Reflections and Takeaways from Evelyn Kreutzer and Alan O’Leary’s Discussion on The Video Essay Podcast
by Miklós Kiss
November 25, 2024
I feel honored that esteemed colleagues – Evelyn Kreutzer and Alan O’Leary – gave my thoughts on the scholarly practice of video essaying (see these here and here) such careful consideration in the latest episode of The Video Essay Podcast entitled ‘The Role of Writings on Video Essays’.
While I was flattered by their meticulous and astute close readings of Allison de Fren’s (2020) and my writings (2020, 2024) about the scholarly aspects of videographic criticism, there are a few points that I felt compelled to address. These, of course, regard only the parts that concern me and are guided by a well-intended and collegial approach towards Evelyn and Alan, and the ideas and ideals they hold. Referring to the meme, one might say ‘this could have been an email’, however, I decided to openly publish my detailed response driven by a developing feeling that the clarifications Evelyn and Alan managed to get from me could be of interest to others as well.
Because I’m not much of a podcasting type, I’m steering the discussion toward a conversation in writing (wondering what the generic label for a written response to a podcast episode is). I will attempt to address all relevant bits, more or less in the order as they appear in the show. For the sake of convenience, I connect my reactions to the corresponding time codes rather than pursuing a systematically built argument.
[11:39] First of all, I would like to stress that none of the discussed texts I’ve written grew out of ‘exasperation’. That’s not my (scholarly) drive. On the other hand, I happily accept Alan’s characterization of my writing as being ‘cranky’, ‘polemical’, ‘provocative’, and ultimately ‘fun’.
[14:13] I highly sympathize with and would suggest embracing Evelyn’s early conclusion – “maybe it’s just easier not worry as much about whether people will find my work scholarly or not” –, though I find her justification, paraphrasing Catherine Grant, not entirely convincing: “my work is scholarly because I am a scholar” [14:29]. I see how the subsequent claim plays out in practice (“it’s often the institutional context of production and circulation of our work that determines whether or not something tends to be considered scholarly or not” [14:34]), but want to believe that there are also other, more text-immanent, parameters that might distinguish a scholarly character (thinking of works of non-scholars, like the videos of Tony Zhou or The Nerdwriter, that are appreciated and used in various academic contexts).
[15:30] Evelyn: “find[s] it quite difficult to fully and clearly locate where those two authors [Allison de Fren and me] actually stand in this [scholarly] debate.” Evidently, our writings are full of ‘oppositions’ [32:45], by which we query many segments of the scholarly spectrum. I can only speak on my behalf, but I take these remarks as compliments bespeaking a balanced and considerate stance – an unbiased quality that should precisely characterize us as inclusive and reflective scholars who are informed about and open to the entire breadth of their field. Indeed, I only hope to find myself not positioned at any end of any spectrum of a debate like this. Commonly, such categorizations are made by those who have a firm and clear opinion about where they want to stand (depending on their scholarly tribes, some labeled me as an orthodox traditionalist, others as a blasphemous disruptor). I like how Evelyn paraphrases my conclusion on this matter: “I’m not here to explain what the ‘academic’ is; I’m actually here to question what the ‘academic’ is” [16:38].
[18:19] Despite Alan’s feelings, I did not intend to ‘mock’ him or anyone else, and I’m truly sorry if my thinking process allows for such inferences. As acknowledged, I’m often ‘cranky’, which might be the uncanny result of a merger of an Eastern-European grumpiness with the infamous Dutch straightforwardness. Additionally, I’m not a native writer and thus lack the feeling of all possible connotations my word choices may carry. Sure, I ask a lot of questions (Alan counts 47), which some may find provocative, but with that I only and sincerely want to find arguments (and nudge others to join me in this pursuit) for justifying Catherine Grant’s famous claim about videographic criticism’s ‘ontological newness’. I would never ‘mock’ such a claim, on the contrary, and even if the road is bumpier than expected, I wish for and continuously chase arguments to justify it. I would like to see more substantiation for what this newness truly comprises, rather than to use it as a label to sideline existing criteria and practices that have characterized scholarly work for decades. Therefore, I’m not mocking only inviting Alan to further validate his alleged “paradigm shift where normal science is being suspended” [18:32]. While looking at its original manifestations with genuine interest, I question the fruitfulness of such an agenda as scientific communication (thus not as art, artistic method, or research). All in all, my questions are meant to be thus constructive provocations, not rhetorical acts of expressing disbelief or mockery.
[19:36] The conversation returns to the topic of situating arguments and arguers. I think the drawn analogy between seeing someone as being inquisitive and lacking (or unwilling to have) any clear position in this exciting discussion and being someone who expects clarity in scholarly communication is false.
[24:53] I would like to remind Evelyn and Alan that occasionally I do analyze actual video essays. See, for example, a few close analyses on desktop videos here, or my reflection on one of my favorite cases here. But I agree: wish there were more scholarly analyses of video essays out there, beyond [in]Transition’s always illuminating (but different genre of) open peer reviews.
[34:30] I agree with Alan, claiming “no work of scholarship is self-contained”, but only if it’s not stated against the specific genre of ‘autonomous video essay’ – an unfortunate opposition that is repeated elsewhere (Gills, Grant & O’Leary 2024: 10). Any scholarly utterance’s openness, either as dotted with dispersive footnotes or open to further debate in its discussion section, stands in mismatched opposition with the self-contained nature of the autonomous form of audiovisual communication, which specific genre’s videos, while aiming to deliver a rounded-out argument in a standalone format (thus without the need for any accompanying piece), obviously, are also often full of references and allow for if not openly invite further dialogue, through for example opening up possibilities for the audience’s own activities of verification, in an unending discourse they contribute to.
[35: 46] Together with Kevin B. Lee (who expressed a similar shift in his view [2:00]), I tend to agree with Alan, that making a video essay as a standalone audiovisual work, thus without an accompanying text, is often an ‘aesthetic preference’. So, no one should feel restricted and compelled to follow my otherwise existing preference for con-textualizing (exposing production history, methodology, etc.) instead of re-textualizing (revealing the ‘point’ of the video) videos (Kiss 2018) – also, because the former autonomous video type is much harder to be achieved and thus might impose too many constraints on its maker’s unfolding ideas.
[39:10] Although I, sadly, agree with Evelyn’s observation that there’s a lot of ‘self-aggrandizing’ going on in academia, I don’t think we shouldn’t try to suppress such urges or call out its scholarly practices (like faked transparencies, pretended understandings, unfounded or twisted quotes, namedroppings, etc.). I see one’s striving for clarity in expression, with its higher affordance of unambiguous engagement and openness to verification, as exactly a practice to support such a liberating agenda.
[40:03] Concerning ‘interpretation’, Evelyn delineates a communication model, stating “scholarship doesn’t exist or it’s meaningless if it’s only in the maker’s mind“ [40:17], and “if we talk about communication here, you need several players; you need at least two players here that communicate with each other” [40:26]. Her implication that explanatorily argumentative videos do not fit into such a communication model is based on a false (and unexplicated) assumption that these videos, just because they argue for a particular understanding in a rounded-out form, communicate their interpretations as exclusive truths and in a vacuum. From such a logical leap comes Evelyn’s conclusion, “explanatory argumentative video essays … risk … to lose ‘openness’ and ‘accessibility’ for more diverse audiences” [40:57], which is thus built on two implications I would like to reflect on: firstly, a closed and rounded-out explanatory form does not claim exhaustiveness on its topic at hand; all types of videographic work are part of an ongoing discourse and thus up for further scholarly scrutiny. Secondly and as stated above, knowledge derived from lucid and coherent reasoning, supported by a systematically conducted and openly presented method, and evidenced by convincing examples, is not a closed product or some one-way street of communication. On the contrary, such scholarship is more unambiguously accessible and more open to being scrutinized – agreed or disagreed with on its clear terms – for the widest and most diverse audiences possible (compared, for example, to “an untranslatable form of absurdist knowledge” of an “inutilious scholarship” that Alan is advocating for (O’Leary 2021)).
[41:25] Alan confronts me by calling him ‘elitist’ when quoting him (Kiss 2024) from a statement he made about being so (O’Leary 2021). Without wanting to pretend that I can untangle all angles of this, but if elitism is a result of either a conscious or unconscious enjoyment of one’s privilege, then, being aware of my (academic and other) privileges, I acknowledge my position and join Alan among such an ‘elite’.
[41:34 - 45:04] Back to the subject of ‘interpretation’, specifically about the question of whose labor interpretations should be (either of the scholar or of the audience of scholarship), I find Alan’s thought process productively evocative. Maybe I missed it or couldn’t fully crystallize it from his earlier writings (or I construct now something that isn’t there), but while listening to him, I imagined a lenient model that could resolve the dichotomy between some firmly held positions. Simply put, while I mostly advocate for a scholarship of which aim is to clearly present knowledge and unambiguously argue for a single or more parallel understanding to the viewers (based on and sampling from a variety of ‘imaginative possibilities’ (Bordwell 1989) that artworks trigger), Alan endorses a scholarly ethos that maintains artworks’ inherent ‘interpretive multiplicity’ and thus results in audiovisual works whose aim is to help (inspire, support, facilitate, steer, etc.) viewers to form their personal interpretations. Not that the first option wouldn’t allow for its viewers to disagree with the video’s claims or prevent them from forming their own interpretations about the work of art at hand, but I see a constructive nuance in these pedagogies: while the former provides a model approach audiences can engage with and learn to master or tweak, the latter doesn’t offer such a model, attempting to deliberately limit its guiding influence on viewers’ imagination to a minimum. One method builds a (scholarly) box and invites viewers to study and/or dismantle it, the other presents no box at all. Either way, I like how Liz Greene cuts the debate’s Gordian knot by suggesting to “focus on teaching the student and not the subject” (Greene 2020).
[45:05] Regarding the general suspicion toward ‘intentions’, I’m wondering about the possibility of extending Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ from the author of art to the scholarly author; about the consequences and benefits of applying Wimsatt and Monroe’s ‘intentional fallacy’ to the domain of scholarly communication. Is there any scholarly work, either written, audiovisual, or audiovisual accompanied by writing, that is not intending to do something? Isn’t it the case that even the most playfully experimental and blasphemously deformative scholarly works, explicitly or not, have some ‘aim’, perhaps even a ‘goal’, an ‘objective’, or at least a ‘hypothesis’? Contrary to the general assumption, I believe that even a consciously delayed research question or deliberately resisted thesis formulation in any type of screwmeneutic tinkerings has a rather precise intention, purposefully pondering ‘what such delay or resistance could result in’. Ultimately, isn’t it the fundamental trait of any scholarship to attempt creating (alias ‘intending’) and transmitting a ‘point’ (i.e., a piece of knowledge)? While I obviously see the value of the above theories in their relation to experiencing art (not that in practice it is possible to fully escape any authorial intent, given audiences’ very real hypothesizing about some plausible intentions of actual authors – see, for example, Jerrold Levinson’s 2016 ‘hypothetical intentionalism’ or Jason Mittell’s 2015 ‘inferred author’), I wonder what would be the benefit in scholarly communication to dismiss all these as fallaciously irrelevant. Since I was invited to engage with it, let me take as an example Alan’s Men Shouting: A History in 7 Episodes video, which, according to Alan, “doesn’t present its findings in a conventional argumentative form, however, it has a very precise form. … There’s a very careful composition at work that is intended to be rhetorically significant” [25:15]. If I’m not mistaken, such a description is precisely an expression of a scholarly intention (in fact, I can be sure of this, given the explicit mention of the word ‘intention’), even if Alan, if I understand him right, would not mind if his intentions would evade the viewers of his audiovisual scholarship. This could even work, potentially leading to an engaging pedagogy, although, as a viewer of scholarship (and not art), I would appreciate to be informed about the purpose of such ‘unintentional intentionality’. The problem often is thus that the more ambiguous the ‘intention’ about a more complex ‘point’, the less probable such point is to be accomplished and effectively conveyed through an audiovisual and/or textual argument that discards clarity (more on clarity in a second).
[from around 45:10 until the end] Concerning further thought snippets about ‘openness’, ‘authority’, ‘outsourced labor’, etc., I cannot formulate my stance better than how I did it earlier: “‹openness› is often contrasted with ‹closeness› of the explanatory type [of video essays] in a manner that may be erroneous because it attributes a degree of ‹definitiveness› to the latter. Closeness of explanations does not claim exhaustiveness; only it refers to arguments that are explicit, unambiguous and well-rounded, which don’t aspire to be the ‹last word,› only a ‹clear word› on a topic at hand” (Kiss 2024). ‘Being clear’ involves a risk of ‘being wrong’ – a hazard if not a vulnerability scholars should not shy away from. ‘Being clear’ is an invitation to engage in a discussion about an explicitly stated ‘point’. Clarity provides an unambiguous access point to learn, discuss, or criticize. If a scholar prefers (for ethical or aesthetic reasons) not to disclose their ‘point’ they (aim to) make regarding the issue at hand, then they might want to consider making the reasons and (expected) value for such ‘intended openness’ or ‘epistemic opacity’ clear, either in the video or in its supplementary writing.
[49:08] For me, there’s a difference between saying something, clear and loud, and posturing as some ‘single authority’ about the issue at hand. Expertise is not the same as authority. In fact, expertise becomes suspicious when it is presented in an authoritative manner. I enjoy engaging with – whether learning from or disputing – the ideas of experts in their fields. Either way, I don’t think it’s useful to see knowledge in hierarchical terms and assign any power to it (namedropping Foucault, just to signal my self-imposed naivety). It’s probably better to approach and gauge every new information, (scholarly) text or video, on its merit, never by its emitter’s (academic) stature. It’s not about the ‘one’ who makes a point, but about the ‘point’ one is making – a conclusion that specifies my doubt about the above-quoted definition: “my work is scholarly because I am a scholar”. To escape the risk of authoritarianism, Alan wants to keep the option alive for his material to have “its own agency not to be understood” [55:32] – a position I admire in art but, for the above reason, find unnecessarily cautious and would not prefer to hold as an art scholar. In any case, I’m sad if my writing comes across to Alan as ‘posturing’ [24:48] – a truly authoritative quality that I find awful in real life, art, and in writing or video-essaying practice about art.
[51:45] Lastly, ‘novelty chasing’ might be but not necessarily should be read as an insult in my writing (Kiss 2024). I regret that Evelyn and Alan read it as such, and then related this to their own practice: ‘I almost accuse them’ of being ‘neoliberal career makers’. Quoting another ‘almost’, I can only look at Johannes Binotto who, in an inspiring manifesto written up with Evelyn, claims that “the problematics of academia and the job market almost force you to be experimental and to try something new” (Kreutzer & Binotto 2023). Even if not exactly for these reasons, I think pursuing novelty, either in the form of unorthodox research or innovative communication, should be seen in a positive light.
References
Bordwell, David. 1989. Making Meaning. Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
de Fren, Allison. 2020. ‘The Critical Supercut: A Scholarly Approach to a Fannish Practice’, The Cine-Files, Vol. 15, http://www.thecine-files.com/the-critical-supercut-a-scholarly-approach-to-a-fannish-practice/.
Gills, Libertad, Catherine Grant, Alan O’Leary. 2024. ‘Academic Filmmaking in the New Humanities: Articles. Introduction to the Special Issue’, Academic Quarter | Akademisk Kvarter, nr. 27 (September): 4-17. https://doi.org/10.54337/academicquarter.i27.8904.
Greene, Liz. 2020. ‘Teaching the student, not the subject: videographic scholarship’, The Cine-Files, Vol. 15, https://www.thecine-files.com/teaching-the-student-not-the-subject/.
Kiss, Miklós. 2018. ‘Videographic Scene Analyses, Part 2.’ NECSUS Autumn #Mapping, https://necsus-ejms.org/videographic-scene-analyses-part-2/.
Kiss, Miklós. 2020. ‘Videographic Criticism in the Classroom: Research Method and Communication Mode in Scholarly Practice’, The Cine-Files, Vol. 15, http://www.thecine-files.com/videographic-criticism-in-the-classroom/.
Kiss, Miklós. 2024. ‘What’s the Deal with the ‹Academic› in Videographic Criticism?’, ZFM https://zfmedienwissenschaft.de/en/online/whats-deal-academic-videographic-criticism.
Kreutzer, Evelyn, Johannes Binotto. 2023. ‘A Manifesto for Videographic Vulnerability’, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, ZfM Online, Videography, June 12, 2023, http://zfmedienwissenschaft.de/en/online/videography-blog/manifesto-videographic-vulnerability.
Levinson, Jerrold. 2016. Aesthetic Pursuits: Essays in Philosophy of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press (specifically, chapter ‘Defending Hypothetical Intentionalism’, pp.146-162).
Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV. The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press.
O’Leary, Alan. 2021. ‘Workshop of Potential Scholarship’, NECSUS Spring #Solidarity, https://necsus-ejms.org/workshop-of-potential-scholarship-manifesto-for-a-parametric-videographic-criticism/.
The Video Essay Podcast 2024. ‘The Role of Writings on Video Essays’, Aug. 22, https://thevideoessay.com/on-writings-on-video-essays.
Miklós Kiss is an Associate Professor of Audiovisual Arts and Cognition at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research focuses on contemporary audiovisual media through intersecting narrative and cognitive approaches. He is co-author of the books Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video (with Thomas van den Berg, Scalar e-publication, 2016) and Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (with Steven Willemsen, Edinburgh UP, 2017), and co-editor of the volume Puzzling Stories: The Aesthetic Appeal of Cognitive Challenge in Film, Television and Literature (with Steven Willemsen, Berghahn, 2022).