The Examined Life

I've spent the last few months watching a truly obscene amount of political and philosophical documentaries in what is probably a subconscious attempt at avoiding 'real' preparation for my PhD. One of the things I've noticed is that the documentary scene in the UK, and particularly in the form of programmes featuring 'public' intellectuals and philosophers, would appear to be in rude health. This is particularly true with the BBC, which seems to be broadcasting a brilliant number of insightful documentaries that sit anywhere between conceptions of justice and the approaches of impressionist painters.

One of the more obvious manifestations of this is the increasing number of documentaries and programmes that consider various subjects under the more general label of 'popular science', an occurrence that to me seems stimulated by the public debate encouraged by the 'New Atheists' such as Dawkins and Hitchens. For me, these merely scratch the surface, much less manage to engage with the philosophical issues surrounding the basis of our moral systems in religious and scripturally based worldviews.

 Examined Life (full video link) is a 2008 film that takes on the form of a Walk-and-Talk in New York with various contemporary philosophical figures, including Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek and Peter Singer. I found the film fascinating in that it operates without a final end point or narrative conclusion, instead treating each 10 minute dialogue as inclusive of itself. There is, in fact, little debate present in the film, instead with each individual presenting, effectively, a 10 minute manifesto on their worldview and way of operating both inside and outside of the Ivory Tower.

While the film has it's downfalls (particularly in the lack of direct challenge to each conversant), the documentary format interests me greatly as, perhaps, the perfect way to promote critical thinking and audience reflection on specific issues. Furthermore, a more political and less abstract set of discussions could be made, in various similar settings around the UK, with regards to various critiques of capitalism and the global political order - a set of interviews with various academics, graduate students and activists to various appropriate soundtracks.

The inclusion of graduate students or other figures above isn't just to appeal to my own ego, but rather to demonstrate and put across the ideas, as opposed to the charismatic force of the person being interviewed. While, for instance, Zizek delivers often mesmerising performances in his interviews and documentaries (check out 'Living in the End Times' available on the same website as linked above), it is his ideas and worldview we should be engaging with, rather than his personality. The background aesthetic (e.g. New York above) can be seen as a way of focussing and contextualising the imagination of the viewer, as would the use of archive footage.

This film idea strikes me as pretty exciting, even if it just fulfils the function of allowing myself, or a group, to interrogate various intellectuals in a way we are unable to purely through journal articles or books. Time to start planning, I think.