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.