without an end, possessing only an ending” (Steedman 2002, 149).
In this spirit, I consider the endings of some recent books that reflect on our field(s). Each functions uneasily, almost uncannily, across the meanings of “end”: conclusion, objective, telos, remnant. For instance The Melancholy Art, Michael Ann Holly’s moving meditation on the nature of the art historical project and its objects, centers (like much recent film studies scholarship) on the issue of melancholy. “I am tempted to argue in general that the discipline of art history is eternally fated to be a melancholic one, primarily because the objects it appropriates as its own always and forever keep the wound open (the cut between present and past, word and image)—resistant to interpretation, these works of art nonetheless insistently provoke it” (Holly 2013, 116). “These beautiful orphans, in other words,” she writes, “animate scholars’ essays on the one hand because they ‘live,’ and on the other, because they are long ‘dead.’ It is melancholy that affords us a disciplinary soul” (132).
Paolo Cherchi‐Usai ends The Death of Cinema, his anxious, uneasy meditation on the extinction of film, with two sections that break free of his analysis in the form of a coda. That piece consists of the anonymous “A Reader’s Report to the Publisher,” followed by a “Reply.” Here the book’s narrating persona speculates about the cinema’s slow slide into oblivion. “Unable to preserve cinema by means of cinema, the archives (no doubt after a few pathetic gestures such as proposing to manufacture film for their own use) will be forced to face up to reality and go for other options. Projecting a film will become first a special circumstance, then a rare occurrence, and finally an exceptional event,” writes this reader (Cherchi‐Usai 2001, 124). “Eventually nothing at all will be projected, either because all surviving copies will be worn to a frazzle or decomposed, or because somebody decides to stop showing them in order to save for future duplication onto another format the few prints that remain” (124). What a vivid picture of inertia and exhaustion. But what follows makes a different claim: “There will be a final screening attended by a final audience, perhaps indeed a lonely spectator. With that, cinema will be talked about and written about as some remote hallucination, a dream that lasted a century or two” (124).
Imagine: a last screening, a lone spectator! But this is precisely a paradoxically optimistic and confident fantasy: the end of cinema will be a privileged punctual moment, and maybe you will be its final spectator. What a fascinating mix of anxiety, anticipatory nostalgia, and fantasies of mastering the medium’s extinction. How uncanny that such optimism surges from this bleak story of entropy.
But if this moment seems saturated with a compensatory sense of mastery, we can turn to Douglas Crimp’s elegant and pointed account of his past curatorial and critical project(s). He chooses to end Before Pictures with this reflection on the trajectory of his developing thoughts on the exhibit Pictures, which he curated in 1977 and with which the book opens: “One thing I can say for certain: when I wrote the Pictures catalogue essay, and even more when I rewrote it for October, I was convinced that with sufficient insight a critic could—or even should—determine what was historically significant at a given moment and explain why,” he writes. “That conviction was a result of my intellectual formation as an art historian and aspiring art critic. Moreover, it was possible to believe such a thing then: the art scene as I experienced it in New York from 1967 to 1977 was small enough to seem fully comprehensible. That, of course, no longer holds true” (Crimp 2016, 278).
“And because it is so clearly not true now, ” he continues, “it seems unlikely that it could really have been true then. In the meantime, coming to the understanding that my knowledge of art can never be anything but partial has been liberating. It has allowed me to write about what attracts me, challenges me, or simply gives me pleasure without having to make a grand historical claim for it.” Crimp continues, concluding his book with this observation: “No doubt that is why I respond to the reception of Pictures with ambivalence. It historicizes me” (278). Ending in process, inside the shifting perspectives or frames evoked by “historicization,” Crimp gracefully closes a narrative that maps a memoir onto a survey of beloved objects of study, even as it tracks the shifting relations between the critic and the work, and the mutating art world of New York City during the period that this book captures and frames. One finds no sense of mastery here, but rather an abiding respect for the work of reframing.
In the second volume of his magisterial trilogy on the “ends” of film theory, D. N. Rodowick inscribes mourning in the book’s title itself: Elegy for Theory. He devotes the final chapter to the question of “becoming a subject in theory,” which builds to a critical–aggressive conclusion that announces his confidence about a certain theory’s future, a certain future of theory. An account of the volatility that marks the evolution of theory across the 1980s and 1990s and into the next century, this 2014 text spends considerable time in its very last chapter anxiously confronting the relationship of theory to its subjects—the subjects in and of it—instead of its objects. Rodowick maps the shifts that have reshaped film theory: he maps them as unstable boundaries that attempt to mark off “film studies” from “media studies” and “cultural studies” (scare quotes here signal the anxious nature of any claim to delimit these categories).
“In a process happening across all media,” Rodowick (2014, 257) argues, “the rise of media studies and new critical interest in popular television, video art, and electronic media produced a situation where the object of film theory gave way to a new concern with visual studies and the multiplication of screen cultures driven by the demands of multinational capitalism and proliferating simultaneously on global and capillary scales” (257). Importantly, however, this movement intersects with developments in cultural studies, which “had created a new conception of a class or collective subject of mass culture, attentive to the differential contexts of reading and readership, that overturned or reversed logics of apparatus theory and the subject in process,” producing “readers rather than spectators” (257).
At the same time, he argues, “the steadily rising arc of cultural studies in film and media studies could also be mapped against a decline or displacement of psychoanalysis,” which is “especially apparent in the history of feminist film theory” (258). Looking back at this moment, he finds that feminist film theory, in particular, presents an apparent contradiction—even an internal rupture—at a pivotal point that displaces “a conceptual framework … committed to psychoanalysis, the unconscious, subjective difference, and the transgressive force of desire and the drives.” “In retrospect,” he contends, “one of the most curious features of contemporary theory is how the concept of negation or critique returns continually to the problem of identity” (260). For him, then, the paradox is that the negative force—or aggression—that lines critique in postmodern theoretical projects is displaced and returns to cling stubbornly to bodies, as if seeking to ground itself in the material resistance of the body, and specifically in visible difference.
So, while Rodowick wants to insist that “one of the very great achievements of this age of theory was its deep ethical commitments to political activism and the desire to critique and seek redress for inequality, discrimination, oppression, and injustice,” he identifies a core problem underpinning these achievements: “the tendency to construct a concept of identity as the site of a special epistemological space in relation to ideology or to power” (261). Consequently, he can then go on to argue that the force of negation has somehow been highjacked to the advantage of certain identity positions. Troubling in this account is its apparent suspicion of any theoretical claims to “a special kind of epistemological privilege” that may issue from a social location. Here, I think, his argument conflates the body and its visible aspects with “situated knowledge.”
It seems to me that this last conflation (or rather collapse) names an ongoing issue in our most pressing efforts to define, delineate, shape, or stabilize and frame our object of study and its critique. And I hear in Rodowick’s retrospection a real interest in tracking the ways in which our critical relationship to aesthetic objects—whether
