Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Archive

 

Volume 7 Number 3, December 2006

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Pepperell, Robert and Punt, Michael, eds Screen Consciousness, Mind and World. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2006, 202 pages; Consciousness, Literature & the Arts Series No 4; ISBN-10: 90-420-2016-4 Paperback price: € 40 / US$ 50

Reviewed by

 

Jan Baetens

KU Leuven

 

This very carefully edited and extremely readable volume by Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt, who have been collaborating on various creative and academic projects during the last decade, is an important achievement in the field of consciousness studies, more specifically in that part of the field that is deeply involved in artistic research and that finds in film theory in general and in the thinking of Gilles Deleuze in particular an interesting way to remediate the more overtly cognitive or neurobiological voices that play a major role in the development of consciousness research.

 

The editors have succeeded in bringing together a broad range of internationally renowned contributors, each of them working in related but more or less independent fields, while at the same time keeping a sharp focus, so that each of the ten chapters of the book (including the clear and stimulating introduction by Michael Punt) both benefits from the presence of the others and enriches them. The very intense “interaction” between the articles, the authors, the disciplines represented, the issues tackled, the answers given, and the new questions asked is the result of a triple characteristic.

 

First, the basic agreement of all the authors on what consciousness studies might represent: in this case, an interest in replacing the older dichotomies of the two cultures or the arts and sciences movement by the conceptual model of the “membrane”, which does not dissolve their differences but enables them to communicate, as well as an attempt to go beyond the longtime dominating models of an exclusively materialist or an exclusively psychoanalytical interpretation of the way consciousness functions. This craving for the integration of the material and the spiritual, of technology, mind, and body, has been converging gradually in these scholars’ research towards a common fascination for the screen, not just in the purely material sense of the word (the screen “out there”), nor in its purely idealist sense (the screen “inside”), but in the sense of the screen as interface between the world and the self, between the objective and the subjective, i.e. as model for visiting afresh dualistic approaches that are no longer satisfying.

 

Second, the shared interest of all contributors in screen theories that have been marginalized by the success of the psychoanalytical paradigm or that, as Deleuze’s theory, are far from having constituted yet a series of dogmas that can only be applied in a mechanical way. The great advantage of Deleuze’s thinking on cinema cannot be reduced to the slogan: “the screen is the brain” (although it would be incorrect to underestimate the rallying force of this kind of motto, that runs indeed through the whole book). What Deleuze brings in the very first place is an open way of thinking cinema and, through cinema, consciousness, open because many aspects of Deleuze’s film books still invite interpretation and discussion and because these books do not aim at staying apart from other aspects of Deleuze’s thinking in general. This makes them of course very useful for interdisciplinary research. Moreover, and this is a wonderful accomplishment of this collection, several contributors establish also strong links with other theoreticians whose position is much less recognized than that of Deleuze. I am thinking of André Bazin (although one might observe, and this is a good thing, that this author is making a great come-back in film studies in general) and of Edgar Morin, a Protean thinker like Deleuze himself, whose seminal works on cinema had been fallen in oblivion (except for those interested in the sociology of film). Morin’s ideas on identification, fan culture, introjection, and so on, prove extremely helpful for consciousness studies and one can only hope that this volume will foster new readings of his work.

 

Third and most importantly, one should add also the exceptionally clear argumentation of all the articles, and the (apparently spontaneous!) willingness of the authors to follow the suggestions of the editors at the moment of starting the collection. Each text opens with a clear abstract, not the one produced by text-robots at the beginning of the end of the beginning of academic publications and devoted to a grammatical rephrasing of the text’s bibliographical keywords, but a clear and direct introduction to what is at stake in the article, to the current state of the affairs, and to what can be expected from the specific direction that will be taken in the article one is about to enter. Moreover, the chapters themselves avoid any superfluous jargon or metalanguage, and even if not all of them are “easy reading” (the most difficult in this regard are the texts with a stronger philosophical background), one does not find here articles that do not commit themselves to clarity and directness.

 

The diversity of the subjects discussed in the articles, both at a highly theoretical level (What is consciousness studies? How do we see the brain in our field? What are the qualities and problems of this or that type of subject theory? etc.) and via original and often exciting case studies (a theme park, a film, historical practices of clairvoyance, etc.) reinforce the strength of the global framework of the book, which appears capable of nuancing and fine-tuning the questions and answers of consciousness field workers.

 

For all these reasons, I think Pepperell and Punt’s collection can (and should!) be used as a great introduction to some of the most important discussions in contemporary consciousness studies. Scholars from related fields, ranging from art history to narrative theory, for instance, have much to win by reading this book, which proves by the example that transdisciplinarity is possible, necessary, and extremely rewarding.