It lurks alongside any assertion that film can be a form of philosophy: the nagging question of the actual need for film as philosophy. ‘So what if films can do philosophy?’ Or, to truly aim for the artery: ‘Of what use is “film as philosophy” if we already have philosophy itself?’1
In Chapter 1, I sketched the project of film as philosophy. And I presented my framework for an ethical meta-analysis of film as philosophy in Chapter 2. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to survey the many ways in which the project of film as philosophy commits itself to the idea of transformational ethics. Yet, in order to appreciate how ‘philosophy through movies’ can entail ‘ethical makeovers’, I must first emphasize the question of the need for film as philosophy as the off-ramp that takes film philosophers onto this ethical route. For the question targets the supposed value – indeed, the added value – of film as philosophy. And any manner of response necessarily broaches the deeper subject of ‘the good’ of film as such.
1 From Movies to Ethical Makeover-Slogans
Siegfried Kracauer, as D.N. Rodowick (2010b: 97) and others note, was the first theorist to directly pose the question of film ethics to film theory: ‘What is the good of the film experience?’2 It is a question of that elemental kind that will nudge its way into any film theorizing. The theorist of film cannot proceed without at least some implicit stance on what good film holds. This inadvertence of film ethics is perfectly illustrated by the film as philosophy debate. When philosophers argue that films can do philosophy, they are bound to make judgments about the good of film, thereby setting themselves on the turf
So which answers to the ‘good’ of film are disclosed by the film as philosophy discourse? In the broadest view, I make out an obvious answer, and a not-so-obvious one. The obvious answer follows from the ‘philosophy’-part: the good of film, quite simply, is that it can do philosophy. And, naturally, philosophers reckon that philosophy in the form of film amounts to something more than good old philosophy by itself. The ‘moderate’ accounts of film as philosophy, as I identified them in Chapter 1, all stress that the added value lies in how “films can sometimes do some things better” than written philosophical texts (Cox & Levine 2011: 11); things like “giving us a clearer grasp of the experiential dimensions of a philosophical issue” (Davies 2015: 150). Film thus bolsters the cognitive value that philosophy already has, by breathing aesthetic individuality, concrete experience and affect into what would otherwise remain abstract ideas. True to its name, the ‘bold’ position on film as philosophy ups the ante considerably: the value of cinematic thinking, far from only doing some things better, is that it does things that traditional philosophy indeed cannot do (e.g. Sinnerbrink 2011c). This view suggests a negative estimation of conventional philosophy and identifies ‘the good’ of film – its unique contribution to philosophy – with making up for that which philosophy lacks.
This chapter, however, scrutinizes the not-so-obvious answer that gets wrapped up into the obvious one: that is, that the ‘the good’ of film consists of it being a special means to the viewer’s self-transformation. This general ideal of personal transformation motivates much of the added value that philosophers attach to cinematic incarnations of philosophy. Thinkers of many different stripes routinely intimate how film as philosophy can transform our thinking, reconstitute our experience or, at the very least, enhance our self-knowledge. In fact, the notion that films doing philosophy has some kind of transformational value proves to be a rare stretch of common ground between what are otherwise mismatching positions in the field.
Of course, the ideal of personal transformation that gets attached to film as philosophy is by no means unrelated to the claim that films do philosophy – for philosophy itself has a long-established tradition of being practiced for purposes of self-transformation. As noted in Chapter 2, Western philosophy has really always been in cahoots with transformational ethics, right from the earliest inceptions of Ancient Greek philosophia. At this time, and even more so in the Hellenistic and Roman periods thereafter, philosophy was by definition an existential pursuit. Philosophy and the practical issue of how to live
So in busying themselves with how films do philosophy, philosophers consistently express the motive that such films also do more than philosophy: they can serve the ethical function of assisting aspirations for self-change. And the philosophers in question, it turns out, do more than only theorize the philosophical capacities of film: to put it bluntly, they also do film ethics – transformational ethics, to be exact. And most of them seem to be unaware of it.
In what follows, then, I take stock of the major strands of transformational ethics that flow from the film as philosophy debate. Since most of the philosophers in question do not address transformational ethics head-on, I make it my task to connect some dots that they leave unattended. The philosophers inevitably cast visions of how self-transformation can be achieved through films that do philosophy – I take their visions and draw out of them the different ethics that they imply. Part of my thinking through each transformational ethic is also to try and picture what the ethics may look like in actual practice – a critical imagining that uses the raw material provided by film as philosophy to figure out what options the everyday viewer has for self-transformation through film.
To streamline this enterprise, the chapter proceeds through a series of representative vignettes that are each headed by a distinctive say-it-all slogan,
My recourse to stereotypical slogans moreover serves to drive home a particular point: the transformational ethics dished up by film philosophers are not quite as fresh as one might perhaps hope. One would expect the notion of ‘transformational ethics of film’ – whatever this may prove to be – to be something quite dissimilar to the transformational practices of the ancient meditator, the religious mystic, or the modern ascetic; we are speaking, after all, of self-transformation through the novel means of the Seventh Art! Yet film philosophers struggle to do more with this thought than only rearticulate ethical notions and categories as old as philosophy itself. To be fair, this is largely foreseen by the theory of transformational ethics covered in Chapter 2. The pursuit of personal transformation entails essential structures – involving fundamental modes of transformation, typical goals, or domains of selfhood – which can certainly be adapted and reimagined, yet cannot be circumvented by the supposed novelty of seeking self-change through film. As much as the conjunction of film and transformational ethics may be new, the core features envisioned in the cinemakeover still remain consistent with classical topoi of transformationalist discourse.
A good deal of my analysis therefore goes to show how film philosophers resort to what are really familiar ethical paths – ancient paths, even – since most of them inevitably lead back to ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. As a precursory step to this end, I arrange my inquiry below around a distinction drawn by Pierre Hadot, which turns out to be just as useful to our understanding of film ethics as it is to the ancient transformational practices Hadot
Dissimilarities aside, however, all versions of transformational ethics of film as philosophy indicate the need for self-transformation of an altogether different order – bringing me to wrap up my analysis in this chapter with the question of ‘preparatory ethics’. Film philosophers paint a compelling picture of film as philosophy’s power to transform, yet at the same time they assume prior measures of self-work that the ideal viewer must have in place in order for film to have these claimed ethical effects. These preconditions prompt questions of the extent to which film per se actually shoulders the work of personal transformation. Especially to those who fancy film as a prime mover of our self-transformations, the dilemma of preparatory ethics shows that there is much more to the bumper than only the stickers.
2 Ethics of Self-Concentration
2.1 ‘Know Yourself’: Film as Thought Experiment
The first major strand of transformational ethics in the film as philosophy debate goes under the classic ‘Know Yourself’ – a sticker that goes all the way back to the so-called ‘father’ of Western philosophy, no less.4
This ethical vision typically comes from philosophers who consider film as philosophy a matter of whether films can embody recognized forms of philosophical knowledge: for film to be philosophy, it has to function as an argument, a thought experiment, or the like. Certainly, philosophers may value such films for the simple reason that they can transmit to us all sorts of philosophical insight. But the philosophers who prefer this approach to film as philosophy are specifically interested in the value of self-knowledge. And, being philosophers, they are after a very specific variety of self-knowledge: to become aware of the beliefs that you hold, the tacit beliefs that structure your knowledge, but which you have never explicitly thought about yourself. When films act as philosophy, they suggest, you are most likely to get knowledge about knowledge that is still unacknowledged in your thinking.
Why this particular emphasis on self-knowledge? The philosophers concerned are the most circumspect ones. They accept only ‘weak’- to ‘moderate’ notions of film as philosophy, according to which film – even if embodying certain techniques of philosophy – can at best make only modest contributions to philosophical knowledge. So instead of saying that films produce new knowledge, they find it safer to rather emphasize how films play upon the tacit knowledge of the viewer, and thus serve the well-known Socratic cause of examining knowledge that is already in place.
2.1.1 Be-(a)-ware: The Matrix of Hidden Assumptions
The ‘Know Yourself’ ethic emerges most clearly when philosophers think of films as thought experiments. The familiar argument goes that films as philosophical thought experiments, by being more immersive and engaging than their traditional written counterparts, are particularly apt to expose unquestioned assumptions upon which we base our judgment.
Wartenberg and Falzon’s take on The Matrix gives us the necessary ingredients to piece together a transformational ethic of film. In terms of the analytical frames that I introduced in the previous chapter, I extract from the claims of these two philosophers a technique, mode, domain and value of transformation respectively. First, The Matrix is thought to facilitate a particular work of the self upon itself: Wartenberg and Falzon imagine the viewer’s encounter with The Matrix as an act of self-reflection, suggesting the specific transformational technique of self-examination through film. Naturally, this self-examination marks a contemplative mode of transformation, elicited in the viewer, they argue, through the pronounced narrative trickery central to
But what is the need for practicing this particular self-examination? On this point, Wartenberg and Falzon sketch roughly the same motivating paradigm for ‘Know Yourself’, which they get from The Matrix’s central theme. The film’s self-reflexive unmasking of an artificial reality, they say, brings to attention our susceptibility to all of the technologically mediated and highly captivating cinematic (or televisual or digital) ‘realities’ that we so easily take for granted in our daily lives (Wartenberg 2007: 75; Falzon 2006: 101). Viewing The Matrix, as an exercise in self-examination, is thus negatively motivated by the context of an all-pervasive screen culture, and our habituation to it, in order to make us aware of what screens might screen us from.
Note, by the way, that both philosophers also approach The Matrix as a digital-era update of the ‘evil demon’ thought experiment – the famous skeptical scenario posed by René Descartes, which, they argue, the film enacts in its own narrative-cinematic (and again: captivating, as I would like to add) terms. This Cartesian connection thickens the ethical plot. For its ‘evil demon’ ancestor stems from a context absolutely steeped in the kind of transformational self-reflection that Wartenberg and Falzon imply of The Matrix. Descartes’ thought experiment, after all, belongs to a series of ‘meditations’, designed to awaken the reader to the errancy of beliefs, and to discern the self as a thinking reality. As Hadot (2002: 264) notes, Descartes certainly knew that the title of his Méditations – presented as successive intellectual exercises, extending over six days – designated spiritual exercises belonging to the tradition of ancient philosophy (cf. Kobusch 2013). And, indeed, numerous classical exercises actually feature in the Méditations: commentators identify spiritual exercises like that of ‘attention’ and ‘circumspection’ (Kobusch 2013: 169–170); the Platonic discipline of aversio, turning the mind away from the senses (Cottingham 2013: 158); and the Stoic discipline of ‘assent’ (Hadot 2002: 265). So when the
2.1.2 Other Twists and Trammels: Do the Right Thing and Happy-Go-Lucky
Whereas Wartenberg and Falzon’s version of ‘Know Yourself’ targets broad assumptions about the nature of reality, Dan Flory gives the ethic a more specific socio-moral emphasis, by considering how films specifically target viewers’ ideological assumptions about race. He focuses on film noir-influenced Black films (i.e. African-American cinema), for the reason that they mobilize the classic genre’s “distinctive potential for encouraging viewers to question presuppositions that might otherwise go unnoticed” (Flory 2009: 5).
Among the variety of cinematic-narrative devices that Flory explores, he too finds ‘epistemological twists’ ideal for triggering the self-examination of unnoticed assumptions.6 Flory’s (2010) analysis of Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee 1989) as a ‘socio-political twist film’ shows how the film exposes problematic background beliefs and default values relating to race. Ideally, this process can lead to a challenge of assumptions, and encourage viewers to reconsider how they perceive characters in terms of race. This is one instance of what Flory broadly sees as Black noir’s potential to minister to viewers an “opportunity for thinking, believing and knowing differently about race” (2009: 309). Much of Flory’s argument would of course also apply to the ‘feminist twist films’ that expose problematic default assumptions pertaining to gender – as in a recent example, the gender role reversal narrative of the French Netflix comedy, I Am Not An Easy Man (Éléonore Pourriat 2018).
Even more than the cases above, lastly, Basileios Kroustallis (2012) stresses the epistemological disruption that philosophical thought experiments perform with regard to the viewer’s latent assumptions. The possibility of a cinematic thought experiment, he explains, requires that “a proposition initially straightforward to agree with will be challenged, and will reveal different consequences by means of narrative, acting and the visual setting of the film” (2012: 80). The suggestion that a film as a thought experiment somehow obstructs the viewer’s natural patterns of reflection and makes thinking difficult – the kind of disruption to thought that is actually also performed by the
Yet, when it comes to how film does this work of making thinking difficult, Kroustallis apparently wants to show that film has methods other than complex storytelling twists. He finds that Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) undermines our automatic assumptions about the nature of happiness not through a narrative twist device, but by means of the actively estranging disposition played out by the main character, Poppy (Sally Hawkins). He describes Poppy as ‘eccentric’, ‘idiosyncratic’, ‘ambiguous’, and ‘confusing’ – terms which, in yet another twist, also go for the equally challenging figure of Socrates, he claims.7 The resultant incongruity between our familiar assumptions about happiness, and the unfamiliarity of Poppy’s, who embodies them, says Kroustallis, establishes an uncomfortable spectatorial experience, compelling viewers to examine the commonsense assumptions that it puts under strain (2012: 79–81).
While Christopher Grau (2013)8 exposes several shortcomings in Kroustallis’ argument – especially regarding his failings of interpretation – my own interest is less in the accuracy of Kroustallis’ reading, than in the motive and argumentative strategy that guide his reading. He counts on a cinematic thought experiment to do the transformational work of actively frustrating our assumptions, and thereby have them ushered into the viewer’s critical awareness. What ultimately drives the self-examination of assumptions, therefore, is an experience of dissonance, a cognitive unease9, which – overstated as it may be – Kroustallis ascribes to a very specific narrative device: a character that resists commonsensical beliefs.
2.2
We come to a rather similar picture with the ethic of transformation that emerges in Noël Carroll’s account of film as philosophy. Carroll, I suspect, would not even mind to bear the ‘Know Yourself’ sticker on his bumper. Yet the particular spin that he puts on that ethic warrants a slogan of its own. Let me call it: ‘Remind Yourself’.
As with the examples of ‘Know Yourself’ above, Carroll’s implied ethic is one of self-concentration; he too affirms film as a means to mind your own knowledge. But whereas ‘Know Yourself’ is about getting knowledge of what you do not know you know – things like hidden assumptions or cognitive frames – ‘Remind Yourself’ is specifically about getting to know, again, afresh, what you have long known. This ethic construes film-going as an occasion to restore in us those truths that we know, no doubt, but do not keep in mind as we would like to – or should.
2.2.1 Self-Knowledge as Recollection and Sunset Boulevard
Carroll offers his most explicit treatment of film as philosophy in an essay on the Billy Wilder film noir classic, Sunset Boulevard (1950) (2013: 161–182). In asking how Sunset Boulevard contributes to philosophical insight, he proceeds from an understanding of philosophy that strongly affirms its practical relevance – a position that also automatically brings to the fore the transformational ends of philosophy.
Carroll explains that, much as philosophy has the function of forging new ideas and advancing unimagined possibilities, it also has the basic task to remind us of matters that for whatever reason we overlook or even actively ignore or suppress. At issue, for Carroll, is the aware-making function that philosophy has with respect to the self’s knowledge, its role as “a discloser of hidden truths, known but repressed” (2013: 179). And he appeals to the examples of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, who remain relevant and significant “precisely because they remind us of facts of the human condition which, although admittedly known, are readily forgotten” (2013: 174).
In recognition of philosophy’s practical task to remind us of dormant truths, Carroll claims that narrative fiction films, by fulfilling this task, have an obvious capacity to do philosophy. The claim typifies Carroll’s general approach to film as philosophy, as seen in Chapter 1: a film does philosophy when it midwifes reflections and insights on behalf of the viewer; film doing philosophy is essentially an occurrence in the viewer’s mind. Accordingly, the philosophical contribution made by Sunset Boulevard, as he argues, is that it calls to mind for us the inevitability of our mortality with respect to the process of aging – an insight brought home not only by the story of the aged and fading silent
Carroll must however agree that this philosophical exercise through film, as he describes it, is inherently also one of self-transformation. A lesser way of stating Carroll’s transformational ethic is to simply say that viewing Sunset Boulevard encourages an enhanced state of contemplation, addressing the existential theme of mortality. The heart of his account, however, is that our encounter with the film constitutes an exercise in self-reflection, aimed at restoring knowledge that has become submerged from awareness: “to recall to mind features of human experience that, even if known once, have been forgotten or are only dimly grasped, ignored, neglected, and/or even repressed” (2013: 174). According to this picture, then, Carroll gives ethical weight to film as a means to be reminded of forgotten truths. This is not so much a ‘remembering’ something that we have literally ‘forgotten’, as it is a (sudden) becoming aware (again), expressed through the deep-rooted and existentially loaded metaphor of recollection. Watching film thus becomes a contemplative technique of recollection; it is aimed at transformational values of awareness and self-knowledge; and it is directed, within the self, at the domain of the well-known, but neglected/suppressed truths, fenced off from our daily existence.
2.2.2 Ancient Backing
Carroll bolsters the above argument – and rightly so – by contextualizing the task of reminding oneself of forgotten truths as something which has always been part of philosophy. As he puts it, the charge to “remind us of facts of the human condition which, although admittedly known, are readily forgotten […] has been one of the tasks of philosophy since the get-go” (2013: 174–175). Carroll associates tasks of this kind with the ongoing tradition of philosophy – exemplified by the Ancients – that primarily concerns itself with how one should live, alongside which he cites the work of Pierre Hadot (2013: 174–175). He concludes that, since Sunset Boulevard compels us to remember our human condition, it also participates in this tradition that puts philosophy to ‘the task of living’ (2013: 176).10
Carroll’s reliance on the Ancients’ paradigm of practical philosophy is actually signaled from the outset of his essay. We see this in his carefully
2.2.3 Self-Knowledge as Clarification
The claim that film, or art, serves to ‘Remind Yourself’ is certainly not a view that Carroll as a cognitivist is particularly well-known for. Still, the claim does agree with Carroll’s broader philosophy of art, where he shows the same transformational interest in self-knowledge, and how art essentially lets us “know what we know” (Landy 2012: 6). The Sunset Boulevard essay frames such self-knowledge as an act of recollection. But far better known in Carroll’s work is the notion that self-knowledge through art is an act of clarification. Art can clarify our existing knowledge – this marks the more pivotal and indeed overarching metaphor on which Carroll’s ethic of self-knowledge hinges. For the recollection of knowledge entails also a clarification: to ‘Remind Yourself’ through art implies ultimately to gain a certain clarity into what you know, and therefore goes under what appears to be Carroll’s umbrella ethic, ‘Clarify (to) Yourself’. Below I refer to a relevant and representative sample of Carroll’s philosophy of art, an essay in which he develops an account of the relation between art and morality (Carroll 1998).
Crucial to what Carroll calls the ‘clarificationist view’11 is his commitment to the position that art – and here he concentrates on the narrative arts – does not give us brand new knowledge. Instead it activates both the cognitive
In this way, Carroll’s position epitomizes the ethical interest that is most likely to accompany weak to moderate notions of film as philosophy: that film can foster self-transformation within the domain of the viewer’s knowledge. As to the nature of that transformation, the likes of Carroll, Wartenberg, and Falzon are not likely to claim that films introduce something fundamentally new, or different, to the viewer’s knowledge. Instead, they emphasize how films call the existing knowledge of the viewer to attention and subsequent reflection. The transformation, as such, is measured by values like awareness, insight and self-knowledge being inserted into the knowledge that the self already has.
2.3 ‘Know Yourself’ Some More: A Word on Film as Philosophy Doubters
It is worth briefly considering also some film as philosophy doubters, for the reason that they, too, affirm the kind of transformational ethics of film surveyed up to this point. Take two clear-cut skeptics: Bruce Russell, already introduced in Chapter 1, as well as Berys Gaut. Both are only willing to endorse a weak engagement between film and philosophy, as I have defined it. Yet they still acknowledge the broader cognitive value of film, and in doing so tread on the same themes of self-reflection, and transformation within the domain of knowledge, that we have encountered in the ethics of ‘Know Yourself’ and ‘Remind Yourself’.
Bruce Russell is known for insisting on definite limits to the philosophy that films can be said to do (see Russel 2005; 2008). But with the philosophical functions that he does grant film, he affirms the by-now familiar theme of transformation aimed at one’s existing knowledge: in addition to the functions of raising philosophical questions and offering counterexamples, he notes that films can “remind us of things we already know”, “motivate us to find out things we do not already know” and to “double-check what we think we know” (2005: 390).
In a similar vein, Berys Gaut (2015: 41) holds that, although certain cognitive functions of films may overlap with philosophy, this does not mean that films do philosophy. Not all forms of cognition are philosophical; and film embraces emotional and aesthetic aims seldom shared by philosophy. Yet when Gaut evaluates Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982), and the effect of the ‘cognitive vision’ that the film casts, he endorses the exact same ‘Remind Yourself’ sticker that Carroll sports in his reading of Sunset Boulevard. In the context of an already death-obsessed film, as Gaut describes it, Blade Runner presents viewers with the plight of the replicants – androids who have the radically curtailed life-span of only four years. Gaut claims that this plight presents viewers with an intensified rendition of what is also our own finitude, thus prompting us to reflect on our mortality. Much of the film’s power, he concludes, lies in it initiating this posture of self-reflection (2015: 42).
So even though Russell and Gaut deny film to do philosophy in any strong sense of the term, they do attach to film transformational functions of self-knowledge. This sets them on what may perhaps be the unintended ethical common ground they share with their opponents.
2.4
The transformational ethics that we have covered up to this point are all about films engaging viewers at a level of higher cognition or reflective knowledge. Yet to leave it only at that, Vivian Sobchack would say, is to very literally take leave of our senses.
Her favorite bumper sticker, ‘Sense Your Senses’, says it all. With what is also an ethic of self-concentration, Sobchack wants to use film not so much to know what you know, but rather to sense how you sense, to perceive how you perceive and, ultimately, to experience how you experience. In short, she radically orients the idea of self-transformation through film towards the body. Much like Richard Shusterman’s well-known ‘somaesthetics’ seeks to redress self-transformation understood purely as a one-sided project of the mind (see Shusterman 2008; 2012; 2013), Sobchack too, as far the film experience is concerned, helps put the ‘soma’ back into ‘tran(s)f(o)r(ma)tion’.
As we have seen earlier, in Sobchack’s thinking the idea of film as philosophy takes the form of ‘film as phenomenology’, the idea that films themselves partake in and perform phenomenology. Films can do phenomenology because they share in the same structures of embodied existence as their viewers. And the philosophical payoff of film doing so, she suggests, is that film in effect performs for us a ‘meta-phenomenology’: it gives expression to an experience of experience, and so enables us to experience our experience. More specifically, our engagement with film’s own ‘body’ and ‘experience’ mobilizes and concentrates the ‘body’s attention’, lets the body ‘sense itself’, and so enhances our ‘sensual being’ (2004: 62, 72, 77). As covered in Chapter 1, she thus sees in film the capacity to create for its viewers an experience of ‘extreme self-reflection’ on those very perceptions – or, structures of embodied existence – that condition the cinematic experience (Sobchack 2011: 204; 1992: 5).
This account leaves little doubt as to the possibilities of personal transformation that Sobchack sees in our meta-phenomenological encounter with film: it affords a transformation of how we experience our embodied selves, based on a restoration of a self-reflective awareness of our own experience. That is, by heightening and intensifying the experience of the viewer’s sensorium, the film experience gives her a greater sense of sensing. Or, as Sobchack also puts it, “the cinema quite concretely returns us, as viewers and theorists, to our senses” (1992: 13).
With this Sobchack puts her own cinematic stamp on a phenomenological tradition that, starting with Edmund Husserl, has always set itself the ethical-transformational agenda of renewing our reflective engagement with
2.4.1 Sobchack’s Blue Exercise
In the spirit of these claims, Sobchack strongly affirms not only the practical value of phenomenology, but also the need to engage in the actual practice of phenomenology: you really have to do phenomenology to fully understand what it is all about. And, unlike the cases considered up to now, Sobchack gives us quite a tangible picture of her theoretical ideals put into practice. In an essay where she lets us in on her pedagogy of phenomenology, Sobchack describes her use of Derek Jarman’s demanding biopic, Blue (1993), as a way of introducing her students to the phenomenological method (2011: 191–206). With this exercise, as I see it, Sobchack leads her students in what is essentially a transformational technique of self-reflection, based on their experience of a film. Incidentally, an obviously contemplative technique in this case also incorporates the transformational mode of ministering, seeing that the self-reflection and its outcomes rely on Sobchack’s guidance as a film phenomenology teacher too.
The goal of the Blue exercise, Sobchack explains, is to forestall students’ habitual recourse to quick-fire judgments and theoretical interpretations (‘abstractive practices’), and instead get them to first attend to their own embodied experiences (2011: 192–194). Yet contemplative techniques of transformation invariably call upon the directions of an explicit guiding text. And
Sobchack notes that sitting through Jarman’s final feature film is typically experienced as difficult and demanding, and that students’ reactions to it are polarized. This is no doubt on account of its radical minimalism. (One might find similar responses, for example, to the minimalism of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975).) Visually, Blue is reduced to a single shot of the screen saturated with the color blue. Yet Sobchack insists that the ‘extreme conditions of somatic attention’ provoked by Jarman’s privations – belonging to the transformational mode that I previously identified as a contemplative asceticism, following from the great deal of visual stimuli from which the film withholds the viewer – help challenge one’s assumptive ‘natural attitude’, and so allow students to expand the limits of their own perception (2011: 191, 194, 196, 199–200). And this is indeed, then, the kind of transformational result that she reports on: following the exercise, students’ phenomenological descriptions become more reflexive; they become sensitized to subtle alterations in their visual attention; they become more receptive to the expansion and sensuality of the aural field; and they can even discover synaesthetic dimensions in their experience (such as listening to color) (2011: 197–199).
2.4.2 Disclosures, Disruptions, and Deepenings
It is fair to say that ‘Sense Your Senses’ overlaps with the other types of ethics discussed so far on the basic transformational value of self-knowledge, or even more generally, self-awareness. But self-knowledge, as it emerges in Sobchack’s ethic, gets linked to a very different profile of transformational domains. Whereas ‘Know Yourself’ & Co. want to use film for knowledge of the self’s knowledge (its constituent themes, assumptions, biases), ‘Sense Your Senses’ probes for more elemental knowledge of the senses and embodiment of the self.
First, Sobchack elaborates the idea of self-knowledge of the body by adding that film also grants us awareness of how the body itself knows. Here we can speak of self-knowledge aimed at embodied knowledge – a composite domain in which the domain of the body incorporates also its own form of knowledge. Noteworthy in this regard are Sobchack’s meditations on The Piano (Jane Campion 1993) (2004: 61–64). Here she recounts how the unidentifiable opening images of the film – which turn out to be the main character’s hands – evoked an anticipatory sense of what, she says, her fingers already knew. These images, as Sobchack explains, mobilized and concentrated her body’s attention: “my tactile sense of being in the world through my fingers grasped the image’s sense in a way that my forestalled or baffled vision could not” (2004: 64). That her fingers can ‘grasp’ or ‘comprehend’ in a manner that can only afterwards be refigured into conscious thought, demonstrates what she takes to be “the carnal foundations of cinematic intelligibility” (2004: 59). The film experience, by giving a greater sense of sensing, can thus also sensitize us to what she variously calls our ‘bodily knowing’, ‘embodied intelligence’, or ‘carnal thoughts’ (e.g. 2004: 60, 75, 84). In this manner, says Sobchack, we become more attuned to how the body reflexively knows before we reflectively know.
Besides getting to know our bodily knowing, Sobchack suggests that film’s engagement of the senses can furthermore stimulate and deepen our capacity for synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is described as a basic exchange and translation between the senses – to experience one sense in terms of another. Such an exchange between the senses she asserts as a given condition of the human sensorium. But even though synaesthetic perception is the rule, she goes on, we become unaware of it through both over-familiarity and cultural conditioning (2004: 67, 69–71). Sobchack therefore wants the particular sensory solicitations of a given film, or filmic moment, to step in and disclose for us this supposedly obscured synaesthetic dimension of our experience. This, too, is a central theme in her meditations on The Piano: film can harness the viewer’s synaesthetic capacities, on the basis of our total embodied involvement with it, and thereby let the dominant senses of vision and hearing ‘speak to’ our other senses, and vice versa (2004: 67). The cited fingers-example in The Piano is thus taken by Sobchack to illustrate how film quite literally touches us through what we see; and, thereby, shows us the deep extent to which sight is informed by the sense of touch (2004: 80).
Finally, for Sobchack, all the above disclosures effected by film – relating to embodied knowledge, synaesthesia, and integrating the senses – give viewers access to greater depth and richness in their sensual experience (e.g. 2004: 67, 71). At this point ‘Sense Your Senses’, which starts off as an ethic of self-concentration, quietly transmutes into one of self-expansion. As much as film heightens and intensifies (i.e. concentrates) our experience of the self’s sensorium, Sobchack sees it as an experience that we simultaneously recognize as general and diffuse (i.e. expanded) (2004: 77). She speaks of this self-expansive flipside to her ethic in terms of an opening of the self and an extensive mode of being (2004: 78–79). The embodied intelligence that is roused by the film experience, she says, “opens our eyes far beyond their discrete capacity for vision, opens the film far beyond its visible containment by the screen, and opens language to a reflective knowledge of its carnal origins and limits” (2004: 84). As this suggests, Sobchack even thinks of this opening of the self
So with Sobchack having already opened the door to the topic of self-expansion, let us now turn to transformational ethics of film where such ideals are the main focus of interest.
3 Ethics of Self-Expansion
3.1 ‘Expand Your Mind’: Stephen Mulhall and Others
Ethics of self-concentration in film as philosophy, I have shown, construes film-viewing as a way to know yourself – that is, to better know what you already know, and to dig deeper into the knowledge and experience that makes you you. With the ethics of self-expansion, film philosophers emphasize transformation in the opposite direction: film-viewing is a way to know what is new, different, and other – not to affirm the self and its existing knowledge. This line of ethics banks on film to break you loose from forms of experience that restrict you to being you. Ultimately, ethics of self-expansion wishes for the film viewer not just to know what is other, but to become what is other.
So what better place to start, then, than with the evergreen transformational slogan, ‘Expand Your Mind’ – the promotion-savvy guru’s bumper sticker of choice. In using this slogan for film philosophers like Stephen Mulhall, however, I do not intend it to mean an expansion of one’s Mind in some grand metaphysical sense (although we will still get to cases that resemble this). No, for Mulhall, and many others, film as philosophy affords a more sensible, down-to-earth instance of self-expansion: films, quite simply, direct our thinking toward different perspectives and unconsidered ideas. ‘Expand Your Mind’ thus prescribes an attitude of openness to film, and what it ‘thinks’, so that it can open up pathways along which we are yet to think.
Bear in mind that already with Vivian Sobchack, above, we have crossed some significant borders within the film as philosophy landscape. Both Mulhall and Sobchack assume a clearly different condition for films to engage in philosophy: films do so, not because they enact forms of philosophical knowledge
On top of that, we are now squarely in the terrain where films are taken to do philosophy in the most direct and literal sense – the so-called ‘bold’ conception, according to which films can actually be philosophy. And the designated poster boy of ‘bold’ film as philosophy is, of course, Stephen Mulhall (e.g. Sinnerbrink 2013: 207–209). As I have previously discussed, Mulhall patently claims that some films think systematically, address philosophical questions and, quite simply, philosophize. Yet, as I have also argued, there is a great deal of ambiguity surrounding this ‘thinking’ that films supposedly do: it remains unclear whether this ‘thinking’ refers to film’s own thinking, the thinking that it generates in the viewer, or the thought that the filmmaker (supposedly) wishes to convey to the audience. What is clear in Mulhall’s account, however, is that a film’s thinking – whatever, exactly, it may be – does not leave the viewer’s thinking unaffected.
3.1.1 The Thinking Film’s Transformations of Thought
Mulhall gives a number of indications that philosophizing films have a subjective agency that grants their viewers transformations of thought. It is no coincidence, by the way, that most of these indications come up precisely when Mulhall (2008: 129–155) sets out to respond to critics of his bold stance on film as philosophy: in having to elaborate on what counts as ‘philosophy’, and how films can do it, he is bound to consider also ethical-transformational effects that are intrinsic to (films) doing philosophy.
The resultant transformational ethic that Mulhall gestures towards, it has to be said, is not exactly as ‘bold’ as the position on film as philosophy that he is reputed to have. Mulhall, to begin with, values film for motivating in the viewer a movement of thought. He takes some films to be particularly adept at encouraging viewers to ask questions and make meaning – like, again, Blade Runner, which Mulhall says ‘educates’ our reflections on what it means to be human (2008: 29–45). From this angle, film-viewing constitutes a contemplative technique in the simple sense that it enhances contemplation, which means that contemplation in Mulhall’s ethic figures as both mode and value of transformation. But compared to the likes of Carroll, Mulhall sees contemplation through film as more open-ended, not as set on some cognitive outcome. Films do not lead viewers to particular philosophical insights, but rather give
Mulhall also differs from the cases dealt with before in that film-viewing, as he treats it, becomes not a transformational technique of self-reflection or introspection, but rather what I would call contemplating the world. This is to reflect, through film, on the nature of existence, and our place within it. But how does such contemplation involve self-transformation? When Pierre Hadot goes into ‘contemplation of the world’ – deeming it one of the most general spiritual exercises of ancient philosophy – he specifically relates the technique to a transformation of vision, the way in which the philosopher sees the world (see Hadot 1995: 251–263; 2002: 229–231). Although not exactly the same17, Hadot’s assessment is useful for pinning down the transformation of thought that Mulhall is after: films in the act of philosophy disclose for their viewers alternative ‘visions of the world’ and ‘visions of what matters in human life’ (Mulhall 2008: 136, 140–141). This is a conversion of thinking in the same sense as “encouraging one’s interlocutor not so much to change her mind about a particular course of action but to look at everything differently” (2008: 140 [emphasis added]).
So besides regarding film as inducing us to think more, Mulhall sees in film’s thinking the ability to accomplish fundamental reorientations of how we think and reason. By providing ‘pathways to thinking’, films can initiate new directions and indeed new ways of thinking (2008: 136). Again, this is not about films engaging in arguments, in the narrow sense of the term. The point for Mulhall is that any argumentation relies on a shared space of thought, which presupposes the shape and significance – the givenness – of the topic under discussion. What films do is to let us “reconceive that space, by finding a new way of thinking about the topic” (2008: 137 [emphasis added]). To re-envision the space of thought is to alter our sense of the stances available to our reasoning about a given topic. In this manner film’s thinking can provide “an open space in which thinking takes place, enabling new modes of organizing and making sense of experience and knowledge” (Andersen cited in Mulhall 2008: 136–137).
Mulhall goes on to suggest that film has an especially important part to play in such re-envisioning and reorientation with regard to ‘ethical perception’
3.1.2 Perspectives, Frames, and Aspect-Seeing
It turns out, then, that Mulhall does in fact nominate for ‘Expand Your Mind’ a more specific transformational value than only contemplation for contemplation’s sake. Now I must admit that certain general values, like achieving awareness or insight, will apply to practically every transformational ethic that I identify in this chapter – and Mulhall is no exception. Yet within each ethic these values still acquire individual flavors: an ethic typically seeks not just awareness but a particular object of awareness; or better put in Mulhall’s case, not just insight but a specific kind of insight. Mulhall hardly uses the term, but it is clear that the kind of insight that he aims for is one of perspective; the reorientations of our thinking that he attributes to films comes down to the shifting- and gaining of perspectives.
There are a number of other philosophers who, like Mulhall, treat film in the act of philosophy as initiating viewers into transformations of perspective – whether this be called perspective-shifting, frame-switching, or aspect-seeing – and in this respect the likes of Mullhall provide us with further possible formulations of the ‘Expand Your Mind’ ethic.18 Perspective as a transformational issue is especially evident in philosophers who draw on familiar ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, like his distinction between ‘saying’ and ‘showing’, and his concept of ‘seeing aspects’. Phil Hutchinson, for example, argues of the films Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) and Melancholia (Lars von
I am struck by how my own perspective of Poppy has undergone a transformation: she no longer strikes me as irritating. The film has succeeded in altering my vision such that a person who I couldn’t help but see as obnoxious I now see as something much closer to the ‘laughing Buddha’ described by Eddie Marsan [an actor, whose statement is quoted earlier in Grau’s essay]. Happy-Go-Lucky has helped me undergo a certain kind of aspect shift in my own perception of that character. (2013: 19 [emphasis added])
This account matches with the core ‘Expand Your Mind’ picture that we get from Mulhall and the others: for Grau, also, the accomplishment of Happy-Go-Lucky is that it grants viewers new insight related to the shifting – the transformation – of perspective. He makes clear that the film incites us not only to shift
3.2 ‘Blow Your Mind’: Deleuzian Inspirations in Sinnerbrink and Frampton
Our next bumper sticker is perhaps best introduced by a dictionary-style definition: to ‘blow someone’s mind’, as they say, is to affect, to excite, to elevate, to overwhelm. Accordingly, film philosophers who advocate the following ethical slogan make emphatic the intense affects, emotions, and experiences that films can rouse in the viewer. But, as the ‘blow’-bit certainly implies, the notion also speaks of potential discomfort: that the mind at stake may be ruffled, disturbed, shocked, or simply blown away. Yet, for the philosophers concerned, it is precisely this moment of disruption that gives films a foothold to redefine the parameters of philosophical thought.
In terms of aspirations of self-expansion, things get considerably more adventurous from here on. Self-expansion now begins to take on the form of ekstasis, the ideal of stepping outside of oneself. In this ethic, more exactly, the ideal manifests itself as a desire to step outside the restraints of our thought. Philosophers who endorse this ethic find in the distinct thinking of film – ‘cinematic thinking’ – a means of pressing beyond the limits and limitations of philosophical thinking. For them, in essence, cinematic thinking transcends our own conventional forms of thinking. And, by doing so, it pushes us to also transcend, and transform, those forms of thinking for ourselves. According to this vision, then, you go to the cinema in search of experiences that cognitively overwhelm you, that disrupt your usual philosophical certainties, so as to be in a position to be forced to invent thinking beyond the confines of your existing thought. This envisioned outcome may go by many names: ‘ecstatic thinking’ (Bernauer 1988); ‘thinking the outside’ (Foucault 1987); thinking ‘the unthought within thought’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 59–60); reaching for the ‘unthinkable in thought’ (Deleuze 1989: 168); even ‘thinking the impossible’ (Gutting 2013). However, to mark off the supposition that films are instrumental in achieving the outcome of such thinking, I label it ‘Blow Your Mind’.
I put forward Robert Sinnerbrink and Daniel Frampton as two paradigmatic representatives of ‘Blow Your Mind’. Of course, the reason for them suggesting a common transformational ethic is that they have in common the same ‘cinematic thinking’ approach to film as philosophy. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, the cinematic thinking approach, which emphasizes the
“Something in the world forces us to think”, Deleuze observes in Difference and Repetition (1994: 139). And, to be sure, that ‘something’ may be anything, owing to the infinite, incessant play of forces that animate the Deleuzian ontology. But as his Cinema books no doubt witness, Deleuze reserves a special role for cinema as something that forces us to think. This is made especially evident in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Deleuze 1989: 156 ff.), where Deleuze portrays the intensities, affects and percepts flowing from cinema as ‘shocks to thought’. These shocks encountered through cinema, among other things, “forces us to think and re-think our own thinking, bringing about a new image of thought” (Huygens 2007). Or, put in an alternative way: the creative forces of cinema inevitably force the creation of new concepts (see Deleuze 1998a: 14–16).
Therefore, rather than tapping the film-philosophical potential of specific Deleuzian notions such as the ‘movement-image’ and time-image’, ‘crystals of time’, or ‘powers of the false’19, the cinematic thinking approach exemplified by Sinnerbrink and Frampton takes its lead from this more basic viewpoint. Firstly, that cinematic thinking forces or shocks us into thought. But, secondly, also, that cinematic thinking enacts this force or shock by virtue of its inherent distinctness from our own forms of thinking. Cinematic thinking is conceived of as an imagistic and affective Other, standing in contrast to the usual conceptual-abstractive thinking that characterize philosophy. It is an Other, consequently, that confronts philosophy with its own limitations. And, for this reason, cinematic thinking forces philosophical thought beyond itself, to become Other. Cinematic thinking thus overwhelms philosophy, challenges and resists philosophy, and jolts philosophy into revision and invention – and, in this sense, can be said to ‘do philosophy’. The philosophical value perceived in cinematic thinking therefore revolves around the supposed power deriving from its otherness – an influence that is at once affective, disruptive, and creative.
The ethical implication of this approach to film as philosophy, of course, is that any encounter with this supposedly forceful cinematic thinking is one of potential formation and transformation. This (trans)formative power of cinematic thinking is especially noticeable in claims of its capacity to generate ‘the New’: new concepts, new knowledge, new perceptions and new possibilities
3.2.1 Robert Sinnerbrink: Ethical Motives and Motifs
I should first point out that placing Robert Sinnerbrink under the ‘Blow Your Mind’ banner is by no means done because I take him to be a boots-and-all Deleuzian in his thinking on film. His ‘romantic film-philosophy’, as he refers to it, echoes many other voices. He explicitly acknowledges his indebtedness to Stanley Cavell as well as Stephen Mulhall (see 2011a: 137–139). A good deal of his thinking on film as philosophy also responds to Heidegger – especially with the notion of aesthetic world disclosure (see 2006; 2014c). Additionally, in more recent work, he (as do Pisters (2012) and other Deleuze-inspired film scholars, for that matter) increasingly takes on board insights from cognitive film theory (see 2016a).
Yet when it comes to his notion of cinematic thinking, Deleuze’s voice echoes the loudest. Recall from Chapter 1 that, like Deleuze, Sinnerbrink treats cinematic thinking as essentially distinct from – and Other to – conventional philosophical thinking. Cinematic thinking stands apart as a ‘thinking in images’, a thinking that he identifies as intuitive, affective, aesthetic, and non-conceptual in nature (2011a: 89, 139, 152). Also recall that, on account of this otherness, cinematic thinking for Sinnerbrink does not engage in philosophy so much as it engages with philosophy. Cinema’s contribution to philosophy thus resides in what is a generative confrontation between two distinct forms of thought. It is thus no wonder that the standout Deleuzian motif in Sinnerbrink’s thinking is that cinema produces a ‘shock to thought’ (Sinnerbrink 2011a: 137 ff.; cf. Deleuze 1989: 156–164). Sinnerbrink elaborates on the motif of cinema’s power by claiming that cinema: “performs a cinematic thinking in images that both challenges and resists philosophy, provoking us to think in response to what film enables us to experience, without, however, reducing cinema to a mere reflection of a philosophical thesis or framework” (2011a: 137). So in a double movement, as he portrays it, cinematic thinking stages for us an experience that provokes philosophical thinking, yet at the same time actively disrupts and challenges that thinking. And by exposing the inabilities of conventional modes of philosophy to come to terms with it – that is, through its aesthetic,
Compared to earlier cases in this chapter, Sinnerbrink is quite explicit on the ethical commitments that he makes with his particular stance on film as philosophy. For one thing, Sinnerbrink is explicitly concerned with the theme of transformation, and makes quite clear the particular ideal that he is after: cinematic thinking, as both a provocation and resistance to thought, should transform philosophy. Between film and philosophy transpires what he calls a transformative “thinking dialogue”, which spurs “philosophy to respond creatively to the kind of thinking that cinema allows us to experience” (2011c: 36).
Less explicit is the added personal transformations, for the philosopher-viewer, that the transformation of philosophy clearly also holds. For the renewal of philosophical thinking, as Sinnerbrink envisions it, surely entails more than ‘thinking’ only in an abstract, cultural sense. It entails also the renewal of the thinking viewer-subjects who must transform in their capacity to think and embody (re-)new(-ed) philosophical thoughts. To his credit, Sinnerbrink often brings up such ‘extra-philosophical’ transformations. He points out, for example, that our grappling with cinematic thinking can result in new ways of thinking and feeling; open new possibilities of thought; question our normative practices and frameworks; challenge habituated ways of seeing; and even do as much as transform our experience of the world (2011a: 7; 2011c: 40; 2013: 207). These remarks are in keeping with the ‘Blow Your Mind’ motto: they signal the transformational ambition that films, by pushing us to move beyond conventional philosophy, can moreover help us move beyond regular forms of thinking, feeling, and experience in general.
To further back up this broader ambition for cinematic thinking, Sinnerbrink specifically petitions the idea of aesthetic world-disclosure which, he says, can help recuperate the ‘ethico-political dimensions’ of film (2011c: 42–43). But before getting to its ethical uses, I must acknowledge that the idea of world-disclosure adds a distinctly Heideggerian dimension to Sinnerbrink’s Deleuzian inspired notion of cinematic thinking and its effects. One obvious token of this dimension is that Sinnerbrink never speaks of the transformation of thinking in terms of the ‘creation of concepts’, as Deleuze would do. In allegiance to philosophical romanticism (more on that in a moment), while by no means in opposition to Deleuze, he rather speaks of such transformation in terms of disclosure and opening up of new possibilities of thought. Cinema’s aesthetic forms of disclosure amounts to its distinctive ways of thinking (2011c: 38). And by our encountering these alternative forms of world-disclosure, Sinnerbrink argues, we are compelled to new ways of thinking, or to ‘think the New’ (2011c: 37).
The exact merit of Sinnerbrink’s concept of world-disclosure is not decisive for my argument here. Much more important is that Sinnerbrink finds in aesthetic world-disclosure (casual as his take on it may be) a further resource for affirming the ethical-transformational value of cinematic thinking. Through aesthetic world-disclosure, film essentially does the work of possibility-disclosure – for Sinnerbrink, the possibility of new forms of meaning-making, new horizons of experience, and by implication new viewer selves (2011c: 42). Incidentally, the idea of world-disclosure also allows Sinnerbrink’s ‘Blow Your Mind’ ethic to incorporate elements of ‘Remind Yourself’ – discussed earlier with reference to Noël Carroll, who, likewise, makes an appeal to Heidegger, even if only briefly so. In effect, world-disclosure needs not only open up the novel in our experience. It can likewise disclose, and thus help retrieve, aspects of our experience that Sinnerbrink describes as forgotten or lost (2011c: 41–42).
Now I take it that any form of art or fiction may lay claim to the function of world-disclosure. But Sinnerbrink seems to reserve for cinema a special capacity for it: since our experience in cinema is essentially that of cinematic worlds, films disclose the world via the actual construction of alternative worlds (2011c: 35, 41–43). This apparent recommendation of a cinematic world-disclosure rides on a strong conception of viewer immersion, but one of which he gives little account. He basically accepts cinema’s capacity for viewers to temporarily ‘inhabit’ its richly sensory virtual worlds, with no mention of how this process may work, nor how it may extend to worlds established by other
Finally, I must say a word on Sinnerbrink’s recent turn to cinematic ethics, seeing that it very much affirms and deepens the above ethical interests that come to the fore in his writings on film as philosophy. In his Cinematic Ethics (2016a) he extends the idea of film as philosophy by going deeper into the idea of ‘film as ethics’, that films can ‘do ethics’, by considering cinema as a ”medium of ethical experience with the power to provoke emotional understanding and philosophical thinking” (2016a: x). His favorite notion of a powerful cinema experience as ‘provocation’ thus already shows up on page two, even though here he refrains from calling it ‘cinematic thinking’. And films that pose enough of a challenge to viewers, he goes on to say, have the capacity to “be exercises in ethical (and political) provocation with a transformative potential” (2016a: x [emphasis added]). The undeniably ethical motive of transformation, which has long been at work in Sinnerbrink’s thinking, is now made explicit and moves center stage. Of course he expands his ethical interests on a number of fronts, addressing for example cinema’s relevance with regard to sympathy and empathy, emotional engagement, perspective-taking, and cultivation of the imagination. But his anchor-notions of an affective medium evoking powerful experience, which challenges and pushes the viewer, while disclosing alternative possibilities for thought and action, remains firmly intact. No wonder then that the value and ideal effects that he sees in cinematic ethics sound so familiar: “to effect an ethical conversion, altering our horizon of understanding and transforming how we think, feel, and conduct ourselves in the world” (2016a: 185).
3.2.2 Sinnerbrink’s Ethic: Domains and Modes
Let me round up the main features of the transformational ethic emerging from Sinnerbrink’s account of film as philosophy, starting with the domain of transformation. Sinnerbrink himself nominates philosophy as the main ‘what’, or domain, to be transformed by film. And even though philosophy or philosophical thinking constitutes a broader cultural domain, we have seen that it cannot be uncoupled from personal domains of viewers: Sinnerbrink’s transformation of philosophy thus entails the transformation of our ways of thinking, in particular, yet reaches also into our feelings, habits of perception, and experience of the world (e.g. 2011a: 7, 141–142; 2011c: 40; 2013: 207). In addition, this already comprehensive set of transformational domains grows even larger in Sinnerbrink’s
Next, we have the implicit modes of transformation that Sinnerbrink poses, especially within the domain of the viewer’s thinking. As to be expected by now in this chapter, we also find in Sinnerbrink’s account the idea that film elicits self-transformation in the mode of contemplation. ‘Contemplation’ in this technical sense encompasses not only the thinking prompted in the viewer, but also the triggered affects, emotions, and experiences of the viewer in which the thinking is prompted. Indeed, for Sinnerbrink, films evoke a contemplative mode of transformation by “provoking us to think in response to what film enables us to experience” (2011a: 137).
Instead of arguing […] that bringing philosophical reflection to popular film genres shows how such films can be philosophical, I would like to explore the reverse scenario: responding to films – such as Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE (2006) – that both provoke and resist philosophical reflection. Such films, of varying provenance, genre, style and commercial popularity, have aesthetic and cinematic qualities that prompt an experience conducive to thought; films that provoke, incite, or force us to think, even if we remain uncertain as to what kind of thinking (or writing) might be adequate to such an experience. These are films that ‘resist theory’, evoking an experience that is aesthetic and reflective, yet where the former cannot be reduced to, or even overwhelms, the latter. Such films communicate an experience of thinking that resists philosophical translation or paraphrase; thus they are films where we encounter what I am calling cinematic thinking in its most intensive and dramatic forms”. (2011a: 141–142)
When proponents of the ‘Know Yourself’ ethic envision the viewer’s contemplative endurance, they typically attribute it to a particular strategy on the part of a film – as when a well devised twist-film upsets a routine assumption or schema in the viewer’s thought. But for Sinnerbrink contemplative endurance is intrinsic to his very definition of cinematic thinking: it is a form of thinking that is essentially Other to philosophy (remember: non-conceptual, affective, and aesthetic) and thus, by default, resists our run-of-the-mill philosophical procedures. This also explains, I should add, Sinnerbrink’s preference for films like David Lynch’s Inland Empire. If cinematic thinking by definition must resist our philosophical mastery of films, then it is only natural for Sinnerbrink to associate cinematic thinking with complex and ambiguous art cinema – including, along with Lynch, the oeuvres of Terrence Malick and Lars von Trier. The particular aesthetic, intellectual, even moral challenges that these filmmakers pose are tailor-made to the contemplative endurance that Sinnerbrink seeks from cinematic thinking. Also in his later work, where he addresses not so much cinematic thinking as he does cinematic ethics, Sinnerbrink remains attracted to the same breed of filmmakers. His analyses of films like A Separation (Asghar Farhadi 2011), Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar 2002), and Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu 2010) all underscore that ‘ethical experience’ thrives most when cinema viewers come up against ambiguity, moral ambivalence, estrangement and complex perspective-taking and switching (see 2016a: 80–164).
Another way to construe this resistance of cinema to our thought is to say that it leads the viewer into a mode of contemplative asceticism. From this viewpoint, cinema’s resistance, its work of difficult-making, as I see it, involves
This brings us to a third dimension in the contemplative mode that Sinnerbrink posits for cinematic thinking, namely that it initiates for the viewer a contemplative mysticism. In his own words, cinematic thinking “prompts philosophy to reflect upon its own limits or even to experiment with new forms of philosophical expression” (2011a: 7). So whereas mysticism proper would entail transcending our ordinary forms of experience, by contemplative mysticism I take Sinnerbrink’s vision to mean that we may analogously transcend and renew our conventional forms of thinking – a vision not unlike the ideal of ‘ecstatic thinking’ or ‘thinking the outside’ that I noted earlier. To summarize, for cinema to ‘resist’ philosophical thought can mean that it enacts on our thinking the work of difficult-making (contemplative endurance), and that of withholding (contemplative asceticism). But for cinematic thinking to elicit a mode of contemplative mysticism, means that it moreover does the work of exceeding and reaching beyond our standard philosophical conceptions – thanks to those concept-transcending powers that by Sinnerbrink’s definition sets it apart from our thinking. Cinematic thinking, free from the constraints of our thinking, thus exposes for us the limits of philosophy, yet by the same token exerts pressure on them. In the resultant mode of contemplative mysticism we are forced – aided, really, Sinnerbrink would assure – to overcome those limits, as cinema leads us to think beyond the accepted confines of our own thought.
3.2.3 Romanticism, the New, and Practicing Receptivity
The stand-out transformational value that emerges in Sinnerbrink’s ethic, it should be quite clear by now, is that of the new. It persistently defines the nature of transformation that he seeks from cinematic experience. Regarding
This priority of the new in Sinnerbrink’s ethic follows from its most prominent guiding paradigm: the earlier mentioned philosophical romanticism as championed by Nikolas Kompridis (2006b). For philosophical romanticism, the main mission of philosophy is to expand intelligibility and possibility within our cultural conditions – “to make room for the new”, as Kompridis (2006b: 4) puts it – which includes also making room for new possibilities within philosophy itself. Kompridis goes as far as to claim that the new is normative to philosophical romanticism, not as a law of any kind, but as a normative challenge: we are compelled to be answerable to the new, as well as to revise or abandon those sense-making frameworks that the new disrupts (2006c: 33). And how does Sinnerbrink heed this normativity of the new? Precisely by responding to challenging cinematic art as harboring for us yet unrealized possibilities of thought and experience. His resultant ethic thus incorporates the new as both the motivator of self-transformation and the value that defines the transformation aimed for.
Having put together a portrait of ‘Blow Your Mind’ in Sinnerbrink’s film-philosophy, let me ask in closing how one is to imagine the actual practice of his transformational ethics. On this front as well he provides much for us to work with – not least the romantic paradigm that he relies on. He makes clear that the occasion of his ethic-in-practice should be seen as our thinking with cinema. Cinema thinks in its own complex and ambiguous ways, and in response, viewers think along with it (see 2011a: 8; 2011c: 38). In more concrete terms, Sinnerbrink (2011c: 36) sees this thinking-with as a mutually transformative dialogue – a notion not really in need of the adjunct, considering that its esteemed history as a technique of self-transformation goes back to Socrates and the model exercises of the Platonic dialogues (see Hadot 1995: 89–93; Gordon 1996). Still, what makes our thinking with cinema a transformative dialogue, says Sinnerbrink, is that on the one hand it helps draw out the thought immanent within particular films, while on the other it spurs us to respond creatively in thought to what those films allow us to experience. Related to this dialogue, then, Sinnerbrink suggests that we can also conceive of the practice of his ethic as an experiment; not a set thought experiment as we encountered in ‘Know Yourself’, but an open-ended experiment in thought (Sinnerbrink 2013b: 212; 2011a: ix). ‘Blow Your Mind’ as experiment is thus to try out different styles of reflection in response to cinematic experiences, and devise a language
Everything above however hinges on a conspicuous ‘if’: we can only respond to the new, and cultivate new thinking, if we are indeed sufficiently open and receptive to the supposed newness of cinematic thinking. We must first be prepared to ‘get’ the new, to put it bluntly, if we want to go on and think it. This provision is yet another point that Sinnerbrink is quite clear on. And I consider it a significant one. For it anticipates the place of preparatory ethics within the bigger picture of the cinemakeover that I am to sketch in this chapter.
Sinnerbrink emphasizes that cinematic thinking – for both its claimed effects on philosophy, and its ethical effects on us – requires an appropriate attitude on the part of the philosopher-viewer. In essence, he is asking for prior measures of self-transformation by which viewers set up the (further) self-transformation desired through film. Such measures are what I label preparatory ethics. The preparatory elements in Sinnerbrink’s ethic start, already, with the most basic tenet of his romantic film-philosophy, which is that it “responds to film as a way of thinking” (2011c: 26 [emphasis added]). And to help ensure this responsive attitude to film, he singles out what are basically three imperatives for the philosopher-viewer to make. I consider them ethical preparations because they each entail a measure of work on the self. The first is a clearly ascetic imperative calling for philosophical self-restraint: we must avoid applying any ‘readymade conceptual framework’ as a key to a film’s philosophical meaning. (His own romantic framework appears to be exempted from the category of ‘readymade’.) The second imperative is to maintain a ‘sustained receptiveness’ to what films disclose for us. Understood in terms of transformational ethics, this is a cultivation in oneself of the value of receptivity. Receptivity is the normative twin that must accompany Sinnerbrink’s pursuit of the New. For “[t]he new is not something we will”, as Kompridis (2006b: 4) explains, “it is something we let happen”. In this sense, “[r]eceptivity is essential to ‘making’ the new possible” (2006b: 4). Hence for us to make possible new thinking, we must practice receptivity towards the thinking immanent to films; and we do so through devoted film-critical attention to the aesthetic particularities that they disclose. Sinnerbrink’s third imperative, then, centers on the closely related value of openness: to be able to respond to the (remember: transformative) thinking of film, we need an “openness to transforming how we think and write philosophically about film” (2011c: 38). We thus allow for a
As I see it, preparatory ethics pose certain thorny issues to the project of film as philosophy, issues well illustrated by Sinnerbrink’s measures for making ‘Blow Your Mind’ happen. Among other things, his preparatory ethics raise questions over where the main initiative for our transformation through film comes from, and suggest that films perhaps play a far less eminent, more incidental role than he would like to admit. But for now I leave this and other questions for the concluding section of the chapter.
3.2.4 Daniel Frampton: Posit a ‘Filmind’ to ‘Blow Your Mind’
‘If we begin to understand how film “thinks”, Daniel Frampton declares in a promotional article for his book, “we will start to understand how moving images affect our life and being” (Frampton 2006b). However, before going into Frampton’s up-front ‘if’, and the ‘life and being’-part that depends on it, let me first sum up how philosophical thinking gets affected, and transformed, within this audacious scheme that Frampton names ‘filmosophy’.
Wherever filmosophy considers the impact of film-thinking on philosophy, it conveys a ‘Blow Your Mind’ transformational ethic very similar to that of Sinnerbrink. Taking his cue from Deleuze, like Sinnerbrink, Frampton characterizes ‘film-thinking’ as a thinking radically distinct from ours: it is ‘languageless’, non-conceptual, and imagistic. It is film’s own thinking, it goes beyond our thinking, it is thinking that we cannot replicate (e.g. 2006a: 10–11, 92). Not that film-thinking is better than ours, he cautions – it’s ‘just different’ (2008: 366). Yet it is this difference that generates the power for film-thinking to transform our thinking; which, Frampton suggests, occurs through the same modes of transformation that I described in Sinnerbrink. First there are the moments of contemplative endurance and asceticism. Frampton claims that film-thinking makes us recognize the ‘limits’ and ‘impower’ of our logical thinking: we struggle to formulate the direct, affective, indistinct meanings that film-thinking conveys; we cannot think images (or ‘image-concepts’) as clearly; hence we cannot create and show new ideas and concepts in the way that film-thinking does. Yet, as with Sinnerbrink, our grappling with film-thinking culminates also in a contemplative mysticism. By thinking new realities, says Frampton, film moves us to construct new ways of thinking. “Film-thinking forces thought to think the unclear, blurry, dispersive, outside” (2006a: 102). It can even provide new categories for us to think by (2006a: 212). It thus drives our thinking
Yet before we can have any of this, Frampton is quite clear, we must take up filmosophy as a new approach to understanding film. Frampton’s entire filmosophy is really an envisioned practice for the filmosophical filmgoer. It is essentially what I call a preparatory transformational practice, since it orients the viewer for an optimal experience of cinema. Frampton is after all not describing cinematic experience. He is re-describing our experience of cinema, by effectively prescribing that we receive film as a thinking entity. For the philosopher, “[f]ilmosophy thus offers a practice, a skill to do something; a strategy for being philosophical about film and seeing the philosophical in film” (2006a: 212). So to accomplish ‘Blow Your Mind’, you first need to harbor the idea of a ‘filmind’, with the rest of Frampton’s conceptual inventions, as your preparatory mindset towards cinema. Because, he makes clear, “[f]ilm bleeds its ideas if you allow yourself to become attuned to its thinking” (2008: 373 [emphasis added]). Also, Frampton doesn’t reserve the practice of filmosophy for the philosopher alone. While filmosophy may “reconfigure our [theoretical] understanding of the encounter between film and filmgoer”, it helps more generally to “shape the experience of the [everyday] filmgoer” (2006a: 148). Prepped with filmosophy’s concepts, filmgoers enhance for themselves cinema’s capacity to immerse, to mean, and to affect: “[Filmgoers] will have a more suitable mode of attention, and thus experience more, and thus have more meaning possibilities to steer their interpretations” (2006a: 149). Unlike any other philosophical work covered here, Frampton’s book is quite consciously a guiding text: one for attaining both a transformed and, in return, transformative experience of cinema.
3.2.5 Filmosophy, the Prequel: Preparatory Ethics
However much Frampton’s filmosophy casts the ethical picture of ‘Blow Your Mind’, then, its greater emphasis is on the preparatory self-transformations that must precede that picture. Thanks to the detail that Frampton goes into, we can formulate his preparatory ethic in the same terms of domain, paradigm, and value of transformation that hold for the other ethics discussed so far.
The main domain that Frampton designates for preparatory transformation is cinematic experience; as filmgoers, that is, we are to enhance what we may experience of cinema (in accordance to a set of values that I will get to in a moment). Yet this must go hand in hand with self-work in the domain of
In Frampton’s compilation of neologisms – involving the ‘filmind’ as ‘film-being’, doing its ‘film-thinking’ – the filmgoer has a “certain kind of knowledge (concepts) of film’s action, resulting in a certain type of linguistic direction (rhetoric)” (2006a: 158). To adopt these concepts, and let them govern one’s cinematic experience, is the basic self-work on language that filmosophy requires. Frampton describes the practicalities hereof in a number of ways. He speaks of filmgoers having to ‘use’ these concepts when experiencing a film (e.g. 2006a: 99), or to experience film “with this language in their knowledge” (2006a: 149). He also speaks of having “to see the film ‘through’ the concept of thinking” (2008: 366). But apparently, also, our recourse to such a new concept should not be too calculated and effortful. “[I]ts true habitat”, says Frampton, “is in the back of our thinking […] to be learnt, then forgotten, even though it never goes away” (2006a: 98).
What does Frampton’s call for inducting ourselves into his alternative vocabulary tell us about filmosophy’s guiding paradigm? Certainly, one cannot ignore his indebtedness to phenomenology, with its characteristic striving for the words that may best describe our experiences. But we should keep in mind that Frampton’s philosophy is of a Deleuzian breed (or a compromised one, at least) that must, for example, answer to Deleuze’s anti-subjectivism (cf. Ferencz-Flatz & Hanich 2016: 51–52). While he takes considerable inspiration from Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology, therefore, he is just as quick to distance himself from the ‘anthropomorphic’ conceptions of cinema that drives her approach (e.g. Frampton 2006a: 46). And to add a further complication, Frampton’s main business is not a phenomenological description of the filmgoer’s experience, but its re-description, unto an ideal experience. If anything, he is formulating a consummate ‘best-case’ phenomenology.
In response, the concepts of filmosophy engender a “poetic rhetoric” – “an emotive and fluid language” – that replenishes the film experience so reduced by technicism (2006a: 99). The strict ‘technicist-poetic’ dichotomy that Frampton draws here is typical of how transformational ethics construct their anti-paradigms. Rather than “technicize” the filmgoer’s experience, he reasons, filmosophy attempts to “organicize” it (2006a: 106). And whereas technicism breaks up the experience, filmosophy aspires to bring the pieces back together in “a new organization of the whole”, under the unifying concept of an intending, thinking filmind (2006a: 171). One may question, as Philipp Schmerheim (2008: 117–118) does, whether it is entirely possible (or even desirable) to completely excise technical conceptions from a poetic appraisal of film. But Frampton sticks resolutely to his dichotomous either-or, because, as I will show in a moment, technicism (by his rhetorical definition) is simply not compatible with the kind of experience that he wishes to fashion. Doing away with technical language is of course a measure of contemplative asceticism required on our part, which he calls “an unlearning, a more ‘suitable’, more cinematic reconceptualization” (2006a: 212 [emphasis added]). Note, however, the ironical twist: we need to make our own a set of concepts in order to attain an experience of film-thinking that Frampton defines as inherently ‘languageless’ and ‘non-conceptual’. Yet even apart from the apparent contradiction, I cannot but question whether a mere reconceptualization of cinema can achieve such an experience.
Despite these issues, it remains the ambition of filmosophy to ensure for the filmgoer an enhanced experience of the cinema. By which transformational
First and most evident, is that Frampton wants to cultivate “the fullest and most poetic experience for the filmgoer” (2006a: 101). He qualifies this fullness of experience especially as a fullness of meaning. The concept of the filmind, he claims, gives a poetic reason for everything we encounter in a film. By seeing film as thoughtful we experience all its forms and actions “as fully intended, giving every formal move a possible meaning” (2006a: 101). Whereas “technicist rhetoric weighs down the meaning possibilities of film” (2006a: 100), filmosophy proliferates possible meaning by transfiguring film into the product of thoughtful intention.
I turn to the second value. The ‘meaning’ that Frampton refers to above is clearly not in the conventional sense of knowledge or an insight derived from interpretation. Frampton speaks outright of “affective meaning”, adding that “the meaning is in the experience” (2006a: 168); or he speaks of the “meaning to be experienced” (2006a: 101). So it is our access to this sort of meaning – thus, the filmgoer’s openness to it – that filmosophy is meant to foster. It is to this end that Frampton emphasizes the immediacy and directness of experience that filmosophy facilitates between filmgoer and film. Whereas the technicist mindset removes the filmgoer from the experience, the filmosopher experiences film ‘directly’ and ‘more intuitively’ (2006a: 8). In the latter case, “[t]he affects of film produce immediate, pure meaning”, since “[f]ilmosophical (affective) ‘meaning’ […] arises directly from experiencing the film” (2006a: 168).
Frampton’s aim for both fullness and openness (directness) in the filmgoer’s experience is arguably an extension of his third and clearest transformational value: unity (or wholeness). As a marker for enhanced experience, as Frampton sees it, unity in fact manifests itself in more than one way. On one level, it refers to the unification of the various elements of films in the viewer’s experience. Unlike technicism, filmosophy aims to “organicize” and remove the separation between style and content; form and meaning; or in Frampton’s terms the ‘object’ of film-thinking (e.g. a character) and the film’s particular ‘thinking of’ (framing, movement, etc.) that object (2006a: 100–101, 162). This unification of form and meaning through the use of the concept of film-thinking, creates for the filmgoer an ‘integral whole’ (2006a: 101).
On a further level, however, filmosophy engenders unity also in the ‘organic uniting’ of filmgoer and film (2006a: 101). Frampton fancies that his theory has been labeled ‘science fiction’ (Frampton 2008: 373; cf. Price 2008: 103). And, at this point, his science fiction seems like an account of a cinema-worshipping mystic cult: he envisions “a filmosophical filmgoer who actively merges with
It is ultimately on the basis of providing this uniting ‘link’ with film-thinking, I gather, that filmosophy promises also the (meaning-)fullness, directness, and openness that define Frampton’s ideal film-going experience. Yet Frampton readily admits: filmgoers will not necessarily make the connection. Because, he says, “the link is not one that filmgoers are practiced at recognizing” (2006a: 158 [emphasis added]). Hence, I must again stress: we are still squarely in the sphere of preparation, where filmosophy spells out the practices of self-transformation that must shape our experience of film.
Yet why take the trouble to shape our experience? What are the benefits that the filmosopher may reap from it?
3.2.6 The Sequel to the Prequel: Filmosophy’s Transformational Effects
‘Throw out your usual technical jargon, and see film as a thinking filmind’. Check. ‘Come to enhance your experience of film’. Check. Here ends the preparatory dimension of the cinemakeover as filmosophy conceives of it. Now the filmgoer, who up to this point had to transform (the experience of) cinema, can just as much expect to be transformed by it. From here on, therefore, Frampton foresees the resulting transformational effects of our engagement
[F]ilm can show us ordinary things in a new way, can make us look again at what we thought we understood, can make us see ordinary things anew. Film-thinking transforms the recognisable (in a small or large way), and this immediate transfiguration by film provokes the idea that our thinking can transform our world. (2006a: 208–209)
Frampton thus poses a direct relation between the way that film transfigures the things that it shows (or ‘thinks’) and, as a result, the transformation of our perception of those things. His particular emphasis on perception and sight in this regard – unlike most philosophers that I discuss in this chapter – suggests that Frampton even qualifies to be called a ‘revelationist’. Revelationist film theories, according to Malcolm Turvey (2008), value cinema for uncovering features of reality that are otherwise inaccessible to normal human vision, and thereby extending our perceptual powers. Frampton, in fact, has no problem with openly extolling cinema as ‘an instrument of revelation’ (2006a: 212). And where he does so, unsurprisingly, he appeals to the very writers who Turvey describes as pioneers of the revelationist tradition – Epstein, Vertov and Balázs (see Frampton 2006a: 3, 204, 208, 212; cf. Turvey 2008: 21–48).
Frampton also shares with the revelationist tradition what seems to be a strategic vagueness on how notions of perception and sight are used (see Turvey 2008: 18–19). Take the double meaning alluded to with the phrase, “film-thinkings […] change our perception of the world” (Frampton 2006a: 211). Frampton blurs the distinction between the concrete sensual perception of things as opposed to the rational, cognitive ‘perception’ (understanding) we have of them – something that he does just as much with the term ‘seeing’. This equivocation is convenient to his larger project. It enables him to make an easy
Lastly, however, I need to be more specific about what it is that Frampton as a ‘revelationist’ takes film to reveal. In terms of transformational values, the classical revelationists were interested in truth or truthfulness – thus, how film reveals ‘the true nature of reality’, or reality as it truly is (Turvey 2008: 3). Not so for Frampton. By now we have seen that a cherished value of ethics of self-expansion – which the ‘Blow Your Mind’ ethic of filmosophy most certainly is – is that of the new. For Frampton, film’s transformation of perception, the effect of its revelatory capacity, comes down to how it shows and engenders what is new (e.g. 2006a: 151, 155, 208–209). Film shows the new, thinks the new, conjures up new realities; and as a result engenders in us new experiences, new perceptions, new thinking – in sum, “a new point of view about the world” (2006a: 212).
Yet the next ethic asks: what is so new about ‘a new point of view about the world’ if it is still your point of view? This ethic, in contrast, sees in film a promise of ridding viewers of a subjective point of view altogether.
3.3 ‘Lose Your Self’: Deleuzian Inspirations Take #2 (Radical Immanence)
The ubiquitous motto ‘to lose yourself’ (in the moment … the pleasure … the spectacle …) is a frequently invoked incentive for our consumption of movies. However, for the philosophers who follow here, as for the transformational ethics of film that they propose, this Subjectivity-affirming motto is too meek. At the very least, they require to be set apart under the fine-tuned bumper sticker, ‘Lose Your [note the space] Self’.
Similar to ‘Blow Your Mind’, the ‘Lose Your Self’ ethic moves within the topos of ekstasis. Yet whereas ‘Blow Your Mind’ wants to transcend forms of thinking, ‘Lose Your Self’ wants to altogether leave behind the individual self or subject that does the thinking. The ethical imperative to ‘Lose Your Self’ takes self-expansion to its most extreme: it pursues a self that expands, that opens up, to the point of its own dissipation. In a sense, ‘Lose Your Self’ pushes ekstasis to a point where it spills over to an equally prominent
Whereas endorsers of ‘Blow Your Mind’ take their inspiration from Deleuze’s two Cinema books (1986; 1989), those of ‘Lose Your Self’ concentrate on the wider Deleuzian ‘metaphysics’ that in the Cinema books recedes more into the background. Pivotal in Deleuze’s ontology for the ‘Lose Your Self’ ethic is his commitment to the pure immanence of being: Deleuze insists on reality as absolute immanence in itself; “it is not in anything, nor can it be attributed to something; it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject” (Deleuze 2006: 385). This plane of immanence knows no outside, and allows for no true transcendence. It implodes the distinction between inside and outside, and – significant in this context – fuses subject with object.
This ontological leveling act represents one of the more radical instances of Continental philosophy’s abiding quest of ‘decentering the subject’. Deleuze decenters the subject straight off the map. An immanentist ontology such as his leaves no room for subjectivity in any conventional sense. He eschews the very notion, preferring instead to speak of ‘pre-personal individualities’ or ‘non-personal individuations’ (cited in Rushton 2008: 135). These individuations – expressed through matter, movements, forces, affects, intensities, and speeds on a plane of immanence – are effectively like ‘little selves’ underneath the self, which render an ‘active’ subject possible (Deleuze 1994: 75). Deleuze thus speaks of “our ‘self’ only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us”, seeing that “it is always a third party who says ‘me’” (1994: 75).
This perspective enforces the same ontological leveling between the viewer and film, fused together on the same immanent plane, as testified to by the Deleuzian maxim ‘the brain is the screen’ (Deleuze 2000: 366). Talk of subjective experience or consciousness, in this context, can only be conceived of as an emergent event of the viewer’s ontological merger with film. As Richard Rushton (2009: 48–49) explains, for Deleuze one cannot posit a ‘subject’ prior to its encounter with film. If we are to suppose such an anterior entity (which in any case would be dismantled by the film encounter’s flow of forces) it is for all practical purposes a non-subject. An eventual ‘subject’ can emerge only from
By now, I trust, my chosen label ‘Lose Your Self’ must seem a misnomer, and one on a number of counts. I would welcome this judgment. The shortcomings of the slogan merely reflect dilemmas that are intrinsic to the ethic itself. My defunct bumper sticker thus helpfully obliges us to note these dilemmas before I go into particular cases below.
The most self-apparent issue: the reliance on Deleuzian-type immanence, as paradigm to the ethic, in many ways rules out the very ‘self’ that we are supposed to ‘lose’. To think of ‘Lose Your Self’ in terms of mysticism solves little of this, since self-transcendence still implies an initial self to be transcended. (Thinking along any lines of transcendence would in any case be branded a ‘distortion of immanence’ (Deleuze 2006: 385) – but I get back to this tension in a moment.) In the particular ‘Lose Your Self’ cases discussed below, I instead attribute to the ethic the transformational mode of asceticism, which is the most natural fit with its assumption that film elicits a loss – a lessening, a giving up – of individual subjectivity. This ascetic self-less-ness, we will see, finds articulation in a range of terms and figures: desubjectivization, deterritorialization, destratification, self-dispersion, self-dismantling, self-destruction, and self-shattering, to name but a few. Not that the option of asceticism makes the predicament go away, however. As an ethic of selflessness, ‘Lose Your Self’ still designates the self as the domain where transformation must occur, even though that very domain is called into question by the immanentism that motivates the ethic.
When reflecting on ‘Lose Your Self’, therefore, I constantly grapple with this ambivalence: does the ethic bespeak our actual ontological condition, or an ideal condition, still to be actualized? Does it insist on our selflessness as already given, or does it set selflessness as a goal? The acceptance of pure immanence suggests the former, although we clearly also have an ethical directive here – a call to action – which affirms the latter. Each of the philosophers discussed below, I believe, try to uphold some compromise between actual condition and ideal condition: namely, that immanence and immanent becoming is our actual condition; but also, that we need various ‘Lose Your Self’ types of ethics
Now for ‘Lose Your Self’ to make the dual-assertion of selflessness as both actuality and ideal, brings into play further transformational values that, by further specifying the ‘selflessness’ strived for, help ease the discrepancy between the actual and the ideal. As will become clear, to merely lose the self is hardly what the philosophers concerned are after – the basic ideal of selflessness is but shorthand for more definitive values.
The most prominent of the definitive values, and a crucial intermediary between accepted ontological actuality and ethical ideal, is the transformational value of nature. Generally, this value betokens the good as a life aligned with, or even abandoned to, nature and its forces. For any version of ‘Lose Your Self’, accordingly, the apparently negative act of losing the self is at once an affirmative losing of self to nature, to the world, in what we may call a ‘becoming-world of the self’ (Braidotti 2006: 157 [emphasis added]). Therefore, as I detail later on, the ethic can be understood as urging a ‘return to nature’, recommending film as our means to nature and the self’s absorption therein. Not that the ethic suggests nature to be something ‘out there’. Rather, it sees film as allowing the viewer an engagement with nature “as it is incarnated in our selves and as it forms the background to our selves” (O’Sullivan 2008: 100). (Needless to say, the philosophers involved exhibit a corresponding Nature-motive in their conceptions of film as philosophy – described at the close of Chapter 1 – according to which the philosophical value of films derives from their capacity to connect with or instantiate nature/the real. By near default, therefore, these philosophers are investing their efforts in the transformational question of how films-as-philosophy may effect a ‘return to nature’.)
However, being the broad notion that it is, the value of nature itself requires qualification by still other values. For Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs, as I will show, ‘Lose Your Self’ is to submit to the flux, change, and becoming of immanent nature; whereas for the likes of Bersani and Dutoit it is rather to submit to nature’s oneness or connectedness. Concepts like change versus connectedness are obviously ontological descriptors. Yet here such descriptors take on a double role as also ethical values in an ontology-focused ethic. The values echo a variety of privileged assumptions about nature, and thus provide distinct measures of what an ideal self-lost-to-nature is supposed to look like.
Undoubtedly, then, the various values above clarify the extent to which ‘Lose Your Self’ turns the all-out immanence of subjectivity into an ideal: such immanence (related to notions of nature, change, connectedness, etc.) is as much something to attain – or, at the very least, maintain – as it is our most
[The Deleuzian plane of immanence] is indeed wholly other than this world. Deleuze creates a new dualism, between the ‘old’ world of representation and the new, creative plane of immanence […] The radically immanent can be understood as transcending our lives, because the whole interpretation of immanence as a goal to strive for, away from the world of representation, pictures this form of immanence as quasi unattainable. To reach it, we have to transcend our own ego, give up our personality. With his plane of immanence, Deleuze creates a place where all egos are left behind […] So transcendence does have a meaning in Deleuze’s philosophy, but it is the dynamic meaning of transcending as an act of human beings or of beings in general. Their static form transcends towards a more dynamic constellation in which they can be creative, in which they can produce again. This is what happens on the plane of immanence: all these moving ‘lines’ produce different intensities of Being. The act of transcending has nothing to do with verticality: on the contrary, it is meant to annul any kind of hierarchical position. (2012a: 101–102)
Building on Justaert’s account, I detect at least two senses of a transcendent immanence in ‘Lose Your Self’. First, a broader sense. Any transformational ethic, even if only in the slightest way, aims for a higher plane of personal existence. Here, ironically, the hierarchy-annulling plane of immanence functions as that ‘higher’ plane. To aspire to fullness of immanence – from an ethical-practical standpoint – implies that we must transcend our world of everyday experience where assumptions of subjectivity, hierarchy, and other supposed distortions of immanence thrive. Yet immanence is also transcendent in the stricter, more direct sense: namely that the aimed-at condition of pure immanence appears to lie beyond our reach. The fullness of such immanence, for all
3.3.1 Dismantle Your Self: The Body without Organs (as Return to Nature)
Before moving on to examples of a ‘Lose Your Self’ ethics of film, let me first consider a more general, paradigmatic instance of ‘Lose Your Self’, as emerges from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s meditations on the ‘Body without Organs’ in A Thousand Plateaus (1987: 149–166). Sketching this Deleuzian-Guattarian exemplar helps to flesh out the broader Deleuzian paradigm that informs the transformational ethics of film following below. The ‘Body without Organs’ usefully demonstrates how immanence – to ‘attain’ immanence, in effect – translates into ethical-practical matter and indeed an ideal of personal transformation. Moreover, it provides an opportunity to show how ‘Lose Your Self’ goes hand in hand with the transformational ideal of ‘a return to nature’.
Where psychoanalysis says, ‘Stop, find your self again,’ we should say instead, ‘Let’s go further still, we haven’t found our BwO yet, we haven’t sufficiently dismantled our self’. Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. (1987: 151)
The authors appropriated the notion from Antonin Artaud (1976), who pits the ideal of a changeable Body without Organs against what he considers the inherent stasis of the organism. The organism, says Artaud, is indicative of the judgment of God: it is static, a fixed consolidation of organs, each ‘organ-ized’ into a discrete function. The Body without Organs, in contrast, is not an organism. As an inherently open condition, not organ-ized, and not fixed; it is
In their elaboration of Artaud’s idea, Deleuze and Guattari argue that it is ultimately not the organs that are the enemies of the Body without Organs. It is precisely the organization of the organs – called the organism – that the Body without Organs is opposed to (1987: 158). They see the organism as concretions and layers that accrue on the Body without Organs: “[I]t is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences” (1987: 159).
To make oneself a Body without Organs, consequently, is to dismantle the inhibiting forms, strata, and organ-izations that make you an organism. In my own framework, this emphasis on doing away qualifies Deleuze and Guattari’s challenge as one of radical asceticism. Although they never use the term, they make quite clear: their project with regard to the organism is to ‘diminish’ and ‘shrink’ it (1987: 162). Moreover, they state, the Body without Organs “is what remains when you take everything away” (1987: 151). Yet they do caution: this self-dismantling is an art of dosages requiring due temperance. “You don’t reach the BwO […] by wildly destratifying” (1987: 160). You must invent self-destructions only bit by bit, and still retain sufficient rations of subjectivity that enable you to respond to the dominant reality and turn it against itself. “Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself”, they explain, “but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor” (1987: 160).
How do Deleuze and Guattari envision the limit or destination of this practice? When you take everything away, they say, you arrive at an immanent field – “nonstratified, unformed, intense matter” (1987: 153) – upon which only intensities can pass and circulate. In other words, the Body without Organs is ultimately occupied and populated only by intensities. So Deleuze and Guattari’s challenge is clear: forget about finding your self – and look instead to dismantle the (sedimentations of) self, causing an open flow “of singularities that can no longer be said to be personal, and intensities that can no longer be said to be extensive” (1987: 156). This resultant field of immanence knows no Selves, as they conceive of it, because the interior and exterior are equally part of the immanence (the ‘absolute Outside’) in which they have fused (1987: 156). Subsequently, “[t]here is no longer a Self [Moi] that feels, acts, and recalls;
Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari would balk at my calling their proposed ethical practice ‘ascetic’ – ever the Nietzscheans, they would point out that the making of a Body without Organs is an affirmative, liberating process. Yet the real issue at this point is not the ascetic mode that I identify. To do justice to their position, instead, one only needs to recognize the particular transformational values that Deleuze and Guattari espouse, values that are unlike the repressive ideals that normally get associated with asceticism. They do not consider a diminished or dismantled self an end in itself. As Brent Adkins (2015: 96–107) rightly notes, the basic ethical challenge that the Body without Organs poses is to realize in ourselves the tendency towards change and, ultimately, a state of becoming. The self, when leveled out to a field of flows and intensities, can open up to new relations and new combinations. This flattened, continuous ontology enables change and creation, and affirms becoming over static being (see Adkins 2015: 105). Deleuze (1998b: 51) astutely captures this transformed state of becoming when in a different context he instructs: “Stop thinking of yourself as an ego (moi) in order to live as a flow (flux), a set of flows in relation with other flows, outside of oneself and within oneself”.
These transformational values behind the practice of a Body without Organs correspond to the selfsame change and becoming that characterizes Deleuze’s process ontology, as it conceives of reality as a constant flux of forces. A related way of construing Deleuze and Guattari’s ethical project, therefore, is to say that we are to abandon our selves to Nature, in the sense that we submit to the ceaseless flux of matter-energy that is the plane of immanence. In this case, the values of change and becoming link up with the further transformational value of (submitting to, connecting with, or even instantiating) nature.
This is an interpretation offered by John Sellars (1999), who in an illuminating essay brands the Deleuzian-Guattarian Body without Organs as an injunction to ‘live according to nature’. (The ‘nature’ that Sellars invokes here is of course nature in the Deleuzian sense of the plane of immanence, which encompasses both the animate and inanimate, as well as the artificial and natural.) What Deleuze and Guattari see as a dismantling of the self, Sellars understands as an “overcoming of the division between man and nature” (1999: 2). Deleuze and Guattari ultimately propose that we engage in a destructive, deterritorializing
The main aim of Sellars’ essay, however, is to demonstrate the indebtedness of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a Body without Organs to ancient Stoicism. Sellars argues that their philosophy of a Body without Organs follows the same metaphysical-cum-ethical model of ‘a return to nature’ set out by the likes of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. Central to the Stoic model is the notion of adopting a ‘point of view of the cosmos’, based on a naturalism (and, I may add, anti-subjectivism) similar to that of Deleuze.22 As Sellars explains, both Marcus Aurelius and Seneca frequently resort to the image of a cosmic perspective as a means of relocating the self within the infinity of nature in order to escape one’s limited point of view (1999: 21). When Marcus Aurelius, for example, uses the phrase ‘to live in accord with nature’, he means to disregard the way things appear from our limited and subjective human judgment in favor of the way they are from the objective, overall point of view of nature. Most of Marcus Aurelius’ famous Meditations can thus be seen as an initiation into the contemplative technique of observing one’s life from this cosmic point of view, from which “local encounters between bodies become insignificant compared to the vast flows of matter-energy that form the system of nature taken as a whole” (1999: 18).
Sellars considers a Body without Organs to involve the same shift in perspective. Much like Marcus Aurelius, Deleuze and Guattari wish to relocate the individual organism within the greater context of nature. They ask that we dismantle the perspective of the individual organism in order to “move towards a limit-perspective from which everything would be experienced as unformed flux” (1999: 5). It is thus in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari, like the Stoics, want to overcome the human-nature dichotomy that Sellars speaks of. They also propose a transformational reorientation, in which the perspective of the finite self is transcended by our submitting to the boundless, extra-subjective perspective of the cosmos.
Yet for all their similarities as ‘Lose Your Self’ ethics, with a mutual naturalistic emphasis, I must insist that the Stoics do urge our self-abandonment
3.3.2 Lose Your Self (to Nature)… through Film
In light of the Body without Organs as a ‘Lose Your Self’ exemplar, let us consider how its ethical principles recur in the context of film as philosophy, and film philosophy in general. I turn to three cases – that of Elena del Río, William Brown, as well as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit. Although these philosophers have not yet featured in this book, their cases are deeply indicative of how a (Deleuzian inspired) immanentist outlook on how films do philosophy leads to the same ‘Lose Your Self’ ethical picture sketched above. Much as in the Body without Organs philosophy, each case advances the ‘self-less’ immanence of the viewer-subject not only as an ontological actuality but also – in one way or another – as an ethical ideal. The main difference, however, is that these film philosophers construe film as initiator of our transformation unto self-less-ness – a move that privileges our encounter with films as a special node, somehow, in the flows and intensities that populate the plane of immanence. All three of the cases therefore rely on a motive of Nature for their conception of film as philosophy: the philosophical relevance of films derives from how they express, instantiate, or move forces of nature/the real. And by mobilizing nature, these philosophers propose, films eat away at the artifices of individual subjectivity, and encourage an abandoning of self to nature. Accordingly, in what follows, I give special attention to the connection between the asceticism of ‘Lose Your Self’ – the ambition to do away with the individual self through film – and the ethical topos of a ‘return to nature’.
3.3.3 Affect Your Self: Elena del Río
Elena del Río’s affective-performative approach to cinema presents a first sample of ‘Lose Your Self’ understood as a transformational ethics of film. Inasmuch as ‘Lose Your Self’ entails a return to nature, that ‘return’ in Del Río’s case is specifically to the realm of body and affect. At first glance, therefore, it would seem that her conception of self-transformation makes for a comfortable fit with ‘Sense Your Senses’ – the ethic that I earlier identified with reference to Vivian Sobchack’s film phenomenology. Not unlike Sobchack, Del Río
However, Del Río’s simultaneous insistence on desubjectivized immanence, as she adopts from Deleuze, bares assumptions that are at odds with those behind ‘Sense Your Senses’. Whereas Sobchack’s approach to film as philosophy is based on a motive of Subjectivity, Del Río proceeds squarely from a motive of Nature. Most notably, when Del Río speaks of affect, she does so from a tradition that conceives of affect as a strictly depersonalized, intensive force – not a personal state (see Ott 2017). Affect rests only upon “the workings of a nonorganic, anonymous vitality” (Del Río 2008: 115). For Del Río the whole point of addressing affection thus understood – as the power of all bodies to affect and be affected – is to downplay individual subjectivity, to carry out a leveling across human and non-human bodies, and thereby to consider ‘the human event’ in ‘a less personal way’ (2008: 211).
In the same Deleuzian vein, Del Río means by ‘body’ an assemblage of forces or affects, which combine and recombine with other forces in a greater process of creative becoming (2008: 3, 12). A body, as much for Del Río as it is for Deleuze, is thus by definition a moving body: its powers of affection and becoming are ceaselessly in the making. It is this inherent movement or becoming of bodily forces that she takes to be ‘ontologically akin’ to a performance – the central theme of her film philosophy (2008: 3). Yet, notice how she has to strip ‘performance’ from all aspects of subjective intent in order to equate it with creative becoming. It is only by trimming performance down to “the expression and perception of affect in the body” that Del Río can claim that performance coincides with the creative becoming of existence itself (2008: 10).
Against this broader affective-performative backdrop that Del Río sets, let me outline three senses in which a return to nature emerges from her approach to film. The first of these senses pertains to her account of how films are relevant to philosophy, and the latter two to the ‘Lose Your Self’ ethic that emerges from that account.
In the first sense, Del Río proposes a theoretical reorientation, a ‘return to nature’ that promises to galvanize the philosophical potential of films. She proposes the need to (re)consider cinema from the viewpoint of nature, which is
What philosophical potential exactly does this viewpoint hold for films? From the immanent viewpoint of nature, Del Río explains, “performance involves a mobilization of affective circuits that supersedes the viewer’s investment in the image through representational structures of belief and mimesis” (2008: 4). From this viewpoint, that is, the affects mobilized by performance are unassimilable; they circumvent language, binary structures, ideological functions, and similar static forms. Mobilized affects summon a creative ontology operating outside of such static forms and compels them to change.23 It is in this inevitable displacement of static forms that Del Río sees the philosophical promise of cinema’s performing bodies: she finds these bodies “capable of transforming static forms and concepts typical of a representational paradigm into forces and concepts that exhibit a transformative/expansive potential” (2008: 6). To single out one example: in her treatment of Sally Potter’s semi-autobiographical drama, The Tango Lesson (1997), the static concept in question is that of narcissism (2008: 129–143). Del Río seeks to demonstrate that the film – which deals with a turbulent dance partnership between a filmmaker (Sally Potter) and her conscripted dancer-actor (Pablo Verón) – transforms the traditional notion of narcissism by undoing the subject-object binary, and fixation on identity, that underpin it. (As Del Río explains, narcissism in the film refers not only to the self-absorbed filmmaker in it but also – as some critics hold – to Sally Potter casting herself in that role.) Contrary to traditional notions of narcissism as a self-absorbedness at the expense of the other, Del Río finds, The Tango Lesson enacts the narcissistic impulse as an affirmative, creative power: the narcissistic body thrives in its affective connections with other bodies, in an open-ended unfolding of its potential for becoming. Yet this particular disclosure of narcissism still depends on a radical reconsideration of bodies and selves from the viewpoint of depersonalized forces – Del Río’s proposal for film as philosophy to return to nature.
Intertwined with her approach to film as philosophy above, is Del Río’s ‘Lose Your Self’ ethic, where ‘return to nature’ emerges in a second – now ethical – sense. Just as we have seen with Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs,
How do we imagine this somewhat abstruse transformational ethic play out in practice, though? What needs to happen between film and viewer? Del Río portrays the cinema situation as an assemblage of desubjectivized forces and bodies, generating an array of intensified affective circuits on the basis of “the affective continuum that joins life and the cinema” (2008: 208). These
Parallel to the transformational ethics above emerges a third and final sense of ‘a return to nature’ – a more modest ethical thread in Del Río’s thinking, suggesting a more conventional transformational ethics. This is not the radical ethics of ascetic self-dismantling in the name of becoming, but an ethics of awareness, where ‘a return to nature’ simply means to become aware of your capacity to affect and be affected by other bodies. She notes, for example, that “one of the foremost functions of the cinema is to bring to consciousness the body’s powers of affection” (2008: 212–213). A few passages on she adds that “the cinema has a unique capacity to bring to living consciousness the most intense, transformative affects in our lives” (2008: 216). According to the implied ethics, then, affects (inevitably) bring about transformation – the transformational function of films is only to enhance awareness of these affects and their effects. A return to nature in this instance is thus qualified by the transformational value of awareness, an awareness of nature; in Del Río’s terms, awareness of “a field of forces that are already here and now” (2008: 215).
To bring Vivian Sobchack back into the picture, Del Río’s agreement with ‘Sense Your Senses’ is nowhere stronger than with the particular ethic of awareness that she expresses here. Despite her mismatching assumptions about the nature of affects, Del Río is at this point just as invested as Sobchack in the ideal of cultivating awareness of affect through cinema. According to Sobchack, we have seen, viewers need this technique of transformation because of conditions of habituation and abstraction that estrange us from our bodies (e.g. Sobchack 1992: 28). Del Río cites similar negative motivations for a transformational engagement with cinema: conditions like ‘our cultural alienation from
3.3.4 See Your Self Enworlded: William Brown
My second sample of ‘Lose Your Self’ as film ethic comes from Willam Brown’s immanentist explorations (which, again, I take to be mainly Deleuzian inspired) of digital cinema in his Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (2013).
I want to focus on a key claim that runs throughout his otherwise wide-ranging book: Brown argues that digital technology begets an enhanced cinema, a ‘supercinema’, that enables us to see our ‘enworlded’ nature24, as he likes to put it, by which he means that we see ourselves embedded in the fundamental continuity of the world (e.g. 2013: 154, 156). Brown’s implied ethic picks up on the same thread that we left off with Del Río above. Here we again encounter ‘Lose Your Self’ as essentially an ethic of awareness – not a radical ethic of self-dismantling. The point for Brown is not to lose yourself, but to recognize – in terms of my bumper sticker – that the self is already ‘lost’ in fundamental connection to the world. The transformational role of cinema is but to dismantle our mistaken notions of a self that stands in opposition to the world. Digital cinema thus fosters a ‘return to nature’ inasmuch as it makes us mindful of how the self is already thoroughly enworlded.
How does Brown arrive at this ethical stance? To start with his Deleuze-inspired conception of film as philosophy, the primary question that Brown asks is not so much whether cinema does philosophy, but rather what cinema
So what is it that digital cinema, in particular, does? What ‘thought’ is produced between the digital film and its viewer? That thought concerns the continuity and interconnectedness of all things. Whereas analogue cinema with its obvious material limitations is compelled to cut, Brown argues, digital cinema is predicated on continuity (2013: 2). Citing films like Fight Club (notably its opening sequence) and Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé 2009), he describes how digital technology enables films to present continuous spaces in which supposedly empty space and solid objects melt into a single continuum. Analogue cinema fragments space. A film such as Fight Club, in contrast, exemplifies “a conception of space as a continuum, in which space consists not of discrete units, or points, but instead in which all space is interconnected […] in which empty space and the objects that fill it share an equal ontological status” (2013: 43). By presenting the interconnected nature of entities, events and space (a reality affirmed by the contemporary theoretical physics, as Brown repeatedly points out) digital cinema paradoxically achieves a greater realism – a realism based not on indexical realism, but on how it enacts ontological continuity. Naturally, most films in the digital era persist with the convention of cutting. But, Brown stresses, we know that they do not need to. For this reason, he speaks of the ‘supercinema’ capacity of digital cinema: although it possesses powers of perfect continuity, digital cinema is like Superman who, for the sake of fitting in, limits himself to the Clark Kent-countenance of analogue cinema (see 2013: 9–12).
The super-continuity of ‘super’ digital cinema presents an equal ontology in which bodies, minds, physical objects, and space exist in a seamless continuum. Such continuity according to Brown – and here he really earns the ‘Lose Your Self’ label – gives an indubitably posthuman, non-anthropocentric impulse to digital cinema. “[I]f space becomes indistinguishable from all that fills it”, he explains, “then this brings about a fundamental decentering of the figures that fill that space […] [T]he result of this ‘decentering’ is a minimizing of anthropocentrism in digital cinema” (2013: 2). With this posthuman continuity, consequently, cinema has the capacity to “take the viewer beyond the human” (2013: 8), as it “allows us to transcend our limited human perception” (2013: 47). Clearly, though, Brown is not advocating here a wholesale transcendence of self, but a transcendence of perception (akin to the mode of contemplative mysticism, as identified in ‘Blow Your Mind’) that lets viewers
However, the same issue raised with Del Río could be raised here. That is, does a growing awareness of our enworlded nature – which implies a distancing of the aware self from its object of awareness – not work against Brown’s insistence on a self that is fundamentally inseparable from the world? Brown is no doubt aware of this inner tension in his position. To allay this tension, I gather, he prefers to speak of an awareness ‘with’ the world, not ‘of’ it. Because a properly rethought relationship with the world, as he conceives of it, will affirm that we are with the world – not in it, and even less so apart from it. Therefore, through digital cinema, he argues, we ultimately “achieve consciousness not of, but with films, and consciousness not of, but with the world” (2013: 156).
In the final chapter of his book, I can add, the ethical investments that Brown puts into ‘enworldment’ reach an explicit crescendo (2013: 147–156). According to his ‘sophophilic’ conclusion, to achieve consciousness with the world – “to understand that we only exist in relation with the world” – amounts to loving the world” (2013: 154). To discover our enworlded nature is thus an act of love. It is not to love this or that, Brown says, but to love everything, holistically. And the effects of this love, especially how he phrases it, would certainly be fully endorsed by Bersani and Dutoit, who follow next. Such a love, as Brown puts it, exhausts and shatters the human. Moreover, it promises to turn an egocentric being into one “dispersed everywhere and everywhen” (2013: 154).
3.3.5 Disperse Your Self: Leo Bersani & Ulysse Dutoit
For a final sample of the idea(l) of ‘Lose Your Self’ through film, I turn to the philosophical aesthetics of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit in their Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004). Whereas in Del Río, I identified the primary transformational value of change or becoming, and in Brown a particular value of awareness, Bersani and Dutoit’s implied ethics is principally concerned with that of connectedness – to not just recognize our connectedness, that is, but to further actualize it. And once more we have an ethic that relies, and quite openly so, on a strict ontology of immanence, even while the name ‘Deleuze’ drops with far less frequency in this case.
In the spirit of an immanentist imploding of the inside versus outside, I start off with the outside of their book. On the cover it states of the three films that the book examines – Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (1963), Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother (1999), and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) – that
In Forms of Being, then, Bersani and Dutoit stage this drama of separation and connection through the films, Le Mépris, All About My Mother, and The Thin Red Line. Their project, in Bersani’s own words, is “to define a different relational mode, one of exchanges and correspondences between the subject and the world, exchanges that depend on the anti-Cartesian assumption of a commonality of being among the human subject and both the human and the nonhuman world” (2015: 62). Accordingly, the particular visual argument that they trace in the three films is that they each “propose the implausibility of individuality” (2004: 6). The films do so, they argue, by enacting the subject’s ‘dispersal’ – their preferred metaphor for the subject’s effective connection to the world – sometimes exchanged for related figures like the subject’s ‘dissemination’, ‘dissolving’, or ‘shattering’, any one of which results in a ‘multiplication of being’ (e.g. 2004: 6, 8, 169–170, 177). These notions speak of nothing else than – once again – ‘Lose Your Self’ as a transformational return to nature: the self-dispersal that Bersani and Dutoit envision, to relinquish individual subjectivity to the oneness of being, is at once a multiplication “that allows us to reoccur, differently, everywhere” (2004: 9). The ascetic imperative, ‘lose’, in the ‘Lose Your Self’ slogan could thus not be more pertinent, because “the multiplication of the individual’s positionality in the universe is, necessarily, a lessening or even a loss of individuality” (2004: 5 [emphasis added]).
How does their selection of films achieve this dispersal of the subject? Or more to the point, how do these films present the said correspondences
As to be expected, the promise of the subject’s dispersal is not limited to the on-screen subjects of Bersani and Dutoit’s three elected films. It holds also for the viewing subject. Take their analysis of The Thin Red Line (which I revisit in greater detail in Chapter 4, when I discuss the philosophical reception of this and other films by the director, Terrence Malick). Bersani and Dutoit claim that The Thin Red Line performs a “reworking of the individual within a new relational ethic” (2004: 135). Yet the claim, it soon becomes evident, deliberately conflates two matters: the film’s aesthetic reworking of individual characters, on the one hand, and a transformational ‘reworking’ of the individual viewer on the other.
[T]he precondition of his wholly receptive gaze is a subject divested of subjectivity […] Witt’s look designates a subject without claims on the world, who owns nothing […] Witt approaches the limit of subject without selfhood, ideally an anonymous subject. (2004: 164–165 [emphasis added])
That Bersani and Dutoit posit a transformational ethics of film aimed at the main value of connectedness is easy enough to see. Their implied mode of transformation, however, is harder to settle. To say that they pose a mode of contemplation may well be seen as going against the whole idea of undoing individual subjectivity. Yet, more than once, they do suggest the mode of contemplative endurance that has come up throughout this chapter, particularly in my appraisal of Sinnerbrink and Frampton. Bersani and Dutoit, for example, note the need for a film viewer’s assumption of individuality to be jolted out of place. They see the Seventh Art, which thrives on the film star, at least in the classical era, as especially conducive to our accepting the existence and priority of individuality. For this reason, “the film-maker must somehow traumatise our perception […] shock our visual habits, and in so doing at least begin to train us to look” (2004: 8 [emphasis added]). Such a ‘traumatized perception’, they explain, both shatters the security of individual selfhood and makes evident the dispersed self’s “limitless extensibility in both space and time” (2004: 9).25 However, to touch on another recurring theme, this transformation cannot occur without willing and prepared viewers. The contemplative endurance thus requires some preparatory ‘effort’ and ‘work of spectatorship’ on our part: “It involves, first of all, allowing ourselves to be transferred from one mode of vision to another, to be jolted out of our ingrained habits of cinematic viewing” (2004: 8 [emphasis added]).
However, in terms of the transformational ethics of film that Bersani and Dutoit propose here, it is not so clear where the main initiative for the viewer’s ascetic mode of ‘lessening’ springs from. Once more, we touch on the issue of preparatory ethics: is it the film that, at least initially, elicits a lessening of the viewer-self? Or is the supposed effect of the film merely incidental to the preparatory self-work of the viewer? They do suggest that artefacts by their very nature induce a lessening of the subject. For instance, they note that “artful ascesis is the precondition for a lessness that allows us to reoccur, differently, everywhere” (2004: 9). In addition, their notion of the ‘aesthetic subject’ – which presumably emerges from the spectator engagement with art – marks by definition a ‘retreat’ or ‘withdrawal’ from any fixed subjecthood (2004: 6,9). Yet, in the same breath, they uphold the mentioned ‘work of spectatorship’ that is required for lessening the subject. They also call this work a ‘relational discipline’ whereby spectators must open themselves up (2004: 177). This preparatory work of the viewer is by far the more explicit precondition that Bersani and Dutoit set. Indeed, they make it clear that the ‘precondition’ for private Witt’s unreserved connectedness to the world – which prefigures and initiates also the viewer’s connectedness to the world through film – is for him to be ‘subject divested of subjectivity’ (2004: 164). In the viewer’s case, it may be that the film can help the process along. Yet, ultimately, it seems to be the viewer’s responsibility to initiate the condition of self-lessening upon which Bersani and Dutoit predicate their ethics of connectedness.
3.3.6 Prepare to Lose Your Self: The Deleuzian Model Viewer
To cap this discussion, it is worthwhile to briefly consider the kind of viewer that a ‘Lose Your Self’ ethics envisions – especially in light of the Deleuzian paradigm that it so strongly relies upon. To this end, I find particularly illuminating Richard Rushton’s propositions on Deleuzian spectatorship (2008; 2009). Rushton points out the lack of any explicit conception of the film viewer in Deleuze’s writings, and undertakes to flesh out such a conception – the result
Rushton’s central claim is a provocative one with respect to Screen Theory’s traditional championing of the active and engaged spectator: he argues that the Deleuzian spectator eschews activity (2009: 46–48). In other words, the Deleuzian spectator excels at a certain passivity (which, of course, is the one p-word that sets political alarm bells ringing among Screen theorists). By passivity, Rushton means a relinquishing of our control or mastery over films, “that we lose control of ourselves, undo ourselves, forget ourselves while in front of the cinema screen” (2009: 53). Simply put, the cinema experience should happen to the subject, and not be caused by the subject (see Rushton 2008: 130). Note, however, that Rushton primarily speaks of this passivity as an ideal to be attained. It is not the given condition of the viewer; passivity is ultimately a ‘challenge’ that Deleuze throws down to us (2009: 53). Obviously, the idea of striving after passivity risks being a contradiction in terms. But Rushton probably has in mind what Martin Seel (2016) describes in another context as the viewer’s ‘active passivity’. Drawing on Theodor Adorno, Seel commends active passivity as giving oneself over to the play of powers of an artwork at hand. Active passivity essentially means to let oneself be determined (cf. Seel 2006). In the context of the cinema experience, it means for viewers to “actively determine themselves in giving themselves over to a passive state of being determined” (Seel 2016). This measure on the part of the viewer allows films to unfold their own processual nature, in a manner that draws the viewer into this process.
Rushton further elaborates on this ideal passive spectatorship in terms of immersion versus absorption – or, at least, in terms of what he understands by the two notions. When a viewer’s relationship to film is one of immersion, he says, then the film comes out towards me. In other words, the film enters my space, my perception, my body, even. An active self is the controlling central point around which immersion unfolds. Absorption is a reversal of this arrangement. In absorption, Rushton explains, it is not the film that comes out to the spectator, but the spectator that goes into the film. To be absorbed is to be drawn into the world of the film, which gives the sensation of bodily occupying the space of another world, and even that of another being. Absorption necessitates a passive self that relinquishes control.
What absorption encourages in the beholder is a sensation that one is no longer oneself, that one has lost one’s selfhood in order to become something other, that one has lost the coordinates by which one’s subjectivity can be defined in order to occupy a position that is in some sense objective rather than subjective.
rushton 2009: 50–51
Remember that Rushton describes absorption as part of the Deleuzian ideal for spectatorship, thus suggesting that it is the viewer’s responsibility to ensure it. So what must the viewer do to be absorbed in film to the degree of a loss of selfhood? Rushton’s answer – the answer echoed by all advocates of ‘Lose Your Self’ – is to be passive; surrender; give yourself over to the film. Yet for the viewer to attain that passivity requires work of the self on itself, a measure of self-transformation, which once more raises the topic of preparatory ethics.
As in most cases of preparatory ethics, we shall see in a moment, the prepared Deleuzian viewer must practice self-transformation in the mode of asceticism; to be suitably passive entails giving up things. The act of giving up constitutes the unavoidable activity inherent to the passivity that ‘Lose Your Self’ requires from viewers. As a means to passivity, the viewer must actively give up control, mastery, even activity itself. In Seel’s terms, the domain of transformation in this instance is self-determination as such: you let yourself be determined by giving up – surrendering to film – your own determination of self. Only then “will we be able to loosen the shackles of our existing subjectivities and open ourselves up to other ways of experiencing and knowing” (2009: 53).
True to form, then, the potential for contradiction in ‘Lose Your Self’ only grows when we consider its preparatory dimension. In keeping with its implied viewer, the ethic in effect states that you can only realize ‘Lose Your Self’ (through film) based on a preparatory measure by which you already lose your self (to film). (I respond to this sort of circularity stemming from preparatory ethics in the concluding section below.) On top of that, the mere preparatory
4 Intermezzo: Stanley Cavell and Some Stickers That ‘Could’
My analysis here would be far from complete without a consideration of what Stanley Cavell brings to this ethical party. Yet what hope can one have to assign a single bumper sticker to an (in)famously indirect philosopher who, according to one recent assessment, “won’t get to the point”, and apparently has good reasons for not doing so (see Jackson 2015). I can therefore only take a leaf out of Cavell’s book: to not get to the point, but to take the scenic route along some contender-stickers that could fill the bumper, even if only to conclude that perhaps it is a bumper better left blank.
4.1 From ‘Overcome Yourself’ to ‘Connect Yourself’: The Moving Image of Skepticism
Our guiding question is straightforward enough: in what ways can we picture self-transformation through film from the perspective of Cavell’s film philosophy? Granted – Cavell’s notion of ‘film as philosophy’, as such, entails various things. So let us set off from the earliest and most familiar Cavellian contention in this regard: that the philosophical value of film consists in how it addresses the philosophical problem of skepticism – encapsulated by Cavell’s famous description of film as a “moving image of skepticism” (1979: 188), which I examined in Chapter 1.
Movies awaken us to the world’s reality and thereby awaken us to the reality of our unnatural condition, a condition in which we have become displaced, have come to displace ourselves, from our natural habitation within the world. (2000: 180)
Indeed, movies awaken us to the world’s reality too. The flipside of Cavell’s moving image of skepticism, let us not forget, is that at the same time it promises respite from our subjective isolation and distance from the world. The transformational ethics implied by this side of Cavell’s argument can be elaborated upon under a number of slogans. A noticeable candidate is ‘Overcome Yourself’. For good measure, we could also throw in ‘Reach Outside Yourself’, in a quite literal sense – as if to ‘Escape Yourself’.27 As much as cinema expresses the problem of skepticism, Cavell suggests, it simultaneously beckons towards the possibility of its overcoming. That possibility resides, as detailed before, in the automatism of photography. Photography reproduces and presents the world mechanically, without any intervention of a human subject. By screening the world, therefore, cinema makes the world present to the viewer in a way that ‘bypasses’ subjectivity, as it were, and so breaches our subjective isolation from the world (see Cavell 1979: 23). Yet to brand all of this as an ‘Overcome Yourself’, I have to admit, is an overstatement of Cavell’s position. (Bumper stickers revel in the hyperbolic.) The only transformation that this ethic can reasonably foresee is that the viewer stands to gain a sense of the world’s ‘presentness’.28 And that outcome is but a spit in the sea compared to a complete escape from our subjective isolation. The satisfaction of this metaphysical
It is worth noting how this apparent impasse has recently been navigated by a flourish of commentary on Cavell’s moving image of skepticism (e.g. Sinnerbrink 2011a: 102–108; 2016a: 28–32; Kelley 2012; Abbott 2013; Trahair 2014). A rough consensus reads that, though you cannot truly ‘Overcome Yourself’ or ‘Escape Yourself’, cinema’s breaching of our subjective isolation does warrant a more modest attempt to ‘Connect Yourself’. This iteration, however, demands a more nuanced understanding of how cinema addresses the problem of skepticism: that is, rather than ‘solve’ the problem of our subjective isolation, cinema re-orientates our relation to it (Abbott 2013: 171). Or: rather than let us ‘get out of’ skepticism, cinema lets us ‘get over’ it (Sinnerbrink 2016a: 32). By, in effect, exacerbating the experience of our skeptical condition (as per Cavell’s ‘Know Yourself’ moment above), cinema encourages us to forego the obscuring desire for certainty of knowledge, to instead acknowledge that which is nevertheless right in front of us.29 In this position, we cannot but acknowledge our subjective finitude. Yet, understood as our finitude in relation to the world, we precisely acknowledge that we have some sort of existent(ial) relation with the world. This is the claim made on us by cinema’s screening of the world: that the world is made present to us, at least, in spite of our finitude, no matter how incomplete or fleeting. Almost paradoxically, then, it is by enlisting acknowledgment of our subjective isolation – hence by a change of epistemological attitude – that cinema leads us to “experience reconnection to the world, a connection we feel has been severed in modernity” (Abbott 2013: 171; see also Rodowick, n.d.: 3). Note, however, that this transformation into a connection with the world is not of the subject-negating kind sought by ‘Lose Your Self’. It is indeed a (subjective) sense or experience of connectedness. Though Cavell affirms a motive of Nature (by insisting on cinema’s present-making of the world), he does not do so at the expense of an equal motive of Subjectivity (cinema, after all, makes the world present to me as subject). As Rothman and Keane observe, “our wish to escape subjectivity cannot be separated from our wish to achieve selfhood” (2000: 65), since the wish for presentness is “to reach this world and attain selfhood” (2000: 90 [emphasis added]). In keeping with this dual-affirmation, then, acknowledgment fosters a connectedness with the world – construed by commentators also as a conviction, belief, or trust in the
In sum: by bringing our skeptical condition to the fore, cinema compels viewers to respond with a transformation of self that fundamentally reorients that condition. It is therefore the type of event (to link it to a different context) “in which a crisis forces an examination of one’s life that calls for a transformation or reorienting of it” (Cavell 2004: 11 [emphasis added]). What this link shows, however, is that the moving image of skepticism has been moving within an ethical province all along. In Cities of Words (2004), Cavell calls that province ‘moral perfectionism’.
4.2 Not ‘Perfect Yourself’, but ‘Become Yourself’: Emersonian Perfectionism
In view of our guiding question, there are certainly much more direct ways of getting to the theme of film and self-transformation in Cavell’s thinking than going via the ethics of the moving image of skepticism. Like his overall philosophical enterprise, the best share of Cavell’s philosophy of film has explicitly ethical questions at its forefront. And at the forefront of those questions is Cavell’s abiding interest in moral (Emersonian) perfectionism – which, of course, is nothing other than an interest in personal transformation.
A promising route map through this winding ethical terrain in Cavell’s thought is his essay, enticingly titled “The Good of Film” (2005 [2000]). As I explained at the outset, this chapter is about how philosophers concerned with film as philosophy answer the question of ‘the good’ of film. And here – finally – we have one philosopher who actually devotes an essay to this exact topic. Yet what at first glance looks like a definitive statement on the ethical value of film quickly becomes a trademark detour. Contrary to his title, Cavell goes into what he takes to be ‘good films’ (2005 [2000]: 334–336). Not that one could hope to accuse him of dodging an essay title of his own choosing. Rather, opting for his usual indirect course, Cavell in this case narrows down the question – from ‘the good of film’ to ‘the good of good films’ – thereby making a very long story, if not short, at least somewhat more manageable.
So what are ‘good films’, according to Cavell? I pick up three criteria worth noting. Firstly, he says, good films have the “capacity to sustain and reward criticism” (2005 [2000]: 335). This is a capacity sometimes realized by the most
Evidently, what Cavell generally means by ‘moral perfectionism’ and what I call ‘transformational ethics’ roughly carves out the same ethical space. Transformational ethics, no less than perfectionism, “has something to do”, as Cavell puts it, with being true to oneself, caring for the self, moreover, a dissatisfaction with the self as it currently stands, and therefore with a progress of self-cultivation too (2005 [2000]: 336). Similarly, where I have emphasized the self’s relationship to itself as the kernel of transformational ethics, Cavell bases moral perfectionism on a conception of a “divided self”, an “insistent split in the self”, without which a better future self cannot be envisaged and pursued (Cavell 2004: 2, 5; cf. Hadot 2002: 190; Davidson 1986: 228).
Key to Cavell’s treatment of moral perfectionism in the terms of the classical remarriage comedy, therefore, is the stress in these films on “becoming, or being changed into, a certain sort of person” – a process prompted by a marriage in crisis, and carried out by means of recurrent passages of conversation
However, as the essay is at pains to show, Cavell’s fascination with the moral perfectionism that emerges in remarriage comedy is a moral perfectionism of a very specific breed. Whereas classical perfectionism as expressed in Plato’s Republic would read ‘Perfect Yourself’, the outlook that Cavell reclaims from Emerson’s writing is of a perfectionism without perfection – motivated, if anything, by a wariness of our finitude, a sense that will always render perfection remote and irrelevant (see Norris 2017: 217). To distinguish this type of moral perfectionism, Cavell first and foremost invokes the Romantics who spoke of self-transformation as “becoming who you are” (2005 [2000]: 336). Hence, considering its opposition to ‘Perfect Yourself’, let us name Cavell’s Emerson-inspired outlook on personal transformation, ‘Become Yourself’.
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. (2005 [2000]: 337 [emphasis added])
Yet while the cited passage poses the broad, open-ended transformational values of becoming, and (a willingness to) change, Cavell does admit this continuous becoming to be directed by further “specific ambitions”. With these ambitions, ‘Become Yourself’ declares a set of more immediate transformational values. These values usher our continuous becoming into definite directions, and thus fix a number of touchstones for what becoming yourself, then, would in fact mean.
The value of singularity is one such touchstone in the essay under discussion. Cavell refers to it as “that without which one cannot become the one one is” (2005 [2000]: 344). Hence, in light of this guiding aim, ‘Become Yourself’ is a matter of one becoming more singular, individual, or authentic (in contrast to conformity, as denounced by Emerson). For Cavell, this is a transformational value with intrinsic democratic promise, distancing ‘Become Yourself’ from the traditionally elitist manifestations of perfectionism. “In being universally distributed”, he says, singularity “is the signal negation of elitism”, even if it is “for the most part buried in distraction and conformity” (2005 [2000]: 344). Unlike transformational aims such as wisdom or perfection, that is, the potential for singularity is in everyone’s purview – hence, he calls it “the sage in each of us” (2005 [2000]: 344). And this is what so greatly enthuses Cavell about the (equally democratic) medium of film: film presents a laboratory that can call into question the elitism of perfectionism. For this laboratory demonstrates how the perfectionist call to singularity, which is inevitably also a call to self-knowledge, stems from the sort of everyday manifestations of skepticism – “undramatic, repetitive, daily confrontations […] with respect to the reality, the separateness, of another” – that remarriage comedies are so apt at calling attention to (2005 [2000]: 340). In these films, ‘Become Yourself’
Another touchstone for ‘Become Yourself’ that the essay elucidates is “the demand to make ourselves, and to become, intelligible to one another” (2005 [2000]: 339). From the perspective of this aspiration, to become yourself is to make yourself intelligible – as much to yourself as to the other. It is thus a call to give account of yourself, to provide reasons for your conduct, and a justification for your life; all of which is to give an account of your moral standing with the other (see Cavell 2004: 24–26, 42). Stated in terms of transformational values, we here have different permutations of the basic value of knowledge. As a call to make ourselves intelligible, ‘Become Yourself’ is about accruing self-knowledge (making oneself intelligible to oneself). Such knowledge of oneself – of the motivations, attractions, and aversions that precede and inform one’s moral reasoning – invariably stands in need of “the perception of a friend” (2005 [2000]: 42). On the other hand, this self-knowledge in ‘Become Yourself’ corresponds to also becoming increasingly knowable (making oneself intelligible to others). That is, by giving account of yourself in a growing acknowledgment of the other, you increasingly become ‘yourself’ to the other. This becoming-known to one another Cavell considers foundational to social consent, the possibility of community, and a shared life in pursuit of happiness.
The demand to make ourselves intelligible at the same time foregrounds the mode of transformation most vital to ‘Become Yourself’. Even though acts of making oneself intelligible obviously call upon the mode of contemplation, Cavell’s version of perfectionism ultimately anchors these acts within the mode that I distinguish as ministering – self-transformation realized through either ministering to, or being ministered to by another. In Cavell’s case, the emphasis falls on the latter. He underlines that moral perfectionism is essentially concerned with “the responsiveness to and examination of one soul by another” (2005 [2000]: 339). Indispensable to Cavell’s outlook on self-transformation, therefore, is the inevitable intervention of the Friend (who Cavell insists is an equal, not a guru-esque mentor) who guides the progress of ‘Become Yourself’ through everyday instances of confrontation and conversation (2005 [2000]: 336; 2004: 27). In light of the particular importance that Cavell attaches to (conversion through) conversation, the role of the Friend, in more concrete terms, is to initiate the classical transformational technique of dialogue as a means to (mutual) self-change (see Hadot 1995: 89–93). Of course, our embarking on this transformational exchange of words is almost never a
4.3 Open-Ended Ends
By the end of Cavell’s “The Good of Film” essay, however, I find myself still suspended on the edge of my seat in unfulfilled anticipation of what its title had promised. In proposing to speak about ‘the good of good films’ (such as remarriage comedies), Cavell went on to say much about ‘the good’ in those good films (namely, their affinity with the ‘Become Yourself’-type of conception of the good, as prescribed by Emersonian perfectionism). But, at the end of the day, he has said surprisingly little about ‘the good’ that these films may be for – to us. That Cavell is leaving this question hanging is no doubt something that he is fully aware of. In his closing paragraph he indeed proposes to formulate “some initial answer” to the question of the good of “that species of film” that he distinguishes as remarriage comedy (2005 [2000]: 347–348). Yet there, again, he only goes on to note what he takes to be an important perfectionist issue raised by these films (in this instance: the ethico-political significance of the remarriage comedy’s affirmation of the ordinary, and acceptance of compromise with respect to the pursuit of happiness); and then he ends, cryptically, with the observation that the lingering influence of remarriage comedy on recent films is “worth stopping over” (2005 [2000]: 348).
What I would have loved to hear more of from Cavell is not the perfectionism that these films thematize for our sake, but the potential perfectionism that the films inspire, evoke, even demand, from us, their viewers. There can be little doubt, as the French Cavell-expert Sandra Laugier (2018: 143–144) sums up, that Cavell finds in popular culture the same capacity for pedagogy and self-transformation (‘education for grownups’) that he attributes to philosophy; and that he sees ‘good films’ as providing viewers with moral resources for working through their own sentiments and situations. So surely in his essay, then, Cavell is gesturing us towards the thought that the same conception of the good in good films – their preoccupation with personal transformation of an Emersonian kind – marks also the good of good films, their ethical value to us. That is to say, in the process of busying themselves with ‘Become Yourself’,
With the exemplar of the remarriage comedy still in mind, the invitation at hand is thus to consider how the kind of self-transformation that transpires between remarriage couples on-screen may be echoed by the viewer’s exchange with the remarriage comedy screened. This is ‘Become Yourself’ construed as a transformational ethic of film, which effectively gives us Cavell’s perfectionist vision of the cinemakeover. Most striking in this vision is that film (the remarriage comedy as ‘good film’) now steps into that crucial role of ‘the Friend’, who initiates for the viewer a transformational mode of ministering through its own forms of confrontation and conversation. For instance, insofar as remarriage couples find between them occasions of “making themselves incomprehensible to others” (Cavell 2005 [2000]: 334), it seems that they can confront the viewer with the same everyday crises of skepticism, of separation of the other, that they confront one another with on-screen. One could go as far as saying that the remarriage couple comprises ‘a Friend’ who reaches beyond the screen to form a ‘couple’ with the viewer. And, as part of this couple, the viewer can just as much expect “the responsiveness to and examination of one soul by another” (2005 [2000]: 339). With the confrontations that they present to one another, and to the viewer, the remarriage couple thus invites the viewer into a transformational dialogue not unlike their own, despite the fact that this particular ‘Friend’ cannot exactly reciprocate the moral demands that it puts on the viewer. (Cavell’s moving image of skepticism reminds us here that although the screened couple is made present to us, and therefore may make certain claims on us, we remain absent to them.) Even if not an occasion to make ourselves intelligible to this particular ‘other’, then, the remarriage comedy as Friend may at least call us to self-knowledge. It turns us inward to our own unattained-but-attainable-selves by means of conversations that it stages and, thereby, elicits. This purpose of remarriage comedy, according to ‘Become Yourself’, is rather like Cavell happens to describe the effect of reading an Emerson essay: seeing that the remarriage comedy is just as much a “conversational text”, it too provides “an exercise in coming to oneself” (2005 [2000]: 337).
In the end, however, this vision of the cinemakeover depends on whether we as viewers can acknowledge a remarriage comedy as ‘Friend’, urging us to ‘Become Yourself’. Recall Cavell’s observation that many ‘good films’ remain unacknowledged only because we are so familiar with them. In the event of
So perhaps the true ‘Friend’ in this scenario is Stanley Cavell, who, like his hero Emerson, writes to guide his readers to acknowledgment – of good films, in this case, and, by implication, the good that they hold for us. I do not believe Cavell is out to attract any particular praise, or devout reader-disciples. I would say (as I assume he would) that with his writing he is simply taking up the conversation that good films extend to him – by virtue of their capacity to sustain and reward his criticism. If anything, his writing as an act of conversation stems from his readiness to be a reader himself, whether a reader of other philosophers or a ‘reader’ of Hollywood films. Cavell conceives of philosophy as “a kind of reading”, by which he has in mind “a kind of responsiveness” (2012: 32). “Philosophy’s first virtue”, for Cavell, “is responsiveness, and it is in reading and responding to the works of those who have come before us, and doing so together, that we learn who we are and how to become who we are” (Cavell quoted in Norris 2017: 7).
In Cavell’s writing – which is writing as response, an extension of how he reads – we therefore have the clearest instance in this chapter of a film philosopher who performs, right before our eyes, his personal attempts at transformation. What Cavell’s writing most immediately testifies to is his embrace of writing as a technique of self-transformation. Cavell’s writing is his act of practicing responsiveness. To read his writings on films is to be at the very site of him cultivating and honing his own responsiveness to them, in a continual search for ways-with-words that might do justice to the experiences and insights that they afford (see Sinnerbrink 2014a). Considered from another angle, as he explains in an interview with James Conant (1989: 58–61), Cavell finds in the concrete practice of written prose a means to foster the conviction that formal argument and poetic persuasion cannot provide. In light of everything considered up to this point, it would not be unreasonable to translate him as saying here that writing offers him a means to foster acknowledgment – especially, acknowledgment of the ministering that good films, as conversational Friends, afford him in his personal efforts to ‘Become Himself’.
Yet the perfectionist self-work that Cavell performs before us, he surely also intends to be for us. By that identical technique of writing, prompted by the ministering of film as Friend, Cavell in turn becomes a Friend offering transformational ministering to his readers. After all, much like remarriage comedies, “Cavell’s texts, many of which revolve around and end with questions, consistently seek to enact and elicit a conversation” (Norris 2017: 6 [emphasis added]). Certainly, Cavell will hope that for his reader there is self-becoming to be gained from conversing with him alone. But, more so, the conversation
So why is it, then, that Cavell ‘won’t get to the point’? One reason, it seems, is that for his readers to be guided to open ends is itself to practice ‘Become Yourself’ in the way that good films, as Cavell suggests, teach us to.
5 ‘Ready Yourself’: Model Viewers and Their Preparatory Ethics
As I hope to have demonstrated, the motive of personal transformation at work in film as philosophy finds a range of distinct expressions, each suggesting an ethic of transformation that I distinguished under the heading of a bumper sticker. These stickers – from ‘Know Yourself’ to ‘Lose Your Self’, whether an ethics of self-concentration or self-expansion – help us to piece together an outline of the cinemakeover; of what it may look like when we seek self-transformation through film.
However, our picture of the cinemakeover still has one gaping hole in need of filling. Peeping out from underneath most of the stickers laid out in this chapter is a prior sticker that reads ‘Ready Yourself’. It speaks of the ideal viewers posited by film as philosophy, and the preparatory self-work that they are supposed to do. The tale therefore has a twist: many philosophers not only envision self-transformation as the effects of film as philosophy referred to by the bumper stickers. Paradoxically, they envision also certain forms of self-transformation as preconditions for film as philosophy – that is, forms of self-transformation required from the model viewer before any of those sticker-stated-transformations can ever occur.
In what follows, I develop a brief account of what I call the ‘preparatory ethics’ of film as philosophy, starting with the question of the model viewer of film as philosophy, and ending with a number of critical observations.
5.1 Aspects of the Model Viewer
I take it to be an uncontroversial claim that every account of film as philosophy, with the transformational ethic that it entails, relies on an image of its ideal viewer.31 The issue here is to identify appropriate lines along which to unravel the general model viewer that has taken shape in this chapter.
Alongside inherent qualities, such as the viewer’s philosophical proficiency, a model viewer encompasses also an ideal manner of engaging with film. That is to say, for films to do philosophy, the viewer must assume an appropriate attitude or state. Considering that the topic in question is philosophy, it may come as a surprise that not a single case of film as philosophy in this chapter calls for a distanced, critically detached viewer. Put differently, the philosophers concerned have no interest in an attitude of ‘suspicion’ (Ricoeur 1970: 32–36). As we have seen, the required manner of engaging with film may lead to such a critical attitude (for example, in Dan Flory’s socio-critically inflected conception of film as philosophy), but such an attitude is never set as a precondition for an ideal encounter with film as philosophy. In fact, most philosophers discussed in this chapter would say that a critical attitude will only undermine the idea of film as philosophy. If the whole point is to see how films initiate or do philosophy, then a predetermined critical posture gets in the way of film actually taking the philosophical initiative. For this reason, philosophers in this chapter imagine more or less the inverse of the critically detached viewer: their model viewers are wholly immersed, even to the point of deception (Wartenberg), open and receptive (Mulhall, Sinnerbrink), ‘fused’ with the films they are viewing (Frampton, Brown), and surrendered to their affects (Sobchack, Del Río). One could even think of this inverse attitude as the viewer pursuing a certain passivity – the notion of which I have already highlighted in Rushton’s explanation of Deleuzian spectatorship.
However, our understanding of a model viewer cannot stop at the viewer’s most appropriate attitude or state. It must also include those things that the viewer must do in order to be in that state. This question of praxis is key to the model viewers posed by film as philosophy. The issue is not only whether the viewer is adequately immersed, receptive, or passive, but – prior to
Because these measures invariably involve some form of work on the self, they can be described in the same ethical-transformational terms that I have used up to this point: they can be reconstructed as practices of self-transformation. Admittedly, these instances of self-transformation are of a different order from ‘Know Yourself’, ‘Remind Yourself’, and the rest of the bumper slogans in this chapter. Hence I distinguish this order of transformational ethics as ‘preparatory ethics’; and I band them together under their own, separate bumper sticker slogan: ‘Ready Yourself’.
5.2 The ‘Spirituality’ of Film as Philosophy
we could call ‘spirituality’ the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth. We will call ‘spirituality’ then the set of these researches, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence, etc., which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject’s very being, the price to be paid for access to the truth. (2005: 15)
Here, Foucault deals with “preparatory transformational work on the subject”; Rabinow (2009: 37 [emphasis added]) could not put it any better when he refers to Foucault’s topic in these terms. Foucault draws attention to a class of transformational techniques through which a subject may render herself ‘available’ to the truth. Yet, clearly, these techniques are preparatory, as Foucault goes
The rough comparison that I wish to make between Foucault’s concept of spirituality and the preconditions of film as philosophy is as follows: film philosophers in this chapter suggest the need for viewers to carry out transformations on themselves in order to have ‘access’ to film as philosophy, as it were (which substitutes Foucault’s ‘truth’). Gaining such ‘access’ would be for viewers to fully discern, grasp, or experience the particular form of philosophy that films potentially (are said to) ‘do’. Then (under these right conditions) viewers can anticipate the resultant film as philosophy to have certain transformational effects on them in return (as with Foucault’s ‘rebound effects’). My comparison thus also applies to Foucault’s overall distinction between philosophy and spirituality. One can distinguish between the ‘philosophy’ of film as philosophy, i.e. theoretical formulations of the nature of film as philosophy; and its implied ‘spirituality’, which concerns the practical self-transformation required to be open to film as philosophy and to receive its transformational effects. To say films can do philosophy is one matter. To say that film as philosophy brings about self-transformation in the viewer is another. But to speak of the measures that viewers need to take – so that films can do philosophy, and so that their transformational work can take effect in us – is a matter of an altogether different order. What Foucault would call the order of ‘spirituality’, then, corresponds to the special class of transformational ethics that I demarcate as preparatory ethics.
All of the transformational ethics explored up to this point rely on the help of films – films doing philosophy – to initiate self-transformation in viewers. ‘Ready Yourself’ concerns transformational ethics that precede that encounter, the prior self-work by which the viewer becomes available to the help afforded by films. In saying that preparatory ethics are ‘prior’, and that they ‘precede’, I mean it in a conditional, constitutive sense – not in the chronological sense. The viewer’s preparatory measures, as philosophers imagine them, may well co-occur with the act of viewing film. But such measures remain ‘prior’ or ‘preliminary’ self-work inasmuch as they make possible both the viewer’s access to film as philosophy and, consequently, its transformational rebound effects – even while the viewer may be ‘in the moment’ of watching a film.
In short, preparatory ethics (self-transformation that ensures film as philosophy) enables transformational ethics of film (self-transformation afforded by film as philosophy). ‘Ready Yourself’ paves the way for ‘Lose Yourself’, ‘Blow Your Mind’, and the rest of the ethics defined in this chapter. In fact,
5.3 Ascetic Preparations and Ethics of Interpretation
Having clarified what I mean by preparatory ethics, let us now consider the specific nature of this ethics within the project of film as philosophy. The issue of preparatory ethics is most endemic to bold conceptions of film philosophy, and has already proved unavoidable my discussions of Sinnerbrink, Frampton, Bersani and Dutoit, as well as Rushton’s account of Deleuzian spectatorship. Here I offer a more general impression of preparatory ethics in the field, by taking a look at the predominant modes, domains, and values at stake.
In terms of transformational modes, most evident is the general ascetic character of the measures that film philosophers expect from the viewer of films that do philosophy. One way or another, that is, the sufficiently prepared viewer must enact some form of preparatory giving up. Typically guiding this imperative are the transformational values of openness and receptivity, as well as particular conceptions of immersion (absorption) or passivity towards film.
Below I list some prominent cases in point, taken from relevant philosophers surveyed in both this chapter and the next. Note especially the common ascetic imperative that runs throughout these examples, whether implied or articulated head-on: each posits a mode of self-work in which viewers must withhold, suspend, disregard, relinquish, renounce, or surrender.
From ‘Expand Your Mind’:
1) Stephen Mulhall. In light of his claims of how films can be philosophy in action, Mulhall (2008: 145) regrets viewers who “permit their preconceptions about the nature of film to dictate what their experience of particular films might be”. Ideally, viewers should instead allow “experience of particular films to teach them what ethics, art, imagination, emotions and thinking might be” (2008: 145). To not do so, he says, is a failure of ‘self-questioning’, as well as a failure “to be sufficiently open to one’s experience” (2008: 145).
2) Simon Critchley. Addressing the films of Terrence Malick as a form of philosophizing, as we will see in the next chapter, Critchley (2005: 139) cautions against reading “from cinematic language to some philosophical meta-language”. Doing this, he explains, “is both to miss what is specific to the medium of film and usually to engage in some sort of
3) Steven Rybin. Also in the next chapter, Rybin echoes Critchley in a similar assessment of Malick’s cinema as philosophical thought. He advises that “film philosophers must encounter the cinema itself – the cinema by itself – as non-textual, non-meaningful, non-philosophical” (2012: xxxi). According to Rybin, Malick’s films call for aesthetic immersion without the external interventions of philosophical texts that aim to master their meaning. The work of film philosophy begins in asking “how a film immerses us” and “why that engagement is valuable” (2012: xv–xvi).
4) Rupert Read. In his reflections on Avatar, which came up under ‘Expand Your Mind’, Rupert Read emphasizes – repeatedly – that the film can only do the transformational work of opening our eyes, if the viewer manages to ‘really see’ the film (2015: 88). To do this, viewers must leave behind a particular bias: “the too-knowing cynicism that immunizes us against hope by insisting that nothing good can come out of anything that is popular or money-making [i.e. a mainstream movie like Avatar]” (2015: 90). Much like the film’s protagonist struggles to truly see things for what they are, Read argues, the viewer too must struggle to see Avatar – despite its status as a Hollywood money-spinner – for the source of self-transformation that it in fact is (2015: 94).
From ‘Sense Your Senses’:
5) Vivian Sobchack. Recounting some central tenets of the phenomenological tradition that informs her approach to cinema, Sobchack states that phenomenology as method proceeds from “a commitment to the openness of its object of inquiry, rather than to any a priori certainty of what that object already ‘really’ is” (2008: 436). Central to this commitment, in the foundational Husserlian formulation, is the making explicit and consequent ‘bracketing’ (epoché – a suspension, or setting aside) of presuppositions about the object of phenomenological enquiry. Bracketing presuppositions rooted in acculturation and habit (what Husserl calls the ‘natural attitude’) serves to reveal the full possibilities or ‘essence’ of the object (2008: 436). In Sobchack’s articulation of the phenomenological method, we have seen, this bracketing of presuppositions helps disclose the richness of our sensual, embodied experience in response to cinema.
From ‘Blow Your Mind’:
6) Robert Sinnerbrink. As discussed before, Sinnerbrink’s romantic film-philosophy, seeking to respond to film as a way of thinking, requires from the viewer a commitment to receptivity and openness – not only towards
7) Daniel Frampton. Although one is easily tempted to read Frampton as simply claiming that films think, and do philosophy, Frampton is quite clear that he envisions his filmosophy as a preparatory “practice […] a strategy for being philosophical about film and seeing the philosophical in film” (2006a: 212). Filmosophy thus offers a manner of transforming (our experience of) film, which establishes the possibility for viewers to be transformed by it in return. The primary preparatory measure that Frampton prescribes, we have seen, is for viewers to give up technicist language about film, and instead feed their experience of films with the more suitable, poetic concepts provided by filmosophy (2006a: 100–101, 172, 212).
From ‘Lose Your Self’:
8) Elena del Río. Although Del Río argues that films generate (desubjectivizing) affection, as well as a growing awareness of affection, she does concede that viewers require a certain pre-awareness of affects for all this to take effect. That is, we have to acknowledge powers of affection in our own and other bodies – be attentive to them, even – in order for them to have transformative effects on us. The need to intuit such depersonalized forces requires that viewers disregard the limitations of their own visual perception – since, when it comes to affect, “it is the invisible level that is most important in a culture that increasingly depends on the visible” (Pisters quoted in Del Río 2008: 210). This, in Del Río’s own words, is one of the most radical thoughts that Deleuze and Guattari have ‘bequeathed’ to us: “the existence of an incorporeal materialism that calls on us to become attentive to a micropolitics of the affections, a virtual plane, no less real than the actual, on which affects, thoughts, and desires continue to brew and transform long before and after they take a shape that we can see, name, or recognize” (Del Río 2008: 210 [emphasis added]).
9) Leo Bersani & Ulysse Dutoit. The ‘Lose Your Self’ ethic of Bersani and Dutoit demands viewers who are willing to give up their commonplace assumptions about individual subjectivity; or, as they also intimate, to renounce the myths of subjectivity that we cling onto (2004: 8–9). On this
Clearly, the domain for ascetic self-work that the philosophers above most frequently designate is the (existing, established) knowledge that the viewer brings to film. In preparation for the philosophy done by film, most notably, viewers must give up their preconceptions, beliefs, and biases – especially those concerning what viewers think film’s philosophy might, or should, be. Likewise, viewers must give up the philosophical concepts, frameworks, or even the technical language in terms of which they would normally want to consider a film. In short, the philosophers above all call for some measure of epistemological self-restraint. The basic mode of self-transformation required from viewers is a contemplative asceticism. As explained before, it is an asceticism of a specifically reflective nature; it involves a giving up of things specifically in your thinking about films.
The perceived need for such ascetic conditioning of knowledge – a measured, preparatory giving up or reduction of certain elements of one’s knowledge, as the philosophers above urge – marks what is in fact a perennial ethical topos in philosophical thinking, both in the West and the East. The topos of contemplative asceticism is quite evident, for example, in the long trajectory that can be drawn from phenomenological bracketing as contemplative askēsis (Ricoeur 1996: 38–43; cf. Gregor 2017), through Descartes’ practice of assent (the systematic withdrawal of particular preconceptions or judgments), back to the Stoics from whom Descartes derives his method (Hadot 2002: 265). A clear equivalent to this in Eastern philosophy is the well-known Zen Buddhist concept of shoshin or ‘beginner’s mind’, an attitude of openness that is to be cultivated by clearing the mind of its preconceived ideas, subjective intentions, and habits (see Suzuki 1970).
The topos of contemplative asceticism that I am tracing here, however, includes not only such restraint within knowledge, but also within the related domains of the will or desire that impels one to impose the knowledge – as demonstrated by film philosophers’ pleas for viewers to relinquish attempts at theoretical mastery or control over films. This aspect of the contemplative asceticism – that is, for viewers to have a non-willing, actively-passive epistemological attitude towards films – finds a major common reference point in Martin Heidegger’s call for Gelassenheit (‘releasement’), a practice of
The cultural prevalence of contemplative asceticism can be magnified yet further with reference to Geoffrey Harpham, and especially his work on hermeneutics (see Harpham 1992: 239–269). Harpham goes so far as to claim that the entire Western tradition of textual interpretation and criticism is invariably conceived in terms of asceticism. Any general account of interpretation, he proposes, is predicated on the ascetic imperative to resist temptation, and at least implicitly prescribes to the interpreter ways of restricting and directing her impulses (again, in the domains of will and desire) in response to a given text (1992: 239–240).
Harpham’s views have an especially close affinity with the theme of preparatory ethics I have been investigating here. It is not only that his claims about interpretation exemplify the topos of contemplative asceticism at work in the preparatory ethics of film as philosophy. His claims also indicate what is essentially at stake in such preparatory ethics: that the transformational self-work that film philosophers require from viewers fits within the broader field of hermeneutics and its ethics. I grant that there is much more at stake in film as philosophy than resisting temptation and suppressing impulses that transgress the meaning-limits of ‘texts’. The preparatory ethics of film as philosophy is patently guided by transformational values of openness, receptivity, fullness of experience, even oneness with film – far more so than values of accuracy or fidelity of meaning. But, even so, to situate this preparatory ethics against the larger horizon of hermeneutics raises perspectives that mutually enrich our understanding of both film as philosophy and interpretation. As for film as philosophy: it proves productive to not lose sight of the fact that these film philosophers are indeed busying themselves with interpretation; they are guiding viewers to interpret (encounter, receive, experience) films-as-philosophy; moreover, they construct different forms of ethics of interpretation, by prescribing contemplative-ascetic measures that viewers must take for their interpretations of films-as-philosophy to be adequate. As for interpretation: the preparatory ethics of film as philosophy – as but one case in the long tradition of deciding how we should interpret – offers a design for thinking specifically
5.4 Questions and Problems
The preparatory ethics sketched above represent a final – and highly significant – piece in the mosaic of the cinemakeover that emerges from the project of film as philosophy. If anything, it sets up camp right in the middle of that picture. For there is much to suggest that without the necessary measures that preparatory ethics prescribe, no cinemakeover, let alone films that do philosophy, would be able to occur.
Not surprisingly, then, it is precisely in the sphere of preparatory ethics that some of the most pressing questions regarding the cinemakeover come up. Here difficulties such as contradiction and inconsistency – things already touched upon in this chapter – come into especially sharp focus. Therefore, to bring this chapter to a close, I raise the most important of these questions as a manner of drawing my conclusions. In posing my respective questions of exclusivism, idealism, contradiction, and initiative, I start with what may be perceived as more peripheral issues, and work my way to those questions with more urgent implications for the cinemakeover and the project of film as philosophy as such.
5.4.1 Exclusivism
A first question worth raising is whether the preparatory ethics of film as philosophy encourages an undue exclusivism in our consumption of cinema (which, as many would have it, is ever the celebrated medium of the masses). Now one might argue that the very idea(l) of wanting films to do philosophy already expresses exclusivist intentions to elevate ‘mere movies’ above the supposedly impoverished popular functions that they normally fulfill. Yet the point for some philosophers (Carroll, explicitly so, but to a degree also Flory, Wartenberg and others with similarly moderate conceptions of film as philosophy) is that films may precisely do popular philosophy. By this, they mean that films, despite being mass entertainment, may still encourage philosophical activity and self-transformation in the ordinary, unsuspecting viewer, who has no prior commitments to making such effects occur. For
However, the bolder philosophers grow in their claims that films can do philosophy, the weightier the ‘Ready Yourself’ requirement becomes that they set for viewers. And the more important the requirement for viewers to prepare themselves for the effects of films, naturally, the fewer the viewers who will in reality experience those effects. In these bold conceptions the emphasis is thus less on what films alone may achieve, and much more on what the viewer also has to achieve – meaning that, by default, far fewer viewers make the cut. By having to put in the extra mile of self-work, it will only be the sufficiently prepared model viewer who opens up a philosophical-transformational dimension to otherwise ‘mere movies’, a dimension which most (ordinary, unsuspecting) viewers would simply not be privy to. So, in effect, these visions of film as philosophy, reliant upon preparatory ethics as they are, forecasts an exclusive class of viewers: they are the ones who are ethically prepared, the self-mastering viewers, the select few who manage to fashion the ordinary activity of film-going into an extraordinary event.
If you find yourself resisting what I am saying in this paper, it may be because what I am saying is wrong, or silly, or whatever; or it may be because you are not quite ready to embrace these teachings and make them your own. (2013: online)
The irony here is that Read himself is denouncing what he sees as an intellectual elitism that rejects films like Avatar as mere popular entertainment. He points out that it is tempting “to remain on the barren heights of cleverness and intellectual superiority” and “to look down on a popular film, to ‘prove’ yourself superior to it – because then you are by implication ‘superior’ to the tens or hundreds of millions who love it” (2013: online). Yet, in denouncing such intellectual elitism, Read supplants it with what I take to be an even more
This sentiment in Read really only echoes a much more pervasive exclusivist tendency in transformationalist discourse: to set apart some higher plane of existence that not only transcends (and often devalues) the ordinary-everyday, but also remains out of reach for the majority of average Joes who will never master the specialist self-transformations that define that plane. In Read’s case, as with the preparatory ethics posed in other bold conceptions of film as philosophy, that higher plane concerns an extra-ordinary way of viewing film. I would like to think that, ideally, notions of film as philosophy should be concerned with how films may do philosophy to the transformational benefit of most viewers. However, the preparatory ethics of the philosophers highlighted here suggest quite the opposite. The inherent demands for self-work set by their bold positions imply that film as philosophy and its ethical benefits are by no means open and available to all. According to their visions, instead, the cinemakeover becomes exclusive, the privilege of a select few; the ones who manage to transform and elevate their reception of films above that of the ordinary masses.
5.4.2 Idealism
Of course, the philosophers concerned may respond to the above by saying that there is nothing wrong with what I label ‘exclusivism’: genuine self-transformation by its very nature cannot occur without effort, which implies that not everyone can or will make the cut. Fine – this is a position that many of us could live with. Yet, if we then drop the potential charge of exclusivism, we would do well to ask whether all of this is in fact achievable. Is the preparatory self-work required by the bold versions of film as philosophy feasible, something that anyone could in reality achieve? Simply put, are these preparatory requirements not overly idealistic?
This set of issues abound in the approach to film as philosophy argued for by John Mullarkey (2009a; 2009b; 2011), who we last met at the end of Chapter 1. Recall that Mullarkey’s approach radicalizes the idea of cinematic thinking: he argues that if we are to take seriously the idea that films think in their own distinctive ways, “then we must first of all get away from any definition (that is, philosophy) of film, as well as any definition of thinking, or indeed of philosophy itself” (2009a: 77 [emphasis added]). In Mullarkey’s uncompromising outlook, therefore, we need to rid ourselves of all philosophical judgments in order to be entirely open to what the ‘philosophy’ of films might turn out to be(come). Again, I simply do not see this as humanly possible. And, apparently, neither does Mullarkey. His core claim is that all film philosophers fall short of this requirement. While they may express the desire for films to think in their own way, they still define this thinking in philosophy’s way, meaning that film’s thinking is still pre-figured and ultimately reduced by the particular assumptions that philosophers have about philosophy.
So how, then, does Mullarkey hope to meet his own uncompromising requirement for letting the philosophy done by films simply be whatever it becomes? I have already addressed his Laruelle-inspired solution of ‘non-philosophy’ in the first chapter, where I also expressed my doubts whether it actually succeeds in ridding film as philosophy of any pre-figuring definitions of philosophy. Let me only point out here the preparatory practice that appears to go together with Mullarkey’s solution. On occasion, Mullarkey speaks of the need for what he calls a process of ‘unknowing’ (Mullarkey 2009b: 14, 211, 214–218), a notion also echoed by Daniel Frampton in calling for an ‘unlearning’ of our usual conceptualizations of the cinematic experience (see Frampton
Is the ‘unknowing viewer’ who Mullarkey envisions someone who can realistically get away from any definition of philosophy, though? It does not seem so. For one thing, Mullarkey himself reserves a necessary place for such definitions in the process of unknowing. In this process, which is immanent in the relationship between the viewer and film, as he argues, it is film that ‘unphilosophizes’ philosophy by resisting the philosophy that we bring to it. Film “breaks our definitions of what is and is not ‘thinking’ by retrospectively creating new possibilities in the wake of its own actuality”; and thereby it co-engenders new, unanticipated possibilities for philosophy (2009b: 213). Therefore, even though Mullarkey urges that we must first of all get away from any of our definitions, his line of reasoning at this point portrays the viewer’s definitions of philosophy as integral to the work of unknowing. As I see it, the model viewer implied here is someone who is simply willing to put forth her definitions before film – so that, in a mode of contemplative endurance rather, those definitions may be resisted, abraded, or even broken in an ongoing process of revision and regeneration. This strikes me as a far more practicable alternative to a strictly ascetic ideal of ‘getting away from’ any of our philosophical definitions. But, construed in this way, the process of unknowing runs counter to Mullarkey’s overall ideal for film as philosophy: since the process inherently acts on the viewer’s definitions, the ongoing ‘philosophy’ that emerges from film will still in one way or another remain a function of those definitions.
Suppose, however, the hypothetical ‘unknowing viewer’ of Mullarkey can realistically get away from any definition of philosophy. Then it may well be that film will have enough room to do something new that could become philosophy. However, once this ‘something new’ comes about, at some point we would still have to recognize it as such. And would this not require that we resuscitate some of our discarded definitions of philosophy in order to appreciate the new philosophy that film (may) have produced? Mullarkey does advise that the knowledge at stake in this process is an emergent and performative knowledge; not knowledge as a representation, but knowledge as an affect (2009b: 206). “Hence”, he argues, “we do not know or define what the new is because the new can only be felt – that is why it is new, why it is a ‘shock to the system’, and why it consequently engenders new thoughts” (2009b: 211).
5.4.3 Contradiction
Another problem with the degree of epistemological self-restraint that film as philosophy often demands from viewers is that it courts contradiction. The avid logician will no doubt have a field day dissecting the issues hatched by the preparatory requirement to give up one’s philosophical beliefs about film (also: assumptions, definitions, or frameworks, all of which I henceforth bundle up in the term ‘beliefs’). As I see it, the preparatory requirement to give up one’s philosophical beliefs is not necessarily a contradiction; but the hypothetical act of meeting the requirement is a clear-cut performative contradiction. To give up one’s philosophical beliefs in accordance with the ascetic requirement (assuming this could be done) would mean that the accepted requirement being met, as well as that the philosophical beliefs by which it is motivated, are not given up. You would be performing a mental state that is incompatible with the very state that you claim to achieve. This hypothetical act – that of the film philosopher who succeeds in giving up her philosophical beliefs about film – can thus be characterized, to borrow a term from a different context, as ‘self-performatively incoherent’ (Clouser 2005: 82–87).
For all that, one hardly needs recourse to logical nitpicking to see the contradictive elephant in the room: precisely by urging a drastic abandoning of our philosophical beliefs about film, philosophers still affirm very definite beliefs about film and film as philosophy. Most essentially, these philosophers affirm a belief in film as such. One way of articulating this belief is that the film somehow ‘knows’ more than we do; and, therefore, that our receptive submission is the most appropriate response to it. Stanley Cavell, to name an example, is always ready to acknowledge the claim of such knowingness on us, as when he notes that “we must let the films themselves teach us how to look at them and how to think about them” (1981: 25). This is the main contradiction of the
This belief in film marks a telling resemblance between the preparatory ethics of film as philosophy and what Colin Davis (2010) expounds as the practice of ‘overreading’. Overreading refers to philosophical interpretations of literature and film that push – and often completely overrun – the boundaries of how we normally gather meaning from a work. (Both Cavell and Deleuze happen to belong to the ‘canon’ of overreaders that he identifies and explores.) Central to the hermeneutics of overreading – and its resemblance to preparatory ethics – is the extent to which it really is a matter of faith. As Davis puts it, the overreader has an “unshakeable faith that the text knows something that it will reveal to us if only we ask it in the right way” (2010: 166). Accordingly, Davis labels this a ‘hermeneutics of conviction’, by which he means to contrast it to both ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ and hermeneutics as ‘the recollection of meaning’ (cf. Ricoeur 1970: 28–36). Like the preparatory ethics of film as philosophy, the hermeneutics of overreading does not set out to unmask works of art in terms of its own critical agenda. Yet neither does it have a straightforward confidence in the possibility of retrieving meaning: it requires conviction, even to the point of desperation; a conviction that (and note also here the exclusivist sentiment that I diagnosed before) the work “rewards the devoted attention that is paid to it because there is in it a kernel of knowledge which only the most unstinting reader can discover” (Davis 2010: 185 [emphasis added]).
Both the preparatory ethics of film as philosophy and the hermeneutics of overreading thus proceed from a supposed belief in the knowingness that films and related works possess. However, apart from submission and attentive devotion to that knowingness, Davis points out, the overreader may also need to apply some necessary pressure or even violence to a film, in order for it to yield to us what it knows (e.g. 2010: 185). Surely this is where the preparatory ethics of film as philosophy and overreading part ways? After all, the former’s asceticism is about guarding viewers from pressuring films with their own beliefs, assumptions and frameworks. Or is it not? Does the belief or expectation that a film somehow ‘knows’ not place upon it, paradoxically, that very pressure of preconception which film philosophers want us to abandon?
The contradiction of the preparatory asceticism inherent to film as philosophy thus grows grander. The basic gesture of openness is to refrain from governing films with our preconceived philosophical beliefs about them. Yet when we give up those beliefs in the name of letting films ‘speak’ for themselves, we impose on them the deeper belief that they do in fact have something to
An ironic implication of the contradiction proposed here is that the film philosophers concerned (and also Davis’ overreaders, for that matter) are not as far away from hermeneutics of suspicion as they think. They simply harbor a more particular breed of critical agenda. Theirs is the suspicion that the unassuming medium of film hides its profound knowingness from us. And they work at unveiling this knowingness (or epistemological agency or power – as this kernel is conceived of in many ways) to reap the philosophical and transformational rewards that it supposedly promises. Yet indispensable to this project is a belief in film, a fervent conviction, which these philosophers – in breach of their avowed ascetic stance – have to impose on film.
Philosophers do not ask themselves whether this belief is justified. It is a pre-theoretical commitment that their entire project takes for granted. And, even if not justified, I suspect that they would still seize on it as the “enabling self-delusion” (Davies 2010: 186) that sustains the promise of films doing philosophy.
5.4.4 Initiative
My final question regarding preparatory ethics concerns the locale of the ‘engine room’ by which the cinemakeover is understood to run. In short: where lies the main initiative for the supposed self-transformation that follows from films doing philosophy? Or even more to the point: who initiates and sustains the cinemakeover – the film or the viewer? The answer should be simple enough. ‘The film, of course’. Is that not the point of the cinemakeover: that film is the prime mover behind the transformational process; much as film is the mover behind its own philosophy? By now, it should be obvious that the lingering theme of preparatory ethics suggests quite the opposite. Yet not so obvious, perhaps, are the pressing implications that this holds for the transformational ethics of film as philosophy, and even film as philosophy as such.
Let us take stock: the view that film as philosophy elicits self-transformation constantly goes with delicate disclaimers which in one way or another imply to ‘Ready Yourself’. It states that the ideal viewer here is the prepared viewer. And the prepared viewer is the viewer who accomplishes those measures of self-work (notably: acts of giving up, letting go, submission, opening up, becoming
What is notable about preparatory ethics as precondition is the circular shape that it gives the envisioned process of transformation. Reminiscent of circular reasoning, the cinemakeover must begin with what it is in fact meant to achieve. That is, viewers have to engage in self-transformation (in preparation for film) in order to achieve self-transformation (through film). In the case of ‘Lose Your Self’, as I have shown, these two orders of self-transformation even involve transformations of the same kind. There, in preparation to ‘Lose Your Self’ through film, you must already in some way or other have lost (lessened, passivized, or abandoned) your individual selfhood. In a manner of ‘like attracting like’, therefore, you must lose your self to ‘Lose Your Self’ some more. And the preparatory ethics of film as philosophy in general is not all that different. Here the circularity only widens beyond self-loss: overall, you must transform yourself to be transformed by film (which is to actually be transformed by your transformed experience of film).
If the point was not yet clear enough, this back-to-front circularity brings it home: because preparatory self-transformation must precede the transformational effects of film as philosophy, the burden of initiative in the cinemakeover rests squarely on the viewer. As many accounts in this chapter suggest, it is up to viewers to enable film to perform its transformational work on them. They must at least open the door for film to work; and possibly even maintain that work once it gets going.
This conclusion however holds challenging implications. Most pressingly, it calls into question the real extent to which film would actually do the work of personal transformation. Frankly, how can we be so certain – considering how the initiative rests on the viewer – that films will do any substantive transformational work at all? Even if it seems to actual viewers that film does do such work, they would not be able to know whether it is the effect of the film or the effect of their own transformational efforts.
What I fear, consequently, is that the supposed transformational affordances of film may be far more incidental – or worse: dispensable – than philosophers would like to believe. If a film’s effect comes down to the ethical-preparatory excellence of its beholder, then who is to say that a poem, a painting, or a pleasant conversation could not be put to the exact same transformational use? The deciding factor, after all, is the openness, giving up, or submission of the beholder – which can be brought to bear on film, yes, but presumably many other things too. Film can lay no special claim to transformational effects just
Where does this leave the idea of the cinemakeover then? The delegation of initiative to the viewer undermines what I take to be the core incentive for the cinemakeover. The incentive is that films promise a distinctive and potent basis for our ideals of personal transformation inasmuch as they (possess the agency needed to) make this ethical appeal on us. Yet when films require our imbuing them with that appeal, as the precondition of preparatory ethics suggests, the incentive goes out the window. Film then no longer promises to be a necessary agent that leads us to otherwise-unattainable ethical outcomes. Instead, it offers only an incidental accessory – one of many possible substitutes – to its transformation-bent beholder, upon whose initiative film’s ethical contributions essentially depend. The cinemakeover thus loses both its presumed potency and distinctiveness as a potential source of personal transformation.
The above issues concerning initiative prove equally pressing to the overall project of film as philosophy itself. After all, we would not be talking about the cinemakeover here if it were not for the project of film as philosophy pointing to it. And we should keep in mind that the philosophers discussed here pose the need for preparatory ethics for exactly that: the sake of films doing philosophy. Only once we allow films to do philosophy, they suggest, viewers can expect the transformational effects of those films. Preparatory ethics is thus a precondition for the cinemakeover only insofar as it is first the precondition for film-doing-philosophy, with its supposed effects, to occur. The real burden of initiative on the viewer, therefore, is to enable film to do philosophy – for self-transformation through film could only follow from that. So, predictably, the same circularity noted a moment ago enters the equation here. For films to do or to be philosophy, we need to attend to them as (doing) philosophy. Hence, the preparatory ethics: we need to do the self-work of instilling in ourselves the restraint (or openness, abandonment, etc.) that will let us attend to film as philosophy (and not, for example, as the mere movies that we would ordinarily take them to be). We may even need to enlist concrete techniques such as writing to help cultivate the “particular kind of attending” that film as philosophy requires (Baggini 2011: 211–212; cf. Sinnerbrink 2014a).
Just as predictably, though, the same circularity gives rise to the same pressing questions. If the initiative for film as philosophy depends on the viewer’s preparatory acts, to what extent can we say that it is film doing the philosophy? Can we tell apart the film’s supposed philosophical work from the self-work by which the viewer has to evoke it? Are we not confusing the viewer’s work for the film’s philosophy? An interlocutor may object that I am forcing an ‘either-or’ onto a process that obviously unfolds as an interaction between film and
To conclude: if the admittedly exciting notion of transformational ethics of film that emerged in this chapter is to have any future, the question of initiative is the one that, to my mind, needs to be addressed most urgently. Considering the significant degree to which film as philosophy and its effects appear to be dependent on preparatory work and a specific preparatory ethics, we need to tighten our theoretical grasp of the divide that separates the viewer’s ethical initiative from the supposed initiative of film. No doubt, in the cinemakeover as we have been imagining here, both will have their part to play. But we need more insight into, for instance, how films may nevertheless prompt preparatory self-work in the viewer; and whether such promptings might in turn require yet earlier ‘pre-preparatory’ acts from the viewer. Whatever the questions, though, we would do well to start clearing up where the ‘Ready Yourself’ work of the viewer ends; and the active, transformational work of film begins. That is, if such work can be reasonably attributed to film. For it might prove to be the case, to snipe a final bumper sticker-slogan from Hamlet, that ‘the readiness is all’…
I credit Berys Gaut for posing to me this incisive question – in a much more cordial fashion, I must add – at a Film Philosophy workshop at the University of Groningen in 2015.
Kracauer opens the epilogue of his famous Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality with this question, referring to it as the issue “which is most central of all” (1960: 285). See also Brian Bergen-Aurand (2013), who uses Kracauer as point of departure for his discussion of film ethics.
Steve Wilken’s Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics (2011) explores a range of ethical systems on the basis of popular statements that include “Look out for number one” (ethical egoism), “Doing what comes naturally” (natural law ethics), and “All you need is love” (situation ethics). For a comparable approach, see Sarah Bakewell’s (2011) celebrated biography of Montaigne, which works through twenty one bumper-perfect answers to the question “How to live?”.
The Delphic precept ‘know yourself’ is synonymous with the figure of Socrates. But in drawing this connection with Socrates, I do take seriously Foucault’s advice that gnōthi seauton (know yourself), for the Ancient Greeks, functioned within the broader justificatory framework of the imperative, epimeleia heautou (the care of the self) (Foucault 2005: 8). Much as the ‘Know Yourself’ ethic in film as philosophy may resemble Socratic self-examination, therefore, I cannot pretend that the film philosophers concerned rely upon epimeliea heautou as the ethic’s motivating paradigm.
Falzon also considers other films, like eXistenZ (David Cronenberg 1999), Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven 1990) and The Game (David Fincher 1997), as variations of the skeptical thought experiments found in the philosophies of both Plato and Descartes (see 2002: 26–29). This suggests that these and comparable “skepticism films” (Schmerheim 2013b) may have ethical relevance similar to that attributed to The Matrix.
The notion of the ‘epistemological twist film’, as Flory indicates, was formulated by George O. Wilson (2006) with reference to drastic revelatory narrative turns in films such as Fight Club (David Fincher 1999) and The Others (Alejandro Amenábar 2001).
At the end of Plato’s Symposium, for instance, Alcibiades describes that unique, near-ineffable Individual who is Socrates as atopos – implying that, not unlike Poppy, he is strange, absurd, unclassifiable, and even disturbing (Hadot 2002: 29–30).
It must be added that Grau’s (counter-)reading of Happy-Go-Lucky is quite upfront about its own transformational interests. I get to this later in the chapter.
See Kiss and Willemsen (2017), who base their incisive account of contemporary complex cinema and complex cinema scholarship on the viewer’s experience of cognitive dissonance. The category of ‘twist films’ under discussion here – for example, The Matrix and Fight Club – represents a key early development in the still-ongoing trend of narrative complexification that they study.
On occasion, Carroll extends the same function of reminding to art in toto. In a brief passage on a different occasion, for example, Carroll remarks that “artworks may serve to remind audiences of what they already know by posing it vividly and concretely” (2010: 184).
Carroll’s clarificationist position is first and foremost a defense of the idea that there are significant relations between art and morality – contrary to the position of ‘automatism’ (arguing that art and morality are essentially separate realms), which he takes issue with. Carroll deems the clarifying effect of art on moral cognition to be the most prominent stratum of the relation between particularly narrative art and morality (1998: 154–155). What I am after is the transformational agenda implied by his position.
Carroll holds that narratives are essentially incomplete: they rely on presuppositions that are filled out by the knowledge that the audience brings to the text (1998: 138). Narratives therefore necessarily mobilize and exercise the existing knowledge of their audiences.
This agenda is clear to see, for instance, in Simon Glendinning’s assessment that phenomenology “aims to cultivate and develop your capacity faithfully to retrieve (for) yourself (as from the inside) a radically re-vis(ion)ed understanding of yourself and your place in the world” (2008: 48). For another example, see Joaquim Siles i Borràs (2011) on the pronounced ethical interests at play in Husserl’s phenomenology.
The five rules read as follows: one, “attend to the phenomena of experience as they appear”; two, “describe, don’t explain”; three, “horizontalize or equalize all immediate phenomena”; four, “seek out structural or invariant features of the phenomena as they appear”; and, lastly, five, “every experiencing has its reference or direction towards what is experienced, and, contrarily, every experienced phenomenon refers to or reflects a mode of experiencing to which it is present” (cited in Sobchack 2011: 195–203).
Sobchack does in fact hint at this first kind of transformational unity. Owing to the relational structure of reversibility and reciprocity between the viewer’s body and the film’s body, she notes that “objectivity and subjectivity lose their presumed clarity” (2004: 66). Quoting from Iris Marion Young, she even speaks of embodied subjectivity as leaving “no basis for preserving the mutual exclusivity of the categories subject and object, inner and outer, I and world”. This view has echoes of the aim of unitive experience in various forms of mysticism, a typical feature of which is the blurring of subject-object boundaries. And, as I will still show, this puts Sobchack in the company of both Daniel Frampton and those who subscribe to the ‘Lose Your Self’ ethic.
See Sobchack (2008; 2011: 202–204) for a sampling of how she approaches the experience of transcendence on the basis of our material, bodily immanence.
For ancients like Seneca or Lucretius, as Hadot evaluates them, contemplating the world is at its core about rediscovering a naive vision: to see the world with new eyes, as if one were seeing it for the first time. In contrast, Mulhall claims that film inspires, not some renewed primitive vision of the world, but new visions – different perspectives – in terms of which to consider the world.
Questions of perspective, in relation to self-transformation, also emerge as a major theme in philosophical readings of Terrence Malick’s film style, which I take up in the following chapter.
Of course, many do find considerable philosophical value in these and related concepts – see the work of Patricia Pisters (2003; 2012) and D.N. Rodowick (1997; 2010a) as two influential examples in this regard.
Of course, although an ethic of transformation may conceive of language as a domain ‘within’ the self, it overlaps with (the attempted transformation of) language as an obviously far broader, supra-personal, cultural domain. Accordingly, Frampton thinks of filmosophy as also providing a new discourse for film writing and criticism in general – and not only for the hypothetical individual filmgoer (see 2006a: 169–182).
The phrase “glowing fog, a dark yellow mist” is taken from Carlos Castaneda’s Tales of Power (1974), which Deleuze and Guattari also cite a few passages earlier. Telling about this otherwise enigmatic reference, to my mind at least, is the indistinctness and diffuseness of fog and mist.
Pierre Hadot (1995: 238–250) situates this Stoic theme within a broader philosophical tradition that practices ‘the view from above’ (involving the contemplation of individuals and society from the universal viewpoint of the cosmos), which in the ancient context he traces from the Homeric epics and later Platonic philosophy, to its apex in the Epicurean, Cynic and Stoic schools.
Restated in the more exact Deleuze-Guattarian terms that Del Río resorts to: static bodies and organizations on a ‘molar’ plane (populated by subjects, identities, binaries, and other inhibiting strata) are all susceptible to the destabilizing movements of intensive forces and affects on a ‘molecular’ plane of impersonal becoming (Del Río 2008: 9, 16; cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 39–60).
With this term, Brown takes particular inspiration from Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s (1991) arguments in favor of the mind’s ‘enworlded’ nature, according to which the mind does not operate in objective detachment from the world, but actively emerges from relations between environments, brain and body (Brown 2013: 144–146).
They speak of such traumatized perception with specific reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s Oh, Woe Is Me (1993) and the sudden visual displacements of characters that Godard achieves through jarring montage.
Naturally, Cavell’s interest in self-transformation of the ‘Know Yourself’ kind goes far beyond his work on film. See, for example, Andrew Norris (2017: 15–48) on the way Cavell construes ordinary language philosophy as a practical act of self-examination.
Here I am thinking of Cavell’s reference to “the human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation – a wish for the power to reach this world” (1979: 21 [emphasis added]).
Cavell’s notion of presentness, which he adopts from Michael Fried, is not to be confused with the common transformational value of ‘being in the present’ in a strictly temporal sense, nor with the philosophical concept of ‘presence’ associated with Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive critiques. For Cavell, ‘presentness’ is simply as ordinary a noun as ‘whiteness’ or ‘blackness’. It refers to the same, everyday quality we refer to when we speak of someone or something as present (Rothman & Keane 2000: 64).
Richard Eldridge (2005) eloquently sums up Cavell’s notion of acknowledgment as “the taking up, articulating, and registering of what in our experience calls for various routes of feeling and interest that we are also inclined to suppress”. This may range from the acknowledgment of the pain of another, to acknowledging our own finitude.
See, for example, Schmerheim (2013b), Früchtl (2017), and Sinnerbrink (2011a: 90–91). As these authors make clear, Gilles Deleuze advances a claim similar to ‘Connect Yourself’ by suggesting that cinema gives us reasons ‘to believe in this world’ (e.g. Deleuze 1989: 171–172).
Besides the model viewers envisioned by these philosophical accounts of film, there is also the related matter of the model viewers that particular films themselves solicit – much like Umberto Eco argued of ‘model readers’ of texts (e.g. Eco 1979: 7–11) – which unfortunately falls beyond the scope of my brief considerations below.