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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Phenomenal Screens: Thinking Crisis Through Film and Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/73z7b1nn Author Troy, Eddy Thomas Joseph Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Phenomenal Screens: Thinking Crisis Through Film and Literature A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Edward Thomas Joseph Troy December 2017 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Heidi Brevik-Zender, Chairperson Dr. Sabine Doran Dr. John Kim Copyright by Edward Thomas Joseph Troy December 2017 The Dissertation of Edward Thomas Joseph Troy is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements: My sincere gratitude is owed to a number of people at the University of California, Riverside, not least of which is Heidi Brevik-Zender, my committee chairperson, who, by some superhuman feat, withstood the barrage of drafts that eventually became this dissertation. Many thanks also to committee members Sabine Doran and John Kim. Their ongoing support and guidance will no doubt shape my work for years to come. I would also like to thank the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages. Thanks to the French program, in particular, Michelle Bloom and Kelle Truby. Thanks to the many friends, colleagues, and mentors throughout the UCR community, in particular, Pierre Keller and Walter Merryman. I would be remiss not to mention the journal Film-Philosophy, which published an early version of the fourth chapter of this dissertation. My thanks, then, to David Sorfa, William Brown, and the many brilliant thinkers who keep the journal running. I must also thank the many along the way who have shaped my thinking and professional development in their capacity as friends or loved ones: Matthew Holtmeier, Jonnie McConnell, Toru Oda (whose knowledge of Zola is boundless), and, of course, Jamie Rogers, whose unconditional support makes so much beyond just this dissertation possible. iv For Colette and Julian v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Phenomenal Screens: Thinking Crisis Through Film and Literature by Edward Thomas Joseph Troy Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, December 2017 Dr. Heidi Brevik-Zender, Chairperson Through comparative readings of Émile Zola, James Joyce, and Krzysztof Kieślowski, this dissertation theorizes crisis as a specifically aesthetic phenomenon. Crisis is understood as the product of the constitutive failure of representational regimes to exhaustively render phenomena. More specifically, the dissertation examines the ways in which the failures of literary and cinematic paradigms, genres, and movements regimented by what philosophers call “natural perception”--or perception grounded in pragmatic human activity--generate novel modes of perceiving, affecting, and thinking. This inquiry draws on philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the “crisis of the action-image,” arguing that the crisis of action is not strictly limited to cinema (as Deleuze suggests), but is in fact an ongoing and generalizable condition of aesthetic forms. In particular, the dissertation works to push at the edges of modernism, reading Zola’s 19th-century Rougon-Macquart and Kieślowski’s transition from documentary to fiction on either side of Joyce’s Ulysses. It asserts, by way of Zola and philosopher Jacques Rancière, that the works in question constitute “phenomenal screens,” or mediating forms that determine the conditions of intelligibility. Throughout, the vi arguments rest on understanding texts in their capacity as phenomenological mediators. Finally, the dissertation concludes that it is precisely this capacity that constitutes the locus of crisis, and thus, crisis as an aesthetic occurrence is always a crisis of the screen. Arguing against dialectical and neoliberal conceptions of crisis, chapter one analyzes the relationship between the crisis of the action-image and the screen. Chapter two asserts that Zola concretizes a crisis of the French realist novel. Zola, the chapter shows, understood works as phenomenologically mediating screens that transform the material they render visible. Chapter three reads Joyce’s Ulysses in light of Henri Bergson’s views on consciousness, arguing that the crisis of the screen in the “Proteus” episode disrupts a detached rationalism that gives way to the phenomenality of the body. Chapter 4 revisits Kieślowski’s oeuvre in light of Deleuze’s comments on exhaustion or l’épuisé. It examines crisis in Kieślowski as the generalized inefficacy of volitional acts in the post- war context of Stalinist Poland and its subsequent dissolution. vii Introduction Theories about the nature of crisis have historically had little to do with the analysis of art forms. Crisis, as a subject of inquiry, has largely been left to social, political, and philosophical thinking. To be sure, artists and critics of art have made proclamations about various crises—to see this, one need only reference prominent texts like Stéphane Mallarmé’s Crise de vers (1897), Paul Valéry’s La Crise de l’esprit (1919), or Paul de Man’s The Crisis of Contemporary Criticism (1967). By and large, however, these and similar declarations take the notion of crisis for granted. I argue, in other words, that the question of how crisis operates as a specifically aesthetic problem remains unanswered. Phenomenal Screens: Thinking Crisis through Film and Literature analyzes crisis as a specifically literary and cinematic phenomenon in order to demonstrate the concept’s critical value. The dissertation seeks to explicate the nature of crisis by traversing modernism, examining the before, during, and after of this broad artistic designation by reading the works of Émile Zola, James Joyce, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Exploring modernism at its edges (Zola and Kieślowski) and its center (Joyce), I argue for a film and literary critical understanding of crisis that cannot be divorced from what I call, following Zola and Gilles Deleuze, the phenomenal screen. The screen refers to the capacity of texts to function as phenomenological mediators insofar as their formal elements annex the structures of rationality and intelligibility that condition experience generally. As I explain in great detail in chapter 1, crisis—in the technical sense I advance—is properly crisis only to the degree that texts instantiate radical transformations of these phenomenologically mediating forms. 1 In addition to the conspicuous ubiquity of “crisis” in contemporary discourse, this study is occasioned by the disproportionate attention the concept has received across disciplines. Great treatises on the subject like Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) or Jürgen Habermas’ field-defining Legitimation Crisis (1973) are bulwarks of a tradition of thinking crisis as a phenomenon specific to the intersections of socio-political, scientific, and economic analysis. Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism, to cite another prominent example, is similarly indebted to the term inasmuch as it posits capitalism as inherently oriented toward crisis. What such texts share is an interest in the specific workings of crisis insofar as they pertain to a given field of inquiry. Published in French, the 1976 edition of the journal Communications, titled La notion de crise (The Notion of Crisis), remains one of the few such attempts to articulate a coherent definition of crisis (though it remains a general theory of crisis rather than one particular to textual analysis). What, from the perspective of the present study, remains applicable is its emphasis on the non-programmatic character of crisis, specifically with respect to the term’s incompatibility with dialectical thinking. Philosopher Edgar Morin’s contribution to the collection outlines what he calls a “crisologie.” Any attempt to produce a science of crisis, Morin believes, requires that one begin with the fact that “[l]a crise du concept de crise est le début de la théorie de la crise” (“the crisis of the concept of crisis is the beginning of the theory of crisis” 162). Such a view remains far removed from popular deployments of the term and helps to explain its elusiveness. Crisis, Morin 2 insists, is inherently paradoxical, at once eliminating means of action, and becoming the condition of possibility for genuinely radical transformation (160). Like the philosophical innovations of his contemporaries, Morin’s “crisologie” breaks with the influence of dialectics in French thought (represented in the issue by Pierre Gaudibert’s essay, “Crise(s) et dialectique”). The break with dialectical thinking is in part responsible for the crisis of the notion of crisis. The 19th and 20th centuries, therefore, witness a transformation of the notion of crisis: No longer can crisis be regarded as having a reparative teleology (as one finds, I argue in chapter 1, in Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel). Still, this slim volume of articles, now 40 years old, only begins to provide a coherent account of crisis, leaving more to be desired from a film and literary critical perspective. How, the present study queries, does crisis function à travers modernity as a specifically aesthetic phenomenon?