Thought Without a Thinking Subject; or, Karl Popper as Film-Philosopher

The most interesting, and problematic, claim made by (some) film-philosophy, for me, is the proposition that film thinks. This claim is interesting because it asserts that film has something philosophical to offer that philosophy itself lacks. It is problematic because we tend to think that where there is thinking, there must be a ‘someone’ doing that thinking. And whatever film is, it is not a ‘someone’. This paper brings Karl Popper’s model of objective knowledge – what he calls ‘knowledge in the absence of a knowing subject’ – to bear on the proposition that ‘film thinks’, in order to sketch out an account of film as a process of objective thinking distinct from that of philosophy or any other merely human mode of thought.