What Philosophy Wants from Images

D. N. Rodowick

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226513225
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

In recent decades, contemporary art has displayed an ever increasing and complicated fascination with the cinema—or, perhaps more accurately, as D. N. Rodowick shows, a certain memory of cinema. Contemporary works of film, video, and moving image installation mine a vast and virtual archive of cultural experience through elliptical and discontinuous fragments of remembered images, even as the lived experience of film and photography recedes into the past, supplanted by the digital.
            Rodowick here explores work by artists such as Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, Victor Burgin, Harun Farocki, and others—artists who are creating forms that express a new historical consciousness of images. These forms acknowledge a complex relationship to the disappearing past even as they point toward new media that will challenge viewers' confidence in what the images they see are or are becoming. What philosophy wants from images, Rodowick shows, is to renew itself conceptually through deep engagement with new forms of aesthetic experience.
 

1

The Memory of Cinema

I begin with a confession—always a good way of getting a reader’s attention. On completing The Virtual Life of Film in 2007, I felt myself at something of an impasse. Indeed, even the completed book is marked by uncertainty. In examining philosophically the disappearance of film in the transition to digital capture and synthesis, the book offers three different perspectives or frameworks for investigation: in part 1 the experience of theatrical cinema on digital screens remains relatively unchanged; in part 2 an entire experience of time and duration shifts and disappears. The perspective of part 3 is more difficult to encapsulate except to say that perhaps it is too early to tell whether the cinematic medium has or will be completely transformed by digital technologies. From our current historical situation, our memory of what moving images were or could be, in fact will be, remains continually in flux.

This book is thus inspired by a question that remains incompletely answered. As a philosopher or a critic, what could the cinema mean to me today? In The Virtual Life of Film, perhaps I was too much attached to my nostalgic memory of the experience of theatrical film, and a deep, contemplative immersion in the time of the image? In any case, my work on Stanley Cavell had led to a conviction—still present within me—that for at least one hundred years moving images have provided the occasion and the conceptual framework for thinking through some of our most fundamental human dilemmas, both ethical and ontological, about questions of meaning and experience, of fantasy and belief, and of our knowledge of the world and of other minds. For a long time, as works of art cinema held a certain power for these philosophical questions of deep interest. But perhaps now it has faded, disappeared, and fragmented into new and highly differentiated series of screens and media types, and so has lost its philosophical hold on us. Our ontological questioning and curiosity has perhaps drifted to other media and forms of art.

I remember distinctly a conversation with Alexander Galloway some years ago at the Museum of Modern Art, where he chastised me, quite justly, for failing to confront this impasse. Algorithmic thought, digitally simulated or transformed images, and computer-mediated communications are without doubt our most powerful contemporary sites of ontological fascination and exploration. The cinema, or a certain idea of cinema, no longer has the same phenomenological hold on us. A new philosophy—perhaps even influenced by Cavell—should turn not to cinema but rather to social networks, computer gaming, and the digital arts. Or, as I wrote in Virtual Life, “those of us whose subjectivity was forged in a cinematic culture . . . may not be capable either perceptually, psychologically, or philosophically of evaluating this experience. It is not our ontology. We seek a new generation of philosophers.”1

Had I thrown in the towel here? Much as I still love going to the cinema, I was not likely to write now on the latest Pixar film or digital superhero blockbuster. But Alex’s challenge raised me from my dogmatic slumbers, and further conversations with Laura Mulvey about Jeff Wall and other new photographic works made me realize that I did have or was developing a new site of philosophical fascination, which now finds expression in the chapters of this book.

Theatrical cinema, or what Paolo Cherchi Usai calls the Model image of cinema, has been fading from our phenomenological experience for a very long time.2 Perhaps the most powerful point of disruption was the explosive growth of home video since the mid-1980s. Anyone born since 1980 lives in a world whose perceptual defaults are primarily videographic and electronic or digital, and has a relationship to time and screens with increasing expectations of interactivity, control, and the possibility of communication; in other words, through images time and information are now encountered in fundamentally new ways.

In the same time frame, however, the contemporary art world has exhibited an ever increasing and variegate fascination with the cinema; or, better, what I will call a certain memory of cinema. As I already noted in Virtual Life, sometimes this fascination expresses itself in the desire to work with or interrogate a specifically filmic duration, as in the work of Sharon Lockhart or de Rijke and de Rooij, or to return, as does Tacita Dean, to the now increasingly scarce chemical materials of 35, 16, or even Super 8mm film in order to reassert through “archaic” media the perceptual powers of the analog with respect to the digital. Other times, our collective memory of theatrical cinema is incorporated or appropriated into new temporal and spatial contexts as in the very different practices of Douglas Gordon, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, or Christian Marclay. Indeed, a major genre of moving image practice in contemporary art has been characterized by Hal Foster as the “archival impulse.”3 There can also be a complex engagement with cinema as a site of tension in the intersection between history, memory, and fantasy as in Pierre Huyghe’s extraordinary work, Third Memory (2000), which involves John Wojtowicz’s restaging, retelling, and counter-narration to the story that inspired Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975). In many of these cases, the material or medium of the artwork becomes what Victor Burgin calls “the remembered film.”4 This is a peculiar kind of time-image where what appears on the screen is overlaid or underwritten with a certain kind of virtuality: the memory of an experience, or the repetitive attempt to reinvoke, regain, or hold on to a perceptual experience that is already lost. A principal material of contemporary art—and it is a rich and varied one—is the ever-fading memory of cinema: a vast archive of cultural experience, elliptical and discontinuous fragments of memory-images, which become an ever more powerful source of phantasmatic resurrection and re-creation because they can no longer be invoked directly.

At the same time, these works produce what I call a future memory of cinema—an anticipatory power but also an interrogative one that investigates not only what the image has been, and can be no longer, but what it is becoming. These works challenge both the history of cinema and our memory of the history of cinema in complex ways. They engage the spectator, I believe, in a complex temporal experience where prior concepts of image, space, movement, and time are no longer adequate, and new concepts, not quite yet nameable or expressible, must be created. My working idea is that the moving image in contemporary art, in all its complex varieties, is producing a new kind of virtuality or time-image in terms of how it presents what I call a “naming crisis” around questions of movement, image, time, and history. This crisis is generated out of an undecidability that vacillates between the questions of how to place such artworks within the past genealogy of moving images (hence their sometimes nostalgic or elegiac element), and the difficulty of grasping their anticipatory force as the harbinger of future relationships to the image.

In the first part of The Virtual Life of Film, I sketch out seven overlapping and sometimes contradictory concepts of the virtual that are often evoked in our experience of cinema. Briefly, these can be characterized as: 1) making the “virtual” synonymous with digital coding; 2) the virtual considered in terms of the ontological uncertainty of any “medium,” including film; 3) the idea that film is essentially a temporal and therefore “immaterial” art form; 4) in relation to how the problem of notationality is described in Nelson Goodman’s distinction between autographic and allographic arts; 5) in relation to Christian Metz’s important distinction between code and text; 6) in terms of the inevitable effects of decay and obsolescence in analog media; and, finally, 7) in relation to Metz’s important psychoanalytic and phenomenological definition of the experience of the imaginary signifier as the hallucinatory projection of an absent referent in space together with the ineluctable slipping away of images in time. Together, these criteria suggest that the inherent virtuality of the image is a fundamental condition of the experience of cinema, where the ontological insecurity of film as an aesthetic object and aesthetic experience is posed as a spatial uncertainty, a temporal instability, and a conceptual undecidability.

I can now add yet another sense of the virtual, expressed in this curious and multiform fascination with the remembered film, where the fading memory of cinema becomes the material for future forms and concepts of moving image works. In other words, as a material or medium of art, the remembered film plunges us into a collective, cultural memory of cinema to project an anticipatory image or idea capable of provoking the creation of new forms and new concepts. I believe that the remembered film can be characterized with good reason as a kind of time-image, and as a peculiar form of indexicality that points back not to past existences in space and time, but rather past experiences that hover uncertainly between our subjective and objective experience of images today. Indeed, one of the principal objectives of this book is to investigate the peculiar powers of “photographic” belief, whose presumed causal powers point toward not past worlds but rather toward states of memory whether real or imagined. As I will explain in the next chapter, the queer powers of photographic belief inspire in us a feeling of or desire for certainty that is nonetheless infused with fantasy. But this might also be a force of the past that can be recovered for the future.

For me, this is a way of creating a new path out of one of the principal themes of The Virtual Life of Film, which is to understand more clearly why in contemporary film study so many scholars are interested anew in the problem of indexicality and in the period of so-called classical film theory. There are two possible lines that I try to explore more deeply in The Virtual Life of Film that now open out to the fading/future memory of cinema. One is oriented toward the past in that the disappearance of indexicality in digital synthesis, and the waning of indexicality in digital capture, make us ever more attentive to the fading of the causal and analogical forces that fueled our phenomenological experience of photography and film. This is a frankly nostalgic and elegiac account of what has been lost without being fully aware of the how or when of its passing.

The other line has to do with the way in which classical film theory expresses a profound disorientation, not only because of the newness of the perceptual experience of moving images, but also because as images or art they were conceptually unfamiliar—the philosophy of art or aesthetics had no appropriate name for them. As Walter Benjamin was most keenly aware, 150 years of aesthetics and the philosophy of art were placed in doubt conceptually by the appearance of film and photography, such that the guiding question was no longer “Is photography art?” but rather “Has photography changed our entire conception of art or what counts as aesthetic experience?” The fact that so much inventive effort, and for such a long time, has been given to producing synthetic images with perfect photographic credibility means that we are not quite prepared to confront the future shock they may express. I think we feel a “modernist” disorientation with respect to the emerging ontology of digital arts and communication (they constitute part of our modernity), one that is analogous to the experience of classical film theorists. And like them, we try to reorient ourselves through theory or philosophy. (This is a recurrent theme in my Elegy for Theory.)

And there is one last paradox to confront. All analogical presentations—photography, film, recorded sound—are historical in the sense that they are temporal and spatial transcriptions of past existences in time and in space. Every photograph begins as a document before it becomes something else (and it can become many other kinds of things). But in addition, the phenomenological experience of this historical power is itself “becoming history” in the sense that it is no longer available to us in the same ways. My current thesis is that one of the main avenues of exploration in contemporary art is to create new concepts for thinking the history of cinema as a medium, and to attune viewers to problems of history, memory, and the image in new ways, ways which in fact shift our given concepts of media of art. In other words, as the previous kinds of indexical powers of analogical cinema fade or dissipate, contemporary art is seeking out new strategies for restoring or expressing a sense of history through the image and, in doing so, to create new definitions and concepts of image, medium, and perhaps of history. One thing that philosophy wants from images, then, is to renew itself conceptually through deep engagement with novel forms of aesthetic experience.

A difficulty is confronted here where our past experience of the image or, rather, our uncertain memory of that experience, blocks or filters our sensitivity to potential future powers of the image. A persistent rhetorical and conceptual gesture of The Virtual Life of Film was to return continually to the problem of time and how temporality is lived and experienced through the media we collectively create and inhabit. As Gilles Deleuze understood so profoundly, our present is composed of multiple and discontinuous versions of the past that persist in every passing present, and every passing present is composed from a present of the past and a present of the future. There is an important historical lesson here for trying to understand screen culture today. The history of cinema suffered a long time from seeing all of history as cinema: Plato’s cave was a cinema, every optical toy anticipated cinema, television was another kind of cinema. In point of fact, the open and variable medium of moving images has been limited by thinking of it as one “thing.” However, every genre or medium of art is continuously innovative, remaking itself by repurposing its concepts toward new uses or contexts, or providing the material for new conceptualizations leading to new media of art. Media archaeology also teaches that screened images have multiple and discontinuous histories, and not all lead inevitably to the Model image, as Paolo Cherchi Usai might put it, of theatrical cinema.

At the same time, this Model image may block conceptual understanding of emergent forms and automatisms; in other words, one’s comprehension of an emergent future may be blocked or masked by the persistence of a past image. I still love Lev Manovich’s story about the digital dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (1993) as images that had to be degraded because they were too real—or hyperreal—they did not look like filmic or analogical images and so were not perceived to be “realistic.”5 Here a future image clothes itself in the past. These images are allegories of a future we do not wish to see and so we render them as a past image. We try to maintain a sense that our present ontology is photographic, when in fact we have already been overtaken by a future that we think is still ahead of us. Spielberg’s dinosaurs anticipate a future world that has already emerged in the present, but they do so as ghosts of the past. As I write in Virtual Life, the perceptual power of photography and film is therefore recognized only retroactively as a disappearing, vanished, or lost world; we are drawn to digital and interactive screens as a will to grasp a future that is always running ahead of us and pulling us forward in its slipstream. Our disappointment in ever knowing the world or others now becomes the perpetual disappointment of attaining the more perfect (future) knowledge of computers and computer communications, whose technological evolution always seems to run ahead of the perceptual and cognitive capacity to manipulate them for our own ends. It is the failure to arrive at what always comes ahead.

In this respect, I have become more and more fascinated with how contemporary art examines and interrogates these historical ironies and paradoxes, or even expresses something like a new historical consciousness of images, both deeply aware of their complex relation to the past, but also confronting us with a naming crisis, of presenting us with works—apparently photographic, apparently moving—that also undermine and challenge our confidence in knowing what these images are, or what they are becoming—as images and in movement, and in relation to time, history, and memory.

The time has come, then, to consider works of contemporary moving image practice that project new images of time, memory, and history. One of the most striking examples of the affective powers of the memory of cinema is, I believe, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s Meteor (2011, 35mm or HD loop, 15m). Like many of Müller and Girardet’s works, both individually and collectively, Meteor is constructed from images extracted from cinema’s history; in this case, sequences appropriated from science fiction films of the 1950s and 1960s as well as images of boyhood from other American and European films of the period. The work begins in a prologue whose first five images are: in extreme close-up, a boy screams, faints, and falls off-screen; an astronaut floating in a spacecraft touches his chest and illuminates a light there; a light falls on the face of a small boy peering from behind the rails of domestic stairs; another boy is drowning in a lake; a black-and-white image of a boy’s foot collapsing a balloon that looks like a planet. And then the second half of the prologue begins with a match cut to the image of a yellow moon followed by stars, a blue planet, a meteor crossing the night sky; then images of boys sleeping in bed, a light shining in their eyes, followed by an astronaut shining a light from above, a flash as if an exploding star, and ending with a boy uneasy in bed. Music plays an important role in the work, as well as a beautifully spoken text, a kind of poetic fairy tale, voiced in John Smith’s wonderful baritone. A theme from Puccini’s one-act opera Suor Angelica arises beneath this second series of images, as well as Smith’s voice-over that intones: “Home. Hole. Drown. Down. Low. Light. Bright. Bread. Bed. Boy.” And indeed this parallel series of word and image fragments expresses in condensed form the clusters of images and affects that will soon unfold.

The poetic patterning of images in Meteor emphasizes a world that emerges between sleeping and awakening where imagination and perception have not yet fully released themselves to consciousness or yielded to reality testing in the external world. The figured boys presented seriatim anchor a chain of images that alternate between scenes of wonder and anxiety. This is a journey of desire but also a painful passage into individuation and independence, or a birthing if you will, toward a world of exploration no longer constrained by home, bedroom, and an endless night sky framed by windows. The title of the work suggests impending disaster but also the awe of an unexplored un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1  The Memory of Cinema
• 2  The Queer Attractions of Perceptual Belief
• 3  A Virtual Presence in Space
• 4  Harun Farocki’s Liberated Consciousness
• 5  The Force of Small Gestures
• Epilogue: Welcome to This Situation
• Index
• Footnotes