ENFOQUE DE GESTIÓN Y COORDINACIÓN MACRO-REGIONAL

In recent years, theoreticalfilm studies has been invigorated by the approach of reading/viewing cinema alongside and through philosophical texts (both analytic and continental). The study of film and ethics is evidently an important part of this rapprochement of visual culture and thought, but– as we have stated before – the relevance of ethical philosophy to film has not previously been accorded the import it merits. Section 2 of this book con- tributes to the emergent field of ‘film philosophy’ by discussing in detail, and placing in dialogue, a wider range of currents in continental ethical philosophy than have previously been addressed in relation tofilm studies.

The chapters in Section 1 proposed a series of ethical insights about form, content and spectatorship, without grounding these fully in continental philosophical debates. This section aims to demonstrate the gains of reading film and philosophy in conjunction with each other. For example, at the end of Section 1, we began, using films as case studies, to discuss the ethical implications of the fixed model of viewing elaborated by gaze theorists and to suggest that this model was conceptually insufficient. We posed a range of ethically informed and urgent questions about the meanings of images and our relationships to them: can we envisage a viewing relationship that does not work in a straightforwardly objectifying way? Does ethics as an optics disrupt the neat subject–object relationship of the gaze?

In Section 2, we attempt to explore these questions more fully by engaging with poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and postmodern philosophical models that unsettle the mechanism of objectification underpinning gaze theory and figure the interactions between viewers andfilms in more complex ways. The phi- losophical frameworks in question are often in conflict with each other regarding the nature and status of the ethical encounter. It is by taking on board a series of differing perspectives that we acknowledge the complexity and multivalency of the ethical energies at play within the experience of cinema. Any study that considers what it means to ‘experience’ an art form sug- gests some engagement with the idea of phenomenology. The notion that the ethical might be the experiential, relational, cognitive or spiritual mod- ality through which we view the world, is a suggestive one for any theory of the

function of modes of cultural production that appeal to vision. The cinematic apparatus presents to the viewer something other than him or herself, in the light shone by the projection equipment onto the screen. In this, it is a perfect metaphor for phenomenology. Rather than taking phenomenology as our philosophical framework, however, we take instead this broad idea of ‘the phenomenology of cinema’ as our object. The thinkers with whom we engage, such as Levinas, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan, are ones who are influenced by, but largely reacting against, classical phenomenological theory such as that by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In Levinas’s account, for example, the phenomenological model is insufficiently ethical. It presupposes that the Other is the object of the one within a dyadic structure. Levinas calls this ‘totality’ and suggests that an ethical model of otherness would follow on from an openness to‘infinity’, in which the Other is irreducible to ‘my’ perception. For Levinas, the alterity of the Other comes ‘without med- iation’ and ‘signifies by himself’. It is the appearance of the other that calls the subject to a consciousness founded in ethical responsibility. This con- tention is pertinent to the cinema, since the subject–object relation of looking and being looked at are the active–passive mechanisms assumed by almost all theoretical models (especially those of Metz and Mulvey) to underlie spectatorship. We might posit, then, that viewing is always potentially an ethically charged encounter, but one that is inevitably manipulated in cinema, rather than unmediated, as in Levinas’s account of the ethical epiphany. It is this specifically cinematic manipulation of the ethical relation that is of principal concern to us here. Chapter 6, which focuses on Levinas, argues that one of the ways in which the altericide of the subject–object relation (the Other’s reduction to an object of my perception) may be avoided is through a disruption of the visual relationship between viewer and filmic subject-matter. The chapter draws parallels between Levinas’s reservations about the visual and Lanzman’s refusal to represent the Holocaust in Shoah.

One of Foucault’s reservations about phenomenology lies in its privileging of the category of the individual and its location of truth within experience. Foucault sees the ethical as residing in the spaces between socially imposed moral codes and the individual’s (historically located) response to them. To assume that an ethics can be created from perception alone is socially naïve according to Foucault, as the subject exists within power relations and may be at once the subject and object of any interaction. A way in which this can be helpful for our consideration of film lies in the links that can be made between perception and surveillance. Voyeurism as a mechanism of cinematic pleasure is endemic to the psychoanalytic model of subject–object relations. Foucault’s suspicion of phenomenology is matched by his suspicion of psy- choanalytic structures. In the force field of Foucaldian power, the subject is watched from multiple and infinite vantage points such that he or she eventually internalizes this process of watching/being watched and self-surveys. The idea that watching does not take place in a linear way, and that we are

all implicated in our own scrutiny, offers a corrective alternative to the uni- directional model of both phenomenology and gaze theory. One of the aims of Chapter 8 is to advance a reading along these lines.

These are two examples of the ways in which the thinkers addressed in this section simultaneously question phenomenological traditions, while offering alternative theories of perception that restore to the phenomenology of cinema its full complexity.

In the Introduction, we briefly discussed the opposition between a Levi- nasian privileging of the other and an ethics built on fidelity to the self. In the chapters of this section, we look in more detail at these two currents of thought and assess their applicability to an ethically informed theory of the cinema. We have already suggested that ethicizing the cinematic experience means conceptualizing it in terms of responsibility and desire (where these are not straightforward opposites), rather than simply in political or moral terms. In the chapters of Section 1, as already noted, the imperative of responsibility and the ethical right to pleasure were often counterpointed uneasily with each other. Section 2 explores more explicitly the applications of an ethics of alterity and an ethics of the self, by means of detailed con- siderations of what these currents (exemplified, respectively by Levinas and Derrida on the one hand, and Foucault, Lacanian thinkers and Badiou on the other) might offer for cinema studies.

Levinas’s, and to a lesser extent Derrida’s, resistance to figurality on ethical grounds makes them challenging thinkers with which to rethink cinematic representation. They encourage us to ask whether it is possible to witness self–other relations on screen, and to find ways of looking at cinematic sub- jects, that do not commit violence to the Other. Derrida in particular engages with the difficulty – or even impossibility – of being a consummately responsible social agent (and spectator), since responsibility to any one other being (or to any one interpretation of afilmic image) comes at the price of another. Saxton’s discussion of Derrida in Chapter 7 explores a theoretical framework for taking further her enquiry into responsibility and spectator- ship begun in Chapter 4. Lacan andŽižek, conversely, offer models of ethics that sit uncomfortably alongside the privileging of otherness advocated by Levinas and Derrida. Their model of ethics as destitution of the ego in pur- suit of the Real of desire, however, is similarly concerned with abandoning easy notions of a centred moral self and interrogating the limits of being. Reading psychoanalytically informed queer theory by Lee Edelman alongside Lacan andŽižek allows for an interrogation of value judgements that appear so obviously ethical that they risk going unquestioned. The ideals of family, solidarity, community and futurity are unflinchingly explored as ideologies of potential oppression in Edelman’s provocative, ‘anti-social’ readings of Hitchcock’s cinema, which are analyzed in Chapter 9.

Postmodern theory to some extent further complexifies, and to some extent resolves, the productive tensions highlighted above. In its refusal to

reify hierarchies or privilege a given position as ‘true’ or ‘right’ (making it the opposite both of fundamental religious discourses and poststructuralist continental thought-experiments such as Badiou’s anti-ethical ethical abso- lutism), postmodernism can serve in various ways to highlight the impossibilities of forcing compatibility on a range of competing viewpoints, that may each offer valid reading, thinking and viewing strategies with regard to different films and different ethico-political contexts. We end our book with Down- ing’s consideration of postmodern ethics in Chapter 10 because post- modernism’s work of relativization (which is distinct from moral relativism) is particularly valuable. It helps us to unpick some of the grand narratives of modernity that structure the ways in which we might think didactically about film and ethics, and offers us instead a series of strategic counter- readings and counterintuitive philosophies. Via explorations of ethical encounters with the non-human, for example, it expands our horizon of thinking about ethics, and forces a break with the enduringly anthropo- centric terms in which ethics is habitually conceived – even in those forms that resist a traditional humanism. This second section of our book, then, theorizes the moving image’s unique potential to intensify and make acute at times, while skewing and deforming at others, the specifically ethical dimension of looking at the cinema screen or, particularly in the context of postmodern practices, of viewing new digital media.

Blinding visions