TY - JOUR
AU - PONECH, TREVOR
AB - >I thank Jonathan Walley for an extensive, vigorous critique of my article, “The Substance of Cinema” (SOC).1 The respondent fixes a few of my dilettantish factual errors. Most importantly, he graces me with a chance to defend, clarify, and elaborate some controversial ideas about cinema's ontology. Let's get started straightaway. All samples of gold have the atomic number 79, melt at 1073°C, and resist corrosion by chemical agents other than aqua regia. These facts make true such statements as “this ring is made of gold” and “this ring has no disposition to rust in water.” For something having (or being composed of material having) the atomic number 79 and so forth is what makes it true that it is (composed of) gold. Individual gold samples have other, incidental properties—of shape, size, genesis, function, and so on. In principle, these could be highly uniform across samples; the totality of gold in Montréal could be from the same deposit in northern Ontario. At present, knowledgeable people have a concept of gold that includes belief to the effect that, if a physical quantity is gold, then it must have the aforementioned cluster of three properties—by its very nature. Were the metal on my finger suddenly to lose one or more properties in this cluster, its existence as a gold band would end. Such characteristics are essential to being gold. The problem is discovering which traits, if any, are indispensable to an object's or sort of object's existence. Harder still is this: establishing that things have the essential properties we attribute to them. The larger question is whether our apparent knowledge of real natures is not ultimately a projection of our capacities and conventions of individuating, identifying, and categorizing the world as we do. Maybe the putatively essential properties are just uniformities we have thus far noticed and tracked. A more audacious proposal is that mind‐independently—independent of our conventions and practices—none of the familiar objects, kinds, or essential properties exist. All that exists exists relative to our perceptions and thoughts (and what makes it true that those exist?). Anti‐realist conventionalism disfavors true belief about which properties are possessed essentially; the sop it throws to knowledge is the possibility of making essentialist claims that are correct, relative to prevailing customs.2 All and only samples of cinema are stroboscopic visual displays. By “stroboscopic visual display” (SVD) I intend a spatially‐temporally delimited field of resolving elements, comprising points of light I call ‘pixels,’ which undergoes a rapid cycle of phase changes when it is activated. My hypothesis is essentialist because it posits that being an SVD makes it true that a candidate item is by its nature an instance of cinema. If that item lacks this property—actually, property cluster—or has instead properties that are to some degree contrasting properties, its candidacy fails. If it passes the test, we can say, “Eureka! Cinema.” We might say this again and again, as individual items are assayed. My critic doubts that I correctly identify the cluster of properties constitutive of cinema. He also charges me with circularity for saying that historically all movies derive from stroboscopic motion. “If one stipulates,” writes Walley, “that a certain feature is a necessary part of a certain class of objects, then of course one will further argue that all instances of that object have possessed that feature” (p. 406). Walley is right, in the wrong way. Yes, it is circular to reason from the premise that atomic number 79 is necessarily a property of gold to the conclusion that all instances of gold have had the atomic number 79. But I commit no such fallacy. I argue that an otherwise heterogeneous bunch of things existing over the last hundred years or so share underlying physical and engineering uniformities; and that this fact empirically supports the further claim that there exists a class of objects that alike possess these properties essentially. Yet there is a strategic stipulative move in my argument. Namely, I restrict the conceptual content and application of the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘movie’ such that they become effective tools for picking out past, present, and future instances of items with the relevant cluster of underlying uniformities. The International Astronomical Union's recent revisions to their definition of “planet,” informed by current scientific research, do as much. Subsequently, some of the celestial bodies people believed or desired to be planets—notably, Pluto—are excluded from one ontological niche, shunted into a new one (“dwarf planet”). I demote a few historically significant visual display systems to something like dwarf planet status. I regret having belittled the venerable Kinetoscope, though.3 The device's magnifying lens and the field of pixels reflected therein constitute the viewer's external perceptual object, not the filmstrip itself. Hence when activated, a Kinetoscope surely is an SVD in which a movie is displayed. Sensing an induction problem, my critic seeks a deadly black swan. He thinks he finds a bevy. None is a genuine counterexample. SOC identifies the familiar “impression of objective displacement” enjoyed by movie viewers as an experience unrealizable but for the display's objective stroboscopic motion.4 Walley judges this claim false, noting that flipbooks trigger apparent motion nonstroboscopically (p. 406). Granted, countless events in the world trigger visual impressions of objective displacement. It is nonetheless trivially true that the experience of objective displacement afforded by movies is unique in kind just in case the human perceptual system's manifestation partner in this experience, the visual display, is unique in kind. I add the following: every experience of glittering ore is not an experience of gold's glitter. And no experience of “apparent motion” is an experience of cinematic motion. The SVD's structure and dynamics are, I would argue, uniquely disposed to produce specifically cinematic motion, the objective displacement within the display space, during a single shot, of such individual perceptual targets as Gelsomina. Moreover, the cinematically triggered impression of objective displacement might be veridical—a problem SOC skirts, partly by eschewing terms like ‘apparent motion’ and ‘illusion of movement.’5 If and only if a visual display is stroboscopically generated, then, according to SOC, it is a cinematic artifact. There exist other sorts of visual displays (statues, paintings, flipbooks, photographs, praxinoscopes), naturally different from properly cinematic ones precisely because they lack this property (or lack pixels). Recall that what I mean by “visual display” is, under a mostly synchronic description, an illuminated field composed of pixels—points of light—plus any unilluminated areas and periods situated spatially‐temporally between those points. Diachronically, the display comprises a rapid, continuous cycle of phase changes during which the pixels are “refreshed” and their spectral distributions vary. This high‐frequency redistribution of illumination within the visual display, a continuous play of light across a reflective or light‐emitting surface, is “stroboscopic motion.” The term refers paradigmatically, not exclusively, to the classic film projection scenario of flashing light produced from an arc lamp strobed by an episcotister such that the screen is entirely unilluminated for periods of time. However, the diachronic description of stroboscopic motion accommodates slightly different but not properly contrasting behaviors of the display corresponding to other ways of generating the SVD. The resolving elements, those locations or items that illume as pixels, can be either fixed or randomly distributed within the display space. Instead of a lamp, an electron beam or electrical current or field might supply the energy controlling the frequency and intensity of the display's illuminated periods. The resolving elements' onset/offset phases need not alternate between illumination and extinction; the onset/offset dynamics might comprise a stream of high‐frequency, continuous changes to the elements' brightness, intensity, and spectral distribution. In SOC, I identify cinema with visual displays embodying the same underlying engineering principles, no matter the combination of projection system and template format. Usually, the projection system's function is to activate the display according to a template's relevant properties. In the case of a film print, these primarily consist of the shape, density, and color of clusters of silver particles or dye clouds. In a video format, the relevant properties are samples of light translated into, for instance, electrical pulses on opaque magnetic tape or digitally encoded values on a disk or harddrive. Just like the film projector, the video optical system works stroboscopically, illuminating the display periodically. In standard television monitors, an electron beam scans every horizontal line of trichromatic resolving elements sixty or more times per second. In plasma monitors, which also have a refresh rate of at least 60 hertz, pixels are generated by gas bubbles glowing intermittently when excited by electrical current flowing throw a matrix of wires. Walley's phosphorescent video monitors and LED displays are also exemplary, not counterexemplary, of the kind of item picked out by the SVD concept defended in my article. The same goes for his flatbed editing machine, which employs a lamp and rotating mirror to redistribute continuously the points of light reflected in the magnifying viewscreen. Walley chastens me for confusing how movies are usually viewed, in detached displays, with how movies are necessarily viewed (p. 407). Again, SOC proposes a stipulative use of ‘movie’ restricted to “an existing class of ubiquitous items” differing ontologically from “bare cinematic artifacts.”6 Call that class what you will—“eidôlon,” maybe. It exists. Its identifying property cluster is the truthmaker for certain statements, for example, “Another eidôlon!” And its identifying properties are candidates for that which is essential to any item's being what it is, call it “eidôlon” or “movie.” The choice of name is somewhat arbitrary, in the sense of being basically up to us. What shall count as a movie is also up to us. The difference between movie and nonmovie is not. It is in the nature of movies to consist of “images generated by templates.”7 I do not “appear” to suggest the intentionality of cinematic imagery (p. 409). I insist on it.8 In contrasting improperly stored film stock with Ernie Gehr's minimalist nonpictorial movie, History (1970), I fully expose my intentionalist commitments: an SVD is an image, hence a movie, only if it stands in the appropriate psychohistorical relation to the moviemaker's creativity, practical reasoning, and practical action.9 Movie status therefore depends on something about the template serving as the maker's vehicle or means of expression. To satisfy this condition, the template must have the power to make an effective difference to the display's visible condition, relative to how the display would look were no template involved.10Fango è il mondo, so “dust and debris” (p. 408) adventitiously coating a clear film strip, like they coat everything else, do not automatically count as decisive, template‐specific structural features appreciably altering the display. Nothing automatically so counts. An additional intentional constraint, unarticulated in SOC, must first be satisfied. The difference the template makes to the SVD must be one that the maker has good reason and sufficient grounds to believe will actually be recognizable to his or her target audience, on the basis of the evidence available to that audience. The radically minimalist case, in which the template makes no such effective difference to the display's visible condition, might still be fittingly identified and valued as a cinematic artwork (subspecies visual artwork)—just not as an imagistic one, hence not as a movie. Walley seems ontologically incurious insofar as he divests himself of commitment to limning the nature of cinema (p. 407) while continuing to judge where a given ontological analysis goes astray. Consequently, his best argument against my analysis is conventionalist. I do not know whether Walley is anti‐realist about cinema having essential properties, about artifacts having them, or about essences in general. His discussion evinces little care for the difference between the truthmakers for statements like “K is an avant‐garde film” versus “K belongs to the avant‐garde film canon” or “K belongs to the avant‐garde film studies canon” (n. 6). The first is made true by (among other facts) the fact of K being an instance of cinema, independent of what anyone takes it to be. The other two statements can be made true by facts about how some person or persons, in a certain historical context, apply concepts like “cinema,”“film,” and “movie,” and by the prevailing practices or conventions according to which these persons make warranted assertions about K's membership in the category “cinema.” Ontological seriousness and realism about the nature of cinema require disentangling these two types of statements, seeking to discover the truthmakers for the former, and defending these as decisive constraints on the latter. In contrast, my critic seems all too credulous of conflationary claims to the effect that cinema “can only ever be ‘cinema as we know it’” (p. 409). If “cinema as we know it” means “cinema‐as‐identified‐by‐someone'scurrent‐practices‐and‐conventions,” then Walley is at least sounding like an anti‐realist conventionalist, one who perhaps faults me for not also embracing what strikes me as a sterile, self‐defeating dogma. I now, at last, comment on Walley's lambasting of my foundational assumption that cinema is something like a natural kind. The “something like” locution is another evasion, this time of lengthy reflection on the relation between artifacts and natural kinds. Presently, I can offer only brief elaboration. Significant ontological differences obtain between physical artifacts and nature's arational or nonrational products. Accepting this premise does not take artifacts and artifactual kinds out of nature. Of the world's familiar objects, substances, and properties, everything that is, is composed of the same finite stock of spatiotemporally located physical particles subject to the same laws of nature. Invoking the roles of intentions and history in the emergence, identification, individuation, use, and alteration of artifacts and artifactual kinds will not remove them from nature, either. Intentions and concepts, construed as psychological entities, are concrete representational states of physical minds. A history of human agents' thoughts, actions, and interactions is likewise a history of physical systems, states, processes, and events. More pertinent to SOC is my supposition that airplanes and cinematic items, no less than rocks and trees, have mind‐independent natures. By ‘nature’ I mean a package of internal properties belonging to a sample of some material substance or to an individual material object; to destroy or remove that cluster is to end the existence of that sample or object. An artifactual kind, like a natural kind, is a category identifiable with reference to the precisely similar inner natures uniformly possessed by each of its members. The specific causes of an artifact's nature, of the clustering of its relevant properties and the multiplication of similar artifacts, differ from those underlying the emergence and multiplication of instances of gold, elms, and marsupials. These causes essentially involve intentional agency, such as the building of apparatus (or functional adaptation of an existing object) according to concepts and engineering principles. Once the apparatus is built, its identity‐bestowing properties exist independent of and external to agents' subsequent sensory‐perceptual, psychological dealings with it. Such things are exemplars of the kind “artifact” because of the way they and their identifying property clusters come into being. They are further classifiable as members of a specific class of artifact (cinema, airplane) because of their property clusters' precise similarity.11 Imagine removing all sentient beings from the universe, along with nearly everything but an activated SVD of whatever sort.12 Retain only those physical particles, configurations, and laws necessary to prevent that display from immediately decaying into nonexistence. Under these austere circumstances, the SVD will still have the parts and features by virtue of which it is an SVD, versus an airplane or a nuclear reactor. None of its properties, dispositions, or causal powers would disappear. All the features by virtue of which it fits the concept “SVD” or “cinema” remain intact. An artifactual kind, like a natural kind, is identified with reference to its member‐artifacts' precisely similar physical properties. Concepts like “movie,”“art,”“painting,”“sculpture,” and “music” therefore do not designate artifactual kinds. Instances of “movie,”“art,” and so on are artifacts. But our concepts of movie, art, and so on cannot be grounded with reference to a strictly internal property package uniformly observable across individual items. A material artifact's, α, also fitting the “movie” (“art,”“music,”“painting,”“sculpture”) concept depends on a complicated network of psychohistorical events and relations obtaining between α and the relevant thoughts and actions of some culturally situated agent(s). Psychohistorical properties—facts pertaining to why and by whom they were made—are (partially) constitutive of α being a movie (art, music, and so forth). The concept “cinema,” as I understand it, makes no such essential reference to agency. Finally, the candidate essential nature I posit for cinema has nothing to do with emergence “out of some ontological necessity” (p. 408). SOC's essentialist sympathies do not imply or assume that any of the world's familiar states and things—certainly not cinema, movies, or our historically variable concepts thereof—arose of necessity. All my article supposes is that what I call “cinema” would not exist in reality were it not true that some visual displays comprise pixels and stroboscopic motion. Footnotes 1 Trevor Ponech, “The Substance of Cinema,”The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2006): 187–198; Jonathan Walley, “On Ponech on the Essence of Cinema,”The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (2007): 406. Parenthetical references are to Walley's discussion in the current issue. 2 I am generally a realist about familiar objects and their essences, and hold that we can get to know these essences. For an idea of the sort of common‐sense realist argument I find worthwhile, see Crawford Elder, Real Natures and Familiar Objects (MIT Press, 2005). 3 SOC, p. 191. Walley ignores this gaffe but not others. One of the more embarrassing is my reference to “the negative image on the celluloid,” SOC, p. 192. From shooting, to processing, to editing, to exhibition and archival storage, film prints come in many varieties, nowadays usually on an acetate, not celluloid base. Negative prints are not normally projected. Walley also faults me for saying all film projectors flash each frame three times per second (n. 2). I actually say that projectors flash light about seventy‐two times per second (SOC, p. 190) to convey that this figure is approximate within the norms of ordinary exhibition situations. More productively, Walley educates me about Anthony McCall's Long Film for Ambient Light (1975) and Line Describing a Cone (1973), though my mis‐descriptions ultimately leave unscathed my argument. Finally, space forbids proper discussion of Walley's interesting suggestion that smoke infused by a projector beam realizes 3D cinema (p. 407). The smoke particles, as well as the volume of fumes within the room, are certainly three dimensional entities. With the projector's light playing off these particles, Line Describing a Cone creates a wondrous metaphor for the way the projector's light plays off the film print's layers of silver halide particles. The smoke also evokes a screen, and in fact serves as a reflective surface. My intuition, however, is that this “screen”/reflectant surface rather than the stroboscopic visual display itself is that which is three dimensional in this setup. Moreover, nothing about the template is determinant of the smoke cloud's being three dimensional, thus ruling out the possibility of Line Describing a Cone realizing a 3D movie. 4 SOC, p. 193. 5 I outline one possible analysis of cinematic motion, along with a case for realism about this property, in “External Realism about Cinematic Motion,”The British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (2006): 349–368. 6 SOC, p. 196. 7 Ibid. 8 SOC, p. 195–196. 9 SOC, p. 196. 10 A template might even prevent the realization of an SVD. See my example (SOC, p. 195) of the maximally opaque print that stops any of the projector's light at all from reaching the screen. 11 Prompted by editorial comments that I seem to defend some type of reductionism, I want to emphasize the following. Here and in SOC, I do proceed on the naturalistic assumption that nothing exists over and above physical reality and its properties. I refer to John Heil, From an Ontological Point of View (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), for those readers curious about why such a premise does not by default support reduction, eliminativism, or ontological minimalism. More to the point, my position assumes and is consistent with realism about the mental: agents have psychological states identifiable with reference to their representational content—content playing causal roles in agents' thoughts and actions. The power to achieve such representational states is a property of human (and other animal) brains, thanks to the stuff they are made of, how it is organized, and what sorts of biochemical changes and events it can undergo. Realism about the mental, and about artifacts, coheres with the further realist assumption that members of artifactual kinds, insofar as these members individually exist at all, are physical items with mind‐independent inner natures. When we inspect them, we perceive, time and again, a uniform cluster of properties in light of which we can form some concept of a category to which they all belong. Successfully tracking occurrences of this package does not depend on tracking whether or not makers and users intended their artifacts be brought under a certain concept or be ontologically associated with one another. 12 In another version of this fantasy, the SVD's existence in the void is the byproduct of a mindless cosmic accident. Any apparent image or meaning it has is likewise nonrational and spurious, like pebbles on the beach accidentally forming the shape ‘I LOVE YOU.’ © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics
TI - Cinema Again: A Reply to Walley
JF - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/j.1540-594x.2007.00276.x
DA - 2007-10-25
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/cinema-again-a-reply-to-walley-k3qOpA8eKl
SP - 412
EP - 416
VL - 65
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -