TV-Philosophy

Sandra Laugier, Daniela Ginsburg

Description

This is the first book to explore the hold of TV series on our lives from a philosophical and ethical perspective. Sandra Laugier argues that this vital and ubiquitous expression of popular culture throughout the world is transformative in its effects on the activity of philosophy in everyday life. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s work on film and ordinary experience, Laugier contends that we are deeply affected by the formative role played by the TV series we watch, and by the ways they become interconnected with our daily lives.

The philosophical thinking embodied in series empowers individuals in their capacity to experience, understand and appropriate elements of the world, and to educate themselves. Through our relationships with TV series, we develop our own tastes and competences, which are constitutive of our distinct experience of life. ‘Series-philosophy’ is thus a democratizing force. It also offers us a new ethics, for morality can be found not in general rules and abstract principles but in the narrative texture of characters in everyday situations facing particular ethical problems, and with whom we form attachments that result in our moral education—in sometimes surprising ways.

Introduction

1. An Education

2. Forms of Shared Experience

3. Family Resemblances

4. Caring For, By, and With TV Series

Conclusion

Bibliography

Serigraphy and Filmography

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Ethique et morale
• Télévision
• Film
• Drama
• General
• Ethics
• History of film
• Television
• General officer
• Philosophy
• Película fotográfica
• Philosophie et théologie
• Genres
• Moral Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: University of Exeter Press
• Date de parution: 27 juin 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781804130223
• Langue: English

Extrait

TV-Philosophy
TV-Philosophy
Series Editors:
Sandra Laugier, Martin Shuster, Robert Sinnerbrink
Television with Stanley Cavell in Mind
edited by David LaRocca and Sandra Laugier (2023)
TV-Philosophy: How TV Series Change our Thinking
Sandra Laugier (2023)
TV-Philosophy in Action: The Ethics and Politics of TV Series
Sandra Laugier(2023)
TV-Philosophy
How TV Series Change our Thinking
SANDRA LAUGIER
translated by DANIELA GINSBURG
First published in 2023 by
University of Exeter Press
Reed Hall, Streatham Drive
Exeter EX4 4QR
UK
www.exeterpress.co.uk
Copyright © Sandra Laugier 2023
The right of Sandra Laugier to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Series title
TV-Philosophy
This book has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement N° 834759)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
https://doi.org/10.47788/ILDG2292
ISBN 978-1-80413-021-6 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-80413-022-3 ePub
ISBN 978-1-80413-023-0 PDF
Cover image © iStockphoto/WhataWin
Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by S4Carlisle Publishing Services, Chennai, India
We cannot see the moral interest of literature unless we recognize gestures, manners, habits, turns of speech, turns of thought, styles of face as morally expressive—of an individual or of a people. The intelligent description of such things is part of the intelligent, the sharp-eyed, description of life, of what matters, makes differences, in human lives.
Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind , reprint (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 [1991]), 375.
The question what becomes of objects when they are filmed and screened—like the question what becomes of particular people, and specific locales, and subjects and motifs when they are filmed by individual makers of film—has only one source of data for its answer, namely the appearance and significance of just those objects and people that are in fact to be found in the succession of films, or passages of films, that matter to us.
Stanley Cavell, ‘What Becomes of Things on Film?’, Philosophy and Literature 2, no. 2 (1978), 256.
‘You know the codes as well as I do. They’re in every western, film noir, and melodrama we watched on TV as kids. What right do you have to ignore the moral you were taught, as was I, by popular entertainment?’
Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric) in My Golden Days , Arnaud Desplechin (2015).
The sense we now have for essential characteristics of persons and objects is very largely the result of art.
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, NY: Perigee, 1980), 294.
Contents
Introduction
1. An Education
2. Forms of Shared Experience
3. Family Resemblances
4. Caring for, By, and With TV Series
Conclusion
Bibliography
Serigraphy and Filmography
Index
Introduction
This book is one of two volumes that result from a decade-long enterprise in writing about TV series. The project developed out of a monthly column for the French newspaper Libération (2013–2022) , which led to a book Nos vies en séries (2019) and an ongoing European Research Council project ‘Demoseries’, which explores a corpus of ‘security TV series’ from conception to reception.
These two new books provide English-speaking readers with access to my work on TV series for the first time. TV-Philosophy: How TV Series Change our Thinking is a theoretical monograph discussing the philosophical thought of series—the thought about the world that is produced and expressed through TV series—a Series-Philosophy akin to the Film-Philosophy developed by Stanley Cavell, William Rothman, Robert Sinnerbrink, and others.
The companion volume, TV-Philosophy in Action: The Ethics and Politics of TV Series , can be seen as that Series-Philosophy put into practice. It offers readers a selection of my columns from Libération , brought together with other writings from the online journal AOC ( https://aoc.media/ ), Le Monde , and l’Obs . These pieces focus on individual series, or groups of related series, and films. Together, they may be taken as exemplars of a body of Series-Philosophy. The Libération columns in particular were often written in close proximity to the viewing experience, and are informal in tone: I write as a philosopher of ordinary language and a fan of series.
These two books—the more theoretical overview provided by TV-Philosophy: How TV Series Change our Thinking and the more specific and particularized TV-Philosophy in Action: The Ethics and Politics of TV Series— are envisaged as complementary. They can be read one after the other or in tandem; that is to say, dipping in and out of TV-Philosophy in Action for exemplars, while digesting the theoretical arguments of TV-Philosophy . An index of series, with references to all pages on which each series is mentioned, is included at the end of each book.
***
I am not an expert on television series, the media, or popular culture. This book and its companion volume do not claim any scholarly erudition or historical or aesthetic expertise. Rather, both books are the contribution of a philosopher of ordinary language and a passionate amateur—in other words, a fan—of series, to the collective reflection that is produced daily by not only critics, sociologists, and theoreticians, but also the mass of viewers and fans who comment on, evaluate, and discuss TV series. I am not interested in viewing series through some philosophical lens—quite simply because philosophy is not a lens, but rather, as the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein has taught me, an activity that leads us to examine our discourses and lives. Nor am I interested in producing a ‘philosophy of series’ that would take television series as its ‘object’— for the simple reason that philosophy itself is completely transformed by our interest in these forms of popular culture, just as it was by cinema, which, as Stanley Cavell has shown, found its place in our world through its particular affinity with our ordinary experience. Our experience is profoundly affected by these works; as John Dewey wrote, it results from them: ‘Instead of fleeing from experience to a metaphysical realm, the material of experiences is so rendered that it becomes the pregnant matter of a new experience. Moreover, the sense we now have for essential characteristics of persons and objects is very largely the result of art.’ 1 In addition, the philosophy I try to practise is inspired by the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, and Cavell, 2 and thus consists in avoiding any position of superiority over ordinary culture.
Today, nearly everyone likes or is familiar with at least a few TV series. But the format is still simultaneously, and inextricably, under- and over-valued. There is a striking discrepancy between, on the one hand, series’ intellectual, political, and moral influence, the place they occupy in everyday conversation and life, the often indulgent adulation they inspire, and, on the other hand, the lack of real interest in or even acknowledgement of them as works of thought. It is as if, in appreciating series, viewers and critics primarily valorize themselves, rather than trying to recognize or explain the influence series have over them. My aim here and in TV-Philosophy in Action is to elucidate or clarify series’ particular power, and their thought—not in the sense of that which is thought about them, but rather the thought that they produce about the world in which we live. This is something that has gradually come to be recognized in cinema, which is now analysed as ‘thought’ in its own right, and not merely as an object of thought. 3 Thus, I am interested in pursuing a philosophy of series, but in the sense of the philosophy that series offer and produce—and for which they do not need the assistance of philosophy as discipline.
Philosophy has a penchant for discussing ‘objects’ that are outside it (this could even be said to be its stock in trade: ‘the philosophy of X’), including the objects of popular culture, and this proclivity reveals its natural tendency to attribute a sovereign role to itself. But rather than providing philosophy with material for reflection or a reservoir of examples, the objects of popular culture constitute experiences, visions of the world that can stand on their own—just as philosophy does. My approach is inspired by Cavell’s works on film, which he wrote at a time when American comedies—the comedies of remarriage 4 (sometimes referred to as ‘screwball comedies’) he studied in Pursuits of Happiness and the melodramas (sometimes referred to as ‘tearjerkers’) to which he later dedicated Contesting Tears —were not taken entirely seriously. 5 When Cavell began studying these films within philosophy, he was met with some perplexity, since they were thought of as popular entertainment, commercial objects devoid of cultural legitimacy or relevance—and, of course, their gendered nature meant they were further denigrated. The genius of Pursuits of Happiness lies in its method, which consists in taking these comedies seriously—not as objects offered up to the intelligence of the philosopher, who can use them as examples to reveal hidden mechanisms that might have escaped the director’s notice (but not the philosopher’s), but rather in order to show the intelligence inherent in the material itself, the intelligence a film brings to its own making. Often, philosophy claims that the genius of a work of art—especially a work of popular art—is discovered through analysis. Cavell showed, first, that these Hollywood movies were great works of art (although that in itself was not his focus; and at least with TV series there was never any debate over this point—or, if there was, it quickly tur