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Terminator: Salvation, on the other hand, takes place firmly after the apocalypse, and was released in 2009, when, indeed, the neoliberal apocalypse had already happened. It isn’t exactly a perfect film, with its focus on explosions taking up time that could have been put to better use telling us, really, anything about the main characters, but it’s a lot better than Terminator 3. It’s temporal location may explain why, except for the last 20 minutes or so, Terminator 3 doesn’t have any of the resonance of the other films: it’s set before the apocalypse, but released in 2003, at which point I don’t think anyone thought apocalypse was avoidable; the film is, really, just marking time.

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(A digression inspired by watching Zombieland the other day. What I like about the film is its presentation of the post-apocalypse as amusement arcade; apparently, you only need to walk a hundred yards to find a Hummer full of weapons, or Bill Murray’s house full of food and fine wine. Obviously in one sense this is ridiculous; if there’s no-one working at the power plant, it will take more than flipping a couple of switches to get the theme park rides back up and running. But there’s also something right about this; our apocalypse isn’t an apocalypse of scarcity, but one that leaves us scavenging in the wreckage of superabundance. I also like the way no-one in the film uses their real names, as if the apocalypse has wiped away bourgeois subjectivity.)

The post-apocalypse of Terminator: Salvation is a more conventional in its portrayal of economic and environmental ruin, but what strikes me as interesting is the role that industry still plays in it. You might expect the world produced by a murderous artificial intelligence to be more immaterial but, in a partial reversal of the first film, in Terminator: Salvation, industry is now firmly on the side of the machines. The choice to locate Skynet central in the Bay Area is clever; what is, in our world, the home of post-industrial Web 2.0, becomes, in the film, the real of post-Fordist capitalism, the nightmare factories of China and other free trade zones. And we see that, like neoliberalism, Skynet still has a use for human beings, even if only as bare life to be fed into its machinic labs. But Skynet is presented as so material in the film that it seems to have neglected its immaterial dimension; surely an omnipotent AI would not have a security system that is as easy to hack as John Connor finds Skynet’s to be? The film is perhaps still caught up in the liberatory fantasies of the late neoliberal period, in which the internet was imagined as uncomplicatedly a site of freedom.

The end of the film perhaps complicates this, as John Connor is saved by the robot that does not know it is a robot. I had thought, and hoped, at one point that they were going to go further with this blurring of the human-machine boundary: would it not have been a better ending if the actual John Connor had died in the attempt to free the prisoners from Skynet, but the humanoid robot had decided to continue Connor’s work by taking on his name, with the result that the “John Connor” who started the whole series by sending Kyle Rees back in time to save Sarah Connor, would have been himself a Terminator?

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2. No hope for the future Some Marxists have seen the current financial crisis as a vindication of catastrophism, as proof that capitalism will be brought down by its own crisis tendencies. But as faithful to the line points out: Years were spent refining an analysis of capitalism that, in the broad, stressed the improbability of...
3. For a new economism I was reading Brown’s Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy last week in order to teach it, and it occurred to me while doing so that many of my students were born not long before Clinton was elected; in other words, they have lived their entire lives in a...

Everyday objects become absurdly aggressive robots (video)

I take it that Michael Bay has some kind of unconscious awareness of the intuition behind Evan Calder Williams’s Hostile Object Theory. Williams argues that objects under capitalism “are the material organisation of all the toil, struggle, and negative affect that went into them, that thwarted, pissed-off agency, a clenched fist that keeps pulling punches and punching clocks,” and they hate us because of it. The second Transformers film, Revenge of the Fallen really doubles down on the hostility of objects, but goes beyond Williams, primarily in terms of creepiness, but also theoretically, by sexualizing the hostility of objects.

Creepy, sexualized robots (video)

A remarkable proportion of the runtime of Revenge of the Fallen is made up of this kind of body horror, showcasing Shia LaBeouf’s horror as feminized robots attempt to insert parts of their metallic anatomy into him. The robot as hostile object becomes, for Bay, a simultaneously horrifying and arousing object (and horrifying because it is arousing, and perhaps also vice versa).

There is, of course, another sexualized object in the Transformers films: Megan Fox. As LaBeouf puts it, “some people think [Michael Bay] is a very lascivious filmmaker, the way he films women,” although LaBeouf disagrees, saying that “the one thing Mike lacks is tact. There’s no time for  ‘I would like you to just arch your back 70 degrees’” (I guess specifying the precise angle at which you want an actor to arch her back doesn’t count as lascivious; to her credit, Fox responded by calling Bay “Hitler,” and getting herself fired). The films then provide an interesting mirror image: women sexualized by objectification, and objects sexualized by feminization. I think the hostility of objects is the truth underlying this mirror image. The way Bay objectifies women is, as LaBeouf’s attempted defense shows, about control, and underlying this desire for control is a fear of an assumed hostility about to break free of control. The hostile robots in Transformers, that is, are the return of the repressed of the portrayal of women in the films.

What Williams’s Hostile Object Theory emphasizes is how the hostility of objects results from the place of the commodity in capitalism; applying this to the particularly gendered objects in Transformers reminds us of the way in which the commodity is gendered. Dumb but treacherous, commodities have something in common with misogynist depictions of women reaching back to Rousseau’s Sophie (we can also see the feminization of the commodity in the connection that is often made between femininity and consumerism, so ably criticized by Ellen Willis back in 1969). This should, I think, encourage us to be careful about construing our opposition to capitalism in terms of a proletariat which is defined by its subjectivity. My worry is that, as the category of subjectivity has a long association with masculinity, emphasizing the subjectivity of the proletariat risks repeating a pattern of gendered subject/object hostility.

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1. Com­modity fetishism and object lib­er­a­tion On of the criticisms of object-oriented ontology which has some currency is the suggestion that it is a form of, or a philosophized alibi for, commodity fetishism. And this has a superficial plausibility; doesn’t the focus on objects enact the kind of reification that Marx criticizes. I don’t think this...
2. The pathos of com­modi­ties I think Lenin underestimates the genuine pathos of the Toy Story films in his review, which reinforces (and is reinforced by) his pedagogical theory of ideology, which tends to emphasize the power of cultural products to impart ideology, thereby underemphasizing why audiences accept and inhabit this ideology. To describe the...
3. Ap­pear­ances are es­sen­tial We have all reason to rejoice that the things which environ us are appearances and not steadfast and independent existences; since in that case we should soon perish of hunger, both bodily and mental. (Hegel) If aesthetics is first philosophy, perhaps we should replace the question “why is there something...

These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. (The Communist Manifesto)

Britney’s Femme Fatale is excellent, and unexpectedly so. It’s produced by Dr Luke, surely one of the most overexposed producers today, but, while it certainly uses plenty of Dr Luke’s current favorite tropes, it’s different in interesting ways from, as well as being much better than, the rest of his current product. Evidence of Dr Luke’s versatility? Or of Britney’s godlike genius, her mysterious ability to bring out the best in her collaborators, even when she doesn’t appear to have any obvious input through the rockist-approved methods of songwriting or production?

Dr Luke’s ubiquity gives us plenty of other material against which to compare Femme Fatale, and so to isolate its particular genius. The two best points of comparison are Katy Perry and Ke$ha, Dr Luke’s other two flagship artists. They all share Dr Luke’s thudding, monotonous beats, but the meaning of this monotony becomes different in each case. Ke$ha deals with this by adopting a vocal style (and writing lyrics to emphasize it) that lurches drunkenly around the beat, skipping ahead of it then getting confused and dropping behind. This is why Ke$ha’s songs always have an air of desperation, a sense that partying might be an escape but is also something remorseless to be escaped from.

Katy Perry has none of this ambivalence, throwing herself with gusto into Dr Luke’s sledgehammer beats. As with Ke$ha, Perry’s songs work on a relationship between the beats and the voice, but where Ke$ha builds up a tension between the two, Perry’s voice reinforces, indeed endorses the beats (a point well made by the “official lyrics video” for “Teenage Dream”). What gives Perry the authority to give this kind of imprimatur to the beats is the organic humanity of her voice, as set against the mechanical repetitiveness of the beats. The naturalness and authenticity of Perry’s voice is always foregrounded (unlike Ke$ha, her voice is almost never processed in a way that draws attention to the artificiality). Her voice thus naturalizes the authoritarian dimension of the rhythm, re-iterating their command as a kind of natural, bodily discipline. It is in this way that Katy Perry’s music is fascist; an aesthetic of fascism it shares with the films of Leni Riefenstahl.

Žižek rejects the idea that “the mass choreography of disciplined movements of thousands of bodies: parades, mass performances in stadia, etc.” in Riefenstahl is fascist in itself, because “such mass performances are not inherently fascist; they are not even ‘neutral,’ waiting to be appropriated by left or right. It was Nazism that stole them and appropriated them from the workers’ movement, their original site of birth.” But Žižek misses the point that there are fascist and non-fascist forms of bodily discipline, and Riefenstahl’s is indeed fascist. We can see the distinction  by comparing Triumph of the Will with Man with a Movie Camera.

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The discipline in Triumph of the Will glorifies the body as organic, making the body part of an ordered whole in which, as in an organism, the parts are given their purposes by their relation to the purposes of the whole: the army marches in a single direction, at the command of a single voice. Fascist discipline instrumentalizes the body. Man with a Movie Camera also involves mass coordinated movement of bodies, but in a rather different context.

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In this scene, where would-be swimmers coordinate their movements as they learn to swim, discipline isn’t directed towards any larger purpose, indeed, it is an element of play, the opposite of purposiveness. This, indeed, is what’s most startling and liberating about Man with a Movie Camera: it is a hymn to the modern industrial city and worker which rejects productivism throughout. Vertov makes this point most specifically through an image that is repeated, with modification, throughout the film, a spinning wheel which occurs as  cogs, as part of the mechanism of a textile factory, and as a merry-go-round.

With this image, Vertov associates the circular, non-directed character of machinery with the non-teleological nature of play. The productivist associations of factory machinery make this seem odd, but it probably shouldn’t; machinery is, after all, automatic, functioning as it does without any direction of its own. Vertov is here dramatizing what we Derrida calls the commodity’s “automatic autonomy,” and suggesting this as an image of purposelessness which technology under socialist control would make available to humanity. Thus the great difference between socialist organization of the body and fascist organization of the body: to put it schematically, socialism rebuilds the body as part of the machine and thereby frees it for purposeless leisure, while fascism builds the machine into a great body and subordinates us all to that body.

Which brings us to Britney. Rather than setting up a a division between mechanical beats and organic voice, Femme Fatale integrates the two by taking up Britney’s voice and making it part of the machine. As the Rolling Stone review point out, “on nearly every track, Britney’s voice is twisted, shredded, processed, roboticized,” to a fairly remarkable extent. Perhaps the most obvious example of this distortion is the duet between Britney and her autotuned double in the genuinely strange “How I Roll,” or the spoken breakdown in “(Drop Dead) Beautiful” (which I’ve excerpted here as it’s otherwise one of the less interesting tracks on the album), which out-Ke$has Ke$ha. But drawing attention to the distortion draws attention back to the organicism of the undistorted voice;  I think the vocal production works best slightly more subtly in “Inside Out,” one of the best tracks on the album, in which Britney’s voice fades in and out of distortion, and in and out of the backing track, getting lost among both the thudding beats and the bleeping and twinkling synths (which are reminiscent of both Britney’s earlier “Piece of Me” and Sky Ferreira’s “One”).

I think Alex Macpherson said something on Twitter about the way “Hold it Against Me” plays its dubstep bass off against the pop sweetness of its superstructure, and that’s something that occurs throughout the album. At the same time as Britney’s voice is drawn into the artifice of the production, the monotony and remorselessness of the beats is transcended and freed, becoming the artificial autonomy of the machine, producing musically a similar effect to the one Vertov produces cinematically. On Femme Fatale, Britney becomes “a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and … consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market,” and suggests a possible way out through this commodification.

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2. Pro­to­cols of the elders of Zeta Reti­culi Some of the things that made ABC’s new show V terrible can doubtless be attributed to the constraints of making a pilot: the rushed pace, the thin characterization, the complete lack of any visual design sense, perhaps even the terrible dialogue. But the main problem is the show’s politics, which...
3. Britney, or, The New Heloïse For my part, I am convinced that it would be as easy to change a blonde into a brunette as a fool into a man of genius. — Rousseau In other Britney news, nice to see the Daily Mail targetting her for a bit of health-as-discipline propaganda....

The film concerns a Montreal teenager, Leon Bronstein, who, discovering that he has the same name as Trotsky, comes to the conclusion that he is the reincarnation of Trotsky, which he interprets as meaning that his life will follow Trotsky’s in quite some detail. What’s interesting is how the film shows Leon responding to this destiny: he takes it as an opportunity to throw himself into the role of Trotsky completely, even though, as we see at the beginning of the film, he believes this means he will eventually be assassinated and, as we see at the end of the film, he believes the relationship to which he is at that point completely committed (as a result of fortuitously meeting an older woman with the same name as Trotsky’s first wife) will inevitably end fairly soon.

I was hoping this would be taken as a springboard for a discussion of the role of determinism within Marxism, particularly as this is a particular point of tension within Bolshevik theory. It would have been great if the film had ended with Leon discovering that, as his own historical moment is different from Trotsky’s, his life, even as a reincarnation of Trotsky’s, would necessarily be different, that is, with him discovering that the theory of permanent revolution applied to his own life. Still, the way Leon responds to determinism with activity rather than fatalism is a genuinely charming feature of the character, and I think is part of what makes the performance, which could easily be caricature, quite sympathetic.

The other interesting theme that pops up in a few points in the film is Leon’s defense of boredom.

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Wondering whether his fellow students are bored or apathetic, Leon concludes that they are bored, and that this is a good thing: where apathy is a withdrawal from engagement, boredom is engagement in its potential rather than actual state. Here he seems to be channeling not Trotsky but Benjamin:

We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the expression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold to great deeds.—Now, it would be important to know: What is the dialectical antithesis to boredom? (Arcades, D2,7)

Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We are at home then in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks bored and gray within his sheath. And when he later wakes and wants to tell of what he dreamed, he communicates by and large only this boredom. For who would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of time to the outside? Yet to narrate dreams signifies nothing else. And in no other way can we deal with the arcades—structures in which we relive, as in a dream, the life of our parents and grandparents, as the embryo in the womb relives the life of animals. Existence in these spaces flows then without accent, like the events in dreams. Flânerie is the rhythmics of this slumber. In 1839, a rage for tortoises overcame Paris.  One can well imagine the the elegant set mimicking the pace of this creature more easily in the arcades than on the boulevards. (Arcades, D2a,1)

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2. Zombies of Marx Derrida’s Spectres of Marx is a frustrating book. For someone capable of such careful readings, Derrida’s references to Marx are remarkably sloppy, and, as with a lot of his later work, the obsessively spiraling style appears hollow rather than beguiling (it’s not as bad as The Politics of Friendship, but...
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This inserts us in a future world in which the apocalypse somehow took place in the 50s, or at least, in the aesthetic of the 1950s, as we see in the decaying Googie architecture and atomic-age trash that clutter the landscape in both. This strikes me as an interesting limit-case of the way our image of the future is still tied to the way in which the the future was imagined in the 50s (the “where’s my jetpack” problem). We’re so incapable of imagining a new future, we can’t even imagine the end of the world without borrowing from the past. This especially a problem for Wall-E; in Fallout, the apocalypse is a nuclear holocaust arising from war with China, that is, it is an apocalypse on a 1950s model. But the environmental disaster in Wall-E is much more modern; that even this has to be imagined via the 50s suggests some fairly significant limitations to our historical imagination.

The out-of-place 50s aesthetic also reveals something interesting about the way in which Wall-E understands environmental catastrophe, which becomes apparent when the action in the second half of the film moves from the Googie-detritus-cluttered Earth to the luxurious spaceship. As Wall-E zoomed into the neon-lit interior of the spaceship, I thought we had moved to Shanghai. The film’s model for the decadent future, that is, the quintessential postmodern, postfordist city, which is contrasted with the stilled machinery and modernist skyscrapers of the first half of the film. What this seems to set up is a strange vision of Fordism as a kind of virtuous Eden; Wall-E is the Fordist worker, engaged in proper work, before the fall caused by the introduction of a consumer society, and this is reinforced by the human return to Earth, and to manual labor, at the end of the film. This doesn’t make much sense as an analysis of Fordism: a social system of mass consumption is what makes the economics of Fordism possible; the incoherence is reinforced by the aesthetics, because Googie is not a dour and industrial style, but a consumerist one.

Indeed, what seems to really exercise the film is not so much consumerism or environmental destruction, but virtualization or immateriality. This is clearest in the way the fat humans in space are surrounded by their screens, using videophones to communicate even with people next to them, with one human being liberated by Wall-E’s interruption, forcing her to turn off her screen and confront the unmediated world (and, later, another human) apparently for the first time (leading to a weird moment where she gazes in wonder at the beauty of the neon billboards, which she’s never previously seen; if the humans are all embedded in their virtual world, to whom are the billboards directed?). More subtly, it seems to me this horror of the immaterial is embedded in the consumption we see in the second half of the film. While the humans are fat and consume both ravenously and lazily, the film doesn’t seem to be so concerned by the fact that, say, what they are drinking is full of sugar, as that it comes in a giant, Buy-and-Large branded, cup. It’s not the consumption of things which is the problematic part of consumerism, in other words, but the consumption of symbols.

This also explains another puzzling feature of the film: the valorization, in a film supposedly worried above all about waste and useless trash, of Wall-E’s collection of the discarded ephemera he finds among the trash-heaps of Earth. Why are these objects worthy of respect and preservation, rather than being further examples of where consumer society has gone wrong? I think the answer is that they genuinely are objects, divorced from the symbolic context of branding and immaterial capitalism: even though they may be mass produced, they do not share the kind of  symbolic production that produces commodities as branded commodities. Writing back when the film came out, k-punk described Wall-E as a “bricoleur-hauntologist, reconstructing human culture from a heap of fragments.” It is the disconnection of objects from meanings which makes reconstruction both possible and necessary, and it also raises the possibility that the culture reconstructed might be different from the original construction (I’m reminded of Joseph Cornell’s collages). This suggests a more positive political program than the Fordist nostalgia and moralizing anti-consumerism that make up the most obvious message of the film. Can we ourselves, without waiting for the ecological apocalypse (or, even in the shadow it casts from the future) undertake this kind of bricolage, and liberate commodities from their commodification, assigning them new meanings and new uses?

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2. The pathos of com­modi­ties I think Lenin underestimates the genuine pathos of the Toy Story films in his review, which reinforces (and is reinforced by) his pedagogical theory of ideology, which tends to emphasize the power of cultural products to impart ideology, thereby underemphasizing why audiences accept and inhabit this ideology. To describe the...
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We see early on in the film that Bella is uncomfortable in her body; she’s clumsy and, she repeatedly insists, she can’t dance. And throughout the film, Bella’s inarticulateness, verging on aphasia, is remarkable; she only completes a handful of sentences (indeed, I think, only a handful of coherent phrases) in the whole film. If the human being is an animal having speech, Bella is excluded from humanity, neither (embodied) animal nor speaking being. But while the film is showing us this exclusion, it is also positioning Bella as the human between two poles of inhumanity, Jacob and Edward. The way in which Jacob, the werewolf, represents animalistic embodiment is fairly clear, while for the vampire Edward his incredible strength and speed mean that the world presents no physical barriers, while his ability to read minds means that there are no communicative barriers either; Edward is disembodied, immersed in the communicability of language without remainder (I think Benladen’s theses on TI, disembodiment and capitalism might be relevant here).

For Edward, this complete at-homeness in the world makes him a monster, and the make-up and direction do indeed do a good job of rendering Robert Pattinson, pallid and looming, monstrous. This is incomprehensible to Bella,who sees in this “monstrosity” the end of her disconnection from her own humanity.

(The title of, and the inspiration for, this post comes from X-Ray Spex’s “I Can’t Do Anything”).

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3. The pathos of com­modi­ties I think Lenin underestimates the genuine pathos of the Toy Story films in his review, which reinforces (and is reinforced by) his pedagogical theory of ideology, which tends to emphasize the power of cultural products to impart ideology, thereby underemphasizing why audiences accept and inhabit this ideology. To describe the...

I think the Toy Story films (at least, the first two—I haven’t seen the new one) are actually kind of interesting in registering some ambivalences about commodification. A large part of the second film revolves around the theft of Woody by a toy collector, who keeps his toys on display shelves, or, preferably, untouched in the original packaging. From the point-of-view of the film, of course, this is what makes the collector a villain, as he keeps the toys away from their proper role in the lives of children. One could read this as advocating  a certain sort of socialism, in which the evil of capitalism is that it privileges exchange value, where socialism would  only be concerned with use value.

What this misses is Marx’s point that use value and exchange value are two sides of a dialectic, both of which are implicated in commodity fetishism; we can’t simply extract the one we like and discard the other. Toy Story 2 is actually quite a nice example to use to illustrate this. Although the toy collector runs a toy shop, the toys he collects are not offered for sale, but are arranged solely for display. Commodities are usually transparent—we buy them because we need, or want, them, and then we consume them, and the nexus that connects exchange and use, the commodity form, disappears in these two moments. It is only when the toys are in their display cases and original packaging, suspended between exchange and consumption, that the commodity becomes visible as such. I’m reminded of Benjamin:

The world exhibitions were training schools in which the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value. “Look at everything; touch nothing.” (Arcades, G16,6)

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“Surely there’s so much going on—”

“That it’s deeply boring. An excess of boringness does not make something interesting except in the driest academic sense.” (Iain M. Banks, “The State of the Art”)

It’s clear that the primary problem, both aesthetic and political, with contemporary pornography, is how boring it is. The particular boringness of porn encapsulates a specific vision of the world and of humanity, which is not at all attractive. It’s common to look on pornography with a certain knowing indulgence, laughing at the hackneyed scripts and shoddy acting. This is a mistake: pornography is a massively wealthy industry, and surely if there were any demand for it, money could easily be found for competent writers and acting lessons. No, the “bad” writing and acting in pornography are intentional, part of what makes porn “work” in the way it does.

Defenders of pornography sometimes argue that we should not be concerned by it because it is mere harmless fantasy, while critics respond that pornography and its effects are all too real. Both of these positions get it slightly wrong, because they miss the point that the fantasy that sustains pornography is the fantasy that it is real. This is why pornography rejects basic cinematic competence: a little bit of play-acting is OK at first, but when the sex starts, the costumes come off and the props and performances, anything that might suggest that this is pretend, are dropped. Pornography puts forward two interlinked claims: this is really sex, and sex is really Real. Any suggestion that sex might be linked to human concerns of imagination, language, or politics, is rigorously supressed.

There is a growing “alternative” porn scene, which one might hope would provide an alternative to this grimly realist logic, but unfortunately the alternative appears to be merely one of decoration rather than underlying aesthetic practice. The Doll Underground seems like it would be a good candidate for a more interesting view of sex, with its references to the Weather Underground and advertising through a series of ambiguously rebellious communiques (note that that page includes automatically starting—but non-pornographic—video). Despite the claim in Violet Blue’s enthusiastic review that the film “feels like anti-porn,” the film seems to mostly be conventionally attractive people having conventionally athletic porn sex, although the costumes are goth-loli and the props are sticks of dynamite.

There’s one exception: the first scene in the film, in which two women have rather disaffected and not obviously terribly satisfactory sex on a train, does something almost unimaginable from the point of view of pornography: it repeatedly interrupts the sex to show the landscape through which the train is traveling.

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3. “So I got to make the song cry” I had no desire to see Mamma Mia! which in a way is odd as I like both Abba and musicals. But a friend prevailed on me to see it last week, and it turns out my initial instincts were correct; it’s not a very good film. Indeed, being a...

Why insist, against all hope, on the communist idea? Is such insistence not an exemplary case of the narcissism of the lost cause? And does such narcissism not underlie the predominant attitude of academic Leftists who expect a theoretician to tell them what to do?—they desperately want to commit themselves, but not knowing how to do so effectively, they await the answer from a theoretician. Such an attitude is, of course, in itself false, as if a theory will provide the magic formula, capable of resolving the practical deadlock (Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, 88).

There were a number of excellent papers at the Waiting for the Political Moment conference in Rotterdam last month, among which were keynotes from Benjamin Noys (which he’s put on line) and Jodi Dean (some of the key arguments of which are in this blog post). These two papers are interestingly read together, I think. Jodi argues that our concern about complexity and the difficulty of knowing enough functions as a kind of theoretical alibi for political inactivity:

The recourse to complexity is a move that says there is always more that needs to be known as well as unknown unknowns and unintended consequences of whatever it is that we end up doing. Such a move says, wait, stop, do you know what you are doing?

Benjamin, meanwhile, criticizes the tendency among political theorists to call for a (return to) concrete politics, a call often made by denigrating the abstraction of theory. Now, these two criticisms of contemporary political thought might seem to be in opposition to one another: Jodi calling for just the kind of concrete politics Benjamin considers inadequate, while Benjamin invokes, in the form of abstraction, the complexity Jodi is suspicious of. I don’t think that’s the case, though; in fact, the turn to the concrete and the retreat into complexity are two aspects of the same process.

As luck would have it, on the flight over to Rotterdam, I saw a film which helps clarify the connection between these two perspectives. Roman Polanski’s The Ghost is quite entertaining and extremely stupid (as befits something based on a book by Robert Harris—I’m not sure it’s either as stupid or as entertaining as Archangel, though). The most interesting thing in the film, though, was the particular way in which the moment of revelation was delayed. At one point, the ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) follows the GPS directions left in his predecessor’s car, ending up at the house of an academic who knew the prime minister (for whom McGregor and the previous ghostwriter were ghostwriting). The revelation, however, does not come through discussion with the academic, who, simultaneously avuncular and guarded, skillfully answers all the ghostwriter’s questions without revealing anything. The revelation occurs just a little bit later, when the ghostwriter types the academic’s name, along with “CIA,” into Google (there’s actually a further, even more hilarious, twist, which involves Ewan MacGregor solving an acrostic in the back room of a bookshop). A montage of link-clicking follows, in which the secrets of the film are laid bare.

This is the fantasy that links together the embrace of complexity and the rejection of abstraction. First of all, the call for concrete politics is always a philosophical or political-theoretical call, and, as a call, it is always at least one step removed from the concrete politics it desires (or purports to desire). Furthermore, what is supposed to allow us to take that step is one last theoretical effort, and it is this idea of the final resolution of theory through one last effort which underlies our relation to complexity: the idea is that we cannot act yet, but if we could finally master complexity, we would, at last, be able to act. As Jodi puts it in Publicity’s Secret:

A key technocultural fantasy is that “the truth is out there.” Such a fantasy informs desires to click, link, search and surf cyberia’s networks. We fantasize that we’ll find the truth, even when we know that we won’t, that any specific truth or answer is only a momentary fragment. Still, the fantasy keeps us looking. (8)

The fantasy, that is, is the one that Žižek criticizes, of a theory that would unravel complexity in such a way that it would immediately resolve itself into action, without us having to ever deal practically with this complexity (to choose, to act, to take a risk). This is also the kind of theory that Benjamin resists; the theory he proposes, a theory which attempts to understand abstraction rather than calling for the concrete, for all that it might assist us in deciding how to act, would not provide the alibi for action (or inaction) that, as Žižek says, is all to often what leftist academics look to theory to provide.

Related posts:

1. Adapting a Woody Allen joke So, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault are in some kind of critical theory afterlife. They get talking, and at some point Foucault asks Benjamin, “Do you think sex is boring?” Benjamin grins and nods, and says, “Yes, if you do it right.”...
2. You can’t solve a problem with a ter­mi­no­log­ical dis­tinc­tion I’ve long been suspicious of anyone who attempts to give some kind of theoretical significance to a supposed distinction between “politics” and “the political.” Partly this is just linguistic; if you use “politics” as a noun you’re going want to use its adjectival form, “political,” at some point, and pretending...
3. Recipes for the delica­tes­sens of the future Discussions of the recent communist conference have me thinking about the relationship between theory and practice, again. Conveniently, I was reading Poulantzas today on the role of theories of the state in revolutionary action: They can never be anything other than applied theoretical-strategic notions, serving, to be sure, as guide...

This is not to deny, of course, that there is a great deal of evidence in the film that suggests that Deckard is a replicant. But what blurs the distinction between human and android is the film’s refusal to confirm what it constantly implies about Deckard, which is the best illustration of Žižek’s point that “the difference which makes me ‘human’ and not a replicant is to be discerned nowhere in ‘reality’” (40). One could even defend the original ending in these terms (which Žižek calls an “imbecile happy-ending”); even if Deckard and Rachel did escape to live a complete life together, it would never be long enough to prove them human.

Related posts:

1. Up to the minute film crit­i­cism The Terminator (1984) and Terminator: Salvation (2009) make great bookends to neoliberalism. Terminator is about the rise of neoliberalism: a woman is hunted down by a representative of the future, a future manifest in a machine hidden within human flesh. This future seems unstoppable until, in the final scenes the fleshly machine is...
2. The pathos of com­modi­ties I think Lenin underestimates the genuine pathos of the Toy Story films in his review, which reinforces (and is reinforced by) his pedagogical theory of ideology, which tends to emphasize the power of cultural products to impart ideology, thereby underemphasizing why audiences accept and inhabit this ideology. To describe the...
3. You can’t solve a problem with a ter­mi­no­log­ical dis­tinc­tion I’ve long been suspicious of anyone who attempts to give some kind of theoretical significance to a supposed distinction between “politics” and “the political.” Partly this is just linguistic; if you use “politics” as a noun you’re going want to use its adjectival form, “political,” at some point, and pretending...