Phenomenology: Philosophy and media theory—an introduction

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Frank Tom asulo] On: 14 May 2014, At : 10: 32 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Quarterly Review of Film and Video Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ gqrf20 Phenomenology: Philosophy and media theory—an introduction Frank P. Tomasulo a a Associat e professor in t he cinema and phot ography depart ment , It haca College Published online: 05 Jun 1990. To cite this article: Frank P. Tomasulo (1990) Phenomenology: Philosophy and media t heory—an int roduct ion, Quart erly Review of Film and Video, 12:3, 1-8, DOI: 10.1080/ 10509209009361348 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 10509209009361348 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. 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Rev. of Film & Video, Vol. 12(3), pp. 1-8 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only Phenomenology: Philosophy and Media Theory-An I ntroduction Downloaded by [Frank Tomasulo] at 10:32 14 May 2014 Frank P. Tomasulo Edmund Husserl, the founder of philosophical phenomenology, wrote most of his central works between 1900 and 1939. (Coincidentally, this was the same period during which Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, wrote his most important books and the "codes" of the classical cinema were invented, conventionalized, and perfected.) This historical epoch was characterized by unprecedented dislocations in the social, economic, and intellectual fabric of European capitalism. By thus contextualizing Husserl's philosophy, we can see the historical determinants for his life-long quest for absolute certainty; for an eidetic science of experience. All theories are implicit responses to concrete social conjunctures, so, in the midst of what he later called "the crisis of the European sciences," Husserl devised a method by which Western philosophy and civilization could find its bearings in a world torn between a useless positivism based on the unquestioned acceptance of facts and an irrational relativismbased on pure subjectivism. His first methodological step toward philosophical certitude was the rejection of what he called the "natural attitude," the taken-for-granted belief that objects exist independent of our consciousness of them. Husserlquestioned this epistemological given, noting that we cannot be sure of the autonomous existence of things but that we can be certain about how they appear to us in consciousness. Hence, objects were not "things-in-themselves," but things posited-"intended"-by consciousness. And, since all consciousness must be consciousness of something, the act of thinking and the object of thought must be inextricably and dialectically related in a "hermeneutics of facticity."l Husserl therefore grounded his ideas in the perceptual and meaning-making operations of human consciousness. According to this view, consciousness is not merely a passive registration of the world, but an active "intentional" constitution of it. Indeed, Husserl's "principle of principles" implies that phenomenological intuitions are not simple experiences, but complex, highly structured interpretive (and potentially meaning-producing) acts.? In short, the phenomenon is not pure presence, although Husserl has been critiqued by the deconstructionists for hinting that it is. 3 But, to establish certainty without presuppositions, Husserl had provisionally to "bracket out" the objects of ｣ｯｮｳｩｵｾ in order to focus on the act of consciousness itself. (This activity is FRANK P. TOMASULO isanassociate professor in thecinema andphotography department at Ithaca College, where he teaches film history, theory, and production. His articles on film and television have been widely published in scholarly journals and books, and his filmmaking students have'!Von numerous national and regional awards. 1 Downloaded by [Frank Tomasulo] at 10:32 14 May 2014 2 F. ｾ Tomasulo analogous to Rene Descartes's "systematic doubt," although Cartesianism eliminates and annihilates the world while for Husserl, it is precisely the persistence of the world-our inability to purge our minds of images-that is crucial.) Despite the apparent abstraction of this methodology; Husserl insisted that it must be concretized, hence his famous slogan "To the things themselves!" Husserl realized that to understand the essence of human experience, one must move beyond looking inward at the workings of consciousness. Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty went even further, insisting that human subjectivity is "always already" situated in and engaged with the outside world of things, other people, and historical events. Today, however.in the midst of a late capitalist era, Husserl's phrase ("To the things themselves!") might be amended to speak of "commodity-things," which have a social life of their own by virtue of their use and circulation in a consumer society. Phenomenology can be used to study the complex but specific . social, political, and media mechanisms that regulate contemporary taste, trade, and desire, as well as the subjective and intersubjective significance that people experientially attribute to them. Because phenomenology is concerned with apodictic experience, it could become a "science of sciences" devoted to a rigorous examination of the categories through which we give meaning to the world, what Merleau-Ponty called"an inventory of consciousness as milieu of the universe." ｾ In short, phenomenology is a method for studying any phenomenon: the world, the mind, or the cinema. Indeed, the cinema is a particularly apt subject for phenomenological investigation because it is so dependent on the explicitly visual experiences of time, space, perception, signification, and human subjectivity. Heidegger, Husserl's most famous student, broke with many of his mentor's basic contentions. But in an essay entitled "Die Zeit des Weltbildes" ("The Age of the World Picture"), Heidegger agreed with Husserl on the importance of scopic imagery in the modern epoch: "The world picture did not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather thefact thattheworld became a picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.?" Heidegger was basically enuciating a point that has frequently been made by film and television theorists over the years: that everything that exists in the modern age does so only in and through figuration and representation-in the case of film and televisual imagery, visual representation This historical circumstance-the fact that the world has increasingly been perceived in visual terms-accounts for some of the appeal of phenomenology to modern media theorists. After all, the ancient Greeks attended dramatic spectacles only once or twice a year; in medieval times, people saw visual imagery and pageantry-stained glass church windows and passion plays-on a weekly basis at best. Today; if surveys are correct, the average American watches six to seven hours of television daily, not to mention being bombarded by films, advertising, photography video and arcade games, and other forms of visual representation. The position of the recipient or spectator of all that media imagery has been a problematic one/in recent theoretical discourse. Again, phenomenology can be of value in explaining the thorny issue of subjectivity. In Heidegger's words, "That the world becomes a picture is one and the same event with the event of man's becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is."6 The interweaving of these two Downloaded by [Frank Tomasulo] at 10:32 14 May 2014 Phenomenology.' An Introduction 3 events-the transformation of the world into a picture and the human being into a subject-is crucial to any understanding of the role of phenomenology in the modern age. With Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as its philosophical precursors and Balzac, Proust, Valery; and Cezanne as its artistic forebearers, phenomenology "merges into the general effort of modern thought."? As such, the phenomenological method is an ideal one to confront the theoretical and aesthetic problems of cinema and television/video, the paradigmatic examples of modern (if not postmodern) 'art forms. For the most part, phenomenological inquiry into the media has focused on issues directly related to Heidegger's two points-issues of visual perception/representation and subjectivity: Andre Bazin's work, for instance, frequently deals with the ontological relation of film to reality; Dudley Andrew's writings often invoke the unique ways by which the self experiences pleasure and meaning in the presence of great film texts. 8 But media phenomenology did not begin with Bazin or end with Andrew. The late Edward Lowry has recounted the history of the postwar French "filmology" movement, including the Institut de Filmologie, its official journal, La Revue Internationale de Filmologie, and its many adherents (Gilbert Cohen-Seat, Edgar Morin, Etienne Souriau),? From a historical perspective, the filmology movement marked the point at which the cinema was academically and institutionally legitimated. Although Vachel Lindsay; Sergei Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, and others had earlier attempted to construct a theory of film, the filmologists made the first concerted effort to explain the cinema from a philosophical point of view. The eclectic variety of their paradigms was extraordinary: phenomenological theory, Marxist sociology aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and physiology were all employed to analyze the relationship between cinematic imagery and its individual/collective spectators. Although filmology had an enormous impact on the French film theory of the 1960s and 1970s, including the work of Andre Bazin, Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Jean-Louis Baudry, and others, few screen scholars are aware of this tradition today.!" Much of the written work of the Institut's members remains untranslated, and phenomenology has now acquired the critical reputation of being "old hat" or "passe." Single theories or serendipitous breakthroughs rarely "solve" the basic problems and "problematics" of any discipline; instead those problems take on a repetitive character similar to Freud's notion of Wiederholungszwang, the so-called "repetition compulsion."ll They continually come back to haunt us, usually in new or varied forms as material and superstructural conditions change over time. In film and video studies, for instance, structuralism/semiotics replaced phenomenology as the leading theoretical and critical paradigm, followed by poststructuralism and deconstruction. Various other "isms"-auteurism, feminism, Marxism, historicism, psychoanalysis-have vied with, supplemented, and/or superseded these dominant discourses along the wa)T, but the jury still appears to be out as far as a single monocausal theoretical explanation for the status and effect of the cinema and television is concerned. Whether this is a temporary or permanent "impasse," a positive eclecticism, or an interregnum awaiting a redeemer, contemporary media theory cries out for a grand synthesis that would combine the wisdom of past methodologies with the "cutting edge" excitement of new hypotheses. On the one hand, "scholars of the Downloaded by [Frank Tomasulo] at 10:32 14 May 2014 4 F. P. Tomasulo moving image" can. stultify by slavishly relying on shopworn ideas; on the other hand, they can slit their critical throats on the cutting edge of a trendy new theory. In this contemporary context, phenomenology's questions (and answers) still demand attention, particularly with reference to the ontological status of cinema/ television, the "language" of film/video imagery, the relationship of authors and viewers to large- and small-screen texts, and questions of assigning aesthetic value to media products. Despite recent dominant (and domineering) trends in film/TV scholarship, many scholars continue to investigate the relationship between media and consciousness. Whether called phenomenology, hermeneutics, reception theory, or readerresponse criticism, many dissertations, articles, and conference panels have been devoted to the subject in recent years. A 1987 issue of Wide Angle was devoted to Andre Bazin and, as this special issue of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video suggests, phenomenology still has a role in contemporary film and television analysis. My prediction, made at the 1981 Society for Cinema Studies conference, that the panel on phenomenology was its "last hurrah" in film studies was premature. There were two major panels on the topic at the 1986 conference and others at the 1988 and 1989 meetings. Major books on film and phenomenology are forthcoming from Vivian Sobchack and Allan Casebier, two of the authors represented in this collection of essays. In sum, media phenomenology has a certain current appeal and resurgence in scholarly publications and learned societies. But the purpose of this special issue is neither to rehash old ground nor to state publicly that the "reports of our death are greatly exaggerated." Rather, the goal is to expand the sphere of media phenomenology into new terrain. In addition to its "tried and true" areas of interest-questions of authorship, representation, relation to the real, aesthetic value, and spectatorship-documentary and experimental film/video, Japanese cinema, television, still photography, feminism, the "viewing experience," sound and music, and even the function of narrative per se (as a temporality that confers meaning to fictive action) can all be profitably studied from a phenomenological perspective. At the same time, phenomenology should not be seen as a monolithic discourse. There are as many disputes between factions in phenomenology as there are in Marxism, feminism, or any other currently dominant methodological paradigm. To be relevant in today's climate of film/TV studies, however, phenomenology needs to formulate concepts of authorial agency and spectatorial subjectivity free from the dead weight of the pure idealist position as well as from the postmodernist denial of the subject. The problems inherent in a poststructuralist position are the mirror image of those addressed by phenomenologists. The latter must see beyond the potential excesses of a purely subjectivist (borderline solipsistic) stance to a recognition of the importance of structure and language in human existence and art, while contemporary poststructuralists need to overcome their excessively objectivist view that structure and language determine and constrain agents to see that only by and through individual and collective agent/subjects can dominant institutions (social, political, or cinematic) be transformed or transcended. In addition, any definition of subjectivity must include "not only a textual-hermeneutical dimension but a historical dimension as we1L"12 Finally, phenomenologists need to Downloaded by [Frank Tomasulo] at 10:32 14 May 2014 Phenomenology: An Introduction 5 reconsider the issue of media realism by moving beyond the mystical religiosity of the Bazinian "Shroud of Turin" model to account for the formative representational a "new" phenomenology could powers of both artists and viewers. In this ｷ｡ｾ make possible the important intervention Fredric Jameson has called for: the reconquest of reified media forms of representation. 13 The essays in this volume represent an attempt to do just that: to apply the phenomenological wisdom of the past to some of the more current and pressing questions of the present-the nature of media reality/representation, the artist-textspectator nexus, the conditions of exhibition, the experience of temporality in life and in the media, perception, point of view, television's "difference"-so as to reposition these classic issues and consider them afresh. Thus these articles represent both a long-overdue reintroduction to and a long-awaited expansion of the phenomenological method to film and television studies. The principles discussed herein can be expanded further to cover topics beyond the traditional ones of representation, perception, and reception. Allan Casebier's opening ･ｳ ｡ｾ for instance, applies the Husserlian concepts of intentionality, noesis, and apperception to issues of non-Western filmic traditions of representation. In the process, he challenges the poststructuralist reading of Japanese cinema enunciated in Noel Burch's well-known book, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in theJapanese Cinema. According to Casebier, unusual optical devices such as wipes and "violations" of conventional editing regimes are not enough to define a Brechtian style to be valorized in the Japanese cinema. The "reading strategies" of the culture must be thoroughly understood before reductively assigning meaning to specific techniques. Using examples from Kurosawa's films, Casebier's complex phenomenological interpretation suggests that the Japanese cinema is not merely a set of illusionistic images employed to deconstruct realist codes of transparency: Instead, Husserl's "critical realism" and certain Japanese aesthetic codes (of simplicity and beauty, for instance) are marshalled to demonstrate that the objects and events depicted and articulated are intended by spectators irrespective of the question of cinematic representation. Vivian Sobchack's article also relies on the phenomenological concept that vision is a constitutive (i.e., intentional) activity: Applying the perceptual and semiotic (in the sense of sense-making) phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack analyzes specific cinematic articulations (camera and subject movement, zooms, freeze frames, focus shifts, etc.) and certain viewing strategies (in particular, the idea that vision is an existential and embodied movement). She ultimately proposes that film spectatorship is not the passive .activity invoked by many recent theoreticians; rather, she shows that meaning production in the movies is linked to the intentional attention of the spectator's dynamic gaze and that it is always present, even in the most ostensibly "zero-degree" visual situations. This process enables the perception of cinematic movement to acquire meaning, through a "meaningful gaze." Sobchack concludes that this "viewing view" of consciousness is actually corporeal and material, in terms of both the film's "body" and the viewer's. Harald Stadler's contribution explores more generally the role a phenomenologically inflected theoretical approach might have in contemporary film and television studies. He notes that phenomenology, in various guises, has contributed (and continues to contribute) mightily to past and current debates on media Downloaded by [Frank Tomasulo] at 10:32 14 May 2014 6 F. P. Tomasulo reception. Stadler focuses on the methodological frameworks of Husserl, Heidegger, John Dewey; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roman Ingarden, Wolfgang Iser, and Hans-Robert [auss (the latter two representative of the "reader-response" school of literary criticism), adopting (and adapting) their premises to both critique existing traditions in media scholarship and to analyze how phenomenology can be used as a corrective. Stadler examines several general theories of film/TV-the medium as window, frame, mirror, text, or art object; psychoanalysis; ideology-only to find them wanting in some crucial aspects. In each case, phenomenology can address, and resolve the problems inherent in each theoretical approach. In conclusion, Stadler argues that a viewer's experience of a film or TV program is crucial, and that media theorists ought to be more cognizant of this when formulating methodological paradigms. Linda Singer notes that filmic pleasure has too often been theorized in terms of scopophilia, a psychoanalytic construct that ignores the phenomenology of cinematic gratification. Citing Merleau-Ponty, she contends that the entire experience must be considered, including such situational variables as the darkness and decor of the theater, projector and screen, specificity of the medium, and circumstances of exhibition. Singer argues that film viewing is thus not a perverse "guilty pleasure" associated with voyeurism but a social jouissance akin to group infatuation. She goes on to consider the joys of certain formal tropes (color, use of space, zooms, closeups, montage and continuity editing, jump cuts) that are beyond the viewer's control. By implying a passive spectatorial agenc)T, Singer appears to disagree with the other authors. Indeed, she suggests that it is precisely the unbidden nature of film imagery that produces pleasure, the delectation of surprise and suspense. In the end, however, Singer posits a link between pleasure and signification whereby filmic perception becomes a form of access to the world and social understanding that grants the viewer activity, productivity, and empowerment. Gaylyn Studlar's thesis is that feminist film theory can profitably appropriate some elements of phenomenology Although phenomenology has been seen as a male-dominated (although theoretically genderless) and apolitical philosophical discourse while feminism is more interested in changing the world than interpreting it, Studlar believes that phenomenology's privileging of the spectator's subjectivity in the creation of meaning can be likened to feminist efforts to "bracket out" male notions of reality and cinema. Using Merleau-Ponty's and Paul Ricoeur's rereadings of Husserl, she holds that such ideas could help emphasize women's lived experiences of their own Lebenswelt. Rather than viewing women as constructed or "interpellated" by film texts (thus theorizing them as passive and transhistorical subject/objects in the face of patriarchal cinema), Studlar instead proffers a phenomenological social theory of women's experience with cinema that valorizes the freedom of intentionality of female viewers, seeing them as women who can see. In short, phenomenology can assist feminism in resituating the self in relation both to male representations of women and to women's representations of themselves. Jenny Nelson's investigation of television reruns propels phenomenology into a new arena. Although most phenomenologists thought and wrote about the experience of temporality (what Husserl called "internal time-consciousness"), few related it to the specificity of televisual imagery. Nelson makes use of Merleau-Ponty's semiotic notions of the tic and operative intentionality to underscore her contention Downloaded by [Frank Tomasulo] at 10:32 14 May 2014 Phenomenology: An Introduction 7 that the TV rerun is the essence of our most dominant communications medium. Although she often employs an empirical social science research model, Nelson also explores the sheer phenomenology of our qualitative experience of les temps perdu televisuel. She points out that, although the temporal structure of the individual rerun episode is the same each time it is viewed, the experience is different each time-in part because of the perceiver's agel memory lapses, historical vicissitudes, differing television codes, and an inherent self-reflexivity built into the rerun. These time-based elements of reruns conspire to return us to "those thrilling days of yesteryear" and allow us constantly to reexperience, through embodied performance, our individual and collective pasts and our attempts to understand their significance. Although Steve Lipkin's concluding article is also devoted to the television medium, it takes an entirely different tact. Lipkin expands the conventional Bazinian model of cinematographic mimesis, which is based on indexical qualities associated with the photochemical properties of film, to an analysis of the electronic resolution of video. The respective technologies of film and video produce a different sense of "presence," of resemblance to the real, in the two media. On one level, ontological differences arise because of their respective apparatuses. Film reflects light off a screen while TV radiates light from a tube. On another level, film (especially the wide-screen process) expands the depicted world to lifelike proportions/ while video generally compresses and reduces space, making it "smaller than life." From a phenomenological perspective, the role of the video viewer becomes more, not less, active asa result of this McLuhanesque "low definition" or "coolness." Finally, Lipkin compares the "presence" of video to painting in terms of Bazin's view of the delimiting effects of the frame. This collection of essays has a long history: As guest editor, I wish to thank those individuals whose assistance and forbearance over many months helped to bring this volume to fruition. A special debt is owed to QRFV executive editor Ronald Gottesman for suggesting the concept. Both the former and current managing editors of QRFV-Hamid Naficy and Mark Williams, respectively-worked tirelessly on the many details of the production and editorial processes. Current editorin-chief Michael Renov was there for the entire four-year period of gestation. And even during her struggle with cancer the late Katherine S. Kovacs provided positive commentary, encouragement, and reassurance about the value of this issue. Above all, the authors of the following articles need to be complimented for their stimulating ideas, intellectual courage, and infinite patience. As this issue was going to press, I learned of the untimely death of one of our contributors, Linda Singer of Miami University. Linda succumbed to kidney cancer on August 2, 1990. She was 39 years old. I was particularly saddened by this news because Professor Singer shared my interest in exploring the relationships between film and philosophy. She will be missed not only for her intellectual accomplishments, but also for her passion and humor. NOTES 1. Martin Heidegger, Being andTime, trans. John Robinson and Edward MacQuarrie (New York:Harper and Row; 1962), 490, n. i. Downloaded by [Frank Tomasulo] at 10:32 14 May 2014 8 F. ｾ Tomasulo 2. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 83-4. 3. My own reading is that Jacques Derrida's critique of Husserl shifts the focus from consciousness to semiotics, from the subject to the sign. Derrida also wanted to preserve the radical implications of Husserl's epoche by insisting on a "grammatological reduction," a questioning of any notion of presence, intuition, or self-showing. See Jacques Derrida, Speech andPhenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 4-7, 51, 84, and en passim. 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, TheStructure ofBehavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 199. 5. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 130. (Emphasis added.) 6. Ibid., 132. 7. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), viii, xxi. 8. See especially Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 9-16; Dudley Andrew, "The Gravity of Sunrise,"Quarterly ReviewofFilm Studies 2 (August 1977):356-87, and Andrew, "The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory," Wide Angle 2 (1978):44-49. 9. See Edward Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985). 10. Lowry; "Souriau and the Institute of Pilmology," On Film, no. 12 (Spring 1984):3-4. 11. Sigmund Freud, Beyond thePleasure Principle, trans. and edited by James Strachey (New York:W. W. Norton & Company, 1961), 12-17. 12. Giovanna Borradori, II1Weak Thought' and Postmodernism: The Italian Departure from Deconstruction," Social Text, no. 18 (Winter 1987/88):44. 13. Leonard Green, Jonathan Culler, and Richard Klein, "Interview with Fredric Jameson," Diacritics 12 (Fall 1982):82.