_____________________............._____

    F I L M - P H I L O S O P H Y

    Journal | Salon | Portal
    PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD
    http://www.film-philosophy.com

    Vol. 5  No. 28, September 2001
_____________________............._____




    Dorian Stuber

    Art Objects



_Film and Philosophy_
Volume 4, 1997
ISSN 1073-0427
116 pp.

Friedrich Schlegel tells us, in an oft-cited aphorism, that the 'philosophy
of art usually lacks one of two things: either the philosophy or the art'.
[1] Must we submit to the pessimism of this claim? Might not the rigour and
speculative power typically granted to philosophy illuminate rather than
obscure the singularity and irreducible presence typically granted to art?
The editors of _Film and Philosophy_, a journal published at Hanover
College, Indiana, would likely uphold just such a possibility. But what
would it mean to exhort the overcoming of Schlegel's antimony? For the
marriage of speculation with object, theory with practice, is inescapable
rather than laudable. Since the late 19th century, beginning with
Nietzsche, it has often enough been observed that an a-theoretical
position, however stridently avowed, is untenable. That is, even the most
formal reading of an artwork hews to certain theoretical assumptions, if
only (speciously) to denigrate all such assumptions as extraneous to the
work in question.

It does not follow, however, that art and philosophy, even if as intimately
connected as bacon and eggs or bread and butter, always taste good
together. Put differently, it is not necessarily interesting to combine the
two, especially if we consider that adjective etymologically rather than
normatively, as Heidegger, for one, does in drawing our attention to its
roots in the relationship between essences or beings (inter-esse). To
return to the journal under review, we might ask, not unreasonably in view
of its title, what sort of relationship is proposed in its conjunction of
terms. For us to speak of film and philosophy requires that we interrogate
the foundations of both, in order to question their presumed difference.
Ultimately, if the ampersand in _Film and Philosophy_ is to serve as more
than shorthand, it must designate an 'and' that is a hyphen rather than a
plus sign. Alas, a handful of exceptions aside, the journal fails to
interrogate its titular concepts in this or, indeed, in any way. Its pages
regrettably add little to our understanding of either film or philosophy.

Rather than the thematic, reflexive, 'meta' investigation into the
relationship between film and philosophy that the journal's title leads us
to expect, we find instead a series of essays which read various films
through various philosophical lenses. There is a careless, even contingent
air to these endeavours, for it is rarely obvious why the choice has been
made to read, say, _Rob Roy_ in terms of, say, the relationship between
speech and community as proposed in _The Republic_. Haphazard approaches of
this sort lead to an eventuality not broached by Schlegel's aphorism:
namely, an argument in which both philosophy and art are invoked, but to
little effect, since no justification is provided for the comparison being
offered. What precisely is the link between Plato's arguments and Michael
Caton-Jones's film? Without such theoretical grounding, we are unlikely to
learn much about either the film or the philosophy in question, and
certainly nothing about the relation between them.

Although the collection's most compelling essays fail to provide
justifications for their theoretical comparisons, they do succeed in terms
of the skill with which they are composed. Both David Goldblatt, in his
reading of _Barton Fink_ (1991), and Harvey Roy Greenberg, in his reading
of _Crash_ (1996), acknowledge the theoretical questions raised by the
films rather than reducing them through a reading guided by a particular
philosophical leaning. Moreover, these questions are grounded in the
particulars of the films they interrogate, as, for example, in Goldblatt's
investigation, informed by Emmanuel Levinas, into the Old Testament
resonances of the Coen Brothers' story, which tells of a Jewish playwright
who arrives in Hollywood to write scripts about 'the common man'.

I would add, however, that this quixotic undertaking is never thoroughly
registered as such by Goldblatt, in that Levinas's misgivings about
aesthetics, and the possible applicability of ethics to art, are in his
essay never addressed. To be fair, Goldblatt's intention is ultimately
rather different; he describes two sorts of Jewishness in the film, 'the
Jew of the Page and the Jew of the Picture' (95). Levinas is thus
conscripted only in a secondary element of his argument, yet I would argue
that to conscript Levinas at all betrays a fundamental failing in reading
him. Nonetheless, in his refusal to insist upon a 'Levinasian' reading of
the film, Goldblatt provokes debate rather than shutting it down through a
dogmatically asserted premise.

Similarly, Greenberg's essay on David Cronenberg's _Crash_ is the most
compelling in the collection precisely because it is the least insistent on
overtly reading artworks through philosophic discourse. His well-written
piece nonetheless acknowledges the film's complexities, for example in the
way it confounds the tedious, yet all too typical dichotomy offered by
theories of technology (that we must fear it or adore it), and places the
film in the context of other twentieth-century representations of man and
machine. It would still be possible to level various objections to
Greenberg's piece -- for example, I would have liked to see him address the
film's obviation of trauma, and the way this both furthers and complicates
its refusal of psychology and, seemingly, an entire lineage of subjecthood
-- but, as with Goldblatt's essay, such objections pertain more to the
specifics of the argument rather than to its premises. Greenberg
especially, but Goldblatt too, deserve further credit for remaining mindful
that they are writing about *film*, that is, of a particular artistic
medium with particular formal components. It is often difficult, when
reading the other essays in the collection, to recall that film is a visual
and aural medium that makes its claim on our attention and affection in
different ways than, for example, written texts do.

In the end, the disappointments of _Film and Philosophy_ lie neither in the
instances it compares (indeed, an appealingly wide array of films and
philosophies is here represented, from Pagnol's _The Baker's Wife_ to
Beckett's _Film_, from communitarianism to post-structuralism; in this
regard, if there is any room to cavail it is in the complete absence of
cinema from the so-called Third World), nor in its guiding impulse to
compare. Indeed, in a time of ever-greater academic specialization, the
latter is an especially laudable goal. Ultimately, however, when presented
in so unselfconscious a manner, that noble impulse only betrays itself. If
philosophy and art are not incommensurable, a supposition with which the
editors of _Film and Philosophy_ would appear to agree, then it remains
imperative to theorize that relationship rather than to posit it. It comes
as no surprise that the films most interestingly -- though by no means
exhaustively -- dealt with here, _Barton Fink_ and _Crash_, are those most
aware of their own status as art objects, and thus those most invested in
their own theorization. As such, they are art objects that refuse the
dichotomy between practice and theory; they are art that objects to its
sequestration from and ostensible subordination to something called
philosophy.

Self-conscious artworks are thus interstitial works, spanning the gulf
between theory and practice, and as such are interesting in the full sense
of the term. The same, alas, cannot be said for the majority of the essays
under review. While _Film and Philosophy_ rightly abjures the dichotomy
that offers, on the one hand, an empirical description of artworks devoid
of all theoretical grounding and, on the other, a reduction of individual
artworks to the demonstration of a grand theory, it is an abjuration that
too often fails. The work presented here is rigid and yet not rigorous:
rigid in that its attempts to yoke film to philosophy are often clumsy and
tendentious; not rigorous in that its failure to theorize comparison
hobbles its ostensible goal of combining theory and practice. On the
evidence of this journal, at least, Schlegel's admonition regarding the
perils of philosophical aesthetics remains to be taken into account.

Cornell University
Ithaca, New York, USA


Footnotes

1. Friedrich Schlegel, _Kritische Schriften_, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch
(Munich: Carl Hanser, 1964), p. 6.


Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_ 2001

Dorian Stuber, 'Art Objects', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 5 no. 28, September
2001 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n28stuber>.

    ________....

These texts are published through the _Film-Philosophy_ email salon so they
can be discussed and contested and continued by you members, so please send
your thoughts to:

    [log in to unmask]

    ______________....