On Compromises
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Brian Price
I.
When discourses of film theory and
political philosophy converge, it is often in a mutual state of unhappiness—one
that can only be remedied by appeals, it seems, to notions of autonomy. For
instance, where John Stuart Mill saw happiness in the key of compromise, as the
tension between Liberty and Authority—which is just one way of describing
happiness as the ground of affable and productive social relations in which
gross social inequities are more closely tended to than are private
satisfactions—radical film and political theorists have regularly viewed
compromise as something forced. Freedom is understood strictly in terms of what
can only be found outside of any social unity.1 Compromise is what happens to us—hence our unhappiness—and not something we
choose to do for the sake of being happy together inasmuch and as often as
possible.
This is, for example, the general drift
of Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni’s influential essay
“Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” in which they understand film as:
…ideology
presenting itself to itself, talking to itself, learning about itself. Once we
realize that it is the nature of the system to turn the cinema into an
instrument of ideology, we can see that the filmmaker’s first task is to show
up the cinema’s so called “depiction of reality.” If he can do so there is a
chance that we will be able to disrupt or possibly even sever the connection
between the cinema and its ideological function.2
If the filmmaker
can recognize what is understood here as a direct and causal relation between
representation and the social, one in which representation nevertheless
organizes the social on a strictly illusory and always involuntary basis, then
what will be disrupted is the false sense of need and illusory sense of unity
that mass art provokes:
Certainly
there is such a thing as public demand, but “what the public wants” means “what
the dominant ideology wants.” The notion of a public and its tastes was created
by the ideology to justify and perpetuate itself. And this public can only
express itself via the thought-patterns of the ideology. The whole thing is a
closed circuit, endlessly repeating the same illusion.3
What Comolli and
Narboni go on to do here is to enumerate a list of types of films, privileging
those that “throw up obstacles” to ideology by adopting more a reflexive
strategy over those that give it free pass, as if the construction of a
taxonomy of progressive and regressive styles were itself unburdened by
ontological suppositions. But most importantly, what we see here is a
distinction between the popular and the avant-garde that is meant to effect a
sense of autonomy, which, once achieved, will collapse any sense we may have of
the popular, or more simply, what can be united under the pretense of false
consciousness. And this division in the social body can only take place, one
supposes, if we are forced by the filmmaker to give up what might otherwise be
said to bring us pleasure, or the happiness we might experience by virtue of
what we share, even if all that we share is our delusions about the social. If
the enlightened filmmaker denies us the familiar conventions of popular cinema,
then we may not find happiness, but we will be in the service of truth.
However, this presumes that once we rid ourselves of one illusion no others
will present themselves, and, more importantly, that truth is there to be had
if we can just learn content ourselves with a less social conception of what it
means to be happy. The decision, in either case, does not belong to us and
there can be no compromise between categories.
In terms of
political theory, we might consider the example of Trotsky’s Terror and Communism, written in 1920,
at the height of the Russian Civil War. After suggesting that there is nothing
logical about revolutionary terrorism—indeed that it would be better understood
as a necessary response to tsarist violence—Trotsky nevertheless suggests that
it is also above reasonable moral reproach:
The
state terror of a revolutionary class can be condemned “morally” only by a man
who, as a principle, rejects (in words) every form of violence
whatsoever—consequently, every war and every rising. For this, one has to be
merely and simply a hypocritical Quaker. 4
By Trotsky’s logic,
the existence of any violence whatsoever, even a use of violence that we may
oppose, cancels out the possibility of opposing revolutionary violence wherever
it may occur. The possibility of compromise—an appeal made in words—is ruled out in advance as hypocrisy. And if something is
ruled out on the grounds of hypocrisy, it is because of a perceived lack of
moral consistency, a mendacity that only violence can correct because violence
is conceived of as the truth beyond or beneath representation. The assumption
of an originary violence—of a truth in violence—makes impossible any
discrimination between what might otherwise and more productively be understood
as historical contingencies. What the truth of violence covers over is the
decision of the one over the many, even if in the name of the many; a certainty
that brooks no disputation and regards that certainty as secondary to what has
been proven inevitable simply because it has happened before. Violence is not
logical, Trotsky says, just necessary and true.
What binds these
two works—one, an instance of film theory, the other a famous work of political
theory—has to do with a general mistrust of representation, whether as images
or words. Truth is rendered in both as that which is guaranteed only in
suffering, in the displeasure that we will never choose for ourselves. And in
both cases, displeasure leads to autonomy, which is understood as liberty, even
though it is hard to know in what sense. For Trotsky, violence was necessary to
the final overthrow of tsarism and the realization of the Bolshevik state, but
the appeal to violence as a truth beyond disputation leaves no theoretical (and
thus practical) basis upon which any dispute within the newly formed bloc might
be resolved. That is, violence might produce a new unity, but what it does more
enduringly and consistently is to dissolve them. For Comolli and Narboni, a
truly resistant, autonomous work must conform to certain aesthetic
prerequisites, and thus earn for itself a sense of belonging to a category of
image production predicated on autonomy, precisely because anything that might
cause pleasure can only be understood in terms of ideological mystification.
Every unity is understood as a false unity. For this reason, so much of radical
film theory demanded a kind of violence to the image (albeit a very different
kind of violence than what Trotsky was defending), and thus the spectator.
Nevertheless, I
do not wish to suggest that we abandon radical political film theory, nor
radical politics more generally. Just the opposite. What I would suggest
instead is that we might take more seriously the dead-end that radical theory
takes in its insistence only on displeasure, which is, as I am suggesting here,
always predicated on a claim that truth is an unhappy event. For one, if we
abandon the idea that the work of the political is the excavation of truth—and
it is tempting not to do so precisely because we are so accustomed to denying
the status of truth to any image that offends us—we might be in a better
position to see the work that images can do in and for the social, especially
as we come to understand the social as something that cannot be, and should not
be thought to be, beyond representation. Likewise, if we understand the
movement of the social as a process of representation, then we are in a better
place to understand just how important it remains to think images politically,
but to do so on the promise of pleasure instead of violence, happiness instead
of deception. We might begin, then, by thinking about the terms of compromise
and recognition rather than identification and interpellation. To proceed in
this way is to bring moving image theory even closer to political philosophy,
and allow us to both understand and effect change in the social along more
peaceable and productive lines.
II.
My title is
borrowed from an essay written by Lenin on September 1, 1917. The plural of
compromise should be noted, even if it is less pleasurable to
pronounce—significantly less tidy on the page and far too wobbly off the
tongue. To speak of compromise in the singular, as we have seen in the case of
Trotsky, is to offer nothing of the sort—a demonstration only of the relative
and dangerous inflexibility of belief and certainty. This is the one thing I can do, and I will do nothing more. The
singular is aggressive, stubborn, and entirely unhappy.
The compromises
that Lenin was entertaining when he wrote this essay were, by contrast,
multiple and related to his ongoing cooperation with the Mensheviks and the
Socialist Revolutionaries in the Provisional government to achieve the
dictatorship of the proletariat by peaceful means. The compromise could be
struck only because the Mensheviks and the S.R. agreed that a government could
not be formed with the Kadets. Most importantly, this moment was one in which a
distinction needed to be made between a forced compromise and a voluntary one.
The former was represented by the Bolshevik’s participation in the Third and
Fourth Dumas. The voluntary compromise, by contrast, was what could be struck
with the S.R./Menshevik block, which Lenin imagined as a true democracy:
The medley of voices in the “bloc”
is great and inevitable, for a host of
shades is represented among the
petty-bourgeois democrats—from that
of the completely ministerial
bourgeois down to the semi pauper who
is
not yet capable of taking up the proletarian position. Nobody knows
what
will be the result of this medley of voices at any given moment.5
Lenin did have
an idea, or at least a worry, a lingering skepticism about how well the
compromise would work—which is a normal effect of any compromise, so long as
that worry remains de-emphasized. Lenin expressed this worry in a long
footnote, which I quote here in its entirety:
The above lines were written on Friday, September 1, but due to unforeseen circumstances (under Kerensky, as history will tell, not all Bolsheviks were free to choose their domicile) they did not reach the editorial office that day. After reading Saturday’s and today’s papers, I say to myself: perhaps it is already too late to offer a compromise. Perhaps the few days in which a peaceful development was still possible have passed too. Yes, to all appearances, they have already passed. In one way or another, Kerensky will abandon both the S.R. Party and the S.R.s themselves, and will consolidate his position with the aid of the bourgeoisie without the S.R.s, and thanks to their inaction…Yes, to all appearances, the days when by chance the path of peaceful development became possible have already passed. All that remains is to send these notes to the editor with the request to have them entitled: “Belated Thoughts.” Perhaps even belated thoughts are sometimes not without interest.6
What Lenin’s
worried note makes clear is the temporal dimension of any compromise. It can
come too late. Made at the wrong time, it can also fail—becoming less an
instance of compromise than a trace of deceit. Compromise, in the moment of a
failed mutuality, has to be understood instead as strategic failure. But if
something can be described as strategy then it is no longer a compromise. Not,
in any case, for the deceived. To compromise, I would suggest, is to decide
without agency in the moment of a mutual suspension of instrumentality, and for
the sake of the greater good for all parties within a bloc. This is why Lenin concludes that “On Compromises” might
be better understood as “Belated Thoughts.” Belated, he says, but not without
interest. Not without interest because any voluntary compromise—we can only
infer—retains the promise of revolution without violence, change without
bloodshed.
A belated
thought is not without interest because it can also become timely; peace should always be on time, and yet it seems to be the
one thing that always comes too late, as Derrida so often reminded us. One
feels this tardiness very strongly in the history of revolutionary political
theory—for instance, in Fanon’s pained realization in The Wretched of the Earth that decolonization would not be the
result of a “friendly understanding,” especially as the colonial subject—in
most instances—grew up with a gun at his nose and barbed wire around his block.
To be, for the colonized, was already to be compromised; it was to live in a
permanent state of risk and disenfranchisement that was always someone else’s
decision. One cannot compromise when one has nothing more to surrender.
We might also
consider, and by sharp contrast, Žižek’s analysis of the 2005 riots in the
Paris suburbs as an instance of superfluous violence, one that nevertheless
occurs and occurs as unnecessary:
If
the much repeated commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era has any
sense, it is here. There were no particular demands made by the protesters in
the Paris suburbs. There was only an insistence on recognition, based on a vague, unarticulated ressentiment. Most of those interviewed talked about how
unacceptable it was that the then interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, had
called them “scum.” In a weird referential short circuit, they were protesting
against the very reaction to their protests. “Populist reason” here encounters
its irrational limit: what we have is a zero level protest, a violent protest
act which demands nothing.7
Žižek’s description of the riots as a short
circuit, in which the protestors only protest the way that the protest itself
was described, is entirely ungenerous. It presupposes, for one, that North
African immigrants in the suburbs were unaware of the discriminatory character
of French modernity and the development of the suburbs in the first place, not
to mention the sense of disenfranchisement that immigrant populations live with
daily. Recognition is the demand; its
lack, the source of ressentiment. The
gap between lived experience and the way in which that experience remains
absent as both news and as popular culture produces antagonism. Moreover, with
the increasing popularity of rap in France at the time—especially as the nation
began to embrace popular representations of suburban immigrant life around
figures like Diam’s and Kery James—one can imagine how easy it would be to
contemplate one’s abjection and to revolt. Resentment emerges when one realizes
that things could be otherwise.
This is why and
when violence becomes thinkable as possible, but not—I would submit—thinkable
as necessary. To decide that it is necessary is to be certain, in turn, that
the violence of 2005 in the suburbs of Paris is contextually identical to the
violence of the F.L.N. in the years of decolonization. The moments are related,
but not identical. The difference is where the prospect for a peaceful
revolution resides. The protestors of 2005 are the inheritors of a revolution
whose violence was entirely just and for the reasons described by Fanon.
Moreover, we are speaking here about a generation of North African immigrants
now living in low-income housing produced during the Algerian War in an effort
to return France to the French, Paris to Parisians, as the racist logic of
colonial France goes. For this reason alone it would be difficult to imagine
how the residue of French colonial policy would not be felt in the suburbs, the
lack of representation and equality felt today as a result of deeply sedimented
values in French culture. These are the values that made possible Sarkozy’s
call, following the riots, to rid France of the sans papiers in the first place. The call, for many, was effective
because it was recognizable—it no doubt felt right, and felt so as historically
familiar and objectively true.
To speak here of
sedimentation is to invoke the relation between sedimentation and reactivation
that Ernesto Laclau expropriates from Husserl in New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time in an effort to
understand the ways in which “the sedimented forms of ‘objectivity’ make up the
field of what we call the social.”8 Reactivation, by contrast, is the means by which the constitutive activity of
thinking is restored to what has become sedimented. Or as Laclau puts it:
The
moment of original institution of the social is the point at which its
contingency is revealed, since that
institution, as we have seen, is only possible through the repression of
options that were equally open. To reveal the original meaning of an act, then,
is to reveal the moment of its radical contingency—in other words, to reinsert
it in the system of real historic options that were discarded—in accordance
with our analysis above: by showing the terrain of original violence, of the
power relations through which that instituting act took place. This is where
Husserl’s distinction can be introduced, with certain modifications. Insofar as
an act of institution has been successful, a “forgetting of the origins” tends
to occur; the system of possible alternatives tends to vanish and the traces of
the original contingency to fade.9
Reactivation,
then, is the disruptive work of the political, as Laclau has defined it. The
political produces the social and is also what can remain buried. As an
imaginative act—as the articulation of an absence in the social that must be
rectified—the political is what, as Laclau says, prevents the social from
“merely reproducing itself through repetitive practices.”10 We might say, then, that the 2005 riots exposed the radical contingency long
concealed beneath the repetition of social forms that were instituted in the
1950s; it was a moment of recognition, the reawakening of historic options long
repressed that will now need to be acknowledged and modified.
As an opening
for the political, recognition—which produces reactivation—is also what would
allow for change without bloodshed, which is largely what the 2005 riots
involved. The violence done was largely to private property—to cars and public
buildings, which do not obtain the status of being in any instance. Moreover,
private property, in this instance, bears an important relation to Žižek’s supposed short-circuit, and the
rioters outrage about the manner in which their own protest is being
represented back to them by the then Interior Minister of France. We can only
assume that Žižek understands representation here as
merely epiphenomenal, ancillary—at best—to what is, to the cause of what appears unmediated beneath and as truth.
If the protestors are absurd for being angry about being represented as scum,
then the real problem can only be said to reside outside of discourse, outside
of the realm of the political. We can only presume that what is, in this instance, is the absence of
a stable ground upon which the validity of any given claim can be measured.
Sarkozy could
only agree. To refer to the protestors as “scum” is to produce at the level of
political discourse the very terms of social objectivity. It could only
reactivate what had appeared as objective, and did so by way of an eidetic reduction that can only ever succeed
on the basis of a willed consistency within representation itself. What
appeared as the essence of North Africans—“scum”—could only appear so because
the political is the ground of the social. It is what makes the appearance of
certain cars and certain buildings in certain neighborhoods seem natural and
inevitable. Car burning and window breaking is a rupture in representation, an
effort to reactivate the discourses that appear to us not as discourse but as
what is. Here is where these cars belong
in and as nature. If these acts provoked Sarkozy to refer to the protestors
as scum, it was only in an effort to justify force by reference to the truth of
the social—the horrible essence of the North African and the poor—and to
silence the re-awakening of an awareness of the contingent character of social
relations. It is not that the protestors demanded nothing; rather, they
proceeded from it, were energized by the nothing and nowhere that gives ground,
but gives it only because ground is both contingent and necessarily unstable.
If the ground of the social is the political, what is can only ever be organized by representation. And that’s a good
thing, provided that representation is understood as both political and contingent; social objectivity more
properly understood to be a dream of the metaphysician.
An appeal for
recognition, then, is not a demand for authenticity—for an authenticity gone
absent but still capable of being recovered nevertheless. Recognition is better
understood as a question of representation. It is not a matter of finding in an
image or a discourse an essential self—this image of me that has been waiting
for me to arrive, where I shall find myself as it—but of seeing in an image or a discourse pure possibility; options for how
things may be different. As Alexander García Düttmann has very convincingly
shown, the one who seeks recognition and the one from whom recognition is
sought can never be One, just as any single representation will never
constitute my entire being. Thus, recognition is, in Düttmann’s terms, a
relation of non-identity, even though what one goes in search of when one seeks
recognition is, in fact, identity. As Düttmann puts it:
If
one wished to define recognition as a pure relationship of otherness, then one
would not be in a position to explain how it is possible to relate to the other
without a moment of sameness; if, conversely, one wished to define recognition
as a pure relationship of sameness, then one would not be in a position to
explain how it is possible to relate to the same without a moment of otherness.
Finally, if one wished to define the relationship between sameness and
otherness as a purely dialectical one, recognition becoming the conceptual
epitome of a positive dialectic, then one would not be in a position to answer
the question of what it is that distinguishes a recognition resulting from the
sublation of otherness from a recognition, from that
knowing-oneself-in-the-other that sub-lates difference in the non-identical in
the unity of an identity, and that, rather than requiring or needing
recognition, already comprises it within itself.11
Recognition thus
presumes a multiplicity in being, difference-within-itself, even while felt as
whole. Because being is multiple, and each being differently multiple, marked
by consistencies and inconsistencies at once—though never in a state of
incommunicable alterity—there is a spacing that makes recognition possible;
room enough to perceive an other in some aspect. I perceive the same in the
other precisely because the other is only same in some ways, other in other
ways; always at once, but not in any stable proportion or relation. Thus, as
Düttmann has shown, recognition cannot be conceived of in terms of a pure
dialectic between same and other; a dialectic, presumably, that leads to a
becoming-one, which is conceivable only in metaphysical terms, and as a
statement of pure essence. Recognition should instead be understood as a
function of reactivation, which I would like to understand here as the
beginning of the work of the political. It is an impossible origin of
representation—a process in which I imagine myself to belong to a community
that I nevertheless constitute in an imaginative process that proceeds from a
lack I perceive myself to be experiencing. The plenitude I seek initially
appears to reside in, and be conferred by, a being or beings in some partial
way that will produce a sense of unity by way of a sublation of otherness that
I require if the ground of the social is to be reactivated and exposed as
contingent.
This way of
understanding recognition poses an intriguing relation between recognition and
compromise. If there is a multiplicity in being, then recognition itself can be
understood as an act of voluntary compromise. If there will be a unity between
the one that seeks recognition and the one or the many in whom, or by way of
whom, recognition is sought, then what I am agreeing to in the act of
recognition is the failure of any relation of identity, and I make this
agreement for the sake of a solidarity provoked by an imagining, by any instance of representation. A
representation can seem like me—must seem like me in some way, like the me I
think I am but am nevertheless yet to become—but can only ever partially be so,
lest the potential for recognition disappear beneath an all consuming
otherness, or an all consuming sameness, to return to Düttmann’s terms. If the
sublation of otherness is fundamental to recognition, then what is other in the
other remains present as other and thus productive of some other possible unity
in which what was other once can also appear as same at some point and for some
time. If being is open and multiple, then the act of recognition itself becomes
context-dependent. Or as Düttmann suggests: “The fact that the recognizing
relationship is one of inconstancy and tension, both homogeneous and
heterogeneous, symmetrical and asymmetrical, reciprocal and interrupted by a
caesura, indicates its dependency on determinate contexts.”12
Context,
however, is not a fixed totality, an unbroken frame in which the recognizing
relationship settles into an order that could have been predicted. Another way
of understanding the problem of context can be found if we think not of
recognition, but of crisis. In “Criticism and Crisis,” for instance, Paul de
Man recounts the story of Mallarmé’s 1894 lecture at Oxford, La Musique et les letters, where he
passionately proclaimed a crisis in poetry brought about by a younger
generation of French poets—influenced by Mallarmé himself, of course—who were
defying the rules of verse. His audience, as de Man tells it, was clearly
nonplussed; they failed to see what all the fuss was about since “English
prosody had not waited for some rather disreputable foreigners to start
tampering with free verse; free and blank verse were nothing very new in the
country of Shakespeare and Milton, and English literary people thought of the
alexandrine as the base supporting the column of the Spenserian stanza rather
than as a way of life.”13 The point, for de Man, is that the trouble of identifying any crisis—that is,
of locating a stable and indisputable referent—has to do with the lack of a
transcendental observer:
Historical “changes” are not like changes in nature, and the vocabulary of change and movement as it applies to historical process is a mere metaphor, not devoid of meaning, but without an objective correlative that can unambiguously be pointed to in empirical reality, as when we speak of a change in the weather or a change in a biological organism.14
For the
sake of our discussion here, then, we should understand context as a question
of crisis. For de Man, context is untranslatable, untransferable, and—worst of
all, from the point of view of one who might prefer to believe in a
transcendent observer—most apparent at the moment in which a crisis is named.
Context, especially as it is summoned in the naming of a crisis, is
antagonistic and productively imprecise. Any crisis, once named, becomes
catachrestic; it becomes the point around which a series of figures, forms, and
events can be collected, or contextualized. It is catachrestic—a slight
misnomer that nevertheless becomes productive of meaning—because there can only
be disagreement about the terms of the crisis. De Man, for instance, notes that
Mallarmé makes a stunning and odd omission from his list of young poets who are
effecting this crisis: namely, Rimbaud. Historical context is always under the
angular sign of catachresis; productive and always inaccurate, insofar as
inaccuracy summons rival formations that it cannot ignore since historical
change can only be articulated metaphorically. But in this way “crisis” is also
constitutive. Mallarmé’s “crisis” is an instance of the political. It sets
forth the terms of representation by which this community will come to
exist—supposing, of course, that others might agree. It is a demand for
recognition. And because it is an instance of the political, the call itself—as
de Man’s characterization of an unimpressed audience of Oxford intellectuals
makes clear—will reactivate a series of related “crises” in the history of
Western prosody.
Context,
then, is that which brings a relation into focus as contingent and necessarily
unstable. It sets the terms by which something or someone can be recognized in
a particular way, but only by way of a misnomer. And as a misnomer, the sign
can never be identical to that which it refers. For instance, when George W.
Bush declared of his antagonists in Bentonville, Arkansas in 2000, “They
misunderestimated me,” two meanings came to the fore in the same moment:
misunderstand and underestimated—neither of which he was capable of
articulating. “Misunderestimate” refers, in the logic of the misnomer as we
make sense of it, to misunderstanding. Thus, the misnomer proceeds by a
relation of non-identity. It refers to a meaning not related in the conventions
of standard usage to that word (misunderstand), while producing sense on a
different register—i.e., we understand all too well that we could, and should,
lower our estimation of him even further. The misnomer re-routes the signifier
away from what we would normally be inclined to think of as its proper
referent, and in so doing, reveals the contingency of language that renders the
notion of a mistake impossible by way of the impossible relation between sign
and referent that it most comically announces. If we get the joke—and it cannot
be overemphasized that Bush probably did not intend it as such—we do so by way
of a context that we share imperfectly. The misnomer finds sense in our
frustration with the repeated acts of brutality authorized by this man who
seems not to grasp the most basic elements of language and is (was) charged
with the highest degrees of responsibility and agency in the U.S. The context
is shared imperfectly because our understanding does not depend on our
experience and memory of the same exact instances in a specified, closed
quantity. It does not matter whether I’ve seen five press conferences, in which
this unsettling mixture of brutality and stupidity are present, and that you’ve
seen twenty-five. Recognition of the joke’s meaning—supposing that a joke’s
meaning can be unintended and still be a joke—merely requires some overlap and
will appear at some historically contingent moment. Some may even get the joke
later (the ones, I can only suppose, who need a little more convincing). If we
require a more determinate temporality and a requisite quantity of instances,
then we no longer have a context, but a system. Moreover, we fail to understand
the representational basis of the misnomer that makes context possible and
productive, but only ever as one possibility among others.
Seen as such,
recognition presents an opening to compromise. It is bound up with compromise
precisely because the historical context in which I find myself preparing to
respond to what appears before me is a vast field of historical contingencies,
whether recovered in reactivation (Laclau) or merely in what appears to us now
as yet another series altogether. In voluntary compromise, I remain open to
what is possible, knowing that once possibility disappears—when the social
appears objective—any compromise will be forced. A
forced compromise can only ever lead to violence since it involves only
subtraction without decision—a subtraction that nevertheless fails to appear as
subtraction, owing to a totalizing sameness or a totalizing otherness, which
follows from the sedimentation of the political within the social. No risk,
then: what is given up is what has already been demanded of me. When I go to
the airport and disrobe with strangers in a hurried fashion I am engaged in a
forced compromise. It is something I have to do. This, as we know, fuels
resentment—a resentment that is gradually disappearing beneath the weight of so
much sedimentation. This is simply how
things are now. I can no longer
remember what used to be allowable. If I can no longer remember how it used
to be, my forgetting might become the ground of a new utilitarianism in which I
participate by dint of my own forgetfulness. It is an agreement that I cannot
help or be helped to make, and that implicitly occurs for the assured safety of
all who pass. And we all know what happens when we let our resentment in the
airport emerge—how much longer it takes us to go on with everyday life.
III.
The
idea of voluntary compromise in the service of peaceful change that I have in
mind has to do with our relation to popular culture as an instance of the
political, as the imagining of a better way. We could say that the revolt of
2005 was internal to the logic of the suburbs themselves, but I can’t help but
think that it had more to do with its constitutive outside: the representation
of something better than what is already present, even if it is not exactly
what we all want—precisely because no representation can ever be exactly what
we all want. A voluntary compromise, in which I imagine a unity of fellow
sufferers, may also come about in more negative representational terms, in an
image of me (“scum,” for instance) that demands resistance, lest what offends
me in that image be hypostasized as the true essence of me, and the “they” to
which I will be said to belong. Popular culture can be the very thing that cues
recognition, insofar as it reveals a lack, which in turn amplifies resentment
and triggers reactivation. But as an instance of voluntary compromise,
reactivation will occur in a more peaceful form, even if the moment of
recognition was expressed, initially, as violence.
If
we carry this understanding of recognition and voluntary compromise back to
film theory, some unexpected possibilities present themselves. The form of
popular culture that I have in mind is classical narrative cinema—the
recurrently bad object of radical film theory.15 The form itself is
universal—the name bequeathed to us by Aristotle—and has been under protest in
Marxist and psychoanalytic film theory for decades for precisely this reason.
As a universal form, classical narratives are most often understood as a
three-fold operation: in the first act, an antagonism is stated; in the second,
the antagonism is expanded; in the third act, resolution is found and order
restored.16 In Aristotelian terms, the spectator undergoes an experience of catharsis in
which his or her unhealthy emotions—which find temporary expression on
screen—are purged. Pleasure is also said to be what secures us as peaceful—or
one might say pacified—citizens of the state. In this way, the experience of
catharsis is also the work of mediation, the establishment on screen of a sense
of moderation that follows the on-screen expansion of crisis, conflict, and
disorder. Most classical narratives depict crisis as a way of establishing
context: a group of people, a closed set of places, and a finite temporality
(finite, that is, in the context that the crisis names and then collects).
Classical narratives, we are told, make us moderate, and our moderation, in
turn, perpetuates the social in its more sedimented form. Or as Siegfried
Kracauer once put it:
A producer…will never allow himself to be driven to present
material that in any way attacks the foundations of society, for to do so would
be to destroy his own existence as capitalist entrepreneur. Indeed, the films
made for the lower classes are more bourgeois than those aimed at finer
audiences, precisely because they hint at subversive views without exploring
them. Instead, they smuggle in respectable ways of thinking.17
For
now, Kracauer’s description will have to stand in for the Marxist and
psychoanalytic critique of classical narration as it was developed in
increasingly specified terms throughout the last fifty years. It is, suffice to
say, the kind of film that Comolli and Narboni had in mind when they wrote
“Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” What Kracauer points to is a Marxist logic of base
and superstructure, one that assumes the image—this respectable way of
thinking—to be causally related to the economic base that it protects in turn.
In other words, the image masks the source of structural inequality. For this
reason, film theorists on the left—with whom I feel a deep sense of
belonging—have called over the years for the development of a counter cinema.
It is what underlies every claim for the autonomy of the avant-garde—namely,
that the autonomy of the subject can only follow from the autonomy of the
aesthetic. However, it might just be that the aesthetic autonomy demanded by
political film theory may very well be beholden to a logic of causality. To
insist on it might very well be to occupy a category of forced compromise—a
site of relative autonomy in which the political becomes less likely to
reactivate the social. For one, the development of counter cinema practices—no
matter how important they are, and how much I admire them—have not had the
revolutionary effect so long hoped for in Marxist and radical psychoanalytical
film theory. If we accept the category of the avant-garde as that which is to
be distinguished from the popular—if we content ourselves with notions of
aesthetic autonomy or advanced art—we merely reinforce our minoritarian position
in oppositional terms, which any dominant class will only ever respect by
referring to us as elitist, incommunicable, or merely arty.18 Moreover, the
superstructural images of moderation described by Kracauer and others have
obviously not imploded. For them to do so, capital—as Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe have shown us—would have to contain within it the seeds of its
own undoing, a scenario which assumes in turn that capitalism is causally
motivated and that antagonism itself resides within capital—indeed, that
capital has an inside.19
What
I would suggest, instead, is that classical narratives are merely fables of
causality; their universal character—their structural repetition through
time—is what produces sedimentation. If crisis becomes the point around which a
context is formed, then the repetition of crisis in each instance, in each new
film, takes on the appearance of an essence. Crisis is what always recurs, and
does so as context; it gathers together beings in a place in order to solve a crisis
that nevertheless brings the world we are watching together in a particular
way, again and again. The pleasure of classical narratives—the happiness they
seem to afford us—should thus be understood as the pleasure of sedimentation,
which is another way of describing apperception. Classical narratives are
fables of causality precisely because the lack they work to fill is contingency
itself. Crisis is thus constitutive of narrative, and in turn the repetition of
narrative in its classical dimensions effects a sense of essence that it cannot
support since crisis, as I have argued, is catachrestic. And if crisis is
catachrestic it is also a misnomer. Crisis always leads to a gathering, but
what is gathered in every instance is something altogether different, even if
the movement through three acts persists as a cultural form. A classical
narrative presents us with images of a world ordered by causality, but it does
so on the basis of a misnomer, according only to a sign that can only gain its
clarity by what it gathers and not by that to which it can actually be said to
enduringly and causally refer. In this sense, we could say that every classical
narrative is an affront to both metaphysics and the religious conception of
origin—no matter what stories they tell, and even when they tell religious
stories. That is, if we agree that classical narration is a political form,
then we can only mean that it works to foment collectivity around something
that has gone missing—namely, causality itself. And until we can irrefutably
prove that the universe is not contingent, classical narratives are likely to
remain with us—but they will only do so as representations of something that
does not exist and that will likely go on not existing.
This,
of course, is also the danger of classical narration. The same sedimented field
of objectivity that allowed for Sarkozy’s racist calls for the removal of the sans papiers to be heard—and felt as
right—is the work that classical narrative can do. Because what recurs beneath
the content of any particular instance is a fable of causality: a structure
without any particular content. It can also move us in a direction that I will
not agree with, depending on the moment in which I experience it. And yet, if
we agree that classical narrative, as a universal form, is always concerned
with producing a sense of moderation in the spectator, and that it reproduces
images of causality in every instance and through time—and what is more, that
they do so because of a lack that will likely never disappear, since the lack
in this case is causality itself—then we would also have to admit its
possibility as a progressive political form. To understand the work of
mediation that classical narrative does in terms of the production of
moderation is thus to recognize, in turn, that what these films continually
present to us is the appearance of voluntary compromise. Of course, not every
voluntary compromise will work out, as the lesson of Lenin attests. The
effectiveness of any compromise is always itself historically contingent. But
in this way, we can also say that once recognition occurs in a particular
moment, a demand can be made, and the political emerges as an imagined
alternative—an alternative without any particular content.
Consider,
for instance—and as just one possible context—the last few months of the Bush
administration; the months, that is, leading up to what would become the
election of Barack Obama. Many of us in the U.S. had at that point lived for
eight years in a state of forced compromise, living, as we all did, under the
state of exception and the Bush administration’s willful indifference to the
physical and socio-economic well-being of its constituents. However, as became
quite clear in these final months, especially as Republican candidates began to
distance themselves from Bush in an effort to secure their party’s nomination
and eventually the presidency itself, there was a demand—on the left and the
right—to put an end to what had been occurring. Our collective
dissatisfaction—the lack of moderation, reason, and justice that so many of us
felt (and feel)—became, as such, a contingent ground of the political. It
united us—eventually and for some time—in what Laclau has called a chain of
equivalence. Equivalence, as Laclau makes clear in “Why Do Empty Signifiers
Matter to Politics?” is not the same thing as identity. In a chain of
equivalence, unification is achieved on the basis of shared partiality—on the
de-emphasization of difference for the sake of unification. What unites any group
is what that group collectively lacks—i.e., lawfulness, reason, moderation. Or
as Laclau has argued, “It is not…something positive that all of them share
which establishes their unity, but something negative: their opposition to a
common enemy.”20 The differences that pertain between members of a given unicity, however,
remain present. The presence of difference within a chain of equivalence is
also what prevents a hegemonic formation from taking on a totalitarian
character, precisely because it cannot emerge on the basis of identity. The
chain of equivalence can be undone by difference just as easily as it can be
formed. What this means for us is that to be a part of any unicity is also to
make a voluntary compromise, such that the demand articulated at the level of
the political—the desire of justice that is currently absent, let’s say—can be
most forcefully heard and effect change in peaceful terms. To change in
peaceful terms means that we have to find a point of agreement across
traditional party lines, compromises that make the chain of equivalence
possible; a bloc dense enough assure the delivery of a new government. Hence,
the arrival of the so-called purple state.
During
this moment of political upheaval, when both the left and the right seem united
by what each collectively lacks, even if we cannot agree entirely on what we
all need, the repetitive insistence on compromise in classical narratives—the
ritual appearance of moderation and mutual assurance—plays an interesting, and
progressive role in the movement of the social. Indeed, this insistence can—and
may very well have helped to—unite groups that would otherwise remain opposed,
and precisely because the particular content of any given compromise in a
universal form is unimportant. It is the operation of compromise that matters,
not what is being depicted in any given instance. Consider, for instance, The House Bunny (d. Fred Wolf), released
in the summer of 2008—in the months, that is, just prior to the election. The
film tells the story of Shelly Darlington (Anna Faris), a Playboy bunny who,
through the machinations of a rival playmate is forced to leave the Playboy
mansion and re-enter everyday life, penniless and without shelter. Shelly
wanders into sorority row and the signs of her former life appear to her:
groups of women living together in large homes suggest to her a sense of
belonging. She becomes hopeful; she seeks recognition. Shelly happens on a
particular sorority, Zeta Alpha Zeta, which is on the brink of ruin. Owing to a
lack of popularity—which stems, according the logic of the film, from its
members’ status as bookish, tacky, and unattractive nerds—the sorority has
failed to recruit enough young women and thus faces the possibility of losing
its charter and house. Needing a place to live, Shelly brokers a compromise
with the young women: in exchange for being named house mother, and thus
providing her with a place to live, she’ll help the young women to recruit the
rest of the women they need to retain their house. What the film goes on to
enact, however, is a larger compromise. Shelly encourages the women to become
less bookish and more beautiful, while the sorority sisters encourage Shelly to
become less shallow and more bookish, all in an effort to secure a relationship
with a “normal” guy. As a result, the sorority becomes more popular with men,
and thus attracts enough new female recruits, and Shelly gets her man.
These
are, for better or worse, fairly familiar terms in the vernacular of classical
narrative. Indeed, they comprise the kind of arrangement and on-screen
compromise that has worried feminist film theorists for a long time. There is
nothing particularly progressive about the terms of compromise offered in The House Bunny, and the dance sequence
that accompanies the closing credits is enough to make any reasonable
person—or, at least, anyone over the age of sixteen—feel embarrassed. Probably,
if you haven’t seen the film, or even if you have, the compromise on offer—and
the terms of the crisis itself—seem entirely retrograde. Obviously, I don’t
believe that women become more attractive as they become less smart. If I’m
being honest, though, I would admit that the smarter a woman is, the more
attractive she would appear. But I also do not see any reason to generalize my
own preferences. Even if I detest the retrograde gender politics of the film
and the specificity of the compromise it enacts—i.e., that social mobility
depends on decreased intelligence and improved bust lines (which is to say,
diminished)—I may take pleasure in the operation of compromise itself, burdened
as I had been by the voice of a lawless, hostile, and ideological
administration. I can forsake my differences knowing that the member of the
religious right sitting next to me in the theater is also getting comfortable
with compromise, taking pleasure in the idea that something has to change
rather than insisting on what must remain the same, at all costs. What matters
in this unicity is not what we share but what we all in this moment lack. I may
prefer the compromise that sees Shelly become more worldly and more
self-conscious about her own sexual objectification, whereas the man next to me
might prefer the compromise he sees these sorority girls enacting for the sake
of popularity and solvency. What matters at this moment is, to borrow Laclau’s
terms, not what we share, but what we lack.
To
be clear, I am not suggesting that The
House Bunny is responsible for the election of Obama, or that its rhetoric
of compromise was what finalized the appeal across party lines for
cooperation—in much the way that Triumph
of the Will (albeit in distinctly opposite terms) is so often said to have
cemented the Nazi masses. Films don’t organize the political all by themselves.
People do. I am simply suggesting that the context brought to bear by crisis in
the film—Shelly’s loss of community and her traditional sense of herself, of
how and where she belongs—appeared at a moment in which Barack Obama’s call for
unity and cooperation across party lines was gaining traction. Many other films
did the same thing. They always do. At the same time, Obama represented the
terms of voluntary compromise in the broadest and most consistent fashion and
his discourse aligned itself with the universal logic of classical narration.
And if we understand classical narratives as fables of causality, as ceaseless
representations of what is missing in the world—i.e. causality itself—then the
movement of the political can be understood as the alignment of discourses
about voluntary compromise that are themselves united on a larger basis: on the
understanding, however implicit, that the social can be re-organized because
there is no determinate and metaphysical ground of the social. Our being is
subject to change, individually and socially, because our identities do not
exist ahead of us and as a determining essence—which is what these films
suggest on the basis of their repetition through time. One cannot compromise
something that cannot actually be changed. And as I have already suggested, the
trouble with this position—and it is a trouble with no remedy—is that the
discourse of voluntary compromise that every classical narrative enacts on the
basis of a crisis could easily serve discourses that I entirely disapprove of.
Nevertheless, those discourses can only be articulated as truth; they cannot
actually be grounded in it. As such they cannot give direct passage to a
determining essence. No one, I submit, would be compelled to make or see
classical film narratives if a determining essence were not what goes missing
in each instance, again and again. One can represent causality, but one cannot
produce it—not, that is, in any metaphysical sense. To be sure, discourses of
causality also find their sedimentation in classical narratives. But those narratives
can also provide a basis for recognition—the voluntary compromise that we will
all have to make in order to form a community that does not yet exist—that
produces the reactivation of the social, and does so precisely because the
political, or representation itself, is the ground of the social. And
representation begins when something has gone missing, or has only ever been
missing. Otherwise, we would only ever speak of the thing itself.
Perhaps,
then, the pleasure I experience with classical narratives is not pathological;
nor is it a sign of my interpellation in the system of Capital. Rather, the
pleasure that the endless cycle of such films brings me, even when such films
require a temporary de-emphasis of difference, is the renewed awareness of the
absence of causality. It is, thankfully, an experience we have been having
again and again, and for centuries. It is also what allows us to make a change
in being, individually and socially; to find new ways of being happy together,
even if that happiness can only every be partial because it is shared and
defined on the basis of a lack—the lack in whose name happiness so often
announces itself. But without sharing, there would be no social—something we
must recognize even if it means adopting something like a utilitarian
conception of happiness. How, in other words, would autonomy and solitude be a
solution to the problems of the social? What we say of cinema, we shall also
say of the social.
Brian Price is an editor of World Picture.
Notes
1Consider, for instance, Simon Critchley’s recent call in Infinitely Demanding for a brand of
anarchism that does not mirror the totality of the state that it has just
undone. What he calls for instead is the model of the artistic avant-garde: “It
seems to me that the great virtue of contemporary anarchist practice is its
spectacular, creative and imaginative disturbance of the state. Contemporary
anarchists have created a new language of civil disobedience that combines
street-theatre, festival, performance art and what might be described as forms
of non-violent warfare.” Infinitely
Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London and New
York: Verso, 2007), 123.
2 Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” Film Theory and Criticism, 6th edition,
eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 815.
3
Ibid.
4 Leon Trotsky, Terror and Communism (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 58.
5 V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1967),
205.
6 Ibid., 206. The emphasis and ellipses are Lenin’s.
7 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 74-75. The emphasis is Žižek’s.
8 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on
the Revolution of Our Time (New York and London: Verso, 1990), 35.
9 Ibid., 34. The emphasis is Laclau’s.
10 Ibid., 35.
11 Alexander García Düttmann, Between Cultures: Tension in the Struggle
for Recognition, trans. Kenneth B. Woodgate (New York and London: Verso,
2000), 62.
12 Ibid., 48.
13 Paul de Man, “Criticism and Crisis,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the
Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), 5.
14 Ibid., 6.
15 Much of what I am saying here is, I
believe, equally true for television. Ultimately, I am not
all concerned with questions of medium specificity. Television, however,
presents an interesting complication, owing to the open-ended temporality of
the narrative it constructs; open-ended insofar as most television shows, I can
only suppose, begin without a definite end in mind, temporally-speaking. So,
for the sake of simplicity, I will just be speaking here of the standard
feature length narrative film—but in very bad faith, where television is
concerned.
16 The most influential account of the
principles of classical narration in film is no doubt David Bordwell’s
“Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Theory, ed. Philip
Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 17-34. Many other examples
could be cited. The proof of its universality (its sedimentation) are the
legions of introductory film texts that rehearse the same distinction that I
have offered above—too many, in fact, to warrant quotes around my own account.
The character and nature of its universality, however, awaits better definition
than one finds in these standard accounts.
17 Sigfried Kracauer, “The Little Shopgirls
Go to the Movies,” The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995), 291.
18 In many respects, I owe this idea to
Phil Solomon. Speaking at Oklahoma State University on September 11, 2008,
Solomon began by expressing his dissatisfaction
19 See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 2001).
20 Ernesto Laclau, “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” in Emancipation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 40-41.