我决定贴一下我反喷Bordwell黑子的小短文 贴出来跟大家伙一起心情舒爽一下

Response to Ray, Robert. "Bordwell Regime and the Stakes of Knowledge." How a Film Theory Got Lost, and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2001. 29-63.
原文戳这里：链接: https://pan.baidu.com/s/1kV56H87 密码: z4qa
Foucault once insisted that
the essential political problem for the intellectual is not to criticize the ideological contents supposedly linked to science, or to ensure that his own scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology, but to ascertain the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth. The problem is not changing people’s consciousness—or what’s in their heads—but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth. (qtd. in Ray 45)
I want to start with this quotation from Foucault in Ray’s essay. Foucault’s argument spurs the emergence of an entire generation’s counter-establishment revolution, and the academic world is obviously inescapable. Critical and sometimes insightfully challenging as they are as revolutionaries, many so-called post-structuralists backfire in producing their own theories and contributing to general knowledge of humankind. One cannot imagine what it would be if the natural scientific world took up such a doctrine. If authority means something that must be revoked and countered, who’s to be responsible for the accuracy of machines that run our everyday life, who’s to blame for when a nuclear plant’s explosion kills thousands of human being, or, it could be worse, no technological development would be possible in the first place. Certainly, this is not what Foucault means. One can disagree about the result when adding number one to another, but so long as we have to rely on these basic intersubjective objectivity to live, we have to come to recognize the fundamental facticity of the world. The pursuit of truth or true knowledge is never about finding certain sets of truth-propositions that we can jot down in our notebooks or look up in dictionaries, but rather the act of pursuit per se gives the possibility of communication, of production, and in the long run, of the liberation of all mankind. The pursuit of knowledge can only be founded on the intersubjectively perceivable and verifiable facticity of the world; otherwise, a subjective illusion can overtake the reason and swallow the entire civilization once and for all. What Foucault warns us is a necessary critical distance we had better maintain to be fully aware of the monkey business that is undergoing in most of our truth-claiming projects. The evil mechanism that operates the modern and especially capitalist society manipulates the discourse of truth and hence renders quite some truth-related projects problematic. Ray suggests that Bordwell is committing such a crime and is “curiously blind to [his] own unquestioning participation in our culture’s hegemonic arrangements between truth and power” (45). The Bordwell’s quotation in Ray’s very essay seems to point to the opposite conclusion.
“I am not denying the need for a theory of cinema to ground itself explicitly in a wider conceptual domain. But the analysis of any form of intellectual inquiry must distinguish among three different things: the enabling presuppositions; the logical structure of the theory; and the method whereby the theory is constructed, tested, and criticized. The expansionism of recent theory is partly traceable to the attempt to insert every conceivable presupposition into the theory.” (qtd. in Ray 43)
While his proposal that film theories should take “more smallscale theorizing” might carry some didactic tone, what Bordwell did is usually quite “modest” work—to use his own word (Bordwell, “Lowering” 18)—looking into details of the structure of a narrative film (typical in his early works on individual directors), observing and coming to a general story logic behind certain group of films he studied (typical in his studies on classical Hollywood cinema), and analyzing specific film texts in relation to its intertexts in film history (typical of his studies in Narration in Fiction Film, Poetics of Cinema, and numerous essays published on his internet blog). If the lack of ideological critique can live up to Ray’s accusation, Bordwellian paradigm is at worst an incomplete approach to study film. But how he becomes some demonic power that endangers the future of film studies will remain something only Ray himself knows. For the most part of the essay, Ray is not talking about Bordwell, but rather criticizing the positivist framework Auguste Comte proposed centuries ago. He tries very hard to convince the readers that Bordwell is nothing but a living Comte who attempts to take control of the film studies discipline by establishing his own methods as the standard paradigm, although there is not even one quote from Bordwell he can provide to support such an accusation.
If we read Ray in a symptomatic way, it might be fruitful for us to figure out what exactly is the case with his essay. What Ray feels obnoxious about is not Bordwell’s theory, but de facto the rise of Bordwell as a certain establishment of authority within the film studies discipline. As we see in a passing remark bringing Bordwell together with Dudley Andrew, Ray calls them “two caporegimes”, which means two Mafia gang leaders for your information, and adds that “[t]hese men attained their stature in the obvious ways: prolific, high-quality publication; active leadership within the discipline’s main organization; skillful teaching; and regular attendance at conferences” (40). If these commonsensical academic achievements, according to the context in Ray’s argument, means more of an oppressive discursive power than a laudable and respectful contribution to the academic enterprise of humankind, what then makes Ray’s own suggestion to take up post-structuralism as the one attitude toward research more persuasive or valid? Ray proposes to yield our research initiative to words and focus the studies on inventing more fanciful terminology instead of seeking after knowledge (51-2). He complains about Bordwell and Thompson for being ungrateful to Noël Burch the one whom they criticized for his inaccuracy. Suppose he said this to a natural scientist, a conversation between Ray and Einstein would go like this: “Albert, you are such an ungrateful kid! Sir Issac Newton is the one who provides the possibility for your work; you even dared to challenge him! I feel ashamed.” Ray’s suggestion that we should be more open to inaccuracy and even errors sounds typical of 1960s mysticism, while his endorsement that more concepts are needed will further confound the future generations of academics, pushing it further up into its ivory tower. Possibly, what initiates Ray to write this essay could probably be his jealousy as well as his narrow-mindedness that cannot stand a fact-based, evidence-testable methodology to enhance the discipline of film studies. Noting that Ray has also written a book on Hollywoods cinema (A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980) but raised no attention at all, it does somehow reveal the cruelty of academia. Despite his mask of being modest and mild, his accusation is ungrounded and most of his attacks fall on a straw-man he creates after the model of Comte.