transcendence vs immanence

More important? Who knows.

Which do I prefer, and makes a stronger statement to me? Immanence.

I believe there is enough that is interesting about reality that there’s no need to sugar coat it.

@ Matt
A boy and his dog is a dystopia, something that has always been difficult for me to place. The thing about dystopia is that might also be transcendent, because it is proposing a true order that is only false in terms of society. (In that book Culture and Anarchy he makes a glowing reference to the Barbarians in that they were seen as true individuals to the Brits.)

other than what is dictated situationally.
And that might put it back in the mumblecore area.

The other thing here is I’m working the ‘about’ rather than the ‘how’, which might be the correct way to use the concepts as you suggested above. Mise-en-scène does get edited though…

“It seems, art taste/philosophical outlook, can be broken-down into these two camps: The transcendence camp would include formalists, a-politicals, and amorals, such as Baudelaire. Immanence camp would include art that makes a statement about society, culture, and history.
On the “Is Contemplative Cinema a Reaction to the Internet Age?” thread these assertions were made:
Immanence: something imperfect like tragedy, completely immersive, its goal something like primordial being.
Transcendence: is something perfect (romanticism, classicism) a lie obliterating suffering, death and instincts.

I think those descriptions could be refined, but they do give us a good basis to conceptualize the idea.

My question is whether transcendence is actually a lie or can people transcend in a materialistic sense? Is transcendence only an illusion?

Also, films that take either extreme should be mentioned. Should immanence films depict any kind of transcendence?
Think Avatar was an example of transcendence and A boy and his dog immanence without transcendence."

Peabody, this kind of masturbation is indecent forum behavior.

haha I knew you would come back as Rich Uncle Skeleto​n.

^ He’s imminent, not transcendent.

@Robert, No, I’ haven’t seen that. Is it more like Harmony Korinne’s Gummo?

“Well, you know, one way to counter that, I suppose, would be to say, hey, strictly speaking, we’re talking about essence, and in one sense, as a true materialist sense, you never really get to essence, so immanence would be as much of a “lie” as transcendence.”

Hence Baudrillard’s famous critic of pop art in the 60’s.

as he rightfully pointed out, immanence and transcendence are two sides of the same coin, so there is no ‘real’ difference in the work of romantics, or a guy like Pollack, compared to a pop photographer that is trying to capture the ‘spirit’ of everyday life.

at least from the point of ‘truth’ anyway, which obviously differs from trying to figure out the ‘truthfulness’ of various different modes of representation, but many of the famous pop artists were habouring under the delusion that they were capturing ‘reality’/truth, not its representation, and that’s who his point was addressed to.

Transcendence is like masturbation, indeed.

Immanence is more like making love to others.

I’m afraid I’m completely lost on this topic, it sounds interesting though…

Masturbation can be both immanent and transcendent.

Horray for aimless forum nastiness!

@ Alice
From my notes: This would be laughable if it didn’t depict and rationalize the misogynic adolescent male objectification fantasies so well.
I’m backing off it being immanent – not sure it qualifies as art.

@ Greg
This thread is for unstructured thinking-off.

“Horray for aimless forum nastiness!”

Transcend! Transcend!

Alice mentioned Gummo maybe that works better as immanent?

From my notes: This would be laughable if it didn’t depict and rationalize the misogynic adolescent male objectification fantasies so well.

Would you like to elaborate on that??

—

I take objection to your definition of Baudelaire as a poet favouring “transcendence” , I would say he was one of the first poets of immanence, only preceded by a few (known) philosophers and poets: Hölderlin, Kleist, Spinoza, early Goethe, the pre-socratics (Heraclitus), etc. I think it’s a simplification to say “transcendent art” = God, metaphysics and “immanent art” = people, realism, society, etc. The very concept of writing a book or making a film about society and how it should be in positive terms (of course “revolutionary fantasies” like those of Glauber Rocha are excluded) is completely transcendent (as it is, like society itself, a dualist project.)

But I prefer approaching this via film. And yes, one could say that the Bazinian focus on the “mise en scéne” is immanent, and the Eisensteinian focus on the process of editing the film is, by its nature, manipulating and transcendent. Why? Because while Bazin (and the most radical followers of “his philosophy”, namely the so-called “contemplative” filmmakers like Tarkovsky or Weerasethakul) have faith in the long take, its flow of time, its multiplicity and “becoming”, Eisenstein have only faith in the human manipulation of reality by juxtaposing the takes, by organizing the chaos of the film clips, because in his view there is nothing before editing. In Tarkovskys view everything worthy of attention is within the take. Tarkovsky himself said it very beautifully: that he’s not on a mission to create anything (religious or political), he is merely “searching” within the spectre of our perception:

For me personally Romanticism, or at least one of its important ingredients, seems something quite different (than searching for spirituality, ed.). Well, Dovzhenko once said very aptly that even in a muddy puddle he could see stars reflecting. This sort of image I can understand perfectly. But if someone said he could see the “starry hosts of heaven” and an angel flying around, it would be a sanitised, allegorical form, totally untrue, removed from life. But that’s the key, Dovzhenko could see it because he was a poet, life for him was much fuller, filled with spirituality, than for those who searched in reality around them merely an addition, a supplement to their own creative activities. For a romanticist life provides a mere reason to create

So for a transcendental filmmaker (religious or political), life is an abnormation, a mere fail that has to be justified by an external God, by a denial of life. Life only provides a reason to create, not to live. An immanent filmmaker destroys the dualism of subject and object, he denies both rationalism and perfection and reintegrates man into the undifferentiated immediacy of nature, make man a pure becoming. The problem with a film like Tree of Life is that its not “perceptual realism” but a romantic fantasy removed from life, a false perfection of life. Mekas’ films are the opposite: they’re the complete affirmation of and believe in human perception, in the flow of time, in the beauty of becoming. All of this is summed up in this quote of him: “I do not know where I am, and going to, where I am coming from. I have seen some beauty. Glimpses of beauty and happiness. Yes, la beauté. And it is still beautiful in my memory. And it is real, as real as this film.”

The same thing could be said about literature. While some novelists (like Rimbaud, Baudelaire (!), Trakl, Rilke) are finding the beauty of life within the sinful “dark night of the soul”, in the ecstasy of nature, in primordial being and in the constant state of becoming; others (the transcendent and dualistic ones) finds it nowhere in the phenomenal world of constant becoming and flowing. They find it, not in the “becoming” of the phenomenon, but in the “being” of the phenomenon and more precisely: the “eternity” of the phenomenon. Thus Nietzsches notion that transcendence/dualism is best represented by the plastic art forms, most profoundly sculpture, while the art of immanence being music, due to its overflowing, non-specific character and its dimension within time (like film). The transcendent piece of art is thus having a specific mission (religious or political), creating a perfect world of eternal being – the subconscious mind, the uncertaincy, the chaos and transience is drowned in the light of the Great Sun of rational cleanliness and perfect, eternal divinity.

^

Someone’s been reading their Deleuze. Now we’re getting somewhere. Couple things:

“The problem with a film like Tree of Life is that its not “perceptual realism” but a romantic fantasy removed from life, a false perfection of life.”

How does one go about proving the falsity of Tree of Life?

“Mekas’ films are the opposite: they’re the complete affirmation of and believe in human perception, in the flow of time, in the beauty of becoming”

Mekas: ” When I begin to work in the editing room, my method is elimination. I begin to eliminate until what’s left is just what I want it to be. Then I begin to change the order, or trim something here and there. Some people have said that I’m careless, random, anything goes. The truth is that what stays in – every frame – is approved by me. The seeming randomness of my filmmaking is actually very deceiving. Because what I film is very precisely determined, chosen by my memory and intuition. And in the editing room it all goes through the Procrustean bed of my editing method. In short: I control absolutely every frame of my film.”

What’s confusing me about the discussion is whether you are talking about the films in terms of what their themes and methods are or the experience of those films by the viewers. If the latter, then I would think the Bazinian evokes descriptions of transcendence in viewers much more than more Eisensteinian filmmaking will, not that I necessarily think that either immanence vs transcendence or Bazin vs Eisenstein are actual binary options for understanding.

@ Fellahe​en …definition of Baudelaire as a poet favouring “transcendence” , I would say he was one of the first poets of immanent.

As I said to Kim, I was only speaking of specifics of Baudelaire’s criticism, not his poetry.

I didn’t like the christian ideology of Tree of Life and the whole thing about the Male and Female principle. Also I thought it was (in its hatred of nature) a very dualist film. What really saved this was the fact that it was a film and thereby its effectfulness and ability to impress. Ideologically it was conservative, simplistic and completely out of touch with “tradition”, i mean this was like a poem written in 19. c. The concept of paradise in the end was, I think, touching, but also a lie.

Though it was beautifully filmed I would also have liked Malick to be more dwelling making some longer takes. Because some of the scenes were too short or serene to make the kind of magic mood the film tried so hard to create.

Actually I think Mekas is not the culmination of “perceptual realism” or “pure filmmaking”, that being Tarkovsky. But ideologically Mekas was closer to the kind of Nietzschean/Bergsonian outspring of subversive filmmaking, he was more aware of his time than Tarkovsky. He knew he was part of the situationist-movement, fluxus-movement, beat-generation, the 1968 revolts, all that – Tarkovsky didn’t really know that. Mekas was more aware of the “moment” and the importance of immediacy, but on the other hand not really a filmmaker. His films were in a way very literary.

See, that’s interesting because any good Christian theologian will tell you that Christian theology explicitly involves both immanence and transcendence. It’s simply a matter of emphasis.

“its hatred of nature”

I didn’t get that sense from the film at all.

How about this as a less metaphysics-orientated schema for getting at some of the same issues:

Don Norman (D.A. Norman, Things That Make Us Smart, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, MA, 1993) writes about two modes of interacting with artifacts which he call “experiential” and “reflective.”

Summary :

“In the experiential mode, information is perceived and acted upon with no apparent effort or delay. The reflective mode requires “mental effort to think of and contrast the various courses of action.” In experiential mode, objects and knowledge are ready-to-hand (i.e., invisible and taken for granted), while in the reflective mode the world becomes present-at-hand (available for inspection and reasoning).

Experiential artifacts allow us to interact with the world. They provide information that enables us to interpret a situation through our perceptions. The danger of experiential artifacts is that they don’t in themselves provide us with knowledge – instead they provide us with information that is tacitly interpreted. The usefulness of experiential artifacts is that they can trigger breakdowns that surface tacit understanding. When what we perceive is different from what we tacitly expect, a breakdown occurs, and the cause of this breakdown is brought to the surface where it can be interpreted and knowledge can be constructed.

Reflective artifacts are also interpreted, but they are more explicit in the knowledge they contain. The danger of reflective artifacts is that they leave things out (mostly things we don’t know how to represent, which is not the same as things of little importance . . . and thus the information we reason with might not reflect the world. This danger notwithstanding, reflective artifacts are the most precise and common means of communicating explicit ideas."

Liked the phrasing of this thought:
Artifacts provide a conceptual anchor for shared understandings. Shared knowledge is constructed when artifacts and shared understanding are coupled through cycles of representing and interpreting.