is a concept identical to or representative of thought, or expressible as a proposition. Secondly, a concept is never finished, whole, complete--it cannot exist or persist as a sign or representation positioned in space and frozen in time. It is neither self-sufficient nor self-identical, but rather draws all its powers from its virtuality, its self-differentiation, its becoming. We can speak of an image of thought or a thought without image, but in neither case is thought identical to the image, but rather is something (when present) that is in movement ahead, behind, or alongside of the image . . . or all at the same time. The key questions here, then, are how do creative expression and philosophical expression coincide, and how do we apprehend concepts if they are given neither in propositions nor percepts? What is the rapport between concept and Image? All of the formal concepts of the cinema books are something like what Stanley Cavell, after Wittgenstein, might call “pictures” as humanly necessary yet inherently inadequate presentations of the multiple variations in which we might hold (or lose) our relationships to thought. This is why I have distinguished between images as formed presentations and an idea of Image as a set of automatisms or genetic relations expressed not as presentations, but as powers or potentials incompletely realized in images. This is more or less what Deleuze means by the movement-image in an absolute sense. If there is a visibility or perceptibility to this Image, however, it is given as force not form, as Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 474 virtual not actual, as a logic unfolding in, around, or outside of images, or holding images in variable combinations, and these are all qualities that Images share with concepts. Now, in spite of the multiplicity and complexity of Deleuze’s vocabulary, and his wild account of the genesis and typology of movement and time-images, Deleuze’s characterization of immanent moving pictures of thought is organized by a limited set of parameters. The whole history of cinema is thus organized by two fundamental Ideas--the movement-image and time-image--as two moving images of thought emerging on their own planes of immanence. The consistency of these planes is maintained by two singular abstract machines, each of which conditions the formative force of movement in relation to the image or images: on one hand, there is an automation of movement in the image or a self-movement of the image that generates indirect images of time; on the other, an autotemporalization of the image provoking direct images of time. The automatisms of each image, as I will explain further in a moment, are fueled by asymmetrical relations between wholes and sets forming images and their components. Yet in both cases there is the possibility of thinking in or through the deepest powers of time and the virtual--the infinite speed of chaosmos, or of constant universal variation, creative evolution, and the unexpected emergence of the new. Moreover, direct time-images are genetically related to what Deleuze calls the passive synthesis or impersonal form of time, whose variable dimensions include: the splitting of the present into three incommensurable points, a passing present, conservation of the past, and an indeterminate protention of the future; the preservation of all of the past as virtual non-chronological strata; and finally, the pure form of time as expressed, on the one hand, by Kant’s remapping of the cogito as divided within itself by the form of time, and on the other, by Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return as the Being of Becoming, or the fact of returning of that which differs. To recapitulate, from a formal perspective the philosophical powers immanent to cinema are organized by two fundamental Ideas expressed across two distinct (though interrelating) planes of immanence, each characterized or made consistent by abstract machines generating two fundamental regimes of signs. Here I am less concerned with describing the kinds of signs emitted than in characterizing the abstract machines that (in)form them. Philosophy performs this task through interpretation. In Deleuze’s Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 475 Nietzschean perspective, to interpret is not to fix or draw out the meaning of a sign or image, but rather to characterize the will to power that fuels their conditions of sense, what gives them their consistency or rarity (in Foucault’s sense), sets their horizons of emergence, and accounts for how and why they are valued. I will return to and deepen this thought in the next section. But let it be said for the moment that there are not only two fundamental cinematic Ideas, but also two fundamental values, each of which characterizes a given logic of sense--the dialectical and Hegelian will to truth of the cinematic movement-image and the Nietzschean powers of the false of the cinematic time-image. For the moment, I am only concerned by the formal conditions or conditioning of these two powers as ways of demonstrating how as pre-conceptual or proto-conceptual forces they condition the endo-consistency and exo-consistency of images, their logics of formation, figurability, interconnectivity, and expansion in succession or series. In each case, there is a logic to images expressive of these powers, which are in every case immanent to images themselves. In both cases we begin again with two abstract machines, one which regulates all the variations where time is rendered as commensurable with space through movement, the other in which the very condition of movement changes as time is expressed directly through its incommensurability with space. One of the conceptual difficulties in Deleuze (and part of the formal genius of Sergei Eisenstein) is that he asks us to think of the Image simultaneously in two dimensions as it were, as if two interlacing diagrammatic lines that condition the ongoing formation of images. One line takes the form of self contained sets or framings succeeding one another, or displacing or replacing one another in space; the other considers the image as an expansive whole, which is continuously regrouping or reframing sets into larger and more complex mobile pictures. Within the context of cinematic movement-images, Eisenstein referred to this logic as the relation between horizontal and vertical montage. At the same time, these two dimensions of the moving image provide the basis for beginning to comprehend how the movement-image in its deepest sense presents four variations of thought’s relation to movement: as infinite speed on the absolute plane of immanence or the whole aggregate of images as a universal regime of a-centered variation (the Image); movement in relation to a perspective or framing relative to singular bodies or Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 476 objects as the opening of intervals forming contingent, spatial sets (perception of movement); as a succession of spatialized self-contained segments (empirical and chronological form of time); and finally, as intuition of the force of the virtual as becoming, change, self-differentiation, or creative evolution. As Deleuze encourages us to think of these logics as formal relationships between sets or ensembles, questions therefore arise about the nature of what links sets together, or how they unfold one from the other in self-generated successive series, what separates them or holds them together, and how they may be grouped into larger ensembles at various scales (frame, shot, fragment, segment, figure, acts, or even complete textual systems, genres, and so forth). What is Philosophy? links directly to the cinema books in that the figurability of the concept as a fragmentary and complex whole--forming, deforming, unraveling, and evolving in open series, the conditioning of both its endo- and exo-consistency--equally describes the formal logic relating Idea to Image in cinema. The problem of thought in relation to movement, then, is expressed differently, and takes on different values, in the extent to which one considers the nature of sets and the relation between sets as a logic of (commensurable) intervals, or whether instead formal relations are governed by (incommensurable) interstices between images, sets, or series of images, and between images and sounds. The problem of interpreting images, then, is not one of reading or establishing meaning, but rather of describing the abstract machines, or setting out the logic of sense, that comprehends the force or will to power that generates formal relationships within and between images. Here we encounter a new set of parameters expressed by the logic of intervals and the relationship between intervals and wholes, or the Whole. An interval is basically a spatial figure with a given, indeed quantifiable, duration. (Think of Eisenstein’s notion of metrical montage.) The compositional elements of intervals fill up space as elapsed time in shots, sequences, and larger montage figures. These are figures of succession and expansion establishing what Deleuze calls the empirical form of time--a linear and chronological succession-expansion in space directed by the arrow of time in the continuous elaboration of a sequential past, present, and future. However, the presentation of time in the cinematic movement-image does not reside in simple Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 477 succession or the present flow of images, but rather in the montage figures that the empirical form of time conditions. Another way of putting this is that the Idea of an indirect presentation of time means that time is not given in an image or images, but only in the continual elaboration of relationships within and between sets. We do not apprehend time in the image, or in the suite of images, but rather in the logical system of relationships that govern the formation, succession, and expansion of sets at variable scales. These can be figures of montage, where formal and metrical relations govern the expansion or contractions of movements, their quantitative sampling and combination of mobile sections in smaller or larger units, or noosigns that direct and regulate logical combinations of sets as expressive figures. As two distinct planes of immanence, the cinematic movement-image and the cinematic time-image relate to or separate from one another according to how each relates relative to absolute movement. What makes the two planes differ, or gives them their consistency, are the different logics with which relative and absolute movement are expressed in relationships between sets and wholes. On one hand, Deleuze asks us to consider the mobile relation between wholes and sets as a relationship between differentiation and specification. Differentiation indicates a process where a whole both divides into objects and bodies as (actual-spatial) components of a set while reintegrating these components into a (virtual-temporal) whole that passes between them as continuous duration. Specification forms specific kinds of images as spatial sets by framing space in a given perspective and delimiting space as a measurable interval. The modulation between wholes and sets, on one hand, and between differentiation and specification, on the other, defines the two basic articulations of the movement-image as a mobile section of duration; it equally governs relations between frame, shot, and montage in the cinema. Moreover, to apprehend the Image as a mobile section of duration means comprehending it as a fundamentally deterritorializing figure whose relative and absolute dimensions are two perspectives on movement, inseparable yet quite different in their genetic relation to images. Movement is not a quality produced in the succession of images as spatial sections, but rather in the complex and indiscernible points of passage between framing as Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 478 the delimitation of a spatial set, the shot in relation to a movement it expresses, and montage as expressing a change in the whole. Here I can do no better than to reconsider arguments (though in a fundamentally new context) that I have already set out in Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Relative movement expresses relations between the parts of a set while absolute movement defines change in the state of the whole. Relative movement involves immobile segmentations of space, which includes changes within and between the parts of a set—sectionings of space as lines, planes, or volumes. Absolute movement, however, refers to the mobility of a whole that changes as an absolute temporal and relational quality. Deleuze explains that the shot always presents this bipolar movement, in relation to the sets in space where it introduces relative modifications between elements or sub-sets; in relation to a whole whose absolute change in duration it expresses. This whole is never content to be elliptical, nor narrative, though it can be. But the shot, of whatever kind, always has these two aspects: it presents modifications of relative position in a set or some sets. It expresses absolute changes in a whole or in the whole. The shot in general has one face turned towards the set, the modifications of whose parts it translates, and another face turned towards the whole, of which it expresses the--or at least a--change. Hence the situation of the shot, which can be defined abstractly as the intermediary between the framing of the set and the montage of the whole, sometimes tending towards the pole of framing, sometimes tending towards the pole of montage. The shot is movement considered from this dual point of view: the translation of the parts of a set which spreads out in space, the change of a whole which is transformed in duration.209 Deterritorialization is another name for the bipolar quality of the image in relation to movement. Relative movement presents a tendency toward closure and the formation of spatial sets. Alternatively, absolute movement is temporal, presenting a deterritorialization of the image: whatever tries to close becomes open; whatever falls into parts or sets will 209 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 19-20. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 479 return to a continuous whole; whatever congeals into space also unravels in time in a continual passage between the actual and the virtual. In this conception, framing is less a compositional act than an exercise in aspect seeing, which asks us to apprehend the continuous alternation between two dimensions of movement that differ in nature. Framing is thus less the action of selecting and stabilizing a visible space, or a mobile section of the world, than an apperception of relations that continually occur outside of the image (the French term is hors-champ, or out-of-field). This is how differentiation and specification relate to relative and absolute movement. Because relative movement is inherently spatial, the implied out-of-field is additive: the unfolding of space in camera movement; the succession of shots in editing; or the subsumption of shots or sequences into larger parts. In any case, movement is defined by physical space as content, a geometry of spatial segments that can be added, divided, or multiplied in various combinations. Here the out-of-field is by definition actual and actualizable: it serves continually to produce new visible spaces. But the Whole is neither spatial nor actual; it is temporal and virtual. It is the dimension of change itself in the form of becoming. The absolute aspect of the out-of-field relates to duration as the Open, which is no longer a set and does not belong to the order of the spatial and the actual. The movement-image only gives an indirect image of time, because time and change are always measured as the division or addition of spatial segments. The direct image of time attests to another power, however. "In one case,” Deleuze writes, “the out-of-field designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around; in the other case, the out-of field testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to 'insist' or 'subsist', a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogenous space and time" (Movement-Image 17). The concept of the out-of-field provides new criteria for defining the planes of consistency of cinematic movement and time images, and in turn, the images of thought they express. The cinematic movement-image presents an indirect image of time as exteriority or extensiveness in space; the cinematic time-image presents a direct image— anteriority of time as creative evolution, the pure form of time as change or Becoming. But how in fact can we understand logically that liminal zone where thought passes from Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 480 one to the other as an unending oscillation between the virtual and actual? The passage between sets and wholes asks us to consider framing as a bipolar movement of succession and expansion, horizontal and vertical montage. But there is also a logic that associates, combines, links, and disconnects sets. In Deleuze’s account, this logic is expressed in noosigns, whose different logics transform both the quality of sets and that of the out-offield as the expression of two powers of thought that differ in nature. Adapting terms from set theory in mathematics, Deleuze says that sets are defined in the cinematic movementimage by rational divisions (coupures rationnels), where the end of one set is continuous with the beginning of the one that follows. In this manner, images are linked or extended according to principals of association and contiguity, and associated images are integrated into a conceptual whole and differentiated into more extensive sets. Here the movementimage’s plane of consistency—and thus what defines its Idea, or the immanence of thought in the image—is organized fundamentally by two kinds of noosigns, one forming through a logic of association, the other through differentiation and integration. The plane of consistency is the surface of the map, noosigns are the coordinates that orient the movements of thought, and from plane to coordinates a mental cartography is drawn out. One noosign defines the linking of images by rational intervals into sequences forming an extendible world; the other assures “the integration of the sequences into a whole (selfawareness as internal representation), but also the differentiation of the whole into extended sequences (belief in the external world)” (Time-Image 277). Thus the potential infinity of movement-images is governed by a horizon of thought where the commensurability of the interval and the whole represent time indirectly as succession in space. The commensurability of interval and whole also presents the identity of image and concept in the movement-image as its particular expression of how thought is immanent in the image. Deleuze calls the logic of association through rational links the law of the image, since it governs the sequencing of images through principles of contiguity or similitude. Integration and differentiation are the law of the concept, since together they define the relations of the whole. Movement expresses change in the whole as the integration of images into extendible sets; differentiation expresses the division of the whole into sets whose movement passes between sequences and their extensions. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 481 Together, these two “laws” define the classical image of thought, where the plane of consistency of the cinematic movement-image is expressed as an open totality in movement whose will to power yields a model of the True as totalization. In this classical image we pass “naturally” from image to concept and back again; thought is commensurate with the dialectical expansion of the whole in a Hegelian vision of the rational unity of mind, world, and Image. To say that the whole is the outside implies a different organization of images. Appealing as it does to the non-representational and non-referential powers of the concept, call this the force of the simulacral. In its primary definition, this outside is the force of time, whose incommensurability with space changes the function of the interval. There is no longer a rational interval assuring continuity in space and succession in time. Rather, the force of time produces a serialism organized by irrational divisions [coupures irrationnels] that force dissociation rather than an association of images--the division functions as a limit where the interval dividing sets or segments becomes autonomous, irreducible, and singular. It is interstitial and no longer forms part of any segment as the beginning of one or the end of another. In the transition to the time-image—no matter how gradual, rare, or indistinct—the definition of movement changes, as does the relation between image and thought. The plane of consistency of the time-image is best characterized by seriality: irrational divisions assure the incommensurability of interval and whole. Succession gives way to series because the interstice is a dissociative force; it “strings” images together only as disconnected spaces. The rational interval is a spatial conjunction since it belongs simultaneously to the end of one set and the beginning of the one that follows, but the irrational interstice is not spatial, nor does it form part of an image. Rather, it presents the force that unhinges images and sounds into disconnected series, which can no longer form a whole. The Idea of a direct image of time is a paradoxical construction, then. What the interstice gives is a nonspatial perception—not space but force, the force of time as change interrupting repetition with difference and parceling succession into series. The plane of consistency of the time-image is marked by the “reign of incommensurables,” and in this manner the movements of thought, and the mental Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 482 cartographies that trace them, are fundamentally transformed and revalued. Time asserts its autonomy in the interstice with several consequences. Images, and images and sounds, are no longer conjoined by rational intervals, but rather “relinked on to irrational cuts” [réenchaînent sur coupures irrationnelles] (Time-Image 277); this is one of the noosigns of the time-image. Not that one image succeeds or is added to another. This montage construction might better be characterized as “differential,” since sequences are formed not through linear succession in space and chronological succession in time but through the incommensurability of space and time reasserted in every irrational division. By the same token, the movements of thought are no longer represented “in” the movement of images, through either the commensurability of intervals and wholes or the open totality in movement. There is neither the integration of sequences into a whole, which promotes the representation of thought as an internal self-representation (memory, dream, fantasy), nor differentiation of the whole into a diegesis or believable world. Rather, the whole is the “outside.” There is movement in the image, of course, which is given as an actual perception in space. But the differential relations “between” images and sounds are furrowed by a pure virtuality—the force of time. Time is always outside the image. It recedes from the image toward an absolute horizon, since it is incommensurable with space. Thought, too, “moves” only in incommensurable relations that recede toward an interiority deeper than the I can reach. For this reason, Deleuze writes, There are no longer grounds for talking about a real or possible extension capable of constituting an external world: we have ceased to believe in it, and the image is cut off from the external world. But the internalization or integration in a whole as consciousness of self has no less disappeared . . . . This is why thought, as power which has not always existed, is born from an outside more distant than any external world, and, as power which does not yet exist, confronts an inside, an unthinkable or unthought, deeper than any internal world. . . . [There] is no longer any movement of internalization or externalization, integration or differentiation, but a confrontation of an outside and an inside independent of distance, this thought outside itself and this un-thought within thought. (Time-Image 277-278, 362-363) Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 483 This is the second noosign of the time-image, where instead of commensurable relations between sets and wholes, or frame, shot, and montage, the interstice produces nontotalizable and asymmetrical relations between the inside and the outside. Logically, the outside is posited through any two incommensurable terms that come into contact independent of space. This is the logic of the irrational interval, which is not a spatial figure since it does not belong to any set nor can it be incorporated as part of a whole. By contrast, in the cinematic movement-image the outside is the referent: a space with which the image has both iconic and indexical relations and against which it measures itself. The value of the interval is measured by a spatial commensurability where the whole is the open—a web unfolding horizontally through relations of contiguity and continuity, and vertically through relations of differentiation followed by integration. Here the world is constituted as image, since the image can expand to encompass any world with all the subjects and objects in it. However, the time-image does not represent in this sense. As a simulacral force, it neither presents an imaginary world complete unto itself in which we are asked to believe, nor does it give us a transcendent perspective from which the world should be judged as false or true, lacking or full. The outside is not space or the actual, but rather the virtual, which acts “from the outside”—on another plane or in another dimension—as force or differentiation. Irrational divisions are not spatial, nor are they images in the usual sense. They open onto what is outside of space yet immanent to it: the anteriority of time to space, or virtuality, becoming, the fact of returning for that which differs. Virtuality, or difference in itself as force, defines time as the Outside. This force opens a line of variation in any image, sign, idea, or concept that attempts to express it. Only on this basis can the cinema express not an image of thought, but rather, what Deleuze calls for in Difference and Repetition--thought without image. The irrational division expresses the simulacral will to power of the direct image of time, where “thought has no other reason to function than its own birth, always the repetition of its own birth, secret and profound. . . . [The] image thus has as object the functioning of thought, and . . . the functioning of thought is also the real subject which brings us back to the images” (Time-Image 165). The irrational division relates here to one last problem--how and in what ways thought is determinable with respect to the form Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 484 or force of time--and thus to Deleuze’s innovative reading of Kant and Kant’s critique of the cogito. Kant's solution, according to Deleuze, is to define time as the immutable Form of everything that changes and moves. All that moves or changes is in time, but time itself neither changes nor moves. This does not mean that time is eternity. If so, we would be caught in the tautology of defining time by time. Rather it is "the form of that which is not eternal, the immutable form of change and movement."210 Time is change, or the fact that the universe never stops moving, changing, and evolving. Therefore, there are two perspectives on time: one which passively witnesses change without finality, the other which understands, through a transcendental synthesis, that what does not change is change itself. The form of time presumes a division of the subject into a passive Ego [Moi] that is in time and constantly changing, and an I [Je] that actively carries out a synthesis of time by continually dividing up the present, past, and future. When Deleuze asserts that "I am separated from myself by the form of time," he is arguing that the ego cannot constitute itself as a unique and active subject. Rather, it is a "passive ego which represents to itself only the activity of its own thought; that is to say, the I, as an Other which affects it" (Kant's Critical Philosophy ix). In Deleuze's reading of Kant, the form of time modulates continually between the synthetic act of the I and the ego to which this act is attributed such that . . . the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way round. That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox. Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and change. . . . Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual. The actual is always objective, but the virtual is subjective: it was initially the affect, that which we experience in time; then time itself, pure virtuality which divides itself in two as affector and affected, 'the affection of self by self' as definition of time. (Time-Image 82-83) 210 Kant's Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984) viii. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 485 This is how Kant undermines Descartes’s cogito, replacing it with a differential and simulacral force. Instead of thinking in the form of identity where I = I, Kant presents an I fractured by the multiple internal divisions of the passive syntheses of time. Descartes disingenuously conceals these divisions, as does most Western philosophy. While the cogito must assume it is present to itself in thought, what it predicates, the object of its thinking, must nevertheless always be divided from it by the form of time. This is why time cannot be known in itself. Once intuited it divides, branches, and slips away, the present falling back into the virtual space of memory, or giving way to a projected nondetermined future. This is the impersonal form of time where the cogito can only place itself as a kind of quantum uncertainty. I contemplate thought, but within my selfreflection thought changes and keeps on changing; its movements are non-localizable. Is my thought in the ego or the I? It is, rather, in the division that constitutes them both in the impersonal form of time.211 211 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues more thoroughly that Descartes's cogito assumes two logical values defined as the determination ("I think") of an undetermined existence ("I am because in order to think I must exist"). Kant ripostes in the following way: while determination obviously implies something undetermined, Descartes fails to explain how or why being should be determinable by the act of thinking. Therefore, Kant's critique of Descartes involves the exposition of a third logical value: time is the form through which undetermined existence is determinable by the "I think." "The consequences of this," write Deleuze, "are extreme: my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject appearing within time. As a result, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the 'I think' cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought—its own intelligence, that by virtue of which it can say I—being exercised in it and upon it but not by it. Here begins a long and inexhaustible story: I is an other, or the paradox of inner sense. The activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than initiates it, and which lives it like an Other within itself. To 'I think' and 'I am' must be added the self—that is, the passive position (what Kant calls the receptivity of intuition); to the determination and the undetermined must be added the form of the determinable, namely time. Nor is 'add' entirely the right word here, since it is rather a matter of establishing the difference and interiorising it within being and thought. It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. In this form it is the correlate of the passive self which appears in time. Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 486 This division in the subject has profound epistemological consequences represented by what Deleuze calls the impower of thought [l’impouvoir de la pensée]. Kant considered judgment as a power [Kraft], the ability to do work or to prepare the way for a synthesis, rather than as a mental faculty or capability [Vermögen]. If the direct image of time is figured in the form of temporal paradox, the True can no longer be thought under the forms of the changeless, the self-identical, or the self-same. What used to be called the “laws” of thought (the principles of identity, of contradiction, and of the excluded middle) are effectively overthrown. Kant shrunk away from the consequences of his discovery in making judgment teleological. Later Nietzsche seized the opportunity. If the forms of truth are temporal, then we are freed from the reactive or passive position of "discovering" a pre-existing truth. Instead, we are active and creative, inventing our world as we move through it. What Deleuze finds so attractive in the paradoxes of time is simultaneously Kantian and critical, and Nietzschean and inventive. What is most true and most immutable is that thought in relation to time is always changing. If we are willing to see truth in its historical and embattled forms, we are in the position of actively willing it. The Kantian intuition of a cogito divided from itself by the impersonal form of time is also a picture of the time-image’s expression of non-totalizable and asymmetrical relations between the inside and the outside. If there is no self-identical subject who could speak for the image or interpret it as whole, if the complexity of the image itself can neither be reduced nor represented as a whole that could be contained in memory, then what does the time-image present in sensation? Only time, the impersonal form of time that divides the ego from the I and disjoins all forms of identity, in the subject or in the image, as a force of becoming. This is the ineluctable return of that which differs— difference in itself that returns from beyond any absolute horizon or from deeper than any interiority. the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution" (Difference and Repetition 86). Also see the "Analytic of Concepts" in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, especially the note to §25 (169). See also Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of Kant’s critique of Descartes in What Is Philosophy? 29-32. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 487 Here the psychological or dialectical automaton of the classical image of thought, is displaced by a spiritual automaton, which is no longer an inferential machine where thoughts are deduced one from the other, or a physical force that renders thought identical with an image or Image. What the time-image contributes to the history of thought then is a powerlessness—in fact, a dispossession of thought in relation to the image—that is equivalent to the division of the subject by the pure form of time. The idea of movement is again subtly transformed here. Dispossession becomes a primary force rather than an effect, separate from a totality that would judge it as a simple lack. Cinema’s harshest enemies have always disparaged this force in the image. Nonetheless, this is a power in the philosophical sense, where cinema confronts us with the highest problem. Cinema’s most profound task is to unveil “this difficulty of being, this powerlessness at the heart of thought” (Time-Image 166). Deleuze’s concept of the impower of thought is deeply influenced by Maurice Blanchot’s reading of Antonin Artaud in Le Livre à venir. In Blanchot’s reading, Artaud’s idea is that cinema must rejoin the brain’s most innermost reality. But this reality is not dialectical nor is it a whole, as Eisenstein’s believes, but rather a crack, a fissure, or a splitting. The cinema does not have the power to make us think the whole. Instead, it is a dissociative force producing a “figure of nothingness” or a “hole in appearances.” Artaud’s dissociative force is an un-linking of images, of images in relation to sound, of bodies in relation to voice, and of thought in relation to image. “In short,” Deleuze writes, “it is the totality of cinema-thought relations that Artaud overturns: on the one hand there is no longer a whole thinkable through montage, on the other hand there is no longer an internal monologue utterable through image. . . . [If] it is true that thought depends on a shock which gives birth to it . . ., it can only think one thing, the fact that we are not yet thinking, the powerlessness to think the whole and to think oneself, thought which is always fossilized, dislocated, collapsed. A being of thought which is always to come . . .” (Time-Image 167). This dissociative force is “a little time in the pure state,” the impersonal form of time splitting the present in dissymmetrical jets between the past and future, whose noosigns are directed by the interstice or irrational division. Neither space nor the perception of space can show us this force in the image. Instead, we encounter a Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 488 time anterior to space: an emptiness, a pure virtuality rendered by the incommensurability of perception in space and thought in time. This is the highest power of the false that cinema can express. Blanchot articulates most clearly a Heideggerianism that expresses the spiritual automaton of the time-image. What forces us to think is the impower of thought, emptiness, the nonpresence of a whole that could be thought. Here we return to an earlier theme--of what inextricably unites plane and concepts, yet also separates them as the motor of thought’s movements. The plane of immanence is to the concept as the unthought in thought, thought’s energeia and blindspot, what moves or motivates its ceaseless search yet can never grant it calm harbor. The unthought within thought is the molten bedrock of every plane, the molecular and energetic movements trembling every substance. There is a fracture or division within thought that separates it from itself and holds it open, such that it will find no rest within any claim of identity, representation, or final reason. Following Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari call this immanence as the intimacy of the Outside--“an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world” (What is Philosophy? 59)-neither object nor subject, but the continuous enfolding of one by the other as expressions of a single substance. “Perhaps this is the supreme act of philosophy,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not-internal inside--that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought . . . .” (59-60). If the modern image of thought is fueled less by the model of the True than by the powers of the false or the impowers of thought, the question arises of how to evaluate a philosophy and its attendant concepts? If it were possible, evaluating planes of immanence would require attention to something like a philosophical environmentalism-the air one breathes, the water one drinks, the quality of the earth one stands upon. However, to experience the plane without concepts would incur a sort of philosophical madness, where one feels the earth’s rotation and the vibrations of matter or flashes of energy rather than enjoying the stability, no matter how illusory, of a fixed perspective. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 489 And so how does one yield a perspective, experience crisis, or become homeless on a plane of immanence, and so commence to construct a philosophy? An image of thought, or better, thought without image, is neither home nor harbor, but rather emerges in points of crisis and moments of anxiety and doubt. Philosophy is not a quest for certainty, but rather, through the creation of concepts, the improvisation and perfection of necessary navigational instruments because the movements of thought always submit us to a certain violence with unpredictable changes of direction, or moments of delusion and unconsciousness where we wake to find ourselves on strange still undiscovered islands. Unlike science, allied to a portrait of referential truth whose face emerges through the accumulation of data and the acquisition of instruments of ever greater resolution, creation in philosophy is inspired by a variety of different crises, many of which were recognized by Wittgenstein: self-doubt marked by the incessant acknowledgment of error, agitation inspired by the sudden recognition that one is drowning in the calm waters of illusion or self-delusion, or the daily confrontation with human folly. In each case, one realizes that philosophy has relinquished its critical force to give itself over to the forces of transcendence or lassitude--ideology, habit, religion, nihilism, or despair. That the plane of immanence is characterized by infinite movement means that the relationship of thought to truth is full of ambiguity and mobile points of perspective. For this reason, what Deleuze and Guattari call the modern image of thought embraces a certain Nietzscheanism where philosophy is guided less by the will to truth than by an image of creation or self-creation. Call this the performativity of philosophy, but also a pragmatism in the sense that Richard Rorty avers that truth is always contextual, created and expressed from a singular plane of immanence that frames or sets the horizon for its presuppositions through a web of positive and negative features, welcoming certain components, problems, or questions and blocking others. Perhaps it is only after we have moved to another plane or projected a new context that we can evaluate what positive features have enabled thought to move forward, and which negative ones have detoured it into illusion or error (acknowledging here that the criteria and conditions of error are set by the plane and context as well), or blocked it outright. Nor is there a simple or Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 490 unambiguous subject of truth in the modern image of thought. In place of the will to truth, Deleuze and Guattari write, “thought constitutes a simple ‘possibility’ of thinking without yet defining a thinker ‘capable’ of it and able to say ‘I’” (What is Philosophy? 54-55). Neither a deictic marker nor point of enunciation, but rather a power or potential for thought on a pre-subjective plane, an empty space but not a void, waiting for concepts to occupy it. And there are further hazards for our habitual image of a subject of knowledge, and they are intrinsic to our powers of thinking. Within the infinite movements of the plane of immanence, the possibility of having and expressing thought appear like eddies or pools out of whose regular rhythms and even contours concepts emerge as intensive, ordered series. But at any moment these pools may dissolve in new and powerful currents or be overwhelmed by tidal swells. Here we find an image common to Deleuze, Heidegger, or Blanchot where our powers of thinking are both enabled and overwhelmed by violence or shock, which at one and the same time give us the possibility of having and expressing thoughts, but which also undermine and disperse our power to say “I” and return us to the presubjective plane of infinite movements. After the acknowledgment that truth is created, and that thought is conditioned as presubjective potential on a plane of immanence before becoming the expression of an Idea or the acquisition of a concept, there still remains the impower or incapacity of thought, confronting us with the fact that we are still not yet thinking. To have thoughts, or to keep thought moving beyond the constraining rhythms of habit or stupidity, while remaining open and receptive to the pure virtuality of the Event, therefore requires a constant confrontation with a violence, of the unthought within thought that blocks it or leads it to madness, where thought advances only in fits and starts with cries and stuttering. Here the task of the work of art is to open a line of flight that passes from the actual to the virtual by interrupting repetition with difference. Simulacra do not represent. Thought cannot confirm itself in an initiating image there. Rather, it forces us to think, if we are able, through the construction of Events. Events are immanent to every moment of time’s passing yet remain both outside and in between the passage of time. Simulacra are better understood as heterocosmic forces rather than utopian worlds. Between each Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 491 measure of time there is an infinite movement, so many possible worlds and immanent modes of existence, that we must recover from time’s passing. The noosigns of the timeimage are time’s concepts in this respect. Time’s direct image is not time in itself, but rather the force of virtuality and becoming, or what remains both outside of, yet in reserve and immanent to, our contemporary modes of existence. The power of the Image is to express force, or the play of forces both flowing over and overflowing every figure or diagram, returning to us a sense of non-stratified life. The powers of becoming immanent to art also mean that there is a profound ethical component to every creative act, for every creative act is also a remapping of the world, a remaking of the world differently as well as an agencement creating new possibilities of Being. Interpretation and evaluation are not the only acts founding a philosophy of the art and humanities--there is also creation and experimentation. Every creative act, whether of art or the interpretation and evaluation of art, begins in a protest against routine, habit, and repetition, in dissatisfaction with a world as lived and in the present means for giving expression to existence. The creation or invention of a style, then, is always a deformation or deviation in the norms of expression, “creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation, and which makes standard language stammer, tremble, cry out, or even sing-this is the style or ‘tone,’ the language of sensations, or a foreign language within language that summons forth a people to come . . . . The [artist] twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes and tears it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions, the affect from affections, and sensation from opinion--in view, one hopes, of the still missing people” (What is Philosophy?176, 166-167). Creation is thus fundamentally a heterocosmic force. Artists do not create for a community or a public; in the becoming of creative acts, they also create new powers of becoming, new possible modes of existence, for themselves and for that virtual community. The work of art is the midwife of a coming community, with no guarantees, of course, that a people will ever answer the call. If works of art are monuments, in Deleuze’s sense, events that conserve or preserve sensations in a durée no matter how long or short, they must interrupt or overflow repetition, not by reinvoking the past but by amplifying attentiveness to the infinite reserve of new becomings in the present, confiding Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 492 “to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed suffering of men and women, their re-created protestations, their constantly renewed struggle. Will this all be in vain because suffering is eternal and revolutions do not survive their victory? . . . . The victory of a revolution is immanent and consists in the new bonds it installs between people, even if these bonds last no longer than the revolution’s fused material and quickly give way to division and betrayal” (What is Philosophy?176-177). Philosophy and art share powers of becoming in ways that beg comparisons between conceptual personae and aesthetic figures. What is Philosophy? is itself a testament to an inherent aesthetic dimension in philosophy, of philosophical style modeled in spatial and temporal figures as well as the figural force of language. And concepts take form, no doubt, in relation to Ideas and ways of seeing and apprehending embodied in aesthetic figures. The networks of passage between philosophy and art, and art and philosophy, are a closely interwoven skein, yet Deleuze insists that their powers of becoming are distinct. Sensory becoming defines acts of becoming-other, where one thing becomes another in series of qualitative differentiations and associations; conceptual becoming is an act where the ordinary event feigns or camouflages its powers. The event that lies dormant, the sleeping giant in every passing present, is a heterogeneity embodied in an absolute form, while sensation is an alterity engaged in expressive matter. If and when art expresses or sustains a sensory event, it engages the virtual in ways distinct from the absolute Event. Art does not actualize the Event, but rather incorporates or incarnates it--it gives the Event flesh or makes of it a world. The Event in itself is the reality of the virtual, of the deepest forms of time as eternal recurrence and of nature as a universal Whole in a state of continuous becoming--a thought of time and of change before expression, reference, or sensory apprehension. Aesthetic universes, however, are reserves of the possible, the alternative, or the undetermined event. In this respect, they are deeply ethical as preserves of non-determined choice. Through art we reassert not only the possibility of a new mode of existence, but also experience the multiplicity of possible worlds, of divagations, forking paths, and unthought alternatives laying dormant in our present perception and lived duration. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 493 Here, without any reference to the earlier books, What is Philosophy? gives one of the best and most thought-provoking accounts of the time-image in its purest form. Any measurable succession in a state of affairs can be expressed as a suite of instants, like measured steps following one from the other, and these steps may be expressed in a function. To the extent that the cinematic movement-image is formed from an idea of time as empirical succession, and thus forms an image of time as a suite of instants in space, it is expressed as the functional equivalent of science’s quantitative view of time. But what occurs between each step, no matter how small or rapid, is a time or duration that no process of actualization can completely absorb. This is why Deleuze and Guattari characterize the virtual as an “entre-temps,” or between-time. This is something that art or philosophy can apprehend better than science. The entire project of Deleuze’s cinema books unfolds from this fundamental intuition of two dimensions of time, though one deeper, more profound than the other. One sort of time unfolds in a succession of actualized, spatial instants, but the other expresses a peculiar kind of virtuality--that of becoming, or the infinite reserve of non-determined change. This distinction between the movement-image and the time-image is a direct expression of the relation between time and entre-temps. This is not an allegory or example, homology or metaphor, but rather pure expression actualized in different though related forms--the percepts and affects of art, the concepts of philosophy. Filmic expression does not exemplify concepts or provide examples for philosophy; as artful expression it is philosophy, or rather, a becomingphilosophy tending toward conceptual formation. As expression, one of art’s many happy occupations is to be a friend to philosophy, and to aid in philosophical becoming. The cinema books do not present a theory of cinema, where philosophy serves to form a new context, framework, or vocabulary for explaining cinema, but rather, they give expression to an active philosophy immanent to the Image--a philosophy of the Image given in or through images. Spiritual automata are thus the expression of a power, both a power of thinking and of a preconceptual subject (conceptual persona) capable (or not) of having thoughts. And this is why Deleuze and Guattari write that “it is possible that the problem now concerns the one who believes in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 494 possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks. It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today.” (What Is Philosophy? 74-75). That thinker within me that is the unthought of my thought is also a power of transformation, indeed the power to transform life by revealing new lines of variation in our current ways of thinking and modes of existence. To believe again in life is to believe again in the transformative powers of life and the possibility of creating new modes of existence. However, we could neither invent nor choose new modes of existence if the force of time as eternal recurrence, becoming or change, did not undermine identity with difference. Differentiation maintains an opening to the future from which we derive our powers to affect life and to be affected by it. The goal of the direct time-image and other forms of art, whether successful or not, is to awaken these powers in us. To become-other, we need an image to awake the other in us as what yet remains unthought. There is no higher task for philosophy, or art. 35. The world, time I want to fix my mind on what I mean by absolute or ethical value. And there, in my case, it always happens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to me which therefore is, in a sense, my experience par excellence. . . . I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as "how extraordinary that anything should exist" or "how extraordinary that the world should exist.” --Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics” The figural force of the concept is complimented by an ethical component wherein the multiplicity of the concept as a fragmentary open whole raises complex questions of time and of our relations with the Other. If Kant’s critique of the cogito discovers that “I is an other,” that the cogito is incapable of self-representation apart form its internal division by Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 495 the pure form of time, then another important question or problem presents itself. The impower of thought may be considered a positive and creative force, but it also initiates moments of profound ethical crisis that potentially shatter our adherence to habitual modes of existence. In the relation of Concept to Image, how do we negotiate these crises, which are less epistemological than ethical? Through the concept, we seek relief from a mental chaos or homelessness that continually threatens, stalks, or tries to reabsorb it. There is a kind of narration or dramaturgy of the concept that emerges in scenes of puzzlement, conflict, terror, anxiety, or surprise. The components of this drama are drawn from worlds both actual and possible. One begins from a field of experience taken to be a real world, not from the standpoint of a subject, but rather as a simple condition of existence and designation-there is or that is. But from within this simple field of experience, which may be the unacknowledged background of routine or quotidian experience, difference may erupt with sudden violence. The Other that emerges to shatter this calm surface is neither a subject nor an object, but rather the apprehension of a possible world, terrifying because unknown and unexpected. This possible world is virtual, which does not make it unreal, but rather more like something on the way to actualization, a potentiality for existence seeking expression: “The Other,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “is, first of all, this existence of a possible world” (What is Philosophy? 17, 22). And this possible world is also a self-positing reality with its own terms of existence conditioned by its virtuality as the expression of an Event, the impowers of thought, or contact with an Outside that cannot be thought; this is ““a vital relation with the Other that one had thought excluded from pure thought. . . .” (4, 9). Wittgenstein and Deleuze: no two philosophers could be farther apart in style. Yet there is a profound connection that runs between them in an idea of restlessness and homelessness as the condition of thought, and that what matters most to philosophy can only be shown, not possessed or expressed. And if it could be expressed, it is likely to be misunderstood. At the same time, what makes the other alien to me, or the world strange to me, also presents the possibility of what Charles Taylor calls transforming myself under a new concept. Here Deleuze emits a phrase that might come equally from Wittgenstein Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 496 or Taylor: “we speak the same language, and yet I do not understand you” (What is Philosophy? 110). In turn, one of the characteristic philosophical acts is selfestrangement, and also to invite one’s language to become infected or deflected and transformed by alien vocabularies. When philosophy takes on the appearance of “nonsense,” whether in Wittgenstein’s sense or Deleuze’s, this is often the sign of the emergence of a new style, syntax, or concept, which may be taken as unfathomable or perplexing. A common element of all of the language games of theory has been an initiating experience of disorientation, conflict, and existential crisis. It may yet be that the will to theory is expressed always as a problem--of a condition, world, or existence that has become, in all senses of the term, problematic. (Perhaps what so dismayed Herder, Kant, or Hegel in the genre of German aesthetic “theories” exemplified by Sulzer, Riedel, and others was the orderliness and calm of their pedagogy, their blissful ignorance of the violence of thought that philosophy contends with?) But philosophy does not respond by offering concepts as solutions to a problem, for philosophical problems are never completely resolved, but rather only expressed in new ways. This is another way of thinking of theory as an intermediate term or process--it always in the middle or in the midst of becoming--and at the same time, the laying out of a concept through its components is something like surveying a terrain and laying out guide markers to orient thought, to keep it moving in certain directions, rather than finding a point of rest. Deleuze and Guattari characterize the apprehension of a possible world as a face surging out of the darkness and the mental chaos of thought. But is it not better characterized, more generally and simply, as an Image? All I have been trying to say in the previous pages is that for all of its abstraction, Deleuze’s characterization of the image in the cinema books exemplifies conceptual creation in often striking ways. The borders between philosophy and art are extremely porous in that the movement and creation of concepts is immanent to the image and its creativeness, and not something separate. If Deleuze sees conceptual creation in the movement and time-images, this is not simple analogy. Rather, in turning to cinema Deleuze wants to show the ways in which conceptual creation is immanent to image and movement in all their luminescence and materiality, but at the same time, the dramaturgy of the concept, and the powerlessness of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 497 thought to which conceptual creation responds, is also the expression of an ethical desire to create new modes of existence. Every concept takes form, then, in expressions that sketch an image of a possible world. (This assertion is related to Wittgenstein’s version of the limits of language, and of moving forward in relation to those limits in recognizing the capacity of language for showing and designating, or of moving in series from one “picture” to another as those pictures draw us to them, or fail us.) The emergence of the Other, or of the Image, always assumes as its precondition the determination of a sensate world, an actual world of possible experience given in perceptions, behaviors, and forces both active and reactive. The Other is a possible world emerging in an Image capable of expressing it, through the medium, as it were, of a language that could give form and contour to that Image while establishing the movement and links that enable it to form expressions by connecting to other images. The three fundamental components of the concept, then, are a possible world, a sensible Figure or image, and actual language or expression. Within and across all three components there is a constant passage between the actual and the virtual, the existent and the possible, commensurate with the concept’s figurability, multiplicity, openness, and fragmentation, as well as a kind of sensation of the concept from multiple temporal perspectives: first, the apprehension of a future anterior as potential or possibility; second, a contour or figure that gives a present Image to that future in terms of its forms, powers, and possibilities of expression; and finally, a real or actual language through which the concept is expressed and into which it passes before returning to renew itself. The problem raised here is how to evaluate the ethical powers of the Image? At the beginning of the Epilogue to his Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer asks: “What is the good of film experience?”212 The phrasing of the question clarifies what it means to bring ethics and cinema together as a philosophical problem. Kracauer does not want to know if a particular film or filmmaker is “ethical,” nor is the question the basis for making moral judgments of art works and their makers. His asks, rather, how do we evaluate our 212 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960) 285. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 498 experience of the movies, meaning in what ways do the movies offer themselves as a medium for an interrogation of our selves, of our relationship to the world and to other beings? In other words, how do moving images and other forms of art solicit and sustain the possibility of ethical thought? Aesthetics and ethics do not make an obvious pairing, much less film and moral reasoning. In 1960 Kracauer is among the first to offer an explicitly ethical question to film theory. In so doing, he places the study of film along some of the most ancient lines of philosophical reasoning, which bring us back around to arguments with which I began my elegy for theory. From at least the 4th century B.C., the activity of philosophy has been characterized by two fundamental questions: How do I know, and how shall I live? The latter is the most self-evidently ethical question. Yet how can the quality of one’s thought be separated from the choice of a mode of existence? Both questions demand a reflexive examination of self, in its possibility of knowing itself and others, and in its openness to change or not. What links philosophy today to its most ancient origins are the intertwining projects of evaluating our styles of knowing, and examining our modes of existence and their possibilities of transformation. In this way, an ethics is distinct from the usual sense of morality. Morals refer ordinarily to a transcendental system of values to which we conform, or against which we are found lacking. An ethics is an immanent set of reasoned choices. In ethical expression, we evaluate our current mode of existence, seeking to expand, change, or abandon it in the effort to achieve another way of living and another form of community. Inspiring an individual to choose a mode of existence embodied in a community, real or imagined, philosophy thus entails the expression and justification of this existential choice and its representation of the world. Therefore, philosophein is, simultaneously, expression and existential choice--the medium and idiom of a life. Gilles Deleuze never devoted a book exclusively to ethics. Yet the two philosophers with whom he felt the closest allegiances, Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche, are importantly connected to the history of moral reasoning, and his books and repeated references to these philosophers mark his frequent examination of ethical Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 499 questions. Deleuze’s most provocative comments on ethics, however, appear late in his work, specifically in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image.213 Here an interesting question detours our path. Why is film so important as the companion or exemplification for ethical self-examination? Indeed, the idea that art should inspire ethical inquiry marks the greatest distance between ourselves and the philosopher-citizens of Periclean Athens. At the same time, it is also one of the clearest signposts of philosophical modernity. In 20th century philosophy, especially in its AngloAmerican and analytic incarnations, ethics has taken a back seat, indeed has been sent to the back of the bus by the more strident emphasis on logic and epistemology, an attitude forcefully summarized in Quine’s insistence that the philosophy of science is philosophy enough. The turn to film as an important site of ethical interrogation is thus doubly curious. And if there is something that can be called film philosophy today, moral reasoning persists as one of its most powerful, defining activities. Undoubtedly, this is due to the influence of Stanley Cavell as the contemporary philosopher most centrally concerned with the problem of ethics in film and philosophy, above all through his examination of philosophical responses to the dilemmas of skepticism and his characterization of an Emersonian moral perfectionism. However, in Cavell’s Emersonian ethics there are also curious and powerful echoes with Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzschean and Bergsonian perspectives on cinema, wherein concepts of movement and time are related as the expression of belief in the world and its powers of transformation. This may appear to be an odd couple. But I am haunted by the idea of a dialogue, as if in a real conversation but between partners who seem only dimly aware of one another, where Deleuze’s cinema books, published in 1983 and 1985, respond to Cavell’s The World Viewed (1971) and Pursuits of Happiness (1981), and where Contesting Tears (1996) and Cities of Words (2004) echo some of the most provocative thinking in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image. 213 The ethical arguments of especially Cinema 2 are also taken up in interesting ways in What is Philosophy? I comment further on this relation in the concluding chapter of Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine 194-210. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 500 Both space and time are lacking here to develop all the implications of this missed philosophical friendship. It is worth noting, however, that one important bridge between Deleuze and Cavell’s thought on cinema and moral reasoning is their mutual interest in Nietzsche. Another is their original way of asking ethical questions in ontological contexts. Though Cavell uses the word frequently and Deleuze rarely, both evaluate ontology as a particular approach to Being. This is not the being or identity of film or what identifies film as art, but rather the ways of being that art provokes in us--or more deeply, how film and other forms of art express for us or return to us our past, current, and future states of being. Also, in both philosophers the ethical relation is inseparable from our relationship to thought. For how we think, and whether we sustain a relation to thought or not, is bound up with our choices of a mode of existence and our relations with others and to the world. There is also an important contrast with Cavell. Part of the difficulty of Deleuze’s thought has to do with his choice to ignore or circumvent the dilemmas of skepticism and its characterizations of the self in relation to being, the world, and to others. These are central features of the philosophical culture most familiar to us, and it is disarming to consider seriously a thinker for whom the great difficulties of relating subject and object seem to have been completely dispelled or overcome. Indeed, throughout his career Deleuze turned consistently to philosophers for whom the division of the thinking subject from the world was ontologically irrelevant; hence, his recovery of a path alternative to Descartes leading from Spinoza and Nietzsche to Henri Bergson. In Deleuze the fundamental ethical choice is to believe in this world and its powers of transformation. How does his avoidance or circumvention of the history of skepticism and Cartesian rationalism inform this question? Although Deleuze was not known for his love of philosophical systems, Alberto Gualandi has astutely recognized his commitment to two principles, which may be considered the basis of his ethics as well as his more general philosophy. The first, as we have already seen, is Spinoza’s pure ontology, or doctrine of the univocity of Being. For Spinoza, there is no division between humanity and nature, but only one absolute and unique substance for all that exists--all attributes and identities are only different manners of being for this substance, or different modalities Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 501 of its expressiveness. As Gualandi explains, “the principle of univocal Being affirms the absolute immanence of thought in the world as it exists, as well as the categorical refusal of any form of thought transcending the Being of things in whatever form of the supersensible. For Deleuze as well as Spinoza, the intuition of the univocity of being is the highest intellectual expression of love for all that exists.”214 This doctrine of a single expressive substance inspires a first ethical principle: the choice to believe in this world, the world in which we exist now, alive and changing, and not some transcendent or ideal world. This is also an affirmation of thought’s relation to the world, as the movements of thought in relation to those of matter differ only in their ways of expressing a common being or substance. The second principle is that of Becoming, wherein the univocity of Being is characterized by its relation to movement, time, and change. Here substance is connected to force as self-differentiation, producing a universe of continual metamorphosis characterized by Bergson as creative evolution. Becoming is the principle of time as force, and time is the expressive form of change: the fact that the universe never stops moving, changing, and evolving, and that no static picture could ever be adequate to this flux of universal self-differentiation. In this, time is something like a metaphysical constant in Deleuze. The highest expression of this force is not Kantian, however, but what Nietzsche called eternal recurrence. Deleuze offers an original reading of the concept of eternal recurrence. In fact, it is the key element of his philosophy of difference, as well as his ethics, linking the univocity of Being and the force of Becoming. In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze asks, “What is the being of that which becomes, of that which neither starts nor finishes becoming? Returning is the being of that which becomes.”215 What does Being speak of in one voice? It does not sing of identity, but rather of recurrence as change and differentiation, of a “returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one 214 Deleuze (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998) 18-19; my translation. Also see, Alain Badiou’s Deleuze: La clameur de l’Être (Paris: Hachette, 1997). 215 Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) 48. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 502 thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs” (48). What returns eternally is not the identity of the same, but the force of difference or differentiation. What Being speaks of recurrently is difference from itself. The ethical stance in the cinema books is fundamentally Nietzschean. (The ontological passes through Spinoza and Bergson.) Deleuze characterizes a Nietzschean ethics as encompassing two related activities, which are now familiar to us: interpretation and evaluation. “To interpret,” Deleuze wrote earlier, “is to determine the force which gives sense to a thing. To evaluate is to determine the will to power which gives value to a thing” (Nietzsche 54). “Interpretation” would relate here to Deleuze’s theory of film semiotics, to the logical relations between sets and wholes, and to the question of noosigns and spiritual automata. It also relates back, of course, to his idea of art as preconceptual expression. In turn, evaluation is central to the ethical project of Deleuze’s cinema books. What philosophy must evaluate in any expression, including aesthetic expression, are its possibilities for life and experimentation in life. This is another important link between Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Bergson in Deleuze’s account. Both Spinoza and Nietzsche distinguish between morality and ethics. Morality involves sets of constraining rules that judge actions and intentions against transcendent or universal values. An ethics evaluates expression according to the immanent mode of existence or possibilities of life it implies. The ethical choice for Deleuze, then, is whether the powers of change are affirmed and harnessed in ways that value life and its openness to change, or whether we disparage life in this world in fealty to moral absolutes. Do we affirm life and remain open to its powers of continuous, qualitative self-transformation, or do maintain an image of thought whose movements are stopped or frozen? To evaluate modes of existence--in which we choose to believe, or on which we place our bets--does not mean comparing them qualitatively or judging them with respect to abstract values or criteria. Criteria for evaluation must remain immanent to the life examined, with respect to its own possibilities for producing new movements or intensities. “A mode of existence is good or bad,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “noble or Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 503 vulgar, complete or empty, independently of Good and Evil or any transcendent value: there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life” (What is Philosophy? 74). To evaluate is to ask: What mode of existence is willed in a given expression? One must go beyond the transcendent moral opposition of good and evil, but this does not mean relinquishing judgments of good and bad as ethical distinctions. Life should not be judged. But the will to power that informs or characterizes a mode of existence may be evaluated as good or bad, noble or base. From Nietzsche’s vitalist perspective, all is a question of force, and ethics involves characterizing forces by evaluating the qualities of their will to power. For example, there are fatigued or exhausted forces that can be quantitatively powerful, but which no longer know how to transform themselves through the variations they can affect or receive. Deleuze finds this will to power often expressed in the films of Orson Welles-Nietzschean filmmaker par excellence--where characters such as Bannister in Lady from Shanghai or Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil are the bodily expressions of a certain impotence: “that is, that precise point where the ‘will to power’ is nothing but a will-todominate, a being for death, which thirsts for its own death, as long as it can pass through that of others” (Time-Image 140, 183). Here force finds a center that coincides with death. These are characters who only know how to destroy or kill, before destroying themselves. This is the mode of existence of ressentiment, characteristic of the men of vengeance. And no matter how great the forces these characters exercise or represent, they are exhausted and incapable of transformation. This spirit of revenge is often paired in Welles’ films with a blind will to truth as transcendent moral judgment. Thus Quinlan is paired with Vargas, or Iago with Othello. The latter are “truthful men” who judge life in the name of higher values: They . . . take themselves to be higher men; these are higher men who claim to judge life by their own standards, by their own authority. But is this not the same spirit of revenge in two forms: Vargas, the truthful man who invokes the laws for judging; but also his double, Quinlan, who gives himself the right to judge without law; Othello, the man of duty and virtue, but also his double, Iago, who takes revenge by nature and perversion? This is what Nietzsche called the stages of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 504 nihilism, the spirit of revenge embodied in various figures. Behind the truthful man, who judges life from the perspective of supposedly higher values, there is the sick man, ‘the man sick with himself’, who judges life from the perspective of his sickness, his degeneration and his exhaustion. And this is perhaps better than the truthful man, because a life of sickness is still life, it contrasts life with death, rather than contrasting it with ‘higher values’ . . . Nietzsche said: behind the truthful man, who judges life, there is the sick man, sick of life itself. . . . The first is an idiot and the second is a bastard. They are, however, complementary as two figures of nihilism, two figures of the will to power.” (Time-Image 140-141, 184) Ethics, however, is not a question of passing judgment on these figures as if from some higher moral ground. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze (and Welles) want to do away with the system of judgment to evaluate, rather, modes of existence in their relation to life. “[It] is not a matter of judging life in the name of a higher authority,” Deleuze writes, “which would be the good, the true; it is a matter, on the contrary, of evaluating every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the life which they involve. Affect as immanent evaluation, instead of judgment as transcendent value . . . .” (TimeImage 141). Going “beyond good and evil” does not mean renouncing ideas of good and bad, or in Nietzsche’s parlance, noble and base. What is base is an exhausted, descendent, and degenerating life, especially when it seeks to propagate itself. But the noble is expressed in a blossoming, ascendant life, capable of transforming itself in cooperation with the forces it encounters, composing with them an ever-growing power, “always increasing the power to live, always opening new ‘possibilities’” (Time-Image 141). There is no more “truth” in one life than the other: there is only becoming, descendant or ascendant, and life’s becoming is the power of the false, a noble will to power. “False” here is not opposed to the “true,” but rather allied to an aesthetic or artistic will, the will to create. The base will to power is the degenerative becoming of an exhausted life with its destructive and dominating will. But the noble will to power is characterized by a certain generosity and openness; it is an artistic will, the becoming of an ascendant life that creates new possibilities and experiments with new modes of existence. If becoming is Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 505 the power of the false, then the good, the generous, or the noble is what raises the false to its highest creative or transformative powers--a becoming-artist. If there is exhaustion in this aesthetic life, it is put in service to what is reborn from life through metamorphosis and creation. “It makes of becoming a protean Being,” Deleuze writes, “rather than hastening it, from the height of a uniform and fixed identity, towards non-being. These are two states of life, opposed at the heart of an immanent becoming, and not an authority that would pose itself as superior to becoming in order to judge or dominate life, thus exhausting it. What Welles sees in Falstaff and Don Quixote is the ‘goodness’ of life in itself, a strange goodness that carries the living toward creation. It is in this sense that one can speak of an authentic or spontaneous Nietzscheanism in Welles” (Time-Image 142, 185-186). The Nietzschean moral universe defines an ontology of descent and ascent, destruction and creation, a base will to power fueled by ressentiment and the will to truth, and a creative or artistic will that affirms life and its powers of transformation while seeking out possibilities for enhancing these powers and this life. Between these two wills lies the deepest ethical problem: the problem of choosing a mode of existence defined by the possibility of choice.216 The problem of the choice of a mode of existence first occurs in the pages of Cinema 1: the Movement-Image devoted to “lyrical abstraction,” a style found principally in the films of Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer. Deleuze is writing here, first, of the qualities and powers of affect in the image, especially in the treatment of light. This affection-image is distinguished from other types of cinematic movement-images through its virtuality or potentiality. In this, the affection-image is unlike action-images. The latter are caught up in chains of causality--or what Deleuze calls “real connections”--and are always expressively related to succession, as well as sets of actions and reactions rebounding between objects and persons. The action-image is thus characterized as a sensorimotor whole, bound up in an organic representation that believes in the 216 This problem is explored in depth in Ronald Bogue’s superb essay, “To Choose to Choose--to Believe in This World” in Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, ed. D. N. Rodowick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) 115-132. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 506 representability of the world for a perceiving subject, as well as the unity of subject and world. Related to C. S. Peirce’s category of “Firstness,” or pure pre-signifying quality, affection-images present instead “virtual conjunctions”: “There one finds pure qualities or singular potentialities--pure ‘possibles,’ as it were” (Movement-Image 102, 145). These qualities are luminescent and affective. They are possibilities for meaning and emotion expressed not in a determined and meaning-laden space, but in an “any-space-whatever” [espace quelconque]. They are ready to act or to signify, but one does not yet know in what direction or with what meaning. They are the virtual expression of choices yet to be accomplished. How does the expression of choice correspond to the compositional logic of lyrical abstraction? Deleuze contrasts this style to German Expressionism, whose approach to chiaroscuro defines a gothic world where the struggle of shadow and light submerges the contours of things in a non-organic life. Light and darkness collude here, prolonging the anticipation of a universal dread. But in lyrical abstraction, light and darkness alternate, thus expressing “an alternative between a given state of things and a possibility or virtuality that overtakes them . . . . In effect, what seems to us essential to lyrical abstraction is that the spirit is not caught up in a struggle, but rather is beset by an alternative” (Movement-Image 112-113, 158-159). What lyrical abstraction exemplifies in the construction of any-space-whatevers are scenarios of undetermined choice. Deleuze turns here to Pascal and Kierkegaard as emblematic of a new approach to ethics in modern philosophy, where moral dilemmas are less a matter of selecting from a limited set of alternatives--the lesser evil or the greater good--than the expression of the mode of existence of the one who chooses. The first case means persuading oneself of the absence of choice or to remain in ignorance of the power to choose, either because one believes in moral necessity (this is my duty, or this confirms to an ideal of the Good), or that the situation presents no viable alternatives, or that one is condemned by an inescapable drive or desire. What Deleuze calls “spiritual determination,” however, presents the possibility of choosing a way of life along with the philosophical reasoning that accompanies it. Here the essence of moral reasoning is awareness of the choice between choosing or not-choosing. Deleuze characterizes this Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 507 awareness as an extreme moralism that opposes morality, and a faith that opposes religion, exemplified by Pascal’s wager: If I am conscious of choosing, there are, therefore, already choices I can no longer make and modes of existence I can no longer pursue, which are all of those I followed in convincing myself that “there was no choice.” Pascal’s wager says nothing else: the alternation of terms is indeed the affirmation of the existence of God, its denial, and its suspension (doubt, uncertainty. But the spiritual alternative is something else--it is between the mode of existence of one who “wagers” that God exists and the mode of existence of one who gambles on non-existence or who does not want to bet. According to Pascal, only the first is conscious of the possibility of choosing; the others are only able to choose in ignorance of the choices confronting them. In sum, choice as spiritual determination has no other object than itself: I choose to choose, and in this act I exclude every choice made in the mode of not having a choice. (Movement-Image 114, 161) From Pascal to Bresson, and Kierkegaard to Dreyer, Deleuze identifies an ethical typology of characters whose moral choices typify different modes of existence that swing from belief in the inescapability of a moral path to those who choose the possibility of choice. Of the former Deleuze characterizes three types of characters and modes of existence. First there are the “white” men of moral absolutes, of God and Virtue--the perhaps tyrannical or hypocritical guardians of religious or moral order, as in the priestjudges of Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc. There are then the grey men of uncertainty or vacillation, as in the protagonists of Dreyer’s Vampyr, Bresson’s Lancelot du lac, or Pickpocket. Third, there are creatures of evil and the blackness of drives: Hélène’s vengefulness in Les Dames du bois de Boulogne; Gérard’s wickedness in Au hazard Balthazar; the thievery of Pickpocket and Yvonne’s crimes in L’argent. These are all instances of false choice or decisions made from denying that there is or may still be a choice. Here, Deleuze’s reading of lyrical abstraction is close to the ethical interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return. We are not caught by the absolute values of darkness and light, or even the indecisiveness of grey. Rather, the possibility of “spiritual determination,” indeed what Cavell might call moral perfectionism, is a choice not to be Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 508 defined by what is chosen, “but by the power choosing possesses of being able to start again at each instant, to restart itself, and to affirm itself of itself, by putting all the stakes back into play each time. And even if this choice means sacrificing the character, this is a sacrifice made in full knowledge that it will recur each time, and for all times” (Movement-Image 115, 162). This is an image figuring an authentic choice in and of consciousness of the power to choose. To each character and image there corresponds an affect. For the white, the dark, and the grey, affects are actualized in an established order or disorder (moral absolutism, indecisiveness, or tragic destiny). But authentic choice “raises affect to its pure power or potential, as in Lancelot’s courtly love, but also embodies and carries out this potential so powerfully as to release in it that which will not let itself be actualized, and which overwhelms its realization (eternal recurrence)” (115-116, 163). (And there is yet a fifth type: the innocent embodied by the donkey in Au hazard Balthazar: the holy fool who is not in a state of choosing, and who cannot know the effect of humanity’s choosing, or not choosing.) The problem of choice is presented in the affection-image by a certain relationship to light, a fluctuation of light. It is an image that solicits thought and draws us to a space of moral reasoning. Expressionism thus conveys, for Deleuze, a space determined by the alternation of terms, each of which compels an inescapable choice, in fact, a non-choice. White-Black-Grey: white marks our duty or power; black, our impotence or thirst for evil; grey, our uncertainty, restlessness, or indifference. . . . [But] only one other implied that we choose to choose, or that we were conscience of choice. . . . We have reached a philosophical space [espace spirituel] where what we choose is no longer distinct from choice itself. Lyrical abstraction is defined by the adventure of light and white. But the episodes of this adventure mean, first, that the white that imprisons light alternates with the black where it stops, and then light is liberated in an alternative, which restores to us the white and the black. We have traveled, without moving, from one space to another, from a physical to a philosophical space of experimentation (or metaphysics). (Movement-Image 117, 164-165) Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 509 This passage already anticipates the problems raised by modern cinema in Cinema 2: The Time-Image. The organic representation of the movement-image is based on connections that are “rational” as well as real. The term “rational,” as I have already explained, indicates a formal relation that assures the continuity of shots within each segment, the spatial contiguity of one segment to another, and the dialectical unity of parts within the whole of the film. But these rational connections also have an ethical dimension--they are expressive of a will to truth. They express belief in the possibility and coherence of a complete and truthful representation of the world in images, and of the world in relation to thought, that is extendible in a dialectical unity encompassing image, world, and subject--hence Sergei Eisenstein’s belief in the utopia of an intellectual cinema and of a direct relation between image and thought. In Deleuze’s account, however, modern cinema is inaugurated by a crisis in the action-image, and a corresponding crisis in belief. This crisis is profoundly related to the dilemma of skepticism, though Deleuze’s conception of the history of cinema in relation to ontological and moral reasoning differs significantly from Cavell’s. In its purest form, the movement-image, or the absolute plane of immanence, defines a world where skepticism is absent or irrelevant. This is a world defined by Spinoza’s pure ontology of one unique substance, or Bergson’s world of universal change and variation based on the equivalence of matter and light, and memory and matter, in a world of open creation. But from this world there emerges the cinematic movement-image, which, in believing itself to have overcome skepticism in the form of an identity between image and thought, nonetheless perpetuates the division of subject and object as a problem. Thus the organic form of the cinematic movement-image believes in the representability of the world for a knowing subject, but in the form of a will to truth--a separation and rejoining of subject and object. Sergei Eisenstein’s theories remain the most powerful visions of a cinematic movement-image that forges a dialectical unity of subject and world through cinematic representation--the utopia of a truthful representation founded on the laws of a “non- Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 510 indifferent nature.”217 And indeed this is a “white” theory where all is subsumed to the dialectics of nature, and choice is no longer a possibility. It is important to emphasize here that the purest form of the cinematic movementimage image is rare. The logic of affection-images and the expressiveness of any-spacewhatevers demonstrate that the action-image is, rather, in a continuous state of crisis or struggle with the essential movements of the world and of cinema, where time is defined not as space, but rather as force, the Open, or the virtual--the eternally recurring potentiality for new creation in each passing present. Similarly, there is no clear historical break between the movement-image and the time-image, for the direct-image of time is an ever-renewable possibility recurring throughout the history of cinema, like an underground river that swells and recedes unpredictably, gushing up in springs or receding still and hidden beneath deserts.218 Therefore, the recurrence of Bresson and Dreyer in the second volume demonstrates a deep connection across the two cinema books. There is less a break between the modern and classic cinema, than a shift in the concept of belief, where the direct image of time restores or gives new expression to a potentiality always present, always renewable, within film’s expressive movements. If the ethical stance of the cinematic movement-image is expressive of a will to truth, then that of the direct image of time is given in powers of the false that challenge the coherence and unity of organic representation. Indeed, for Deleuze modern cinema emerges from a profound and global crisis of belief, experienced as a traumatic gulf between humanity and the world. With neither causality nor teleology directing the unfolding of images, nor a given totality in which they can be comprehended as a Whole, the powers of non-determined choice anticipated by affection-images are raised here to a new power. Consequently, there arises within the universe of modern cinema a new moral type defined by their sensitivity to pure optical and acoustical situations and their susceptibility to “wandering forms” (la 217 See Eisenstein’s, Nonindifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987). 218 On the historical relation between the cinematic movement and time-images, see my essay, “A Genealogy of Time,” Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham: Duke UP, 2001) 170-202. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 511 forme-balade)--affective situations where characters stroll or stray without obvious goals, destinations or motivation. Best exemplified by Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s great postwar trilogy--Voyage in Italy, Europa 51, and Stromboli--the protagonists of modern cinema wander and observe. They transmit sights rather than motivating movements and actions: “the character becomes a kind of spectator. She may move, run, or stir restlessly, but the situation in which she finds herself overflows her motor capacities on all sides, making her see and hear what no longer justifies a response or an action. She registers more than reacts. She surrenders to a vision, which she pursues or which pursues her, rather than engaging in an action” (Time-Image 3, 9). Finally, this modern cinema is subject to a generalized paranoia, sensitive to conspiracy and suspicious of all forms of totality. What Deleuze calls pure optical and acoustical situations neither derives from presented actions nor extends into them. Rather, it confronts us with situations that are so intolerable, unbearable, and unjust, but also sometimes too beautiful and overwhelming, that our capacities for reaction are arrested. In this way, the time-image produces characters and affective situations marked by a perceptual sensitivity to the intolerability of a world where faith and confidence in representation have disappeared, and where we are consumed by “The idea of one single misery, internal and external, in the world and in consciousness. . .” (Movement-Image 209). Or, as Ingrid Bergman exclaims in Europa 51: “something possible, otherwise I will suffocate.” Both Cavell and Deleuze assert a special connection between cinema and the concept of belief. The movement-image as plane of immanence is the most direct expression of a link between being and the world, or matter becoming luminescent, and thought emerging in relation to the movements of the world. The cinematic movementimage and time-image, however, appear as two ethical directions across this plane of immanence: one a transformation of the world by humanity, or the Eisensteinian belief that one can construct an image that makes thought happen; the other is Antonin Artaud’s intuition of an interior, deeper world “before man” as it were, produced from a shock to thought or by thought’s confrontation with what is unthinkable. This is a confrontation Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 512 with a time which is not that of Being, identity, or teleology but rather an anticipatory time--of contingency, the purely conditional, the non-determined or not yet. The dilemma of modern cinema is in many respects that of skepticism as Cavell describes it. But as we shall soon see, Cavell describes belief in the mode of credibility and a potential overcoming of skepticism. In contrast, a European pessimism pervades Deleuze’s account. As in Kracauer’s late theory, the confrontation with post-war destruction, genocide, and the collapse of the grand narratives of ideology and utopia mark the decline of belief, expressed as a crisis in the action-image and the collapse of the sensorimotor schema. For Deleuze, modernity is experienced as a kind of traumatism. The break in the sensori-motor whole and the emergence of pure optical and acoustical situations makes man a seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable in thought. Between the two, thought undergoes a strange fossilization, which is as it were its powerlessness to function, to be, its dispossession of itself and the world. For it is not in the name of a better or truer world that thought captures the intolerable in this world, but, on the contrary, it is because this world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself. The intolerable is no longer a serious injustice, but the permanent state of daily banality. Man is not himself a world other than the one in which he experiences the intolerable and feels himself trapped.” (Time-Image 169-170, 220221) The problem then becomes: how to restore belief in a world of universal pessimism, where we have no more faith in images than we do in the world? In the pure optical situation, the seer is alienated both within herself and from the world, but she also sees farther, better, and deeper than she can react or think. This augmentation of the powers of sight and of sensitivity to the injustices of the world may give the appearance of passivity, or an impotence of thought before that which is intolerable to consider. But for Deleuze the solution is not to quail before the thought that there is no alternative to this or any other situation. What Deleuze calls the impowers of thought demand a revaluation of our perceptual disjunction from the world that makes of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 513 it the possibility for a new faith, and a new thought. The problem of skepticism is here radically reconfigured. It is not that we are perceptually disjoined from the world. But rather that self, sight, and thought are divided from within and from each other by time, or by the force of time’s passing. What is outside of thought that thought must confront as the unthought is our existential and ethical relationship to time as an infinite reservoir of non-determined choice, which is also an ontology where life and thought are inseparable. What Deleuze calls the “subtle way out” of this dilemma has already been introduced through the concept of lyrical abstraction--to commit to a mode of existence in which one chooses out of faith in the link between world, thought, and life. An arc must be drawn between the Movement-Image and the Time-Image where new thought is generated by experiencing the powerlessness to think, just as new alternatives emerge in confrontation with the inability to choose: Which, then, is the subtle way out? To believe, not in a different world, but in a link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in the impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought: ‘something possible, otherwise I will suffocate’. It is this belief that makes the unthought the specific power of thought, through the absurd, by virtue of the absurd. Artaud never understood powerlessness to think as a simple inferiority which would strike us in relation to thought. It is part of thought, so that we should make our way of thinking from it, without claiming to be restoring an all-powerful thought. We should rather make use of this powerlessness to believe in life, and to discover the identity of thought and life. . . .” (Time-Image 170). For Deleuze, the basic fact of modernity is that “we longer believe in this world.” However, much is explained by emphasizing that “we no longer believe in this world,” that is, the world present to us, in which we are present, and which comprises the present time we occupy as a constant becoming. We no longer even believe in the events that happen to us, love or death, as if they hardly concern us. We do not make cinema; rather, the world looks to us like a bad film. . . . It is the link between man and the world that has been broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief, as the impossible that can Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 514 only be given back in faith. Belief is no longer addressed to another world, or a transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical or acoustical situation. The reaction of which man is dispossessed can only be replaced by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. Cinema must not film the world, but rather belief in this world, our only link. One often questions the nature of cinematographic illusion. To give us back belief in the world--this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being shoddy). Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia we need reasons to believe in this world.” (Time-Image 171-172, 223) From Eisenstein to Artaud, the ethical problem for Deleuze is to understand that the traumatic unlinking of being from the world is yet more powerfully a leap towards faith in life, in this life or this world and its powers of self-transformation. The time-image’s powers of the false do not show that the image is an illusion, nor do they replace a false perception with a true one. Rather, the powers of the false release the image from the form of identity and restore to it the potential for Becoming or eternal recurrence. From the cinematic movement-image to the time-image, from Pascal to Nietzsche, and in the cinema of Rossellini and Dreyer, a great shift occurs in philosophy, replacing the model of knowledge with that of belief as if in a conversion from piety to atheism, and moralism to morality--thus the turning points represented in the history of moral reasoning by Deleuze’s pairing of Pascal and Hume, Kant and Fichte, or Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. One should emphasize that knowledge is based on faith no less than belief; namely, the will to truth and a belief in humanity’s technological domination of nature. But even among the “pious” philosophers here, belief no longer turns towards another, transcendent world, but is directed rather to this world, the one in which we exist. We can learn much from Pascal or Kierkegaard’s struggles with the problem of the existence of God, but a philosophy of immanence, including Deleuze’s film philosophy and philosophy of art in general, passes to another plane or territory and a different problematic. This plane of immanence places its bets not on a transcendental existence, but rather on thought that begins from the principal of the univocity of Being, and of a world with a single expressive substance. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 515 write of Pascal or Kierkegaard that there is a secret atheism to the great religious philosophers whose quests are less for metaphysical certainty than the achievement of a certain philosophical serenity. Belief only becomes a genuine concept when it renounces transcendence for immanence, that is, when belief is reconnected to this world instead of projecting it towards another, transcendental world. In Deleuze’s account, what Kierkegaard or even Pascal assert in the concept of faith is something that returns to us humanity’s link with the world and with life. Hence belief only replaces knowledge when it elicits belief in this world and its future-oriented powers. Deleuze’s ethics, then, is a moral reasoning that wants to give back to us a belief capable of perpetuating life as movement, change, becoming--the eternal recurrence of difference. And rather than yearning for another transcendent or transformed world, we must believe in the body and the flesh, to believe in the substance of the world and the world as substance, returning to them all their one and unique voice. “We must believe in the body as in the germ of life, a seed that splits the pavement, that is conserved and perpetuated in the holy shroud or mummy’s wrappings, and which bears witness to life and to this very world such that it is. We need an ethic or a faith that makes idiots laugh, not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe in this world, of which fools are a part” (Time-Image 173, 225). This passage signals a modern mutation where from Descartes to Dostoevsky the conceptual character of the Fool or Idiot is transformed. In Descartes’ version, this represents the private and universal desire of the thinker to want or will the truth, but the new Idiot wants to make of the absurd the highest power of thought-creation. The modern Idiot expresses a utopian and ethical will, one that will never finally accept the verities of History and insists that every victim of history be accounted for and redeemed. The new Idiot, an important motor or motivator of moral perfectionism, wants the world to restore to him what is lost, incomprehensible, or unreasonable. In What is Philosophy?, this argument is followed by another potentially Wittgensteinian motif: shame as a motif of philosophy. One version of philosophy is based on an ideal of universal agreement to fundamental principles, arrived at through communication and consensus. But in a global milieu dominated by capitalism, one Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 516 imagines easily that such a conception of philosophy is easily and thoroughly territorialized by the logic and value of capitalism and the commodity form. Restoring an ethical or moral dimension to philosophy, then, is not based on the quest for consensus and communication as much as contestation and experimentation. At the same time, philosophy must begin its struggle for thought at the very point where we feel our “humanness” or lack of it most intensely, which is precisely where we experience the shame of being human. This shame is motivated by our lack of conviction, our paralysis or inaction with respect to life’s daily injuries as much as its moral cataclysms, or our inability to sustain belief in this world and its powers of transformation. We experience the shame of being human not only in the extreme situations described by Primo Levi, for example, but also “in insignificant conditions, before the meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies, before the propagation of these modes of existence and of thought-for-the-market, and before the values, ideals, and opinions of our time. The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered appears from within. We do not feel ourselves outside of our time but continue to undergo shameful compromises with it” (What is Philosophy? 107-108). The fact that we must continually and shamefully endure and respond to dishonorable compromises with our terms of existence is a powerful Emersonian theme, and thus an interesting bridge back to Cavell. And in this same gesture, Deleuze’s desire for philosophy is shown to share much with Wittgenstein’s, and thus a possible a philosophy of the humanities as I have portrayed it. Humanity is not something that universally binds us, a quality we all share, but rather the widely shared experience of not living up to our best intentions, or to have failed on a quotidian basis to have been human or to have acted in a responsibly human way. Here the conceptual problem of the posthuman or the Nietzschean super-human is that the tragedy of being human is not to have fully understood or achieved our humanity. Deleuze’s philosophy is thus not a posthuman one. How can one transcend or leave behind something one had not yet achieved or become? And yet we must find strategies for becoming and for responding to daily failures of ethical response and sociability. Here our doubts and lack of conviction or belief may spur us to imagine a future self or a new mode of existence to which we may Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 517 aspire. (This idea will be one of Cavell’s most powerful contributions to ethics and a philosophy of the humanities.) Belief must then be reconnected to the two principles of Deleuze’s system. Skepticism is the sign of a thought disconnected from Life comprised of a single substance and a time of constant becoming. But Being and thought are in Life; they speak with a single voice and become in the same time, such that skepticism must be overcome with another will to power, which draws its energy from Life’s potential for selfdifferentiation, and moralism overcome by choosing to believe in the ever-renewable possibility of beginning again--eternal recurrence. 36. The ordinary necessity of philosophy [P]hilosophy concerns those necessities we cannot, being human, fail to know. Except that nothing is more human than to deny them. --Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” That art may be considered philosophical expression is an important link between Deleuze and Cavell’s interest in film. Like Deleuze, Cavell’s cinema books are not studies of film but rather philosophical studies—they are works of philosophy first and foremost. Nonetheless, it may also be reasonable to read them as studies of film culture in their deep awareness of how the moving image has penetrated the daily life of the mind and of being in the 20th century and beyond. Though in very different ways, both Deleuze and Cavell comprehend cinema as expressing ways of being in the world and of relating to the world such that cinema is already philosophy, and a philosophy intimately connected to our everyday life. Deleuze exemplifies this idea in pairing Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory with the early history of cinema. At the moment when philosophy returns to problems of movement and time in relation to thought and the image, the cinematic apparatus emerges neither as an effect of these problems nor in analogy with them. In its own way, it is the aesthetic expression of current and persistent philosophical problems. Nor should one say that Deleuze’s thought is simply influenced by cinema. Rather, it is the direct philosophical expression, in the form of concepts and typologies of signs, of problems presented pre-conceptually in aesthetic form. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 518 In his compelling philosophical and biographical account of Wittgenstein’s thought and life, The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk recounts Wittgenstein’s love not only for pulp detective fiction but also for popular American films, especially Westerns and musicals. No doubt Wittgenstein saw these pursuits as escapes from philosophy. However, as Wittgenstein never commented in writing or in a philosophical context on this love for what might be called the most ordinary of arts, I am led to wonder, philosophically, what is the nature of the philosophy from which so deep a thinker wishes to take flight, and what motivates this escape into the ordinary, or why would one wish the ordinary to represent a place of escape, out of or into philosophy? These remarks might also characterize Cavell’s deeply original approach to philosophy, wherein the ordinary in all of its manifestations is the expression of a particular stance in or towards modernity. In several strong senses, the wish to escape from the ordinary responds to one of the starkest dilemmas of modern philosophy from the time of Descartes and Locke up through the positivist and analytical strains of the twentieth century. What links these two historical moments is the skeptical desire for certainty--a form of rationality where knowledge (of the world, or of other minds) wishes to suffer no ontological doubts. Ironically, this desire is itself fueled by skeptical doubt, and the incessant return of skepticism and the historically variegate responses to it present a poignant historical lesson: that we may forget the anguish of skepticism, or find temporary relief from it, yet it remains continually with us--the craving for certainty is maintained in the force of doubt. This paradox is a persistent characteristic of the human, or an ordinary state of the human, in at least two ways: it accompanies us daily, and living our daily, ordinary lives in the world and in community is precisely how we exist, often happily, with the dilemmas and doubts that plague us. (This is one of the key lessons of The Claim of Reason.) Here is where Cavell and Deleuze might also locate their greatest differences in spite of the various claims and concerns that could bring them together. Deleuze’s commitment to Spinoza’s doctrine of the univocity of Being evades skepticism by weaving human existence into the whole of universal existence. There is much to recommend, especially for an environmental politics, in asserting this unbreakable connection to nature Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 519 and to the universal plane of immanence. But the cinema books and What is Philosophy? show implicitly that Deleuze has not left aside or overcome the existential anguish of skepticism. What is Philosophy? expresses this anxiety in its account of the Other, who I confront both externally and internally in the division of the self by time; in The TimeImage, it is expressed as humanity’s disconnection from the world that cinema must restore in faith. In either case, one feels strongly that Deleuze seeks relief in philosophy through its powers of conceptual innovation fueled by an ontology of time. This is, as it were, a faith in philosophy. Alternatively, Cavell draws from Wittgenstein the lesson that for all its attractions, philosophy will continually fail us if we cannot somehow return it to the ordinary, or make it pass through and return from the ordinary as humanly lived. Another obvious way of linking Deleuze to Cavell is that in their own unique ways both share a picture of philosophy as inherently problematic; that is, as posing its own existence as a problem that must continually be revisited and rethought. And for both thinkers, the problematic nature of philosophy often takes the form of ethical questioning. What is the good of philosophy? Why do philosophical dilemmas of knowledge and value continually trouble us, or why can we not tolerate the absence of philosophy, no matter how prosaic, from our lives? These questions do not belong to philosophy alone but rather are key features of non-philosophy, especially in our daily existence and in our encounters with artistic expressiveness. Not that there is an analogy between philosophy and art; rather, Cavell’s career long project has been to show that philosophy and art or film are bound and interconnected by sets of common criteria aimed at justifying our cares for the world, for the self, and for others. In this way, art and philosophy are brought together as common expressions of and responses to the dilemmas of skepticism as a peculiar condition of our philosophical and cultural modernity. One way of characterizing the unifying threads of Cavell’s philosophy, then, is to consider it a deep meditation on the problem of the modern or of modernity, not only in philosophy, but also as a general condition of present culture as lived. Whatever problems or questions that Cavell turns to seem also to be a working out of a concept of the modern--in philosophy, in art, but also in daily life--in all its peculiar temporality. The temporality of modernity is exemplified by what I have already referred to in my Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 520 discussion of Wittgenstein as the problem of the human. Cavell’s philosophy is (or should be) of central concern to the humanities because, following Wittgenstein, his aim is not to define the human or to address the “human condition,” but rather to make continually present the dilemma that the human has yet to be achieved. This idea will eventually lead to the third principle strand of Cavell’s philosophy after the temporality of modernism and the dilemmas of skepticism--perfectionism as a moral register or expression of the necessity or aspiration to self-transformation. From a perfectionist perspective, the human is not what we are but a condition to be achieved; or better, something that solicits a desire for becoming human, or for better understanding what it might mean to achieve the condition of humanity. “Being human is aspiring to being human,” Cavell explains in The Claim of Reason. “Since it is not aspiring to being the only human, it is an aspiration on behalf of others as well. Then we might say that being human is aspiring to being seen as human.”219 The philosophical desire to become human or to achieve humanity is a continually recurring state aspiring to a possible yet so far unattained future existence, which at the same time wonders, in its present dissatisfaction, to what extent it is continuous or discontinuous with the past. This recurring present preoccupation with a felt discontinuity between past and future, tradition and creation, or between the repetition of 219 The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) 399. In sketching an overview of Cavell’s philosophical project, I should foreground some of the issues of central concern to him that will be absent from my account. Foremost among them would be fully addressing the depth and complexity of Cavell’s critique in The Claim of Reason of science’s claim to an exclusive and universal mode of rationality, and his defense, through the procedures of ordinary language philosophy, of moral and aesthetic reasoning as ways of exploring the full reach of rational thought, both in the investigation of self and of the self’s relation to a community of others. Another important area of concern is Cavell’s position on the importance of the practice of criticism, which might contribute to a deeper account of practices of interpretation and evaluation from a philosophical perspective. Of equal importance in accounting for the full spectrum of Cavell’s concerns would be his political theory, especially his sympathetic debates with John Rawls’ theory of justice, and how Cavell investigates critically the question of skepticism in Shakespeare’s tragedies and romances, and in opera. The best overview of Cavell’s work in these respects remains Stephen Mulhall’s Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), a book to which I owe a great debt. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 521 habit and the difference of change, is a central feature of Cavell’s thoughts on the time of the modern. This discontinuity may be considered in another way. Of all contemporary philosophers, Cavell comes closest to exemplifying in concept and in action what it means to practice a philosophy of the humanities. This has come about less from the conscious aim of promoting a philosophy of the humanities than as a natural outgrowth of Cavell’s career long concern for the human--in isolation and in community, in her cares and commitments, and in the quest for accord and agreement, partial or not, in inevitable contexts of disagreement. Although greatly influenced by Wittgenstein, Cavell’s philosophy is less a philosophical anthropology than a deeply felt ethics. As one of the most original contemporary readers of Wittgenstein, Cavell understood early on, keenly and with consequence, that the late Wittgenstein’s appeal to criteria, grammar, language games, perspicuous description, and recounting and reminding, was less a perspective on the expressive behavior of others, than a thorough-going diagnostic and therapeutic examination of one’s relationship to self and to others. The threat of skepticism arises here in the ironical acknowledgement that what seams our experience with the world and with others also separates or divides us as isolated perceptual beings, something which Cavell refers to as an image, picture, or fantasy blocking our relations with the world and a community of others. In the preface to the first edition of The World Viewed, Cavell follows Heidegger in offering “that ours is an age in which our philosophical grasp of the world fails to reach beyond our taking and holding views of it, and we call these views metaphysics.”220 And so a response of philosophy might be giving cause to return to the ordinary from the metaphysical, just as Wittgenstein wished. In The Claim of Reason Cavell’s examination of modes of moral reasoning and aesthetic judgment is a response to skepticism in that it requires the active presence of others, of a community with like cares, and through that dialogue one establishes not only one’s presence in the community but a certain presence to self, an acknowledgment and recounting of otherwise vague or unacknowledged cares and commitments, woven in new, if fragile, patterns of agreement. 220 The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) xxiii. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 522 Before examining with greater depth Cavell’s account of modernity and skepticism, I want to sketch out two more issues of central concern to his thought: the ethical call to philosophy in everyday life, and how, in an American vein, the call to philosophy seems inevitably linked to our experience of moving images. Cavell’s writing on film and art, especially the essays, often provide fascinating and encapsulated versions of his broader approach to philosophical practice. One of his earlier essays on film, “The Thought of the Movies,” characterizes philosophy as aspirating to learn “to think undistractedly about things ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them . . . .”221 Foremost among these plaguing questions are the skeptical dilemmas of deciding whether we can know the world as it is in itself, whether we can really grasp the internal lives of other minds, or whether, like Descartes before his fire or the characters in Inception or Waking Life, we can be certain that we are awake and not dreaming? These epistemological quandaries are accompanied by evaluative questions concerning the stability of criteria for discerning the good from the bad, the moral from immoral, or the just from the unjust, and how we might attain a more perfect world. Finally, there are historical dilemmas in wondering to what degree our current values and modes of existence are anchored in tradition or not, and thus whether they should be maintained or superseded. These thoughts present the three principle concerns of Cavell’s philosophy--the response to skepticism, moral perfectionism, and the experience of modernity. Cavell continues by remarking that “Such thoughts are instances of that characteristic human willingness to allow questions for itself which it cannot answer with satisfaction. Cynics about philosophy, and perhaps about humanity, will find that questions without answers are empty; dogmatists will claim to have arrived at answers; philosophers after my heart will rather wish to convey the thought that while there may be no satisfying answers to such questions in certain forms, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover” (“The Thought of Movies” 92). Philosophy responds to these dilemmas through what I would like to call the aim of concepts, which neither anchor nor represent 221 “The Thought of Movies” in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005) 92; first published in The Yale Review (Winter 1983). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 523 thought but rather direct or orient it on pathways known and unknown, anticipated and surprising. Along similar lines, Cavell asks whether the same sensibility that is drawn to and perplexed about philosophy is likewise drawn to and puzzled about movies? An unwavering continuity throughout Cavell’s writing on film and philosophy is that for American culture in the twentieth century the movies have been the moral accompaniment to everyday life. Throughout his long career Cavell has insisted that movies have played a role in American culture different from their role in other societies, and that in comparison to Europe, this difference is a function of the historical absence in America of a sustained, public philosophical culture. At the same time, the craving for thought and ethical examination is no less powerful or ambitious in America than it is in Europe, and so in the absence of a sustained philosophical tradition, America composed its difference in thought or art from whatever portable fragments were culturally at hand. Here Cavell arrives at one of his most controversial yet most appealing propositions: that this absence of a public philosophical culture finds its response at the movies, which at their best inspire, in ordinary encounters, a new cultural ambition of self-thought and selfinvention. As the very expression of our modernity, or our modern responses to the world, American film has enacted a democratization of philosophy, where the movies provide a tradition of thought of the ordinary absent from the concerns of academic philosophy, whether European or American. And, since American thought was not weighted with the long history of European thought, it was more open and responsive to what the movies might teach us. In the absence of a native philosophical tradition, American public culture lacked the means and vocabulary to explore deep ontological and ethical questions of concern to us all. According to Cavell, American film found ways to compensate for this lack by satisfying the ambition of an engaged culture to examine itself publicly. What Cavell often calls film at its best offers, then, three philosophical attractions or invitations: to consider what our fascination with screened worlds expresses ontologically; to assess what film dramatizes as forms of moral reasoning; and finally, to examine how the presence of a community frames our pleasurable engagement with these activities. Perhaps the movies have or had a natural relationship to philosophy not only Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 524 because the perceptual situation staged by the screening of projected images conditions a certain ontological fascination, but also because an audience was constituted as a temporary yet recurrent community of individuals engaged in a common project of moral reflection in response to the portrayal of lives “pursued by thoughtful, mature people, heavily in conversation with one another about the value of their individual or joint pursuits.”222 Seen from the right perspective, cinema may well be the event where the ancient tradition of philosophical dialogue has found a modern home. This idea forms the basis of Cavell’s later books on comedies of remarriage and melodramas of the unknown woman. The interest of film here is to show it as the ordinary or quotidian expression of the deepest concerns of moral philosophy. And just as Wittgenstein sought to displace metaphysical expression into ordinary language and daily concerns, film brings moral philosophy into the context of quotidian dramatic expression. In the absence of a sustained public philosophical culture, Cavell suggests that these “films are rather to be thought of as differently configuring intellectual and emotional avenues that philosophy is already in exploration of, but which, perhaps, it has cause sometimes to turn from prematurely, particularly in its forms since its professionalization, or academization . . . . The implied claim is that film, the latest of the great arts, shows philosophy to be the often invisible accompaniment of the ordinary lives that film is so apt to capture . . . .” (Cities of Words 6). Where contemporary philosophy has reneged on its promise of moral perfectionism, film has responded and compensated, though in the preconceptual manner of all art and sensuous expression. Thus the great project of film philosophy today is not only to help reinvigorate this moral reflection, but to heal by example the rift in philosophy’s relation to everyday life. 37. “Art now exists in the condition of philosophy” One of the most fascinating aspects of Cavell’s accounts of skepticism and modernism is the implication that over the long term philosophical beliefs and concepts can become the 222 Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of Moral Life (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004) 9. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 525 framework for ordinary beliefs about our relations with the world--perhaps something more like structures of feeling in Raymond Williams’ sense than a full blown Foucauldian episteme. In any case, such structures are ethical more than epistemological. In this view, the origins of modernism are the origins of skepticism, that is, patterns of thought and senses of the self emerging in early modern Europe, whose first powerful instance is Descartes’ Meditations, but which are equally and powerfully present in cultural forms such as Shakespeare’s tragedies. Skepticism is not just a problem for philosophers but rather expresses a novel and disturbing situation where our “natural” relation to the world becomes one of beholding, as if from a distance or in some perceptual withdrawal from the world. One word for such an experience is alienation, though Kierkegaard refers to it as being away, separate or withdrawn from the world. Cavell is drawn to Heidegger or Wittgenstein, and especially to Emerson and Thoreau, because of their recognition of the power of this condition, as well as their insistence on its ordinariness, or recurrent presentness or presence to us. From Deleuze to Cavell, modernism is portrayed as something like a recurrent existential state of ontological restlessness or uncertainty no less present in philosophy than in culture or art. This condition cannot be submitted to epistemological or ocular proof. No data can be gathered nor thesis falsified that would ever convince us, or fail to convince us, of the rightness of this perspective; it is a matter of ethical discernment, or more simply, belief. It requires from philosophy, rather, an ethical examination of self, and of myself in relation to others, my form of life, and my encounters with things of value to me, as a practice open to diurnal testing that is in principle unfinished and interminable. In his earliest essays, Cavell first suggests that modernism is the general (ontological) condition of art, or let’s say, artful expression. For this reason there is no essential division between the popular arts, or indeed between existing genres of art. From this perspective, the problem of modernism does not necessarily refer to questions of form or style but rather to an experience of time or of history, where “Convention as a whole is now looked upon not as a firm inheritance from the past, but as a continuing Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 526 improvisation in the face of problems we no longer understand.”223 In modernism the set of relationships linking a practice (in art or philosophy) to its history itself becomes problematic. One relationship to the past can be thought of as continuity in the form of extending and renovating tradition or convention; another may be thought of as a discontinuity or rupture in which the past is overcome or superseded by the absolutely new. Modernism, however, floats in a state of uncertainty, meaning not only that the presence or experience of authentic existence must be questioned and reasserted in every expressive act but also that these assertions find it difficult to place where or when the past appears as a force in the present. (Later, this dilemma reappears in Cavell’s account of the ontological perplexities of photography.) After Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Cavell argues that, the repudiation of the past has a transformed significance, as though containing the consciousness that history will not go away, except through our perfect acknowledgment of it (in particular, our acknowledgment that it is not past), and that one’s own practice and ambition can be identified only against the continuous experience of the past . . . . But ‘the past’ does not in this context refer simply to the historical past; it refers to one’s own past, to what is past, or what has passed, within oneself. One could say that in a modernist situation ‘past’ loses its temporal accent and means anything ‘not present.’ Meaning what one says becomes a matter of making one’s sense present to oneself.224 Making one’s sense present to oneself is no doubt the principle act of philosophical practice, especially in ordinary language philosophy; for Cavell, it is also the principle task of both aesthetic and moral expressions. The problem raised by modernism is that the questioning and reassertion of existence is also an acknowledgment that this questioning and reassertion is open and perpetually unfinished. In this way, the ontological uncertainty of art and aesthetic experience recapitulates the ontological uncertainty of the modernist subject. Modernism is thus characterized as 223 “Music Discomposed” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 201. 224 “Forward: An Audience for Philosophy” in Must We Mean What We Say?, xxxiii Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 527 a moment in which history and its conventions can no longer be taken for granted; . . . the beginning of the moment in which each of the arts becomes its own subject, as if its immediate artistic task is to establish its own existence. The new difficulty which comes to light in the modernist situation is that of maintaining one’s belief in one’s own enterprise, for the past and the present become problematic together. I believe that philosophy shares the modernist difficulty now everywhere evident in the major arts, the difficulty of making one’s present effort become a part of the present history of the enterprise to which one has committed one’s mind, such as it is. (“Forward” xxxvi) Modernism is understood here not just as a perspective on art but more broadly as a pervasive cultural condition to which philosophy must respond. What modernism thus signifies is a kind of groundlessness, or absence of transcendental authority, where the relation or continuity of past to present becomes difficult or unclear as the inability to take for granted the regulation of genres, forms, styles, and practices by ongoing traditions. This uncertainty with respect to the pressures, demands, or comforts of the past is transmitted into the present as a condition, one wants to say, of the difficult presentness of practice and of artworks themselves. The status of the work--its coming into being or state of Being--is subject to a present, continuous questioning about the fact of its existence, or of its continuing to exist. And this uncertainty and doubt, this self-questioning and selfinterrogation, perpetuates itself as a projection into the future in the form of questions about the possibility or impossibility of both creation and interpretation themselves taking place in the absence of a authorizing tradition. In Must We Mean What We Say, convention then becomes less a matter of working with and expanding tradition than of finding strategies for improvised responses to problems we hardly understand, and which confront and detour our present perspectives. In other words, the right of a work to be accepted as art or philosophy can never be taken for granted--this right must be continually earned, and convention and context for given series of works must be continually regenerated through acts of creation and criticism. What might appear at first glance as the interiority or even solipsism of modernism can now be seen as its openness and desire for community, a wish to convert a private conversation into a public one, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 528 where an anticipated community feels invited to enter freely into the conversation, no matter how difficult or painful but also joyful, initiated by the difficult presentness of modernist works. What Cavell portrays as the wish for community can also be framed in Deleuze’s terms as a work’s ethical call to a people who do not yet exist, or setting the conditions for a people to come. Modernist works seek acknowledgment, want to be acknowledged, as does, in the modernist condition, the world, the self in the world, and the self in community. But the world is replete with failed or disappointed desires, and there is no guarantee of present or future acknowledgement. This fact also means that some of the most powerful modernist works, in art or philosophy, may not presently find contexts or communities to interpret, value, or evaluate them. They remain wholly or partly always to be received or to be acknowledged. I have said that the modernist situation in art or philosophy inspires acts of criticism as well as a desire to be heard and acknowledged. This is why Cavell writes in a late essay that I remain grateful to the artwork or artworld objects, as it were, for their still strange interest to me, and particularly, I think, for making me voluble, loosening my tongue, expressing myself. This is also no small matter. On my reading of Wittgenstein's Investigations, it is concerned with the human terror of inexpressiveness, of suffocation, alternating with an equal terror of exposure, as if speech threatens to become unable perfectly to refer to objects of my interest or to give expression to my states of being, or else to refer and give expression so fully as to give myself away. It is the version, or threat, of skepticism that I claim Wittgenstein's Investigations stakes itself on identifying and dispersing, ceaselessly.225 One principle value of art is not just expression, but rather the power of inducing expressiveness, and this power has an ethical force. This is why Cavell asserts that “art now exists in the condition of philosophy” (The World Viewed 14). In his discussions of Wittgenstein and Austin, especially in Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell argues that 225 “Crossing Paths” in Cavell on Film, 372. These 2002 paper was originally written for a colloquium at Columbia University honoring the work of Arthur Danto. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 529 in the modernist situation, art responds philosophically to dilemmas of daily existence that philosophy itself has come to ignore. Philosophical dilemmas of knowing and valuing are endemic to daily life, yet philosophy has deserted the diurnal or the temporal, the contingent presentness of modern life, in its quest for a stable and certain image of a known or knowable world; or put more simply, in wishing to know the world with certainty, we lose or become blind to knowledge of ourselves. For Cavell, our responses to modern art, and its responses to itself as acts of creation, illuminate how the procedures of ordinary language philosophy offer routes for reconnecting the self to world and community by making present the knowledge of self by self. These are means for rediscovering, refining, and deepening our awareness and knowledge of the forms of life we inhabit. Cavell characterizes this procedure as “recounting criteria,” or ways of reminding ourselves of “what would we say, or what should we say” in ordinary situations of doubt and disagreement. Routes of consensus often take the form here of projecting new contexts that open previously unforeseen semantic depths and complexities and possibilities of agreement. In asking and answering these questions of ourselves and others, we draw upon capacities of self-knowledge available to any speaker of language in a given form of life. To draw upon or examine one’s native competence as an expressive being is also to manifest the criteria regulating expressions or expressiveness. Grammatical investigation then calls upon procedures or practices for displaying, recalling, and exploring these criteria. The value of these practices is that they bring us back to the terms of our alignment with the world by specifying and clarifying what may count as specific matters of fact within the expressive community in which these terms are in play, although as Stephen Mulhall rightly emphasizes, “the nature, extent, and security of those alignments are not determinable in advance of grammatical investigation. In short, ordinary language philosophizing is a matter of tapping the resources of the self in a way which will allow the philosopher to recall, explore, and display the nature, extent, and security of her alignments with the world and with the human community.”226 226 Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 19. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 530 Therefore, in acquiring and expressing knowledge of ourselves, we also acquire and give expression to knowledge of others. Rather than an interiorized self confronting the gulf of external objects and minds, in Cavell’s perspective, to come to know one’s own mind is the path to knowing other minds, of discovering common ground in an interpersonal web of linked and linking criteria, vocabularies, concepts, and grammars of belief. This practice of self-knowing is a way of weaving oneself into a community of others, because to acknowledge others is a way of recognizing oneself and opening oneself to acknowledgment by others. As the origin of one powerful strand of skepticism, Cartesian doubt can then be seen as a particular form of solipsism that has forgotten philosophy’s more ancient and fundamental concerns with self and community. An innovation of ordinary language philosophy in this respect is its withdrawal from the quest for certainty and the need for universal agreement. Its practices are less concerned with convincing or conviction than with investigating and mapping the possibility of agreement, whole or partial, in a community whose scale and stability cannot be assured either from within or without. Agreement must be continually solicited and negotiated. Yet this process often fails, such that the appeal to the grammar of ordinary language, which we all share, is not just a request for agreement, but also an investigation of our quotidian failures of communication and consensus. (Earlier, I characterized this condition as the value of being disagreeable because disagreement is as important a motivation to philosophy as agreement or achieving conviction.) The process of trying to communicate with, and to convince or persuade others, is or should also be a process of self-investigation, education, and expression. For Cavell, then, ordinary language philosophy is the quintessentially modern philosophy (or better, the philosophy most prepared to respond to the dilemmas of our modernity), in that its methods or procedures aim at discovering and displaying modes of self-knowledge through which an individual might discover the range and depth of her connections with given communities without relinquishing the right to speak for herself. Nor does such a philosophy expect or require either uniformity or complete agreement among its participants. In each case, its objective is to discover (for myself, for others, within my claim to speak for and to others, and they to me) the web of intersubjective relationships Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 531 that bind human communities together despite the inevitable fact of disagreement and disagreeableness. In like manner, the guiding argument of The Claim of Reason, in all its depth and complexity, is to demonstrate the variety of ways (in ethics, politics, or aesthetics) in which claims to reason or rationality are not exhausted by methodological monism and scientism’s demand to reach agreement on conclusions. And in fact, if philosophy is to become attentive again to daily life, then both moral reasoning and aesthetic judgments might be more appropriate domains for exploring how reason is deployed and debated in human communities. Philosophy might be guided by a mistaken view of science, which in its daily practice is less concerned with certainty than with maintaining consensus as to what counts as procedures and protocols that regulate empirical and experimental investigation. (Following his friend Thomas Kuhn, Cavell knows that these procedures are themselves historically contingent.) “If what makes science rational is not the fact of agreement about particular propositions itself,” Cavell concludes, “or about the acknowledged modes of arriving at it, but the fact of a commitment to certain modes of argument whose very nature is to lead to such agreement, then morality may be rational on exactly the same ground, namely that we commit ourselves to certain modes of argument, but now ones which do not lead, in the same ways, and sometimes not at all, to agreement (about a conclusion)” (Claim of Reason 261-262). The humanities need not follow scientific modes of argument nor commit themselves to patterns of logic and agreement through which scientific reason is adjudicated. And in fact, in the humanities both moral reasoning and aesthetic judgment provide a better range and depth of methods and perspectives (call them theories if you like) for investigating how one negotiates situations of rational disagreement without sacrificing respect for the other. Broadly conceived, one might say that for all their messy methodological and multi-disciplinary diversity, the humanities provide important laboratories for experimenting with creative procedures of interpretation, evaluation, and recontextualization. Later, I will examine Cavell’s picture of Emersonian perfectionism as exemplifying ordinary moral reasoning in an imperfect democratic society. For the moment, however, I want to look more deeply at Cavell’s account of the importance of aesthetic problems for Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 532 modern philosophy. “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” is of course the title of one of the essays in Must We Mean What We Say? In the early period of his published work, one of Cavell’s main concerns is to restore the claim of reason to both aesthetic judgments and moral debate. One of Cavell’s most original strategies is to revisit in the context of ordinary language philosophy Kant’s examination of the paradoxical quality of aesthetic conversation: that it requires a disinterested and subjective assessment, as if a conversation of self with self, that is both perceptual and affective (Derrida calls this autoaffection), which in turn desires or claims universal assent from all others within range of its hearing. The question can be put another way: Does the absence of universal agreement in aesthetic judgments demonstrate their lack of rationality, or alternatively, do they convey another picture of rationality? In fact, one of the many accomplishments of Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason is to remap a series of relationships in epistemology wherein aesthetic and moral discussion are investigated and revalued such that criteria of logic and scientism no longer dominate or serve as exclusive models for the rational exercise of thought. Cavell’s aim is to show how the paradox of artful conversation is reasonable. One of Kant’s first steps in the Critique of Judgment is to observe in sections 7 and 8 of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” that because aesthetic judgments are grounded entirely in the subjective, they can be neither objective, logical, nor theoretical. The non-theoretical character of aesthetic judgments has a precise sense here: such judgments are singular and thus not generalizable, and in addition are unmediated by concepts. Aesthetic judgments also have the peculiar character of asking for universal assent, even if we know that it cannot and will not be granted, at least universally. Does this mean that aesthetic judgments are irrational since we cannot hope for universal consensus and thus risk isolation and ridicule in making them? And what to make of Kant’s assertion that aesthetic judgments are without concept, which is a scandal from the point of view of a positivist or analytic conception of philosophy? At the same time, Cavell takes Kant at his philosophical word but without wishing to dissolve the paradox. For this paradox may be expressive of another power of great human value--the nature of aesthetic judgments is to be arguable, that is, discussable or Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 533 provoking discussion, as if to say that the capacity for disagreement is also the capacity for conversation and sociability, which is also, one wants to say, a fundamental human capacity. And there is another paradox to confront in our ordinary practices of expressing aesthetic judgments. One of Wittgenstein’s most important and difficult lessons is that at some point reasons are exhaustible. (Recall §217 of the Philosophical Investigations where Wittgenstein states: “Once I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’”) Or to put it another way, there will be moments when speech loses it force; hence Wittgenstein’s frequent appeals to look and to see, which might be an appeal to the other to find their own Idea and own concept or context, since mine seems to be at some point incommunicable. This is a place or situation where reasons fail or find their limits, but in so doing they do not become irrational. In examining the powers of aesthetic and moral judgments Cavell does not seek to replace or overturn claims of scientific knowing. Rather, in his investigation of the limits of the demand for certainty, Cavell finds in the procedures of ordinary language philosophy the bases, no matter how open-ended and contingent, for negotiating rational agreement in whatever domain. In this respect, Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason are two of the great founding texts of a philosophy of the humanities. And in ways both very different from yet similar to Deleuze, Cavell is testing the porous frontiers between philosophy, art, and science, while demonstrating the common ways of thinking and expressing that nonetheless cross between them. What lessons can be learned then about the patterns, procedures, or grammar for reaching agreement in examining our ordinary claims in aesthetic and moral reasoning? In other words, what are the claims of reason expressed in our interpretive and evaluative activities? The first lesson is to value the fact that aesthetic and moral judgments are in principle inconclusive and less open (if at all) to falsification than are scientific claims. Aesthetic judgments are arguable, that is, open to and inviting debate and conflicts of interpretation. What is asked for here it not assent to a conclusion but rather a mutual seeking out of overlapping patterns of understanding and (partial) agreement. What Cavell learns from Kant is that in our enthusiasm for art we may want to ask for universal assent, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 534 but we are willing to settle for arriving at and better understanding mutually held contexts-call them patterns or designs--for discerning consensus or agreement, no matter how tentative or fragile. Disagreement may also be valued as the motivation for further conversation. Cavell thus encourages us to recognize pattern and agreement as distinctive features of logic--or better, reasoning--and that coming to agreement does not necessary mean assent to inescapable conclusions, but rather only reaching a partial and flexible accord supported by (again partial) consensus in the grammar of aesthetic conversation. And this is also where the subject returns in artful conversation, for “The problem of the critic, as of the artist,” Cavell writes, “is not to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways” (“Aesthetic Problems” 94). Patterns of disagreement can and should be further motivations to selfinvestigation and the achievement of greater clarity. The claim to reason in aesthetic judgments therefore presents key features of modes of reasoning in ordinary language. Here empirical evidence is in many cases irrelevant to one’s assertions, though some such evidence may support them. Moreover, instances of disagreement are to be commonly expected. If aesthetic conversation lapses into disagreement, consensus will not be achieved by attempting to confirm or disconfirm one or the others’ conclusions by collecting new data. Rather, in a spirit of rational accommodation, the conversation starts again in trying to understand why disagreement has arisen, perhaps by imagining novel examples or points of comparison, and then if new points of consensus are found, to try to explain how this agreement has come about and what kinds of grammar support it. In these situations, one often appeals to counter-factual examples that require what Cavell calls projective imagination or projecting a new context. Call this the search for alternatives, or testing through the deployment of imaginative counter-examples the acknowledged and unacknowledged assumptions, grounds, and contexts, or the not fully accounted for reasons, underlying every expressive act. There is a comparative and imaginative dimension here as well in that the “appeal to ‘what we should say if . . .’ requires that we imagine an example or story, sometimes one more or less similar to events which may happen any day, sometimes one unlike anything we have known” (“Aesthetic Problems” 95). In this process, Cavell writes, “The Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 535 philosopher appealing to everyday language turns to the reader not to convince him without proof but to get him to prove something, test something against himself. He is saying: Look and find out whether you can see what I see, wish to say what I wish to say. . . . [The] implication is that philosophy, like art, is, and should be, powerless to prove its relevance; and that says something about the kind of relevance it wishes to have. All the philosopher, this kind of philosopher, can do is to express, as fully as he can, his world, and attract our undivided attention to our own” (95-96). And in fact, this is all the modernist situation asks of us, whether epistemologically or ethically. The existential and perceptual uncertainty of modernism, and the modern arts, is therefore to be valued as demonstrating that achieving certainty is an inappropriate criterion for assessing the reasonableness of aesthetic judgments. For example, in “Music Discomposed,” Cavell observes that within the context of modernism, the category of the aesthetic has itself become uncertain raising questions of fraudulence and conviction. In the space of this uncertainty, works of art ask for a certain quality of trust from their viewers, and this request may be betrayed or disappointed. Authenticity cannot be taken for granted or as given--it recurrently requires critical determination that something counts as a work of art, and that we are genuinely having an aesthetic experience. Moreover, the process of critical determination is open and contingent--one can never establish with certainty a fixed list of criteria that assure how these judgments can be made and adjudicated. What modernism insists upon is not the discovery of the object or experience as genuine but rather an awareness that we do not know exactly which is under critical scrutiny: the work or the viewer? Epistemology will not help us here. The critic’s job is to persuade or convince, to achieve some confidence that her interlocutor will come to see or experience as she experiences, that one can join her in a special and fragile community of interpreters and valuers. “It matters that others know what I see,” Cavell writes, “in a way it does not matter whether they know my tastes. It matters, there is a burden, because unless I can tell what I know, there is a suggestion (and to myself as well) that I do not know. But I do--what I see is that (pointing to the object). But for that to communicate, you have to see it too. Describing one’s experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it. Art is often praised because it brings Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 536 men together. But it also separates them” (“Music Discomposed” 193). Cavell follows this argument with the claim that as a form of conduct that affects others, the making of art is subject to the same care and commitments as other forms of human conduct; therefore, it has a powerful ethical dimension, and the same may be said for aesthetic conversations and judgments. Respecting the autonomy of a work of art--its separate and perhaps unknowable and uncertain existence before you--means allowing yourself to be questioned, interrogated, or investigated by it, to be open to it in ways that allow an interpretation in which you yourself, reader, are subject to criticism and change. In any case, one of the great powers of aesthetic sensation is that it is incommunicable. Or rather, every effort to convey such sensations to others rebounds to the subject himself who, in face of the doubts and uncertainties of his interlocutors, including the work itself, must reflexively discover the depth of his conviction and the clarity of his criteria for judgment. “Nothing can show this value to you unless it is discovered in your own experience,” Cavell insists, “in the persistent exercise of your own taste, and hence the willingness to challenge your taste as it stands, to form your own artistic conscience, hence nowhere but in the details of your encounters with specific works” (“Thought of Movies” 93). In “The Thought of Movies,” Cavell reprises his conviction that in the framework of modernism art now exists in the condition of philosophy as it has always been the condition of philosophy to escape itself. This assertion also connects modernism to the medium of moving images, and indeed film’s virtual life of ontological uncertainty, since in modernism it is the condition of art to escape itself; hence, there is also an intimate connection between philosophy and what we experience as our modernity in thought and through artful expression. There is a link here to the temporal condition of the moving image, just as Deleuze so complexly describes it, or how I have characterized it in The Virtual Life of Film: the uncertain medium of moving images perhaps exemplifies an art whose temporal condition is to be continually escaping from itself in the expressive condition of becoming and change, thus expressing a duration or temporality commensurate with life, or the world, but also of the self. This is why film is a moving image of skepticism but also a medium of recovery from skepticism. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 537 38. Falling in love with the world I said that one’s experience of others puts a seam in experience. Why not consider that experience is endlessly, continuously, seamed? Every thing, and every experience of every different thing, is what it is. --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” My account of Deleuze’s possible contributions to a film philosophy followed upon my sketch of the elements or grammar of a possible philosophy of the humanities. I have already noted that there is an interesting link between Deleuze and Cavell through their common concern with the dilemmas of skepticism and the problem of belief. However, while Deleuze’s Spinozan ontology presents a universe or plane of immanence where skepticism should be made irrelevant, in The Time-Image his ethical picture of humanity’s broken link with the world demonstrates Deleuze’s difficulty in accounting for the human dimensions of this dilemma and the possible range of responses to it. A deep though not immediately apparent connection between Cavell and Deleuze might be located precisely at this point. There is a sinuous line where Cavell and Deleuze’s accounts of ontology complement one another, as if two pieces of a puzzle, whose pictures portray different worlds that nonetheless fit precisely at their joins. Along this line, Deleuze’s ethical demand to restore belief in this world finds itself paired with Cavell’s career-long examination of the grammar of acknowledgement and the logic of moral perfectionism. In turn, Cavell’s work is exemplary of a philosophy of and for the humanities, particularly in his original attempt to rebalance the concerns of epistemology and ethics. Two principle ideas unite Cavell’s philosophical and film work in this respect. Moreover, these are less separate ideas than iterations of the same problem that succeed one another more or less chronologically, namely, the philosophical confrontation with skepticism and the concept Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 538 of moral perfectionism. One still incompletely answered question here is why film is so important as the companion or exemplification of this confrontation. One clue resides in the title of an important Cavell essay, “What Photography Calls Thinking.” What does it mean to say that images or art think, or that they respond to philosophical problems as a way of thinking or a style of thought? In the first phase of Cavell’s film philosophy, represented by the period surrounding the publication of The World Viewed, the responses to this question are ontological and epistemological (at least in the sense of how the experience of modernism conditions our senses of knowing or not). But this ontology refers neither to the medium of art nor to the identity of artworks, but rather to how art expresses our modes of existence or ways of being in the world as a continuous fall into and return from skepticism. In Cavell’s early philosophy, skepticism is also the touchstone for examining and measuring the relationship between philosophy, science, and art. The moment has arrived then to investigate more deeply why the problem of skepticism is of such deep concern for Cavell, and how the definition of this problem and responses to it inform claims to reason in both aesthetics and ethics. This is of course one of the main themes of The Claim of Reason. For Cavell the skeptical attitude is one of the foundational characteristics of early modern thought. One might even say that skepticism is the foundation of modern philosophy as an academic discipline, as well as that of the modern scientific attitude. Descartes is the first protagonist in this story for several reasons. Cartesianism places epistemology as the centerpiece of philosophy, and in so doing makes perception the guarantor of knowledge about the world. At the same time, Descartes knows that human perception is limited and therefore unreliable. One last dilemma must be added to this linking of acts of perceiving to the quest for certainty in knowledge: existence. In the Meditations, the instability of knowing is linked to possible failures of perception and judgment that are at once outward and inward directed. Sitting alone before the fire in his study Descartes is lulled into wondering, as we all sometimes are, whether I am awake or dreaming, or to suddenly fearing that the frontiers between these two states are indiscernible or indistinguishable. What makes such thoughts all the more disturbing is that doubts about the existence of the world lead inexorably to doubts about Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 539 the reliability of the self and its anchoring in a stable, perceptible, and knowable world, as well as about the power of any transcendental authority to assure the universal coherence and meaningfulness of the world. In a strong sense, one could portray Descartes as the founding author of the experience of modernity in its doubled aspect: presenting the self as divided from the world by its capacities for perception and thought, and thus wishing for the self to master both itself and the world, and all the objects in it, by assuring their existence through criteria of certain knowledge--call this, method; one might also say, theory. Method functions (as logic will for analytic philosophy) as an a-subjective or trans-subjective legislator of reason. In the same move, epistemology is removed from the subject, or the subject disappears from epistemology. One might say in this case that reason becomes inhuman. Therefore, one of the principle aims of The Claim of Reason, as I have already suggested, is to rebalance epistemology’s exclusive claim to rationality with the powers of aesthetic judgment and moral reasoning. In his quest for the certainty of existence (of self, world, or God) Descartes enacts a series of divisions--of self from world, of mind from body, of transcendental authority absented from the world--whose consequences have persisted for 400 years. Skepticism is another aspect or dimension of modernity in that the desire for certainty is a response to a perceived precariousness of one’s relation to the world, as if a sudden and unexpected dislocation of the subject from the object of knowledge. (Cavell often refers to this experience as the “traumatic event” of the New Science of Copernicus and Galileo, which inspired a new and modern response from philosophy in the work of Bacon, Descartes, and Locke.) The unacknowledged symptom of skepticism, what Cavell sometimes calls the truth of skepticism, is suppressing recognition that it produces the situation it is supposed to overcome. In diverse moments of writing, Cavell describes this condition as the difficulty of making ourselves present to the world, and the world present to us. One should recognize immediately Cavell’s characterization of the question of modernism as the difficulty of reconciling presentness and existence as a historical or temporal experience. In its response to skepticism, epistemology creates a new and potentially disquieting situation that Cavell pictures as seeing ourselves as outside the world as a whole. The self is thus constrained to relate to the world as if ontologically distinct from Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 540 it. Moreover, since perception is optically unreliable the self or mind are made distinct from the body, even if the only way of relating to the world is through the frame or window of perception, as if from an immaterial and partial perspective looking out at different aspects of external objects. In this situation, the character of the subject and the character of the world are both transformed. The world is fashioned here as what Cavell calls a “generic object”; that is, as something that epistemology can treat in its generality as indistinguishable from all the singular and particular things within the world, or alternatively, where singular things serve pars pro toto as tokens of the world as a knowable object. (This idea is deeply related to Deleuze’s account of the cinematographic movement-image’s desire to express the Whole of the world, or the world as Whole in relation to a subject capable of perceiving this totality.) In its need to know the world as a complete object, skepticism expresses an anxiety that Cavell presents as “a sense of powerlessness to know the world, or to act upon it; I think it is also working in the existentialist’s (or, say, Santayana’s) sense of the precariousness and arbitrariness of existence, the utter contingency in the fact that things are as they are” (Claim of Reason 236). In the splitting of the subject from the object of knowledge--and in fact, creating subject and object as special categories or components of epistemology--the philosopher promotes a condition that Cavell describes as “one of being sealed off from the world, within the round of one’s own experiences, and as one of looking at the world as one object (“outside of us”). The philosopher’s experiences of trying to prove that it is there is, I will now add, one of trying to establish an absolutely firm connection with that world-object from that sealed position. It is as though, deprived of the ordinary forms of life in which that connection is, and is alone, secured, he is trying to establish it in his immediate consciousness, then and there. (This has its analogues in non-philosophical experience, normal and abnormal)” (Claim of Reason 238). Later in the book, Cavell asserts yet more forcefully “that what skepticism questions or denies my knowledge of is the world of objects I inhabit, is the world” (Claim of Reason 448). These sentences comprise some of Cavell’s most direct and succinct descriptions of the dilemma of skepticism. What Cavell then calls the (unacknowledged) truth or moral Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 541 of skepticism is “that the human creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such, is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think of as knowing . . . . (Then what rootlessness, or curse, made us, let us, think of our basis in this way, accepting from ourselves our offer of knowledge?)” (Claim of Reason 241). This is Cavell’s way of acknowledging Kant’s insight that limitations of knowledge are not necessarily failures of knowledge, an implication worked through in different ways in Heidegger and Wittgenstein. But it is also the case that skeptical doubts are unavoidable; we live with them diurnally. The skeptical misfire is to respond to this doubt only as a problem of epistemology to the exclusion of other kinds of reason and relationality, whether aesthetic, moral, or political. One might also say that the skeptic too strongly wants the world, and so treats it as a generic object, something possessable in its entirety and totality, rather than as a multiplicity that is relational, contingent, and changing. We need a response to the force of skepticism though not through certainty or a better epistemology, but rather through a diagnosis or etiology. Driven by the will to truth, the skeptic loses sight of the fact that our desire is a desire for the world, and so loses the world, or at least, loses sight of this world in its singularity and contingency, alive, changing, and inhabited by humanity and sociality. What Wittgenstein or Cavell want to return to us is human reason, for nothing is more unnatural than the grounding of skeptical reason in a kind of naturalism. One obvious bridge between Cavell and Deleuze’s account of ethics is that both find that the broken link with the world, or the skeptic’s crisis of belief and his passion for possessing the world through certain knowledge of it, is death dealing. Call this the original sin of skepticism, where philosophy desires a picture of the world as a static or unchanging and therefore lifeless image. Skepticism imagines the world as a confined and unchanging generic object because only of such imagined objects could we have complete and certain knowledge. (And to obtain this knowledge, one has to imagine a similarly confined interiorized subject, also impermeable to change.) Similar to Deleuze, Cavell is seeking a form of philosophy that will encourage our recovery from skepticism, thus restoring life to the world. However, the way of life or the world is such that the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 542 skeptic is doomed to disappointment, and so his quest for certainty is expressed as disappointment in that the aim of achieving and holding certainty of the world’s existence means claiming full and uncontested possession of the world and of knowledge--an unacknowledged and unattainable desire. In this way, the world’s death at the hands of skepticism expresses what might be called the three dimensions of nihilism: the failure to acknowledge the world (as it is, alive and changing); a freezing or fixation of the world as a static and possessable image; and finally, the annihilation of the specificity and value of the world and all the individuated and singular objects and souls within it. What does it mean to acknowledge instead the world as other, but an other whose existence is both separate from yet necessary to my own? Acknowledging the world’s necessity for us means recognizing our interest in it and its attraction for us; acknowledging its separateness means accepting its independence from us by not imposing our interests and needs upon it, but rather by being open to the responses and requests it may solicit. Following Cavell, Stephen Mulhall calls this falling in love with the world on terms of mutuality and equality. In response to the demand of a will to truth that insists upon a single mode or method for knowing, one which regulates rational investigation of all things, both Cavell and Deleuze would agree that thought requires attentiveness to things in the singularity and uniqueness of their existence. This is an appeal for recognizing and acknowledging difference, and the uniqueness of singular encounters or events. Or as Cavell puts it towards the end of The Claim of Reason: But why shouldn’t one say that there is a required appropriateness with respect to each breed of thing (object or being); something appropriate for bread, something else for stones, something for large stones that block one’s path and something for small smooth stones that can be slung or shied; something for grass, for flowers, for orchards, for forests, for each fish of the sea and each fowl of the air; something for each human contrivance and for each human condition; and, if you like, on up? For each link in the Great Chain of Being there is an appropriate hook of response. I said that one’s experience of others puts a seam in experience. Why not consider that experience is endlessly, continuously seamed? Every thing, and every experience of every different thing, is what it is. (Claim of Reason 441-442) Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 543 A seam both separates and unites, of course. It acknowledges that there are frontiers between interiority and exteriority, but also that they are at every point contiguous in our human experience of the world, and our relationality with the world and with others. This statement is as close as one can come in Cavell to Deleuze’s version of the univocity of Being as a life--singular, individuated, and individuating. (It is, moreover, a coherent response to Deleuze’s unacknowledged skepticism, or anguish over humanity’s disconnection from the world.) To accept and acknowledge the world and our life within it, to understand that we share a life with it, means recalling what we already know--that our experience of separation from the world is part of our shared existence with the world and all the individuated things within it. And we may be called to this recounting at any moment of our existence because it is continually forgotten. This recounting or recalling amounts to a quotidian re-finding of difference within repetition as series or iteration--the fact of returning for that which differs--which forcefully contests skepticism’s will to repeat the world with its own alienated image. Recovering the world from skepticism means interrupting repetition with difference, and thus Cavell comes strikingly close to Deleuze’s own conclusions in Difference and Repetition. But in Cavell’s view this is more a matter of continually bringing to mind the grammar of relations that bind us to the world, to life, and to others. This is only half the picture, however. Cavell and Deleuze share a conception of philosophy that seeks to recover itself from Cartesian skeptical dilemmas. To lay claim to my existence, the solitary self-acknowledgment that “I think” is not enough to assert a shared ontology with the world and with others. I must claim my existence, not only by acknowledging it and its relatedness (to the world, to others), but also by expressing it, and thereby publically requesting acknowledgment. Nothing less is meant by participating in a form of life. Because my expressions are anchored in my body and in my life, my expressions display life and expressiveness of an embodied existence, both in me and on earth, as agents in a common world where soul and matter are continuously seamed. And to do so means drawing from within myself an often unseen or unrecognized knowledge or capacity for knowing--a peculiar form of reflexivity as becoming-other to one’s self, of passively allowing oneself to become known by another that thinks within me as the first Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 544 step toward acknowledgment. Cavell’s answer to the question, “What is philosophy?,” then, seems in many respects to respond precisely to the ethical and existential dilemma expressed so poignantly by Deleuze in The Time-Image. Our responsiveness to the world will not be rekindled only by believing again in life and our connection to the world; it also requires that we find strategies for reanimating our deadened or alienated relations with the world and others, and to do so as a quotidian practice. Acknowledgment, recounting criteria, or assembling reminders thus become practices of declaring and enacting one’s existence, and that of other persons and things, as participating in a shared form of life, one to which we have a daily responsibility to investigate and to reaffirm anew each day in ways that make us continually responsible for and responsive to the singularity of our expressions and our relations in that form of life. 39. Ontology and desire, or a moving response to skepticism Film’s promise of the world’s exhibition is the background against which it registers absolute isolation: its rooms and cells and pinions hold out the world itself. --Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed Earlier in my elegy for theory, I characterized Cavell’s The World Viewed (1971) and Kracauer’s Theory of Film (1960) as untimely works, both projecting a vision of (film) philosophy for which there was no appropriate context of reception. Cavell was disappointed, no doubt, by the misunderstandings and confusions generated by The World Viewed in philosophy no less than film studies. A series of essays of the same period--“What Becomes of Things on Film?” (1978), “More of The World Viewed,” the “Foreword” to the enlarged edition of The World Viewed (both 1979), and “What Photography Calls Thinking? (1985)--are meant to respond to these criticisms, though ironically, often not in ways that directly confront Cavell’s critics in ways they would like. With forty years of hindsight, the problems or questions regarding ontology and medium that so troubled Cavell’s critics might be obviated if one can rise to the challenge of reading The World Viewed against the background of Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason. Even though the latter was published eight years after the first Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 545 edition of World Viewed, work on The Claim of Reason, based on Cavell’s 1961 dissertation, was nonetheless his philosophical preoccupation throughout the sixties and into the early seventies. The deep philosophical background so present to Cavell in his first film book is thus probably absent to most of his initial and even subsequent readers. However, there is another difficulty, perhaps more simply put, which in the age of Theory and ideology was no less scandalous for readers in film studies and the poststructuralist humanities than it was for philosophers working in a post-analytic framework. Cavell’s approach to skepticism was not to respond to its epistemological dilemmas but instead to pose skepticism as an ethical question, or rather as a question of evaluating and transforming a mode of existence. To demonstrate the kinship of moral reasoning to epistemology, and not through adjudicating claims of certainty but by demonstrating how they both respond uncertainly to commonly experienced existential crises, would be scandal enough. (Recall that Cavell is not alone here. G. H. Von Wright, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, P. M. S. Hacker, Hubert Dreyfus and other important thinkers are all examining similar arguments from their different perspectives.) However, Cavell compounds the problem by connecting it to the domain of aesthetics, most prominently, Shakespearean tragedy and romance, classical music and contemporary experimental music, opera, Hollywood comedies and melodramas, and European art films. Moreover, philosophical criticism cannot find its way alone through these dilemmas of knowing and valuing. Rather, Cavell asks us, philosophers and non-philosophers alike, to acknowledge that the problem of managing one’s relation to skepticism is already embedded or expressed in and through art; or to put it another way, that the problem is fully immanent to the ontological situation of projected worlds and screened images, as well as the actions and images so deployed there. Here I rediscover in Cavell an intuition or idea that I have been exploring for more than twenty years--that art is always running ahead of philosophy. In the period coincident with the publication of both The Claim of Reason and the second enlarged edition of The World Viewed in 1979, Cavell is revisiting and reformulating his arguments about skepticism in ways that subtly and complexly transform the purview of ontological investigation. Ordinarily, ontology is thought of as the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 546 question of existence of things, objects, or ideas external to myself. (This modern prejudice would have been unknown to the thinkers of ancient Greece.) One of Cavell’s most original contributions to philosophy is to shift completely the framework of these questions, and in ways strangely coincident with Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence. Through Cavell’s investigations of skepticism, questions of ontology and of examining the best cases for knowing the world and other minds continually return to or fold back onto the subject. The skeptical dilemma only retains its force if the subject continues to believe that it is imprisoned by its perception and thus separated from the world and from others. Cavell wants us to understand that when caught by skeptical doubt, we are enthralled by belief or lack of belief, and that epistemology alone cannot give us support or succor. Epistemological or theoretical reason is not reason enough, which is why other strategies must be found for evaluating the hold these beliefs have on us; hence the importance of both moral reasoning and aesthetic judgment in Cavell’s larger philosophical perspective. Moral reasoning and aesthetic judgment thus become ways of overcoming the interiority and solipsism of the subject, and of returning us to acknowledgment of the complex web of intersubjective relations that bind us, in every perception and expression, to our forms of life, or rather, to communities that include both the world and all the others in it, in which I myself am an other. One of the main themes of The Virtual Life of Film is that the concept of medium is inseparable from the problem of ontology, but not as a concept of the identity or essence of forms or genres of art. A medium is not simply a passive material or substance; it is equally form, concept, or Idea. Indeed one of the most original arguments of The World Viewed, and the source of much misreading and confusion, is that Cavell considers medium as a terrain where works of art establish their modes of existence, and in turn pose questions of existence to us. As I wrote in Virtual Life, a medium is that which mediates--it stands between us and the world (but also confronts us as a world) in ways that return our perceptions to us in the form of thoughtfulness, and sometimes forgetfulness. The whole of Cavell’s pioneering and difficult work is marked by a complex phenomenology drawn from Wittgenstein, Thoreau, and Emerson as much as Heidegger, and this phenomenology transforms conceptions of ontology in fascinating ways. Perhaps Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 547 even Cavell himself did not fully realize at the time that what he had written was less an aesthetic or even a theory of film than a deeply considered work of ethics whose point of attention was a certain kind of emblematic world--the worlds of cinema as projected and screened. The World Viewed is a formidable work of aesthetics, and perhaps also of theory, but it is primarily an ethics. This is a powerful bridge to Deleuze, who considers the Image as both an ontological and an ethical concept. To speak of ontology in reference to a mode of existence for art, as well as our actual or projected modes of existence in relation to art, is already to evoke an ethical reasoning in which relations between object and subject are co-determined, fluid, and suspended from historical or chronological time. Indeed the most powerful aesthetic experiences effect an interruption of time or an opening in temporal experience. Every assertion about medium or automatism in The World Viewed is equally a characterization of acts whereby the self engages with its forms of identity, where it may come to know itself or project some future self. In glossing Cavell’s concept of automatism in The Virtual Life of Film, I noted that unlike classical art wherein automatisms function as the renewal and extension of tradition, modernist works provoke in each of their instances the sense of being self-actualizing, of standing alone. It is as if in each act of art making the possibility of producing art, and of having an aesthetic experience, has to be reasserted without any promise of success. In this way, the modern work of art embodies an existential condition expressive of our own current mode of existence: in the absence of tradition or any transcendental authority, whether moral or epistemological, the self is provoked to a state of continual self-actualization or invention. What we then seek in cinema, or indeed aesthetic experience, is not the re-finding of an essence, but rather the new discovery of our selves, or the discovery of a new self. I said in Virtual Life that a medium, if it is a living one, is continually in a state of self-transformation. In like manner, the force of aesthetic sensation is that of a self discovering another self in a process of new formation. In this context, Cavell’s early definition of cinema as a succession of automatic world projections, which I discuss at length in The Virtual Life of Film, also suggests a program of philosophical investigation that links the temporality of modernism to the “movement” or transformative power of the image. Succession indicates types and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 548 degrees of depicted motion, of course, both within the frame and across continuous or discontinuous series at various scales. Yet this criterion should also be broadened to include the complex temporalities of the image in its states and phases of becoming. (Later, Cavell will refer to the image’s powers of becoming as “photogenesis.”) Automatic designates those aspects of the image that are self-producing independent of a human hand, as well as the absence of people and things so produced on the screen. Call this the inhuman dimension or power of screened worlds, which may also be characterized as the passive intentional power of cinematographic expression. World then leads to ontological investigations of the worlds and subjects so made, and the interpenetrating qualities of reality and fantasy experienced through institutional conditions of viewing and response. And finally, projection signals the phenomenological conditions of viewing, as if at a remove or distance from the world, as well as the force of analogy in movement and time between the screened world and the pro-filmic world thus transcribed and projected. Movement, time, and becoming are all complexly linked here, in ways expressive of the unsettled and unsettling force of fantasy and reality (of fantasies of reality, or the reality of fantasy in relations to screened worlds), as well as the passing or becoming of ontological situations thus projected. In the first phase of Cavell’s film philosophy, the problem of ontology does not wish just to account for the existence of the projected world and perception as screened. Rather, Cavell wants to ask: what are the conditions of my current existence that lead me to desire to see and to experience the world in just this way, as projected and screened? Why does just this kind of picturing of the world hold me? What are the sources of its attraction or attractiveness? Cinema itself responds to this question by offering another regime of belief, not necessarily as an escape into fantasy, but rather by offering a condition or situation wherein we might understand more clearly how our views of or on reality are burdened by fantasy. This is neither an escape into or out of fantasy, as if somehow our thoughts, perceptions, and expressions could be disconnected from our desires. The screened world is a perfect emblem of skepticism, as I have already pointed out in The Virtual Life of Film, but it also opens to view a range of options for relief from skepticism. And not by bolstering our knowledge of things, not by documenting our Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 549 certainty of the world either present or past, but by opening to question dilemmas of belief or disbelief framed by a mode of existence that desires these kinds of pictures of the world; or alternatively, by examining the forms of our responsiveness to a world that wants us to experience it as or through moving pictures. Cavell’s version of ontology is transformational. When Cavell asks in 1978, what becomes of things (or people) on film?, he want us to comprehend the world viewed as projected on the screen as a space of transformation, or if you will, becoming. Cavell calls this force of becoming on screen and as image, “photogenesis.” These transformations do not only count for objects recorded and transformed to the screen, but also for the subjects included there. (Indeed as we shall soon see, as transcribed and projected on the screen, people and things enter into a common space of expressive potential.) In his first accounts leading up to Pursuits of Happiness, these subjects are ethical exemplars responding to skeptical belief, usually in comic ways; or in fact, finding such belief to be comic rather than tragic. In the “Avoidance of Love,” Cavell states that in King Lear, “Tragedy has moved into the world, and with it the world becomes theatrical” (Must We Mean What We Say? 344). Cinema then finds the possibility, perhaps, of detheatricalizing this world, thus undermining skepticism with laughter. The figures of Keaton, Chaplin, or Cary Grant are especially important in this context, not to mention the great actresses of remarriage comedy. Later, Cavell’s interests in Emersonian moral perfectionism uncovers new dimensions of immanence where the temporal logic or structure of perfectionism can be seen as fully coincident with certain varieties of cinematographic becoming. Becoming on the screen is a species of (self) transformation, meaning that it is both automatic or subject to certain automatisms of recording, transcription, and narration, but also that it projects reflexively a picture of self responding to pressures of transformation. (Cavell often refers to this process as the ascendency of actor over character in the cinema.) Ontology in Cavell’s sense is therefore not about an attained existence for either objects or persons, which film is then capable of recording, representing, or preserving, nor is it about the preservation or projection of the world as a generic object. The temporal structure of screened worlds, and the ethical stakes for our picture of subjectivity Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 550 so projected, are more complex. To understand the concept of ontology as expressing film’s relation to reality, and thus fantasy, Cavell asks us to investigate the reality of this relation through moving images as images that move us. What makes cinema an emblem of modernity in the arts or culture is not only that it perfectly expresses the dilemma of skepticism as a structural condition of perception; it also shows that the reality of this condition is inescapably marked by fantasy, and that this condition is in fact escapable. Take for example Cavell’s discussion of the comedy of Buster Keaton in “What Becomes of Things on Film?” Cavell frames his response to Keaton through Heidegger’s characterization of the worldhood of the world announcing itself to us, not as a revelation to the subject, but rather through the obstinacy of things, which in opposing us expose the limitations of our acts, knowledge, and preoccupations in our encounters and struggles with material objects. The resistance of the world to our actions and will not only circumscribes us as subjects--if we are willing, it also opens us sensuously to so far unrecognized textures and capacities of the world, and to our contingent relationships to it as a space of accidents, which are also unforeseen possibilities. In slapstick comedy, every mischance is a gift and an opportunity for evasion. That this occurs in the time and movements of cinema, Cavell explains, says something about the human capacity for sight, or for sensuous awareness generally, something we might express as our condemnation to project, to inhabit, a world that goes essentially beyond the delivery of our senses . . . . I understand Buster Keaton, say in The General, to exemplify an acceptance of the enormity of this realization of human limitation, denying neither the abyss that at any time may open before our plans, nor the possibility, despite that open possibility, of living honorably, with good if resigned spirits, and with eternal hope. His capacity for love does not avoid this knowledge, but lives in full view of it. Is he dashing? He is something rarer; he is undashable. He incorporates both the necessity of wariness in an uncertain Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 551 world, and also the necessary limits of human awareness; gaze as we may, there is always something behind our backs, room for doubt.227 At the same time, these comments are not a defense of stoicism. The personae of Keaton or Chaplin do not ask that we gracefully accept the obstinacy of fate and the world but rather show that human beings are resourcefully capable of pursuing happiness in spite of these limitations--this is not far from Deleuze’s ethical demand to exercise the freedom to choose or to recognize the always open possibility of willed alternatives. Similarly, in “The Thought of Movies,” Cavell asks us to recognize “. . . that there are conditions under which opportunities may be discovered again and retaken, that somewhere there is a locale in which a second chance is something one may give oneself” (97). The comic responses of Keaton or Chaplin to the world’s contingency and obstinacy are extraordinary manifestations of what any ordinary human being is capable of. Cavell calls this a willingness to care, or to be attentive to the depth of a human capacity for inventiveness and improvisation in seeking out newly imagined alternatives. Here the link between reality and fantasy in the screened image is especially important. Or rather, it may be characteristic of the automatisms of the screened image that every transcription of the world is also expressive of a desired stance towards the world--the world as we want to see it or desire it to be. The real and the imaginary are not opposed here as genres of cinematographic expression. Rather, they continually flow into and out of one another in the temporality of the projected image and our responses to it. Cavell calls this an alternation between the indicative and subjunctive tenses, or unmarked juxtapositions of reality with some unresolved opposition to reality; Deleuze calls this the indiscernibility of the actual and the virtual, or of the real and the imaginary. Cavell evokes the term photogenesis to describe the image’s peculiar quality of becoming, which is also expressive of “the power of film to materialize and to satisfy (hence to dematerialize and to thwart) human wishes that escape the satisfaction of the world as it stands; as perhaps it will ever, or can ever, in fact stand” (“What Becomes of Things on Film?” 6). To speak of ontology here is to address not only or not simply a fact 227 “What Becomes of Things on Film?” in Cavell on Film 3. Originally published fall 1978 in Philosophy and Literature. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 552 of film, as Cavell might put it, but also to focus on a genetic capacity of the image that needs to be interpreted or evaluated in terms of its qualities of attraction. In the force and quality of their genesis or becoming, the temporality of the world and subjects becoming on film, or in the expressiveness of the image, anticipate the grammar of what Cavell later calls moral perfectionism. Considered retrospectively, this idea is put forward with great clarity in “What Becomes of Things on Film?,” when Cavell writes “That to be human is to have, or to risk having, this capacity to wish; that to be human is to wish, and in particular to wish for a completer identity than one has so far attained; and that such a wish may project a complete world opposed to the world one so far shares with others: this is a way of taking up the cause of Shakespearean Romance . . . . In both skepticism and romance, knowledge, call it consciousness as a whole, must go out in order that a better consciousness can come to light” (7). At various moments in this period of his writing, Cavell repeats that film is a moving image of skepticism. To answer the question, what becomes of things and people on film, means comprehending all the variety and complexity of what “movement” means here. We certainly find cinematographic images to be moving, that is, as inspiring affect or emotion. But they are also unsettling; they make us ontologically unquiet. If film is a moving image of skepticism, it does not so much confirm our subjectivity (as modern for example), as shake our belief that we know the basis of our conviction in reality. This movement is also transformational. In cutting conviction loose from its moorings, the subject is made vulnerable to pressures of uncertainty, doubt, and self-questioning, and thus open to the possibility of change. And finally, movement is also historical: the passage of skepticism into art or cinema, from the everyday or philosophy into a mode or machine of presentation, may also mean that modernity is changing the terms of its existence, as I already argued in The Virtual Life of Film. (Here we pass, perhaps, from an experience of modernity to nostalgia for it, or what Cavell calls losing one’s natural relation to art or film.) The concept of photogenesis plays an interesting role in the first phase of Cavell’s thought as a key point of transition from the concerns of ontology to those of perfectionism. For Cavell, photogenesis names one of the principal powers or Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 553 automatisms of cinematographic presentations, where the transcription and projection of screened worlds enacts transformations whose violence is commensurate with the force of becoming immanent to thought and things on film. The concept of photogenesis is complexly linked here to cinema’s specific institutional presentation of the skeptical dilemma. For example, in the Foreword to the enlarged edition of The World Viewed, Cavell writes that objects projected on the film screen are inherently reflexive or selfreferential, meaning first that one is led to wonder about their physical origins in past times and spaces, but also that the quality of their presence on the screen also indicates their ineluctable absence. This situation is an emblem of skepticism in that all we need to convince ourselves of the presence of the world is a projected image wherein the world is screened and we are screened from it, as if viewing it from a distance. Belief in the causal presence of objects on the screen, and our surrender of responsibility for that world to film’s automatic transcriptions and projections of it, is one of the satisfactions of skepticism. But the anguish of skepticism is also produced from this situation in two ways, both of which signify a withdrawal or diminution of human agency and autonomy. In viewing this succession of automatic world projections, we are absolved from responsibility for producing views of the world, since another automatic or automatizing (nonhuman) entity has brought them into being. Call this the Platonic view that so worried Baudry or Metz. Alternatively, in the projected worlds so produced, human beings are also leveled to the plane of immanence of worldly things. In other words, within the space and duration of the cinematographic image people and objects have the same degree and level of expressive potential. Within this space of recorded time and movement, people and objects, events and actions, are absorbed into a common matrix of interdependency that is singular and immanent. This leveling of beings and things in a common field of expression is one of the most noteworthy characteristics of photogenesis as a significant cinematographic automatism. In his essay, “Stanley Cavell on Recognition, Betrayal, and the Photographic Field of Expression,” Richard Moran notes that Cavell characterizes cinematographic expression--call this the image--as a kind of seam in experience, or an ontological link between views and viewing, indeed as a kind of powerful expressive immanence. Because Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 554 the image takes in the entirety of what exists in the frame and renders all of the elements thus transcribed as equally and uniformly expressive, it enfolds every object, action, and individual into a common space and duration, and it does so automatically in ways that supervene human agency. This observation is one way of characterizing photographic intentionality, or rather, the grammar of intention we evoke in trying to say what the camera does and reveals. The camera creates a zone, Moran suggests after Cavell, where even silence and immobility become expressive, and indeed where objects, themselves silent and immobile, become as expressive as subjects, no matter how moving and voluble. In turn, even the most reticent subject also becomes demonstrative. Cavell refers to this quality as “the camera’s knowledge of the metaphysical restlessness of the live body at rest . . . . Under examination by the camera, a human body becomes for its inhabitant a field of betrayal more than a ground of communication, and the camera's further power is manifested as it documents the individual's self-conscious efforts to control the body each time it is conscious of the camera's attention to it.”228 Moran’s observations on photographic expressiveness also clarify what Deleuze tends to call “camera-consciousness.” Not that the camera thinks or has an active or reflective selfconsciousness in the same way as human minds, but rather its powers of expressivity are shown as a kind of revelatory intending. There are active powers in the arts of photography and film, of course, through the actions of intentional recording, framing, editing, and narrating. However, in Moran’s view, there is also a passive power to cinematographically intentionality. “The camera relates to a human subject, forcing it to reveal itself, not through a kind of active power,” Moran writes, not by interrogation or forcing anything to happen, but rather by its very passivity, by somehow bringing whatever is going on in the visual field into the realm of the expressive, the revealing. It is not a matter of forcing the human subject to speak, but rather of creating a space within which either speaking, hesitating, or not speaking at all are all equally forms of expression . . . . Here Cavell's description of the powers of the camera is accented less on the liberatory potential of “giving 228 “What Photography Calls Thinking” in Cavell on Film,126. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 555 expression to the inexpressive,” than on the inescapability of the expression under the camera's gaze, and on the fact that what is thereby revealed is not under the control or understanding of the human subject himself.”229 In addition, this passive and automatic power does not simply register details of surface and externality--it puts the subject, so to speak, beside itself in ways where the passive expressive intentionality of the camera will always exhaust or overwhelm those of its subjects--every surface is exposed in the sense that every recorded thing and movement is rendered with the same degree and quality of immanence: it is always “utterly unable not to be continuously expressive, to be always giving itself away” (Moran 6). For Cavell, the character of this immanence makes the cinematographic image an emblem of perpetual visibility where in principle nothing can be hidden and all is potentially public and open to view. In a very real sense, Moran concludes, objects and subjects are exposed photographically, such that “even the tiniest deflections of one's glance or posture count as part of the manifestation of the self, whether actively or passively . . . . And the interplay between activity and passivity in Cavell's writing, both philosophic and cinematic, helps us to see the dependence of that active power of interrogation on the corresponding power of the camera to hold still, to withdraw from assertion. The forms of expressiveness are inescapable even when not imposed from without, when they are rather the conditions of visibility within the frame” (18-19). Cavell’s characterization of the immanent expressive powers of the image is not a realism, or not only a realism in a limited sense. (This is also a way of saying that when seen from the right perspective Cavell’s most abstruse assertions about the cinematic image turn out to be his most precise.) The reality of the condition of cinematic viewing, according to Cavell, is ineluctably marked by fantasy, and in turn fantasy is one of the most powerful components of our experience of reality through cinema. This experience is neither the illusion of reality nor the reality-effect so thoroughly studied by contemporary film theory. Rather, it relates to Cavell’s close connection of the skeptical 229 Richard Moran, “Stanley Cavell on Recognition, Betrayal, and the Photographic Field of Expression,” 4-5. To appear in L’écran de nos pensées (editions ENS), ed. Elise Domenach. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 556 dilemma to the experience of modernity in cinematic viewing, and how that experience conditions our responsiveness to the camera’s powers of passive intentionality. There is a powerful reality expressed in this situation since it is the philosophical background of our daily cultural life in modernity--the experience of cinema is a component of that life and also an expression of it. But the reality of this experience is also permeated by fantasy (of belief or conviction, of a world accessible only through the senses, of a past preserved against time, of a self withdrawn into privacy) as a force of attraction inseparable from our lived reality. In philosophy, this situation is not to be negated, overcome, or deconstructed, but rather acknowledged and evaluated. The challenge of ontological investigation is not to alter our conditions of knowing, but rather our conditions of valuing and living. The photographic and cinematic arts have a special role to play here because they embody and replicate the structure of skepticism, and also because they so powerfully inspire a hesitancy or equivocation with respect to skepticism’s powers of conviction, which according to Cavell is inherent in the structure of skepticism itself. In other words, photography both elicits a certain regime of belief and also destabilizes it. This assertion and destabilization of belief is beautifully expressed in Cavell’s statement, early in The World Viewed, that “A photograph does not present us with ‘likenesses’ of things; it presents us, we want to say, with the things themselves. But wanting to say that may well make us ontologically restless” (World Viewed 17). Here Cavell wants to describe the powers of photogenesis to simultaneously affirm belief and inspire doubt, to attract us to the image as confirming the existence of the world through its powers of automatic analogical causation, and at the same time, to enact a fantasy of the world’s presence through its absent existence. This is another way of asserting that the automatic transcription and projection of the world hovers uncertainly between indicative and subjunctive tenses or moods, or a co-present belief of the past existence in time and of a world preserved, and the present projection of a world transformed. We misrecognize photography’s hold on us if we gravitate too urgently to one pole or the other. Rather, the truth of the image, if there is one, resides in its uncertainty, contingency, and becoming. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 557 Cavell’s concept of automatism is therefore not meant to describe, or not only to describe, the fact of mechanical reproduction; it also wants to account for the powers of attraction or fantasy in relation to images so produced in ways both human and inhuman. Automatism thus manifests a specific kind of desire--the wish to view the world unseen and as if by a self hidden behind perception--and this world must be taken to be the world in its totality. This is the modern philosophical wish of skepticism, whose desire for the world as a completely knowable object places it just beyond the reach of our knowing, and so produces a situation where our natural mode of perception is viewing as an invisible and anonymous observer. Here, Cavell explains, “We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self” (World Viewed 102). This is a precise description of the perceptual and epistemological situation of skepticism, which seems to want to make the self distinct from perception. Moreover, in the cinema, this perception appears to be produced independently of the self as an automatic instrumentality. The skeptical attitude thus engenders a peculiar internal division where the mind can only assure itself of the possibility of knowledge by treating its own perception as a separate mechanism that intervenes between itself and the world. At the same time, this mode projects an external division separating self from world, whose only points of contact can take place through acts of viewing. Perception thus becomes both a structure of separation between subject and object, mind and world, and also the only pathway through which mind and world can communicate. In thrall of skepticism, Cavell suggests, that the only way of establishing connection with the world is through viewing it or having views of it. To wish to view the world itself--as it was in the past or is in the present past-as a complete causally produced object, is therefore to wish for the condition of viewing as such, but in the passive form of an automatic and instrumentalized perception. In turn, to wish for the condition of viewing as such is to desire a sure connection to the world, but also to hold at bay, unseen and unacknowledged, recognition that this desire is a fantasy of anonymity, privacy, and power over the world. In theatrical cinema, the deepest irony of this situation is that the condition of collective viewing and of shared experience might reinforce our desire for the privacy and anonymity of skepticism. (Perhaps the contemporary proliferation of home viewing and personal data screens might Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 558 likewise reinforce and expand exponentially an isolation where our only recourse for connecting to the world or to others is through the image and from behind screens. In this ontology we are not alone together, but rather together alone.) Alternatively, philosophical investigation and criticism might be able to release the hold of this fantasy or to let us see beyond it the attractions of sociality and a shared mode of existence waiting to be acknowledged. 40. Automatism and the declaration of existence in time Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? --Henry David Thoreau, Walden I have been speaking of Cavell’s difficult and controversial account of the concept of automatism. At this point in The World Viewed, Cavell presents two of the most powerful and elusive arguments in his philosophical oeuvre. One relates to cinema, and the other to painting; together they present alternative frameworks for thinking through questions of existence as raised by the concepts of automatism and photogenesis. Cavell’s reasoning is worth examining in detail. One of the key powers of cinematographic automatism is that it relieves the individual of responsibility for viewing since the screened world produces views automatically with its own (mechanical and inhuman) conditions of causality, projection, and temporality. In this situation, Cavell says, somewhat mysteriously, that the movies seem “more natural than reality” (The World Viewed 102). This statement is rife with irony, but it is also deeply felt. Framed by the long history of skepticism, movies may seem more natural than reality because they reproduce views automatically, and thus reinforce the perceptual and epistemological structure of skepticism as if it were our most familiar and customary option for encountering the world. One is reminded here of Walter Benjamin’s observation in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version)” that “The equipment-free aspect of reality has here become the height of artifice, and the vision of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 559 immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of technology.”230 The intense alienation produced by automated images makes us long for the sight of reality itself, and this may also be a way of agreeing with Benjamin that reality has become denatured within the skeptical culture of modernity. Alternatively, another power of the movies may be that they alert us to a different view of nature in which objects and subjects are no longer separate and distinct, but rather are embedded and interrelated in a singular and immanent matrix of duration. But here Cavell’s argument makes a rather stunning turn. That movies seem more natural than reality is not the sign of escape into fantasy, dream, or illusion so much as a respite from private fantasy and withdrawal into ourselves. Automatism releases us from the task of producing world views. But in reproducing automatically this condition of viewing as a mechanism separate from our selves and actions, we may become alert to the fact that, whether experienced with or without projection, the world is already drawn by fantasy. In other words, there are no views of the world unencumbered by our desires, whether singular or collective. Thus it is evermore important to acknowledge and evaluate those desires philosophically so as to understand what kinds of worlds attract us, and either bind or free us. Automatism not only reproduces the conditions of skepticism and the withdrawal of the self behind the anonymous screen of perception; it may also awaken and alert the self to other senses of reality and community. “Movies convince us of the world’s reality in the only way we have to be convinced,” Cavell writes, “without learning to bring the world closer to the heart’s desire (which in practice now means learning to stop altering it illegitimately, against itself): by taking views of it” (The World Viewed 102). The density and complexity of these arguments are unwoven in compelling ways in Cavell’s 1985 essay, “What Photography Calls Thinking.” That we may be convinced or not of this reality is a central fact of its fluctuating existence. Moreover, this instability at the heart of the image is not a matter of representation or illusion, nor can we test this conviction in the framework of epistemology. Rather, it is a matter of ethics, or of an 230 In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) 263. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 560 uncertainty or unmooring of our sense of existence expressed as “an impressive range of anxieties centered on, or symptomatized by, our sense of how little we know about what the photographic reveals: that we do not know what our relation to reality is, our complicity in it; that we do not know how or what to feel about those events; that we do not understand the specific transformative powers of the camera, what I have called its original violence; that we cannot anticipate what it will know of us--or show of us” (“What Photography Calls Thinking” 116). The sense of reality we intuit, or rather inhabit, in relation to a world projected and screened is closely allied to the condition of modernity as Cavell defines it in art or philosophy. “Photography could not have impressed itself so immediately and pervasively on the European (including the American) mind,” Cavell writes, “unless that mind had at once recognized in photography a manifestation of something that had already happened to itself. What happened to this mind, as the events are registered in philosophy, is its fall into skepticism, together with its efforts to recover itself, events recorded variously in Descartes and Hume and Kant and Emerson and Nietzsche and Heidegger and Wittgenstein” (“What Photography Calls Thinking” 116). The stakes of philosophical investigation as ethical evaluation are woven into the style of this sentence. Photography is a moving image no less than film; or rather it induces a movement, fluctuation, or sense of transformation that is personal as much as historical or cultural. There is both a fall into skepticism and an effort to recover the self--a diagnosis of illness and suggestion of therapy--expressed in the fact that recognition of our complex and contradictory desires or fantasies in relation to photography make us anxious, or ontologically restless. To the extent that we are in the epistemological thrall of skepticism, the fate of modernity is to relate to the world only by viewing it as if from behind the self. Heidegger diagnoses this withdrawal from the world behind the screen of perception as distance; Thoreau or Emerson refer to the experience as nextness or proximity to the world, which also expresses our separateness from it and each other. But as diagnosed by Cavell, this movement is not only one of withdrawing, but also of returning or recovering. Think of movement here as transport, which induces anxieties of dislocation and disorientation, but which also defines arcs of transition towards something else, say a future condition of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 561 culture or state of self. Here Cavell’s sense of ontology is linked not only to ethics but also to time--the event of photography in Cavell is not so distant from the Event in Deleuze. Another connection to Deleuze is Cavell’s concern with the difficulty and possibilities of thinking. Cavell’s title recalls Heidegger’s question, “Was heißt Denken?,” often translated as “What is called thinking?” but perhaps more powerfully understood as “What calls for thinking?” To ask what a photograph is thinking about is not to attribute consciousness to it but to ask what it knows of itself, or to examine more carefully, as does Richard Moran, its powers of passive intentional expression. When Cavell refers to a text’s self-referentiality or self-acknowledgement, and asks what it knows or expects of its viewers or interlocutors, he asks readers to engage in philosophical criticism, not only of the text, but also of themselves, thus reinforcing art’s call to thinking, and inspiring, perhaps, artful conversation. To ask what a photograph knows of me is to request a closer examination of how the conditions of photography or film as media in Cavell’s sense solicit responsiveness from me, and therefore to investigate the ambiguity, singularity, and strangeness underlying our ordinary experience of such images. In philosophical (self) investigation, the potential derangement or madness of skepticism may be recognized and acknowledged. But this is also a form of evaluation leading, perhaps, to repossession of one’s self or possession of a newer self. If film is a moving image of skepticism, it also a point of passage towards something else. Terms of transport or transformation also suggest creation and self-creation, which is perhaps the central theme of Cavell’s treatment of comedies of remarriage and melodramas of the unknown woman. Both genres are exemplary of what Cavell later calls moral perfectionism. And in fact moral perfectionism is meant to describe and account for the (aesthetic) qualities and (ethical) stakes of “movement” or photogenesis in their expressions of fall and return, diagnosis and recovery, leading to new creations of the human. It is an irony, but perhaps a welcome one, that recovery also entails loss. In their peculiar qualities of movement, and their capacities to induce movement, photogenesis, transport, and transformation are meant to convey some unsettling varieties of becoming in the image as complex expressions of our experience of time. To be convinced of being present to a past world may lead to nostalgia, but through its powers of ineluctable Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 562 succession, the cinematographic image may also express the incessant passage of time and the transience of life. To be attracted to the past but also caught up in a present that slips from your grasp in every passing instant may leave you distracted and inattentive to the future. Cavell finds such thoughts to be powerfully expressed with “particular lucidity in shots of candid happiness, where the metaphysical transience of such instants marks their subjects with mortal vulnerability” (“What Photography Calls Thinking” 124). But this is only one dimension of film’s transport in time, or how it calls for thinking in, of, or through time. Cavell therefore reminds us of his depiction of “a vision of the world viewed--the world as photographed--as the world of my immortality, the world without me, reassuring in the promise that it will survive me, but unsettling in the suggestion that as I stand now the world is already for me a thing of the past, like a dead star. Romantic writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth and Emerson and Thoreau mean to awaken us to our harboring of such a vision, and to free us from it. Yet our nostalgia deepens. Memory, which should preserve us, is devouring us. We must, as Thoreau put the matter, look another way” (124). To look another way is to seek out new paths to recovery, or to be present again to one’s self by suddenly awakening to the fact that we have forgotten ourselves. It is as if human conduct and human thought continually fail to synchronize with one another-Cavell calls this the condition of a creature whose body and soul do not everywhere fit, which is perhaps the signal discovery of psychoanalysis. The open question, however, is how and why cinematographic thinking might provide philosophical support in aid of recovery? In his essay on “Behavior,” Emerson calls this returning the mind to the living body. In a wonderfully astute and pleasurable reading of Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Cavell depicts cinematography’s attention to thinking as a somatography, or the image’s registration and expression of bodily responses to thought in ways unknown to its self. (This is yet another name for the power of photogenesis and of the camera’s passive powers of expressive intentionality.) One of the peculiar powers of the camera is to frame such behaviors, which often remain unknown to the subject and misunderstood by others of his world, in ways where they can finally be acknowledged and evaluated. Deeds is Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 563 thought insane because of his inexplicably eccentric behavior, one of whose features is renouncing the gifts of inherited capital. In the climactic trial scene, Deeds defends himself not by explaining himself, but rather by invoking the criterion of “fidgetiness.” Call this the often inexplicable responses of the body to thought, or thought’s unsettling of the body, as a shared characteristic of the human. Rather than justifying his eccentricity or singularity, Deeds demonstrates what all present to him share as human creatures: that the presence of thought may render the body speechless, but the human being no less thoughtful and expressive. In a wonderful turn, the film refers to this condition as being “pixilated.” There is both error and truth in this idiom. The mistaken view of the elderly sisters who bear witness to Deeds’ eccentricities is that pixelated means “crazy.” Yet in asserting that everyone is pixilated apart from them (thus revealing their fairly deep state of pixilation) they confirm a power of the cinematographic image--it can reveal the presence of thought or thoughtfulness in ways that individuals are often incapable of recognizing in themselves or in others, and it does so thorough its own attentiveness to everything that moves before the camera and in making movement expressive. One wants to say, it gives intelligence to movement. Before the trial scene, the voluble, sociable, and fidgety Deeds has been reduced to immobility and silence. As the very figure of American communitarianism and civic mindedness, Deeds has withdrawn into himself, in protest perhaps of a community that asks him to account for himself, and which refuses to recognize in him the generosity, honesty, and loyalty, indeed the spirit of criticism that might be characterized as a kind of American utopianism. There is also something frightening in Deeds’ utopianism and his often violent libertarian moralism, as if the uneven line between democracy and a kind of proto-fascism was still thinly drawn in 1936. (Twenty years later, Nicholas Ray will explore the darker side of this American madness in Bigger Than Life.) Then perhaps the only way to avoid the failure of democracy is to acknowledge our common capacity for pixilation, and to learn to recognize and evaluate whether we have lapsed into real madness or not. Here the camera is meant to help us apprehend, in ways our unaided selves cannot, that soul and body do not everywhere fit. Thoughtful behavior betrays our existence to our selves (the presence of our selves to both mind and body), but not in ways Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 564 Descartes would find satisfying, nor in such situations would Descartes’ proof of existence much compel us. There must be other ways of being and seeming reasonable, and to lay our claim to existence. To find ways of answering the question, what photography calls thinking thus means considering possibilities for thought and existence that release skepticism’s hold on our sense of reality. In evoking Heidegger, Cavell wishes to convey the idea that what calls for thinking is desire, or rather that the desire to think is essential to the possibility of thinking. Thinking is linked to the human desire for the possible, and bringing the possible to realization. “Fidgetiness” means then not so much the unspoken presence of thought as much as the desire to think and to give expression to thought. Perhaps this is the body’s responsiveness to thoughts that it can hardly contain and which it feels compelled to express? For Cavell, this recognition and acknowledgement of the unquiet body, which connects human desire with possibility and realization, captures better and in more prosaic terms what Descartes’s cogito is meant to prove--the existence of the human or of the possibility of becoming human in spite of the world’s denials, or our denials of the world. But here Deeds’ impassioned proof is directed less toward the possibilities of knowledge and existence, or in proving his own self-possession and sanity, than in demonstrating the ethical failure of the community that would judge him. In acknowledging that he has been “away,” Deeds wants to awaken his community to the fact that they have all lapsed into that form of pixilation called conformity, where their own ideals of democratic commons have parted from them, and where they are no longer able to recognize the presence of thought to self and thus confirm their existences to themselves and in community. Cavell characterizes this experience as implying “that we are without proof of our existence, that we are, accordingly, in a state of preexistence, as if metaphysically missing persons. . . . But the only difference between their expressed view of the world and Deeds’ view is that he does not clearly exempt himself, any more than Thoreau exempts himself, from the madness of the world. Perhaps this is what philosophical authority sounds like” (“What Photography Calls Thinking” 128-129). Descartes’ declaration of existence requires not the presence of thought, but rather the ego’s exercise of its capacity for thought, and thus Descartes’ cogito asserts that Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 565 thinking cannot doubt itself. After Emerson, and later Freud, the proof of thinking is that it cannot be concealed. Yet there is a missing term in this uncanny reversal. Descartes’ proof of existence requires the action of a consciousness fully present to itself independently of any body. Not only is thought deprived of its anatomy here, but perhaps thought, and therefore existence, can only occur intermittently, that is, in the action of its exercise, which is all too infrequent. Cavell’s portrayal of Emerson suggests another image of thought, one where thought courses through us continually in the medium of our daily creaturely existence, yet only intermittently becomes present to our selves, or where consciousness is defined as becoming again present to self. Existence is never in doubt here, but it is often unacknowledged; we need only to be awakened to the fact. Cavell says that a reverse field of proof is needed and, one responsive to skepticism in ways very different from Cartesianism. Here the camera’s passive intentional powers present evidence of another kind of unseen or unconscious surface-- that of our perceptual externality to others. In other words, we are not a perception hidden by a body, but a persistent expressive visibility at one with the world. Cinema is not the answer to this dilemma, but rather an apposite tool to think with, not only because of its revelatory affinity with metaphysical restlessness, but also because of the ordinariness of its companionship. I return again here to film’s moving image of skepticism, not only its registration, but also its promotion of movement into or out of fragile states of being and becoming. The cinematographic image cannot but produce an image of change or becoming; we only need to interpret and to evaluate the forces of becoming it presents to us. And so Cavell concludes that “My idea is that the invention of the motion picture camera reveals something that has already happened to us, hence something, when we fail to acknowledge it, that is knowledge of something fundamental about our existence which we resist. And the camera also reveals and records that resistance--recall that, in the course of Deeds' lecture to the court, each time the camera follows his attention to a person's body's motion, that person's reflex is shown to be to attempt to hide the motion. We can think of what the camera reveals as a new strain either in our obliviousness to our existence, or in a new mode of certainty of it” (“What Photography Calls Thinking” 131). This is what cinematography calls thinking. No active powers of consciousness need be Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 566 attributed to the camera here, anymore than in Emerson the self manages to recognize its continual and continuing presence to its body, the world, or a community of others. The camera’s mode of thought is the enactment of perpetual visibility in terms of what I have called after Moran its passive powers of expressive intentionality. Siegfried Kracauer called this power alienation, or the camera’s capacity for capturing and rendering as expressive, and thus humanly interpretable, the flux of existence in time. Time floods us and overwhelms us; it divides us from our selves. Yet through its capacity to register this flux and render it expressive, the moving image provides a new medium for pondering the grounds of our conviction in reality, or what we believe reality conveys or can convey in the image. “If the price of Descartes's proof of his existence,” Cavell concludes, “was a perpetual recession of the body (a kind of philosophical counter-Renaissance), the price of an Emersonian proof of my existence is a perpetual visibility of the self, a theatricality in my presence to others, hence to myself. The camera is an emblem of perpetual visibility. Descartes's self-consciousness thus takes the form of embarrassment” (131). Skepticism’s doubt of existence is the name of this embarrassment. Moreover, photography’s powers of automatic analogical causation will not relieve us of this chagrin. (Often enough they are a manifestation of its symptoms.) What the camera recognizes in helping us examine the fact that we do not yet know in what our conviction in reality relies upon, is that skepticism is not yet overcome--all the camera can do is present to us an image of skepticism moving in an alienated form. This act is not the presentation of a new knowledge, but rather, as Cavell puts it, a registration and revealing of something fundamental about our existence that we resist. At one and the same time, it is both a new variation in our obliviousness to existence and a new mode of certainty in it. One may wonder here why Cavell’s discussions of automatism in The World Viewed are placed so close to an excursus on modern painting, by which Cavell principally means the minimalist, abstract, and process driven art of Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, and their contemporaries. However, there is a reality to the experience of abstraction that is not so far removed from that of cinematographic transcription. Neither are considered by Cavell to be Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 567 “representational.”231 Both are deemed to be deeply ethical expressions of and responses to skepticism’s division of subject and object, and thus the isolation of the subject in and from the world. (Realist) cinema and (abstract) painting are thus promoted as the two genres or media of art most philosophically characteristic of our modernity, and significantly, in ways that efface distinctions between the popular and elite arts. The ontology of film declares our distance from the world by automating our views of it, but also by including us in the temporality of succession and projection--this is a declaration of our presence to past existence. The ontology of minimalist abstraction declares the autonomy of painting as a complete being occupying a specific time and space that confronts us with our own sense (and perhaps our fantasies) of autonomy and independent existence--this is a contingent encounter in an indeterminate shared time of presence. One wants to say that both are declarations of existence, and in their own singular ways, each declare existence in time. For Cavell, the demands modern painting make on us are as much ethical as aesthetic, and in contrast to most art criticism, their declarations of existence as art works are less spatial than temporal. Or more precisely, it is not so much the worked space of the canvas that is in question as much as the quality of the spatio-temporal encounters such works solicit, as a contingent relation of immanence between work and viewer. Moreover, in following the discussion of automatism in film, the excursus on modern painting powerfully expands and broadens the concept of automatism itself. In adding the example of painting, which are some of the most powerful pages in The World Viewed, Cavell shows automatism to refer to something deeper and more significant than just 231 In “What Photography Calls Thinking,” Cavell explains that the strangeness and power of photography derives from the fact that our conventional view of picturing or representing is conditioned by the criterion of semblance or the making of likenesses, that is, as “one thing standing for another, disconnected thing, or one forming a likeness of another” (117). Photography, however, performs another activity: “A representation emphasizes the identity of its subject, hence it may be called a likeness; a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, recording it; hence it is that it may be called a transcription” (118). As I argue in The Virtual Life of Film, counterintuitive as it may be, this means that a photograph is not a representation—it is less concerned with likenesses in space than with existences in time. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 568 technological reproducibility. Automatism is both a productive and a temporal concept that expresses the potentiality of events happening in series. To speak of series, however, is not to evoke redundancy, but rather to convey the powers of singularity and contingency in each specific iteration within a series. Paradoxically, what bestows identity on a genre or medium of art is less repetitiveness than the uniqueness of each individual instance, which is produced from within the series yet never identical to it. Although produced from automatisms that color our picture of the evolving form of styles or genres (think here of productive Ideas or concepts, something like Sol LeWitt’s “structures”), individual works in the series nonetheless challenge the continuity or coherence of the genre itself. (Here we find again the force of modernism in art.) Automatisms produce work in series, yet each new iteration of the series can swerve or derail the current line of development, or produce unexpected variations in and of it. Series and automatisms evoke the search for the singular, the contingent, and the absolutely new. In this modernism is less a negation of tradition, or a conflict with culture and history, and “more like an effort, along blocked paths and hysterical turnings, to hang on to a thread that leads from a lost center to a world lost” (World Viewed 110). The modernist anxiety of influence is the persistently open question of whether each new work extends the series, or declares its (partial or complete) autonomy from it? Or alternatively, whether the work is only coherent and meaningful from within the series or in its departures from it? Does the instance vary the series or terminate it? In Cavell’s account, modernist works produce encounters of viewing that are both singular and evanescent, thus recalling Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of sensation as something monumental or durative, yet extremely fragile. In another startling connection, Cavell also invokes a concept familiar to every reader of Deleuze: haecceity, or the fact of singular existence in space and time. Accordingly, the aim of modernism is to free painting from representation and to assert the autonomy of art objects, producing an effect that Cavell calls total thereness. Formally, such effects are accomplished through the flatness and frontality of minimalist paintings as well as through their strategies of selfreference and self-containment. In this way, Cavell suggests, “a painting may acknowledge its frontedness, or its finitude, or its specific thereness--that is, its Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 569 presentness; and your accepting it will accordingly mean acknowledging your frontedness, or directionality, or verticality toward its world, or any world--or your presentness, in its aspect of absolute hereness and of nowness” (World Viewed 110). One might think that Cavell is veering towards a sense of object and viewer confronting one another as two self-enclosed worlds, and indeed he speaks of such works as being complete without the viewer’s presence and in a sense closed to her. But this argument is misunderstood if framed in a formal and spatial perspective rather than an ethical and temporal one. In ways not unlike Deleuze, Cavell writes of such encounters as events where an artwork declares its simultaneity. Simultaneity can be read as complete spatial expression, but also as the contingent and fleeting moment of shared presence where the viewer encounters the work. The total thereness of the modernist work is thus characterized “as an event of the wholly open . . . . The quality I have in mind might be expressed as openness achieved through instantaneousness--which is a way of characterizing the candid” (World Viewed 111). To be candid is to be frank, open, and sincere, but also to make an image or view without the acknowledgment or awareness of the subject. Children are thought to be candid, hence the clichéd response to abstraction that any child could do it. Such responses withdraw from or repress the challenges of abstraction, and deny its power of generating not only aesthetic responses but also ethical encounters. The candidness of such works derives from the sense that they are free of equipment or technē, which is misread as lack of skill or lack of attention to the complex apparatus of producing paintings. But the feeling that this work is free of craft and the artfulness of human hands also evokes “an old wish of romanticism--to imitate not the look of nature, but its conditions, the possibilities of knowing nature at all and of locating ourselves in a world. For an old romanticist, these conditions would have presented themselves as nature’s power of destruction or healing, or its fertility. For the work of the modernists I have in mind,” Cavell continues, “the conditions present themselves as nature’s autonomy, selfsufficiency, laws unto themselves” (World Viewed 113). Here Cavell invokes Wittgenstein’s expression in the Tractatus of one of the most ineffable qualities of ethical response: ““Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 570 is.” (6.44). That the world exists, that its existence is intractable in spite of all our words about it and our views of it, that it persists independently of all our doubts and convictions, and that we exist in it on a single plane of immanence and not apart from it, are among the deepest intuitions linking ontology to ethics. It is to consider experience as everywhere and continuously seamed. And this intuition is the sinuous line that connects Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Deleuze, though each in their different ways with their very different languages and styles of philosophizing. That aesthetic experience can inspire such philosophical intuition is the strongest bridge between Deleuze and Cavell, despite all the other differences that separate them. To restore belief in this world, and to turn us away from the interiority, anonymity, and even solipsism of skepticism towards a shared existence with the world (call it nature if you will) and with all the others in it, is one of the greatest tasks of art as well as philosophy. In this framework, Cavell insists that abstraction is not a return to nature as much as a return of it; or perhaps more poignantly, a returning of us to it as if recognizing or acknowledging our forgotten link or seam with all of existence within a singular ontology. Cavell calls this “the release of nature from our private holds. No doubt such art will not repeal the enclosure acts, but it seeks to annul our spiritual-biological-political accommodations and attachments to enclosure. It reasserts that however we may choose to parcel or not to parcel nature among ourselves, nature is held--we are held by it--only in common. Its declaration of my absence and of nature's survival of me puts me in mind of origins, and shows me that I am astray. It faces me, draws my limits, and discovers my scale; it fronts me, with whatever wall at my back, and gives me horizon and gravity. It reasserts that, in whatever locale I find myself, I am to locate myself. It speaks of terror, but suggests elation--for the shaking of sentiment never got us home, nor the shiver of the picturesque. The faith of this romanticism, overcoming the old, is that we can still be moved to move, that we are free, if we will, to step upon our transport, that nature's absence--or its presence merely to sentiment or mood--is only the history of our turnings from it, in distraction or denial, through history or industry, with words or works. . . . . It is not as though we any longer trust or ought so fondly to trust our representations that the absence of them must mean to us the absence of the things Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 571 represented. Art in the absence of representation could then declare that those earlier approaches to nature had indeed been the making of representations--not merely of the world, but to it, as appeals or protests. (114) So perhaps the new romanticism and the new reality of abstract art is not to lodge a protest against nature’s distance from us, but rather to declare the terms of our common existence (with nature, with others, and with others and nature on a singular plane of immanence). The structure of cinematic viewing offers other means for recovering this distance of self from nature or reality. To speak of a succession of automatic world projections is not to sustain an ontology of imprisonment like Plato’s cave, but rather to create an interval where attractions of conviction or doubt, and of fixation and change, may be entertained and evaluated. The automatizing or mechanical reproduction of world views may make present before us, and thus available to us, skepticism’s conceptual basis--its detachment of perception from our human selves and its isolation of our human minds from one another and from the external world. As I already explained in The Virtual Life of Film, that skepticism should reproduce itself in a technology for seeing might mean that it is no longer the ontological air we breathe, but a passing phase of our philosophical culture. In its very dispositif for viewing and encountering the world, cinema presents philosophy’s historical dilemma (skepticism’s perceptual disjunction from the world) as past, while orienting the modern subject towards a possible future. If, as Cavell argues, the reality that film holds before us is that of our own perceptual condition, then it opens the possibility of once again being present to self or acknowledging how we may again become present to ourselves, in ways similar to the attractions of modern art. (Indeed Cavell’s examination of cinema’s relation to the fate of skepticism helps clarify a Deleuzian cinematic ethics as faith in this world and its possibilities for change.) For these reasons, film may already be the emblem of skepticism in decline; or rather, perhaps we are confronted with new variations of skepticism in the peculiar monadism of social media. Cinema takes up where philosophy leaves off, as the pre-conceptual expression of the passage to another way of being. This is why cinema is both a presentation of and withdrawal from skepticism—the almost perfect realization of the form of skeptical Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 572 perception as a way, paradoxically, of reconnecting us to the world and asserting its existential force as past presence in time. Cinema takes up where philosophy leaves off, and this is why cinema both presents and replies to the skeptical attitude—the almost perfect realization of skeptical perception is a way, paradoxically, of reconnecting us to the world and asserting its causal presence. The irony of this recognition now is that modernity may no longer characterize our modes of being or of looking, and we must then anticipate something else. Abstraction enacts this intuition differently but no less powerfully. “Perhaps what we must be faithful to,” Cavell concludes, “is our knowledge that distance from nature is no longer represented by perspective, which places us in relation to it, places nature before or away from us, and falsifies our knowledge that we are lost to nature, are absent from it, cannot face it. Then, upon such unpromising ground, an art that reveals without representation may give us perspective. For example, it may show us that a painting must be viewed alone, from the one place one occupies at any time--an acknowledgment not directly that one must view things for oneself, but that one must take them one at a time” (The World Viewed 115). This idea is an expression of the power of series. The modernist declaration of autonomy in space is also an assertion of freedom in time. As I have already argued, the fact of series is not repetition but contingency--the recognition that any new instance produced may exhaust the series or open an entirely novel line of development, thus generating new series, genres, or media. Here the only ontologically secure fact of modernism, as expressed in minimalist abstraction and our responses to it, is what Cavell calls a declaration of the evanescence of existence in space and time. Thus Cavell explains that “Like a monad, like the world there is, the only fact about these paintings that does not follow analytically from a complete idea of them is that they exist in space and time. Existence in this world, like the existence of the world itself, is the only contingent fact about them. They are themselves, I feel like saying, contingencies, realizations” (116). Later, what Cavell calls the beauty of minimalism also expresses an experience close in feeling to Deleuze’s description of percepts as singular instances related to yet distinct from their forms and materials of expression, and sensation or aesthesis as an effect that is both durative and ephemeral: “. . . the fact about an instance, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 573 when it happens, is that it poses a permanent beauty, if we are capable of it. That this simultaneity should proffer beauty is a declaration about beauty: that it is no more temporary than the world is; that there is no physical assurance of its permanence; that it is momentary only the way time is, a regime of moments; and that no moment is to dictate its significance to us, if we are to claim autonomy, to become free” (116). This statement presents an ethics of the Event close in spirit if not in language, to Deleuze’s own ethics of time as acknowledgment of the freedom to choose nondetermined alternatives. Abstraction presents the possibility of acknowledging and incorporating the Event as an ethical principle in that the singular contingency of time is irreducible to any presentation of it. Minimalism is thus not a refutation of realism but rather the expression of a new reality, which as expressed above is also the unforeseen passage toward new concepts and new states of existence. Abstraction expresses a new displacement where representations fail either to convince us or to assure us of our connection to the world. In cinema, Deleuze calls this the collapse of the sensorimotor connection and a broken link with the world. But this is a sign of skepticism, where the promise of abstraction is an overcoming of it. Here the association of reality with representation is posed in a different way, which overcomes the representativeness which came between our reality and our art; overcame it by abstraction, abstracting us from the recognitions and engagements and complicities and privileged appeals and protests which distracted us from one another and from the world we have constructed. Attracted from distraction by abstraction. Not catching our attention yet again, but forming it again. Giving us again the capacity for appeal and for protest, for contemplation and for knowledge and praise, by drawing us back from private and empty assertion. These works exist as abstracts of intimacy--declaring our common capacity and need for presentness, for clear separateness and singleness and connection, for horizons and uprightness and frontedness, for the simultaneity of a world, for openness and resolution. They represent existence without assertion; authority without authorization; truth without claim, which you can walk in. It is out of such a vision that Thoreau in Walden ("The Pond in Winter") speaks of nature as silent. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 574 Is the power of representation otherwise irretrievable? Is there no way to declare again the content of nature, not merely its conditions; to speak again from one's plight into the heart of a known community of which one is a known member, not merely speak of the terms on which any human existence is given? "Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven?" (117-118).232 The common denominator between Deleuze and Cavell occurs in a grammar of worlding or worldliness--to acknowledge our connection to the world, as a moral connection to the world and to others; to believe again not in a transcendent world, but in this world with its reticence or recalcitrance, but also with its powers of change. There is thus both fantasy and reality, expressions of desire and conviction, in the idea that automatic analogical causation brings into being a world that is more powerfully real than our own, or that all its powers of reality derive from our own. There is both anguish and joy in the recognition that both worlds--the one in which we exist and the other that exists before us as screened--powerfully express or make expressible possibilities and dimensions of experience where human actions and beliefs are inseparable from the material life of what I have called the universal plane of immanence. “Then if in relation to objects capable of such self-manifestation human beings are reduced in significance,” Cavell writes, “or crushed by the fact of beauty left vacant, perhaps this is because in trying to take dominion over the world, or aestheticizing it (temptations inherent in the making of film, or of any art), they are refusing their participation with it” (World Viewed xvi). The open question, then, is not how to better know these worlds but how to better live in them through the location and evaluation of appropriate forms of participation. 41. Ethical practices of the ordinary As things stand, love is always the betrayal of love, if it is honest. It is why the path of self-knowledge is so ugly, hence so rarely taken, whatever its reputed beauties. The knowledge of the self as it is always takes place in the betrayal of the self as it was. That is the form of self-revelation, until the self is wholly won. Until then, 232 The interior citation is from Thoreau’s Walden (Mineola: Dover, 1995) 199. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 575 until there is a world in which each can be won, our loyalty to ourselves is in doubt, and our loyalty to others is in partialness. --Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed The cinematographic image makes all of recorded existence expressive; hence there is no such thing as silent film. Ontologically, the image is continually capable of affirming existence, and so are we if only we can return from silence and awaken the self from its state of preexistence. This is why Cavell’s Emersonian proof of existence requires a kind of theatricality that reasserts my presence to others, and thus to myself. In other contexts, Cavell calls this conversation, or sometimes, education, as practices contributing to the pursuit of happiness. These are strategies for complimenting ontology with ethics, of rising above mute existence in an effort to construct or rebuild a human community that has failed to sustain itself. Cavell’s investigations of modernity and the quandaries of skepticism are (or should be) of central concern to the humanities because Cavell’s aim is not to define the human or to address the “human condition” within modernity, but rather to make present continually the dilemma that the human has yet to be achieved. It is to be achieved, or better, should solicit a desire for becoming human or to better understand what it might mean to achieve the condition of humanity. In Cavell’s account, the epistemological and ethical framework of modernity was forged historically in a series of blows to human narcissism: the Copernican demonstration that we are not the center of the cosmos; Darwin’s discovery that humankind and animals occupy the same continuum; and finally, Freud’s investigations of the fact that we are not one with ourselves. Before Wittgenstein, Thoreau best emblematizes the figure who transfigures these dilemmas of alienation or skeptical withdrawal from the world into diurnal possibilities of emergent selftransformation; as Cavell puts it, honoring Thoreau, “the sun is but a morning star (there is room for hope); we are indeed animals, and moreover we are still in a larval state, awaiting metamorphosis; we are each of us double and each must learn ‘to be beside Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 576 oneself in a sane sense’ (as opposed to our present madness).”233 In phrases like these, Thoreau and Emerson appear in Cavell’s philosophy as conceptual personae able to link the dilemmas of skepticism to an ethical practice of the ordinary. In this context, the project of the late Wittgenstein is viewed not as refuting or denying skepticism, but rather as acknowledging, Cavell says, “its permanent role in the human mind, one not to be denied but to be placed (within different historical guises and economies). What this requires, as I read Wittgenstein, is learning to bear up under, and to take back home, the inevitable cracks or leaps of madness that haunt the act of philosophizing and haunt the construction of the world--to take the madness back to our shared home of language, and to take it back not once and for all (for there is no once and for all within life) but each day, in each specific, everyday site of its eruption” (“The Fantastic of Philosophy” 150). Cavell accepts as a fundamental fact of the human that skeptical doubts cannot be avoided--they return diurnally and so each day we must seek out new responses to them. The lure of skepticism fuels a profoundly human and private dilemma because skepticism fundamentally threatens to barricade us within a self-enclosed and enclosing world. In Cavell’s view, this fantasy of isolation can only be kept at bay through the appeal to community and to a certain relationality of the self in its potential (if often failed) intimacy with others. (We shall soon see that Cavell’s interest in melodrama and comedy derives from their dramatic expression of problems of privacy and community--of the couple and the impossibility of accepting coupling--as a model for democracy and its continually imperiled status.) The tragedy of skepticism is that it enforces an inhuman isolation--it separates us from human community or sociability and the weave of human responsiveness to and activity in the world. At the same time, to have renounced or overcome skepticism (if this is humanly possible) would be to forego privacy and all protection afforded by my interiority. Perhaps the objective of philosophy, and the human need for it, is not only to form and encourage practices of self-examination, but also to assure that there is a continual passage between reflection and communion, privacy and sociability, or, I am tempted to say, between metaphysics and ordinariness. Cavell’s 233 “The Fantastic of Philosophy” in Cavell on Film, 149. First published in The American Poetry Review 15.3 (May-June 1986). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 577 answer to the question “What is philosophy?,” then, is responsive to the ethical dilemma of Deleuze’s later work, especially on cinema. To believe again in life and our connection to the world is not enough. We also need quotidian strategies for reanimating our deadened or alienated relations to the world and to others. Acknowledgment, recounting criteria, or assembling reminders thus become practices of declaring and enacting one’s existence, and that of other persons and things, as participating in a shared form of life, one to which we have a responsibility to investigate and to reaffirm anew each day in ways that make us continually responsible for, and responsive to, the singularity of our expressions and relations in that form of life. Both Cavell and Deleuze consider philosophy to have diagnostic and perhaps reparative powers, though their appeals to cinema or art differ in this respect. To understand this difference means looking more closely at Cavell’s career-long commitment to ordinary language philosophy as the source of his ethics and as a therapeutic response to skepticism. Moreover, as ordinary expressions are anchored in actual daily practices, our forms of life as lived and language as expressed, and if they offer a range of responses to the dilemmas of skepticism and belief, then philosophy might also turn to other normally encountered non-philosophical artifacts or expressions for aid in repairing our broken links with the world and with others. This is one way of understanding Cavell’s interest in cinema as the moral accompaniment of everyday life, or Deleuze’s account of the need of philosophy for non-philosophy. Cavell’s ontological account of cinema in the early seventies is already an ethics that investigates and evaluates our modern sense of the self as divided from the world, and from other minds, by the screen of perception. In the major books that follow The World Viewed and The Claim of Reason, culminating in Cities of Words, the temporality of this epistemological condition is reconsidered more deeply as a question of art and ethical evaluation. The guiding concept here is what Cavell calls moral perfectionism as the nonteleological expression of a desire for change or becoming, which is often precipitated by a sense of existential crisis. In this way, the perfectionist desire for a further, future self, so far unattained, is also a critical intervention in, or interruption of, the temporality or lived time of the ordinary. As the melodramas of the unknown woman will exemplify so Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 578 poignantly, the desire for transformation often occurs in suffocating conditions, which may be as common as the banality of the ordinary existence of diurnal repetition, a lack of recognition or acceptance that there is a new dawn in every day. What philosophy can try to diagnose and alleviate is a condition where our mode of existence is out of sync with our times, which means existing in a present felt as discontinuous with our past and our future, unmoored, disoriented, and uncompassed. Cavell calls this the unarticulated ground on which Nietzsche, or for that matter Emerson, issues his call for the future, for the new day; namely his sickness (“seasickness” Nietzsche calls it in the preface to Human, All Too Human) in response to the way humankind lives today. He regards himself, while still participating in that way, as having broken with it (he is at sea) and consequently as in a state of convalescence with respect to it, not ready for, not in possession of a context for, a new way; and he knows--it is the state of knowledge in which he writes--that almost all others remain buried in conformity, in an unrelieved routine of ordinariness, the thing Emerson calls conformity, and Nietzsche calls philistinism in the Untimely Meditations.234 In such comments, Cavell confronts philosophy’s recurrent retreat from the ordinary, whose earliest emblem is the human inhabitation of Plato’s cave in the Republic. Every possibility of transport from this place of capture and constraint is already present there, for those held there are self-captivating. There is an admonition to philosophy here to return to the everyday, to the place where we are held now, to aid us in our navigation of ordinary moral existence. From the standpoint of perfectionism, our cinematic culture responds to dilemmas of perception and thought through a moral imperative more than an epistemological one. (This attitude, of course, is in stark contrast to the demands of political modernism.) In this respect, the trajectory from ontological to ethical questions in Cavell’s thought is exemplary of how he uses cinema to deepen his description of the subjective condition of modernity as itself suspended between a worldly or epistemological domain and a moral 234 “Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow” in Cavell on Film, 325. Lecture presented originally at the Einstein Forum, Berlin (November 2000). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 579 domain. In both cases, cinema confronts the problem of skepticism. In the first instance, this is an epistemological disappointment in that we are disconnected from the world by our own subjectivity—all we can know of the world is from behind the screen of our consciousness. The second responds to a moral disappointment in the state of the world or with my current mode of existence. This division is not only formal; it is also, and perhaps primarily, temporal. As Kant posed the problem, the province of understanding, of knowledge of objects and their causal laws, defines the modern scientific attitude whose formidable power derives from making time an independent variable. What is unknown in the natural world could not become known through the powers of causal reasoning if the rules could change in the course of time. But the problem that so provoked Kant was that intemporal reason was in conflict with moral freedom. To be human is to experience change. So how might philosophy characterize humanity as at once subject of understanding and of reason, as subject to causal relations and expressive of moral freedom? Given that as material creatures we are in bondage to the empirical world and its causal laws, philosophy’s task is to explain how we are also free to experience and to anticipate change in the projection of future existences. In Cavell’s account, moral perfectionism takes us from the form of skepticism to the possibilities of human change, and to the deeper moral problem of evaluating our contemporary modes of existence and transcending them in anticipation of better, future existences. In the first stage, the problem is to overcome my moral despair of ever knowing the world; in the second, my despair of changing it and myself. Thus, Cavell’s interest in Emerson (or in Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, or Freud) is to heal this rift in philosophy exemplified by Wittgenstein’s disappointment with knowledge as failing to make us better than we are or to give us peace. Alternatively, moral perfectionism begins with this sense of ethical disappointment and ontological restlessness, catching up the modern subject in a desire for self-transformation whose temporality is that of a becoming without finality. “In Emerson’s and Thoreau’s sense of human existence,” Cavell writes, “there is no question of reaching a final state of the soul but only and endlessly taking the next step to what Emerson calls ‘an unattained but attainable self’--a self that is always and never ours--a step that turns us not from bad to good, or wrong to right, but from Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 580 confusion and constriction toward self-knowledge and sociability” (Cities of Words 13). This, in fact, is what Cavell means by the pursuit of happiness. In retrospect, both the problem and form of moral perfectionism seem to have been present already in Cavell’s first major works. For example, the lesson Cavell takes from Wittgenstein, even in his earliest accounts, is that philosophy is deeply problematic. Or rather, that philosophy lives daily a paradox of wishing to solve problems that in fact it continually creates in the form of skeptical dilemmas posing knowledge against belief. The skeptical desire to overcome the boundaries and finitude of human knowing and expression is pictured as a wish to escape the human, perhaps to become post-human; Cavell calls this the “predicament of human self-dissatisfaction” (“Crossing Paths” 365). Wittgenstein’s discovery was that the skeptical dilemma was neither a result of nor resolvable by recourse to metaphysical or scientific reasoning, but rather, it was an ordinary problem or a problem of the ordinary, which Cavell portrays as a drama enacted in philosophy’s dissatisfaction with or disappointment with ordinary language, one in which ordinary language both rejects itself and assumes the obligation to come to itself. In this way of looking at things, the “return” to ordinary language is rather seen as a return of it, not as to a place of stability, but as of a place of inevitable loss. In particular it is not a place of common sense or shared belief--the thing Emerson calls conformity--but is equally to be understood as an attack on settled beliefs. It is the possibility, or necessity, of this selfdissatisfaction, this battle of the human with itself, that creates the possibility, and necessity, in philosophy, of skepticism. (“Crossing Paths” 365-366) These lines recall Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on philosophy’s battle with and in doxa. Philosophy’s continuous struggle, then, is to find ways of unsettling belief, or to change the conditions of belief, so that we no longer doubt the world and suffer our separation from it, but rather embrace its capacity for change and self-differentiation. In a similar way, Wittgenstein was not refuting skepticism, but rather diagnosing and evaluating its sources in our everyday and ordinary expressiveness, and in our relations with others. In Cavell’s account, Wittgenstein’s turn to the ordinary comes from the discovery that “Human language is such that dissatisfaction with it can never be stilled; Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 581 the question is not so much whether we can live within our finite means (which those who have respected skepticism have in different ways recommended, from the ancient Greeks to thinkers through Descartes and Hume to such as Bertrand Russell) as whether we can become responsible for our infinite desires” (“Crossing Paths” 366). To become responsible for our infinite desires is to know how our desires block or release our relation to the world and knowledge of ourselves, hence Cavell’s discussions of fantasy and reality in The World Viewed. Towards the end of The World Viewed, Cavell writes that “To satisfy the wish for the world’s exhibition we must be willing to let the world as such appear” (159). Through cinema’s automatism, its succession of automatic world projections, perhaps the world is capable of appearing as such, but this does not mean that we have released it from our own desires and fantasies of or for it. Nor does it mean that we have acknowledged and evaluated our own fantasies of being lost to self in privacy and anonymity. To free ourselves of fantasy, or to free the world of our fantasies, would require something violent, angst-ridden, and almost impossible: the total exhibition of our selves in complete candor, without concealment or camouflage. Exposing our selves with total and undisguised intelligibility would require the self’s betrayal of itself, hence the interest of the passive intentional powers of photogenesis. But this also means that there is not within us only one self to hide or to reveal, and indeed that the mechanism for hiding and revealing, or for dissembling or accounting, is yet another self that speaks in place of my past, but also future selves. (Perhaps the fantasy of skepticism is also the fantasy of a self-identical ego untroubled by time’s divisions? Yet how could there be self-reflection or consciousness of self without experiencing an internal division of self by self?) Ethically no less than ontologically, we are divided by time as if we lived and thought in two dimensions; hence Deleuze and Cavell’s common interest in Kant, and to a certain extent, psychoanalysis. There is the chronological time of the I which, from moment to moment, must anchor the self in and against the flow of time as the expression of location, self-indication, and grammatical expression. But there is also the non-chronological dimension of memory in its deepest sense, as the ebb and flow of an immense tidal force that draws on deep and chaotic currents while pitching waves at an uncaring sky. Memory is what catches the ego in undertow and threatens to Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 582 overwhelm it, but also that which sustains the ego and gives it duration or the capacity to sustain itself in time. Why would we not wish, then, for an art that fixes the past as sense in time, presents the past as a causal force in the present, and assures me of the world’s continuity both by and without my presence? As Cavell writes at the end of The World Viewed, a world complete without me is the world of my immortality. However, this is the exact point that requires ethical evaluation, or else we are lost, because a world complete before me, but which is also present without me, is a world that will either confirm my continuing existence or deny it. Skeptical perception is an assertion of power over the world in its totality, but it may also leave me disconnected from the world, and thus haunting it as if powerless to change it or myself. So Cavell concludes that “there is reason for me to want the camera to deny the coherence of the world, its coherence as past: to deny that the world is complete without me. But there is equal reason to want it affirmed that the world is coherent without me. That is essential to what I want of immortality: nature’s survival of me. It will mean that the present judgment upon me is not yet the last” (The World Viewed 160). In 1971, these are Cavell’s last words in The World Viewed, at least until he produces the Enlarged Edition eight years later. However, in this extraordinary book I am struck not by the last words, but by the last thought before the last. In the penultimate paragraph, Cavell completes his meditation on the perils of total candor of the self. “As things stand,” Cavell writes, “love is always the betrayal of love, if it is honest. It is why the path of self-knowledge is so ugly, hence so rarely taken, whatever its reputed beauties. The knowledge of the self as it is always takes place in the betrayal of the self as it was. That is the form of self-revelation, until the self is wholly won. Until then, until there is a world in which each can be won, our loyalty to ourselves is in doubt, and our loyalty to others is in partialness” The World Viewed 160). Acquiring knowledge of self by self is difficult and painful, but also comic--a world in which skepticism does not count is comedic, but a world in which skepticism counts too much is ironic or melodramatic. In either case, a transcendental element is indispensable as the motivation for a moral existence--self-disobedience. Transforming the self, if we are capable, means overcoming Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 583 ourselves in reaching for an as yet unattained mode of existence. This is the time of moral perfectionism. 42. Perfectionism as self-disobedience The perception or attitude demanded in following this drama is one which demands a continuous attention to what is happening at each here and now, as if everything of significance is happening at this moment, while each thing that happens turns a leaf of time. I think of it as an experience of continuous presentness. Its demands are as rigorous as those of any spiritual exercise--to let the past go and to let the future take its time; so that we not allow the past to determine the meaning of what is now happening (something else may have come of it) and that we not anticipate what will come of what has come. Not that anything is possible (though it is) but that we do not know what is, and is not, next. --Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love” In a late lecture on “The Good of Film,” Cavell evokes, with forty years’ distance, the concluding question of Kracauer’s Theory of Film: What is the good of film experience? What good can we claim from film (or art, or literature), or what good can or does film offer us? Cavell links perfectionism explicitly here to Foucault’s examination of practices of care of the self. But the self only requires care when it is beside itself, that is, when in moments of despair or dissatisfaction the self fissures internally in crises of self-doubt and self-examination. Deleuze views this as an innate power or capacity of the subject in that the Kantian passive ego lives in every moment its separation from itself through intuition of the pure form of time. It cannot but undergo change and observe itself in the course of transformation--this is the origin of subjectivity in and as time. In addition, both Deleuze and Cavell are concerned with a similar problem: how does the subject undergo or experience change? However, unlike Deleuze, in Cavell time does not operate as a metaphysical constant, but rather as an ethical will that must be continually re-enacted because it is continually forgotten. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 584 Therefore, moral perfectionism is to Cavell’s philosophy what becoming is to Deleuze. Both concepts require new attention to the force of time in relation to qualities of change and transformation rooted in new and original approaches to Nietzsche’s thought. However, this profound link is also a measure of distance between them. Among other things, Deleuze’s cinema books present an ethical turn in his philosophy but without a corresponding transformation in his concept of ontology. Deleuze’s radical materialism, to which I feel profoundly committed, returns body and mind to the world, makes them one with the world on a single plane of immanence governed by the pure form of time as self-differentiation and universal variation. In a sense, how could we not believe in change and the capacity for (self)transformation since in Deleuze’s philosophy the fundamental intuitions are that the only thing that does not change is the Form of time itself, and that what returns eternally is the capacity for self-differing. (Photogenesis is Cavell’s analogue for this force of becoming or change in the image.) At the same time, the philosophical tone of Deleuze’s late works is darkened by the effort to sustain a utopian belief in the force of time or difference in the face of all the powers of inertia and resistance marshaled against the subject under late capitalism. However, the pathos pervading Deleuze’s later philosophy, in both the cinema books and his work with Guattari, testifies to another unresolved problem: how can this intuition be made humanly livable, or what practices encourage a coming community? In this philosophy without a subject, The Time-Image calls for a new place or locus of perception characterized as the voyant or seer of modern cinema who can return this intuition to us in the face of all the world’s suffering. This seer is itself a kind of conceptual persona who, in response to the universal variation of the movement-image, is capable of transmitting in human form a perception giving the pure form of time as change, and who can show us that it is possible to choose to choose, and to believe again in this world. The problem is that even Deleuze himself does not seem convinced by this. Or rather one feels somehow that in his philosophical conviction he is still not humanly sustained or satisfied by the ethics he seeks, or that he cannot quite overcome the sense of despair and revolutionary disappointment that pervades his late writing. A clear and active sense of the quality of self-transformation as an active philosophical practice is missing Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 585 from Deleuze’s philosophical constructivism. (In late works and interviews, Deleuze gestures to this practice in Foucault’s concept of “subjectivation.”) The problem here is how to overcome one’s self, to recognize and rid one’s self of all that is deadening, inertial, and resistant to change. For example, in his essay “Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow,” Cavell examines what is at stake not only in becoming, but in overcoming. Cavell’s point of departure is the concluding sentences of Thoreau’s Walden, which I alluded to earlier: “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” Thoreau’s language echoes Emerson and anticipates Nietzsche, a fact of which Cavell is well aware. But in the acknowledgment that there is more day to dawn, and that in all its blinding brightness the sun is only an anticipation of something in the course of happening that has not yet arrived, Thoreau exhibits an intuition of time and the event that, one wants to say, is Deleuzian. Cavell focuses, however, on the homonym where the sound of mourning is folded into Thoreau’s morning star, and thus emphasizes that “every illumination of the world that we have been party to has passed away and is something we must learn to rid ourselves of, to reevaluate. Nietzsche calls this overcoming himself--Überwinden, which in Nietzsche’s twist of the old prefix Über-, would presumably mean to unwind, unscrew, unbind, straighten, release himself. Conquering oneself then becomes a progress of continuing to free oneself, one might say, pardon oneself” (“Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow” 323). In such accounts, perfectionist practices of becoming, overcoming, and projection are recognized less as a method than as a style or even a kind of dramaturgy or performativity. For example, one of the most remarkable and most criticized features of Cavell’s early writing is his eccentric use of the em dash, as if to enact a strange conversation of doubt and disagreement with or within himself. I find these extraordinary moments to enact a sort of philosophical self-disobedience. Perhaps this use of the em dash and a divided voice within his text is Cavell’s way of adapting and performing the confessional style of the Philosophical Investigations, as if to express an internal division or discord within one’s self, a persistent dislocation, doubt, or disagreement that must continually be reckoned with as the price of philosophical continuation. This practice is an early indicator of the structure of moral perfectionism--an internal division or projected Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 586 other as the voice of doubt or disagreement, but also of wondering and projecting into new contexts, as a potential transformation of the self, or as a form of self-education. This fracturing of the self recalls Deleuze’s version of the Kantian passive ego as the internal division of the self by the Form of time. Alternatively, in the example of Wittgenstein’s confessional style, or Cavell’s writerly dialogues, the practice of ordinary language philosophy is here deployed as a dialogue of two selves, or between two voices of the same self continually interrogating and questioning one another. No better definition can be found for Deleuze’s characterization of intercessors or conceptual personae. Imagine this, then, as an inner deployment of intercessors, or the projection of an philosophical friend real or imagined, one reminding or recounting to the other what they have forgotten or ignored. Ordinary language philosophy wants us to recall this inner capacity, which we all share. It aids in the recovery from skepticism because within the thrall of skepticism’s particular will to truth one forgets or loses the human capacity to think of and relate to others and the world as both singular and changing, whereas skepticism projects a frozen world from which we are divided, and so promotes a withdrawal into ourselves. To open ourselves to the autonomy of the world and to others is to ask that our autonomy be acknowledged, and to be acknowledged as belonging to a shared life. This process is never complete, however; the danger of lapsing back into a nihilistic mood is ever present and thus the need for diagnosis and recovery must be continually reaffirmed as a liferestoring recurrence that contests the life-deadening repetition of skepticism. In this peculiar form of philosophical dialogue, Cavell restores to the practice of philosophy one of its most ancient and persistent activities: the evaluation of a way of life or mode of existence. And through the concept of moral perfectionism, this book comes full circle back to its beginnings. The origins of perfectionist discourse and practice are venerable. The first examples are inspired by Socrates’ lesson to Euthyphro: that unlike questions of scientific reason, which may be resolved through measurement or further experimentation and the collection of new data, dilemmas that cause hatred and anger must be addressed through forms of evaluative conversation that are in principle interminable. These conversations involve disagreements over what is just or unjust, and honorable or dishonorable, that involve assessments of moral standing aimed both at Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 587 myself and my interlocutor. And in best cases our own self-assessments of moral standing may evolve as we converse. No single or universal method can govern this process--moral judgments are always contextual and contingent. At the same time, perfectionism always involves an admonition to change your life--or further, to change the mode of existence that limits your life, constraining or circumscribing it with intolerable moral conditions. (In a Deleuzian framework, one might say we are limited by forces that block or suppress acknowledgment that we are free to choose an alternative mode of existence.) In contrast to utilitarian or deontological frameworks for moral reasoning, perfectionism does not seek out common much less universal standards for moral evaluation. In every case, the situation of perfectionist discourse will be singular and contextual. However, while the experience of perfectionism is not generalizable, the forms or modes of perfectionist evaluation and transformation have common characteristics. What perfectionism first requires is the often painful recognition of the need and capacity for change in the desire to seek out what Emerson calls our unattained yet attainable self. But this desire cannot be accomplished alone--it requires an intercessor, friend, or interlocutor, real or imagined. It requires a community (actual or virtual) of at least two to exemplify a process where a future self and future form of community can be discovered and aspired to. Plato’s Republic offers an early image of perfectionism for philosophy in that ethics is not understood as separate from epistemology, metaphysics, or poetics. Platonic education includes all of these activities in a transcendent journey where the soul is set upward on a path toward the good, “one which requires a release, dramatized as a turning away, from its everyday life, a transformation initiated and furthered by a kind of painful conversation with a more advanced figure who sets those who approach him on a path of education” (“The Good of Film” 336-337). Plato’s image of perfectionist education is marked by the demands of discipleship and subordination to a sage or master. Cavell, however, turns to Emerson and Thoreau for a more democratic and indeed self-reliant model. The perfectionist admonishment for change thus appears in moments of realization that we are not one with ourselves, at home in our skins, unreachable or unfindable in or by our selves. What is needed here is not a figure of authority, no matter how generous, but rather a philosophical friend or conceptual persona, whether actual or Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 588 real, in conversation with whom we return to ourselves or become the self we desire to be. Thus Cavell explains that The decisive difference of Emerson's outlook from that in Plato's Republic is that the soul's journey to itself is not pictured as a continuous path directed upward to a known point of completion but rather as a zigzag of discontinuous steps following the lead of what Emerson calls my "unattained but attainable self" (as if there is a sage in each of us), an idea that projects no unique point of arrival but only a willingness for change, directed by specific aspirations that, while rejected, may at unpredictable times return with new power. The path is no more toward incorporation in a given condition of society than it is toward the capacity to judge that condition. The sage in us is what remains after all our social positionings. (“The Good of Film” 337) Thus in Emerson’s essay on “Self-Reliance,” the friend we are attracted to in conversation is not my model to emulate, but a figure who returns me to my own rejected thoughts so that the process of philosophical engagement becomes a practice of returning or awakening to or within myself. Here education is self-education through a practice that Cavell often refers to checking one’s experience and “of subjecting it to examination, and beyond these, of momentarily stopping, turning yourself away from whatever your preoccupation and turning your experience away from its expected, habitual track, to find itself, its own track: coming to attention” (Pursuits of Happiness 12). Perfectionism in Socrates or Aristotle requires the presence of a sage or authority confronting you to examine and change your life. A similar appeal to a moral or regulatory authority, conceptual or actual, informs both deontological and utilitarian forms of moral reasoning. In contrast, what Cavell finds so appealing in classic Hollywood cinema, especially the remarriage comedies, is a democratization of perfectionism, which is also given a particular American form. In both cases, the problem of marriage serves as the site or context for working out problems of disagreement and consensus in the pursuit of happiness, and this consensus is unregulated and unregulatable by any standard that does not emerge and evolve from within the community itself. No transcendental or external authority can confirm or disallow this community. As Cavell explains, “A guiding Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 589 idea of both the comedies, where marriage is accepted, or reaccepted, and of the related melodramas, where marriage is in fact rejected, is that nothing legitimizes or ratifies marriage--not state, or church, or sex, or gender, or children--apart from the willingness for reaffirmation, which is to say, remarriage (the films open or climax with the threat of divorce), and what makes marriage worth reaffirming is a diurnal devotedness that involves friendship, play, surprise, and mutual education, all expressed in the pair’s mode of conversing with one another, expressing an intimacy of understanding often incomprehensible to the rest of the world” (“Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow” 324325). Both dramatically and visually, for Cavell these films are nothing less than a form of philosophical dialogue or dramaturgy, and one open to all that view them, concerning what makes consensus in community worth seeking and struggling for. Marriage stands here for an imagined community of democratic equals, yet at the same time it is not meant to serve as an image of perfected community in microcosm. It is neither the telos of a given social project nor a field of fairness for individual projects. Rather, as a genetic form of community, remarriage comedy figures marriage as the exemplification of a happy enough realization of lives in just enough structure. In Cities of Words, Cavell calls this the commitment to pursue “happiness without a concept” (361). For Cavell, what these comedies dramatize is most obviously the quality of friendship, and the necessity for a philosophical friend in working out the evaluation of ethical dilemmas and finding the path towards self-transformation and new creation of the self. Friendship in its highest form expresses a desire to live together, or spending time together, of finding community. Ethical reasoning cannot be born alone in isolated meditation (ethical judgments in principal are not theoretic), but rather must unfold in the context of and in response to a form of life “whose texture is a weave of cares and commitments in which one is bound to become muddled and to need the friendly perception of others in order to find one’s way, in which at any time a choice may present itself . . . , in pondering which you will have to decide whose view of you is most valuable to you” (“Moral Reasoning” 357). In like manner, Emersonian perfectionism is not a specialized or uncommon activity, but rather a practice of ordinary existence. Or as Cavell often puts it, perfectionism is a philosophy of the everyday. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 590 Another key contrast with Socratic or Platonic perfectionism involves the question of education. Greek perfectionism is in service to a sage or guiding authority figure. But the comedies and melodramas offer an alternative perspective based on mutuality: the dramatic couple or pair function here as a core community, or a genetic ideal of community, who in their discord wish not to learn from one another as teacher and student, but rather to transform in common their conditions of existence. The possibility of transformation must arise in discord and asymmetry, however--the role of the friend here is to inspire me to self-disobedience. In contrast to Greek perfectionism, neither one of this quarreling pair is a youth and each of them has also reached a certain stage of sexual maturity. What brings them together is a quality of attraction where they must discover that each is exemplary for the other. Yet between them there is an inequality of education, say of self-knowledge, that their dialogue depends on challenging. Where marriage stands for community, education stands for (self)transformation, and “those who cannot inspire one another to such an education are not married; they do not have the right interest for one another” (“Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow” 325). In remarriage comedy, the idea of marriage as it may be is the projection of a possible or attainable community. (In the derived melodramas, marriage is rejected as given or presented in the films, on the ground that it is the negation of what marriage may be, this community being unattainable in the present world.) In its pursuit of happiness, what this community desires is mutual acknowledgment of equality, and similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them, thus suggesting that a precondition for becoming human is to imagine a mode of existence where equal justice is both desirable and possible, and where human beings can aspire to an education equal in rights and possibilities of desire and knowledge. 43. Comedy and community The moral regeneration of mankind will only really commence, when the most fundamental of the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in rights and in cultivation. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 591 --John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women Put otherwise, the achievement of human happiness requires not the perennial and fuller satisfaction of our needs as they stand but the examination and transformation of those needs. --Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness The pursuit of happiness is one important dimension or aspect of perfectionism, which is embodied already in Cavell’s depiction of remarriage comedy: an open series of works whose core films include It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937), Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940), The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941), and Adam's Rib (George Cukor, 1949). In “The Good of Film,” Cavell presents several points of contact between remarriage comedy and perfectionism. One involves the particular kinds of moral problems addressed in and through comedic conversation. Conversations concerning standard moral problems are noticeably absent in these dialogues of questioning and contestation, “quite as if the perplexities of the conditions of ordinary moral life, matters of equality or of the conflict of inclination with duty, or of duty with duty, or of means with ends, pose no intellectual hardships for these people” (“The Good of Film” 338). Perfectionism’s attention is usually not focused on headline moral issues such as abortion, capital punishment, or euthanasia, but rather arises in conversations about inattentiveness, contemptuousness, brutality, coldness, cowardice, vanity, thoughtlessness, unimaginativeness, heartlessness, deviousness, and vengefulness, as one soul examines another. Moral perfectionism is less a method or a theory, then, than a perspective on the value of inevitable human disagreeableness that finds in discord and dissension the potentiality for, and necessity of, entering into moral conversation and ethical self-examination in moments of crisis, confusion, and dissatisfaction with others and oneself. It is a request both from within and from outside myself to examine and to change my way of life. This is not a retreat from politics, much less gender politics, as we shall see. Nor is it the case that great moral dilemmas do not Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 592 matter to these films. Rather, there is a different point of emphasis where perfectionism turns from moral conflict to a kind of ethical examination more deeply rooted in questions of self and community that confront us in local moments of daily life. Thus another important point of contact between remarriage comedy and perfectionism is the importance given to self-transformation, of becoming a new person in support of a new community, through a process of bringing out and making perspicuous and recognizable qualities that were always there. Perfectionism is not about self-betterment, but rather about self-knowledge and evaluation. Perfectionist aspirations arise from the demand to make oneself intelligible, and to make ourselves intelligible to one another, in order to address and redress the daily confusions, conflicts, and misunderstandings that separate us, and in which we deal or are dealt little deaths everyday. In this way, Cavell considers remarriage comedies as philosophical laboratories for examining practices of perfectionist reasoning. These practices are less concerned with influencing courses of action or critiquing social institutions than they are with a conception of ethics that both prepares moments of perfectionist becoming and follows after them, as one soul is confronted with or by another. The prior or preparatory moment involves acts of critical evaluation that questions or examines the standing of a moral agent in their judgment of an other; what follows is a redrawing and evaluation of the moral framework with which two or more moral agents stage their conflict and try to arrive at consensus. Early in his philosophical career, this was already Cavell’s way of responding to the then dominant emotive theory of ethical judgment, which relied on the expression of feeling to persuade or dissuade the other with respect to given courses of action, as if “there had come upon philosophers thinking of the moral life an amnesia of the fact, or a wish to be free of the fact, that we have claims upon one another, count for one another, matter to one another, sometimes in questionable ways . . . . One might say that confronting another morally risks one’s identity; otherwise one risks moralism” (“The Good of Film” 339). From a contemporary perspective, and living and teaching in the first American commonwealth to legalize gay marriage, I am struck by the fact that Cavell’s focus on the centrality of marriage as a concept, and as an ethical domain for working out questions of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 593 perfectionist aspiration, may be less controversial now than it was thirty years ago. Now more than ever, the concept of marriage is targeted as a contested site of community, or a site of contested community, where what counts as public and private business is deployed in conflicts between the law and desire. The lesson to be drawn here is that our image of marriage is unsettled and unsettling, especially as a framework for working through problems of privacy and community, division and consensus, aimed at achieving what John Rawls called good enough justice. Published in 1981, and following on the heels of The Claim of Reason, Cavell draws an explicit link between his study of skepticism and the concept of marriage deployed in Pursuits of Happiness. Where one responds to crises of doubt in relation to the world, the other expresses the difficulty of living in community with others, thus weaving an epistemological and an ethical problem into an existential skein. “Two of the fundamental human properties that human societies have been most anxious to limit,” Cavell writes, are the capacity to relate oneself to the world by knowledge and the capacity to relate oneself to others by marriage. We seem to understand these capacities for relation as constitutive of what we understand by human society, since we attribute to them, if unchecked, the power to destroy the social realm. If we do not equate human knowledge with the results of science but understand it as the capacity to put one’s experience and the world into words, to use language, then the will to knowledge and the will to marriage may be seen to require analogous limitations in order to perform their work of social constitution, limitations that combat their tendencies to privacy or their fantasies of privacy.” (Pursuits of Happiness 74) The regulation of knowledge and that of marriage are thus linked in terms of managing, hence limiting, concepts of the world and of community. It is a striking observation that epistemology and ethics find a point of intersection in the concept of marriage. Yet as Cavell points out, this is a recurrent theme in writers as diverse as Milton, Kant, Hume, Locke, Mill, and Kierkegaard. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 594 The will to manage limits, to constrain or circumscribe and thus isolate, also suggests possibilities for the exercise of freedom and the expression of desire in the world and with others. In his chapter on It Happened One Night, “Knowledge as Transgression,” Cavell notes in Kantian terms that in contrast to the domain of understanding, where thought and the senses are bound to blind and irrevocable causal laws, moral reasoning requires the possibility of choice, and indeed the acknowledgment and exercise of the human freedom to choose. In this perspective, shared by Cavell and Deleuze, the potentiality for becoming human arises in the self-given freedom of choosing to choose, of exercising choice as a power. While Kant believes we are forever blocked from knowledge of things in themselves, no such limitation constrains the human exercise of moral choice. “In the case of our social life,” Cavell explains, we do have a choice over whether the laws of the moral universe, "objective" moral laws, apply to us; which is to say, a choice over whether to apply them, as is implied in their presenting themselves to us as imperatives, matters, as it were, not fully natural to us. This is as we should expect. There is an alternative to moral goodness--moral evil. Moral evil is not merely a matter of falling short of the dictates of the moral law: our sensuous nature indicates to us that for all we know we always fall short. The matter is rather one of choosing evil, of choosing to thwart the very possibility of the moral life. Kant does not say much about this alternative, but I understand it in the following way. One inflection of the moral law is that its necessity and universality are to be viewed as holding in "the realm of ends," which may be thought of as the perfected human community. This realm is also a world "beyond" the world we inhabit, a noumenal realm, open to reason, standing to reason; but I am not fated to be debarred from it as I am from the realm of things-in-themselves, by my sensuous nature; for the perfected human community can be achieved, it may at last be experienced, it is in principle presentable. Yet, there is between me and this realm of reason also something that may present itself as a barrier--the fact that I cannot reach this realm alone. . . . If the eventual community of humanity is not merely something close to us that we are falling short of, but something closed to us, something debarred, then its Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 595 nonexistence is due to our willing against it, to the presence of moral evil. This takes moral evil as the will to exempt oneself, to isolate oneself, from the human community. It is a choice of inhumanity, of monstrousness. Then our inability to picture ourselves as debarred from the social, or as debarring it, our drawing a blank here, may express a horror of this possibility, call it a horror of metaphysical privacy, as though picturelessness were a kind of namelessness. (Pursuits of Happiness 79) Skepticism is as much an ethical problem as it is an epistemological one, and to the extent that it encourages (inhuman) isolation, the choice of skepticism towards the existence of others is a choice of moral evil that enforces isolation from others and the world in the exercise of a negative or self-negating freedom. In the first phase of Cavell’s philosophy, skepticism poses a deep and disorienting problem of division from the world and difference from others to which philosophy must respond. Acknowledgement of skepticism’s powers thus signals the painful recognition that change is necessary, and one’s present mode of existence must be transformed. The second phase acknowledges that the pain of self-transformation may yield new forms of desire, or new recognitions of desires present but unexpressed or forgotten. This is why the pursuit of happiness (a striving and not an accomplishment) is not a turning from bad to good, or wrong to right, but rather a movement from occlusion or exclusion and constriction toward selfknowledge and sociability, which indeed requires accepting that this transformation cannot be accomplished alone. It requires acknowledgement of others and of the possibility of a good community, or at least a better one. Skepticism negates or undermines the possibility of living in a human community with its conclusion that the world is radically unknown to me. Withdrawn into privacy and isolation, I am unknown to myself and to others, and they are unknown to me. “I must find a way to put this doubt aside--,” Cavell writes in Cities of Words, “perhaps through what Pascal calls the taste for distraction, or what Hume depicts as the desire for sociability, or what Kant calls recognizing the necessary limits of human understanding, or what Wittgenstein calls the limits of my language” (426). The pursuit of happiness is therefore another way of expressing the desire for sociability, but also an acknowledgement that a happy, or at Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 596 least, a good enough compromise with the limits of human understanding of oneself and others may be achieved. In these films, no less than Cavell’s readings of Shakespeare, the quarreling couples of remarriage comedies and the unknown women of melodrama are exemplary of the human capacity to withstand and perhaps even overcome skepticism’s doubts concerning commerce with community and the world. And across the two genres, the drama of moral perfectionism addresses a common set of concerns: (re)marriage as the reaffirmation of community, the demand for an education, the need for a philosophical friend, and the metamorphosis of the woman as a new creation of the human. In the comedies, marriage, or rather remarriage, is an idealized image of an attainable perfectible community. At the same time, the topos of marriage is a figuration of discord and discontent. Part of the general insanity of remarriage comedy, pursuant to its pursuit of happiness, is that the open craving for happiness is a standing test, indeed a threat to social order. Any society that relinquishes or blocks rights of happiness is crazy, and we are reminded of this through the characters’ mishaps and misunderstandings, as well as their wild efforts toward recovery pictured as re-finding themselves or coming back to themselves. Here marriage signals a realm of freedom--indeed a Kantian domain of reason and the exercise of moral choice--that demands a transformation of the characters’ mode of existence or form of life. Crucially, they are divided. The request for divorce is a demand for freedom. Separation is essential to remarriage comedy because it is an affirmation of choice, to choose to be or to remain married or not. It is an expression of the possibility of freedom in community, which is all that freedom requires, that is, the recurrent possibility of its exercise. Having married they now occupy separate worlds, and to re-inhabit a joined world will mean suffering transformation, perhaps humiliation. The pursuit of happiness in community is fraught with difficulty, inspiring conflict between the couple and with the worlds they inhabit with others. The fact that these are comedies of remarriage thus projects a complex image of time and transformation. The trajectory of (past) marriage, (present) divorce, and (future) remarriage, defines a time of dissent and reaffirmation that figures society as subject to criticism but also to change. “Marriage is always divorce,” Cavell writes in Pursuits of Happiness, “always entails rupture from Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 597 something; and since divorce is never final, marriage is always a transgression. (Hence marriage is the central social image of human change, showing why it is and is not metamorphosis.)” (103). Communities can dismantle and rebuild themselves, and do so in the absence of violence, though not conflict, and through the most ordinary of means-the daily (re)negotiation of consent and consensus. Remarriage comedies focalize and dramatize this process, projecting it into an ethical framework; for philosophy, they provide a new concept of marriage. The pair is engaged in a conceptual and experimental journey, where marriage is pictured as an intellectual undertaking, a certain demand for understanding and a willingness to press for an understanding of the conditions of that understanding. In these terms, a good marriage is a self-generating and self-regulating state that claims for itself the power both to ratify society and to receive ratification from society. But it also maintains the potential to question or threaten the social order and the terms of that ratification. It thus reserves a place from which to judge its society, Cavell claims, in order “to determine for itself (within the couple itself, but by that fact within that fragment of society itself) whether its desires for a world worthy of consent are sufficiently satisfiable within the world as it is given” (Cities of Words 76-77). There are no guarantees. This statement thus underscores the moral uncertainty and fragility of perfectionism as exemplified by the couples’ unavoidable conflicts and disappointments with another. The crazy kineticism of these characters presents them as inhabiting a world whose ethical ground is unstable and open to question; they must assess their position in this world, both with respect to one another and to themselves. Nonetheless, the fact that one of them is willing to reform their world, even as they comically test the limits of its intelligibility and desirability, shows their consent to it, no matter how imperfect the world or the conditions of consent. This consent acknowledges that they (and we) are compromised by society’s inevitable only partial compliance with the principles of justice. But what remarriage signifies is that the compromise is worth suffering to the extent that society is committed to reforming itself. In these films the ideal of marriage, or rather achieving remarriage, is no doubt utopic as every comedic world must be. But at the same time, this idea is a pragmatic, working image of our prosaic and daily compromises with good enough Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 598 justice. The problem here is whether one can achieve satisfactory compromise with an other, and whether or to what extent others in community can accept compromise in an imperfect society. And as we shall see in the melodramas of the unknown woman, the demand for compromise can also be powerfully challenged and rejected. The pursuit of happiness figures in the image of (re)marriage the ethical demand for a perfected human community whose medium and form of life is conversation. As a perfectionist ethical practice, conversation aims for an acknowledgment of self and of others that must not only be affirmed, but continually re-affirmed. Through the medium of conversation, these comedies invoke the fantasy of the perfected human community, and propose that marriage is our best emblem of eventual community. This is not a figure of marriage as it is, but rather as it may be; that is, an eventuality whose probabilities of success or failure are undecided and undecidable. For these reasons Cavell insists that this fantasy or image suggests “on what may be seen as Kantian and Freudian and LéviStraussian grounds, that we cannot know that we are humanly capable of achieving that eventuality, or of so much as achieving a marriage that emblematizes it, since that may itself be achievable only as part of the eventual community” (Pursuits of Happiness 152). Perfectionism in the comedies thus takes the form of the problem of sustaining marriage in the dynamics of conversations where the other is acknowledged as the vehicle for new self-knowledge and a transformation of self; hence the importance of the problem of education and its links to friendship. “The issues the principal pair in these films confront each other with,” Cavell explains, “are formulated less well by questions concerning what they ought to do, what it would be best or right for them to do, than by the question of how they shall live their lives, what kind of persons they aspire to be. This aspect or moment of morality—in which a crisis forces an examination of one’s life that calls for a transformation or reorienting of it—is the province of what I emphasize as moral perfectionism” (Cities of Words 11). Conversation becomes here the modeling of a mode of existence, where talking together is being together or learning to speak the same language, both socially and sexually. This form of life is the projection of a mode of existence where acknowledging another person, and being acknowledged in turn, is a way of reestablishing intimacy with the world in its dailiness. These diurnal comedies, as Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 599 Cavell calls them, thus express the particular temporality of moral perfectionism. They conclude not in an anticipated future, “but in a present continuity of before and after; its transformation of a festival into a festivity; its correction not of error but of experience, or of a perspective on experience” (Pursuits of Happiness 240). In this remarriage signifies for Cavell “the two most impressive affirmations known to me of the task of human experience, the acceptance of human relatedness, as the acceptance of repetition. Kierkegaard’s study called Repetition, which is a study of the possibility of marriage; and Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, the call for which he puts by saying it is high time, a heightening or ascension of time; this is literally Hochzeit, German for marriage, with time itself as the ring. As redemption by suffering does not depend on something that has already happened, so redemption by happiness does not depend on something that has yet to happen; both depend on a faith in something that is always happening, day by day” (Pursuits of Happiness 241). The demand for an education, and the centrality of the place of the feminine, both independently and in relation to community, is a central feature of both remarriage comedies and melodramas. Yet, as demonstrated powerfully in Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), heteronormativity need not be the exclusive context for these demands.235 The ur-text for the perfectionist demand for an education as an act of self-disobedience or selfovercoming is Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, where Nora must seek her independence and the completion of her self (re-)creation outside of marriage. Her rebuke to Torvald is that they are not married, that in fact they have never been married, and that he is not the friend with or from whom she might desire or imagine education to a form of life where friendship and mutuality, hence marriage, are standing possibilities. She demands new imagination of marriage as a space for becoming-other, in a process that Cavell calls education. “This demand for education,” Cavell explains, “has to do with the woman’s 235 In Contesting Tears, Cavell’s “Postscript: To Whom It May Concern” is a fascinating account of the interest of addressing concepts of skepticism, irony, and melodrama in terms that are not heteronormative. I am also grateful, in this respect, to Ian Polonsky’s essay “Contesting Skepticism: Brokeback Mountain and the Unknown Human,” published in Cinematic xxxxxx, and more recently, a so far unpublished essay by Nicholas Mendoza on “Irony, Film, and Queer Identity in Cavell and Edelman.” Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 600 sense that her life asks for some transformation, that she stands in need of creation, or recreation. I say of this need that it marks a new step in the construction of the human.” 236 The perfectionist demand for an education turns on the expression of difference, and in both the comedies and melodramas, problems of gender and the expression of sexual difference are central features of genres whose conflicts also revolve around the suppression and return of the feminine voice. But this voice does not return as it was, as if the recovery of a lost or suppressed essence, but rather in the return of new voicing of terms of difference or differentiation as the call for a new possibilities of community. Such features call for psychoanalytic interpretation, of course. But one might also say that the suppression of the human voice is one of the dangers of skepticism. And in this way, in our culture, or in our modernity as lived, the acknowledgment and recovery of the feminine voice may project some of the most powerful perfectionist paths toward becoming human. The pursuit of happiness in comedies of remarriage is equally the pursuit of a community of mutually supportive desire. One must desire, or as importantly, one must be free to desire, to belong to just this community, and thus work to desire it and so be desired by or in it. Marriage is therefore one example of the search for a commonwealth of equals who must work out the right ratios of dependence on, and independence from, one another in an exercise of choice regulated neither by duty nor transcendental authority. One might also call these films, like many related works, comedies of differences of opinion where ongoing disagreement and dissent arise out of mismatched criteria for assessing what is reasonable or unreasonable to expect from a mutually supportive community of equals. The possibility of misunderstanding is a distinguishing feature of the community in that the central pair of the comedies are often associated or were brought together because of their presumed eccentricity or externality to a more conventional social world. Only these two are capable of really understanding one another because the community they tried to form, and are still trying to form after having renounced it, is misunderstood by the larger society in which they find themselves. They 236 “Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette Davis and "Now, Voyager," Critical Inquiry 16.2 (Winter 1990): 216. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 601 are misunderstood, and yet it is also crucial for the films’ projects of education and friendship that they misunderstand one another. This misunderstanding maps the skeptical problem of knowing or not knowing other minds in a new direction; namely, the question of knowing or not, understanding or misunderstanding, one’s sexual other. In these terms, what drives the comedies is not only the mismatch of criteria, and so the potential for misunderstanding, but also an asymmetrical relation of power marked by gender. The central philosophical aim of these films is to examine the problem of community and of human communion and communicativeness. But it is equally important that the films display this problem through the expression of sexual misunderstanding and as the possibility and difficulty of negotiating terms of equality between the sexes. This is why Cavell insists that comedies of remarriage be read as a development in the consciousness women hold of themselves as this is developed in its relation to the consciousness men hold of them. . . . Our films may be understood as parables of a phase of the development of consciousness at which the struggle is for the reciprocity or equality of consciousness between a woman and a man, a study of the conditions under which this fight for recognition (as Hegel put it) or demand for acknowledgment (as I have put it) is a struggle for mutual freedom, especially of the views each holds of the other. This gives the films of our genre a Utopian cast. They harbor a vision which they know cannot fully be domesticated, inhabited, in the world we know. They are romances. Showing us our fantasies, they express the inner agenda of a nation that conceives Utopian longings and commitments for itself. (Pursuits of Happiness 17-18) Another way of thinking about the promise of future mutuality, and of addressing and refiguring the asymmetry of gender in the films, is to follow through their depiction of the problem of finding or returning to a place of joint habitation, which may also be understood as finding new terms for joining or reconciling private and public life. Marriage, divorce, and remarriage thus become the image of establishing a new public and a new private relation, literally of gaining purchase on new place, which Cavell describes as “the creation at once of new spaces of communality and of exclusiveness, of a new outside and inside to a life, space expressible by the private ownership of a house, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 602 literally an apartment, a place that is part of and apart within a larger habitation . . . . You are also free to understand the economic issue as part, hence as trope, of a more general issue of human happiness, call it the task or the cost of joint inhabitation, an essential requirement of which is the mutual creation of room, the resources for which (economic, spiritual, epistemological, metaphysical, geographical) remain incompletely charted” (Pursuits of Happiness 208-209). The mutual creation of room may also be thought of as the creation of new room, of new placement, hence new ways of considering and refiguring the sexual relation. In the recent past and still current context of theory, the temptation to apply a critical template that reads these films as narratives of the re-domestication of women and the management of heteronormative desire is strong. But this would be too easy. Moreover, a symptomatic reading of remarriage comedies might occlude two of the most fundamental and interesting facts about their narrative structure. First, they are primarily concerned with working out a dynamic of mutuality in the recognition and acknowledgment of desire where both sexes have something at stake, where relations of activity and passivity are not often clear, and where desire is not about the finding of an object (it is already found, and lost), but rather as Freud would say, its re-finding, thus suggesting a difference in repetition that cannot be definitively concluded or settled. Among the most essential and disorienting features of remarriage comedy (exemplified best, perhaps, in Bringing Up Baby) is that it is undecidable whether the man or the woman is the active or passive partner, and that we can know with real significance the difference between the masculine and feminine, or indeed whether concepts of activity and passivity adequately capture the continuum of sexual difference. Another key feature of remarriage comedies is that marriage is not the conclusion or end of the narrative--marriage neither seals identity nor assures happiness. It is not a point of resolution whose concept can be taken for granted, but functions rather as a site of contestation and debate that aims at the transformation of a concept, marriage becoming remarriage. Perhaps this makes marriage a suspended concept, or a concept that is not free of doubt or uncertainty, and thus must be continually tested. In Adam’s Rib, for example, marriage is not only subject to debate but is also a concept that can be Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 603 taken to court, thus turning a private ethical conversation into a public and political one. It is also a film that strikingly investigates a central question of remarriage comedy; that is, whether the man or the woman is the active or passive agent in conflicts of desire and education. Adam’s Rib plays on the asymmetry of gender relations more than the other films, which is already announced in naming the couple Amanda and Adam. The film is called Adam’s Rib, but which name and thus position is derived from the other? This phonetic transformation signals how in the course of its plot the film works through different ways of permutating the logic of a field of relations that associates activity and passivity with masculinity and femininity and maleness and femaleness, and all within a debate about the law and what makes private matters of public interest. A second obvious fact, as I have already suggested, is that the meaning and value of the state of marriage are depicted as contested and undecided; marriage must be open to failure in order for the question of remarriage to present itself through the free exercise of choice and consent. As Cavell astutely points out, Adam’s view that marriage is defined contractually and regulated only by law is incoherent. Yet this incoherence clarifies some of the most important criteria in remarriage comedy that philosophy must account for: that divorce and dissent are standing possibilities in any union, and further, that our criteria for knowing what marriage is, or what makes it desirable, are unsettled. Moreover, the portrayal of dissenting concepts of marriage as decidable publicly as contract in a court of law signals that there is more than a couple at stake--here again the open play of discord and agreement, of consensus lost and (temporarily?) re-found is meant to dramatize the fragility of the democratic social bond and to test its desirability and its possibilities for seeking new forms. These films are less about the return to domesticity and a settlement of active-passive relations along the axis of masculinity and femininity than about the standing possibility of threat or division, indeed the instability that continually inhabits those criteria. And this persistent threat or instability also demonstrates that even in comedy an undercurrent of violence dogs sexual difference. On one hand, this violence is expressed by what Cavell calls the taint of villainy that mars the male characters--C. Dexter Gordon’s violent ejection of Tracy from their space of common habitation at the beginning of The Philadelphia Story, or in Adam’s Rib, Adam’s Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 604 inability to discern the difference between a slap and a slug and the shading of erotic intimacy into domestic conflict. On the other, violence is also the price of ethical transformation, and of building new terms of existence where the sexual relation may be differently lived. The price of education to this fact is often expressed in situations where the principal pairs experience together a climactic event, suggestive of death or risk of life, that inspires painful change. These events are breaks or detours in the present direction of the characters’ lives, which express the fact that progress towards comic ending requires the exercise of choice as the price of change, and the choice may be painful. Likewise the change. While there is often an asymmetry of knowledge or desire in these climactic moments, the characters nonetheless live them together and deal with their consequences and draw their conclusions together. The couple educate one another to new terms of existence. This means that the theme of education is strongly tied to mutuality, and that an education happens together or not at all, even if one arrives at understanding or transformation at a pace uneven with the other. But an education to what? Perhaps at recognizing the necessity of change and of accepting the pain of ethical transformation. In similar terms, the films’ emphases on hunger, thirst, or longing for a different life are thinly veiled expressions of perfectionist desire. In The Philadelphia Story, C. Dexter Gordon calls this his “gorgeous thirst” from which he was cured only by finding the right pursuit for his happiness, and thus finding or re-finding the correct aim of his desire. In It Happened One Night, Peter’s hunger might be called love, which Cavell describes as imagining someone hungry for the same things you are yourself hungry for. . . . Since Dexter’s praise of alcohol lies in its capacity to open your eyes to yourself, we might think of his thirst as for truth, or for self-knowledge, as well as for [Tracy’s] desire, since his implied rebuke to her (that her eyes are closed to her own desire) is that what she could not bear was his thirst for whatever it is the alcohol represented, call this their marriage. He seems pretty clearly, and unapologetically, to be thinking about it still, still thirsting. (His curing himself of his substitute addiction, and moreover curing himself by reading, by an absorption Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 605 in art, is understandable as the act of self-mastery that has lent him his special powers). (Pursuits of Happiness 145) And indeed what Dexter rebukes Tracy with is her incapacity to accept imperfection or frailty in others, which is not only an inability to accept others, but also of accepting her desire for others, or to undertake to help them change, or to undergo change herself. She is called divine, a goddess to be worshipped; what she must become is human through an act of self-disobedience, which will not be achieved without a certain testing of her pride as well as her identity. Thus education takes a particular form in remarriage comedy--that of recognizing and acknowledging desire of and for the other. Here Cavell emphasizes one of the key elements organizing the perfectionist desire for a transfigured form of life: that the obstacles to a happy union “are not complications unknown to the characters that a conclusion can sort out. They have something to learn but it cannot come as news from others. . . . It is not a matter of the reception of new experience but a matter of a new reception of your own experience, an acceptance of its authority as your own” (Pursuits of Happiness 240). New reception of your own experience, and the acknowledgment and acceptance of its power to transform your life, is called perfectionism. Thus, one of the conclusions of Pursuits of Happiness is that “Even in America, the land of the second chance, and of transcendentalist redeemers, the paradox inevitably arises: you cannot change the world (for example, a state of marriage) until the people in it change, and the people cannot change until the world changes” (257). The standing question of remarriage comedy is how does one undergo change, and to recognize the necessity of undergoing change, in support of the possibility of a new form of life? How does one pass into difference or a state of becoming, a self-overcoming in the creation of a new community? (This is the unanswered question of Deleuze’s gestures toward ethical practice.) The first stage of response is that one cannot undertake this transformation alone. This is why a doubling of identity is so fundamental to remarriage comedy (but also melodramas of the unknown woman), as if one of the parties must project their own conceptual personae to force change in the relationship, or to initiate their partner to a changed relationship, and one that reaffirms the dailiness of friendship, intimacy, and mutual education. In one’s care for Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 606 the other, one must acquire from them an acknowledgment of their rigidity, say their resistance to change and blindness to desire (Tracy in The Philadelphia Story), or their fixity in repetition (Jerry’s philandering in The Awful Truth). This is what education means in remarriage comedy. One tries to force an acknowledgment from the other that he or she must come to stand for themselves in a relation analogous to that of remarriage to marriage, that is, an overcoming or succeeding of oneself in a perfectionist act of selfdisobedience. “Can human beings change?” Cavell asks. “The humor, and the sadness, of remarriage comedies can be said to result from the fact that we have no good answer to that question” (Pursuits of Happiness 259). Yet the conditions for undergoing perfectionist change are foreseeable and expressible. Perhaps we only need to act on Nietzsche’s request that we inhabit time anew. 44. A digression on difference and interpretation Philosophy, which may begin in wonder (thus showing its relation to tragedy), may continue in argument (thus showing its kinship with comedy). Human thinking, falling upon itself in time, is not required of beings exempt from tragedy and comedy. --Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness I said that Cavell approaches remarriage comedies and melodramas of the unknown woman as philosophical dialogues, not only as speech or dialectic in confrontation but also as a complex aesthetic structure with its own scenography, narrative arcs, and dramatic space and time. Cavell’s critical approach to art, and especially the popular arts, is also powerfully redemptive though in ways probably best understood in the context of ordinary language philosophy than through the critical perspectives of Benjamin or Kracauer. In Cities of Words, Cavell accordingly makes present and perspicuous two principles guiding especially his interest in Hollywood films: “that the concept of art remains powerful enough to contest the idea that human artifacts are homogeneously and with no resistance ideological reflections of their culture; and . . . that works with the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 607 power of art were regularly, not of course predominantly, produced within the Hollywood studio system” (53-54). I might rephrase this argument in saying that effects of power are neither homogeneously nor completely and without contradiction deployed throughout a society and its cultural expressions. Nor can the concept of ideology and its critique account for the complete range of relationships of understanding and desire that we enjoy with each other and with works of art, popular or otherwise. I do not wish to undermine or displace the value and importance of ideological criticism here. But I do think that with few exceptions, ideological criticism in the humanities--sometimes called theory--is far too often linked with concepts of totality, negation, and dialectic that are the unexamined conceptual inheritance of Hegelianism. This attachment to the absolute--to be inside or outside of ideology, with reference to no criteria of value apart from ideology and its negation--has strong though implicit links to the problematic of skepticism as examined by Cavell. The current interest in ethical assessment and criticism throughout the humanities, and not just in a Cavellian or Deleuzian framework, strongly indicates, I think, that there is more to our complex and contradictory experience of culture than ideology, and that, perhaps more controversially, in philosophy ethics precedes politics. (Perhaps this assertion is no less controversial than the idea, so widely held in the seventies and after, that theory is politics.) As noted at the end of the last section, ethical examination is the best hope for interrupting the circle of confusion that says you cannot change the world until the people in it change, and that people cannot change until the world changes. Or perhaps ethics fully embraces the circle in acknowledging that the possibility and necessity of change is an individual’s first step in transforming her or his mode of existence, alone or in the company of others. One may not change without the other. And one must know what one values in the world or not before one can ask the world to change. In turn, philosophy must acknowledge that there are more and varied pathways of reason than the one marked by certainty, fallibilism, and “good theory,” and in this way, it may contribute constructively to the project of theory, whatever we consider it to be. This is tantamount to saying after von Wright that the humanities have their own special forms Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 608 of reasoning, interpreting, and valuing, which remain, perhaps, still to be discovered or recovered and valued. Moral perfectionism seeks to get beyond a critical perspective that finds everywhere hurtful asymmetries of power and the negation of voice to deploy a variety of evaluative and interpretative frameworks other to positions based on the critic’s judgment of political blindness and contradiction in the text (or in others). It thus provides an alternative to what Cavell calls the moralizing morality of academic moral philosophy, which insists on getting the other to agree to something, to do something, or to believe something that you are persuaded, independently of the conversation, that she ought to do. (One might find a similar tendency in the association of theory with a politics of identity.) An often unrecognized or unacknowledged question is raised here about the relation of authority to morality or ethical standing--that my judgment of your position occurs without any critical questioning of my authority or right to question you. The worry is that my claim to a right of judgment rests only on some unquestioned transcendental principle, which may blind and deafen me to my own moralizing agenda and isolate and block me from change, when it fact, my demand is for you to change. There is no room here for the mutual elaboration of what Charles Taylor calls a language of perspicuous contrast, which is in fact what Cavell calls education. I have already said that perfectionist conversations are singular, contingent, and context bound, and thus without appeal to transcendental authority of reason or morality. Perfectionism requests desire for change, and on this basis provokes a reflexive questioning of what constitutes one’s standing in confronting another person with moral questioning. As an alternative to moralizing morality, Cavell reminds us that “in confronting another with whom your fate is, by your lights, bound up (either generally, as another human being, or more specifically by your cares for and commitments to the other, casual, institutional, or permanent), you risk your understanding of the other as of yourself--it is part of the argument you have initiated, or accepted the invitation to enter, to determine whether you have sufficiently appreciated the situation from the other’s point of view, and whether you have articulated the ground of your own conviction” (Cities of Words 235). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 609 Similar arguments might be raised in any act of criticism, thus linking perfectionism to artful conversation. Here there is another implicit bond of agreement between Cavell and Deleuze (or even Foucault) in that for both the potential for meaning is fully immanent in works of art. Texts already convey all they can possibly convey. From this perspective, producing new readings or recovering latent meanings is less a matter of a symptomology, of knowing better than the text what it says, than a function of readers’ own productive acts of misrecognition, acknowledgment, or projective imagination, which continually illuminate or darken new informational foci by bringing new contextual situations and ethical perspectives to critical reading. Reading or interpretation is understood here as listening, of being receptive and open to what the text says, what the other says, and to grant that perhaps they do say what the mean, though perhaps incompletely or inchoately. (They may also be perfectly clear, yet misunderstood. You do not yet speak the same language together, or have the right context for understanding one another. One should be reminded here of Cavell’s account of conversation and education in remarriage comedy.) What Cavell calls reading also involves locating and arguing for terms of intelligibility in the text that may in turn provoke a process of reflexively acknowledging and deepening your terms of intelligibility to yourself, and to transmit them in acts of criticism. Our encounters with art, and the artful conversations they inspire, may lead to perfectionist moments of self-education, where I grant to my self the possibility of change in a new language of perspicuous contrast, or undergo transformation under a new concept. Here philosophy asks us to free ourselves from judgment, or rather, asks us to become less judgmental, and asserts its difference from theory, at least in the forms usually given us in the humanities. In this framework, an ethical film philosophy again distinguishes itself from film theory. For film philosophy is less interested in producing new knowledge about cinema than in soliciting thought and argument that demonstrate the quotidian importance of the moving image to contemporary ways of being and thinking, and as the accompaniment to the ethical dilemmas of everyday life. Here perfectionism addresses local and diurnal dilemmas of living together or alone, of conformity or individuality, or of forming a community or standing apart from it. And if Cavell is primarily, though certainly not Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 610 exclusively, concerned with American film genres, this parallels his lifelong interest in both philosophy’s recounting of the ordinary and in the possibilities of characterizing a particularly American strain of philosophical activity. In Cavell’s view the comedies of remarriage discussed in Pursuits of Happiness and the melodramas of the unknown women addressed in Contesting Tears stand in relation to one another as different variations of working through the Emersonian problem of self-reliance (which may also be considered in skeptical terms of isolation and existence) though they also share a common grammar for articulating this problem. In The Claim of Reason, Cavell suggests that defining the question of the human should be pursued in the discovery or acknowledgment of internal relations that each human being inhabits with others. In the utopic world of the comedies, this binding series of relations is not thought to be present in society as it stands, but rather is expressed through the contests and conversations of the romantic couples who exemplify the as yet unachieved possibilities of human community present in this world. In forming their own world, in declaring its existence, they suggest the possibility of another world present in or next to the one they inhabit and converse in. Their self-reliant reaffirmation of community is the genetic element projecting the possibility of this new world. In the melodramas, however, and no matter how deep the isolation and ironic confinement of the heroines, the discovery of self-reliance will require acts of perfectionist self-disobedience where Emersonian qualities of rightful attraction, expressiveness, and joy are undertaken first in relation to one’s self. In asking for a place in film philosophy other to ideological criticism, I do not want to say that forceful asymmetries of power and knowledge marked by lines of gender division are unimportant in these films; indeed such asymmetries are central features of their grammar. But if the figuration of marriage is accepted as a genetic form of community, where living together in dissent is a standing possibility, then one must also acknowledge that questions of sexual difference play significant roles, both externally and internally, in the process of change or metamorphosis that these films require and enact. Externally, that little but inescapable difference, as Adam puts it in Adam’s Rib, fuels conflict and misunderstanding between the couples, but also functions as the price of their Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 611 achieving freedom and exercising choice; internally, difference is another expression of the fact that division within the self is the price of becoming other to who you are. Acknowledging division within the self--the self’s conflict, or lack of conformity with itself--as preparatory to the possibility of change takes several forms in Cavell’s philosophy of film. Through the concept of photogenesis, for example, Cavell illuminates a force of becoming where subjects and things reveal otherwise unrecognized states or possibilities of existence. Change, including ethical transformation, requires reflexivity, of recognizing that the other to one’s self that resides in oneself, or rather that “oneself” may comprise two or more selves (or even a multitude), which are less points of departure than projected images of transformed identity yet to be achieved as much as past residues of identities overcome. This reflexivity can also take the form of sexual reflexivity. Cavell suggests that one of the camera’s powers of photogenesis is the capacity to reveal the reverse nature of the human subject; in short, that the camera has the power to capture the feminine aspect of masculine physiognomy, and perhaps the masculine aspect of feminine physiognomy. (Remarriage comedy presents this power as expressing the undecidability of whether the man or the woman is the active or passive partner, or whether we can know with real significance the difference between the masculine and feminine, or indeed whether concepts of activity and passivity adequately capture the continuum of sexual difference.) This power is linked to film’s powers of passive intentionality--its capacity for revealing thought’s expressiveness in the body, thus locating an otherwise non-visible self. The concept of photogenesis is meant to express the inherent reflexivity of projected subjects and things becoming on screen in the photographic presentation of themselves, a presence that indicates an absence, and perhaps also a past projected toward a future, or some future state of becoming whose direction is often unclear or unrecognized in the present. In Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell expands this thought in writing that “I wish to understand as an analogue to this ontological speculation about material objects the speculation about human beings, things with consciousness, that their presence refers to their absent, or invisible, or complementary, sexuality. The reflexiveness of objects harks back, in my mind, to the earlier claim in The World Viewed that objects on screen appear as held in the frame of nature, implying the world as a whole. The sexual reflexiveness of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 612 human beings would accordingly suggest the individual as expressing humanity as such, what in The Claim of Reason I call the internal relation of each human being with all others” (Pursuits of Happiness 224-225). This is a point worth repeating: that the reversibility of qualities of activity and passivity along the lines of masculinity and femininity, or maleness and femaleness, do not so much divide gender through criteria of identity and asymmetries of power, as affirm human relatedness in a shared if contradictory web of intersubjective relations. Recall Cavell’s earlier response to the question of what becomes of things on film. In the image, subjects and things are not only held in the frame of nature (implying the world as a whole, hence a common plane of immanence or existence), those individuated things we call human beings are also shown to exist in a world, in a shared form of life, where each being shares an internal relation with every other being. 45. Perfectionism’s ironic transport Helmer: But to leave your home, your husband, your children! Have you thought what people will say? . . . But this is monstrous! Can you neglect your most sacred duties? . . . First and foremost you are a wife and mother. Nora: I don’t believe that any longer. I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, like you--or anyway, that I must try to become one. --Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House Skepticism breaks into . . . life, with a surmise that I cannot live with, that the world and I and others are radically unknown to me. --Stanley Cavell, The Claim to Reason Cavell’s study of the melodrama of the unknown woman has provided some of his most complex and penetrating insights into the structure of moral perfectionism. Although published fifteen years apart, Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears are complimentary works. (The intervening period was marked by intensive work on the concept of moral perfectionism perhaps best presented in three books: In Quest of the Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 613 Ordinary [1988], This New Yet Unapproachable America [1989], and, most importantly, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome [1990].) Contesting Tears shows that there is also a dark side to perfectionism and the pursuit of happiness. The book returns to themes present earlier in Cavell’s discussion of film though not yet set in the context of moral perfectionism: ethics as the evaluation of a mode of existence that requires contesting and evaluating a community or a form of life; the demand for an education, apart or alone, in situations that require tests of your own moral standing no less than those who would befriend you; and film’s expression of the power of metamorphosis and the capacity for change, which often takes the form of a certain reflexivity and the projection of a divided self. Unlike the comedies, perfectionism in the melodramas is explored as a mode of irony that acknowledges the consequences of a life buried in conformity or consigned to a community blind to or even destructive of the desire for change. Like remarriage comedy, melodramas of the unknown woman also constitute an open set, whose exemplary instances comprise just four films: Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), and Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948). Recall that the concept of genre as an open set insists on the following principles: that the coherence of genres is established and continually transformed by critical reading, and is not set in advance or concluded historically; that the practice of evaluation is itself open, constantly adding or subtracting candidates in a process of critical argumentation aimed at recognizing new formal features in the works, which in turn produce new conceptual possibilities for philosophical investigation; and finally, that the assertion of generic identity projects new contexts for assessing subsequent work. In short, the power of genre is founded through difference in repetition, rather than on a principle of identity, similar to Cavell’s discovery of the power of automatism in seriality. In “The Good of Film,” for example, Cavell proposes many contemporary candidates for assessment in the context of remarriage comedy, most prominently, Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993). Cavell has also examined several recent European films in the context of ethical dramas of unknownness, including The Marquise of O (Eric Rohmer, 1976), A Tale of Winter (Eric Rohmer, 1992), and The Captive (Chantal Akerman, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 614 2000). In any case, as ethical dramas of perfectionism the melodramas of the unknown woman are closer structurally and philosophically to remarriage comedies than they are to proximate versions of melodrama, say the Hollywood women’s film. Cavell considers the unknown woman films to be a genre derived from remarriage comedy through a process of negation or inversion, and of turning the comic and affirmative features of the comedies into an ironic mode. Accordingly, what constitutes this group of films as a genre is that they systematically negate the structure of remarriage “to reveal systematically the threats (of misunderstanding, of violence) that in each of the remarriage comedies dog its happiness” (Contesting Tears 83). The genre also continues Cavell’s examination of film along the lines of skepticism--if marriage is an image of the domestic, the ordinary or the everyday, then skepticism’s threat to the ordinary may take the form of irony or melodrama. Cavell makes this point in many contexts, including in The Claim of Reason. The image of the failed or cursed marriage, or the dissensual community, is accordingly a threat to perfectionism’s image of the practice of philosophy as the intimacy of one soul’s examination of and by another. The ironic mode of melodramas of unknownness directly confronts the criteria through which the remarriage comedies pursue their happiness in the formation and reaffirmation of community. The comedies project—through dilemmas of marriage, domesticity, and the social everyday—the problem of maintaining equality between human beings based on Emersonian qualities of rightful attraction, expressiveness, and joy. The melodramas, however, express problems of privacy and qualities of self-reliance that demand such expressiveness first in relation to oneself. Marriage is no longer a standing possibility for the melodramas, or at least it can no longer be valued in the same way. (As in the example of Gaslight, it can even be the site of a terrorization of the woman to the point of madness.) Rather than presenting a community in formation, the films examine the problem of a self in need of transformation, not only from joylessness to self-acceptance, but also as the assertion of an independent place within a community of equals unbounded by standing concepts of marriage. The irony of unknownness is key to the ethical dilemmas of the melodramas. Where the domestic pairs in the comedies regain acknowledgment of and responsiveness Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 615 to one another (no matter how temporary, uncertain, or fragile), the ironic conversational mode of the melodramas continually blocks or undermines any communication and social interaction that could permit or advance this acknowledgment and responsiveness. The unknown woman of the melodramas does not share a language with those around her, thus raising the question, in the context of skepticism, of her isolation within her pictured community and therefore from us, the film spectators. This isolation suggests a break or separation in the internal relations binding her to others in a human form of life. In their unknownness to us, and their isolation from the community that surrounds them, the women in these melodramas embody the skeptical dilemmas of a world held at a distance and of a self isolated from other minds, one whose price is voicelessness and a fragile hold on a social, thus human form of life. Indeed, these are studies of the consequences of an inhuman existence, all the more horrific because of its setting in the domestic or the ordinary. How is recovery possible? If skepticism is held at bay through acknowledgment, sociability, and conversation, then the unknown women of the melodramas must find adequate partners in dialogue and education; they are in need of a philosophical friend even if, as in the case of Now, Voyager, that friend is transcended or becomes irrelevant. In these films, the solution to inhuman isolation is not found necessarily or only in others, especially the men in the films, but rather more forcefully from within the protagonist herself as the discovery of a new mode of self-reliance. In Stephen Mulhall’s account, what the melodramas express is “a mode of metamorphosis which is a route towards a new or original integrity that can be (at least provisionally) achieved in isolation—a personal change without social interchange” (Mulhall 239). In the context of moral perfectionism, the melodrama of the unknown woman amplifies the problem of self (re-)creation or of creating new states of self, as if discovering or constructing within oneself a new conceptual personae as a route toward self-disobedience. And to the extent that this process involves the recovery of her voice, hence language in a new form of life, this new creation of the woman is linked to a new imagination of the human. What these women show us are the stakes of aiming toward perfectionist paths for becoming human, and the high price of failing to recover from inhuman isolation. The route out of irony Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 616 toward self-reliance can thus be thought of as “involving a relation between two selves,” Mulhall explains, or rather two states of her self: condemned by the world of her film to a mode of existence in which she at best haunts the world, she stakes her life on her capacity to envision a further state of her self which it is within her power to realize or enact. She permits this vision of an unknown but knowable future self to attract her away from her present self, to initiate her self-transformation, her refusal of her world and its conditions—to initiate and maintain her refusal to conform. Thus the melodrama of self-reliance involves a doubleness within the self, a capacity for self-transcendence which amounts to a movement from one state of the self to another, an avoidance of fixation or repetition and an openness to the unknown future. (242-243) I have called this capacity perfectionism as self-disobedience. Since it is also a revolt against a standing community of conformity, suffocating and resistant to change, selfdisobedience becomes civic disobedience--a contestation of the community as it stands, and sometimes, the imagination of a community to come, perhaps a new and more human form of existence. In these terms, it is important to emphasize that the problem of marriage remains central to the grammar of these melodramas, though in the form of negation rather than affirmation or reaffirmation. These women are sisters of Ibsen’s Nora, who rejects marriage as the mode of existence in which a new life, say a newly won human life, can be discovered. Understood in a perfectionist context, here the woman seeks her unattained but attainable self otherwise than in marriage, whose opportunities and promise of community have proven to be destructive for her. It turns out that the partner to whom she was drawn as a way of sharing her fantasies of transcendence of the everyday was one capable only of inspiring fantasies, not acting on them. Accordingly, she must leave children and husband behind on the ground that there is no marriage between them because he is not the individual with whom a mutual education is possible--she must set out from her current habitation to find an education in and to a new form a life. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 617 As a possible route to creating a new and original integrity, marriage is contested and even transcended in these films. Yet as a Cavell points out, “The route to this alternative integrity is still creation, or what I might call metamorphosis--some radical, astonishing, one may say melodramatic change of the woman, say of her identity. But this change must take place outside the process of a mode of conversation with a man (of course, since such a conversation would constitute marriage)” (Contesting Tears 6). Considering that the two genres run parallel to one another historically, one may presume a standing conversation between them on the concept of marriage. And indeed what the melodramas bring forth in stark clarity is the topos of marriage as a site of contestation or failed consensus where the pursuit of happiness is fraught with risk. We have arrived at the central (perfectionist) question that binds the two genres in something like a common grammar: How is change possible, or better, how is human change possible? To the extent that these films are considered media of art (neither Cavell nor I have any doubts on this matter, though perhaps it remains for you to discover this for yourself), the question of becoming on film, how the concept of becoming is projected in film--its automatisms, its elements or forms, its genres--must now be connected, philosophically, to the perfectionist problem of self-reliance defined as self-disobedience, aversion to conformity, or of overcoming one’s fixed or stagnated self as a recovery of human existence. In Contesting Tears Cavell asks, “Does, for example, the moving picture do its work by fixation or by metamorphosis? Here we need to think about change or difference in connection with concepts of identity and of repetition, in Kierkegaard’s, Nietzsche’s, and Freud’s senses, invoked in Pursuits of Happiness” (141). No doubt, to think of difference in identity through Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Freud suggests another unfinished conversation with Deleuze. Still, the main issue here is that in their deployment and expression of concepts of transfiguration and transvaluation, the moral of the melodramas of the unknown woman, or better, what they construct and convey from and through the medium of film, is that one of the powers of photogenesis is to express the transformation of fixation as metamorphosis, to show that subjects do become, or become-other, on film. This is one of film’s most powerful affinities with perfectionism. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 618 Interpreting and evaluating our given terms of existence, and their possibilities for transformation, is a key task of perfectionism. In like manner, the problem of existence--or rather, the will to recover from a problematic existence--is a key element linking perfectionism to what Cavell calls the underlying myth of melodramas of the unknown woman where, “a woman achieves existence (or fails to), or establishes her right to existence in the form of a metamorphosis (or fails to), apart from or beyond satisfaction by marriage (of a certain kind) and with the presence of her mother and of her children, where something in her language must be as traumatic in her case as the conversation of marriage is for her comedic sisters--perhaps it will be an aria of divorce, from husband, lover, mother, or child” (Contesting Tears 88). Marriage and family play important roles in these films, though often perverse ones, as do relations between parent and child, which often image the temporal possibility of extending the past into the future, ironically as identity (eternal recurrence of the past in the present), or hopefully as difference (being reborn into a transformed world). (There can be utopia in the melodramas no less than the comedies.) The shared grammar of marriage also signals important criteria of contrast with the remarriage comedies. With the exception of the heroine of Gaslight, the woman is shown to be a mother, or as in the case of Now, Voyager, she assumes the role of a (revised) mother. In any case, she is often shown in relation to a child. The woman is also presented in relation to or in fateful separation from her mother, who haunts her present psychologically. Lastly, the woman’s desire is in conflict with the law, sometimes represented by an authoritarian father. If her father (or a father figure, sometimes a husband) is present, he is never on the side of desire, but rather stands for the prohibition of desire. Now, Voyager plays an interesting variation on this element, in that Charlotte’s desire is blocked and suppressed by a tyrannical matriarch, who has absorbed the dead father’s powers of prohibition. I want to speak soon of the temporality of these melodramas in contrast to the time of comedy. But Now, Voyager raises another set of problems, often less clearly set out or articulated in the other films. The image of the impossible or failed marriage is intimately linked to the perfectionist logic of this film. In turn, ironic impediments to marriage, or at Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 619 least a certain standing idea of marriage, unfold in stages through the narrative as variations on questions of identity and existence, of giving in to conformity or finding new possibilities of self-disobedience and self-reliance, of who can be a friend in this dilemma, and for how long? Problems of identity and sexual difference are raised in every case around these questions, and with interesting consequences. My thought is that the power of Now, Voyager derives from its critically savvy remapping of concepts of gender and class difference in pictured society as it stands. A central argument of the film is that names or predicates do not define existence, or put another way, existentially, the community of Vale is not set in stone. The rain swept boundary stone in the film’s opening shot is also a signpost to an altered form of community, where the terms that constitute a family named Vale--call this a view of the domestic--must be transformed. The narrative arc of the film clearly unfolds along divisions that separate the world of women from the world of men. The Vale home is, significantly, a world where men are absent, apart from a manservant. Initially, the world of women is the world of Charlotte’s isolation, almost to the point of madness, as signified by the locked room where she attempts to protect some form of privacy against her mother’s authoritarian control. Dr. Jaquith is brought into this world by Charlotte’s sisterin-law and niece, both of who return later in the film at significant moments as friends and markers of change. Jaquith will also escort her out of this world, first to his country clinic, Cascades, whose name suggests not only a poetics of falling gently, but also a process of displacement in series, and then by recommending an ocean voyage. Connected by an image of water, hence rebirth, both Cascades and the setting of ocean liners are significant topoi in the film. To be on a boat is to be “at sea” but also to be in transport; the linking of the two is important to the film’s perfectionist narrative. As shown in flashback, Charlotte’s first failed “marriage” takes place at sea with the handsome young radio operator, Leslie Trotter. The discovery of their secret romance also initiates the increasing isolation of Charlotte by her mother. The film then progresses through a series of failed attempts to marry. Meeting Jerry on the trip after her first stay at Cascades, he makes no secret of the fact that he is married with two daughters, one of whom, the younger Christina, will become Charlotte’s fateful double. Jerry, like Jaquith, is pictured as a Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 620 philosophical friend and a key agent enabling Charlotte’s transformation and her education to a new form of life. Jerry encourages and enables Charlotte’s play with image and transformation as she tries on the identity of Renée Beauchamp, and is then finally christened by Jerry, Camille, the lady of the Camellias. Camellias will be the secret image of their shared past together, as well as a sign of Charlotte’s unmarried “idiosyncrasy,” as she calls it. However, Jerry also presents an image (literally a photograph) of a failed or unhappy marriage. His sickly and demanding wife isolates him, no less than Charlotte by her mother; his only hope for the future, an introverted and unhappy child, unwanted by her mother. Of course, there are not one but two family photographs exchanged in the film: one of Jerry’s wife and daughter; the other of the imposing Vale clan with Charlotte on the margins on the right, the spinster aunt, the “fat lady with the heavy eyebrows and all the hair.” Two photographs and two families, both of which offer an image of a stultifying past still active in the present. Together they also present the possibility of still undecided choice in two family domains: that Renée-Charlotte-Camille might be able to take a step into a revised future is still not a standing possibility for Jerry’s daughter, Christina. And here is another irony of the film. What Charlotte refinds with Jerry is the possibility of marriage. On returning home, to reestablish her new identity through the discovery that that she is no longer afraid, especially of her mother, she must now again confront the fact of marriage in the person of Elliot Livingston, a notable Bostonian from her own social caste. This, of course, would be a marriage of conventionality and conformity, as the film makes clear by reintroducing Jerry into the plot. What Charlotte and Jerry discovered together is what makes for a happy marriage. Elliot is a fine man, though lacking Jerry’s sense of humor, sense of beauty, and sense of play. Elliot, alternatively, is incapable of being her friend, or not like this--he cannot teach her to be loving and affectionate as Jerry did. In the meantime, Jerry has taken his own step into a revised future. One may say that he has been educated by Charlotte’s example, and so becomes the architect he always wanted to be, that he was meant to be. But this is not enough to make a marriage. The most powerful irony lies here. In the world of the film, Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 621 aristocratic Boston, ethically Jerry and Charlotte cannot marry. Yet through her past with Jerry, Charlotte has discovered what might make a good marriage, and must now acknowledge, again ethically, that she cannot create this world with Eliot--there is no possibility of further education, hence change, with him. The narrative of the film is littered with images of failed marriage. Or if there are happy marriages, like that of Charlotte’s sister-in-law, for example, husbands never seem to be present. Is a marriage only happy in the absence of a husband? How unhappy or happy is this thought? This is not funny, but it is also perhaps not bad. These are all marriages ruled by a transcendental principle of conventionality and conformity. To prevent falling into tragedy, a revised vision of family, of community, must be discovered and constructed. Before returning to the concept of marriage as contested and transfigured in this film, I want to pursue briefly one last digression. I said that the narrative unfolds along a line that separates a world of women, say the darkened Vale matriarchy, and a world of men. The masculine is first given in the film as an image of care and concern in the character of Jaquith, and then as romance in the figures of Leslie and Jerry, both significantly discovered at sea. What kinds of men are these? If we care to divide masculinity from femininity along the lines of activity and passivity, Leslie and Jerry are all rather limp and indecisive figures, as Elliot will be later. At the same time, each represent poles of attraction and desire in the film: Leslie is the site of fantasy and impossible romance, literally found in books; Jerry presents the possibility of the good but unattainable marriage; Elliot the sign of possible marriage, though perhaps not good enough, since this path leads to a life of predictable conformity. In Nietzsche’s terms, these are passive men capable only of marshaling reactive forces; they are incapable of imagining, encouraging, or undergoing further change. Apart from Jaquith, to whom I will return later, it is mostly women in the film who support and encourage care and transformation. That Jerry is capable of being a true friend to Charlotte shows that there is something like an active femininity in him, signified perhaps by his European accent and manners. Alternatively, the fact that Charlotte’s mother has replaced her father in the form of a lonely, repressive, and domineering tyrant shows that a woman can exercise an active masculine power, though in this case through a kind of destructive and passive Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 622 aggressivity that reduces her to bedridden stillness. In this film, the criteria defining masculinity and femininity, activity and passivity, or what defines a home, family, marriage, who is a child and who is a parent, are all distorted and out of joint. What ironic self-reliance will mean in Charlotte’s case is that new perfectionist terms of identity must be created, wherein a new creation of the woman becomes the source of a revised vision of family, of community. We will come back to this. Perfectionism asks for the capacity to change, and accordingly projects an image or concept of time. Here again the melodramas invert or negate the structure of the comedies. In contrast to the comedies, with their openness to inventiveness and a revised future, n the melodramas time is frozen in the past, resistant to change or exchange, and this stultifying past is compulsively active in the present. The comedies have short and rather unified and linear time spans--from less than twenty-four hours to a few days or weeks--whereas the arc of action in the melodramas is more extended (sometimes including a span of many years) and elliptical. Often the past deforms the present as an irrepressible force of return that takes the form of temporal reversals and recursions. The best-known examples are no doubt given in the complex narrative time of Letter from an Unknown Woman. In the remarriage comedies, repetition or recurrence signify invention, improvisation, and openness to change. Melodramatic time in a film like Letter is selfenclosing and loops back on itself in death-dealing repetitiveness. Finally, the melodramas tend to conclude where they begin, opening and closing in the same house, as if to insist upon the difficulty of undergoing change, but also more positively, as a sign of possibility for transforming the domestic. If the ending is to avoid a complete acquiescence to irony, a form of difference in repetition must transcend or overcome the eternal return of past unhappiness in anticipation of an attainable better, future life. In fact, Now, Voyager is the only member of the genre that clearly depicts an attainable revised future, though in Stella Dallas there is also the suggestion of a step into a new existence, but one not yet visionable or imaginable by the film. In a similar way, the past is not a place of shared happiness, but rather a site of blockage, failure, and unredeemed desire, which takes the form of isolation and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 623 voicelessness. (Letter from an Unknown Woman varies and amplifies this idea: the woman’s voice guides that narrative as the recovery of a lost memory. But this voice is not only the resurgence of a lost past, it also comes from a woman lost to life and thus signifies the unavoidability of death for Stefan, as well as his acceptance of this fate.) In the comedies, perfectionism is deployed in playful and confrontational conversation where the romantic pairs try to discover whether they can indeed define new terms of existence together based on mutuality. In the melodramas, the place of conversation is transformed and negated. It is no longer an improvisational and intimate battle of wits, but rather an isolating struggle with irony and misunderstanding: “not a clearing of communication,” Cavell writes in Cities of Words, “but a darkening of it” (109). Communication and conversation are everywhere undercut by irony, and at various levels--dialogue, image composition, and camera movement--making of irony a pervasive expressive mode in these films. The problems of time and transformation, of repetition and difference, raise again the question of sexual difference. A taint of villainy in the men is part of the shared grammar of the comedies and melodramas, especially in working out of themes of conversation and education. In Contesting Tears, Cavell confronts directly the moral cloud that hangs over the woman’s demand for an education--whether in Ibsen or more specifically, remarriage comedies--with respect to the difficulty of their relations with men. From what place or desire does the woman’s need of creation, re-creation, or new creation come from? “Does creation from, even by, the man somehow entail creation for the man, say for his use and pleasure and pride?,” Cavell asks. “If not, how does the woman attain independence; how does she complete, as it were, her creation?” (Contesting Tears 116). If the comedies end in new creation or re-creation, this is not only a transformation of identity but also an expression of belief in the possibility of creating and inhabiting a renewed form of life in which terms of difference may (must) be reconfigured or remapped. Comic endings believe in the possibility of changing one’s self, and of helping others to change, in situations where one does not so much risk autonomy or independence as bet on the possibility of achieving a new condition or grammar for autonomy. (And the aim of such transformations is neither the recovery of a Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 624 lost essence nor the discovery of a new one. Autonomy means here the acquisition of new agency and new terms of existence.) That happiness may be pursued in a transformed world is the heterocosmic image of remarriage comedy. The ironic image of the melodramas, however, expresses the risks of autonomy as a return to and revaluation of self-reliance because the promise of happiness may not be enough--its compromises may not be worth the price of pain of transformation. That a taint of villainy mars the image of masculinity in remarriage comedy thus acknowledges the presence of a field or background of pain marring relations between the sexes. As Cavell explains, in the comedies it is as if “maleness, or rather masculinity, has been defined, or deformed in our culture. The implication is that the woman’s creation will be completed, furthered, only with the man’s. The derived melodrama will then be expected to ask where the woman gets the power to demand the man’s transformation, which is to say, where she gets the power to transcend his standing. The melodrama signaled in the tainted male of the comedies suggests that there is a structure of unhappiness that the happiness of the comedies is lucky to escape, even temporarily, even (and always partially by happenstance) partially” (Contesting Tears 116-117). In the melodramas of the unknown women, the affirmative mode of the comedies is inversed as if to acknowledge and to make perspicuous the undercurrent of violence to which the women are often submitted. The potential for suffering, and of suffering alienation, is not hidden by these films whose structure of irony resolutely focuses on a feminine subject blocked and damaged by life under patriarchy. Of the four films, Gaslight is the most extreme example of what might be understood as a near absolute negation of the remarriage genre in that marriage is depicted as a mode of existence that the man constructs as the very scene of skepticism and madness, and where the woman is isolated, deprived of a voice, and made to see herself as an object of madness and horror. Gaslight’s scene of madness is almost a pure expression of the moral cynicism to which perfectionism must respond. As if to amplify the ironic tone of these dramas, the male characters are often depicted either as extreme manifestations of the skeptical personality, or even when portrayed sympathetically, as fixed in their identity and incapable of recognizing the capacity for change or the possibility of constructing new terms of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 625 existence with the women. It may well be that the perfectionist need for transformation is literally incomprehensible to the man in these dramas, and that unlike the remarriage comedies, at some point mutual understanding is no longer possible between the woman and the man. In other words, there is no possibility of a mutual education, and thus the validity and legitimacy of marriage is undermined. In the ironic mode, Cavell suggests that the first perfectionist step occurs in recognition that “the initial onset of self-knowledge is the reality for the first time of being known, being acknowledged in her difference, as if until then her existence had been denied--suffered the polite skepticism of everyday life” (“Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow” 329). One of the deep ironies of these films is the recognition that moral cynicism (related to what Cavell called earlier moral evil) is a motivator of perfectionist desire for change. Another name for this moral darkness or obscurity is what Emerson called conformity--the perpetual sense of having assumed a false position in society without anyone having exactly placed you there, or without you yourself realizing that you have acquiesced to this compromised position. The acknowledgment of moral cynicism may thus be a moment preparatory to perfectionist self-examination. “A mark of this stage,” Cavell writes in Cities of Words, “is a sense of obscurity, to yourself as well as to others, one expression of which is a sense of compromise, of being asked to settle too soon for the world as it is, a perplexity in relating yourself to what you find unacceptable in your world, without knowing what you can be held responsible for” (23). The irony of this situation expresses itself in a recognition of voicelessness, of lacking language or concept with which to make one’s self intelligible to one’s self or to others, as if the power to imagine the possibility of becoming other requires the invention of a new language. This felt lack of language or concept distinguishes perfectionism from both teleological and deontological conceptions of moral reasoning. Based on a concept of the good, teleological theories evaluate the consequences or ends for which actions are taken. As expressed in the utilitarianism of Hume, Bentham, or Mill, they define a rational society as one that attempts pragmatically to maximize the amount of good present and available in a given society for those governed by it. Deontological theories are based on concepts of right and the correctness of motives rather than consequences. Exemplified Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 626 by Kant’s categorical imperative, priority is given here to concepts of justice and duty that outweigh individual desires, and society is defined by fundamental principles of justice that neither governments nor individuals may infringe. Both approaches assume a subject capable of recognizing and accepting a concept of the good, or of expressing and conforming to a categorical imperative. However, the perfectionist desire for change is motivated by the intuition that the present world and existing terms of language fail me, that I am not one with myself, and that my conformity to their terms of existence is both false and damaging. Both I and the world need to change, and new criteria must be found to attune my relationship to the world and to others. Accordingly, perfectionism is not an alternative to utilitarianism and Kantianism but rather a response to the intuition of being left out of their sway, and of finding no solace in their concepts. It is a response to a secret melancholy, as Emerson says, where either you or the world is wrong. As exemplified in Now, Voyager, the melodramas often depict the woman in two states of her life, set years apart--a state of innocence and a state of experience. One could also say that this temporal distance marks a transition from conformity to selfreliance, or from a sense of obscurity to herself (as well as to others) to the voicing of the possibility of a revised world because a new perspective has been found from which to contest the limitations of this world. Finding a voice also signifies a recovery from isolation, from enforced terms of skepticism, where the woman discovers her power to contest and transcend the man’s moral standing, and to demand his transformation in a revised world, if he is capable. (The closing of Now, Voyager, to which I will return, is exemplary of this situation.) To be placed in position to judge the world is to decide whether or how we accept or resist conformity in or with that world. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson calls this practice the aversion of conformity. To live in conformity to a given state, whether existential or governmental, is to accept its usurpation of your voice, to let it speak you and thus render you voiceless. Cavell considers this a form of madness; it is at least a relinquishing of one’s own claim to reason. The ethical response to this situation is not to radically reject this world or to turn your back to it. How does one escape a world? With a characteristic Emersonian twist of meaning, acting in aversion to society does not only mean a turning away from conformity but also directly confronting it. Cavell calls Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 627 this a process of deconformity, where one’s aversion to conformity also means standing next to it, of being beside it as if being beside oneself or some former state of self. Cavell repeats here Thoreau’s definition of thinking as being beside oneself in a sane sense, as if we were continually vacillating between madness and sanity. Thinking in conformity, then, would be being beside oneself in despair of the possibility of change or of turning in a new direction, as if facing a forever frozen mirror image of one’s identity. In Now, Voyager, Charlotte Vale dramatically (I would say aversively) confronts such images more than once. One of the lessons of Now, Voyager is that the temporal path of perfectionism is complex. At their first lunch together on shore, Jerry expresses fascination (and perhaps expresses our fascination) with Charlotte’s unknownness. He says that he wishes he understood her. After leaving the table, and Charlotte alone, Charlotte reflects that “He wishes he understood me.” There is a cut to an over-theshoulder shot that tracks in to Charlotte’s image doubled in a nearby window. The angle reverses again to show Charlotte’s look at herself, and then changing to a new angle, shows more clearly what the spectator sees of Charlotte as she repeats with a self-ironizing emphasis: “He wishes.” What does he wish? Or what does Jerry desire of Charlotte’s fragile identity, and what in turn does she desire in response to his wish? In this simple series of shots, Charlotte recognizes Jerry’s attraction to her unknownness, which the film also marks as a reflexive moment of isolation where she acknowledges her sense of obscurity to herself. And in this moment, the film suggests that Charlotte also intuits new terms for her own desire. Perhaps this is a desire for further transformation, for taking a next step in the transition from Charlotte to Renée and Camille. But Jerry’s desire for her, fueled by the mystery of her identity, is not congruent with her own desire. The otherness she now discovers within herself is, in my interpretation, the discovery of a new power to become other. And if she discovers new desire in herself, it is not a desire to conform further to Jerry’s fantasy of her. She will, to some extent, want to become known to him, at least as far as he is capable of knowing her. In this series of images she is confronting a sense of obscurity to herself. At the same time, she is discovering a new person, a projection of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 628 one future version of herself, as if confronting her unknownness to herself with a new concept of identity. He wishes, but so does she (as if her wish was folded into and out of his). The perfectionist structure within remarriage comedies and melodramas of the unknown woman depict a journey to a new form of life as a turning from conformity and the achievement of new possibilities of choice and self-reliance. Cavell calls this “a journey, or path, or step, from haunting the world to existing in it; which may be expressed as the asserting of one's cogito ergo sum, one's own ‘I think, therefore I am,’ call it the power to think for oneself, to judge the world, to acquire--as Nora puts it at the end of A Doll's House--one's own experience of the world” (Contesting Tears 220). Charlotte takes a new step towards an Emersonian discovery of self-reliance in seeing how the criteria marking her difference from others opens onto a new discovery of difference within her self. In this present time of transformation, Charlotte’s present self confronts a reflection of a future self, already emergent in the present as if her present past began on her ocean voyage rather than in a life of isolation in the Vale mansion. Very soon the film presents other means of temporal comparison. First there is Jerry’s presentation of his family photograph (an image wherein he is significantly absent or absented), which is the image of past unhappy love that he carries with him on the present voyage. A brief time later, Charlotte will reciprocate, offering a photograph of the imposing Vale clan as evidence of why she does not have a high opinion of herself. The significance of this repetition lies in the fact that while Jerry is absent, unlocated in his scene of domesticity, Charlotte is visible yet unrecognized or unknown in hers. “Who’s the fat lady with the heavy brows and all the hair?” Jerry asks. At first Charlotte hesitates. She is embarrassed that Jerry has introduced her to his friends as “Camille Beauchamp.” (Significantly, as named by Jerry she is no longer Renée and not yet the newly transformed Charlotte.) As always in the ironic mode, Jerry is half-wrong, yet half-right about many things. He mistakes Charlotte’s mother for her grandmother, but judges the mother to have a strong character. Charlotte’s response to his question is to offer a cascade of ironic predicates to identify this image: a spinster aunt, then, I am the fat lady, and finally, “I’m Aunt Charlotte and I’ve been ill.” Charlotte both is and is not these nominations; or Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 629 rather, they are the background of past pain against which new identity is forming, or emerging from a structure of irony. There is another photograph, however, that serves as the background of this scene of confession. Behind Charlotte and Jerry is an obvious back projection of a beautiful seascape at night, sparkling with reflected moonlight. This film is marked by its rapid rotation between registers of romance and melodramatic irony. What interests me more are the temporal dislocations presented by this mise-en-scène, which is at once ironic and romantic. Charlotte is unfixed along a line of becoming, where she must come to terms with a past that is already behind her--her present past, the way she lives now, is the present of the ocean voyage with Jerry. Significantly, it is obviously finite; it will come to a scheduled end, no matter how many times delayed. At the same time, this rather clichéd image of the moonlit sea is the background for this time of transformation. Is it ironic? No doubt it is utopic. It suggests the possibility of an awakening of desire that may urge Charlotte along her perfectionist path, where the series Charlotte-Renée BeauchampCamille enacts displacements in the series spinster-aunt-fat lady with hair-Charlotte who has been ill. But like all phases of perfectionist becoming, it is only one world, one finite world, and it too must be overcome, for all its attractions. Romance suggests the possibility of marriage, yet we already know that marriage is impossible for Charlotte and Jerry. Charlotte must look another way. What is Charlotte doing when she faces her image in the window and also turns from it, facing us in an image of self-absorption? She is thoughtful, reflective. Is it too much to say that she is here confronting her self in aversion to (past) conformity as one her first steps to self-reliance? In his lecture on Emerson’s “Aversive Thinking” in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Cavell reconsiders the place of thought in relation to moral perfectionism and its desire for change. In the framework of my elegy for theory, this may be another way of reasserting the primacy of ethics in philosophy. Cavell presents Emerson’s sense of thinking as a process characterized by acts of transfiguration and conversion. One might say that there is no thinking without becoming as if thinking yourself into a new form of life. Aversive thinking requires that difference be enacted as constitutive of a twofold becoming. As I have already written, it requires facing Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 630 conformity, facing up to it or perhaps facing it down, in order to turn away from or to look another way, indeed to look for another way. (Need I say that this is a variation on Deleuze’s ethical demand to choose to choose?) Conformity is the name of Emerson’s distaste for moralism, or moral cynicism, which is often given expression as a “disgust with or disdain for the present state of things so complete as to require not merely a reform, but a call for a transformation of things, and before all a transformation of the self . . . . We must become averse to this conformity,” Cavell says, “which means convert from it, which means transform our conformity, as if we are to be born (again). How does our self-consciousness--which now expresses itself as shame, or let us say embarrassment-make us something other than human?”237 Aversion arises in crises of identity, but its power lies in the free exercise of moral choice. Moral cynicism refuses the human capacity for change and thus blocks or debars us from choosing a moral life, or from taking active responsibility for our forms of life instead of acting automatically or out of habit. Accordingly, embarrassment takes the form of ironic recognition that we have or had already chosen a life of conformity, and thus renounced the possibility of exercising moral freedom. “That debarment or embarrassment is for Emerson, as for Kant,” Cavell emphasizes, “a state other than the human, since it lacks the humanly defining fact of freedom” (48). In Emersonian terms, I want to say that here Charlotte is discovering her “genius,” that is, discovering within her self (as if another self) the capacity for selfexamination and self-criticism, of being freed to take the next step in self-overcoming toward her as yet unattained attainable self. Call this a philosophy of the human based on the capacity to claim the freedom to exercise moral thought and moral choice. In Now, Voyager, this is another version of what photography calls thinking. I have said that Charlotte is thoughtful. Or it might be better to ask: what sort of thoughtfulness opens these images photogenetically to artful conversation? The brief series where Charlotte confronts her doubled image in the window comprises a rotation of perspective, Charlotte seeing and being seeing from various angles as if facing and turning 237 Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (La Salle: Open Court, 1990) 46-47. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 631 from different facets of identity where she is newly theatricalized. The concluding image is one that we, viewers, have of her in her isolation and thoughtfulness. Here Bette Davis showcases a power for conveying what Cavell calls in The World Viewed the opacity of self-consciousness. To present self-consciousness in the condition of opacity is to claim or to express existence as a sign or surface presented outwardly to others--it is a way of existing for others, and also of presenting acknowledgment and acceptance of the limitedness of others’ views of oneself. What is Jerry’s wish, and what is hers? With her beauty and her irony, what Davis conveys artfully throughout the film is that the claim of existence--the new assertion of existence or the assertion of new terms of existence-remains somehow uncertain or intangible no matter how powerful its outward manifestations. Cavell calls this the quality of unknownness. In The World Viewed, Cavell links the quality of unknownness to a photogenic capacity of film whose discovery marks the acknowledgment of another power of the medium of film. There are subjects for film, indeed subjects in film, that demand physiognomies that are not simply unknown, “but whose point, whose essence, is that they are unknown. Not just any unknown face will do; it must be one which, when screened, conveys unknownness; and this first of all means that it conveys privacy--an individual soul’s aliveness or deadness to itself. A natural reason for a director’s requirement of this quality is that his film is itself about unknownness, about the fact and causes of separateness or isolation or integrity or outlawry” (The World Viewed 181). That a soul is thus placed--isolated, imaged, and framed--might yield new knowledge of another link between the time of moral perfectionism and the time of becoming on film. Cavell calls this the discovery at any moment of “the endless contingency of the individual human’s placement in the world, as though nothing could be more unanticipated than one’s existence itself, always in placement” (181). The endless contingency of individual human placement in the world is a fair characterization of the thought of moral perfectionism. The contingency of identity also reprises another element of grammar shared between remarriage comedy and melodramas of unknownness. As if anticipating his later book, Cavell observes in Pursuits of Happiness that remarriage comedies often engage in philosophical conversations about Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 632 comedy and romance, as if a goal of these films were to consider reflexively their own grammar and conditions of possibility. To examine their own conditions of possibility while testing the concept of marriage also raises a deeper metaphysical problem, which Cavell defines as “the problem and the concept of identity--either in the form of what becomes of an individual, or of what has become of two individuals. On film this metaphysical issue is more explicitly conducted through the concept of difference--either the difference between men and women, or between innocence and experience, or between one person and another, or between one circumstance and another--all emblematized by the difference, hence the sameness, between a marriage and a remarriage” (55). I have discussed at length how the question of difference is articulated in the shared grammar of gender asymmetry in the two genres. Now another possible difference emerges in the possibility and impossibility of marriage. Irony supplants comedy here because the unknown women of the melodramas must judge whether the concept of marriage is worth the price of compromise (with the world of men, but also with the world), or whether it must be revised or rejected. Indeed she must decide whether fully to renounce her privacy, her unknownness, or rather to embrace irony as a form of identity. Is the desire for romance, for marriage, worth the price of compromise, or must a different form of life be imagined and aspired to, no matter its cost? These women derive their power to judge the world from their aversion to conformity. There is a deeply painful and unromantic side to unknownness. One may be unknown because one has been reduced to a state of isolation and voicelessness, unrecognized and unacknowledged by others, as if dispossessed of the capacity of speech and held in a state of pre-existence apart from the internal relations that bind each human to others. “Then what is wanting,” Cavell responds, “--if marriage is to be reconceived, or let’s say human attraction--is for the other to see our separate existence, to acknowledge its separateness, a reasonable condition for a ceremony of union. Then the opening knowledge of the human is conceived as the experience of being unknown. To reach that absence is not the work of a moment” (Contesting Tears 22). We are closer now to understanding the multiple valences of Charlotte’s wish. (Does this make her any less unknown?) In a first act of self-reliance, she has understood Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 633 that she is unknown, especially to her self, and she has imagined the possibility of new existence apart from that self. Here self-reliance takes the form of self-education, say an education in the philosophical art of self-fashioning. This possibility may have occurred because she is finally learning to see herself as Jerry sees her. His interest in her or attraction to her is inspired by her unknownness, wherein he perhaps recognizes his own unrealized capacity for becoming. To reach this knowledge is indeed not the work of a moment. No happy conclusion is assured, though this film may be able to reimagine concepts of identity and marriage just enough to reach a new compromise in its vision of happiness. At the same time, Bette Davis’ physical power for expressing privacy, of active knowledge of her unknowability, is a democratic claim of personal freedom in this film. Through the exercise of this power she becomes more than the various predicates that would define and limit her identity: Vale, spinster, fat lady, Aunt Charlotte who has been ill. Like her sisters of privacy and unknownness, Garbo or Dietrich, Davis is able to convey in this and other films not only images of love, fate, or irony, but also, and more importantly, of chance and choice in a declaration of singularity and freedom. The opacity of self-consciousness and the quality of unknownness are thus linked to the deeper philosophical problem of the films, which is to examine the irony of human existence as such. Charlotte’s facing of her own transformed image, and the voicing of her wish to comprehend her own unknownness as passing through and emerging from an other (“He wishes”), are powerful aesthetic expressions of this irony. Perhaps it can be said that she claims Jerry’s wish as her own, acknowledging and voicing its irony as the expression of a newly active feminine difference. Human existence is ironic because the capability of undergoing change, for the self to think existence as a power of change, means acknowledging that the self is not one. In this context, the opacity of selfconsciousness recognizes the division of the self as still whatever the world sees, of how the world sees or has seen one’s self, and at the same time knows the self to not be or to never have been identical to that outward image. To be capable of undergoing change or not, means being capable of an internal division where identity can be beside itself, to separate from and leave behind a prior yet still unforgotten self. In her capacity for thoughtfulness, for reflexivity and metamorphosis, Charlotte shows that she is and is not Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 634 what she is or has become; in his incapacity for self-education and change, Jerry is not what he is not nor can ever become. The irony of perfectionist transformation is that the co-presence of past identity with present becoming means that, simultaneously, “Every single description of the self that is true is false, is in a word, or a name, ironic” (Contesting Tears 134-135). And, ironically, change would not be possible if this were not the case. Identity must yield to difference. Cavell recognizes in Emersonian perfectionism the self’s desire and capacity for change, which comes equally from recognizing that the self can neither be whole nor at rest--Thoreau calls this the self’s answerability to itself, its neighboring of itself. One of the deepest and most painful ethical dilemmas one can experience, then, is that we have become incapable of undergoing change. There is a diagnostic side to Emerson, of which Nietzsche was well aware, that begins in my awareness of the self as lost, frozen, or fixated, and thus in need of regeneration or rebirth. This is a first philosophical step toward recovering from skepticism (what Wittgenstein would call a Gedankenweg), but a step without conclusion or clear direction. It is a step taken not once but rather on an open path in a continuing process of becoming from one stage or state of the self to another. Each state is itself an achievement of new terms of existence; yet if change is to occur each must eventually give way to new experience. The perfectionist practice of refinding the truth of oneself, or the humanity in oneself, is a journey whose first step is discovering that one is lost to the world, as if buried in a fantasy of skepticism. And rather than sinking into despair, perfectionist desire refuses this society to seek another more humane or cultured state of society and the self. If the truth these women find within themselves is the irony of human existence, then what they have discovered is a capacity of the human, for becoming human, as if living in conformity means that all of us only haunt existence or persist in a state of pre-existence. The isolation of unknownness is painful, just as the doubts of skepticism and the fantasy of finally putting doubt to rest are painful. Another dimension of this irony, then, would be expressed in the incapacity to enact one’s aversion to conformity, and thus to be incapable of overcoming one’s self in the imagination of new terms for existence. Call this irony as blindness to difference. (In The Claim of Reason Cavell terms this condition “soul-blindness”.) This is one aspect of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 635 moral cynicism and a negation of human freedom, which in accepting isolation also negates the possibility of community. To enact aversion to conformity is to interrupt repetition with difference, to take a step out of that fateful circle and to enlarge the diameter of experience. This perfectionist step is exemplified in Cavell’s original reading of the conclusion to Stella Dallas. In one reading of this film, the ambition of the proletarian protagonist to overcome herself or to aspire to a better class (through, as it turns out, unhappy marriage) is continually thwarted, marking irony as embarrassment. Stella’s absence from her daughter Laurel’s wedding to a young and wealthy husband, her withdrawal from that social space to view it at a distance, from the outside, framed and screened by a brilliantly lit living room window, is here interpreted as sacrifice and a renunciation of ambition. It is worth noting that a condition of this marriage has been Stella’s granting of divorce to Stephen Dallas, Laurel’s father, so that he may marry the more prominent and refined, Helen, his now-widowed original fiancée. The wedding is taking place in Helen and Stephen’s home, the site of their newly won upper-class domesticity, and significantly, it is Helen who stages the scene, the wedding movie as it were, by insisting that the curtains remain open. Helen stages an image of happiness for Stella, as if in a movie, but what is the nature of this happiness? In Cavell’s reading Stella learns that the world her daughter desires--of desire bound by law and church, of exclusiveness and belonging; in short, conformity--is not to her taste. This world is given to Stella as an image--indeed a screened image, an image from which she is screened--yet in ecstasy she turns away from it. Turns away from what, or in favor of what direction of new transport? “May we imagine,” Cavell asks, “that we have here some Emersonian/Thoreauvian image of what Nietzsche will call the pain of individuation, of the passion Thoreau builds Walden to find, expressed as his scandalous pun on mo(u)rning, the transfiguration of mourning as grief into morning as dawning and ecstasy?” (Contesting Tears 212). This is a happy enough image of aspiring to another world, unseen yet perhaps just adjacent to the frame of this image of existence, where happiness may be pursued alone and outside of marriage. The world from which she is debarred is not her home. She must find another. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 636 In this Stella is sister to Nora in A Doll’s House in the sense that any future one might imagine for her is less important than the fact that she has a future, yet to be imagined and inhabited. In turning toward this world, facing it, she turns away from a mode of existence that she has discovered is not to her taste. At the same time, in Cavell’s reading, In fancying Stella walking away as one continuation of Nora walking out, there is the additional moment to consider of her walking toward us. Again a house is turned away from, one that for a woman contains (self-)destructive illusion, or a way of illusory perception she had taken as reality, a way allegorized as a perception of the film screen. The mother's gaze she has received from such a screen replaces that of the screen she had identified with the world of the man she married. The ratifying of her insistence on her own taste, that is, of her taking on the thinking of her own existence, the announcing of her cogito ergo sum, happened without-- as in Descartes's presenting of it, it happens without--yet knowing who she is who is proving her existence. (Contesting Tears 219) At the end of Stella Dallas, we discover the variable sense of what tears contest. Are they tears of protest and of the joy of discovery and pain left behind, and do they then contest what tears are usually taken to mean in melodrama? The promise of Stella’s transport, away from the screen and past the edge of her current existence, is an artful expression of the fact that repetition can also take the form, as Cavell suggests, of the promise of return as unpredictable reincarnation. Rereading Linda Williams’ interpretation of the film in her essay “Something Else Besides a Mother,” Cavell writes that in these melodramas, “the woman's problem is not one of not belonging but one of belonging, only on the wrong terms; unlike the exile, the woman is not between two different cultures but is at odds with the one in which she was born and is roughly in the process of transfiguring into one that does not exist, one as it were still in confinement” (Contesting Tears 213). Perfectionism may also want to say that she is in the process of transfiguring this world into one that does not yet exist. Along these lines, Stephen Mulhall interprets Emersonian perfectionism as having a political dimension where the unknown women of melodrama confront and contest a society that Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 637 fails to acknowledge them and their autonomy: “. . . these women both instantiate a mode of self-reliance which amounts to a visible withdrawal from their society, a refusal of its conformity which functions as a rebuke to their fellow citizens in the name of an unknown but attainable state of each individual and consequently of society as a whole. And what these terms highlight is the political dimension of self-reliance, the implication that individuals who enact a proof of their own existence and so overcome skepticism can be thought of as engaging in a species of civil disobedience, an act that democratic society should not only permit but honour” (Mulhall 265). The self-disobedience of perfectionism is also an expression of civil disobedience in which the irony of identity is given another turn. Here and now in the present, we are all there is of the human or what can be expected from the human, and it is lacking; “we are not what we are meant to be,” Cavell writes in Cities of Words, “not what the human expects of itself” (210). The promise of return, indeed of the time of difference and eternal recurrence, and of unpredictable reincarnation, opens onto a practice of ethics that is as fundamental to Cavell’s philosophy as it is to Deleuze’s. To locate the expression of this ethical practice as a power immanent to cinematographic expression, in fact in a genre that requires the transfiguration and transvaluation of the woman’s image and the refinding of the active voicing of her existence in new terms, is thus a significant discovery. If indeed one can link the new creation of the woman to the creation of the human, then philosophy has been discovered or rediscovered in an unanticipated domain, one that makes philosophy immanent to an art of lasting public power. The new creation of the woman as a new creation of the human is therefore not only a transfiguration of her own terms of existence-it also suggests a grammar for the aspiration to transform human existence, or whatever part of existence might define the human. In this perfectionism recognizes Nietzsche’s call for an untimely philosophy, in contradiction to and in contest with the present, where “culture is the child of each individual’s self-knowledge and dissatisfaction with himself. Anyone who believes in culture is thereby saying: ‘I see above me something higher and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 638 more human than I am; let everyone help me to attain it, as I will help everyone who knows and suffers as I do’.”238 In the melodrama of the unknown woman, there is something that the woman may give to the man--a form of education, as if introducing him to a new culture of difference, if he is willing to listen or to look, and this lesson is conveyed precisely by her unknownness. Perhaps it can be called an education in the passion for time? Cavell reads this passion out of Greta Garbo’s capacity to look away from, beyond, or through the men who confront her, as if in an absence (a distance from him, from the present), hence as if to declare that this man, while the occasion of her passion, is surely not its cause. I find (thinking specifically of a widely reprinted photograph in which she has inflected her face from that of John Gilbert, her eyes slightly raised, seeing elsewhere) that I see her jouissance as remembering something, but, let me say, remembering it from the future, within a private theater, not dissociating herself from the present moment, but knowing it forever, in its transience, as finite, from her finitude, or separateness, as from the perspective of her death: as if she were herself transformed into a mnemonic symbol, a monument of memory. (This would make her the opposite of the femme fatale she is sometimes said--surely in defense against her knowledge--to be.) What the monument means to me is that a joyful passion for one's life contains the ability to mourn, the acceptance of transience, of the world as beyond one--say, one's other. (Contesting Tears 106-107) What I call the lesson of a passion for time draws upon the photogenetic powers of the moving image, where the automatic transcription and projection of the world hovers uncertainly between indicative and subjunctive tenses or moods, or a co-present belief of the past existence in time and of a world preserved, and the present projection of a world transformed. To say that a joyful passion for life is linked to the acceptance of transience, or the ability to mourn and thus transcend past time, means acknowledging becoming and change as forces integral to the possibilities of human identity. These ideas provide a new 238 “Schopenhauer as Educator” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 162. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 639 context for understanding the place of the feminine in both the comedies and the melodramas, which often figure a splitting or doubling of the projected presence of the women in the film, as if these characters held a greater share of knowledge or acknowledgement of a self-given capacity for transformation, whether playful or ironic. This particular feature is perhaps best exemplified by Barbara Stanwyck’s portrayal of Jean/Eve in The Lady Eve and Irene Dunne’s Lucy/Dixie Bell in The Awful Truth. “For this we require a new creation of woman” Cavell writes in Pursuits of Happiness,” call it a creation of the new woman; and what the problems of identification broached in these films seem to my mind to suggest is that this creation is a metaphysical enterprise, exacting a reconception of the world. How could it not? It is a new step in the creation of the human. The happiness in these comedies is honorable because they raise the right issues; they end in undermining and in madcap and in headaches because there is, as yet at least, no envisioned settlement for these issues” (65). Both genres share a grammar where the feminine conveys a new active concept of identity, which is marked by a structure of irony and aversion to conformity whose genealogy leads back to Nora in A Doll’s House. What the woman must undergo is a metamorphosis, a painful acquisition of new identity, one in which the past is neither negated nor forgotten, but rather exists alongside new terms of identity, as if they were always present within her, yet for a time unavailable or inaccessible. Another form of irony then is recognition of a divided or divisible identity, one of which is isolated, voiceless and unknown; in short, cocooned. In this structure, old lives are not forgotten but ever remain as a past to be reckoned with. Current standing is fragile and subject to decay or revision, and the newly achieved voice is ironic because it knows that at any moment it may be reduced again to silence. This voicing of the irony of existence is an image of Cavell’s career-long depiction of the human as expressed in a skeptically inspired condition that rotates wildly between, on one hand, the terror of absolute isolation and inexpressiveness, and on the other, anxieties of absolute and unconditioned exposure. Irony is the condition of the present, and recurrently possible conditionings of the future. In contrast to the comedies, only a compromised future is possible, if one is possible at all. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 640 Cavell also notes that in contrast to the comedies, the painful journey to transformation takes place in a world where the mother is present, and also in the presence of a child who spiritually if not biologically belongs to the protagonist. I think of the presence of the child as the projection of a so far unredeemed future. This is indeed the case in Now, Voyager. But this dramatic constellation has other meanings as well, as it seems to project new terms or conditions of identity. The woman is neither the mother, nor the child, nor biologically (call this the past’s terms of transition) mother to the child. And if she also refuses to become or to be wife to a man, the pre-given lines of domestic identity are transformed. Jaquith’s friendship no less than Jerry’s is surely essential to Charlotte’s perfectionist voyage of identity. Jaquith helps her discover her autonomy. In turn she must declare and protect this autonomy in relation to Jerry, and also preserve her new autonomy has a standing possibility for Jerry’s daughter to take her own perfectionist step toward a revised future. The ethical power or possibility that Charlotte must preserve is that of the power to choose, to select and affirm lines to future selves that are so far undetermined by present possibilities weighted with a deadening past. Accordingly, not only marriage but also motherhood is placed into question by this film. Or rather, considering the stultifying and oppressive powers of both Charlotte’s mother and Jerry’s wife, the terms of existence defined by motherhood must be transformed no less than those of marriage. For a child to be raised, to be given the power to become, she needs a new woman--that is, a newly created or recreated woman--who is something else besides a mother, to quote Stella Dallas. One might call this one woman’s revolt against a certain tyrannical image of women. This revolt is not only an act of selfdisobedience but also a transformation of the terms of consent by which parents are given the power to govern children, hence the power to control the future governed. Cavell notes that this image of consent is a fairly explicit reference to Locke’s Second Treatise of Government: Now the significance I draw from the way this grown daughter contests the authority over her--a woman who has everything money can buy and that position can secure--is that the legitimacy of the social order in which she is to participate is determined (to the extent to which it can be determined) by her consent, by Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 641 whether she, in her state of freedom, finds that she wants the balance of renunciation and security the present constitution of society affords her. The price is madly high: the life of desire (outside the price of marriage) is one of irony, of enforced transcendence, and of romance as creating "cads," a name Charlotte and Jerry each claim for themselves. It turns out in Locke's Second Treatise that the existence of consent, hence of the social order, may be no easier to be clear about and establish than, as in Descartes's Meditations, the existence of a finite other proved to be. In linking the position of a woman's voice (hence her individual existence) with the constitution of consent (hence the existence of the social order), the film offers a sort of explanation about why we remain studiedly unclear about both. That Charlotte consents in the moments we conclude with--and for her own reasons--is clear enough. That she would consent under altered conditions is unknowable. A good enough or just enough society--one that recognizes her say in it--will recognize this fact of, this threat in, or measure by, the woman's unknownness. (Contesting Tears 147-148) This argument leads, again, to asking how are we to interpret the sense of ending in these films? Cavell notes that the melodramas solicit our tears and our recognition of sacrifice. At the same time he asks: “But is it that the women in them are sacrificing themselves to the sad necessities of a world they are forced to accept? Or isn’t it rather that the women are claiming the right to judge a world as second-rate that enforces this sacrifice; to refuse, transcend, its proposal of second-rate sadness?” (Contesting Tears 127). The tears that mark the conclusion to Now, Voyager are not Charlotte’s acknowledgement that she can expect nothing more of life with Jerry but rather that she expects a different, better life. To the extent that he is incapable of educating himself to this life, perhaps the tears are for him. Cavell reads Charlotte’s words thus: "The fat lady with all the hair is eternally grateful. Yet having saved me from the exclusions of that fate, without denying that it was mine, allowing my metamorphosis, you cannot (I assume) be saved yourself. So these tears are from what the world calls an old maid, and they are tears for you, for your limitations, as well as for me and for mine. I assume, that is (correct me if I am wrong), Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 642 that you cannot aspire to anything more from me” (Contesting Tears 132). At the end of the Now, Voyager, Charlotte no longer occupies the same level of spiritual existence as Jerry. He has been transcended, left behind in conformity and conventionality. Can the man practice an active passion for time? In the comedies the perfectionist pair take a step together into the future; in the melodramas the man is psychically fixated and it is the woman alone who seeks change and permits herself metamorphosis. Gender asymmetry is figured differently here. With respect to remarriage comedy, the reversibility or malleability of the network of relations mapping activity and passivity onto masculinity and femininity is reformulated. In melodramas of the unknown woman the man is often incapable of undergoing or even recognizing change. (The character of Stefan in Letter to an Unknown Woman is the emblem of this figure of masculinity as stuck in time, blind and impervious to change.) Only the woman is capable of shedding the frozen past that has entrapped her in a cocoon of irony and privacy, and thus takes an active step into a revised future. Yet part of Now, Voyager’s revised vision of happiness is that men can develop an ear for the irony of identity, acknowledging and accepting its powers and passions. Before drawing completely to a close, the film reintroduces Dr. Jaquith to Charlotte’s home in the company of Jerry--it is in fact a home that is now hers--a move wherein the film draws a contrast between the couple Charlotte-Jaquith and Charlotte-Jerry. Jaquith is able to inhabit this revised site of domesticity in ways that Jerry cannot. As Cavell describes it: “What these two discover together, looking like a couple well along in marriage, is that she is unknown--that the various names and labels that have been applied to her (another pervasive theme of the film) are none of them who she is. That this is a desirable therapeutic result I would like to maintain from a philosophical point of view of what the self is, something which no set of predicates can in principle exhaust, indeed something to which, as Heidegger takes Being and Time to demonstrate, no predicate applies, in the way predicates apply to objects. This idea of the self--always and never my possession, always to be discovered--is fundamental to the idea of perfectionism. . . .” (Cities of Words 245). Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 643 Recall, then, the conclusion to Now, Voyager. Charlotte and Charlotte’s moral universe has never been more unknown to Jerry. And indeed, despite the love she still has for him, she embraces her own moral standing in their relationship by confronting him with the worst accusations possible--pretentiousness, piousness, conventionality--because in fact, he unknowingly wants to remove from her the gift of freedom and the power of choice by refusing to let her, as he sees it, sacrifice her life for Tina’s. Jerry finally accepts the limits of their relationship, and Charlotte’s freedom to continue building the life she has chosen, which includes caring for Tina and being something else besides a mother. The emblem of this acceptance is one of the most quoted lines in the history of American cinema. When Jerry asks Charlotte if she will be happy, she replies, “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.” The end of Now, Voyager is sometimes considered to be incoherent. Yet, this incoherence, which is rather a lack in understanding of what is perfectly clear, should be embraced as perfectly in tune with the moral logic of the film. The ending is only incoherent from the point of view of the man in his ethical failure to comprehend the necessity of change and the attraction of a future society. Here the failure of the man is a failure of selfdisobedience and becoming human, and a failure to understand that he has lost or relinquished all power, especially the power of change. In contrast to the comedies, the man has not learned a perfectionist passion for time. Nor can he enter a community based on the comedies’ respect for the daily reaffirmation of difference, of time as creation and ever present becoming in a revision of the domestic or the ordinary, where in Cavell’s terms, “the respect for difference demands responsiveness, specificity of response to the unforeseen, the perhaps uncategorized, say an improvisation of vision” (Contesting Tears 135). Another difference that demands respect is the woman’s capacity for metamorphosis, self-disobedience, and self-overcoming. Yet another is acceptance of the heterocosmic difference expressed in her vision of transformed society, indeed a society where terms of friendship and marriage are themselves projected differently. The presence of Jerry and Jaquith in the denouement of the film is equally important for the narrative and philosophical arc of Now, Voyager. Both emblematize the possibility of relation where marriage is contested as a standing possibility, but differently. Jerry Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 644 signifies marriage as it presently stands, and thus offers no vision of marriage as a transformed relation--one might think of this as a vision of marriage with romance, but without desire or further becoming. As Cavell puts its, Charlotte and Jerry might have a child together, but Charlotte and Jaquith have a life and a future together on terms of equality. In the penultimate images of the film, they form not just an implied couple but rather a whole community, and one founded on mutuality in education and care, and in the desire to construct new terms for life. They are building a community of care for others. There is a positive irony here: Charlotte has found happiness in marriage, but in so doing she has transformed the concept of marriage and produced new terms for existence within marriage. What does it mean, then, to relinquish the moon for the stars? Perhaps the moon is a sign of romance foregone, but having the stars is to possess the means for new navigation. The stars thus become guides for new departures, new arrivals, and new becomings. “So to begin with,” Cavell writes, “ we have the stars as Bette Davis is a star, hence we have images of independence to aspire to, individuality to the point, if necessary, of undeciphered idiosyncrasy. Further, we have stars as Emerson and Thoreau had them, as signs of a romance with the universe, a mutual confidence with it, taking one’s productive habitation on earth; signs of possibility, a world to think” (Contesting Tears 137-138). Signs of possibility and a world to think are apt characterizations, as good as any, for whatever happiness philosophy can bring to human existence. 46. An elegy for theory Éloge. n. m. (1580: lat. elogium, pris au sens gr. eulogia).  1. Discours pour célébrer qqn. ou qqch. Éloge funèbre, académique. Éloge d’un saint. --Le Petit Robert Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 645 [P]hilosophy, as I understand it, is indeed outrageous, inherently so. It seeks to disquiet the foundations of our lives and to offer us in recompense nothing better than itself--and this on the basis of no expert knowledge, of nothing closed to the ordinary human being, once, that is to say, that being lets himself or herself be informed by the process and ambition of philosophy. --Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness I would have preferred to title this book Éloge de la théorie, for in composing an elegy for theory I have kept in mind the subtle variations present in French. Combining the English sense of both eulogy and elegy, and something more besides, an éloge can be both praise song and funereal chant, panegyric and chanson d’adieu. (In addition, it conveys the second meaning of a legal judgment expressed in someone’s favor.) If you feel I have been indecisive or unnecessarily subtle in my assessments of the prospects and future of theory, this is perhaps because it is necessary to explore critically the full range of emotions it inspires. Certainly I think the enterprise of theory is still a worthy one. Yet why in contemporary critical discourse are there so few left to praise and none to love it? This question is still unanswered. Your work is long, and yet having reached the end of this journey, I feel we are left with no clear definition of theory, or even Theory, and no sense of whether we should embrace or contest it. If one accepts my argument about discontinuity and retrojection in genealogies of theories, then the idea of theory as a potentially unified or unifiable concept is chimerical. The variable senses of theory can only be located pragmatically, as contingent and historically positioned practices. Indeed our idea that Theory could represent a genre of critical discourse for the humanities, falling somewhere in between criticism and philosophy, is fairly new, arising only in the 1960s. The goal of this book could never have been to produce a stable conceptual definition and defense or criticism of theory or Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 646 Theory. The best one can do in the framework I have offered is to delineate and examine the variety of language games in which concepts of theory have been deployed. And in grasping their overlaps, uneven edges, tectonic shifts, and contested borders, to consider theory as an open set. When examined genealogically, “theory” can only be presented as what Wittgenstein calls an intermediate case. There is a virtual life of theory no less powerful or elusive than that of film. We will never settle on a satisfactory definition of theory, even though one of the attractions of theory may be to demand just this satisfaction from us. We still hold a picture of theory in our minds as an orderly image well composed and contained in a beautiful frame. It is rather a wild mountainside, densely forested and overgrown with prickly vegetation. So let us produce a natural history of theory, no matter how disorderly, clearing back the brambles to discover the eccentric paths--call them rhizomes--twisting over and through the concept. Or even a geology of theory where one finds in exposed crevices and cracks a tangle of superimposed layers of from different ages, discolored and bleeding one into the other while still preserving something of their distinctiveness. There is still a picture, or series of pictures here, though it will take genealogy’s tactful eye and sensitive hand to draw it out. And in making our way along this mountainside, in good weather or bad, we may find ourselves emerging out of theory onto the landscape of philosophy. Nevertheless, just as Wittgenstein approaches and critiques the notion of absolute value by assembling and testing the variety of language games in which concepts of ethics are deployed, can we not settle on some idea of theory, and thus achieve some consensus regarding its senses and its range of activities? We turn to or from theory with ease, though often without critical acknowledgement and interrogation of its multiple provenances and lines of descent. I have tried to make a full account of theory’s long and complex genealogy, to feel completely its weight and density, and to plunge unafraid into its tangle of meanings and practices. One of my principle motivations for undertaking such a long and arduous journey was to demonstrate Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 647 how across the history of philosophy theory returns and continually remakes itself as a rival to philosophy. From the standpoints of ethics and epistemology there are many disputed borders between theory and philosophy, and the territories they contest are themselves continually shifting and evolving. Yet, perhaps one frontier, no matter how elusive, could be drawn in this way. Theory is often driven by a desire for certain or secure knowledge, no matter how quixotic the quest. In its latest space or location of contestation, the academic practice of Theory is a curious mix of structuralist and post-structuralist arguments. While post-structuralism sought to counter the positivist and scientific pretentions of structuralism, nonetheless a certain specter of truth refused to be exorcised. In the age of Theory this will to truth was sustained in an identitarian epistemology that persisted in locating truth, the truth of the subject, and the subject’s access to truth, in the essence granting experience of an asymmetrical relation to power. At the same time, theory and philosophy often meet in interesting ways in post-structuralism, especially in a line that runs through Kristeva, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze. Kristeva and Barthes especially approach theory as a turning of the subject upon herself, or in a concept’s turn upon itself, in the form of a critical division and asymmetry within the subject that projects future relations to knowledge and to self. The desire for philosophy, however, is expressed only in what might be characterized as persistent existential crisis. “What is philosophy?” is the intractable and insistent question to which every philosophy worth its salt returns. In Contesting Tears, Cavell observes that this might be the only question to which philosophy is really bound. And regardless of its historically contingent forms, to cease caring about the practice and existence of philosophy is to abandon it recklessly to logic, science, politics, or religion. Here it would seem that an open or incomplete notion of the practice(s) of philosophy is now turning around your vision of theory as an open set. Our senses of theory cannot be resolved into a continuous picture. Theory’s genealogical lines are contested, discontinuous, variable, and retrojecting; once examined Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 648 genealogically, they begin to unravel like so many multicolored and differently textured threads falling from a tangled skein. Alternatively, in spite of the variability of its forms, contexts, and methods, the practice of philosophy displays relative continuity. (This is one of the most compelling lessons of Pierre Hadot’s work, among others.) This is the final irony or paradox of this book, and the reason why a life in philosophy requires an elegy for theory. Perhaps the moment has finally arrived to state clearly that despite their jagged and irregular borders, and all of the seams or edges that both link and separate them like the ocean meeting the land, both reaching over and withdrawing from it, philosophy is not theory. Philosophy may overlap with and link to many problems of theory, yet for me it remains distinct from theory as a practice. One way to characterize theory might be as an activity wherein experience is converted into thought, and so made expressible and communicable to others. Along these lines one might also say that theory is outward directed while philosophy is inward directed. Theory’s primary activity is explanation. Theories designate or refer to an object, which they hope to completely describe and whose effects they wish to account for or explain. In its generality, this definition counts as much for the criticism of art as it does for investigations of the natural world. Alternatively, in turning to art and other forms of human inventiveness, philosophy expresses knowledge of our selves and our relations with others. Art provokes in philosophy self-referring inquiries and evaluations of our ways of being and styles of existence. Here interpretation and evaluation are always turning one over the other as mutually amplifying activities. This is why I refer to philosophy as artful conversation. The style of philosophical expression is ontological and moral or ethical, more than it is epistemological. And in turn, philosophy is a practice of styling the self and of projecting a world, no matter how unattainable, where that self might find new expression. You still leave many questions unanswered, and you have also strayed very far from standing conceptions of film and media study. Does philosophy belong in the critical and Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 649 historical study of film, not to mention literature or art? Do we need philosophy to give us better theories, or even to teach us to live without theory? I can put the idea more radically in an example. Film theories are "about" film--they take or even construct films as objects of knowledge. They propose explanatory concepts to examine what film is (and these concepts will give us many competing definitions) and to explain its logics and effects. Here one presumes the empirical existence and history of the object and its effects, and the activities of theory are dependent on our sense of this object. Alternatively, philosophy turns to film to examine and clarify problems and concepts that are of concern to philosophy. Paradoxically, this means that a (film) philosophy is not necessarily a part of film studies; rather, it belongs to philosophy alone. Philosophy explains nothing "about" film. However, it might have a lot to say about why and how film and the arts matter to us, why we value them, and how we try to make sense of ourselves and the world with and through them. It may even want to examine our "theories" of film to test their conditions of sense. However, I do not seek in philosophy a model for theorizing for the straightforward reason that, for me, philosophy is not theory, and does not propose theories. Its domain and activities lies elsewhere. If a philosophical reading returns to film or literary studies some fact or insight regarding the nature or history of the medium and its meanings, it is in the form of a gift. Here philosophy overlaps with or contributes to theory, perhaps, but it does not become, for all that, a theory of film or art or literature. Perhaps we should reserve for theory epistemological inquiries into the nature of things, matters, and causes? Theory would be epistemological and empirical, then, in diverse and open senses of the concept. Still, there is a point where philosophy and theory touch or find a common join: where in examining an object we also evaluate the conditions and styles of knowing, limits as well as possibilities, that confront us in efforts, successful or not, toward knowing. If there is any continuity to my work of the past thirty years (and I hope that there is), it has been to probe and test the conceptual foundations of what we say about film or the arts. Here there is a second task for theory, one which borders on philosophy, and which Kant calls "critique" as testing the limits and possibilities of our knowledge. This second task of Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 650 theory can come into conflict with the first to the extent that it makes us aware that we are constantly creating our objects, or at least the forms of their intelligibility and value, and thus they do not pre-exist our conceptual characterizations, but are always relative to them. (This is perhaps one of the greatest lessons of Althusser that seventies film studies neglected to absorb.) Philosophy is ill-served, though, when its self-image is based on establishing conditions of truth, or judgments of truth and falsity. It is better served in casting epistemology not in matters of science, but in questions of ethics: What do we want from truth? What powers does the will to truth serve, and what world would it make in its image? This activity is evaluative. Ethical (self) investigations and the ethical evaluation of epistemology—the will behind styles of thought—are two of the domains proper to philosophy. And now comes a third turning. There is conceptual critique, but also conceptual creation and innovation. This is what really interests me in Deleuze or Cavell. Here philosophy engages art in order to aid the further creation or clarification of concepts. As philosophers, when we turn to film we come back to philosophy. Are Deleuze and Cavell theorists or philosophers? Well, a bit of both. Cavell reads films very closely and I think he has made a significant and undervalued contribution to the problem of defining genres. That is a real theoretical contribution. And Deleuze has helped us to understand films in a host of new ways. But it is almost always the case that this theoretical work in both thinkers is geared toward moving forward larger and more general philosophical problems. Is this kind of philosophical work only metaphysical or speculative? No, because our engagements with the world, both moral and epistemological, are orientated by the concepts we inhabit and deploy pragmatically. And we can only understand those engagements, and possibly transform them, by reflexively practicing conceptual critique and conceptual innovation. In our artful conversations, film and other forms of art often help this reflection in profound ways, but in so doing, we are usually philosophizing, not theorizing. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 651 Your question put into focus something I have been thinking about for a long time. Am I really a "film theorist"? In my career have I ever presented something resembling a film theory, generalizable concepts or arguments that explain something about the nature and effect of film? In some of my early essays, perhaps, but I think in none of my books. And if this activity is not theoretical, then how do I describe what has driven me to write the books that I have written? "Working in philosophy," writes Wittgenstein in Culture and Value, "is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)" I have yet to find a better characterization of philosophical investigation. I believe your emphases on interpretation and evaluation are too strong. Can one not make knowledge claims without any larger epistemological or ethical commitments? How can one make knowledge claims without commitment to an ethical perspective that would give them value and provide criteria for what makes them reasonable or not? What my vision of philosophy teaches us is that adherence to a domain of reason is marked by an existential choice. In any case, one should have a sense of what one values in knowing if knowledge claims are to be worth something. This is why Charles Taylor insists that evaluating import ascriptions are vital to assessments of our claims to reason and their potentially transformative effects, for good or ill. At the same time, it is crucial to evaluate and critique continually the senses of theory or philosophy to which we find ourselves attracted. It is equally important to clearly acknowledge that the senses of theory to which we feel epistemologically allied are wrapped into uses of language and to forms of life that we value and express discursively, and which in turn are framed and conditioned by history. You might see here, then, why ethical evaluation is so important to me. In philosophy, and perhaps even "theory," I believe that the separation of epistemological questions from ethical ones is a dangerous business. And do I think it is impossible to make a claim to knowledge outside of an implicit or explicit sense of what we value in knowledge and how we go about seeking it. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 652 I can put the question in another way. In “Traveling Theory” Edward Said notes the obvious yet always incompletely learned fact that no reading is neutral or innocent. Every interpretation arises in the context of some guiding concept or idea, however implicit or unconscious. No matter how open or ambiguous, such conceptual frameworks guide interpretation and sense making, and we can call these frameworks, theory. Another feature of theory is that it is invariably incomplete because, happily, conceptual understanding can never exhaust the interest of everyday life and experience for us. This observation is important, since aspirations to systematicity, continuity, homogeneity, completeness, and universality are among the most persistent qualities of what one might call theory’s truth games; likewise their force of retrojection in each new appearing. Nevertheless, theory travels in time no less than space, and each one of its displacements yields new mutations of sense, enlarging or constricting its potential for generating new ideas or for connecting to new areas of interest. Displacements in context also mean that theories are continually translated and retranslated in both literal and abstract senses--their “language” can be deformed and refashioned, leading to renewal or decline. All of which is to say that in spite of its retrojecting tendencies, theory has no sense nor power in the absence of history. Perhaps this is another way of asserting thought’s relation to time, and of philosophy’s relation to history or genealogy? Is not historical thinking a real alternative to theory or philosophy? This intuition is also incompletely learned. Why do we resist fully embracing the fact that thought is time bound? I think of this as a piercing of theory by history, which subjects the internal structure of concepts to a certain violence that loosens the connections among its components, holding them open, fragmenting them, or producing irregular spaces where new and foreign genetic materials sometimes settle and blossom. To attend fully to the force of history in theory or philosophy requires attention to detail and sensitivity to context as well as receptiveness to time. Said calls this “critical consciousness,” which is one of his most powerful yet least remarked upon concepts. Critical consciousness is not a Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 653 rival to theory. (Neither is philosophy rival to theory to my mind.) Indeed critical consciousness is close to what Nietzsche calls genealogy. It is something like the conscience of philosophy or theory, or an ethical will that encourages critical thought to evaluate the displacement and mutation of concepts in time and place in constant recognition that sense and value are relational and contextual. Would critical consciousness be an act of theory or philosophy? Said characterizes critical consciousness as a spatial sense or faculty for measuring and assessing the situatedness of theory and its incompleteness in any given situation. Theories emerge, persist, mutate, or decline in response to specific and often unrepeatable historical forces in concrete circumstances. Investigating the historical senses of theory or mapping its genealogies, then, does not only mean restoring or deepening knowledge of a theory’s provenance, but also critically assessing the singularity of its appearances. The singularity of a theory’s historical displacements also shows that no theory exhausts, or is itself exhausted by, its original or subsequent locations. But what happens to the association of theory with politics here, or perhaps more precisely, the critique of ideology? Or in fact the relation of theory or philosophy to practices lived and suffered? Said says that above all “critical consciousness is awareness of the resistances to theory, reactions to it elicited by those concrete experiences or interpretations with which it is in conflict.”239 One might even say that theories “decline” grammatically and genealogically in or through forces of resistance. In this sense, every theory is a grid of selection and omission, produced in conflict and productive of dissensus. Genealogy as critical consciousness not only restores a sense of the historical conflicts in which theories are 239 Edward W. Said, “Traveling Theory” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) 242. Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 654 born and to which they respond, it is also the critic’s job, as Said puts it, “to provide resistances to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just beyond the interpretive area necessarily designated in advance and thereafter circumscribed by every theory” (“Traveling Theory” 241-242). In this critical consciousness is a third domain, distinct from both theory and philosophy yet overlapping with them. Indeed, one of the attractions of the kind of philosophy I care about in figures as diverse as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, or Cavell, is its critical capacity--the desire for philosophy is incited in those very conditions that oppose or resist thought. For Cavell, this critical capacity defines the difficulty of philosophy as well as its particular strength, which Cavell himself characterizes as receiving “inspiration for taking thought from the very conditions that oppose thought, as if the will to thought were as imperative as the will to health and to freedom” (Pursuits of Happiness 42). The possibility of thinking, or better critical thinking, should also be a potential pursuit of happiness, and thus part of the daily practice of the good city. Of course, one must also take account of the resistance to philosophy, which has often occurred from within philosophy itself. Our vision of philosophy today (primarily academic philosophy) is a also a picture transposed retroactively on the whole history of philosophy. And philosophy’s vision of itself (primarily analytic philosophy) is one that wants to stand apart from this history in its attachments to abstract reason an activity and a form of life that belittles matters of value, say art or ethics, as “metaphysical.” The critical stance of analytic philosophy is one wherein the whole history of philosophy must be accepted or rejected, and critiqued, only from within the framework of analytic philosophy and its own claim to reason. Here again, we must reclaim or try to imagine what is continuous, as well as discontinuous, in a life called philosophy. Analytic philosophy is too small an island, or too low a hill, for surveying the continent of philosophy. (In any case, its gaze is turned in the wrong direction.) If Kant is the great turning point in philosophy--its modernization or modernity, hence its institutionalization in the university--then Kant’s reading of Hume, Rousseau, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz accomplishes a violent double gesture. These thinkers enter a history of philosophy as Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 655 academic philosophy as the creation of systems and their critiques--an Oedipal line of father-killing. But in so doing, other lines of descent, other conceptions and genealogies of philosophy are suppressed. And this includes the classical philosophers, who taught in academies but were not academics, and where philosophy had a different role with respect to the polis. Think again here of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s or Nietzsche’s wish to recover or heal philosophy, thus freeing it from its professionalization. I am curious now about what interpretation means in this context? Is interpretation an intermediary practice where we pass from theory to philosophy? You have led me to understand that interpretation has a special sense for philosophy. The central question that binds Deleuze and Cavell’s conception of philosophy in something like a common grammar is: How is change possible, or better, how is human change possible? In this context, the need for interpretation often begins in confrontation with an internal and external division. Foucault calls this a confrontation with the Outside (of self or of thought; in any case something completely alien to the world I currently inhabit). For Deleuze my internal or external relation to time is something that divides me like an alien force. In other terms, the need for interpretation arises in the experience of unknownness--of others’ unknownness to me or my unknownness to myself--and in this interpretability also takes account of my capacity for being unknown to others. The difficulty of being unknown is a quality that we all share, or a form of life we inhabit in common as humans. And only in acknowledging this commonality can we avoid skepticism and violence by entering into interpretation, no matter how difficult or unsure. This is also why the dilemmas of skepticism are as much ethical as epistemological. My explicit promotion of philosophy, and hesitant withdrawal from theory, is inspired in important ways by Cavell’s attempts to moderate problems of epistemology as raised by skepticism’s persistent claims on us. In this way, the will to theory may be reframed in terms of the skeptical tendency to want too much from knowledge of the external world, or of other minds. The Claim to Reason might thus be read as an attempt to curb the immoderate desire of epistemology to require certainty in all domains, where in fact there Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 656 is not one standard of knowing or rationality for all things, especially human thoughts, actions, and creativity. In contrast to theory, philosophy embraces this uncertainty, no matter how disorienting or alarming, as a path toward change, and for its possibilities of a life examined and reexamined in oneself and with a community of others. This is why Cavell insists that what opens us to possible knowledge of the human, or of discovering the internal relation of each human being with all others, is the experience of being unknown to myself and to others. The perfectionist practice of refinding the truth of oneself, or the humanity in oneself, is a journey whose first step is discovering that one is lost to the world, as if buried in a fantasy of skepticism. The call to interpret in philosophy is inspired by this fundamental insight. Fueled by the attraction of certain knowledge, the temptation of skepticism is the fantasy of possessing absolute knowledge of the world, of self, or of others. But the will to interpret, the desire to interpret, arises from the experience of confronting the human limitations of knowing oneself or others. Cavell’s insistence after Wittgenstein that dilemmas of skepticism are irresolvable is therefore a way of acknowledging the absence of totality in knowing, despite the fascination and terror inspired by the unknowability of others and philosophy’s insistent craving for certainty. A feature of human life might then be that human behavior is less to be explained than interpreted. Philosophy should encourage us to embrace the fact that we are interpretable, and that we have the capacity for becoming known to ourselves and to others, no matter how uncertain or fragile we consider this knowledge to be. In this perspective, interpretation may indeed be an activity wherein we pass from theory to philosophy. Questions of interpretation only arise with respect to beings we perceive to be capable of expressive behavior, despite all their ostensible differences from us, and consequently, in the belief that miscomprehension can give way to comprehension. In these situations of otherness, we need “passing theories” as Donald Davidson might say, to ferret out patterns of similarity and difference wherein we can make ourselves understood by one another. And in so doing we not only comprehend but also create what Taylor calls new languages of perspicuous contrast. In this way, there is a virtuous circle wherein miscomprehension, theory, and interpretation turn around one another. There is value in being disagreeable, as I have said, because we can only come Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 657 to terms with human potentialities for sociability and concord through discord and disagreement. The pursuit of happiness through marriage must always pass through divorce. Another way of thinking through this question is to imagine the strange style of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as vacillating between theory and philosophy, like turning between two incommensurable pictures in aspect seeing. Theory arises in situations of doubt and hesitancy where one feels the need to chance an explanation, or to make a guess in confidence that new discovery of some missing piece of information will solve the riddle, once and for all. That is one way of seeking conviction or certainty. Subsequently, if Wittgenstein finds that philosophy is not theory, or that theory is little help to philosophy, this also means that nothing is deferred in philosophical problems--there is nothing to look for or wait for that is not already present before us or available to us. Everything one needs for philosophical investigation is present or “open to view” in the forms of life we inhabit and practice. Call these human expressive resources, or in short, culture. And if we are in a state of disagreement, there is no standard or measure to which we can appeal that is external to this form of life. Strangely, it is as if there is no content to philosophy--no theses, no syllogisms, nothing to believe or to take another’s word for, no explanation to accept on condition that further evidence or data will prove it with certainty. This is less a sense of philosophy’s criticism of theory or disdain for theory than an acknowledgment that philosophy is not theory, or that philosophy speaks or writes or shows from a place that is not theoretical. A shift of perspective is enacted here where I cannot prove philosophy or give evidence for philosophical assertions apart from inspiring a form of examination or investigation that begins with--in--my self, and your self as well as mine. The desire for philosophy only arises and moves--but also declines and disappears--in an internal relation with one’s own thinking, a process of interpretation that begins with self-interpretation. It may also simply be the case that acts of interpretation are unavoidable in any mode of inquiry we undertake, whether as scientists or humanists. Interpretation is integral to sense making and value assessing in all its varieties. Interpretive acts also frequently produce acts of creation, thus producing new situations and frameworks for Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 658 understanding. In such cases, there is both a transformation of the conceptual contexts in which inquiry and understanding take place, and also a subjective transformation of the interpreting agents. In this perspective, there is no separation of an object from a subject of knowledge, and thus the ascription or creation of sense will also involve a corresponding self-interpretation and transformation. Such arguments are aimed at preserving a space for the humanities in the face of an ever-expanding instrumental and technological reason. But they also profoundly challenge any strict division separating the humanities and the sciences. Perhaps the basis or fundamental context of a philosophy of the humanities is this: not to be engaged in the discovery of new knowledge, but rather in the creation or establishment (experimentation) of novel modes of knowledge that place in new contexts both our possible knowledge of self and the self’s relations to a community of others. The focal point of a philosophy of the humanities, then, is to assert and evaluate the place, function, and importance of the human subject with respect to these activities of interpretation, creation, inquiry, and understanding. However, as both Cavell and Foucault warn in each their different ways, the creation of a new mode of knowledge may equally be that of a new mode of ignorance. The task of philosophical criticism is unending. Does this mean that we have “found” philosophy more certainly than theory? The power of this question only makes sense in the context of perfectionism and the perfectionist embrace of becoming other, and becoming other in thought. The philosophy most meaningful to me asks that we acknowledge that being and thought are incommensurable, and that this incommensurability is a force that divides thought from itself and pitches it toward new thinking, if we don’t instead fall into darkness and confusion. Thought has no telos apart from the pitch of thinking, and the sage is only wise in theory since wisdom is the emblem of an attainable yet always unattained state. Therefore, the commitment to philosophy means that one can never become a philosopher or finally attain a state of wisdom. There are only steps to be taken without finality toward each new thought or new terms of existence, and each step is uncertain Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory 659 and imbalanced, guided only by the projection of a desired future self, one which is attainable but for which there is not guarantee of achievement, for there is always another step to be taken. As I wrote earlier, in the long view the two critical tasks of philosophy are to interrogate the bases, grounds, and frameworks wherein reasons are given and defended, both to constrain them when they are unreasonable but also to expand and ramify them in the production of new frameworks, contexts, and concepts, and to evaluate the axiological commitments that frame or structure our forms of reason-giving. To claim to know is always to value certain ways of knowing, and to value is to project a world commensurate with the forms of reason one aspires to define and develop in conceptual expression. Since the time of Socrates, philosophy is always finding its way (because the desire for philosophy arises from the distress of being lost) by way of these two compass points. And in this way, perfectionism has been a recurrent presence in the will to philosophy as the emblem of a desire for change and for becoming other, which leads us to seek out new terms of existence by fully interrogating, sometimes to the point of madness, one’s disappointments with life as its stands. Perhaps, then, philosophy is the practice of a virtual life, of embracing becoming and perfectionist aspirations to new and as yet undiscovered terms of existence? In the prologue to Cities of Words, Cavell reprises Thoreau’s lament that “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live.” How well Thoreau foresaw the difficult life of philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If one must compose an elegy for theory, let us hope it awakens a new life for philosophy in the current millennium. At the same time, it is a delicious irony that at the beginning of the last century, Hugo Münsterberg, arguably the first film theorist, was in fact a philosopher who grasped completely that the new medium of moving images asks of us questions both ontological and ethical. And so it is most fitting that as film bows from the stage of history, it leaves us Rodowick | An Elegy for Theory with our thoughts and returns us to philosophy. After a one hundred year history, what becomes of theory? Philosophy. Films still entertain and move us, but they also move us to thought. 660