05. Mai |  19:00   |  David Rodowick (Cambridge, Mass.)

»A Compass in a Moving World« On genres and genealogies of theory

Looking at the history of concepts of theory in general, and the history of film theory in particular, I will argue that theory has no stable or invariable sense in the present, nor can its meanings for us now be anchored in a unique origin in the near or distant past. If the currency of theory is to be revalued conceptually for the present, we need a history that attends critically to the competing sites and contexts of its provenance in the past, and which can evaluate the forces that shape its diverse and often contradictory conditions of emergence and its distributions as genres of discourse.