Melancholy Emotion in Contemporary Cinema

A Spinozian Analysis of Film Experience

Francesco Sticchi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429847455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This work outlines a new methodology for film analysis based on the radical materialist thought of Baruch Spinoza, re-evaluating contemporary cognitive media theory and philosophical theories on the emotional and intellectual aspects of film experience.

Sticchi's exploration of Spinozian philosophy creates an experiential constructive model to blend the affective and intellectual aspects of cognition, and to combine it with different philosophical interpretations of film theory. Spinoza's embodied philosophy rejected logical and ethical dualisms, and established a perfect parallelism between sensation and reason and provides the opportunity to address negative emotions and sad passions without referring exclusively to traditional notions such as catharsis or sublimation, and to put forth a practical/embodied notion of Film-Philosophy. This new analytical approach is tested on four case studies, films that challenge the viewer's emotional engagement since they display situations of cosmic failure and depict controversial and damaged characters: A Serious Man (2009); Melancholia (2011); The Act of Killing (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).

This book is an important addition to the literature in Film Studies, particularly in Cognitive Film Theory and Philosophy of Film. Its affective and semantic analyses of film experience (studies of embodied conceptualisation), connecting Spinoza's thought to the analysis of audiovisual media, will also be of interest to Philosophy scholars and in academic courses of film theory, film-philosophy and cognitive film studies.

Part 1

Philosophical Models and Interpretative Instruments

Baruch Spinoza is becoming more and more a source of inspiration for scholars in various fields, from Neurosciences to Political Theory and finally arriving at Film Theory (cf. Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, pp. 6–7). Many interpretations of Spinoza’s work would categorise him within the tradition of Neo-Platonic thought, while others tend to consider him as deterministic thinker and ‘cold’ rationalist; however, in this book I will rely, in particular, on Gilles Deleuze’s exegesis of Spinoza’s work. This choice is motivated by the fact that I think Deleuze has been able to highlight more than any other scholar those elements of Spinoza’s philosophy that detain an incredible analytical power in addressing issues that are also fundamental challenges of our time – above all, the analysis of interactivity and the definition of a rationality that goes beyond the tradition of Enlightenment and Rationalism. Deleuze, indeed, has demonstrated that Spinoza conceived of the ‘human’ as an ecological and immanent phenomenon, and believed that thought is practical and alive in the world, and that determinism does not coincide with absence of freedom, or rather that our freedom should not be considered an abstract principle but an experimental and affirmative journey. For this reason Gilles Deleuze brilliantly summarised the tension within Spinoza’s philosophy in the question ‘What can a body do?’ (cf. Deleuze, 2013, p. 81). Furthermore, Spinoza’s parallelism and his surprising take on empathy and simulation as basic elements of human cognition and interaction have encouraged many scholars in putting his work in connection with contemporary neurocognitive theories (Ravven, 2003; Wolfe, 2006). This is why in this first part of the book I will be comparing and connecting Spinoza’s theories with the work of George Lakoff and other scholars in the field of Cognitive Sciences; I think that this assemblage could produce a new theoretical take on film experience, one that can overcome many impasses in the studies of audiovisual media. Because of the comparability between these two theoretical frameworks, in this section, I will interchange the discussion of Spinoza’s philosophy with the analysis of notions coming from neurocognitive studies. Moreover, I will use this Spinozian look to address the problem of negative emotions, and the connection between conceptualisation and affections in film. Finally, what I aspire to accomplish with this book is to provide the reader with an ‘experimental’ perspective on film experience – an interactive and experiential account capable of highlighting the concrete conceptual possibilities offered by a particular experience, which, therefore, transfers the previously quoted Spinozian question to the readers, asking what they can do as viewers and more broadly what films can do.

1 From Spinoza to the Embodied Mind

A Radical Notion of Immanence

As Spinoza, I will start the discussion from some necessary ontological premises. This unusual beginning is based on the necessity to describe the effects and the relevance of a radically immanent philosophical perspective for the purpose of analysing films, and how this same conceptual account unites Spinoza’s philosophy with recent theories on embodiment. Spinoza thought that all life depends on a unifying principle: God or the Substance (Spinoza, 1979, p. 227). However, this is not to be understood as an abstract or transcendent entity; instead it coincides with life itself. The Substance, for Spinoza, is not an emanated force but expresses existence without countable limits. God is ‘absolutely’ infinite, the one all-embracing being, which by definition is absolute free and limitless (causa sui). Another fundamental property of the Substance is existence; it necessarily exists because if it did not, this would imply that it is not absolute but determined (Spinoza, 2002, p. 219). We also understand how unlimited freedom and perfect necessity coincide since the power of not being is not a faculty at all but a negation. The latter is a limit, a trait of finite and determined beings and the characteristic of their imperfection. Spinoza summarised this notion with the well-known phrase: Omnis determinatio est negatio¹ (All definitions are negations). However, this statement should not be understood as the fact that all subjects are defined through their negation but as the opposite (cf. Esposito, 2018, p. 3076; Macherey, 2011, p. 115). This principle, indeed, affirms that while the Substance is characterised by the co-presence of necessity and absolute power, finite beings, or modes, experience freedom as a discovery, as the continuous experimentation of their capacity to act in the world.

The Substance does not exist in a particular time; it cannot be conceived as something with a past and a future because this would imply that it is imperfect and needs to modify itself in order to improve its condition. Spinoza here presents two definitions of time: the former, which is referred to as eternity and describes the absolute, actual, and everlasting endurance of life, and the latter, referring to finite temporalities, which explains time in its determined relational forms (cf. Spinoza, 2002, p. 217). From these initial statements we can understand that the Substance, for Spinoza, cannot be represented with anthropomorphic properties and that it would be absurd to confer to God goals and objectives or previous stages to modify, for God is actual infinity. The Substance is not describable as a ‘thing’; it cannot be observed from the outside, for there is no isomorphism between a hypothetical mental structure and the world. We live in it, and when we imagine and describe an organisation of Nature, we are expressing some particular relations of its internal elements. This immanent vision of reality is in complete opposition to those philosophies that, as Cartesianism, establish their ontological foundations on abstract principles: Descartes, for instance, believed that the starting and evident point of any speculation resides in a fundamental logical assumption: Cogito ergo sum (cf. Spinoza, 1974, p. 53), which made possible thought and the ordered categorisation of reality. Spinoza, on the contrary, affirms the necessary existence of a Plane of Immanence, in which every possible form of life is a virtuality of the real, and is inextricably linked and simultaneous, as a body made of infinite folds. Therefore, the Plane of Immanence must be considered as the universal condition of existence that places every existing being and faculty on the same ontological level, thus rejecting the codification of superior states or of existential hierarchies. Indeed, we understand the concrete meaning of Spinoza’s famous phrase: Deus sive Natura (God or Nature), which conveys that the Substance is Life itself (Spinoza, 2002, p. 321).

Furthermore, the Substance is expressed through infinite modes and attributes. The latter are infinite essential properties of Nature; they all exist simultaneously and none of them is cause of the other. We know the existence of two parallel Attributes, res cogitans (thought, the mind) and res extensa (the body), and we cannot conceive of one of them as preceding the other. Modes are finite beings and objects and, therefore, they are partial and determined expressions (or the affections) of the Substance. The more a mode is composed by parts of reality, the more it has power and is capable of forming relations between beings. From this definition it is clear that there is no negativity or falsity in a mode because it exists as effect of the Substance, and it cannot cause something against its Nature (Spinoza, 2002, pp. 235–236). The imperfection of a finite being depends essentially on its incompleteness and consists in the fact that it cannot be self-sufficient but relies on something else, and so, with its expressions, it defines a limit, a boundary, a territory, and a composition of beings. Therefore, we use modes to indicate individuals, the composition and assemblages these beings are able to form, and the relational systems in which they are involved. Moreover, according to Spinoza, every mode should be judged false just by evaluating its power of implications and explications, and the usual distinctions between natural and artificial objects, or real and imaginary experiences collapse, since everything expresses a possible combination of individuals in the world (Deleuze, 1988, p. 68). This idea is comparable with the Nietzschean principle of the ‘power of the false’, which affirms the necessity to evaluate things for connections they create and the intensities they possess instead of judging them in accordance with transcendent categories (Deleuze, 2013, p. 169). This philosophical stance, however, should not be juxtaposed with relativism, as it presents, instead, a perspectivist and realist position, which is based on the capacity to recognise the practical and affirmative power of physical and intellectual assemblages or, on the contrary, to identify their destructivity and impotence.

It is possible to find a similar immanent account also in many considerations expressed in the field of contemporary Cognitive Sciences. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their book Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), for instance, analyse Western Thought and critically re-elaborate many of the notions deriving from this tradition, such as the concept of essence and the notion of causation. What derives from their enquiry is that these concepts are ineffective in describing reality because they tend to ignore the material nature of thought and focus on the research of pure representational ideas, which cannot give justice to the complex and dynamic nature of reality. Indeed, Lakoff and Johnson’s conclusion is that even the most complex ideas are embodied and, therefore, produced by experiential and operational dynamics (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, p. 136, 443), and should be evaluated in connection with their capacity to describe and address the complexity of the world surrounding us. We can notice how the attention to the embodiment of thought directly involves an immanent and ecological perspective on reality and cognition since it implies the refusal of the transcendence of thought and focusses, instead, on its relational and practical processes.

For Spinoza, our existence as finite beings involves a constant definition of a part-whole relationship, which is transformative and connected with our own perspective and position in the world. The constant interaction between the parts and the whole will be relevant in the description of film characters’ emotional and conceptual systems, and their relation with general atmospheres and moods that affect and distinguish a particular audiovisual world as this focus connects the activity of subjects in space with complex ideas, intellectual systems, and moral values. Moreover, this peculiar dimension of immanence allows us to recognise a concrete epistemic and explicative value in artistic forms, which are not so much representations as living artefacts. In a Spinozian perspective, films should be understood as relational and ecological systems, which establish an agentive and ontological dimension expressed through the audiovisual form. Thus, we could conceive every film experience as a ‘Spinozian mode’, existing on a plane of audiovisual immanence of infinite possibilities, describing and allowing the viewer to interact with particular notions of temporality and spatiality, and with the ethical systems associated with them.

In the next sections we will see how, for its effectiveness in describing human affective/intellectual operations, and the multifaceted unity of Nature, Spinoza’s philosophy can be considered a jump into the dark sea of immanence and a lesson in how to swim inside it (cf. Deleuze, 2013, p. 177).

The Embodied Mind

In accordance with Spinoza’s immanent vision of the world, human beings are finite modes: ‘The essence of man … is a modification, a mode that expresses the nature of God in a certain determined manner’ (Spinoza, 1979, p. 44). As physical beings we experience the world through two attributes, extension and thought and, as it was explained before, these work in parallel and manifest the nature of things through a particular property. A concept of the mind is the abstract expression of a specific body and the conceptualisation of its states. Therefore, an idea should not be considered as a representation or a mental picture but as a schema, a model of a particular disposition of the subject. Spinoza prefers to use the term ‘concept’ or ‘idea’ to refer to the activity of the mind in order to distinguish it from perception, an expression that could manifest passivity (Spinoza, 1979, p. 37). The parallelism between the mind and the body indicates that they work simultaneously and must be conceived of as an indivisible set, within which none of them can generate the other. Consequently, the perceptions and the ideas of the mind are linked to the changes in the body states, which, in turn, depend on the affections received from other beings; and so everything that touches the body is necessarily expressed in the intellect (Spinoza, 1979, p. 47).

According to Spinoza, all bodies exist because they are determined by something else, and so their state depends on a relation. Spinoza thought that individuals are proportions and tensions between different parts of the extension, so he imagined the composition and interaction of things as a constant process of erosion and rubbing between objects (Spinoza, 1974, pp. 74–76). This never-ending motion implies the absurdity of the concept of vacuum, which is paradoxical and against the idea of God, because it means absence of existence. We shall see that this anti-atomism is also reflected in his psychology and ethics, as Spinoza thought that when we describe phenomena as unreal, we express a negation and a limit of comprehension. Nonetheless, we start to consider bodies from the simplest, the minimum aggregation of matter that is relevant and significant. Since an individual is identified by a particular relation of its components, it can be considered as existing as long as it can preserve this composition (gradus), even though it is changed by the connection with other beings. Following this line of thought, we identify individuals or ourselves not through objective and neutral descriptions but as conceptual models of specific compositions, which, nonetheless, are endlessly reframed by ecological and interactive factors.

Every encounter of our body is perceived by the mind and involves its abstract conceptualisation, which recalls the presence of an external object and a relation with it. This interaction identifies a state of the body that proceeds until something else does not add modifications to this composition or substitutes it (Spinoza, 2002, p. 256). A particular connection leaves a ‘trace’ (vestigia), an impression of its presence, which is automatically evoked every time the body is similarly disposed. Therefore, the reverberation of a previous relation is not the memory of a singular object but the generation of a chain of ideas through associative intellection. According to Spinoza, this is the basic functioning of memory: a constructive and generative path of relations between bodies and their ideas (Spinoza, 2002, pp. 257–258). The act of remembering, therefore, is not a mere reprocessing of information but the acquisition of new knowledge, a dynamic process of reconstruction of the past, confrontation with present states, and their combination. The associative mechanism that defines our memories is not a neutral and disinterested course but the semantic conceptualisation of experience, the definition of structures of meanings through which we organise and interpret new data and signs. The trace of a particular relation is a symbol, which does not mirror something, as Cartesian semiotics maintained, but stands for a state of the body, an arrangement of things in the world. Moreover, as Deleuze explained, the term ‘expression’ is also fundamental to comprehend Spinoza’s philosophy and its difference from traditional rationalism attributed to Cartesian thought. Indeed, according to Spinoza, symbols and intellectual structures are the products of particular interactions, and, therefore, it is important to examine the components of such interactivity. For this reason Spinoza frequently used the term ‘expression’ in opposition to ‘representation’ to highlight the idea that linguistic codes describe practical developments of the bodies and indicate relations between beings rather than fixed and crystallised images.

As indicated by Heidi Morrison Ravven (2003), we can here notice several similarities between Spinoza’s theory on the embodied mind and George Lakoff’s semantics. As Spinoza, Lakoff rejected the idea that cognitive processes should be considered abstract and the product of pure mental activity. On the basis of this assumption Lakoff reformulated all of the assumptions posed by Objectivism, a philosophical and linguistic account, which, continuing Cartesian tradition, utilises computational models and understands language and categorisation as disembodied activities. Lakoff’s approach is characterised by a focus on the experiential bases of cognition and imaginative thought.

It is possible to summarise the main arguments of the Objectivist models of understanding in the following propositions:

• Thought consists in the abstract and disembodied manipulation of symbols, which are internal representations of the external world.
• The mind is comparable to a machine that operates by algorithmic computation, and whose symbolic activity stands in correspondence with the order of nature (isomorphism).
• This faculty of the mind is independent from our physical characteristics, whose importance is incidental and limited to the description of our particular interactions in life.
• Thought and language are atomistic, or rather they can be divided into simple significant particles that follow logical and mathematical rules.

However, according to Lakoff the objectivist and Cartesian idea according to which we simply reproduce abstract signs mechanically, and organise them into pure logical relations does not explain their effectiveness or the possibility to use them in ordinary life (Lakoff, 1987, p. 270). Against the idea that concepts are pure abstractions dependent on syntax, Lakoff puts forward a model according to which systems of meanings are generated through our interaction in the world. He calls his approach ‘Experientialism’ or ‘Experiential Realism’, illustrating how our linguistic activity entails concrete relations of beings in the world. Our semantic models are the conceptualisation of specific conditions or states of the body in action, and express their intellectual reflection. Therefore, we understand that our linguistic activity is largely associative and based on the connection of physical encounters with their mental elaboration, and that we cannot separate the abstractions from their reference to concrete sensori-motor experiences since reason is embodied and not transcendent (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, p. 22). Experientialism rejects the existence of an external order in reality or the interpretation of reason as ‘God’s eye’ looking at the world from the outside:

We are not outside of reality. We are part of it, in it. What is needed is not an externalist perspective, but an internalist perspective […] But that does not mean that knowledge is impossible. We can know reality on the basis of our being part of it.

(Lakoff, 1987, p. 261)

We can summarise the experientialist paradigm in these statements: thought is completely embodied and consists in the conceptualisation of physical experience; for this reason words and symbols do not mirror the order of reality and cannot be considered representations. More specifically, they indicate types of relations we carry out in the world. Human intellect is ecological, it cannot be reduced to simple parts, and its activity goes beyond the mechanical manipulation of abstract symbols; therefore, the comprehension of the mind passes through the discovery of the interactive possibilities of the body in the world (Lakoff, 1987, p. xv; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, p. 77).

As for Lakoff, Spinoza’s perspective on reality is internalist and immanent, with his words: ‘the human mind perceives no external body as actually existing save through ideas of modifications of its body’ (Spinoza, 1979, p. 60). Spinoza’s semiotic approach can be considered a semantic one because he believed that signs and words cannot convey the interactive totality they refer to but need a system of meanings to be understood and used; they are not, therefore, appropriate by themselves (Vinciguerra, 2012, pp. 136–137). If a symbol is the product of a relation, then e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Philosophical Models and Interpretative Instruments
• Part 2 A Spinozian-Experiential Theory of Film
• Part 3 Case Studies: Four Melancholic Films
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index