Communism conference — Michael Hardt

Michael Hardt’s talk, “The Production of the Common,” at the London conference On the Idea of Communism, summarized a lot of his ideas over the last several years in a way that I found helpful. He defined “communism” as having to do with the common — as opposed to both private property and state property. And said he wanted to put the focus on political economy and on the question of property. (This in contrast to the other speakers on his panel, Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward, who were both far-ranging and lucid, but foucsed rather of questions of political action and organization. Indeed, I have now gone to nine talks — with three more to come — and Hardt’s and Negri’s were the only two which so much as mentioned political economy. Quite odd for what is supposed to be a Marxism conference). I will try to summarize what Hardt said, with a little commentary

In the 18th century, and still in the 19th when Marx wrote, capitalism was in transition from a form based mostly on immobile property, which is to say agricultural land, from which surplus was extracted in the form of rent, to a form of capitalism based on mobile property, which is to say manufacturing (since a factory can in theory be built anywhere), from which surplus was extracted in the form of profit (i.e., although Hardt didn’t express it this way, from the direct expropriation of absolute and relative surplus value). The landlords were losing out to the new industrial capitalists. Even still in Marx’s time, there were less industrial workers than there were agricultural ones, but industry was the dominant mode of production in the sense that it was the one that imposed its forms and methods of organization on all the rest (a “dominant,” as Jameson would say).

Today, Hardt said, we are in the midst of another transition, this time from industrial production to “immaterial production.” The number of workers involved in immaterial or affective production is still much smaller worldwide than the number of factory workers, etc., but immaterial production is the leading edge that imposes its forms of organization on the rest, just as industry was in the 19th century. (This, in part, was Hardt’s response to criticisms of the entire notion of immaterial production on the grounds that millions of people still work in factories, even if it is mostly today in the “underdeveloped” world instead of in the wealthy nations of the West, or global North). [Hardt didn’t mention this, but his periodization fits in well with McKenzie Wark‘s idea of a movement from landlords to industrialists to the current “vectorial class” of the owners of property rights to “information.” Hardt, like Wark, is focused on what Wark calls “the property question”].

Today, informatic or immaterial production is focused on questions of so-called “intellectual property” (this is my term, not Hardt’s), in the forms of copyright, patents, etc. A company’s physical products often have value, not because of any actual use, but because they are manifestations of a “brand” to which consumers are attracted, or with which they identify. Massive sums of money are gained from things like patents on genetic sequences, genetically modified crops, rights to copyrights on music, video, and text, to (often frivolous) patents on supposed inventions, to control of certain channels of distribution, to a company’s working methods and “trade secrets,” and so on. Even traditional hard-manufacture factories are governed by informatics, and profit comes as much or more from control of the informational organization that governs production, than from the physical items in themselves that are produced (as these latter are not sold for much above cost).

According to Hardt, all this means that immaterial production has more similarities to the pre-industrial capitalism focused on the extraction of rent than it does to the (pre-informatic, or perhaps Fordist) industrial system that focused on the extraction of surplus value as profit. The most dynamic sort of capitalist appropriation today comes in the form of a renewed “primitive accumulation,” or privatization of the common: one can see how both the patenting of genetic sequences taken from plants used by traditional cultures, and the copyrighting of “new” ideas and their expression, fits into this paradigm. This means that the struggle against capitalism must take on radically different forms, compared to those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Hardt, immaterial production qua primitive accumulation is more a case of the direct appropriation of the common by capitalists, than it is one of the indirect expropriation of the common through the sale and purchase of labor power as was the case under industrial capitalism.

Now, I am largely in agreement with Hardt (and Negri, and some of the economists associated with their position, like Marazzi and even to some extent Moulier Boutang) about the transformations in capitalism over the last fifty years, and especially since the 1970s. But I am not sure I entirely accept the framework through which Hardt interprets these developments. In particular, I do not think that immaterial production involves a more “direct” expropriation of the common than was the case when industrial capitalism extracted value. It is true, as I have already said, that a lot of this new source of capital appropriation comes from a kind of “primitive accumulation” — corporations are now appropriating the commons in the form of things like genomes and songs and procedures of working, in the same way that landlords appropriated the commons of land at the time of the enclosures. But I don’t think that this is either a novelty or a reversion. It is rather the case that “primitive accumulation” never went away; it is a continual structural feature of capitalism, and was at work in the industrial age as much as it was in the agricultural stage, and as much as it is still today. Capitalism always both appropriates to itself things that it didn’t produce — and this precisely by “privatizing” them — and extracts a surplus from the processes of production that it directly initiates and supervises.

That is to say, there isn’t that great a difference between, on the one hand, how industrial capitalism imposes “cooperation” on large numbers of workers simultaneously, and draws profit from the economies of scale due to this cooperation (which is a form of relative surplus value) as much as it does from the initial inequalities built into the process of buying and selling “labor power” as a commodity (which is what Marx calls absolute surplus value); and, on the other hand, the way that immaterial capitalism today draws its profits from turning employees’ collaborative projects, and the cultural knowledge of indigenous peoples, into “intellectual property” locked under copyright and patent. In both cases, there is a double movement: on the one hand, the appropriation of what would otherwise be (or what previously was) common, and on the other hand, the transformation of that “common” precisely into a commodified form that stores or embodies congealed “labor” and that allows for the “marketization” of the product. The transformation of home knitting into manufactured clothing is not that different from the transformation of a plant with medicinal properties into a patented drug, or into a genetic sequence that can be used for controlled production of the medicine.

So, the point is that primitive accumulation and surplus-value extraction go together, both in 19th-century industrial production and in today’s immaterial production. This is why I don’t accept Hardt’s claim that production today somehow involves a less mediated and more direct appropriation of the common than was the case in the large factories of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Primitive accumulation or appropriation doesn’t occur apart from those other techniques of the extraction of surplus value — and this is just as much true for immaterial production today as it is, and was, for industrial production.

If we are to see a difference in the capitalism of the contemporary era, this has to to with the fact that, today, capital has become even more mobile and abstract than it was in the age of heavy industry. The movement from industrial to immaterial production is an intensification of the movement from agricultural to industrial, an even further internalization of capitalist social relations, an increase in the “mobility” or “flow” of capital. Today we are coming closer than ever to the limit-condition of the real subsumption, instead of the merely formal subsumption of all of society under capital. There is less and less of an “outside” that capitalism can “primitively” accumulate, and more and more is included in the mass of what is directly managed by capital’s disciplinary and modulatory procedures. (But there is only an asymptotic approach to the absolute of “real” subsumption; such a totality is never fully achieved. There always has to be some outside that capital has not appropriated yet, and without such an outside capitalism would entirely stagnate — a point made as much by Schumpeter as by Marx).

To say that we are moving ever closer to real subsumption is equivalent to saying that now — under what Jonathan Beller calls “the cinematic mode of production” (although I think it is rather post-cinematic — which is a point I am still working on), or what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism” — surplus value is extracted in the processes of distribution and consumption as well as in the process of primary production. For Marx, circulation involved the faux frais of the capitalist mode of production, and had to be subtracted from profit. But today, in an “information economy” or ‘attention economy,” circulation is itself a direct source of further profit. Hardt and Negri are correct to associate this situation with real subsumption displacing merely formal subsumption. But they seem to me to be overly opimistic when they suggest that this means that we are finally reaching the point where the “objective conditions” for communism finally exist, or that the property form has become a “fetter” on the technological means of production, a fetter that is ready to be burst asunder. It just ain’t so. Digital technologies bring with them new forms of potential liberation, certainly; but they also bring new forms of control, new potentials for micromanagement and control via continual modulation (as Deleuze says in his great article on the society of control).

Hardt said at several points that the restrictions of copyright, patent, etc., because they are privatizing the common, are thereby making immaterial or affective labor less “productive” than it could be — which isn’t altogether wrong, but also isn’t the right point to be making — since “productivity” (like “efficiency”) is a category of the private enterprise system and wouldn’t have the same meaning (certainly wouldn’t be measured in anything like the same way) in a world of communism, or of the unrestricted common. Part of the point is precisely that (as Hardt, together with Negri, says — and as Virno says as well) even the most individualized and particular acts of human invention rely so extensively on the whole past accumulation of human invention, that private property rights become absurd. I maintain my signature on this blog, for instance, but it would be utterly ludicrous for me to maintain that my ideas and words come from nowhere — in fact, they come from what I have heard and read and otherwise encountered in the society that I live in. My own personal spin on things is still a spin on what arises and exists elsewhere, or in many elsewheres. And people can make what they want of my words, including things that I absolutely detest, which disabuses me of the notion that these words are “mine” in any metaphysical, propertarian sense.

At best, my words here will become part of what Hardt beautifully called — quoting from Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts — “the production of man [sic] by man” — this by way of making the point that those early manuscripts are anything from essentialist, since they see “human nature” not as something that exists once and for all as our basis, but rather as something that human beings themselves continually remake. Our very remaking of ourselves is at stake, and this is one further reason why the relentless privatization of the common is so obscene. But I am made uneasy when Hardt also calls this remaking a process of “biopolitical production” — because, once again, I think that this characterization is only valid under the conditions of capitalist appropriation, and that it would have to be characterized differently if it were truly to be, and to remain, common. I think that more than vocabulary is at stake here; Hardt and Negri’s terminology reflects what I see as their excessive optimism about how conditions for the common have (supposedly) already been achieved in the heart of capitalism itself.

One final word, on finance. Hardt cited the current financial crisis as an instance of capital’s inability to manage its own complexities in a useful manner. But things seem to me to be a little more complicated than this. Obviously, the system is dysfunctional; and obviously, the insane proliferation of derivatives and other “arcane financial instruments” is a symptom of informatics run amok. More orthodox Marxists often say that finance is merely fictive, since it is not related to, or backed up by, any actual production. But this “ungrounded” finance itself needs to be seen as part of the infrastructure of immaterial and affective capitalism; and as an effect of immaterial and affective labor. In such a context, “fictive” does not mean unreal or ineffective — as we are currently experiencing, the effects of delirious financial capital flows are all too material and evident. This is something that needs to be theorized much more than I am able to do here. I am still trying to figure things out; I would definitely say that, for instance, Christian Marazzi‘s ideas about the linguistic nature of these types of finance is inadequate. But I haven’t found anyone yet who can explain it to me, or theorize it, better.

2009 UK “Post-Cinematic Affect” Tour

I will be in the UK next week for what I may as well call my “Post-Cinematic Affect” tour, since all the talks I will be giving will be extracted from a manuscript-in-progress of that title. Basically, there are sections on Grace Jones’ “Corporate Cannibal” video, on Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate starring Asia Argento, and on Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. (All of these are heavily revised and expanded versions of texts originally published on this blog). For each talk I will be doing one or two of these sections; the two talks in London will together cover the entire manuscript.

The schedule of talks is as follows:

  • Monday 16 March: Goldsmiths, London (“Dangerous Modulations: Grace Jones’ Corporate Cannibal”)
  • Tuesday 17 March: Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge (“Dangerous Modulations: Grace Jones’ Corporate Cannibal”)
  • Wednesday 18 March: Salford University, Manchester (“Post-Cinematic Affect in Boarding Gate and Southland Tales”)
  • Thursday 19 March: University of Western England, Bristol (“Post-Cinematic Affect: Grace Jones and Justin Timberlake”)
  • Saturday 21 March: Kings College, London (“Post-Cinematic Affect”: keynote address for “Emergent Encounters in Film Theory” conference).

Fragment

A footnote from work in progress:

There is a hidden affinity between the aesthetics of Deleuze and of Adorno. For both thinkers, the authentic work of art resists an otherwise ubiquitous culture of commodification, by virtue of its force of negativity (Adorno) or of counter-actualization (Deleuze). Deleuze’s account of how modernist art works to “prevent the full actualization” of the event to which it responds, and to reverse “the techniques of social alienation” into “revolutionary means of exploration,” echoes Adorno’s insistence that it is “only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse” that art can “enunciate the unspeakable: utopia.” For both thinkers, and despite their radical differences in vocabulary, art restores potentiality by derealizing the actual. The question that haunts aesthetics today is whether such strategies of derealization are still practicable, in a time when negation and counter-actualization have themselves become resources for the extraction of surplus value.

Eugene Thacker

The DeRoy Lecture Series Presents

Friday March 6, 3pm
English Dept Seminar Room
Wayne State University
Room10302
5057 Woodward
Detroit

Eugene Thacker
“After Life”

Eugene Thacker is the author of Biomedia (University of Minnesota, 2004), The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (MIT, 2005), and co-author with Alexander Galloway of The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (University of Minnesota, 2007). He co-edits the book series “Anonymous Theory,” and has previously collaborated with RSG (Radical Software Group), Biotech Hobbyist, and Fakeshop. Thacker is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, & Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

JCVD

I watched JCVD last night, and I loved it. But then I dreamed about it all night, which is not something that happens with very many movies. This suggests that JCVD has some deep affective resonance for me; I’d like to figure out what it is. Also Charlie Bertsch asked me how I thought it compared to The Wrestler, which I also liked, though not anywhere near as much.

Both JCVD and The Wrestler are about highly athletic men who have slowed down in middle age. They both used to be big stars, but now they are both struggling to make a comeback. And in both films, this is the situation both of the protagonist, and also of the actor playing that protagonist. Now, I’ve never felt that Mickey Rourke ever went away — during the years of his obscurity, I continued to enjoy his star presence in such movies as Spun (2002), Sin City (2005), and Domino (2005). [And don’t forget how he is the only macho action star to have also successfully played such a role as that of St Francis of Assisi — as he does in Liliana Cavani’s underrated Franceso (1989).] But I couldn’t be happier that Rourke is winning all that attention for The Wrestler. In his portrayal of one-time wrestling hotshot Randy “The Ram”, he manages to be both masochistically exhibitionistic (in the wrestling scenes, of course), and at the same time sweet, clumsy, and clueless in equal measure (in the scenes depicting the rest of his life, at his job in the supermarket, his home in the trailer park, and his botched relationships with his daughter and with the Marisa Tomei character). I am rooting for him to wih the Best Actor Oscar (though I will be very surprised if he actually does; while Hollywood loves rehabilitation stories, their love goes only so far, and The Wrestler is too much the sort of termite-art, semi-disreputable genre movie that the Oscar crowd looks down upon, preferring to give awards to white elephants).

Jean Claude Van Damme, in contrast, will never be nominated for an Oscar. His performance in JCVD obviously does not achieve (and doesn’t even aim for) the gonzo bravura heights of Rourke’s turn in The Wrestler. But there’s a sense in which his simple presence on the screen is even more audacious than that of Rourke. And also, I really hadn’t seen Van Damme in years — his IMDB profile shows that he has been continually busy, but mostly in straight-to-video films that I had never even heard of.

In any case, in JCVD, Van Damme simply plays a double of himself: “Jean Claude Van Damme”, a middle-aged, one-time martial-arts-action-star, with his career now on the skids. He’s coming home to Brussels, after failing miserably in Hollywood. His agent can only find him roles in the crummiest, lowest-budget movies; his finances are so low that all his credit cards are rejected by the ATM; and (in the opening section of the film) he loses custody of his daughter after a bitter divorce trial (in which his ex-wife’s lawyer denounces the moral depravity and glorification of violence in Van Damme’s movies, and his daughter complains to the court that other kids in school make fun of her for having such a washed-up has-been ex-star of a father).

But even before the divorce-court flashbacks, the movie makes you pay attention to Van Damme, and to what he can and cannot do. Over the opening credits, there’s an amazing long sequence shot, filled with special effects and digitally composited add-ons, in which Van Damme makes his way down a street, dispatching bad guys right and left with gunshots, with kicks and karate chops, or by banging them down with various props; he manages along the way not only to dodge bullets, and drag along somebody he is rescuing, but even to douse a flamethrower (I can’t remember quite how; I will have to watch the shot again). The sequence is so shamelessly over-the-top, and so extended, that it becomes absurd, or sublimely ridiculous: sort of the movie equivalent of really bad, but compulsively addictive, methamphetamines. Finally, the credits over, Van Damme reaches a door, and steps inside; at that point, there’s a cut, we see the cameras that were filming the scene; an exhausted Van Damme remarks that, at age 47, it’s hard for him to do those long single takes the way he used to.

In 1991 or thereabouts, Kathy Acker told me that she thought Van Damme had the most gorgeous and perfect body of just about anyone on screen. Today, it isn’t that he is decrepit — he looks pretty good, and pretty solid, for somebody his age (he is considerably younger than me, and about 10 months older than Obama) — but he is no longer young, and he clearly doesn’t have the looks, or the moves, that he used to. Nonetheless, everyone loves him because he is a star; everyone wants to take a photo with him, or to see him demonstrate his trademark drop kick. The young Maghrebi men in his Brussels neighborhood video store even give him extra props for being the only big action star who hasn’t demonized Arabs or Muslims as bad guys. But all that is really in the past; now he’s short of money, and short on career options. He’s even lost a hoped-for comeback movie role to Steven Seagal (who has even agreed to cut off his ponytail in order to get the part). This sense of hapless failure, combined with the general (unfair) impression that Van Damme cannot act (that his young body was the one and only thing he had going for him), gives an atmosphere of haplessness and decay to everything that he does in the film.

The plot, of course, is a mere (and largely implausible) contrivance, as it so often is in B movies. Van Damme goes to the post-office/bank to see if he can get some money; he inadvertently stumbles into a holdup in progress, and is held as a hostage, along with the other customers and employees. But the robbers force Van Damme at gunpoint to be their public voice, appearing in the bank’s window and negotiating by phone with the police; they make it appear to the outside world as if he were the one holding hostages and demanding ransom. And so it all becomes an international media spectacle, with Van Damme’s celebrity as the focal point. Basically, everyone thinks he’s gone beserk due to his recent career setbacks. The international TV crews are there, as are Van Damme fans thrilled to think that he is apparently doing his action-movie routine in real life. Van Damme’s American agent and lawyer both dump him in disgust; his parents show up, and tearfully beg him to give himself up without hurting anyone. Meanwhile, inside, Van Damme’s action chops are useless when faced with guns; instead, he’s the voice of sweet (albeit weary) reason, trying to reassure the other hostages, and to defuse tensions. He suggests alternative actions to the robbers, trying to avoid a massacre; and he also plays mind games with them to some extent, trying to turn them against one another (and finally succeeding to a degree).

But real life isn’t anything like an action movie. And so Van Damme can’t really do that much. This is emphasized, precisely, by the film’s numerous self-reflexive, meta-cinematic turns. Action is scrambled, and repeated from different perspectives, and out of chronological order. Movie fantasy scenes of Van Damme’s drop kick are interspersed with scenes where we see how ineffectual he actually is. The whole movie is shot in ultra-widescreen, and its general look is overlaid by a washed-out patina (I do not know what filter, lighting arrangement, or digital effect is used to generate this): this gives JCVD an overall feel that is difficult to describe: perhaps I could call it “gritty realism,” but with the quotation marks indicating that it is more the abstract idea of being gritty and realistic, than something that actually is gritty and realistic. I mean that this abstraction, this distancing, is the movie’s deliberate effect. There’s a curious dislocation operating everywhere: it indicates that, even when we are seeing Van Damme outside of his movie persona, as he “really is,” this reality cannot shake itself free of the impotent aura of his stardom. Van Damme can never be just “himself”; he can never return to being plain and simple Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varenberg.

All in all, then, the movie offers a melancholy take on celebrity, as well as allowing Van Damme to deconstruct his whole career, and the movie business that gave him that career. The high point of the movie is another single long take, in which the background of the beseiged bank, with robbers and hostages, falls away, and Van Damme addresses the camera directly, for something like six minutes, with a film-studio platform as his backdrop. He speaks fervently and emotionally of his life, and of the state of the world, at one point nearly breaking down in tears. His monologue is filled with existential anguish. He recalls that he was not brought up in luxury, and says how thankful he is to have seen his dreams come true, and how sad he is that so many people do not live to see their dreams come true. He recalls his many marriages and divorces, and says that there was love in every one of these relationships, even if they ultimately failed to work out. He speaks of love and loneliness, and the sad state of the world, and of how, even for someone as fortunate as he has been, there are always failures and disappointments.

This scene is remarkable, and affectively powerful, not just because it comes up when we do not expect it, and ruptures the realist frame of the film. But also, and more importantly, because of the way that it mingles sincerity with the utmost artifice. Van Damme steps out of the frame of the fiction (even of the fiction that this is his “real life” rather than a turn on a movie set) in order to deliver a genuine cri de coeur. But at the same time, the very things that guarantee the monologue’s “authenticity” — its inordinate length, its direct address, and the earnestness with which Van Damme speaks out, and faces up to the pitiless eye of the camera — all these also foreground themselves as artifices, because they are a self-conscious demonstration. Van Damme is showing the world that he can act. He emotes, he turns the emotions on and off; he shows us the virtuoso range of his persona. He proves to the world that he is not just “the muscles from Brussels,” but also somebody with a heart and a brain, and with strong dramatic chops. In other words, the effectiveness of his performance hinges entirely on our not quite taking it seriously, but instead taking it as a performance, as a masterful display of technique. We are being forced to believe, not in what Van Damme actually says, but in the way he says it, and beyond that in his power of fabulation. So one watches this scene with the same fascinated sense of delirious over-the-topness, as one does the sequence shot during the opening credits.

To my mind, this means that JCVD is an honest and affecting film — precisely in the way it includes its own artifices in everything that it avows. (This is also why I think that it reaches further than The Wrestler, which lovingly explores the artifices of wrestling, but does not quite extend this exploration to itself, or to its own medium). And because of the film’s conviction, its trust in its own artifice, and because Van Damme is at once so resourceful and so hapless and helpless, because of the way he has made this film that pulls out the rug from under his whole career — because of all this, we must imagine Jean Claude Van Damme (as Albert Camus said we must imagine Sysiphus) happy.

Bruce Robbins

The DeRoy Lecture Series presents:

Bruce Robbins
“Chomsky and Cosmopolitanism”

Friday, January 23, 3pm
English Department Conference Room, 10302, 5057 Woodward
Detroit, Michigan
Wayne State University

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has also taught at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland and at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and has held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, and NYU. His most recent book is Upward Mobility and the Common Good (Princeton 2007). He is also the author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999), The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986), and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993) and is co-author of the Longman Anthology of World Literature (2003). He has edited Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (1993) and co-edited (with Pheng Cheah) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (1998). He was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000 and is on the editorial board of boundary 2.

Celebrity

I am not sure whether this works at all, and at best it is extremely tentative, but I will post it anyway. I am trying to think about contemporary media celebrity, and how it is different from the kind of celebrity associated with movie stars in the early and middle twentieth century. I am writing this especially with Justin Timberlake and Asia Argento in mind, because they are the celebrities with whom I am most obsessed right now. But it should apply just as well to Brad and Angelina (and Jen), and to Britney and to Madonna.

In order to theorize this, I make use of Graham Harman‘s description of what he calls “allure.” But I should probably say that I am abusing Harman’s concept, rather than using it. I am abusing it, in the first place, because, even if I am getting his idea right (which I am not sure I am), I am trying to apply it in a particular historical context. This is wrong, because metaphysical notions, should be “generic,” as Whitehead puts it, or applicable equally to everything in existence. Harman is always driving home a similar point: for instance, to take seriously Heidegger’s ideas about our relation to Being means to reject the claim, which Heidegger sometimes makes, that Germans (unlike Chinese, Americans, or Brazilians, say) would have an especially privileged relationship with Being. In the second place, it’s wrong because Harman has recently rethought the account of allure that he gives in Guerrilla Metaphysics, and upon which I am drawing here.

Nevertheless, here goes…

Post-cinematic celebrities are perturbing presences. They circulate endlessly among multiple media platforms (film, television talk shows and reality shows, music videos and musical recordings and performances, charity events, advertisements and sponsorships, web- and print-based gossip columns, etc.), so that they seem to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Their ambivalent performances are at once affectively charged and ironically distant. They enact complex emotional dramas, and yet display a basic indifference and impassivity. I feel involved in every aspect of their lives, and yet I know that they are not involved in mine. Familiar as they are, they are always too far away for me to reach. Even the Schadenfreude I feel at the spectacle of, say, Britney’s breakdown or Madonna’s divorce backhandedly testifies to these stars’ inaccessibility. I am enthralled by their all-too-human failures, miseries, and vulnerabilities, precisely because they are fundamentally inhuman and invulnerable. They fascinate me, precisely because it is utterly impossible that they should ever acknowledge, much less reciprocate, my fascination.

In short, post-cinematic pop stars allure me. Graham Harman describes allure as “a special and intermittent experience in which the intimate bond between a thing’s unity and its plurality of notes somehow partly disintegrates.” For Harman, the basic ontological condition is that objects always withdraw from us, and from one another. We are never able to grasp them more than partially. They always hold their being in reserve, a mystery that we cannot hope to plumb. An object is always more than the particular qualities, or “plurality of notes,” that it displays to me. This situation is universal; but most of the time I do not worry about it. I use a knife to cut a grapefruit, without wondering about the inner recesses of knife-being or grapefruit-being. And most of the time, I interact with other people in the same superficial way. And this is largely a good thing; if I were to obsess over the inner being of each person I encountered, ordinary sociability would become impossible. It is only in rare cases — for instance when I intensely love, or intensely hate, someone — that I make the (ever-unsuccessful) attempt to explore their mysterious depths, to find a real being that goes beyond the particular qualities that they display to me. Intimacy is what we call the situation in which people try to probe each other’s hidden depths.

[Explanatory Note: Three additional things need to be noted here. In the first place, Harman’s discussion does not privilege human subjectivity in any way. His descriptions of how objects exceed one another’s grasp in any encounter applies as much “when a gale hammers a seaside cliff” or “when stellar rays penetrate a newspaper” as it does when human subjects approach an object. When I use a knife to cut a grapefruit, the knife and the grapefruit also encounter one another at a distance, unable to access one another’s innermost being. In the second place, I do not have any privileged access into the depths my own being. My perception of, and interaction with, myself is just as partial and limited as my perception of, and interaction with, any other entity. And finally, none of this implies that a person, or any other entity, actually possesses some deep inner essence. The argument is that all entities have more to them than the particular qualities they show to other entities; it says nothing about the status or organization of this more — or at least, what Harman says on these topics is irrelevant to the way I am using or abusing his ideas here.]

What Harman calls allure, however, is what arises in the rare situation — generally an aesthetic one — when an object does not just display certain particular qualities to me, but also intimates, and forces me to become acutely aware of, its deeper, hidden existence as something other than, and more than, these qualities. This inner, or surplus, existence is something that I cannot reach — and yet that I cannot forget about or ignore, as I ordinarily do in my interactions with objects, and other people, in the world. The alluring object displays the fact that it is separate from, and more than, its qualities — which means that it exceeds everything that I feel of it, and know about it. It draws me beyond anything that I am actually able to experience. And yet this ‘beyond’ is not in any sense otherworldly or transcendent; it is situated in the here and now, in the very flows and encounters of everyday existence.

This is why pop culture figures are so affectively charged. They can only be grasped through a series of paradoxes. When a pop star or celebrity allures me, this means that he or she is someone to whom I respond in the mode of intimacy, even though I am not, and cannot ever be, actually intimate with him or her. What I become obsessively aware of, therefore, is the figure’s distance from me, and the way that it baffles all my efforts to enter into any sort of relation with it. Such a figure is forever unattainable. Pop stars are slippery, exhibiting singular qualities while, at the same time, escaping any final definition. This makes them ideal commodities: they always offer us more than they deliver, enticing us with a “promise of happiness” that is never fulfilled, and therefore never exhausted. In terms of a project of affective and cognitive mapping, pop stars work as anchoring points, or as particularly dense nodes of intensity and interaction. They are figures upon which, or within which, many powerful feelings converge; they conduct multiplicities of affective flows. At the same time, they are always more than the sum of all the forces that they attract and bring into focus; their allure points us elsewhere, and makes them seem strangely absent from themselves. Pop culture figures are icons, which means that they exhibit, or at least aspire to, an idealized stillness, solidity, and perfection of form. Yet at the same time, they are fluid and mobile, always displacing themselves. And this contrast between stillness and motion is a generative principle not just for celebrities themselves, but also for the media flows, financial flows, and modulations of control through which they are displayed, and that permeate the entire social field.

Object-Oriented Philosophy

On his marvelous new blog, on which he manages to write more in a day than I do here in a month, and with consistent brilliance, Graham Harman makes a concession (or, I should probably rather say, a restatement) that I had been hoping to hear from him for a long time:

It’s not a matter of forgetting Kant’s exclusion from the in-itself. It’s a matter of questioning why he gives humans a monopoly on such exclusion. In a sense, I’m trying to let rocks, stones, armies, and Exxon join in the fun of being excluded from the in-itself. A sort of Kantianism for inanimate objects.

This is pretty close to one of the major theses of my own forthcoming book on Whitehead:

Whitehead rejects correlationism and anthropocentrism precisely by extending Kant’s analysis of conditions of possibility, and of the generative role of time, to all entities in the universe, rather than confining them to the privileged realm of human beings, or of rational minds. (p. 79)

Throughout his books, Harman rightly praises Whitehead for rejecting what Harman calls “the philosophy of human access,” that is to say, the philosophy that gives a privileged position to human subjectivity or to human understanding, as if the world’s very existence depended upon our ability to know it.  Rejecting the philosophy of human access means, among other things, rejecting Kant’s privileging of epistemology. As Whitehead puts it, since the 18th century, and especially since Kant, “the question, What do we know?, has been transformed into the question, What can we know?” (PR 74). What’s so energizing about Harman’s “object-oriented philosophy,” or about “speculative realism” more generally, is that it refuses to subordinate its arguments about the nature of the world (or about anything, really) to (second-order) arguments about how we can know whether such (first-order) arguments are correct. Kant endeavored to use the subordination of what we know to how we can be sure about the validity of what we know as a firm grounding for “any future metaphysics”; but of course this kind of meta-questioning inevitably leads to an infinite regress, or to an infinite argumentation that prevents one from ever making any actual arguments (this, I take it, is the witting or unwitting lesson of Derrida and of deconstruction). When we privilege epistemology, or the question of what we can know, over metaphysics, or the question of what we do know, we fall into the abyssal rabbit-hole that Hegel called the “bad infinity”. [Though in truth, I have always preferred this “bad infinity” to the sort of infinity of which Hegel approved — because the latter seems to involve a kind of fatuous self-confirmation, that would make “what we can know” into the measure of all existence. Kant at least insists that there are things whose existence we must affirm, even though we cannot know anything positive about them — sort of like Rumsfeld’s now famous “unknown unknowns” — whereas Hegel entirely subordinates existence to knowability. But that is a subject for another essay].

Now, I understand that Kant is the godfather of what Harman calls “the philosophy of human access,” or what Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism.” Seriously, for all the speculative realists, Kant is the Number One bad guy. Nonetheless, as I have already suggested, it has long bothered me that Harman was (at least until now) unwilling to say about  Kant’s “things in themselves” what he says about Heidegger’s “tool-being”: that the concept is an important one, in underlining how things, or objects, cannot be reduced to our knowledge of them; that is to say, how things have a subterranean existence beyond whatever aspects of them we (or for that matter, any other entities that encounter them) are able to grasp. (Since Harman’s whole point is that there is no sense in privileging my encounter with a stone over, say, the snow’s encounter with that stone — the same problems of limited access arise in both situations). Harman argues that Heidegger makes a crucial step beyond human access with his concept of tool-being, even if he falls back into privileging human access in other aspects of his thought (like whenever he talks about Dasein). Couldn’t one make exactly the same argument vis-a-vis Kant?

Admittedly, I ask this question to a large extent for aesthetic and stylistic reasons. It is simply that (perversely, I admit) I enjoy Kant’s prose, while I do not get any pleasure at all from Heidegger’s. (As I have forgotten what little German I ever knew, I read them both only in translation, which makes the question of my likes and dislikes even more dubious and complicated). These preferences aside, however, the right question to ask is: what difference would it make to Harman’s argument if it were to be founded on Kant’s doctrine of things in themselves, and the impossibility of accessing the in-itself, instead of on Heidegger’s doctrine of tool-being (or the “subterranean reality” of things “which never comes openly to view” — Tool-Being, p. 24), and the irreducibility of things to their mere presence (or present-at-handedness)? How would Harman’s argument change, if it were to credit Kant instead of Heidegger with the discovery of a subterranean reality beyond, and irreducible to, representation and presence?

I am not sure about this, but my preliminary suspicion is that a recourse to Kant instead of Heidegger might force Harman to abandon, or at least modify, one of the most important features of his argument: his brilliant revival of the philosophical doctrines, which have been despised for most of the last several centuries, of substantialism and occasionalism. For Harman, if objects have a “subterranean reality,” beyond whatever relations they enter into, and beyond whatever qualities other objects are able to grasp of them, this means that all things or objects in the world are independent substances, entirely separate from one another. And, given that objects or substances are radically disjointed from one another, the relations between substances — which, ordinarily, we just take for granted — themselves need to be explicitly explained. As Whitehead says (and this is his criticism of substantialism; or his criticism of Harman in advance, as it were):

Such an account… renders an interconnected world of real individuals unintelligible. The universe is shivered into a multitude of disconnected substantial things, each thing in its own way exemplifying its private bundle of abstract characters which have found a common home in its own substantial individuality. But substantial thing cannot call unto substantial thing. (Adventues of Ideas, p. 133)

Harman answers this objection by recourse to occasionalism, or to what he also calls vicarious causation. An “occasion” must be posited to show how independent entities, each locked into its own subterranean existence, could encounter one another at all, even superficially. In the 17th century, occasionalism meant the intervention of God at every moment in every interaction between two or more entities. Harman argues, for the very first time, for a non-theistic occasionalism; he creatively explains how interactions between objects can occur, but can only occur, when both objects are located in the interior of some larger, or more all-encompassing object. The universe has layers of reality, and we never get either to the bottom or to the top.

Now, substantialism and occasionalism are the aspects of Harman’s thought that most perturb his readers (myself included). One would like to accept his “object-oriented,” anti-correlationist argument, his refusal to place “human access” at the center of things, or to give such access a uniquely privileged status, without thereby having to accept the radically anti-relational consequences that he draws from this argument. To think this way, however, is to do Harman an injustice: his substantialism/occasionalism is not a bug but a feature; it is precisely the creative core of his metaphysics. So what follows might well be just another attempt to evade the full audacity of Harman’s argument.

Nonetheless, I do think that reference to Kant’s “things in themselves” might really make a difference here. Heideggerian tool-being is inherently relational and “global,” as Harman explains. But by pushing Heidegger just a little bit, Harman is nonetheless able to argue that “tool-being recede[s] not just behind human awareness, but behind all relation whatsoever” (Tool-Being p. 288). For if human awareness loses its privileges, and is no different from any other sort of relation among objects, then what Heidegger says against the delusions of presence applies just as well to all other forms of relation. I want to suggest, however, that this logic might change if we see Heidegger’s argument about presence as a derivative of Kant’s argument about the relativity of phenomena. For Kant, noumena lurks inaccessibly behind phenomena, just as for Heidegger, the hidden tool-being of all entities lurks inaccessibly behind those entities’ presence-at-hand. But for Kant (unlike Heidegger?) the limitation which grasps of noumena only their reduced phenomenal profile is not only a loss or a reduction, but also a positive act, a construction, a bringing-into-relation. (This is why Whitehead, despite all his criticisms of Kant, nonetheless praises Kant as “the great philosopher who first, fully and explicitly, introduced into philosophy the conception of an act of experience as a constructive functioning” — Process and Reality, p. 156). Phenomena are generated out of the encounter between subject and object in Kant — but if one is willing to “to let rocks, stones, armies, and Exxon join in the fun of being excluded from the in-itself,” then we can say that phenomena are positively generated out of all encounters between objects: this move away from human access, and toward objects indiscriminately, is precisely what Whitehead accomplishes (so that, for Whitehead, “subjectivity” is precisely the result of such a constructive process, rather than what initiates it).

Now, when Heidegger (followed by Derrida) attacks metaphysical and scientific thought for its reduction of the reality of things to mere presence, what he misses is the Kantian sense in which any such reduction is also a positive construction: it is a new event, a creation, a transformation or a “translation.” (I am thinking here of what Levi Bryant calls “Latour’s Principle”: “there is no transportation without translation.” Harman’s own book on Latour is coming soon). Heidegger’s critique of presence might be summarized as the idea that translation is always a betrayal of that which is ostensibly being translated. But Kant’s conception of constructive functioning maintains that translation is the creation of something new: a successful translation (which for Heidegger is impossible) is not a perfectly faithful reproduction of the original, but precisely (to cite the terms of Latour’s Principle in inverse order) an act of transportation, a carrying-across which, in the process, thereby makes something new. From this point of view, both Whitehead and Latour give us a Kantianism without privileging human access, a Kantianism for all entities. And seeing the constructive work of relays and transportations/translations in this manner releases us from the desperate recourse (though, of course, Harman does not see it this way) to positing a universe of occult substances that can only communicate vicariously.

To put this in another way, just briefly (since this is something I am still working on, and trying to work out): Harman’s criticism of Whitehead is that Whitehead’s vision of relationality reduces the world to an endless infinite regress, something that is “too reminiscent of a house of mirrors.” According to Harman’s summary, for Whitehead any entity “turns out to be nothing more than its perceptions of other entities. These entities, in turn, are made up of still further perceptions. The hot potato is passed on down the line, and we never reach any reality that would be able to anchor the various perceptions of it” (Guerrilla Metaphysics, p. 82). This criticism, however, is based on the assumption (precisely rejected by Whitehead) that “perceptions” are nothing positive in themselves, but just passive registrations of that which is perceived. Harman’s objection no longer holds, once we recognize that “perception” (or what Whitehead rather calls “prehension,” precisely to differentiate from the Humean, or classical empiricist, notion of perception) is itself a constructive functioning, a positive, creative and self-creative, process. And it is in all these acts of perception themselves that the “reality” already exists and “anchors” everything around it.

Harman also says that “no relational theory such as Whitehead’s is able to give a sufficient explanation of change,” because if a given entity ” holds nothing in reserve beyond its current relations to all entities in the universe, if it has no currently unexpressed properties, there is no reason to see how anything new can ever emerge” (ibid.). But Whitehead doesn’t quite say this; he says, rather, that what he calls the “subjective aim,” which is the way in which an entity skews or modifies its relations to all other entities, in a process of “decision”, is precisely that which the entity holds “in reserve” in relation to the other entities that it perceives. Once again, because Harman follows Heidegger (instead of Kant), he is unable to give credit to the way that perception as constructive functioning, precisely because it is always incomplete or selective, thereby produces new properties, new twists of relation, and thereby gives us novelty without the need to have recourse to occult substances.

I will be the first to admit that my argument here is incomplete; I need to say something as well about Whitehead’s notorious “eternal objects,” which play an important role in the processes over which I am disagreeing with Harman. I probably also need to say something about Whitehead’s notion of God, and how it relates to Harman’s counter-intuitive attempt to assert an occasionalism without God. And I certainly need to spell out more fully how I see Whitehead as championing a Kantianism without privileging human access. But for now, I have run out of energy and this post is already too long.

Michael Swanwick, Wild Minds

Michael Swanwick’s 1998 short story “Wild Minds” (which I found in the collection The Best of Michael Swanwick) offers a different angle on the issues most recently raised by Scott Bakker’s Neuropath. The story is set in a future world in which “the workings of the human brain were finally and completely understood” by science. As a result, traditional “education” is no longer necessary, since everything can be “learned” by direct bioelectrochemical manipulation: “anybody could become a doctor, a lawyer, a physicist, provided they could spare the month it took to absorb the technical skills.” The complete understanding of the brain also renders traditional notions of guilt, crime, and punishment irrelevant. The narrator of the story has committed a murder; but he recalls that “a panel of neuroanalysts had found me innocent by virtue of a faulty transition function and, after minor chemical adjustments and a two-day course on anger control techniques, had released me onto the street without prejudice.”

In a world where the human brain is completely understood, there is no more learning ‘for its own sake’; nor is education a job requirement. Instead, “most corporations simply educated their workforce themselves to whatever standards were currently needed.” Isn’t this the logical next step, under our current regime of cognitive capitalism? The “valorization” of capital now takes place 24/7, in leisure time as well as in work time, in the processes of circulation and consumption, no less than in those of “production” proper. The automation of education by direct manipulation of the brain would seem to validate Rancière’s axiom of equality, his insistence upon the generic propensity to learn that is equal in all human beings, all intelligences. Yet, far from being liberating, or even resulting in a greater measure of social equality, the mobilization of this generic propensity results in a further exacerbation of corporate control, with its invidious distinctions and its incessant accumulation of capital. Corporations have learned to commodify and exploit, not just “labor power” in the classic sense, but also, and above all, that “general intellect” which (according to Negri, Lazzarato, et al) is the true source of wealth in the postmodern or post-Fordist era. General intellect has been technologized to the point where it can be installed in any given individual at will (and if you can afford the investment — as corporations can). It is therefore entirely open to be exploited for the extraction of surplus value.

In other words, neither the equalization of intelligences, nor the movement of “real subsumption” that leads from the factory floor to the common activities of humankind, is in the least bit liberatory.

Now, it’s become almost a cliche these days to warn against “the kind of remorselessly monopolist accounts of capitalism that act as a kind of intellectual and political bulldozer,” and thereby overlook real possibilities of resistance and a new sort of politics (I am quoting Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory, p. 23). I am inclined to think, however, that this is one kind of criticism that needs to be inverted. There has been way too much unwarranted celebration recently of the alleged creativity of fan cultures and the like, and of “empowered” consumers. If such activities are “political,” then they only point up the irrelevance and lack of import of any sort of “politics” that focuses only on “domination” and “empowerment,” and ignores the harsh realities of political economy. Part of what I like about Swanwick’s fable is that it assumes this point as a background assumption, without calling attention to it, or didactically insisting upon it.

In any case, corporate control of the automated education process isn’t the only point of “Wild Minds.” There’s worse. “With knowledge so cheap, the only thing workers had to sell was their character: their integrity, prudence, willingness to work, and hard-headed lack of sentiment.” These are indeed the qualities of character that the new “flexible” and “innovative” capitalism requires. It needs people who will not just contribute during working hours, but devote all of themselves to whatever project is at hand; and yet with a sufficient lack of sentimental attachment that, once any given project is over, they will move on without regret or nostalgia to something entirely different. And, given the technology that results from a complete understanding of the human mind, it turns out that this kind of character formation can also be achieved by technological means: “it was discovered that a dozen spiderweb-thin wires and a neural mediator the size of a pinhead would make anybody as disciplined and thrifty as they desired. Fifty cents worth of materials and an hour on the operating table would render anybody eminently employable.”

This process is called “optimization.” It leads to a “blessed clarity that filled my being,” the narrator says; or, more objectively, it leads to an “absolute clarity of thought, even during emergencies. Freedom from prejudice and superstition. Freedom from the tyranny of emotion.” Instead, when you are optimized you have access to “information” that previously you had “ignored or repressed.” When you’re optimized, you realize that (just as Nietzsche said, or as The Argument in Bakker’s Neuropath says) there is no such thing as “free will,” and hence no responsibility. “Self is an illusion. The single unified ego that you mistake for your ‘self’ is just a fairy tale that your assemblers, sorters, and functional transients tell one another.” And so, during a brief simulation of what it is like to be optimized, the narrator finds himself “not regretting a thing. I knew it wasn’t my fault. Nothing was my fault, and if it had been that wouldn’t have bothered me either. If I’d been told that the entire human race would be killed five seconds after I died a natural death, I would’ve found it vaguely interesting, like something you see on a nature program. But it wouldn’t have troubled me.”

Optimization makes for perfect corporate employees. I would think, as well, that it makes for the sort of “bright,” rational, and illusion-free personality type so desired by rationalist crusaders like Richard Dawkins. Indeed, one of the effects of optimization is that it leads almost immediately to the rejection of any prior religious beliefs: their delusive, compensatory quality simply becomes too obvious, and is no longer required. And so, when optimization becomes possible, “the ambitious latched onto [it] as if it were a kite string that could snatch them right up into the sky… Acquiring a neural mediator was as good as a Harvard degree used to be. And — because it was new, and most people were afraid of it — optimization created a new elite.” The optimized are uber-yuppies, living in buildings that are all “shimmering planes and uncertain surfaces… buildings that could never have been designed without mental optimization, all tensengricity and interactive film.” The optimized are separate from the “obsolete people” who have not had the operation; they are virtually a new species, and indeed they “don’t claim to be human.”

The narrator of “Wild Minds,” however, is a reactionary and an ironist; he chooses not to be optimized, and he fervently embraces the illusions and consolations of religion. He clings to Catholicism’s sense of guilt, repentance, and possible redemption. “The thought,” he says, “that a silicon-dosed biochip could make me accept [the murder he committed] as an unfortunate accident of neurochemistry and nothing more, turns my stomach.” He clings to his sense of guilt precisely because he knows that after optimization he would no longer feel this way; that doing what turns his stomach would insure that it would no longer turn his stomach. He accepts that “being human” is no longer “essential”; yet he “cling[s] to the human condition anyway, out of nostalgia perhaps but also, possibly, because it contains something of genuine value.” “Wild Minds” works as a story precisely because its defense of the “human” against the “posthuman” is so nuanced and hinged with irony; the story wouldn’t be in the least convincing if it preached the eternal verities of the human condition in the usual pompous and high-minded terms. Everything depends upon two crucial points, I think. In the first place, the posthumanity that so many of us have imagined over the last several decades is largely a corporate fantasy; it basically envisions re-engineering “human nature” in line with the demands of what David Harvey has called “flexible accumulation,” or of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello describe as “the new spirit of capitalism.” And in the second place, no humanist nostalgia about our essential inner being or spirit is able to undermine or interrupt the scientific discovery, at an ever-accelerating pace, of the actual ways that our brains work, of the material (bioelectric, biochemical, neurological) basis of thought. What we need, instead, is to comprehend how these discoveries are pragmatic and operational, rather than essential or foundational; they are oriented to power and efficacy, to the ways that the brain can be transformed, manipulated, and controlled. In refusing optimization, the narrator of “Wild Minds” acknowledges (far from questioning) the efficacy of such a procedure. And thereby, he challenges us to imagine — even if he himself cannot — a posthuman transformation that would not merely serve the agendas of capital, and of what used to be called (how quaint this title appears today) “instrumental reason.”

Abel Ferrara’s Mary

I finally caught up with Abel Ferrara’s 2005 film Mary: it was the one Ferrara feature (excluding his pre-Driller Killer pornos) that I had never seen before. Needless to say (at least for me, since I have expressed my enthusiasm for Ferrara before, and also, long ago here), it’s amazing. It’s hard to get a total grip on Mary after just one viewing, but I will do my best.

Mary is apparently Ferrara’s response to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. It concerns a macho-asshole film director (played by frequent Ferrara alter ego Matthew Modine) who has made a film, This Is My Blood, about the life of Jesus, in which he also played the title role, and who is now trying to promote the film, in the face of protests both by Jews (who consider it anti-Semitic) and Christian fundamentalists (who consider it heretical). Strictly speaking, the fundamentalists are right, since the film emphasizes the role of Mary Magdalene as a key disciple of Jesus, drawing upon various suppressed, heretical Gospels. Mary clashes repeatedly with Peter, who seems to reject her role as a disciple largely on sexist grounds. The revisionist reading of Magdalene is supported by interview footage with Elaine Pagels and several other (real-life) scholars and theologians who have worked on early Christianity.

Though Mary does have characters and a straightforward narrative, it is also very much of a collage film. We see scenes from the film Modine’s character has made, together with various other types of footage from the (fictional) world in which Modine’s character lives, together with documentary, or documentary-style footage. The scenes from This Is My Blood are gorgeous, in murky chiaroscuro, with a mobile camera that frequently stays close enough to the actors that all we can see are their faces, filling the screen, emerging out of, and returning to, the shadows. Despite the director’s egotistical stunt of playing Jesus, the weight of this film-within-the-film clearly rests with the actress playing Mary, whose feelings — from the mournfulness of witnessing Jesus’ death, to the joy of his resurrection, and the message (rejected by Peter) that she has gotten from him — are subtly, but powerfully, modulated throughout these chiaroscuro sequences.

Mary starts with the film’s final wrap, and mostly takes place a year later, in New York, as Modine is preparing for the premiere. But another plot strand involves the actress playing Mary (this character is played by the great — and woefully underappreciated in the US — Juliette Binoche). Binoche’s character has overidentified with her role; she can’t let go of Mary Magdalene — and she drops everything in order to go to Jerusalem, where she wanders the streets and jostles the crowds on a spiritual quest. The scenes involving her seem to be shot on location, with handheld camera, and bright and even natural lighting; we see documentary-ish scenes of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prayer, together with ones of her roaming the streets. She embraces the Wailing Wall (?), takes part in a Seder that is interrupted by a terrorist attack (with the fact that the Last Supper was a Seder clearly on her, and Ferrara’s, mind), and prays at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (I think). Binoche has very little dialogue, but anguish (and later, peace) are etched on her face throughout these scenes of quest. And there is an emotional continuity (beyond the stylistic differences) between her scenes in Jerusalem, and those in the film-within-the-fillm.

I still haven’t mentioned the most extended narrative strand in Mary, which involves an intellectual (as in Charlie Rose, or someone else on PBS) talk-show host (played by Forest Whitaker), who is doing a series of shows focusing on the actual, historical Jesus — hence the interview material with theologians and Biblical scholars. Between his preparations for the series, and his general philandering, Whitaker’s character is woefully neglecting his late-term-pregnant wife (played by Heather Graham), and generally making a mess of his life. Whitaker interviews Modine (and Binoche via telephone) on his show, which is the minimal way in which the various plot strands intersect.

The New York scenes, involving Modine and Whitaker, are mostly at night — they feature the poetry of distantly-lit office skyscrapers, briidges, and freeways, contrasting sharply with both the chiaroscuro of the film-with-in-the-film, and the clarity of light of the Jerusalem sequences. Whitaker is also often seen in his TV studio, surrounded by video monitors that are usually showing either interview footage, or else the news: domestic (US) riots and crime scenes, and political violence in Israel and Palestine. There are also other dissonant moments; at one point, somebody throws a rock through the window of a limousine in which Whitaker is negotiating with Modine, and the confrontation is shown in music-video style, with swish pans and jump cuts. Throughout the New York scenes, there are also lots of tracking shots down corridors (and sometimes back as well), the vertiginous camera movement accenting the increasingly unhinged emotions of the characters.

So the film is wildly disjunctive stylistically, as well as disjointedly multi-stranded narratively. It’s as if this promiscuously jarring mixture of styles and media were the only way Ferrara could express the actuality of life in the 21st century — and this, in turn, is necessary in order to make the film’s spiritual explorations vital and meaningful, instead of merely antiquarian. As the film proceeds, things become more and more unhinged. Modine confronts the protesters at his film’s premiere; when a bomb threat empties the theater, he locks himself in the projection room and rolls the film despite the absence of spectators. Meanwhile, Whitaker is not there for his wife when she goes into labor and gives birth to a baby boy whose survival is in doubt (it was unclear to me whether this was a case of birth defects or just premature birth; in any case, there’s an amazing scene of the baby, crying and crying while encased in a plastic bubble, as Whitaker tries futilely to comfort the child). By the end of the film, Binoche, surrounded by violence, seems to find a sort of inner peace, while Modine is in the throes of a full-fledged ego breakdown, and Whitaker, weeping, throws himself before the Cross.

All this echoes moments of spiritual intensity in other films by Ferrara (Harvey Keitel abjecting himself at the end of Bad Lieutenant; or the peace that Lili Taylor perhaps finds at the very end of The Addiction). Mary is, I think, the equal of those earlier films. Its greater heterogeneity or fragmentation perhaps lessens the emotional impact a bit, but it has the effect of making Ferrara’s spiritual claims more compelling than ever before. It’s useless to ask whether Ferrara is in a literal sense “religious”; I am inclined to agree, however, with Dennis Lim’s suggestion that Mary is “the rare movie that could stand as a rebuke to both The Passion of the Christ and Religulous.” Ferrara’s sensibility is, of course, deeply Catholic; but this is inflected, in Mary, both by a concern for Judaism (which Ferrara comes back to again and again, throughout the film) and by a general heretical/quasi-feminist edge. The recentering of the film’s implicit theology around Mary Magdalene is expressed through a delirious male abjection before the feminine (in terms both of the role of Binoche, and Whitaker’s hysterical-yet-moving repentance for how he has wronged Graham). One can rightly say that such an inversion of the masculine arrogance Modine’s and Whitaker’s characters both represent is not truly feminist, because it just inverts the gender stereotypes, rather than actually undoing them. But the film’s masculine hysteria is inseparable from its spiritual longings; by which I mean one cannot reduce either of these dimensions to being merely a displaced symptom of the other — they must both be accepted and taken seriously, together. And, looking at the film this way, it charts, and makes, a convulsive emotional movement that is its own evidence and justification. Ferrara’s greatness as an affective filmmaker is unparalleled, and has never (apart from Nicole Brenez’s wonderful book) gotten the recognition that it deserves. Ferrara breaks down the distinction between art film and exploitation film, just as he does between spirituality and sleaze. He is absolutely contemporary, and yet he pushes beyond the cheap irony and encapsulated soundbytes of all too much contemporary culture.