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.

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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.

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The principle of family life is dependence on the soil, on land, terra firma. Similarly, the natural element for industry, animating its outward movement, is the sea. Since the passion for gain involves risk, industry though bent on gain yet lifts itself above it; instead of remaining rooted to the soil and the limited circle of civil life with its pleasures and desires, it embraces the element of flux, danger, and destruction. Further, the sea is the greatest means of communication, and trade by sea creates commercial connections between distant countries and so relations involving contractual rights. At the same time, commerce of this kind is the most potent instrument of culture, and through it trade acquires its significance in the history of the world. (The Philosophy of Right)

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What I wonder, though, is if it isn’t functioning as a kind of displaced version of a further fantasy. You could interpret the all-powerful conspiracy, or, the seamless control of electronic devices, as a kind of metaphor for capitalism; the all-powerful agency, which doesn’t exist, represents the all-determining system, which does exist, in the form of capitalism. But Eagle Eye, by emphasizing the seamlessness of the fantasy power structure, made me wonder if that might not be, indeed, a fantasmatic element too. Is capitalism really seamless and all-determining? The truth seems more complicated: capitalism’s system manifests itself by not being systematic, by breaking society up into complicated  interconnecting parts. A truly radical conspiracy thriller, then, would have to expose the incoherence of the model of the conspiracy; perhaps 24 has been forced, by the pressure of producing 24 cliffhangers a season, into precisely this position.

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The criticism is wrong in both cases, of course; but Burn After Reading is so consistently and explicitly critical of narrative closure that it’s baffling that these reviewers haven’t noticed that the film argues its own defense against their criticisms. The film is built around the absence of a plot: all the characters think that there is a hidden logic, to which they therefore adapt their actions, but the secret, of course, is that there is no  secret. Hence the particularly funny scene between Brad Pitt and John Malkovich, in which each expects the other to know what they’re doing and fill in the missing half of the conversation; Malkovitch’s character of course cottons on first and gets increasingly pissed off, as does Pitt’s, when he finally notices.

However, it’s the ending of the film that makes this more than just an excuse for humorous misunderstandings. What is, I think, genuinely clever about the film is the way in which, finally, the lack of a hidden plot makes no difference. It’s funny watching the characters stumble through what they think is the logic of a spy story, but what really matters isn’t the strategies, clever or stupid, of the players in the spy game, but the blind force of the state. The marshal’s weapon is finally discharged, the CIA agent whacks someone with an ax, and the CIA’s clean-up squad comes in to pick up the pieces.

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The reason I mention Rogues is that the critique of sovereignty seems to me to provide the link between the film’s two main themes: the war on terror, and cock jokes. I owe the realization that the cock jokes are politically important to Steven Shaviro’s great post on the film, but I think there may be more coherence at an explicit, thematic, level than Steven suggests. Harold and Kumar’s anxiety about dicks is an anxiety about bodily integrity and autonomy; what Derrida calls ipseity, the same logic that underlies sovereignty. Where Harold and Kumar are absurdly anxious about their ipseity, the representative of sovereignty in the film, the homeland security agent chasing Harold and Kumar, is absurdly lacking in anxiety, totally condfident in his sovereign power even in its most ludicrous exercise (my favorite example of which is the scene pictured—and linked to—above).

This kind of self-confident fantasy is sovereignty as imagined by Schmitt; except of course Schmitt doesn’t play it for laughs, but takes it very seriously (it would hardly have the necessary fantasmatic power otherwise). It makes sense that an authoritarian like Schmitt would promote this fantasy, but it’s a little pathetic when left-wingers (I’m thinking of Laclau and Mouffe) buy into it. To engage the Schmittian logic of sovereignty is to have already made the mistake of thinking the kind of ipseity it depends on is possible, that is, it is effectively to already concede defeat. The correct response to Schmitt is to laugh at him.

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All the reviews I’ve seen have mentioned Pierce Brosnan’s terrible singing, but I haven’t seen  much criticism of Meryl Streep’s performance, which is much worse, and also does more to explain what’s wrong with the film.The problem with her acting in the film is precisely that it is acting, or rather Acting with a capital A, an emoting that suggests that the only way of conveying emotion is through mimesis.

Watching Mamma Mia made me think about what it is I like about Abba. Two common responses to the band are the deflationary one, to say they are “just a great pop group” (or a guilty pleasure); and the inverse, to reject the idea that Abba were a superficial pop group and emphasize the emotional depth of their songs. Neither of these responses is quite right, because it’s the pop elements, the glossy artifice of production, that give Abba their emotional charge. So much of the emotion resides in the carefully constructed production, while the voice, far from expressing emotion, is strangely blank; the effect is to produce an externalization of emotion, a sense that the music carries the emotion for the singer, perhaps because these emotions are so powerful that the only way to deal with them is to, as Jay-Z puts it, make the song cry.

Something rather similar is true of musicals: if the songs don’t manage to convey something that a mere representation would not, what’s the point of including them. Which is the problem with Mamma Mia. The role of the songs in the film is strangely peripheral, like the Arctic Monkey’s songs (or whatever) shoe-horned in to the latest terrible Channel 4 drama. This has an interesting consequence: because so much time is spent on karaoke that adds little or nothing to the film, there’s no time for any dramatic arc and, consequently, no possibility of catharsis. The most striking thing about the film is the way in which it desparately demands that the audience respond emotionally to it; yet, Mamma Mia is structured throughout to prevent any actual emotional involvement.

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Batman, operating outside the law to protect the defenseless people, represents a kind of Bush/Cheney figure, doing what he has to do for the good of the homeland.

He seems to have somehow forgotten that George Bush is the president of the US, and so he can hardly be said to be “operating outside the law”; indeed, the Bush administration’s particular mode of employment of the law is one of its distinguishing features.

Lenin’s review also struck me as kind of wrong, but it took me a while to figure out why. Part of the problem is a lack of specificity. Lenin argues that the film is fascist because it foregrounds an exceptional individual, an extra-legal strong man. But these are the things that define the superhero genre, so saying that they apply to The Dark Knight doesn’t tell us anything specific about the film. A statement doesn’t simply mean something on its own, it gets its meaning from its relationship to a range of standards and conventions; so the meaning of generic conventions lies not in their literal meaning, but in how they are deployed. What is it about this Batman film that makes the use of superhero tropes fascist?

More generally, both these reviews frame their critique around a claim that the film embodies or reflects capitalist ideology of a particular sort, rather ludicrously in John’s case, where the problem with the film is held to be its limitation of political options to the American mainstream: “What’s on the menu in The Dark Knight? The same thing that’s on the two-party American political menu, year in and year out.”

But again, this fails to sufficiently distinguish the film, and raises a more general question about the point of left-wing criticism. What critical edge is there in saying that a film reflects capitalist ideology? What else could a film produced in a capitalist world do? To say that a film embodies capitalist ideology is not a criticism, it’s a banal fact, true of every film ever made. Both these reviews, it seems to me, exhibit a deeply flawed understanding of ideology. The thought seems to be that a film has a message, which is conveyed, perhaps with more or less resistance, into the mind of the viewer; the problem with ideology, then, is that this message is a lie that serves the interests of capital. The problem is that this makes the mechanism by which both ideology and ideology-critique work into something magical. Where is the “meaning” located in the film? How does it travel from the celluloid to my head? How do I, the left-wing critic, resist the power of this meaning? How do I know it to be false?

Materialism provides a way out of these questions. Ideology is not something foreign, something in a film with a strange power to impose itself on our minds; ideology is what we and the film share, what allows for the transfer of specific meanings between film and audience (a transfer which is not one way). As Žižek puts it, ideology is made up of “unknown knowns”; that is to say, the problem with ideology is not that it is a falsehood of which we might be persuaded, but because it is a truth that we already accept without knowing it. The point of ideology critique, then, shouldn’t be to try and ward off the dangers in what the film is trying to tell us, but to try and figure out what the film can tell us about ourselves.

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There’s an interesting article that suggests that the film shows “the future of Russia lying not with revolution but with evolution,” but I don’t know that that interpretation is really credible. The film, after all, takes place after the Russian revolution, and doesn’t question either that revolution or the proletarian revolution on Mars. The villains of the piece, instead, are Loss’s lodger, a NEPman whose corruption is eventually uncovered by the revolutionary authorities, and Aelita herself, who attempts to use a simulacrum of revolution to cement her own power. Loss and his wife, on the other hand, consistently work for the development of a “new Russia.” I’m tempted to read the film more as an almost Maoist injunction to remember the importance of class struggle within the revolution. The ambiguity, that is, is dialectical, as can be seen, indeed, in the constructivist architecture of Mars, showing technology in both its liberating and repressive aspects.

Аэлита is available on the internet, but unfortunately only in a slightly dubiously edited musical version.

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LA is beautiful. I’m not sure if that’s the point Antonioni is trying to make in Zabriskie Point, but he makes it anyway. And Death Valley, as it appears in the film, is beautiful too. What are we to make of the pairing here? The easy way to read it would be as a romantic opposition: the unspoilt beauty of the desert vs. the degenerate construction of the city. But Antonioni blocks this interpretation whenever it appears as a possibility in the film. In part, this is necessitated by the very nature of LA—as a city, its so strangely unfinished and temporary, a landscape of shacks thrown up along monstrously overgrown dirt roads; any competent depiction of LA (and Antonioni’s is more than competent) cannot posit the city as civilization to nature’s other.

Likewise, the desert is never quite allowed to settle into an untroubled naturalness. Certainly, Antonioni’s LA, a montage of advertising hoardings and riot-police brutality, manifests the deeply psychotic nature of late capitalism. But the desert is no less psychotic. Daria, the female lead, stops to make a phone call in a small town between LA and Phoenix. The phone is located in a bar that is built from neon signs and psychologically damaged regulars (“You used to be heavyweight boxing champion of America? That’s swell.”). Daria is set upon by a group of rock-throwing kids, who uneasily echo the rioting students in LA. “Can we have a piece of ass?” one of the kids asks. “Would you know what to do with it?” Daria responds. Whatever else the film is, it is not an uncomplicated advocacy of the hippie utopia of nature and free love.

This brings up the third, most complicated and troubling, reason to reject the romantic construal: it is precluded by the film’s overall political logic. The first scene sees a group debating tactics for the following day’s student strike. Aside from containing one of the most passionate defenses of minority leadership I’ve seen in a film, the debate turns around questions of agitation and organization. What will radicalize white students? The Black leaders (one of them played by Kathleen Cleaver) are uncompromising: either white students’ own experiences will radicalize them, or they remain enemies. One of the students quotes Mao: “rigorously struggle against bourgeois individualism.” The alternative to a romantic reading is, I think, to see the film as a meditation on this question. What does it mean, what will it take, what might it cost, to come to understand revolution as a struggle against bourgeois individualism?

The genius of Zabriskie Point‘s pairing of Los Angeles and Death Valley, then, is that it makes them the opposite of the romantic contrast, seeing them both as interstitial. Because of this, it allows us to see them both as interstitial, and so raises what I’m increasingly finding to be the central question of revolutionary politics: how can we see these interstitial, other, visions, as something that is not simply an individual, hence powerless, fantasy?

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