Conclusion: Toward a Transdisciplinary Critical Theory of Film

Abstract

The conclusion argues that film should be critically situated in the era of escalating crisis called the Anthropocene. Multiple commentaries now available on climate change and related environmental problems cry out for responses from across the arts and sciences to address the emerging human condition. Accordingly, a transdisciplinary and transcontextual critical theory is invoked to bring perspectives from the spectrum of knowledge into the service of human ecology and adaptation. For longer and broader philosophical perspectives, both classical Greek and Buddhist perspectives are recalled to provide a cross-cultural account of the problems of unity and variety, the one and the many, that underlie scientific models as well as artistic representations: the problems of knowledge, reality, and value for our time. The argument recalls the ideas of the prism and the Fibonacci spiral, discussed in Chap. 4, as guiding metaphors to comprehend the myriad ideas that must be brought into focus to negotiate the era. Finally, Lewis Carroll’s Alice at her famous game of croquet is imagined as a further metaphor for the dynamic complexity and artistry required to “play” the game of life in the biosphere—Gaia.

To shed light on this question [of why even many scientists failed to recognize and alert their fellow citizens about the peril of climate change], some scholars have pointed to the epistemic structure of Western science … which was organized both intellectually and institutionally around “disciplines.” This “reductionist” approach, sometimes accredited to the seventeenth-century French philosophe René Descartes … was believed to give intellectual power to investigations by focusing on singular elements of complex problems. Reductionism … made it difficult for scientists to articulate the threat posed by climate change, since many experts did not actually know very much about aspects of the problem beyond their expertise.

—Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway