Thread by @deontologistics

I'm fielding a lot of objections to the claim articulated in this tweet (which you can read down thread), but it might be worth starting a new thread that takes a different tack, and synthesises my perspective on the video essay as a legitimate format in which to do philosophy.

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1343641939099480065

Academic philosophers often have very inconsistent opinions on the range of legitimate and/or effective formats in which philosophy can be performed/expressed. Yes, even Derrideans and Deleuzians, whose rote textual experimentation consistently produces negative results.

What do I mean by inconsistent here? Well, we regularly teach philosophical texts that display a range of formats, styles, and even genres that is much broader than the range in which we permit ourselves and our students to produce work. This fact should be obvious.

There's a pretty good reason for this discrepancy. We try to stick to formats in which there are fewer failure modes. Not everyone can be Plato, Seneca, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Derrida, Deleuze, or even Bernard Suits (cf. The Grasshopper).

As already mentioned, rote stylistic imitation tends to produce consistent streams of philosophical failures, and there's volumes of secondary literature in the Anglophone Continental tradition that attests to this.

Moreover, when we are training students to write, and this includes graduate students, the emphasis is on getting the basics right. Train students to express themselves in straightforward, relatively standardised argumentative forms, and then maybe let them do something else.

The problem is that this '...and then maybe let them do something else' is a promissory note that is almost never cashed out. The academic community has a tendency to brutally police divergence from its own tacit norms, even while bemoaning its own stagnation.

This is a much broader problem than restrictive expressive norms, but I've discussed aspects of this elsewhere and want to stay on point: academics all too easily generate post-hoc rationalisations justifying expressive constraints that have been more or less beaten into them.

We impose on our students those expressive constraints that were imposed on us in turn, in a deceptively mundane cycle of violence that is not without its own peculiar traumatic effects or internalised modes of repression.

Any academic philosopher reading this who thinks they had an entirely healthy relationship with their supervisor and their extended familial circle would do well to at least contemplate the pressures that shaped their professional behaviours and how they are perpetuating them.

They might not find anything amiss therein, as there are occasional parental figures who are beyond reproach, but even the good ones make mistakes, and if so, I a can guarantee that you know academics who had a much rougher time of it than you.

What about those metaphorically raised by wolves? Well, many of the figures mentioned earlier were just such foundlings, or at least wayward children who ran away with one circus or another: Nietzsche, Bataille, etc.

There's a proud history of renegades, autodidacts, and polymaths being integrated into the tradition, even after it becomes a pillar of the society of letters that becomes the modern university. However, this is usually retrospective legitimation, rather than mutual recognition.

Once more however, not everyone can be Spinoza, Marx, or Peirce. There are a thousand more names long forgotten for more or less good reason, and in the age of the internet there are thousands more each year. A torrent of undisciplined intellectual noise.

We can now frame our question properly: is everyone creating video essays on youtube without academic affiliation a feral/wayward child whose meagre contribution to the pursuit of knowledge is doomed to be forgotten? If not, why not? How can they possibly make a contribution?

To be quite frank, I think most who simply answer 'yes' to the first question and dismiss the rest are more likely to be emoting than expressing an articulated opinion, in much that way that every generation eventually complains of 'kids these days'.

If there is to be a real argument here, it must proceed by analysing the medium, the way it is used, and the way in which it is evolving. Anything less is insufficiently serious to be worth engaging. I will stand firm on this point.

Returning to my opening point: there is a much wider range of performative and expressive forms native to the history of philosophy than we regularly deploy, even limiting ourselves to the major figures of the Western canon (which we shouldn't). This should give us pause.

Any argument that resembles 'but this is not how things are done!' is likely based on a much narrower conception of how things have in fact been done, and even continue to be done in the context of teaching, that is remotely defensible.

Nevertheless, I still have to present a positive case for the potential of the medium. I'm not content with merely defanging reflexive dismissals of philosophical performances that are unfamiliar.

So here's my first positive point: they aren't unfamiliar at all.

They deploy distinctly cinematic techniques that are unfamiliar in this context, which can be studied with all the extant resources of film studies and media theory (shout out to @thelindsayellis and @Hbomberguy), but these modulate more familiar modes of performance.

I think it's no coincidence that the video essay as a medium was popularised as a mode of media analysis, or that it continues to be informed by, or hybridised with it, even when its content is more traditionally philosophical. There's a self-awareness built into this new medium.

I could talk about the collapse of boundaries between mediums in modern and contemporary art as precedent for this, but I think that's the wrong way to read it. This is a distinctive new medium, much as the music video is a thing unto itself, irreducible to one or the other.

(Speaking of which, I should invoke @shaviro, who will no doubt have something to say about music videos and whether this parallel holds up, not to mention the video essay as a philosophical medium.)

So, what exactly is so familiar about these modes of performance? Well, I think the evolution of the video essay is best described by tracing its divergence from documentary, which is by now a well established form with recognisable periods and subtypes. This is the origin point.

For instance, if one looks at Werner Herzog's documentaries (e.g., Grizzly Man), one can see a virtuoso synthesis of techniques from across the board, all employed towards a very clear rhetorical end, ultimately presenting an explicitly articulated conclusion.

A more obvious forerunner of the youtube format is Adam Curtis (e.g., The Power of Nightmares), who is less tied to the resources/norms of cinema and revels in the overdubbed aesthetic of newsreel, mixing and matching found footage in a way I cautiously describe as 'postmodern'.

Curtis almost provides the template for the low-fi, cheap to produce, first person patchwork video essays one finds all over youtube, doing everything from analysing the mutating memetics of The Simpsons () to more familiar critical content (@shaun_vids).

The question is now, what familiar forms of performance capture this apparent offshoot of documentary in their orbit, modifying its narrative form and expanding its rhetorical repertoire. I want to claim that there are two.

Let's take the most obvious first. The key innovation is the transition from documentary to dramaturgy. This is something that @PhilosophyTube has pursued with clear and admirable self-consciousness (cf. ).

But it's @ContraPoints who maintains a consistent and expanding range of personas and characters that persist across videos (cf. contrapoints.fandom.com/wiki/Tabby), using them to track the evolving dialectical interactions between distinct philosophical perspectives.

If this sounds familiar, it bloody well should, because it's the reason that we have over 1,000 pages of Plato and Aristophanes and scattered fragments from their contemporaries and even their immediate inheritors.

This is so obviously the deployment of the oldest tried and tested techniques for compressing and communicating philosophical arguments that I'm frankly quite surprised I need to point it out, but it seems that I must in order to make the shape of my argument explicit.

Regardless of what you think about how well these techniques are deployed, and the philosophical ideas they are used to compress and communicate, you must recognise this for what it is. If this isn't a legitimate form of philosophical performance/expression, what is?

There's a lot more I could say here to flesh out this comparison, as their is a fascinating relationship between dramaturgy and dialectic (no Hegelian connotations necessary). But I'll try to limit myself to one substantive point.

My favourite feature of @ContraPoints is the attempt to capture often inchoate or miasmic points of view that we're all too familiar with, even if we find it difficult to pin them down with references, while nevertheless sustaining a discursive charity that genuinely illuminates.

There are no doubt by now more attempts to imitate this than I could reasonably count and assess, and I suspect they'll mostly fail in the way that Derrida's imitators fail to achieve more than surface syntactic playfulness. It's hard to ape either without coming off as smug.

It's all too tempting to slip into caricature, especially when attempting the rhetorical strategies at which Natalie excels. I can't say she succeeds in avoiding it at all times, but it's hard to sail a perfect course between a smug Scylla and an unedifying Charybdis.

Moreover, there's a dramaturgical innovation here that distinguishes her work from mere repetition of Plato. It's cliche to claim that there are not really multiple characters in Plato's dialogues, and even that there are no characters, insofar as Socrates is himself a cypher.

But this point is *visually* incorporated into the framework of Natalie's dialogues in a way that makes the adoption of various personas something like an intimate rehearsal of an inner dialogue between her own conflicting tendencies and temptations. It's positively confessional.

I shouldn't need to add that the confession is another tried and tested philosophical format, popularised by Augustine and quite self-consciously stolen by Descartes (along with the cogito, cf. 'On the Trinity'). But again I must, for the sake of explicitness.

Yet this isn't the second familiar format I wanted to talk about, but merely a segue from dramaturgy to its partner, insofar as this *intimacy* is a characteristic feature of youtube as a medium that continues to distance it from documentary in every sphere.

One thing you will find in everything from cooking videos (cf. ) to meta-commentaries on gaming culture () is the dramatisation of failure as a way of endearing the audience to the protagonist/host.

What is interesting about this is that it's not just 'diegetic failure' in the sense of mistakes that humanise the person as character within the narrative, but 'non-diegetic failure' which incorporates errors in production that humanise the person as author.

This can be done in a variety of ways, but the most common I've noticed is the use of jump-cuts to edit out dialogue mistakes without thereby erasing the editorial effect. In youtube, the editing is often deliberately visible in a way that can produce rhetorical affect.

This really isn't something unique to the video essay, but something that seems to have spontaneously and independently evolved across the youtube genrescape. Nevertheless, it leads us to the specific mode of performance that I want to add to the dramaturgical register.

We start with the observation that the specific affect created by the rhetorical use of failure (diegetic or non-diegetic) is *humour*. This should make the performative mode in question obvious: stand-up comedy.

Once more, this is self-consciously developed in @PhilosophyTube, and even plays a genetic role in origin of his particular style (cf. ). He is very open about the influence of Stewart Lee, that most consummate comedian's comedian.

It's impossible to watch Lee's recent work without seeing that there is an obvious underlying argumentative structure that is not just being rhetorically conveyed by his act, but which forms the basis of the humour itself (). It's approaches philosophy.

Yet, as interesting as the philosophy of stand-up comedy is (Hegel did say that humour was the highest form of art, working as it does with absurdities), I'm here to talk about the deployment of comedic technique in philosophical performance/expression.

This is also hardly new: Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Sidney Morgenbesser (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Mo…) are all uproariously funny in places, and often for good rhetorical and philosophical reasons. It's something I myself have come to enjoy, having previously cultivated drier prose.

At this point it would be remiss of me not to mention the king of philosophical shitposters, @lastpositivist, whose slow rise to bluetick fame is driven in no small part by his deft and disarming embodiment of the straight man (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_…), even when he has no foil.

Philosophy twitter and philosophy youtube use comedic techniques as a way to build something like discursive solidarity in disagreement, to cultivate discursive charity through the mutual sympathies and fleeting intimacies that only humour can conjure, as if from nothing.

There's nothing wrong with this at all, and it should be lauded and encouraged by everyone who spends time in this medium. If you don't look down on one another for cultivating of such techniques, don't look down on youtubers, especially because they're the professionals here.

I love a perfectly crafted philosophical shitpost. It's like a delicate haiku that somehow captures the perfect balance between referential transparency and allusive compression (cf.

https://twitter.com/lastpositivist/status/1343360244123054081

). But it's more like the Steven Wright than Stewart Lee.

Anyway, enough of this aesthetic tangent. The deeper point I'll make is that though humour can be used to weave evasive *irony*, it can equally be used to cultivate *sincerity*, and this is a condition of the possibility of true philosophical practice and communication.

Moreover, if one accepts this, one must accept the philosophical value of this work, not just because it displays this in its form, but because, in at least one case, it has made it its content:

That's my favourite @ContraPoints video, and it would form a fitting conclusion to my argument, but I have one final point to make. It concerns the one counterexample to my suggestion that youtube philosophers have more direct influence than individual academic philosophers.

That's right motherfuckers, it's Slavoj Žižek. Say whatever you want about the content of Žižek's philosophy, you simply cannot deny that he reaches more non-academics than any other philosopher with a public profile. Why is this, do you think. Hmmm? Can you guess?

I'm not going to say the philosophical content of his work has nothing to do with it, nor that it's got nothing to do with his insane productivity and his status as a go to philosopher for controversial hot takes it print journalism. But it's also this:

Žižek *literally* makes video essays. But that's not all. He is an incredibly popular writer and speaker, in no small part because he is *funny* both in print and in person. His lectures are like stand-up routines littered with anecdotes and straight up jokes.

I normally hate saying things like this, but I think it's warranted in this case: Žižek is the exception that proves the rule.

So, it's been an interesting 3 hour dive into the video essay as a medium in which to do public philosophy. The one thing I haven't dealt with is precisely what 'public' philosophy is and whether it does anything useful. Even I must stop somewhere though.

I hope some of you found it interesting, or at least, will find it interesting when you return from whatever else you were doing while waiting for me to finish. In the end, the moral of this story is the same as many I tell: avoid snobbery, embrace solidarity. Good night!

Looking at this again the day after, I must correct a serious omission: the thoughts expressed here were developed in discussion with students at Newcastle in my Video Essay Discussion Group, and I have benefitted immeasurably from their insights. Shout out to the VEDG!