münsterberg’s ghost or a film theorist as objet a
Rodowick writes his first paragraph like a roman-a-clef. He begins by asking you, the reader, to imagine yourself as a “young sociologist working around 1907” who wants to know how it would be “possible to comprehend, despite the breadth and depth of your knowledge, that an entirely new medium and an important industry were being created, which in many respects, would define the visual culture of the twentieth century” (2). At the bottom of the page a footnote unlocks Rodowick’s fantasy, revealing our imaginary sociologist as “not unlike the case of Hugo Münsterberg.” Rodowick creates a little virtual cinema, his writing brings together perceptions like the “explosion of ‘nickelodeons’ along the trolley route” and the how “rare” it is “not to see a queue outside their doors” together with a subjectivity who desires to explain what is seen. The passage’s second person and present tense identify its address with that of a point of view shot. The footnote acts like a shot retroactively identifying the seeing character. The cinema in this fantasy is of the kind described by Münsterberg in which the articulation of shots produces a subject whose internal movement spectators play along with. One might read the passage as illustrating the subjectification of a theorist by a certain kind of cinema, but one would have to add that Rodowick seems not to know it, since such a reading exposes what The Virtual life of Film ignores, namely the immanence of subjectivity and media.
In The Virtual Life Of Film, Münsterberg’s ghost labors to situate Rodowick in media history. If Münsterberg experienced and theorized a new medium, film, that defined a period in “visual culture,” Rodowick experiences and theorizes a newer, digital medium that presumably defines current “visual culture.” Our contemporary can only experience and theorize the birth of the newer medium in relation to a cinema that has either mutated or died, entailing the professional anxiety about the fate of film theory in the academy. Not surprisingly, he as written a book in which cinema mutates into a fully virtual mode and thus persists.
The Virtual Life Of Film calls for a philosophical approach and its first sentence claims that films move us to think. For many of Rodowick’s loyal readers, that phrase brings to mind Gilles Deleuze’s study of cinema as thinking. Yet Rodowick begins by asking the reader to imagine comprehending film on the basis of pre-established forms of knowledge. In the second paragraph, he associates his interest in “new media” with the possibility of predicting in 1907, when cinema was new, what it would become as the 20th century dragged on. He uses the comparison between himself and the “young sociologist” to explain his interest in images produced with new technology to friends. In informal social circumstances, Rodowick tells us, he describes his enterprise as an attempt at calculation, or at least an attempt to see what would have made it possible to calculate the future of the cinema. Such a question appears to us not as philosophical, but as political, for cinema did not become what it did because of what its images made us think, but because of a need to control what it might make people think. Moreover, to calculate the destiny of a medium is perforce to subject it to an episteme already in place rather than to an emerging one.
Rodowick’s opening scene omits precisely the politics of cinema, despite the footnote’s admission that Münsterberg was said to have been seduced into an interest in the cinema by the charms of Annette Kellerman, a lure that embroils his interest in gender politics. As Allan Langdale points out in his introduction to Hugo Munsterburg On Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study And Other Writings, a complex political situation lead Münsterberg to an interest in film. He wrote his photoplay book at a time when he was rejected by the public for having written books on the superiority of German culture during the first world war and when he had lost favor with his supporters at Harvard, including William James, who had arranged for Münsterberg’s to Cambridge from Germany.
When Münstrberg engaged with cinema he brought with him the assumptions of an instrumentalized experimental psychology more or less explicitly committed to perfecting subjects in an industrial society. The system of values entailed in those assumptions needed to construct the photoplay as potentially psychologically beneficial to it’s audiences, making them better at performing their economic roles. Unsurprisingly, Münsterberg elaborated a theory of narrative film claiming that the medium mimics mental functions and that a narrative series of shots can produce healthy or unhealthy mental states in audiences.
Rodowick presents a more anonymous figure, a sociologist not a psychologist, an abstraction of Münsterberg that retains Münsterberg’s relation to prior knowledge. Instead of asking his readers to imagine a figure who wonders about how films change what we call thinking, he sketches someone who will calculate the social destiny of film according to established thoughts. Rodowick gives us Münsterberg as spiritual automaton.
Münsterberg’s ghost distracts Rodowick from the possibility that film, sociology and experimental psychology might be part of the same becoming in the history of thought — some of Gilles Deleuze’s readers have understood that all three must be understood as expressions of a thinking whose unthought is life. As expressions of biopolitical social organization, the analysis of one in terms of the others cannot reveal the culture in embedding all of them except as a visual culture and misses its most salient dimensions.
Like Münsterberg’s writing, The Virtual Life Of Film proceeds as if the new media arise within a scheme of established concepts. He writes of the new media’s “emergence as an industry and perhaps an art,” as if any newness in the new media were something other than the way they have transformed our models of art and industry. Alan Liu’s The Laws Of Cool details the industrial form associated with new media and describes how it has changed the form of industry itself. As for the arts, Rodowick needs to convince the reader that they still exist as such after for example, Marcel Duchamp, Theador Adorno, Guy Debord, Fredric Jameson and the cinema. Instead, he merely assumes the term “an art” still refers to something.
Münsterberg’s ghost functions as a double, a semblable for the author. The early twentieth century Harvard professor provides the diagram for the twenty-first century professor’s explanation of his work to his peers. Here perhaps, Rodowick means to set up a philosophical justification of film as an object of study, but instead of starting by a justification referring to an order of concepts, he refers to his own social need. That reference might be taken as inspired by Delezue’s insistence that questions more or less referring to a social need provokes the history of philosophy, except that Rodowick treats his social need as a philosophical given, sealing it off from analysis. The book assumes that the reader too has to explain his professional activities to friends without wondering why. As in the work of Stanley Cavell, another Harvard Professor mentioned in the book, polite dinner conversation becomes the model for philosophy.
One imagines the Münsterberg’s ghost passage as an example in an introductory Lecture on Jacques Lacan’s objet a delivered by Slavoj Zizek. The ghost serves as a model of Rodowick’s ideal reader and as ideal version of himself as an author, yet sketching his ideal he discloses the philosophical persona he hopes not to be. Like the objet a, Münsterberg’s ghost figures a subject as simultaneously over and under valued.