Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 3, December 2006
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Pepperell, Robert and
Punt, Michael, eds
Reviewed by
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.