Abstract
In this article, I claim that film matters to political theory not because of the stories films recount, but because the medium of film offers political theorists an image of political thinking that emphasizes the stochastic serialization of actions. I thus argue that the stochastic serialization of moving images that films project makes available for democratic theory an experience of resistance and change as a felt discontinuity of succession, rather than as an inversion of hierarchical power. In my treatment of these issues, I rely on Hume's ontology of ‘broken appearances’ and ‘interrupted perceptions’, as well as Stanley Cavell's ontology of film as treated in The World Viewed. I elaborate the following four aspects of the relation between film and political theory: (i) the action-image; (ii) discontinuity and the fact of series; (iii) actors, artificial persons and human somethings; and (iv) political resistance and an aesthetics of politics. The manner in which I proceed is to show the aspectual overlay between film and political thinking. Such a method of exposition suggests a further, methodological site where film matters to political theory: the stochastic serialization of moving images in film provides political theory with a genre for elaborating ideas that is not reducible to the analytics of causal argument.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Following convention, all references to Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature are cited as Book number, Section number, Chapter number and Paragraph number.
See especially Jacques Rancière (1994, 1998, 2004, 2007, 2009); Panagia (2010).
Panagia (2006, p. 2).
On the concept of narratocracy, see Panagia (2009, pp. 1–20 and passim).
On this point, see Gilles Deleuze's chapter, ‘The Image of Thought’ in Difference and Repetition, and his discussion of representational thinking as the dogmatic image of thought where he affirms that ‘the most general form of representation is thus found in the element of a common sense understood as an upright nature and a good will’ (1994, p. 131).
Admittedly, my remarks may seem anachronistic. Hume's cinematic thinking predates the invention of photography by over a century, and the invention of film by almost 150 years. Nevertheless, I follow André Bazin's thesis in ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’ (2005) and suggest that cinematic thinking predates the medium of film. That is, cinematic thinking is not married to the technology of film. In this article, therefore, I call upon Hume's account of experience and awareness as the succession of interrupted perceptions to show what are the mutually inflecting aspects of film and political theory. My central concern is to bear the burden of Hume's ontological insights regarding the punctual instantaneity of impressions, the non-necessity of their succession, and the capacities and strategies by which we handle such incompossible aspects.
This issue of the relation between images was a concern from the early attempts to capture serial motility in Muybridge's photographs of the sulky drawn by the galloping horse, Abe Edgington (1878), at Stanford's farm in Palo Alto, to Georges Méliès's conjurings in (amongst many films) Un Homme de Têtes (1898), to the montage film-making of the Russian formalists, to contemporary feature-length films from the Bourne series to the Michael Bay mash-ups that rely on what the film scholar David Bordwell calls ‘intensified continuity’ (see Bordwell, 2002, pp. 16–28). Also see Steven Shaviro's discussion of post-continuity in Post-Cinematic Affect (2010, esp. pp. 64–92).
Such issues are also at the heart of Derek Parfit's (1986) examples of ‘simple teletransportation’ and the branch-line case of teletransportation in Reasons and Persons. Relevant to this discussion is precisely the issue of the relationship between identity and discontinuity. I discuss these and other related matters in the first chapter of my forthcoming book, Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity.
Equally compelling in this regard are the development of new cameras and digital editing programs that possess a rate of capture of up to 5000 frames per second. I note in this regard two video artists, Zach Gold (2011) and Tom Guilmette (2011), whose use of the Phantom Flex camera is visually stunning and worth exploring further.
Initial sites of theoretical consideration for the development of these ideas might include the following (though there are many more): Rodowick (2007); Dean (2010); Parikka (2010); Mason (2011); Idle and Nunns (2011); and Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002). Finally, such considerations would have to engage Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (2002) – the first feature-length narrative film shot in a single take (on digital video, using a specially designed disc instead of tape). But also, such reflections would have to reflect on the status of footage as the potential medium of digital media. The most persuasive exploration of this thus far is found in William Gibson (2003).
The discussion of the daimon is from Arendt's The Human Condition (pp. 175–181).
This is especially evident in the chronograph experiments of Etienne-Jules Marrey, who, throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, developed various approaches to graphically transcribe movement. Such experiments were described in two important works: La Machine Animale (1873) and Le Movement (1894). On Marrey's contributions to film, see Laurent Mannoni (2000); on his contributions to the study of duration and movement, see Erin Manning (2009).
Also see Stephen Englemann's (2006) review of Ferguson's book.
To specify: In saying this, I mean to suggest that for Rancière the force of democracy is that of rendering available the non-necessity of any one interest, or structure of interest, as authoritative. As I elaborate in The Political Life of Sensation, this is also the radical democratic claim of aesthetic disinterest formulated by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgment.
In the history of cinema, the train is an important object – both philosophically and culturally – as the filming and projection of a train arriving at a train station (L’Arrivée d’un Train a la Ciotat, 1895; directors: Auguste and Louis Lumière) was one of the first films ever projected. Its projection has gone down in cinematic folklore as shocking the audience out of their seats as the train arrived in the station (see Tom Gunning, 1989, p. 34).
If the reader is interested, they may access and view the short clip at this web address: www.facebook.com/#!/video/video.php?v=10150105489091395.
Cavell offers a second, crucial, definition of film as ‘a moving image of skepticism’ (1979b, p. 188). This latter definition, though relevant to my discussion, cannot be dealt with in detail. Suffice it to say that what Cavell means by it is that the experience of film raises and deals with issues also raised by modern skepticism – most notably, the ontological question of the relationship between beholder (that is, observer) and object – the question of spectatorship; and the question of identity and causality.
Please note that I use the term ‘durational intensity’ and ‘duration’ throughout this article to refer to a unit of time and not a description of time's trajectory or continuity.
As David Rodowick (2007, in The Virtual Life of Film) and others, including Lev Manovich (2002), Mark Hansen (2004) and Vivian Sobchack (1999), suggest, this differs with the experience of digital video viewing and digital shooting technology for the simple fact that the digital image is composed of code and not celluloid impression. Thus, the claim to a photographic transcription of the world is unsustainable with the use of digital cameras, and hence the importance of reflecting on an ontology of the virtual in our experience of new media technology. On this last point, see Kam Shapiro's (2010) ‘Critical Feelings and Pleasurable Associations’.
See André Bazin's (2005) What is Cinema? Vol. 1.
What I isolate as the acknowledgement of ‘broken appearances’ by Hume is a corollary to what Quentin Meillassoux (2009, 2011) identifies as Hume's discovery of an ontology of contingency. By this, Meillassoux means that there is no law (in nature or otherwise) that can guarantee a priori that the same causes will provide the same effects. Contrary to the presumptions of linear causality, Hume's disjunctive a priori affirms that the same cause could source a multiplicity of outcomes because, to quote Meillassoux, ‘if reason knows of no a prioris other than that of non-contradiction, then it is perfectly compatible with reason for any consistent possibility to arise, without there being a discriminatory principle that would favor one possibility over another’ (Meillassoux, 2009, pp. 90–91).
For a provocative and thoughtful consideration of these issues within the genre of science fiction, see Steven Mulhall's (1994) essay ‘Picturing the Human (Body and Soul): A Reading of Blade Runner’. Also see Minsoo Kang (2011) and Alex Wetmore (2009).
Wood (2002, p. 190). It is worth noting that Wood's cultural history of the modern obsession with automata is the inspiration for of Brian Selznick's (2007) The Invention of Hugo Cabret, adapted to film as Hugo (Scorsese, 2011).
Cavell's discussion of a film actor's human somethingness is linked to his treatment of the problem of scepticism and the example of the ‘perfected automaton’ (1979b, pp. 403–411). Specifically, it is the issue of the automaton or the doll as being a humanoid, a human something, of having all the attributes of a human, save one (p. 403). I discuss this in greater detail in the essay, ‘Blankets, Screens, and Projections; Or, The Claim of Film’ (forthcoming).
I borrow the notion of aspects, and the idea of juxtaposition, from Michael Fried's (1998) discussion of modernist art in his seminal essay, ‘Art and Objecthood’. Specifically addressing the sculptures of Anthony Caro in contrast to the literalist art of Tony Smith, Fried says this: ‘A characteristic sculpture by Caro consists, I want to say, in the mutual and naked juxtaposition of the I-beams, girders, cylinders, lengths of piping, sheet metal, and grill that it comprises rather than in the compound object that they compose. The mutual inflection of one element by another, rather than the identity of each, is what is crucial – though of course altering the identity of any element would be at least as drastic as altering its placement … . The individual elements bestow significance on one another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition’ (1998, pp. 161–162).
On the relationship between aesthetics, interest and aesthetic disinterest for democratic politics, see my discussion of Kantian disinterest in Panagia (2009) ‘From Nomos to Nomad: Kant, Deleuze and Rancière on Sensation’ (pp. 21–44).
For a contrasting point of view, see Sam Chambers (2009) who makes the case for understanding unintelligibility as something other than non-sense.
References
Arendt, H. (1988) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (2005) Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Schocken Books.
Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Translated by R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bazin, A. (2005) What is Cinema? Vol. 1. Translated by H. Gray. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Bordwell, D. (2002) Intensified continuity – Visual style in contemporary American film. Film Quarterly 55 (3): 16–28.
Cavell, S. (1979a) The World Viewed. Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cavell, S. (1979b) The Claim of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chambers, S. (2009) A queer politics of the democratic miscount. Borderlands 8 (2): 1–23.
Clee, P. (2005) Before Hollywood: From Shadow Play to the Silver Screen. New York: Clarion Books.
Dean, J. (2010) Blog Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition, Translated by P. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.
Englemann, S. (2006) Review of Pornography, the Theory. Political Theory 34 (3): 409–411.
Esposito, R. (2012) The Dispositif of the Person. Law, Culture and the Humanities 8 (1): 17–30.
Ferguson, F. (2004) Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Fried, M. (1998) Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Gibson, W. (2003) Pattern Recognition. New York: Putnam.
Gunning, T. (1989) An aesthetics of astonishment: Early film and the (in)credulous spectator. Art and Text 34 (1): 31–45.
Hansen, M. (2004) New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hobbes, T. ([1651]1996) Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hume, D. (1896) A Treatise of Human Nature, In: L.A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), Reprinted from the Original Edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Idle, N. and Nunns, A. (eds.) (2011) Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt's Revolution as It Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made It. New York: Or Books.
Kang, M. (2011) Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kittler, F. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Translated by G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Knorr Cetina, K. and Bruegger, U. (2002) Global microstructures: The virtual societies of financial markets. American Journal of Sociology 107 (4): 905–950.
Manning, E. (2009) Relationscapes. Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mannoni, L. (2000) The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archeology of the Cinema. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press.
Manovich, L. (2002) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Marrati, P. (2008) Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mason, P. (2011) Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere. London: Verso.
Meillassoux, Q. (2009) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Translated by R. Brassier. London: Continuum Press.
Meillassoux, Q. (2011) Potentiality and virtuality. In: L. Bryant, N. Srnicek and G. Harman (eds.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne, Australia: re.press.
Mulhall, S. (1994) Picturing the human (body and soul): A reading of Blade Runner. Film and Philosophy 1 (1): 87–104.
Münsterberg, H. (2002) Hugo Münsterberg On Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, A. Langdale (ed.) New York: Routledge.
Panagia, D. (2006) The Poetics of Political Thinking. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Panagia, D. (2009) The Political Life of Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Panagia, D. (2010) Partage du sensible: The distribution of the sensible. In: J.-P. Deranty (ed.), Jacques Rancière Key Concepts. Durham, NC: Acumen Press.
Panagia, D. (forthcoming) Blankets, screens, and projections: Or, the claim of film. In: N. Kompridis (ed.), The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought. London, UK: Continuum Press.
Panagia, D. (forthcoming) Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Parfit, D. (1986) Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parikka, J. (2010) Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Rancière, J. (1994) The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, Translated by H. Melehy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Rancière, J. (1998) Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Translated by J. Rose. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Rancière, J. (2001) Ten theses on politics. Theory & Event 5 (3): 1–30.
Rancière, J. (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum Books.
Rancière, J. (2007) The Future of the Image. New York: Verso.
Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator. New York: Verso.
Rodowick, D. (2007) The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Selznick, B. (2007) The Invention of Hugo Cabret. New York: Scholastic Press.
Shapiro, K. (2010) Critical feelings and pleasurable associations. Theory & Event 13 (4): 1–25.
Shaviro, S. (2010) Post-Cinematic Affect. Washington DC: Zero Books.
Sobchack, V. (1999) Nostalgia for a digital object: Regrets on the quickening of quicktime. Millennium Film Journal 34 (1): 4–23.
Wetmore, A. (2009) Sympathy machines: Men of feeling and the automaton. Eighteenth-Century Studies 43 (1): 37–54.
Wood, G. (2002) Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Films & Images:
Brown, C. (dir.) (1931) Possessed, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: USA. [Video: DVD].
Gold, Z. (dir.) (2011) String Theory, http://vimeo.com/17901475 [Video: Online].
Guilmette, T. (dir.) (2011) Locked in a Vegas Hotel Room with a Phantom Flex, http://www.tomguilmette.com/archives/198 [Video: Online].
Nolan, C. (dir.) (2000) Memento, New Market Entertainment: USA. [Video: DVD].
Scorsese, M. (dir.) (2011) Hugo, Paramount Pictures: USA. [Cinematic Release].
Sokurov, A. (dir.) (2002) Russian Ark, Wellspring Media: Russia. [Video: DVD].
The Horse in motion. ‘Sallie Gardner’, owned by Leland Stanford, running at a 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19 June 1878. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ppmsca-06607 (digital file from original item, copy 2) LC-USZ62-45683 (b&w film copy neg. of copy 2): http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3a40000/3a45000/3a45800/3a45870r.jpg.
Acknowledgements
A previous iteration of this article was presented at the State University of New York, Albany, Political Theory Workshop. I would like to thank Torrey Shanks and Mort Schoolman for their generous invitation, and the participants of that workshop (especially Lori Marso, Laurie Naranch, Libby Anker and Matt Scherer) for their thoughtful questions and criticism. This article benefitted greatly from the attentive criticism of two anonymous reviewers of Contemporary Political Theory. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to Sam Chambers, Terrell Carver and Drew Walker for their deft handling of my manuscript and for encouraging and enabling this kind of interdisciplinary work to appear in the pages of Contemporary Political Theory.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Panagia, D. Why film matters to political theory. Contemp Polit Theory 12, 2–25 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2012.4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2012.4