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Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media

Posted on: Wednesday, 8 October 2003, 06:00 CDT

READING THE FIGURAL, OR, PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE NEW MEDIA. By David Norman Rodowick. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. xviii, 276 p.

Lenin famously said that the biggest problem faced by thinkers and social theorists, as well as revolutionaries, was to be "as radical as reality itself." One need not be a Leninist to appreciate the cogency of this observation. In order to be effective, thought must have the time and the leisure to distance itself: only thus can it engage in critical reflection. But this also means that thought always lags behind the actual events to which it responds, and which it endeavors to comprehend. Our ideas are always a little bit out of date. Our concepts, and our critiques, are never quite equal to the reality that they are trying to explain. Life continually outstrips whatever theoretical models we have of it. If this was true in Lenin's time, it is all the more so today, given the rate of technological change and the way that the world has been permeated and reshaped by electronic media and digital networks. We live in an age in which, as Donna Haraway puts it, "the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion."

This is the problem that D.N. Rodowick addresses in Reading the Figural. The book was born out of what Rodowick calls, in self- conscious and self-ironizing quotation marks, his "Music Television epiphany." Which is to say, in more formal terms, that the book is an effort to work through "an implicit philosophical confrontation between the history of contemporary film theory as a semiological endeavor and the increasing appearance of digitally manipulated images on American television" (p. 3). The film theory of the last quarter-century or so-grounded in the influential texts of Metz and Mulvey-has largely been concerned with understanding film on the basis of a notion of signification ultimately grounded in linguistics. Such criticism never "steps beyond a horizon delimited by a restricted concept of text" (p. 5). It remains within a two- hundred-fifty-year-old (at least) aesthetic tradition that opposes pictures to words, the image to the text, the visual to the linguistic, and the arts of simultaneity to those of succession, implicitly privileging the latter term over the former in each of these binary pairs. But all such oppositions are ripe for deconstruction; they are especially questionable at a time in which, thanks to the new digital media-as seen on MTV-text is fluidly spatialized, "thus losing its uniform contours, fixed spacing, and linear sense," and space is textualized, "rendered discontinuous, divisible, and liable to recombination," so that "the image [becomes] articulable, indeed discursive, like never before" (p. 3).

Reading the Figural is about the transition from one "regime of signs" (Deleuze and Guattari) or "ratio of the senses" (McLuhan) to another: from an analog world dominated by the opposition between the visual and the textual, to a digital world in which such a division no longer makes sense. This is the transition that we are living through today. "Our era," Rodowick writes, "is no longer one of images and signs. It is defined, rather by simulacra" (p. 44). After all, both images and words are now modeled and generated by the same manipulations of binary code. Rodowick argues that, in order to take the proper measure of these developments, we need to reject the old structuralist models that privilege textual signification, together with their binary opposites, the romantic models that privilege the supposed ineffability, excess, and irreducibility to discourse of the visual. Instead, we need to think in terms of the audiovisual, or of what Lyotard calls the figural. The figural, as Rodowick explains it, does not combine image and text so much as it comprises a sort of in-between, a dynamic field in perpetual movement that calls upon the resources of both text and image, but is reducible to neither. The figural is not a stable concept; rather, it points to a realm of "incommensurable spaces, nonlinear dynamics, temporal complexity and heterogeneity, logic unruled by the principle of non-contradiction" (p. 49). To expound the figural, Rodowick gives lucid close readings, not just of Lyotard but also of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze (expanding upon his previous book, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine), and (most surprisingly) the neglected late work of the Frankfurt School film theorist Siegfried Kracauer. All of these readings point up crucial aspects of these European thinkers that have been neglected by most Anglo-American theorists. I found Rodowick's reading of Foucault particularly valuable, because his careful reconstruction (with some help from Deleuze) of how Foucault explores the "chiasma" between the visible and the expressible (p. 75) and rethinks the possibilities of similitude and affirmation gives the lie to the still all-too-common misreading of Foucault as a grim, reductive thinker of totalizing power and monolithic discourse.

Rodowick is to be commended for not just writing another celebratory or condemnatory book about "postmodernism" (a term he disdains) or digital culture, but instead reflecting upon the question of what new intellectual tools we need to think meaningfully and critically about such things as digital networks, virtual reality, and the ubiquity of digitized "information." It's not for nothing that this book begins with the Deleuzian question, "what does it mean 'to have an Idea'?" (p. 1). The Idea of the figural allows us to come to grips with the new situation in which "discourse encompasses expression and affect, as well as signification and rationality" (p. 10), while, for its part, "the image has ceased to refer to things, by becoming a thing of a particular order" (p. 70). The Idea of the figural also allows us to apprehend, in the same glance, both the Utopian elements of digital media (as embodied, for instance, in the "hacker ethic" that had so much to do with the early growth of the Internet [p. 228]) and the actuality of the ways in which these media allow for the ruthless commodification of leisure time, and of experience in general, to a degree never seen before (p. 214ff).

Reading the Figural raises all the right issues and thinks them through with an admirable rigor and a rare critical intelligence. But I can't help feeling that the book suffers, at times, from an overly narrow focus-due partly to Rodowick's writing style and partly to his choice of a critical canon. There are far too many sentences in Reading the Figural that are more or less like the following (chosen almost at random): "This identification of speech with reason and a pure interiority of thought ensures that a logocentric bias organizes the division and ranking of the fine arts in the Critique of Judgment" (p. 126). This is the sort of sentence that is often picked out by ignorant, reactionary reviewers seeking to demonstrate that academic "theory-speak" is nothing more than meaningless gibberish and intimidating jargon. Of course such charges are ludicrous and false, and the sentence in question is meaningful and defensible. I understand it clearly, and-for what it's worth-I agree with it. Nonetheless, the sentence is poorly written. For one thing, it is needlessly redundant, since it basically comes down to saying that Kant's logocentrism ensures that logocentrism conceives the fine arts in a logocentric manner. For another, I question whether logocentrism can rightly be described as a matter of "bias"; I don't think it is a matter of subjective attitude. But the real problem with this sentence-and Rodowick's writing in general-is that it makes for such a highly specialized, thoroughly professionalized, sort of discourse. The problem, of course, isn't unique to Rodowick; it's a general one for academic writing today in the humanities. I am under no illusion that philosophical issues can be discussed with any adequacy in the language of Bill O'Reilly, George Bush, or Steven Pinker, but I find it depressing that this kind of narrowly self-referential writing seems to be the main alternative that critical intellectuals are able to offer.

I am also concerned by the narrowness of Rodowick's critical canon. Everything in Reading the Figural seems to come down to a familiar group of late-twentieth-century French thinkers, who were influenced by an equally familiar group of late-nineteenthand early- twentieth-century German ones. While I admire the thinkers in question as much as anyone, and have certainly learned a great deal from them, I could wish for a wider range of citation and reference in a work of media theory, especially one that deals with questions of such scope and importance. Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze are more nearly the first word than the last when it comes to something so new, and so quickly changing, as digital culture. I wish there were more of a sense in this book of the tentativeness of these thinkers' formulations, the way they are bound, in their turn, to be outrun by events. It's not easy for a critical theorist to be "as radical as reality itself."

STEVEN SHAVIRO

University of Washington

Copyright Comparative Literature Summer 2003

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