My theme is the same as the question raised by David Sorfa in panel 1, yesterday: What is it we think we are doing, when we are doing videographic criticism? I will anticipate the answer that I will circle back to in this short talk: I think we are philosophising.
I will explain what I mean by that at the conclusion of the talk, but for now, I want to note two things. Firstly, please notice my use of the '-ing' form: I don’t say ‘we do philosophy’. but rather ‘we are philosophising’. I want to put the emphasis on the activity. Secondly, I want to remind you of the (dubious) old adage that philosophy never makes progress.
Whatever I might think we are doing in our videographic practice, I want also to crowdsource an (unscientific) answer to David Sorfa’s question by sharing a poll I designed about points of reference for videographic criticism. By ‘points of reference’, I mean other practices, discourses or disciplines that we may think of or refer to in order to make sense of our own videographic practice.
Here’s the poll: https://forms.gle/YTe8VqgRkGoBvAF98 (This is a Google form — you may need to sign in.)
If you wish to respond to the poll, please do so before you read on!
As you’ve seen, the poll has two questions. The first is a multiple-choice list of categories derived from the debates during the symposium itself: I made a note of what practices, discourses or disciplines speakers referred to, and have added a couple of hobby horses of my own. I admit that the alternatives in the second, single-choice, question are designed as proxies: if a respondent chooses the second option ‘the above list is far too broad’, I take the response as indicating a belief that a kind of order needs to be imposed on videographic criticism — that it needs to be codified and normalised. If a respondent chooses the first option ‘the above list is far too narrow’, I take the response as indicating a conviction that the practice of videographic criticism needs to continue to expand, to experiment and to explore.
My choice of vocabulary just now suggests my sympathy with the latter position, of course. (And plainly this poll is an unfair way of determining opinion on the state and future development of videographic criticism; for that reason, I have included a third option for that respondent who wishes to avoid being coerced…) I agree with the thrust of Catherine Grant’s question, posed some years ago:
I’m exaggerating for the sake of argument, but I take from Katie’s statement that, with our current practice of and debates about videographic criticism, we are experiencing a ‘paradigm shift’ in scholarly practice. Paradigm shift is Thomas Kuhn’s term, of course, for when ‘normal science’—the consensus set of frameworks and protocols for explaining phenomena—breaks down in the face of new observations and speculations. I overstate pompously, but for me, we videographic practitioners are in an extended historico-epistemological moment when normal science has broken down and a new paradigm has yet to establish itself. Another way to say this is that we are in a condition of philosophy, or rather, as I want to say: we are engaged or immersed in an activity of philosophising.
As I mentioned, it is sometimes said that philosophy never makes progress and that this is what distinguishes it from science. But as David Papineau has suggested:
the supposed lack of progress in philosophy is an illusion. Whenever philosophy does make progress, it spawns a new subject, which then no longer counts as part of philosophy. In reality, philosophy is full of progress, but this is obscured by the constant renaming of its intellectual progeny.
Once upon a time, for example, physics was part of philosophy. The physical world represented a set of issues for investigation, but the first task was to establish what those issues were. When the physics strand of philosophy had reached a point where the debate could agree on the questions to ask (and these questions became amenable to empirical investigation), physics was spawned as a distinct and ‘scientific’ area of activity.
To apply this to our current condition: at some point, videographic criticism may spin off into multiple codified set of questions and protocols. But for the moment, we simply can’t be sure what the issues are, or how they should appropriately be formulated as questions.
This is the potential of videographic criticism: to discern new sets of concerns in the nebula of audiovisual phenomena, and new ways to grasp and elucidate them. But let’s not discern them prematurely!
For now, I prefer not to know where we are. Let’s be concerned less with content, with analysis, with arguments, and so so, and more with the activity itself of videographic criticism, with developing and playing with methods. Let’s do philosophising.
In his roundtable presentation, Ian Garwood made a brilliant distinction between ‘reproducibility’ — a value seen as essential in experimental science — and ‘remixability’, which he suggested was a better aspiration for videographic work. Remixability seems to me exactly the right goal for our work in the current historico-epistemological interregnum.
