Towards a Natural Film Philosophy

Hunter Vaughan

Towards a Natural Film-Philosophy

What might constitute a natural film-philosophy? In asking myself this question, I realized just how many moving parts there were in this proposal, and was forced to take a step back, another step back, to return to multiple square ones and then to find their overlap, the degree zero of this Venn Diagram. Firstly, it requires a negotiated reframing of the notion of film-philosophy, whose dual terms return us to two of the twentieth-century’s fundamental critical and cultural questions: what is philosophy, and what is cinema? In answering these questions to my own satisfaction, the next step seemed logical.

As Wittgenstein pursues in his later philosophy of language, the goal of

philosophy is not conceptual but is existential and even ethical: to arrive at a harmony between thought and action, wherein we live in accordance with our beliefs, wherein we draw some coherent harmony between what we mean and what we express. In other words, philosophy is not an internal interrogation, but instead pursues the external manifestation of abstract theory. Merleau-Ponty eschews this slightly, positing philosophy as the coming to terms with our inter-subjective coexistence as beings-in-the-world. In both cases, philosophy is not a static condition, but a flux in action. I would reconcile these two so as to understand philosophy as the ongoing quest to live in harmony with the mind and the world, a transcendental ethics that binds our moral beliefs to our actions, and the two to the world around us. The logical extension of this would be natural philosophy, which

considers “being in the world” to reach beyond inter-human action, to a world where nature itself is granted a slice of that sweet inter-subjective pie.

To allow nature entry to the human is a surprisingly radical notion to

western philosophy; as Michel Serres notes in his 1990 The Natural Contract, with his usual clairvoyance, our conceptualization of the human condition and social contract must extend beyond the local and even the global, to the planetary: “global history enters nature,” Serres writes as a summation of civilization; “global nature enters history,” he continues with a pointed shift, “is something utterly new in philosophy.”1 As time and carbon bend history toward ecological crisis, philosophy must adjust for an inevitable confrontation of ecology; meanwhile, so has the latter curved toward a philosophical paradigm. In his aptly titled Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, ecologist Gregory Bateson insisted that we bring environmental science out of its pigeon hole and redefine ecology as “the act of dwelling, of occupying a mental and physical space,” thus catapulting the central dualism of Cartesian philosophy to a view of ecology that is no longer simply an empiricist science of nature, but is instead an ethics beyond the human, a moralism of our coexistence with the space around us.2

But what of cinema, you might ask—and rightly so. I believe that these

preliminary notes might help us to update the underlying concerns of Andre Bazin’s classic question: “what is cinema?” While cinema is certainly a series of texts, a dynamic of aesthetic practices, a network of identity constructions, a bricolage of 1 The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 4 2 Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 96.

media, and a megaphone of ideology, I would like to offer an understanding of cinema in the tradition of philosophy and ecology: cinema is what binds us to the earth, what externalizes our internal; it is our most technologically updated form of being-in-the-world. Not through its representations, but through its practice, both as a mode of artistic production and as a social projection of values and desires—a cultural contract between material use and human reception that has profound natural repercussions. The most ecologically disruptive and demanding popular art yet developed, cinema is civilization’s heightened testament to the strain on natural resources and the production of waste we will abide for our culture industries; consequently, an eco-materialism of film must interrogate the concrete ramifications of this industry, and a true natural philosophy of cinema would incorporate a social understanding of how our collective use of cinema marks that liminal space between our beliefs and our actions into a material study of its impact on “global nature”.

In addressing the relationship between film and philosophy, I find it valuable

to return to the conceptual bedrock of my previous work, which theorizes the form of film representation according to modern philosophy’s guiding problem: the relationship between subject and object. As almost all previous eco-critical approaches to film and media studies have revolved around the problem of representation, perhaps this methodology—textual analysis, the problem of representation—is an important place to initiate a venture in new directions. While looking at different films’ representations of nature, it is important to keep in mind that the content is not always the message: that the connotations of how the content

is framed, how subjective and objective worlds are arranged, reveals a more profound and significant philosophical logic. The typical binary hierarchy found in mainstream cinema, which places the human subject in superior conflict with a perspective-less object-nature, is manifested on levels of narrative, form, and practice from production methods to marketing rhetoric, thus consolidating the classical subject-object dualism on all levels: textuality, aesthetics, and industry; denotation, connotation, and discourse.

Challenging the classical organization of subject-object relations, and the

ideological hierarchies consequent of these relations, is an important bond between the identity-based politics of post-structuralism and the rise of environmentalism, as Verena Andermatt Conley maps out in her 1997 work, Ecopolitics. Environmental discourse of the 1990s, she argues, owes much to the rhetoric of 1960s political and intellectual movements, with a rejection of the classical subject-object binary being central to critiquing the treatment of women, non-European cultures and, today, nature itself. The evolution of postwar thought that climaxed with May ’68 changed how the world is thought; while Sartrean existentialism returned philosophy to a Cartesian anthropocentrism, the subsequent structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers insisted on transcending the limited space of the individual human experience; whereas for Sartre man came before all else, Conley points out, for LeviStrauss life came before man. This de-centering of man (and, ultimately, humanity) returns Conley to Serres’ insistence that “humans do not just dwell as individuals, they weigh on the earth,”3 and reveals that at the bottom of the Levi-Straussian 3 Verena Andermatt Conley, Ecopolitics (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 74

mission is a materialism that is not necessarily Marxist, but instead deeply ecological: “life begins in matter.”4

As such, it may benefit the field of film-philosophy in general to reach beyond

the philosophical and ethical problems represented in film and even manifested in film form, and to return to the alarmingly basic problem that is our existence, as cultural beings, in the natural world. Life begins in matter; let us begin there, and there consider humanity’s weight on the world. Let us convert a rather abstract cost-benefit question like “What is the natural cost we are willing to pay to have art?” to a closer ethical confrontation of the material ramifications of film culture, and what desires and pleasures this culture of spectacle appeals to and satisfies. The binary between culture and nature is as outdated as that between interior subject and exterior objective world, and yet we still consider our human endeavor to be separate from the planet and life with which we coexist. But we can no longer entertain this Cartesian split whereby our mind is in the cultural experience and our body in the physical world, which is the essential goal of spectacle—the replacement of use-value with sign-value, according to Baudrillard; the “disproportion between the reality represented and the means used to represent it,” as cultural theorists Brewster and Jacobs phrase it.5

Spectacle as a regime of art, to adapt Rancière’s terms, should be seen as the

antithesis of ecology, a complicit distraction from the material roots of our actions and the insinuation that this very removal is a goal, autonomous and 4 P.44 5 Brewster and Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.8

inconsequential in and of itself. Might this be the underlying philosophy of culture itself? An eco-materialist approach would reconfigure Baudrillard’s and Brewster and Jacobs’ frameworks to consider the natural resource means necessary to transform reality into signification and would thus compel us toward an understanding of what social and philosophical need culture serves, and how its function is derived from the use of natural resources—and, in doing so must extend the Marxist notion of alienation to the ecosystem that is exploited and yet does not profit from the final product it helps to produce. Like the laborer of Marxist materialism, the natural environment of eco-materialism is rendered invisible by the process, a patent collective denial that is integral to the fine print of our cultural contract. This cultural contract has long been in need of an eco-ethics.

A natural film-philosophy, the metaphysical basis for my larger project to

construct an eco-materialist approach to film culture, seeks to link the economic logic of natural resource usage and waste to a cultural contract that romanticizes the grandeur of the natural while neglecting the deep role that nature plays in our production and discursive practices. In this long haul of civilization, we risk rendering the natural world as our endgame nothingness: the thing that we let get away, the lack that we must forever mourn, but without which we will cease to be able to live. I propose a Wittgensteinian and Merleau-Pontian environmentalism, a philosophy of impact, of action, as we can no longer view cultural practices to have no material consequences. An ecophilologiphenoventalism. Or, more simply: being in the world, where the being is cultural and the world is planetary.