Cinema/Politics/Philosophy

Nico Baumbach

• Éditeur: Columbia University Press
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231545372
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Film History & Criticism

Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni published the manifesto "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism," helping to set the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the productive ways in which theory understands the relationship between cinema, politics, and art. In Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, Nico Baumbach revisits the much-maligned tradition of seventies film theory to reconsider: What does it mean to call cinema political?

In this concise and provocative book, Baumbach argues that we need a new philosophical approach that sees cinema as both a mode of thought and a form of politics. Through close readings of the writings on cinema by the contemporary continental philosophers Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, he asks us to rethink both the legacy of ideology critique and Deleuzian film-philosophy. He explores how cinema can condition philosophy through its own means, challenging received ideas about what is seeable, sayable, and doable. Cinema/Politics/Philosophy offers fundamental new ways to think about cinema as thought, art, and politics.

1

CINEMATIC EQUALITY

Rancière and Film Theory After Althusser

Though he wrote absolutely nothing about film, perhaps no thinker was more influential to the cutting-edge currents of seventies film theory than the French philosopher Louis Althusser. By reading Marx to the letter through the lens of structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusser’s seminars and writings in the 1960s offered the tools for analyzing the internal structure of texts in relation to both subjectivity and history.1 In the wake of the political consciousness that emerged in the 1960s, new forms of agitational independent cinema, and an upheaval in university curricula informed by revolutionary student demands, there was an increasing desire to take mass culture and film seriously as a subject for academic study understood as a priori political. Althusser’s thought supplied a method for reading cinema politically that seemed to answer the call for a new, more rigorous film theory in fidelity to the political events of late sixties.

Introductions to Jacques Rancière frequently begin with the story of his parting of ways with his Althusserian past over his realization that the mode of reading Althusser attributed to Marxist science required assuming a position of mastery. One of the four students who collaborated with Althusser on Reading Capital,2 the seminal 1965 volume that helped codify the conception of textual reading that grounded the practice of much seventies film theory in France, the United States, Britain, and elsewhere, Rancière in 1974 published La Leçon D’Althusser, announcing a definitive break with his former professor in dramatic fashion. He revealed the “lesson” of Marxist reading as defined by Althusser to be complicit with what it sought to subvert—namely, inequality. According to Rancière, “Marxist science” not only failed to transform but rather collaborated with the university as an institution set on reproducing itself as the guardian of knowledge.

The education system had been identified by Althusser as perhaps the most powerful and effective “ideological state apparatus” in France at the time. The teaching of Marxism by Althusser and his former students, including Rancière, was meant to change this. Althusser had created a theoretical edifice designed to absolve itself of accusations of vulgar Marxism while ensuring its rigorous separation from bourgeois ideology. But, Rancière argued, the radical pedagogy that emerged out of Althusser’s rereading of Marx, which was meant to carry on the spirit of May ’68, had become none other than the effacing of politics by the antiegalitarian discourse of the university at its most stultifying.

What is ultimately interesting about the narrative of Rancière’s break from Althusser is how its consequences have unfolded over the course of Rancière’s writing. It is not just a simple narrative in which the king is exposed as naked—the radical politics of the intellectual master revealed to be enhancing his own power while excluding the excluded he claimed to be speaking for. This gesture of unveiling is no more emancipatory than what it seeks to expose. Rather, Rancière’s break from Althusser can be seen in retrospect to initiate a two-part discovery: (1) politics should be defined as axiomatic equality and (2) axiomatic equality is not a science but must be conceived of in relation to aesthetics. The importance of aesthetics becomes more explicit in Rancière’s more recent work, but it is my contention that his disagreement with Althusser over science and politics was from the very beginning a disagreement over aesthetics. As I will demonstrate, for Rancière, thinking the interrelation of aesthetics, politics, and theory is necessary to think equality and therefore the politics of cinema.

Althusser, by largely bracketing aesthetics in the attempt to conceptualize the relation between philosophy (or theory) and politics, provided a model of reading or analysis for the politicized film theory of the late sixties and seventies that while frequently generative was bound to lead to an impasse. Rancière’s work provides a way out of this impasse not through a new solution so much as a brilliant rethinking of the history of the relation between aesthetics and politics grounded in a commitment to emancipation. We must rethink theory/philosophy itself through the question of aesthetics, the ways in which the sensible is shared and divided, to offer an egalitarian approach to cinema’s politics in opposition to the more hierarchical tendencies in film theory understood as ideology critique.

THE AXIOM OF EQUALITY

If, as Bergson maintained, all philosophers have only one idea, for Rancière it is contained in the following axiom: equality without conditions. His writing on cinema can be grasped as part of the intractable pursuit of this impossible idea. Rancière’s vigilance about “equality without conditions” means always questioning the conditions of possibility of attempts to define politics. As he demonstrates, positions that promote what goes by the names “subversion” and “resistance,” if not Rancière’s preferred terms “equality,” “democracy,” and “emancipation,” are again and again conditioned by a framework of consensus and inclusion that attempts to neutralize the radical dimension of political equality.3 We are familiar with this insistence on the “radical” to ensure the theorist’s political capital, but it has a precise meaning here as a root equality, an equality that grounds politics and is not an ostensible end that is dispensed with in the political process, as it is for many liberal theorists and even many “radicals.” Rancière then is interested not only in criticizing conservative thinkers who denounce equality outright because it is a threat to a well-ordered society or the supposedly “natural” state of affairs that emerges from human evolution (and a market economy), but also in critics and theorists who take up progressive or radical banners to delimit what counts as seeable, sayable, and doable. The terrain of what is seeable, sayable, and doable must always be challenged by any conception of politics as axiomatic equality. Another term for the “seeable, sayable, and doable” is what Rancière has called, in his most well-known slogan, “le partage du sensible,” or the distribution (both sharing and division) of the sensible. Politics, in Rancière’s view, must always intervene in how the sensible is shared and divided and affirm the “anonymous capacity of anyone” to speak or make a claim. The “anyone” who speaks is the one without qualifications who assumes his or her equality without conditions.

This vigilance about equality extends from Rancière’s writings on Marxism, pedagogy, and democratic theory to his work on literature, visual art, and cinema. But what is the precise relationship between political equality and the experience of art or film? One of the keys to Rancière’s method is to understand that this question cannot be answered with a simple formula because, for him, it should remain a question—or rather, a site of struggle and dissensus. Equality without conditions annuls itself if it remains a mere regulative principle. Equality acquires meaning when it is instantiated or inscribed.4 Rancière’s conception of political equality is as a situated, localized intervention. How is it possible that equality can be without conditions and situated, rooted in the concrete material world of political struggle? We could clarify by suggesting that equality without conditions is in a certain sense conditioned, but only by the very conditions it breaks from. The anonymous capacity of anyone, an equality without conditions, always means inscribing something that cannot be accounted for, that both exists and does not exist, that is, in Rancière’s terms, “the part of those who have no part.”5 This logic of the immanent break can be thought or imagined only through a paradoxical logic. It is in this sense that it is an impossible idea. The politics of axiomatic equality then is always a question of aesthetics because it always involves staging, making fictions, reframing, constructing a new mise-en-scène and montage as an intervention into “le partage du sensible,”6 or what was once known as “the symbolic order” or “ideology.”7 Politics, in other words, has an aesthetic (and cinematic) dimension.

Correspondingly, aesthetics has a political dimension; this is what has led Rancière to investigate regimes of images and textual and artistic production as arenas where equality gets inscribed and thwarted as a counterpart to thinking through the aesthetics of politics. A painting, novel, or film, he has made clear, to many of his interlocutors’ disappointment, should not be identified as a political act in itself—its very function and identification as art or entertainment that frames its legibility precludes just that—but like a theoretical essay or philosophical treatise, it constructs ways of thinking what politics might mean through new arrangements of common images and ideas. As Rancière has put it, “Art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity. That is why those who want to isolate it from politics are somewhat beside the point. It is also why those who want it to fulfill its political promise are condemned to a certain melancholy.”8 To say that the right kind of political art creates active political subjects where they did not exist before is to give up on art’s capacity to be available to its spectators as equals. On the other hand, to preserve the promise that art can change the world, we have to let go of the idea that we can anticipate its effects.

This investigation into the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics has meant that Rancière has continued the project that informed sixties and seventies film theory at the same time as he has departed from it in significant ways. As discussed in the introduction, this era of theory is no longer our own. The current interest in Rancière might be seen as part of the tide that has turned away from the central concerns of sixties and seventies theory—another name to signify our suspicion of the hermeneutics of suspicion. This, for example, is how Hal Foster situates Rancière in a 2012 essay in October, “Post-Critical.” Foster, sensitive to the appropriation of Rancière as what he takes to be the latest fashion by those who believe they have moved beyond critical theory, asserts that Rancière gives up on critique in favor of “wishful thinking,” and in turn has become “the new opiate of the art world left.”9 Though I share Foster’s concern about the abandonment of critical thought in contemporary writing on art, his target is misplaced. Rather, I would like to propose how Rancière’s work may provide a way to start rethinking the very problems and questions about the legacy of critical theory and ideology critique that persist in contemporary cinema studies, which in turn have application for the study of art and literature. Rancière’s thinking about the relation of art, theory, and politics in relation to Althusser’s own thinking about that relation makes it possible to reconsider and rearrange the terms that dominate the current retreat from an Althusserian film theory that all too often amounts to a retreat from politics.

THE PARADOX OF BRECHTIAN-ALTHUSSERIANISM

Before taking a closer look at Rancière’s critique of Althusser and how this relates to his writing on cinema and more specifically his conception of the politics of cinema, I will examine a certain problem in Althusser’s limited conception of aesthetics and how this problem is intrinsic to his influential understanding of the relation between politics and theory or philosophy. This limited conception of aesthetics can be seen at the root of many of the unacknowledged contradictions of the dominant operations of seventies film theory.

Althusser may have written nothing about film and little about art and aesthetics, but it is difficult to overestimate the influence his work had on the dominant currents of sixties and seventies film theory. He did, however, have an interest in Brecht, which has informed much of the uptake of Althusser in not only writings about political theater and performance but also film and literary theory. The link between Brechtian political modernism and Althusserian symptomatic reading is found both in seminal political films from the era, for example in Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) or Le Gai Savoir (1969), and in many of the most referenced theoretical essays in Screen, Cahiers du Cinéma, and Cinéthique in the late sixties and seventies.

A significant, if not well-known, piece by Althusser from 1968 provides a remarkable illustration of the logic of Althusserianism and its impasses for thinking the political dimension of art, to which Rancière’s work may be seen as providing a novel and generative solution. By following the logic of this short unfinished essay, titled “On Brecht and Marx,” we can understand better why Rancière’s need to rethink the relationship between philosophy and politics in Althusser’s thought ultimately can be seen as leading him to rethink the meaning of aesthetics. We can also see clearly the deadlock in Althusserian aesthetics that I will show persists in modified form in many of the most influential film theory essays of the late sixties and seventies.

“On Brecht and Marx” is Althusser’s most explicit attempt to think aesthetic practice as a form of politics. Brecht is offered to provide within the realm of artistic practice an analogous breakthrough to Marx’s break with traditional philosophy. The analogy between Brecht and Marx is established on the ground that they both generate within their respective domains, philosophy and theater, a new kind of practice based on a knowledge of the repression of politics that founds both their practices.10 This might be seen as an axiom of theoretical inquiry following from Althusser: everything is political, but the political dimension tends to be obscured. The form that politics takes when it is obscured is called ideology. Politics is the repressed absent cause that needs to be revealed from any given discourse. According to Althusser, Brecht and Marx are examples of an artist and a philosopher who realized this and attempted to make it intrinsic to their respective practices. Althusser makes clear that...