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New Review of Film and Television Studies

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Doubting vision: film and the revelationist tradition

Christian Quendler
a a

Department of American Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria Published online: 21 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Christian Quendler (2012) Doubting vision: film and the revelationist tradition, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 10:2, 299-304, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2012.661308 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2012.661308

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New Review of Film and Television Studies Vol. 10, No. 2, June 2012, 299304

BOOK REVIEW
Doubting vision: lm and the revelationist tradition, by Malcolm Turvey, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, 20.00 (paperback), 65.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-532098

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lix Guattari declare that the core In What is Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze and Fe programme of philosophy is to create concepts that are always new (1994, 5). While this minimalist denition of philosophy retains the traditional objective that the tools of our understanding must be reliable and prevailing, it also points to the competitive forces in the economy of concepts: Concepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. There is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and would be nothing without the creators signature (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 5). It is an integral part of this philosophical language-game that concepts are being challenged not only by rival philosophers but also other disciplines and discourses. Twentieth-century philosophy has been confronted in a series of turns by epistemology, linguistics, psychoanalysis and logical analysis. Malcolm Turveys Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition follows the last turn. Doubting Vision is a philosophical book that challenges lm theory by exposing its logical and empirical errors (11) within a general framework of analytical philosophy. Turvey draws primarily on the insights of ordinary language philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for whom clarity was the core programme of philosophy. The conjunction of logic and empiricism made famous by the Vienna Circle in the 1920s is necessary because logic is not a science but a philosophical method that claries the sense of a proposition or validates the method of a theory. Logically speaking, we cannot say why or say that a proposition is true, we can only show its meaningfulness by establishing external relations to so-called empirical observations. The theoretical claims subjected to Turveys philosophical investigation maintain that lm art is endowed with an awesome, even miraculous power that, rather than extending the power of the human eye, escapes its limitations and thereby has the potential to bring about a fundamental change for the better in human existence (6). In classical lm theory, this view is shared by lmmakers la Bala zs and Siegfried and critics as diverse as Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov, Be Kracauer. For Turvey they institute a canon of what he calls the revelationist tradition. Although they often clothed their work in scientic garb and compared artistic knowledge to scientic discovery (129), their invocations of cinema go well beyond scientic uses of lm. As Turvey observes, to varying degrees in their writings, they express near-religious extremes of euphoria about its
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revelatory capacity (6). It is a great merit of Doubting Vision that it takes conspicuous and idiosyncratic concepts of lm theory seriously. Instead of discarding them as exuberant rhetoric brought about by the novelty of the medium, Turvey insists on the sincerity of the theorists words and probes their senses and meanings by subjecting them to the rigorous policing regimes of logical analysis and common-sense empiricism. l Carroll (1996), Turvey is deeply convinced that if we want to take Like Noe lm seriously as an art form, we must not confuse it with philosophical and scientic endeavours. His critique particularly targets lm theoretical approaches that following Stanely Cavell and Deleuze regard cinema as a mode of thinking or philosophizing (130). For Turvey this is a categorical mistake that illicitly confounds different types of knowledge productions. He considers this confusion symptomatic of a kind of theorizing that blurs the distinction between the mind and the brain and that projects the scope of intentionality from human agents onto technological instruments. Although Turvey qualies his book as mainly theoretical, his theoretical intervention evolves from an insightful historical reappraisal of cinematic modernism as seen through the writings of the revelationist tradition. This studys trajectory is straightforward and succinct. The rst chapter is dedicated to an zs and Kracauer exegesis of the revelatory virtue that Epstein, Vertov, Bala attributed to cinema. Subsequent chapters offer a critique of their theories, tracing their legacy in more recent approaches such as psychoanalytic lm theory, the lm philosophies of Cavell and Deleuze as well as the lm theory, which David Bordwell and Charlie Keil have dubbed the modernity thesis (89). The concluding chapter The Lure of Visual Skepticism proposes to revise central claims of this tradition in a logically consistent and an empirically plausible way. Even readers who are new to analytical philosophy may immediately get an zs nor Kracauer will stand the test of uneasy feeling that neither Epstein, Vertov, Bala logical analysis. In this sense, the rst historical chapter may only seem to delay a crushing verdict. Yet, this is, I believe, the books best chapter. Grouping these four together under the label of the revelationism is intriguing not simply for its connotations of dramatic disclosure but also because they form a canon that cuts across what orthodox lm histories often call realist and modernist traditions. Studying this revelationist tradition promises not only a richer understanding of modernism, but it also helps to bring out a pervasive feature of modernism that, as patrons of this tradition illustrate, informs both realist and anti-realist positions. These lmmakers and theoreticians approached cinema for different reasons with diverse objectives and favoured different kinds of lm aesthetics. However, as Turvey observes, they all shared a distinct form of visual scepticism: a deep distrust in human vision that is paired with the desire to transcend these limitations through cinema. Turvey shows that the spectrum of invisibility that this cinema of revelation claims to make manifest covers an impressively wide range. Epstein argued that cinema permits a glimpse into the inner life of things in their continuous mobility and their entanglement in the ux of time. For Vertov, the disembodied vision of the

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camera and the unforeseen possibilities of reorganizing these views through montage promised an escape from preconceived notions of reality and a means zs discovered the close-up as a to showing a social reality unmarred by ideology. Bala kind of micro-expressionist laboratory where we can see to the bottom of a soul by means of such tiny movements of facial muscles which even the most observant zs, cited in Turvey, 2008, 41). For Kracauer lm partner would never perceive (Bala illuminates such psycho-physical correlations in a macrostructural context in that it reawakens our senses to perceive those aspects of reality that have become invisible in modern routines of everyday life. Turvey places these claims in their historical contexts such as the contemporary philosophy of Henri Bergson or the romantic tradition that has variously employed art as meditations on time, divinations of the human soul or as defamiliarizations of everyday life. Turvey doesnt altogether reject these claims. In fact, the last chapter reformulates them to highlight the singularity or superiority of lm as an art form. Some readers may wonder if Turvey wishes to institute a new paragone of the arts. Others may feel cheated that the exegesis and critique of Kracauers theory as well as the discussion of its prevailing inuence conclude in what appears to be a rather literal-minded revision:
[T]here is a genuine insight buried in Kracauers argument: the cinema is an art with an unparalleled capacity to direct our attention to truths that are in plain sight but that we do not notice or pay attention to, such as familiar environments. The other visual arts, of course, also possess this ability. However, variable framing and the control over attention it allows means that lmmakers can force us to notice things we might otherwise overlook. (124)

The physical reality redeemed by cinema is not, as Kracauer states, invisible but passes merely as unnoticed just like the world outside the window of Turveys ofce, the author explains, does not become invisible when he focuses on writing his book. Turvey emphasizes more than once that this is not merely a quarrel over words. The objection that Kracauer uses the word invisible guratively misses the point as it raises the question: how must we interpret the conclusion of an argument that rests upon imsy metaphors? Film theory is replete with conceptual misuses of perceptual terms that mix senses and tenses across different logical categories, a fallacy that Ryle famously called the category mistake. It is impossible to see to the bottom of a soul zs) unless we understand seeing in a spiritual sense or give the concept (Bala soul a physical meaning. Nor can we see the past and future in the present (Epstein) unless we project time onto space. Similarly, Turvey nds Vertov guilty of treating social relations
as if they were physical, intrinsic properties of things that the eye is incapable of seeing unaided, when in fact they are properties things possess by virtue of their interactions with the world, interactions we are in many instances perfectly capable of perceiving or nding out about without assistance. It is therefore as nonsensical to accuse the eye of failing to see these social relations as it is to accuse it of failing to see the past and the future. (58)

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Since the very notion of a category mistake is premised upon the logical separation of physical and mental domains, any attempt (whether it is dualistic, idealistic, materialistic, psychoanalytic, cybernetic, neuroscientic, etc.) that tries to resolve body mind relations is likely to face a categorical mistake. Thus, it is not surprising that logical analysis and Vertov become strange bedfellows. Turveys analytical framework helps to invalidate categorical mistakes in lm theories and informs his theoretical revisions, but can it account for the programmatic and consistent use of illogical confusions in a theory? Why did Vertov conceal his genuine insights in an amalgam of such errors? Turveys overall answer lies in the hegemonic politics of discourses:
The sciences have been so successful at explaining and predicting the natural universe over the last four centuries that they have become the paradigm of explanation in the modern world, thereby casting a long shadow over other types of knowledge, such as philosophy, religion, and art. (129)

Doubting Vision can be read as an analytical critique that challenges an important strand in lm theory. Readers who disagree with the premises of this critique will nd the book an invitation to argue against a seemingly incompatible approach. In what sense can cinema as a relational system be understood as a dispositif of temporal and social perception? Turvey argues that construing a disanalogy between a decient naked-eye vision and a superior technological vision leads to an erroneous confusion between agency (intentional) and ability (instrumental), which he rejects on logical and empirical grounds. He concedes, however, that visual technologies extend and augment human vision:
They enable us to see further and know more than we would be able to otherwise. Discovering the particulate structure of an object using a microscope, for example, presupposes that we can see the microscope correctly. It also assumes that we can accurately see what the microscope reveals, and that any mistakes we make in doing so can be corrected by looking through the microscope again, or using another one, or having someone else conrm what we see. Using such technologies, in other words, relies on the fact that our eyes are reliable and that we already can see and know the world around us. (113)

He succinctly argues that microscopic discovery depends upon the reliability of our eyes. Yet his example also shows how the logical distinction between subject and object is challenged by the synthetic character of observations (the microscopic discovery), which are marked by an irreducible dualism of relations (the particulate structure discovered) and things (the object examined).1 His example also illustrates that this discovery is not a simple relation based on the reliability of our immediate sense-experience, but involves conventions of using a microscope, relying on different microscopic technologies, a series of views forming efcient viewing habits, and negotiating observations with other viewers. We may add other normative practices and technologies that, on the one hand, seem to rely on our subjective experience, but, on the other, form relays of objectied norms, rules and principles that become part of the multifarious world of experience. The standard, everyday, normal, physical vision (101) that is the

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subject matter of Doubting Vision is itself a great example of this double movement subjects are caught up with. Doubting Vision is a provocative book in at least two senses: it compels us to think about the sense and meaning of lm theory. It reminds us to use language clearly so we dont stray beyond the bounds of sense into nonsense (17). Furthermore, Turveys heavy recourse to an analytical Wittgenstein, where the distinction between sense and nonsense is absolute, provokes one to think of Wittgensteins pragmatic strain that highlights the contextual by shifting the focus from logic to a grammar of use.2 As Wittgenstein remarks in Philosophical Investigations, [t]he word language-game is meant to bring into prominence that speaking a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life (1958, 11). Notably, Wittgenstein distinguishes between a variety of uses such as Gebrauch (usage), Nutzen (usefulness), Benutzung (using), Verwendung (employment) or Anwendung (application). Examining meaning and use also dismisses the notion of nonsense as the only alternative to sense. From a logical point of view assuming a rigorous distinction between art and zs and Kracauer must indeed science, the scientism in Epstein, Vertov, Bala appear the illicit extension of the forms, methods, and rhetoric of the natural sciences into realms where they have no application (129). From a grammatical perspective the cross-bearing of scientic and aesthetic claims raises the question of their respective uses, some of which may be incompatible with Turveys representationalist conception of lm art as a repertoire of techniques (such as variable framing and others). For Turvey, art is a type of knowledge that serves primarily as a vehicle of intuition and is subservient to concept and reason. We are reminded of Carrolls objection that avant-garde lms can only illustrate theoretical tenets but never claim to be acts of theorizing themselves. There is still plenty of space for confusion and negotiation. While analysis is the business of making clear cuts, interpretation is that of mediation. As Wittgenstein sought to master both the ciphers of logic and the forms of life, he may indeed be the philosopher most pertinent to this debate.

Notes
1. In analytical philosophy, this objection was raised by W.V. Quine (1951), whom Turvey mentions only in a footnote. About the same time, Deleuze developed a similar critique in his essay on David Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity (1991, orig. 1953). 2. On Wittgensteins logical and grammatical approaches to clarity, see Garver, 2006.

References
l. 1996. Avant-Garde Film and Film Theory. In Theorizing the Moving Image, Carroll, Noe 162 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humes Theory of Human Nature. New York: Columbia University Press.

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lix Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia Deleuze, Gilles, and Fe University Press. Garver, Newton. 2006. Wittgenstein and Approaches to Clarity. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Quine, W.V. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. The Philosophical Review 60: 20 43. Turvey, Malcolm. 2008. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Christian Quendler Department of American Studies University of Innsbruck, Austria christian.quendler@uibk.ac.at q 2012, Christian Quendler