Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club

Anna Kornbluh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501347313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Anna Kornbluh provides an overview of Marxist approaches to film, with particular attention to three central concepts in Marxist theory in general that have special bearing on film: "the mode of production, " "ideology, " and "mediation." In explaining how these concepts operate and how they have been used and misused in film studies, the volume employs a case study to exemplify the practice of Marxist film theory. Fight Club is an exceptionally useful text with which to explore these three concepts because it so vividly and pedagogically engages with economic relations, ideological distortion, and opportunities for transformation. At the same time, it is a very typical film in terms of the conditions of its production, its marketing, and its popularity. Adapted from a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the film is a contemporary classic that has lent itself to significant re-interpretation with every shift in the political economic landscape since its debut. Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club models a detailed cinematic interpretation that students can practice with other films, and furnishes a set of ideas about cinema and society that can be carried into other kinds of study, giving students tools for analyzing culture broadly defined.

CHAPTER ONE

Marxist Film Theory

In this chapter, I offer an overview of a few key concepts in Marxist theory that prove particularly foundational for the project of film theory, along with a summary of some of the ways those foundations have been built upon. The key concepts discussed are “mode of production,” “ideology,” and “mediation.” Before turning to the outline of those key concepts, this chapter asserts in some broad strokes why Marxism in general is useful as a theoretical paradigm, since this cannot be taken for granted in academic inquiry at large nor in film studies at all. Resurgent interest in Marx after the global financial crisis of 2008 and the revaluing of socialist (albeit not communist) alternatives in 2016 and beyond suggest that the time is ripe for a renewed centrality of Marxism in film studies. Marxism is a project of composing new ideas in the service of composing a new social order, and that project remains compelling almost two hundred years after its emergence.

Formalism in Marxism

In the introduction, I indicated that through its emphasis on human creativity and the contingency of social history, Marxism can accord a special significance to art. I want to give that significance some more heft in pointing out how much Marxism defined itself as a philosophy of contradiction by analyzing the concrete forms in which contradiction takes shape. Indeed, “form” is a crucial category of analysis for Marx, and one which opens connections to aesthetics and to art interpretation. Marx presented his revolutions in thought as rooted in his focus on the forms of existing relations. He called this revolutionary approach “materialism.” As he defines it, materialism addresses itself “first . . . to the existence of living human individuals . . . the organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.” Note the plural existence, and the organization of this plurality. Where Kant, Hegel, and other idealists philosophized in the singular, about being and consciousness and the idea, Marx pointed thought toward the ways that material context complicates, diversifies, and multiplies the singular subjects of philosophy. He contextualized philosophy’s spiritual realm, placing ideas in their material context of power, relations, organizations, and the outcome of this process of contextualization was concern for the “definite forms” of philosophical abstractions. He differentiated between his philosophy and the prevailing idealist philosophy, and between his critique of economic relations and the prevailing discipline of bourgeois political economy, by training his gaze on the way phenomena are composed, arranged, designed, put together. Where bourgeois political economists before him had identified numerous aspects of capitalism and even promoted a labor theory of value, Marx distinguished his contribution to the critique of political economy with his own emphasis on what he called “forms” of value. Capital, Marx’s culminating work, of course famously begins with the commodity form—“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its elementary form being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity”—and its analysis proceeds by taking up definite forms, forms of appearance, forms of value, and more.

Marx often framed his advances beyond existing scholarship in terms of this attention to form. Where bourgeois political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo had already described value as produced by labor, Marx departed from their labor theory by contributing an analysis of the different forms value takes on (use-value, exchange-value, surplus value), and of what he always called the “commodity form” as the distinguishing feature of capitalist economies. Early sociologists, industrialists, and activists had all used empirical observation and journalistic techniques to describe the capitalism of the nineteenth century, but Marx added the formalist focus on the systemic nature of capitalism, and on its functioning according to intrinsic principles. Early theorists of money and the credit economy, from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to Walter Bagehot, had described the predicament of faith and suspense created by the promise of paper money or lines of credit, but Marx added the elaboration of how these apparently subjective experiences constitute the objective system of metaphysics under capitalism, with its orientation toward the future and its deferral of reckoning. In each of these cases, Marx was able to make conceptual innovations because he attended to forms, to systems, to wholes, to composites.

Form is composed relationality. Marx was a thinker of relations, a thinker of and with form, so his critical presuppositions, procedures, and vocabulary lend themselves readily to analysis of forms of cultural production. His signature critical move is to ask why things take the form they do: Why do we have this form of economic production and not another, why do we have this form of class relation and not another? As he described his own analytic project, he aimed “to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized.”¹ He wants to start with observing the empirical, and move from there to the general, to study relations in context in order to abstract to their principles of composition.

In our current university configuration, we probably think of the study of form as a minor subset of soft disciplines like literature, music, and art history. Even in those disciplines, form is often a secondary rather than primary consideration, one among many elements like context, biography, technology that would be introduced in, say, a film studies class. But Marx’s work can remind us that form is indispensable for the hard disciplines like economics, sociology, history. Moreover, it can remind us that taking form as a primary object of inquiry rather than a secondary or tertiary topic can actualize an intrinsically Marxian methodology: the study of form can be politically astute and politically consequential. Indeed, prominent Marxist theorists like Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson, and Sianne Ngai have regarded form as the site of social relationality. In this book I advance this understanding of Marxism as a combination of formalist focus and contextualist rigor, suggesting that Marxism can transcend these shopworn oppositions between soft and hard disciplines, between aesthetics and politics, between formalism and the social.

Germane to Marx’s prioritizing of form is his own formal practice. Throughout his career Marx worked in numerous genres, and he was constantly inventing new genres, concerned with the manner of production, circulation, and consumption of ideas about economic and cultural production and the role of representation in those domains. He wrote poetry and plays and a novel; he layered all of his philosophical, political, and journalistic writing with myriad literary and artistic allusions and quotations from an international, transhistorical pantheon of creative writers such as Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, and Dickens. He wrote a manifesto, deftly wielding that genre’s reductive and performative features; he wrote stirring expository jour nalism; and he also wrote painstakingly detailed systematic treatises. He improvised the new genre of “the critique of ideology,” starting with his massive and wild 500-page The German Ideology (cowritten with Friedrich Engels), a text that sometimes gracefully, sometimes awkwardly incorporates essays, manifestos, declarations of philosophical tenets, logical equations, sustained jokes, lists of maxims, catalogues of uninterpreted quotations, shorthand notes for future elucidation, gnomic slogans, and play-written scripts for the dramas that might take place among his opponents.²

Building things with Marxism³

Marx’s experiments with forms provide just one clue to the importance of form and of building things up for his thought, but this importance itself is key to answering the common charge, from both popular and academic circles, that Marxism is an overly reductive, destructive, and negative endeavor to spoil everything fun and beautiful by exposing the power behind it, and to attack everything normal in the name of dethroning that power. If you bounce around the right-wing cybersphere, or read The New York Times, you might think Marxism doesn’t want to build anything up—it wants to “destroy,” “sabotage,” “commit treason,” and “wage psychological warfare against America;” in its grips, “western civilization itself is under relentless attack.” Ignorance and anti-Semitism underwrite these caricatures, but such rhetoric of Marxism as a force of destruction actually operates very widely, even in more refined spheres. In the academy, to take only the example of cultural studies and literary criticism (let alone political science or economics), the widespread and well-funded movement called “postcritique” faults Marxism for promoting an overly negative view of art, literature, and culture. For example, feminist film theorists celebrate how female spectators find empowerment in films and deplore Marxism as a total bummer. Right-wing fake news and liberal feminist professors surprisingly align.

That spectrum may be united by poor reading, but perhaps Marx set himself up for it, since he described his life’s work as “the ruthless critique of everything existing,” and the title of the very first work he coauthored with Friedrich Engels was “Critique of Critical Critique.” The joke’s repetition and tautology betoken Marx’s signature ironic tone, the abyssal downward drive of judging judging, the undermining of everything. This tail-chasing reflexive quality is important: Kant thought the job of philosophy was to assess itself, to analyze the subjectivity of the philosopher—and Marx took this job seriously, noting that the history of philosophy had not yet reckoned with philosophy’s history, had not yet situated the knowing subject within her historical conditions. The work of explaining how “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” can often seem largely negative. What is Marxism, but critique of everything existing, indicting the corruption of everything, exposing the complicity of even those who want social reform, ever denouncing the sleeping unwoke? What is critique, but tearing things apart, revolutionary arson? What is revolution but permanent revolution, ceaseless churning? What is the critique of critical critique, but a joke about this hollowness, the chasm of irony undermining any solid ground on which to stand?

Even in the course of writing his most sustained elaboration of what materialism is (The German Ideology—around the same time as the Critique of Critical Critique), Marx demurred to define the positive tenets of communism: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Then just a few years later in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, the genre that is supposed to make manifest things that have remained unseen, this aura of the negative remains forefront: as the document concludes “In short, the communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. . . . The Communists . . . openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Marxism’s reputation for insatiable negativity is perhaps not all caricature.

Nor in fact is this reputation always a bad one. In fields like history, philosophy, and literature, critics who have claimed Marxism as inspiration—especially the framework of historical materialism, of studying social life in situ—have often understood their work to be this forcible overthrow—the dismantling of hierarchies, the breaking down of grand narratives, the decomposition of universals. The hallmarks of these enterprises are probably familiar—“Declarations of the universal are problematic.” “Rights are a bourgeois construct.” “If we invoke the human we bring the baggage of Enlightenment racism.” “The state is nothing but an apparatus of violence.” Opposing all of these built-up generalities and institutions, theorists understand their work as instead particularizing and taking-apart. Thinking locally, prioritizing “the exceptional, nuanced, situated, concrete, embodied, the historically specific,”⁴ critics devote themselves to what eludes classification or massification, what is excluded from formed wholes. For example, the prominent Marxist theorist Jacques Rancière, who claims to devote his work to the liberation of the proletariat, repeatedly argues that politics is the designed configuration of social relations and the corresponding design of sensory experience, and repeatedly associates any such definite configuration, any fixed relations of order, with “the police.” The police is any established arrangement for social relation; against it, “the essence of politics consists in disturbing this arrangement,” but these disturbances must perpetually disturb themselves—anything sustained or instituted transmutes politics back into the police. Fighting the police, destabilizing order, fueling dissensus, this putatively Marxist project of perpetually overturning anything which stands in place ends up bearing striking resemblance to what Jill Lepore and John Pat Leary have called “the disruption machine,” the culture of innovation at the heart of neoliberalism.

In the ecstasy for overturning, for resisting any reification, for spurning institutions, for rejecting constitutions, many political thinkers claiming some allegiance to Marxism have ultimately viewed their work as against constructs and consensus, against synthesis, against building things up. The spectacularly influential political philosopher Giorgio Agamben even has a name for this dissolution and dismantling, which he celebrates as the opposite of constituting: “destituency” (from the Latin de + statuere—moving away from setting things up, deserting, forsaking, abandoning). Agamben consummates a profound tradition associating constituting and building with violence, and formalization with oppressive containment, and thus for embracing as an alternative unforming, destituting, deconstituting. Agamben names the ethos of formlessness that functions as the ideal uniting a variety of theories and practices, from the mosh of the multitude to the localization of microstruggle and microaggression, from the voluntarist assembly of actors and networks to the flow of affects untethered from the symbolic. Noting its refusal of order, we can call this ideal “anarchovitalism”—the fantasy of life without any built formations, of effusions beyond bounds.

As this ideal has taken hold, it has become a reflex to valorize destituency, taking things apart, and to often claim a Marxist basis for this. But, as we have seen, the elementary lesson of materialism is to situate reflexive positions in their contexts of power—what ruling classes are served by these ruling ideas of demolition? And by contrast, what might be the revolutionary potential of valorizing building? I would argue that Marx’s own work actually provides important resources for building. The ruthless critique of everything existing enables making new things. Proactive projection of another order of things is latent in the reactive rejection of this order of things. The work of liberation is the strengthening of those projections into compelling visions, positive platforms, definitive demands, utopian maps.

Marx’s norms, Marx’s utopian maps

The projective function of Marxism is perceptible in the tacit norms with which Marx frequently frames his materialist constructs. His ideas are designed to serve an active, enabling function in the work for other worlds rather than just for passive documenting of the merely existent world. Even though he invented the practice of ideology critique, exposing how ideas participate in power relations, and even though his radical revisions of materialism set it up as a tool for revealing how norms and normative values uphold unequal distributions of power and wealth, his work also implies that not all norms are bad. After all, his materialism is more than the insight that “ideas” are shaped by context of their production—it is also a great exercise in how ideas exceed context, exceed determination—his materialism is itself an idea! Marx and Engels established critique as an immanent relation to context. Materialism reveals the rootedness of thought in a given society, but it also performs the faculty of thought as uprooting, as pivotal for social transformation. Marxism is the theory and practice of critique of this given sociality of capitalism, critique which this sociality itself generates, critique which must of necessity be immanent to what exists even while it works for the inexistent, setting out toward utopia.⁵

When the Manifesto exhorts the workers of the world to unite, it does so in the interest of implied reversals of the way things are under capitalism. Take a statement like

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of laborer’s, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborer’s, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

These lines imply that laborers should be able to live even if they do not find work and should be able to work even if their labor does not increase capital, and should not have to sell themselves piecemeal, like a commodity. The social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat Marx and Engels positively call for decisively intervene in the existing world in order to actualize a better world: normatively, things will be better when the regime of surplus value does not organize the production of material life itself, when the norms of the state are to serve the immiserated and expelled.

Creative labor

Perhaps the most essential expression of norms for our film theory purposes is Marx’s definition of human beings as creative, constructive builders. Rejecting common ways of differentiating human nature from animal nature, Marx settles on the idea that whereas animals merely subsist, humans produce a mode of production: “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Marxist Film Theory
• 2 Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright