A Reply to Heath

Abstract

Whether, in fact, the hypothetical cabal of Cavell, Danto, and Carroll has been and continues to be more instrumental than Stephen Heath in the professionalization of contemporary cinema studies is a question I leave to informed readers to answer. Heath, at least, says he regards professionalism as reactionary and responds to the epistemological objections propounded in my Address to the Heathen' by whining that he will not sink to such rank professional preoccupations. It is part of a pernicious conspiracy, Heath would have us believe, to consider epistemology to be the formal inspection and evaluation of theories. Thus, maintaining what he fancies to be his political purity, Heath never addresses the core objections of AH: that suture theory is, strictly speaking, vacuous; that his deployment of psychoanalysis is not properly constrained by consideration of countervailing cognitive-psychological hypotheses; that his analyses of the various mechanics of subject positioning are based on equivocation; that his metaphors are uselessly obscure; that his notion of unity is illicit; that his concept of the cinematic apparatus defies the pragmatic requirements of theory building. Instead, Heath raises a smokescreen in order to disguise the fact that he is not dealing with issues raised in AH and wastes a great deal of time itemizing my alleged misrepresentations of QC. But surprisingly, nearly half of his complaints such as his attack of my quotation of Hegel (AH, p. 93)are extracted from side comments made in my footnotes which are peripheral to the central, still uncontested points made by AH. Perhaps we can explain Heath's footnote fetish by postulating that he takes literally the idea of weighing arguments and that he was unable otherwise to add bulk to the slim PN. When Heath finally mounts his three sustained counterattacks concerning perspective, illusion, and interminability in only one of these, the section