An Elegy for Theory*

D. N. RODOWICK

Éloge. n. m. (1580: lat. elogium, pris au sens gr.

eulogia). 1. Discours pour célébrer qqn. ou qqch.
Éloge funèbre, académique. Éloge d’un saint.
—Le Petit Robert

He sent thither his Theôry, or solemn legation for

sacrifice, decked in the richest garments.
—George Grote, A History of Greece (1862)

From the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the institutionalization of
cinema studies in universities in North America and Europe became identified
with a certain idea of theory. This was less a “theory” in the abstract or natural sci-
entific sense than an interdisciplinary commitment to concepts and methods
derived from literary semiology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian
Marxism, echoed in the broader influence of structuralism and post-structuralism
on the humanities.
However, the evolution of cinema studies since the early 1980s has been
marked both by a decentering of film with respect to media and visual studies and
by a retreat from theory. No doubt this retreat had a number of salutary effects: a
reinvigoration of historical research, more sociologically rigorous reconceptualiza-
tions of spectatorship and the film audience, and the placement of film in the
broader context of visual culture and electronic media. But not all of these inno-
vations were equally welcome. In 1996, the Post-Theory debate was launched by

* This essay was originally prepared as a keynote lecture for the Framework conference on “The
Future of Theory,” Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, November 3–4, 2006. I would like to thank
Brian Price for his invitation and perceptive comments. I would also like to thank the participants at
the Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on “Contesting Theory,” co-organized by Stanley Cavell, Tom
Conley, and myself at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, May 4–5, 2007—including Richard
Allen, Sally Banes, Dominique Bluher, Edward Branigan, Noël Carroll, Francesco Casetti, Joan Copjec,
Meraj Dhir, Allyson Field, Philip Rosen, Vivian Sobchack, Malcolm Turvey, and Thomas Wartenberg—
for their challenging discussions of these and other matters.

OCTOBER 122, Fall 2007, pp. 91–109. © 2007 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
92 OCTOBER

David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, who argued for the rejection of 1970s Grand
Theory as incoherent. Equally suspicious of cultural and media studies, Bordwell
and Carroll insisted on anchoring the discipline in film as an empirical object
subject to investigations grounded in natural scientific methods. Almost simultane-
ously, other philosophical challenges to theory came from film scholars influenced
by analytic philosophy and the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. These
debates emerged against the vexed backgrounds both of the culture wars of the
1990s and the rise of identity politics and cultural studies.
Confusing “theory” with Theory, often lost in these debates is the acknowl-
edgment that judgments advanced—in history, criticism, or philosophy—in the
absence of qualitative assessments of our epistemological commitments are ill-
advised. To want to relinquish theory is more than a debate over epistemological
standards; it is a retreat from reflection on the ethical stances behind our styles of
knowing. In this respect, I want to argue not for a return to the 1970s concept of
theory, but rather for a vigorous debate on what should constitute a philosophy
of the humanities critically and reflexively attentive in equal measure to its episte-
mological and ethical commitments.
A brief look at the history of theory is no doubt useful for this project.
Retrospectively, it is curious that early in the twentieth century film would become
associated with theory, rather than with aesthetics or the philosophy of art.
Already in 1924, Béla Balázs argues in Der sichtbare Mensch for a film theory as the
compass of artistic development guided by the construction of concepts.1 The evo-
cation of theory here is already representative of a nineteenth-century tendency in
German philosophies of art to portray aesthetics as a Wissenschaft, comparable in
method and epistemology to the natural sciences. From this moment forward, one
would rarely speak of film aesthetics or a philosophy of film, but rather, always, of
film theory.
“Theory,” however, has in the course of centuries been a highly variable con-
cept. One finds the noble origins of theory in the Greek sense of theoria as viewing,
speculation, or the contemplative life. For Plato it is the highest form of human
activity; in Aristotle, the chief activity of the Prime Mover. For the Greeks, theory
was not only an activity, but also an ethos that associated love of wisdom with a style
of life or mode of existence.2

1. Béla Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). The original citation is:
“Die Theorie ist, wenn auch nicht das Steuerruder, doch zumindest der Kompass einer Kunstentwicklung.
Und erst wenn ihr euch einen Begriff von der guten Richtung gemacht habt, dürft ihr von Verirrungen
reden. Diesen Begriff: die Theorie des Films, müsst ihr euch eben machen” (p. 12). Balázs does, however,
associate this theory with a “film philosophy of art” (p. 1).
2. On the question of ethics as the will for a new mode of existence, see Pierre Hadot, What Is
Ancient Philosopy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). An influ-
ence on Michel Foucault’s later works on the “care of the self,” Hadot argues that the desire for a philo-
sophical life is driven first by an ethical commitment or a series of existential choices involving the
selection of a style of life where philosophical discourse is inseparable from a vision of the world and
the desire to belong to a community.
An Elegy for Theory 93

Bringing together thea [sight] and theoros [spectator], theory has often been
linked to vision and spectacle. (Perhaps this is what Hegel meant in the Aesthetics
when he names sight as the most theoretical of the senses.) In Keywords, Raymond
Williams identifies four primary senses of the term emerging by the seventeenth
century: spectacle, a contemplated sight, a scheme of ideas, and an explanatory
scheme. With its etymological link to theater, no doubt it was inevitable that the
young medium of film should call for theory. However, although the persistence
of associating thought about film with theory might be attributed to the deriva-
tions of the term from spectating and spectacle, a contemporary commonsensical
notion follows from the last two meanings. Theories seek to explain, usually by
proposing concepts, but in this they are often distinguished from doing or prac-
tice. In this manner, Williams synthesizes “a scheme of ideas which explains
practice.” 3 This is certainly the way in which someone like Balázs or Sergei
Eisenstein invoked the notion of theory.
In The Virtual Life of Film, I argue that one powerful consequence of the rapid
emergence of electronic and digital media is that we can no longer take for
granted what “film” is—its ontological anchors have come ungrounded—and thus
we are compelled to revisit continually the question, What is cinema? This
ungroundedness is echoed in the conceptual history of contemporary film studies
by what I call the “metacritical attitude” recapitulated in cinema studies’ current
interest both in excavating its own history and in reflexively examining what film
theory is or has been. The reflexive attitude toward Theory began, perhaps, with
my own Crisis of Political Modernism and throughout the 1980s and ’90s manifested
itself in a variety of conflicting approaches: Carroll’s Philosophical Problems of
Classical Film Theory and Mystifying Movies, Bordwell’s Making Meaning, Judith
Mayne’s Cinema and Spectatorship, Richard Allen’s Projecting Illusions, Bordwell and
Carroll’s Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Allen and Murray Smith’s Film
Theory and Philosophy, Francesco Casetti’s Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995, Allen and
Malcolm Turvey’s Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, and so on.4
In detaching “theory” as an object available for historical and theoretical
examination, these books take three different approaches. Natural scientific mod-
els inspire one approach, both philosophical and analytic, which posit that the

3. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1976), p. 267.
4. See D. N. Rodowick, Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory
(1988; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Noël Carroll, Philosophical
Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Noël Carroll,
Mystifying Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); David Bordwell, Making Meaning
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London:
Routledge, 1993); Richard Allen, Projecting Illusions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1996); Richard Allen and Murray Smith, eds. Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997); Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995 (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1999); and Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, eds., Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts (London:
Routledge, 2001).
94 OCTOBER

epistemological value of a well-constructed theory derives from a precise concep-

tual framework defined in a limited range of postulates. This approach assumes
there is an ideal model from which all theories derive their epistemological value.
Alternatively, Casetti’s approach is both historical and sociological. Agnostic with
respect to debates on epistemological value, it groups together statements made
by self-described practitioners of theory, describing both the internal features of
those statements and their external contexts. In The Crisis of Political Modernism,
my own approach, inspired by Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, assumes
that the conditioning of knowledge itself is historically variable. Discourse produces
knowledge. Every theory is subtended by enunciative modalities that regulate the
order and dispersion of statements by engendering or making visible groups of
objects, inventing concepts, defining positions of address, and organizing rhetori-
cal strategies. This approach analyzes how knowledge is produced in delimited
and variable discursive contexts.
As a first move, it might indeed seem strange to associate theory with history.
Introducing a series of lectures at the Institute for Historical Research at the
University of Vienna in 1998, I astonished a group of students by asserting that film
theory has a history, indeed multiple histories. Here the analytic approach to the-
ory, on one hand, and sociological and archaeological approaches on the other,
part ways. The fact of having a history already distinguishes film theory, and indeed
all aesthetic theory, from natural scientific inquiry, for natural and cultural phe-
nomena do not have the same temporality. Aesthetic inquiry must be sensitive to
the variability and volatility of human culture and innovation; their epistemologies
derive from (uneven) consensus and self-examination of what we already know and
do in the execution of daily life. Examination of the natural world may presume a
teleology where new data are accumulated and new hypotheses refined in model-
ing processes for which, unlike human culture, we have no prior knowledge.

I believe we need a more precise conceptual picture of how film became

associated with theory in the early twentieth century, and how ideas of theory vary
in different historical periods and national contexts. But let us return to the more
recent, metacritical attitude toward theory.
By the mid-1990s, film theory and indeed the concept of “theory” itself were
challenged from a number of perspectives. This contestation occurs in three over-
lapping phases. The first phase is marked by Bordwell’s call throughout the 1980s
for a “historical poetics” of film and culminates in the debates engendered by the
publication of Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema
and by the special issue of iris on “Cinema and Cognitive Psychology,” both pub-
lished in 1989. The capstone of the second phase is the 1996 publication of
Post-Theory. Subtitled Reconstructing Film Studies, the book represents an attempt to
establish film studies as a discipline modeled on cognitivist science and historical
An Elegy for Theory 95

poetics, and to recenter “theory” according to the epistemological ideals of nat-

ural scientific reasoning. If the second phase may be characterized by the attempt
to return theory to a model of “scientific” investigation and explanation, the third
phase subjects the association of theory with science to philosophical critique. As
found in the recent work of Allen and Turvey, and deeply influenced by Wittgen-
stein’s critique of theory in the Philosophical Investigations, this perspective calls for
a new orientation in the examination of culture and the arts through a philoso-
phy of the humanities. In this manner, throughout the 1980s and ’90s there is a
triple displacement of theory—by history, science, and finally, philosophy.
It is important to appreciate Bordwell’s contribution to what I have charac-
terized as the metacritical or metatheoretical attitude in cinema studies. Among
his generation, Bordwell was among the first to exhibit fascination with the his-
tory of film study itself, and to focus attention on problems of methodology with
respect to questions of historical research and the critical analysis of film form
and style. Throughout the 1980s, Bordwell produced a number of path-breaking
methodological essays promoting a “historical poetics” of cinema. From Narration
and the Fiction Film (1985) to Making Meaning, the broad outlines of his approach
are made apparent. Bordwell cannot be accused of a retreat from theory—no
one’s commitment to good theory building is greater or more admirable.5 Instead,
he wants to recast theory as history, or rather, to ground theory in the context of
empirical historical research. In this way, Bordwell responds to what he perceives
as the twin threats of cultural and media studies. On the one hand, there is a risk
of methodological incoherence for a field whose interdisciplinary commitments
had become too broad; on the other, the risk of diffusing, in the context of media
studies, cinema studies’ fundamental ground—film as a formal object delimiting
specifiable effects. The aim of historical poetics, then, is to project a vision of
methodological coherence onto a field of study perceived to be losing its center,
and to restore an idea of film as a specifiable form to that center. In this respect,
poetics concerns questions of form and style. It deals with concrete problems of
aesthetic practice and describes the specificity of film’s aesthetic function while
recognizing the importance of social convention in what a culture may define as a
work of art. In Narration and the Fiction Film, the historical side of poetics addresses
the proliferation of distinct modes of narration (classical Hollywood, Soviet or
dialectical materialist, postwar European art cinema, etc.) as delimitable in time
and sensitive to national and/or cultural contexts. Here Bordwell makes his best
case for basing the analysis of individual works upon sound historical investigation
and explicit theoretical principles in a way that avoids arbitrary boundaries
between history, analysis, and theory.

5. See especially Bordwell’s introduct ion to Cinema and Cognit ive Psychology, “A Case for
Cognitivism,” iris 5, no. 2 (1989), pp. 11–40. Here I am especially interested in Bordwell’s characteriza-
tion of theory as “good naturalization.”
96 OCTOBER

By 1989, however, Bordwell’s attack on interpretation and his promotion of

cognitivism as a model of “middle-level research” recast theory with respect to
three particular propositions. First, his appeal to middle-level research calls for
pulling back from broader concerns of ideology and culture to refocus attention
on film’s intrinsic structure and functions. Second, he promotes a comparable
turn from psychoanalytic theories of the subject to the study of filmic comprehen-
sion as grounded in empirically delimitable mental and perceptual structures.
Finally, his renewed emphasis on history also signals a withdrawal from high-level
conceptual concerns to refocus research on the fundamental data of films them-
selves and the primary documentation generated from their production contexts.
Thus, Bordwell accuses interpretation of reaching too high in grasping for
abstract concepts to map semantically onto its object. Here the film-object itself
disappears in its particularity, becoming little more than the example of a concept.
Moreover, the interpreters are reflexively insensitive to the cognitive operations
they execute. They produce no new knowledge, but rather only repetitively invoke
the same heuristics to model different films.
The somet imes unruly responses to Making Meaning and Cinema and
Cognitive Psychology demonstrate that Bordwell’s criticisms touched a nerve, and
there is little doubt that these works are a genuine and important response to the
impasse in theory that cinema studies began to confront by the end of the 1980s.
In the critique of so-called Grand Theory, what is most interesting here is the
implicit alliance between historical poetics and analytical philosophy. In the two
introductions to Post-Theory, Bordwell and Carroll promote strong views of what
comprises good theory building in stark contrast to the then current state of con-
temporary film and cultural theory. Here I am less concerned with assessing their
critique of contemporary film theory than in evaluating the epistemological ideals
embodied in their common appeal to natural scientific models.6 Looking at the
reverse side of Bordwell and Carroll’s criticisms, I think it is important to examine
their ideal projection of “good theory” as the ethical appeal for a new mode of

6. Ironically, one consequence of this appeal, strongly implicit in Carroll’s contribution, is that
film theory does not yet exist. Carroll, for example, criticizes both classical and contemporary film
theory according to three basic arguments: they are essentialist or foundationalist, taking films as
examples of a priori conditions; they are doctrine driven rather than data driven, meaning not sus-
ceptible to empirical examination and verification; and finally, they deviate to widely from film-based
problems, that is, the concrete particularity of filmic problems disappears when they are taken up to
illustrate broader concepts of ideology, subjectivity, or culture. Characterized by “ordinary standards of
truth” as a regulative ideal, good theory seeks causal reasoning, deduces generalities by tracking regu-
larities and the norm, is dialectical and requires maximally free and open debate, and, finally, is char-
acterized by fallibilism. In this sense, good theory is “historical” in the sense of being open to revision
through the successive elimination of error. In this respect, middle-level research presents the provi-
sional ground for a theory or theories of film projected forward in a teleology of debate, falsification,
and revision. The “post” in Post-Theory is a curious misnomer, then. For what has been characterized
as Theory is epistemologically invalid, and, ironically, what comes after may only appear after a period
of long debate and revisionism. A legitimate film theory remains to be constructed, the product of an
indefinite future.
An Elegy for Theory 97

existence where, in their view, politics or ideology has not supplanted reason.
Here “dialectics,” as Carroll presents it, become the basis of an ideal research com-
munity of rational agents working on common problems and data sets with results
that are falsifiable according to “ordinary standards” of truth and error.7 But these
ideals, I would argue, rest on no firmer philosophical grounds than the ideological
theories they critique. For example, while Grand Theory is criticized for its
obsession with an irrational and unconscious subject that cannot account for its
actions, Bordwell promotes a “rational agent” theory of mental functioning,
which is in fact the subject of good theory recognizing itself in the object it wants
to examine.8 The concept of the rational agent functions tautologically here as a
projection where the ideal scientific subject seeks the contours of its own image in
the model of mind it wishes to construct or to discover. In a perspective that
strives to be free of ideological positioning and to assert an epistemology that is
value-neutral, the introductions to Post-Theory nonetheless express the longing for
a different world modeled on an idealized vision of scientific research: a commu-
nity of researchers united by common epistemological standards who are striving
for a universalizable and truthful picture of their object.
Richard Allen and Murray Smith’s critique of contemporary film theory in
Film Theory and Philosophy echoes Bordwell and Carroll’s perspective. Accusing
Theory of an “epistemological atheism” powered by an exaggerated ethical con-
cern with the critique of a capitalist modernity, Allen and Smith’s criticisms make
clear a number of philosophical assumptions absent from the Post-Theory cri-
tique. From the analytic point of view, arguments for and against “theory” take
place against the background of a philosophy of science. One engages in theory
building or not according to an epistemological ideal based on natural scientific
models. In employing the methods and forms of scientific explanation, however,
philosophy becomes indistinguishable from science, at least with respect to theory
construction. Philosophy disappears into science as “theory” becomes indistin-
guishable from scientific methodology.
In this manner, I want to argue that from the beginning of the twentieth
century analytic philosophy has been responsible for projecting an epistemologi-
cal ideal of theory derived from natural scientific methods. This ideal produced a
disjunction between philosophy’s ancient concern for balancing epistemological
inquiry with ethical evaluation.9 Here, theory, at least as it is generally conceived

7. In a so-far-unpublished essay, “Film Theory and the Philosophy of Science,” Meraj Dhir has pre-
sented an excellent defense of Carroll’s position.
8. For related arguments, see Richard Allen’s essay, “Cognitive Film Theory,” in Wittgenstein, Theory
and the Arts, pp. 174–209.
9. Bertrand Russell’s 1914 essay “On Scientific Method in Philosophy” presents a succinct defini-
tion of this ideal: “A scientific philosophy such as I wish to recommend will be piecemeal and tentative
like other sciences; above all, it will be able to invent hypotheses which, even if they are not wholly true,
will yet remain fruitful after the necessary corrections have been made. This possibility of successive
approximations of the truth is, more than anything else, the source of the triumphs of science, and to
transfer this possibility to philosophy is to ensure a progress in method whose importance it would be
98 OCTOBER

in the humanties, disappears in two ways. Not only is the activity of theory given
over to science, but philosophy itself begins to lose its autonomy and self-identity—
it would seem to have no epistemological function save in the light reflected from
scientific ideals. Analytic philosophy attacks theory on more than one front.
There is the implicit tendency to delegitimate extant film theory to the extent that
it draws on concepts and methodologies influential in the humanities that fall
outside of the reigning norm of what W. V. Quine would call a “naturalized philos-
ophy.” Consequently, because so little aesthetic thought on film conforms to
scientific models, Carroll concludes that, for the most part, a theory of film does
not yet exist, though it might at some future date. The conflict over theory in film
studies thus reproduces in microcosm a more consequential debate, one that
concerns both the role of epistemology and epistemological critique in the
humanities and the place of philosophy with respect to science. Analytic philoso-
phy wants to redeem “theory” for film by placing it in the context of a philosophy
of science. At the same time, this implies that the epistemologies that were charac-
teristic of the humanities for a number of decades are neither philosophically nor
scientifically legitimate. And so the contestation of theory becomes a de facto
epistemological dismissal of the humanities.
Throughout the 1990s, then, in cinema studies philosophy allies itself with
science as a challenge to theory. In this phase of the debate, “theory” is the con-
tested term. Very quickly, however, “science” becomes the contested term, as a
philosophy of the humanities gives over theory to science and opposes itself to
both. Important keys to this transition are the late works of Wittgenstein, especially
his Philosophical Investigations, as well as G. H. von Wright’s calls for a philosophy of
the humanities in works like The Tree of Knowledge, and Other Essays (1993).
The interest of the later Wittgenstein for my project, and for the humanities in
general, concerns his attack on the identification of philosophy with science. In
asserting that “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” (Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus 4.111), he presents a formidable challenge to Bertrand Russell’s
conception of philosophy as allied with epistemological models drawn from the
natural sciences. In contrast to Russell, Wittgenstein argues that science should not
be the only model of explanation and knowledge, and so he insists on the specificity
of philosophy as a practice. It is important to examine carefully Wittgenstein’s attack
on “theory” as an inappropriate form of explanation for the arts and humanities.
However, my central concern here will be to explore arguments favoring a philoso-
phy of the humanities as distinguishable from both science and theory.

almost impossible to exaggerate.” In Mysticism and Logic: and Other Essays (New York: Longmans, Green
and Co., 1918), p. 113 (my emphases). This is an admirably succinct summary of the epistemology to
which Carroll subscribes. Theories are built piecemeal out of preliminary and falsifiable hypotheses,
and one must establish the factual character of the parts before the whole can be understood. The
theory then advances teleologically as successively closer approximations to the truth as hypotheses are
further tested, refined, or rejected in light of new evidence.
An Elegy for Theory 99

If philosophy involves another mode of explaining and knowing, why does

the alternative not amount to a theory? As Allen and Turvey summarize in their
introduction to Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, philosophy differs from science in
that its subject matter is not empirical in nature—only nature is subject to investi-
gation by empirical methods. “Empirical” has a precise definition here as that of
which we can have no prior knowledge. Alternatively, philosophy is concerned
with problems of sense and meaning, and these problems are not empirical in the
sense that language use and creative expression are already part of a commonly
accessible stock of human knowledge.
This involves a second criterion: statements about empirical phenomenon
are, and must be, necessarily falsifiable. Philosophical investigation, however, only
concerns testing the limits of sense and meaning of given propositions. In this
way, Wittgenstein’s case for philosophy as the best alternative to theory for study-
ing human behavior and creativity is based on what he calls the “autonomy of
linguistic meaning.” This concept is exemplified in the distinction between rea-
sons and causes. In a causal explanation, each effect is presumed to have a cause
identified by a hypothesis, which may and must be rejected or revised in light of
further evidence. Causal explanations are legitimate in scientific contexts because
actions have origins that derive from states of affairs of which we have no prior
knowledge. Most human action and behavior, however, is ill served by causal
explanation, for agents have the capacity to justify their behaviors with reasons.
“Autonomy” now indicates that agents have the capacity for authoritative self-
examination and self-justification. Therefore, a key difference between scientific
and philosophical inquiry is that science tests its hypotheses against external phe-
nomena, that is, the natural world. But philosophy admits only to internal or
self-investigation. This is less a question of truth and error than judgments concern-
ing the “rightness” of a proposition tested against prior experience and knowledge.
This is one way to begin to unravel the conceptual confusions surrounding
the idea of theory in cinema studies; for example, why Bordwell and Carroll have
been so wedded to a certain idea of science, but also why theory, even from a cul-
tural or psychoanalytic perspective, remains so compelling for a great many fairly
intelligent people. As Turvey puts the question, “Why is there a lack of basic
empirical research in film theory if the nature and functions of cinema are like
the laws governing natural phenomena? Why does such research, somehow, seem
unnecessary to film theorists? And how is it that film theories ever convince any-
one that they are plausible in the absence of such sustained research?”10 Because
these criteria are irrelevant for cultural investigation. Film theories, like all

10. Malcolm Turvey, “Can Science Help Film Theory?,” Journal of Moving Image Studies 1, no. 1
(2001), http://www.uca.edu/org/ccsmi/journal/issue1_table_contents.htm. The passage reads differ-
ently in the latest published version of the essay. See Turvey, “Can Scientific Models of Theorizing
Help Film Theory?,” in The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Texts and Readings, ed. Angela Curren and
Thomas E. Wartenberg (London: Blackwell, 2005), p. 25.
100 OCTOBER

humanistic investigation, concern human activities and thus presume a high

degree of prior, even self-, knowledge and examination. Like any cultural activity,
cinema is a human creation and thus is embedded in practices and institutions
that form the basis of our quotidian existence. We may not have conscious knowl-
edge of these practices and institutions, nor any desire to construct theories about
them in the form of propositions or concepts, yet we act on and through them in
coherent and consistent ways. This is why cultural theories are able to solicit agree-
ment in the absence of empirical research and experimentation. Their power and
plausibility is based on the extent to which they seem to clarify for us what we
already know and do on a daily basis. Here we need no external examination
beyond the critical investigation of our own practices as they evolve historically.
However, what film studies has called theory, in its multiple and variegate guises,
might more appropriately be called aesthetics or philosophy. And indeed, perhaps
we could achieve much methodological and conceptual clarification by setting
aside “theory” provisionally in order to examine what a philosophy of the humani-
ties, and, indeed, what a film philosophy might look like.

I would prefer to title this essay Éloge de la théorie, for in composing an elegy
for theory I have kept in mind the subtle variations present in French. Combining
the English sense of both eulogy and elegy, and something more besides, an éloge
can be both praise song and funereal chant, panegyric and chanson d’adieu. (In
addition, it conveys the second meaning of a legal judgment expressed in some-
one’s favor.) Certainly I think the enterprise of theory is still a worthy one. Yet
why, in contemporary critical discourse, are there so few left to praise and none to
love it?
We must first examine the debate on theory from the point of view of com-
peting epistemological stakes. Accused of “epistemological atheism,” theory as a
concept has been wrested from the Continent to be returned semantically to the
shores of science and the terrain of British and American analytical philosophy.
Initially, this debate was posed as a conflict between theory and philosophy. But
the late Wittgenstein took this argument in another direction, one that also
questioned theory but as a way of turning philosophy from science to restore it to
the humanities. In so doing, Wittgenstein was less concerned with the epistemo-
logical perfectibility of philosophical language than with reclaiming philosophy’s
ancient task of theoria. If the politics and epistemology of theory have been subject
to much soul searching and epistemological critique, it is important nonetheless
to find and retain in theory the distant echo of its connection to philosophy, or to
theoria, as restoring an ethical dimension to epistemological self-examination. As
Wittgenstein tried to teach us, what we need after theory is not science, but a
renewed dialogue between philosophy and the humanities wherein both refash-
ion themselves in original ways.
An Elegy for Theory 101

Ultimately, I want to argue that Wittgenstein’s attack on theory is both too

broad and too restrictive, but here it is more important to foreground what the
later Wittgenstein brings to a philosophy of the humanities. In liberating human-
istic inquiry from the bonds of empirical and causal explanation, a philosophy of
humanities may make propositional claims, but these claims need not be fallible—
they only require suasion and clear, authoritative self-justification. This is because
humanistic theories are culture-centered. Unlike the investigation of natural phe-
nomena, philosophical investigations examine what human beings already know
and do, and this knowledge is in principle public and accessible to all. In
Bordwell’s sense of the term, “naturalization,” whether good or bad, has little rele-
vance here as humanistic (self-) inquiry does not require finding new information,
but rather only clarifying and evaluating what we already know and do, or know
how to do, and understanding why it is of value to us. In its descriptive emphasis,
Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations do support strongly one important
aspect of historical poetics—the analysis of the internal norms of cultural
objects and of our everyday sense-making activities in relation to those objects.
Nonetheless, a “nonempirical” notion of history is wanted here, and for specific
philosophical reasons. Natural laws are time-independent, at least in a human
context, and thus are appropriately explored through falsifiable causal explana-
tions. Alternatively, cultural knowledge is historical in a particular sense. It
emerges and evolves in the context of multiple, diverse, and conflicting social
interactions that require constant reevaluation on a human time scale. Human
history and natural history may not be investigated by the same means, even if,
with respect to certain problems, their domains may overlap. Unlike the scientist,
the humanist must examine phenomena that may be shifting before her very eyes.
She must account for change in the course of its becoming, while she herself
might be in a process of self-transformation.
To what extent, then, is the enterprise of theory still possible? And how
might we return to philosophy the specificity of its activity? The two questions are
different yet related, and both are linked to the fate of humanities in the twenty-
first century and the place of film in the future of the humanities. Possible
answers begin in recognizing that epistemological atheism does not follow from
an ethical critique of modernity. And indeed what links philosophy today to its
most ancient origins are the intertwining projects of evaluating our styles of know-
ing with the examination of our modes of existence and their possibilities of
transformation. I want to conclude by briefly exploring these questions in dis-
cussing two contemporary philosophers as exemplars of the twinned projects of
ethical and epistemological evaluation: Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell. Deleuze
and Cavell are the two contemporary philosophers with the strongest commit-
ment to cinema, yet with distinctly original conceptions of the specificity of
philosophy and of philosophical expression in relation to film. Though an
unlikely pairing, reading these two philosophers together can deepen and clarify
their original contributions to our understanding of film and of contemporary
102 OCTOBER

philosophy. Here I want to make the case that a (film) philosophy may and should
be distinguished from theory. At the same time, I want to distinguish for the
humanities a fluid metacritical space of epistemological and ethical self-examination
that we may continue to call “theory” should we wish to do so.
Deleuze’s cinema books present two pairs of elements that show what a film
philosophy might look like. These elements recur throughout Deleuze’s philo-
sophical work. On one hand, there is the relation of Concept to Image. Here the
creation of Concepts defines the autonomy of philosophical activity, while the
Image becomes the key to understanding subjectivity and our relation to the
world. The second set involves Deleuze’s original reconsideration of Nietzsche’s
presentation of ethical activity as philosophical interpretation and evaluation.
Deleuze ends Cinema 2: The Time-Image with a curious plaint for theory.
Already in 1985, he argues, theory had lost its pride of place in thought about cin-
ema, seeming abstract and unrelated to practical creation. But theory is not
separate from the practice of cinema, for it is itself a practice or a constructivism
of concepts.
For theory too is something which is made, no less than its object. . . .
A theory of cinema is not “about” cinema, but about the concepts that
cinema gives rise to and what are themselves related to other concepts
corresponding to other practices. . . . The theory of cinema does not
bear on the cinema, but on the concepts of cinema, which are no less
practical, effective or existent than cinema itself. . . . Cinema’s con-
cepts are not given in cinema. And yet they are cinema’s concepts, not
theories about cinema. So that there is always a time, midday-midnight,
when we must no longer ask ourselves, “What is cinema?” but “What is
philosophy?” Cinema itself is a new practice of images and signs, whose
theory philosophy must produce as a conceptual practice.11
A slippage is obvious here with theory standing in for philosophy. But that being
said, what does Deleuze wish to imply in complaining that the contemporary
moment is weak with respect to creation and concepts? The most replete response
comes from the most obvious successor to the problems raised in the cinema
books—Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?
For Deleuze and Guattari, the three great domains of human creation are
art, philosophy, and science. These are relatively autonomous domains, each of
which involves acts of creation based on different modes of expression—percep-
tual, conceptual, or functional. The problem confronted in What Is Philosophy? is
knowing how philosophical expression differs from artistic or scientific expres-
sion, yet remains in dialogue with them. Percepts, concepts, and functions are
different expressive modalities, and each may influence the other, but not in a way

11. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galet a
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 280.
An Elegy for Theory 103

that affects the autonomy of their productive activity. An artist or scientist no

doubt profoundly engages in conceptual activity, and so is influenced by philoso-
phy. Yet the outputs of that activity—percepts, functions—retain their autonomy
and specificity.
From one perspective, the distinctiveness of these outputs is easy to explain.
The aim of science is to create functions, of art to create sensuous aggregates, and
of philosophy to create concepts, but the devil is in the details. In art, percepts
refer to the creation of affective experience through constructions of sensuous mate-
rials. In painting, these expressive materials may be blocks of lines/colors; in cinema,
blocks of movements/durations/sounds. Alternatively, the role of functions helps
clarify the relation of philosophy to theory in the scientific sense. There is a function,
Deleuze explains, as soon as two wholes are put into a fixed correspondence.
Newton’s inverse square law provides an apposite example. A function is a mathe-
matical expression orienting thought (first whole) to a natural phenomenon (the
propagation of energy). As expression, the function is not the specific phenomenon,
of course, nor is it analogous to thinking. The function is a descriptor or algorithm.
Its descriptiveness of behaviors in the natural world is important, but this is not
the key to its specificity. It is abstract and general, and its generality derives from
its time-independence. It produces descriptions, and these descriptions are valid
for all times and all places—thus, the proposal of a second whole. In its predictive-
ness of future behaviors, then, the function is exemplary of what science calls
“theory,” and when this predictiveness becomes regular, functions become “laws.”
Contrariwise, the concept is abstract yet singular—it relates to thought in its
own temporality and human specificity. For these reasons, philosophy is much closer
to art than it is to science. The expressiveness of art finds its instantiation in the
sensuous products of art and its human affects, and the expressiveness of science
finds its confirmation in the predicted behaviors of natural phenomena. But con-
cepts express only thought and acts of thinking. Does this mean that thinking is
purely an interior activity cut off from the sensuous and material world? Art provides
important answers to this question in relating concepts to ideas, signs, and images.
In 1991, Deleuze gave an important lecture at FEMIS [École nationale supérieure
des métiers de l’image et du son], the French national film and television school, an
excerpt of which was published as “Having an Idea in Cinema.” What does it mean
to have an Idea in art and how do Ideas differ from Concepts? Ideas are specific to
a domain, a milieu, or a material. And so Deleuze writes, “Ideas must be treated as
potentials that are already engaged in this or that mode of expression and insepara-
ble from it, so much so that I cannot say I have an idea in general. According to
the techniques that I know, I can have an idea in a given domain, an idea in cin-
ema or rather an idea in philosophy.”12 Now, ideas in philosophy are already

12. Gilles Deleuze, “Having an Idea in Cinema,” trans. Eleanor Kaufman, in Deleuze and Guattari:
New Mappings in Polit ics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 14.
104 OCTOBER

oriented by a certain kind of image, what Deleuze calls the “image of thought,”
and so a connection or relation must link them. In What Is Philosophy? the image
of thought is defined as the specific terrain or plane of immanence from which
ideas emerge as preconceptual expression, or as “the image thought gives itself of
what it means to think, to orient one’s self in thought.”13 To have an idea, then, is
to express thought through particular constructions, combinations, or linkages—
what Deleuze calls signs. As Spinoza insisted, signs are not an expression of
thought, but rather of our powers of thinking. Ideas are not separable from an
autonomous sequence or sequencing of ideas in thought, what Spinoza calls con-
catenatio. This concatenation of signs unites form and material, constituting
thought as a spiritual automaton whose potentia expresses our powers of thinking,
action, or creation.
The importance of Deleuze’s cinema books is that they present his most
complete account of a philosophical semiotic modeled on movement and time
and show how images and signs in movement or time are conceptually innovative;
that is, how they renew our powers of thinking. In this manner, art relates to phi-
losophy in that images and signs involve preconceptual expression in the same way
that the image of thought involves a protoconceptual expression—they prepare
the terrain for new concepts to emerge. The cinema may be best able to picture
thought and to call for thinking because like thought its ideas are comprised of
movements, both spatial and temporal, characterized by connections and con-
junctions of particular kinds. Every instance of art is expressive of an idea which
implies a concept, and what philosophy does with respect to art is to produce new
constructions or assemblages that express or give form to the concepts implied in
art’s ideas. It renders perspicuous and in conceptual form the automatisms that
make a necessity of art’s generative ideas.
There is also an ethical dimension to the various ways Deleuze characterizes
image and concept in relation to the image of thought. For Deleuze, this implies a
Nietzschean ethics encompassing two inseparable activities: interpretation and
evaluation. “To interpret,” Deleuze writes, “is to determine the force which gives
sense to a thing. To evaluate is to determine the will to power which gives value to
a thing.”14 What bridges Deleuze and Cavell here are not only their interest in
Nietzsche, but also their original concept of ontology. Though Cavell uses the
word and Deleuze does not, both are evaluating a particular way of Being. This is
not the being or identity of film or what identifies film as art, but rather the ways
of being that art provokes in us—or more deeply, how film and other forms of art
express for us or return to us our past, current, and future states of being. In both
philosophers, the ethical relation is inseparable from our relation to thought. For

13. Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 37.
14. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), p. 54.
An Elegy for Theory 105

how we think, and whether we sustain a relation to thought or not, is bound up

with our modes of existence and our relations with others and to the world.
The key to grasping this relation in Deleuze is to understand the originality
of his characterization of the image as both an ontological and ethical concept.
Especially in the cinema books, the image is not the product of cinematic creation
but rather its raw material, the worldly substance that it forms and to which it
gives expression. Hence the key place of Henri Bergson’s assertion from Matter
and Memory that there is already photography in things. Like energy, images can
neither be created nor destroyed—they are a state of the universe, an asubjective
universal perception or luminosity that evolves and varies continuously. Human
perception is therefore largely a process of subtraction. Because we must orient
ourselves in this vast regime of universal change according to our limited percep-
tual context, we extract and form special images or perceptions according to our
physiological limits and human needs. This image is the very form of our subjec-
tivity and persists in the crossroads between our internal states and our external
relations with the world.
The image is thus in relation with ourselves (interiority) and in relation with
the world (exteriority) in an intimately interactive way. It is absurd to refer to sub-
jectivity as pure interiority as it is ceaselessly engaged with matter and with the
world. By the same token, thought is not interiority but our way of engaging with
the world, orienting ourselves there and creating from the materials it offers us.
Thus, another way of considering the autonomy of art, philosophy, and science is
to evaluate the different though related images of thought they offer us. The per-
cept is visually and acoustically sensuous, provoking affects or emotions in us.
Concepts and functions are more abstract. What the function is to scientific
expression, the sign is to aesthetic expression. Art’s relation to thought, then, lies
not in the substance of images, but in the logic of their combination and enchain-
ment. No doubt every artistic image is an image of thought, a physical tracing and
expression of thought given sensual form, no matter how incoherent or inelegant.
However, while the aesthetic sign may imply a precise concept, it is nonetheless
entirely affective and preconceptual. Yet there is a philosophical power in images.
The artist’s iIdea is not necessarily the philosopher’s. But images not only trace
thoughts and produce affects; they may also provoke thinking or create new pow-
ers of thinking. In so doing, we are thrown from sensuous to abstract thought,
from an image of thought to a thought without image—this is the domain of
philosophy. And in moving from one to the other, art may inspire philosophy to
give form to a concept.
What does philosophy value in art? To ask this question is to demand what
forces expressed in art, in images and signs, call for thinking? Philosophy parts
ways with science to the extent that time is taken as an independent variable—in
fact, the simplest way of describing Deleuze’s (or Bergson’s) philosophical project
is as the will to reintroduce time and change to philosophy’s image of thought.
Philosophy finds inspiration in art because there the will to create is brought to its
106 OCTOBER

highest powers. Here, as in many other ways, Deleuze goes against the grain of
contemporary philosophy. While happily science has never renounced its powers
of creation, it has become less and less conceptual. And of course, it does not
need concepts as philosophy does. Contrariwise, philosophy has moved closer and
closer to art, and vice versa. This is the great untold story of twentieth-century
philosophy that the twenty-first century must recount: that philosophy’s greatest
innovations were not made with respect to science, but in dialogue with art. And
further, that the modern arts came closer and closer to philosophical expression
while nonetheless amplifying their aesthetic powers.
That art may be considered philosophical expression is an important link
between Deleuze and Cavell’s interest in film. Like Deleuze, Cavell’s cinema books
are not studies of film but rather philosophical studies—they are works of philoso-
phy first and foremost. Nonetheless, it may also be reasonable to read them as
studies of film culture in their deep awareness of how cinema has penetrated the
daily life of the mind and of being in the twentieth century. Though in very differ-
ent ways, both Deleuze and Cavell comprehend cinema as expressing ways of
being in the world and of relating to the world. In this respect, cinema is already
philosophy, and a philosophy intimately connected to our everyday life. Deleuze
exemplifies this idea in pairing Bergson’s Matter and Memory with the early history
of cinema. At the moment when philosophy returns to problems of movement
and time in relation to thought and the image, the cinematic apparatus emerges
neither as an effect of these problems nor in analogy with them. In its own way, it
is the aesthetic expression of current and persistent philosophical problems. Nor
should one say that Deleuze’s thought is simply influenced by cinema. Rather, it is
the direct philosophical expression, in the form of concepts and typologies of
signs, of problems presented preconceptually in aesthetic form.
Cavell presents a similar perspective, though one more clearly framed by
problems of ontology and ethics. In my view, Cavell’s work is exemplary of a phi-
losophy of and for the humanities, particularly in his original attempt to balance
the concerns of epistemology and ethics. In this respect, two principal ideas unite
Cavell’s philosophical and film work. Moreover, these are less separate ideas than
iterations of the same problem that succeed one another more or less chronologi-
cally, namely, the philosophical confrontation with skepticism and the concept of
moral perfectionism. The question here is why film is so important as the com-
panion or exemplification of this confrontation. One clue resides in the title of an
important Cavell essay, “What Photography Calls Thinking.”15 What does it mean
to say that art or images think, or that they respond to philosophical problems as a
way of thinking or a style of thought? In the first phase of Cavell’s film philosophy,
represented by the period surrounding the publication of The World Viewed, the
responses to this question are ontological and epistemological. But this ontology

15. Stanley Cavell, “What Photography Calls Thinking,” in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), pp. 115–34.
An Elegy for Theory 107

refers neither to the medium of art nor the identity of art works, but rather to
how art expresses our modes of existence or ways of being in the world as the fall
into and return from skepticism.
Here an ontology of film is less concerned with identifying the medium of
film than with understanding how our current ways of being in the world and
relating to it are “cinematic.” In its very conditions of presentation and percep-
tion, cinema expresses a particular philosophical problem, that of skepticism and
its overcoming. If, as Cavell argues, cinema presents “a moving image of skepti-
cism,” it neither exemplifies nor is analogous to the skeptical attitude.16 Rather,
cinema expresses both the problem and its possible overcomings. The quality of
“movement” in this philosophical image is temporal or historical in a specific
sense. In its very dispositif for viewing and encountering the world, cinema pre-
sents philosophy’s historical dilemma (skepticism’s perceptual disjunction from
the world) as past, while orienting the modern subject toward a possible future.
That skepticism should reproduce itself in a technology for seeing might mean
that it is no longer the ontological air we breathe, but a passing phase of our
philosophical culture. If, as Cavell argues, the reality that film holds before us is
that of our own perceptual condition, then it opens the possibility of once again
being present to self or acknowledging how we may again become present to our-
selves. (Indeed Cavell’s examination of cinema’s relation to the fate of skepticism
helps clarify a Deleuzian cinematic ethics as faith in this world and its possibilities
for change.17) For these reasons, film may already be the emblem of skepticism in
decline. Cinema takes up where philosophy leaves off, as the preconceptual
expression of the passage to another way of being. This is why cinema is both a
presentation of and withdrawal from skepticism—the almost perfect realization of
the form of skeptical perception as a way, paradoxically, of reconnecting us to the
world and asserting its existential force as past presence in time. The irony of this
recognition now is that modernity may no longer characterize our modes of being
or of looking, and we must then anticipate something else.
In the major books that follow, culminating in Cities of Words, the temporality
of this epistemological condition is reconsidered as a question of art and ethical
evaluation. The key concept of ethical evaluation is what Cavell calls moral perfec-
tionism. Moral perfectionism is the nonteleological expression of a desire for
change or becoming. Here our cinematic culture responds not to a dilemma of
perception and thought, but rather a moral imperative. This trajectory from onto-
logical to ethical questions is exemplary of how Cavell uses cinema to deepen his
description of the subjective condition of modernity as itself suspended between a
worldly or epistemological domain and a moral domain. In both cases, cinema

16. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition (1971;
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 188.
17. See my essay, “A World, Time,” in The Afterimage of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, ed. D. N.
Rodowick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).
108 OCTOBER

confronts the problem of skepticism. In the first instance, this is an epistemological

disappointment, in that we are disconnected from the world by our own subjectiv-
ity—all we can know of the world is from behind the screen of our consciousness.
The second responds to a moral disappointment in the state of the world or with
my current mode of existence. This division is not only formal; it is also, and per-
haps primarily, temporal. As Kant posed the problem, the province of under-
standing, of knowledge of objects and their causal laws, defines the modern scien-
tific attitude whose formidable power derives from making time an independent
variable. What is unknown in the natural world could not become known through
the powers of causal reasoning if the rules could change in the course of time. But
the problem that so provoked Kant was that atemporal reason was in conflict with
moral freedom. To be human is to experience change. So how might philosophy
characterize humanity as at once subject of understanding and of reason, as sub-
ject to causal relations and expressive of moral freedom? Given that as material
creatures we are in bondage to the empirical world and its causal laws, philoso-
phy’s task is to explain how we are also free to experience and to anticipate
change in the projection of future existences.
Therefore, in Cavell’s account moral perfectionism takes us from the form
of skepticism to the possibilities of human change, and to the deeper moral prob-
lem of evaluating our contemporary mode of existence and transcending it in
anticipation of a better, future existence. In the first stage, the problem is to over-
come my moral despair of ever knowing the world; in the second, my despair of
changing it and myself. Thus, Cavell’s interest in Emerson (or in Wittgenstein,
Nietzsche, or Freud) is to heal this rift in philosophy exemplified by Wittgenstein’s
disappointment with knowledge as failing to make us better than we are or to give
us peace. Alternatively, moral perfectionism begins with this sense of ethical disap-
pointment and ontological restlessness, catching up the modern subject in a
desire for self-transformation whose temporality is that of a becoming without
finality. “In Emerson and Thoreau’s sense of human existence,” Cavell writes,
“there is no question of reaching a final state of the soul, but only and endlessly
taking the next step to what Emerson calls ‘an unattained but attainable self’—a
self that is always and never ours—a step that turns us not from bad to good, or
wrong to right, but from confusion and constriction toward self-knowledge and
sociability.”18
This idea forms the basis of Cavell’s later books on comedies of remarriage
and melodramas of the unknown woman. The interest of film here is to show it as
the ordinary or quotidian expression of the deepest concerns of moral philoso-
phy. And just as Wittgenstein sought to displace metaphysical expression into
ordinary language and daily concerns, film brings moral philosophy into the con-
text of quotidian dramatic expression:

18. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 13.
An Elegy for Theory 109

These films are rather to be thought of as differently configuring

intellectual and emotional avenues that philosophy is already in explo-
ration of, but which, perhaps, it has cause sometimes to turn from pre-
maturely, particularly in its forms since its professionalization, or acade-
mization. . . . The implied claim is that film, the latest of the great arts,
shows philosophy to be the often invisible accompaniment of the ordi-
nary lives that film is so apt to capture.19
Where contemporary philosophy has reneged on its promise of moral perfection-
ism, film has responded, though in the preconceptual manner of all art and
sensuous expression. Thus the great project of film philosophy today is not only to
help reinvigorate this moral reflection, but to heal by example the rift in philoso-
phy’s relation to everyday life.
In the prologue to Cities of Words, Cavell reprises Thoreau’s lament that
“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is
admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live.” How well Thoreau
foresaw the difficult life of philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
If one must compose an elegy for theory, let us hope it awakens a new life for phi-
losophy in the current millennium.

19. Ibid., p. 6.