Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image by JOHN MULLARKEYReview by: JOHN M. CARVALHOThe Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 68, No. 4 (FALL 2010), pp. 428-431Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40929558 .

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428 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

The second reason for the book's overall success is that Gregory offers us compelling arguments and specific examples of how we use stories to construct our moral frameworks. We are sometimes aware of these moral frameworks, but are more often not con- scious of them. Nevertheless, the stories we read are formative because they provide moral lessons, even the simplest of stories. He cites the simple tale of the "Three Little Pigs" as providing lessons about both intellectual and moral virtue. Gregory explains, "the very structure of the story requires us to see that the problem with the first two little pigs is primarily a deficiency of intellectual virtue- an inability to calcu- late realistically the dangers of a world where wolves with porcine appetites roam freely- laced with a dol- lop of ethical deficiency as well, revealed by their self-indulgent desire to spend their time dancing and singing (foolish little porkers) rather than working hard and building sturdy homes" (p. 184). He draws from this that even the simplest stories are able to draw our attention to different kinds of virtues and vices (he notes four kinds of virtues: physical, intellectual, social, and ethical) of everyday living, and we make these kinds of ethical judgments on a regular basis without thinking about it much at all (p. 178).

Gregory pairs short examples (references to sto- ries like the "Three Little Pigs") with more ex- tended examples of our engagement with authors like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. In fact, the last chapter is almost entirely an analysis of ethi- cal engagement with these two authors. Of course, philosophers are not new to ethical analyses of Dick- ens and Austen, but I think that Gregory sets himself apart from others by setting up the framework of the analysis in a different way. His absolute emphasis on the pervasiveness of stories in our lives, the com- panionship we find in fictional characters, and the engagement that we find with compelling narrative allow him to make these familiar arguments (that we find moral virtue in Dickens and Austen) seem more poignant. He is well versed in the arguments of Martha Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge (how nar- rative can offer us the double consciousness that we can be so intimately involved and at the same time distanced) and Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of the Good and carefully distinguishes himself from the kinds of arguments that they make.

My third reason for thinking this book a success is Gregory's inclusion of two chapters using two fully reprinted short stories to provide context and exege- sis for his theory. He uses Katherine Anne Porter's "The Grave" to discuss ethical implications of life, death, and the impact that it can have on the for- mative experiences of children, as well as James Thurber's "The Catbird Seat" to discuss how it is that misogyny is made so prevalent in the language

and craft of this story. It was nice to read the full text of the story along with Gregory's ethical analysis. He showed clearly how the kind of analysis that he advocates (and argues we do with or without know- ing it) can be so helpful to understanding the ethical implications of a text. He explains that "stories con- tribute to our understanding of what the right thing is, give us models of how the right thing might be done, and show us how things look when the wrong thing is done. Stories, of course, cannot make us be good any more than religion or the law or the Ten Commandments can, but if we are ever to make our- selves better by seeing ourselves and the issues of life more clearly, more comprehensively, and in greater depth, then it follows that stories- at least some kinds of stories- are qualified to provide us with assistance that is vital, vivid, and irreplaceable" (p. 191). The stories that he thinks are bad for us are not the ones that might invite us to sympathize with vicious or immoral characters (as is often argued), but the kinds of tales that are "mostly thoughtless stories that eagerly reflect, mostly for commercial reasons, the leading cliches and prejudices of any given cultural moment - [His] larger point is that stories traffick- ing in prejudices and cliches anesthetize our ability to think about the very issues they pretend to illu- minate" (p. 194). Gregory argues fervently for the position that stories have an essential role to play in the kinds of people we ultimately become and does it convincingly.

This book is an important addition to the literature about the importance of fiction, narrative, and liter- ature more generally, but it is especially important in explicating the relationship between narrative and moral character. This is also an important alterna- tive to Nussbaum's arguments in Love's Knowledge and Poetic Justice (among other places) that litera- ture can make us more moral. What Gregory adds is the insistence of a wide range of stories that per- sists with or without the kind of training Nussbaum might advocate in addition to a wider range of moral virtues.

SARAH WORTH Department of Philosophy Furman University

mullarkey, john. Refractions of Reality: Philoso- phy and the Moving Image. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, xviii + 282 pp., $90.00 cloth.

This book will be a challenge for many if not most readers of this journal. I know it was a challenge for me. Not because the films referenced and the interpretations offered are eccentric, though some- times they are. Not because the treatment of what the author calls Anglo-cognitivist film theory and

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Book Reviews 429

philosophy of film is reductive, though it could be so described. Not because the author favors what he calls Euro-culturalist approaches to the "tech- nology, ideology and materiality of cinematic pro- duction, distribution and consumption," though he surely does (p. 8). What will be challenging is how John Mullarkey advances beyond what readers might think to include in this Euro-culturalism to figures and theories only recently current in Continental philosophical criticism. More challenging, still, will be Mullarkey's critiques of this more recent theory and preference for still more exotic theory, in partic- ular a theory of non-philosophy matching a theory of non-art that, with an irony he relishes, Mullarkey recommends for a philosophy of film. For those who accept the challenge, the reward will be a glance at the most recent philosophical trends in Europe and, more importantly, an argument for giving up the com- pulsion to make particular films an illustration of some philosophical idea and film in general an illus- tration of philosophy itself.

Critical reflections in the English-speaking world on the writings of Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere emerged largely in this century and have prolifer- ated only in the last five years. Mullarkey takes their combined oeuvre as common knowledge. While both were writing and publishing in France for thirty years or more, Continental philosophy in the 1970s-! 990s was preoccupied with studies of Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida. The thought of Badiou and Ranciere is often distinguished from the poststructuralism and deconstruction that preceded it as "event philoso- phy," revamping what was already a key concept in that earlier European thinking.

For Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, the event fig- ured as something of an abstraction, as the chance or anticipated actualization of something only virtu- ally significant. For Badiou, the event is the material condition; for Ranciere it is the material effect of real, concrete change. Film is an event for Badiou by being the material condition for a subtractive "orga- nization" of the other arts: "It operates on the other arts, using them as a starting point, in a movement that subtracts them from themselves" (p. 130). Film draws from literature, music, and the rest but refuses to be defined by any one of them, and, refusing their essence, it remains undefined and without an essence of its own. The event in film, for Ranciere, is found in the conflict between the story line and the "fab- ulation" of a narrative in images which materially "thwarts" the textual narrative, interrupting and con- tradicting it (p. 157).

Mullarkey will draw from but reject these theories of film, and every other theory of film, because they reduce film to an illustration of the philosophy un- derwriting the theory of film they propose. Badiou, Mullarkey argues, makes film illustrative of the ax-

iomatics of being as such that structures his thinking in general. With Badiou, "we don't ask what film is, but rather what it makes us think," which is what he says we should expect of his philosophy (p. 131). Ranciere, Mullarkey says, makes film illustrate the agonistic politics of aesthetics that characterizes his philosophy from beginning to end: "Film, like all the arts, bears out Ranciere 's picture of the political as a plurality of discordant voices ranged against each other in absolute democratic equality" (p. 162).

According to Mullarkey, all film theory suffers the pain of the part trying to think the whole. Every the- ory, to the extent that it proposes to be the theory, is necessarily partial and, as partial, can never capture the whole of film. Even David Bordwell, who wrote that "we must pretend that all theories are correct, all methods are valid, and all critics right," assumed, Mullarkey says, that "all theories are equally wrong relative to the twin truths of cognitive science and his own poetics of film form" (p. 190). Against Bord- well's "incomplete relativism," Mullarkey argues for a "complete relativism" which is "always reflexive, involving itself as well, with an immanent absolute concerning its own indefinite purchase" (p. 190).

This argument, certainly open to criticism, is a clue to the thinking implicit but rarely stated in Mullarkey's text, namely, the non-philosophy of Francois Laruelle. Very little of Laruelle's prodigious output, from 1971 to the present, has been trans- lated into English (most of it online); there is, like- wise, very little English language commentary on his work. From what is available and from his Principes de la non-philosophie (Paris 1996), Laruelle argues that all philosophy is circular. Starting from a deci- sion to split the world into what there is to know, the Real, and what can be known about it, philoso- phy is condemned to construe the Real in terms that confirm or disconfirm the concepts it has of it. What Laruelle calls non-philosophy is the way out of this dilemma. Mullarkey follows Laruelle in the way he makes the object of film and the object of film theory precisely what cannot be objectified in concepts. In its approximations of the Real, Mullarkey would have film tend to nonrepresentational non-art. In its ap- proximations of film, he would have film theory tend to nonconceptual non-philosophy. A philosophy that would escape its constitutive dilemma would follow the lead of film theory.

More generally, Mullarkey wants to improve on Deleuze's claim that filmmakers also think, that while philosophers think with concepts, filmmakers think with images. But it is not just filmmakers who think, according to Mullarkey. Film itself thinks, the mov- ing images themselves think. And while Deleuze thought certain films were exemplary cases of cin- ematic thinking, Mullarkey insists that "if film can think then all films can think" (p. 4). The idea is not

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430 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

to reduce thought to "mere" images but to "inflate" the real materiality of images into thinking processes (p. xiii). On his view, film thinks exactly what phi- losophy thinks, or ought to think, namely, what he calls, following Laruelle, the Real. But film itself im- proves on philosophy and recommends for philos- ophy a new way of thinking precisely because, like the Real itself, film moves. "The reality that film is supposed to capture," Mullarkey writes, "is itself al- ways in motion, such that film must miss its pu- tative target, must converge on something that is itself divergent" (p. xv). In fact, Mullarkey states axiomatically that reality is "processual or divergent. As such," he continues, "film's power is always based on a missed encounter, a convergence with diver- gence. Moving pictures move us because movement is what is Real" (p. xv).

The language here invites comparison with the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, and Mullarkey devotes a chapter to Slavoj Zizek's no- toriously Lacanian film theory. But the implicit ref- erence is, again, Laruelle, who seems to borrow, with- out acknowledging it, Lacan 's rubric of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. We can understand the Real in Mullarkey's theory as that form of becoming which never becomes something, which always di- verges from any sense we attempt to make of it. We forever miss an encounter with this Real, with this sheer, unremitting becoming, because the symbolic structures of meaning keep us encountering some- thing, anything, to keep this impossible becoming at bay. More simply put, reality is in flux. It moves, it changes, it generates new forms and corrupts existing structures. Film is also in flux. It moves, it changes, it generates new forms and discards old technologies. Film, consequently, is in a privileged position to con- verge on, never completely or successfully, the real flux of our world.

This brings us to a comment on the title of Mullarkey's book. It is commonly thought that film, as philosophy, aims to mirror, capture, or reflect the world as completely as possible. However, because the world it attempts to capture moves and, in its movement, is always becoming something other than it is, Mullarkey thinks that film can never mirror or reflect the world. It can only offer what Henri Bergson called "impeded refractions" of it. Following the argument from Matter and Memory, Mullarkey writes, "Reflection, as representational perception and thought, is a limit case of refraction" (p. 188). It mediates its object "at the highest speeds and in the shortest time," giving us just those parts of the object our theory wanted to see, "and in the nar- rowest movement (or angle) of the present possible" (p. 188).

More clearly stated, reflection is an ideal state of what is otherwise, and normally, bent and skewed.

Light is refracted when, passing from one medium into the depths of another, it changes speed. Light reflected in a mirror is redirected at the surface in an instant. What is possible in that instant, how- ever, is a limit set by other, broader movements established by our cultural, psychological, and bi- ological situation. The mirror is tin plated and shaped to maximize certain social expectations, to satisfy certain personal needs, to confirm certain facts about parts of our bodies and our environment that we cannot see directly. According to Mullarkey, "film's own thinking belongs to these broader move- ments," to the refracted realities- slow, enduring, and thick- of our bodies, our affects, and our culture at large.

On this view, the refractions that configure film's thinking are not just incomplete or imperfect reflec- tions of the Real, but rather critical, contextual per- spectives and evaluations of what we take to be real. These "refractions of reality," the thinking in film, call attention to how "reflections" only outline our virtual influence on the Real, only sketch what we wanted to get from it. They tell us, precisely, that the image locked in the mirror's tin lacks what it wants to reflect. The slow, enduring, and thick effects of bod- ies and the broad cultural movements those bodies constitute impede the transparency of reflection and form a sedimented resistance to the instantaneous, symbolic ordering of the Real. Whatever can be said to be true about the Real, then, in the thinking proper to film, is an opaque thickness formed from multiple, overlaid mediations of social, psychological, physical, and biological effects.

So, according to Mullarkey, when film thinks, it does not think something. It refracts the thick, im- peded effects of bodies and peoples. It approximates in vain the flux of life, changing forms in response to changes in that flux. And a theory of film embracing its partiality and relativity completely and absolutely would follow suit. If Mullarkey does not give many examples of films that fit this model, it is because his film theory, which we are to suppose is an example of the complete relativism he has in mind, does not permit him to do so without becoming circular, with- out making films and film itself into an illustration of his view. Yet Mullarkey clearly has a view, and, while dressed up in the protocols of non-philosophy, I won- der whether it is really so very different from "the creative use of reality" Maya Deren advocated, or, better still, what Stan Brakhage provocatively called "tricking" the real. In all of these cases, film thinks just insofar as it does not idealize as a sign of its ca- pacity to reflect but slows down and thickens enough to approximate in refractions the materiality of the world it is thinking about.

But if this is Mullarkey's view, then does film not, as Mullarkey construes it, once again, illustrate that

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Book Reviews 431

view? Is Mullarkey not trying to persuade us that film itself exhibits or illustrates a way of thinking that compares favorably with non-philosophy? And, yet, Mullarkey's book invites us to question the value of using film as such an illustration, of making film into what we cannot otherwise theorize. It also invites us to question the illusion of the complete film. What we capture on film is an unstable, uncertain world, and the means we have for capturing that world are them- selves constantly changing (computer-generated im- agery, for example), not so much to reflect that world more perfectly but in response to broader cultural and psychological demands. Mullarkey is surely right to caution that a theory aiming to fix what film is

essentially may very well miss what is essential about these changes for the elan cinematique of film (p. 11). At the same time, Mullarkey does not make it easy to track the virtues of his book. His argument is not easy to follow, and, in the end, he questions whether he has made his point. He presents this unsatisfying conclusion as approximating the principles of non- philosophy, but whatever Laruelle and those follow- ing him may be up to seems more interesting than that.

JOHN M. CARVALHO

Department of Philosophy Villanova University

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