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f i l m - p h i l o s o p h y
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Josh Cohen
Phenomenology, History, and the Image
A Reply to Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
'Images of/and the Postmodern'
_Film-Philosophy_, 20 February 1999
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/fitzpatrick.html
In responding to Kathleen Fitzpatrick's excellent and incisive review of my
_Spectacular Allegories_, my intention isn't to take issue with her local
criticisms of the book, some of which I'd contest, a number of which I'd
concede. Rather, I want to address one, much broader theoretical contention
which emerges out of her concluding criticism, and which opens up some very
significant questions for the future of visual theory.
To recapitulate the steps leading up to Fitzpatrick's criticism:
_Spectacular Allegories_ explores, through a theoretical framework which
fuses Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenology of perception, the ways in which a range of articulations of
the spectacle -- cinema, urban form, television amongst others --
penetrates the narrating eye(s) of postmodern American fiction, generating
both crises and reconfigurations of visual agency (for a more thorough
account of the book's argument, see Fitzpatrick's review!). Fitzpatrick
points up both the strengths and drawbacks of my coverage of such a 'broad
spectrum of visuality'. Chief amongst the latter is a tendency to subsume a
vast range of visual forms under the generalised sign of 'the image': 'At
certain novelistic moments that Cohen unpacks, the image is filmic, or
televisual, or otherwise the product of mediated forms of visual
representation. At other moments the image is any object of sight.'
Whilst I've sought to be attentive in the book to the internal
differentiatedness of the field of spectacle -- for example distinguishing
clearly the ways in which film and television are valenced in Mailer's
'metaphysics of vision' -- there are clearly a number of passages for which
Fitzpatrick's observation holds good. There are moments, and she identifies
them, at which a generalized terminology -- 'the image', 'mass spectacle',
'visual culture' -- is groaning under the strain of the many different
visual forms it's trying to carry. What I take issue with, then, is less
this specific criticism of the book, than the generalized theoretical claim
she draws from it, namely that, 'the phenomenology of perception cannot
account for the differences among these images, transforming them into
roughly equivalent objects'.
I think this claim depends on a very narrow definition of phenomenology
which reduces it to the kind of visual idealism I seek, throughout the
book, to contest. It's true that, say, a Husserlian phenomenology,
bracketing off the external conditions of the object's being in order to
describe its appearance 'in itself' to the consciousness of a
transcendental ego, would offer little scope for excavating the specific
material histories which inscribe different images.
My use of Benjamin, however, is an implicit attempt to give a much broader
scope to phenomenology, more continuous with its Hegelian conception as the
tracing of the formation and deformation of consciousness in and by
modernity. [1] Put less obliquely, Benjamin demonstrates that a focus on
the ways in which images are experienced (i.e. a phenomenology) doesn't
preclude attentiveness to their material nature. Indeed, for Benjamin, the
material history of the image is inextricably bound up with its experience
by its viewer or reader.
Let me elaborate by way of a reading of the famous 'Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction' essay. [2] The essay is often crudely
caricatured as an unproblematic 'defence' of the mass cultural
consciousness engendered by film. In fact, it's better read as an
excavation of the different futures contained within the medium. One
future, which the conclusion of the essay calls 'Communism', and which is
anticipated in Vertov's images, would release the viewer's eye from its
confinement in a spatio-temporally linear (strictly Kantian) regime of
seeing. Another, which the conclusion of the essay calls 'Fascism', and
which is anticipated in Riefenstahl's images, would fetishistically
reinforce that regime of seeing, to the point where other modes of
perception would be paralysed.
The point of this excursion into the 'Artwork' essay is to suggest that a
cultural object's history is best reconstructed phenomenologically -- that
is, through the history of its collective and individual perceptual
experience. Film, Benjamin shows us, has no essential significance, and is
as such neither 'positive' nor 'negative': its historical function can be
established only by demonstrating the kinds of perceptual experience to
which it gives rise in different social and political contexts. By plugging
this approach into Merleau-Ponty's more formalized philosophical account of
the perceptual interpenetration of subject and object, I seek to provide an
account of the shifting and complex encounter of literary subject and
spectacular object. Literature's different negotiations of that object --
hostile, ambivalent, celebratory -- compact its different histories. This
point can be illustrated with reference to a passage in Mailer's _Deer
Park_ which, in Fitzpatrick's review, becomes a focus for her various
criticisms. The passage describes 'a smoky yellow false ceiling [that]
reflected into the mirror behind the bar and colored the etching of a
half-nude girl that had been cut into the glass'.
Fitzpatrick's reading of this image is tied to a further criticism of me
for a tendency 'repeatedly to forgive [Mailer's] misogyny'. In arguing that
what I miss in the etching of the half-nude girl is an image of Woman as
'the reflection of a false ceiling', there's an implicit attempt to fix the
image's place in a particular symbolic economy of gender. In other words,
the image is a straightforward articulation of misogyny which my own
reading of Mailer (at least partially) elides. But my intention in the
Mailer chapter, and indeed throughout the book, is to go further than
simply register a misogyny which is often so self-evident as to require
very little labour on the part of the critic to draw it out. Rather, I want
to show how this misogyny functions, what it signifies in the context of a
text's broader strategies of perception. It's a phenomenology, I suggest,
which makes this possible. By reading Mailer's images of the eternal
feminine not simply as expressions of masculine perceptual authority, but
as, simultaneously, articulations of a crisis in that authority, the
unstable history of such images is revealed. The material history of an
image, in other words, is always the history of its experience in different
cultural and historical contexts. It is a phenomenology of the image of the
eternal feminine that enables us to reconstruct the different meanings it
carries in postmodern America, and, say, nineteenth century France.
Fitzpatrick is undoubtedly right, then, in insisting that any account of
the spectacle's function in postmodern textuality must be attentive to the
many different forms it may take, and to the different material histories
which inscribe those forms. My argument with her, however, is that any
shortcomings in this regard -- such as those she's acutely identified in
_Spectacular Allegories_ -- stem not from an excess, but from an
insufficiency of phenomenological insight.
Goldsmiths College, University of London, England
March 1999
Footnotes
1. For further elaboration of this reading of Hegel's phenomenology, see
Gillian Rose, _Hegel: Contra Sociology_ (London: Athlone, 1992)
2. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction', in _Illuminations_, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana,
1992). My reading of this essay owes much to Howard Caygill's _The Colour
of Experience_ (London: Routledge, 1998).
Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_ 1999
*****************
Josh Cohen, 'Phenomenology, History, and the Image: A Reply to Kathleen
Fitzpatrick', _Film-Philosophy_, 13 March 1999
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/cohen.html>.
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