Why Philosophy? Byron Davies
Philosophizing through Film
What is philosophy to you?
Perhaps someone somewhere has already remarked on this, but it is striking that many roughly contemporary characterizations of philosophy recur to the image of the child: these are “questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers,” according to David Hills; or philosophy is the “education of grownups,” according to Stanley Cavell. In fact, I prefer an earlier formulation by Cavell that is closer to Hills’, remarking on a child’s puzzlement when someone says of a photograph, “That’s your grandmother”: “Very early, children are no longer puzzled by such remarks, luckily. But that doesn't mean we know why they were puzzled, or why they no longer are. And I am suggesting that we don’t know either of these things about ourselves.” For me, philosophy is precisely asking those questions about ourselves.
This means that to approach an issue philosophically is always to run the risk of being viewed as simply a puzzled child, or perhaps as one of that figure’s comrades: the new kid on the block, the meddling newcomer, the outsider. Some escape academic professionalization and become shamans, or revolutionaries.
This also means that the incentive structures of the neoliberal and neocolonial university are inherently anti-philosophical. They typically reward the form, or deft parroting, of challenging questions, rather than the agonistic and even shame-inviting spirit of critique.
How were you first introduced to philosophy?
As most readers probably know very well, it is rare in the U.S. to have any kind of philosophical education in high school. But I was very fortunate and very privileged in one respect: my parents kept their philosophy textbooks from college on a bookshelf, and among those were Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects as well as his History of Western Philosophy. (These were the Simon & Schuster editions from the 70s, with somewhat attractive geometric designs on the covers.) Finding both as a teenager was extremely interesting. The first book fascinated me because I had been raised Catholic; trying to reconcile that fact with finding an anti-Christian book on my parents’ bookshelf helped me to form a more complex picture of my family. The second book fascinated me because it used names and terms (like “a priori”) that were completely unfamiliar to me, and which I could not at first make sense of from what I had read before. This remains one of my main pleasures in reading philosophy: that of entering an entirely unexpected space of thought.
How do you practice philosophy today?
Philosophy finds its natural home in open, public spaces. (Among founding myths in “western” culture, that of Socrates in the agora is among the most welcome.) Nevertheless, the internet is essentially a tool of surveillance, and a systemically commodified one; its dangers can lead us to yearn for the comforts of the gate-kept seminar room.
One way in which some colleagues and I have tried to navigate that impasse is via free and open philosophically-informed film programming. Together with the Colombian philosopher and filmmaker Sebastian Wiedemann and with my colleague in the Oaxaca-based film exhibition collective Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU), the Oaxacan film scholar Viridiana Martínez Marin, we have for the last couple of years organized a colloquium in film and philosophy in Mexico City and Oaxaca City that has held public screenings—always with the hope of avoiding a hermetic and elitist discourse, but also without avoiding the difficulties internal to a philosophical approach to Latin American experimental cinema. Our idea is that those difficulties should always be made open and public.
The first edition of the colloquium focused on questions of trance in film. This was largely inspired by a proposal in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image that has enjoyed enormous influence in contemporary Latin American experimental cinema. Deleuze’s idea is that where well-defined peoples can no longer be captured on film (like, supposedly, in early Soviet and in prewar Hollywood film), a standing resource, which Deleuze especially associates with the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, is the people-generating or people-sustaining experience of the trance. Despite rationalistic prejudices, perhaps it is obvious enough that trance and ritual are possible topics of philosophy; what needed articulation in our colloquium and screenings was how those experiences can themselves be philosophical.
The second edition of the colloquium focused on relations between “the people” (el pueblo) and “the land” or “the earth” (la tierra). I think that one of our most satisfying screenings was of the Brazilian artist Darks Miranda’s A Dangerous Night in Vulcano Island (Uma noite perigosa na ilha De Vulcano, 2022): a found-footage film consisting of interstitial moments—marked by the absence of people—taken from science-fiction films made during the Cold War. As I remarked to Sebastian in a dialogue on the colloquium that we recently published in the journal La Furia Umana, I think that the significance of sharing this film at a moment of a New Cold War and of climate catastrophe rested in its self-reflexive gesture of declaring that film formats—whether analog or digital—are composed of those mineral elements that will survive the extinction of our species.
Thus, these colloquia are largely organized around the question of what kind of people can be constituted, or re-constituted, in a film screening. In his novel Valis (which inspired the film El Prototipo [2022] by my SACIMU colleague Bruno Varela), Philip K. Dick has his narrator/alter ego express the idea of the Catholic mass as a kind of time machine: the priest becomes Christ, and two different times are superimposed. “Time has been overcome.” A similar vision operated in classical film theory; André Bazin notoriously said, “The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it.” Mesoamerican versions of those ideas are closer to the spirit of our colloquia than Catholic or even Bazinian ones. Alfredo López Austin discussed the Mesoamerican concept of the ixiptla—an image that is less a representation than a manifestation—with etymological connections, via the participle xip—to the idea of skin.
The propagation of the idea of a film image as a manifestation from another time—a skin from without—is one vision of a “public” philosophy.
What is a philosophical issue that is important to you?
I think that I will be forever imprinted by the joys and challenges of reading the last part of Stanley Cavell’s book The Claim of Reason, focused on skepticism about other minds, and the drama of his declaration that toward others “we live our skepticism.” Cavell was brilliant in articulating a specifically modern skepticism that takes the form of the denial of the separateness of the Other. But I have come to think that his gestures towards an account of the historical sources of such skepticism, which mainly involve references to the “New Science” and especially to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, miss the foundational issue, namely the denial of separateness constitutive of and flowing from European colonialism (not to mention later North American neocolonialism). Though I do not know whether he ever read Cavell, it was for this kind of framework that the Argentine-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel criticized the Eurocentrism of his interlocutors (including North American philosophers like Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor). For Dussel, understanding the genocidal denial of the Other involved in 1492—in both the Catholic Monarchs’ culmination of the Conquest of al-Andalus and the beginning of the Conquest of the Americas—is essential preparation for understanding how colonialism and modernity are co-constitutive.
Though it will probably strike most as a much less important issue, I have also come to think that Cavell’s eliding of colonialism’s importance to modern skepticism is matched by his over-emphasis on dynamics of interpersonal “acknowledgment” in art. It was deep of Cavell to see a parallel between the acknowledgment of others’ existence and the acknowledgment of modernist works as art, but this also came too close to a rebuff, in the case of film, of the subpersonal and extrapersonal dimensions of sound, light, and color. (This issue has been brilliantly explored in writing by Dave Burnham on Cavell and experimental film.)
The above issues appear related once we recall that the questions “But is it art?” and “But is it a person?” have very specific modern European lineages: a European curiosity about the reality of the Other. Even in the peculiar field of aesthetics, much of “modern” philosophy can seem like a long, mostly unconscious return to the debate about Indigenous humanity between Las Casas and Sepúlveda in Valladolid in 1550-51.
What books, podcasts, or other media have stood out to you as a philosopher?
I happen to think that one of the truly great books of twentieth-century analytic philosophy is Richard Wollheim’s Painting as an Art, which opens with precisely the kind of question I just alluded to, namely, what makes paintings art. But ironically (and perhaps thankfully), that question largely vanishes in his psychoanalytically informed readings of individual paintings, which occasionally even approach visions of the cosmos. Thus, for Wollheim, interpretations of Nicolas Poussin’s engagement with Stoicism (like Anthony Blunt’s) cannot be reduced to geometric registrations of rationally ordered nature. This is because—and here Wollheim is alluding to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein—of course unordered nature is reasserting itself in these paintings in the form of snakes and water, adopting the infant’s resources for “phantasized attacks upon the parental bodies,” whom the infant “has loved as well as hated.” Nature in Wollheim’s Poussin is rather a site for the “ambiguity of feeling,” which reaches its crescendo in a poignantly late painting (Winter, or The Flood, 1660s) by adopting the simultaneously destructive and redemptive powers of water.
Light—both its exposure and its occlusion—also bears powers for being simultaneously destructive and redemptive. This is why seeing a film screening as a shadow play has special possibilities for understanding mourning. A film I have written on previously, by the Oaxacan documentarian and anthropologist Sandra Luz López Barroso, El compromiso de las sombras (The One Amongst the Shadows, 2021), concerns Lizbeth, a transgender funeral orator in the Afro-descendent community of San Nicolás de Tolentino, in the Costa Chica of Guerrero, Mexico. In a brightly lit space, she leads mourners in slowly and collectively turning a casket’s cross upright, which constitutes the ritual of uplifting the deceased’s shadow on the ninth day of grief (the day when the dead can visit loved ones in dreams). It is hard to escape the idea that screening the film is itself a ritual of uplifting shadows, sustained less by the mechanisms of projection than by the collective spirit of the beholders who regard it, who respect it.
Perhaps you would like me to mention media that engage with philosophy even more directly, or films about philosophers. A film on Enrique Dussel by Cecilia Fiel will premiere at Mexico’s Cineteca Nacional next February, and I hope it finds an international audience. The film consists of interviews with Dussel at the end of his life, during the pandemic, when he was finishing his book manuscript on the aesthetics of liberation. Since the latter has not yet been published, the film also serves as a kind of preview of that book. I have Cecilia’s permission here to mention its final shot: a circular pan around Dussel in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Tlalteloco, Mexico City—site of the Tlalteloco archaeological site, the Colegio de Santa Cruz, and the 1968 student massacre, each in its way superimposing on the present one of the plaza’s titular “three cultures”—as he walks towards a setting sun.
Byron Davies is a researcher in philosophy, a film programmer, and a visual artist originally from the U.S., as well as a naturalized Mexican citizen. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Murcia in Spain with the research project “Materialism and Geographic Specificity in the Philosophy of Film.” He is a member of the Oaxaca, Mexico-based film exhibition and programming collective Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU). He holds a PhD in philosophy from Harvard and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. His writings have appeared in October, Screen, Millennium Film Journal, The Baffler, and Los Experimentos, among other places. You can learn more about his research and art on his personal website.