Philosophy-Screens: From Cinema to the Digital Revolution

Author(s): Mauro Carbone; translated by Marta Nijhuis Year: 2019 (original French: Philosophie-écrans. Du cinéma à la révolution numérique, Vrin 2016) Publisher: SUNY Press (SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, ed. Dennis J. Schmidt) Type: book

Carbone's programmatic elaboration of a "philosophy-cinema" at digital-era scale — a philosophy-screens. The book moves from French phenomenology's engagement with cinema (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Lyotard) to a theory of the arche-screen as the transhistorical apparatus of showing-and-concealing, and then to today's screens (interactive billboards, social networks, post-9/11 media, AI-operating-systems) as sites of a new condition Carbone names dividuation. The book prosecutes a single unified claim: philosophy's traditional fight-against-screens masked its own dependence on them, and the image's logic — which the concept cannot capture — is now the logic philosophy must become.

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: Deleuze's call for a "philosophy-cinema" (1974) names a task that has not yet been performed — including by Deleuze himself. Because: In the Cinema diptych (1983–85), Deleuze reverts to "philosophy as practice of concepts" whose "object" is the concepts of cinema. This abandons the radical program of Difference and Repetition's 1968 Preface and leaves the hyphen in "philosophy-cinema" unexplained. Žižek's complaint that Deleuze misses Hitchcock's materialist anti-Platonism is the symptom. Against: The standard reading of Deleuze's Cinema books as accomplishing the philosophy-cinema project.

  2. Claim: Among mid-20th century French thinkers, only the late Merleau-Ponty genuinely listens to cinema as a site of "fundamental thought" that philosophy must let reshape it, rather than drafting cinema into a prior philosophy. Because: The young Sartre conscripts cinema as a "Bergsonian art" (Apologie pour le cinéma, 1924–25) and drops the topic after his 1933 turn to Husserl. Deleuze assimilates cinema to Bergson's orbit. But the late MP — in the preparatory notes for his unfinished "Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today" course (1960–61) — identifies Bazin's "ontology of cinema" as a spontaneous philosophy or a-philosophy from which philosophy must rebuild itself. This is a different operation.

  3. Claim: MP's 1945 IDHEC lecture "The Film and the New Psychology" is a silently polemical response to Bergson's Creative Evolution ch. 4 condemnation of cinema. The 1952–53 course "The Sensible World and the World of Expression" confirms the polemic explicitly. Because: Bergson is never named in the 1945 lecture, yet the structure — Gestalt psychology → cinema as "temporal Gestalt" → Kuleshov effect — systematically inverts Bergson's argument. Where Bergson said perception is analytic like the cinematograph and therefore false, MP says perception is synthetic and therefore the cinematograph is true to its logic. The 1952–53 course notes explicitly cite Wertheimer's stroboscopic movement and a sequence of Vigo's Zéro de conduite as evidence. Against: Pierre Rodrigo's reading that MP absolutizes Soviet montage and thereby reduces the image to the "atom of meaning" of a sentence.

  4. Claim: The ontological figure at the center of MP's late work is mutual precession — from the single occurrence in Eye and Mind: "the precession of what is upon what one sees and makes seen, of what one sees and makes seen upon what is — this is vision itself." Because: Emmanuel de Saint Aubert's inventory of unpublished manuscripts shows that MP systematically replaced the spatial figures enjambement and empiétement with the temporal figure precession during 1960; and the Grand Résumé of V&I (Fall 1960) amends "Circularity, and precession" to "Circularity, but rather precession." Mutual precession dissolves the cleavage of real/imaginary: neither the gaze nor the things, neither the imaginary nor the actual, is primary — which is why we see according to or with images rather than at them. Against: Both Bergson's insistence on a primary term and Bazin's residual "logical distinction" between movement and the mobile.

  5. Claim: The arche-screen is the transhistorical apparatus of showing-and-concealing — a theme constituting itself simultaneously with its variations, not a Platonic form abstracted from them. Because: Plato's Cave already contains two screens — the teikhíon (parapet, concealing) and the opposite wall (showing). The etymology of "screen" (Old Frankish skirmjan, "to shelter") matches paráphragma (from phrássō, "to fence"). Variations: cave wall, rupestrian images (Chauvet), tent, mirror, veil of Isis, Pythagoras's curtain, templum, Albertian window, cinema, TV, computer, smartphone, display. Each variation reshapes perception, desire, and thought. Against: (a) Manovich's purely historical screen genealogy (misses the arche-screenic dimension); (b) a transhistorical invariant abstracted from all variants; (c) Stiegler/Derrida's "arche-cinema" (Carbone borrows the "arche-" prefix and re-theorizes).

  6. Claim: Three dynamics of visual desire have layered in Western visual culture: (i) the metaphysical desire to see beyond the surface (raise the veil of Isis); (ii) the perspectival desire to see through the surface (Albertian window); (iii) the cinematic desire to see according to or with the surface. Cinema enhances (iii) to the point of making us dream of entering the screen. Because: The Albertian window separates spectator/show, opaque/transparent, seer/seen (inventing the "subject"); the cinematic screen "inaugurates a space that does not institute any metaphysical 'beyond,' but makes visible a mythical 'elsewhere.'" Carbone's autobiographical evidence: the child's Far West was neither beyond nor through the screen but an "other spatiotemporal dimension" to be recreated in play. Against: The persistent window-based "image of seeing" (including Microsoft Windows) and the film-theoretical reading of cinema as continuation of the window (Hitchcock's Rear Window rather disproves this).

  7. Claim: Today's screens — especially interactive, urban, and social-media screens — modulate the cinematic dynamic. Our desire is no longer to live in the screen but to be present on screen-like surfaces for an instant — "to see ourselves as others, being seen by others." Because: Analysis of the Forever 21 interactive Times Square billboard (2010), BITcrash44's hacking video, La Piège des Images, and Jonze's Her shows a new temporality: a "mythical present" (untraceable "now") paralleling Deleuze/Proust's mythical past. The screen is in imminent reversibility with the viewer — arche-screen as "quasi-subject" (Dufrenne via Sobchack), spectator as "quasi-image." Žižek's postmodern superego injunction "Enjoy now!" captures this.

  8. Claim: Today's screens are "new prostheses" whose two coupled dynamics are (i) development-of-potentialities / delegation and (ii) development-of-potentialities / an-aesthesia. Because: Grusin's Premediation (generation + suppression of anxiety via proliferating future scenarios) and Ishida's Japanese earthquake/tsunami alert system both prosthetize protension (lived future-time). The prosthesis does not supplement an unchanged human time but converges into it, transforming it. Benjamin's "shock effect of film" is re-read: "technologically strengthening is what produces a certain atrophy." McLuhan's purely extensional model ("extensions of man") missed the atrophy.

  9. Claim: Screen-mediated life is a condition of dividuation, not individuation — and this requires moving past the concept as our privileged cognitive instrument. Because: Drawing on Simondon (individuation as metastable becoming), Foucault (subjectification via apparatuses), Agamben (proliferation of apparatuses → proliferation of processes of subjectification), and Sherry Turkle's windows-self: if "individual" literally means "indivisible," the screen-self is constitutionally divided. Simondon's "techno-aesthetics" (1982 draft letter to Derrida) names our aesthetic-sensible relation to world as primitively technical. The concept (Begriff = "grasping") belongs to the Albertian window — a substance facing a stranger world; it cannot grasp the screen apparatus.

  10. Claim (closing): The philosophy of our epoch must be a philosophy-screens — Deleuze's philosophy-cinema at today's scale — which takes the image's logic as its own operating logic, rather than treating screens as the object of a concept-based philosophy. Because: "In the gaps between the fingers of our hand, squeezing in the gesture of seizing... we increasingly feel that sense is slipping away." The philosophy to come must account for this "without falling into a rhetoric of the ineffable."

Key Findings

  • MP's reflection on cinema is not confined to the 1945 IDHEC lecture; it extends from the 1948 radio causerie "Art and the Perceived World," to the 1949 "Signification au cinéma" talk (Marcel Martin's notes), to the 1952–53 course "The Sensible World and the World of Expression," to Eye and Mind's "mutual precession," to the 1960–61 course notes on "Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today."
  • The only occurrence of the word precession in MP's published corpus is in Eye and Mind. De Saint Aubert's archival work shows the term emerging around 1957 (reading notes on Arnheim), replacing enjambement / empiétement in MP's manuscripts, and becoming programmatically central in the Grand Résumé of V&I.
  • The etymology of "screen" (French écran, Italian schermo, English screen) is Skirmjan = "to defend, shelter" — matching the Greek paráphragma that Plato uses for the teikhíon (parapet) in the Cave.
  • The archaic rupestrian images of the Chauvet Cave (14,000 years older than Lascaux) — with their kinetic figures, play of torch-light, and sound accompaniment by beaten rock — qualify as "proto-cinema" (Herzog) or "prehistory of cinema" (Azéma), thus extending the arche-screen's history deep into prehistory.
  • 9/11 operated as a hinge event for screen-philosophy: it was the first "live global media event," and the subsequent premediation dynamic (Grusin) installed the screen as prosthesis of temporal protension.

Methodology

Philosophical history + close archival reading of MP's published and unpublished work + film analysis + philosophy of media. Carbone holds that the relevant epochal mutation — of perception, desire, thought — is registered first in specific cultural artifacts (films, interactive installations, video works), which must be read with a kind of hermeneutical attention Merleau-Ponty calls "reverie." The book's method is not philosophy-applied-to-cinema but a slow, motif-tracking reading of philosophical texts and screen artifacts with each other.

Concepts Developed

Where this book does original work:

  • arche-screen — Carbone's technical neologism. Chs. 4–5 do the central theoretical work.
  • philosophy-cinema (/philosophy-screens) — Deleuze's 1974 phrase re-programmed; ch. 2 § "All This Being Said" and ch. 6 close.
  • mutual precession — as a reading of MP's single Eye and Mind occurrence, deeply developed through de Saint Aubert's inventory of manuscripts. This is not a new concept but a new philological and philosophical reading of the existing MP concept. The precession page has been updated to carry Carbone's reading alongside the earth-precession track.
  • dividuation — Carbone's coinage against Simondon's "individuation"; ch. 6 hinge.
  • quasi-subject / quasi-image: Dufrenne-Sobchack genealogy extended to the screen's imminent reversibility with the viewer (ch. 5).
  • seeing beyond / through / according-to — typology of visual desire (ch. 4 p. 89).

Concepts Referenced

Concepts this book uses but does not develop further:

Key Passages

"Philosophy always made its distaste for screens quite clear, regardless of the kind. One could even claim that philosophy traditionally identified itself — i.e., found its very identity — in a fight against the screens, which it assimilated with the illusion, the deceit, the obstacle preventing from the contemplation of truth. ... Still, if only one looks deeper, things are not quite as simple... What Plato describes in the Allegory of the Cave is not a single screen, but precisely two: one showing, the other one concealing; both converging, however, in their global effect, as two complementary possibilities of one single configuration. In the following pages, I shall call such a configuration the arche-screen." (Preface, pp. ix–x)

"A film is not a sum total of images, but a temporal Gestalt." (Merleau-Ponty, quoted ch. 2 p. 15; from "The Film and the New Psychology," Sense and Non-Sense, p. 54)

"This precession of what is upon what one sees and makes seen, of what one sees and makes seen upon what is — this is vision itself." (Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, quoted ch. 2 p. 44)

"Circularity, but rather precession | visible–seer / silence–speech / I–Other [moi–autrui]." (Merleau-Ponty, unpublished Grand Résumé of V&I, Fall 1960, quoted ch. 2 p. 45 — textual evidence that precession supplanted circularity in MP's final formulations)

"Here movement = revelation of Being, outcome of its internal configuration and clearly different from change of place." (Merleau-Ponty, summary of 1952–53 course "The Sensible World and the World of Expression," quoted ch. 2 p. 38)

"I would propose to define such a 'specular wall in general' as 'arche-screen,' understood as a transhistorical whole gathering the fundamental conditions of the possibility of 'showing' (monstration) and concealing images on whatever surface." (ch. 4 p. 78)

"I conceive the notion of arche-screen as a 'theme' that ... does not give itself preliminarily to and independently from its 'variations,' which would platonistically depend on it and descent from it. Rather, the arche-screen should be understood as a sort of (musical) theme constituting itself simultaneously with its own variations and yet exceeding these very variations — since it is irreducible to them, but at the same time is inseparable from them and can only become by means of their own becoming." (ch. 4 p. 78)

"The arche-screenic feature of our experience... turns out being one and the same with our body experienced as a space that is (inter)posed in the sensible to which it belongs. In this sense, the sensible itself — as well as its excessive feature — can be intercepted and hence be known." (ch. 4 p. 81 — the crucial move from regional aesthetic concept to general ontological structure)

"As a child, when I saw western movies, I did not think that the Far West was beyond the screen, nor did I think that I was overlooking it as through a window. Rather, cinema inaugurated the Far West as an other spatiotemporal dimension of my life that would invite me to further appointments ... in my childish games. This is why it was an other dimension situated 'everywhere and nowhere,' and this is why I name it 'mythical.'" (ch. 4 p. 88)

"Film acts as the orthopedic mirror analyzed by Lacan in 1949 as constitutive of the imaginary subject or objet a." (Lyotard, "Acinema," quoted ch. 3 p. 56)

"Technologically strengthening is what produces a certain atrophy." (ch. 6 p. 108)

"In the gaps between the fingers of our hand, squeezing in the gesture of seizing — the gesture on which the modern action of conceptualizing was shaped — we increasingly feel that sense is slipping away. Without falling into a rhetoric of the ineffable, the philosophy to be made is called upon to account for this." (ch. 6, closing, p. 111)

What's Not Obvious

Three things about this text that would not appear in a conventional summary or book review:

  1. The hyphen is the doctrine. The book hinges on a typographical mark: the hyphen between "philosophy" and "cinema" (or "screens"). Carbone reads Deleuze's slow drift from the 1969 Logic of Sense "Note" and the 1968 Difference and Repetition Preface to the 1983–85 Cinema books as precisely the loss of the hyphen — the gradual return to "philosophy of cinema" in the most traditional sense ("cinema as object," "concepts of cinema"). The explicit complaint appears in ch. 2 p. 52: "What happened to the 'philosophy-cinema'? How about this hyphen? If we leave behind the theoretical stake expressed by this hyphen... do we not risk writing, once again, books of philosophy 'as it has been done for so long'?" The book's title Philosophy-Screens is thus a precise philosophical claim: the hyphen is normative, not decorative. This is not a book about screens; it is a performed attempt at a philosophy-screens, at the scale of the digital revolution — and the hyphen is its irreducible minimum.

  2. The arche-screen requires reading the Cave backward. Plato's Cave is usually read through its shadows (what the prisoners see). Carbone reads it through its screens — two of them: the opposite wall (on which shadows appear) and the teikhíon (the parapet from behind which puppeteers manipulate objects). The second screen, almost never thematized in Plato scholarship, has the function of concealing the machinery: it selects what the prisoners will see and hides the rest. Carbone's etymological demonstration — teikhíon : paráphragma : phrássō ("to fence") : Old Frankish skirmjan ("to defend, shelter") : screen — shows that the very word "screen" carries the concealing-dimension, which Western aesthetics has suppressed in favor of reading the screen only as showing-surface. Plato's Cave, re-read this way, already contains the full arche-screenic structure that will be elaborated from Pythagoras's curtain through the Albertian window to the cinema hall to the phone in your hand. The allegory of the Cave becomes a genuine arche-text of media theory — not a cautionary tale against images but the first thinking of the screen's constitutive ambiguity.

  3. The sensible-ideas screen is the arche-screen. In MP's V&I the sentence "there is no vision without the screen" appears in the context of Proust's "sensible ideas" and is generally read as a regional aesthetic claim about literature and music. Carbone's ch. 4 p. 81 makes a subtle upgrade: "the screen evoked by Merleau-Ponty has to be understood, in my opinion, as the 'arche-screen' itself, rather than a particular case of it." The "arche-screenic feature of our experience" is then identified with "our body experienced as a space that is (inter)posed in the sensible to which it belongs." What looked like a local remark about Proust's little phrase is revealed as a compressed statement of MP's ontology: the body is a screen — not metaphorically but structurally, because it is the surface on which the sensible encounters its own excess. This upgrade connects sensible-ideas to flesh-as-element and reversibility through the figure of the arche-screen.

Critique / Limitations

  • The "regional → universal" upgrade of the screen (ch. 4 p. 81) — identifying the screen of sensible ideas with the arche-screen, and identifying the arche-screen with the interposed body — is made by gesture rather than argument. A reader sympathetic to MP but not to Carbone's generalization could stop short at "vision needs a ground" without needing an arche-screen to name it.
  • The convergence thesis is inherited rather than argued. Carbone assumes MP's claim that 20th-century arts (Cézanne, Proust, cinema) converge with phenomenology on the "same epochal task." The thesis is a structuring premise of the book's Part One but is never defended against the alternative that the convergence is partly a rhetorical effect of MP's own selection.
  • Lyotard is read somewhat narrowly. Carbone presents Lyotard in ch. 3 as someone who misreads MP's "vision" by narrowing it to the perceptual. A fuller engagement would need to treat Lyotard's own figural theory on its own terms, not as a deviation from a correct Merleau-Pontian line.
  • Some exemplary artworks do a lot of work. The Forever 21 billboard, La Piège des Images, the BITcrash44 hack, and Her are made to carry large theoretical claims in ch. 5–6. A critic could ask whether these artifacts support the weight — or whether they have been selected for their fit with Carbone's thesis.
  • The treatment of digital specifically is comparatively thin. The book's title foregrounds "the digital revolution," but the digital specifics (algorithm, data, platform) are mostly framed through pre-digital categories (screen, arche-screen, seduction). The treatment is phenomenological-aesthetic rather than technical-political.

Connections

  • extends merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind — especially the "mutual precession" passage
  • extends merleau-ponty-2020-sensible-world-expression — 1952–53 course on cinema, Wertheimer, Vigo
  • applies fundamental-thought-in-art / nonphilosophy to cinema and media
  • reads sensible-ideas and the "clouded surface" through the generalized figure of the arche-screen
  • contrasts with Deleuze's Cinema 1 / Cinema 2 — which Carbone holds lost the philosophy-cinema program they were supposed to execute
  • contrasts with Lyotard's Discourse, Figure and "Acinema" on the specular wall
  • builds on Carbone's earlier The Flesh of Images: Merleau-Ponty Between Painting and Cinema (2015; French 2011) and Être morts ensemble (2013)

Sources

  • Read closely: Preface; ch. 1 (Sartre/Deleuze via Bergson); ch. 2 (MP and cinema — central); ch. 3 (Lyotard); ch. 4 (arche-screen — central); ch. 5 (seduction today); ch. 6 (philosophy among/through screens).
  • Skimmed: endnotes 1–174 (read selectively for archival data).
  • Not read: index.
  • Companion extraction note: wiki/sources/.extraction-carbone-2016-philosophy-screens.md (preserved as fourth-layer depth).