Mobs

A character in Don Delilio's Mao II, watching the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on TV:

Karen could not imagine who else was watching this. It could not be real if others watched. If others watched, if millions watched, if these millions matched the number on the Iranian plain, doesn't it mean that we share something with the mourners, know an anguish, feel something pass between us, hear the sigh of some historic grief? She turned and saw Brita leaning back on the far arm of the sofa, calmly smoking. This is the woman who talked about needing people to believe for her, seeing people bleed for their faith, and she is calmly sitting in this frenzy of a nation and a race. If others saw these pictures, why is nothing changed, where are the local crowds, why do we still have names and addresses and car keys? ( 191)

I seem to be treading a little away from mafia-triads, thematically at least, and more toward the more general concept of the mob, or the crowd. This is not just a tactical move (since it's difficult to find literatures on triads of literary or theoretical, rather than just informational depth) but also a conceptual one. For if questions of the state and political organization seem to be outdated now -- there is no outside of late capitalism, as Badiou says -- it is even more urgent to reimagine new forms of organization that exceeds the political. And here goes my new, even more colossally embarrassing and impossible entry point: the social.

How ironic it was to pose that thought to a sociologist last night at our dinner table while the Trojan brass band was determined to blow our eardrums and intestines all at once. I think that while the original idea of illicit economies still hold, it has been nearly done to death, though in a different way, by folks like Bataille and Goux in the glorious days of Marxist-Freudianism. Anna was kind enough to give us a quick run-down of the difference between internationalism and transnationalism. The former focuses more on official, inter-state cooperations and avenues while the latter aims at less official, more culturally specific ways to broach cosmopolitan relations beyond the state. Hence the former's traction in policy-making, political science, and the latter's stronghold in other parts of the social sciences, the humanities and especially cultural studies, although transnationlism is really buzzing everywhere now, for good and for bad reasons. However, I asked my lovely dinner companions, isn't this where the history of Marxist Internationals precisely challenge the international/transnational distinction over the state since the Marxist Internationals were really tossing for the withering away of the state? Have we suppressed the significance of the Marxist Internationals so as to reify current anti-state movements as precisely 'counter-socialist", more "democractic" and thus more "free"?

This is where Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, while really dry to read, makes a very good base for what I'm trying to tie together. The early translation of Aristotle's zoon politikon by animal socialis, by Senaca and subsequently Thomas Aquinas is significant in that the word social is Roman in origin and has no equivalent in the Greek language or thought. Yet the Latin usage of the word societas, according to Arendt also had a limited political meaning; "it indicated an alliance between people for a specific purpose, as when men organize in order to rule others or to commit a crime" (Aquinas also maintains the economic purposes of a true sociatus where "the investor himself shares in the risk") (23).

Reading "The Geopolitical Aesthetic"

At first read, the subtitle to Jameson's 1992 book, "Cinema and Space in the World System" seems a tad misleading. For the author is not arguing that cinema can capture our present geopolitical world system: insofar as cinema does elaborate an idea of interconnected space, the temptation to spatialize is only a "caricature of the mode of production itself (most often called late capitalism), whose mechanics and and dynamics are not visible in that sense, cannot be detected on the surfaces scanned by satellites, and therefore stand as a fundamental representational problem -- indeed, a problem of a historically new and original type" (2). The spatial dynamics of the world system is for Jameson underscored as a historical (Marxist?) problem. Representation opens up the nature of the social raw material on the one hand (including the psychic and the subjective) and the aesthetic technologies available for the crystallization of a particular spatial or narrative model of the social totality.

The Geopolitical Aesthetic is divided into two main sections. The first examines "conspirational texts" in films like Three Days of the Condor, Videodrome, and All the President's Men in order to see how they perceive the incommensurability between an individual subject (the protagonist) and the collective web of the hidden social order. While these conspiracy films attempt to think the collective and the epistemological together, the second section of the book argues, through a different set of films ranging from Russian Sci-Fi, Edward Yang's The Terriorizer, Godard's Passions, etc., the cohabitation of geography and ontology. The latter, according to Jameson, exhibits a kind of allegorical thinking or what he terms the geopolitical unconscious as "attempts to refashion national allegory into a conceptual instrument for grasping our new being-in-the-world" (3-4). While the first section takes as conspiracy the question of totality itself, the second illustrates how films can "circumnavigate" around totality. I am a little uncomfortable by the neat division of the films discussed into these two categories, with mainly American films in the first and Russian, Taiwanese, French and Fillipino ones in the second -- although Jameson is very careful about his definition of the "Third World." Of persistent interest for me is the question of social totality and production, and it is an instance toward the end of the book that I am beginning to concretize my doubts about these concepts. If "Western" or "First-World" films betray a kind of fascination with human interactions and social relations exclusively, Fillipino director Kidlat's film The Perfumed Nightmare intervenes by positing production as neither "the ceaseless destruction and replacement of new and larger industrial units, nor a doomed and nostalgic retrenchment in traditional agriculture, but a kind of Brechtian delight with the bad new things that anybody can hammer together for their pleasure and utility if they have a mind to" (211).

I want Jameson to elaborate more on this Brechtian delight in the Marxist vocabulary that he is so accustomed to using (What is "the bad new things??"). Would such a production be outside of the market/exchange economy, if not a simple return to use-value? Or is Jameson here exhibiting a kind of Bataillian notion of excess and waste? I really don't know, and it's time to read his book Late Marxism for some hopeful pointers. But my feeling is that social totality -- whether its affirmation or disavowal -- cannot be disengaged from production. And that the failure of conspiracy films discussed in the first section of The Geopolitical Aesthetic, once extended to non-governmental conspiracies to my favored genre of 'secrecy', may well have allegories of its own.

Addendum: This cracks me up, and rings true. Except that I won't have the psychoanalytic training to go into libidinal economies, a topic that has indeed been one of the most interesting ways to engage with Marxism in this century. Jameson ventriloquizing one of Godards characters in Passion: "how do you show labor, Godard's characters ask; can you make a film about work -- isn't it something like pornography?"

The Hiatus Report

It's been three months since I've blogged now, and seriously, it feels longer than that. A friend recently attributed this hiatus to my state of happiness. I've been a little troubled by this relation for awhile now and am finally refusing to leave writing too long on its own.

In the midst of finishing the paper for the comparative field exam and more or less moving to Echo Park, somethings have slowed down in my life while living with someone I love has been a most thrilling ride. Justin and I are looking forward to spending the summer in Singapore and Bali, but in the meantime, I will probably start devoting more of this space to dissertation ideas and works-in-progress. I miss writing: not just for work but also when I was freelancing, reviewing dance for The Flying Inkpot and the occasional dangles of fiction or poetry. Folks who blog often ponder on the nature of writing when it's in such an open and overdetermined medium. Perhaps this hiatus will prompt me to reflect on such a medium even more now.