Having sketched and characterized various approaches to film as philosophy in Chapter 1, and in anticipation of detailing the transformational ethics of those approaches in the chapter that follows, the task at hand is clear: to first formulate the ethical framework that will guide my analysis of the project of film as philosophy. The framework that I set up here is largely indebted to a theory of transformational ethics developed by South African philosopher, Johann Visagie (1999), a set of concepts that he distinguishes to account for the most basic parameters and options available to any given ethic of personal transformation. Building on his theory, I develop in this chapter a number of expansions and elaborations to fine-tune Visagie’s approach to the notion of transformational ethics of film, which in turn will enable me to trace and articulate such ethics at work in various conceptions of film as philosophy.
To give readers an early taste of how the ethical framework works, I introduce it here with frequent reference to Fight Club (1999). This David Fincher film makes for an illuminating case, as the film’s own preoccupations with the theme of personal transformation compel its interpreters – and among them meta-interpreters like myself – to join in some sparring around this mutual ethical interest. Fight Club the book, written by Chuck Palahniuk (1996), as well as the film that soon became a cult hit after its release in 1999, throws together a royal rumble of views about transformational ethics – all of which can be scrutinized in terms of the framework that I put forward. In more than one sense of the term ‘hands-on’, therefore, the film offers a handy warm-up round for showing how I approach questions of transformational ethics both in a film as well as in its critical, philosophical reception.
Moreover, by enlisting Fight Club as a sparring partner for this chapter, I ultimately would like to suggest that film philosophers – that is, those who explicitly concern themselves with film as philosophy – have far more in common with Fight Club than they, no doubt, would initially believe. I do not mean to suggest that these philosophers have any personal interest in underground brawls, or anarchist pranks like taking a leak in restaurant soup. However, in looking forward to the next chapter, I submit that they do share with the fictional Fight Club members a more basic enthusiasm over the ideal of personal transformation. Of course, the two groups envisage such transformation
1 Johann Visagie’s Theory of Transformational Ethics
I begin with an introductory overview of the theory of transformational ethics that I adopt and adapt here for my own meta-critical purposes. Visagie developed his theory as a component of a more comprehensive philosophical programme, ‘Discourse Archaeology’ (a working title that eventually stuck), a network of theories dealing with various conceptual grounds from which philosophically relevant discourses originate (e.g. Visagie 1996a; 1996b; 1998a; 1998b; 2001; 2004; 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b). With the sub-theory of transformational ethics, specifically, Visagie endeavors to describe the most basic structures and continuities which underlie practices of personal transformation. As in the rest of his archaeological programme, he gives an account of a specific kind of discourse: in this case transformational practices are taken as expressive of a distinct ethical discourse relating to self-formation and transformation.
Visagie has no interest in normative conceptions here, so the theory does not commit itself to any ‘ideal’ action or value of transformation. Nor is it an ‘explanatory theory’ in the sense that it aspires to tell us why, in some grand sense, people seek personal transformation or how, in empirical terms, such transformations may actually occur. Instead, he offers what I take to be a ‘descriptive theory’ – bearing in mind that a descriptive theory still provides explanations, only explanations of a different order. Visagie deems the syntactic analyses of transformational (generative) grammar in linguistics a fruitful model for the kind of descriptive analysis that he is after: his theory seeks to explain transformational ethics by describing the essential options and parameters that inform any particular practice of personal transformation. In terms of this analogy with Chomskyan linguistic theory, his own theory can be said to take aim at the general ‘deep-structures’ that ‘ground’ any individual ‘surface’ variation of ethical-transformational discourse (Visagie 1999: 1–2). His theoretical endeavor, then, is perhaps best defined as ‘meta-ethical’. He wants to account for any possible manifestation of transformational ethics by isolating the basic structures and elements that appear to be essential to them all.
Another recurring topic: I will continually relate my considerations of Visagie’s theory to Michel Foucault and his ethical work on the care of the self. The ‘final Foucault’, after all, remains a towering reference point that no discussion of transformational ethics can ignore (see, for example, Foucault 1984; 1986: 25–32; 1988a; 1990; Veyne 1993; O’Leary 2002). Visagie indeed readily acknowledges the “directive importance” of Foucault’s ethical project to his own theory of transformational ethics which, as he discovered some years after first formulating his, bears “some remarkable similarities” to that of Foucault (Visagie 1999: i, 1n1). Yet he is equally quick to stress that his own approach, “in terms of its meta-theoretical presuppositions as well as its methodological models, differs much from Foucault’s approach and is even, in important respects, opposed to the latter” (1999: 1n1). In view of this nuanced association, I make a point of drawing out the most pertinent points of agreement and disagreement between Visagie and Foucault, which should provide useful orientation to readers who are familiar with the latter. At times, I can add, my discussions will also cross paths with Pierre Hadot, who Foucault cites as one of his major influences (see Davidson 1990). There is yet another incentive for involving Foucault as a virtual ‘partner in dialogue’ in this chapter: Foucault was not only a distinguished scholar of transformational ethics, but is also
1.1 Transformation as Motive, Ethic, and Practice
Although it mostly remains implicit, Visagie’s approach to transformational ethics proceeds from a tripartite distinction between personal transformation as a motive, an ethic, and a practice. To quickly summarize this distinction in relatable terms: (1) If a despondent pencil pusher, for instance, entertains the idea of reinventing himself, he is being driven by a ‘motive’ of personal transformation. (2) Whenever this motive finds expression in a particular formulation of how and why such self-change should be pursued, we have an ‘ethic’ of transformation – like the idea of taking part in a ‘Fight Club’ to, say, inject the authenticity of blood and guts into one’s bland daily existence. (3) Yet both a motive and ethic are still distinct from the real ‘practice’ of transformation, which would mean that the pencil pusher actually takes up hard core fisticuffs as a manner of self-therapy.
So at the root of any particular ethic or practice of transformation, firstly, Visagie posits an abstracted, trans-historical motive of personal transformation. In so doing he insists – rightly, I believe – on disentangling the comprehensive viewpoint of a general motive from the varied individual orientations and expressions that it may inspire. As an abstracted motive, the ideal of personal transformation involves any aspiration to change the self to some desired state, be it greater happiness, insight, awareness or care. Visagie assumes the motive to be effective in any discourse that aspires toward, or only even thematizes, the conscious ambition for a change in individual- or collective personhood. This change can go by a host of names: it can be the ‘creation’, ‘formation’, ‘reconstitution’, ‘fashioning’, ‘cultivation’, ‘disciplining’, ‘maintenance’, ‘enhancement’ and, of course, ‘transformation’ of the self.1
Visagie accepts that the quest for personal transformation, understood in this broad sense, appears to be a universal ideal. For this reason, he iterates that the appeal of personal transformation exerts its influence across particular eras and cultural-historical contexts. He notes, for example, the inception and growth of this ethical motive in early Greek philosophy, reaching an influential crescendo in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (1996a: 142). Especially in the Hellenistic and Roman contexts, he explains, philosophy was not only substantially concerned with ethics, but ethics itself primarily entailed the
For Visagie to stress the historical and cultural pervasiveness of personal transformation, however, is not to deny the individuality of each situated expression of this motive – these particularities must be duly recognized. But the theoretical balancing act required here is to still not lose sight of the continuity – an underlying basic motive of personal transformation – that runs throughout all individual, historically determined practices of self-transformation.
a cross-cultural ideology entailing an acute sensitivity to the importance of human subjectivity, particularly the importance for human individuals (alone or in groups) of striving after stylized change in the mode of thought and behavior, thus reaching a higher level of existence than
‘ordinary’ people, and in this process availing themselves of a set of specific methods. (2006a: 49)
The general motive of personal transformation is inseparable from its incarnations in particular ethics and concrete practices of transformation. A transformational ethic, secondly, refers to an articulable conception of why and how self-change is to be achieved. Any person or community inspired by the ideal of personal transformation practices this ideal in accordance with an ethic, which offers specific motivations, credos, goals, guidelines and rules relating to their transformation. These specifications can be analyzed in terms of the five frames that I discuss below.
Although such an ethic is often explicitly formulated, it need not be. Many forms of ethics of transformation do derive from discourses or ‘manuals’ with explicit transformational instructions – be it religious scripture, philosophical works, or self-help books dishing out ‘chicken soup for the soul’. Yet any discourse can harbor a latent- or implied conception of self-change. In this regard, Visagie is mostly interested in the ways in which human actions and practices, modelled upon and studied as ‘text’, may be ‘read’ as expressive of a tacit ethic (1999: 2, 2n4; cf. Ricoeur 1979). In fact, he accepts that no active pursuit of personal transformation can exist in the absence of at least an implicit ethic which informs it (1999: 111).
Although a transformational practice implies an ethic, the inverse does not apply. The motive, expressed in an ethic, does not automatically entail that transformation is practiced – the concrete actions that someone performs to achieve the goal of personal transformation remain a separate matter, as most smokers (and all lawyers) can confirm. Transformational practices, lastly, refer to the various activities, routines, habits, as well as the adherence to rules and codes that may be exercised for the sake of self-change. It is particularly in this area that Fight Club strikes one as relentless – more on that in a moment.
Visagie deploys the motive/ethic/practice distinction for the most part in the sphere of practical discourse – the practical guidelines, decision-making and actions that support personal transformation. But where does this leave theoretical discourse, the main subject of my ethical inquiry with this book? Visagie certainly recognizes that personal transformation as a motive can be at work in both practical and theoretical reflection (1999: 2). And, although this is not on his main agenda with the theory, he does touch upon three distinct senses in which we can think of personal transformation as a motive also to theoretical reflection.
In the most elementary sense personal transformation can simply present itself as a theme for theoretical reflection. In such cases the idea and ideal of
The second sense concerns personal transformation as the motive that drives the theorist. Here Visagie separates the theorist who only theorizes transformational ethics (say, the ‘distanced theorist’) from what I would call the ‘committed theorist’ – someone who indeed also responds, at an intellectual or personal level, to the appeal of transformational ethics (1999: 47–48). The theorist who responds at an intellectual level, says Visagie, proceeds from some commitment to the view that “the transformation of the self is indeed a legitimate and worthwhile project for individuals to engage in” (1999: 48). The theorist who responds at a personal level, however, actually practices an ethic that he or she is personally convinced of, and so qualifies as a ‘transformationalist’, a conscious and dedicated practitioner of self-transformation in one form or another. It comes as no surprise that Visagie sees an arch model for the ‘committed theorist’ in the life of Foucault (1999: 50–52). Although Foucault’s historico-philosophical analyses of transformational ethics could easily pass for the work of a ‘distanced theorist’, it is well publicized that he was also deeply committed to his own (theoretically informed) vision of personal transformation. For this reason, we can deem Foucault a theorist who practiced what he preached, in the sense that he resorted to personal experiments in self-creation, involving among other things sado-masochistic sexual practices and the use of drugs (1999: 117–118).3
The third and strongest sense in which Visagie relates a motive of personal transformation to theoretical reflection is the notion that theoretical reflection itself can be the means by which the theorist pursues self-transformation. For some ‘committed theorists’, therefore, it is the very theoretical work that they do – the reading, writing and all the other contemplative acts that go into it – that comprise their practice of transformation. And, once more, one can roll out the example of Foucault. He took his intellectual work as philosopher to be intimately tied to the problem of his own transformation, the “transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge” (Foucault 1988c: 14, cited in Visagie 1999: 51). Visagie notes in particular how Foucault saw writing as instrumental to this ethical project, and how his use of writing is informed by a well-researched appreciation of a variety of techniques and genres of writing in
1.2 Frames of Analysis
With the necessary preliminaries now in place, let us turn to the basic anatomy of transformational ethics. For Visagie, the kernel of any ethic or enactment of personal transformation is a self that operates on itself. This is much in line with Foucault’s somewhat idiosyncratic understanding of ‘ethics’4, which he delimits as the study of a self’s relationship to itself (rapport à soi), and the ways in which this self-relation is meant to constitute the individual as moral subject (Davidson 1986: 228). And, in the same vein, Hadot (2002: 190) speaks of intentions of self-transformation in terms of a manner of “self-duplication” by which “the ‘I’ concentrates itself on itself”.
Yet the point is this: when one poses to this ‘self-operating self’ questions of its means and motivations, its objects and objectives, there emerges a clear set of dimensions in terms of which this kernel of self-transformation can be framed and elaborated.
Visagie’s framework, as I adapt it, provides five frames of analysis that brings into focus each of these dimensions of transformational ethics. The (1) mode and (2) technique frames are two complementary perspectives on the proposed means: the ‘how?’, of self-transformation; the (3) value frame examines
These five dimensions – the ‘why’, the ‘what’, the two ‘hows’, and the ‘to what end’ of self-transformation – make up the essential structure of transformational ethics. And Visagie’s frames of analysis help specify the basic elements and parameters that each of these dimensions consist of, as I elaborate below. His meta-ethical enterprise is therefore not only to distinguish the fundamental dimensions that structure transformational ethics, but also to differentiate within those dimensions the essential ‘options’ that present themselves to any given vision or version of self-transformation.
1.2.1 Technique of Transformation
A good place to start is the most self-evident dimension of transformational ethics – that of the transformational technique or exercise. Transformational techniques, quite simply, are the concrete procedures by which someone works on or changes the self, or, alternatively, facilitates self-change for another. Such techniques can go by many names: in the Foucauldian scheme they are grouped under “technologies of the self” and would be called “ascetics” (askesis), which is ethical work, self-forming activity, the elaboration of oneself (see Foucault 1984: 354–355; 1990: 27); Pierre Hadot (1995) would here instead opt for the notion of “spiritual exercises”.
Regardless of what you want to call them, techniques of transformation abound in Fight Club, our tutor case. As inherited from the novel, the film indulges in a gangbang of conventional and less conventional samples of self-forming activity, typically presented in hyperbolic fashion. Most conspicuous in Fight Club is the technique of fighting, the emblematic reference point to most of my analyses in this chapter. To identify fighting as a transformational technique – atypical as it may be, which may have brought the film its cult following – is to place it in the company of well-established practices: solitude, meditation, writing, reading, dialogue, walking, exercising, confession, chastity, fasting, ways of dressing, and taking drugs are some of the familiar techniques that Visagie singles out (1999: 131–134). Yet, unlike most of these techniques, the use of fighting in Fight Club renders the idea of self-forming
Yet the blunt instrument of physical violence is but one of many further transformational techniques depicted in Fight Club. I highlight the most notable instances by way of a synopsis. The film starts with the insomniac narrator – commonly referred to as “Jack” (Edward Norton) – who recounts his unfulfilling, alienating life-style of ‘retail therapy’. Then, in a bid to treat his insomnia and alienation, Jack becomes addicted to the strangely therapeutic experience of attending medical support groups where he does not belong. While he does take part in the conventional psychological techniques like confession and guided meditation, Jack also uses his voyeurism in these support sessions as a self-tailored method for experiencing catharsis. Enter Tyler Durden – Jack’s charismatic second-self – whose hodgepodge of anti-establishment sentiments yield a corresponding selection of further transformational practices: Tyler prescribes ascetic renunciations of luxury and beauty; he devises offensive pranks that defy capitalist and consumerist mores; and begins to issue his Fight Club members with specific tests (or “homework”, as he puts it) that enable them to do the same. As the Fight Club degenerates into the fascist collective called ‘Project Mayhem’, Tyler becomes increasingly aggressive in the disciplinary techniques that he ministers: there are vows of silence, rites of initiation, strict training regimens and out-and-out military style brainwashing. What is more, the entire Fight Club narrative can be construed as a transformation-seeking dialogue with self, seeing that the film’s famous twist reveals Tyler to have been Jack’s twisted alter ego all along. This crisis ultimately culminates in the extreme transformational act of self-violence, when Jack shoots himself in order to kill off the tyranny of Tyler within him.
However, given the sheer variety in which transformational techniques obviously come, how does one actually go about analyzing such techniques? One option is to situate and specify techniques of transformation within a chain of sub-techniques. The technique of meditation, for example, is clearly a broad, inclusive category that can undergo numerous steps of specification: a major sub-category of meditation is a meditative self-examination, say of one’s inner-life and experiences; such self-examination can be exercised through writing, but can equally be pursued through things like reading, dialogue, doing art, interpreting dreams, etc.; the technique of writing may in turn take the form of a meticulous recording of one’s experiences in a journal; the procedure of
Another option for the analysis of transformational techniques is to delineate the larger complex of techniques within which a given technique functions (1999: 138). Practically no technique is practiced in isolation from other co-techniques or sub-techniques. This principle applies as much to fighting as it does to meditation. For Tyler Durden, the technique of fighting should be practiced within an entire complex of supporting measures – things like codes of confidentiality, seclusion, rule-keeping, camaraderie and ‘homework’ all serve to reinforce his transformational core business of bare fist fights. Most analyses of technique-complexes, as Visagie makes clear, address precisely such hierarchical arrangements, in which one technique governs another in a ‘means-end’ kind of relationship (1999: 131). Here one can imagine for instance how regularly ascetic techniques like solitude and silence are practiced as a preparatory means to more effective meditation. Such preparatory measures are in fact a significant topic that features later in the book.
Naturally, the analysis of transformational techniques may also require that one zooms in on an individual technique, whether to establish its general structures (e.g. the technique of fighting relies on consensual violence between at least two people) or to examine its practical implementation (e.g. “only two guys to a fight”; “no shirts, no shoes”; or “someone yells ‘stop!’, goes limp, taps out, the fight is over”). Visagie mentions a number of aspects in terms of which a technique can be evaluated: among others, the social, the physical, the psychological, and the aesthetic (1999: 135). Nearly all Tyler Durden’s rules for fighting, for example, pertain to the social interaction in and around the fights.
1.2.2 Mode of Transformation
The gist of Visagie’s analytical stance toward transformational techniques, however, comes to light through the correlative frame of modes. Following his understanding of a trans-historical motive of personal transformation, as discussed above, he abstracts a set of distinct modes that each consistently realizes this motive across diverse contexts and times. These modes also concern the ‘how’ of personal transformation, but in far more fundamental terms. Unlike techniques, the transformational modes refer to the most basic options or means available to subjects who aim to change themselves. The modes distinguished by Visagie are (1) contemplation, (2) mysticism, (3) asceticism, (4) temperance, (5) enduring hardship, (6) ministering, and (7) the refined pursuit of pleasure (1999: 101–115).
‘Mysticism’ seeks transformation through experiences of ecstasy or transcendence. This mode encompasses both radical and subtle forms of experiencing ecstasy (ekstasis), understood in its original sense of standing or being outside of oneself. Whereas contemplation (even deep philosophical or theological reflection) still abides by certain given categories and distinctions of the mind, the mode of mysticism pursues subjective processes which go beyond the structures and boundaries that constitute our reflective and experiential capacities. Visagie recognizes that ‘mysticism’ is traditionally only associated with exclusive, esoteric experiences of transcendence. Clearly, few people can lay claim to experiences such as ‘soul travelling’, transportations to another reality or extra-personal unification with ultimate Being. But such extraordinary quests can nevertheless be accommodated within a more general mode of transformation, which opens up our understanding of mysticism to a variety of ‘everyday’ instances of overcoming the (perceived) limitations of ordinary thought and experience. Visagie highlights in this regard the ‘democratization’ that mysticism has undergone in late modernity: transformational mysticism can now be practiced in the form of expert psychological guidance, ‘way out’ experiences that typically ‘defy description’ or ‘cannot be put into words’ (e.g. being in the wilderness, doing extreme sports, practicing tantric sex, etc.) and using consciousness altering drugs (1999: 106).
The mode of ‘asceticism’ involves transformation through the giving up of things. This ‘giving up of things’ should be understood as relinquishing in the most comprehensive sense possible: it is at stake in any instance of doing away with something for the purpose of self-change. Expressions of the ascetic mode may be as subtle as merely giving up things that are generally considered to be pleasurable, but can equally take on various extremes of self-inflicted pain – like relinquishing personal comfort, or bodily safety, or even one’s very life.5
Visagie next distinguishes the closely related mode of ‘temperance’, transformation through the avoidance of excess, which essentially also involves the giving up of things. Yet whereas the ascetic may want to live without things such as environmental comfort, enjoyable refreshments, or sex, the practitioner of temperance may be distinguished for being far less radical: he or she looks to rather use such things in a stylized, calculated and, most of all, sparing manner – usually for the sake of attaining some state of balance or calmness, à la the Epicurean prescription of the temperate enjoyment of only necessary, ordinary pleasures (1999: 108).
The mode of ‘endurance’, transformation through using experiences of hardship for purposes of self-change, can likewise be seen as an extension of the ascetic. Still, there is a clear distinction to be drawn with regard to control: while the ascetic intentionally designs circumstances of deprivation, the practitioner of endurance merely finds herself in such circumstances. The practitioner of endurance effectively has no control over challenging conditions – ranging from discomfort to absolute suffering – but only over how she reacts to and is affected by them. “In choosing to experience a very difficult situation in a certain way”, Visagie explains, “the practitioner of endurance also performs a disciplinary moulding of the self, in effect using his circumstances as a tool” (1999: 107). The Stoics, for example, not only advocated transformational endurance (‘Stoic indifference’) of all situations, but they also practiced preparatory meditative exercises (in which the mode of endurance thus enlists that of contemplation) whereby they imaginatively anticipated ‘the worst that could happen’ and tested and rehearsed their reaction to the latter (Visagie 1999: 108; cf. Foucault 1988a: 36–37).
The mode of ‘pleasure’, lastly, seeks transformation through the deliberate use of pleasure. While many efforts at transformation aim to resist pleasure, Visagie finds ample evidence that pleasurable experience – the proverbial sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll – itself is often enlisted as a distinct instrument of self-change. Whereas Epicurus encouraged the experience of necessary everyday pleasures, for example, nineteenth century dandies such as Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde were devoted to a refined experience of pleasure – the cultivation of style, elegance, and beauty – in an attempt to lead an artful existence (1999: 114).
These seven modes, capturing the most essential ways of attempting the task of self-transformation, find their actualization in concrete techniques. Visagie in fact designates these elemental modes by the (Foucauldian) metaphoric label of ‘technologies’, in order to indicate that these elemental modes serve as enabling conditions for transformational activity. In these terms, therefore, ‘techniques’ are the particular realizations of their underlying ‘technologies’. Yet it has to be emphasized Visagie draws an explicit, technical distinction between transformational ‘technologies’ (or ‘modes’, as I opt to call them) and ‘techniques’ – a distinction that is absent in the approaches of both Foucault and Hadot. Although Foucault tends to use the terms interchangeably, or to refer to specific methods as ‘techniques’ and to more general classes
To be sure, Visagie does not conceive of transformational modes as mere categories of techniques. He takes these modes to mark basic, diachronic continuities that run throughout historically situated practices of transformation; they are the persistent avenues through which personal transformation has been pursued to this very day (Visagie 1999: 116). Foucault’s historicist assumptions, he would say, lead him to over-emphasize both the contingency and discontinuity of ‘epistemes’ (or epochal paradigms), and thus preclude the possibility of posing recurring diachronic transformational modes. Though not denying the historically specific, Visagie has no problem with posing such elemental modes on the reasonable grounds of our shared human cognitive endowment, seeing that the modes appear to be “related to very basic human attitudes and actions” (1999: 3). In fact, he faults Foucault for his antithetical separation of self-transformation from the idea of a relatively fixed human nature (2006: 50).
But what exactly do we gain from distinguishing transformational modes from concrete techniques? For one thing, the distinction affords greater explanatory ‘coverage’. To analyze transformational ethics only in terms of their posited techniques simply yields a never-ending list of individual techniques which, at best, can be bunched together in functional sub-lists. The frame of transformational modes adds a correlative perspective that cuts across individual permutations. To pinpoint a set basic actions that all techniques rely upon, and then examine transformational techniques in tandem with their modes, sets up a penetrating systematic vantage point on any particular manner of practicing self-transformation.
In this regard, Visagie notes the heuristic potential of differentiating transformational techniques according to the underlying modes within which they seem to be most ‘at home’ (1999: 131–134). Such a differentiation of techniques enables considerable analytical manoeuvres in a case such as Fight Club: it shows, among other things, the progression in how Jack trades earlier techniques based on pleasure (retail therapy, voyeurism) and contemplation (guided meditation, escapism) for the generally ascetically focused renunciations of comfort that qualify the eventual practices of his Fight Club.
Yet the ultimate benefit of the mode-technique distinction, as I see it, is that it enables us to discern the multiple modes which are often at play within a single transformational technique. This is visibly at stake in a technique such as fighting: it simultaneously realizes elements of asceticism, endurance, ministering, and pleasure. And insofar as the Fight Club brawls involve certain states of mind and experiences of ecstasy, the practice even calls upon the modes of
1.2.3 Value of Transformation
The value frame addresses transformational ethics in terms of the aims that guide self-change. For Visagie, such aims boil down to a question of values: any transformational ethic advances a selection of values that capture the envisioned objective of personal transformation.
Classical examples of such transformational values include wisdom, serenity and goodness – but, classical as they are, one would not hope to get them from a fist fight. Naturally Fight Club dabbles in transformational values more befitting to its central theme: the fighters’ practice of consensual violence can thus be read as an aspiration to freedom, authenticity, visceral awareness, to feeling ‘more alive’, a sense of connection, masculinity and solidarity, to name a few obvious possibilities.
It is worth re-emphasizing that Visagie probes the ‘aimed-at’ states of transformation – what Foucault (1984: 355) calls the telos, or goal, of one’s work on the self – in terms of the values that an ethic seeks to realize. So rather than deal with a transformational outcome such as redemption (or salvation), Visagie would look to relate ‘redemption’ to more basic values that may undergird it. A state of redemption could for instance be one of freedom, as is apparently the desire of the Fight Club; yet in other cases the values at stake may be innocence, purity, peace of mind, or unity with the Divine. Likewise, the transformational telos of ‘immortality’ – sometimes mentioned by Foucault (e.g. 1984: 355) – Visagie would treat in terms of more basic desires for infinity, autonomy, or fullness of life. This manner of abstracting transformational values makes it easier for the analyst to relate the values of an ethic to larger cultural motives (value ‘regimes’) that fall outside a more immediate project of self-transformation.
To function as a transformational value needs not imply that a value is an inherently or recognizably ‘ethical’ goal. Attempts at self-transformation may just as much be guided by ‘bad’ (misguided, perverted, ideologically sinister) values. The mentioned values pertaining to Fight Club clearly derive from much broader cultural motives and ideologies, which have trickled down into the idiosyncratic – to put it lightly – transformational ambitions of a secret fighting society. Visagie thus reserves the technical specification for any value
At this point one could have stopped with a simple precept: that the analysis of transformational values should be open to any value that may present itself as an aim of self-transformation – a position that I am happy to accept. But Visagie aims for more: he wants to arrive at “the standard values […] that have always guided the practitioners of transformational ethics, across many different paradigms from ancient to modern times” (1999: 123). The working set of values that he thence arrives at are: happiness, fullness (fulfilment, completion), wholeness (integration, unity), perfection (purity), wisdom (insight, knowledge, truth, rationality), simplicity, serenity, beauty, goodness (care, morality, justice), freedom (independence, self-sufficiency) and individuality (1999: 123–129). This basic index of values, Visagie argues, functions as a unitary complex that gets individuated within any given context, meaning that values get interpreted, selected, combined and prioritized in different ways (1999: 123, 127–128).
As with posing a trans-historical motive and corresponding modes of transformation, Visagie therefore wants to establish also a set of general values that reaches across particular ethics and their contexts. Yet I am less convinced by the proposition when it comes to values. For although there are ‘classical’ values that seem to persist across centuries, and across cultures, I find it impossible to abstract a set of ‘base’ values that can adequately account for any potential value of transformation (as, I believe, can be done with transformational modes). And it is not only that Visagie’s selection is bound to make glaring omissions – like the value of awareness (with its variations: presence, attentiveness, receptivity, openness), which is a widely recurring concern of transformation and also a prevalent one in this book. More problematic still is that his selection of ‘standard’ values makes normative calls that compromise his own meta-ethical aim, as I see it, which is to formulate the structures that can account for all potential instances of transformational ethics.
With that said, I have no problem with the idea that there are certain general transformational values which do reappear in different contexts. And in this respect, I do see the benefit of using Visagie’s proposed index as a guide to the kind of values that the analyst of transformational ethics should be on the lookout for.
1.2.4 Domain of Transformation
The issue of the values that define an ideal transformed state is separate from what, exactly, is supposed to get transformed in the process. The latter issue
The domain frame is in actual fact not a part of Visagie’s formal framework. He does seem to recognize transformational domains – what Foucault (1984: 353; 1990: 26–27) identifies as the ‘substance’ of ethics – as a valid dimension for analyzing self-change (Visagie 1999: i), but never ventures to show what this addition may look like within his own approach. Yet considering the deep relevance of this frame of analysis, the fact that Visagie does acknowledge it, and the ease with which it slots into his overall framework, I include the frame of transformational domains here as an essential feature of the approach that I adopt for my own project.
Fortunately, in Foucault we have plentiful aid in filling out the picture that Visagie leaves incomplete. The domain of transformation, as Foucault would have it, is the part of self that is taken as the perceived object or ‘material’ of one’s ethical work, the part that gets singled out for judgments and acts of self-change (Foucault 1984: 352–353; Davidson 1986: 228–229). This may include ‘working on’ domains such as one’s thoughts, emotions, desires, will, or experience in totality. The technique of fighting in Fight Club, for example, clearly concentrates on the domain of the body. But it applies equally to domains that extend beyond the immediate physical self, since their fighting is as much a self-fashioning of the characters’ behavior, lifestyle and social relations.
I believe it necessary that the analyst abides by any ‘logic’ of domains that an ethic of transformation may impose, as the above example also suggests. This means that a posited domain of transformation, depending on the ethic at stake, need not be an empirical property of the self – it can be wholly phenomenological, conjectural, even superstitious. For it is often elusive, imperceptible phenomena such as ‘intentions’, ‘passions’, ‘character’ or ‘the soul’ that are deemed to be in need of transformational work. In addition, it must be agreed that designated domains of transformation often lie outside the stricter boundaries of what one would normally demarcate as ‘the self’. People like the Fight Club members may want to shape their actions, skills, habits, or way of life – things which are not necessarily ‘internal’ to the self, but which are nevertheless experienced as ‘part’ of the ‘extended’ self. And to recognize that aspirations of self-transformation may embrace interpersonal and culturally embedded extensions of selfhood, helps to ward off likely objections to the notion of personal transformation as being too individualistic or even solipsistic.
Many versions of transformational ethics will furthermore advance, not one, but a complex of domains, much like they also tend to do with techniques, values and paradigms. And, here too, the analyst can look into how an ethic conceives of its domains in terms of particular arrangements and interactions.
Pinning down such relationships between transformational domains also offers a useful basis for critical appraisals of transformational ethics, since these hierarchical configurations tend to pose problematic essentialisms, reductionisms, and dualisms which call for critical deconstruction.
1.2.5 Paradigm of Transformation
Any ethic of transformation gives expression to, or ‘colors’, the motive of personal transformation in a particular way – the transformation is sought after for precise reasons, some values are privileged over others, and specific techniques are singled out as suitable to the cause. So the question is: what guides someone in selecting particular elements of transformational ethics and putting them to work in a distinctive way?
The paradigm frame details the particular constellation of discourses, or ‘paradigms’, that motivate a transformational ethic and casts it into a distinctive form. The overall paradigm of a transformational ethic, as Visagie conceives it, is typically composed of commitments to a philosophical school (e.g. Platonism, Stoicism, Rationalism, Romanticism), religious institution (e.g. Buddhist monasticism, Sufism, Puritanism), social movement (e.g. 1960s counterculture, Human Potential Movement, environmentalism), or any similar ideological ‘home’ (1999: 121–122). Tyler Durden’s ethic of fighting, for example,
For Visagie, to reconstruct the paradigm of a transformational ethic is to come to terms with its historical situatedness and, by that, its individuality. A given context constitutes the specific interpretive environment, the guiding worldview, within which personal transformation is understood and enacted: it introduces the idea of transformation, it gives the rationale for transforming the self and it dictates a particular application of modes, techniques and transformational values. The transformational paradigm is thus the individuating ‘filter’ through which the general structures of self-transformation – belonging to the other dimensions of mode, technique, value and domain – acquire their distinctive historical identity and meaning in a given ethic (Visagie 1999: 121).
The consideration of transformational paradigms incorporates what Foucault (1984: 353) identifies as the “mode of subjection”, which concerns “the way in which people are invited or incited to recognize their moral obligations”, and so prompts practices of self-change. Foucault more or less limits this aspect of self-change to various historically defined agencies (divine law, natural law, cosmological order, reason, social convention, beauty or ‘aesthetics of existence’) which reveal moral obligations as well as inspire adherence to them – his aim being to show how people in disparate historical contexts can be subjected to similar moral codes (relating to self-transformation) in fundamentally different ways (Foucault 1984: 353; Davidson 1986: 228–229).
Visagie’s analysis of transformational paradigms, by contrast, seeks to situate the sort of transformation-inspiring agencies that Foucault describes, within a broader ensemble of contextual conditions of which they form part. Among other things, this requires an indication of how the complex interconnection of multiple paradigms – and the historical agencies that they respectively pose – may give form to a particular approach to transformation. One way of going about this is to locate ‘closer’, ‘inner’ paradigms within its concentrically expanding ‘outer’ contexts. Whereas Foucault may treat the self-regulating practice of sexual moderation, for instance, as following from the call of Reason as the ethical ‘mode of subjection’, Visagie would rather approach this practice in terms of the more immediate context or paradigm of a particular philosophy that, on its part, is embedded in broader discursive contexts. He would thus interpret the paradigm of sexual moderation
Similarly underdeveloped in Foucault’s ‘mode of subjection’, I can add, is its restriction to what can be called the ‘normative’ motivations of the transformationalist. Visagie rightly recognizes that transformational paradigms also encompass negative, ‘anti-normative’ prescripts. Aspirations of personal transformation are frequently conceived of as a struggle against supposedly threatening paradigms. We can thus imagine transformational paradigms to have a ‘positive’ and ‘negative pole’: whereas the positive pole circumscribes that which should be attained, it may be complemented by negative suggestions of that which someone must ultimately turn away from (1999: 122). This polarized (dualistic) separation of ideals is arguably inherent to the worldview of the transformationalist, whose practice of transformation typically takes a stand against some (vilified) segment of reality – like the sinful ‘flesh’ in Christian discourse, or a ‘corrupting society’ in Romanticism.
For Visagie, therefore, it is characteristically common for transformational ethics to function as a form of ‘revolt’ (sometimes literally so) against a denounced status quo: the flight from the supposedly anti-normative to a claimed normative ideal of transformation marks a resistance against, and transgression of, what is generally taken to be ‘normal’ or ‘natural’. The paradigm at work in Fight Club is exemplary of this reactive kind of impetus which frequently drives transformational ethics. Fighting, in this case, serves to rid the fighters of a life of consumerism as well as the millennial ‘crisis in masculinity’, which constitute the asserted ‘enemy paradigms’ of the Fight Club. The group’s recourse to violence for the sake of self-transformation thus makes literal the implicit cultural resistance that this practice at the same time enacts. And this cultural resistance itself becomes literal when the Fight Club eventually degenerates into a terrorist collective.
1.3 On/Against a Critical-Ideological Conception of Transformational Ethics
Finally, I should restate that the frames of analysis above ultimately also serve Visagie’s critical interests with regard to transformational ethics. I have already noted that Visagie observes in transformational ethics an inherent bent towards the ideological, which he treats as a distortive ‘transformationalism’. Whilst he does recognize the legitimacy of wanting to change oneself in certain respects, or needing to care for the self, he insists that these endeavors cannot evade their ideological contexts; and more often than not the imperative of self-transformation itself acquires the status of a distortive ideology.
- 1)its characteristically selective privileging of (idealized) values (including the ideal of transformation itself) to extents which result in the disregard, distortion or even derision of other equally legitimate values;
- 2)its fixations on the extraordinary and the novel, which downgrade the validity of ordinary life states in favor of achieving ecstatic or (quasi-) ‘transcendent’ experiences;
- 3)fallible anthropological assumptions and appraisals which reductively place too much weight on isolated modes and techniques to achieve fundamental personal transformation;
- 4)the idealistic individualism inherent to separating the ideal of self-transformation from constitutive and restrictive fundamental contexts such as a relatively constant human nature and unavoidable socialization processes;
- 5)and the frequently problematic ideological biases – born from religious schools, social movements, philosophical paradigms, etc. – which motivate and define particular transformational practices.
Visagie thus sees it fit to frame transformational ethics in terms of ideological ideals pursued by ‘expert’ transformationalists – individuals, that is, who devote themselves to rigorous and explicit ethical programs of self-change. This particular emphasis prompts Visagie to make transformational ethics exclusivist: he identifies aspirations of personal transformation, not with the doings of the average person, but with the extreme kind of quest that one would associate with the mystic, eremite or sage; a quest, as he defines it, “to radically change and refine one’s existence in accord with the desire to live on a higher level than that of the general populace” (2006: 48–49).
However, by branding transformational ethics per se as a radical, elitist endeavor, Visagie sells short the reach of a theory that can be far more exhaustive and resilient. Certainly, history has shown that transformationalist projects typically harbor an elitist streak. But to claim that elitism is essential to all transformational ethics withholds us from likewise recognizing minor, everyday aspirations of self-change, which can be clarified in the same analytical terms that Visagie somehow wants to reserve for only grand transformationalist pursuits.
I therefore have reservations about Visagie’s inclination to tie transformational ethics down to their ideological qualities. I do acknowledge that there is always an ideological side to transformational ethics: aims of personal transformation are inevitably embroiled in all kinds of hegemonic idealizations and distortions. Oftentimes, also, the transformationalist ideal itself manifests
My own approach to transformational ethics therefore downplays Visagie’s general, a priori critical stance on the topic. As my point of departure, I locate transformational ethics first and foremost within the elemental horizon of the self’s relationship to itself – an unavoidable relationship, as I see it, within which judgments and intentions of personal transformation are equally unavoidable. This more basic perspective allows us to see transformational ethics – susceptible to ideology and elitism as it may be – as an indispensable part of our ordinary ethical lives. Yet this should not be taken to say that relevant critique has no place in the analysis of transformational ethics. Some of Visagie’s objections to transformational ethics do indeed surface in my appraisals of film as philosophy, especially in the bold conceptions of film as philosophy – most notably so when we get to the ‘preparatory ethics’ that these conceptions imply. And it is precisely considerations of transformational ethics of film to which we now turn.
2 Adapting the Framework: Transformational Ethics of Film, and Its Meta-analysis
Leaving Fight Club aside for a moment, I have to elaborate on the fact I’m adopting Johan Visagie’s theory of transformational ethics framework for two
2.1 Transformational Ethics of Film
A first reorientation of Visagie’s framework required here is to set it up as a distinctive ethical perspective on film. Essentially, this is a matter of importing film into the ethical territory described by Visagie’s theory, with a view to discern the consequent contours of what I call ‘transformational ethics of film’ – an array of conceptions of how film, specifically, may serve as a means to personal transformation.
Although self-transformation may have definite relevance to the practices and intentions of filmmakers, as well as to what films themselves depict, the various transformational ethics that emerge in discourses on film as philosophy mostly revolve around film reception – the hypothetical viewer’s potential transformation through particular cinematic experiences. In other words, philosophers of film suggest that watching film can be a technique of self-transformation. Yet, as with any other technique, I propose, this notion of transformational film-viewing cannot but take shape around the basic dimensions that Visagie’s theory isolates. With its aid, we can therefore distinguish various versions of the notion comparatively with reference to the same basic dimensions: the transformational modes that are attributed to watching films, the domains that it is said to work on, the supposed values that it may realize, and so forth.
In the greater scheme of things, of course, the possibility of a transformational ethics of film relates to the more comprehensive issue of how transformational ethics relates to art. My project here thus inadvertently opens up the question of what art, in general, has been held to mean to our transformational pursuits. The function of art in practices of self-transformation is a question that Visagie never gets around to. Interestingly, neither did Foucault – perhaps even purposively so. While Foucault gave considerable attention to literature and painting in the earlier stages of his career, his ethical project gives no consideration to engagements with art within the care of the self. This seems a strange omission for an ethics that is synonymous with notions like an ‘aesthetics of existence’ or self-creation as a ‘work of art’. Yet the reason for this discrepancy might be that Foucault explicitly decries the fact that today “art has become something which is related only to objects and
A question of such sweeping scope I cannot hope to answer here. But let it suffice to say, at least, that practically no canonical ethical value associated with art seems to drift too far from a motive of personal transformation. Apart from the multitude of ways in which the creation of art can serve as a practice of self-transformation, the classic uses that art is said to have for the beholder – catharsis, emotional enrichment, leisure and play, learning, cultivation of empathy, self-reflection, self-improvement, Bildung, moral guidance, therapy, consolation, and withdrawal from everyday life8 – are either essentially about personal transformation, or at least approximate it by implying some form of self-regulation on the part of the beholder. As in any other activity of basic human interest, our engagements with art are inevitably framed by a self in relationship to itself – what I take to be an “inescapable horizon” (Taylor 1991), alongside others such as nature, society, and history – with all the attendant structures and propensities to self-change that furnish this relationship. Hence, any given value that we place upon art is bound to have some aspect of self-transformation to it.
This potential role of artworks in transformational ethics however requires that a vital axis be added to my framework: namely that the self’s operations on itself may occur via the parallel relation of that self being affected and operated upon by a work of art. The notion of transformational ethics of film thus introduces a ‘third’ role player into the relation of a self that seeks to change itself, by positing film as an indispensable aid or means to that self’s work-on-self. Call it an ethical ménage à trois if you want. As Foucault (1988a: 18) defines it, the work of self-transformation may be effected by one’s “own means” or “with the help of others”. And ‘others’ need not be restricted to other people; it can certainly extend also to concrete objects – films, or artworks in general,
However, as will become evident in the chapters to come, philosophers also conceive of such transformational teamwork with film in much stronger terms: the view that film may actually initiate the suitably attuned viewer’s transformation. Film, thus conceived, is more than a mere partner or aid. As an agent of personal transformation, rather, film makes a transformational appeal to its viewers, the encounter of which draws them into a particular course of work on the self, unfolding in harmony with the particular experience that the film provides.
Granting this kind of agency to film demands that we be clear about the distinctness of the film’s work from the self-work that the viewer has to do. On the one hand, the film’s ‘transformational work’ involves those posited forms, modes and methods by which a film is said to encourage and support transformational activity in the viewer – the result of which I call the film’s assumed ‘transformational effect’ on the viewer. The work of the film is not ‘transformative’ – it does not transform directly – but precisely ‘transformational’, conveying that it only plays a part in the viewer’s transformation. For, on the other hand, we have the viewer’s relatively independent acts of self-transformation in response, the modes and techniques that the viewer performs, which remain distinct from the film’s work, even if prompted by it. Any transformational ethics of film, it seems to me, must sufficiently account for these two sides: to claim that the film postures the viewer in a mode of transformation is to simultaneously affirm the viewer’s own active involvement in the transformational process. I will pick up again on this correlation in my discussion of film and transformational modes momentarily.
2.2 Meta-theoretical Analysis of Film as Philosophy
The core business of this book is to examine transformational ethics as a theme in theories of film as philosophy; that is, transformational ethics as envisioned by film philosophers. This objective calls for a second reorientation of Visagie’s theory: to deploy it as a framework explicitly geared towards meta-theoretical analysis. Whereas Visagie intends his theory to address the practical discourse of self-transformation, I transpose it into a meta-theory that lays bare how the same ethics takes shape in a theoretical discourse – the film as philosophy debate.
I am not fashioning my own ethical theory of film. I am fashioning a purposely second-order perspective, from which to behold the first-order theoretical affair of how film as philosophy commits itself to transformational ethics. Although, ‘commitment’ might be too strong a term for what we have
But there is much more to lay bare in the film as philosophy debate than a mere motive. Whenever a theory expresses a motive of personal transformation, it will also give definite hints about the kind of transformation that it, quietly often, attributes to film. These hints provide the raw material with which to reconstruct an ethic that the theory in fact posits. To do the work of reconstructing such an implicit ethic, I have the necessary frames of analysis that pose to a theory various questions about the ‘how’, ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘to what end’ of self-change through film, and thus help distill the essential transformational claims that a theory makes.
In what follows, I give an initial idea of how my frames of analysis serve to do this meta-critical work.
2.2.1 The ‘How’ in Film as Philosophy I: Viewing Film as Technique
The most protruding dimension of transformational ethics in film as philosophy concerns the posited ‘how’ of transformation, its concrete means. The very notion of transformational ethics of film entails that various dealings with film – making films, viewing films, thinking about them, writing about them – have the capacity to be transformational techniques. Film philosophers, for the most part, emphasize the transformational value of film for viewers, and
Barring the odd exception – like Daniel Frampton’s guidelines for enhancing the experience of the ‘filmosophical’ filmgoer (2006a: 148–168) – these philosophers, quite understandably, do not go into detailed methods and instructions for watching films as a practice of transformation. Yet more specific prescriptions for the practice can still be derived from philosophers’ outlook on film as philosophy, and the nature of the ethic that they adopt; for instance, viewing particular (kinds of) films, or viewing films with the deemed appropriate attitude, expectation, or frame of mind. Filling in the specifics of the technique of film-viewing thus extends also to the theme of ‘preparatory’ transformational ethics – the prior steps of self-work needed to ensure a transformative encounter with film – which I will develop in the following chapter.
The question of ‘how’ includes – by default – also the presumed modes of transformation that techniques carry out. The mode frame, as explained, helps disclose the heterogeneity of basic means that a technique may muster: depending on the context, the transformational mode of film-viewing may shift between modes as diverse as pleasure, contemplation or asceticism. As distinct potential aspects of transformation, these modes may even be simultaneously present in transformational film-viewing. So although theories of film as philosophy all presuppose a notion of film-viewing as concrete means of transformation, the task of my meta-analysis is to differentiate the array of possible modes underlying this technique, and to identify which modes philosophers thematize and ascribe to this process.
2.2.2 The ‘How’ in Film as Philosophy ii: Modes of Transformation
To pose the question of transformational modes to film as philosophy, then, is to probe the essential means to personal transformation provided for by cinematic ‘thinking’, or philosophy ‘done’ by film, as philosophers conceive of it. Visagie’s notion of transformational modes predicts a fundamental set of alternatives that any intention of self-change is most likely bound to. This set of alternatives, I propose, also holds for self-change through film. Indeed, the modes – contemplation, asceticism, mysticism, and endurance, in particular – persistently feature as topoi and guiding models for the ethical-transformational significance attributed to films-as-philosophy. And, again, the modes are often suggested to function in an interactive harmony, where each represents a distinct perspective on, or aspect of, the transformational effect that a particular film is said to achieve.
When analyzing transformational modes that pertain to film as philosophy, one must take care not to confuse supposed modes of the viewer with the
All the more reason, then, for my insistence on clarifying the difference between the supposed work of the film, on the one hand, and the elicited mode of the viewer, on the other. Take, for instance, the implied ethics in Robert Sinnerbrink’s characterization of ‘cinematic thinking’ (e.g. 2011a: 137–142), introduced in Chapter 1, a thinking that he says promises to renew our own thinking by provoking yet also resisting philosophical reflection in equal measure. Clearly, this conception of film as philosophy attributes to film the transformational work of provocation and resistance. But this work can also be related to various possible modes of the viewer, each of which recasts the work of film in a slightly different light. No doubt, Sinnerbrink’s notion of cinematic thinking firstly suggests the viewer to adopt a contemplative mode of transformation, which defines film’s essential work as guiding the viewer towards a particular awareness or course of reflection. Yet, in terms of the resistance that it enacts, cinematic thinking can also be seen eliciting an ascetic posture, which entails that a film does the corresponding work of withholding from viewers, for instance, the applicability of neat and clear conceptual categories that they would normally rely upon. Closely related, also, is the presumed mode of endurance that cinematic thinking elicits. This mode explicitly renders the resistance enacted by cinematic thinking as a matter of confronting viewers with obstructions, difficulties or discomforts that may prompt a transformation of thought. Cinematic thinking moreover hints at a certain mystical mode of viewing, insofar as it reflects an aspiration for viewers to overcome and renew ordinary forms of thought. According to the mode of mysticism, cinematic thinking’s resistance comes down to a work of transcendence – resorting to the affective, imagistic and aesthetic qualities of cinema to nudge us beyond the accepted limitations of conventional philosophical concepts and language.
Types of transformational work by film in relation to modes of transformation
| Transformational mode of the viewer | ← | Transformational work of film |
|---|---|---|
| Most basic means available to self-transformation | Ethical posturing of viewer / Fostering of transformational modes | Corresponding kinds of work of film on the viewer |
| Contemplation: Transformation through a form of reflection or consciousness or concentrated experience | To elicit reflection; to induce a particular state of consciousness; to construct a concentrated experience | |
| Asceticism: Transformation through the giving up of things | To withhold the viewer from things taken for granted; to take away; to lessen; to reduce | |
| Mysticism: Transformation through experiences of ecstasy or transcendence | To transcend; to push the boundaries of the viewer’s faculties or ordinary experience | |
| Endurance: Transformation through using experiences of hardship for purposes of self-change | To make difficult; to challenge; to obstruct; to discomfort | |
| Ministering: Transformation through attending to others; or through being attended to by others | To let the viewer address (the situation, the perspective, the person of) another; or to let viewers be addressed by another | |
| Pleasure: Transformation through the use of pleasure | To arouse pleasure, enjoyment or delight |
Some ethical conceptions pose a simple one-to-one correspondence between the above modes and the kind of film-work that each of them forecasts, whereas others mix and match. The former occurs, for instance, in philosophical appraisals of Terrence Malick’s ‘contemplative style’ in Chapter 4, which for the most part connect the viewer’s assumed contemplative mode with the ‘contemplative work’ of the style that is perceived to promote this mode. This stands in contrast to perceptions of the equally much-remarked contemplative character of so-called ‘slow’ films, which commentators instead match with the ‘ascetic’ work that these films are taken to do. We see this in the typical sentiment, captured by Kuhn and Westwell (2012), that it is slow cinema’s patient efforts of “minimalism”, “austerity” and “downplaying of drama, action, and event” that helps endow “the activity of viewing with a meditative or contemplative quality”. A similar correlation between mode and film also happens to clear up Paul Schrader’s (1972) potentially confusing designation of a ‘transcendental style’ in the films of Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer. It is ‘transcendental’ in the sense that he proposes this style to foster for viewers an indirect disclosure of the Transcendent. But paving the way for this presumed mode of mysticism is the essentially ascetic work – cinematic operations of elimination, sparseness and purification – that Schrader centrally associates with a transcendental style.
The analysis of transformational modes in film as philosophy runs into another challenge. Philosophers’ notions of transformational film-viewing are by and large confined only to the mode of contemplation, the idea that films foster self-transformation by means of particular forms of reflection or awareness in the viewer. Their preference for this mode is understandable, given the contemplative nature of philosophy itself – but where does that leave the other modes in my analysis?
In most cases it is not exactly accurate of me to infer that cinematic thinking postures the viewer in a mode of endurance, to take one example. If this mode is literal, it has to be something like Alex DeLarge’s forced endurance of the fictional ‘Ludovico technique’ in A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick 1971); the viewer who willingly submits herself to the graphic sexual violence of contemporary ‘extreme cinema’ (see Horeck & Kendall 2011; Frey 2013); or adolescent males who watch frightening horror movies as a test for affirming their masculine identity to their peers (Goldstein 1999: 275–276). Similarly, to attribute a mode of mysticism to film-viewing implies that a film supports a literal experience of ecstasy – say, in conjunction with the use of drugs. No
Yet this is not what transformational modes like endurance and mysticism mean in the contemplation-focused context of film as philosophy, such as Sinnerbrink’s notion of cinematic thinking described above. Hence, I propose that the mode of contemplation be systematically unfolded by identifying each of the other transformational modes within it. This relies on the assumption that the interaction between transformational modes can extend also to ‘internalizing’ relations: that one mode can figure in the inner-constitution of another, with the latter providing a qualifying context for the former (cf. Visagie 1999: 138). And nowhere is this possibility more clear than in the set of sub-modes that can be distinguished in the mode of contemplation. These internal distinctions allow for more exactness in describing the modal dimension implied by a given conception of film as philosophy. To again return to Sinnerbrink, the specifically cerebral challenge that he attributes to cinematic thinking then elicits not a literal mode of endurance, I conclude, but an endurance of a contemplative kind – captured by the sub-mode that I call a ‘contemplative endurance’. The same qualification holds for further relevant configurations, like a ‘contemplative asceticism’ and a ‘contemplative mysticism’, which I include in Table 2 below.
Types of contemplative work by film in relation to sub-modes of contemplation
| Contemplative mode of the viewer | ← | Contemplative work of film |
|---|---|---|
| Potential basic channels for transformation through contemplation | Ethical posturing of viewer / Fostering of transformational modes | Corresponding work of film on the viewer |
| Contemplative Asceticism: Transformation through the giving up (renunciation) of things in thought or awareness | E.g. To lessen, or entirely withhold from the viewer, necessary information, clarity, convenience of perception, etc. | |
| Contemplative Mysticism: Transformation through transcendence or ecstasy of thought | E.g. To exceed conventional forms and categories of conceptualization | |
| Contemplative Endurance: Transformation through the use of difficulties in thought or state of mind | E.g. To make thinking (also perception, concentration, or attention) difficult by defying established norms and assumptions | |
| Contemplative Ministering: Transformation through acts of reflection that attend to others; or transformation through being led to reflection by others | E.g. To elicit sympathy or empathy for a character or group of people; or to explicitly address (or ‘hail’) the viewer as a recipient of insight through the film | |
| Contemplative Pleasure: Transformation through the use of pleasurable states of awareness or thought | E.g. To invite a state of cognitive play |
These distinctions unlock a finer-grained gauge for pinpointing the essential transformational modes that film philosophers entertain. Whereas most of my reconstructions would have been restricted to only a general mode of contemplation, I now have analytical recourse to the other modes as marking distinct channels within that of contemplation as a means to transformation.
2.2.3 The ‘To What End’ in Film as Philosophy: Values of Transformation
The value frame brings into focus the transformational ends that philosophers envision for viewers’ engagement with film. It serves to clarify these envisioned ‘end-states’ or outcomes of transformation around the particular values that they affirm. Within the broader assumption that film as philosophy enables
As may be expected, the theoretical project of film as philosophy places the quest for personal transformation within an overall paradigm that extols cognitive ideals associated with ‘the love of wisdom’ as a highest priority. As a result, most transformational ethics in the field are oriented towards the general value of transformed knowledge: philosophers see in films-as-philosophy the potential to change perspectives, to establish new ways of thinking, to foster emancipated forms of knowledge. This epistemological orientation can be further specified by showing how philosophers incorporate into the general value of knowledge other transformational values such as freedom, individuality, and openness – as when they speak of transformation through film as a liberation, individuation, or ongoing unfolding of thought.
Yet the most patent transformational value in the film as philosophy debate, and closely related to that of knowledge, is the perennial ideal of awareness. With reference to film, the value typically takes the form of an increased awareness of one’s beliefs and assumptions, one’s thinking and experience, one’s embodiment, and even an awareness of what is unknowable and transcendent. Again and again, I will return to the value of awareness – and its incarnations as attention, presence, openness, receptivity or sensitivity – as a central theme that emerges in the transformational ethics of film as philosophy.
Still, it will become clear, transformational values of film can get much more unusual – even if only compared to traditional practices of personal transformation. Especially when it comes to bolder, more adventurous notions of film as philosophy, it is worth recalling that any value can be appropriated by an overarching motive of transformation; and that, technically, any conceivable state can figure as such a value. The analysis of film as philosophy thus requires the dexterity to also recognize that abstract and sometimes open-ended goals like ‘becoming’ and ‘difference’ and ‘the New’ turn up in the role of transformational values to the viewer of film.
2.2.4 The ‘What’ in Film as Philosophy: Domains of Transformation
The domain in transformational ethics of film-viewing concerns the ‘what’ – that supposed aspect of the viewer-self – that gets targeted for transformation, and where film is said to do its transformational work.
One already sees the pertinence of transformational domains in a notion as common as film theory’s longstanding interest in how film transforms human perception. This is particularly so for what Malcolm Turvey (2008) calls the ‘revelationist tradition’ – rooted in the work of Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov, Béla
Many theories of film as philosophy, of course, look at the transformational work that films do within the cognitive domains of higher-level thinking, on the assumption that these films stimulate viewers through their own cinematic forms of thought. However, cases where cinematic thinking is taken to be inherently affective in nature (e.g. Frampton 2006a: 98, 196, 200; Sinnerbrink 2011a: 152), require that I reconstruct what is a proposed interaction between a complex of transformational domains. The commonly posed interaction, in this instance, is that the viewers’ transformational work on a ‘higher’ cognitive domain, like philosophical thinking, relies on it being impacted upon by the ‘lower’ domain of affect, as activated by the corresponding ‘affective thinkings’ of film. In this complex, therefore, the self-aspect that undergoes the work of transformation is spread between two domains: affect, construed as a constructively disruptive ‘source’, which, for its part, operates on philosophical reflection as the ‘target’ of transformation.
To accurately profile the domains of a transformational ethic of film therefore requires attention to its implicit model of selfhood – assumptions of the self’s organization in different aspects – yet in conjunction with its implied ‘theory’ of how the cinematic medium relates to the viewing self. Any such ethic will have assumptions about which continuities, affinities or correspondences may exist between film and selected domains of the self, which in turn provide the basis upon which film is said to enlist these domains for transformation. Film’s capacity to reach and activate transformational domains in the viewer can be based on qualities as varied as the material properties of the medium, formal-technical aspects of a film, its socio-cultural and ideological entanglements, or the narrative-affective appeal that a film makes. This interrelation of film and the viewing self is even couched in broader ontological assumptions – like the Deleuzian intertwinement of film and viewer in what is understood to be a single field of desubjectivized forces (Elsaesser & Hagener 2009: 158); or Vivian Sobchack’s (1992: 5) assumption that film, too, has a body, inasmuch as viewer and film share the same structures of embodied existence. In fact, the more radical the presumed continuity between film and viewer, the
2.2.5 The ‘Why’ in Film as Philosophy: Paradigms of Transformation
The paradigm frame serves to clarify the contexts and surrounding discourses that both motivate the notion of transformational ethics in film as philosophy, and define distinct versions thereof.
No question, there is a cascade of possible contexts to take into consideration. At the outermost bounds are the overall historical, socio-cultural motivators for personal transformation, which Visagie tends to focus on – contexts such as social movements, or a culture of ‘selfism’, which sets ideals of self-actualization, personal authenticity, and ‘finding one’s true self’ as its highest priorities (Visagie 1999: 3–4). But to try and explain ethics in the film as philosophy debate as symptomatic of a therapeutic “culture of narcissism” (Lasch 1979), for instance, or the political apathy of “the great flight inwards” (Lijster 2016), would, if not overstepping my purview of analysis, anyhow take me too far down the path of speculation.
In line with my meta-critical agenda, rather, I take the analysis of paradigms as an opportunity to spell out the more immediate theoretical contexts determining the transformational ethics that I examine here. The first of these is the general context of ‘film as philosophy’ itself, a distinct theoretical project which clearly nurtures a distinctive series of expectations and ideals of personal transformation through film. A second significant theoretical context needing clarification is the respective paradigmatic bases, and the particular conceptual frameworks, from which philosophers take on the project of film as philosophy. This is a matter of tracing how various approaches to film as philosophy – i.e. Cognitivist, ‘Analytic’, ‘Continental’, Phenomenological, post-Structuralist, New Materialist, or even Deleuzian, Cavellian or Heideggerian – each have their own ethical inclinations, and so motivate different variations on the general theme of self-transformation through film. A third and crucial context that I will expound concerns the conditions for film as philosophy that philosophers appeal to. As concluded in the previous chapter, diverse theories of film as philosophy organize themselves around the basic conditions of Knowledge, Subjectivity, Power and Nature. And each of these conditions enters into the paradigm frame as decisive for the kind of ethic – the essential direction of transformation – that a theory ultimately delineates.
As with any other transformational paradigm, the paradigms in film as philosophy can also be formulated from a negative, oppositional perspective. This perspective yields the perceived threats and adversaries – often rhetoricized and constructed – that fuel a negative motivation for the idea of
2.2.6 Final Calibrations
My meta-critical ventures with the five frames above require some further calibration to provide more nuanced analytical description of my often abstract and complex subject matter.
One bit of fine-tuning concerns the possible interrelations that may be drawn between elements within a particular frame of analysis. In this regard, Visagie only goes as far as detailing how modes, values, or domains may interact in a ‘means-end’ relation of support. However, such ‘external’ relations between elements need to be supplemented by the further possibility of their ‘internal’ connections, by which I mean that one element may co-opt and ‘internalize’ another as a feature or extension of itself.
I have already proposed the fruitfulness of drawing such connections for the analysis of transformational modes – as when I elaborate on the contemplative mode with internalizing relations like a ‘contemplative asceticism’, a ‘contemplative endurance’, and the like. Similar tie-ins can give an equally enriched texture to the analysis of transformational domains. Consider the blends that occur between the viewer’s knowledge and her body when thematized as transformational domains by film phenomenologists like Vivian Sobchack. One can expect from film phenomenology, which emphasizes embodied situatedness, to conceive of the viewer’s body as a domain of transformation. But, as I show in Chapter 3, someone like Sobchack in addition addresses the body’s presence within the domain of knowledge – thereby designating a composite domain, which is the knowledge (understanding, awareness) of one’s bodily states. In fact, Sobchack posits also an inversion of this particular relation between knowledge and the body when she suggests film to be just as capable of transformational work on the composite domain of embodied knowledge, on what the body ‘knows’.
Likewise, with regard to transformational values, such internalization proves useful for specifying a broad, ubiquitous value such as awareness. The value, for example, repeatedly comes up in philosophical readings of Terrence
Another bit of fine-tuning is still needed. This is to recognize the degree to which elements may also move and operate between the theory’s frames of analysis, i.e. when a particular element ‘native’ to one frame shows up in another. As a ‘travelling concept’ from one frame to another (Bal 2002), the same concept thus assumes an alternative role as defined by the ‘foreign’ frame that it comes to inhabit.
Notable in this regard is how transformational modes duplicate themselves into the value frame where they function as transformational values in their own right. It is not hard to see, for example, how ascetic restraint or temperance may in themselves be teloi of self-transformation – especially if they operate within a larger complex of accompanying transformational values. Likewise, pleasure, which Foucault is inclined to treat as a domain of transformation, also shows itself in both the mode frame, where Visagie identifies it as a means to transformation, and the value frame, in cases where pleasure is nominated as the goal of self-change. And philosophers of film, we will see, like to think of transformational film-viewing as geared towards the end of enhanced reflection, which essentially transfers the mode of contemplation into the value-dimension of transformational ethics.
Awareness, as a transformational value, exhibits a similar mobility and adaptability across frames. It has obvious affinities with the mode of contemplation, insofar as the latter mode typically finds expression in various techniques of exercising awareness. And one’s awareness can equally manifest in a given ethic as the domain of the self on which transformational work should be exerted – often as a composite domain like bodily awareness, perceptual awareness, or epistemic awareness. In fact, the same logic of movement goes for concepts with no immediately obvious ‘home base’ in the framework at all. The example of knowledge, in my analyses of film as philosophy, features just as frequently as a value as it does as a domain of transformation.
Equipped with the applied frames and considerations outlined above, I can articulate a special set of ethical selections and assumptions that philosophers make in their conceptions of film as philosophy. Each such set of selections, as I will show, combines into a particular ethic, a theoretical vision, giving us a
Yet, as will also become clear in the following chapter, such an ethic may eventually demand more from viewers than it does from film. This demand entails a distinct branch of transformational ethics at play within film as philosophy: the required forms of self-work by which viewers must adequately prepare themselves for the transformational effects of films on them. Such requirements make up the decisive transformational dimension of ‘preparatory ethics’, addressed towards the end of Chapter 3, using exactly the same frames of analysis presented above.
2.3 Conclusions and Clarifications
For the purpose of opening up the implicit ethics of film as philosophy, I first had to open up Visagie’s theory of transformational ethics. The reorientation of his framework here equips my own endeavor with various functions of explication and reconstruction: to make explicit ethical impulses and conceptions in the film as philosophy debate that are mostly only implied or suggested; to enlarge upon the general motive of personal transformation in theories of film as philosophy; as well as to articulate the differentiation of this motive into the diverse transformational ethics, and their imagined practices, that these theories consequently pose.
Significantly, the framework also serves to lay bare the deciding influence that assumptions about philosophy, in particular, but also film, have on the distinct types of transformational ethics that the theories suggest. The ethical-transformational potential that theorists envision for film consistently follows from their understanding of what philosophy is, or should be, plus how they perceive film to address the shortcomings of philosophy. A central reference point, again, will be Knowledge, Subjectivity, Power and Nature as the more general assumed conditions for film as philosophy. These abstracted motives mark out four basic approaches to the question of how films can be a form of philosophy; and each of these approaches, I will show, sets a very definite scope for the kind of transformational ethics that various film philosophers envision. It is thus a matter of tracing how such assumptions ‘trickle down’, from the way in which philosophy and film is defined, through a resultant theory of how films can do philosophy, all the way into the eventual ethic of transformation that a theory puts forward.
I have previously referred to the kind of meta-theoretical contributions above as making ethical sense of film as philosophy. However, as also noted before, the contribution of my meta-theoretical framework does not stop at making better sense of film as philosophy: it simultaneously intends to give an ethical direction to its future development.
The significance of the framework developed here is thus not restricted only to its critical, ‘diagnostic’ capacities, so to say. It can help steer the film as philosophy debate towards more explicit considerations of its own ethical inclinations and implications. Its core concepts and distinctions supply a distinct research agenda in film ethics, with a variety of strategies and guidelines for future theorizing, and possibly even empirical work, on how films may lead us in self-transformation. That is to say, it not only brings to the surface transformational ethics as the most prominent ethical undercurrent in the film as philosophy debate – it also lays the conceptual groundwork upon which to tackle this hitherto latent topic head-on.
At this point, though, I sense some questions simmering, if not already burning, in the minds of some readers. Let me at least single out what I take to be the two most likely ones for brief but necessary clarification.
The first question is: Am I not shoehorning film as philosophy into a reductively individualistic, even solipsistic, kind of ethics? Where does all the emphasis on ‘self’ leave transformation with reference to relationality and ‘the other’?
And the closely related second: How does the socio-cultural factor into the ‘self’ transformations of transformational ethics?
To begin with the first: just because practices of self-transformation are frequently conceived of in overly individualistic, subjectivist terms is not reason enough to limit transformational ethics by definition to such reductionisms. Of course there are limits to what transformational ethics can deal with. But this does not take away from the fact that self-transformation, especially conceived of as general everyday intentions of self-change, still offers a legitimate entry point or ‘lens’ through which to approach ethics. And this insistence is not to implode all ethics into an ethics of the self. It is only to affirm the self’s relationship to itself, and the acts of self-change by which it operates, as a necessary, irreducible aspect of ethics (in fact, of any sphere of basic human interest – also watching films).
Take for instance how an aspect of self-transformation features in both ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’, as per the commonly-drawn distinction (e.g. Habermas
To affirm self-transformation as only an aspect or entry point to ethics is to also keep in check a Foucault-style ‘ethics of the self’ with its supposed antithesis, ‘ethics of the other’ (Ricoeur, Levinas). This way, in fact, they prove to be two sides of the same coin. As just suggested, transformational self-work is unavoidably present within ethics of the other; after all, one has to bring oneself to heed the other, or at least align oneself with the other, as part of any such ethics. But, in various ways, ‘the other’ also has a constitutive presence within the practices and ethics of self-transformation. Self-transformation is invariably pursued through the help and participation of the other (more on that in a moment). Yet the presence of the other in self-transformation runs even deeper than that. The epicenter of any transformational activity is ‘the self’s relation to itself’ – thus placing at its very heart a relationship with, to slightly paraphrase Ricoeur (1992), one’s self as an other. Transformational ethics is not only impossible, it would seem, but quite literally inconceivable when separated from our experiences and encounters with the other as its guiding image. The particular ethics of the self that I bring to the table is therefore not individualistic and exclusive of the other, in principle – it is only of such a nature to the extent that hermits, recluses, and similar one-man-bands wish for it to be.
The question of the other within self-transformation has already shed some light on the socio-cultural constitution of self-transformation. To briefly address the second question, then: the supra-personal realities of social
Most noteworthy is that self-transformation cannot really be practiced in total isolation; there is always some aspect of ‘ministering’ to any means of personal transformation. Transformation is frequently sought with the help of other transformation-seeking selves and agents, usually within a dedicated community or movement. Yet even when others are physically absent from the isolated individual, they nevertheless retain a mediated virtual presence via the guiding texts or discourses that define their shared community, no matter if it is only an imagined one.
Alongside the inevitability of social modes of transformation is the fact that social worlds also furnish the paradigms, the basic motivating contexts, for transformational ethics. As the ancient Greeks knew perfectly well, human betterment can only flourish within a body politic, within communities, and within friendships that foster self-change for the better. Yet a society that fails at such fostering provides just as much, if not more, of a motivation for self-change. Usually, such social resistance takes an ascetic form, and may involve abstentions as simple as doing vegetarian recipes or a digital detox.
The social embeddedness of self-transformation is not only to be seen in its means and motivations. It can manifest also in the setting of distinctly social goals for transformational ethics. Self-change may serve very un-selfish values: achieving solidarity, sociality, communitas, or greater companionship. A commitment to always watch movies with company might well be a good place to start.
And if, after all of this, self-transformation still seems a too narrow, asocial affair for the ethical purposes of this book, keep in mind that it need only be as narrow as the concept of ‘self’ that you entertain. While I would not want to do away with the notion of an individual self altogether – like some people in the next chapter – it seems to me that there is a lot of room for extending what we take to be domains ‘within’ the self. Self-transformation can be motivated by social relationships, occur through relationships, and be in the service of relationships. I see no reason why transformation cannot also include working on one’s social relationships, as an inextricable domain of the ‘extended’ self. At any rate, I’m sure most Fight Club members would agree.
3 Post-script: Violent Strokes for Different Folks
For the sake of giving readers a further taste of the heuristic potential of my framework, I cannot resist the temptation of ending this chapter with one
To help reign in this self-indulgent little excursion, I zoom in on how violence – a central thematic and visual fixation of Fight Club – persists as a key reference point in the ethically relevant responses to the film that I discuss below. Hence, I emphasize how Fight Club’s portrayals of force and fighting get transposed into various notions of ‘transformational violence’, across different spheres of the film’s reception.
In this regard, I should parenthetically add that I do not consider it incidental that notions of violence recur the way they do within the context of transformational ethics. I take it safe to suggest that any imperative to transform oneself goes with inherent demands and challenges, seeing that the transformed state is not a given, but precisely something to be attained. For this reason, it seems, any intention of self-transformation is naturally relatable to the metaphor of ‘fighting’, ‘struggle’, or ‘war’, as theorists of conceptual metaphor would by and large conceive of it (e.g. Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Turner 1987). And, on the basis of this conception of ‘fighting’, it is not difficult to see how the elaborating notion of ‘violence’, especially transformation as ‘violence to self’, follows suit. Not that ‘fighting’, and its related concepts is the only natural way of understanding self-transformation. But the metaphor does spotlight where the particular ethical appeal of Fight Club lies for its diverse audiences. As the examples below attest, the film (no less than the book by Palahniuk) plays on the ease with which we think of self-transformation as a ‘fight’ against the self.
3.1 Everyday Reception
In the sphere of Fight Club’s everyday reception, firstly, a researcher of transformational ethics cannot but get a kick out of the of numerous real-life ‘Fight Clubs’ reportedly inspired by the film (e.g. McCarthy 2006; Complex Mag 2009). It is not clear whether this apparent aping of Fight Club is committed
Compelling about a case like this, as an ethic of transformation, is the extent to which a film features within its overall paradigm. With both their methods and the stated ends of the Gentleman’s Fight Club – transformational values like feeling “more alive” and “more in touch with our physical selves” (FoxNews.com 2006) – the group takes a barefaced leaf out of the book of Tyler Durden. And, of course, the thick veneer of Hollywood-cool (think: Brad Pitt, all brawny and badass) makes for an all the more attractive model through which to negotiate their own aspirations of self-change by the fist.
3.2 Critical Reception
It is no surprise then, as we move to the sphere of film criticism, that many journalistic and scholarly responses to Fight Club have hovered around the film’s violence. Often cited in this context is Henry Giroux’s (2001) fierce critique of Fight Club and the “public pedagogy” that it disseminates. One of Giroux’s many concerns is the apparent mode of pleasure that informs characters’ use of violence, which he takes to reinforce cultural formations of misogyny, fascism and cynicism (e.g. 2001: 69).
Giroux’s views in this regard can be construed as a certain ‘violence’ of criticism, intended as a resistance to the ideological work performed by contentious Hollywood exports like Fight Club. He himself designates it as “pedagogies of disruption”, which aim to “unsettle the commonsensical assumptions and ways of thinking that inform films” and thus make viewers “more attentive” to cultural texts as sites of political struggle (2001: 77, 79).
This is a good opportunity to point out the fruitfulness with which normative interpretative stances, such as Giroux’s, can be modelled as ‘self-transformations’. Most conceptions of ideal interpretative attitudes can be spelt out in terms of various transformational intentions towards the self. Giroux’s stance entails the self-intention of maintaining one’s own critical principles in the face of a film that threatens them. This is in stark contrast to the often-cherished ascetic ideal of self-preparation, discussed in the next chapter, of letting go of your assumptions and beliefs in order be sufficiently
3.3 Philosophical Reception: Commentary and Interpretation
But what is the place of transformational fighting in the philosophical reception of Fight Club? In this sphere the notion of ‘violence’ persists as a figurative guideline for the various ethical interests that philosophers pursue. This means that Fight Club’s depictions of violence provide an attractive symbolic resource for its philosophical interpreters to draw on.
Slavoj Žižek’s declarations on self-beating in Fight Club makes for a rather rich illustration (see 2001: 149–150; 2003; 2008: 107). With quintessential Žižekian zeal, he latches onto the film’s depictions of striking at oneself, an exaggeratedly ascetic act, most notable when Jack visibly slogs himself right in front of his boss. For Žižek, these self-beatings pose an incisive lesson in how self-degradation brings forth real change of the subject and its situation. Yes, Tyler Durden might just as well be channeling Žižek when the character says that “self-improvement is masturbation”, and recommends the alternative of “self-destruction” instead.
Obviously – or, hopefully, I should say – Žižek is not calling for literal self-violence on our part, but for what he calls a ‘shattering’ or ‘emptying’ of identity, by undermining the fantasies and symbolic support that underpin it (see 2003: 116–118). Žižek’s assumption of a negative subject – i.e. subjectivity as essentially void – encourages a logic of asceticism whereby the pure subject “in the Real” can materialize only through its own self-undermining. The figurative asceticism of “self-beating”, as he treats it, thus yields a model for self-transformation unto two parallel ends: towards a value of connection, a reaching out to “the real Other”, which is a way out of capitalist abstraction and isolation; and, at the same time, towards a value of distance, or freedom, when self-beating serves to cut us loose from the symbolic backing that keeps social oppression in place.
It is worth mentioning that existentialist appraisals of Fight Club echo much the same ascetic motive (e.g. Bennett 2005; Skees 2012; Baker 2014). Not unlike Žižek, the typical existentialist angle on Fight Club links the film’s violence to struggles of self-liberation – in this case, the purging of false beliefs, misplaced values, or bad faith (figuring as domains of transformation), and doing so in the hope of fostering personal freedom and authenticity of experience (values
3.4 Philosophical Reception: Film as Philosophy
Still, the kind of interpretations above only go as far as approaching Fight Club as a potential script, or allegory, for transformational action. Philosophers who claim that films can do philosophy tend to take things further: they suggest that films can actually do transformational work for its viewers.
The metaphor of violence retains its relevance in the context of film as philosophy, notably through its association with broader notions of ‘force’ and ‘strength’: many players in the field like to formulate the philosophical capacities of certain films as a ‘challenge’, ‘resistance’ or ‘provocation’ to thought – recall, for example, how Robert Sinnerbrink defines cinematic thinking along these lines. Roughly paraphrased in Fight Club-terms, one could say that these philosophers see in film as philosophy the potential of a constructive force – a ‘violence’ – that can counteract or ‘fight’, and thereby transform, our habits of thinking. This conception of film as philosophy, especially when distilled in such ‘forceful’ terms, makes for a rather ironic comparison with the position of Giroux: whereas he calls for a pedagogy of disruption (another notion of ‘force’), to make viewers aware of problematic assumptions at work in a film, we have the exact inverse in the claim that a film itself can function as such a pedagogy of disruption, able to rattle problematic assumptions at work in the viewer. In short, Giroux hopes for the viewer to resist the film; film philosophers, for the film to resist the viewer.
Does Fight Club indeed then serve its viewers with such a transformational ‘violence’ to thought? From the Deleuzian camp in philosophy of film comes a characteristically bold and resounding ‘yes’: William Brown and David Fleming, with their detailed ‘schizoanalytic’ treatment of the film, come to the conclusion that “Fight Club affects its spectator in much the same way that the characters seem to be affected in the film” (2011: 292).10
Yet, for starters, there are other softer suggestions of Fight Club’s contemplative-transformational value. Most of these can be related to the film’s status as a mainstream ‘complex film’, falling within the categories of ‘twist film’ or ‘mind game movie’ (see Wilson 2006; Elsaesser 2009; Klecker 2013). A prevailing assumption among philosophers is that such films, by virtue of their disruptive complexities, do the work of making thinking difficult – a
Approaches inspired by Gilles Deleuze, however, present us with a singular philosophical take on Fight Club and, accordingly, the self-change that it may instigate. We come full circle, in a sense, for in the Deleuzian scheme of things film is an assemblage of forces that exert literal force on its viewers. This is how Brown and Fleming can claim that Fight Club “enacts a physical form of violence that is deterritorializing and puts viewers’ bodies through new experiences that call for new modes of thinking and movement, and allow us to become, as opposed to simply being” (2011: 293 [emphasis added]). For them this has little to do with the depicted violence in the film. The violence enacted on the viewer is rather a function of the film’s supposed creative power, its disruption of temporal order, its distortions of image, color and sound – all of which boldly suggests a more literal mode of endurance on the part of the viewer, and not only a contemplative one. In this way, say Brown and Fleming, Fight Club allows for physical and mental ‘deterritorializations’ of the self – Deleuze-speak, that is,
3.5 Conclusion: Fight Club, Violence, and Transformation
With this outing, I have given only the slightest of appetizers for the kind of meta-analyses of film as philosophy that I take up in depth in the next two chapters. As I have admitted from the outset, my focus in this post-script was of course slightly more comprehensive: to try out, across different spheres of Fight Club’s reception and interpretation, the scope of applicability of my proposed ethical framework. It seems to me that the framework can indeed open up a productive analytical perspective – broad enough to address the transformational ethics that transpire both in Fight Club and across diverse spheres of its reception (due to a shared investment in some ideal of personal transformation in each case), while having enough nuance to distinguish essential differences between those ethics. In the end, this sweeping analytical perspective is even broad enough to link film philosophers with the wild, fist-swinging members of Fight Club. Indeed, a more-or-less philosophical reading of Fight Club such as Žižek’s shows that some philosophers, at least, long for much the same thing that the fictional fighters do: blessed violence – and lots of it. Although, here we still need to retain the nuance of seeing in Žižek’s ‘violence’ something extolled for obviously different reasons, and to different transformational ends, than those of the fighters.
More importantly, I also took a closer look at members of the more specific group of philosophers with whom this book goes into dialogue – those who explicitly subscribe to the notion that films can, in one way or another, do philosophy. And, thanks to the analytical space opened up by my ethical framework, even this group can be linked with the members of Fight Club. Most fundamentally, these philosophers and these fighters share a common motive of personal transformation. Certainly, it is a commonality that is obscured by the starkly different ways in which they endeavor to unfold this motive: violent fighting versus silent film viewing (as philosophy). But, in essence, the proposal to transform yourself through viewing a film, as the philosophers imply, is just as much a transformational ethic as Tyler Durden’s proposal to transform the self through fighting. Both parties, in the end, seek out an unusual means for achieving self-transformation. It is in this sense that I like to think of these philosophers as ‘joining’ the Fight Club.
Yet some of the philosophers, as we have seen, ‘join’ the Club in the further sense that they suggest Fight Club itself to be such a filmic means to self-transformation. That they single out Fight Club in this regard opens up – in anticipation of the next chapter – one preliminary angle for understanding
Admittedly, this richly figurative construal of self-transformation through film as ‘violent’ is one strongly inflected by the particular case of Fight Club and its philosophical exegeses. It hardly needs stating that there are many more ways, also less baroque ways, in which philosophers suggest films have transformational effects. So let us now turn, with my framework of analysis set in place, to an analysis of the basic shapes that various transformational ethics take within the project of film as philosophy.
By this embracive account, ‘moral perfectionism’, prominent in Cavell’s ethics covered in Chapter 3, represents yet another way of formulating the motive of personal transformation.
In Visagie’s thought, personal transformation forms part of a set of similar trans-historical motives. Much of his thinking on personal transformation in fact goes into developing a theory of ‘macromotives’ as the broader theoretical context from which he approaches transformational ethics. Visagie identifies the most evident of these macromotives (‘ultimate values’ or ‘elemental forms of ideologies’) as: Nature, Knowledge, Power, Personhood and Society – and he treats the ideal of personal transformation as one basic version or ‘face’ of the general motive of Personhood (Visagie 2006a: 46; 1996a: 129).
See, for example, James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault (2000), which chronicles the philosopher’s personal preoccupations with various forms of self-transformation. Visagie cites in this regard David Macey’s The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993).
Davidson (1986: 228) explains that Foucault considered ‘ethics’ (the self’s relationship to itself) as one part of the more general study of ‘morals’. In addition to ethics, morals comprises two further elements: people’s morally relevant actions and the moral codes (determining rules) which are imposed on them.
Visagie dissociates his understanding of ‘asceticism’ from the routine Foucauldian use of the term. In addition to the term’s familiar associations with radical abstinence, Foucault invokes the notion of ‘ascetics’ (askesis) to indicate the wide spectrum of techniques that he relates to the care and the changing of the self. Much of what Foucault thus calls ascetics fall outside the scope of Visagie’s delineation of asceticism as a distinct mode, and not technique, of transformation (1999: 101n19).
In this regard, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999: 267–289) speak of the ‘Subject-Self’ metaphor, a basic conceptual schema according to which people perceive and understand the self as ‘split’, as essentially being a ‘relationship’ between a conscious ‘Subject’ and a more or less objective ‘Self’. This concept of a dual self expresses a highly commonplace, if not universal, experience of the self and its inner life (1999: 268, 288).
“We have hardly any remnant of the idea in our society, that the principal work of art which one has to take care of, the main area to which one must apply aesthetic values, is oneself, one’s life, one’s existence” (Foucault 1984: 362).
For a useful overview of the standard values and functions attributed to art, see Belfiore and Bennet (2008), Eldridge (2014a: 225–283), Van Maanen (2009: 149–201), and Landy (2012: 4–11).