Holding on to the Real (2000)

For two decades, I have taught cinema studies in an undergraduate program in a school of communications dedicated primarily to teaching and film production. These two categories summon profound philosophical debates and quite aggravated and contentious practical tensions about the epistemologies, social and political contexts, and intellectual groundings of media arts education that inform what I see as the of our profession of critical media arts work. When the Society for Cinema Studies asked me to sit on the plenary panel addressing the State of the Profession in March, I hesitated. For me, the of cinema studies seems rather remote, esoteric and disconnected. The I have worked in for the last 20 years encompasses more than just scholars: it includes media artists, working professionals, curators, programmers, distributors and grants agencies--in other words, the larger infrastructure of non-profit media arts in the United States. I have never had the luxury of living and thinking in an exclusively theoretical cinematic domain. My own location in a four-year teaching college in upstate New York has been both sobering and dialectical. On the sobering side, working in a program with more practitioners than theorists and more production courses than critical studies courses has kept me grounded in the dual realities of creating work and curating artists to produce something resembling an energized public space for real debate. Dialectically speaking, within my own institutional context, there quite simply is no possibility for ivory tower theorizing: theory and practice, for better or for worse, are and always will be intertwined, and are increasingly so. A creeping professionalization, corporatization and privatization have infused most sectors of the academy. They have wreaked havoc on our liberal arts humanist foundations for exploration of ideas and conversations with larger visions and values. The almost excessive concentration at many institutions on securing students professional jobs has created quite palpable contradictions between instrumental education and spirited critical inquiry. Unfortunately, the instrumentalists and machine cultists seem to be winning, further delegitimating the worthiness and utility of critical thinking. The profession of cinema studies therefore desperately needs to be defantasized. It also needs to be rebuilt as a public activity in conversation with ideas outside of itself. What is the of the this realm of critical media arts work and writing, in the twenty-first century? All of these words trouble me: state, profession, twenty-first, century. Perhaps we hold on to this concept of orderliness because the whole as we formerly knew it is vaporizing. It is difficult to map the because our locations have expanded. We teach cinema everywhere--in film schools, nursing and medical schools, communications, arts, humanities and engineering departments. More books on the marginal areas of cinema studies--documentary, experimental, unknown histories, digital work, national cinemas, race, class and gender--are published than ever before. All of this combustion is exhilarating. The word state worries me: it infers an orderliness that I find problematic within the context of the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Chechnya and of the shooting of Amidou Diallo and others in the U.S. It feels too static, too grand, too universal, too limiting, not fluid or mobile enough. I do not like the word field if it means marking off borders for cinema studies, whose very libidinal economy is based on its outsider academic status, its pleasures in watching, its fluidities and disorderliness. If as scholars and writers we belong to anything at all, I hope it is the struggle to insure that cinema, as Salman Rushdie has said about literature, argues with the world. …