On the Importance of Writings on Video Essays w/ Alan O'Leary & Evelyn Kreutzer

[Music] hi welcome to the videoa podcast I'm

Kevin be Lee normally you'd be hearing the voice of the producer and host of this podcast the one and only will de graio but I wanted to introduce this conversation because I found it quite provocative

it's part of a series of conversations that are part of the research project that I co-lead with Johannes benotto and Evelyn ker called the video essay memories ecologies bodies funded by the

Swiss National Science Foundation and this conversation was inspired by some observations that Evelyn made at the annual meeting of the society in cinema

and media studies scms that took place last March in Boston I have to say that this year's SCS conference really marked how far videographic scholar ship has come in the last decade I think there

were six or seven panels and workshops related to video essays 10 years ago I'm not even sure if there were any panels on video essays maybe one at most Evelyn was on one for the in transition Journal

which celebrated its 10th anniversary and in transition has been a major force in establishing video as a legitimate scholarly practice in a field that's long been dominated by text-based

scholarship it's been nothing short of revolutionary and so there's been a lot of debate about what the relationship should be between videographic criticism and writing it's a debate that in

transition has played a major role in facilitating by implementing written Creator statements and peer reviews to establish academic standards for evaluating videographic work some people

including myself have wondered if video essays could ever speak for themselves and break free from having to be framed by text based explanations but I have to admit that I've tempered my stance on

this and I do recognize that a written text can play an important role in clarifying what's going on inside a video essay okay that's fine but at the

Boston conference there was something being picked up on by Evelyn and others including alen oi who's a professor at arhus University and a major proponent

of experimental videographic practices they both observed that at some of these panels on video essays there would be references to texts from

other areas of film studies texts on feminist film studies texts on genre film studies texts on global film studies and so on but there wasn't so

much reference to texts about videographic scholarship what are the examples of written scholarship that are worth referencing in shaping our thinking about video essays and how can

we start to get a better appreciation of the role of writing in video essay scholarship so Evelyn and Allan recorded this conversation to get into these questions Evelyn asked Allan to come up with two

written essays that could be especially helpful in understanding videographic scholarship and Allan came up with about six or seven which will list in the show

notes and from those they pick two to discuss in depth and it is a very rich and contentious conversation that raises many questions about what Scholars want

from video essays and what role does writing have in determining the answers to that question I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did and I just want to mention that you can also follow

my research team on Instagram at videor essays thanks for listening [Music]

[Music] [Music] well Ellen I was excited to invite you to have this conversation because we had

a few chats at the SCS conference in Boston a few months ago and we we went to a lot of panels on on videographic

work video essays and I think this was really an explosion of video essay Focus panels at scms which is really great to

see how that subfield is blowing up within the the scope of this this major big conference and one of the things that kept coming up for For You

especially but something that I was concerned with as well is that we um we don't do enough or I think we could do

more in terms of integrating the written scholarship that has come out of the video essay Community about videographic work into conference presentations and

into our ongoing discourse there's really a at this point there is a a Canon of of literature by video essay Scholars about the video

essay and it's I think it's a really good time to check in about where that written scholarship stands and how we

might how we might trace the development of video essay work in film studies over the last few years based on the written

scholarship that has come out of it and I asked you to suggest two texts that you would like to talk about and you picked Ellis Ander friends the critical

super cut a scholarly approach to a fish practice which appeared in the copile special issue in 2020 and miklo kisses what's the deal with what's the deal with the academic and

videographic criticism which appeared in the videography block of the S shift for median busens shft this year so we have four years in between those two

Publications and uh I think that's also a great a great frame of reference to to talk a little bit about how the

discourse in video essay scholarship has shifted over those four years if it has so before we get into the discussion I

would just ask you to briefly introduce those two pieces and why you pick them well I mean first of all I want to

repeat or Echo what you've just said about the or sense my sense and I think that you shared it in the SCS that you know the quality of the videographic panels the work that was being shown was

good was very good in many cases and it was very exciting to be following this strand within the conference but it was surprising that uh people as you say

weren't drawing on the I won't say the cannon but the Corpus of scholarship about videographic criticism and the kind of meta Reflections the theoretical Reflections about the kind of work that

we do because there are some great pieces out there and there is by now quite a lot of work that also takes place in you know the Creator

statements or the companion articles that makers have have composed uh to a company and this is actually the whole question of the companion article or the

Creator statement is something we'll come back to I think in relation to both of the pieces today but the there's a very interesting body Corpus of

Reflections out there that people weren't drawing on explicitly at least in the uh scms panels that did surprise me and it was odd to hear other Theory

uh from outside videographic criticism or the discourse around it being drawn upon to deal with issues that had actually been directly addressed within the body of scholarship about videographic criticism for example the

question of the performative was one that struck me um so so that's why actually you you invited me to choose two articles and of course I immediately chose I think

six and are seven and sorry about that but I think I might mention them because I think the fact that we narrowed it down to these two not so much as representative

but as uh particularly important examples of a strand of the thinking um is kind of interesting I chose or I

suggested that we might talk about what I think is a great piece of work um in Ian garwood's from video essay to videographic monograph Indie vinyl as

academic book which is a piece I reread regularly because it's just so incredibly rich uh which I think came out in 2020 in

Nexus then there's several pieces from the copile special issue from uh 2020 even though I think it actually came out the following year it's it's the

ciles special issue on the scholarly video I said there's the one you mentioned Alison friend's critical SC Supercut a scholarly approach to a f fish practice which we'll just describe

at greater length but also uh a short article called seeking a cure for cilia by Susan herwood and a more

recent piece again from zfm which you may have uh edited this one Cannon and Catalyst in video essays and they're kind of a pair I also thought that a

piece by ml kiss again uh from the copile special issue called videographic criticism in the classroom research method and communication mode in scholarly practice which is a kind of

precursor a slightly more if I can put it like this sober precursor to the zfn P what's the deal with the academic in videographic criticism and then finally

something that's very different from all of these which we might have talked about was Johannes Pino's uh uh in lag of knowledge the video essay as

parapraxis which I find a very seductive statement of a Poetics that I might aspire to share as well but I chose the two you know you you rightly said to me

come on Alan choose the the two that we're going to talk about and I chose these two the critical Supercut by Allison def friend and what's the deal

with the academic in videographic criticism by m kiss because I find um very powerful statements of a

particular ethos of scholarly video making that I suppose I don't share so I I particularly Allison's piece I mean it's from several years ago as you said

is longer than mcl's piece it's also in a different mode it's quite uh restrained carefully argued it's extremely rich and intelligent with a

broad R range of reference and I reread it again like I do the inar word article often because I find it so useful to think with the michos kiss piece was to

deal with the academic and video graphic criticism is as I say I think part of a similar strand from Allison's piece in that it's

it expresses and it has it has also it expresses an exasperation and is composed in a mode of kind of if not

hectoring then certainly exasperation um about some of the positions that people and we should declare an interest here like yourself

and myself have articulated in print and more broadly the some of the the sorts of work that is made which he

characterizes as poetic and so on H I like it because it's fun I think it's a polemical and a provocative piece it's a

bit cranky and I suppose to that extent given that I'm perhaps a slight bit of a crank myself I I'm sympathetic with the the torn and the M even though I

profoundly disagree I think with what miklos is arguing here so these are are two articles then that are very different but have certain things in

common both of which I enjoy reading because they help me to I guess horn my own perspective on the practice and on what I think the scholarly is the

academic is uh in relation to the work that I do and in relation to the field yeah I think the the both of those

texts are they they get at the at the heart of a lot of discussion that I hear coming up again and again in in our

scholarly community and certainly uh in myself and both of them more or less Begin by talking about the spectrum of

academic versus non-academic or scholarly versus popular or scholarly versus fanish practice these are of course multiple Spectra but they all

kind of cluster around a single Spectrum of scholarly or non-s scholarly that we talk about almost obsessively I think in in the video essay

Community certainly I I would say uh in part because a lot of us have anxieties around whether or not our work is scholarly or is academically valid or

will be seen as such by other people in this community or outside of this community in our fields and yet I was I was curious to reread those texts and

find that that anxiety is still so so prevalent because even though we talk about it a lot I myself have kind of just accepted that that's a tension I

won't be able to solve for myself or for others and uh maybe it's just easier to not worry as much about whether people will find my work scholarly or not as long as I hold a scholarly

position I will position myself as a scholar I'm in line with what Katie Grand has said about um about this question for herself which is my work is

scholarly because I am a scholar it's often in my opinion it's often the institutional context of production and of circulation of our work that determines whether or not something

tends to be considered scholarly or not or tends to be considered artistic or not personally I don't really think those those two terms should be uh

mutually exclusive anyway so I've tried to to distance myself from that that tension at that conversation a little bit in the recent past and yet I see it coming up again

and again and in that way I found it quite interesting to read those two texts again that came out four years apart which in this particular subfield

is quite a long time and a lot of a lot of production a lot of swallowship has has happened in in the meantime so it's interesting that it that it still shines through in this way and and yet I find

it quite difficult actually even though I have also read both of those texts multiple times I find it quite difficult to actually to fully clearly locate

where those two authors actually stand in in this debate I I think both of them or it's quite quite obvious that both of

them are Mindful and critical of expanding the academic label or the scholarly label too much uh probably

also specifically towards practitioner like myself who like to play around in the so-called poetic mode quite a bit and and like to

experiment uh take experiments further away from a tra quote unquote traditional explanatory argumentative

essay and yet both of them also make inclusive open gestures towards those very practices in in their texts Ellis

Ander friend uh writes about the the fanish practices and what fanish practices and scholarly practices have

in common and mikos kiss opens his uh his text by saying I'm not here to explain what the academic is I'm actually here to question what the

academic is but then seems to actually reaffirm an i a relatively traditional understanding of of the academic so I always find myself going through these

texts kind of jumping back and forth and and trying to figure out what what the clear position is uh and it's very both of them are very

evocative for me in that way well I mean the fact that these articles as you say were published four years apart is very

interesting because I think it suggests that we're in what anthropologists call a meta social moment in this case a kind of meta academic moment where the

because of the transition from medium Pros to uh the videographic to the digital the assumptions the protocols the standards the conventions and the

rhetoric of scholarly practice has been raised up to view it's held up to the light or these things are held up to the light and we're having to reconsider them anthropologists talk about this in

relation to moments like Carnival or initiation rights where the conventions of a society where its ordinary modes of

uh existence and its practices are foregrounded and and quizzed for that moment and perhaps even inverted for that moment and I think we're still in

that extended metas social moment in videographic practice this is why and miklos kiss um mocks me for saying this and mocks I

think Katherine grant for saying it we when she talks about um an ontologically new scholarly form that the digital video might represent and I've talked

about a moment of Paradigm Shift where normal science has been suspended now that might be an overstatement but but I do think there's a sense that we're in a moment where the

paradigms are being quizzed we might come out at the other side in to another or we will come out to at the other side to another uh

version of normal science where we have a shared set of assumptions where we're kind of filling filling in you know a bunch of uh outlines in a in a shared research program and so on but for the

moment we don't share those things so these articles and perhaps this is why you feel that they're trying to tease out a position that they haven't quite worked out themselves yet because we are

thinking through this as as a kind of videographic agonistic Society uh a whole bunch of practitioners thinkers writers about the

practice who are trying to work out what that practice is and means and implies and can can achieve and we haven't figured that out yet I don't know if I

necessarily agree with you that they don't quite stake out a position that is clear I think they would be offended perhaps that we say that because of course Clarity a cogent form of

argumentation is what both of them ASP tell us we should be aspiring to but I think there is a sense in which you know they're they're part of an activity of

thinking out loud and a durational Act of thinking that has been going on now for some years and hasn't finished yet well ju just to clarify I I wouldn't dare to accuse them of having unclear

positions I would be a really bad editor actually if I did that with with M's piece because I I was one of the editors for that one uh it's more working

through my own confusions uh it's not so much their positions actually I think that has to do with a general blurriness

around certain Concepts and terms in our entire Community including the terms that tend to be placed uh on opposite ends of the spectrum what what actually

what really is Art versus scholarship uh it's such a fundamental question that comes up again and again but I don't think we generally have a shared agreed

definition of either of those terms that we can then uh take each other through discussions about right like and and so I'm I'm working through my own

hesitations confusions agreements and disagreements when I read those texts and to me that makes them wonderfully evocative and and

and also troubling uh because because they they appeal to my own insecurities and and unclarities about about what I

do and what we do gotcha I mean the this whole opposition between art

um which we could gloss as in both cases as referring to Method so art not so much as a goal as as a form of practice

in both cases what they seem to want is that art should be subsidiary or it should be prior to but then tamed by or

framed by at least scholarship or a perspective so they each talk about artistic methods one way or another as part of the

process but they see as were artistic form as being illegitimate when treated as academic

work uh there needs to be a further step they seem to be saying a a particular sort of further step that needs to

reframe what has gone so fast and uh present it in Allison talks about in in sort of Nar narrative terms whereas uh

and both of them talk about arguments that need to be explicitly made and evidence explicitly offered and so on um

and framed in such a way that they then uh can communicate and here's where um actually the essay that mlos puts in the

copile special issue where he makes this distinction between research method and communication mode that's really key to him and I think that's present also in

the um in Allison's article where she talks about the Supercut or the use of database means as she talks about them database thinking and the Supercut has been the kind of quintessential example

of this within uh fish but then academic practice too as something that ultimately is very useful and generative as part of a process but then needs to

be tamed or framed and represented in an appropriately she would say essayistic but she also means she also explicitly says scholarly way in order to be um

taken seriously AS Scholarship as academic work so I find that quite interesting and something they both share I for political reasons as well as

I suppose as epistemological ones would want to resist that um because of course however we Define it art must have its own

claims I mean they're also both very suspicious of what Allison uh borrowing the term from the in transition uh pages

in which it it the journal describes what it hopes that videos will achieve she talks about knowledge effect uh in transition doesn't terribly

well defined that but I think it's related to what mlos then talks in in his piece as giving the labor of interpretation or of completing the

argument to the reader or viewer there's a lot going on there I think we really really need to interrogate what that might mean because I think it's true I mean the work that I do for example and I think one of the

weaknesses I have to say of ml's piece because it is very posturing it's very almost quixotic as I say it's provocative is he doesn't analyze actual any video essays it would be nice to get

some examples of material that is plainly good but that he doesn't like you know that that that is an example of this mode that he's unsympathetic with but but obviously has

certain demonstrable qualities you know something by yourself or by Katherine Katherine Grant would be very interesting to look at or I would propose to him I would like him to

engage with my men's shouting in which is very much uses super cut mechanisms so the kind of thing that Alison friend talks about in her article but doesn't

present its findings or its uh what is generated by these mechanisms in a conventional argumentative form however it does have

a very precise form and that very precise form has designs on its viewer it's investigative in that I'm trying to

find a a form that will Engage The viewer in a very active way through uses of repetition through uses of call backs and uh and anticipation throughout the

video so there's a very careful composition at work that is intended to be rhetorically significant

but derives if you like from art methods and I would like to see you know people who dislike this art of work to engage with the achievement of that I mean perhaps I shouldn't be talking about my own work as as being a good example of

this but like other sorts of work that does similar things and that attempts to be video essays that take seriously Uh Kevin B Lee and before him Jean luk

godar's notion that the essay film is a form that thinks so how is the form thinking and how is the achievement of form allowing uh a certain sort of

experience of knowledge let's call it that on the part of the uh of the viewer I yeah I think what you're just saying uh about the form that thinks that gets

at the heart of the main tension that comes out of of these pieces for me perhaps more so with Moss's piece than

Allison's which is I think it's very important to talk about and distinguish the process from the quote unquote end

product or as as he he puts it in several pieces the process of making making the video and the video as a communication mode a research mode as

opposed to a communication mode I think it's totally legitimate and important to make those distinctions and to talk about them and to talk about the affordances of either of them we do this

whenever we talk about the affordances of videographic scholarship we always highlight the fact that some people use it even more as a research tool and

don't publish video essays and other people are prolific in in releasing one video essay after the other so it's it's totally fair to draw on that distinction

and yet when it comes to watching an actual specific video I find it really difficult to imagine where you would draw that line as a viewer how do I know

that something that I'm watching is a quote unquote proper finished communication video or or a video that

communicates a complete research process as opposed to watching a video that has just come out of that that research process and hasn't been tamed as you put it through

argumentative framing while reading those pieces I'm just trying to come up with concrete elements to look for to to

make those distinctions in relation to specific pieces and also my own I would certainly say that the process behind

any of my videos for me determines where I would place a given video that I've made on the scholarly on scholarly Spectrum but I've definitely made pieces

that might look to be performing in a on a very in a very similar mode or in a very similar position on that Spectrum to someone who's watching them but I

know the process behind them I know the conversations I've had around them I know the potential peer review process that I've gone through with either of those pieces I know the the written

statements that I have or have not written for them and to me that makes a conglomerate it out of any video essay project that would then determine for me

how scholarly or not scholarly I would call them is that the main determining factor I don't think it should be I I think it would be really impossible for

anyone else to trace that if I didn't tell them exactly what the process had been I'm not sure this is it's clear what what I'm trying to say I'm just trying to apply these implicit and

explicit rules and guidelines from from the two texts to my own concrete experience with my own work or to any concrete videos that I can think of and

it it becomes really difficult to pinpoint is it is it about adding voiceover that delivers an argument I I don't think either of them would be that prescriptive and and strict that it has

to have that or it has to have text on screen that delivers the argument is it about the Creator's statement or not and I mean M mikas brings up Katie Bird's emphasis on the

video itself being the scholarship and not requiring the written statement to give it that legitimacy or is it about a specific audiovisual style it's just really

difficult for me to imagine any particular guidelines or criteria that would in any way be collectively agreed on or would

possibly be valid for for a large number of us I think I'll just leave that statement stand um but what I would say is that both

articles Allison's and mlos have very interesting things to say about the relationship of process and product so Allison talks you know very explicitly

about how she's looking back to the tradition of the essay practice that goes back to Montaine and how it's a an attempt a a process of working out where

you follow the author her through uh an activity of Investigation so she doesn't write a script and make a video she rather uh the the video emerges from her

process but in the end it will take a sort of form that you know States his premises offer offers its evidence draws its conclusions even though within that

she will offer instances of her process of Investigation so for example in the article she talks about a including a brief super Moment In Her film um fbot in a red

dress which is you know as everyone knows an extremely well achieved and very important video essay extremely influential and uh much much viewed for good reason and she talks about

including a a Supercut of f bots in a red dress or women in red dresses in various texts as a way of showing the process uh as well as showing her

evidence she's also showing her process of thought she would say and mlos in his piece talks about how the desktop documentary unifies ideally this

activity investigation this process with the communication outcome so he admires it precisely for that so I think both of them have quite sophisticated takes on

that even if both of them all the way through their essays posit oppositions I mean this happens all the in both of them I I made a list actually of uh

oppositions that both of them made and it it it's it's very long it's almost as long as the number of questions that miklos asks in his piece I I counted

them and there's 47 in a six-page essay it's almost uh I thought at one point that the whole essay would just be questions which struck me as a very interesting way of writing and of course there have been video essays that have

been made in this way and I think it's a good mode so it's I don't know to what extent uh his kind of parametric form here was deliberate certainly the

rhetorical form of offering of questions to express an exasperation rather than the expectation of having them answered was was quite intriguing but I want to come back to this question though which

seems to me key to both of the essays not just mosus this question of the the the status of the written statement and this is something I think I've heard you talk about too Evelyn

Allison talks about the the the the risk of the video essay being a supplementary form to written scholarship whereas mlos

talks about the uh the written Creator statement as being a supplementary form to what ought to be an autonomous piece of work the video essay like kitty Bard

seems to suggest now I think this is I won't say naive I think it's it's it's an aesthetic preference that will not declare itself and I think it's there too in Allison's work where she wants an

autonomous video essay that can be self-contained I think what defines scholarship is is precisely the fact that it is not self-contained no work of scholarship is self-contained um a work of scholarship

is built from footnotes as we know that tends to disperse it and I think we we work in a dispersed form by its very nature both of these writers uh Allison

and mlo to what extent they're working in a self-aware way with what dered de calls or called the logic of the supplement the idea of the supplement was one of his kind of key terms and he

he had this notion that the supplement shows a contradictory character at least in our understanding of entities let's say like the video essay so a video essay is

complete in itself so the supplement is something that's added to something that's already to complete but of course in adding to that which is already complete you're showing that there was

something lacking and there this this constant tension there which I think is actually very productive very important very I would say generative in terms of

how we engage with these things like Creator statements my Creator statements are extremely carefully composed I I would say that one of the things that makes my work scholarly is

precisely the introduction to the process that the Creator statement gives so it reveals your means and this is characteristic of let's say scholarship rather than

art uh Scholars will try and go back and reconstruct the stages in the in a painting let's say even these days through the use of X-ray and so on but

we as Scholars will will tend to try and make our methods explicit and that's part of our disposition as Scholars and I think you quoted Katie Grant earlier as saying you know my work is scholarly

because I'm a scholar and I don't think she that was a tautology I think it was saying that I have a particular disposition towards my objects of study

that mean that I will eventually come to explicate my means even if it's some years afterwards I mean Katie has this habit of doing a video essay often incredibly well achieved but then waiting some years to

actually write the essay about it and she will talk about how she would often have to wait perhaps also in order to understand her own work personally when I write my creative statements I want to

introduce I want the the reader viwer into my own process in such a way that they can offer some sort of Judgment of the utility of that process and adopt it

so I am all for the complement here and I I think that this Quest that mlos has repeated several times and Allison in in various articles and Allison talks about

in in her uh critical Supercut article for an autonomous video essay I think it's a false goal and I think it's actually an aesthetic rather than an epistemological preference I think it's

it's to do with Notions of the organic and here again is where their oppositions between art and academic work kind of falls down it's it goes back to the notion of the art object as

a organic whole I think we make inorganic objects and I think they're they're dispersive you know they point in multiple directions rather than being

hermetically sealed in themselves what you just said made some things a bit more clear to me that I phrased less clearly and and incoherently before

which is this question of interpretation that is key to me and that I think is is not fully developed uh or

considered in those two pieces this subjectivity of interpretation as part of the process when we talk about process there's we we usually mean the

research process the things that the researcher brings to the table of a given video essay and that's how I understand Katie Gran's statement that her work is scholarly because she is a

scholar meaning her work will be scholarly informed because it's her work whether it uh makes it explicit and and puts the arguments out there or it's

more implicit and that's how I would view my my approach to the poetic mode as well uh I never make a video without thinking about it with my brain which is

scholarly trained and scholarly informed and comes with a specific mindset that I that I bring to the table um but in all of this focus on the process which then

leads to the video essay output or the communication of research uh or the potentially self-contained or supplemented uh video essay and I and I

would actually also question this idea that in traditional scholarship we are transparent about our research method I think there's a lot of fake transparency

or and a lot of certain um certainly a lot of uh self agrand going on in in in all of our written scholarship I mean how often do we

pretend to have read or understood an entire piece uh by including it in a footnote and we actually have a very vague sense of what we mean I mean let's let's let's at least be honest about that aspect of it too this is written

scholarship is a highly coded highly performative highly um exclusive a privilege filled disposition anyway but

in all of that we don't give enough attention to the third part of this of this process between research video essay output and now the third thing

which is interpretation there is someone who will watch it and interpret it and that's a process in and of itself as well and this is where scholarship comes into

being scholarship doesn't exist or isn't or is meaningless if it's only in the maker in the Maker's mind in my opinion I think some people would disagree even with that but if we we talk about

communication here you need several players you need at least two players here that communicate with each other and uh and this is I think key for the for any conversation about the video

essay because we talk a lot about how this is a form that can make exclusive difficult inaccessible scholarship more

accessible more open to different audiences uh and also to different takes or different modes of interpretation

and in that I actually think if we if we all started making more traditional explanatory argumentative video essays there would be a risk there to lose this

this openness and this uh accessibility for um more diverse audiences I guess I'll leave the whole question of accessibility to one side because I

don't think of my work as aiming for accessibility personally I mean M close quotes me in an article of my own talking about

myself as an elitist and I I claim that um but much more important than that I think I don't mean in terms of uh the discourse at large but in terms of

the two articles here or a significant point that both make is how interpretation should not be left to the viewer I mean they're quite explicit

about that uh Allison talks about this whole notion of knowledge effect effect that is spoken about in the in transition submission Pages uh as being

reliant on allowing the viewer to make the interpretation and she considers this to be incorrect she sees the duty of the academic or scholarly video

essayist to have done the work of interpretation and to have presented that interpretation likewise uh mlon I think this is worth quoting actually he

says videography without an explicit and clear critical intention where the labor of producing the latter that is to say the critical intention or interpretation is

outsourced to the viewer he's talking about this in a critical way so he describes this and I think that's very interesting so he talks about he talks about how we're not doing our work we're not doing the labor if we haven't made

this interpretation now of course you made a very import very important point about overstating transparency and I think

vital the academic form of rhetoric is very performative in a way that will often disavow and pretend to be purely an informational

transaction which is a term that mlos uses in his piece but I find this idea of the labor of providing interpretation uh kind of intriguing because yes

there's work here that you're asking the viewer to do and of course we know that there's a long tradition in uh the the theory of someone like bre or the Russian formalists and so on who would

say actually that's exactly the sort of Labor that you should be asking a viewer or reader to do but it's also what you're asking to be shared shared here and this is what I want in my work um

and I'd be interested to to hear you actually talk about one of your own particular pieces about how you address it to a viewer and what you would hope the viewer not that that what they would get from it but how they would engage

with it what is the particular mode of Engagement but for me uh what I'm trying to do is to offer a kind of intellectual

flirtation I would say where the viewer is invited into the fun of the work and that fun can also often be kind of abrasive you know the men shouting uh

video I said that I made that I mentioned earlier is um is an annoying video you know it's deliberately irritating at points to watch and by the

end of it you should hope to be liberated from the world of these men that I portrayed uh but the act of giving

meaning to the whole ought to be a fun one where you're invited to share in the um uh the activity of making sense yes

as a labor as some work to be done which will hopefully then be epistemologically and politically enabling in some way or empowering uh but also a kind of a joy

ful one a fun acity a game precisely a playful activity and I don't think we should apologize for

that I also find the the term intention very intriguing uh yes it is because I think if it's if if we make it about um

scholarship needing to present explicitly a scholarly intention that's that's a different way of phrasing it than saying a a specific an explicit

scholar interpretation or argument but at the same time that makes it again that that primes me to say but how do we know what an explicit intention really

is in in a scholarly piece I would claim that I had a a strong scholarly intention be everything that I've made but I would also argue that whether or

not you find it to be explicit in the given piece very much depends on how you on how you view it and the context in which you view it and who you are

actually I was thinking of the video essay that I made with my colleague noas about Holocaust footage it's called the archival in between I would argue this

is a highly scholarly informed video actually I know it is a highly scholarly informed video because we spent a lot of time researching this footage talking about it bringing our different

disciplinary perspectives into it hers being artist REM mind being film studies and we wrote a lengthy article that is very much a classic scholarly article

with lots of footnotes and and quotations for us it was not just a stylistic and aesthetic question but it was actually key to the ethics of the

video and and how we approached it that we that we didn't present either an explicit single intention or argument or

questions and we've always whenever we've shown this video in in in public we've always said that the best kind of feedback that we could hope for is if you tell us that

the video made you think that it moved you in some way but that it confused you as well or that that it leaves you wondering about what exactly it's trying

to say uh and in this context and I think there are other context we could we could think about here not presenting

a definitive answer to me is the right ethical and aesthetic choice that doesn't mean that it's not scholarly

informed uh but it means that to take out this the single Authority that we would present as makers um but instead

to invite a sharing process and a communicative process between us and our our viewers that is thequality intention

and I'm not sure there's there's room for for that idea of it in this line of of of argumentation I think you're right I think they would see you as not doing

your job but I mean I I I I'm really glad that you brought up that example because it's obviously an extremely

powerful argument in favor of a kind of ethics of epistemic opacity and this is I think isn't Edward gisa talks about this uh but other Scholars too I mean in

anthropology for example one of the things they of the principles they some sometimes operate on is that you have

to respect the invisibility of phenomena sometimes so you you have an obligation an ethical one not to explain sometimes

you simply have to accept the phenomenon uh because you're outside it as a perhaps an anthropologist coming from a different culture and so on so I think these are very powerful ideas actually and it's the kind of thing I was trying

to get at in my video essay nibbler epistemics you know that's obviously related to this notion of epistemic opacity um I also think you made a very

important point which is the refusal of the single Authority uh yes there are different reasons and different ways to do this

but I think it's exactly what Allison def friend thinks you shouldn't be doing I think Allison here and I mean I'm inferring this uh from Allison's work

more Broad broadly I think in her work there's it's a particular strand of feminism that looks for the female author and the the woman as Authority as maker I mean there's a kind of

historical Paradox here that um you know when second wave feminism was coming along uh in the late 60s and 70s was also the moment that the death of the

author was being declared by Fuko and bar you know so there was you could see to some extent that a certain strand of post structuralist thought was also a

refusal of a certain kind of um progress being made in the status of women you know as as authors as authorities so this it's politically

important sometimes to really insist on the authority of the the female maker and I get that at the same time there's obviously very good reasons too to

refuse that idea of the single Authority the kind of you know liberal intellect ual model um and I think you know here's

one of the reasons why I would have been interested to discuss johanes uh johann's work on parapraxis um because of course one of the problems with aiming for authority

and transparency and Clarity and so on is that it assumes that one's own motivations and motives and uh practices are visible and and and present to oneself you know after the 20th century

after psychoanalysis after fraud we can't assume that our motivations are present to ourselves at all uh so it's it's strange in a sense to take ourselves for granted when we're doing

this work and I think that's what you and Johannes were getting at in your discourse on vulnerability as well we know that we are ourselves it's not simply that the video essay let's say or any scholarly form is dispersive also

the person behind it is dispersive you know we are ourselves not coherent Allison uh brings that up uh a little bit when she when she talks

about Scholars employing fanish practices or hiding fanish motivations uh behind scholarship I I I do think that's that's an interesting

point yeah yeah as if this is something to be disavowed I guess but I think we should explicitly deal with one

assertion or question that he does raise um which is the extent to which refusing uh traditional academic modes

protocols standards as he would say it um is a form of novelty chasing I mean he almost accuses you and Johannes and

also to some extent me of um of being neoliberal career makers basically who are choosing a novelty form in order to distinguish ourselves in a crowded field

and you know to presumably we we uh make our careers get funding get reputations get status and so on and

yet I'm not in a tenure track position so but how how do you respond to that is that what you're trying to do is that what I'm trying to do is that what

Johannes is trying to do simply um carve out a kind of a novelty Niche for ourselves uh rather than doing the hard labor as miklos would see it of of of

proper scholarly work well first I'll say I didn't read it as strongly as a as a as a critique or a provocation in our direction as you did though I think you can read it as

such I can't speak for you I know for sure that in in our conversation um uh between johannas and me that was not that was not what we were going for and

I also think it would be a really risky career move certainly I as a as a more Junior scholar I'm always aware of the career risks that I'm taking by doing this kind of work I've been warned in

the past by by established Scholars don't just Bank on this thing it's too new and it's unclear um in in terms of

its legitimacy uh and I did it anyway not to make a career actually despite its implications for for my career for me this was a courageous step I I think

it's very difficult to be a good strategic career maker in the humanities anyway so much of it is up uh is up to luck to developments you can't necessarily foresee and I think Johannes

was trying to make the point that because it's so impossible to plan out how how any job market will develop it it makes it even

more vital to follow your instincts and follow what you really want to do because you might you might go down either way but at least then you'll go down or you'll have to a different

career after having done the thing that you really want to do yeah yeah I mean I you I I wasn't really expecting you to agree

with the the accusation but I was interested that he felt it needed to be made you know that this could just be a kind of a novelty

chasing I talked about how the you know the motivations of the video maker might not be present to themselves you know in Johannes work you

you get a notion of the unconscious ious at work but this unconscious is also the unconscious of the material and it's also the unconscious if you like of the software that we use and indeed of the

methods that we use so I think the uh both Allison and ml don't don't want to admit really that there's more of an agency to the material that

itself is very complex I I don't want ultimately and this is what I really want to refuse uh from both articles is a sense of authority over my material

it's always an engagement with material that that allows it its own agency not to be understood as

well um and implicates me I I think that's a great way to end

yeah

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