In an essay entitled ‘An Elegy For Theory’ by D. N. Rodowick in the Fall 2007 issue of October, Rodowick begins by revealing that when he says ‘Theory’ he means ‘a certain idea of theory’ and the narrative he draws is a familiar one. ‘From the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the institutionalisation of cinema studies in North America and Europe became identified with this idea of theory’ (2007: 91) now in decline which he describes as ‘an interdisciplinary commitment to concepts and methods derived from literary semiology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism’ (ibid.). For twenty years we have been told that this ‘certain idea of theory’ is in crisis and in need of revision if not simply obfuscating, poisonous and in need of disposing with in its entirety.
The current interest in Jacques Rancière, the former student of and collaborator with Louis Althusser who became one of his most stringent critics, might be seen as part of this tide – another name to signify our suspicion of the hermeneutics of suspicion. But rather than offering another condemnation, apologia or elegy for ‘Theory’, I would like to suggest that Rancière’s work may provide a way to start rethinking the very problems and questions about this legacy that still persist in contemporary cinema studies. Rancière’s thinking about the relation of art, theory and politics in relation to Althusser’s own thinking about that relation makes it possible to reconsider and rearrange the terms that dominate the current retreat from an Althusserian film theory which all too often amounts to a retreat from politics.
Introductions to Rancière usually begin with the story of his parting of ways with his Althusserian past over what he detected as the position of mastery in the mode of reading attributed to Marxist science. What is interesting about this story, however, is how its consequences have unfolded over the course of Rancière’s writing. It is not just a simple narrative in which the king is revealed as naked—the radical politics of the intellectual master shown to be enhancing his own power while excluding the excluded he claimed to be speaking for. This gesture of unveiling is no more emancipatory than the discourse that absolves itself of vulgarity through a theoretical edifice designed to ensure the rigorous separation from bourgeois ideology. Rather, politics defined as axiomatic equality must, as Rancière’s recent work has shown, be conceived of in relation to aesthetics. His disagreement with Althusser over science and politics was from the very beginning a disagreement over aesthetics. More broadly, what is at stake is thinking the separation and entwinement of aesthetics, politics and theory.
I
Althusser wrote little about art and aesthetics, but he did have in interest in Brecht, which has informed much of the uptake of Althusser in film and literary theory. The link between Brechtian political modernism and Althusserian symptomatic reading is found both in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and in much Screen theory of the 1970s. In a piece from 1968, Althusser draws an analogy between Brecht and Marx. This analogy is established on the basis that they both generate within their respective domains, philosophy and theatre, a new kind of practice based on a knowledge of the repression of politics that founds both their practices. Althusser makes clear that for both Brecht and Marx this not a new philosophy or new theatre but a de-mystification of philosophy and theatre within their respective places. Politics, which according to Althusser determines both theatre and philosophy, is repressed in favour of enjoyment – aesthetic enjoyment or enjoyment of speculation. One must put philosophy and theatre in their true places but to do this one has to carry out a ‘displacement’ within philosophy and within theatre (Althusser 2003: 141). Through the displacement of the point of view of philosophy and theatre we can in Althusser’s words, ‘yield the floor to politics (ibid). But we can only do this by showing that philosophy or theatre are not politics and that they are only philosophy or theatre. Politics in both cases is conceived as the ground of these practices, but it speaks only when its silence is revealed.
But this analogy between Brecht and Marx, Althusser suggests, can only go so far because not only is philosophy not politics and theatre not politics, but the theatre is not philosophy. Here Althusser makes clear that he is unsatisfied with Brecht’s explanation because it turns out that the specificity of theatre, its difference from philosophy, politics, science and life is that it shows and entertains, and yet showing and entertaining are the very things that disguise theatre’s difference from philosophy, politics, science and life. To show what theatre is, we have to betray what it is but it must remain theatre and only theatre in the process without generating a new mystification. Althusser asks rhetorically, how is it that theatre can still provide entertainment through mere showing while also thwarting this logic at the same time? Althusser excuses Brecht for not solving the problem, because he is finally a man of the theatre and not a philosopher, and insists that the importance of Brecht is not his theory but his theatrical practice that takes ideology for its raw material.
II
The essay remained unfinished, but its twisted logic can be found smoothed over using Althusser’s Lacan-inspired definition of ideology throughout film theory. Christian Metz provides us with the formula: The role of film theory, according to Metz, is ‘to disengage the cinema-object from the imaginary and win it for the symbolic’ (1982: 3). Cinema, we are told, is a machine of the imaginary and theory by imposing questions of representation and the subject into a phenomenological experience that effaced those questions is a political intervention. As Pier Paolo Pasolini claimed, the work of theory was to add something to our knowledge of its object and hence to separate itself from ‘the obscure ontological background’ that arises from ‘explaining cinema with cinema’ (1988: 197). As the example of Pasolini should remind us, this period was not anti-cinema, but was firmly committed to a cinema of the symbolic, whether in the camera-stylo of Nicholas Ray or John Ford in which the mise-en-scene functions as écriture to reveal the contradictions of the film’s official narrative or in the more overtly oppositional cinema of a Godard or Pasolini in which the cinematic-imaginary is perpetually under erasure. The concern, according to Godard, was not with the representation of reality, but the reality of representation; that is, not with the imaginary, but the symbolic.1
Peter Wollen linked this logic explicitly back to Brecht to advocate for a materialist cinema that countered ideology in contrast to the apolitical Greenbergian Modernism that he detected in the American avant-garde. According to Wollen, ‘Brecht wanted to find a concept of representation which would account for a passage from perception/recognition to knowledge/understanding, from the imaginary to the symbolic’ (1976: 18–19).2 Here we see how the Althusserian-Lacanian language is used to account for the logic of separation, both as problem and then through the Brechtian V-effect3 as solution. Whether conceived of as an immanent break within the artwork itself or through the intervention of theory, the goal is conceived as a passage or break out of appearance or sensory experience and into knowledge. In film, like theatre, distance is perceived as immediacy, but once we become aware of the distance through distancing we are restored to real immediacy in the form of cognition. To offer another example from this era of film theory, this is what Jean-Louis Baudry called, in a reference to Vertov, ‘the return of the apparatus in flesh and blood’ (1986: 296). Mediation made present breaks us out of the illusions of mediation. But as Althusser himself recognised in the case of Brecht, this linking of art and theory in a common project of political modernism reaches an impasse unless we rethink the very relation between the imaginary and symbolic, art and philosophy.
III
This logic may be out of favour but its repudiation is not. Indeed, what is striking today is how often the repudiation takes the form of a strict obversion of this logic. Sometimes anchored in an historical argument about the decline of the narrative feature film and more fluid, dispersive images in the age of the information and networks, the current emphasis in much film theory on ‘the body’, affect, sensation tends to take its cues from one of two sources: Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson or a return to phenomenology to assert an immanent theory of film no longer conceived of as representation. With some significant exceptions, much of this work amounts to a simple reversal of the Metzian dogma—theory becomes an attempt to disengage cinema from the symbolic and win it for the imaginary, returning us to that obscure ontological background that Pasolini declared it was theory’s role to cut through.
Phenomenological and Deleuzian writings would likely wish to separate themselves from what David Bordwell and Noël Carroll have termed ‘Post-Theory’. Bordwell and Carroll hoped to usher in a new era by dethroning ‘Grand Theory’ in favour of a more modest ‘piecemeal’ approach turning to the natural sciences for methodological support for new ‘theories’ (in the plural) not marred by Marxist or psychoanalytic jargon or extrinsic concerns such as class, race and sexuality. If cognitivism, offered as the most promising new avenue of investigation, does not seem to have had the traction within film studies departments the authors may have hoped, the polemical dimension of their book seems less and less like the contrarian position it was announced as at the time. A stated polemical distance from ‘Theory’ should be familiar to anyone who has read the introductions to books on film put out by academic presses in the last twenty or so years. All too often anti-Grand Theory might rather be called Grand Anti-Theory in that it turns Theory into such a monolithic project that once a little common sense is offered to undermine some the most provocative claims that have been influential, then suddenly a vast range of philosophical inquiry and scholarly research can be swept under the rug.4 If the cognitivists’ interest in ‘biological propensities’ and ‘cognitive universals’ would strike the Deleuzian as too normative and not properly nomadic, let’s identify what they have in common: a refusal to see media in terms of either the subject or representation and an unqualified dismissal of the utility of concepts such as identification, ideology or any terminology derived from psychoanalysis or Saussaurian linguistics.
A serious examination of Deleuze’s relation to both phenomenology and Althusserian film theory is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is worth looking at a typical example of the Deleuzian turn. Deleuze’s remarkable Cinema books sit uneasily alongside a tradition of French theory that they are often indirectly commenting upon. Turning our attention to effaced mechanisms – be it through breaking down the illusion of movement, the return of sprocket holes or the return of the gaze – in order to pass from identification to knowledge is of no interest to Deleuze, because for Deleuze nothing has been effaced. Deleuze announces in the introduction to Cinema 1: The Movement Image that ‘cinema is always as perfect as it can be’ (1991: x). The identification of matter and image is also an identification of matter and its movement and temporality, being and becoming. As Giorgio Agamben suggests, Deleuze grasps that the movement-image undoes the distinction between psychical and physical reality (2007: 153). There are no components of the movement-image that can be isolated to reveal how cinema works because, ‘cinema begins with the movement-image – not with any ‘relation’ between image and movement; cinema creates a self-moving image’ (1995: 65). Deleuze takes the famous maxim of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology that ‘consciousness is always consciousness of something’ and argues that Bergson goes farther by proposing that ‘consciousness is something’ (1991: 56). Hence an image, as a form of consciousness, has an autonomy and materiality that is only obscured by bringing in questions about a subject of enunciation.
To say, as I have, that cinema for Deleuze actualises the identity of matter and image may seem paradoxical since the identity of matter and image is not an identity and not actual in Deleuze’s terms. The image is rather virtual in Deleuze’s sense – an immanent plane of potentiating fields that create signs out of blocks and movement and time. It is a grin without a cat, an event-sensation without body or object (1997: 168). To preserve the creative power of the new sign grasped as image, Deleuze rejects the Saussurian distinction between signifier and signified, which means he also rejects the distinction between imaginary and the symbolic.
If we remove all elements of dissensus and pedagogy, then Deleuze’s claim that cinema is always as perfect as it can be readily adapted to something called Filmosophy, as a 2006 book by Daniel Frampton has it. This book is of interest to the extent that it demonstrates an impasse when grasping film theory/philosophy’s role once it has shaken off the shackles of any form of hermeneutics, historicisation or ideology critique. The concept of filmosophy (which the book’s cover informs us is trademarked and the use of it is subject to copyright laws) is meant to be a way of writing about film as a purely immanent thinking and feeling. No source, no outside, no recourse to a ‘language of representation’, to filmmaker or spectator needs to be appealed to speak of the cinema-effect. Each film is its own perfect cybernetic machine. Cinema for Frampton cannot be thought of as reflexive or in terms of excess, supplement, void or lack because all these concepts betray the film’s own immanent expression. The language of production and technology adopted by film studies is therefore taking what a film does or is and recoding it in a language of representation that refers only to how it was made. ‘We should not be taught to see zooms and tracking shots but led to understand intensities and movements of feeling and thinking’ (Frampton 2006: 169). This may sound Deleuzian (or Lyotardian), but what does it mean to be ‘led to understand’ something that Frampton will have to claim that we already understand? In Frampton’s words, ‘we do not need instruction in how to read film, we only need a better language of those moving-image sounds—we are already well suited to understanding film’ (2006: 175). Ultimately, Frampton’s argument can only affirm a kind of transparency of images in the pure self-sufficiency of what he calls the ‘filmind’. But then why do we need a language for these images at all if language applies a representational over-coding to images that are always already their own ‘filmosophy’?
To get out of this tautology that would seem to negate the need for his own project, Frampton affirms a poetics of interpretation: ‘The film … might be said to be crying in empathy, sweating out loud, feeling pain for the character. The concept of the filmind should provoke these kinds of interpretations’ (2006: 174). What Deleuze attempts to create is a semiotics of moving images that presupposes an importance for philosophy as a creative practice separate from cinema; Frampton’s Deleuzian reading anchored in a new age of information and fluid digital images is finally interested only in a descriptive language (generously termed poetic) that is still analogical and vague. Before we start ‘sweating out loud’, this ‘better language’ can be deferred in favour of a back and forth between speculative utopian claims that consciously echo writings of the 1920s about film’s equivalence to mind and a repetitive insistence on the way academic ‘film theory’ reterritorialises the immanent singularities or intensities of film’s own creative power.
IV
It should be mentioned that a fidelity to the older model of film theory remains visible in the Lacanian cultural criticism associated primarily with Slavoj Žižek. Here, too, there is a shift away from the symbolic, but it is toward the failure of symbolisation – not a turn to body and affect, but rather the way that films and generally filmic narratives reach an impasse in the third prong of the Lacanian triad – the traumatic void of the Real. While Žižek insists on preserving the political project of film theory against the post-theory turn, there’s little trace of the political Modernism of his predecessors. Like them he privileges the symbolic over the imaginary, theory over aesthetics, but the logic of exposing mediation through mediation is now on the side only of theory and not of art. The relation between film and theory is viewed as just that: a relation, and not a non-relation in the Lacanian sense. In regard to his use of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Žižek says that his aim is
…not to talk about his work, but to refer to his work in order to accomplish the work of Theory. In its very ruthless use of its artistic pretext, such a procedure is much more faithful to the interpreted work than any superficial respect for the work’s unfathomable autonomy. (2001: 9)
For Žižek, the tendency is for film to have only an instrumental function in the illustration of Lacanian concepts. It is part of his charm to have made this so explicit. These are not then the concepts cinema gives rise to, as they are for Deleuze, but mere repetitions of the same. For Žižek, the effect of the work of art is imaginary. And this is what leaves him with the false choice of prostrating ourselves before the work of art as autonomous entity or relegating it to a pretext for theory.
In this adventure, the unsymbolisable real must be found everywhere in an endless process of generating meaning out of inconsistent common sense by attributing a lesson to its rhetorical inversion. For all the canny insights and love of the game, the mixture of discourses and taste for paradox, the selfcannibalising and proliferation across media, Žižek’s machine works too well. In Žižekian fashion it might be asked whether this discourse isn’t precisely Lacan’s discourse of the university, in which everything must be counted and in which ‘objet petit a’ is continually brought into the fold of the big Other?5
V
Rancière’s work, on the other hand, suggests that we need not side with the symbolic over the imaginary or vice versa. The thwarting logic that Althusser found in Brecht’s theory is only a theoretical impasse if we also wish to ensure that the work of theory or art accomplishes the passage from identification to knowledge. As Rancière has proposed, constitutive of art and the thinking of art over the last two centuries is this very thwarting logic, an identification of the unity of contraries. And the images of cinema and art, are not defined by their destiny in either the symbolic or the imaginary, studium or punctum, actual or virtual, but rather they invent new possibilities out of their capacity to play with these contradictory functions.
Rancière has proposed that the realm of appearance and broadly of aesthetics is a contested terrain not to be grasped in its truth only by identifying its symbolic constitution. On the contrary, for Rancière, the symbolic constitution of the social is what he calls the police (1998: 28). The social is symbolically constituted through the various mechanisms by which sensible or sensual experience is both shared and divided, distributed and recognised. Police is a term for when the imaginary and symbolic coincide without remainder or on the other hand, when one falsifies the other. It is any sensorial or conceptual orientation that offers no room for supplement or lack. Metz’s call for winning the imaginary for the symbolic and the reversal that claims that the affective dimension must be liberated from its interpretive territorialisation are but two modes of policing the uses and meanings of images. Politics is not then on the side of the imaginary, but it is an inscription of supplement or lack that rearranges what constitutes the distinction between imaginary and symbolic.
Rancière retains the critique of the Feuerbachian ‘humanism’ of the early Marx and its uptake in twentieth-century Western Marxism, initiated by the Althusser-led Reading Capital project of which he was a part. The difference between police and politics, whatever may appear to be the connotations, is not the difference between alienation and self-consciousness. According to Althusser, the production of the Marxist theorist is not outside ideology but rather it is the only standpoint from which to properly say ‘I am in ideology’. But in Ranciere’s reading, this is merely another twist on the discourse on alienation by drawing a distinction between good and bad forms of knowledge. For Althusser, the good Marxist no longer says, ‘I am outside ideology but the masses are not’; instead, he says, in effect, ‘We are all in ideology. The difference is I know it, but the masses (and the bad Marxists) do not.’ Knowledge as production, the symbolic, is posed against knowledge as sight, the imaginary.
This privileging of the symbolic over the imaginary can be accomplished only through a strict separation between theory and art. In Althusser’s open letter to André Daspre published in English as A Letter on Art, Althusser states that ‘the real difference between art and science lies in the specific form in which they give us the same object in quite different ways: art in the form of ‘seeing,’ ‘feeling’, ‘perceiving’, science in the form of knowledge (in the strict sense, by concepts)’ (1971: 223). He continues, ‘Art makes us “see” “conclusions without premises”, whereas knowledge makes us penetrate into the mechanism which produces the “conclusions” out of the “premises”’ (1971: 224). In other words, for Althusser, art offers objective appearance, but is silent about its own conditions of possibility. Science is what gives us knowledge of causality, the mechanism that generates the logic of cause and effect. Even as Althusser’s notion of structural causality attempts to break from bourgeois conceptions of scientific method, his conception of the distinction between science and art remains resolutely classical.
But the impasse that Althusser recognised in Brecht is the same impasse Rancière recognises in Althusser. Philosophy, art and politics must all maintain their places to ensure the passage from ideology to knowledge-effect. And yet this very passage is impossible if these places remain unmoved. For Rancière, aesthetics is a name for the blurring of these places.
VI
To return to where we started, while Rodowick’s elegy does not wish to salvage this idea of Althusserian-Lacanian theory, he does wish to critique the critique of it that in the name of Cognitivism or analytic philosophy attempts to restore film theory to a model based on the natural sciences. Using Wittgenstein Rodowick proposes that theories of culture are not properly analysed empirically, but can only ever be matters of soliciting agreement about sense and meaning. Therefore he poses a third way, a philosophical turn, in which Deleuze is recruited for an ordinary language philosophy that is separated from empirical investigation in favour of an approach defined by an ‘ethical’ commitment to ‘epistemological self-examination’(Rodowick 2007: 100).
In the same issue, Rodowick’s essay is followed by a dissenting response from Malcolm Turvey. Turvey also appeals to Wittgenstein’s work to suggest that these ethical and epistemological commitments are just as extrinsic to the theory of film as psychoanalysis, Marxism and cognitivism. Theories, according to Turvey, should stick to explanatory ‘generalizations about film’ that proceed within a community with shared standards toward progressive knowledge of how film functions (2007: 120).6
In this debate over methodology, hinging finally on a conflict over what the late Wittgenstein does or does not authorise we can say about film, we find only brief mentions of Marxism, feminism, or political analysis, reduced to examples of so many ethical commitments that we should, depending on who you believe, Rodowick or Turvey, either be responsible to through self-examination if and only if they happen to inform our approach or should dismiss because they underdetermine workable explanatory hypotheses about what cinema is and does. That this debate should take place on these terms in a journal that still bears the name October should impress us with its irony.
If I offer Rancière’s writing to signal the persistence of film theory, it is not in the name of returning wholesale to this certain idea of theory that Rodowick highlights so much as to one aspect of it: the thinking of the relation between film theory and politics. The persistence of film theory does not mean shoring up a disciplinary practice by determining the contours of the object and delimiting the shared criteria for generating knowledge and debate. On the contrary, it means a break from this very logic of consensus. Yet Rancière avoids the tedious language of the ‘break’ or ‘rupture’. In Rancière, there is no muscular assertion of deep temporality or emphatic will. Possibilities for thought are found in a montage of associations and disassociations not in the signalling of commitment. An investigation into the conditions of possibility of thinking about cinema in cinema and in film theory is no longer in the service of resting on knowledge of the system, but of dissociating the very logic of cause and effect that gives theory and cinema their specifiable places.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agamben, G. (2007) Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. London: Verso.
Althusser, L. (1971) ‘A Letter on Art’ in Lenin and Philosophy. London: NLB, 221-228
_____ (2003) ‘On Brecht and Marx,’ in W. Montag, Louis Althusser. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 136–49.
_____ and E. Balibar (1970) Reading Capital. London: NLB.
Baudry, J-L. (1986) ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, in P. Rosen (ed.) Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia University Press, 286–98.
Bordwell, D. and N. Carroll (eds) (1996) Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Deleuze, G. (1991) Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
_____ (1995) Negotiations 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press.
_____ (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Frampton, D. (2006) Filmosophy: A Manifesto for a Radically New Way of Understanding Cinema. London: Wallflower Press.
Lacan, J. (2007) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton.
Metz, C. (1982) The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mulvey, L. (1990) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in P. Erens (ed.) Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 28-40.
Pasolini, P. P. (1988) Heretical Empiricism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Rancière, J. (1998) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rodowick, D. N. (2007) ‘An Elegy For Theory’, October, 122, Fall, 91–109.
Turvey, M. (2007) ‘Theory, Philosophy and Film Studies: A Response to D. N. Rodowick’s “An Elegy for Theory”’, October, 122, Fall, 110–20.
Wollen, P. (1976) ‘Ontology and Materialism in Film’, Screen, 17, 1, Spring, 7–23.
Žižek, S. (2001) The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory. London: British Film Institute.
FILMOGRAPHY
La Chinoise (1967) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard [DVD]. London: Optimum.
NOTES