Film, Art, and the Third Culture
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Film, Art, and the Third Culture Film, Art, and the Third Culture A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film Murray Smith 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/2/2017, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Murray Smith 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. 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For Miri, finally OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/2/2017, SPi Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Figures xv Introduction 1 Towards a Naturalized Aesthetics of Film 3 Art, Aesthetics, and Film 5 Things to Come 8 Part I. Building the Third Culture 1. Aesthetics Naturalized 21 Naturalism, Knowledge, and Method 24 From Conceptual Analysis to Theory Construction: Three Cases 26 From Explanation to Understanding (and Back Again) 32 Perceptualism and Expansionism 37 From Causes to Reasons (and Back Again) 43 Beneath and Beyond Intention: In the Realm of the Subpersonal 45 From Thick Description to Thick Explanation 51 No Ghosts Need Apply 54 2. Triangulating Aesthetic Experience 57 Triangulation, the ‘Natural Method’ 59 Tracking Suspense 69 Fixing Empathy 72 The Brain and the Body 74 Behavioural Evidence, Social Cognition, and Critical Analysis 77 Neural Behaviourism 80 What Do I Know? 81 3. The Engine of Reason and the Pit of Naturalism 83 Meet the Neurosceptics 85 Normative Panting 89 Startling Sounds and Sights 92 Mirror Thrills 99 So What? 101 4. Papaya, Pomegranates, and Green Tea 106 Consciousness Analysed 111 Consciousness in the History of Film 113 Inside the Stream of Consciousness 116 Qualia and (Film) Art 118 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/2/2017, SPi viii CONTENTS Part II. Science and Sentiment 5. Who’s Afraid of Charles Darwin? 127 The Art of Film in the Age of Evolution 127 Facial Expression, Montage, and the Kuleshov Fallacy 134 Beyond the Basics 139 Evolution and the Aesthetic Sculpting of Emotional Expression 144 6. What Difference does it Make? 153 Culture and Biology 155 The Emotions in Biocultural Perspective 162 An Example: Heimat and Emotion 165 Culture and Emotion 172 Emotions as Cultural Bridgeheads 175 7. Empathy, Expansionism, and the Extended Mind 177 Personal Imagining, Empathy, and Subpersonal Scaffolding 178 Empathy and the Extended Mind 185 Extension and Expansion 191 Empathy Stays in the Picture 193 8. Feeling Prufish 198 Binding and Blending 200 The Role of Language 205 The Role of Narrative 208 The Critic’s Share 214 The Art and Science of Emotion 216 Conclusion 219 Reconciling the Manifest and Scientific Images 219 Notes 225 Bibliography 263 Index 281 Acknowledgements In November 2015, the Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Debate pitched James Ladyman and Raymond Tallis against one another in relation to the motion, ‘Human Nature is Better Understood through Science than through Philosophical and Artistic Reflection’; two years earlier, Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier had exchanged fire in the pages of The New Republic over Pinker’s defence of scientific approaches to cultural phenomena, in his essay ‘Science is Not your Enemy’. These are but two of the recent episodes in the long-standing drama initiated (in recent times, at least) by C. P. Snow’s essay ‘The Two Cultures’, which appeared in its first version in October 1956, triggering a debate that has since then been staged and restaged in print, in public debate, and in the classroom on myriad occasions. Across the sixty-year span between the publication of Snow’s essay and the drafting of these acknowledgements, Snow’s argument has been praised, celebrated, scorned, debunked, deconstructed, rebuffed, and rehabilitated; the issue that Snow raised— the nature, history, and future of the relationship between the sciences, and the arts and humanities—has drifted in and out of fashion. But Snow’s intervention has never been left alone for long, and that is in large part because the question he addressed is one that has been with us for centuries (as the epigraph from Spinoza demonstrates) and remains a vexed matter. Film, Art, and the Third Culture is an attempt to demonstrate how and why the debate persists—if not always under the banner of the ‘two cultures’—in relation to the arts and culture in general, and film in particular. The book has been a long time in the making, so inevitably there are many individuals, groups, and institutions that I need to thank; and it gives me great pleasure to do so. The University of Kent has been my base of operations now for almost a quarter-century. The School of Art’s commitment to regular research leave has been indispensable, while a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2005–6 enabled me to begin work on what eventually took shape as Film, Art, and the Third Culture. I thank the Leverhulme Trust for supporting the kind of exploratory, risk-laden research that tends not to fare well with the more conservative decision-making dynamics of other funding bodies. On a personal level, I thank my colleagues at Kent for the congenial atmosphere in which we pursue the core business of teaching and research in the face of the vicissitudes of higher education in the UK, and the endless stream of new—good, bad, and ugly—institutional imperatives. In particular, I thank my colleagues in Film, past and present—Clio Barnard, Lavinia Brydon, Jinhee Choi, Maurizio Cinquegrani, Elizabeth Cowie, Mattias Frey, Katie Grant, Frances Guerin, Lawrence Jackson, Tamar Jeffers-McDonald, Andrew Klevan, Virginia Pitts, Cecilia Sayad, Peter Stanfield, Sarah Turner, Aylish Wood—for maintaining the space and diver- sity in which I can exercise my philosophical and psychological interests; and I thank x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS my colleagues in other parts of the School of Arts, including Paul Allain, Helen Brooks, Martin Hammer, Nickie Shaughnessy, and Robert Shaughnessy, for encouraging those interests. Gillian Lodge deserves special mention for superlative, sanity-saving REF support. Elsewhere at Kent, the Philosophy Reading Group, run by Sean Sayers for more than fifteen years now and engaging with a wide range of philosophers—though Kant and Hegel are never far from sight—has been a source of insight and inspiration, as have Jon Williamson’s ‘reasoning and evidence’ reading groups with their emphasis on the philosophy of science. Over the years, Sean, Jon, Simon Kirchin, David Corfield, Julia Tanney, Alan Thomas, Edward Harcourt, Richard Norman, Tony Skillen, the late Laurence Goldstein, the late Frank Cioffi, Edward Greenwood, David Ellis, Graeme Forbes, Ruth Hibbert, Matt Wittingham, Veli-Pekka Parkkinen, and Michael Wilde have all contributed to my philosophical education. My co-conspirators in the Aesthetics Research Centre (ARC)—Margrethe Bruun Vaage, Ben Curry, Jonathan Friday, Hans Maes, Michael Newall—however, deserve a special shout-out for their collaboration and company. (Time for a trip to The Sportsman?) Now more than a decade old, ARC has created a unique space in which philosophical aesthetics and the study of the individual arts may join debate in a genuinely interdisciplinary manner. That debate has been sustained in part by my doctoral supervisees over this period: Dan Barratt, Gary Bettinson, Angelo Cioffi, Sérgio Dias Branco, Mick Grierson, Neil McCartney, Ted Nannicelli, Ivan Nunes, Alaina Schempp, Sabina Sitoianu, Paul Taberham, Aaron Taylor, Matt Thorpe, and Dominic Topp. Along with my undergraduate and MA students, they have delighted, instructed, and occasionally tortured me as I sought to wrestle the book into shape. Friends and colleagues beyond Kent have been no less important to the gestation and maturation of the project. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga read the manuscript in its entirety on behalf of Oxford; special thanks to them for their patient, detailed, and thoughtful feedback, which certainly has made the book much better and saved me from many embarrassments. Sherri Irvin and Elisabeth Schellekens provided insightful comments on the manuscript in the context of a panel readdressing the question first posed by George Dickie, ‘Is psychology relevant to aesthetics?’; I would certainly have acted on these comments had time in the production process allowed. These generous folk cannot, of course, be blamed for the many other failings that doubtless remain. Patrick Hughes and John Smith graciously permitted me to draw on their work. At Oxford, Peter Momtchiloff waited patiently for the manuscript to reach maturity, and has offered expert guidance throughout the process (as well as some amazing music). I thank Peter and the team at Oxford—Matthias Butler, Clement Raj, Jane Robson, Susan Smyth, Carrie Hickman, and Rio Ruskin-Tompkins—for their support, enthusiasm, and attention to detail.