Knock-off Soviet Kitsch: On Comrade Detective

Has Slavoj Zizek written about Comrade Detective yet? It seems to be the perfect show for him, not just for its setting behind the iron curtain, but its central premise is that of a "subject supposed to believe." Comrade Detective is a show streaming on Amazon. Its central premise, or gag, is that it is ersatz Soviet Bloc propaganda. The show is made to look as if it is a Romanian detective show from the nineteen-eighties; it is shot with Romanian actors (but modern production values) the dialogue is then dubbed by actors such as Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. 

The Golden Pig: Okja and the limits of Satire

Critics of Okja have been quick to point out its jarring tonalities, one part satire of the world of corporations and branding events and one part touching story of a girl and her (giant mutant) pig. This seems to be off for at least two reasons. Tonal shifts seem to be something Bong Joon-Ho revels in. The Host also melded horror, a family drama, and a scathing account of the US involvement in South Korea, and Snowpiercer reveled in shifting tones, as every new railcar opened to a new scene and a new mood, from its own satire of the ideological state apparatus to the horrorific scene of black hooded executioners of the repressive state apparatus. A kind of jarring tonal shift is not new to this movie. 

It is the Symbolism, Stupid: Trump and Sanders

There is a certain similarity in criticism of Sanders and Trump. I am not referring to the symmetry posited by pundits of the radical center for who every left has an equal and opposite right--the tea party and Occupy Wall Street, Fox News and CNN, Iron Man and Captain America, but to a criticism offered by those far from the radical center that argue that Trump and Sanders are not the outside of the existing political spectrum. Trump's supposedly outlandish promises to deport millions of undocumented workers is not that different from existing policy. Sander's socialism is just what a previous generation would have called a new deal democrat, or what the rest of the world calls "center-left". 

Abstract Materialism: Sohn-Rethel and the Task of a Materialist Philosophy Today

This is the longer version of an old conference paper. It never quite became publishable; it is left here to the gnawing criticism of digital mice.

Materialism has always been the bastard stepson of philosophy. Its very position is paradoxical, if not impossible. It must use concepts and arguments to conceptualize and argue against the primacy of concepts and argument. This perennial problem is even worse today. If Marx was in some sense the most sophisticated materialist philosopher, elevating the material beyond the brute materiality of the body, to locate the material in the reality of production and the conflicted terrain of social relations, then one could argue that even this version of materialism is in jeopardy today. The economy, the last instance of materialist philosophy after Marx, can no longer be identified with the machines and noise of the factory, it has become digital, immaterial. What then remains of materialism when the economy has become ideal, determined more and more by the idealist category par excellence, speculation, and even labor has been declared immaterial, intersecting with beliefs and desires? At least the beginning of a response can be found in the seemingly paradoxical concept of “real abstraction.” This term, introduced by Marx, takes on a central importance in the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, where it is no longer a methodological necessity, but the cornerstone of a philosophy that seeks to understand the material basis of abstraction itself.

A Brief Encounter: Between Analysis and Affect

I was introduced to David Lean's A Brief Encounter by Slavoj Zizek and Sophie Fiennes A Pervert's Guide to Ideology.  The film is about a married doctor and a woman (also married) who meet in a train station and fall in love. The film documents their brief affair against a stifling atmosphere of propriety in Post-World War Two England. 

Bigger than Life: Nicholas Ray films Anti-Oedipus

It seems to me that a fundamental point has perhaps been lost in all of the writing on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Deterritorialization, body without organs, desiring machines, codes, and axioms have been debated, clarified, and discussed, becoming part of contemporary jargon, but the fundamental critique of psychoanalysis has passed by the wayside. This criticism can be summed up as follows: the conditions of the production, and reproduction of subjectivity, exceed the confines of the family, encompassing all of history. That is what it means to be “anti-oedipal” to have a fundamentally different ontology, or ontogenesis, of subjectivity, one that is more materialist, moving beyond the confines of desire in the family. Against the tendency of psychoanalysis to reduce everything to the family, to see father figures lurking behind every boss and president, Deleuze and Guattari explode the family triangle seeing the political and historical dimensions underlying it, to see politics where psychoanalysis see only Oedipus.

“The father, the mother, and the self are at grips with, and directly coupled to, the elements of the political and historical situation—the soldier, the cop, the occupier, the collaborator, the radical, the resister, the boss, the boss’s wife—who constantly break all triangulations, and who prevent the entire situation from falling back on the familial complex and being internalized in it.”

This must be the case not only of those “extreme situations,” the political conflict that cuts through a family, but those situations where Oedipus would appear to be most applicable, where it is just a father and a son in conflict. Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate this in their book on Kafka, arguing that even Kafka’s conflict with his father has to be seen as political. Thus using Kafka to restate their position.

“The goal is to obtain a blowup of the “photo,” an exaggeration of it to the point of absurdity. The photo of the father, expanded beyond all bounds, will be projected onto the geographic, historical, and political map of the world in order to reach vast regions of it: ‘I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach.’ An Oedipalization of the universe. The Name of the Father encodes the names of history—Jews, Czechs, Germans, Prague, city country. But beyond that, to the degree that one enlarges Oedipus, this sort of microscopic enlargement shows up the father for what he is; it gives him a molecular agitation in which an entirely different sort of combat is being played out.”

The best cinematic version of this process, of this blow-up, is perhaps Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

"Witness a film by Nicholas Ray, supposedly representing the formation of a cortisone delerium: an overworked father, a high-school teacher who works overtime for a radio-taxi service and is being treated for heart trouble. He begins to rave about the educational system in general, the need to restore a pure race, the salvation of the social and moral order, then passes to religion, the timeliness of a return to the Bible, Abraham...What the film shows so well, to the shame of psychiatrists, is that every delirium is first of all the investment of a field that is social, economic, political, cultural, racist and racist, pedagogical, and religious..."

It is tempting to subject Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life to a psychoanalytic interpretation. Paired with the well-known Rebel without a Cause, it functions as a kind diptych: one on the father, the other on the son. Thus it is possible to see each film, which were made in the mid-fifties, right after each other, as completing two sides of an Oedipal triangle. Which is not to say that Rebel is not about fathers. As Ray argues, in that film Jim Stark (James Dean) is searching for some kind of guidance from his father (Jim Backus), who “fails to provide the adequate father image, either in strength or authority.” In fact all of the misfits of the film have daddy issues: Judy (Natalie Wood) just wants her father to love her (perhaps a bit too much) and Plato (Sal Mineo) just wants his parents to be there at all. It is odd that this film, a film that is supposed to document the early stages of a generation of rebellion, is ultimately about a bunch of kids looking for a proper parental relationship. (However, I will leave aside for a moment the question as to whether or not it is possible to extract an Anti-Oedipal reading of that film to focus on Bigger than Life).

Bigger than Life is the story of a schoolteacher in an unnamed suburb, whose life self destructs due to his increased addiction to a drug that he has been prescribed for a rare illness. James Mason, a British actor best known for playing Humbert Humbert in Kubrick’s Lolita, plays the teacher, Ed Avery. This casting introduces a bit of old world class and distinction into the suburban egalitarianism of nineteen-fifties America. A point that is reinforced by the layout of the Avery home, the walls of which are decorated by maps and travel posters of Barcelona and Greece. These posters suggest both the past, the weight of history, and middle class aspirations of travel and luxury. The latter are undermined by the presence of an exposed water heater in the Avery kitchen. The rusty and malfunctioning heater stands out as a kind of Zizekian anamorphosis, a stain that actually puts the whole scene in perspective. We quickly learn that the middle class comfort of the Avery household is just a veneer, Ed Avery works as a taxi dispatcher after school hours to make ends meet. He keeps this secret from his wife, generating suspicion.

Most of the initial clues of conflict are subtle, functioning at the level of casting and sets, demonstrating Ray’s often cited control, but all of this begins to explode, moving from subtext to text, as Avery begins to unravel. His unraveling stems from a drug that he is prescribed to treat a rare condition, a drug that has serious psychological side effects. However, I think that it would be as much of a mistake to see this as cautionary tale about drugs as to see it as an Oedipal drama. The drug is something of a Macguffin, setting the plot in motion. Ray later said that he regretting naming the drug in the film, reducing the crisis of the film to a single knowable cause. As much as the drug sets the conflict in motion, turning Avery into a grotesque parody of paternal authority and middle class aspirations, it is their precarious class position that maintains it. Even as he spirals out of control, his wife refuses to call the doctor for fear of what another medical bill will do to their financial situation, or what the stigma of going to see a psychiatrist will do to his job. Avery’s addiction to the drug sets in motion a spiral of delusion and delirium that crosses through class, politics, and religion.

First, in an initial bought of megalomania, Avery takes his wife and son to a high-end department store. His wife immediately protests this transgression of the class position. The scene that follows prefigures the dress-fitting scene of Vertigo, a man violently demanding that “his” woman look a particular way. Only in this case the ideal is not a melancholic lost love object, as in Hitchcock's film, but a desired class position. Avery’s second noticeable outburst takes place during “parent teacher” night at his school. He refuses to play the faux-egalitarian game of hanging every student’s artwork, of acknowledging that every child is a special little snowflake, and gives a tirade against collapsing standards. As Avery states, “Childhood is a congenital disease - and the purpose of education is to cure it.” Ultimately warning that, “We're breeding a race of moral midgets,” in a remark that will be heard again and again in authoritarian philosophies of education from Plato to Allan Bloom. Half of the audience of parents reacts in horror, offended to hear their children spoken of in such a way, as idiots in need of discipline, while the other half openly embrace the new authoritarian standards.

After this the posters of Europe, of Barcelona at the home take on a new significance: they are no longer symbols of middle class aspirations, but of the possibility of fascism. After the debacle of the PTA meeting Avery returns home, focusing his efforts now on his son--privatizing his desires for discipline and authority. This is arguably the most Oedipal dimension of the film, and the one most caught up in a particular middle class ideal of “wanting a better life for one’s children.” Avery looms over his son in a monstrous scene of parental discipline. When his son fails to perform, fails to become an instant genius, Avery turns to the Bible, specifically the story of Abraham, for parenting advice, deciding that his son must be sacrificed. When his wife reminds him that God stayed Abraham’s hand, Avery declares, “God was Wrong!” With the exception of this last heretical remark, the film prefigures a particular American form of fascism (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) based on consumption, family, and the Bible.

Avery’s blasphemous declaration completes the sequence of megalomania, passing through class, politics, and ultimately religion. Oedipus is blown up until it encompass all of history and the cosmos, revealing its social and political dimensions. What follows in the denouement, the happy reconciliation of the family, can only be understood as the imposition of the era’s ideological demands. What is more important is that the film illustrates that every familial conflict encompasses all of society and history; there is no demand for an authoritarian father without a demand for authority, that every desire for a better future for one's children is the projection of one's own frustrated economic aspirations. Thus, the unconscious is political and economic before being familial and libidinal.

The Zombie as Critic

If I were Slavoj Zizek, I would begin this post with something to the effect that each period in history gets the monsters it deserves. These monsters express a fundamental contradiction at the heart of reality, a particular social nightmare. Thus while the nineteen-nineties may have been the decade of the vampire, from the brooding Goth vampires of Anne Rice to the nightmarishly adolescent vampires of Buffy, the first decade of this century has clearly been the decade of the zombie. The zombie movie has come back in multiple forms, from horror to comedy, and has even given rise to various “pseudo-zombies” such as the rage infected of the 28…films and the “reavers” of Firefly. There are even zombie books such as Max Brook’s World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide.

The zombie film carries particular heavy symbolic baggage, placed upon it by the genre’s creator George Romero, to serve as a metaphor or allegory (to use Shaviro’s term) for something about reality. Ever since Romero’s “living dead” wandered through the shopping mall, the zombie film has been inseparable from a social critique. The political subtext is not just tacked onto these films as some kind of didactic message, but stems directly from the narrative of the film. Romero’s zombies are so slow and lumbering that any destructive power that they have must be an effect of internal tensions within humanity. In each of Romero’s films it is ultimately the fissures within society, fissures of class, race, and gender, that lead to the zombie’s victory over the living. It is true that some films have avoided this burden of subtext, case in point the remake of Dawn of the Dead, which eschews the original’s anti-consumerism for a vaguely nihilistic apocalypse. The 28… films seem to embrace the imperative of subtext, making allusions to everything from fears of contagion to the contagious nature of violence itself.

What interested me about the first film, 28 Days Later, is the way in which it uses the geographical isolation of the UK as an element of its plot structure. One of the central questions of the first film has to do with the scope of the “rage infection” itself: does it encompass the globe, or is it limited to the island nation of the UK? This question is answered in the film by the memorable shot of the jet contrails in the sky. This could be seen as a sign of hope, that all is not lost. However, it also suggests that the UK is simply quarantined from the rest of the world. There is something horrific about the contrast between the apocalyptic violence on the ground and the image of the jet streaming peacefully overhead. What makes it horrific is that this is not just something invented by the film, but is in actuality a occurring event. All around the world jets full of businessmen and tourists coast blissfully unaware of the struggles for basic survival that rages below. At one point in the film a character imagines that life goes on outside of the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the UK, conjuring up images of people watching “The Simpsons.” What the character of the film imagines is us, the audience who seeks out horrors on the screen in a world full of horror.

The first film deals with the relation between what Balibar calls “ultra-objective violence,” the violence of the quarantine or embargo that simply renders a part of society expendable, and “ultra-subjective violence,” not just in the form of the “infected” of the film, but the soldiers who have become violently corrupt. In Balibar’s thought these two forms of violence are never separate, but exist in a dense “overdetermined” dialectic that it is necessary to untangle. As Balibar writes, discussing Bernard Ogilvie’s concept of a “l’homme jetable,” a disposable human being, individuals left to the ravages of AIDs, malnutrition, and ethnic battles.

“The “disposable human being” is indeed a social phenomenon, but it tends to look, at least in some cases, like a ‘natural’ phenomenon, or a phenomenon of violence in which the boundaries between what is human and what is natural, or what is post-human and what is post-natural, tend to become blurred; what I would be tempted to call an ultra-objective form of violence, or cruelty without a face; whereas the practices and theories of ethnic cleansing confront us with what I would call ultra-subjective forms of violence, or cruelty with a Medusa face.”

In the second film, 28 Weeks Later, the dialectic of types of violence is almost entirely absent. The soldiers in this film are no longer the unstable but charismatic faces of violence of the first one, they are, for the most part, pure functionaries of orders, automatons of calculated risk and procedure. The narrative of the second film deals with the attempt to repopulate and repatriate London twenty-eight weeks after the rage infection, hence the title. The US Army is undertaking the mission that can only be called, quite literally, “nation building.” The soldiers are there not so much to protect the new population but to ensure the success of the mission, even if this means killing the people in order to stop the infection. The central horror of the film takes place in the scenes in which the military firebombs part of London. Thus, to paraphrase an infamous saying, “Bombing London in order to save London.” It is worth noting that the allusions to Iraq are quite heavy in this film, right down to a green zone and an enemy that cannot be eradicated.

What is somewhat disappointing about the second film is the way in which it dispenses with the structural conflict between types of violence in favor of a narrative focused around responsibility. The film opens with a horrific scene of betrayal, as the central character abandons his wife to the violence of the infected to save his own life. This sets up the question of guilt and culpability. What is more central to film is the fact that this act has unintended consequences that set the rest of the plot in motion. The focus of the film is thus not so much responsibility in the face of a horrific situation, which would be interesting, but the unintended effects of individual actions. In the end, the film would seem to suggest that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” in that the acts of heroism and responsibility only serve to further the spread of the infection.

I suppose it is possible to see the second film as indicating the inadequacy of individual responsibility in the face of both the objective violence of markets and law and the subjective violence of hatred and corruption. However, it seems more likely that it will be understood cynically as simply underscoring the impossibility of acting responsibly in a corrupt world.