B ernd h erzogenrath Towards a Practical Aesthetics 1 When in 1750 Alexander Baumgarten published the first part of his Aesthetica, he basically invented a new philosophical discipline, or, rather, he re|invented philosophy by defining a new way of how to perceive its objects of inquiry: logical analysis could not cope with the complexity of individual objects. Thus, logic had to be complemented by a non-abstractive way of analysis Baumgarten dubbed aesthetics, a theory of sensate thinking� Sensible or aesthetic cognition, ‘clear-obscure’ as it is, is of the utmost importance for ‘making sense’ of the world—the ‘logic of sense’ has to be aligned with the ‘logic of sensation�’ It might be of interest here that Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (which he considers both a science and an art: a ‘science of the lower cognitive faculties’ and an ‘art of beautiful thinking,’ see §1) opens with a chapter on ‘heuristics’— which does not denote a clear-cut method (the term method in fact denotes a μετά όδός, meta-hodos, a way afterwards, a retroactive abstraction, a recipe), but is related to a (non-finite) inventiveness, an improvisation—and here Baumgarten relates to the αυτοσχεδιασ-ματα (improvisations) of the child that imitates beauty when it sees it, not merely apprehends it (like the adult), (see § 57)� Thus, what is at stake is not so much the issue of method, but rather the question of art’s specific potential for expressing sensible cognition, with aesthetics as an analogon rationis, both analogous to and different from rational logics� Aesthetics thus counts as a defense of the Sensual as the Non-Representational, and this is not only evident in the content of thinking, but also in new forms of presentation, in which figures of thought reveal themselves� The second part of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, though never published, was to be called Aesthetica practica—‘practical aesthetics�’ And although it is safe to say that Baumgarten here wanted to show practical examples of his theory, I would rather pick up the thread of heuristics and improvisation, and would like to speculate on aesthetics as a science|art that mimics and imitates beauty and art in its performance� That is a ‘practical aesthetics’ not as an ‘aesthetic practice,’ but an approach that takes aesthetic’s double signification as both science and art seriously and performs it from the perspective of the philosopher, not the artist� It takes the practice of the artwork not as its object of analysis, but as its own modus operandi: not thinking about art according to external (mostly rational, propositional) categories that more often than not follow the logic of the ‘written word,’ but thinking with art, thinking with images, thinking with sound, etc� 1 A longer version of this essay is appearing as the introduction to Practical Aesthetics, ed� Bernd Herzogenrath (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019)� 134 B ernd h erzogenrath According to Gilles Deleuze, one of the philosophers who, I argue, was instrumental in the notion of thinking with art 2 : [t]he theory of cinema does not bear on the cinema, but on the concepts of the cinema, which are no less practical, effective or existent than cinema itself. […] Cinema’s concepts are not given in cinema� And yet they are cinema’s concepts, not theories about cinema� … … Cinema itself is a new practice of images and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as conceptual practice� (Cinema 2; Deleuze 280) For Deleuze, art cannot be contained by making it conform to pre-existent categories and concepts, explanations and thus ‘judgments’ that are brought to it from the outside� For Deleuze, the most important question is if—and in how far—art addresses life, how its creativity liberates vitality and processuality [of affects, of thought], or if it is rather a blockage to these forces, containing the free-play of vitality and making it ‘play by the rules’ of any given institution, language system, or ‘organization�’ Art thus is evaluated by the way it either enhances or reduces our powers to act, and it does so by affecting us in a particular manner� Art—as well as life—is a process of production and creation, and by that very characteristic involved in the bringingforth of ‘newness,’ which by definition is what evades ‘normative criteria: ’ the indeterminable processes of both life and art can only be evaluated by and on their own terms, by features that are immanent to these processes themselves, but not by explanatory logics external to them. What is at stake here is not representation, but presentation—practical Aesthetics is not the theorization of the sensual, but the inquiring and accompanying production of sensuality—or sensual thinking� Philosophy here does not morph into art, but proceeds in a playful proximity to art. As Deleuze specifies in one of his seminars, “between a philosophical concept, a painted line and a musical sonorous bloc, resonances emerge, very, very strange correspondences that one shouldn’t even theorize, I think, and which I would prefer to call ‘affective’ … these are privileged moments” (“Deleuze 22”)� 3 These moments privilege an affect where thought and sensation merge into a very specific way of “doing thinking” beyond representation and categorization—here, ‘traditional [rational] thinking’ faces its own shortcomings� This is why, for Deleuze [and Guattari], “[p]hilosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience” (Deleuze and Guattari 218), in order to focus on the ways in which art, philosophy, and science ask the same kinds of questions and relate to each other’s “findings,” as 2 Gesa Ziemer, who in Verletzbare Orte proposes a similar project, singles out Deleuze and Blumenberg as two ‘thinkers with art�’ She relates her idea of ‘practical aesthetics’ to the architect Gottfried Semper, while I think that already Baumgarten points into a similar direction� 3 My translation of : “Alors je dirais que le concept philosophique n’est pas seulement source d’opinion quelconque, il est source de transmission très particulière, ou entre un concept philosophique, une ligne picturale, un bloc sonore musical, s’établissent des correspondances, des correspondances très très curieuses, que à mon avis il ne faut même pas théoriser, que je préférerais appeler l’affectif en général … � Là c’est des moments privilégiés�” Towards a Practical Aesthetics 135 it were� Whereas science involves the creation of functions, of a propositional mapping of the world, art involves the creation of blocs of sensation [or affects and percepts], and philosophy involves the invention of concepts� Yet, since “sciences, arts, and philosophies are equally creative” (5), it might be fruitful, as Deleuze proposes, “to pose the question of echoes and resonances between them” (Negotiations; Deleuze 123)� Film Philosophy During the last ten to fifteen years, the convergence of film studies and philosophy has become the recent ‘big thing,’ with a community growing fast, and on a global scale� However, under the heading of Film Philosophy, different approaches have found an umbrella term—mainly an American tradition, represented by scholars such as Noel Carroll, Thomas Wartenberg, a�o�, and a German tradition, with researchers such as Martin Seel, Gertrud Koch� Both these approaches relate film to philosophical questions (ethics, justice, aesthetics, anthropology, etc�), but leave the disciplinary boundaries intact— film may illustrate philosophical problems, but these problems ‘belong’ to the field of [academic] philosophy proper. However, there is an alternative tradition in which philosophy takes film as a serious field of philosophical engagement: beginning with Henri Bergson this contestation culminated in recent decades in the approaches of the film philosophies of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, who argued for an appreciation of film as philosophy� How can this relationship between film and philosophy be thought anew? Can philosophy renew our concepts of film as art and/ or as a medium? And vice versa: can film change our understanding of philosophy as a scholarly practice and endeavor? Should both concepts of ‘film’ and ‘philosophy’ be reconsidered once we dare their encounter? Regarding the recent ubiquity of neuroscience in the humanities, a new perspective opens, which puts a focus on the process of thinking itself: what is thought and where does it occur? Examining the philosophical status of film, this project thus situates it within a greater context: is there something like cinematic thought? And if cinema can be a medium of thought, how does it relate to philosophical enquiries or to scientific analyses of this process? Can those disciplines benefit from each other? This essay argues that the two questions “what is film? ” (as a slight rephrasing of Bazin’s question What is Cinema? ) and “what is philosophy? ” (as Deleuze and Guattari have asked) are intimately intertwined—also in a very pragmatic and institutional way� When Roger Odin, one of the pioneers of ‘institutionalized’ Film Studies in France, was called to office in the early 1980s, he was faced with the fact that the field of Film Studies as a discipline did not (yet) exist. But, far from despairing, Odin rather felt confirmed in his belief that film and cinema are not suitable objects for an academic discipline� By that he did not mean to discredit cinema as an object worthy of academic analysis—on the contrary, Odin’s firm belief was that cinema 136 B ernd h erzogenrath opens up a whole field of research, with a whole range of disciplines contributing. While Odin was taking Gilbert Cohen-Séat’s ‘Institut de filmologie’ as a model, which was an interdisciplinary institute par excellence, he found that his own institute was still miles away from that ideal� But nevertheless, the amount of film scholars worldwide that have a degree in another subject (Odin himself is a linguist by training)—be it one of the National Philologies, Art History, Musicology, or Philosophy—is overwhelming� So, also institution-wise, an interdisciplinary approach to film (including philosophical expertise) is not only desired, but fact� 4 In the 1980s, cognitive film studies discovered the brain for the analysis of film. Against the “Grand Theories” of psychoanalytic and [post]structuralist theory they employed the findings of cognitive psychology for explaining the processes in the spectator’s mind to ‘make meaning,’ seeing the understanding of film as a rational and cognitive endeavor that applies scientific “theories of perception, information processing, hypothesis-building, and interpretation” (Cognitivism; Currie 106)� At that time, the dominant strand in neuroscience was the field of ‘computation’: the brain here was essentially seen as an input|output machine of representation� Approximately at the same time, Gilles Deleuze, in the ‘new image of thought’ he developed (among others) in his two Cinema books, also utilizes the concept of the brain, with implicit and explicit references to on the one hand Henri Bergson, and on the other hand to a more constructivist brand of neurosciences in the wake of Maturana, Varela and Changeux, seeing both film and brain as agencies of the ‘creation of worlds’—“the Brain is the Screen” (see Flaxman). Certainly, the brain that cognitive film studies, neuroscience, and Deleuze talk about is not the same ‘object|concept’ in these discourses� Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience into the so called 4EAcognitivism that considers the brain as embodied, enacted, extended, embedded and affective might however create new insights into the encounters of brains and screens� Here, in contrast to classical computation, and even in contrast to ‘connectionism,’ which is more advanced than computation in so far that it involves a far more complex [and a-centered] dynamics, thinking finally does not take place inside our skull (only) anymore, but ‘out of our heads’ [to quote the title of Alva Noë’s book]� Yet one of the main difficulties that impede a smooth and simple marriage of film studies, [Deleuzian] philosophy, and the neurosciences is the fact that the brain in question is in fact many brains� Not only do the concepts of the brain between these various disciplines differ, but Deleuze himself uses the brain in different guises� First, on a very general level, he traces the motif or metaphor of the brain in movies by Alain Resnais and Stanley Kubrick� Far more important in the context of our interest however are Deleuze’s references to the philosophy of Henri Bergson and his ‘new conception’ of the brain—Bergson “introduced a profound element of transformation: the brain was now only an interval [écart], a void, nothing but a void, between 4 I am very grateful to Vinzenz Hediger for this information� Towards a Practical Aesthetics 137 a stimulation and a response“ (Deleuze 211)� In a universe that consists, as Bergson has it, of images in motion that all react on one another, the subject (and the brain) functions as “centers of indetermination” (Matter and Memory; Bergson 36), in which the direct cause|effect or stimulus|response reaction is slowed down� This idea of the brain as a center of indetermination is supported by findings in neurosciences that focus on the brain as “an uncertain system” (Deleuze 211), as rhizomatic neural networks� Deleuze is here referring to Jean-Pierre Changeux’ Neuronal Man; The Biology of Mind, and Steven Rose’s The Conscious Brain (which also refers to Delisle Burns’ The Uncertain Nervous System): what it boils down to for Deleuze is that [w]e can consider the brain as a relatively undifferentiated mass and ask what circuits, what kinds of circuit, the movement-image or time-image traces out, or invent, because the circuits aren’t there to begin with … the brain’s the hidden side of all circuits, and these can allow the most basic conditioned reflexes to prevail, as well as leaving room for more creative tracings, less “probable” links� The brain’s a spatio-temporal volume: it’s up to art to trace through it the new paths open to us today� You might see continuities and false continuities as cinematic synapses—you get different links, and different circuits, in Godard and Resnais, for example. The overall importance or significance of cinema seems to me to depend on this sort of problem� (Negotiations; Deleuze 60-1) One of the most decisive questions that emerges in the wake of thinking the interrelation between media—and here, more specifically, film—and thought is related to the respective status of “philosophy�” As we have seen, there seems to be a great divide between analytic and continental “schools of thought�” A possible answer is best summarized by the Cavell—inspired words of Stephen Mulhall: I do not look at these films as handy or popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that philosophers do. Such films are not philosophy’s raw material, nor a source for its ornamentation; they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action—film as philosophizing. (Mulhall 4) In this claim, films themselves are seen as capable of doing a unique kind of philosophical work (even though Mulhall’s characterization of films philosophizing ‘in just the ways that philosophers do’ might still be in need of some qualification). Thus, the question is, what kind of knowledge (affects and percepts themselves giving rise to concepts) does the medium film generate qua medium? Ultimately, the question ‘what is film philosophy’ might better be restated as ‘where is film philosophy’? Does it reside in the institutionalized version of [academic] philosophy (‘proper’), or might it also be said to be inherent to film itself? An important qualification has to be made here: the question of “what is philosophy” has to be addressed again at this point, because the different relations of film and philosophy owe a lot to the definition of the philosophical. If the rubric of film as philosophy claims that films or cinema can do philosophy, this does not mean the institutionalized version of academic 138 B ernd h erzogenrath philosophy, i�e�, the production of propositional knowledge, but rather what Deleuze and Guattari call the “creation of concepts” (What is Philosophy? ; Deleuze and Guattari 5). This entails a definition of philosophy that goes beyond its traditional territorialization, one that is extensional, forming assemblages rather than propositions, what—again—Deleuze has called ‘the new image of thought�’ 5 Following this approach, the terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘thinking’ do not necessarily refer to rational propositions and|or a purely neural activity, though� Thinking is not just a representation of the world as ‘it is’—as Deleuze puts it, “[s]omething in the world forces us to think� This something is an object not of recognition, but a fundamental encounter” (Difference and Repetition; Deleuze 139).. While the idea of ‘thinking as (re-)cognition’ is based on the verification of ideologies, of pre-collected knowledge, customs and articles of faith, the notion of ‘thinking as an encounter’ shatters our epistemological and experiential habits, it produces a break in our ‘normal,’ habitual perspective of the world and enables the possibility to approach alternative points of view and means of thought and to question our common practices. Thus film-thought is philosophical since it offers its own genuine cinematic reflections about the world� According to Deleuze these are especially new approaches to concepts of images, time, space, and movement (concepts which are grounded in the peculiarity of the medium as a stream of ‘moving images’)� In an interview with Raymond Bellour and François Ewald, Deleuze stated, “I’ve never been worried about going beyond metaphysics or any death of philosophy� The function of philosophy, still thoroughly relevant, is to create concepts” (Negotiations 136). This affirmative function of philosophy is also a call to transdisciplinarity, so that even when Deleuze was working on “painting and cinema: images, on the face of it … [he] was writing philosophy books” (ibid� 137)� In defense of Deleuze against Sokal|Bricmont’s attempt to control and regulate the limits of the disciplinary fields, Paul Harris points out that Deleuze’s work in contrast shows “how productive it is to work with and think through material from others and other fields … , working with ideas cooked up in geology and geography, zoology and ornithology, archeology and paleontology, and even mathematics and physics” (Harris 24-5)� The philosophical practice of ‘creating concepts,’ as a creation of ‘newness’ as well, necessitates, according to Deleuze, that philosophy enters into manifold relations with arts and sciences, since philosophy “creates and expounds its concepts only in relation to what it can grasp of scientific functions and artistic constructions� … Philosophy cannot be undertaken independently of science or art” (Difference and Repetition xvi). It is these resonances and exchanges between philosophy, science, and art that make philosophy ‘creative,’ not reflective. These relations—from the perspective of philosophy— are vital for reasons internal to philosophy itself, that is, vital for the creation 5 With a nod to Arthur Danto, Robert Sinnerbrink has shown this tightrope act as an oscillation between the philosophical ‘disenfranchisement’ of film and its ‘re-enfranchising�’ See Sinnerbrink� Towards a Practical Aesthetics 139 of ‘concepts,’ and—from the perspective of film philosophy—in resonance with the percepts and affective logics and modalities of art in general, and film in particular. This approach attempts to bring film studies and philosophy into a productive dialogue without assigning the role of a dominant and all-encompassing referee to one of these disciplines� Rather, it is about relating the diverse entry points—the many colors of the spectrum—toward each other in a fertile manner in order to establish, ultimately, a media philosophy that puts the status, the role, and the function of the medium—here, film—into a new perspective: no longer are the representational techniques of the medium at the center of inquiry but rather its ability to “think” and to assume an active role in processes of thought, in finding alternative and differentiating point(s) of view� If we take this a step further, relating this approach to the whole range of media [production], but also take a step back, and see what this approach basically means, we begin to see the seeds of a new ‘media philosophy’— not talking about media by way of ‘philosophy proper,’ but by realizing the ‘philosophical qualities and impacts’ of the medium: it all starts from the assumption that our memory, perception, and thinking is not just a given, as a bodyand weightless, immaterial logics, reason or internal process that takes place behind the walls of our skull and is purely mental—there is always a ‘material basis: ’ as Nietzsche already claimed, “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts” (qtd� in Kittler, 200)� From here, we can derive the media-philosophical insight that media [help us] think [differently]� Media thus reveals themselves as the body [or, better: different bodies] of thought� It is important to note that these ‘bodies’ are not ‘retroactive’ to those thoughts that they ‘materialize,’ just like the telescope is not retroactive to the discovery of planets—media are coextensive with the thoughts they ‘allow.’ Media philosophy, as Lorenz Engell has put it, is an event, even a praxis—but of the media themselves� It takes place through and in the media in question—and this in turn opens up the question if this philosophy could only be described by translating it into the human ‘master-medium: ’ philosophical writingthinking … The Audiovisual Essay One way to deal with this problem of ‘media change’ is a form of aesthetic presentation that stays within the realm of the art form or medium it reflects on, thereby using the very modus operandi that defines that very art form/ medium— 6 6 This does not mean that a Practical Aesthetics rules out the option of writing with regard to any other medium—it would have to be a writing, though, that in its style thinks with rather than about� See also Herzogenrath (2019)� 140 B ernd h erzogenrath Question: does film analysis have to exist in the form of words alone, words in written or spoken language, as conventionally published in books and journals, or as verbally delivered in lecture halls, or on a DVD audio commentary? Might one not perform a thinking with film with the very tools of the cinema itself—with images and sound, that is? Hence the audiovisual essay (and I like the term audiovisual essay much better than other terms such as Videographic or Digital Criticism, because it both keeps the provisional and experimental character of the ‘form of the essay’ intact, as Adorno described it, and it also makes a point of the ‘relational character,’ or the montage, that is characteristic of the audiovisual essay as well)� Thus, even if there are academic audiovisual essays that present a combination of written commentary and filmand sound-clips, a more radical version of the audiovisual essay—‘truer’ to the idea of practical aesthetics, that is—consists in the form of a creative montage and juxtaposition of images, sequences of preexisting film works that ‘realizes’ a filmic idea, a film-thought, so to speak. In his 1919 dissertation on Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik [The Concept of Art-Criticism in German Romanticism], Walter Benjamin describes one of the key notions of the Romantics’ aesthetic as follows: Thus, criticism is, as it were, an experiment on the artwork, one through which the latter’s own reflection is awakened, through which it is brought to consciousness and to knowledge of itself� (151) The work of art—according to Benjamin—thus already contains its own criticism, a knowledge of its own which, if we follow Deleuze, is not (yet) conceptual or, rather: propositional� And today, there are quite some approaches to different arts that work on that brink between art and science, ‘sensible cognition’ and proposition, aesthetic knowledge and rational knowledge, while thinking with art (or the artistic material) rather than about it� New forms of aesthetic research and presentation, such as media philosophy, the audiovisual essay, the audio paper, artistic research, are no longer only a topic or an object of study, but a medium of mediation� Aesthetic modes of representation are increasingly being incorporated into critical academic practice, with the role of the aesthetic for “thought” coming to matter more directly than mere discussions of the aesthetic in whatever discipline hitherto could envision� This is no longer a question of what kind of critical methodologies we adopt to understand works of art, but of how we think with works of art—how they both shape our understanding and experience of the world, and also how they serve as ‘partners in crime’ to our thought� If a practical aesthetics almost performs a thinking with images, with sounds, etc�, such a non-writerly, non-propositional thinking pushes a strictly representational and logocentric reflection to its limits. And if what we have is a companion, then that relation is not one of hierarchy, subservience or distance, but is instead a relation predicated on an attraction that cannot be explained in terms of absolute identity� To have a partner or companion is to be with someone whose sensibility one shares, but in ways that are not identical, or else there would be nothing left to say or do� Towards a Practical Aesthetics 141 Practical aesthetics cannot be reduced to a common singular practice� It is a mobile and disparate set of practices, a dynamic approach� A practical aesthetics, thus understood, can be described as thinking with art, and with media, in order to find new ways to create worlds and thus to perceive and experience the world in different ways. Works Cited Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Ästhetik/ Aesthetica� Trans�, Ed� Dagmar Mirbach� Band 1, Lateinisch-deutsch. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007. Benjamin, Walter� “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism�” Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926� Ed� Marcus Bullock and Michael W� Jennings� Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1996� 116-200� Bennett, Jill� Practical Aesthetics. Events, Affect and Art after 9/ 11� Tauris, 2012� Bergson, Henri� Matter and Memory� Trans� N� M� Paul and W� S� Palmer� New York: Zone Books, 1991� Currie, Gregory� “Cognitivism�” A Companion to Film Theory� Ed� Toby Miller and Robert Stam� Malden: Blackwell 2004� Deleuze, Gilles� “Cinéma cours 22�” Cours Vincennes - St Denis: le plan, 2nd November 1983, Web� 22 March 2019� ---� Cinema 2. The Time-Image� London: Athlone Press, 1989� ---. Difference and Repetition� New York: Columbia UP, 1994� ---� Negotiations 1972-1990� New York: Columbia UP, 1995� ---, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia UP, 1994� Flaxman, Gregory. The Brain Is the Screen. Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema� Ed� Flaxman, Gregory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Harris, Paul A� “Deleuze’s Cinematic Universe of Light: A Cosmic Plane of Luminance�” SubStance 39: 1 (2010): 115-124� Herzogenrath, Bernd� “Et in Academia Ego: Affect and Academic Writing�” How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices. Eds� Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 216-34. Kittler, Friedrich A� Gramophone, Film, Typewriter� Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999� Mulhall, Stephen� On Film� 2 nd ed� London: Routledge, 2008� Noë, A� Out of Our Heads. Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness� New York: Hill and Wang, 2009� Sinnerbrink, Robert� “Disenfranchising Film? On the Analytic-Cognitivist Turn in Film Theory�” Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides� Eds� Jack Reynolds et� al� London and New York: Continuum, 2010� 173-89� Sinnerbrink, Robert� “Re-Enfranchising Film: Towards a Romatic Film-Philosophy�” New Takes in Film-Philosophy� Eds� Havi Carel and Greg Tuck� Blasingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011� 25-47� Ziemer, Gesa� Verletzbare Orte. Entwurf einer praktischen Ästhetik. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2008�