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?"