An Elegy for Theory*

D. N. RODOWICK
loge. n. m. (1580: lat. elogium, pris au sens gr. eulogia). 1. Discours pour clbrer qqn. ou qqch. loge funbre, acadmique. loge dun saint. Le Petit Robert He sent thither his Thery, or solemn legation for sacrice, decked in the richest garments. George Grote, A History of Greece (1862) From the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the institutionalization of cinema studies in universities in North America and Europe became identied with a certain idea of theory. This was less a theory in the abstract or natural scientic sense than an interdisciplinary commitment to concepts and methods derived from literary semiology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism, echoed in the broader inuence of structuralism and post-structuralism on the humanities. However, the evolution of cinema studies since the early 1980s has been marked both by a decentering of lm with respect to media and visual studies and by a retreat from theory. No doubt this retreat had a number of salutary effects: a reinvigoration of historical research, more sociologically rigorous reconceptualizations of spectatorship and the lm audience, and the placement of lm in the broader context of visual culture and electronic media. But not all of these innovations were equally welcome. In 1996, the Post-Theory debate was launched by
* This essay was originally prepared as a keynote lecture for the Framework conference on The Future of Theory, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, November 34, 2006. I would like to thank Brian Price for his invitation and perceptive comments. I would also like to thank the participants at the Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on Contesting Theory, co-organized by Stanley Cavell, Tom Conley, and myself at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, May 45, 2007including Richard Allen, Sally Banes, Dominique Bluher, Edward Branigan, Nol Carroll, Francesco Casetti, Joan Copjec, Meraj Dhir, Allyson Field, Philip Rosen, Vivian Sobchack, Malcolm Turvey, and Thomas Wartenberg for their challenging discussions of these and other matters.

OCTOBER 122, Fall 2007, pp. 91109. 2007 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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David Bordwell and Nol Carroll, who argued for the rejection of 1970s Grand Theory as incoherent. Equally suspicious of cultural and media studies, Bordwell and Carroll insisted on anchoring the discipline in lm as an empirical object subject to investigations grounded in natural scientic methods. Almost simultaneously, other philosophical challenges to theory came from lm scholars inuenced by analytic philosophy and the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. These debates emerged against the vexed backgrounds both of the culture wars of the 1990s and the rise of identity politics and cultural studies. Confusing theory with Theory, often lost in these debates is the acknowledgment that judgments advancedin history, criticism, or philosophyin the absence of qualitative assessments of our epistemological commitments are illadvised. To want to relinquish theory is more than a debate over epistemological standards; it is a retreat from reection on the ethical stances behind our styles of knowing. In this respect, I want to argue not for a return to the 1970s concept of theory, but rather for a vigorous debate on what should constitute a philosophy of the humanities critically and reexively attentive in equal measure to its epistemological and ethical commitments. A brief look at the history of theory is no doubt useful for this project. Retrospectively, it is curious that early in the twentieth century lm would become associated with theory, rather than with aesthetics or the philosophy of art. Already in 1924, Bla Balzs argues in Der sichtbare Mensch for a lm theory as the compass of artistic development guided by the construction of concepts.1 The evocation of theory here is already representative of a nineteenth-century tendency in German philosophies of art to portray aesthetics as a Wissenschaft, comparable in method and epistemology to the natural sciences. From this moment forward, one would rarely speak of lm aesthetics or a philosophy of lm, but rather, always, of lm theory. Theory, however, has in the course of centuries been a highly variable concept. One nds the noble origins of theory in the Greek sense of theoria as viewing, speculation, or the contemplative life. For Plato it is the highest form of human activity; in Aristotle, the chief activity of the Prime Mover. For the Greeks, theory was not only an activity, but also an ethos that associated love of wisdom with a style of life or mode of existence.2

1. Bla Balzs, Der sichtbare Mensch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). The original citation is: Die Theorie ist, wenn auch nicht das Steuerruder, doch zumindest der Kompass einer Kunstentwicklung. Und erst wenn ihr euch einen Begriff von der guten Richtung gemacht habt, drft ihr von Verirrungen reden. Diesen Begriff: die Theorie des Films, msst ihr euch eben machen (p. 12). Balzs does, however, associate this theory with a lm philosophy of art (p. 1). 2. On the question of ethics as the will for a new mode of existence, see Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosopy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). An inuence on Michel Foucaults later works on the care of the self, Hadot argues that the desire for a philosophical life is driven rst by an ethical commitment or a series of existential choices involving the selection of a style of life where philosophical discourse is inseparable from a vision of the world and the desire to belong to a community.

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Bringing together thea [sight] and theoros [spectator], theory has often been linked to vision and spectacle. (Perhaps this is what Hegel meant in the Aesthetics when he names sight as the most theoretical of the senses.) In Keywords, Raymond Williams identies four primary senses of the term emerging by the seventeenth century: spectacle, a contemplated sight, a scheme of ideas, and an explanatory scheme. With its etymological link to theater, no doubt it was inevitable that the young medium of lm should call for theory. However, although the persistence of associating thought about lm with theory might be attributed to the derivations of the term from spectating and spectacle, a contemporary commonsensical notion follows from the last two meanings. Theories seek to explain, usually by proposing concepts, but in this they are often distinguished from doing or practice. In this manner, Williams synthesizes a scheme of ideas which explains practice. 3 This is certainly the way in which someone like Balzs or Sergei Eisenstein invoked the notion of theory. In The Virtual Life of Film, I argue that one powerful consequence of the rapid emergence of electronic and digital media is that we can no longer take for granted what lm isits ontological anchors have come ungroundedand thus we are compelled to revisit continually the question, What is cinema? This ungroundedness is echoed in the conceptual history of contemporary lm studies by what I call the metacritical attitude recapitulated in cinema studies current interest both in excavating its own history and in reexively examining what lm theory is or has been. The reexive attitude toward Theory began, perhaps, with my own Crisis of Political Modernism and throughout the 1980s and 90s manifested itself in a variety of conflicting approaches: Carrolls Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory and Mystifying Movies, Bordwells Making Meaning, Judith Maynes Cinema and Spectatorship, Richard Allens Projecting Illusions , Bordwell and Carrolls Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Allen and Murray Smiths Film Theory and Philosophy, Francesco Casettis Theories of Cinema, 19451995, Allen and Malcolm Turveys Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, and so on.4 In detaching theory as an object available for historical and theoretical examination, these books take three different approaches. Natural scientic models inspire one approach, both philosophical and analytic, which posit that the
3. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 267. 4. See D. N. Rodowick, Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (1988; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Nol Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Nol Carroll, Mystifying Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); David Bordwell, Making Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993); Richard Allen, Projecting Illusions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Bordwell and Nol Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Richard Allen and Murray Smith, eds. Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema, 19451995 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999); and Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, eds., Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2001).

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epistemological value of a well-constructed theory derives from a precise conceptual framework dened in a limited range of postulates. This approach assumes there is an ideal model from which all theories derive their epistemological value. Alternatively, Casettis approach is both historical and sociological. Agnostic with respect to debates on epistemological value, it groups together statements made by self-described practitioners of theory, describing both the internal features of those statements and their external contexts. In The Crisis of Political Modernism, my own approach, inspired by Michel Foucaults Archaeology of Knowledge, assumes that the conditioning of knowledge itself is historically variable. Discourse produces knowledge. Every theory is subtended by enunciative modalities that regulate the order and dispersion of statements by engendering or making visible groups of objects, inventing concepts, dening positions of address, and organizing rhetorical strategies. This approach analyzes how knowledge is produced in delimited and variable discursive contexts. As a rst move, it might indeed seem strange to associate theory with history. Introducing a series of lectures at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of Vienna in 1998, I astonished a group of students by asserting that lm theory has a history, indeed multiple histories. Here the analytic approach to theory, on one hand, and sociological and archaeological approaches on the other, part ways. The fact of having a history already distinguishes lm theory, and indeed all aesthetic theory, from natural scientic inquiry, for natural and cultural phenomena do not have the same temporality. Aesthetic inquiry must be sensitive to the variability and volatility of human culture and innovation; their epistemologies derive from (uneven) consensus and self-examination of what we already know and do in the execution of daily life. Examination of the natural world may presume a teleology where new data are accumulated and new hypotheses rened in modeling processes for which, unlike human culture, we have no prior knowledge. * I believe we need a more precise conceptual picture of how lm became associated with theory in the early twentieth century, and how ideas of theory vary in different historical periods and national contexts. But let us return to the more recent, metacritical attitude toward theory. By the mid-1990s, lm theory and indeed the concept of theory itself were challenged from a number of perspectives. This contestation occurs in three overlapping phases. The rst phase is marked by Bordwells call throughout the 1980s for a historical poetics of lm and culminates in the debates engendered by the publication of Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema and by the special issue of iris on Cinema and Cognitive Psychology, both published in 1989. The capstone of the second phase is the 1996 publication of Post-Theory. Subtitled Reconstructing Film Studies, the book represents an attempt to establish lm studies as a discipline modeled on cognitivist science and historical

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poetics, and to recenter theory according to the epistemological ideals of natural scientic reasoning. If the second phase may be characterized by the attempt to return theory to a model of scientic investigation and explanation, the third phase subjects the association of theory with science to philosophical critique. As found in the recent work of Allen and Turvey, and deeply inuenced by Wittgensteins critique of theory in the Philosophical Investigations, this perspective calls for a new orientation in the examination of culture and the arts through a philosophy of the humanities. In this manner, throughout the 1980s and 90s there is a triple displacement of theoryby history, science, and nally, philosophy. It is important to appreciate Bordwells contribution to what I have characterized as the metacritical or metatheoretical attitude in cinema studies. Among his generation, Bordwell was among the rst to exhibit fascination with the history of lm study itself, and to focus attention on problems of methodology with respect to questions of historical research and the critical analysis of lm form and style. Throughout the 1980s, Bordwell produced a number of path-breaking methodological essays promoting a historical poetics of cinema. From Narration and the Fiction Film (1985) to Making Meaning, the broad outlines of his approach are made apparent. Bordwell cannot be accused of a retreat from theoryno ones commitment to good theory building is greater or more admirable.5 Instead, he wants to recast theory as history, or rather, to ground theory in the context of empirical historical research. In this way, Bordwell responds to what he perceives as the twin threats of cultural and media studies. On the one hand, there is a risk of methodological incoherence for a eld whose interdisciplinary commitments had become too broad; on the other, the risk of diffusing, in the context of media studies, cinema studies fundamental groundlm as a formal object delimiting speciable effects. The aim of historical poetics, then, is to project a vision of methodological coherence onto a eld of study perceived to be losing its center, and to restore an idea of lm as a speciable form to that center. In this respect, poetics concerns questions of form and style. It deals with concrete problems of aesthetic practice and describes the specicity of lms aesthetic function while recognizing the importance of social convention in what a culture may dene as a work of art. In Narration and the Fiction Film, the historical side of poetics addresses the proliferation of distinct modes of narration (classical Hollywood, Soviet or dialectical materialist, postwar European art cinema, etc.) as delimitable in time and sensitive to national and/or cultural contexts. Here Bordwell makes his best case for basing the analysis of individual works upon sound historical investigation and explicit theoretical principles in a way that avoids arbitrary boundaries between history, analysis, and theory.

5. See especially Bordwells introduct ion to Cinema and Cognit ive Psychology , A Case for Cognitivism, iris 5, no. 2 (1989), pp. 1140. Here I am especially interested in Bordwells characterization of theory as good naturalization.

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By 1989, however, Bordwells attack on interpretation and his promotion of cognitivism as a model of middle-level research recast theory with respect to three particular propositions. First, his appeal to middle-level research calls for pulling back from broader concerns of ideology and culture to refocus attention on lms intrinsic structure and functions. Second, he promotes a comparable turn from psychoanalytic theories of the subject to the study of lmic comprehension as grounded in empirically delimitable mental and perceptual structures. Finally, his renewed emphasis on history also signals a withdrawal from high-level conceptual concerns to refocus research on the fundamental data of lms themselves and the primary documentation generated from their production contexts. Thus, Bordwell accuses interpretation of reaching too high in grasping for abstract concepts to map semantically onto its object. Here the lm-object itself disappears in its particularity, becoming little more than the example of a concept. Moreover, the interpreters are reexively insensitive to the cognitive operations they execute. They produce no new knowledge, but rather only repetitively invoke the same heuristics to model different lms. The somet imes unruly responses to Making Meaning and Cinema and Cognitive Psychology demonstrate that Bordwells criticisms touched a nerve, and there is little doubt that these works are a genuine and important response to the impasse in theory that cinema studies began to confront by the end of the 1980s. In the critique of so-called Grand Theory, what is most interesting here is the implicit alliance between historical poetics and analytical philosophy. In the two introductions to Post-Theory, Bordwell and Carroll promote strong views of what comprises good theory building in stark contrast to the then current state of contemporary lm and cultural theory. Here I am less concerned with assessing their critique of contemporary lm theory than in evaluating the epistemological ideals embodied in their common appeal to natural scientic models.6 Looking at the reverse side of Bordwell and Carrolls criticisms, I think it is important to examine their ideal projection of good theory as the ethical appeal for a new mode of

6. Ironically, one consequence of this appeal, strongly implicit in Carrolls contribution, is that lm theory does not yet exist. Carroll, for example, criticizes both classical and contemporary lm theory according to three basic arguments: they are essentialist or foundationalist, taking lms as examples of a priori conditions; they are doctrine driven rather than data driven, meaning not susceptible to empirical examination and verication; and nally, they deviate to widely from lm -based problems, that is, the concrete particularity of lmic problems disappears when they are taken up to illustrate broader concepts of ideology, subjectivity, or culture. Characterized by ordinary standards of truth as a regulative ideal, good theory seeks causal reasoning, deduces generalities by tracking regularities and the norm, is dialectical and requires maximally free and open debate, and, nally, is characterized by fallibilism. In this sense, good theory is historical in the sense of being open to revision through the successive elimination of error. In this respect, middle-level research presents the provisional ground for a theory or theories of lm projected forward in a teleology of debate, falsication, and revision. The post in Post-Theory is a curious misnomer, then. For what has been characterized as Theory is epistemologically invalid, and, ironically, what comes after may only appear after a period of long debate and revisionism. A legitimate lm theory remains to be constructed, the product of an indenite future.

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existence where, in their view, politics or ideology has not supplanted reason. Here dialectics, as Carroll presents it, become the basis of an ideal research community of rational agents working on common problems and data sets with results that are falsiable according to ordinary standards of truth and error.7 But these ideals, I would argue, rest on no rmer philosophical grounds than the ideological theories they critique. For example, while Grand Theory is criticized for its obsession with an irrational and unconscious subject that cannot account for its actions, Bordwell promotes a rational agent theory of mental functioning, which is in fact the subject of good theory recognizing itself in the object it wants to examine.8 The concept of the rational agent functions tautologically here as a projection where the ideal scientic subject seeks the contours of its own image in the model of mind it wishes to construct or to discover. In a perspective that strives to be free of ideological positioning and to assert an epistemology that is value-neutral, the introductions to Post-Theory nonetheless express the longing for a different world modeled on an idealized vision of scientic research: a community of researchers united by common epistemological standards who are striving for a universalizable and truthful picture of their object. Richard Allen and Murray Smiths critique of contemporary lm theory in Film Theory and Philosophy echoes Bordwell and Carrolls perspective. Accusing Theory of an epistemological atheism powered by an exaggerated ethical concern with the critique of a capitalist modernity, Allen and Smiths criticisms make clear a number of philosophical assumptions absent from the Post-Theory critique. From the analytic point of view, arguments for and against theory take place against the background of a philosophy of science. One engages in theory building or not according to an epistemological ideal based on natural scientic models. In employing the methods and forms of scientic explanation, however, philosophy becomes indistinguishable from science, at least with respect to theory construction. Philosophy disappears into science as theory becomes indistinguishable from scientic methodology. In this manner, I want to argue that from the beginning of the twentieth century analytic philosophy has been responsible for projecting an epistemological ideal of theory derived from natural scientic methods. This ideal produced a disjunction between philosophys ancient concern for balancing epistemological inquiry with ethical evaluation.9 Here, theory, at least as it is generally conceived
7. In a so-far-unpublished essay, Film Theory and the Philosophy of Science, Meraj Dhir has presented an excellent defense of Carrolls position. 8. For related arguments, see Richard Allens essay, Cognitive Film Theory, in Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, pp. 174209. 9. Bertrand Russells 1914 essay On Scientic Method in Philosophy presents a succinct denition of this ideal: A scientic philosophy such as I wish to recommend will be piecemeal and tentative like other sciences; above all, it will be able to invent hypotheses which, even if they are not wholly true, will yet remain fruitful after the necessary corrections have been made. This possibility of successive approximations of the truth is, more than anything else, the source of the triumphs of science, and to transfer this possibility to philosophy is to ensure a progress in method whose importance it would be

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in the humanties, disappears in two ways. Not only is the activity of theory given over to science, but philosophy itself begins to lose its autonomy and self-identity it would seem to have no epistemological function save in the light reected from scientific ideals. Analytic philosophy attacks theory on more than one front. There is the implicit tendency to delegitimate extant lm theory to the extent that it draws on concepts and methodologies inuential in the humanities that fall outside of the reigning norm of what W. V. Quine would call a naturalized philosophy. Consequently, because so little aesthetic thought on film conforms to scientic models, Carroll concludes that, for the most part, a theory of lm does not yet exist, though it might at some future date. The conict over theory in lm studies thus reproduces in microcosm a more consequential debate, one that concerns both the role of epistemology and epistemological critique in the humanities and the place of philosophy with respect to science. Analytic philosophy wants to redeem theory for lm by placing it in the context of a philosophy of science. At the same time, this implies that the epistemologies that were characteristic of the humanities for a number of decades are neither philosophically nor scientically legitimate. And so the contestation of theory becomes a de facto epistemological dismissal of the humanities. Throughout the 1990s, then, in cinema studies philosophy allies itself with science as a challenge to theory. In this phase of the debate, theory is the contested term. Very quickly, however, science becomes the contested term, as a philosophy of the humanities gives over theory to science and opposes itself to both. Important keys to this transition are the late works of Wittgenstein, especially his Philosophical Investigations, as well as G. H. von Wrights calls for a philosophy of the humanities in works like The Tree of Knowledge, and Other Essays (1993). The interest of the later Wittgenstein for my project, and for the humanities in general, concerns his attack on the identication of philosophy with science. In asserting that Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences (Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus 4.111), he presents a formidable challenge to Bertrand Russells conception of philosophy as allied with epistemological models drawn from the natural sciences. In contrast to Russell, Wittgenstein argues that science should not be the only model of explanation and knowledge, and so he insists on the specicity of philosophy as a practice. It is important to examine carefully Wittgensteins attack on theory as an inappropriate form of explanation for the arts and humanities. However, my central concern here will be to explore arguments favoring a philosophy of the humanities as distinguishable from both science and theory.

almost impossible to exaggerate. In Mysticism and Logic: and Other Essays (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918), p. 113 (my emphases). This is an admirably succinct summary of the epistemology to which Carroll subscribes. Theories are built piecemeal out of preliminary and falsiable hypotheses, and one must establish the factual character of the parts before the whole can be understood. The theory then advances teleologically as successively closer approximations to the truth as hypotheses are further tested, rened, or rejected in light of new evidence.

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If philosophy involves another mode of explaining and knowing, why does the alternative not amount to a theory? As Allen and Turvey summarize in their introduction to Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, philosophy differs from science in that its subject matter is not empirical in natureonly nature is subject to investigation by empirical methods. Empirical has a precise denition here as that of which we can have no prior knowledge. Alternatively, philosophy is concerned with problems of sense and meaning, and these problems are not empirical in the sense that language use and creative expression are already part of a commonly accessible stock of human knowledge. This involves a second criterion: statements about empirical phenomenon are, and must be, necessarily falsiable. Philosophical investigation, however, only concerns testing the limits of sense and meaning of given propositions. In this way, Wittgensteins case for philosophy as the best alternative to theory for studying human behavior and creativity is based on what he calls the autonomy of linguistic meaning. This concept is exemplied in the distinction between reasons and causes. In a causal explanation, each effect is presumed to have a cause identied by a hypothesis, which may and must be rejected or revised in light of further evidence. Causal explanations are legitimate in scientic contexts because actions have origins that derive from states of affairs of which we have no prior knowledge. Most human action and behavior, however, is ill served by causal explanation, for agents have the capacity to justify their behaviors with reasons. Autonomy now indicates that agents have the capacity for authoritative selfexamination and self-justication. Therefore, a key difference between scientic and philosophical inquiry is that science tests its hypotheses against external phenomena, that is, the natural world. But philosophy admits only to internal or self-investigation. This is less a question of truth and error than judgments concerning the rightness of a proposition tested against prior experience and knowledge. This is one way to begin to unravel the conceptual confusions surrounding the idea of theory in cinema studies; for example, why Bordwell and Carroll have been so wedded to a certain idea of science, but also why theory, even from a cultural or psychoanalytic perspective, remains so compelling for a great many fairly intelligent people. As Turvey puts the question, Why is there a lack of basic empirical research in lm theory if the nature and functions of cinema are like the laws governing natural phenomena? Why does such research, somehow, seem unnecessary to lm theorists? And how is it that lm theories ever convince anyone that they are plausible in the absence of such sustained research?10 Because these criteria are irrelevant for cultural investigation. Film theories, like all

10. Malcolm Turvey, Can Science Help Film Theory?, Journal of Moving Image Studies 1, no. 1 (2001), http://www.uca.edu/org/ccsmi/journal/issue1_table_contents.htm. The passage reads differently in the latest published version of the essay. See Turvey, Can Scientic Models of Theorizing Help Film Theory?, in The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Texts and Readings , ed. Angela Curren and Thomas E. Wartenberg (London: Blackwell, 2005), p. 25.

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humanistic investigation, concern human activities and thus presume a high degree of prior, even self-, knowledge and examination. Like any cultural activity, cinema is a human creation and thus is embedded in practices and institutions that form the basis of our quotidian existence. We may not have conscious knowledge of these practices and institutions, nor any desire to construct theories about them in the form of propositions or concepts, yet we act on and through them in coherent and consistent ways. This is why cultural theories are able to solicit agreement in the absence of empirical research and experimentation. Their power and plausibility is based on the extent to which they seem to clarify for us what we already know and do on a daily basis. Here we need no external examination beyond the critical investigation of our own practices as they evolve historically. However, what lm studies has called theory, in its multiple and variegate guises, might more appropriately be called aesthetics or philosophy. And indeed, perhaps we could achieve much methodological and conceptual clarication by setting aside theory provisionally in order to examine what a philosophy of the humanities, and, indeed, what a lm philosophy might look like. * I would prefer to title this essay loge de la thorie, for in composing an elegy for theory I have kept in mind the subtle variations present in French. Combining the English sense of both eulogy and elegy, and something more besides, an loge can be both praise song and funereal chant, panegyric and chanson dadieu. (In addition, it conveys the second meaning of a legal judgment expressed in someones favor.) Certainly I think the enterprise of theory is still a worthy one. Yet why, in contemporary critical discourse, are there so few left to praise and none to love it? We must rst examine the debate on theory from the point of view of competing epistemological stakes. Accused of epistemological atheism, theory as a concept has been wrested from the Continent to be returned semantically to the shores of science and the terrain of British and American analytical philosophy. Initially, this debate was posed as a conict between theory and philosophy. But the late Wittgenstein took this argument in another direction, one that also questioned theory but as a way of turning philosophy from science to restore it to the humanities. In so doing, Wittgenstein was less concerned with the epistemological perfectibility of philosophical language than with reclaiming philosophys ancient task of theoria. If the politics and epistemology of theory have been subject to much soul searching and epistemological critique, it is important nonetheless to nd and retain in theory the distant echo of its connection to philosophy, or to theoria, as restoring an ethical dimension to epistemological self-examination. As Wittgenstein tried to teach us, what we need after theory is not science, but a renewed dialogue between philosophy and the humanities wherein both refashion themselves in original ways.

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Ultimately, I want to argue that Wittgensteins attack on theory is both too broad and too restrictive, but here it is more important to foreground what the later Wittgenstein brings to a philosophy of the humanities. In liberating humanistic inquiry from the bonds of empirical and causal explanation, a philosophy of humanities may make propositional claims, but these claims need not be fallible they only require suasion and clear, authoritative self-justication. This is because humanistic theories are culture-centered. Unlike the investigation of natural phenomena, philosophical investigations examine what human beings already know and do, and this knowledge is in principle public and accessible to all. In Bordwells sense of the term, naturalization, whether good or bad, has little relevance here as humanistic (self-) inquiry does not require nding new information, but rather only clarifying and evaluating what we already know and do, or know how to do, and understanding why it is of value to us. In its descriptive emphasis, Wittgensteins philosophical investigations do support strongly one important aspect of historical poeticsthe analysis of the internal norms of cultural objects and of our everyday sense-making activities in relation to those objects. Nonetheless, a nonempirical notion of history is wanted here, and for specic philosophical reasons. Natural laws are time-independent, at least in a human context, and thus are appropriately explored through falsiable causal explanations. Alternatively, cultural knowledge is historical in a particular sense. It emerges and evolves in the context of multiple, diverse, and conicting social interactions that require constant reevaluation on a human time scale. Human history and natural history may not be investigated by the same means, even if, with respect to certain problems, their domains may overlap. Unlike the scientist, the humanist must examine phenomena that may be shifting before her very eyes. She must account for change in the course of its becoming, while she herself might be in a process of self-transformation. To what extent, then, is the enterprise of theory still possible? And how might we return to philosophy the specicity of its activity? The two questions are different yet related, and both are linked to the fate of humanities in the twentyfirst century and the place of film in the future of the humanities. Possible answers begin in recognizing that epistemological atheism does not follow from an ethical critique of modernity. And indeed what links philosophy today to its most ancient origins are the intertwining projects of evaluating our styles of knowing with the examination of our modes of existence and their possibilities of transformation. I want to conclude by briey exploring these questions in discussing two contemporary philosophers as exemplars of the twinned projects of ethical and epistemological evaluation: Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell. Deleuze and Cavell are the two contemporary philosophers with the strongest commitment to cinema, yet with distinctly original conceptions of the specificity of philosophy and of philosophical expression in relation to film. Though an unlikely pairing, reading these two philosophers together can deepen and clarify their original contributions to our understanding of lm and of contemporary

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philosophy. Here I want to make the case that a (lm) philosophy may and should be distinguished from theory. At the same time, I want to distinguish for the humanities a uid metacritical space of epistemological and ethical self-examination that we may continue to call theory should we wish to do so. Deleuzes cinema books present two pairs of elements that show what a lm philosophy might look like. These elements recur throughout Deleuzes philosophical work. On one hand, there is the relation of Concept to Image. Here the creation of Concepts denes the autonomy of philosophical activity, while the Image becomes the key to understanding subjectivity and our relation to the world. The second set involves Deleuzes original reconsideration of Nietzsches presentation of ethical activity as philosophical interpretation and evaluation. Deleuze ends Cinema 2: The Time-Image with a curious plaint for theory. Already in 1985, he argues, theory had lost its pride of place in thought about cinema, seeming abstract and unrelated to practical creation. But theory is not separate from the practice of cinema, for it is itself a practice or a constructivism of concepts. For theory too is something which is made, no less than its object. . . . A theory of cinema is not about cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and what are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices. . . . The theory of cinema does not bear on the cinema, but on the concepts of cinema, which are no less practical, effective or existent than cinema itself. . . . Cinemas concepts are not given in cinema. And yet they are cinemas concepts, not theories about cinema. So that there is always a time, midday-midnight, when we must no longer ask ourselves, What is cinema? but What is philosophy? Cinema itself is a new practice of images and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as a conceptual practice.11 A slippage is obvious here with theory standing in for philosophy. But that being said, what does Deleuze wish to imply in complaining that the contemporary moment is weak with respect to creation and concepts? The most replete response comes from the most obvious successor to the problems raised in the cinema booksDeleuze and Flix Guattaris What Is Philosophy? For Deleuze and Guattari, the three great domains of human creation are art, philosophy, and science. These are relatively autonomous domains, each of which involves acts of creation based on different modes of expressionperceptual, conceptual, or functional. The problem confronted in What Is Philosophy? is knowing how philosophical expression differs from artistic or scientic expression, yet remains in dialogue with them. Percepts, concepts, and functions are different expressive modalities, and each may inuence the other, but not in a way
11. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galet a (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 280.

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that affects the autonomy of their productive activity. An artist or scientist no doubt profoundly engages in conceptual activity, and so is inuenced by philosophy. Yet the outputs of that activitypercepts, functionsretain their autonomy and specicity. From one perspective, the distinctiveness of these outputs is easy to explain. The aim of science is to create functions, of art to create sensuous aggregates, and of philosophy to create concepts, but the devil is in the details. In art, percepts refer to the creation of affective experience through constructions of sensuous materials. In painting, these expressive materials may be blocks of lines/colors; in cinema, blocks of movements/durations/sounds. Alternatively, the role of functions helps clarify the relation of philosophy to theory in the scientic sense. There is a function, Deleuze explains, as soon as two wholes are put into a xed correspondence. Newtons inverse square law provides an apposite example. A function is a mathematical expression orienting thought (rst whole) to a natural phenomenon (the propagation of energy). As expression, the function is not the specic phenomenon, of course, nor is it analogous to thinking. The function is a descriptor or algorithm. Its descriptiveness of behaviors in the natural world is important, but this is not the key to its specicity. It is abstract and general, and its generality derives from its time-independence. It produces descriptions, and these descriptions are valid for all times and all placesthus, the proposal of a second whole. In its predictiveness of future behaviors, then, the function is exemplary of what science calls theory, and when this predictiveness becomes regular, functions become laws. Contrariwise, the concept is abstract yet singularit relates to thought in its own temporality and human specicity. For these reasons, philosophy is much closer to art than it is to science. The expressiveness of art nds its instantiation in the sensuous products of art and its human affects, and the expressiveness of science nds its conrmation in the predicted behaviors of natural phenomena. But concepts express only thought and acts of thinking. Does this mean that thinking is purely an interior activity cut off from the sensuous and material world? Art provides important answers to this question in relating concepts to ideas, signs, and images. In 1991, Deleuze gave an important lecture at FEMIS [cole nationale suprieure des mtiers de limage et du son], the French national lm and television school, an excerpt of which was published as Having an Idea in Cinema. What does it mean to have an Idea in art and how do Ideas differ from Concepts? Ideas are specic to a domain, a milieu, or a material. And so Deleuze writes, Ideas must be treated as potentials that are already engaged in this or that mode of expression and inseparable from it, so much so that I cannot say I have an idea in general. According to the techniques that I know, I can have an idea in a given domain, an idea in cinema or rather an idea in philosophy.12 Now, ideas in philosophy are already

12. Gilles Deleuze, Having an Idea in Cinema, trans. Eleanor Kaufman, in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Polit ics, Philosophy, and Culture , ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 14.

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oriented by a certain kind of image, what Deleuze calls the image of thought, and so a connection or relation must link them. In What Is Philosophy? the image of thought is dened as the specic terrain or plane of immanence from which ideas emerge as preconceptual expression, or as the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to orient ones self in thought.13 To have an idea, then, is to express thought through particular constructions, combinations, or linkages what Deleuze calls signs. As Spinoza insisted, signs are not an expression of thought, but rather of our powers of thinking. Ideas are not separable from an autonomous sequence or sequencing of ideas in thought, what Spinoza calls concatenatio . This concatenation of signs unites form and material, constituting thought as a spiritual automaton whose potentia expresses our powers of thinking, action, or creation. The importance of Deleuzes cinema books is that they present his most complete account of a philosophical semiotic modeled on movement and time and show how images and signs in movement or time are conceptually innovative; that is, how they renew our powers of thinking. In this manner, art relates to philosophy in that images and signs involve preconceptual expression in the same way that the image of thought involves a protoconceptual expressionthey prepare the terrain for new concepts to emerge. The cinema may be best able to picture thought and to call for thinking because like thought its ideas are comprised of movements, both spatial and temporal, characterized by connections and conjunctions of particular kinds. Every instance of art is expressive of an idea which implies a concept, and what philosophy does with respect to art is to produce new constructions or assemblages that express or give form to the concepts implied in arts ideas. It renders perspicuous and in conceptual form the automatisms that make a necessity of arts generative ideas. There is also an ethical dimension to the various ways Deleuze characterizes image and concept in relation to the image of thought. For Deleuze, this implies a Nietzschean ethics encompassing two inseparable activities: interpretation and evaluation. To interpret, Deleuze writes, is to determine the force which gives sense to a thing. To evaluate is to determine the will to power which gives value to a thing.14 What bridges Deleuze and Cavell here are not only their interest in Nietzsche, but also their original concept of ontology. Though Cavell uses the word and Deleuze does not, both are evaluating a particular way of Being. This is not the being or identity of lm or what identies lm as art, but rather the ways of being that art provokes in usor more deeply, how lm and other forms of art express for us or return to us our past, current, and future states of being. In both philosophers, the ethical relation is inseparable from our relation to thought. For

13. Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy? , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 37. 14. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 54.

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how we think, and whether we sustain a relation to thought or not, is bound up with our modes of existence and our relations with others and to the world. The key to grasping this relation in Deleuze is to understand the originality of his characterization of the image as both an ontological and ethical concept. Especially in the cinema books, the image is not the product of cinematic creation but rather its raw material, the worldly substance that it forms and to which it gives expression. Hence the key place of Henri Bergsons assertion from Matter and Memory that there is already photography in things. Like energy, images can neither be created nor destroyedthey are a state of the universe, an asubjective universal perception or luminosity that evolves and varies continuously. Human perception is therefore largely a process of subtraction. Because we must orient ourselves in this vast regime of universal change according to our limited perceptual context, we extract and form special images or perceptions according to our physiological limits and human needs. This image is the very form of our subjectivity and persists in the crossroads between our internal states and our external relations with the world. The image is thus in relation with ourselves (interiority) and in relation with the world (exteriority) in an intimately interactive way. It is absurd to refer to subjectivity as pure interiority as it is ceaselessly engaged with matter and with the world. By the same token, thought is not interiority but our way of engaging with the world, orienting ourselves there and creating from the materials it offers us. Thus, another way of considering the autonomy of art, philosophy, and science is to evaluate the different though related images of thought they offer us. The percept is visually and acoustically sensuous, provoking affects or emotions in us. Concepts and functions are more abstract. What the function is to scientific expression, the sign is to aesthetic expression. Arts relation to thought, then, lies not in the substance of images, but in the logic of their combination and enchainment. No doubt every artistic image is an image of thought, a physical tracing and expression of thought given sensual form, no matter how incoherent or inelegant. However, while the aesthetic sign may imply a precise concept, it is nonetheless entirely affective and preconceptual. Yet there is a philosophical power in images. The artists iIdea is not necessarily the philosophers. But images not only trace thoughts and produce affects; they may also provoke thinking or create new powers of thinking. In so doing, we are thrown from sensuous to abstract thought, from an image of thought to a thought without imagethis is the domain of philosophy. And in moving from one to the other, art may inspire philosophy to give form to a concept. What does philosophy value in art? To ask this question is to demand what forces expressed in art, in images and signs, call for thinking? Philosophy parts ways with science to the extent that time is taken as an independent variablein fact, the simplest way of describing Deleuzes (or Bergsons) philosophical project is as the will to reintroduce time and change to philosophys image of thought. Philosophy nds inspiration in art because there the will to create is brought to its

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highest powers. Here, as in many other ways, Deleuze goes against the grain of contemporary philosophy. While happily science has never renounced its powers of creation, it has become less and less conceptual. And of course, it does not need concepts as philosophy does. Contrariwise, philosophy has moved closer and closer to art, and vice versa. This is the great untold story of twentieth-century philosophy that the twenty-rst century must recount: that philosophys greatest innovations were not made with respect to science, but in dialogue with art. And further, that the modern arts came closer and closer to philosophical expression while nonetheless amplifying their aesthetic powers. That art may be considered philosophical expression is an important link between Deleuze and Cavells interest in lm. Like Deleuze, Cavells cinema books are not studies of lm but rather philosophical studiesthey are works of philosophy rst and foremost. Nonetheless, it may also be reasonable to read them as studies of lm culture in their deep awareness of how cinema has penetrated the daily life of the mind and of being in the twentieth century. Though in very different ways, both Deleuze and Cavell comprehend cinema as expressing ways of being in the world and of relating to the world. In this respect, cinema is already philosophy, and a philosophy intimately connected to our everyday life. Deleuze exemplies this idea in pairing Bergsons Matter and Memory with the early history of cinema. At the moment when philosophy returns to problems of movement and time in relation to thought and the image, the cinematic apparatus emerges neither as an effect of these problems nor in analogy with them. In its own way, it is the aesthetic expression of current and persistent philosophical problems. Nor should one say that Deleuzes thought is simply inuenced by cinema. Rather, it is the direct philosophical expression, in the form of concepts and typologies of signs, of problems presented preconceptually in aesthetic form. Cavell presents a similar perspective, though one more clearly framed by problems of ontology and ethics. In my view, Cavells work is exemplary of a philosophy of and for the humanities, particularly in his original attempt to balance the concerns of epistemology and ethics. In this respect, two principal ideas unite Cavells philosophical and lm work. Moreover, these are less separate ideas than iterations of the same problem that succeed one another more or less chronologically, namely, the philosophical confrontation with skepticism and the concept of moral perfectionism. The question here is why lm is so important as the companion or exemplication of this confrontation. One clue resides in the title of an important Cavell essay, What Photography Calls Thinking.15 What does it mean to say that art or images think, or that they respond to philosophical problems as a way of thinking or a style of thought? In the rst phase of Cavells lm philosophy, represented by the period surrounding the publication of The World Viewed, the responses to this question are ontological and epistemological. But this ontology
15. Stanley Cavell, What Photography Calls Thinking, in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), pp. 11534.

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refers neither to the medium of art nor the identity of art works, but rather to how art expresses our modes of existence or ways of being in the world as the fall into and return from skepticism. Here an ontology of lm is less concerned with identifying the medium of lm than with understanding how our current ways of being in the world and relating to it are cinematic. In its very conditions of presentation and perception, cinema expresses a particular philosophical problem, that of skepticism and its overcoming. If, as Cavell argues, cinema presents a moving image of skepticism, it neither exemplies nor is analogous to the skeptical attitude.16 Rather, cinema expresses both the problem and its possible overcomings. The quality of movement in this philosophical image is temporal or historical in a specic sense. In its very dispositif for viewing and encountering the world, cinema presents philosophys historical dilemma (skepticisms perceptual disjunction from the world) as past, while orienting the modern subject toward a possible future. That skepticism should reproduce itself in a technology for seeing might mean that it is no longer the ontological air we breathe, but a passing phase of our philosophical culture. If, as Cavell argues, the reality that lm holds before us is that of our own perceptual condition, then it opens the possibility of once again being present to self or acknowledging how we may again become present to ourselves. (Indeed Cavells examination of cinemas relation to the fate of skepticism helps clarify a Deleuzian cinematic ethics as faith in this world and its possibilities for change.17) For these reasons, lm may already be the emblem of skepticism in decline. Cinema takes up where philosophy leaves off, as the preconceptual expression of the passage to another way of being. This is why cinema is both a presentation of and withdrawal from skepticismthe almost perfect realization of the form of skeptical perception as a way, paradoxically, of reconnecting us to the world and asserting its existential force as past presence in time. The irony of this recognition now is that modernity may no longer characterize our modes of being or of looking, and we must then anticipate something else. In the major books that follow, culminating in Cities of Words, the temporality of this epistemological condition is reconsidered as a question of art and ethical evaluation. The key concept of ethical evaluation is what Cavell calls moral perfectionism. Moral perfectionism is the nonteleological expression of a desire for change or becoming. Here our cinematic culture responds not to a dilemma of perception and thought, but rather a moral imperative. This trajectory from ontological to ethical questions is exemplary of how Cavell uses cinema to deepen his description of the subjective condition of modernity as itself suspended between a worldly or epistemological domain and a moral domain. In both cases, cinema

16. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition (1971; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 188. 17. See my essay, A World, Time, in The Afterimage of Gilles Deleuzes Film Philosophy, ed. D. N. Rodowick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).

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confronts the problem of skepticism. In the rst instance, this is an epistemological disappointment, in that we are disconnected from the world by our own subjectivityall we can know of the world is from behind the screen of our consciousness. The second responds to a moral disappointment in the state of the world or with my current mode of existence. This division is not only formal; it is also, and perhaps primarily, temporal. As Kant posed the problem, the province of understanding, of knowledge of objects and their causal laws, denes the modern scientic attitude whose formidable power derives from making time an independent variable. What is unknown in the natural world could not become known through the powers of causal reasoning if the rules could change in the course of time. But the problem that so provoked Kant was that atemporal reason was in conict with moral freedom. To be human is to experience change. So how might philosophy characterize humanity as at once subject of understanding and of reason, as subject to causal relations and expressive of moral freedom? Given that as material creatures we are in bondage to the empirical world and its causal laws, philosophys task is to explain how we are also free to experience and to anticipate change in the projection of future existences. Therefore, in Cavells account moral perfectionism takes us from the form of skepticism to the possibilities of human change, and to the deeper moral problem of evaluating our contemporary mode of existence and transcending it in anticipation of a better, future existence. In the rst stage, the problem is to overcome my moral despair of ever knowing the world; in the second, my despair of changing it and myself. Thus, Cavells interest in Emerson (or in Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, or Freud) is to heal this rift in philosophy exemplied by Wittgensteins disappointment with knowledge as failing to make us better than we are or to give us peace. Alternatively, moral perfectionism begins with this sense of ethical disappointment and ontological restlessness, catching up the modern subject in a desire for self-transformation whose temporality is that of a becoming without nality. In Emerson and Thoreaus sense of human existence, Cavell writes, there is no question of reaching a nal state of the soul, but only and endlessly taking the next step to what Emerson calls an unattained but attainable selfa self that is always and never oursa step that turns us not from bad to good, or wrong to right, but from confusion and constriction toward self-knowledge and sociability.18 This idea forms the basis of Cavells later books on comedies of remarriage and melodramas of the unknown woman. The interest of lm here is to show it as the ordinary or quotidian expression of the deepest concerns of moral philosophy. And just as Wittgenstein sought to displace metaphysical expression into ordinary language and daily concerns, lm brings moral philosophy into the context of quotidian dramatic expression:
18. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 13.

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These films are rather to be thought of as differently configuring intellectual and emotional avenues that philosophy is already in exploration of, but which, perhaps, it has cause sometimes to turn from prematurely, particularly in its forms since its professionalization, or academization. . . . The implied claim is that lm, the latest of the great arts, shows philosophy to be the often invisible accompaniment of the ordinary lives that lm is so apt to capture.19 Where contemporary philosophy has reneged on its promise of moral perfectionism, film has responded, though in the preconceptual manner of all art and sensuous expression. Thus the great project of lm philosophy today is not only to help reinvigorate this moral reection, but to heal by example the rift in philosophys relation to everyday life. In the prologue to Cities of Words, Cavell reprises Thoreaus lament that There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. How well Thoreau foresaw the difcult life of philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-rst centuries. If one must compose an elegy for theory, let us hope it awakens a new life for philosophy in the current millennium.

19.

Ibid., p. 6.