The Rebirth of Satire
I recently received Shane Ralston’s invitation to write ‘a treatment of a single film, classic or contemporary, from any philosophical perspective/approach’. Sipping my beer on a hot summer afternoon, I froze. As one of the founding members of the Association for Visual Pedagogies and its Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, I felt the need to respond to the invite. Yet film as an artistic form is very different from video as an educational tool!
I’ve never been one to suffer from impostor syndrome. I write philosophy and I’m not a philosopher; I’m a professor of education and I never taught in school; I enjoy sex and… you can finish that one yourself. So, which film should I write about? A classic, such as Koyaanisqatsi, that would allow me to delve into the relationship between humans, nature, and technology? An independent film, to bring some attention to the many globally under-rated masterpieces? A contemporary blockbuster, a short film, an artistic film, a cartoon?
Following the example of Christopher Columbus, I decided to resolve this hugely complex egg problem by brute force and write about the latest film in my Netflix viewing history. Don’t Look Up depicts the discovery of its main character, the scientist Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), that that the gigantic comet will wipe out Earth in precisely 6.5 months, and his useless efforts to convince the world to blow up the comet before it’s too late.
Some films capture the attention of their audience by creating a visceral feeling that the audience is a part of the story. Don’t Look Up does just the opposite. It recreates the old genre of satire, dating from the ancient Greeks, which, according to Oxford dictionary, uses “humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues”. Satire may not be everyone’s cup of tea, and the humor in Don’t Look Up is far from typical, yet the film does a great job exposing the absurdity (‘stupidity’ and ‘vices’) of our postdigital age.
Why Postdigital?
The term ‘postdigital’ was inspired by Nicholas Negroponte’s 1998 Wired article, “Beyond Digital,” in which he uses another film, The Graduate, to convince the reader that “[l]ike air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence”. In 2000, musicians (Kim Cascone) and visual artists (Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt) developed an early outline of the concept of the postdigital. In 2018, a group of researchers brought the concept into the social sciences and the humanities. Since the inception of the Postdigital Science and Education journal and book series, the concept has finally entered the (research) mainstream.
Being postdigital can mean many things to many people, yet most researchers have found the following description particularly useful: “The postdigital is hard to define; messy; unpredictable; digital and analog; technological and non-technological; biological and informational. The postdigital is both a rupture in our existing theories and their continuation” (Jandrić et al. 2018). The exact definition of the concept is up for grabs, and many people have expanded its meaning in different directions. In the rest of the post, I explore what postdigitalism means in the context of philosophy of film.
Postdigital Philosophy of Film
Don’t Look Up is a postdigital film. It was produced by Netflix, which has destroyed the difference between the ‘high culture’ of film-making and the ‘low culture’ of television production. The film portrays the rabid obsession of celebrity culture, and the primacy of aesthetics over substance. It cuts through our post-truth and fake-news condition with surgical precision, showing the power of postdigital infotainment and echo chambers. Through the character of the billionaire CEO Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), whose failed attempt to make money on the rare-earth elements significantly contributes to planet’s destruction, Don’t Look Up outlines deep relationships between postdigitalism and capitalism.
Perhaps the deepest example of postdigitalism, and also the most disturbing one, is the fact that most characters in Don’t Look Up tend to put more faith in mass media than in science. It is only when the comet becomes visible with naked eye, that the people get away from their cocoon of celebrity culture and land in the reality of immanent destruction. Predictably, they come to their senses too late and the Earth gets destroyed in a gigantic clash with the comet. The powerful out-take, and the one very well known to philosophers and educators, is that access to information is worthless without the willingness, and critical tools, to critically assess it.
Released in late 2021, Don’t Look Up is widely interpreted as a critique of Covid-19 deniers and anti-vaxxers. Yet the satirical genre reaches deeper than any particular example. The ancient art form (satire), known for thousands of years, demonstrates its universal power in this film. Almost every theme to emerge in Don’t Look Up has its counterpart in postdigital scholarly research: the dichotomy of ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’ (see Jandrić and Hayes 2019), post-truth and fake news (see MacKenzie, Rose, and Bhatt 2021), postdigital transformations of capitalism (see Jandrić 2019) and many others.
Working at the intersections between information, biology, and society (see Jandrić 2021), Don’t Look Up cuts through our Zeitgeist with surgical precision. It explores important philosophical questions and makes us contemplate these questions at multiple levels, individual and social. How would I react in a similar situation? How should politicians and governments respond? What should scientists do? What is the social role of science, media and education?
As a simple yet powerful form of satire, Don’t Look Up brings these deep philosophical questions to everyone; especially to those who reach for their pistol whenever they hear the word ‘philosophy’. For those of us who belong to flexible philosophical traditions (based on consensus-directed dialogue not absolutist doctrine), this is an important contribution to the democratization of philosophical discourse and philosophy itself. Don’t Look Up is not a film about philosophy, but in this context, it is nevertheless a deeply philosophical film.
What Can Postdigital Philosophy of Film Do?
Unsurprisingly, Don’t Look Up is unable to provide solutions for these problems; it is painfully unable to even suggest directions for developing new solutions. But then, the same can be said for scholarly books and articles. For instance, today’s social scientists know so much about (the epistemology of) post-truth and fake news, yet people of the world, again and again, fall prey to the same or slightly improved tricks. While we do know that academics should perform as public intellectuals (see Jandrić and McLaren 2021), most of us–save for few notable exceptions such as Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek–epically fail at that task.
This is one area in which film has a huge advantage over academic production. Film is the essence of public pedagogy, which – as shown in the example of Don’t Look Up – can bring complex philosophical questions to the widest audiences. This is hugely important, yet the artistic nature of film cannot be reduced to mere ‘dissemination’ or ‘democratization’ of knowledge. The postdigital perspective itself was conceived in the context of the arts, and film has the power to turn public attention to questions novel and unexplored.
Borrowing from the language of critical pedagogy, postdigital philosophy of film is an emancipatory praxis (see Freire 1972). This praxis is theoretical, because we need theory to work with complex concepts, and also practical, because complex concepts need simple and widely available representations. Without postdigital philosophy, Don’t Look Up is a poor attempt at humor; almost a caricature of a popular comedy. Viewed as a satire of our Zeitgeist, the same film represents a deeply philosophical journey.
Postdigital philosophy can learn a lot from film, and film can lean a great deal from postdigital philosophy. To get the most out of this reciprocal relationship, we need to develop a new postdigital philosophy of film at the intersections between academic fields that have traditionally been viewed as incompatible.
Welcome the Hedgefox
At the beginning of this post, I confessed that I am no expert in either film or philosophy, and I ironically wrote that I’ve never been one to suffer from impostor syndrome. Now this is not completely true. I do worry about my own lack of knowledge in many areas, yet I deeply believe that today’s knowledge ecologies are deeply skewed towards specialization. This is exemplified in the dichotomy of the hedgehog approach to research (digging one’s own knowledge hole and owning it) versus the fox approach to research (wandering around many knowledge disciplines) (see Jandrić 2017).
Specialization exists for good reasons, and curious foxes can often be shallow, so I won’t lean towards any of these extremes. Yet it would be great to develop a sort of a hedgefox approach that would take the best of both worlds. This is why I’m not too shy to write about postdigital philosophy of film. Being a hedgefox, I’m not claiming any expertise in philosophy or film; instead, I’m pointing towards connections that I find useful. It would be great to hear what other hedgehogs, and foxes, and various other members of the animal world, will make of this proposal. The notion of the hedgefox, of course, is a metaphorical way to say that postdigital philosophy of film is a transdisciplinary enterprise, where constituting disciplines do not merely prove commensurable, but also transform each other through collaboration.
At the beginning of this post, I wrote about my dilemma regarding which film I should choose to write about. Choosing a classic, an art film, or a cartoon, would surely take my post in a different direction, to discuss different aspects of our postdigital condition. Yet, I deeply believe that some conclusions, such as the need to appreciate postdigital philosophy of film as a matter of transdisciplinary collaboration and emancipatory praxis, would–regardless of the film chosen–remain the same.
Philosophy is arguably one of the most general(izable) intellectual exercises, yet it is much less general(izable) than people often think (see Fuller and Jandrić 2019). Film is always tied to things that happen on the screen, yet as an art form, film is much more general(izable) than people often think. The problem of commensurability between philosophy and film is far from trivial, but it is also not a limiting factor. I believe that postdigital philosophy of film has a bright future, and in that spirit I warmly welcome the American Philosophical Association’s new Philosophy of Film Blog Series.
Petar Jandrić
Petar Jandrić is Professor at the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Croatia, and visiting professor at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. His previous academic affiliations include Croatian Academic and Research Network, National e-Science Centre at the University of Edinburgh, Glasgow School of Art, and Cass School of Education at the University of East London. He is Editor-in-Chief of Postdigital Science and Education journal and book series.
