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University of Exeter Press - Sandra Laugier

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189 pages

English

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TV-Philosophy in Action is inspired by philosopher and series-devotee Sandra Laugier’s monthly columns published in the French journal Libération. It is her contribution to the collective reflection on TV series produced by critics, theorists, and the vast mass of individual watchers who evaluate and discuss these programmes every day. The book brings together a selection of articles from Libération, as well as longer pieces, to demonstrate ‘TV-Philosophy in action’: Laugier’s response as a philosopher-viewer to a range of particularly salient TV shows from the last 20 years, and their relationship to social and political issues of our times. Arranged under a number of important themes—relating to politics, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves about our world—the book shows how TV series provide a rich resource for thinking about our lives, and places them centre-stage as works of art, and of thought, in their own right.

Foreword by William Rothman

Introduction and Acknowledgements

1. Perfectionism

2. The Second Wave: Gender, Race, and Class

3. Spoilers, Stories, Stars

4. Metaphysics

5. Serial Care

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	9781804130933
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,4200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

TV-Philosophy in Action
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 in Action
The Ethics and Politics of TV Series
SANDRA LAUGIER
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/QOOC5977
ISBN 978-1-80413-092-6 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-80413-093-3 ePub
ISBN 978-1-80413-094-0 PDF
Cover image iStockphoto/paseven
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce the material included in this book. Please get in touch with any enquiries or information relating to an image or the rights holder.
Contents
Foreword by William Rothman
Introduction and Acknowledgements
1 Perfectionism
2 The Second Wave: Gender, Race, and Class
3 Spoilers, Stories, Stars
4 Metaphysics
5 Serial Care
Bibliography
Serigraphy and Filmography
Index
Foreword
William Rothman
This book, and its companion volume, TV-Philosophy: How TV Series Change our Thinking , both draw on the author s 2019 book Nos vies en séries , and her weekly columns for French newspaper, Libération -and together prove Sandra Laugier to be a philosophically sophisticated theorist, and insightful and engaging critic, of twenty-first-century television series.
Laugier, a philosophy professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, is the author of thirteen-and editor or co-editor of an astonishing twenty-five (and counting)-books on moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of language, gender studies, and popular culture. She has also translated into French nine books by Stanley Cavell, her own professor of philosophy and mentor, as he was mine. We are far from alone in recognizing Cavell as the greatest and most important modern American philosopher. That this judgement is shared by a large and growing community of scholars in so many countries and so many academic fields is in no small part thanks to the inspiring international conferences Laugier has organized over the years and to her own writing and teaching.
When I published my first books in the 1980s, academic film study in America was in the grip of the delusion that by embracing what it called theory , a fledgling field groping for assurance of its legitimacy could acquire, in a single bold stroke, the authority of a science-an authority unattainable by acts of criticism accountable to a critic s experience. When the field turned to theory , it turned away from philosophy-and from criticism. Students were taught that to think seriously about film they had to break their attachment to the movies that were meaningful to them, as if movies were pernicious ideological constructs to be decoded and repudiated, not works of art capable of teaching us how to think about them. But if we stop loving movies, stop letting them move us, we cannot think about their value, why we seek our attachments to them, how they attract us, what rightful call they make upon us. That is, we cannot think seriously at all about the movies in our lives.
That is not how Cavell wrote about film-or the way Laugier writes about television series. She writes in ways that are open and responsive to the ways television series themselves think, as I like to put it, and to her ways-our ways-of incorporating series into our lives with others in the world. In writing about television series, she aspires to align herself philosophically with Cavell s understanding that we cannot acknowledge the worth of a work of art, or its meaning, without finding words we are prepared to stand behind, words that give voice to our experience even as they acknowledge the work s ways of expressing its ideas in its own artistic medium.
Laugier s work stands on its own, but it takes inspiration and guidance from Cavell in many ways. Cavell is considered, not wrongly, an ordinary language 1 philosopher in the tradition of J.L. Austin (his own professor of philosophy) and the Ludwig Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations . But he s an ordinary language philosopher like no other. From the early essays that comprise Must We Mean What We Say? , his first book, to his last writings, Cavell not only skilfully employed the kinds of appeal to what we ordinarily do and do not say that are exemplary of ordinary language philosophy, but he was also engaged in investigating philosophically the very procedures his writings exemplified. Insofar as he treated the medium of his own philosophical writing as a subject for philosophy, I think of Cavell as the philosopher who, in a modernist spirit, raised ordinary language philosophy to an explicit self-consciousness.
Why the serious study of film calls for philosophy is a question at the heart of The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film , Cavell s second book. And why thinking seriously about television series, too, requires the perspective of self-reflection that only philosophy is capable of providing is a question at the heart of Laugier s two books about television series.
In a 1999 colloquium at the Sorbonne-one of those events Laugier organized-Cavell remarked that the study of film-or television, Laugier would add-cannot be a worthwhile human enterprise if it isolates itself from the kind of criticism Walter Benjamin had in mind when he argued that what establishes a work as art is its ability to inspire and sustain criticism of a certain sort, criticism that seeks to articulate the work s idea; what cannot be so criticized is not art . Laugier s book, TV-Philosophy in Action is that kind of criticism.
As the book s title implies, for Laugier as for Cavell, philosophy is not a realm of abstract and technical thought; it is an activity performed by human beings in the world-an activity, in principle open to all, that can play important roles in the human form of life. Indeed, as Cavell put it, any place in which the human spirit allows itself to be under its own question is philosophy (Fleming and Payne, 59).
The World Viewed is such a place. As Cavell s writings about film demonstrate, a Hollywood movie can be such a place too. That there have been films that are great works of art, masterpieces, that are under their own question , that film is a medium of philosophy, is for Cavell what makes it a subject for philosophy. And it is at once the premise and conclusion of TV-Philosophy in Action that the television series Laugier loves, cares about, thinks about, and writes about are also under their own question . For Laugier, the television series, like the feature film, is a medium of art that has produced its share of masterpieces, works worthy of the kind of philosophical criticism she devotes to them, criticism that reveals the television series, at least at its best, to be a medium of philosophy.
As Laugier points out in her Introduction to this book s companion volume, TV-Philosophy: How TV Series Change our Thinking , Cavell himself, in his 1982 essay The Fact of Television (Cavell and Rothman, 59-86), denied that television was capable of producing artistic masterpieces, individual works that most fully reveal and acknowledge the conditions of the television medium. He distinguished between television, a current of simultaneous event reception , and film, defined in The World Viewed as a succession of automatic world projections . The mode of perception that he claims is called upon by television s material basis is not viewing; it is monitoring (Cavell and Rothman, 72).
Between the 1980s and the beginning of the twenty-first century, television became something other than what it had been. Insofar as the experience of television no longer had to be tethered to monitoring, the arguments in The Fact of Television for denying that television can be a medium of art were rendered moot. The untethering of television fiction from monitoring was a development whose possibility The Fact of Television acknowledged. It was a development Cavell surely welcomed, as he welcomed the news that his son Benjamin had signed on as a screenwriter for the great-and quite Cavellian-series Justified , which premiered in 2010 and ran for six seasons.
And in his 1988 essay The Advent of Videos (Cavell and Rothman, 145-52), Cavell considers some implications of the fact that since he published The Fact of Television this had come to pass. The advent of digital video recorders (TiVo was introduced in 1999), in tandem with streaming video, made untenable the assumption of the evanescence of television series. What made digital recorders and streaming video so consequential is that it made it possible for television-television as it had become, that is, or what replaced television as it had been-to be an artistic medium capable of producing great works worthy of the kind of criticism that TV-Philosophy in Action exemplifies.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer , a teen series like none that had come before it, which premiered in 1997 and ran for seven seasons, and The West Wing , which ran from 1999 to 2006, are two series that figure prominently in TV-Philosophy in Action , as do numerous other series that were made-and Laugier may have s