INTERROGATION OF THE IMAGE
I remember listening to Stuart Hall a few years back. He was lecturing on the notion of “representation.” Hall has always understood the ways in which power operates. Those, who have power in a society, influence and control representation. It is indeed a given that we live in an image saturated age. So how does a critical thinking person confront power and the images it represents. In that lecture, Hall offered a method to do just that. He called it “interrogation of the image.”
This is not unlike detective work. How often do we see a police drama without an interrogation scene? Almost never. Police dramas must contain at least a scene where the good guys are asking tough questions of a suspect. Spike Lee’s Inside Man starts with an interrogation and makes interrogation the most integral part of the film. One can argue that the entire film is one long interrogation of American history, past, present, and future. With his interrogating film, Lee deconstructs the image of the respected businessman, politician, and others.
Do Americans, who seem to be image savvy, interrogate the images that try to shape their thoughts and run their lives? How often do we ask hard questions about an image? What’s its story? Does it want to sell us an idea? Does it seduce us into something? An image represents a “meaning,” and that is constructed by the image-maker. How often do we stop and think who the image-makers are? Do everyday images of people in advertisements, movies, sports, and corporate environments offer an implicit notion that they are merely representing what already exists? Or do the powers that be construct these representations?
Well, the only way we are going to come close to any sort of an answer is through interrogation of these images. Next time you see a beer commercial, interrogate it. Ask the process by asking, “has beer, historically speaking, always been associated with large female breasts?”
TRANSFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY & TRANSDISCIPLINARITY
Thinking about university teaching, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, “The Justification for the university is that it preserves the connection between zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.” Whitehead believed that a real pedagogy ought to be a transformative pedagogy. Henry Giroux argues that our task in implementing a transformative pedagogy is to prepare the learner to cope with complexity of the world, prosper in it, and positively contribute to it. Indeed, we live in the most complex time of our (human) history, and with this complexity we are faced with new epistemological challenges. The liquid times, as Zygmunt Bauman calls the current era, with its demand of rethinking everything presents us with increasingly complex applications of understandings and perpetually expanding possibilities for interpretation. I should like to add that the “real” world is comprised of instability, ambiguity, contestability, and dynamic change. Within such a complex context there is a paramount need for a pedagogy that fosters learning experiences that enable both the learner and the educator (co-learner) to act purposefully and make this planet a better place to live. The old reductive/disjunctive approach to learning has been a mixed bag of failures and successes. But the traditional approach never brought us to what Basarab Nicolescu calls the golden age. Many thinkers who steadfastly cling onto the reductive/disjunctive tradition have been calling for a social revolution to return us to the imagined golden age. However, as Nicolescu points out there was never any golden age to begin with. He pointedly argues that even if one supposes that a Golden Age existed in time immemorial, such a return would have to be accompanied by an inner revolution of dogmatism, the mirror image of the social revolution.
The above approaches are effective but limited. In other words, with multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity there exists one dominant discipline that is in the center of knowledge production. As Gregory Bateson taught us, transdisciplinarity is a creative process in ways of which the inquirer, informed by certain epistemological assumptions, challenges knowledge production and its organization. In the context of pedagogy, this will require a creative inquiry that is both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. Finally, I would have to agree with Bateson, “transdisciplinarity is more or less a promise.” So, to be a bit Derridaean, I am talking about the possibility of an impossiblity.
THE POWER OF CINEMA
The intersection of cultural studies (e.g., cinema studies) and social sciences offers the possibilities for scholar/practitioners to confront history as more than simulacrum and ethics as something other than the casualty of incommensurable language games. If we want to be agents of social change we need to assert a philosophy of life that makes the relationship among authority, ethics, and power central to a paradigm that expands rather than closes down the possibilities of a democratic human society. Within this discourse, images do not dissolve reality into simply another text; on the contrary, representations become central to revealing the structures of power relations at work in the complex global order. Planetary thinking, aided by cinema, does not succumb to the whims of the market place. Although the logic of the market place is seen as logic of common sense by many, a pedagogy of cinema can help dismantle this logic. Cinema can effectively help usher in an ongoing movement towards a shared conception of justice and a polycentric-multicultural social order.
Cinema is a medium that belongs to the public realm and it can assist humanity to achieve freedom and fight for social justice. Hannah Arendt articulated it best when she wrote, “Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance.” Cinema, a complex art form and, as astutely coined by Henry Giroux, “a teaching machine,” is also an agent of complexity. Complexity is an intellectual practice, a worldview, a politics, and an ethic. Accordingly, I think, as scholar/practitioners we must strive for making the private agenda public.
With the digital revolution, starting in the 1980s an exciting diverse cinematic movement has been evolving around the globe. This collective movement that uses cinema for social justice is in a similar vein to that of the French New Wave, however, there is one striking difference. This global movement is not a cinematic culture replacing another, but rather the integration of various cinematic styles and philosophical approaches being produced at the same time. This postmodern market place is transcending Hollywood and seriously challenging its hegemony.
FILM THINKING FOR ITSELF
As I was reorganizing my study—again– I came across some dusty research from a distant past. This was material on the impact of Dada and Surrealism on cinema. As it is well documented, all those European filmmakers of yesteryear who were heavily involved in Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism-let’s just say, Avant-Garde cinema-were profoundly influenced by Henri Bergson.
So…can film (i.e., cinema) think for itself? And can this thinking be intuitive to the extent of development of a relationship with an existing reality? My starting assumption is “Yes, it can.”
Something else, cinema is also a meditation on time. Bergson discusses two forms of time: pure time and mathematical time. Pure time is of course real duration (perhaps when we dream we are experiencing real time). Cinema is the vehicle that captures time and space and gives us a reflection of “real time.” For Bergson intuition is “a method of thinking in duration which reflects the continuous flow of reality.” Anchored in that thought, for me, cinema is one powerful medium that can build a bridge between intellect and intuition, as proposed by Bergson to be the perfect combination to produce what he calls “dynamic knowledge of reality.”
So Bergson considers the flow of time and concludes that real duration of time cannot be measured or experienced intellectually. In other words to experience “real time” we must be tuned in to our intuition. Bergson believed that intuitive knowledge is the ultimate knowledge. That is a provocative and ambitious statement. Bergson gets himself in trouble with finalist statements like that. In his Radiance of Being, Allan Combs states,
“Bergson’s emphasis on the role of the human as the highest expression of the evolutionary ascent led to the criticism that he was a ‘finalist.’” But Combs does point out that “his most important contribution for us was his creation of a major evolutionary perspective which placed the inner dimension of consciousness on an equal footing with external material organic processes” (p. 68)
Morin also explicates the dream process as follows,
“Dreams show us that there is no solution of continuity between subjectivity and magic, since they are subjective or magical depending on whether they occur by day or at night. Until we wake up, these projections of images seem real to us. Until we go to sleep, we laugh at their unreality. Dreams show us how the most intimate processes can become alienated to the point of reification and how these alienations can reintegrate subjectivity. The essence of the dream is subjectivity. Its being is magic. It is projection-identification in its pure state.
There are filmmakers that translate dreams into cinema effectively (e.g., David Lynch, the Coen brothers, Ingmar Bergman, Terrance Malick, and Andre Tarkovsky). But these dreams become a form of reality and form a life of their own. Think about it, projection of lights and shadows on a two dimensional flat screen in a dark room becomes a three dimensional reality that also contains in it many implicit dimensions. Each audience has his/her own unique relationship with this projected dream and interacts with it in a unique manner, as if the film is thinking for itself and adjusting its presentation according to the specific audience’s consciousness. The process of “projection-identification” gives life to this organism. Or does it?