Davide Panagia, "Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France" (Fordham UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, this is Lily Gorin with the New Books Network, the New Books in Political Science podcast. Today I'm joined by Davide Panagia, who's the author of two recent books.

books, Intermedialities, Political Theory and Cinematic Experience, and, this is a twofer, Sentimental Empiricism, Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Post-War France. We're going to talk about both of these books because they are clearly connected to one another. And I'm going to welcome Davide to the New Books and Political Science podcast and ask him to tell us a little bit about himself and how he came to these two projects. Hi, Davide.

- Hi, Lily. Thank you for having me. This is so much fun.

Well, how did I come to these two projects? Well, I've been working on film for a long time, film and political theory. It's part of my general interest in political theory and aesthetics. And as you know, you know, the way that I approach this is really sort of deep diving in the sort of philosophical questions around the technical ontologies of various media, in this case, film.

So that's how I came to the Intermedialities book. And I can say a little bit more about why it developed as it did. In the Sentimental Empiricism book,

I came to it because a sort of general interest on my part to very arrogantly set the record straight on what I saw was a series of misapprehensions about

uh, some, uh, philosophical developments in post-war France that, you know, arrived in North America under the title of post-structuralism or post-modernity or, and most recently, uh, affect theory. And so, uh,

It began with an interest in showing something that I thought was really missing in that reception, but it sort of snowballed into a project that has to do, like the Intermedialities book, that has to do with how it is that we perceive our interactions with media. In the case of the Sentimental Empiricism book, it had to do with the medium of media

a kind of philosophical curriculum, but also obviously the entirety of a philosophical education. You know, the Sentimental Empiricism book is very much, I mean, even though it doesn't seem like it, it's very much a sort of like a lot of books that I'm sure are coming out now, very much a kind of COVID slash

you know that period of america that i was you know we were all hunkered down in the at least i was in the united states um and uh um you know it became clear to me that one of the things that really bothered me about that time was

The amplification, even more so than we're accustomed to of American exceptionalism that I wanted to show was manifest even in the most progressive ways of studying philosophical trends in political theory and political theory in general.

And so what that led me to was this tradition of sentimental empiricism that had never been sort of talked about with regards to the thinkers in post-war France that we're familiar with, Foucault, Deleuze, et cetera, et cetera. But really what that allowed me to do was to set up the Intermedialities book

because at the core of the sentimental empiricism and at the core of that tradition that I'm drawing from, which is very much, you know, coming from a tradition of radical empiricism from Hume onwards is a critique of Aristotle. I mean, you know,

Yeah, go ahead. And I mean, I wasn't necessarily expecting that as I started into both the books. But as you sort of unfold, I understood where this critique of Aristotle was situated. Can you, before we sort of move into both the books, can you explain why?

that critique of Aristotle with regard to sort of this understanding of sentimental empiricism, which will also get us some of the definition of sentimental. Right. So, I mean, you know, very crudely put what I, what you could imagine the critique of Aristotle being is another restaging, you know, one of the things that, that modernity does really well is restage the ancients versus the moderns debate.

Right. So, I mean, you know, if you if you want to do a very sort of crude, superficial summary, that's that's what's happening there. You know, why Aristotle? Well, you know, in the French context, and this is to me what, you know, part of what was, you know, missed by the American uptake.

I mean, amongst a lot of things that was missed about the American uptake in the late 70s, early 80s, and then 80s and 90s post-war French thought is that, you know, they were very much, these were not just a series of, you know, philosophical innovations.

These were ongoing sort of philosophical reflections, debates about media, specifically about practices of reading and writing that emerged and that have been ongoing because of the constant presence of scholasticism, even after the revolution in France.

And here, that's why the first part of that book is set up the way that it is, which is trying to tell the story of the fact that, like, you know, despite the romantic history of the revolution,

That, you know, it was it dismantled, you know, religious authority and all that sort of stuff. What really happened is that once Napoleon immediately takes power, he set up the he sets up the new education system in France with the Lysées. But of course.

You know, he tries to do it in such a way that there you know, that that is oriented towards more or less a secular view of the nation. But of course, the imprint that was there was the sort of religious, especially Catholic inheritance of scholasticism.

especially through the Jesuitical training of the Ratio Studiorum. And so that becomes very much the template, right? And one of the things that you can consistently see within the French context, but in general in Europe, is whenever someone wants to sort of liberalize education or open up

The education system, uh, as we say today to sort of decolonize the curriculum, uh, the first thing they do is they try to, uh, uh, they try to limit, uh, the stability of, uh, the ancient languages, Latin and Greek, right? Uh,

as qualifications or curricular necessities, et cetera, et cetera. And why is that the case? This happened after the Dreyfus Affair, which is one of the first major modern reforms, precisely because of the Dreyfus Affair. Obviously it happened again in the 1960s and it had been ongoing. And why is that the case? Well, because Latin and Greek are the languages of the church.

And these are the languages that give you access to meaning and understanding.

And so, you know, what is sentimental empiricism about? Well, it's trying to sort of explain how it is that you can't understand the various literary aesthetic and sort of readerly reception arguments that come out of the post-war period in France if you don't think about them in relationship to Aristotelian scholasticism.

and specifically the continued presence of Aristotelian scholasticism as both a national project and a political project and a state project. And in terms of the issues that you're talking about with regard to the reforms in France, and we're sitting over here in the United States, you and I, and many of our students here,

And what is the connection that you are drawing in sentimental empiricism with regard to sort of this more contemporary period here that you say essentially the reforms in the 1970s in France were important to think about, but what do they do in terms of translating across the ocean?

Well, they don't do much in terms of translating across the ocean, right? Because across the ocean, we have a very different reality, which is we've got to stop totalitarianism.

You know, and the way in which that project gets developed, especially in political science. And you see this in the 1980s. You know, I sort of cite various moments in which there is this like really deep fear and consistent fear. You know what? Basically, one of the things that you that I see happening in the United States in the postwar period is the shutting down of pluralism.

Pluralism is associated with relativism. Relativism opens the door to moral ambiguity and therefore opens the door to various forms of totalitarian, not the least and most important of which is communism. Right. I mean, that's a very crude story, but.

You know, we see this. I was very impressed as I was reading this with Katrina Forrester's book that, you know, that details some of this this history. Right. That tells a story, a sort of, you know, intellectual history of Rawls's political philosophy. Right.

amongst other things that it does really well. But it sort of makes very, very clear that what happens in the post-war period is that the one sort of form of, one philosophical innovation that America had developed, which is pragmatism, gets shut down very quickly.

And it gets shut down very quickly because it is radically pluralist. Right. At the same time, that same form of radical pluralism, right, is being embraced in the 1950s in France.

you know, through and thanks to, you know, and the central figure, the sort of pivot figure is Jean Wall, who, you know, I tell the story of this figure. He was a very famous philosophy professor, had to escape because of the Vichy regime, basically was on the last ship that left France.

was a colleague of Hannah Arendt on Mount Holyoke until he went, he came back to the United States, sorry, came back to France after the war and sort of set up, you know, the entirety of a very robust sort of philosophical program, was the editor of the Review of the Metaphysique, and in fact was the person who, you know,

effectively sponsored and made uh levinas's uh contributions possible um and uh emmanuel levinas's contributions possible especially the book totality infinity uh and infinity but uh wall was the person who interestingly you know was uh a kind of conduit uh

Anglo-American empiricism in France because he was a student of Bergson, amongst other things. He did his PhD with Bergson, but also because his father was the, at the time, had taken over, this is at the turn of the century, the 19th to the 20th century, had taken over the chair of English that had been held by Mallarmé,

And so he grew up bilingual as the chair of English at one of the leases, the specific one, I can't remember, but he had grown up bilingual. Um, you know, you have to understand that, you know, we live in a world in which things, even if they're not translated, can be Google translated in a heartbeat. Uh,

But, you know, at the time, not many French people spoke English or read English for that matter. Right. And those books weren't, you know, hadn't been translated. And so now all of a sudden you have somebody who can navigate both languages and both philosophical traditions. So this is where.

Figures like Russell and Whitehead start to filter through and become very influential for one of my sort of political theory and philosophical sort of center foundational figures, Gilles Deleuze.

But also, I think, I mean, I know Beauvoir and some of these other figures, right? So, you know, what, before Nietzsche, who was German and nobody was reading Germans in the post-war period because, you know, they had had enough of Germany for a while. But, you know, before Nietzsche ever came into the fold, and it was Deleuze's

Deluza's book, 1963 or 64 book, is the first book that's written on Nietzsche in the post-war period in France. You know, and so people take an interest in Nietzsche after that. But in that crucial moment in the, between the, you know, that artificial decade that I set up between 1950 and 1960, which I end with the story with the emergence of the Tel-Kel journal. You

you know, the figure who presented the critique of metaphysics was what it turns out was was you or, you know, and to some extent, James. But, you know, that that critique of identity, that was a critique of substances. Right. As we know from the treatise

And it was for these people, and now this is how I'm imagining it, right? Because we always imagine what other people are thinking as we're doing this kind of work. As we're reading their own, we create these inferences that are probably fully magical. But what you get in Hume is a way of attacking the priority of a theory of meaning.

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And that's what I want to talk to you about. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. Because that's, I mean, this is a foundational definition in both of the books in terms of what you mean by sentimental empiricism, because it's coming from Hume. And this is also the refutation of the sort of Aristotelian perspective. And so if you can just define the sort of Hume understanding of the

Right. Most people understand in a particular way, but it's not really what you're talking about. No, no, no. So, um, you know, so where to begin? I mean, probably we should begin with Aristotle's poetics, but I'll bracket that for now. Maybe we'll return to it. Right. Uh,

But because I think that that's the text, that and the politics are the texts that for me sort of help understand the shift and the critique. But it was the recently departed philosopher, moral Schneewan, Jerry Schneewan, moral philosopher, Jerry Schneewan,

whose book, The Invention of Autonomy, to me, his chapter on Hume, it was very good, but it was very quick because he's much more interested in the Kantian perspective. But he had one insight, and my colleague here, Anthony Pagan, picks up on this in his work on

on the emergence of moral sentimentalism in the 18th century, you had one insight that to me was really gave me a really good picture of what was going on. Right. And so, you know, until this moment in Scottish Enlightenment and then afterwards, we have a vision of the world and a vision of political theory other than a few cases where

you know, we understand we're exploring as a civilization in the West, exploring our relationship to the universe, right? And there, the foundational thing is something like a soul, right? However you want to imagine it. You know, as

And these authors and let's say as you know, I say Hume, but I'm thinking of Hume broadly in moral sentimentalism more generally come about all of a sudden.

we start to understand our role in the universe, not on the basis of an internal soul that moves us, right? Whether it's consciousness, you know, Cartesian cogito, that is ultimately another version of the soul, or the Aristotelian CK, or of course the Christian animus. But

it's our bodies that move us, right? That is the empiricist move.

That and that's the moral sentimentalist or the sentimentalist empiricist move that that that I want to that I trace and this is you know This is really just like a throwaway sentence that that Jerry Schneewan wrote where he says like, you know Basically and I cited in the book. He says, you know that What Hume and others like him all of a sudden started to appreciate is the fact that we move in the world because of our bodies and not because of our souls, right

Those are the sentiments. What do we mean by sentiments? They're not our feelings. They're not our emotions. Right. But they are the forces of attraction and repulsion that move us about.

Right. So, you know, and this is where I start to sort of see the importance of the language of dispositionality. That is another sort of aspects of both of these books that I'm trying to develop. Right. That we tend to lean towards things, lend an ear to a song.

want to, you know, to be very sort of concrete, want to, you know, once we appreciate a flavor, want to, you know, discover other similar types of flavors, right?

Those have nothing to do with our soul or with our consciousness. They have everything to do with our bodies. Right. That we then reflect on those things and develop recipes, as Ken and Ferguson has, you know, has studied in his cookbook, Politics.

which is, you know, a fantastic and very helpful book for me, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. Those are the ways in which we codify our bodily experiences. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. But,

what human others really sort of figured out is that we can give an account of human action that doesn't require a theory of meaning and a theory of the soul, which ends up being both of those, you know, uh, related. Right. Um, and you know, and that my understanding of another person, uh,

is, you know, is based on my observation of their movements in the world, their actions. And this is also the refutation of Aristotle's understanding of both teleology, but also our, you know, our sort of natural disposition towards politics. That's right. That's right.

Right. Because what happens when it's experience all the way down now? And here we should say this is not experience as verifiable data. Right. This is experience in the terms of like bumping into the world. Right. You know, the verifiable data stuff happens, you know, much, much later. And it's and and and in fact, it is, you know, is is.

You know, is a different story from a different part of the world. But in this case, you know, what is it about experience that matters for somebody like you and for the thinkers that I'm interested in? It is the fact that if we start from experience, it means that our beliefs are perpetually revisable. Which takes us back to relativism.

Which can take us back to relativism, right? But it's also what, you know, and of course, you know, relativism is another word for, you know, not knowing what happens next, right? But, you know, let's bracket that just for a second because, you know, what happens with Aristotelian scholasticism, right, is it creates...

a place in the universe for humans where it is not possible for the human to imagine the possibility of revising their beliefs, right? This is the problem with Catholic theology and Catholic dogma and Christian theology and Christian design. This is why Hume was considered an infidel, right? Because he introduced the possibility that our beliefs about the universe can be revised, right?

Based on our experiences. And that's also in general, that's a critique of dogma. It's a critique of dogma. Right. I mean, I always say that like there is I don't think that first of all, I don't think there is a left in the United States that doesn't exist.

Because most people wouldn't be able wouldn't sign on. Most people who imagine a left in the United States wouldn't be willing to sign on to the idea that they no longer will negotiate their salaries individually, but rather have collective bargaining agreements. Right. At that very core level, I'm assuming that, you know, so but to the extent we can imagine

imagine a distinction between a left and a right. I don't think it has anything to do with specific issues. I have, I think what it does have to do is that within a conservative mindset, one of the fundamentals is that beliefs aren't revisable, right? And in a more radical mindset, the fundamental commitment is that of the revisability of beliefs. This is why there's such a fear about science, right? Because science, you know,

crudely speaking with a big paintbrush, but one of the sort of fundamental principles of science to the extent that it comes from the world of empiricist philosophical empiricism is that, you know, any commitment to a set of principles is, is temporary and exists only to the extent that it can be, you know, disproven. Yeah.

And so I wanted to bring you back because the focus of both books, but particularly Intermedialities, is on the revised understanding of shifting capacities with regard to film and politics.

And political theory. That's right. And this is something that you and I share in terms of areas of scholarship and interest, and that it has important...

ramifications for citizens and absolutely. And so my students always get mad at me when I teach them how to analyze films because they can't ever unsee that. And so I wanted to sort of talk about because one of the things that you point out in Intermedialities is that

analyzing the narrative or the representation in the film is one thing, but what you're really trying to do is look at the importance of the experience and, and to some degree, the process.

Um, and this is also the terminology that you are using here, intermedialities. Can you talk a little bit about the term itself and how that comes out of this sort of humian, um, understanding of, of human interactions? Right. So I, so there's a couple of things there. Um,

One is, you know, I have lived my entire life as an immigrant. I was born in Italy, immigrated to the United States and then, you know, grew up. Sorry, that didn't happen. Yes, there was an intermission. I was born in Italy and immigrated to Canada. And, you know, and then.

And after I did my undergraduate, so that whole period of education going back and forth between Europe and Canada, I went and studied in England and then I came to the United States and then I went back to Canada. And now I've immigrated back to the United States and I'm here at UCLA. So.

You know, I have been somebody whose life has been defined by intermediary spaces where movement is consistently being paid attention to. Yeah. The most terrifying of which is TSA checkpoints and things of that, you know, things that border crossings. Yeah.

Right. You know, and why do I say that? Why do I interject this personal narrative? Well, because the Intermedialities book, as strange as it seems, is a book, is a political theory of border crossings. My problem with, you know, the, let's call it that, my problem with the Aristotelian thing is

and narrative is that, you know, there is always a poetics to border crossings. There's always a theory of meaning implicit in any moment of border crossings. And what I see film doing or what I'm trying to sort of push on in the Intermedialities book is to get people away from having a theory of meaning as a

the sort of implicit precondition for engaging film and pay attention to the most the intermediate points intermediary points in the experience of film where your theory of meaning doesn't help you in terms of accounting for the experience

Right. And this is, again, part of the sort of Humean move vis-a-vis the revisibility of beliefs. Right. You can't revise your beliefs about the world, about other people. Right. If you're not willing to enter that space of intermediality where, you know, you have to construct a meaning rather than rely on how meaning works. Right.

And in terms of film itself, because this is also something that you are arguing in the book.

This is something that political theory has not spent all that much time on. Political science has not spent all that much time on. We have ceded that ground to many of our brilliant colleagues in film studies and media studies and so forth, but that there is an importance that we need to pay attention to in terms of the politics of

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Canada's huge contribution to political theory was political theory multiculturalism. Australia too, I would argue, because of the particular political conditions and situations that there was, which is a very different account of political cultures that you get from the American experience coming from all...

Almond and Baraba and then what have you. Right. Which is to say a very different, a very different view of what a culture is. And, you know, this is very on in my Ph.D. experience. But even when I was doing my my M.A., the thing that was really missing to me in the study of political cultures was an account of.

basically, you know, the way that I would articulate it now, a way of giving an account of the aesthetic experience of culture in relationship to the kinds of claims that people make about identities. Right. And so, you know,

Why, you know, why is it that, why is it that I, that I turned to film ultimately? Because to me, it's a way of trying to understand how it is that through a visual experience, individuals and groups generate values, but also generate the systems of ranking values, right? You know, to me, it's, it's just like,

It's absurd. I mean, you know, you've done this work. So it's absurd to me that you would study American politics and not study Marvel Comics and the Marvel Universe. Right. I mean, especially since, well, first of all, you know, we haven't seen, you know, just to be crudely economistic, you know, if something's making that much money, it's it's.

And coming from L.A. and having met a lot of Hollywood people over the past decade, they don't make decisions based on aesthetic sensibilities. It's bottom line. It really is. Is this going to make money? Obviously, it's an industry, right? I mean, that's not an insight. It's a fact.

And so you don't have a Marvel universe, a cinematic universe, because it didn't strike a chord. But then you have to ask yourself, oh, okay, so what is the striking of a chord?

Right. And, you know, you can pull people about it, but really you can go into sort of seeing, you know, look at, of course, the stories that are being told, which are basically, you know, it's basically the American version of Greek of the Greek gods. Right.

Right. I mean, that's obvious. That was explicitly Stan Lee's objective. But more importantly, you know, there is, you know, I look at something like, you know, the Avengers, specifically the Avengers sequences of films. And it's just like, you know, these are just.

basically a bunch of powerful people who can't get along and can't work as a group. That is America. A bunch of powerful individuals that can't work as a group. Because why? Because there is no strong tradition of social thinking and collective associationism.

Which is why I really like the the sentimental empiricists, because, you know, at the core and this is going back to the sentimental empiricism book, but also the intermedialities book. What is the political theory argument that's there? These are different accounts of political solidarity that don't rely on.

transcendental theory of meaning, right? Aristotle and Christianity. Right. And don't rely on fixed associations, right? To me, the core sort of insight is that relations are not determined by substances. That's the philosophical metaphysical insight, right? What does that mean? It means that, you know, that...

Just because an engine can be used or a camera can be used to take a picture, right, doesn't mean that a camera is limited to taking stills.

Exactly. Right. Just because you set up a sequence of shots this way doesn't mean that that's the only sequence of shots to set up. Just because you write a paragraph in a particular way doesn't mean that that's the only way in which that paragraph can be written.

Right. I mean, this is what one of the sort of features of the modern period is this, you know, this view that we have these technologies that emerge that give us the possibility of perpetual revisibility. Right.

Right. Which are whether it's the revisibility of an article. Right. And we have an entire peer review system and an entire academic structure that's based on the fact that, you know, we should revise things on the basis of other people's inputs. Right. You know, that's that's fundamentally an empiricist insight. Right. But, you know, I don't think that's relativistic. Right.

But it's very easy in this country to, because it happened for a series of political reasons, to reduce revisability to relativism. - Yes. And so what is unique about film? 'Cause you spend the book in "Intermedialities" talking about the cinematic experience.

And as you say, you know, a shot or a number of shots can be taken in one direction or another direction in black and white or in color or whatever it is. But what is it that you are trying to get at in terms of the role that cinema and film have in our understanding of political theory? So to the extent that in political theory, we study action, political action.

And by that, we mean a certain dynamism of body or mind, right? Right. Film is the first technology that allows us to see human movement without the human being present. It is quite literally the most, to me, significant political technology because it screens movement. It screens action. Right. That's why film for me, right? Right.

You know, you see action on a stage, but it disappears once the performance is finished. It's not preservable and rewatch. It's not preservable unless it's filmed. Right. Right. And then, you know, but for me, the sort of the nuts and bolts of film is that it is a technology thing.

that emerges in order to capture and screen movement. Human movement, movement of things in the world, wind, you know, but it is the technology that allows us to screen dynamism, right? Which is life. Right.

And so part of what you're doing in the book, Intermedialities, is looking at not the narrative, not the actors or actresses or directors, but the way that a human being sort of, as you say, bumps into it.

Yeah. Um, and, and how the, the sort of, and then there, there may be a collective experience and going to the movie theater to see the movie. Although these days, all of that is very fragmented and evolving. Um, but that it also remains in our memory. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and it's different, you know, so, uh,

You know, so the thing about about collective participation in film is an interest. There's an interesting sort of story to tell about how it is that people think about film audiences and the history of talking about film audiences, because it's always been controversial. Right. From the get go, you know, that film was viewed as the principal medium for the transmission of hysteria.

um, you know, why? Because we know that humans are imitative creatures. So what are they going to imitate the choppy movements and why were there chopping movements? Because they hadn't standardized, uh, the, the, uh, the rate of film, right. Uh, to, to what is it? 24 frames per second or whatever it was, uh, it had gotten standardized, uh, um,

Right. So it was some, you know, some dude in the back cranking something. And when their arm got tired, it would be slower. And when they just, you know, had a cup of coffee, the movement would be faster. But the point being that there wasn't a consistency in movement. So, of course, film is film is going to teach people how to be hysterics because they can't control their movements. Right.

And then, you know, what happens in the in the 1970s? Well, all of a sudden, the penny theaters or the nickel theaters, the Nickelodeons, as they were called, disappear and you have standardized viewing time. So you can't dip in and out anymore.

And that changes completely, you know, the dynamics of audience. So that's, I mean, that's a sort of fast. And now we have, you know, the personal screens, which obviously and all the various algorithm, the recommendation algorithm. So that obviously changes everything as well. Right. But at the core of that, to me, remains the question of our sort of fascination with observing movement.

uh as humans uh and paying attention to things that move uh that to me you know really speaks to how it is that we are you know uh that we are attentive to to to to you know to life and to the world about us um

you know, how is that connected to the Hume? Well, it goes back to the, you know, Jerry Schneewan sentence that I wish I could reproduce. I should probably memorize it. That I wish I could reproduce because, you know, what the sentimental empiricists give us is a way of thinking about human life as movement.

And that's why I call film a sentimental medium because unlike other types of media, it tracks, you know, it really is about things that move in the world, right? That's why, you know, Andy Warhol's empire is so damn boring because there's no movement. Nothing moves or you can't, you know, see movement. Yeah.

But it's also why it's so really challenging in some sense, because the lack of movement is precisely what's making you aware of the fact that you're expecting movement on a screen and you're not getting it.

But you had asked a different question that I circumnavigated and I haven't gotten to an answer about it. So maybe you might want to repeat the original question that you asked. Well, I mean, one of the things that I'm interested in, in terms of the collective sort of taking away of ideas from the filmic experience,

So whether it be as an audience member in a giant multiplex or if you're watching it on your phone, that the actions that you're seeing are things that you are then going to interpret and think about. Sure. And become somewhat embedded in your memory because you've seen the visual of it, which is an important aspect of film and I would say television as well.

that the memory is something that you carry along and it gets kind of perhaps I don't want to say confused but threaded through with like any other memory exactly

Right. You know, and this is OK. So this is this is the part that I had missed out. So in the in the sort of empiricist reconstruction of of the human priority is given to memory and the imagination. Right. Why? Because these are the things that, you know, the memory retains in a very faded way the experience.

And the imagination for the traditional sentimental empiricism is not the romantic imagination that is very much goes back, you know, their imagination of romanticism that is about sort of, you know, the muse and mind. You know, it's not that at all. Right. What the imagination for, you know, you read some of these people, it's just, you know, an editing machine.

Right. Right. The account of the imagination that you get in in Hume, in in James, you know, to some extent in Burson, et cetera, et cetera, is is, you know, it is a place where things are stitched together and.

but that there isn't a preexisting self or will that does the work of stitching. Right. Right. That's what's, you know, that's, I think the big shift away from, from Aristotle. Right. Because for Aristotle, like it or not, you know, you have a natural progression of causal efficiency of linear causality or necessity, right?

Right. From the heterosexual, you know, birthing process. Right. To political community. Exactly. Right. You have the same man as a political animal. You know, you read that. That's the politics. You read the poetics. It's exactly the same framework, formal framework. Right. You have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Right. What is the beginning? Something that doesn't have an end to this is almost for being something that doesn't end to have an antecedent cause. What is the middle? Something that has an antecedent cause and a subsequent effect. And what is an ending? Something that has an antecedent cause and doesn't have a subsequent effect. Right. And the worst plots are for errors. He literally says this episodic. Right. Right.

What does Hume do? He says, life is completely episodic. You need it to be episodic. Otherwise, you can't revise your beliefs about the world and about one another. Right. There is no sympathy without the episodic. And so cinema or film is not necessarily the one discrete item, but our interaction with

what we are sort of taking in every time. We are editors as viewers. Exactly. Right. This is, you know, and this is why I move away from apparatus theory and from, you know, that kind of language is because it really just is.

you know as a theoretical formulation it really imagines that there's no movement in the person right this view I mean it's very platonic view of you know constraint viewing perspective on unconstrained viewing right and I just you know I just don't buy it because I you know I have this very chaotic account of of of perception and the imagination right that that

that doesn't lend itself well to those kinds of epistemic accounts of viewership.

So you have two books that are threaded together and they're very impressive. Thank you. But you've now moved on to something else, I'm sure. So what are you working on Davide? So now, you know, so thank you for asking. So now it's sort of the stuff that, you know, it's, it's one of the, it's so funny that, you know, you,

We have the privilege of having the type of life where we get to read and write, and it's something we enjoy doing. We always hope that, you know, that there is a readership out there. And, you know, but we often find out that that that that might not be the case.

that being said, uh, I'm now having to write the thing that I'm have become most known about by, even though I haven't written anything about it, you know, I've written maybe one or two pieces about it, which is, you know, algorithms. Uh, so, you know, it's just like people keep sort of turning to me, uh,

uh and asking me you know to to about this that review this article on you know on algorithms and politics and all that sort of stuff is it's like okay so now i actually have to put pen but you know part of the reason why i wrote these two books is that it sets up the possibility of actually talking about uh algorithms in the way that that that i think is possible because for me um

You know, what is the Intermedialities book about? It is very much indebted to people like Cavell and Miriam Hansen, all the people that I talk about in there, right? Cavell, Miriam Hansen, Deleuze, et cetera. And what is it that they're doing? Well, they're actually paying attention to the medium of film and, you know, what the medium of film does to human experience, right?

rather than paying attention to storytelling and how that changes people's epistemic views, uh, or positions. Um,

So, you know, I want to do something similar when it comes to the relationship between algorithms and political theory. So that's, you know, that's the next project. But it's, you know, it takes some time because I'm not a coder. So I really want to, you know, but then again, I'm not a filmmaker either. Nor am I a novelist or a poet or a painter. And yet I take liberties in talking about all of these things. So are you learning to code?

I'm not learning to code, but I have the good fortune of being in a political science department that's very code heavy. And so I get to talk to a lot of my colleagues who are some of the best sort of minds in this area, in the world for that matter.

And, you know, get to ask them ridiculous kinds of questions that they don't know the answers to. But, you know, that are interesting to me to see how they respond to it. So things like, you know, I'll ask, you know, my friends and colleagues in our methods, you know, subfield, you know, what whether an algorithm is a.

uh, is a calculation or not, uh, or what kind of a calculation is an algorithm. They don't really know how to answer that because they, you know, they take it for granted, but it's interesting to me to sort of, because, you know, what I think is, is, is important to sort of worry about, uh, now and why I have these two books and set them out, because I don't actually think that film is going to be very helpful to us or any much of the, uh,

critical philosophies that we've developed are going to be very helpful to us when dealing with algorithms because algorithms are very unique in that they are not as I certain this is the one thing that I have published that I think is is right that these are not representational structures these are not memetic structures they don't represent anything they generate outputs and the rendering of an output is very different from the representation of the world and

or an imagined world or what have you. So that's a fundamental operation that political theory has never encountered because all of our critical and political thinking is oriented towards

this Aristotelian, you know, or Greek anyway, notion of mimesis, right? It's really all about, it's about representation all the way down. Good or bad representations, representations of power, you know, representations of citizens, voting is basically a technology for generating representations, elections are, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Now we're dealing in a world that, first of all, an output is not a representation. So any image that you see on the screen is not a representation, even though we perceive it as an image or as a representation, but it's basically an algorithmic rendering of pixels, right? And

These are orchestrated on the basis of probabilities and not certitudes, right? The commitment is not to create something that's faithful to the world, right? This is not, you know, the sort of picture of nature or the mirror of nature that we know about. This is really just like, you know, a fabulation, if you will.

So, you know, we really are dealing with a technology that operates like the Humean imagination, you know, that stitches things together and is completely perpetually, you know, updating based on the data that it gathers. So when you bring that book...

Will you come back? I'd be happy to come back. But this is the big challenge for me now is that what does it mean to live in a world where we're governed by probabilities and technologies of probability? Yeah. And, you know, and that's that's the question. You know, how do we think ethically about a probability? Right. When we've always thought ethically in terms of truth and falsehood.

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. - Yeah, and the constant revision of the probabilities also make it-- - And the constant revision of the probability, yeah. I mean, I'll figure out what I can do with it. I don't know if there's anything, 'cause it's such a huge kind of thing.

But but I really do think that, like, at the very least, this next project just wants to sort of insist that we need a different kind of critical apparatus because our modes of criticism rooted in representations and, you know, mimesis representation, call it whatever you will, are just not going to work. Yeah, they won't apply. Right.

You know, and we can keep complaining about, you know, fake news and all that sort of stuff. But, you know, we're not going back to an alternative. Yeah. I want to thank you, Davide Panagia. This was fun. Thank you. Not one book, but two. Intermedialities, Political Theory and Cinematic Experience, which is published five.

Northwestern University Press. Northwestern University Press. And Sentimental Empiricism, Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Post-War France, which is published by Fordham University Press. Both books are available at their press websites. Is there a brick-and-mortar store in your neighborhood that you would like to... Oh, dude, this is L.A. There is no...

We don't have brick and mortar stores anymore. That's fine. Go to the website. This is a part of the world where Target is struggling and closing down. No, but I do want to sort of

The Intermedialities book, go to the Northwestern website and it's distributed by Chicago. It's part of the Superimposition series that Brian Price is editing. It's got a lot of other great books in it that I highly recommend checking out. It's very interesting experimental work on film. But the Fordham book, obviously the Fordham site, but it's actually available for free because of whatever, you know,

Creative Commons open access platform that our library here at UCLA subscribes to, I was able to make it available for free. So. Okay. And I will put that in the show notes too. So I'll link. Yeah. Yeah. It's I can send you the, I've linked the PDF to my academia.edu site, but it's, it's also the EPUB and stuff. It's all available for free. So you can access it for free. Thanks so much for doing this today, David. It was great to see you. Thank you.

Happy New Year.