What Philosophy Wants from Images

What Philosophy Wants from Images

What Philosophy Wants from Images

D. N. Rodowick

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51305-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51319-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51322-5 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226513225.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rodowick, David Norman, author.

Title: What philosophy wants from images / D. N. Rodowick.

Description: Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017015713 | ISBN 9780226513058 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226513195 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226513225 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC PN1995 .R6195 2017 | DDC 302.23/43—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015713

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Sarah, as she takes her first steps into the wild . . .

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

Preface

No one was more surprised than I by the appearance of this book, which came into the world like an unexpected child, though no less loved for that. And indeed the unanticipated pleasure of this book was echoed by other significant changes in my life and career over the past eight years.

Finishing books is almost as great a pleasure as writing them. However, after The Virtual Life of Film was published in 2007, I was completely preoccupied with the manuscript that would become Elegy for Theory and Philosophy’s Artful Conversation, which had been in development on tracks parallel to Virtual Life. The last things on my mind then were digital images or digital culture. Yet I was suddenly the recipient of many gracious invitations to speak on those very topics on which I felt my imagination had been completely exhausted, or at least overrun with new philosophical preoccupations.

This period also coincided with my tenure in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Among my greatest pleasures there was the close daily contact with artists and the teaching of studio art, which reinvigorated and deepened my interest in contemporary art. Another welcome consequence of teaching in an art department was the unexpected return of my own creative practice, which after some early successes had lain dormant for several decades.

However, the most important sparks for the series of unexpected events out of which this book would emerge took place first at the Harvard Film Archive and in contact with moving image work that would completely reorient my thinking about digital images. One strongly suggested argument in The Virtual Life of Film is that moving images created from processes of digital capture and especially digital synthesis are unable to express duration with the same phenomenological intensity as analog film. (So curious that now one must now specify film as analog.) While not saying so directly, this was nonetheless an expression of my doubt that what Gilles Deleuze called direct time-images could be expressed with digital means. Philosophical arguments did not prove me wrong, however, but rather creative ones. Indeed, there were three exemplary works, each with a central place in this book, that unleashed in me a new critical passion for the moving image in contemporary art and, as importantly, entirely reoriented my thinking and erased my doubts about the potential power of digital time-images. A new critical passion for art is one thing that philosophy wants from images.

The first work was Ernie Gehr’s Glider (2001), projected as part of a program devoted to his past and current works at the Harvard Film Archive in February 2008. As I relate in the fifth chapter of this book, in watching Glider I was overwhelmed with the idea that this work expressed with its own sensory and immanent means the world of pure perception in the universal movements of image, energy, and force, as portrayed philosophically in Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory. Just a year later, and also at the Harvard Film Archive, I encountered Ken Jacobs’s Capitalism: Child Labor (2006) and other, newer digital works. If Glider captures something like a world-time of matter, movement, and light, Capitalism: Child Labor offers a critical interrogation of deep historical time by generating new modalities of movement, time, and perception out of archival materials that make us newly aware of the converging genealogies of photography and computation in relation to the history of the exploitation of labor.

The third work was Victor Burgin’s Hôtel Berlin, which opened at the Gallery Campagne Première in Berlin in September 2009. Hôtel Berlin taught me about paradoxical expressions of movement and stillness in digital moving image work, and yet more importantly unlocked for me two of the principal intuitions from which this book emerged. One has to do with how the fading memory of film, and the multiple histories of cinema, have become the material for future forms and concepts in contemporary moving image works. One might say, after Stanley Cavell, that new media of art are emerging here that profoundly test our criteria for what counts as a moving image, and so provoke what I call a naming crisis that contests our confidence in knowing what these new images are and how they are meaningful for us. Here the memory of cinema, and the disappearance of a certain experience of cinema, demand a new imagination of what movement, time, and history might mean. There are other artists and other works that could and should be named here, and you will encounter many of them in the pages to come. But I leave off for the moment in saying that what philosophy also wants from images in the context of contemporary art is critical attention to the conceptual reciprocity between thought-in-images and thought-about-images.

This book has taken a serpentine path marked by many detours and digressions before finally achieving its current form. My thoughts about the memory of cinema in contemporary art emerged at first in fragments that unfolded one out of the other in a series of talks and lectures. The first stages of my thinking were inspired by a symposium entitled From the Reel to the Virtual organized by Mark B. Hansen at Duke University in 2009. These thoughts were reworked, redeveloped, and refined in subsequent years in talks given at the University of Minnesota, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, the University of Stirling, the University of Copenhagen, and the Facultad de Comunicación, Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona.

Further development of the ideas and arguments that would eventually form the basis for chapter 1 occurred through lectures given at a symposium entitled The Material and the Code: Disciplinary Crossing on Cinema and New Media, organized by the late and much missed Miriam Hansen at the University of Chicago; the conference Film Futures at the Norwegian National Library in Oslo; New Screen Ecologies, the Third Nomadikon Meeting at the Bergen Center for Visual Culture at the University of Bergen; the Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem, New University of Lisbon; the ARTHEMIS International Conference on Moving Images Studies: History(ies), Method(s), Discipline(s), at Concordia University, Montréal; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles; in giving the Lois Walters Coker Lecture at Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina; and in a keynote lecture at the conference Diversifying Digital Media, Hongik University, Seoul. My deepest thanks go out to the organizers and participants of these events, and also my apologies for not thanking all of you here individually.

My second chapter, on questions of photography and belief in the contrasting yet related arguments of Christian Metz and Stanley Cavell, was first presented as a lecture at Queen Mary, University of London, in fall 2015. I thank Steven Eastwood for our long friendship and for the invitation to speak there to such an engaged and critical audience.

Versions of chapter 3 developed across a series of lectures and talks inspired by Victor Burgin’s recent digital work, whose locations included the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie during a fellowship at Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar; the University of Chicago Mass Culture Workshop; Cooper Union School of Art; the Humanities Lecture Series at Amherst College, Amherst; the Getty Institute–sponsored conference Sculpture and Photography: The Art Object in Reproduction at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; and at Sensational Humanities, the Sesquicentennial Conference of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Earlier or alternate versions of this chapter have been published as A Virtual Presence in Space in Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017), edited by Sarah Hamill and Megan Luke, and as The Unnameable (In Three Movements) in Victor Burgin: Projective (Geneva: Éditions de Mamco [Musée d’art moderne et contemporain], 2014), edited by David Campany. I thank these publishers for their kind permission to reuse and rework this material.

My chapter on Harun Farocki arose from an invitation by Don McMahon at Artforum to write a short appreciation after Harun’s untimely passing in summer 2014. I also wish to thank the editors at Artforum for their permission to fold that short text into this book, and for their extensive feedback. My deeper interest in the work of Harun Farocki arose from working closely with Harun and Antje Ehemann on the first exhibition I supervised as director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, The Image in Question: War—Media—Art (2010), an expanded version of which became the extraordinary show, Serious Games: Krie—Medien—Kunst at the Mathildenhöhe Institut in Darmstadt, Germany. My thoughts on Farocki’s media work were further expanded and developed in a keynote lecture for SOCINE, the Brazilian Society for Cinema and Audiovisual Studies at Campinas, Brazil, in October 2015, and at the LUX/Central St. Martins MRes Public Lecture in London in November 2015. Mattias Rajmann at Farocki Filmproduction generously supplied preview copies of the work I discuss in chapter 4. I would also like to express here my enormous debt to friends who have worked on Farocki far longer than I, and whose thoughts and scholarship have profoundly influenced my own work, including Nora Alter, Christa Blumlinger, Thomas Elsaesser, and Volker Pantenberg. My deepest and warmest thanks, however, are reserved for both Antje Ehemann, whose friendship and support were instrumental for this research, and for Harun’s daughters, Anna and Lara Faroqhi.

Versions of chapter 5 were presented at the colloquium Etrangeté Technologique at the Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7, at the conference Cinematic Thinking Outside Itself at Cambridge University, at the symposium Indefinite Visions at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Free University of Berlin’s Cinepoetics workshop, and at Boston University. An earlier and much shorter version of this chapter was published as The Force of Small Gestures in Indefinite Visions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), edited by Martine Beugnet and Allan Cameron. I am grateful to Edinburgh University Press for their kind permission to reproduce this material. I am also grateful to Matthias Müller for supplying images from Meteor and to Victor Burgin for his image of the installation plan of A Place to Read at Campagne Première.

Many other friends and colleagues contributed to this book through their engaged and engaging conversations including Emmanuelle André, Greg Beal, Brooke Belisle, Raymond Bellour, Martine Beugnet, Dominique Bluher, Giuliana Bruno, Katarina Burin, Allan Cameron, David Campany, Jimena Canales, Tom Conley, Alexander Galloway, Sarah Hamill, Mark B. Hansen, Miriam Hansen, Bruce Jenkins, Homay King, Nina Koidl, Martin Lefebvre, Malcolm Le Grice, George Lellis, Megan Luke, Richard Misek, Laura Mulvey, Tim Murray, Francette Pacteau, Walid Ra’ad, Karen Redrobe, Eivind Røssaak, Matt Saunders, Maureen Turim, and finally Henning Weidemann at Campagne Première Berlin, whose infectious enthusiasm for ideas and art provoked and sustained my thinking during the long gestation period for this book. I also want to express my deepest gratitude to the graduate students in two of my seminars at the University of Chicago—Cinema and Experience and Deleuze and the Image—whose infectious conversation recharged and renewed my thinking about Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, and other writers central to this book’s arguments. Throughout the review and publication process, I have been expertly guided with both humor and rigor by Susan Bielstein, executive editor at University of Chicago Press. I also want to thank my anonymous readers for University of Chicago Press for their helpful and detailed suggestions, and for their openness to and appreciation for the very personal voice of this book.

My final and deepest thanks are reserved for the artists who both inspired this book and generously supported my research by sharing their work, especially Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs, Harun Farocki, and Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller. The greatest debt is owed to my long friendship with Victor Burgin, whose theoretical and creative practices have continually produced new critical and creative models for what philosophy wants from images, and vice versa.

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